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)

Iran looks like it will come out swinging at a global conference on the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) opening in New York on Monday, and in the process take a swipe at Israel as well as India.

And that is a bit of a shift, for India and Iran have ties going back into history, but which have in recent years come under pressure and play in the tangled relationship between India and Pakistan.

Iran, according to this Reuters story, has submitted papers to the NPT conference accusing the United States of violating the treaty by developing new nuclear weapons and providing nuclear aid to Israel and India. The target is clearly Washington and according to the story an attempt by Tehran to deflect attention from its own nuclear programme.

But by turning the spotlight on India, is it risking turning off an old friend, a civilisational ally?

(more…)

In the space of a decade, the United States and India have travelled far in a relationship clouded by the  Cold War when they were on opposite sides.

From U.S sanctions on India for its nuclear tests in 1998 to a civilian nuclear energy deal that opens access to international nuclear technology and finance, while allowing New Delhi to retain its nuclear weapons programme is a stunning reversal of policy and one that decisively transforms ties.

America has also ’soberly’ after decades of differing over counter-terrorism priorities become a vocal 
supporter of India’s concerns over the use of Pakistani territory for Islamist militant groups, says the Asia 
Society in a report laying out a blueprint for an expanded India-U.S. relationship ahead of 
President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday.

Indian and U.S. interests have converged and “never in history have they been so closely aligned,” the  report by an Asia Society Task Force says, arguing for a still deeper security and economic engagement between the two large democracies.

Click here for a PDF of the report

The Obama administration must keep India as one of its top foreign policy priorities, Richard Holbrooke, chairman of the Asia Society and who has been talked about as a possible envoy to South Asia, and Vishakha N.Desai, president of the Asia Society, say in a joint foreword

Besides the players involved, the report is also interesting because it adopts a rather different tone on India’s relations with Pakistan and especially Kashmir to some of the policy prescriptions offered by some other influential U.S. think tanks such as the Center for American Progress.

(more…)

Pakistan and its nuclear weapons are back in the centre  of the U.S. foreign policy frame as a steady stream of reports from think tanks and newspapers build the case for President-elect Barack Obama to recognise and act urgently with regard to the potential threat from the troubled state.

The New York Times Magazine in an extensive article  headlined Obama’s Worst Pakistan Nighmare says the biggest fear is not Islamist militants taking control of the border regions. It’s what happens if the country’s nuclear arsenal falls into the wrong hands. And it then takes a trip to the Chaklala garrison where the headquarters of Strategic Plans Division, the branch of the Pakistani government charged with protecting its growing arsenal of nuclear weapons, are located and led  by Khalid Kidwai, a former army general.

“In the second nuclear age, what happens or fails to happen in Kidwai’s modest compound may prove far  more likely to save or lose an American city than the billions of dollars the United States spends each year  maintaining a nuclear arsenal that will almost certainly never be used, or the thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars we have spent in Iraq and Afghanistan  to close down sanctuaries for terrorists,” writes David E. Sanger, author of a forthcoming book: “The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power”.

The article quotes a Bush administration official as saying there were two ways Pakistan’s weapons could fall into the wrong hands. One was when the Pakistani military was moving its tactical weapons closer to the frontlines when it could be much more vulnerable to seizure by militants. A time of heightened tensions with India, as is the situation now following the attacks in Mumbai, would be a top reason for Pakistan to begin moving its weapons.  Could that be one of the objectives of the Mumbai attacks, the New York Times asks.

A second route for al Qaeda would be to infiltrate Pakistan’s nuclear labs, put in sleeper cells and then squirrel away the material.

“It is relatively easy to teach Kidwai’s security personnel how to lock down warheads and store them separately from trigger devices and missiles, training that the United  States has conducted, largely in secret, at a cost of almost $100 million.”

“”It is a lot harder for the Americans to keep track of nuclear material being produced inside laboratories,  where it is easier for the Pakistanis to underreport how much nuclear material has been produced, how much is in storage or how much might be ’stuck in the pipes’ during the laborious enrichment process.” And it would be nearly impossible to stop engineers from walking out the door with the knowledge of how to produce fuel and bomb designs.

(more…)

Do read this piece by Gurmeet Kanwal, the head of the Indian Army’s Centre for Land Warfare Studies, about how India should respond to the Mumbai attacks with covert operations against Pakistan.

He says that ”hard military options will have only a transitory impact unless sustained over a long period. These will also cause inevitable collateral damage, run the risk of escalating into a larger war with attendant nuclear dangers and have adverse international ramifications. To achieve a lasting impact and ensure that the actual perpetrators of terrorism are targeted, it is necessary to employ covert capabilities to neutralise the leadership of terrorist organisations.”

But he also argues that India’s covert capabilities in Pakistan were wound down on the orders of the Prime Minister in 1997 so as to promote reconciliation. “If that is true, a great deal of effort will be necessary to establish these capabilities from scratch. It will take at least three to five years to put in place basic capabilities for covert operations in Pakistan as both the terrorist organisations and their handlers like the ISI will have to be penetrated. The R&AW must be suitably restructured immediately to undertake sustained covert operations in Pakistan. The time to debate this issue on moral and legal grounds has long passed.”

Pakistan has long accused India of supporting militants in its Baluchistan province, among other places, in retaliation for what New Delhi sees as Pakistani support for separatist movements in Punjab, the north-east, and in Kashmir. But for a democratic government, the value of covert operations is limited. India’s Congress-led government is under pressure now to show it is standing firm against the Mumbai attacks and (leaving aside ethical questions) you can’t achieve electoral popularity with covert operations.  That’s why it’s particularly interesting that someone like Gurmeet Kanwal would suggest them.

B. Raman, a former head of India’s Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) made similar points in an article he wrote in May 2002 in response to the attack on an Indian Army camp in Kaluchak.

“The situation we face today is due to the long neglect of the need for a carefully worked out counter proxy war doctrine to be implemented consistently, intelligently and with determination,” he wrote. ”Now is the time for formulating such a doctrine and implementing it — more covertly than overtly. A counter proxy war doctrine would provide space for both overt, correct state-to-state relations and simultaneously, covert undermining of the wielder of terrorism.”

I am not entirely sure what to make of this talk of covert operations rising above the surface. Does it imply there will be more covert operations? According to Gurmeet, India’s ability to run covert operations in Pakistan is hopelessly rusty, suggesting that Pakistan’s own accusations of Indian interference in Balochistan may be exaggerated. But then again, and to the credit of both India and Pakistan, few other countries in the world debate covert operations against each other so openly. 

My own experience – and this of course is limited to one person’s view – is that India and Pakistan understand each other rather better than appears to be the case, and certainly better than most countries outside South Asia understand either of them. So does that mean we are going to see more and more “messages” delivered to either side, in the form of covert operations, which only those inside the South Asian family can decipher?

(Reuters file photo of Indian troops on Siachen/Pawel Kopzynski)  

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari says he would be ready to commit to a policy of no first use of nuclear weapons, in what would be a dramatic overturning of Pakistan’s nuclear policy. Pakistan has traditionally seen its nuclear weapons as neutralising Indian superiority in conventional warfare, and refused to follow India’s example of declaring a no first use policy after both countries conducted nuclear tests in 1998.

Zardari was speaking via satellite from Islamabad to a conference organised by the Hindustan Times when he was asked whether he was willing to make an assurance that Pakistan would not be the first to use nuclear weapons.

“Most certainly,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.  “I can assure you that Pakistan will not be the first country ever to use (nuclear weapons). I hope that things never come to a stage where we have to even think about using nuclear weapons (against India). Personally, I have always been against the very concept of nuclear weapons,” he said.

So what is the Pakistan Army going to make of that? It has always seen itself as the ultimate guarantor of Pakistan’s survival, and nuclear weapons are an essential part of the country’s arsenal should its very  existence come under threat.

And will Zardari’s suggestion turn out to come with conditions that would be unacceptable to India? According to the Hindustan Times, “Zardari mooted in the same breath some kind of regional cooperation for a non-nuclear South Asia”.  That does not look likely to find many immediate takers in India, given that its nuclear weapons were developed as much as a defence against China as against Pakistan, and that it has just reached a nuclear deal with the United States effectively giving it recognition as a nuclear-armed state.

Zardari’s late wife, Benazir Bhutto, had championed Pakistan’s nuclear programme, which was started by her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s – India tested its first nuclear device in 1974. Have times changed so much for Pakistan that Zardari is willing to turn his back on this? Or is he just looking for the right words to set the tone for improved ties with India?

