Angry Planet - Breaking Down Complex Conflict Between India and Pakistan

Episode Date: March 1, 2019

On February 14, a 20-year old man drove a car packed with explosives into a bus full of Indian Central Reserve Police Forces. 40 of the police officers died in the attack. This happened in an Indian controlled portion of Kashmir and India responded by launching an air strike on a village in Pakistan. Things have escalated since then and, as so often happens in modern conflict, gotten confusing and muddied.With us today to help untangle all this is Suchitra Vijayan. Vijayan is a writer, photographer, and lawyer. Her work has appeared in GQ, the Telegraph, and Foreign Policy. As a lawyer she worked for the United States war crimes tribunal for Yugoslavia and Rwanda. As a journalist, she was embedded with NATO-led troops along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and is currently studying the conflict in Kashmir and India’s borderlands.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Again, the question is, can two of the nuclear states keep doing this given the precarious nature of how things are unfolding, given what's happening in Iran, given what's happening in Syria, also understand that these regions are connected.

Just as what happened in Bosnia affected Iran during the Yugoslav war, or what's happening in Kashmir is going to affect the larger region. And I think those are things that we should be more cognizant of. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Derek Gannon. On February 14th, a 20-year-old manager of a car packed with explosives into a bus full of Indian Central Reserve police forces.

40 of the police officers died in the attack. This happened in an Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir, and India responded by launching an airstrike on a village in Pakistan. Things have escalated since then, and, as so often happens in modern conflict, gotten confusing and muddied. With us here today to help untangle all of this is Suchitra Vigyan. Vigyan is a writer, photographer, and lawyer. Her work has appeared in GQ, the Telegraph, and Foreign Policy. As a lawyer, she worked with United Nations War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia and Rewan. As a journalist, she was embedded with NATO-led troops along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border

and is currently studying the conflict in Kashmir in India's borderlands. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. As we'd like to do on this show, especially with a topic we're pretty ignorant about, quite honestly, I want to hit the basics. So tell us about Kashmir where it is, what the background of this conflict is and why it's such a contentious region. Right. Kashmir has been contentious. Often when you listen to the state narratives, they will talk about Kashmir as a conflict or a dispute that rises from the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. But if you ask the average Kashmiri on the street, you know, many of them would claim that they have been fighting and occupying force since the Mughal army first marched into Kashmir Valley in 1586. And for many Kashmiri, since the Mughals, it's the Afghans,

seeks the dogras, and of course the British come in. And then finally for them, now the Indian presence in the valley is just seen as one of the other presences of a long line of occupying armies capturing their territory. And often in many of these narratives, what we talk about is how India and Pakistan are fighting over our territory, which again, de-centers what Kashmiris truly believe, which is the right to self-determination and the right for their own state. So both countries, India and Pakistan, have laid claim to Kashmir since 1947, and both countries have gone to war multiple times. And something else happens in 1990s for the first time when Kashmiris and militants staged and armed a pricing against the Indian state and Indian-occupied Kashmir. In response, India launches its own counter-insurgency operations, which again, less.

to imposition of emergency laws. And what really started was a really bloody 15 to 20 years in which there were massacres, ex-adjudicial killings, torture, and to the large extent that still continues suspension of civil liberties for a large section of Kashmiri population. And much of the armed militancy was put down in early 2000.

And since 2000, what you've really seen is a people's protest asking for freedom and independence at the same time you have the war in Afghanistan. Often people claim that the war in Afghanistan is actually not about India and Pakistan's positions in Afghanistan is often not about Afghanistan but about Kashmir. So that's where we are in terms of Kashmir and what it means to the largest continent.

Recently, you had mentioned Afghanistan and the war in Afghanistan. The Taliban, due to the recent events in Kashmir, they're saying that the fighting in Kashmir could impact the Afghanistan peace talks. You kind of touched on it, but how do these conflicts kind of overlap? Right. I think the conflict, I mean, again, depending on who you talk to, if you talk to the story and they will go back as, you know, as back as 400 years. But what you really start with is the partitioning of the subcontinent, which becomes, India becomes Pakistan,

and then later East Bengal, East Pakistan becomes Bangladesh. And all the while you have Afghanistan. Also, one has to understand that when I did my field, work in Afghanistan. For a lot of the older generation of Afghans, the racial memory of a border is with India, not with Pakistan. So for them, all of this is one unity in which people and goods and ideas flowed back and forth all the way from Iran to what is today Bangladesh. And all of that somehow gets butchered and made into nation states and borders. The reason why Afghanistan is relevant is because Afghanistan has always been the battleground where empires and nations have a battle for proxy, whether it's Russia and the United States,

