Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is in the United States for the first official state visit by any foreign leader since President Barack Obama took office this year. While the atmospherics are right, and the two leaders probably won't be looking as stilted as Obama and China's President Hu Jintao appeared to be during Obama's trip last week (for the Indians are rarely short on conversation), there is a sense of unease.

And much of it has to do with AFPAK - the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan which is very nearly at the top of Obama's foreign policy agenda and one that some fear may eventually consume the rest of his presidency. America's ally Pakistan worries about India's expanding assistance and links to Afghanistan, seeing it as part of a strategy to encircle it from the rear.  Ordinarily, Pakistani noises wouldn't bother India as much, but for signs that the Obama administration has begun to adopt those concerns as its own in its desperate search for a solution, as Fareed Zakaria writes in Newsweek.

And that is producing a "perverse view" of the region, he says adding it was a bit strange that India was being criticised for its influence in Afghanistan. India is the hegemon in South Asia, with a GDP 100 times that of Afghanistan and it was only natural that as Afghanistan opened itself up following the ouster of the Taliban in 2001, its cuisine, movies and money would flow into the country. The whole criticism about India,  Zakaria says, is a little bit like saying the United States has had growing influence  in Mexico over the last few decades and should be penalised for it.

But what about Pakistan's concerns, a country that was dismembered in the last full-scale war with India in 1971 with the creation of Bangladesh. The last thing it would want is a hostile regime in Afghanistan on its western flank on top of the Indian army, the world's third largest, massed on the eastern front, not to mention the Islamist militants whom it once nurtured turning on  the State itself.

Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Kayani told the U.S. National Security Adviser General Jim Jones earlier his month that Indian presence in Kabul would hurt the war objectives.

And what about the Afghans themselves ? The India-Pakistan rivalry is probably a sideshow in the broader battle between a resurgent Taliban and the foreign forces, but perhaps one they can do without.

[Photographs of Afghan children and Indian and U.S. flags at the White House]

Steve Coll, journalist and president of the New America Foundation, sets out four consequences of failure in Afghanistan in a blog in The New Yorker, which speak to those especially in America who question its involvement in the first place in this far-off "graveyard of empires."

A new ABC/Washington Post poll says 52 percent of Americans don't believe the war is worth the costs.

Coll says: 

1) If the world were to give up on Afghanistan and the Taliban were to return to power, it would mean a re-run of the Civil War in the 90s, but this time on "steroids". It is inconceivable that the Taliban could triumph in the country completely and provide a regime (however perverse) of stability and so you could have a rump Afghan government dominated by ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks find arms and money from India, Iran, and perhaps Russia, Europe and the United States. This would likely produce a long-running civil war between northern, Tajik-dominated ethnic militias and the Pashtun-dominated Taliban.

2) Success in Afghanistan would give momentum for a Taliban revolution in Pakistan. If the Quetta Shura regained power in Kandahar or Kabul, it would undoubtedly interpret its triumph as a ticket to further ambition in Pakistan. The Pakistani Taliban would likely be energized, armed and financed by the Afghan Taliban as they pursue their own revolutionary ambitions in Islamabad.

3) Increased Islamist Violence Against India : The probable knock-on effect of a second Taliban revolution Afghanistan would be to increase the likelihood of irregular Islamist attacks from Pakistan against Indian targets as they see to extend their influence. In time, democratic Indian governments would be pressed by their electorates to respond with military force, and the world would then have to deal with a fourth Indian-Pakistan war, this time both nations nuclear-armed.

4) Al Qaeda's ambitions against Britain and the United States would strengthen. While al Qaeda's capacity to launch disruptive attacks on American soil remain low, it would be absurd to argue it won't be strengthened by a Taliban return to Afghanistan, Coll says. London may well be more vulnerable to a future attack five or ten years after an Afghan Taliban revolution, given the large Pakistani Diaspora in Britain that the "bad guys" may well use to blend in.

