Jeopardy Benefits:Containment don't hold water

Jeopardy Benefits: Containment don’t hold water


Josh Brolin as “W”, in the 2008 Oliver Stone directed feature film on George W Bush has him saying: “Containment don’t hold water,” in that epigrammatic way of his.

We know George W Bush believed in aggressive action against the forces of Islamic terrorism. In short order, during his first term of office, he demolished Afghanistan after 9/11 but stopped short of eliminating the Al Qaeda. Instead, he set about destroying the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, following through there from where his father had left off. Here too there were problems. The Americans did not find any WMDs and faltered badly over the subsequent occupation of Iraq. Aggression, like containment, to be sure, is far from perfect.

Dubya never did get aggressive with nuclear Pakistan. Instead, he outsourced the fight against the Al Qaeda to the double-dealing Pervez Musharraf - with less than spectacular results. But the policy of encouraging extremism while pretending to counter it in order to obtain American funding gradually got out of hand. It now threatens the very state of Pakistan. But even now, America has chosen to carry on with a curious and theoretical AFPAK Policy.

Incredulous as it may sound to us, long familiar with Pakistani terrorism and duplicity, the new US policy actually expects to find and negotiate with a reasonable and “moderate” Taliban. This is so naive a plan, that it fills the average Taliban commander in the field, both in Pakistan and Afghanistan, with a full and unbridled mirth. And even Hamid Karzai, the compliant Afghan President, almost totally dependant on American support, can’t bring himself to believe in it.

But perhaps events are fast overtaking such improbable strategies. As radical Taliban hordes muster at Buner, a mere 100 km from Islamabad and advance further to Shangla, just 70 km from Islamabad; their intentions are no longer in doubt. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tacitly acknowledging as much, has accused the Pakistani government of “abdication” in advance of the great Taliban push to come.

And as this end game plays out, America, in the interests of its own self preservation, may be forced to harden its stance. Short of militarily attacking the main problem till it becomes unavoidable, it must at least stop financing the very forces ranged against it.

India, contrary to the conventional wisdom, may have cause to be happy with this latest turn of events. Because, quite apart from the barbaric beating and killing women as a mark of its resolve, the Pakistani Taliban has declared war on the “infidel” Islamic moderates and also against what it has labelled an “Unislamic democracy,” in the rest of Pakistan.

Compared to these seismic and elemental stirrings over our western border, India’s thus far inept and ineffectual diplomatic bleating abroad, complemented by its appalling inability to resist terrorist attacks at home, may not matter very much going forward.

Among influential Western voices, that of Australian anthropologist, David Kilcullen, a former Lt.Colonel in the Australian Army turned Reservist turned US State Department strategic adviser to Gen. David H. Petraeus of the Iraq theatre, is prominent. He holds Pakistan to be the unequivocal central front in the war on terror.

Kilcullen cites its “ 173 million people, 100 nuclear weapons, an army bigger than the US Army, and Al-Qaeda headquarters sitting right there in the two-thirds of the country that the government doesn't control,” as some of the immediate threats. He goes on to say that “The Pakistani military and police and intelligence service don't follow the civilian government; they are essentially a rogue state within a state,” echoing the long-held Indian position.

And as recently as March 22nd, Kilcullen created a stir by predicting, in the Washington Post that: “We're now reaching the point where within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state, also because of the global financial crisis, which just exacerbates all these problems. . . . The collapse of Pakistan, al-Qaeda acquiring nuclear weapons, an extremist takeover -- that would dwarf everything we've seen in the war on terror today”.

Of course he’s quite right: the most pressing strategic concern are the Pakistani nuclear weapons and their capacity, with long-standing Chinese and North Korean backing, to create ever more of them, threaten first use of them, and even send them out to, or with, whomsoever they please.

America may be forced to act sooner rather than later to destroy this dangerous capability while it still has covert control of the Pakistani nuclear establishment. There is a perfect excuse currently for America to defang Pakistan’s nuclear threat, and it may regret vacillating over this issue. Once this monumentally important task is completed, degrading the fighting ability of the extremists is a long-term function of shutting down the flows in the financial taps and mounting a slew of technological, military and economic sanctions.

In the long run, history teaches us that theocracies tend to fail, particularly when they are subjected to a determined siege. But in this instance, the world may find that in the unwinding, this particular extremist movement that has loudly promised dominion in return for blood, may, when exposed as hollow, do more. Its eventual fall, or overthrow, may well act as a poultice to the Afghan-Pakistani body politic, drawing out its poisons and leaving it free to indeed engage with that intended moderate residue.

Meanwhile, at the other tip of this country, an end game is finally playing out. A fugitive V Prabhakaran of the LTTE is all but captured if not destroyed. President Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka has shown a relentless and commendable determination to visit the end of this scourge that has long tormented his country. After the LTTE is gone, a bright new day will surely dawn for the future of the Tamil minority living in Sri Lanka. It will be a bright future because much has been sacrificed over many years to bring it about. It may be composed initially of many challenges, but none will be comparable to the corrosive terrorism of the blood-soaked decades during which the LTTE terrorists held the country and its future to ransom.

But for the Pakistan established by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, now grown almost unrecognisable, sadly, it may already be too late for it to cleanse itself.

(1,050 words)

23rd April 2009
Gautam Mukherjee


Appeared as "Naive America, silly policy" OP-Ed Leader in The Pioneer on Thursday, 30th April 2009 and online at www.dailypioneer.com. Also archived under Columnists.