Time to Negotiate Tough - Send for Shatner or The Rock

For the past week, the biggest issue relating to the killing of Osama bin Laden has been the one no one wants to confront directly: did the Pakistani government know of bin Laden's hideout and what do we do next? It's an issue that is likely being furiously debated at the highest levels of the US government and every other level besides, including the very inefficient waiter at the pizzeria by my office who told us he was a cousin of Leon Panetta. It is equally clear that Pakistan must be pondering the same question and wondering what the fallout for them will be.

Pakistan would have us believe that they had no idea that bin Laden was hiding just a short journey from their capital, a neighbor almost to their military academy. In a nation that has suffered multiple vicious and bloody attacks by terrorists committed to destroying the status quo and Pakistani state, it certainly stretches credulity that a large compound could be maintained so openly without the slightest knowledge of the government. Now, it is likely that the Pakistani intelligence service is no KGB or secret police service, that they are far from omnipotent, no matter what the Indians and Afghans may claim, and they may not have had the ability or even the mandate to investigate that mysterious complex. But one thing that makes hiding in south Asia so difficult is the pervasive corruption. I do know that the local police would have known there was something strange about that compound and would have suspected that it was either a mujaheddin commander, either Pakistani or Afghan, or a drug dealer. In  either scenario, they would have expected to be bribed to stay silent.  And the most troubling question is whether they could be bribed or coerced into silence regarding the world's most wanted man, that never once did they allow the news to slip out, say in hope of snagging that American reward. If the local security forces were willing to keep secret of this magnitude from the federal government in Islamabad, that may be far scarier than the possibility that the government was sheltering bin Laden. It suggests that even in a seemingly peaceful oasis, the government writ has ceased to run and from greed or fear, the local authorities answer to a different power. For the safety and survival of the Pakistani state, we must hope that is not so.

For the same reason, it is time for India and Afghanistan to face the truth they would rather not: fun as it is to crow over Pakistan's discredited government, we all need that government to remain stable and survive for none of us want to see a failed state with nucleur weapons in the hands of the boldest rather than the sanest claimant. There is but a small window of opportunity now and it will take the greatest act of statecraft since Disraeli bought the Suez canal, but the US must seek to  bring Pakistan, Afghanistan and India to the table together. India has till now resisted all attempts to engage with Pakistan on the larger issues of the region, retreating into a shell of Cold War hostility and knee jerk reactions, opposing even having Special Envoy Holbrook's title mention them at all. But India is deluding themselves, as much as the US does. The three countries, linked by common heritage that predates even the Mughal invasion of the Indian subcontinent, cannot address their issues bilaterally, when the issues go way beyond bilateral interests.

India likes to see all issues with Pakistan through the prism of their conflict over Kashmir. Afghanistan sees Pakistan interference in the Pushtun areas as a mischievous precursor to annexing the southern provinces. And so India plays Afghanistan against Pakistan, cultivating the Tajik and Uzbeks against the Pushtun south, while Pakistan supports a pushtun based insurgency against the Afghan government to remain relevant in Afghanistan. Back in 2001, the US offered Pakistan a stark choice, to join our war on the Taliban or become our enemy. We forced them to drop their tool against India, the strategic depth they desired and then were surprised when they kept their back channels open to their erstwhile clients. We offered the Pakistani government military aid in return, but in doing so we robbed them of all legitimacy in the eyes of their people. And with each drone strike, we further emasculate their government, even as we destroy common enemies. It is this failure to appreciate the nuances of the south Asian imbroglio that has most hampered US interests. We asked Pakistan to act against their own perceived strategic interests to further our own needs and never stopped to ask what the cost for them would be, And equally strangely, we pretended that a dictator ruling by proclamation represented the will of Pakistan when he paid lip service to our demands.

The only way to solve this problem is by ending the three way struggle between India, Afghanistan and Pakistan. By now, even Pakistan's most chauvinistic leaders must know that they will never gain all of Kashmir, just as the most bloody minded Indian knows that no matter what they call the northern part of Kashmir under Pakistani rule, it's never becoming a part of India. And no matter how much they harp on the UN mandated plebiscite, at this stage India knows that no Kashmiri north of the Line of Control is going to vote to join India. Since neither nation is going to give up territory to the other, much less allow an independent Kashmiri nation, it's time for them to quit pretending and convert the Line of Control into a permanent border. Once they drop claims on each other's territory, it will be a lot easier to stop supporting insurgencies in the opponent, and the need to fight a proxy war in Afghanistan will also decrease. If Pakistan accepts that they no longer need the strategic depth to the north, and India no longer seeks to encircle Pakistan, it will become a more straightforward battle in Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, there are deeply entrenched attitudes that will make such a bargain difficult to achieve. Pakistan has since its inception worked on the assumption that India seeks to destroy them; the claim on Kashmir is as old. Changing that mindset is only part of the challenge, since even an elected government must now fear the reactions of the fundamentalists as well as the military whose very raison d'etre is based on the existential threat of India. A bargain would have to involve the government as well as most of the centrist opposition. Winning over the military is best achieved by clearly showing them the cold hard facts and their own interests rather than trying to bribe them as we've done over and over in the past. India is no easier to deal with, stuck in some ways in Cold war prickliness to any American "interference". But in reality, few Indians want the rest of Kashmir as part of India - the last thing they want is more Muslims, much less a group that has no wish to be in India. Strategic needs have long since receded - after all, India has managed without Kashmir for most of its life as an independent nation and the current generation do not even know a time when Kashmir was not a bomb wracked battleground. The diplomatic equivalent of a hard shake and a presentation of harsh reality may actually be so unusual an experience for India that it just might work. And secretly, both India and Pakistan know that their continued conflict helps no one and costs both of them enormously in lost economic possibilities. It's not going to be easy, but if we want to ever get out of Afghanistan and not see another bin Laden rise, we're going to have to engage all the players, even those, like India, who want to pretend that they aren't playing.