By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: Things are going great with India -- don't screw it up.
That's the bottom line in a report from the influential Center for Strategic and International Studies entitled "US-India Military Engagement: Steady As They Go," which the think tank previewed today as President Obama tours through Asia.
"[Go] slow and steady, and the trajectory is inevitably upward," summed up report author S. Amer Latif in an exchange with AOL Defense after today's briefing. (Latif, a Pentagon official on loan to CSIS as a visiting scholar, emphasized he was speaking for himself, not for the Department of Defense. But he is returning to the Office of the Secretary of Defense in a few weeks and he is an influential voice on policy). "The relationship is going to move at a pace that's comfortable for India."
"It's important that we realize how far we've come," retired Adm. Walter Doran, the former commander of Pacific Fleet, told the audience at CSIS, "lest it succumb to the fatigue and the frustration that is flowing around the overall relationship." Doran, who attended India's Defense Services Staff College as a young officer in 1979, is more familiar with the subcontinental pace than most US officers. Now is the time, he said, to "reignite" the US-India relationship.
US outreach to populous, growing, democratic India has increased in parallel to American anxiety about the rise of populous, growing authoritarian China. But India has a 60-year tradition of "non-alignment" in great power quarrels and is hesitant even to project power in its own immediate region.
Read the full story at AOL Defense