Avoiding Armageddon Read online

  India and Pakistan will be among the most important countries in the twenty-first century. In Avoiding Armageddon, Bruce Riedel clearly explains the challenge and the importance of successfully managing America’s affairs with these two emerging powers and their toxic relationship.

  Born from the British Raj, the two nations share a common heritage, but they are different in many important ways. India is already the world’s largest democracy and will soon become the planet’s most populous nation. Pakistan, soon to be the fifth most populous country, has a troubled history of military coups, dictators, and harboring terrorists such as Osama bin Laden.

  The longtime rivals are nuclear powers, with tested weapons. They have fought four wars with each other and have gone to the brink of war several times. Meanwhile, U.S. presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have been increasingly involved in the region’s affairs. In the past two decades alone, the White House has intervened several times to prevent nuclear confrontation on the subcontinent. South Asia clearly is critical to American national security, and the volatile relationship between India and Pakistan is the crucial factor determining whether the region can ever be safe and stable.

  Based on extensive research and Riedel’s role in advising four U.S. presidents on the region, Avoiding Armageddon reviews the history of American diplomacy in South Asia, the crises that have flared in recent years, and the prospects for future crisis. Riedel provides an in-depth look at the Mumbai terrorist attack in 2008, the worst terrorist outrage since 9/11, and he concludes with authoritative analysis on what the future is likely to hold for America and the South Asia puzzle as well as recommendations on how Washington should proceed.

  COVER PHOTO © ISTOCKPHOTO

  JACKET BY SESE-PAUL DESIGN

  BRUCE RIEDEL is director of the Brookings Intelligence Project. He is the author of The Search for al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology, and Future and Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of the Global Jihad, both published by Brookings. He is a frequent media commentator on security and terrorism and is also a regular contributor to The Daily Beast.

  AVOIDING ARMAGEDDON

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  A BROOKINGS FOCUS BOOK

  AVOIDING ARMAGEDDON

  AMERICA, INDIA, AND PAKISTAN TO THE BRINK AND BACK

  Bruce Riedel

  BROOKINGS INSTITUTION PRESS

  Washington, D.C.

  ABOUT BROOKINGS

  The Brookings Institution is a private nonprofit organization devoted to research, education, and publication on important issues of domestic and foreign policy. Its principal purpose is to bring the highest quality independent research and analysis to bear on current and emerging policy problems. Interpretations or conclusions in Brookings publications should be understood to be solely those of the authors.

  Copyright © 2013

  THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION

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  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the Brookings Institution Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Riedel, Bruce O.

  Avoiding Armageddon: America, India, and Pakistan to the brink and back / Bruce Riedel.

  pages; cm. — (Brookings focus books)

  Summary: “Traces the history of the United States, India, and Pakistan as British colonies and their interaction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particularly in regard to relations between India and Pakistan, nuclear proliferation, the global jihad movement, and U.S. diplomatic efforts to stabilize conditions on the subcontinent”—Provided by publisher.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-8157-2408-7 (hardcover: alkaline paper)

  1. United States—Foreign relations—South Asia. 2. South Asia—Foreign relations—United States. 3. India—Foreign relations—Pakistan. 4. Pakistan—Foreign relations—India. 5. Terrorism—South Asia—Prevention. 6. Nuclear arms control—South Asia. I. Title. II. Series: Brookings focus books.

  DS341.3.U6R54 2013

  327.73054—dc23

  2012046847

  Composition by Cynthia Stock

  Silver Spring, Maryland

  This book is dedicated to my son, Christopher.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1 Mumbai on Fire

  2 America, the Raj, and Partition

  3 In the Shadow of the Cold War: The First Forty Years

  4 The Carter and Reagan Years

  5 From Crisis to Crisis: Bush and Clinton

  6 Bush, Mush, and Sonia

  7 Obama and South Asia

  8 Promoting Game Change in South Asia

  Notes

  Index

  PREFACE

  PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA made his first substantive call to a foreign leader on November 28, 2008, amid terrible tragedy. India, the world’s largest democracy, was still in shock from an attack by ten Pakistani terrorists that had killed more than 160 people, six of them Americans, and wounded hundreds in the city of Mumbai, the country’s financial capital. Obama began his conversation with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who had called Obama just two weeks earlier to congratulate him on his stunning election victory, with words of condolence: “I wish it was a happier time. America is with you in these days; all my hopes and prayers are with you today, and all the hopes and prayers of America.” The prime minister responded by saying that the call meant a lot to him and to India. “Your call is a ray of sanity in this time,” he said, adding that their two countries needed “to fight the curse of terrorism” together. Then he told the president-elect that “all indications point to Karachi as the launch site for this attack. I have told this to Pakistani President Asif ali Zardari.” Obama noted that he was not yet sworn in as president but vowed that once in office, “I will work with you to ensure this tragedy is never allowed to happen again.”

