OBAMA VISIT II: The art and science of being an apprentice great power

After 60 years of being the object of American off-shore balancing, India is now being rewarded by a US policy reversal—it has, following the Obama visit, become an apprentice big power. Some of what that means was spelt out by Mr Obama during the visit, some will always be unsaid. Power comes with responsibility was one homily from Prof Obama, the other was a rebuke on India’s squeamishness in promoting the values of democracy and human rights. Left unsaid is the steep learning curve India has ahead in ruthless exercise of raw power and the bare-faced double standards that great powers are called on to employ.
There is nothing unusual in the American reversal related to India. China was actually seen as an enemy state by the US for twenty years before suddenly becoming a friend and an ally. In India’s case, at least, the US has mainly been a formal friend and well-wisher and a contributor of a significant amount of aid and assistance, in the 1950s and 1960s.
Circumstances change, and great powers like the US, change the objects of their affection. There is no sentiment here, it’s all a matter of self-interest. India has been lucky on this for two reasons. First, besides the sharply accelerated rise of China in the 2000s, there was the economic crisis of 2008 which acted as a brake on the US and actually increased the pace of China’s emergence as a world power. Second, the US entanglement in Iraq and Afghanistan has left it weaker and more inclined to reach out to newer allies. The result is the increased urgency of the US approach to India.
Attributes
So, in addition to the termination of the US-led nuclear embargo on India, which conducted a nuclear test in defiance of the US-led non-proliferation system, there is now the promise of support for a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council.
The acknowledgment of India’s new status is also being heralded by a decision to remove Indian entities from the export control list, as well as its admission into a number of US-led international cartels. In the latter category are the Wassenaar agreement that controls the export of conventional weaponry, the Australia Group whose list of chemical and biological precursors is more extensive than that which operates under the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Nuclear Suppliers Group of all nations with the significant nuclear materials export capability.

India has to understand that even though it has the US imprimatur to be a great power, there is some distance it will have to walk alone. To switch metaphors, the US can drag us to the water, but we need to be able to drink it ourselves. Size, economic and military power, or culture can only take you so far. Beyond that are the more intangible issues such as the skill of building a diplomatic consensus on an issue using the carrot and the stick, the capacity to undertake coercive action, in self-interest, or on behalf of other, possibly weaker actors, the felicity in changing sides when self-interest demands and, above all, the ability to carry your own country, or, at least, most of it, behind you on certain key issues.
One part of the Indian exercise of becoming a big power has been the evolution of its competence in public diplomacy through the Ministry of External Affairs. This is a commendable effort that has sought to educate and influence global opinion on the emerging India. A measure of its importance has been its conception and the high quality of officers deputed to run the division.
But an apprentice big power also requires a covert action division. And this is where we are severely lacking. While the external intelligence agency Research & Analysis Wing is reasonably competent in tactics like “election support” — the covert funding of foreign politicians— or gathering technical intelligence, it has since 1990, largely stayed away from covert action on the instructions of the government. Covert operations—smearing enemies, blackmailing and neutralising them by promoting rivals, arranging their assassination and organising insurgencies—are not things that Indians, even in the government agencies, are too comfortable with. But they are an important, if sinister, ingredient of power.
This attitude is less motivated by moral qualms, than the fact that such operations are expensive and require considerable skill and mental focus. Indian politicians can be as ruthless as any, but they do tend to be a bit weak-kneed.

