US President Donald Trump has given multiple reasons to Pakistan in the past few days for serious heartburn. Perhaps heartaches and heart attacks too. One of the most galling moments for our western neighbour was the way he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his US visit. The joint US-India statement released in Washington on Friday (February 13) has shocked Pakistan as it had too many shockers for our neighbour.
Around the same time, during Modi’s visit to the US, Vice President J D Vance’s office announced the appointment of S Paul Kapur as Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia affairs. In the days to come, this appointment can cause lots of problems for Pakistan as Kapur is an expert who knows it inside out. He has written very extensively on Pakistan’s use of non-state Islamist actors and its nuclear deterrence strategies.
In one of his books on Pakistan, Paul S Kapur has described its use of non-state actors against India, right from the day the nation was born in August 1947. The book titled Jihad as Grand Strategy: Islamist militancy, National Security, and the Pakistan State, was published by Oxford University Press (New York) in 2017.
One reviewer has described it as a persuasive and insightful analysis of Pakistan’s use of Islamist militancy against India. Jihad or support for Islamist militants has constituted a central pillar of Pakistan’s “grand strategy’’, not just one of the many tools of Pakistani statecraft. Since its emergence as a nation-state, Pakistan has exploited Islamist oriented non-state actors as geopolitical tools for confronting India.
This has been done deliberately to shape Pakistan’s strategic environment without the risks of direct military confrontation with much stronger India.
In this well-articulated book, Kapur traces the roots of Pakistan’s strategy in the use of Pashtun raiders in Kashmir immediately following the partition of British India into two political entities.
He has written some more books and one of them is India, Pakistan, and the Bomb: Debating Nuclear Stability in South Asia which was published by Columbia University Press in 2010. Specialising in International Affairs, particularly the geopolitics of South Asia, Kapur can become a handful for the Pakistani diplomats during his tenure. Earlier, the South Asian desk was seen by Donald Lu which got involved in some controversies in Pakistan.
Kapur’s official biodata given on the website of the United States Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) reads: S. Paul Kapur is a professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the United States Naval Postgraduate School. He is also a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2020-2021, Kapur served on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, working on issues related to South and Central Asia, Indo-Pacific strategy, and U.S.-India relations. Previously, he taught at Claremont McKenna College, and was a visiting professor at Stanford University.
As things are unfolding in the very first month of Trump’s tenure, it is clear that he is prioritising the bilateral relations with India. His picking up Kapur for the key diplomatic appointment shows that he is backing an expert on India-Pakistan security and nuclear issues. If confirmed, Kapur will be the second Indian-origin US diplomat overseeing the South Asia bureau, which manages ties with India and the other countries in the region.
Kapur was briefly part of the US State Department’s policy planning team on South Asia during Trump’s previous term. Kapur is a strong proponent and backer of close US-India relations and a very harsh critic of Pakistan. Due to this reason, Pakistan is likely to find him a tough nut to deal with in the near future.
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