the British and the Americans, later the British and, I mean the Americans and the Soviets. Similarly, Afghanistan has become this proxy, a place of proxy war for India and Pakistan. For instance, in early around 2008-2009, India spent invested close to $1.2 billion in Afghanistan. They built roads. They have four embassies and consulates. They built its parliament building. Karzai was seen very close to the Indian state. Often all of this creating anxieties within Pakistan. And of course, there's also attacks against the Indian embassy in Afghanistan

that often is attributed to Pakistan. So what do you really see are these two nation states fighting for a certain kind of supremacy in the region? And often some of these wars kind of bleed into Afghanistan. but you also have to realize that a lot of the fighters who fought in the struggle in Kashmir came from Afghanistan. A lot of the mujahideans crossed the border. Even today, the people I spoke to in Pactica province would say that it's very easy for a lot of these young men to travel all the way up and into Pakistan and into Kashmir. So again, there's a long history of people

traveling and traversing these routes. So that's what's happening. And yeah, let me know if you have more questions or clarification about this. No, I think that's a good background. We're going back up to kind of the event that kicked all of this off. Can you tell us about the organization that the young man belonged to who drove the car and what they want and what their stake is in all of this? So there's a lot of discrepancies in this. So the organization, Adil Ahmadar, the young man who drove the SUV into the CRPF

convoy belongs to the organization, which is called Jem or Jaiish. The organization is led by Molana Masud Azar. But also there is conflicting report that initially he belonged to Luxury Taiba, which is a much older, more established organization, which also has its own networks, which also fought in Afghanistan. So again, we have no real confirmed information except for a video where he claims that he belongs to Jem. Jem's crucial role, Jem again, was founded in early 2000s. It was funded by Pakistan. It had the blessings of Osama bin Laden.

And unlike luxury Thawiba, which has a larger mandate of fighting certain injustices, colonial imperial injustices in large Muslim countries or Islamic countries, James is very focused on Kashmir. Their main goal is to unite Kashmiri territory with Pakistan. And Gemma, again, had as acclaimed, you know, responsibility for a lot of these attacks in the last couple of years. One of the interesting articles that we read in the run-up to this is your piece about the competing narratives surrounding what happened in the area.

and I think, especially like looking at modern conflicts, this is really a, you can almost teach it in a classroom. As you're watching different powers spin different narratives, and I'm wondering if you could talk about that a little bit and how each side sees things. Right. I think we need to foreground this in the larger context of how media has been reporting war since the war in Kuwait.

I think Kuwait War was the first war in which, for the first time, you had journalists embed with the U.S. forces. And in some ways, given the global hegemony the United States has, it's interesting that a lot of Indian newspapers now, both newspapers and television anchors in India, in Pakistan, and Bangladesh, world over now use what is the CNN or the Fox format. Very often they become, often what you really get is not facts, not. reporting, but a lot of it is ideologically shaded. In India, of course, this has been happening for a really long time, given that India is a Hindu majority country and many of the news anchors and newspaper reporters who have these powerful positions often report with very specific nationalistic angles. For instance, one of the most powerful newspaper editors, sorry, television anchor editors says, you know, if I'm going to report,

I'm always going to report. His name is Sudhir Chowdhary, and he says, if I'm going to report, of course I'm going to report with the nationalistic bend. If you don't like living in this country, then leave the country. If you don't like on reporting, leave the country. It's very interesting that in some ways

the journalists have taken the responsibility of becoming amplifiers of the state position rather than investigating and giving out facts. And what is specifically troubling about the recent Pulwama attack is that, first, there is no evidence. As of today, we have very little actionable intelligence connecting the attacks to Pakistan. While Gem was historically

funded by Pakistan, we also understand that Pakistan does not have complete control over many of these non-state access at funds. One of the reasons that Pakistan creates Gem is because luxury Taiba, the older organization it funds, in some ways, becomes more renegade and becomes less submissive to the Pakistani state. So while the Pakistani state funds these or gives them tactical support, we really do not know to what extent. We don't know if the Pakistani state ordered this or to what extent, so we don't have actionable intelligence. So without actionable intelligence, the journalists have been reporting what they call sources. Often these sources are from the intelligence agencies, which could be the equivalent of the FBI or CIA back in India.

