ON February 12, Pakistan did something that no state barring Libya has done in recent times. It admitted that some of its nationals were involved in a terrorist act – specifically, the November 26-29 attacks in Mumbai – and that the conspiracy to carry it out was at least partially planned on Pakistani soil. Although the admission came two and a half months after the event, and five weeks after India gave a weighty dossier on Mumbai, it doubtless represents a huge shift of stance.
Pakistan confirmed some of the evidence given by India on Mumbai, including the role of captured terrorist Amir Ajmal alias Kasab and some other Lashkar-e-Taiba members, named a new figure, Hammad Amin Sadiq, as a key player, and arrested six suspects, including Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi. It also identified three boats in which the attackers travelled from Karachi.
Interior Ministry adviser Rehman Malik’s statement confirming this, and his “request” for more information on 30 counts, stands in sharp contrast to Islamabad’s earlier denial of Kasab’s identity and home address and attempts to prevent media access to his relatives, followed by prevarication and evasion.
As recently as on February 9, Pakistan’s Defence Coordination Committee – which includes the service chiefs and the Inter-Services Intelligence agency head – said a case would be registered against the attackers but claimed that India’s dossier had not furnished the “substantial evidence” necessary to complete the investigation.
Just two days earlier, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, following talks with Richard C. Holbrooke, President Barrack Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, was at pains to report that “interestingly enough, [Mumbai] did not surface” in the interactions with him. This may have been an elaborate charade, as we see below: Islamabad had probably collected the relevant information weeks earlier.
However, what explains the shift? Domestically, Pakistan’s civilian government took the Mumbai issue seriously and was keen to cooperate with India, as was civil society, partly to loosen the Army’s stranglehold on the India policy and weaken the jehadis’ social influence. It was thwarted by a military obsessed with shielding the attackers’ collaborators. Moderate opinion could not assert itself enough against hysterical media coverage. But now, the balance has shifted temporarily in favour of the civilian government and the moderates. Not to be underrated is India’s diplomatic pressure, based on solid evidence and unassailable logic, buttressed by the global public’s enduring shock at the world’s worst-ever terror attack by gunmen in public places. The quality of evidence could not but have impressed even Pakistani sceptics.
Role of FBI and CIAHowever, as important as Indian and global pressure was the United States’ role. The Mumbai police allowed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to interrogate Kasab several times, and the FBI shared the information thus gathered, along with intercepts of conversations between the attackers and their minders, with the Pakistani authorities. FBI personnel, it was hinted, might appear as prosecution witnesses against Kasab.
The FBI reportedly wrote parts of the Mumbai dossier and probably pressed Pakistani investigators to accept its authenticity. Such collaboration is qualitatively different from the sharing of evidence or exchanging of intelligence on an equal basis. It is a form of splitting and sharing sovereignty by allowing a foreign entity to make a political case and/or legal pleadings on India’s behalf.
This is unprecedented for India, which prides itself on the independence of its agencies and has been loath to do this with any country. New Delhi should also know better than to trust the U.S. in such matters after top spy Rabinder Singh’s defection.
Now, we know through The Washington Post (February 16, 2009) that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) too “orchestrated back-channel intelligence exchanges between India and Pakistan, allowing …[them] to quietly share highly sensitive evidence.” The exchanges “began days” after the assault and “gradually helped the two sides overcome mutual suspicions and paved the way” for the February 12 announcement.
The CIA’s role was highly proactive. “The intelligence,” says the Post, “went well beyond… public revelations… and included sophisticated … intercepts and an array of physical evidence…. Indian and Pakistani intelligence agencies separately shared their findings with the CIA, which relayed the details while also vetting the intelligence and filling in blanks.”
This, too, is unprecedented. It speaks of India’s growing dependence on U.S. agencies in deeply uncomplimentary ways. Also significant was Obama’s February 11 telephone call to President Asif Ali Zardari, the first since the U.S. President assumed office. It is extremely unlikely that Obama did not speak of Mumbai and the need to crack down on terrorists.
Holbrooke factorAbove all, there was Holbrooke’s overwhelming presence in Pakistan on his maiden visit as special envoy. Given who he is, it is inconceivable that he did not read the riot act to Pakistani leaders and remind them of “the writing on the wall” if they did not act against the Mumbai culprits.
Holbrooke “is the diplomatic equivalent of a hydrogen bomb”, former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot recently told The New York Times. Holbrooke was chosen, says the paper, “because of his ability to twist arms as well as hold hands, work closely with the military and improvise inventive solutions to what others write off as insoluble problems. But no one yet knows how his often pyrotechnical style – he whispers, but also pesters, bluffs, threatens, stages fits and publicises – will work.”
His return to the State Department has “rattled colleagues who remember him as someone who cultivates the powerful and tramples those with less to offer …. [T]here seems to be confusion about whether the American embassies in Pakistan and Afghanistan will be controlled by [him] or the regular State Department overseers.”
Holbrooke was assigned to what the U.S. regards as “the most problematic region on earth”, with unstable governments, insurgencies, nuclear weapons, monumental corruption, a thriving narcotics trade, resentment of U.S. power, and a resurgent Taliban. “You have a problem that is larger than life,” senior diplomat and Holbrooke’s longtime colleague Christopher Hill said. “To deal with it you need someone who’s larger than life.”
This image derives from Holbrooke’s role in negotiating the Dayton accord in November 1995, which ended the war in the former Yugoslavia. This role was extremely controversial and involved the use of force, bluster, deception and outright fabrication. Holbrooke used U.S. military power to orchestrate what has been called “imperial intervention” to support operations of a despicably brutal nature.
Holbrooke’s most important decision was to encourage the Croatian army to launch a bloody surprise offensive against the Serbs in August 1995, which turned out to be the Balkans’ worst act of ethnic cleansing. Over 2,500 people were killed, and 200,000 displaced.
But Holbrooke had no remorse. He infamously said: “We hired these guys to be our junkyard dogs because we were desperate. We need to try to ‘control’ them. But it is no time to get squeamish.”
Equally important was his long-standing advocacy of “direct use of force against the Serbs”, which materialised in 1995. NATO’s bombing of Bosnian Serb targets established it as the greatest player in the conflict, which could drive a hard bargain.
Holbrooke’s thoroughly unscrupulous tactics helped him reach the Dayton accord. For him, the agreement’s significance was more than the war’s end.
Writes Holbrooke in his book To End a War (Random House, 1998): “Suddenly, the war was over – and America’s role in post-Cold War Europe redefined.” In 1998, Holbrooke’s appointment as Ambassador to the United Nations was stalled because he was accused of violating federal ethics guidelines.
It is on the shoulders of such a controversial figure that India will place its strategy vis-a-vis Pakistan if it relies on the U.S. to play a mediating role. Those who advocate this approach are already talking about offering “full-scale” cooperation to the U.S. as it fashions “a regional approach to Afghanistan”, calculated to give India a role in stabilising it. This is liable to draw India into a military role as a junior partner of the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force, which has a fundamentally flawed strategy towards Afghanistan.
Prescription for disasterThis is a prescription for disaster, which will assuredly undermine the tremendous goodwill India enjoys in Afghanistan. It will compromise the independence of India’s policies and actions in the region. And it will draw India into a terrible Cold War-style, but far more ruinous, rivalry with Pakistan as it joins the U.S. camp as an unequal ally in pursuit of a skewed world order.
That cannot be India’s destiny. If India is to play a worthy international role, it must distance itself from the U.S. and chart a fiercely independent policy towards Pakistan and Afghanistan. That may not produce quicker results than American mediation, but it is the only principled course.
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