Foreword: Under the mercurial President Donald Trump, is America swinging back towards Pakistan? Or simply nettling India? In this mini-series, we do a fascinating replay of history since the 1940s – how the personalities of successive American presidents have had an outsized impact on the quicksilver, vacillating, even fraught, America-India-Pakistan equation.
In five earlier episodes, we’ve covered the presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George Bush Sr, and Bill Clinton. Here, in Part 6, it’s the frenetic tenure of the dour George Bush Jr, arguably the most pro-India POTUS (President of the United States).
For once, the two governments were ideologically aligned: President George Bush Jr’s conservative Republican administration found a sympathetic partner in India’s newly-formed right-leaning National Democratic Alliance government under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee — composed of the conservative, Hindu dominated BJP and a handful of smaller parties.
The US lifted the economic sanctions imposed after Delhi’s 1998 nuclear tests, removed long-standing restrictions on the sale of military and high-tech equipment to India, and paved the way for cooperation over civilian space exploration.
The two countries also agreed to conduct the first joint military training exercises in nearly forty years, creating the novel sight of US troops parachuting down near the Taj Mahal, and Indian mountain warfare specialists navigating the Alaskan tundra.
Perhaps the growing warmth was most evident on a diplomatic level; when Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh visited National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice in April 2001, President Bush ‘dropped by’ the meeting, spontaneously escorting Singh on a tour of the Oval Office. When the Pakistani ambassador came to town, POTUS did not drop in.
9/11: A Dramatic Pivot to Pakistan
But the instant those planes struck the World Trade Towers on 11 September, Washington abruptly reversed course. Suddenly, Pakistan was vital to US security interests again, and India, though still strategically important, took a back seat.
Speaking before Congress nine days after the attacks, President Bush left little room for equivocation in his hastily launched global war on terror. "Either you are with us, or you are against us," he said. "From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime."
That left Pakistan little choice but to lend its support to the US-led effort to dismantle the Taliban regime that had allowed Al Qaeda to flourish in Afghanistan. Still, the opportunity came at a good time for General Musharraf; his military regime had overthrown the civilian government two years earlier, and he was desperate to shed his reputation as an international pariah.
US economic and military sanctions had left his country poor and isolated. Musharraf agreed not only to give the US blanket fly-over and landing rights, intelligence assistance, and access to Pakistani naval and air bases, but also to crack down on home-grown militant groups and end the country’s diplomatic recognition of the Taliban.
America Courts Musharraf, India Holds Its Tongue
Washington was so grateful for Musharraf’s cooperation that it overlooked his undemocratic tendencies. He wasn’t asked to doff his military uniform during a 2004 visit to the US. Secretary of State Rice called him ‘a good ally in the war on terror’. Indeed, the US named Pakistan a major non-NATO ally, lifted all economic sanctions, and began pouring aid money into the country.
India was not happy but took the moral high road. Though they loathed the idea of the US resuming military aid to Pakistan, they bit their tongues and said they understood the need. At the same time, they threw their full support behind Washington’s war against the Taliban, even offering use of their military bases—though Delhi drew the line at sending supplies or troops.
India could be forgiven, then, if it felt a hint of schadenfreude when the US–Pakistani counter-terror partnership began to fray almost immediately. The Pakistanis resented being strong-armed into fighting the Taliban, a regime with whom they shared a long history of friendly relations, as well as ethnic Pashtun roots; Musharraf told CBS News that after 9/11, then US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had threatened to bomb Pakistan ‘back to the stone age’ if it didn’t help the US unseat the Taliban.
Washington struggled to rationalise its embrace—and arming—of a barely functioning state whose long-term strategic objectives so directly contradicted America’s own. "Part of the problem was Pakistan’s obsession with India," wrote President Bush in his memoir, Decision Points. "In almost every conversation we had, Musharraf accused India of wrongdoing."
The Nuclear Deal That Changed Everything
That didn’t sit well with Bush, who believed firmly in the moral superiority of democracy. Since the first days of his presidency, he saw Indians as ‘good people’, says Kux, and was puzzled about why the two countries weren’t closer. He made it his mission to rectify that.
In 2004, he and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee established a strategic partnership to boost cooperation in space, defence, and civil nuclear technology. That led to a major breakthrough the following year: Bush proposed that Congress allow an exception to its nuclear non-proliferation policy and allow the US to share civilian nuclear technology with India, even though Delhi still hadn’t signed the NPT—and had tested nuclear weapons to boot.
Bush and India’s new Prime Minister Manmohan Singh hammered out the details in Delhi the following March: if India would agree to submit its civilian reactors to oversight by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and continue its ban on nuclear weapons testing, the US would build new reactors in India and supply nuclear fuel for civilian purposes.
"Bush was willing to do what no one else was willing to do: break up the NPT," says Kux.
A Presidential Legacy Sealed in Delhi’s Hearts
For America’s forty-third president, the US–India Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement constituted a rare foreign-policy triumph in an arena littered with disasters. After the nuclear deal, [Secretary of State] Condi Rice said, “We hope you will now buy American reactors,” and Bush said, “This is not about reactors; it’s about cementing India’s place in the world.”
No wonder that during his final visit to Washington under the Bush administration, Prime Minister Singh gushed to the president, "The people of India deeply love you."
The same could not be said of Pakistan, which was infuriated by Washington’s nuclear deal with Delhi. After all, the US had denied Islamabad a similar arrangement. Bush had scoffed at the notion of equal treatment back in 2006, when he stopped in Islamabad after he and Singh finalised the Indo–US nuclear agreement.
"Pakistan and India are different countries with different needs and different histories," he said during a joint news conference with Musharraf. "As we proceed forward, our strategy will take in effect those well-known differences."
Postscript: Next, in Part 7, our final episode of this mini-series, we review the historic two terms of America’s first Black President, Barack Obama.