How should we respond to another 26/11?

As US President Barack Obama’s sojourn in India concluded, Indians, the South Asia think tank community, and the public in general were left wondering how much progress was really made toward advancing either country’s strategic interests any farther than had already been achieved during the Clinton and Bush eras.

Certainly many glowing words were uttered by both parties about the advances achieved in mutual understanding, and in the expansion of economic opportunities. After a terse exchange between Obama and prime minister Manmohan Singh about US domestic criticism of job-outsourcing, the president noted that $10 billion worth of deals had been signed that would create 50,000 new jobs in the United States. This at least took some of the edge off one source of ‘estrangement’ between the two countries.

Clearly, the informal and symbolic aspects of President Obama’s visit were in many respects as compelling as their formal aspects. His and the first lady’s encounter with the youthful Diwali celebrants in Mumbai had a powerful visual impact as the images of their gleeful dancing amidst the smiling, costumed kids was transmitted around the globe. His visit to Mani Bhavan, once home to Mahatma Gandhi, was a moving experience for all parties. “He is a hero not just to India, but to the world,’’ Obama declared. In the words of a dear friend of Mumbai vintage, “Obama received a rousing reception here. America needs all the friends it can get.”

Unresolved issues
Apart from these gestures of goodwill and intercultural mutual appreciation, and even what passed for bilateral commercial transactions (e.g., 250 US business persons accompanied the President), a number of crucial challenges not formally on the agenda were left unresolved. These pertain to the security situation that looms menacingly on all sides of the Indian border and whose management and eventual disposition must inevitably influence the scope and viability of whatever form any strategic agreement established between India and the US finally takes.

On India’s northern and eastern flank looms China which many believe is in the process of entering the South Asian political mix more aggressively than at any time since the China War in the 1960s. Columnist Fareed Zakaria rightly declares that recent military and economic moves by China are making nations such as Japan, India and South Korea nervous about the potential for Chinese dominance in the region. “I think that for all of these countries the United States becomes the most important friend to have, the most important ally to have, because it is not threatening, because it is so far away and frankly does not have imperial designs in Asia. But it is powerful enough to balance China.” (Emphasis added)

There is the irony, of course, that this is the same America which for decades, in another time, was deemed to be the nemesis India’s leaders were dedicated to keeping at bay! This aside, however, power equations have dramatically changed for South Asia and now we find India not only welcoming Obama’s pledge to further amplify the ‘strategic partnership’ between the two countries pioneered by presidents Clinton and Bush, but wishing they were even stronger.

Obama has not explicitly admitted that countering Chinese expansionism throughout Asia has anything to do with this rapprochement, and this fact has been criticised by some experts like Kanwal Sibal (former Indian foreign secretary), Daniel Twining (former Bush administration official) and Prof Sumit Ganguly, but everyone knows that down deep this is a major reason for it. It is certainly one basis for the president’s declaration that India is no longer to be regarded as a ‘developing society’ but a ‘major power’ on the world scene — politically, economically, and militarily, and therefore worthy of partnering with the US in the quest for strategic balance in Asia.

Obama’s ambiguity
Ironically, however, attaining and sustaining such strategic unanimity actually may prove easier to accomplish vis a vis China and the Pacific littoral than towards the obstacles to regional peace and security looming on India’s western flank, where a nuclear-tinged Pakistan, home to a military-jihadi nexus which nurtures and manipulates the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and reinforces the Afghan insurgency, while nominally allied with the US, poses mind-boggling dilemmas for building anything resembling an eventual stable and secure status quo in this part of South Asia.

Given these contradictions, it is small wonder that President Obama’s fragile aversions to Pakistan and terrorism fell so far short of what his Indian hosts longed to hear. The ambiguity and tentativeness of his remarks matched the tentativeness and ambiguity of the situation America finds itself in on South Asia’s western flank, rendering it highly doubtful whether the kind of consistent and durable strategic collaboration needed can ever be achieved.

Nothing he said, for example, gave the slightest indication that the US would act decisively in concert with India to punish any terrorist attacks emanating from Pakistan equivalent to the 26/11 Lashkar-e-Taiba massacre in Mumbai. What Indians obviously wanted to hear from their alleged strategic partner was promise of a much harder line on Pakistan, as well as assurances that they would more closely coordinate their approach to Afghanistan, where America appears to be approaching a Vietnam-style fiasco.

What is needed in order to give credible saliency to the US-India strategic relationship under current circumstances is to scale it upward to a level equivalent to a genuine military alliance, in fact if not in name, dedicated to doing whatever it takes to counterbalance Chinese politico-economic encroachment on South Asia’s northern and eastern flanks, and on India’s western flank to contain and ultimately bring about the dissolution of the terrorist nexus nurtured by the Pakistani military and ISI.

Accomplishing the latter would require the US and India to jointly create combat units specialised in defeating cross-border terrorist incursions into India. It would require the US to gauge all military and economic assistance to Pakistan in accordance with verifiable actions to disband and dissolve all the terrorist groups currently enjoying sanctuary and logistical support within the country’s borders by the army and the ISI.

In short, the Pakistani regime should be left to fend for itself with no more bailouts by the US. I agree with Nitin Pai, editor of Pragati, that, “We need to stop believing that dialogue with Pakistan will somehow convince the military-jihadi complex to change”.

Both India and the US should step back and let Pakistan go through its inevitable Götterdämmerung while deploying their armed forces and their diplomacy to keep the chaos from spilling across the Indian border until it has run its course.

This is what the strategic relationship between India and the US in the aftermath of President Obama’s South Asian yatra should become. Anything less is meaningless rhetoric.

Harold Gould is visiting scholar in the Center for South Asian Studies, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA