India grapples with the Obama era
India grapples with the Obama era
By M K Bhadrakumar
What prompted the spokesman of India’s ruling party, Congress, to recommend that the Bharat Ratna - the “Jewel of India” - be bestowed on George W Bush, we might never know. India has conferred its highest civilian honor on only two foreigners, one of whom was Nelson Mandela.
The Congress politician apparently got carried away on a balmy winter day with nostalgia hanging heavily in the air, as he faced a select audience of Delhi’s elite, who formed the gravy train of India-US “strategic partnership” in the Bush era.
Ironically, even as he spoke last Friday, a delegation was setting out from the United States for India to pay homage to Mahatma Gandhi, the great apostle of non-violence, who inspired Martin
Luther King, who in turn remains a constant source of inspiration for US President Barack Obama.
The bizarre coincidence was driven home when at a special ceremony at the US State Department marking the visit, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “India is a reminder that the struggle for civil rights and justice has always been and continues to be a global mission; it knows no borders.”
The two unconnected events underscored the dilemma facing India’s policymakers as the Obama era gets under way. Indeed, it is an extraordinary statement that the first American delegation to visit India after Obama took office should be a “Gandhian” delegation. Is Obama “demilitarizing” India-US strategic cooperation? “Mil-to-mil” cooperation was at the core of US-India relationship during the past eight-year period. In recent years, India conducted more than 50 military exercises with the US.
All dressed up, nowhere to go
Yet a pall of gloom has descended on New Delhi’s elite. There is a pervasive nostalgia for George W Bush. The Bush administration officials claimed that the US regarded India as the preponderant power in South Asia and as a key Asian player that would shape up to be a viable counterweight to China militarily. The expectation was that the US would extricate India from the morass of its South Asian neighborhood by arm-twisting Pakistan.
Under constant encouragement from the Bush administration, the Indian elite placed faith in the country’s emergence as a global player. They began working “shoulder to shoulder” with the US, just as Bush’s officials urged. Now, Indian strategists find themselves awkwardly placed - all dressed-up but there’s nowhere right now for them to go.
Three factors have shaken up the Indian complacency. First, Indian strategists seriously underestimated the military stalemate that was developing in the war in Afghanistan and the consequent acute dependence of the US on Pakistan’s cooperation. This may sound surprising, but the knowledge of Afghan affairs remains shockingly poor among Indian strategists.
Two, Indian strategists underestimated the gravity of the global financial crisis that erupted last year. They couldn’t comprehend that the crisis would fundamentally change the world order. Even hard-nosed Indian strategists placed a touching faith in the “New American Century” project.
Three, the Indian establishment failed to grasp what Obama meant when he spoke of “change”. The Indian skepticism about Obama’s capacity to change US policies remained fairly widespread. The Indian establishment concluded that Obama would ultimately have to work within the box, hemmed in by America’s political, foreign policy and security establishment. It failed to see that the US’s capacity to sustain its global dominance was itself weakening and that necessitated radical changes in Obama’s policies.
From this perspective, the past week offered a reality check. The visit by the newly appointed US Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, to the region underscored that Islamabad’s support for the US war strategy in Afghanistan has become critical. The war is at a crucial stage and salvaging it appears increasingly difficult.
More to the point, given the overall fragility of the political situation in Pakistan, a stage is reached beyond which the US cannot “pressure” Pakistan. Therefore, in a change of approach, the US will have no choice but to work with Pakistan. In the coming period, as Holbrooke gradually opens the political track leading to an Afghan settlement, need of Pakistan’s cooperation increases further.
Meanwhile, the revelation that the US Predator drones operate out of Pakistani bases underlines how closely Washington and Islamabad have been working. The US’s acquiescence in the release of AQ Khan revealed the great latitude towards Pakistan’s concerns. The Indian strategists who fancied that New Delhi was Washington’s preferred partner in South Asia are stunned. Clearly, India is nowhere near as valuable an ally as Pakistan for the US for the present.
