Author: pstaniland

Asfandyar Mir at USIP summarizes the current state of play:

“Four developments will significantly shape politics in Pakistan and determine the prospects of stability in the near term.

• Judicial intervention. The Supreme Court’s order to release Khan adds to tensions between the army and the court. The army had signaled its intent to hold the PTI leadership, including Khan, to account for the violence against military installations, so the release order, by offering reprieve to Khan and the PTI, dilutes the army’s plan. The court’s intervention may also shield Khan in future legal proceedings as judges are sensitive to cues from the Supreme Court’s chief justice. That could frustrate military leaders and push them to consider emergency measures, perhaps even direct intervention.
• Military cohesion. Khan’s future prospects and the government and the military’s ability to counter the PTI also depend, in great measure, on the military establishment’s cohesion. Pakistan’s military establishment, generally composed of senior officers in the army and intelligence services, has shown no overt signs of fracture, but the past year has included signs of its cohesion being under pressure. Khan and his party have significant support in military elite networks; retired military officers have been extremely critical of the establishment’s approach and its decision to distance itself from Khan since last year. Amid the widespread protests and judicial intervention, senior military leadership may be under pressure to de-escalate current tensions and take an off-ramp from the crackdown against the PTI. On the other hand, the sense of embarrassment and breach of honor due to PTI supporters’ attacks against military installations could create a “rally around the flag” effect, and Khan’s support within the military’s elite networks may begin to diminish. The military’s cohesion remains important to watch.
• Level of violence. An important factor will be the scale of violence. The government, in coordination with the military, has launched a major crackdown against the PTI for inciting and directing violence. While Khan’s release immediately eased popular anger, a re-arrest, which is possible, could revive protests. If protesters target military personnel and installations again, the crackdown could become more severe. Terrorist violence by the Pakistani Taliban, which has been surging, also could add to the instability. In general, more agitation and violence can trigger emergency measures, including countrywide curfews. That will also push the country towards a direct military intervention. But if the protests persist beyond those emergency measures, Khan may prevail, and the government and military could back off.
• Economic crisis. A wild card is Pakistan’s precarious economic situation. Pakistan has been muddling through a balance of payments crisis, and in the next few months, it has major repayments due to its multilateral, private and bilateral lenders. To manage these repayments and avert a default, Pakistan foremost needs rollover and refinanced loans of a couple of billion dollars from China. Pakistan is also looking to revive a program of loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which remains stalled due to Pakistan not meeting the IMF’s conditions. The crisis will make it harder for Pakistan to convince the IMF — and possibly even Chinese leadership, which publicly called for political stability in the country — to provide the help necessary to avert default and keep the economy afloat. The narrow path for Pakistan to avert economic collapse has narrowed further.”

An interesting new Journal of Peace Research article by UChicago’s own Andres Uribe:

“How do armed actors affect the outcome of elections? Recent scholarship on electoral violence shows that armed groups use violence against voters to coerce them to abstain or vote for the group’s allies. Yet this strategy is risky: coercion can alienate civilians and trigger state repression. I argue that armed actors have another option. A wide range of armed groups create governance institutions to forge ties of political authority with civilian communities, incorporating local populations into armed groups’ political projects and increasing the credibility of their messaging. The popular support, political mobilization, and social control enabled by governance offer a means to sway voters’ political behavior without resorting to election violence. I assess this argument in the context of the Peruvian civil war, in which Shining Path insurgents leveraged wealth redistribution and political propaganda to influence voting behavior. Archival evidence, time series analysis of micro-level violent event data, and a synthetic control study provide support for these claims. These results have implications for theories of electoral violence, governance by non-state actors, and political behavior in war-torn societies.”

First, Ashley Tellis’ new piece in Foreign Affairs is an eyebrow-raiser because he has been a foremost proponent of closer India-US ties, both while in government and since. The headline is perhaps a bit hyperbolic (“America’s Bad Bet on India”) but the piece is nevertheless striking. I’ve expressed skepticism about the ceiling of India-US strategic alignment in this 2018 War on the Rocks article (some of which has held up well, some of which hasn’t) and noted many countries’ lack of interest in the “liberal international order” in this 2018 Lawfare piece, so have sympathies with some of the claims.

That being said, I’m just not sure how much “the bet” being good or bad rests on India becoming tightly aligned with the United States – it all hinges on what you expected and what you think is a “good enough” outcome. It would not shock me at all if India was able to extract some benefits from the US partnership while also partnering with Russia, France, etc, and possibly even arriving at a rapprochement with China, and avoiding an overwhelmingly prioritized relationship/alignment with the US in doing so.

That would certainly be very far from India being a core strategic ally building a pro-American order in Asia as a major importer of US weapons systems, a goal which appears in some of Tellis’ own past writings (see his contribution here, for instance). But such a dramatic outcome always seemed fairly unlikely to me, so it’s hard to get too exercised about its failure to come to fruition. A more muddling-along, better-but-not-harmonious approach seems potentially plausible and adequate, too, shorn of high-flying rhetoric and accurately characterized in public discourse.

Much also rests on how you think about the need for, nature of, and best approach to US competition with the PRC – is a broadly bigger, richer India a net benefit for the US, regardless of anything else, or does it need much closer integration into America’s security infrastructure in Asia? If you’re more relaxed about China, or think it primarily needs economic/diplomatic responses, then the former seems just fine; if you see a highly-militarized, rapidly intensifying present-danger arms race in which the US, Japan, and India are seriously on the backfoot in the face of the PRC, then a more institutionalized, security-oriented partnership, a la the latter outcome, is more necessary. That answer might also affect what you are interested in offering India.

Anyways, it’s an important piece worth reading and reflecting upon:

“Washington’s current expectations of India are misplaced. India’s significant weaknesses compared with China, and its inescapable proximity to it, guarantee that New Delhi will never involve itself in any U.S. confrontation with Beijing that does not directly threaten its own security. India values cooperation with Washington for the tangible benefits it brings but does not believe that it must, in turn, materially support the United States in any crisis—even one involving a common threat such as China.

The fundamental problem is that the United States and India have divergent ambitions for their security partnership. As it has done with allies across the globe, Washington has sought to strengthen India’s standing within the liberal international order and, when necessary, solicit its contributions toward coalition defense. Yet New Delhi sees things differently. It does not harbor any innate allegiance toward preserving the liberal international order and retains an enduring aversion toward participating in mutual defense. It seeks to acquire advanced technologies from the United States to bolster its own economic and military capabilities and thus facilitate its rise as a great power capable of balancing China independently, but it does not presume that American assistance imposes any further obligations on itself.

As the Biden administration proceeds to expand its investment in India, it should base its policies on a realistic assessment of Indian strategy and not on any delusions of New Delhi becoming a comrade-in-arms during some future crisis with Beijing.”

Second, Laxman Kumar Behera has a working paper with IGCC on how he characterizes India’s approach to strategic competition with China. It comes in quite differently on the India-US relationship (“India has forged a strong defense and security partnership with the United States. This is evident on multiple counts”) and has a much greater focus on geoeconomics and economic innovation, as opposed to hard security, compared to Tellis (who differentiates “high politics” from “low politics” in his piece). It’s definitely a different lens for thinking about where India’s strategy focuses, and I found a lot of the data pretty interesting as someone how doesn’t focus on technology or economic statecraft. Go forth and read (it’s less copy-and-paste summarizeable than the much shorter Tellis article).