US won't take India's 'No' for an answer
By Sultan Shahin
NEW DELHI - Ever since the United States sought Indian military help to continue its three-month-old occupation of Iraq, speculation about the carrots and sticks attached to the request have been rife. As New Delhi dithered, suspicions grew stronger, despite denials of pressure from both sides, that the incentives were substantial, as were the potential punishments.
Now that Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's coalition government has shown the courage to refuse to send troops to Iraq, both the carrots and sticks are beginning to come out into the open.
In total contrast to its very mild public reaction, expressing just disappointment, senior US officials have reportedly made American displeasure very clear in a closed-door meeting with Indian Ambassador Lalit Mansingh in Washington. One of India's largest-circulated newspapers, the Hindustan Times, quoted diplomatic sources on Thursday to confirm that the US administration conveyed that it felt "let down" by India's decision. More worrying for India, they said it could impact Indo-US ties in "critical areas".
In a parallel development, senior Pentagon official Peter Rodman told the head of India's Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt-Gen Kamal Davar, that India's refusal to send troops may have a negative impact on Indo-US ties. This too contrasts with the official US position that "the transformation of US-India relations will continue as before". Rodman, the assistant secretary of defense (international security affairs), had visited India recently to try and remove, apparently unsuccessfully, New Delhi's doubts about troop deployment in Iraq.
Diplomatic sources pointed out that Mansingh's explanation that the decision was taken because there was no UN mandate was brushed aside by US officials. They told him that there was a clear mandate under Security Council Resolution 1483. They also pointed out that the US had appointed a Governing Council, which was the first step toward setting up an Iraqi power structure in Baghdad.
Indian officials believe that Washington's displeasure stems from the fact that the US was heavily banking on Indian support. There is huge domestic pressure on President George W Bush to reduce US forces in Iraq. With American casualties mounting, key US divisions were promised that they would be sent back once the Indian contingent stepped in.
Anxious to reduce its presence in Iraq and anticipating a positive answer from India, the US Defense Department had told the American press earlier that foreign forces would begin moving into the war-torn country by the end of this month. Three divisions, one led by the UK which has been asked for a larger presence, another headed by Poland, and a third possibly led by India, would be in place by September.
As analyst Seema Sirohi put it: "Hell hath no fury like the US scorned." State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher expressed his concerns more diplomatically: "I am not predicting any particular problems. However, we hoped the troops would have been able to go, I think in our interests and what we perceive as their interests as well."
The Bush administration is known to have a vindictive streak. It reacts strongly to countries that don't cooperate in its imperialist ventures. Even before India's decision to reject the US request, William Triplett, former Republican counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said: "A 'No' from India will have an impact although no one will say so in public. The adults in the administration are thought to be more than a bit put out by the Indian parliament's resolution on Iraq, especially its timing. Showing that the Indian army are rolling up their sleeves to help out now will pay dividends with the Americans later."
George Perkovich, vice-president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, believes with other analysts that this administration does not forget easily. He commented earlier: "The administration would be angry or at least disappointed, and if India sends troops, it would be bailing out the Republicans from a growing crisis of occupation without international partners."
So much for the stick. What about the carrots? Has India lost out on them by its decision? Hani Shukrallah, the managing editor of the Arab world's largest-circulated Al-Ahram Weekly, published from Cairo, warned: "Certainly, one can remind the Indian government of the many examples - not least that of Egypt - of American imperial ingratitude." Perkovich appears to agree: "The question Indians should then ask is whether and how the US has 'thanked' those who help it and how long the thanks last." He goes on to predict: "It might help with some high-tech trade issues but others such as nuclear cooperation are constrained by agreements and regimes that the US does not control unilaterally."
Unlike the US officials in Washington who were entrusted with wielding the stick, the outgoing American Ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill, has been assigned the carrots. He is out to prove skeptics like Shukrallah and Perkovich wrong. Unwilling to take the Indian decision as final, he brings out the rewards of a closer strategic relationship with the US into the public domain.
