An Unnecessary Public Fracas

New Delhi has been credited with taking a strong stance on the Devyani Khobragade case. But there are discomfiting questions about why the Ministry of External Affairs allowed the matter to blow out of proportion in the first place

Even though the dust is yet to settle on the recent India-US diplomatic face-off, it is perhaps safe to assume that the storm has passed. Ms Devyani Khobragade, the Indian diplomat accused of visa fraud, has been moved from her position at the consulate in New York to India’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations — with the tacit approval of the US State Department — where she now enjoys full immunity from criminal prosecution. Washington, DC, has also exempt her from personal appearances in court and if everything goes according to plan, she will not have to deal with any more pesky law enforcement officials while in New York. Eventually, the Ministry of External Affairs will bring her home ostensibly with her “dignity restored”, as Mr Salman Khurshid promised Parliament last week.

As and when that happens, be prepared for yet another round of vacuous nationalism that can be matched in fervour only by the pointless patriotism that was once the staple at India-Pakistan cricket matches. Worse still, be prepared for a smug Ministry of External Affairs as it pats itself on the back for a job well done.

Indeed, South Block has mostly been praised by the media and the public at large for taking a strong stand on the Khobragade case which, as many commentators have rightly argued, stands on flimsy legal ground and violates diplomatic conventions. The diplomat’s arrest and incarceration, the primary bone of contention between India and the US, was a disastrous move on the part of the Americans, and even Washington has now sought to distance itself from the act by trying to pin the blame on the one Diplomatic Security Services agent who was responsible for apprehending Ms Khobragade. As for the charges against Ms Khobragade, any good lawyer worth his day in court will rip them to shreds — especially if he follows the same line of argument that the US itself has used on earlier occasions to invoke the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations so as to protect its own people in foreign shores.

Finally, as Mr Ashok Malik and Mr Abhijit Iyer-Mitra have explained in this newspaper over the past few days, the US State Department and India’s Ministry of External Affairs had an unwritten understanding regarding the employment of domestic staff. This was based on pragmatic considerations and diplomatic courtesies that went both ways. When the US cracked down on Ms Khobragade, India rightly viewed it as the latter reneging on its side of the deal.

Unacceptable as this breach in diplomatic code has been, New Delhi should have seen it coming. Twice before, our diplomats in New York have been pulled up by US authorities on this exact issue, and even though neither case was allowed to escalate, New Delhi should have been on guard. But clearly, South Block didn’t move fast enough to change the status quo, thereby putting our diplomats in a precarious position. This was the first mistake.

The second and far more damaging mistake has been the manner in which the Ministry of External Affairs allowed the matter to blow up in the public domain. Especially since much of this case is in the gray zone — a nudge-nudge-wink-wink agreement gone wrong is not exactly a compelling defence — it ideally should have been resolved away from the public eye. By allowing it to escalate into a full scale diplomatic crisis, New Delhi compounded Washington’s callousness and brought the crucial India-US bilateral under enormous strain. That this happened at a time when relations between the two countries had already hit a plateau of sorts — with the much-touted nuclear deal failing to take-off, the economic partnership seeming less attractive etc — has only made matters worse. Especially at the bureaucratic level, such an episode reinforces old notions of the two countries being in the different camps etc, and threatens the hard-won gains made in the bilateral over the past decade or so.

Also, New Delhi’s defence narrative of respect and dignity publicly pushed both parties onto the high moral ground. While on the one hand this exposed American double standards (the privileges they demand for their diplomats but do not care to accord to others is just one example), it also opened India to unnecessary criticism (no matter how flawed, prejudiced and ill-informed) about ‘slave labour’ and ‘class culture’. Sure, Indian society has its problems but so does every other society and nobody needs to be lectured on how to wash their dirty laundry.

So, why did the Ministry of External Affairs allow this case to blow up? Well, technically, it was Ms Khobragade’s father, a former IAS officer, who orchestrated the tamasha in India but it is highly unlikely that he did it all without the Ministry of External Affairs’s blessings. Yes, there were other factors too, such as a resentful foreign service cadre which played its part, but still the episode could not have so escalated without the express consent of the Ministry of External Affairs — which, of course, has now craftily presented this foreign policy fiasco as a foreign policy success!

Given the UPA’s poor track record in diplomacy and the Congress’s history of playing cynical politics, this begs the question: Under the garb of protecting national prestige, did the Ministry of External Affairs actually sacrifice our national interests so that the Congress-led regime could gain some easy brownie points in the run-up to the 2014 general election? Did the Congress seek to make up with cheap demagoguery what it has failed to offer in terms of good governance? Increasingly, this seems to be the case given how the Ministry of External Affairs is suddenly being hero-worshipped for baring its fangs and standing up to US bullying.

On a concluding note, however, it must be clarified that it is no one’s case that the Ministry of External Affairs should not have retaliated. To the contrary, it absolutely should have (more so, since the Richard family evacuation segment of this story is an insult to the India’s judicial system) — but not under the public glare. For instance, just like the common man knew nothing when American consular officials were given full diplomatic privileges over and above what was specified in the rule books, they didn’t have to be told when those measures were withdrawn. This would not have in any way blunted the Ministry of External Affairs’s diplomatic offensive but it would have saved the already strained India-US relationship from unnecessary pressure. But now, the whole thing just looks like a cheap pre-poll gimmick.

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on December 26, 2013)

For Want Of Better Options

Drones remain the most effective weapon in the US’s counter-terror arsenal. Critics of the remote-controlled missile will do well to reconsider their contention the attacks lead to high civilian casualties and violate Pakistan’s sovereignty

On November 21, a US drone strike in the Hangu district of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province killed six people including a senior leader of the Haqqani network and at least one more militant from the Al Qaeda-affiliated group. The strike came exactly 20 days after a similar drone attack took down another high-profile terror target, Pakistani Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud, in Miranshah, North Waziristan. In the intervening days, the Haqqani network’s main financier Nasiruddin Haqqani was shot dead by unidentified assailants in Islamabad. His brother, Sirajuddin, currently heads the network and was reportedly the target of the November 21 attack in Hangu, since he was seen at the seminary where the drones struck thrice last week. Also, the senior Haqqani leader who was killed in the strike, Maulvi Ahmed Jan, was Sirajuddin Haqqani’s trusted right-hand man.

