'Failure of Indo-US N-deal will be damaging for US'
Press Trust of India Posted online: Friday, January 13, 2006 at 1224 hours IST
Washington, January 13: Indians view the Indo-US civilian nuclear energy accord, as a "litmus test" of America's seriousness on developing strategic ties. The failure to implement the agreement would be "very damaging" to Washington's vital interests, said the former Us Ambassador to India Robert Blackwill.
"We are at a historic intersection at Indo-US relationship… The Indians see this (the civilian nuclear energy cooperation agreement) as a litmus test of our seriousness with respect to the development of the strategic relationship and they have a long history of suspicions…", Blackwill said during an address at the US Chamber of Commerce, organised under the aegis of the US India Business Council.
"If this were to fail, I believe this would setback many years of the evolving Indo-US strategic partnership - for many years… It would be very damaging for US' vital interests, perhaps for decades to come," he remarked.
Blackwill is currently the President of Barbour Griffith and Rogers International, one of the top lobbying firms in the United States. The former Envoy said the issue of Pakistan getting a similar arrangement with the US is "not even a realistic part of the discussion" stressing that "not a single member" of the nuclear suppliers group supports a similar agreement with Islamabad making the point that the clandestine A Q Khan network had sunk the chances of Pakistan, if there was any at all.
Blackwill said different elements of the civilian nuclear arrangement with India are not supposed to be a long drawn out affair and various elements involved in the arrangement such as separation of Indian civilian and nuclear facilities and discussions with the nuclear suppliers group are being done in "close proximity".
Assuring that this is not going to be a "long process", he said, "this is all going to happen in the next few months". The issue of safeguards was being discussed and that this was a practical one as opposed to being theological, he said adding those practical issues could be sorted out by the international atomic energy agency and India.
The former American Envoy to New Delhi emphasised that the civilian nuclear energy agreement with India did not weaken the Non-Proliferation treaty or the Non-Proliferation regimes as some critics contend and that this will not lead to other nations like Iran and North Korea to get ideas or abandon their policies.
"If India announces tomorrow that it is giving up all nuclear weapons... I don't think Iran is looking at New Delhi on how they proceed. The same is true of North Korea", he said adding the NPT is not affected in any legal sense as a result of the Indo-US accord on civilian nuclear energy cooperation.
"The NPT is not affected as a legal matter by this exception", he remarked. Blackwill placed the transformation in bilateral relations between the US in the broader diplomatic context stressing that the controversies surrounding the civilian nuclear accord should not be surprising given that it was an important departure in American and Indian foreign policies.
The disagreement and debate, Blackwill pointed out was very much in line with other major events in international politics such as the creation of the NATO, Germany's participation in the Atlantic Alliance, Richard Nixon's detente with the erstwhile Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China and the NAFTA.
"The rise of India as a great power and the transformation of the Indo-US relationship is likely to have a great impact on the international system, greater than the events that I mentioned", Blackwill noted.
The American diplomat argued that both India and the US will be "attentive to the implications" of the rise of the power of China, but this did not mean containment".
