Bangladesh Open Source Intelligence Monitors: [BdOsInt Monitors] Essay: And now, as if the world had forgotten, Indian terrorism

Contrary to the wishful thinking which has plagued the State Department for almost a decade now in its puerile effort for a shortcut to policy in the Subcontinent, this Indian problem is part and parcel of any effort to achieve progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Now that Washington and the world's attention is shifting from an ameliorating situation in Iraq to Afghanistan-Pakistan, out of the fog of war lumbers the huge hulk of India.

The most recent terrorist attacks in two Indian cities have dramatized some realities long camouflaged by more dramatic headlines elsewhere. If the Indian authorities know who actually perpetrated these deadly horrors, they have confused the media thoroughly. But two salient features do quickly come forward:

The usual accusations, however valid they may have sometimes been in the past, of all acts of Indian Muslim terror being directly instigated and operated by Pakistan have not been made this time. These brutish but rather amateurish efforts have been acknowledged to have been homegrown. And they are growing evidence that the infection of Islamofascism is an increasing phenomenon among India's more than 150 million Muslims. That despite New Delhi lulling itself into false optimism that its nominally secular society and its very huge diversity including a variegated Muslim community would spare it. But it is now obvious that various Muslim international and local terror groups are quickly spreading their venom inside the Indian Muslim community.

As important, even the semi-government Indian websites which monitor terrorism throughout the region are now admitting the obvious: the country's security apparatus is totally incapable of meeting this new terrorist challenge. New Delhi officials make the required pronouncements about the high priority the issue takes. But the kinds of inadequacies that have been exposed in the police forces in the U.S. and Western Europe since 9/11 are even more dramatic in India. And what is even more shocking is that with its Maoist insurgencies blossoming in a dozen areas for more than two decades, those techniques have never been developed.

But the problem is not just India's.

Contrary to the wishful thinking which has plagued the State Department for almost a decade now in its puerile effort for a shortcut to policy in the Subcontinent, this Indian problem is part and parcel of any effort to achieve progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In a flash of self-delusion during the Clinton years, the U.S. diplomatic establishment had convinced itself it could arbitrarily separate American bilateral relations with each of the bitter players in what used to be called the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent. The U.S., it was said, would defy the intensity of a conflict which has dictated the foreign and much of the domestic policy of both countries since their inception in 1947 and through two and a half largely unresolved wars.

But the obvious truth is that any U.S. policy directed toward Pakistan must take into account its effect on India and the reverse. For example, to help the Pakistani military enhance its capabilities, the U.S. has extended $10 billion in military aid since President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's about-turn after 9/11 and withdrawal of support from the Taliban government in Kabul. This American benefice – and the continuing support Pakistan received from what it calls its "all weather" ally, China — has helped drive the Indians into a vast expansion of their own forces in its effort to exert hegemony over the Indian Ocean region.

Even Sen. Obama, after his photo ops visit to the region, discovered the relationship of the Indo-Pakistan confrontation to the problem of rooting out the terrorists in the Afghanistan-Pakistan tribal areas. He blithely suggested that Washington would have to turn its attention to it. One doesn't know whether this was simply the normal campaign oratory or whether, indeed, he does not know how much the U.S. – and so many others – have invested in the problem of Indo-Pakistan enmity over the last six decades. Nor for anyone who has had any exposure to the issues, is the knowledge of how difficult is any settlement of the major issue, Kashmir, the contested state that not only lies between India and Pakistan, but also abuts China in Tibet and neighbors Afghanistan. And, unfortunately, "Kashmir" trials and tribulations are intimately bound up with the border issues among all the parties.

Furthermore, India's internal Islamicist terrorist threat grows at a time of a number of other intertwined and equally complex issues.

