THE next bilateral consultation in the India-Pakistan composite dialogue will focus on disengagement in Siachen and Sir Creek. This meeting will be watched with interest in both the countries as much for its specific agenda as for the insight it would provide into the current state of the dialogue.

In recent months, analysts in both the countries have expressed fears of an impasse in the dialogue. Before one turns to the reasons underlying this perception, it has to be noted that the Siachen issue is often cited as an illustration of the current impasse. A relatively easy problem, an equitable solution of which has existed since 1989, Siachen is becoming an example of reservations that belong altogether to another domain. Progress towards its solution will, it is argued, showcase an unflagging interest in a general rapprochement. Prolonging the stalemate on its dizzy frozen heights may signal reluctance to arrive at this grand settlement. The real clue may well be found in the fast changing dynamics of the larger international politics.

By common assent, the dialogue process needs revitalisation which can come from a visit to Pakistan by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh this summer. This visit would have the right resonance, atmospherics and optics, the argument continues, if the two sides can announce an end to the disputes over Siachen and Sir Creek. The impetus generated by this achievable gain will arguably flow into negotiations on more intractable issues, particularly Jammu and Kashmir, and make for a steady, if slow, progress towards full normalisation of relations.

Until recently, there was an upbeat assessment that back-channel negotiators have worked out a shared approach for the implementation of ideas available since 1989 for terminating the highly wasteful confrontation in the icy wastes of Siachen. The Indian prime minister, who is more sensitive to the larger economic possibilities of an India-Pakistan detente than the veterans of New Delhi’s South Asia strategic establishment, was believed to favour a solution that would transform the mighty glaciers into a mountain of peace.

Traditionally, Pakistan’s solution for Siachen was built upon the restoration of the status quo ante i.e. a return to the situation prevailing at the time of the Simla agreement. During late Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to Islamabad in 1989, the two sides agreed that the redeployment of troops would bring the confrontation to an end. A press release issued after a meeting of officials in mid-June, 1989, spoke of “a comprehensive settlement” based on the redeployment of forces and the “determination of future positions on the ground so as to conform with the Simla agreement”. In more recent parleys, India has insisted on authentication of the positions marking the Indian advance as an essential precondition of the relocation of troops, a demand resisted by Islamabad as legitimising territorial gains by force in violation of the Simla agreement.

According to the grapevine, a breakthrough in the back-channel diplomacy occurred when Pakistan agreed to the authentication of the actual line of ground control in the annexures to the main agreement on disengagement of troops. A spate of reports in the Indian press, however, claims that the Indian army has mobilised the strategic community to oppose Manmohan Singh’s endorsement of even this solution.

Apparently, the Indian army wants to effectively change the nomenclature of dispute from Siachen to the Saltoro Ridge. It argues that it would be impossible to re-take the vacated positions in case Pakistan violates the agreement and captures them. Furthermore, the Indian army wants unequal redeployment where distance is measured by the time that each army would take to get back to the authenticated forward line. It also wants authentication of the Indian advance in the main text of the agreement. If accurate, these reports provide a sad commentary on the failure of the composite dialogue to generate even minimal trust between the two sides.

Even more alarming is the perception found in both the countries that India has re-ordered its priorities after the landmark nuclear agreement with the United States. A rapprochement with Pakistan is now being visualised as desirable but not urgent. What receives greater attention in New Delhi is the virtual invitation by the United States to India to assume a leadership role in Afghanistan and Central Asia. A distinguished Indian analyst tells me that there is no hesitation in New Delhi to completely supplant Pakistan in Kabul; this would flow naturally from the relentless hostility of the Afghan decision-makers towards Pakistan. But Central Asia is a heavier mantle to wear and India, reportedly, needs to assess the limits of Russian tolerance of strategic Indian penetration of the Near Abroad as a key partner in the American plans for the region. Tajikistan is said to provide the testing ground for it.

This is of course an Indian version of the great game; it is perhaps not easy to be so definitive about the drastic readjustment of the relative role that the United States wishes to assign to India and Pakistan in the area. The Indian view pre-supposes that Washington has downgraded Pakistan’s role to counter-terrorism, as a junior partner of Nato in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, there has nearly always been a certain naivete about American strategic thinking. Even today some seasoned analysts maintain with an air of finality and much innocence that the US decided to attack Afghanistan to dismantle the terrorist network there after the tragic events of 9/11. It betrays wilful disregard of published evidence that a decision to establish a new order in the region had been taken before that atrocity took place.

