U.S. Security Challenges in South Asia.

Key Points

* India seeks to be a global player and has charted a largely
autonomous course since it gained independence.

* In the 1980s, Pakistan cultivated and received some U.S.
attention as a strategic balance to India and as a conduit
for supplies to Afghanistan.

* Since independence, India-Pakistan tensions have centered on
the dispute over Kashmir and have been influenced by global
strategic shifts, particularly the policies of the USSR
(now Russia), the U.S., and China.

India

The U.S. has had an uneven relationship with India since the former British colony gained independence in 1947. During the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. looked to India as a large, poor, democratic challenger to large, poor, communist China. In 1956, India was the largest recipient of U.S. economic assistance. The U.S. responded to a widespread famine in 1965-66 both with a food aid program and with technology that supported the controversial chemical-intensive agriculture of the Green Revolution. Yet throughout this period, India, as a founding member of the nonaligned movement, which claimed political independence from both cold war superpowers, was an important voice for developing countries, a role it continues to play today.

Infrequently, the U.S. and India assist one another on security issues. During India's 1962 war with China, the U.S. sent an aircraft carrier to the Bay of Bengal in response to an Indian request. It also provided India limited military assistance in 1963 (at the cost of alienating Pakistan to some extent). After the 1965 war between India and Pakistan, the U.S. largely lost interest in a subcontinent whose cold war implications were, at best, ambiguous. After 1971, India built a robust relationship of convenience with the Soviet Union: India received military equipment at low prices and the Soviets successfully limited U.S. and Chinese influence in India. However, during the Gulf War in 1991, India allowed U.S. aircraft en route to the conflict zone to refuel in Bombay. Still, India continues to import aircraft from Russia and maintains a complex relationship with China.

From the U.S. perspective, the most challenging aspect of India's security policy is its longstanding position regarding nuclear weapons. Since well before the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) negotiations concluded in 1968, India has regarded global nuclear disarmament as a paramount common security interest. However, Indian officials have insisted on the right to retain India's nuclear option as long as other countries retain their nuclear armaments. India has viewed U.S. insistence that India unilaterally renounce its right to produce nuclear weapons as hypocritical, and this difference of opinion was magnified after India's nuclear tests. Since then, India's position has insisted on the right to maintain a "credible minimum nuclear deterrent."

Pakistan

Since its independence in 1947, the government of Pakistan sought to link its regional security concerns to the cold war dynamic. Pakistan and the U.S. reached a bilateral security agreement in 1954 and, together with Iran and Turkey, formed the Central Treaty Organization in 1959. From the Pakistani perspective, the U.S. let it down twice: in 1965, after the second India-Pakistan war, when Washington imposed an arms embargo on both India (which imported little) and Pakistan; and in 1971, when the U.S. voiced only symbolic opposition to Indian involvement in the war that led to the creation of Bangladesh. U.S. assistance to Pakistan remained negligible throughout the 1970s and, in 1979, U.S. aid to Pakistan was suspended for a few months due to suspicions that Pakistan was developing nuclear weapons.

Later in 1999 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, leaving Pakistan on the frontline of U.S. "containment" of the Soviet Union. In 1981, the U.S. and Pakistan signed a $3.2-billion military and economic assistance agreement and, for the next decade, Pakistan became a funnel for supplies to Afghan resistance fighters. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the U.S. Congress cut assistance in order to punish Pakistan for its continuing nuclear weapons research. During the past decade, Pakistan's chief military collaborator has been China, which has provided ballistic missile and nuclear components to Islamabad.

Kashmir

India-Pakistan tensions since independence have centered on the disputed status of the bordering state of Kashmir. In 1947 Kashmir was a semiautonomous kingdom on the India-Pakistan boundary. At the time of partition, conflict over whether Kashmir would join either country or declare independence resulted in armed conflict between the armies of the new countries. A UN-mediated cease-fire arrangement drew a Line of Control (LoC) through the former kingdom: India controls approximately two-thirds of the area and Pakistan one-third. A 1948 UN resolution called for a plebiscite among Kashmiri citizens to determine the fate of the kingdom; India rejects this proposal. Another resolution called for the Pakistani Army to vacate Pakistan-administered Kashmir prior to the plebiscite; Pakistan rejects this provision.

Sumit Ganguly ([e-mail]) is a visiting fellow at the Center for International Security and Arms Control, Stanford University. David Stuligross ([e-mail]) is the South Asia editor at Asian Survey and coordinates the South Asia Nuclear Dialogue at the Nautilus Institute.