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The India Imperative

Article in "The National Interest"
by former Ambassador to India Robert D. Blackwill
Summer 2005

What are the origins of the transformation of U.S.-Indian relations?

No bilateral relationship in George W. Bush's first term improved as much as that between the United States and India. The president has noted, "After years of estrangement, India and the United States together surrendered to reality. They recognized an unavoidable fact--they are destined to have a qualitatively different and better relationship than in the past." Some attribute the expansion in relations to the impact of 9/11. But this is not the case. Five days before the terrorist attacks against the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, I delivered in Mumbai my first major address on the bilateral relationship in my capacity as the American ambassador to India. I told my audience:

"President Bush does not intend only to accelerate cooperation with India on purely bilateral matters, although that will be important. He does not want his administration to engage more actively with the Indian government and people here solely in the context of the challenges of Asia, although that too will be consequential. Rather, he is seeking to intensify collaboration with India on the whole range of issues that currently confront the international community writ large. In short, President Bush has a global approach to U.S.-Indian relations, consistent with the rise of India as a world power."

These radical propositions represented a striking departure in American foreign policy. From the beginning, the president saw India as an answer to some of our major geopolitical problems, rather than, as did his immediate predecessor, as a persistent non-proliferation problem that required an American-imposed solution. Thus, the president and his then-national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, perceived India as a strategic opportunity for the United States and not a constantly irritating recalcitrant. Right from the start, beginning with the transition, the White House developed a strategy to invigorate U.S.-Indian ties and decided to stop hectoring India about its nuclear weapons. We began to speak about transforming the U.S.-India relationship.

Why did this transformation not proceed faster and further in Bush's first term?

For most of the president's first four years, this strategic objective produced a constant struggle with two entrenched forces in the bureaucracy of the U.S. government. The first were the non-proliferation "ayatollahs", as the Indians call them, who despite the fact that the White House was intent on redefining the relationship, sought to maintain without essential change all of the non-proliferation approaches toward India that had been pursued in the Clinton Administration. It was as if they had not digested the fact that George W. Bush was now president. During the first year of the Bush presidency, I vividly recall receiving routine instructions in New Delhi from the State Department that contained all the counterproductive language from the Clinton Administration's approach to India's nuclear weapons program. These nagging nannies were alive and well in that State Department labyrinth. I, of course, did not implement those instructions. It took me months and many calls to the White House to finally cut off the head of this snake back home.

The second is related to what I term the "hyphenators", those within the U.S. government who view India only through a Pakistan-India perspective. With respect to their public statements during these years, if one does a Lexis-Nexis search using the word "India", one will invariably find that the word "Pakistan" appears in the same sentence or the following sentences, or both.

In policymaking, the White House can say what it wishes conceptually, but this must be translated into specific policies. Implementation is the orphan of public policy inquiry. As Harry Truman noted as he was preparing to hand over the presidency to Dwight Eisenhower: "He'll sit there all day saying do this, do that, and nothing will happen. Poor Ike, it won't be a bit like the military. He'll find it very frustrating." While the intellectual basis for transforming the U.S.-Indian relationship was firmly in place in the first term, the implementation was sometimes halting because of constant bureaucratic combat.

What has now changed?

The visit of Secretary of State Rice to New Delhi in March demonstrated that the U.S.-Indian relationship is now being rapidly accelerated. Several issues were significantly advanced that were perfectly consistent with the transformation concept expressed by President Bush but had not been accomplished during his first term because of bureaucratic resistance, the administration's rightful focus on Iraq, and the president's reelection campaign at home.

First, the United States is now prepared to assist India in generating civil nuclear power. This is a major breakthrough because the nonproliferation fraternity had been dead-set against this throughout the first term. In my view, the United States should now integrate India into the evolving global nonproliferation regime as a friendly nuclear weapons state. We should end constraints on assistance to and cooperation with India's civil nuclear industry and high-tech trade, changing laws and policy when necessary. We should sell civil nuclear reactors to India, both to reduce its demand for Persian Gulf energy and to ease the environmental impact of India's vibrant economic growth.

