India remains a "very important country” for the United States for its regional interests in Asia and other global interests, part of an "environment-shaping exercise" for the Indo-Pacific region to contain the growth and aggression of China, Dr. Ashley Tellis, who holds the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs and is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said.

He also said that the days of "free pass" for Pakistan were over and "Pakistan was not anymore a priority in US foreign policy".  The US "will not bend backward (anymore) to subsidize Pakistan's pathologies," he said pointedly. 

While Pakistan played a very crucial role in US efforts to dismantle Al-Qaeda’s network, the primary US goal at the time, Islamabad had severely “undermined” the efforts to defeat the Taliban, he added.  

At the same time, he said “America’s concern about India’s domestic politics has not disappeared, but it is good that it has not become the center of their bilateral relationship,” Ashley said during a discussion organized virtually by the Indo-American Friendship Association (IAFA) on India’s security environment.

He said that the relationship, which is in “very good shape”, however, would “compete among many other challenges” that it has been facing. Among other key areas of differences and difficulties between the two nations are the different attitudes towards the Asia region and trade, he pointed out during the discussion hosted by Ambassador Surendra Kumar (retd), founding president of the IAFA.

Tellis was intimately involved in negotiating the civil nuclear agreement with India in the first decade of this century while on assignment to the Department of State as senior adviser to the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs. Previously, he was commissioned into the Foreign Service and served as senior adviser to the ambassador at the US Embassy in New Delhi. He also served on the National Security Council as special assistant to President George W. Bush and senior director for strategic planning and Southwest Asia.

“Our relationship with India was meant to be a part of an environment-shaping exercise that would channel the Chinese ambitions and Chinese directions,” he said responding to the question if Beijing, which has been posing challenges to both US and Indian strategic and security interests, is indeed acting as a default catalyst in deepening Indo-American cooperation.

Calling China an “enormously difficult challenge to deal with”-- given its dominance in the supply chain-- he said, “This is a competition of strategic interests between two powers that are deeply economically interlinked.” He conceded, however,  that the US has been one of the biggest supporters of China’s economic rise in the last four decades.

However, there is a direct correlation between China’s growing military assertiveness with its increased economic power, the latter directly aided and abetted by the US over successive decades. 

In a policy reversal, the US’ goal now is to limit Chinese growth--one that would be a difficult task--in ways that undermine US interests, Tellis said. For instance, the recent trend of denying high technology space to Chinese tech companies.

India and Vietnam among other countries in South-East Asia can help the cause by creating an appealing business environment enough to drive American companies to relocate from China. 

Ashley, during the discussion, also dispelled the perception of America’s diminished credibility on the global front after the ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan where the Taliban--the enemy the US had been trying to defeat-- has managed to return to power even before all US troops could withdraw. 

“The structural power of the US in the global world hasn’t been affected,” he said, adding domestic challenges, including protecting democracy and disgruntled American middle class, have limited domestic support to the US’ global role, one that it enjoyed for a very long time. 

“When you think of the future of the US in global politics, I am more cautious only because I see domestic transformations that are not always very supportive of that global role," he said, adding it is not because the US has any inherent weakness nor reduced global credibility.

On the collapse of the Afghan government and Pakistan’s role in it, he said that the rapidity of the Taliban advances hasn’t had much to do with Pakistan, as the individual stakeholders on the ground were willing to change sides quickly.

The fundamental cause of the fall of the Afghan government, he said, lay in the inherent “structural weaknesses” of the political system put in place by the United States that failed to win legitimacy among its own people and in Ghani’s failures in building a “unified political base.”

Tellis said the initial urgency towards the "war on terror" has disappeared; it was “not going to be the centerpiece of American foreign policy” and does not have much domestic support twenty years after it was first launched by President George W Bush to weed out terrorists, particularly Al Qaeda, from Afghanistan in the post 9/11 scenario.

On Islamabad’s role in installing, once again, the Taliban in Kabul, Tellis said, “Pakistan may regret the manner it has acquired its strategic depth. There are deep divisions between Pakistan and the Taliban,” adding Pakistan had neither wanted nor bargained for a complete Taliban monopoly there, but one that was more inclusive, with checks and balances. 

(SAM)