A pedestrian carrying an umbrella walks through a Memorial Day display of United States flags on the Boston Common in Boston, Massachusetts May 23, 2013. According to the Massachusetts Military Heroes Fund, the flags are planted on the Common for fallen Massachusetts service members at the Memorial Day holiday, which will be celebrated May 27 in the U.S.
REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Russian Spy Games
By Edward Lucas
Foreign Affairs

The Cold War may have officially ended and the rest may be the new policy, but Russia and the U.S. are still adversaries, says Lucas. While Ryan Fogle’s, the 29-year-old third secretary at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, gamble may seem absurd, the extraordinary thing about the case is actually that the Russians made it such a public scandle, which are by convention not published. But with Putin’s regime facing a recession and a decline in popularity, renewing anti-Westernism with a spy scandle should come as no surprise.

Tocqueville in China
By Rebecca Liao
Dissent

Tocqueville’s been imported to China, and after a plug by China’s anti-corruption czar, has become one of the best-selling titles in the last few months. Liao examines China’s fascination with Tocqueville and the relevance of the text to the modern Chinese government.

A Day in the DRC
By Armin Rosen
The Atlantic

Goma, a city of roughly one million inhabitants in the province of North Kivu, DRC, is a city “built by conflict” but not defined by it. A thoughtful piece on a trip through this city in the “conflict-prone” province of North Kivu.

An ‘Epic’ Mess in Iran
By Abbas Milani
The New Republic

With a list of vetted candidates due to be announced on Tuesday, Khamenei’s so-called “epic election” seems like it might be on the rocks. Former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who announced his candidacy at the last minute and who has been shunned by the mouthpieces of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, has put Khamenei in a lose-lose situation: Throw him out and lose the “epic election” or allow him to run, thereby failing in his eight-year mission to discredit him.

Pulp Liberation Army
By Isaac Stone Fish and Helen Gao
Foreign Policy

Military fantasy novels are far from new — as Fish and Gao note, Tom Clancy can imagine a situation where the U.S. attacks Beijing all he wants. In China, however, facing strict censorship and unforgiving review boards, these fantasies of foreign wars and invasion are not permitted to be published, forcing authors online. In the process, these novels have become vehicles of self-reflection, exploring Chinese identity through imagined conflicts.

Blogs:

A Candid Discussion with Eric Trager by Reza Akhlaghi
Somalia and the Slippery Slope of ‘Jubbaland’ by Abukar Arman
India, Pakistan and China: The importance of regional powers in a post-U.S. Afghanistan by Tyler Hooper
Beyond the Amended Arab Peace Initiative by Justin Scott Finkelstein
Analysis: The Arctic Council’s Kiruna Vision by Mia Bennett

SOURCE: AP/Saurabh Das

By Tyler Hooper

With U.S., NATO and International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) personnel set to withdraw the bulk of their military personnel from Afghanistan in 2014, regional powers such as China, India and Pakistan will have the opportunity to play an influential role in the country’s future. Both India and Pakistan have historically been involved in Afghan affairs, and lately China has begun to show interest in expanding its Central Asian influence. With an Afghan election set for April of 2014, in which President Hamid Karzai will have to cede power, U.S. policymakers hope that the next Afghan leader will continue to combat Islamic extremism and the Taliban. Although the U.S. has plans to keep some of its military bases in the country, U.S. foreign policy interests are bound to shift away from Afghanistan towards other regions, such as Africa and the South China Sea. Ultimately, as western powers scale down their military forces, regional powers will be forced to play a greater role in Afghanistan’s future, and in terms of U.S. interests, India’s actions will be of vital importance.

After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and subsequent withdrawal ten years later, a civil war between the Taliban, Northern Alliance and local warlords broke out across Afghanistan. The civil war and Taliban presence, supported by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), during the 1990s made Afghanistan a regional threat to India, which caused Indian leaders to support the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s chief rival. Since 9/11 and the U.S.-led invasion, India has played an important role providing aid to Afghanistan and its people and has continued to support international efforts to eliminate the Taliban. As a result, the U.S. has recognized India’s economic and strategic importance to the country, and lately U.S. policymakers have publicly praised India for its role in Afghanistan.

Recently, Robert Blake, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, stated during a Congressional hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee that “any discussion of South Asia has to start with India.” Blake also highlighted the economic impact India has had on the Afghan economy: “We appreciate very much the significant role that India is playing in Afghanistan. In fact, we see India as kind of the economic linchpin for the future.” Blake was correct in calling India an “economic linchpin” as India is the largest regional contributor of aid to Afghanistan, having provided approximately $800 million in aid so far. The Indian government, led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, has pledged to provide more than a billion dollars of foreign aid and has also put a sizable amount of cash into foreign investments, primarily in ore deposits like the one in Hajigak.

Unlike ISAF and the U.S., India has taken a “soft-power” approach when it comes to dealing with Afghanistan: instead of strictly providing military assets, India has invested in relief aid for the country, which goes towards building proper infrastructure, agricultural development and improving security. Because of this, relations between India and Afghanistan have been relatively good; Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who studied in India and speaks Hindi, has a good relationship with Prime Minister Singh, and the Afghan people have been known to get along with Indian workers and even embrace aspects of India’s culture. However, some U.S. officials worry that India’s hostilities with Pakistan are the primary motivator for India’s interest in Afghanistan.

In 2011, Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s newly appointed U.S. Defense Secretary, commented that India was using Afghanistan as a “second-front” in its feud with Pakistan. Although India publicly refutes these claims, there appears to be some truth behind Hagel’s comments. Both Indian and Pakistani officials have blamed each other for attacks in and outside of Afghanistan. Pakistan claims that India has funded rebel groups who target the ISI and the Pakistani military. Similarly, Indian officials accuse the ISI of being involved in the planning of the 2008 and 2009 attacks against the Indian embassy in Kabul in which India accused the Pakistan based al-Qaeda Haqqani network for planning the attacks, something Islamabad and Pakistani officials strongly deny. Relations became especially tense after the Mumbai attacks in 2008, in which the Pakistani based jihadist group Lashkar-e-Tayiba (LeT) — allegedly funded by the ISI – killed more than a 160 people and wounded almost 300.

But Pakistan and India are not the only regional powers to show interest in Afghanistan. China, who has invested in Afghan mineral and oil deposits, has expressed concern over the security with its Afghan border. The two countries share a very small border between Tajikistan and the Jammu and Kashmir region and recently China has become increasingly worried about the increase of Islamic extremist activity in its Xianjing province. Consequently, newly elected President Xi Jinping has taken interest in what a post 2014 Afghanistan will look like, and has even planned to meet with an Indian delegation to discuss the Taliban and the threat of Islamic extremism to the border regions.  However, a recent land grab by the Chinese military, which saw Chinese forces penetrate and build a camp more than 700 kilometers into India’s territory, has threatened to create a rift between the two countries, a rift that could bring more instability to the region and stall any discussions on Afghanistan.

