|
Converting
Myth into History, Foggy Bottom-style
M.
D. Nalapat
ENGAGING
INDIA: Diplomacy,Democracy and the Bomb.
A
Memoir by Strobe Talbott.
Brookings
Institution Press.
Pages
256
During
the eight years when William Jefferson Clinton was President of
the United States,both Communist China as well as the Wahabbist
extremism stereotyped by Osama bin Laden grew exponentially in
power. If in 1989 the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) was in the
doghouse thanks to its suppression of the democracy movement,
just a few weeks into his term, Bill Clinton was signalling to
Beijing that he was eager to co-opt the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) as a strategic partner. At the same time, the Wahabbi
establishment that controls Saudi Arabia was cossetted, even
being given the right to decide on who among the Muslim
community would be selected as chaplains in the US armed
forces.From Kosovo to Kashmir, "freedom fighters" were
viewed with sympathy and were often given help, sometimes
material, or at the least," moral". Those in the
Clinton kitchen cabinet say that it was Vice-President Al Gore,
inspired by Peter Galbraith, who had delusions about making both
the Wahabbis as well as the Communist Chinese strategic allies
of the west, and that this vision was enthusiastically embraced
as gospel by the US State Department under Madeleine Albright
and the hero of this book, Strobe Talbott, who modestly says
that his recitation catalogues the "turning point in
US-India relations". That such a point has been reached
will be news to most of us, who are watching with dismay as the
non-proliferation lobby in Washington (championed by Talbott)
fights off every effort by the Department of Defense and less
delusional heads in the National Security Council to fashion a
strategic alliance between the world's most powerful democracy
and the most populous.
Talbott
represents the trend that dominates US diplomacy, a subservience
to the Europeanist weltanschauung that implicitly assumes that
only that continent's thought and conjectures have validity.
Almost all the "think-tanks" and foundations in the US
share the same mindset, with the result that any viewpoint
contrary to this fundamental assumption gets discarded as
"unsound". The author remembers a meeting of him and a
covey of State Department officials in 1995,where there was a
collective grin at his contention that Wahabbism - represented
by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan - posed a grim danger to the world,
especially to the US, and that therefore the Clinton policy of
moral support to the jihad in Kashmir and to Taliban elements in
Afghanistan was suicidal. After 9/11,at least a few of those who
attended that two-hour meeting in the US State Department may
have changed their minds.
Not
so Talbott, to him, there is no difference between the
Wahabbists who have converted Pakistan into a theocracy in which
the percentage of
minorities has fallen to less than a tenth of the 1947 level,
and
India, which has the second-highest Muslim population in the
world. Both Talbott and his wife Brooke - or so the book informs
us - are horrified by the menacing Hindus. Again and again,
first the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and ten
years later the Gujarat riots are held up to buttress a claim
that comes straight out of Pakistan Army locker rooms. There is
no mention of the nine dozen Hindu temples that have been
destroyed in Kashmir during 1989-2003,or of the several hundred
that have been torn down in Pakistan an vandalized in
Bangladesh. Both these, in contrast to rabid India, are moderate
states. Josef Korbel whose influence on Zbigniew Brezezinski led
the Carter aide to emerge as the armorer of the fanatics who
later morphed into "Al; Qaeda", would have approved.
In 1948 and 1949,he saw India as a failing state and Pakistan as
a future success story, a preference still held by the US
foreign policy establishment. If his admirer Talbott is correct,
India is a country where the "practice of tearing down
mosques and burning churches" is commonplace
.
While
Talbott mocks the Indian leadership for its obsession with
Pakistan (a trait that is particularly evident among politicians
and analysts coming from those Indian states bordering
Pakistan), he himself invariably does likewise, even in
questions of mythology! To him, both the Vedic Agni-Prithvi and
the Mughal Abdali-Ghauri share the same length in ancestry,
"nine centuries". What would Strobe have thought of an
Indian who confused the length of the American republic with
that of the British monarchy? Exactly what would be thought of
an individual who confuses the Vedic period in India's history
with the Mughal perhaps? Poor Talbott is at sea even on matters
of protocol, a failing unusual in a self-declared diplomat. He
confuses the (Cabinet-level) Deputy Chairmanship of the Indian
Planning Commission with his own Sub-Cabinet post of Deputy
Secretary of State, writing that Jaswant Singh outranked him
only when he "graduated" to be the External Affairs
Minister. In fact the move was a sideways swipe rather than a
move up, in protocol terms.
