Kanwal Sibal, Indian Foreign Secretary under the previous government, is the voice of reason for all of us:

Because of its “soft power”, the US presidential election gets such extensive coverage internationally that its import gets exaggerated. This election decides the fate of two competing candidates, not that of the world. As in elections elsewhere, the central issues are domestic ones, not those of foreign policy. In the American case, the contest is not between two radically different visions of US foreign policy; it is about advancing US interests best. The difference is in tactics, not strategy. On basic assumptions, such as US global pre-eminence, preventing the emergence of any other power that can challenge Washington’s dominance, the goodness of US intentions and actions, superiority of American values, the responsibility to maintain international peace and stability, its exceptionalism providing the right to act unfettered by multilateral constraints if required and keeping America safe against non-proliferation, there is internal consensus in the US.

Certainly, there are many Indians who don’t mind the status quo that much, other observers from India who would like to see many changes to the U.S.-India relationship, but even here Mira Kamdar acknowledged that “87 percent of Indians polled said that they did not think the [U.S.] election mattered to them.” Their indifference is refreshing. Perhaps the only thing more strange than the jubilation among Americans I have seen is the enthusiasm of some foreign nations after the election. There aren’t going to be that many significant changes domestically, so how much less are things going to change in our relations abroad?

Sibal also sees a flaw in the Indian response to the Bush administration’s initiatives on the nuclear deal:

As a country desiring and capable of playing a larger international role a prospective global power and a pole in a future multi-polar world public expressions of gratitude to any foreign leader, especially one so unpopular in many parts of the globe where we have interests, are self-diminishing.

This error of personalizing international relations and identifying too strongly with particular foreign leaders is one that Americans should recognize, as we do it all the time with leaders of governments all over the world. Rarely do we prefer to think in terms of governments and their interests, which may help explain why we tend not to discuss parts of the world that cannot be readily defined by references to familiar political leaders. If we like Sarkozy, suddenly France is our close ally again, and if we find Ahmadinejad offensive then negotiating with Iran, even when it is in our interest to do so, becomes much worse than it would have been when Khatami was in office. More than almost any other nation, we take the electoral results in other countries as referenda on America and relations with the West, which sometimes even leads our government to take sides more or less openly in foreign elections.

Of course, like so many others in India, Sibal is not pleased with Obama’s agenda for India:

Obama has announced an acceleration of the US non-proliferation agenda. So long as India is not pressed to assume obligations ahead of internationally negotiated non-discriminatory treaties, the situation can be managed. But if the provisions of the nuclear deal are used as pressure points and concepts of regional strategic stability are actively resuscitated, tension will surface in India-US relations. Far more problematic is Obama’s advocacy of a quick resolution of the Kashmir issue in order to free Pakistan to conduct the war on terrorism on its western front to greater US satisfaction.

This is retrograde thinking. The US will once again be seen as seeking to reward Pakistan for doing what it must at India’s expense [bold mine-DL]. His toying with the idea of appointing former president Bill Clinton as special envoy on Kashmir is “old think”. Such a move will embarrass New Delhi and deplete the high levels of goodwill Washington currently enjoys in India. The government has already reacted negatively. Some may see in this move to satisfy Clinton’s thirst for a subcontinental role, [or] the potential costs to India of the nuclear deal.

Just as Sibal understands the consensus that prevails in Washington, the next administration needs to understand that when it comes to India’s nuclear program and Kashmir there is a fairly broad consensus in Indian politics that includes the two leading parties. No matter which coalition is in power after elections next year, India is not going to be receptive to having the nuclear deal used as leverage against it and will certainly not respond well to any initiatives on Kashmir.

Peter Suderman says that he doesn’t understand this Palin statement:

Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that. We have to balance budgets and we’re dealing with multibillion dollar budgets and tens of thousands of employees in our organizations.

