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BOOK REVIEW: Engaging India
Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy, and the Bomb
Strobe Talbott
Brookings Institution Press,
August 2004, 268 pp.
Strobe Talbott's memoir, Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb, offers readers an insider's account of U.S. relations with India and Pakistan during the tenuous period after both countries openly tested nuclear weapons in May f 998. Talbott, the deputy secretary of state, was then chosen to be the Clinton administration's point person and crisis manager for South Asia.
His diplomatic skills were never more important or adept than during the 1999 Kargil conflict between India and Pakistan, which posed the risk of nuclear escalation. At the same time, Talbott was repeatedly frustrated in trying to convince New Delhi and Islamabad to formalize nuclear restraints. In a narrative rich with irony and insight, the author recounts how stalemated nuclear talks ended up broadening U.S.-Indian relations.
Talbott was handpicked for this highstakes mission after President Clinton and secretary of State Madeleine Albright considered, and then rejected the possibility of appointing former President Jimmy Carter or former Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) to the job. Their prospects faded because a high-profile special envoy might further complicate matters on the subcontinent. Albright, already busy with the Balkans and other crises, had enough "problems from hell" on her plate, so the crisis in the subcontinent became Talbott's challenge-and his story to tell.
It is a story woven around extended talks with his primary Indian interlocutor, Jaswant Singh, the confidant of former Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee and subsequently New Delhi's minister of external affairs. The story's crucial pivot is a bold and ill-considercd initiative hatched by a small group of senior Pakistani officers to seize the heights above the Indian town of Kargil. In doing so, the plotters, led by Army Chief Gen. Pervez Musharraf, unwittingly undercut their hopes to change the status quo in the disputed area of Kashmir and paved the way for a triumphant Clinton visit to New Delhi. The Kargil conflict and the rejection by Senate Republicans of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) derailed the author's primary mission. Nevertheless, as Talbott notes, "|s]ometimes a negotiation that fails to resolve a specific dispute can have general and lasting benefits, especially if it...