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WASHINGTON, Nov. 1 (UPI) -- The White House has been at great pains to explain that President Barack Obama's visit to India this week is all about jobs and trade. But nobody in Asia believes it. With China canceling a planned summit with Japan's prime minister, Kashmir erupting again, Afghanistan sinking deeper into disaster and Iran loading fuel rods into its new nuclear reactor at Bushehr, the Asian security agenda looks considerably more compelling.
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And yet Obama is hoping to save some Democratic congressional seats from the likely wreckage in this week's mid-term elections, so the propaganda about jobs makes a kind of sense. As a result, he is taking the biggest entourage of top businessmen ever to grace a presidential trip.
A jumbo jet full of chief executive officers, some 250 at last count, will be joining Obama's own entourage of family, six armored cars and a total of 40 aircraft on the Indian mission, chasing deals.
And deals there will be. Ron Somers of the U.S. India Business Council is talking of more than $10 billion being signed in contracts next week, bringing with them 100,000 U.S. jobs.
GE thinks it has sewn up a $5 billion order to supply locomotives for Indian Railways. American hopes of providing India's new generation of advanced fighter jets may not come to fruition but Boeing is confident of a $6 billion sale of C-17 military cargo and another $2.5 billion in commercial jets to India's flourishing budget airlines.
"We want to highlight growing U.S. exports to India but also growing inward Indian investment into the U.S.," said a White House official, speaking off-the-record last week, and noting that India is the second-fastest growing inward investor to America.
The United States and India are each investing more than $10 billion a year into the other country and bilateral trade is running at $43 billion a year. That's good but it's not much more than 10 percent of U.S.-China trade.
There is some hard negotiating to be done over intellectual property rights and export controls and a bilateral investment treaty that may someday grow up to be a free trade agreement if roadblocks in Congress and over nuclear technology transfer can be resolved. It should be a no-brainer with U.S. corporations salivating over some of the $5 billion India is planning to invest in infrastructure this decade.
The really tricky negotiations will be over geo-politics. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have been at pains last week to stress that the United States didn't see China as an adversary. But there is little doubt that the United States, as the world's most powerful democracy, sees India, the most populous and fastest-growing democracy, as a natural ally against an authoritarian and potentially aggressive China.
But Obama must tread softly. His administration's regional envoy Richard Holbrooke got off to a bad start when India made it clear that it was no longer prepared to be seen through the traditional Indo-Pakistan perspective. India is bigger than that now and has never welcomed any outside interest in its troubles in Kashmir. Yet Pakistan remains crucial to the embattled U.S. mission in Afghanistan.
"The U.S. sees Pakistan as an indispensable but dishonest partner," suggested Pakistani commentator Imtiaz Gul, on a visit to Washington last week. "Pakistan has its own worries about the waning U.S. commitment in Afghanistan. It's a war between the short-term American agenda and Pakistan's long-term national interests."
The Pakistani military establishment still sees itself in terms of military parity with India, Gul suggests, ignoring the reality that India has eight times the population and its economy is eight times bigger. As a result, India thinks it has bigger geo-political fish to fry than the dysfunctional Pakistani nuisance and wants to be treated by the United States as an equal strategic partner.
Nor does India want to be taken for granted as a strategic ally in Asia, in part because India knows that it has much healthier long-term demographics than China. If China will be challenging the United States for the No. 1 economic slot around the year 2030, India thinks it could be the challenger by 2050.
Moreover, India is one place on Earth where Obama's predecessor remains popular for his own efforts to forge a close relationship with New Delhi.
"It is ironic that there is nostalgia for the Bush years and apprehensions about the Obama administration," noted Ronen Sen, India's former ambassador to Washington. "It's true that Bush had a deep personal fascination and an abiding admiration for India, well before he became president. He did more for India than any of his predecessors. We should honor his legacy."
Bush, who also saw India as America's key ally in Asia against a rising China, set a positive course, and it will be up to Obama to use his personal charm to maintain and extend it. The problem is that he looks like arriving in India as a loser, as a defeated leader of the Democratic Party after a humiliating loss in Congress, and with a big question mark over his power to get things done in Washington over the next two years.
