An Orthodox friend alerted me to Christopher Hitchens’ latest inane ramblings. It is admittedly odd that Castro has built a Russian Orthodox cathedral. Yes, this is clearly a way to curry favor with patrons in Moscow. Why should anyone outside Cuba care one way or the other? Castro is ridiculous, and above all he is irrelevant. The same might be said of Hitchens, which is why I have given up saying much about his articles. However, a few points need to be made about this one.

Hitchens goes through the usual motions of his typically unpersuasive anti-Christian whining, blaming the Church for “the clerical guarantee of serfdom and czarism,” as if the Church had any control over the Ulozhenie of 1649 or other policies of the Romanov dynasty. Did the Orthodox Church teach people to obey their secular rulers? Yes, just as Christian bishops have taught since the time of the Apostles. Far better that than the butchery of Hitchens’ confreres in the name of freedom and equality. Particularly in the post-Petrine period, when the Church was subjected to more direct control by the state thanks to the Westernizing efforts of Peter I, the Russian Orthodox hierarchy was in no position to protest against state policy. This year the Patriarchate did not fully support Moscow’s line on the war in Georgia, but immediately called for the cessation of hostilities. If that is what being “Putin’s most devoted and reliable ally” looks like, Russia could use a few more “allies” of Putin like this.

Rod:

I think a useful distinction between progressive and traditionalist religionists and their approach to religious truth is as follows. Progressives think that religious truth is indefinite and subjective, and can change according to the perceived needs of people in a given time and place. Traditionalists believe that religious truth is definite and objective, and can be known with some degree of certainty.

Put another way, progressives tend to think that religious truth claims are statements of an individual’s thoughts and emotional state; trads tend to think that religious truth claims are statements about metaphysical reality.

Rod is right to put it in this other way, as there is something potentially very misleading in speaking in terms of subjectivity and objectivity. In Orthodox theology, and most specifically in the modern Orthodox neo-patristic theology of Lossky drawing on the teaching of St. Gregory Palamas, knowledge of God is experiential. Truth claims about God arise out of real experience (“he that saw it bare record, and his record is true”), which the faithful verify through their life in the Church and whose verification they also find in the written and unwritten Tradition of the Church and the lives of the saints. Indeed, if we had to choose between defining our knowledge of God as subjective or objective, we should probably prefer to say that it is subjective (or as some our colleagues might put it, intersubjective), but neither part of this opposition states things correctly. At least for man, objectivity is a myth, and objectivity here presupposes a weak or non-existent personal relationship man and God. God is radically Other in nature, but He is self-revealing and desires communion with His creatures, and His inner Life is characterized by communion and a relationship of perfect unity, which tells us that He is not an Object to be perceived, but a Person to be known and loved.

There is another difficulty here. Truth is not definite, because ultimately God is the Truth, and He is incomprehensible and ineffable. Our statements about God, both positive and negative, are definite because of the finite capacity of our mind and our language to conceive and to express the truths that God has revealed to us in a manner befitting our understanding. Doctrinal definitions are true and meaningful, and they point accurately to reality, but they are necessarily inadequate to express the fullness of Divine Life. The certainty of the faithful, or the certainty that the faithful can find in the teachings of the Church, is the certainty that the Spirit of Truth (Jn. 15:26) continues to guide and instruct the Church, and it is the certainty that these teachings derive from the real experience of members of the Church recorded in Scripture and explained by the generations of the faithful who have handed down the Faith in practice and devotion to us.

So Tymoshenko and Moscow win — but so, perhaps, does Ukraine, for the extreme pro-Western and anti-Russian positions taken up by Yushchenko were not wise. Moscow does not appear to harbor any ambition to regain the control over Ukraine that it had in Soviet and czarist times, but it would see a Ukrainian government that joined NATO as an enemy of Russia. Ukraine’s independence is probably safer outside NATO than it would be inside it. ~Gwynne Dyer

When half of the people in Ukraine do not want to join NATO, numerous NATO allies don’t want to bring Ukraine in, and the Russians don’t want them to join, what possible sense can it make to continue down the path to expansion? Yet this was exactly what Gates was proposing just a few days ago when he was visiting Estonia. Whatever else one might say in favor of Gates, his advocacy for another round of expansion ought to be a huge strike against any chance of his staying on in the new administration.

Communications between the suspected top spy and his commanding officer seemed like a throwback to the Cold War. Investigators allege that in order to send messages to his Russian contact, Herman Simm, 61, used a converted radio which looked like a relic from yesteryear’s world of consumer electronics. But there was nothing old-fashioned about what Simm, a high-ranking official in the Estonian Defense Ministry in Tallinn, reportedly transmitted to Moscow over the years. It was the very latest intelligence information.

