Matt Yglesias

First-Order Counterinsurgency in India

There was a very interesting article in the Times over the weekend about India’s decision to step up efforts to combat a growing Maoist insurgency centered in the state of Chattisgarh, but now spreading to surrounding areas as well:

Or one piece of it. India’s Maoist rebels are now present in 20 states and have evolved into a potent and lethal insurgency. In the last four years, the Maoists have killed more than 900 Indian security officers, a figure almost as high as the more than 1,100 members of the coalition forces killed in Afghanistan during the same period.

If the Maoists were once dismissed as a ragtag band of outdated ideologues, Indian leaders are now preparing to deploy nearly 70,000 paramilitary officers for a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign to hunt down the guerrillas in some of the country’s most rugged, isolated terrain.

I don’t know much of anything about the subject other than what’s in the article. It did, however, serve as a reminder that there’s a difference between this kind of situation and the kind of thing that tends to go under the term “counterinsurgency” in the American context. What India has is an insurgency. So the insurgency is being fought by India, which is trying to counter the insurgency.

A lot of what makes the Afghanistan situation problematic is that we’re not there providing assistance to an Afghan government’s counterinsurgency strategy. Instead, we seem to be trying to coerce/cajole the Afghan government into adopting what we think of as a sound approach. That’s a tricky needle to thread.

Today in Wild Overstatements

To may a long story short about a bad way to make the case for war in Afghanistan, if you take any situation (say the war in Afghanistan) then you assume that failing to apply maximum effort will lead to the worst possible consequences, then you assume the worst possible next stage consequences, and then you assume the worst possible next stage after that, then you easily generate an argument for maximum effort. But this is a serious fallacy. You could also do the same worst-case scenario mongering for other possible courses of action. Benjamin Friedman shows that we’ve got a lot of this fallacy running loose:

[Richard] Cohen calls Obama soft for letting McChrystal run amok, ignoring the fact that both the Secretary of Defense and the National Security Adviser publicly rebuked him. Cohen approvingly cites Obama’s foolish claim that Afghanistan is a war of necessity. One can’t say enough that this is senseless; even wars of pure self-defense aren’t strictly necessary, and Afghanistan, at this point, isn’t that. He then drops the dominos. Should we leave, he says, the Taliban will take over Afghanistan and then Pakistan, grabbing nukes. India then invades Pakistan, and we get 1947, but nuclear. He doesn’t say how the Taliban columns advancing on Kabul will suppress our airpower. The widespread Afghan and Pakistani hostility to the Taliban — especially among the non-Pashtuns who support and dominate both governments — doesn’t impress him. He doesn’t mention the fact that the Pakistani military keeps close hold on its nukes, no matter who is officially in power. One could go on, but suffice it to say that there is an equally plausible worst-case scenario that results from following Cohen’s advice and expanding the war.

To be fair though, Cohen is a clear-eyed realist compared to Daniel Twining, who writes for Foreign Policy’s Shadow Government blog. Twining sees the war in Afghanistan as a means to keep Russia in a box, China down, India up, world trade humming, and the current international order, whatever that is, intact. I’m not going to bother to explain how all this works, but I picture the causal diagram as somewhat psychedelic. It’s almost like a parody of Jack Synder’ work on imperial myths, like he missed the part of the story where it says these aren’t theories you copy but BS people use to sell wars.

The fact of the matter is that in the modern world everything is sort of connected to a bunch of other stuff and it all, in the end, kind of links together. So you can start anywhere on the chain and start speculating about falling dominoes. It’s really true that an India-Pakistan nuclear war might start. And the fact of the matter is that a variety of different scenarios in some sense “could” lead to that happening. On another level, such a war would always be unlikely to result under any scenario since it would be suicidal. But the only reliable way to fundamentally mitigate India-Pakistan nuclear war risk would be to work on the fundamental issue of the India/Pakistan conflict. Beyond that there’s no real reason to think that Taliban military successes in Afghanistan makes an India-Pakistan nuclear war more likely.

You can spin a scenario in which a total victory for Karzai constitutes a strategic win for India and makes Pakistan feel vulnerable, leading them to increase support for anti-India radical groups leading to a war and staggering numbers of casualties. It’s just an inherently dangerous region of the world.