Looking ahead, Obama’s decision on Wednesday approving a troop buildup in Afghanistan constitutes a defining moment. He has put his presidency on the firing line. From this week onward, Obama’s war has begun. The war can well consume his presidency. Either he succeeds, or he gets mired in the war. Yet, the new US strategy is still in the making. Delhi takes note that it is at such a crucial juncture that the Pakistani army chief, General Parvez Kayani, has been invited to go across to Washington for consultations.
The message is clear: Washington will be in no mood to antagonize its Pakistani partner and Delhi is expected to keep tensions under check in its relations with Islamabad.
Dollar courting yuan
But there is another aspect in Obama’s new foreign policy that worries India even more. Obama’s China policy renders obsolete the Indian strategic calculus built around the US containment strategy. Hardly two to three years ago, the Bush administration encouraged India to put faith in a quadrilateral alliance of Asian democracies - the US, Japan, Australia and India - that would strive to set the rules for China’s behavior in the region.
According to reports, State Department officials had originally proposed that India be included in the itinerary of Clinton’s current first official tour abroad, but she struck it out. As things stand, Clinton meant every word of what she wrote last year in her Foreign Affairs article that “our [US] relationship with China will be the most important bilateral relationship in the world in this century”.
In a major speech at the Asia Society in New York last Friday before embarking on her tour of Asia, Clinton said, “We believe that the United States and China can benefit from and contribute to each other’s successes. It is in our interests to work harder to build on areas of common concern and shared opportunities”. She argued for a “comprehensive dialogue” and a “broader agenda” with China.
The Washington Post cited State Department officials as saying, “It is symbolically important that Clinton is the first secretary of state in nearly 50 years to intensely focus his or her maiden voyage on Asia”. The story is easily comprehensible. The US needs to have new opportunities to export more to China; it should persuade Beijing to accept a realistic dollar-yuan exchange rate; and, it should convince China to keep investing its money in America. But what is unfolding is also a phenomenal story insofar as a new chapter in their mutually dependent relationship is commencing where the two countries become equal partners in crisis. This was simply unthinkable.
Dennis Blair, the newly appointed director of national intelligence, in his testimony before the US senate intelligence committee on January 22, struck a fine balance when he said,
While the United States must understand China’s military buildup - its extent, its technological sophistication and its vulnerabilities - in order to offset it, the intelligence community also needs to support policymakers who are looking for opportunities to work with Chinese leaders who believe that Asia is big enough for both of us and can be an Asia in which both countries can benefit as well as contribute to the common good.
However, this is precisely where a serious problem arises for India. In the Indian perception, South Asia and the Indian Ocean just aren’t “big enough” for India and China.
Dragon encircles peacock
This was rubbed home when Chinese President Hu Jintao arrived in Port Louis, Mauritius, on Tuesday on the final lap of his latest odyssey to Africa. Hu nonchalantly handed out a generous US$1 billion aid package for Mauritius, which India traditionally regarded as its “sphere of influence” in the Indian Ocean. No doubt, it was an audacious gesture by Beijing to a country the majority of whose 1.3 million population are people of Indian origin - at a time when China too faces an economic crisis and analysts say anywhere up to 40 million migrant workers may lose their jobs this year.
Arguably, Beijing regards Mauritius as a value-added platform between China and Africa from where its entrepreneurs could optimally perform. But Hu has convinced the Indian strategic community about China’s “encirclement” policy towards India. A leading Indian right-wing daily commented that Hu’s visit was “anything but ordinary … It underscores Beijing’s relentless thrust to secure a permanent naval foothold in the western Indian Ocean … That, of course, would only come at the expense of the Indian navy, which has been the principal external security partner of Mauritius all these decades”.
It is precisely such hubris that gets punctured by the shift in the Obama administration’s new priorities in the Far East and southwest Asia. A difficult period of adjustment lies ahead for Indian policymakers. India needs good relations with the US. At any rate, the India-US relationship is on an irreversible trajectory of growth. There is a “bipartisan” consensus in both countries that the relationship is in each other’s vital interests. But the US’s current strategic priorities in the region and India’s expectations are diverging. Given the criticality of Pakistan in the US geo-strategy, Obama administration will be constrained to correct the Bush administration’s “tilt” towards India.
