[My commentary published today on Foreign Policy's AfPak Channel]

[My commentary published in today's DAWN.]

We have seen this movie before. Invigoration is pouring out of Islamabad these days as it tries to wrap up its Swat offensive and extend the frontline deeper into Pakistan’s northwest.

Everyone says that this time Pakistan’s crackdown is different. Islamabad, Rawalpindi, the ISI and everyone else finally gets it: jihadis do not make for good neighbours. The Pakistan Army is clearing Taliban territories; militants are fleeing from their ‘entrenched’ positions to avoid the rain of artillery shells; and Rawalpindi is gearing up for the last showdown in Waziristan. Until the next one, that is.

At a time when Islamabad is insisting louder than ever that it has always been honest and sincere in its counterterrorism efforts since 9/11, other wheels are squeaking differently. Former President Musharraf told Fareed Zakaria in May that “of course” Islamabad has contact with the Taliban. “After all,” he continued, “the KGB had contacts in CIA. CIA had contacts in KGB. That is how you have ingress into each other, and that is how you can manipulate things in your favour.” Fair enough. But if today’s state of affairs is how one might describe “in your favour”, then what does a bad day look like?

The truth is that Musharraf and most of the local Islamist groups agreed to ignore each other’s consolidation of power in their respective neighbourhoods, allowing insidious ‘rogue’ elements of the ISI to cultivate and enhance their own ‘ingress’ with the Taliban. To be sure, many believe that whether these ‘rogue’ operators are officially unofficial or unofficially official, they continue informing, arming, training and trouble-shooting for the Taliban and its various jihadi brethren—ranging from self-righteous warlords to the sophisticated Jamaatud Dawa to Al Qaeda wannabes.

Granted, the government is currently putting up quite a fight in Swat, but in the meantime, the people of Sindh are terrified that droves of Taliban IDPs are on the cusp of bringing Mingora’s fate to Karachi, while Punjabis are enduring suicide bombings because the militants there typically fighting in Kashmir decided to host and train aspiring Pakistani Taliban. Once Pakistan publicly ‘turned’ on domestic extremists, the disparate militants in Pakistan found a common enemy in Islamabad and largely abandoned the struggle in Kashmir.  So who can counter this newly congealed beast?

Now that the military has put its full weight behind this offensive, potentially for the long haul, it has a chance to reverse many of the gains the Taliban made when Washington was focused on Iraq and Musharraf was focused on himself. Most importantly, this can be done without the government incurring any more wrath than it already has incurred.

Gone are the days when Islamabad walked a ‘fine line’ to ensure that the Islamists were both unrestrained and distracted by external enemies. If the Lal Masjid massacre cleared up any confusion about where Islamabad’s allegiance officially lies, then the operation in Swat serves as a considerably larger clarification. Every Pakistani who is capable of supporting the Taliban has as much reason to do so today than he or she ever had or ever will. But that is not all bad news; if everyone thinks the gloves have already come off, then Islamabad need not continue wearing those gloves out of habit. Using widespread perceptions to adjust and guide strategy is vital to any successful military operation.

For a similar reason, the massive failure of Islamabad’s February appeasement of the TTP in Swat has galvanised most of the country into swallowing the horrendous civilian casualties associated with purging Swat of the Taliban. At long last, Pakistanis seem to recognise that this operation — or something very similar to it — was inevitable and necessary to ensure both the stability of all of Pakistan and the security of all Pakistanis. So, expanding the operation into the rest of NWFP and even Fata (as the army has begun doing) is the natural extension of this logic, much to Washington’s delight. But Musharraf once exhibited such determination, as well, mostly in vain.

As usual, India holds the key to Pakistan’s insecurities, for better or worse. The Pakistan Army’s troops based along the Afghan border can clear plenty of northwestern territory and plausibly insist that this is significant. But the real question is holding the territory, and artillery is no permanent substitute for trained soldiers in this regard — not in Swat and not in Waziristan.

Yet Rawalpindi simply does not have the flexibility to transfer the needed army divisions from Punjab to the northwest because the daunting million-man Indian army is still saturating Pakistan’s eastern border. No sudden resolve in Islamabad to eliminate Baitullah Mehsud can change this military reality. So what reassurance would Pakistan need before moving brigades westward? Several divisions of India’s strike forces would have to pull back from the border as well.

When Washington realises that its latest push for a demilitarised Line of Control is not going to happen any time soon, it will push harder for a temporary drawdown of forces at the international Indo-Pak border. The time frame for deployment could be short to start, perhaps six months to a year, barely enough to assist Rawalpindi’s effort in the tribal belt. But this is naturally a tough sell in Delhi, as jihadi infiltration is a major Indian concern. Admittedly, however, there is a large degree of redundancy in these Indian strike forces, and most of them are tasked with impeding Pakistani tanks, not small-scale jihadi cells. Still, US President Barack Obama would have to offer Delhi something in return for such a noticeable stand-down.

