Afghanistan has wasted little time in accusing Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency of being behind a bomb attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul on Thursday.

Asked by PBS news channel whether Kabul blamed Pakistan for the bombing, Afghan ambassador to the United States Said Jawad said: ”Yes, we do. We are pointing the finger at the Pakistan intelligence agency, based on the evidence on the ground and similar attacks taking place in Afghanistan.”

But what has been more striking is how careful India has been not to assign blame too quickly.  Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, the country’s top diplomat, visited Kabul on Friday but said it was too early to say who was responsible for the bombing.

“I think the investigation should be completed,” she said when asked if India thought Pakistan was behind the attack. “Whoever is responsible for this attack is against peace, is against democracy, is against people of Afghanistan and against the people of India.”

India has in the past accused the ISI of being behind attacks on Indian interests in Afghanistan. An attack on the same Kabul embassy last year killed 58 people. And as discussed regularly on this blog, rivalry between Indian and Pakistan over Afghanistan complicates U.S. efforts to stabilise the country no matter how many extra troops it sends.

For a sense of deja vu, see this post from last August on India-Pakistan rivalry in Afghanistan, this post on the United States often conflicted approach in its dealings with the ISI, and this post from December asking whether it still made sense for President Barack Obama to send more troops to Afghanistan after last year’s attack on Mumbai torpedoed hopes of a regional settlement.

So what is to be expected as a result of this latest bombing on the Indian embassy in Kabul?  Will it automatically lead to a fresh increase in tensions between India and Pakistan, or at the very least stall tentative attempts to repair relations soured by the Mumbai attack?

The answer to that is not as obvious as it might seem.

Pakistan’s civilian government, which says its wants to hold peace talks with India, is already embroiled in an awkward stand-off with the Pakistan Army over provisions in the U.S. Kerry-Lugar aid bill which appear to curb the power of the military. So India might judge that now is not the right moment to raise the temperature.

Complicating the picture further is increasing violence within Pakistan itself - as highlighted by Saturday’s attack by suspected Taliban militants on the Pakistan Army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi, a day after 49 people were killed by a suicide car-bomber in the city of Peshawar. Do also read this chilling BBC account about the growth of militancy in south Punjab, in the heartland of Pakistan.

Add to that uncertainty about Obama’s yet-to-be-completed review of strategy in Afghanistan, along with reports that the insurgency there is both growing and becoming increasingly independent of leaders in Pakistan, and you get one of the more fluid and volatile mixes in the history of relations between India and Pakistan.

All that makes it impossible to predict with any certainty the impact of the Kabul embassy bombing on relations between the two countries. One to watch closely in the days and weeks ahead.

(Photos: Site of bomb blast in Kabul; Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao; soldiers take position in Rawalpindi)

Following up on my earlier posts here and here about what is happening behind the scenes between India and Pakistan, first a word on defining the terms. The two countries are not about to sign a peace deal. Any attempt at normalising relations will be long and painful, and as has been the case many times in the past, vulnerable to spoilers with a vested interest in stoking conflict.

Given the importance of India-Pakistan rivalry in Afghanistan, along with U.S. attempts to persuade the Pakistan Army to focus more on fighting Islamist militants than on the perceived threat from India, it’s worth keeping tabs on progress so far and on the outlook for the months ahead.

As I flagged up in July “Afghan campaign gains from India-Pakistan thaw”, tentative attempts to improve relations soured by last year’s attack in Mumbai were already beginning to bear fruit even as the news from Afghanistan itself turned increasingly negative. A fragile thaw had allowed the Pakistan Army to move “a very large number” of troops from the eastern border with India to the western border with Afghanistan in what U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke called a “significant redeployment”.

The implications of that redeployment are beginning to take form, with reports that the Pakistan Army may be preparing a major offensive into South Waziristan. The army, which rarely talks about troop movements, has gone public to say it has two divisions, or about 28,000 troops, in place in South Waziristan, while U.S. defence officials say Pakistan now has enough forces to launch a ground offensive there.

