BOTH the United States and India have spelt out their opening positions for the forthcoming discussions between President Reagan and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and their aides. These run along familiar lines and cannot therefore provide the basis it for a significantly higher level of political understanding between the two countries.
For the United States, the central issue for the forthcoming talks is the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan. The deputy assistant secretary for south Asia in the state department, Mr. Robert Peck, has taken care to emphasise this point on the eve of Mr. Gandhi’s arrival in Washington on June 11. In a talk with Indian correspondents, he has said: “One thing India could do to help would be to encourage the Soviet Union to take the UN proposals for a resolution more seriously…”
For India the central issue is Pakistan. Mr. Gandhi himself has spoken several times on this question. He has been critical of the US supply of sophisticated weapons such as F-16 to Pakistan and of its failure to take strong enough measures to force Islamabad to abandon its effort to acquire a nuclear weapons capability and possibly nuclear weapons.
The weaknesses of the two positions are evident. The United States exaggerates India’s influence with the Kremlin if it seriously believes that New Delhi can in fact persuade Moscow to withdraw from Afghanistan. The fact of the matter is that the Soviet Union and India have circumvented such contentious issues and not confronted them and resolved them and they can do no better now. Moreover, Americans cannot in fairness expect India to wish to play any role at all in the Afghanistan affair so long as they do not allow it a say in the determination of their own policy in this regard. As it happens, even the UN secretary-general’s special emissary trying to find a political solution to the Afghanistan issue has not cared to come to New Delhi for serious discussions.
It is widely believed not just in this country that the Reagan administration sabotaged an agreement that had virtually been reached between the Soviet Union and Pakistan in April 1983 under UN auspices. Mr. Selig Harrison and Mr. Lawrence Lifschultz, leading experts on Afghanistan, have detailed this agreement and how the United States compelled President Zia-ul-Haq to go back on it. So it is difficult to believe that Washington wants an agreement which the Soviet Union can find acceptable. But we can let that pass. The crux of the matter for India is whether it is entitled to have a say in the determination of US policy on an issue in which Washington wants it to be helpful. A say, let it be noted, is not a veto.
Fundamental Question
The same applies to the points Mr. Gandhi and other Indian leaders have made in respect of the US policy towards Pakistan. They cannot in fairness ask for a say in it so long as they are not prepared to concede to Washington a say in their approach to Afghanistan and indeed Pakistan.
American policy-makers must have a rather poor opinion about us if they seriously expect us to buy the proposition that their military assistance to Pakistan is wholly the result of Soviet military presence in Afghanistan and that it can end if that presence is terminated. They know as well as we do that their military aid to Pakistan is the product of a number of developmentsin the late seventies, the overthrow of the Shah of Iran being one of the most significant. President Carter was not ready to go as far as President Reagan did in respect of military supplies to Islamabad in the wake of Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. But it is significant that President Carter was willing to ignore his earlier decision to cut off all aid to Pakistan because the latter was engaged in a clandestine effort to acquire a nuclear weapons capability. In other words, like President Reagan later, he too was prepared to ignore Pakistan’s weapons-oriented nuclear programme.
If the Americans are guilty of under-estimating our intelligence and our understanding of international developments, we err in blowing out of all proportion their capacity to determine the behaviour of their friends and allies.
Pakistan can occasionally be manipulated as it was in the summer of 1983 when it was forced to go back on a deal that it had more or less worked out with the Soviet Union on Afghanistan. But there are limits to this kind of manipulation by the US which we should recognise.
Regardless, however, of what the United States can or cannot do to restrain Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions, there is a fundamental question regarding Pakistan’s status which must in all honesty be discussed between President Reagan and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and their aides. The issue is whether in view of Soviet presence in Afghanistan Pakistan has become a front-line state in the struggle against the Soviet Union, or whether it has become the last buffer between Soviet power and India.
