Pakistan: Now or Never?

Academics, experts appeal to Obama to back Taliban talks

A group of academics, journalists and NGO workers have published an open letter to President Barack Obama appealing to him to support direct negotiations with the Taliban leadership.

The letter argues that the situation on the ground on Afghanistan is much worse than a year ago. “With Pakistan’s active support for the Taliban, it is not realistic to bet on a military solution,” it says.

“Like it or not, the Taliban are a long-term part of the Afghan political landscape, and we need to try and negotiate with them in order to reach a diplomatic settlement. The Taliban’s leadership has indicated its willingness to negotiate, and it is in our interests to talk to them. In fact, the Taliban are primarily concerned about the future of Afghanistan and not – contrary to what some may think — a broader global Islamic jihad. Their links with Al-Qaeda – which is not, in any case, in Afghanistan any more — are weak. We need to at least try to seriously explore the possibility of a political settlement in which the Taliban are part of the Afghan political system.”

“The current contacts between the Karzai government and the Taliban are not enough. The United States must take the initiative to start negotiations with the insurgents and frame the discussion in such a way that American security interests are taken into account. In addition, from the point of view of Afghanistan’s most vulnerable populations – women and ethnic minorities, for instance – as well as with respect to the limited but real gains made since 2001, it is better to negotiate now rather than later, since the Taliban will likely be stronger next year.”

“This is why we ask you to sanction and support a direct dialogue and negotiation with the Afghan Taliban leadership residing in Pakistan. A ceasefire and the return of the insurgency leadership in Afghanistan could be part of a de-escalation process leading to a coalition government. ”

The United States, which is due to release a review of strategy in Afghanistan next week, has so far shown little inclination to engage in serious negotiations with the Taliban leadership, although it has accepted that ultimately there will have to a political solution to a war that cannot be won militarily.  There is also little sign it is about to change its stance of ramping up military operations — Defense Secretary Robert Gates just returned from a trip to Afghanistan where he said the U.S. strategy was working.

The letter, however, is still worth reading and particular scrolling through the list of names of those who signed up to it.  If nothing else, it serves as a useful marker from regional experts that they believe the Taliban are willing to negotiate.

Will Obama refer to Kashmir in public in India?

Will President Barack Obama make some public remarks on Kashmir during his trip to India next month?

At a White House press briefing, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes refused to be pinned down on specifics,  beyond saying that the United States would continue to express support for India and Pakistan to pursue talks.

“I wouldn’t — I don’t want to get into prefacing with precision what his comments are, in part because he’ll be answering a lot of questions there in the town hall and press conference and we haven’t — we’re still working through his remarks on certain things,” he said.

Yet it is a question that cannot — and will not — be left to chance.

Indian is deeply sensitive about foreign visitors talking about Kashmir — as British foreign ministers have learned to their cost on earlier trips. It regards Kashmir as an integral part of India and refuses even to recognise the territory at the heart of more than 60 years of enmity with Pakistan as disputed. Moreover, it has consistently rejected outside interference, saying that its disputes with Pakistan must be settled bilaterally.

Obama, who raised hackles in India during his presidential election campaign by suggesting the Washington should try to help resolve the Kashmir dispute, is hoping to use the trip to help U.S. business tap into India’s growing economy. With a flagging economy at home, he cannot afford to offend his hosts.

But at the same time, the biggest foreign policy challenge of his administration is over how to deal with Afghanistan and Pakistan.  The war in Afghanistan cannot be ended without Pakistan’s help. And Pakistan itself faces serious instability — potentially a much bigger worry than Afghanistan with its 180 million people and nuclear bombs. Pakistan’s identity in turn is intimately bound up with India – its past support for Islamist militants was driven by its belief that this was the only way to neutralise the influence of its much bigger neighbour both in Kashmir and in Afghanistan.  Depending on who you listen to, it either will not, or can not, tackle Islamist militants based in Pakistan without a peace settlement with India, including on Kashmir.

from Afghan Journal:

Guest Column: Getting Obama’s Afghan policy back on track

(C. Uday Bhaskar is a New Delhi-based strategic analyst. The views expressed in the column are his own).

By C. Uday Bhaskar

The May 12 summit meeting in the White House between visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his host, U.S. President Barack Obama comes against the backdrop of the mercifully aborted May 1 terrorist bombing incident in New York's Times Square.

From the barrage of news and commentary that floods various media outlets here in Washington DC, it is evident that the Obama Af-Pak policy unveiled with considerable fanfare last year will be in for detailed and contested policy review.

Immediate U.S. interests apart - including the Obama second term, the stakes for the long-term stability of the entire southern Asian region and the troubled Muslim populace in the scattered diaspora ranging from North America to west Europe are immense and complex.

Afghanistan came into global focus with the tragic enormity of September 11, 2001 when it was under the control of the Taliban and the obscurantist, anti-liberal ideology espoused by this group had earlier impacted India's security interests in the December 1999 aircraft hijacking episode.

