India: America's New Gendarme or Strategic Partner?

By Frank Schell

"Strategic Outlook 2008: National Security Issues for the Next Administration" / Winter 2008 Vol. 18 / No. 1

Frank Schell, a Member of the National Strategy Forum, has recently returned from a fact finding mission to India with the Harris School of Public Policy Studies of the University of Chicago. The Dean’s International Council of the Harris School met in New Delhi with a number of leaders in economics, politics and diplomacy, business and IT, journalism, medicine, law and banking, social services and the NGO sector, and national security. Mr. Schell is a former banking executive specializing in trade, treasury and risk management. He worked in a development program based in India (1969-1972) and was later engaged in India offshore banking. He speaks Hindi-Urdu and has traveled extensively in the subcontinent.

Like a busy beaver in the Wisconsin Chippewa flowage, for many years America built an extensive array of gendarmerie in the Third World to block Soviet expansionism. Since the end of World War II, some of those proxy states were tripwires against Soviet tank divisions, while others were conceived as ideological fronts against global Communism. There was the American engineered deposition of Guzmán in Guatemala, the sponsorship of Mobutu in Zaire, Suharto in Indonesia, and the coup by Pinochet in Chile. There was Marcos in the Philippines, the Shah of Iran, and a number of mostly military regimes in Pakistan, where the U-2 spy flights originated in the early days of the Cold War. Lastly, there were the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion and occupation.

For the most part, the U.S. supported regimes with values antithetical to our own, led by inexperienced or awkward autocrats whose mission was to suppress the populace, extract national resources for private gain and construct crude kleptocracies. Those countries were seen by the U.S. through the prism of national security, with a principal interface through the Military Assistance Advisory Group of the Pentagon or the Central Intelligence Agency. There was little attention paid to the importance of human rights and the longer term development of democracy, however from a practical point of view it was difficult for U.S. diplomats to cultivate ties with opposition elements in authoritarian regimes.

All this time, India was a major strategic annoyance to the U.S. Although it was a like-minded secular democracy and federal republic, it did not benefit in the U.S. calculus for global security. To the contrary, there have been about five decades of chill out between Washington and New Delhi. There was American distaste for Indian avowed non-alignment, while at the same time a client state of the Soviet Union, purchasing Soviet MiGs, tanks, and submarines, as well as Belarus tractors, and other equipment and spare parts. Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a state of emergency to persecute political adversaries also did not sit well in Washington.

Further, there was hectoring of the U.S. about the evils of foreign capital and neo-imperialism. And there was Indian antipathy toward the U.S. for its support and arming of Pakistan – a South Asian archrival that subverted democracy in what is now Bangladesh, and continues to foster insurgency in the Indian state of Kashmir. A low moment in the Indo-U.S. relationship was the dispatch of the Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal during the 1971 conflict with Pakistan, when India supported the democratically elected government and independence of Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan.

In the case of Pakistan, the U.S. elected to align itself with Pakistani Generals Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, and Zia-ul-Haq, who is acknowledged to have introduced Sharia principles and Islamic influence into the army and intelligence service, and encouraged development of the madrassa Islamic schools. In 1956, our major ally renamed itself the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Until his recent resignation, the U.S. supported General Pervez Musharraf, who it was hoped would prevail against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in the remote tribal regions of Pakistan.

Understandably, India has been disturbed by America’s unrelenting focus on Pakistan, with which India has had three major conflicts since 1947, and fighting over the Line of Control in Kargil (a region of Kashmir) in 1999. The world’s largest and second largest democracies have had a painfully dysfunctional relationship, guided by the false dichotomy of having either national security or human rights, and the related U.S. need to fundamentally support either Pakistan or India.

However, new geopolitical forces offer India and the U.S. the unprecedented opportunity to forge a strategic partnership to benefit both countries in terms of national security and economic development. These forces include the collapse of the Soviet Union and India’s desire for new sponsorship, the economic liberalization of India and its creation of a free market system, the ascent of China, the presence of failed or ineffective states on or near its borders, and the related rise of Islamist extremism globally and in India.

