WhirledView

India and the US: Nukes and Politics

By PLS

(I just got back from three weeks in India, a week in Pakistan and a few interesting days in the UAE, and so I'm going to go out on a few limbs here. I could be very wrong, but this is the way the situation looks to me at the moment.)

Just in case you wondered why the Bush administration decided to negotiate a nuclear deal with India that violates the sense as well as the provisions of the existing non-proliferation regime, go back and re-read today's New York Times:

Over the next five years military analysts expect India to spend as much as $40 billion on weapons procurement....As a result, the country will become one of the largest defense markets in the world.

During the Cold War the Soviet Union was the principal supplier of arms to India. Now George Bush is making nice to India so that US defense firms can snatch some very lucrative contracts away from Russia. Of course, the deal will also open markets for suppliers of civilian technology as well.

For India the essence of the deal is not just access to ores not locally available. A mortal competition has developed between India and China, and India is often seen as second best in terms of economic advancement. Access to US nuclear technology will allow India to do some very useful leap-frogging. What’s more, China is the real reason for the big arms push. Pakistan may have the bomb, but by comparison to China, Pakiston is an annoying sort of mosquito. Not only is China the country that betrayed India’s trust in 1962, the Chinese are once again insisting that the briefly-occupied Tawang area of Arunachal Pradesh is rightfully China’s.

While I was in India last month, I amused myself by watching the Bush administration and the Manmohan Singh government playing the same public relations game. Each was trying to persuade its more nationalistic constituencies that the pending deal is in the national interest. Each was forced to make statements that would alarm the co-signatory even as it placated the base. And then the statements had to be explained away.

Although there are indeed in both Indian and US legislatures those who could sabotage the treaty, that most likely will not happen. I won’t analyze the US situation here, but I am fairly sure that the treaty will be activated in India, because the objections, however much they refer to this or that provision, don’t really have much to do with the actual provisions of the agreement. Although the Hyde amendment is pretty hard to swallow, the objections are mostly political, designed to harass or embarrass the current Congress-led coalition government at the Center. Naturally the BJP, the Hindu-nationalist party which makes up the primary opposition in the Lok Sabha, objects to the treaty. It objects to everything the Congress wants to do. As for the leftists in the various Communist parties, the Marxists and the Maoists need to raise a fuss and grab headlines because they have no hope of coming to power, except as minority members of a coalition government. If this Congress-led government actually falls, they’ll end up with less not more influence on policy.

Back the arms market. No doubt the Indian government will let many contracts to the Russians. But India will not want to become totally dependent on any one supplier, and so the US will also gain contracts, assuming the India-bashers do not manage to kill the treaty in Washington.

Meanwhile, the US under George W. Bush has already made it abundantly clear that the US is not bound to honor treaties which hamstring national security. Conversely, should the US attempt to apply sanctions on India for not complying with US interpretations of the treaty, Indian leaders belonging to any party currently in existence will not hesitate to do the same. Treaties were once considered to be close to sacrosanct. That day appears to be over. So why not sign on?

Thus, in India, the mechanism for getting full support (or at least for muting opposition) is already in place. As a face-saving device for the Marxists who have denounced the treaty, the government has agreed to set up a carefully balanced expert committee to study it line by line. In due time, the committee will find the treaty in no way violates India’s sovereignty. The Communists will be able to say they were consulted and will quietly, if not enthusiastically, let it go through. The Singh government most likely will get its treaty and will probably not fall in the process, though it may be forced to call elections a little earlier than absolutely required by law.

George W. Bush and Manmohan Singh make a very odd couple, but in this case their interests coincide.

Friday Night-Lightning Blogging

by CKR

Last night there were a couple of nice thunderstorms southwest of the city. I love the way the clouds look like big lightbulbs as the lightning flares inside them. Here are my three best photos. I'm hoping to do a photo post from my trip to Oregon, but that's going very slooooowly.

The Children’s Crusade: Another Public Diplomacy Misfire, according to UAE Observers

By PLS

I was preparing to lampoon the latest public diplomacy quick fix to emanate from the office of Bush lackey Karen Hughes when, at breakfast in Dubai last Sunday, I came upon an editorial in the Gulf News that says it all.

The title was: “Another Waste of Taxpayers Money.”

The summary sentence was: “The plan to ‘shape the views of Muslim youths’ about America is bound to fail.”

And here’s the full text:

Karen Hughes is back—with another project. A confidante of President George W. Bush who has become the most powerful United States public diplomacy czar in decades, Hughes has come up with a new idea to “shape the views of Muslim youths’ toward America," following many months of impotent projects that failed to change the perceptions of Arabs and Muslims. The new scheme, which the State Department says will be the first comprehensive public diplomacy effort targeting Muslim children, is also designed to “counter negative images” of the United States.

