by Bruce Riedel
By 1993, Bush was no longer president; Bill Clinton had defeated him in the 1992 elections. During the campaign, Clinton had stressed domestic issues—“It’s the economy stupid”—not foreign policy. Bush had done a superb job of managing most of America’s foreign policy challenges in the transition from the end of the cold war to the era that followed. South Asia, however, had not been one of his strong points. For perhaps understandable reasons, he had largely neglected India altogether. India was preoccupied with itself—with its economic crisis, with the collapse of its Soviet friendship treaty, and with forming a stable government. Bush had hoped to build a new relationship with Pakistan, but his courtship of Benazir Bhutto failed when she could not control the ISI and the jihadi monster that America had helped to create. But Bush, Gates, and Haass had kept the region from nuclear disaster.
CLINTON’S FIRST TERM
Although Clinton was elected for his stance on domestic issues, he was fascinated by India, and he believed that India was certain to be a major global player in the twenty-first century. His emphasis on economics helped him to see better than his predecessors that India was bound to prosper once it allowed its entrepreneurs the freedom to invest and develop. The star of the Indian government in the early 1990s was Manmohan Singh, who served as finance minister from June 1991 to May 1996. In those five years he transformed the Indian economy by opening it up to outside investment and reducing, though but not eliminating, government regulations and controls. Singh was born in what would become Pakistani Punjab into a Sikh family that moved to India after partition. He was educated at Cambridge and Oxford. On opposite sides of the globe, both Singh and Clinton were trying to transform their country’s economy, and Clinton followed Singh’s economic policies closely during his first term in the White House. Clinton was eager to build a new partnership with New Delhi and became more interested as he watched Singh open up and transform India.
Clinton’s fascination with India went back to his student days at Oxford in the late 1960s, according to his friend and confidant Strobe Talbott. His interest in India and South Asia continued when he became governor of Arkansas, a poor Southern state. Clinton was intrigued by the experiments in microcredit in Bangladesh conducted by Muhammad Yunus (a future winner of the Nobel Peace Prize), for example, and tried to import them to Arkansas. When he became president in 1993, Clinton focused on domestic issues, but from his very first days in office, he looked forward to a trip to India. In March 1995 his wife, Hillary, traveled to the subcontinent, and her report on the trip only increased his interest.23 But once again, Pakistan was a more pressing immediate concern. The president believed that the Pressler amendment was profoundly unfair. The United States was not only refusing to deliver the F-16s, it would not refund the money that Pakistan had paid for them. On top of that, the United States was charging Pakistan the cost of storing and maintaining them at an American air force base. To Clinton all of this seemed like overkill. When Benazir Bhutto was reelected to office in the fall of 1993, Clinton invited her to Washington. When she arrived in April 1995, she found a receptive Clinton.
It was unfair for the United States to sanction Pakistan by both freezing delivery of the F-16s and refusing to return the money that Pakistan paid for them, but the president’s hands were tied. The Pressler amendment was very clear: once the president no longer certified that Pakistan did not have the bomb, it was illegal to provide any assistance to Pakistan and, according to government lawyers, even returning its money was a violation of the law of the land. Although Clinton sympathized with the prime minister in private and even in public, she went home largely empty handed. A single-minded preoccupation with nuclear nonproliferation had locked the U.S. government in a position in which it could not help the struggling democracy in Pakistan, and it was losing the effort to block the development of nuclear weapons.
One member of the president’s cabinet who was especially outraged by the situation was his secretary of defense, William Perry. Perry believed strongly that nuclear war was a real possibility in South Asia—indeed, over time, a probability. A student of nuclear planning and decisionmaking, Perry was intensely frustrated that the United States was doing little to reduce the likelihood of catastrophe while it stuck to stale talking points to lecture India and Pakistan, as Gates had done with Rodrigues. Perry was especially eager to change American policy and undo the Pressler amendment after the CIA detected preparations for a nuclear test in India in December 1995. The CIA’s warning was leaked to the New York Times, and Clinton’s ambassador in New Delhi, Frank Wisner, used the leak to persuade India not to test. However, it was a close call with bringing the bomb out of the closet and into the open in a dramatic nuclear test.
