I just returned from my third trip to India in four years. Every time I am struck by its confidence facing an ever more integrated world. Retaining relatively high growth rates, India has been relatively unscathed by the financial crisis. India's confidence about its future comes from a number of factors, including the success of the India diaspora across the globe and its definitive break with failed Indian- style socialism in the early 1990s. They have signed on to a model of development that requires increasing openness and they see the U.S.as a key partner.

The United States and India have many shared interests and much of the credit goes to former President Bush for successfully "resetting" the India relationship. After visiting Brazil and Russia in the last three months for a project at my day job, I conclude that a new President will have a most willing partner in India and a most able partner in Russia.

I met with senior officials of the U.S. and Indian governments, leaders in the NGO sector, and think tank scholars who were all very openly pro US. It was refreshing after meeting with Brazilians and Russians with a laundry list of "issues" about the U.S. relationship. The U.S.-India relationship benefits from the best "atmospherics" of the three. One senior Indian official described the United States as the "greatest country in the world" without hyperbole or sarcasm.  These are people with whom we can do A LOT of business.

Some facts to think about as we look to the 2012 election:

• India has consistently provided a top number of troops to the U.N. Peacekeeping Mission and continues to do so -- hundreds ahead of other donor countries.
• The number quoted to me is 3 million "overseas Indians" in the U.S. The most prominent Indian American politicians are Republican -- Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley.
• India is slated to become the 3^rd largest economy in the world within the next few years.
• With 1.1 billion people, it has something like 400 million very poor people. India has more poor people than all of sub-Saharan Africa.
• At the same time, India has sought to increase its foreign aid to other countries and has a joint space exploration program with Russia and is a member of the G-20. About eight years ago, India kicked many smaller European donor countries out of the country because the transaction costs were too high in exchange for the money they were getting.
• This past year, our trade with India hit nearly $50 billion, up from only $5 billion in 1990 -- a relatively small number compared to other U.S. trading partners. For example, U.S. trade with Canada totaled nearly $495 billion in 2009 while trade with China totaled $390 billion.
• Indian officials see the world much like those in the United States with similar interests and concerns. The concerns about terrorism were ever present in my visit -- constant metal detector stops at hotels, metro stations, airports and government ministries -- a far cry from Brazil's splendid isolation and sense of safety.

The opportunities with India are immense and our assistance and other cooperation programs need to radically reposition our relatively small amounts of foreign aid away from social service delivery to a number of smaller catalytic activities that leverage Indian expertise, deepen the institutional relationships between the two countries, and export India expertise and innovation to third countries in line with Indian aspirations as a global player. USAID and the State Department have started to make some steps, but need to take much more aggressive steps over the next several years. It will be hard to justify an annual foreign aid program in India as it becomes wealthier, but there are a large number of opportunities to work together with India requiring small and shrinking amounts of foreign assistance over time.

A new Republican administration would do well to heed the following:

• Science and technology. Much has been written about the Indian Institutes of Technology, one of which was funded and set up by the United States in the 1960s through USAID funding. There is a strong desire to link scientists and leverage India's lead in what is called "frugal innovation" (which means solving problems in poverty-based contexts, such as selling consumer goods in smaller/cheaper ways than traditionally imagined). The Obama administration, to its credit, is working this area with enthusiasm (I note as a good start the new innovation fund set up in December through USAID).
• Agriculture. Norman Borlaug, one of America's least famous (in the U.S.) Nobel Peace Prize winners, is a revered figure in India because of the USAID-supported Green Revolution of the 1960s that dramatically increased agricultural productivity in South Asia and helped feed hundreds of millions of people. India still has agricultural challenges, but is ready and willing to engage with the U.S. in third countries on agriculture. We should take them up on this.
• Democracy Promotion. India is the largest democracy. It is often described as having "too much democracy." At the same time, India is an ideal partner for any number of democracy promotion projects in third countries. We are only just beginning to identify opportunities here. In a future administration with a more outspoken Freedom Agenda, we should be looking to bring India and others in on a more strategic basis.
• Economic Integration. India has massive energy and raw material consumption needs. India's needs are a part of the bigger South Asia equation including China, Afghanistan, Iran and elsewhere. Engaging India in the greater South Asia challenges is a U.S. priority, but continues to be stymied by the Indo-Pak dysfunctional relationship.
• Free Trade. Taking the long view -- the United States is a long way away from a free trade agreement with India partially because of the closed nature of the economy. However, technical discussions have begun between the U.S. and India on a "Bilateral Investment Treaty," which is sort of a starter free trade agreement. The U.S. should watch if the British are able to establish a "free trade agreement on services" because the UK is the largest foreign player in services. If that takes hold, the U.S. could follow if we made it a focus over two presidential terms.
• Overseas Indian Community. "OICs" are going to be the new Irish or Italians in U.S. domestic politics -- loved by all and very invested in their home country. The Obama administration has invested a lot in what they can offer in terms of expertise and appetite for investment and engagement, but much more could be done to help provide brokering, convening, training and seed capital. Small amounts of money will go a long way in India and will be recognized at home.