Kashmir beckons
New Delhi pulled out all the stops when rumors surfaced that Holbrooke’s mandate might include the Kashmir problem. Obama paid heed to Indian sensitivities. But at a price. It compels India to curtail its own excessive instincts in recent years to seek US intervention in keeping India-Pakistan tensions in check.
In short, New Delhi will have to pay much greater attention to its bilateral track with Pakistan. And, of course, Pakistan will expect India to be far more flexible. Rightly or wrongly, Pakistan harbors a feeling that India took unilateral advantage from the relative four-year calm in their relationship without conceding anything in return.
In a sensational interview with India’s top television personality, Karan Thapar, on Thursday night, Pakistan’s former foreign minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri confirmed what many in New Delhi suspected, namely, that through back channel diplomacy, Islamabad and New Delhi had reached a broad understanding on contentious issues such as Sir Creek, Siachen and Kashmir as far back as two years ago.
The Indian prime minister was expected to visit Pakistan to conclude some of the agreements but the Indian side apparently began developing cold feet and it is “sheer bad luck”, as Kasuri put it, that the momentum dissipated.
To quote Kasuri, “If the Prime Minister of India had come when we [Pakistan] thought he would, we would have actually signed it, and that would have created the right atmosphere for resolution of other disputes, particularly the issue of J&K [Jammu and Kashmir]. We needed the right atmosphere.”
In other words, there is always a lurking danger that at some point, Holbrooke may barge into the Kashmir problem by way of addressing the core issues of regional security. The Bush administration had been kept constantly briefed by New Delhi on its back-channel discussions with Islamabad regarding Kashmir. Retracting from any commitments given to Pakistan becomes problematic at this stage.
At the same time, the Indian government has done nothing so far to sensitize domestic public opinion that such highly delicate discussions involving joint India-Pakistan governance of the Kashmir region have reached an advanced stage.
Thus, in a manner of speaking, with Holbrooke’s arrival in the region this past week, the clock began ticking on the Kashmir issue. Pakistan will incrementally mount pressure that Obama must insist on India moving forward on a settlement of the Kashmir problem in the overall interests of peace and regional stability.
And New Delhi will remain watchful. Holbrooke’s visit to New Delhi on Monday was kept low-key. The Indian media fawned on any mid-level official calling from the Bush administration, but Holbrooke was tucked away as if under quarantine. And no wonder; there could be many among New Delhi’s elite who feel nostalgic for the tranquility and predictability of the Bush era.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey
Sunday, April 05, 2009
US wants Afghanistan/Pakistan/India as its military base
It will a great mistake for analysts and leaders of AF-PAK-IN to take Obama or others in the US administrations on their words and work on the premises that US is in Afghanistan and Pakistan only to take out Al Qaida, or Taliban, or Mullahs in Pakistan and then they will leave.
US policy makers, from Obama downwards are once again fooling the world through their carpet to carpet media and public relations blitz to camouflage their real objective of coming back to the sub-continent after they left it 60 years back as ‘tactical retreat’.
India was partitioned at Churchill express plea to US Viceroy Lord Wavell, to ‘keep something for us’ while leaving the country at the mercy of the Brahmins. That was the real genesis of Partition and creation of Pakistan. Churchill convinced the US to take over from where UK is pulling out due to resource crunch after being virtually destroyed by the Second World War.
It was the US that single-handed husbanded Pakistan and started with the very first check to Pakistan’s newly anointed Governor General, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. It was the US that had built up and maintained Pakistan’s armed forces. It was the US that got Pakistan into CENTO and SEATO. It was the US that looked away, while Pakistan got its nuclear arsenal.
It is naïve for Indian policy makers to nourish the wishful hope that US will anytime leave its ‘vital asset’ – Afghanistan or Pakistan — in the neighbourhood and carry out the wishes of some lightweight democrats ruling India, that are obsessed with their private and insidiously consuming hatred of Islam and Muslims and Muslim world. This hatred is seriously blurring their focus on the real issues confronting the subcontinent and its total 1.5 billion people.