She had US embassies in 14 Islamic countries this summer come up with pilot programmes for that age bracket, and spent nearly $1 million on projects that involved about 6,000 youths and hundreds of local partnering organizations. For example, in Baghdad, 41 Iraqi students “learned about baseball” and the English language over three days this summer. A photo of the group meeting with US Ambassador Ryan Crocker hangs on the door of Hughes’s office at the State Department. She got that picture, but Hughes certainly didn’t get the message last time around. She, and other simple-minded officials in Washington, refuse to admit that their so-called outreach programme will not work unless accompanied by a change in US policies [my itals].

Millions of dollars spent on projects aimed to tell us how wonderful the US is will not erase memories of victims around the region who have lost families to US attacks or Israeli bombs made and delivered by mighty America. How can our children forget the now infamous images of Israeli children writing death messages on US-made Israeli bombs that were dropped on Lebanese villages? Hughes would be better off saving taxpayers’ money by asking her boss to be the honest broker he promised to be over the Middle East. She could try that—it may work.

The Presidential Candidates’ Foreign Policy Statements: Bill Richardson

by CKR

I’m continuing my series boiling down the presidential candidates’ statements on foreign policy to readable points (Obama, Romney). I’m a bit late with Bill Richardson. James Joyner has already done something like this, but I like to do these things myself. At some point in the future, I’ll do some analysis. For now, I’m just trying to see what they’re saying. As I did earlier, I’ll mostly use the candidate’s words, but I’ll edit for coherence. And I urge you to read Richardson's own words.

Richardson frames his statement with

a new realism adapted to the facts of a new century. Such a policy will require a bipartisan paradigm shift as profound as that which occurred in the middle of the last century, when thinkers like George Kennan and Hans Morgenthau saw that the world had changed, that isolation was no longer an option, and that the United States needed to assume a role as global leader.

It’s easy to say we need a change, much harder to provide that paradigm shift. Here’s what Richardson offers as an outline:

Such a new realism must harbor no illusions about the importance of a strong military in a dangerous world, but it must also understand the importance of diplomacy and multilateral cooperation in a world in which what goes on inside of one country has profound impacts on other countries.

Also,

Today, leadership by the world’s only superpower is needed more than ever, but such leadership cannot disregard what goes on inside other societies. No nation can defend its own interests without blending them with the interests of others and seeking common solutions to common problems.

India Nuclear Roundup

by CKR

Word of the unrest in the Indian Parliament has reached the American media by steamship and pony express. Both the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have taken note.

Reuters gives a timeline.

I thought I'd do a little googling to see what the Indian press is saying. I don't know the Indian press very well, but some of these seem to be interesting. I'll just add short comments, in some cases letting the articles speak for themselves.

India's ruling Congress party says that the government will not fall over the issue. But that's what you'd expect the ruling party to say.

D. Raja, the national secretary of the Communist Party of India, one of the parties protesting the agreement, says he's not talking about taking the government down, but...

Who is talking about felling the government? We haven’t said so. We have a position on the issue, which we have conveyed to the Congress leadership and we are waiting for a response from the Congress chairperson. It is for them to decide if they want our support or not, why should we succumb?

Several articles have noted that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been seen by some to be simply an agent of Sonia Gandhi. Gandhi is said to have returned to India from a trip to South Africa, indicating that she sees the situation as serious. IndoLink suggests that Singh's strong stand on the nuclear agreement and, presumably, winning any test of his government, would establish his independence.

Is There a Plan?

by CKR

It seems as though we’re seeing reports like these more and more frequently lately.

Air cargo end-run

Terror Suspect List Yields Few Arrests

And I saw something on my recent travels that makes me wonder. I was traveling on Southwest, an airline I haven’t used too often but who impressed me favorably. Their personnel were cheerful and polite, while more attentive than the old-line airlines to safety issues (carryons fully under the seat – a bugaboo to window-seaters like me).

During preboarding, the agent made an announcement: would the holder of the light blue preboarding pass please come to the head of the line? Was it a lottery, I wondered? If the machine gives you a light blue pass, you get to be the first one on? Someone quite severely disabled? A tall, fit-looking man carrying a small bag walked to the head of the line with the light blue pass in his hand.

On Max Boot's Rewrite of US Diplomatic History

By PHK

I read Max Boot’s oped “Another Vietnam: President Bush’s analogy to Iraq is not inaccurate, just incomplete” in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.

