Opinion

The Holbrooke Mission
By Ahmad Faruqui, PhD
Dansville , CA

Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, has begun his mission. It is disappointing that it does not include India.

When he wrote on “Renewing America’s Leadership” (Foreign Affairs, July/August 2007), US Senator Barack Obama spoke of the need to “ encourage dialogue between Pakistan and India to work toward resolving their dispute over Kashmir and between Afghanistan and Pakistan to resolve their historic differences.”

Then came the clincher: “If Pakistan can look toward the east with greater confidence, it will be less likely to believe that its interests are best advanced through cooperation with the Taliban.” By seeing the problems that affect the three countries through a single lens, Senator Obama showed keen insight into the sub-continent’s most enduring problem.

But just as he raised hopes in Pakistan, he raised hackles in India. Regardless of which party has held sway in New Delhi, the stance has been that Kashmir is not on the table.

Nehru on down, Indian leaders have contended that were it not for Pakistani interference, Kashmiris would live in peace. Since 9/11, periodic reminders have emanated from South Block that borders cannot be redrawn with blood.

One of India’s leading national security analysts, C. Raja Mohan, exulted in the fact that India had “fobbed off” Holbrooke but said the threat still hung in the air. He warned the US against “any high-profile intervention” in Indian affairs, diplomatic-speak for mediating on Kashmir.

Another national security figure, Brajesh Mishra, stated undiplomatically, “ India is not going to relinquish control of Jammu and Kashmir. That is written in stone and cannot be changed.”

Such truculence is nothing new. Objective observers such as US analyst Daniel Markey know that “intellectually, it is impossible to disentangle these problems from each other.” However, even Markey concedes that “the smartest thing is to work on this behind the scenes.”

Well, working behind the scenes has been tried for decades, going back to the time of President John F. Kennedy, who sent veteran diplomat William Averell Harriman to the region for exploratory discussions. Harriman, who had negotiated the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviets in 1963, failed to make any headway with New Delhi.

The time to work behind the scenes has come and gone. A new approach is called for since the problem is still very much there.

The US should rethink its policy toward the sub-continent. While India is unquestionably the bigger power, Pakistan is a large, strategically located country with strong ties to the Middle East and China. It is impossible to imagine South Asia realizing its full potential if the Indo-Pakistani conflict is allowed to fester.

Historically, US ties with Pakistan have been marked with expediency. To paraphrase Brookings’ Steve Cohen, time and time again, the US has rented out the Pakistani army to fulfill its regional objectives. It has shown little interest in resolving Pakistan’s domestic and foreign policy objectives.

Pakistan ’s insecurity vis-à-vis India has led it to adopt a strategy based on asymmetrical warfare emphasizing the use of guerillas in Kashmir and supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan. India is viewed as an existential threat by the Pakistani establishment, a view originally espoused by the army and now widely accepted throughout Pakistan.

Pakistani fears reached an all-time high in 1971, when India militarily facilitated the secession of East Pakistan. The creation of Bangladesh accelerated the nuclearization of the sub-continent.

Pakistan has a new concern now as it evaluates India’s attempts to convert Afghanistan into a client state. At various times since the Partition of British India, various Afghan governments have questioned the validity of the Durand Line which serves as the international border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and divides what would otherwise be an ethnically unified Pashtun nation. Secessionist movements in the NWFP have often found an ally in India.

India ’s recent completion of a billion dollar highway from Afghanistan to Iran has raised eyebrows among Pakistan’s national security elite which sees it a stratagem designed to encircle Pakistan.

It is that prolonged sense of insecurity that has led Pakistan’s military intelligence agencies to recruit, train and arm myriad militant groups. They were intended to serve as a strategic reserve against an India invasion. But as time went by, the militants began to view themselves as the vanguard of a holy war against an infidel state.

A big gulf now separates the interests of the militants from those of the Pakistani state. The militants have turned on their master, who they regard as complicit with the infidel Americans. Partly as a result of this reverse Frankenstein phenomenon and partly because of the war in Afghanistan, the so-called “federally administered” tribal areas have effectively seceded from the Pakistani federation.

The surge of militant violence is not limited to the tribal areas. As much as 80 percent of the Swat Valley appears to have gone the way of the Taliban. And there is no place in Pakistan which is immune from suicide bombings, kidnapping, and beheadings.

When asked who is to blame for this orgy of violence, the majority of Pakistanis name the Americans. India comes in second and al-Qaeda and the militants a distant third. Bruce Riedel, a former US intelligence officer, summed up Washington’s predicament: “Anytime you are outpolling India as the bad guy in Pakistan, you’re in deep, deep trouble.”

Much of this anti-American sentiment can be traced to the US presence in Afghanistan and to the firing of Hellfire missiles from unmanned US aircraft. Both have led to large and visible civilian casualties.

President Obama should declare a moratorium on these attacks and engage in an open dialogue with the people of Pakistan. He has a short window of opportunity in which to win them over.

If he does not radically change the Bush administration’s widely disliked policies, Pakistanis will write off Obama as just another American president, not as the transformational figure they got to admire during the campaign.

Obama should commit to a regional approach for bringing peace to South Asia and expand Holbrook’s mandate. The problems are triangular in nature and cannot be solved if Holbrooke walks along the three-sided periphery. Kashmir holds the key and it lies in the heart of the triangle. Unless Holbrooke goes there, nothing will change.

(The author is an associate with the Pakistan Security Research Unit at the University of Bradford. Faruqui@pacbell.net)

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