Apart from the obvious observation that the attacks have put both the Haqqani network, and to a lesser extent the Pakistani Taliban (the two are affiliated but work independently) “on notice”, as a US official said recently, their relative success in eliminating high-profile targets has underlined the fact that America’s remote-controlled predator drones remain one of the most potent weapons in its counter-terrorism arsenal — their reputation as ‘joysticks’ used to play ‘video-game wars’ notwithstanding.

As expected, the Hangu strike has been usurped by the Government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as yet another opportunity to play to the gallery and whip up oodles of anti-American sentiment. Ruling party chief Imran Khan, always the showman, has kicked up a huge fuss about the strikes and blocked Nato supply routes into Afghanistan that run through the Province. Given Pakistan’s previous experience with this pressure tactic — remember, the routes were also shut after a US-Nato attack on the Salala outpost killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in November 2011 but re-opened later without Islamabad being able to squeeze so much as an apology from Washington, DC — it is clear that Mr Khan’s passionate outbursts on the matter are, well, just that. He had responded in exactly the same manner when Mehsud was killed, no matter that the Pakistani Taliban has not only been responsible for the death of an estimated 43,000 Pakistanis but also does not recognise the democratically-elected, Government structure of which Mr Khan himself is a part!

But Mr Khan is not alone in his opposition to US drone strikes. There are many within Pakistan and outside who share his views, and criticise drone strikes based on a whole host of issues — legal, moral, political and strategic. It is difficult to do justice to the whole debate here but essentially, the anti-drone club puts forth two major arguments: First, drones strikes cause enormous civilian casualties without promising enough returns; second, they are a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty. Both arguments are problematic.

In the first case, the number of civilian casualties caused by drone strikes is unclear and varies widely between a few hundred to several thousands. This is because of the covert nature of the drone strikes programme which makes it extremely difficult to put together verifiable data on the matter. The US Government does not officially release information on drone strikes while the Pakistani Government sometimes denies it, sometimes acknowledges it.

That leaves us with reports from external agencies such as the UN, think-tanks and advocacy groups, and the media — almost all of them are usually just as vague and unreliable, as foreigners have no direct access to the tribal areas of Pakistan where these attacks take place. Special permission is required from the Government, and even after such access is granted, journalists can only travel with official escorts. In fact, even Pakistani citizens cannot travel to these areas without permission and unless they have proven families ties to the region. This leads to a veritable information black hole, and ultimately a debate that is based on half-baked facts and mostly just fiction.

Occasionally, though, this black hole has been penetrated with reporters being able to conduct first-hand interviews of villagers in these remote areas. But even then they have found it near impossible to ascertain the exact number of civilians, when any, who are killed in a drone strike. There are two reasons for this. One, after such a strike occurs, the militants seal the area, remove the bodies and secretly bury them. Then, they slap the label of ‘martyr’ on all the deceased. Two, the locals live in an environment of constant and violent intimidation. Therefore, their testimonies, on the rare occasion that they are available, are often tainted.

Mr Guillaume Lavallee of the Agence France-Presse reported earlier this month that any local who dares to speak in support of drone strikes is abducted, tortured and murdered by the militants — their last moments caught on tape and distributed in the area. The news report quotes Gul Wali Wazir (not his real name) from South Waziristan tribal area who says: “They (the militants) will cut his throat or shoot him, they will film his false confession, kill him and leave the body on the road with a DVD and a note saying that anybody who supports America and drones will face the same fate. I have seen a dozen such dead bodies.”

That despite these circumstances, Mr Lavallee’s interviews have led him to conclude that “a sizeable number of people in the country’s tribal areas support them (drone strikes)” must be noted. The report quotes Safdar Hayat Khan Dawar, former head of the Tribal Union of Journalists, from the militant-infested North Waziristan who says that the missiles were the preferred solution to the problem of militancy, as opposed to Pakistani Army’s operations. “The military option, people hate it because the army don’t kill militants but civilians”, says Mr Dawar. His opinions are echoed by Nizam Dawar, director of the Tribal Development Network, who asks: “Those people who became internally displaced persons due to the military operation, those people who are victimised by the Taliban and the militants, all the families whose family members are beheaded because they were accused of spying for America — why would they oppose drone attacks?” A recent Pakistani Government report has also noted that only a small percentage of those killed are civilians.

If the civilian casualty argument stands on thin ice, the one on Pakistani sovereignty holds no water at all. We now have enough evidence to say with certainty that Pakistan’s military and political establishment bartered away the country’s sovereignty years ago when it gave the US explicit permission to carry out these attacks. Former President Pervez Musharraf had said at that time that the drone strikes would be no big deal “as things fall out of the sky in Pakistan all the time”. In fact, his Government even took credit for some of the early drone strikes,  pretending that they had been carried out by the Pakistani Air Force.

Over the years, as relations between Washington and Islamabad have become relatively tenuous, the degree to which Pakistani support now extends to the US drone programme may have dipped. But it has not diminished entirely. The drones do not just sneak into Pakistani airspace, point and shoot, and then flee. They study their targets for hours, sometimes days, before they attack; in the November 21 case, locals said that they knew about the hovering drones for days. This cannot be done without insider support. The Pakistani establishment may feign ignorance and even froth at the mouth over the drone strikes for domestic consumption, but that does not change the facts.

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on November 28, 2013)

Taking Advantage of Taliban Flux

In the run-up to 2014, rival groups are re-aligning themselves, against the backdrop of clashing intelligence agencies and competing political interests. Can the US and Afghanistan seize on this to scuttle the groups from within?

