Geopolitical factors

contributing to Afghan
quagmire
By MANOJ KUMAR MISHRA OCTOBER 24, 2018 4:43 AM (UTC+8)

Afghanistan’s strategic position between the Eurasian heartland and the Indian Ocean made
it the focus of the “Great Game,” the historical competition between the British and
Russian empires for geopolitical supremacy.

During the Cold War, the Great Game referred to the two superpowers, the US and the
Soviet Union, jostling for influence, and now it characterizes the complex game involving
America and various active regional powers such as Russia, Iran, Pakistan, China and
India, and non-state actors such as the Taliban, ISIS and other insurgent groups.

Access to the Eurasian region is needed to facilitate land strategies and to the
Indian Ocean to support naval strategies. The region contains critical resources
for the sustenance of a global power, such as minerals, gas and oil. Washington
believes wielding influence in Kabul is essential to containing the regional influence
of Russia and neighboring Iran and China.

The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 witnessed an exponential growth in

the number of madrassas, which provided recruits for filling the ranks of the
Islamist mujahideen to fight the communist forces. These were, however, the
result of the ideological indoctrination and economic resources poured into raising
the insurgencies by state actors instead of indicating a religious backlash.

The importance of these factors is borne out by the fact that when the Pakistani
leader Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq turned down the Carter administration’s offer
of US$4 million, the Reagan government provided Pakistan with an aid package
worth more than $3.2 billion to strengthen the insurgency.

The effects of geopolitical factors were underlined by the fact that most of the
sophisticated weapons such as the first firearms – mainly .303 Enfield rifles
– arrived in Pakistan on January 10, 1980, 14 days after the Soviet invasion
(CG Cogan, “Partners in Time: The CIA and Afghanistan since 1979”, World Policy
Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2, Summer 1993, p76).
In the latter part of 1986, the US brought the first ground-to-air missiles in
the form of the American Stinger, a handheld, “fire and forget” anti-aircraft
missile to Afghan territory to fight the Russian forces (K Katzman,
“Afghanistan: Current Issues and US Policy”, CRS Report for Congress, updated in
August 27, 2003, p2).
Pakistan saw an alliance with the US as an opportunity to offset the power
imbalance with India, scuttle the Indian effort to cultivate Afghanistan
and increase its influence in Kashmir. It is roughly calculated that 70% of the
weapons supplied to continue jihad in Afghanistan never reached there.
They either became Pakistani military assets or were sold for profit by the
Pakistani military or its various entrepreneurial middlemen.

The mujahideen were the first non-NATO recipients of the sophisticated

weapons (For more details on US arms sales to Pakistan during the Soviet
Occupation, see RF Grimmett, “US arms sales to Pakistan”, CRS Report for Congress,
August 24, 2009, p1).

Pakistan wanted to enhance its influence vis-a-vis India, particularly in relation to

Kashmir. Prominent Pakistani leaders and army officials preferred to describe
Kashmir as the jugular vein of Pakistan, underlining the geopolitical importance of
Kashmir for Islamabad, although they committed themselves to the cause of the
freedom struggle in Kashmir.

It was after the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan that Pakistan tried to

internationalize the Kashmir issue. Its active anti-Soviet role paid it rich
dividends in terms of securing diplomatic support from the West and Islamic
states apart from the huge amount of aid and arms received from the US, Saudi
Arabia and Britain.

In this context, Pakistan hoped to reverse the agreement reached between it

and India in Shimla that Kashmir was a bilateral issue to be resolved
bilaterally. Furthermore, Pakistan was involved in the clandestine acquisition
of nuclear weapons to create a favorable strategic environment to pursue its
interests in Kashmir with relative asymmetry.

It was during this time that Pakistan hoped that its activities were likely to be
ignored as the attention of the West was focused on the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan (For details. see V Longer, The Defence and Foreign
Policies of India, Sterling Publication, New Delhi, 1988, p285-290).
The Pakistani leadership also considered the Soviet intervention an
opportunity to forge an overarching Islamic identity within which demand for
an independent Pashtunistan could be subsumed. Pakistan was aware that
the demand for Pashtunistan, if conceded, would have granted Afghanistan
the most desired route to the Indian Ocean as Kabul was on the lookout
for alternative routes to lessen dependence on the market provided by
Islamabad.

