Global Change
By Bhabani Sen Gupta
“ A terrible beauty is born”. US vice-president Josef Biden used
these words from a poem of T. S. Eliot to give a select elite European
audience at Munich early this month a vision of the change in American
foreign policy contemplated by president Barak Obama. Biden did not
go beyond vague outlines. What he said, however, was enough to warn
Europeans that the era of projecting U.S. hegemony in the world, with
unilateral military intervention to assert or preserve American global interests, was coming to an end, and the US, under Obama’s leadership.
would try to create an inclusive, non-polarised, cooperative world order
trying to find regional, global and multilateral solutions to problems and
conflicts, and address the biggest challenge of kickstarting the world economy that is caught in a deepening recession..
Obama has given his cabinet members and White House advisors
sixty days to complete in-depth and extensive reviews of U.S. engagements in different regions of the world as well as global issues and submit their reports and
recommendations to the president. The three regions claiming priorities
are the Middle East---of which the focus is on Israel and the Palestinian
issue; the AfPak region combining Pakistan and Afghanistan and, at a
certain remove, Iran; and China in the larger regional context of North-East Asia. While the Middle East and AfPak regions have been
straddled by special envoys Senator Mitchel and Richard Holbrooke, the secretary of state,
Hilary Clinton herself, took over the task of reassessing America’s interactions with China with a weeklong tour of Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul
and Jakarta.
Relations with China are of the utmost importance. The Obama
administrations expects China to lend it much of the $ 787 billion Obama
has committed as stimulant to the sinking American economy, The
New York Times reported on February 12. Such borrowing will invest
China in America’s recovery. The New York Times report said that “a need to borrow China’s real capital could cost Mr Obama the political
capital as he and China’s leaders haggle over North Korea and Climate
Change.” An international affairs analyst observed on the BBC on February 20 that relations between the U.S. and China could develop as
the “most important bilateral relationship in the 21st century.”
This is only one of the ways the global economic crisis is changing
the power map of the world, noted The Times report. It is perhaps the
most important way because it will involve building of cooperative bridges
between the world’s leader of capitalism and its preeminent socialist power--- the upside down of the cold war that dominated the world order
between the end of World War II and the collapse of the USSR.
For India, a gradual lowering of America’s global hegemonic profile is generally welcome since the process will create larger space
for India’s foreign relations, both political-strategic and economic. Easier
U.S.-Russian relations will enable India to expand its economic infrastructural ties with Russia, particularly in building its
nuclear power generating capability. Easing of tensions and launching of
normal relations between the U.S. and Iran will open up larger and more
productive spaces of cooperation with Iran at the bilateral level and also
in concluding agreements with Iran to build oil and gas pipelines through
Central Asia as well as in partnership with Pakistan.
The strategic community in New Delhi will be alarmed by an
enhancement of China’s global status; the Indian media which are more
anti-China than the major political parties, will be highly upset, and will
respond with the construction of a big China threat to Indian interests and national security.. However, whoever forms the next government in New Delhi after the national poll
in April-May 2009 will be encouraged to expand economic and technological cooperation with China and to work together to secure much of Asia from a sharp economic meltdown At this time—in February 2009, the man who is piloting the Indian government, Pranab K. Mukherjee, is credited with the belief that closer India-China economic and political cooperation is the only way to insulate South-
SouthEast and NorthEast Asia from the U.S.-Japan-EuropeanUnion
type of a deepening and extended economic crisis.