When Latifullah Mehsud, a senior Pakistani Taliban leader, was taken by US forces in Afghanistan in October, a few eye-brows were raised in the strategic community, but overall it got little attention. Then, less than a month later, on November 1, his boss and group chief, Hakimullah Mehsud, was killed in a US drone strike in the tribal areas of North Waziristan, leading to much political drama in Pakistan. Now, another top leader belonging to the powerful Haqqani network which is allied to the Taliban and also operates out of North Waziristan, has been shot dead in  Islamabad.

It is difficult to establish if these incidents are related but there is little doubt that they point to an internal upheaval within the greater Taliban. In the run-up to the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014, rival groups are lobbying for more power and influence, against the backdrop of clashing intelligence agencies and competing political interests. 

For instance, when Latifullah Mehsud was taken in October by US forces in Afghanistan’s eastern Logar Province, he was returning from a meeting with Afghan intelligence officers on a prisoner swap deal. His capture angered Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who viewed it as an impediment to the ongoing peace talks with the Taliban. Similarly, the Pakistani Government threw a fit when Hakimullah Mehsud was killed. The strike came just one day before a state delegation was scheduled to meet Taliban leaders to initiate a dialogue, and Islamabad blamed the US for disrupting the talks. In fact, given its shrill response, one would not be faulted for assuming that it was just one step away from inking a peace deal with the insurgents. In reality though, the talks had not even begun and there was no guarantee that the deliberations would lead to any kind of truce.

On the contrary, there is reason to believe that the Taliban never cared for the talks but were just playing for time. They wanted to stave off a Pakistani military operation in Waziristan at this time, and they have been successful. The fighting season for this year is over and the next window will open only in the Spring of 2014. At that time, American troops will be withdrawing from Afghanistan while the country prepares for presidential polls. In other words, there will be instability in the region and the group can take advantage of that to seek shelter across the border in case the Pakistani military moves into Northern Waziristan.

Against this backdrop, Mullah Fazlullah elevation to the top job within the Pakistani Taliban is interesting. A hardliner even by Taliban standards — he ordered the hit on Malala Yousafzai — he established his leadership credentials during the Pakistani military’s operations in the Swat valley in 2007 and 2009. Afterwards, he fled to Afghanistan and now operates from Kunar Province. His recent exploits include the bomb attack that killed the Pakistani Army’s commander in the Swat valley, Major General Sanaullah Niazi.

Although Kabul has denied his presence in the country, Pakistani analysts have alleged that Mullah Fazlullah is supported by the Afghan intelligence. Either way, the consensus is that Mullah Fazlullah brings strategic depth to the Pakistani Taliban. This explains why the group picked him, cutting crossing tribal and regional faultlines. The mullah is a lowlander Pakhtun while traditionally the leadership of the Pakistani Taliban has rested with the Mehsud tribe from the highlands. Also, with Mullah Fazlullah at the helm, the Pakistani Taliban may move to his native place in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province — in which case, it will be the first time that the group sets up base in the settled areas of Pakistan. Conveniently, here Mr Imran Khan’s PTI is in power, and it has no qualms in supping with terrorist groups.

In fact, in these past weeks, the surreptitious relationship of the Pakistani establishment with the terror groups has once again been highlighted.

If Mehsud was killed just a few kilometres away from the Pakistani military’s fortress in Miranshah, the young Haqqani was shot in Islamabad, bringing back memories of Osama bin Laden’s safe haven in Abbottabad. Nasiruddin Haqqani, son of  Haqqani network founder Jallaluddin and brother of current chief Sirajuddin, was the group’s chief financier. He maintained a permanent residence in Islamabad, often travelled to the Gulf to secure funding and represented the Haqqanis at the disastrous Doha talks. It is not clear who is responsible for his death — rumour has it that it was the result of a fallout with his cousin who was talking to the Afghan intelligence — but it is a blow to the Pakistan-based group which is losing control over its stronghold in Afghanistan where the Zadran tribe of Khost may have broken ties with the group. 

The situation is in a flux. The question here is: Will state agencies (Afghans, Pakistanis and Americans) take advantage of the shifting dynamics to scuttle the groups from within. Before you answer that, factor this in: In 2012, after Malala was shot, the Americans refused to hunt down Mullah Fazlullah in Afghanistan, as they viewed him as an ‘other-side-of-the-border’ problem.

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on November 14, 2013)

Sliver of Hope in the Middle East

Israel’s security cooperation with Egypt has strengthened in the past two years, and a mutual dissatisfaction with US policy has brought it on the same page as Saudi Arabia. Will the Jewish nation’s ties with its neighbours finally blossom in the Arab Spring?

In his address to the Winter Session of the Knesset earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made an important comment that has gone largely unnoticed. He said: “For the first time since the establishment of the State of Israel, a growing understanding is taking root in the Arab world, and it is not always said softly. This understanding, that Israel is not the enemy of Arabs and that we have a united front on many issues, might advance new possibilities in our region.” The statements were made in reference to the tremendous upheaval that the region has witnessed since 2011 and placed against the background narrative of radical Islam gaining ground in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Prime Minister Netanyahu now believes that this narrative is flawed; that radical Islam’s assumption of power is “neither inevitable or nor irreversible”, as the common man doesn’t support the extremists.

While only time will tell if Mr Netanyahu’s assessments (which many believe to be a tad bit too optimistic) are correct, and more importantly if Israel will be able to leverage these shifts in regional power equations to push for a less-hostile neighbourhood, there is, however, some reason to hope for the better. We see this primarily in Israel’s relations with Egypt and to a lesser extent with Saudi Arabia.

In the case of Egypt, Israel’s peace with the world’s largest Arab nation has held strong despite the tumultuous changes that have taken place in that country since 2011. In fact, when the autocratic but relatively secular regime of President Hosni Mubarak was ousted, there were concerns that the Egypt-Israel peace treaty that has been the anchor for regional stability for four decades now, would fall apart. These concerns gained strength especially after the Muslim Brotherhood, which barely recognises Israel’s right to exist, was voted to power last year and Mr Mohammed Morsi became President. And his removal from office earlier this year did little to assuage those fears.

