| |
India: Still fighting the
hyphen
By Sultan Shahin
NEW
DELHI - India has for long fought against its hyphenated
relationship with Pakistan in the eyes of the US-led
international community.
With September 11,
2001, and the role of the Pakistan-supported
Taliban-al-Qaeda nexus in it, India had hoped that the
United States would see the difference between the two
countries and start treating it accordingly. But that
did not happen; indeed, Pakistan got its role as a
frontline state in America's wars restored.
But
with the Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan episode and the exposure
in the past fortnight of his and concomitantly
Pakistan's role as a serial nuclear proliferator, it has
become clear that unlike Pakistan, India is a
responsible nuclear power. New Delhi felt, now, finally
the hyphen would be off. But this time, too, it is not
happening. US policy toward South Asia continues to be
based on parity between India and Pakistan, regardless
of the so-called strategic relations with the United
States that the Indian government has been feeling so
good about.
In fact, India is even being asked,
along with Pakistan and Israel, to sign the
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the latest additional
protocols as a non-nuclear power, despite its status of
a declared nuclear-weapons power (it tested the bomb in
1998). The European Union's Irish presidency on
Wednesday urged India, Israel and Pakistan to sign the
NPT "unconditionally".
Addressing the European
Parliament, the Irish Europe minister, Dick Roche, said:
"There are three countries, India, Pakistan and Israel,
that remain outside the regime, and we continue to call
upon them to accede unconditionally to the NPT as
non-nuclear-weapon states. The EU has repeatedly stated
that the NPT is the cornerstone of the global
non-proliferation regime and the essential foundation
for the pursuit of nuclear disarmament." This is not
what India had bargained for. Delhi had given total
support to the United States in all its endeavors, from
Washington's national missile defense to the "war on
terror". A frustrated Brajesh Mishra, India's national
security adviser and Prime Minister Atal Bihari
Vajpayee's principal secretary, has been forced to
comment: "Clubbing partners against proliferation with
countries of true proliferation concern is a
self-defeating approach which can only weaken the cause
of genuine non-proliferation."
He said this in
the wake of reports that after Pakistani disclosures,
the US is very keen that India significantly strengthen
its own export control regimes. Washington would like
New Delhi to create new laws to prevent nuclear leakage.
This while even US President George W Bush in his major
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) speech on Wednesday
took care to protect the Pakistani president and
military from being accused of proliferation in which
they have clearly been engaging for at least 15 years.
A burgeoning divide between the US and Indian
perceptions on the nuclear-proliferation issue becomes
clear from the different positions of Bush, as spelled
out in his WMD speech on Wednesday, and Mishra's address
to an international security conference in Munich last
Saturday, as well as Indian External Affairs Minister
Yashwant Sinha's remarks during a press conference with
visiting British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
Detailing Pakistan's "A Q Khan network", which
was driven by "greed, fanaticism or both" and "fed rogue
nations", Bush vowed to block nuclear proliferation and
proposed sweeping changes in the international nuclear
regime to tackle what he called the "greatest threat
before humanity today". Staying silent on the
culpability of the Pakistani military, he merely said
that President General Pervez Musharraf had assured him
he would share "all information on the Khan network"
with Washington.
The key Bush proposal is that
no new country should have the technology to enrich or
process nuclear material, and that all countries that
need nuclear technology for civilian purposes must sign
the additional protocol, under which there is room for
vigorous international supervision. The US president
also called for strengthening of the United Nations
nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA), and suspending all suspect nations from its
board. He asked the Nuclear Suppliers Group - the
roughly 40 nations that provide most of the world's
nuclear technology - to refuse to sell designs and
equipment to any country not already capable of making
nuclear fuel. He would ask nations, he said, to restrict
the sale of nuclear technology to countries that do not
agree to vigorous international inspections.
Against this peremptory setting of new rules
unilaterally by the United States, Sinha called for a
wider international discussion on the implications of
the nuclear developments in Pakistan. Indeed, India has
reacted quite cautiously to Bush's latest initiatives.
The External Affairs Ministry spokesman welcomed on
Thursday only his "emphasis on imperatives of collective
action to check WMD proliferation", but avoided any
mention of specifics. Other officials are making it
clear that there is no question of India signing the NPT
as a non-nuclear-weapon state and thus opening up all
nuclear installations, including weapons-related
facilities, to international inspections.
