Mayank Chhaya Daily

Washington speaking to Delhi via Islamabad

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs has reiterated what President Barack Obama said last week about the importance of Pakistan recognizing that the threat to its existence comes from within and not from outside, namely India.

"I think he will reiterate what he said to you guys last week," Gibbs told reporters that there's no threat from India.  As I had written last week, in making such a categorical assertion the White House is in fact telling New Delhi to not exploit the volatility in Pakistan. Although it is true that there is no identifiable and clearly enunciated unilateral threat from India to Pakistan, one necessarily needs to read more in when the assurance to this effect comes from the White House and not South Block.

I do not remember any other occasion when in a span of about a week the White House, either directly via the president or by his spokesman, made such an unequivocal statement about one of the world’s most equivocal conflicts. That tells me that the Obama administration is also talking to New Delhi while engaging with Islamabad.

Of course, there is nothing to stop the U.S. from directly telling New Delhi to lay off while Pakistan attempts address a million mutinies on its territory. It is more than likely that the administration has at the very least requested India not to fish in the troubled waters of Pakistan at this time or any time in the near future.

The Obama administration wants to make it sure that Islamabad does not use the historic alibi of India’s looming threat as an argument not to eliminate the Taliban-Al Qaeda from its territory. Unless it can simultaneously convince India to support this line, the U.S. will have no ground to stand on. I am sure Washington is mindful that India will have a new government in less than two weeks. It would be unrealistic to expect any major policy movements in this period of political flux. 

If Prime Minister Manmohan Singh returns to power the Obama administration can safely presume a continuity in the Pakistan policy of the last five years. In case, the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is known to strike a more strident posture on this issue, comes to power there may be some degree of uncertainty. To its credit the BJP-led coalition government under Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee made some of the boldest and most unexpected moves to normalize relations with Pakistan.

Pakistan should stop chasing phantoms of history

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said the United States is “advancing its relationship with India” in part because of the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The two countries need to advance their relationship irrespective of it.

The “mortal threat” emanating out of Pakistan is as good a reason as any to change the dynamic of US-India relations but it need not have waited for the region to become so unstable.  Unlike many countries that the U.S. seeks to establish closer ties, in India’s case it will come after a vigorous debate and rigorous scrutiny within the country given its vibrant democracy. In the past decade or so Washington has learned to negotiate the twists and turns on the way to a strong bilateral relationship.

Now that Pakistan is confronted with a very real challenge to its sovereignty, it is imperative that India figures in any strategic equation. That should happen with a clear recognition of not just New Delhi’s crucial role in global affairs  but also because what happens in Pakistan and Afghanistan has a direct and immediate bearing on India.

In this context it is necessary for the U.S. to make Pakistan understand and accept that by far the greater challenge to its existence comes from the Taliban-Al Qaeda combine which is already within its borders rather than India. In a cynical way it made sense for the Pakistani military to keep alive the threat of India as a rationale to do everything it has done since the country’s inception. But times have changed so fundamentally that even the most entrenched minds in the country’s security apparatus will have to recognize that you fight a real and identifiable problem rather than chase phantoms of history.

I am baffled by the seeming passivity or helplessness of the Pakistani army in the face of the Taliban advance. To think that bands of heavily armed lawless, ruthless and misanthropic men are within an hour and half of the country’s capital should have pushed the nuclear state into a local version of DEFCON 1. I see no signs of even DEFCON 3. I hope I know less than what I am trying to project.

A terribly short history of India-Pakistan distrust

US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michele A Flournoy has said the “deeply historic distrust’ with India is hindering Pakistan’s focus on the war on terror. Let it be known to her that that very “deeply historic distrust” is a direct consequence of another empire at another time trying to fashion the region in its own image.

 "The only way that you are going to give the Pakistani government and armed forces the confidence to shift their focus is to address some of those areas of tension to try to reduce tension between the countries," Flournoy was quoted as telling the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

I do not want to read more into her comment but my first reaction to it is that she is suggesting that Pakistan would have focused on battling terrorism had it not been for India’s looming presence. It is now a widely accepted fact that significant elements of the Pakistani army and intelligence apparatus created and propped up many of the very jihadi groups they are in a quandary over now to carry out a non-state proxy war against India. India’s assertion since the late 1980s and early 1990s that such groups were being facilitated by at least some of the Pakistani army to infiltrate through the Kashmir border were dismissed by the pre 9/11 international community then.

So it is disingenuous now to spin the whole mess as a result of Pakistan’s inability to take on jihadi groups because of the “deeply historic distrust.” It is true that Pakistan is now discovering to its own chagrin that those very groups are now turning on its own people and state. That ought to motivate them to eliminate the menace.

