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April 24, 2013: Pakistanis are scheduled to go to the polls on May 11 to choose members of the country’s National Assembly and its four provincial Legislative Assemblies. We offer a handy primer on the election – and why and how it matters. The bottom line: despite pre-election violence from Islamic extremists, chances are this election will eventually produce a viable government. If mass public protests occur after the election, that would be the clearest indication of a more troublesome prognosis.

Why is this Pakistan election different from all other Pakistan elections?

This is a historic event for Pakistan. For the first time since independence in 1947 the country will be choosing a new National Assembly to replace another that was elected in a free and fair vote and completed its five-year term.

Who’s being elected?

At stake are 342 seats in the National Assembly and over 700 in the Legislative Assemblies of Punjab, Sindh, Khyber-Pakhtunhwa, and Balochistan. At the national level, voters will elect 272 members on a first-past-the post basis. The 70 remaining seats – 60 reserved for women and ten for non-Muslim minorities – are allocated to political parties on the basis of their showing in the contests for the directly-elected seats.

Who’s not being elected?

Asif Ali Zardari’s five-year presidential term continues until September. Whether he runs again will depend on how the political wind blows after May 11. The president is chosen indirectly by an electoral college comprising members of the National Assembly, the Senate (the upper house of the Pakistan Parliament), and the provincial Legislative Assemblies.

No Senate seats are up for election this year. The next election, for one-third of the Senate, will take place in 2014.

Who’s running the election?

A caretaker government, chosen under complicated provisions to ensure neutrality and responsible only for conducting the election. Headed by Mir Hazar Khan Khoso, an 84-year old retired chief justice of the Balochistan High Court, it comprises mostly technocrats and other non-political types and is forbidden to make major policy decisions before the elected political government takes over. Similar arrangements are in place at the provincial level. A neutral Election Commission runs the election on the ground. Large numbers of American and other international observers are expected to be on hand. The Army will help provide security for the balloting but will not otherwise have an official role.

Even with such arrangements, will the election really be free and fair?

There’s a good likelihood that the elections will be properly run in most parts of Pakistan. International observers have generally found earlier elections administered by interim governments free and fair, though there have been some important exceptions. What’s troubling this time is violence by Islamic extremists against parties they consider unacceptably secular. In Khyber-Pakhtunwha (formerly the North-West Frontier Province), the provincially-based, secular Awami National Party has been particularly targeted. Another contentious issue has been the insistence by some Election Commission officials that candidates prove they meet Islamic credentials required by the constitution but rarely enforced before. This has produced an outcry and appeals to the courts by more liberal contenders whose nomination papers had been rejected.

If President Zardari remains in office, won’t that tip the balance toward the PPP?

Not really. During Zardari’s tenure the Pakistan constitution was amended to shift power to the prime minister and away from the president. He remains a powerful figure but will have no role in the interim administration and has not to date taken part in the election campaign. He recently resigned as PPP co-chairman under pressure from the judiciary, which held that the president of Pakistan was expected to be impartial.

Who are the major contenders?

As in 2008 and repeatedly in the 1990s, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) are the chief contenders.

Who will win?

Most pundits daring enough to predict election results expect the PML-N to win the most seats, but believe that it will require the support of some of the smaller parties to form a stable government.  Impartial polling data also suggests this outcome. Another possible but less likely outcome: a coalition headed by a smaller party, with support of one of the big parties.

What should we know about the PML-N?

The PML-N (for Nawaz) emerged as the second largest party in the 2008 election, when it won 91 National Assembly seats to the PPP’s 124.  It is a family-dominated party led by Nawaz Sharif, the scion of a Lahore business clan who was twice prime minister in the 1990s. Its power base is in Punjab, Pakistan’s largest, wealthiest, and most politically influential province. Nawaz’s younger brother Shahbaz was chief minister of the province for five years before he gave way to a pre-election caretaker regime in March. Ideologically, the PML-N is considered right-of-center. It has generally followed pragmatic economic policies.  Like most Pakistanis, PML-N leaders mistrust the United States. But they have not made anti-Americanism a significant feature of their campaign, which in any event is focused on domestic issues. The party has had political ties with non-terrorist Islamic groups: each has sought to use the other for its own purposes. Its overriding political interest since it left a PPP-led coalition government in Islamabad in 2009 is to return to national power. Although Nawaz’s last government was overthrown in an army coup, he should be able to work out a modus vivendi with the military if he returns to power.

Why is the PML-N seemingly in the lead?

Anti-incumbency sentiment runs high. The PPP government is bitterly criticized for its inability to deal effectively with rampant inflation, severe power shortages, pervasive violence, and other pressing economic and social problems. Many Pakistanis see Zardari as corrupt and incompetent. By comparison, Nawaz and the PML-N now look good, though his performance when he held national power was mediocre at best.

Can the United States work with a Nawaz Sharif government?

Yes. In the 1990s, the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations maintained decent working relations with his government. He was not held in high esteem in Washington, especially when he rejected U.S. pleas not to test a nuclear weapon and acquiesced in the Pakistan army’s invasion of the Kargil area of Indian-administered Kashmir. Unless he is saddled with coalition allies powerful enough to insist that he reject any significant relationship with Washington, expect Nawaz to seek friendly if limited bilateral ties.

What about the PPP?

Don’t count the PPP out. Zardari is recognized even by his critics as a shrewd political operator. He has access to plenty of cash, and he knows where a lot of bodies are buried. And Pakistani pundits and pollsters have been wrong before.

