Written by Richard Rapaport   

Last week’s “request” by the Pakistani government that the U.S. close down a key drone base in Baluchistan is a reminder that American policy remains locked in a mindset regarding Pakistan that is sixty-years old and more dangerous than it is antiquated.

From the bloody partition in 1947 that tore Pakistan from India to the American military’s decision to freeze our Pakistani “ally” out of intelligence regarding the attack on Osama Bin Laden’s compound, American policy regarding Pakistan and India has scrambled to balance the interests of both nations as if they occupied equal halves of the sub-continent’s geopolitical whole. They do not.

Even giving Pakistan existential points for its nuclear status, demographics alone argue against Pakistan ever offering a credible, democratic rejoinder to the Indian colossus. Pakistan’s population is only 15% that of India’s and its economy, even in the best of times, a basket case. Equating the giant, politically messy, yet remarkably stable India with the relatively small, wobbly, quasi-military dictatorship, Pakistan, is to revisit a dangerous farce that, exempting a few brief golden years, has exemplified the wrongheaded American propensity to, in the Nixon-era rubric, “tilt towards Pakistan.”

Today’s increasingly seismic rift between the U.S. and Pakistan also brings to mind the work of former Connecticut Governor, Congressman and early New Dealer, Chester Bowles. It was Bowles’ seminal understanding of the natural affinity between India and America, developed during his two terms as U.S. Ambassador to New Delhi. Bowles’ wisdom on the subject has since been largely forgotten but is still today’s most useful, hardheaded analysis of the powerful potential of a real Indo-American partnership. Bowles, who sacrificed high position in the Kennedy State Department over his opposition to America’s budding involvement in Vietnam, was, not coincidentally, the hero of David Halberstam’s Vietnam magnum opus, “The Best and the Brightest.”

Bowles played a similarly noisy role as American Ambassador to India in 1951, and in both cases, his appointment was an effort to send the brilliant, often-irascible Bowles as many time zones away from Washington as possible. In New Delhi, Bowles would not pipe down about the cool and unfortunate state of relations between the U.S. and India virtually since the latter’s independence.Beginning in the late 40s under Truman, Chet Bowles had warned against America arming Pakistan, Cold War bribes which he correctly estimated would end up being used against India in what has become the endless war over Kashmir.

At the time Bowles lamented “I had strongly urged the State Department to issue some kind of public rebuke to Pakistan.” Instead, he recalled, back came official gobbledygook urging Bowles “to say whatever I felt would be helpful off the record or as background.” Elected to Congress from Connecticut during the late Eisenhower era, Bowles used that less-than-bully pulpit to continued to question various American/Pakistan arms agreements with their tendency to favor whichever Paki generalissimo happened to be in power at the time.

This affinity for strongmen in uniform was an ongoing leitmotif of American diplomacy possibly because they were always so much easier to deal with than often-messy democracies like India. During his second, early-sixties stint as Ambassador, Bowles would similarly not shut up about the State Department’s decision to “bracket” India and Pakistan, a silly dualism which led, for example, to the 1965 Johnson Administration’s insistence that the President of Pakistan be scheduled to visit Washington just weeks after the new Indian Prime Minister came calling. This not only insulted the Indians, but, as Bowles commented in his autobiography, “Promises to Keep,” “was as illogical as the President of Frances refusing to invite the President of the United States unless a similar invitation were sent to the President of Mexico.”

As Ambassador to India under Kennedy/Johnson, Bowles remained the most powerful voice, with the possible exception of his immediate predecessor, John Kenneth Galbraith, celebrating the common links between India and America. Bowles was also a key formulator of a so-called “Indian Monroe Doctrine.” This policy recognizes India as the logical regional super-power and American ally and friend, empowered like the U.S. by a similar right of regional exceptionality particularly when dealing with a disintegrating A-Bomb-armed Pakistan.Chet Bowles’ prescient warnings about the danger of favoring Pakistan are again coming tragically to life as we watch Islamabad writhing in the throws of fundamentalism, radicalism, anti-Americanism and even possible dissolution and civil war.

It was, in fact, Bowles who almost single-handedly helped preserve at least some vestiges of tolerable relations between Washington and New Delhi. So important did he think Indian/ American relations were, that in “Promises to Keep” Bowles tartly questioned “whether my greatest accomplishment may not have been in keeping potentially explosive situations from actually exploding.”The region has already had its share of political explosions. In the early seventies tens of thousands died as the Pakistani military attempted to quell a revolt in what was then called “East Pakistan.”

The brutality of Pakistan’s attempt to hold onto a province 900-miles on the other side of India, finally forced the Indian Army to intervene, and thus mid-wife what is today’s independent Bangla Desh. More than historical curio, the breakaway of Bangla Desh is a ready, frightening blueprint for the disintegration of modern Pakistan. Chet Bowles died in his beloved Essex, Connecticut River home in 1981, his voice stilled still earlier by Parkinson’s.

Never, however, did his faith waver in the inevitable, long-overdue, grand democratic alliance between India and the U.S. A clue to Bowles’ certitude is seen in the title of his 1971 autobiography, “Promises to Keep,” a line taken from fellow New Englander, Robert Frost’s elegiac “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” In his book, Bowles relates how on the night that the great Indian patriot and founding father, Jawaharlal Nehru died, his aides found a note on his bed-table, which was a handwritten transcription of the stanza from the Frost poem:
“These woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep ...”

America still seems to have “miles to go,” before it finally recognizes India as a democratic bulwark and crucial strategic ally with so much more to lose if nuclear Pakistan dissolves or becomes America’s foe in Afghanistan. Ultimately, the logic of an Indo-American diplomatic marriage seems irresistible. One way or another, the U.S. will finds itself forced to back away from perfidious Pakistan while at the same time keeping a promise to embrace India as the partner and guardian of the sub-continental region, the sensible, reasonable ending Bowles and Nehru collectively imagined. ###