Perhaps not surprising given Boot’s neoconservative credentials, his major assertion was that the consequences of the US withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975 were far worse than W had maintained in his recent Veterans of Foreign Wars convention speech. Namely, that from Boot’s perspective, “the enfeeblement of a super power” had allowed all sorts of awful things to happen - from Iran and Afghanistan to Mozambique and Cambodia - that wouldn’t have happened had we just kept our military in Vietnam and – I suppose by implication - continued to take and inflict more casualties.

Nonsense

When I worked at the US Embassy in Bangkok from 1973-5 and observed the evacuations of our missions from Vietnam and Phnom Penh that final spring, conservative domino theory fingers wagged virulently threatening the imminent onslaught of the future Communist apocalypse.

We were admonished as we left in June that the rest of Indochina and Southeast Asia were fated to be next. They too, we were assured by the right-wing nay-sayers, would shortly succumb to the Communists, e.g. our ignominious departure from Vietnam and Cambodia would result in Communist takeovers of the rest of Southeast Asia post haste. The implication being that Hawaii, then the mainland would follow.

Well, yes, Laos was taken over by the Pathet Lao – but its leader, the “Red” Prince Souphanouvong who became president from 1975 until 1986 was the half brother of royalist Prime Minister Prince Souvanna Phouma so, in effect, a member of the same family continued to retain a hand in the country’s leadership perhaps, in part, as a result of the lengthy internecine warfare that had transpired between two wings of the same family.

Meanwhile, the US has quietly maintained diplomatic relations with the Laotian government – despite its Communist identification - keeping relations alive, but at a low key, over the years.

The “dominos” that weren’t

What about Thailand? This is the next domino that should have fallen if the domino theory had had legs. True there was a Communist insurgency in Thailand’s north and northeast and a Muslim insurgency – which continues – in the south.

But in the post-Vietnam era, Thailand has remained staunchly in the capitalist camp and its monarch revered by the Thai people. Politically, Thailand has alternated between military rule and shaky parliamentary democracy with a very wise king very much behind the scenes, but a Communist government was never in the cards. Besides, Communism’s straight-jacket would never have fit the fun-loving Thai.

Malaysia, too, has prospered economically even more than Thailand despite a lengthy and bitter Communist insurrection in the country’s north which began after the end of World War II. According to the State Department’s background notes, the insurgents were mostly disaffected Chinese who compose a minority of Malaysia’s population. The state of emergency was lifted in 1960 – 15 years before the American departure from Vietnam – and three years after Malaysia gained independence from the UK. That struggle finally ended in a peace accord in1989.

The Communist insurgency in the Philippines began to sputter once the corrupt Marcos dictatorship was overthrown by the 1986 People Power Revolution and the US military bases – the last remaining vestige of early 20th century colonialism – were thrown out by a one vote margin in the Philippine Senate in 1992.

Cambodia, of course, was a tragic and different story. Mr. Boot, however, must have forgotten that the evacuation of the US Embassy from Phnom Penh occurred a few weeks before, not after, the evacuation from Vietnam – or perhaps, given his tender age at the time, he never really understood the sequence of those events.

Boot also ignores the fact that the Khmer Rouge and the Ho Chi Minh’s government in North Vietnam were far from birds of a feather. In fact, there was downright antipathy between the two: the stronger Soviet-supported Vietnamese ultimately dispensed with Pol Pat’s Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge in 1979 and installed a less malignant, pro-Vietnamese leadership in its place – but not in time to stop the worst of the killing fields. If you don’t believe me, here’s the link to a BBC report at the time.

Even to suggest that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan as a result of a display of American weakness in Southeast Asia – as Boot does – is living in fantasy land. The geriatric Soviet leadership at the time ordered the invasion of Afghanistan because it did not want to see the weak Communist regime then in power there fail - or worse - its then shaky leader Amin move in an American direction. This had all to do with a generations’ old entrenched Russian fear of revealing the Russian Empire’s weaknesses for fear of its unraveling and little, if anything, to do with any perceived US chinks in its armor. I witnessed the Afghanistan invasion while I was worked at the US Embassy in Moscow – Boot, born in Moscow in 1969, however, was no more than a kid at the time.

Public Diplomacy on a "Wing and a Prayer"

By PHK

As my former Foreign Service colleague John Brown observed in The Huffington Post last week, several puff up Karen Hughes articles have appeared in the national media in recent weeks.

These articles feature one-on-one interviews with the Under Secretary herself. The AP photo accompanying one in The Houston Chronicle is especially noteworthy because of the near dourness of her expression: this is not the face of a lady pleased with her situation in life. Neither is it the photo I would have chosen to accompany a make-the-interviewee-look-good article if I wanted to portray a picture of the individual bathed in an aura of confidence and success.

