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US trying to Make India a regional super power, as her agent!!!
Part I
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Asif Ezdi
The writer is a former member of the Foreign Service
On Sept 6, the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) gave India a waiver from its guidelines restricting nuclear trade with states, such as India, that are not members of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and do not allow comprehensive safeguards. The waiver would allow member-countries of the NSG to supply to India civilian nuclear plants and fuel, as well as dual-use technology which can be used for producing the material for nuclear bombs. One month later, on Oct 10, India's External Affairs Minister Mukherjee and US Secretary of State Rice signed the bilateral agreement on cooperation in peaceful uses of nuclear energy which allows civilian nuclear trade with India in exchange for IAEA safeguards at India's civilian nuclear plants. Under the NSG decision and the bilateral agreement with the US, the swathe of restrictions that were erected incrementally in response to India's nuclear test in 1974 and its refusal to accept full-scope safeguards on its nuclear complex have been lifted and India can now buy dual-use nuclear technology from the US and other countries.
The signature of the India-US nuclear agreement was the culmination of a nearly four-year-long effort which began with the second Bush administration and which was aimed, in Rice's words, at "making India a global power." A proposal in the first administration of President George W Bush to give India access to civilian nuclear technology was supported by Defence Secretary Rumsfeld and Robert Blackwill, a former ambassador to India who served on the National Security Council staff but was resisted by non-proliferation experts at the State Department, among them John Bolton, then under secretary of state for international security and arms control.
According to The Washington Post of Sept 8, Rice set the agreement in motion just weeks after becoming secretary of state in January 2005, pushing for a dramatic change in policy that took even the Indian government by surprise. Soon afterwards, in an effusive op-ed in The Times of India (March 31, 2005), US ambassador to India David C Mulford wrote: "It is now official. It is the policy of the United States to help India become a major world power in the 21st century. This is what Rice conveyed to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during her recent visit to India."
India made nuclear cooperation the central issue in a global partnership with the US and the agreement on civil nuclear cooperation is the lynchpin in Washington's effort to midwife the birth of India as a new great power. Although Washington has given a variety of grounds for lifting the ban on nuclear cooperation with India, the main purpose was to advance American strategic interests in Asia. This was implicit also in Rice's testimony before the Senate in April 2008. After recounting the benefits of the nuclear deal advancement of energy security, promotion of environmental protection and "strengthening of the global non-proliferation regime" Rice said that all this must be viewed "in a still larger, still greater context: what this initiative does to elevate the US-India relationship to a new, strategic height."
From the US perspective, the hope is that building up a broader relationship with Delhi will give the foreign policy of India a more American tilt and position the country as a counterweight to China in the event of an intensified strategic contest between Washington and Beijing. Besides the China factor, another reason for the evolving strategic understanding between the US and India, in the words of an editorial in The Washington Post (July 20, 2005), is that "[India] may serve as an ally against Islamic militancy." In an article in the Foreign Affairs journal (July/August 2006), Ashton Carter, a former assistant secretary of defence in the first Clinton administration, put it more explicitly: "Washington gave something away on the nuclear front in order to gain much more on other fronts; it hoped to win the support and cooperation of India to help the United States confront the challenges that a threatening Iran, a turbulent Pakistan, and an unpredictable China may pose in the future."
Similarly, a leading article in the London Times ("India looks West," Oct 4) defended the nuclear deal on the ground that it would make India a strategic partner of the West. "For Washington, the deal was always more about geopolitical strategy than business ties," it wrote. "Since the collapse of India's treaty links with the Soviet Union, and especially since its move away from economic self-reliance to an embrace of the market, the US has looked to India as a democratic counterbalance to China. It is important that India aligns itself more closely with the West and develops its nuclear potential in partnership with the West. [Rejecting] the nuclear deal would not have bolstered the already shaky NPT. Forging a new partnership and alignment in Asia is by far the more valuable strategic prize."
The India-US nuclear deal was first made public in a joint statement issued by President Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on July 18, 2005. Secretary of State Rice spoke to Musharraf about it the next day and no doubt informed him that Pakistan could not expect to get a similar deal. His reaction, according to The New York Times (July 20, 2005), was "constructive" and "not overly problematic." Subsequently, in a meeting with the press on Dec 18, 2006, Under-secretary of State Nicholas Burns said that Washington had "briefed the Pakistanis in July 2005 and every step of the way as to what was happening." President Bush, when he was in Islamabad on March 3, 2006, had also described the civil nuclear accord with India to Musharraf. There were some Pakistanis, Burns said, "who are not happy about it, not President Musharraf, but people beneath him." Evidently, Musharraf was not prepared to jeopardise US support for his dictatorship by being "overly problematic" about the nuclear deal.
