President
George W Bush's election victory reflects
certain ground realities in the United States. The first
is the continuing concerns and anxieties in the minds of
large sections of the people over the threat posed to
the US, its nationals and interests by international
jihadi terrorism of the kind practiced by organizations
such as al-Qaeda and the International Islamic Front
(IIF).
With memories of September
11, 2001, still haunting them, Americans not prepared to change
the president, who is also the commander-in-chief of
their armed forces, in the midst of what Bush has projected
as a relentless war against international terrorism.
A strategic victory in the war is not yet in sight,
but the Bush administration can be credited with
many tactical victories, such as the capture or killing
of more than half a dozen leading associates of Osama bin Laden.
In the election campaign, Bush succeeded in having the
spotlight focused on the achievements of his
administration in the war rather than on its failures.
Senator John Kerry was unable
convincingly to articulate and address the concerns and
anxieties of these people. His projection of the war in Iraq
as an unwise diversion from the "war on terrorism"
did not convince enough people. His attempts to have
the focus partly shifted to bread-and-butter issues such as
unemployment did not prove beneficial either.
The second ground reality is
the widespread conviction among American people that
Bush's objectives in Iraq of having the Saddam Hussein
regime overthrown and bringing Iraq and its oil wealth under US
control were correct, though the means followed, such as
the deliberate use of disinformation to justify the war
etc, might have been wrong, and though the sequel to the
war in the form of bloody resistance from the Iraqi
people might have made the strategic objective of making
US control and influence acceptable to the Iraqi people
elusive. Kerry's ambivalence on the Iraq war, marked by
his initial support for the objective of overthrowing
Saddam and subsequent criticism of the conduct of the
war, projected him in a negative light.
The
euphoria over the victory in the elections is unlikely
to last long as Bush and his advisers continue to
grapple with the Iraqi nettle and step up their hunt for
bin Laden and other dregs of the IIF. A satisfactory end
to the war in Iraq, which is now through its second year
and which has already cost nearly 1,100 American lives
and resulted in the death of many thousands of Iraqi
civilians, is nowhere in sight. The pronouncements of
Bush and his advisers during the election campaign did
not give evidence of any new thinking and new strategy.
The starting point of any new thinking and
strategy is generally the realization that past thinking
and strategy have failed to produce results and that a
mid-course correction is called for. No signs of any
such realization could be detected during the election
campaign. The Bush administration seems to be under the
belief that if somehow Fallujah could be pacified and
the proposed elections in Iraq could be held as
scheduled in January, that would mark the beginning of
the end of its troubles in Iraq.
A lack of lucidity
in the analysis of the ground situation in Iraq,
marked by ideological predilections, and an inability
to refashion the policy response to make amends
for the past mistakes continue to stand in the way
of a turn for the better. The situation in Iraq continues
to be dark and grim, but there are flickers of light.
One such glimmer of light is the fact that despite
the ruthless massacre of large numbers of Iraqi policemen
and other civil servants by the suicide bombers
of foreign terrorists and indigenous resistance fighters,
the desertions from the newly raised police
and army have not been as high as feared and there has
been no significant drop in the number of volunteers for
joining the police and the army.
Those watching
TV images of the bloody scenes after each suicide car-bomb
explosion would have been struck by the courage with
which members of the newly trained Iraqi security
forces perform their duties, despite the threat faced by
them. These images show that there are sections of the
Iraqi civil society, including many public servants, who
do not side with the terrorists and the resistance
fighters despite their unhappiness with the US-led
occupation.
The over-militarization of US
responses to terrorism under Bush during his first term,
whether in Afghanistan or in Iraq, has resulted in very
little attention being paid to other dimensions, which
are equally if not more important. The most important of
these dimensions is the psychological - creating
feelings of revulsion against terrorism and violence and
encouraging spells of introspection in the civil
societies of not only Iraq, but also in the rest of the
ummah over the brutalities of the terrorists in
the name of jihad and Islam.
The absence of any
such introspection is partly due to perceptions of
similar brutalities in the military response of the US
and in the methods followed by Israel against the
Palestinians. Without appropriate modifications in the
counter-terrorism methods followed by US forces, the
terrorist attacks, even if directed against innocent
civilians, will continue to be seen by large sections of
the Muslim masses as understandable acts of retaliation
and not with feelings of revulsion.
Killing of
Muslims by Muslims in the name of Islam; beheading of
innocent civilians, including Muslims, by Muslims in the
name of Islam; and killing of innocent Iraqis by Muslims
in the name of Iraq and Islam - these are nauseating
elements of the jihadi terrorism of the kind practiced
by the likes of bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri,
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and others, which should be
troubling the minds of large sections of Muslims even in
the Islamic world, though they might be reluctant to
give open expression to the prickling of their
conscience.
How to bring about a more assertive role
by the right-minded sections of the Islamic world? How
can they be expected to be more assertive if, in their
perception, the US military is no less brutal as seen
from air strikes in civilian areas, excessive use of
force through tanks and artillery in heavily
inhabited areas etc?
The
over-militarization of the counter-terrorism campaign
has been the bane of the Bush leadership of the
so-called "war against terrorism" since September 11 -
whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere. Since the US
is waging its counter-terrorism campaign in foreign
territory and not in its own territory, the restraints
normally dictated and imposed by counter-terrorism
campaigns in one's own territory, such as non-use of the
air force, the armor, the artillery and other heavy
weapons, do not operate. The harsh methods used by the
US to match the harshness of the terrorists are
weakening whatever little influence the civil societies
of these countries may be able to exercise and adding to
the number of volunteers joining the ranks of the
terrorists.
