Brajesh Mishra proposes India-Israel-America axis to combat terror

Brajesh Mishra, the Indian National Security Advisor (NSA), recently gave a speech at the annual dinner of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in Washington, in which he proposed an informal association of democratic countries, which come together for a limited aim of combating terrorism.

Needless to say, this elicited frantic and foamy reactions, with accusations of neo-colonialism, treachery, selling out, Zionism, injustice, unfairness, warmongering, toadying, machismo etc. flying about like confetti. Hold on just a cotton (non-GM??) picking second, just what DID Mishra say that was followed by such vituperation and angst?

Brajesh Mishra was a guest at the annual AJC dinner in the august company of several US congressmen, as well as Spanish Prime Minister Aznar. He delivered a short speech, where he talked about the relationship between India and Israel, the lack of anti-Semitism, the flowering economic and defence links and a full diplomatic relationship. He also mentioned the growing relationship between India and the USA, echoing the Indian Prime Minister's words, USA and India are natural allies for a whole host of reasons.

He then moved on to talk about the impact of terrorism in each of the 3 countries and reiterated the stand, that they are all facing the same beast. After talking about a few aspects of terrorism, he then closed off the speech by calling on democratic countries, which are the main targets of international terrorism, to form a viable alliance against terrorism and take joint action against it. He also warned against getting bogged down in definitional and causal intellectual mastication and to keep firm pressure on the terrorists.

An interesting related article by Ralph Nurnberger, a professor at Georgetown University, USA predates Brajesh Mishra's speech. Professor Nurnberger also mentions the growing Israeli-Indian-American relationship and reiterates that, "the three democracies are now poised to cooperate in counter-terrorism efforts. It must be stressed this is not a Christian-Jewish-Hindu coalition gearing up against Islam. Rather, it is an effort by civilized, democratic nations to combat terrorism by extremists."

Sounds pretty fair to me, that's exactly what I would hope that a National Security Advisor would say and prescribe. Heck, this is exactly what I would expect anybody, who wants to bumble about with theories while people are actually dying from terrorist bombings, to say? So why did people throw a complete apoplectic fit at this speech? The major reactions came from the leftists, the communists, the Anti-Americans, congress and several Arab and Pakistani newspapers, though the Israeli foreign ministry emphasised that the relations with India are not targeted at Pakistan.

The reaction from the Arab newspapers was patchy and much muted. India rarely comes onto their radar screens; if it does then it's generally very low level and mostly economic or business in nature. Even the Babri Masjid incident didn't raise any significant waves in the Arab Press. They are more concerned with Israel, and the fact that the Indian NSA went about asking for help in lining up international support against terrorism didn't really matter! The Pakistani Press is a different matter and there was and is serious amounts of ink spread about the emerging nexus of India-Israel-USA and how it is bad and so on and so forth. After all the word "alliance" might be taken as a hint at a joint enemy.

This is again understandable, after all, USA is its "mai-baap"(godfather is the nearest I can relate to) and for USA to consort with India, its sworn enemy, along with Israel, the dreaded Zionist bug bear, is literally more than it can bear. A perusal of the Urdu and English Pakistani press will show that Israel comes a close second to India in terms of external threats or concerns. Oh! Jeez, it only needs the addition of China to this nexus and Pakistan might as well as saw itself off and go park it inside the Persian Gulf or at the foot end of the Arabian Peninsula. Anyway, so this is understandable, after all, guess who are the state sponsors of terrorism from the viewpoint of India/Israel/USA?

The majority of the Indian comments came because of ideological opposition to America and Israel. After all, anything that India does with America, even fighting terrorism is really not something which sits well with these fellows. India's famed non-aligned foreign policy was a crock, for all practical purposes, India was in bed with the erstwhile USSR and it had a rather interesting record of being one of the UN members having the largest number of votes against US-sponsored resolutions. But all this was part of the cold war machinations. All part of a so called "idealistic" foreign policy, which has been thankfully junked and a healthy dose of realism has been interjected into the denizens of our foreign ministry.

