The weakening legs of Obama’s Afghanistan policies

President Barack Obama is weakening the legs of his policies to stabilize Afghanistan through missteps in the important relationship with India. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is trying to repair some of the cracks during the current State visit but success is elusive so far.

The White House’s fixation on Pakistan’s troubles in handling its incipient domestic Jihadist insurgency is blinding it to the fact that India is by far the overwhelming military power in South Asia. Its competitor is China, not Pakistan.

Obama seems to think that China is the great Asian power and should have a say in everything, including Afghanistan and South Asia. He is striking at his own legs because he is forgetting the other great Asian power, Russia. India will have no choice but to return to Russia’s military hands, if Obama insists on giving more importance to China on the South Asian subcontinent.

Obama pays lip service to the importance of India but his actions have not matched his words. Whatever closeness there might be in soft areas like software, science and education, the defining element in any friendship between nation States is security. On that, he is putting India’s regional interests on the backburner.

He forgets that India knows much more about South Asia than Washington or Beijing because it shares common culture. Indian civilization provides the dominant lifestyle blanket, regardless of whether people are Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or animist. More generally, ancient Indian beliefs and Buddhism have colored Asia for millennia, all the way from Afghanistan through Indonesia to Japan. So, India’s opinions are worth listening to with more than half an ear.

The keys to Afghanistan, and America’s exit from there, lie not just in Pakistan but in India, China and Russia. Iran is also an important player. Getting troop numbers and counterinsurgency right in Afghanistan is not the entire road to stability and newly-minted Pakistani and Afghan Taliban are not the only threats. There are several prickly national security interests waiting in the wings as potential spoilers.

Singh’s security concerns are being misread in Washington as New Delhi seeking respect yet again, somewhat like a teenager who needs gentle but firm handling. This mistake could seriously delay Obama’s exit from his “war of necessity” in Afghanistan.

Of course, Pakistan’s stability is critically important but having a willing American partner in Delhi is still more important. That alone can create the medium term regional stability required for democracy to survive in that inflammable country.

Pakistan’s despotic army and its spy services continue to covertly use jihadists to scare civilian opponents in Pakistan and force Washington to give more money. They are fighting the Pakistani Taliban and other jihadists in the frontier areas to keep them from securing beachheads in the lucrative heartlands of Punjab and Sind. But they are also nurturing a tough kernel of jihadists to spy on other insurgents and create just enough trouble in Afghanistan, India and within Pakistan.

The goal is to ensure that the army elites are guaranteed billions of dollars in US military and economic aid, some of which ends up in their personal pockets. This policy has been extraordinarily successful. It brought $12 billion from the Bush administration since 2002 and will bring another $10 from the Obama administration.

The aid is justified on the argument that boosting economic development and education in Pakistan will wean ordinary people away from religious fundamentalism and weaken the army’s hold over civil society. For the moment, this is a mistake because much of how and where the money is spent is controlled either directly or indirectly by the army, spy services and their sympathizers. Some of it is transferred through hawala transactions to the jihadists to keep them sweet. Hawala is an untraceable illegal money transfer system that does not use banks.

The power of militarists and jihadists must be broken in Pakistan before channeling more funds for economic and social development. Establishing a functioning democracy with strong enough institutions is the only way to put power in the hands of ordinary people to render ineffectual the militarists and jihadists among them. That is a slow and painful process in poor developing countries. India knows more about it than any US or Western think tank.

The alternative is more bloodletting between Pakistan’s militarists and jihadists fed by US arms and money. The jihadists may win because they hide among civilians, causing the deaths of large numbers when the army uses heavy weapons. In the end, civilians turn against the side that kills more of them.

The answers for whatever they are worth lie in more democracy, not more weapons. Here, India is the expert and America the teenager in South Asia.