Global News Journal

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Could you pass bin Laden to the left please?

Whatever Osama bin Laden once aspired to, it was not to be passed around the table like a bottle of port  in the British Raj nor worse, handed on quickly  in a child's game of Pass the Parcel. Yet that is the fate which for now appears to be chasing him.

For years, the default assumption has been that bin Laden is hiding somewhere in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Last month, I heard a Pakistani official say that bin Laden was last heard of in Pakistan's traditional enemy India in 2003 - in Bangalore and Hyderabad to be precise -before he disappeared without trace.  Then Fox News came up with a story about how he was living in luxury in Iran. Not to be outdone, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad then suggested he was more likely to be hiding in Washington.

Anyone want to guess where bin Laden is reported to be next?  He definitely seems to be acquiring the taint of the unwelcome guest.

That said, and to be briefly serious, you can draw two tentative conclusions.  Either you say that the man identified with the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington is no longer the icon and threat he once was. Or you say that the man himself was never the real threat, but rather a symbol of the cause (itself subject to much debate) which both preceded bin Laden and will also outlive him.

Either way, how many people out there still believe that taking out bin Laden would change things on the ground? Probably quite a few - but how many compared to those who believed this immediately after 9/11? The answer to that question would tell historians quite a lot about how attitudes have changed over the past nine years.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

On U.S., India and Pakistan: maybe some transparency would help

According to the Wall Street Journal, "President Barack Obama issued a secret directive in December to intensify American diplomacy aimed at easing tensions between India and Pakistan, asserting that without détente between the two rivals, the administration's efforts to win Pakistani cooperation in Afghanistan would suffer. "

"The directive concluded that India must make resolving its tensions with Pakistan a priority for progress to be made on U.S. goals in the region, according to people familiar with its contents," it says.

It also says there is a debate within the U.S. administration over how far to push India to improve relations with Pakistan, with the Pentagon lobbying for more pressure on New Delhi and the State Department resisting, arguing this could backfire.

The idea that resolving tensions between India and Pakistan is central to stabilising Afghanistan is not new. Its importance rose up the agenda during Obama's election campaign in 2008. And it never really went away despite successful Indian lobbying to keep any reference to India or Kashmir out of the title given to U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke in January 2009.  At the time, the truncated title was seen as not so much as a reflection of ground realities (Pakistan has always fixed its foreign and security policies in relation to India), but as a way of providing the space for discreet diplomacy to succeed where public pressure might fail.

What is new is the context.   India is deeply sensitive to what it sees as Washington's favouritism towards Pakistan as it tries to find a way out of the stalemate in Afghanistan.  As a result it has become "America's Wounded Ally" in the expression used by Indian analyst Sumit Ganguly in Newsweek, angry with Obama for turning his back on a blossoming relationship forged by his predecessors.

As a brief aside, this has happened before. Immediately after 9/11 India sought to capitalise on its then growing ties with the United States by offering the use of Indian bases for its campaign in Afghanistan only to see Washington turn instead to its old Cold War favourite Pakistan. At the time, an Indian analyst I knew rather graphically compared the sense of betrayal in New Delhi to that of a mistress whose lover goes back to his wife.  His analogy may have accurately captured the emotional response at the time, but it was wrong in substance, since India and the United States went on to build an even stronger relationship, including signing a deal effectively recognising India as a nuclear power.  The same may yet happen again despite all the current hand-wringing.

However, to return to the subject of the WSJ report, and the debate over how far Washington should go to push India and Pakistan into improving relations:

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

India and Pakistan on the U.S. see-saw

Few who follow South Asia could miss the symbolism of two separate developments in the past week -  in one Pakistan was cosying up to the United States in a new "strategic dialogue"; in the other India was complaining to Washington about its failure to provide access to David Headley, the Chicago man accused of helping to plan the 2008 attack on Mumbai.

Ever since the London conference on Afghanistan in January signalled an exit strategy which could include reconciliation with the Taliban, it has been clear that Pakistan's star has been rising in Washington while India's has been falling. 