Lord Palmerston, the 19th century British Statesman had expressed it very simply when he said, "nations don't have permanent alliances, only permanent interests". Idealism in foreign policy almost always gets the country into the "pay no heed to box". An aggressive idealism gets the country into the "boring box". If the country is big and/or powerful enough, then it can even lead to other countries treating it as an enemy. Most countries are reasonably well-versed in the art of defending and supporting the national permanent interests. I guess it says much about India that it spent more than 40 years with the Hindu rate of growth and that utterly incomprehensible non-aligned foreign policy. Be that as it may, things have moved on thankfully and the country is now working on a foreign policy which is more oriented towards its own interests, rather than going about poking its nose into things which are, at best, of no concern and at worst, unnecessarily makes enemies.

The drivers behind the Indian relationship with USA are pretty self evident. But just what is so interesting about Israel, that India has to chuck its 40 year old foreign policy and get into bed with it? As far as I can make out, the relationship with Israel is very limited to military equipment, training, anti terrorism aspects, diamonds and some dry fruits. The Indian and Israeli diplomats in the Middle Eastern region have been very clear and precise in saying that there is no explicit alliance at all and that the relationship is purely on the military and anti-terrorism front.

Most of the Arab nations understand the issues surrounding India's Kashmir problem, as evidenced by the sheer lack of response that Pakistan gets when it tries to raise the Kashmir problem in the OIC. Even the Arab League is very muted about the entire issue.

If one looks at the criticisms levelled against the alliance, it is not really against the alliance per se' but rather disagreements against Israel's policies, as well as against the BJP/NDA government's policies. A classic case of typical bumbling myopic foreign policy analysis or in other words, missing the wood from the trees. You do not like the domestic policies of the government, so go after something which is totally unrelated.

The fact that Israel has got technology to spare and knowledge of anti-terrorism to propagate rarely comes into the picture. If it did come into the picture, their rather silly suppositions will be knocked into a cocked hat! The frequent accusation of anti Islamic orientation rests on rather shaky foundations as well. The fact that there are tons of howling Islamic fanatics targeting the 3 countries is what makes the commonality so clear.

There is also this curious matter of Zionism. Who cares? Certainly nobody in India, except for a miniscule number of people who don't have better things to do. Why would India be concerned about a tiny part of the world's population? Why would a billion people be more interested in the convoluted problem of Israel-Palestine, when they are faced with terrorism on their own doorsteps? 13 Million Jews in the world and about 5 million in USA. Right, I want to see a similar reaction to the plight of the Mongolians (3 million) or the Copts (10 million) or even the Hutus.

In any case, India has been quite vocal in the support of the Palestinian cause, the Israeli relationship notwithstanding. So that's the problem? I believe a snort is appropriate at this juncture.

All the three countries are faced with the demons of the same ilk, specially coming from the band of Al-Qaeda and their associated members. This has been waved away airily by the denizens of the left and called as just an excuse to keep their citizens scared, increase military spending and help their corporate masters. I suspect they are extrapolating their hero Stalin's methodology to the democratic states. The mind boggles at the stretch of imagination, which allows people to come up with these ideas and suppositions. I think they should label their work as fiction rather than commentary.

Another oft quoted plaintive complaint is, "but these countries are not democracies". Ummm, indeed, I presume they have better options and examples of democracies in their erstwhile communist bloc. Perhaps they should look at the Freedom House ranking to see where these 3 countries end up and then rethink their moan. Freedom House classifies the 3 countries as "free" as far as their democracy is concerned, with a high ranking on the political rights and civil liberties. Ah! Well, I suppose they need something to do and whine about, since their state and economic ideology is of as much use as that of a wet paper bag in a fish market.

So, Mr Mishra, yes, please, go right on ahead and line up international support against terrorism wherever you can get it. An international coalition is vital to defeat international terrorism, especially those terrorists who do not respect state borders or who rely on rogue states supporting these reprehensible elements. And as India, UK and Canada collaborated together to deal with the Punjab crisis, so also India, USA and Israel can collaborate equally. As for the complaints, perhaps a word of advise - please try to distinguish between national interests and party ideology, mucking up national interests on the basis of party ideology is heinous and utterly lacking in any form of basic intelligence and analysis.

(Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta, currently working on a doctorate at Kings College in International Relations and Terrorism, also holds a Doctorate in Finance and Artificial Intelligence from Manchester Business School. He works in the City of London in various capacities in the Banking Sector. He also lectures at several British Universities.)

I would actually say that the US, India, Israel, Russia (despite their stance on Iraq and subsequent actions), and Australia are probably the most viable members of an alliance against al-Qaeda in the sense that together we all control the largest part of the world's military and that we're ultimately being targeted by the same people. As Putin noted recently, the same network that finances, trains, and carries out terrorist attacks in Jammu and Kashmir is also running the Chechen rebellion. We're all targets from the perspective of these people, which is one of the reasons why we're better off fighting them together than separately.

