of economic and security issues. For example, the geo-political
exigencies of the Cold War elevated the European Bureau to a pre-
eminent position for almost six decades. The Near East and South
Asia Bureau also attracted a great deal of attention because of the
strategic value of oil resources located in and around the Persian
Gulf and the US’ special relationship with Israel. NEA’s South
Asia appendage appeared only rarely on US policy makers’ radar
screen.
Enormous changes have occurred since 1975 in the context
and parameters of the South Asia regional government. In the
mid-1970s South Asia as a region and India and Pakistan as
countries were on the back burner. In 1998 they moved to the front
burner after India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in May and
June 1998. Since then, in 1999 in connection with Pakistan’s
military occupation of the Kargil salient in Kashmir, and in early
2002 following a terrorist attack in December 2001 on the Indian
Parliament by a Pakistan based group, the nuclear rivals have
engaged in conventional and nuclear military confrontations.
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.
For a detailed account of the Kargil crisis and President Clinton’s role
in defusing it, see Strobe Talbot’s intimate and insightful account in chapter
eight, “From Kargil to Blair House,” in his Engaging India: Democracy,
Diplomacy and the Bomb [New Delhi: Viking/Penguin, 2004]. At the height
of the Kargil crisis, Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif,. initiated a
visit to Washington in July 1999. The conversations, Talbot says, convinced
Clinton that “the world was closer even than during the Cuban missile crisis
to a nuclear war. Unlike Kennedy and Krushchev in 1962, Vajpayee and
Sharif did not realize how close they were to the brink, so there was an even
greater risk that they would blindly stumble across it.” P. 167.
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Convention