Pavlovian Response
It is, of course, not an issue which has just arisen in Indo-US relations. It was the main bone of contention even in the fifties when President Eisenhower decided to extend military assistance to Pakistan and Mr. Nehru objected strenuously though the Indian Prime Minister did not and indeed could not say for obvious reasons that Pakistan’s security vis-à-vis the Soviet Union was a matter of concern principally for India and not far away America. But it has acquired a new edge in view of the disappearance at least for the time-being and possibly forever of one of the two buffers which separated India from the Soviet Union and the US Pavlovian response to this development
It would have been dishonest for us to raise this question if India was genuinely a Soviet ally and had no reservations regarding the extension of Soviet military power southward. But India is not a Soviet ally and it must have reservations regarding its military presence in Afghanistan. The existence of the two buffers – Afghanistan and Pakistan – was an essential prerequisite of friendship between the two countries, one a superpower which is inevitably seeking worldwide influence and the other a struggling nation which is naturally anxious to preserve its freedom and integrity.
There has never been an identity of interests and therefore no identity of viewpoints between them. There could not have been any such identity. Their interests have not converged, though they have not collided either. And they have not collided precisely because Soviet influence and leverage in south Asia have been limited.
Similarly, it would have been futile for us to raise this question if the US policy of extending massive support to Afghan mujahideen had succeeded or had held the prospect of succeeding and if the Pakistanis had continued to believe that in agreeing to serve as a conduit for US, Saudi and Egyptian arms and funds for the mujahideen in return for American military supplies and Saudi largesses, they had made a good bargain. But the US policy is not succeeding and there are indications that Pakistanis are beginning to be concerned over the consequences of their present policy.
Dramatic Turn
We all know that Mr. Gorbachov administered a most serious warning to President Zia when the latter visited Moscow on the occasion of President Chernenko’s death. For the Soviets went out of their way to publicise this fact and President Zia himself acknowledged the accuracy of the Tass statement. We also know that under Mr. Gorbachov’s leadership the Soviets have stepped up their anti-rebel campaign in Afghanistan. There have been reports of Soviet-Afghan incursions into and raids on, Pakistan, and of demoralisation among mujahideen groups in Peshawar. Reports suggest that mujahideens going into Afghanistan are not able to find the necessary support within the country. Mao compared guerillas to fish in a friendly sea. In the present case the sea is in danger of drying up. The Soviets have virtually emptied large areas close to Pakistan’s borders where guerillas have sought and found shelter and sustenance.
Americans and Pakistanis have shown poor understanding of Russian psychology. They have not remembered the well-known fact that Russians resorted to a scorched earth policy in their fight against Napoleon and Hitler. And they have ignored the obvious implication that a people who can destroy their own hearths and crops in the defence of their country can do the same in Afghanistan if they are driven to it. The result of such a lack of understanding can only be disastrous.
Pakistanis are said to be nervous. But how nervous we do not know. In the case of Americans, we can be even less sure. Indeed, the evidence is that they are as far from recognising the futility of their present policy as ever. After all, they are planning $ six billion aid package for Pakistan as the $ 3.2 billion one moves into its last phase. Thus we cannot dismiss the grim possibility we are trapped — between the deep sea and the devil. The US has so far produced catastrophies in places such as Indo-China which have been sufficiently far away from us and the Soviet Union has imposed or promoted communist regimes in lands which have been distant from ours. Now they are doing so on our doorstep.
Despite all these new complications and the old ones between us and Pakistan, it cannot be seriously denied that history has taken a dramatic new turn in south Asia with the arrival of the Soviets on the Khyber. None of the parties has recognised this reality. But that will not make it go away. If the Soviets are there to stay in Afghanistan as appears to be the case, Pakistan has become India’s only buffer. It may render services to America as in Saudi Arabia, but it cannot be America’s front-line state in the crusade against “the empire of evil”, to use President Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union. Frontline states have met sorry fates in Africa (against South Africa) and West Asia (against Israel). US power cannot avoid a similar fate for Pakistan.
The Times of India, 8 June 1985