  Now, four years after the Mumbai attack, a great deal more is known about its perpetrators and objectives than Obama and Singh knew in 2008. It was the result of a very complex plot involving an equally complex cast of deadly actors. It was also a turning point in the history of America’s relations with India. For the first time, American and Indian citizens had been targeted together by the global jihad movement. For more than 200 years, America and India had been distant and often cold friends. The United States had watched with admiration India’s fight for independence from Great Britain and more recently its rise as a global power, but there had also been many years of tension between Washington and New Delhi. Now, for the first time, the two h
ad a common enemy. As the president-elect’s adviser on South Asian issues during the campaign and the transition and as the note taker for this call, I felt that history was changing in front of me.

  At the same time it was déjà vu. During their short history as independent nations, India and Pakistan have fought four wars against each other and have often edged to the brink of yet another one, and in 2008 there was widespread concern that the horror in Mumbai would lead to a fifth. Fortunately it did not, but the next mass casualty terrorism attack in India may well bring the two nuclear-armed states not just to war but to nuclear war. The risk of war in South Asia is all too real. The last war that India and Pakistan fought, over Kargil, threatened to expand to a nuclear conflict. Since the Kargil war the two countries have experienced several dangerous crises. In 2001 and 2002 they mobilized for war. In 2008 Mumbai exploded. But the two nations can also create a better future—Nirvana, if you like—in South Asia. By focusing on ending their differences and building bridges to each other, literally and figuratively, India and Pakistan could together become one of the most prosperous parts of the globe in the twenty-first century.

  India was the richest country in the world in the fifteenth century, when Europeans found both the passage around Africa to India and the Atlantic path to the Western Hemisphere. At that time, India and China together produced about 40 percent of the globe’s gross national product. However, the rise of the European empires that followed the great explorers like Vasco da Gama, who first reached India, and Christopher Columbus, who discovered North America, changed the locus of the world’s economy, and by 1900 India and China accounted for only 20 percent of global product. Now at the dawn of the third millennium, the pendulum has shifted back. By 2030, the two Asian giants will again produce 40 percent of the world’s GNP.

  This book is in part about America’s relationship with one of these giants: India, the world’s largest democracy and soon to be the most populous country on the planet. The rise of India—or the return of India to global power status—is a good-news story. Hundreds of millions have escaped poverty in India in the last few decades and more will do so in the decade ahead. As a democracy, India holds the world’s largest elections, and each time that it does it breaks the record for the largest organized human activity in history. India today is a great success.

  America and India are often described as natural allies. To some extent that is true. Since they sit on opposite sides of the globe, they have no territorial disputes. They are both democracies that prize their citizens’ civil liberties and freedoms. Both have created entrepreneurial geniuses who have built thriving middle classes. Yet the history of the relationship between the two countries has not been one of natural allies. Both were born of the British Empire, which ruled more of the world than any other nation in history, but independence came to America just as India was being conquered by the British. Once India achieved its freedom (with a little backstage help from Washington), the relationship between India and the United States was far from close or warm. Indeed, for most of its first fifty years, India was as much an adversary of America as anything else, and even the end of the cold war did not bring greater harmony. In 1998 relations dipped to a low when India tested nuclear weapons. Today there is much talk about the natural alliance, but in practice the partnership is still thin, arguably more hype than fact. Certainly, much of the potential of the U.S.-India relationship is still to be achieved.

  A major reason for the disharmony in the U.S.-India relationship—perhaps the most important reason—is a third party, Pakistan. Pakistan, today the sixth-largest country in the world and soon to be the fifth, was born, as was India, in the partition of British India in 1947. From the start, the two great powers of South Asia have been deadly rivals. Pakistan is a rising power in its own right, a fact too often lost on those dazzled by India’s rise next door. If Pakistan were situated anywhere but next to India, it would be recognized as a power at least as influential today as Turkey, Brazil, or Indonesia. In fact, with its nuclear arsenal, the fastest growing in the world, it is of great importance. That is not to say that the two countries are identical or equivalent powers; obviously India is much larger, and so far it has been much more successful on many accounts. Pakistan meanwhile has become a center of terrorism, a victim and patron of terror at the same time. But both are very important nations whose future will have a great impact on that of the United States.

