The overriding interest of the United States in South Asia lies in the establishment of positive and constructive relations with India, a rising power with one-sixth of the world's population. India is growing economically at an average annual rate of 7 percent, and is developing significant military power projection capabilities that will make it an increasingly important factor in the Asian balance of power and in global councils.
The key to a constructive American relationship with India and with neighboring Pakistan is to avoid embroilment in their struggle over the terms of their power relationship. Yet during the cold war the United States became enmeshed in this struggle. American policy assigned a clear priority to relations with Pakistan by providing a total of $3.8 billion in military aid to Pakistani military rulers that was nominally directed against the communist powers but was in practice used to strengthen Pakistan relative to India.
The psychological and political legacy of this cold war American tilt continues to trouble United States relations with India despite the steady growth in economic and cultural ties. Shortly after Prime Minister Inder K. Gujral assumed office in May 1997, The New York Times, in a profile of the new Indian leader, recalled the strained atmosphere that had marked a recent meeting between Gujral and a prominent American senator. Gujral "maintained an air of studied distance," an aide to the senator told the Times. "There was a kind of bristling feeling, as though there were bad memories that had not been fully laid to rest."
In Pakistan the cold war years have also left painful memories that impede constructive relations with the United States. As Keith Callard observed in his 1959 book, Pakistan's Foreign Policy, Pakistan had "no strong convictions about the balance of righteousness between the West and the Communist powers and shared many of the preconceptions of those areas of Asia and Africa that have recently secured independence," notably a general acceptance of the Leninist theory of imperialism and the sentiment of "Asian, or perhaps non-white solidarity." With this mind-set, most of Pakistan's politically conscious elements looked on the alliance with the United States as a distasteful marriage of convenience and would have been more comfortable with a neutralist policy. But Pakistan swallowed its pride and entered the alliance in order to use the Defense Department to outflank India. Thus, when the United States cut off petroleum and spare parts to Pakistan during the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war, and when it gave high levels of economic aid to India, especially during the Kennedy years, Pakistan felt a strong sense of betrayal that continues to shape its attitudes toward the United States.
This essay on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan will analyze the development of the triangular India-Pakistan-United States relationship since 1947. First, I will show how and why the United States tilt developed and explain why its impact on both countries has been so enduring. Next, I will focus on the most sensitive issue in American relations with both countries: nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear arms control. Finally, I will suggest specific policy approaches that could lead to a resolution of the nuclear issue and thus open the way for broader improvement in United States relations with South Asia.
When India and Pakistan won their independence in 1947, American officials were focused on the unfolding global power struggle with the Soviet Union and were only dimly aware of the 800 years of Hindu-Muslim rivalry that had preceded the partition of the Indian subcontinent. From the American perspective, partition was a settled issue, and the difficulties between India and Pakistan had little immediate relevance to United States interests. In Indian and Pakistani eyes, however, partition had settled nothing. It was only one episode in a continuing rivalry over the terms of a viable regional power relationship between the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority in South Asia. The 1947 territorial settlement came after two decades of jockeying for position in which it was far from clear until the eleventh hour whether there would be one Pakistan, several, or none at all. The geographically truncated Pakistan that emerged was an improvised, last-minute contrivance.
The dominant Indian attitude toward the creation of Pakistan mingled dismay with a recognition that a loose federation would have carried its own built-in difficulties. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, in particular, felt that economic development required a more unitary state and was only regretfully reconciled to partition. Among Hindu conservatives in the ruling Congress Party, however, there was a more complicated attitude that reflected humiliating memories of the 700-year Moghul imperium. Nehru had never been able to make secularism more than a thin overlay on the vast Congress organization. Hindu conservatives such as Sardar Vallabhai Patel were outraged by the threat of a separate Pakistan. Ironically, it was Patel who clinched the creation of Pakistan by taking the position in Congress councils that the new state would never be viable. It would be good riddance to at least some of the Muslims, if only temporarily, and would teach them a lesson.
It was deeply frustrating to most Hindus that at the very moment when Hindus were to rule over Muslims for the first time in their history, so many of the Muslims should escape their appointed fate. The saving grace, it was assumed, was that even if partition endured, a strategically vulnerable Pakistan, divided into two widely separated wings and economically weak relative to India, would ultimately be compelled to accept India's regional primacy. India was thus totally unprepared emotionally for the influx of American military aid that was to give Pakistan such an inflated power position.
