Pakistan
On Tuesday, U.S. Senators Schumer, Hagan, Gillibrand, Menendez, and Lautenberg issued a press release urging the State Department to add the Pakistani Taliban, or the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), to the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list. Also Tuesday, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley stated that the State Department had considered adding the TTP to the terror list before the Times Square incident.
Adding the TTP to the FTO list is a necessary and correct action. However, the TTP struck the United States several months before the Times Square incident. In December 2009, a TTP-linked suicide bomber killed seven Americans in a suicide bombing at Camp Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan. Prior to that attack, TTP rhetoric threatened violence against Pakistani troops it saw as acting on behalf of America; the group’s spokesman said on November 15 that, “We will ensure that those who have sacrificed their honor for the sake of America meet their logical end very soon.” TTP actions and rhetoric before the Times Square incident suggest that the group should have long been identified as a terrorist group dedicated to targeting America.
Yet, the criteria for what makes a terrorist group a threat to America should not rest solely on the operations it conducts or threats it makes against the United States or her interests. Instead of reactively designating terror groups after they have conducted attacks on American soil, we should proactively add members of the violent Islamist network led by al Qaeda to the FTO list, so that we might identify our foes before they reach the American homeland.
Assessing the Balance of Terror in South Asia
Video from Monday’s CDS event on the nuclear balance in South Asia is now available. Check it out here.
Each of the panelists offered a number of thoughtful observations; here’s a brief selection: NDU’s Jack Gill noted that while many analysts and observers base predictions of future Indian responses to terrorist attacks on Delhi’s behavior in past crises — which has been characterized by remarkable restraint — it would be unwise to discount the aggregate effect of further attacks on Indian decision-makers’ strategic calculus. The next straw, in other words, could break the camel’s back. For his part, Feroz Hassan Khan of the Naval Postgraduate School argued for more formal, institutionalized nuclear crisis management mechanisms between Islamabad and Delhi, and called for Pakistan to develop a more transparent nuclear doctrine, one which clearly outlines its nuclear “red lines.” In short, strategic ambiguity remains one the biggest dangers on the subcontinent.
Afghanistan’s Regional Context
In an interview on Monday with the Wall Street Journal, General Stanley McChrystal provided some commentary on the regional dynamics which stand to affect U.S. efforts in Afghanistan:
“We get overly fixated sometimes on al Qaeda, but the reality is there are regional issues here that are potentially more important than that and so that needs to be put as one of the key points.”
This was encouraging observation on the part of the ISAF commander, given that the competition among regional players to exert influence in Afghanistan will only become more intense as the United States’ 2011 drawdown date approaches. McChrystal went on:
“Everything in the region affects everybody else. You know it’s like in the solar system: Each planet actually does gravitational pull on all the others. Pakistan is clearly affected by a number of actors, India being large. And Afghanistan is affected by a huge number of actors.
I think the better we can make India and Pakistan relations, the better it is for everyone, particularly a relatively weak nation right now like Afghanistan because as those two significant nations have friction sometimes, it can affect Afghanistan in ways that are just huge. So I think it’s really important that the transparency and the trust with India be part of that calculation. And clearly the Pakistanis are worried about Indian activities inside Afghanistan and sometimes there’s a lot of misperception associated with those, so I think clarity there is essential.”
Reducing India-Pakistan tensions in the near-term may indeed allow the Pakistani military to feel more comfortable in shifting forces from its eastern flank to combat insurgents just inside its border with Afghanistan. We have seen this phenomenon in action, with the redeployment of more than 100,000 forces from Pakistan’s Indian to Afghan border (as reported in the Pentagon’s biannual report to Congress on progress toward security and stability in Afghanistan), and the Pakistani army’s continuing operations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
But in truth, there is little India — or the United States, for that matter — can do to dissuade Pakistan’s national security establishment that Afghanistan remains a critical source of “strategic depth,” or that India’s engagement in the country — which has taken the form of a broad but low-profile “soft power” campaign — is anything other than an effort to encircle Pakistan. At the same time, India — whose objectives in Afghanistan have been clear and, as Dan Twining noted recently, coincide closely with those of the U.S. — should not be expected to reduce its presence in Afghanistan simply to mollify its rival.