Finally, while the threat to the rest of the world from an unstable Afghanistan has been spelt out innumerable times, what about the risk to Afghans themselves? An Oxfam survey offers a sobering glimpse of the mood of the nation with these findings: one in five Afghans questioned said they had been tortured, one in 10 claimed to have been imprisoned at least once since 1979, when Soviet forces invaded, and one in six Afghans are currently considering leaving the country.

One of the survey's respondents from the eastern province of Nangarhar summed up what instability in Afghanistan has led to already by saying more than 2 million people had died in decades of conflict, 70 percent of the country had been destroyed, and its economy virtually eliminated.

"Half our people have been driven mad. A man who is 30 or 40 years old looks like he is 70. We always live in fear. We are not secure anywhere in Afghanistan," the respondent said.

[Top: A U.S. Marine passes Afghan children while on patrol in Helmand province (Reuters/Asmaa Waguih); above: Afghan children hold a banner during the celebration of Peace Day in Kabul in September (Reuters/Omar Sobhani)]

                                              By Lucy Hornby

The setting for Barack Obama and Hu Jintao's "date night" on Tuesday was magnificent -- the Gold Room in Beijing's Great Hall of the People, with its lush red carpets and elaborate murals. 

The chef was cautious, choosing a menu of chicken and tofu soup, steak and grouper without any of the spicier or exotic fare common to Chinese banquets. For the wine --  a little vin d'appellation Hebei, c 2002, otherwise known as Great Wall, gave Obama, a foretaste of his trip on Wednesday to the Great Wall itself.
 
And the music? The military band of the People's Liberation Army serenaded Hu, Obama and the 150 other guests with a selection that combined keen hopes for the future with a whiff of the karaoke playbook.

"Wonderful Night" gave way to "America the Beautiful," "We Are the World" segued into the Chinese tune "Step by Step Higher". But then the band turned coy - "I Just Called to Say I Love You" was met with "In that Faraway Place." The band finished off with "In the Mood" before the two went their separate ways, returning home through the chilly night and the empty Beijing streets.

[A volunteer on the outskirts of Beijing in a campaign urging Obama to honour promises and ensure the U.S. plays a key role in climate change negotiations. Pic by Jason Lee.] 

U.S. President Barack Obama hopes to win over a sometimes wary Chinese public at a "townhall" meeting in Shanghai on Monday, inviting questions from young people and also -- the White House hopes -- reaching out across the Internet to the country's some 300 million Internet users.
 
But Obama better prepare for some combative, and outright odd, quizzing, to judge from Chinese Internet web sites that have begun inviting people to suggest questions to lob at Obama.

The questions range from thoughtful ones about trade policy,Tibet and Taiwan to angry rants about U.S. foreign policy and one provocative one about handing over California to China !

Here's Beijing Senior Correspondent Chris Buckley's story  on what Obama could be up against next week.

[Women at a cemetery in Kabul, picture by Reuters' Ahmad Masood]

As U.S. President Barack Obama makes up his mind on comitting more troops to Afghanistan, the search for analogies continues. Clearly, Afghanistan cannot be compared with Vietnam or Iraq  beyond a point. The history, geography, the culture and the politics are just too different.

The best analogy to Afghanistan may well the very area in dispute - the rugged Pashtun lands straddling the border with Pakistan and where  the Pakistani army is in the middle of an offensive, argues William Tobey in a piece for Foreign Policy.

Tobey, a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfar Center and who served on the National Security Council staff under three U.S. presidents, takes a walk down history to the 1936 uprising against British rule in Waziristan.

The rebels were driven by radical Islam, Pashtun nationalism and armed opportunism, much the same factors firing up the modern Taliban campaign.  

"The rebels improvised roadside bombs, ambushed convoys, and launched hit and run attacks on isolated outposts to drive out alien forces. They kidnapped and beheaded British soldiers and civilians. In unprotected villages, they massacred civilians who did not support them. "

And when troops chased them, they crossed the border into Afghanistan. Much of the same is happening on either side of Waziristan's border with Afghanistan and you could be forgiven to think if this isn't a re-run in some ways.