In addressing despotic regimes, President Obama tends to pose a question and a challenge: we know what you are against, now tell us what you are for. Now, as he prepares to deliver a major address on the Middle East, the same question might be posed to the president when it comes to U.S. policy in the region. Whether or not his speech is deemed a success will depend on how convincingly he answers this challenge.

When President Obama took office, it seemed clear what he was for in the Middle East. In Cairo in June 2009 he outlined his objectives. Featuring prominently among them were progress on Israeli-Palestinian peace, easing the mutual mistrust between the United States and Iran through dialogue and engagement; withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq; and improving U.S. standing amongst Arab publics.

Almost immediately after the speech was delivered, the reality of Middle Eastern politics intervened. Iranians poured into the streets of Tehran on June 12 to protest a rigged presidential election, and were brutalized by the very regime President Obama hoped to engage. The U.S. response, which seemed to coldly prioritize negotiations with Iran's rulers over empathy with its embattled populace, was starkly at odds with the tone of the Cairo speech.

Since then, the president's initial agenda in the region has foundered, and many of the assumptions that informed his initial approach have proven mistaken. Engagement with Iran is not only no silver bullet, it is not new -- every U.S. president since Jimmy Carter has reached out to Tehran, all with disappointing results. Moving forward on Israeli-Palestinian peace requires that Washington win the trust of both parties. Instead, the trust of both was lost in one fell swoop over a highly public and ultimately unnecessary spat over Israeli settlements.

As for U.S. standing in the Arab world, it turns out, is tied less to comity and more to solidarity, which was in short supply during both the Arab and Iranian uprisings. Our views on Islam globally are less relevant than our impact in the lives of Muslims -- and Christians, Jews, and everyone else -- locally.

These days, as the Middle East is gripped by a wave of historic change, U.S. policy appears at best slow and inconsistent and at worst increasingly irrelevant to events in this vital region. Like those we criticize, we find ourselves at risk of being defined by what we are against. We are against violent extremism, and the death of Osama bin Laden will rightly be touted repeatedly by the president as evidence of U.S. determination in the face of our enemies. We are against rapacious autocracy, but we are also against, more dubiously, U.S. involvement in what the administration has termed "organic" revolutions.

But what exactly are we for? Over the past weeks and months, we have given little indication apart from repeated intonations of our commitment to "universal values" which could apply as easily to the Medicare debate as to the Middle East. In Tunisia and Egypt, we spoke up only when forced by events. In Syria and Iran, we hesitate as regimes ratchet up their repression. Even in Libya, where we have called upon Qaddafi to "go," our military approach stands in curious contrast to our stated policy aims.

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The Washington Post is running a series of articles highlighting failed projects funded by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly $5 billion in funds has been appropriated through the Commander's Emergency Response Program (CERP), which gives military forces in combat money to put toward humanitarian assistance and development projects that advance the war effort, to include reducing unemployment and building support for U.S. objectives. The articles highlight numerous projects that have been abandoned once under the control of the Iraqi and Afghan governments, with the implication that the programs were scandalously wasteful. And that may be right in many cases; but the Post articles also give no context for whether CERP funded projects are more or less successful than other development assistance. Here are three points they ought to have addressed but did not.

No. 1: A project that is abandoned now does not mean it wasn't beneficial.
I realize it's a difficult argument to make that wasted money is a good thing; but CERP funds aim for short term effect in a combat zone. They are not projects for the ages, they are designed to affect the here and now decisions of insurgents and the population that may permit them to operate with impunity. The Post concludes that "have created no more than a temporary illusion of progress," but temporary progress can be vital in creating or sustaining momentum in warfare. If the Iraqi government does not now make a water park (one of the projects) a priority, that does not mean it wasn't a hopeful and useful sign to Iraqis three years ago when we were trying to convey that violence was dramatically down, it was safe for Iraqis to engage in normal pursuits, and our objectives were a peaceful and prosperous Iraq.

No. 2: Development assistance is an inherently speculative undertaking.
What proportion of businesses started here in the United States fail? Add to that the complexities of societies coming out of authoritarian governance or decades of war, developing law and judicial practice while democratizing, and it's not at all surprising that a large number of projects will be abandoned or unsuccessful. If we expect a guaranteed return on investment with our development assistance, we would actually not be assisting development very much. Those projects tend toward large infrastructure guaranteed by local governments, and even those are often rife with corruption and mismanagement. Part of what development assistance does is teach the practices of capitalism, and failure is a part of capitalism, so we should not balk at failed attempts.