One is domestic, one is more international. And yet, all of these sources have been leaking and reporting classified information, again, contradictory information that hasn't really given us any clarity. For example, initially we were told that the RDX was close to 115 pounds. Later, it was reduced from a much smaller number. initially you were told that the RDX used was acquired in India, then we were told was acquired in Pakistan, but also we don't know how is it possible that someone could smuggle so much RDX

from the border into Kashmir given how heavily surveilled Kashmir is. Kashmir is also one of the most militarized parts of the world, which means that there is surveillance by raw, there is surveillance by ID. So RAW is your more international agency that does the surveillance for, and then your ID is more domestic. There is each of the police units have their own intelligence agencies. The CRPF has its own intelligence agencies. So, I mean, Kashmir is like what Lebanon is during the war in which every person you meet there, every state person you meet for some reason could be a spy.

And despite all of this, it just becomes really, there's no explanation has to, how so much RDX was smuggled into this. We don't know that. We don't know the number of people involved. We have no idea what's happening. And yet, all of the journalists were reporting information that was contradictory, that was false. So it was not even the state was giving out.

It wasn't like there was a press briefing. What was really happening was all these journalists were speaking to high-level sources and then reporting contradictory information, which again became very jingoistic. All of these anchors weren't India to go to war. They wanted Pakistan to be destroyed. And also, you really don't want two nuclear states to go to the brink of war. De-escalating this is just really hard.

So that's mostly being what's happening since the attacks on the 14th of Feb. You kind of just touched on it. Nobody wants two nuclear power states to go to war. It seems to me that their intelligence apparatus, specifically in India, it has no fusion. So it sounds like everybody's reporting every other thing that they can think of. How concerning is that, knowing that both of these nations have a finger on the button, per se, of a nuke? It's very scary.

I mean, let's also not forget that what we're really seeing is a serious crisis of democracy in India. I'll speak less about Pakistan because, again, I don't want this conversation to come across as if Pakistani state is any better. We have to understand that both the Indian state and the Pakistani state historically have been pretty irresponsible when it comes to how they could solve these issues diplomatically. The only saving grace is that in this very specific moment, the Pakistani Prime Minister, Imran Khan seems to be the more stable, reasonable person who is now agreed to release. the pilot who was, the Indian pilot, whose aircraft was shot down and captured as a measure of, as a gesture of peace. And he's the one who's constantly been saying, oh, we don't, we cannot go to war. We need to escalate, de-escalate this. But on India, on the other hand, the prime minister hasn't spoken to the people yet. We haven't had any direct communication from the prime minister's office.

instead the prime minister is busy campaigning for the next up-and-coming elections, often using these airstrikes as a way of saying, it's the equivalent of Trump saying, let's build a war. You know, let's, you know, let's bomb Korea. I don't know. It's just the kind of rhetoric that is taken seriously by many of the people who support him. And for the world's largest democracy, that is, that doesn't bode well. So the prime minister, Modi, he uses up for real.

election. So he's using this incident in the Kashmiri region as a just complete and total political fodder to get reelected. Is that where you're that's basically what he's using it for? Yes. Because as I said, the prime minister hasn't addressed the nation since the attacks, but he has, he's right now on a campaign rally, campaigning. And in the campaign rallies, he's actually saying that, oh, you know, this is done. We have something big waiting for you. And one is not quite sure what this thing that we are waiting for. but also understand that India's borders, the border with Pakistan, is highly militarized. There are civilian populations living there

that have been facing the problem of having two nuclear states living next to each other for the last at least 20, 30 years when the borders became more militarized. But yes, that's what the prime minister has been doing. I know that there's a highly militarized border. It just seems like the attack happened and almost instantly India launched a strike. And what you've kind of expressed is that there really is no central mechanism of intelligence gathering.

Is what is that, is that something that's always been this way in the Kashmary region where it's India or Pakistan just instantly just do a strike and then kind of figure out what happened? I mean, that seems, that seems interesting. It's actually concerning. No, I think it really depends. I think, um, I think, um, I think it's, Historically, both the states have responded very differently. In the time when Pakistan had a military state and was run by the military,

you often saw an increase in the funding for many of these organizations, you saw Pakistan use this idea of strategic depth to fund organizations. And often India was seen as the country that was being a little more reserved, which again changed quite a bit when reports of India also funding organizations in Balochistan, which is, again, Pakistan's equivalent of its own Kashmir, Balochistan, for many Baluchis, they consider Balochistan being occupied by the Pakistani state. So then you saw a series in which India becomes more and more muscular, it becomes more, and again, India's own position in Afghanistan shows India becoming more muscular, more masculine in terms of what they claim is how they respond.