Obama’s AfPak Problem
There is a spike of regret in New Delhi that president Obama
will go to London in April armed with policies and plans to initiate
a new global order when India will be entangled in a national poll,
waiting for a new government.to be formed. However, the bureaucracies of the Prime Minister’s Offce (PMO), External Affairs Ministry (EAM)
and Defence Ministry, all located in the South Block of the Central
Secretariat on Raisina Hills, will keep up the continuity in foreign and
strategic policies regardless of the composition of the next coalition regime in New Delhi,
Both leading political parties and the leading central bureaucracies
look darkly at the unfolding arms of the “AfPak” geopolitical thrusts of
Obama’s foreign policies involving Pakistan and Afghanistan and sucking in a host of other countries as well as the United Nations. In
Indian perception, the AfPak geopolitical concept took clear shape during the week-long diplomatic explorations by Obama’s special envoy, Richard Holbroke in Pakistan ( 2 days, Afghanistan 4 days and New Delhi 1 day) in mid-February 2009. Very soon after Holbroke’s return
to Washington DC, Obama announced on February 19 a troops surge of 17,000 to
join the 38,000 American troops already deployed in Afghanistan. He
said Afghanistan remained ‘a priority’ and that the war there was
“winnable.”
But Obama may find it hard to persuade U.S. allies in the West
to share the burden of his troops surge in Afghanistan. He had found even in the summer of 2008 during his visit to Western Europe as a presidential candidate that the Europeans partners of George Bush’s ‘coalition of the willing’ had
little will to contribute more troops or finance in the war in Afghanistan. Even the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, wanted his troops out of Afghanistan in 2009. Obama sent defence
secretary Gates to a meeting of the Atlantic Alliance in Paris on
February 20 to sell the Afghan surge to the NATO members. The
BBC reported that the NATO response was lukewarm. The president
himself made Canada the first country of his foreign trip after getting elected to the White House. The Canadian defence minister
observed, however, that a surge in the Afghan war on the Taliban and AlQeuda ‘must be led by Afghanistan itself.”
Even before Richard Holbrooke landed in Pakistan on his ‘see and
listen” week-long tour, the American Generals concerned with the
Afghan war had asked that Pakistan and Afghanistan be treated as
a single zone of war if it had to be won, and their suggestion was accepted by the Obama administration. Dennis C Blair, a member
of the team of experts Holbrooke had gathered around him when he
was president of Asia Society of New York, and who was appointed
Director of Military Intelligence by Obama in the first round of appointments after inauguration, had told the Senate Intelligence
Committee on February 14 that Pakistan and Afghanistan had to be
treated together if the Al Queda and Taliban forces were to be denied
their sanctuary in Pakistan while fighting Americans in Afghanistan.
Blair also said that the Pakistan government “is loosing territory in
parts of the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan where insurgents ran free and while mounting economic hardships and
frustrations over poor governance have given rise to greater
radicalization elsewhere.” (NYT).
The New York Times reported that the Europeans had not been
brought into the new strategy that was shaped by the outgoing Bush
administration in the summer of 2008. The CIA and the Special Forces
were given the task of extending ground operations from Afghanistan to
the border regions of Pakistan as well as to areas in Baluchistan and
NWFP with the tacit consent of the military regime in Islamabad. This
escalation of the Afghanistan war touched on the sovereignty of Pakistan,
a nuclear power, and was thus “so dangerous and politically loaded…that
no American ally wants to be anywhere near it.”
When Holbrooke landed in Pakistan ---his previous visit had been made in
the early 90s---- he found the country with a split government and a bankrupt
economy, the elected civilian regime of president Asaf Ali Zardari denied power
by the Army and the ISI to enforce its writ in the NWFP and Baluchistan provinces as well as much of Punjab where his political rival, Nawaz Shariff
and his brother Shabaz Shariff ( who was also chief minister of Pakistan’s
largest and richest province) held sway. Holbrooke heard a litany of complaints
against America, much bitterness about the war in Afghanistan, and despair about the future of the Pakistani State. The loudest and most widely shared of resentment was about a number of secret agreements reached between the military ruler General Pervaiz
Musharaff and the Bush administrations allowing American troops to operate
in the frontier regions from bases within Pakistan, and also against the bombing
of tribal areas within Pakistan by American ‘drones’ killing hundreds of civilians including women and children, each strike arousing anger amongst
Pakistanis and boosting radicalization of the youth and the faithful Muslims.
Holbrooke visited certain tribal areas, listened to groups of women and
intellectuals, met with the army chief Kayani and the ISI chief General Pasha,
and of course with president Jardari and the prime minister, the foreign minister
and other officials.