Some speculate that China may have other reasons for being interested in Afghanistan. For instance, some argue that China may wish to use Afghanistan to expand its Central Asian pipeline, which already runs through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Dr. Alexandros Peterson recently wrote a very interesting article in Foreign Policy magazine in which he asked, “Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan have grown wealthy and centralized partly due to Chinese energy investment. Could the same be true for Afghanistan in the future?” A pipeline built through Afghanistan would greatly expand Chinese influence in South and Central Asia. In addition, such a large project could be extremely helpful to the Afghan people, creating potential jobs and bringing foreign business and investment to the country. However, a pipeline is highly unlikely until Afghanistan becomes less of a security risk for foreign investors, and given Afghanistan’s current state, the outcome doesn’t look promising.

Afghanistan’s fate rests largely on what kind of role regional powers will play after the U.S. and other foreign troops withdraw the bulk of their forces in 2014. Currently, interest in Afghanistan remains high; both India and China have foreign investments in the country (China’s largest investment is a copper mine in Mes Aynak) and both would like to capitalize on the plethora of untapped natural resources. Moreover, Pakistan also has a heightened interest in the future of Afghanistan and recently Pakistani and Afghan forces have skirmished among the Afghan-Pakistani borders, creating tension between the two countries. Given the ISI’s history of involvement with the Taliban and other Islamic extremist groups, Pakistan will not let its influence in the country wane easily. As previously mentioned, 2014 will present more opportunities for regional powers to play a substantial role in Afghanistan’s future. In terms of U.S. interests, India’s involvement in both foreign aid and security aspects will be of vital importance. As western attention begins to turn elsewhere, particularly to Africa and Asia, other countries will need to pick where the U.S. left off.

Tyler Hooper is a freelance writer and journalist from Ottawa, Ontario. He has a Master’s degree in history from the University of Waterloo, in which his studies primarily evolved around Western and South Asian diplomatic relations during the Cold War. Tyler writes on a variety of subjects including politics and technology, but his passion lies in U.S. foreign policy, particularly U.S. policy in Afghanistan and the Middle East. He has a blog and website at http://tyhooperw.wordpress.com/ where you can check out the rest of his work. You can also follow him on Twitter @thooper8.

This documentary is all over the place.

It is in part a history of modern Afghanistan and also a film about independent journalists – some of whom were killed – trying to report on the situation on the ground.

Afghanistan is called “The Graveyard of Empires” for good reason: Every country or empire that has tried to possess it gets mired down and loses its way.

What Shadow of Afghanistan does a good job of showing is how so many people have been uprooted and living in refugee camps, most on the border with Pakistan.

Another issue addressed is the landmines left behind by the retreating Soviets. The fact that they either never kept records of where they planted those mines or intentionally withheld such knowledge is barbaric.
Many Afghans – a good many children – have died or been maimed by the mines that lay scattered across the country.

Also, the makers of the film claim the CIA inadvertently supported the Taliban before 9/11 because it was funding the Pakistani ISI (the nation’s largest intelligence service) who supported the radical religious group.
What Shadow of Afghanistan does show in some detail is the number of people and parties vying for power, mostly in the 1990s. Also, the situation average Afghans face every day is explored.

This film could have been much longer or could have been divided into shorter pieces. It should be watched, however, as a primer of modern Afghanistan.

Shadow of Afghanistan is available to rent.

Murphy can be reached at: Lojano@comcast.net

India tends to receive most of the attention when it comes to mind-boggling demographic trends, though its western neighbor is no laggard either.  True, India is projected to overtake China as the world’s most populous country in about a decade or so.  But by some estimates, Pakistan eclipsed Brazil to move into the fifth position last year and could pass over Indonesia to take the fourth spot by 2030.  Yes, India will add the equivalent of Europe’s labor force over the next 15 years and end up supplying a full quarter of the global workforce.  But Pakistan’s population nearly doubled over the past two decades and its working-age population is growing at a faster clip than the overall population.  Pakistan also is a younger country, with a median age of 22 versus 26 in India.  And according to Forbes magazine, Karachi is the world’s fastest-growing megacity, with its population expanding 80 percent in 2000-2010.  Such dramatic growth helps to explain the city’s steady slide into chaos (see here and here).

In theory, the youth bulges in India and Pakistan are good things, since a growing proportion of workers to non-workers in a society – what is often termed the “demographic dividend” – helps propel capital accumulation and economic growth.  Youth bulges played an important role in powering the East Asian economic miracle from 1965-1990.   But it is unclear whether this pattern will be replicated in South Asia, since India and Pakistan have difficulty in generating productive employment for new entrants to their labor forces.*

Indeed, the “Global Trends 2030″ report issued by the U.S. National Intelligence Council late last year, warns that Pakistan’s burgeoning young population, combined with a slow-growing economy, “portends increased instability.”  James Clapper, the U.S. director of national intelligence, underscored this point in Congressional testimony earlier this month when he stated that Pakistan “faces no real prospects for sustainable economic growth.”  A new assessment by the Asian Development Bank likewise warns that the country’s growth prospects are dim and will remain far below what is required to absorb new workforce entrants.

Some are touting Pakistan’s young generation, which is the largest in the country’s history, as the decisive factor in shaping its political evolution.  As one analyst puts it:

[Y]oung people have become a formidable political force, likely determining who wins the 2013 election….  Pakistan’s young people are increasingly patriotic, socially conscious, and globally oriented, and the person or political party that can play to these qualities and win over this coveted bloc will shape politics in the region for years to come.

Similarly, a new British Council report argues that there is

a transformational opportunity for any party that succeeds in motivating young voters to go to the polls. A ten percentage point increase in youth turnout would translate into an additional 2.5 million votes on election day. It could also be enough to swing the vote of large numbers of marginal constituencies.

According to the Election Commission of Pakistan, 20 percent of the country’s 84 million registered voters are under the age of 26 and almost half are between 18 and 35.  One-sixth of these registered voters are new to the rolls.  And much of the rising popularity enjoyed in the last year or so by Imran Khan, a cricket hero who until recently was a politician of little note, is due to support by urban youths.  Still, it is not certain whether the potentially sizeable youth vote will actually materialize or, if it does, which political parties would benefit.

This is all the more so since the British Council study disconcertedly finds that Pakistan’s young people are overwhelmingly pessimistic about their country’s future and have very low regard for democratic institutions but a high opinion of the military establishment and religious organizations.  Indeed, their support for military rule or sharia law is higher than for democratic governance.

Even more worrisome is a new report about how the jihadi movement draws its strength from Pakistan’s mainstream society.  Of the tens of thousands of young men recruited into militant groups, the report finds, most are products of working- and middle-class families as well as the public education system.  This contradicts the conventional wisdom that terrorist recruits come largely from impoverished communities or the madrasas system of religious education.

Pakistan’s political future turns in significant measure on whether its massive number of young people becomes a force for moderation or radicalism.  The next few weeks will offer clues as to which way they will turn.

*I have written elsewhere in greater detail about the deep challenges India faces in converting its demographic potential into economic reality.  A new overview of the country’s young population can be found here.

This commentary is cross-posted at Chanakya’s Notebook.  I invite you to connect with me via Facebook and Twitter.

