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| Thursday, 25 March 2004 |
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'South Asia today: promise and peril' by Ambassador Karl F. Inderfurth Presented at the seminar on 'The US Role in South Asia', organised by the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies, Colombo on March 19, 2004. I am very pleased to have been asked by Lakshman Kadirgamar to take part in this seminar on "The US Role in South Asia". It is a subject of great interest to me - both professionally and personally - inside and outside of government. I think we would all agree that the US role in the region has changed in many significant ways in recent years, and most of them very positive.
One way to describe this change is to call attention to probably the two finest diplomatic histories of US relations with countries in the region, both by Ambassador Dennis Kux. The first, 'Estranged Democracies', covers US-Indian relations from President Franklin Roosevelt through the first Bush administration; the second, 'Disenchanted Allies,' deals with the United States and Pakistan from 1947 to 2000. I think these two titles capture the ups and downs of US relations with these two countries, and the disappointments that those relationships never got fully on track. I would also add a third adjective to 'estranged' and 'disenchanted' to sum up the overall US relationship with South Asia through the years - and that adjective would be 'disengaged'. But let me now hasten to add that I believe that diplomatic history is a thing of the past. This week's visit by secretary of State Colin Powell to the region underscores this point. This is his fifth trip to South Asia since taking office; the most ever by an American Secretary of State. Secretary Powell and the Bush administration recognize - as did the Clinton administration before it - that South Asia today is a region full of great promise, but also great peril, which also happens to be the title of my remarks to you this morning. What role for the US? My reference just now to Colin Powell provides me an excellent sigue to begin by raising the very relevant question of just what is the appropriate role for the United States to play in South Asia. As many of you know, before he was Secretary of State, and before he was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of State, Colin Powell served as President Reagan's National Security Adviser, at the end of Reagan's second term. In his autobiography 'My American Journey', Powell described the role he played in that position. He said "I was to perform as judge, traffic cop, truant officer, arbitrator, fireman, chaplain, psychiatrist, and occasional hit man". What a job description! Now, taking my cue from Colin Powell how would I describe the US role in South Asia? Let me suggest the following. I believe the United States has many roles to perform in this region - sometimes emphasizing one, sometimes another. These roles include: friend, supporter, investor, trader facilitator, persuader, aid provider, and the one I like the most - partner. Unfortunately, as I have already suggested, for a long time the United States played only a few of these roles in South Asia - and when it did it was on a fairly erratic basis. Now I know that Shafi Sami and Walter Andersen will be discussing this history later in the seminar, so I will not attempt to cover this territory in my remarks. Suffice it to say that for most of the period since the Second World War, South Asia was peripheral to US global interests. As Dennis Kux has noted, the subcontinent was not directly involved with the politics and security of the regions where US concerns were centred - Europe and the Middle East to the West, and China, Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia to the east. Moreover, South Asia's comparatively slow economic growth made the region at best a second tier order of interest to the United States. Today, both the security and economic contexts have greatly changed. South Asia is now recognized as having strategic, political, economic and social consequence for the United States. Moreover, the events of 9/11, 2001 placed the region, as one State Department official recently put it, on the "front line of our Global War on Terrorism". Policy of engagement In preparing for this seminar, I went back and read the testimony I delivered at my Senate confirmation hearing in July 1997 to become the new Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs. At the beginning of that testimony I spoke about five US interests in the region. I said these interests "run the full gamut of our foreign policy goals". First, "promoting peace and security, particularly by supporting the Indo-Pakistani dialogue" (which was then being pursued by Prime Ministers Gujral and Sharif); Second, "Containing proliferation" (Made even more important now that we know about the activities of A. Q. Khan); Third, "improving economic and commercial interaction and relations;" (this was well before the India "shining" campaign!) Fourth, "Enhancing conventional security cooperation;" And, finally, "promoting sustainable development and maintaining the region's environment". What I did not say to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was that these US interests had recently been identified by a National Security Council review of US relations with South Asia. These five issues - or 'baskets' as we called them - would serve as the foundation for a new policy of 'enhanced engagement' with South Asia. It was decided by the NSC - and approved by President Clinton - that we would pursue this