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U.S. Aims to Ease India-Pakistan Tension

06 April 2010 05:00 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Progress in Afghanistan Hinges on Improved Relations Between New Delhi and Islamabad, Obama Administration Directive Says, APA reports quoting â€œThe Wall Street Journalâ€.
President Barack Obama issued a secret directive in December to intensify American diplomacy aimed at easing tensions between India and Pakistan, asserting that without dÃ©tente between the two rivals, the administration’s efforts to win Pakistani cooperation in Afghanistan would suffer.

The directive concluded that India must make resolving its tensions with Pakistan a priority for progress to be made on U.S. goals in the region, according to people familiar with its contents.

The U.S. has invested heavily in its own relations with Pakistan in recent months, agreeing to a $7.5 billion aid package and sending top military and diplomatic officials to Islamabad on repeated visits. The public embrace, which reached a high point last month in high-profile talks in Washington, reflects the Obama administration’s belief that Pakistan must be convinced to change its strategic calculus and take a more assertive stance against militants based in its western tribal regions over the course of the next year in order to turn the tide in Afghanistan.
A debate continues within the administration over how hard to push India, which has long resisted outside intervention in the conflict with its neighbor. The Pentagon, in particular, has sought more pressure on New Delhi, according to U.S. and Indian officials. Current and former U.S. officials said the discussion in Washington over how to approach India has intensified as Pakistan ratchets up requests that the U.S. intercede in a series of continuing disputes.
Pakistan has long regarded Afghanistan as providing "strategic depth"â€”essentially, a buffer zoneâ€”in a potential conflict with India. Some U.S. officials believe Islamabad will remain reluctant to wholeheartedly fight the Islamic militants based on its Afghan border unless the sense of threat from India is reduced.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has already taken the political risk of pursuing peace talks with Pakistan, but faces significant domestic opposition to any additional outreach without Pakistani moves to further clamp down on Islamic militants who have targeted India.
U.S. and Indian officials say the Obama administration has so far made few concrete demands of New Delhi. According to U.S. officials, the only specific request has been to discourage India from getting more involved in training the Afghan military, to ease Pakistani concerns about getting squeezed by India on two borders.
"This is an administration that’s deeply divided about the wisdom of leaning on India to solve U.S. problems with Pakistan," said Ashley Tellis, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has discussed the issue with senior officials in the U.S. and India. "There are still important constituencies within the administration that have not given up hope that India represents the answer."
India has long resisted outside involvement in its differences with Pakistan, particularly over the disputed region of Kashmir. But, according to a U.S. government official, a 56-page dossier presented by the Pakistani government to the Obama administration ahead of high-level talks in Washington last month contained a litany of accusations against the Indian government, and suggestions the U.S. intercede on Pakistan’s behalf.
The official said the document alleges that India has never accepted Pakistan’s sovereignty as an independent state, and accuses India of diverting water from the Indus River and fomenting separatism in the southwestern Pakistani province of Baluchistan.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has signaled that Washington isn’t interested in mediating on water issues, which are covered by a bilateral treaty.
The White House declined to comment on Mr. Obama’s directive or on the debate within the administration over India policy. The directive to top foreign-policy and national-security officials was summarized in a memo written by National Security Adviser James Jones at the end of the White House’s three-month review of Afghan war policy in December.
An Indian government official said the U.S.’s increasing attention to Pakistani concerns hasn’t hurt bilateral relations overall. "Our relationship is matureâ€”of course we have disagreements, but we’re trying not to have knee-jerk reactions," the Indian official said.
According to U.S. and Indian officials, the Pentagon has emerged in internal Obama administration debates as an active lobbyist for more pressure on India, with some officials already informally pressing Indian officials to take Pakistan’s concerns more seriously. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the U.S. government’s prime interlocutor with the powerful head of the Pakistani army, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, has been among the more vocal advocates of a greater Indian role, according to a U.S. military official, encouraging New Delhi to be more "transparent" about its activities along the countries’ shared border and to cooperate more with Pakistan.
In interviews, U.S. military officials were circumspect about what specific moves they would like to see from New Delhi. But according to people who have discussed India policy with Pentagon officials, the ideas discussed in internal debates include reducing the number of Indian troops in Kashmir or pulling back forces along the border.
"They say, ’The Pakistanis have this perception and you have to deal with the perception’," said one foreign diplomat who has discussed India’s role with Pentagon officials.
An Indian defense ministry spokesman said his country’s army has already moved about 30,000 troops out of Kashmir in recent years.
The State Department has resisted such moves to pressure India, according to current and former U.S. officials, insisting they could backfire. These officials have argued that the most recent promising peace effortâ€”secret reconciliation talks several years ago between Indian Prime Minster Singh and then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharrafâ€”occurred without U.S. involvement.
A senior State Department official involved in Indo-Pakistani issues said Mr. Singh, in particular, has risked his political standing domestically by suggesting India would decouple talks on issues such as trade and travel from Indian demands that Pakistan act more aggressively against terrorist groups, particularly Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Islamist movement believed to have masterminded the 2008 attacks in Mumbai.
"Our principal interest has always been to encourage the talks to resume, but we also understand where the Indians are coming from, which is that there has to be some progress on these bilateral counterterrorism" issues, said the official.
The official noted that recent arrests by Pakistani authorities of top members of the Afghan Taliban have come without any major progress on Indo-Pakistani talks, raising questions about the link between the two.
Separately, Pakistan has been more forcefully raising concerns about Indian activities in Afghanistan with the U.S. Senior Pakistani officials allege India is using its Afghan aid missions as a cover to support separatists in Baluchistan and the Pakistani Taliban, and say they have presented evidence of that to U.S. officials. Indian officials deny the accusations.
A Pakistani security official said his government also has pressed the U.S. about India’s ties to the Afghan intelligence agency, the National Security Directorate, and argued that Indian consulates in Jalalabad and Kandahar are outposts for India’s spy agency.
"Something has to be done to stop Afghanistan from being a jumping-off point for Indian intelligence," said the security official.
Indian officials said they have received no requests from the U.S. to scale back India’s rebuilding efforts in Afghanistan, and don’t plan to change those initiatives."We’re in Afghanistan to help the government; we don’t do anything they aren’t asking us to do," said an Indian official. India’s engagement with Kabul is broad and deep, giving Afghan President Hamid Karzai an important diplomatic ally in the region. It has given Afghanistan more than $1.5 billion in aid, building roads and laying power lines, among other projects. India, with its own well-developed bureaucracy, trains about 700 Afghan civil servants a year in India.
The senior State Department official said the U.S. remains skeptical of Pakistani accusations about India in Afghanistan.