Even the British response in Waziristan seems to be similar to US/NATO operations in Afghanistan. They called in air strikes, the earliest use of air power, and with similar set of rules to limit civilian casualties. But of course, like the NATO forces they ended up causing civilian casualties.

[U.S.Marines in Helmand, picture by Reuters' Asmaa Waguih}

The British, also attempted, to improve civil society, building roads and schools. Again the results were mixed. Some people appreciated the assistance, but many others saw it as a way to extend British military power and Western values deeper into their lands.

Here's a Time magazine article from January 1948 detailing what it calls Britain's "most dogged  (and futile) essays in civilisation."

Eventually Waziristan was pacified through a combination of overwhelming force, shrewd political moves dividing and sapping the morale of the rebels, and patience, Tobey says.

The thing to remember is that the West's war with al Qaeda must somehow not be transformed into a war with nearly 40 million Pashtuns who live on both sides of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, he says.

 The West has just saved itself more trouble by acquiescing to the re-election of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, however imperfect the process may have been.  

The brute reality of Afghanistan is that it would be even more difficult to govern under a non-Pashtun president such as Karzai's main challenger Abdullah Abdullah who is half-Tajik, since Pashtuns are half the population and "most of the trouble",  says Bret Stephens in a piece in the Wall Street Journal.

Stephens, in fact, argues that it is self-serving for the U.S-led coalition to blame Karzai for all of Afghanistan's problems.

"It would be equally useful if some of Mr. Karzai's more acerbic Western critics could ask themselves why matters went abruptly south in Afghanistan after several years in which they had gone swimmingly well under Mr. Karzai, including a thriving economy, girls back in school, people having access to health care and so on. The answer has a lot less to do with Mr. Karzai's performance than with NATO's.," he says.

The Pakistani Taliban are warning the Pakistani military that it faces a fight in Waziristan tougher than Kashmir where the Indian army has struggled to quell a 20-year armed revolt.

It must be a rather bitter irony for the Pakistani army to be dealt such a warning from an umbrella militant group, several of whose members it once nurtured to fight the Indian army in Kashmir.

War by a thousand cuts, the Pakistan strategic establishment said, referring to the strategy to bleed India's much larger army and ensure parity. So militants were given material support to take on the Indian army which was then forced to throw in more and more troops in to the conflict zone, until there were almost - and to this day remain -  anything around 400,000 to 500,000 troops in the area.  Such a large military presence by itself deepens the people's alienation and perpetuates the insurgency.

Is it going to be the same for the Pakistani army as Pakistan Taliban spokesman  Azam Tariq told Reuters on Tuesday just as suspected militants carried out the third attack near the frontier city of Peshawar in as many days ?

Waziristan as Kashmir does seem a stretch. One, the Pakistani Taliban don't have the cross border backing that the militants operating in Kashmir had, beginning with helping them cross over, to training, to  giving them arms and then pushing them back across the Kashmir frontier. Leave alone state support, it's not even certain that their brothers-in-arms, the Afghan Taliban, are backing them to the hilt in what must be their toughest battle yet since they turned against the Pakistani state.

For what it's worth an Afghan  Taliban commander on Tuesday distanced himself from the Pakistani Taliban, saying it didn't support targeting innocent people.  The Afghan Taliban's target were only the foreign forces in Afghanistan, Afghan Taliban commander Abdul Mannan alias Mullah Toor told Pakistan's GEO TV.

Two, the Pakistani army has deployed about 30,000 troops in the South Waziristan operation, a drop for an army with a size of over 520,000 troops.  The Taliban will have to do much more to draw the Pakistani army deeper into their lair and in  greater numbers before it can really begin to bleed them.

Third, there doesn't seem to be any people's support for the Taliban,  at least not in the open and not in the sense that the Indian army faces in Kashmir.

