This is a open letter to President-elect Barack Obama on the above subject.
Dear Mr. Obama,
Hearty congratulations to you on your election to the presidency of United States of America!
Many, including me, heard your comments on your first press conference with great interest. The media is also reporting about your team formation process and the 'deliberate haste' that you are proposing to exercise. So far so good.
However, there are some media reports that suggest that you are considering to bring in former President Clinton to act as a mediator for resolving Kashmir issue. You are reported to have said during your luncheon meeting with Clinton in New York recently, “We should probably try to facilitate a better understanding between India and Pakistan and try to resolve the Kashmir crisis so that Pakistan can stay focused not on India, but on the situation with those militants (on Pak-Afghan border).”
The news is also rife that Gen David H Petraeus, who took over as commander of the US Central Command on October 31 and visited Pakistan and Afghanistan soon after that, has reportedly nominated Ahmed Rashid and Shuja Nawaz, author of the recently published book on Pakistani Army called "Crossed Swords", as members of a brains trust to advise him on a new strategy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Ahmed Rashid (along with Barnett Rubin) in an article in Foreign Affairs called for a “grand bargain” in which the Pakistani state trades a course correction on its western front with a more sustained international effort at resolving the Kashmir dispute with India. Former Pak president Pervez Musharraf justified abandoning the Taliban regime in September 2001 as a legitimate price Pakistan had to pay in order to keep up its support for militants in Kashmir.
But the outgoing US administration rightly found it difficult to accept such a trade-off, especially, after the brutal murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl which highlighted the fact that there are no walls that separate the terrorists operating in different parts of Pakistan.
Mr. President-elect, the foregoing, which I tried to keep as brief as I could, is meant to provide a background so that I could make a sincere request to you: In your administration's eagerness to deal with anti-American forces in Afghanistan/Pakistan please do not push anything on India regarding Kashmir.
Mr. Obama, American interests will be best served if your administration can get Pakistani military to forswear involvement in politics for all time to come. Once that step is taken in earnest, the policy of building alliances with or tolerating terrorists in Afghanistan, Kashmir and Pakistan itself would naturally come to an end.
Instead of achieving the above, if your advisers get launched on the so-called “grand bargain” trajectory, it will be like trying to address the surface rather than trying to hit the root cause. And, in the process the strong partnership which got built between US-India during the last four years can potentially get undone.
Mr. President-elect, India has unhappy memories of some of your foreign policy advisers — Anthony Lake, Strobe Talbott, Robert Einhorn and Richard Holbrooke. Please tell your State Dept folks to DELINK Kashmir from any US strategy on Afghanistan. It doesn't require much brain to understand that support to any terrorist elements, be it in Kashmir or in any part of the world by any govt (in this case Pakistan) is totally unacceptable.
What I am trying to say, if your policy advisers tell you that to incentivize Pakistan (read Pak military & ISI) to help US in winning against Taleban, US has to mediate and 'solve' Kashmir issue (in some way that would please Pak), there is nothing more foolish, illogical, unethical, unprincipled than this.
If YOU didn't subscribe to anything Bill Ayers purportedly said about radicalism, how can you let your judgement be clouded by any "grand bargain" strategy which predicates itself on pleasing one set of radical elements (i.e. the militants in Kashmir) to almost beg support from a govt (Pakistan) to serve US interests.
If you don't handle the Kashmir issue from moral, logical grounds you may end up screwing up an excellent alliance that got built up between US and India - an alliance which has far more strategic spin-offs for US than one could imagine.
My suggestion to you would be that before embarking on any US-Pak-Afghan policy that potentially impacts India, please have a chat with your running mate, Joe Biden. He will have a lot to contribute in finding a strategy that on one hand will get US its desired outcome, but at the same time it will not seek to bulldoze India in some uncomfortable situation which will have immense potential negative knock-on effect.
You may also like to consult Karl Inderfurth, one of your foreign policy advisers.
I hope you will handle India (and Kashmir issue) in a 'deliberate' and sensible manner. Please remember it takes a long time to build a mutually advantageous alliance; and it takes a far shorter time to weaken and/or destroy that alliance!
With warm regards.
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