Pakistan: Now or Never?

Solving Afghanistan and Pakistan over a cup of tea

I have never read “Three Cups of Tea”, Greg Mortenson’s book about building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I tried to read the sequel, “Stones into Schools” and gave up not too long after the point where he said that, “the solution to every problem … begins with drinking tea.” Having drunk tea in many parts of South Asia – sweet tea, salt tea, butter tea, tea that comes with the impossible-to-remove-with-dignity thick skin of milk tea – I can confidently say that statement does not reflect reality.

So I have always been a bit puzzled that the Americans took Mortenson’s books so much to heart. Yes, I knew he boasted that his books had become required reading for American officers posted to Afghanistan; and yes, there is the glowing praise from Admiral Mike Mullen on the cover of  ”Stones into Schools”, where he wrote that “he’s shaping the very future of a region”. But I had always believed, or wanted to believe, that at the back of everyone’s minds they realised that saccharine sentimentality was no substitute for serious analysis. Just as hope is not a strategy, drinking tea is not a policy.  (To be fair to the Americans, I have also overheard a British officer extolling the virtues of drinking tea in Afghanistan.)

As a result of my scepticism on the miracle powers of tea-drinking, I find I am learning an awful lot more about the thinking of the U.S. administration than I ever did from Mortenson from the fall-out from the allegations of inaccuracies in his books. (Mortenson rejects these allegations in a statement on the website of his Central Asia Institute charity.)

Take for example the detailed account by Jon Krakauer (pdf) charting not only inaccuracies but also alleged irregularities in the finances of the Central Asia Institute. In his opening paragraph, Krakauer notes that President Barack Obama donated $100,000 of the award money from his own Nobel Peace Prize, which he received in 2009, to the Central Asia Institute. I had not known about the Obama connection until I read advance stories on Krakauer’s piece.

During his presidential election campaign, Obama made Afghanistan and Pakistan his foreign policy priority. So you might expect that he would have had foreign policy advisers who would have questioned the wisdom of associating publicly with one man. After all, it was quite clear — whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of Montenson’s philanthropy — that the narrative used to describe his schools in Baltistan as a bulwark against the Taliban and Islamist militants was a bit awry.

I have only been to Baltistan once, on a brief trip organised by the Pakistan Army to visit the Siachen region, the world’s highest battlefield, where Indian and Pakistani troops have faced off against each other since 1984. Yet even under the watchful gaze of my army minder, a group of Balti intellectuals who I met in the regional capital Skardu were able to tell me (over several cups of tea) that they felt neglected by Islamabad and excluded from power in Pakistan. Baltistan is part of the former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, divided between India and Pakistan, and because of its disputed status, the people there have never been integrated into Pakistan and nor have they been given voting rights.

The political and security issues in Baltistan are related to the rivalry between India and Pakistan, to the dispute over Kashmir, and to the electoral dispossession of a people who have been frozen in time since the partition of the subcontinent since 1947. They are nothing to do with the Taliban, militant Islam, or the war in Afghanistan. That should have been easy enough to find out – have U.S. diplomats never been to Baltistan?  Indeed even without going there, the information was available for free on the Internet. Why did nobody ask any questions?

Could you pass bin Laden to the left please?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have Plato’s cave shadows finally made it into the Afghan debate?

Joshua Foust has a great piece up at Registan.net about a two-day workshop he attended on tribal engagement in Afghanistan. While essentially focusing on how far the United States should rely on tribes to find a solution to Afghanistan, he raises a fundamental question about the nature of the debate on what to do in a war now into its ninth year:

“There is a bit of a crippling strain of experientialism in the military. It leads a lot of people to trust implicitly their own experiences and to assume those experiences are shared or generalizable. It also tends to engender a degree of mistrust of academia, since most academics gain their understanding through voracious reading rather than extensive experience.”

