I thought this was a very interesting article.
Mumbai: Terror's Frankenstein on the loose
By Stephen Blank
The bombers in Mumbai, like their opposite numbers throughout the Muslim world, knew exactly what they were doing when they set off two bombs in India's commercial capital on Monday. Their target was the fragile Indo-Pakistani minuet that has begun to show signs of actually improving relations between those two states.
If progress in those relations were actually to occur, it could only take place at the expense of the terrorist formations operating in Pakistan, Kashmir, and probably underground in India. In this respect, these terrorists emulate their counterparts in Iraq and Palestine, whose motto is the worse it is, the better it is for us. For these militant men and women, peace is the enemy.
It is also clear that people possessing so twisted a militant orientation, including belief in the merit of blowing oneself up, cannot in any way imagine a political solution to their grievances. Though their leaders are perfectly willing to exploit state support for their ulterior motives, they are ultimately a wild card who almost inevitably escape the bonds of control that the state which supports them tries to fasten on them.
Like Frankenstein, they refuse to be part of someone else's experiment, and strike out on their own, causing havoc wherever they go. The terrorist groups that organized this latest bombing in Mumbai are thus Pakistan's Frankenstein for they almost certainly issued forth, at some stage, from one or another of the groups sponsored and supported - either directly or indirectly - by Pakistan and its intelligence organs, such as the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI).
This episode duly confirms that the decisive factor that makes South Asia so dangerous is the fact that, bearing all the aforementioned factors in mind, the terrorists, Pakistan, and India constantly act in reckless and provocative ways in order to stimulate or make the most of a crisis.
Indeed, the current crisis, triggered by the terror attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, America's ensuing "war against terrorism", itself part of Afghanistan's civil war, and subsequent terrorist attacks against Kashmir's and India's parliaments in Srinagar and New Delhi on October 1 and December 13, 2001, shows that the terrorists can now act increasingly autonomously to trigger a much grander Indo-Pakistani conflagration.
Pakistan, as a US ally against the Taliban, has lost some measure of official control over these groups and over disaffected pro-Taliban and other officials in Pakistan's military and intelligence community who sponsored those attacks to oppose President General Pervez Musharraf's pro-American policies.
Therefore, to a certain but undefined degree, terrorist groups, formerly or even presently backed by elements of Pakistan's army and intelligence agencies, most prominently the ISI, possess a considerable tactical and strategic initiative. The terrorists and their backers could autonomously launch attacks that might overwhelm both states' political leadership and trigger a general war, or at least frustrate efforts to prevent war from breaking out.
The nearest historical analogy to this situation, albeit one that should not be overdrawn, is the Austro-Serb relationship in 1914. Serbian terrorists, operating with Belgrade's support, but acting on their own, assassinated the heir to the Habsburg Empire. They hoped and believed, rightly as it turned out, that this would start a general crisis or war that would lead to Austria's disintegration and Serbian territorial enlargement. Instead, World War I and a more general European devastation was the result.
Presumably, we have advanced beyond the statecraft of 1914. But that experience and analogy obligates leaders and analysts to proceed with utmost caution and to draw the appropriate lessons.
The most urgent lesson is that India and Pakistan must not give the terrorists the war that they want. A second lesson that must be learned from these crises is that states sponsor terrorism at their own risk and that this risk increases over time. Therefore, Pakistan must do more than merely arrest a few terrorists, release them and make statements condemning terrorism while arguing that one must draw a distinction between them and allegedly responsible "freedom fighters".
These distinctions are weasel words and are common to terrorists like the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Hizballah, the Irish Republican Army, etc, all of whom seek to disrupt the ability of publics and governments to think straight about terrorism and unhinge their targets' polities.
In fact, the situation now makes clear that Pakistan, for its own safety, and not because India now demands it, must conclusively renounce terrorism as an instrument of its foreign and defense policies.
To deny the terrorists the strategic outcomes and the war that they seek we must understand what those outcomes and that war are. Obviously, the terrorist groups inside Pakistan and Kashmir seek to destroy or at least unhinge Indian rule in Kashmir to the point where Kashmir either completely goes out of control or India's sovereignty is effectively compromised beyond any point of return.
Then, they believe, Kashmir will ultimately either become self-governing, autonomous, independent, or perhaps be partitioned or revert entirely to Pakistan. Terror and continuing guerrilla violence are long-established strategies towards those ends.
But the continuing attacks, seen in the context of the pervasive international resort to terrorism to achieve strategic goals, the attacks on the United States, and the Afghan civil war suggest much broader ambitions than merely destabilizing Indian rule in Kashmir. These continuing attacks strongly point to a wider strategic design whose objectives include, but transcend, Kashmir.
Terrorism is rarely, if ever, random. It is undertaken by intelligent, highly motivated and trained cadres to obtain specific strategic objectives that would otherwise (or at least so they believe) be denied to them. And its purveyors clearly embody a distinctive ethos that informs their perception of strategic opportunities and risks. Certainly, that was the case in this bombing in Mumbai. But there are also numerous examples from both South Asia and other theaters the world over. But today the most critical theater, or second front, is inside Pakistan, which is why these attacks are so provocative.
