In geopolitics, US shifts to Asia

Driven by US resolve to deal with terror, the geopolitical map of Asia is fundamentally shifting. Crucial Asian fault lines between secular and religious views, elites versus the poor, and regional power relations and interests, are all suddenly being tested.

Asian military budgets will likely increase. Local Muslim-identity movements from Pakistan to Indonesia are stirring. As US-led coalition forces mobilize for a borderless war like no other in memory, lights are burning late in Asian foreign ministries and security agencies. Underscoring US concern about instability in a region that spans half the globe, a Defense Department review - scheduled for release even before the Sept. 11 attacks - called yesterday for a shift of US military assets and resources from Europe to the Asian theater.

"Asian cornerstones will change," says Wang Yizhou, deputy director of the Institute of World Economics and Politics in Beijing. "Pakistan and Afghanistan will more and more be the focus of international attention. This will produce major consequences in Southeast Asia. Malaysia and Indonesia may be trouble spots. The Asian landscape of power relations will have to adjust. America will be a new partner in the Central Asian opera, and China and Russia will have to rethink."

The stakes are high - and complex. Will the US response bring benefits - greater stability in Asia, the possibility of better US-China relations, hope for dealing with disputes like Kashmir? Will it rather ignite grievances in the streets and mosques that will unravel states? Or will America's shift from Europe to the Pacific mainly result in a hardening of military and state power that will crush opposition groups, of all kinds, with impunity?

For now, Pakistan is at the epicenter of the shift. President Gen. Pervez Musharraf is trying to reverse overnight a seven-year policy to aid and support the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan. (Pakistan, through its ISI security services, helped create the Taliban.)

Yesterday, in a BBC interview, President Musharraf was asked if the Taliban's days were numbered. "It appears so," he replied.

Musharraf agreed to side with the US, partly to remove Pakistan from years of US sanctions and overall diplomatic isolation. The result will be more US presence in Central Asia and closer ties to Islamabad, a key ally of China. This change is already a disappointment to archrival India, which was cultivating a "special relationship" with the US.

Yet Musharraf faces a host of Islamic militant groups that are not only pro-Taliban, but are also devoted to a jihad, or holy war, in the Kashmir Valley that Musharraf himself supported. The militants, and many ordinary Pakistanis, do not always make distinctions between support for the Taliban and support for Kashmir.

"For Pakistan, this is an opportunity to get the country back on track, to perform economically, to control the Islamist groups," says Ayesha Jalal, a MacArthur Fellow at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. "The disaster scenario is that Pakistan is thrown into crisis, there is civil war, and the Army cracks."

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