Ejaz Haider's TFT op-ed on the India-US nuclear deal

India’s long-term benefit
Ejaz Haider
The US-India nuclear pact has come in for a lot of stick in India as well as the United States. This was predictable. American non-proliferationists fear, not without reason, that rewarding India for flouting an international norm will lead to the demise of the non-proliferation regime. But India could not have struck gold without the Bush administration. So we have two sets of interests here, those of the US and of India, and at least at this point some of them converge.

A good starting point on how the US wants to – or should – deal with India in the coming years is contained in Ashley Tellis’ monograph, India as a New Global Power: An Action Agenda for the United States (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005). In a nutshell, Tellis, an Indian-American scholar, has recommended that the US prop India up as a major power in the region and the Indian Ocean. Not only can the two countries have economic relations, but Washington, by enhancing India’s nuclear and conventional military prowess, can hope to have India by its side in the new strategic game that is unfolding from the Middle East to West, Central and South Asia to Southeast Asia and onwards to the Far East.

Of course, Tellis is prepared to live with the contradictions of granting India nuclear legitimacy on the basis of the US and Indian interests. India can also be put up as a counter to China, a theme that resonates nicely with most neo-conservative strategic thinkers. Tellis has been efforting to increase the salience of India in the US since 1998 when India tested its nuclear potential. His book on India’s nuclear capability ( India’s Emerging Nuclear Posture: Between Recessed Deterrent and Ready Arsenal ) and the path it will take, his stint as advisor to Ambassador Robert Blackwill and his time at the National Security Council mean he has contributed significantly to the evolving US policy on India.

Of course, much of what has happened, and is likely to happen, is also linked with the Bush administration’s global strategic thinking. In policy terms that thinking is perched on the use of force, both in the pre-emptive and preventive senses. The moral hazards of this policy are clear from the two different cases of Afghanistan and Iraq. While on Afghanistan, the US had a legitimate casus belli , Iraq offered the problem of jus ad bellum . The Bush administration might have tried to pass it off as a pre-emptive war but it was squarely in the category of a preventive war, which bears a heavier moral cross than pre-emption. The UN system did not come to the rescue of the US and, therefore, Washington decided to by-pass the UN with the concept of a “coalition of the willing”.

Since the US is not prepared to review its policy of taking the war to the adversary, it requires allies that can help it do things outside the UN framework.

But this is not all. The use of force also means conceiving the deployment and employment of nuclear weapons in a certain role. While states may be deterrable with strategic nuclear assets, non-state actors are not. The 2002 Nuclear posture Review takes care of that by putting forth the concept of “forward deterrence” through the actual battlefield use of tactical nukes. As part of that policy, the Bush administration has successfully steered a bill through the Congress amending the 10-year-long ban on the research and development of TNWs.

This nuclear policy, in tandem with the Bush administration’s use of force, means the administration looks at non-proliferation differently. While it would like to retain the legal impediments that bind the signatories of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, it is now relying more on counter-proliferation through means such as PSI (proliferation security initiative). The current administration does not have much regard for legal niceties such as article VI of the NPT, which required legitimate nuclear-weapon states to move in earnest towards disarmament, and which undertaking was the basis for the decision by the majority of the states to forego nuclear-weapons capability. In its absence, the NPT has merely become a millstone around the ankles of states that seem eager to get rid of that commitment. It is a moot point whether the current combination of legality and coercion without being grounded in the normative framework of non-proliferation will last. But that is another issue.

While the events of September 11, 2001 have played a major part in shaping the policies of the Bush administration, the Republicans in the US were opposed to the direction non-proliferation was taking under President Bill Clinton even before the 9/11 attacks. They sabotaged the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and forced Clinton’s hand into Ballistic Missile Defence. Ultimately, and expectedly, President Bush just walked away from the 1972 ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) Treaty.

The US-Indian deal, from Washington’s perspective, needs to be seen through the strategic prism of the Bush administration. While relations between the two were on the mend since Clinton’s presidency, the dividends India was looking for could not have come without the changes wrought by President Bush.

To recap, among other things, the Bush administration plans to keep the US arsenal; it wants to employ TNWs in the field; it is planning a BMD shield in ‘full-spectrum dominance’ mode, which includes the weaponisation of space (this is being fought by other states at Conference on Disarmament, especially China, which argues that PAROS – Prevention of Arms Race in Outer Space – is as important as Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty; it has shown that some states can have nuclear weapons while others can’t; the US needs to have India counter China.

