Author: Praveen Swami

Backstage, Trump will be talking Kashmir with Modi—but the path he’s advocating is doomed

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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From a distance, it might have been mistaken for an early autumn snowfall: torn leaves of a Quran fluttered all around the famous Rozabal ziarat in Srinagar; the grave of the saint Yuz Asaf, believed by some to in fact be the resting place of Jesus, had been dug up. In the small village of Wutligam, a woman charged with promiscuity had been marched to the village square and then shot through the back of the head. In Arigam, jihadists looted the store of Hindu grocery-store owner Raj Nath; in Arizal, they tried to assassinate the pro-India politician Ghulam Qadir.

In August 1965, Hayat Mir—a crack intelligence operative with special forces training— had crossed the Chor Panjal pass with the columns of advancing Pakistan army troops. Then, perched on the mountains near the Baba Reshi shrine, he abandoned his uniform: Mir’s job was to provoke a mass Islamist insurgency against Indian rule.

Two years earlier, sitting in his office in Washington, DC, Central Intelligence Agency officer-turned-diplomat Robert Komer had watched the unravelling of a secret United States effort to mediate on Kashmir—and predicted it would end in just such bloodshed.

“Everybody from (Field-Marshall) Ayub (Khan) down is on a new hate-India jag”, he observed in a terse October 22, 1963 missive to President John F Kennedy’s National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy. The Pakistanis, he noted, “appear to be deliberately building up tensions over Kashmir”.

“I cite this not because I lack sympathy for the Paks but because until we do give them a cold shoulder on this sort of business we’ll continue to have all sorts of problems”.

Four weeks later, President Kennedy was assassinated. The prospect of peace in Kashmir was buried with him. Indeed, the failed effort of 1961-1963—into which declassified documents now give historians granular insight—helps understand why the road to peace in Kashmir has so often led, paradoxically, to war.

Later today, when when the folk-dances and hugs celebrating the India-United States relationship are done, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Donald Trump will get down to the real business—backstage. There’s little doubt Kashmir is high on President Trump’s mind. Last summer, President Trump outraged India’s foreign policy establishment by asserting Prime Minister Modi had asked him to meditate on the Kashmir conflict—and then brushed off New Delhi’s denial, to repeat his claim.

Early this year, Trump went even further, saying that he and Prime Minister Imran Khan were “working together on some borders, and we’re talking about Kashmir”.

The reasons for Trump’s interest isn’t opaque. Hoping to pull out of the endless war in Afghanistan, President Trump has negotiated a peace deal with the Taliban. There’s even odds, though, that the Taliban might use a drawdown in United States troop levels to overrun major Afghan cities. That would be a disaster for Trump’s re-election prospects—and he needs the Taliban’s patrons, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, to keep them to their word.

Islamabad’s support, however, comes with a price-tag: support on securing concessions in Kashmir.

President Trump also has other reasons to intervene on Kashmir. Like President Kennedy, he sees India as a strategic buffer against China—but the conflict over Kashmir gives Beijing leverage across South Asia. He is also apprehensive, with good reason, about the conflict escalating into a large-scale war, even a nuclear conflagration with catastrophic impacts on the region.

For these very reasons, President Bill Clinton had offered to mediate over Kashmir in 2000, while President Barack Obama had hoped his Afghanistan envoy, Richard Holbrooke, would be able to engage Islamabad and New Delhi on the issue.

New Delhi, in turn, has often sought international help—though it doesn’t like the word meditation. United States mediation helped bring a rapid end to the Kargil war in 1999, and since 26/11, it’s played a key role in tempering Pakistan’s use of jihadists against India. Following the Balakote air-battles, which mercilessly exposed gaps in India’s military preparedness, New Delhi has also lobbied hard for Washington to hold back Pakistan from staging terrorist attacks which could force it to risk another crisis.

This all makes mediation—conducted in secret, so it doesn’t appear to be mediation—seem like an excellent idea to many in Washington, Islamabad, and even New Delhi. Except, it isn’t.

In the autumn of 1961, Komer floated the idea of a grand India-Pakistan bargain that read like a Wagah candle-waver’s dream: a common air-defence system; a customs union; even joint management of agriculture in Punjab. This, he hoped, would allow India and Pakistan to negotiate a new relationship in Kashmir: perhaps New Delhi could be persuaded to give up “a little more wasteland up in Ladakh”, and some minor territorial concessions alone the ceasefire line of 1948; perhaps there could even be “joint tenancy” in the Kashmir valley.

The China-India war of 1962 gave traction to Komer’s proposals: New Delhi now desperately needed United States military aid, and Washington thought it could use the opportunity to push for progress on Kashmir.

Late in 1962, the United Kingdom’s secretary of state for Commonwealth relations, Duncan Sandys, and the United States’ Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, Averell Harriman, were dispatched to South Asia to determine what military assistance India needed.

Lord Louis Mountbatten travelled with Sandys on this mission, hoping to persuade Nehru to agree to a demilitarised and independent Jammu and Kashmir. India’s cabinet, however, shot down the idea. The diplomats did, however, succeed in pushing Nehru and the Pakistani military dictator General Ayub Khan, who had taken power in 1958, to the negotiating table.

After two rounds of talks, an event took place which, for all practical purposes, destroyed the prospects of an accord. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had taken over as Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, travelled to Beijing in March 1963 and ceded parts of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to China.

To the President, Komer was blunt. “I wonder if we aren’t doing ourselves a disservice by our continued pressure on Kashmir”, he wrote in a May 14, 1963, note for Kennedy. “There is no denying the great value of a Kashmir settlement to us”, he recorded, “and until recently, I was as much of a hard-liner as anyone on this issue. I would be still if I saw a sporting chance”.

In reality, Komer argued, the prospects of a deal had been “dimmed by Pakistan’s own excessive appetite and misguided tactics, such as trying to use the Chicoms (Chinese communists)”. Talk of Indian concessions on Kashmir, he went on, would engender “a dangerous Pakistan emotional reaction”.

“The longer we nurture Pak illusions”, Komer told Kennedy, “the more a head of steam is built up in Pakistan, and the harder such a reaction will be to head off”.

From the memoirs of Lieutenant-General Gul Hasan Khan, we know just how high that head of steam had built up: hoping to pressurise India into making the concessions President Kennedy sought, it prepared to use force. There was, General Khan wrote, to first being an “intensification of the firecracker type of activity that was already current”, a reference to terrorism. Then, the Pakistan Army was to train guerrillas like Hayat Mir, who would be tasked with “arming the locals and helping them rise against the Indian Army of occupation”.

Then, on August 29, 1965, Pakistan’s army chief, General Mohammad Musa received secret orders to initiate full-scale war: “a general rule”, the orders read, “Hindu morale would not stand for more than a couple of hard blows delivered at the right place and the right time”.

New Delhi’s own position in Kashmir hardened in the build-up to the war, with Prime Minister Nehru moving to tie the territory closer into the Indian union. In 1963, with the political patriarch, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah in jail on charges of seeking independence, Nehru’s hand-picked regional strongman, Ghulam Muhammad Bakshi, ceased to call himself Kashmir’s wazir-i-azam, or prime minister and picked the standard title of chief minister instead. The arrangement would be formalised by the legislature in 1965.

In late 1964, an order issued by the President of India allowed the central government to take charge of Jammu and Kashmir’s administration in the event of the collapse of the constitutional machinery. Prior to this order, the imposition of emergency powers required the concurrence of the state legislature. A wide variety of central legislation was made applicable to Kashmir; high officials and candidates contesting elections now had to vow to “uphold the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India”.

Then, in January 1965, the Indian National Congress amended its party constitution and enabled the setting up of a state unit in Jammu and Kashmir which in turn simply subsumed the National Conference, then led by chief minister GM Sadiq.

For both Islamabad and New Delhi, there are important lessons in those events. Pakistan’s efforts to seize Kashmir failed spectacularly: far from rising in support of jihad, the villagers of Wutligam and Arizal were repelled by jihadists like Hayat Mir and betrayed them to police. New Delhi’s integrationist efforts, in turn, failed: incarcerating Sheikh Abdullah in jail, and the National Conference-Congress merger, left the state without legitimate political opposition, strengthening the Islamist tendencies that would explode in the 1980s.