Although Simm was arrested with his wife Heete in the Estonian capital Tallinn on Sept. 21, this spy story — which has been largely kept under wraps until now — primarily concerns the European Union and NATO based in faraway Brussels. Since Simm was responsible for dealing with classified information in Tallinn, he had access to nearly all documents exchanged within the EU and NATO. Officials who are familiar with the case assume that “virtually everything” that circulates between EU member states was passed on to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR — including confidential analyses by NATO on the Kosovo crisis, the war in Georgia and even the missile defense program. Investigators believe that Simm was a “big fish.” ~Der Spiegel

Besides being militarily useless, highly vulnerable to cyber-attacks, and a dangerous potential flashpoint for NATO-Russian conflict, Estonia as a member of NATO now seems to have another significant drawback, which is that a member of its government has turned out to be a conduit for valuable intelligence to the very state against which NATO expansion is directed. The implications for further NATO expansion should be obvious: another round of expansion will expose the Alliance to compromises of the security of the allies we already have, just as the last round has already managed to do. Surely even those who believe that NATO still has a purpose as a defensive alliance in Europe can see the absurdity of exposing the Alliance to more risks of such security breaches.

This might be a good moment to pay attention to the recommendations of Jeffrey Tayler at The Atlantic, which include these remarks on NATO expansion:

In view of all these factors, what steps can the United States take to redefine its approach to Russia, and show that it means business? First, Obama should seek to overturn the NATO Freedom Consolidation Act of 2007, which advocates, and allocates funding for, the accession of Georgia and Ukraine. NATO expansion hardly made the news in the United States until the Russia-Georgia war, but it has stoked unprecedented suspicion, incredulity, and even ire both in the Kremlin and among the Russian population at large. American and European assurances that NATO expansion “isn’t directed at Russia” sound fatuous, laden with the tone-deaf arrogance of their bearers. NATO was created to counter the Soviet threat, and its expansion is meant to check Russia’s potential for reviving its influence beyond its borders. But to end the “Russia threat,” the West needs to engage Moscow as a partner. Sooner rather than later, Obama should decisively announce that NATO will grow no further, citing, perhaps, the expense involved in bringing the Ukrainian and Georgian militaries up to speed, and the many strategic problems those two countries would pose as members.

Joe Carter, Freddie de Boer, Andrew Sullivan and Rod Dreher have all commented on Obama’s Christianity. Since this is ground I have covered a little before, I thought I might add a few points. Rod and Carter are correct that by any formal, credal standard of traditional Christianity in any confession, Obama is heterodox. It is important to distinguish this from the more loaded question of whether or not he is a Christian. It is relatively easy to demonstrate heterodoxy, but more difficult to show non-Christianity, and this is as it should be.

There are Christians whom the Orthodox and Catholic Churches consider heterodox, but who nonetheless affirm certain central truths about Christ; heterodox doctrines are typically definitions related to these truths that the Church has found to be false in some important way. Since at least 1283, the Orthodox Church has held that Catholics are in error concerning the Filioque, so by an even stricter standard Orthodox would regard anyone who confessed the post-Seville (589)amended Nicene Creed, including many Protestants, to be at odds with the consensus patrum. However, there is no question that Orthodox regard Catholics, Protestants, non-Chalcedonians and Assyrians as Christians, and generally speaking they view us in the same way.

Raising the question of whether Obama is orthodox within this much broader definition–the “Great Tradition” definition that ecumenically-minded people like to use–makes more sense if we are interested in categorizing a great many other liberal Protestants in the same way. For many theologically conservative Protestants, especially those within the denominations where liberal theologies hold sway, this is all old news. Our longsuffering Episcopal friends have been confronted with these problems for decades. But this is where things get thornier. At what point do heterodox Christians lose all claim to the name? In a polemical reading of Obama’s statement concerning Christ, you might be able to make out a kind of semi-Arianism; on the other hand, his statement about Christ serving as a “bridge” might be a rather sloppy way of saying that He is Mediator and Redeemer. If he were semi-Arian in his theology, would we credit semi-Arians with the label of Christian? We might not, but we would need to have a good deal more information about Obama’s views before we take the step of applying that conclusion to him. If Obama were not a Christian, what would it mean to say that there are Christian UCC members in communion with non-Christian UCC members?

