South Asia

By Dan Twining

What should we make of the current imbroglio over U.S. aid to Pakistan? The fact that a singularly generous American civilian assistance package has led to a crisis in U.S.-Pakistan relations rather than improving them reveals three things: one, Pakistan's continued civil-military imbalance, two, Pakistani public hostility to what has been viewed as Washington's transactional relationship with their country's leaders, and three, the imperative of a sustained U.S. commitment to Pakistan and its region that helps reconstitute the way Pakistan's military and civilian leaders define their interests -- and in turn reconfigures the possibilities for partnership between Islamabad (where the civilian government sits), Rawalpindi (the headquarters of the Pakistani Army), and Washington.

First, Pakistan's military leadership is clearly using the conditionalities contained in the U.S. assistance package as a hammer with which to beat the country's unpopular (and pro-American) civilian president, Asif Ali Zardari. That this is a manufactured rather than a genuine crisis should provide little comfort, however, for it demonstrates how well-intentioned U.S. congressional efforts to strengthen civilian governance in Pakistan can backfire. To take one example, provisions in the final congressional bill authorizing the assistance package urge the civilian government to assume some responsibility for military promotions -- anathema to the generals, who believe civilian meddling in internal Army matters threatens both its institutional integrity and, because they define their country's interests as derivative of the Army's, the national security of Pakistan.

The challenge for American friends of Pakistan is to pursue policies that strengthen the country's civilian institutions while at the same time not unduly threatening the prerogatives of the Army, working overtime to rebalance relations between them while engaging closely with both. But such is the gap between military and civilian capacity that this is the work of years, even decades -- not of a single assistance package. For the moment, Washington has a compelling interest in the sustained survival of civilian government in Pakistan, a country that has been ruled by the military for roughly half its 60-year history. Policies that threaten civilian government by crossing the Army's red lines do not contribute to that end.

Second, America needs to be a better ally of Pakistan's moderate majority of citizens who oppose Taliban or military rule but nonetheless view the United States as an enemy, not an advocate, of liberal values in their country. In the past, the United States has supported military dictatorship in Pakistan: Washington's embrace of General Zia al Haq and its partnership with him to support the Afghan mujahideen fighting Soviet forces in the 1980s contributed to the rise of a strand of militant Islam that had previously been quiescent in Pakistan. Washington's support for Gen. Pervez Musharraf, not only immediately following 9/11 but well after his sell-by date, created political space for opponents of dictatorship to define their dissent with reference to an ideology of anti-American, Islamist zealotry.

Pakistanis lament that their leaders rule only with the support of "the Army, Allah, and America." The United States is not responsible for Pakistan's pathologies, many rooted in its violent birth as a nation and the subsequent choices of its political and military elites. But no U.S. policy to stabilize Pakistan can succeed as long as most Pakistanis view Washington as a fickle, disreputable partner that seeks a transactional relationship with their leaders and then abandons their country when narrow objectives sought by Washington are secured. Setting the matter of conditionalities aside, the Kerry-Lugar civilian assistance package promises to reconstitute relations with the Pakistani people by making sustained investments in educational, judicial, governing, and developmental institutions that provide for their welfare. But the road to a relationship of trust will be long, and American public diplomacy faces extraordinary challenges -- not only in changing Pakistani public attitudes, but in emboldening Pakistani political and military leaders to speak out in defense of partnership with the United States, rather than leveraging it as a weapon against their political adversaries (see above).

Third and relatedly, America must sustain a long-term commitment to Pakistan and its region across the political-economic-military spectrum to change some of the intractable ground realities that lead Pakistani leaders to define their interests in ways inimical to those of the United States. Chris Brose and I have detailed the outlines of such an approach here. The goal of such a strategy would be to gradually reorient Pakistan's definition of national security away from its current manifestation -- supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan and terrorism against India, for instance -- policies destructive to its neighbors, to us, and to itself. This would be a slow, systematic, and evolutionary -- not revolutionary -- approach to changing the strategic context of Pakistani decision-making and so nudging Pakistan in a direction more favorable to the interests of the United States -- and the welfare of the Pakistani people.