The United States may sell "defensive nuclear, biological and chemical equipment" to India under the growing defense cooperation between the two countries, Blackwill told Indian industrialists on Thursday. "In US defense sales to India, we have gone from zero to almost US$200 million in the past 14 months and are posed for far more ambitious interaction in this field," Blackwill, who returns to Washington at the end of this month after a two-year tenure, said in a farewell address to the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), one of the leading business chambers. He was speaking on "The future of Indo-US relations".
He said the US defense sales to India would include possible "defense nuclear, biological and chemical equipment, Special Forces gear and P3 Orion Maritime Patrol aircraft". Giving an indication of the dimension of the military-to-military cooperation between the two countries, he said, "We now have at least one joint military exercise or engagement each month." And these covered a range of fields aimed at improving the skills and capacity for combined military operations across the board - by Special Forces against terrorists, maritime interdiction, search and rescue, airlift support, logistics transport and airborne assault.
He noted that in June last year Indian Navy ships Sukanya and Sharda conducted escort patrols for American ships through the Malacca Straits in support of "Operation Enduring Freedom" in Afghanistan. "Knowing what they would be up against if they had to deal with the Indian Navy, the pirates sensibly stayed away," said Blackwill. "With American warships now routinely refueling in Chennai and Mumbai, we saw last September the largest ever US-India naval exercise," Blackwill said and added that the two were in the "planning stage for a fighter aircraft exchange".
Conscious of the recent controversy about the derogatory American view of the Indian military as projected in a Pentagon document, Blackwill said, "To put it directly, the US military personnel like interacting with their Indian counterparts because they both come from professional cultures that believe that their central mission is to fight and win wars." He added: "In short, Indian and American soldiers are warriors. That deep commonality is not going to change in either military establishment."
Blackwill said that until George W Bush took office in January 2001, India had not been on Washington's primary policy agenda "except for a persistent US preoccupation with India as a nuclear proliferation problem of the first magnitude".
Giving a background to the changing Indo-US relations, Blackwill said: "Always in the foreground in recent years were the 1998 US nuclear sanctions against India and, as important, the administration frame of mind that those sanctions represented. In this regard, India was not seen in Washington as an essential and cooperative part of solutions to major international problems. Rather, India was one of the problems - a nuclear renegade whose policies threatened the entire non-proliferation regime, and which must be brought to its senses so that its nuclear weapons program could be rolled back to zero. With India's reaction to this continual American carping being defiance or worse, the two sides intermittently conducted what was mostly a dialogue of the deaf that did little to narrow the seeming unbridgeable gap between the two sides on these nuclear issues."
That impression had changed with Bush's "big idea" that by working together more intensely than ever before, the US and India, two vibrant democracies, could make the word "freer, more peaceful and more prosperous". Blackwill said, "No longer does the US fixate on India's nuclear weapons and missile programs. No more constant American nagging nanny on these subjects and no longer does the US largely view its relationship with India through a prism that must always include India's next door neighbor."
While things have changed for the better, he acknowledged there had been disagreements on the issue of Iraq. "But this time, contrary to the dismal decades of the Cold War, we have disagreed in our official exchanges concerning Iraq without vitriol, without accusations and without inflamed rhetoric." He said Washington had "obviously hoped" India would send troops to Iraq. "But the transformation of US-India relations that I am describing will not be affected in the slightest by this particular outcome of India's governmental democratic processes."
What were the blandishments US offered to India to help it make up its mind as it became clear that the overwhelming majority of Indians opposed sending troops to Iraq? India's second largest-circulated newspaper Indian Express quotes highly placed sources in the government to point out that the message conveyed by senior officials in Washington to visiting Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal contained a number of incentives if the government sent the troops without insisting on a UN mandate. It was told in effect: "Yours is a BJP government, (meaning an adventurous Hindu fundamentalist government), you took the risk in 1998 [with the Pokharan II nuclear tests], take the initiative now as well. We know you may ask for UN cover or cite domestic concerns. We can get a UN cover but if you send troops right now, that will strengthen our friendship."