If we are going to take these definitions seriously, we should likewise be concerned to investigate the theological views of Mormon politicians and hold them to the same standard. Were we to do so, every serious Mormon so investigated would fail the test being applied to Obama, and he would fail it more spectacularly, and indeed he would have to fail if he were to be faithful to his own church’s teachings. I have made clear in the past that I think the devaluing of Christian doctrine that the pro-Romney ecumenist argument represented was deeply misguided–the idea was that so long as we shared the same “values” different confessions of faith are irrelevant in the political sphere. This is a pernicious idea for much the same reason that I find “Abrahamic” ecumenism pernicious, but it is one that Romney’s defenders advanced on a regular basis. According to the ecumenists, if Mormons held themselves out as Christians it was neither here nor there. We were routinely informed that Mormons claimed that they were, so that ought to be that.

The debate over the relationship between conservative Mormons and Christians is a good example of the distinction between theological and cultural conservatism that James has made many times in the past. (An aside: “theocons” are not always necessarily theological conservatives in this way, which is why I find that label misleading in the extreme.) The cultural conservative is likely to see shared “values” as far more important than shared theology, because the cultural conservative has already given up to a large extent on doctrine and theoria and has become obsessed with praxis. In this view, there are works over here, which are what matter, and faith is over there, tucked away a private nook where no one should look too closely. This emphasis on “values” is at the root of so-called “ecumenical jihad”–the tactical alliances between Muslims and Christians on social issues–and can be seen again in the irony that the LDS church helped put Proposition 8 over the top despite the anti-Mormon attitudes of many theologically conservative Christians who were also pro-Prop. 8 cultural conservatives.

Ultimately, the inquiry into Obama’s faith does not tell us much that we didn’t already know, which is that he is a liberal Protestant with an accordingly poor grounding in theological orthodoxy. I have to wonder how much power this critique has unless it is made as part of a general argument for theological conservatism in public life. Would cultural conservatives be open to this kind of critique when it is one of theirs being criticized, or would they repeat the arguments marshalled in defense of Romney?

There are other problems with Jeffrey Hart’s latest. He observes that a majority opposes repealing Roe, but then most of these people do not know what Roe required and what it allows. Ross is correct that so long as Roe is the law, compromise is out of the question simply as a practical matter, because the ruling does not permit any meaningful compromise. Indeed, to speak of compromise under the current regime leads pro-lifers to assume that any and all calls for compromise are nothing more than demands for capitulation. One can almost understand why pro-choice people would make these demands–they have the high ground, so to speak, and they believe they have pro-lifers outnumbered, so you can see their point in a Borg-declaring-“resistance is futile” way. Part of it is also the self-understanding that pro-choicers have that they are actually very reasonable, thoughtful people, unlike the theocrats and “fanatics” (Hart’s term) on the other side. “Look at all these compromise deals we keep offering you people–why can’t you be reasonable?” they say, comfortably situated behind the walls of full government support. Of course, defenders of Roe are no less universalist than their opponents, and perhaps may be even more so, as they take it as a given that they are defending a constitutional right that cannot be treated differently in different states. Even though a federalist and democratic compromise, which would entail the repeal of Roe, commands much broader support, and a narrow majority favors some or many restrictions on the availability of abortion, we are supposed to take the uninformed majority support for Roe to be decisive. Frankly, that doesn’t make any sense.

The argument that opposition to abortion in particular is somehow a drag on the GOP is one that doesn’t seem persuasive even at first glance, and it becomes less so the more one engages it. In state after state, somewhere between a quarter and a third of Democrats right now say that they are pro-life, but for a variety of reasons they remain in the Democratic Party because they find its positions on economic policy, social services and the like to be preferable. The ever-elusive 60-70% of the Hispanic vote that keeps going to Democrats, despite the alleged “natural” Republicanism of this community (a “natural” Republicanism defined by claims of socially conservative attitudes), remains elusive because of other policies endorsed by the GOP. That doesn’t mean that these voters would move into the GOP column even if Republicans altered their views (i.e., moved to the left) on a number of other issues, but it almost certainly does mean that it is not pro-life planks in the party platform that are driving them away. As I mentioned earlier this month, the rising generation is neither more nor less pro-life than its elders, so you cannot blame the loss of young voters on this, either.

