US ropes in Pak security experts, India jittery - Indrani Bagchi
NEW DELHI: As new US Centcom commander General David Petraeus begins a strategy security review in Tampa, Florida, the presence of two security analysts from Pakistan as consultants have raised eyebrows here.
Ahmed Rashid, an acknowledged authority on the Taliban and Afghanistan, and Shuja Nawaz, author of a book on the Pakistan army, have been named "consultants" at the classified review starting in Florida this weekend. The aim is to review the war plans in Afghanistan and Iraq as the Barack Obama administration considers the wisdom of a troop surge in Afghanistan.
About 100 military specialists, known as the Joint Strategic Assessment Team, will help with the wide-ranging assessment and are expected to report in February. They will be helped by policy officials from the participating countries. India's concern stems from the possibility that Rashid's latest recommendation of the "grand bargain" to solve Afghanistan's mammoth problems of security and terrorism may have found fertile ground in the Obama set. Certainly, the central argument in the article draws the same connections between "solving" terrorism in Afghanistan and "solving" Kashmir that Obama has been advocating for a while, including in the same journal some time ago.
In a much quoted article in the esteemed 'Foreign Affairs' journal, Rashid and America's best known Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin wrote that Pakistan would be persuaded to stop supporting terrorism if India can be persuaded to solve Kashmir, which they argue to be a bigger strategic threat to Pakistan than terrorists on their soil, which "can be controlled". This is a "grand bargain" that India will not support.
Ahmed Rashid, an acknowledged authority on the Taliban and Afghanistan, and Shuja Nawaz, author of a book on the Pakistan army, have been named "consultants" at the classified review starting in Florida this weekend. The aim is to review the war plans in Afghanistan and Iraq as the Barack Obama administration considers the wisdom of a troop surge in Afghanistan.
About 100 military specialists, known as the Joint Strategic Assessment Team, will help with the wide-ranging assessment and are expected to report in February. They will be helped by policy officials from the participating countries. India's concern stems from the possibility that Rashid's latest recommendation of the "grand bargain" to solve Afghanistan's mammoth problems of security and terrorism may have found fertile ground in the Obama set. Certainly, the central argument in the article draws the same connections between "solving" terrorism in Afghanistan and "solving" Kashmir that Obama has been advocating for a while, including in the same journal some time ago.
In a much quoted article in the esteemed 'Foreign Affairs' journal, Rashid and America's best known Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin wrote that Pakistan would be persuaded to stop supporting terrorism if India can be persuaded to solve Kashmir, which they argue to be a bigger strategic threat to Pakistan than terrorists on their soil, which "can be controlled". This is a "grand bargain" that India will not support.
posted by temporal at 11/08/2008
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