Osama hit a wake-up call for
India By Chietigj Bajpaee
The killing of terror mastermind Osama bin
Laden in Pakistan's heartland by United States
special forces demonstrated American resolve in
the decade since the 9/11 attacks to get its man.
It has also renewed concerns that the South Asian
nation is a hub of Islamic extremist activities
that have targeted neighboring India.
The
May 3 hit draws attention to the shallowness of
India's claims to be an emerging "great power"
since it caps events in South Asia over the past
decade that show India remains incapable of
solving problems within its own sub-region, far
from acquiring the capability to project influence
on a larger scale.
Death by a thousand
cuts The Fedayeen (guerilla)-style attacks
in Mumbai on November 26-28, 2008, which claimed
the lives of nearly 200 people have often
portrayed in the media as
"India's 9/11". However, in reality, India has
suffered multiple 9/11 moments over the past two
decades inflicted by Pakistan-based militant
groups, and few of the masterminds behind these
attacks have been held accountable as India's list
of demands grows longer with each assault.
From the multiple bomb strikes targeted at
transport infrastructure, religious venues and
commercial hubs across major cities in India's
heartland, including Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore,
Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Pune, attacks
have claimed some 1,000 lives and injured almost
3,000 people. Add to that toll the death of more
than 40,000 people in the two-decade insurgency in
Jammu and Kashmir state that has seen continued
militant infiltration and ceasefire violations
along the Line of Control dividing Indian and
Pakistani-administered Kashmir.
The
incursion of militant elements supported by
Pakistani paramilitary forces in the Kargil
district of Jammu and Kashmir in mid-1999 could be
defined as India's "Pearl Harbor moment" when the
country was caught off-guard by Pakistani
aggression. It came mere months after
then-Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's
much-hailed "bus diplomacy" mission to Pakistan.
Pakistani military and intelligence
services continue to feign ignorance of these
plots to destabilize India while drawing
distinctions between "good" militants (Kashmiri
separatists, Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani group,
Hafiz Gul Bahadur and Maulvi Nazir factions of the
Pakistan Taliban) and "bad" militants (the Mehsud
faction of the Pakistani Taliban, al-Qaeda,
Lashkar al-Zil, TNSM) as a means to escape charges
of being state sponsors of terrorism.
Indian interests and citizens have also
faced direct threats beyond its shores from
Pakistan-based militancy and extremism. In
December 1999, India faced what some have
described as the "dress rehearsal for 9-11" as
five militants hijacked Indian Airlines 814 after
it took off from Kathmandu, Nepal and diverted it
to Kandahar, Afghanistan after stopovers in
Amritsar, Lahore and Dubai.
The hostage
crisis was resolved following the release of three
militants, one of whom, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh,
was later implicated in the kidnap and murder of
Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002
and another, Maulana Masood Azhar, was linked to
an attack on the Indian parliament in December
2001.
The Indian Embassy in Kabul,
Afghanistan, has come under direct attack on two
occasions in recent years (in July 2008 and
October 2009). Indian nationals from the Border
Roads Organization working on the Zaranj-Delaram
Highway project have also been attacked on several
occasions and Indian civilians appear to have been
sought out in an attack on a guesthouse in Kabul
in February 2010.
These attacks on Indian
interests in Afghanistan have happened despite the
fact that the country does not maintain a military
presence in Afghanistan, is not a member of
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)
there, and its activities largely limited to
diplomatic and reconstruction initiatives.
Playing second fiddle in South Asia With clear indications that Pakistan remains
the most direct external threat to India's
sovereignty and security, India has turned the
other cheek time and again in the most clear
demonstration of appeasement since Neville
Chamberlain's pledge of "peace for our time"
following his Munich meeting with Adolf Hitler in
1938.
Despite a frequent war of words and
the occasional mobilization of military resources,
which brought both countries on the verge of a
fourth war in 2001-2, India appears to have more
often than not turned Theodore Roosevelt's proverb
on its head by "speaking loudly and carrying a
small stick".
Whether driven by
international calls for restraint, deficiencies in
its military resources that prevent rapid
deployment, or fears of escalation fueled by
Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and unwillingness to
commit to a no-first-strike policy (while India
lacks clarity over its own nuclear doctrine),
India has remained reluctant to exercise the
military option to Pakistan's frequent
provocations.
Instead, New Delhi appears
to have "outsourced" its Pakistan policy to the
United States and then expressed shock and
frustration when Washington has not toed the same
line in its approach toward Pakistan. Despite
claims to pursuing a more pragmatic foreign
policy, New Delhi appears to maintain a strain of
Nehruvian idealism in its foreign policy approach.
This is demonstrated in its inability to
acknowledge that despite the United States'
self-proclaimed role as the world's policeman,
Washington is in fact driven by the only interest
that dominates every state's decision-making in
international relations - the national interest.
New Delhi cannot expect Washington to do
its bidding, especially as New Delhi retains its
own preference for a non-aligned foreign policy.
This saw its most recent manifestation when two US
companies (Lockheed Martin and Boeing) were
knocked out of the mammoth competition for 126
medium multi-role combat aircraft, which is likely
to leave a bitter taste in the US-India
relationship and unravel some of the goodwill
generated by the US-India nuclear agreement.
