Christine Rocca 
Robert Blackwill
Posted on 04/21/2003 6:57:29 PM PDT by Joseph_Erulkar
In the end, even his personal friendship with the President could not help the Professor save his job in New Delhi. Robert Blackwill, the US ambassador to India who announced his resignation today, was left with little choice but to take that return ticket to Harvard because of his constant and increasingly unpleasant run-ins with a US State Department that sought to openly wear its predilection for Pakistan on its sleeve.
The last time a genteel exchange of views between India and the US — led, respectively, by foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal and US assistant secretary of state for South Asia Christina Rocca — degenerated into the diplomatic version of a boxing bout, there was so much blood on the floor that hardened diplomats on both sides were shocked into silence. Most of the blood, it now turns out, was Blackwill’s.
It happened in early February when Sibal flew to Washington for talks with the American establishment. Rocca, a former CIA operative with little or no experience of South Asia when she came to this job a couple of years ago, confronted Sibal with the ‘‘fact’’ that New Delhi was deliberately turning up the tension with Pakistan by threatening to take ‘‘strong measures’’. Rocca cited Ambassador Blackwill’s cables from New Delhi to Washington in support of her accusation. Blackwill’s comments were, in fact, just underlining the Indian government’s position.
Sibal, unwilling to take the blame for a plan of action that was supposed to be more feint than fact, was forced to deny the substance of Blackwill’s comments. As far as Rocca and her groupie critics of India were concerned, that was only another black mark in the top-secret file marked ‘Robert Blackwill, Esq’.
The anti-Blackwill bureaucrats in the State Department’s South Asia bureau, analysts here point out, had already been strengthened in their ‘‘irritation’’ of India by the non-proliferation hawks in Washington, who believed that the rest of the world was already beginning to forget about punishing New Delhi over its de facto nuclear status.
As pointperson in the South Asia bureau, Rocca’s ‘‘sisterhood’’ in Washington with the former Pakistani ambassador to the US, Maleeha Lodhi, as well as the former US ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlin, was well-known. Despite US national security advisor Condoleezza Rice’s friendship with Principal Secretary Brajesh Mishra and deputy US secretary of state Richard Armitage’s friendly feelings towards Sibal and the New Delhi crowd, Rocca strongly believed that it was in America’s interest to give General Musharraf — whether over Kashmir or Afghanistan — a longer and longer rope, sources here said.
Already, with the tension in the US government — between Rice and the Pentagon on one side and Colin Powell’s State Department on the other — being stretched over much more important issues like Iraq, it would be a matter of time before the dam burst on the India-Pakistan story.
Seen to be ‘‘overly supportive’’ of India’s line — whether on Kashmir, taking a tough line on terrorism against Pakistan or urging compromise on the transfer of dual-use nuclear-missile technology to India — Blackwill began to get increasingly out of step with the pro-Pakistan line of the US State Department.
It didn’t help that Blackwill had also been chastised barely a year ago by the foreign service inspector in the US bureaucracy for harshly treating his staff in the New Delhi mission. At an inspection mission here last year, Blackwill’s subordinates were said to have been more than withering about the ‘‘autocratic’’ manner in which he dealt with them.
Certainly, the US ambassador’s overly brusque style, where he treated his guests at dinner in Roosevelt House in New Delhi with an often disdainful wave of the hand that many mistook for contempt — often giving them, in his exaggerated professorial style, a two or ten-minute deadline to make themselves heard around the round table — did not really make him a popular item on New Delhi’s burgeoning social circuit. (Not that a dinner invitation by him was still not a coveted item.)
Unlike his predecessors, the Celestes, who made Brand America as much a Page Three story as a Page One number, the Blackwill-Hildebrand duo preferred intellectual stimulation to frothy company. Still, Blackwill’s Scandinavian wife, Wera, said to be a scholar in her own right, caused quite a minor furore at an ICCR-sponsored literary meet last year when she chastised V S Naipaul around a Neemrana table for his impolitic utterances on both life and politics. Naipaul was said to be so furious that he threatened to walk out of the literary meet. He was persuaded to stay.
Back to Rocca. While observers here hesitate to brand her as a modern-day Robin Raphel — the distinctly anti-Indian assistant secretary of state for South Asia in the first Clinton administration — they point out that Rocca has not hesitated to push the line that New Delhi sees as double standard. That is, talk to Pakistan even without a discernible reduction in cross-border terrorism.
With Blackwill reduced to being a toothless tiger before he returns to Harvard by the end of August, Indo-US ties seem headed for a long, parched summer ahead. It will take all of Richard Armitage’s diplomatic skills when he comes to the sub-continent next month, analysts say, to not only ensure that Musharraf sticks to his promise of ending infiltration but also push the bilateral relationship full steam ahead.
But I have known many Indians and several Pakistanis. The US should side with India.
Christine Rocca Robert Blackwill
Welcome to FR, BTW.
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