We should also enter into a vigorous, long-term program of space cooperation with India. Such a joint effort would capture the imagination of ordinary citizens in both countries. It is now anachronistic or worse for Washington to limit its interaction with India's civil space efforts because of concern that U.S. technology and know-how will seep into India's military missile program. Why should the United States want to check India's missile capability in ways that could lead to China's permanent nuclear dominance over democratic India?

Second, the United States is now willing to sell F-16 and F-18 fighter aircraft to India, as well as to consider co-production and licensing agreements for those aircraft and other advanced U.S. weapons systems. This is an explicit repudiation by the administration of the long-standing paradigm in which India's military power was evaluated by the United States only within the India-Pakistan context. It is a recognition that the administration understands the profound military implications of viewing India as a rising and friendly great power, a point a State Department policymaker recently stressed in a background briefing. Thus, the entire notion of a South Asian regional military balance has lost its raison d'etre. It has now been explicitly cast aside by the administration, led by the new leadership at the top of the State Department.

Of course we should sell advanced weaponry to India. The million-man Indian army actually fights, unlike the postmodern militaries of many of our European allies. Given the strategic challenges ahead, the United States should want the Indian armed forces to be equipped with the best weapons systems, and that often means buying American. To make this happen, the United States must become a reliable long-term supplier through co-production and licensed-manufacture arrangements and end its previous inclination to interrupt defense supplies to India in a crisis.

This ties into the third breakthrough in the New Delhi talks: Secretary Rice's statement that more space needs to be found for India in international institutions. As she explained:

"There are countries like India that have emerged in recent years as major factors in the international economy, in international politics, taking on more and more global responsibilities. . . . [T]here have been great changes in the world, and international institutions are going to have to start to accommodate them in some way."

We should announce that in the framework of basic reform of the United Nations, the United States will support India as a permanent member of the Security Council. Although this would not happen anytime soon, nothing else would so convince the people of India that Washington had truly transformed its approach to their country. At the same time, we should promote the early entry of India into the G-8. India's economic punch, its increasing geopolitical reach and its vibrant democratic institutions all demand that it be at the head table.

Of course, there will continue to be bureaucratic opposition to these new policies Secretary Rice has laid out on behalf of the president. There will be those naysayers who will fight in the Washington trenches to have a de minimus implementation of any agreement concerning Indo-American cooperation in the area of civilian nuclear power and space cooperation. There will be those who will follow a similar approach to the question of the United States providing military equipment to India. And, no doubt, there will be those who will want to promote collective amnesia regarding what Secretary Rice said about India and international institutions. These oppositionists in the State Department and around the U.S. government have not been vanquished; they have not surrendered. Old bureaucrats do not fade away; they just dig in. But they are discovering that Secretary Rice, Deputy Secretary Robert Zoellick and Counselor Philip Zelikow at the State Department, along with National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, will be more than their match.

Led by this formidable administration team, the momentum in the transformation of U.S.-Indian relations that was boosted by Secretary Rice's March visit to New Delhi was pushed further by Foreign Minister Natwar Singh's April talks in Washington. His meeting with the president was especially productive. It will be pushed further still through the initiation of a cabinet-level bilateral energy dialogue beginning in May, talks at the Pentagon in June between Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Indian Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee, a summit session at the White House in July between President Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a likely meeting between the two in New York in September at the margins of the United Nations General Assembly, and a visit to India by the president near the end of the year. Each of these high-level encounters will provide further occasion for the administration and India's Congress Party government to put ever more muscle into the bilateral relationship.

Why is India America's natural ally?

Let me answer in this way. Imagine a matrix, with America's most important national security concerns along one side, and the world's major countries along the other. What emerges may come as a surprise to many Americans--and perhaps to plenty of national security pundits as well.

Think first of the vital national interests of the United States: prosecuting the global War on Terror and reducing the staying power and effectiveness of the jihadi killers; preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction, including to terrorist groups; dealing with the rise of Chinese power; ensuring the reliable supply of energy from the Persian Gulf; and keeping the global economy on track.