Unless these aspects of the policies
followed by Bush and his advisers during his first term
are corrected and a new counter-terrorism strategy
devised and implemented, the second term of Bush could
turn out to be a rerun of his first. This would not be
in the interests of the US, its nationals and interests.
India watched the presidential
race and the prospects of a Kerry win with nervousness
because of his pronouncements against outsourcing,
his emphasis on bread-and-butter issues tht might have presaged a
return to protectionism, etc. Memories of the past
rigidities of the advisers around Kerry on the nuclear
issue and the ambivalent stance of the Bill Clinton
administration in its first term on issues of concern to
India, such as Pakistani sponsorship of terrorism
against India, the Kashmir issue, technology transfers
etc, added to the nervousness in India.
The only benign stance favorable to India that the
Clinton administration adopted was at the time of the
Kargil conflict in 1999. Otherwise, it was hardly ever
helpful toward India. It was Clinton who, despite the
strong advice of his counter-terrorism experts,
avoided declaring Pakistan as a state-sponsor of terrorism
in 1993. It was Robin Raphael, his assistant secretary
of state, who in October 1993
publicly supported Pakistan's stand that Jammu and Kashmir
is disputed territory. Before joining the State Department,
it was she, while posted in the US Embassy in New
Delhi, who had instigated Kashmiri militant leaders to
form the All-Party Hurriyat Conference to wage a
united struggle against the government of India. Who can forget
her role and that of Bill Richardson, Clinton's
energy secretary, in the birth and growth of the Taliban to
promote the oil interests of the US company Unocal?
In 1995, it was Clinton who, after a visit
by then Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto to the
US, engineered the passage of the Brown Amendment
by Congress to facilitate the renewal of the US arms-supply
relationship with Pakistan.
As against this,
what has been the track record of successive Republican
administrations? After having initially courted the
Khalistani terrorists of Punjab after coming to office,
the Ronald Reagan administration ordered its
intelligence agencies to cut off their links with them
after a visit by Indira Gandhi, the then prime minister,
to Washington, DC. It was George H W Bush, the father of
the present president, who invoked the Pressler
Amendment and terminated the military supply
relationship with Pakistan in 1990 because of its
development of a clandestine military nuclear
capability. Bush and James Baker, his secretary of
state, took a tough line against both China and Pakistan
for China's clandestine missile supply relationship with
Pakistan. If Bush had returned to the White House in the
elections of 1992, it was most likely that he would have
accepted the advice of the US counter-terrorism experts
to declare Pakistan a state sponsor of international
terrorism. Clinton, to whom the file came in January
1993 for a decision, did not declare Pakistan a state
sponsor of terrorism. Instead, he kept Pakistan on a
list of suspected state sponsors of terrorism and
removed it after six months.
The attitude of
the present Bush administration on the question
of Pakistan-supported jihadi terrorist groups
operating against India has been more helpful than that of
the Clinton administration, though not as satisfactory
as one would have liked it to be. It designated
the Lashkar-e-Toiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammad foreign
terrorist organizations and took sympathetic note of
India's complaints against the activities of the
transnational criminal mafia group led by Dawood Ibrahim
from Pakistani territory and declared him an
international terrorist linked to al-Qaeda.
Despite
these positive factors, India has had reasons to be
concerned over some aspects of the policy of the Bush
administration toward Pakistan. Among these, one could
mention its lionization of President General Pervez
Musharraf as a stalwart ally in the "war against
terrorism", despite his failure to act against Pakistani
jihadi terrorist organizations operating against India
and his complicity in keeping the Taliban alive and
active in sanctuaries in Pakistani territory, its
declaration of Pakistan as a major non-North Atlantic
Treaty Organization ally, thereby according it certain
facilities in matters of military procurement, the US
decision not to act against Pakistan for the nuclear and
missile proliferation activities of Abdul
Qadeer
Khan, the so-called father of Pakistan's atomic bomb,
and the recent reports of a possible reconsideration by
the US of its past refusal to sell new squadrons of F-16
planes to the Pakistani air force.
Bush, during his second term, is unlikely to
address these concerns to the satisfaction of India. A question
often asked in India is, Who would better promote Indian
interests, Bush or Kerry? That is an irrelevant question. The
US electorate elects someone as its president because
it thinks he will better promote US interests and
not because of the interests of any other country.
Anyone who is elected president has US national interests
foremost in his mind while formulating his policies.
Indian interests will receive attention only if they are
compatible with US national interests.
The
purpose of any exercise in relation to Indo-US relations
should, therefore, be to identify Indian interests,
which are compatible with US interests, and work for a
convergence of views and policymaking and implementation
with regard to them. Three such issues can be
immediately identified - the campaign against jihadi
terrorism; the importance of the restoration of normalcy
in Iraq and the prevention of its balkanization and
pulling it out of the throes of fundamentalism and
jihadi terrorism into which US policies have pushed it;
and facilitating India's catching up with China as an
economic power of equal strength, for which India will
need a large flow of US investment and technology.
Until the US wins its war against jihadi
terrorism - if it is able to win it at all - its
national interests demand close strategic and military
relations with Pakistan. While India should work toward
closer relations with the US, Washington is unlikely to
let such relations be at the expense of its
counter-terrorism-related relationship with Pakistan.
Unless and until the US realizes that Pakistan has been
playing a double game in the so-called "war against
terrorism", there is unlikely to be any change in its
policies toward Islamabad. B Raman is
additional secretary (retired), cabinet secretariat,
government of India, New Delhi, and currently
director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai, and
distinguished fellow and convenor, Observer Research
Foundation (ORF), Chennai Chapter. E-mail:corde@vsnl.com