So what are the signposts to look out for in the months ahead in terms of India-Pakistan relations?

First, with India saying it will not resume a formal peace process until Pakistan takes action against those accused of involvement in the Mumbai attack, it’s worth keeping a close eye on the trial of seven men accused of involvement.  That trial was postponed for the second time on Saturday, with the next hearing set for Oct. 10, according to the New York Times.

(more…)

According to Dawn newspaper, the Pakistan Army is poised to launch a major military operation in South Waziristan, stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban.

It quotes senior military and security officials as saying that the army would launch what it called “the mother of all battles” in the coming days.

“If we don’t take the battle to them, they will bring the battle to us,” it quotes a senior military official as saying of the militants. “The epicentre of the behemoth called the Taliban lies in South Waziristan, and this is where we will be fighting the toughest of all battles.”

“For three months, the military has been drawing up plans, holding in-depth deliberations and carrying out studies on past expeditions to make what seems to be the last grand stand against Pakistani Taliban in the Mehsud heartland a success,” it says.

“We are ready. The environment is ready,” it quotes the senior officer as saying. “It will not be a walkover. This is going to be casualty-intensive hard fighting. The nation will have to bear the pain,” said another officer.

The Pakistan Army is not saying anything in public, and information about its operations in Waziristan is hard to come by since the area is so remote and inaccessible.

But any ground offensive into South Waziristan would be a major escalation in the Pakistan Army’s battle against the Pakistani Taliban, dwarfing its operation earlier this year to clear militants out of the Swat valley northwest of Islamabad.

The army has been reluctant to send ground troops into South Waziristan, instead aiming to seal off the area and rely on airstrikes to target militants. But talk of a possible ground offensive has risen after two bomb attacks last weekend raised fears the Pakistani Taliban were recovering from the death of their leader, Baitullah Mehsud, in a U.S. missile strike in August.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik told me earlier this week that Pakistan was considering whether it needed to launch a full-scale military operation against the Pakistani Taliban, who he described as “the front face of al Qaeda”.

And according to Dawn, “Thousands of army soldiers - two divisions - are now sitting on the fringes of the Mehsud mainland waiting for orders from the high command to move in.”

South Waziristan is believed to be heavily defended; it is larger than Swat and more inaccessible. Its people have always been hostile to outsiders, unlike Swat which was once a tourist paradise before it was overrun by Taliban militants. So any ground offensive would likely cause heavy casualties.

The general view has also been that the army has been running out of time to launch a ground offensive before the winter snows make operations extremely hard and would defer any big moves until the spring. That could still be the case, if it judges that a combination of air attacks and missile strikes by U.S. drones - the latest reported casualty from these was Uzbek militant leader Tahir Yuldashev - is enough to keep the militants at bay and stop them from bombing Pakistani cities.

But Malik said Pakistan could even launch an operation in winter if needs be. “Even in the winter, even before starting winter … if we feel appropriate that this operation is unavoidable, yes, we will consider that,” he said.

The Pakistan Army has years of experience of fighting in winter conditions - along with the Indian Army it became a world expert in high-altitude warfare in the conflict over the Siachen region which erupted in 1984, and it also has troops posted in the mountains along the Line of Control dividing Kashmir - although there has been a ceasefire there since 2003.

So it is not out of the question for the Pakistan Army to launch an offensive that drags into the winter. According to the Dawn report, temperatures in Waziristan can drop to 20 degrees below freezing, with snow setting in towards the end of November — fairly brutal conditions for an offensive, but less hostile in terms of weather than it has had to deal with in Siachen over the years.  And Dawn quotes military strategists as saying the weather problem would hit the militants more than the troops, although the former would have the advantage of knowing their terrain.

In its battle against Islamist militants, Pakistan has concentrated on tackling the Pakistani Taliban, which threaten the country directly. That has annoyed the United States, which wants Pakistan to move as well against militants fighting western troops in Afghanistan, including the Afghan Taliban which it says are based in Quetta, in Baluchistan province. India is pressing for action against militant groups based in Pakistan’s Punjab province, including the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group it blames for last year’s attack on Mumbai.

