Washington: The Obama Administration needs to increase intelligence and counter-terrorism cooperation with India to ensure that the recent efforts by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to improve ties with Pakistan are on track, according to two top American experts.
"An early dividend of Narendra Modi's election as India's prime minister appeared on May 26, when Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visited New Delhi for the inauguration," George Perkovich and Toby Dalton from the prestigious Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said yesterday.
"However, the hoped-for peace process could turn to war, with huge implications for the United States, if militant actors in Pakistan attack India in hopes of provoking Modi to overreact," the two American scholars said.
Writing in the American bi-monthly international affairs magazine National Interest, the two scholars at the Carnegie's Nuclear Policy Programme urged the U.S. to increase its intelligence co-operation with India to avoid any such terrorist attempt coming from across the border.
"The United States needs to be more forthcoming than it has been in the past in sharing intelligence with India on possible threats and holding Pakistan to account for its ambivalent counter-terrorism performance concerning India," they wrote.
Indian leaders need to correct longstanding "inadequacies" in their intelligence and counterterrorism organisations and prepare contingencies for responding to attacks that take full account of the risks of escalation, they argued.
