On Sunday morning, I drove into the State Department on my own, parked my car, and walked the five blocks to the White House. I joined Clinton and the rest of Obama’s team in the Situation Room for the long wait. At 2:30 P.M., we watched on a small video map as two Black Hawk helicopters took off for Abbottabad from Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. The next couple hours seemed like an eternity, and the raid itself began with gut-wrenching drama, when one of the two helicopters made a hard landing in the courtyard of the compound. The SEALs were unhurt, but they had to destroy the helicopter and adapt quickly. McRaven narrated the whole operation with incredible calm from a command post in Afghanistan. As the president and his senior aides sat in rapt attention, there wasn’t a hint of second-guessing or backseat commentary. Then McRaven’s voice came on the line to confirm “E-KIA”—the enemy had been killed in action. Bin Laden was dead. Never had I been prouder of the U.S. military, or of a president who had so coolly taken such a big risk. For a diplomat accustomed to long slogs and victories at the margins, this was an incredible moment.
The president announced the successful operation to the nation and the world at around 11 P.M. that night. Secretary Clinton and I divided a series of phone calls to notify key allies and leaders around the world. Late that night, my calls completed, I walked out the White House gate, heading back to my car. In front of the White House, all across Lafayette Square, was a large and boisterous crowd, waving flags and shouting “USA, USA, USA.” I couldn’t help but think, as I walked back to the State Department, of a much different moment nearly a decade before, standing in front of State with Lisa as the full import of the 9/11 attacks began to sink in. It had taken a long time, but a measure of justice had been done.
Amid the deliberations about the bin Laden raid that spring, Clinton called late one afternoon and asked me to come down to her office. The issue on her mind was not bin Laden, but finding a successor to Jim Steinberg, who had just decided to step down as deputy secretary. Smiling broadly, she got right to the point. “I’d like you to take Jim’s place,” the secretary said. “I trust you, the president trusts you, and everyone in this building trusts you. It would mean a lot to me personally if you’d agree.” I smiled back, surprised but flattered, and mentioned that it was a little unusual to have a career person in that role.1 “I know,” she replied. “But you’re the right choice, and I like the message it sends.” I quickly accepted. This was a vote of confidence in the professional diplomatic service, not just me.
My work as undersecretary and deputy secretary stretched me across the whole range of issues in American foreign policy. On many days, it was a little like taking ten exams on ten different subjects, some of which I knew well, and some of which I didn’t. I filled in for the secretary at meetings of foreign ministers, going to a G-8 ministerial in Italy on short notice, after Clinton fell and broke her elbow in the State Department parking garage, and later accompanying the president to the G-8 summit and Moscow. I spent considerable time testifying and consulting on Capitol Hill, and my travels took me to every part of the globe, from Africa and Latin America to the Balkans and Southeast Asia. Inevitably, I spent more time on some issues than others. And the issue that was at the core of the long game, and the heart of our revitalized diplomacy, was the effort to manage changing relations with the major powers, especially India, China, and Russia.
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OBAMA INHERITED FROM Bush an emerging partnership with India. The world’s biggest democracy, and soon to be the world’s most populous country, India had begun an economic transformation in the early 1990s and was growing at a rapid clip. It remained, however, a nation of vast contradictions. Hundreds of millions of people had been lifted out of poverty and into a new middle class, but hundreds of millions more still lived on less than two dollars a day, without toilets or regular access to electricity. The tech sector was beginning to boom, but infrastructure was crumbling and pollution and urban overcrowding were worsening. Expansive national ambitions were slowed by a constipated, corrupt, and overbureaucratized political system. India was sometimes schizophrenic in its international ambitions, caught between a future that argued for a more assertive and agile role and a past that bogged down Indian diplomacy in the pedantic quarrels of a nonaligned world left behind by the end of the Cold War. As a matter of policy, India had been “looking east” to its future in a wider Asia for two decades. When Obama took office, it was still doing more looking than acting.
