The Acorn  

…but outside the corridors of power

Ashley J Tellis’s testimony before the US House of Representatives subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia is one of the most clear-headed assessments in Washington.

The only lasting solution to this danger is to press Pakistan to target groups such as LeT conclusively. Many in the United States imagine that the fix actually lies in pressing India to make peace with Pakistan; such an outcome would eliminate the Pakistani military’s incentives to support a sub- conventional conflict against New Delhi—or so the theory goes. There is no doubt that a lasting reconciliation between India and Pakistan would be fundamentally in the interests of both countries— and of the United States. To that degree, Washington should certainly use its influence with both India and Pakistan to encourage the dialogue that leads to a resolution of all outstanding disputes, including the vexed problem of Kashmir. But, unfortunately for those who advocate pressing India, the impediments to a lasting peace in South Asia do not emanate from New Delhi. Rather, they are incubated in Islamabad, or to be more precise, in Rawalpindi.

So long as the Pakistani Army and the security establishment more generally conclude that their private interests (and their conception of the national interest) are undermined by a permanent reconciliation between India and Pakistan, they will not rid themselves of the terrorist groups they have begotten and which serve their purposes—irrespective of what New Delhi or Kabul or Washington may desire. This fact ought to be understood clearly by the Obama administration. Once it is, it may push the United States to either compel Pakistan to initiate action against LeT or hold Pakistan responsible for the actions of its proxies. If these efforts do not bear fruit, the United States will have to contemplate unilateral actions (or cooperative actions with other allies) to neutralize the most dangerous of the terrorist groups now resident in Pakistan. Doing so may be increasingly necessary not simply to prevent a future Indo-Pakistani crisis, but more importantly to protect the United States, its citizens, its interests, and its allies. [Tellis/US House of Representatives (pdf)]

Another sound assessment comes from Fareed Zakaria:

Pakistan’s military retains its obsession with India — how else to justify a vast budget in a poor nation? It has still not acted seriously against any of the major militant groups active against Afghanistan, India or the United States. The Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani group, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Lashkar-e-Taiba and many smaller groups operate with impunity in Pakistan. But the Pakistani military is doing more than it has before, and that counts as success in the world of foreign policy.

Such success will endure only if the Obama administration keeps at it. Some believe that Pakistan has changed its basic strategy and now understands that it should cut ties to these groups altogether. Strangely, this naive view is held by the U.S. military, whose top brass have spent so many hours with their counterparts in Islamabad that they’ve gone native. It’s up to Obama and his team to remind the generals that pressing Pakistan is a lot like running on a treadmill. If you stop, you move backward — and most likely fall down. [WP]

Trying to understand why terrorists are attacking Lahore

As Pakistan’s internal jihadi civil war intensifies, it is important to note that the groups targeting Pakistani cities—specifically the Pakistani army and law-enforcement agencies—are not the same ones as those that the Pakistani military establishment uses to attack India.

It is highly likely that the perpetrators of this week’s attacks on Lahore are terrorists belonging to the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi/Sipah-e-Sahaba or those connected to the Karachi Deobandi groups. They are against the Pakistani army’s collaboration with the United States, duplicitous though that collaboration might be. Their recent attacks might have been provoked by the killing of Qari Zafar, one of the leaders of this faction, in a drone attack earlier this month. Similarly, the yesterday’s targeting of a Sipah-e-Sahaba leader in Karachi was likely an operation carried out by ISI in retaliation.

These groups are different from the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group that the ISI uses to attack India.

Related Post: Is a fratricidal war between the two sets of jihadi groups in the offing? Or, as Marvin Weinbaum testifies, are the two groups one Deobandi, one Ahl-e-Hadith, coming together?

Empowering women is not quite the same as creating powerful women

(From this blog’s archives, a post first published on August 23rd, 2005.)

No nation can stand proud if it discriminates against any of its citizens. Certainly no society can claim to be part of the modern civilized world unless it treats its women on par with men. The time for genuine and full empowerment of women is here and now.” (the Indian prime minister) asserted. [IE]

Dr Manmohan Singh is on the money when he identifies discrimination against women as one of the biggest problems that India faces. Unfortunately, his government is not quite on the money as far as the solution goes — reserving a third of seats at the national and state legislatures does not sufficiently guarantee that India will change its attitude towards women. Worse, it may convey an impression that the problem is being addressed while not amounting to much in reality. But this may explain why Indian politicians are excited about the move in the first place.