What kind of party is it?

The PPP has a broader national political base than any other serious contender. It is represented in all four provinces of Pakistan, including Punjab, the Sharifs’ native heath.  Its strongest bastion is in rural Sindh, the home of the Bhutto-Zardari family that has dominated the party since Zardari’s father-in-law, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founded it in the 1960s and brought it to national power in the 1970s.

Zardari remains the PPP standard-bearer, although he is not running for office in the May election. If they win, he will appoint the party’s ministers and participate in key policy and personnel decisions. Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, the son of Zardari and his assassinated wife Benazir Bhutto, is too young to run for parliament this year, but is being groomed to follow in his parents’ footsteps.

What will the PPP do if it wins again?

Expect continuity, taking into account changes in the international political landscape. The biggest change, of course, will be the withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan and the reappraisal of U.S. interests in Pakistan that will accompany it. Like other political parties that have ruled Pakistan, the PPP will defer to the Army on major foreign and security issues. Whether Zardari and the prime minister he chooses will be able to pursue their interest in mildly improved relations with India will depend as much on developments in New Delhi as on Pakistani politics.

Aside from the Big Two, who else is contesting the election?

Pakistani election documents list 148 political parties, ranging from major national parties to individual or feudal franchises. Two of the most prominent parties have ethnic bases. The Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) represents Urdu-speakers in urban Sindh whose families emigrated from India to Pakistan, and the Awami National Party (ANP) is supported by Pashtuns in northwestern Pakistan and the Pashtun diaspora in big cities, especially Karachi. Both the MQM and the ANP have joined PPP-led coalitions and have led or participated in national and provincial governments. Both are strongly secular and have incurred the wrath of Islamic fundamentalists.

What about cricketer-hero Imran Khan?

Imran’s Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf (PTI) has never won more than one seat in the National Assembly. His cricket star power has helped him emerge as a crowd-pleasing populist politician, who promises the kind of genuine change in Pakistani politics that the established parties cannot credibly offer. His greatest appeal appears to be to young, urban Punjabis, but a good number of prominent and respected people have also recently joined his ranks. What is still not clear is whether he can tap into the feudal patronage system that drives Pakistani politics. Unlike other secular party leaders, Imran has made criticism of the United States a major plank in his platform, promising to rid Pakistan of American “slavery” if he comes to power. There are periodic reports that he is considering some kind of understanding with the largest Islamic party, the Jamaat-i-Islami.

PTI cannot hope to challenge the PML-N or the PPP in number of seats won. But it could pick up enough of them to make Imran a kingmaker.

What is the role of ex-President Musharraf?

Little or none. Musharraf’s hopes of rallying support for a return to power were dashed after his homecoming in February. The Election Commission disqualified him from running for the National Assembly. The Supreme Court ordered his arrest, and he has been charged with crimes committed during his nine years in office. He is currently detained in his villa outside Islamabad (now designated a “sub-jail”). His detention generated no protest. His political party has a minimal presence, and politicians who worked with him have shown no interest in re-connecting. The army appears to consider him an embarrassment. Conceivably, he may believe that post-election chaos would lead the country to turn to him, or he may be eyeing a run for President in September. So far, both seem unlikely.

What about Islamic fundamentalist parties?

Their electoral high water mark was in 2002, when they gained 11 percent of the vote. The parties are divided, both by the style of Islam they preach and by their provincial identities. Several are potential partners in a governing coalition (with either of the major parties, based on their track record). The Islamic parties should not be confused with the Pakistani Taliban, an insurgent movement prepared to use violence against the state. The Taliban condemn the election and are implicated in pre-election violence.

Will the army intervene?

Probably not, barring a major breakdown in public order. At this writing, army leaders prefer to work behind the scenes, and hope the constitutional process will yield a government they can work with.

What does this all mean?

Keep your expectations realistic. Forming a coalition may take a while (over a month in 2008). The leader will probably be a familiar and flawed figure, who will need to govern with one eye on the army. Relations with Washington will remain strained by diverging strategic objectives and deep mutual suspicions. Major policy decisions will still be hard to reach. Economic pressures will still weigh, especially on Pakistan’s cities.

But a decently held election, with manageable levels of violence, will be an important step toward stabilizing Pakistan’s system of civilian government. No one – probably not even Imran Khan – wants to explode relations with the United States, and even the army is searching for a better way to manage ties with India.

What would be indications of post-election trouble?

The key indicator of a darker prognosis would be mass street protests after the election, which could affect the army’s actions. Other developments that could badly stress the system include attacks on Pakistani security forces or senior government figures by the Afghan or Pakistani Taliban, or a “terrorist spectacular” in India traceable to Pakistan.

Howard and Teresita Schaffer

South Block, http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahinsajain/6216604388/sizes/m/in/photostream/

March 31, 2013: In the past six months, passionate domestic politics have twice taken over India’s foreign policy process, complicating its relations with neighboring countries. The most recent case involved a resolution on Sri Lanka adopted by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which led an important coalition partner to leave the government. The earlier crisis, in September 2011, scuttled two major features of India’s proposed expansion of relations with Bangladesh. When India’s foreign policy becomes domestic, decisions tend to escalate, coalition politics intensify, and the fallout affects both politics and policy.