In the process of having a marginalized
military role in the Af-Pak region, India has been
limited to spewing rhetoric. The inability of the
Indian government to support several positions
vis-a-vis Pakistan through concrete action makes
its pronouncements shallow. While in themselves
laudable, there is a hollow ring to statements
that the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir,
including the Gilgit-Baltistan and
Pakistan-administered ("Azad") Kashmir are an
integral part of India, that the Pakistani state
must cease its support for militancy targeted at
India, and in New Delhi's opposition to proposed
reconciliation with the Afghan Taliban.
In
a contrast with India for instance, the Chinese
government, while maintaining a similarly
stringent position on recognition of its "One
China" policy, has been able to make definable
progress in its goal of reunification with Taiwan
by pursuing a carrot and stick approach through a
free-trade agreement, three links of direct
postal, transportation and trade, burgeoning
tourism and by swaying the cross-strait military
balance in Beijing's favor to deter separatist
tendencies in Taiwan.
India has not been
able to make any such strides in reaffirming its
claim to all of Kashmir, curbing the anti-India
ideology that continues to permeate the Pakistan
military and intelligence services and combating
the spread of Islamic extremist ideology embedded
in hardline Deobandi, Wahhabi and Salafi Islam in
Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Instead, its
actions are limited to symbolic and token gestures
such as the recent "cricket diplomacy" that
occurred during Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf
Raza Gillani's meeting with his Indian counterpart
Manmohan Singh during the World Cup semi-finals.
Filling a strategic void The
boldness with which the United States deployed
Navy SEALs commandos deep inside Pakistani
territory to decapitate al-Qaeda's leadership and
thus accomplish the mission that it set itself
nearly 10 years ago should be a wake-up call for
India, which continues to face the same security
dilemmas it faced at independence 64 years ago.
India for its part has developed the
much-hailed "Cold Start" military doctrine, which
advocates rapid deployment as a means to
facilitate swift and limited military engagements
aimed at deterring a nuclear response and
intervention by the international community.
However, this doctrine remains mere
rhetoric given its inability to deter continued
aggression by Pakistan, whose development of
asymmetric warfare tactics and nuclear-capable
battlefield range ballistic missiles has served to
somewhat negate the utility of Cold Start.
Furthermore, India has demonstrated an
inability to execute the doctrine given resource
and logistical constraints, including
transportation bottlenecks and the shortage or
poor quality of key platforms, such as artillery
and surveillance systems, deficiencies in
interoperability between branches of the armed
forces, and an apathy or unwillingness by the
civilian leadership to properly consider issues of
national security.
Given these logistical,
resource and command and control constraints, the
chances of India mounting similar operations
inside Pakistani territory to kill or capture
members of terrorist groups such as Hafiz Saeed,
Dawood Ibrahim, Maulana Masood Azhar, Ilyas
Kashmiri appears slim.
Furthermore,
despite the double-digit increase in the country's
defense budget this year to over $36 billion,
revisions to the doctrine, including fighting a
two-front war and engaging in "out of area"
operations, appear wishful thinking and a case of
strategic overreach.
Pakistan, despite all
its faults, has demonstrated an impressive agility
to redefine itself depending on the changing
strategic landscape. This includes maintaining an
"all weather friendship" with China, portraying
itself as the quintessential Islamic state as
noted by its status as the possessor of an
"Islamic" nuclear bomb, and being a pivotal
component of the US-led security architecture by
first bandwagoning with it in the struggle against
communism during the Cold War (in the Baghdad
Pact/CENTO/opposing Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan) and more recently as an ally in the
"war on terror", which granted it recognition as a
"major non-NATO ally".
India on the other
hand, has tended to be more slow-moving and
reactive in its foreign policymaking with shifts
driven more by necessity or upheaval, such as the
country's foreign exchange crisis in 1991 that
prompted economic liberalization. Changes in the
country's foreign policy orientation have also
been driven by the actions of other players, such
as the US government's recognition of India as a
major emerging power during the Bill Clinton and
second George W Bush administrations, which fueled
a rapprochement.
Rather than being driven
by objective and long-term strategic assessments,
indigenous shifts in foreign and security policy
have often been more the result of the
personalities of ruling parties, such as the more
realpolitik interpretation of the international
system by the Hindu-nationalist BJP (Bharatiya
Janata Party), which prompted it to declare India
as an overt nuclear weapons power in 1998.
Calm before the storm Al-Qaeda's Arab element is being increasingly
displaced from South Asia and back to its
heartland in the Middle East and North Africa.
This push has been fueled by anti-terrorism
operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the
emergence of new places of instability as ripe
terrorist sanctuaries, which have given rise to
such groups as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
and Islamic Maghreb, and militant groups
exploiting ongoing instabilities plaguing the
region, such as in the conflict in Libya.
As such, terrorist leaderships in South
Asia are becoming localized, as demonstrated by
the proliferation of indigenous militant umbrella
organizations such as the Pakistan Taliban
(Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan) and Punjabi Taliban.
These groups are likely to return attention to
Kashmir, their original grievance, and target
their original enemy - India.
The
decapitation of al-Qaeda's leadership in the
Af-Pak region and the planned US withdrawal from
Afghanistan by 2014 set the stage for a reversion
to the original bilateral conflict plaguing
regional stability between India and Pakistan. New
Delhi cannot afford to be caught off-guard once
the dust settles in South Asia and it is once
again alone in facing the scourge of terrorism,
separatist insurgency and military aggression
emanating from Pakistan.
Chietigj
Bajpaee is an Asia analyst. He has worked with
several political risk consultancies and public
policy think-tanks based in the United States,
Europe and South Asia. The views expressed here
are his own. He can be reached at
cbajpaee@hotmail.com.
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