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US adds power to India's Israeli
links
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- Immediately after the September 11 attacks on New York
and the Pentagon, the editorial page of the Wall Street
Journal featured an article arguing that Israel, India
and Turkey were Washington's only "allies for the long
haul" in the coming war against terrorism.
While
an increasingly democratic Turkey turned out to be a
major disappointment (from the Washington point of
view), three-way ties between Israel, India and the
United States are growing fast, spurred by precisely the
same forces in Washington who championed the invasion of
Iraq.
That trend reached new heights when US
officials confirmed last week that Washington has given
the go-ahead for Israel to sell its advanced Phalcon
airborne reconnaissance system to India in a deal worth
some US$1 billion.
The same officials said that
the administration of President George W Bush is also on
the verge of approving the more-expensive sale of
Israel's Arrow anti-missile system, which was developed
jointly with the US. Such a system could go far in
neutralizing threats posed by Pakistani missiles capable
of carrying nuclear warheads.
Both moves
highlight the burgeoning alliance between the two most
potent non-Islamic militaries in the Middle East and
South Asia, a trend that has the enthusiastic support of
Bush administration hawks, particularly in the Pentagon
and Vice President Dick Cheney's office. That alliance
will again be spotlighted with next month's scheduled
visit to India by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
While Israel sees India as a comrade in the
fight against Islamic militants, the US has a somewhat
broader agenda to pursue with New Delhi, particularly
its possible role as a counter-balance to China, which
US hawks see as Washington's strategic competitor in
Asia. "India is the most overlooked of our potential
allies in a strategy to contain China," according to
Lloyd Richardson of the Hudson Institute, a think tank
very close to the administration.
With India
determined to build a naval force capable of projecting
power into the South China Sea, says Conn Hallinan, an
analyst at the University of California at Santa Cruz,
Washington has especially courted India's navy, most
recently with the Malabar IV joint exercises involving
thousands of sailors and pilots from both countries.
Not coincidentally, some of the biggest boosters
of US-Indian military ties both in and outside the Bush
administration are also prominent neo-conservatives with
close ties to Israel's ruling Likud Party.
With
the support of hardline officials like Undersecretary of
Defense for Policy Douglas Feith - whose law partner is
a spokesman for the settlement movement on the West Bank
- a group of leading neo-conservatives have formed a new
think tank, the US-India Institute for Strategic Policy,
precisely to promote military ties, according to
Hallinan.
Members of note are the head of the
Washington-based Center for Security Policy, Frank
Gaffney, and a founder of the Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs, Michael Ledeen. Both have
promoted Indian-Israeli military ties as well. Gaffney
and Ledeen, in particular, have long argued that the
Pakistani military was unreliable as a US ally in the
"war against terrorism" given the alleged sympathies
felt by middle- and some senior-ranking officers.
Washington put on hold the Phalcon deal last
year when Pakistan and India were mobilizing their
forces along their common border. Tensions between the
two countries have since eased considerably, and there
is hope that a new peace initiative by Indian Prime
Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee may yield progress.
But the fact that the deal was approved before
any indication of serious forward movement in bilateral
talks suggests that the more hawkish forces within the
administration are winning the argument over the value
of "tilting" ever more sharply in India's direction.
It is no secret that the Pentagon, in
particular, has become increasingly angry about the
alleged role of Pakistan's intelligence services in
protecting Taliban and al-Qaeda forces along the border
with Afghanistan, from which ever more frequent and
lethal attacks against Afghan security forces and US
soldiers have been launched.
Final approval of
the Phalcon sale and likely approval of the Arrow sales
are designed in part to demonstrate that Washington's
patience is running out, according to one administration
official.
India is already the biggest customer
for Israel's sophisticated military industry, which last
year ranked fifth in the world among all arms exporters,
after the US, the European Union, Russia and Japan. The
Phalcon and Arrow deals are likely to propel Israel even
higher in the rankings over the next two years, arms
experts say. Almost one half of Israel's total military
sales last year of $4.2 billion went to India.
But the deal also moves the relationship between
Israel and India closer to the vision set out by the
Journal back in September, 2001, of an alliance of three
non-Muslim states (now, perhaps, minus Turkey) and the
US in an existential battle against "Islamic terrorism"
and the governments (including, presumably, Pakistan's)
that support it.
"Outside the Western world, as
geographically defined," wrote the author, editorial
board member Tunku Varadarajan, "these three states are
perhaps the only ones on which the US can count,
virtually unconditionally, to show an immutable
opposition to Islamic terrorism. Crucially, they are all
situated at terrorist nodes, in a vast, seething region
in which Islamic states are preponderant."
Indeed, that vision was also echoed earlier this
month with the unprecedented appearance by Vajpayee's
National Security Adviser, Brajesh Mishra, at the gala
dinner of the annual convention of the American Jewish
Committee. The US, India and Israel, he said "have to
jointly face the same ugly face of modern-day
terrorism", adding that "such an alliance would have the
political will and moral authority to take bold
decisions in extreme cases of terrorist provocation".
Given their democratic governments, "vision of
pluralism, tolerance and equal opportunity ...", Mishra
said, "stronger India-US relations and India-Israel
relations have a natural logic".
The AJC
announced it would soon be opening an office in New
Delhi.
(Inter Press Service)
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