I have concluded that the problem that so many people have in understand what Palin is saying is that we make the mistake of assuming that all of the words have some reason for being there. What we have to do instead is decrypt her message by filtering out all of the confusing chatter that keeps her statements encoded and difficult to follow. Let’s take the first sentence, and identify the essential elements in bold:

Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that.

See? If you just cut out about 60% of what she says, it hangs together nicely. By comparison, the second sentence is a piece of cake. Pretty much every word in the second sentence serves a function. Once reporters and voters acquire sufficient training in Palinonics, there should be no more misunderstandings.

John Schwenkler notes that Rahm Emanuel was and is a drug war hawk and this has been leading some libertarians to expect continuity in drug policy, but it’s not as if this should come as a big surprise. In his Latin America policy speech in Miami earlier this year, Obama made clear that he was entirely on board with current policy, and why wouldn’t he be? Everyone is probably already tired of hearing me say this, but it seems as if it needs to be said yet again: Obama is extraordinarily conventional in almost all of his policy views and he normally hews to the establishment line. To make the point about Emanuel clear: his appointment tends to confirm what we already know about Obama’s policy views; it is not evidence of a sudden shift away from views that he has held in the past. It is because Obama is a drug war hawk that Emanuel’s views on this subject will simply reinforce Obama’s own, and the same is true about other subjects.

Obama has stated his support for Plan Colombia, which is the clearest expression of militarized interdiction and combining anti-narcotics efforts with meddling foreign policy, but heavy-handed, useless drug war tactics will not be limited to other countries. As he said in May:

We have to do our part. And that is why a core part of this effort will be a northbound-southbound strategy. We need tougher border security, and a renewed focus on busting up gangs and traffickers crossing our border. But we must address the material heading south as well. As President, I’ll make it clear that we’re coming after the guns, we’re coming after the money laundering, and we’re coming after the vehicles that enable this crime. And we’ll crack down on the demand for drugs in our own communities, and restore funding for drug task forces and the COPS program. We must win the fights on our own streets if we’re going to secure the region.

Not to worry–infringing your constitutional liberties is necessary to make sure that farmers in Colombia cannot make a living, so it’s all for the greater good.

Prof. Stephen Walt warns against an overly expansive definition of American interests in his conversation with Anne-Marie Slaughter. In the short clip, he calls for more restraint and worries about Obama’s potential for excessive international activism. Those remarks brought to mind Prof. Bacevich’s The Limits of Power, which I had the chance to read on my flight back east this weekend. I agree with Clark that it is the book conservatives, and indeed anyone interested in a sane U.S. foreign policy, ought to read this year.

Here is an essay adapated from The Limits of Power that appeared in TAC earlier this year.

The Krikorian-Kaus thesis that Obama will make immigration a lower priority in his administration seems to be indirectly supported by the whining in Ruben Navarette’s latest column. I have also assumed for some time that amnesty would have been more likely under McCain than Obama, in part because McCain has made this something of a personal crusade and in part because McCain believes that it will win voters for the GOP, while the Democrats have no need to offer Latinos much of anything.

Here’s where Navarette is likely to be very wrong:

He will probably toss Latino supporters a bone by stopping construction of the border fence that he voted for in the Senate and ending the workplace raids that have caused so much disgust in the Latino community.

Does that make any sense? Obama voted for the fence, but he’s going to halt construction of it and take the attendant criticism for ignoring border security so that…his Latino supporters will feel better? Repeatedly on the campaign trail and in the Senate, Obama has talked about stricter enforcement against employers of illegal immigrants, and in this questionnaire he does not say that he opposes workplace raids. Maybe that doesn’t reflect what he will do in his administration, but this would seem to be another case of expecting Obama to do things that he has given no indication that he will do.