There’s an even more important lesson for the United States. Kennedy’s peace efforts, no matter how well-intentioned, had led both India and Pakistan to sharpen their swords, not beat them into ploughshares. Either hoping to secure concessions or to avoid having to make them, both nations hardened the status-quo—a process that led on, inexorably, to war.

Late on the afternoon of November 17, 1965, Hayat Mir walked into the lunch-room at Srinagar’s Ahdoos Hotel, to discuss plans to take forward the jihad in Kashmir after Pakistan’s military defeat. Plain-clothes police personnel were waiting. “This is the first time in my life I have failed,” police files record him as saying.

Everybody failed: Washington, Islamabad, and New Delhi alike. Leaders who don’t read history are condemned to repeat its errors. The path President Trump is now embarked on with Prime Minister Khan leads to the same destination so many other leaders found themselves at: a grim, blood-soaked place called an impasse.

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The Summit of Power: Your cheat-sheet to the five biggest takeaways from the Modi-Trump summit

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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This weekend, when you’re catching up on sleep or heading off for a weekend break, a small army of people are going to be working 24/7 to make sure Monday’s summit meeting between two of the world’s most powerful leaders goes off flawlessly. That doesn’t just include the thousands of government staff organising President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s roadshow in Gujarat, or the security staff who have the gargantuan job of making sure the unthinkable remains exactly that. Trade negotiators, defence experts, diplomats, politicians and intelligence officials are all going to burning the midnight oil, until the moment Air Force One touches down on Monday.

1. BACKSTAGE: THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF A PERFECT SUMMIT MEETING

• Long before President Trump lands in Ahmedabad on Monday, hundreds of Secret Service Agents began working with India’s Intelligence Bureau and the Special Protection Group to make sure both he and Prime Minister Modi will be secure through the course of their two-day summit—no small challenge when they’ll be appearing before almost-impossible-to-police crowds of hundreds of thousands.
• In addition to the specially-modified Boeing 747 Trump will be flying on, he’ll be bringing with him a car capable to withstanding explosive blasts—and top-secret communications equipment that can even let him unleash America’s nuclear arsenal remotely.
• Through Monday and Tuesday, we’ll be casting light on the backroom boys who’ve put together the perfect summit—a cast of characters including spies and hospitality workers, hospitality workers and diplomats, who’ve worked to make this summit work.

2. THE ECONOMY: EXPECT NEGOTIATIONS TO BEGIN ON A COMPREHENSIVE ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENT

• The bedrock of the India-United States relationship, ever since it began to flower in the late-1980s, has been the economy—but, in recent years, protectionism in the United States and the slowdown in India have raised questions on its future.
• The bad news is that India and the US won’t be signing the limited Free Trade Agreement many had hoped for. They’ve chosen, instead, to work on something far bigger: a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, that will encompass not just duty-free trade of merchandise, but also free movement of professionals and easier investment norms.
• The deal will take the time of hammer out, because of its enormous complexity, but when it’s done, it should be a game-changer.

3. DEFENCE: 8-10 BIG DEALS LIKELY TO FIRM UP, HELPING TO GROW THE INDIA-US PARTNERSHIP

• From the early 2000s, the United States has emerged as India’s second-largest defence supplier. This visit will see the firming up of 8-10 major acquisition decisions, worth around $10 billion—among them, the $2.6bn. acquisition of 24 MH60 helicopters for the navy, and 6 AH64E Apache attack helicopters valued at $795 million.
• There will also be negotiations on the acquisition of the NASAMS air-defence system, part of a three-tier ring to guard our cities, and the P8I long-range maritime surveillance aircraft.
• The United States will also push for India to purchase its F21 combat jets. There are tensions in the relationship: the US hasn’t been as willing to part with technology for India’s indigenous defence industry as New Delhi hopes, while Washington is irked by New Delhi’s purchase of the S-400 air-defence system from Russia.
• But the two sides have shown the ability to overcome differences in the past—laying the foundations for a defence relationship critical to shaping Asia’s future security.

4. ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: WILL MODI AND TRUMP FIND MIDDLE-GROUND ON KASHMIR, AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN?

• Last month, President Trump set alarm bells ringing in New Delhi’s strategic establishment when he said he was negotiating borders, and a future course of action on Kashmir, with Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan.
  He’s irked New Delhi in the past by offering to mediate on Kashmir—an absolute no-no for India, which insists the conflict is a bilateral matter to be resolved with Pakistan.
• That isn’t all: Trump’s peace deal with the Taliban holds out the prospect that the jihadist organisation, closely-linked to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, could soon wield significant power in Afghanistan.
• For New Delhi, all this raises the nightmare prospect of a Pakistan Army more assertive in using its jihadist proxies against India. Behind closed doors, the two leaders will be discussing this complex geopolitical jigsaw puzzle, trying to find middle-ground.

5. ENDURING GAINS: THE ORDINARY INDIANS WHO’VE POWERED THE INDIA-US RELATIONSHIP, AND WHY THEY NEED THIS SUMMIT

• Late in the nineteenth century, when the first Indian immigrants arrived in the United States as agricultural workers hoping for better lives, they could never have imagined where the community stands today.
• Indians are now the second-largest foreign-born ethnic group in the United States, after Mexicans—and solidly represented at the top of its structure of power, including the economy, government, academia and politics.
• Even though United States-born and Indian-born Americans together make up just 1 percent of the country’s population, too small a community to be of direct electoral significance, their influence gives them almost unrivalled heft and influence. Irrespective of the many crisis India and the United States have encountered over the decades, the community has ensured the relationship has grown.
• Now, though, the community faces new challenges, ranging from visas to rising nationalism—and is hoping the goodwill from the summit will help resolve these problems.

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The bigly business of keeping President Trump safe

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Keeping US President Donald Trump safe is the job of the United States Secret Service — the agency responsible for protecting him and his immediate family no matter where in the world they are. Secret Service agents will have planned security arrangements down to the last detail — down to ensuring there are adequate supplies of blood on hand for the president, just in case something goes wrong. The roads the president will use will have been carefully sanitised, emergency escape routes planned, threat scenarios rehearsed: nothing is left to chance.

Even though state police forces and the Central Reserve Police Force will be on hand to provide layers of protection for the VVIP summit — with the National Security Guard standing by, just in case — the innermost ring of President Trump’s security will be made up of the Secret Service.

Throughout the planning for President Trump’s visit, and all through it, the Secret Service has been liaising with VVIP security experts at the Intelligence Bureau — who, in turn, will be working with local police to make sure literally every square metre of ground the president traverses is secure. The Secret Services brings its own highly sophisticated communications security and threat-detection equipment, as well as bomb-sniffing dogs — but the Gujarat Police and Delhi Police will carry out the same tasks, too.

Local police officials, in some senses, have the toughest task, since it’s their job to make sure there’s no threat from the crowds — a task complicated by the fact that politicians sometimes like to spontaneously mingle with the public. Top cops have sometimes used a little subterfuge to make this happen smoothly: In 1990, when Prime Minister VP Singh insisted on an open-car ride through terrorism-torn Amritsar, Punjab Police officer KPS Gill saturated the crowds with plainclothes police personnel.

The Secret Service also has to guard those who must be with the president at all times — among them, a military aide carrying the 20-kilogram, Zero Halliburton metal briefcase, clad in a black leather jacket, which carries the launch codes for the United States’ nuclear missiles.

An armed Secret Service agent even accompanies the president to the restroom, or into any other situation where he might want a little bit of privacy — and, by law, President Trump cannot order them to leave him alone. That means Secret Service agents know more about the lives of those they protect than leaders are comfortable with — though only one, President Bill Clinton’s bodyguard Gary Byrne, has ever broken the agency’s code of silence about the lives of the leaders they guard.

Founded in 1865, and charged with protecting United States Presidents since 1901, the 7,000-strong Secret Service — about one quarter women — is believed to have among the most gruelling training requirements of any armed force.  Less than one in one hundred applicants make the cut to enter its training facilities at Laurel, Virginia.

