[Reader-list] Pushing South Asia Toward the Brink

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Pushing South Asia Toward the Brink

Zia Mian | July 27, 2009
www.fpif.org

The contradictions and confusions in U.S. policy in South Asia were on
full display during Secretary of State Hilary Clinton's recent visit
to India. U.S. support for India, which centers on making money,
selling weapons, and turning a blind eye to the country's nuclear
weapons, is fatally at odds with U.S. policy and concerns about
Pakistan.

By enabling an India-Pakistan arms race, rather than focusing on
resolving the conflict and helping them make peace, the United States
is driving Pakistan toward the very collapse it fears.

America's New India

In an op-ed in The Times of India just before the start of her visit,
Clinton laid out U.S. interests in India. The first item on Clinton's
list was "the 300 million members of India's burgeoning middle class,"
that she identified as "a vast new market and opportunity."

The emerging Indian middle class is large — for comparison, the
current total U.S. population is also about 300 million — and greedy
for a more American lifestyle. But the focus on India as fundamentally
a market for U.S. goods and services, and a source of cheap labor for
U.S. corporations, marks a remarkable shift. The United States and
other western countries have traditionally seen India as the home of
the desperately poor, deserving charity and needing development. But
no more. Clinton's article made no mention of India's poor, which the
World Bank recently estimated as including over 450 million people
living on less than $1.25 a day.

India is also seen as a new emerging power of the 21st century, one
that can be an ally of the United States and help it balance and
contain the rise of China. Under the Bush Administration, in 2004, the
U.S. and India signed an agreement called the "Next Steps in Strategic
Partnership." To make India a fitting strategic partner, a senior
State Department official later explained the U.S."goal is to help
India become a major world power in the 21st century," and left no
doubt what this meant, saying "we understand fully the implications,
including military implications, of that statement."

India is seeking both to modernize and expand its military forces. It
has dramatically increased its military budget, up over 34% alone this
year. India now has the 10th-highest military spending in the world.
It's becoming a major market for U.S. arms sales. U.S. weapons makers
Lockheed Martin and Boeing have already racked up deals worth billions
of dollars. But the real bonanza is still to come. India is said to be
planning to spend as much $55 billion on weapons over the next five
years.

But the big news of the Clinton visit was the announcement of an
India-U.S. Strategic Dialogue. This will include an annual formal
meeting of key officials, co-chaired by the secretary of State and
India's external affairs minister, and including on the U.S. side the
secretaries of Agriculture, Trade, Energy, Education, Finance, Health
and Human Services, Homeland Security, and others. But given the
difference in the power and range of interests of the two states, this
will be no dialogue of equals. The process is intended to align Indian
interests and policies in a wide range of areas with those of the
United States.

Nuclear India

In her press conference with India's minister of external affairs,
Clinton said, "We discussed our common vision of a world without
nuclear weapons and the practical steps that our countries can take to
strengthen the goal of nonproliferation." But there was no mention
here of India's nuclear buildup, or of the United States asking India
to slow down or to end its program. In fact, one would never guess
from Clinton's remarks that India even had a nuclear weapons program.
She seemed interested only in the prospect of U.S. sales of nuclear
reactors to India worth $10 billion or more.

India is one of perhaps only three countries still making material for
new nuclear weapons. The others are Pakistan and Israel (with North
Korea threatening to resume production). India is building a
fast-breeder reactor that is expected to begin operation in 2010 and
is outside International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. It could
increase three- to five-fold India's current capacity to make
plutonium for nuclear weapons.

India seeks to become a major nuclear power. On July 26, it launched
its first nuclear–powered submarine. India plans to deploy several of
these submarines. Last year, it carried out its first successful
underwater launch of a 700 kilometer-range ballistic missile,
Sagarika, intended for the submarine. India joins the United States,
Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and China in the club of those
owning such nuclear-armed, nuclear-powered submarines. Israel is
believed to have nuclear-armed cruise missiles on diesel powered
submarines.

India is also developing an array of land-based missiles. In May 2008,
it tested the 3,500 kilometer-range Agni-III missile, which was
subsequently reported to have been approved for deployment with the
army, and is working on a missile with a range of over 5,000
kilometer. In November 2008, India also tested a 600 kilometer-range
silo-based missile, Shourya. In 2009, India carried out several tests
of its cruise missile, Brahmos, which the army and navy are inducting
into service.

The U.S. silence on India's nuclear weapons and missile programs is
all the more telling, given that it was the Clinton administration
that proposed United Nations Security Council resolution 1172. In
1998, this unanimous Security Council resolution called on India and
Pakistan to "immediately stop their nuclear weapon development
programs, to refrain from the deployment of nuclear weapons, to cease
development of ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear
weapons, and any further production of fissile material for nuclear
weapons." The Bush administration ignored it. It seems the Obama
administration will too.