That
India looks at the Bush proposals with some trepidation
and merely as an excuse to introduce what one
commentator called a "US nuclear Raj" is clear from the
remarks by a senior Indian official to the media. He was
quoted by The Times of India as saying: "We would like
to make sure that we are not in any way a target for a
tightened trading regime, that no ships bound for Indian
ports are stopped. In other words, we have to be sure
India is part of the enforcers, not the enforced."
In a cautious speech at Munich a few days
earlier, Mishra offered India's own understanding of the
new threats and its ideas on how to respond. He stressed
that the old non-proliferation order is no longer
effective - the international context has changed,
thanks to the rise of non-state actors such as terrorist
groups, suicide attacks, failing states and new
incentives for WMD proliferation.
Referring to
the unilateral measures being then contemplated to deal
with the challenge, the ones that were later spelled out
by Bush, Mishra said: "A multilateral consultative
machinery with international credibility can provide
legitimacy to such measures." But for it to be
effective, he said, "it has to be evolved with wide and
representative consultations". For a stronger nuclear
regime to be effective, the kind that Bush has proposed,
it has to be "evolved with wide and representative
consultations".
Among the non-proliferation
measures to which Mishra was referring and which will
have Indian support, perhaps the most significant is the
proliferation security initiative (PSI) that the US has
developed in recent months for a cooperative military
interdiction of international air and sea traffic in
sensitive materials and technologies. Joint military
exercises have already been undertaken by the US and 10
other "founding countries" to develop operational
capabilities for such interdiction. Fifty other
countries are reported to have extended their support to
this initiative.
Among other such multilateral
initiatives are a set of proposals from the Group of
Seven Western countries in recent years to improve the
safety and security of nuclear materials worldwide.
Also, the proposal recently endorsed by the head of
IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, to put new restrictions against
countries acquiring capabilities in what is called a
"full fuel cycle". The idea is to prevent the
development of national capabilities to produce
nuclear-weapons materials among non-nuclear-weapons
states. Nations will be asked to forgo such capabilities
in return for assurances of international supply of
nuclear fuel for legitimate needs. There are other
measures for the strengthening of export controls among
advanced states to prevent proliferation and for
enhancing inspection procedures by the IAEA.
Many of these provisions, particularly those
Bush has proposed, are sweeping in nature. Some of them
go beyond the NPT. These measures are part of an effort
to build structures and mechanisms outside the NPT to
strengthen the global nuclear order. Mishra's remarks at
Munich do not suggest that India is completely unwilling
to cooperate with the new non-proliferation initiatives,
though it may not want to sign any binding agreements.
But the core of the new Indian nuclear position is that
it wants to be treated as a nuclear-weapons power and be
fully consulted on all proliferation-related issues with
its own interests being taken taken into account.
Also, India wants the United States to
understand that India fully shares the objective of
preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. That it has
stayed outside the NPT and would like to continue doing
so is another matter. India also wants the US to
understand that its record on non-proliferation has been
a responsible one and its nuclear policies and programs
cannot be equated with those of irresponsible states.
India would not like the US to pursue such "a
self-defeating approach which can only weaken the cause
of genuine non-proliferation". India would like the US
to treat it as a "partner in controlling the WMD
proliferation" along the lines of the identical
statements issued by Bush and Vajpayee last month.
But wanting is one thing, and believing it will
happen quite another. Almost the entire strategic
community in India is unanimous that the United States
is not really interested in nuclear non-proliferation -
it is merely playing games. Pakistani nuclear scientist
and father of its bomb Khan said in his televised
confession of proliferation: "I have chosen to appear
before you to offer my deepest regrets and unqualified
apologies to a traumatized nation. It pains me to
realize in retrospect that my entire lifetime
achievements of providing foolproof national security to
my country have been placed in serious jeopardy on
account of my activities. I wish to clarify that there
was never any kind of authorization for these activities
by the government."