From the Indian perspective, the nuclear tests were meant to turn India from being merely important to the US to being urgent for it. Strobe Talbott’s account is ample evidence of how New Delhi played the game. That Indian policy has continued under the Congress-led government.

India did not sign the NPT because it pegged its stand to universal disarmament. It argued that there could not be two sets of states: the privileged and the have-nots. Having tested, it embarked upon the effort to get legitimacy for what it had done. If it could not get into the elite club legitimately, it would gatecrash. Immediately after the tests, some Indian strategists suggested that India should be declared a State with Nuclear Weapons (SNW) if it could not be accommodated in the NPT as an NWS because the treaty accepted a state as a legitimate NWS only if that state had tested nuclear weapons on or before 1964.

The Bush administration has granted that legitimacy to India. It is a foregone conclusion that the US Congress would give a nod to the administration’s decision. The Nuclear Suppliers Group is also likely to agree to the pact, scepticism on that count from detractors, notwithstanding. But the point really is the bilateral nature of the pact. After Israel (and that’s a peculiar case), India is the second country to have this kind of arrangement. In fact, the US-Indian pact is even more significant because India has overtly tested its potential.

The legitimacy aspect of the deal not only allows India to now rest on its capability without having to deal with non-proliferationists in the US and elsewhere – the issue having been settled – but also to enhance its capability further by getting US cooperation on the civilian side of the programme and acquiring dual-technology components. It can now separate its civilian programme from its military programme without having really given guarantees that it would not use the expertise gathered through technological interaction on the civilian side for use on the military side.

Overall, the new framework allows India a prominent place not only in South Asia but also in the Indian Ocean. Some Indian analysts fear that this arrangement would deprive India of its freedom of action. Personally, I don’t think the costs would be higher than the benefits. India needs the push to the status it is hankering after, and it won’t hurt if it comes from Washington. India would like to be able to face up to China without necessarily getting into a confrontation with Beijing. In fact, it is a measure of the success of Indian policy that its crest with the US also comes at a time when it enjoys good relations with China. India is evincing a developing capability, common to big powers, of playing multiple state actors and dealing with conflicting interests.

Most analyses so far have tended to imply that the US attempt to put India up as a counter to China would necessarily lead New Delhi into a conflict with Beijing. That scenario is unlikely, at least in the next ten years (see Ziad Haider, US-China-India – three giants at play ; Indian Express August 2). Even US-China relations, despite talk in America of containing China, will remain stable in the short- to mid-term (see Michael O’ Hanlon, US economic integration with China ; Daily Times , July 31, courtesy LAT).

The scenario will be played along the lines of China coming up as another pole while the US would try to offset that possibility. But it is significant to note that the possibility of a conflict on that score is very remote (unless China was to actually try to take over Taiwan). China is a leading player on the Korean peninsula not only in relation to North Korea but also South Korea, the latter fact generally missed out by most observers predicting a Sino-US confrontation. And the US needs China in that region. Moreover, China’s own US policy is a guarantee against any deviation from the current multi-tiered relationship. To the extent of other states emerging to counter US dominance, China is not the only contender. Other potential candidates are a more integrated European Union and, even, Japan. The EU has faced a setback to its efforts to further integrate and Japan, for now, is happy with US security guarantees. It is for this reason that China seems more conspicuous on the radar screen. In any case, if the Structural Realist theory is anything to go by, as Kenneth Waltz argued, the US efforts at preventing other poles to emerge should fail.

Indeed, if US-Indian relations do blossom further, as they will, the US would be setting the stage for India to emerge as a major power and, eventually, as a pole the US will have to contend with. India knows this and may even forego some immediate benefits for the larger prize a couple of decades down the line.

This situation poses challenges and opportunities for Pakistan. We shall come to them in the coming weeks but suffice to say at this juncture that we must be thankful for the nuclear capability we developed in the teeth of bitter opposition from the world. If our non-proliferation record were better, we might have positioned ourselves to extract more out of our capability. Even so, it guarantees our security in a changing geo-political environment as nothing else does. The only danger is that we may fall prey to the thought that it is the only ingredient of security. That would be disastrous.