India, the US, Kashmir and Iraq
Ravi Rikhye
orbat.com
Though Washington has been careful not to say so, it is disappointed by the Indian decision not to send troops to Iraq except under the UN flag. More so because India is the first non-western nation the US has elevated to the status of strategic partner. Right now, to many in Washington, India is behaving more like a selfish adolescent than a strategic partner.
A Brief History of Indo-US Relations
America supported India’s drive for freedom, even if the support was mainly moral. With the onset of the Cold War, the US approached India to enter an anti-communist alliance system. India, newly independent, sought to avoid entangling alliances and refused. Pakistan proved much more amenable and by 1954 had joined SEATO and CENTO.
The supply of US arms to Pakistan caused the first deterioration in Indo-US relations. The US offer to help India when in 1962 China attacked India did something to reverse this trend. Ultimately, however, the US would not supply the weapons India wanted for fear of upsetting the regional balance. That the US simultaneously embargoed arms supplies to Pakistan between 1962 and 1972 made no impact on India, which by now had turned to Moscow.
Because of the Vietnam War in particular, India’s ruling elite, with its philosophical roots in the quaint theories of British socialism, became virulently anti-American. The Nixon-Kissinger support to Pakistan during the 1971 civil war exacerbated this hatred. The reality of America’s reaction to the East Pakistan Civil War is complicated, and Indians have an exceedingly naïve view of events of that war, compounded both by their lack of knowledge about America and by brilliant Soviet propaganda. Nonetheless, by 1972 the relationship reached a new low.
At some point in the late 1970s early 1980s, the United States decided that India had to be won over. The story of this highly successful endeavor is one of the least known of American diplomatic achievements; moreover, it is likely bureaucrats in the State Department, CIA, and Pentagon, not at the political level, created the shift. Congruently, the great Indian migration of skilled persons to America became a flood, for the first time creating a domestic US constituency for India. By the early 1990s the Indians had become politically organized and what had previously been a secret romance between the two nations became a very public, full-fledged affair.
In the meanwhile, the American intervention in Afghanistan and the consequent reengagement with Pakistan caused few ripples. The Indian elite may have been anti-American, but the Afghanis were South Asians, and the brutal Soviet repression caused great unease and anger in India, even if it was not translated into overt action against Moscow. Soon the Berlin Wall fell, and with it the Russian empire. Overnight, India’s great friend and strategic partner vanished from the world stage. Earlier, India had begun to jettison its socialist economic doctrine and began turning to market capitalism – which meant America. The rapid American abandonment of Pakistan after the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan helped soothe Indian suspicions about America. The relationship between the two countries grew rapidly on every level, including the military and intelligence.
There were rocky patches, to be sure, such as the 1998 Indian nuclear tests. After some mild sanctioning, however, America decided it could live with a nuclear India. Whereas India had done everything possible to keep the Soviets out of the Indian military, intelligence, administrative, and foreign policy systems – something most Americans don’t understand to this day in part because India never bothered to explain – India started doing everything it could to make Americans welcome. Joint intelligence cooperation. Joint law-enforcement cooperation. Supply of high-technology weaponry. Naval exercises. Army exercises, even – and this is a topper – Indian troops exercising with US troops in Alaska, and soon, Indian participation in the US Air Force’s Red Flag exercises.
But on the horizon, a small cloud was steadily growing bigger.
Kashmir
In 1987, the Kashmir insurgency began. By the early 1990s, despite extensive Pakistani support, India had defeated the insurgency. Pakistan now started a new round, using fighters left over from the detritus of the Afghan war. Growing Pakistani involvement in creating the Taliban, which took over Afghanistan, provided an inexhaustible supply of fighters. While possible Pakistani hopes of early and easy victory were belied – the Indian Army has proved far more tenacious than the terrorists who seem to have a preference for easy living and exhibit short-attention spans – the war became a bloody stalemate, with neither side gaining ground.
For many years the Kashmir insurgency did not enter the Indo-US equation. In the middle 1990s, however, the US, comfortable with its growing alliance with India, asked for Indian help to fight the growing menace of Islamic fundamentalism. India made a huge mistake: it refused, even though that fundamentalism was a greater problem for India than for the United States. The Indian reasons were – as is usually the case with Indian strategic reasoning – ill thought out and replete with bad logic. The US did not publicly say anything, but the refusal was to have repercussions.
Fast forward to September 11, 2001. India was one of the first countries to offer its support to the United States. Further, its offer was possibly one of the most genuine and unconditional reactions India has ever expressed, with little thought of return for itself.
