Most of their energy will go towards the stabilization of Iraq and a focus on multilateralism that would drastically differ from Bush’s eight years of unilateral policy. But amid the fallout of the latest terrorist attacks on Mumbai, India, Obama and his team will now have to be aware of a new worry: a volatile South Asia.
As the death toll of the Mumbai massacre rises to upward of 180, the Indian government is slowly gathering the facts of all the attacks and piecing together who was behind the assault. Early analysis has revealed that the terrorists are Islamist militants, and India claims that they have Pakistani links.
And they are probably true, according to Stratfor, a leading geopolitical intelligence and analysis company. The Mumbai attackers are likely Islamist militants operating within India, “with some level of outside support from Pakistan.” This news is troubling, and won’t bode well for Indo-Pak relations: India can’t afford to take any blame for the attacks, so all the blame will be aimed at Pakistan, and in return, India can “use the crisis atmosphere to strengthen the government’s internal position by invoking nationalism,” according to Stratfor.
“That, in turn, will plunge India and Pakistan into the worst crisis they have had since 2002,” Stratfor says. As the situation escalates, the United States would be drawn in, not only because Americans and Westerners were held hostage and allegedly targeted at the hotels in Mumbai, but also because Pakistan has always sided with the United States on the War on Terror, and would be expected to cooperate. Demands to crush domestic militants would flood into Pakistan.
But both India and Pakistan could face another ticking time-bomb: one coming inside their borders, warns Stratfor. Should India not be assertive in its demands to Pakistan to hunt down Islamic militants, or should Pakistan not answer calls to respond, their respective leaders and governments could lose credibility and their grip on their populaces, and “massive destabilization [would be] possible,” which, Stratfor comments, is “never a good thing with a nuclear power.”
Pakistan faces a unique predicament, since its military has “created, trained and sustained [Islamic militant] groups” like those that attacked Mumbai, according to Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria. The United States even has relatively close ties to Pakistan’s military, to the point of propping up corrupt and ruthless General Pervez Musharraf as the former Prime Minister, in exchange for his allegiance on the War on Terror. Under Musharraf, and for the past three decades, the Pakistani military didn’t care to suppress some militants, for the simple fact that they felt the militants that threatened to destabilize India and Afghanistan were “good” and the ones that killed Pakistanis “bad.”
But more recently, according to Zakaria, the “problems of Pakistan, Afghanistan and India are bleeding into one another so that what you have is a kind of south Asian terrorism where these groups are feeding off each other, finding pockets where they can train in lawless parts of the country.”
One notable region is Waziristan—the mountainous region between Afghanistan and Pakistan where Osama bin Laden is suspected of hiding. During his presidential campaign and more specifically during the presidential debates, Obama has repeatedly vowed that he would make finding and eliminating bin Laden a top priority and that he would order strikes in Pakistan if Pakistan was unable to pursue bin Laden.
Bin Laden and al-Qaeda have dominated America’s attention, having been the perpetrators of the September 11th attacks and multiple other terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. However, Islamist militants breeding in South Asia, along with terrorists harbored by the resurgence of the Taliban of Afghanistan, could pose significant threats as well in the near future.
Seven years after America invaded Afghanistan, the ruling Taliban that was toppled is eyeing a resurrection, setting up “courts and other local-government institutions across southern Afghanistan, challenging U.S. efforts to pacify the country and bolster the authority of the central government in Kabul,” according to the November 20 edition of the Wall Street Journal.
American generals are saying that not enough troops are in Afghanistan to weed out the Taliban, echoing a sentiment felt by the President-elect himself, who has argued that more troops in Afghanistan were needed as much as in Iraq.
If Afghanistan falls to the Taliban, al-Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists would likely run rampant. If India and Pakistan erupt in war, not only would all of South Asia become a powder keg, but militants would get the green-light to wreak further havoc.