Now consider the key countries of the world. Which share with us these vital national interests and the willingness to do something about threats to these interests--in an unambiguous way, over the long term--for their own reasons? India may lead the list. Henry Kissinger argues that a cooperative U.S.-Indian relationship is in the cards because of "the geopolitical objectives of India, which they are pursuing in a very hardheaded way, [and] which are quite parallel to ours."

With respect to terrorism, India in the past 15 years has lost more people to jihadi killers than any other nation in the world. Though cross-border terrorism has now receded significantly in Kashmir, India remains an abiding target for terrorists and their supporters in governments that view it as a historic oppressor of its Muslim population, particularly in Kashmir. Thus, India will not relent in its determination to do everything it can to eliminate this threat. Indeed, the Indians recognized the dangers of Islamic extremism long before the United States. As Steven Coll brilliantly documents in his book, Ghost Wars (2004), the United States in effect subcontracted its Afghan policy in the past to Pakistan's intelligence service, which in turn fostered the growth of Islamic zealotry across the border in Afghanistan and with it, the rise of the Taliban. While we were looking at our shoelaces, the Indians saw the menace coming. New Delhi doggedly tried to warn us during these years that the Taliban were not exactly social reformers, but to no avail. So India will need no urging from Washington to be with the United States in word and deed to the end of the global war on Islamic extremism. Will all of our European allies, some with large unassimilated Muslim minorities, be as steadfast over the long term? One wonders.

Weapons of mass destruction are a pressing shared danger as well. Picture the following: A group of terrorists have obtained a nuclear weapon and are debating where to detonate it. The number one target would almost certainly be in the United States. But what would be the second most likely destination? Perhaps Israel. Maybe Britain, although over time its saliency will fade as the war in Iraq winds down. But New Delhi and Mumbai, India's financial capital, will remain preeminent potential WMD targets for these mass murderers because of the hateful place India occupies in jihadi ideology. This too will surely put India at America's side in the period ahead. There is no continental European city that faces this same threat at anywhere near the same magnitude.

Like some in Washington, India is enormously attentive to the rise of Chinese power. Let me make clear, however, that this will not lead to joint U.S.-Indian containment of the PRC. Worrying that this could be self-fulfilling, no Indian politician of any consequence supports such a policy. But it does mean this: Behind the elevated rhetoric that emits from New Delhi regarding relations between India and China, the Indians understand better than most that Asia is being fundamentally changed by the weight of PRC economic power and diplomatic skill.

In the short term, the Indian military is not alarmed with China's military buildup because it is primarily focused on the Taiwan Strait. However, the Indians have noticed that China is also constructing airfields in Tibet, which is not especially near the Taiwan Strait. China is also assisting in the construction of a major port in Pakistan and is deeply involved in Myanmar. So India's military leadership has to be concerned about what might happen if China were to move in a hostile direction. They earnestly hope that it will not--and expect their political leaders to craft a strategy that makes any sort of confrontation unlikely. This was an important consideration for India during the successful April visit of China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, to India.

All the same, as the Indian military thinks strategically, its contingency planning concentrates on China. It is partially in this context (as well as energy security) that India plans a blue-water navy with as many as four aircraft carriers. India will also eventually have longer-range combat aircraft and is working on extending the range of its missile forces. What other U.S. ally, except Japan, thinks about China in this prudent way? On the contrary, witness the current widespread eagerness within the European Union to lift its arms embargo against China. As a Chinese general said to me a few years ago, European policy toward China can be summed up in a six-letter word: Airbus.

With Respect to energy security, both the United States and India are hugely dependent on foreign sources for our energy needs. About a quarter of the crude oil imported by the United States is from the Middle East. India, meanwhile, imports nearly 75 percent of its crude oil, much of which also comes from that region.

