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Triangulating an Asian Conflict
By Chan Akya
05/09/08 "Asia
Times" -- - One
of the more predictable turns during any US presidential
election year is the sheer speed with which issues of
longer-term strategic importance are quietly subsumed by a
global media fed a steady diet of soap-operatic drama on the
candidates, their spouses, born and unborn children and so on.
By no means am I throwing stones while sitting in a glass house
though; this is more of an introspective comment on the
realities of the supply and demand for newsworthy discussions.
In 2000, it was all about the drama about the election battle
between George W Bush and Al Gore, not to mention the
post-election vote-capturing behavior of the US Supreme Court.
Never mind that the US economy had slipped into a recession
following the bursting of the dot.com bubble or that al-Qaeda
was quietly expanding its control of the Taliban even as the
latter itself was engaged in a final push against the Northern
Alliance and its charismatic commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud. The
costs of ignoring those developments are still being felt around
the world.
The 2004 election perhaps went against that trend - and readers
can disabuse that notion by pointing out the big emerging
stories that were not given serious importance in that election,
such as the debacle in the conduct of the Iraq occupation - but
this time around certainly looks like a replay of 2000. This
observation is based on my read of major global online
newspapers for the past few weeks; and pertains especially to
the apparent indifference with which three major trends in Asia
are being treated.
Even as the media feverishly debates the paternity of the
Republican vice-presidential candidate's granddaughter and the
difficulties associated with sitting through an Obama speech
without either dancing or dozing off, these important Asian
stories are being relegated to the back pages. The first of
these stories gets some coverage, but perhaps without any
comprehensive analysis of its longer-term ramifications; the
second and third are virtually missing from all media.
These stories are: firstly, the encirclement of Pakistan;
secondly the resurgence of Han nationalism and thirdly the trend
towards Hindu fanaticism.
Pakistani nukes
Readers will argue that the Pakistan story has been given
sufficient importance in global media, and especially in
American newspapers. A cursory examination of the coverage
though shows a morbid fascination with character analysis (or
assassination) of the major players, namely ex-president
Musharraf, putative president-elect Zardari and PM-in-waiting
Nawaz Sharif.
As the reasonably quick exit of Musharraf showed, none of these
players actually matter in the current situation. Increased
lawlessness on the border with Afghanistan, which prompted a US
cross-border raid this week, is the story with greater
significance over the near term.
Some analysts have speculated that al-Qaeda is now firmly on the
path of securing nuclear weapons in Pakistan. The trifurcation
of Pakistani politics on the lines of the above three players
still leaves out two important interest groups, namely the army
and Islamic fundamentalists. While the last two parties tended
to be part of the same continuum - as shown in the war against
India in 1999 and even the terrorist attacks that followed -
events since 2001 have sundered the alliance. With parts of the
army turning on its own al-Qaeda sympathizers, there is no more
trust between the two groups.
The abortive attempt on the life of the current Pakistani prime
minister this week was an indication of how close to the
corridors of power the Islamic fundamentalists are. It is even
possible that this attempt was a warning shot intended to
present a fait accompli to Pakistani politicians: deal with us
or die.
Pakistan debt this week climbed to become the most risky credit
across all global sovereigns, a motley crowd of risky
governments around the world that includes Argentina (which
seeks to refuse payment to external creditors) among others.
This dubious distinction signals the complete shutdown of
external funding for Pakistan, at a critical juncture when a
slowing economy and foreign portfolio outflows combine to make
matters hard enough.
The Pakistani rupee has continued to fall dramatically even as
the stock market remains in limbo. The mounting problems on the
market front highlight the firm belief among external investors
that be it the US or Saudi Arabia, there is no likelihood of
imminent assistance for Pakistan to address its mountain of
maturing debt obligations. Now more than ever, the temptation
for rogue government and military officials to threaten a
violation of safeguards on the country's nuclear weapons must
rank very high.
Meanwhile in Afghanistan, areas outside Kabul that are under the
control of the Taliban will likely expand in winter months. The
paucity of any new armed commitment to that country by the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which now needs to make
contingency plans to contain the Russian bear in its own
neighborhood, and the US (which thinks it has bigger problems in
Iraq or Iran depending on who you ask) means that by the time a
new US president takes office, the Taliban conceivably will be
back in control of Afghanistan.
Bleeding on its western flanks and ever-watchful of its eastern
border with India, the Pakistani military has limited options.
Cooperating with the US or NATO is unlikely in the current
political climate, which ensures that increasing resources are
misspent on the lost war pursuing al-Qaeda. Quelling an internal
rebellion - no military man actually wants to die in combat,
contrary to their popular image - would take an assumption of
political power once again in the country, with all the baggage
this brings.
Taken to a logical extreme, the slippage of the Pakistani
establishment to a quasi-vassal relationship with al-Qaeda
ideologues appears all the more likely. Politicians will strike
deals with extremist Islamic groups and seek to appease their
grievances; these range from the heavy handedness of Pakistani
police against the militant groups to the regrouping of
madrassas across the country.
Meanwhile, the army is also likely to secure its own peace with
the terrorist groups by calling off intensive operations and
allowing for a return of an expanded Taliban state within
Pakistani borders that calls the shots in Afghanistan. I don't
believe it will take more than year for the current Afghan
government to fall and make way for the Taliban when this
happens.