Again, we do not know if these have really helped solve the problem or the crisis. In terms of the intelligence failure, there was another big attack that happened in Bombay in 2008. Again, had very similar intelligence failure where they were pre-warned, and yet India's IB and the raw were not talking to each other. that's the current of the CIA and the FBI not speaking to each other. Again, this is not an Indian pedicament. You see this happen globally with various agencies. But also Kashmir is a case where militarization of an economy of its own,

the amount of money that goes into keeping Kashmir militarized and the people who profit from it, it's quite a bit. So it could simply be a failure of intelligence. It could be failure. to coordinate, but also as the piece that I put out says, they did have information that they were expecting an attack. Apparently, one of these attacks was toward it, and then the person responsible was caught. And yet, if you had intelligence saying that there was going to be an attack, why weren't you more careful? What happened? Right? So again, nobody has asked the establishment

these questions and the government has not given any of these answers on record. So what you really see is institutions that are supposed to be accountable for people are no longer accountable. We haven't had any of these questions answered. There hasn't been a press briefing. Instead, what you really have, the way that people are getting information is through Fox News or your CNN or CNBC-like scenario where you have six people all yelling at each other trying to get information across.

What part is social media playing in all of this? I think social media is playing, I would say, a good role and a bad role in the sense that a lot of the Indian and Pakistani civilians have said no to war. People are pointing out that going to war, it might not be the best way. But also, long before Trump mobilized United States and make America great again, Modi did this much before. He did it at least three years before. So Prime Minister Modi has a big, he has an army of trolls who would jump in the moment someone is critical of him and troll them. The BBC came out at the report earlier last year.

There have been two books published, I think. I think there's one book that was published earlier this year that talks about BJP, the government that the party that Prime Minister Modi belongs to, that actually pays people to be trolls and attack anyone that criticizes either the Prime Minister Modi or BJP's policies. So you see that as well. But also the sad part is now journalists no longer report, the embed tweets. So a lot of the reporting on Kashmir is also now based on tweets. People are just embedding tweets from former army chiefs. As of said, that is the equivalent of reporting.

But on the good side, does social media allow Pakistani and Indian citizens to directly engage each other? And is that a positive or bad? Or how does that work? I think Indians and Pakistanis, they share a history that is much longer than the borders. And in my experience, it's very funny, I've been doing this for the last three and a half years, is every time I would speak to someone who had left Lahore during the point, partition and moved to India would say something like Upna Lahore, which means it's my Lahore. While they live in Delhi, they're Indian citizens. But then for them, Lahore is not Pakistan. Lahore is, it's theirs. So there's a long history that brings people together.

And I think Pakistanis and Indians are the heart of it. For the average Indian, the crisis now is the crisis of not having jobs, not having, you know, having biometric data being mined. you know, the economy not doing well, I don't think Pakistan is even in the horizon of the average Indian who gets up each day to get to his work. In my experience, Pakistanis that I've interacted with have been nothing but generous and wonderful. And we share the same concerns about the nation state. We share the same concerns about the future of our countries. So that's always been there. I think in some way social media amplifies that, of course, you always have idiots who don't believe that way.

But I think that's more of a minority as against majority of the people. No one wants to go to war. Yeah, I was interesting. It was interesting to hear you talk about trolls on social media and how India and the Indian government's kind of been empowering to do that. And you mentioned the, you know, Bill, the Donald Trump's Make America Great Again kind of rhetoric. Do you think that's energizing Prime Minister Modi more that now he has an American president who thinks along the same lines as saber-rattling and war rhetoric? You think that's energizing more foreign nations to become more nationalist?

Of course. I mean, I think they, I mean, oppressors and bullies learn from each other. So, yes, I think the biggest problem right now is that we were having this conversation with a family friend of mine who used to serve at, who used to serve at the Department of State. and his concern was that at one point in time, the United States had the moral authority to say, despite all of its flaws, the moral authority to say something is wrong, let's step in. And for him, at least optically, optics-wise, having someone like, you might have problems with the Clintons,

you might have problems with Obama or any of the American presidents. But he said, in his opinion, it was that when the United States is seen as no longer having the moral authority to step in, I think it's a great crisis of foreign policy. It's a great crisis of the soft power that the United States has. And with someone like Trump, I don't see the Indians having great faith in him. I don't see the Pakistanis having great faith in him. And surprisingly, an Indian anchor who was interviewing a Pakistani minister on the television yesterday said, oh, you know, the United States no longer loves you.

Trump loves us now. I mean, it's just, it just shows how, um, how much the discourse is this broken down. And the breaking down of discourse in D.C. can also be seen in the breaking down of discourse in the Delhi, in various parts of the world. Pakistan just gave back the pilot, you know, as, it's sort of like an olive branch, correct? It's like, they're trying to de-escalate. Is India accepting that? Or do they want to push this harder?