But for now, attention within Pakistan seems to be turning to Waziristan for what could turn out to be the toughest military campaign in the whole of the Afghanistan and Pakistan theatre.

(File photos:Pakistani soldier in Swat; Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Kayani with U.S. General David Petraeus; Taliban fighters; author in Siachen)

A single paragraph in General Stanley McChrystal’s leaked assessment of the war in Afghanistan has generated much interest, particularly in Pakistan.

“Indian political and economic influence is increasing in Afghanistan, including significant development efforts and financial investment,” it says. “In addition the current Afghan government is perceived by Islamabad to be pro-Indian. While Indian activities largely benefit the Afghan people, increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions and encourage Pakistani counter-measures in Afghanistan or India.”

He did not say anything that anybody did not already know. Pakistan has long been wary of India’s growing influence in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and is seen as reluctant to turn against the Afghan Taliban and other insurgent groups as long as it believes it might need them to counter India. The fact that he said it all suggested a renewed focus on the relationship between India and Pakistan, whose confrontation to the east spilled long ago into rivalry over Afghanistan to the west.

Pakistan’s Daily Times said in an editorial the rivalry between India and Pakistan in Afghanistan highlighted the need for peace talks between the two nuclear-armed neighbours, which have fought three full-scale wars since independence in 1947, two of them over Kashmir.

“One must be clear in one’s mind that in many ways the mess in Afghanistan is actually a spillover of the Indo-Pak conflict in the region of South Asia,” it said. “Pakistan’s policy of “strategic depth”, which reached a climax with the hijacking of an Indian airliner to Kandahar in 1999, was in reaction to the unresolved dispute over Kashmir which created the “threat of India” that Pakistan felt “from the east”. Even today, as Pakistan struggles against the Taliban, 80 percent of its army is stationed on the Indian border.

Dawn newspaper said McChrystal’s words on India were ”perhaps as significant as any other in the report”.  The Americans appeared to have finally understood, it said, that the war in Afghanistan could not be won without help from Pakistan. “But that means gaining Pakistan’s full cooperation, which in turn means alleviating the national security establishment’s concerns vis-à-vis India.”

However, as discussed in this analysis, India is in little mood to move rapidly towards peace talks with Pakistan until it takes greater action against militants it blames for last year’s attack on Mumbai, although the two countries have been taking incremental steps towards repairing relations. Many argue that the powerful Pakistan Army would be unlikely to turn against militant groups it once cultivated to fight India in Kashmir, without a comprehensive peace settlement with India. (For an understanding of how complicated all this is, read this book reviewby Pakistani strategic analyst Ayesha Siddiqa.)

So, to win the war in Afghanistan, the United States needs help from Pakistan, which Pakistan in turn is reluctant to provide so long as it believes it is threatened by India to both the west and east.  From Washington’s point of view, it needs to nudge Islamabad and New Delhi towards the negotiating table, by leaning on Pakistan to act against militant groups and putting pressure on India to resume peace talks. 

Here is another catch. Although the relationship between the United States and India blossomed under former President George W. Bush, there is far less warmth in New Delhi towards the Obama administration. The relationship started on the wrong foot with India concerned about increasing U.S. economic dependence on its rival China.

Now India and the United States are at loggerheads over President Barack Obama’s nuclear non-proliferation drive.  India has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That row, in turn, complicates efforts by Washington to persuade India to talk to Pakistan.

(Reuters file photos: Obama with Karzai and Biden; a British soldier in Afghanistan; hijacked Indian Airlines plane in Kandahar)

Back in 2008, even before Barack Obama was elected, Washington pundits were urging him to adopt a new regional approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan involving Russia, India, China, Saudi Arabia and even Iran. The basic argument was that more troops alone would not solve the problems, and that the new U.S administration needed to subsume other foreign policy goals to the interests of winning a regional consensus on stabilising Afghanistan.

It would be simplistic to suggest that the Obama administration’s decision to cancel plans to build a missile-shield in eastern Europe was motivated purely — or even primarily — by a need to seek Russian help in Afghanistan. But it certainly serves as a powerful reminder about how far that need to seek a “grand bargain” on Afghanistan may be reshaping and influencing policy decisions around the world.

“Securing Afghanistan and its region will require an international presence for many years, but only a regional diplomatic initiative that creates a consensus to place stabilizing Afghanistan ahead of other objectives could make a long-term international deployment possible,” Barnett Rubin and Ahmed Rashid argued in their much-cited 2008 policy paper titled “From Great Game to Grand Bargain”. (pdf document).

Many of those arguments reappeared in a more recent report by the Asia Society (pdf document) — formerly chaired by U.S special envoy to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke – so they are worth studying closely.

The ideas were ambitious and far-reaching, from remapping relations between Russia and the United States, prodding India and Pakistan towards a peace deal on Kashmir, seeking help from Iran and drawing in China and Saudi Arabia.  Some of those ideas were blown off course by the financial crisis, by the row in Iran over its disputed election, and by last November’s attack on Mumbai which undermined U.S. attempts to steer India and Pakistan towards a peace deal.

And recently, they had been almost completely drowned by the media focus on military tactics and the merits of sending more troops to Afghanistan. With the U.S. decision to cancel the missile shield, one of those ideas — about seeking Russian help in Afghanistan — may have finally managed to break above the surface again.

In the case of Russia, the question was always about what price the United States was willing to pay to win Moscow’s help in Afghanistan, possibly through less ardent support for NATO aspirants Ukraine and Georgia and a review of the missile shield due to be set up in the Czech Republic and Poland.

Obama already moved to try to assuage fears in Moscow and elsewhere that the United States might be seeking a permanent military presence in Afghanistan, a long-standing concern in Russia wary of having U.S. troops in what it sees as its backyard. “Make no mistake: we do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We seek no military bases there,” Obama said in his speech in Cairo in June. 

But it has been unclear how much further he might be willing to compromise to win Russia’s support for what has become widely known as “Obama’s war” in Afghanistan.

As discussed in this post, the Moscow Times spelled out what it saw as the price of Russian cooperation in Afghanistan in an op-ed published before Obama’s inauguration:

“Afghanistan may well define your foreign policy legacy the way Iraq defined Bush’s,” it said. “You will need all the support you can muster, including from Iran. You will also need Russia’s support. Moscow understands that the stability of its southern flank will hugely depend on what happens on the Hindu Kush mountain range in eastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan. But Moscow is torn between giving support to the West and preparing for the West’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. The latter would mean cutting deals with the Taliban locally and relying on China strategically. You can help Russia make the right choice.”

Of course, there are many other reasons for, and consequences of, the U.S. decision on the missile shield, as discussed here and here.

But if anyone wants a steer on the likely direction of U.S. foreign policy, and its implications globally, it’s probably worth rereading Barnett Rubin’s “grand bargain” proposal from last year. Diplomacy is the art of the possible, and nobody expects the recommendations to be followed to the letter. But with Obama a considerably more cerebral president than his predecessor, the old “Read my Lips” slogan probably needs to be replaced with a new one: “Read the pdf.”

(You can also find regular updates on the progress in relations between India and Pakistan – one of the key themes of that report — on “Pakistan:Now or Never”, most recently in this post)

(Reuters photos: Girl in Afghanistan; Holbrooke, Obama)

Following up on my earlier post about what is happening behind the scenes in the fraught relationship between India and Pakistan, it’s worth keeping track of this report that Islamabad is considering appointing former foreign secretary Riaz Mohammad Khan to handle the informal dialogue with New Delhi known as “backchannel diplomacy”.

As discussed in this story there has been much talk about trying to get the backchannel diplomacy between India and Pakistan up and running again, both to reduce India-Pakistan rivalry in Afghanistan and to prevent an escalation of tensions between the two countries themselves.  So any forward movement on the backchannel diplomacy, if confirmed, would be important.