What had accelerated dramatically in the George W. Bush administration was the improvement in U.S.-Indian ties that had begun at the end of the Clinton administration. Sensing the historic opportunity that a rising India provided, Bush made a big strategic bet at the beginning of his second term. He decided to cut through the most difficult knot in our relationship with India—its nuclear program. India’s decision to remain outside the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), alongside Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea (which withdrew in 2003), and its refusal to put its nuclear facilities under international safeguards, proved for decades an immovable practical and symbolic roadblock to closer relations.
The president believed that bringing India in out of the nuclear cold would be a net plus for American strategy. The result, in the summer of 2005, was a crucial understanding announced by President Bush and Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh. India would seek to separate its military and civilian nuclear facilities and put the latter under the most advanced international safeguards, called the Additional Protocol; it would put in place effective export control systems consistent with the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), and would not transfer enrichment and reprocessing technologies to states that did not already have them; and it would continue its “unilateral moratorium” on nuclear testing. In return, the United States would bend domestic and international rules to accommodate the reality of India’s nuclear program and its commitment to act responsibly.
It was not an easy call. Questions remained on just how aligned India would be with us, how significant the costs of the India exception would be to nuclear diplomacy and the broader nuclear nonproliferation regime, and whether the economic benefits for the American nuclear industry would ever live up to the hype. Proponents of the deal tended to overstate the promise and understate the risk; critics did the opposite, lambasted by Indian officials as “nuclear ayatollahs” whose nonproliferation zeal blinded them to wider possibilities. As a long-term strategic investment, however, Bush’s decision was bold and smart. It was the essential prerequisite to unlocking the possibility of a strategic partnership that would be a huge asset in shaping the unfolding Pacific Century. The downsides were real but manageable, the returns promising, if delayed. There are no guarantees in diplomacy, but this was a bet worth making.
Producing that initial accord proved difficult, but Secretary Rice, National Security Advisor Hadley, and my predecessor as undersecretary for political affairs, Nick Burns, led a formidable diplomatic campaign. Congress passed the Hyde Act, laying out its expectations for implementation and amending U.S. law to permit civilian nuclear cooperation with India, but there continued to be resistance from members primarily concerned with nuclear proliferation. It was tough going in the Indian Parliament too, with opposition members complaining about infringements on Indian sovereignty. By the time I returned to Washington in the late spring of 2008, the process had stalled, and it looked as if this would be yet another challenge for the next administration to pick up.
Then Prime Minister Singh, in a burst of unforeseen political risk-taking, decided to press ahead in Parliament. With India’s next national elections looming in the spring of 2009, time running out for his allies in the Bush administration, and uncertainty about the attitudes of their successors, Singh pushed for and won a confidence vote, clearing a major hurdle on the Indian side. The president and Secretary Rice made clear that they wanted to make a hard push to complete the agr
eement before the end of their term. Rice called me into her office in mid-June and said, “I know the odds on this are long. But Singh has taken a real risk, and we need to pull out all the stops.” I dove in—the beginning of a three-month sprint to finish the civil nuclear agreement, and of another six years of active personal involvement in deepening and normalizing the U.S.-Indian partnership.
We had three more forbidding obstacles to clear: approval of India’s nuclear safeguards program by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); agreement by the NSG to allow a so-called clean exemption for India, permitting it to engage in civil nuclear cooperation with other countries; and finally, passage by both houses of Congress of the civilian nuclear agreement. Of these, the NSG hurdle looked the highest, with six or seven member states in vocal opposition, and consensus a requirement. Passage by Congress would be tough on such a short timetable, but we had to move in sequence and hope that there’d be a small window left for hearings and a vote in September.