Leadership
Another vital ingredient, one that separates, say, a Japan and Germany and a China, is military capacity. India has a large army, a fairly big air force and navy. But it still lacks both the capacity and the will to “export” power. This is a consequence of the lack of integration of our military capabilities with the other instruments of national power such as diplomacy, finance and commerce, and even our vibrant domestic industry.
Deep reform is needed in our governmental system to achieve this integration. But this can have a meaning only when it is done under political leadership. At present, it is convenient for the political class to allow these instrumentalities to operate on their own with little reference to an integrated national effort.
So, the bigger agenda of the apprentice big power is to create the institutions that will integrate the elements of its soft and hard power and a political class that understands and practises the use of this power. Minus this, we will be condemned to follow the American lead on issues, instead of, on occasion, providing the lead.
Neighbours
By any measure, the reform of the UN in which India can occupy a permanent seat, the symbol of its big power status, is some years, and perhaps even a decade away. But there is a full shorter term agenda through which India must prove itself. This is largely a regional agenda, one where India must exercise the panoply of its existing powers with a degree of skill and efficacy. Already, there has been a sea change in the region. There was a time when India was seen with suspicion by almost all our neighbours. Today, the situation has changed in countries like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Even in Nepal, there is an understanding that minus India the endemic political crisis there cannot be terminated.
And then, of course, there are Pakistan and China. This is where our new mentor, the US comes in. The hand of friendship that it has extended— no doubt for reasons of its own— can be of considerable assistance to India by facilitating our negotiation with our two difficult neighbours.
Islamabad continues to see India in the most negative fashion. New Delhi has been correct in trying to deal with Pakistan with a mixture of diplomacy, coercion and negotiation. Hopefully at least one message ought to have gotten across to the generals in Rawalpindi—that no amount of terrorist attacks is going to shake India from its steady march to great power status. Once this realisation sinks in, the rest will be a matter of detail.
And then, of course, there is China. At some point, China must calculate— does it want to retain its adversary status in India by using the Pakistani proxy? Or is it a better idea to work out a modus vivendi with New Delhi? As it is, the last six months have revealed that Beijing has fewer friends than it thought in its own neighbourhood.
manoj.joshi@mailtoday.in

OBAMA VISIT I: America's main engagement in Asia remains Sino-centric

Politics, they say, is the art of the possible. A sharp awareness of what is feasible in Indo-US relations — and what is not — has been the running subtext of the Obama visit. The US President himself made that clear in the manner he played around with the ‘P’ word and the ‘K’ word, and spun out the offer of a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council for India.
With nearly 1,00,000 troops on the ground in Afghanistan, dependent on a logistical line through which 1,000 trucks pass daily through the Khyber pass to Kabul, and another 150 through Chaman to Kandahar, even the US President cannot dare to annoy Islamabad. The last time that happened in late September and early October, when US helicopters fired at a Pakistani post killing three soldiers, Pakistan blockaded the US supply convoys and several were attacked and destroyed, allegedly by the Taliban. Entangled in AfPak or PakAf, Washington cannot afford to cross the generals in Rawalpindi and the easiest way to do that would be to give India comfort on the issue of terrorism or Kashmir.
While rhetoric about India as a world power, “India risen”, or “India indispensable”, is fine, and perhaps part of any formal discourse that comes with a state visit, the actuality of the US policy towards India is that it is a hedge against its China relations turning sour, an insurance policy for the future. Given India’s size, location, population, military and economic potential, this is a sound logic. It is the only country in the region that can offer some kind of a counter-balance to China. But Indians should not delude themselves into thinking that they are a world power, even in the sense China already is. We are at least two decades behind China in economic growth, and in that elusive thing called “will to power” perhaps much further behind.
America’s main engagement in Asia remains Sino-centric. The same could be said of the attitude of Japan, Australia and the ASEAN — India is a good hedge, but China is where the principal bets remain.
The principal Indian take-away from the visit is likely to be a promise, rather than an actuality — the American endorsement for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. As of now, the commitment is a diplomatic gesture rather than a concrete step since the reform of the UN is still some time away and the US, though primus inter pares, will still be one actor amongst many in that process.
But, even that commitment has come with a homily about the increased responsibility that comes with increased power and a rebuke for avoiding issues such as criticising countries like Burma for violating human rights. As a permanent member of the Security Council, India would have to learn to play the big power game and when required, be prepared to exercise raw power when “resolutions are implemented and sanctions enforced”, as Obama implied, in the case of Iran’s proliferation issue.
To move in the circles that America and China move in, we have to do a great deal of housekeeping first. There is first the matter of making much more severe dents on the problems of illiteracy, hunger and disease in the country. India must ruthlessly focus on what our interests are in the world of the next 10 to 15 years. Articulating it in terms of a century, such as the “partnership of the 21st century” is a cop-out.
Once we are clear about our interests, we need a policy to safeguard and further them. We need institutions and instruments to move in that direction. And even before that, we need a political leadership which is able to initiate and lead the process. As of now, unfortunately, we have a syncopated leadership in New Delhi which has shown that it cannot even carry the whole Cabinet on an issue such as Kashmir, leave alone Iran or Burma.
President Obama has noted that there is bipartisan support in the United States for a policy to befriend India. In India, as the somewhat shoddy example of the BJP has shown, policy is partisan to the point where the party avowed one policy in power, and quite the opposite out of it.
For a variety of reasons of its own, the US has begun to undo its 60-year-old policy of offshore balancing of India. We should welcome that opportunity and take what we can from it. America will remain the world’s sole superpower for some time to come.