In this March 24, 2013 photo, distributed by RIA Novosti Agency on Wednesday, April 10, 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin poses for the camera as he plays with his dogs Yume, an Akito-Inu, front, and Buffy, a Bulgarian Shepherd in an undisclosed location of Moscow region.(AP Photo/RIA Novosti, Alexei Druzhinin, Presidential Press Service)

The Modern King in the Arab Spring
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The Atlantic

Can King Abdullah II of Jordan, the areas most pro-American Arab leader, save his desperately broke country through liberalization, modernization and regime change?

How a Single Spy Helped Turn Pakistan Against the United States
By Mark Mazzetti
The New York Times Sunday Magazine

Raymond Davis, a contractor hired by the CIA, sent off a flurry of bullets on Jan. 27, 2011 in response to an attack by two men on motorbikes in Lahore, Pakistan, only months before bin Laden’s death. Despite overwhelming news of the raid on Abbottabad and killing of Osama bin Laden, Davis’ shootout is consistently referenced by Pakistani officials as being the event that lead to the real unraveling of the U.S.-Pakistani relationship. But why?

Social Diplomacy
By Alexis Wichowski
Foreign Affairs

Even with the firestorms caused by various diplomat’s tweets throughout the years — most recently in Cairo — the diplomatic community is inching more and more towards strategically using social media. And despite some faux paus, it’s really proving to be worth it.

The Importance of Being Prickly
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
The New Republic

Famously considerate to secretaries and cleaners at Downing Street but brutal to her Cabinate ministers, Thatcher was far from a “likable” politician. Perhaps, Wheatcroft argues, this was her greatest strength: Her tendency to move away from the “popularity contest” aspect of politics and instead seeking respect.  Prickly, yes, but with purpose.

The Cuba Lobby
By William M. Leogrande
Foreign Policy

The most powerful lobby in American politics isn’t the NRA — it’s the Cuba Lobby. Although the U.S.’ Cuba policy is stuck in the cold war, America has, for the most part, stuck to her guns. Leogrande analyzes the historical role of the Cuba Lobby and it’s place today while pushing for what U.S.-Latin America relations needs: a reconciliation with Havana.

Blogs

Obama Visit to Israel Key Link in Redesign of U.S. Foreign Policy by Sarwar Kashmeri
NO: The Rest of the Story by Scott Monje
Brave New Bailout by Gus Constantinou
A Candid Discussion with Hooman Majd by Reza Akhlaghi
Iran’s Presidential Election: An Equation with too Many Variables by Azadeh Pourzand

SAUL LOEB/GETTY IMAGES

By Sarwar Kashmeri

It would be a mistake to view President Obama’s visit to Israel as just a fence-mending exercise. It is in fact part of a planned redesign of U.S. foreign policy that will change the face of American leadership around the world.

The redesign began with the appointment of John Kerry as Secretary of State and Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense. Both complement Vice President Joe Biden, and the president’s new chief of staff, Dennis McDonough. All of them, I believe, share a keen understanding of what it means to live in a world of seven billion interconnected people, in an age where the basic equation of geopolitics, that superpower equals ultimately getting one’s way, no longer holds.

The next stage of the redesign is now being rolled out with strategies to deal with today’s five key foreign policy issues: Syria, Iran, North Korea, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and the end game of the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan. Each is a ticking time bomb loaded with unforeseen consequences for U.S. national interests around the world, for America’s fragile economic recovery, and for a military still recovering after a decade of non-stop wars.

None of these issues lends itself to an America-only resolution. All five require the support and active cooperation of Russia, China, Israel and Turkey. That is why the president has moved aggressively in the last two weeks to remove impediments to better relations with each of these countries.

Russia is Syria’s benefactor and also the key to unlocking an alternative route for the removal of U.S. military assets from Afghanistan. Although the Pakistani port of Karachi is the shortest route out of Afghanistan the United States cannot afford to predicate its military exit solely on the on-again, off-again goodwill of Pakistan.

American-Russian relations have suffered because of the U.S. plans to deploy an anti-missile system on the borders of Russia. To be set up in four phases through 2020, this battery of anti-missile weapons is being rolled out to protect Europeans from Iranian missiles. But the Russians have never seen it that way. They see it as an American attempt to weaken the deterrent effect of Russia’s long range nuclear arsenal. Although the Russians object to the entire anti-missile project it is the project’s fourth phase, in which sophisticated interceptors would be deployed in Poland and perhaps Romania, that is of particular concern to them.

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced last week that this phase will now be abandoned. There were technical and funding reasons that also contributed to the decision, but a major irritant to American-Russian relations is now off the table.

Relations with China, already tense, plummeted with the announcement two years ago of America’s “pivot to the East.” The Chinese interpret this phrase as a signal that the United States views China as a potential military competitor. The United States has tried to explain that the pivot is not really a pivot citing America’s century old presence in the Pacific and Asia. But to no avail.

To bridge this credibility gap with China the Obama Administration cited cuts to the Defense Department’s budget in announcing a study to review the “pivot” of U.S. forces to Asia. This buys time to try and fine tune the “pivot” to allay Chinese concerns

Finally, In spite of his very strong support for Israel, the president has been perceived as being wobbly in recognizing the uniqueness of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. These perceptions have now been put to rest by the president’s visit to Israel during which he delivered unequivocal statements like this one reported by CNN,

“You are not alone,” Obama said in both English and Hebrew, prompting a standing ovation when he declared that “those who adhere to the ideology of rejecting Israel’s right to exist might as well reject the earth beneath them and the sky above, because Israel is not going anywhere.”

President Obama’s visit has already borne fruit. Before Obama left the country Israel had apologized to Turkey for the 2010 killing by the Israeli military of Turkish citizens on the flotilla headed to Gaza to break the Israeli-imposed blockade. Within hours, the apology led to the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Turkey, two of America’s closest Middle-Eastern allies are again its partners in dealing with Syria and Iran.

I predict that a thaw in the Palestinian-Israeli relationship will be the next result from the Obama visit to Israel. Is this wishful thinking? Perhaps it is. But if I am correct in believing that both Israelis and Palestinians are finally convinced that nothing can shake the bond between the United States and Israel, reality will drive both sides to a bargain. To increase the odds of this thaw Vice President Biden, who accompanied the president to Israel, has stayed on to strengthen the initiatives launched by his boss.

If this be the first act of the McDonough-Biden-Kerry-Hagel foreign policy team’s debut, all I can say is bravo! Pedal to the metal gentleman, and God speed!

Sarwar Kashmeri is a fellow of the Foreign Policy Association. He is adjunct professor of Norwich College, and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center for International Relations. His most recent book was NATO 2.0: Reboot or Delete? You can find the original article at the Huffington Post, which was reposted with the author’s permission.

Up until recently, the debate over drone policy has largely been the territory of a small group of vocal critics — a persistent if not particularly high-profile media issue, but not one that particularly troubled the U.S. public. Polls indicated broad popular support for the use of drone strikes abroad, mainly out of a belief that they were the best way to prevent terrorism without endangering American lives. In February 2012, a Washington Post-ABC News opinion poll found that 83 percent of Americans supported President Obama’s use of unmanned drone aircraft against terrorist suspects overseas. Of those 83 percent, 79 percent also approved the use of drone strikes against American citizens living in other countries who were suspected of terrorism. The responses were more ambivalent when the idea of civilian casualties was introduced, but the Obama administration has been quite adept at insisting that these are exceptionally rare, despite evidence to the contrary.

