Hello people,
One thing always wonders me that why indian leaders/pms were always a letdown in foreign policy wrt to pakistan.From nehru to Manmohan singh all pm offered olive branch to pakistan only to be backstabbed later.But then why dont indian pms/leaders/political class/media etc cant see through this vice double game of pakistan and keep on starting aman ki asha every time.Now that MMs and shiv shankar menon combo team of Sharm-e-sheikh fiasco are back with their olive branch again to pakisstan under usa pressure as it was last year in july at Sharm-e-sheikh,i thought its necessary to start a thread to keep an eye on this olive branch too as another fiasco by MMS team waiting to happen through various news article just to give perceptive as wats happening.
India willing to normalise ties with Pakistan: Krishna
‘India’s security problems are graver than America’s in relation to jehadi terrorism’
One thing always wonders me that why indian leaders/pms were always a letdown in foreign policy wrt to pakistan.From nehru to Manmohan singh all pm offered olive branch to pakistan only to be backstabbed later.But then why dont indian pms/leaders/political class/media etc cant see through this vice double game of pakistan and keep on starting aman ki asha every time.Now that MMs and shiv shankar menon combo team of Sharm-e-sheikh fiasco are back with their olive branch again to pakisstan under usa pressure as it was last year in july at Sharm-e-sheikh,i thought its necessary to start a thread to keep an eye on this olive branch too as another fiasco by MMS team waiting to happen through various news article just to give perceptive as wats happening.
India willing to normalise ties with Pakistan: Krishna
India has indicated its willingness to normalise ties with Pakistan following indications that Islamabad is serious about prosecuting the masterminds of the Mumbai terror attacks in November 2008. The first step in this direction would be the Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram’s end of the month visit to Rawalpindi to attend a meeting of SAARC Ministers where he could “get a chance to have useful exchanges” with Pakistani leaders in addition to the planned multilateral meetings, External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna told newspersons accompanying him for a visit to Kuwait.
Taking note of Pakistan’s readiness to accept the lone surviving gunman’s confessional statement as evidence to prosecute the planners of the Mumbai attacks and other evidence with respect to boats used to ferry the attackers from Karachi, Mr. Krishna said India interpreted these as constructive signals. “Any step forward in the direction of Pakistan also investigating the Mumbai attacks will certainly make it easier for India to carry out normalisation of business with Pakistan,” observed Mr. Krishna.
Asked whether India would move in the direction of reviving the composite dialogue if Pakistan continued to show resolve to bring to book its nationals involved in the Mumbai attacks, the Minister felt “India should be quite satisfied with Pakistan taking a few steps to investigate the Mumbai attacks”. He hoped Pakistan would continue to focus its attention on rooting out elements plotting violence in India and termed such an attitude as “extra helpful” to Indo-Pak bilateral relations and dialogue.
The External Affairs Minister had given indications of the possibility of a change in India’s position a day earlier when he said the “doors were not closed” to talks with Pakistan but it should continue to demonstrate its steadfastness to combating anti-India formations.
India had broken off all talks with Pakistan immediately after the Mumbai terror attacks but unlike the rift in bilateral ties after the Parliament House attacks in December 2001, it had not sundered people-to-people and trade links in the hope that the Pakistani leadership would also take the fight against terrorism to its eastern borders with India
‘India’s security problems are graver than America’s in relation to jehadi terrorism’
Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Coll, author of books such as Ghost Wars and The Bin Ladens, was South Asia bureau chief for The Washington Post between 1989 and 1992, during which he did some incisive reporting and writing about Pakistan and Afghanistan.
In an interview with The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta on NDTV 24x7’s Walk the Talk, Coll speaks about terror in Pakistan and Afghanistan and Obama’s response to terror.
Steve, from the time when you were in India, 1989 on, there was trouble in Afghanistan. We travelled for some of those stories together, during the first jehad, the ‘good jehad’. Those look like such innocent times now.
Yeah, they do. It was an accident of professional assignment to be travelling in that first jehad and understand how complicated it was and what the structures were that were feeding this pattern of radicalisation during that war, particularly in Pakistan. And because US policy was so heavily involved in the first jehad, in the anti-Soviet jehad, and I was out there for The Washington Post, my colleagues thought I was a little obsessed with subjects like ISI, and how the pipeline worked and what the political choices were. A whole generation of journalists that grew up in that time understood after 9/11 the sort of deep structures that had created that.
