Kashmir, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan & U.S. Foreign Policy

This is a brief article to describe some elements of the equilibrium of terrorist organization location, activity and relationship in the central Asian region, as I understand it. For an American citizen with interests besides those of foreign policy objectives and analysis there is quite a lot of time consuming reading required to get a meaningful idea of the relationships in this area.

The U.S. Defense budget is just about the largest expense annual in the U.S. federal budget. We as citizens are told by the military from year t year that the 'war' must go on for several years for national defense. We also wonder if the cost is worth the return. Since it is our federal budget, we have no necessity of signing carte blanche these checks too fund military, defense contractors and C.I.A. ventures abroad. National interest might be in making our own nation prosper rather than those of central Asia.

So we wonder; is the premise that installing a friendly government in Afghanistan will halt most al Qaeda terrorist attacks on the United States valid. Another point possible, desirable and so forth. We wonder how many years that will take, and what the opportunity for the United States will be?

The origin of terrorist training camps and organizations in Pakistan goes back to the early 19th century. Jihadist organizations sought to repel the noon-Muslim British occupiers. Yet we will skip over that to the more recent 1940's, 1970s and 1980's when two more recent political conflicts stimulated the formation of jihadist terrorist training organizations in Pakistan.
The first and most significant cause was the sectarian separation of India and Pakistan and their fight to control Kashmir. On one side is the Hindu Indian Government with the legal title to Kashmir and on the other is the majority population of Muslims with decades long support continuing to the present of training of jihadist Muslim guerilla fighters. The 1972 line of control roughly divided Kashmir and Jammu in half and is a good enough permanent boundary, yet neither nation (Pakistan or India) would be happy with that, and the additional problem of Kashmiri Muslim guerrillas fighting for Kashmiri national independence form both Pakistan and India also exists.

The Pakistan Intelligence Service and military have worked for decades in providing training and support for Kashmiri Muslim jhadist guerrilla fighters. Pakistani leaders have supported the constellation of terrorist training camps and have provided arms and munitions including some from the United States.

The Afghanistan war against the Soviets and the Afghan civil war following led to the Taliban taking control of most of the nation. The Taliban were formed in Pakistan and simply move south when American forces are present. It is possible that a natural selection of fundamentalist Muslim leaders are elevated to lead the Taliban and that to negotiate with the United States would be suicidal in effect, for the Taliban would be at the top of one jihadist pyramid and unlikely to receive broad popular support in the jihadist community if they fraternized with the infidels much. U.S. concepts of negotiating with theTaliban seem destine to just create a Hamas effect of shifting the violence to another terrorist organization and infrastructure supported at sometime by the Pakistani I.S.I. (intelligence service).

The United States to reduce the terrorist training in Pakistan would need to settle the Kashmir issue satisfactorily to all concerned parties first. That would reduce tensions between India and Pakistan. Pakistan does not want Indian involvement in Afghanistan and were probably happy when the Indian embassy in Kabul was blown up in 2008.

From my point of view it seems improbable that the Indian-Pakistani boundary, water rights and Kashmir control issues will be solved in the next year or two, and that means more pressure for Pakistan to support Muslim jihadist guerrillas to train in Northern Pakistan to establish terror structures and cells in Kashmir. Whenever Pakistan regulars go to fight in Kashmir as they have in the past against Indian forces it escalates the conflict--and that could lead to a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India potentially.

A comprehensive solution to the problems of Pakistan and Kashmir seems an essential element of a plan to have peace in Afghanistan. It is dubious that peace and stability in Afghanistan would itself eliminate the terrorist dangers to U.S. interests, for al Qa'eda and the Taliban merely moved south and east when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and are flourishing there today.
Perhaps Bin Ladin is in an alp near Nanga Parbat in Kashmir with a few wives enjoying the good, rural life-who can say? At six foot five Oz bin Ladin is a striking king of figure in some regards, and one unlikely to be followed by the paparazzi for some years. Because the U.S. Government does not say what its comprehensive India-Pakistan-Kashmir-Afghanistan policy is, we have no basis to determine if it is competent or not, or if there is not a need to formulate a better and more effective policy to reduce the development of terrorism in the region.