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CIAO DATE: 08/02
Volume XVIX, No 1, Spring 2002
The Kashmir dispute, long on the sidelines internationally, has moved front and center since September 11. India has made use of changed opinions since the terror attacks on the United States to pressure Pakistan, which for decades has promoted a jihadist guerrilla movement within Jammu and Kashmir, the only Indian state with a Muslim majority. When Islamic extremists mounted a murderous attack on the Indian parliament last December, New Delhi responded with a massive troop buildup along its border with Pakistan. The confrontation of the two nuclear-armed neighbors was temporarily contained by U.S. and European diplomacy but could flare up again at any moment. Are there more durable means of containing this 50-year dispute? Is there even a possible solution to the problem? This essay will attempt answers, with the important caveat that it is difficult to con-vey the complex and angry passions that the word “Kashmir” evokes.
For confirmation, one only has to visit a website for a Pakistani Islamic university, Markaz ad Dawa’ah Wal Irshad (Center for and Invitation to the Spread of Islam). The site featured a poll that asked whether America’s new war was against Islam or terrorists. The poll was programmed so as to elicit an “against Islam” response. Elsewhere, the site quoted a prominent Islamic cleric’s claim that the war in Afghanistan was a clash of civilizations: “This battle will take [the] shape of the religious war of Hind in which the Muslims stood victorious,” the cleric said, referring to the Mughal conquest of India.
Markaz ad Dawa’ah is the parent organi-zation of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure), a militia that the U.S. State Depart-ment added to its list of banned terrorist organizations this past January. Founded in 1994, the Lashkar is based in Pakistan but active in Indian-held Jammu and Kashmir. Its religious center is the 200-acre Markaz complex in Pakistan’s Punjab province, but its training camps are in Pakistani-held Azad Kashmir. Its mujahideen (holy warriors) are mostly Punjabi Pakistanis, and until recently it also drew heavily on the radical fringe of Britain’s Muslim diaspora, mostly of Pakistani origin, who provided it with funds and foot soldiers. After an attack on New Delhi’s historic Red Fort in December 2000, which the Lashkar boasts of on its website, Britain banned the group in February 2001. Since then, the supply of British Muslim foot soldiers has trailed off, though recent reports suggest that as much as $3 million a year still flows from Britain into the coffers of the Lashkar and the Jaish-e-Mohammed (Mohammed’s Troops).
Before Osama bin Laden rewrote the script, American officials did not regard the vast Indian subcontinent, stretching east from Afghanistan to Burma and south from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean, as strategically important to Washington. That meant no American troops, even during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The United States has now overthrown one government in Afghanistan and installed a caretaker of Washington’s choosing in its place. It has revitalized a deep relationship with Pakistan. Inevitably, more effort will now go into the relationship with India, the regional power, which has not responded to all these recent events with equanimity. The United States would do well not to forget India’s smaller neighbors as work on this relationship resumes.
Think of India as the regional meddler, just as the United States was – a generation or more ago – in the Caribbean and Central and South America. In South Asia, tensions are likely to continue until India is persuaded to adopt more generous, less destabilizing policies toward its own neighborhood and put more of its enormous power and energies into the urgent tasks of regional cooperation in social, economic, and political development. Perhaps no country – beyond Pakistan, India’s prime obsession – understands this better than Sri Lanka, now daring to hope more than ever that a two-decade- long Tamil rebellion may be brought to an end, if India will stand back and let it happen.
No country has more vexed Americans in the crisis that began on September 11 than Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden was born and raised there and is a product, albeit an extreme and unique one, of the educational and cultural milieu of the country. He was able to recruit 15 fellow Saudis, equally products of that milieu, to participate in the terrorist attacks. But America’s vexation (as opposed to its revulsion, which those who perpetrated the attacks of September 11 richly deserve) is less with our Saudi enemies than with our Saudi friends.
No government in the Arab world is closer to Washington than that of Saudi Arabia. Just over ten years ago the Saudis opened their country to half a million American troops and cooperated openly with the American military effort against Iraq. Yet now Saudi cooperation with the United States appears grudging and reluctant, at least in public. Saudi leaders, at times, go out of their way to distance themselves from the United States, particularly when addressing domestic audiences. Why the Saudi hesitancy to back America in its hour of need, particularly when bin Laden is as much their enemy as he is ours?