Nonetheless, the fact that Pashtunistan dominated Afghan foreign policy in

the early 1960s despite the little support it enjoyed among the Pashtuns of
Pakistan indicated its geopolitical character. Further, the geopolitical character of the
insurgency is underlined by the fact that when the Afghans thought the jihad
had ended with the departure of Soviet troops, the US adopted a rollback
policy, increasingly relying on Salafi Arab fighters to enhance its influence.

The Soviet Union disintegrated in the early 1990s and gave way to the
emergence of five Central Asian states that were landlocked but rich with
natural resources. The resource potential of the Caspian Sea region was
believed to be high enough to sustain the growing needs of the global economy and
even serve as an alternative to the unstable Persian Gulf region.

Indicating its desire to reach

Indicating its desire to reach out to the region, the US Congress started
passing bills that called for the diversification of energy supplies from the Central
Asian and Caspian region starting from the late 1990s. Around this time, however,
the US lacked an overarching ideological threat due to the demise of the
Soviet Union, around which it framed its geopolitical interests.

Its interests were placed, on the one hand, within the spheres of various regional
powers and militant groups. On the other hand, Pakistan, in its attempt to
enhance both trade and political ties to the region, needed stability in
Afghanistan, which was ripped apart by civil war and the local rule of the
warlords.

Under the government of Benazir Bhutto, the interior minister, General

Naseerullah Babur, prepared the groundwork to use the Taliban to bring
stability to southern and eastern Afghanistan, following the failure
of Gulbuddin Hekmetyar to subdue ethnic forces in Afghanistan despite repeated
attempts. In this changed context, the US was poised to recognize the Taliban
as a legitimate regime.

For instance, Robin Raphel, who was in charge of the Central Asian region at
the US State Department, paid two visits to Kabul to meet Taliban
government functionaries. State Department spokesman Glyn Davies said
the US found “nothing objectionable” in the steps taken by the Taliban to
impose Islamic law (A Tarock, “The Politics of the Pipeline: The Iran and
Afghanistan Conflict”, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 20, No4, August 1999, p815). Deputy
Spokesman and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs from 1995 to 1997
American and Pakistani geopolitical interests in Afghanistan converged
in the opening of trade routes and the forging of links with different resource-
rich Central Asian states. Nonetheless, the fact that the Taliban comprised
many members drawn from the Central Asian states instead of
exclusively representing the Pashtun Afghans of the refugee camps in Pakistan
pointed to it being structured to suit geopolitical interests.

On the other side, Russia saw the Taliban’s rise to prominence as a threat.
Sergei Ivanov, then the head of the Russian Security Council, not only
accused the Taliban government of assisting the Chechen resistance but
claimed the group gave sanctuary to Islamists from some of the Central
Asian states and allowed them to train for guerrilla warfare to destabilize
those states.

Similarly, the animosity between Iran and the Taliban reached a peak in
1998 when the Taliban attacked and conquered the northern town of Mazar-i
Sharif, killing eight Iranian diplomats and journalists they accused of
supplying arms to the opposition.

This issue led to the deployment of Iranian troops along the Afghan border,
raising fears of conflict. Washington’s enhanced military presence in
Afghanistan and the Central Asia region and proposals for alternative pipeline
routes, such as the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline through Turkey and
the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline from Turkmenistan to
Pakistan through Afghanistan, engendered deep-rooted suspicions
within the Iranian and Russian governments.
Because of the evolving dynamics in Kabul and the geopolitical importance of the
outcomes of regional war and peace efforts, Moscow and Tehran have allegedly
shifted their support from the fragmented Northern Alliance group to
the Taliban in order to strengthen their Afghan role. Washington has signaled its
dissatisfaction with these states’ alleged support for the Taliban to impede the peace
process in Kabul and roll back progress made by US-led forces. On the other hand,
Moscow and Tehran have denied reports of their support for the radical group.

The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal with
Iran, impose fresh sanctions on Tehran and Moscow and inaugurate the Trans-
Afghan peace pipeline project in February 2018 indicate an American desire to
pursue its geopolitical interests at the expense of Iranian and Russian interests.

Evolving Afghan circumstances, such as increasing violence perpetrated by the

Taliban and America’s withdrawal of security assistance to Pakistan, indicate that
Washington’s interests are seemingly at odds with the Taliban as well as Islamabad.