Bad news for Hollywood fans, though: No, Secret Service bodyguards do not swear an oath promising to die for the president.

In the air

Air Force One isn’t actually a plane: It’s the call-sign assigned to whichever of the two state-of-the-art Boeing VC25s — the military variant of the Boeing 747-200 — that carries the President of the United States. Inside, there’s some 370 square metres of space for the president, officials and the media. Trump himself has a lavishly fitted suite, which includes a large office, lavatory, and conference room. The plane’s two kitchens are designed to feed up to 100 people at a time. Furniture for Air Force One was mostly hand-crafted, making its interiors look more like a hotel than an aeroplane.

The thing that distinguishes Air Force One from the jets owned by Saudi oil magnates and kings are its onboard electronics. Hardened to resist electromagnetic pulses — which would be released by a nuclear explosion —Air Force One is designed to function as a mobile command centre in the event of an attack on the United States. There are also a welter of electronic counter-measures against missile attack, of the kind normally fitted in military aircraft.

Air Force One is maintained and operated by the Presidential Airlift Group, part of the White House Military Office. The Airlift Group was founded in 1944, at the direction of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as he prepared to travel to Yalta for the conference where the leaders of the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union famously decided what the post-World War II world would look like.

For the next 15 years, various propeller-driven aircraft served presidents, until President Dwight Eisenhower flew to Europe aboard VC-137A, a modified Boeing 707 Stratoliner, in August 1959. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy became the first President to fly in a jet specifically built for presidential use, a modified Boeing 707.

For fans of the Hollywood hit Air Force One, starring Harrison Ford, there’s some bad news: According to the United States Air Force, the real plane doesn’t have an escape pod, or even parachutes. But then, the details of safety and survival equipment on Air Force One are secret — so who knows what might be hidden away inside?

On the road

Like every US President, President Trump will be bringing his own cars — a custom-built, 9,000-kilogram monster known as “the Beast”. Built from the bottom-up over a Chevrolet Kodiak truck chassis, the President’s limousines are estimated to have some eight inches of armour cladding, made from steel, aluminium and ceramics, as well as windows of the kinds commercial jets use. It’s also got defensive tools like smoke-screens, oil slicks and tear gas — as well as night-vision technology. The drivers trained in evasive manoeuvres, make a 180° turns if needed to evade an attack.

Though there’s no such thing as indestructible, the Beast makes the president pretty much invulnerable to almost any form of foreseeable attack, whether from an assassin armed with an assault weapon, or a direct hit from a rocket-propelled grenade.

From inside the car, President Trump can securely communicate with his officials in Washington and around the world at all times — even to authorise a nuclear attack, just in case World War III breaks out while he’s abroad.

Though other world leaders also have special vehicles — President Vladimir Putin uses a modified Mercedes-Benz, the Maruti 800 of the VVIP world, while China’s chief executive, President Xi Jinping, uses a custom-made Hongqi L5 — the Beast is the most expensive and sophisticated of its kind.

How much does it all cost?

Bigly. According to Freedom of Information Act disclosures made in 2017, Air Force 1 costs $142,380, for every hour of flight time. Remember, there are two identical Boeing 747s involved — so the bill is actually twice that. Then, there’s the C5 Galaxy cargo aircraft which carries the president’s limousines, specialist security equipment and so on. There can be up to 1,000 civil servants on-site for logistics; they’ll all need hotel rooms, local transport and per-diems. During President Trump’s visit to Jerusalem, the entourage booked the entire King David Hotel, where suites go for over $5,500 a night — as well as about 1,100 other hotel rooms.

In response to a domestic political controversy over President Trump’s frequent golf trips, the United States’ audit watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, determined four such holidays from February 3–March 5, 2017, cost the taxpayer over $13.5 million.

India does not disclose information on the costs of foreign VVIP visits, and they’re hard to estimate because the salaries of personnel — like police on ground — are not separately costed.

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Is it time for world leaders to get over the pomp and pageantry of summit meetings?

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Flushed with the triumph of his armies at Austerlitz and Jena, Napoléon Bonaparte, emperor of France, rowed out one summer in 1807 to a barge moored on the Nieman river at Tilsit, to reshape Europe with his defeated enemies. There were two great white tents on the barge, one emblazoned with an ‘N’, for the French emperor and the other bearing the letter ‘A’, for Aleksandr Pavlovich, Tsar of Russia. There was no tent, Prussian diplomats sourly noted, for their monarch, Frederick William III.

Lavish entertainment and banquets greased the march towards peace. Napoléon and Alexander were regularly dining together, and taking long walks after dark. In one letter, Napoléon teased his wife with news that he had been flirting with Prussia’s queen, Duchess Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

Then, a deal signed to “ensure the happiness and tranquillity of the world”, the two new-best-friends left Tilsit — and promptly set about stabbing each other in the back.

Modi-Trump meeting

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi and United States President Donald Trump meet this week, there’s reason to ask what the fuss is all about. Talks on an India-United States Free Trade Agreement are deadlocked; there’s no daylight, either, on visas for Indian information technology workers. The $3.5 billion in military purchases India is expected to announce didn’t need the intervention of the two leaders; India and the United States won’t suddenly see eye-to-eye on Pakistan or Afghanistan, either.

Leave aside the pomp and spectacle, and there won’t be that much to see at this summit. And that’s true of most summits between leaders across the world. The sad end of the Tilsit treaty teaches us that personal warmth and charisma don’t carry nations all that far.

Past years haven’t been kind to the institution of the summit meeting. The 2019 summit between President Trump and North Korea’s chairman, Kim Jong-un spectacularly imploded. Trump’s 2018 summit with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, only won him uniformly negative coverage at home. And Prime Minister Modi’s surprise summit with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 2015 led, in short order, to the Pakistani leader being deposed by his own army brass.

The summit meeting, it is important to understand, is an artefact of technology. For most of history, sheer distance meant rulers rarely met, delegating the task of diplomacy to professionals. The professional envoy’s message wasn’t usually that different from that of the professional extortionist. “From sunrise to sunset, all the world has been given to us”, the Ilkhan emperor Abaqa Khan wrote to Sultan Rukn al-Din Baibars in 1266. “You must submit”.

To the time of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who served as United States president from 1933-1945, scholar Elmer Plischke notes, only five of his predecessors had even set foot on foreign soil. For the most part, international relations were the business of the professional—not the politician.

Early in the last century, though, as relationships between nation-states became increasingly complex, leaders began see their personal charisma as a means to overcome bureaucratic resistance, and resolve intractable problems. “If you want to settle a thing, you see your opponent and talk it over with him”, said David Lloyd-George, Britain’s prime minister from 1916-1922. “The last thing to do is write him a letter”.

Talking it over, events soon demonstrated, wasn’t always the wisest course. In 1939, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was beguiled by Germany’s Fuhrer, infamously holding out an agreement the two signed in 1939 as evidence “of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again”.

But bitter experience, the history of diplomacy shows, proved unable to temper the narcissism of political leaders.

Leading up to the Potsdam Conference of 1945 — where the leadership of the Soviet Union, United States and Great Britain decided the post-World War II structure of Europe — summits between world leaders had become increasingly common. The foundations had been laid for a new kind of diplomacy, with spectacle at its core.

The narcissism of political leaders

Following their intimate walks in the woods at Tilsit, Napoléon and Alexander promptly returned to the pursuit of power and interests. The French emperor obstructed Russia’s interests in the Balkans. In turn, his treasury under pressure, Alexander lifted a blockade meant to choke Britain’s Baltic and Russian trade. Finally, in 1812, Napoléon embarked on a disastrous war with Russia, which would see his army slaughtered and Alexander kicking open the gates of Paris two years later.

Even though the historical experience of summitry had — at best — been mixed, modern leaders continued to be seduced by their own assessments of the power of their personalities.

The results were predictable. President John F. Kennedy’s summit meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev at Vienna in 1961 ended up deepening mutual suspicions. Prime Minister Harold MacMillan’s faith in his own charisma led him to eschew a translator during a summit with President Charles de Gaulle in 1962. The misunderstandings that followed led France to veto Britain’s first application for entry to the European Economic Community.