The Sri Lankan story began in 2012, when Washington sponsored a resolution intended to press for accountability for the anguishing events that took place at the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war. The text was very mild, recommending that Sri Lanka take a number of measures that it had already more or less pledged (see our previous article). India’s surprising “yes” vote reflected pressure not so much from the United States as from a handful of politicians from the southern state of Tamil Nadu, who were concerned about Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority. Indian foreign policy professionals were unhappy over this departure from their normal practice of not voting for country-specific resolutions.

The second act took place at the March 2013 UNHRC meeting. The United States sponsored a somewhat sharper Sri Lanka resolution. “Requests” became “urgings” and the text called on Sri Lanka to heed not just the recommendations of its own government-appointed Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission but also reports from the United Nations.

The drama in India, however, was substantially greater than last year. The absence of any significant movement toward national reconciliation left Indian foreign policy professionals frustrated (like their U.S. counterparts), and the release of film footage reportedly showing the killing of the Tamil rebel leader’s twelve-year-old son, created widespread revulsion in India. But what really drove events was the rivalry between two Tamil parties that alternate in running the state government. The Sri Lanka conflict is deeply embedded in this contest, and both parties use their alliances and disputes with the party in power in Delhi to further their quest for state primacy. The DMK, allied with the central government but opposed to the state government, mounted a full-court press to demand that India not just vote for the resolution, but amend it to accuse the Sri Lankan government of “genocide and war crimes.” This fit in with the DMK’s traditional sympathy for the now-defeated spearhead of Sri Lanka’s Tamil uprising, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). It also was an opportunity for the DMK to outdo its rival, the AIADMK, in support for their brothers in Sri Lanka.

The DMK took its campaign on the road. A debate in the national parliament produced no consensus, but drew public statements blasting Sri Lankan anti-Tamil “atrocities” from a parade of government ministers as well as Sonia Gandhi, president of the ruling Congress party. The Government of India cancelled the upcoming India-Sri Lanka defense dialogue. A DMK-led organization reportedly lobbied foreign embassies in Delhi to toughen the resolution. The DMK then pulled out of the government coalition, citing the U.N. resolution. This put the government’s existence in technical danger, though the DMK hinted that it would not bring the government down. Not to be outdone, the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu (from the other major Tamil party, the AIADMK), banned Sri Lankan cricket players from participating in an upcoming match in Chennai.

Unusually, India’s UNHRC representative was summoned to Delhi, and returned to Geneva with instructions – evidently from the top – to try to toughen the resolution. This last-minute effort went nowhere. On March 21, the resolution passed with 25 positive votes, 13 negative ones and 8 abstentions – compared to last year, one more yea, and two fewer nays. India had once again overridden its normal distaste for country-specific resolutions, and India and Sri Lanka were left with some difficult fences to mend. Last year’s Sri Lankan anger was mostly against the United States; this year, India was the principal target. There is every likelihood that the same issues will be back again at next year’s UNHRC meeting.

The Bangladesh case also involved a regional party and former ally of the Indian government, and was in some ways even more dramatic. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Bangladesh in September 2011 (see our earlier article). In preparation, the two governments had worked out a package of agreements to resolve many of their oldest and most complex disputes. These included settling a border that includes nearly 200 enclaves on both sides that are under the sovereignty of the other, division of the waters of one of their shared rivers, transit for India to areas east of Bangladesh, and expanding trade. The Indian government thought it had the acquiescence of the provincial government in West Bengal, headed by the feisty Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress, mercurial former allies in the central government coalition.

They reckoned without Banerjee. A week before the prime ministerial visit, she denounced the water sharing agreement. The central government dispatched a star senior diplomat, National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon, to pour oil on the troubled waters in Kolkata. He failed. Among many competing explanations, two stand out: Menon had no authority to provide sweeteners for the financially strapped West Bengal; and he was not an elected politician, much less one Banerjee would consider her equal. In addition, it is not clear that he could help Banerjee address the local impact of the proposed agreement within West Bengal.

Banerjee’s opposition nearly scuttled the whole trip, to both sides’ great embarrassment. The overture to India was Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s signature foreign policy issue. She reluctantly agreed to implement the salvageable parts of the program. The two governments continued to work on the water issue and the transit agreement that Bangladesh had withheld in retaliation. In February, Indian Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid visited Bangladesh and opined that the problems would be resolved. He was followed by President Pranab Mukherjee, India’s most senior Bengali politician.

Bangladeshis of different backgrounds and politics tend to blame the Indian bureaucracy for their problems with India, and hope that politicians – especially Bengali ones, and especially Mukherjee – will provide solutions. The view from Delhi and Kolkata is more complicated. The personalities of the political leaders in Kolkata and in Dhaka emerge as a critical factor. The long-time Communist chief minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu, had his state’s politics in the palm of his hand. Political observers in Kolkata told us that this enabled him to take a statesmanlike view, as he had in shaping the 1996 India-Bangladesh water agreement. Banerjee is less secure in her political hold on the state. She is also a “street fighter,” determined to eliminate any threat to her West Bengal power base, either from the communists or from her former allies in Congress. This makes for a natural tension with New Delhi.

Indian observers ruefully agree that the next move is up to New Delhi. The government faces an uphill task in obtaining parliamentary assent to the constitutional amendment it needs to implement the border agreement. Obtaining the support of the West Bengal government for the water and transit deals is probably becoming more difficult.