new policy through a series of high level visits to the region, including by the Secretary of State and by the President himself. I should mention here that the last Secretary of State to visit South Asia had been George Shultz in 1983 and the last American president to travel to the region had been President Carter almost two decades earlier when he paid a state visit to India, in January 1978. As the new Assistant Secretary of State, I was the beneficiary of this new policy of engagement - for which I was very thankful. I also had the good fortune to be working with a team of high-ranking US officials during President Clinton's second term who had a real interest in doing more with South Asia - beginning with the President himself and his National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger. Another South Asia-ally in the White House was First Lady Hillary Clinton who had made an extended visit to the region in 1995, including to Sri Lanka. At the State Department, Secretary Alright and especially, Deputy Secretary Talbott became deeply involved, as did Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering, who had earlier served as the US ambassador to India. Getting it right with India Let me also make a point here about India before I go any further. India was to be the centrepiece of our new policy of engagement toward the region. Clearly India is South Asia's largest and most influential country, by virtually all measures - political, economic and military to name three. As I mentioned earlier, for years the relationship between the United States and India was best described by the title of Dennis Kux's book, 'Estranged Democracies'. With the Cold War over and the world economy globalizing, it was time for this to change. I would also argue that a closer, more positive relationship with India was something of a prerequisite for improving our relations with the other countries of South Asia. By getting our relationship with India right - and placing that relationship on a more productive and respectful basis - we could begin to remove the element of distrust and suspicion that New Delhi often toward our actions in the region. This, in turn, would open up new political and economic and even security opportunities for US diplomacy. During President Clinton's second term, I believe this is exactly what happened - with India we went from being "estranged democracies" to "engaged democracies". Three events were crucial in this regard. First - and paradoxically - relations began to improve after India's May 1998 nuclear tests. Not immediately, because of congressionally mandated sanctions, but over time because of the twelve rounds of talks that took place between Deputy Secretary of State Talbott and India's External Affairs Minister, Jaswant Singh. These talks didn't significantly narrow our differences on nuclear issues, but they did give the two sides a better understanding of each other's views (or security "compulsions") and marked the most intensive high-level US-India dialogue ever. It therefore established the basis for a new relationship between Washington and New Delhi. Second, the Kargil crisis in the summer of 1999 brought the two countries closer together. Let me read from the account by my NSC colleague, Bruce Riedel, about the meeting on July 4th between President Clinton and Prime Minister Sharif at Blair House in Washington. "The most important strategic result of the Blair House summit was its impact on Indo-US relations. The clarity of the American position on Kargil and its refusal to give Pakistan any reward for its aggression had an immediate and dynamic impact on the relationship. Doors opened in New Delhi to Americans that had been shut for years. The Indian elite - including the military - and the Indian public began to shed long held negative perceptions of the US". The third transforming event was President Clinton's highly successful five day visit to India in March 2000, which India's national security adviser Brajesh Mishra has called simply "the turning point". That visit was followed by Prime Minister Vajpayee's also successful trip to Washington six months later. In hindsight, I think it is fair to say that these two visits laid the cornerstone for the new US-Indian relationship that we see today - one that has been built upon and expanded even further by the Bush Administration, for which I give it great credit. So, to conclude this portion of my remarks, let me just underscore this very important point, namely that at any given point in time the "The US Role in South Asia" has been highly contingent on the relationship between the United States and India. With US and Indian interests converging in so many areas, I believe India sees US involvement here as a "net plus". Now that we have got that relationship right - and I do not mean by this at the expense of other countries in the region - the US role in South Asia can be more expansive, more constructive - in short, more engaged. Regional security and stability Let me now return to my Senate confirmation testimony to pick up the thread of my remarks about "South Asia Today: Promise and Peril". A portion of my testimony was entitled "Regional Security and Stability." Here I said that "the South Asia region has a troubled history and continues to face problems... These range from (continuing disputes between) India and Pakistan, to the ongoing conflict between the government and the Liberation Tigers to Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, to the seemingly never-ending tragedy of Afghanistan." (To be continued) |
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