Security of South Asia

Part One looks at perceptual and issue-related problems from the standpoint of India, Pakistan, and the United States. We have tried to encourage new thinking by having the major chapters on each country written by nationals from another state. Thus, the major chapter on Pa kistani security problems was written by Lt. Gen. Eric Vas, formerly of the Indian army; the companion chapter on Indian security policy was written by Brig. Noor Husain, a retired Pakistan army officer and the di rector of the Institute for Strategic Studies in Islamabad. Similarly, chap ters on Indian and Pakistani regional policies were written by two American authors (Leo Rose and W. Howard Wriggins), while two chapters on American policy and policymaking were written by Indian and Pakistani scholars (R. R. Subramaniam and Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema). The authors of these chapters were asked to place themselves in the position of their counterparts in another country.

Part Two takes a different approach. Four of the most distinguished strategic analysts familiar with South Asia were asked to speculate on "the" future, or on various "futures" of the region. K. Subrahmanyam and Jagat S. Mehta (India), Lt. Gen. A. I. Akram (Pakistan), and Thomas Perry Thornton (United States) clearly differ in their views of whether the desirable, the feasible, and the likely are the same.
This book was completed in mid-1985, which happened to be a period of great tension between India and Pakistan and great internal develop ments in those two countries. India held national elections in late 1984, and Pakistan held them in early 1985. Mrs. Indira Gandhi was assassi nated and succeeded by her son, Rajiv Gandhi. He and Mrs. Gandhi had earlier issued threatening statements about the prospects for war in South Asia; rumors of a planned Indian attack on Pakistani nuclear fa cilities were widespread, and Pakistan itself was thought to have moved close to the possession of a nuclear weapon.

Despite these tensions, there is a remarkable degree of optimism in some chapters (as well as outright pessimism in others) about the pros pect for substantial normalization of relations between India and Paki stan and the evolution of a coherent and effective South Asia policy by the United States. Yet the striking quality of this book as a whole is that there is no clearcut correlation of nationality with optimism or pessi mism. Indeed, the differences among Americans, Pakistanis, and Indi ans themselves seem to be as great as those among the three groups. Per haps I am describing the glass as half full, but I am rather optimistic