Holbrooke met with ‘deep and widespread’ resentment with the U.S. in all sections of Pakistanis he met, especially the journalistic and academic communities as well as retired Generals and diplomats who had been warm
friends of America even in the recent past. He found the Army Generals and
corps commanders reluctant to fight the Taliban and Queda elements on the home front, something they had never done, nor were they willing to shift the
bulk of the Army from the eastern front with India to the West to fight the Taliban and Queda. Indeed, he was told by many of his interlocuters, including
president Zardari and Nawaz Shariff that the Pakistan State could collapse
if Washington forced on it a war it did not wish to wage---against its own people
with American arms, money and under virtual American command
Good Talibans, Bad Talibans
Taliban is a creation of the Pakistan army. It was born and nursed during
the ten year rule pf the late General Zia-ul Haque to fight the Soviet
forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Over the years, Taliban has not merely
expanded as a massive army of Islamic fanatics, it has taken different
shapes and colours in the four Pakistani provinces as well as in the tribal
borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan itself.
Taliban is a distinct and dispersed militant force controlled by different
different tribal warriors who have nursed their respective cohorts for decades.The cult of Taliban fundamentalism has penetrated the Pakistan army deeplypermeating its Other Ranks as well as the junior and middle level officers.
In Afghanistan and in the tribal areas, free-wheeling warlords command
the Taliban fighters who thrive on extensive cultivation of poppies and
a multi-billion dollar illegal opium trade spanning much of the world.
In Afghanistan as well as Waziristan, Holbrooke met with several
warlords who maintain Taliban as private armies. Hamid Karzai, the
Afghan president, has over the years built his own network of non-combatant relations with Taliban warlords. In fact, Karzai’s model of copting
‘moderate’ Taliban groups as part of a loosely federal political regime has been
tantalizing the top brass of the Pakistan army as well as part of the political
class as perhaps the only way to create and hold together a ‘stable’ regime in
Pakistan. Pakistani interculators told Holbrooke that governance hardly
prevailed in Pakistan, and, for the U.S., Pakistan’s political and economicmeltdown posed a far greater problem than a regime collapse in
Afghanistan. Hardly anyone in Pakistan suggested the sacking of Karzai
and nearly every one to whom the special envoy from Washington listened
told him that there should be no sacking of Karzai before the presidential
election scheduled for August 2009.
In Swat Valley, Waziristan, the Zardari government as well as the Army
have conceded political control to the local Taliban who have determined to rule
the once-reputed resort area under Shariat law. The idea is to come to terms with ‘moderate’ Taliban elements who enjoy widespread positive responses
from the masses of devoutly Islamic population of Pakistan and even large segments of the middle classes and intellectuals. Indeed, Pakistan was created
a Muslim State by the All-India Muslim League with British
support, and it has remained a Muslim state ever since. The distinction between an Islamic State and an Islamicist State escapes the bulk of the Pakistan people.The secularists in Pakistan are still a relatively minority group confined mostly to the main urban centres. The National Awami Party, Pakistan’s only
secular political group, has by and large succumbed to Islam after the death of its first generation of leaders. This party is in power in the NWFP. It has conceded Swat to the local Taliban.
The tactics of Good Taliban and Bad Taliban is getting attractive to Pakistan political leaders as well as the American military. More than one
Pakistani secularist who visited New Delhi recently seemed to believe that
‘adoption’ of ‘good Talibans’ to the Pakistani model of democracy is the only
way to build a stable political regime in the country.
By Bhabani Sen Gupta
“ A terrible beauty is born”. US vice-president Josef Biden used
these words from a poem of T. S. Eliot to give a select elite European
audience at Munich early this month a vision of the change in American
foreign policy contemplated by president Barak Obama. Biden did not
go beyond vague outlines. What he said, however, was enough to warn
Europeans that the era of projecting U.S. hegemony in the world, with
unilateral military intervention to assert or preserve American global interests, was coming to an end, and the US, under Obama’s leadership.
would try to create an inclusive, non-polarised, cooperative world order
trying to find regional, global and multilateral solutions to problems and
conflicts, and address the biggest challenge of kickstarting the world economy that is caught in a deepening recession..
