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India forced to bite its
tongue
By Sultan Shahin
NEW
DELHI - United States-India relations seem destined to
follow a zigzag course. In the latest swerve, it's time
for India to get suspicious of US intentions, and
distrustful of its intelligence capability, despite the
efforts of visiting strategists from the US to soften
the blow of growing consternation over continuing US
patronage of the Pakistani military.
Many Indian
strategic analysts are angry with the US over the
emerging details of Pakistani nuclear proliferation to
Iran, Libya and North Korea, and the US's silence on the
matter. Instead of calling for exemplary punishment to
the proliferators, the US is still busy protecting them
in order to serve its short-term interests, the analysts
argue.
The unfortunate recipients of Indian ire
and "we-told-you-sos" on Wednesday were known American
friends of India, three former officials of the
administrations of presidents George Bush Sr and Bill
Clinton. These are Brent Scowcroft, national security
adviser during the Bush Sr and Gerald Ford
administrations, Sandy Berger, Clinton's national
security adviser, and Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary
of state in Clinton times. None of these people took
seriously in their time repeated Indian allegations of
Pakistani proliferation activities.
Part of the
high-profile Aspen Institute India, a think tank set up
to implement so-called Track II diplomacy, they
interacted in Delhi with other American and Indian
strategists, some of them retired officials of the
Ministry of External affairs. Interestingly, former
Indian officials were the same people who had tried to
get them interested in persistent reports India was
receiving of Pakistan leaking nuclear fissile materials
and know-how.
One of the points on which they
disagree with Berger, among others, is his advocacy of a
tightened nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) regime.
This includes banning the transfer of nuclear power
technology to those countries, like India, which have
"closed fuel cycle" programs capable of generating
fissile material. India, like Pakistan, is not a
signatory to the NPT.
India is finding it
difficult to understand how the US can accept and even
encourage Pakistani attempts to blame its proliferation
entirely on its scientists, and absolve the military of
all blame. New Delhi is also wondering what message this
attitude is sending to future proliferators.
However, New Delhi is hoping, as some
high-ranking officials told Asia Times Online, that the
US will at least conduct a thorough enquiry into the
involvement of smugglers and black-marketers in the
process of proliferation, so that at least Indian
allegations of the involvement of mafia dons like
Mumbai's Dawood Ibrahim, possibly hiding in Pakistan,
will become apparent and strengthen India's case for
their extradition to India.
There is
information, though so far inconclusive and still being
investigated, that a Dubai company run by Ibrahim, which
has suddenly disappeared, was involved in procuring
nuclear-related material from Pakistan and passing it on
to Iran.
There is great consternation in New
Delhi that even amid reports that Pakistan's father of
the bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, has pointed to President
General Pervez Musharraf's "involvement" in nuclear
proliferation, top US officials have said that America
does not have any information that the Pakistan
government was involved in leaking nuclear technology
and that it "values" Musharraf's assurances in this
regard. Certainly, the US also "values" Musharraf as an
ally in the "war on terror".
New Delhi still
feels, though officials are maintaining a discreet
silence, that it is a short-sighted view of things and
will prove disastrous for the US and the larger
international community in the long term.
Adding
to the Indian dismay is the juxtaposition of the
Pakistani revelations with a report from Washington that
President George W Bush has proposed a US$2.4 trillion
budget that will include some $560 million for South
Asia. While India will receive $15 million to finance an
education initiative for disadvantaged communities,
implement water and power infrastructure reforms and
develop a more effective response system for disasters,
Pakistan will receive $300 million. This will include
$200 million for debt relief and budget support, with
the remainder going in the direction of social sector
programs that will include expansion of health services
for women and children.
Not willing to
jeopardize the nascent peace process with Pakistan,
official India is tight-lipped. But what the officials
cannot say openly, newspapers close to the government
are saying loud and clear. India's largest-circulated
newspaper, The Times of India, termed it "a story of
intelligence failure so extraordinary that it makes the
Iraqi botch-up look almost benign in comparison". This
at a time when "Bush prepares to order a belated probe
into the intelligence fiasco that led to his fictitious
pre-war claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction".
