The Progressive Response

The Progressive Response is a publication of Foreign Policy In Focus, a joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies. The project produces Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) briefs on various areas of current foreign policy debate. Electronic mail versions are available free of charge for subscribers. The Progressive Response is designed to keep the writers, contributors, and readers of the FPIF series informed about new issues and debates concerning U.S. foreign policy issues.

We encourage comments to the FPIF briefs and to opinions expressed in PR. We're working to make The Progressive Response informative and useful, so let us know how we're doing, via email to irc@irc-online.org. Please put "Progressive Response" in the subject line.

Editor: Tom Barry (IRC)

Table of Contents

I. Updates and Out-takes

U.S. SECURITY CHALLENGES IN SOUTH ASIA
By Sumit Ganguly and David Stuligross

NATIONALIST IDEOLOGIES AND MISPERCEPTIONS IN INDO-U.S. RELATIONS
By Arun Swamy

RELIGION IN TIBET
By A. Tom Grunfeld

II. Letters and Comments

NSOA REACTION

"UTTERLY PREPOSTEROUS" ANALYSIS

I. Updates and Out-takes

U.S. SECURITY CHALLENGES IN SOUTH ASIA
By Sumit Ganguly and David Stuligross

(Editor's Note: This issue of the Progressive Response is devoted largely to South Asia issues to coincide with President Clinton's visit to India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. John Gershman of the Institute for Development Research and FPIF's Asia-Pacific Editor edited the policy brief on security challenges and the policy brief on India. The "U.S. Security Challenges in South Asia" policy brief, which is excerpted below, will be posted in its entirety on the FPIF website tomorrow, March 21.)

The U.S. administration would do well to take far greater cognizance of how U.S. global interests mesh with South Asian regional ones. U.S. influence will be most effective if it is well focused. For example, pressure to sign the CTBT is meaningless. Until the U.S. first ratifies the CTBT and pursues a more robust arms control agenda, India will not come on board. A vocal intellectual minority notwithstanding, Pakistan will not sign the CTBT until its large neighbor has done so. Clinton's desire to be the CTBT president was quashed by his own Senate; he will serve no substantive purpose by pressing the issue in South Asia. He could, however, promote further action by both India and Pakistan on developing more extensive confidence building mechanisms as well as containing the further weaponization of their extant nuclear weapons capabilities. Delicate and determined leadership is required, and the Clinton administration could provide the impetus for negotiations in this direction.

Clinton could play the terrorism card, but must use considerable care in doing so. In Pakistan, Clinton is faced with a few choices: 1) he could abandon his pursuit of an antiterrorist agenda and leave the current government to chart its own course; 2) he could focus single-mindedly on creating incentives for Pakistan to use its influence to bring Osama bin Laden to U.S. justice; or 3) he could attempt a more nuanced approach to combating terrorism. The latter could include a statement by the Musharraf government rejecting state sponsorship of terrorism as well as concrete steps to break the links joining Pakistani civilian and military officials with Afghani- and Kashmiri-based terrorist groups. In exchange, the U.S. could provide financial resources for such antiterrorist initiatives. This approach is more likely to address the bin Laden problem than other strategy, because it would enhance the stability of Pakistan's current military government. The stick to balance the carrot involves Kashmir. Clinton should remind Pakistan that if it does not move against supporters of terrorists in Afghanistan and Kashmir, Washington will lend support to the position that the LoC in Kashmir should be considered a de jure international border.

Having decided to go to Pakistan, there is no way for Clinton to escape a de facto legitimization of the military regime. But though the Clinton administration must be realistic about the limits of U.S. power, it should not underestimate U.S. leverage in Pakistan. Trade and aid both strengthen central governments, and both U.S. and multilateral assistance are critical to Pakistan's stability. The Clinton administration could ensure that this assistance is doled out slowly and only after measurable progress on the principal U.S. concerns: nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and democracy.

Regarding democracy, the U.S. should not push for a rapid return to elected civilian rule in Pakistan. Instead, the U.S. should devote political and financial resources to promoting respect for basic human rights, monitoring progress on the Musharraf government's timetable for a return to democratic rule, and supporting the construction of the state institutions necessary to make elected civilian rule function more democratically, such as tax systems and an independent judicial apparatus.

The U.S. needs to adopt a more evenhanded approach to the Kashmir question. Current U.S. policy has strengthened India's hand in the Kashmir conflict in two ways. First, the U.S. has not objected to India's use of antiterrorist rhetoric to justify its repression of militant challenges to its control of Indian-administered Kashmir. The U.S. must insist that India respect the basic human rights of Kashmiris living in the area it controls and move to craft institutions that provide meaningful political representation to currently disaffected citizens in this troubled state.

Second, like India, the U.S. has maintained that the Kashmir conflict should be resolved through bilateral negotiations rather than through international mediation, which is Pakistan's preferred option. Washington should pressure India to drop its demand for Pakistani withdrawal from the areas of Kashmir it occupies as a precondition for bilateral negotiations.

