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Sunday, December 14, 2008

South Asia’s Deadly Dominoes

By HELENE COOPER, New York Times, Published: December 6, 2008

The Mumbai attacks may have begun with Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani guerrilla group known in the West mostly for its preoccupation with Kashmir. But by the time the crisis finally ends, foreign policy experts say, the fallout may have expanded to include the United States, NATO, Afghanistan and Iran.

Once again, South Asia is showing itself to be vulnerable to contagion.

President-elect Barack Obama during the campaign laid out an intricate construction for what might happen in South Asia with the right American push. He advocated increasing American troops in Afghanistan and pressing Pakistan to do more to evict foreign fighters and to attack training camps for radical terrorists along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Such actions, Mr. Obama said, would help prevent the Taliban and Al Qaeda from using Pakistani soil as a staging area for attacks in Afghanistan or on the United States or other Western targets.

Seldom did Mr. Obama mention or include India in his roadmap to peace in South Asia. During an interview with Time magazine, Mr. Obama did hint at trying to make a diplomatic push to mediate the Kashmir issue. But most of his South Asia focus has been on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The trouble, South Asia experts say, is that just about every issue in the region is somehow interconnected, and they all have a tendency to set each other off. The Mumbai attacks killed 163 civilians and members of the security forces, , and terrorized India’s most populous city for more than three days. But when the dust had cleared, “there was a lot more wreckage than just that,” said Teresita C. Schaffer, a South Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Strategically, the Mumbai massacres have brought into stark relief just how tenuous are American hopes for any kind of calm in Pakistan and Afghanistan, let alone victory over militant forces in the region.

Forget worrying about the hunt for Osama bin Laden along their shared border, and the battle against a resurgent Taliban. After Mumbai, it is suddenly all anyone can do just to keep Indians and Pakistanis from war.

“Step back and consider the situation the Mumbai attackers have created,” said George Friedman, chief executive of Stratfor, a geopolitical risk analysis company.

1. India’s already weak government decides it has to retaliate against Pakistan or risk falling.

India didn’t retaliate after the deadly bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul July 7. But many Indians view the Mumbai attacks the same way Americans viewed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and the Indian government is under enormous pressure to retaliate, perhaps by bombing training camps in Pakistan. Seven years ago, when gunmen attacked India’s Parliament in New Delhi, the Indian government moved forces close to the Pakistani border and brought its nuclear forces to a higher alert level, prompting a similar response from Pakistan and an intense crisis between the two nuclear rivals. Since then, the Indian government has been more restrained. But you can’t expect that restraint to dissolve were a firm link between the Mumbai attack and Pakistan’s intelligence service to emerge.

2. Pakistan responds by withdrawing forces from western Pakistan, where they can fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban, to the India-Pakistan border.

Pakistan security officials have already warned that if the situation with India worsens, they will shift troops from western areas, and pointedly noted during a news conference that such a step would likely upset the United States because it would mean resources were being moved from the fight against Islamic militants along the Afghan border. The Americans have been pressing Pakistan for more military action against the militants, not less.

While part of Pakistan’s threat was “half designed to scare the daylights out of the United States,” part of it was serious, Ms. Schaffer said. “The serious part of it is, as far as the Pakistan Army is concerned, India is still the existential threat. If it looked as if India was going to take some kind of military action, there would be a re-deployment so fast it would make your head spin.”

3. Taliban forces, freed from having to watch out for Pakistani troops, are strengthened along the Afghan border; Qaeda operatives are more secure.

A resurgent Taliban that is freed from having to fight a two-front war will turn its full attention to American and NATO troops in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama has already said he wants to send two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan, where violence has climbed — allied military deaths there have reached 267 this year, the most ever. The American military plan for the war in Afghanistan assumes some help from Pakistani troops on the border. It also assumes that the United States can continue to use Pakistan for logistical support for the Afghanistan war.

4. The United States’ situation in Afghanistan goes from bad to worse.

For the American military effort in Afghanistan to succeed, the Pakistani military needs to establish control of the lawless territory between the two countries. It is virtually impossible, South Asia experts say, to envision a scenario where American soldiers themselves could establish control of the border regions, with their mountainous terrain and a local population that is sympathetic to Islamist militants. So America is seeking a greater willingness from Pakistani leaders to go after Qaeda and Taliban operatives along the border; a Pakistani government that is distracted by a new flare-up with India would not figure into those plans.

5. Iran, watching Pakistan and India rattling their nuclear sabers, concludes that it is in a better position to insist on pursuing its nuclear program.

Mr. Obama has said he will do whatever he can to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, including breaking with years of American foreign policy and sitting down with Iran’s leaders, if necessary. But for decades, some Iranians have argued that their country needs a nuclear weapons capacity to match the influence of, or deter, neighbors like India, Pakistan and Israel — not to mention Russia and China. Foreign policy experts say that persuading Iran’s leaders to stop their current uranium enrichment program before it makes such a goal attainable would only get harder if they could point to a nuclear standoff taking place between Pakistan and India.

Turkish officials have stepped in to try to help, summoning Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, and Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, to Istanbul for talks. A senior Turkish official involved in the talks expressed optimism that diplomacy could somehow avert a further ratcheting up of tensions in South Asia. Speaking on condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic rules, the diplomat said that the Mumbai terrorists “wanted to create a problem for the whole region, because they knew this could radicalize the population more.” But, he said, none of that has to happen — if the Indian government resists the domestic pressure to hit back at Pakistan.

“It would be too much,” he said, “to start a war just to keep a government in place.”