Yet, despite all of this, the treaty has not fallen apart — as many had feared. Instead, it has paved the way for unprecedented military and strategic cooperation between Israel and Egypt in the past two years. As Ehud Yaari at the Washington Institute notes, “Israeli and Egyptian officers hold almost daily meetings and have established an efficient system of communications. This cooperation stems from a mutual interest in curbing the terrorist factions that have emerged in Sinai over the past decade, threatening both the Israeli border and the Egyptian control over the peninsula.”

A good example of this kind of cooperation, and the mutual trust that it quietly engenders, lies in the fact that earlier this year when Egypt wanted to temporarily deploy its troops in areas of eastern Sinai where they are generally not allowed, Israel agreed. This was an especially big deal because the sanctioned deployment was in excess of what the peace treaty provides for.

Zack Gold, who studies Israeli-Egyptian security cooperation in the Sinai Peninsula, has also observed that “Jihadi action over the past two years has purposefully attempted to embarrass the Egyptian military, expose Israeli-Egyptian cooperation, and draw Israel into a cross-border response.” In an attempt to inject bad blood between Egyptian and Israeli troops, terrorists in fact raided Israeli targets wearing Egyptian uniforms.

Yet, in spite of these many challenges, the treaty has proved to be resilient much like it had during previous times of turbulence — such as the two Palestinian Intifadas, the two Lebanon wars and rounds of fighting Israel-Hamas fighting in the Gaza strip. While the treaty may have failed to forge greater socio-economic cooperation between the two countries of the kind that had been envisaged at the end of the Yom Kippur war, the last war waged by an Arab nation against Israel, its strategic benefits cannot be overstated. Not only has it fostered a ‘cold peace’ between the two nations, protecting lives and territory, it has also now seemingly encouraged Israeli-Egypt cooperation on the global platform.

For instance, after the Egyptian military ousted President Morsi from office, Israel lobbied hard with Washington, DC, to not label it a coup — even though that was exactly what it was. Terming it as such would have immediately ended the flow of all American aid to Egypt and upset the generals in Cairo. Of course, the Obama Administration has since then still partially suspended its hefty aid package to Egypt, its biggest Arab ally, at a time of widespread instability in the Maghreb and Mashreq, and no doubt the decision has come under intense scrutiny from several quarters.

Some experts, such as Princeton scholar Sharanbir Grewal, believe that it was the Obama Administration’s “smartest possible option”. Writing for a Washington Post blog, he notes that by halting cash assistance and delivery of large-scale military systems such as F-16 fighter jets, Apache helicopters, M1A1 tanks, and Harpoon missiles, while leaving support for counter-terrorism programmes and economic assistance untouched, Washington, DC, has demonstrated “resourcefulness in maximizing what little leverage it has over Egypt.” He argues that the US has hit the generals where it hurts them the most (the boys in Cairo love their big, shiny, toys) while causing almost no damage to American national interests.

But most policy-makers and security analysts do not share his optimism. While some have criticised the Obama Administration for cutting too much aid that will only lead to further erosion of Washington’s leverage in Cairo, others believe that it has cut too little and, therefore, exposed itself as a toothless tiger desperate for Egyptian support to maintain its influence in the Arab world. And then are others who believe that the partial cut sends out yet another muddled message of the kind that has come to characterise the Obama Administration’s Arab Spring policy. Ultimately, though the strongest criticism of America’s decision to cut aid to Egypt has come from what many would consider to be an unlikely quarter: The State of Israel.

Irrespective of the merits of the debate on US aid to Egypt, the point to be noted here is that it was yet another instance of diverging Israeli and American interests in the region. Washington’s decision to cut aid to Egypt came around the same time it chose to respond positively to Iranian President Hasan Rouhani’s peace overtures. This has sent alarm bells ringing in Jerusalem, where Prime Minister Netanyahu has warned against his counterpart in Tehran being a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and also in Riyadh where the royals have made clear that the US is violating the terms of their protection racket by warming up to Tehran. Clearly, mutual dissatisfaction over US foreign policy has brought Israel and Saudi Arabia closer than ever before. It is, of course, still unclear if Israel in the near future will be able to have peaceful ties with its Arab neighbours but a sliver of hope seems to be emerging.

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on October 31, 2013)

Futile Bid at Damage Control

Foreign policy will not be among the glorious legacies that Manmohan Singh will leave behind. But that will not be for want of trying, although on many occasions he blundered badly. Ties with Pakistan remain strained, since he has been repeatedly outsmarted 

Coming at the tail end of his almost decade-long prime ministerial tenure, Mr Manmohan Singh’s trip to the US for the 68th session of the United Nations General Assembly should, ideally, have been about consolidating, if not celebrating, his foreign policy legacy. Instead, it turned out to be a last-ditch attempt to salvage his image. Be it his lacklustre speech to the General Assembly or his meetings with US President Barack Obama, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, each one of these was essentially just an exercise in damage control. Here’s how:

The Singh-Sharif Meet: That this one was even held in the first place is  a little victory for Mr Singh. The meeting was not confirmed until the very last minute, and exactly a day after it was finalised a terror attack in Jammu that claimed nearly a dozen lives, put tremendous pressure on the Prime Minister to call off the talk. Such incidents have been happening with increased frequency since Mr Nawaz Sharif was sworn in as the Prime Minister of Pakistan earlier this year. Earlier, we had the brutal beheading of two Indian soldiers in January. Since then, there has continued ceasefire violations along the Line of Control — and most in New Delhi believed that the time was not right for a high-level summit. But having still committed himself to the New York meet, Mr Singh was right in not caving to forces that wanted to disrupt the peace process. Unfortunately, this is pretty much the only positive take-away from the Singh-Sharif meet — and few are possibly more disappointed about this than Mr Singh himself.

Having spent his entire nine years in office nurturing the fond hope that he will be the one to script a landmark India-Pakistan peace deal, sometimes even at the cost of India’s security interests, in the final analysis Mr Singh has been able to do next to nothing. This is despite the fact that he inherited Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s legacy of vastly improved bilateral ties between the two countries. He clearly failed to carry it forward. In this context, the New York meeting was little more than a pointless conciliatory gesture from India that made the Pakistani Prime Minister (who came to power promising better ties with New Delhi) look good, and gave the latter the opportunity to bid Mr Singh farewell.

