An atmosphere of stale defensiveness has sunk over Kabul. The mood has been lowered by the protracted saga of the Afghan election count, almost two months on from the first round August 20 vote. It's a drama veering towards farce more often than post-modern play, as we wait endlessly for a result, that like Godot, does not want to come.

Winter has not yet arrived in Kabul, though the evenings are cold, quickly taking the heat of the sun out of the day. Afghan politicians are frustrated and twitchy, second-guessing the reasons for the U.N.-backed election watchdog's plodding. We are being solidly methodological to retain the confidence of all, says the Electoral Complaints Commission, as it examines thousands of dodgy votes. A thankless task, most likely. The ECC officials will be puzzling over whether a box of votes has been mass-endorsed for one candidate, and should not stand, or if the suspiciously similar ticks on the ballot paper are attributable to only one man in the village knowing how to write. Many of the rural voters will never have held a pen in their hand, argued one official. It is natural in such a tribal society for the village to establish a consensus on who to support. Do such ballot papers count? Remember Florida, and how 'hanging chads' and the U.S. Supreme Court gave George W. Bush the presidency over Al Gore? It's that kind of agony.

Behind the scenes the whispers are that hesitation and delay are because the outcome is excruciatingly close, too close to call. President Hamid Karzai, once set clear for victory, may find first round success ripped from his grasp by the disqualification of votes stuffed into ballot boxes by his supporters. He'll likely win a second round, if it happens, against his former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah; but there will have been a loss of dignity, of self-confidence and of an opportunity to stabilise Afghanistan and get on with fighting the Taliban.

Other more fraught scenarios are possible, as outlined by my colleague. Would Karzai gamble that the West has no alternative to him in Afghanistan? And that he can therefore afford to ignore the opprobrium that would follow if he rejected an outcome he did not like? Or are the suspicions of chicanery, back-room pressure on election officials and string-pulling by all involved just a proliferation of nonsense to fill the void left by the lack of a clear outcome?

Eventually the result will be out, perhaps by the time some of you get round to reading this. Most likely I will be back in London, watching from afar. Optimists would have it that clarity will clear the air, the Afghan political mood will lighten and spoils to all will come from the haggling over the shape of the next government.

Meanwhile Afghanistan is Limbo-stan. Obama won't decide his strategy on Afghanistan until he sees what kind of Afghan partner he has to deal with. At least until then, and possibly longer, he won't say yes or no to the extra troops that General Stanley McChrystal says he needs to carry out the counter-insurgency strategy that he has prepared. (Though he'll carry out a different strategy, with no or fewer extra troops, if that's what he's ordered to do by his commander-in-chief). So in this limbo - the Washington policy void is filled with echo-chamber exhortations across the political divides; the Taliban is emboldened; Afghanistan's neighbours are positioning themselves to benefit or at least guard against strategic loss should Washington fold its tent; and Western publics are wondering if there is a real purpose to their boys getting their limbs blown off while trudging through the fields of southern Helmand.

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)

(Updated with official reaction)

The decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama has opened up a field day for people on Twitter.

 While many politicians around the world were still working out their reactions to the surprise announcement, Twitterers leapt in with instant analysis from Pakistan, India and around the world. Here are some of the more frequent retweets which caught my eye::

 ”Pakistan asks for credible evidence to show Obama indeed won the Nobel Prize asks 4 dossier from Nobel”

“Obama wins the nobel peace prize? umm. for what exactly? he’s shooting missiles into pakistan! good intentions?”

“Obama gets Nobel Peace Prize: For the accuracy of his drones in Pakistan?”

“India & Pakistan demand a Nobel Peace prize for not bombing de shit out of each other!”

Official reactions from the region were generally positive, while the Afghan Taliban condemned the decision. 

