In the wake of elections in India and with the crisis in Pakistan deepening, The World's Jeb Sharp examines the Obama Administration's South Asia policy.
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LISA MULLINS: I'm Lisa Mullins, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH in Boston. There were mass celebrations in Sri Lanka today as the government there declared victory over the Tamil Tiger rebels. US Ambassador to Sri Lanka Robert Blake called it an important milestone.
ROBERT BLAKE: As of today, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ellam no longer control any territory in Sri Lanka – for the first time in more than 20 years. And the government has also announced all the senior leadership of the LTTE including its leader Prabhakaran have been killed.
MULLINS: During the final weeks of fighting, the US government expressed concerns about the humanitarian crisis. But in strategic terms, the issue of Sri Lanka is dwarfed by the Obama administration's other foreign policy challenges in South Asia. The World's Jeb Sharp reports.
JEB SHARP: Pakistan is emerging as the Obama administration's number one foreign policy priority. But when it came into office, the administration thought it would be taking a broader regional approach to South Asia. The thinking was you had to get India to make some sort of accommodation with Pakistan over the disputed region of Kashmir in order to get Pakistan to address its problem with militants. But Christine Fair of the RAND Corporation says the Obama administration bumped up against reality.
CHRISTINE FAIR: The problem is that when President Obama appointed a special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, to this region and it originally included India Pakistan dispute focusing on Kashmir, the Indians quickly made it clear this was not going to be part of his mandate and what you've seen in recent months is very quick backpedaling on that issue.
SHARP: And Christine Fair says now, US policy makers are facing the realization that promoting its ally India's global ambitions may be at odds with the simultaneous goal of a stable Pakistan.
FAIR: Because of Pakistan's fears of India, in my interpretation, I think what we're going to see from Pakistan is not some sort of acquiescence to India's might but rather an increasing reliance upon the only tool that it has to secure its interest, and that's militancy.
SHARP: Fair says there are hardly any good policy options, which makes her pessimistic that the region will be anything other than a source of insecurity and instability for a long time to come. Meantime, US policy toward India has languished. Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institution says that may be partly because the Obama administration wanted to wait for the outcome of month-long elections there. Still, Cohen thinks the administration's inattention is a mistake. He's impatient for President Obama to name an Ambassador to India and get on with the job. He says the only mention of India so far as been from Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg.
STEPHEN COHEN: Until Jim Steinberg gave a speech in March, there was no mention of India at all. Maybe they thought they would wait until after the Indian election, but the Indians noticed very clearly that the US had sort of dropped them off the world map. So I think they've got a lot of making up to do.
SHARP: Cohen worries that concerns over the terrorism originating in Afghanistan and Pakistan drown out other important conversations the US should be having with India and other countries. Furthermore, Cohen points out that the specter of Pakistan imploding is a concern that should be shared by the US and India.
COHEN: India, until recently, sort of looked at Pakistan's distress with barely hidden joy. Their enemy is in trouble. Okay. But if Pakistan should go under – and it's not going to do that soon, but maybe in a year or a couple of years or even a decade, then India would be most badly affected. And I think we need to be talking to Indians about this and as well as to the Chinese. I think that's the long-range big problem for South Asia.
SHARP: For Cohen, India's and Pakistan's nuclear programs are a huge concern. He says the international community should focus on controlling and restricting those weapons. He has faith the Obama administration understands the dangers; he just thinks it is getting off to a slow start. For The World, I'm Jeb Sharp.
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