India celebrated its 60th birthday last week with a raucous parliamentary debate over nuclear energy and its new strategic relationship with the United States. New Delhi had the air of the capital of an emerging world power looking ahead into a promising, if complicated, future.

Pakistan marked the same occasion by sinking deeper into the past. The corrupt backroom dealing between military rulers and politicians that has produced a cycle of disasters for the Pakistani nation resumed — aided by the hidden hand of US diplomacy working to preserve President Pervez Musharraf’s dwindling power in Islamabad.

The anniversary of the partition of the Asian subcontinent six decades ago showed the region’s two contrasting faces: a giant, open democracy and a sclerotic but nuclear-armed garrison state. It also revealed two contrasting faces of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, where pockets of bold thinking about the future compete with the need for short-term fixes that rely heavily on illusion.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh defended the nuclear accord against a barrage of attacks from the Communist Left and the reactionary Hindu right, keeping alive Bush administration hopes that the President can finally translate unconventional thinking in foreign policy into a substantial achievement.

The accord underpins a transformed US-India relationship that is essential to the struggle against transnational jihadist terrorism. It sets the stage for a badly needed reframing of the global nuclear non-proliferation agreements and practices that failed to stop Pakistan from becoming the world’s nuclear Wal-Mart. And it is a key to hopes for a more effective international approach to the real dangers of global warming.

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