Engaging India

#4 by khamkhwa. on December 22, 2004 6:51am PT

Ofcourse, I have some cousins in LAhore who would have also been annihilated if Mush the rascal would have dropped a single bomb anywhere on India.
Incidently, are you willing to see the annihilation of your family in Pakistan just because Mush wants a good fight with the Indian army again???

Dost-Mittar

Nuclear explosions have benefitted both India and Pakistan.

Nikki`s concept of `managed strength` hearkens back to India`s original religious insight - before the inequities of caste system put a long curse upon our society. Continuous moral and intellectual development, maintenance of superior military might, building of commerical strength, and providing for the ample production of economic goods - ALL THESE FOUR are the required ideals and goals of any society.

For too many centuries we devalued one or the other of these equally important goals and ideals. First we became ignorant, then we became cowards, then we lost control over our trade and commerce, and then we became uncompetitive and de-skilled in the production of material goods.

Few civilizations took as heavy a beating as we did. Time has exacted an extremely heavy price for our mistakes.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

There are times when I have to change my views in the light of the events that follow. My views about India`s nuclear status is one of them. I thought that the Indian nuclear explosion was an unmitigated disaster. It achieved no additional security wrt Pakistan or China, made a covert situation overt and made India into a pariah state.

How wrong I was! The pariah status did not last long. It made the world, aka the USA, forced to engage India which it had until then totally ignored as a two-bit player. More than anything else, it gave Indians a sense of pride and confidence that they had lacked. India may not be shining but Indians have certainly shunned their defeatist tendencies, insularity and developed a can-do attitude in dealing with the rest of the world.

And it was due in no small measure to Jaswant Singh, who proved to be the best foreign minister of India ever, including the long tenure of Jawahar Lal Nehru in that position.

#4,khakhwa:
Jaisa naam vaisii baat!

[ that the SOB Musharaff could not cause the murder of my brothers in Pakistan ]

ballu khan...

...abay O do takay ka miraasi...don`t call us your brother and don`t call our president cum ceo cum chief of staff cum whatever takes his fancy a SOB...only WE can call him that and some more but not you ....samjha?

Read this and thank the almighty that the SOB Musharaff could not cause the murder of my brothers in Pakistan and India that he hoped for in order to avenge his personal humiliations in the past wars with India.......


The Day A Nuclear Conflict Was Averted

During the 1999 Kargil crisis, Clinton`s forceful diplomacy pulled Pakistan back from the nuclear brink


Strobe Talbott
YaleGlobal, 13 September 2004



On the brink of a catastrophe: Indian artillery pound Pakistani infiltrators in the Kargil region of Kashmir. Pakistan was reported to be readying its nuclear weapons until President Clinton intervened

WASHINGTON: During the first week in June [1999], just as Milosevic was acceding to NATO’s demands over Kosovo, Clinton turned his own attention to India and Pakistan.


In letters to Nawaz Sharif and Vajpayee, the president went beyond the studied neutrality that both prime ministers were expecting—in Pakistan’s case with hope, and in India’s with trepidation. Clinton made Pakistan’s withdrawal a precondition for a settlement and the price it must pay for the U.S. diplomatic involvement it had long sought. Clinton followed up with phone calls to the two leaders in mid-June emphasizing this point.

The United States condemned Pakistan’s “infiltration of armed intruders” and went public with information that most of the seven hundred men who had crossed the Line of Control were attached to the Pakistani Army’s 10th Corps.

In late June Clinton called Nawaz Sharif to stress that the United States saw Pakistan as the aggressor and to reject the fiction that the fighters were separatist guerrillas. The administration let it be known that if Sharif did not order a pullback, we would hold up a $100 million International Monetary Fund loan that Pakistan sorely needed. Sharif went to Beijing, hoping for comfort from Pakistan’s staunchest friend, but got none.
Pakistan was almost universally seen to have precipitated the crisis, ruining the promising peace process that had begun in Lahore and inviting an Indian counteroffensive.

On Friday, July 2, Sharif phoned Clinton and pleaded for his personal intervention in South Asia. Clinton replied that he would consider it only if it was understood up-front that Pakistani withdrawal would have to be immediate and unconditional.

The next day Sharif called Clinton to say that he was packing his bags and getting ready to fly immediately to Washington—never mind that he had not been invited. ..He warned Sharif not to come unless he was prepared to announce unconditional withdrawal; otherwise, his trip would make a bad situation worse. The Pakistani leader did not accept Clinton’s condition for the meeting—he just said he was on his way.
“This guy’s coming literally on a wing and a prayer,” said the president.” That’s right,” said Bruce Riedel [NSC aide], “and he’s praying that we don’t make him do the one thing he’s got to do to end this thing.”

It was not hard to anticipate what Sharif would ask for. His opening proposal would be a cease-fire to be followed by negotiations under American auspices. His fallback would make Pakistani withdrawal conditional on Indian agreement to direct negotiations sponsored and probably mediated by the United States. Either way, he would be able to claim that the incursion had forced India, under American pressure, to accept Pakistani terms.

After several long meetings in Sandy Berger’s office, we decided to recommend that Clinton confront Sharif with a stark choice that included neither of his preferred options. We would put before him two press statements and let Sharif decide which would be released at the end of the Blair House talks. The first would hail him as a peacemaker for retreating—or, as we would put it euphemistically, “restoring and respecting the sanctity of the Line of Control.” The second would blame him for starting the crisis and for the escalation sure to follow his failed mission to Washington.

