05-20-2006, 08:47 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>India capped</b>
Â
Stagecraft & Statecraft:Â
10 reasons for pakistan to celebrate India's nuclear deal
by Brahma Chellaney, Deccan Chronicle, May 20, 2006
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has claimed from the outset that his vaunted nuclear deal with the United States is about nuclear energy and not about India's strategic programme. Yet his own actions epitomise the intentional manner the deal has been allowed to ossify into a cap on India's nuclear military programme, with nuclear energy just the bait. With Dr Singh's deferential commitment "to work with the US for the conclusion of a multilateral Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty," the Americans have now introduced a draft FMCT whose principal target is India.
The PM's new, expanded list of Indian facilities â tabled in Parliament on May 11 â shows how in the name of gaining a meretricious right to import uneconomical power reactors, 37 establishments across the gamut of India's nuclear capability are being put under permanent international inspections or, in the case of two, being dismembered. From basic research to weapons-grade plutonium production capability, India's nascent nuclear deterrent is being delivered a body blow. Added to that is the unseemly rush to complete the proposed actions on most of the 37 facilities within the next four years.
No nation has ever done what India has set out to do. While the five established nuclear-weapons states together have only 11 installations under voluntary, revocable International Atomic Energy Agency "safeguards" at present, India singly is subjecting almost three-and-a-half times that number of facilities to perpetual, immutable inspections without even the escape hatch available to a non-nuclear nation in a state of national contingency â the right of withdrawal from a commitment. As Condoleezza Rice made clear on April 5, India's legal commitments are unilateral, unrelated to assured fuel supply, and per se "without condition," with the US reserving the right to leave India in the lurch if at any point it were to test or violate IAEA safeguards. Her remarks confirm India's backdoor accession to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty through the pending congressional legislation.
Also, India has gradually expanded the number of facilities it is sacrificing â from the "one or two" that the Vajpayee government offered to Dr Singh's furtive, incremental increases now totalling 37. To deflect attention from the gravity of what Dr Singh was preparing to do, the government earlier this year actually orchestrated a public charade on the fast-breeder programme to take credit for "saving" the tiny experimental breeder and the under-construction prototype breeder (which together, according to US national security adviser Stephen Hadley, have "very limited capability").
The deal's qualitative and quantitative ceilings succeed in "limiting the size and sophistication of India's nuclear-weapons programme," according to Joseph R. Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The deal has been designed to underpin a fundamental US goal â to deter the rise of India as a full-fledged nuclear power that could threaten US global or regional interests. Not only will the deal widen India's nuclear asymmetry with China, its US goal jibes well with Pakistan's strategic objectives.
It was M.J. Akbar who had the foresight to explain on these pages why Pakistan was lucky to escape President George W. Bush's nuclear embrace. Mr Akbar stated what nuclear boffins had missed out â that while a dreamy India had enmeshed itself in a web of onerous, US-fashioned obligations, Islamabad could be "held down to nothing." The more the deal has unfolded, the clearer India's disadvantage has become. And the bigger the US demands have grown.
Indeed, Pakistan's opposition to the deal has been misconstrued in India. Its opposition is less on substance (it welcomes the capability limits and one-sided obligations on India) and more on symbolism (rather than a special exception being carved out for India, it wants a common standard applicable to the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty's non-signatories). Islamabad's strong reaction also sprang from a foreboding that the deal could open the way for enlargement of the foothold the US gained in its nuclear programme following the proliferation scandal in which A.Q. Khan became the scapegoat. But given its obsessive fixation on parity with New Delhi and clear-eyed resolve to thwart India's regional pre-eminence, Pakistan has at least 10 reasons to celebrate.
1 The deal constricts India's freedom of action and thereby helps level the field for Pakistan. By playing to India's ego and desire for status, the deal paves the way for the US to stunt India's nuclear deterrent and influence its foreign policy. Islamabad can only be happy that India is going to stay condemned forever as a second-class, subcontinentally confined nuclear-weapons state without the latitude to develop power projection force capability to unpin its world-power ambitions.