The answer lies in how, for the Al Saud rulers of Saudi Arabia, this crisis differs from that of 1990-91. Then, their rule was directly threatened by an Arab army that had already swallowed up one monarchy. The threat presented by bin Laden and his sympathizers is much less immediate. In fact, the Saudis believed that they had, through their own security measures in the mid-1990s, largely eliminated it domestically. Identification with the United States now, at a time of increasing anti-Americanism in the Arab world, could excite more domestic opposition to the Al Saud. With the social and economic changes that the Saudi kingdom has experienced over the past 20 years, there is a larger, more educated, and more attentive public with which the Al Saud have to deal. Rather than run the risk of alienating it through unstinting support for the United States, the Al Saud have chosen to hedge.
In the winter of 1919 and the spring of 1920, the British journalist C. E. Bechhofer traveled around southern Russia and the southern Caucasus. His In Denikin’s Russia and the Caucasus, 1919-1920 is a classic and terrifying account of a region imploding. The White armies’ resistance to the Bolsheviks was crumbling and the newly independent states of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan were falling apart. Bechhofer witnessed floods of refugees, famine, typhus epidemics, and terrible massacres by all sides.
Bechhofer, a fellow freelancer, was an inspiration and guide for me as I spent much of 2000 and 2001 traveling through the south Caucasus and doing research for a book on the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Experiencing independence anew in the 1990s, the three Caucasian countries went through a depressingly similar descent into chaos and self-destructive nationalism. Ten years into their second round of independence, it frequently felt as though I was studying the sequel of the same conflicts Bechhofer had observed 80 years before. At the same time, I shared his love and excitement for a region that can be dangerous but is never dull. As he assures us in his foreword: “[L]est the reader should come to these pages in too gloomy a spirit, I venture to assure him that many of the incidents of Caucasian life during the past three years belong as much to the world of opera bouffe as to history.”
The pervasive theme of Bechhofer’s tour of the Caucasus is highly relevant today. These mountains are capable of generating a lot of international chaos – and it is not necessarily all their fault. As in 1919, so in 2002, the economic and demographic importance of the area between the Black and Caspian Seas is small. By no calculation could Georgia, Armenia, or Azerbaijan be called strong states: currently their combined population is about 15 million people, and their combined GDP, at around $10 billion, is minuscule in international terms (compare it with British Petroleum’s turnover for the year 2000 of $148 billion). Yet by an accident of geography, which has situated them between Russia and the Middle East, Europe, and Central Asia, these countries are fated to be the meeting place and a crossroads for the “great powers.” These big power encounters have generally been more battlefield than bazaar. In 1915-20 and 1991-94, Turkey’s support for Azerbaijan and Russia’s for Armenia – both explicable in terms of their narrow strategic priorities – helped fuel war and destruction. In the mid to late 1990s, Moscow and Washington polarized Caucasian politics by their competition for energy resources and pipeline routes from the Caspian Sea. So the United States, Russia, Turkey, and Iran care less about the Caucasus itself than about each other in the Caucasus.
This year, the relative importance of this region is growing again. In part, this is because it lies on the margins of what is now the most turbulent area of the world: the crescent of land running from Central Asia through Afghanistan and Iran to the Mediterranean. Another factor is that the Caspian Sea oil boom, first hyped and then ridiculed, finally seems about to become a reality.
“Follow the money” is a classic technique for chasing criminals. It can be used as a sharp instrument to pry evidence from a bank account or a blunt one to seize assets on the orders of a prosecutor. Al Capone was put away for paying no income taxes because nothing worse could be proven against him. Evidence of disguising the profits of crime by laundering them into legally held bank accounts, businesses, and real estate has helped corroborate the testimony of turncoats that destroyed most of the mafia’s muscle. Can tough money-laundering laws take down terrorists? They will probably help, in the same way that less stringent laws have slowed the drug trade by making it less profitable – though they certainly have not stopped it.
Congress and the Bush administration bought a comprehensive toolkit against money laundering in last October’s hurried passage of the USA Patriot Act. At least in intent, it is probably the least objectionable part of the law permitting expanded wire-tapping, detention, listening in on lawyers, and other license to law enforcement hidden in the deceptively cute acronym for the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001.” The authorities now have five years to find out whether their enhanced financial tools actually work to obstruct terrorists instead of merely finding them after they strike. But the law must be used seriously because it has a sunset provision. It expires unless renewed halfway into the next presidential term.
