COMMENTARY South Asia in the shadow of
terror By Ajai Sahni
The US
coalition's growing troubles in Iraq are bad news for
South Asia. Among the primary targets of Islamist
extremist terrorism in the region, India has long seen a
necessary convergence of its interests with those of the
US-led global "war against terrorism" - though there
have been differences over the discriminatory focus of
this war, and the evident indulgence extended to
Pakistan's continuing support to terrorist groups. The
increasing disarray in Iraq creates imminent dangers of
an escalation and widening of Islamist terrorist
activities in this region, even as it creates
possibilities of intensification of violence by
terrorist groups deriving their justification from other
ideological streams.
The spaces for such a
resurgence are created by two factors. The first of
these is based on the nature of terrorism as a method;
to the extent that it is seen to succeed substantially
even against the world's greatest military and economic
power in Iraq, it will be estimated to have far greater
probabilities of success against the weaker state powers
within South Asia. This would be considered to be the
case in all theaters, and with respect to movements
inspired by the entire spectrum of "revolutionary"
ideologies.
The second of these factors relates
to the diminished international focus on terrorist
movements in this region, as events in Iraq (and, to an
extent, the Middle East) exhaust the greatest proportion
of Western, and particularly US, attention.
This
creates opportunities and incentives for terrorists and
their state sponsors in South Asia to intensify
campaigns that had, briefly, been brought under
significant pressure as a result of the glare of
international publicity and the increased risk of
international penalties after September 11, 2001. It is
useful to recall that it was the neglect of developments
in South Asia - and particularly of the assembly lines
of jihad in Pakistan and then-Taliban-controlled
Afghanistan - that contributed directly to the current
mushrooming of global Islamist terrorism and the
planning and execution of September 11. While the armies
and infrastructure of terrorism in Afghanistan were
substantially eroded by the US-led campaign there, much
of these simply shifted across the border into Pakistan,
to join forces with a number of like-minded terrorist
groups, many of them created and directly supported by
covert state agencies in that country. Considerable US
pressure on the regime of President General Pervez
Musharraf had resulted in some cosmetic curbs on these
organizations, and a marginal decline in their visible
activities. Such trends are now in danger of reversal,
as US prestige suffers blow after blow in Iraq.
There is, today, a growing assessment among
radical Islamist groups that, while the United States
does have the unquestionable power and technology to
blow any country out of existence, it does not have the
capacity or comprehension to manage even a mid-sized
nation - such as Afghanistan or Iraq - under occupation
or surrogate rule. The US, moreover, is assessed to have
no effective defenses against sustained and determined
terrorist campaigns, and is, consequently, perceived to
be immensely vulnerable despite its apparent strength.
As Iraq emerges as a critical element in the US
presidential election campaign, America's domestic
political vulnerability to terrorist activities in
foreign theaters will also be underlined. The events in
Iraq, within these calculations, place an absolute limit
on how much pressure the US can now exert on rogue
states and state sponsors of terrorism, especially where
such entities are able to manipulate the
instrumentalities of terror within intensities that do
not provoke extreme retaliation, or within the confines
of "credible deniability". The result is that the US is
expected to be increasingly cautious in exerting
extraordinary pressure on countries such as Pakistan,
for instance, to end their covert support to terrorism
and the activities of terrorist groups on and from their
soil. This will create the opportunities for a
consolidation of terrorist forces within such areas.
Iraq has also sounded the death knell of the
international consensus against terrorism, once again
throwing the entire issue into the realm of moral
ambivalence. America's unilateralism and mismanagement
have alienated many natural allies in the "war against
terrorism", and the delusionary constructs under which
the US administration continues to act do not suggest
any trends toward increasing executive competence, and
consequently, little prospect of greater international
participation in the campaign in Iraq.
Spain's
new prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, has
already issued instructions for the withdrawal of his
country's 1,300 troops from Iraq "as soon as possible".
The US administration has expressed some expectations
that India and Bangladesh would send forces to Iraq
after the "handover of sovereignty" on June 30, but this
is sheer fantasy. No country would send its forces into
Iraq unless the present administrative and political
incoherence were brought to an end. To the extent,
however, that US decision-making continues to rely
overwhelmingly on paradigmatic constructs and the
personal proclivities and biases of individuals within
the administration, rather than on any clear conception
of the ground realities in Iraq, no such resolution
appears to be in sight.
These factors are
superimposed on a South Asia immensely more complex than
it was before September 11, 2001. Pakistan alone stands
at a crossroads in its history, with its internal
contradictions creating increasing stresses, as the
Musharraf regime adopts ideologically incompatible
objectives - and as elements within a number of hitherto
"captive" jihadi groups begin to chart an independent
course.
Areas of instability in Pakistan
currently include the North West Frontier Province,
Balochistan and the Federally Administrative Tribal
Areas (FATA), which have long been loosely controlled by
the state but where strong bonds on ethnic and religious
lines dominate social and political life. In addition,
Sindh, while currently relatively calm, has a history of
political and sectarian violence that could, in
situations of rising political uncertainty in Islamabad,
revive.
Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, and
particularly the Northern Areas, are denied basic
political and human rights, and the Shi'ite population,
which constitutes a majority in the region, has been
subjected to repeated campaigns of repression; there are
now increasing signs of political unrest and a potential
for violence in this region. The US effort to
orchestrate a transition to democracy through a
controlled military regime is also fundamentally flawed,
and has, in fact, immensely weakened democratic and
secular forces in Pakistan, even as it has further
entrenched the military-jihadi-feudal combine of
revanchist forces in the country. The Kashmir issue,
moreover, has been entirely miscast by the US
administration, which ignores the reality that it is in
essence a symptom of the larger ideological conflict
between an exclusionary Islamist extremist Pakistan and
a liberal, democratic and pluralist India.
There
is, moreover, an enormous multiplicity of terrorist
actors and organizations across South Asia - drawn from
diverse ideological streams, including Islamism, ethnic
fundamentalism and left-wing extremism - who will derive
great encouragement from America's discomfiture in Iraq.
It is, indeed, safe to say that the future of terrorism
in the South Asian region will be decided substantially
by actors and events outside the region; events in Iraq
are impacting directly on the potential not only for
Islamist terrorism, but for all forms of terrorism in
South Asia, and on the diminishing potential for the
stabilization of both Afghanistan and Pakistan in the
foreseeable future.
Ajai Sahni is
editor of the South Asia Intelligence Review and
executive director of the Institute for Conflict
Management.