As diplomatic historian Peter Weilemann has noted, summit-driven diplomacy has often led to “superficial understandings that in the long term could actually aggravate differences. Heads of states are not experts in highly complex matters such as arms control, trade, or other issues on summit agendas”.

In stark contrast, professional diplomatic advice helped President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev resolve the Cuban Missile Conference in 1963, saving the world from potential nuclear armageddon without a single face-to-face discussion.

And apparent summit success — like President Richard Nixon’s Cold War-shaping meeting with China’s Mao Zedong in 1973 — came about because of a convergence of strategic interest, not personal warmth.

The reasons why world leaders continue to crave summits aren’t hard to understand. The mass-media attention that goes with summits; the spectacle of heroic world leaders appearing to grapple with intractable problems; status and prestige: in our mass-media age, these have powerful electoral and political dividends.

“Failures”, scholar Jan Mellisen has ruefully recorded, “did not deter Presidents and Prime Ministers from their unabated love of the summit. The practice of summitry has become an addictive drug for many political principals”.

In a world where governments’ dealings are ever-more complex, and where technology enables secure, instant communication, the summit no longer serves any country’s national interest. There are few world leaders, though, willing to eschew the ersatz, taxpayer-funded glory that comes from pomp and pageantry — however little it actually signifies.

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The Budget has taken another brick out of the walls protecting Indians from anarchy

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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When it was all over, the crowd turned on Ruby Batham, kicking and hitting her before someone finally did her the mercy of smashing her skull in with a rock. Police watched. Batham’s husband, Subhash, had held 23 local children hostage, threatening to execute them as an act of vengeance against those, he claimed, had framed him for murder. For the mass-circulation, Amar Ujala, the murder of his wife was her own fault: “How can we let them go”, it reported Ruby Batham as saying, with troubling itself with citing a source, “these kids are worth Rs 1 crore each”.

The murder of Ruby Batham isn’t the only savagery we haven’t chosen to dwell on this week gone by: There were the terrorist attacks by Hindu nationalists on New Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh protests; the brutal beatings administered to a woman schoolteacher by Trinamool Congress workers; the acid attack on a Hapur teenager unwise enough to complain to police that she had been raped.

India’s biggest national security threat isn’t in Kashmir or Chhattisgarh: It is the complete vanishing of the rule of law in giant swathes of the Republic’s territory. This year’s budget commitments for policing have taken one more brick out of the walls protecting us from anarchy.

In 2020-2021, Rs 784.53 crore has been budgeted for the modernisation of state police and India’s national criminal database, down from Rs 939.79 crore spent in 2019-2020. Though cash might be short, depressing reading isn’t: The Intelligence Bureau will spend just Rs 83.50 crore of its  Rs 2575.25 on capital acquisitions, this at a time new challenges across the region are mounting. capital expenditure on police training is just Rs 21.69 crore, and forensic science Rs 15.41 crore.

Compare that with the Rs 145.20 crore budgeted for capital expenditure on the Special Protection Group, which guards the prime minister, or the Rs 222.63 the Delhi Police has got—and you get a good sense of what VIPs actually care for.

Law enforcement system is at breaking point

These funding cuts are coming at a time it’s clear the law enforcement system is at breaking point.  The implosion of the Haryana Police along caste lines in 2016, searingly documented in Prakash Singh’s official investigation; the failure of intelligence services and police to contain violence after the arrest of Ram Rahim Singh; the near-collapse of the state across southern Kashmir in 2018: Together, these provide graphic illustration of what India’s future might be looking like.

The key to understanding why police forces are overstretched is the stark fact that there just aren’t enough personnel. The United Nations recommends that nation states maintain 250 police officers per 100,000 population. India has vowed, repeatedly, to move towards that target but has miserably failed.

In 2007, Indian police forces were sanctioned 1,334,344 personnel, 411,871 of those committed to everyday duties, and 1,746,215 as armed reserves to be used in emergencies. For a projected population of 1.140 billion, that meant 153 police officers for every 100,000 people. Today, Bureau of Police Research and Development statistics show, there are 192 officers sanctioned for every 100,000 of India’s 1.287 billion residents — but because of budget constraints, India actually has only 150.80 police officers per 100,000 population, below the sanctioned level even for 2007.

Uttar Pradesh should have 185 police officers per 100,000 citizens; it has 127. Telengana should have 218; it has 131. Bihar doesn’t even pretend to aspire to United Nations norms, yet its sanctioned strength of 121 per 100,000 population is far higher than its actual numbers, a pathetic 73 per 100,000.

Even worse, the police we have aren’t trained or equipped. In 2016-2017, the last year for which figures are available, just 44,083 police personnel across the country received any form of in-service training: 0.03 percent of the national police force. Little spending, the BPR&D records, actually went into improvising the capability of police forces: Combined state and central government spending on modernisation of facilities, the BPR&D records, stood at just Rs 7,356.18 crore, or less than 7 percent.

For all the talk of smart policing and modernisation, most state governments have been reluctant spend cash to fix these problems. In 2017-2018, according to BPR&D statistics, India’s states and union territories together spent

Rs 108,174.88 crore on police forces: up just 1.39 percent in nominal terms. In no states barring Tamil Nadu, Telengana and Delhi did spending on police constitute more than 2 percent of the state budget.

Even in relatively well-administered Maharashtra, scholars Renuka Sane and Neha Sinha have found that “budgets, as they stand, barely allocate funds for operational expenses of running police stations, or maintenance costs for computer systems, arms and ammunition”. The cuts in central funding for state police forces will, obviously, accentuate the crisis.

Poor investigation, corruption and incompetence thus characterise the criminal justice landscape: Eroding the legitimacy of law-enforcement, and the law itself. Instead of building a modern criminal justice system, we’ve been reduced to lynching people on the streets. Like the crowds who gathered at football stadiums in Kabul to witness Taliban executions-by-stoning, we gawp at ball-by-ball commentary on the hangings of rapists; this simulacrum of justice is all that remains when hope has been lost for the real thing.

Lack of law and order 

The United States, with a far smaller population than India, spends over $100 billion a year on policing, New York alone will spend $5.6 billion this year, with $107 million dedicated to training, and another $187 million to intelligence and counter-terrorism. China is estimated to have spent more on internal security than on defence this last decade. No genius needed to understand why: A society that can’t ensure law and order is one that is headed into the abyss.

Indians can’t complain they weren’t warned. In 1953, the first issue of the national Crime in India survey warned that “the old fear which the police used to inspire among criminals has dissipated”. The reasons were clear, even then: “India has the lowest number of policemen per 100,000 of the population”; in rural areas, the police “had ceased to exist as an effective force”. Lack of funding had meant “there had been no improvement in methods of investigation, or the application of science”.

“All these handicaps continue to exist,” the survey recorded the next year, in 1954. “We make the same suggestions we made the last year.”

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Afghanistan’s request for Indian troops — It’s an insane idea, which New Delhi must take seriously

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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“Legs and arms protruding from the snow, Europeans and Hindustanis half-buried, horses and camels all dead,” Subedar Sita Ram chronicled the annihilation of the imperial British garrison which began to march out of Kabul in the high winter of 1842. Perched in the hills, Sita Ram recorded, Afghan tribesmen shot at the British forces, leaving them “as helpless as a handcuffed prisoner”. “The men fought like gods, not like men”, he concluded. “But, alas!, alas!, who can withstand fate”?

Five thousand soldiers, and some 15,000 camp-followers —many women and children — had marched out of Kabul. Pop history holds just one, surgeon William Brydon, survived; the real number was a few hundred.  For fifteen months, Sita Ram served as a slave, sold in the bazaar for Rs 240; the wives and children of other soldiers never saw their homeland again.

Early this month, Afghanistan’s National Security Advisor, Hamdullah Mohib, used a visit to New Delhi to privately press a request for at least a Brigade — perhaps even a Division —of Indian troops to be deployed in a peacekeeping role, ahead of a peace deal with the Taliban which is expected to lead to the final withdrawal of United States forces. Kabul, diplomatic sources said, hopes to put together a multinational framework, perhaps United Nations-led, for this troop deployment.