At best, it was also an excuse for some diplomatic amusement — and no, this is not a reference to Mr Sharif’s PJ about village women, but that he, of all people, would whine about India taking up Pakistan’s shenanigans with the US when it was he who had pleaded for Washington to intervene during the Kargil conflict.

The Singh-Obama Meet: This one came at a time when the India-US bilateral has slowed down significantly, having initially raced forth into the 21st century. The decade between 1998 and 2008 saw the India-US relationship come into its own with the world’s largest democracy forging a strong sense of fellowship with the world’s most powerful democracy and acknowledging each other as natural partners. For the first time, Washington’s India policy was dehyphenated from Pakistan while the landmark nuclear deal literally energised the India-US bilateral. In Washington, President George W Bush had used all his political capital to push through that deal while in New Delhi, Prime Minister Singh put his Government at stake. But, if in those years, India and the US were like teenagers in the throes of first love, as one analyst put it, post-2008 their relationship seems to have matured and settled into a humdrum routine. And so, ambitious plans for bilateral cooperation have got stuck in the bureaucratic maze that is as much Delhi as Washington — think of the nuclear liability clause, the tightening of the visa regime and restrictive trade practices. Unfortunately neither Mr Singh, who has already been reduced to a lame-duck Prime Minister, nor Mr Obama, whose Government is shutting down, was currently in a position to resolve any of these issues, even though now would have been the time to give the India-US bilateral that extra push so that it doesn’t plateau before reaching its full potential. And so, the nuclear negotiations, for one, have been left for a later date.

Still, the meeting was not as much of a failure as some had predicted it would be. President Obama, for instance, deserves credit for being graceful enough to spare Mr Singh the litany of complaints against Indian trade practices that American companies have thrown at him. Similarly, Prime Minister Singh, often derided for being soft on terror, deserves a word in praise for highlighting the issue of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, particularly the support that organisations like the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba receive from state actors in that country. Indeed, Mr Singh’s description of Pakistan as the “epicentre of terror” took many by surprise. Also, talks on defence co-operation between Ashton Carter and Shiv Shankar Menon have been positive, with the US offering a deal to India that, it claims, it has not offered to its Nato allies even.

The Singh-Hasina Meet: Though largely ignored in the international and the national media, this was possibly the most important of Mr Singh’s engagement, given that it was the only meeting that had the potential of immediate impact. While the Prime Minister’s discussions with Prime Minister Sharif and President Obama would have done little to change the ground realities of either the India-Pakistan or the India-US bilateral, his talks with Ms Hasina was crucial to India-Bangladesh relations, which are at a crossroads. This bilateral too has evolved significantly in the recent past, thanks primarily to Ms Hasina who has left no stone unturned to address India’s primary concerns regarding terror fugitives hiding in Bangladesh. But Mr Singh and his Government have failed to put the deliverables from their end — the land border agreement and the Teesta water deal — on the table. This has left Ms Hasina, who is bracing for a tough re-election battle later this year, in an uncomfortable position. The Prime Minister has promised to push these measures through during the Winter Session of Parliament. In the meantime, the progress made in the power-sharing deal — the two leaders will jointly inaugurate a power transmission system on October 5 — is good diplomacy. It will hopefully placate to some extent an otherwise very disappointed Ms Hasina.

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on October 3, 2013)

Deal for Everybody and Nobody

The US-Russia deal on Syria will neither bring peace nor will it punish the Assad regime. Yet, it is being dubbed a success because it makes world leaders, who have failed to stop the killing of more than a lakh people, feel good about themselves

At a Press conference in London on September 9, US Secretary of State John Kerry was asked if there was anything the Assad regime could do to stop Western military intervention in Syria, which at the time seemed imminent. America’s top diplomat replied somewhat oddly: “Sure”, he said, adding, “He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week. Turn it over, all of it, without delay, and allow a full and total accounting for that. But he isn’t about to do it. And it can’t be done, obviously.”

The State Department downplayed Mr Kerry’s response saying that he was just being rhetorical. But Mr Kerry’s counterpart in Russia, a diplomat of far greater calibre, Mr Sergey Lavrov, seized the moment. He spoke to Mr Kerry in-flight and before the American had even landed in Washington, DC, the situation on the ground had shifted considerably: Russia had offered to convince Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, its friend and ally in Damascus, to hand over to the international community his chemical weapons stockpile — and in the process, had suddenly averted war, at least for the time being.

After that 14-minute-long in-flight  conversation on Monday (September 9) between Mr Kerry and Mr Lavrov, things moved at breakneck pace. With America having consented to the deal, Mr Obama called off the scheduled Congressional vote on military intervention; Mr Kerry, Mr Lavrov and their posse of security aides hurriedly met in Geneva on Thursday to hammer out the details; the deal was finalised on Saturday and quickly accepted by the Assad regime which, by the way, until then had not even acknowledged the existence of its chemical weapons stockpile.

The following Monday, UN inspectors confirmed that chemical weapons were used in the August 21 attack in east Ghouta that triggered this international response, but stopped short of pinning the blame on the Assad regime; on Tuesday, all five permanent members of the UN Security Council met in New York to discuss the deal and negotiations will continue over the next few days.

Anyway, a final resolution that can be presented before the entire 15-member Council is not possible unless the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons’ Executive Council in The Hague approves a plan on how to deal with Syria’s chemical weapons. This plan is not expected until Friday at the earliest.

In the meantime, the deal, dubbed as the greatest US-Russia joint diplomatic effort since the unification of Germany, has already run into troubled waters. While the rest of the Western powers want military intervention in case of non-compliance to be part of the deal, Russia believes that such a clause would hamper the peace effort and make the Assad regime uncooperative — especially since there is no definite proof that it was Damascus that carried out the August 21 attack. Russia is also opposed to the draft resolution being covered by Chapter 7 of the UN Charter which gives the Security Council authority to enforce its decisions through the use of force or the imposition of sanctions. Instead, in case of non-compliance, it wants members to come back to the Security Council and seek a fresh mandate for military intervention. In all probability, UN diplomats will just draft a resolution whose deliberately vague language will appease all parties.