Washington has refused to consider for Pakistan a nuclear deal similar to that given to India. There are three main reasons for this. One, Pakistan does not have the strategic weight or place that India has in Washington's scheme of things. Two, the international regime built by Washington over the years to disallow nuclear cooperation with non-NPT countries would have lost more of its credibility if both Pakistan and India were exempted from it. Declaring that India is a "unique" case is an effort to limit the damage done to the non-proliferation system. Thirty-four years ago, Kissinger warned that Washington would make a horrible example of Pakistan if it pursued a nuclear programme. Today, the Bush administration wants to make an example of Pakistan to demonstrate that it will not tolerate deviation from its non-proliferation policies, unless the country happens to be a strategic ally. Third, Washington was confident that Musharraf, though an "indispensable ally in the war on terrorism," would not be "overly problematic" because of his dependence on US backing to stay in power.
The reasons given by Washington publicly for its no to Pakistan are, of course, different: that Pakistan has been a "proliferator," that it is not a democracy and that it is politically unstable. There is nothing unusual about countries trying to cloak the pursuit of national interest in high-sounding principles. What is unusual is the readiness with which many in Pakistan have bought the official US line that Pakistan cannot get a similar deal because of its "history." Typical of those commentators who attribute Pakistan's inability to get a nuclear deal, not so much to Washington's strategic calculations but to Pakistan's own "flaws," is the Daily Times' editorial of Oct 6. The newspaper does not seem to have noticed the Bush administration's plans to make India a global power as a hedge against a possibly not-so-friendly China in the future, and places the blame, as it sees it, entirely on Pakistan for being a country that "keeps trying to change the status quo." "India, on the other hand, has accepted the global architecture and gone to work on enhancing its status within it. There is a world of difference between the two approaches, present, as they do, two different worldviews." The daily ends with the prescription that "as the first big step," Pakistan must get on the fast track of normalisation of relations with India. Nothing wrong with that. But the newspaper forgets that it takes two to tango and that the more India sees itself on the path to becoming a great power, the less reason it sees for mutual accommodation.
(To be continued)
Part I
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Asif Ezdi
The writer is a former member of the Foreign Service
On Sept 6, the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) gave India a waiver from its guidelines restricting nuclear trade with states, such as India, that are not members of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and do not allow comprehensive safeguards. The waiver would allow member-countries of the NSG to supply to India civilian nuclear plants and fuel, as well as dual-use technology which can be used for producing the material for nuclear bombs. One month later, on Oct 10, India's External Affairs Minister Mukherjee and US Secretary of State Rice signed the bilateral agreement on cooperation in peaceful uses of nuclear energy which allows civilian nuclear trade with India in exchange for IAEA safeguards at India's civilian nuclear plants. Under the NSG decision and the bilateral agreement with the US, the swathe of restrictions that were erected incrementally in response to India's nuclear test in 1974 and its refusal to accept full-scope safeguards on its nuclear complex have been lifted and India can now buy dual-use nuclear technology from the US and other countries.
The signature of the India-US nuclear agreement was the culmination of a nearly four-year-long effort which began with the second Bush administration and which was aimed, in Rice's words, at "making India a global power." A proposal in the first administration of President George W Bush to give India access to civilian nuclear technology was supported by Defence Secretary Rumsfeld and Robert Blackwill, a former ambassador to India who served on the National Security Council staff but was resisted by non-proliferation experts at the State Department, among them John Bolton, then under secretary of state for international security and arms control.
According to The Washington Post of Sept 8, Rice set the agreement in motion just weeks after becoming secretary of state in January 2005, pushing for a dramatic change in policy that took even the Indian government by surprise. Soon afterwards, in an effusive op-ed in The Times of India (March 31, 2005), US ambassador to India David C Mulford wrote: "It is now official. It is the policy of the United States to help India become a major world power in the 21st century. This is what Rice conveyed to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during her recent visit to India."
India made nuclear cooperation the central issue in a global partnership with the US and the agreement on civil nuclear cooperation is the lynchpin in Washington's effort to midwife the birth of India as a new great power. Although Washington has given a variety of grounds for lifting the ban on nuclear cooperation with India, the main purpose was to advance American strategic interests in Asia. This was implicit also in Rice's testimony before the Senate in April 2008. After recounting the benefits of the nuclear deal advancement of energy security, promotion of environmental protection and "strengthening of the global non-proliferation regime" Rice said that all this must be viewed "in a still larger, still greater context: what this initiative does to elevate the US-India relationship to a new, strategic height."
