Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is in the United States for the first official state visit by any foreign leader since President Barack Obama took office this year. While the atmospherics are right, and the two leaders probably won’t be looking as stilted as Obama and China’s President Hu Jintao appeared to be during Obama’s trip last week (for the Indians are rarely short on conversation), there is a sense of unease.And much of it has to do with AFPAK - the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan which is very nearly at the top of Obama’s foreign policy agenda and one that some fear may eventually consume the rest of his presidency. America’s ally Pakistan worries about India’s expanding assistance and links to Afghanistan, seeing it as part of a strategy to encircle it from the rear.  Ordinarily, Pakistani noises wouldn’t bother India as much, but for signs that the Obama administration has begun to adopt those concerns as its own in its desperate search for a solution, as Fareed Zakaria writes in Newsweek.And that is producing a “perverse view” of the region, he says adding it was a bit strange that India was being criticised for its influence in Afghanistan. India is the hegemon in South Asia, with a GDP 100 times that of Afghanistan and it was only natural that as Afghanistan opened itself up following the ouster of the Taliban in 2001, its cuisine, movies and money would flow into the country. The whole criticism about India,  Zakaria says, is a little bit like saying the United States has had growing influence  in Mexico over the last few decades and should be penalised for it.But what about Pakistan’s concerns, a country that was dismembered in the last full-scale war with India in 1971 with the creation of Bangladesh. The last thing it would want is a hostile regime in Afghanistan on its western flank on top of the Indian army, the world’s third largest, massed on the eastern front, not to mention the Islamist militants whom it once nurtured turning on  the State itself.Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Kayani told the U.S. National Security Adviser General Jim Jones earlier his month that Indian presence in Kabul would hurt the war objectives.And what about the Afghans themselves ? The India-Pakistan rivalry is probably a sideshow in the broader battle between a resurgent Taliban and the foreign forces, but perhaps one they can do without.[Photographs of Afghan children and Indian and U.S. flags at the White House]

On the eve of Hamid Karzai’s inauguration as Afghanistan’s president, the obvious question to ask is what happens if he, or more crucially his Western backers, fail to turn back a resurgent Taliban the second time around.Steve Coll, journalist and president of the New America Foundation, sets out four consequences of failure in Afghanistan in a blog in The New Yorker, which speak to those especially in America who question its involvement in the first place in this far-off “graveyard of empires.”A new ABC/Washington Post poll says 52 percent of Americans don’t believe the war is worth the costs.Coll says: 1) If the world were to give up on Afghanistan and the Taliban were to return to power, it would mean a re-run of the Civil War in the 90s, but this time on “steroids”. It is inconceivable that the Taliban could triumph in the country completely and provide a regime (however perverse) of stability and so you could have a rump Afghan government dominated by ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks find arms and money from India, Iran, and perhaps Russia, Europe and the United States. This would likely produce a long-running civil war between northern, Tajik-dominated ethnic militias and the Pashtun-dominated Taliban.2) Success in Afghanistan would give momentum for a Taliban revolution in Pakistan. If the Quetta Shura regained power in Kandahar or Kabul, it would undoubtedly interpret its triumph as a ticket to further ambition in Pakistan. The Pakistani Taliban would likely be energized, armed and financed by the Afghan Taliban as they pursue their own revolutionary ambitions in Islamabad.3) Increased Islamist Violence Against India : The probable knock-on effect of a second Taliban revolution Afghanistan would be to increase the likelihood of irregular Islamist attacks from Pakistan against Indian targets as they see to extend their influence. In time, democratic Indian governments would be pressed by their electorates to respond with military force, and the world would then have to deal with a fourth Indian-Pakistan war, this time both nations nuclear-armed.4) Al Qaeda’s ambitions against Britain and the United States would strengthen. While al Qaeda’s capacity to launch disruptive attacks on American soil remain low, it would be absurd to argue it won’t be strengthened by a Taliban return to Afghanistan, Coll says. London may well be more vulnerable to a future attack five or ten years after an Afghan Taliban revolution, given the large Pakistani Diaspora in Britain that the “bad guys” may well use to blend in.Finally, while the threat to the rest of the world from an unstable Afghanistan has been spelt out innumerable times, what about the risk to Afghans themselves? An Oxfam survey offers a sobering glimpse of the mood of the nation with these findings: one in five Afghans questioned said they had been tortured, one in 10 claimed to have been imprisoned at least once since 1979, when Soviet forces invaded, and one in six Afghans are currently considering leaving the country.One of the survey’s respondents from the eastern province of Nangarhar summed up what instability in Afghanistan has led to already by saying more than 2 million people had died in decades of conflict, 70 percent of the country had been destroyed, and its economy virtually eliminated.”Half our people have been driven mad. A man who is 30 or 40 years old looks like he is 70. We always live in fear. We are not secure anywhere in Afghanistan,” the respondent said.[Top: A U.S. Marine passes Afghan children while on patrol in Helmand province (Reuters/Asmaa Waguih); above: Afghan children hold a banner during the celebration of Peace Day in Kabul in September (Reuters/Omar Sobhani)]