So let us assume that the UN Security Council will pass a resolution paving the way for the transfer and eventual destruction of the Assad regime’s chemical weapons. The question then is:How will it be implemented? The answer is President Assad will lead UN weapons inspectors to his stockpiles and then stand aside while they take over his weapons — even as a civil war rages in the backdrop.

If you are sceptical already, wait till we get to the details. First, there is no clarity on what will be covered under the chemical weapons tag and what kind of delivery systems will be neutralised since many of these systems also deliver conventional weapons. Second, there is no solid intelligence on the quantity of chemical weapons stocked in Syria and/or their exact locations. There were supposedly 42 sites before the war but now the regime has been moving the weapons all over the country. Third, after the chemicals have been located, it will still take several months, if not years, to destroy them (think of the nightmarish Iraqi experience). And it will require boots on the ground — apart from the UN inspectors, the Pentagon estimates at least 75,000 troops will be needed to secure the sites. Finally, of course, all of this will have to happen in the middle of a civil war wherein UN inspectors and foreign troops will be walking right into the heart of the Syrian battlefield with the Assad regime as their guardian angel.

This overt dependence on the Assad regime is one of the biggest pitfalls of the deal because Damascus has proven itself to be unreliable and untrustworthy. In the past three years, it has repeatedly made promises to buy time from the international community and then violated them. There is no reason to believe that President Assad will now cooperate with the West. Even Muammar Gaddafi, who voluntarily gave up his chemical weapons to end Libya’s international isolation, had put away a secret stash that was discovered unguarded in the middle of the desert after his death in 2011.

For all practical purposes, this Syria peace deal is ready to crash even before it gets off the ground. So why are world leaders scrambling all over the globe to bring this together? The answer is simple: Because it makes them, all of them — Messrs Putin, Obama and Assad — look good.

The deal is a diplomatic coup for Mr Putin who has resurrected Russia’s image from a Cold War relic to a 21st century superpower that is capable of protecting its allies and resisting the US-led West. It has also helped him reiterate Moscow’s influence in West Asia where it had been relegated to the position of a bit player vis-à-vis Washington.

Interestingly, Mr Putin had first suggested the deal to Mr Obama at the G-20 summit in St Petersburg (before the Kerry-Lavrov talk) but neither the US President nor British Prime Minister David Cameron, with whom the matter was also discussed, saw any merit in the idea. But clearly, the Russian President was a few steps ahead — which explains why at a Press conference soon after, he referred to a possible peace deal without giving any detail.

As for President Obama, the deal is the desperate face-saver he needed to extricate himself from the ‘Red Line’ narrative in which he had foolishly entwined himself. It also means he no longer has to go to a war he didn’t want to in the first place — that Nobel was beginning to feel heavy.

Finally, for President Assad, the deal allows him to also breathe easy now that the chances of a military intervention have been drastically reduced. It also means he can continue with his daily massacres, as long as he doesn’t use chemical weapons again — which works just fine for him.

In fact, the deal has effectively taken the spotlight away from the killings by conventional weapons and focussed it narrowly on chemical weapons. This brings us to the only losers in the deal: The people of Syria, who will continue to be butchered by both the regime and the rebel forces.

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on September 19, 2013)

Maldives Gets a Second Chance at Democracy

By securing the largest vote-share in the September 7 election, deposed President Mohamed Nasheed has re-established his popular credentials. But he still has to complete an uphill trek before he can move back into the Muliaage

Nineteen months after their first democratically elected leader was coerced out of office, on September 7, the people of Maldives returned to the hustings once again to take a second shot at democracy. They came in large numbers — voter turnout was at an impressive 88 per cent — and reinforced their mandate in favour of deposed President Mohamed Nasheed. The charismatic leader who first came to power in 2008 after defeating Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, Asia’s longest serving autocract, this time received  an impressive 45.45 per cent of the votes. Former Minister and Mr Gayoom’s half-brother Abdulla Yameen came in second with 25.35 per cent votes, edging past business tycoon Gasim Ibrahim, who secured 24.07 per cent, while incumbent President Mohamed Waheed trailed far behind with 5.13 per cent of votes. However, even though Mr Nasheed has the largest vote-share, it still falls about five per cent (or approximate 10,000 votes) short of the stipulated 50 per cent-plus-one vote minimum needed to take charge. And so, on September 28, Mr Nasheed will face Mr Yameen in an electoral run-off.

This one will be a close call. Unlike in the first round of polling where it was a foregone conclusion that Mr Nasheed, arguably Maldives’s most popular leader, will secure the largest vote bloc, the dynamics change significantly in the second round as the non-Nasheed votes will tend to coalesce in favour of Mr Yameen. In this context that Mr Gasim, supposedly the country’s richest man, may emerge as the king-maker because his vote-share —considered to be the most transferable — could go either way.

If Mr Gasim throws his weight in favour of Mr Nasheed, as he had done back in 2008, the former President will have a strong chance of returning to power. However, Mr Gasim already has a loose (although some say reluctant) alliance of sorts with Mr Yameen. The two reportedly also have some commercial joint ventures planned together as well as share the other’s view of Maldives as a staunchly Islamic nation. If they do come together in the second round, Mr Nasheed will have a tough battle ahead of him as the Yameen-Gasim vote-share combine just about makes it to the 50 per cent mark. In such a situation, Mr Nasheed will absolutely have to win over the five per cent that went to Mr Waheed in the first round.

This is not an entirely unimaginable prospect. Mr Waheed contested as an independent candidate but represented a coalition of two small political outfits alongside two major players, the Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party and the religious Adhaalath Party. It is unlikely that Mr Nasheed with win over AP supporters but he should be able to convert the significant support base of the DRP — a party that he believes is ideologically most similar to his own MDP.

