Dialogue, Democracy and Nuclear Weapons in South Asia
Thank you, Chris [Warren Christopher], for the kind introduction and for
the chance to serve for four years at your side. It is also to be back
together with our other colleagues: Bill [Perry], Peter [Tarnoff], Frank
[Wisner], Tom [Simons] and Ash [Carter]. Chris, it was you who
introduced me to the practice of preventive diplomacy in South Asia.
Immediately after swearing me in as your deputy in 1994, you dispatched
me to Pakistan and India with the assignment of trying to persuade the
two Prime Ministers, Benazir Bhutto and P. V. Narasimha Rao, from
ratcheting up their military competition. I was not totally successful.
But I had already learned a thing or two about patience from Warren
Christopher, so, undeterred, I have persisted. A week from next
Thursday, I'm joining the other members of our interagency flying squad
-- Joe Ralston, Rick Inderfurth, Bob Einhorn, Bruce Riedel, and Matt
Daley -- for a trip to New Delhi and Islamabad. It will be Round 8 of
the parallel dialogues we've been conducting with India and Pakistan in
the aftermath of the explosions last May in the Pokhran Desert of
Rajasthan and the Chigai Hills of Baluchistan.
Here is the essence of what I see as both the challenge and what we are
trying to do. Because of those tests, we are confronted with a
lamentable but for the foreseeable future, irreversible fact: India and
Pakistan have formally and overtly demonstrated that they have nuclear
weapons. In so doing, they made themselves in 1998 even more part of
the problem of regional and global proliferation than they were before.
However, they can, in 1999, if they so choose, move back in the
direction of being part of the solution -- and they can do that while
enhancing their own security at the same time.
One way they can move back in the right direction in the political
sphere is by intensifying contacts and confidence-building measures,
including on the issue of Kashmir. But they can also do it by taking
four important steps in the security field:
first, by adhering to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; second, by
making possible a moratorium on the further production of fissile
material; third, by demonstrating prudence and restraint in the
development, flight testing and storage of ballistic missiles and
nuclear-capable aircraft; and fourth, by strengthening export controls.
Our discussions with the Indians and Pakistanis over the past 7 and a
half months have inevitably focused on these core non-proliferation
issues, but we've tried not to lose sight of the broader context -- and
indeed the broader definition of security itself. With both parties, we
have been trying to make the case that security is not just a matter of
what kind of weapons they have and in what quantities; rather, security
is also, crucially, a matter of raising living standards and building
healthy democracies. The essence of the argument that we're making to
the Indians and Pakistanis is that in pursuing what we believe is their
ill-advised reliance on nuclear deterrence, we hope very much they will
not jeopardize the other, political and economic dimensions of their own
safety.
Let me elaborate, starting with the issue of democracy. It has long
been a guiding principle of American foreign policy -- which is to say,
American preventive diplomacy -- that promoting democracy advances
America's own interests, including its security interests. That is
because democracies are more likely to abide by their international
commitments -- more likely to be stable trading partners, less likely to
interfere in the affairs of their neighbors, and less likely to make war
on each other.
South Asia has been a testing ground for that proposition. While the
record is mixed and the future clouded, there is reason for some
encouragement. Today, more people live under democratic rule in South
Asia than in any other part of the world. As South Asian democracies
have matured, they have generally moved to settle their differences in
peaceful fashion.
India and Pakistan's neighbors also offer evidence of a more hopeful
trend. Tensions and misunderstandings are far less likely to arise
between India and its smaller neighbors, Bangladesh and Nepal, now that
democracy has taken root in those countries and now that India has
consciously moved toward an admirably more far-sighted and generous
approach.
Even in Sri Lanka, whose long democratic experience has failed thus far
to end a bloody ethnic conflict, most observers and many government
officials believe that a resolution will not be achieved on the battle
field, but through negotiations and the devolution of power.
But now let me do what our Indian interlocutors frequently urge us to
do, and that is look beyond the Subcontinent. The gravitational pull of
South Asian democracy extends well beyond South Asia. If India's
democracy continues to flourish, it can exercise a positive influence on
those countries in East Asia where democracy is either in jeopardy or
only a gleam in the eye of would-be reformers.
One such country that would so benefit is China -- which is very much on
India's mind, as well as our own. India can continue to serve as an
important reminder to China that democracy is not only possible, but
also necessary, if a government is to succeed in binding a huge and
diverse population into a successful modern state. As others have noted,
China is an immensely complicating dimension to what we are talking
about at this conference. China's role in the security situation on the
Subcontinent would provide enough fodder for a whole different follow-up
session.
