Reagan and India: Great Expectations

WASHINGTON: India's current External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh best described relations between the United States and India during the Reagan years (1981-1988) roughly coinciding with the leadership of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi.

The ties, the bibliophile Singh said in 1987 when he was Minister of State, were like the titles of two Charles Dickens novels: Great Expectations and Hard Times.

In hindsight, the literary allusion works even better if reversed. Washington and New Delhi went through hard times in the early Reagan years.

The Soviet Union had just invaded Afghanistan, and Reagan, sworn opponent of the "evil empire", felt that New Delhi had not opposed it. He pumped billions into Pakistan, gave it F-16s, winked while it went nuclear, and trained and bankrolled the progenitors to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

By the time he left office in 1988 the United States had put aside its differences with New Delhi on these issues and agreed to supply jet engines for the LCA aircraft and Cray supercomputers, the most substantial hi-tech sales Washington has ever made to India.

Two Defence Secretaries – Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci – visited New Delhi, after none had come in the previous 40 years, setting up great expectations.

In between those two milestones, there were good times and bad times, a period that Dennix Kux, a chronicler of Indo-US ties says saw a "paradoxical" improvement in relationship between the two large democracies.

They disagreed on issues but decided that it would not stop them from improving ties, a situation that continues to this day.

Reagan came to the White House soon after Mrs Indira Gandhi had returned for her second term in 1980, a mellowed figure who had toned down her anti-US stance. Following Reagan's victory, she had sent her cousin and former ambassador BK Nehru to meet the president-elect to convey the change in sentiment.

Soon after, she met him in Cancun, Mexico for the first time. Reagan invited her to Washington in July 1982, and from all accounts, the two hit it off famously, a welcome change after Mrs G's frosty ties with Nixon and his administration.

But Reagan did not mix sentiment with geo-politics and backed Pakistan to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan, much to Mrs Gandhi's disappointment.

However, Mrs Gandhi returned home with a science and technology initiative that set the foundation for greater things to come and which was built on by Rajiv Gandhi in his two visits to the Reagan White House.

In the first of those visits in 1985, Rajiv Gandhi and Reagan, generations apart, hit it off. Reagan, who worked for General Electric early in his life, cleared the supply of GE's 404 jet engine for the LCA. But administration mandarins raised objection to the sale of the Cray XMP-24 supercomputer and finally allowed the sale of a lower XMP-14 version.

In 1987, Reagan also blessed the Indian intervention in Sri Lanka, masterminded by Rajiv Gandhi and the current National Security Adviser, JN Dixit.

But it was Reagan's decision to back Pakistan's military regime, its spy agency, and their fundamentalist wards in the Afghan resistance that would come back to haunt the region, the United States, and the rest of the world many years later.

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I have found that the India press is very good. If we are going to continue to outsource jobs to India lets immediately include our mainstream media jobs.

It was a good article but as usual it never fails that these articles from India omit the rest of the story vis-s-vis U.S. and Pakistan during the Cold War.

(I will defer to those who know better, but please include valid source references, TIA.)

It was India that was the leader of the "nonaligned" nations during the Cold War -- a group that sided almost 100 percent with the USSR and against the U.S.

Well, the U.S. had the need for "listening posts" for collecting intelligence on the USSR. India would not allow us to spy on their friends and Pakistan did allow us to set up the posts in their territory.

What was a competing superpower to do? :)

I agree with you that the American handling of the Cold War CANNOT be criticised. You won, didn't you? And since the Cold War was a dangerous competition, it was perfectly fair for America to have done what it did. Every sane person on earth capable of rational thought would also have wished deep in their hearts for America to win. And it did. As it should've. Now same with India too, although mistakes have been made. India depended and still does, far more on her neighbours and powers around her for her existence.She is surrounded by enemies on all of her fronts, right in the middle of the commies and the 'slammies.'Slammie oil keeps her alive and Commie weapons(read Soviet Union) allowed her to defend herself(You must remember a Soviet-backed India defeated a US-backed Pakistan, when both had comparable balance of forces, in '71.Uncannily, a US-backed India got brutalised by a Soviet-backed China in '64.You answer why).India had her interests to defend when she supported her decision to help the Russians. And America had hers, to support the Pakistanis.I think both America and India won.Free people won.And that was good.Don't you think so too? BTW, like how India didn't allow the Americans to spy on the Russians from her territory, neither were the Russians allowed the same, FYI, the Russians had neither port rights nor bases, on Indian soil.(If they had, Afghanistan wouldn't have happened).

But, this might interest you: When the CIA planted nuke devices atop the Himalayas

http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/jun/05nuke.htm

Badly need Occam's Razor here.And would love to hear back from you.

Cute. Not so cute is the implication that the U.S. took a Saudi multi-millionaire businessman and turned him into a radical Muslim or radical of any sort. Bin Laden was called to Afghanistan in 1979. He headed just one of several groups (mujahedin) fighting against the pro-Soviet puppet regime.

"The USSR supported the communist People's Democratic Party (PDP) in Afghanistan, and backed the April 1978 coup that ousted the neutral government of Mahammed Daoud, which was replaced by a PDP government headed" by the Soviet puppets.

Afghan mullahs declared a jihad against the pro-Soviet regime.

The puppets invited the Soviets to invade.

All major Afghan towns were quickly seized by Soviet invaders starting in late 1979.

"By early 1980 nearly 30,000 people had been killed in the Poli Charki concentration camp alone -- many of them doctors, teachers, diplomats and other members of the educated elite. Soviet troops and units of the Afghan army committed untold atrocities in the years to come in order to cement their control over a rebellious populace."

(http://eightiesclub.tripod.com/id333.htm an article by Jason Manning)

What was a compassionate superpower to do? We and other countries backed the several resistance fighter groups.

Presient Carter did nothing but boycott the Olympics. President Reagan's CIA director Casey and the CIA "became active in providing logistical and economic support to Pakistan, which struggled to provide for 3.5 million Afghan refugees. While the CIA did not usually get involved in humanitarian efforts, Casey's theory was that the Afghan men would not fight the Soviets unless they knew their families were being provided for."

Pakistan cooperated with weapons shipments. So did Saudi Arabia help with funding the mujahedin. The British helped, of course.

"The agency [CIA] trained thousands of holy warriors. The American goal was summarized by one Pakistani official who pointed out that the Soviets had 'kept the Vietcong supplied with hardware to kill . . . Americans. So the United States would now do the same for the mujahedin so they could kill Soviets. This view was prevalent among CIA officials, particularly William Casey.' By early 1983, estimates placed Soviet casualties in Afghanistan at between 12,000 and 15,000. . .

"The CIA-mujahedin operation designed to encourage anti-Soviet nationalism in the USSR's Central Asian republics met with success, too. On 8 February 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev announced that Soviet forces would be withdrawn from Afghanistan. An aggressive American policy and the daring of defiant Afghan freedom fighters had turned the tide. Afghanistan had become the Soviet Union's Vietnam -- and the ten-year debacle contributed in no small measure to the collapse of the USSR."

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