On the other side, there has been a series of trilateral meetings between
Pakistan, Russia and China primarily aimed at combating the ISIS threat.
During one of the trilateral meetings in Moscow, they agreed to remove certain
Taliban figures from the US sanctions list and approved Islamabad’s hosting
of a meeting of heads of intelligence agencies from Russia, China and Iran to beef up
counter-terrorism efforts aimed at the threat posed by ISIS.

Afghanistan continues to be in an imbroglio even while the US and other regional

powers such as Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran have changed sides in the
geopolitical game. These regional powers allege that the US pursued shared
interests with ISIS in keeping Afghanistan embroiled in instabilities and
disorder so that it could have a permanent military presence in the
region.

The US has reportedly claimed that the size and strength of ISIS were
intentionally inflated while attempts were made to strengthen the
Taliban to bog down the US war and peace efforts in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the
distrust between the US and the regional powers has prevented a coordinated
response to the Afghan quagmire, and violence by radical groups is on the rise.
Robin Raphel, 'the bird', who was
disliked in USA
Robin Raphel, a former US diplomat now under a counter
intelligence investigation, has spent much of her professional life dealing
with Pakistan and defending it against criticism as she doled out
billions in aid to the “frenemy”.

She said she “understood” Pakistan. It can be argued that her

understanding of India was in inverse proportion -- the more she understood
Pakistan, the more she pushed its agenda and the less she understood
India.

Even some State Department officials agree that her capacity to poison the waters
of diplomacy on India-Pakistan issues was remarkable. She relentlessly
pushed Kashmir to the forefront, perhaps imagining she would be the
one to find a solution by arm-twisting India.

After retirement she worked as Pakistan’s lobbyist and then rejoined the State
Department as an adviser in the key office of the Special Representative on
Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Conflict of interest doesn’t even begin to describe this sequence especially in

light of the law that requires a two-year cooling-off period. In Raphel’s
case, the State Department never clarified how she met the requirements of the
law.

By Raphel’s own telling, she first landed in Peshawar in 1975 in a beat-up

Chevrolet Vega travelling through Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. Her
fondness for Pakistan only grew with time and in her most recent avatar as
adviser she controlled $7.5 billion in non-military US aid to Pakistan.

As the news of the Federal Bureau of Investigation probe percolated through

Washington, her detractors and supporters have both come out to denounce or
defend her.

The exact nature of the investigation is still unknown except that most cases
such cases involve allegations of spying for foreign governments. Her
supporters are surprised by the revulsion she still evokes in India. They say the
criticism is unfair and the reaction unwarranted since she could still come out of
it unblemished.

An old Washington hand said Raphel probably got “sloppy” in handling classified
documents and came under the scanner. Although not a friend of Raphel but
someone who has worked with her, he said she might be part of a larger probe in
which the FBI might be pressuring her for information to nail other people.

MUST READ: Robin Raphel, the American Indian diplomats hated

“I can’t believe she would sell information or be ideologically motivated to pass

information along. The only thing that makes sense is sloppiness,” he said.

Raphel is 67 and retired from the US foreign service in 2005 after 30 years but
came back as an adviser in 2009 when Richard Holbrooke took over as SRAP. In
between she was a lobbyist for Cassidy and Associates representing Pakistan.

The Legal Times blog, which tracked disclosures from Cassidy and Associates,
reported in November 2009 that Raphel was crafting Pakistan’s lobbying strategy
less than a week before her new position was announced as adviser to the SRAP.

She reportedly attended more than 40 meetings, including many at the State
Department and on Capitol Hill, on Pakistan’s behalf in the two months before
she left the lobbying firm. A filing submitted to the Justice Department showed
that the lobbying firm was e-mailing her even after she assumed her new position.

Her detractors are reportedly spread across the US military and the CIA,
according to a well-informed source. Apparently, in the intelligence circles,
Raphel was known as ‘the bird’ and intensely disliked. The US military
lost thousands of soldiers in the Afghanistan war in which Pakistan’s
role has been more than dubious, a country she habitually defended.

People like Raphel were meant to get Pakistan to deliver the Taliban for the so-
called ‘peace talks’ but they failed miserably while the Pentagon commanders
faced defeat and have to explain the 2,350 dead soldiers. When she talked up
Pakistan at think tanks in Washington, they were appalled.