That was before the question of drone use within the borders of the United States began to sneak into the equation, buoyed in part by suggestions — both genuine and to make a point — that drones might be used in the manhunt for triple murder suspect (and retired marine) Christopher Dorner. This kicked off a firestorm of media coverage and largely took over the drone policy debate. Seeking answers to whether or not the Obama Administration thought it was entitled to launch drone strike within the United States, Rand Paul (R-KY) filibustered for 12 hours at the 6 March Senate confirmation hearing of Obama’s CIA Director nominee, John Brennan, a leading architect of drone policy in the Obama White House.

The formerly niche issue has taken center stage, with pundits and politicians questioning whether drone strikes should be used in the United States under certain circumstances, and indeed whether or not that would be legal. Obama administration officials have fueled the fire by answering questions opaquely and refusing to categorically rule out their right to exercise the option. Even Attorney General Eric Holder’s latest clarification leaves the door open under some circumstances.

The Administration’s refusal to take this option off the table is very worrying, but for now at least, the prospect of the U.S. deteriorating into a dystopian hellscape where justice is meted out through extrajudicial drone strikes on American soil is a less immediate concern than the continued immoral and counterproductive use of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

Although the U.S. may be getting better at minimizing “collateral damage,” as long as strikes continue, civilian casualties will be all but inevitable. Any civilian casualties should be considered morally unacceptable, but the continued use of the drone program is also unwise from a more pragmatic perspective. There are many indirect consequences of the drone campaign. As documented in the recent Stanford/NYU study, Living Under Drones, the specter of drone strikes inflicts great emotional trauma on the targeted areas, causing widespread fear, and undermining community institutions. That’s to say nothing of the damage drone strikes do to America’s reputation abroad, where they are universally unpopular, disliked particularly in the Muslim world, and reviled in places like Pakistan which bear the brunt of their impact. It is impossible to determine exactly how much this antipathy translates into the radicalization of new extremists, but the issue should be taken seriously. It certainly deserves a more robust examination than the blanket dismissal typically provided by White House spokespeople.

Perhaps the emergence of the domestic question is a positive development for the wider drone debate. Foreign drone strikes have been more visible in the news, either tangentially or more directly as a corollary to the issue of activity on U.S. soil. But there is a danger that they will become a fringe issue as the debate continues to turn toward the question of whether or not drones should be used to strike foreign or domestic terror suspects within U.S. borders, or indeed whether or not unmanned aerial vehicles can play a more benign role in American skies. (The appearance of articles defending drones for things like counting sealions (disclaimer: I am totally fine with this, count away!) clearly signals a new phase of the debate.) Theoretical questions about drone use have always been a distraction from the key question of how they are actually used in practice, but now drone usage abroad — already a rare subject of bipartisan agreement inside the beltway — is at risk of becoming a marginal aspect of the debate.

Photo Credit: Al Jazeera English

My last post focused on the domestic implications in Pakistan of the latest revelations about the 1999 Kargil mini-war.  Since the crisis is a key point of contention – a sort of Rorschach test, really – in the debate over whether the proliferation of nuclear weapons in South Asia has stabilized or aggravated the India-Pakistan rivalry, it’s also worth taking another look at two important points regarding Kargil’s nuclear dimensions:

• Did Pakistan’s nuclear tests in May 1998 embolden the Kargil planners, especially Pervez Musharraf, the newly-appointed chief of army staff, to undertaken the ill-advised operation just a few months later?
• Did the perceived success of Pakistan’s small nuclear arsenal in deterring fulsome Indian retaliation during the crisis give Musharraf the security confidence to embark upon an intensive back-channel peace process in 2004-07 that reportedly was on the verge of defusing the perennially-inflamed dispute over Kashmir?

Although the fighting remained confined to a relatively small front in northern Kashmir, the Kargil crisis represents the most serious instance of actual military conflict between nuclear-armed belligerents in history.  Many experts call it the fourth Indo-Pakistani war and its seriousness has been likened to that of the Cuban missile crisis.  Proliferation pessimists regard Pakistan’s role in sparking the confrontation as exemplifying the crisis-stability fragilities emanating from the spread of nuclear weapons and worry that war was only averted by factors outside the nuclear realm.  Optimists, on the other hand, view the absence of general hostilities, as well as the evident signs of Indian restraint, as compelling evidence that the caution-inducing properties of nuclear deterrence simply overwhelm the surfeit of powerful and interlocking factors that have generated military conflict between the two countries in the past.

As noted in the previous post, the new disclosures (here and here) about the crisis largely corroborate the points advanced in a 2009 book, Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict, that is the most authoritative study of the crisis to emerge to date.  One of the book’s major findings is that there was little causal connection between Islamabad’s attainment of an overt nuclear posture in mid-1998 and its actions at Kargil in the opening weeks of 1999.  As one of the volume’s authors put it:

The post-1998 nuclear reality did not make Pakistan change its strategy.  The reality is quite the opposite: the architects of the Kargil land grab utterly failed to think through the implications of nuclear weapons on the behavior of both their adversary and the international community, the latter of which fundamentally changed its posture toward South Asia after the 1998 nuclear tests.

This judgment is at sharp odds with the Indian consensus that nuclear weapons facilitated Pakistan’s aggressive behavior at Kargil.  New Delhi’s official inquiry into the conflict, for example, deduced that Pakistan’s use of proxy jihadi forces in Kashmir in the 1990s and its Kargil venture were rooted in a belief that its nuclear arsenal negated India’s advantage in the conventional balance of power.  The inquiry concluded:

Otherwise, it is inconceivable that [Pakistan] could sustain its proxy war against India, inflicting thousands of casualties, without being unduly concerned about India’s ‘conventional superiority.’

General V.P. Malik, India’s army chief during the crisis, likewise avers that nuclear weapons:

played an important role in shaping Pakistan’s military strategy for the Kargil episode….The Pakistani military believed then, as it still does, that it could safely conduct a low-intensity conflict or a limited war in Jammu and Kashmir and that its nuclear capability would prevent a conventional Indian attack.

It is striking that the new revelations, which are quite critical of Musharraf’s thinking in provoking the crisis, are altogether silent about this issue.  This absence leads one to conclude that the book’s judgment is substantially correct: Pakistan’s nascent nuclear force had no bearing on the Kargil decision-making.

But the avoidance of all-out war in the crisis prompts a second, more speculative, question: After Kargil, did Musharraf absorb what is an article of faith in the optimist canon: That even a modest nuclear force generates outsized deterrence benefits, thus ensuring to an unprecedented degree Pakistan’s external security vis-à-vis Indian military superiority.  Further, did this confidence embolden him to jump into the 2004-07 détente process?

An affirmative answer to these questions would help explain what otherwise appears perplexing: How did Musharraf evolve in a period of a few years from instigating the Kargil crisis to being the prime mover behind the diplomatic negotiations?  The evidence on this issue is quite sparse.  Optimists can point to the historical parallel of Lavrentiy Beria during the brief interregnum between Josef Stalin’s death in early 1953 and when Nikita Khrushchev emerged as the undisputed Kremlin leader more than a year later.  As the brutal chief of the secret police, Beria supervised the Soviet atomic bomb project, which came to fruition in 1949.  In the weeks following Stalin’s passing, he urged his Politburo colleagues to pursue a more conciliatory line vis-à-vis the United States.  Some historians believe he did so because his intimate knowledge of the nuclear weapons program led him to understand that it, despite its then quite limited size, had decisively shored up Moscow’s security position in the Cold War.

One could plausibly – but far from definitively, given the sharp limits of the empirical record – apply the Beria analogy to Musharraf.  But the real problem with this thesis is that the post-Musharraf leadership of the Pakistani army, judging from the on-going buildup of tactical nuclear forces, seems to put little faith in the optimists’ belief that the revolutionary character of nuclear weapons renders territorial conquest much more difficult.  While the military establishment has been supportive of the détente process with New Delhi (here and here) over the last two years, it is driven by concerns about rising internal security threats and the precarious condition of the domestic economy.   A more fundamental rethinking of Pakistan’s strategic calculus has yet to occur.

More rigorous inquiry into Kargil’s nuclear aspects is surely necessary before more conclusive judgments can be rendered.  But it could well be that proliferation pessimists and optimists have both gotten some things wrong.  After all, if the nuclear factor had no effect on Kargil decision-making, perhaps it is only natural that its impact is likewise absent on Islamabad’s broader security calculations.

This commentary was originally posted on Chanakya’s Notebook.  I invite you to connect with me via Facebook and Twitter.

A Malian soldier fires an AK-47 during fighting with Islamists in Gao, Mali, February 21, 2013.
[REUTERS/Joe Penney]

Be sure to check out some new reviews of “Great Decisions in Foreign Policy” on PBS by Foreign Policy Blog’s Gail Harris, Scott Bleiweis and Jason Anderson.

A Ground-Level View of the U.S.’s Drone Campaign
By Christopher Swift
The Atlantic

From the ground in Yemen, the complexities of the country’s fractured politics make Washington’s drone debate seems shallow. Perhaps, too, it’s Washington’s practice of “targeted killings” that’s keeping Yemen in a unstable state, undermining its efforts to stabilize the country’s political and economic environment.

L’Étranger
By Lauren Collins
New Yorker

Gérard Depardieu, the French actor gone Russian, handed back his French passport in December of 2012 and nested in Russia after being granted citizenship by Putin’s executive order. Collins tells the story of how he ended up there in the first place after the drama of France’s “supertax.”

Capitalism and Inequality
By Jerry Z. Muller
Foreign Affairs

Arguing that both the left and the right are wrong about the origins — and how to deal with — inequality, Muller postulates that “inequality is an inevitable product of capitalist activity,” not a matter of politics. Each end of the spectrum, furthermore, minimizes the concerns of the other when in fact, as Muller claims, both are wrong.

To Fight India, We Fought Ourselves
By Mohsin Hamid
The New York Times

Pakistan’s problem is it celebrates the militants, elevating them to a heroic status. Yet to squash the rise of militancy in the country, Pakistan must normalize relations with India, avoiding confrontations where the militant is viewed as an “equalizer.”

Hillary Clinton, State Feminist?
Tara McKelvey
The Nation

Hillary Clinton came into the State Department vowing to make women’s rights a core part of U.S. foreign policy. So what does her record look like?

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Censoring Speech in Haiti’s Most Celebrated Agora (part one) – Haiti by Chris Celius
Cybersecurity: Top Challenges and Six Big Policy Action Ideas by Franz-Stefan Gady
North Korean Nuclear Test: What Is the Nature of the Threat? by William Sweet
Thoughts on Zero Dark Thirty by Michael Crowley

The Kargil crisis, named for a small town in the mountainous reaches of northern Kashmir around which the fighting took place, is the most serious military conflict between nuclear-armed belligerents in history.  Occurring less than a year after India and Pakistan conducted dueling tests of their nuclear weapons arsenals, it had far-reaching reverberations:

• Erupting just a few months after a landmark summit meeting in Lahore between the Indian and Pakistani prime ministers, the crisis abruptly derailed hopes that a fundamentally new era in bilateral relations was at hand.  It would take five years and another military crisis – this one occasioned by a brazen jihadi assault upon the Indian parliament in December 2001 – before the two countries returned to an intensive peace diplomacy.
• The military debacle suffered by Pakistan altered the country’s domestic politics by precipitating a chain of events leading to the ouster of the civilian government and the installation of a military regime that remained in place until 2008.
• The crisis also cemented the widespread impression that the 450 mile-long ceasefire line – known as the Line of Control – separating the two armies in Kashmir was, as President Bill Clinton famously dubbed it, the “most dangerous place in the world.”  This view underpinned the Clinton administration’s nonproliferation policy in the region as well as the Obama administration’s early efforts to mediate the Kashmir dispute.  It also still colors the perceptions of many experts that South Asia is a nuclear tinderbox – a topic I’ll turn to in my next post.

The crisis began in early 1999 when a sizeable Pakistani force (numbering at least 1,500 – 2,000 and perhaps more) of lightly-armed mountain infantry troops infiltrated across the LoC and seized large swaths of rugged territory that had been vacated by Indian forces during the winter.  By the time the intruders were discovered in May, they had occupied over 300 square miles of Indian territory and were in a position to interdict a strategic highway linking the disputed Siachen Glacier area to the rest of Kashmir.  In response, New Delhi launched a fierce and sustained counterattack.  The ensuing two-month battle featured intense ground fighting, heavy artillery barrages and the first combat sorties undertaken by the Indian air force since the 1971 war over Bangladesh.   India also placed its entire military establishment on high alert and deployed mechanized forces to the international border with Pakistan.

Although New Delhi took pains to keep its combat response confided to the immediate front – including restricting military operations to its side of the LoC – there were widespread fears that broader hostilities would break out and even escalate to the nuclear level.  The crisis was finally defused by a combination of Indian battlefield successes and U.S. diplomatic intervention, including a dramatic White House visit by Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in early July that arranged for the withdrawal of Pakistani forces.  Although exact combat losses are not known, India suffered nearly 500 battle deaths, with Pakistani losses estimated at 400-700 fatalities.

Just what Pakistan hoped to accomplish by the incursion is still a matter of debate, one that has been rekindled by revelations made by Shahid Aziz over the past several weeks.* Now retired from the Pakistani army, General Aziz was the head of the analysis branch of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency during the crisis.  He would later go on to serve as director-general of military operations and chief of the general staff – both prestigious positions in the army.

His disclosures (here and here) largely corroborate details about Pakistani actions that were presented in a 2009 book, Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict, that is the most authoritative study of the crisis to emerge to date.  Here is an overview of some of the book’s key findings, which drew on in-depth interviews with the operation’s planners, along with notes about where Aziz agrees or differs:

• An extremely small coterie of military leaders planned the Kargil maneuver in great secrecy and little thought was given to broader coordination within the Pakistani army or the wider government – a situation that accounted for the utter disarray in Islamabad’s response once the crisis was joined.**  At the center of the group was Pervez Musharraf, the recently-appointed chief of army staff who had earlier served in a commando unit along the LoC. 

