Blind
Destinies
Ajai Sahni
Editor SAIR; Executive Director, Institute
for Conflict Management
There
is more killing, more peace, and a greater fragility
in South Asia.
The qualified
good news first:
In Sri
Lanka, one of the world’s most lethal and pitiless terrorist
organizations, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
(LTTE),
has been comprehensively defeated,
bringing to an end a relentless 33-year long conflict,
and 26 years of full scale civil war. On May 20, 2009,
the Sri Lanka Army officially declared the end of Eelam
War IV after the fall of the garrison town of Paranthan.
The top leadership of the LTTE, including its chief
Vellupillai Prabhakaran, intelligence chief Pottu Amman
and Sea Tigers chief, Soosai, were dead. Defeated remnants
of the armed cadres surrendered or sought obscurity
among the thousands of the Tamil displaced in refugee
camps, while the Diaspora leadership squabbled over
succession, eventually to publicly renounce the option
of violence.
Had this
been a Western victory, there would have been a sense
of "unadulterated and righteous triumph",
a quick forgetfulness of all that was done in the darkness
of war, and an accelerated effort of reconstruction.
In Sri Lanka, however, the peace has been quickly poisoned,
first by "a seething and barely concealed outrage"
among various international agencies who had been involved
in the ‘peace efforts’ in the country; then by a Sinhala
triumphalism that sought to deny or at least defer a
fair deal to the Tamils; thereafter, by a bitter and
polarizing presidential election that saw a face-off
between two of the war’s most prominent heroes, President
Mahinda Rajapakse, and his victorious Army Chief, General
(Retd.) Sarath Fonseka; and finally, by a vicious personalized
politics of vendetta that finds General Fonseka arrested
and currently in detention under less than credible
charges of conspiring to assassinate the President.
There
is, of course, little possibility of a resurgence of
terrorist violence in the foreseeable future. The LTTE
has been entirely decimated but, more significantly,
Sri Lankan intelligence penetration of the structures
of the organization and its accumulated information
resources on the rebel cadres and leadership, are now
so complete that any possibility of revival would quickly
– and ruthlessly – be crushed. The enduring tragedy
of Sri Lanka is that the opportunities of a hard won
peace are quickly being frittered away in a blind, polarizing
and fractious politics.
Another
bitter peace prevails in Nepal, where the Communist
Party of Nepal – Maoist (now Unified Communist Party
of Nepal – Maoist, UCPN-M) led a decade-long insurgency
against what was then the country’s decaying monarchy.
A deal between the Seven Party Alliance of democratic
parties and the Maoists brought hostilities to an end
in April 2006, a Comprehensive Peace Agreement in November
2006, and the abolition of the monarchy and creation
of a Republic in 2008. The years of bloody violence,
the worst of which, 2002, saw 4,896 fatalities (SATP
data), are now in the past, though sporadic violence
between various armed groups still resulted in 50 fatalities
in 2009, and 12 have already been killed in 2010 (till
March 21). Though these numbers are negligible in comparison
to the slaughters of the war years, a culture of intransigence
and armed intimidation has now become entrenched in
the country’s politics, and various political formations
have raised armed groupings to secure a privileged position
at the negotiating table. As a result, the work of the
Constituent Assembly, elected in April 2008, has been
stalled, even as an unremitting succession of crises
paralyses governance. A worsening political deadlock
saw the fall of the UCPN-Maoist led Government on May
4, 2009, even as disruptive protests
by the Maoists, and by smaller militant political formations
crippled the Administration. There has been much acrimony,
and the ruling Communist Party of Nepal – United Marxist-Leninist
(CPN-UML)-led Government and the Maoists have, each,
repeatedly accused the other of working to subvert the
peace process. As the two year deadline of May 28, 2010,
for the completion of the Constitution drafting process
approaches, with the process barely begun, the Maoists
have threatened to take to the streets – if not worse
– again if the Constitution is not completed in time.
The outlook for Nepal is, evidently, more than uncertain.
The political
deadlock is, in any event, worsening
rapidly, with no single one of the parties demonstrating
the sagacity to pull the country out of the political
and constitutional logjam, and Maoist belligerence mounting.
Bangladesh
is probably the source of the best news in the region
in recent times, as it pulls back dramatically from
what, just three years ago, had begun to look like the
brink. Since the election of the Sheikh Hasina Government
in December 2008, with a thumping majority, the country
has experienced an abrupt stabilization, as the regime
moves strongly to curb the activities of powerful terrorist
groupings who had operated under significant state acquiescence,
if not direct support, under earlier administrations.
