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COMMENTARY
The US as an 'indispensable' power
By Ehsan Ahrari
Former
secretary of state Madeleine Albright used to refer to
the United States as an "indispensable state". That
characterization raised hackles among a whole lot of
Third World countries, which blamed the US for a lot of
their problems, and, as far as they were concerned, its
interference in their affairs was highly dispensable.
But on the issue of peacefully resolving at
least three major regional conflicts - Kashmir,
Palestine, and Chechnya - the US has remained very
much an indispensable power. If it uses its power
constructively, its involvement should push those
conflicts at least close to resolution.
Kashmir
defies political solution, largely because one party,
India for all intents and purposes, considers it
resolved. The present Line of Control (LoC) separating
the Indian- and Pakistani-administered regions of
Kashmir, according to India's views, should be accepted
as an international border between the two South Asian
antagonists.
For Pakistan, on the contrary, the
Kashmir issue is far from resolved. A proper solution,
according to this view, is to hold a plebiscite, which
is bound to give at least the Muslim-dominated Valley of
Kashmir (minus the Jammu region, where Hindus are in
majority) to Pakistan.
The balance of
conventional power in South Asia is in favor of India.
That means that the so-called strategic parity that
Pakistan achieved after becoming a declared nuclear
power in 1998 does not really help its case unless it
fights a major war. But that war would escalate into a
nuclear conflict, given the gross disparity of
conventional power between the two. If there were a
nuclear war, neither India nor Pakistan would enjoy the
benefit of having Kashmir as part of their sovereign
territory.
Now the Kashmir conflict has become
embroiled in transnational terrorism. India recently
upped the ante by claiming that al-Qaeda terrorists were
involved in destabilizing the part of Kashmir under its
control. Obviously, India was hoping that, by raising
the specter of al-Qaeda, it would be able to get US
forces involved in eradicating the Islamist forces that
are allegedly terrorizing its side of the LoC. The
United States refused to fall for that claim, absent
concrete intelligence supporting it. Pakistan has
declared its intentions not to support those groups, but
still insists that the Kashmir conflict must be
resolved.
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is
also defying resolution. Latest figures on deaths
stemming from the escalating spirals of violence since
September 2000 are more than 1,400 Palestinians and more
than 550 Israelis. The progress made by the Palestinian
Authority (PA) in creating a semblance of a government
on the territories under its administrative control has
been pretty much shattered by intermittent Israeli
military incursions since last April. The powerful and
the weak in this conflict are using their best weapons
to counter each other. Israelis are using their
US-supplied weapons to reoccupy the PA-administered
territory in order to control violence, and Palestinian
youths are sacrificing themselves, thereby ensuring that
the Israeli occupation remains fruitless. Despair is an
abundant commodity.
In the meantime, the US
interlocutors, instead of coming down hard on both sides
for escalating violence, are very much a party to the
blame game, attempting to dictate to the Palestinian
side that they had better come up with an alternative to
Yasser Arafat, whom they portray as increasingly
irrelevant. In the meantime, Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon continues his refusal to negotiate with
Arafat, whom he used to refer to as the "Osama bin Laden
of Israel". To Sharon, it is not good enough that
Arafat, like him, is an elected leader. These types of
highly contentious perspectives have submerged the
Palestinian conflict into rhetorical whirlpools, from
which it may not be rescued any time soon.
Unlike India's refusal to negotiate a political
solution that is aimed at territorial compromise, Israel
is willing to agree to offer territorial concessions.
However, the greatest hurdle is how to start the
negotiating process itself. Even US President George W
Bush's commitment to an "interim" Palestinian state,
made public in his speech on June 25, does not look
promising in the sense that there is no assurance that
the "interimness" would lead to some sort of final
status. Even then, there is little hope that the actual
size of the ultimate Palestinian state would be much
different from its size under the interim status,
especially if Sharon has any say over the outcome.
Moreover, if both the United States and Israel
continue to harp on the purported irrelevance of Arafat,
then who is going to negotiate for the Palestinians?
This very issue promises to postpone the resolution of
the Palestinian conflict to a distant future. In the
meantime, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist
groups will have a field day in further deteriorating
the chances of a peaceful resolution of the PA-Israeli
conflict.
The situation in Chechnya is also as
hopeless as the preceding two conflicts. The pro-status
quo power of this conflict, Russia, like India on
Kashmir, refuses to negotiate on the future status of
Chechnya. Like New Delhi, Moscow refuses a radical
change in the status of the Chechens through
independence. Even the issue of granting autonomy to the
Chechens does not appear promising because Russia does
not want to consider even that option. Considering that
62 percent of Russians support negotiating with the
Chechen resistance, one wonders why President Vladimir
Putin is so intransigent on the issue.
It is
possible that, as long as Putin continues to refer to
the Chechen resistance as "terrorists", he expects that
his friend Bush will support him for the foreseeable
future, if not indefinitely. But he should know that the
support of Washington on that issue is not at all
unconditional. The US State Department has recently
condemned the "indiscriminate and disproportionate" use
of force by the Russian military. Like Arafat, Chechen
President Aslan Maskhadov is ready and willing to
negotiate. But like Sharon, Putin dismisses the
legitimacy of Maskhadov.
In all three conflicts,
one side is either refusing to enter into negotiations
that would bring about radical changes in the political
status quo, or delaying its resolution through stalling
tactics of one sort or another. More to the point, in
all three instances, the dominant side or the pro-status
quo side has the support of the United States. And that
support has become weightier in the post-September 11
era. This last variable might be the main reason the
resolution of all three conflicts looks more
unattainable than it did before September 11. In that
sense, the support of the United States for the dominant
parties has become indispensable if they are to maintain
their current advantage.
At the same time, if
the United States is an indispensable force for
political status quo, then it follows that it also
possesses an equally tremendous potential to become an
indispensable force for conflict resolution, even if it
means changing of the political status quo. If the Bush
administration wants to see the dissipation of terrorism
at least in those three regions and those regions
contribute significantly to political violence and
resultant instability, and one, South Asia, may even
lead to nuclear war it had better become
indispensable as a force for change, and soon.
Ehsan Ahrari is a Norfolk,
Virginia-based strategic analyst
(©2002 Asia
Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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