The crisis in Iraq is a sobering lesson for India: A snake's mother will always get bitten by her offspring, irrespective of who that mother is — Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence or policymakers in the US. We have to be on guard
As the militant group ISIS closes in on its dream of an Islamic state encompassing large parts of the Fertile Crescent, we have much to ponder over the strategic direction, the opportunities for and the dangers to India. Much of these pros and cons invariably come about as a result of the United States’ actions on the ground and the deep fundamental differences with which we perceive the region.
The first great disagreement we have with our ‘strategic partner’ is a clash of narratives. Invariably digging into these narratives, we find that both are myopic and on extremely slippery ground. Any crisis has two sides to it — the supply side and the demand side. The demand side of a crisis like that in northern Iraq refers to the ground conditions that enable a pool of sympathy to arise for militants like the ISIS, or as happened in the case of Iraq for its national military to fail. The supply side refers to who arms, supports and motivates the militants. With Iraq we find the US narrative rests exclusively on the demand side, and in India, exclusively on the supply side, as though these were somehow stand-alone problems and not one composite whole.
The US narrative goes thus: Evil Nouri al-Maliki has run a blatantly sectarian Government that has basically excluded, hounded and, in some instances, sent out death squads to kill the Sunni leadership of the country. In doing so, he has completely alienated the Sunnis. This has resulted not just in fertile ground for Sunni extremism, but also the complete collapse of the largely Sunni military that now serves in Iraq. This is the joint narrative further splitting into the narrative of the Democrats and the Republicans. The Democrats and their proxies like MSNBC have been peddling the line that had former US President George W Bush not invaded Iraq in 2003, the current situation simply would not have arisen. They further point out, quite germanely, that it was Mr Paul Bremer, Mr Bush’s appointed pointsman — the one man who more than anybody else literally ‘screwed up’ Iraq — who dismissed the Iraqi Army en masse, setting a bunch of highly-trained killers on the loose. The Republicans and their proxies like Fox news counter rather weakly that President Barack Obama’s pusillanimity and refusal to use force is the main reason for the current crisis.
Not one side, however, has bothered mentioning that these ISIS fighters are the same ones, the Syrian resistance opposing Bashar al-Assad, that the US — especially the Republicans and Ms Hilary Clinton — wanted to arm. True, they wanted to arm ‘more liberal’ fighters, but invariably these supplies would have found their way to ISIS, which has brutalised and terrorised its more tolerant colleagues in the Syrian resistance. Moreover, the US tacitly acquiesced and aided its allies Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE actively providing arms to the more extreme elements like ISIS and Al Nusra. In a recent interview with Ms Barkha Dutt on NDTV, Ms Clinton has made some clearly hypocritical remarks, that she went on telling the Pakistanis that terrorism as state policy is like “breeding poisonous snakes in one’s backyard in the hope they will bite your neighbour but will not bite you”. Yet, in the interviews she has been doing to sell her upcoming biography, she claims very clearly that she egged on Mr Obama to strongly support the vipers of ISIS.
If all of this seems hypocritical and myopic, then India seems guilty of much the same. For most of this conflict it seems no one at the Union Ministry of External Affairs saw it coming, except for generic statements on the ‘fallout of support to extremists in Syria’. The so-called cautionary travel advisory they issued was after every channel worth its salt had already broadcast news of the fall of Mosul and the seemingly-imminent capture of Baghdad. What exactly had the Indian embassy in Baghdad been doing all this while, if not providing New Delhi with early warning of events on the groundIJ Much of this has to do with the fact that we — in a truly myopic, Nehruvian, non-aligned sense — looked at the problem from just one prism — that of the supply side — the supply of arms and training to Sunni militants across the border in Syria, but never thought of Mr al-Maliki as part of the problem. WhyIJ Because according to our mythology, all problems stem from Western imperialism and good brown Third-Worlders clearly do not make mistakes — all mistakes are fabricated by evil, white developed countries.
Irrespective, a crisis is now upon us and we need to introspect. The first failure is one of vision, and just because the US’s vision in this case also failed, does not mean we take solace in the fact that our foreign service could not predict and respond to events rapidly and effectively. Clearly, our current foreign service is far too small to be primary collectors of information that are required to make first-hand assessments required to deal with situations like this deftly. But the counter question is will and expansion of the Indian Foreign Service with an expanded officer core being indoctrinated into its ossified dogmas, prejudices, and downright obsolete thought patterns ever really serve IndiaIJ Or, is it time to have a purge within the service before expansionIJ After all, any expansion without a purge will simply reinforce and buttress failure — and failure reinforcement is the last thing India needs.
The second issue here is the larger question of our strategic partnership with the US. While ready to support us against our great eastern neighbour and claiming to augment our security against them, the US is having a deeply negative impact on our security environment, be it the reinforcing of venomous state ideologies like Wahhabism, or pushing Russia into an ever-warmer embrace with China. Moreover, when Ms Clinton makes two-faced statements like she did on ‘poisonous snakes’, while midwifing their birth in Syria, what message is the US sending to PakistanIJ Basically that terrorists are okay if they serve US interests. No wonder then that Rawalpindi keeps insisting it gets mixed messages from Washington.
For the Narendra Modi-led Government that is reportedly contemplating using guerrillas in response to Pakistani terrorism, Iraq is a sobering lesson: A snake’s mother will always get bitten by her offspring — irrespective of who that mother is — the Inter-Services Intelligence or someone in the US.