A new approach from Washington
On 25 March 2005, after months of secret deliberation, US President George W. Bush finally telephoned India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to personally inform him that the United States would, after a hiatus of some 15 years, resume the sale of F-16 combat aircraft to Pakistan. Singh, according to his spokesman, conveyed his ‘grave disappointment’ but, in a remarkable contrast to previous episodes, New Delhi’s public response was uncharacteristically muted. While several Indian security analysts expressed their chagrin in public commentaries, and some Indian political figures complained about the US decision, Bush administration representatives expressed quiet confidence about the value of their wider strategy. As three senior officials described it, in a background briefing on the day Bush called Singh, India and Pakistan represented different kinds of strategic opportunities, and the United States had now reached the decision ‘to help India become a major world power in the 21st century’.
Selling F-16s to Pakistan, even as Washington committed itself to advancing the growth of Indian power, thus emphatically represented the triumph of the policy of ‘de-hyphenation’. It implicitly conveyed to all within and beyond South Asia that the United States would do whatever it took to assist Pakistan to transform itself into a successful and moderate state, by rewarding General Pervez Musharraf as necessary through military and economic assistance. But, more importantly, Washington would also invest the energy and resources to enable India – the pre-eminent regional state and an emerging success story internationally – to secure as trouble-free an ascent to great power status as was possible through the instruments of American support. The Bush administration, accordingly, has clearly placed its biggest bets on India, expecting that transformed bilateral relations would assist the expansion of Indian power in a way that would ultimately advance America’s own global interests with respect to defeating terrorism, arresting further proliferation and preserving a stable balance of power in Asia.
Although this strategic shift was depicted by American officials as the product of an administration-wide effort that was months in the making, it was probably more improvised than is usually conceded. More to the point, however, it owed much to the strategic vision of a small group of senior State Department officials who, acting in concert with the White House, fashioned this bold initiative to further advance Bush’s longstanding desire for a transformed relationship with India. The role of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice herself, Deputy Secretary Robert Zoellick and Counsellor Philip Zelikow – who had previously authored the US National Security Strategy’s reference to India as a rising power – was crucial in this regard. Their decisive intervention in what might otherwise have been uninspired bureaucratic meandering permitted the dramatic changes in approach that Rice would preview with Singh privately during her trip to New Delhi on 17 March – a new course that not only built upon the previously announced Next Steps in Strategic Partnership, the great achievement of the Bush admin-istration’s first term, but also reached for far more ambitious objectives that, if successfully concluded, would have the effect of changing the character of the Asian strategic environment over the long term.
The contours of US regional engagement
The Bush administration envisions its new strategy towards Islamabad and New Delhi as proceeding on two separate and distinct tracks. Where Pakistan is concerned, the administration is committed to providing a $3bn economic and military assistance package, to be disbursed between 2005 and 2009. Furthermore, through private sector and international assistance, Washington will continue to support Islamabad in reforming education and health programmes, and in increasing state penetration into the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Finally, as a reward for Musharraf’s efforts in the war on terror, and in response to Islamabad’s pleading for over two years, the Bush administration will proceed with the F-16 sale. The configuration of these aircraft has not yet been made public, but it has been decided that no limits will be placed on the number that can be purchased. Industry sources have suggested that the initial batch would consist of a mix of some 25–40 early- and late-model aircraft, which are likely to be equipped with the AIM-120 AMRAAM, the best active radar air-to-air missile currently in service. The F-16 sale thus expands the access that Islamabad has enjoyed to American weapons systems since the start of counter-terrorism operations in Afghanistan: previous transfers included C-130 aircraft, helicopters, and communications and electronic equipment. Washington also recently decided that P-3C Orion aircraft, TOW anti-tank missiles and Phalanx terminal defence systems, would be made available for sale to Pakistan.
Regarding India, the administration is pursuing two different kinds of initiatives. Firstly, overcoming the hesitation of the past, it has decided to take a more liberal view of the supply of advanced defence equipment to India. Accordingly, it has permitted Lockheed Martin and Boeing to offer the F-16 and F-18 aircraft respectively as candidates for the Indian Air Force’s multi-role fighter programme, with the assurance that Washington would be favourably inclined to licence even more sophisticated systems than those made available to Pakistan and to consider co-production of these platforms in India. Washington has also stated directly that it will support Indian requests for other ‘transformative systems in areas such as command and control, early warning and missile defense.’ Secondly, and even more important to India than access to defence technology, the administration has expressed willingness to discuss a range of difficult and highly contentious issues through three separate high-level dialogues.
The strategic dialogue will focus on global security issues, including India’s quest for permanent UN Security Council membership, future bilateral defence cooperation, high-technology trade, space cooperation, as well as regional issues pertaining to security in and around South Asia. The energy dialogue will discuss matters relating to energy security as it is broadly understood, including the proposed Indo-Pakistani-Iranian gas pipeline, nuclear safety cooperation and, most important of all, ways of integrating India into the global nuclear regime so that New Delhi can enjoy renewed access to peaceful nuclear cooperation. The economic dialogue, somewhat otiose at present, will be resuscitated by high-level political and private sector participation in order to increase US–Indian economic interactions aimed at boosting India’s growth and creating new constituencies in the United States having a stake in India’s growing power and prosperity.
Given the importance of these issues to India’s future strategic trajectory, it is not surprising that New Delhi adopted a muted response to the US decision to sell F-16s to Pakistan. No matter how unpalatable this action is in its own right, Indian policymakers appear to have decided that they would overlook increases in Islamabad’s military capability – so long as such accretions are indeed marginal, and so long as the Bush administration actually makes good on its intention to strengthen Indian power by adopting new policies on issues that are fundamentally important to New Delhi.
Risks and challenges
The Bush administration’s new approach to India and Pakistan, while welcome and long overdue in a strategic sense, is not without risks both to the United States and to its two most important bilateral relationships in South Asia. As far as Pakistan is concerned, the great danger is that Islamabad will use – as it has done in the past – the security provided by enhanced US military assistance to pursue its own assertive agendas vis-à-vis India. Such an outcome would not only disrupt the current thaw in Indo-Pakistani relations but would also, by souring relations between Washington and New Delhi, undermine the Bush administration’s larger goal of transforming the US–India relationship. Many analysts also fear that major weapons transfers would further strengthen the Pakistani military’s chokehold over the country’s political life, thus undermining another cherished Bush administration goal, namely that of spreading democracy in the Muslim world.
These risks are real and cannot be dismissed. Yet, there is reason for optimism, grounded less in Pakistan’s capacity for visionary action and more in its cold calculation of self-interest. Although the Bush administration has assiduously sought to avoid imposing any formal conditionality on military assistance to Pakistan, the fact that these transfers will take years to implement and must be annually approved by Congress – a body far less enamoured of Musharraf than the executive branch – imposes a non-negotiable form of tacit conditionality. Pakistan already has long experience of congressional wrath for having violated past political commitments to the United States, and so it is possible to be hopeful that sheer self-interest, if nothing else, will ensure good behaviour in regard to eschewing terrorism, curbing proliferation, and moving towards democracy – at least for the foreseeable future.
As far as New Delhi is concerned, the risks in the new strategy are of a different sort. It is not lost on Indian policymakers that the administration’s latest pronouncements remain – at least at the moment – innovations at the level of intention rather than at the level of policy. Some within the Indian cabinet have privately expressed the opinion that while the new American approach actually provides Islamabad with airplanes, all that New Delhi has received thus far are merely eloquent words. While this judgement is premature and unduly harsh, it highlights one important reality: that the advances pertaining to India have occurred thus far either at an ideational level or in the realm of process, but they have not yet translated into concrete policy changes that produce fresh material gains for New Delhi.
The new willingness to co-produce military equipment, which Bush administration officials view as major evidence refuting the cynics’ claims, simply does not have the same resonance in New Delhi that it possesses in Washington. While Indian leaders, if pressed, will concede that the new US offers represent an important solution to India’s concerns about constricted access to advanced weapons systems and the reliability of supplies, they will also reiterate that India’s growing economic strength now permits it to secure a variety of comparable defence equipment on similar terms in the international market. More to the point, however, they do not see military technology as constituting the principal means of fulfilling their country’s desire for greatness. These claims can only be satisfied by more liberal access to a variety of civilian high technologies, such as nuclear energy, satellite components and advanced industrial equipment, which hold the promise of helping India attain the even higher levels of economic growth necessary for rapid development.
The greatest risk to the new US strategy, therefore, is that the Bush administration may be unable to realise the policy changes needed to make increased Indian access to such civilian technologies possible. If that turns out to be the case, the cynics in New Delhi will have been proven right. The Bush administration’s claim to assisting the growth of Indian power will be viewed merely as lofty rhetoric – or, even worse, as cynical manipulation designed to pacify India while the United States proceeds with its ‘nefarious’ plans to rearm Pakistan. If this outcome is to be avoided, the principals at the State Department and in the White House will have to exercise the same kind of political initiative that was required to craft the new strategy, in order to force a real transformation in policies concretely affecting India.
