Fierce Enigmas: A History of the United States in South Asia

by Srinath Raghavan

Overview

The two-hundred-year history of the United States' involvement in South Asia — the key to understanding contemporary American policy in the region

South Asia looms large in American foreign policy. Over the past two decades, we have spent billions of dollars and thousands of human lives in the region, to seemingly little effect. As Srinath Raghavan reveals in Fierce Enigmas, this should not surprise us. For 230 years, America's engagement with India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan has been characterized by short-term thinking and unintended consequences. Beginning with American traders in India in the eighteenth century, the region has become a locus for American efforts — secular and religious — to remake the world in its image.

The definitive history of US involvement in South Asia, Fierce Enigmas is also a clarion call to fundamentally rethink our approach to the region.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465030194
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	10/16/2018
Pages:	496
Sales rank:	994,754
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Srinath Raghavan is a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and a visiting senior research fellow at King's College London. He is the author of three books, including India's War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939-1945. He lives in Mumbai.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 Fortune, Fantasy, and Faith 17

2 Under American Eyes 59

3 Fighting for Freedom 99

4 Between East and West Asia 143

5 Allies and Aid 191

6 New Frontier in South Asia 229

7 The Dangerous Decade 273

8 Sowing in the Wind 309

9 In the Unipolar World 345

10 The New Century 379

Conclusion 409

Acknowledgments 417

Notes 420

Index 461

Editorial Reviews

"Srinath Raghavan's remarkable historical command yields a definitive, unrivalled account of America's long, ambivalent and ultimately transforming relationship with South Asia: a place of danger and treasure, and a strategic prize still to be won."—Sunil Khilnani, author of The Idea of India

"Srinath Raghavan, one of the very best diplomatic and military historians working on modern South Asia, has written an excellent and ambitious book. Sweeping and insightful, Fierce Enigmas shines new light on the United States' troubled engagement with India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, showing how power, ideology, and culture drove these strategic relationships. Deeply researched and elegantly written, the book is rich with insights on democratic foreign policy, nuclear proliferation and confrontation, Islamist resurgence, and more-shaping the political and social bonds between the last superpower and almost a quarter of humanity."—Gary J. Bass, author of The Blood Telegram

"A treasure trove of information and fresh interpretation...an excellent work of clarification for readers curious about past and present associations between the U.S. and South Asia."—Booklist Online

"Raghavan is to be commended for the rich temporal tapestry he has woven and it is a complex yet rewarding trapeze. His nimble pen points to stimulating linkages."—Financial Express (India)

"Raghavan's mastery has been in bringing together a vast trove of material to write this eminently readable history of the US in South Asia."—Outlook (India)

"It is a wonder that Raghavan has been able to encompass so much history across the expanse of the subcontinent in under 400 pages and few details miss his archive-trained eye."—The Hindu (India)

"IT is a definitive account, and the sheer scope of expanse of coverage sets the book apart from all earlier efforts on US and South Asia."—Indian Express (India)

"Raghavan's broad and detailed swathe of the US-South Asia relationship beautifully brings out this inherent contradiction in the heart of US policy."—The Print (India)

"This is one of the best histories of US engagement with South Asia offering a more nuanced and coherent perspective. Raghavan has burnished his reputation as India's leading contemporary historian and political analyst."—India Today

"Raghavan's treatment is sure footed and his narrative animates the interplay of personalities, interest and power, as US presidencies rub up against Indian and Pakistan leaders."—Open Magazine (India)

From the Publisher

2018-07-31

A critical, sometimes embarrassing account of American relations with the major nations of South Asia.

Americans have been poking around in South Asia since the beginning of the republic. As Raghavan (India's War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia, 2016), a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, writes, the British Raj refused to issue credentials to George Washington's choice of consul, a businessman who had been living for years in Calcutta. "Britain's reluctance to sanction an American consul stemmed mainly from its desire not to dilute its hold over the Indian economy," writes the author, but the Americans kept at it, establishing themselves as an important trading partner in an economy that has done nothing but grow. At the same time, and especially in the period since Indian independence, the U.S. has not quite known what to do with India. Some administrations have been friendly, others eager to treat China as the sole Asian power worth dealing with, and still others more inclined to side with Pakistan in the binational rivalry. Things have become no less murky in recent decades, and the result has been a particularly difficult relationship. During the Eisenhower administration, for example, India's policy of nonalignment could mean nothing but a pro-communist stance, with China, in the words of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, "attempting to rally all of Asia to rise up to eject violently all Western influence." A case in point in America's difficulty in wrapping its collective diplomatic head around South Asia is a dam project in Afghanistan's Helmand Valley, modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority, which "would at once cater to irrigation, electricity, and farm extension." Begun in the early 1950s, it has met only partial success, though the opium trade has certainly benefited from irrigated poppy fields.

Encounters with America, writes Raghavan, have not always been negative, but as his book shows, there's much room for improvement.

Kirkus Reviews