The US helps India to help itself

Review of Stephen P. Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta: Arming without aiming: India's military modernisation (Brookings, 2010)





ARMS and military equipment transfer from the United States to India is a major backdrop of President Barack Obama’s ongoing visit. It is not that the president himself will sign agreements relating to such acquisitions, but that his visit will lubricate a process that has already begun with India beginning to acquire big-ticket items such as weapons location radars, maritime patrol aircraft and specially configured transport aircraft for the Special Forces.
Waiting on the wings are contracts for ten C-17 heavy lift transports and 145 ultra-light howitzers, and a little further down the assembly line is the deal for 126 medium multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA).
The thrust of this book is how America can help India to help itself. In other words, how America’s participation in India’s military moderenisation needs to be accompanied by the emergence of a shared strategic vision between the two countries. The basic thesis of the book is accurate — India is undertaking military modernisation, but in seems to have a hazy focus as to the purpose and goals of that process.
The writers have diagnosed the problem as India’s historic strategic restraint, though there are some areas where we may quibble with their analyses. It is not clear, for example, whether India’s posture in the 1965 war and in the western sector in 1971 was born out of restraint or the incompetence of its generals. It is true that in 2008 (after the 26/11 terror attacks on Mumbai) “the government did not even ask the army to mobilise against Pakistan,” but the reason was that it did ask and while the Air Force and the Navy were prepared for action, the Army said it would be several weeks before it could be ready for operations.
The book provides a set of prescriptions as to how India can be pushed in a manner that it is better aligned to American interests — which, of course, the authors argue, is also in the Indian interest — but its basic conclusion is pessimistic. “We believe that this state of arming without aiming will continue into the future,” the authors say because there seems to be a “collective wisdom” among the politicians that while military modernisation needs to be supported, there was no need to also provide the institutional mechanisms that will aid India to be more strategically assertive.
The authors do not go deep enough in examining why the country’s politicians have a collective distrust of the armed forces. This is manifested by the reluctance of the National Democratic Alliance and the United Progressive Alliance governments to appoint a Chief of Defence Staff who could trigger a significant reform in the management and procurement practices of the armed forces.
Paradoxically, all reports of the parliamentary committees dealing with the armed forces are strongly supportive of their acquisitions and goals. But when it comes to government action, the approach becomes pusillanimous.
The chapter titled ‘The Reluctant Nuclear Power’ has an important discussion on India’s nuclearisation process. Given the peculiarities of the civil-military relations in India, the authors point to the major issues that India confronts in adopting a credible deterrent posture vis-à-vis Pakistan and China. While you can arm without aiming, the process of the development of the nuclear arsenal underway could lead to some rethinking in the political class. This is because once India deploys its nuclear-propelled submarine fitted with ballistic missiles, the government will have to think hard about pre-delegating nuclear weapons launch authority, and mull the issue of keeping the warheads and missiles separately.
Despite the overall thrust of the book, which is on how India can serve American interests — a legitimate theme from the American point of view — the authors have come up with good suggestions. Their recommendation that the US work with India on an initiative to create a nuclear restraint regime in Asia, involving China, Russia, India and Pakistan, is well taken. The unrestrained growth of the Pakistani arsenal points to the need for this. But it is likely to pose a dilemma for any Indian deterrent towards China because we do not have an adequately tested thermonuclear weapon. As Mail Today revealed last year, there are serious doubts about the efficacy of the thermonuclear weapon test in Pokhran in 1998.
The authors have useful suggestions on the manner in which Indian deployments and doctrines can be tweaked to assist Pakistan to “retrain and redirect” the bulk of its forces away from the Indian obsession.
The key insight in the book is its assessment that India will never accept a relationship where it is placed in a subordinate position, and that an American partnership with India, would be akin to its relationship with France which “pursues a ruggedly independent foreign policy with the larger strategic objective of reducing America to ‘normal’ proportions”.
Mail Today November 8, 2010