No. 3: The U.S. military is not particularly good at development assistance.
It's not their job. They will optimize funding to projects that advance their war fighting objectives, predominantly near-term security. To make the military good at development assistance, as Carl Schramm has advocated in his Expeditionary Economics article in Foreign Affairs, would require a major diversion of effort from fighting and winning the country's wars. We actually have a branch of the U.S. government whose job it is to provide assistance; that would be the Agency for International Development. The real disappointment of so much money being channeled through CERP is that our government proved incapable of working together to prioritize and fund both near-term and long-term assistance in Iraq and Afghanistan when they are essential to our war efforts.

The Obama administration had a relatively good year in Asia (relative, that is, to its disastrous first year), but it still must follow up and break bad habits, as my colleague and former State Department official Randy Schriver likes to say. They stood up to China's bullying in the South China Sea, declaring that freedom of navigation and the peaceful resolution of disputes are American "core interests." They finally signed the most significant free trade agreement since NAFTA, with South Korea. When President Obama went to India he removed barriers to high-technology exports and pressed for more business-to-business ties. In Indonesia, he signed a number of agreements that should help both trade and defense relations. The administration accepted an invitation to the East Asia Summit, which is very important to Southeast Asians and will make it easier to forge lasting bonds in the region.

Now for the critique. The administration seems ready to go wobbly on North Korea, and in the process China. It has shifted from supporting whatever tough measures President Lee Myung-bak wanted to take to nudging him back to the failed six-party talks and congratulating China for its diplomacy in getting North Korea to signal agreement to talk. This is the worst of the bad habits in Asia we must break. The North did not just test a missile this time; they twice killed South Koreans in cold blood last year. No president can allow his people to be killed without responding. We seem not to understand that. The first task for the U.S. and South Korea is to re-establish deterrence, which could well mean proportionate retaliation against the North.

Instead, we are falling back on the same old failed patterns. The North commits an act of aggression and eventually China urges their ally back to the table. Washington then falls over itself complimenting China for its diplomatic skill. This will not get the North to denuclearize or stop its aggression. And it is dangerous. North Korea can continue to commit acts of war with impunity while China simply looks the other way. It will only lead to more attacks on South Korea and is more likely to lead to conflict -- South Korea will eventually have to strike back. Instead, we should thank China very much for its efforts, cut Beijing out of any future talks we wish to have with North Korea, re-establish deterrence, and implement a number of coercive measures against the North to rebuild our negotiating leverage. Not only would direct talks backed up by coercion put us in a more powerful position with North Korea, if carefully orchestrated with our allies, but China might fear being excluded from future arrangements on the peninsula and pressure its friends in Pyongyang to abide by international rules.

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The biggest disappointment of President Barack Obama's Asia trip was his failure to strike an agreement on the Korea-United States Free Trade Agreement in Seoul. His biggest success was his embrace of a transformative partnership with India. The president can now claim ownership of a relationship that has been on the rocks since he took office, and he deserves considerable credit for arguing that India's rise and success as a future democratic superpower is a core interest of the United States.

The president's vision of a far-reaching partnership with India -- to manage global diplomatic and security challenges, tie the two countries together in a mutually beneficial economic embrace, and promote freedom and rule of law in Asia and beyond -- was bracing. Obama's warm reception by the Indian parliament, commentariat, and public bodes well for future ties between the world's oldest and the world's largest democracies.

In New Delhi, Obama made a strong case for strengthening Indo-U.S. ties -- and to create an "indispensable" partnership that would help define the course of the 21st century:

Now, India is not the only emerging power in the world. But the relationship between our countries is unique. For we are two strong democracies whose constitutions begin with the same revolutionary words -- the same revolutionary words -- "We the people." We are two great republics dedicated to the liberty and justice and equality of all people. And we are two free market economies where people have the freedom to pursue ideas and innovation that can change the world. And that's why I believe that India and America are indispensable partners in meeting the challenges of our time… The United States not only welcomes India as a rising global power, we fervently support it, and we have worked to help make it a reality… [P]romoting shared prosperity, preserving peace and security, strengthening democratic governance and human rights -- these are the responsibilities of leadership. And as global partners, this is the leadership that the United States and India can offer in the 21st century.

Obama's expressed ambitions for Indo-U.S. ties came just in time to check a growing chorus in Washington of pessimism toward the relationship. Most prominent among the skeptics is George Perkovich, the esteemed vice president for studies of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, whose foundational book on India's development of nuclear weapons was an inspiration for this author, and many others, to embrace the study of India. Dr. Perkovich was an India expert long before it was popular, so his arguments carry great weight. That is why his recent Carnegie report arguing that India cannot be the partner the United States wants it to be -- and that ambitions of the kind Obama expressed for the relationship are actually harmful to it -- deserves attention.