“Indeed, at the end of the day the whole workshop was crippled by three things the workshop’s organizers cannot control: the war’s strategy and history, the military’s bureaucratic inertia, and a nasty ontological problem we still didn’t resolve. Most importantly, we are coming at this in 2010, when the leadership has already decided upon tribal or community or local ‘defense initiatives’ as the way it is going to solve the war. That severely limits the discussion—despite an entreaty to answer the question ‘should we even do this’, there was almost no discussion of why everyone assumed the answer was ‘yes’”.

I have been trying to work out for a while not so much how the conflict in Afghanistan should be resolved – a question which many others are far better qualified to answer -  but rather the way in which the discussion about what to do is defined by our own cultural history.  Are we, as Joshua Foust suggests, no better than the men in Plato’s cave whose understanding of the shadows they saw there was limited by their own experience?

Before you dismiss this as an academic exercise, consider first that there appears to be a divergence between Britain and the United States over how far the international coalition should go to strike a deal with the Taliban. We don’t know how much this divergence is merely a matter of public posturing. What we do know, however, is that Britain and the United States have very different historical experiences of Afghanistan and South Asia and if policy is based on experience you will almost certainly get different outcomes.

Britain learned the hard way in the 19th century the dangers of invading Afghanistan. It also has a long history of wheeling and dealing in South Asia, learning the local languages in order to build its British Indian Empire, suppressing a Muslim-led insurrection, and playing one community off against the other to extend its power. That does not make its experience right, nor indeed necessarily applicable to 21st century Afghanistan. It does make it different from the one which defines Washington’s own view of policy.

Take another example – the way in which ordinary Muslims view the campaign against Islamist militants in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. One of the arguments you hear frequently is not over how the United States should bring a successful end to its post 9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but rather of the need to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Here is what even Pakistan’s very liberal secular English-language Dawn newspaper had to say about it:

Pakistan, India and the Kabul attack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Towards a regional settlement in Afghanistan (Redux squared)

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

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

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

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

(File photo: Children in Arghandab, Afghanistan)

Pakistan seen drifting away from the west

Pakistan is likely to drift further away from the west in the years ahead as pressure from Islamist groups and anti-Americanism undermine the traditional moorings of the secular pro-western elite, according to a report just released by the Legatum Institute. 

The report rules out the possibility of a Taliban takeover or of Pakistan becoming a failed state, predicting it is most likely to ”muddle through” with the army continuing to play a powerful role behind the scenes in setting foreign and security policy. “Rather than an Islamist takeover, you should look at a subtle power shift from a secular pro-Western society to an Islamist anti-American one,” said Jonathan Paris, the author of the report.

I recommend reading the full report, which examines the outlook for Pakistan in a one to three-year time horizon on a range of issues from the economy to security to relations with the United States, India and China. It also lays out factors to watch in the tremendously complex interplay of influences which will determine the direction for Pakistan in the coming years. You can read the full report here (pdf).

Pakistan has been down the Islamist road before, particularly during the Zia years.  And public opinion turned against the hardline Islamist practices of the Taliban when they occupied the Swat valley last year.  But while people may be willing to argue against the Taliban, it is less clear that society as a whole will resist the creeping Islamisation wrought by Islamist political parties and militant organisations, particularly in Punjab province, unless the state can deliver economic growth along with a reliable and speedy legal system.

Paris, whose research background was originally in the Middle East, also draws a parallel between Pakistan and Turkey, arguing that societies in countries which have traditionally been dominated by a secular pro-western elite are becoming Islamicised, while those which have lived under Islamic rule, for example in Iran, may be turning against it.  He has a brief summary of his outlook for various Muslim countries likely to be pivotal players in 2010 at the Atlantic Council website.

Finally, he also sees a risk of fragmentation of militant organisations into splinter groups which could be more extreme and harder to control.  This has become something of a global trend among militant groups, for example in the Middle East, where Hamas is now struggling to control Islamic Jihad dissident groups.  While much attention has been paid to the question of Pakistan’s militant groups uniting, the report is a reminder of the equal and perhaps more serious risk of them fragmenting into the kind of loose network modelled by the al Qaeda franchise.

(File photo of protesters burning the American flag)

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.