And then there is the world economy. Right now, U.S.-Indian trade figures are small, but India today has a larger middle class than the combined populations of France, Germany and Britain. And that middle class is rapidly increasing. Despite the modest trade figures, the United States is India's largest trading partner. U.S. exports to India grew by 25 percent in 2004 and are no longer, as I used to say in India, "flat as a chapatti." The United States is also the largest cumulative investor in India, in both foreign direct investment and portfolio investment. More than 50 percent of America's Fortune 500 companies now outsource some of their information technology (it) needs to Indian companies. The market is on track to send 15 percent of U.S. it jobs to India in the next six years.

Both India and the United States need high and sustained rates of economic growth in order to reach their domestic goals and promote their vital national interests, so the prospects for the rapid expansion of U.S.-Indian trade are bright. In 2004, India's GDP growth was over 8 percent. Today there are more Indian it engineers in Bangalore than in Silicon Valley. This is despite the fact that approximately 30 percent of the software engineers in Silicon Valley are Indian or of Indian extraction, and that the region boasts 774 companies owned by Indian-Americans. Moreover, 41 percent of H1-B visas--designated for temporary employees in specialized fields--go to Indians coming to this country each year.

Not only do our vital national interests coincide, but we share common values as well. The policies of the United States and India are built on the same solid moral foundation. India is a democracy of more than one billion people--and there are not many of those in that part of the world. Indian democracy has sustained a heterogeneous, multilingual and secular society. In the words of Sunil Khilnani, the author of The Idea of India (1999), India is a "bridgehead of effervescent liberty on the Asian continent." George W. Bush fastened onto the genius of Indian democracy very early on, long before he was president. This has now become an even more central element of American foreign policy, given the march of freedom across the Greater Middle East and the president's emphasis on the growth of pluralism, democracy and democratic institutions in that region. At 130 million people, India's Muslim population is the second-largest of any nation in the world, behind only Indonesia. Yet, it is remarkable for the near absence of Islamic extremism in Indian society. For instance, there is no record of a single Indian joining Al-Qaeda, no Indian citizens were captured in Afghanistan and there are no Indian Muslims at the Guantanamo Bay military detention center. This all says something important about democratic processes and how they are a safety valve for extremist currents within societies.

So on these major issues connected to vital national interests and the values of liberty, India and the United States will find themselves together over the long term. They are natural allies not because of any current or future organizational connection; there will be no formal alliance between the two countries. But I cannot think of another nation with which the United States shares in such a comprehensive way, and with the same intensity, these vital national interests and democratic values, and which must face threats to them in the decades ahead.

Let me hasten to add that this does not mean that Washington and New Delhi will always agree on specific policies or tactics. That will not happen. The Indian bureaucracy can be as maddeningly slow and recalcitrant as that in the United States. India's colonial history makes it particularly sensitive to what it perceives as overbearing policies from abroad. Some remnants of the Cold War-era "nonalignment" movement still exist within the Indian government. India has its own strategic perspective based importantly on its geographic location. And Indian domestic politics will sometimes constrain the actions of governments in New Delhi. But in spite of this, the United States and India will always eventually be pulled back together again by these common fundamentals.

How do you see India's role in the Greater Middle East?

If we think of vital U.S. national interests in geographic terms, they are especially concentrated in the region stretching from the Persian Gulf to Pakistan. This region is the nexus for energy, weapons of mass destruction and Islamic extremism. At the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it was called the "arc of crisis." But today it is also an arc of opportunity, and one in which India will play an increasingly influential part.

We sometimes use the term "Greater Middle East" to describe this area, but where to draw the line on the eastern side? Given Pakistan's relationship with Afghanistan, I suggest that it ends in the Punjab--or to stretch a bit, perhaps even at the Bay of Bengal. Many Americans--including senior analysts--have the impression that India is far from the Persian Gulf. When asked for the flight time from Dubai to New Delhi, most say six or seven hours. In fact, it is a little over three hours, much closer than western Europe. The strategic perspective certainly changes if you put India in the middle of your mental map: On one side it borders China, on another the Greater Middle East and on another Southeast Asia.

