Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower (48 page)

In effect, Pakistan now confronts on one border exactly what it does on the other: a territory that Islamabad is convinced should be in its sphere of influence but that its archrival India threatens to dominate. Kabul has become the new Kashmir.

What’s worse, from Pakistan’s perspective, is that tensions over Afghanistan are making it harder to sustain the progress India and Pakistan had finally begun to make over Kashmir—the open wound that has prevented peace on the subcontinent ever since independence. In 2004, the two countries agreed to a cease-fire in the contested region, over which they have fought three wars. For the first time since 1947 they initiated a diplomatic back channel, which in 2008 came extremely close to settling the intractable dispute. Both armies have dramatically reduced the crossfire between them, and the number of Pakistani militants crossing over into Indian Kashmir have dropped considerably. Yet further advances have stalled.

At the same time, the jockeying between India and Pakistan on the ground in Afghanistan threatens to flare into a new proxy war, especially as U.S. forces prepare to withdraw from the region. In some ways such a battle has already begun. Pakistanis accuse India’s intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), of providing funds, training, and arms from camps in southern Afghanistan to separatist insurgents in Pakistan’s Balochistan province. Indians accuse the ISI of sponsoring Taliban attacks on India’s embassy in Kabul and on Indian doctors and contractors working in the capital and elsewhere. Dozens of Indians and Pakistanis have died already in this shadow war.

Rather than trying to tamp down the growing violence, Delhi and Islamabad continue to vie for dominance over Afghanistan. Pakistan has blocked India from any role in power-sharing talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban, hoping to ensure that its allies and not India’s hold the upper hand in Kabul. That strategy is foolishly shortsighted: India has invested too much in Afghanistan to be cut out of the loop entirely, and Delhi could easily encourage its friends in the Northern Alliance to sabotage such talks.

None of the players in the region can afford another Afghan civil war. The fighting could easily swell into a regional proxy war, with Pakistan enlisting the aid of the Chinese, and India working with Iran, Russia, and the Central Asian republics. The chaos could dwarf the long-simmering war in Kashmir.

None of this is inevitable, of course. In fact, India and Pakistan should be able to find common ground much more easily in Afghanistan than in Kashmir. Disorder in Kabul serves neither of them.

The most obvious arena for cooperation is the Afghan economy. Right now both sides are acting against their own interests. Pakistan blocks Indian exports from traveling across Pakistan to Afghanistan. That means Islamabad is losing out on lucrative transit fees. More important, the restrictions have led the Indians to encourage alternate trade routes through Iran. Tehran has offered to build a railway line connecting the Afghan city of Herat with the Iranian rail network—a development that could cut Pakistan off from even more of the trade from Afghanistan and the Central Asian republics.

For their part, major Indian companies that have bid for oil and mineral exploration rights in Afghanistan could benefit immensely from hiring Pakistani service companies to help them. And perhaps the most significant missed opportunity is in energy. Since 1993, a critically important pipeline known by the acronym TAPI, which would carry gas from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan and India, has been stuck in the planning stages. Pakistan desperately needs the gas and TAPI could prove to be a major bridge builder between India and Pakistan. But no institutional funding for the pipeline will be available until fighting in the region ends and the world sees greater cooperation among the South Asian rivals.

The real failure on both sides is their refusal to discuss their current status and aims in Afghanistan. Remarkable as it may sound, neither country has ever talked about the situation in Afghanistan with the other. According to Pakistan, India is not a direct neighbor of Afghanistan, so there is nothing to discuss. India says it sees no need to explain to Pakistan its relations with third countries. This attitude has helped fuel the worst suspicions and fears about the other’s role in Afghanistan.

India and Pakistan need to institute a series of bilateral meetings on the Afghan situation at several levels, from the diplomatic to intelligence and military. Such talks would make their missions more transparent and create greater trust. Much greater openness is needed on issues such as the number of intelligence agents each embassy maintains in the country and the alleged support given to Baloch dissidents by India and to Taliban fighters by Pakistan.