(Sumit Ganguly <sumit2@leland.stanford.edu> is a Visiting Fellow at the Center for International Security and Arms Control, Stanford University. David Stuligross <dave@socrates.berkeley.edu> is the South Asia editor at Asian Survey and coordinates the South Asia Nuclear Dialogue at the Nautilus Institute.)

Sources for More Information:

Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security
University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana
Email: acdis@uiuc.edu
Website: http://acdisweb.acdis.uiuc.edu/

Bangladesh Institute of Strategic Studies
Website: http://www.bangla.net/webera/biiss/

Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute
Website: http://cns.miis.edu/research/india/index.htm

Henry L. Stimson Center
Project on Confidence-Building Measures in South Asia
Email: cgagne@stimson.org
Website: http://www.stimson.org/cbm/sa/index.html

Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, Delhi
Website: http://www.idsa-india.org/

Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, New Delhi
Website: http://www.ipcs.org/

Nautilus Institute South Asia Nuclear Dialogue Project
Email: sandnet@nautilus.org
Website: http://www.nautilus.org/sand/index.html

Regional Centre for Security Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka
Website: http://www.rcss.org/

UC Berkeley "Webliography" on South Asia
Website: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/SSEAL/SouthAsia/nuclear.html

NATIONALIST IDEOLOGIES AND MISPERCEPTIONS IN INDO-U.S. RELATIONS
By Arun Swamy

(Editor's Note: The following policy recommendations are excerpted from an FPIF Policy Report by Arun Swamy that details the historical origins for continuing U.S. misperceptions of Indian politics. This timely policy report will be posted in its entirety tomorrow, March 21.)

Guidelines for building a more constructive relationship between the U.S. and India--one that overcomes the cycles of misperceptions and mistrust include the following: First, negotiate quietly to define limited, attainable changes. Second, identify objectives for which a significant domestic constituency exists. Third, avoid blatant and public arm-twisting along the lines of the "short tether" policy. Fourth, offer specific concessions to compensate for specific policy changes. Fifth, live up to your commitments.

Two other guidelines draw on the contemporary situation. First, recognize that Indian suspicions of U.S. intentions stem as much from conflicts over economic issues, like the role of labor standards in the WTO, as military ones. For Indians, American domination in the military and economic spheres is of one piece, and Clinton's penchant for compartmentalizing the arenas appears disingenuous. Second, recognize that India, like many other countries, views U.S. pretensions of leading a new order of international morality with great suspicion.

How would these guidelines be applied to the dual U.S. policy priorities of preventing nuclear war between Pakistan and India (as a result of escalated fighting in Kashmir) and halting nonproliferation? Nuclear stability requires rivals to agree clearly what they will and will not accept from each other. At present Pakistan's bottom line (self-determination for Kashmir) and India's bottom line (probably turning the ceasefire line into an international border) are too far apart to achieve this by pressing the two to discuss the substance of the dispute. There are, however, measures the Clinton administration could promote that would reduce the prospect of war if it were willing to clearly separate this goal from its non-proliferation concerns:

• Encourage both India and Pakistan to pull back heavy weaponry from the Line of Control.
• Encourage both sides to eliminate short-range missiles--which, unlike medium-range missiles are useless for deterring China and hard to monitor.
• Offer to use its spy satellites to monitor the movements and threaten Pakistan with punitive action if guerrillas crossed from its territory. The spy satellites played an important role in sorting out Indian and Pakistani claims last summer.
• Finally, the United States could press India to begin talks with the home-grown factions of the Kashmiri militancy, as it has with separatists in other regions. This is an act for which there is considerable domestic support in the opposition and which might well lead eventually to some form of self-determination--meeting Pakistan's stated goal--without requiring India to publicly reverse its opposition to a U.N.-mandated plebiscite.

These proposals would be a hard sell, but the very high cost India paid last summer and continues to pay for maintaining troops on high mountains and glaciers, might make it receptive.

None of these measures will be easy to achieve. The main hope for doing so will be to tacitly accept the existence of nuclear weapons in the subcontinent, but to insist that responsible nuclear powers make efforts to remove possible flashpoints with their nuclear adversaries, as the Soviet Union and the United States once did. This line, which has been adopted by the administration on occasion, is undermined by the intrusion of non-proliferation goals in a quite contradictory way. In fact, as non-proliferation advocates have pointed out, had the administration's goal been to compel India to adhere to the NPT, it should not have been talking to the Indian government for the last two years. The attention paid to India since 1998 has, if anything confirmed to the BJP that the bomb gets respect.

A more modest goal of slowing the growth of India's nuclear arsenal without capping it might, however, be attainable. India has been prevented from importing safety equipment for its highly dangerous nuclear reactors because of its refusal sign the NPT and place these under international supervision. India has refused to do this as it would permanently cap India's stockpile at its present level, while placing no limits on other countries. An arrangement that allowed the export of safety equipment to the most dangerous reactors and placing only these under international supervision might decrease India's production of fissile material to a trickle without capping it. Again, while the BJP government would resist this, growing domestic concerns about nuclear safety could prove a useful ally. Doing this, however, would require the administration to compromise on its own insistence on adhering to the rules of the NPT. To attempt to go much beyond this, however, would be both self-defeating and unnecessary. Sanctions have achieved little; the ritual condemnations of every Indian missile test achieve less. Ultimately, economic constraints and democratic politics will prevent any Indian government from launching a huge missile program.

