Kikobor

Mike Innes of Monkwire and CTLab alerts us to a new blog.

Eric Randolph, late of Jane's Country Risk and a CTlab contributor, recently relocated to India to get a close look at the underside of AfPak - literally, by looking at goings on in India and reporting it, some of it via Janes and other outlets that pay him for his freelance work, and a lot of it on his blog, The Kikobor.

I haven't had much opportunity to take a look yet, but I trust Mike on this one so it's added to the blogroll. Check it out.

Bob Gates or Bill Gertz -- who seems more sane?

Bill Gertz wrote a piece in today's Washington Times bleating about an essentially meaningless downgrade in China's intelligence collection priority, a move that's intended to ease tensions with Beijing.

The White House National Security Council recently directed U.S. spy agencies to lower the priority placed on intelligence collection for China, amid opposition to the policy change from senior intelligence leaders who feared it would hamper efforts to obtain secrets about Beijing's military and its cyber-attacks.

The downgrading of intelligence gathering on China was challenged by Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair and CIA Director Leon E. Panetta after it was first proposed in interagency memorandums in October, current and former intelligence officials said.

The decision downgrades China from "Priority 1" status, alongside Iran and North Korea, to "Priority 2," which covers specific events such as the humanitarian crisis after the Haitian earthquake or tensions between India and Pakistan.

The National Security Council staff, in response, pressed ahead with the change and sought to assure Mr. Blair and other intelligence chiefs that the change would not affect the allocation of resources for spying on China or the urgency of focusing on Chinese spying targets, the officials told The Washington Times.

White House National Security Council officials declined to comment on the intelligence issue. Mike Birmingham, a spokesman for Mr. Blair, declined to comment. A CIA spokesman also declined to comment.

But administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the new policy is part of the Obama administration's larger effort to develop a more cooperative relationship with Beijing.

I'm gonna be honest: I have no idea what it means to move a state from Pri 1 to Pri 2. Gertz says that there's no movement of assets or shift in resources, but I have to wonder what the hell this rating even means if there's no money or people associated with the ranking. That aside, what's really telling is the last paragraph in the section I've quoted above: Gertz expects his audience to feel outrage at the suggestion that we'd want to have a "more cooperative relationship with Beijing." (Also, dude, why do you need three sentences to say "the NSC, DNI, and CIA all had no comment"?!)

Contrast this with the eminently sane Bob Gates, responding to a question in India today about whether he and his Indian counterparts had discussed cooperative responses to Chinese cyber threats:

We didn’t talk about China at length. We did talk in more generic terms about a common interest in security of the Indian Ocean and security of the global commons, and the global commons meaning the air, sea, space, and if you’re talking about the internet, the ether, I suppose.

There was a discussion about China’s military modernization program and what it meant and what the intentions of that military buildup were. And a desire, I won’t speak for the Indian side, but certainly a desire on our part to engage China in a more routine, in-depth dialogue about our strategic intentions and plans so as to avoid any miscalculations or misunderstandings down the road. As I’ve long said, I was involved with the strategic arms talks with the Soviet Union for many many years. I’m not sure those talks ever actually reduced any arms, but the dialogue over a long period of time with great candor about nuclear capabilities, thinking about nuclear options, thinking about how each side looked at nuclear weapons and at their military modernizations, I think played a significant role over time in preventing miscalculations and mistakes in the relationship between these two super powers during the Cold War. I think that kind of a dialogue with China would be most productive and frankly in the best interests of global stability.

Sounds about right to me. And what about you: are you a Gatesian or a Gertzian on China? (I'm not going to pretend like I have a charitable neutrality on this. If you think Bill Gertz is smarter on long-term strategy towards China than Bob Gates, then... Well hell, I don't know, vote Republican I guess. Mabe Pete Hoekstra will run for president!)

The limits of cooperation

Apparently we've found them. Or at least, found them more explicitly than before. Not-so-suprisingly, the Pakistanis have come out and said what we all knew they were thinking: that they're hedging for the day the West pulls out of Afghanistan, and want to preserve their 'strategic assets,' namely those militant groups based in Pakistan that aren't allies of the TTP.

So, no, Mr. Obama, we won't be going after the Haqqani network, or other elements of the Quetta Shura that don't seek our overthrow. Because in our grand delusions, we still believe that we can control and direct the chaos on the other side of the border to our own advantage. And dammit, we will have 'strategic depth'!

Apparently this is "part of a mounting grievance in Pakistan that the alliance with the United States is too costly to bear." Umm, and what do you think the costs of abandoning that alliance will be?

Seriously, if Pakistan is concerned that it will be surrounded by Indians (or pro-Indian regimes) on all sides, why can't they see that the surest way to make that happen is to become the West's opponent? If it becomes an explicit proxy war between Pakistani and US-backed groups, why wouldn't the West align more closely with India?

Granted China may align with Pakistan against India again if the surge fails and there's a scramble in Central Asia, but isn't it just as likely to have second thoughts rooted in concerns about militants in Xianjang? Moreover, the Pakistani military still seem to think they can manage and control their militant clients. That strikes me as a deeply dangerous game to play between nuclear powers that seem at times to be itching to step into the street and settle 60 year old scores.

Perhaps more to the point, this brings into pretty sharp focus the unanswered questions about our Pakistan strategy. Even if the NYT story reflects attitudes in the military rather than civilian leadership, how do we simultaneously strengthen the civilian government's grip on its military (while not appearing to do so and thereby delegitimizing it (further) amongst the Pakistani electorate) while at the same time putting Hellfires into Waziri hillsides...or maybe the suburbs of Quetta?

