A cauldron is brewing in parts of Pakistan, Taliban-controlled segments of Afghanistan, radical enclaves in Libya and Syria.

This is the intensified and covert training by “retired” or “on leave” officers of the Pakistan Army, who are training youths in the kind of warfare that is carried out by extremist fighters across the world.

What is becoming a worrying development is the Nelson’s Eye that the Central Military Commission of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has turned towards the asymmetric warfare activities of GHQ Rawalpindi, its “iron brother”.

Assisting the conventional forces of Pakistan is a less than friendly action in a context where India has been the primary target of hostile activities. Facilitation of such activities of GHQ(R) by the PLA would cross a red line in terms of the Sino-Indian relationship.

On an even broader scale, any knowledge and tacit acceptance of the training operations undertaken by retired and “on leave” elements of the Pakistan Army in locations other than in South Asia would pose a security challenge to countries in the EU as also the US... .

Quarters hostile to US interests may wish to teach the Biden administration a lesson and may turn to terror groups as a low cost, deniable option to secure such an outcome.

When the A.Q. Khan network was discovered, it was apparently accepted in several chancelleries that the scientist was a solo operator running a vast network of nuclear smuggling and espionage without the backing and indeed the knowledge of GHQ Rawalpindi.

The problem that has now to be confronted so far as the major democracies are concerned is that GHQ Rawalpindi has an all-weather (all-tactic) partnership with a powerful military, the PLA, that is itself allied to the armed forces of the Russian Federation.

The ever closer strategic and tactical relationship between the PLA and GHQ Rawalpindi in the context of Cold War 2.0 has yet to have several of its dimensions explored by the countries affected.

The use of asymmetric warfare to weaken a foe openly or covertly is not a skill that can be used exclusively in operations against India.

The CCP leadership core has long been aware that at some stage in the future, there will almost certainly be kinetic contact between the PLA and the US military. This may escalate to a scale significant enough to alter the geopolitical destiny of the losing nation.

Earlier, Hitler had bowled a googly to Stalin, planting a fake dossier that purported to show that the higher echelons of the Red Army were infested with agents of the Nazi regime. Stalin fell for the trap and executed more than 30,000 officers, including 86 generals.

The best military minds in the country were killed from 1936 onwards not by the German armed forces but by the government to which the soldiers who were executed had been loyal.

Fast forward to the present, where in countries regarded as hostile or potentially hostile by China & its ally the Russian Federation, fake dossiers have been sought to be planted about those in policymaking circles that the Sino-Russian alliance would like to get out of the way.

The Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union, and has no ambition of replacing the US as the primary power of the world in the manner that the USSR had until the declining years of CPSU General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev.

Once Putin ensured a lengthy rather than a truncated stint in power, efforts by major NATO powers at boxing in Russia expanded in scope, with the consequence that an alliance with Beijing was the only option available to Moscow for its continued salience as a Great Power.

At least so long as President Putin and General Secretary Xi are in charge of their respective countries, the Sino-Russian alliance will endure.

Indeed, it may reach a level such that even a leadership change may have little effect on this significant partnership that challenges the primacy of the US and its allies in the Indo-Pacific and later the Atlantic.

This is a fact not clear to more than a few policymakers in Delhi’s Lutyens Zone, as also to their counterparts in the Washington Beltway. The Biden team in particular has several elements wedded to a view of the world that became obsolete before the close of the previous century

Although the fact was not apparent at the time, the effort under Leonid Brezhnev to make Afghanistan a country firmly tethered to the Soviet bloc ultimately resulted in much grief to the USSR.

In much the same way, the constantly expanding linkages between Pakistan and the PRC are almost certainly going to entail a substantial cost to Beijing, and not just in terms of the money spent.

The US got out of Pakistan in time, although its stint there has done great damage to itself and to other countries, including several friends.

Entering a zone of rising geopolitical risk without an exit strategy may in course of time be accepted within the CCP leadership as the mistake it is.

Since the 3 May intrusions and the 15 June clash at Galwan, the disaggregation between action on the border and commercial linkages between the two most populous countries of the world has ended.

Had wiser counsel been adopted, that entity (Taliban) would have been as inconsequential a force as the alliance between the US and the Northern Alliance made it in four short months in 2001 that ended with the suicidal concession made by Bush and Cheney at Kunduz... .

A thousand cuts (the ultimate Imperial Chinese punishment) on that country from a miscellany of forces could weaken at least the resolve of Washington to challenge Beijing much more assertively than was the case during the Obama administration in the South China sea... .

The militarisation of the South China Sea proceeds without any let-up, and the effort by the PRC is to get ASEAN to agree to a Code of Conduct that would legitimize its sway over the waters.

Apart from Taiwan,the Himalayan massif is another strategic target of the PLA, and it remains to be seen whether the CCP leadership core will understand the damage done to PRC interests by permitting the PLA to so unreservedly sign on to GHQ Rawalpindi’s action plan against India

It had been thought in Beijing that Moscow would succeed in keeping Delhi apart from Washington in a military sense, and the S-400 purchase by the Govt of India has helped keep that expectation of distance between Delhi and Washington alive. #S400

Beijing has established partnerships with Venezuela, Iran, Turkey and powers other than Pakistan, each of which has the capability of causing damage to US and allied interests.

The manner in which Russia accepted the counsel to remain practically uninvolved in a conflict that was going disastrously for a treaty partner such as Armenia shows the limits to which assistance can be expected from Moscow in the event of faceoff between Indian military and PLA

Rather than stop buying oil from Iran and going forward with the purchase of S-400 systems, the oil should have been bought and the Russian system abandoned in a signal to Washington that India has the potential to be a reliable partner.

The CPEC in particular is becoming a tar baby that is locking Beijing in an embrace with GHQ Rawalpindi that could be as fateful to the PRC as the move into Afghanistan was for the USSR.

Errors made in Afghanistan and elsewhere by successive US administrations facilitated 9/11. Policy missteps that have taken place since may cause a second such security disaster not just in India but in the EU and the US.

The democracies and other powers that are slowly but steadily allying against common threats may have more than Covid-19 to worry about during the term of the next US administration.

Full article: http://i.mdnalapat.com/tsg271220