On the eve of Sharif’s arrival, we learned that Pakistan might be preparing its nuclear forces for deployment. There was, among those of us preparing for the meeting, a sense of vast and nearly unprecedented peril. When Clinton assembled his advisers in the Oval Office for a last minute huddle, Sandy told him that overnight we had gotten more disturbing reports of steps Pakistan was taking with its nuclear arsenal. Clinton said he would like to use this information “to scare the hell out of Sharif.”

Sandy told the president that he was heading into what would probably be the single most important meeting with a foreign leader of his entire presidency. It would also be one of the most delicate. The overriding objective was to induce Pakistani withdrawal. But another, probably incompatible, goal was to increase the chances of Sharif’s political survival. “If he arrives as a prime minister but stays as an exile,” said Sandy, “he’s not going to be able to make stick whatever deal you get out of him.” We had to find a way to provide Sharif just enough cover to go home and give the necessary orders to Musharraf and the military.

The conversation had already convinced Clinton of what he feared: the world was closer even than during the Cuban missile crisis to a nuclear war. Unlike Kennedy and Khrushchev in 1962, Vajpayee and Sharif did not realize how close they were to the brink, so there was an even greater risk that they would blindly stumble across it.

Adding to the danger was evidence that Sharif neither knew everything his military high command was doing nor had complete control over it. When Clinton asked him if he understood how far along his military was in preparing nuclear-armed missiles for possible use in a war against India, Sharif acted as though he was genuinely surprised. He could believe that the Indians were taking such steps, he said, but he neither acknowledged nor seemed aware of anything like that on his own side.

Clinton decided to invoke the Cuban missile crisis, noting that it had been a formative experience for him (he was sixteen at the time). Now India and Pakistan were similarly on the edge of a precipice. If even one bomb were used…Sharif finished the sentence: “. . . it would be a catastrophe.”
[Clinton] returned to the offensive. He could see they were getting nowhere. Fearing that might be the result, he had a statement ready to release to the press in time for the evening news shows that would lay all the blame for the crisis on Pakistan.

Sharif went ashen.
Clinton bore down harder. Having listened to Sharif’s complaints against the United States, he had a list of his own, and it started with terrorism. Pakistan was the principal sponsor of the Taliban, which in turn allowed Osama bin Laden to run his worldwide network out of Afghanistan. Clinton had asked Sharif repeatedly to cooperate in bringing Osama to justice. Sharif had promised to do so but failed to deliver. The statement the United States would make to the press would mention Pakistan’s role in supporting terrorism in Afghanistan—and, through its backing of Kashmiri militants, in India as well. Was that what Sharif wanted?

Clinton had worked himself back into real anger—his face flushed, eyes narrowed, lips pursed, cheek muscles pulsing, fists clenched. He said it was crazy enough for Sharif to have let his military violate the Line of Control, start a border war with India, and now prepare nuclear forces for action. On top of that, he had put Clinton in the middle of the mess and set him up for a diplomatic failure.

Sharif seemed beaten, physically and emotionally. He denied he had given any orders with regard to nuclear weaponry and said he was worried for his life.
When the two leaders had been at it for an hour and a half, Clinton suggested a break so that both could consult with their teams. The president and Bruce briefed Sandy, Rick, and me on what had happened. Now that he had made maximum use of the “bad statement” we had prepared in advance, Clinton said, it was time to deploy the good one. ..Clinton took a cat nap on a sofa in a small study off the main entryway while Bruce, Sandy, Rick, and I cobbled together a new version of the “good statement,” incorporating some of the Pakistani language from the paper that Sharif had claimed was in play between him and Vajpayee. But the key sentence in the new document was ours, not his, and it would nail the one thing we had to get out of the talks: “The prime minister has agreed to take concrete and immediate steps for the restoration of the Line of Control.” The paper called for a cease-fire but only after the Pakistanis were back on their side of the line. It reaffirmed Clinton’s longstanding plan to visit South Asia.
The meeting came quickly to a happy and friendly end, at least on Clinton’s part.

Adapted from Strobe Talbott`s ``Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb`` (Brookings Institution Press). Talbott, former Deputy Secretary of State is the President of the Brookings Institution. Copyright © 2004, The Brookings Institution.

The US would have had to engage India as a counterweight to China. Instead of telling the world to go to hell, Vajpayee announced a test ban after Pokhran II. And that idiot Natwar Singh is supposed to have said that Pokhran II was a mistake. Bullcrap!

What India needed to do back in 1998 was to open the Bombs `R Us store. After a couple of years of crap from the US, after Pakistan has been caught selling nuclear technology, what could the US do except make it manifestly clear that it still intends to cripple India in some way or other? Like it did offering older, refurbished PC-3 Orion aircraft to India but offering brand-new ones to Pakistan.

Sell The Bomb to North Korea and Taiwan. That ought to set off a nice nuclear spiral in East Asia with China unable to take over Taiwan and Japan producing about a 1000 plutonium bombs.

Amrita,

You pipped me to the post! Was getting my review ready.

This was a comprehensive review. Talbott`s Time experience shows in the high readability quotient of the book. So does his clear love for Jaswant, and counterparts of his negotiating team on the Indian side. But Talbott also comes out as a rather formidable negotiator.

It also has some very interesting takes on his occassional interactions with Clinton...and the track two ``engagement`` with India and Pakistan...as he finally says...had ``Jaswant winning more than him.``

It was also exciting revelation in the book: Jaswant Singh had predicted the coup before it happened!

I thoroughly enjoyed his dissection of Jaswant`s circumlocutory language...one comes to mine...when Jaswant uses the word ``civilisation``....It shows how much he must be serious about the idea if he were to use the adverbial in speech!

Harish