Far from developing an intercontinental ballistic missile, India has put even the maiden flight-test of the intermediate-range Agni III on hold for months now, in deference to the US. Islamabad, on the other hand, has tested in the past three months alone the Babur cruise missile, the Abdali short-range ballistic missile and the Shaheen 2, a potential counter to Agni III.
2Â The deal will balance the foothold the US has secured in the Pakistani nuclear programme with a corresponding foothold in the Indian programme. Just as Bush secured a handle on the Pakistani nuclear programme by forgiving Islamabad for its illicit export of nuclear know-how to Iran, Libya and North Korea, he offered New Delhi a deal which, when implemented, will cap the size and quality of its deterrent and give the US for the first time, in the words of US undersecretary Nick Burns, "a transparent insight into India's nuclear programme."
After meeting General Pervez Musharraf on March 4, Bush said: "Pakistan and India are different countries with different needs and different histories." It is to satisfy "different needs" by recognising "different histories" that Bush has pursued parallel tracks with India and Pakistan to achieve the same objective â a greater US say in their nuclear and foreign policies. It thus makes little sense for Washington to bait Islamabad with the same deal it has ensnared India, especially when Pakistan had already been trapped. Today, nothing pleases Pakistan more than to see its rival in the same trap.
It is enlightening how those who walk into a trap begin to speak the lingo of enlightenment. Just as Musharraf discovered "enlightened moderation" after he, in cahoots with the US, made A.Q. Khan the fall guy to save his military's skin, Dr Singh embraced "enlightened national interest" after being enlightened by the US-drafted deal he signed. America's success in infusing enlightenment underscores why it prefers to cut deals with unelected leaders.
3Â Pakistan retains the advantage of enjoying an open line of covert nuclear and missile supply from China. US-imposed fetters on India and Pakistan will impair the Indian deterrent more. Among the non-NPT nuclear powers, India has always faced the biggest challenges because, unlike Pakistan and Israel, it has neither received tested warhead designs from an established nuclear-weapons state nor other clandestine transfers. That China's supply line to Pakistan remains open has been underlined by the tests in the past two months of Shaheen 2 and Babur, both Chinese-origin missiles.
Beijing will do whatever it can to profit from the Indo-US deal, using it as a pretext both to make further covert transfers and to sell its dubious power reactors to Pakistan. Yet the US has convinced itself that capping India's deterrent holds the key to persuading Beijing to halt illicit transfers to Islamabad and to corralling Pakistan's nuclear ambitions.
4Â The deal will remove from potential military use a large part of the Indian nuclear programme. Pakistan must be pleased that the deal will reduce to less than one-third the number of Indian facilities available to generate weapons-usable fissile material. Not only is India dismantling one of its two plutonium-production research reactors, it is also putting under permanent IAEA inspections one of its two existing industrial-scale reprocessing plants, 14 power reactors and two-fifths of its heavy-water capability.
Absent this deal, India would have remained free to use these facilities for military purpose. Pakistan's fissile-material production complex, in contrast, will stay unencumbered â until an FMCT takes effect.
5Â The deal opens a real opportunity for Pakistan to overtake India on nukes, as it has already done on missiles. Having fallen way behind China's deterrent capabilities, India now risks lagging behind Pakistan's nuclear-weapons drive. For a country given to painting illusion as reality, it must pain India when a former US President publicises the bitter truth â that despite Asia's oldest nuclear programme, "India so far has only rudimentary nuclear technology." In a recent op-ed, Jimmy Carter also said that while today China possesses 400 nuclear weapons, India and Pakistan have "40 each."