If the United States wants to force the Taliban to the negotiating table, it needs Pakistan's help. And Pakistan has shown by arresting Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar amongst others that it intends to keep control of any negotiations. In return for its cooperation, it expects Washington's help in securing Pakistan's own interests, including through a scaling back of India's involvement in Afghanistan.

By contrast, the relationship between India and the United States which blossomed under the Bush administration has been fading as Washington looks to China and Pakistan to help meet respectively its economic and security needs. An initial outpouring of sympathy and international support for India following the Mumbai attack  - which led to intense pressure on Pakistan to crack down on the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group blamed for the assault - has dissipated over time.

Nowadays the mantra in Washington is that India and Pakistan must talk to each other to resolve their differences. Pakistan, after initially cracking down on the Lashkar-e-Taiba, eased the pressure on the group in the second part of 2009. India suspects the Lashkar-e-Taiba is not only active again but may have been involved in last month's attack in Kabul which targeted Indian interests. If true, this would suggest that Lashkar-e-Taiba is acting in conformity with the interests of the Pakistan Army, which is deeply sensitive about India's growing presence in Afghanistan following the fall of the Pakistan-backed Taliban in 2001.

To rewind briefly, it has always been unclear how far the Pakistan Army and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency could go in dismantling the Punjab-based militant group it once nurtured to fight India in Kashmir. While few doubt it could shut down the Lashkar-e-Taiba if it chose to do so, the risk has been that action against an organisation which has been scrupulous in avoiding attacks within Pakistan itself would shatter it into splinter groups which would make common cause with al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. A raid on the Pakistan Army's own headquarters last October highlighted just how vulnerable the country could be to an alliance between militants in its tribal areas bordering Afghanistan and those based in its heartland Punjab province.

So the debate amongst analysts has been whether relative inaction against the Lashkar-e-Taiba has been driven by self-preservation or a desire on the part of the ISI to retain the group's operational capacity to use it against India. Islamabad is convinced India's own intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), is using Afghanistan as a base to destabilise Pakistan, particularly by funding separatists in its Baluchistan province.  Any evidence of Lashkar-e-Taiba's involvement in the Kabul attack would therefore reinforce suspicions that the Pakistan Army is still using it as part of a proxy war between the two countries' intelligence agencies. (Both countries deny the accusations levelled at each other's intelligence agencies.)

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Seeking Saudi cooperation on Afghanistan and Pakistan

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is making the first visit to Saudi Arabia by an Indian leader since 1982, seeking to build economic ties and to enlist the kingdom's help in improving regional security. While much of the focus is likely to be on securing oil supplies for India's growing economy, the visit is also part of the complex manoeuvres by regional players jostling for position on Afghanistan and beyond.

Singh told Saudi journalists ahead of the visit that he would discuss with Saudi King Abdullah how to promote greater stability and security in the region.  "Both King Abdullah and I reject the notion that any cause justifies wanton violence against innocent people. We are strong allies against the scourge of extremism and terrorism that affects global peace and security," he said.

Junior Foreign Minister Shashi Tharoor also said India could seek Saudi support in persuading Pakistan to act against Pakistan-based Islamist militant groups -- later adding however this did not mean looking for Saudi mediation (anathema to India which sees no room for third party involvement in its relationship with Pakistan).

"Saudi Arabia of course has a long and close relationship with Pakistan but that makes Saudi Arabia all the more a valuable interlocutor for us," he said. "When we tell them about our experience, Saudi Arabia listens as somebody who is not anyway an enemy of Pakistan but rather as a friend of Pakistan, and therefore I am sure listens with sympathy and concern to a matter of this nature."

Sunni Saudi Arabia has close ties with Pakistan, seeing it in part as a bulwark against Shiite Iran, its main rival. Analysts say it shares Pakistan's concerns about Indian and Iranian influence in Afghanistan. It has also been cited as potential mediator with the Taliban. While it has shown little enthusiasm right now to act as a mediator, it is expected to play a powerful role in negotiating any eventual political settlement in Afghanistan.

