While formulating foreign policy, points out Fareed Zakaria, a well-known American columnist and commentator, nations often misjudge who to befriend. He is right. In pivoting towards Pakistan and distancing himself from India, President Donald Trump is making such an error. He is underestimating the importance of India to the US. As the new rising power of Asia, it alone can help the US deter Chinese designs. Failure to understand this could prove a costly mistake.
This point needs to be understood within a historical context. India and Pakistan took vastly different trajectories after Independence. Pakistan chose to be an ally of the West. It joined the SEATO and CENTO pacts and sought for and gained support for its claim on Kashmir. India, on the other hand, selected a more independent path, and through its policy of non-alignment, declared that it would do business with anyone with whom its interests converged. Neither the US, nor its allies nor indeed the Western press really appreciated India’s stance. “If you ain’t with us, you are against us,” the State Department would tell us. India was given very little credit for its efforts at establishing a successful functioning democracy work in a newly independent poor country. The military dictatorship in Pakistan, on the other hand, was lionized. Its claim to Kashmir was widely supported on the supposedly moral ground of the right to self-determination. Never mind that, Pakistan, in violation of UN resolutions, never withdrew its aggression. India, the US felt, was not worth investing in because it was too weak, too poor and too divided to be of any use.
The US repeatedly punished India for failing to comply with its dictates: in 1971, it threatened India with its Seventh Fleet. In 1998, it sanctioned India for testing nuclear weapons. By 2001, however, it began to realise that this country was an emerging power in its own right and could not be ignored. Subsequent deliberations between the two countries led to the Indo-US nuclear deal in 2009. Relations continued to improve and manifested themselves in pretty close cooperation across a vast spectrum of fields over the next two decades. In the height of transactionalism, President Trump seems now to have reversed this evolving partnership to the detriment of both countries.
Over the same decades, Pakistan’s relationship with the US see-sawed: throughout the 1980s, it flourished when the US used it as a front line state, to raise jihadi Mujahideen to fight against the erstwhile Soviet Union. It declined somewhat thereafter for a while. But revived after 26/11 when the US began using Pakistan for its operations in Afghanistan. It took this step, even though Pakistanis were involved in the terrible terrorist attack that took place on 26/11. But it was not long before the US was deceived again: Osama Bin Laden was taken out from an ISI safe house in Abbottabad. American diplomats then began complaining bitterly about the duplicity of the Pakistanis. Trump himself admitted as much in his first term. The US, he said, received nothing but deceit and deception in returns for its $30 billion aid. Relationships by then had soured.
Come Trump’s second term and they again seem to have metamorphosed by Trump himself as he has started seeing value in Pakistan, even as his relationship with India sours over tariff disputes, purchase of defence equipment and denial of access to agricultural and dairy markets—a sensitive issue in India inasmuch as 44% of the population depends upon these sectors for their livelihood. The US wants to use Pakistan as a possible base for any future operations against China and Iran. It seems to have mended its relationship with India slightly of late, but it clearly wants to use as Pakistan as leverage against India.
This is for the third time that the US is making major strategic miscalculations in South Asia. It may be sacrificing a long-term strategic partnership for a short-term tactical gain from a failed state, largely feudal in character, marred by social and political strife as well as corruption and financial ruin. For those who do not learn from it, point out Karl Marx and George Santayana in their own separate ways, history has an uncanny knack of repeating itself.
The writer was Chief Commissioner of Income-Tax and is the author of the “Moral Compass: Finding Balance and Purpose in an Imperfect World”, Harper Collins India, 2022.
