Author: Editorial
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: March 5, 2010
URL: http://www.dailypioneer.com/239885/Tumbledown-Dick.html
Holbrooke is bad news for India
The US special representative to Afghanistan
and Pakistan, Mr Richard Holbrooke, has come up with the preposterous idea
that this past week's terror attacks in Kabul were not directed at Indians.
Taliban gunmen entered a guest house complex where Indians lived, they went
door to door ascertaining nationalities and identifying Indians, and yet Mr
Holbrooke seems to believe Indians just happened to be caught in the crossfire!
To be fair, Indians were not the only ones who died that day. Other foreigners
were also killed in what seemed to be a pattern. The Haqqani faction of the
Taliban and its principal strategic ally, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence,
were seeking to scare away those countries and individuals that were building
civil society and Afghan Government capacities to take charge of the embattled
nation's destiny. They were targeting President Hamid Karzai's closest backers.
India is the biggest of these and, as such, is in the Taliban's line of fire.
It is crucial to understand what the ISI and the Pakistani establishment are
doing. They are gradually undermining the Mullah Omar faction of the Taliban,
believing it to be messianic, too aligned with Al Qeada's universal jihad
and politically unreliable. They are seeking to cripple Mr Karzai and his
administration. In all this they are clearing the way for the Haqqani faction
as the only viable force in Afghanistan in case of an American withdrawal.
In the past year, Islamabad has encouraged engagement between the Haqqani
group and the Americans, a process in which they found Mr Holbrooke a willing
ally. In Pakistan's best-case scenario, the generals will rule Islamabad and
their Haqqani proxies will run Kabul. Forget the fog of religious zealotry.
While some of that no doubt exists, what Pakistan is attempting is straightforward
power-play. It is reigniting its strategic depth doctrine and gearing up for
a future assault on the Indian mainland. The game is crystal clear to everybody
- except Mr Holbrooke. Or is he pretending ignorance?
Perhaps the real problem is not the prickly,
bumptious and self-important Mr Holbrooke but the President who has appointed
him. Mr Barack Obama has at his command an ocean of assessments and inputs
on Afghanistan and Pakistan. There is Mr Holbrooke; there is the British Government
and Vice-President Joe Biden, who want to cut and run; there is Secretary
of Defence Robert Gates and his Generals, who want more troops and who want
to fight; there is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose visits to the
region resemble NGO road shows; there are former intelligence gurus like Mr
Bruce Riedel, once said to be Mr Obama's closest adviser on AfPak, who worry
what a jihadi victory will mean for American morale, influence and security.
In their own way, all of these opinions are persuasive, though India will
obviously agree with some more than others. Yet, it is astonishing that Mr
Obama still has not been able to make up his mind. Between ordering a surge
and giving huge concessions to the ISI-Taliban coalition, which is what he
did at the recent London Conference on Afghanistan, he has come out looking
confused and simply under-equipped for the job. Consider Mr Holbrooke. He
consistently misled Washington, DC, in his early days as special representative,
embittered relations with Mr Karzai and ran an insidious campaign to replace
him with a lightweight. With such a record, it is a wonder Mr Obama still
has him in his Administration. Or is there a purpose to it?