Choose how protected you want to be, easily
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So we all became terror junkies or intrigue junkies or ISI junkies?
ISI junkies, yeah. But for many journalists who travelled there, Afghanistan itself sort of gets under your skin. It’s a place apart. I have travelled just about everywhere and there is really no place quite like it. Its independence, the way geography has sort of encapsulated the culture, the fact that it is a fairly young modern state but also a very old culture. And there is something about it, in war time also, that shaped the experiences of at least my generation of foreign correspondents. Lot of colleagues lost their lives, you saw a lot of suffering among Afghan civilians…this was a country that had been broken by outsiders but it was also very powerful.
Also, it is a very strange country where every tribe is like a sovereign republic. And yet, every tribe has more tribesmen in the neighbouring country than in Afghanistan. There are more Pashtuns in Pakistan than Afghanistan. More Tajiks in Tajikistan than Afghanistan... It is a peculiar place.
But the other thing that happened during that time--especially the period in the early 90s, after the Soviet left but before the Mujahideen triumphed in 1992--was that under Najeebullah, there was a state, however weak, however limited in Kabul. But there was a state that was shared by Afghans of all sorts of tribes and language groups and ethnic traditions. And so, that idea that there really was an Afghanistan worth fighting for did somehow survive, at least that phase of the war. After 9/11, it was common in the United States to see Afghanistan just as an ungovernable space dominated by tribes that would submit to no one. And I think a lot of journalists who had been around in that period when we were there, recognised that while tribal identity is important in Afghanistan, there is also a state.
And there is an Afghan nationalism. Very powerful.
Why is Afghanistan resilient under the pressure that it has faced and despite policy failures? It is because Afghans themselves are still trying to reclaim their own state.
Is that understood in Washington?
I think, partially. The one thing that has happened in the United States since 9/11 is that in the military, there are a lot of Americans who have now spent a lot of time on the ground in Afghanistan. They have now started to understand the place at the level of depth that was not available inside the system before 9/11. But, there is still an argument in Washington about what we were discussing, which is, is there really an Afghanistan that is worth investing in?
Like Iraq. If they pull out, can they leave behind a country that is still a hole, a sovereign hole?
Well, at least it can defend itself from the coercive revolutionary movements like the Taliban.
Or the ISI.
Or the ISI. Well, those two have been partners.
We started by saying we are a generation of ISI obsessed reporters. No city in the world is more obsessed with the ISI than New Delhi.
The ISI is a state within the state in Pakistan. It is a deep structure that has affected the Pakistani history and constrained the space in which Pakistani elites make very important decisions about their own national security doctrine. (But) the more you scrutinise ISI, the more you realise that like the Pakistani state itself, it is constrained by its own blind spots. It has internal diversity, there are arguments, there is corruption, there are multiple motivations going on at the same time. So, it is not as powerful as I think it sometimes gets represented as being, but its place today, within a very important debate in Pakistan about what kind of country Pakistan wants to be and what kind of defence and national security doctrine it wants to pursue, is still as powerful today as it was in the 80s.
On which side of that debate do you think the ISI belongs to now?
My impression from recent travel in Pakistan--that is over the last five-six years--is that since the Red Mosque incident (the July 2007 siege of Lal Masjid in Islamabad) and the emergence of domestic insurgency in Pakistan, ISI, like the Army, has no one view. There is an argument about where Pakistan’s interests lie exactly, with which group? What should we do with these groups tomorrow? What are the costs and benefits of pursuing the use of jehadi groups as an instrument of regional policy? Should we pursue it with some groups and not the other groups? And you see this playing out in the actions they are taking. So they will go after the Tehreek-e-Taliban, because those groups have explicitly made war against the ISI and the Pakistani states. But they are undecided, I would say, about the other groups, like Lashkar.
