India And Operation Geronimo
The Editors
May 20, 2011
This is a guest post by Shashank Joshi, an Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and doctoral student at Harvard University.
In no country did Osama bin Laden's demise generate as acute a sense of vindication as in India. For the past twenty years, India has pointed to Pakistan as the epicentre of regional and global terrorism.
Aside from sensationalist headlines and the occasional barb, India’s self-satisfaction was generally muted, expressed in tones of exasperation rather than glee. In the short-term, bin Laden’s discovery at the heart of the Pakistani establishment offers only a fleeting sense of schadenfraude to Indian decision-makers.
Despite the anger coming from the US Congress, it would be wishful thinking on the part of India to expect US assistance to Pakistan to dry up. As long as 130,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan continue to require feeding and fueling, and as long as the Northern Distribution Network (NDN) into the country is deemed inadequate, the US will not completely stem the flow of funds to the war's staging point.
Moreover, if bin Laden's death enables President Obama to declare victory in the Afghan campaign, as many Democrats are urging, then India envisages a new set of security threats. New Delhi fears that a precipitous US withdrawal would result in a power vacuum in Kabul, one that would open operating space for anti-Indian militants in southern and eastern Afghanistan.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was accorded the rare honour of addressing Afghanistan’s parliament in mid-May, and he pointedly exhorted the country to determine its future “without outside interference or coercion”. But Hamid Karzai’s growing overtures to Pakistan indicate that that this is unlikely to happen, and that significant concessions will be made to Pakistan as the peace process unfolds over the next several years.
India does have robust links to Afghan line ministries, but its influence within the regime has dwindled since Hamid Karzai’s firing of interior minister Hanif Atmar and intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh last year. It could attempt to re-activate old ties to what is left of the Northern Alliance, but this would make India little more than a bit player in any renewed civil war. It's ability to funnel money and arms to anti-Taliban warlords in the 1990s was hardly effective in preventing militancy across the rest of the country.
As a result, few in Delhi are calling for an American departure, even if this would grant Washington a freer hand in pressuring Pakistan’s generals. Whether or not this is a sound prognosis, it continues to guide Indian thinking about Afghanistan.
An Indian Abbottabad?
In the longer-term, however, May 2 2011, might prove to be a pivotal moment. This is because the circumstances of bin Laden's death may have shifted India's calculus for using force against Pakistan in future crises or standoffs.
This is categorically not because India is able to conduct an Abbottabad-esque raid, as Indian Army chief VK Singh suggested when he declared that "all arms of the [Indian] military are competent to carry out such an operation". They are not. (And this reflects a worrying trend among Indian Army chiefs to make self-assured and subsequently misinterpreted statements that complicate Indian diplomacy).
Pakistan's air defences did appear to receive a blow by the notional ease with which four American helicopters traversed the 160 miles from Jalalabad to Abbottabad, conducting a firefight under the nose of sleeping cadets of the Pakistan Military Academy, before supposedly evading hastily scrambled US-supplied F-16 jets of the Pakistan Air Force.
But this is a moot point, because India will operate on the entirely reasonable assumption that Pakistan was informed of the operation once it was underway and was told in no uncertain terms that the Pakistani Air Force would come to regret any interference.
More importantly, India’s soldiers and spies know that they possess neither the same proficiency in joint operations nor the necessary human intelligence to replicate the feat. According to B Raman, the former head of counterterrorism of India’s foreign intelligence service, India’s covert action capabilities in Pakistan were dismantled by then Prime Minister I K Gujral nearly fifteen years ago and have never been reconstructed. All this means that a figure like Hafiz Saeed, leader of the Punjabi terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, can sleep soundly without fear of Indian commandos dropping into his Lahore compound.
Perceptions of Pakistan
Rather, the important implications of Operation Geronimo lie in the way it has transformed global perceptions of Pakistan’s links to militant organisations.
This international dismay with Pakistan is somewhat ironic, because the evidence tying the Pakistan Army and ISI intelligence agency to Al Qaeda is weaker and more circumstantial than that implicating them in the activities of other groups, such as the Afghan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, or Jaish-e-Mohammed, which has been steadily mounting over the past decade.
Only a week before the US raid, the top American military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, bluntly conceded that “the ISI has a long-standing relationship with the Haqqani network”. Separately, a federal court in Chicago will shortly implicate an officer of the ISI in the Mumbai attacks of 2008.
Few American and NATO officers still harbour any doubts about the direct collusion of the highest ranks of the Pakistani military with most segments of the Afghan insurgency. Leaked threat assessments from Guantanamo Bay are replete with references to links between the ISI and Taliban leader Mullah Omar.
And yet it took bin Laden's death to bring these sentiments to boiling point, prompting even President Obama to ask “whether there might have been some people inside of [Pakistan's] government” helping bin Laden to elude capture. Public statements are careful to note that the US has no evidence of Pakistani complicity, but officials privately express a certain incredulousness. Whether or not Pakistan did facilitate bin Laden's evasion of US forces - and there is a volume of circumstantial evidence each way - is less relevant than the effect that this episode has produced: a worldwide exhaustion of patience with Rawalpindi.