Ultimately, though, these are all backhand calculations and unless more details emerge about pre-poll alliances it is difficult to make a detailed assessment. As for New Delhi, it would, of course, like to see Mr Nasheed return to power not only because he is an avowed friend of India but also because he is Maldives’s best bet for a stable and prosperous future which again is in India’s interests given the archipelago’s strategic location in the Indian Ocean region. After all, Mr Nasheed was the only presidential candidate who had a clear and detailed policy blueprint for the country.

Having initially bungled its response to the crisis in Male last year, New Delhi has since been able to get its act together. The Indian High Commission in Male did well to give refuge to Mr Nasheed earlier this year.India also worked with the US and other international partners to ensure that Mr Nasheed could fight the election in the first place — a major achievement given that the incumbent regime tried repeatedly to put him behind bars.  

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on September 13, 2013)

Reckless or feckless in Syria

The US is determined to punish the Assad regime for using chemical weapons and violating ‘red lines’ through a military intervention. Inadvisable as this may be, even a narrow targeted attack might be effective if well-planned. However, this does not seem to be the case

The debate on foreign military intervention in Syria is as complicated as the situation in Syria is itself, and it is difficult to do justice to the whole horde of issues — political, ideological, economic and strategic — that shape the conversation in this regard. So, let’s strip the discourse to its bare essentials and focus on two key issues here: First, why does President Barack Obama want to intervene in Syria? And second, what exactly does he plan to do?

The Assad regime has been at war with its own people since 2011 when it first used brutal police force to crackdown on peaceful protestors. Since then, President Bashar al-Assad has slowly but steadily intensified his campaign, using artillery fire and scud missiles even, and each time the West has responded with nothing more than a bland condemnatory statement. What changed in recent weeks is the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime — President Obama had designated this as a ‘red line’ — that reportedly killed  almost 1,500 people on August 21.

This flagrant breach of what the White House now likes to believe was an ‘international red line’ has to be punished, the Obama Administration has decided. The problem is that there is still no concrete proof that it was, in fact, the Assad regime that ordered the CW attack. The US intelligence assessment in this regard is flimsy; the UN is still investigating the attack; the French are the only ones with a detailed analysis of Mr Assad’s CW stockpile but still cannot pin the blame firmly on Damascus.

Also, the French and American estimates for the number of dead — 400 and 1,400+ respectively — do not match. The British peg the figure even lower at around 300. This is an important distinction because there were chemical attacks prior to August 21 but none elicited such a response, presumably because the body count was low. This brings us to the fallacy of using chemical weapons attacks as a ‘red line’ in the first place.

First, there is no evidence to suggest that chemical weapons kill more people than conventional weapons. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Second, there is an underlying assumption that there is something especially horrific about using a chemical agent as opposed to a conventional weapon. That does not make much sense. As the chemist James Conant, involved in the United States’ chemical weapons programme, wrote: “I did not see in 1917…  why tearing a man’s guts out by high explosive shell is to be preferred to maiming him by attacking his lungs.” In fact, some scholars have even argued that chemical weapons are more humane than conventional weapons but that is beside the point. The crux of the matter is that the international brouhaha over a CW attack is largely misplaced.

But still, let’s go with the flow and assume that President Assad who has been on a murderous spree for two years has now committed an exceptionally terrible crime by gassing his people, and therefore, deserves to be punished by the US (and the international community) or else it will be setting a dangerous precedent for other despots around the world. This brings us to the second aspect of how exactly President Obama intends to hand out this punishment — and it is here that the situation gets really murky. 

President Obama has proposed targeted, signature strikes — America fires a few missiles and bombs key military assets, thereby, weakening the regime and possibly forcing President Assad’s regime to the negotiating table. On the face of it, this seems like a quick, clean, surgical operation but dig below the surface and there lies a can of worms. First, what do these strikes hope to achieve? Is the US looking only to ‘deter’ further CW attacks or is it looking to significantly ‘degrade’ President Assad’s military capabilities?

If the elimination of chemical weapons-related targets is the only aim of US intervention, this is not a practical option. As military experts Chandler P Atwood and Michael Knights point out, the Assad regime is likely to be taking ‘defensive measures’ such as moving the stockpiles around, making it extremely difficult to target them unless the US can respond with persistent intelligence collection for which it will have to establish full control over Syrian airspace. Also, even after these stockpiles have been discovered, the US cannot bomb the chemical weapons. Boots on the ground will be needed. The US can choose to focus on CW delivery systems but even that will require rocket launchers, missiles and aircraft — in other words, a major military operation.

The other option, as Messers Atwood and Knight note, is to hit President Assad’s military assets such as the Damascus-based Fourth Armoured Division which was supposedly responsible for August 21 attack and the lethal 155th Brigade, led by the President’s brother. The US could also attack symbolic targets such as the Air Force intelligence headquarters and military bases in Dumair, Saiqal, Tiyas and Hama and ‘People’s Army’ units that are financed by Iran and trained by its militant Shia proxy Hezbollah. 

In fact, single targeted strikes can actually be quite effective, as Brigadier General Michael Herzog points out. For instance, this year Israel attacked two weapons shipments intended for Hezbollah and also the Scientific Studies and Research Centre in Damascus that was reportedly involved in the development of biological and chemical weapons. All three were targeted strikes (of the kind that Mr Obama fancies) and they were all successful in achieving Israel’s narrow goal of preventing Hezbollah from receiving weapons. But, the key to that success was careful planning and the element of surprise.

Unfortunately, President Obama does not seem to have planned targets and he has already frittered away the surprise advantage. In fact, he if really wanted to launch targeted strikes, he should have done it months ago when Mr Assad was losing ground and the rebels were advancing. A military intervention at that time could have actually tipped the balance in the Opposition’s favour (although, this is not to say that Syria’s Islamist infested, fractured rebel groups are a welcome alternative to the Assad regime). But the calculus has since changed, especially after Hezbollah threw in its weight in favour of the regime. Today, the Assad regime is in a stronger position and there is no reason for the President to willingly give up power.

There is also the matter of civilian casualties which cannot be ruled out, no matter how surgically precise the strikes, as most military experts acknowledge. Even Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday that while the US can restrain its own actions, there are no guarantees for how the Assad regime (and its allies in the region) will retaliate.