Some of us here think we are eternal skeptics on ISI and Pakistan. I, for example, have been writing that the Pakistanis, and the ISI in particular, are now indulging in a game of double nuancing. So they have got three sets of groups. They have got the Pakistani Taliban, who they will fight, because they threaten the Pakistani state and the Pakistani Army. There is the Afghan Taliban, who they will help the Americans fight a little bit but it does not suit them to have the Americans winning it. They would rather have a situation where both sides get tired and they can broker some kind of peace and install a friendly government. And then there is an entirely different third set, the Lashkar and the Jaish, who are still seen by many as a tactical and strategic asset or a force multiplier against India.
Do you think that is still reasonable?
That’s too reasonable. I think that I would add a couple of layers to that observation. One is that if you look at ISI’s own history, it is obvious that a pattern of failure is that they cannot control or categorise these groups as successfully as they would like to. And I think they become aware of the limits of their own “client management skills”. So, they have lost control of the lines of categories in this movement and they are aware of that to some extent because people they used to trust have walked into their cantonments and detonated themselves and taken the lives of their colleagues.
So, if I may use a metaphor that is relevant to the weather today, the ISI is getting caught or getting lost in the fog of the war it has created.
I think to some extent that is true. And it is certainly true in reference to the western groups. I mean to relationship between the Pakistani Taliban and the Afghan Taliban, remnants of the Al Qaeda group, group from Punjab that have migrated up to the border and now fused themselves with Tehreek-e-Taliban. That’s a mess. Unfortunately, they have not made a fundamental break with the idea of using these groups against India.
I am sorry to use the sort of Clausewitzian concept of ‘fog of war’ because a war that ISI is fighting is not a war that strategic theorist Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz would have imagined.
Yeah, there was a suicide attack in Muzaffarabad the other day, first time in years. It shows that the old structure is in turmoil and the ISI is not in control in the command booth the way it used to be. I am hopeful, though not optimistic, but I think you have to keep your mind open to the possibility that there is a debate going on among Pakistani elites, including the Army, about where their self-interest lies as individuals, where their corporate-interest lies as an Army, as an institution and where the national interest lies.
That is the question. What will drive them? Their own interest, corporate interest or national interest or a trinity of these or a hatred for India.
Well, I think if you look around the world, there is no conflict like this one. There is no state like India and Pakistan.
There is no state like Afghanistan. God never made one.
But there are lots of examples of very large countries that were debilitated by conflict, by internal conflict and by Frankenstein’s monsters that they created themselves that found their way out of that box through economic integration. So, I think the only answer that will create this tri-effective motivations--individual self-interest; corporate self-interest, that is the Army’s self-interest in access to enough GDP growth to be able to modernise, and national self-interest, the sense of how Pakistan can possibly survive and succeed--depends on normalisation within there. The end. That is where Pakistan’s national self-interests lie.
When you talk to people from that side--ISI, Pakistani Army, people who call the shots in Pakistan--do you think some of these changes are coming?
There was a minority of very senior officers around Musharraf who started pushing this argument forward. Musharraf himself, obviously for his own flawed reasons--ego, legacy project, all of that--was interested in this idea. The trouble is that the institutional arrangements in Pakistan have collapsed.
The only functioning institution is the Army.
…and it has got its hands full. The experience of Pakistan that is felt by the Army today is not only dominated by the very active insurgency that is targetting them, assassination attempts against brigadiers, suicide bombers penetrating cantonment perimeters. They are under siege. But they are also politically under siege. After Musharraf’s collapse, you meet young officers and they would talk very openly about the hostility that they met on the street in that period. The Army was discredited. Now, they have started rebuilding their position but they are back-footed in significant ways.
But will it be tempting to rebuild their position by reviving the fears of India, contempt for India or hatred for India?
I think they are doing that now to some extent. I think it is a combination of a mindset that is sincerely held, however misguided. It is deeply embedded in the culture of the officer, it’s the ethos that these very talented, well-educated young men are drilled in from the moment they go to the military academy.
But do you see a change? What happens when they look at India? Is there envy, is there admiration or is there still insecurity and hatred?
Let’s talk about the Pakistani elites more broadly than the Army. So, let’s include the globalised political parties and the rising middle class, media culture and let’s think about Karachi and Lahore, not just the core command. In that Pakistan, there is a profound understanding of where India is and where it is going. And a combination of envy, desire to be a part of that sub-continental transformation… So I think something important is changing in the broader mindset of the Pakistani elites and Pakistan. But the Army, as a corporate institution, still feels that it is engaged in internal competition, and still wonders about its place, if it accepts a different narrative about India.