This includes Islamist terrorist groups, such as the
Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami Bangladesh (HuJI-B)
as well as subversive political formations such as the
Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh, whose leadership is now
at serious risk as a result of the Government’s determination
to bring the guilty in the war crimes of 1971 to book.
At the same time, Dhaka has acted decisively against
the many terrorist groupings operating in India’s Northeast,
who had found safe haven on Bangladeshi soil for decades.
Their camps have been shut down, even as most of their
leaders have been quietly handed over to Indian authorities,
while others – most prominently including Paresh Baruah,
the ‘commander-in-chief’ of the United Liberation Front
of Asom (ULFA)–
have fled. Prime Minister Hasina has also initiated
several measures to address institutional deficits in
the security apparatus, including the formation of a
17-member National Committee on Militancy Resistance
and Prevention’, and has called for a South Asian Anti-Terrorism
Task Force, to curb cross-border terrorism.
But the
transition from radicalism to stability in Bangladesh
is far from complete. Groups such as HuJI-B and the
Pakistani Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT)
retain a significant presence in the country, though
they are currently lying low. The Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen
Bangladesh (JMB), which was the principal architect
of the serial blasts across the country on August 17,
2005, has a substantial surviving presence, despite
the execution of its top leadership that was found guilty
of the serial bombings, and the arrest of many second-rung
leaders. There are at least some signs that, despite
the Governments very effective campaign against them,
Islamist extremist organizations in the country are
regrouping.
At least part of the Government’s anti-terrorist campaign,
moreover, appears to be misdirected. There were 86 ‘terrorism
related’ fatalities in 2009, 80 of them enumerated as
‘terrorists’ (the remaining six were civilians) every
one of them purported members of a Left Wing Extremist
(LWE) movement of which there is little evidence on
the ground, other than the large numbers of alleged
militants who are routinely bumped off by the Rapid
Action Battalion (RAB). Not a single Islamist terrorist
was killed in the country in 2009, though one has already
been killed in 2010.
India
has been another mixed bag. Total terrorism / insurgency
related fatalities have plummeted, from a peak of 5,839
in 2001, to 2,611 in 2008, and further to 2226 in 2009
(SATP data). Through 2009, India experienced no major
Islamist terrorist attack outside Jammu & Kashmir
(J&K), after the succession of attacks in 2008,
culminating in the Mumbai 26/11 outrage, which killed
at least 166. While this must bring some relief to the
security establishment in the country, there is little
ground for complacency. 2010 has already seen a major
terrorist attack in Pune, suspected to have been engineered
by Pakistan-backed Islamists, and Union Home Minister
Chidambaram referred repeatedly to some 13 Islamist
terrorist conspiracies that had been thwarted through
2009. Crucially, the steep decline in total fatalities
is overwhelmingly the consequence of the precipitate
fall in Jammu & Kashmir, where fatalities have dropped
from 4,507 in 2001, to 377 in 2009, principally as a
consequence, not of any dramatic Indian initiatives
or successes, but of Pakistan’s growing internal difficulties
and the overwhelming media and international focus on
the support regional and international terrorism secures
from that country’s establishment and on its soil. While
the scale of terrorism exported from Pakistan has certainly
been calibrated downward, the reality is that the infrastructure
of the anti-India jihad continues to be held
in reserve by the Pakistani State. There is also mounting
evidence of an escalation of tensions along the Line
of Control (LoC) and International Border (IB) in J&K,
with Pakistan troops repeatedly firing on Indian Forces,
usually to facilitate terrorist infiltration. At least
28 incidents of ceasefire violation were recorded along
the LoC in 2009.
Across
India’s Northeast, total fatalities in the multiplicity
of ethnicity based conflicts dropped from 1,054 in 2008
to 843 in 2009. These trends were further consolidated
by Bangladeshi initiatives that divested the major Northeast
insurgent groupings of their safe havens in that country,
and handed over their leaderships to Indian authorities.
But the
Maoist rampage has escalated. SATP data suggest at least
998 killed in 2009, but partial data released by the
Government indicates that the total for the year will
mount well above the High Intensity Conflict mark of
1,000 fatalities. The Maoists have established a presence
in 223 Districts across 20 States, out of a total of
636 Districts in 28 States and seven Union Territories.
The situation is not, however, as alarming as this spread
may suggest. Home Minister Chidambaram indicated that
violence "has been consistently witnessed in about
400 Police Station areas of around 90 Districts in 13
States" (there are over 14,000 Police Stations
in the country). More troubling, however is the breakup
of data on Maoist-related fatalities, with Security
Forces(SF) accounting for as much as 71 per cent of
the total of 998 fatalities enumerated by SATP in 2009
(as against 66 per cent of 638 fatalities in 2008),
demonstrating the degree to which the Maoists have monopolized
the initiative. India’s Maoist troubles threaten to
augment, even as the notorious ‘flailing state’ continues
to flounder through contradictory and uncertain policy
and operational responses.
