August 28, 2018: The United States continues to cut military ties with Pakistan because of Pakistani refusal to shut down its support of Islamic terror groups that, in effect, do the bidding of the Pakistani military. The latest cuts include training for Pakistani officers in American military schools (alongside American and other foreign officers). Russia immediately stepped in and offered to replace the American training with equivalent Russian training. This is a major loss for Pakistan as their officers gained more useful instruction and more useful contacts (with American and other foreign officers) at the American senior schools.
Pakistan already has a number of defense relationships with Russia. For example in 2015 India and Pakistan joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and became full members in 2017. India and Pakistan recently sent troops to Russia to take part in SCO joint training exercises. This is the first time Indian and Pakistani troops have jointly participated in counter-terrorism training. These SCO joint training exercises take place every two years. SCO is a regional security forum founded in Shanghai in 2001 by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Russia, and China. The main purpose of the SCO was originally fighting Islamic terrorism. Russia, however, hoped to build the SCO into a counterbalance against NATO. That has not happened as no one has joined since India and Pakistan did. SCO members conduct joint military exercises, mostly for show. They also share intel on terrorists, which is often useful. Iran, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mongolia, and Turkey were all favorably disposed towards joining the SCO. These nations were allowed to send observers to meetings.
China has put more emphasis on economic cooperation because greater Chinese economic power means that China is replacing Russia as the principal investor and trading partner throughout the region. Russia does not like to dwell on this, because it means China is expanding its economic and political power. This is particularly true in Pakistan. On paper China is now the dominant military power in Eurasia, a fact that Russia likes to downplay. Many Russians fear that the aggression China is demonstrating towards India and everyone bordering the South China Sea will eventually be turned towards Russia. As the old saying goes; “hold your friends close, and your enemies closer.”
China and India have used this mutual SCO experience to improve military relationships and discuss mutual problems (aside from all the Chinese claims on Indian territory). India is willing to talk, if only because Indian military capabilities are falling further behind those of China. That is no secret in China and India has only itself to blame because China has done a better job of creating an efficient manufacturing capability and reducing corruption in the procurement process. Indian military procurement is still crippled by corruption and very ineffective state owned weapons development and manufacturing organizations. The only thing stopping China from just taking disputed border areas is the Indian nuclear weapons capability. The Indian nukes are also less effective than their Chinese counterparts but not to the extent that there is not a high risk of China suffering heavy losses in a nuclear exchange. So China will continue grabbing bits of Indian territory, bits too small to risk a nuclear war over. China is patient and India gets weaker so China makes the most of the situation.
Speaking of friends and enemies, Pakistan has some bizarre relationships in that department. Consider the Taliban movement, which is a major reason for the Americans cutting aid. Actually there are two Taliban movements, both of them staffed largely by Pushtun tribesmen (long dominant in southern Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan). Both Taliban movements were founded in Pakistan, one by the military and the other because of the military. The original Taliban was created by the Pakistani military in the mid-1990s (by recruiting Afghan Pushtun refugees) and sending them back home to win, or come close to winning, the civil war that had been underway since the Russians left in 1989. This Afghan Taliban still works for the Pakistani military but by 2007 that inspired the formation of a Pakistani Taliban, recruited from Pakistani Pushtuns, to overthrow the Pakistani government and, as the Afghan Taliban tried to do, establish a religious dictatorship. The Pakistani military declared war on the Pakistani Taliban in 2014 and quickly crushed but did destroy them.
The Afghan Taliban are another matter. Because the Afghan Taliban still have the support of the Pakistani military they are still a threat to the Afghan government and that is mainly because the Afghan Taliban have a sanctuary in southwest Pakistan (Baluchistan), right across the border from Helmand province, where most of the heroin (in the world) is produced. The Pakistan military facilitates getting whatever the Afghan Taliban need from Pakistan and, for a fee, getting the Afghan heroin into Pakistan and out to the world via the port of Karachi.
