Engaging India

Brookings Institution Press

Chapter One

When I arrived for work that damp, overcast morning of Monday, May 11, 1998, I was expecting a relatively normal week, at least by State Department standards. There was plenty to do at the office and plenty to worry about in the world, but nothing that quite qualified as a crisis.

Shortly after 8:00 a.m., I chaired the daily meeting of the department's senior staff. As deputy secretary, I was supposed to keep tabs on what was going on in the building and around the globe. Assembled at a mahogany table in the windowless conference room across from my office on the seventh floor were about twenty assistant secretaries. Their bureaus either covered various geographical regions or sought to advance such global objectives as the promotion of democracy and human rights, the protection of the environment, the struggle against terrorism, and the effort to stop the proliferation of lethal armaments, materials, designs and technologies.

Each official reported briefly on what had happened over the weekend and reviewed what lay ahead. The British government and Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, were looking for help in bringing peace to Northern Ireland. A team of American diplomats was in the Balkans trying to avert war over Kosovo. Iraq's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, was barnstorming through Europe, lobbying for an end to the U.S.-led campaign to isolate the Baghdad regime. The annual summit of the Group of Seven major industrial democracies, or G-7, was coming up later in the week in Birmingham, England. Boris Yeltsin, the president of Russia, would be attending for the first time as a full member of the group, making it the G-8. As the administration's point man on Russia, I planned to spend most of the coming days preparing for the private session that President Bill Clinton would have with Yeltsin in Birmingham.

When the senior staff meeting ended, I returned to my office and settled behind the desk to read the New York Times. I skimmed articles on the front page about the latest Arab-Israeli tensions and drug trafficking in the Caribbean but skipped a feature article about India. That country could hardly have been further from my mind. In government, it is often said, the urgent drives out the merely important. India-the world's second most populous country, its largest democracy, and the most powerful country in a region that is home to nearly a quarter of humanity-seemed permanently stuck in the latter category.

At that moment, Phyllis Oakley, the foreign service officer in charge of the department's bureau of intelligence and research, was returning to her own office from the senior staff meeting when her deputy intercepted her in the corridor with the news that India had set off a nuclear device several hours earlier. Phyllis was stunned. How had we learned? she asked. From CNN, she was told. She winced, then rushed back to my office to make sure I had gotten the word. I hadn't. After sitting motionless for a moment with my eyes closed, I swiveled around in my chair and picked up the handset of the "red switch" phone behind my desk. The buttons on this clunky device, each labeled with bureaucratic initials, connected me by encrypted lines with my counterparts in other departments and agencies of the government. I punched the button that put me through to John Gordon, a four-star Air Force general who was deputy director of central intelligence at the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, nine miles up the Potomac River. I assumed John would be able to give me some details on what had happened overnight in India. We had been friends for about ten years, since the first Bush administration, when he had served on the staff of the National Security Council and I had been a Time magazine reporter covering foreign policy. John had just arrived at work, so instead of learning anything from him, I succeeded only in ruining his week just as it started. After hearing what I had to say, he, like me a few moments before, needed at first to absorb the magnitude of the news in silence. He then remarked that the only thing worse than being scooped by CNN was being scooped by the State Department.

Phyllis took some consolation from this exchange, since her bureau was microscopic compared with the CIA. "It looks like we're all having a bad government day," she said over her shoulder as she hurried back to her office for more information. I got on the phone again, this time to the secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who was at the White House in the office of Sandy Berger, the president's national security adviser. They had just heard what happened, also courtesy of CNN.

"When it rains, it pours," said Madeleine. She and Sandy had their hands full dealing with the latest setback in the Middle East peace process. The Israeli government had just rebuffed a U.S. proposal for a compromise with the Palestinians.

Also in the meeting was Bruce Riedel, a career intelligence officer on assignment to the National Security Council staff. He was in charge of the NSC office that covered South Asia as well as the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, which meant riding herd on U.S. diplomacy with the Arabs and Israelis and on U.S. military operations in Iraq. On learning of the Indian test, Bruce commented that he suddenly felt overemployed.

Phyllis Oakley soon returned to my office with a sheaf of printouts of classified cables and faxes that were by now pouring in from some extremely embarrassed offices around the U.S. government, especially in Langley. She had brought a map to show me where the explosion had occurred-in the northwestern Indian state of Rajasthan. Phyllis knew the political geography of South Asia, having lived and worked in Pakistan in the late 1980s and early 1990s when her husband, Bob, served as U.S. ambassador there. The test site, she noted, was just over ninety miles from the Pakistani border, so the subterranean explosion must have set off seismographs in Pakistan.

"Let's just hope that's all it sets off," she added.

The week was no longer normal, and India was no longer merely important.

What follows is the story of the negotiation-or, as we agreed to call it, the dialogue-that the Indian statesman Jaswant Singh and I conducted over the next two and a half years. We met fourteen times at ten locations in seven countries on three continents. Those encounters added up to the most intense and prolonged set of exchanges ever between American and Indian officials at a level higher than ambassadors.

I held a parallel series of meetings with various Pakistani officials. That exercise, too, was called a dialogue, but it barely qualified as such. Why that was the case is also a subject of this book.

In a successful dialogue, the two parties do more than just talk to each other. Each makes an effort to understand what the other has said and to incorporate that understanding into a reply. A dialogue does not, however, necessarily mean that the participants change each other's minds. Hence the other term that figured prominently in the way Jaswant Singh and I defined our task: engagement. That word can connote eye-to-eye contact, a firm handshake, a pledge, or a long-term commitment. But engagement can also refer to the crossing of swords, a clash of armies or warships or wills. Both elements, conciliation and contest, were present in what went on between Jaswant Singh and me.

