Posted on 05/25/2005 3:39:32 AM PDT by CarrotAndStick
Washington, May 24: No bilateral relationship during US President George W. Bush's first term improved as much as that between the US and India, former US ambassador to India Robert D. Blackwill has said.
"From the beginning, the President saw India as an answer to some of America's major geopolitical problems, rather than, as did his immediate predecessor, as a persistent non-proliferation problem that required an American-imposed solution," he wrote in an article India, our natural ally in leading American quarterly The National Interest.
Some attribute this expansion in relations to the impact of 9/11. But this is not the case, he said.
Blackwill said President Bush and his (then) National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice perceived India as a strategic opportunity for the United States and not a constantly irritating recalcitrant.
Right from the start, beginning with the transition, the White House developed a strategy to invigorate US-India ties and decided to stop hectoring India about its nuclear weapons.
"We began to speak about transforming the US-India relationship," he said.
For most of the President's first four years, Blackwill reveals, this strategic objective produced a constant struggle with two entrenches forces in the bureaucracy of the US government.
"The first were the non-proliferation 'ayatollahs,' as the Indians call them, who, despite the fact that the White House was intentionally redefining our relationship, sought to maintain without essential change all of the non-proliferation approaches towards India that had been pursued in the Clinton administration," he wrote.
"During the first year of the Bush presidency, I vividly recall receiving routine instructions in New Delhi from the State Department all the counterproductive language from the Clinton administration's approach to India's nuclear weapons programme," Blackwill said.
"These nagging nannies were alive and well in that State Department labyrinth. I, of course, did not implement those instructions. It took me months and many calls to the White House to finally cut off the head of this snake back home."
The second, says Blackwill, is related to what he would call the "hyphenators," those within the US government who would view India only through a Pakistan-India perspective.
With respect to their public statements during these years, if one does a search using the word "India," one will find invariably that the word "Pakistan" appears in the same sentence or the following sentences, or both.
The former envoy said while the intellectual basis for transforming the US-Indian relationship was firmly in place in the first term, the implementation was sometimes halting because of constant bureaucratic combat.
The visit of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to New Delhi in March demonstrated that the US-Indian relationship is now being rapidly accelerated.
"In my view the US should now integrate India into the evolving global non-proliferation regime as a friendly nuclear weapons state. We should end constraints on assistance to and cooperation with India's civil nuclear industry and high-tech trade, changing laws and policy when necessary. We should sell civil nuclear reactors to India, both to reduce the demand for Persian Gulf energy and to ease the environmental impact of India's vibrant economic growth.
Now that it is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, progress in this fruitful cultivation will be persued further. An accomplished foreign policy in this geopolitical arena is important enough for me to cast a vote and make it President Condoleezza Rice.
Throughout the history of our Republic, there has always been one abiding principle which is unchanging and eternal:
THE STATE DEPARTMENT IS ALWAYS WRONG.
The State Department - just about the last people you would want to see if you were an American in trouble overseas.
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