It is not possible to look at the current India-Pakistan dynamic without going back to its history some six to seven decades ago when the retiring British empire divided the region in an extraordinarily random manner.  I am not for a moment suggesting that since then India and Pakistan have introduces their own very unique subcontinental complexities to the paranoia that existed at the time of the partition. For a historic reference it is important for the US to remember how facts have played out in the past couple of decades as well. 

Holbrooke's Souh Asia mission

It is hard to imagine how US special envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan can go to India and not discuss Kashmir at all. But let’s for a moment take State Department spokesman Robert Wood’s word that Richard Holbrooke will not raise resolution of the Kashmir dispute as a strategy to deny Islamic terrorists the excuse and justification to carry on their terror campaign against India.

"India is an important country in the region and has interest in Afghanistan. And he wants to hear from the Indian government in terms of how we can all better contribute to peace and stability in Afghanistan," Wood said. That assertion is factually correct given India’s historic ties with Afghanistan and the enormous goodwill India still enjoys with the Afghani people much to the chagrin of Pakistan.

One compelling example of how India can act as an important player came when on January 22, New Delhi handed over to the Afghan authorities the 215-km Delaram-Zaranj highway costing six billion rupees. Apart from the hard cash India also spent its blood in the death of six Indians who were killed by the Taliban during the construction of the highway. The highway offers a shorter alternative between Kabul and Iran.

It is obvious that India has not constructed the highway out of pure altruism. Since Pakistan denies India any transit facility to Afghanistan, it is important that the country has an alternative for the supply of goods. A strong Indian presence in Afghanistan two distinct advantages—one it helps create some sort of long-term stability and two gives New Delhi another vantage point on Pakistan.

Holbrooke ought to be aware that in the long-term the US cannot possibly maintain any significant presence in Afghanistan. It is important that Washington can count on New Delhi to help Kabul slide back into the hands of the Taliban. To that extent Holbrooke’s India mission is important.

But I still cannot imagine that he will go all the way to New Delhi and not so much as mention Kashmir.

India watch out for Kashmir

I have been saying this for sometime now how an Obama administration could unsettle the status quo that Washington has maintained on the question of the Kashmir dispute. Now that President Barack Obama is finally taking over, India needs to closely watch his approach towards Kashmir as it fits in the broader mosaic of Islamic radicalism.

Of course, Obama has many competing and equally consequential worries staring him the face from the 12.01 p.m. today. Kashmir may not seem anywhere close to his immediate concern but as he begins to pay close attention to the contiguous geostrategic region of Afghanistan-Pakistan-India, the Himalayan state and its over two-decade-long ferment is bound to factor in seriously in any new policy formulation.

In this context it is important to note the recent comments of Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband, particularly about creating some incentives for Pakistan to continue with its military pressure on its western border with Afghanistan. Explicit in that was that Kashmir requires to be resolved were Pakistan to cooperate with the US and the West in battling the Al Qaeda-Taliban combine. "Resolution of the dispute over Kashmir would help deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms and allow Pakistani authorities to focus more effectively on tackling the threat on their western borders,” Miliband had said in an article in The Guardian newspaper just before his recent visit to India. In an ideological sense Miliband’s comment coincides neatly with what the Pakistan based terror group  Lashkar-e-Taiba, the main accused in the Mumbai terror attacks, has been saying about Kashmir.

India was not at all happy with his comments and made it clear to him and Britain without couching its language in diplomatic nuance. But beyond that it is reasonable to speculate that Miliband’s comments could have acted as a trial balloon for the Obama administration. Obama himself has spoken in terms of the US helping to resolve the Kashmir dispute, a suggestion that he probably knows India bristles at.

Taken together New Delhi will be well advised to monitor how quickly Kashmir features in either Obama’s or his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s policy matrix. It is very clear that Obama would go after Pakistan far more aggressively than the Bush administration ever did. The best way for Obama to soften the blow on Pakistan’s western front is by simultaneously stepping up the pressure on its eastern border.

I doubt if Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s sanguine praise of George Bush in the specific context of India would have been lost on the Obama team. For someone who has followed South Asian politics and its deep emotional content for over two decades, all I can say to anyone who cares to listen is that the powers that be in New Delhi do not take slights or interventions or meddling very well. It is no longer possible to railroad the world’s biggest democracy, which is also a huge economy to boot.

Significance of Biden in South Asia

Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s pre-inauguration visit to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India underscores how central the region would be to the Obama administration. Nothing else can explain the visit barely 11 days before Barack Obama takes over the reins in Washington.