Despite their different dynamics, these cases have important features in common. Both featured high-octane local political leaders in India, and both had deep roots in state politicians’ volatile relations with the central government. Domestic politics swept aside the normal foreign policy process, making decisions and follow-up unpredictable. When foreign policy issues are taken up by party politics, decision-making rockets to the top of India’s power structure. Domestic deal-making becomes the primary requirement. India’s foreign policy machinery cannot control that – or the international bargaining that goes with it. India’s foreign policy institutions are starting to maintain stronger state level contacts in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. However, as we saw in both these cases, when there is a political dispute over policy toward Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, contacts between senior officials or ambassadors and the state government are mainly useful as an early warning system. They are unlikely to be able to resolve problems.

Some foreign policy issues get caught up in party politics without the direct local identification that marked these two cases. Recent examples include the U.S.-India nuclear deal, frozen for nearly a year because of the leftist parties’ objections, and the Indian government’s initial decision to permit foreign direct investment in retail trade. Such issues are less likely to revolve around one high profile opponent, like Tamil Nadu’s Karunanidhi or West Bengal’s Banerjee. But they share the other characteristics of the boundary between foreign and domestic politics, including escalating the locus of decisions. They will become more frequent as India’s economy grows and its integration with the global economy becomes more important.

Teresita and Howard Schaffer

Hank Greenberg. From flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootbearwdc/2824824228/sizes/m/in/photostream/

On a table in the office of a senior Indian diplomat sits an unusual piece of memorabilia: a baseball bat. It is signed not by members of the official’s favorite baseball team, but by the U.S. officials who participated in the inaugural session of the now well-established consultations between India and the United States on East Asia, in 2010. This bat and the similarly adorned cricket bat kept by the Indian diplomat’s American counterpart are an apt symbol of how the United States and India have deepened their common understanding of the strategic stakes in this critical region. Now they need to deepen their economic ties across the Pacific. It’s time for the U.S. to facilitate India’s joining APEC.

No, this picture is not the Indian official, nor his American counterpart – it’s U.S. baseball great Hank Greenberg. See our article in The Hindu March 27, 2013.

Ajmer Shrine, photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/ajmer/4478622642/sizes/m/in/photostream/

March 11, 2013: Pakistan lame-duck Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf’s brief private visit to India March 9 accomplished nothing of substance, but it put an unintended spotlight on the troubled state into which India-Pakistan relations have fallen in the past few months. The causes of the downturn are many and varied – trouble in Kashmir and along the Line of Control, concerns about post-2014 Afghanistan, a stalling of their encouraging trade opening, and perhaps most importantly impending elections in both countries. A State Department spokeswoman welcomed Ashraf’s visit and confirmed Washington’s interest in the two nations talking to one another. But such long-standing U.S. cheerleading from the sidelines is unlikely to have any meaningful impact. Significant progress seems unlikely until parliamentary elections are held in both countries, Pakistan’s this May, India’s probably in early 2014.

Ashraf’s visit contrasted in tone and substance with President Zardari’s brief, similarly “private” journey last April to worship at the same Muslim shrine, in Ajmer, Rajasthan. On that occasion Zardari lunched with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi. The two leaders congratulated one another on the progress their countries had made in improving ties, especially in facilitating trade, investment, and travel. Their summit encounter, which included a reiteration of Islamabad’s invitation to Singh to visit his native village in Pakistani Punjab, seemed a modest step forward toward a further improvement.

This year, Ashraf did not visit New Delhi. He was hosted to lunch in Jaipur en-route to Ajmer by Indian External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid, but the media were told that no official talks and specifically no discussion of the hot-button terrorism issue had taken place. In both Jaipur and Ajmer, protesters, reportedly including activists from the Hindu nationalist BJP, demonstrated against the Pakistani visitor.

Two developments in Kashmir earlier this year have contributed to this downward cycle. The first involved clashes in early January along the Line of Control, one allegedly involving the beheading of an Indian soldier. As is usually the case, the two sides offered different official versions of what happened. What was unusual, however, was the reporting by the highly regarded Kashmir correspondent of the Indian newspaper The Hindu, that it had been the Indian side that had started the trouble.

Official Indian reaction to the incident, which had been moderate at first, quickly escalated.  The Armed Forces led the way: the chiefs of both the Army and the Air Force threatened retaliation. Prime Minister Singh joined this aggressive chorus on January 15, when he declared that after the barbaric beheading there could not be business as usual with Pakistan. The following day, amid jingoistic clamor from India’s electronic media and leaders of the BJP, the government announced that a newly established special visa-on-arrival facility for older Pakistanis visiting India had been put on hold and expelled Pakistani field hockey stars touring the country. It was a clear case of overreaction by the usually mild-mannered prime minister, very likely heightened by pre-election concerns. Although some of the mainstream press to its credit urged the government to modify its position, Singh has continued to maintain a hard line on further efforts to bring about Indian détente with Pakistan. The Pakistanis have maintained a much more restrained attitude.

Another series of unhelpful developments took place soon afterwards in the Kashmir Valley. These followed the hanging in a New Delhi jail in early February of Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri convicted and sentenced to death for the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001. The execution was ordered without prior notification of Afzal Guru’s family and before a final appeal for clemency could be entered. The Indian government subsequently refused the family’s request that Afzal Guru’s body be sent to Kashmir for burial. Even Indians totally unsympathetic to Afzal Guru acknowledge that the Manmohan Singh government seriously blundered in taking this position. Severe rioting followed, forcing the authorities to impose curfews throughout the Kashmir Valley. Matters had only begun to calm down when Indian forces shot and killed an unarmed Kashmiri youth. This led to further disturbances and a virtual shutdown of activity in the Valley.