Pakistan knew before 9/11 that the Taliban regime would be brought down. When the twin towers were destroyed, President Bush wanted to attack Iraq first as that would be more consistent with the project for the new century to reconfigure the region. He settled for Afghanistan as the first of many targets only after he was persuaded that the Iraq invasion needed diplomatic and military preparation. Similarly, the trashing by President Bush of what remained of Clinton’s Camp David initiative to revive the Middle East process and the complete ostracisation of Yasser Arafat preceded 9/11. The new global policy was launched the day the Bush presidency was inaugurated

The same analysts also claim that Israel has never flaunted its nuclear weapons. They seem to forget that in 1973, as the Egyptian army broke through Israel’s Maginot line in Sinai, a panicky Tel Aviv seriously considered nuking the Egyptians and that this option was given up only after the air bridge for a massive re-supply of Israel by the United States had turned the tide in Israel’s favour. In any case, the policy shift about the Middle East was not caused by 9/11; it only made it easier to implement it. The blueprint of the new policy with emphasis on the reconquest of energy resources and creation of a network of military bases in the region began in the board rooms of the energy multinationals and in the secret conclaves of the neo-conservative ideologues.

The same script is now being translated into reality in our region partly by assigning a new role to India. In fact, Afghanistan is fast becoming an instrument for curbing Pakistan’s strategic import. President Karzai has once again declared that “Pakistani intelligence gives military training to people and then sends (sic) to Afghanistan with logistics”. Islamabad, he claimed on May 18, has no longer the power to determine events in his country. He also hinted that Mullah Omar was hiding in Pakistan.

Karzai was merely reinforcing the recent allegations made in Kabul by the visiting US ambassador for counter-terrorism. Chris Patten, an insider of the British establishment with impressive European Union credentials also wrote the other day that there would be no peace in Afghanistan until there was a regime change in Pakistan. Simultaneously, efforts have been intensified, for perfectly valid reasons of geography, to secure greater Pakistani cooperation with Nato’s new mission on our doorstep in southern Afghanistan.

Against this emerging new hierarchy of power in the region, India-Pakistan negotiations run the risk of losing urgency and salience. An astute Indian observer of the scene tells me that there is an “unfortunate trend” in his capital to secure Pakistan’s compliance with Indian ideas through “the agency of Washington’s irresistible pressure on an increasingly vulnerable Musharraf”.

Pakistan should accept the challenge of the new situation and energise the dialogue with India bilaterally. Relying for ever on outside powers to extract concessions for Pakistan from New Delhi is already subject to the law of diminishing returns. A serious threat to the composite dialogue comes from the growing Indian effort to delink it from Kashmir. India is understandably exploiting the Kashmiri disenchantment with Pakistan, created by a plethora of ill-judged unilateral declarations by Pakistani leaders, to “internalise” the problem. Our Indian friends argue that the quantum of autonomy that Pakistan has tacitly accepted as the solution can be determined better by New Delhi together with distinctive Kashmiri factions in the Valley, Jammu and Ladakh.

Pakistan needs to develop a comprehensive India policy that takes full measure of the entire agenda including Kashmir, a credible security regime, economic cooperation, energy grids, communication networks and cultural interaction. Its institutional capacity for working out a sustainable India policy is at present weak. Most of its diplomats share a nameless, perhaps an unwarranted, fear that secret negotiations with India may become prejudicial to Pakistan’s long-term national interest. Clearly, President Musharraf would have a stronger hand in dealing with momentous regional issues if he were to overcome his distrust of representative institutions and intellectual outfits capable of independent appraisal of major problems confronting Pakistan.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Email: tanvir.a.khan@gmail.com

THE Taliban are back. The resurgence of Taliban attacks in the Pashto-speaking provinces of southern and eastern Afghanistan means that the US and other foreign troops in Afghanistan are now taking casualties at the same rate as American troops in Iraq (although the actual numbers are much lower).

This was entirely predictable, but almost impossible to prevent, given the strategy that the United States has pursued since overthrowing the Taliban regime in late 2001. On the other hand, no alternative strategy would have offered a guarantee of success in Afghanistan either.