We had a skillful team, and Indian counterparts who had received similarly urgent marching orders from Manmohan Singh. President Bush, Secretary Rice, and Steve Hadley were indefatigable in making phone calls and leaning on other leaders, and our ambassador in New Delhi, David Mulford, was not shy about pushing the Indians to show maximum flexibility. John Rood and Dick Stratford, senior arms control officials at State, were excellent partners.
On August 1, the Indians won IAEA approval, clearing the first and lowest hurdle. The NSG was another matter. At an initial meeting of the NSG board in late August, consensus proved elusive. A number of the four dozen member states balked, with Austria, Ireland, and New Zealand among the most outspoken about the concern that India’s nonproliferation commitments weren’t strong enough. I was candid with Rice. “We really are at a crunch point,” I wrote to her in a memo on August 27, “and the Indians are extremely nervous about their domestic politics, and not giving us much to work with at the NSG….The obstacles on both sides are pretty steep.”2
Both the secretary and the president urged Singh to sharpen the Indian text, and worked the phones with reluctant NSG members. Armed with a somewhat tighter draft, we set off with the Indians for the follow-on NSG board meeting in early September in Vienna. Rice asked me to lead the American delegation, a higher level than we would normally have used, to signal our determination.
This was an exercise in diplomatic blunt force as much as persuasion. I had to wake up senior Swiss and Irish officials in their capitals at four in the morning to push for a final yes. I argued our case but didn’t belabor it. The point was simply that we needed this vote and were calling in a chit. There was no point in going back and forth on the merits; we were not looking to do any convincing. This was not elegant diplomacy. This was about power, and we were exercising it.
The votes eventually began to fall into place, and on September 6 the NSG finally approved India’s exemption, following a formal pledge by New Delhi that it would not share sensitive nuclear technology or materials with others, and would uphold its moratorium on testing. There was still a lot of uneasiness within the NSG over the purely declaratory nature of the Indian commitments, but in the end it was enough. It was a few years before I was welcome again in Bern or Dublin, but we had cleared the second hurdle.
Although legislative days were limited with the November elections approaching, the congressional leadership agreed to give us a shot at passage in the fall of 2008. Rood and I testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on September 18 and made our pitch—looking to take seriously the nonproliferation concerns but overwhelm them with the strategic argument. By the end of the month, both the Senate and the House voted to approve the deal. Prime Minister Singh made a last visit to have dinner with President Bush at the White House, a moment of genuine mutual satisfaction, and a moment in which the promise of U.S.-Indian partnership seemed tangible. The ever-polite Singh looked more bemused than offended when his plate was whipped away with his fork still poised in midair. It was his introduction to President Bush’s penchant for culinary speed dating, where business was the first and only course. However abbreviated their dinner, their sense of pride was enduring, and so was their achievement.
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THE ADVENT OF the Obama administration initially unnerved the Indian leadership. Fresh from their successful partnership with Bush, Singh and his chief advisors were worried that Obama was less enthusiastic. In the near term, they feared the new president’s campaign focus on the “right war” in Afghanistan would “re-hyphenate” the relationship, seeing it through a wider lens that balanced American priorities with Pakistan and Afghanistan against strategic investment with India. In the longer term, they were anxious that he would subordinate partnership with India to a “G-2” worldview, in which the U.S.-China relationship was paramount. Obama’s ambitious agenda on nuclear issues was another source of concern—for all the unburdening of the nuclear deal, India was still a square peg in the round hole of the nonproliferation regime. As the most senior U.S. representative of continuity in relations with India, I worked hard to overcome misimpressions and sustain momentum.