Short of a conference on global nuclear disarmament, there is little the United States can do to reverse the status quo, whether it accepts it or not. Insisting that India formally agree to restrain its own behavior as an example to others, without the existing nuclear powers doing the same will likely meet with the same combination of resentment and defiance it has for decades. Applying extreme pressure to achieve this might even produce the unintended consequence of undermining the legitimacy of democratic institutions altogether.

(Arun Swamy <Arun.swamy@oberlin.edu> is a visiting professor of political science at Oberlin College.)

RELIGION IN TIBET
By A. Tom Grunfeld

(Editor's Note: The new FPIF policy brief by A. Tom Grunfeld of Empire State College will be posted on the FPIF website on March 23. We regret an editing error in a recent PR that may have given an inaccurate understanding of the history of China's claim of sovereignty over both Inner and Outer Tibet. The corrected sentence in the second paragraph should have read as follows: "In 1912 the13th Dalai Lama's unilaterally declared independence in 1912 but two years later signed a treaty granting Chinese 'suzerainty' over both 'Inner Tibet' and 'Outer Tibet,' exercising direct rule over the former while the latter remained autonomous." The following overview of religion in Tibet was excerpted from the policy brief.)

There are four religious teachings in Tibetan Buddhism and the distinctions between them can sometimes be confusing. The largest, and most recent, is the Gelug (Yellow Hat) of which the Dalai Lama is the leader. The others (sometimes referred collectively as Red Hat), in order of their membership, are the Nyingma (the oldest), Kagyu (the order with the Karmapa Lama known as the Black Hat Lama and a Sharmapa Lama known as the Red Hat Lama), and Sakya. There are also numerous sub-orders. Their theological similarities are greater than their differences.

There is no official hierarchy of lamas but while the Dalai Lama is only the head of one school, he is considered by almost all Tibetans to be their foremost spiritual leader although that does not mean they will all automatically obey every one of his instructions. Moreover, until 1959, he was also the theocratic head of the Tibetan government.

The Panchen Lama heads a Gelug Monastery (Tashilhumpo) in Tibet's second largest city, Shigatse, and is generally considered the second most important Tibetan cleric. The Karmapa Lama is often considered the third most influential lama.

II. Letters to the Editor/Comments

NSOA REACTION

I applaud your critical examination of the National Summit on Africa process.

A litmus test of the reaction to the NSOA process can be found by examining an e-group sponsored by one of the participants at http://www.egroups.com/list/us-afr-network/info.html

- John Pritchett LCDR <PRITCHEJ@LEAVENWORTH.ARMY.MIL>

"UTTERLY PREPOSTEROUS" ANALYSIS

I am writing in response to Erika Weinthal's recent article, entitled "Central Asia: Aral Sea Problem." Before I do so, let me state that I know next to nothing about this region of the world. Like others, I've read articles in the New York Times and other newspapers that mention U.S. foreign policy toward Central Asia. This hardly qualifies as substantive knowledge, so if I'm missing some fundamental info, all apologies. My quibble is not necessarily with what is apparently happening in Central Asia, but with Ms. Weinthal's characterization of current events there.

"The breakup of the Soviet Union brought great hopes that the successor states would embark on a path toward building free market democracies." Who exactly are you referring to? My guess is the CEOs of the oil companies that stand to gain from prospective contracts. Washington's goals are "democracy building, free market economies, regional cooperation... integration into the international system;" they are motivated by "geopolitical concerns" that ultimately amount to favoring "the creation of a stable political and economic climate favorable to American business interests, especially in the energy sector." In the end, this will hopefully lead to a lessening of "its dependence on Persian Gulf oil." This is something I expect to read in the New York Times or Foreign Affairs or to come out of the mouth of James Rubin.

Really, I find it utterly preposterous to think that the U.S. is concerned about democracy building in Central Asia of all places. 5 years from now or however long it takes to construct a pipeline and start removing oil, a few people who are the heads of the various oil companies, the leaders of the various Central Asian countries, and maybe a few other people, will be more wealthy than they already are and there won't be a democratic system in any of those countries. Sour? Yes. But this is the kind of automated and thoughtless rhetoric that I heard for 2 years while getting a Master's Degree in International Relations at Columbia University. FPIF, you let this one slip through.

Personally I don't think there's anything going on there other than a scramble for resources and the resultant payoff. I challenge Ms. Weinthal to provide evidence of support for democracy. Anywhere the U.S. is supporting the "creation of a stable political and economic climate favorable to American business interests," you can be sure there is something dirty going on.

- Mike Ede <michael_ede@yahoo.com>

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