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on September 15, 2013)

Left to Fend for Itself in Asia

India remains an important player in the New Silk Road project which hopes to integrate the Afghan economy into that of Central and South Asia. But can it succeed without the US's help? America seems to have given up on the initiative

 From all available reports, there isn’t much to write home about the first India-China dialogue on Central Asia that happened in Beijing last week, apart from the fact that it happened. Still the two-day meet, which was similar in structure to the recent bilateral dialogues on Africa, West Asia, Afghanistan and counter-terrorism, managed to briefly move the spotlight to Central Asia — the newest theatre of Sino-Indian rivalry and the one where New Delhi is seemingly performing the worst.

The Dialogue may have been designed to bring both countries on the same page as they increase their engagement in Central Asia, but New Delhi knows well that Beijing has long since raced ahead of it. In fact, India lags behind not just China but all other major players in the region — definitely the US and Russia but also Iran and Turkey. This is despite the fact that India has civilisational ties with Central Asia that go back centuries; more recently, New Delhi has also made a conscious effort towards strengthening its presence in that region. The Government of India’s official Connect Central Asia policy was unveiled by Minister of State for External Affairs E Ahamed at the India-Central Asia Dialogue in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek in June 2012. More than a year later, the policy remains more aspirational than it is in the actual.

Yet, a strong presence in Central Asia is important for India for two key factors: Energy security and military security. In the first case, India currently receives almost all of its oil and gas from West Asia but given how volatile that region can be, it is a good idea to look for other suppliers. Moreover, as the country’s energy demands continue to grow, New Delhi has no choice but to tap into other sources. In this context, energy-rich and proximate Central Asia is best positioned to become India’s next big oil and gas supplier.

China faces much the same challenges (growing economy, growing population) — except that it seems to have responded to them much better, as is evident from the deep inroads that it has already made into the Central Asian energy market. Beijing’s two trillion-dollar-strong foreign exchange reserves and a ruthlessly efficient Government not encumbered by the demands of democracy, have meant it has consistently managed to out-bid New Delhi in oil deals not just in Central Asia but across the world. For example, just weeks before the dialogue in Beijing, India lost to China the world’s largest oil find in five decades — the giant Kashagan oilfield in Kazakhstan.

In November 2012, India’s state-run ONGC Videsh Limited had struck a deal with America’s ConocoPhillips to buy the latter’s 8.4 per cent stake in Kashagan for five billion dollars.  However, the deal fell through in July when the Kazakh Government itself stepped in and informed ConocoPhillips that its own national oil company, KazMunaiGaz, will buy the American company’s stake for the same amount. Kazakh law allows the Government certain pre-emption rights as a result of which it has the authority to buy any oil asset for sale in the country at the price agreed on by the buyer and seller. KazMunaiGaz will now sell that stake to China National Petroleum Corp for a reported $5.3-5.4 billion.

But China is only one of India’s problems in Central Asia. What has most significantly limited New Delhi’s diplomatic efforts in that region is a stubborn Pakistan which has wholly refused India overland access to Central Asia, through Afghanistan. Ideally this would have been the shortest route for India; however, that is not to be — one of the big reasons why the ambitious Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India oil pipeline project, for example, has been a non-starter.

Consequently, New Delhi has had to look for new routes that bypass Pakistan altogether. Towards that end, the North-South Transportation Corridor which connects India to the Central Asian region through Iran was envisaged as a game-changer. Initiated in 2003, this project aims to connect the port in Mumbai to the Iranian ports of Chabahar and Bandar Abbas through maritime transport, and then develop road and rail networks linking these two ports with Afghanistan and other Central Asian republics. Some initial progress was made in this regard — India’s Border Road Organisation invested $136 million to set up a road link from Zaranj to Delaran which was inaugurated in 2009. This 215km long road is a crucial part of what is known as Afghanistan’s garland road network that goes around the country connecting Herat to Kabul via Mazar-e-Sharif and Kandahar. But this road link apart, the North-South Transportation Corridor has mostly been gathering dust for a decade now.

In the meantime, the Chinese have aggressively built similar road and rail networks penetrating deep into the heart of Central Asian Region. The Karakoram Highway, which is under-construction in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and stands a direct threat to India’s security interests in that region, is also essentially an extension of this plan, and so is the Gwadar port in Pakistan that is being developed as a counter-balance to the Chabahar port in Iran, located less than 200km away.

This brings us to military-security aspect of India-Central Asia dynamic. As of now, India’s military footprint in that region is next to nothing. New Delhi had sought to shore up its prospects by taking over the Ayni air base in Tajikistan which would have given tremendous strategic depth in the region but its plans have most definitely been thwarted by Russia, the big brother in the region. India began renovating the Ayni air-field, located just outside the Tajik capital of Dushanbe, in 2004 and up until the end of 2010, Indian engineers were still working there. However, in the last three years, the Tajik Government which depends considerably on Moscow for financial aid, seems to have made clear that it will only let Russia use the air-base.

India’s other military assets in the region include a military hospital in Farkhor, also in Tajikistan. Set up in 2001 to treat Northern Alliance members fighting the Taliban, it was shut down after the US removed the militant group from power. But in recent years, there have been talks of re-opening that field hospital. 

The India-Tajik relationship is as far as India’s military presence goes in that region. And while there have been some positive indications of improving that footprint, it is unlikely to change significantly in the near future. Not only because China and Pakistan will do all that they can to limit India’s presence but also because Russia will probably not go all out to support India. The US is the only country which has unequivocally stated that it would like India to emerge as its regional partner (this explains Russia’s reluctance) especially post the 2014 Afghan pullout.

India remains an important player in its New Silk Road project that hopes to integrate the Afghan economy into that of Central and South Asia. But America’s diminished clout at this point (the NSR project has been all but discarded) it is unclear how far Washington, DC will be able to help on the ground. In other words, India is on its own.

(This article was published in the Op-ed sector of The Pioneer on August 22, 2013.)