More to security than just affluence for India
Within hours of India and the United States signing landmark deals on defence, technology and end-user protocols, Mohammad Ajmal Kasab - the surviving terrorist of the Mumbai attacks - stood in court to give a four-hour confession.
It was a potent reminder that, as the most powerful social units in the world craft complex international agreements to further security through trade, the greatest challenge to nations today arises from disaffected gunmen acting on distorted ideologies.
Kasab's confession should provide the context for US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's comments made recently in India that there is 'a real commitment on the part of the Pakistani government to tackle terrorism'.
Mrs Clinton's advisers are obviously behind the curve. Indians, by and large enthusiastic about engaging America, remember that Pakistan's terrorist infrastructure was set up with American help. Having acquired a dynamic of their own, these jihadist forces now control large chunks of Pakistani territory. Though eager to embrace India, the US unfortunately remains enamoured of Pakistan - a long-time ally to both the US and China.
There are a host of other outstanding issues in need of immediate discussion. Climate change is the most pressing. Mrs Clinton was publicly challenged by India's environment minister who expressed a deep-seated resentment that many Asians feel. It revolves around the industrialised West, unwilling to curtail its own extravagant lifestyles, insisting that some of the poorest people in the world curtail their efforts to improve their paltry lifestyles. Other prickly issues, such as border disputes with Pakistan and China, were carefully avoided during Mrs Clinton's visit.
None of this detracts from the three agreements Mrs Clinton signed with her Indian counterparts. They were only possible because an Indian prime minister derided for being spineless and a US president abhorred for being a cowboy deconstructed a decades-old policy of 'nuclear apartheid' that denied India high-technology and opened the way for India to come into a nuclear-powered fire.
Of course, the US hopes that its companies will be awarded billions of dollars of contracts to build nuclear reactors. India requires the reactors to make up an endemic deficit in power production and ensure continuing economic growth through industrialisation.
The third agreement, a mundane End-Use Monitoring Agreement, might be the most significant. It paves the way for the US to sell India sensitive military technology by ensuring that the 'end-user' - India - does not pass it on.
Undoubtedly, the agreements build on a budding relationship. But there remain outstanding issues that cannot simply be sidestepped. What is required is a fundamental debate that moves beyond economics and addresses broader social and political issues to iron out kernels of dissatisfaction that still scar the relationship. After all, security is not simply a function of affluence.