The GOP is losing younger voters, but it is not particularly because of its abortion stance. Part of the shift is structural: non-Christians, non-whites and singles are much less likely to be Republican voters, and there are a lot more non-Christians, non-whites and singles among Millennials than in the past. What is notable about this for our purposes here is that despite significant demographic and cultural changes–Millennials are less religious and more ethnically diverse–young voters’ attitudes on abortion are essentially no different from older generations that tend to be more religious and more white. Another is simply backlash against the Bush administration–most Millennials became politically conscious at the beginning of or during the Bush Era, and like all other groups in the country they have soured on the GOP as a result. An important part of this is what happened in Iraq between 2004 and today. Kerry still won 18-29 year olds in 2004, but not by the large margins that Obama did this year. It is partly the case that Bush made most of the 9/11 generation into Democratic voters primarily through his national security and foreign policy decisions, which his other prominent policies did little or nothing to counteract, but these just exacerbated the party’s problem with younger voters that has its roots in demographic and cultural changes.

Now Mr. Hart opposes the war in Iraq, and this is very good, and I think he also understands the damage this has done to the party’s credibility on national security. Why then does he seem to make a habit of treating the GOP’s pro-life position into the main albatross around its neck? Doesn’t it seem obvious that foreign and economic policies, in which the GOP is widely viewed as having failed, have much more to do with the woes of the party than pro-life views? These would be the policies that the administration put into action, as opposed to its pro-life rhetoric, which has more or less changed nothing. Changing those foreign and economic policies would also alienate some voters, but it would alienate far fewer and probably gain many more than junking pro-life positions would. Of course, we all know that there is a far better chance that the GOP establishment would weaken the party’s pro-life stance before it would ever consider altering its foreign and economic policy views, which should tell us something about who is really in charge of the party and why all of these exercises in lamenting the power of religious conservatives are pointless.

It was little noticed that the 2008 Republican platform – I’m not making this up – promised to end all abortions without exception. ~Jeffrey Hart

As I assume Mr. Hart understands, party platforms are as close to truly meaningless documents as one can get in this world, or at least they are if you take them as reliable guides for what the party intends to do when in office. But does the platform say what Mr. Hart claims? Yes and no. Actually, the platform said what the platform has said every presidential election since 1980, which is a statement of support for the Human Life Amendment, and for the last 28 years there has obviously been no concerted effort to pursue the amendment process because there have never been enough votes even under unified Republican government. One might wonder what relevance there is in mentioning a platform plank that has never resulted in any legislation that had a serious chance of passing.

The first paragraph of the relevant section seems worth quoting in full:

Faithful to the first guarantee of the Declaration of Independence, we assert the inherent dignity and sanctity of all human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution, and we endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children. We oppose using public revenues to promote or perform abortion and will not fund organizations which advocate it. We support the appointment of judges who respect traditional family values and the sanctity and dignity of innocent human life.

Now there are all kinds of things in this statement that might annoy a conservative, but the affirmation of the humanity of unborn children–and support for legal protections of the same–shouldn’t be one of them. Citing the Declaration is rhetorically clever, but this language of guarantee is misleading, since the Declaration doesn’t guarantee anything. It declares. It asserts. Mostly, it complains, but it does not guarantee anything and, in theory, doesn’t have to make guarantees. Then there is that ever-troubling language of rights, but at least here we are talking about affirming legal rights. There is also an irritating nod to the 14th Amendment, and I suppose we crossed that bridge quite a while ago, but then this gets at the heart of the flawed national strategy of the pro-life movement.

A pro-life federalist might find the reference to the 14th Amendment here somewhat troubling, but this is what comes of a movement that models itself more or less consciously on antislavery activists and the civil rights movement. They take their models seriously: states’ rights have been used to deny individuals their rights, they argue, so they cannot now tolerate the possibility that some states could keep abortion legal. In other words, they have accepted the idea that abuse invalidates use, which is something they would not normally accept under any other circumstances. Having turned respect for human life into an abstract universalist commitment, pro-life universalism cannot be reconciled with a genuinely federal solution that would return the matter to the states. The most extreme case of this universalism in action was the Schiavo debacle, when a local, intra-family quarrel was made into the business of state governor, legislature and the Congress in violation of every principle of federalism, separation of powers and respect for the rule of law. Just as the party platform plank offers pro-lifers a symbol that they are being taken seriously, the entire Schiavo episode was an exercise mainly in placating pro-life universalists with a one-time intervention on the assumption that the GOP was not going to do anything substantively on policy that would satisfy them. Typically, moderates find these episodes that actually demonstrate the severe limits on pro-lifers’ influence on policy to be clear evidence that the “fanatics,” as Hart calls them, are in control.