Given its far more limited scientific and economic resources, Pakistan has done an impressive job on deterrence. Such is its deterrent's credibility in Indian eyes that it intruded deep into enemy land and yet made India fight the entire 1999 Kargil War on Indian territory on Pakistani terms, with New Delhi needing America as a midwife to deliver a favourable outcome. Militarily, it matters little that China has fathered Pakistan's key nukes and missiles.
What matters is possession, not parentage. Not only is Pakistan set to surpass India on quantity, it also has done a better job integrating its nukes into its military doctrine and strategy. The point is that a dawdling India continues to drop further behind its regional defence needs. The PM cannot claim that India has even a minimal deterrent, let alone a credible one. Yet he has accepted restrictions on the deterrent. Is it an accident that none of those championing the deal inside or outside the government had wanted India to go overtly nuclear through tests?
6Â Pakistan has escaped the trials and tribulations of negotiating perpetual IAEA inspections on manifold facilities. By the time 37 Indian facilities come under external inspections, only six Pakistani installations will be subject to IAEA safeguards â the Chashma 1 and 2 and KANUPP power reactors, the teeny, pool-type PARR 1 and 2 research reactors, and the Hawks Bay depot. Pakistan has refused to open to outside monitoring a single indigenous facility. But India is gratuitously dismembering Cirus and Apsara research reactors and opening up 29 other indigenous facilities.
Worse, while Pakistan sustains its nuclear opaqueness like China (which has only three facilities under IAEA safeguards), India is to sever the symbiotic relationship between its civil and military programmes, agreeing to erect fail-safe, IAEA-supervised firewalls between the two. New-entrant China is likely to invoke the Nuclear Suppliers' Group's grandfather clause and supply Pakistan a couple of more power reactors without Islamabad having to carry out what India is being compelled to do â negotiate with the IAEA both everlasting inspections and an invasive "additional protocol." Islamabad, in any case, cannot afford to buy more than a couple reactors.
7Â "Unique India" is accepting not only fetters but also is going to cough up between $14.4 billion to $20 billion "to import eight power reactors by 2012," as revealed by Dr Rice. The eight-reactor imports (calculated at the current prices of Framatome ANP-Siemens' EPR-1600, Westinghouse's AP-1000 or BWR-90 and Russian Atomstroyexport's VVER-91) will cost far more than what India has invested in building nuclear weaponry since its 1998 tests.
According to Dr Rice, "Our agreement with India is unique because India is unique." It is easy to see why "India is unique": the Indian import commitment will entail New Delhi annually spending over the next six years between $2.4 billion to $3.3 billion â more than the $2.04 billion appropriations it has budgeted this year for its entire nuclear programme.
Pakistan has two reasons to be pleased: first, by creating a troublesome Indian dependency on external supplies of fuel and spare parts, the deal will serve to keep India on good behaviour; and, two, profligate imports will gobble up Indian resources that otherwise could go for augmenting indigenous capabilities. Others too have reasons to be pleased: "it will mean thousands of new jobs for American workers," as Dr Rice put up, while the Paris junkets by France signify its hunt for nuclear mega-deals after clinching the questionable Scorpene contract.
8Â Pakistan has little to lose as the US is seeking to build a strategic partnership both with New Delhi and Islamabad. Any Indian illusion that America is building a special strategic relationship with India and distancing itself from old ally Pakistan was shattered by Bush, who used Indian soil to hail Problemistan as "another important partner and friend of the US" and to seek Indo-Pak "progress on all issues, including Kashmir." After he returned home, a White House statement said the US "relationship with Pakistan, which has Major Non-NATO Ally status, follows a separate path" to buttress "close ties and cooperation."
Like in the past, America treats the maintenance of a balance of power as a central strategic goal in any region. Its strategy is unlikely to stop employing Pakistan to countervail India, even as it seeks to frame an option to leverage its increasingly cosy ties with India against China.
9Â America's avowed aim to promote nuclear and conventional balance on the subcontinent is music to Pakistani ears. Having agreed to sell its nuclear soul, India is getting one jarring message after another. Not only has a goalpost-shifting US presented a fresh demand no sooner than New Delhi has met one demand, it also now wants India to define its deterrent in the sole context of Pakistan.