To most in India’s strategic establishment, the idea appears insane: From the decimation of Britain’s 1842 army, which included thousands of Indians, to the grinding down of Soviet Union in 1979-1989, and the morass the United States has descended into since 9/11, intervention in Afghanistan hasn’t had happy outcomes.

For India, though, failure to intervene will also have costs —key among them, the risk that southern Afghanistan could become a safe haven for jihadists, and that protracted insurgency could eventually destabilise the West Asian states on India depends for its energy security. Put simply, Indian troops in Afghanistan might be an insane idea — but this insane idea needs to be considered very, very seriously.

Idea finds few takers 

To understand why Afghanistan’s calls for Indian troops are becoming louder, one has to turn to the agreement now being hammered out between Taliban negotiators and United States diplomats in Doha. The deal is expected to include guarantees the Islamist insurgents will scale down violence — but bitter experience has taught Afghans to suspect the Taliban will resile on their word the minute the United States vacates its military bases.

New Delhi’s long-standing allies in Afghanistan’s north — who India, along with Iran and Russia funded and armed through their long, bitter battle against the Taliban until 9/11 — see an Indian Army as insurance against their cities being overrun by proxies for the Pakistan Army.

Few Indian military analysts see deployment in Afghanistan as sustainable. There is, critically, just no way to provide logistical support to an Indian garrison. The only workable route is through Iran’s Chabahar port, connecting by rail and road to the city of Herat. The route has been used by India before, to provide both civilian and military aid to Afghanistan — but with Iran-United States hostilities rising, the route may not be a reliable one.

Vivek Chadha, a former army officer now working at the Institute for Defence and Strategic Analysis in New Delhi, says that, decades after India’s ill-fated intervention in Sri Lanka in 1987-1990, the country just doesn’t have the logistical and technological means to support a counter-insurgency mission in a third country.

The Indian Air Force just isn’t equipped to provide cover for forces operating in hostile environments out-of-theatre; surveillance assets are limited; independent intelligence capacity almost non-existent.

“Experience also teaches us,” Chadha argues, “that missions like these tend to snowball. We’ll send troops; they’ll be attacked by Pakistan’s proxies, and we’ll have to send more troops to protect them.”

India’s partners in sustaining the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance have worked, in recent years, to make their peace with the Islamist insurgency. Iran’s intelligence services have long enjoyed a robust tactical relationship with the Taliban — using them to harry the United States, on the one hand, while at once arming and equipping Shi’a proxies opposed to the insurgents. In the event of a Taliban effort to capture power, Tehran would likely back its opponents — but at arm’s length, as it did in the 1990s.

For its part, Russia sees the Taliban as an ally against the Islamic State on the borders of its central Asian allies. Afghan authorities have bitterly complained that Russia is providing covert military assistance to Taliban units operating in the country’s north — a claim Moscow denies. Beijing, similarly, has cultivated close links to the Taliban, in return for help with jihadists seeking to target Xinjiang province.

The United States, of course, doesn’t care deeply about the prospect of Afghanistan becoming a safe haven for jihadists: the country protected from the immediate fallout by sheer distance, and capable of operating against targets using its global network of bases.

New Delhi, though, just doesn’t have the option of relying on the Taliban’s goodwill. Even though Taliban negotiators have reached out to New Delhi, seeking diplomatic engagement, the group remains deeply enmeshed with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. It also has disturbing links with a welter of anti-India jihadist groups — ranging from the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, to al-Qaeda’s Indian subcontinent unit.

Al-Qaeda’s last subcontinent chief, Uttar Pradesh-born jihadist Sana-ul-Haq, was in the company of Taliban when he was killed in a drone strike, intelligence sources note.

But against this counter-terrorism concerns, New Delhi must weigh the costs — in cash and blood — of a physical presence in Afghanistan, which are likely substantial. The question will be: Are a few terrorists really worth the enormous financial burdens and risks which come with committing troops overseas?

India’s status as a regional power 

The answer will, of course, lie partly in what kind of multinational framework is stitched together to secure Afghanistan once the United States withdraws — and how much pressure there is on Pakistan to abide by it. The signs, for now, aren’t heartening. President Donald Trump’s government seems content to hand over management of a post-deal Afghanistan to Islamabad, and is already working to ease sanctions imposed by the multinational Financial Action Task Force.

But New Delhi also needs to ask itself a harder question: If India intends to be taken seriously as a regional power, a status it often seeks, it also needs to be a provider of collective security. For decades, New Delhi’s sought a seat at the global high table, but has shied away from the responsibilities that come with it. India was conspicuously absent, even in a humanitarian role, from helping its West Asian allies push back against the Islamic State. New Delhi’s silence on the Rohingya crisis, similarly, led neighbours Bangladesh and Myanmar, similarly, to turn to China to mediate.

To any half-competent historian, the idea that Afghanistan is a land of untameable savages where order cannot be restored —a favourite trope of Western reportage — is nonsense. For more than 2,500 years, Afghanistan was a stable and prosperous part of one empire or the other, from the Kushans to the Persians. The Soviet war of 1979-1989, or the United States post-9/11 war, failed because of errors in planning and execution, not some mystical property of the Afghan soil.

New Delhi has the opportunity here to bring something genuinely new to the table on what multinational peacekeeping should look like the insurgency-torn which litter Asia, and what the global order to govern them should be. Even if New Delhi turns its back on Afghanistan, it’s going to face similar challenges again — perhaps sooner than it imagines. The time to stop dithering, and prepare for the challenge, is now.

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Beijing’s new back-door to the Indian Ocean through Myanmar underlines limits of India’s regional ambitions

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Through the sweltering summer of 1967, the cloying scent of hate had hung over Yangon, mixing with the familiar odours of sweat and decay. For months, as Chairman Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution reached its climax, ethnic-Chinese students had begun wearing Mao badges, and abandoned the traditional Burmese longyi. Then, in June, the students at Yangon’s No. 3 National Elementary School clashed with their teachers. The fires began: the Chinese embassy was attacked, businesses looted, dozens killed.

Five decades after General Ne Win’s anti-Chinese pogrom, and the invasion that followed, Myanmar has emerged as Beijing’s most reliable partner in the region—giving it a strategically-vital back-door opening into the Indian Ocean that hacks at India’s interests.

President Xi Jinping visit to Myanmar this weekend past, the first by a Chinese premier in almost two decades, is, among other things, an education in the stark realities of geopolitics. It’s also evidence, though, of what patient, focussed diplomacy can achieve, even in the most adverse circumstances.

Beijing’s Gain

Beijing’s key gain from President Xi’s visit is the firming up of the Kyaukpyu port project, in the troubled Rakhine province—a port that will let China plug its growing hydrocarbon imports into a 793 kilometre network of oil and gas pipelines running to Kunming. In essence, the port gives China a back-door opening into the Indian ocean, allowing it to bypass the narrow Malacca Strait, which Beijing has long feared its regional adversaries’ navies could choke in the event of a strategic crisis.

Neither country has revealed details of the agreement so far, but an agreement Myanmar signed with Chinese state-owned Citic bank in 2015 had envisaged an $7.3 billion deep water port, and an $2.7 billion industrial park. In 2018, though, the ruling National League for Democracy slashed the budget to US$1.3 billion, concerned Myanmar wouldn’t be able to service the debt.

That rollback, its almost certain, has been substantially reversed. In his meeting with Myanmar’s state counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, President Xi described the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor as the“priority among priorities” for the Belt and Road global infrastructure initiative, underlining the strategic value of Kyaukpyu to the superpower.

Ever since 2011, when nominal democracy was restored in Myanmar, Beijing’s durable relationship with its southern neighbour—cultivated by the military junta which ruled from Naypyidaw—had come under increasing stress. In the wake of improved relationships with the United States, for example, Myanmar suspended the controversial, $3.6 billion Myitsone hydroelectric dam, which was to have supplied electricity to southern China.

The strains in the relationship were several: China’s relationship with the Generals; allegations its companies were engaging in corruption; even tensions sparked off by cultural friction with the growing numbers of Chinese tourists. The key factor, though, was that Naypyidaw had many potential allies, including Europe and rising-power India, to turn to.

