"We are counting on India's rise not just as an economic partner but as a global power one that engages everywhere from Latin America to the Middle East to East Asia," Deputy Secretary of State William J Burns said in his remarks on 'Is there a future for the US-India partnership?', organised jointly by the FICCI and Brookings Institute, a Washington-based eminent American think tank.
Doubts about the Obama administration's commitment to a strategic partnership with India were raised by the likes of Lalit Mansingh, former Indian ambassador to the US and former Indian foreign secretary, and Kanwal Sibal, former Indian foreign secretary and former deputy chief of mission in Washington, DC, in two separate panels titled 'American and Indian Strategic Interests in Asia' and 'Where is the US-India Strategic Relationship Headed in the Coming Year?'
India's exponential economic prowess has made Boeing covet that country like never before, said Thomas Pickering, former under secretary of state and former ambassador to India, who after he retired was a vice president with Boeing and who remains a consultant with the aviation giant.
Noted economist Arvind Panagariya says India is an emerging power. With liberalisation, Indian entrepreneurs have emerged and they are top class.
India and Pakistan are not yet ready for a true settlement of disputes between them and the two countries would gain by pressing towards increased trade, commerce and shared approach to problems of terrorism, water shortage and environmental degradation, US experts have said.
The researchers said that the public school system in Pakistan is highly corrupt with positions handed out for political favours and teachers being paid even if they don't turn up for classes.
United States President Barack Obama must focus on Pakistan, which is home to more terrorist groups than any other country, for success in the war against terrorism. "This year, President Obama must focus like a laser on Pakistan. He has already promised to travel to the country in 2011," said former CIA official Bruce Riedel. "And he will need to signal our determination to (subtly) help broker a rapprochement between India and Pakistan, with the aid of key players," he said
Former ambassador to India Frank Wisner is convinced that "the United States cannot pursue its interests in the world without cooperation with India, and India will not achieve her essential interests without cooperation with the US."
Jonah Blank, former journalist and now policy director for South Asia on the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, believes the Bush administration should have expended its political capital on strongly supporting India's bid for a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council and being a catalyst in India securing this long-desired position in the world body, instead of the US-India civilian nuclear deal.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said that deepening of America's relationship with key countries like Russia, China and India gives the US a better understanding and also to its counterparts.
Curtis, who was the lead panellist at a conference at The Brookings Institution titled, The US-India Nuclear Agreement: Expectations and Consequences,' said, "During the Bush Administration, US officials broke the habit of viewing India solely through the India-Pakistan lens. Washington developed a greater appreciation for the Indian democratic miracle and viewed our shared democratic principles as the bedrock for a broader strategic partnership."
India will most likely sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty--a top non-proliferation priority of the Obama Administration--if the world moves "categorically towards nuclear disarmament in a credible time-frame," India's point man for nuclear issues has indicated.
Former Indian Foreign Secretary, Shyam Saran will headline a major conference this week on the expectations and consequences of the US-India Nuclear Agreement, hosted by The Brookings Institution,
'We should encourage all of our partners in the counter-terror world to break up these cells and use any intelligence gained to undermine and weaken this threat. This is a good counterterrorism policy, a good policy for keeping India assured that we take their concerns seriously in the war on terror, and a good way to put pressure on Islamabad to finally take on Lashkar at home,' Bruce Riedel observed.
Sajjid Chenoy, India economist at JP Morgan is the new part-time member.
While India is waiting to begin nuclear trade with the US, Pakistan may well have two nuclear reactors constructed on its own soil.
'It is all Pakistan. They have not thought of bringing India into the biggest foreign policy crisis the US has had, which is Afghanistan and eventually Pakistan,' says South Asia expert Stephen P Cohen.