India and Pakistan in Afghanistan

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had a very interesting article about India’s extensive aid projects in Afghanistan and the discomfiture said projects cause Pakistan. And I think Justin Logan is absolutely right to suggest that COIN enthusiasts have an unfortunately tendency to neglect these kind of state-vs-state dynamics in their analysis of the situation.

The United States will, at some point, either decide we “won” “the war” in Afghanistan and then leave or else that we “lost” “the war” in Afghanistan and then leave. Pakistan and India can’t leave. And they never really win or lose definitively. The centrality of the India-Pakistan conflict in shaping conflict throughout the region isn’t really anything anyone involved in the “Afpak” debate denies, but it’s as if the issue is too hard so people decide they’d really rather not seriously incorporate it into their analysis.

Pakistan’s NIMBY Approach to the Taliban

The Obama administration’s efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan continue to be hamstrung by some pretty fundamental disagreements about what’s important here:

A major concern is that the American offensive may push Taliban militants over the border into Baluchistan, a province that borders Waziristan in the tribal areas. The Pakistani Army is already fighting a longstanding insurgency of Baluch separatists in the province.

A Taliban spillover would require Pakistan to put more troops there, a Pakistani intelligence official said, troops the country does not have now. Diverting troops from the border with India is out of the question, the official said.

As long as Pakistan’s thinking about its national interest is dominated by India and the quest to gain control over Kashmir, it’s very hard to imagine them and us ending up eye-to-eye on how to think about Afghanistan.

India-Pakistan Linkages

Fred Kaplan writes that the situation in Pakistan is inextricably linked to Pakistan’s issues with India:

Meanwhile, the Pakistani military has little desire to improve its counterinsurgency skills. Many officers are more loyal to the Taliban than to the central government. And though the army is beginning to crack down on Taliban fighters in the Swat and Buner districts, it is still the case that 80 percent or 90 percent of Pakistani troops are stationed on the border with India, which most officers still see as the country’s greatest threat. This perception is no mere idiosyncrasy; it is integral to the Pakistani worldview, dating back to the founding of the nation and the partition from India in 1947. It has been reinforced by three wars between the two nations, in ‘47, ‘65, and ‘71, as well as a war or two that nearly broke out in the past decade, and has been hammered home further by the fact that both counties have nuclear weapons. [...]

Meanwhile, is anyone trying to persuade India to take steps to ease tensions on its border with Pakistan? This is a precondition to getting the Pakistani military to take its threat from within more seriously. The fact that it’s difficult doesn’t make it any less necessary. Everything that needs to be done—and done fairly soon—is difficult, and none of it can be done by the United States alone.

I like the diagnosis, but I’m less certain about the prescription. It seems to me that Kaplan’s approach creates a situation in which the stronger the Taliban grows, the more Pakistan’s goals vis-à-vis India get advanced. But given that India is Pakistan’s top priority, and the Taliban is our top priority, that creates perverse incentives for the Pakistani military to do as little as they can possibly get away with in terms of Taliban-fighting. This is similar to the dynamic by which if the Pakistani military is effective at fighting the insurgents, the civilian government is bolstered, whereas the closer the Taliban comes to the capital, the more inclined the West becomes to support a coup.

I would put the linkage to the Pakistanis in a different way. I would say that the United States is prepared to exert pressure on India to prevent Pakistan from becoming the victim of unprovoked aggression. But I would observe that if the Taliban grows too strong, that’s a more pressing problem for India than it is for the United States. And I would follow up with the observation that if India seriously feels that the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is being compromised, that there’s no way we’re going to be able to restrain the Indians. Consequently, by far the most likely scenario in which the Indian threat manifests itself is a scenario in which failure to combat the Taliban effectively prompts an Indian preventive military response.

India’s Role in Af-Pak

Steven Walt observes that however scary a collapsing, Talibanized Pakistan may look to the United States, it looks way scarier to India:

So instead of its traditional goal of trying to weaken Pakistan, you’d think India would be going to considerable lengths to shore up the Zadari government. Pakistan’s military isn’t strong enough to pose a conventional threat to India, and New Delhi ought to be looking for ways to allow Pakistan’s armed forces to reorient their attention away from India and towards the real danger. This wouldn’t a concession on India’s part; it would be a smart strategy. But it would also require a level of foresight that few governments manage to display, so I ain’t optimistic.

