[R-G] Helene Cooper: "South Asia's Deadly Dominoes"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/07/weekinreview/07cooper.html>
December 7, 2008
South Asia's Deadly Dominoes
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — The Mumbai attacks may have begun with Lashkar-e-Taiba, a
Pakistani guerrilla group known in the West mostly for its
preoccupation with Kashmir. But by the time the crisis finally ends,
foreign policy experts say, the fallout may have expanded to include
the United States, NATO, Afghanistan and Iran.

Once again, South Asia is showing itself to be vulnerable to contagion.

President-elect Barack Obama during the campaign laid out an intricate
construction for what might happen in South Asia with the right
American push. He advocated increasing American troops in Afghanistan
and pressing Pakistan to do more to evict foreign fighters and to
attack training camps for radical terrorists along the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Such actions, Mr. Obama said, would help prevent the Taliban and Al
Qaeda from using Pakistani soil as a staging area for attacks in
Afghanistan or on the United States or other Western targets.

Seldom did Mr. Obama mention or include India in his roadmap to peace
in South Asia. During an interview with Time magazine, Mr. Obama did
hint at trying to make a diplomatic push to mediate the Kashmir issue.
But most of his South Asia focus has been on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The trouble, South Asia experts say, is that just about every issue in
the region is somehow interconnected, and they all have a tendency to
set each other off. The Mumbai attacks killed 163 civilians and
members of the security forces, , and terrorized India's most populous
city for more than three days. But when the dust had cleared, "there
was a lot more wreckage than just that," said Teresita C. Schaffer, a
South Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies in Washington.

Strategically, the Mumbai massacres have brought into stark relief
just how tenuous are American hopes for any kind of calm in Pakistan
and Afghanistan, let alone victory over militant forces in the region.

Forget worrying about the hunt for Osama bin Laden along their shared
border, and the battle against a resurgent Taliban. After Mumbai, it
is suddenly all anyone can do just to keep Indians and Pakistanis from
war.

"Step back and consider the situation the Mumbai attackers have
created," said George Friedman, chief executive of Stratfor, a
geopolitical risk analysis company.

Mr. Friedman laid out a frightening domino theory of possible
repercussions of Mumbai. Warning: it gets scary fast.

1. India's already weak government decides it has to retaliate against
Pakistan or risk falling.

India didn't retaliate after the deadly bombing of the Indian embassy
in Kabul July 7. But many Indians view the Mumbai attacks the same way
Americans viewed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and the Indian
government is under enormous pressure to retaliate, perhaps by bombing
training camps in Pakistan. Seven years ago, when gunmen attacked
India's Parliament in New Delhi, the Indian government moved forces
close to the Pakistani border and brought its nuclear forces to a
higher alert level, prompting a similar response from Pakistan and an
intense crisis between the two nuclear rivals. Since then, the Indian
government has been more restrained. But you can't expect that
restraint to dissolve were a firm link between the Mumbai attack and
Pakistan's intelligence service to emerge.

2. Pakistan responds by withdrawing forces from western Pakistan,
where they can fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban, to the India-Pakistan
border.

Pakistan security officials have already warned that if the situation
with India worsens, they will shift troops from western areas, and
pointedly noted during a news conference that such a step would likely
upset the United States because it would mean resources were being
moved from the fight against Islamic militants along the Afghan
border. The Americans have been pressing Pakistan for more military
action against the militants, not less.

While part of Pakistan's threat was "half designed to scare the
daylights out of the United States," part of it was serious, Ms.
Schaffer said. "The serious part of it is, as far as the Pakistan Army
is concerned, India is still the existential threat. If it looked as
if India was going to take some kind of military action, there would
be a re-deployment so fast it would make your head spin."

3. Taliban forces, freed from having to watch out for Pakistani
troops, are strengthened along the Afghan border; Qaeda operatives are
more secure.

A resurgent Taliban that is freed from having to fight a two-front war
will turn its full attention to American and NATO troops in
Afghanistan. Mr. Obama has already said he wants to send two
additional combat brigades to Afghanistan, where violence has climbed
— allied military deaths there have reached 267 this year, the most
ever. The American military plan for the war in Afghanistan assumes
some help from Pakistani troops on the border. It also assumes that
the United States can continue to use Pakistan for logistical support
for the Afghanistan war.

4. The United States' situation in Afghanistan goes from bad to worse.

For the American military effort in Afghanistan to succeed, the
Pakistani military needs to establish control of the lawless territory
between the two countries. It is virtually impossible, South Asia
experts say, to envision a scenario where American soldiers themselves
could establish control of the border regions, with their mountainous
terrain and a local population that is sympathetic to Islamist
militants. So America is seeking a greater willingness from Pakistani
leaders to go after Qaeda and Taliban operatives along the border; a
Pakistani government that is distracted by a new flare-up with India
would not figure into those plans.

5. Iran, watching Pakistan and India rattling their nuclear sabers,
concludes that it is in a better position to insist on pursuing its
nuclear program.

Mr. Obama has said he will do whatever he can to prevent Iran from
acquiring a nuclear weapon, including breaking with years of American
foreign policy and sitting down with Iran's leaders, if necessary. But
for decades, some Iranians have argued that their country needs a
nuclear weapons capacity to match the influence of, or deter,
neighbors like India, Pakistan and Israel — not to mention Russia and
China. Foreign policy experts say that persuading Iran's leaders to
stop their current uranium enrichment program before it makes such a
goal attainable would only get harder if they could point to a nuclear
standoff taking place between Pakistan and India.

The Mumbai attacks, said Mr. Friedman, of Stratfor, "could leave
Obama's entire South Asia strategy in shambles."

Turkish officials have stepped in to try to help, summoning
Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, and Pakistan's president, Asif
Ali Zardari, to Istanbul for talks. A senior Turkish official involved
in the talks expressed optimism that diplomacy could somehow avert a
further ratcheting up of tensions in South Asia. Speaking on condition
of anonymity under normal diplomatic rules, the diplomat said that the
Mumbai terrorists "wanted to create a problem for the whole region,
because they knew this could radicalize the population more." But, he
said, none of that has to happen — if the Indian government resists
the domestic pressure to hit back at Pakistan.

"It would be too much," he said, "to start a war just to keep a
government in place."