On 14 November 2003 IISS hosted a Special Round Table Discussion with Ambassador Dennis Kux, Senior Policy Scholar, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington DC.
Ambassador Kux is a Senior Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington, and has been co-executive director of the Council on Foreign Relations - Asia Society Independent Task Force on India and South Asia. After a distinguished diplomatic career, Ambassador Kux has written extensively on US policy in South Asia including the definitive history of US-India and US-Pakistan relations.
Ambassador Kux spoke on the new Task Force report on 'New Priorities in South Asia: US Policy Toward India, Pakistan and Afghanistan', of which he is the principal author. In his presentation, he argued that the US must make South Asia a high foreign policy priority or face crises in the region that will pose major threats to US national security. After the 11 September terrorist attacks, and the massing of a million men on the borders of nuclear-armed India and Pakistan in 2001, the critical importance of South Asia to global and US national security is absolutely clear. Securing a moderate Muslim state in Pakistan, consolidating and deepening increasingly important US-India ties, actively encouraging peaceful relations between India and Pakistan, and ensuring an Afghanistan where terrorists can never again find shelter must be priority foreign policy goals for the US.
Pakistan presents one of the most complex and difficult challenges facing US diplomacy anywhere in the world today. Its political instability, entrenched Islamist extremism, economic and social weaknesses, and dangerous confrontation with India have cast dark shadows over the nuclear-armed nation. Even though Pakistan offers valuable help in rooting out al-Qaeda remnants, it has failed to prevent Islamist terrorists from using its territory as a base for armed attacks on Kashmir and Afghanistan. The US has a major stake in a stable Pakistan at peace with itself and its neighbours and should be prepared to provide substantial assistance toward this end. The extent of US assistance, however, should be calibrated with Islamabad's own performance and conduct.
India, with its democratic political system and decade of steady economic advance, holds out the prospect for long-term political and security ties and substantially expanded trade and economic relations with the US. The medium-term policy challenge for the US and India is to complete the transition from past estrangement through engagement on to genuine partnership.
Given the dangers inherent in festering India-Pakistan rivalry, the US should become more active in trying to help the two nuclear-armed enemies manage their differences. Their hostility, and its most neuralgic point, the dispute over Kashmir, remains the gravest threat to regional peace and US interests. India's most recent proposals to Pakistan, although limited, and the overtures to the Hurriyat group are encouraging moves. In the short-term, the goal for US diplomacy should be to help start a bilateral process of India-Pakistan negotiations. A plausible place to begin would be working out a comprehensive cease-fire along the Kashmir Line of Control (LOC), the most likely flashpoint of wider conflict.
In Afghanistan, reconstruction has stalled partly because of inadequate resources, but mainly because of deteriorating security outside Kabul, especially in the Pashtun areas bordering on Pakistan. The Task Force recommends that much more be done to improve security and to strengthen the capabilities of the central government.
