For Your Eyes Only

(From November 5,2008, President-elect Barack Obama started receivingfrom the Director National Intelligence (DNI) a daily brief on the state of theworld the previous day called the President'sDaily Brief (PDB).  The CIA would do well to incorporate the followingin its PDB to Obama)

There is amazement -- and confusion -- in India over reports that one of thefirst acts of  the President will be to appoint Bill Clinton as his SpecialEnvoy on the Kashmir issue to facilitate a settlement between India  andPakistan

Well-informed sources in India say that if the President-elect wants toseverely damage the developing  Indo-US relations  he could not havethought of a better idea than to meddle in Kashmir. So manyAmericans--Presidents, Presidents-elect and defeated Presidential-aspirants--thought they could help in finding a solution to the Kashmir issue and burnttheir fingers and damaged Indo-US relations.

This started from Adlai Stevenson, who after losing the election to GenDwight Eisenhower, proceeded to Srinagar ostensibly for a houseboat holiday onthe Dal Lake and tried to meddle in the affairs of the state by suggesting toSheikh Abdullah, the then Chief Minister of Jammu & Kashmir, that he shouldseek independence and promised that the US would support him. When the IndianIntelligence Bureau informed Jawaharlal Nehru, the then Prime Minister, ofStevenson's secret discussions with Abdullah, he sacked Abdullah. AdlaiStevenson became persona non grata with the Indian political class and public.

When Clinton became the President in 1993 he could not resist the temptationto have a go at settling the Kashmir issue. He chose as his secret emissary nota distinguished American, but  an old college mate of his called RobinRaphael, who was posted as a junior diplomat in the US Embassy in New Delhi. HerAmerican colleagues in New Delhi  used to allege  that after Clintontook office, she used to go around projecting herself as if she was a trustedadviser to Clinton, who took her into the State Department.

Our Indian sources say that she had two "achievements" to herdiscredit. She instigated the formation of the Hurriyat , a hotch-potch ofanti-New Delhi Kashmiri personalities, which added to the existing mess. Shealso  encouraged the formation of the Taliban in 1994 with the help of herclose personal friends Benazir Bhutto, the then Prime Minister, and Asif AliZardari, the present President of Pakistan. She even met Mullah Mohammad Omar,who subsequently designated himself as the Amir of the Taliban, secretly andsought his help for a project of the Unocal for a gas pipeline from Turkmenistanto Pakistan via the Herat area of Afghanistan.

According to the sources, her misadventures in Kashmir further damagedIndo-US relations and her godmothering the Taliban inexorably set in motion thetrain of events that led to Osama bin Laden shifting from Khartoum to Jalalabadin 1996 and launching from Afghanistan the terrorist strikes outside the USEmbassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam in August 1998, the attack on USS Coleoff Aden in October,2000, and the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the US homeland.

Our Indian sources say that in the history of Indo-American relations sinceIndia became independent in 1947, there have been more instances of meddling byDemocrats than by Republicans. They feel that Democrats seem to think that theyunderstand sub-continental affairs better than anybody in the US and find itdifficult to resist the urge to meddle. According to them, that is why Indiansecurity agencies feel uncomfortable when  the White House has a Democratas incumbent. They say that if one draws a graph of terrorism in J&K, onewould find that it tends to go up when a Democrat is the President. 

At a time when India and Pakistan are on the road to slowly mending theirbilateral relations, Indians are amazed that the President-elect oblivious ofthe past misadventures of the US in  the sub-continent should be thinkingof one more.

The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. ofIndia, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies,Chennai.