“Her ice queen act didn’t go down well with soldiers who were getting
shot at, blown up and dying having no idea why any of it was
happening,” the source commented. The anti-Pakistan feeling is intense among
US veterans of the Afghan war.
Meanwhile, Pakistan has collected $20 billion in US military and
civilian aid since 2002, $7.5 billion of which under the Kerry-Lugar
was overseen by Raphel. As with all large aid packages, there is patronage and
lack of transparency.

During a conference last year at the Middle East Institute in Washington where
Raphel was the keynote speaker, Pakistan insiders openly referred to the Kerry-
Lugar money as bribe or “the price of doing business in Pakistan.”

As the administrator of USAID, Raphel wielded immense clout. She handed out
cash to Pakistanis claiming they were partners in the war against terrorism while
the US military and CIA operatives were fighting and dying, often precisely
because of Pakistan’s games.

The FBI investigation could be the result of intersection of the many patterns
Raphel wove in her career.

-- Seema Sirohi is a senior journalist based in Washington, DC

Robin Raphel, the American Indian

diplomats hated
November 09, 2014 16:19 IST

On Thursday, November 6, the Washington Post newspaper reported that

controversial American diplomat, Ambassador Robin Raphel, had her
office and home searched by the FBI.

This most unusual development likely raised much cheer at India's ministry of
external affairs, in whose flesh Raphel had been a thorn through much of her
tenure in the first Bill Clinton administration in the early and mid-1990s by
her anti-India and pro-Pakistan stand.

Seventeen years ago, as she was about to step down as Assistant Secretary of State
for South Asian Affairs, Raphel granted an exclusive interview to Aziz Haniffa
and India Abroad, the leading Indian-American weekly newspaper, which is now
owned by Rediff.com

The July 1997 interview, which provoked a raging controversy in both

capitals, Washington, DC and New Delhi, is reproduced here:
R obin Lynn Raphel, who last week left her sixth-floor office as the first
Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs, believes that, despite a
sustained conspiracy by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in New Delhi and
the entrenched South Asia hands at the State Department to have her removed
within months of her appointment, she not only survived but succeeded in both
increasing and enhancing the profile of South Asia in terms of US foreign policy.

In a lengthy conversation with India Abroad, among many of the remarks that
she made with the caveat that they be released only after she left as head of the
South Asia Bureau, to which she was appointed on August 6, 1993,
Raphel declared, "The MEA is being left behind."

She said "the economic people and others who aren't stuck in these old ways of
thinking and mindset" were driving the agenda in India and the MEA was largely
becoming irrelevant.

Raphel said that right from the time of her appointment, there was a concerted
campaign by the ministry to discredit her in the eyes of President Clinton and the
powers that be in the US Administration. "All the stuff about me was misplayed,"
she said.

"I know it was that MEA kind of pettiness. There is a kind of pettiness in that
bureaucracy which at times is worse certainly than ours, but similar to many
others. It's too bad."

Raphel said that "all the gutter press stuff" that was written about her in the
Indian media, which she said "became completely unseemly," was largely "due to
the MEA."

She referred to her controversial remark at her first briefing with the South Asian
press at the Foreign Press Centre here almost four years ago, when she said the
US does not recognize the instrument of accession of Jammu and Kashmir to
India.

Raphel, who had retired from the State Department in 2009, was
appointed to Richard Holbrooke's (third from left) team as an advisor
on Pakistan by President Obama in 2009.

The appointment was controversial because Raphel was then a paid

lobbyist for the Pakistan government.
In retrospect, following the angry passions it provoked, she said it could have
been phrased better. "(But) what I said was consistent with US policy and it still
is," she explained. "I would have phrased it a bit differently if I had to do it over
again, but that's our policy and has been for 40 years basically."

R aphel said that from the time of former Foreign Secretary J N (Mani)
Dixit and others, while the MEA had tried to pull rank on her and
prevent her from meeting with the prime ministers, foreign ministers
and others, she had developed a rapport with the Indian people,
politicians, Opposition figures and the intelligentsia. "I do actually think
I command quite a lot of respect from them because I know the country, I know
the issues," and have "a certain passion about it, which comes through, and
people respect that. People respect people who stick with an issue."