Afghanistan was always the problem from hell for western strategists, as it was in earlier times for British and Russian strategists. It’s an easy country to invade, but an almost impossible country to occupy for long because of the rugged terrain, the deep ethnic divisions (if you make some ethnic groups your allies, you automatically make others your enemies), and the profound xenophobia that so many foreign invasions has fostered in Afghan culture. That’s why Osama bin Laden wanted the United States to invade Afghanistan in the first place.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington were, in a sense, all about luring Washington into invading Afghanistan, in order to draw American troops into the quagmire of a long and ugly guerilla war and turn Muslims everywhere against the United States and their own pro-western governments. It was an obvious strategy for Al Qaeda to choose, since bin Laden had been a first-hand witness to the long ordeal that the US inflicted on the Soviet Union after it suckered Moscow into occupying Afghanistan in 1979.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, wanted to create “Russia’s Vietnam” in Afghanistan, so he sent arms and money to fuel a revolt by the deeply conservative hill tribes against the Communist regime that had seized power in Kabul in 1978. By late 1979 the Communist regime in Kabul was tottering, and Moscow sent in troops to save it. The US then gave the local rebels even more arms and money, and encouraged Muslim volunteers from other countries (mainly Arabs and Pakistanis) to join the war against the Russians. After ten years and over fifteen thousand dead, the Soviet Union pulled out of the endless, unwinnable struggle in 1989. However, most of the foreign volunteers who fought in Afghanistan were Islamist extremists, and some of them realised that what the United States had done to the Russians, they might now do to the Americans themselves. Once a friendly Islamist regime, the Taliban, took power in Afghanistan in 1996, Al Qaeda moved its bases there and began planning the attacks that would trick the United States into invading the country.

The strategy worked. After 9/11, President Bush had to invade Afghanistan; American public opinion would have accepted nothing less. But Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld must have seen through bin Laden’s strategy, for he chose not to roll into Afghanistan with several hundred thousand troops in the traditional American military style. Given Afghanistan’s history and the profound cultural differences between Americans and Afghans, the mere presence of such a large force would alienate the local population and call a resistance movement into existence.

Instead, Rumsfeld sent in only about five hundred CIA agents and special forces troops carrying suitcases stuffed with cash to buy alliances with Afghanistan’s numerous ethnic minority groups, and laser target designators to call in US air strikes on Taliban forces. Then he let the various ethnic militias do the actual fighting on the ground, and in ten weeks he brought down the Taliban regime without any large-scale commitment of American troops. He successfully evaded the trap that bin Laden had laid — but his strategy implied that the US would have very little influence over the political shape of post-Taliban Afghanistan. It had put the warlords in power.

They are still in power today, despite the facade of Hamid Karzai’s democratically elected government in Kabul. Opium production, almost eliminated under Taliban rule, is back bigger than ever, because the warlords need the income. Even the Taliban (who no longer have any conventional tax revenues) are now taxing opium rather than eradicating it in the areas they control. And they will continue to have support in those Pashto-speaking areas because the Pashtuns, some 40 percent of the population, see the Taliban as their best chance of recovering their traditional dominant role in running Afghanistan.

So there will be a guerilla war in Afghanistan for an indefinite future, but what was the alternative? Sending in a large American army to control and transform the country would have fallen into Al Qaeda’s trap and created a much bigger guerilla war of resistance — and besides, Rumsfeld was reluctant to commit many troops to Afghanistan because he was saving them for the invasion he really wanted to do in Iraq. There have never been more than 27,000 American troops in Afghanistan, and now they are down to 19,000 (though the gap has been partly filled by 16,000 United Nations troops, mainly from Europe and Canada).

Would the situation improve if they all went home? No; the Taliban would probably win again, after a while, because they are more motivated and disciplined than the warlords. Will it get better if they stay? No; it will probably just jog along as a low-level guerilla war, with occasional peaks of violence like the present and no end in sight. Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

—Copyright

RETHINKING the very foundations of US-Pakistan relations is critical to developing a case for a new strategic partnership between the two countries. The perception of both countries regarding each other is based on many stereotypes that portray the people at cross purposes with each other.

Thanks to the western media, the American public sees the Pakistani people as dagger-drawing, slogan-chanting, flag-burning fanatics out to destroy America. The Pakistani public’s perception of America — again, thanks to the local media — is shaped by America’s policies towards the rest of the world.

Neither of these visions is a true reflection of reality and it is simply not true that people in the two countries have no basis to build a relationship upon. Beneath the brouhaha of political posturing, there is considerable affinity between Pakistanis and Americans at the people-to-people level. Anybody who has met the other in a context divorced of political connotations can testify to this fact.

While individual Pakistanis might disagree vehemently with American policy towards Pakistan or the rest of the Islamic world, in the same way as more than half the Americans or Britons do, when it comes to people-to-people contacts between Pakistanis and Americans, there is little hostility and much affinity. If the recent experiences of American aid workers supporting earthquake relief in Pakistan suggest anything, it is that Pakistan and the United States have a lot to work with at the people-to-people level.