Lights will brighten the sky only temporarily

(On the occasion of Diwali)

This is a day of celebration across large parts of the country, the day that commemorates Ram’s victorious return to Ayodhya after defeating Ravan in a great battle, a triumph of good over archetypal evil. Lamps will be lit across the country to dispel the darkness and to celebrate the event. People will for a short while forget their everyday travails, brought on by an increasingly corrupt and unjust system. But for the ordinary Indian, the light and the joy will only be temporary, not because many do not have electricity, but because the forces of darkness seem to draw closer by the day.
Evil in India—manifested as corruption and injustice— is not through the acts of a particular wicked man or woman, or even a set of them. There is, to use Hannah Arendt’s phrase, a certain banality about it in that it lies in the acts of ordinary people— your brother, neighbour, school friend or even, yourself. But its primary instrumentality resides in the trinity of politicians, babus, and policemen. Yes, there are contractors and realtors who bribe and manipulate them, but they are merely the parasites.

Evil
There has been a time, which is probably not fully gone, when evil came in this season of celebration in the form of terror — Surjit Singh Penta’s attacks in Chittaranjan Park and Greater Kailash in 1986, Umar Sheikh’s kidnap attempt in 1993, the terrible bomb blasts in Delhi in 2005, and the September 2008 bomb blasts, all aimed at depriving us of our celebratory spirit.
But these days it appears as the symbiotic set of twins, corruption and injustice. For the average person, the consequences of the two are no less lethal than the act of a terrorist and the destruction is far more widespread as compared to a bomb blast. We all know what injustice is all about, but corruption is a complex word and it does not only mean the giving and taking of cash bribes. It also incorporates the moral blindness of those who witness bribery and injustice and do nothing about it, or, worse, go out of their way to cover it up.


For generations of Indians, particularly at the lower end of the social scale, injustice has always been present, but corruption seems to have taken a new virulence. People say China is very corrupt, and there are those who argue that Pakistan is worse. But I doubt if there is any country where a policeman would demand money for the release of a body from a morgue, as indeed they often do in this country. The Bangalore NGO Janaagraha runs a website called ipaidabribe.com where you can see how widespread the process is and how it diminishes the dignity of the person who is often compelled to give a bribe to execute the smallest of tasks—getting a birth or death certificate, clearing customs, getting a verification form cleared by the police and so on.
A former Central Vigilance Commissioner even quantified it, claiming that one in three Indians was corrupt. From small things, the large ones grow and it is not surprising that the spread of corruption has now reached epic proportions as revealed by the CWG and Adarsh Housing Society scams. And with its mass still hidden like an iceberg’s is the humongous 2G spectrum scam.
The resources of the people diverted into pockets is not just about opportunity costs in terms of highways not built or projects shelved, but the non-existence of schools, colleges and health facilities destroys human beings in a different way.
The system that we have created is more insidiously evil than anything that Ravan could have thought of. After all, besides his enormous ego, he was only accused of kidnap. His modern day equivalents are not above murder, rape, false imprisonment and torture. Fish, they say, rots from the head, and so we have Indian Police Service officers like R.K. Sharma convicted of murder, S.P.S Rathore of molesting a young girl and driving her to suicide and K. Lakshamana of ordering the execution of a detained political activist.
You do not have to read Human Rights Watch’s report Broken System: Dysfunction, abuse and impunity in the Indian police, to understand how our criminalised police force functions; all you need to do is to read the newspapers in any part of the country. While the well off and even the middle class are able to bribe their way out of a mess, or to further their goals, those who lack any cash suffer the brunt of everyday injustice. FIRs are not registered, people are railroaded for crimes they did not commit, others are left rotting in jails as undertrials, daughters and wives are raped and children exploited.

Trinity
Perhaps a most monstrous case is unfolding relating to the relationship between Amit Shah, the former Gujarat home minister of state and senior police personnel who are alleged to have murdered a petty criminal and then ordered the rape and execution of his wife so that she would not spill the goods.