The visit ought to have been at the instance of Obama  although the ostensible purpose is said to the conferment of the the Hilal-e-Quaid-e-Azam, a Pakistan civilian honor given to foregin dignitaries who support Pakistan. I could be wrong but Biden has not been particularly gung-ho about Pakistan. If anything his approach has been to the contrary. So obviously there is much more to the visit than just receiving a state honor at a time when Obama is preparing to take charge.

Given the contiguous nature of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India and the easy movement of terror groups along the three, no government trying to settle Afghanistan or Pakistan can do without involving all three. India has a strong presence in Afghanistan which has been a matter of great annoyance for Pakistan. It is absolutely essential that India stays seriously engaged in Afghanistan because anything happening in the region has a direct cosquence for the country.

For the Obama administration the area that is going to matter the most is the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). For those tracking this region I should point to an exhaustive report written by Shuja Nawaz for the Center for Startegic and International Studies (CSIS). The report says, “Increased militancy and violence in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan known as the Federally  Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan has brought FATA into sharper focus, as U.S., Afghan, and Pakistani leaders attempt to find solutions to the problems underlying the situation there. This most dangerous spot on the map may well be the source of another 9/11 type of attack on the Western world or its surrogates in the region.”

The report can be found here: http://www.csis.org/component/option,com_csis_pubs/task,view/id,5185/type,1/

"State actors" or "state-assisted actor" behind Mumbai attacks?

India’s Home Minister P. Chidambaram has surprisingly upped the ante in categorically declaring that “state-actors” or “state-assisted actors” were involved in the Mumbai terror attacks.

"Somebody who is familiar with intelligence and who is familiar with commando operations has directed this operation. And that cannot be a non-state actor,” Chidambaram told the television channel NDTV’s program ‘Walk the Talk.’

"In fact, I presume they are state actors or state-assisted actors unless the contrary is proved. It was too enormous a crime and required elaborate planning, communication networks, financial backing. It was a very, very sophisticated operation," Chidambaram said.

The assertion adds a more unsettling factor into the already vitiated atmosphere between India and Pakistan in the aftermath of the attacks. Coming from the country’s top internal security boss, it is quite a claim. It comes just before the minister is scheduled to travel to Washington with a detailed dossier containing corroborating evidence of Pakistani involvement in the attacks. Unlike in the wake of terror attacks in the past New Delhi seems bent on keeping up the pressure on Islamabad which has swung between denial and grudging acknowledgement of Pakistani involvement.

So far the debate was focused on the possibility of “non-state actors” based in Pakistan, namely terror groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba having been involved. But Chidambaram has significantly changed the context by saying that a sophisticated operation of the kind that the Mumbai attacks were could not have been mounted with some state assistance. Of course, state assistance could also mean some shadowy and rogue elements of the country’s intelligence but Chidambaram has kept it tantalizingly vague.

On the specific question of whether the lone surviving attacker Mohammad Ajmal Amir Qasab is a Pakistani, Chidambaram suggests a simple DNA test to prove it. It is question of matching Qasab’s DNA with that of his father in Pakistan who had reportedly acknowledged that it was indeed his son.

On a related matter C. Uday Bhaskar, one of India’s best known strategic analysts, has an interesting piece out on the wire service IANS where he says India should have no illusion about US support on the question of terror and Pakistan. “The US dependence on the Pakistani military goes well beyond the presence of its troops in Afghanistan and the proposed 'surge' strategy in the Obama watch. The CIA-ISI linkages are embedded in a murky past and Indian expectations from the US will have to be tempered accordingly,” Bhaskar writes. The full analysis can be read here http://dailysub.com/analysis1.htm 

Return to reasonableness

Reasonableness has returned to Pakistan’s official response to the question of whether Mohammad Ajmal Amir Qasab, the lone surviving Mumbai attacker, is a Pakistani.

Islamabad now says it will provide Qasab legal assistance if they can establish that he is indeed from Pakistan. A senior Pakistani official has been quoted the IANS wire as saying, "Yes, we will provide him legal aid if he's a Pakistani and we are allowed consular access to him."

It is baffling why Pakistan could not have taken this position soon after it was disclosed by India that Qasab had sought consular access to the Pakistani mission in New Delhi. No one is suggesting that merely agreeing to afford him consular access is tantamount to admission that he is Pakistani origin but it is a start. It is obviously better than whipping war hysteria and claim to redeploy troops from the Afghan border to the Indian border.

The “information” on Qasab as Pakistan calls it and “evidence” as India calls it was routed to Pakistan via the US. "Yes, we have received information like the confession by Qasab and a record of his conversation with people in Pakistan," the official said.  One can smell incredulity in his expression ‘information like the confession’. You can tell that he does not believe for a second in the veracity of what India calls the confession.

I agree that such cases are never watertight but given that India has also furnished phone intercepts and logs about contacts between the terrorists and their handlers/trainers in Pakistan the case appears far more credible than what Pakistan would like the world to believe.

This is a promising opening in the eventual resolution of the stand-off that is causing palpitations in Western capitals. But then India-Pakistan relations have a great history of letting hopes down.

Pakistan's not-so-subtle message to Obama

The following analysis appeared worldwide on the IANS wire yesterday.

By Mayank Chhaya

Away from Chicago’s intensely cold winter and vacationing in the salubrious climes of his birth state of Hawaii President-elect Barack Obama is being delivered a not-so-subtle message by Pakistan.

The reported movement of Pakistani troops from the country’s northwest to its border with India may well be aimed at telling the incoming president that Islamabad will make its own independent decisions. This could be particularly triggered by Obama’s well known position that Pakistan ought to take strong action against the Al Qaeda-Taliban combine, failing which the US might consider doing so itself.

Raising the bugbear of an impending Indian attack is the only way Pakistan can at least nominally justify redeploying its troops from the northwest to the east. To that extent India’s officially stated position that all options, including a military one, are on the table in the aftermath of the November 26 Mumbai terror attacks in case Pakistan chooses not to act against terrorist groups based there, may have played into this design.

As early as August, 2007 Obama had said, “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.” The statement was then seen, as it is now, as a significant departure from President George Bush’s policy of not attacking targets inside Pakistan. In effect, Obama had said that the US would act with or without Pakistani approval in case Islamabad did not or could not.

In some sense the troop redeployment barely three weeks before Obama’s inauguration must be seen as Pakistan indirectly reminding him that it still pursues policies it considers its sovereign right. Without building up war hysteria Pakistan would have found it practically impossible to significantly disengage its troops from the Afghan border. It was not surprising that Islamabad seized the first opportunity that India might be considering a military option, which has been denied by no less a person than Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself.

The timing of the Pakistani decision falls within that peculiarly transitory period when the outgoing president no longer has the bully pulpit and the incoming one would be reluctant to appear to be acting before his time. Of course, back channels between Washington, Islamabad and New Delhi must have lighted in the aftermath of the troop movement.

The redeployment has the potential of seriously undermining the US war on terror in Afghanistan and by implication inside Pakistani border areas in the region where both the Taliban and Al Qaeda are known to have a free run. It is possible that some in the US might see the latest Pakistani move as upping the ante with the specific objective of strengthening its bargaining position vis-à-vis the incoming Obama administration.

It s not entirely clear in Washington what the extent of the redeployment might be, although a figure of 20,000 has been heard in some media reports. U.S. military and intelligence officials had not yet determined if there is any truth to the reports and if so how much.

Although it is not likely to be stated in so many words by anyone in the Obama team but between the two India is automatically expected to be the responsible party and therefore exercise restraint. There could be a sense in the team that New Delhi may not want to present Obama with a highly dangerous challenge by launching surgical strikes against Pakistani targets even before he takes office. 

Stop gratuitous posturing

Gratuitous posturing is the name of the game in Pakistan and to an extent in India these days. Reports of war hysteria building up are coming in rapidly. Islamabad has suspended leave for its army personnel and is planning to move some of its troops from the Afghanistan border to the Indian border in anticipation of surgical strikes by New Delhi.

Surgical strikes by their very nature are surprise strikes. No intelligent country builds up a crescendo towards such strikes. What’s the point of advertising impending strikes when their entire purpose is to catch your target by complete surprise? But that is putting too fine a print on the broader issue of war hysteria that Pakistan in particular appears to have been gripped by.

This is happening in notwithstanding Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s clear statement that no one wants war. At some level one cannot fully blame Islamabad for reacting the way it is because India is showing some signs of stirring up the pot, the latest being a meeting between the prime minister and the country’s three armed forces chiefs over their “preparedness.” It is not every day that the four men discuss the armed forces’ preparedness unless they are trying to send a signal to the neighbor. New Delhi is certainly letting it be known that it is deeply unhappy at the stonewalling by Pakistan in the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks. The bone of contention is whether Mohammad Ajmal Amir Qasab, the lone surviving attacker, is from Pakistan.

After making some polite and friendly noises Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari has changed his position saying, “We will defend the country till the last drop of our blood.” A bit dramatic, considering there are no serious signs from the Indian side yet.

All this is feeding what appears to be a larger plan to ease up military pressure on the Taliban-Al Qaeda combine on the Afghan border. It would be a serious mistake for India to offer Pakistan the opportunity to do what it would otherwise find nearly impossible to do. Without a threat of war from India, Pakistan will have no justifiable reason to go slow on the Afghan border.