As secretary of defense, Perry could not change the law or abandon American arms control policy, but he could try to develop richer and more extensive military-to-military relations with India and Pakistan. With encouragement from the White House during Clinton’s first term, Perry brought senior defense officials from the Pentagon together with their Indian and Pakistani counterparts on a regular basis in separate bilateral forums held both in Washington and in New Delhi and Islamabad. It was a first in U.S.-Indian relations and a partial warming of U.S.–Pakistani relations. Perry traveled to the region in January 1995 to put his personal stamp on the process and outlined his thinking in a speech later that month. He began by stressing the importance of security in South Asia, noting that India and Pakistan had fought three wars before each acquired nuclear capability. He argued that “a fourth India-Pakistan war would not be just a tragedy—it could be a catastrophe.” To avert it, the United States needed to engage the militaries of both states to encourage restraint. With India, “it was a matter of building a defense relationship almost from scratch.” He quoted a letter from John Kenneth Galbraith to President Kennedy in 1962 in which he stated that “politics is not the art of the possible, rather it consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”24 Perry was convinced that South Asia was headed toward nuclear disaster if the United States did not take action to end Indo-Pakistani tensions; sooner or later, the nuclear nightmare would explode. Perry tasked me, as his deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Near East and South Asia, with helping to build new ties between New Delhi and Islamabad.
Perry energetically lobbied on Capitol Hill for some relief from the Pressler amendment. He was joined by Robin Raphel, the first assistant secretary of state for South Asia affairs, a position that had been created at the behest of Congress at the end of the Bush administration. Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, were against creating a separate bureau for South Asia, but Bush was unwilling to use the veto to stop it. The Perry-Raphel team got limited relief for Pakistan when Congress passed the Brown amendment, named for Hank Brown, a Republican senator from Colorado, which allowed some assistance, including economic aid and equipment such as naval patrol aircraft. However, the amendment did not touch on the most toxic issue, the F-16s. India’s supporters on the Hill fought even the small steps that Brown had supported.
Benazir Bhutto also pushed the administration to recognize the new government in Afghanistan. The civil war between the mujahedin factions finally produced a new player, the Taliban, an extreme Muslim movement for law and order. The Taliban—translated literally as “students”—emerged suddenly in Kandahar province, in southern Afghanistan, born of the frustration of Pashtuns who were sick and tired of endless feuding among the warlords. Led by Mullah Omar, the group dispensed quick justice based on Islamic and Pashtun law and practices. The ISI quickly saw the power of the new movement. The ISI had ties with Mullah Omar going back to his training in ISI camps during the war against the Soviets. A Taliban-run Afghanistan would end the chaos next door, stabilize Pakistan’s western border, and open trade and transit routes to Central Asia, a new market for Pakistan. With ISI help, the Taliban expanded rapidly in southern Afghanistan in 1994, capturing Kandahar and moving to the outskirts of Kabul. Bena
zir agreed to support the ISI on this issue even though ideologically, the Taliban were her enemy. In 1995 Benazir Bhutto pushed Clinton to reopen the American embassy in Kabul and recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of the country. Her request was, of course, deeply ironic in that as a progressive woman in politics who was a fighter for women’s rights, she represented much of what the Taliban hated. Clinton held back recognition, influenced by Hillary Clinton, who was hearing alarming reports about the fate of women in the new regime: schools were being shut to girls, women were being fired from their jobs, and justice was gender biased. Benazir’s second term in office did not last long. On November 6, 1996, the president again dismissed her government. Once again, the choice on the ballot was the same as it had been twice before. This time Nawaz Sharif beat Bhutto, winning the February 1997 elections.
At the start of his second term in office, Clinton had little to show for four years of effort in South Asia. India and America were still estranged, and Pakistan and America were at odds over nuclear weapons, Afghanistan, and the aging F-16 aircraft.