Despite
Pakistan's now-public record of proliferation and borrowing and
stealing of technology, as compared to India's commitment in
deed to avoid such activity, despite the help Pakistan's missile
and nuke program has got from China as against the cutoff of
technology transfer to India since 1974,Talbott brackets India
with Pakistan whenever he discusses proliferation. Talbott
dismisses any question of a nuclear threat to India from either
Pakistan or China, even while he retails the State Department
lie that there is a high risk of nuclear war between the two
South Asian neighbors. Indeed Talbott claims that both in 1990
and in 1999,only skilful US diplomacy averted a nuclear
conflict. No doubt this line will get him several millions of
dollars more in research grants from ageing heiresses shuddering
at the slides of a mushroom cloud shown to them by fundraisers
calling themselves scholars. Washington insiders say that
Talbott was among the fiercest defenders of China's (now
shattered) nuclear monopoly in Asia, going to extraordinary
lengths to block even civilian technology transfers to India,
such as the supply of two 1000-megawatt light-water reactors by
Moscow and the supply of cryogenic engines from Russia to India.
As he writes in the book, Talbott "spent considerable time
in 1993 helping President Clinton and secretary Christopher
dissuade the Russians from supplying rocket engines and related
technology to India for use in its missile program". While
the US administration was thus engaged, one of its favorites -
Communist China - was freely supplying deadly technologies to
dictatorships. Of course, nothing that the Wahabbis or the
Communist Chinese did in that Age of Innocence was wrong.
It
is a different matter where democracies are concerned. While
India is anathema to Talbott and the rest of the US
non-proliferation, they have been responsible for the manner in
which Washington winked at China's transfers, and at the growth
of missile and nuclear capability in countries such as Libya,
Iran, North Korea and Pakistan. Indeed,in his book Talbott is
dismissive of the Indian suggestion that no conference on
proliferation would be complete unless these countries were
brought in, seeing in it a sinister effort to sabotage US
policy. Ironically with his eyes firmly on Colin Powell's job in
a future Kerry administration, Talbott is today one of the
shrillest critics of the Bush administration’s (admittedly
wishy-washy) policy towards North Korea, a country that had been
cosseted and rewarded by the Clintonites for nothing other than
a promise of good behavior. Indeed the State Department's
penchant for holding up signed scraps of paper as evidence of
progress is incomprehensible in an age when Munich and
"Peace in our time" has not yet been entirely
forgotten
.
These
days there is a lot of media comment about the way dossiers on
alleged Saddamite WMD were "sexed-up". Talbott makes
clear that political pressure to doctor intelliegence estimates
did not orginate with Dubya. As he writes, "American
intelligence analysts (in the 1980s), who were convinced that
Pakistan had everything it took to make the bomb(italics
mine), felt under pressure from their political masters to give
the Pakistanis the benefit of an almost nonexistent doubt".
This at a time when President Zia ul-Haq told TIME
that "Pakistan can build the bomb whenever it
wishes", a statement quoted by Talbott
.
With
a mindset that - while accepting the East Asians as
"honorary whites" a la Apartheid-era South Africa -
regards only those of European descent as having any right to a
security not related to tutelage, Talbott gasps that the Indian
"draft nuclear doctrine of 1999 would, if implemented,
"give India an arsenal not just equal to but bigger than
either Britain's or France's, and it would surely provoke an
acceleration of China's nuclear buildup". Apart from the
fact that Beijing's strategic buildup is primarily US and not
India-focused, the fact is that India has an external security
environment vastly more problematic than that faced by the two
European powers Talbott quotes. If the tomes written by US
"experts" were to be dissected, it would be seen that
the assumption implicit in them is that India occupies a
geographical space somewhere between Denmark and Belgium, rather
than Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and China. The same implicit
contempt for a non-western civilization leads Talbott to believe
that cosmetic gestures such as a visit by a US President or the
sanctioning of a
$200 million loan by the World Bank is a major concession. The
fact is that Washington was - and is - offering New Delhi
peanuts in exchange for platinum. It is another matter that
there are numerous Jaswant Singhs around, cringing and cloying
as they squirm to accommodate US policy. The many sycophantic
asides by the current Leader of the BJP in the Rajya Sabha make
interesting reading. In trying to shore up Singh, Talbott has
exposed the man and his boss.
That
Indians are a lesser breed that cannot be trusted with nukes is
an article of faith for western "liberals”. Those who cry
out on the
"nuclear threat" in South Asia point to the rhetoric
from those trusty
allies, the generals in Pakistan. It is a fact that the army in
that country -especially under Pervez Musharraf, the commando
who personally trained Mullah Omar's jihadis from 1987 to 2001 -
helps China to fend off competition from India as an investment
destination by declaring that it is on the verge of unleasing
nukes. However while this may surprise the Talbotts and other
"Middle Kingdom Europe"-wallas in Washington, the
reality is that Pakistanis are as reluctant to incinerate
themselves into radioactive ash as Americans. Now that the
conquest of territory controlled by Pakistan (including that
part of Kashmir under Islamabad's yoke) is no longer a military
objective of New Delhi, and has not been since the 1971 war,
there is no reason for Pakistan to risk massive retaliation by
lobbing nuclear devices at India. There has never been a risk of
an India-Pakistan nuclear conflict, but this is another of those
myths about the Subcontinent that keep the grants flowing, and
hence it is repeatedly presented as fact. The risk of a nuclear
exchange is much higher in Northeast Asia and across the Taiwan
Straits than in South Asia, but for reasons connected with
funding, Talbott ignores this, just as he effectively ignored
proliferation of nuclear and missile technology from China and
the spread of a diseased extremism posing as religion from Saudi
Arabia for so long. Today the Peoples Republic of China has over
200 nuclear-armed missiles with a range above 1800 kilometers.
