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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."
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online
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