Firstly, reservations and entitlements are not the best way for a democratic country to order its society. History has shown that once an entitlement or a reservation is put in place, it is impossible to revoke — regardless of whether the purpose for which it was intended has been achieved or not. Reservations create no incentives for those entitled to them to break away from them and enter the mainstream. Besides it is a fallacy to believe that women legislators solve women’s problems better. And the idea of free and fair elections is for the electorate to choose who, in its combined opinion, is the best person for the job. Interfering with the course of free and fair elections seriously undermines democracy.

Secondly, reservations for women are ineffective from another, practical, point of view. That is because while it will empower those women who make it to parliament, it will not do much for the majority of women who don’t. Creating powerful women is not quite the same as empowering women. And that is an important distinction. The streets of Chennai, New Delhi or Lucknow, all in states ruled by a powerful women, are no more safer from the streets of Bangalore or Kolkata which have male chief ministers.

Forget empowered women. In the worst case, reservations may not even create those powerful women. Packing parliament with 150 ‘Rabri Devis‘, elected as proxies for their male relatives will defeat the spirit and the purpose of the entire idea. Worse, it will also create 150 ‘Laloos‘ who can enjoy all the privileges of political power without being accountable to anyone. (Perhaps with the exception of their wives. But the jury is out on this.). Given the way electoral politics has come to be practised in India, this is a real possibility.

What then is the appropriate public policy response to what is arguably India’s single biggest challenge? Actually, Dr Manmohan Singh alluded to it further down his speech.

“We are pursuing legislation that will provide flexibility in working hours to women and encourage women’s employment in the industrial and services sector”, he said adding a Bill on protection of women from domestic violence has been passed and changes had been effected in the criminal procedure code and the Hindu Succession Act to empower women. [IE]

Indian women have been politically empowered (in law) since 26th January 1950. But economic and social empowerment has been elusive. Laws and regulations — sometimes introduced with the intention to protect them — have only led to their economic marginalisation. Other laws, like those allowing Muslims to follow a different civil code from people of other faiths, have led to cases like Shah Bano or Imrana.

For India to truly empower women, it does not need to have ‘gender sensitive legislation’ as Dr Manmohan Singh has proposed. It just needs to clean up the gender sensitivities in the existing body of legislation that distort the equality and undermine the empowerment that they already enjoy under Indian constitution.

Defence expenditure is the premium paid to insure against the failure of foreign policy

A good defence strategy is one that manages the risks of foreign policy going wrong for one reason or the other. It might turn out that foreign policy was based on the wrong presumptions, or unexpected events might upset the geopolitical balance and so on. In these circumstances, a state should have the military capacity to ensure that its interests are protected. In other words, work for the best, but prepare for scenarios where the best doesn’t happen.

It follows that there is a good reason to keep the foreign & defence policy establishments at a sufficient distance in order to prevent confusion on their respective objectives. They must co-operate and co-ordinate at some levels, but it must be recognised that defence expenditure is essentially premium paid to insure against the failure of foreign policy.

There are two mistakes states can make: subordinating defence strategy to foreign policy and vice versa.

Nehru’s policy of non-alignment (as distinct from participation in the Non Aligned Movement) in the years following independence was infused with realism. But he failed to (and indeed refused to) invest in building the necessary military capacity to hedge against the chance that non-alignment might fail. In the event, he had to seek urgent military assistance from the United States in 1962 after the Chinese invasion.

Pakistan is an example of the other mistake. Its foreign policy is completely subordinate to its military strategy. It is eminently sensible for Pakistan to develop military capacity to defend itself against India. But it is high folly to then pursue a foreign policy of relentless hostility and antagonism towards its eastern neighbour.

The takeaway from this little post is that an essential question that foreign policy analysts must ask is—are the goods sufficiently insured?

Did the Ayatollah qualify for a PIO card?

From Hooman Majd’s excellent The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran:

Some secular Persian intellectuals … reserve a special hatred for Ayatollah Khomeini, not just because he founded the Islamic Republic, but because to them he wasn’t even Persian. Since his paternal grandfather was an India who immigrated to Iran (to the town of Khomein) in the early nineteenth century, some Iranians feel that his “tainted” blood means that a true Persian was not at the helm of the revolution, the most momentous event in their country’s modern history, good or bad. And soon after that revolution, when the time came to change the symbol of Iran on its flag from the lion and sun (which the revolutionaries incorrectly associated with the Shahs), Khomeini himself chose a symbol among those submitted by artists—a stylized “Allah”—which is opponents, at least the more race-conscious ones, continue to insist bears a remarkable similarity to the symbol of the Sikhs.

