Bush Administration officials and South Asia policy wonks have said that the co-opting of Mumbai-born Ashley Tellis as adviser to Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns, the point man for the US-India civilian nuclear agreement, is a no-brainer.

Last month, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where Tellis was a senior associate, announced that Tellis would be taking a two-month leave of absence so that he could serve as senior adviser to Burns 'in support of various State Department activities relating to US-Indian relations.'

CEIP President Jessica T Mathews, in asserting her support for Tellis' interim assignment, said 'The Carnegie Endowment recognizes the great importance of President Bush's visit to South Asia and US relations with India and Pakistan, so we are glad to contribute to this end by making Ashley J Tellis' great talents available to the administration.'

A senior State Department official told rediff-India Abroad that Tellis� an unambiguous cheerleader for the envisaged US-India nuclear deal� "has a lot to contribute, especially now as we are getting ready for the President's visit and we are looking at the civilian nuclear cooperation agreement and so on, in terms of ideas and contacts and context.

"He would have been very limited in capability to do that if he wasn't actually working in the State Department," the official added.

Countering criticism by some South Asia experts and several Congressional leaders that the Administration, in pushing through the deal, had not explored the nuances involved in changing US nonproliferation laws, the State Department official acknowledged that Tellis, who testifies regularly before Congress, could bring a great deal to the table.

In particular, the official said, Tellis brings a depth of knowledge that may have been hitherto lacking � a lack that had led to lawmakers and the nonproliferation lobby poking holes in the deal.

"Ashley has been in the middle of this (strategic partnership) from when he was working with (former US Ambassador to India, Robert) Blackwill and even before that," the State Department official explained. "So he's definitely an asset."

During a recent interview, Tellis told India Abroad that the implementation of the US-India nuclear deal as intended would be a "critical landmark" because it "will mark the end of what former Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh once famously called 'nuclear apartheid' against India."

"Implementing the agreement is vital for the continued transformation of this relationship", Tellis said, while disagreeing with those who contend that there is no need to link bilateral relations with the nuclear deal, and that the US-India strategic partnership can not just survive, but grow on the bedrock of shared interests even if the deal were to fall through the cracks in Congress.

He argued in the interview that "we have a record of over 20 years of US diplomacy to support this conclusion: the United States cannot have a transformed relationship with India that treats New Delhi as a partner on one hand while it continues to remain a target of the US-led global nonproliferation regime on the other."

This was also the theme he underscored in his seminal Carnegie report titled 'India as a New Global Power: An Action Agenda for the United States,' which some say was the precursor to the US-India civilian nuclear deal.

At the time Blackwill, who launched the report, said, 'Ashley and I are close friends, and perhaps the very smartest thing I did before I went to India was to persuade Ashley to come along. And he's too graceful and too generous a spirit to catalog the many times that I was heading for the precipice, when he caught me by the suspenders and prevented it. Unfortunately, he wasn't present at every moment so he didn't prevent every one.'

Blackwill describes Tellis � who is also as effusive when he speaks about Blackwill as being "indispensable to the process that brought about this (nuclear) agreement" � as 'a brilliant scholar in my opinion, as an analyst. He is the very best analyst on not only India and the region it lives in, but the relationship between India and the global system.'

Michael Krepon, president emeritus of the Henry Stimson Center, told rediff-India Abroad that "Ashley is immensely talented and he's a true believer in this deal. I believe he can do more to support it from the inside than from the outside. So I am not surprised that he's been asked to serve as an adviser to Nick Burns.

"The Administration needs people who know the particulars of nuclear issues and knows a lot about India. So Ashley is as good a person as one can find on these matters and of course, it helps that he's strong in support of this (deal)� he has to be. He's not ambivalent. He is a true believer."

But Krepon knocked down the contention in some quarters that the Administration's hiring of Tellis was because it did not have expertise in the area of India's nuclear weapons and civilian programs.

"There is a lot of expertise in the State Department, in the intelligence community, in the Pentagon," he argued. "So I am not sure that what is lacking is expertise. But there are a lot of particulars to work out and Ashley can help in that. It's a very hard deal to do, and it may take some time and it's obviously taking time for the government of India to figure out its priorities."