Pakistan v. India

Pakistan was noticeable for its near absence from Clinton's agenda in
India. It came up only in the context of the need to fight terrorism.
Forgotten was the brute fact that India and Pakistan are straining
harder than ever in their nuclear and conventional arms race. A
Pakistani diplomat responded to the Clinton visit to India by telling
The Washington Post that "What Hillary is doing there is probably
again going to start an arms race." This race drives Pakistan toward
collapse, the very thing the United States fears.

Pakistan is buying U.S. weapons as fast as it can, some paid for with
U.S. military aid, with arms sales agreements worth over $6 billion
since 2001, including for new F-16 jet-fighters. China, an old ally,
is also supplying the country with jet fighters and other weapons.
Pakistan is also boosting its nuclear program. It's building two new
reactors to make plutonium for nuclear weapons. It continues to test
both ballistic missiles and cruise missiles to carry nuclear weapons.

The principal U.S. concern about Pakistan, aside from the country
falling apart and its nuclear weapons falling into the hands of
Islamists, is the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan
and in the border areas of Pakistan. It has been telling Pakistan to
focus its military forces and strategic concerns on this battle, which
requires moving more soldiers away from the border with India. The
generals who command Pakistan's army were bound to resist such a
redeployment. They worry about the new U.S.-India strategic
relationship, and what it may mean for them when the war on the
Taliban is over and the United States no longer needs Pakistan.

The Pakistani army, which rules the country even when civilians are in
office, will not easily shift its view of India. The army and those
who lead it see the threat from India as their very reason for being.
The army has grown in size, influence, and power, to the point where
it dwarfs all other institutions in society and would lose much if
there was peace with India. But there is a personal dimension as well.
The partition of the subcontinent 62 years ago that created Pakistan
is in the living memory of many who make decisions in Pakistan.
General Pervez Musharraf, who was chief of army staff before he seized
power in 1999 and ruled for nine years, was born in India before
partition. General Musharraf, along with the current chief of army
staff, General Kayani, and others in Pakistan's high command, fought
as young officers in the 1971 war against India. The war ended with
Pakistan itself partitioned, as East Pakistan became the independent
state of Bangladesh, with India's help, and 90,000 Pakistani soldiers
captured by India as prisoners of war.

As Graham Usher notes in the new issue of the Middle East Report,
before becoming president, Barack Obama seemed to understand that
resolving the conflict between India and Pakistan was critical to
dealing with the problems in Afghanistan and with the Taliban. In
2007, Obama claimed "I will encourage dialogue between Pakistan and
India to work toward resolving their dispute over Kashmir and between
Afghanistan and Pakistan to resolve their historic differences and
develop the Pashtun border region. If Pakistan can look toward the
east with greater confidence, it will be less likely to believe that
its interests are best advanced through cooperation with the Taliban."
There is little evidence that this view has yet informed U.S. policy.

The Reality of Pakistan

In their rush to make money and to preserve American power in the
world by crafting an alliance with India, U.S. policymakers seem to
have averted their eyes from the reality that stares them in the face
in Pakistan. In March 2009, the Director of National Intelligence
summed up the situation in Pakistan:

The government is losing authority in parts of the North-West Frontier
Province and has less control of its semi-autonomous tribal areas:
even in the more developed parts of the country, mounting economic
hardships and frustration over poor governance have given rise to
greater radicalization…Economic hardships are intense, and the country
is now facing a major balance of payments challenge. Islamabad needs
to make painful reforms to improve overall macroeconomic stability.
Pakistan's law-and-order situation is dismal, affecting even Pakistani
elites, and violence between various sectarian, ethnic, and political
groups threatens to escalate. Pakistan's population is growing rapidly
at a rate of about 2 percent a year, and roughly half of the country's
172 million residents are illiterate, under the age of 20, and live
near or below the poverty line.

Things have worsened since then. The Taliban is now seeking to escape
U.S. drone attacks and major assaults by the Pakistan army in the
Tribal Areas by taking refuge in the cities. There are already no-go
areas in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, where the Taliban controls
the streets. Meanwhile electricity riots have exploded in cities
across the country, with mobs attacking public buildings, blocking
highways, and damaging trains and buses. Each day seems to bring news
of some new failure of the state to provide basic social services.

The Obama administration believes that an increase in U.S. aid to
Pakistan can help solve the problem. The Kerry-Lugar bill (the
Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act) approved by the Senate in June
would triple economic aid to Pakistan to $1.5 billion a year for five
years. But as the Congressional Research Service noted in its recent
report on Pakistan, the United States has given Pakistan about $16.5
billion in "direct, overt U.S. aid" up to 2007. More of the same
offers little hope for change.

A basic reordering of U.S. priorities in South Asia is long overdue.
The first principle of U.S. policy in the region should be to do no
more harm. This means it has to stop feeding the fire between India
and Pakistan. Only an end to the South Asian arms race can begin to
undo the structures of fear, hostility, and violence that have
sustained the conflict in the subcontinent for so long. The search for
peace may then have at least a chance of success.

Zia Mian is a physicist with the Program on Science and Global
Security at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International
Affairs at Princeton University and a columnist for Foreign Policy In
Focus.