Beijing worked hard to recover lost ground. Through the decade, China reached out to interlocutors across Myanmar’s political spectrum, and even to civil society. Chinese corporations were brought to heel. Beijing-owned Wanbao undertook a voluntary cut in its profits from the Letpadaung mines, while the China National Petroleum Corporation dramatically increased spending on community healthcare and education.

Perhaps most important, Beijing quietly used its influence among insurgent groups along its borders with Myanmar, working to negotiate an end with violence to United Wa State Army and the Kachin Independence Army.

From 2014, when Myanmar’s relationship with the West began to fray in the wake of its state-sponsored violence against ethnic-Rohingya, Beijing was poised to step in. President Xi played the long game—and is now harvesting the fruits.

India’s Myanmar Plan

Like China, India avoided isolating Myanmar in the wake of the Rohingya crisis. But unlike China, it just doesn’t have the resources to be an actor of influence without its Western partners. Trade has seen a steady uptick, approaching near $2 billion last year. That’s dwarfed, though, by Myanmar’s $7.5 billion trade with China. India’s investments in Myanmar—notably, the $500 million Kaladan project, linking the Rakhine port of Sittwe with Kolkata by sea, road, and, eventually, rail—are small, compared to the $5.5 billion China’s pumped in after 2011.

In the same period, according to the American Enterprise Institute, Pakistan has received $47.5 billion in investments, Sri Lanka $9.46 billion and Bangladesh $25.32 billion—numbers that tell Naypyidaw that there’s cash on the table for Indian Ocean rim states willing to dance with the dragon.

Pragmatism was a core part of Beijing’s playbook. Following 1967, it enhanced support to the Burmese Communist Party, and even sponsored an invasion to teach Myanmar’s Generals a lesson. Inside four years, though, it realised the strategy was counterproductive. Through the 1970s, China patiently rebuilt its relationship with Myanmar’s Generals, consolidating them further under Deng Xiaoping.

For all the talk of a multinational Indo-Pacific alliance to contain China, the case of Myanmar shows how little shared strategic vision there is between India and its partners in Europe, the United States or Australia.  India is aware Myanmar’s assistance has been key to reining-in insurgents like National Socialist Council of Nagaland hardliners, whose camps have been dismantled and key actors arrested. It’s also acutely aware of the threats the string of major Chinese ports in the Indian ocean pose.

New Delhi’s been unable to persuade its partners, though, that the principal beneficiary of isolating Myanmar hasn’t been Rohingya refugees—but Beijing. Indeed, China is now mediating between the two states most engaged with the fallout of the Rohingya crisis, Bangladesh and Myanmar, not India or the West.

Through 2019, the gap between India’s ambitions and influence have been brutally exposed. New Delhi’s hopes of limiting Pakistani influence in Afghanistan have been undermined by President Donald Trump’s pursuit of peace with the Taliban; Islamabad’s Generals have shown the United States they’re a vital ally; Bangladesh angered by the ill-informed railing of Indian ministers about its treatment of its minorities. Even Nepal, now signed on to a high-speed train link with China, is looking eastwards—and Bhutan could follow.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government isn’t to blame for all of these problems: the asymmetry in power between China and India is simply too large for the superpower not to exert influence in India’s periphery. But Beijing’s cause has also been helped by a succession of own-goals and carelessness. Through the region, India has developed a reputation for delivering late on its commitments, or not delivering at all.

New Delhi needs to make its neighbourhood, not pie-in-the-sky alliance building, its principal priority—and learn carefully matching the ends it seeks with its often-anemic means.

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Donald Trump’s Iran policy is forcing the world to fall in love with the nuclear bomb

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Leaving a little office above mother-and-child store on Dubai’s Crescent Drive one afternoon in 1987, Brigadier Muhammad Eslami clutched a one-page, handwritten guide for buying the power to destroy entire nations. The men he had met — German engineer Heinz Mebus and Sri Lankan businessmen Mohamed Farouq and Buhary Syed Ali Tahir — had made firm offers for everything from centrifuges, to enrich uranium to weapons-grade, along with technical drawings for a nuclear bomb.

Eslami was even told their boss, Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons czar Abdul Qayoom Khan, was willing to offer custom guidance on how to circumvent western export restrictions.

Thirty-three years on, President Donald Trump’s Iran policies have taken the wrecking ball to international efforts to put the nuclear djinn back inside the bottle. From his relentless threats of force against Iran’s regime, and his inability to coerce North Korea in the same fashion, regimes everywhere are drawing the same lesson: Regimes that acquire nuclear weapons survive.

For the global order, the foundation of the historically unprecedented prosperity the world has enjoyed since World War II, that is exceptionally bad news.

The roots of this looming crisis lie in President Trump’s decision, last year, to walk out of the multinational Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, seeking to restrict Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme. Put together by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, along with Germany — the so-called P5+1 — the deal saw Iran freeze its uranium enrichment programme and open up facilities to international monitoring.

Iran kept its end of the deal — but Trump argued the JCPOA was flawed because it simply froze the nuclear status-quo until 2031. The Iranians could, his argument went, push for a nuclear weapon after 2031, with a richer economy and more conventional military assets to back a renewed effort.

To push Iran towards dismantling its nuclear programme altogether, and reining-in its missile programme, Trump imposed ever more stringent sanctions. Iran responded by stepping up support to proxies fighting Saudi Arabia, and targeting United States military operations in Iraq.

Ever since May 2019, Iran responded by rolling back one element of its compliance with the nuclear deal every 60 days — abandoning limits on how far it would enrich uranium stockpiles, the size of that stockpile, and its research and development on centrifuges.  Following the United States’ killing of Qasem Soleimani, it’s taken the expected fifth step — abandoning limits on the number of centrifuges it operates.

This much is clear, though: Trump’s efforts to ensure Iran dismantles its nuclear capabilities are proving counterproductive. Their chances of success, moreover, are low. Decades of sanctions didn’t stop North Korea from acquiring either nuclear weapons, or the medium and long-range missiles it needs to deliver them to distant cities.

A disturbing lesson

In pop fiction, the United States would have simply taken out this infrastructure with air strikes — but real-world nuclear installations are hardened against attack, so at least some warheads and missiles will survive. That means anyone using force to destroy nuclear targets has to be willing to give up their cities in return.

Perhaps the most disturbing lesson United States policies have taught nations, though, is this: Giving up nuclear weapons, no matter what the West promises, is a kind of suicide. Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, who gave up his nuclear weapons plans as part of a deal with the West, ended up sodomised to death by Islamist rebels backed by those very partners.

In 1994, similarly, Ukraine agreed to surrender its nuclear warheads, after receiving guarantees of territorial integrity from Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Those guarantees proved worthless: These powers weren’t going to risk their militaries and cities to save Ukraine from Russian invasion.

Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s supreme leader. fears that his neighbours might sponsor an internal insurrection, or that the United States might chose to launch an attack, aimed at bringing down his regime. Iran feels the same way. And nuclear weapons are their ultimate insurance policy.

Growing numbers of nations could make the same call. For example, Vietnam could see the acquiring of nuclear weapons as a means to resolve the asymmetry of power with China. In 2000, South Korean scientists actually produced weapons-grade plutonium, an act the government claimed was unauthorised. In technological terms, both it and Japan can assemble nuclear weapons at short notice.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman has publicly warned that if Iran makes a nuclear weapon, Saudi Arabia would do so too. The kingdom already has a civilian nuclear agreement with South Korea, which allows it to enrich uranium to a level where 20 percent consists of the isotope U-235 — well short of the level needed to make nuclear weapons. But to further enrich this uranium to 90 percent U-235 takes just a tenth of the time of the original process, making it a key stepping-stone on the road to having weapons-grade uranium

The United States is now negotiating a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, designed to close the door on that possibility by granting it technology in return for limitations on enrichment of fissile material to weapons grade.

In the view of some experts, nuclear proliferation may actually engender stability. “In a conventional world, one is uncertain about winning or losing”, theorist Kenneth Waltz, noted 1981. “In a nuclear world, one is uncertain [only] about surviving or being annihilated”. Thus, he argued, “the measured spread of nuclear weapons is more to be welcomed than feared”.

