Post Washington

http://www.newsinsight.net/archivedebates/nat2.asp?recno=1916

It should be clear to the Manmohan Singh government that India's survival depends on strategic independence, says N.V.Subramanian.

25 November 2009: The PM will return from the United States empty-handed. And even while Manmohan Singh was on his "first official state visit" to Barack Obama's America, the Agni-II failed on its first night launch. What do these two developments add up to?

There was never any expectation that the Manmohan-Obama summit (if it can be called that) would produce definable returns. This writer, at any rate, had nil expectations, and had described the general course of Manmohan Singh's US tour in a commentary titled "Manmohan's US visit" (6 November 2009), closing that with the advice that, at best, the PM should try to be Obama's "friend" in the US's hour of distressing decline. By calling Manmohan Singh "wise" and a man of "honesty and integrity", Obama has sought that close friendship with the PM that the previous US president, George W.Bush, had so successfully won. That friendship, as was predicted, will come about. But, ironically, it will not get the US and India any closer.

Why is that? However you look at it, America is in decline. This decline is unlike the faux decline after the 1929 Great Crash, the post-1973 Oil Shock, the reverses in Vietnam leading to withdrawal, the disastrous Carter term, the latter Clinton years (although without the Soviet Union, the US lost its competitive greatness), and so forth. Nor is Bush II entirely to blame for the decline, although he surely speeded it up. Obama, in contrast, US strategists say, is leading the country down through a process that they call "elegant decline", which is, in part, an angry denunciation of his masses of elegant but basically meaningless rhetoric.

Obama is essentially chasing three things, in which India serves only to be extracted from, but to be gifted zilch in return. One is Obama's "Nobel cause". This is a World Without Nuclear Weapons. Obama has to justify the Nobel Peace Prize which was given precisely to produce this never-never land without nukes. Indian nukes, that fall outside the NPT regime, are one of the principal threats to the Nobel-Obama "vision". India won't sign the present NPT because it will out-treaty its own nuclear weapons. So what's the way out? Choke its weapons' programme, not directly, which is not possible, but put limits on its fissile materials' production (through FMCT, which Manmohan Singh has agreed with Obama to negotiate), and freeze its weapons' quality in their present primitive stage (via CTBT; Manmohan Singh has again committed to the voluntary test moratorium).

The Indo-US nuclear deal also stands against the Nobel-Obama vision. The US non-proliferation lobby has succeeded with its canard that the nuclear deal frees India's domestic uranium resources for weapons' use. Even without the lobby, the Democratic president Obama is not only persuaded about the non-proliferation ideology, he is its active, enthusiastic and leading proponent. It is true that Obama mentioned India as a "nuclear power" while welcoming Manmohan Singh, but it was a passing reference, and it would be perilous to build on it, as Manmohan Singh's spin masters are engaged in doing. If the US can pause and, who knows, even retract from a signed 123 (as it is trying to do on generic power-reactor and specific ENR-technology exports), what does a mere reference in a welcoming speech count? It is simply rhetoric, and Obama is all (and only) about rhetoric. This writer's considered opinion is that the US will not operationalize the nuclear deal at least in Obama's first term (Bush II was looking to make History with the deal; Obama has completely the opposite plans), compel India's dependence on non-US, imported power reactors, and then force those importers to make further fuel provisions conditional on India drinking up the entire noxious alphabet soup of discriminatory WMD so-called non-proliferation regimes.

The second of those three things Obama is chasing (mentioned in the foregoing) may be loosely termed presidential purpose I. This is to end the US engagement in Afghanistan-Pakistan. On 1 December, Obama is expected to announce his planned surge in Afghanistan, and it is this writer's analysis that it will fall far short of what his Afghanistan commander, General Stanley McChrystal, has demanded (forty thousand soldiers), which again at least ten times underestimates the troops' strength required to put down both the Taliban-led insurgency/ terrorism and Al-Qaeda's terrorism in Afghanistan, which ultimately will be directed against continental United States. Speaking to reporters in the presence of Manmohan Singh, Obama said that the international community (meaning US allies) had to shoulder the burden of Afghanistan, and that the Afghan people had eventually to provision for their own security. It needs little genius to figure from this that the US is on its way out from Afghanistan.