India, meanwhile, invested heavily in Afghanistan after the fall of the Pakistan-backed Taliban in 2001, and built close ties with the government of President Hamid Karzai. It has been caught on the back foot by talk of reconciliation with the Taliban, which it fears could give Pakistan an opportunity to reassert its old influence over Afghanistan as well as bolstering its position as Washington's indispensable ally in the region.

Some analysts have argued that India should counter this by building its own relationships with both Saudi Arabia and Iran -- C. Raja Mohan made this point as early as May last year. Any improvement in the relationship between India and Saudi Arabia, including a deepening economic inter-dependency, could therefore be significant.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Pakistan, India and the Kabul attack

As discussed in my last post, the place to watch for developments on relations between India and Pakistan right now is more likely to be Kabul than Kashmir. That may have been graphically illustrated when Taliban fighters attacked Kabul on Friday, killing 16 people, including up to nine Indians.

It is too early to say whether the attack specifically targetted Indian interests or whether it was aimed at foreigners more generally. But India has blamed earlier attacks on its interests in Afghanistan on Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency -- its embassy in Kabul has been bombed twice.

"These are the handiwork of those who are desperate to undermine the friendship between India and Afghanistan, and do not wish to see a strong, democratic and pluralistic Afghanistan," an Indian Foreign Ministry statement said after Friday's attack.

India invested heavily in Afghanistan after the fall of the Pakistan-backed Taliban in 2001 and has built close ties with the government of President Hamid Karzai.  Islamabad accuses it of using its large presence there (it has four consulates along with its Kabul embassy) to channel money and weapons to militants seeking to destabilise Pakistan -- a charge New Delhi denies.

So one question to ask is whether the Kabul attack was an extension of an undeclared proxy war between the two countries in Afghanistan. And if so, what does it mean for their fresh attempt at dialogue begun with a meeting of  their foreign secretaries on Thursday? In such a decentralised insurgency, the Kabul attack was unlikely to be timed specifically to follow those talks but it could sour the mood further. 

And although the Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, Thomas Ruttig at the Afghanistan Analysts Network asks where this would leave the statement made by Taliban leader Mullah Omar that his movement did not represent a threat to any other country. "Does that not apply to India?" he writes. "Or has this attack been carried out by other elements: Pakistani Taleban, the Haqqani network or those linked to groups like Lashkar-e Taiba or al-Qaeda that has declared ‘Hindu’ India a target, too?"

In the meantime, U.S. media appear to be stepping up calls on Washington to do more to try to nudge India and Pakistan back into peace talks, judging by these editorials in The Christian Science Monitor and The New York Times. "The administration knows how important it is for India and Pakistan to lower tensions," said The New York Times. "At India’s insistence, it has decided to take a low profile role, nudging the two sides discreetly back to the table. It should nudge harder."

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Towards a regional settlement in Afghanistan (Redux squared)

Regular readers of this blog will know we have been talking for a long time about finding a regional solution to Afghanistan. The argument -- much touted during President Barack Obama's election campaign -- was that you could stabilise the country if you persuaded the many regional players with a stake in Afghanistan -- including Iran, Pakistan, India, Russia and China -- to cooperate rather than compete in finding a political settlement to what was effectively an unwinnable war.

The argument looked at best utopian, at worst a description of the delicate balance of power in the early 20th century that was meant to keep the peace but in reality led to the outbreak of World War One.  It is now resurfacing again as public opinion in western countries -- including in staunch U.S. ally Britain -- turns against the long war in Afghanistan.

As discussed in this analysis, we are now seeing some fresh signs of regional cooperation. The foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan hold talks on Thursday to try to break a diplomatic freeze which followed the 2008 attack on Mumbai. And Pakistan and Iran may have cooperated on the arrest of Jundollah leader Abdolmalek Rigi.

The utopian argument may finally about to have its day. That said, none of this is following a U.S. script. So we could also  see -- as happened before 1914 -- the best efforts at balancing out every nation's interests turning out for the worst.