Meanwhile the remnants of the Pakistani Taliban hide out in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border. A favorite hideout for all sorts of Islamic terrorists, smugglers and outlaws is Nangarhar province where the Afghan military and American forces are constantly seeking out all manner of Islamic terrorists (Haqqani Network, al Qaeda, ISIL and both flavors of Taliban). For example on August 25th an American air strike killed the head of the Afghan branch of ISIL. This sort of thing is one reason ISIL has not been able to spread into Pakistan. This is something the Pakistani military would rather not dwell on because Pakistan prefers to insist that Afghanistan and the Americans are not doing enough to suppress Islamic terrorists who are hostile to Pakistan (especially the Pakistani Taliban).
Although a growing number of Afghan Taliban leaders want peace and an end to being manipulated by the Pakistanis the senior Afghan Taliban leader and the Pakistani generals are not inclined to consider peace talks because of all that money from the drug gangs as well as the ability to “control” (or at least disrupt) Afghanistan. Direct peace talks between Afghan Taliban leaders and the United States, which is now a possibility, are very risky for the Taliban and their Pakistani patrons because the existence of their sanctuaries in Pakistan, while denied by the Pakistani military, are an open secret in Pakistan where it is also obvious that the Pakistan military and its intelligence agency (the ISI) handles these sanctuaries. Those sanctuaries make it possible for the Afghan Taliban to plan and organize attacks on internal enemies (factions that oppose Pakistani control). Peace talks between the Americans and factions of the Afghan Taliban are just one of the problems the Afghan Taliban faces. There has been growing internal unrest, mainly between factions that believe they are serving Pakistan at the expense of Afghans. On an individual basis, more Afghan Taliban veterans are quitting to join ISIL because they see the Afghan Taliban becoming more of a drug gang security force than anything else. Other Taliban veterans just quit. The Afghan Taliban is gradually losing its true believers (in the original goal of establishing a religious dictatorship in Afghanistan) and turning into mercenaries.
Whatever the Afghan Taliban evolves into the Pakistani military will have a major role to play. The Palistani military does what it wants in Afghanistan, just like it does in Pakistan, where the military is very much above the law and can usually do whatever it wants. That is not a secret because about half the time since Pakistan was created in 1947 the military has openly run the government (after a coup) until popular opposition (and frustration at the task of governing) forced the generals to allow elections again. The Afghan Taliban insist their main goal is to get foreign troops out of Afghanistan but say nothing about suppressing the widely unpopular drug trade. Moreover terrorism related deaths are overwhelmingly caused by the Islamic terrorists, mainly Taliban and Haqqani Network terror attacks. These men die protecting the drug production that has turned millions of Afghans into addicts and crippled efforts to build the economy and educate the children. Few Taliban really believe they are doing anything good for Afghanistan or the average Afghan.
To maintain control of the Afghan Taliban the ISI calls on another of their “protected” Islamic terror groups; the Haqqani Network. This group was once a faction in the 1990s Afghan civil war but always had a good relationship with the ISI. Over the last two decades Haqqani have turned into a criminal gang that also manages terror operations in Afghanistan for ISI. Because of that Haqqani, at the behest of ISI, also became part of the current Afghan Taliban senior leadership. Most Afghans know all about this and are not happy with how the Pakistani military gets away with it.
The Unwanted Bengalis
It’s not just Burma that has a problem with unwanted migrants from Bangladesh. Most of these Burmese Moslems are technically stateless because during the colonial period the British needed more workers in Burma and simply offered the jobs to Moslem Bengalis who stayed in Buddhist Burma after the British left in 1948 and now find themselves declared stateless and forced back into Bangladesh. Thus there are at least a million Moslems in Burma who originally (often over a century ago) came from Bangladesh but don’t want to return there. They prefer to live in Burma, where most of the population is Buddhist.
India has a similar problem in its northeast tribal territories, especially Assam, where four million Bengali migrants (most of them or their ancestors entered illegally) are being denied citizen status. The tribal locals have long resented the illegal migrants, more so than the legal migrants. India sees this citizenship crackdown as a way to reducing support for local tribal separatist rebels. It wasn’t the British who brought the Bengalis into Assam before 1948 but Indian politicians (mainly from the ruling BJP party) who encouraged the illegal migration after 1948 so these new residents of Assam would show their gratitude by registering to vote and do so regularly for BJP candidates. This is an old problem and India passed a law in 1950 making it clear that these Bengali migrants were illegal and not to be considered citizens. Now another law has been passed to enforce the original 1950 “who is a citizen” act. Bangladesh considers this an unfriendly (to Bangladesh) act. What this really demonstrates is that Bangladesh has long been very poor and very overpopulated. Illegal migrants have long been a problem and one that is not going away.
