Turning POINT

It will soon be transparent to India that an entire edifice of a foreign policy cannot be underpinned by a single India-US partnership

Zorawar Daulet Singh Delhi

After free-riding on American power for the past few years to improve India's international status, New Delhi's financial and security elites will need to reassess their path to great power status. The ongoing global financial convulsion, which coincided with change in the White House, suggests India's favoured strategic partner will hereon neither possess the luxury nor the resources to enhance US strategic commitments in the West Asian theatre. In fact, the next administration's declared objective to rely on a broader Afghanistan strategy has direct implications for the power play New Delhi had envisaged for itself in the South Asian neighbourhood and beyond.

The structural conditions that enabled the US-Indian rapprochement and subsequent quasi-alliance emerged first with the disappearance of the Soviet Union. The explosion of a nuclear device by India in 1998 brought South Asia back on the US radar screen. It was not until the deployment of US troops in the Hindu Kush in the fall of 2001 that India perceived an opportunity to elevate relations with Washington, and finally hope to displace Pakistan as the preferred ally in the region.

Geography, however, ensured that the Pakistani military remained the only feasible instrument to enable the US to sustain its military presence across the dubious Durand Line (US relies on Pakistan for 80 per cent of its logistics route and air bases). In fact, by late 2004, American claims to de-hyphenate the South Asian triangle were experiencing stresses similar to the Cold War era when Washington was unable to sustain parallel bilateral relations with Pakistan and India.

Pre-empting disillusion among the Indian security community, Washington put forward a bold policy innovation to address the principal obstacle to complete normalisation - India's lack of status in the international nuclear system. For the ensuing three years, the nuclear deal captivated India's elites like little else has. That the finale of this nuclear episode, which resulted in not a single unequivocal strategic, economic, technological or status gain, has not deterred the Indian elite from pressing forward with their quest to emerge as Washington's número uno in the region.    

It was at such a juncture that the financial crisis struck Wall Street, and very rapidly convulsed the entire global financial system and consequently, the broader economy. Even as foreign policy got sidelined as the decisive electoral issue, the incoming Barack Obama administration will inevitably need to reassess US security interests in West Asia and seek to salvage whatever it can.

Indeed, in the closing months of the Bush administration, the conflict in Afghanistan has been portrayed as the principal theatre demanding renewed US strategic attention. Ironically, much of Obama's pre-election strategy to take the conflict deeper into the Afghan-Pakistani frontiers has already been initiated by his predecessor. Already, by an astute mixture of coercion and aid, the US has not only neutralised the intransigence of the Pakistani security and political elite, but is now reportedly receiving valuable intelligence and tactical support of Pakistani troops who are directly engaging the resistance forces in the frontier regions.