When one asks which country or set of countries will have persistent involvement with the Greater Middle East over the next three decades, one would correctly include the European Union and especially Britain, France and Germany. After all, they are negotiating with Iran (as the so-called "EU Three") over its nuclear programs, and the EU is a participant in the implementation of the "Road Map" for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. EU economic assistance can be a crucial stabilizing factor in the area.

But few understand India's stakes in and connections to the Greater Middle East. As noted above, this region touches many of India's vital interests--energy supply, Islamic terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Jaswant Singh, the "George Shultz of India" (he has served as foreign minister, defense minister and finance minister), once said to me, "Well, Bob, I think it's interesting that you Americans are now preoccupied with Iraq. We Indians have been involved with that part of the world for some time. Indeed, when we first went there, it was called Mesopotamia." In addition to these ancient links between India and that region, some three million Indians live and work in the Persian Gulf. Add to that a growing Indian energy dependence on the Gulf in the decades ahead. And then there are India's civilizational ties to Iran and Afghanistan. India has the world's second-largest Shi'a population after Iran. Too often we do not know our history. For instance, at a recent event at Harvard, a well-known policy pundit opined, "It is absolutely inconceivable to me that Indian troops would ever find themselves in and around the Persian Gulf." The British units active there during the First World War were largely from India, with minor supplements of British troops.

India has not sent troops to Iraq, in part because it was politically just too difficult. But Indian businesses have a centuries-old involvement with Iraq, and there are long-standing Indian commercial connections throughout the Gulf. In the short term, India can help to train Iraqi police and to build a civil society within Iraq. Over time, India will do more. Even when the Indians have disagreed with the United States over policy--most did not support the U.S.-led coalition's military intervention in Iraq and do not agree with it to this day--they most certainly do not want us to fail. Indians understand the consequences for them of an American defeat in Iraq. They realize it would give an intense and long-lasting boost to Islamic terrorism everywhere, particularly against India. And it would introduce another acutely destabilizing element in an already wobbly Middle East region where India's vital national interests are profoundly engaged.

Iran is a tougher issue for the Indian government and, as Indian Foreign Minister Natwar Singh has made clear, India has a different perception of Iran than does the United States. When Washington abandoned Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, India and Iran (along with Russia) opposed the Taliban and sought to keep the Northern Alliance alive. When the United States tells India that it opposes a pipeline between Iran and India, the Indians politely respond that we are free to have our own opinion, but given their energy needs, this project makes strategic sense to them. We are not going to come to a meeting of minds with India on this subject.

Regarding Iran's nuclear program, many Indians ask why they should believe grim U.S. assessments, given Washington's momentous mistake concerning Iraq's WMD capability. Put simply, the Indians are not convinced that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon, and Washington is nowhere close to persuading them.

Nevertheless, India does not want a nuclear-armed Iran, so it should be possible for the administration to enlist India quietly to try to convince the Iranians to give up the nuclear fuel cycle. But New Delhi understands that it has a certain liability in that regard. As one Indian policymaker recently said to me, "We are not the best country in the world to convince Iran not to have a full fuel cycle and nuclear weapons. After all, we acquired both in the face of deep and strident American opposition." In any case, it would be a serious U.S. mistake to attempt to force New Delhi to choose between its burgeoning strategic relationship with the United States and its cordial ties with Iran. India will not do so.

Where does Pakistan fit into all of this?

Pakistan continues to worry both India and the United States. In the last four years, the U.S. relationship with Pakistan has undergone a significant shift for the better, but one that is not easy to sell to the Indians.

As Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institute eloquently points out in his magisterial writing on the subject, there have always been ups and downs in Washington's relationship with Islamabad. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, we needed Pakistan as a staging area from which to ship weapons to the mujaheddin. Yet, throughout this period and into the 1990s, Pakistan was systematically lying to us about its program to develop nuclear weapons and about its supportive relationship with the Taliban. By the second term of the Clinton Administration, the relationship had once again turned sour, especially after the coup d'Çtat led by General Pervez Musharraf in 1999.