The most likely (if private) indulgence would be for President Obama to promise Delhi that his administration will never utter a single word of concern or advice about the Indian occupation of Kashmir. Undoubtedly, the stability of Pakistan and the impotence of Al Qaeda are far too important in Washington to allow the aspirations of Kashmiris to hold sway. This would be the most powerful and immediate concession that Delhi can request and the easiest for Washington to grant, once it recognises Rawalpindi’s limitations with the current deployments.

Accordingly, Delhi would be under no pressure to resume or invigorate negotiations with Pakistan about Kashmir or any other matter, even if/when Pakistan is able to contain the militants in Fata. Such a trade could be devastating for the Kashmiris, depending on how much Delhi wanted to milk the concession, but unless Washington grudgingly indulges India in this way, Pakistan will not have the flexibility to move its troops and prevent the creation of more Kashmirs in its own heartland.

Islamabad, after all, only has so much ingress to go around. The rest is up to India.

[Note: an abbreviated version of this commentary was published by Le Monde Diplomatique]

It’s no surprise that President Obama’s foreign policy challenges are unsavory, diverse and numerous, but what makes them most worrisome is the degree to which they overlap in the worst ways possible.  Our allies’ concerns, our enemies’ threats and our victims’ pleas are inextricably tied to one another—if not by nature, then by the hand of political leaders and institutions across the globe.  Solving one problem seems impossible without solving the rest, or at least pretending to do so.  And ‘pretending’ may be what it comes to, though it’s difficult to imagine just whom we’d fool.  The world seems to be knocking at every American door, imploring, cajoling or threatening us to do (or not do) something.  And whenever no one’s knocking, we can’t help but wonder where everyone went.

Iraq and Afghanistan seldom wonder far from our doorstep for obvious reasons, but with Obama’s focus on renewing old alliances and engendering newer convenient ones, many others are requesting an audience.  Unfortunately, it is mathematically impossible for President Obama to address each or even most of them.  And inevitably, the process of prioritizing is going to get ugly.

Here are just a few of Obama’s more important foreign policy goals:
•    Eradicating (or rendering impotent) al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
•    Securing Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and some modicum of democracy there.
•    Withdrawing US forces from Iraq and preventing the Iranians from filling the void.
•    Derailing and/or deterring Iran’s development of a nuclear (weapons) technology program.
•    Spreading democracy across the globe, especially in Muslim and formerly Soviet states.
•    Reaching a final settlement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
•    Mitigating the heavy spillover from the drug wars in Mexico into America’s southwest.
•    Limiting the social and political upheaval of a global recession.

If only these goals could be divided on a chopping block.  But instead, they are all connected in an interminable run-on sentence.  To defeat al Qaeda, we have to remove its support structure along the Afpak border.  To do that, we have to (implicitly) convince Pakistan that it does not need an Islamist buffer in Afghanistan to ensure its own survival.  To do that, we have to ensure the economic development of southern Afghanistan.

To rebuild Afghanistan, we will need supplies, and those supplies will soon be guaranteed only when transited through Russia’s backyard.  To get that access, however, Russia is insisting that we abandon our plans to install anti-ballistic missile shields in Eastern Europe.  Meanwhile, Obama seems happy to do this as long as Russia stops supplying Iran’s nuclear development.  But for that concession, Russia is also demanding that we abandon our efforts to integrate Russia’s former satellite states (Ukraine and Georgia, specifically) into NATO and other western institutions.

We might be in a position to refuse this last Russian demand if only we could know for sure that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program.  But to obtain that reassurance from Iran, Tehran itself is looking for carte-blanche in its consolidation of Shiite influence in Iraq, Iran’s greatest historical enemy.  We might be willing to make a trade—nukes for Iraq—but the US is slated to withdraw most of its forces anyway, so we have little to offer Tehran that it won’t get by merely sitting on its hands.

Perhaps, then, the gridlock will dissipate if we manage to break off Syria from its alliance with Iran, but that requires Israel’s willingness to negotiate with Syria and other enemies—a practice which Israel’s new prime minister is apparently refusing to do until after President Obama defuses Iran’s nuclear ambitions, in one way or another.

If you are confused, join the club.  No one knows where this negotiation starts or ends, who the parties really are, and what concessions they are prepared to make.  So far, the only real sacrifice President Obama has asked of the American people is economic.  He has not asked us to tolerate an Iranian Bomb; he has not suggested we send our sons and daughters into northwest Pakistan; and he has not indicated just how far he would go in a confrontation with Russia.  After all, reset buttons might inspire a respite of amnesia, but just how far back does he expect that button will take us?  To the Yeltsin days when Russia slept in every morning?  Or to the Cuban missile crisis, when no one slept at all?