And now,
the unmitigated bad news:
Despite
the expanding theatres of palpable, though fragile,
peace in South Asia, total fatalities in the region
continue in a sustained upward spiral, rising to as
much as 31,824, up from 20,242 in 2008, 10,599 in 2007;
8,760 in 2006, and 6,129 in 2005. The terminal stages
of the war in Sri Lanka, of course, account for nearly
half of this total (15,565).
It is,
however, in Pakistan – and in the wider AfPak region
(it is no longer possible to divorce developments in
Afghanistan from the trajectories of Islamist terrorism
in South Asia) – that the heart of an abiding darkness
lies. The Afghanistan-Pakistan complex has, for more
than a decade now, been the principal source of the
global crisis of Islamist
terrorism. Over the past years of
intense, but conflicting and uncertain, efforts, the
situation in both countries has worsened steadily. 2009
was a year of escalating violence and widening disorder
across the AfPak region. The ‘surge’ of US troops in
Afghanistan in 2010 and the uncertain tactical gains
in Marjah notwithstanding, there is little reason to
believe that the troubling fundamentals of the region
are going to experience any significant change.
In Pakistan,
at least 11,585 persons were killed in terrorism-related
violence in 2009 (the actual numbers could be significantly
higher, since Pakistan denies access to the media and
independent monitors in most areas of conflict), a number
that comes close to the cumulative fatalities between
2003 and 2008, at 13,485. The 2009 figure represented
an increase of 73 per cent over the 2008 fatalities,
at 6,715. The 2009 fatalities included 2,307 civilians,
1,011 SF personnel and 8,267 ‘terrorists’ (the last
category is arbitrary, since, on most accounts, every
person killed by State Forces is simply so labeled,
and no independent verification is possible). By March
8, 1,521 people had already been killed in terrorism-related
violence in 2010, including 428 civilians, 126 SF personnel
and 916 ‘terrorists’.
In Afghanistan,
Coalition military fatalities in 2009 were the highest
since the commencement of Operation Enduring Freedom
in 2001, and, at 520, were higher by more than 76 per
cent over the 295 killed in 2008. Coalition losses between
2001 and 2009 totalled 1,567. Coalition fatalities for
2010 had already reached 126 by March 21, suggesting
that this could be the bloodiest year yet. Reliable
data on Afghan fatalities is unavailable in the open
source, and no such data is released by Coalition authorities
or the Afghan Government. One unconfirmed source, citing
"lowest credible estimates", however, put
Afghan civilian fatalities at 2,014 between January
and October 2009, while total civilian fatalities were
estimated at 2,118 in 2008; at 1523 in 2007; and 929
in 2006. Anecdotal reportage on continuous Taliban attacks
and incessant reports of ‘collateral’ fatalities in
Coalition and Afghan National Army (ANA) operations
would, however, suggest a far worse and escalating scenario.
No authoritative estimate of the total number of militants
killed is available.
As could
easily have been anticipated,
the ‘surge’ of 2009 in Afghanistan has been a clear
failure. A second ‘surge’, equally poorly conceptualized,
has now been initiated, even as a fresh deadline for
a phased ‘exit’ of Western Forces, possibly commencing
in July 2011 (on some accounts, 2012), preceded by the
integration of the ‘good Taliban’ in the power structure,
is now being envisaged. The consequences can only be
disastrous.
The ‘London
Summit’ (London Conference on Afghanistan, January 10,
2010), represented the ‘consensual’ approach of the
international community, led by the US and the UK, outlining
the proposed ‘strategy’ to support the Afghan Government
"to secure, stabilize and develop Afghanistan".
The Summit led to a measure of optimism, and to at least
some positive commentary. Significantly, the Summit
included the participation of five ‘moderate Taliban’
leaders – Abdul Wakil Mutawakil, Faiz Mohammad Faizan,
Shams-us-Safa, Mohammad Musa, and Abdul Hakim – after
their names were dropped from the United Nations’ listing
of terrorists.