Trouble of this kind in Kashmir always has a negative effect on India-Pakistan relations. Pakistanis see it as further evidence of Indian oppression of their fellow Muslims. Whatever the facts, Indians see a Pakistani hand in the disturbances. They find it difficult to acknowledge that most Kashmiri Muslims are unhappy with Indian rule or that New Delhi’s often insensitive handling of the Kashmiris contributes seriously to law-and-order problems in the state. Many long-time observers we spoke to during our recent visit to India argued that the Kashmir insurgency had gone away, citing as evidence the large-scale revival of tourism to the Valley last summer and the diminishing violence there.

During these events, the Indian authorities expressed no interest in looking for solutions that would foster reconciliation within the Valley and between Kashmir and India. Although the Kashmir state government and the leading Kashmir-based pro-India opposition party have called for reforms, the Indian government has made no fresh offer to “give peace a chance,” as it had following severe rioting in the summer of 2010. It has refused to scrap the much loathed Armed Forces Special Protection Act, which gives the military immunity from prosecution for many types of offenses they may commit against civilians in the Valley. It has buried the report prepared by the three-member commission of “interlocutors” that it had set up to seek out Kashmiri opinion on the political future of the state. Some observers argue that India can manage intermittent disorder in Kashmir better than the Congress party can manage the political fallout from appearing “soft” on Kashmir.

Kashmir appears to be less central to New Delhi’s current concerns about Pakistan than the problem of postwar Afghanistan.  Indians worry that Pakistan will encourage a Taliban takeover and might even send irregulars into Afghanistan to make this happen. The Indian military are now training some Afghan forces in India. Ironically, Washington, which had long been skittish about any Indian activity in Afghanistan other than economic support, now seems eager to see India expand its military training effort. Islamabad, intensely suspicious of India’s ties with Kabul, continues to decline New Delhi’s invitations to include a discussion of Afghanistan in their bilateral dialogue.

The promising trade opening initiative launched in 2011 remains the most encouraging item on the India-Pakistan agenda, but it too has been virtually stalled since December 2012. Pakistan has gotten cold feet about completing and formalizing its extension of normal trade relations to India, and India’s cancellation of the visa-on-demand facility for older visitors adds to the problems. No one has denounced the initiative, however, and it may well revive, but not until after both elections are over.

Indeed, the looming elections underline what may be the most important problem: weak governments in both countries. The result is likely to be a difficult year for India-Pakistan relations. And there are plenty of spoilers out there who could make things even more perilous, as they did when they attacked Mumbai in 2008. More encouraging scenarios are likely to emerge only when leaders come to power in both countries who are both confident and looking for ways forward.

Teresita and Howard Schaffer

Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/travlr/104367309/

March 8, 2013: Breaking up may not be “hard to do,” as Husain Haqqani has written in the March-April 2013 issue of Foreign Affairs – but his article doesn’t answer the key question about U.S.-Pakistan relations: what will the two countries expect of each other if they step back from their hopes for a close alliance?

We agree with Haqqani’s basic argument that U.S. and Pakistani interests are not well aligned. This has been true since the two countries first entered into a security relationship in the 1950s, but they have rarely acknowledged it.

U.S. officials who deal with Pakistan say that its leaders have now reevaluated their strategic interests and are moving toward goals for the future of Afghanistan that are closer to Washington’s. Such transformations have had short shelf lives in the past. Given Pakistan’s distrust of Afghan leaders who would favor closer ties with New Delhi, it would be astonishing if Pakistan did not put its trust in its old Taliban clients as U.S. troops depart. In other words, to the extent that U.S. policies in Afghanistan assume that Pakistan will be a partner in our transition efforts, Washington is likely to be disappointed – and so is Islamabad, which continues to hope for greater distance between Washington and New Delhi. A new and more modest paradigm is badly needed.

But both countries also need more than greater honesty, which Haqqani cites as the major benefit from “breaking up.” Pakistan continues to need international trade and investment as well as the financial support of institutions that can mobilize real money, and the United States is central to these requirements. The United States continues to be at risk from terrorist networks with roots in Pakistan. A hostile relationship would be an insufficient response to this problem. Both countries could benefit more by cooperating to clip the wings of organizations that threaten the security of both.

In short, even if the old alliance is out of reach, we need to do more than break up: we need to define a new, more modest relationship, preferably one not built on the shifting sands of the Afghan transition.

Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/bdgamer/8466028340/sizes/m/in/photostream/

A series of increasingly violent, interlocking political confrontations have gripped Bangladesh for more than a month. The conflict threatens the country’s fragile democratic institutions and its remarkable export-oriented economic progress. As we found in a recent visit, many observers fear that the fundamental issues that underlie these confrontations cannot be resolved within Bangladesh’s constitutional framework.  Some worry, as we do, that in the absence of some form of compromise among the main political parties, especially on the hot-button issue of the conduct of the upcoming parliamentary elections, the Bangladesh Army will again step in, as it has many times before in the country’s forty years of independence.

The United States, for its part, should privately warn political leaders of the dangers Bangladesh’s democratic institutions face – and they with them. But as the experience of one of us as American ambassador in Dhaka in the mid-1980s suggests, any effort by Washington or other friendly foreign powers to intervene more directly is likely to fail. The only country that might effectively do so is China, but it avoids such roles.

The most recent phase of Bangladesh’s political conflict was triggered by the February 5 conviction by a specially constituted war-crimes tribunal of Abdul Quader Mollah, a senior official of the Jamaat-i-Islami, the country’s largest Islamic party.  Established by the government headed by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed, the leader of the Awami League and daughter of the man who led Bangladesh to independence, the court was designed to try men who had sided with Pakistan in the 1971 liberation war and participated in the massive atrocities that accompanied the struggle. Its procedures – and the very idea of trying people forty-odd years after their alleged crimes – were  criticized by international and Bangladeshi human rights groups, legal authorities, and others. But the trials are close to Hasina’s heart and important for her government, and she persisted in them.  As expected, Jamaat reacted violently against the court’s ruling.

But what was totally unexpected was the gathering at downtown Dhaka’s Shahbagh crossing that protested peacefully against what the demonstrators considered the court’s unduly lenient sentence of life imprisonment for Mollah and the government’s failure to ban the Jamaat.  Comprising mostly middle-class younger people initially gathered together by Bangladesh’s widespread social media network, the demonstrations took on an appealing carnival aspect that distinguished them from the country’s typical political rallies. Protest meetings spread to cities around the country. The demonstrations generated a kind of electric excitement; headline writers referred to “Bangladesh’s Tahrir Square.” The government quickly bowed to the protesters’ demands and enacted legislation allowing it to retroactively appeal the sentence and outlaw the Jamaat if it wished. Nonetheless, the Shahbagh demonstrations persisted. They morphed into a celebration of Bangladeshi secularism and a loud call for an end to Islamic extremism. At first seemingly non-partisan – politicians were reportedly shooed away – the gatherings took on an increasingly pro-Awami League coloration.

These actions took place against a background of increasing antagonism between the ruling Awami League and its longtime rival, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party led by Begum Khaleda Zia. The two parties have alternated in power since the overthrow of Bangladesh’s military dictatorship in the early 1990s and Begum Zia and Sheikh Hasina, who have headed them for decades, are sworn enemies.

The present intense confrontation between the two parties is chiefly aimed at the conduct of the parliamentary elections expected at the end of this year. Since 1996, these elections have been carried out by non-partisan caretaker governments that were allowed three months in office to complete this task. This pioneering constitutional arrangement, made necessary by each party’s not unjustified conviction that the other would rig the election if it were in power, has generally worked well. (A notable exception was the aborted election of 2006, when the ruling BNP government connived to have one of its supporters lead the caretaker government and the Awami League withdrew from the race.) In 2011, Sheikh Hasina’s government amended the constitution: elections would henceforth be carried out not by a caretaker but by the political regime in power. Begum Zia and the BNP have adamantly refused to accept this change and have launched a series of agitations to force the government to give up its position. Our conversations in Dhaka with Awami League and BNP leaders convinced us that the two parties were on a collision course over this issue; neither was prepared to agree to a meaningful compromise.

Some Bangladeshi observers are convinced that the Awami League will go ahead with the elections without BNP participation. According to them, the government will try to persuade many of the smaller parties to take part, thus effectively assuring a decent turnout that will undercut BNP claims that the balloting was unfair.  (In conspiracy-theorizing Bangladesh, these Awami League machinations include persuading the Jamaat to participate: hence the “light” sentence initially given Mollah.)

The BNP has viewed the Hasina government’s moves against Jamaat leaders with growing suspicion. The Jamaat was a coalition partner in Begum Zia’s 2001-2006 government and was awarded a few seats in her cabinet, which it used to its advantage. This arrangement was expected to continue in the next elections, when and if these are held (and presuming the party has not been outlawed before then). Initially non-committal on the Shahbagh demonstrations, the BNP has become convinced that the rallies have been taken over by the Awami League. To the BNP, Shahbagh and other aspects of the government’s anti-Jamaat program are part of a scheme to distract Bangladeshi public opinion from the failures of Hasina’s government, especially the widespread corruption and violence that it alleges with good reason have marred her four years in power.

The BNP also seems convinced that India has somehow had a hand in the Shahbagh demonstrations and the Awami League’s campaign against the Jamaat. This may also have led Begum Zia to retreat from the “opening to India” that the party adopted when she was well received by the Manmohan Singh government during her visit to India last year, and to revert to the party’s longtime suspicion of the Indians’ motives and intentions (and to its familiar allegation that the Awami League is a tool of New Delhi.)

Under these circumstances, the BNP has at least passively supported the hartal (a familiar Bangladeshi political action designed to bring public activity to a complete halt) which the Jamaat called following the war crimes court’s sentencing to death of another Jamaat leader, Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, on February 28. The hartal was accompanied by widespread violence across the country. This included attacks on the homes and temples of Bangladesh’s Hindu minority. Although Begum Zia eventually condemned the violence, she pointedly cancelled her meeting with the visiting president of India, citing the Jamaat’s hartal as the reason. (Observers were quick to comment that the scrapping of the meeting was further evidence of the BNP’s move away from its recent more favorable approach to New Delhi.) The BNP staged its own hartal following the Jamaat’s. In effect, the two parties carried out a joint three-day shutdown and were publicly perceived to have done so.