1998: THE YEAR OF CHANGE
Clinton’s second inauguration in 1997 also marked the fiftieth birthday of both India and Pakistan. During those fifty years, however, American diplomacy had produced little in the way of enduring relationships with the two powers of the subcontinent. Bill Clinton was determined to do better, and his second term should rightly be marked as the turning point in the American encounter with South Asia and with India in particular. Ironically, it would be decisions made in New Delhi about testing nuclear weapons that would make change between Washington and New Delhi possible. It was Clinton’s genius to recognize that in adversity, opportunity beckoned.
Engagement with South Asia began slowly in Clinton’s second term. While the president was more focused on advancing the stalled Middle East peace process and the ongoing crises in Iraq and the Balkans, he decided to make South Asia a priority for his annual trip to New York for the UN General Assembly. World leaders gather there every September, each giving a speech to the assembly and having side meetings with other world leaders. For an American president, it is an easy way to see a lot of foreign leaders without having to deal with the protocol of White House visits. Clinton had decided to see both Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, and India’s prime minister, I. K. Gujral. I was the note taker for both sessions.
It was Clinton’s first face-to-face meeting with Nawaz Sharif, and they got along fine. Clinton repeated his irritation with the constraints of the Pressler amendment, vowed to try to do more to remove it, and urged Sharif to control the proliferation of nuclear technology from Pakistan. The president said that he hoped to visit Pakistan during his second term. It was also Clinton’s first meeting with Gujral, who had just come into office. Gujral had written a book on Indian foreign policy that advocated building better ties to the country’s neighbors, and Clinton hoped that in him he would find a kindred spirit. The soft-spoken Gujral was famously prone to speak in a very low voice, but that day he outdid himself. It was very difficult to understand him. Clinton leaned in closer to hear, and I leaned over the president, all to no avail. When the meeting was over, the president turned to me and said that he looked forward to reading the memorandum of the conversation to find out what the prime minister had said. He was disappointed. I couldn’t hear Gujral either.
The summitry in New York set the stage for a follow-on trip to the region by Clinton’s ambassador to the UN, Bill Richardson, in April 1998. In the interim, Gujral lost in an election to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), or Indian People’s Party, in early 1998. The BJP, India’s second-largest party, stands politically to the right of the Congress Party, its traditional rival. It is often labeled a Hindu nationalist party, a title that it rejects, and it is frequently criticized as excessively nationalist and anti-Muslim. Fortunately, the State Department’s intelligence staff included a real expert on the BJP, Walter Anderson, who would be invaluable in the next couple of years as an adviser on the party. At the White House, I had urged Clinton and Sandy Berger, his national security adviser, to follow the BJP’s progress closely. I warned that a BJP government might be difficult to work with given the party’s background and its promises over the years to develop a more muscular nuclear policy. At the National Security Council’s 1998 New Year’s retreat, I predicted that the BJP would probably win the February elections and proceed to challenge the global nonproliferation regime by openly developing a nuclear weapons arsenal. That said, I did not anticipate just how quickly the new government, led by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, would move to test India’s nuclear weapons once in office.
Richardson’s trip became a reconnaissance mission to determine the intentions of the new BJP-led coalition government in New Delhi. In addition to Richardson, the new assistant secretary for South Asia, Karl (Rick) Inderfurth was on the trip. Rick had served on Carter’s National Security Council and had traveled with Carter in 1978 on his last trip as president to New Delhi. More recently, he had been in New York as Madeleine Albright’s deputy at the UN during Clinton’s first term. After a stopover in Bangladesh, the Richardson team arrived in New Delhi on April 14, 1998. Vajpayee proved to be almost as soft spoken as Gujral. Vajpayee had been prime minister briefly once before, for thirteen days in 1996 when the BJP came in first in an election but could not form a stable coalition. He had also served as foreign minister in the Desai government in the 1970s. He was experienced and rightly regarded as one of the most thoughtful and moderate voices in the BJP. He assured Richardson that India was not intent on making any dangerous changes in its foreign policy and that he looked forward to working with Clinton. The Indian message was that no surprises were in the works and that the BJP would carefully study its options regarding the bomb.