New Delhi has launched a massive armaments program involving doubling to more than $30 billion by 2012 as the country's military seeks to modernize and replace its largely Soviet military hardware. By 2022 spending is expected to reach $80 billion in purchases of the latest planes, ships, tanks, and other equipment. Although both sides emphatically deny it, strategists in both Washington and New Delhi see a tacit Indian-American alliance as a counterweight to China's increasingly formidable armament program about which Beijing reveals nothing.

That proposed alliance has just played a role in a crisis for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government. An agreement negotiated by him and the Bush Administration to open up transfer of U.S. nuclear technology for power generation was opposed by his Communist partners whose votes sustained his fragile coalition government. Although contributing little to India's energy hunger, the business community saw the agreement as the door opening a vast transfer of technology for its growing export trade with the U.S. It was also seen as a necessary part of Singh's program to liberalize the Indian economy. India's abandonment — if halting — of Soviet-style planning in the past decade has brought the Indians double digit growth. And its trading relationship with the U.S., including the ultra hi tech offshore information technology software industry, has brought new hope for breaking out of the world's worst poverty for millions of Indians.

But, just as in China, the problem of the great bulk of India's 1.3 billion people – soon to surpass China as the world's largest population – still is held back by a primitive rural sector. [Protecting this subsistence agriculture dictated India's blocking – along with China — the latest proposed round of tariff reductions at negotiations in Geneva in late July.] Their flight to the cities, as in China, threatens to engulf the progressive urban areas. And even the green revolution – new plant varieties and agricultural methods for the wealthier landlords — which ended endemic famine in the country has not solved this basic problem. Electoral politics, in fact, has aggravated it by the temptation for Singh's party to go back to rural social programs that proved failures over the long period of post-independence stagnation – a flight of fancy, for example, into a program for guaranteed rural income through subsidies. At the moment, with energy and food prices rising worldwide, India is facing a threat of inflation.

Singh – and his back-seat driver, Sonia Gandhi, widow and daughter-in-law of former Nehru prime ministers and inheritor of the Congress Party leadership – has now patched together a coalition of regional parties. But he will soon have to face an election where his principal opponent will be the Bharatiya Janta Party, a spokesman for India's new rising entrepreneurial class but also with its tainted origins in Hindu chauvinism. Its complicity two years ago in the important state of Gujarat in a pogrom against Muslims, and the failure of the federal government and the courts to deal with it summarily, was one pretext for the recent terrorist bombings. Unfortunately, increasingly, India's electoral system has become a victim of block voting by caste – including the attempt to seduce the Muslim voters.

Singh recently had to suspend local government in Kashmir after communal riots broke out over a local land issue. Keeping a lid on the increasingly rebellious Kashmiris demanding independence or adherence to Pakistan requires New Delhi to maintain more than half a million security forces, some of them aligned along the Line of Control [LOC] in the fragile armistice with Pakistan.

The tribals who pose the growing problem for U.S., NATO – and Pakistani – forces on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border have been intimately involved in the Kashmir struggle since it developed at independence. India charges, with a good deal of evidence, that Pakistan uses the tribal jihadists to keep the pot boiling in Kashmir. Despite continuing peace talks between New Delhi and Islamabad, the rate of incidents on the LOC have increased recently. The Pakistanis, of course, claim, probably justifiably, that India's RAW [Research and Analysis Wing], contributes to its political and military problems in tribal areas, particularly in its huge western state of Baluchistan, bordering Afghanistan. And New Delhi has long claimed that Pakistan's ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence], which before 9/11 backed the Taliban in Afghanistan, is responsible for terror attacks against Indian targets – the most recent a bloody assault on the embassy in Kabul.

It remains to be seen, of course, whether – as a series of bombings in Mumbai [Bombay] in 1993 which ended as suddenly as they began – India is now in for a continuing terror campaign. But the elements are all there – including a terrorist organizations among Indian Muslim students and professionals, the hallmark of sophisticated terror developments in the West. But should it come, it would add new elements of difficulty to the already devil's brew that faces U.S. strategists in the region.

Sol W. Sanders, is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.

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