This is not to say that the BNP accepts the Jamaat’s Islamic ideology or shares its view of the 1971 war for Bangladeshi independence. Its founder, President Ziaur Rahman, the late husband of Khaleda Zia, defected from the Pakistan Army and proclaimed Bangladesh’s independence. Its ranks include such heroes of the liberation struggle as Shamsher Chowdhury, Begum Zia’s principal foreign policy adviser. But its views of the nature of that struggle and its narrative of the historical development of Bangladesh have always been less secular-oriented, less antagonistic toward Pakistan, and more suspicious of India than has the Awami League’s. It has been comfortable with its association with the Jamaat and accepts political Islam far more readily than the Awami League ever could.

The next few months could be a crucial time for Bangladesh. As we mentioned at the start of this posting, the United States can play a limited role in helping the country to move forward toward strengthened political stability and economic prosperity. Under stable, popular government, Bangladesh could move further from the “basket case” status to which Henry Kissinger once supposedly assigned it and join the growing ranks of middle-class Asian states. But at the end of the day it will be up to the Bangladeshis themselves to find their way out of their present political problems.

By Steve Rhodes, http://www.flickr.com/photos/ari/8114647325/

The October 22 debate between Romney and Obama presented a badly distorted view of U.S. foreign policy. Their discussion does offer a perceptive glimpse of the most urgent short-term international worries of the American electorate.

The defining image from the October 22 debate between President Obama and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is of the two candidates passionately disputing their prescriptions for the U.S. domestic economy. The moderator, veteran TV journalist Bob Schieffer, caught the spirit of the evening with his final words before inviting the debaters to make their closing comments – “I think we all love teachers.” A visitor from Mars might be forgiven for not realizing that this was a debate on foreign policy.

Read our article in The Hindu, October 27, 2012.

Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/taruntej/95021506/

John Paton Davies’s China Hand: An Autobiography, the posthumously-published 2012 winner of the American Academy of Diplomacy’s annual Douglas Dillon Award for distinguished writing on the conduct of U.S. diplomacy, is one of the best diplomatic memoirs we’ve read in years.

Davies, who died in 1999 at the age of ninety-one, is best known as one of the most prominent of the State Department China-specialists who were hounded out of the Foreign Service during the McCarthy era because of their alleged sympathy for the Communists in the Chinese civil war. But his memoir includes more than recollections of his experiences in China.  A fascinating surprise, for readers interested in South Asia, lay in its accounts of his meetings in India in 1942-43 with top leaders of the independence movement at a crucial period in their struggle against the British Raj. His spirited, well-written reports of his talks with these prominent figures, his incisive observations of their personalities, and his analyses of other salient features of the contemporary Indian political scene add an important dimension to his book. They provide fresh insights into the way Indian leaders viewed their struggle as well as their – and Davies’s –  assessments  of  what the United States was doing and should do in the Indian subcontinent in those years.

Davies was born into a missionary family in China and had served at several U.S. diplomatic posts there before returning to the country only weeks after Pearl Harbor as a middle-grade Foreign Service officer on the staff of General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, the commander of U.S. forces in the China-Burma-India Theater headquartered in Chungking, China’s wartime capital. There he shrewdly concluded that he could be most useful to the general, surrounded as Stilwell was by China experts, if he made India his specialty. He confesses that at the time he knew virtually nothing about the country aside from the little he had picked up from the writings of Kipling and E.M. Forster. That handicap did not deter him. With Stilwell’s approval he headed over the hump for India in May 1942.

Once there, Davies soon went well beyond the Indian contacts American officials in New Delhi and Calcutta arranged for him. He writes that he wanted “to go further afield, to other parts of India, and to meet influential Indians outside the diplomatic circuit, especially the troublemakers.” He was convinced that his unusual posting to General Stilwell’s staff gave him an accepted standing in the country that would allow him to seek out Indians with whom his Foreign Service colleagues posted there on regular assignment could have little or no contact.

As a diplomatic second secretary Davies, then thirty-four, was only a mid-level officer. But he was never shy in reaching out to the top leaders of the independence movement. The Indians, for their part, seemed to welcome his overtures and readily met with him, many of them in repeated sessions. His list of contacts is stunning for someone of his rank. Headed by Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, it included a wide variety of other leaders who like them would become prominent figures in independent India and Pakistan. None of them seemed to stand on ceremony; they dealt with Davies’s searching questions willingly and with considerable if not total candor despite his modest official diplomatic standing.

Davies usefully quotes letters, reports and diary entries he wrote at the time. These make for compelling and often entertaining reading. Filled with insightful analyses of political events and shrewd descriptions and character sketches of the people involved, they are diplomatic reporting and analysis of a very superior quality.

Davies’s first major contact with political India came when he barged uninvited into a crucial session of the Indian National Congress Working Committee in Allahabad in May 1942. He listened as the members – “who only five years later would govern India” – argued over the strategy the party should follow in its dealings with the British raj, the Muslim League, and a prospective invasion by the Japanese Army. No one seemed to object to his presence. He was later able to set up private meetings with some of the main players in the session, who elaborated on their working committee speeches for his benefit.

Davies seems to have been particularly taken by C. Rajagopalachari, a future governor general of India whom he found clever and pragmatic. Displaying his knack for vivid description that is a delightful feature of the book, Davies calls Rajaji “a frail little man with slender hands, the palms of which were dyed lavender.” He was less impressed by future prime minister Nehru, in his words “a glamorous super-Brahmin,” a “bicultural…elegant, intellectual, ornamental aristocrat” with a contradictory, indecisive personality. These and other major leaders conversed with Davies in excellent English. But in the Working Committee session itself he was amused that those who spoke in their own regional languages often sprinkled them with English phrases. These, he recalled, included “popular mandate, wishful thinking, and child psychology.”  Some aspects of Indian political meetings never change!

