Opinion India’s Holbrooke opportunity

“Every time I go to India people say: ‘Are you working on this problem? Are you a messenger? Are you an envoy between the two countries?’ Holbrooke said. “The answer’s ‘no’.”,the envoy insisted in an interview to the Reuters news service.

Holbrooke also underlined the difference between the nature of his mandate in Kabul and Islamabad on the one hand and in New Delhi on the other. He described his visit to India as a “consultative trip,it’s not a negotiating trip”,unlike his stops in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The assurance that the US will not mediate between Delhi and Islamabad has come from the highest levels in Washington — from President Barack Obama when he met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Washington a couple of months ago. This has been confirmed by Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao in an interview to a TV channel in Delhi.

It is about time then Delhi viewed Holbrooke’s mission as an opportunity to influence U S policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan rather than an instrument of American pressure on Kashmir. If it is bold and self-assured,Delhi could in fact leverage American concerns on Indo-Pak relations to achieve desirable outcomes on the ground in Pakistan.

Islamabad has sold the argument in Washington that India is a major obstacle for its cooperation with the United States in the stabilisation of Afghanistan. If only Delhi were more flexible in its diplomatic negotiating position towards Pakistan and stopped threatening it on its eastern borders,the argument goes,Islamabad could help Washington a lot more on the Pak-Afghan frontier.

Forget the merits of this argument. What matters is that it has gained ground at all levels in Washington. Instead of objecting to the Pak proposition,India should turn it on its head and offer two theses of its own to Holbrooke.

One is to make it clear to Holbrooke that the U S should not take India’s restraint vis a vis Pakistan for granted. If there is another attack of the kind that took place in Mumbai in November 2008,Delhi will necessarily consider military options.

The other is to offer a substantive reduction in the Indian military profile on the Pak border,if Islamabad is ready to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism and move towards a genuine normalisation of bilateral relations.

Put simply,the message to Holbrooke must be that India can either be a ‘spoiler’ or ‘partner’ for Pakistan in Afghanistan and that it’s up to Washington to nudge Islamabad to consider the consequences of its instrumentalisation of terrorism as a foreign policy tool.

(C. Raja Mohan is Henry A Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress,Washington DC)