It didn’t take long to reassure the Singh government, and making the case for India’s significance was pushing on an open door with Clinton and Obama. In an early memo, I reminded Clinton of the heavy lift required to finalize the civil nuclear agreement the summer before, and added that “despite the difficulties—the reversals, recriminations, and negotiating brinksmanship—I was taken by the potential of our relationship. India is as remarkable as it is complicated, a democracy of many and competing voices, and without doubt an emerging Great Power with a growing role in Asia and beyond. I don’t believe it will be an easy or quick task, but building a true American alliance with India is a mission worthy of our patience and investment.”3
Obama and Clinton fully appreciated the importance of partnership with India, both on its own merits and as a key element in the “rebalance” toward Asia that they were beginning to shape. Step-by-step, we expanded the bilateral agenda, strengthening counterterrorism cooperation; looking for opportunities to work together in education and science; deepening two-way trade and investment; starting a systematic discussion on climate change; and significantly increasing defense cooperation. By the end of Obama’s first term, India was conducting more military exercises with the United States than with any other country, and its acquisitions of American defense equipment had risen from a little over $200 million to $2 billion.
The president and Prime Minister Singh had a cordial first encounter in London on the margins of the G-20 summit in April, and Obama invited him to make a state visit—the first of his administration—in November 2009. The symbolism of that went a long way to assuage Indian anxieties, and Obama and Singh hit it off. The next year, Obama made a reciprocal state visit to India. He and Singh pressed ahead in a number of areas, as both the economic and defense dimensions of the relationship continued to grow. There were headaches, of course; nothing came easily in U.S.-Indian relations, and the Singh government lost political altitude and clout steadily after its reelection in the spring of 2009.
Pakistan remained a neuralgic topic; despite the president’s best efforts with Singh, and my own quiet conversations with Shivshankar Menon, the prime minister’s national security advisor, the Indians had no interest in opening up much with us about their relations with the Pakistanis. Active back-channel talks between them had nearly brought about a breakthrough over Kashmir and other disputes in the spring of 2007, but the collapsing political position of Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf had brought them to an abrupt halt, and they had made no more than fitful progress since then. We were increasingly worried about the risks of nuclear confrontation, but the Indians were not much interested in talking about their perceptions or how to avoid escalation, let alone any American mediation role.4
The president took advantag
e of his 2010 visit to take another dramatic step to highlight his commitment to U.S.-Indian partnership. Speaking to India’s Parliament, Obama repeated that the U.S.-India relationship was “one of the defining partnerships of the twenty-first century,” and indicated for the first time his support for Indian permanent membership in a reformed UN Security Council. The announcement fit the moment and the setting, but it was not an easy decision. The United States had made only one other similar statement, some years before, in support of Japan’s candidacy. The whole issue of expanding permanent membership was fraught with difficulty—in terms of procedures; preserving the efficacy of the institution; navigating the reservations of other permanent members; and managing the sensitivities of a number of players, including close allies and Security Council aspirants like Germany.
Susan Rice, our ambassador to the UN, was understandably concerned about taking this step, not least because the Indians hadn’t exactly been reliable partners in New York over the years. On the morning of his speech to Parliament, I sat with the president and Tom Donilon, newly elevated as national security advisor, for one last secure conference call with Susan, who repeated her reservations and argued for more conditional language. I fully acknowledged the risks, but said I thought it would be a mistake to miss this opportunity. Tom agreed. The president ultimately decided to go ahead—but made a point of stressing to Singh privately the difficulties involved in expanding permanent membership, and the importance of India doing its part to earn the seat in New York.
Over the next few years, U.S.-Indian relations continued to deepen. John Kerry followed in Clinton’s footsteps and worked with Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker in the second Obama term to deepen the promise of economic ties. Implementation of the civil nuclear agreement was a slog. Menon and I finished a required nuclear reprocessing agreement in 2010, but that same year the Indian Parliament passed nuclear liability legislation that discouraged domestic, American, and other foreign firms from taking advantage of the commercial opportunities that were one of the attractions of the civilian nuclear deal. It took several years to develop a workable compromise. It was a deeply frustrating exercise, one that tested the patience and goodwill of Congress and much of the U.S. bureaucracy—and served as a gnawing reminder that whatever the long-term gains might be from the agreement, the near-term pains would not be inconsequential.
The Back Channel Page 28