Guest Post: An Interested American's Two Cents On The Mumbai Attacks

Negeen Pegahi is a candidate for a doctorate in Political Science at the University of Chicago, and a fellow at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She works on India-Pakistan issues, and as a friend, very kindly agreed to write something for our blog.

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Given how high emotions appear to be running in many of the comments, and therefore how appalling an attempt at sober political analysis will likely strike many readers, I should probably briefly note where I am, and am not, coming from. I’m an American of neither Indian- nor Pakistani-descent, writing a doctoral dissertation in political science about what the acquisition of nuclear weapons can and can’t do for weaker states in conflict dyads. Pakistan vs. India is the most interesting case for such arguments, and India vs. China is another important one, hence my interest in the region. I’ve spent only one year in South Asia and have not been to Bombay.

I’d like to comment on several issues:

1. Likely motivations for the attacks;
2. Parallels between the strategic situation of Pakistan and anti-Indian
insurgents;
3. The relative importance of that shared strategic situation and the nature the links, if any, between whatever portion(s) of the Pakistani establishment and these particular insurgents;
4. What the US role will likely be and should be; and
5. What lessons India will likely draw from our 9/11 experience and what lessons it should draw.

So first: “Why do they hate us?” This was what we in the States were asking ourselves after the attacks of September 11, 2001 and there were two possible answers:

- “They hate us for who we are,” and
- “They hate us for what we do.”

Most Americans went with the former because, I’d say, it was comforting and allowed no further debate. Why should we change who/what we are? Especially if who/what we are is great stuff like “freedom” and “democracy,” which is of course how we chose to define the issue. The only policy prescription that can come out of such conclusions is to kill or capture as many of them as you can as quickly as you can because how can you deter people who hate you for who you are?

A far smaller number of Americans suspected it was our foreign policy driving things. The locations and target types of al-Qaeda attacks, and how these expanded over time, supported such an assessment. A campaign against what was perceived to be US military occupation of the Arabian peninsula began in the early 1990s with attacks on US troops in Yemen, moved onto US embassies in third countries, and concluded with strikes on civilian as well as military and likely government targets on US soil. So we went from attacks on the actual “boots on the ground” to embassies believed to coordinate intelligence collection in the region to the very top of the ladder back in Washington plus our financial foundations in New York. Given continuing failure to achieve their objectives, each time insurgents faced the choice of “escalate” or “give up,” since “more of the same” presumably wasn’t getting it done, they chose the former. I suspect this is what’s happening in India.

There are two main ways to get an adversary to do what you want. One is to threaten him, which may include actually hurting him in order to make your threats of more pain to come credible, in an effort to make him give in because resisting would mean too much suffering to be worth it. The other is to threaten his military, meaning his ability to achieve his objectives, in an effort to make him give in because resisting you carries too small a likelihood of success to be worth it. Ironically, in asymmetric fights -- either between insurgents and states, such as the LeT and India, or between weak states and strong, such as Pakistan and India, respectively -- only the first type of coercion, a.k.a. “terrorism,” is an option. The LeT can’t defeat the Indian military in the traditional sense, and the idea of the Pakistani military being able to do so is only slightly less ridiculous. From the other side, the Indian military can’t press its advantages too far against Pakistan for fear of tripping the latter’s nuclear “red lines” and it can’t do much of anything against insurgents as these aren’t adversaries with much to actually target. So “terror” becomes the strategy of everyone, and that -- all these self-important“My Bombay,” “My Mumbai” articles we’re seeing in the NYT and the Guardian aside -- is what we’re seeing from both sides, not just one.

So the whole question of “Are the attackers linked to the Pakistani establishment and, if so, how closely?” is a red herring. Any weaker actor facing India -- whether a state, Pakistan, or not, the LeT, etc. -- will attempt to coerce by punishment, ie. commit terrorism, because doing so is their only option besides giving up. (Yes, yes, of course resistance through non-violent means is always an option, but when you’re not facing a colonial power on their way out and down anyway it’s a very different story: just ask the Tibetans how things are going for them.)

Given all this, and regional realities -- namely, that we need Pakistan to help us with cleaning up, or at least containing, our assorted messes and that we just cut a nuclear deal with India that gave us the short end of the proliferation stick but, we hope/expect, longer-term strategic benefits -- what can the United States do and what will it likely do? I think the answers, the same in the two cases, are “Not much.” Structurally, the India-Pakistan problem is very similar to the Israel-Palestinian one: a weaker party dissatisfied with the existing territorial distribution and a stronger one relatively content with it. The only “successes” we’ve ever gotten in the Middle East have come as a result of making the leverage-less Palestinians swallow absurd deals. However, given our dependency on Pakistan for the war on terror -- not that it’s doing much for us -- we lack even this option for “progress” in South Asia.

One thing I’ve found surprising in this particular crisis -- particularly when one compares it to the one sparked by the December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament -- is how subdued the official Pakistani response has been. I see two possible explanations here:

1. In 2001, India couldn’t launch a full-scale attack on Pakistan because of the latter’s nuclear arsenal (not that such an option would otherwise have been considered) and, much more important, India couldn’t launch any limited attacks because it lacked the capability to do so in a timely manner. Pakistan was therefore free to act relatively belligerently. India’s “Cold Start” doctrine, developed in response to the perceived failure to have any good limited options in 2001-2002, is coming online though and may explain Pakistan’s relative quiet this time around.

2. The Pakistani leadership may not only not have had anything to do with this one but may not even see any potential gain in it.

Particularly given how decent Pakistan’s behavior has been this time around, it depresses the hell out of me to see India responding with all the self-righteous fury of the United States post-9/11, rather than concrete plans to work with Pakistan on containing the militancy and making such efforts worth Pakistan’s while with some actual progress/concessions on the Kashmir issue. We’ve seen how unsuccessful Israel’s “Do everything we demand and then maaaaaybe we’ll talk final status” approach has been with respect to Palestinian militancy, and we’ve seen how counter-productive (and hideous, immoral, etc.) the US response to our particular problem has been, so I’m very sad to see that India appears to be making the same mistakes.

It is of course fine to decide that suffering one of these attacks every few years is worth the benefits of keeping Indian Muslims fifth-class citizens, keeping Kashmir a garrison state, and being the regional hegemon. We in the US have of course implicitly arrived at the same conclusion vis-a-vis our own militancy problem: the occasional attack from al-Qaeda or whomever is not too high a price to pay to continue to try to run the world and its peoples. Reasonable people can disagree about which side of the cost-benefit ledger is greater in such cases. Pretending the ledger doesn’t exist, however, is neither a smart nor an ethical way to move forward.