[Women at a cemetery in Kabul, picture by Reuters' Ahmad Masood]As U.S. President Barack Obama makes up his mind on comitting more troops to Afghanistan, the search for analogies continues. Clearly, Afghanistan cannot be compared with Vietnam or Iraq  beyond a point. The history, geography, the culture and the politics are just too different.The best analogy to Afghanistan may well the very area in dispute – the rugged Pashtun lands straddling the border with Pakistan and where  the Pakistani army is in the middle of an offensive, argues William Tobey in a piece for Foreign Policy.Tobey, a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfar Center and who served on the National Security Council staff under three U.S. presidents, takes a walk down history to the 1936 uprising against British rule in Waziristan.The rebels were driven by radical Islam, Pashtun nationalism and armed opportunism, much the same factors firing up the modern Taliban campaign.  ”The rebels improvised roadside bombs, ambushed convoys, and launched hit and run attacks on isolated outposts to drive out alien forces. They kidnapped and beheaded British soldiers and civilians. In unprotected villages, they massacred civilians who did not support them. “And when troops chased them, they crossed the border into Afghanistan. Much of the same is happening on either side of Waziristan’s border with Afghanistan and you could be forgiven to think if this isn’t a re-run in some ways.Even the British response in Waziristan seems to be similar to US/NATO operations in Afghanistan. They called in air strikes, the earliest use of air power, and with similar set of rules to limit civilian casualties. But of course, like the NATO forces they ended up causing civilian casualties.

[U.S.Marines in Helmand, picture by Reuters' Asmaa Waguih}The British, also attempted, to improve civil society, building roads and schools. Again the results were mixed. Some people appreciated the assistance, but many others saw it as a way to extend British military power and Western values deeper into their lands.

The Pakistani Taliban are warning the Pakistani military that it faces a fight in Waziristan tougher than Kashmir where the Indian army has struggled to quell a 20-year armed revolt.It must be a rather bitter irony for the Pakistani army to be dealt such a warning from an umbrella militant group, several of whose members it once nurtured to fight the Indian army in Kashmir.War by a thousand cuts, the Pakistan strategic establishment said, referring to the strategy to bleed India’s much larger army and ensure parity. So militants were given material support to take on the Indian army which was then forced to throw in more and more troops in to the conflict zone, until there were almost – and to this day remain –  anything around 400,000 to 500,000 troops in the area.  Such a large military presence by itself deepens the people’s alienation and perpetuates the insurgency.Is it going to be the same for the Pakistani army as Pakistan Taliban spokesman  Azam Tariq told Reuters on Tuesday just as suspected militants carried out the third attack near the frontier city of Peshawar in as many days ?Waziristan as Kashmir does seem a stretch. One, the Pakistani Taliban don’t have the cross border backing that the militants operating in Kashmir had, beginning with helping them cross over, to training, to  giving them arms and then pushing them back across the Kashmir frontier. Leave alone state support, it’s not even certain that their brothers-in-arms, the Afghan Taliban, are backing them to the hilt in what must be their toughest battle yet since they turned against the Pakistani state.For what it’s worth an Afghan  Taliban commander on Tuesday distanced himself from the Pakistani Taliban, saying it didn’t support targeting innocent people.  The Afghan Taliban’s target were only the foreign forces in Afghanistan, Afghan Taliban commander Abdul Mannan alias Mullah Toor told Pakistan’s GEO TV.Two, the Pakistani army has deployed about 30,000 troops in the South Waziristan operation, a drop for an army with a size of over 520,000 troops.  The Taliban will have to do much more to draw the Pakistani army deeper into their lair and in  greater numbers before it can really begin to bleed them.Third, there doesn’t seem to be any people’s support for the Taliban,  at least not in the open and not in the sense that the Indian army faces in Kashmir.In such circumstances, can the Pakistani Taliban really go the distance, fight a 20-year war? Perhaps they will target Pakistan’s cities and towns to weaken the state’s resolve as they have done in the run-up and aftermath of the offensive.{Reuters picture of people fleeing south Waziristan]