An imperialist US, whose children play games travelling to other galaxies to assure their survival in millennium to come, can not be faulted if it has a grand design for Afghanistan- Pakistan- India, as a big consumer heaven that will be the driving engine, pulling the western economies in years to come. However, the US is not for any partnerships. It wants to enslave and rule. Its wish is our command. This is coming of the second age of colonialism for the subcontinent.
And it all happened due to lack of vision by Indian leaders, who were consumed by hatred of Muslims. If they had overcome that negative obsession and had visionary plan of their own to take the whole neighbourhood in a all-embracing economic and strategic unit, Indian subcontinent could have been as independent today as China.
The Brahmin’s need for exclusivity born of pathological insecurities, has throttled the future of the whole subcontinent.
India’s most celebrated security analysts are all obsessed with Pakistan — an obsession that has robbed them of all independent and visionary thinking about alternatives available to them and availed by others in same stage of development. It is sickening to see media headlines about the same old hackneyed phobias consuming the media and analysts and preventing them of the larger picture. Be that Subrahmanyam, Parthasarthy, or all other favourite talk-show panelists, they all end up brainwashing entire nation of the hate filled propaganda about their favourite ‘Other’. That leaves them no time for them to look up from their full plates and see the wider implications of US moves in the sub-continent.
The worst scenario of any US move into Afghanistan/Pakistan/India is the danger of widespread bloodshed. US is deliberately provoking and instigating rogue elements in the north so that it can fool the whole world that it is in these troubled countries, to ensure peace —- peace for the people here and peace for the West, who are targets of terror attack. It is time both India and Pakistan figure out, if the real terrorists are the Taliban or the CIA-Mossad backed operatives in the region. They can always get hire-hands from any group that can suit their current propaganda thrust.
The whole subcontinent is at the threshold of a very trying future. It has no defence against the super-power. It has no diplomatic savvy or vision or courage to cross red-lines drawn around us and go for a wider circle of friends to be helpful at crucial times.
The thoughts for my above rejoinder came about while I was reading Mr. A. G. Noorani’s following article: US’s Afghan lesson 1: Taliban are not jihadis in today’s Asian Age/ Deccan Chronicle. I am not sure if we in India and Pakistan are not wasting our time trying to distinguish between Taliban and Al Qaida while for the US policy makers – all of them are the same ‘terrorists’. Mr. Noorani did gather courage to write the last few lines:
‘Special conference on Afghanistan met in Moscow. Convened by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), with India and Pakistan participating, it threw its hat in the ring: “The SCO was one of the appropriate fora for a wide dialogue” on the issues related to Afghanistan. It proposed an “SCO-Afghanistan Action Plan”.
But I feel the subject could do with a larger public debate, at least in the media.
While we are being kept engaged in micro strategies, the US is most sure- footed, thanks to Jewish Neo-Cons plans for America’s New Century, and is single – mindedly fixated with macro strategies, whoever may be the President, Bush or Obama.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com
http://www.ghulammuhammed.wordpress.com
http://www.deccanchronicle.com/dc-comment/us’-afghan-lesson-1:-taliban-are-not-jihadis-073
US’ Afghan lesson 1: Taliban are not jihadis
April 5th, 2009
By A.G. Noorani
“IT is an infallible rule that a prince who is not wise himself cannot be well advised… wise counsels, from whoever they come, must necessarily be due to the prudence of the prince, and not the prudence of the prince to the wise counsel received”. Niccolo Machiavelli’s sage words aptly sum up the predicament of President Mr Barack Obama on Afghanistan. Unlike his predecessor Mr George W. Bush and his equally rash bunch of advisers, Mr Obama is a sensible man. However, the haste he has shown in crafting a policy on Afghanistan does not reflect wisdom.
He ordered “a careful policy review… as soon as I took office” he said on March 27 in a speech which, like all American pronouncements, did not err on the side of brevity. His own understanding of that country and this region, as his campaign speeches revealed, is not profound. His advisers are none too blessed with the knowledge or understanding either.