The most important element of such a strategy is for the United States and its Western and local allies to win the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Construction of an Afghan state that can defeat the insurgency and govern its people legitimately, in conjunction with sustained investment in Pakistani civic institutions and a reorientation of the Pakistani military's worldview, would in the long term create a dynamic in South Asia in which states like India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan define their security in ways that are positive- rather than zero-sum. It would demonstrate to the jihadists intent on undermining civilian governments in Delhi, Islamabad, and Kabul that they have no hope, separating their violent aspirations from those of citizenries that instead aspire to modernity, security, and opportunity.

By contrast, failure in Afghanistan, no matter how many American resources were subsequently shifted to Pakistan, would only compound the latter's insecurity and misgovernance. The policy conundrums America confronts in South Asia today would pale against those we should expect if the Taliban continue their ascendance in Afghanistan, emboldening their fellow extremists in Pakistan. Just as our country should finish what we started in Afghanistan in part because it will strengthen the forces of moderation next door, so American assistance to Pakistan should empower our natural allies there rather than put them on the defensive.

RIZWAN TABASSUM/AFP/Getty Images

By Dan Twining

Today is the 50^th anniversary of the Lhasa uprising. Much of the associated commentary suggests that Tibet is, at most, an internal human rights issue in China, albeit one that impacts China's foreign relations with Western democracies who care about the plight of the Tibetan people. Indeed, the Dalai Lama's admission that Tibet is part of China, and that he seeks true autonomy rather than actual independence for his people, reaffirm this view. There is also, however, an external dimension to the Tibetan crisis, one that implicates core national security interests of nuclear-armed great powers.

This is the role Tibet's dispensation plays in the conflict between China and India. Indian strategist C. Raja Mohan puts it bluntly: "When there is relative tranquility in Tibet, India and China have reasonably good relations. When Sino-Tibetan tensions rise, India's relationship with China heads south." Although not widely recognized in the West, the nexus of Tibet and the unresolved border conflict between China and India ranks with the Taiwan Strait and Korean peninsula among Asia's leading flashpoints.

Contrary to Chinese propaganda, Tibet was not traditionally a part of China. Over the centuries, relations between China and Tibet were characterized by varying degrees of association spanning the spectrum from sovereignty to suzerainty to independence. The People's Liberation Army invaded Tibet in the middle of the last century precisely because Tibetans did not consent to Beijing's rule.

For its part, prior to Indian independence, then-British India vigorously supported Tibetan autonomy and sponsored the Himalayan kingdoms of Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, and Ladakh to create an expansive geographic buffer between China and the subcontinent. John Garver's excellent history of Sino-Indian rivalry contains useful maps depicting a rump China and an expansive Indian subcontinent separated by a vast, autonomous Tibet, demonstrating how far apart were India and China geographically until Chinese unification by the Communist Party several years after Indian independence gave them a common border.

That common border has since been a source of conflict. As is well known, India and China went to war over their territorial dispute in 1962, ending the era of what Indian Prime Minister Nehru called "Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai" ("Indians and Chinese are brothers"). What is less well known in the West is that China, while subsequently resolving 17 of its 18 outstanding land border disputes with neighboring countries, has kept the territorial conflict with India alive, at times appearing to inflame the issue as a source of leverage over New Delhi.

Over the past two years, Chinese officials have publicly asserted Chinese claims to the entire Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which some Chinese military advisors and strategists refer to as "Southern Tibet." Chinese forces have periodically engaged in small-scale cross-border encroachments, destroying Indian military bunkers and patrol bases in Ladakh and Sikkim.

At the same time, China has been systematically constructing road and rail networks across the Tibetan plateau in ways that tilt the balance of forces along the contested frontier in China's favor; India has responded with infrastructure projects of its own, including roads and air fields, to enable military reinforcement of its border regions, but has failed to keep pace with its northern neighbor. China has also positioned large numbers of military and security forces on the Tibetan plateau, mainly with an eye on suppressing popular unrest. But the possibility of using them to "teach India a lesson" (as in 1962) remains.

Indian pundits note that public reminders from Beijing of China's decisive victory over India in the 1962 war have spiked over the past year, sending what Indians believe is a clear signal to New Delhi at a time of rising tensions. Combined with China's reported deployment in Tibet of nuclear missiles targeting India, officials in New Delhi feel increasingly alarmed in the face of Chinese provocation.  In striking statements little noted in the West, both Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee and respected former National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra recently warned China against any attempt to seize Indian-held territory along their contested border.