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President Barack Obama and his advisors formulated their Afghan policy almost exclusively to achieve one goal: deny safe haven to al Qaeda, according to Bob Woodward's book Obama's Wars. Counterterrorism is an important goal, but the administration seems to believe it is the only goal. This is a seriously myopic vision of U.S. national security interests. We have a much broader range of interests at stake in Afghanistan and South Asia. The administration's failure to understand them goes a long way to explain why it settled on a half-hearted strategy in Afghanistan.

So why are we fighting?

• Deny safe haven permanently. If al Qaeda returns the day or the year after we leave, we lose. Our effort in Afghanistan has to be about more than an endless holding pattern or a temporary band-aid. It actually has to enable Afghans to continue denying safe haven after the last U.S. soldier has left. That is the main problem with the scaled-down counterterrorism-only plan: it presents no realistic scenario for the United States ever to leave.
• Prevent instability in Pakistan. Chaos in Afghanistan will bleed over into Pakistan. Woodward's book records only a few brief mentions of this danger by administration officials, yet state failure in Pakistan is probably a much greater long-term danger to U.S. security than al Qaeda regaining another safe haven.
  Read on

A series of bomb scares and plots in Europe -- combined with a stepped-up campaign against jihadists in Pakistan -- reminds us once again of the threat posed by al Qaeda and the groups that support its ideology.

Let's start with Europe where France, perhaps because of its vote to ban the Islamic veil in public, has become a special target for the extremists. The bomb scares began on Sept. 14, when a Metro station and the Eiffel Tower were evacuated, and have continued since then with three further evacuations of both Metro stations and the Eiffel Tower, the last of which occurred just yesterday. France's security threat warning was raised to "reinforced red," the second highest possible level, and French officials announced that they were searching for a female suicide bomber who might attempt to attack public transportation. Counterterrorism officials in France linked the threats to al Qaeda's branch in North Africa (al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghab, or AQIM) as well as to sleeper cells in France that were activated by extremists arriving from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

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Another week, and another Big Bombshell Story in the national security press, this time a series of stories based on the leak by Wikileaks of over 90,000 classified cables and reports from the Afghan theater. (A sidebar: The word "leak" just doesn't seem adequate for a data dump and security breach of this magnitude. This is not so much a leak as a gusher.)

After reading the stories, my reaction is similar to FP colleague Tom Ricks: There does not appear to be any bombshell revelation here. Perhaps the more interesting and damning revelations are to come, but presumably the newspapers led with their best stuff.

If so, I would go a step further: The bombshell is that, with 90,000 classified documents from which to cherry-pick, the reporters were obliged to conclude, "Over all, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the war." That is pretty significant, given the layers of distrust and skeptical reporting that have accumulated over the years. (By contrast, a few days of reporting from a very different kind of data dump, the archives of JournoList, seems to have generated far more damning revelations.)

In other words, the general understanding of the overall arc of the Afghan war thus far that an attentive public audience would develop by staying abreast of the information already in the public domain is what one would glean if one digested 90,000 classified documents from the same period. That is a big story, but it is not the one the editors are hyping.

Instead, they are hyping a few items that seem less significant upon closer inspection:

• Did the Taliban use heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft?Although this has been a concern from the earliest days of the Afghan war, apparently neither NATO nor U.S. commanders have publicly and officially confirmed an incident. The newspapers culling the Wikileaks trove found a few tactical reports where some officers suspected an attack might have used a heat-seeking Stinger missile, and the Guardian story in particular trumpets this as evidence of an official cover-up.

   

  But,as anyone who has read tactical reports knows, there are always contradictions and uncertainties in raw reports. If the newspapers had evidence that the chain of command ignored these reports and did not investigate them further, that would be a story. But that is not what is reported (not yet, anyway). Rather, what is reported is that there are a few tactical sitreps that differ from the official/public account. That may indicate that the original tactical reports did not prove out under further investigation. Given the way the New York Times downplays the issue, I suspect that may be what happened here.

• Secret commando raids against top insurgent leaders have had "notable successes" but "have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment." I have no doubt whatsoever that this is all true. I just don't see this as new news.

• Drones do not work perfectly. Ditto.

• The CIA has been extensively deployed in Afghanistan. Ditto.

• Pakistan has been an uncertain ally, sometimes helping and sometimes hurting the war effort. Ditto.

Of course, this doesn't mean the leaks are without consequence. As Gabriel Schoenfeld has argued, the leaks further undermine the classification system on which sensitive national security collection, analysis, and decision-making depends. Moreover, the leaks -- and especially the hyped air-of-scandal coverage (see especially the way the sensationalized British press are covering the story) -- fuel public despair about the war and provide fodder for well-established anti-war arguments. This appears to be the reason why anti-war activists collected and disseminated the classified documents in the first place.

