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The Limits of Influence: Americas Role in Kashmir Howard B. Schaffer Viking Pages: 286 Rs 499

Howard Schaffer is a veteran US Foreign Service Officer with long experience as a diplomat in India,Pakistan and Bangladesh. He has dealt with South Asia most of his career,either in field postings or at the desks dealing with South Asia in the State Department. He has come out with a well-researched book about the limits of US influence in its attempts to mediate on the Kashmir issue between India and Pakistan since 1947. He has covered the history of the US efforts in three periods. 1) A deep Washington engagement in efforts to bring about a settlement in 1948-63. 2) A quarter century of American diplomatic quiescence in 1964-89. 3) A focus on crisis management in 1990-present. His last chapter is about a role for the US. He buys the Pakistani argument that to enable Pakistan to shift forces from its eastern borders to the west to deal effectively with the Taliban,it requires a solution to the Kashmir problem. Underlying the book is the sentiment that India has not been entirely reasonable in finding a solution to the dispute. In his view,the Kashmiri people want independence and no political leader in Kashmir,including the elected ones,can credibly speak for the Kashmiris.

The US President,Barack Obama,in his March 27 speech on the Af-Pak strategy,said,Al Qaeda and its extremist allies are a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within. It would appear,according to Schaffer,that Pakistanis would rather be killed by the extremist cancer than give up their dispute with India. All the Indo-Pak wars have been started by Pakistan and there is no reason to assume that India will take advantage of their transferring troops to the western border to fight the jihadis since Al Qaeda and its associates are enemies of India. The problem the US has traditionally faced in the Af-Pak region is their basic inability to grasp the nature of the threat they are facing just as they could not understand the nature of the Kashmir dispute. The US establishment is still to understand why the 9/11 plot can be traced to Pakistan,why the CIA operatives were shot at the headquarters at Langley,Virginia,by a Pakistani in 1993,why another Pakistani tried to blow up the World Trade Centre in 1993,why there are plots against the US by Pakistanis and Pakistan-origin people with links to the Lashkar-e-Toiba. The same jihadis have been operating in Kashmir since 1989. The modus operandi during the 1947 raid of Kashmir,the Operation Gibraltar in 1965,in Kargil in 1999 and in the campaign to bleed India through a thousand cuts since 1989 is the same.

The two-nation theory of Pakistan on which its claim to Kashmir is based was the earlier version of the Clash of the Civilisations thesis. Today,the US is considered the foremost enemy of Pakistan by nearly 80 per cent of its people. The reason is Islamic extremism. The British fanned Islamic extremism through Mohammed Ali Jinnah and created Pakistan as a Cold War move. While secretary of state George Marshall accepted the legality of Kashmiri accession to India,his successors fell in line with the British in the attempt to deliver Kashmir to Pakistan. Thereby,Kashmir became a Cold War issue from day one. Pakistan became a military ally of the US in 1954. The bombs made in the arsenal of democracies,as US used to call itself with justifiable pride,were dropped first time on a democracy by US-made Pakistani planes in a war triggered by Pakistani attack on Kashmir in 1965.

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The US kept silent,in tacit support of Pakistan,during one of the biggest genocides and ethnic cleansing of the 20th century in Bangladesh in 1971. The US and Pakistan became allies in their joint support to the mujahideen campaign against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. As a price for such support,the US agreed to be permissive of Chinese nuclear proliferation to Pakistan throughout the 1980s. The Wahabbisation of the Af-Pak region during the 80s led to the spawning of Pakistani covert operations in Kashmir and the establishment of Al Qaeda and its associated organisations. The International Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and the Crusaders (the US and the West) was born out of the marriage of the Wahabbi cult and Pakistans nuclear deterrent capability. Pakistan conducted a nuclear test with Chinese help on May 26,1990. The Gates mission failed to stop Pakistan from going ahead with it. So the Pressler Amendment had to be invoked

In the light of this history which is not what is recorded by Schaffer,how will India have any confidence in the mediation or good offices of the US with respect to Kashmir? From 1947 to 1999,India could not view the US efforts as nonpartisan. It was not a question of limiting the US influence,but fighting against blatant US partisanship. With a rising awareness about the threat of Islamic extremism,the US became impartial from the time of the Kargil war. Since then,the Indo-US relations have registered a dramatic improvement. In her speech on June 17,Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke of the US and India facing a common threat and needing a common strategy. The common threat has Pakistan as its source. Kashmir is an aspect of that multifaceted threat. This understanding is missing in Schaffers book.

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