What's the extraction from India on Af-Pak? The Obama administration may resurrect the bogus link between Pakistani good behaviour in Afghanistan and India bending on Kashmir. Richard Holbrooke has said no to US mediation between India and Pakistan, but Obama in wanting a small increase of troops (that does not qualify to be a surge) to succeed in Afghanistan may want partners and near-neighbours to "pitch in", and pitching in for India would mean a dialogue with Pakistan leading to concessions on Kashmir. Concessions on Kashmir are a closed option, but that doesn't prevent the US from trying again, working on the Obama-Manmohan chemistry. There is after all the example of Sharm-el-Sheikh. On the other hand, India anxieties about Afghanistan won't be addressed, because India directly cannot assist US goals in that country by deploying its military. But Pakistan and, because of China's leverage on Pakistan, China can, at least in theory, be of assistance to the US in Afghanistan, although both countries are working hand-in-hand to rid America from there. So in Obama's presidential purpose I, India does not fit, unless it can be wrung dry on Kashmir.

Obama's third chase may be called presidential purpose II, which is to revive the US economy with China's help, and overcome American indebtedness to the Chinese. Despite Obama's most abject genuflection to the Chinese on his latest China visit, totalitarian Beijing is not bending. Obama does not have plan B to make China amenable. An emerging counterweight to China (like India, for example) would make its one-party leadership reassess its arrogance, but Obama, tellingly, did not meet the India-residing Dalai Lama before his summit with Hu Jintao, and he has brought his infamous dither to the Indo-US nuclear deal, which China persistently has objected to as a countervailing instrument to its rise. Obama's final bidded extraction from India, which India rejected in time, was offering China a policing role in South Asia. But an opened door like that won't shut easily or for long.

Which leads to Obama's quest for an "elegant decline" for the US. Pulling out of Afghanistan (where India can play a no more pro-US role than now) remains a sine qua non for giving elegance to that decline (some elegance, that), because it will considerably staunch the economic-military haemorrhaging of the US, and Pakistan and China are key to that exercise. And feeding on the US economy like a "vampire squid", China almost dictates American financial choices. So where does it leave India in US plans? Nowhere. China's rise has come at considerable cost to the US (although the US remains innocent to this reality), but India's rise has not hurt anyone terribly (the Bangalore phenomenon is vastly exaggerated). By a quirk of national fate, though, India is being called to account, in a fashion, because its rise has largely been autonomous (internal demand fueling growth more than exports) and non-threatening.

That takes you to the second critical development during Manmohan Singh's US tour mentioned in the opening paragraph, which is the failure of the first Agni II night launch. It is strange that while the military is insisting on retesting missiles before accepting them, it is not exercising the same degree of due diligence in the matter of nuclear warheads to be fitted on them, especially miniaturized thermonuclear warheads. It is undeniable that the Pokhran II thermonuke failed to explode as planned. If a tested Agni II fails on a new mission, how can the government sit pretty with a thermonuke that flunked in its first and only test?

Manmohan Singh's non-visit to the US and the failed Agni II night launch add up to this. India, as this writer has indicated before (Commentary, "The coming isolation," 11 November 2009), is on its own, as it has been for so much of its post-Independence history. There is nothing to suggest that Barack Obama is fundamentally ill-disposed towards India (like say Nixon), but he can do little for this country, both because he is weak and indecisive (decisively indecisive), and since the US is in irreversible decline. It would be very advisable, therefore, to plot India's political and military rise and to enhance its abilities to influence international decision-making and outcomes in the same manner as the country has become an emerging economic power -- by tapping on its own genius and great internal strengths.

On the strategic/ military aide (since this writer is more concerned with it), the minimum beginning to make is that India restores confidence in its deterrent. The threat from China and Pakistan will multiply in the foreseeable future, and it is instructive that if the Chinese won't bend to the US president, New Delhi can expect little reprieve from Beijing. At a time of its choosing (which has to be soon), India has to conduct a third series of nuclear tests on an array of thermonuclear weapons. India's survival rests on strategic independence.

N.V.Subramanian is Editor, www.NewsInsight.net, and writes internationally on strategic affairs. He has authored two novels, University of Love (Writers Workshop, Calcutta) and Courtesan of Storms (Har-Anand, Delhi).

Please visit N.V.Subramanian's blog http://courtesanofstorms.blog.com/ and write to him at envysub@gmail.com