Is there any wonder that the two persistent insurgencies in our region—that of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Maoists in India—thrive because of a sense of injustice, linked to corruption. Almost all counter-insurgency experts point out that the Taliban and Maoist dispensation of justice may not tread the orthodox path, but it is quick and effective and provides immediate relief to the poorest of the poor who otherwise bear the brunt of the exploitative system.
A major reason for the impunity with which corruption flourishes in the country is the lack of a deterrent. The reason for this is the complicity of the political class which heads the government. All cases of police and babu prosecution require government or political clearance. And that is where the rub lies. That permission never comes, or comes with the utmost reluctance, often with minnows being offered up instead of sharks, because the politician is only the apex of the evil triangle whose other poles are the policeman and the babu.

Remedy
Sadly, neither the BJP nor the Congress seem to be able to resist the power of evil. But that is what evil is all about. Ravan, too, was said to have once been a holy man. And so we are witness to a major All India Congress Committee session where corruption may have been the backdrop, but it was never discussed. Remarkable, considering that the party’s functionaries and its governmental allies have been named as the villains of the respective cases.
If the Congress offers a tin ear to talk of rampant corruption, the BJP is morally deaf to the issue of the rights of an individual, especially if he or she professes another faith. So we have the party defend and indeed fete the likes of Amit Shah. Another manifestation is the approach of the Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh, the BJP’s paternal organisation, whose functionaries are being charged with involvement in several terrorist plots and whose vacuous response is to suggest that it is an oxymoron to link Hinduism with terrorism.
Yet the key to eliminating these two soul-destroying evils in our country lies in changing the way our bureaucracy, police and judicial systems work. And, this may sound shocking, the only class that can change this are our politicians. Instead of attending Ram Lilas, they would be better off fighting the modern manifestations of the real thing.
This appeared on November 5, 2010

Ignore history at your own peril

Sixty three years ago, on this day, in the pre-dawn darkness and the chill of an autumn morn, 6 civilian and 3 Royal Indian Air Force C-47 Dakota aircraft took off from New Delhi’s Palam and Willingdon airports respectively. The two flights met up over the skies of Haryana and became a single armada. Each civilian aircraft had 15 soldiers of the 1 Sikh Regiment, based in Gurgaon, the military ones had 17, as well as 225 kg of supplies. The troops were fully equipped with arms, ammunition and dry rations to enable them to go into battle as soon as they hit the ground. Their destination?
Srinagar airport.

The Sikhs had been given just about two hours to get ready and emplaned after a hot meal. Their instructions were that if they could not raise the air traffic control in Srinagar airport, they were to turn around and land in Jammu and proceed by road. Fortunately, after an uneventful 3 ½ hour flight, the Sikhs landed safely and were followed by two more flights of 19 Dakotas later in the day that brought in another company of troops and some supplies.

Accession
But they had little idea what lay ahead. They spent the night in defensive positions around the airport and next morning, their commanding officer Lt Col Dewan Ranjit Rai led his troops and took up positions east of Baramula, 72 kms from Srinagar, occupied by a tribal backed army that had been sent into Kashmir by Pakistan. As soon as he did so, the Sikhs came under a strong attack from the tribal lashkars. Among the first casualties of the clash was Colonel Rai himself, struck by a stray bullet, as he organised a tactical withdrawal towards Srinagar. Thus commenced what is called the first Kashmir War whose consequences resonate to this day.
The reason why the Indian forces were there was because Pakistan had, in violation of the principles under which the dominions of India and Pakistan were created, sent in armed invaders to grab the state by force. On October 26 the state had legally acceded to the Indian Union and that accession had been accepted. And, so, the Indian army was sent in to protect what was now a part of India.