Surging border tensions may be related to worries in Beijing over the Dalai Lama's succession. Some of the holiest sites in Tibetan Buddhism, including the sacred monastery at Tawang, are in Indian-held territory. The Dalai Lama, who has been in poor health, has said that he would not feel obligated to nominate a successor from, or be reborn in, Tibet proper, raising the possibility that the next Dalai Lama could be named outside China -- in the Tibetan cultural belt that stretches across northern India into Bhutan and Nepal.

Some Indian strategists fear that China may act to preempt, or respond to, an announcement of the Dalai Lama's chosen successor in India - particularly in Tawang -- by deploying the People's Liberation Army to occupy contested territory along the Sino-Indian border, as occurred in 1962, creating a risk of military conflict between the now nuclear-armed Asian giants.

Although China enjoys the dominant military position in the Tibetan plateau, India still has cards to play. It hosts the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile in Dharamsala, enabling Tibet's representatives to keep their cause alive in the court of world opinion. And unlike Britain -- which last October withdrew its recognition of China's "suzerainty" (in favor of "sovereignty") over Tibet in a failed effort to placate Beijing, leading one scornful Singaporean commentator to note that China was "bringing Europe to its knees" -- India continues to recognize only Chinese suzerainty over Tibet, rather than full and consensual sovereignty. This creates the possibility that New Delhi could play a "Tibet card" in its relations with Beijing in the same way that China accuses the United States of playing a "Taiwan card" to keep it off balance.

What do Sino-Indian border tensions linked to the Tibetan cause mean for the United States?

First, the U.S. has a compelling interest in preventing conflict between one of its largest trading partners and its newfound strategic partner.

Second, historic U.S. support for the cause of human rights in Tibet, in addition to Washington's growing military ties with New Delhi, mean that the United States would find it difficult to be a neutral arbiter in such a conflict.

Third, India's continuing political and moral support for the Tibetan government-in-exile demonstrates that it shares with America a set of ideals in foreign policy, creating the basis for greater values-based cooperation between Washington and New Delhi - a prospect that has not gone unnoticed in Beijing.

Fourth, given China's development of military capabilities designed to threaten U.S. access to the Western Pacific and Southeast Asian waterways, Chinese pressure on U.S. friends including the Philippines and Vietnam to back down on claims to contested islets in the South China Sea, and Chinese harassment of the U.S. Navy in Asian waters, Washington has an important interest in making perfectly clear to Beijing that the use of force to resolve contested territorial claims or limit freedom of the seas is unacceptable -- and could upend rather than facilitate China's peaceful rise.

By Dan Twining

In 1998, President Clinton flew over Japan without stopping to spend nine days in China. This led to acute concern in Tokyo over "Japan passing" -- the belief that Washington was neglecting a key Asian ally in favor of the region's rising star, China. Is the same thing happening today -- not with Japan, destination of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's first overseas trip, but with India?

The construction of a strategic partnership with India was arguably President Bush's signal foreign policy accomplishment. Decades of estrangement between the world's largest democracies gave way to a strategic breakthrough akin to President Nixon's visit to China in 1972. Senior Bush administration officials believed that India could emerge as America's most important international partner over coming decades, given India's growing capabilities and a congruence of interests in defeating global terrorism, managing China's rise, sustaining an open global economy, and securing our common values. 

For its part, the government of Manmohan Singh literally put its survival on the line for the United States, subjecting itself to a confidence vote in parliament in order to move forward with the civil nuclear cooperation agreement. Few other countries -- including America's closest allies -- have passed such a test.

But signs of trouble in U.S.-India relations emerged early on Barack Obama's road to the White House. As a Senator, he offered a killer amendment to restrict nuclear fuel supply to India during consideration of the civilian-nuclear agreement, which the Bush administration and India's supporters in Congress had to work hard to defeat. 

During the presidential campaign, he revealed that he had asked Bill Clinton to consider serving as a special envoy for Kashmir in an Obama administration, alarming Indians in the way that Americans might be alarmed if the European Union offered to send a senior envoy to mediate between Mexico and the United States over the status of Texas. 