With Karzai off to Washington, Taliban talks back in focus

“The effort required to bring about a compromise was indistinguishable from the requirements of victory—as the administration in which I served had to learn from bitter experience.”

The quote is from Henry Kissinger on Vietnam but you could just as easily apply it to the current U.S. strategy in Afghanistan of aiming to weaken the Taliban enough to bring them to the negotiating table. And unfashionable as it is to compare Vietnam to Afghanistan (it was hopelessly overdone last year), it does encapsulate one of the many paradoxes of the American approach to the Taliban.

If, so the argument goes, the United States is willing to reach an eventual political settlement with the Taliban, why does it keep launching fresh military offensives? Or alternatively, if it has no intention of making a deal, why has President Barack Obama promised to start drawing down troops in 2011, signalling to the Taliban that all they need to do is wait it out until the Americans leave?

In this 2008 Newsweek article which carries remarkable resonance today, Kissinger, a former National Security Adviser, sets out the risks of a strategy that is somewhere between war and peace.

“When the United States goes to war, it should be able to describe to itself how it defines victory and how it proposes to achieve it. Or else how it proposes to end its military engagement and by what diplomacy. In Vietnam, America sent combat forces on behalf of a general notion of credibility and in pursuit of a negotiation whose content was never defined,” he writes.

He then faults previous administrations for assuming that once the U.S. military thwarted the North Vietnamese, ”an undefined compromise would emerge through diplomacy—in effect, a strategy seeking stalemate, not victory. But stalemate violates the maxim that the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. “

“The purpose of war is victory. Stalemate is a last resort, not a desirable strategic objective.” (my italics)

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 Afghan Journal:

Engaging the Afghan Taliban: a short history

(The niche that once held a giant Buddha, in Bamiyan. Picture by Omar Sobhani)

For those pushing for high-level political negotiations with the Afghan Taliban to bring to an end to the eight-year war,  two U.S. scholars  in separate pieces are suggesting a walk through recent history  The United States has gone down the path of dialogue with the group before and suffered for it, believing against its own better judgement in the Taliban's promises until it ended up with the September 11, 2001 attacks, says  Michael Rubin from the American Enterprise Institute in this article in Commentary.

Rubin, who is completing a history of U.S. engagement with rogue regimes, says unclassified U.S. State Department documents show that America opened talks with the Taliban soon after the group  emerged as a powerful force in Kandahar in 1994 and well over a year before they took over Kabul. From then on it was a story of   diplomats doing everything possible to remain engaged with the Taliban in the hope it would modify their  behaviour, and that they would be persuaded to expel Osama bin Laden who had  by then relocated from Sudan.  The Taliban, on the other hand, in their meetings with U.S. diplomats, would stonewall on terrorism  but would also dangle just enough hope to keep the officials calling and forestall punitive strategies.

Over a five year period of engagement, the United States gained little while the Taliban grew even more radicalised and the threat from al Qaeda more serious. Rubin details how State Department officials were repeatedly misled by Taliban officials harbouring bin Laden even after two U.S. embassies were attacked in Africa in  1998.  They even told them they would protect the Buddha statues in Bamiyan which were subsequently destroyed.

"The Taliban had like many rogue regimes, acted in bad faith.  They had engaged not to compromise, but to buy time. They had made many promises, but did not keep a single one. The Taliban refused to isolate, let alone, expel Bin Laden , and al Qaeda metastasized," says Rubin. The Sept 11 attacks were plotted at a time when U.S. engagement with the Taliban was in full swing. 

Some of the logic and even the language used at the time is eerily similar to the current push for a political settlement with senior Taliban figures.  There was a difference between al Qaeda and the Taliban and it was possible that the latter could be peeled away,  U.S. officials and political commentators said at the time.  Second, Pakistan with its close ties to the Taliban was a key player offering advice to Washington, as it seeks to at the present time.

Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2010: the year of living incrementally?

One of the labels being attached to President Barack Obama is that he is a committed incrementalist - an insult or a compliment depending on which side of the political fence you sit, or indeed whether you believe it to be true.

A couple of articles on U.S.-led strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan fill out what that could mean going into the new year.

Rory Stewart writes in The New York Review of Books that a measured, long-term strategy for Afghanistan could be more effective than either extremes of a drive for victory at all costs and precipitate withdrawal. Here’s an excerpt:

“Obama’s central – and revolutionary – claim is that our responsibility, our means, and our interests are finite in Afghanistan. As he says, “we can’t simply afford to ignore the price of these wars.” Instead of pursuing an Afghan policy for existential reasons—doing “whatever it takes” and “whatever it costs”—we should accept that there is a limit on what we can do. And we don’t have a moral obligation to do what we cannot do.

“The US must husband its resources to meet other strategic challenges. Obama’s description of these is still narrowly focused on failed states and terrorism: it does not include the threats posed by states such as China or Russia, still less Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, or Kashmir, and it does not attempt to compare the conflict in Afghanistan to the risks posed by climate change or threats to the supply of food in poor nations. But he names Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia as posing challenges. The US responsibility to the Afghan people is only one responsibility among many and “the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”

 The Boston Review carries a series of articles from experts debating the strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Among them, Andrew Bacevich makes a similar point about the need for the United States to juggle competing challenges and demands on its resources, among them climate change and the economy:

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.

Pakistan and Afghanistan:how do al Qaeda and the Taliban respond?

In openDemocracy, Paul Rogers writes that one of the great mistakes of the media is that it tends to assume the only actors in the campaign against Islamist militants are governments, with al Qaeda and the Taliban merely passive players.

“Beyond the details of what the Taliban and its allies decide, it is important to note that most analysis of Barack Obama’s strategy published in the western media is severely constrained by its selective perspective. There is a pervasive assumption – even now, after eight years of war – that the insurgents are mere “recipients” of external policy changes: reactive but not themselves proactive,” he writes.  

“This is nonsense – and dangerous nonsense. It would be far wiser to assume that these militias have people who are every bit as intelligent and professional in their thinking and planning as their western counterparts. They have had three months to think through the Obama leadership’s policy-development process; and much of this thinking will be about how the US changes affect their own plans – not how they will respond to the United States. Thus they may have very clear intentions for the next three to five years that are embedded in detailed military planning; and what is now happening on their side will involve adjustment of these plans in the light of the great rethink across the Atlantic.”

So how will al Qaeda, the Taliban and other Islamist groups respond?

As discussed before in openDemocracy, and highlighted on this blog more than a year ago, the Taliban has been pretty good at studying the lessons of history, including taking inspiration from the Vietnamese war commander General Vo Nguyen Giap, who successfully employed guerrilla tactics against the French before crushing them in the battle of Dien Bien Phu  in 1954.

It is reasonable to assume they have also studied the spillover of the U.S. war in Vietnam into Cambodia where the United States, reluctant to send in its ground troops, resorted to special ops and bombing campaigns to choke off the Vietcong’s supply routes  – rather as Pakistan now fears the Afghan campaign will spill into its territory as Washington tries to eradicate Afghan Taliban leaders and bases there. The ensuing chaos paved the way for the takeover of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge.

 It would be a step too far to suggest that the Afghan Taliban and their allies are set on taking over Pakistan. As it is, there is still a fierce debate on how far they  are primarily Afghan nationalists who would settle for a return to power in Afghanistan and how far they have bought into al Qaeda’s global Islamist agenda.

India and Pakistan: the missing piece in the Afghan jigsaw

One year ago, I asked whether then President-elect Barack Obama’s plans for Afghanistan still made sense after the Mumbai attacks torpedoed hopes of a regional settlement involving Pakistan and India. The argument, much touted during Obama’s election campaign, was that a peace deal with India would convince Pakistan to turn decisively on Islamist militants, thereby bolstering the United States flagging campaign in Afghanistan.

As I wrote at the time, it had always been an ambitious plan to convince India and Pakistan to put behind them 60 years of bitter struggle over Kashmir as part of a regional solution to many complex problems in Afghanistan.  Had the Mumbai attacks pushed it out of reach? And if so, what was the fall-back plan?

One year on, there is as yet still no sign of a fall-back plan for Afghanistan and the tense relationship between India and Pakistan remains the elusive piece of the jigsaw.

After some attempts at peace-making which culminated in a meeting between the leaders of India and Pakistan in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt in July, and despite Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s own determination to try to repair relations, the two countries have descended into mutual recrimination.

India accuses Pakistan of failing to take enough action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group it blames for Mumbai and which analysts believe is still in a position to launch fresh attacks, and refuses to reopen formal peace talks broken off after the three-day assault. Pakistan has put seven men on trial over the attacks but has refused to arrest the group’s founder Hafiz Saeed nor, analysts say, to dismantle the infrastructure of an organisation whose original role was to fight India in Kashmir. It says it wants to resume talks with India.

As a result of the deadlock, both countries remain bitter rivals for influence in Afghanistan; while Pakistan, fighting its own battle against Islamist militants who have turned against the state, is seen as reluctant to move more troops from its eastern border with India to press home a military campaign against the Pakistani Taliban in its tribal areas. India in turn remains vulnerable to another Mumbai-style attack which could trigger Indian retaliation against Pakistan, running a risk of escalation between the two nuclear-armed countries.

“Now India and Pakistan are both playing for broke. Pakistan says it will support a U.S. regional strategy that does not include India, while India is talking about a regional alliance with Iran and Russia that excludes Pakistan. Both positions — throwbacks to the 1990s, when neighboring states fuelled opposing sides in Afghanistan’s civil war — are non-starters as far as helping the U.S.-NATO alliance bring peace to Afghanistan,” writes Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid in the Washington Post.