The leaked documents may even have put in jeopardy coalition troops and military missions. The editors at the New York Times assure us that they took every necessary step to ensure that the safety of the troops and their missions were not compromised by this leak. President Obama's National Security Advisor says otherwise, warning that the leaks could "put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security."

One doesn't have to be a knee-jerk partisan supporter of the Obama administration to think that it is a better judge of how to preserve American national security than newspaper editors and anti-war activists.

I've had a bracing welcome to the blogosphere and see that there are some folks who disagree with me on the relationship between Mullah Umar, Bin Ladin, and the TTP. Of course issues like relationships are always open to interpretation and intelligence analysts with access to the full range of available sources debate this question on a daily basis. It's also a fact that the situation on the ground is fluid, and the insurgency in Pakistan-Afghanistan is continuously evolving. What is true today about relationships between groups might not be true next year.

But here's why I said that -- at least today -- the TTP are "under the authority" of both Mullah Umar and Bin Ladin: leaders of the TTP have publicly said that this is true. On March 1, Hakimullah, the head of the TTP posted a video on the Jamia Hafsa website in which he clarified the relationship between the TTP and Mullah Umar, saying among other things that "the Afghan Taliban are doing jihad under the leadership of Mullah Umar, and the mujahidin of the Tehrik-e-Taliban [TTP] are also doing jihad under his leadership. The commander of the faithful [i.e. Mullah Umar] is the leader of the Afghan Taliban as well as the Pakistani Taliban."

As for the relationship between the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qa'ida, this is how Mullah Nazir, a local commander in the TTP, put it last year in an interview with al-Qa'ida's media wing, al-Sahab. First, he confirmed their allegiance to the global jihad:

Our Jihad isn't limited to Pakistan or Afghanistan. We do not even accept these boundaries that separate us, that 'this shall be Pakistan' and 'that shall be Afghanistan...' this is nothing but an inanity devised by the Jews and we reject it...' Our Jihad is a global Jihad, and we aim to liberate Muslims throughout the world and obliterate tumult, oppression and mischief, and establish the system of Shariah all over the world.

He then affirmed their commitment to both Mullah Umar and Bin Ladin as commanders of the jihad:

Al-Sahab: What are your sentiments regarding the leadership of the Mujahidin i.e. Mullah Muhammad Umar, Commander of the Believers, and Shaykh Usama bin Ladin?

Mullah Nazir: We want to say to them that we are your Mujahidin and your soldiers. We await your orders. Do not worry, for the Mujahidin here in Waziristan alone suffice you. We are proud of your leadership and consider it an honor for us. We give away our lives at your command and feel proud to obey you at all times.

Of course, whether Bin Ladin actually gives the TTP orders and they actually obey him is another question.

I find Fareed Zakaria always intriguing even, or perhaps especially, when I am not fully persuaded by his argument. Today, he writes:

President Obama gets much credit for changing America's image in the world -- he was probably awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for doing so. But even devoted fans would probably say it is too soon to cite a specific foreign policy achievement. In fact, there is a place -- crucial to U.S. national security -- where Obama's foreign policy is working: Pakistan.

I agree more or less with all four claims in that opening paragraph: Obama deserves credit for improving America's image; image is the only plausible justification for giving Obama the Nobel prize; Obama's foreign policy achievements have been sparse thus far; and the results and prospects in Pakistan are less gloomy than one might have predicted a year ago. However, the Pakistan claim is the dodgiest of those claims and I am only partially persuaded by Zakaria's reasoning.

Zakaria argues that success (so far) in Pakistan is due to four factors, three of which he credits to the Obama team:

1) Obama properly recognized that prospects in Afghanistan are linked to Pakistan and dramatized this fact by referring to the problem as the Af-Pak problem.
2) Obama used sticks and carrots to pressure Pakistan: sticks in the form of outreach to Pakistan's rival, India; carrots in the form of massive aid.
3) Obama has put in time and effort, specifically a "whole of government" approach to Pakistan.
4) Obama got lucky because the militants over-reached in Pakistan with their brutality.

My problem with this argument is that all of these factors, except perhaps the "AfPak" label and luck (!), pre-date the Obama administration by some margin. 

• The Bush team saw Afghanistan and Pakistan as linked, indeed the very first move after 9/11 was sending Deputy Secretary Armitage to Pakistan to threaten Musharraf to get on-side; ever since, the Afghanistan and Pakistan policy lines have been intertwined.  The problem was that sometimes this meant that progress on one line led to progress on the other but just as often it meant that a set-back on one line led to a set-back on the other.
• The Bush team used sticks and carrots with Pakistan, indeed the very same sticks and carrots of outreach to India and generous aid to Pakistan. 
• The Bush team likewise devoted considerable time and effort to Pakistan and tried the same whole of government approach.
• The militants certainly over-reached in Pakistan and have been over-reaching for quite a long time.  The one difference is that Bush was unlucky, in the form of a mostly unrelated over-reach by Musharraf when he challenged his Supreme Court Justice Chaudhry back in 2007.