Pakistan, for its part, needed the specter of India to hold together a spiritless body politic. The nationalism espoused by the ruling Muslim League rested almost entirely on an anti-Hindu raison d'être, and largely lacked the underpinnings of a positive economic and social ideology. Pakistan was to have been a monument to the Islamic way of life, but it was immediately clear that there was no consensus as to what this meant. Modernists who wanted the commitment to an Islamic state to be nothing more than a statement of values wrangled with traditionalists pressing for more explicit theological guidelines. The indeterminate character of Pakistani nationalism led to an India-obsessed foreign policy and a search for American military support that would enable the new state to restore some of the glory of the Moghul centuries.
The geopolitical thinking that persuaded the United States to provide this support to Pakistan was a strange compound of the British Tory worldview in the aftermath of partition and the emerging cold war collective security concepts of the late Truman and early Eisenhower years. If the idea of United States military aid had any one author, it was Sir Olaf Caroe, a foreign secretary in New Delhi under two viceroys and an authority on Soviet Central Asia. After his retirement in 1947, Sir Olaf became a leading proponent of the view that something had to be done to fill the "power vacuum" left by the departure of the raj.
In March 1949, Sir Olaf published an article in Round Table (which still described itself as "a comprehensive review of imperial politics") that was to mark the birth of the concept of United States military aid to Pakistan within the framework of the Baghdad Pact (a now defunct security alliance of Great Britain, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan). "The strategic movements of the allies in Iraq and Persia in the Second World War," he wrote, "were made possible from the Indian base. . . In this quarter, as on the Northwest Frontier, Pakistan has succeeded to much of India' s responsibility, for the [Persian] Gulf opens directly on Karachi. . . The importance of the Gulf grows greater, not less, as the need for fuel expands, the world contracts, and the shadows lengthen from the north. Its stability can be assured only by the closest accord between the states which surround this Muslim lake, an accord underwritten by the great powers whose interests are engaged."
Sir Olaf was not at this point sure what to expect of the new Indian government. By 1951, however, he had to face the implications of Nehru's well- articulated neutralism, and India was left outside his proposal for a defense pact of what he called the "Northern Screen" states along the Soviet border. "India," he wrote that year in The Wells of Power, elaborating his earlier article, "is no longer an obvious base for Middle Eastern defense. It stands on the fringe of the defense periphery. Pakistan on the other hand lies well within the grouping of Southwestern Asia as seen from the air."
In Washington, the Caroe message came at an impressionable moment and had a powerful impact, providing a clear rationale for advocates of a policy "choosing" between India and Pakistan. The divergence between India's emerging foreign policy of neutralism and Pakistan's eagerness for an alliance had already become increasingly clear to American leaders with Nehru's 1949 visit and Pakistani Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan's American mission in early 1950. The assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan a year later ended the short-lived Muslim League dynasty, accelerating a shift of power from political leaders to the civil service-army hierarchy that ultimately took the form of overt military rule.
By March 1952, well before the end of the Truman administration, the United States was informally committed to the idea of a grant military assistance program for Karachi; by December 1953, after the advent of the Eisenhower administration, Vice President Richard Nixon returned from a visit to India and Pakistan strongly supportive of the program.
Nehru's open protests led to a last-minute quest for a formula to mollify India, but by February 1954 the alliance had been formally concluded. Initially projected as a program of only $25 million, the first phase of United States military aid to Pakistan reached a cumulative total of $1.5 billion in weaponry and defense-related economic aid before it ended a decade later. This was followed by a second phase during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan that totaled another $2.3 billion between 1979 and 1988.
The military aid program became sacrosanct soon after it started because United States intelligence agencies set up secret electronic intelligence bases in northern Pakistan to monitor Soviet missile tests in nearby Soviet Central Asia. These facilities provided information that was valuable not only in United States military planning but also in arms control negotiations. As I warned at the time, however, by positioning itself on Pakistan's side at the expense of its relations with both India and Afghanistan, the United States incurred enormous political costs, alienating India and opening the way for Soviet penetration of the Afghan armed forces. In addition, by inflating the power of the armed forces the United States undermined its professed goal of strengthening democratic institutions in Pakistan.
