As the US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, prepares for his first visit to South Asia, New Delhi should be ready to offer the Obama administration a grand bargain on regional security.

The purpose of New Delhi’s successful lobbying effort in Washington to remove India and Kashmir from Holbrooke’s South Asia mandate — which has received some breathless commentary from Washington’s Beltway — was not about avoiding an engagement with the Obama administration on the regional conflicts. The more astute among Washington’s analysts have figured out India’s real aim — to generate the right atmosphere for a sustained and comprehensive Indo-US conversation on how to stabilise the lawless lands between the Indus and the Hindu Kush.

After the positive gesture from the Obama administration, it is New Delhi’s turn to reciprocate by offering to work out a framework for mutually beneficial regional security cooperation. If Washington is ready to press Islamabad to abandon for ever its instrumentalisation of terror and extremism, India will certainly be willing to help the United States in managing the profound threats to its national security from the borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Once New Delhi and Washington recognise their shared interests in stabilising and modernising Afghanistan and Pakistan, the template for give and take presents itself.

Any suggestion of an Indo-US deal on regional security would horrify the conventional wisdom in New Delhi and Washington. This is not surprising, since Pakistan has been at the very heart of the security divergence between India and the US for all these decades. We might, however, recall how wrong the conventional wisdom in both the capitals was on the nuclear question — the other critical contention between India and the US. Having achieved the seemingly impossible goal of nuclear reconciliation with the US under the Bush administration, India must have a shot at working with the Obama administration in transforming India’s north-western frontiers.

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