As for Pakistan, it has an important and positive role to play beyond
the bounds of South Asia. Pakistan combines the attributes of a deeply
religious society with many strengths of a moderate, pluralistic
democratic political system. As such, it has the potential to encourage
likeminded forces in an Islamic world that stretches from Morocco to
Indonesia.
That is the good news to date, and it has promising implications for the
future. But there's a darker side of the picture as well. In the last
several years, we've seen the resurgence of forces in both India and
Pakistan that threaten to undermine pluralism, civil society, good
governance and the rule of law -- without which democracy loses its
viability and indeed its meaning. In both countries, extremist factions
and sectarian-based parties are on the rise. The world has been
watching closely the growth in India of caste and religious-based
politics. Even more alarming has been the spate of murderous attacks on
Christians in Gujarat and Shantinagar. India today reverberates with
inflammatory rhetoric from religious leaders who seem bent on opening
the wounds that Gandhi and Nehru worked so hard to heal -- and thus
jeopardizing what Indians rightly and proudly regard as their
"civilizational" experience.
It's with much the same apprehension that we've seen, in Pakistan, the
trend toward "Islamicizing" the constitutional and legal system. This
development has coincided with outbreaks of deadly sectarian violence in
Karachi and the Punjab. Just two weeks ago in Punjab, 16 Shi'ites were
gunned down while praying at their mosque in early January. The
attempted assassination of Prime Minister Sharif on January 3 was
another sign of burgeoning political violence.
There appears to be a perverse and dangerous interplay between the
politics of Pakistan and the turmoil inside Afghanistan. With the
emergence of the Taliban, there is growing reason to fear that militant
extremism, obscurantism and sectarianism will infect surrounding
countries. None of those countries has more to lose than Pakistan if
"Talibanization" were to spread further.
All of this is highly relevant to the nuclear question in South Asia --
and therefore to the American effort to engage in preventive diplomacy
there. In addition to dealing with the immediate issue of the weapons,
we also need to understand the circumstances and trends that could
precipitate their use. That reality poses a challenge for Indian and
Pakistani statecraft: how best to establish security policies that will,
to the greatest extent possible, lengthen the fuses and remove the hair
triggers of weaponry now accumulating in both countries.
Let me turn now to the other non-military component of security, which
is broad-based prosperity -- or at least a broadly felt hope for
progress in that direction. If the average citizen sees the possibility
for a better future, then the state is, by definition, stronger and
safer.
As Chris and other architects of our support for democracy have
emphasized for many years, there is a direct linkage between economic
and political freedom. Market economies tend to flourish in democratic
settings. Here again, South Asia is a case in point. With the obvious
and glaring exception of Afghanistan, the region is beginning to realize
its potential as a market for foreign business and investment, and it's
making important strides toward integrating into a regional trading
bloc.
Bangladesh -- which is too often neglected in discussions of South Asian
security -- is key to this hopeful pattern. If it were lifted by a
rising tide of regional growth, Bangladesh might gain enough economic
self-confidence to export some of its enormous gas reserves. That, in
turn, would give a push to regional cooperation. It would fuel India's
development as well, given that nation's enormous need for energy.
Pakistan and Nepal -- and, a bit further to the north, Central Asia --
are also promising sources of natural gas, hydroelectric power and oil.
But for the pieces of this puzzle to come together in a way -- and in a
time frame -- that benefits all the countries of the region, 3 things
must happen.
First, there has to be a high degree of commerce, confidence and
cooperation among the states of the area. That means peace -- not just
peace today, or peace in the sense of absence of war, but a predictable,
stable, sturdy peace stretching into the future.
Second, the international financial institutions must be prepared to
increase their support for infrastructure, telecommunications,
transportation, the energy sector and financial reform.
Third, the countries of the region must be able to attract foreign
investment. None of those conditions is firmly in place today, for
reasons that derive, at least in some measure, to the explosions last
May and their continuing aftershocks.
These are all points that we have included in our dialogues with the 2
parties -- and by that I mean not just with the governments of those
countries, but with others as well: media, ilites, think tanks, non-
governmental organizations and political figures across a broad
spectrum. That brings me to the last subject I want to touch on: the
public affairs dimension of preventive diplomacy. This is a sensitive
but important dimension of our task.
