Politics, economics, regional dynamics of South Asia
With more than a billion citizens, a thriving economy and a rapidly modernizing military, India is swiftly becoming a growing force in geopolitics. Teresita Schaffer explores the country’s complex relationships with its neighbors in Asia and the Persian Gulf and describes how the increased competitive pressures of its economy will force the United States to adapt.
Watch video on the Brookings Institution web site, August 5, 2011.
Hillary Clinton and her distinguished team beat expectations for the U.S.-India Strategic Dialogue. They notched up some solid gains on the bilateral agenda, started two regional dialogues with strategic potential, and established some benchmarks for the next year.
For the future of U.S.-India relations, they need to tackle some of the longstanding trade and investment issues, get nuclear trade moving despite the undoubted difficulty of the nuclear liability issue, and above all – keep paying attention. This is an important but high maintenance relationship.
Read text of Teresita Schaffer’s comments on the Brookings web site.
July 20, 2011: Veteran Kashmir-watchers like ourselves were amazed to find that today’s New York Times and Washington Post gave front-page coverage to the arrest of Ghulam Nabi Fai, the longtime director of the Washington-based Kashmir American Council. Fai and another Pakistani-American were charged with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign principal – the Pakistan government – without registering with the attorney general. They were also charged with concealing the fact that Pakistan was funding and directing the KAC’s lobbying and public relations campaigns in the United States. The funding allegedly included campaign contributions to members of Congress known for their pro-Pakistan positions on the long-standing Kashmir dispute.
Continue reading “Pakistan: Don’t Get Distracted by the Fai Case”
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is bringing with her an all-star team for the second round of U.S.-India Strategic Dialogue, which will take place later this year. Five heads of agencies are joining her, including the Director of National Intelligence, along with 3 officials who are one rung away from the top of their agencies. They will do useful work, but they need to make their game more ambitious.
Read Teresita Schaffer’s comments, posted by Brookings July 18, 2011.
The recent announcement that the United States is suspending about one-third of its military assistance is understandable at one level — but both the United States and Pakistan still need each other, and this is not the way to avoid a breakup. Instead, they need to rebuild the relationship around a civilian core, recognizing the strategic importance of Pakistan’s economy, and to focus on a more modest and concrete set of shared objectives on the security side.
Read Teresita Schaffer’s op-ed on CNN.Com, posted July 14, 2011.