To recap (and with apologies to those who already know this), India and Pakistan have many different ways of engaging with each other.  They have a formal peace process known as the composite dialogue, started in 2004 and broken off by India after last November’s attack on Mumbai.  India has said it will not resume the composite dialogue until Pakistan takes more action against those accused of involvement in Mumbai.

Then there are Track II talks, in which politicians, journalists, administrators and others on both sides of the border meet in a private capacity to try to promote understanding between India and Pakistan.

Senior politicians also have a habit of holding bilateral meetings on the fringes of international conferences, as happened when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met President Zardari in Russia in June and Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani in Egypt in July. The foreign secretaries, or top diplomats, of both countries are also expected to meet on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly this month, ahead of a meeting between the foreign ministers.

But of all the different ways that India and Pakistan have found to engage with each other, the backchannel diplomacy carried out away from the glare of the media has arguably been the most successful. In 2003, the two countries agreed a ceasefire on the Line of Control dividing disputed Kashmir, and extended it to Siachen, where the two countries had fought a high-altitude war since 1984.

In 2007, Satinder Lambah, a special envoy to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and Tariq Aziz, envoy to then president Pervez Musharraf, etched out a set of principles meant to allow them to work towards a resolution of the Kashmir dispute (Praveen Swami at The Hindu gives the details here.)

I’m told there is no evidence the deal would ever have worked - many crucial details had yet to be negotiated. And since the backchannel talks were held in secret, it has always been unclear whether either country could win over domestic constituencies which might resist or sabotage any peace deal. But the backchannel diplomacy, and the intellectual space it opened up even to consider an agreement on Kashmir, functioned as an important ”shock absorber” between two nuclear-armed countries which have already fought three full-scale wars since independence in 1947.

The tentative “roadmap” agreement fell apart as Musharraf’s own political fortunes deteriorated, and the backchannel talks have yet to find their feet again in any kind of structured format.

The signs are that many other informal discussions are going on. As discussed here, the Pakistan Army has moved a significant number of troops away from its eastern border with India to fight the Pakistani Taliban on its western border with Afghanistan. The head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) broached what is effectively Indian territory by attending an iftar at the Indian High Commision in Islamabad. And the Indian government is trying to work out how to engage the Hurriyat, the main political separatist group in Kashmir, and that is something it can only do with Pakistani acquiescence.

But these informal contacts have lacked the structure of the backchannel diplomacy, whose main aim was to work out a way towards peace.

Until this week, it was unclear who would handle the backchannel diplomacy on the Pakistan side to replace Tariq Aziz, who was an appointee of Musharraf. On India’s side, Satinder Lambah could remain as a special envoy to the prime minister.

So the suggestion that Riaz Mohammad Khan might be appointed to fill that role for Pakistan would be a major step forward.

That said, there are plenty of spoilers in both countries who don’t believe in the peace process. So if India and Pakistan find a way back into their secret backchannel diplomacy, we might never know.

(Reuters file photos: A child at the funeral of Benazir Bhutto; Prime Minister Singh and President Zardari in Yekaterinburg; the gates closing on the india-Pakistan border; and a soldier at base camp in Siachen)

Saeed Shah at McClatchy has an interesting story about Jaish-e-Mohammad, an al Qaeda linked militant group, building a big new base in Pakistan’s Punjab province.

The group, which was blamed for killing U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl and for an attack on the Indian parliament in 2001, already has a headquarters in the town of Bahawalpur in south Punjab.

But Shah writes that it has now walled off a big new compound outside the town. The new facility, he says, is surrounded by a high brick and mud wall, has a tiled swimming pool, stabling for more than a dozen horses, an ornamental fountain and even swings and a slide for children.

“There are jihadist inscriptions painted on the inside walls, including a proclamation that “Jaish-e-Mohammad will return”, alongside a picture of Delhi’s historic Red Fort, implying further terrorist attacks against the Indian capital,” he says. 

It’s unclear what the new base is meant to be used for - Shah quotes Jaish and Pakistani officials as saying that the facility, which is still under construction, is simply a small farm to keep cattle.

What is clear is that many countries have an interest in what is happening with the Jaish-e-Mohammad.

