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Mumbai: Terror's Frankenstein on the
loose
By Stephen Blank
The bombers in
Mumbai, like their opposite numbers throughout the
Muslim world, knew exactly what they were doing when
they set off two bombs in India's commercial capital on
Monday. Their target was the fragile Indo-Pakistani
minuet that has begun to show signs of actually
improving relations between those two states.
If
progress in those relations were actually to occur, it
could only take place at the expense of the terrorist
formations operating in Pakistan, Kashmir, and probably
underground in India. In this respect, these terrorists
emulate their counterparts in Iraq and Palestine, whose
motto is the worse it is, the better it is for us. For
these militant men and women, peace is the enemy.
It is also clear that people possessing so
twisted a militant orientation, including belief in the
merit of blowing oneself up, cannot in any way imagine a
political solution to their grievances. Though their
leaders are perfectly willing to exploit state support
for their ulterior motives, they are ultimately a wild
card who almost inevitably escape the bonds of control
that the state which supports them tries to fasten on
them.
Like Frankenstein, they refuse to be part
of someone else's experiment, and strike out on their
own, causing havoc wherever they go. The terrorist
groups that organized this latest bombing in Mumbai are
thus Pakistan's Frankenstein for they almost certainly
issued forth, at some stage, from one or another of the
groups sponsored and supported - either directly or
indirectly - by Pakistan and its intelligence organs,
such as the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI).
This episode duly confirms that the decisive
factor that makes South Asia so dangerous is the fact
that, bearing all the aforementioned factors in mind,
the terrorists, Pakistan, and India constantly act in
reckless and provocative ways in order to stimulate or
make the most of a crisis.
Indeed, the current
crisis, triggered by the terror attacks against the
United States on September 11, 2001, America's ensuing
"war against terrorism", itself part of Afghanistan's
civil war, and subsequent terrorist attacks against
Kashmir's and India's parliaments in Srinagar and New
Delhi on October 1 and December 13, 2001, shows that the
terrorists can now act increasingly autonomously to
trigger a much grander Indo-Pakistani conflagration.
Pakistan, as a US ally against the Taliban, has
lost some measure of official control over these groups
and over disaffected pro-Taliban and other officials in
Pakistan's military and intelligence community who
sponsored those attacks to oppose President General
Pervez Musharraf's pro-American policies.
Therefore, to a certain but undefined degree,
terrorist groups, formerly or even presently backed by
elements of Pakistan's army and intelligence agencies,
most prominently the ISI, possess a considerable
tactical and strategic initiative. The terrorists and
their backers could autonomously launch attacks that
might overwhelm both states' political leadership and
trigger a general war, or at least frustrate efforts to
prevent war from breaking out.
The nearest
historical analogy to this situation, albeit one that
should not be overdrawn, is the Austro-Serb relationship
in 1914. Serbian terrorists, operating with Belgrade's
support, but acting on their own, assassinated the heir
to the Habsburg Empire. They hoped and believed, rightly
as it turned out, that this would start a general crisis
or war that would lead to Austria's disintegration and
Serbian territorial enlargement. Instead, World War I
and a more general European devastation was the result.
Presumably, we have advanced beyond the
statecraft of 1914. But that experience and analogy
obligates leaders and analysts to proceed with utmost
caution and to draw the appropriate lessons.
The
most urgent lesson is that India and Pakistan must not
give the terrorists the war that they want. A second
lesson that must be learned from these crises is that
states sponsor terrorism at their own risk and that this
risk increases over time. Therefore, Pakistan must do
more than merely arrest a few terrorists, release them
and make statements condemning terrorism while arguing
that one must draw a distinction between them and
allegedly responsible "freedom fighters".
These
distinctions are weasel words and are common to
terrorists like the Palestinian Authority, Hamas,
Hizballah, the Irish Republican Army, etc, all of whom
seek to disrupt the ability of publics and governments
to think straight about terrorism and unhinge their
targets' polities.
In fact, the situation now
makes clear that Pakistan, for its own safety, and not
because India now demands it, must conclusively renounce
terrorism as an instrument of its foreign and defense
policies.
To deny the terrorists the strategic
outcomes and the war that they seek we must understand
what those outcomes and that war are. Obviously, the
terrorist groups inside Pakistan and Kashmir seek to
destroy or at least unhinge Indian rule in Kashmir to
the point where Kashmir either completely goes out of
control or India's sovereignty is effectively
compromised beyond any point of return.
Then,
they believe, Kashmir will ultimately either become
self-governing, autonomous, independent, or perhaps be
partitioned or revert entirely to Pakistan. Terror and
continuing guerrilla violence are long-established
strategies towards those ends.
But the
continuing attacks, seen in the context of the pervasive
international resort to terrorism to achieve strategic
goals, the attacks on the United States, and the Afghan
civil war suggest much broader ambitions than merely
destabilizing Indian rule in Kashmir. These continuing
attacks strongly point to a wider strategic design whose
objectives include, but transcend, Kashmir.
Terrorism is rarely, if ever, random. It is
undertaken by intelligent, highly motivated and trained
cadres to obtain specific strategic objectives that
would otherwise (or at least so they believe) be denied
to them. And its purveyors clearly embody a distinctive
ethos that informs their perception of strategic
opportunities and risks. Certainly, that was the case in
this bombing in Mumbai. But there are also numerous
examples from both South Asia and other theaters the
world over. But today the most critical theater, or
second front, is inside Pakistan, which is why these
attacks are so provocative.
