Forget the Israel Lobby. The Hill's Next Big Player Is Made in India.
By Mira Kamdar
Sunday, September 30, 2007; B03

The fall's most controversial book is almost certainly "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," in which political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt warn that Jewish Americans have built a behemoth that has bullied policymakers into putting Israel's interests in the Middle East ahead of America's. To Mearsheimer and Walt, AIPAC, the main pro-Israel lobbying group, is insidious. But to more and more Indian Americans, it's downright inspiring.

With growing numbers, clout and self-confidence, the Indian American community is turning its admiration for the Israel lobby and its respect for high-achieving Jewish Americans into a powerful new force of its own. Following consciously in AIPAC's footsteps, the India lobby is getting results in Washington -- and having a profound impact on U.S. policy, with important consequences for the future of Asia and the world.

"This is huge," enthused Ron Somers, the president of the U.S.-India Business Council, from a posh hotel lobby in Philadelphia. "It's the Berlin Wall coming down. It's Nixon in China."

What has Somers so energized is a landmark nuclear cooperation deal between India and the United States, which would give India access to U.S. nuclear technology and deliver fuel supplies to India's civilian power plants in return for placing them under permanent international safeguards. Under the deal's terms, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty -- for decades the cornerstone of efforts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons -- will in effect be waived for India, just nine years after the Clinton administration slapped sanctions on New Delhi for its 1998 nuclear tests. But the Bush administration, eager to check the rise of China by tilting toward its massive neighbor, has sought to forge a new strategic alliance with India, cemented by the civil nuclear deal.

On the U.S. side, the pact awaits nothing more than one final up-or-down vote in Congress. (In India, the situation is far more complicated; India's left-wing parties, sensitive to any whiff of imperialism, have accused Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of surrendering the country's sovereignty -- a broadside that may yet scuttle the deal.) On Capitol Hill, despite deep divisions over Iraq, immigration and the outsourcing of American jobs to India, Democrats and Republicans quickly fell into line on the nuclear deal, voting for it last December by overwhelming bipartisan majorities. Even lawmakers who had made nuclear nonproliferation a core issue over their long careers, such as Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), quickly came around to President Bush's point of view. Why?

The answer is that the India lobby is now officially a powerful presence on the Hill. The nuclear pact brought together an Indian government that is savvier than ever about playing the Washington game, an Indian American community that is just coming into its own and powerful business interests that see India as perhaps the single biggest money-making opportunity of the 21st century.

The nuclear deal has been pushed aggressively by well-funded groups representing industry in both countries. At the center of the lobbying effort has been Robert D. Blackwill, a former U.S. ambassador to India and deputy national security adviser who's now with a well-connected Republican lobbying firm, Barbour, Griffith & Rogers LLC. The firm's Web site touts Blackwill as a pillar of its "India Practice," along with a more recent hire, Philip D. Zelikow, a former top adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who was also one of the architects of the Bush administration's tilt toward India. The Confederation of Indian Industry paid Blackwill to lobby various U.S. government entities, according to the Boston Globe. And India is also paying a major Beltway law firm, Venable LLP.

The U.S.-India Business Council has lavished big money on lobbyists, too. With India slated to spend perhaps $60 billion over the next few years to boost its military capabilities, major U.S. corporations are hoping that the nuclear agreement will open the door to some extremely lucrative opportunities, including military contracts and deals to help build nuclear power plants. According to a recent MIT study, Lockheed Martin is pushing to land a $4 billion to $9 billion contract for more than 120 fighter planes that India plans to buy. "The bounty is enormous," gushed Somers, the business council's president.

So enormous, in fact, that Bonner & Associates created an India lobbying group last year to make sure that U.S. companies reap a major chunk of it. Dubbed the Indian American Security Leadership Council, the group was underwritten by Ramesh Kapur, a former trustee of the Democratic National Committee, and Krishna Srinivasa, who has been backing GOP causes since his 1984 stint as co-chair of Asian Americans for Reagan-Bush. The council has, oddly, "recruited groups representing thousands of American veterans" to urge Congress to pass the nuclear deal.

The India lobby is also eager to use Indian Americans to put a human face -- not to mention a voter's face and a campaign contributor's face -- on its agenda. "Industry would make its business case," Somers explained, "and Indian Americans would make the emotional case."

There are now some 2.2 million Americans of Indian origin -- a number that's growing rapidly. First-generation immigrants keenly recall the humiliating days when India was dismissed as an overpopulated, socialist haven of poverty and disease. They are thrilled by the new respect India is getting. Meanwhile, a second, American-born generation of Indian Americans who feel comfortable with activism and publicity is just beginning to hit its political stride. As a group, Indian Americans have higher levels of education and income than the national average, making them a natural for political mobilization.

One standout member of the first generation is Sanjay Puri, who founded the U.S. India Political Action Committee in 2002. (Its acronym, USINPAC, even sounds a bit like AIPAC.) He came to the United States in 1985 to get an MBA at George Washington University, staying on to found an information-technology company. A man of modest demeanor who wears a lapel pin that joins the Indian and American flags, Puri grew tired of watching successful Indian Americans pony up money just so they could get their picture taken with a politician. "I thought, 'What are we getting out of this?', " he explains.

In just five years, USINPAC has become the most visible face of Indian American lobbying. Its Web site boasts photos of its leaders with President Bush, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and presidential candidates from Fred Thompson to Barack Obama. The group pointedly sports a New Hampshire branch. It can also take some credit for ending the Senate career of Virginia Republican George Allen, whose notorious taunt of "macaca" to a young Indian American outraged the community. Less publicly, USINPAC claims to have brought a lot of lawmakers around. "You haven't heard a lot from Dan Burton lately, right?" Puri asked, referring to a Republican congressman from Indiana who has long been perceived as an India basher.

USINPAC is capable of pouncing; witness the incident last June when Obama's campaign issued a memo excoriating Hillary Rodham Clinton for her close ties to wealthy Indian Americans and her alleged support for outsourcing, listing the New York senator's affiliation as "D-Punjab." Puri personally protested in a widely circulated open letter, and Obama quickly issued an apology. "Did you see? That letter was addressed directly to Sanjay," Varun Mehta, a senior at Boston University and USINPAC volunteer, told me with evident admiration. "That's the kind of clout Sanjay has."

Like many politically engaged Indian Americans, Puri has a deep regard for the Israel lobby -- particularly in a country where Jews make up just a small minority of the population. "A lot of Jewish people tell me maybe I was Jewish in my past life," he jokes. The respect runs both ways. The American Jewish Committee, for instance, recently sent letters to members of Congress supporting the U.S.-India nuclear deal.

"We model ourselves on the Jewish people in the United States," explains Mital Gandhi of USINPAC's new offshoot, the U.S.-India Business Alliance. "We're not quite there yet. But we're getting there."

miraukamdar@gmail.com

Mira Kamdar, a fellow at the World Policy Institute and the Asia Society, is the author of "Planet India: How the Fastest-Growing Democracy is Transforming America and the World."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-kirkuk28sep28,1,4617719.story?page=2&coll=la-headlines-world
From the Los Angeles Times
Security may trump ethnicity in Kirkuk
Kurds have long sought the mixed city and its environs for their semiautonomous region. Now some Arabs think that may not be so bad.
By Borzou Daragahi
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

September 28, 2007

KIRKUK, IRAQ — A staunch Arab nationalist, Ismail Hadidi once dreaded the possibility that his ethnically diverse city would be swallowed up by the neighboring semiautonomous Kurdish region and cut off from the Baghdad government.

But the provincial councilman is also a practical man. And when he compares the chaos and violence in the Iraqi capital with the prosperity and peace next door in the three-province Kurdistan Regional Government area, teaming up with the Kurds doesn't seem like such a bad idea. He's even considering buying some property in the Kurdish enclave.

"The people of Kirkuk were afraid of this," said Hadidi, a Sunni Arab tribal leader. "But given the situation, I believe most people will move toward being part of Kurdistan, because what the people want above all is security."

Uncertainty clouds Iraq's future, but not so much here. The Kurdish region's exploding economic and political power has begun to shape northern Iraq's reality.

Oil-rich and ethnically diverse Kirkuk, the capital of Tamim province, was billed as northern Iraq's most contested prize in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and its fate was to be resolved by the new Iraqi Constitution, which instead mandated a referendum. But that hasn't happened yet. And now, just as medieval peasants clung to local warlords who could protect them from looters and bandits, this gritty city's war- and poverty-ravaged population has begun gravitating toward the Kurds, who are hungrily reclaiming territory lost to successive waves of Arabization.

Few doubt what will happen when U.S. forces exit. Grown strong and rich in their enclave of more than 16,000 square miles, Iraq's Kurds will rush to annex Tamim and other areas in Diyala and Nineveh provinces they have laid claim to, which could double the size of their de facto state.

"The Kurdistan region will include all parts of Iraq that are historically and geographically part of Kurdistan," predicted Omer Fattah, deputy premier of the Kurdistan Regional Government, which is based in Irbil.

Hussein and leaders of earlier Arab-dominated Baghdad governments sought to upend the oil-rich region's ethnic balance by forcibly evicting tens of thousands of Kurds and other non-Arab minorities and replacing them with Arab settlers. A referendum on whether Kirkuk and its outlying province will join the Kurdish region is scheduled to take place by year's end.

However, many doubt the vote will be held. Politicians in Baghdad said this week it can't be held until well into 2008. Kurds blame the delays on U.S. reluctance to address an explosive Iraqi political issue. At the same time, Kurds say the Americans are increasingly less of a factor in the north. Kirkuk security officials say U.S. forces have already moved from the city to more volatile Baghdad and central Iraq.

A U.S. Army spokesman in Kirkuk skirted the question of redeployment. "Our brigade remains committed to providing security and partnering with Iraqi forces to maintain stability in the Kirkuk province," said Maj. Derrick W. Cheng of the 31st Brigade Combat Team in response to an e-mail query.

Kurds say they don't mind the Americans leaving. "We are thinking about it and preparing for it," said Abdul-Salaam Berwari, who runs a think tank close to the Kurdish leadership. "It's OK for us if they do that."