India's decision to conduct nuclear tests was a manifestation of long-festering differences over the rules governing the international system and our countries' self-assigned positions in that system. Jaswant Singh and I began the dialogue hoping that before it ended-or, better yet, once it became permanent and institutionalized-the United States and India would be able to reach agreement on some of those fundamental questions and, where we could not resolve our disagreements, we would be better able to manage them. To that extent, he and I were dealing with each other on behalf of two governments that shared a desire to fix something that had been broken for a long time: the U.S.-Indian relationship.

But first we had to grapple with the issue at hand, which was India's acquisition of the bomb. That thoroughly unwelcome development had occurred not just in the face of American objections but also against the backdrop of the United States, Britain, China, France, and Russia having acquired bombs of their own many years before.

From the American perspective, what was at stake was the stability of the global nuclear order. If India felt it had to have a bomb, other counties would conclude that they must have one too, and the world would become a much more dangerous place.

For their part, the Indians saw the matter in terms of sovereignty, security, and equity: if those other five powers had an internationally recognized right to be nuclear armed, why did India not have the same prerogative?

My government attempted to finesse that question with what was essentially a compromise: the United States would limit the extent to which the Indian bomb was an obstacle to better relations if India would, by explicit agreement, limit the development and deployment of its nuclear arsenal.

But the Indian government was, from the outset, disinclined to compromise. Its short-term goal was to resist precisely the sort of abnegation the United States proposed. Its strategy was to play for the day when the United States would get over its huffing and puffing and, with a sigh of exhaustion or a shrug of resignation, accept a nuclear-armed India as a fully responsible and fully entitled member of the international community.

The Indians conducted their test knowing that it would provoke American castigation but also hoping it might have another consequence: perhaps it would force the United States to pay them serious, sustained, and respectful attention of a kind the Indians felt they had never received before. Engagement gave the Indians a chance to resist the Americans' pressure face-to-face. In that sense, the dialogue could be its own reward, as both a means and an end. By weathering the storm of U.S. disapproval -by outlasting and outtalking the Americans in the marathon of diplomacy spurred by the test, in short, by not compromising-the Indians would prove their resolve and their resilience, thereby giving a boost to their national self-esteem and self-confidence.

As one of the architects of the Indian strategy, Jaswant Singh came closer to achieving his objective in the dialogue than I did to achieving mine. Insofar as what follows is that story, it stands as an exception to Dean Acheson's maxim that the author of a memorandum of conversation never comes out second best.

However, there is more to the tale told here than that. This book can be read as a parable about a benign version of the law of unintended consequences. The annals of diplomacy are replete with examples of accords that backfired, apparent breakthroughs that led to disastrous breakdowns, signatures on peace treaties that lit fuses to war. But the opposite can also occur. Sometimes a negotiation that fails to resolve a specific dispute can have general and lasting benefits, especially if it is a dialogue in fact as well as name. Diplomacy that meets that standard can improve and even transform the overall quality of relations between states. It can make it possible for governments to cooperate in areas that had previously been out of bounds and, at moments of crisis, enable their leaders to avert catastrophe.

That, too, is a theme of this book: it is the story of the turning point in U.S.-Indian relations.

The bad news from Rajasthan that Monday morning in May of 1998 marked a new low between two countries that had seen very few highs. Jaswant Singh and I sat down across from each other for the first time a month later. Yet a little more than a year after that, his prime minister trusted my president enough to let him play a decisive role in defusing a conflict between India and Pakistan that could have escalated to nuclear war. Then, in March 2000, President Clinton's triumphal visit to India established that these two countries were finally engaged in the unambiguously positive sense of that word. They remain so today.

That is all to the good. The great shame is that it took so long to happen.

The opposite of engagement is estrangement. By 1993, when the Clinton administration came into office, that word, which has no positive connotation, had become standard in describing the United States's dealings with India.

Relations between states often take on the attributes, in the minds and language of their citizens and political leaders, of relations between individuals. Countries are described as friends or enemies, partners or rivals; they feel good will toward each other, or they regard each other with irritation and disappointment.

The U.S.-Indian relationship has had this personalized aspect for half a century, especially on the Indian side, where the political and intellectual elite has felt neglected, patronized, or bullied by the U.S. government. Why, it is often asked, did two countries with so many political values in common, not get off to a better start?

Part of the answer is to be found in a difference between their historical experiences. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, America was, like India, a British colony-but with a major difference: it was made up largely of people transplanted from Britain itself, while Indians were of a different race and culture. They were bearers of a great and ancient civilization who had been treated, in Rudyard Kipling's famous phrase, as a burden to be borne by the white man. A lingering sense of being objects of racism and condescension made many Indians all the more wary when, just as their own country was breaking free of the Raj in the late 1940s, America seemed to be inheriting from Britain the mantle of global empire.

On the U.S. side, too, the relationship was jinxed. For most of the next forty years, India was a target of American ideological and geopolitical antagonism. The affinity that might have otherwise existed was a victim of incompatible obsessions-India's with Pakistan and America's with the Soviet Union. One reason that the United States and India were so at odds for so long was that each was on such good terms with the other's principal enemy. The dissolution of the Soviet Union created an opening for the Clinton administration to free the United States's relations with South Asia from the strictures and distortions of the cold war.

But Pakistan was still on the map, and for many Indians, its very existence rankled. They resented what they saw as America's continuing patronage of their misbegotten neighbor.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Engaging India by Strobe Talbott Copyright © 2004 by Brookings Institution Press. Excerpted by permission.
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