That way it wants to draw India into further capability limits. While Dr Rice has put the emphasis on Indo-Pak "nuclear balance," her assistant secretary, Richard Boucher, went one step further, publicly asking India to enter into "mutual understandings" with Islamabad "in both conventional and nuclear areas." One such "mutual understanding" sought is an Indian military pullout from Saltoro Ridge, of which Siachen Glacier is a part.
The nuclear deal has only whetted the US appetite for parallel success on the conventional side. It had justified its decision to sell Pakistan F-16s, P-3C Orions, C-130s, TOW missiles, Aerostat surveillance ra-dars, 155mm self-propelled howitzers and Phalanx systems on grounds of maintaining a "military balance on the subcontinent." Now to underpin such a balance and ensure the Indian military can fight the next war only to a stalemate, it wants India to buy similar or countervailing weapons that the US military is phasing out, including P-3C Orions or P-8As, C-130s and F-16s or F/A-18s.
10 Islamabad will have the last laugh: after India has been put through the mill, it will gain access to whatever New Delhi might secure. The misbegotten nuclear deal will go through more tortuous twists and turns, but if in the end it does take effect, India will find it has gained little over Pakistan. Indeed, after India has been made to pay through the nose, Pakistan will be no less a beneficiary.
An opinion is already gaining ground in Washington and the NSG that rather than design a country-specific exception, new common export standards for non-NPT States would serve the non-proliferation regime better. India's action to import power reactors dependent on imported fuel by compromising on its vital strategic interests is the 21st century equivalent of Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq's move in 1326 to shift his capital from Delhi to Devagiri, which he renamed "Daulatabad," or Abode of Prosperity. India today is being led up the path to a new Daulatabad where it can entrust its crown jewels for safekeeping.Â
http://deccan.com/Columnists/Columnists....a%20capped
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Â
Stagecraft & Statecraft:Â
10 reasons for pakistan to celebrate India's nuclear deal
by Brahma Chellaney, Deccan Chronicle, May 20, 2006
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has claimed from the outset that his vaunted nuclear deal with the United States is about nuclear energy and not about India's strategic programme. Yet his own actions epitomise the intentional manner the deal has been allowed to ossify into a cap on India's nuclear military programme, with nuclear energy just the bait. With Dr Singh's deferential commitment "to work with the US for the conclusion of a multilateral Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty," the Americans have now introduced a draft FMCT whose principal target is India.
The PM's new, expanded list of Indian facilities â tabled in Parliament on May 11 â shows how in the name of gaining a meretricious right to import uneconomical power reactors, 37 establishments across the gamut of India's nuclear capability are being put under permanent international inspections or, in the case of two, being dismembered. From basic research to weapons-grade plutonium production capability, India's nascent nuclear deterrent is being delivered a body blow. Added to that is the unseemly rush to complete the proposed actions on most of the 37 facilities within the next four years.
No nation has ever done what India has set out to do. While the five established nuclear-weapons states together have only 11 installations under voluntary, revocable International Atomic Energy Agency "safeguards" at present, India singly is subjecting almost three-and-a-half times that number of facilities to perpetual, immutable inspections without even the escape hatch available to a non-nuclear nation in a state of national contingency â the right of withdrawal from a commitment. As Condoleezza Rice made clear on April 5, India's legal commitments are unilateral, unrelated to assured fuel supply, and per se "without condition," with the US reserving the right to leave India in the lurch if at any point it were to test or violate IAEA safeguards. Her remarks confirm India's backdoor accession to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty through the pending congressional legislation.