Kurdish officials suggest that it might be better if the U.S. pulled out of day-to-day operations in the north. Without Washington's political obligations to fellow North Atlantic Treaty Organization member Turkey, which fears Kurdish regional ambitions, many Kurds believe they can resolve the Kirkuk dilemma themselves.

"You'll never find a single Kurd willing to give up Kirkuk whether the Americans are here or not," said one official of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, one of the two main Kurdish parties in Iraq. He spoke anonymously because he said his view and that of many others was not the official Kurdish position.

Just as Kurds exploited Iraq's chaos after the 1991 Gulf War to build their enclave, they've begun quietly incorporating Tamim province and reversing the Arab migration.

Kurds have also in effect taken up security duties in other traditionally Kurdish lands and villages, including oil-rich Makhmour, northwest of Kirkuk, and Khanaqin, farther south in Diyala province. Kurds emphasize that the bombings that killed at least 400 Yazidis, a religious minority that is ethnically Kurdish, last month fell just outside the zone of Kurdish control.

Already at least 58,000 Arabs have left the Kirkuk region, said Kamal Kirkuki, deputy speaker of the Kurdish parliament. He said the Kurds have collected a trove of documents to determine who belongs in Kirkuk and who does not, including records of all Arabs who arrived in Kirkuk from 1968, when Hussein's Baath Party consolidated power, to the Iraqi leader's ouster in 2003.

"We could solve the Kirkuk issue in one minute," Kirkuki said. "All we need is a political decision."

The Irbil-based regional government bankrolls the teaching of the Kurdish language in Kirkuk schools. New housing sprouts on the no-man's land that served for 12 years as a buffer between Hussein's Iraq and the three Kurdish provinces, Irbil, Dahuk and Sulaymaniya, that were protected by American and British air power.

Soon, 5,000 overwhelmingly Kurdish Iraqi army troops will begin patrolling the countryside around Kirkuk, ostensibly to protect oil and electricity lines, but also to form a de facto barrier between the area and the rest of Iraq. The controversial patrols were approved by the Baghdad government.

"Our problem is coming from the terrorists who are outside the city," said Police Chief Gen. Jamal Taher, a Kurd. "What we want to do is to protect ourselves from the rest of the provinces where the terrorists are."

The proposal has outraged some of the city's Turkmen and Arab leaders, who see it as a ploy to extend Kurdish control.

"This is a barrel of TNT," said Hassan Torhan, an ethnic Turkmen politician and a member of the Turkmen Front, which is backed by Turkey. "Saddam Hussein tried to Arabize Kirkuk, Now the two parties are trying to 'Kurdize' Kirkuk."

Torhan frequents Irbil's new international airport. He drives there through newly constructed tunnels and freshly asphalted streets and past shiny new hotels, restaurants, office buildings and apartment blocks.

Kurds boast that not a single non-Iraqi has been killed in their semiautonomous region since April 9, 2003. They say they've drawn on decades of intelligence experience from their dealings with Western and Middle Eastern spy agencies to keep militants at bay.

They've also incorporated into the political process many of the Kurdish Islamist groups that share the same extremist religious outlook as Al Qaeda.

Around Irbil, they've strengthened a gigantic earthen berm to keep militants out. Ironically, the trench was dug by Hussein during the 1980s to keep the city out of the hands of Kurdish guerrillas now running much of the north.

Meanwhile, in the 4 1/2 years since the invasion of Iraq, life inside Kirkuk has only become more dangerous. Grinding poverty persists. Insurgent bombings and gunfire daily target soldiers, police officers and civilians. Barbed wire and concrete blast barriers line the city's unkempt boulevards as Black Hawk helicopters hover above.

Fifteen minutes into a day-long foray into the city, a visiting Western reporter was accosted by a burly man who drew a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun on him and taunted his driver. It was an off-duty police officer venting frustration over a minor traffic incident.

Kirkuk officials believe Kurds can do a better job of providing security than either the Iraqi or U.S. security forces.

"There will be bloodshed if the Americans leave," said Brig. Gen. Hamid Salar, head of Kirkuk's traffic police. "But if the Kurdish authorities would be given responsibility, the terrorist activity would immediately drop 50%."

Looking at life without the Americans, some Arabs in Kirkuk whisper that at least the Kurds are mostly Sunni Muslims, whereas the Baghdad government is dominated by Shiite Muslims with close ties to Iran. The Kurds also generally have a much better record on human rights and treatment of minorities than does Baghdad, where security forces are full of Shiite militiamen and sectarian death squads have run rampant.

But some worry as to how the Kurds might behave without U.S. scrutiny. Recently, Arabs who fled to Kirkuk to escape sectarian killings elsewhere in Iraq have reported being rousted from their homes by Kurdish-dominated security forces and ordered to move again, lest they upset the city's ethnic balance ahead of the referendum.

"We were informed that we have to leave our houses that we have rented for over a year and a half," said Radhi Mohammed, who fled Baghdad's Bayaa neighborhood for Kirkuk with 13 family members.

"Police arrested one of my sons and told us to leave or they will detain my son until we do so."

daragahi@latimes.com

A special correspondent in Kirkuk contributed to this report.