What is so particularly strange about Hart’s use of this plank in damning Palin is that Palin has stated a federalist position on abortion. In other words, she may have been a nominee of the party that affirmed support for the HLA, but her own position at the time was apparently something very different. This was largely lost in the to-do over her inability to name other non-Roe Court cases she disagreed with, but I was surprised by the answer because this sort of answer was normally the sort of thing that earned Republican candidates the wrath of pro-life activists, whose universalist language and explicit rejection of states’ rights in this matter found clearest expression in the primaries in the Huckabee campaign.

While Huckabee had considerable support from many, though certainly not all, Christian conservatives, the GOP cast most of its votes for other candidates in the primaries. Huckabee’s voters nonetheless represent a very large part of the party that is more significant than Huckabee’s vote total would suggest, and Hart is probably right when he predicts that “putting clear blue water between moderate Republicanism and the religious right would undoubtedly give rise to a third party, a breakaway Christian Party.” What is unclear is why Hart or any of the other bemoaning the role of Christian conservatives in the party think that the breakaway party would be smaller than the “common sense, Eisenhower” wing once all the evangelicals and ethnic white Catholics that came over to the GOP in the ’70s and ’80s either returned to the Democrats or joined the breakaway party. As near as I can tell, the moderate plan for victory is to try to cast out social conservatives and become the party of all the remaining Episcopalians, Californians and New Yorkers who prefer lower taxes (or whatever it is that this reduced GOP would embrace).

The 1948 example is misleading–the Democrats had been the dominant party for almost twenty years at that point, and their voting coalition was already so large and diverse that they could afford two challenges from both left and right and still win the presidential election. The GOP does not now and has not since the 1920s commanded the reliable support of a coalition that large, so a splintering of the party along religious and cultural lines would leave the moderates in the position of a rump that would probably quickly go the way of the Whigs. What this scenario does seem likely to guarantee is enduring Democratic rule.

Robert Stacy McCain is among the first, but he will not be one of the last, to declare that this anonymously-sourced Times story is proof that Obama “is now poised to destroy Israel.” First of all, it seems implausible that Obama’s support for the Saudi peace plan, if it exists at all, is any stronger than that of members of the current (and likely future) Israeli government, who have indicated a willingness to reconsider it. Second, were Obama to support this peace plan it would mean that he holds the remarkably sane view that Israel is actually illegally occupying the territories and that no enduring peace settlement is conceivable so long as this occupation goes on. That would be the first real evidence that Obama’s views on Israel are not as conventional as I have assumed they were based on everything he has said and done until now. The difference between this report of backing a particular peace plan for Israel and Palestine and news of the floated intervention in the Kashmir dispute is that Obama has publicly stated on several occasions his interest in resolving the latter. I would be more willing to believe at this point that he is more serious about the Kashmir remarks than he is in supporting the Saudi plan.

In other words, it is possible, but by no means certain, that Obama is aligning his position with that of the current Israeli government and adopting a reasonably good policy at the same time. Of course, Israelis will be able to decide for themselves what course they want to choose when they have their election next year, as they will have a clear choice between coalitions led by Likud or Kadima. If Kadima wins, it becomes increasingly difficult to portray this position, which is essentially an expression of support for the position of the sitting Israeli government, as a “betrayal of Israel.”

P.S. McCain writes in an update:

If Obama pushes the dismemberment and disarmament of Israel, Likud will come roaring back.

Obama is not going to do any such thing, but the choice of words is telling. The Saudi peace plan and suggestions about what Obama might do regarding Israel and the FMCT do not require the “dismemberment” or “disarmament” of Israel. It is doubtful that Likud can come back at all if it cannot come “roaring back” in the wake of the absolutely failed tenure of Ehud Olmert. If most Israelis prefer the Kadima-led coalition, and it seems that they do, that would suggest that Likud is not going to make a comeback on the basis of opposing this peace plan. The peace plan, if carried out, dismembers nothing except an illegal occupation. As McCain might say, anything to the contrary is a lie. Now it’s not as if we don’t have other allies that continue illegal occupations of other people’s territory–the Turks in Cyprus come to mind–but then it is because they are our allies that this illegal occupation should concern us. The FMCT (Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty) does not require Israeli disarmament. If Israel ratified this treaty, which it is not likely to do (just as India is unlikely to ratify it), it would halt the production of fissile material used in making nuclear weapons. Supporting the halt of production of new material for such weapons is quite distinct from “pushing” disarmament. In any case, the Ha’aretz report to which McCain links is a report on an independent institute’s report of what Obama ought to do, which tells us absolutely nothing about what Obama intends to do.

