Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, doesn’t really have a job. She was given a title by the Obama Administration so that he could prevent her from running against him in 2012. It has been more than a year, and Mr. Clinton could not find time to visit Delhi or have substantive talks with the Bharati leadership. On her first visit to Asia, she went to China and deliberately excluded Delhi from her itinerary. She has now finally made it to Bharat, but not as a Secretary of State. She went to Delhi as the Secretariat of Commerce and the America’s Chief Salesperson. She signed a lot of deal which would ship old dilapidated nuclear equipment that no one else wants to buy. She took the checks and will be laughing all the way to the bank.
The amazing thing is that after the deals where signed, she gave a blunt message to Delhi. “Lay off Pakistan“. The matter of the Indian Consulates in Afghanistan has already been brought up and the US want’s Delhi to stop supporting the terrorists in Pakistan.
There are several issues facing the US-Bharati relationship. The problems can succinctly been defined as follows:
- Bharat’s disputes with China threaten peace in the area.
- Bharati refusal to sign the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT). May jeopradise 123 treaty in light of the Hude Amendment.
- Bharat’s refusal to resolve climate issues.
- Bharati presence in Afghanistan. The US wants the Consulates scaled down or closed.
- Bharat’s support of terrorist elements in Pakistan
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged India on Friday to join Washington in supporting Pakistan’s fight against terrorism, but Delhi demanded results before it begins formal peace talks with its rival.
Clinton is due to arrive in Mumbai late on Friday to start a five-day visit designed to cement ties and dispel any doubts about U.S. President Barack Obama’s commitment to India’s role as a rising global power. Although her trip has a wide agenda, including securing a deal to ensure U.S. arms technology does not leak to third countries, Clinton is expected to push for a smoothing of Indo-Pakistani ties frayed by last year’s Mumbai attacks.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani counterpart Yusuf Raza Gilani agreed on Thursday to fight terrorism jointly but Singh insisted Pakistan must punish those responsible for the Mumbai attacks if it wants formal talks. Clinton, in an opinion piece published in the Times of India newspaper on Friday, wrote that both India and the United States had “experienced searing terrorist attacks.”
“We both seek a more secure world for our citizens. We should intensify our defense and law enforcement cooperation to that end. And we should encourage Pakistan as that nation confronts the challenge of violent extremism,” she wrote.
Singh said the agreement with Gilani had not diluted India’s position that Pakistan must stop militant groups using its territory to carry out attacks on Indian soil as a precondition for resuming peace talks, known as the composite dialogue. India paused the talks after the attack on Mumbai last November, in which 166 people were killed.
“It only strengthens our stand that we wouldn’t like Pakistan to wait for the resumption of the composite dialogue … but take action against terrorist elements regardless of these processes that may lead to resumption,” Singh told parliament on Friday.
The Congress government is speaking from both sides of their mouths. Under US and European pressure they are talking to Pakistan. The joint statement issued at the end of the last meeting dis say that the dialogue would continue, but Prime Minister Singh has contradicted himself on this
“ACTION CANNOT AWAIT”
Singh was answering an opposition accusation that the agreement with Gilani was a reversal since it removed the link between the five-year peace talks and fighting terrorism.
“Action on terrorism … cannot await other developments,” Singh said.
Since the attacks, Washington has sought to cool tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbors so it can keep Pakistan’s army focused on fighting Taliban militants on its western border with Afghanistan, and not on its eastern frontier with India. Back Pakistan in terror fight, Clinton tells India, By C. Bryson Hull, Reuters, Friday, July 17, 2009; 10:14 AM. (Additional reporting by Augustine Anthony in ISLAMABAD; Editing by Paul Tait)
The world has ignored the sounds coming out of Delhi. Washington tripled aid to Pakistan, increased military assistance and is pushing forward the Reconstruction Opportunity Zone (ROZ). The UK, and Japan are doing the same. Europe is helping Pakistan in increasing trade activities. There is talk of an Free Trade Agreement.
All this caused Delhi to pause and reevaluate its “roothi dulhan” (angry bride) pose. Her “complain diplomacy” has failed, and her hot words have rankled Beijing
It is obvious that things in South Asia are not going well for Bharat. The panicked politicians in Delhi expected the worse. When it came it didn’t surprise them. The Mumbai gig is up. The world is fed up with the whining Bhartis. The subtle message was ‘get over it”. Help Pakistan fight terror. The not so subtle message was “Stop supporting terror in Balauchistan” and “Halt the mercenaries helping Mehsud and the other terrorists in Swat“.
All this makes the Bhartis yearn for the previous administration which had wanted to build Bharat as a bulwark against China. The Obama administration has other ideas, and sees dialogue with China. The economic realities of the world make confrontation with China unfeasible. China owns about a Trillion Dollar of US T-Bills.
Sharp differences
But the Obama administration also needs Delhi’s co-operation on three key global issues which are among its key policy objectives – nuclear non-proliferation, climate change, and a new world trade treaty.
India has sharp differences with Washington on all three areas.
Along with China, it has been a key dissenter on trade and climate change talks, refusing, for instance, to agree to emission caps.
India has also refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, describing it as discriminatory since it does not press existing nuclear powers to give up their weapons.
Without India on board, the Obama administration knows they will make little headway on any of these issues.
And while President Obama’s new Afghanistan-Pakistan policy forms the cornerstone of his regional approach, Washington is only too aware that without India’s co-operation, any resolution of the situation in those two countries could come apart.
So if the US wants Pakistan to concentrate its efforts on the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban along the Afghan border, it needs to ensure that there is peace between India and Pakistan so that troops from the east can be relocated to the battle in the north-west.
Regional wrangling
For the first time, a major US figure is visiting India without also travelling to Pakistan.
Many in India strongly believe that it was gentle pressure from Washington that persuaded Delhi to restart peace talks with Islamabad, on hold since last year’s Mumbai attacks. And Pakistan has recently indicated that it may be willing to broker peace between the US and the Taliban, but in exchange wants India to reduce its engagement in Afghanistan.
After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, India quickly re-established diplomatic ties and now operates four missions in Afghanistan, two of them located in Kandahar and Jalalabad, uncomfortably close to the Pakistan border. Islamabad accuses Delhi of using these missions to foment trouble in Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province, a charge that India denies.
But there is some suggestion that the US is trying to press India to at least scale down its diplomatic presence, if not close down some of its posts. Despite her popularity, Mrs Clinton will have her diplomatic skills tested to the fullest in India. BBC
Foreign Policy the new name of PNAC has a conculated twist on the Sino-Indian relationship.
India has every right to be worried. One new report suggests China may be trying to extend its reach into Kashmir, and possibly even Pakistan. Another hints at the possibility of an imminent Chinese invasion of India:
‘China will launch an attack on India before 2012. There are multiple reasons for a desperate Beijing to teach India the final lesson, thereby ensuring Chinese supremacy in Asia in this century,’ Bharat Verma, Editor of the Indian Defence Review, has said.”
Given the urgency of the situation, it’s possible that India is trying to mend its stormy relationship with Pakistanin order to prevent a Sino-Pakistani partnership, or lay the foundation of a containment policy towards to China from dominating Asia. (See Minxin Pei’s recent article in FP for more on this point.)
Naturally, India might simply be pursuing cooperation with Pakistan for its own sake. But the move makes good strategic sense. Foreign Policy
