Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

India's and Pakistan's nuclear tests have created new challenges. There is a danger that the international community's response will repeat the mistakes that led in part to India's and Pakistan's decisions. There is already evidence that the reactions in many quarters do not come to grips with the real cause and nature of South Asia's nuclear breakout. The tests were greeted with a combination of shock and moral outrageespecially in the United States-out of proportion to the events. The two nations' nuclear weapons capabilities have long been known, neither broke any treaty and both are nonaggressive democratic states. But even the more considered statements from the Geneva meeting of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and op-ed page debates reflect old thinking about South Asia.

Fundamentally, the problem stems from the inattention to and isolation of South Asia in international affairs for most of the last 50 years. For the U.S. and other Western powers, interest in South Asia has been largely a derivative of the Cold War and other global concerns. Japan has had limited dealings with South Asia until rather recently, and those have been almost exclusively economic. China, despite its assistance to Pakistan and improving relations with India, has not seen South Asia as an important factor in its foreign policy and security calculus.

There are four mistakes the international community, particularly the U.S., must not repeat in South Asia if the dangers in the new situation are to be averted and the opportunities seized.

First, India's extra-regional security concerns must be taken seriously. India made explicit repeatedly that a potential threat from China, not Pakistan, was a key motive for developing a credible nuclear deterrent. It has also laid great stress on its being an odd-nation-out in the evolving post-Cold War security framework. It emphasizes that India is the only emerging power with nuclear neighbours that has not had its own deterrent or an external security guarantee.

Simply to dismiss these claims is to risk a new dialogue of the deaf. Yet most of the pronouncements and proposals emerging from the West have focused almost entirely. on IndiaPakistan relations or the global non-proliferation framework, and not acknowledged the strategic context that has worried India. Of course, the tests have heightened tensions between India and Pakistan, and these must be addressed, but not to the exclusion of other concerns. For instance, the Permanent Five should sit down with India and Pakistan to discuss their global as well as regional security perspectives.

Second, a policy of denial and isolation towards South Asia will not be any more effective than it was in the past. From 1977 onwards, threats and punishments by the U.S.-cutting off fuel to India's Tarapur power reactor, banning aid to Pakistan under the Pressler amendment, isolating India in the test-ban treaty negotiationhave failed to persuade India or Pakistan to follow a course other than that dictated by their perceived security needs.

Yet so far the international reaction to the tests has centred on U.S. economic sanctions. The rigidity and open-endedness of these legislatively mandated sanctions threaten to transform an understandable message of disapproval into a policy cul-de-sac. The international community must also come up with incentives for India and Pakistan, such as offers of technology transfer that will help alleviate their power shortages.

Third, single-issue, litmus-test relations with India and Pakistan limit the long-term influence of outside powers on their behaviour. During the Cold War, Western policies toward South Asia were driven almost entirely by how India and Pakistan lined up in the global confrontation. During most of the 1990s, nuclear nonproliferation objectives have dominated official ties, at least with the U.S. To the Clinton administration's credit, it began in the mid-1990s to develop a broad, positive approach to relations with both countries that would, over time, build mutual confidence. But it was too little too late.

The current preoccupation with and sense of betrayal over nuclear issues in Western capitals should not blind them to other important interests. South Asia has a quarter of the world's population. If the reforms of recent years continue, their economies could contribute to global growth at a time when the rest of Asia is faltering. Stability and development in South Asia will have an impact on key issues beyond the region, such as access to energy resources in Central Asia and global warming.

Finally, the U.S. and other powers must be mindful of the potent nationalism in India and Pakistan. Indians and Pakistanis have strongly supported their governments' defiance of perceived efforts by the West to instruct them on security interests and to keep them in a secondclass status in the world. The international community should take an active interest in conflict resolution in the region. But the will to resolve the differences between these democracies must come from within.