surinder wrote:Johann wrote:It seems highly likely that Musharraf following failure at Kargil in 1999 adopted a similar model of building and sustaining an Pan-India jihadist insurgency, which he has prioritised even over Kashmir.
Johann:
Interesting. What is Musharraff's aim in making this change? Why did he change? Is he achiveing his goal?
Thanks.
Surinder
The Pakistani fear has always been that if the economic/diplomatic/military/internal cohesion gap between India and Pakistan widens beyond a certain point, Pakistan will either be destroyed from the outside, or collapse under internal pressures.
Pakistan's original choice was a military arms race, but that isnt something that its relationships are strong enough to maintain.
Its next choice was separatist regional insurgencies, but those have also led to near-war situations in which Pakistan lacked diplomatic and military support to face down.
Ayodhya 1992 was a turning point for the Pakistanis because that is when they recognised that the Hindu-Muslim struggle within India as a whole was a viable and exploitable option.
It became clear after Kargil even to someone with an overinflated view of his own prowess like Musharraf that
(a) The Pakistani hope of a great power intervening before a war goes seriously bad and maintaining a balance at the negotiating table doesnt exist.
(b) the conventional balance had changed to the point that Pakistan could not hold the Indians even in a very limited campaign despite the advantages of strategic surprise and the commanding heights. To make a very rough analogy its as if India had sneaked up on to the heights of Siachen in 1983 without the Pakistanis knowing, and then managed to lose them to a Pakistani counter-attack.
(c) that the Indian state and the Indian public is much more coherent in its response to state vs. state confrontations than internal disturbances.
So while Pakistan continues to attempt to play the arms race and regional separatism cards, they are weak cards. The pan-India Islamist/communal card is the strongest one they have left against India.
- Is it 'succeeding'? Depends on how you define 'success'.
I think Musharraf's plan of mobilising SIMI to fan terror, violence and extremism across the country, to heighten and harden communal conflict, and to intensify friction between non-Muslims in India is succeeding. Pakistan has not had to account to India or any other country for this.
However, these developments havent yet paralysed governance or tarnished India's image to the point that it has stunted economic growth or restricted India's ability to put together strategic partnerships that come at Pakistan's cost.
This mixed success in some ways a reflection of jihadi performance worldwide. Shock, but not awe, hardening of both Muslim and non-Muslim attitudes, and laying the conditions for spiralling internal violence in a number of societies that in the longer term will probably hurt the soft Islamists and the non-Muslim doves and dhimmis the most.
surinder wrote:BUT, something more will happen too (in my prediciton). Arab lands will descend into poverty because of either oil/gas drying up or alternative sources of energy being developed. This will plunge Arabs (especially Saudi) into a state of discord and internal strife. A large population with no skills will turn inwards in its fights. All violent movements ultimately turn inwards (including crime mafias). They center of Izlam will turn in a cesspool of conflict. This will leave the jihadist foot soldiers in the periphery (India, especially) at a loss. This will undermine their entire world-view more than simple failures of jihad. This will make this round of Izlam going to sleep different. It may actually be a fatal blow and izlam may not rise again.
...Your take?
You can be dirt poor, and still essentially get people to pay to not fall apart by threatening their welfare.
It's like the transexual gangs on the streets of some cities in India you have to pay not to touch you or hang around your wedding.
North Korea is a great example of this - by threatening to go suicidally berserk and/or collapse and set South Korea back 30 years, they've extracted hefty aid packages and all sorts of free passes from Seoul.
A combination of WMDs, threats to maritime trade (Tangiers-Tripoli, Suez, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, etc), the challenge of stemming avalanches of illegal immigration and assorted smuggling would allow the Arab world to remain at the international table, but much, much weaker of course.
The loss of petro-wealth will undermine the speed and scale with which jihadist ideology can be exported, but it will not end the process, only make it a somewhat easier to isolate and contain Islamist outbursts.
The 'Islamic revival' that produced Wahhab, Syed Ahmed and the future Deobandis in India, the Santri wars in Sumatra, etc in the early 1800s came out of Medina at a time when there was no powerful state patronising jihad.
The Arabs were really nothing between 1000-1750; mostly ruled by Turks and converted slaves from the Caucasus and Balkans. That did not stop jihad around the world.
Back then one of the biggest vectors were actually the orthodox sufi brotherhoods like the Naqshbandis - Sufi brotherhoods are well designed to act as secret societies when the state is strong, or when conditions permit, a framework for mass-mobilisation. That is why Hassan el-Banna who founded the Muslim Brotherhood modeled it on one.