US Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit to India this week focused largely on climate change and economic issues. From a US domestic perspective, this was no surprise. President Obama laid out Tuesday a sweeping plan for the US to address climate change and over 200 US Congressional leaders last week chastised India for discriminatory trade practices.
In choosing this tack, however, Secretary Kerry may have lost a valuable opportunity to enhance mutual understanding and cooperation with India on key security and defence issues, a necessary part of maintaining momentum in the strategic partnership.
US Bungling on Afghanistan
The confusion surrounding the opening of a Taliban political office in Doha last week meant Secretary Kerry had his work cut out for him in trying to explain US strategy in Afghanistan to his Indian interlocutors.
The US administration blundered in its handling of the Taliban political debut. In rushing a US delegation to Doha to meet with the Taliban leadership without the presence of the Afghan government, the Taliban appeared to be achieving its long-sought objective of cutting the Karzai administration out of the talks.
The Taliban also scored a public relations coup by raising its flag in front of the office. The episode angered Afghan President Hamid Karzai so much that he pulled out of the Bilateral Security Agreement talks with the US, thus fulfilling another Taliban goal of driving a wedge between the US and Afghan governments.
It is unclear why Washington would have agreed to meet separately with the Taliban. The US Ambassador to Afghanistan sought to clean up the mess on Thursday by declaring that a condition for talks was Taliban willingness to engage with the Afghan High Peace Council.
Some of Kerry’s statements in New Delhi helped smooth the bumps created by the Doha fiasco. Kerry made clear that talking with the Taliban was not the focal point of US policy in Afghanistan, even as the US was willing to explore the possibility of a negotiated settlement.
Kerry was firm that such a solution would require the Taliban to break with al-Qaeda, renounce violence, and accept Afghan constitutional protections of women and minorities. He also called for an Indian role in preparing the way for credible Afghan elections scheduled for next April.
India has significant stakes in Afghanistan and is understandably wary of the US attempts to negotiate with the Taliban. Indian officials believe the US - desperate to strike a peace deal before its troops depart - might allow Pakistan to play a driving role in the talks.
Pakistan has long relied on the Taliban to serve as its proxy for maintaining influence in the country. And the US has seen how allowing Pakistani strategists to have their way in Afghanistan led to the development of the Taliban-al-Qaeda nexus that facilitated the 9/11 attacks. It would be foolhardy for the US to go down a similar path in 2013, especially when so much US blood and treasure has been invested in the country over the last 11 years.
It is important that the US and India consult more closely on Afghanistan. They share the long-term objective of stabilising the country and ensuring it never again serves as a safe haven for global terrorists. At the same time, the US should try to avoid making Pakistan feel cornered, and seek to facilitate economic and political links between Islamabad and Kabul.
For its part, Pakistan must be willing to squeeze the Taliban and Haqqani network and pressure them to compromise for peace in the region.
Defence, Nuke ties take Low Priority
Kerry spent little time on the issue of US-India defence cooperation. While giving a nod to the idea of co-production and co-development of defence systems, he failed to flesh out a course forward in Indo-US military ties.
Perhaps that’s because New Delhi has shown lacklustre interest in deepening the defence relationship. While some US defence contracts are moving forward, New Delhi still relies on Moscow for most if its military needs, especially sensitive military equipment.
Large segments of the Indian population and bureaucracy remain suspicious of US strategic intentions and thus object to strengthening Indo-US defence ties. It is up to Indian leaders to explain the benefits of greater Indo-US defence cooperation and to convince the skeptics that long-held suspicions of US power are unmerited.
The American rebalance toward Asia will serve India’s own fundamental security interests. Kerry raised the need for the two sides to finalise the proposed joint venture between Westing-house and the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) for the construction of a nuclear power plant in Gujarat.
Westinghouse and NPCIL a year ago signed a preliminary pact to negotiate an Early Works Agreement to construct the plant. India’s passage of legislation nearly three years ago that contained language inconsistent with international standards for engaging in nuclear commerce complicated US companies’ ability to invest in India’s civil nuclear sector.
The passage of the legislation angered US officials that went to tremendous lengths to convince a skeptical international community of the merits of the civil nuclear deal. Finalising the commercial agreement between Westinghouse and NPCIL that would allow preliminary work to be done in areas of licensing and site development would at least keep alive the hope that American companies will eventually be permitted to participate in India’s nuclear energy sector.
Biden visit next opportunity
Fortunately, US Vice President Joe Biden’s planned visit to India in late July provides another opportunity for the US to highlight and lay out fresh proposals for regional security and defence cooperation. But before Vice President Biden makes any grand strategic gesture toward India, he will have to be assured of Indian reciprocation. Otherwise, we can expect the relationship to remain safely on its current plateau.
- Lisa Kurtis, Senior Research Fellow with The Heritage Foundation, Washington, DC)
A drift in danger of becoming a rift
Seema Sirohi
John Kerry’s first visit to India as US Secretary of State was meant to give a political push and rescue the relationship caught somewhere between a drift and a rift. Or stranded on a plateau - take your pick from the metaphorical soup.
Political misunderstandings have grown over the past two years. And ambition for what can be achieved has diminished. That is not good for the overall relationship. Kerry’s visit helped keep the relationship from going off the rails. Some damage control was done. Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid tried hard – sometimes too hard – to put a fine sheen in public.
But there were minor explosions and agenda problems inside the meeting rooms. Even some acrimony. The prime minister can’t be pleased to see his foundational work on the relationship being frittered away because some policy makers think they can spring miracles on China and the United States through clever calibration.
This strategy has robbed some heft from the India-US equation. The joint statement issued at the end of the fourth round of the Strategic Dialogue betrays a sense of covering “all” issues to “mutual” satisfaction, which means checking the boxes.
Responsibility lies on both sides for the stasis, although we can debate the degree. The hard truth is, it is mainly the bureaucrats who have been managing the relationship for a while. They tend to fall back to the old default positions. Enough years haven’t gone by for new thinking to become routine.
Indo-US relations still need sustained attention from the very top. The reason the two countries have come so far so quickly is because of the momentum of the initial breakthrough of the civil nuclear deal. But President Obama hasn’t thought about India for a while because of domestic preoccupations and foreign crises.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is also otherwise engaged, constantly fighting fires. But his instincts are right on just about every country of importance to India. If only his party would let him work.
On the India-US front, discontent has been brewing for some time on both sides about who did what to whom and why. It doesn’t take away from the vast and varied nature of Indo-US relations, which have grown from zero to 80 in a pretty short time.
But it has begun eating into the hard work of a decade under two US administrations and two Indian governments. In time, it can creep into the strategic convergence. On the Afghanistan issue, it already has. India thinks the Americans have sold its interests by outsourcing the “peace process” to Pakistan’s military establishment.
On the US side, anger has grown against Indian economic policies to an extent not appreciated in New Delhi. Kerry’s delegation carried a list of complaints about Indian preferential market access policies, intellectual property protection and recent court judgments, which US companies claim single them out.
They have waged a public campaign in Washington and demanded “punishment” for India. The new US Trade Representative Michael Froman is believed to agree with this line of thinking. This is not a good sign for moving forward.
Indian diplomacy has been reactive and behind the times on these issues. It missed loud signals from the US Congress where a section of corporate America declared war on India some time ago. No strong counter strategy is in sight. A wide array of US Senators and Congressmen need to be personally engaged, not told through letters, about Indian policies.
India has its own anger issues. It is fuming over US accommodation of the Taliban and America’s forced amnesia about the past. Pakistan’s generals, no doubt, are toasting with a glass of Scotch. A perception has grown that Kerry is too close to the Pakistan military establishment, especially the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani.
Detailed accounts in the Pakistani press about the “personal diplomacy” by Kerry and Kayani to reach an understanding on talks with the Taliban speak to their friendship. And Kerry does place a lot of store in personal relationships he has built around the world as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
But New Delhi must watch against not letting Kerry’s reported pro-Pakistan feelings become a self-fulfilling prophecy. He is still the man to set the terms of engagement for bilateral relations. It is also important to remember that he was key in shepherding the Indo-US civil-nuclear deal through the US Congress.
Differences on Afghanistan must be managed or set aside. Kerry tried to convince the Indian side he was “not giving away the store” and won’t leave the place a mess. India is not convinced. It is clear that the US and India will make their separate calculations. That might even be for the good.
What is more disturbing is the new push from Washington on India to improve relations with Pakistan because it would “automatically improve” the situation in Afghan­istan. James Dobbins, the US special representative for Afghanistan, said words to this effect in New Delhi last week.
This is gratuitous advice. The Taliban and terrorists of other shades attack Afghanistan’s legitimate government and US targets because they want to capture Kabul, not because India and Pakistan don’t get along. But this erroneous line of thinking has once again begun making the rounds in Washington.
Besides, Singh has gone more than half way to help Pakistan’s civilian leaders, even though they are under the veto of the military on foreign policy issues. What India needs to know from Kerry and Dobbins is whether they would change their policy towards Pakistan after 2014, when US troops are safely home.
Perhaps they should listen to one of their own experts, Christine Fair who, in her testimony to the US Congress on June 14, had this to say: “Pakistan is at best a perfidious ally if not an outright foe…I sincerely hope that after 2014, the United States will look very closely at Pakistan and evaluate that state’s contribution to the degradation of US security interests in South Asia and beyond.”
- Seema Sirohi, foreign policy columnist