Comcasa is signed: India success gives US traction for Asia strategy, which must be scaled up to meet Chinese ambition

The United States and India signed on Thursday the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (Comcasa) military cooperation deal. The success for Mike Pompeo brought a positive end to a tricky trip to India and Pakistan where the US secretary of state sought traction for his revamped Indo-Pacific strategy in the face of China’s growing strength.

In New Delhi, Pompeo and US defence secretary James Mattis met their counterparts – external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman – for the so-called “2+2” talks to strengthen the US-India partnership.  Sitharaman hailed the Comcasa deal as elevating bilateral relations “to unprecedented heights”, while the US side depicted it as a breakthrough too.

Part of the rationale for the revamped US Indo-Pacific strategy (the Trump team’s preferred phrase for the massive geography spreading from the US west coast to India), is that New Delhi could potentially act as a growing regional counterweight to Beijing.  Mattis has said that “we see the strengthening of India’s democracy, its military, its economy as a stabilising element in the world.”

The deepening of the US-India relationship is centred around promoting a regional agenda of ensuring “freedom of the seas and skies, promoting market economics, supporting good governance, and insulating sovereign nations from coercion.” To this end, Washington declared New Delhi a major US defence partner in 2016, and the new Comcasa will now underpin greater counterterrorism and defence cooperation.

While the New Delhi leg of the US tour was relatively smooth sailing, the Islamabad stopoff was much more difficult. Pompeo said after the meeting with new Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan that he hopes for a “re-set of relations.”  While Khan has deployed much anti-US rhetoric over the years, the US secretary of state rightly sought early engagement with him, especially with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi – who has called Pakistan the “iron brother” of his own nation – due into Islamabad on Saturday.

For strategic and potentially economic reasons, the new Pakistani prime minister is being courted by both Washington and Beijing with the latter having already made commitments of around $60 billion to Islamabad under its Belt and Road Initiative. Pakistani troops also recently took part in exercises with some 3,000 others from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), including the Chinese military.

While Islamabad had for decades been a significant US ally, the relationship has frayed. This was highlighted in August when a transcript of a phone conversation between Pompeo and Khan, released by the US state department which referred to the new government “taking decisive action against all terrorists operating in Pakistan,” was disputed as factually inaccurate by Khan’s team.

It was this vexed terrorism issue which was the key issue on the agenda on Wednesday between Khan, Pompeo and Mattis. And this conversation was made no easier by the US military decision last week to cancel $300 million in aid to Islamabad over what Washington calls its failure to take action against militant groups operating on its soil. Mattis asserted that tough talks were needed Wednesday and that he and Pompeo made “very clear what we have to do, all of our nations, in meeting our common foe, the terrorists.”

Pompeo’s latest tour, on the back of his visit last month to Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia, was designed to see clear movement forward on US agendas in both India and Pakistan to help bring greater energy and credibility to the US Indo-Pacific strategy, which has come under criticism for its perceived (under) ambition vis a vis China.  Pompeo announced some $113 million in regional investments focussed on technology, energy and infrastructure. In the secretary of state’s words, this is “just a down payment” on future US commitments to the region.

The added pressure on the White House here is China’s monumental ambition as illustrated by the $1 trillion Belt and Road scheme. In this context, Pompeo faces a tough ask in reassuring sometimes sceptical US regional allies that the Trump team is wholly committed – politically, economically and security-wise – to its Indo-Pacific plan.  Even with Thursday’s success in India, questions will remain about the ambition of the strategy, especially given the scale of China’s own plans.