Also, India has gradually expanded the number of facilities it is sacrificing â from the "one or two" that the Vajpayee government offered to Dr Singh's furtive, incremental increases now totalling 37. To deflect attention from the gravity of what Dr Singh was preparing to do, the government earlier this year actually orchestrated a public charade on the fast-breeder programme to take credit for "saving" the tiny experimental breeder and the under-construction prototype breeder (which together, according to US national security adviser Stephen Hadley, have "very limited capability").
The deal's qualitative and quantitative ceilings succeed in "limiting the size and sophistication of India's nuclear-weapons programme," according to Joseph R. Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The deal has been designed to underpin a fundamental US goal â to deter the rise of India as a full-fledged nuclear power that could threaten US global or regional interests. Not only will the deal widen India's nuclear asymmetry with China, its US goal jibes well with Pakistan's strategic objectives.
It was M.J. Akbar who had the foresight to explain on these pages why Pakistan was lucky to escape President George W. Bush's nuclear embrace. Mr Akbar stated what nuclear boffins had missed out â that while a dreamy India had enmeshed itself in a web of onerous, US-fashioned obligations, Islamabad could be "held down to nothing." The more the deal has unfolded, the clearer India's disadvantage has become. And the bigger the US demands have grown.
Indeed, Pakistan's opposition to the deal has been misconstrued in India. Its opposition is less on substance (it welcomes the capability limits and one-sided obligations on India) and more on symbolism (rather than a special exception being carved out for India, it wants a common standard applicable to the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty's non-signatories). Islamabad's strong reaction also sprang from a foreboding that the deal could open the way for enlargement of the foothold the US gained in its nuclear programme following the proliferation scandal in which A.Q. Khan became the scapegoat. But given its obsessive fixation on parity with New Delhi and clear-eyed resolve to thwart India's regional pre-eminence, Pakistan has at least 10 reasons to celebrate.
1 The deal constricts India's freedom of action and thereby helps level the field for Pakistan. By playing to India's ego and desire for status, the deal paves the way for the US to stunt India's nuclear deterrent and influence its foreign policy. Islamabad can only be happy that India is going to stay condemned forever as a second-class, subcontinentally confined nuclear-weapons state without the latitude to develop power projection force capability to unpin its world-power ambitions.
Far from developing an intercontinental ballistic missile, India has put even the maiden flight-test of the intermediate-range Agni III on hold for months now, in deference to the US. Islamabad, on the other hand, has tested in the past three months alone the Babur cruise missile, the Abdali short-range ballistic missile and the Shaheen 2, a potential counter to Agni III.
2Â The deal will balance the foothold the US has secured in the Pakistani nuclear programme with a corresponding foothold in the Indian programme. Just as Bush secured a handle on the Pakistani nuclear programme by forgiving Islamabad for its illicit export of nuclear know-how to Iran, Libya and North Korea, he offered New Delhi a deal which, when implemented, will cap the size and quality of its deterrent and give the US for the first time, in the words of US undersecretary Nick Burns, "a transparent insight into India's nuclear programme."
After meeting General Pervez Musharraf on March 4, Bush said: "Pakistan and India are different countries with different needs and different histories." It is to satisfy "different needs" by recognising "different histories" that Bush has pursued parallel tracks with India and Pakistan to achieve the same objective â a greater US say in their nuclear and foreign policies. It thus makes little sense for Washington to bait Islamabad with the same deal it has ensnared India, especially when Pakistan had already been trapped. Today, nothing pleases Pakistan more than to see its rival in the same trap.
It is enlightening how those who walk into a trap begin to speak the lingo of enlightenment. Just as Musharraf discovered "enlightened moderation" after he, in cahoots with the US, made A.Q. Khan the fall guy to save his military's skin, Dr Singh embraced "enlightened national interest" after being enlightened by the US-drafted deal he signed. America's success in infusing enlightenment underscores why it prefers to cut deals with unelected leaders.