Privacy advocates, libertarians, and especially the financial institutions now charged with onerous duties they have long resisted are among those who will keep the money-laundering provisions under close scrutiny as the shock of last September 11 recedes. Democrats in Congress have already begun worrying that the Bush administration will use its new tools against terrorists but not against white-collar money launderers. The only thing certain is that no law, even one with a trajectory as long as this one, is a magic bullet. It is more like a blunt instrument and must be used in conjunction with meticulous counterintelligence. That includes the penetration of terrorist cells, or at least their close surveillance, of which the financial sleuthing that proved so woefully inadequate before September 11 can only be a part.
Reportage
Unlike some of Uzbekistan’s stunningly beautiful cities, the country’s capital chiefly emits visions of autocracy. Almost completely leveled in a massive earthquake in 1966, central Tashkent consists mostly of grim Soviet buildings and a sprinkling of post-Soviet glass and steel office towers. What little remained of the old town’s clay-and-straw brick walls and meandering, windowless streets has been razed during the past few years to make way for thoroughfares into the city center.
It was in front of one of the city’s grand new projects – a large sports complex built by the National Bank of Uzbekistan – that Nikolai (not his real name) picked me up in his Daewoo. (If one thing has improved for the average citizen – as opposed to the few privileged occupants of the city’s newest office architecture – it’s that Daewoos have taken the place of the ubiquitous Russian Lada. That’s thanks to Uz-Daewoo, a joint venture that assembles the now-bankrupt South Korean automaker’s products in Uzbekistan.) Nikolai kept an eye on his rearview mirror as we drove off, and continued glancing at it often after we stopped and I began interviewing him as we sat in the car.
Weeks earlier, the United States had begun sending troops and aircraft to southern Uzbekistan’s Khanabad air base as a staging ground for the war against the Taliban regime and Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda forces. Khanabad is less than 100 miles north of Uzbekistan’s border with Afghanistan.
“It’s like in 1937,” Nikolai says, comparing present-day Uzbekistan to the Soviet Union during one of the darkest periods of Stalinist repression. A Slav in his early forties, Nikolai has reason to know. A former KGB officer, he later worked for the republic’s newly independent government. He was recently fired and blacklisted for, as he put it, “talking too much.” (Given Uzbekistan’s small number of dissenters, identifying him in any more detail would put him in jeopardy.)
“When I say there are economic and social problems, I’m told I’ll be thrown in jail,” Nikolai said. “Why? Because the economy is growing on paper. But take one look around you at how the people live and you’ll see the reality for yourself.”
September 11 shone a spotlight on this country, about which many abroad were previously scarcely concerned. But that fateful day did more than draw attention to Uzbekistan; it added a new dimension to the country’s internal power struggles.
Knowledge
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Education Center for Afghanistan, located in Peshawar, Pakistan, and operated by the Afghan mujahidin (holy warriors), published a series of primary education textbooks replete with images of Islamic militancy. These schoolbooks provided the mujahidin (who, after a ten-year struggle, drove the Soviet occupying forces from Afghanistan in 1989) with a medium for promoting political propaganda and inculcating values of Islamic militancy into a new generation of holy warriors prepared to conduct jihad against the enemies of Islam. Consider the following introduction to the Persian alphabet in a first-grade language arts book:
Alif [is for] Allah.
Allah is one.
Bi [is for] Father (baba).
Father goes to the mosque . . .
Pi [is for] Five (panj).
Islam has five pillars . . .
Ti [is for] Rifle (tufang).
Javad obtains rifles for the Mujahidin . . .
Jim [is for] Jihad.
Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad. Our brother gave water to the Mujahidin . . .
Dal [is for] Religion (din).
Our religion is Islam. The Russians are the enemies of the religion of Islam . . .
Zhi [is for] Good news (muzhdih).
The Mujahidin missiles rain down like dew on the Russians. My brother gave me good news that the Russians in our country taste defeat . . .
Shin [is for] Shakir.
Shakir conducts jihad with the sword. God becomes happy with the defeat of the Russians . . .
Zal [is for] Oppression (zulm).
Oppression is forbidden. The Russians are oppressors. We perform jihad against the oppressors . . .
Vav [is for] Nation (vatn).
