Obama Needs to Tackle South Asia as a Whole

President Obama needs to resolve the problem of India and Pakistan before he can have any hope of success in Afghanistan.

In his speech on Tuesday, he wasn’t forthright about the nature of the problem. “In the past, there have been those in Pakistan who've argued that the struggle against extremism is not their fight, and that Pakistan is better off doing little or seeking accommodation with those who use violence,” he stated. Actually, it’s much worse than that.

The Taliban are headquartered in Pakistan under the protection of the Pakistan's intelligence services. The Pakistani spy apparatus shelters and supports the Taliban (a Pakistani creation) because of its fear of India. It feels surrounded due to the pro-India orientation of Hamid Karzai’s government in Afghanistan. (Pakistan's government also alleges that India uses Afghanistan as a base to foment violence in Pakistan.) And Pakistan relies on extremist groups to challenge India in Kashmir. So a settlement in Kashmir is a necessary part of any solution in Afghanistan.

Yet, due to Indian pressure, the Obama Administration is unwilling to prod both countries to engage in dialogue. When Richard Holbrooke was appointed special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, indications were that Kashmir—and a push for both sides to negotiate—would be in his portfolio. But that was not to be.

“The omission of India from his title, and from Clinton's official remarks introducing the new diplomatic push in the region was no accident—not to mention a sharp departure from Obama's own previously stated approach of engaging India, as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan, in a regional dialogue,” Laura Rozen reported in January for Foreign Policy magazine’s online component. “Multiple sources told The Cable that India vigorously—and successfully—lobbied the Obama transition team to make sure that neither India nor Kashmir was included in Holbrooke's official brief.”

India and Pakistan have had diametrically opposite positions regarding outside mediation on Kashmir: Pakistan, as the weaker party, welcomes it; India, as the stronger one, deplores it. India pays lip service to one-on-one negotiations with Pakistan to arrive at a solution to a problem that has vexed the region since both countries’ independence in 1947. In practice, however, this has most often meant foot-dragging, since India owns the larger and more desirable portion of Kashmir.

The Pakistani government’s retaliation has been inexcusable, however. It has armed and trained extremists and sent them across the Pakistan-India border and to target the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan. Instead of bringing India to the negotiating table, this has had the effect of reinforcing India’s stubbornness. The especially horrific attacks last November in the city of Mumbai by a Pakistani terrorist outfit has provided good reason for India to suspend the peace process.

But India’s reluctance to alter the status quo with regard to Kashmir has been there forever, and Pakistani regimes feel that even when they make good-faith gestures, there’s no reciprocity from India’s side.

“ ‘The army’s recent experience with India is very bitter,’ a Pakistani analyst told me,” writes journalist Graham Usher. “After 2004, the army scaled down militant intrusions into Kashmir by 95 per cent. And India’s response was to refuse to talk about Kashmir. The army thinks it would be the same in Afghanistan if it abandoned the Afghan Taliban.’ ”

In a profile in the New Yorker, Holbrooke makes a joke about his limited mandate.

“Obama had mentioned the conflict in Kashmir twice in the weeks after the election, and the government in New Delhi ‘went berserk,’ according to someone familiar with the situation,” writes George Packer. “Holbrooke later turned the setback into a quip: He was going to get through his new job without ever uttering the ‘K-word.’ ”

If only the consequences weren’t that serious. The Obama administration now has nothing to offer Pakistan.

“Holbrooke was denied the tools required to hammer out a grand bargain for the region: For example, an agreement in which Pakistan stopped offering sanctuary to the Afghan Taliban in exchange for a deal with India over Kashmir,” writes Packer. “Instead, according to [scholar] Vali Nasr, Holbrooke had to ‘claw his way up by addressing other issues,’ such as the threat to Pakistan from homegrown extremism.”

Not for nothing does Usher write that “the road out of Kabul goes through Kashmir.”

But the Obama Administration is afraid to travel down that path. Obama timorously told Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during their meeting last week that the United States wanted to “be encouraging ways” for India and Pakistan to sit down together but it wasn’t America’s role to “to resolve all those conflicts” in the region. This reassured the Indian government, since even a reference in a U.S.-China statement at the end of Obama’s China visit that both sides would “work together to promote peace, stability and development” in South Asia had caused an uproar in India, doubly so because of the suspicion toward China in that country.

Obama’s reticence will bedevil the United States in Afghanistan. Since Obama has announced a timeline for withdrawal, Pakistan’s mind is even more focused on its long-term antagonist and the rivalry in Afghanistan. “Many in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, argued that the short timetable diminished any incentive for Pakistan to cut ties to Taliban militants who were its allies in the past, and whom Pakistan might want to use to shape a friendly government in Afghanistan after the American withdrawal,” reports the New York Times.

“This is where Pakistan’s trust of the U.S. could very dramatically increase,” says Ahmed Rashid (a leading Pakistani journalist and analyst), “if it became known the Americans were trying to get the Indians to become more flexible.” ll

But the Obama Administration is unwilling to do that, further dooming its chances in Afghanistan.