Indian reaction to Obama’s talks with Pakistani President Zardari and his statements about U.S. mediation of the Kashmir dispute has been fairly intense. The Times of India has a thoughtful editorial that also explains the views of many Indians on this question:

This bristling response to even the mildest proposal that perhaps New Delhi might like to do some rethinking on Kashmir is not restricted to officialdom; many, if not most, Indians feel that Kashmir is, or ought to be, a closed book, and any attempt to open it, by Indians or by outsiders, immediately compromises India’s national security and sovereignty. Even after more than 60 years of conflict – in which the worst sufferers have been the Kashmiri people, both embattled Muslims and exiled Hindus – any attempt to introduce a new perspective to the problem is summarily chucked out of court, as the thin edge of a wedge which would eventually and inevitably balkanise India.

C. Raja Mohan wrote in Indian Express just before the election why American involvement in Kashmir negotiations would be unwise and counterproductive:

India and Pakistan have made progress in recent years, because their negotiations have taken place in a bilateral context. Third party involvement will rapidly shrink the domestic political space for India on Kashmir negotiations.

For another, the prospect that the U S might offer incentives on Kashmir is bound to encourage the Pakistan Army to harden its stance against the current peace process with India.

Finally, the sense that an Obama Administration will put Jammu & Kashmir on the front burner would give a fresh boost to militancy in Kashmir and complicate the current sensitive electoral process there. Kashmiri separatist lobbies in Washington have already embraced Obama’s remarks.

Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, editor of The Hindustan Times, sees some of the same political problems in any U.S.-led mediation effort:

But any Kashmir peace process that is seen to be a consequence of US pressure is politically dead on arrival in India. Kashmir is a diplomatic minefield. One misstep by the new Obama administration could result in a deep freeze of the Indo-US relationship for years.

Mahendra Ved, writing for The New Straits Times, observes that Obama’s Kashmir position is out of date:

However, his recent remarks on Kashmir are seen as a throwback to American postures [of] 10 years ago.

In an interview to MSNBC, Obama said: “We should probably try to facilitate a better understanding between Pakistan and India and try to resolve the Kashmir crisis so that they can stay focused not on India, but on the situation with those militants.”

This is well-meaning to the extent that the US would want to keep India and Pakistan engaged and avoid a confrontation. But it is ill-advised and outdated and indicates that his advisers have not kept up with the times.

Despite this acknowledgement from a number of sources in India and the region that Obama’s proposal of mediating the dispute is politically disastrous and substantively wrong, there seems to be little awareness of this in Western commentary. Here is Aryn Baker writing for Time:

India and Pakistan have fought over Kashmir twice since 1947. Resolving an issue that has been the failure of many great diplomatic efforts will by no means be an easy task. But Obama, strengthened by his mandate at home and even abroad, and spurred on by his pledge to fix Afghanistan, is the man for the job. The time is right. Despite the economic meltdown, the U.S. has leverage in the form of an agreement to sell India civilian nuclear technology and fuel. Pakistan has a civilian government for the first time in nine years, and a desperate need for cash and trade. There is nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

This is absolutely wrong. There is a great deal to be lost, almost nothing to be gained and there is also the potential for destroying one of our better international relationships. Until the Indians approve the nuclear deal, Washington has no leverage, and this talk of using the nuclear deal’s provisions as leverage to force India to make concessions on Kashmir will harden the strong Communist opposition to the agreement and probably kill its chances in the lower house.

Update: C. Raja Mohan elaborates on the problems with Obama’s approach in Forbes:

Obama appears poised to make the same mistake that he had accused Bush of–mollycoddling Pakistan’s now fallen strongman Gen. Pervez Musharraf and relying on his Army rather than the democratic forces in that nation to fight the war on terror. Obama is now buying into the Pakistan Army’s argument that it cannot fight on two fronts–on the east with India and on the west against the Taliban and al-Qaida.

The argument that Obama’s people have bought into ignores a simple truth. India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has presided over a productive peace process with Pakistan and has been engaged in important back-channel negotiations with its leaders on resolving the Kashmir dispute. Pakistan’s new civilian leaders, too, are enthusiastic about normalizing relations with India.

The only institutional force that remains hostile to India in Pakistan is its army; it is a pity, then, that the Obama team is ready to buy into its new story about the link between Kashmir and Afghanistan. The sources of the troubles of the United States, Afghanistan and India stem from the unwavering dominance of the Army over national security politics of Pakistan.