Foreign analysts have long known that Pakistan, despite its being a nuclear power with a respectable conventional army, is in danger of degenerating into ungovernability across a wide swath of its key cities and territories. In Pakistan, landowners, military and intelligence officials and Muslim fundamentalists all contend for power in authoritarian and corrupt fashion.
And large sums earned by drug running both inside the state and abroad are used, in part, to fund terrorists, or the Taliban, and extreme Islamic groups who are aligned with either or both those groups. Hence it would not take relatively much to destabilize Pakistan, a nuclear state, and unseat its government, or at least this is what the fanatics believe. The crisis the terrorists and their supporters hope to provoke aims to bring about precisely the kind of outcome the world most fears, a general Indo-Pakistani war and/or general crisis in Pakistan. The terrorists clearly know that India is generally thought to enjoy a substantial conventional superiority over Pakistan. Therefore, they hope to provoke the following outcomes.
First, many of them believe their own propaganda about the internal irresolution, corruption and weakness of India and the belief that they can exploit that, plus the deterrence afforded by Pakistan's nuclear arsenal to defeat India. Second, they also probably believe - and this is not necessarily contradictory to the first belief - that even if, or especially if, Pakistan loses, the "traitorous" Musharraf government will fall and a regime more supportive of their objectives and of the Taliban, not to mention perhaps Osama bin Laden or his successor, will arise in Pakistan.
The terrorists most assuredly seek to strike at New Delhi, but even more importantly, seek to destroy Pakistan's ability to act as a pro-American outpost in the "war on terrorism" because Pakistan is the strategic rear of this American war. Thus the terrorists want to unhinge Pakistan and cause a general civil war there in the belief that the ensuing upheaval will lead to a government amenable to their ends and to those of their brother insurgents in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
This could further escalate the Afghan civil war, which in itself is a microcosm or one local theater of the broader civil war within Islamic societies. In line with their and bin Laden's beliefs, such global outbreaks would undo any effort by America and its Muslim supporters to protect their investment in a particular kind of Middle East and Pakistan and supposedly ultimately bring about the withdrawal of Western power from the Muslim world.
A general conflagration arising out of an Indo-Pakistani war that Pakistan would almost inevitably lose is precisely what they seek and they also seem extremely complacent about the nuclear contingencies that might arise from their scenarios. Unfortunately, such complacency is not available either to Pakistan's, India's or to other governments. Therefore, the prospect of a general war with Pakistan is a very sobering one indeed.
Pakistan thus now reaps the results of its own support for terrorists and insurgents in Afghanistan, Kashmir, and at home. These groups and their protectors have made clear their determination to control the policies of the government in Islamabad, even if it means domestic terror inside Pakistan.
Thus, they have already assassinated the brother of Pakistan's new interior minister who railed against political power in the hands of half-illiterate mullahs. They have become Pakistan's Frankenstein, monsters who have eluded their masters' control and then turn on their masters for trying to control them.
Pakistan must now realize that creating such groups eventually leads them and not their masters to take control of the strategic initiative that could determine these masters' fate. But because domestic support for them, especially in the military-intelligence apparatus, is so great, Musharraf's ability to act decisively against them and go beyond the hitherto essentially cosmetic measures taken is dubious. Indeed, doing so could bring about their goal: collapse of his regime and an internal civil war that will undermine not just Pakistan but all of South Asia and the "war on terrorism".
Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies have acted in the belief that they could torment India with impunity and prevent it from becoming a stable hegemon over South Asia - India's strategic goal - either by virtue of their foreign alliances or their own military power. They also sought to create Islamic regimes in Afghanistan to deny it first to the Soviets and second to India, which has always regarded Afghanistan as its strategic rear against Islamabad. Therefore, Pakistan's present situation graphically testifies to the fact that states who sponsor terrorism risk becoming beholden to that terrorism, or to its anger against them and internal disaffection from those who have carried out that policy enthusiastically when official policy must change.
Gambling on terror thus turns out to be a high-risk venture; one that may ultimately force the gambler to become a gladiator in the wrong war. While states may sponsor terrorism profitably for a long time; ultimately either that card becomes unprofitable and the advantages derived from it diminishes; or it becomes a creation that escapes its creator's controls and threatens to involve it in highly dangerous wars.
Those who wish to strike at terrorism in turn must calculate quite precisely exactly what outcome they want to achieve, thereby and how best to do so. For if they underplay or overplay their hand, they, too, can end up losing control of their own policy and strategy, and even of some of their territory. And where nuclear arms are potentially involved, that loss of strategic control or of a state's integrity, precisely what the terrorists hope to achieve, becomes the most dangerous possibility of all.
Stephen Blank is an analyst of international security affairs residing in Harrisburg, PA. |