Again, we don't know what the India is. state is doing because Indian state hasn't said anything. The prime minister is right now in a campaign rally, so we have no idea. But the Indian media is reporting this as a victory for Modi's diplomacy. And again, they're calling this as not as a gesture of peace, but a gesture of weakness on the side of Pakistan, which again is very perplexing because whatever is Pakistan's history of funding terror organizations, funding non-state actors, despite my own disagreements with Imran Khan's, various other positions, based on what the Pakistanis have done under the leadership of Imran Khan,

is that they have categorically said, we do not want to go to war. Imran Khan said, you do not want two nuclear states to go into a position where we are having, you know, we are talking to each other about war. He's talked about the escalation. He's talked about dialogues. In Urdu, he says, if India comes one step towards us, we will take two steps towards you. Pakistanis have overwhelmed social media saying that we want peace. Pakistanis have actually all congregated in Karachi and Lahore saying that we don't want war, we want peace with Pakistan.

We want peace with India. but the Indian response has been quite appalling. You have news anchors in combat fatigues, you know, simulating war. It's, you know, it's just, it's quite, again, as I said, it's very surprising that now we have to crumble to figure out what India's response is through newspapers and media and tell television when the prime minister himself has been quiet. He has not said anything about this. He hasn't welcomed this. He hasn't at least at the moment that we're talking right now. He hasn't welcomed this. He hasn't said that's great. He hasn't said let's have a conversation.

He hasn't said anything. It doesn't look like he wants to de-escalate this. I rarely would say this, but it seems like Pakistan really wants to de-escalate in India. it seems like they're just using this to create even more divisiveness. What's de-escalation look like? What would be the best form of de-escalation? What could Pakistan do further? I think Pakistan is, at this moment, I think Pakistan has done everything that Pakistan can do, given the systemic nature of things.

Also, let's understand that Imran Khan is, it's a he's a, he's a, new prime minister. There's the first time he's holding considerable position of power. He wants in some ways, or at least claims to wanting to transform Pakistan into a more democratic, egalitarian society, which also means that he does not want the military to have the kind of power that it usually has within the Pakistani state. And a war with India would also mean Imran Khan wanting to relinquish large parts of the democratically elected power that he has, because the moment you go to war, the Pakistani army is again going to try and, you know, do what is always done. So for him strategically, even for a domestic constituency and for him to even run his country, war makes no sense.

If he wants to hold on to this political mandate, then for him a war is the worst thing that can happen. So for him, it makes absolute sense. Also, he's, he's, you know, he's considerably young. He's come to power. The people in Pakistan seem to like him. He's riding the way. You know, he's imagined the first couple of years of the Obama administration or even, you know, Justin Trudeau. He's riding the popular wave.

So his people like him. On the other hand, Modi's four years have been disastrous. The demonetization, which completely, I mean, today the economic report says that India's growth rate, which was at 7.8 is now reduced. It's at, sorry, 7.4 is now reduced. So the country is actually slowed down in the last. So since Modi took power, the country's economy is now slow down. Second, you have the Rafael deal scam where there's a large scam involving defense contracts that's happening. Farmers throughout the country are protesting, and they are about the march towards the center.

There is a big LGBTQ resistance against the current laws that is meant to be. criminalized this, but again, the point is that there's a big problem with that. India wants to repeal Article 35A that gives Kashmiris the autonomy. They have Baudenmore forces into the valley. There is another crisis that's happening in the northeast. It feels like the country is on the verge of something, and Modi really needs to win. So for him, the people no longer love him. At least not the people, not his base, but there is a lot of people who believe that let's give this man a chance

who now no longer want to. So that's, I think the domestic situation is also equally important. And one of the BJP ministers has said, the war means we will get 22 more seats in the parliament. So I think that's something that we really need to pay attention to. can we talk about Afghanistan again what what I know that the India has been spending money on reconstruction in Afghanistan uh you know you kind of hit on some of the defense contract uh corruption going on in the country what are the long term goals there in that country and I know that

the Taliban has said uh that the you know the the the the the what's going on now is affecting peace talks Right. Again, I think we need to situate this in the larger context of history. And I think soon after 9-11, when Holbrook wanted to have a conversation about Afghanistan, what was very interesting is that a very strong Indian lobby wanted to take Kashmir outside the table when discussing the India-Pakistan dispute. Robert Fisks talks about this in 2009, where he talks about how the dispute between India and Pakistan is Kashmir. And a lot of what was happening in Afghanistan and continues to happen in Afghanistan as a result of the conflict between India and Pakistan, both claiming Kashmir, that kind of spills into Afghanistan. And what happened in this conversation was the Indians very successfully, which I would call a diplomatic country, made sure that you talk about F-PAC-p-p-pinated without Kashmir. In an ideal world for foreign policy, what should have happened around 2004-5