In such circumstances, can the Pakistani Taliban really go the distance, fight a 20-year war? Perhaps they will target Pakistan's cities and towns to weaken the state's resolve as they have done in the run-up and aftermath of the offensive.

{Reuters picture of people fleeing south Waziristan]

While attention has almost entirely been focused on America's difficult relationship with Pakistan - a writer in Foreign Policy magazine called it the world's most dysfunctional relationship - India and the United States have quietly gone ahead and completed the largest military exercise ever undertaken by New Delhi with a foreign army.

The exercise named Yudh Abyhas 2009 (or practice for war)  and conducted in northern India involved tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and helicopter-borne infantry. The U.S. army deployed 17 Strykers,  its eight-wheeled armoured vehicle, in the largest deployment of the newest vehicle outside of Iraq and Afghanistan for Pacific Rim forces, the military said.

"This exercise indeed is a landmark. For the Indian Army, this is the biggest we have done with any foreign army," Indian army director general of military operations, Lt. Gen. A.S. Sekhon said.

Since they began exercising together over the past decade after being on opposite sides of the Cold War, India and the United States have steadily advanced their military relationship. As the two big powers in the Indian Ocean, they  have had steadily complex naval exercises and this year, for added measure, brought in the Japanese navy too in a three-way exercise, a move which must not have been lost on the Chinese.

Indeed, as Robert Haddick, who edits the Small Wars Journal, writes in his column at Foreign Policy that the one defence relationship  in Asia that is progressing well for the United States is that involving India. It's not trouble-free especially with a prickly power such as India, but it stands out compared with the troubled security relationships the United States has with Pakistan and China, the author notes.

U.S. military engagement with China remains a work in progress. As Admiral Timothy Keating, the former military commander for the U.S. Pacific Command told the Financial Times in an interview last month he didn't have direct phone contacts for his counterparts in the People's Liberation Army, increasing the potential for misunderstanding.

"I don't have their [senior Chinese military officials'] phone number. I can't pick up the phone and wish them happy birthday. I don't mean to be glib about it . . . [But] we don't enjoy the sort of communication that I have with almost every other military leader in Asia," he said.

And what of Pakistan ? As noted in this blog, before only 16 percent of Pakistanis surveyed have a favorable view of the United States and 13 percent have confidence in President Barack Obama, according to the Pew Research Center.

Such a deep distrust and rage  severely complicates the relationship,  and often blinds Pakistan at its own loss, a Toronto-based analyst Sadiq Saleem writes. He says the visceral opposition to the U.S. aid bill was a case in point.

"Pakistanis as a nation are riled up en masse over the supposed ‘loss of sovereignty’ over the fact that our ally of 55 years decided to give us unconditional economic aid – in addition to conditional military aid.  At $1.5 billion per year the Enhanced Partnership for Pakistan Act 2009 would make Pakistan the single largest recipient of US government development aid in the world – greater than the Israel economic aid package."

But a combination of politicians and journalists have called the aid as anti-Pakistan because of the conditions attached to it. The big worry, according to Saleem, is that at some point Washington may get tired of dealing with a difficult partner.

"If our anti-Americanism continues the day might come when the Americans do not see the value of their Pakistani relationship. I, and anyone else who points this out, is not an American agent but a voice of sanity in an environment of anger and hate," he says.

Will America turn to India, where it still enjoys support and admiration among ordinary people even more than government leaders ? 

[Reuters picture of the exercise, and below a U.S. military release of the exercise]

If you were on the U.S-led coalition base in Bagram in Afghanistan soon after the 2001 invasion, you couldn't help noticing soldiers with long, Taliban-style beards and dressed in light brown shalwar kamaeez down to the sandals.

They kept to themselves. They weren't the friendly sort and before long you figured out these were the Special Forces who had fought along side the Northern Alliance in small teams to overthrow the Taliban and were then hunting its remnants and members of al Qaeda. The men grew beards to blend in during difficult and isolated missions in the Afghan countryside.

