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India Furious at Powell Policies

WASHINGTON, Oct. 11 (UPI) -- The Bush administration's ambitious dreams of replacing China with India as America's strategic partner on the Asian mainland is becoming a casualty of its cautious broad coalition strategy for the so-called "crusade against terror."

Indian leaders and diplomats are furious that the U.S. crusade against terror does not include taking any effective action against the Pakistan-backed guerrillas in overwhelmingly Muslim but Indian-ruled Kashmir, who have killed around 40,000 people in the past decade. That is eight times the number of people who died in the World Trade Center terrorist attacks.

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President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have all made statements that their crusade against terror following the nightmarish Sept. 11 attacks will target terrorism in all forms. They have also included the Pakistan-backed Kashmiri guerrilla group Jaish e-Mohammed in the list of international terrorist groups whose assets are to be frozen.

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However, the Indians do not trust Powell and are now furious at Bush and Blair. Blair has told the Indians that they must refrain from taking major retaliatory action against Pakistan or the Kashmiri guerrillas, despite the suicide bomb attacks in which at least 36 people, including many legislators, died last week in the Jimmu and Kashmir state legislature in Srinagar.

The Indians are convinced that Powell, during his visit to New Delhi next week, will seek to pressure them the way he has pressured Israel to compromise with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and get them to refrain from any retaliation for the Srinagar massacre.

New Delhi officials fear that Powell will seek to force them to compromise their nation's basic security and make sweeping concessions to groups that the Indian government and most of its people regard as murderous terrorists with even more blood on their hands than Osama bin Laden's al Qaida organization that the United States holds responsible for the Sept. 11 massacres.

Powell wants to defuse Indian and Pakistani tensions in order to maintain cooperation with Pakistan's military strongman, President Pervez Musharraf. He and other Bush administration officials see renewed cooperation with Pakistan as essential, first to bring effective pressure to bear on the Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan and second, to defuse the danger they fear that Musharraf may be toppled and replaced with openly Islamic extremist figures.

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Powell's policy of trying to broker compromise between India and Pakistan over Kashmir is a reversion to the policies of the previous Clinton administration. And, as he has on so many other policy issues, he has prevailed in Washington infighting to win his case with Bush.

But Powell's policy is backfiring on him and the United States even before he arrives in New Delhi. The Indian government of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is furious at what they regard as the hypocrisy and double standard of urging them to compromise with the Kashmir guerrillas to help the United States go after its own terrorist attackers.

And, as United Press International reported Wednesday, the Indians are also furious that Musharraf in his reshuffle of top military commanders this week has promoted Gen. Mohammed Aziz to become chairman of Pakistan's Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As reported in an UPI Analysis Wednesday, the U.S. media and government have portrayed Aziz 's promotion as rally a demotion, claiming he has been given an honorary title without any real power. But Musharraf himself was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before masterminding the toppling of Pakistan's civilian government and his own takeover as military strongman two years ago.

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New Delhi officials say Vajpayee is determined to reject Powell's pressures. The Indians have closely watched Powell's tactics in pressuring Israel. But the United States gives nearly $3 billion a year in aid to Israel, which is a tiny nation of around 6 million people. Gigantic India has a population of 1 billion, has a strategic alliance with Russia and is not dependent on the United States in any comparable way.

Indian officials privately say that if Powell thinks he can pressure Vajpayee the way he pressured Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, he is entirely mistaken.

Even if Vajpayee wanted to yield to Powell's demands, which he does not, it would be politically impossible for him to do so. Anger is running high in India following the Srinagar massacre and Indian media comment has made clear that any pressure or lectures from Powell to refrain from retaliation will be deeply resented.

Powell's efforts to build a working relationship with Musharraf and restrain India flies in the face of the Bush administration policy over the previous eight months. It came into office with ambitious hopes of building a new strategic relationship with giant, democratic India with its billion people.

Bush in a 1999 speech at the Ronald Reagan Library in California openly advocated a new, close relationship with India. And in the eight months after he took office, a long stream of high-ranking State Department and Pentagon officials flew to New Delhi seeking to woo the Indians.

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National security adviser Condoleezza Rice favored the idea. So did Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who fancies himself as the strategic mastermind of the Bush administration, was gung-ho for the idea. It fit into his other convictions that the United States had to build a sweeping global alliance of major democratic nations and that America had to prepare itself to confront and contain China in the 21st century.

But like so many attractive, broad, and bold sweeping ideas, this one proved less easy to implement than to imagine. The Bush administration certainly pleased the Indians by showing their willingness -- and clout -- in urging Congress to abolish the mandatory sanctions imposed upon both India and its historic enemy and neighbor Pakistan after both nations openly tested nuclear weapons three years ago.

However, India has relied upon alliance with the Soviet Union and then with Russia for is broad strategic protection for the past three decades. And last year, it renewed that alliance and conducted at least $6 billion worth of defense and nuclear technology deals with Russia. India also continues to see Russia as its longstanding and reliable counterweight against China. No major Indian policymaker is prepared to risk endangering that crucial relationship.

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Also, Indian officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have told UPI that they continue to have widespread and serious doubts about the stability and continuity of U.S. strategic policy.

"The United States does not have a very good record of standing by its allies and protecting them, does it?" one of them said. "Just look at the Shah of Iran, President (Anwar) Sadat of Egypt and the Shah of Iran."

These fears were widely held even before the United States sought to revive its relations with Pakistan. Powell's moves in dealing with Islamabad since Sept. 11 have now revived them.

Even worse, Powell's efforts to maintain "even-handedness" between India and Pakistan are now reopening all the old wounds from half a century of misunderstanding, distrust and mutual recrimination between India and the United States -- the two largest English -- speaking nations and rule of law democracies in the world.

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