is that the United States spoke about Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir as a trifecta and not as AFPAC as a problem. So we never address the Kashmir problem. And also understand that there are historical ties, there are cultural ties. And one of the things that often is now being said is how the U.S. forces withdrawing from Afghanistan

would mean that you have you have people in Afghanistan who might enter the valley to kind of recreate situation of the 1990s. For me, that doesn't make more sense, but what is really important is that

to solve Afghanistan, you need to solve India and Pakistan. You can't solve Afghanistan crisis. You can't solve the crisis of what means to have Taliban continuing to have a presence in Afghanistan without solving the India-Pakistan crisis. And the India-Pakistan crisis is not a question of whether India gets Kashmir or Pakistan gets Kashmir, but to solve the Kashmiri dispute is to return back to Kashmiris and ask them what they want, which is always self-determination. Kashmiris, for the longest of times,

have not a generation ago, perhaps, a lot of the Kashmiris would have said, oh, we want to go with Pakistan, but now a lot of the young Kashmiris don't want to belong to India or Pakistan. What they really want is self-determination, their capacity to govern themselves, rule themselves, which they have not been given, which they were promised in 1947, but the peblosite never took place. So if you ask Kashmiri what they want, they will say we want al-Azadi, which means we want freedom. And again, there is a question of militarization. You've had mass graves. We have The numbers are between 8,000 to 15,000, depending on who you speak to, of men who disappeared. We continue to have human rights violations.

Asfa, which is emergency laws, have been implemented in the valley for over 30 years now. So, again, you cannot solve a dispute without giving people some kind of justice or giving them the right to choose how they want to be governed. So that's how you solve and de-escalate all of this, is returning the right to govern themselves, the Kashmiris. How does the average Indian see the second and third-order effects of U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan? They don't care. They don't? They just, it's not on their radar? No, they don't. It's just not something that is talked about. It's not talked about in India. It's not something of importance to them.

Afghanistan, again, Afghanistan has never been really reported in any real sense. Even when the war on terror was happening when you had so much reporting resources when in Afghanistan, Indian reporting on Afghanistan was very, very different. The average Indian doesn't care. There is no sense. Often Afghanistan is the kind of things you will hear about Afghanistan is how now ISIS in Afghanistan, which is not true. is there's been a couple of ISIS flags spotted in Afghanistan and Kashmir,

but that does not mean that the Islamic State is now in it. Again, often those reports are created to those reports again reinforce the idea of the Muslim other that all Muslims are terrorists. It's again Islamophobia couched as news reports. There are a few reporters who have report on Afghanistan, but that's again a few and far between If you ask the average Indian what they think about,

I don't even think most people know that the U.S. is still in Afghanistan, to be honest. That's another problem that news is no longer news. We don't have reported news. Nobody reports from Afghanistan anymore. That's true of India and of the United States. These suspected proxy wars that are being kind of funded and run by the ISI, is that kind of, is that still the threat to keep the nuclear, a threat of nuclear war still fresh in both India and Pakistan's minds?

Do you feel that that's still an issue? I think, look, I mean, my generation has never, we didn't go through the crisis of the emergency. We didn't go through what a real nuclear Armageddon might mean. My generation grew up in a liberalized India where we had access to everything. You know, we grew up watching, I don't know, we had friends in Texan City and, you know,

water is the new version of that. You know, it's a liberalized India never really encountered real war. that the last real war was Cargill, where, again, many of us were kids. I think the real concerns of a nuclear war is not something that most people really comprehend. I remember a couple of years ago at Yale when we had this conversation. This was in 2012, and there's this question of, oh, how do we think of getting rid of nuclear weapons? And somebody said, yeah, but nuclear weapons are not relevant anymore. And, you know, it's really surprising that not just in India, but globally, there's an entire generation that was born in the 80s or 90s who had no idea what a nuclear war might mean.

I mean, there were houses, there are houses in L.A. that have nuclear bunkers recently. Like, last year was in a friend's house, and his father had built a nuclear bunker. or these grandfathers built a nuclear bunker thinking that they might be some kind of an attack on the United States oil. So I don't think there's an awareness of how close we are to something this devastating.