I think an Indian would tell you that the real problem with this proposal isn’t that India isn’t farsighted enough to do it, it’s that Pakistan is the aggressor in the India-Pakistan conflict. If Pakistan would stop trying to take over Indian-controlled Kashmir, the conflict would go away and Pakistan could focus its energies on its domestic radicalism problem. But Pakistan has historically preferred to focus its energy on India. India can—and should—try to give Pakistan some reassurances on this score. But recent blowups in the India-Pakistan relationship have all been caused by Pakistan. India is just trying to maintain the status quo.

Bush and Asia

Another new feature on the Foreign Policy website is a group blog of Republican worthies called “shadow government” a collection of Republican heavyweights who’ll be critiquing the new administration. Except for now the new administration’s not in office yet. So they’ve been doing some looking back on the Bush years. And I think this from Peter Feaver is pretty strained:

Well-calibrated “great power” strategies. The “realist” tradition of foreign policy has traditionally emphasized evaluating great powers based on how they manage their relations with other great powers. More recently, those who call themselves realists have focused their attention narrowly on what used to be called the periphery, such as conflicts in the Middle East. But if you use a traditional realist yardstick, then the Bush Administration has done pretty well.

The Bush years boasted the best-ever relations with the following major centers of power: Japan, India, and China — and managed to advance all three relationships at the same time, even though each of those states views the other as a major threat. The Bush team developed a workable plan for integrating the rising BRIC powers into the world system; the collapse of the Doha round was a big blow to this effort, but the blame for that failure spreads far beyond the Bush Administration. Bush had as cooperative a working relationship with our closest allies — Britain, Australia, Canada, and Mexico — as any previous administration. Relations with other key NATO allies were stormy in the first term, but relations with France and Germany improved markedly with the change of leadership there. And relations with the new NATO allies were extraordinarily fruitful.

Rather than a detailed rebuttal here, let’s observe that Feaver’s counting India and China (the “I” and “C” in BRIC) twice — a good indication that he’s reaching. And it’s true that relations with France and Germany improved from their “worst in the modern era” baseline after the election of center-right governments, but by the same token the periods when Australia and Canada have had center-left governments have been full of tensions. What’s more, the new NATO allies aren’t major powers any more than Australia, Canada, and Mexico are.

You’re left here with two claims. One that the US relationship with the UK and Japan is so strong that even George W. Bush couldn’t break those bonds. The other thing, the claim that I think Feaver should have advanced in the first place, is that to an underappreciated extent the Bush administration has had a successful approach to Asia.

The rise in Chinese power and prestige is a situation that’s fraught with peril, and under Bush’s stewardship no real peril has materialized. And he’s managed to bring us closer to India in a useful way without provoking problems with China, and do this while maintaining healthy relationships with Japan and basically all the other countries in the region. It winds up being difficult for Bush to claim credit for this, because basically it’s a story of things not happening. But oftentimes the most important things presidents can do are make sure that there’s no story. The absence of giant blow-ups between the United States and our main NATO allies ought to count as a real accomplishment of the Clinton years. Similarly, simply maintaining an atmosphere of cooperation and respect between the United States and rising Asian powers is important. The past few years have seen a lot of proposals floating around that would, among other things, have the effect of making a big US-China Cold War-style standoff much more likely. That would be a bad thing.

The Pakistan Shift

Rising tensions with India are prompting Pakistan to shift forces away from fighting the Taliban near the Afghan border and toward preparations for a subcontinental standoff. And of course they are — Pakistan has no choice but to make its situation vis-a-vis India its primary security concern. This is the sort of thing people really need to think harder about before talking about bringing India into NATO.

Meanwhile, it’s a reminder that all the clever counterinsurgency tactics in the world aren’t going to work as a substitute for a regional diplomatic strategy.

Uh-Oh

If I were Rama Lakshmi, I’d be a bit pissed that the Post decided “Pakistani Jets Scramble As India Hardens Tone: All Options Open, Minister Says in New Delhi” was an A-12 story. I suppose we’re all assuming India-Pakistan tensions probably won’t end in a nuclear war that kills tens of millions of people, but it’s a very real possibility.