Perceptions Matter
This sea-change in perceptions matters. After Pakistan-based terrorists assaulted the Indian parliament as part of a sequence of attacks from 2001-02, India undertook its largest military mobilisation since the 1971 India-Pakistan War. Over a million troops were called up on each side, and many hundreds died in accidents and skirmishes. During that standoff, known as the “twin peaks crisis”, American and British diplomats made strenuous efforts to restrain India from using force.
But hereafter, diplomats everywhere will begin with a firmer presumption of state complicity. Last year, outgoing US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, normally a paragon of caution, noted that it was “not unreasonable to assume Indian patience would be limited were there to be further attacks” after that inflicted on Mumbai. Gates' comment was more than an observation; it was a warning, and one whose applicability has suddenly sharpened.
Washington is hardly likely to green-light a war, of course. It has deep-rooted concerns about nuclear escalation, and does not trust the command and control arrangements of either India or Pakistan. But it may go as far as to facilitate Indian air strikes away from urban areas, possibly through the provision of sensitive intelligence. This is particularly so if it deems the likely alternative to be an Indian ground assault that could result – as per Pakistani doctrine – in the use of tactical nuclear weapons against India's conventional forces on Pakistani soil.
The extent to which India has adopted a limited war plan – the so-called Cold Start doctrine – has been greatly overstated. That plan was developed by the army without consulting other branches of the military and it is yet to secure the approval of civilian leaders. Its logistical and organisational foundations are nowhere near ready.
But, as in the aftermath of Mumbai, the Indian Air Force is likely prepared and willing to conduct aerial attacks. An Indian defence journalist, Manoj Joshi, claimed that in November 2008 "all three services were keen to strike" and that the IAF went as far as to activate its forward bases. Segments of the civilian leadership, particularly in any future government controlled by the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (which is currently in opposition), would favour this option.
Far from being “surgical”, these would likely be ineffectual and risky. They would do little, in concrete terms, to degrade terrorist groups’ operational capabilities. Rather than deter Pakistan’s generals from the sponsorship of terrorism, they might renew widespread support for such a policy, although air strikes would serve a punitive and symbolic function – just as the US action did in Abbottabad.
None of this means that India is guaranteed to use force, and an array of other constraints - military readiness, fear of nuclear escalation, civilian reticence – will play their part. Nonetheless, the diplomatic environment in which the choice would be made has changed.
Old gamble, new odds
Does Pakistan understand this shift? The three years since the Mumbai attacks have passed without any significant acts of mass-casualty terrorism from Islamist groups. This is principally because the ISI has kept Lashkar-e-Taiba and affiliated groups on a tight leash (though the extent of that control over the minutiae of their operations remains contested).
The leash may tighten, but the Pakistani military is not ready to completely give up its "strategic assets", as Pakistan Army chief General Kayani once famously described warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani. This is because Pakistan's guiding assumption continues to be that the US is willing to discriminate between global and India-centric militants. That assumption became less tenable as these groups made alliances of expedience, cooperated in places like Waziristan, and some, like Lashkar-e-Taiba, began to explore Western targets.
The idea that the Americans are still willing to distinguish between different Pakistani militants may have dissolved altogether on that moonless night in Abbottabad. Pakistan's gamble that the US will turn a blind eye to attacks on India because they are peripheral to US interests may no longer pay off.
Whether or not one approves of putative Indian retaliation, and there are reasons to be leery, there is only one surefire way to transform international perceptions of Pakistan's involvement in any future attacks on India. That is for Pakistan to begin degrading – cautiously and without public fanfare – the full panoply of terrorist groups on its soil, and not just those threatening the Pakistani state. This is no easy task - it will take considerable finesse to prevent this leading to a further escalation of Pakistan's civil war.
This prescription is at odds with one advanced by Anatol Lieven, who has recently published an exhaustive study of Pakistan. Lieven argues that “the United States should accept and even welcome continued Pakistani military links to Lashkar-e-Taiba … while holding to the absolute condition that the Pakistani military uses these connections successfully to prevent further LeT attacks”. The audacity of this argument only marginally obscures its wrongheadedness. As extraordinarily painful as a process of adjustment would be, in a country already accustomed to considerable pain, endorsing such Pakistani “links” will purchase short-term stability at a potentially devastating long-term cost. (Lieven's argument also implies the reductio ad absurdum that one ought to fund any terrorist group over which one might exert some control).
Many Pakistanis reject this argument wholeheartedly. Babar Sattar, writing in Pakistan's Dawn newspaper, wrote with penetrating clarity that “it is time to completely liquidate the jihadi project and cleanse our state machinery of those who believe in its virtue”. Instead, the military establishment closed ranks. Kayani regrouped his senior officers and, with cowed civilians in tow, struck back at the US. Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani hit a defiant note in parliament. The name of the CIA station chief in Islamabad was mysteriously leaked for the second time in six months. The war that should have been launched on militants was, it seems, launched on the CIA.
Once its complaint has been lodged, the dispute will quickly die down. But the disparity in perceptions between a disillusioned international community and a recalcitrant military establishment means that next time Pakistan stands indicted by India, the anticipated chorus of restraint may be reduced to a Pakistani solo.