Afghanistan and Pakistan congratulated Obama, with Sherry Rehman from the ruling PPP party saying she hoped the award would encourage the U.S. president to focus on bringing peace to South Asia, and help end the Kashmir conflict.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh sent a congratulatory message saying that “the world today is in need of a healing touch. Your pursuit of an inclusive approach to problem-solving, and primacy to dialogue as an instrument of policy are setting new benchmarks for the world community.”

The Afghan Taliban said he should get a Nobel prize for violence instead.

Do people in the region agree with the assessment of the Norwegian Nobel Committee that, “Obama has as president created a new climate in international politics”. Will he bring peace, or more war to South and Central Asia?

(File photo of Obama after his first 100 days in office) 

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)

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]

Michael Cohen and Parag Khanna have become the latest to argue, in an article in Foreign Policy, that the real focus of President Barack Obama’s battle against the Taliban and al Qaeda should be Pakistan rather than Afghanistan.

“Preventing a return of al Qaeda to Afghanistan is important, but a long, state-building mission in one of the world’s most underdeveloped countries is the costliest and least effective way to accomplish that goal,” they write.

“The even better course of action is to shift the weight of U.S. political and military efforts to Pakistan. There, the United States should continue its policy of waging drone attacks against al Qaeda and Taliban leaders. With better intelligence from the Pakistani side — as demonstrated recently — the U.S. Army can improve the accuracy of its strikes. And though drone strikes are controversial, targeting al Qaeda’s leadership is the best military strategy — and the best way to protect Americans, Afghans, and Pakistanis from terrorism. And that fight is in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.

“What’s more, though nation-building in Afghanistan is an unlikely proposition even in the long term, nation-building in Pakistan is essential — and achievable,” they say. And to achieve this, the authors argue for reconstruction efforts in the tribal areas, comparable to those planned for the Swat valley, where the Pakistan Army has just completed a military offensive. 

The argument about Pakistan rather than Afghanistan being the central front is interesting. It has been gaining currency in recent months, particularly in Britain where misgivings about the Afghan campaign tend to run higher than in the United States. Why, runs the refrain, are soldiers being sent to die in Afghanistan, when al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership are believed to be in Pakistan?

Where the article falls down is in the details.

Joshua Foust at Registan.net has already picked up on some of them. “It’s not a bad thing to argue the necessity of a focus on Pakistan. It’s just… that won’t do us much good if we also ignore Afghanistan, which is kind of what they’re arguing,” he writes.

The authors make an assumption that the Pakistan Army, which is preparing an offensive in South Waziristan, plans the same kind of “clear, hold and build” operation there as it carried out in Swat. Yet while this was appropriate for Swat, a so-called “settled area” not that far from Islamabad, there is no evidence that it would do the same in the tribal areas. These have never been governed by central authority, right back to the days when the rulers of the British Raj tried, and failed, to pacify them.

Rather what many are expecting in South Waziristan is a traditional punitive expedition against Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud – quite different from the operation in Swat where the army aimed to restore government and public services after a brief period under Taliban rule. So talking about reconstruction efforts in tribal areas like South Waziristan is at the very least, premature.

Nor do the authors deal with a widespread belief, backed by the U.S. administration, that the Afghan Taliban are based not in the tribal areas of Pakistan but in and around Quetta, the capital of its Baluchistan province. Sending U.S. drones into ”mainland Pakistan” would be quite different from dropping missiles on the tribal areas — and even these cause resentment in Pakistan, which sees them as both a breach of its sovereignty and a 21st century sledgehammer in which civilians as well as militant leaders die.

Nor do they say how the United States should deal with militant groups like the Laskhar-e-Taiba, traditionally focused on India, based in Punjab in the heart of Pakistan, and increasingly seen as a potential threat to the west.

In post 9/11 literature, it has become almost axiomatic that failed or dysfunctional states like Afghanistan are less dangerous than functioning states, since it is easier for the United States to bomb or fight its way in without a strong central government to stop it. Pakistan is a functioning state with a powerful, professional army and nuclear weapons. So even if Washington were to decide its main focus should be on Pakistan rather than Afghanistan, what exactly should it do?

The authors raise the question, but do not come up with the answers. Should we not perhaps also assume that the U.S. administration asked the same question?

(Reuters photos: Afghan villager; the widow and mother of a British officer killed in Afghanistan; U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan)

President Barack Obama chose his words carefully when asked in an interview with Dawn earlier this week why the United States has been silent on Kashmir in recent months:

“I don’t think that we’ve been silent on the fact that India is a great friend of the United States and Pakistan is a great friend of the United States, and it always grieves us to see friends fighting. And we can’t dictate to Pakistan or India how they should resolve their differences, but we know that both countries would prosper if those differences are resolved,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.

“And I believe that there are opportunities, maybe not starting with Kashmir but starting with other issues, that Pakistan and India can be in a dialogue together and over time to try to reduce tensions and find areas of common interest,” he said. ”And we want to be helpful in that process, but I don’t think it’s appropriate for us to be the mediators in that process. I think that this is something that the Pakistanis and Indians can take leadership on.”

During his election campaign, Obama said the United States should try to help resolve the Kashmir dispute so that Pakistan could focus on tackling militants on its western border with Afghanistan. “We should probably try to facilitate a better understanding between Pakistan and India and try to resolve the Kashmir crisis so that they can stay focused not on India, but on the situation with those militants,” he said in an interview with MSNBC in October 2008, shortly before the presidential election.

The U.S. public position changed after the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai, blamed by India on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group.  Under pressure from India, which argued that any talk of resolving the Kashmir dispute would be rewarding terrorism, the Obama administration quietly dropped any reference to Kashmir.

But has the U.S. position on India, Pakistan and Kashmir really changed, or just gone underground?

It’s hard to believe that the U.S. position has changed dramatically. As I discussed in this analysis, the Lashkar-e-Taiba – once nurtured by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency to fight India in Kashmir – is increasingly being seen as a potential threat to the West comparable to al Qaeda (scroll down on this pdf document from CTC Sentinel to see a detailed background report on the LeT and its Jamat ud-Dawa charitable wing).

Neither the United States nor Britain can afford to turn a blind eye to the Lashkar-e-Taiba when its training camps can be used by disaffected Pakistanis from the diaspora. And that suggests that the old “hands-off” approach in which the West tended to view the Kashmir dispute as a bilateral issue between India and Pakistan no longer works. It needs to convince the Pakistan Army to turn its sights on the LeT while also nudging India to resume a peace process that might — over the long term — help reduce tensions over Kashmir.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Asif Ali Zardari met at a regional conference in Yekaterinburg in Russia this month. But they remain a long way off from resuming a formal peace process broken off by India after the Mumbai attacks. While the Pakistan government has said it wants to resume the peace process — a position supported in detail in Pakistani op-eds, including by former Pakistan ambassador Maleeha Lodhi and by retired Lieutenant-General Talat Masood – India wants Pakistan to take action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba first before it will resume formal talks.

In the meantime, the Pakistan Army is engaged in what looks as though it will be a very protracted and difficult battle against the Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan. So even if it were determined to target the Lashkar-e-Taiba, it would be unlikely to do so until it has defeated the Pakistani Taliban. Yet without a reduction in tensions with India, it is also unlikely to move significant numbers of troops from the eastern border with India to use against the Pakistani Taliban on the western border with Afghanistan.

So how does the United States break the logjam?

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits India in July, and while she is likely to choose her words in public as carefully as Obama, privately she is expected to try to enlist Indian support for U.S. policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan — including by moving forward on peace talks. In advance of her trip, she has promised to “create a new era” in the relationship between the United States and India.  Given India’s reluctance to respond — or be seen to respond — to American pressure on talks with Pakistan, that’s probably the kind of language New Delhi needs to hear if it is to be won over.

The challenge for Clinton, and U.S. administration as a whole, will be in winning over India without offending Pakistan, where people are intensely wary of a U.S.-India relationship that would squeeze the country from both sides, from Afghanistan and from India.

