Friday, December 05, 2008

The Game Changer - World - The Sydney Morning Herald -smh.com.au

The Game Changer - World - smh.com.au

The Game Changer

December 6, 2008

Pakistani Islamists hope the Mumbai massacre will tame Barack Obama and diminish Indian influence, writes Christopher Kremmer.

Whoever planned the Mumbai massacre - and it was planned, funded and executed by some group in Pakistan - the murders of at least 188 people and paralysis of India's largest city were intended to change geopolitics.

Topping the shortlist of suspects are al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the Pakistan Government and intelligence and security services, or rogue elements within those services working with Islamist extremists. But what would anyone in Pakistan stand to gain from a terrorist plot so easily traced to that country? And why has Pakistani culpability met with such a muted response from India and the West?

Pakistan is one of those countries - Israel another - for which a benign foreign policy environment is seen as essential to national survival. The stunted offspring of the Partition of the British Raj, Pakistan is doomed to live in India's shadow.

During the Cold War - in which Pakistan sided unreservedly with the United States, while India played footsie with the Soviets - Islamabad's existential fear of its neighbour was balanced by the confidence that only a friendly White House can give. But since the red menace evaporated and the West became a target of South Asia-based terrorists, Pakistan is less secure. The West's embrace of India as an economic and strategic balance to China has exacerbated Pakistan's insecurity.

The American alliance provided Pakistan with some immunity against India. Islamabad's politically-dominant army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) used or worked closely with a variety of extremists bent on fuelling secessionist violence in parts of India, including Punjab and Kashmir. America even turned a blind eye to Pakistan's covert nuclear program from the 1970s until the early 1990s, when America's victory in Afghanistan led powerful figures in Washington to believe they did not need Pakistan any more, and economic and military aid was cut off.

Fast forward to September 2001 when al-Qaeda and the Taliban attacked the US. Having backed the Taliban in Afghanistan and worked hand in glove with armed Islamists in the 1999 Kargil invasion of Indian-controlled Kashmir, Pakistan was caught hand in cookie jar. Only when General Pervez Musharraf agreed to join the so-called War On Terror did America forgive its sins.

But controllers of Pakistan's security services always regarded that as a mere tactical retreat. Since the time of an earlier military ruler, the late General Zia ul-Haq, the country's ruling elite retained a barely concealed contempt for an American superpower that spent hundreds of billions of dollars buying their friendship. They were confident the West would eventually see the wisdom of subcontracting to Pakistan the messy business of South Asia security. The lavish and misplaced lauding of Musharraf as a hero in the War on Terror illustrated the tendency. But this year, Pakistan's confidence in its ability to set the terms of engagement was badly shaken. American strikes went ahead on al-Qaeda and Taliban forces based in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas despite Islamabad's vociferous protests. Meanwhile, India revived its diplomatic influence in an Afghanistan long regarded by Islamabad as an unofficial province of Pakistan. Adding to hardline alarm has been the vocal adventurism of Pakistan's new president - Asif Ali Zadari, widower of former leader Benazir Bhutto.

He recently pledged to shake up the ISI and uttered the ultimate apostasy by declaring Pakistan had nothing to fear from India and should have warm relations with New Delhi.

The Mumbai attack was designed to wreck rapprochement with India and replace it with military crisis. The same strategy underpinned the December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament - an attempt to murder the entire Indian government.

The key suspects for Mumbai all want the US to halt military strikes on Pakistani soil. They want to undermine Western resolve to stay in Afghanistan, thereby facilitating Pakistani suzerainty there. The strike on Mumbai was meticulously planned and expensive, with the foot soldiers getting the sort of specialist training usually restricted to commandos. Above all, it was exquisitely timed to tame two new presidents.

Pakistan's Zardari will find it difficult to pursue his peace and domestic reform agenda in the face of rising tensions with India. And Barack Obama finds his country plunged into another looming crisis in South Asia, one tailor-made to circumscribe his options so that his policy ultimately serves a Pakistan wedded to a chaotic and bloody status quo.

No sooner had India blamed Pakistan than Pakistan threatened to shift to the Indian border military forces fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda - a threat guaranteed to send shivers down the Washington spine.

Panic, of course, is the wrong reaction, as is naivety. Nothing moves in Pakistan without ISI knowledge. The Mumbai massacre could not have been set in train in Pakistan without assistance of the security and intelligence establishment, past or present.

It has taken Pakistan decades to become the sovereign equivalent of a suicide bomber: "Do what we say or we'll blow ourselves up - and take everyone else with us!" Who would call the bluff? Nobody wants to see self-immolation of a country of 170 million people with nuclear weapons.

As always, India will be expected to swallow pain and turn a blind eye to the escape of the back room perpetrators. The more strident New Delhi's reaction, the more it suits the planners of this outrage. But the bitter pill of restraint will be made more palatable for India if it results in closer diplomatic, military and intelligence co-operation aimed at containing the Pakistan problem.

Events like Mumbai are rarely the work of wounded idealists. They are cynical acts of mass murder designed to achieve specific political outcomes. There is method in this madness, but also desperation.

Pakistani extremists - in and out of uniform - want to scare us out of the region and hold hostage to Pakistan indulgence our improving relations with India.

By staying the course, by building a stronger, better targeted international military presence in Afghanistan, by deepening our economic and security ties with India, and by working patiently and methodically to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism in South Asia, we deny the massacre architects their most heartfelt desire, and best serve the security of millions of decent people everywhere, including our own.

Christopher Kremmer, author of four books on modern Asia, is a scholar with the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney.

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