So that's the first thing. So what was the second part of the question? These proxy wars that they're suspected to be run by the ISI, do you see these escalating as sort of like a guerrilla underhanded tactic against India and India's

kind of answering to that to the Pakistan. Do you see that continually trying to keep the, specifically the Kashmiri region, highly militarized? Look, I mean, in 2014 when I was there, I was speaking to a military official, his response

was, oh, this is, we have the lowest number of terrorists in the valley. So from the 1990s, still about a few years ago, the militancy was completely wiped out ruthlessly brutally. That's also meant that killing an entire generation of young men who are not going to come back home. They might be in mass graves, they might be now in Pakistan,

we don't know where they are. But having said that, it's not just an India-Pakistan concern. Nation states, all nation states fund proxies to fight their war. The United States does it. Pakistan does it. You see this in Lebanon. Iran does it. Saudi Arabia, does it. Israel, does it. all nation states fund non-state proxy actors to wage its war in various places. I mean, you see this, in Lebanon, you can see this as this fight between Israel and Iran happening. Afghanistan has become this proxy battle war initially between the United States and Zutuania, now India and Pakistan. I mean, even the Irish fund their own non-state actors to act as proxy proxy war.

So this is not an India-Pakistan predicament. This is the predicament of the nation-state where you no longer have wars like the Second World War. What you really have are protracted conflicts, and often protracted conflicts, are fought through proxies. You go to Nigeria, you'll find this. You go to Congo. There's not a single nation state in the world

that does not fund proxies. So I think that's something that we really need to understand how nation states work in terms of how they fight their wars and battles. Given the new technologies, given the drone warfare, given the cyber warfare, given what's happening in all these various spaces, I think we have to be very cognizant of that. Will Pakistan continue to do this? Yes, of course Pakistan will continue to do this. Will India continue to do this? Yes, India will also continue to do this. Because what we never speak about is that India also is accused by Pakistan of funding organizations in Balochistan. India is accused by Pakistan of funding organizations in Afghanistan.

For example, Masood was funded by India for the longest of time when he was trying to fight the Taliban or the coming of the Taliban. So in that sense, this is again a long, complicated history. Again, if you look at Syria, again, this happened in Afghanistan as well. At one point in time, you know, there's this one guy that I interviewed who said, you know, there are four armies that are part of NATO that give me money to give them information. And at this point in time, I don't know who is who. So, yeah, everybody does it.

And then I think, yes, I think it's not going to stop. But the question is, can two nuclear, again, the question is, can two nuclear states keep doing this, given the precarious nature of how things are unfolding, given what's happening in Iran, given what's happening in Syria, also understand that these regions are connected. Just as what happened in Bosnia, affected Iran during the Yugoslav war,

what's happening in Kashmir is going to affect the larger region. And I think those are things that we should be more cognizant of. You had mentioned earlier, and I kind of want to piggyback off what you just said about, we should be more cognizant of. You mentioned earlier rogue militant groups, such as, you know, these groups just acting on their own or via some sort of, you know, proxy handler.

How absolutely feasible and frightening would it be for a nuclear-capable country such as India or Pakistan, one of these rogue, you know, extremist organizations getting a hold of a nuke and actually attempting to use it? Well, we actually have precedence. We saw this happen when the Soviet Union disintegrated. There were many, many reports of, if not nuclear weapons, definitely weapons of nuclear-grade capabilities from former Soviet Union, especially from Ukraine, being widely used. So we have seen this happen before, and again, we do not want that to happen. The answer is it's very easy. Often it's told that since India's civilian and military establishments are divided, that India has a democracy, that we have better checks.

and balances. And often it's told that given that Pakistan has been under military dictatorship for so long that Pakistan is likely to be more likely to happen in Pakistan. Of course, we have the instance of AQ Khan network where a Pakistani engineer was indeed making deals to sell veterinary to other countries. So this happens all the time. For example, I saw this happen in Afghanistan all the time where the Afghan local police that was staffed by the NATO forces would then go on and sell their weapons to the local Taliban. So again, this happens from the smallest level of your AK-47s all the way up to material that nation states have, and it's very possible.

It's happened before. It's not unlikely, but the question is, how do we protect it? I think those are the questions we need to talk about. Should the U.S. or the, or the, you know, NATO itself step in in this instant? No. No? You don't want the U.S.? Because do you think the U.S. would just escalate it further?

I think the U.N. should. I think the U.S. again, the U.S. is, again, if you look at the United States track record, it's been, I mean, it's been abysmal in solving the crisis going all the way back to 1947. And more than the multiple things are happening. First, United States no longer has the kind of authority or the power it did, say even 15 years ago. People do not, the United States no longer has the kind of power it did to negotiate, to bring people to the table, demand a certain kind of, you know, resolution. That has been in decline for a really long time. And we see this more and more now.