3Â Pakistan retains the advantage of enjoying an open line of covert nuclear and missile supply from China. US-imposed fetters on India and Pakistan will impair the Indian deterrent more. Among the non-NPT nuclear powers, India has always faced the biggest challenges because, unlike Pakistan and Israel, it has neither received tested warhead designs from an established nuclear-weapons state nor other clandestine transfers. That China's supply line to Pakistan remains open has been underlined by the tests in the past two months of Shaheen 2 and Babur, both Chinese-origin missiles.
Beijing will do whatever it can to profit from the Indo-US deal, using it as a pretext both to make further covert transfers and to sell its dubious power reactors to Pakistan. Yet the US has convinced itself that capping India's deterrent holds the key to persuading Beijing to halt illicit transfers to Islamabad and to corralling Pakistan's nuclear ambitions.
4Â The deal will remove from potential military use a large part of the Indian nuclear programme. Pakistan must be pleased that the deal will reduce to less than one-third the number of Indian facilities available to generate weapons-usable fissile material. Not only is India dismantling one of its two plutonium-production research reactors, it is also putting under permanent IAEA inspections one of its two existing industrial-scale reprocessing plants, 14 power reactors and two-fifths of its heavy-water capability.
Absent this deal, India would have remained free to use these facilities for military purpose. Pakistan's fissile-material production complex, in contrast, will stay unencumbered â until an FMCT takes effect.
5Â The deal opens a real opportunity for Pakistan to overtake India on nukes, as it has already done on missiles. Having fallen way behind China's deterrent capabilities, India now risks lagging behind Pakistan's nuclear-weapons drive. For a country given to painting illusion as reality, it must pain India when a former US President publicises the bitter truth â that despite Asia's oldest nuclear programme, "India so far has only rudimentary nuclear technology." In a recent op-ed, Jimmy Carter also said that while today China possesses 400 nuclear weapons, India and Pakistan have "40 each."
Given its far more limited scientific and economic resources, Pakistan has done an impressive job on deterrence. Such is its deterrent's credibility in Indian eyes that it intruded deep into enemy land and yet made India fight the entire 1999 Kargil War on Indian territory on Pakistani terms, with New Delhi needing America as a midwife to deliver a favourable outcome. Militarily, it matters little that China has fathered Pakistan's key nukes and missiles.
What matters is possession, not parentage. Not only is Pakistan set to surpass India on quantity, it also has done a better job integrating its nukes into its military doctrine and strategy. The point is that a dawdling India continues to drop further behind its regional defence needs. The PM cannot claim that India has even a minimal deterrent, let alone a credible one. Yet he has accepted restrictions on the deterrent. Is it an accident that none of those championing the deal inside or outside the government had wanted India to go overtly nuclear through tests?
6Â Pakistan has escaped the trials and tribulations of negotiating perpetual IAEA inspections on manifold facilities. By the time 37 Indian facilities come under external inspections, only six Pakistani installations will be subject to IAEA safeguards â the Chashma 1 and 2 and KANUPP power reactors, the teeny, pool-type PARR 1 and 2 research reactors, and the Hawks Bay depot. Pakistan has refused to open to outside monitoring a single indigenous facility. But India is gratuitously dismembering Cirus and Apsara research reactors and opening up 29 other indigenous facilities.
Worse, while Pakistan sustains its nuclear opaqueness like China (which has only three facilities under IAEA safeguards), India is to sever the symbiotic relationship between its civil and military programmes, agreeing to erect fail-safe, IAEA-supervised firewalls between the two. New-entrant China is likely to invoke the Nuclear Suppliers' Group's grandfather clause and supply Pakistan a couple of more power reactors without Islamabad having to carry out what India is being compelled to do â negotiate with the IAEA both everlasting inspections and an invasive "additional protocol." Islamabad, in any case, cannot afford to buy more than a couple reactors.
