Book review by Prof Nalapat 'Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb - Strobe Talbott'
Nalapat, Madhav. Far Eastern Economic Review; Hong Kong Vol. 167, Iss. 35, (Sep 2, 2004): 54-55.
BOOKS: U.S. ENVOYS IN ASIA Whose Truth? Former U.S. Deputy Secretary
of State Strobe Talbott's memoir shows a failure of American diplomacy,
writes Madhav Nalapat [Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the
Bomb] by Strobe Talbott. Brookings Institution Press. $27.95
WHEN THOSE WHO HELP to make history write it, the result is a
memoir that dresses up the truth. This is clear from former United
States Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott's new book, Engaging
India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb, a self-absorbed view of the
U.S. intervention in the nuclear stand-off between India and Pakistan
that began in 1998.
Talbott says the
personal diplomacy that he and then-Indian External Affairs Minister
Jaswarit Singh undertook for 22 months starting in June 1998 represented
"the turning point in U.S.-Indian relations." The book is peppered with
the view that only skilful U.S. diplomacy averted a nuclear war between
India and Pakistan.
According to Talbott,
Pakistan's army was "preparing its nuclear forces for deployment" in
1999. Indeed, he says, there was the risk of a world war, as "Pakistan
might seek support from China and various Arab states, while India would
perhaps turn to its old protector Russia and even to its newer partner
Israel."
In reality, Beijing had already
indicated to Islamabad that it would not rescue Pakistan in a conflict, a
point acknowledged by Talbott himself a few pages later. Meanwhile,
President Boris Yeltsin's Russia arid Israel were both equally unlikely
to snub Washington in favour of India.
According
to Talbott, Beijing's feverish armament programme was not to counteract
the U.S., but India, whose "draft" nuclear doctrine "would surely
provoke an acceleration of China's nuclear build-up." Of course, he
says, China itself was not a threat to India. Talbott approvingly quotes
former President Bill Clinton telling then-Prime Minister Atal Behari
Vajpayee to follow the example of Brazil, "which had done the right
thing in not going nuclear."
But Brazil may
have acted differently if, like India, it had two nuclear neighbours,
had fought both in the recent past and was tackling a continuing proxy
war with one of them. And, nowhere in the book does Talbott accept that
China might be a factor in Indian security strategy.
Talbott
places great value on symbols such as membership of the United Nations
Security Council, rather than on India's strategic muscle, demonstrated
in the 1998 nuclear explosions that forced the Clinton administration to
seriously engage India, or the high rate of growth that has kept New
Delhi on the U.S. radar ever since.
Talbott
follows the line then hewed by the U.S. government's South Asia
specialists in hyphenating India with Pakistan. After the 1999 Pakistani
incursion in Kargil, Talbott writes, the U.S. put its views "bluntly"
to both the Indian and Pakistani envoys. They would be treated equally
as "proliferators," though India, unlike Pakistan, has an impeccable
record in avoiding cross-border proliferation.
Talbott
would have us believe that then-Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif
came uninvited to Washington after the Kargil incursion, when newspapers
reported that Clinton had invited both him and Vajpayee to a
photo-opportunity in the White House Rose Garden, in the style of the
famous meeting that had been held there in 1993 between Palestinian
liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin. It was a bit of American political theatre that
the canny Vajpayee refused to join in. Officials in Delhi were aware
that Sharif had been given a face-saving cover to what was a military
rout. As some had foretold, the Pakistani army described the
Clinton-Sharif meeting as a sellout, and moved against the luckless
prime minister.
The relevance of Talbott's
book is a grudging admission that U.S. policy in South Asia has been a
failure. Pakistan continues to tacitly support militants in Kashmir,
while India stubbornly refuses to disarm, in the face of persistent U.S.
efforts to ease China's fears. We are likely to see more of the same
mix of hypocrisy and self-delusion that has made "U.S. diplomacy" an
oxymoron.
