An American Perspective

In the first decade of the present century, South Asia has achieved a prominence for American policy makers that had previously escaped it. In earlier decades, the countries of the region had struggled, often without much success, to gain Washington's attention. Yet it frequently required a crisis, as during the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war, or the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to persuade American officialdom to give the region more than a cursory glance.

US Interest in South Asia

Developments in the 1990s, however, and more dramatically, in September 2001, convinced Washington it could no longer afford such a casual approach toward the subcontinent. In the first half of the 1990s, a growing number of Americans awoke to the fact that changes were afoot in India that, if continued, would make that country an economic powerhouse and a major political actor in Asia and beyond. In 1998, nuclear tests first by India, then Pakistan, dismayed official Washington and touched off the first ever senior sustained diplomatic dialogue between Washington and New Delhi – the much celebrated Strobe Talbott-Jaswant Singh talks. A year later, a dangerous military confrontation between India and Pakistan, sparked by a clandestine Pakistani incursion into the Kargil sector of Kashmir, had strategic analysts in Washington worrying about the possibility of the world's first nuclear exchange. A military seizure of power in Islamabad in October of that year further escalated the stakes in South Asia for American decision makers.