When President Barack Obama unveiled his plans for Afghanistan and Pakistan in March, he promised to involve other countries with a stake in the region, including the Central Asian states, the Gulf nations and Iran; Russia, India and China. But a major sticking point in enlisting regional support has been distrust over the United States’ long-term intentions for Afghanistan.  Washington has never been able to shake off suspicions that it is using its battle against the Taliban and al Qaeda to establish a permanent military presence in the region. 

In that context, Obama’s statement during his speech in Cairo that the United States is not seeking to set up permanent military bases in Afghanistan is rather interesting:

“Make no mistake: we do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We seek no military bases there. It is agonizing for America to lose our young men and women. It is costly and politically difficult to continue this conflict. We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can. But that is not yet the case.”

It will be worth watching to see whether the Obama administration is able to build on this to win more regional support for its policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  But at the same time, it has to avoid feeding Pakistani fears that the United States might one day abruptly leave the region, just as it did when the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. 

(Photo: Obama speaks at Cairo University/Goran Tomasevic)

(For Reuters analyses of Obama’s speech in relation to the Middle East, please see here and here).

With President Hamid Karzai now looking all but unassailable in Afghanistan’s August election, two articles out this week - one from Washington and the other from India - offer mirror-image analyses of President Barack Obama’s handling of the Afghan leader. They should really be read as companion pieces since both offer insights into the workings of the Obama administration and the complexities of Afghan politics.  Reading both together also highlights how different the world looks depending on your perspective, whether writing from America or Asia.

According to this article in the Washington Post by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (highlighted by Joshua Foust at Registan.net) the Obama administration had decided to keep Karzai at arm’s length. It says Obama’s advisers faulted former President George W. Bush for forging too personal a relationship with Karzai through bi-weekly video conferences and as a result creating such cosiness that it became hard for his administration to put pressure on the Afghan government.

“It was a conversation. It was a dialogue. It was a lot of ‘How are you doing? How is your son?’” it quotes a senior U.S. government official who attended some of the sessions as saying. “Karzai sometimes placed his infant son on his lap during the conversations.”

“Obama’s advisers have crafted a two-pronged strategy that amounts to a fundamental break from the avuncular way President George W. Bush dealt with the Afghan leader,” the report said.  ”Obama intends to maintain an arm’s-length relationship with Karzai in the hope that it will lead him to address issues of concern to the United States, according to senior U.S. government officials. The administration will also seek to bypass Karzai by working more closely with other members of his cabinet and by funnelling more money to local governors.”

Retired Indian diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, has a rather different reading on the wisdom of the Obama administration’s approach. In this article in the Asia Times Online, headlined What Obama could learn from Karzai, (highlighted by Marie-France Calle on her French-language blog), he says the Americans allowed themselves to be outmanoeuvred by the Afghan President by keeping him at arms-length.

“In retrospect, United States President Barack Obama did a great favour to Afghan President Hamid Karzai by excluding him from his charmed circle of movers and shakers who would wield clout with the new administration in Washington,” he writes. “Obama was uncharacteristically rude to Karzai by not even conversing with him by telephone for weeks after he was sworn in, even though Afghanistan was the number one policy priority of his presidency.”

But Karzai, he says, had the last laugh, as the opprobrium heaped upon him by the west raised his standing in Afghan eyes. Karzai had been able to manoeuvre himself into a strong position through weeks of Afghan-style backroom negotiations, capped by a decision by a popular candidate to pull out of the election race.

“The Afghan experience with democracy offers a good lesson for Obama: it is best to keep a discreet distance and leave the Afghans to broker power-sharing on their own terms, according to their own ethos and tradition,” he writes. “However, Obama has a long way to go in imbibing the lessons of democracy in the Hindu Kush …”

(Reuters photos: President Karzai, and Karzai with President Obama and Vice President Biden. Photos by Yuri Gripas and Jonathan Ernst)