(File photo: Children in Arghandab, Afghanistan)

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

On India-Pakistan thaw and the changing Afghan dynamics

There is a time and a place for everything and back in the days of the Obama election campaign the idea that progress on the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan could help turn around the flagging military campaign in Afghanistan looked plausible. The argument, much touted by Washington think-tankers, was that Pakistan would not turn against Afghan Taliban militants on its western border as long as it believed it might need to use them to counter India's growing influence in Afghanistan, and as long as it felt the need to keep the bulk of its army on its eastern border with India.

Even in the middle of last year, when Pakistan and India made an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to revive peace talks which had been frozen since the attack on Mumbai at the end of 2008, the possibility of a "grand bargain" from Kashmir to Kabul still carried some resonance.

But time has moved on, so it is a little bit strange to see these arguments resurfacing now after India proposed to resume talks with Pakistan.  (See Newsweek's "Kashmir is the key to peace in Afghanistan" or the op-ed by David Ignatius in the Washington Post)

As I wrote in this analysis, a thaw in relations between India and Pakistan would be too little, too late to achieve results in time for Washington's 2011 deadline for drawing down troops in Afghanistan. Real progress on Kashmir would require them to get back to a roadmap for peace sketched out between India and Pakistan in 2007 under former president Pervez Musharraf. But Pakistan, whose vulnerability to attacks by Islamist militants has been demonstrated in a spate of gun and bomb attacks over the past year, probably no longer has the political space to offer the kind of concessions Musharraf made to get there without risking a backlash at home. And while the roadmap provided a framework for further negotiations on Kashmir, a lot of ground had yet to be covered to translate that into a real agreement; even if indeed it would ever have worked.

So public opinion in the West, already weary of the long Afghan war, is unlikely to have the patience to support ongoing military operations in Afghanistan for the kind of time it would take to achieve a breakthrough on Kashmir.  That is not to suggest the India-Pakistan thaw is not important for Afghanistan - by talking both countries may be able to reduce their suspicions about each other's involvement there so that they don't end up backing opposite sides in any renewed civil war which might erupt as U.S.-led forces begin to leave.  But the road to Kabul no longer runs through Kashmir, if indeed it ever did (as regular readers of this blog know, it is a hotly contested subject.)

Perhaps of more significance even than the long timeline for progress in relations between India and Pakistan  is the way in which Western governments are looking at the war in Afghanistan.  In a sea-change to their approach to Afghanistan which surfaced in the days before last month's London conference, the United States and its allies acknowledged that lasting peace there would need to involve the Taliban. As a result, the talk in the corridors at the London conference was about the possibility of an eventual political settlement with Taliban leaders - right up to and including Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, condemned in the West for his refusal to hand over al Qaeda leaders after the Sept. 11 attacks.

From what I am being told,  Taliban leaders would be willing to negotiate if they believed that they could secure a better settlement through talks than by waiting it out for U.S.-led troops to start to leave and then trying to fight their way to power in a renewed civil war.  Talks would also get them the international recognition denied them when they were in power from 1996 to 2001. To get one perspective on this, do read the statement posted on the Taliban website in which they say they "want to have good and positive relations with the neighbouring countries in an atmosphere of mutual respect and take far-reaching steps for bilateral cooperation, economic development and prosperous future".  On the other side, Washington and its allies are insisting that the Taliban sever ties with al Qaeda and renounce violence.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Can China help stabilise Pakistan?

When President Barack Obama suggested in Beijing last month that China and the United States could cooperate on bringing stability to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and indeed to "all of South Asia", much of the attention was diverted to India, where the media saw it as inviting unwarranted Chinese interference in the region.

But what about asking a different question? Can China help stabilise the region?

As I wrote in this analysis, China -- Islamabad's most loyal partner -- is an obvious country for the United States to turn to for help in working out how to deal with Pakistan.

It already has substantial economic stakes in the region, including in the Aynak copper mine in Afghanistan and Gwadar port in Pakistan. Its economy would be the first to gain from any peace settlement which opened up trade routes and improved its access to oil, gas and mineral resources in Central Asia and beyond. It also shares some of Washington's concerns about Islamist militancy, particularly if this were to spread unrest in its Muslim Xinjiang region.

There is virtually no chance of Beijing sending military forces to Pakistan or Afghanistan. But Chinese support could come in the form of pressure on Pakistan, help for its economy, and at least tacit backing for U.S. actions and demands.