Consequently, she said that not only did she serve out her full tenure, but
outsurvived Dixit and the "senior conservative" White males in the State
Department like the former deputy chief of mission in New Delhi, Kenneth
Brill, who was her senior in New Delhi when she served there from August 1991
till August 1993, who wanted her not only to fail but fail miserably.

"Like any bureaucrat," Raphel said, "he (Dixit) was very hierarchical and may
have thought why did they (President Clinton and the powers in the
administration) reach down and get this person (herself) and all the rest of it."

At the time it was rumoured that Raphel got the job, even though she wa
much junior to several other South Asia hands at the State
Department because she was an FOB (Friend of Bill), having been in
England doing postgraduate studies when Clinton was attending
Oxford and was part of a group of Americans who used to hang out
together.

She said the reason she got the job was because "When you look at all the South
Asian specialists who had vision and some sense of taking a policy somewhere,
there weren't many to choose from; in fact, I was at the top of the list," she added.

Raphel acknowledged, "I wasn't the most senior, but in terms of the qualities
people were looking for, which was imagination, leadership, not the same old
mindset," that she said afflicts "the MEA bureaucracy," she was the automatic
choice.
Raphel, who is now biding her time waiting for an ambassadorial appointment,
which rumours have said it could be to Tunisia, said, "If you talk to someone who
really knows the issues, this administration realises that they are indebted to me
for holding the South Asia account and keeping it and trying to get attention on to
it."

She said that from the President down, there was a cognisance that she was
dealing with the policy issues in "South Asia that matter," and was taking flak,
while they were doing what in this part of the administration was not more
important but more urgent -- Russia, China Bosnia.

She continued, "That made me have more influence over policy toward
South Asia than anybody in this building, in fact, anybody in this
town, because it was done here and they were very happy because they didn't
have to worry about it."

She reiterated that this didn't mean that "they (particularly the White House)
weren't interested, but there were more urgent matters. Again you need to
distinguished between urgent and important."

"And I have worked very hard to hew a line between India and Pakistan and
people have not tried to understand that," she said. "Indians have not wished to
understand that and I heard such nonsense from the MEA. They don't get it. They
never understood about the Brown Amendment (initiated by the State
Department and introduced by former Republican Senator Hank
Brown that provided for a waiver of the Pressler Amendment and led to
the transfer of $368 million in sophisticated weaponry to Pakistan in
1996)."

She added, "All they (the MEA) do is fantasise about the security relationship
(between the US and Pakistan)."

Raphel emphasised that "we do not want an arms relationship with Pakistan in
the 1990s," as the MEA always seems to be paranoid about and believes the
Brown Amendment was the precursor to the resurrection of such a relationship.
She also strongly denied the perception that had been drawn of her as being pro-
Pakistan and anti-India.

"I like Pakistan, I like India, I like South Asia," she declared. "In India, I like
the colour and the texture and the sensuality of the place and the interestingness
of the people, except the bureaucrats, who in my experience are not worth the
time of day."

In Pakistan, where she has also served, Raphel said, "Of course, I like the place
and I appreciate their predicament, and a lot of times they behave in a more
seeming manner because they are the smaller one and I appreciate it. (But) that
doesn't say anything about my views of India, about which I am quite passionate."
Raphel claimed, "I am perfectly well plugged into that country, and I like it and I
enjoy the people and they enjoy me."

"I am not a stuffy diplomat and I know what I am talking about," she went on,
"and I talk straight and at the end of the day most people appreciate that. I don't
suck up to anybody, and I mean not to anybody at home or abroad. That's not my
style, and in India where there's a bit of tradition of obsequiousness, they get a
little confused about that."

But she said, "At the end of the day, when people know you are engaged and that
you care and that you are fair, and that you are straight and you know your
business, they respect you, and that's what I was after."

Although she assailed Dixit for being the key conspirator against her, she also
praised him.

"H e (Dixit) had his reasons for being bitter with his own system," she
declared. "But he in fact was the best foreign secretary in terms of understanding
India's potential in the world and how they ought to play it. He was not parochial;
he was a smart guy. I've felt bad about Mani Dixit primarily because he
was a person of some vision, and for his talents to be turned inward
and bitter and complaining that 'Nobody pays enough attention to me'
type of thing was a shame because he was exceptionally good. He
could see where US-India relations were supposed to go."

