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| India-Pakistan |
| Oh Bummer! |
| 2008-11-08 |
| In the run-up to the United States presidential election, Barack Obama posited himself as a unifier as opposed to President George W Bush and his contested legacy. Strangely -- and one suspects inadvertently -- Obama has also served to unite New Delhi's strategic affairs community. Senior members of the foreign policy establishment who were, till the other week, debating and hotly disputing the implications of the India-United States nuclear deal are back together, speaking in voice, expressing dismay and serious concern at the President-elect's plans for Jammu & Kashmir. As is now well-known, Obama told Time magazine his administration would focus on "working with Pakistan and India to try to resolve ... the Kashmir crisis in a serious way": "Kashmir in particular is an interesting situation ... obviously a potential tar pit diplomatically. But for us to devote serious diplomatic resources to get a special envoy in there, to figure out a plausible approach, and essentially make the argument to the Indians, you guys are on the brink of being an economic superpower, why do you want to keep on messing with this?" He saw a resolution of Kashmir as essential for Pakistan to be able to focus its energies on the war in Afghanistan. Obama also suggested that Bill Clinton could be his special envoy to New Delhi and Islamabad, as the White House's chosen troubleshooter for Kashmir. What Obama articulated in that interview with Time -- and on other occasions when he mentioned Kashmir -- was actually conventional wisdom in another era, another Washington. Between, roughly speaking, August 13, 1948, when the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan adopted its first resolution on Kashmir and July 4, 1999, when President Bill Clinton virtually ordered Nawaz Sharief, then Prime Minister of Pakistan, to get his troops out of Kargil, the State Department experimented with numerous formulae on Kashmir. However, after the Kargil war, a new verity was established. The Line of Control (LoC) was seen as sacrosanct and inviolable, a sort of de facto international border. India did not cross the LoC in the 1999 conflict and did not violate the border during the Operation Parakram stand-off in 2001-02. In the second Clinton Administration and during the Bush years, it became clear that maps would not be redrawn, boundaries would not be changed. This led to an easing of tensions. America's -- and the world's -- understandable concern is that Kashmir does not lead to a war between two nuclear powers. That aside, social, cultural and economic exchange between the two Kashmirs should be gradually expanded. Both of these are being met. The LoC is not a soft border but has softened considerably, Kashmiris from both sides can cross over, trucks with goods travel back and forth. The danger of conflict is so minimal that Pakistan has moved troops from the Kashmir front to the Afghan front. Even within Pakistan, politicians and opinion-makers -- including President Asif Zardari, however much he counts -- have discounted the notion that Kashmir is a priority issue or that India poses a military threat. All this does, however, seem unfamiliar to Obama. As a Foreign Office veteran in New Delhi put it, "His interest in energising the Afghan war is commendable but he has to be educated, he has to understand there is no correlation with Kashmir." While Obama will some day be a wiser man, for the moment the fact is the "Kashmir industry" has been revived. Two generations of academics, international civil servants, United Nations (UN) busybodies, cartographers and track II seminarists have made the "Kashmir question" their livelihood. In the past 10 years many of them had gone out of business, occasionally resurfacing in think tank circles in the United States, rehashing old ideas. The Bush Administration paid them no attention. It can be expected, however, that they will have Obama's ear -- or be consulted by his people -- for the next two years or so. That is where problems could begin for India, especially since sensitivity on Kashmir is just so high here. The so-called "internationalisation" of Kashmir is an old story. Over the years, various models have been suggested. A plebiscite was the original plan but it could not happen because, as per the UN resolution, Pakistan was asked to first withdraw its soldiers from Kashmir, which it had invaded in 1947. The prerequisite was never met and the plebiscite became a non-starter. Indeed, in the early 1960s, Pakistan handed over a northern tract of the original State of Jammu & Kashmir to China, to give it access from to Tibet from Xinjiang. Legally, it has been argued, this changed the ground situation and a full and fair plebiscite of the State as it was on August 14-15, 1947, is now no longer possible. Other models, such as those of Andorra -- the notionally independent, landlocked country bordered by Spain and France -- and the Aland Islands -- the Swedish-minority autonomous enclave within Finland -- have been discussed and, for a variety of reasons, rejected. In the 1950s and 1960s, the UN sent a series of experts and mediators, including Canada's General AGL McNaughton and the Senator Frank Graham from the United States. The most famous such visitor was Sir Owen Dixon, the Australian jurist. The Dixon Plan saw the river Chenab as the border. It gave Ladakh to India, the Northern Areas and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir to Pakistan, split Jammu and recommended a plebiscite in the Kashmir Valley. Over the years, the Dixon plan has occasionally been revisited. In 1978, Nelson Rockefeller, the former Vice-President of the United States and at the time Governor of New York, visited Srinagar and floated the idea of a new Dixon Plan. In the 1990s, a group of non-resident Pakistanis in the United States sought to revive the "Chenab formula". It was discussed by Indian and Pakistani back-channel negotiators, but, obviously, to no avail. In recent years, President Pervez Musharraf also advocated segmenting the Jammu and Kashmir dispute into cantons and regions, but found India unwilling beyond a point. In the worst case scenario, India could be headed for the experience it previously had when Clinton began his first term in 1992. In 1994, Robin Raphel, a Clinton favourite and the State Department official responsible for South Asia, infamously said the Instrument of Accession signed by Maharaja Hari Singh in October 1947 -- merging his kingdom with India -- was dubious and illegal. It was a tough period for India. There was pressure from the Clinton crowd to de-nuclearise and sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Pakistan was setting up the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The leftover jihadis from the Soviet-Afghan war had made Kashmir the Valley of Blood. Washington was looking to do business with the occupying militia in Kabul and building gas pipelines through Afghanistan, Raphel was a key interlocutor with the early Taliban. Pakistan, with Benazir Bhutto in office and going through one of its periodic bouts of democracy, was an ally. India waged both a military battle in Kashmir as well as a diplomatic one against America and Pakistan. It survived that round. By 1997, when Hillary Clinton came to India for Mother Teresa's funeral, Bill Clinton was beginning to change his mind. By 1999, he had seen the light. A puzzling question remains: why would Bill Clinton want to take up a thankless job? He knows India well enough to realise it cannot possibly give away the Valley or agree to further territorial compromise in Kashmir. For the former President and his eponymous foundation, India is a happy hunting ground -- for work, projects and speeches. Would he want to risk all that? Would he want to risk fund-raising by the Indian diaspora for Hillary Clinton in New York? An Indian Foreign Service officer takes a cynical view: "What does Al Gore have that Clinton doesn't? The Nobel Prize. The solution may be far off, but if he can get India to agree there is a problem at all ..." The upshot is obvious -- the Indian political leadership, now and after the 2009 election, will have to be rigid, unbending and absolutely stubborn. It will have to say "No" to Uncle Sam, and to Brother Obama. While Obama may feel he needs Kashmir as the carrot to dangle before Pakistan when he asks it to take on Al Qaeda and the Taliban in FATA and the Northwest Frontier, his advisers must be mindful that he is potentially opening a Pandora's Box. So far Palestine has been the uber pan-Islamist cause, mobilising radicals from Tehran to Tunis, Jakarta to Jeddah. By giving Kashmir a profile it does not perhaps merit, by making a former American President special ambassador, by staking his own presidency on a solution, is Obama not likely to create a new "root cause" for the international Islamist brigade? In diplomacy, as it happens, there are few people more dangerous than the well-meaning. |
| Posted by:john frum |
| #5 If Obama even threatened to change the rules on Indian workers in America it would cause problems for some Indian politiicians. That would be the first low-level salvo if I wanted to prod India. The next level would be to may more attention to Pakistan and Bagladesh. No need to batter India but they would certainly notice. Having said that I hope there is no trouble with India. They are our natural ally in the region and if Obama screws that up he is a fool. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2008-11-08 22:42 |
| #4 Barack Obama will require India to work. He is going to demand that it shed its cynicism. That it put down its divisions. That it come out of its isolation, that it moves out of its comfort zones. That it pushes itself to be better. And that it engage. Barack will never allow it to go back to its life as usual, uninvolved, uninformed. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2008-11-08 20:17 |
| #3 Well Barry, there is Google and Wikipedia as a start to bring you up to speed. And then there is your Secretary of State, John F. Kerry. Man, that thought scares the $hit out of me. I didn't vote for him either but I have to live with his decisions. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2008-11-08 16:54 |
| #2 So? How far can Obama's (or any US) administration pressure India? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2008-11-08 16:44 |
| #1 India should beware this administration, and prepare or four years of status quo at best, barring a Chinese attack on Taiwan. I didn't vote for the naive b*stard. Sorry |
| Posted by: Frank G 2008-11-08 16:29 |