The one thing that is clear is that Russia, Iran and Pakistan are at the center of nearly every obstacle we face abroad, and we lack the military, financial and political resources to address more than one of them at a time, if that.

[Note: an abbreviated version of this commentary was published by DAWN]

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in late November, Pakistan’s government in Islamabad is scrambling to show grief-stricken Indians and the world that Pakistan is actually able and eager to mount successful counterterrorist operations.  In the meantime, India is still considering its military options, and the US is finding itself in the awkward position of biased mediator, but a mediator with options, nonetheless.

Indian ire in the immediate aftermath of the attacks was so unmistakable that it prompted Islamabad to sound the loudest alarm bell in its arsenal: insisting that it could only fight one war at a time, Pakistan warned Washington that a vengeful India would compel Islamabad to redeploy the 100,000 troops currently assisting the US War on Terror in northwest Pakistan to its eastern border with India, Pakistan’s greatest strategic threat.  Hearing the message loud and clear, President Bush dispatched Secretary of State Rice to Delhi to calm the Indians—much as Washington had in the past—to ensure that Pakistan has the resources and flexibility to fight al Qaeda and its various supporters on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Yet from Washington’s perspective, both the political and military implications of heightened tensions between India and Pakistan—especially the kind that involves Pakistani troop movements—open many new doors to a war on terror that appears increasingly bleak.

The View from Washington

First, India is not alone in its profuse criticism of Pakistan’s failure to fight the very terrorists it bred during the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad in the 1980s.  Seven long years into the war on terror, Washington remains convinced that Pakistan is still unwilling and/or unable to make good on its counterterrorism commitments on the other side of the Durand Line.  It was difficult enough to compel Islamabad to deploy twenty percent of its roughly half-million-man army to the northwestern border during President Bush’s first term, and that contribution only led to a steadfast resurgence of the Afghan Taliban and the near-steroidal growth of the Pakistani Taliban.

Facing dim prospects, over the last 18 months the Americans have begun taking matters into their own hands, dispatching the much-resented predator drones to kill senior Taliban and al Qaeda leaders with greater frequency, and deeper into Pakistan’s heartland, no less.  With President-elect Barack Obama insisting that he will allocate more American soldiers and resources to the ‘real’ war on terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Washington’s relationship with Islamabad has nowhere to go but down, especially as the Pakistani Taliban rip the country apart. It is in this context that a redeployment of Pakistani troops frightens Washington—regardless of who occupies the White House.

But according to a flood of recent press reports, if India seems likely to attack Pakistan, then both the Pakistan Army and the militants they are supposed to destroy could find themselves facing the same grave threat in India.  Various militant factions and supporters of the Taliban—all the way from South Waziristan up to the Swat Valley—would put their wars with NATO and Islamabad on hold and find their way to Kashmir or the Indian border.

The Composition of a United Pakistani Defense

In practice, no matter how likely Pakistan’s warring factions are to unite to confront an Indian attack, Islamabad’s ability to influence that union is another matter entirely.  First, it is important to note that Pakistan would need all the help it could get if India invades, say, Azad Kashmir, the small Pakistan-occupied territory that is also the operational headquarters for much of the anti-Hindu resistance, including the perpetrators of the Mumbai siege, Lashkar-e-Taiba.  But to make any use of these eager militias in a conventional war, Islamabad would have to arm them with far more weapons and hardware than the Pakistani intelligence agency (ISI) has traditionally and quietly bestowed upon them.  And given the Taliban’s animosity for the secular government in Pakistan, Islamabad would only provide these jihadists and militant nationalists with sophisticated weaponry if Pakistan were facing imminent defeat by India.  Otherwise, Islamabad, Washington and Delhi all know exactly where those weapons would be aimed once the Mumbai storm blew over.

If, however, Washington or Delhi pressures Islamabad to an unprecedented degree—and it seems that only foreign invasion could do so—then the Pakistani military would be tempted to utilize the plethora of Taliban and Kashmiri militant groups as Pakistan’s front line of defense—IE, cannon fodder—for an invigorated insurgency in Indian-occupied Kashmir.   And unsurprisingly, many such militants would jump at the opportunity.  One could even envision a scenario where—given enough pressure on Islamabad—the Pakistani military would quietly inform Delhi of the positions and plans of these militants, making them easy targets for the Indian Army.  And such theatrical backstabbing would hardly be new to this conflict, nor would these cadres be difficult to replace when Islamabad was out of the spotlight.  President Musharraf certainly performed such a feat in the months after 9/11 when he allied with the US, though the result was more a severing of Islamabad’s official ties to militants than it was a severing of those militants’ actual abilities.