In return for India's support the US was willing to:
Accommodate an Indian army general as liaison officer at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, as well as post 35 Indian officers at its command and control headquarters in Iraq;
Offer progress on the "trinity issues" - nuclear, hi-tech and space cooperation. Implied in this was that, like Russia and France, the US would be more accommodating toward India when it came to the Nuclear Suppliers Group for transfer of critical technologies;
Pick up the estimated $300 million tab for troop deployment;
Help India recover its investments in Iraq made during the Saddam regime as well as get a share of the economic reconstruction efforts in Iraq.
It is now becoming apparent that a desperate US is not going to take India's considered rejection of its request for troops as a closed chapter. While there were several reasons for India's refusal, it has mainly cited the lack of a UN cover. So the US is moving to provide it with one. It has started looking to the United Nations Security Council for a much broader mandate that would facilitate India and some other nations sending troops to Iraq. The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, admitted on Wednesday that moves were on with other governments and UN officials, but only at the preliminary stage.
This was also indicated by the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, who said In New York on Thursday that peacekeeping operations in Iraq under the mandate of the world body "is under discussion", adding that this was an issue not merely confined to the positions of France or India. "This is not an issue just for France and India. Other governments are grappling with the same issue and the question has been posed as to whether or not Security Council action may not improve the situation... "
Now, the UN operations in Iraq are limited to humanitarian relief, and a greater say for the UN means a greater say for countries other than the US in affairs pertaining to Iraq. This is what the US was trying to avoid, but is now becoming reconciled to, as its need for foreign troops grows more critical.
Senior members of US Congress are appalled that the US is spending close to $4 billion every month in Iraq; and with Afghanistan added, the bill is about $5 billion. The economics of the US involvement apart, there is a growing clamor for making the operations in Iraq truly international - that is, meaningful participation from Europe, Russia and the Asia-Pacific region. In fact, some on Capitol Hill are calling on the administration to bring in NATO for the reconstruction, development and stabilization of Iraq. For the last several days the consistent theme of the administration, be it the State Department or the White House, has been that there is enough in UN Resolution 1483 for countries to send troops to Iraq if they choose to.
This demand has become more insistent since the admission for the first time by the new head of the United States Central Command, John Abizaid, that what American troops are encountering inside Iraq is indeed "classic guerrilla-type" war. The four-star general who is in charge of troops in Iraq has directly taken on his civilian boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who on Sunday maintained that what was taking place inside Iraq was not "anything like a guerrilla war or an organized resistance"
Abizaid's characterization of the conflict in Iraq as war has made the task of the pro-US lobby in the Indian government and media even more difficult. Can India send its troops to participate in what can only be described now as a colonial war of occupation, especially in the face of a unanimous parliamentary resolution adopted only three months ago denouncing that same war? Can it do so even under a UN resolution?
Following on news reports quoting the UN Secretary General that the UN Security Council might issue an appeal to nations to send their troops to Iraq, India said on Thursday it did not have any specific comment to offer. Pointing out that India was not a member of the Security Council, the Foreign Office spokesman said these were evolving developments which New Delhi was watching.
While the government has once again gone into a wait and watch mode, knowing that it will again be called upon to make a decision it doesn't want to make, an angry editorial in Friday's Hindustan Times sums up the Indian position succinctly: "Any displeasure which American officials may have voiced privately over India's refusal to send troops to Iraq is unwarranted... If they'd only paid heed to what their military commanders in Iraq were saying, they would have understood the reason for India’s decision... So, it may not have been so much for stabilization and reconstruction that the Americans were eager to have the Indian troops as for fighting the war on their behalf. This is clearly out of the question. In fact, unless there are definitive signs that the war is really and truly over, the Indian troops cannot be expected to go to Iraq... It is India which has a greater reason to voice displeasure because of the manner in which it was sought to be dragged into a quagmire of the Americans' own creation."
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