Contrary to perceptions in Pakistan, India had not rushed into accession. The Maharaja asked for help on October 24th when Baramula had fallen to invaders who could have reached an undefended Srinagar in three hours by the motorable road. Yet Nehru demurred. Neither he, nor Mountbatten called for accession at the Defence Committee of the Cabinet’s meeting on October 25 either. It was only after the Maharaja agreed to constitute a popular government did Nehru relent on October 26 and agree to accept the accession. The history is fairly simple, but its recounting has been clouded by events thereafter.
There are many myths about how India and Pakistan came about. Indian nationalists are wont to believe that the idea of India has always been there; Pakistani nationalists now claim that the idea of Pakistan goes back to the advent of Islam. The fact is that both the states were a creation of an act of British Parliament and their boundaries were decided by a British jurist. Rulers of princely states had the unfettered right to accede to either of the two dominions, subject to having common borders. There was no mention of religious persuasion in any of the pre-independence discussions with regard to the future of princely states. Indeed, Mohammed Ali Jinnah was the strongest advocate of the absolute right of rulers to decide the future of their respective states. It should hardly be a surprise that as late as September 1947, he accepted the accession of a Hindu majority state, Junagadh.

Dispute
What happened thereafter to complicate the story was the product of Cold War politics through which a somewhat naïve Indian complaint of aggression by Pakistan in Kashmir was converted into the “India Pakistan Question” by the United Nations, through the active machinations of the British foreign office. Even so, at no stage has the UN raised doubts about the legality of Indian sovereignty over the state. That is why it is somewhat misleading to talk of an India-Pakistan “dispute” over Kashmir.
Pakistan was probably itself surprised at its success in the UN. Indeed, in October and November 1947 it did not make a direct demand for accession of the state to Pakistan; only that India had obtained the accession by force and fraud. Indeed, in the initial weeks, the Pakistani leaders went through the charade of asking the tribal army to withdraw. Even though the boot was clearly on the other foot, the British decided to play along with Karachi.
Instead of prosecuting an all-out war on a vulnerable Pakistan which was just about coming into being, New Delhi confined the war to Kashmir and also ended it at a point where the state would be effectively partitioned in a manner that preserved Pakistan’s vital security interests and gave it a bonus of Gilgit-Baltistan. There may be no “dispute” with Pakistan, but there is an “issue” relating to the legitimisation of the status of Gilgit-Baltistan, Azad Kashmir and the Line of Control. This is the third-party role that India sees for Pakistan, and to see anything more in this is to seriously misunderstand the Indian perspective.

Autonomy
The real issue New Delhi needs to deal with is the domestic one. It is not enough to say that the state is now an integral part of India. That took place in a layered process which has given J&K a unique status. It is the only state, for example, which has its own penal code, a state constitution and flag. Article 370 has been written into our Constitution as our promise to uphold the Kashmiri autonomy. Many aspects of the autonomy that had been promised were undermined in the 1950s and 1960s as the weak Indian state sought to protect itself against domestic and external threats.
But in 2010, there is nothing that the Indian union needs to fear any more. The country— a nuclear weapons state, with a large and well regarded military and a flourishing economy— has never been stronger than it is today. That is why it is surprising to discover people who are so sensitive to alleged slights to the nation’s honour and who see seditious beasts lurking everywhere. Even while claiming to speak for the Indian identity, they adopt a mean-spirited approach towards our regional identities.
But what the country does need to do is to tidy up the clutter of the past half century and more, and there is nothing more important and immediate as the issue of Jammu & Kashmir. New Delhi needs to firmly go ahead and do what needs to be done, without worrying about those who are constantly looking back and cowering before the ghosts of the past.
Mail Today October 27, 2010

Time to hit the pause button with United States

As the third round of the strategic dialogue between the US and Pakistan gets underway, it is clear that Washington is getting ready to signal its deeper and longer term commitment to Islamabad’s well-being. Pakistan is central to our security concerns— never mind the brave talk of Pakistan being a pinprick and China our main worry— but it also happens to be central to the US effort to prosecute its AfPak war. Perhaps the time has come for us to reassess what is often termed the strategic relationship between India and the United States.

To start with, the whole business of “strategic relationship” has become a bit overblown. As of now we have strategic ties with just about everyone—the US, EU, Russia, and even China. However, the true meaning of strategic relations would require, at the least, a significant identity of interests over an extended period of time—of the kind that, say, UK and the US have, or Japan and the US have developed since 1945. Just how we can have strategic ties with a country, which has been, and remains, the principal ally of our main adversary, defies intelligence.

