October 15, 2009 ☼ Af-Pak ☼ Afghanistan ☼ al-qaeda ☼ Foreign Affairs ☼ India ☼ jihadis ☼ military-jihadi complex ☼ Mumbai ☼ Pakistan ☼ Security ☼ United States
This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.
The first message, mainly for those in the Obama administration who use catchy phrases like ‘offshore strategy’ and ‘light footprint counter-terrorism’, is that with drone attacks, you can never really be sure whether the target was taken out. Baitullah Mehsud is probably dead. Rashid Rauf less so. Mohammed Ilyas Kashmiri is probably alive. Because he’s giving interviews to the intrepid Syed Saleem Shehzad. Drones might be generally successful, but even with greatly improved technology, a strategy that solely relies on them is unlikely to do anything more than drive the terrorist trade, well, underground.
Now the interview itself. It is evident that Mr Kashmiri used the occasion to do more than signal his continued live existence. It is also evident that he is batting for the Pakistani military-jihadi complex (even as he is battling it, but this is a familiar Pakistani paradox). He denies that he was once a member of the Pakistan army’s Special Services Group (SSG), takes the party line on Indian consulates in Afghanistan and professes loyalty to Pakistan’s interests and even to its army.
He—or perhaps Mr Shehzad—reinforces the linking of the 313 Brigade (a joint venture of the five biggest Pakistani jihadi outfits) to the 26/11 attack on Mumbai. This is important, because it suggests that although the Lashkar-e-Taiba arranged for the foot soldiers, it involved actors and organisations responsible for carrying out major acts of terrorism against India in the past. And perhaps, last week’s raid on the Pakistan army’s general headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi. (Perhaps, because this requires you to believe that Mohammed Aqeel alias Dr Usman, Mr Kashmiri’s associate, was caught rather than ‘caught’ by the Pakistani forces during their hostage rescue operations.)
It is what Mr Kashmiri says about the jihadi grand strategy that is most important. He concedes that “decades of armed and political struggles could not help to inch forward a resolution of (the Kashmir issue” because:
the entire game was in the hands of the great Satan, the USA. Organs like the UN and countries like India and Israel were simply the extension of its resources and that’s why there was a failure to resolve the Palestinian issue, the Kashmir issue and the plight of Afghanistan. [Asia Times Online]
Ergo, the “real game is the fight against the great Satan and its adherents” and “al-Qaeda’s regional war strategy, in which they have hit Indian targets, is actually to chop off American strength.”
There you have, expressed succinctly and lucidly, why the United States and India are fighting the same war. The Obama administration is demonstrating strategic folly by failing to contemplate the damage to its geopolitical interests and those of its allies by demonstrating a lack of will to win in Afghanistan and Pakistan. New Delhi partly believes that Afghanistan is “America’s war” and lacks the political imagination to strengthen the military component of its presence in Afghanistan. If there was any doubt that an American withdrawal from Afghanistan & Pakistan will re-escalate the insurgency in Jammu & Kashmir, Mr Kashmiri has laid it to rest.
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