The U.S. stake in South Asia

MS. CHRISTINA ROCCA, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, has scrupulously followed the normative rules of a ``familiarisation tour'' during her visit to this region. No dramatic agreements have been announced in New Delhi or Islamabad. However, it is quite obvious that her intensive talks in these two South Asian capitals were designed to enable the Bush administration to chart out a road map for its ties with this sensitive zone of diverse countries with a shared history. It is no less significant that the U.S. wants to reorganise its relationship with each of the South Asian states as a ``stand- alone'' dynamic with such vibrance as might be possible. An approach of this kind is eminently reasonable, with the irrelevance of the old Cold-War logic of zero-sum games being just one of the contributory factors. The huge political difference between democratic India and Gen. Pervez Musharraf's Pakistan is another element which Ms. Rocca appears to have suitably reckoned with during her measured swing through this region. While in New Delhi, she sought to push forward the frontiers of an economic engagement, too, with India. In Islamabad, in contrast, a prime concern of her deliberations was about a fundamentally ideological characteristic of Pakistan's internal politics - a time frame for the restoration of democracy as a state attribute. Quite apart from the evident qualitative variations of this magnitude, the U.S. can only engage India and Pakistan, albeit separately, from the same standpoint on a range of issues. Washington's definitive interests as a global superpower define its perspectives over such matters as nuclear non-proliferation, international terrorism as also peace and stability in South Asia.

The ranking U.S. official has done well to underline the Bush administration's stated preference for a non-intrusive approach in regard to the latest efforts by India and Pakistan towards crafting a dialogue process. Supporting the idea of a sustained re-engagement between India and Pakistan, Ms. Rocca said the U.S. would want the two countries themselves to determine how best to resolve the Kashmir issue by suitably taking into account the wishes of the Kashmiri people. By articulating this rational position at length, she may have succeeded in putting New Delhi at ease over the nuances of Washington's intentions in the context of a recent offer by the U.S. Secretary of State, Gen. Colin Powell, to ``lend'' America's ``good offices''. It is also a measure of the growing maturity in India's interactions with the U.S. that New Delhi, too, did not make an issue of Gen. Powell's non-specific offer, which coincided with Ms. Rocca's arrival in South Asia nearly two weeks ago.

Recognising the imperative of freeing the U.S.-India equation from the psychological moorings of the sanctions that Washington imposed in the context of New Delhi's nuclear weaponisation tests of 1998, Ms. Rocca held out the promise of a brighter outlook even while indicating that the separate category of a pre-1998 embargo might still be viewed independently. Ms. Rocca's agenda in Pakistan included the parallel issue of deeply-layered sanctions, with the Musharraf administration pleading for parity with India for the removal of the economic and military injunctions that could be traced directly to Islamabad's nuclear detonations of 1998. However, Ms. Rocca dropped no hint about how the U.S. will apply the new thumb-rule of strict bilateralism in this connection. Given also Pakistan's American baggage of other sanctions - the Pressler embargo as also the punitive deal over Gen. Musharraf's suppression of internal democracy - the U.S. is trying to put Islamabad to a new criticality test of good faith. Islamabad's actions in respect of Afghanistan and international counter-terrorism seem to figure prominently in a long check list. The U.S. has not also lowered vigil over Pakistan in regard to proliferation issues.

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