The week before the election, the Obama campaign ran a television commercial attacking the Republican candidate for vice president. To my knowledge, this had never been done before. ~Jack Kelly

It’s probably not a good way to start a column endorsing Palin as a future presidential candidate by making a claim that shows that you don’t know something that is central to your first claim.

In fact, since the dawn of televised campaign commercials, at least two campaigns have directly attacked the VP nominee or sought to use the VP candidate against the top of the ticket. Stevenson’s ’56 campaign ran a spot that asked whether you were “nervous about President Nixon” and put up a single word across the screen: “Nixon?” Scary stuff. Presumably, the audience was supposed to be very afraid of the possibility that Nixon might have to succeed Eisenhower (whose health was a minor issue in ’56). Like all of Stevenson’s other abysmal ads in both of his campaigns, this was a failure. As you would expect, there was also an anti-Quayle ad that laid it on thick. There may have been others, but they don’t leap to mind.

The key difference between this year’s ad criticizing the Palin choice and the others was that the Obama ad avoided the question of whether she was ready to be President. The Stevenson and Dukakis ads were intended to stoke fear and anxiety, and they were the products of losing, trailing campaigns. The Obama ad on Palin was much milder and came out very late in the campaign when Obama’s victory seemed assured. The Obama campaign set the bar much lower, and so delivered a more effective blow, by simply mocking McCain for having said that he needed someone with expertise in economic policy and then having chosen Palin. Perhaps because McCain’s age was already part of the debate, they did not need to remind anyone that there was an unusually good chance that McCain’s VP might have to serve as President. The campaign did not need to drive home the obvious that Palin was not exactly bursting with economic policy understanding, because anyone who had been following the election for the two months before that already knew this.

What Kelly missed, among other things, was that the Obama ad against Palin was aimed mainly at McCain’s judgement. Most Palin critics, myself included, started from the assumption that the Palin selection mattered because of what it told us about McCain, and what it told us was not flattering. The criticism of her misrepresentations of her record and her flubs on policy was as severe or pointed because there was an unusually good chance that she might have to become President if McCain were elected. Another round of criticism was directed against the slightly obsessive, blind devotion of an unqualified candidate for high office, because it seemed as if most conservatives had learned nothing from the Bush experience and were not interested in learning in more ways than one. Under normal circumstances, the VP selection might not have mattered at all, but it was because of what McCain purported to represent and because of his age and health that it took on more significance than most of these selections ever do.

Anxiety in India over Obama’s possible intervention in the Kashmir dispute persists. Karan Thapar in The Hindustan Times writes:

But such apparently conflicting thoughts often lie at the bottom of many a politician’s thinking. It would not be unusual if that was also the case with Barack Obama. And it certainly doesn’t absolve us of the need to be cautious and gently yet firmly, talk him out of attempting to step in and resolve Kashmir.

The problem is just as we are eager he should desist, Pakistan is keen he must persist. An American role in resolving Kashmir is something Pakistan has always wanted and India has, similarly, always resisted. So Obama’s intentions could affect a triangle of relations: Delhi-Washington, Washington-Islamabad and Delhi-Islamabad.

Referring to one of the co-authors of the new Foreign Affairsessay arguing for precisely this kind of “grand bargain” involving Kashmir, Kuldip Nayar, former Indian High Commissioner to the U.K., writes:

The reported nomination of Ahmad Rashid as adviser on Afghanistan to the American forces at Kabul is a welcome development. He is liberal and has many friends in India. His advice would be sober and not smack of [a] high-and-mighty attitude. His knowledge on Afghanistan is intimate. But why has he been given the responsibility of Kashmir as well?

I have not been able to understand the linkage between Kashmir and Afghanistan. The first problem is as old as partition while the second came up after 1980 when America created a force of Taliban to bleed the Soviet Union to death. Even if the time factor is forgotten, combining the two will be like mixing chalk with cheese.

Rashid’s presence as an advisor in Afghanistan is not a guarantee that the next administration will pursue the “grand bargain” that Rashid advocates, but if Petraeus will be taking advice from him it is one more reason to be seriously concerned that Washington actually will blunder into the Kashmir dispute in a misguided attempt to get Islamabad to address the threat in western Pakistan. In light of Obama’s repeated statements in support of such a move, we have to begin treating this proposal as a real part of Obama’s agenda in South Asia and not merely idle speculation or empty campaign bluster. Once we’ve done that, there needs to be a concerted effort to dissuade him from going this route.