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Afghan story sidebar - becoming more central?

Thursday, October 15, 2009

AF-PAK IS THE SHORTHAND used throughout many media, as they've borrowed a piece of jargon initiated in geo-strategic think-tanks and then eagerly adopted by the Pentagon and the State Department.

With the Obama Administration yesterday holding its fifth review session on the Afghanistan war, which now fully embraces the Pakistan dimension next door, this 2-nation war-theater’s complexities are increasingly perplexing reporters and observers.

 

The multifaceted nature of the US-led coalition’s 8-year involvement in the region, and of its myriad challenges, has come to almost defy analysis, and it certainly defies easy labeling.

 

Just in the space of the past few weeks the simplistic alternative of “increase US troop numbers, or not” has progressed through “emphasize counter-terrorism, and downgrade counter-insurgency” to a range of policy options being discussed now that seem to cry out for “advance on all fronts at once” … if only that were possible.

 

And there’s an under-reported participant in the whole imbroglio which needs to be much more fully addressed. It’s India. Maybe the facile abbreviation should be stretched to AF-PAK-IND.

 

India has a long historical, but widely unremarked role in Afghanistan, and is currently spending $1.2 billion on reconstruction projects there, fielding about 4,000 aid workers who build dams, install electricity supply-systems and more.

 

That in itself may not appear too important to many a reporter on the Afghan war. But it’s vital to remember how Pakistan (created 61 years ago out of the formerly British-ruled subcontinent, as a Muslim counterweight to India, a counterweight that turned out to be often obsessionally and fanatically sectarian) will inescapably view almost everything that happens in the region through a lens of anti-Indian paranoia.

 

The latest US efforts to help Pakistan, to the tune of a $1.5 billion-a-year package from Congress have run foul of the Pakistani Army – since the soldiers can paint it as American interference in national sovereignty, or at the least as a cramp on the nation’s military and its freedom to operate as it wishes.

 

Pakistanis may well have some ambivalent feelings about their army, but almost since the nation’s violent birth, the armed forces, drawn as they are from a wide swathe of the population, and being more of a meritocracy than any other national institution, have still claimed more popular respect than any political party ever could.

 

The Army's frequent seizures of political power have been tolerated, sometimes even welcomed, and its perceived role in protecting the country from the much larger neighbor (India’s population is nearly eight times Pakistan’s) has proved crucial to maintaining its re-eminence in Pakistani society. In their relatively shorts lives, after all, the two nations have been at war with each other three times over.

 

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WHEN PAKISTAN SEEMED in danger of separatist collapse, after the Bengalis of what was then East Pakistan rebelled in 1971, I had my first experience of the depths of Pakistani nationalist sentiment - and its horrific consequences).

 

Pakistan’s army swept into Bengal and committed some of the worst atrocities against a civilian population I ever saw in my decades of field reporting. The nightly military briefings to correspondents like myself would, as a matter of course, deny such war-crimes were happening (despite what we could all see in the daytime) but even senior, sophisticated and well-educated Pakistani officers made little secret of a visceral and vicious hatred for their Bengali fellow-Muslims – condemning them as little short of subhuman, and in the same breath as “collaborators with India”.

 

Newbie international reporters in Pakistan nowadays are often baffled by the military’s intelligence arm, the ISI, enjoying such deep connections with the mujihaddin of the Taliban movements, both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan itself. It’s not enough to recall that such support lay in making common cause with co-religionists against the godless Soviets in the 1980s.

 

We all need to remember as well that Soviet Russia was an ally of India, and that – even since Communism’s collapse – maintaining a range of well-supplied guerrilla forces as clients (not so very different from the anti-Indian militants of Kashmir’s disputed terrain) has proved a very effective way for anxious Pakistani spy-masters, during two decades, to keep India persistently off-balance militarily.

 

And so as Obama’s security experts gathered again yesterday - spreading out their briefing books for a busy-looking photo-opportunity - they had to consider this week’s brazen run of deadly attacks by jihadists in Pakistan. But also on the agenda was an attack by the Haqqani brand of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan’s capital – the target there being India’s embassy.

 

A suicide bomb killed 17 people last week and wounded another 76. This was the second attack on India’s diplomatic base in Kabul in 16 months. The previous bomb killed 58.

 

Right now India's government is publicly forbearing to accuse Pakistan of involvement outright, in view of all the recent - and welcome - efforts at improving neighborly relations (both subcontinental nations are nuclear powers, no-one would wish to forget) but the Indian media are full of the unavoidable assumption that ISI's fingerprints will soon be found.

 

At the very least Indians will be demanding an increased, indeed powerful say in the way the AF-PAK theater of conflict gets to be handled internationally.

 

Given the state of the neighborhood, who could blame them?

 

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