We understand that Prime Ministers Vajpayee and Sharif must justify
their policies to parliaments, where opposition parties are vigorous,
voluble and skeptical. India and Pakistan are, after all to their credit
and to the world's benefit -- democracies. That fact alone confronts us,
in our own practice of statecraft, with something quite different from
what we have dealt with in our earlier efforts to conduct arms-control
negotiations and head off proliferation with other nations.
For most of the first half-century of the nuclear age, the U.S. focused
its diplomatic energies on the other nuclear-armed superpower, which was
the opposite of a democracy. Whether under the rubric of SALT or START
or INF or MBFR or CFE, our Russian interlocutors took their cue
exclusively from the Politburo and the General Staff. Neither they, nor
we, gave much thought to sentiment in the Supreme Soviet or on the
editorial pages of Pravda, Izvestia and Krasnaya Svezda.
It wasn't until the beginning of the Clinton Administration that we
began to get a real taste of what it was like to pursue arms-control and
non-proliferation with fledgling democracies. Chris [Warren
Christopher], Bill Perry, Ash Carter and I spent a lot of 1993 trying to
ensure that, with the breakup of the USSR, there would be only one
nuclear-armed successor state rather than four.
Our hardest work was in Ukraine. During our frequent trips to Kyiv, we
spent a lot of time calling on the Verkhovna Rada, the parliament, where
deputies were loath to let President Kravchuk give up the Soviet-era
nuclear weapons that had ended up on Ukrainian soil. We succeeded in no
small measure because we included a public dimension to our preventive
diplomacy.
In that same spirit, we have pursued our arms-control and non-
proliferation agendas with India and Pakistan in a way that both
recognizes and respects the democratic environment -- with all its
pressures and constraints -- in which our interlocutors are operating.
In this regard, we admire and welcome the assiduous campaigns that both
Prime Ministers have mounted to build support for the CTBT.
For our own part, we have tried to strike a balance between the
appropriate degree of confidentiality in the negotiations and a
necessary degree of transparency with the public. Here, I actually have
in mind 4 publics: our own here in the U.S., the world's, India's and
Pakistan's.
With respect of American opinion: we will only be able to build a
constituency for dealing with this issue if we are clear and convincing
about the stakes in South Asia and about our handling of the nuclear
challenge. There are aspects to our position that are inevitably going
to be controversial even if -- perhaps I should say, especially if -- we
succeed. For example, there are quite a few experts and not a few
members of Congress who believe that we should hold India's and
Pakistani's feet to the fire, insisting on adherence to the Non-
Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear weapons state and on a missile-
flight-test ban before we grant any significant sanctions relief.
We believe that following that stern advice would be to make the best
the enemy of the good. But we can't just say, "trust us, but don't ask
us what's going on in this black box." We've got to make the case for
what we're up to and why. We must do the same with regard to
international public opinion, particularly in those countries -- like
Ukraine, for example, or Brazil or Argentina or South Africa -- that had
the option of going nuclear but instead decided, bravely and wisely, to
join the NPT as non-nuclear-weapon states.
In our dialogues with India and Pakistan, we make no claim to having a
formal mandate or proxy from any other country or international grouping
-- the P-5, the G-8, the South Asia Task Force. But we do feel a
political and moral obligation to make sure that our position and
proposals are consistent with the various communiquis issued by those
bodies last June, and that we keep faith with the world community as a
whole. That consideration too argues for a carefully calibrated degree
of transparency as we move forward.
Now, as for Indian and Pakistani public opinion: here we obviously and
properly must let the governments in question decide how much they want
to expose to public and parliamentary scrutiny the content of their side
of the dialogues that they are conducting with us. We have taken pains
not to reveal, or respond to, the Indian and Pakistani positions beyond
what their spokesmen have chosen to say in public. But we have seen fit
to summarize our own approach, our own goals and our own interests. Not
least because we think we have some pretty good arguments worthy of, and
appropriate for, consideration and open discussion as well as closed-
door deliberations. That's why, in addition to our closed-door session
with our official interlocutors, Joe Ralston and I will, in both Delhi
and Islamabad, be meeting with members of the media, non-governmental
organizations, and other opinion-leaders.
In any event, Chris [Warren Christopher], Bill [Perry] and David
[Hamburg], I welcome the chance to be part of your conference here today
-- not least because it gives me a chance to benefit from your
observations and advice. So with that, over to you and to a discussion
that I'm sure will inform and guide me as I mentally pack for next
week's travels.
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