Din, Din, Din
By John Batchelor on November 25, 2009 at 2:30 PM in Current Affairs
Chilly India.
The Obama administration’s recent swing through Asia, featuring Shanghai and Beijing, left behind a bad opinion of POTUS as weak or indifferent or unconfident. What was left out of the trip was India, and now there is the State Dinner at the White House for dry, no-nonsense, low-key India PM Manmohan Singh (above). Again, POTUS makes ceremonial pledges of cooperation and partnership and a new beginning. This is all hokum, and the Indians ignore it. The relationship between Delhi and Washington is touchy. The chief offense is that Richard Holbrooke approached his job as if Kashmir was part of his mission — bring the Indians and Pakistanis to the table, find a solution. Naive hokum. Tunku Varadarajan, DailyBeast.com, told me Sunday 22 that the Indian government enjoyed such warm relations with the Bush administration that the relatively aloof tone of the new team combined with the Hokbrooke pushiness has resulted in a chill. PM Singh is not expected to make mention of the issue. It is just another of those question marks re the Obama administration’s so-called reset.
India in Afghanistan.
What is especially puzzling about the chill between Washington and Delhi is that India is accustomed to working with Afghanistan, contra the rogue Pakistan, and is in a place to be most helpful to the struggle in Kabul for development and stability. India is the regional super power in development (not Iran). This is the other famous sovereign state of the BRICs. While the India discomfort with Washington knuckleheadedness continues, POTUS has started the long-form leaking of his Afghanistan decision. At this point there are no secrets, no surprises. The single metric worth watching is how may watch the spech on Monday night. It will be the headline on Tuesday. The White House has put out the tough-guy phrase, “finish the job” to explain POTUS aims. This is advert blither. The facts about the POTUS decision on Afghanistan are not glamorous. There is a limit to the combat brigades available over the next year. The Army wants to give combat teams 24 months out of theater before it rotates them back in. Right now, the Army is 12 months in theater and 12 months in the USA. It is wrecking families and lives. The 80k number was fantasy and misdirection. The airborne unit I spoke to on Saturday 21, in Zabul Province (hour helicopter ride north of Kandahar), has a mission to train an Afghan National Army unit way, way outside the wire. They are camped in a mud-built fort left by the British when they were lords. Sending in training units will free the airborne for operations.
Kandahar, Khe Sanh
Early spin says that the Army and Marines will draw a cordon around Kandahar. Don’t make anymore of it than an incomplete gossip. The speech next week will be a balm to the anti-war left that wants to rationalize POTUS as a peace president who must clean-up the mess of a war president. There is no exit from Afghanistan until and if the Taliban is defeated. The Taiban is camped at Quetta in Pakistan. The Taliban is linked to the ISI at Rawalpindi. The whole Pakistan government is soaked with money from the House of Saud. The short version is that the solution to the Taliban is not at Kandahar. Now we will pretend that the cordon around the city is the first step to retake the country. As if this is Dien Bien Phu, as if this is Khe Sanh. Also, India is part of the solution. India knows how to train the Afghan National Army. Ask Din, Din, Din for help, for leadership, for weight. I am told the work in Afghanistan is a long, troubling road that would require the kind of patience that ISAF and the US do not possess. India is an empire that knows how to wear down and beat the savages. Instead we have POTUS making another sonorous, sober, moving and futile speech about war, pivoting to his left as he shields his eyes from the right. As he is deaf to the tempo of the frontier:
| Din! Din! Din! | 80 |
| You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din! | |
| Tho’ I’ve belted you an’ flayed you, | |
| By the livin’ Gawd that made you, | |
| You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din! |
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