India is key to Pakistan, Afghan stability

Today Pakistan is probably the most dangerous country in the world, but it is India, not Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda, that now bears much of the responsibility for this and arguably is the country that holds the key to the beginnings of a solution.

More the pity that President Barack Obama seemed to have backed straight down when India protested at the mandate he wanted his sharp-shooting diplomat, Richard Holbrooke to have — including India as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan. So Holbrooke is reduced to dealing with only two sides of the triangle of madness.

Of course, it is an over simplification to finger India first. It ignores history, not least the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which left behind a raging civil war in Afghanistan, enabling the rise of the dogmatic Taleban, who in turn gave a home to Osama Bin Laden.

In 1986 I visited Peshawar in northeast Pakistan, close to the Khyber Pass. The town even then was full of armed encampments in its outer suburbs — Pathan chiefs who had escaped with their people from the war in Afghanistan had built huge well-defended compounds to house the refugees from their kin group. It was clear then that the hospitality that Pakistan felt it had to extend to the displaced Pathans was storing up trouble ahead. Two million such refugees bred violence and extremism.

The Americans and some Gulf states were engaged at that time in bolstering these Pathans with money and weapons to fight the Red Army. All of it was funded through Pakistan’s notorious secret service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate.

Most of it came through Peshawar.But once the Soviets were defeated, the US, Britain, France and Israel and others who had worked together on this venture, just walked away. The US had known about Pakistan’s nuclear bomb development the past decade but kept mum suddenly imposed sanctions on Pakistan, complaining that Pakistan had been developing nuclear weapons in secret.

Pakistan was triply furious — at the sanctions, at Washington’s convenient hypocrisy and the fact it was left to cope with the aftermath of the war, not least the radicalizing and rise of the Taleban among the Pathans of Afghanistan, the Pathans in its refugee camps and the Pathans in its own border lands.

Ambiguously it supported them, not least because it wanted friends on that border so it could concentrate on defending its border with India. So year by year Pakistan got drawn into the netherworld of the “triangle of madness”, convinced that India was at work trying to use Afghanistan as a way of encircling Pakistan.

It was all part of India’s obsession with retaining its grip on its majority Muslim province of Kashmir. The ISI matched the Indians by encouraging its Pathan extremists to aid the Muslim militants in Kashmir.

All this was before the arrival in Afghanistan in 1996 of Osama Bin Laden, with his anti-American mission. But once he was there and safely ensconsed among the Taleban, the next acts in the drama had something of an inevitability about them — terrorist attacks on America, reprisal in the form of bombing that hurts civilians more than the militias, attempted US and NATO occupation of Afghanistan, ongoing war.

But the Western effort, not succeeding in its main goals of defeating the Taleban and finding Bin Laden, has backfired, not just in Afghanistan but increasingly in Pakistan’s border areas. It has turned hundreds of thousands of people who in free elections didn’t vote for the fundamentalist parties into raving radicals.

Moreover, in their minds the cause of a free Kashmir is now inextricably linked up with the cause of supporting the Taleban’s fight against the Americans and NATO. The Indians, it is widely believed, are working with them. Hence the tolerance for those militants who in November went down to Mumbai and unleashed 24 hours of terror. Even if the US and NATO pulled out tomorrow India would still be a red rag for Pakistan.

India missed its great opportunity for peace with Pakistan and an end to the Kashmir dispute when it failed to move fast enough to grab the unclenched fist the now deposed military president, Pervez Musharraf, offered them.

The Bush administration failed to use its post-nuclear deal prestige with India to help drive the negotiations to closure. Holbrooke needs to get busy with the power centers of India, (army, Foreign Ministry, intelligence services, academics, press) while the pro-peace Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is still in power.

With Kashmir solved it would go a long way to quieten the fundamentalist militancy in Pakistan that feeds into the war against the Americans and NATO and the support for Taleban extremism in Afghanistan.