I agree, but it also seems that the overarching US strategy since 9/11, despite the rhetoric, is to differentiate between various degrees of the terror emanating from essentially the same sources. Sort of a salami policy, attmpting to quarantine alqaeda from all the other entities, including states and other jihadi groups.

This points up how using the "democratic" temperature of a broth is not the only thing needing to be evaluated before you make soup with it.

Is India more anti-terrorist in action than Pakistan, their joint conflict aside?

As Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International and author of The Future of Freedom (Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad) points out, India has its own problems. As a well know writer of Indian heritage, his comments on this false measurement of sound government by voting only, leaves a lot to be desired.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not condemning India for this initiative mentioned in the speech, but we don't need to think that just mechanical voting is a measure of alliance or that some majorities can't occur that want to do the great wrongs we all abhore.

Oh, I agree completely, but it has always struck me that these groups are funded and I would argue ultimately controlled by the same source. I would cite as evidence for this that every time we get hit with a "wave" of global terror attacks (and so far I've been able to break it down into at least four distinct waves since 9/11), things start heating up worldwide. That takeover of the Hindu temple in Gujarat by back in October that left 30 dead, for example, took place around about the same time as Bali as well the Moscow hostage seige, plus lots of smaller attacks. That, at least IMO, was one of the key things I took as a sign that all of these groups operating under bin Laden's aegis were launching a coordinated worldwide attack.

The major reason the US has thus far been unwilling to identify this jihadi internationale (like the old Comintern) is likely due to the fact of either State Department polyannish thinking that al-Qaeda couldn't possibly be THAT big or else desire to reevaluate our relationships with our alleged allies such as Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. And don't get me wrong, I'm as thrilled as the next guy whenever the Pakistanis bust a top al-Qaeda leader, but I don't think we should have any illusions about Pakistani fidelity as anything more than an ally of convenience if that.

Of course, the ultimate source of US hypocrisy when it comes to terrorism is on the subject of Saudi Arabia, without which the current Islamist internationale simply could not exist. Our refusal to recognize Sudan for what it is as far as an al-Qaeda haven goes is also an area of perpetual annoyance to me.

>>Is India more anti-terrorist in action than Pakistan, their joint conflict aside?

The fact that you even posit this question makes me laugh.

Apart from the Saudis, is there a more terror supporting state than Pakistan.

But like the Saudis, they are our treasured allies.

It always also makes me laugh when India takes knocks against her democracy, but Americans in general are willing to forgive the Saudis, chase the chimera of an "islamic" democracy, Turkey being held up ad nauseum as the paragon of such, while at the same time putting the stamp of US approval on sham attempts at democracy in places like Pakistan, Jordan and Egypt.

So you can call it mechanical voting, but more people vote than in the US. I know, I know, do they really know what they're doing? Maybe, maybe not but when a democracy like the US has a voting percentage hovering arount 50%, it's best not to throw rocks!

Clearly, it is in the interest of the PRC to foment discord between the US and India, whilst fomenting false "friendship" between the US and Pakistan. As always, the US are great as shopkeepers but we are bumpkins when it comes to geopolitical chess. Sadly, Vijpayee appears to have read "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" and himself gotten infected. Thank God there are still hard liners in India who are keeping the flame of a solid, semi-permanent alliance of the US, India and Israel lit. (I would extend the alliance BTW to formally include Taiwan and Japan!..)

I have no illusions about the tendancies and leanings of the average Pakistani on the street in Pakistan being a lot less generous to the rest of the world than the average guy in Delhi, for example.

I do wish they would frame the issue of working in alliance by deeds rather than names. Should I beleive I have a lot in common with the Irish Republican Army because they back the joining of the North with the Irish Republic and Republics are a good thing?

I hope that both countries, the US and India, make good relations between themselves with deeds and not rhetoric and I hope that each won't be defined in the main by its relations with a third country.

It must be stressed this is not a Christian-Jewish-Hindu coalition gearing up against Islam.

Why on earth not? That's one of the better ideas to come out of the war on terror. It makes sense for all civilized nations and decent religions to help keep a boot on the throat of the fiendish Mohammedans.

-ccm

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