Asia-Pacific, Headlines, North America | Analysis

POLITICS-U.S.: Hawks Push Growing India-Israel Ties

Analysis - By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, May 23 2003 (IPS) - Immediately after the Sep. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the neo-conservative editorial page of the ‘Wall Street Journal’ featured an article arguing that Israel, India and Turkey were Washington’s only ”allies for the long haul” in the coming war against terrorism.

While an increasingly democratic Turkey turned out to be a major disappointment, three-way ties between Israel, India and the United States are growing fast, spurred along by precisely the same forces in Washington who championed the invasion of Iraq.

That trend reached new heights when U.S. officials confirmed here this week that Washington has given the go-ahead to Israel to sell its advanced Phalcon air-borne reconnaissance system to India in a deal worth some one billion U.S. dollars.

The same officials said the administration of President George W. Bush is also on the verge of approving the more-expensive sale of Israel’s Arrow anti-missile system, which was developed jointly with the United States. Such a system could go far in neutralising threats posed by Pakistani missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

Both moves highlight the burgeoning alliance between the two most potent non-Islamic militaries in the Middle East and South Asia, a trend that has the enthusiastic support of Bush administration hawks, particularly in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. That alliance will again be spotlighted with next month’s scheduled visit to India of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

While Israel sees India as a comrade in the fight against Islamic militants, the United States has a somewhat broader agenda to pursue with New Delhi, particularly its possible role as a counter-balance to China, which U.S. hawks see as Washington’s strategic competitor in Asia.

”India is the most overlooked of our potential allies in a strategy to contain China,” according to Lloyd Richardson of the Hudson Institute, a think tank very close to the administration.

With India determined to build a naval force capable of projecting power into the South China Sea, says Conn Hallinan, an analyst at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Washington has especially courted India’s navy, most recently with the Malabar IV joint exercises involving thousands of sailors and pilots from both countries.

Not coincidentally, some of the biggest boosters of U.S.-Indian military ties both in and outside the Bush administration are also prominent neo-conservatives with close ties to Israel’s ruling Likud Party.

With the support of hard-line officials like Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith – whose law partner is a spokesman for the settlement movement on the West Bank – a group of leading neo-conservatives have formed a new think tank, the U.S.-India Institute for Strategic Policy, precisely to promote military ties, according to Hallinan.

Members of note are the head of the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, Frank Gaffney, and a founder of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Michael Ledeen. Both have promoted Indian-Israeli military ties as well. Gaffney and Ledeen, in particular, have long argued that the Pakistani military was unreliable as a U.S. ally in the ”war against terrorism” given the alleged sympathies felt by middle and some senior-ranking officers.

Washington put on a hold on the Phalcon deal last year when both Pakistan and India were mobilising their forces along their common border. Tensions between the two countries have since eased considerably, and there is hope that a new peace initiative by Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee may yield progress.

But the fact that the deal was approved before any indication of serious forward movement in bilateral talks suggests that the more-hawkish forces within the administration are winning the argument over the value of ”tilting” ever more sharply in India’s direction.

It is no secret that the Pentagon, in particular, has become increasingly angry about the alleged role of Pakistan’s intelligence services in protecting Taliban and al-Qaeda forces along the border with Afghanistan, from which ever more frequent and lethal attacks against Afghan security forces and U.S. soldiers have been launched.

Final approval of the Phalcon sale and likely approval of the Arrow sales are designed in part to demonstrate that Washington’s patience is running out, according to one administration official.

India is already the biggest customer for Israel’s sophisticated military industry, which last year ranked fifth in the world among all arms exporters, after the United States, the European Union, Russia, and Japan. The Phalcon and Arrow deals are likely to propel Israel even higher in the rankings over the next two years, arms experts say. Almost one-half of Israel’s total military sales last year of 4.2 billion dollars went to India.

But the deal also moves the relationship between Israel and India closer to the vision set out by the Journal back in September, 2001, of an alliance of three non-Muslim states (now, perhaps, minus Turkey) and the United States in an existential battle against ”Islamic terrorism” and the governments (including, presumably, Pakistan’s) that support it.

”Outside the Western world, as geographically defined,” wrote the author, editorial board member Tunku Varadarajan, ”these three states are perhaps the only ones on which the U.S. can count, virtually unconditionally, to show an immutable opposition to Islamic terrorism. Crucially, they are all situated at terrorist nodes, in a vast, seething region in which Islamic states are preponderant”.

Indeed, that vision also echoed earlier this month with the unprecedented appearance by Vajpayee’s National Security Adviser, Brajesh Mishra, at the gala dinner of the annual convention of the American Jewish Committee (AJC). The United States, India, and Israel, he said ”have to jointly face the same ugly face of modern-day terrorism”, adding that ”such an alliance would have the political will and moral authority to take bold decisions in extreme cases of terrorist provocation”.

Given their democratic governments, ”vision of pluralism, tolerance and equal opportunity…”, Mishra said, ”stronger India-U.S. relations and India-Israel relations have a natural logic”.

The AJC announced it would soon be opening an office in New Delhi.