The group was set up in 2000 after its founder, Maulana Masood Azhar, was released by India in return for the freeing of passengers aboard an Indian Airlines plane hijacked from Kathmandu to Kandahar in Afghanistan.  While its focus was on fighting in Indian Kashmir, it had links to Afghanistan dating back to the militant campaign against the Soviet occupation.  Shah says in his article that Jaish and other Punjab-based militant groups now recruit and train thousands of young men to fight western forces in Afghanistan.

“Bahawalpur also serves as a safe “R&R” stopover for jihadists battling in Afghanistan,” Shah quotes western intelligence officers as saying. “In Bahawalpur, militants can rest and recuperate away from the U.S. unmanned aerial drones that patrol Pakistan’s tribal area in the northwest.”

British nationals of Pakistani origin involved in militancy have also been linked to Jaish, making the group a major worry for the British government. These include Omar Sheikh, who was released along with Maulana Azhar after the Kathmandu to Kandahar hijacking and later convicted of organising Daniel Pearl’s kidnapping; and Rashid Rauf, accused of masterminding the plot to bring down multiple airliners over the Atlantic.

India, which has demanded Pakistan take action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militant group accused of involvement in last year’s attack on Mumbai, is also pushing for it to crack down on Jaish-e-Mohammad. Like Jaish, the LeT is also based in Pakistan’s Punjab province; unlike Jaish its focus has remained on targetting India. And while Jaish has been blamed for attacks inside Pakistan, including an attempt to assault then president Pervez Musharraf, the LeT is not believed to be behind any attacks on Pakistan.

Maulana Azhar has also been reported to have acted as the link between al Qaeda and Islamist militants who attacked U.S. forces in Somalia in 1993.

And if that is not already complicated enough, there are serious concerns about the danger posed to Pakistan itself from militants based in south Punjab.

(Reuters file photos: Maulana Azhar; the hijacked Indian Airlines plane at Kandahar; Rashid Rauf)

Try hard as you can, there doesn’t seem to be any escaping from comparing America’s eight-year war in Afghanistan to the one it fought in Vietnam.

Every now and then, either when there is a fresh setback or a key moment in Afghanistan’s turbulent history, like last week when it went to the polls to choose a president, the debate flares anew.

Foreign Policy magazine has a provocative piece headlined “Saigon 2009: Afghanistan is today’s Vietnam. No question mark needed.” No matter who wins last week’s election, America is certainly not winning the war in Afghanistan because it is committing the same mistakes it did in Vietnam, authors Thomas H.Johnson and M Chris Mason argue.

The parallels are just too strong, too structural to be ignored. Both Afghanistan and Vietrnam (prior to U.S. engagement there) had surprisingly defeated a European power in a guerrilla war that lasted a decade, followed by a civil war which last another decade. Insurgents in both enjoyed the advantage of a long, trackless and unclosable border and sanctuary beyond it, the authors say.

Both were land wars in Asia with logistics lines more than 9,000 miles long and extremely harsh terrain with few roads, which nullified U.S. advantages in ground mobility and artillery. Almost exactly 80 percent of the population of both countries was rural, and literacy hovered around 10 percent. In both countries, the United States sought to create an indigenous army modeled in its own image, based on U.S. army organization charts.

But above all, the United States has consistently and profoundly misunderstood the nature of the enemy in each circumstance, the authors say. “In Vietnam, the United States insisted on fighting a war against communism, while the enemy was fighting a war of national reunification. In Afghanistan, the United States still insists on fighting a secular counterinsurgency, while the enemy is fighting a jihad.”.  In short, it is hard, almost impossible, to defeat an enemy you don’t understand.

Already, like the Vietnam war, support is starting to dwindle at home with a Washington Post-ABC poll showing the number of Americans who believed the war in Afghanistan was worth fighting slipping to below 50 percent.

Is Afghanistan already starting to weigh on President Barack Obama, then ? The New York Times this weekend questioned whether he was fated to be another Lyndon B. Johnson,  and not another Abraham Lincoln or the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt as his supporters portrayed him to be even before he took office.

