In a January 8 article for the World Policy Blog, Charles Cogan argued recently that the United States should not attempt to mediate the long-standing dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, as doing so could jeopardize America’s good relations with India and further muddle U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. On the contrary, only by accepting that India-Pakistan relations are a key part of the larger security problem can the United States end the war in Afghanistan. Thus, an active U.S. role in mediating the dispute over Kashmir and other issues dividing India and Pakistan is very much in America’s national interests.
First, tensions between India and Pakistan are hindering the latter’s efforts to aid the U.S. military in fighting militant Islamists along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. Indeed, senior American military officials like Admiral Michael Mullen have pointed out that Pakistan’s need to maintain a heavy troop presence on its border with India limits the resources it can divert to fighting the Islamist insurgency elsewhere in Pakistan. These officials agree that such a presence is justified, given the history and current level of tension between the two states. While some commentators argue that the Pakistani Army is unwilling to fight extremists on its own soil, Admiral Mullen himself has suggested that casualty statistics show Pakistan to be very much engaged in the struggle against Islamist terror.
Indeed, Pakistan’s military has already suffered more casualties in its own fight against militant Islamists than has the American military in Afghanistan. Suicide bombings within Pakistan have already claimed more than 11,000 victims. Thus, the Pakistani army’s slow progress in its war against militant Islamists is due not to a lack of zeal, but rather is tied largely to its inability (because of lack of capacity) to focus exclusively on fighting terror as long as Indo-Pakistani tension persists. An easing of the tensions would likely enable Pakistan to redeploy more troops to the fight against insurgents, which would be to the benefit of American forces in Afghanistan.
Second, poor India-Pakistan relations are central to longer-term but no less serious issues that plague the daily lives of Pakistanis and contribute to the conditions that drive some of the nation’s poorest citizens into the hands of extremists.
Pakistan’s current water crisis is one case in point. While religious identity is at the core of the Kashmir dispute, water also is a root cause of the conflict. The region is the source of the main rivers flowing through much of the Indian and Pakistani Punjab (literally, “land of the five waters”) that is South Asia’s breadbasket. Antagonistic relations only encouraged India to construct the dams that, in turn, now limit the flow of water to Pakistan, threatening its agricultural heartland and creating water shortages nationwide. Of course, myopic policymakers and political horse-trading in Pakistan have only made matters worse.
But poor India-Pakistan relations remain the major contributing factor to the crisis. Far from fostering cooperation on the issue, they actually create an incentive for India to withhold water from Pakistan. The water crisis in Pakistan hurts the poorest of the poor in Pakistan—prime targets for Al-Qaeda’s recruiters.
Finally, India is an active player in Afghanistan. An American diplomatic position that ignores Indian involvement in the region’s problems is simply not rooted in reality. A recent Time magazine article by journalist Ishaan Tharoor—son of Shashi Tharoor, India’s current external affairs minister—speaks to the extent of Indian involvement beyond the India-Pakistan border.
India maintains at least five diplomatic missions in Afghanistan—the same number it has in the United States (where there is a significantly larger Indian population), more than it has in Canada, and even more than the number of American diplomatic outposts in Afghanistan. India also maintains an airbase in Tajikistan, just a short hop from key regions of conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But this is not nearly New Delhi’s first foray into that nation: Shashi Tharoor himself notes active Indian support of military groups in the Afghan civil war of the 1990s. Given such a marked physical presence and a history of Indian involvement in Afghanistan, there is little doubt that India is an active player in the affairs of its neighbor, and more generally, in northwestern South Asia.
Some may argue that much of India’s “involvement” in Afghanistan is civilian in nature and involves foreign aid projects. Yet it’s appropriate to wonder if purely benign motives have driven a poverty-stricken country like India to give more than $1.2 billion in aid to Afghanistan (making it one of the largest donors), not to mention setting up an airbase in Tajikistan and training Afghan troops. Indeed, the senior NATO and American officer in Afghanistan, General Stanley A. McChrystal, in a recent report on Afghanistan, explicitly noted India (along with Iran and Afghanistan) as an “external influence,” warning that “increased Indian influence in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions.” Given a background of tense India-Pakistan relations, such an active Indian role in Afghanistan only feeds suspicions of strategic encirclement in the Pakistani defense establishment, hindering both cooperation between the Afghan and Pakistani governments, and, in turn, American efforts to fight the Taliban.
For the U.S. government to expect diplomats like Richard Holbrooke to solve problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan without regarding India as part of the dilemma and actively engaging it in the search for a solution is bad policy. Holbrooke’s portfolio and American policy more generally should reflect this multifaceted reality, recognizing that India-Pakistan tensions—over Kashmir and other matters in particular—are central to the larger regional security problem.
Such a stance may upset some special interests (including an increasingly active Indian-American lobby in the United States), but the prospect of an even longer and tougher U.S. fight in Afghanistan should simply outweigh this consideration. Moreover, just as the United States has an interest in maintaining strong relations with India, New Delhi has every interest in strengthening its ties with Washington.
True allies should be able to speak frankly with each other.
Hassan Malik is a PhD candidate in international history at Harvard University and previously worked in investment banking for J.P. Morgan and Troika Dialog in New York and Moscow after graduating from the University of Chicago. Born in Lahore, Pakistan, he has lived in Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Venezuela, Malaysia, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom.