IN the wake of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Pakistan’s government is scrambling to show grief-stricken Indians and the world that Pakistan is actually able and eager to mount successful counterterrorist operations.

In the meantime, India is still considering its military options, and the US is finding itself in the awkward position of biased mediator, but a mediator with options, nonetheless.

Indian ire in the immediate aftermath of the attacks was so unmistakable that it prompted Islamabad to sound the loudest alarm bell in its arsenal: insisting that it could only fight one war at a time, Pakistan warned Washington that a vengeful India would compel Islamabad to redeploy the 100,000 troops currently assisting the US war on terror in northwest Pakistan to its eastern border. Hearing the message, President Bush dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Delhi to calm the Indians to ensure that Pakistan has the resources and flexibility to fight the militants.

Yet from Washington’s perspective, both the political and military implications of heightened tensions between India and Pakistan — especially the kind that involves Pakistani troop movements — open many new doors to a war on terror that appears increasingly bleak.

First, India is not alone in its profuse criticism of Pakistan’s failure to fight the very terrorists it bred during the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad in the 1980s. Seven long years into the war on terror, Washington remains convinced that Pakistan is still unwilling and/or unable to make good on its counterterrorism commitments. It was difficult enough to compel Islamabad to deploy 20 per cent of its roughly half-million-man army to the northwestern border during President Bush’s first term, and that contribution only led to a steadfast resurgence of the Afghan Taliban and the near-steroidal growth of the Pakistani Taliban.

Facing dim prospects, over the last 18 months the Americans have begun taking matters into their own hands and dispatched much-resented unmanned aerial vehicles to kill senior Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders with greater frequency. With president-elect Barack Obama insisting that he will allocate more US soldiers and resources to the ‘real’ war on terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Washington’s relationship with Islamabad has nowhere to go but down, especially as the Pakistani Taliban rip the country apart. It is in this context that a redeployment of Pakistani troops frightens Washington.

But according to a flood of recent press reports, if India seems likely to attack Pakistan, then both the Pakistan Army and the militants they are supposed to destroy could find themselves facing the same grave threat in India. Various militant factions and supporters of the Taliban — all the way from South Waziristan to the Swat Valley — could put their wars with Nato and Islamabad on hold and find their way to Kashmir or the Indian border.

In the meantime, US and Nato forces in Afghanistan would be in the unfamiliar position of having neither friends nor foes on the other side of the Afghan/Pakistan border. And this would present Washington with equally unfamiliar flexibility.

The US presidential transition could alter this dynamic, but under these circumstances, the most likely benefit to the US would manifest in southern Afghanistan, where the resurgent Afghan Taliban would face potentially crippled supply lines of weapons and equipment, which are currently flowing from the Pakistani Taliban and the tribal clans loyal to them in the NWFP and especially Fata. If those middlemen are busy at Pakistan’s eastern border, there will be fewer available at the western border.

Another possibility is that, like their Pakistani counterparts, the Afghan Taliban might also flock to the Indian border or LoC to fight the Indians. Numerous Taliban leaders and foot soldiers are foreign-born and tied to the militant Pakhtun world by marriage and lifestyle; but many are jihadists at heart and would drool at the prospect of a glorious war on numerous fronts.

Though less likely, in either scenario, the Afghan Taliban would be stretched uncharacteristically thin without support from across the border, and the US/Nato/Afghan forces would be less hindered to improve security and perhaps earn a little loyalty from local Pakhtun tribes in southern Afghanistan. At the very least, there would be fewer obstacles to US intelligence gathering and infiltration, which is always in desperate need of a boost.

Either way, however, a substantive contingent of the Pakistani Taliban and their supporters will probably remain in the NWFP/Fata and continue supporting the Afghan Taliban. In the end, Pakhtuns are notoriously territorial, and some will not be interested in repelling the Indians from the land of their ethnic rivals in Pakistan’s eastern provinces.

In this case, Washington would be able to test Pakistan’s claim that — as limited as Islamabad’s assistance has been since 2001 — the war on terror would be in a far worse state without Pakistan’s help. Wilfully testing this claim has always been too risky for the US because the price of being wrong could be frightfully high. But if Islamabad refuses to keep its contingent of soldiers on Pakistan’s western border anyway, then as a silver lining, Washington might be able to test this notion and use it as a basis for strengthening or drastically altering the US-Pakistan relationship.

After all, even if every observant western official already knows that little will change on the ground without the Pakistani soldiers, then mounds of supporting evidence for such assertions

would be critical for the Obama administration to justify greater and deeper incursions into northwestern Pakistan to eliminate Al Qaeda and its support structure.

Naturally, Washington will have to test these waters more before diving in, but the situation in Pakistan is likely to get much worse before it gets any better.

Given the presidential transition in Washington, it is still unclear if the US will be in a position to improvise its military approach to southern Afghanistan, at least in the near term. Nevertheless, if tensions remain high between India and Pakistan, the US might benefit in the long term from the internal solidarity in Pakistan and the decreased intensity of conflict in the tribal regions on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Obviously, a calamitous war between the two South Asian rivals is far too high a price to pay to obtain a temporary calm in western Pakistan that may or may not benefit anyone. But if escalation is the path that India chooses — despite Washington’s calls for restraint — then high-octane sabre-rattling on both sides of the Indo-Pak border (especially if it lasts for many months) could actually suit Washington rather well.

The writer is a Washington-based analyst and blogs at www.justwars.org.
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