If Obama were to focus on changing the civil-military relationship in Pakistan and develop a joint set of initiatives with India for the stabilization of the region, New Delhi will be eager to respond. But if Obama’s foreign policy team insists on a unilateral approach to Kashmir, the resistance from India might be fierce and the new president might set himself up for an early foreign policy defeat.

Second Update: I had missed this short item by Meghan O’Sullivan in the Post, in which she pushes the crazy Kashmir option and completely misreads the situation:

India has resisted U.S. mediation on Kashmir in the past, but the growing U.S.-India strategic relationship may now make American involvement possible.

O’Sullivan misses entirely that we there is a growing U.S.-India strategic relationship because Mr. Bush has carefully avoided meddling in the Kashmir dispute. The two governments have built this relationship partly by accepting that each state’s internal affairs are not the business of the other.

Fortunately, Joe Klein is not being considered for any senior posts in the next administration. He writes:

Perhaps most important, as President-elect Obama indicated to me a few weeks ago, a high-powered special envoy should be named–someone like Bill Clinton–to try to solve the eternal dispute between Pakistan and India over Kashmir. If India recedes as a threat, the Pakistani military’s imagined need for a guerrilla counterforce in Kashmir and Afghanistan should also recede.

Here is what Obama said to Klein:

Kashmir in particular is an interesting situation where that is obviously a potential tar pit diplomatically. But, for us to devote serious diplomatic resources to get a special envoy in there, to figure out a plausible approach, and essentially make the argument to the Indians, you guys are on the brink of being an economic superpower, why do you want to keep on messing with this? To make the argument to the Pakistanis, look at India and what they are doing, why do you want to keep n being bogged down with this particularly at a time where the biggest threat now is coming from the Afghan border? I think there is a moment where potentially we could get their attention. It won’t be easy, but it’s important.

This is madness. Kashmir is perhaps the thorniest case of disputed land claims in the world. If it were to erupt into a new war, the dispute has much greater stakes for South Asia and the world than anything currently happening inside Pakistan, and there is no guarantee that attempted mediation gone wrong would not push the Subcontinent in the direction of war. It is almost certain that no American envoy or administration knows enough about the region and the relevant issues to make an attempt at resolving it.

How would this mediation effort cause India to “recede as a threat” to Pakistan? To put it less one-sidedly, how might the border be largely demilitarized and the two states no longer regard each other as rivals with competing claims over this territory? As near as I can tell, that would happen only when nearly all of Jammu & Kashmir has been ceded to Pakistan, and perhaps not even then. Obviously the Pakistanis are not going to go along with a process in which they gain little or nothing. If this is their pay-off for doing more against the Taliban, they will want significant territorial concessions from India. I can see what Pakistan gets out of this arrangement, but why the Indians would participate is a mystery. One does not need to be an India expert to know that major concessions will never happen, especially when they are being promoted by a foreign power. Were some Indian Congress governmenr cajoled into making any concessions over Kashmir, the nationalists would crucify them come the next election. Even if such a deal could somehow be pushed through, which the recent remarks of the Indian External Affairs Minister show to be essentially impossible, it would be very unpopular and it would be repudiated by the next government.

It’s a terrible idea, it won’t work, and if it became a real policy of the U.S. government it would be fairly dangerous to both parties and to our interests. Have I left anything out? Oh, yes, it will badly harm our relationship with one of the rising powers of Asia, and it will distract us from realistic options in Pakistan.

Update: K. Subrahmanyam writes against U.S. involvement in Kashmir in a Times of India piece from last week:

The president-elect could not have selected a worse moment to air these thoughts. Kashmir is due to go in for elections in the next few weeks. Such a suggestion will come in handy for secessionist elements.

I have not yet found any Indian commentary that supports the proposed mediation. If anyone finds some, I’d be interested to see it.