Gandhi himself was not at the Allahabad session, so Davies sought him out first at his ashram in Central India and then in Bombay, where he held a long conversation with the Mahatma. He reported to General Stilwell that he had begun the discussion by asking Gandhi what he thought the United States could do to be helpful to India. “Persuade the British to withdraw immediately and completely,” Gandhi replied. The Mahatma then explained that once the British had left there would be no incentive for the Japanese to attack since their primary objective in that part of the world was the destruction of British power.  A long, fascinating argument followed. Davies had no qualms about taking on the venerable leader and sharply questioning his assumptions. Gandhi, for his part, told Davies that he did not believe the United States might exert its good offices on behalf of India because “American diplomacy was under the control of the British and…the voice of Americans in the United States friendly to India was being stifled by the British.”

Davies went well beyond the Congress party leadership in his search for understanding of the contemporary Indian scene and sought out senior figures across the political spectrum. Mohammed Ali Jinnah figured prominently among them. After several conversations with the future founder of Pakistan, Davies commented in a January 1943 message that he was “as astute and opportunistic a politician as there is today in India. [He] fulfills the role of fuehrer called for by the circumstances the Muslims found themselves in. He has skillfully exploited the apprehensions of his community and has built up the Muslim League as a disciplined organization obedient to his will.” Davies accurately called Pakistan, Jinnah’s battle cry, a “vaguely defined program.”

Another future leader of Pakistan whom Davies came to know well was Ghulam Mohammed, a top official in the British Indian government who in the 1950s became the powerful governor general of the Muslim state. Like Rajaji and some other Indians whom Davies drew out on the subject, Ghulam Mohammed asserted that American solidarity with Britain at the expense of the independence of India and other colonies would eventually lead to international conflict on the basis of color.

Comments like this heightened Davies’s strong concern that Washington’s continued backing for Britain’s efforts to hold on to India following the end of the war and American support for the British, Dutch, and French as they sought to return to their colonies in Southeast Asia at that time could pose a major problem for the United States. He told Stilwell in January 1943 that “we [Americans] have come to be associated with the British. That was in part because of American silence and inaction about British imperialism in India, giving the impression that the United States at least tacitly supports it.” Davies warned that “India in [postwar] revolt against persisting white imperialism might well attract the practical interest if not sympathy of the Soviet Union, or China, or both.”

Davies argued that Washington must dissociate itself from British imperial policy. He wanted it to stop supporting Britain’s control over India and its efforts to regain its lost colonies in Southeast Asia.  He recognized that going further than this—seeking to induce London to set in train an orderly relinquishing of sovereignty over India in favor of an eventual independent Indian government — would be offensive to the Churchill government then in power. But he concluded that such American intervention was justified because of the heavy postwar risks arising out of a British attempt to hold India. In his view, these risks would strongly affect the United States.  He asked rhetorically – and dramatically– “can we afford …to let the British run the risk of losing us the peace?”

As he recognizes in his memoir, these fears of postwar imperialist struggles in Asia did not materialize, at least not in the Indian subcontinent. (They did of course in Vietnam and Indonesia.) Instead, the British quit India in 1947, in Davies’s words “with consummate skill and statesmanship.”

Doing so, they left India (and Pakistan) in the hands of those very leaders Davies had so zealously cultivated and evaluated as a young, energetic, and enterprising American Foreign Service officer during the unusual assignment there he recorded so well in China Hand: An Autobiography.

From Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/mandala_travel/7682803992/sizes/m/in/photostream/

I always enjoy coming back to the Boston area. I spent four happy years here as an undergraduate at a college on the Charles in the late ninety-forties. This is something that Harvard fund-raisers and football team promoters never let me forget.

Coincidentally, it was during those times so long ago that Kashmir first came to the world’s attention. A classmate, one of the few Indian undergraduates then studying in this country, assured me that the problem was the result of Pakistani mischief, that India was completely in the right, and that the United States was at fault in not recognizing these verities. I am sure that if there had been a Pakistani in my class at Cambridge – unfortunately there was not – I would have gotten a very different story. India and Pakistan have embraced sharply conflicting narratives of what happened way back in 1947 and 1948. Their ideas on the role the United States should play have been similarly at odds with one another. As we’ll see, this U.S. role has taken many different forms and shapes over the years, sometimes to the liking of one side or the other, sometimes to the liking of neither, as far as I can recall never to the liking of both.

Read Howard Schaffer’s talk at Boston College on the history of the Kashmir problem and the modest prospects for a U.S. role in the future.

Mumbai port: http://www.flickr.com/photos/48722974@N07/5034342298/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Trade and more generally economic relations have been a major driver of U.S.-India relations in the past decade. U.S. exports to India have grown nearly sevenfold. This makes the relationship important to both sides, and provides a degree of stability that was unknown in earlier times. This expansion is not unique to the United States: the two biggest growth stories in Indian trade are China and the oil producing countries of the Persian Gulf.

Growing trade has not eliminated trade problems, nor does it translate into easier dealings in multilateral settings. One way to address periodic frustration about stubborn trade problems would be to open the lens a bit, and work toward a more ambitious long term goal, such as a free trade agreement. It’s a difficult challenge, but steps along that path could be hugely beneficial to both countries.

Read the full article.