From the US perspective, the hope is that building up a broader relationship with Delhi will give the foreign policy of India a more American tilt and position the country as a counterweight to China in the event of an intensified strategic contest between Washington and Beijing. Besides the China factor, another reason for the evolving strategic understanding between the US and India, in the words of an editorial in The Washington Post (July 20, 2005), is that "[India] may serve as an ally against Islamic militancy." In an article in the Foreign Affairs journal (July/August 2006), Ashton Carter, a former assistant secretary of defence in the first Clinton administration, put it more explicitly: "Washington gave something away on the nuclear front in order to gain much more on other fronts; it hoped to win the support and cooperation of India to help the United States confront the challenges that a threatening Iran, a turbulent Pakistan, and an unpredictable China may pose in the future."
Similarly, a leading article in the London Times ("India looks West," Oct 4) defended the nuclear deal on the ground that it would make India a strategic partner of the West. "For Washington, the deal was always more about geopolitical strategy than business ties," it wrote. "Since the collapse of India's treaty links with the Soviet Union, and especially since its move away from economic self-reliance to an embrace of the market, the US has looked to India as a democratic counterbalance to China. It is important that India aligns itself more closely with the West and develops its nuclear potential in partnership with the West. [Rejecting] the nuclear deal would not have bolstered the already shaky NPT. Forging a new partnership and alignment in Asia is by far the more valuable strategic prize."
The India-US nuclear deal was first made public in a joint statement issued by President Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on July 18, 2005. Secretary of State Rice spoke to Musharraf about it the next day and no doubt informed him that Pakistan could not expect to get a similar deal. His reaction, according to The New York Times (July 20, 2005), was "constructive" and "not overly problematic." Subsequently, in a meeting with the press on Dec 18, 2006, Under-secretary of State Nicholas Burns said that Washington had "briefed the Pakistanis in July 2005 and every step of the way as to what was happening." President Bush, when he was in Islamabad on March 3, 2006, had also described the civil nuclear accord with India to Musharraf. There were some Pakistanis, Burns said, "who are not happy about it, not President Musharraf, but people beneath him." Evidently, Musharraf was not prepared to jeopardise US support for his dictatorship by being "overly problematic" about the nuclear deal.
Washington has refused to consider for Pakistan a nuclear deal similar to that given to India. There are three main reasons for this. One, Pakistan does not have the strategic weight or place that India has in Washington's scheme of things. Two, the international regime built by Washington over the years to disallow nuclear cooperation with non-NPT countries would have lost more of its credibility if both Pakistan and India were exempted from it. Declaring that India is a "unique" case is an effort to limit the damage done to the non-proliferation system. Thirty-four years ago, Kissinger warned that Washington would make a horrible example of Pakistan if it pursued a nuclear programme. Today, the Bush administration wants to make an example of Pakistan to demonstrate that it will not tolerate deviation from its non-proliferation policies, unless the country happens to be a strategic ally. Third, Washington was confident that Musharraf, though an "indispensable ally in the war on terrorism," would not be "overly problematic" because of his dependence on US backing to stay in power.
The reasons given by Washington publicly for its no to Pakistan are, of course, different: that Pakistan has been a "proliferator," that it is not a democracy and that it is politically unstable. There is nothing unusual about countries trying to cloak the pursuit of national interest in high-sounding principles. What is unusual is the readiness with which many in Pakistan have bought the official US line that Pakistan cannot get a similar deal because of its "history." Typical of those commentators who attribute Pakistan's inability to get a nuclear deal, not so much to Washington's strategic calculations but to Pakistan's own "flaws," is the Daily Times' editorial of Oct 6. The newspaper does not seem to have noticed the Bush administration's plans to make India a global power as a hedge against a possibly not-so-friendly China in the future, and places the blame, as it sees it, entirely on Pakistan for being a country that "keeps trying to change the status quo." "India, on the other hand, has accepted the global architecture and gone to work on enhancing its status within it. There is a world of difference between the two approaches, present, as they do, two different worldviews." The daily ends with the prescription that "as the first big step," Pakistan must get on the fast track of normalisation of relations with India. Nothing wrong with that. But the newspaper forgets that it takes two to tango and that the more India sees itself on the path to becoming a great power, the less reason it sees for mutual accommodation.
(To be continued)
