Why is America siding with Pakistan on Kashmir?

Pakistan's chronic hostility towards India, its constant efforts to internationalise its differences with India, the persistent US bias in favour of Pakistan on issues bedevilling India-Pakistan relations, all oblige us to pay attention to visits of Pakistani leaders to the US.

India and the US have a strategic partnership today. The nuclear issue between them has been settled politically. India now purchases major US defence equipment, overcoming earlier reluctance to create dependence on a country considered unreliable as a defence partner. We now have a Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean region, with all its geopolitical connotations. We are talking of a defining counterterrorism relationship for the 21st Century. A stand alone US-India Joint Declaration on Combating Terrorism was issued in September 2015.

With such rapid advance in building trust-based ties in sensitive nuclear, defence, maritime and counterterrorism areas, we would have expected the US to shed its proclivity to take position on India-Pakistan issues at Pakistani prodding. Why the US feels that its objectives in South Asia can only be met by establishing some kind of a balanced equation between India and Pakistan is difficult to understand, given the huge disparities between them in geographic, demographic, economic and military size, in human capital, in the functioning of democratic institutions and so on.

Puzzling

This becomes more puzzling because of Pakistan's involvement in international terrorism, its complicity with the Taliban and the Haqqani group in the killing of US and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan, the harbouring of Osama bin Laden, and evidence of Pakistan's abetment of terrorist attacks against India, most notably the 2008 Mumbai attacks in which six US nationals were killed.

Nawaz Sharif's Washington visit a few days ago revealed the soft US approach to Pakistan and its ambivalence on India-Pakistan issues. The visit was preceded by talk of a US-Pakistan nuclear deal, which Pakistan does not strictly need because of its on-going nuclear cooperation with China. But Pakistan presses for it because it cannot tolerate the idea of the US denying it parity with India.

Ignoring the unrestrained expansion of its nuclear arsenal, its quest of tactical nuclear weapons which it openly threatens to use against India, its dismissal, on the eve of Nawaz Sharif's visit to Washington, of any possibility of accepting any restrictions on its nuclear programme, Obama gave approval chits to Pakistan in the joint statement on its nuclear conduct by welcoming its "constructive engagement" with the Nuclear Security Summit process, its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and its efforts to improve its strategic trade controls and enhance its engagement with multilateral export control regimes. It is only after the visit that an un-named US official categorically declared that the US was not contemplating any 123 type agreement with Pakistan or an NSG exemption.

Strategic

Obama and Sharif expressed their "shared interest in strategic stability in South Asia" in their joint statement. This ignores the fact that China's continuing nuclear and missile relationship with Pakistan makes this a triangular China-Pakistan-India affair and not merely an India-Pakistan one. Moreover, India's nuclear programme is under some agreed constraints as part of the India-US nuclear deal, while that of China and Pakistan are not. Why is the US disregarding these realities and equating India and Pakistan?

Obama applauded in the joint statement "Pakistan's role as a key counterterrorism partner". By reiterating "their common resolve to promote peace and stability throughout the region and to counter all forms of extremism and terrorism", Pakistan was made to look good. Worse, Obama made the suppression of extremism and militancy the cooperative responsibility of all South Asian countries, not only that of Pakistan as the source of all these forces. The defining counterterrorism partnership of the 21st century between India and the US is absent from all this.

Credence

Pakistan uses the excuse of Kashmir for its terrorist onslaught against India, which makes it even more necessary not to pander to its Kashmir fixation. But the US is unable to shed its traditional pro-Pakistan slant on Kashmir. Whereas in 2013, during Nawaz Sharif's Washington visit, Obama supported a "sustained dialogue process" for "resolving all outstanding territorial and other disputes through peaceful means", Kashmir was not specifically mentioned. This time, to satisfy Nawaz Sharif who has been determined to internationalise the Kashmir issue, it was. By calling Kashmir a "dispute", the US is preferring the Pakistani term. To top this, the joint statement calls for an "uninterrupted dialogue in support of peaceful resolution of all outstanding disputes", rejecting implicitly the Indian line that dialogue and terror cannot go together.

Most unfortunately, the US has implicitly given credence to Pakistan's outlandish charges against India for supporting terrorism in its territory by emphasising the importance of "working together to address mutual concerns of India and Pakistan regarding terrorism". This equates India and Pakistan on the terrorism issue. Our spokesman has rightly objected to Obama's "support for Pakistan's efforts to secure funding for the Diamer-Bhasha and Dasu dams" in Gilgit-Baltistan, despite calling it "disputed territory".

The US should not legitimise Pakistan's illegal occupation of PoK.

It is important that even as we engage the US as much as possible in our own interest, we must not lose sight of the ambiguities of America's strategic policies towards us in our region.