When the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan in 1979, India was initially reconciled to the prospect of United States military aid to Pakistan designed to bolster Pakistani defenses against possible Soviet military pressures. For example, although New Delhi would no doubt have made pro forma protests, Indian public opinion would have been able to digest American arms sales that would have had a specific relevance to the mountainous Afghan frontier. India reacted with predictable anger, however, when the United States provided military equipment that was used to improve Pakistan's balance of power with India. It was not the Afghanistan-related United States military aid package for Pakistan as such, but rather the character of the package that produced such a sharp reaction in India. Moreover, in contrast to Eisenhower's assurances in 1954 that United States military hardware would not be used against India, Reagan administration officials did not try to justify arms aid to Pakistan solely in terms of the Soviet threat. On the contrary, they acknowledged that Pakistan wanted United States aid mainly to strengthen its power in relation to India, and they pointedly declined to give either public or private assurances to New Delhi that Washington would not permit its weaponry to be used in an Indo-Pakistani conflict.
The United States posture during the Afghan war years led many Indians to conclude that the United States will invariably tilt toward Pakistan. This conclusion was recently reinforced during Robin Raphel's tenure as assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs from 1993 to 1997. The strong Indian reaction to statements by Raphel that called into question the accession of Kashmir to India can be understood only against the background of United States policy toward Pakistan in earlier decades. Similarly, it is not surprising that when the United States Congress approved the Brown Amendment in 1996, releasing $375 million in previously agreed military aid to Pakistan, India reacted skeptically to American assurances that no further military aid was planned. In time, it was widely assumed, under pressure from United States defense contractors, Washington would find a new excuse for military ties with Islamabad, such as a threat from Iran or the need to use Pakistan as a bridge to oil-rich Central Asia.
For India, the principal test of the American desire for friendship is likely to be whether the United States finally ends its pro-Pakistan tilt, states unambiguously that the termination of the cold war has nullified the rationale for United States military aid to Pakistan, and makes clear that it will henceforth refrain from new attempts to orchestrate the balance of power between India and its smaller neighbor.
India's detonation of a nuclear device in 1974 marked the start of a continuing conflict with the United States over nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear arms control. The Indian explosion made it politically necessary for Pakistan to pursue a nuclear weapons program that led to tensions with the United States even more abrasive than Indo-United States frictions over nuclear issues. However, while Pakistan has been motivated to seek the nuclear weapons option largely by the need to counter India, New Delhi wants its weapons option for much broader reasons. Militarily, India's nuclear option is primarily a response to the Chinese nuclear weapons posture, and politically it reflects a determination to achieve greater recognition in global forums. Thus, if India can be induced to cap its nuclear weapons potential at present levels and join in global nonproliferation and nuclear arms control measures, notably the comprehensive test ban treaty and the fissile material cutoff, Pakistan is likely to follow suit.
India has refused to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty primarily because it considers the NPT an inherently discriminatory treaty that requires the nonnuclear states to remain nonnuclear without an equally binding commitment by the nuclear weapon states to phase out their own nuclear weapons. The conflict between India and the United States over the NPT not only reflects disagreement on nuclear matters, but also underlines what may prove to be incompatible views concerning the nature of the global power structure. As Satu P. Limaye has observed, for the United States it has seemed "to make eminent sense to try to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and to restrict their ownership to a 'manageable' number of countries--including, of course, itself. This was nothing more nor less than an attempt to retain its dominant place in the international system and to shape the international order in a way which suited its interests."1 Conversely, it is India's goal to escape from second-class status in world affairs and receive recognition commensurate with its position as one of the world's oldest and largest civilizations. Since nuclear weapons still constitute the principal coin of power, this quest for equitable status has prompted India to perfect its ability to assemble and deliver nuclear weapons--unless and until the existing nuclear weapon states make credible progress toward a nuclear-free world.
