Avoiding Armageddon
Author: Bruce Riedel
Publisher: Harper, Rs 499
What makes Bruce Riedel’s book fascinating is its candid analysis of the self-centred policies America pursued towards India and Pakistan, writes MK Bhadrakumar
The Central Intelligence Agency was tight-fisted while vetting ace terrorism expert Bruce Riedel’s manuscript. Riedel has been prevented from sharing a story he probably knows far better than what he narrates in his book Avoiding Armageddon: America, India, and Pakistan to the Brink and Back. The story is a perennially intriguing one — Pakistan’s obsessive claim to being the “epicenter” of international terrorism. But Riedel actually adds very little from his window seat as senior advisor to four US Presidents, to what we already know. And that’s because the subject matter of the book is still “work in progress.”
The 26/11 strikes in Mumbai would have been at the planning stage since 2005. Riedel writes: “The attack was planned and partly funded by the ISI during the tenures of both (Ashfaq) Kayani and (Nadeem) Taj as director of the intelligence service.” And, pray, who was TajIJ Indeed, it was the general who was in the aircraft travelling back from Sri lanka in October 1999 from where Gen Pervez Musharraf engineered the coup d’etat; who was, again, with Musharraf at the time of the aborted assassinated attempt against him in 2003; who was rewarded by Musharraf with the charge of the ISI in 2003; and, who became the commandant of Kakul in 2006 and was the man in charge when Osama bin laden set up his hideout in Abbottabad.
So, it is a cozy little world, after all — Musharraf, Kayani, Taj, bin laden, David Headley. This, in fact, is also the core of the problem in America’s regional policy in South Asia — knowing so much and doing so little about it. The United States knew that as a “key non-NATO ally” Pakistan began cheating right from the nuptial bed in October 2001. If Uncle Sam looks a cuckold today, who, then, is to blame but himselfIJ Riedel estimates that Pakistan is actually the “terrorism capital of the world,” but Washington has been helpless about it because of the great dependency on Pakistan’s cooperation in the Afghan war.
Riedel narrates in some detail the 26/11 attacks and estimates, “But it is hard to believe that an asset like Headley, an American citizen operating for years in India, would not get the constant attention of officials at the highest levels of the ISI. No intelligence service would ‘run’ an agent like Headley, an American citizen plotting mayhem, without the direct supervision of the top (ISI) leadership.” However, Riedel also appreciates why the US expected India not to retaliate, because a war between India and Pakistan would have been “devastating to US interests.” Not only for America’s war on terror, but also for the global economy at a time when “banks were failing, jobs were fading, and a deep recession loomed ahead”. The point is, the war in Afghanistan would have been “vastly complicated”, because in 2008 more than 80 per cent of NATO supplies for the war “came through Pakistan, the bulk through Karachi, the port that the terrorists departed from on their journey to Mumbai”.
What makes Riedel’s book fascinating is its candid analysis of the coolly self-centred policies Washington pursued towards India and Pakistan. Riedel writes, “Pakistan was the key to attaining our objectives in South Asia, and it was thwarting the achievement of our goals. Its behaviour — or, more specifically, the behaviour and policies of the Pakistani Army and the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate — was our biggest problem.” Indeed, genuine trust and transparency in the US-Pakistan relationship cannot be expected in a conceivable future. Even President George W Bush knew that much. As for Obama, “The Abbottabad raid and the drone war made it virtually impossible for Obama to develop a strong relationship with Pakistan’s leaders. He tried hard. In the first two years of his administration he pushed his cabinet to try to find common ground with Pakistan.”
Riedel’s book doesn’t take into account that the co-relation of forces is rapidly changing on the regional chessboard against the backdrop of the US’s rebalancing strategy even as India gets drawn steadily into that strategy and China likely responding with a counter strategy to upgrade its “all-weather friendship” with Pakistan and make it a “testing ground” for the new world order, as the communist party tabloid Global Times wrote recently. like many American scholars before him, Riedel too concludes that the onus is on Kabul and New Delhi to assuage the existential angst in the Pakistani mind about that country’s disputed borders in the west and east. “At the heart of the matter is Pakistan’s twin sense of vulnerability and unfulfilled aspirations. Pakistan is a state unsatisfied with its borders and living next to a much-bigger rival.”
Thus, Riedel concludes that to cut the Gordian knot of terrorism in South Asia — and to “avoid the Armageddon” (title of the book), since he fears the real danger of a nuclear war erupting between India and Pakistan — a solution has to be found for the Durand line question and the Kashmir issue for which the US and the international community should “step in.”
As for Kashmir, he’d hope to see the entity becoming like the Saar region between France and Germany — a “zone of peace and prosperity between India and Pakistan”, a “special condominium” built on a “win-win approach.” He urges Washington to “forcefully encourage New Delhi to be more flexible on Kashmir” and invites other states to come to the aid of the US — specifically, China, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Arab Gulf states (and Britain, the old colonial master and lord). Riedel concludes, “Quiet, behind-the-scenes Chinese and Arab diplomacy with Islamabad and quiet work between Washington and New Delhi could become a mechanism to push India and Pakistan toward engaging in bilateral interaction.”
As for the Durand line, Riedel has a simple formula. He proposes that the US and NATO should work with Kabul and Islamabad to “accept publicly that the line cannot be modified or altered without the consent of both governments.” Of course, India also could endorse the Afghan-Pakistani border “to remove any suspicions that it wants to help Afghanistan take over Pakistani territory in Balochistan or the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. That alone would not eliminate Pakistani fears of an Afghan-Indian plot to carve up their country, but it would be a good start”.
Unsurprisingly, Riedel’s preferred solution to the Afghan war is to reconcile the Taliban in the power structure and give more regional autonomy for the Pashtun-dominated southern provinces bordering Pakistan.
Riedel used to be a counsel to Obama. But Obama outstripped him. last week in an interview with Associated Press, Obama spoke about the unthinkable — “zero option” in Afghanistan, namely, cut and run from the Hindu Kush by end-2014. That’s a week after he pleaded persuasively in his UN speech about the limits to US’s capacity to influence the Arab Spring.
Riedel couldn’t anticipate these winds of change. The dismal truth is that the Pakistani Army’s doctrine sponsoring terrorism as the instrument of state policy stands vindicated today.
The reviewer is a former diplomat