Close up, on the base some people thought looked like a little bit of America with its mountains of food, gym, and the easy banter of men and women soldiers, the Western men with the flowing beards stood out.

Eight years on, the Special Forces ops are still trying to master the disguise. But the men are still no closer to ordinary Afghans. In fact, the locals have grown to be especially wary of the Special Forces as this article on the Foreign Policy website says. The beards apparently only serve to allow ordinary people to distinguish them from regular U.S. and allied military units.

In Kandahar province's Zhari district, elders refer to the "bearded Americans," who they say behave very badly, and the "shaven Americans," who aren't so bad, the article says. Likewise, in Uruzgan province, locals have complained about "bearded Americans" using foul language and manhandling respected community elders and government officials.

Of course not all the members of the Special Forces go around with beards and not all the regular troops are clean shaven.  And to paint them as Rambo-types would be equally inaccurate, most of them are probably unassuming men, chosen as much for their mental as their physical aptitude.

But because they undertake the most dangerous and controversial missions, they tend to take much of the flak. They are involved in the capture and killing of al Qaeda and Taliban figures, which apart from causing civilian casualties also brings them in close contact with Afghan society at sensitive times. "Special operations forces, for example, perform late-night raids of Afghan homes, a deeply humiliating and dishonorable event in the local culture -- in particular, the searching of women's quarters," the article says.

It has been written by Anthony Bubalo, the programme director for West Asia at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney and Susanne Schmeidl a co-founder of the Liaison Office, an Afghan nongovernmental organization that since 2003 has worked with tribes in southeast and southern Afghanistan on governance, stability, and security.

The renewed focus on the Special Forces is important because of the ongoing debate on whether the United States should embrace the idea of a full-blown counter-insurgency campaign with its population-centric strategy as advocated by General Stanley A. McChrystal or counterterrorism as Vice President Joe Biden argues. In that scenario there would be greater use of Special Forces and unmanned drones to disrupt al Qaeda.

One Special Forces major  who spent time both in Afghanistan and Iraq has written a paper arguing that one way way to undermine the Afghan insurgency is to return in part to the strategy that ousted the Taliban in the first place: embed small, highly skilled and almost completely autonomous units with tribes across Afghanistan.

Much like the men who worked with the Northern Alliance in 2001, the unit which Major. Jim Gant calls Tribal Engagement Teams, would wear Afghan garb and live in Afghan villages for extended periods, training, equipping and fighting alongside tribal militias.

Here's his 45-page paper called One Tribe at a Time that has kicked off much debate.

Just as the Sunni tribesmen, dubbed the Sons of Iraq, turned against foreign al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq, Major Gant argues that the Tribal Engagement Teams can counter al-Qaeda networks in Afghanistan by creating or strengthening indigenous fighting forces built upon local militias.

[Pictures at the Bagram air base and Afghan women walking in front of a U.S. soldier]

 One questioner during an interaction with members of the public said the missile strikes by Predator aircraft amounted to "executions without trial" for those killed.  Another asked Clinton to define terrorism and whether she considered the drone attacks to be an act of terrorim like the car bomb that ripped through Peshawar that same week killing more than 100 people.

The people of Pakistan aren't the only ones asking that question.  A top UN rights expert has swung the attention back on the drone programme, saying that the United States may be violating international law with the missile strikes.

Philip Aston, the Special Rapporteur on extradjudicial, summary or arbitary executions, said there could be circumstances under which the use of such techniques could be justified in international law, but Washington would have to show it followed appropriate precautions and accountability mechanisms.

The United States will have to be more upfront about its Predator war. "Otherwise you have the really problematic bottom line, which is that the Central Intelligence Agency is running a programme that is killing a significant number of people, and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international law."

