In the space of a decade, the United States and India have travelled far in a relationship clouded by the  Cold War when they were on opposite sides.

From U.S sanctions on India for its nuclear tests in 1998 to a civilian nuclear energy deal that opens access to international nuclear technology and finance, while allowing New Delhi to retain its nuclear weapons programme is a stunning reversal of policy and one that decisively transforms ties.

America has also ’soberly’ after decades of differing over counter-terrorism priorities become a vocal 
supporter of India’s concerns over the use of Pakistani territory for Islamist militant groups, says the Asia 
Society in a report laying out a blueprint for an expanded India-U.S. relationship ahead of 
President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday.

Indian and U.S. interests have converged and “never in history have they been so closely aligned,” the  report by an Asia Society Task Force says, arguing for a still deeper security and economic engagement between the two large democracies.

Click here for a PDF of the report

The Obama administration must keep India as one of its top foreign policy priorities, Richard Holbrooke, chairman of the Asia Society and who has been talked about as a possible envoy to South Asia, and Vishakha N.Desai, president of the Asia Society, say in a joint foreword

Besides the players involved, the report is also interesting because it adopts a rather different tone on India’s relations with Pakistan and especially Kashmir to some of the policy prescriptions offered by some other influential U.S. think tanks such as the Center for American Progress.

(more…)

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice  will be in New Delhi this weekend to celebrate a hard-fought nuclear deal that to its critics strikes at the heart of the global non-proliferation regime by allowing India access to nuclear technology despite its refusal to sign the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty (NPT)  and give up a weapons programme.

China and Pakistan are not amused although both stepped aside as they watched an unstoppable Bush administration push the deal through the International Atomic Energy Agency and then the Nuclear Suppliers Group in one of its few foreign policy successes.

A commentary in the state-controlled Beijing Review says Pakistan has reason to worry about the deal and recalls a statement put out by the Pakistan Army last month that warned of negative implications for strategic stability in South Asia. It would have been better if the United States had considered a package approach for both India and Pakistan, which conducted its first nuclear weapon tests two weeks after India, the magazine said, quoting the Pakistan Army statement.

China’s own stand, it said, was that all countries are entitled to make peaceful use of nuclear energy and that bodies like the NSG must address the aspirations of all parties. But it described the India-U.S. deal as a turning point which in the long run would have have a profound impact on international non-proliferation efforts. 

“Countries on the nuclear threshold might be tempted by the potential rewards of the Indian approach and pursue their nuclear weapon programs with renewed vigor,” it said. “This new perspective might also affect negotiations over the North Korean and Iranian nuclear issues. ”

Within hours of the U.S. Congress clearing the deal by an overwhelming vote, Pakistan’s prime minister was demanding a similar agreement for his country

“Pakistan will also now make efforts for a civil nuclear (deal) and they will have to accommodate us,” Yousaf Raza Gilani said.

And I could’t help thinking about Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s oft-repeated  remark way back in the 1960s that Pakistan would eat grass  if it had to in order to fund its own nuclear weapons should India go nuclear. 

And that’s the way it turned out eventually with the foes developing nuclear weapons programmes that ended in the tests of 1998 that shook the world. 

So is Pakistan in a position to embark on a similar project to develop its nuclear capabilities now that it sees its core national interests are again at threat from a nuclear India, backed ironically by its ally the United States?

Pakistan, says former foreign secretary Tanvir Ahmed Khan, needs a coherent strategy and maintaining a credible nuclear deterrent will clearly be a part of it especially if New Delhi now proceeds to build an oversized nuclear arsenal.

And is America’s new nuclear partnership with India going to add another complication to an already difficult engagement with Pakistan? Or will Pakistan, given the multiple pressures it faces, have to live this time with an India that has just won a seat on the nuclear high table ? 

The irony is hard to miss. Just as Pakistan is struggling with the fallout of the first known breach of its territorial sovereignty by U.S. ground troops and all the odium associated with it in a proud nation, India has been welcomed into the nuclear high table, almost entirely at America’s behest.