The paper is horrified that for a
full 15 years, as Islamabad was passing nuclear know-how
and technology to North Korea, Iran and Libya as early
as the mid-1980s, Washington and the West remained
wholly oblivious to the threat. "No media leak, no
informed speculation, not even a whisper that anything
might be amiss." On second thoughts, the paper finds the
silence "so conspicuously total" that it almost rings
untrue.
From this point, speculation starts and
India's strategic community is wondering if, as the
Times of India puts it: "Could it be that this was not
so much an intelligence lapse as a systematic
unwillingness on the part of Washington to face the
facts?"
Another newspaper close to the
establishment in New Delhi, run by a ruling Bharatiya
Janata Party-nominated member of parliament, the
Pioneer, is even more blunt in its articulation of
disapproval. It demands that "at least the ISI [the
Pakistan military's Inter-Services Intelligence] be
defanged". Understandably, the question has arisen, the
paper says, whether Khan and his associates are being
made scapegoats for deals in which Pakistan's military
establishment and the ISI have been involved.
The Pioneer poses the question those in New
Delhi's strategic circles are asking: "Given the ISI's
all-pervasive surveillance and the Pakistani
government's repeated claim that its nuclear weapons
program and facilities were in safe hands, one wonders
how Dr Khan and his colleagues could have exported vital
nuclear secrets and equipment for processing
weapons-grade uranium - that too for over 15 years -
without being found out. If nothing else, his lavish
lifestyle and ownership of prime property in Pakistan
and abroad, which could not have been accounted for by
his salary, should have attracted attention. It is,
therefore, safe to assume that if not Pakistan's
government as such, at least a section of its military
establishment and the ISI had been closely involved in
the nuclear technology transfers and shared the spoils
with Dr Khan and his colleagues."
Hence a most
disturbing question, it goes on: "If Pakistan's nuclear
secrets could reach two countries - Iran and North Korea
- which are a part of what President George Bush of the
United States has described as the axis of evil, what
guarantee is there that these will not reach - if they
have not already reached - terrorist outfits like the
al-Qaeda? It is not just a question of prosecuting Dr
Khan under Pakistan's Official Secrets Act, but of
taming the rogue elements in Pakistan's armed forces and
the ISI. It will be a difficult task and powerful people
involved in the murky business will resist bitterly.
President Musharraf has no alternative to acting firmly.
Even if the claim by his country's military
establishment that there has been no illegal
proliferation since the setting up of the National
Command Authority, which controls Pakistan's nuclear
arsenal, in February 2000, is true, the world will not
be reassured about the future unless at least the ISI is
defanged."
There is another reason why India is
worried over the revelations in regard to Pakistan's
nuclear proliferation. This refers to Pakistan's effort
to build a kind of Islamic solidarity around its nuclear
weapons technology. In the words of Jasjit Singh, former
bureaucrat and director of the government-funded think
tank, India Defense Studies and Analyses: "What is of
critical importance is not only the world's most
adventurous multi-national nuclear proliferation, but
the reason Khan has put forward for his activities.
Pakistani officials are saying that, contrary to earlier
assumptions, he did not do so for money, but that he
'was motivated enough to make other Islamic countries
nuclear powers also' and reduce pressure on Pakistan.
This may be an effort to garner public support from
Islamic parties and countries. It also harks back to
[former premier Zulkfikar Ali] Bhutto's notion of the
'Islamic Bomb' for its ummah [world Muslim
community]. The only exception known so far is the
supply of nuclear weapon making technology to North
Korea for strategic reasons in exchange for long-range
ballistic missiles for nuclear weapon delivery."
