In India’s two recent crises with Pakistan, the US played the key role in defusing the tensions and finding an acceptable termination of the conflict. In 1999, President Bill Clinton insisted that Pakistan must unconditionally vacate its occupation of the Kargil heights without any reciprocal concessions from India. During the military tension between India and Pakistan after the attack on Parliament on December 13, 2001, President George W. Bush pressed General Musharraf to give commitments on ending Pakistan’s support to cross-border terrorism on a permanent basis. While the results from that commitment were never fully satisfactory, Musharraf’s restraint was indeed real. In these two crises, Clinton and Bush offered cooperation that was both unexpected and significant. Together, Clinton and Bush demonstrated that the US will no longer tilt towards Pakistan in its conflicts with India.

This in turn provided an entirely new basis for mutual political trust between New Delhi and Washington.

What we don’t know at this stage is what exactly Barack Obama wants to do in South Asia. On the one hand, he supports India’s right to self-defence against cross-border terrorism from Pakistan. On the other hand, he has repeatedly suggested some kind of linkage between Kashmir and Afghanistan.

India’s principal task is not further dissemination of the Mumbai dossier. The FBI has been very much part of this investigation and the American establishment knows as much about the Mumbai attack as India, and then some. Instead India should concentrate on one consequential question: Is there any common ground between the new integrated approach towards Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India that Obama promises and India’s urgent need to end, once and for all, Islamabad’s war against India? India must convey two important messages to the incoming Obama team. One is that India is prepared to fully cooperate with the Obama administration in a positive transformation of the north-western parts of the subcontinent; and the other is to make it absolutely clear that New Delhi will oppose, with all the resources at its command, any American attempt to appease the Pakistan army with Indian political concessions on Kashmir.

... contd.