Obama has given his cabinet members and White House advisors
sixty days to complete in-depth and extensive reviews of U.S. engagements in different regions of the world as well as global issues and submit their reports and
recommendations to the president. The three regions claiming priorities
are the Middle East---of which the focus is on Israel and the Palestinian
issue; the AfPak region combining Pakistan and Afghanistan and, at a
certain remove, Iran; and China in the larger regional context of North-East Asia. While the Middle East and AfPak regions have been
straddled by special envoys Senator Mitchel and Richard Holbrooke, the secretary of state,
Hilary Clinton herself, took over the task of reassessing America’s interactions with China with a weeklong tour of Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul
and Jakarta.
Relations with China are of the utmost importance. The Obama
administrations expects China to lend it much of the $ 787 billion Obama
has committed as stimulant to the sinking American economy, The
New York Times reported on February 12. Such borrowing will invest
China in America’s recovery. The New York Times report said that “a need to borrow China’s real capital could cost Mr Obama the political
capital as he and China’s leaders haggle over North Korea and Climate
Change.” An international affairs analyst observed on the BBC on February 20 that relations between the U.S. and China could develop as
the “most important bilateral relationship in the 21st century.”
This is only one of the ways the global economic crisis is changing
the power map of the world, noted The Times report. It is perhaps the
most important way because it will involve building of cooperative bridges
between the world’s leader of capitalism and its preeminent socialist power--- the upside down of the cold war that dominated the world order
between the end of World War II and the collapse of the USSR.
For India, a gradual lowering of America’s global hegemonic profile is generally welcome since the process will create larger space
for India’s foreign relations, both political-strategic and economic. Easier
U.S.-Russian relations will enable India to expand its economic infrastructural ties with Russia, particularly in building its
nuclear power generating capability. Easing of tensions and launching of
normal relations between the U.S. and Iran will open up larger and more
productive spaces of cooperation with Iran at the bilateral level and also
in concluding agreements with Iran to build oil and gas pipelines through
Central Asia as well as in partnership with Pakistan.
The strategic community in New Delhi will be alarmed by an
enhancement of China’s global status; the Indian media which are more
anti-China than the major political parties, will be highly upset, and will
respond with the construction of a big China threat to Indian interests and national security.. However, whoever forms the next government in New Delhi after the national poll
in April-May 2009 will be encouraged to expand economic and technological cooperation with China and to work together to secure much of Asia from a sharp economic meltdown At this time—in February 2009, the man who is piloting the Indian government, Pranab K. Mukherjee, is credited with the belief that closer India-China economic and political cooperation is the only way to insulate South-
SouthEast and NorthEast Asia from the U.S.-Japan-EuropeanUnion
type of a deepening and extended economic crisis.
Obama’s AfPak Problem
There is a spike of regret in New Delhi that president Obama
will go to London in April armed with policies and plans to initiate
a new global order when India will be entangled in a national poll,
waiting for a new government.to be formed. However, the bureaucracies of the Prime Minister’s Offce (PMO), External Affairs Ministry (EAM)
and Defence Ministry, all located in the South Block of the Central
Secretariat on Raisina Hills, will keep up the continuity in foreign and
strategic policies regardless of the composition of the next coalition regime in New Delhi,
Both leading political parties and the leading central bureaucracies
look darkly at the unfolding arms of the “AfPak” geopolitical thrusts of
Obama’s foreign policies involving Pakistan and Afghanistan and sucking in a host of other countries as well as the United Nations. In
Indian perception, the AfPak geopolitical concept took clear shape during the week-long diplomatic explorations by Obama’s special envoy, Richard Holbroke in Pakistan ( 2 days, Afghanistan 4 days and New Delhi 1 day) in mid-February 2009. Very soon after Holbroke’s return
to Washington DC, Obama announced on February 19 a troops surge of 17,000 to
join the 38,000 American troops already deployed in Afghanistan. He
said Afghanistan remained ‘a priority’ and that the war there was
“winnable.”
