Pakistan as an issue in Asia

Benazir Bhutto’s killing was horrific. At a personal level I can only hope she didn’t suffer too much as she died. But she had already shown herself to be an extremely courageous leader. It is true– though it is not nearly sufficient– to say that assassinating her was a cowardly act. And western commentators are quite right to point out that this assassination pushes Pakistan further and faster on the path it already seemed to be on, towards an even more serious political crisis and perhaps state failure of a catastrophic kind… This, in a country that (a) has nuclear weapons, and (b) is an absolutely crucial part of, and location for, the US-led campaign against Al-Qaeda and its supporters.
But where most western commentators have it wrong, I think, is when they assume that this is just about all that is at stake in Pakistan. That is an extremely solipsistic, occidocentric viewpoint.
Hey, people! Pakistan is located in Asia. So is Afghanistan. And developments in those two countries are not simply of concern to the US-led west. In fact, other major world powers including China, India, and Russia, have far greater stakes in the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan than do the US or its western allies, and correspondingly greater concerns about the threat of political meltdown in those two countries.
We could remember, first of all, that Pakistan received some key assists in the development of its nuclear weapons program from China (and also some from the US, I seem to recall.) That happened at a time when China was not unreasonably concerned about India’s development of nuclear weapons. At that time, India had a strategic alliance with the Soviet Union (and yes, there still was a Soviet Union.) And Russia and the Soviet Union were in serious strategic competition with each other.
So there is, for starters, a very tight historical nexus among the nuclear-weapons stances of the four large Asian countries…
Well, that was back in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, relations among these and many other Asian countries have shifted significantly. Today’s China has much better relations with Russia and India than it did back then. All three of those countries have reason to be extremely concerned indeed about any further eruption and consolidation of violent Islamism in and from central Asia, such as might well ensue from further social/political breakdown in Pakistan and Afghanistan. China, India, and Russia probably all feel themselves to be in the front rank of those threatened by any Taliban/Qaeda resurgence in Central Asia– much more than distant America, or Europe.
So what is the logic of having the US and NATO play such a prominent role in the anti-Qaeda campaign in Afghanistan, and having the US play such a prominent role in it, in Pakistan? Especially given the political toxicity of the US and its western allies in Muslim societies at the present time… This really does not make any sense to me.
(I found this article, by BBC producer Ben Anderson, who was embedded with the British forces in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province last summer, very informative. The bottom line I took from it was that even 5.5 years into the West’s anti-Taleban campaign inside Afghanistan, its leaders still didn’t have any clue as to how they might succeed, and in the interim were relying only on loosing massive amounts of deadly ordnance into the country and its people.)
But at a broader political level it doesn’t make much sense, either. Unless, I suppose, you were a wily Russian or Chinese strategic planner and you saw the military and power-projection capabilities of the US and its NATO allies being rapidly and very expensively attrited there in the mountains of Afghanistan. But it strikes me that if such planners exist, their joy at seeing NATO and the Taleban slugging at each other there in the mountains would not be unbounded, or endless. Especially because the West’s position in the fight now seems so very, very precarious, bringing us closer to the point where its forces might actually need to be bailed out if the whole world– including of course, those front-line Asian nations– is not to be faced with a massive growth of Taleban/Qaeda-style power.
I have tried to think like a Pentagon planner, too. Pakistan is crucial to the US-led fight against the Taleban– not just because it has its own Talebs and provides a safe haven for the Talebs from Afghanistan, but also because a huge proportion of the military and support materiel the Western forces in Afghanistan rely on is shipped in along the land routes through Pakistan. (75%, according to this November report.)
Alert JWN readers will recall this post I published here December 17, taking note of and commenting on the report the WaPo ran that same day, to the effect that planners in the US military were already starting to call for a hastened shifting of focus and troops from Iraq to Afghanistan.
Bhutto’s killing will probably make such a shift seem even more urgent. However, all the questions I raised in that earlier post about whether simply adding more US troops into support of a pacification campaign in Afghanistan that does not look designed or headed for success– and may indeed be actually unwinnable in the way it is currently being waged– still stand.
I see that a researcher at the usually very sober Congressional Research Service wrote in this recent (PDF) report on the NATO campaign in Afghanistan that

The mission of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Afghanistan is seen as a test of the alliance’s political will and military capabilities. The allies are seeking to create a “new” NATO, able to go beyond the European theater and combat new threats such as terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Afghanistan is NATO’s first “out-of-area” mission beyond Europe…

What the researcher there, Paul Gallis, does not specify is who is doing this “seeing”. Member-states of NATO, obviously; but equally clearly, other states around the world, too, who might not have any particular interest in seeing NATO succeed at developing an “out of area” capability.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think there are some interesting geostrategic parallels between the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In both, you have the US leading an intentionally non-UN “coalition of the willing” (COTW) that is fighting a non-winning pacification campaign in the middle of a country marked by huge political complexity, very high levels of violence, and state bodies that are not able to deliver any services at all to the vast majority of the country’s national territory.
In both countries, too, you have the leaders of other nearby countries sitting by, watching with some degree of satisfaction as the US-led COTW grinds itself deeper and deeper into the quagmire– but these countries also don’t want the US’s most determined opponents in either country to win, either… So there is some careful calibrating that these neighbors need to do. Above all, they don’t want to make it impossible for the US to “ask” them to come to its aid if the present COTW’s situation should start to fall apart very rapidly– which it might, in either Iraq, or Afghanistan.
In Iraq, the main neighbors sitting in this position are Iran (and Syria.) But in Afghanistan, it seems to me the geostrategic stakes are even higher, since China and Russia are both among the neighbors who are currently sitting there in “watchful waiting” mode…