'Summit, a win-win situation for U.S.'

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

WASHINGTON, JULY 12. On the eve of the Agra summit between the leaders of India and Pakistan, one view in the non-official community here is that the outcome of the meeting is neither going to be a dramatic breakthrough nor a disaster. That said there is also a feeling in some quarters that if Pakistan sticks to its traditional approach and insists on talking only about Kashmir, the summit will fail.

A Brookings Institutions press briefing on Wednesday saw the participation of known South Asia hands interacting with not only the media but also others keenly following the events in the subcontinent. Dr. Steven Cohen, a senior fellow at Brookings, argued that with the Bush administration still groping for a policy on South Asia, New Delhi wanted to preempt a more active U.S. role and thus handed out the surprise invitation to the President of Pakistan, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. That apart, closer relations between India and the U.S. had given India ``more strategic freedom'', it was maintained.

The summit, from the U.S. perspective is a win-win situation, for among other things, it is in Washington's interests to reduce the risk of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. Some nuclear relevant agreement should be a pretext for lifting the sanctions, Dr. Cohen says.

What is being pointed out is that the summit may produce agreement on confidence-building measures where the U.S. may be able to play a role by way of providing technology for verification - something that has been made available before to other parties, say, for instance in West Asia. But the kind of technology or for that matter the ``role'' of the U.S. in the realm of verification is in very early stages.

From the point of view of India, in the short-term the prospects of re-engaging with Pakistan looks good; and from the long-term perspective, India, by engaging with Pakistan, will be able to get out of the ``Pakistan trap'' which, in many ways, is constraining New Delhi from being able to play its aspired role globally, argues Ms. Teresita Schaffer of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

Tactics and strategies

There are several elements to the approach of the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, in Ms. Schaffer's view. These would include keeping some parts of the peace talks going; entice the Kashmiris into the political process; make the Kashmiris and Pakistan nervous that the peace process will move without them; and allow India to stay in the driver's seat.

``These are tactics, not strategies,'' argued Ambassador Schaffer, but added that for these to be effective, the individual moves need to be followed up and that tactics need to be wedded to strategies that would involve a broader vision and the willingness to make compromises.

Mr. Dennis Kux, a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Centre and author of a recent work on U.S.-Pakistan relations talked about the Agra summit in terms of being ``another'' summit between the two countries from the days of Jawaharlal Nehru and that there was indeed a pattern - certain amount of hoopla and build-up, some agreements and then it all starts to peter out. The hope is that it will be different this time, Mr. Kux noted.

Expressing reasonable optimism that the coming meeting of the leaders will be a success, Mr. Kux argued that the Agra summit would have a better outcome not only if there was agreement on the process but also if New Delhi and Islamabad get moving on over Siachen, the nuclear issues and work on the internal arrangements to lower the temperature on Kashmir.

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Section  : International
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