It is hardly surprising in this scenario of
developing mistrust towards the US that General K
Padmanabhan, who was Indian army chief until last year,
has come out with a book predicting a US-India war in
which, interestingly, China is on the Indian side. The
book is titled The writing on the wall: India
checkmates America 2017. The former army chief says
that he has formed his opinion on the basis of his
extensive experience of interaction with the US military
during his long years in the army. The US has its own
complaints. Strobe Talbott, for instance, believes that
following the 1998 nuclear tests at Pokhran conducted by
India, New Delhi's failure to follow US advice on export
controls robbed Washington of the "leverage" it needed
to crack down on Pakistan's nuclear proliferation
activities. The US logic is quite interesting. Talbott
told The Times of India on Thursday: "One of the reasons
we pushed export control benchmarks with India was not
because we were worried India would proliferate. We
wanted Pakistan to tighten up. You know the perverse
dynamics of the sub-continent: you do Pokhran, they do
Chagai. So we thought there could be a benign version
too. India signs the CTBT [Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty] and agrees to export controls; and then Pakistan
follows."
But along with the negatives, there
are several positives in the steadily growing US-India
strategic ties. India has just released a program of
year-long joint military exercises with the US military
in various parts of the country, for instance. Also on
the positive side, a visiting US defense business
delegation said on Wednesday that Washington was ready
to meet India's strategic requirements and shed the
notion that the US was not a reliable partner in
defense. Twelve US companies are taking part in the
Defexpo exhibition under way in New Delhi. This has been
called the biggest arms bazaar. A member of the US
delegation, Lieutenant-General Dan Christman said: "We
are here to translate to Indians that US is a long-term
reliable defense partner and to take forward President
Bush's commitment to expand ties in missile defense,
peaceful nuclear energy, space and high technology
weaponry."
Despite the confusion and
disappointment in India, however, India cannot but
appreciate the fact that some high-profile US
strategists are beginning to realize and say openly that
as a responsible nuclear power, India can be a valuable
long-term strategic partner; a position that cannot be
accorded to Pakistan, no matter how much the US may need
it in the short term.
Indeed, a growing
strategic relationship is being promoted on a full-time
basis by a brand new think tank, called the Aspen
Institute India. To articulate his vision of a more
tolerant world promoted by a US-India partnership,
Walter Isaacson, former chairman and managing director
of Time magazine and CNN for 25 years, and now president
of Aspen, has come to New Delhi from the high American
mountains of Aspen, Colorado, via Washington DC.
He told an admiring audience on Wednesday that
perhaps, in the 21st century, India, "with the
importance it gave to tolerance, its feel for pluralism,
its understanding of the dangers of tribalism and its
values for the virtues of humility", would turn out to
be America's most important ally. He went on: "Finding a
common ground is so important, it is crucial to locate a
leadership which is not defined by the passion of
extremism, which doesn't believe in uncompromising
positions. In the 1990s in the US, we lost touch with
those values in the media, in business and politics."
Isaacson went on to say that Bush had squandered
the opportunity after September 11 to keep America
together and to take secular issues out of partisan
politics. Moreover, he opined, the US needed allies,
even if as Winston Churchill once famously said,
"allies, sometimes, develop an opinion of their own".
Brent Scowcroft, too, took a middle, moderate
path. He sought to define America's present fractured
polity in the context of September 11. "After September
11," he said, "we tried to destroy those who gave us
grievous harm, but we could have tried to do so without
causing resentment ... We should have tried to convey to
people that we are allies in a common cause, but we are
not embracing those regimes."
In the advancement
of our interests after September 11, Talbott commented,
it was important that the US tried to induce changes in
different regimes in different ways, whether in Pakistan
or Saudi Arabia, "politely but effectively". It was
"extraordinary", he pointed out, that the US had
excluded the "great Middle East from our general impulse
to democracy", that the extremes that were created in
these societies as a result bred resentment that was
directed at the US. "No longer are we preaching that
democracy is good for them," he said, in fact, that the
US argument was only advanced in order to make those
societies less susceptible to becoming cradles of
terrorism.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
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