Hi all; India looking to welch on troops for Iraq or a stronger defense agreement:
US presses India on Iraq, military bases
Chidanand Rajghatta, Times of India, June 9, 2003
A meeting with the high priests of Pentagon precedes one with the pandas of Washington's Durga Temple for Deputy Prime Minister LK Advani, who arrived in the US on a week-long visit amid a political flap at home but high expectations here.
The city and the government was closed for the weekend, but Advani, who arrived in New York on Saturday and took a train this morning to get to Washington, headed straight to the Pentagon. The fact that Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his aides felt it necessary to fit in a Sunday appointment – it was not on the original schedule -- points to the urgent order of business between the two sides.
Topping the agenda is the immediate question of Indian troops for Iraq, where the American military is getting bogged down in an increasingly hostile situation. New Delhi has so far hedged on US request on various technical grounds, but Rumsfeld is expected to aggressively push for an Indian commitment. [Bilow: This reminds me of a mysterious, possibly rhetorical question that my mother used to ask me, back in my salad days: "If your friend jumped out of a speeding car to his death, would you want to do that too?"]
Also on the table will the more long-term issue of Indian military bases and training facilities for the United States amid a burgeoning defence relationship that has already seen joint exercises of the kind Washington usually reserves for its allies like Japan and South Korea.
American ships and planes now have a case-by-case access to Indian bases, but recent reports suggest that the Pentagon is keen on a formal, long-term arrangement. US military officials made a strong pitch for such a deal in a recent Pentagon report titled, "Indo-U.S. Military Relationship: Expectations and Perceptions." The report also makes scalding observations about what US officials see as Indian cussedness and rigidity in its dealing with the US military.
While the controversial report points to lot of hiccups at the operational level given the little military interaction between the two sides for decades, Rumsfeld and his Pentagon aides seem keen to bring about greater strategic coherence by bringing India into some sort of security arrangement. There has even been talk of an Asian NATO (informally called NAATO) in which India and the U.S will anchor an alliance of Asia-Pacific democracies.
The aggressive US push is tempered by India's own reluctance to rush into any such arrangement without securing its immediate objective of dousing terrorism on its borders inflamed by the policies of Pakistan's military establishment. In fact, what could have been a straightforward defence relationship with Washington has been complicated by the US State Department's relentless patronage of Pakistan's military dictatorship at a bruising cost to India.
...
timesofindia.indiatimes.com
-- Carl
P.S. The administration's incredible error was starting a land war in Asia, against a classic guerilla foe, without arranging for an overpopulated Asian country to supply the body bag filler. So now the US needs to at least double, and probably triple the troop count in Iraq, but since that would be horribly embarassing, instead they look for other countries to contribute.
It also the operation a nice sheen of internationalism.
Probably the major problem is that Indian troops would piss off the Iraqis more than US ones, if their actions in Kashmir are any guide.
But the tendency for our allies to become fair weather friends at the first sight of gun smoke is certainly reminiscent of Vietnam, where we had a lot of allies at first, but all the help eventually dribbled away, except for South Vietnam itself.
And of course Bush got this one started with a lot less than the usual amount of support seen in modern invasions and occupations of nations with 23 million nut case moslem fanatics. |