At the end of a long day of talks with officials of the new government, an additional meeting was put on our calendar on short notice, without any press coverage. Jaswant Singh, Vajpayee’s close aide and confidant, came to Roosevelt House, the ambassador’s residence, to call on us. His message was simple: India wanted a good relationship with America, and the prime minister wanted a direct channel to the White House. Singh suggested that he and I should be that channel. If any issue arose that needed urgent direct attention from Vajpayee and Clinton, the two of us could speak immediately to get messages to our bosses. It seemed to be an important gesture that would reassure those who were worried about the BJP’s intentions. Richardson went on to Islamabad and Kabul next.
Then, on May 11, 1998, less than a month later, India tested three nuclear weapons in the Rajasthan desert at Pokhran. On May 13, it tested two more. The U.S. intelligence community was caught completely off guard. The CIA would later conclude after a postmortem that it also had been misled by Indian officials, who had engaged in careful deceptive practices at the test facility, having learned about American intelligence collection capabilities from the 1995 episode in which Ambassador Wisner had stopped a planned Indian test after it was leaked by the New York Times. Most work was done at night, and preparations for the test were skillfully covered up by the time that U.S. satellites scanned the site. Nonetheless, local residents knew something was amiss, and a small Canadian Sikh newsletter reported that test preparations were under way, but no one noticed. Vajpayee and Singh had pulled off a diplomatic and intelligence coup and surprised the world with five underground nuclear tests. The era of nuclear ambiguity in South Asia was over.
Clinton was furious at India, the CIA, and everyone else. The tests tied his hands. Under existing legislation, he had no choice but to impose harsh sanctions on India. Aid would be cut off and military-to-military ties broken, and Washington would have to vote against loans to India at the World Bank and other international financial institutions. He was especially upset because one of the signature accomplishments of his first term was the conclusion of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which, on September 26, 1996, he had been the first world leader
to sign. JFK had started on the road to the CTBT in 1963, and Clinton rightly regarded it as a major step toward making the world safer. Now it was in deep trouble, and rather than planning a trip to South Asia, he was imposing tough sanctions on India.
The Indians justified their tests by pointing to China, not Pakistan. They reminded the world that they had been attacked by China in 1962 and that China had tested its bomb in 1965. As recently as 1987, there had been another flare-up on the border at Wangdung Ridge, where each deployed 60,000 troops in an uneasy standoff.25 In the first visit to China by an Indian prime minister since the 1962 war, Rajiv Gandhi had traveled to Beijing the next year to try to reduce tensions. Negotiations to permanently settle the border conflict began in 1991, but it still is not resolved. By putting its test in the context of its relations with China, India was arguing that it was a major global power in the league of the P5, the permanent members of the UN Security Council. For its part, the Security Council unanimously condemned the test on June 6, 1998, in Resolution 1172. The resolution demanded no further tests, a halt to development of nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, and a halt to production of fissile material for weapons. It encouraged India and Pakistan to address “the root causes of the tensions between them, including Kashmir.”26
By then Pakistan had followed India’s lead. It was virtually certain that Islamabad would do so, but the Clinton team tried to head it off. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott was given the mission impossible assignment. Strobe, Rick, and I flew to Pakistan on the airplane of CENTOM’s commander, General Anthony Zinni. It was then the oldest aircraft in the U.S. air force, and the trip from Tampa took forever. Sharif and his cabinet were in turmoil. The Pakistani media and elite wanted an immediate, powerful response to India’s tests. The scientists, including A. Q. Khan, were pushing for permission to test. The Foreign Ministry was screaming for tests. Only the chief of army staff, General Karamat, was cool-headed, but he knew that Sharif had no choice but to test or lose all credibility at home, so there was no reason to be excited. Foreign Minister Gohar Ayub told Talbott that “now that India has barged its way into becoming the world’s sixth nuclear power, it will not stop there. It will force itself into permanent membership of the UN Security Council.”27
