A Coldness Carried From The Cold War

The camaraderie between American and Pakistani militaries is a Cold War legacy that gets in the way of India-US relations. But a genuine India-US partnership is a necessity

- LT GEN SYED ATA HASNAIN (RETD)

It was in 1991 that India-US relations began to acquire a strategic shape. With the Cold War concluded and the Soviet Union reduced to a diminished Russia, the US found itself in an unfamiliar role—as a lone superpower with global responsibilities. It recognized the dangers of complacency in victory and quickly began pivoting from its Atlantic preoccupations to the Asia Pacific, anticipating a new set of challengers.

The growing rise of China, while facilitated in earlier decades by the US itself, had begun to look less like an opportunity and more like a coming storm. India, geographically positioned next to China, democratically stable and increasingly open to global markets, became a natural component of this new architecture—a potential US partner.

Yet, for much of its early strategic phase, the India-US relationship remained cautiously transactional. Military-to-military ties grew at a measured pace, beginning with the Malabar exercises in 1992. Somehow, the trust deficit remained a Cold War legacy. The 1998 Pokhran nuclear tests were a shock to Washington and created an immediate rift. But this proved temporary. President George W. Bush's outreach, culminating in the landmark civil nuclear deal, and external affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee's 2005 speech at RAND Corporation marked a turning point. India, at that point, became a more serious US partner.

The devil in the relationship remained Pakistan. The US equivocation on Pakistan's role in cross-border terrorism has been one of the most vexing elements of this evolving relationship. Despite overwhelming evidence of Pakistan's nurturing of terror networks, Washington has not held Islamabad to account. It has always had the leverage—economic, diplomatic and military—but rarely used it.