Since the end of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union, America's self-image as the "only superpower" has reinforced the American assumption that the nuclear club should be restricted to its five present members and that the United States is entitled to have the biggest--and best--nuclear arsenal in order to preserve international stability. In pressing India and Pakistan to sign the NPT, the United States has presented its position in benign, altruistic terms, emphasizing its desire to help prevent a nuclear war in South Asia. The implication is that South Asians are irrational fanatics who cannot be trusted with the bomb and that deterrence, which was the basis of the United States strategic doctrine during the cold war, will not work in the non-Western world. Since the United States is the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons, this American emphasis on the nuclear danger in South Asia is viewed in India and Pakistan as at best patronizing and at worst racist.
Many Indians have what might be called a "postdated" self-image; they are confident that India is on the way to great power status and want others to treat them as if it has already arrived. By the same token, to many Americans India's ambitions are pretentious nonsense, given its widespread poverty, and New Delhi should be prepared to deal with the United States on the basis of the actual power relationship between the two countries. This is the normal attitude for a powerful state to adopt in relations with a less powerful state, but its practical effect, in the case of India, is to reinforce nationalist feeling, including support for nuclear weapons.
General Krishna Sundarji, a former Indian army chief of staff, expressed a widely held view when he recently declared that India needs a nuclear deterrent "to dissuade big powers from lightly pursuing policies of compellence vis-à-vis India. The Gulf War emphasized once again that nuclear weapons are the ultimate coin of power. . . [T]he United States could go in because it had nuclear weapons and Iraq didn't." As India's space program acquires growing sophistication, India is developing technical capabilities that could be used to make intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States, possibly within 10 years. Meanwhile, by making clear that it is capable of rapidly assembling and delivering short-range and intermediate-range nuclear weapons through its Prithvi and Agni missile programs, India is attempting to assert major power status without incurring the economic and diplomatic costs that overt weaponization would involve.
On January 31, 1995, then Secretary of Defense William J. Perry announced a basic reversal of American nuclear policy in South Asia. "I recognize that the nuclear capabilities of India and Pakistan flow from a dynamic that we are unlikely to be able to influence in the near term," Perry said in a talk before the New York-based Foreign Policy Association. "Rather than seeking to roll back--which we have concluded is unattainable in these two countries--we have decided, instead, to seek to cap their nuclear capabilities."
Despite this pronouncement, the United States has failed to give India and Pakistan concrete incentives to cap their nuclear weapons potential at present levels. Yet the Perry declaration has opened up the possibility of a pragmatic bargain between India and the United States that could achieve the capping objective and, more broadly, reduce tensions over nonproliferation that could threaten the stability of the Indo-American relationship.
In such a bargain, India would retain its nuclear weapons option but would agree to a series of concessions that would make its commitment to capping unambiguous and also provide political cover for the Clinton administration to make parallel American concessions. An accommodation between India and the United States on nonproliferation and nuclear arms control issues is a prerequisite for a parallel accommodation with Pakistan.
First, India would seek a compromise with the United States in their current dispute over India's refusal to sign the test ban treaty. One approach would be to sign the treaty, while reserving the right to conduct further tests (as China has done) until the treaty goes into force. Another approach would be to stop testing without signing the treaty, either immediately or after further tests. The Indian government could make a declaration, endorsed by parliament, citing the key clauses of the treaty and explicitly pledging that India will unilaterally comply with these provisions.
Second, India would agree to extend the application of International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards, now limited to its Tarapur nuclear reactor, to all of its existing and future civilian nuclear reactors, and would sign the fissile material cutoff convention now being negotiated, which would require similar safeguards to confirm that fissile material is not being diverted from power reactors for military use. (This would not constitute the "full-scope" safeguards hitherto demanded by the United States because inspections of research reactors and reprocessing facilities would still be barred.)
Third, India would make a binding commitment not to export nuclear technology, formalizing its present de facto policy. This would place New Delhi in accord with a key provision of the NPT.
The United States, for its part, would have to make clear that it is reconciled to India's acquisition of the nuclear weapons option and avoid policies suggesting that it still harbors the "rollback" objective. In particular, the United States would have to end its ban on the sale of nuclear reactors to India and other restrictions on United States cooperation with India's civilian nuclear power program, starting with restrictions on United States cooperation on nuclear safety. This would require amendment of the 1978 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act to allow exports of nuclear technology under specified conditions.