Such trust-building measures could have an impact well beyond Afghanistan. Kashmir will be a much tougher problem to resolve, of course, after decades of suspicion and tens of thousands of deaths and disappearances. But almost everyone acknowledges that the key to closer ties between India and Pakistan is greater economic cooperation. In 2011, the two countries began reducing the list of goods that could not be traded between them, and India offered Pakistan most-favored-nation status—a gesture that Islamabad is expected to reciprocate. Partnering on development projects in Afghanistan would benefit both countries economically and provide a model for closer cooperation in other sectors. India and Pakistan could stumble their way toward another war in Afghanistan. Or they might just find a path to peace.

Bruce Riedel

Bruce Riedel is director of the Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institution and a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. He is the author of
Avoiding Armageddon: America, India, and Pakistan to the Brink and Back.

America and India have taken to describing themselves as “natural allies.” The label is apt. Our two nations have never had any quarrels over territory since we sit on opposite sides of the globe. We are both democracies that prize our citizens’ civil liberties and freedoms. (And as democracies, we like to tell the rest of the world that we know best.) Both of us have bred a host of entrepreneurial geniuses and have built thriving middle classes.

Our nations were born from the same mother, the British empire that ruled more of the world than any other in history. America won its independence just as India was losing its: Soon after his decisive defeat at Yorktown, Cornwallis moved to the other side of the world to become governor-general of India, where he laid the foundations of British rule on the subcontinent. Yet when India finally won its freedom from the British (with a little backstage help from Washington), our relationship was far from friendly. For most of its first fifty years, India was as much an adversary of America as anything else.

India’s freedom fighters had not liberated India from a failing superpower in order to fall into the clutches of a rising one. The nation’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, admired America’s freedoms and dynamism yet was driven by his socialist dogma to mistrust its capitalist ambitions. Above all, India resented Washington’s relationship to its sister nation, also carved out of the former British Raj in 1947—Pakistan.

Throughout the cold war, India believed—all too often rightly—that America favored its South Asian rival. Pakistan assiduously cultivated the relationship with the United States, joining the global chain of anticommunist allies encircling the Soviet Union from Norway to Japan. The Pakistanis signed up to so many pro-Western defense organizations that they described their nation proudly as America’s “most allied ally.”

Depending on who happened to be in the White House at the time, this ostentatious show of support worked. Richard Nixon, who once said Pakistan was “a country I would do anything for,” detested the Indian leader Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter. (She returned the sentiment, once asking in Hindi during a meeting with the American leader, “How much longer must I talk to this man?”) In 1971, when the Indians helped East Bengal to break away from Pakistan and form an independent nation, Bangladesh, Nixon tried to brush back Gandhi by sending a U.S. carrier battle group into the Bay of Bengal. The iron lady of South Asia was not amused.

Indians understandably still blame the United States for spending billions to support the Pakistani-backed mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, a policy that ended up fostering the jihadist culture that now infects the region. Even in the last decade, as relations between New Delhi and Washington grew much closer, the $25 billion that America poured into Pakistan for its dubious support in the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda rankled deeply across the border.

I have spent much of my professional life working to understand India and trying to build ties between our countries. I’ve spent an equal amount of time trying to find common ground with Pakistan and hoping for an enduring partnership with America to emerge. I have had the honor of working for four presidents as they grappled with India and Pakistan in the White House. I am the first to admit that U.S. policies over
the years have often been misguided, shortsighted, and ineffective. Even now, despite all the talk about our common interests, the relationship between America and India remains dismayingly flimsy.

Still, the answer is not for either of us to disengage. Indians need to appreciate that the United States has legitimate interests in South Asia—not least in seeing that two of the world’s nuclear powers do not go to war again. American policy makers should likewise accept that they cannot “dehyphenate” the relationship to India and Pakistan, to use the current jargon, and hope simply to deal with each on its own merits. The goal may be laudable, but geography makes it a mirage. Instead, Washington must plunge directly into the most difficult, long-lasting, and dangerous issue that bedevils relations between the South Asian rivals: Kashmir.