But Obama may find it hard to persuade U.S. allies in the West
to share the burden of his troops surge in Afghanistan. He had found even in the summer of 2008 during his visit to Western Europe as a presidential candidate that the Europeans partners of George Bush’s ‘coalition of the willing’ had
little will to contribute more troops or finance in the war in Afghanistan. Even the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, wanted his troops out of Afghanistan in 2009. Obama sent defence
secretary Gates to a meeting of the Atlantic Alliance in Paris on
February 20 to sell the Afghan surge to the NATO members. The
BBC reported that the NATO response was lukewarm. The president
himself made Canada the first country of his foreign trip after getting elected to the White House. The Canadian defence minister
observed, however, that a surge in the Afghan war on the Taliban and AlQeuda ‘must be led by Afghanistan itself.”
Even before Richard Holbrooke landed in Pakistan on his ‘see and
listen” week-long tour, the American Generals concerned with the
Afghan war had asked that Pakistan and Afghanistan be treated as
a single zone of war if it had to be won, and their suggestion was accepted by the Obama administration. Dennis C Blair, a member
of the team of experts Holbrooke had gathered around him when he
was president of Asia Society of New York, and who was appointed
Director of Military Intelligence by Obama in the first round of appointments after inauguration, had told the Senate Intelligence
Committee on February 14 that Pakistan and Afghanistan had to be
treated together if the Al Queda and Taliban forces were to be denied
their sanctuary in Pakistan while fighting Americans in Afghanistan.
Blair also said that the Pakistan government “is loosing territory in
parts of the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan where insurgents ran free and while mounting economic hardships and
frustrations over poor governance have given rise to greater
radicalization elsewhere.” (NYT).
The New York Times reported that the Europeans had not been
brought into the new strategy that was shaped by the outgoing Bush
administration in the summer of 2008. The CIA and the Special Forces
were given the task of extending ground operations from Afghanistan to
the border regions of Pakistan as well as to areas in Baluchistan and
NWFP with the tacit consent of the military regime in Islamabad. This
escalation of the Afghanistan war touched on the sovereignty of Pakistan,
a nuclear power, and was thus “so dangerous and politically loaded…that
no American ally wants to be anywhere near it.”
When Holbrooke landed in Pakistan ---his previous visit had been made in
the early 90s---- he found the country with a split government and a bankrupt
economy, the elected civilian regime of president Asaf Ali Zardari denied power
by the Army and the ISI to enforce its writ in the NWFP and Baluchistan provinces as well as much of Punjab where his political rival, Nawaz Shariff
and his brother Shabaz Shariff ( who was also chief minister of Pakistan’s
largest and richest province) held sway. Holbrooke heard a litany of complaints
against America, much bitterness about the war in Afghanistan, and despair about the future of the Pakistani State. The loudest and most widely shared of resentment was about a number of secret agreements reached between the military ruler General Pervaiz
Musharaff and the Bush administrations allowing American troops to operate
in the frontier regions from bases within Pakistan, and also against the bombing
of tribal areas within Pakistan by American ‘drones’ killing hundreds of civilians including women and children, each strike arousing anger amongst
Pakistanis and boosting radicalization of the youth and the faithful Muslims.
Holbrooke visited certain tribal areas, listened to groups of women and
intellectuals, met with the army chief Kayani and the ISI chief General Pasha,
and of course with president Jardari and the prime minister, the foreign minister
and other officials.
Holbrooke met with ‘deep and widespread’ resentment with the U.S. in all sections of Pakistanis he met, especially the journalistic and academic communities as well as retired Generals and diplomats who had been warm
friends of America even in the recent past. He found the Army Generals and
corps commanders reluctant to fight the Taliban and Queda elements on the home front, something they had never done, nor were they willing to shift the
bulk of the Army from the eastern front with India to the West to fight the Taliban and Queda. Indeed, he was told by many of his interlocuters, including
president Zardari and Nawaz Shariff that the Pakistan State could collapse
if Washington forced on it a war it did not wish to wage---against its own people
with American arms, money and under virtual American command
Good Talibans, Bad Talibans
Taliban is a creation of the Pakistan army. It was born and nursed during
the ten year rule pf the late General Zia-ul Haque to fight the Soviet
forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Over the years, Taliban has not merely
expanded as a massive army of Islamic fanatics, it has taken different
shapes and colours in the four Pakistani provinces as well as in the tribal
borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan itself.