For the Army, it is a market.
Well, it’s how they have made themselves indispensable. I was in Indonesia this summer, and you know again, let’s admit that there is not a lot of value in some of these comparisons. Indonesia (is) a very large, very troubled, post-colonial state with irrational borders, internal separatist movements and a long history of troubled civil-military relations, (but) it is a success story of jaw-dropping proportions. Why? Fundamentally because they are integrated into South-East Asia’s economy and integrated into China and India’s rise and nobody, no force, no civilian politician, no young talented son of a general who has just gotten his MBA and come home, wants to go back to the old way.
And you think that could happen with Pakistan?
I do. I absolutely do.
And what could India do to help that process? Because that is really what we want. We don’t want a military victory over Pakistan.
Of course, it is in India’s interest to have Pakistan succeed in this way. So I think that all the evidence of the history of the Indo-Pakistan conflict and comparable conflicts elsewhere is that progress comes not government-to-government but business-to-business, people-to-people, travel, opening up of borders, forcing this sense of debate into the Pakistani system by enabling it through cross-border interactions. It is very difficult, as Musharraf and Manmohan Singh discovered, to do this top-down, as a big, grand bargain between two relatively isolated cabinets. It is hard to do it that way. That leadership is important but I think Manmohan’s leadership is important.
Interesting that you say this because that is why the decision of the IPL franchises of not buying Pakistani cricketers is such a shocker and so terrible. It will play so badly in Pakistan. I almost feel like saying nationalise the IPL, shut this tournament because this is damage.
People’s expectations have changed on both the sides. People in both the countries want to live in societies where it is possible for Pakistani cricketers to play in the IPL and not be bothered about visas and travel and the rest of it.
Steve, go back to some of the work you have done and you are doing. Ghost Wars, your masterpiece. You got obsessed with the Bin Laden family more than anybody does, except may be Osama himself.
Well, he has been out of the family’s good graces for some while. Like a lot of journalists who spent time in Saudi Arabia, I always felt frustrated that it is a very difficult place to work in as an outsider. It is a very closed society, it has no press, it has no points of access and yet the more you travel there and get to know the sort of modern, globalised elites, not just the royal family but the next two or three layers down, you realise there is a fascinating story that is not really told. So, I thought the family was a way to just talk right in specific details about what it was like to come of the age in Saudi Arabia during the royal boom. Because it was a crazy time to be not just a member of the Bin Laden family but any comparable business family in Saudi Arabia.
Give us a sense of how different Obama’s understanding of the problem is? Is there a feeling that he is not quite sure he wants to go all guns blazing because that was what Bush was doing? Is he being seen as soft?
I don’t think that is his political problem. His problem in the United States is very specific, which is, that the Independents that sent him to the White House expected two things. That he would concentrate on their economic insecurity and that he would change the way of Washington, attack the culture of corruption, attack the role of money in politics. And he has done many of the things he said he would do. He said that he would responsibly draw down on Iraq and concentrate on Afghanistan, he said he would deliver health care reforms, that he would deliver new energy policy. He has done all the things he said he would do, except that he has not been able to fix the job picture very rapidly. It may not be in the power of any President to do so.
But is he seen as soft on terrorism?
He is not, not yet. He weathered the criticism that was delivered against him by the Republican Party during his Afghan policy review and after the Christmas Flight 253 incident.
The underwear bomb…
Yeah, the underwear bomb. His communication wasn’t always perfect but he recovered from some initial hesitation and I think was able to demonstrate that America has learnt something about terrorism and is not inclined to overreact or to think about an attack like Flight 253 in 2010 the same way we thought about it as a country in 2001. And India is a model for this. A lot of other democracies have dealt with the problem of persistent terrorism without surrendering their values.
That is the most fascinating thing about your latest article in the New Yorker, where you said that America is now changing as a democracy. It is becoming better at dealing with terrorism and Al Qaeda is declining. You also use India’s example--the way Manmohan Singh dealt with 26/11, keeping restraint and his re-election. How are democracies getting better at dealing with this?