India and Pakistan began fighting for control over the former Himalayan kingdom of Kashmir within weeks of becoming independent nations. Both claim the entirety of the state, although India—which controls the most populated areas, including the lush Kashmir Valley—has shown willingness to accept the line dividing the two sides as a de facto border. Pakistan has traditionally and unrealistically sought outside support for its claim to all of Kashmir; India has by the same token bitterly resisted any intervention in what it insists is a bilateral issue. American presidents have accordingly put the Kashmir problem in the “too hard” category and left it to simmer.

This hands-off policy has clearly failed. As part of its asymmetric war against India in Kashmir, Pakistan continues to sponsor some of the world’s deadliest jihadist groups. Operations launched by organizations like Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of God)—including the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai—have pushed the two rivals close to outright war several times in just the last decade. If anything, Kashmir presents an even more dangerous flashpoint today than fifty years ago, as both India and Pakistan rapidly expand their nuclear arsenals.

On the other hand, Indo-U.S. relations have probably never stood on a steadier, more enduring footing. The civil nuclear agreement first announced in 2005—by which some Indian nuclear reactors would be put under an international safeguard and inspection regime, and in return India would be able to purchase reactor technology from America and other countries—was a landmark in relations between the two countries. It has effectively taken one of the thorniest issues between them—nuclear proliferation—off the table. American support for India’s bid to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council has further eased doubts about America’s reliability as a strategic partner. An extremely rare bipartisan consensus in Washington now backs closer ties with India.

Quietly but forcefully, Washington should now push New Delhi to be more flexible on Kashmir. India is right to argue that it should not be asked to give up its portion of the state. But Indians also need to recognize that their hopes and aspirations for the future are unlikely to materialize as long as a state of near war continues to plague relations with Pakistan. As the stronger power in the equation, with a far more stable and predictable political system, India is much better equipped to make the kind of diplomatic moves needed to break the logjam over Kashmir. It can reduce the size of its military footprint in the state and encourage more dialogue about the future; it also can and must take greater action to prevent human rights abuses.

There is a way to resolve the Kashmir problem along the lines of Indian thinking—focusing less on territorial adjustments than on making the state a zone of peace and prosperity between India and Pakistan, like the Saar region between France and Germany. The Line of Control would have to become both a permanent, conventional international border (perhaps with some minor modifications) and a permeable frontier between the two parts of Kashmir. A special condominium might be
created—a zone where India and Pakistan shared sovereignty—to allow Kashmiris on both sides of the border to work together on issues like transportation, the environment, sports, and tourism. Indian and Pakistani currencies could become legal tender in both parts of the state—an idea recently floated in India.

As a symbol of reconciliation, such an arrangement could set the tone for a broader rapprochement across the region. Formal and informal trade barriers should be lowered. Most visa requirements should be lifted, so that average citizens can travel between countries in the region as easily as Spaniards, Greeks, and Germans do across the European Union. As transit and trade grow, so will cooperation on the environment, water resources, and other crucial issues.

I’m not suggesting that Washington lecture India on what’s in its best interests. But a discreet, sustained American effort led by the U.S. president to promote a solution is probably necessary to any effort to move the parties toward an agreement. The United States can help concretely by making clear to Pakistan that some red lines on terrorism are real; if Indian leaders see proof that their neighbor is taking action to dismantle Kashmiri jihadist groups, they will have much more flexibility to pursue a breakthrough peace deal. Where American influence falls short, Washington can encourage allies like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to nudge Pakistan toward a rapprochement. There might even be an opportunity for the United States and China—a strong supporter of Pakistan—to work together in the interests of a deal. That would relieve fears among some in New Delhi that America wants to use India to counter the rise of Asia’s other superpower.