The failings of central planning and control are now well-known, with the Soviet model roundly rejected by India, which liberalized trade and investment starting in 1991 with continuous focus to the present. The full matrix of American support may now be applied – trade and direct investment, diplomacy and military cooperation, business process outsourcing, education and cultural exchange, collaboration in space and high technology, nuclear technology transfer, and drug enforcement activities. By some accounts, the Indian people are unique in their generally favorable view of the United States. If there is a foreign partner with the scale, technology, and reach that can help India achieve its national priorities – education, public health, infrastructure development, and social services delivery – it is the United States.

India may also be seen to counter Chinese influence in Asia, given its potential to overtake the Japanese economy in terms of (PPP) GDP in coming years. While India has the world’s fifth largest navy, with blue water capability to protect its maritime routes from the Persian Gulf to southeast Asia, there is nevertheless the issue of whether it can really compete with the scale and technology of the Chinese shipyards.

India and America share a fear of terrorism. India needs a stable Pakistan on its frontier, a country needing effective institutions and control of its borders. Kashmir will always be an area of dispute, and India can retaliate by destabilizing the Pakistani province of Baluchistan. However, these separatist tensions need not prevent both countries from recognizing that they have one strategic commonality: Fear of Islamist extremism, which should trump other differences.

Although Muslim, the Pakistani provinces of Sindh and Punjab have marked similarities – ethnic, linguistic, and cultural – to the adjoining Indian states of Gujarat, Rajasthan and Punjab, which are predominantly Hindu and Sikh. In Pakistan, ethnic Sindhis and Punjabis represent nearly 60 percent of the population of 173 million (CIA World Factbook July 2008 estimate) and those two provinces have the bulk of Pakistan’s agricultural production, manufacturing and services, banking and commerce – sharing a similar entrepreneurial spirit with India, where many of them originally migrated from after partition in 1947.

With 150 million of its own Muslims, India is vulnerable to traditional Hindu-Muslim communalism, as well as to a more recent form of Islamist insurgency. One example is the Lashkar-e-Taiba, believed aligned with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, renegade elements of the Pakistani Army, and the Pakistani ISI (intelligence service), which has engaged in major agitation and terrorism in Kashmir. Further, some of the recent serial bombings in major Indian cities have been attributed to SIMI, a homegrown student Islamic organization, and to suspected Muslim radicals operating in the northeastern state of Assam. There are also Hindu groups such as the Shiv Sena and RSS which are viewed as extremists and add to the volatility of the region.

At this writing, the terrorist attacks in Mumbai demonstrate a new boldness in terms of scale and coordination, the use of foreigners as hostages, and targeting of national architectural landmarks, the Taj Mahal Hotel and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus of the Western Railways. Expected collaboration with U.S., British and Israeli intelligence agencies to analyze these attacks will strengthen the perception that India is now a staunch ally of the West. Suspicion inevitably falls on its neighbor, however Pakistan the state, and rogue elements in the ISI and army supported by Al-Qaeda, are two different matters. In any case, there is a dearth of reported evidence to attribute sponsorship by the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Like the majority of the Pakistani middle class, business and government establishment, the Indians fear more influence of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in rural and urban areas of Pakistan, where there is already significant penetration. Alongside U.S. and NATO coalition operations, Indian influence has grown in Afghanistan, with an advisory presence in Kabul, and the recognition that Afghanistan and Pakistan are effectively one country in the fight against Islamic fundamentalism. To some observers, Pakistan’s principal enemy is not India, but its enemy within. The issue, however, is the Pakistani army, part of the world’s seventh largest armed force with public estimates of 600,000 in active service. A professional fighting force, it is the most effective and respected institution in Pakistan, and its main purpose for over sixty years has been to take on India. How the well-entrenched, nuclear armed military can be moderated and redirected in the principal question.

India and America have values and characteristics in common: Diversity and democracy, a federal republic government, equality before the law, a free market philosophy, the English language, entrepreneurial spirit, and vulnerability to Islamic radicalism. If there ever was a time for a strategic alignment of the two countries, it is now. India is a self-assured country, proud of its culture, traditions and methods, and global brands. While the colonial era is receding from memory, India is still sensitive to the extent of respect that it receives or does not receive from the West. For an alliance with India to succeed and bring lasting benefit to both countries, India must be seen as a strategic partner, and not as America’s convenient new gendarme in an unstable region.