Then what is it that emboldened Mr Obama to think that he would hit upon a cure for the ills in Kabul in record speed? The recipe prescribed in his speech does not reckon with the one fundamental that lies at the root of the problem — the presence of foreign troops on Afghan soil. They went there to be rid of Al Qaeda. The Taliban were affected because they had extended hospitality to its chief Osama bin Laden. Second only to secretary of state Ms Madeleine Albright, her colleague Mr Karl F. Inderfurth was responsible for snubbing the Taliban’s many overtures and for, thus, hardening their attitude. Disdain for diplomacy and indifference to other people’s sentiments are the twin hallmarks of American diplomacy.
They were reflected in the President’s speech and in an article by Mr Inderfurth and Mr James Dobbins, a Bush official. Mr Inderfurth and Mr Dobbins first lay out the sketch of an impressive edifice of an international treaty which ensures peace in Afghanistan and in the region. The US and its allies will “withdraw all forces from Afghanistan once these other provisions (of the treaty) had been implemented”.
That is a consummation devoutly to be wished for. But how will it be achieved? By the use of military force. “More western troops and economic assistance, more sophisticated military tactics and greater civilian capacity will be needed to turn the tide that is currently running against Nato…”
Mr Obama’s proposals are no different. Deployment of more US troops. “That’s how we will prepare Afghans to take responsibility for their security, and how we will ultimately be able to bring our own troops home”. Is this a realistic exit strategy?
The goal is defined thus: “to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future”. To this end “we must isolate Al Qaeda from the Pakistani people (sic)” — a strange formulation. Even the Economist came to realise by March 28 that “America’s bombing raids inside Pakistan are counterproductive”.
Afghanistan is also asked to wipe out “corruption that causes Afghans to lose faith in their own leaders”. One wishes President Obama will also direct his energies to rooting out corruption in the US Congress which causes Americans “to lose faith in their own people”.
There is no effort to distinguish between the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Their agendas differ, as they have always differed. The Kabul correspondent of the Economist reported, “For most Taliban fighters, the ideology of global jihad is less important than other things: Pakhtun nationalism; opposition to the Western invasion; desire to defend conservative Muslim values deemed to be under attack; and a raft of local grievances, tribal frictions, inter-ethnic conflicts and competition for power and resources… Most analysts think that the irreconcilable ideological component of the Taliban remains in the minority. What is not so clear is the answer to the question: how does one go about engaging with the Taliban? So far, the Western aim has been to defeat them; little thought has been given to coming to terms with them. Taliban representatives were not invited to the Bonn conference of 2001, which was supposed to lay the foundations for an Afghan political settlement. (Many analysts have argued that that was a mistake). Since then, other Afghans have used their positions in power to marginalise many who might otherwise have been brought into the political process. The result has been that whole sections of the populace in the Pakhtun south feel alienated, a problem sometimes compounded by the clodhopping tactics of Nato-led forces”.
In contrast, to Mr Richard Holbrooke, Mr Obama’s special envoy to Afgh-
anistan and Pakistan, the real source of the problem lies in Pakistan. The Taliban, he told Nato ambassadors, were only the “outer rim” of a global jihadist movement. Familiarity with this region was not one of Mr Holbrooke’s qualifications. He is a man who would rather be wrong in speech than be right in silence.
Finally, Mr Obama proposes “a new Contact Group for Afghanistan and Pakistan” comprising all the stakeholders in the region from the Gulf nations to Central Asia; Iran, Russia, India and China included. A group as large as this cannot serve as an efficient contact group. Its members do not see eye to eye. Some reject Mr Obama’s thesis on the entire region.
The day Mr Obama spoke, a special conference on Afghanistan met in Moscow. Convened by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), with India and Pakistan participating, it threw its hat in the ring: “The SCO was one of the appropriate fora for a wide dialogue” on the issues related to Afghanistan. It proposed an “SCO-Afghanistan Action Plan”. Mr Obama has a lot to learn — and unlearn.
A.G. Noorani is an advocate and one of India’s leading constitutional expert
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