Each presidency is different, but it is “the L.B.J. model — a president who aspired to reshape America at home while fighting a losing war abroad — is one that haunts Mr. Obama’s White House as it seeks to salvage Afghanistan while enacting an expansive domestic program,” the newspaper said.  Obama himself  has expressed concern that Afghanistan may yet hijack his presidency, it reported based on accounts of a group of historians who had dinner with him at the White House this summer.

Like Johnson, Obama has framed Afghanistan as a war of necessity and not choice. Just as Johnson had no choice but to fight in Vietnam to contain communism,  America has to be engaged in Afghanistan as the bulwark against international terrorism.  “Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban  insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans,” he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars at their convention in Phoenix last week.

But is it really a war of necessity ? Richard Haas, the president of the Council of Foreign Relations, argues it was necessary to go into Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, but no longer to remain there. Wars of necessity must meet two tests, he says in an op-ed in the New York Times. They must involve vital national interests, and second, a lack of viable alternatives to the use of military power to defend those interests.

While it was necessary to invade Afghanistan to oust the Taliban,  now that there is a friendly government in Kabul is it necessary to maintain a military presence ? While it is true that the government is weak, and unable to enforce its writ in large parts of the country, it is equally true that terrorism cannot be eliminated even if you had a strong government, Haas argues.

 Militants could still operate from Afghanistan and would put down roots elsewhere. And Pakistan’s future would remain uncertain at best.

Moreover, he says  there are alternatives available.  The United States can begin to curtail  ground combat operations and emphasise drone attacks on militants, the training of Afghan police officers and soldiers, development and diplomacy to fracture the Taliban.

A more radical approach would be withdraw completely and focus on regional and global counter-terrorism efforts and homeland security initiatives to protect the United States from threats that may emanate from Afghanistan, Haas suggests, In that sense, Afghanistan would resemble the approach toward Somalia and other countries where governments are unable or unwilling to take on militants, and the United States eschews military confrontation.

But is the world ready for that ?

[Photographs of Afghan women voting, U.S. troops in Bagram and Obama in Phoenix last week]

Bruce Riedel, who led a review of the “Af-Pak” strategy for the Obama administration, says the United States must now target Mullah Mohammad Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, following the apparent death of the chief of the Pakistani Taliban this month.

The one-eyed, intensely secretive founder of the Afghan Taliban is a much more elusive and important player in the “terror syndicate” attacking Pakistan, Afghanistan and the NATO mission in Afghanistan than Baitullah Mehsud, reportedly killed in a U.S. drone strike, Riedel says.

“Under his leadership, the Afghan Taliban has returned from near total defeat in 2001 to threaten the survival of the NATO effort in Afghanistan and indeed the future of the alliance,” Riedel, a former CIA officer and now a scholar at Brookings, writes here.

In 2003, the Taliban was active in only 30 of Afghanistan’s 364 districts; now it is a player in 160. “For too long the self-described Commander of the Faithful has been on the rampage. Now is the time for Washington and Islamabad to cooperate to shut him down.”

Going after Mullah Omar and other leaders with strong links to al Qaeda such as Jalaluddin Haqqani is Pakistan’s next test, the Los Angeles Times wrote on Monday.  Both these leaders have directed their efforts at Afghanistan, rather than Pakistan, and Islamabad as a result or otherwise hasn’t really focused on them, it said.

So does this mean the United States is building a case for widening military operations inside Pakistan to include Baluchistan, where Mullah Omar is believed to have long operated from, heading a leadership council known as the Quetta shura? U.S. drone strikes have so far been confined to the sparsely populated Federally Administered Tribal Areas in the northwest and even these have evoked such revulsion among Pakistanis that America is now considered the number one threat to Pakistan, as a poll we wrote about earlier showed.

