AfPak Strategy Solves Nothing

As US President Barack Obama, unveiled his new AfPak strategy in Washington last week, a suicide bomber struck a crowded mosque in northwest Pakistan, killing dozens of worshippers and underlining the challenges that the US faces in its endeavor to stabilize the regional security environment.

Describing the situation as "increasingly perilous," Obama announced plans to send an additional 4,000 troops, bringing the US deployment to more than 6,000, and to increase economic aid to Pakistan to US$1.5 billion a year for five years. Progress will be monitored with a series of benchmarks and metrics imposed on Pakistan, Afghanistan and US efforts. There will be no "blank cheques," and Afghanistan and Pakistan will be expected to demonstrate their commitment by ramping up their governance and rooting out extremists.

Obama underlined the reasons behind this risky and costly strategy by suggesting - much like his predecessor George W Bush - that al-Qaida continues to actively plan attacks on the US from its safe haven in Pakistan. Therefore, the US goal remains one of disrupting, dismantling and defeating al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan and preventing its return to either country in the future.

The US has clearly taken the lead now and marginalized NATO in its efforts to secure the two countries. It has also made an attempt to cast its net wider by incorporating regional states, most significantly Russia, China, Iran and India.

The situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating rapidly and the Taliban is strengthening its hold in Pakistan as the US-led intervention is increasingly resented by the local populace in both countries. A new approach is the need of the hour. Yet it is not clear if the new strategy will be effective in achieving the end-state that the Obama administration wants to achieve in the region, or if the US president will be willing to spend resources and political capital on a long, hard campaign.

Moreover, what can be seen so far from the US strategy makes success highly unlikely. It is more likely to provoke a much more fierce regional competition, leading to greater instability.

Two issues in particular will continue to hamper the new American approach. First, the idea that the Taliban can be divided into “good” and “bad” categories might look appealing to outsiders desperate to make an exit, but to the regional powers such as India, Iran and Russia, such an approach is an anathema. Elements of the Taliban who might be willing to strike a deal with the West just to see the western forces leave the region will haunt the security of regional states like India and Iran long after the western forces are gone, as they have done in the past.

The idea that the US could do business with the Taliban after all is not new. This was what led the Clinton administration to turn a blind eye to the Taliban’s rise to power in Kabul and its medieval practices, all in the name of good old-fashioned realism.

The rejuvenation of the Taliban bolsters Pakistan’s role as a frontline state in the war on terror, securing often lucrative assistance from the US. The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Pakistani military elite also see Pakistan engaged in a proxy war for influence in Afghanistan. The Taliban may be a concern to Kabul and Washington, but Islamabad is more willing to tolerate jihadist violence as long as it is focused outward on Afghanistan, Kashmir or other parts of India.

While the US may have no vital interest in determining who actually governs in Afghanistan, as long as Afghan territory is not used to launch attacks on US soil, other regional states do. The threat of some kind of strengthened “moderate” Taliban in Afghanistan is already making India, Iran and Russia come together to craft a regional response. It is chimerical to assume that the US can negotiate its way out of the present mess by luring the “moderate” Taliban.

The other strand of the new US strategy of re-orienting Pakistan’s foreign policy is being undermined by the Obama administration’s lack of awareness of regional balance of power sensitivities. The idea in the western capitals that India can somehow be persuaded to negotiate with Pakistan on Kashmir, allowing Islamabad to concentrate less on its feud with India and more on its turbulent western frontier sounds good only paper.

India and Pakistan were close to a deal on Kashmir in 2007, not because of any outside pressure but because India was confident of the support of the friendlier Bush administration. The present administration's clumsy handling of India so far has put India once again on the defensive - and a defensive India is never going to give the US what it wants most.

It is indeed remarkable how quickly the goodwill toward the US has disappeared in New Delhi. Small signals emanating from Washington are having a much bigger impact in the corridors of power in India than is perhaps intended. It is instructive that the only context in which Obama has talked of India yet is the need to sort out Kashmir so as to find a way out of the West’s troubles in Afghanistan.

The talk of a strategic partnership between the two democracies has all but disappeared. US Secretary of  State Hillary Clinton’s omission of India as part of her first trip to Asia; her assertion that the US-China bilateral relationship is the most important one in the world; the appointment of Jeff Bader, a China expert, as the new senior director of East Asia, who will be looking at India; the US reluctance to make India a part of its larger strategy toward the region despite sharing a common interest in tackling terrorism and extremism from the turbulent territory between the Indus and the Hindu Kush are all being seen in New Delhi as a snub to a nation that was just a few days back being toasted as an emerging superpower.

Indians are nothing if not sensitive to such slights, and this will have consequences for the US policy toward the region in the coming weeks and months.