Beijing can deploy at least three-dozen Dong-Feng 4 missiles
that reach 4,750 kilometers of which nineteen are known to be
targeting India. Today the CSS-4 missile can reach Los Angeles
or San Francisco from Chengdu, while within the present decade;
it will be able to land in Houston or Washington. Throughout
China's development of its nuclear "triad" systems,
the response from Washington has been indulgent, in contrast to
the vicious efforts at preventing India from developing a
deterrent against a proxy nuclear state or a regime in Beijing
more adventurous than the present one.
However
our boy Strobe never lets such detail - leave alone fact - come in the way of a hair-raising story. According to him, Pakistan
was
"preparing its nuclear forces for deployment" during
the final days of the 1999 Kargil conflict, just as the Gates-Haas
diplomacy nine years earlier averted a certain nuclear war, one
that could have been sparked by Pakistan's "assembling one
or more nuclear weapons" and very probably "preparing
them for use". If we are to believe Talbott, "New
Delhi" is in a collective ecstasy of gratitude at this
near-divine intervention. This reviewer has been staying in New
Delhi since 1994,and used to visit the city frequently before.
Apart from those feeding at the US "think-tank" and
foundation troughs, he has met no one who believes this tale to
be anything other than what it is, a lie.
The
reality is that the philanthropists who contribute so generously
to the task of preventing a mushroom cloud over India (or
blocking efforts to ensure that Kashmir accepts the same
standards of secularism as the rest of the country) are being
had. The Talbotts, the Cohens and the
Krepons have crafted a self-contained world in which they
nurture selected South Asian "scholars" and then pass
off the pap gratefully regurgitated by such intellectual
mercenaries as authentic "South Asian opinion". Small
wonder that the editorial pages of the main English-language
newspapers (a favorite hunting ground for Talbott et al.) are
riddled with views very different from those at the frontline of
India's defense and security. Wajahat Habibullah is only the
most recent example of the Indian "scholar" who feels
compelled to mouth words that could as well have been spoken by
those who ensured that he was given a grant to do
"research" in the US. This reviewer has invariably
been at the receiving end of this tribe, being ridiculed in 1995
for suggesting that Wahabbism was a threat, or in 1996 for
daring to claim that the US would soon cozy up to India as a
counter to China. In 1999, there was much anger and amusement
over his claim that India would easily be able to weather the
sanctions imposed by the Clinton administration after Pokhran
II. The Hindustan Times ran a contemptuous article by Prem
Shankar Jha not once but twice, while the Economic Times, with
British understatement, merely forecast in its front page that
the Indian economy would suffer a "meltdown" because
of the international sanctions. Clearly the barrage of
fellowships and freeships distributed by the Talbotts, the
Cohens and the Krepons was having its intended effect of
spreading defeatism at any sign that official India would shake
off the strategic torpor that had condemned its people to
slavery for so long. As Talbott approvingly points out in the
book, official India did not. Indira Gandhi fell quickly back
into line after the 1974 test, while every other prime minister
obeyed the US diktat to gut the missile and nuclear weapon
program. Apart from
Vajpayee (who like Indira Gandhi, quickly fell back into line
after
Pokhran II, as the book reveals) and Rajiv Gandhi, no Indian
leader put the security interests of a sixth of humanity above
the need to propitiate the Talbotts
Talbott
reveals that Jaswant Singh and Vajpayee committed India to
signing the CTBT and complying with the provisions of the NPT by
May
1999.This intending sellout was prevented only by the two "J"s,Jesse
Helms and Jayalalithaa. By defeating the move to get Senate
ratification of the CTBT, and by converting the BJP-led
government into a minority in the Lok Sabha, the promise made
explicitly by Singh to the Clinton administration was broken.