Yet, the more nuclear states there are, and the more volatile their strategic circumstances, the chances of that outcome arising from missteps or miscalculation increases.

The JCPOA offered the world a real opportunity to show that there were alternatives to the acquisition of nuclear weapons. The sledgehammer Trump directed at the agreement, might have also broken open the locks on the gates of hell.

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The assassination of ‘the Goat Thief’, Qassem Soleimani, will have dangerous global consequences

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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For weeks, survivors would later recall, the bodies lay littered on the streets: Some were machine-gunned at point-blank range or blown apart by grenades casually tossed at their feet; others’ throats bore the marks of the executioner’s traditional tools. In August, 1998, the Taliban rolled into the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, and began a savage massacre of the city’s ethnic Hazaras — Shi’a by faith, unbelievers to the victors. Perhaps six thousand people were killed.

No one in the West cared. In 1996, the United States of America had begun engaging the Taliban on an ambitious project to link central Asia’s gas to the Indian Ocean.  Late in 1996, diplomat Robin Raphel called on the international community to “engage the Taliban”.

The next year, Taliban foreign minister Mullah Muhammad Ghaus was hosted by energy giant Unocal’s headquarters in Sugarland, Texas; their itinerary included supermarkets, museums, and the local zoo.

Eight Iranian diplomats, and a journalist, were among the dead at Mazar-i-Sharif, though — and Tehran did care. General Yahya Rahim-Safavi, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Council massed a quarter of a million troops on the border. “Give us permission for the punishment of the Taliban,” he petitioned Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “to advance to Herat; annihilate, punish, eliminate them and return”.

But one military commander disagreed: Rage, he argued, held out the prospect only of inferior kinds of vengeance. Major-General Qassem Soleimani, assassinated by the United States on Friday, instead advocated working with allies and proxies to bleed the Taliban slowly — a strategy that, in coming decades, became Iran’s blueprint for regime survival.

The death of that one man marks a moment of decisive confrontation between the United States and Iran, with enormous consequences for the region, and the world beyond.

Impact on India

In New Delhi, the prospect of a United States-Iran confrontation disrupting shocks global energy, is causing alarm: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has sailed forward on a sea of cheap oil. From $113 a barrel when the prime minister took office in May, 2014, prices fell to just $50 by January, 2015. In spite of efforts by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries to tighten supply, they’ve stayed low — in part, because of the United States’ gargantuan shale oil reserves coming online.

Expert estimates tell us exactly what Soleimani’s assassination could mean in hard cash: a $10 per barrel rise in the price of crude oil,, translates into a 0.2 percentage point cut in Gross Domestic Product, and widens the current account deficit by 0.4% of GDP.

The story of how Iran and the United States came to this point, and where things could now head, began the day of carnage in Mazar-i-Sharif.

In 1998, as India joined the arc of nation-states waging the great secret war against the Taliban, Indian diplomats and intelligence officials saw Soleimani’s imprint everywhere. The Northern Alliance of warlord Ahmad Shah Masood received funding and weapons from the IRGC, just as it did from India and Russia. Bar a single meeting with a senior Indian diplomat, Soleimani maintained his distance, instead using emissaries in Iran’s intelligence services to speak on his behalf when needed.

India’s Research and Analysis Wing, sources familiar with the issue say, at one stage proposed a meeting in a neutral country to coordinate supplies — but the idea fell through, for fear of the meeting becoming public, and irking the United States.

To India’s Afghan allies, though, Soleimani emerged as a key tactical mentor. Known to his adoring rank and file as “the Goat Thief”, for his skills in cross-border operations during the Iran-Iraq war, Soleimani was willing to put himself in harm’s way.

“There was one time he spent three days on the ground in Mazar-i-Sharif personally,” one official recalled, travelling to combat zones with the ethnic Hazara leader Muhammad Muhaqiq. “We thought he was crazy, exposing his presence. That was not our culture”.

In the wake of 9/11, and the eviction of the Taliban, Soleimani was key to efforts to seek normalisation with the United States. The two countries’ relationship had ruptured in 1979, when revolutionary Islamists took diplomats at the United States embassy in Tehran hostage. Iran provided military intelligence on the Taliban to the United States, and operated aggressively against al-Qaeda.

Facilitated by Swiss diplomats, this effort at normalisation showed real promise: The two countries’ interests, after all, neatly coincided on almost everything of significance, from containing jihadists operating in West Asia to the security of energy-shipping routes in the Persian Gulf.

Israel and Washington, though, just weren’t willing to make peace with a power that challenged the Saudi Arabia-led order in the Gulf. In 2002, President George W. Bush branded Iran part of an ‘Axis of Evil’ that had to be overthrown.

Faced with the prospect that Iran could be targeted for regime change, like President Saddam Husain’s Iraq, Soleimani drew on the lessons learned in Afghanistan.  From 2003 to 2011, Shi’a insurgents in Iraq staged hundreds of attacks on American troops, tying them down in an unwinnable urban war. In addition, Iran allowed al-Qaeda jihadists to transit to Syria — from where they set up bases to target United States operations in Iraq.

Iran, also played a key role in saving President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, and stuck a knife in Saudi Arabia’s hopes of controlling Yemen’s future. Hizbollah, Iran’s Lebanon-based client, also received enhanced support.

Terror was a part of Soleimani’s arsenal

Following a visit to Lebanon in 2006, during which time bombings in Iraq fell sharply, Soleimani is reported to have sent a mocking text message to United States commanders in Baghdad: “I hope you have been enjoying the peace and quiet in Baghdad. I’ve been busy in Beirut!”

Terror was a key part of Soleimani’s arsenal — though, in fairness, he wasn’t the only actor engaged in that particular business. Tehran’s 2012 terrorist attacks on Israeli diplomats in New Delhi, and similar attacks in Georgia and Thailand, for example, were retaliation for the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists.

Indeed, Iran’s actions have been pragmatic, not ideological: It has backed largely-Christian Armenia, rather than Shi’a-inhabited Azerbaijan, to thwart nationalist tendencies among its ethnic-Azeri minorities; supported Sunni-dominated Hamas in Palestine; and carefully avoided stoking Islamism in neighbouring central Asian states, wary of the consequences for its relationship with Russia.

The critical bend in the road came in 2015, when then-United States president agreed to lift sanctions against Iran, in return for Tehran agreeing to stringent, internationally-monitored limitations on its civilian nuclear programme — designed to ensure it could not develop nuclear weapons to threaten its neighbours. Iran kept its end of the deal, but Israel and Saudi Arabia became increasingly worried by the country’s drive to enhance its conventional military capabilities.

President Trump, in the face of protests from his European allies, walked out of the nuclear deal — compelling evidence, for Iran’s leadership, that the United States was bent on regime change, irrespective of its conduct.

Tehran moved rapidly to find new strategic allies — key among them, China. From 2014-2018, Chinese companies invested $2.3 billion in Iran, up from the meagre $110 million pumped in from 1996-2015, Iranian government figures state. The state-owned investment arm, China International Trust Investment Corporation, has established a $10 billion credit line for Iran, while the China Development Bank is put $15 billion more on the table.

From the expansion of the Tehran Metro, and the construction of high-speed railway lines to the eastern city of Mashhad and the Gulf port of Bushehr, Beijing’s presence is everywhere in Iran today.

Tehran also consolidated its relationship with Russia, making extensive weapons purchases from that country, and working with it to shore up al-Assad’s government in Syria.

Survival strategy

Iran’s survival strategy, though, doesn’t rest on superpower patronage. Tehran knows it will be annihilated in a conventional confrontation with the United States, but has acquired the capacities not to go down with imposing catastrophic costs. In 2018, the United States acknowledged that Iran had “the largest ballistic missile force in the Middle East”. Those missiles can hit targets up to 2,000 kilometres away, across Saudi Arabia and even Turkey.

The United States responded, through sales of its Patriot PAC3 and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense systems, to build a Gulf Cooperation Council-wide missile defence system. But Iran served notice, in September 2019, that those defences could be penetrated: Drone-borne explosive devices forced the heavily-defended Saudi Aramco oil facilities at Abqaiq to shut down for weeks, impacting the entire global energy chain.

