Obama's Af-Pak Quandary

Breaking away from President George W Bush's goal of democratisation of the Islamic world, President Barack Obama has placed defeating the al-Qaida terrorist network at the centre of the US's policy goal in Afghanistan and Pakistan. While popular and logical from the American perspective, this approach fails to take into account the interest of the US's indispensable ally Pakistan, which is concerned with not just al-Qaida, but also with what it sees as growing Indian influence in Afghanistan and the threat of subversion.

Recent interviews with senior Pakistani military officials make it clear that Pakistani cooperation will depend on the Obama administration's readiness to contain India's anti-Pakistan efforts in Afghanistan. While US troop strength in Afghanistan has increased, US officials have repeatedly said that al-Qaida leadership is now located in Pakistan. How deep America will go, and how it will choose between employing drone attacks or deploying troops in the pursuit of al-Qaida will depend on Pakistani cooperation.

In fact, the al-Qaida is already moving beyond the tribal areas, facilitated by local alliances and motivated by counterproductive Pakistani counterinsurgency tactics that alienate people through brute force. In the past seven years while Pakistan made short-term political deals with the Taliban, al-Qaida and associates assassinated national leaders, bombed munitions factories, police training centres, mosques and girls' schools. They even extended their attacks to Kabul, London and Mumbai. While angering the US, Pakistan's duplicitous policy, meanwhile, has failed to achieve its legitimate national security goals that of fighting al-Qaida with the Americans, but maintaining its influence in Kabul through pro-Pakistani Pashtuns as a safeguard against a precipitous US withdrawal and perceived threat from India in Afghanistan.

But why is this important? In the early years of the war that defeated the Taliban, leaders in Kabul failed to conciliate pro-Pakistan and moderate Taliban leaders, consistently ignoring their legitimate influence over south-east Afghans, thus increasing Islamabad's anxieties. President Hamid Karzai gave India unprecedented access, accepting large amounts of socio-economic aid worth $1.2 billion and military training knowing that Pakistan with its $200 million programme could not compete. He also ignored Pakistani allegations of "India's financial support" for separatists from Pakistan's Baluchistan province, as military analyst Ayesha Siddiqa has noted.

If the US remains oblivious to Pakistani concerns and Pakistanis remain secretive about their duplicitous means in taking care of a perceived Indian threat, then US unilateral military escalation may be unavoidable. In that case Washington should have no illusions: if the United States sends troops, it would face an angry, 175 million-strong, nuclear-armed nation, willing to fight for every inch, attracting regional intervention and coalescing with the al-Qaida. An imploding Pakistan could start a domino-effect-war with incalculable consequences for the United States and the world.