  So the real challenge for America in South Asia in the twenty-first century is coping with the rise of two powers, India and Pakistan. America has tried to maintain good relations with both and to deal with each on its own merits—a policy called, in the jargon of South Asia watchers in America, “dehyphenating the relationship.” It is a laudable goal, but geography makes it a mirage. The two rivals cannot be separated in many important ways, and U.S. policy cannot undo geography. Tailored policies are needed for each, and bilateral relations must be separate and specific to each. Washington should not hyphenate when it does not need to, but it should not pretend that geography and history are irrelevant. The interplay between the two cannot be ignored.

  India’s rise to global power in both economic and strategic terms is one of the defining events of the twenty-first century. How America interacts with India is among the most important foreign policy challenges that Washington faces, and it will be harder to meet than many assume. The history of the two is more troubled than is often realized, and Pakistan casts a complex and controversial shadow over the relationship. Simplistic suggestions such as the proposal that India and America “gang up” on Pakistan are recipes for disaster. Ignoring the issue is foolhardy.

  This book describes how America and India have interacted since 1500, with the emphasis on recent times. It shows that their natural alliance is not natural at all, that it requires hard work and compromise. It also explains the tortured path of America’s relationship with Pakistan, in particular the challenge that Pakistan presents to building a strong U.S.-India partnership and to managing U.S.-Afghanistan policy. Ultimately, it highlights the urgent need for Washington, New Delhi, and Islamabad to find new solutions to the problems in their traditional interactions before disaster strikes.

  The book begins with a detailed analysis of what is now known about the Mumbai terror attack, the worst in the world since 9/11 and a very important case study in American diplomacy during an Indo-Pakistani crisis. Then, for some historical perspective, it looks back at how today’s India, Pakistan, and America were born of a common parent, the British Empire. The book next focuses on the relationship among the three countries since 1947, examining how twelve American presidents have engaged with India and Pakistan. Although much could be said about the economic relations of the three, I am not an economist, so I leave that for others to do. The primary focus here is on diplomacy, counterterrorism, and nuclear affairs.

  India and Pakistan attract and dazzle even as they sometimes confound and confuse. For me they are the most interesting and exciting countries in the world—very different from America in many ways and yet very similar in others, changing faster than ever and yet ancient and eternal. I have spent much of my life trying to understand India and trying to build the “natural” alliance between India and the United States, and I have spent an equal amount of time trying to find common ground with Pakistan so that an enduring partnership with America can emerge. I have had the honor of working for four presidents as they grappled with India and Pakistan in the White House. This book is the result.

  Over the last several years I have also had the honor of teaching students at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies about the politics and history of America’s relations with the countries of South Asia. My students have made me smarter and more thoughtful about these issues, and I want to thank them for doing so. I am grateful to Dan Byman and Walter Andersen for asking me to teach at these great institutions.

  I
also want to thank my colleagues at the Brookings Institution for their insights and comments on my work. Stephen Cohen is the dean of South Asian scholarship in America, and he has been an immense source of inspiration and insight. Both Strobe Talbott and Martin Indyk, who were my partners in government and who brought me to Brookings in 2007, are mentors and friends. Michael O’Hanlon, research director in Foreign Policy at Brookings, provided excellent insights on the manuscript. Two fantastic research assistants, Aysha Chowdhry and Irena Sargsyan, have given me tremendous assistance with the project. Special thanks is also due to the Brookings Institution Press, especially its director Robert Faherty and my editor, Eileen Hughes, for their friendship and fine work.

  Throughout the book I have tried to let the Americans directly involved in the diplomatic interactions among the United States, India, and Pakistan—from Admiral Nimitz and John Kenneth Galbraith to Strobe Talbott and Rick Inderfurth—speak for themselves through their own words and memories. I am, of course, solely responsible for any errors of fact or judgment. The Central Intelligence Agency has reviewed this book to ensure that there is no disclosure of classified information. Nothing in the following pages should be construed as asserting or implying that any branch of government has authenticated the information herein or endorsed my views. All the statements and opinions herein are solely mine. This book is dedicated to my son, Christopher, who has always made me very proud. Finally, my deepest thanks are to my wife, Elizabeth, for making the journey so joyful.

  CHAPTER ONE