Now, Iran knows reached a moment of decision: President Trump has drawn a line in the sand, and dared the country to cross it.  Iran knows large-scale violence — like the use of missiles against Saudi Arabia —will invite reprisals on a scale that could obliterate the regime.  Failing to respond, however, will erode the credibility of the threats that underpin the regime’s survival.

In Tehran, somewhere, retribution is almost certainly being planned — because from the regime’s optic, there is no choice. That retribution, though, will be carefully calibrated and then served up ice-cold.

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Emerging from the ruins of the Islamic State, jihadists hope to build a new paradise in the Indian Ocean

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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For more than an hour, the villagers had stared out into the endless wash of cerulean that surrounded their island, watching as the police boat negotiated the great coral reefs of the northern Alif atoll. The boat had come to take home the neoconservative cleric Ibrahim Fareed, banished to the remote island years earlier from the Maldives capital Male for preaching jihad — after, the story has it, being tortured by having his beard shaved off with chilli sauce.

Except, Fareed didn’t want to be set free — and the villagers had armed themselves to make sure his wishes were respected.

In Fareed’s time on Himandhoo, unknown to authorities in Malé, he had succeeded in transforming it into a Shari’a-governed independent state. The scholar Aishath Velizinee has recorded: The “men grew beards and hair, took to wearing loose robes and pyjamas, and crowned their heads with Arab-style cloth. Women were wrapped in black robes”.

The villagers were determined to remake their island paradise into a new utopia, modelled on medieval rural Arabia. “Goats were imported,” Velizinee wrote, “and fishermen gave up their vocation to become shepherds.” Indian ocean islands are not kind to goats — but when they died, Fareed’s West Asian financiers simply sent more.

Last month, the Maldives government placed security forces on alert across the island — based, according to Indian intelligence officials, on credible information jihadists returning home from Syria are plotting attacks.

In New Delhi, that news has set off alarm bells across the intelligence community. Islamist groups in the near neighbourhood don’t just destabilise their national governments, but are also known to have provided logistical support for jihadists in India.

Jihadist ideology

Fourteen hundred Maldivians, police commissioner Mohamed Hameed said last month, are estimated to be committed to jihadist ideology —“to the point where they would not hesitate to take the life of the person next to them”. According to Hameed, some 423 Maldivians sought to join the Islamic State’s forces in Syria and Iraq, with 173 succeeding in doing so. In addition, Hameed said, hundreds more travelled to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In population-adjusted terms — the Maldives has just 425,000 citizens — this makes the country the highest single provider of foreign fighters to the Islamic State.

Perhaps over a hundred of these trained fighters and their families have returned home —providing  a hard core for a jihadist movement that, the Himandhoo story demonstrates, is near-impossible to police. In 2017, Maldives authorities allege, jihadists even plotted to bomb an airliner — mirroring similar operations in Australia and elsewhere.

Local Islamist communities, the government says, illegally marry underage girls out of court, refuse to vaccinate their children or send them to school as “they consider education to be a Western ideology.” More than 250 cases of parents refusing to send children to school have been reported to the Ministry of Gender, Family and Social Services.

Long a crossroads for trade across the Indian ocean, Maldives’ traditional culture had relatively relaxed attitudes to personal freedoms. In the 14th century, the great traveller and cleric Muhammad Ibn Battutah recorded his frustration at the disinclination shown by local women to cover up. “I strove to put an end to this practice and commanded the women to wear clothes, but I could not get it done,” Ibn Battutah wrote.

Islamism began to gather force in the Maldives after 2004, after the Indian Ocean tsunami claimed hundreds of lives on the islands, and destroyed entire communities

“Preachers began touring the islands, armed with cash from Islamic charities who had arrived from Pakistan and the Middle East,” said writer and analyst Yameen Rasheed, himself later assassinated by jihadists. “Their message was simple: Maldivians were paying for their sins, and must atone to avoid Allah’s wrath.”

Fareed’s Himandhoo circle soon expanded its ambitions. Along with Mohamed Mazeed of Male, as well as Ali Rashid and Mohammad Saleem, both residents of the Kalaidhoo island in the Laam atoll, Fareed’s student, Ali Shareef plotted to re-establish a Shariah-based state in the Maldives. In 2009, they bombed Chinese tourists visiting Malé’s Sultan Park — mistaking them to be Japanese, investigators later found.

The Maldives jihadist networks developed transnational links early on. In 2008, Maldives national Ali Assham, alleged to have been involved with the Lashkar-e-Taiba network and accused of attacking the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore in 2005, was deported from Sri Lanka to Maldives. Despite Indian demands, he was never prosecuted.

Ali Jaleel, who in 2008 became the first Maldives citizen to conduct a suicide bombing, had been imprisoned two years earlier on terrorism-related charges, but was released and allowed to leave for Pakistan. There, he killed himself in an attack on the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate headquarters in Rawalpindi.

Mohammed Faseehu, from the Laam atoll island of Dhanbidhoo, and Shifahu Abdul Wahid of the Dhiffushi island in the Kaaf atoll, were killed fighting Indian troops in Kashmir in 2007.

Behind the stories like a society torn by painful cultural conflicts, and fuelled by a toxic cocktail of drugs and crime.

Rise of political Islam

Every night, for three nights in 2008, Hassan Shifazee had the same dream, of fighting alongside the Prophet of Islam.  Then, his mother Saaba recalled, he “took all his music CDs to the garbage dump, and began learning to recite the Quran”. He stopped playing football, quit partying with friends on the fringes of Male’s drug culture, and married his long-standing girlfriend, Mariam — on condition she also accepted his new religious beliefs.

The young man’s parents were delighted. Then, in 2014, al-Qaeda-affiliated Bilad al-Shaam media reported that Shifazee had died fighting with Islamic State forces near Areeha, also known as Jericho. His wife Mariam and two sons, four-year-old Nuh bin Hassan and two-year-old Umar bin Hassan, are suspected to have died in fighting early this year.

In early 2012, Shifazee participated in an Islamist mob which a priceless ancient head of Buddha. Ironically, the head was only part of the statue to survive terrified villagers on the island of Thodoo, who attacked it soon after it was discovered by archaeologists in 1959, believing it to be a demonic totem.

Forty-eight percent of the Maldivians who travelled to criminal records and 39 percent were members of Male’s criminal gangs — often linked to violent crime, and narcotics trafficking. Shifazee was among them.

Political Islam was, for many, a means of eradicating the shame associated with lives they came to see as sinful — and discovering a sense of community to replace the collapse of traditional ties of kinship in Male.

Ahmad Munsif, who died in combat in Syria, had multiple drug-related run-ins with police, and in 2012 spent time in prison for attempting to assault a police officer. His time with Islamic clerics, though, led him to clean up. In October 2014, he headed to the Islamic State with his wife, Suma Ali.

But Maldives jihadism has also been enmeshed with the state itself, with politicians often allying with Islamists to target their opponents. Photographs of former gang member Ismail Rahim travelling to Syria as part of a group organised by Adam Shameem — appointed to the country’s Islamic council by President Abdullah Yameen — have surfaced. Azlif Rauf, named as a suspect in writer Ahmad Rilwan’s assassination, fled to Pakistan with the connivance of authorities.

Education, ironically, contributes to the problem. A Class IX Islamic studies textbook, for example, tells students, “performing jihad against people that obstruct the religion” is an obligation. It promises that “Islam ruling over the world is very near.” Promising a caliphate, the textbook says, “this is something that the Jews and Christians do not want. It is why they collaborate against Islam even now”.

Throughout the city, as well as in some of the smaller islands, graffiti calling on young people to join the jihad in Syria is widespread.

Long having based their legitimacy on Islam, Maldives political leaders are beginning to grasp that their opportunistic relationship with jihadists has unleashed forces which threaten to engulf them all.

President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih’s government has taken important steps forward by acknowledging the problem, and has shown signs of being serious about cracking down on jihadist networks. The walk back from the abyss, though, will be a long and perilous one.

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KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow