South Asia Hand

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.

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

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.

An article by Teresita C. Schaffer on the relationship between Afghanistan and its neighbors.

The debate over the end game in Afghanistan heated up after US president Barack Obama’s December 2009 West Point speech and the London Conference in late January 2010. Two out of four major potential elements of a strategy are getting headlines: the military approach to counter-insurgency and the ‘civilian surge’, including both economic aid and support for better governance. A third, the issue of whether, and under what circumstances, to reintegrate or include current Taliban personalities in the final government, is highly controversial. But policymakers in the United States and other NATO countries need to start paying more attention to the fourth: the relationship between Afghanistan and its neighbours, which could undo whatever gains Afghanistan achieves internally. Addressing the neighbourhood needs more than a handy formula; it will require continuing and sustained diplomatic effort.

Originally published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in the June-July 2010 issue of Survival. Read the entire article.

A review essay by Teresita C. Schaffer of five books about South Asia: In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan, by Seth G. Jones; Seeds of Terror: How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda, by Gretchen Peters; India: The Emerging Giant, by Arvind Panagariya; Bangladesh and Pakistan: Flirting with Failure in South Asia, by William B. Milam; and India and Counterinsurgency: Lessons Learned, edited by Sumit Ganguly and David P. Fidler.

William Milam, who served as US ambassador to Bangladesh and Pakistan, has looked at both countries side by side in an attempt to understand why both have had such troubled politics and such uneven economic performance. Three themes dominate the book: the problem of the army and politics, the challenge of instituting democratic governance (as distinguished from democratic elections), and the difficulty of defining what Islam means in both countries’ national life and identity.

Originally published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in the October-November 2009 issue of Survival. Read the entire essay.