An unwanted mediator

 Hardnews Bureau Delhi

The first overseas trip that US's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) boss, Leon Panetta, undertook was to New Delhi. Barely a few weeks into his job, he carried a message for India's lame duck government: cooperate with Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) to fight Islamic terror.

Panetta, who met Union Home Minister, P Chidambaram, National Security Advisor, MK Narayanan, RAW and IB chiefs during his short Delhi stay, went back empty-handed, but left behind an old India hand and a CIA analyst, as the "acting ambassador" to India. Panetta was told about the political and strategic sensitivities of the Indian establishment and how the suggestion of cooperation between Indian intelligence agencies with the ISI would not merit any consideration by any government in Delhi. "He seemed to be ill-informed about the subcontinent's troubled history and the role of ISI in causing problems in this region," informed an Indian intelligence source to Hardnews.

US President Barack Obama, who resolved to fix the Afghanistan problem during the run-up to the November elections, is engaged in a major strategic review of the Afghanistan policy. He appointed Richard Holbrooke as his representative for Afghanistan-Pakistan (now called Af-Pak in strategic circles) to find ways to sort out a mess that in Obama's reckoning has not got much attention.

Holbrooke's visit to India and Pakistan provided a glimpse of his line of thinking that has caused some anxiety in Delhi. His statement on the Taliban is extremely significant and fraught with interesting possibilities. "For the first time in 60 years, your country, Pakistan and the US, face an enemy (the Taliban) that poses direct threats to our leaderships, our capitals and our people," Holbrooke told the press in New Delhi. He got a stirring endorsement from Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee, who dittoed it by saying: "In my assessment, the Taliban is a danger to humanity and civilisation."

By asserting that the Taliban posed direct threat to the leadership of all the three countries "our capitals and our people", Holbrooke firstly unhinged the Pakistani government or its agencies from any kind of involvement in sustaining the jehadi terror network that India keeps accusing. Secondly, and more significantly, he in some ways hinted that the perpetrators of the atrocities in Mumbai last November, too, had Talibani origin.

To reiterate, Holbrooke successfully peddled the idea in New Delhi that the "ungoverned spaces", as US Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, puts it, between Pakistan and Afghanistan, are responsible for the rise in terror in this region. Holbrooke elegantly draws from some new interpretations of the history of this region when he said that it is "one theater of war straddling an ill-defined border. We have to think of it that way and not distinguish between the two".

All this fancy footwork is to convince Indians that they need to participate in this 'great war' to save their society and their way of life. Holbrooke echoed New Delhi's concerns by saying that Pakistan has replaced Afghanistan as the epicentre of the threat posed by international terrorists.

"We must recognise that the heart of the threat to the United States, to the European Union, to Australia, to many other countries in the world including India and, I stress, including Pakistan itself, comes from... western Pakistan," Holbrooke told participants at the Brussels security conference.