Since the administration’s media policy does not appear to allow one-on-ones for reporters – or heaven forbid bloggers - who might write less than favorable stories, I have to wonder whether these half-dozen or more pro-Karen reports are part of an orchestrated campaign to make the Under Secretary look good in front of the home town crowd – deservedly or not. One might also ask whether they were ginned up by members of her public affairs staff or herself as – ahem – going away presents before she edges toward the exit - although she denies the rumors that she’ll be leaving any time soon.

"Smoke and mirrors" or real accomplishments?

From my perspective, Ms. Hughes tenure at State has been too heavy on “smoke and mirrors” and too light on accomplishment. What troubles me is that here’s someone who has the president’s ear yet has done little to restore or expand the still tattered US public diplomacy infrastructure at home or abroad. What’s particularly aggravating is if Hughes can’t – or won’t – make the big push needed to develop, or recreate - depending on your perspective - the infrastructure required to make a real difference given her proximity to W, who can or will? What I’ve seen for the most part are a series of almost timid half-measures often introduced with great hoopla – but with few bold new strokes and lack of accompanying funds to make them work really well.

Sure maybe 80 - 90% of the America’s “image problem” is W and his militaristic approach to foreign policy so one can argue that what Ms. Hughes does, or doesn’t accomplish in public diplomacy infrastructure restoration won’t make a difference. But even after he’s gone – and especially after he’s gone – the US will need a robust public diplomacy infrastructure in place to help repair the damage and ensure that the world knows our policies have changed and how. Hopefully for the better.

Meanwhile, there are more public diplomacy staff vacancies (22% to 16%) this year than there were last – according to the General Accountability Office’s July 2007 public diplomacy report. Also according to the same GAO report, State’s public opinion surveys are far too broad to help support or shape public diplomacy campaigns and programs. This, GAO stated, is in sharp contrast to far more targeted approaches of the Pentagon and even USAID.

Winging US public diplomacy

No wonder then that Hughes makes decisions based on her own hunches not facts or wings it – as Juliana Giran Pilon characterized it in World Politics - and runs US public diplomacy programs out of her hip-pocket: she has scant reliable evidence to base them on and an understaffed staff in the field and in Washington to make them work properly.

But couldn’t Hughes have fought even a little harder for State Department funds to support more targeted research that would aid the spending of scarce public diplomacy dollars more effectively?

It seems to me that Ms. Hughes “new” public diplomacy initiatives are often updated retreads launched under new names, usually a paucity of funds and – as suggested above - lack of research to support their potential efficacy. A few other initiatives are new, untested and sometimes controversial. Take, for instance, her new Youth Enrichment Program (YEP) initiative which has recently drawn US media attention because some (don't ask me the percentage, I don't know) of its funding has been designated for summer camps for 8-14 year olds run largely by NGOs or other entities in their home countries.

Regardless, Ms Hughes’ public affairs staff usually introduces new “old” or new “new” initiatives in the US with great fanfare for the unstated purpose of making the faltering administration and Ms. Hughes in particular look good - as if these programs really were doing something of significance. Somehow she always seems to have enough public affairs staffers around to get her message out in these United States.

These accompanying pr initiatives are all too reminiscent of the preverbal roll-out of the newest SUV off Detroit’s beleagured assembly line.

In all fairness, no such trumpet fanfare happened with YEP. Until Farah Stockman’s Boston Globe article on August 18, this $6 million one-time funds initiative remained out of sight and beneath the media radar screen.

I’m not sure why YEP summer camps became the focus of Stockman’s article – whether by Hughes’ design to show off her latest toy or because Stockman was looking for a “hook” to hang the interview on and ran with the kiddy camp portion because she thought it would be controversial and hence news worthy

Overall, however, most of Ms. Hughes’ requests for budget increases have been in the “slow freight” category of educational and cultural exchanges. These funds, by the way, are fire walled off by Congress – they cannot be used, for instance, to dig a swimming pool for Embassy Baghdad or even to speed up passport issuance for you and me.

Increases in the regular educational and cultural exchanges budget make sense. These funds were gutted during the mid-1990s in the Cold War’s aftermath and even now have not been restored to pre-Cold War levels. I agree, however, with Patricia Lee Sharpe that it’s short sighted to focus them almost exclusively on the Muslim world; the US does and should also have interests elsewhere. At the same time, I have a sinking feeling that qualified staff to make even these programs run smoothly at home and abroad is not what it should be.