This has made two things
clear. Either the Pakistani army was a partner in
proliferation for the past 15 years in order to acquire
hard cash from Libya and Iran and missiles from North
Korea, as most observers even in Pakistan believe, or it
was unable to detect what was going on in its own back
yard. Either way, this makes Pakistan a dangerous nation
for the international community and all the more so for
India. It is India against whom the Pakistani bomb is
particularly targeted. If Khan is correct, then
Pakistan's bomb can easily fall into the hands of
terrorists and rogue army officers who can use it
against India. Former Indian ambassador to Pakistan G
Parthasarthy wonders whether it can be called "license
for jihad".
The question in this context
naturally is how to contain and eliminate this danger
emanating from Pakistan. How the United States' response
will solve this problem, by putting a ban on the sale of
peaceful nuclear-fuel technology to all nations, is
beyond what any Indian strategist can understand. No
wonder India's foremost defense strategist, Brahma
Chellaney, calls the US and Pakistan "partners in crime"
in an article in the widely circulated Hindustan Times
(February 12). "Had Syria or Iran exported even
chemical-weapons technology to just one nation," he
writes, "Bush would have threatened military preemption.
In contrast, he showers praise and money on Pakistan ...
India's security has come under pressure from US actions
and inactions in its neighborhood."
Pravin
Sawhney, the influential editor of the defense journal
Force, is even gloomier about the prospects of Indo-US
relations in the immediate future. He asks: "Where does
all this leave India? First, the so-called trinity talks
between India and the US, and the 'Glide Path'
enunciated by [US Secretary of State] General Colin
Powell, will get stalled indefinitely. The seemingly
growing Indo-US cooperation in areas of space, nuclear
energy and transfer of dual-use technology will not
happen in a hurry. Considering the US has decided to
support President Musharraf, it will do nothing that
will weaken his position within his country. He has
already said that any transfer of high technology to
India by the US will tilt the precarious military
balance in the region, forcing Pakistan to take
corrective measures - read, a resort to nuclear weapons.
"Worse, the US has resolved to review various
control regimes. This will put pressure on India to make
its strategic technology control regime more
transparent, and also to bring more nuclear
establishments under IAEA safeguards. This means that,
on the one hand, the US will not part with its high
technology to India, and on the other, it will be more
intrusive in its strategic dialogue with India. The US
will seek to know more about India's command and control
of its strategic arsenal, it will desire to understand
our nuclear weapons program better, and offer us help
for security of our nukes. Clearly, India will be
hard-pressed to resist such overtly friendly gestures."
One of the reasons India is feeling forced at
every level to make a new assessment of its relationship
with the United States is its increasingly low opinion
of US intelligence capability. Despite all the praise
Bush bestowed on his intelligence community, it is clear
to all that it did not have a clue about what was going
on in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It is now clear that it did
not have a clue about Pakistan either. The latter is
even more unforgivable. India was aware of most of what
was happening in Pakistan and informed the US throughout
this period, but to no avail. Both Iraq's motivated
opposition in exile and the Pakistani military were able
to deceive the United States with impunity.
The
US president says US intelligence was aware of every
move Khan was making in the past 15 years. Most Indian
strategists believe that is a lie. But if true, it is a
far more puzzling proposition and puts a question mark
on US commitment to non-proliferation. Why did the
United States allow Khan to go on his proliferation
missions?
Many Indians are wondering whether
earlier media reports of a conspiracy in Washington to
protect Khan should be given more credence than they
have been so far. It was reported that the Central
Intelligence Agency and other US agencies could not
investigate the spread of nuclear bombs through Pakistan
because funding appeared to originate in Saudi Arabia.
The Bush administration's "spike" of the investigation
of Khan followed from a wider policy of protecting key
Saudis, including the bin Laden family from which Osama
is estranged.
Washington will require all its
creativity to keep New Delhi on board its
non-proliferation project, even though official India is
not rejecting Bush's proposals out of hand. Washington
has already taken New Delhi for granted for far too
long. It would be mistaken to continue doing so any
further. India is upset. Strangely, this is not directed
at Pakistan. Even the constant Pakistan-baiters are
mostly holding their peace, unwilling to endanger the
nascent peace process that formally begins on Monday.
The target of their ire is Washington, which has seldom
listened to Indian pleas, either in the Bill Clinton or
the Bush administrations.
(Copyright 2004 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