It is possible that Obama has tweaked the mix of these policies just right and this has produced better results.  It is more possible that simply the steady accumulation of continuing basically the same things has produced more progress.  And it is perhaps most possible that the critical ingredients distinguishing between progress and reversals is the adoption of the McChrystal surge strategy in Afghanistan, good luck, and circumstance.

Consider this: if the situation in Pakistan was worsening, there would be plenty of explanatory factors available to blame.  First, just as Bush was stuck with the compromised Musharraf regime as partner, Obama is stuck the equally but differently compromised Zardari regime as partner.  Second, numerous bureaucratic snafus have largely hobbled the "whole of government" effort.  Third, the way the Pakistani aid package was, well, packaged produced a sharp backlash in Pakistan -- it is hard to know whether to code this a carrot or a stick or a poisoned carrot. Fourth, the tortuous Afghan Strategy Review 2.0 and the botched roll-out provided as much confusion as clarification in the region, at least initially.

In short, it seems it would be no harder to explain a lack of progress as it is to explain progress. Under the circumstances, a modified version of the old Scot verdict, "not yet proven," seems warranted.

To be fair, Zakaria duly caveats the Pakistan argument.  One cannot accuse him of naïve boosterism on this issue.  Indeed, he closes with a warning against naïve optimism on Pakistan and warns the Obama administration that relations with Pakistan are like running on a treadmill: "If you stop, you move backward -- and most likely fall down." He may be more right than he realized: it could be like running on a treadmill in that you can be doing the right things for a very long time and at great effort and still not appear to be any closer to your final objective.

The capture of Taliban commander Mullah Baradar in a combined Pakistani-American intelligence operation in Karachi is a major development in the war on terror. This is true not only, and obviously, with reference to the military campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Perhaps more profoundly, it is also true with reference to the future of U.S.-Pakistan relations. It could be a critical step forward in a long-troubled partnership, one fueled by converging perceptions of the threat of Islamic extremism. But, if part of a deal to grant Pakistan a free hand in Afghanistan once American forces withdraw in return for greater near-term cooperation to support the West's rush to exit the region, it could presage a troubling step backward.

The CIA worked closely with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) in combined intelligence operations targeting Al Qaeda after September 11, 2001 -- following a famous U.S. ultimatum to Pakistan to assist in the Taliban's defeat in Afghanistan or share its fate, and reinforced by al Qaeda's repeated assassination attempts against General Pervez Musharraf, the country's military ruler at the time. But ISI has continued to enjoy intimate relations with the Afghan Taliban, which it helped create and bring to power in 1996. More recently, Pakistani intelligence officers have helped Afghan Taliban commanders outwit their American adversaries, even as ISI benefited from American material support. Indeed, Mullah Baradar was previously captured by Afghan forces in November 2001 -- then released after ISI intervention, according to the New York Times.

What has changed the Pakistani military leadership's calculus to the point that ISI has now helped capture the Afghan Taliban's No. 2 leader? The optimist's answer is, in a word, the Pakistani Taliban. Pakistan sponsored the Taliban when it was a vehicle for Pakistani influence in Afghanistan's Pashtun heartland. But the spillover from the Taliban's resurgence next door helped create a monster in the form of the Pakistani Taliban, whose suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks increasingly have targeted the institutions of the Pakistani state and its supreme defender: the Pakistani armed forces. 

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By Dan Twining

What should we make of the current imbroglio over U.S. aid to Pakistan? The fact that a singularly generous American civilian assistance package has led to a crisis in U.S.-Pakistan relations rather than improving them reveals three things: one, Pakistan's continued civil-military imbalance, two, Pakistani public hostility to what has been viewed as Washington's transactional relationship with their country's leaders, and three, the imperative of a sustained U.S. commitment to Pakistan and its region that helps reconstitute the way Pakistan's military and civilian leaders define their interests -- and in turn reconfigures the possibilities for partnership between Islamabad (where the civilian government sits), Rawalpindi (the headquarters of the Pakistani Army), and Washington.

First, Pakistan's military leadership is clearly using the conditionalities contained in the U.S. assistance package as a hammer with which to beat the country's unpopular (and pro-American) civilian president, Asif Ali Zardari. That this is a manufactured rather than a genuine crisis should provide little comfort, however, for it demonstrates how well-intentioned U.S. congressional efforts to strengthen civilian governance in Pakistan can backfire. To take one example, provisions in the final congressional bill authorizing the assistance package urge the civilian government to assume some responsibility for military promotions -- anathema to the generals, who believe civilian meddling in internal Army matters threatens both its institutional integrity and, because they define their country's interests as derivative of the Army's, the national security of Pakistan.