(Reuters file photo of Pakistani missile test)

When the British left India in 1947, they bequeathed what was arguably a European notion of the nation state on a region for which the very concept was alien. I say ”arguably” because anything one writes about Partition or the nation state is open to dispute. And until the financial crisis, I relegated this argument to the realm of historians – a subject that interested me personally, but did not seem relevant today.

That was until I noticed a new debate bubbling up on the internet about the future of the nation state. Will it become more powerful as countries scramble to protect themselves from the financial crisis as George Friedman at Stratfor argues in this article?  Or does the need for global solutions to the crisis sound a death knell for the nation state, as John Robb suggests here?

Let’s just suppose the paradigm has shifted and the 60-year-old model defined by the departing British colonial rulers is no longer valid. What does that mean for Pakistan and India? (more…)

While much of the media attention during Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Japan this week was focused on a free trade deal the two sides failed to agree on, another pact that could have even greater consequences for the region was quietly pushed through.

This was a security cooperation agreement under which India and  Japan, once on opposite sides of the Cold War, will hold military exercises, police the Indian Ocean and conduct military-to-military exchanges on fighting terrorism.

It doesn’t sound very grand, but its significance lies in the fact that pacifist Japan has such a security pact with only two other countries - the United States and Australia.

And it comes in the same month that India and the United States closed a nuclear cooperation deal that won New Delhi a place on the world’s nuclear high table, ending three decades of isolation following its first nuclear tests in 1974. (more…)

Time was when every time militants set off a bomb in Pakistan, India’s strategic establishment would turn around and say “we told you so”. This is what happens when you play with fire … jihad is a double-edged sword, they would say, pointing to Pakistan’s support for militants operating in Kashmir and elsewhere.

Not any more. When India’s opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party – which has consistently advocated a tougher policy toward Pakistan – tells the government to be watchful of the fallout of the security and economic situation in Pakistan, then you know the ground is starting to shift.    

“Pakistan is on the verge of an economic and political collapse,” party leader and former foreign minister Jaswant Singh said in remarks that  seem to have escaped much public attention. “It is time we understood the influence and be prepared to face it.”

Former Indian High Commissioner to Britain Kuldip Nayar, who is from the opposite end of the political spectrum, made a similar point shortly after the bombing of Islamabad’s Marriott hotel. 

“If ever Pakistan goes under, India’s first line of defence would collapse. The Taliban would have secured the launching pad to attack India’s values of democracy and liberalism which do not fit into their scheme of things,” he wrote in the Gulf News. 

“Terrorism is the means, Talibalistan is the end. New Delhi and Islamabad should jointly fight against the menace,” Nayar, who has long campaigned for peace with Pakistan, said.

On Thursday, a suicide attacker struck again in a high-security part of Islamabad, this time on the police headquarters itself, underscoring the militants’ ability to strike at will anywhere across the nation.

“The grim truth is that Pakistan is becoming something alarmingly close to a failed state,” wrote Sumit Ganguly, director of research at  the Center on American and Global Security at Indiana University, in a piece for the Washington Post.  Pakistan, he said, faces an “existential crisis on its streets and in its courts, barracks and parliament”.

The world, led by the United States, must work to put the country back together again, he said. “If not, we will face a terrifying prospect: Pakistan’s collapse (slow or otherwise) into a full-blown failed state, armed with nuclear weapons, riven by ethnic tensions, infused with resentment and zealotry, with roving bands of Taliban sympathizers and bin Ladenists in its midst. ”

So is New Delhi ready to play ball? Given that India looms large over the Pakistani mind and its security/foreign policy has been predicated to meet the threat from its larger neighbour, one obvious way for Pakistan to be more at ease with itself would be to reduce tensions with New Delhi.  

 The Pakistan Policy Group, comprising independent, bipartisan American experts on U.S.-Pakistan relations, said in a report that while America couldn’t really impose normalcy between India and Pakistan,  “it can continually point out  both countries’ interests would be served - now more than ever - by building better relations because both face existential terrorist threats.”

This weekend Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh launches a rail link in Kashmir, which fueled much of the hostility between the two nations all these years and remains the main stumbling block to better ties.

Is this an opportunity for Singh to announce concessions? Pakistan’s Dawn, citing unspecified news reports, said that Singh was expected to announce important peace measures with Pakistan during the trip to Kashmir.