7Â "Unique India" is accepting not only fetters but also is going to cough up between $14.4 billion to $20 billion "to import eight power reactors by 2012," as revealed by Dr Rice. The eight-reactor imports (calculated at the current prices of Framatome ANP-Siemens' EPR-1600, Westinghouse's AP-1000 or BWR-90 and Russian Atomstroyexport's VVER-91) will cost far more than what India has invested in building nuclear weaponry since its 1998 tests.
According to Dr Rice, "Our agreement with India is unique because India is unique." It is easy to see why "India is unique": the Indian import commitment will entail New Delhi annually spending over the next six years between $2.4 billion to $3.3 billion â more than the $2.04 billion appropriations it has budgeted this year for its entire nuclear programme.
Pakistan has two reasons to be pleased: first, by creating a troublesome Indian dependency on external supplies of fuel and spare parts, the deal will serve to keep India on good behaviour; and, two, profligate imports will gobble up Indian resources that otherwise could go for augmenting indigenous capabilities. Others too have reasons to be pleased: "it will mean thousands of new jobs for American workers," as Dr Rice put up, while the Paris junkets by France signify its hunt for nuclear mega-deals after clinching the questionable Scorpene contract.
8Â Pakistan has little to lose as the US is seeking to build a strategic partnership both with New Delhi and Islamabad. Any Indian illusion that America is building a special strategic relationship with India and distancing itself from old ally Pakistan was shattered by Bush, who used Indian soil to hail Problemistan as "another important partner and friend of the US" and to seek Indo-Pak "progress on all issues, including Kashmir." After he returned home, a White House statement said the US "relationship with Pakistan, which has Major Non-NATO Ally status, follows a separate path" to buttress "close ties and cooperation."
Like in the past, America treats the maintenance of a balance of power as a central strategic goal in any region. Its strategy is unlikely to stop employing Pakistan to countervail India, even as it seeks to frame an option to leverage its increasingly cosy ties with India against China.
9Â America's avowed aim to promote nuclear and conventional balance on the subcontinent is music to Pakistani ears. Having agreed to sell its nuclear soul, India is getting one jarring message after another. Not only has a goalpost-shifting US presented a fresh demand no sooner than New Delhi has met one demand, it also now wants India to define its deterrent in the sole context of Pakistan.
That way it wants to draw India into further capability limits. While Dr Rice has put the emphasis on Indo-Pak "nuclear balance," her assistant secretary, Richard Boucher, went one step further, publicly asking India to enter into "mutual understandings" with Islamabad "in both conventional and nuclear areas." One such "mutual understanding" sought is an Indian military pullout from Saltoro Ridge, of which Siachen Glacier is a part.
The nuclear deal has only whetted the US appetite for parallel success on the conventional side. It had justified its decision to sell Pakistan F-16s, P-3C Orions, C-130s, TOW missiles, Aerostat surveillance ra-dars, 155mm self-propelled howitzers and Phalanx systems on grounds of maintaining a "military balance on the subcontinent." Now to underpin such a balance and ensure the Indian military can fight the next war only to a stalemate, it wants India to buy similar or countervailing weapons that the US military is phasing out, including P-3C Orions or P-8As, C-130s and F-16s or F/A-18s.
10 Islamabad will have the last laugh: after India has been put through the mill, it will gain access to whatever New Delhi might secure. The misbegotten nuclear deal will go through more tortuous twists and turns, but if in the end it does take effect, India will find it has gained little over Pakistan. Indeed, after India has been made to pay through the nose, Pakistan will be no less a beneficiary.
An opinion is already gaining ground in Washington and the NSG that rather than design a country-specific exception, new common export standards for non-NPT States would serve the non-proliferation regime better. India's action to import power reactors dependent on imported fuel by compromising on its vital strategic interests is the 21st century equivalent of Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq's move in 1326 to shift his capital from Delhi to Devagiri, which he renamed "Daulatabad," or Abode of Prosperity. India today is being led up the path to a new Daulatabad where it can entrust its crown jewels for safekeeping.Â
http://deccan.com/Columnists/Columnists....a%20capped
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->