The
London Summit is a clear admission of defeat by the
Western powers, and demonstrates that they lack the
will and capabilities to fight terrorism within a protracted
war framework. Whatever the rhetoric, this is, at best,
a plan for ordered flight. It is a plan, moreover, based
on a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the
adversary, and on the misconception that the Western
powers can simply ‘walk away’ from the mess in Afghanistan
after ‘co-opting’ the ‘moderate Taliban’ into the ‘political
process’.
The
reality is that a Western withdrawal will surrender
Afghanistan to extremism, and will be seen as the triumph
of radical Islam not only by its adherents, but also
by hundreds of thousands of fence sitters, among whom
a significant proportion will certainly be inspired
by this ‘victory’ to join the terrorist jihad.
The only consequence of this will be that the West itself
– and Europe most particularly – will become the principal
battlefield of Islamist terrorism, even as the South
Asian neighbourhood comes under unprecedented jihadi
attack. As for Afghanistan, once the cover of Coalition
Forces is lifted, the moderates would be wiped out.
It can also be anticipated that an alliance of extremists
in Pakistan and Afghanistan (including elements in the
state structure in these countries) will come to dominate
the global jihad. This alliance would operate
with a new impunity, since it will then be clear that
no power in the world has the capacity or the will to
intervene effectively in the region. Such confidence
can only be increased by Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
While
Pakistan’s internal disorders escalate exponentially,
this calculus has evidently not been missed by its leaderships.
Violence now engulfs every region of Pakistan. Balochistan,
the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Federally
Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Punjab, Sindh, Gilgit-Baltistan
and ‘Azad Kashmir’ – is each experiencing augmenting
levels of violence. But, even as the military and political
heartlands of Punjab – Rawalpindi and Islamabad – come
under direct radical extremist attack, Pakistan has
not abandoned its duplicity on terrorism. While selective
action has been taken against the ‘renegade’ Tehrik-e-Taliban
Pakistan (TTP), the Pakistan establishment continues
to extend support to the Taliban and various warlord
factions in Afghanistan, even as it nourishes a multiplicity
of India–directed terrorist formations, including the
Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), the Jaish-e-Muhammad, the Harkat-ul-Mujahiddeen,
and the 16-group United Jihad Council headed by Hizb-ul-Mujahiddeen
chief, Mohammad Yusuf Shah aka Syed Salahuddin.
As Ashley Tellis notes, for instance, in his testimony
to the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, on March
11, 2020,
LeT
remains primarily Pakistani in its composition,
uses Pakistani territory as its main base of operation,
and continues to be supported extensively by the
Pakistani state, especially the Army and Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI)… The United States should stop
pretending that LeT is an independent actor.
|
Pakistan’s
role in supporting terrorism in India and Afghanistan
is now one of the world’s worst kept secrets. This was
further confirmed, through December 2009, by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation interrogation of David Coleman
Headley alias Daood Gilani [one of the prime
suspect in the 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attacks]; the
FBI found that "a section of serving Pakistan Army
officers" were working in close collaboration with
India-specific jihadi groups like the LeT and
Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM). That Islamabad also continues
to harbour Taliban militants fighting against the Allied
forces, led by US, in Afghanistan, was confirmed, albeit
obliquely, from the highest US Office: on February 10,
2009, President Barack Obama asserted that his Administration
would not allow ‘safe havens’ for al Qaeda and the Taliban
operating with ‘impunity’ in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan,
bordering Afghanistan.
And
yet it is increasingly evident, now, that the US-led
coalition in Afghanistan is only looking for a face
saving ‘exit strategy’. A premature Western withdrawal
from Afghanistan would, however, have a devastating
impact on security and stability, not only in South
Asia, but immediately across the Eurasian mass, and
beyond, to comprehend a global stage. Unprecedented
forces would be unleashed by a perceived jihadi
‘victory’ in Afghanistan, and such forces would not
only target the South Asian neighbourhood, but, overwhelmingly,
the Western world as well. This is not Vietnam; the
US cannot simply turn its back on Afghanistan, without
the risk of being attacked on an unprotected rear. The
US-Western perspective on AfPak remains incoherent,
and, unless drastically re-envisioned, can only add
to global chaos.
For
all her millennia of history, there is little political
wisdom in contemporary South Asia. For centuries now,
outsiders have defined the critical turning points of
destiny across these territories, and this does not
appear to have changed. There is an evident collapse
of leadership across much of the region, and an incapacity
to capitalize even on the tremendous gains that have
been secured in many of the constituent countries. Once
again, it seems, the decisions of outside forces will
overwhelmingly determine the trajectory of violence
and the receding possibilities of peace, in this vast,
populous and troubled region of the world.