Some of Khomeini’s enemies see it as proof of a foreign hand in the revolution, perhaps British because of their influence in India, or, worse, a secret conspiracy by an Indian religion to destroy Persia, and today, when Iranian exiles and even some inside Iran want to disparage him, they sometimes refer to him as Hindi (which happened to be his grandfather’s surname but is also Persian for “Indian”). One such Iranian in Tehran, when he found out where I was staying, insisted that I take a short walk in my neighborhood past the Sikh center of Tehran, a large white compound with a garden surrounded, naturally, by high walls. “Look at the logo on the gates of the walls, and then tell me that Khomeini wasn’t a Sikh,” he said. I found that there was indeed a Sikh center, right in my neighborhood, and the emblem on the gates I have to admit, does give one pause while viewing it in the Islamic Republic, where its own emblem is ubiquitous. But after a few moments reflecting on the coincidence of its uncanny similarity to the “Allah” of Iran, I moved on, reflecting instead on my compatriots’ love of and insatiable appetite for conspiracy theories. [Hooman Majd/The Ayatollah Begs to Differ pp168-169]

The Khalsa and the Islamic Republic

Related Links: With thousand testicles—the Vedic-Avestan divergence; and the ensuing discussion.

General Kayani’s moves suggest that he sees the final lap

President Barack Obama gave his Af-Pak speech at West Point on December 1st, 2009 where he announced his intention “to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.” General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani signaled his policy by the end that month when a suicide bomber attacked a CIA facility at Khost.

Mr Obama’s speech might have triggered the Pakistani military-jihadi complex into implementing its endgame strategy. Pakistani actions over the last three months suggest that it is both attempting to hasten the US exit from Afghanistan and neutralising the other regional actors—Iran and India—which might oppose a pro-Pakistan post-US arrangement in Kabul. From the attack on the CIA at Khost; to the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in Karachi; to the terrorist attack at German Bakery in Pune; to the raid on Kabul city centre; to the rendition of Abdolmalek Rigi to Iran; and most recently, the attack on Indian officials at Kabul, General Kayani & Co have executed their moves masterfully.

Mullah Baradar was not only a ‘moderate’ among the Quetta Shura Taliban, but also actually negotiating with the United States and the Karzai government, against the wishes of the ISI. ‘Capturing’ him not only allowed Pakistan to undermine the US-Afghan political initiative but also allowed General Kayani to be seen as arresting a ‘high-ranking Taliban leader’. This was a brilliant move—Washington had to praise Pakistan even after receiving a kick below the belt. It was, nevertheless, a significant setback for independent US political efforts in Afghanistan. It meant that the United States relies a little more on Pakistan to act as the, well, interlocutor with the Taliban.

Abdolmalek Rigi, the leader of a Iranian-Baloch-Sunni terrorist organisation called Jundallah, was almost certainly a CIA asset. The Iranian government has accused him of both being a US agent and of having links with al-Qaeda. Both these charges are perhaps true—contradictory as they might seem. The ISI allowed him to operate from Pakistani territory, for the CIA, against Iran for several years. But after India, Iran and Russia—whose interests were ignored at the London conference on the future of Afghanistan—started coming together, the ISI played the CIA out and handed him over to Iran. The United States can’t complain too loudly, after all, like Mullah Baradar, hasn’t Pakistan just acted against a terrorist with links to al-Qaeda?

(There was the little issue of how to hand Rigi over without setting a precedent that New Delhi might exploit—so an elaborate drama became necessary)

With Iran it was mollification. With India it is aggression. The attack on Indian officials in Kabul is intended to scare India out of Afghanistan. Even as the Pakistani military-jihadi complex seeks to hasten US military withdrawal, it is working towards installing its proxies into the corridors of power in Kabul. It will allow President Karzai to remain in office just long enough to provide a political cover for the United States—but before long, a pro-Pakistan regime will take his place.

Is General Kayani overplaying his hand? Maybe. But bringing the situation to a head before 2011 works to Pakistan’s advantage.

Will the United States watch silently as the Pakistani military-jihadi complex destroys its assets and—brazenly, if cleverly—frustrates its designs? Will the vaunted COIN campaign work fast enough? Will the United States intensify its covert war inside Pakistan to counter General Kayani’s moves? Let’s see.

Guns are necessary

The attack on Indian officials in Kabul on February 26th was no ordinary one—it was almost certainly an operation ordered by the ISI and carried out by one or the other of its errand boys. If the ‘taliban’ wanted to merely attack Indian nationals they could have picked any of the hundreds of civilians and aid-workers spread across the country. That they chose the particular hotel in Kabul, and at what appears to be a particular time, suggests that the targeting was deliberate. When, while storming the guest house, one of the attackers shouted “where is the director?” he wasn’t asking for Mahesh Bhatt.

Pakistan has escalated the proxy war against India in Afghanistan. How should, and how will India respond?

Right from the time when Indian aid workers first came under attack in November 2005, The Acorn has argued that India must both increase its development activities as well as increase its military presence in Afghanistan. India cannot fight this war with shovels alone. Then in August 2008 after Pakistan escalated the proxy war to yet another level, Pragati argued that India should consider sending combat troops to Afghanistan. And when it became clear that General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani had decided to continue on the path of escalation of the proxy war both in Afghanistan and on Indian soil, we advocated that India must send combat troops to Afghanistan.

The February 26th attacks on Indian interests in Afghanistan reveal that the criticism that sending troops will cause Pakistan to escalate violence was misplaced. On the contrary, absent an Indian response, Pakistan will continue to escalate until India suspends its development activities, disengages from political engagement of the Afghan government and completely pulls out of Afghanistan. And then it will shift the main theatre of the proxy war back to Jammu & Kashmir.

Given the nature of the game, India’s immediate response must be a tit-for-tat attack against Pakistani interests. That should be followed by a strengthening of the number, quality and terms of engagement troops providing security to Indian installations, projects and personnel. But even this will fall short of what is really required—combat troops on missions that support the Hamid Karzai government.

But how will India respond? It is quite likely that the Indian government will want to continue the development projects but enhance the number of paramilitary troops that provide security. It is also likely to increase intelligence co-operation with Iran and Russia, and might even attempt to bolster the anti-taliban and anti-Pakistan groups (of which there is no shortage). While all this might give India some tactical options in the proxy war, it will lack effective strategic levers unless the UPA government is willing to take some bold steps.

Tailpiece: Richard Holbrooke, who made a reasonable point when he said that it is too early to jump to conclusions, should have known better than to speak too soon. He has himself to blame not merely for angering mourners but for losing credibility by appearing to exonerate the ISI too early. Now he’s had to eat a humble pakora.

…is that we don’t learn from them

Here’s a passage from my review of India & Counterinsurgency: Lessons Learned, a volume of case studies and analyses edited by Sumit Ganguly & David Fidler.

A recurring theme in the book is that lessons that were to be learnt in one counter-insurgency campaign were not learnt, and mistakes repeated over and over again. That is as much a damning indictment of the Indian armed forces—particularly the army—as it is of a political class that treats political violence as within the ambit of legitimate politics. But while the failings of political leaders are well-known and roundly condemned, the lapses of the security forces are masked by information asymmetries.

Shouldn’t a counter-insurgency doctrine help prevent mistakes from being repeated? Comparing the counter-insurgency doctrines of the United States and India, Dr Fidler writes that the exercise of developing the Indian Doctrine for Sub-Conventional Operations (DSCO) was “mainly one of codification—collecting in one document guidance accumulated over the course of more than fifty years. The objective was not to revolutionise how the Indian Army or government thought about how to fight insurgencies.” That sounds quintessentially Indian and evokes images of the Vedas, which were codified into written form after centuries of existence as oral tradition. It will be a challenge to translate this kind of a document into a strategy for current and future conflicts.

Dr Fidler also points out that India’s counter-insurgency doctrine “has not involved the civilian government agencies affected, such as the state and central police forces.” This is perhaps its biggest weakness—by its very nature, counter-insurgency is a problem of (re-)establishing governance. The Indian pattern has been one where, even after a successful campaign by security forces, the civilian government is somehow expected to miraculously appear and resume administration. Unfortunately, this does not usually happen, setting the state for the insurgency to resume. It is unclear if this broad point has registered at the highest levels of the Indian government. [Pragati---The Indian National Interest Review]

Maoist leader has talktime

Here’s a delightful passage from today’s Hindu:

Mr Chidambaram had earlier given a fax number of the Union Home ministry for (Maoist leader Koteshwara Rao) Kishenji to make his offer of talks, with the stipulation that there should be “no ifs, buts and preconditions“.

Kishenji had responded by sharing a mobile number and saying he would wait for a phone call.

“There has been no response from the government to the number we gave to Union Home Minster for talks so far. There is no phone call from them. This proves once again that Chidambaram is not interested in talks,” Kishenji alleged.

The Maoists would communicate to the media by fax if they received a “positive response” from the Government, he said. [The Hindu]

The Maoists will send a fax to the media but will not send one to Mr Chidambaram. They want him to call Kishenji’s cellphone. Clash of egos?

A deadlock like this can only occur when neither party feels sufficient pain in order to swallow pride and wave that white handkerchief. Mr Chidambaram should just wait for that fax.

What sauce do you like on your spaghetti (or, the tale of two covers)

Because this one looks so good (and lost out only due to ‘technical reasons’) we thought you should see it.

Arrabiata