Raphel during the long conversation also dismissed the persistent rumour about
two years ago that it was Brill, who at the time had returned from New Delhi and
was director of the State Department's staff secretariat with the authority to
decide which papers go to the secretary, had opposed her desire to go to
Islamabad as ambassador. "He had no say who was ambassador (to) where," she
said.
She described Brill as being "very conservative and old-fashioned, and that made
it difficult for him with officers who have something other than a conservative
style who aren't tall white male and so on."

She said that consequently, Brill "had a hard time when someone beneath him in
the hierarchy -- I was number three when he was number two in New Delhi -- was
moved up."

"He really bridled under that, not because he had anything personal against me,
but it just wasn't the way he saw the world going," she said. "It shouldn't have
been that a woman should have moved up above him. So that was a problem and
I think he groused and crumbled under that. So Ken Brill had no influence over
my future at all."

But lending credence to the rumour that she had indeed coveted the envoy's
posting to Islamabad, Raphel said, "To tell you the honest truth, I would love to
be ambassador to Pakistan or to India. Either of these two, I would love to go."

"(But) when Pakistan came up," she explained, "I had been in the job (as head of
the South Asia Bureau) for two years and there was no way they (Clinton and the
State Department hierarchy) would let me go because I was 'it' on South Asia."

"They were aware that I carried the water and they liked it that way," she recalled,
and thus did not want her to leave as Assistant Secretary for South Asia, despite
"all the efforts of the MEA in Delhi to try and change that."

India-baiting US diplomat Robin Raphel

under probe
Veteran American diplomat Robin Raphel, known for her strong pro-
Pakistan leanings, has been placed under federal counter intelligence
investigation.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation searched the homes of Raphel and also
her State Department office, which has been sealed, according to media reports.

At the time of raids, she was an advisor on Pakistan in the Office of

Special Representatives for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the State
Department. Her contract with the State Department expired last week.
In 1993, she was appointed as America's first Assistant Secretary of State
for South and Central Asian Affairs.

She later served as the US Ambassador to Tunisia and in the 2000s, was
appointed to or held a number of official positions related to her expertise on
South Asia.

She was also posted in Britain and India.

According to the Washington Post, which first reported about it, US officials
acknowledged that the FBI conducted a search at Raphel's home on October 21
but would not provide details of the search.

Agents removed bags and boxes from the home, but it is not clear what was seized
there or at her office.

At the State Department, Raphel's office remained dark and locked, the daily said.

After her retirement and before returning to the State Department, Raphel
worked as a lobbyist for Cassidy & Associates, a Washington-based
government relations firm.

She represented Pakistan, Equatorial Guinea and Iraq's Kurdistan

regional government, according to federal disclosure forms.

‘Espionage cases involving State Department officials are relatively rare,’ the daily
reported.

Because of her stand on Kashmir and pro-Pakistan leanings, Raphel was

extremely unpopular in India.

In his book Diplomatic Channels, former Indian Foreign Secretary Kris

Srinivasan, released in 2012, wrote that the Research and Analysis Wing snooped
on a telephone conversation of Raphel which confirmed that the US would not
back a draft resolution against India on Kashmir moved by Pakistan at the United
Nations, and therefore

it would fail to proceed any further.

'It's unclear whether she is the target of the investigation, or what agents were
searching for. The officials said it is an ongoing investigation and no charges have
been filed,' reports CNN.com, while the Post adds that "the exact nature of the
investigation involving Raphel remains unclear. She has not been charged.'
Raphel, a retired career diplomat, was an adviser to the Barack Obama
administration on Pakistan, functioning under a limited, renewable
contract to US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
She also had the power to administer non-military aid and economic grants.

The 67-year-old former diplomat was married to ambassador Arnold

Raphel, who was killed along with former Pakistan president Zia ul
Haq in an air crash in 1988. At the time of the accident the couple was
already separated.

Raphel, a long-time diplomat, was among her country’s senior advisors on

Pakistan and South Asia.

Raphel gained notoriety in the 1990s in India when, as assistant secretary of state
in the Bill Clinton administration she got Jammu and Kashmir
declared as a ‘disputed territory’, and called for the dispute to be resolved as
per the wishes of the Kashmiri people.