NEW DELHI, Feb. 26 (UPI) -- The most important message that Indian officials will try to deliver to President George W. Bush on his three-day visit this week is not that India's economy is booming and that its high-tech graduates and IT industries make for a perfect commercial fit between the world's largest and the world's richest democracies. That message has long been received and understood in the White House, as in America's corporate boardrooms.
The reality that they want to bring home to Bush is that India lives in a dangerous neighborhood, and India's own security concerns have to be understood in Washington.
This goes far beyond the Islamist terrorism that routinely spills over from Pakistan into Indian-controlled Kashmir. That same Jihadist violence is now taking root in neighboring Bangladesh, with alarming implications for the security of India's eastern borders. To the south, the violent separatist war of the Tamil Tigers against the government of Sri Lanka looks to be erupting yet again, and to the north, the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal is rent apart by a Maoist insurgency against the authoritarian rule of an increasingly unpopular king, whose army has just received a large shipment of small arms from China. And those Maoist ideas and tactics have started creeping across the border to revitalize India's own Naxalite insurgents.
Indian security officials see the hand of Pakistan's military intelligence arm, the ISI, behind each of these problems on their borders. The ISI has long taken the view that the way to constrain the power of their looming, nuclear-armed and much richer neighbor is to distract India's forces with a host of small-scale problems.
And behind Pakistan, Indians have traditionally seen the hand of China, which along with Russia is India's only great power rival on the vast Asian continent. China and India are both booming, both hungry for raw materials and energy imports to fuel their booms, and their oil exploration teams and energy ministers keep bumping up against one another as they look for oil in Iran and Iraq, in Africa and Southeast Asia.
India's last defense minister, George Fernandes, used to say openly that India's nuclear arsenal and its Agni missiles were aimed at deterring China, not against the much smaller threat of Pakistan, despite Pakistan's own nuclear arsenal. Pakistan's nuclear technology and its missiles came from China, and Pakistan's new generation of warplanes is being built jointly with China.
Last week, Pakistan's ruler, General (and President) Pervez Musharraf, was in Beijing to propose a new energy lifeline for China, going directly alongside the existing Karakoram highway through the passes of the Hindu Kush mountains, from Pakistan to China's western province of Xinjiang. It could begin with a railroad, and proceed to a pipeline, Musharraf proposed.
The key to Musharraf's plan is Pakistan's new port and naval base of Gwadar, close to the Iranian border and the Persian Gulf, which is being built with Chinese money and Chinese engineers. Gwadar already houses a Chinese electronic listening post, and is the last link in a chain of Chinese bases through the Indian Ocean that a recent Pentagon report described as "a string of pearls."
Designed to secure the vital sea routes bringing Middle Eastern oil to China, the string of pearls is a series of bases and naval facilities that go from the Gulf of Siam to Myanmar in the Bay of Bengal and then to Gwadar in Pakistan. In Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, China has built a rail link from its southern provinces down through Myanmar to the sea. The economic logic is clear. This gives a transit corridor that cuts off a long and costly dogleg journey through the Straits of Malacca to China's Pacific Ocean ports.
But the military logic is alarming for India, which likes to see the Indian Ocean as its own strategic reserve. Chinese ports and bases on each flank, in Pakistan and Myanmar, represent a clear challenge to India's command of the sea in its own ocean. India's response has been an ambitious naval program, buying a Russian aircraft carrier and advanced Su-30 warplanes, and buying state-of-the-art "Scorpene" stealth submarines from France.
The message to China is clear that India intends to buy the weapons and to build the military capability required to assert its command of the Indian Ocean. A crucial piece on this chessboard will be India's purchase of the Phalcon AWACS system from Israel, an airborne early-warning and control system aboard 3 Russian-built Ilyushin aircraft. Because of U.S. technology built into the Phalcon, this purchase needed Washington's approval. And significantly, while Washington barred China from buying the Phalcon, the Indian deal got the go-ahead.
So a crucial part of the evident warming of relations between India and the United States is that the Indians are starting to feel confident the Bush administration and the Pentagon understand their security concerns and are prepared to support them. A series of joint naval and other U.S.-Indian military exercises has reinforced this confidence, despite repeated objections from the U.S. Congress about the need to prevent an arms race in South Asia, to balance relations between India and Pakistan, to assure China that it is not being 'encircled' by a U.S.-Indian alliance.
This is the context that makes the latest hiccup over the proposed U.S.-Indian nuclear cooperation agreement so important. India is determined to maintain and modernize its nuclear weapons arsenal, while at the same time coming sufficiently within the international nuclear control regime to get access to nuclear fuel and nuclear power technologies that it sees as essential to its future energy needs.
That agreement was supposed to be signed during the Bush visit. But the Bush administration, under strong Congressional and international pressure, is demanding more international controls over India's nuclear industry than India is prepared to give. And for India, this is about more than just the nuclear issue; it has become a symbol and a touchstone of the precise nature and future potential of the "strategic partnership" that Bush has offered.