Friend
This is not to argue that India should not have good, and even strategic, relations with the US. But we do need to be clear-headed about the terms of engagement and understand their evolution and changing context. For most of our modern history, the US has adopted a strategy of off-shore balancing of India through the use of proxies like Pakistan. The shift towards India in the 1990s has been significant, but tentative. If we continue to work at it, and the global situation so evolves, we may develop strategic ties, but for the moment, it remains a work in progress.
Today, while there is a desire in both countries to intensify the process of coming closer, the ground realities, and the bonds of America’s karma in the region are holding it back. It is apparent that much though it may desire it, the US cannot walk away from Afghanistan or Pakistan. If its commitment were truly directed towards assisting Pakistan’s counter-insurgency efforts against the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, it would be fine. But it is not.
Since 2001, under a number of US programmes and its own funds, Pakistan has received maritime patrol aircraft, anti-tank and anti-ship missiles, artillery surveillance radars, self-propelled howitzers, a missile frigate.
The current US-Pakistan strategic dialogue will come up with a new five-year military aid package worth $2 billion. This is, of course, on top of the $6 billion in development aid and more than $8 billion in military reimbursements that Pakistan has already received between 2001 and 2010. Beginning this year, Pakistan will also begin receiving the $7.5 billion economic aid package approved by the US Congress last year. In addition, the US Central Intelligence Agency provides what one estimate says is some one-third of the budget of Pakistan’s ISI.
American assistance has freed funds for a larger shopping list from China and elsewhere which includes tanks, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, AWACS, fighter aircraft, submarines and nuclear technology. None of this has relevance to the Al Qaeda and Taliban; all of them have a relevance for India.

Headley
It is easy to understand why the United States is following the course it is in Pakistan. Softening up Islamabad is a key component of its strategy of defeating the Taliban-Al Qaeda alliance and shoring up the government of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. The other component is the building up of the Afghan National Army. But as long as Pakistan continues to provide sanctuary to the Taliban, even while permitting NATO and the US to ferry supplies for the war in Afghanistan through its territory, the US needs to hold Pakistan close to itself.
Of course, in contrast to the past, the US is much more hard-headed about its relationship. But it cannot escape the logic of its situation. So, even as the US would like to restrict its aid to counter-insurgency items, it cannot but help providing Islamabad with weapons that are directed at India, because that is the only means through which it can retain the trust of the Pakistan Army, and the generals in Rawalpindi know this.


The limits to the ties between India and the US are most vividly brought out by the fallout of the David Coleman Headley revelations. It transpires that the US probably had information on his activities and did not tip off India.
Fair enough. The US was perhaps pursuing its vital national interests. It is entirely possible that at some time he was being controlled, or so they thought, by the CIA, which saw him as a possible means to get Osama bin Laden. For the record, of course, he was an important DEA source who had managed to establish links with the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. So he was allowed to operate freely, till it became clear that he was going to hit Denmark and then, he was pulled in. The Mumbai thing did not seem to have mattered to the US. It was the possible danger to a NATO ally that counted. That’s what strategic relationships are all about—mutuality of outlook and obligations.
Since then, as this paper has extensively reported, Headley has revealed that the Mumbai operation had deep ISI links. He has named names, provided the dates and other information. But that, too, has not mattered to the US. It does not want to raise the issue that could profoundly unsettle its links with the Pakistan Army, the outfit which runs the ISI and effectively controls Pakistan.

Potential
There is a lot that brings India and the US together. Democracy and all that is one part of it, a growing distrust of China is another. But New Delhi would be mistaken if it thought that there was an identity of interests and mutuality of obligations between us right now. The quality of the Sino-US relationship is quite different from that between India and China. The two matter far more to each other, in contrast to their more secondary relationships with India.
The more important point to understand is that there is a great deal of potential in Indo-US relations, but that we are still some way from being able to realise that potential. There are subjective factors that prevent that realisation such as India’s inability to think through its longer range grand strategy, as well as the very real inequality of their status in relation to each other. And there are objective factors such as the current interplay of ties of our interlocutor, the US, with our adversaries, Pakistan and China.
In some future, if the Pakistan problem can be sorted out satisfactorily and Chinese behaviour becomes more problematic, perhaps a strategic relationship may actually develop. But nothing is foreordained. So for the present let us agree to be just good friends, and leave it at that.
Mail Today October 22, 2010