A more likely confrontation, however, would involve the two armies meeting at their mutual international border and the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir, where they would stay for a period of months—perhaps exchanging artillery and air strikes until Washington negotiates a ceasefire.  (This very scenario played out three months after 9/11, when a motley crew of Kashmiri militants stormed India’s Parliament.)  But once at a stand-off, neither the civilian nor military establishments in Pakistan will make the first move because they know they will lose.  Yet in preparation for a conventional Indo-Pak war, these militias would have little to offer at the border and would thus, if for a time, be neutralized.

Leveraging a Shuffle at the Northwestern Border

In the meantime, however, US and NATO forces in Afghanistan would be in the unfamiliar position of having neither friends nor foes on the other side of the Afghan-Pakistan border.  And this would present Washington with equally unfamiliar flexibility.

The US presidential transition could alter this dynamic, but under these circumstances, the most likely benefit to the US would manifest in southern Afghanistan, where the resurgent Afghan Taliban would face potentially crippled supply lines of weapons and equipment, which are currently flowing from the Pakistani Taliban and the tribal clans loyal to them in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and especially the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).  If those middlemen are busy at Pakistan’s eastern border, there will be fewer available at the western border.

Another possibility is that, like their Pakistani counterparts, the Afghan Taliban might also flock to the Indian border or LoC to fight the Indians.  Numerous Taliban leaders and foot soldiers are foreign-born and tied to the militant Pashtun world by marriage and lifestyle; but many are jihadists at heart and would drool at the prospect of a glorious war on numerous fronts.  Though less likely, in either scenario, the Afghan Taliban would be stretched uncharacteristically thin without support from across the border, and the US/NATO/Afghan forces would be less hindered to improve security and perhaps earn a little loyalty from local Pashtun tribes in southern Afghanistan.  At the very least, there would be fewer obstacles to US intelligence gathering and infiltration, which is always in desperate need of a boost.

Either way, however, a substantive contingent of the Pakistani Taliban and their supporters will probably remain in the NWFP/FATA and continue supporting the Afghan Taliban.  In the end, Pashtuns are notoriously territorial, and some will not be interested in repelling the Indians from the land of their ethnic rivals in Pakistan’s eastern provinces.

In this case, Washington would be able to test Pakistan’s claim that—as limited as Islamabad’s assistance has been since 2001—the war on terror would be in a far worse state without Pakistan’s help.  Willfully testing this claim has always been too risky for the US because the price of being wrong could be frightfully high, but if Islamabad refuses to keep its contingent of soldiers on Pakistan’s western border anyway, then as a silver lining, Washington might be able to test this notion and use it as a basis for strengthening or drastically altering the US-Pakistan relationship.

After all, even if every observant Western official already knows that little will change on the ground without the Pakistani soldiers, then mounds of supporting evidence for such assertions would be critical for the Obama Administration to justify greater and deeper incursions into northwestern Pakistan to eliminate al Qaeda and its support structure. Naturally, Washington will have to test these waters more before diving in, but the situation in Pakistan is likely to get much worse before it gets any better, and the water aught to feel tantalizingly welcoming in the year to come.

As usual, another significant obstacle to such a test is logistical.  If and when Islamabad and Pakistan’s military leadership in Rawalpindi agree to redeploy these soldiers eastward, there will be no one to guard and reinforce US and NATO supply lines from Karachi’s port—where roughly 75% of such supplies transit—to central and southern Afghanistan.  Even before the siege in Mumbai, supply lines for the US, NATO and Afghan militaries have become increasingly vulnerable to the whims of the Taliban-led insurgency, especially in the vicinity of Peshawar.

In fact, with thousands of more US troops set to deploy to Afghanistan, this vulnerability will only increase, and the 60,000 locally recruited and poorly trained soldiers in Pakistan’s Frontier Corps would be forced to fill the vacuum left by Pakistan’s Army.  For a while now, American military planners have been exploring alternative and inevitably more cumbersome routes through central Asia, but without a “Peshawar Awakening” some time soon, the stage is set for a worsening of security along the treacherous border, with or without the redeployment of Pakistani troops.

Given the presidential transition in Washington, it is still unclear if the US will be able to improvise its military approach to southern Afghanistan, at least in the near term.  Nevertheless, if the tensions remain high between India and Pakistan, the US might benefit in the long term from the internal solidarity in Pakistan and the decreased intensity of conflict in the tribal regions on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Obviously, a calamitous war between the two South Asian rivals is far too high a price to pay to obtain a temporary calm in western Pakistan that may or may not benefit anyone.  But if escalation is the path that India chooses—despite Washington’s calls for restraint—then high-octane saber-rattling on both sides of the Indo-Pak border (especially if it lasts for many months) could actually suit Washington rather well.