Should India care whether the war against terrorists is being lost in Pakistan or Central Asia? A lot of the rhetoric after the Mumbai attacks has focused on "striking Pakistan". But who precisely, is to be the target? Civilians? The army or the ISI? The Lashkar training camps (which might well have been dismantled already)? The complexity of terrorist networks and links belies easy answers. The hard reality is that conventional military strikes against Pakistan are unlikely to seriously affect the operations of such groups, given their highly mobile and dispersed nature and the fact that, many of them are now strong enough and autonomous enough to strike even at their terrorist masters themselves.
Rashid, a Pakistani journalist who wrote one of the first books on the Taliban back in 2000, shows in Descent Into Chaos that things have gotten distinctly worse in the 'war on terror' in South and Central Asia — even apart from India. Terrorist incidents in Pakistan rose sharply in 2007, especially after the assault on the red mosque in Islamabad, which lead to attacks by extremists on Pakistani security forces themselves. 2008 has been worse. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the attack on the Marriott in Islamabad are only the most vivid examples of Pakistan's own problems with Islamic extremism.
With Afghanistan things are worse. The rebuilding of the Taliban, the failure of NATO to have a coherent counter-insurgency strategy, as well as infighting among its different members, all mean that effective control of Afghanistan by the US and its allies is being gradually eroded. In the light of such failures, tactics have evolved. The US has mounted attacks on the Taliban's base areas in Pakistani territory. Rashid says that intelligence sharing between Pakistan, NATO and the Afghan government has improved.
Little of this amount to anything more than sticking band aids on a bullet wound. If the Pakistan army and the ISI still continue to support such terrorists, either overtly or covertly, and as long as they are allowed to do so it seems highly unlikely that any other measures will succeed. At the same time, as is clear from the dramatic increase in terror incidents in Pakistan over the last couple of years, it is Pakistani civilians who are now as much a target of terror groups as are Indians. It seems a classic case of 'blowback' — a phrase coined by the CIA to describe the serious unintended consequences that result from supporting and funding outfits that you then can no longer control or direct. They eventually end up biting the hand that feeds them.
Descent Into Chaos is interesting enough in its details. Rashid talks of having lunch with Hamid Karzai ("an old Afghan friend") weeks before 9/11. He talks about his only one on one meeting with Musharraf, who warns him not to write articles linking the ISI with the Taliban ("he considered himself a master of spin and tragically believed that his spin was the absolute truth"). He talks of his meetings with clueless and ignorant Bush administration officials in the run up to and in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (trips to Washington at this time are described as an "Orwellian experience").
But the book also covers much familiar ground. Rashid points out how the indifference of the Bush Administration to Afghanistan in the years leading up to 9/11 was followed by a swing to the opposite extreme and dwells on the obsession of the neocons with the Iraq war. The book looks at the complete failure of nation-building in Afghanistan and the fact that the US, in its attempts to tackle extremism, was forced to compromise with the very forces in Pakistan (the army and the ISI) who supported such groups. These are all issues that have been written about elsewhere by other commentators and analysts.
Also Rashid's aim is to talk about extremism in what he calls 'the region' — the area which covers not only South Asia, but also Afghanistan and central Asian states such as Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, among others. His reason for doing so is that, as he quite rightly points out, any strategy to battle terrorism must look at the region as a whole. A simple focus on Pakistan or Afghanistan in isolation and tackling the problem only in those countries will merely push terrorists and their bases to other parts of central Asia, where corrupt, autocratic and weak regimes are propped up by US or oil money. But in this aim Rashid doesn't quite succeed — much of the book ends up being about Pakistan and Afghanistan, and less so about the other central Asian states. To some extent this is perhaps unavoidable. The problems of Pakistan and Afghanistan themselves are enough to occupy separate books of their own.
Where does America fit in? Many Indian observers and analysts have a simplistic (even delusional) view of American attitudes towards the region. As Rashid points out, following 9/11, the Indians hoped that the US would declare Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism, quite forgetting the extent to which the Americans needed Pakistan to help execute the war in Afghanistan. In the aftermath of Kargil and 9/11, "India also thought that Bush's new policy of preemption would give it the right to take unilateral military action against Pakistan…but the Americans had to warn the Indians several times that preemption did not apply to India over Pakistan." There is little to show that this view has changed in the last seven years. This is unlikely to change under an Obama administration.
Book Reviews 
Should India care whether the war against terrorists is being lost in Pakistan or Central Asia? A lot of the rhetoric after the Mumbai attacks has focused on "striking Pakistan". But who precisely, is to be the target? Civilians? The army or the ISI? The Lashkar training camps (which might well have been dismantled already)? The complexity of terrorist networks and links belies easy answers. The hard reality is that conventional military strikes against Pakistan are unlikely to seriously affect the operations of such groups, given their highly mobile and dispersed nature and the fact that, many of them are now strong enough and autonomous enough to strike even at their terrorist masters themselves.
