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http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2008/12/15/081215taco_talk_packer  

THE NEW YORKER 

Risk Factors 

by George Packer December 15, 2008 

A few days after well-armed men mowed down scores of helpless people in Mumbai, an American commission released a report on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. "World at Risk" is one of those conscientious, bipartisan efforts, its importance signalled by publication as a trade paperback, whose sober findings and pragmatic recommendations momentarily give you the sense that every problem—even one as alarming as the likelihood that "a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack so mewhere in the world by the end of 2013"—has a common-sense solution. The report includes chapters on biological and nuclear risks, and one titled "Pakistan," which would seem to suggest that the nation itself is a kind of W.M.D.

According to intelligence reports, the attacks in Mumbai were carried out by terrorists who had received extensive training from the Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba, or Army of the Pure. Its agenda has been to force India to give up control over the disputed northern mountain region of Jammu and Kashmir. More recently, the group's leader, Hafiz Saeed, spoke of creating a Muslim south Asia—thus, the band that carried out the killings called itself the Hyderabad Deccan Mujahideen, implying a holy war extending down to the south-central Indian region that, in the late eighteenth century, marked the farthest limit of the Mughal empire.

The name has the ring of nostalgic grandeur common among jihadist groups elsewhere, with their historical claims on far-flung places like Al Andalus, also known as Spain. And the designated targets in Mumbai suggested an ambition on the terrorists' part extending well beyond the local troubles of Kashmir: hotels, a café, a hospital, a train station; foreign visitors, well-heeled Indians, Jews. The terrorists tortured their Jewish victims. They demanded to know the caste and home state of Indians. They held conference calls with their superiors in Lahore and Karachi to determine whether or not a certain h ostage should be killed. When the goal is a Muslim south Asia, the answer is almost always yes.

The operation was so skillful and deadly, complete with a maritime landing by inflatable craft, that one security expert said that Navy SEALs would have had a hard time pulling it off. The sophisticated tactics, as well as electronic evidence, point to the involvement of top Lashkar figures, and also, according to Indian sources, of current or former officers of Pakistan's intelligence and military. So the murders have led to a familiar volley of accusations, denials, counter-accusations, and threats between the nuclear-armed governments of India and Pakistan. They have also inspired a degree of restraint on India's part and pledges of coöperation on Pakistan's that are less familiar and more encouraging. 

In one sense, the most appropriate response—articulated by commentators and ordinary people after the terror was over—is to express solidarity with the victims, and also with the idea of Mumbai, which, like the idea of New York, represents a vision of society that is the opposite of the vision behind names like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hyderabad Deccan Mujahideen: impure, secular, modern, open. But moral revulsion doesn't suggest an intelligent course of action. The attacks in Mumbai reveal the vexing complexity of the interconnected conflicts throughout south Asia. At the urging of the United States, Pakistan had moved six divisions from its eastern frontier with Indian Kashmir t o fight militants on its western border with Afghanistan; now the terrorists have succeeded in inducing Pakistan to threaten to cut back its pressure on the tribal areas and redeploy its troops to the east. Islamist radicalism is the main spark that keeps inflaming these conflicts.

Some commentators have simply demanded that Pakistan rid itself of the virus of extremism that threatens its own security as well as its neighbors'. But which Pakistan is going to do it? The weak civilian government of President Asif Zardari? The two-faced security services? The tribal leaders along the Afghanistan border? The huge, overwhelmingly poor, tumultuous population? The core problem is that Pakistan is no longer really a country, if it ever was. "Our Pakistan strategy is hopelessly at odds with reality," David Kilcullen, a former counterinsurgency adviser to the State Department, said. "We treat it as an earnest but incapable ally in the war on terrorism." In fact, some civilian elements of the government are American allies; some military elements are American enemies. The wild northwest, where Islamist militants have extended their control and created a safe haven for Al Qaeda, has thwarted those who would govern it for a long time. Lord Curzon, the British viceroy of India at the turn of the last century, fumed, "No patchwork scheme—and all our present recent schemes . . . are mere patchwork—will settle the Waziristan problem. Not until the military steam-roller has passed ove r the country from end to end, will there be peace. But I do not want to be the person to start that machine."

American policymakers must be tempted to agree. Years of U.S. efforts in Pakistan—military aid, air strikes, Special Forces operations, bilateral diplomacy, coaxings, warnings—have been patchwork, and they have failed. Different approaches, including ones suggested in "World at Risk," such as putting more effort into development and governance in Pakistan's northwest, or bringing other regional countries to the table, offer some promise. But, in Kilcullen's words, "Iraq might be easier than this. It's a very, very difficult problem, and we don't have much leverage in it."

In the days after the Mumbai attacks, the Washington Post reported that the Obama transition team was considering Richard Holbrooke as a special envoy to the region. The position would create a kind of civilian counterpart to General David Petraeus, the head of Central Command, filling a diplomatic void in U.S. foreign policy that the military has occupied throughout the Bush years. The Administration has always regarded terrorism in the narrow terms of war, and this myopia led it to deal with the region's countries in isolation from one another, so that the policy in Kabul sometimes contradicted the one in Islamabad, which in turn was undermined by the growing partnership with New Delhi, and all of them were hampered by the refusal to talk to Tehran,=2 0whose role in the affairs of its neighbors to the east receives little attention. A special envoy would have to see the problem whole.

Holbrooke is the most experienced diplomat in the Democratic Party, and the aggressive negotiating skill he showed in brokering the Dayton accords that ended the war in Bosnia is badly needed in south Asia. But a legacy of the Bush Administration is that America can no longer sweep in and impose a solution on a crisis. The answers for Pakistan lie largely in its own hands—that's the most frightening thing of all. ♦