Taliban is a distinct and dispersed militant force controlled by different
different tribal warriors who have nursed their respective cohorts for decades.The cult of Taliban fundamentalism has penetrated the Pakistan army deeplypermeating its Other Ranks as well as the junior and middle level officers.
In Afghanistan and in the tribal areas, free-wheeling warlords command
the Taliban fighters who thrive on extensive cultivation of poppies and
a multi-billion dollar illegal opium trade spanning much of the world.
In Afghanistan as well as Waziristan, Holbrooke met with several
warlords who maintain Taliban as private armies. Hamid Karzai, the
Afghan president, has over the years built his own network of non-combatant relations with Taliban warlords. In fact, Karzai’s model of copting
‘moderate’ Taliban groups as part of a loosely federal political regime has been
tantalizing the top brass of the Pakistan army as well as part of the political
class as perhaps the only way to create and hold together a ‘stable’ regime in
Pakistan. Pakistani interculators told Holbrooke that governance hardly
prevailed in Pakistan, and, for the U.S., Pakistan’s political and economicmeltdown posed a far greater problem than a regime collapse in
Afghanistan. Hardly anyone in Pakistan suggested the sacking of Karzai
and nearly every one to whom the special envoy from Washington listened
told him that there should be no sacking of Karzai before the presidential
election scheduled for August 2009.
In Swat Valley, Waziristan, the Zardari government as well as the Army
have conceded political control to the local Taliban who have determined to rule
the once-reputed resort area under Shariat law. The idea is to come to terms with ‘moderate’ Taliban elements who enjoy widespread positive responses
from the masses of devoutly Islamic population of Pakistan and even large segments of the middle classes and intellectuals. Indeed, Pakistan was created
a Muslim State by the All-India Muslim League with British
support, and it has remained a Muslim state ever since. The distinction between an Islamic State and an Islamicist State escapes the bulk of the Pakistan people.The secularists in Pakistan are still a relatively minority group confined mostly to the main urban centres. The National Awami Party, Pakistan’s only
secular political group, has by and large succumbed to Islam after the death of its first generation of leaders. This party is in power in the NWFP. It has conceded Swat to the local Taliban.
The tactics of Good Taliban and Bad Taliban is getting attractive to Pakistan political leaders as well as the American military. More than one
Pakistani secularist who visited New Delhi recently seemed to believe that
‘adoption’ of ‘good Talibans’ to the Pakistani model of democracy is the only
way to build a stable political regime in the country.
Bhabani Sen Gupta’s blog on President Obama’s foreign policy makes for interesting reading. The piece has some structural problems, needs proof reading and formatting, but, in essence, it seems to be penned by a journalist who obviously has both experience and wisdom (later, I “Googled” the author and what I learned about this esteemed writer confirmed by guess – and more).
ReplyDeleteBy and large I agree with Dr. Sen Gupta’s premise: the Obama administration may be on to something new and refreshing in its foreign policy, by wielding what Daisaku Ikeda, the contemporary Japanese philosopher, has called the “soft power of diplomacy,” eschewing the “big stick” wielded by the Bush-Cheney administration. One thing Sen Gupta does not mention about Barak Obama is his astute use of the Internet and the electronic media. He ran his campaign through them, and now he seems to be bypassing foreign governments and addressing directly the people through television and the Internet. While he has gathered an impressive group of intellectuals and military and financial experts to help implement his foreign and domestic policies, he really does believe that in the twenty-first century, political power does not reside in the barrel of a gun but in the hands of everyday people.
KS
Atlanta, Georgia