So that's the first thing. Second, United States has an abysmal track record of trying to fix anything in this region. And second is that there is already a UN body, unless this becomes a global consensus, where globally through an organization, even an organization as inefficient, has bloated. And, you know, again, this is not to say the UN is any more better, but then the Kashmiris, for one reason, have consistently petitioned to the UN. Every generation of activists, writers, scholars, in the last 70 years have consistently petitioned to the Human Rights Council. The Human Rights Council just came out with a report last year which specifically said Kashmiris right to self-determination should be respected. All of that was seen as something that was really, really important in the valley.

I think globally there must be a pressure to both India and Pakistan to finally give the peplocide. I think that's what we need to do. Can the United States alone do it? I don't think so. But if the United States, can the United States take a lead? Again, I'm not sure because, as I said, the moral authority, the capacity to get two people to the table and have a conversation, surprisingly, Trump administration does not command that. And I mean, when Imran Khan said, we are going to release the pilot, you know what the United, the president. of the United States said, you know what the person of the free world said, he said it's a very

attractive option. Sorry, I'm sorry. That's on, that's on brand, I guess. So, and it doesn't, that does not really, yeah, it's, it's also the question of the decline of, it's a decline of the American power to get people to the negotiating table, even, uh, even when the negotiating table was often uneven and deeply problematic and sometimes just, just so that's, we have to get bad. And then, of course, yeah, I think the UN always used to be the place where the Kashmiris have gone.

And they've done that consistently for 70 years. So I feel like they still have faith in the UN as a mechanism. And I think it has to be a global effort. People understand that the crisis of what's happening, in many of these countries, whether it's also we have to understand that this is a global crisis. You cannot just look at Kashmir and Afghanistan.

You know, when I was there, Afghans were not getting on a boat to go to Germany as refugees. Now they are. You have a Syrian crisis, again, that is fueled by a certain breakdown of a state, by serious interventions that's happening in the region that were seriously miscalculated.

A lot of the debris from the war in Iraq. It's all coming back. It's 2011 to 2019. We forget what a phenomenal, you know, the map of the world is changing and it's happening in a really violent way. And it needs a global response.

And it cannot just be a U.S. response. And it definitely cannot be a response from a president who says, that's a very attractive option. Again, not referring to a woman, but to, you know, decision to release a pilot back to India. Do you think, and this is more of like a personal opinion for you, do you think that labeling nowadays that, you know,

these countries, to include the United States, labeling everything violent extremism and playing on fears within their own nations, is this the new way of waging war without declaring war, or is this something that these nations are using to advance their political agendas? There's nothing new about this. We saw this in the First World War. We saw it in the Second World War. We've seen it in every war that humanity is fought. The difference is that now, the only difference is the rate at which information flows. I think for the longest of time, the United States, I mean, not very far from various day. Madison Square Garden actually hosted a Nazi rally just before the Second World War. Americans were part of this Nazi rally celebrating Hitler and Germany. I know that's a very very small percentage of the American population, but that still happened. We've seen this historically happen in many of the places and many of the places that we've gone to war. We saw this happen in Afghanistan. We see this in Lebanon, Iran. There's not a place in the world where crisis has been

used. The difference, perhaps, is the difference of measure and degree. And yes, it's happening. and now the difference is that the president or the prime minister can tweet. And he can weaponize a million people with a tweet. And that's the problem. A friend of mine, Arjun Saepi, wrote this book called American Hate, where he traveled throughout the country after the Trump presidency. And he talked about people who have faced hate crimes because of what the president said. And another fantastic phenomenal book has come out of India that calls Anatomy of Aid

that talks about how Prime Minister Modi, when he was the chief minister in Gujarat, was responsible in how he presides over a massacre, but it also goes and speaks to perpetrators of this violence. And today is the 28th of Feb, which means that it's also the anniversary of the Gujarat riots and massacres, which actually completely radicalized the country, where Muslims in the country were massacred under. Prime Minister Modi's chief minister ship. So that was in 2002. So the symbolism of all of this is just, you know, it's ridiculous. But the answer is yes. And again, it's not just new.

It has a long history. Well, thank you for coming on the show and walking us through all of that. Thank you. It's always good to, yeah, it's always good to get on the professorial mode and explain things to people. I think that's the best part of any day. So thank you for giving you the opportunity. Thank you so much for listening. War College is me, Matthew Galt, and Derek, Derek Gannon, and Kevin Nodell, who's created by me and Jason Fields, who watches us even still. If you like the show, please leave us a rating on iTunes and leave a comment. It helps others find the show. We're also on Twitter at War underscore College and on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash war college podcast. So we've been very busy recording shows, and I know I teased a great

rush episode last week. We felt that events in Kashmir necessitated us changing courses. We hope you agree. Russia is still coming, I promise, two weeks from now. Next week, as the markets close, a very interesting look at the business of war.