On December 13, 2001, Pakistan-based terrorists attacked India’s Parliament. India had previously utterly failed to make its case that the Kashmir insurgency was not a freedom movement but a foreign terrorist drive. The reasons are simple: India’s foreign policy establishment is about the most incompetent organization to be found anywhere. Now, however, India did something clever – and we use this term in its derogatory English usage. It appropriated America’s slogan that terror was terror, no matter for what cause. Pakistan is the source of terror against India, India said, and regardless of its own interests, Washington must punish Pakistan to the utmost.
It did not escape Washington that by asking America to destroy Pakistani terrorism, Delhi was asking America to do what India had itself failed to do for 14 years. It also did not escape the Americans that India had refused them help in the war against terror. Even if it could have punished Pakistan the way India wanted, America was inclined to let India twist in the wind for a while.
The reality was, however, that the US was severely limited in its options vis-à-vis Pakistan. India, which had for so long conducted a foreign policy devoid of morality or scruple, based on the narrowest definitions of national self-interest, did not care to be sensitive to America’s limitations. While unwilling to give up the least of its self-interest, India wanted America to give up all its self-interest in Pakistan.
America said no, and the trouble started again. The Indian elite was swept by a wave of anti-Americanism, focusing most oddly on America’s destruction of the Taliban and the liberation of Afghanistan. No one in their right mind can doubt for a moment that America has rid the world of a great evil, and what is more, an evil that had openly designated India as its next target. Indians, however, lambasted – and continue to lambaste – America for “interfering” in another country. So great and so irrational was India’s anger that few thought to even note that the Taliban was created by India’s arch enemy, which had rather extravagantly interfered – and continues to interfere – in another country, Afghanistan. Bad as this was, along came Iraq, and now the Indians really went to town with their anti-Americanism.
The Indian elite is so dishonest that no dictatorship has troubled it – as long as the dictator was not seen as America’s puppet. When there was a Second World, India aspired to leadership of the Third World, the greatest collection of dictators seen in modern times. It didn’t matter what you did at home, as long as you were not white, and not seen as America’s puppet, you were a brother. So South Korea, South America, the Shah’s Iran and the like were Bad, but almost every other totalitarian leader was Good. And what makes this very odd is that India is itself an absolutely, genuinely democratic country!
The great mass of the Indians that matter, the intellectual and ruling elite, are completely opposed to the US intervention in Iraq, and India’s parliament took the unusual step of condemning it. In this light, its hardly surprising that when push came to shove, the Government of India decided it could not risk sending troops to Iraq.
Now that we have seen why both countries are standing where they are, lets see what can be done.
What America Needs To Do
Those in Washington that are getting warm about India’s refusal to send troops need to take pause. When even some of your closest allies – Germany, France, Turkey – are refusing to send troops without a UN mandate, please don’t pick on India.
Washington argues India must start standing for principles: if India wants to be a world leader, if it wants a seat on the Security Council, it must take the responsibilities of a world leader. All true, but please remember that India is insecure about itself, leave alone about how the world sees it, and asking it to accept this burden at a time so many American allies, friends, and well-wishers oppose sending their own troops is unrealistic. Till now India has thought that being a world leader meant giving grand speeches, something Indians are first-rate at. The thought of taking action that so much of the world – and its own people – oppose is something India needs time to get used to. Even Pakistan, which misses no opportunity to rack up brownie points with the US, is hesitating.
What India Needs To Do
Indians need to put themselves in America’s shoes and look at their long-term interests rather than just their short term ones. America is at war, and if we Indians are to be friends with the US, we must support America in that war. There are huge numbers of people in Britain, Spain, Italy – to mention a few countries – who oppose the US intervention in Iraq, but those countries are still doing what they can to help America. Sometimes you have to stand by your friend even if you think he is wrong. But in this instance is he really wrong?
Islamic fundamentalism threatens India’s security much more than America because we are geographically closer to the Islamic world and so much more fragile as a state. We have to jettison expediency and not worry about what other Muslims will say because we too are at war – not with Islam, but with a tiny fraction of Muslims that seek to hijack Islam. After all, haven’t we been fighting Muslims in Kashmir even while we accept Muslims, as our biggest minority, are part and parcel of the fabric of our country? The Islamic world is caught in the death grip of totalitarianism and fundamentalism. Don’t we as a democratic people owe it to our brothers to help give them democracy? Its easy to say the US way is not the right way. What then is the alternative? The one time we have helped another country to become free and democratic was in 1971: we freed Bangladesh at gunpoint, the same as America has done in Iraq. We had our strategic interests, America has its strategic interests. Why were ours right and America’s wrong?
If sending combat troops is not feasible right now, why are we not at least sending medical personnel and engineers? Why are we not helping train the Iraqi police and security organizations? We have every right to worry about casualties. Then we should send our troops to the Kurd areas where they will be welcome.
Indian foreign policy is at a crossroads. The time for cheap talk is over. The time for hard action, which means tough mindedly accepting the costs, is at hand. |