The Unknown Abuses

I don’t really know what to make of this Tariq Ali piece, but this here is a provocative point:

Add to this the continuing sore of Kashmir which has for decades been treated as a colony by Indian troops with random arrests, torture and rape of Kashmiris an everyday occurrence. Conditions have been much worse than in Tibet, but have aroused little sympathy in the West where the defense of human rights is heavily instrumentalised.

I don’t see any point in trying to get into a Kashmir-Tibet oppression olympics, but problems in Kashmir are real enough according to Human Rights Watch:

Violence erupted in Jammu and Kashmir after a state government decision in May 2008 to transfer uninhabited forest land to a Hindu trust to build temporary shelters during an annual Hindu pilgrimage called “Amarnath Yatra.” Once the decision became public knowledge in June, Muslim Kashmiris protested against the land transfer and the transfer order was revoked. This sparked off anger among Hindu Kashmiris. Demonstrations in the Jammu region have paralyzed the state in recent weeks.

The state of Jammu and Kashmir has been in conflict for the last two decades, and tens of thousands of civilians have died, caught between separatist militants and Indian security forces. While militants have been responsible for human rights abuses, Kashmiris have long complained about violations by Indian troops who go unpunished for serious crimes including extrajudicial executions, torture, arbitrary detentions and enforced disappearances. The violence had reduced since 2003, but the recent protests show that the Kashmir issue is yet to be resolved.

You hear basically nothing about this in the United States. And surely Ali is right that the “instrumentalization” of concern for human rights is part of the story.

All Around the World

Of course, when you see a spectacular terrorist attack in India, it’s natural for some eyes to start looking across the border to Pakistan, and then one starts to worry that the subcontinent’s cold war might turn hot:

Counterterrorism officials and experts said the scale, sophistication and targets involved in the Mumbai attacks were markedly different from previous terrorist plots in India and suggested the gunmen had received training from outside the country. But they cautioned it was too soon to tell who may have masterminded the operation, despite an assertion from a previously unknown Islamist radical group.

Officials in India, Europe and the United States said likely culprits included Islamist networks based in Pakistan that have received support in the past from Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. [...]

“This is a new, horrific milestone in the global jihad,” said Bruce Riedel, a former South Asia analyst for the CIA and National Security Council and author of the book, “The Search for Al Qaeda.” “No indigenous Indian group has this level of capability. The goal is to damage the symbol of India’s economic renaissance, undermine investor confidence and provoke an India-Pakistani crisis.”

A lot of basically sensible people, including folks like these and these who may well find themselves with positions in the Obama administration, have suggested that maybe we don’t want to throw the alleged baby of preventive war out with the bathwater of Bushism. I always think people thinking along these lines need to keep in mind that the United States isn’t the only country on the planet. I don’t think we want a world in which India claims to have a U.S.-endorsed right to launch preventive military strikes on Pakistan, or a world in which Pakistani policymaking is dominated by fear of a potentially imminent preventive Indian military attack.

They Live There

One of these kind of obvious-but-important points brought to mind by yesterday’s atrocities in India is that when you’re thinking about US policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan it’s important to recognize that unlike the other players on that chess board, we live in the Western Hemisphere. The ISI, the Indians, the Taliban, Hamid Karzai, various warlords, Lashkar-i-Taibar, and all the rest live right over there. None of them have the option of packing up and leaving, none of them can afford to lose, and when they balance priorities their concerns in that region are always going to outweigh other kinds of concerns elsewhere.

Part of what that means is that none of these actors can really ever afford to make whatever it is we want from them their top concern. They need to worry more about each other than they ever need to worry about us.

India Gets a Pass

Nobody’s paid any attention to this, but as Mark Goldberg points out probably the most significant news of the weekend was the Nuclear Suppliers Group’s decision to give the go-ahead to the US-India nuclear deal. Daryl Kimball and Joseph Cirincione have described the deal as “a non-proliferation disaster.” I sort of reconciled myself to it being a fait accompli a while ago. It goes to show, however, that if we want to get global non-proliferation policy on the right track we’re going to have to start doing things differently. The preferred American scenario in which the extent to which a country’s nuclear activities are permitted is just a function of how we feel about them seems unlikely to be viable over the long haul. To prevent countries from going nuclear, you need a quite robust level of international cooperation and that means a fairly neutral, objective scheme that all different kinds of countries can endorse.