Candidate Obama also pledged, if elected, to push for U.S. ratification and global entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. This issue, more than any other, divided the United States and India in the 1990s, especially when the United States and China -- which had helped sponsor Pakistan's nuclear and missile programs targeting India -- ganged up on India at the United Nations to press it to accept the test ban.

Following Obama's election, Indian officials lobbied hard to exclude India from inclusion in Richard Holbrooke's mandate as Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (first "and Kashmir," then "and related matters" were dropped from his notional title with Indian prodding). Senior officials in New Delhi worried that formally including India in Holbrooke's Afghanistan-Pakistan portfolio would lead to inevitable U.S. pressure on India (intensified by Holbrooke's talent as a negotiator) to make concessions to Pakistan even as elements of its security apparatus were judged to have been complicit in the 11/26 terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

India's worries were intensified when the new administration excluded India from its inaugural list of foreign policy partners and priorities, despite references to other Asian powers, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and China. And Indian diplomats were dumbfounded when Prime Minister Singh was not among the first two dozen world leaders to receive an introductory phone call from President Obama. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Chinese President Hu Jintao, among others, did.

Secretary Clinton deserves enormous credit for making her inaugural official trip to Asia. But the original Policy Planning Staff transition memo suggesting such a visit included India along with Japan, South Korea, China, and Indonesia in its recommended itinerary. What happened?  No senior U.S. official can go everywhere, especially across the vast expanse of Eurasia. But skipping New Delhi only reinforced an Indian perception of U.S. coolness.

The Bush administration made a conceptual and bureaucratic breakthrough in considering India to be part of wider Asia, rather than relegating it to its tough neighborhood on the subcontinent. As Senior Director for East Asia at the NSC, Mike Green included India in his portfolio as part of a conscious strategy of making India a key player in East Asia's evolution. To his credit, the current Senior Director, Jeff Bader, reportedly has done the same thing, although, because he is a China specialist, Indian elites do not expect his equal attention.

So who will have the India account in the Obama administration? Arguably, in the ancien regime, Bush himself was India's biggest booster, which in turn led Secretary Rice to devote considerable time and energy to building the relationship, with day-to-day management by Undersecretary of State Nick Burns and then his successor, Bill Burns. In the current line-up, the president does not appear to hold a particular brief for India. Though her presidential candidacy enjoyed strong support from the Indian-American community, Secretary Clinton seems focused on East Asia. At a traveling press conference this week, her press secretary reportedly dismissed one reporter's inquiries with the declaration, "No questions about India." 

Does this mean that the Obama administration is putting India back into its subcontinental box? Undersecretary of State Bill Burns in theory still has the India account at State. But he has lost his office space in the Secretary's suite to Deputy Secretary Jacob Lew, and there are reports of early tussles with Holbrooke over seniority and access. Indeed, Holbrooke was the first senior American official to visit New Delhi. In addition to praising Indian restraint after the Mumbai attacks, he again called for India to reduce tensions with Pakistan.

The Obama administration is right to frame the problems of Pakistan and Afghanistan in their regional context. But India can be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. India has enormous equities in the construction of a democratic state in Afghanistan. It has contributed substantial development assistance, built infrastructure, and trained Afghan civil servants. New Delhi has long wanted to do more, but Washington's Pakistan-centric bureaucracy resisted. Given the growing challenge of getting Afghanistan right, it may be time to ask India to step up, in police training and other areas.

More generally, it's worth keeping in mind that the Bush administration's de-hyphenation of India and Pakistan policy, after decades of Pakistan-centricity in the U.S. approach to South Asia, created a range of new strategic possibilities -- including the most substantial progress ever made between India and Pakistan in back-channel negotiations over a Kashmir settlement. 

Today, victory in Afghanistan is critical, as is preventing Pakistan's Talibanization or economic collapse. But democratic India, destined to surpass China as the world's most populous country and to emerge as the world's third-largest economy within several decades, is the region's big strategic prize, an essential partner for the United States in promoting a more peaceful, prosperous, and liberal world. India's people also hold the United States in high regard. As the Obama administration finds its feet, it will want to invest in this potentially transformative relationship, even as it necessarily fights fires elsewhere in South Asia.