Talbott writes with emotion about Jaswant Singh's chagrin at not
being able to carry out Washington's wishes "because of the
vagaries of Democracy". It is the very same Jaswant Singh
who today leads the "nationalist" BJP in the Rajya
Sabha. Thanks to Strobe Talbott, the extraordinary compromises
made by the then External Affairs Minister during his
discussions with the US came to light. How many other such
self-inflicted jabs at Indian security are out there, awaiting
exposure? The incident where the then National Security Advisor
Brajesh Mishra allowed a CIA agent to escape to freedom in May
2004 and the evident cover-up by the Manmohan Singh government
shows the cozy relationship between the Sonia and the Vajpayee
camps. Both are each other's strongest allies, as indeed are
their factotums. If those in the know in New Delhi are correct,
the role of "National Security Advisor to the Prime
Minister" M. K. Narayanan, for example, is to funnel
information back to the real (as distinct from the virtual)
prime minister and - more subversively for India's battered
democracy - to "fix" those politically inconvenient to
the Palace. Small wonder that the security situation is getting
even worse than it was under the geriatric Vajpayee
administration
.
Talbott's
own version of modesty is in evidence throughout the book. He
claims that the period that it deals with - where he was the
principal interlocutor with the Indians - "is the story of
the turning point in
US-India relations”. It is true that the Clinton visit in 2000
made
almost the same impact as Jacqueline Kennedy's did three decades
earlier, but Talbott himself admits that he was opposed to
Clinton's going to India at all! In every chapter of the book,
he makes his exasperation clear with the way in which some in
official India have refused to lie down on the Procrustean bed
he and his mates have designed for them. With candor he admits
that Jaswant Singh was wrong when he spoke of a relationship of
equals. "There was no such place on the American map",
writes Talbott. India would have to permanently accept
second-class status if New Delhi were to be given the privilege
of "normal" relations with Washington. And as for the
right of self-defense, forget it! Even after the December 13
attack on the Indian parliament by jihadis run by the ISI,
Talbott's dominant fear was that "the Indian government
might feel it had to retaliate in some fashion
(italics mine) against Pakistan". Given this
mindset, it would be worthwhile examining if the Kandahar
surrender was done by Vajpayee on the advice of Talbott and
Inderfurth. The records of the diplomatic exchanges that took
place between Washington and New Delhi during the Kathmandu
hijack need to be outed.
Apart
from retailing as fact the fiction about there being a real
threat of nuclear war in the Subcontinent,
Talbott's literary
license is in full flow over the Kargil episode. To him, it was
US diplomacy that not only prevented a nuclear exchange, but
halted a disastrous conflict. Sadly for him, the truth outs in a
corner of the book, where he admits that the military situation
for the Pakistanis was so desperate that Prime Minister Nawaz
Sharif "begged Clinton to come to his rescue with a plan
that would stop the fighting and set the stage for a US-brokered
solution to Kashmir". According to Talbott, the US
President reluctantly agreed to meet Sharif. The truth is that
Clinton was desperate for a Camp David photo-op with him
sandwiched between Vajpayee and Sharif. For once, good sense
prevailed over Vajpayee, who declined the White House's
invitation for him to come along with Sharif. As the Kissinger
versions of history demonstrate, when those involved in events
retell them, what follows is an account that any PR agency - not
to speak of a Hollywood screenwriter - would be proud of
Naturally
even during the Kargil episode – where incidentally Beijing
responded positively to India's interests for the first time
after 1959
by making it clear that it would not lift a finger to help
Pakistan - both New Delhi and Islamabad were treated on the same
footing, with Thomas Pickering and Rick Inderfurth "talking
bluntly" with the envoys of both countries. However this
did not stop Talbott from a fevered scenario in which Kargil
could have mutated into a world war, with China and the Arab
world on Pakistan's side and Israel and Russia backing India.
Given that Talbott in his book mentions that the Chinese were
unusually unresponsive to Sharif's plea for help ("Sharif
went to Beijing hoping from comfort from Pakistan's staunchest
friend but got none"), and that Boris Yeltsin was eager to
take the US rather than the Indian side, such a prospect should
have seemed unbelievable except, of course, to aged and wealthy
heiresses tapped for funds to bankroll compliant South Asian
"scholars" and organize yet another bunch of
conferences where the same group could meet and repeat nostrums
that were plainly failures even when first aired decades back
There
were those who expected a more realistic, less racist policy
from
Washington after George W Bush took office. However that
ultra-Europeanist, Colin Powell, soon dispelled such illusions.
There has been almost nothing to show for the Vajpayee
government's efforts to align with Washington. Even the
much-ballyhooed sale of the Israeli Phalcon AWACS was because
Ariel Sharon insisted that he could not visit India in 2002
without delivering on the deal. The Talbott book shows not just
the extent to which defeatism has infected India's policy elite,
but also the fact that it is likely to be a long, long time
before the apartheid that separates India from the
"civilized" nuclear powers dissolves. If India and the
US are moving closer, it is despite US policy. It is because of
the millions of Americans and Indians who realize that if
Washington and New Delhi will not hang together, both will hang
separately
Professor
Nalapat is Director of the School of Geopolitics of the
Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India's elite private
university
|