Our nation is Afghanistan . . . The Mujahidin made our country famous . . . Our Muslim people are defeating the communists. The Mujahidin are making our dear country free.
As in this passage, the promotion of violence for the sake of Islam is the predominate theme throughout the mujahidin textbook series in both mathematics and language arts for grades one through six.
Although these violent images were officially edited out of the schoolbooks in 1992, my fieldwork in Afghanistan and among the Afghan refugee population in Pakistan in 1999 and 2000 revealed that the unedited versions of these textbooks were still in use in both countries. Aid workers reported that the unedited versions promoting violence occasionally surfaced in classrooms in Pakistan and were sanctioned by the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Peshawar’s secondhand bookshops regularly stocked the old textbooks, which are filled with messages of Islamic militancy and illustrations of tanks, rocket launchers, and automatic weapons.
Reconsiderations
It is now exactly 50 years since India’s first general elections, a massive act of faith with few parallels in the history of humankind. A huge newly independent country chose to adopt universal adult franchise immediately, rather than – as was the case in the West – restricting the vote to men of property, with the workers and women enfranchised later, and only after a bitter struggle. It is hard to overstate the occasion’s radical novelty. The condescending imperialist belief was that non-Europeans were somehow not suited to self-government, and that Asians in particular were prone to “Oriental despotism” (a pejorative even Karl Marx employed). Adding to the risk was the fact that the overwhelming majority of the Indian electorate was illiterate and poor. And yet the experiment worked, and more important, was followed by 12 successive elections over 5 decades, a source of understandable pride. It is not surprising, then, that in December terrorists struck at the Parliament in New Delhi, India’s symbolic counterpart to the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
In August 1947, India became free of British rule, but as a dominion, with an English governor general sitting above an Indian prime minister. A constituent assembly, its members drawn from the different states, set to work on drafting a constitution. In January 1950, the new constitution went into effect, and the country became a republic. In March 1950, Sukumar Sen, a member of the Indian Civil Service then serving as chief secretary of West Bengal, was appointed chief election commissioner. The following month, Parliament passed the Representation of the People Act, which set the voting age at 21 and gave the right to vote to every Indian who had resided continuously in a constituency for 180 days or more. In proposing the act, India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had expressed the hope that national elections would be held as early as the spring of 1951. Nehru’s sense of urgency was understandable – the chief complaint of the Indian nationalist against the British Raj had been its denial of democratic rights – but his timetable was viewed with some alarm by the man who had to make the elections happen.
Books
Services Spéciaux: Algérie 1955-1957
Paul Aussaresses
Paris: Éditions Perrin, 2001
In the fall of 2000, an 82-year-old French officer named Paul Aussaresses, who, for many years, had been living quietly on his pension, sought out members of the French media, promising to shed new light on the conduct of the French military during the Algerian war. Outside the military fraternity itself, and a small coterie of military historians and academic specialists on the Algerian war, he was virtually unknown. And yet this obscure retired brigadier general more than delivered on his promises. In a series of interviews, first in the newspaper Le Monde, then on French television, and then in a book titled Special Services: Algeria Aussaresses publicly admitted his own role, and that of the special operations unit he commanded, in torturing and killing Algerian prisoners between 1955 and 1957. These crimes had been committed both in the course of field operations in the Algerian countryside and during what became known as the Battle of Algiers – the campaign of counterinsurgency in 1957 during which the French army broke the back of Algeria’s Front National de Libération (FLN) in the capital.
That the French army, and, for that matter, the FLN had used torture during the war came as no surprise to anyone. Apart from the Indochinese wars and the Korean conflict, no bloodier struggle was waged anywhere on earth between the end of the Second World War and the final dissolution of the European colonial empires than the one that took place in Algeria between 1954 and independence in 1962. French military losses were approximately 27,500 dead, 65,000 wounded, and 1,000 missing in action. Somewhere between 3,000 and 9,000 French civilians from among the so-called pieds noirs – whose ancestors had settled in Algeria after it had been conquered by France in 1830 – were also killed. The losses among the Algerians themselves were exponentially greater. Somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 were killed. Most died at the hands of the French during the course of the war, although at least 30,000 fell victim to the intra-Algerian bloodbath that ensued in the summer of 1962, in the immediate aftermath of the decision of the government of Gen. Charles de Gaulle to bow to the reality of Algerian independence.
Nonetheless, General Aussaresses’s declarations broke new ground.