I think India’s security problems are graver than America’s, in relation to jehadi terrorism. But the larger point that I was trying to draw was, I think anyone who has lived in democracies where terrorism has been persistently present over a long period of time--Great Britain, Israel, India, even places like Spain, Indonesia--you can see a pattern in which a democracy goes through stages of learning about how to deal with the persistence of terrorism…and an idea of how to balance security and openness. And the United States essentially began that learning process on 9/11.
Having said that, the United States is quite fortunate, because the jehadi terrorist threat is quite small in comparison to what India continues to face. So, in that sense, we can afford to be resilient because we are not challenged the same way. But I do think that Obama is speaking for a majority, when he says--as Blair said after 7/7--we are not going to let them define us every time they attack. We are going to be vigilant, we are going to be aggressive in our forward defence, but we are not going to play their game and I think Americans support that general idea of how to respond to that threat.
In India, the general feeling is that Obama is a bit fuzzy-headed. Maybe that comes with having dealt with Bush, who had no clutter because he had no detail. Also, his fixing a time-limit for withdrawal of forces has not worked very well.
A lot of young presidents, without previous experience of executive leadership on the international stage, learn in the first year that the world does not conform to the plans they had during the campaign. So, if you look at Obama’s first year, his strengths abroad have been the things that he planned to do, speeches he had already written in his head, the Cairo speech, the Nobel speech. Those kinds of things he is brilliant at and he has represented the United States abroad in the ways that he had promised to do and certainly changed the equation between United States and Europe in a very constructive way. So those things, he has done well. A lot of first year presidents--George W Bush was one of them, Clinton was another--discover that the world has its own shocks and its own surprises. And at this point in Bush’s presidency, 9/11 had happened and he was thinking that Saddam Hussein was responsible. So, you know, you learn on the job unfortunately, when the world comes at you in these surprising ways.
The Afghan decision was an example of how he had a plan that he thought Afghanistan was going to conform to the plans they had formed during the campaign and during the transition.
Last year, at a conference in Brussels, Ahmed Rashid, who has done some of the most significant work in Central Asia and Afghanistan, predicted that the next big attack will come in Europe and that the next Mohamed Atta could be blonde and blue-eyed. Scary, given that the US just caught David Coleman Headley and he would have carried out an attack in Europe. Has that been worrying you? Al Qaeda being able to attract or recruit more and more non-conventional ethnicities.
Well, that pattern, that threat has really been present since 2002 and I think the US government has been aware of it all that time and has been trying to think about how to defend against it. The difficulty in Europe is that the barriers to movement and formation of talented cells are smaller than they are in the US. The thing that worries me about Al Qaeda is its pattern of being able to put together talent, really talented people, who are determined to die in an attack. So that was the 9/11 group. Those guys were not nuclear physicists but they were well-educated, smart, determined, careful and willing to learn. So you ask, where is the talent that al Qaeda can recruit?
Or Lashkar from my point of view.
To me, the Lashkar’s style of talent is more worrying in terms of the kind of spectacular game-changing attack that it might be able to produce. I am more worried about India frankly, than I am about Europe or the United States because there is a lot of talent in these Lashkar groups, in the Karachi base. Some of those proselytising networks have been able to recruit and radicalise scientists, doctors and other talented people, and they have a fairly permissive environment. They are not under pressure. So, if they can get from here to there and from there to here, then as we saw on 26/11, they can wreak a lot of havoc. And that was not a representation of the highest level of talent that those groups can put together. That was a sort of medium talented group I would say.
Look at David Coleman. Who would suspect that a man with American passport, American name, American looks would be doing this?
And you know the Nigerian bombers and other examples. They know what passports attract the most scrutiny. They know what nationalities, regardless of their passports, are going to be stopped and scrutinised at borders. So, they are looking for ways to evade that.
Could the Lashkar do it, not only without any help from the ISI but with ISI trying to prevent them?
I think if the ISI is actively trying to prevent them, then it is difficult for them to move too much beyond the fidayeen-suicide bombing model. We saw in 26/11 that could be a very damaging model if you are not lucky and defenders are not fully prepared.
All I can say is, the story is not dying out.
Thank you so much. Glad to see you again.
Transcribed by Shivani Kala