The challenge for American friends of Pakistan is to pursue policies that strengthen the country's civilian institutions while at the same time not unduly threatening the prerogatives of the Army, working overtime to rebalance relations between them while engaging closely with both. But such is the gap between military and civilian capacity that this is the work of years, even decades -- not of a single assistance package. For the moment, Washington has a compelling interest in the sustained survival of civilian government in Pakistan, a country that has been ruled by the military for roughly half its 60-year history. Policies that threaten civilian government by crossing the Army's red lines do not contribute to that end.

Second, America needs to be a better ally of Pakistan's moderate majority of citizens who oppose Taliban or military rule but nonetheless view the United States as an enemy, not an advocate, of liberal values in their country. In the past, the United States has supported military dictatorship in Pakistan: Washington's embrace of General Zia al Haq and its partnership with him to support the Afghan mujahideen fighting Soviet forces in the 1980s contributed to the rise of a strand of militant Islam that had previously been quiescent in Pakistan. Washington's support for Gen. Pervez Musharraf, not only immediately following 9/11 but well after his sell-by date, created political space for opponents of dictatorship to define their dissent with reference to an ideology of anti-American, Islamist zealotry.

Pakistanis lament that their leaders rule only with the support of "the Army, Allah, and America." The United States is not responsible for Pakistan's pathologies, many rooted in its violent birth as a nation and the subsequent choices of its political and military elites. But no U.S. policy to stabilize Pakistan can succeed as long as most Pakistanis view Washington as a fickle, disreputable partner that seeks a transactional relationship with their leaders and then abandons their country when narrow objectives sought by Washington are secured. Setting the matter of conditionalities aside, the Kerry-Lugar civilian assistance package promises to reconstitute relations with the Pakistani people by making sustained investments in educational, judicial, governing, and developmental institutions that provide for their welfare. But the road to a relationship of trust will be long, and American public diplomacy faces extraordinary challenges -- not only in changing Pakistani public attitudes, but in emboldening Pakistani political and military leaders to speak out in defense of partnership with the United States, rather than leveraging it as a weapon against their political adversaries (see above).

Third and relatedly, America must sustain a long-term commitment to Pakistan and its region across the political-economic-military spectrum to change some of the intractable ground realities that lead Pakistani leaders to define their interests in ways inimical to those of the United States. Chris Brose and I have detailed the outlines of such an approach here. The goal of such a strategy would be to gradually reorient Pakistan's definition of national security away from its current manifestation -- supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan and terrorism against India, for instance -- policies destructive to its neighbors, to us, and to itself. This would be a slow, systematic, and evolutionary -- not revolutionary -- approach to changing the strategic context of Pakistani decision-making and so nudging Pakistan in a direction more favorable to the interests of the United States -- and the welfare of the Pakistani people.

The most important element of such a strategy is for the United States and its Western and local allies to win the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Construction of an Afghan state that can defeat the insurgency and govern its people legitimately, in conjunction with sustained investment in Pakistani civic institutions and a reorientation of the Pakistani military's worldview, would in the long term create a dynamic in South Asia in which states like India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan define their security in ways that are positive- rather than zero-sum. It would demonstrate to the jihadists intent on undermining civilian governments in Delhi, Islamabad, and Kabul that they have no hope, separating their violent aspirations from those of citizenries that instead aspire to modernity, security, and opportunity.

By contrast, failure in Afghanistan, no matter how many American resources were subsequently shifted to Pakistan, would only compound the latter's insecurity and misgovernance. The policy conundrums America confronts in South Asia today would pale against those we should expect if the Taliban continue their ascendance in Afghanistan, emboldening their fellow extremists in Pakistan. Just as our country should finish what we started in Afghanistan in part because it will strengthen the forces of moderation next door, so American assistance to Pakistan should empower our natural allies there rather than put them on the defensive.

RIZWAN TABASSUM/AFP/Getty Images

By Dan Twining

In 1998, President Clinton flew over Japan without stopping to spend nine days in China. This led to acute concern in Tokyo over "Japan passing" -- the belief that Washington was neglecting a key Asian ally in favor of the region's rising star, China. Is the same thing happening today -- not with Japan, destination of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's first overseas trip, but with India?

The construction of a strategic partnership with India was arguably President Bush's signal foreign policy accomplishment. Decades of estrangement between the world's largest democracies gave way to a strategic breakthrough akin to President Nixon's visit to China in 1972. Senior Bush administration officials believed that India could emerge as America's most important international partner over coming decades, given India's growing capabilities and a congruence of interests in defeating global terrorism, managing China's rise, sustaining an open global economy, and securing our common values. 

For its part, the government of Manmohan Singh literally put its survival on the line for the United States, subjecting itself to a confidence vote in parliament in order to move forward with the civil nuclear cooperation agreement. Few other countries -- including America's closest allies -- have passed such a test.