Aziz confirms this point, noting that few within the military establishment were consulted about the operation.  He opines that Musharraf and his associates likely acted in stealth because the incursion was an “unsound military plan based on invalid assumptions, launched with little preparations and in total disregard to the regional and international environment.”

• The Kargil coterie was focused on the pattern of localized firefights and aggressive probing that had taken hold along the northern segments of the LoC in the wake of India’s occupation of the Siachen Glacier in 1984 and thus had rather limited objectives in mind – the severing of Indian forces deployed on the glacier from their supply lines.  Viewing the operation as part of the normal jockeying for military advantage each side had engaged in for years, they assumed that the reaction from New Delhi and the international community would not be vigorous.  And due to the limited objectives, no provision was made for troop reinforcement and logistical supply of the captured posts. 

Aziz likewise corroborates these points, and excoriates Musharraf for sending men into battle without doing detailed planning and then abandoning them once the battle began.

• Pakistani commanders also wanted to shore up their own tactical positions with a preemptive maneuver since they came to believe (erroneously as it turned out) that India was preparing for its own military action along the LoC in the summer of 1999.

Aziz contests this point, noting that “it certainly wasn’t a defensive manoeuvre. There were no indications of an Indian attack. We didn’t pre-empt anything; nothing was on the cards.”

• Despite Musharraf’s vocal insistence that he kept then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif entirely in the loop, Sharif’s exact role in the events leading up to the crisis remains unclear.  The evidence points to his knowing that the army was planning some type of operation along the LoC but it is uncertain whether he was told of its expansive scope and objectives.

Aziz seconds this proposition, stating that while Sharif knew something was up he “was not fully in the picture.”

This last point not only underscores Pakistan’s long history of dysfunctional civil-military relations but also has current political relevance, as Sharif and Musharraf are both readying presidential bids later this year.  Musharraf has reacted to Aziz’s revelations by calling him as “an unbalanced personality” engaged in “character assassination.”  This is an odd denunciation since Musharraf trusted Aziz enough to appoint him, after his military retirement, to serve as head of the National Accountability Bureau, an anti-corruption agency that Musharraf created following his coup against Sharif.

Musharraf has also reiterated his contention – which was advanced in his 2006 memoir – that the Kargil operation was a splendid tactical success that caught the Indians napping but which was then squandered when Sharif caved in to U.S. diplomatic pressure.  This theme was further echoed in a rather curious report last week in The News, the largest English language paper in Pakistan.  Recounting information it claims was supplied by a source closely involved in Kargil – but who it refuses to name other than saying that the “story has nothing to do with General (r) Pervez Musharraf directly” – the article contends that the operation only became a fiasco due to the “follies of the political bigwigs.”

The notion that feckless civilians snatched defeat from the jaws of victory is not only a distortion of the historical record but also has pernicious political implications.  The growing success of Indian counterattacks meant that military defeat was all but assured even before Sharif set off to Washington to try to find a face-saving escape from the crisis.  Indeed, Musharraf contributed mightily to what by then had devolved into a fiasco by failing to prepare for the possibility of an extended conflict and then by publicly insisting that the intruders were not Pakistani soldiers but jihadis over whom Islamabad had little control – a strategy that all but foreclosed coming to their rescue.

Even more important, Musharraf’s claim that all was lost at Kargil due to the fecklessness of the political class is reminiscent of the “Stab in the Back” myth that plagued democratic government in Germany following World War I.  A similar notion has decisively warped civil-military relations throughout Pakistan’s history, starting with claims that the 1947-48 Kashmir war was lost due to Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan’s pusillanimity.***

Aziz’s revelations are surely not the last word about the Kargil drama.  Much remains uncertain, including Sharif’s own actions.  But with the civilian government in Islamabad within weeks of completing its allotted term – a singular achievement given the military establishment’s bonapartist instincts – and with a new army chief set to be appointed later in the year, Musharraf’s deleterious claim of battlefield victory needs to be quickly knocked down.

*It should be noted that while Aziz has written a just-published memoir containing these allegations, I am relying here on the information presented in a newspaper piece he authored last month and his subsequent press interview.

**See here for an interesting account of how the Kargil planners kept the Pakistani air force out of the loop.

***Disgruntlement over the Kashmir war was the driving force behind a failed 1951 plot to overthrow Khan’s government.  The main conspirator was the chief of the general staff in the army.

This commentary was originally posted on Chanakya’s Notebook.  I invite you to connect with me via Facebook and Twitter.

The clashes are a stark reminder of how combustible the military rivalry in Kashmir remains and how even localized incidents there can have important ramifications for the broader relationship.*  Accusations that Pakistan decapitated one of the dead Indian soldiers and carried off his head as a trophy provoked fury in New Delhi.  The Indian army chief warned of “aggressive and offensive” reprisals in the event of further provocation and a senior leader in the Bharatiya Janata Party, the main opposition party, demanded that India “get at least 10 heads from their side” if the Pakistanis did not return the soldier’s head.  An influential Hindu nationalist group even called for nuclear retaliatory strikes – a contingency that was underscored when Indian officials inexplicably advised residents in Kashmir to prepare for a possible nuclear war.  And Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a dogged champion of better ties with Islamabad, was forced to announce that “there cannot be business as usual with Pakistan.”  One immediate consequence is New Delhi has put on hold a liberalized bilateral visa regime that had been hailed as an important milestone in relations.

Although the two countries managed to contain the fighting, The Hindu, an English-language Indian newspaper, has provided fascinating details about the long record of tit-for-tat competition along the LOC.  According to the newspaper, last month’s incidents can be traced back to September, when an elderly woman in the Indian part of Kashmir slipped across the LoC to join her sons and grandchildren residing on the Pakistani side.  Alarmed at the ease by which she was able to do this, the Indian army quickly began building concrete observation bunkers in the area.  Since military construction along the LOC is forbidden by the 2003 ceasefire accord, this elicited heated Pakistani protests, which the Indians dismissed on the grounds that the bunkers were defensive in nature and therefore not a threat to Pakistani forces.

The Pakistanis soon began to punctuate their demands with gunfire and mortar shelling directed at the Indian posts.  Matters came to a head in early last month when, following an exchange of fire, Indian troops crossed the LOC to raid the Pakistani position that was targeting them.  A Pakistani commando team thereafter retaliated with an assault on an Indian post located elsewhere along the LOC, at a point where frictions have likewise been simmering since last summer over the construction of new Indian outposts.  According to the newspaper, similar clashes occasioned by disputes over Indian border construction have occurred over the past few years.

The Hindu also reports that Pakistan has filed a long series of heretofore undisclosed protests about Indian cross-border raids with the United Nations group in charge of monitoring the LOC.  Included in the protests are allegations that Indian forces have engaged in the torture, mutilation and decapitation of Pakistani soldiers since at least 1998, as well as the massacre of civilians living on the Pakistani side of the LOC.  New Delhi rejects these charges.

The newspaper explains that the combustibility of the military rivalry is caused in part by informal nature of the ceasefire agreement, which bans the construction of border fortifications but provides no guidance about how to define them or address possible violations.  New Delhi and Islamabad have exchanged drafts for a more detailed written agreement and diplomats met last December to discuss the matter but failed to resolve their differing interpretations.  Although the two military establishments are in regular communication, disputes are rarely reported to diplomatic officials in both countries until tensions reach a boiling point.

Last year’s narrative in bilateral affairs was about cross-border bonhomie and a détente process driven by growing economic engagement.  The headline last month was about cross-LOC military raids and security competition arising from festering territorial disputes.  As noted in earlier posts (here and here), political turbulence in Pakistan in the coming months, along with the likelihood of renewed geopolitical jousting over Afghanistan, portend the return of long familiar themes of rivalry and security-seeking behavior in the year ahead.

Even though the rapprochement now appears to have stalled, leaders in New Delhi and Islamabad would do well to preserve existing gains as well as lay the groundwork for forward movement once a more propitious climate emerges.  They can do this by redoubling support for the constructive dialogue about important confidence-building measures that is taking place between retired senior military leaders from both countries.  And they might think about setting up a joint commission of business leaders and distinguished private citizens to develop recommendations about expanding trade and transportation links across the LOC.  This would accentuate the cooperative impulses on both sides as well as generate bold ideas and valuable political cover that could never be delivered by risk-averse bureaucrats.  A recent series of useful reports (here, here and here) from groups in both countries offer a point of departure for this effort.

* The 1999 Kargil mini-war in the mountainous reaches of northern Kashmir epitomizes how military tussles along the LOC can escalate into a wider confrontation and subvert important diplomatic initiatives.  By coincidence, new revelations about the conflict emerged in Pakistan just as the last month’s fighting broke out.  I’ll turn to this topic in my next post.

This commentary was originally posted on Chanakya’s Notebook.  I invite you to connect with me via Facebook and Twitter.

Chastain plays CIA officer Maya who is obsessed with finding a courier used by bin Laden to track him down. While some see her quest as a wild goose chase, she stands her ground and is a constant thorn in the side of those in charge.
There has been some controversy about how torture is portrayed in the film. It appears the movie’s makers fall on the side that torture is an unfortunate but necessary part of protecting people from terrorists.
While not saying any names, the film shows how the United States administration’s view on torture changed after the notorious events at Abu Ghraib. According to U.S. filmmaker Michael Moore, the CIA had to rely on detective work once torture was no longer an option.

Moore claims the film will turn people off of torture but that’s not the case. The movie merely reinforces the belief an audience member has about torture going in.
There are some big surprises that have the audience jumping at times.
All in all this is a good movie.
Murphy can be reached at: Lojano@comcast.net

Pakistan, the most important country on everyone’s roster of failed states in the making, is once again in the throes of political chaos.  The Supreme Court, led by maverick Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, has just ordered the arrest of Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf on corruption charges arising from Ashraf’s earlier stint as the federal minister in charge of power production.  Two years ago, the judiciary ousted him from the post when it found that a program he oversaw to spur private generation of electricity was riddled with graft.  The latest action is sure to aggravate what was already shaping up to be a chaotic round of parliamentary elections that are scheduled to take place in the next few months.

Frictions between the civilian government and the assertive judiciary have become a running theme in Islamabad.  Last summer, the Supreme Court dismissed Ashraf’s precedessor, Yusuf Raza Gilani, for defying its order to reactivate a dormant money-laundering case brought against President Asif Ali Zardari by the Swiss government.  Zardari quickly settled on Makhdoom Shahabuddin as a replacement, only to have a lower court issue an arrest warrant for the man in connection with his alleged involvement in a drug importation scandal during his time as health minister.

Chaudhry justifies these actions as necessary demonstrations of the rule of law in a country where governmental malfeasance is endemic.  And it’s worth noting an activist Supreme Court that sees itself as a guardian of the public integrity has likewise emerged in neighboring India.  Moreover, ructions can be expected in Pakistan’s halting democratic transformation as various civilian institutions sort out their respective roles following a decade of military rule.

Still Chaudhry’s zeal appears to be motivated less by high-minded constitutional principles than the settling of personal scores.  The chief justice, a hero of the popular movement that forced Pervez Musharraf into exile, is reportedly indignant that Zardari refused, until forced to bow to public pressure, to reinstate him to the bench after Musharraf sacked him at the start of the state of emergency that was declared in November 2007.  Once returned to the court, Chaudhry promptly struck back by invalidating a general amnesty that Musharraf had forged with Benazir Bhutto and Zardari, thereby opening Zardari to criminal prosecution once he leaves the presidency.  Chaudhry is slated for mandatory retirement at the end of the year but one wonders, given the evident hard feelings, whether he’s in any mood to go quietly.

Compounding the sense of instability is the emergence of several new political movements that many suspect are secretly backed by the powerful military establishment, which barely bothers to conceal its contempt for Zardari’s administration.  These include the protest movement led by Muhammad Tahir ul-Qadir, an enigmatic populist Muslim cleric (background here and here) who just arrived back in the country last month after residing in Canada for six years.  Mr. Qadir, who voices support for both the military and the judiciary, has launched a mysteriously well-funded media campaign critical of Zardari and others in the political class, and tens of thousands of his supporters have now encamped in Islamabad demanding the president’s resignation and the parliament’s dissolution.

Mr. Qadir’s sudden arrival on the scene parallels the ascendance of two other anti-Zardari movements.  Difa-e-Pakistan (“Defense of Pakistan Council”), a coalition of some 40 militant outfits that is a font of anti-American and anti-India sentiment, emerged last year just as the long-insignificant opposition party led by Imran Khan, gathered noticeable steam.  Khan, the charismatic cricket hero turned political leader, has made much hay blaming America as the source of the country’s woes.

Growing levels of societal conflict has reinforced the sense of political crisis.  Pakistan suffered its worst sectarian violence a few days ago when horrific bomb attacks in Quetta, capital of the restive province of Baluchistan, killed some 90 people.  This is just the latest turn in an ever-spiraling cycle of Sunni-Shia conflict that threatens to rend a country founded as a place of refuge for South Asia’s Muslims.  Making things even worse is the accelerating political strife in two of Pakistan’s major cities – Karachi and Peshawar.

The all-around turmoil is diverting high-level political attention from the tenuous détente with India just as the bilateral relationship has hit its worst crisis since the Mumbai terror strikes in November 2008.  Less than a year ago, the New York Times praised Zardari and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh “for their sensible, workmanlike effort over the past year to improve relations between the two nuclear rivals.”  Now, with small-unit skirmishes breaking out along the de-facto frontier in the disputed Kashmir region over the past week, the Indian army chief is promising “aggressive and offensive” retaliation while Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid questions Islamabad’s “seriousness in pursuing normalization of relations.”  Even Mr. Singh, an ardent champion of better ties with Islamabad, has concluded that “there cannot be business as usual with Pakistan.”  One immediate repercussion is that New Delhi has put the kibosh on implementing a liberalized bilateral visa regime that was hailed as an important milestone in relations.

The political tumult in Pakistan also places at risk other propitious developments, such as Islamabad’s tentative moves to play a more constructive role in Afghanistan as NATO forces accelerate their exit, as well as efforts to find a new equilibrium in relations between Washington and Islamabad.  Above all, it jeopardizes the gathering democratization process inside Pakistan that promises to move the country gradually in the liberal and moderate direction its founders envisioned.

Buckle up – Pakistan has embarked upon what will be a year-long wild ride.

