By Akhilesh Pillalamarri
There has been little mention of the region – and that’s unlikely to change.
The campaigning season for the United States’ 2016 presidential elections is now in full swing. Yet, after multiple U.S. presidential candidate debates, we have not heard much about how they would handle American policy toward South Asian countries. So, what do U.S. presidential candidates think about South Asia? Are they willing to articulate their thoughts on this region, albeit one that few Americans are directly interested in, when the political agenda revolves around other issues?
South Asia was not at the top of anyone’s agenda initially, as the campaign season mostly focused on domestic issues. When foreign policy did enter the discourse, it mostly focused on events in the Middle East or security and trade issues in the Asia-Pacific. AsThe Diplomat noted last month, though China was rarely mentioned directly in the third Republican debate, at least “the ubiquity of China implicitly pervaded messaging on tackling federal debt, U.S. global economic competitiveness, climate change, job creation, and bringing manufacturing capabilities back to the United States.” And now, after Paris and San Bernardino, the debate has shifted toward security issues and Islam, its foreign policy aspects are dominated by the chaos in the Middle East and the threat of the Islamic State (IS).
So far, South Asia has barely garnered a mention in the debates or on the campaign trail. Afghanistan—because it hosts American troops—gets the most mentions out of all the South Asian countries. But the candidates, both Republican and Democrat, do not get into the specifics of any strategy that would stabilize the country in the long run, including the problem of Pakistan’s alleged support for the Taliban. However, at the very least, the majority of the candidates agreed with President Obama’s plan to keep troops in Afghanistan after he leaves office in 2017, because, as Bernie Sanders pointed out in October, “Clearly, we do not want to see the Taliban gain more power, and I think we need a certain nucleus of American troops present in Afghanistan.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat