Mumbai changes the playing field
As we wait to finally discover who actually organized this bloodbath in Mumbai, I would like to point out something obvious: the Indian economic "miracle" has been more than tempting fate to have created such a growing number of exuberant and ostentatious nouveau riche in a country where hundreds of millions of people are as scandalously poor... Islamist, Maoist or things as yet undreamed of are bound to grow in the gigantic, bubbling petri dish. globalization has created in India.
So if all we had to go on was potential rage and resentment themselves, we would be looking for a needle in a haystack. It would probably be more profitable to look at the wide effects of this attack as a way of narrowing down the list of possible culprits.
Although it does massive harm to India, I don't think this attack was really about India as much as it was designed to throw a monkey wrench in the American strategy of pressuring Pakistan.
The United States wants the Pakistanis to use their army to control the Pashtun areas of their country, the areas which harbor the taliban who attack NATO forces in Afghanistan.
If the Pakistani army does this it will mean a civil war, which might lead to the breakup of Pakistan: that is a result that only a drunken neocon could contemplate sanguinely.
Despite this danger to Pakistan's unity, president Bush has been pushing the Zardari government very hard and, if his statements during the campaign are to be taken seriously, president Barack Obama will press them even harder.
What this attack on Mumbai certainly does is to change the subject from America's problems in Afghanistan to the possibility of an armed confrontation between nuclear India and nuclear Pakistan. This prospect should focus Washington's mind wonderfully. Both incoming and outgoing presidents will have to everything they can to defuse tension between the countries.
I think by now it is clear that the objective of the attacks is too make it impossible for Pakistan, with India threatening, to collaborate with the USA on its northwest frontier. Certainly the Pakistani army will have no resources to spare for chasing the taliban when a conflict with Indian is in the offing. The pressure on Zardari now from the military will be much too great.
Today some are blaming Al Qaeda for the attacks in Bombay and others are pointing fingers at Pakistan's army intelligence, the notorius ISI. The relation between the ISI and Al Qaeda, or even where one leaves off and the other begins is not really clear. This "joined twin" effect is said to be blowback from the CIA and Saudi collaboration during the USSR's futile attempts to modernize Afghanistan.
It is my impression that what we call Al Qaeda today is more a general consensus and willingness to collaborate among a very wide number of Islamic activists all over the world than the finite hierarchy that it was in 2001.
Many if not all the diverse jihadist groups now see their local struggles in the context of a wide international one and this multiplies their effectiveness as this leads to a wide consensus on their priorities.
Priority number one is to degrade American influence in the Muslim world and they seem to be having some success. You could say that bin Laden began a "worldwide conversation about killing people and blowing things up" among millions of angry young men. This instrument for building and implementing consensus is his greatest achievement.
The attack in Mumbai has changed the playing field and its scale. From worrying about guerrillas crossing from Waziristan to attack Americans in Afghanistan, we can worry now about the serious possibility of an atomic war in South Asia.
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Certainly things are now more interesting. We will see if possession of nuclear weapons concentrates the minds of India and Pakistan as well as the US.
November 29, 2008 6:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
Don't blame the CIA for the blowback; it was the Reagan Admin's doing. They took a Brzezinski plan at the end of the Carter administration of providing available Eastern bloc arms to the Afghanistan Russian resistance movement, and turned it into an all you can shoulder weapons and training smorgasbord open to all comers, with specials for disaffected Egyptian radicals and the bastards conceived by the concubines of Saudi princes. This was a Reagan Admin policy forced onto the CIA by Reagan's appointed Director, William Casey.
Afghanistan has always been a distant armpit of empiric expansion, and has a rich history of repelling invaders. Only Alexander the Great was able to conquer and rule it with any real success. Even the Mongol horde failed. Their high-tech archer cavalry advantage got neutralized in the narrow mountain passes, and picked off one by one by from high altitude positions. Afghan resistance was never successful when it was well-organised. Afghanistan has been a fertile ground for warlords and banditry, for allegiances that shift faster than a sirocco's sands. Even in the beginning of the Soviet resistance Afghanis still preferred to use hand-crafted Enfield rifles knock-offs from behind rocks at great distance and elevation advantage to direct confrontation. It was survivable, and it was the Arabs who brought with them the suicidal mystique. Afghanis had a derogatory term for the Arab freedom-fighters early in the Soviet/Afghan war. It meant "worth less than my goat", because they were often used for clearing mine fields, a task unfit for livestock.
In the eighties, the CIA wanted a hands-off relationship when dealing with the non-Afghan mujahadin. They desired a proxy, providing some shielding from the future blame they knew would be trickling-down from the Executive Branch once the policy become public record. Pakistan's dictator, Zia ul-Haq, was concerned about the potential governmental destabilizing effects from arming religious radicals, and wanted some control over it, so the CIA used the ISA as their proxy, which was at that time headed by Pervez Musharraf. I'm tired of The CIA taking the blame for what was done under Executive orders, and implemented top-down by appointed cronies.
Pakistan was created by fiat at the end of the British Empire, and the U.S.A. has never had an even-handed policy towards it. Pakistan policy has generally been perceived as a fulcrum for leveraging more pressing contemporary policy concerns.
In the 50's and early 60's, we used Pakistan as a foil against Soviet expansion into South Asia, arming it over the protests of democratically elected governments in India. This policy went south when Pakistan invaded India in 1965, using American provided arms for the aggression in violation of treaty. Nixon intervened for Pakistan as an offering to China, pressuring The USSR to tell its ally India to back-off, even though it had been Pakistan that invaded India without warning, and this has resulted in India utterly demolishing the East Pakistan military forces and taking it as a spoil of war. India would have conquered West Pakistan too, but stopped. Nixon achieved this with a patented use of his sadistic ball-busting, threatening the Brezhnev government with cutting-off western consumer goods to them. Nixon had opened up western consumer goods to USSR early in his presidency, and he knew that once they accepted Pepsi manufacturing plants and Burger Kings, the Iron Curtain was coming down. (See Conversation between Richard Nixon and John Connally in the Oval Office - 636-8; December 10, 1971)
Carter at first reversed this tilt when Zia ul-Haq became its dictator, but then forgot about its authoritarian rule just as the Soviet was preparing to invade Afghanistan. The Reagan and GHW Bush Administrations ignored Pakistan's Nuclear weapons development, because they felt this concern was trumped by their Afghanistan policy. (Matt Kelley-AP, "Pakistan threatened to give nukes to Iran, ex-officials say", USA Today, February 27, 2004)
Also see: Ted Galen Carpenter, "A Fortress Built on Quicksand: U.S. Policy Toward Pakistan", Policy Analysis no. 80, January 5, 1987
November 29, 2008 8:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
There's no risk of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan. These are local rivals with a history of confrontation, but that's all there is to it. India now accuses Pakistan because it caught a Pakistani among the terrorists, India should be accusing Britain with twice the energy since twice as many of the terrorists have been identified as coming from Britain. But India knows Britain isn't training terrorists to attack them and they think Pakistan does.
Pakistan does have a problem with how its peprceived, particularly by India. The relationship between Pakistani military intelligence and terrorist groups is unclear. In the past they've cooperated, some think they still do, despite US involvement and pursuit of terrorists. I doubt Pakistan is openly supporting and cooperating in US efforts against Islamic terrorists and at the same time maintaining secret ties through its intelligence apparatus to support those terrorists. This would have to be the case if India was right.
The attacks in Mumbai were perpetrated by terrorists who operated out of territory ostensibly under Pakistani control, but that's as far as it goes. Pakistan doesn't have the capacity to prevent terrorists from training in that territory because it is remote, inaccesible and deployments there are challenged not just by the terrorists, but by India itself.
November 30, 2008 5:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's a serious subject with serious replies. Let me interrupt with a nit picking correction.
is redundant. Lose general it's already included in the definition of consensus.November 30, 2008 6:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
Very interesting analysis. I totally agree that India's economic inequality was a crucible for violent fringe movements. I certainly agree about the coalescing of local terror groups around an international frame and set of priorities. But it had not occurred to me previously that there might be this strategy playing off US-Pakistan relations that you suggest. Food for further thought...
November 30, 2008 9:15 AM | Reply | Permalink