September 11 fundamentally changed this bilateral relationship. Once again, we needed Pakistan to wage war in Afghanistan. Our relationship with Pakistan is now much better, one of the major accomplishments of the Bush Administration. We have captured or killed members of Al-Qaeda inside Pakistan--hundreds of them--and continue to hunt Osama bin Laden along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. In sum, Pakistan is a crucial partner of the United States in the global War on Terror.

It has not been easy to persuade the Indians that this is a sensible and productive American policy. Many Indians believe that the U.S.-Pakistani relationship is based on an incandescent double standard. They think that although the administration declares that state supporters of terrorism will be viewed the same way as terrorists themselves, the quintessential state sponsor of terrorism--including against India across the Kashmiri border--is in their view given a pass by Washington. I can personally attest that it is not easy to convince them otherwise. But here too, things are changing. President Musharraf's April visit to India reflected the best bilateral relationship between India and Pakistan in decades. But, Indians ask, will it last?

Pakistan is unstable as a government and a society. This is often the case with one-man rule--and especially one-man rule in which serious people, Al-Qaeda and its allies inside Pakistan, are trying to kill him. There were serious attempts on Musharraf's life within the last year or so, one of which came very close to succeeding. Add to that the thousands of madrassas inside Pakistan and the hundreds of thousands of potential jihadis, as well as Taliban sympathizers who travel back and forth across the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Equally problematic is Musharraf's unwillingness to promote genuine democracy inside Pakistan, despite the fact that the only longer-term answer to the problem of systemic instability in Pakistan is pluralism and democratic expression.

Musharraf also hesitates to address seriously the future role and mission of the Pakistani army. For more than fifty years, young cadets--including Musharraf himself--have been taught in Pakistan's military academies that their holy mission was the liberation of all of Kashmir and that the central purpose of Pakistan itself was to further this task. Beginning in 1947, Pakistani attempts to accomplish this directly by military force have failed. Thus thwarted, in the past decade and a half, Pakistan has used terror as an instrument of attempted change in Jammu and Kashmir. This too has not succeeded.

When faced with a fruitless strategy, a government has three choices. It can stick with its losing strategy, develop a new strategy or change objectives. In my judgment, Pakistan has not yet made a strategic shift away from its long-time policies of territorial acquisition and cross-border terrorism. Although Pakistan has reduced its effort to push killers across the Kashmiri border, Musharraf implicitly holds out the possibility of Pakistan resuming terror against India if the bilateral talks with New Delhi do not produce favorable results regarding Kashmir. This was the import of one of his final public statements in India during his largely successful April visit there. The terrorist infrastructure inside Pakistan--the camps and the instructors, the weapons caches, the communications capabilities, the terrorists themselves--is still in place.

Nevertheless, Islamabad holds a losing hand. The Indian government will give up no territory it now controls, including in Jammu and Kashmir. Officially, India remains committed to the return of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir to India. But the Indian elite would likely settle for the permanent international border being drawn along the current Line of Control. Therefore, unless the Pakistani government and the army change for good their objective and accept the current division of territory, the Kashmir dispute will go on for a very long time. Cross-border terrorist violence from Pakistan against India could resume.

The two countries that would be most negatively affected by a convulsion within Pakistan, a country with dozens of nuclear weapons, are India and the United States. Bush Administration policy regarding Pakistan has been adept and effective to this point, but that could change tomorrow if Musharraf is murdered. This is why both India and the United States have such a stake in the emergence of a democratic, stable and prosperous Pakistan. Washington and New Delhi should have a sustained secret dialogue on how best to promote that historic goal.

What is the way forward?

Since the September 11 attacks, the Bush Administration has radically altered U.S. policy toward the Greater Middle East. Previous administrations focused on attempting to manage existing conflicts while supporting autocratic regimes. That approach offered neither lasting stability nor peace to the region or the world at large. George W. Bush believes that the promotion of democracy and freedom is the central strategic concept offering a serious, long-term alternative to Islamic extremism. In my judgment, he is right. As this decade progresses, India will be an ever more active partner with the United States in this noble pursuit, as a central part of the continuing transformation of U.S.-Indian relations, based in addition on largely congruent vital national interests.