Islamic terrorism And Other Fatal Distractions
The Pakistani military continues to suppress Islamic terrorist violence in Pakistan while increasing it in Afghanistan and India. In 2014, when the Pakistani army finally decided to shut down sanctuaries for Islamic terror groups not under military control, there were 5,496 Islamic terror related deaths in Pakistan and the Pakistani public was enraged at the military. In 2015 that Islamic terror related deaths in Pakistan dropped to 3,682, then to 1,803 in 2016, 1260 in 2017 and so far in 2018 it looks like these deaths will fall to under a thousand and possibly even below 800. These are low casualty levels not seen in Pakistan since 2003.
India, with six times as many people, has had terror related deaths under a thousand a year since 2012 and most of those have nothing to do with Islamic terrorism. That trend continues, despite increased Pakistani efforts in Kashmir. For 2018 India will have more terrorism related deaths but still under a thousand. In 2017, for the first time in many years, India had more fatalities from Islamic terrorism than from leftist rebels in eastern India. But if you added deaths from tribal separatists in the northeast the Islamic terrorism only accounted for 45 percent of deaths. That trend has reverted to the traditional one in 2018, with Islamic terror related deaths lower. This is mainly because Islamic terror related deaths will not increase much for 2018 while deaths related to the leftist rebels (Maoists) in eastern India are up (mainly among the Maoists and their civilian victims).
The big difference between the Kashmir casualties compared to everything else (communist rebels in eastern India and the tribal separatists in the northeast) is that only the Kashmir Islamic terrorists have outside help. Pakistan has been supporting violence in Kashmir for over 60 years and added Islamic terrorism support in the 1980s. That failed but it did ruin the Kashmir economy and Pakistan continued to get enough Islamic terrorists (recruited and trained in Pakistan) across the LOC (Line of Control) into Indian Kashmir to keep the area “dangerous” for tourists or investment. Then Pakistan realized that a new generation of Kashmiri Moslems had access to the Internet and Pakistan created a local fan (of Pakistan ruling Kashmir rather than India) that eventually achieved celebrity status. When this young guy got himself killed he was elevated to martyr status and suddenly making the street violence a regular thing and Islamic terrorism fashionable once more, economic recovery became even less likely and casualties increased. For the first time in many years local recruits for Islamic terror groups were higher than those able to get across the LOC from Pakistan. In the last decade Indian border security has greatly improved but the LOC is largely in rugged terrain that is thinly populated. So it is not certain death to make the crossing. But with a larger number of active Islamic terrorists on the Indian side of the LOC those getting across from Pakistan have a longer life expectancy. This means more Islamic terrorist violence in Kashmir. While the Islamic terrorists try to confine their attacks to the security forces there are still civilian bystanders getting killed and with more Islamic terrorists active there is more opportunity to murder locals who support the government and don’t want to be part of Pakistan.
This Pakistani aggression in Kashmir is pushing the two nations towards war, despite the possibility of both sides using nukes. This has brought more pressure on the Pakistani military to behave but so far the Pakistani generals are resisting the popular pressure inside Pakistan for less violence on the Indian border. The Pakistani generals see Kashmir as a victory for Pakistan, but one that that Pakistan cannot take proper credit for because supporting Islamic terrorism and sending those Islamic terrorists into India (and Afghanistan) is a violation of international law. While the Pakistani military denies culpability the evidence has piled up to the extent that most of the world is convinced that the Pakistani military is, indeed, violating international norms and supporting Islamic terrorism.
When it comes to Islamic terrorism it is not all bad news. Consider Bangladesh. Despite the growing popularity (among Moslems) of Islamic radicalism in the last three decades, Moslem majority Bangladesh has been largely free of it. Compared to Pakistan (with a ten percent larger population) Bangladesh still had only six percent as many terrorist deaths as Pakistan during 2017. So far it looks like Bangladeshi terror related deaths will decline even more in 2018, to less than three percent of the Pakistani total and lower than they have been since 2012. That means under 30 deaths a year and 2018 is headed for another record low.
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