FIRST THINGS LAST - Barack Obama’s new coalition of the willing by K P
Nayar in TELEGRAPH – 30/1/13
The taxi-driver who picked me up in
Washington the other day, began praising Manmohan Singh as soon as
he found out that I am Indian. There was a time when praise for the
prime minister was routine in the United States of America: from
corporate boardrooms to stock- exchange floors, from ethnic Indian
venues to barber-shops. Not anymore. So Naeem Akram was an exception
because he continued to sing praises for the United Progressive
Alliance’s head of government all the way till I was dropped off
home. And until I firmly insisted that he must accept my full fare
Akram told me that the ride was on him because I was Singh’s
compatriot. Early into the 20-minute ride, though, it was clear why
this American was unstinting in his praise for the prime minister.
Like Akram, Singh was born in Gah in Pakistan, the Punjab village’s
only claim to fame. Akram said his village owes its solar-powered
street lamps, electricity in some of its homes and hot-water for the
village mosque to the prime minister’s initiative and the resultant
generosity of The Energy and Resources Institute, better known
worldwide by its acronym, TERI.
If this American taxi-driver could realize
his fantasy, India and Pakistan would live happily ever after. It is
reasonable to presume that the villagers of Gah share such a
fantasy. But Gah is not the epitome of Pakistan and there are many
Pakistanis outside Gah, elsewhere in their country, who would not
hesitate to kill men like Akram for his views on India that he is
free to air as long as he is in the US. Unrelated to the main thread
of this column, Akram got in touch with me at my home a few days
after the taxi-ride to tell me that he was going back to Gah to
fight elections on a ticket from the Tehreek-e-Insaf, the party of
the cricketer-turned-politician, Imran Khan. Some day, I hope I will
reconnect with him for a case-study of Pakistan.
It has been clear from September 24, 2004
when Singh had his first encounter in New York with Pervez
Musharraf, then Pakistan’s head of state, in what was described as
an hour-long one-on-one “essay in mutual comprehension”, that the
prime minister’s vision of Indo-Pakistan relations is no different
from the fantasy of the Washington cabbie from Gah. It is a vision
that is laudable in principle, but Singh’s failure has been his
inability to separate his government from that vision and free it in
its thoughts and action on Pakistan.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee told me once that
throughout the debate within his government over joining or
supporting George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, he remained
silent, at times even pretending to be asleep, while his aides,
strategists and experts argued over the issue. The reason for his
silence, Vajpayee insisted, was that the moment he signaled any
personal preference for a policy, civil servants and others who
ought to give him an independent assessment would tilt with the wind
and tell him what they presumed he wanted to hear.
To a lesser
extent, P.V. Narasimha Rao did the same, especially on Pakistan,
sitting at the head of long meetings with his inscrutable pout, not
opening his mouth to indicate which way he was leaning. As a result,
the wheels of government, the foreign-policy establishment, the
internal and external intelligence agencies and, most notably, the
armed forces could not take any cue from the political leadership.
They dutifully did what they were supposed to do.
But not under Manmohan Singh, and
especially not in his second term as prime minister. The result is
that India has lost the Pakistan story as recent events in their
bilateral relations clearly demonstrate. Infinitely more disastrous,
in the long run, is that the government has lost its grip on its
global anti-terrorism strategy with consequences that could have a
severe impact on national security. If proof of this were needed, it
is writ large on the 60-page minutes of the Foreign Service Board,
which took place only weeks before France intervened militarily in
Mali to rescue that country from al Qaida and other Islamist
militants.
Oblivious to the impending military escalation, the board
continued merrily to post diplomats at Bamako, Mali’s capital, where
New Delhi has a small mission, which it opened three and a half
years ago. To this day, the ministry of external affairs has not
converted Bamako into a ‘non-family’ station and is, therefore,
risking the safety and lives of Indian personnel.
From time to time, especially when French
presidents are about to visit New Delhi, the government makes much
of its ‘strategic dialogue’ with Paris. What is the worth of this
dialogue if France did not tell India reasonably in advance about
its military intervention in Islamist-infested Mali? And what is the
government’s intelligence worth if it could not anticipate the
crisis in Bamako as reflected in the business-as-usual approach
evident in the decisions of the Foreign Service Board?
Forget the strategic dialogue with France
for the moment. As a member of the United Nations security council,
India was party to a unanimous council decision on December 20 to
deploy an African-led military force to help defeat Islamist
militants in northern Mali. It is a reflection of the intense
disconnect within the UPA government on national security that when
these security council documents are on tables on Raisina Hill, its
approach to global terrorism is adrift. It is the same pattern of
disconnect in the US that enabled Osama bin Laden to execute the
September 11 attacks.
It may be comforting to sit in Lutyens’
Delhi and think that Bamako is a far-away capital, no Indian plane
has been hijacked there and, therefore, it is not critical to Indian
interests unlike, for example, Kandahar or Kabul. But that would be
a false comfort, for which the country could pay dearly one day.
The French military intervention in Mali,
in which the US is now indirectly participating with aerial
refueling and transportation of supporting troops from Chad and
Togo, is not a development in isolation. It is part of a new
strategy by Western powers to deal with Islamic extremism worldwide,
in which Libya was the curtain-raiser. On Monday, the French foreign
minister, Laurent Fabius, made it plain that the strategy in Libya,
which was riddled with faults, has been refined in Mali and would be
further sharpened in Syria with the sole aim of preventing Damascus
from falling into radical Muslim hands when Bashar al Assad is
forced out of power.
India must look at this strategy in
conjunction with what is happening behind the scenes in Afghanistan.
When the presidents, Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai, agreed to speed
up the withdrawal of the American troops they did not do so blindly
to let Afghanistan descend into chaos. They are putting together a
diplomatic and security infrastructure in Kabul that will be
managed, in addition to the US and the Karzai government, by Saudi
Arabia, Qatar and Turkey. The ‘chairman emeritus’ of this
arrangement will be Pakistan. This is Obama’s new global “coalition
of the willing”, which will eventually groom and manage
foot-soldiers in the fight against Mali-type insurgencies, terrorism
in Benghazi of the variety that killed the US ambassador, and
guarantee that Damascus does not become an al Qaida haven.
The writings on the wall are already
clear: the nuanced sentencing in Chicago of Lashkar-e-Toiba’s David
Headley for the Mumbai plot and an assertion last month by the US
state department that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency
is immune from prosecution in New York on the 26/11 Mumbai terror
attacks are proof that Washington and Islamabad have kissed and made
up in order to operationalize Obama’s new “coalition of the willing”
with support from Britain, and indeed from the Western powers.
India could have seen all this coming but
for a prime minister who is intent on somehow visiting Gah before
laying down office. Singh’s office became complicitly obsessed with
that objective and surrendered coherence in policy. Yes, it cannot
be business as usual with Pakistan any more, but not the way the
prime minister meant it on January 15. Because Pakistan is now in a
new business, which could push India into the red unless the UPA
government pulls itself up by its
bootstraps.
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