This commentary was originally posted on Chanakya’s Notebook.  I invite you to connect with me via Facebook and Twitter.

This would seem to be good news for those worried that the Pakistani military establishment’s fixation on the Indian threat has left it blind to the precarious conditions inside the country.  These domestic challenges include spiraling levels of violence in two of its major cities – Karachi and Peshawar, growing Sunni-Shia conflict, and a chronic electrical power crisis that some experts suggest is more of a threat to stability than is terrorism.

Still, a healthy skepticism about Pakistani pronouncements is always in order.  After all, even U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last summer seemed to be taken in by Kayani’s promises that a long-awaited offensive into North Waziristan was just around the corner.  This occurred despite the incredulity of other U.S. officials – the New York Times even quoted one as quipping that “This is the most delayed campaign in the history of modern warfare.”

So here are two litmus tests for assaying the value of the announced doctrinal change, both of which entail fundamental departures in entrenched security calculations vis-à-vis India.

The first test is whether the revision leads to Pakistan ending its strategy of supporting Taliban insurgents as a means of exerting influence in Afghanistan and instead playing a constructive role as NATO forces prepare to exit the country after 2014.  For two decades, Islamabad has backed the Taliban out of fears of Indian strategic encirclement.  Recent reports, however, suggest that the Pakistani military establishment has had an epiphany and now believes that prolonging the Afghan conflict would only blow back over the porous border, giving further energy to the domestic militants now waging war against the Pakistani state and perhaps even inflaming Pashtun separatism.   Evidence for this change of heart includes stepped up efforts to bring about reconciliation between the Taliban and the government in Kabul, including releasing a number of jailed Taliban leaders as a goodwill gesture, as well as a campaign to reach out to non-Pashtun leaders in Afghanistan who are suspicious of Pakistan’s intentions.

Ahmed Rashid, a keen observer of the AfPak scene, attributes this major shift to the army’s realization that Pakistan is in increasingly desperate straits.  He notes that General Kayani “is now banking on the hope that reconciliation among the Afghans will have a knock-on positive effect on the Pakistani Taliban also – depriving them of legitimacy and recruits.” A Reuters report carries the same message, quoting a senior Pakistani military officer as saying:

There was a time when we used to think we were the masters of Afghanistan. Now we just want them to be masters of themselves so we can concentrate on our own problems.

It obviously bears close watching whether Islamabad follows through with these promises to be a better neighbor.  (For a doubtful view, see here.)  The outcome will have significant implications not only for Afghanistan but the larger region as well.

The second test is whether the doctrinal revisions bring about a more relaxed nuclear posture toward India.  Pakistan is rapidly expanded its nuclear stockpile, especially in tactical nuclear weapons.  Indeed, many worry (see here and here) that South Asia is on the verge of a destabilizing nuclear arms competition.  General Kayani justifies the need for battlefield nuclear options by pointing to the threat posed by the Indian army’s “Cold Start” doctrine – which emphasizes the threat of large-scale but calibrated punitive actions in order to deter Pakistani adventurism.

In an earlier post, I criticized the nuclear buildup as strategically unnecessary as well as a wasteful diversion of precious economic resources away from more pressing national priorities.  So far, there are no signs that the military establishment is reversing course, though civilian leaders are at least beginning to ask tougher questions about the direction of the nuclear program.  The coming year may also see a somewhat changed equilibrium in the country’s fraught civil-military dynamics, with the upcoming parliamentary elections establishing a new milestone in civilian governance coupled with Kayani’s scheduled retirement towards the end of 2013.  It’s also worth noting that the army’s new doctrine acknowledges the legitimacy of civilian input into national security decision-making.

And there might be an opportunity here for New Delhi to provide some strategic reassurance than can help nudge Pakistan’s security calculus onto a new path.  It could further encourage the informal but promising dialogue by retired senior military leaders from both countries that has produced good ideas about confidence-building measures.  It also can signal openness to convening an official dialogue about the posture and readiness levels of military units, including nuclear-capable missile forces, deployed along the common border.  Given their lack of strategic utility as well as the perils they pose for crisis stability, one idea might be for the two countries to agree on eliminating their shortest-range ballistic missiles.

2013 is shaping up to be a pivotal year for Pakistan and I’ll have more to say in a future post about things to watch for.  But one of the key items to monitor is whether the army’s doctrinal shift leads to substantive policy changes on Afghanistan and nuclear weapons.

This commentary was originally posted on Chanakya’s Notebook.  I invite you to connect with me via Facebook and Twitter.

Photo Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IRIN

With the opening of “Zero Dark Thirty” this week, many have condemned the depiction of torture in the film — and debates have resurfaced about the “enhanced interrogation” of suspected terrorists by the United States to find Osama bin Laden. What gets left out of these discussions is the role that a deplorable espionage tactic played in the manhunt and the wide-reaching effects that this tactic has had in global health.

I’m talking about the use of a fake vaccination program in Pakistan, run by the C.I.A., that drew blood samples from children in Abbottabad to check their DNA against relatives of bin Laden’s, a story I covered more than a year ago and again this July when the Taliban banned polio vaccinators from operating in Northern Pakistan. Now, nine health workers who were administering polio vaccines have been killed across Pakistan. These coordinated attacks have forced the WHO to suspend a major vaccination drive in the country.

Pakistan is one of three countries in which polio is still endemic (the other two are Afghanistan and Nigeria), although there were resurgences found in Angola, Chad, and the DRC this year. In one of the greatest public health near-victories of the past century, we’ve almost eradicated this devastating disease, reducing cases by 99 percent in 25 years. You rarely see numbers like that in global health efforts — smallpox is the only disease affecting humans that we’ve managed to eradicate. We’ve made these incredible gains through preventative measures:  by vaccinating 2 billion children in the past quarter-century.

When news about the fake vaccine program (which was for hepatitis B, not polio) surfaced, I wrote that it was an unacceptable ruse that undermined global health efforts and took away the ability to trust doctors. As I wrote in July, polio vaccinations are a particularly fraught issue in some parts of the Muslim world, where the drives are seen as a Western conspiracy to infect Muslim children with HIV or conduct espionage, which is why objections to polio programs grew instead of objections to hepatitis prevention. The New Yorker pointed out that in 2004, we nearly wiped out polio, but condemnations from mullahs in northern Nigeria about the programs meant that people refused vaccinations, contracted the disease, and traveled to Mecca for the hajj, where they spread polio to other pilgrims.

According to the AP, the Pakistani Taliban — the prime suspect in the attacks — have distanced themselves from the killings, and there is no confirmation of who organized the two-man motorcycle teams who shot and killed five female health workers on December 17 within the span of an hour, adding four more victims in the following days, some of whom were teenagers. It’s probable that the C.I.A. program is not directly responsible for these deaths, since there are a number of other cultural factors, such as suspicion of polio programs in general, as well as the liberation of women, that could have added motivation for the violence. At the same time, it added fuel to a very volatile fire. As Michael Specter wrote in the New Yorker last week, “There is a history here, and somebody in the American intelligence community should have known it.” Unfortunately, that ignorance, or willful disregard, has potentially contributed to the deaths of nine people and put the great progress we have made against polio in serious jeopardy.