The resulting theocratic state will be run essentially by
today's al-Qaeda reservists, with the added advantage of
possessing nuclear weapons. As epitaphs go, George W Bush could
not wish for anything worse, but sadly this does seem to his
most likely legacy.
Han-Hindu resurgence
The increased attention that the world will give Pakistan from
the beginning of next year though brings a new host of
challenges. The most reasonable expectation would be for
increased military intervention in the region to push back the
Taliban and along with it, the al-Qaeda sympathizers in the
Afghan and Pakistani establishments.
Geographically this would present serious obstacles, not the
least because Iran is likely to remain fiercely antagonistic to
any strikes against military targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan
by Western powers. That leaves the northern approach, where a
resurgent Russia will complicate matters to no trivial degree.
Simplistically put, the West will have to depend on the
munificence of China and India to control the pest that will be
unleashed on their borders over the near term. While China has
less to fear initially as compared with India about the
expansionist aims of Islamic fundamentalists, it does have a
sensitive border problem in Xinjiang, which could present the
Achilles' heel of its non-interventionist policy with respect to
Muslim issues.
Simply put, a Taliban government with nuclear capabilities is
unlikely to treat China any differently - better or worse - than
it treats India over the longer term.
The emerging economic slowdown - sparking talk of a government
stimulus package in short order - presents a casus belli for the
majority Han. Frowning on the subsidies and handouts to minority
groups will become more prevalent when millions lose their jobs
in the manufacturing belts of southern China. The majority group
believes that the minorities are already spoiled in terms of
their ability to have more than one child as well as benefiting
from a plethora of handouts. That resentment will become
palpable in the face of any protests about human rights and the
like in China - which is exactly what has happened over the
recent past.
The Beijing Olympics highlighted a sensitive weakness for Han
Chinese, namely how to reconcile to their existence when issues
of trust are clearly paramount. Taking the paranoia to its
extreme, the government assigned Han children to play the part
of ethnic children in the opening ceremony in order to preclude
even the remote chance of someone whisking out and waving a
Muslim or Tibetan flag from under their costumes.
In turn, this resurgence of Han nationalism - that only the
majority group can be trusted to represent China and its
interests - causes its own set of complications. Getting along
with minority groups requires vastly greater amounts of trust
than the current wave of Han nationalism seems capable of
showing. That will cause alienation of minority groups, with an
automatic feedback loop to perpetuating Han dominance. Needless
to say, that puts Han China in a direct path of conflict with
any new Islamic power in South Asia.
Echoing the behavior of the Chinese during the Tibetan riots
earlier this year, India's Hindus have gone on the warpath in
the eastern state of Orissa, against Christian missionaries who
they claim are illegally converting their members. Even as the
Han are pushing for greater dominance over their own affairs in
China, India's Hindus appear to be rebelling under a similar
impulse in their country.
Having already outlawed untouchability, India's approach to the
problem needs to be socio-economic. I have consistently argued
that the key issue for India is to pursue economic development
and to destroy poverty in all its guises - rural and urban -
rather than the simplistic questions of handouts and welfare
payments that politicians seem to be prefer. That path, which
necessitates infrastructure building, better schooling and
access to healthcare, is more or less an afterthought in the
current climate of short-term goal-setting by the government.
It is these handouts that democratic India is up in arms about.
With an economic slowdown underway, various sections of Indian
society are in greater need of government attention, whether it
is in the form of infrastructure building or simple handouts.
Conversions within geographically concentrated groups create
lobbying power, which has in turn led to policy intervention in
funding and budget allocations by politicians eager to capture
votes. With an election due by next year, political behavior has
shifted up a gear in India, with the almost inevitable result of
sparking violent confrontations among interest groups.
In the past, these confrontations used to be within the
construct of Hinduism but have now seeped out to encompass other
religious groups. That is no surprise given that Indians of all
religions - including Christianity - still observe caste
segregation in one fashion or another.
The current wave of Hindu fanaticism isn't about putting the
right-wing political parties into power, seeing as they seem to
have had little impact in the matter. Rather, it seems like an
incident in one part of the country that has lit the fuse of
Hindu nationalism elsewhere. This is where the echoes to Han
Chinese resurgence since the Tibetan events become more
relevant.
Thus, the indomitable force of Islamic fundamentalism that
emerges from Pakistan will have to confront the immovable
objects of Han and Hindu resurgence. It is well likely that the
first course of action will be against the well-known enemy of
India rather than the scarier opponent in China, but that is a
relatively minor detail in that it only applies over the
relative near term.
The last one?
As a postscript to the above, one thought that does strike a
chord is the likelihood that future US elections will matter a
whole lot less to the rest of the world. The decline of the sole
superpower, along with a concurrent emergence of alternative
powers on the military, ideological and economic fronts, means
that parts of the global media could well be disengaged from US
election reviews - that is, regurgitating the latest specials
from US media outlets - to doing something a lot more productive
in their own backyards.
The opposite side of that loop is that the column inches devoted
to candidate discussions could well decline in the US media
itself, as the relative importance of the rest of the world
becomes increasingly apparent.
At least, I hope so.
Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd
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