Via Joe Carter, this article on intelligence policy under the next administration should (I hope!) give our Obama fans pause:

President-elect Barack Obama is unlikely to radically overhaul controversial Bush administration intelligence policies, advisers say, an approach that is almost certain to create tension within the Democratic Party.

Civil-liberties groups were among those outraged that the White House sanctioned the use of harsh intelligence techniques — which some consider torture — by the Central Intelligence Agency, and expanded domestic spy powers. These groups are demanding quick action to reverse these policies.

Mr. Obama is being advised largely by a group of intelligence professionals, including some who have supported Republicans, and centrist former officials in the Clinton administration. They say he is likely to fill key intelligence posts with pragmatists.

“He’s going to take a very centrist approach to these issues,” said Roger Cressey, a former counterterrorism official in the Clinton and Bush administrations. “Whenever an administration swings too far on the spectrum left or right, we end up getting ourselves in big trouble.”

Ah, there’s that wonderfully flexible word for “flexible” politicians–pragmatist! Pragmatists who can “get things done” by treating people as things. Of course, we must always have a “centrist” approach, which means an approach least likely to challenge established practices. It is as if opposition to torture was not the position that commands the broad middle of reasonable opinion. We don’t want Obama going off on some crazy jag about human dignity–who knows where that might lead?

M.K. Bhadrakumar in an Asia Times column discusses something that I have noticed in the past, namely Obama’s bizarre failure to have much of anything to say about U.S.-Indian relations during the entire campaign. First, this is from an early August post of mine:

While it is not in East Asia, India appears nowhere in his major statements, and the extent of his campaign’s references to U.S.-Indian relations is, so far as I know, his campaign’s dismissive description of Hillary Clinton as the Senator for Punjab.

Bhadrakumar explains that the Indian government is not pleased with Obama’s initial moves after the election:

Delhi finds it appalling that Obama phoned Pakistani leader Asif Zardari on Saturday and the two leaders reportedly discussed the Kashmir issue. External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee promptly reacted, invoking the Simla Accord of 1972 as the cornerstone of India-Pakistan relations, which rules out third-party mediation over the disputed territory of Kashmir.

It is a long while since an Indian statesman mentioned the Simla Accord. It is a “back-off” message and it comes amid reports that in a move to inspire Islamabad to perform better in the “war on terror”, the incoming US administration may coax India into a settlement of the Kashmir problem and that Obama proposes to appoint former US president Bill Clinton as special envoy to undertake a sustained mediatory mission between India and Pakistan [bold mine-DL].

Indians might have fondly overlooked Clinton’s incurable flaws and warmed to him as president, but his anointment as Kashmir envoy will not go down well. Public opinion would see it as a failure of the government’s foreign policy. And the ruling Congress party is gearing up for a string of tough provincial and federal elections.

If true, all of these moves by Obama would be as clumsy and stupid as his handling of the Russian government was sensible and intelligent. The Indian relationship is probably the one major foreign relationship that Mr. Bush has managed to improve over the last eight years, and the nascent alliance with Delhi has been one of the few that has become noticeably stronger despite foreign policy blunders everywhere else. Embarrassing the government that negotiated and is trying to pass the nuclear deal over strenuous objections from the Indian left and criticism from the BJP hardly seems the right way to develop that relationship. What makes even less sense is that it was the previous Democratic administration that engaged Delhi after the end of the Cold War (Clinton famously being the first American President to visit India), which marks this odd Obama tilt towards Pakistan, if it continues, as something of an inversion of the old partisan pattern.

Bhadrakumar assumes that discussion of Kashmir is merely a diversionary effort to keep the Indians occupied while Obama focuses on the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and he asserts:

But Obama cannot be naive enough to conclude that his route to Afghan settlement lies through the treacherous minefields of the 60-year-old Kashmir dispute.

I would like to think that no one is this naive, but what is really gained by annoying the Indians over Kashmir when it must be obvious that there is not going to be a resolution of the dispute anytime soon?