No book on South Asia published in recent years has received the kudos veteran diplomat Howard B Schaffer's The Limits of Influence: America's Role in Kashmir, published by Brookings Institution Press, elicited.In an interview with rediff.com's Aziz Haniffa, he explains why the Barack Obama administration should intervene in resolving the contentious Kashmir issue.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today said the new missile defence system for Eastern Europe would leave America and its allies stronger and charged the Republicans that their criticism of the new policy is not based on facts.
He argued that "as India emerges as one of world's leading economic and political power, the central question is how United States and India can work together to address the regional and global challenges that no country alone can solve."
India has pressed the new Barack Obama Administration to lift the 'unnecessary' restrictions on international trade with New Delhi on dual use items and technology. Addressing a meeting at the prestigious Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think-tank, prime minister's special envoy on climate change Shyam Saran also hoped that America would scrap the so-called entity list, which prohibits sale of US technology to a number of Indian companies.
Revive growth by taxing fuels less and lowering interest for productive loans.
Bruce Riedel, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who is being talked about as likely to be tapped for a senior position in an Obama Administration that deals with South Asia, said while the LeT's continuing relationship with the Pakistani intelligence services, the ISI, is much debated and the Pakistani authorities deny any such relationship, "The fact is that the organisation has been tolerated in Pakistan despite the 2002 ban."
"Therefore, we have given our full support to the consolidation of a multi-party democracy in Afghanistan. We feel that it can and should be a multi-ethnic society, a plural society backed by the United States and India," Saran said.
'Steve was the foremost strategic analyst on South Asia,' remembers Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
Cohen, testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs' Subcommittee on International Security on the safety and security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and the US-Pakistan strategic relationship, predicted that "Pakistan may decide, as a matter of state policy, to extend a nuclear umbrella -- or engage in nuclear sharing --with one of more Middle East states, especially if Iran acquires a nuclear device."
Vanda Felbab-Brown, a fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and the Afghanistan expert at the much-respected Washington think-tank, has said that the United States is urging India to exercise restraint against perhaps launching punitive attacks against Pakistan in the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks. It should convince India that Washington's concerns are genuine and not governed by its own vested interest vis-a-vis its global war on terror.
Hamza bin Laden promised to continue the global militant group's fight against the United States.
The United States and India are now poised to take their growing relations to a "third stage", a top US diplomat has said, seeking New Delhi's cooperation in addressing global challenges and combating terrorism in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Outgoing United States Ambassador to India, David Mulford, believes that India can help stimulate the world economy in the wake of the global economic meltdown.Mulford observed that "Developing countries have tended to be recipients during times of difficulty, but this time, some of them may be stimulators and producers. That is an important thought to bear in mind when you are in the condition that the United States is today."
'While in the past elements within the Pakistani security establishment viewed Afghanistan as an essential part of its strategic depth vis-a-vis India, the rapprochement between New Delhi and Islamabad in recent years has made such a policy obsolete.'
The author of a definitive guide to the Kashmir crisis speaks with Managing Editor Aziz Haniffa.
Bruce Riedel, a South Asia expert speaks about the situation in Pakistan.
The United States should first and foremost support the restoration of democracy and an end to a military dictatorship
Armitage, appearing in a Brookings Institution discussion on 'The US-Pakistan Strategic Relationship', said, "I have gone my whole career desperately wanting to tell somebody that I would bomb them into the Stone Age and I have never been able to do it because I have never been authorised to do it."
Retired Marine General Anthony Zinni even went to the extent of defending Musharraf in terms of defusing the Kargil crisis
While criticising Musharraf for not acting swiftly and ruthlessly to set Pakistan's politics on a proper course, Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institution, a known South Asia expert, praised him for his position on Kashmir.
"We have to look out of the box... we have to look at innovative ways of resolution (to the Kashmir issue). We have our minds open to such issues," Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said on Friday while delivering a lecture at the Brookings Institution.
'I think it is extremely naive for anyone to think that terrorism can be completely eliminated anywhere in the world. However, as far as cross-border terrorism specific to Ind-Pak goes, Musharraf has made a difference.'
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