Foreign analysts
have long known that Pakistan, despite its being a
nuclear power with a respectable conventional army, is
in danger of degenerating into ungovernability across a
wide swath of its key cities and territories. In
Pakistan, landowners, military and intelligence
officials and Muslim fundamentalists all contend for
power in authoritarian and corrupt fashion.
And
large sums earned by drug running both inside the state
and abroad are used, in part, to fund terrorists, or the
Taliban, and extreme Islamic groups who are aligned with
either or both those groups. Hence it would not take
relatively much to destabilize Pakistan, a nuclear
state, and unseat its government, or at least this is
what the fanatics believe. The crisis the terrorists and
their supporters hope to provoke aims to bring about
precisely the kind of outcome the world most fears, a
general Indo-Pakistani war and/or general crisis in
Pakistan. The terrorists clearly know that India is
generally thought to enjoy a substantial conventional
superiority over Pakistan. Therefore, they hope to
provoke the following outcomes.
First, many of
them believe their own propaganda about the internal
irresolution, corruption and weakness of India and the
belief that they can exploit that, plus the deterrence
afforded by Pakistan's nuclear arsenal to defeat India.
Second, they also probably believe - and this is not
necessarily contradictory to the first belief - that
even if, or especially if, Pakistan loses, the
"traitorous" Musharraf government will fall and a regime
more supportive of their objectives and of the Taliban,
not to mention perhaps Osama bin Laden or his successor,
will arise in Pakistan.
The terrorists most
assuredly seek to strike at New Delhi, but even more
importantly, seek to destroy Pakistan's ability to act
as a pro-American outpost in the "war on terrorism"
because Pakistan is the strategic rear of this American
war. Thus the terrorists want to unhinge Pakistan and
cause a general civil war there in the belief that the
ensuing upheaval will lead to a government amenable to
their ends and to those of their brother insurgents in
Afghanistan and elsewhere.
This could further
escalate the Afghan civil war, which in itself is a
microcosm or one local theater of the broader civil war
within Islamic societies. In line with their and bin
Laden's beliefs, such global outbreaks would undo any
effort by America and its Muslim supporters to protect
their investment in a particular kind of Middle East and
Pakistan and supposedly ultimately bring about the
withdrawal of Western power from the Muslim world.
A general conflagration arising out of an
Indo-Pakistani war that Pakistan would almost inevitably
lose is precisely what they seek and they also seem
extremely complacent about the nuclear contingencies
that might arise from their scenarios. Unfortunately,
such complacency is not available either to Pakistan's,
India's or to other governments. Therefore, the prospect
of a general war with Pakistan is a very sobering one
indeed.
Pakistan thus now reaps the results of
its own support for terrorists and insurgents in
Afghanistan, Kashmir, and at home. These groups and
their protectors have made clear their determination to
control the policies of the government in Islamabad,
even if it means domestic terror inside Pakistan.
Thus, they have already assassinated the brother
of Pakistan's new interior minister who railed against
political power in the hands of half-illiterate mullahs.
They have become Pakistan's Frankenstein, monsters who
have eluded their masters' control and then turn on
their masters for trying to control them.
Pakistan must now realize that creating such
groups eventually leads them and not their masters to
take control of the strategic initiative that could
determine these masters' fate. But because domestic
support for them, especially in the
military-intelligence apparatus, is so great,
Musharraf's ability to act decisively against them and
go beyond the hitherto essentially cosmetic measures
taken is dubious. Indeed, doing so could bring about
their goal: collapse of his regime and an internal civil
war that will undermine not just Pakistan but all of
South Asia and the "war on terrorism".
Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies
have acted in the belief that they could torment India
with impunity and prevent it from becoming a stable
hegemon over South Asia - India's strategic goal -
either by virtue of their foreign alliances or their own
military power. They also sought to create Islamic
regimes in Afghanistan to deny it first to the Soviets
and second to India, which has always regarded
Afghanistan as its strategic rear against Islamabad.
Therefore, Pakistan's present situation graphically
testifies to the fact that states who sponsor terrorism
risk becoming beholden to that terrorism, or to its
anger against them and internal disaffection from those
who have carried out that policy enthusiastically when
official policy must change.
Gambling on terror
thus turns out to be a high-risk venture; one that may
ultimately force the gambler to become a gladiator in
the wrong war. While states may sponsor terrorism
profitably for a long time; ultimately either that card
becomes unprofitable and the advantages derived from it
diminishes; or it becomes a creation that escapes its
creator's controls and threatens to involve it in highly
dangerous wars.
Those who wish to strike at
terrorism in turn must calculate quite precisely exactly
what outcome they want to achieve, thereby and how best
to do so. For if they underplay or overplay their hand,
they, too, can end up losing control of their own policy
and strategy, and even of some of their territory. And
where nuclear arms are potentially involved, that loss
of strategic control or of a state's integrity,
precisely what the terrorists hope to achieve, becomes
the most dangerous possibility of all.
Stephen Blank is an analyst of
international security affairs residing in Harrisburg,
PA.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information
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