But signs of trouble in U.S.-India relations emerged early on Barack Obama's road to the White House. As a Senator, he offered a killer amendment to restrict nuclear fuel supply to India during consideration of the civilian-nuclear agreement, which the Bush administration and India's supporters in Congress had to work hard to defeat. 

During the presidential campaign, he revealed that he had asked Bill Clinton to consider serving as a special envoy for Kashmir in an Obama administration, alarming Indians in the way that Americans might be alarmed if the European Union offered to send a senior envoy to mediate between Mexico and the United States over the status of Texas. 

Candidate Obama also pledged, if elected, to push for U.S. ratification and global entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. This issue, more than any other, divided the United States and India in the 1990s, especially when the United States and China -- which had helped sponsor Pakistan's nuclear and missile programs targeting India -- ganged up on India at the United Nations to press it to accept the test ban.

Following Obama's election, Indian officials lobbied hard to exclude India from inclusion in Richard Holbrooke's mandate as Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (first "and Kashmir," then "and related matters" were dropped from his notional title with Indian prodding). Senior officials in New Delhi worried that formally including India in Holbrooke's Afghanistan-Pakistan portfolio would lead to inevitable U.S. pressure on India (intensified by Holbrooke's talent as a negotiator) to make concessions to Pakistan even as elements of its security apparatus were judged to have been complicit in the 11/26 terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

India's worries were intensified when the new administration excluded India from its inaugural list of foreign policy partners and priorities, despite references to other Asian powers, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and China. And Indian diplomats were dumbfounded when Prime Minister Singh was not among the first two dozen world leaders to receive an introductory phone call from President Obama. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Chinese President Hu Jintao, among others, did.

Secretary Clinton deserves enormous credit for making her inaugural official trip to Asia. But the original Policy Planning Staff transition memo suggesting such a visit included India along with Japan, South Korea, China, and Indonesia in its recommended itinerary. What happened?  No senior U.S. official can go everywhere, especially across the vast expanse of Eurasia. But skipping New Delhi only reinforced an Indian perception of U.S. coolness.

The Bush administration made a conceptual and bureaucratic breakthrough in considering India to be part of wider Asia, rather than relegating it to its tough neighborhood on the subcontinent. As Senior Director for East Asia at the NSC, Mike Green included India in his portfolio as part of a conscious strategy of making India a key player in East Asia's evolution. To his credit, the current Senior Director, Jeff Bader, reportedly has done the same thing, although, because he is a China specialist, Indian elites do not expect his equal attention.

So who will have the India account in the Obama administration? Arguably, in the ancien regime, Bush himself was India's biggest booster, which in turn led Secretary Rice to devote considerable time and energy to building the relationship, with day-to-day management by Undersecretary of State Nick Burns and then his successor, Bill Burns. In the current line-up, the president does not appear to hold a particular brief for India. Though her presidential candidacy enjoyed strong support from the Indian-American community, Secretary Clinton seems focused on East Asia. At a traveling press conference this week, her press secretary reportedly dismissed one reporter's inquiries with the declaration, "No questions about India." 

Does this mean that the Obama administration is putting India back into its subcontinental box? Undersecretary of State Bill Burns in theory still has the India account at State. But he has lost his office space in the Secretary's suite to Deputy Secretary Jacob Lew, and there are reports of early tussles with Holbrooke over seniority and access. Indeed, Holbrooke was the first senior American official to visit New Delhi. In addition to praising Indian restraint after the Mumbai attacks, he again called for India to reduce tensions with Pakistan.

The Obama administration is right to frame the problems of Pakistan and Afghanistan in their regional context. But India can be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. India has enormous equities in the construction of a democratic state in Afghanistan. It has contributed substantial development assistance, built infrastructure, and trained Afghan civil servants. New Delhi has long wanted to do more, but Washington's Pakistan-centric bureaucracy resisted. Given the growing challenge of getting Afghanistan right, it may be time to ask India to step up, in police training and other areas.

More generally, it's worth keeping in mind that the Bush administration's de-hyphenation of India and Pakistan policy, after decades of Pakistan-centricity in the U.S. approach to South Asia, created a range of new strategic possibilities -- including the most substantial progress ever made between India and Pakistan in back-channel negotiations over a Kashmir settlement. 

Today, victory in Afghanistan is critical, as is preventing Pakistan's Talibanization or economic collapse. But democratic India, destined to surpass China as the world's most populous country and to emerge as the world's third-largest economy within several decades, is the region's big strategic prize, an essential partner for the United States in promoting a more peaceful, prosperous, and liberal world. India's people also hold the United States in high regard. As the Obama administration finds its feet, it will want to invest in this potentially transformative relationship, even as it necessarily fights fires elsewhere in South Asia.