To make acceptance of the test ban treaty and the fissile material cutoff convention politically feasible in India, the United States would also have to make a concession in some form to the widespread consensus in India that the existing nuclear powers should move more rapidly to reduce their own nuclear weapons. There is a growing albeit unstated recognition in India that the existing nuclear powers are not likely to make a commitment to the complete elimination of nuclear weapons within a specified period, as demanded by India in the test ban negotiations. However, significant steps short of complete elimination could prove to be necessary to bring about the bargain outlined here.
One possible approach would be a "fissile material production moratorium" that would precede the cutoff convention. Under this, India would join others in agreeing to cap its nuclear weapons potential in return for significant time-bound steps toward nuclear disarmament; India would reserve the right to resume testing and fissile material accumulation should the existing nuclear powers fail to adhere to an agreed timetable for such steps. A distinguished panel of experts, the Deep Cuts Study Group, which includes former Ambassador James Goodby and Frank Von Hippel, who served as a key White House adviser on nuclear policy during President Bill Clinton's first term, has reported that it would be technically feasible for the United States and Russia to reduce their existing stockpiles to 1,000 warheads each by the year 2010, setting the stage for further multilateral reductions down to a level of 200 warheads each by the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France by the year 2020. Von Hippel has proposed a fissile material moratorium by India, Pakistan, Israel, and China linked directly to such a timetable.
The bargain outlined here would be bitterly resisted in New Delhi by nuclear hawks who favor overt weaponization, and in Washington by orthodox nonproliferation supporters who are opposed to the use of nuclear power for civilian as well as military purposes. In the case of India, however, influential analysts and highly placed officials are quietly discussing it, and long-term realities in both New Delhi and Washington make it worthy of serious consideration. India is now engaged in a quiet debate on nuclear policy resulting from its realization that burgeoning energy demands make expansion of its civilian nuclear power program urgent, and that this must take place largely through foreign private investment. The United States, for its part, would benefit both politically and economically from this bargain. Politically, in addition to the overall benefits of improved relations, the United States would acquire significant influence in one of the most sensitive sectors of the Indian economy. Commercially, the payoff to the United States nuclear industry resulting from a liberalization of the 1978 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act could prove to be enormous.
With its energy needs growing, India wants to offset its dependence on petroleum and coal with a massive expansion of its nuclear power capacity. Imports of nuclear reactors from Russia are under discussion, and Indian officials are signaling that imports from the United States and other foreign sources would be welcome. In February 1997 then Prime Minister H. D. Deve Gowda told a Japanese newspaper that India would permit fully foreign-owned nuclear plants. India could absorb up to $50 billion in investments by foreign nuclear technology suppliers to fulfill current plans for new nuclear reactors.
Washington and Beijing are currently exploring the possibility of United States nuclear exports to China in return for verifiable controls on exports of Chinese nuclear technology. For the United States to sell nuclear reactors to China, a declared nuclear weapon power already suspected of nuclear exports, while denying them to India, which does not deploy nuclear weapons and has not exported nuclear technology, would exacerbate existing tensions between New Delhi and Washington.
Unless a bargain of the sort described eventually emerges, tensions over nonproliferation will poison all aspects of Indo-American relations. The expansion of economic relations would be hampered by restrictions on the transfer of dual-use technology designed to deny India any technology that could be used in its nuclear and missile programs. Economic relations will be subject to periodic strain in any case as India seeks greater access for its textile and other exports on terms comparable to those accorded to China, and as the United States presses India for faster economic reforms. But tensions over economic issues are likely to be moderated by the mutual economic benefits resulting from increased trade and investment. What could damage the relationship most seriously are conflicts over issues involving Indian sovereignty and great power aspirations.
To remove the "bristling feeling" from their relations, both the United States and India will have to show greater sensitivity and forbearance. The United States will have to learn that it cannot cling forever to its self-appointed role as the "only superpower" in a world characterized by a growing diffusion of power centers, and India will have to recognize that political and economic accommodation with the United States is a necessary precondition for its own achievement of superpower status.
Selig S. Harrison is a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His books include India: The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton, N.J.: PRinceton University Press, 1960) and, most recently, with coauthor Geoffrey Kemp, India and America: After the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1993), and with Diego Cordovez, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdraw (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).