By Christian Brose

Yesterday, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer had a thoughtful op-ed about Afghanistan. Here's how he frames the problem:

[A]n honest assessment of Afghanistan must conclude that we are not where we might have hoped to be by now. While the country's north and west are largely at peace and improving, the south and east are riven by insurgency, drugs and ineffective government. Afghans are increasingly frustrated by the lack of progress in building up their country. And the populations in countries that have contributed troops to the NATO-led mission are wondering how long this operation must last -- and how many young men and women we will lose carrying it out.

He goes on to list five lessons the alliance should learn if it is to succeed -- things like encouraging a more responsible Afghan leadership, more cohesive NATO operations, better regional diplomacy, civil-military cooperation, and strategic communications. All of this is right and unarguable. But isn't the United States learning another, far more sweeping lesson? Here's a hint: President-elect Obama will add up to 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan this year, nearly doubling the force we currently have. So isn't the real lesson that, after several years of pushing our allies to add more resources, more troops, and to lift the restrictions on their ability to operate, the United States is now re-Americanizing the war effort? In short, haven't we all but admitted that we are losing with NATO, and now we are going to do what's necessary to win -- with or without NATO's full support? One could be forgiven for calling this unilateralism that dare not speak its name.

Now, don't get me wrong: I don't mean to minimize the sacrifice of allies like Canada and the Netherlands that are in the thick of the fight and taking casualties, or that their contribution isn't needed and valuable. Nor do I mean to suggest that more troops alone will solve all our problems in Afghanistan. John Nagl and Nate Fick explain why in the latest issue of Foreign Policy. That said, what's interesting about the debate over Afghanistan is how, in the excitement that more attention will be paid and resources devoted to that war, we seem to be glancing over the fact that one of the major decisions of Obama's first year is the return of a more unilateral approach in Afghanistan.

Though I wasn't in government at the time, my sense is that the unilateral impulse in Bush's first term was adopted less out of a concern for ideology than effectiveness. The administration had seen what a mess coalition fighting was in Kosovo, how we'd only barely won, and fairly or not, it resolved that the U.S. effort in Afghanistan would not be hamstrung by coalition cat-herding. The push to multilateralize the war came later. NATO was invited in, and a patient, persistent, good faith effort was made in Bush's second term to win as an alliance -- to get more troops, new rules of engagement, better coordination, and greater committments of resources from our allies. This was a valiant attempt to make multilateralism effective, but the new U.S. committment to Afghanistan seems to imply that it didn't fully work, and that we'll take it mostly from here, thank you. Considering what Secretary Gates has already said publicly about the problems of NATO's war effort, I have a feeling he'd agree if he were being less diplomatic.

Maybe Obama's hope is that, by nearly doubling the U.S. force in Afghanistan, we will effectively shame Europe into stepping up with us. Maybe Obama will be able to turn Europe's goodwill toward his presidency into real will power to fight and win a tough, costly war. Maybe. But something tells me that NATO's performace in Afghanistan these past several years better reflects the perceived national interests, domestic public opinion, and limited capabilities of our allies, more than it does their unwillingness to work with an unpopular American president.

This could have big implications for NATO. A major hope of the Bush presidency -- not all of it, to be sure, but much of it -- was that NATO could be transformed into an expeditionary alliance, that it could move beyond Europe to tackle global challenges. The acid test is Afghanistan. If NATO can't be relevant there, where it matters most, then what? And if NATO's contribution in Afghanistan is now deemed inadequate, as the new policy would imply, this would seem to suggest that our hopes of NATO, and thus Europe, becoming a real global power -- hard, soft, smart, etc. -- won't fully be borne out. This doesn't mean the United States should spurn NATO's help. It might just mean that the primary mission now for NATO as an institution is simply to add greater international legitimacy to what is becoming a more unilateral exercise of American power.

This could become the future role for NATO writ large, and it's not an insignificant one. No one should cheer or revel in Europe's limitations. The United States needs partners, and we can't do everything alone. Still, if NATO's imprimatur helps to maintain domestic and international support for the United States, more or less on its own, addressing global security problems that desperately need to be solved, then so be it. This is a valuable role for NATO and thus Europe to play, but it's not the one many of us hoped it would.