It already indicated a willingness to take a more nuanced approach to Pakistan when it supported a U.N. ban on the Jamaat ud-Dawa, the humanitarian wing of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, after last year's attack on Mumbai. It is also looking for ways to help bolster Pakistan's economy --a Pakistani finance ministry official said this week that Pakistan was in talks with China on a currency-swap deal with the aim of conserving its foreign exchange reserves.

But Chinese antipathy to interference in other countries' affairs, a divergence of views on exactly what needs to happen in Pakistan, and China-India rivalry all limit how far Beijing can be roped into helping on Pakistan.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Pakistan and Afghanistan: “the bad guys don’t stay in their lanes”

This new style of international terrorism was quite unlike militant groups he had investigated in the past, with their pyramidal structures. "After 1994/1995, like viruses, all the groups have been spreading on a very large scale all over the world, in a horizontal way and even a random way," he said. "All the groups are scattered, very polymorphous and even mutant."

Gone were the political objectives which drove terrorism before, he writes, to be replaced with a nihilistic aim of spreading chaos in order to create the conditions for an Islamic caliphate. For the hijackers on the Algiers-Paris flight, their demands seemed almost incidental. "We realised we faced the language of hatred and a total determination to see it through."

Many have argued against this view of international terrorism as a new and nebulous Islamist network without obvious political objectives, which found its most powerful expression in al Qaeda. Just as Lashkar-e-Taiba grew out of rivalry between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, the GIA sprang from anger about the annulment of elections in Algeria that an Islamist group was poised to win. Its attacks on Paris in the mid 1990s were seen as a reprisal for France's role in supporting the government in its former colony. Many of those who support al Qaeda and other Islamist groups are driven by anger over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other perceived injustices across the Middle East. 

Yet if he is right that the United States and its allies are facing a loose international network of Islamists with no clear pyramid structure, then it would suggest that no amount of drone bombing of al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership of the kind promoted by counter-terrorism supporters would work. Nor would it be enough, alone, to address political grievances at a national level without taking account of a network which operates globally and does not recognise the validity of the nation state. Rather, you would need a sophisticated and comprehensive strategy which went far beyond the kind of focused counter-terrorism first used by the Bush administration.

Browsing through the New Yorker profile on U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke, I noticed the same argument was raised there:

"A pure counter-terror approach had, in fact, been the Bush Administration’s policy for years: kill or capture terrorist leaders, with minimal support for political institutions in Kabul and Islamabad," it said. "It had created the mess that (President Barack) Obama inherited, with two countries under threat from insurgents and Al Qaeda’s strength increasing.

"'Al Qaeda doesn’t exist in a vacuum," it quoted former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, who led Obama's first review of strategy, as saying.  “They’re part of a syndicate of terrorist groups. Selective counterterrorism won’t get you anywhere, because the bad guys don’t stay in their lanes.”

How Ill is Kim Jong-il?

Photo:A compilation by Reuters of pool photographs and images provided by North Korea’s KCNA news agency showing North Korean leader Kim Jong-il from 2004 to 2009. The photograph in the lower right was released this week by KCNA

By Jon Herskovitz

The image the world once had of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, with a trademark paunch, platform shoes and a bouffant hair-do, is gone and may never come back. He has now become a gaunt figure with thinning hair who has trouble walking in normal shoes, let alone ones with heels 8-10 centimetres (3-4 inches) high like he used to wear.

A look at photographs the North’s official media has released of Kim over the past few months indicate he is not a healthy man. There has been an enormous amount of speculation about what is wrong with Kim, 67, including a report from South Korean TV network YTN this week that he has life-threatening pancreatic cancer.

Kim’s health is one of the most closely guarded secrets in the highly secretive North and his actual condition is likely known by a handful of people in his inner circle who risk death or prison camp for themselves and their families if they ever whisper a word about Kim’s problems.

It is a state crime in North Korea to make any comment that questions Kim’s god-like status in the communist dynasty he has ruled since 1994 when his father and state founder Kim Il-sung died.