Here's a question for all the Pakistan experts out there: in the eyes of the Pakistani military, what is the relative value of US military aid compared to taking out Haqqani? Would the threat of cutting off the former change the calculus, or simply reinforce the paranoia?

Hitchens going off the deep end?

I know that a lot of people are going to say "you mean he hasn't already?", but I've always quite enjoyed Christopher Hitchens' writing. I won't say that I always agree with him, but there's usually something to appreciate in the way that Hitchens expresses himself, both in his technical execution and in the confidence with which he eviscerates his rhetorical foes.

But lately it seems like the politics are getting the better of him, that he's taken to a sort of Mark Steyn-esque ranting against anything and everything associated with Islam. You'll be unsurprised, then, to find that today's column in Slate is mostly about how dumb it is for the U.S. to be playing nice-nice with Pakistan while jilted India longingly awaits our well-deserved affections.

The visit of Prime Minister Singh should have been the occasion for a vigorous public debate on whether this growing tendency—the Pakistanization of U.S. policy in the region—is the wise or correct one.

India was supporting the Northern Alliance against the Taliban long before the events of 9/11, and it has been providing a great deal of reconstruction aid since the Taliban were removed. It has excellent sources of intelligence in the region and is itself a frequent target of the very same forces against which we are committed to fight.

Its national parliament, the multifariously pluralistic and democratic Lok Sabha, was the target of a massive car bomb attack in the fall of 2001, its large embassy in Kabul has been singled out for special attention from the Taliban/al-Qaida alliance, and of course we must never forget Mumbai. Nor ought we to forget that India's massive economic and military power on the subcontinent is accompanied by a system of regular elections, a free press, a secular constitution under which almost as many Muslims live as live in Pakistan, and a business class that extends all the way to Silicon Valley and uses the English language.

Of Pakistan, a state that has flirted with the word failure ever since its inception, it is not possible to speak in the same terms. Only with the greatest reluctance does it withdraw its troops from the front with India in Kashmir, the confrontation that is the main obsession of its overmighty and Punjabi-dominated officer corps. This same corps makes no secret of its second obsession, which is the attainment of a pro-Pakistani regime in Kabul. (This objective, too, is determined by the desire to acquire Afghanistan for the purpose of "strategic depth" in the fight with India.) The original Talibanization of Afghanistan was itself an official project of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, and the CIA has spent the last eight years admitting, or in some cases discovering, what everyone else already knew: that the Taliban still enjoy barely concealed support from the same highly placed Pakistani institutions.

The enormous subventions given to the Pakistani elite in the "war on terror" are thus partly a subsidy to the very forces we claim to be fighting and partly a bribe to make them at least pretend to stop. Meanwhile, Pakistan's press and the remnant of its education system are virtual machines for the mass production of anti-American and anti-Semitic propaganda aimed at persuading people that the real enemy is the democratic secular West. And on top of all this, the country's "national hero" A.Q. Khan for many years enjoyed state collaboration in the running of a nuclear black market that shared fissile materials with countries like Libya and North Korea. Yet the Obama administration, phrasing its strategy for the crisis, cannot get beyond the silly and limited abbreviation Af-Pak. By excluding India from the equation, the political and military planners impose a tunnel vision upon themselves and dishearten the country that should be our major ally in the region (for other purposes, too, such as forming a counterweight to the increasingly promiscuous power of China).

All of which is well and good, but so far as I can tell, sort of misses the point. For one thing, who cares that India supported the Northern Alliance? So too did Iran, and you won't see Hitchens clamoring for rapprochement with the "mullahcracy."

And what of Pakistani concern with Kashmir? Is not India similarly preoccupied?

(My favorite part is that latter bit when Hitchens criticizes the Obama administration for excluding India from the "Af-Pak" construction, apparently alienating and "dishearten[ing] the country that should be our major ally in the region." Except when they're not. Hitchens should know that India vociferously resisted inclusion in Dick Holbrooke's portfolio; there were even rumblings that he'd be declared persona non grata before visiting the country.)

The simple fact of the matter is that Pakistan is the key to a meaningful solution in Afghanistan, a fact that Hitchens well knows. But he'd rather daydream about the cataclysmic struggle between secular, multicultural good -- India and the West, in this instance -- and backwards, monotheistic evil -- here as Pakistan and the Taliban, obviously -- than deal with the real, tangible security threat as it presently exists. I'm a little put off by Hitchens seeming enthusiasm for the day when the with-us-or-against-us lines are drawn rather more boldly. It reminds me a bit of Reuel Marc Gerecht's pathetic justification for continued U.S. involvement in Afghanistan: because -- according to him -- if we leave, there will be a civil war, and we'll be forced to side with non-Pashtun Afghans (from afar) against the Pashtuns, and thus (obviously!) against the Pakistanis. Which would be bad because then the Pakistanis would stop helping us against al-Qaeda and other transnational terrorists. Of course, in order to follow this logical chain, you have to forget that Gerecht and Hitchens basically insist that Pakistan has nothing to offer us, anyway.

The absurdity of this position is summed up in Hitchens' closing:

But if the United States was to upgrade and cement an economic, military, and political alliance with the emerging giant in New Delhi, we could guarantee without any boasting that our presence in the area was enduring and unbudgeable. It would also be based more on mutual friendship and common values and less on the humiliating practice of bribery and cajolery. And the Pakistani elite would have to decide which was its true enemy: the Taliban/al-Qaida alliance or the Indo-American one.

Well, you're right about that. And how do you think that one is going to turn out for us? All of which is why it's difficult for me to conclude that Hitchens isn't just itching for the fight.

Let's make Pakistan pick sides! Who cares which one they take; at least if it's not us, we can fight 'em!