By all rights, the United States and India should be bound together by the shared tragedies of 9/11 and last year’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai. India’s size, economic-growth trajectory, and rising power as a stable, secular democracy in a dangerous part of the world ought to make it a key US partner. Instead, Washington’s single-minded focus on India’s much smaller unstable neighbor, Pakistan, in carrying out the war on terror has increasingly strained its relations with New Delhi. To India’s dismay, the US has looked the other way while much of the $10.5 billion in military hardware and cash subsidies provided to the Pakistan Army for use against the Taliban has been diverted to building up arms capabilities targeted at India. Equally disturbing is that Washington has given only perfunctory support to India in pushing Pakistan to prosecute the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks.

The principal argument advanced to justify this focus is that the US needs the cooperation of Pakistani generals to counter Al -Qaeda and the Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan. But, far from helping, Islamabad is giving covert aid to the Taliban. It also has yet to provide the intelligence needed to root out Al Qaeda — a point driven home in October when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, referring to Al Qaeda, told an audience in Pakistan that it was “hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to.”

To complicate matters further, many Pakistani leaders now argue that their country needs a strong Taliban in Afghanistan to offset the rising Indian influence there. The price for cutting its ties with the Taliban, Islamabad says, is a “grand bargain” in which India lowers its profile in Kabul and settles the Kashmir issue. This position is of a piece with the longstanding desire in Islamabad to make Afghanistan a satellite state that will provide “defence in depth” against New Delhi. In an interview with me in 1988, Pakistani President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq declared that “we have earned the right as a frontline state against the Russians to have a friendly regime in Kabul, a regime to our liking.” Two decades later, a Pakistani general told the visiting US Director of Intelligence Mike McConnell that “we must support the Taliban so that there is a government friendly to Pakistan in Kabul. Otherwise, India will reign.” More recently, the spokesman for the Pakistan armed forces criticised the “overinvolvement of Indians in Afghanistan,” specifically warning against any Indian aid in training the Afghan Army.

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