And so to take the covert “Predator war” to Baluchistan would seem to be crossing another red line in the minds of a majority of Pakistanis already seething at the assault on its sovereignty. “The moral, legal and political dimension of it  (drone attacks) remains a dilemma for the government and parliament. It is difficult for national pride of a nascent nuclear power to swallow that it allows frequent infringement of its sovereignty by an ally,” former Pakistani army lieutenant general Talat Masood wrote in The News

 Riedel doesn’t obviously spell out how the United States should go about taking on Mullah Omar, but is a drone strike possible in  a city such as Quetta ?  The risk of civilian casualties would seem to be high in any such operation either in Quetta or the teeming Afghan settlements and refugee camps in and around the city and nearby the Afghan  border.

And above all the use of such missile strikes remains a matter of debate. Micah Zenko, a scholar at the Council of Foreign Relations, says if you were to measure the strikes against President Barack Obama’s stated objective of disrupting and dismantling al Qaeda and those responsible for 9/11 then the strikes must be judged to be ineffective. At best, he argues, it can be part of a national strategy toward Pakistan, and that is something that still hasn’t been put on the table.

“There’s almost no U.S. military policy on Pakistan. There’s limited foreign internal assistance in terms of counterinsurgency training. There are a very small number of [U.S.] troops [inside Pakistan]. The other part is large payment for the Pakistani army to conduct operations. That’s the extent of our military policy.”

[File photograph of a newspaper notice of the most wanted men including Osama bin laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar and  2) Baitullah Mehsud at a news conference last year]

The obvious question to ask about the apparent death of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in a U.S. drone attack (apart from the question of proving his death) is what, or who, is next? Does the Pakistan Army still go into South Waziristan to fight the Taliban, or does it consider it “mission accomplished”? And after apparently eliminating a militant leader who had focused on targetting Pakistan, will it now go after other militants whose main area of operation is Afghanistan?

As discussed in my last post, Pakistan’s military offensive in South Waziristan was framed in the context of a punitive mission against Mehsud based on Raj-era notions of retribution, and was therefore quite different from its operation in Swat, which aimed to re-occupy territory seized by the Taliban and restore the writ of the state.  So if Mehsud is indeed dead, the Pakistan Army may already have met its objective.

It would probably need new orders to do more - and however much analysts argue that the Pakistani military still calls the shots on foreign and security policy - Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani has been something of a stickler in insisting that he takes his orders from the civilian government.

So even on this narrow technical definition, the decision about what happens next will be political rather than military - albeit a decision in which the army has a powerful say.

But at a much broader level, the decision will define Pakistan’s approach to Islamist militants.

According to the New York Times, the death of Mehsud is likely to mean that Islamabad will come under even greater U.S. pressure to go after militants who fight the United States and its allies in Afghanistan. These include the Afghan Taliban, believed by Washington to be based in Quetta in Baluchistan, and the Haqqani network founded by Afghan warlord Jalauddin Haqqani, based in North Waziristan.

And that could be much trickier. The Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network were used by Pakistan in the past to control Afghanistan and many analysts think it is reluctant to turn against them now as long as it believes it can use them to counter India’s growing influence there.

American journalist Nicholas Schmidle argues in Slate that Mehsud was an easier target since he had alienated both the United States and Pakistan.

“Now the hard part begins,” he writes. “Since the CIA has demonstrated its ability to pinpoint “high-level targets,” it will want to go after other top Taliban leaders in Pakistan, such as Maulvi Nazir in South Waziristan and Jalaluddin Haqqani in North Waziristan. But Pakistan’s military and security establishment perceives both men, who focus their fighting in Afghanistan and not in Pakistan, as national security assets more than threats. And there’s no magic drone strike to fix that.”

And the hard part may take time. There are many, many other pieces of the jigsaw that have to be fitted in first. Inside Pakistan, the civilian government, the army and public opinion would all have to rally behind any decision to widen the scope of the country’s fight against the Taliban. And beyond  Pakistan, the likely outcomes of the U.S. military offensive in Afghanistan to the west and the tortuous peace process with India to the east have yet to become clear.  Expect much uncertainty before the broader picture takes shape.

(File photos: Pakistani soldier on Afghan border; General Kayani with Prime Minister Gilani)