Big ideas can be bad ideas

A conditional US civilian-nuclear agreement with Pakistan fails to address the underlying problem of Kashmir.

One unequivocal fact about C Christine Fair, a professor at Georgetown University and a South Asia expert, is that she is willing to propose big ideas. In her recent article for TIME magazine (“Can This Alliance Be Saved? Salvaging the US-Pakistan Relationship”), Fair’s latest, she unfortunately departs from her previous, more balanced arguments.

Professor Fair wrote that a US conditions-based, civilian-nuclear agreement backstopped by disincentives could compel Pakistan to crack down on militants and help further secure the command and control architecture of the country’s expanding nuclear arsenal.

Perhaps, but her proposal detracts from a more reasoned argument written last November. At that time, Professor Fair correctly named Kashmir, the disputed territory between Pakistan and India, as the primary step to resolving the larger issue of “asymmetric warfare under a nuclear umbrella”.

Writing in TIME, Professor Fair takes a carrot-and-stick approach to ending what she now calls “nuclearised jihad”. She instead uses the territorial issue as a coercive tool and negative inducement to achieve the goals of her civilian-nuclear deal.

It is difficult to understand how, in Fair’s estimation, the primacy of Kashmir changed when its status has not.

Additionally, Fair also overlooks two facts that undermine her proposal: China is a willing former and future source of nuclear technology and, therefore, deleverages US bargaining power from the start. And, by her own admission, the US nuclear deal with India has not reaped its expected benefits.

Pakistan, like India, could fail to live up to its end of her proposal. In which case, Fair’s list of targeted negative inducements could kick in, leading to the disintegration of US-Pakistan relations. For Pakistan, this would necessitate closer strategic relations with China, greater economic ties with Iran, and empower India’s more hawkish factions as Pakistan and China ramp up strategic cooperation.

In the final analysis of this scenario, the US would be faced with a southern Eurasian landscape, from the Persian Gulf to the East Sea/Sea of Japan, of nuclear-armed and arming states opposed to US interests. For Fair, an American academic concerned about US interests and relations in South Asia, this seems like an undesirable result both for the US and for Pakistan.

Rather, as Professor Fair once wrote, albeit in a different context, “the United States should instead focus its energies on persuading New Delhi to make right by the reasonable and constitutional demands of its Kashmiri citizenry. This will put India on the spot to follow through and consolidate a hard-won peace.”

The disputed territory of Kashmir has led to militancy in the region and the consequential development of India’s conventional warfare and nuclear triad. Facing an existential threat, Pakistan prioritises its own nuclear deterrent.

A conditional US civilian-nuclear agreement — a one-sided, transactional solution — fails to address the underlying problem Professor Fair identified previously and leaves stability on the subcontinent still wanting a long-term resolution.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 15^th, 2013.

Correction: An earlier version of the article lacked the clarification that the Sea of Japan may also be referred to as the East Sea. The error is regretted.