Two unrelated events but coming days apart seemed to underline the divergent paths the two nations are embarked upon.  One has a gun pointed to it; the other is being wooed.

On Saturday, America railroaded whatever opposition there was from smaller countries in the Nuclear Suppliers Group to civilian nuclear trade with India, despite its refusal to give up nuclear weapons and sign the NPT. As far as New Delhi is concerned the approval is a momentous decision as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said, because it ends 34 years of sanctions and isolation following the first nuclear test in 1974.

I remember an Indian defence scientist telling me way back that the sanctions were so pervasive that some institutions blacklisted by the United States on suspicion they were involved in the nuclear weapons programme couldn’t even import a toothbrush from there.

In one stroke, and in line with the way in which the Bush administration has gone about remaking the world in its own image, all that has changed. India’s nuclear weapons aren’t a problem any more as America builds a new strategic partnership that many see as aimed at balancing China.

And what of Pakistan ? A seat at the nuclear table is probably the farthest thing on anyone’s mind including perhaps Islamabad’s as it struggles with  more fundamental issues of territorial integrity at this point. The raid this week by U.S. forces may signal an even more intense attacks as this report says.

But the Pakistan government, says Gary Leupp, a history professor at Tufts University, has provided more assistance to the United States than any other as it pursues its goals in southwest Asia. No country has been more dramatically destabilized as the price of its cooperation.
 
“But not only does the U.S. political class take this disastrous compliance for granted, it wants to further emphasize Islamabad’s irrelevance by attacking the border area at will,” he writes. And ominously it’s not just the Bush crowd; Senator Barack Obama has been saying that the United States must do more to press Pakistan to act against the Islamist militants as an earlier post on this blog pointed out. 

1. It’s early days yet, but people are already trying to work out what any Israeli attack on Iran would mean for Pakistan. (The idea that Israel might attack Iran to damage or destroy its nuclear programme gained currency this week when former U.S. ambassador John Bolton predicted in an interview with the Daily Telegraph that it would do so after the November U.S. presidential election but before the next president is sworn in.)

Pakistan defence analyst Ikram Sehgal paints an alarming, and perhaps deliberately alarmist, picture in The News of what this could mean for Pakistan: ”Could Israeli or (US) planners afford the risk of leaving a Muslim nuclear state with the means of missile delivery intact if there is war with Iran? Can they take this calculated risk in the face of a possible Pakistani nuclear reaction because of military action on a fellow Muslim nation and neighbour…?” he writes. ”Should one not be apprehensive that India as the ‘newly U.S. appointed policeman of the region’ takes the opportunity … for launching all-out Indian military offensive….?”

Sounds like a prescription for the Apocalypse? Maybe, but perhaps worth taking apart to see whether this is a serious risk for Pakistan.

The nightmare scenario would require that Israel really was capable of taking out Iran’s nuclear installations and it is by no means clear that its air force has the size and reach to deal with Iran’s dispersed and well-hidden defences and targets.  The Americans, with their huge air strike capacity and firepower could have a go, but even then this would just give an excuse to Iran to leave the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and embark on a crash course to develop the bomb. (Both India and Pakistan developed their nuclear weapons while refusing to sign the NPT.)

You would also have to build in the fact that India has a ‘no first strike’ policy and that Pakistan has made clear it will use its nuclear weapons only if it feels its very existence is threatened. Pakistan also has a history of difficult relations with Iran, driven in part by rivalry over Afghanistan, by Sunni dominance over Pakistan, and by the sheer competitiveness of two countries which see themselves as the standard-bearers of Muslim glory in an earlier era. So it is not obvious that Pakistan would come to the rescue of Iran even if it were to be attacked by Israel.

Perhaps the fall-out of the sabre-rattling over Iran will be more mundane.

Pakistan is heavily touting a gas pipeline from Iran to India as a “pipleline of peace” that might bring Islamabad and Delhi together.  Yet at the same time the United States is leaning heavily on India not to agree to the pipeline project in order to put pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme, as this article in The Telegraph from Calcutta the makes clear.

It is not at all clear how all this will fit together in what appears to be a very unpredictable world. Views please?