There is little doubt now that targeted killing is official U.S. policy,  Jane Meyer argues in a detailed piece for the New Yorker.  What is worrying is that the embrace of the Predator programme has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force. "And because of the CIA program's secrecy, there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war," Meyer writes.The drone programme, for all its successes, has stirred deep ethical concerns. Meyers quotes Michael Walzer, a political philosopher and author of the book "Just and Unjust Wars" that he is unsettled by the notion of an intelligence agency wielding such lethal power in secret. "Under what code does the CIA operate ?" he asks. "I don't know. The military operates under a legal code, and it has judicial mechanisms. "

He said of the CIA's drone programe, "there should be a limited, finite group of people who are targets , and that list should be publicly defensible and available. Instead, it's not being publicy defended. People are being killed, and we generally require some public justification when we go about killing people."

The article is worth reading in full, but here some other parts that I found interesting :

- It took the CIA 16 missile strikes and 14 months before it killed Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistan Taliban. During this hunt, between 207 and 321 additional people were killed, depending on which news accounts you rely upon.

-  During his first nine and half months in office, President Barack Obama has authorised as many CIA aerial attacks in Pakistan as George W. Bush did in his final three years, according to a study done by the New America Foundation. So far this year, the administration has sanctioned at least 41 CIA missile strikes inside Pakistan - a rate of approximately one bombing a week.

- At any given moment, the CIA has multiple drones flying over Pakistan, scounting for targets, according to a White House counter-terrorism official. There are actually so many drones in the area that sometimes arguments have broken out over which remote operators can claim which targets, provoking "command and control issues."

- Only six of the 41 CIA drone strikes conducted by the Obama administration in Pakistan have targeted al Qaeda members. Eighteen were directed at Taliban targets in Pakistan and 15 were aimed specifically at Mehsud.  The tactical shift in the U.S. strikes has quieted some of the Pakistani criticism of the air strikes, although the bombings are still seen as undermining the country's sovereignty.

(Amending the article with the correct name of the organisation which conducted the research as also with more details on the survey itself}

The Asia Foundation has released its annual survey of Afghanistan and a key finding is that the Afghan people are a bit more optimistic about their country than the rest of the world is, at this point of time.  The survey found that 42 percent of the people felt Afghanistan was heading in the right direction, up from 38 percent in 2008, and mainly because of better security conditions.

In fact each year the number of respondents who think security has improved has gone up, even though the Taliban insurgency is at its worst in 2009.  Some 44 percent of those surveyed this year said they felt safer, up from 31 percent in 2006. More respondents in 2009 also mentioned reconstruction and rebuilding (36%) and opening of schools for girls (21%) as reasons for optimism than in previous years.

It may not be such a disconnect as it seems. Security remains the main worry for the people  of Afghanistan with some 42 percent saying that was the most important reason for pessimism.  It is just that an increasing number of people - and the number is rising very slowly - believe things are starting to get better.

The survey was carried out among 6,408 adult in all 34 provinces of Afghanistan between June 17 and July 6, 2009.

Some more key findings :

- In 2009, Afghans give a more positive assessment of their economic situation than in previous years, although this prosperity is not evenly shared. Considerably more urban respondents (63%) than rural residents (52%) say they are more prosperous today than they were under the Taliban.

- Unemployment continues to feature amongst the most important problems at both national (35%) and local (26%) levels. Other major problems at the local level concern basic infrastructure and services such as electricity (26%), roads (24%), water (22%) and lack of healthcare/clinics/hospitals (20%), as in previous years

- The majority of respondents (71%) support the government’s attempts to address the security situation through negotiation and reconciliation with armed anti-government elements. The high level of support for this approach is likely to be influenced by the fact that a majority of respondents (56%) say they have some level of sympathy with the motivations of armed opposition groups.

- The proportion of respondents who say that democracy is the best form of government available continues to fall, from 84 percent in 2006 to 78 percent in 2009.

- Interestingly, the survey, which was conducted two months before the August presidential election, found that more than 60 percent of the people thought the election would be free and fair. Those who thought otherwise identified a range of potential problems including cheating in the vote count (39%) and buying of votes (33%).