Month: February 2011

Posted on

The Limits of Influence: America’s Role in Kashmir

Written by Howard B. Schaffer and published by the Brookings Institution Press in 2009.

Before the 1947 partition of India, few Americans knew or cared about the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. Tucked away in the high western Himalayas, Kashmir, as it was commonly called, was an amalgam of territories widely varied in language, culture, religion, ethnicity, and economic development. Its disparate regions had been cobbled together by the dynastic ambitions of the state’s rulers abetted by British imperial design. In the first half of the nineteenth century, these maharajas,Hindus of the Dogra ethnic group based in the Jammu area of the state, had with British backing created one of the largest states in Britain’s Indian empire. Situated along India’s border with China, touching Afghanistan, and close to the Central Asian regions of Czarist Russia and, later, the Soviet Union, it was also one of the most strategically placed.

To order the book, contact Brookings Institution Press.
Indian edition available from Penguin Viking.

Posted on

Kashmir’s Fuse Alight

An op-ed by Howard B. Schaffer and Teresita C. Schaffer on the necessity of the United States to get involved in Kashmir, in light of Kashmiris’ protests against the Indian government.

The United States has not paid much attention to Kashmir for the past few years, confident that an active India-Pakistan peace process would prevent any crises on that front. It no longer enjoys that luxury. If the current unrest leads to another India-Pakistan confrontation, the whole area from Afghanistan through India will be affected, with critical U.S. interests in play.

Originally published by the Washington Times on September 3, 2008.

Posted on

South Asia Book Reviews, Part 3

A review essay by Teresita C. Schaffer of five books about South Asia: Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History, by Thomas Barfield; The Other War: Winning and Losing in Afghanistan, by Ronald E. Neumann; Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field, by Antonio Giustozzi; Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict, by Peter R. Lavoy; and Making Sense of Pakistan, by Farzana Shaikh.

Antonio Giustozzi has put together a remarkable collection of essays on the Taliban. But do not open this book with the expectation that it will make the Afghan tangle simple or clear. On the contrary, its real contribution is that it complicates the mental models we have of Afghanistan’s tribes, the Taliban movement, and their relationships with the Afghan government, its Western friends and Pakistan.

Originally published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in the October-November 2010 issue of Survival. Read the entire essay.

Posted on

A Difficult Road Ahead: India’s Policy on Afghanistan

Teresita Schaffer and Arjun Verma analyze India’s policy on Afghanistan:

Following the decision by U.S. president Barack Obama in December 2009 to announce that the United States will begin to reduce its presence in Afghanistan by July 2011, the region has taken this as a signal of U.S. disengagement. India’s goals are a dismantled Afghan Taliban; an inclusive, democratic state with normal relations with India; and better transport and economic ties through Afghanistan into Central Asia. India has been a major contributor of economic aid, but has been kept at arm’s length on security issues. As Afghan president Hamid Karzai pursues reconciliation efforts with militants and Pakistan attempts to tilt this process in its favor, New Delhi must recalibrate its strategic calculus in Afghanistan.

First published in the CSIS South Asia Monitor series on August 1, 2010. Afghanistan India

Posted on

Sri Lanka: Talking Past Each Other

Sri Lanka’s victory over the LTTE in May 2009, which should have been a moment of opportunity as well as triumph both for the country and for relations with the United States, is in danger of leading to a downward spiral. Sri Lanka and the United States have sharply different priorities and are talking past each other. The result is not just a sour bilateral relationship in which the U.S. has little impact on the Sri Lankan policies it finds most objectionable, but an adjustment in Sri Lanka’s regional policies that could affect Indian Ocean security.

 

See full text of Teresita Schaffer’s article dated July 2010.