This could provide the foundation of a durable, positive relationship between the people of the two countries. To succeed, this relationship must provide for the long-term interests of both Americans and Pakistanis without forcing them to give up anything. Such a relationship is also crucial to long-term global peace and stability.

The world has entered a dangerous phase. The clash of civilisations is already underway and is likely to deepen with the passage of time. Under this new form of conflict, we are much more likely to confuse our moral compass, lose a sense of our friends and foes, and abandon the old rules of the game. In the process, we would be causing irreparable damage to the international regime and our own long-term interests as well. In fact, we have already begun to experience that.

A US-Pakistan strategic partnership, based on mutual respect and understanding of each others’ interests, challenges and limitations, can be instrumental in arresting this trend and can serve as an example for similar partnerships elsewhere. It can, however, only be built through the activism and hard work of the respective people who must provide the courage, vision and leadership to bring about such a partnership.

Making a case for a US-Pakistan strategic partnership would first require setting objectives. Why would the Americans want to have a long-standing relationship with Pakistan? What long-term interest does it serve for the United States to pay attention to Pakistan’s interests? Conversely, why should Pakistanis care about the interests of the Americans?

In the world of realpolitik, the two countries must adopt a policy that serves their own aims well without being subservient to each others’ interests. This can only happen if their self-interests are perceived as aligned. In fact, both Pakistan and America have paid for the consequences of not realising how intertwined their interests are in certain respects.

The US turnabout at the end of the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the late 1980s was a classic example of the ill-effects of short-term and myopic thinking as was Pakistan’s attempt to seek “strategic depth” in Afghanistan by aligning itself with the tyrannical Taliban regime. Neither of these decisions was informed by a broader meaning and understanding of each others’ long-term interests. The first created Al Qaeda while the second provided them with a platform to operate.

The central thesis of my argument is that it is indeed in the self-interest of both countries to pay more than cursory attention to their relationship. Had it not been the case neither of the countries would have found themselves in the mess that they are in today. This was as true in the 1980s and 1990s as it is today where once again the leaders on both sides are playing a dangerous game: “milk’em and leave’em” for the US and “make hay while the sun shines” for Pakistan. We can certainly do better in the best interests of the people of both America and Pakistan.

Once again, Pakistan is not only a key frontline state in the American-led war on terror but also one of the most important Muslim countries in the world. In terms of population, it is the second largest Muslim country and the sixth largest in the entire world.

Also, Pakistan, for no fault of its own, occupies one of the world’s most dangerous nuclear flashpoints and is stuck in the middle of a battle of regional supremacy between China and India. At the same time, Pakistan represents a key element not in the US vision of a stable and prosperous world but in that of a progressive Islam that is not at odds with the rest of the world.

In many respects, Pakistan represents opportunities for achieving these objectives that other countries do not. All its follies aside, and there are many, Pakistan still remains one of the very few Islamic countries outside the Southeast Asian belt where there is an active struggle between democracy and dictatorship, and if the latter continues to succeed it only does so because it serves the myopic interests of western political leaders and home-grown civilian and military dictators.

It serves nobody’s long-term interests and may even be counter productive to “fear” the Pakistani people and keep them in check. Only engagement, rather than containment, can be a viable strategy to deal with a people genuinely interested in and seeking freedom and democracy.

Secondly, barring personal political differences with the individual in question, Pakistan was the first, and thus far the only, Muslim country that elected a woman prime minister — a feat that even eludes the American political experiment so far. It is also the Muslim country with the largest number of women parliamentarians, perhaps more than many of the more enlightened and liberal western democracies in the world.

While there still remains a vast amount of work that needs to be done to bring women at par with men, Pakistan is way ahead of much of the Islamic world in terms of granting women their rights. Here, once again, it would certainly help America’s cause if Pakistan were to remain a player in the international global order rather than become a pariah state as it was for much of the 1990s.

By far, Pakistan is one living experiment that must succeed if the progressive vision of an Islamic state is to become a reality in the 21st century. While the Pakistani people labour to realise that goal, it would certainly help if they did not face a task further complicated by the roller coaster trend in US support.

There is considerable room for thinking about and building a long-term strategic partnership between the US and Pakistan that more accurately represents the intertwined interests of the two people than one that is aimed at seeking short-term gratification from each other. It would be an investment that will pay handsome dividends.

This is a case that still needs to be made in America. It is also one that Pakistan’s current rulers have failed to make.

The writer is a public policy analyst based in Santa Monica, US.

Email: athar.osama@gmail.com