In a personal friendship you can make sacrifices; sometimes big ones. It is because it is a personal choice with only your interests at stake. However, the nature of friendship between countries is an entirely different beast. The decision makers are responsible for the interests of the entire nation. Their personal feelings and honor cannot and should not be part of any decision-making. It would seem that we do not understand that. This is what leads to a lot of problems.
Friendship between nations is based on overlap mutual interests – tactical or strategic, commercial or ideological. However, even in the best of such friendships, it is the national interests that override any other concerns. The US will help India as long as their own interests are not involved. They will also try to do the right thing as long as their security is not at risk. Israel, whose security is totally dependent on their proximity to the US, bombed an American warship near Sinai Peninsula during the Yom Kippur War. The Israelis thought that the US was spying on them. There are numerous incidents the US spying on the British even though the Brits are American lapdogs. The point is that the national interests trump all other concerns.
It is clear that Dawood Gilani was working for the US Drug Enforcement Administration and came in contact with the Paki terrorists. He clearly was double-crossing the US outfits. I am quite sure that the US government did not know about Gilani’s involvement with the Mumbai bombings. It is one thing to destroy a couple of lives or some property on friendly territory and entirely different thing to be responsible for over 160 deaths. However, once they found out about Gilani’s complicity in the matter, then the choice they had was to either punish him in the US and keep him under their control or they could have extradited him to India. The former option enabled them to hide their own stupidity and access to intelligence that Gilani has. That is a huge incentive to keep him in the US, which overrode any Indian concerns. Moreover, with UPA in power, the US has no reason to fear any adverse Indian reaction (not that we can do much). Moreover, what right do we have of calling Gilani's punishment light when we have not even charged let alone punish anyone in India who helped Gilani or the paki terrorists (don’t fool yourself by saying that the pakis did all that in Mumbai without any local help).
The point is that the US took care of their interest. WHAT THE HELL HAVE WE DONE TO TAKE CARE OF OURS?
Our foreign policy is dictated by the “mere dushman, mere bhai” and hope and other such warm and fuzzy feelings rather than hard-nosed pragmatism. We cannot even deal with pakis at our terms. How the hell can we demand anything from the US? Blaming the US in this matter clearly tells me that we are trying to blame them for our inability. Hell, we personally delivered Hafeez Syed and Omar Sheikh to the pakis. Shinde cannot even refer to Syed the way he should be. We invested money in Afghanistan in hopes that the US will take care of our interests. That was a big mistake. The US may help us if it does not cost them anything. We should have foreseen that any Afghan resolution would NEVER be possible without Pakistani help. The US needs to get out of Afghanistan and for that they will appease the pakis even at the cost of Indian interests. And why shouldn’t they? What can we do to them other than yell and scream and call them names.
We have to accept that we are a soft state. We are sheep and sheep get slaughtered. That is the status quo. Even the pakis know that. They can behead our boys. They can inflict terror on us and yet get us to play nice with them. Their policy is winning / hurting us at all costs. Our policy is peace at all costs. If we want people to pay attention to our interests then WE HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION TO OUR INTERESTS. Until then, we need to shut up and accept our weaknesses and limitations. We have no right to complain.
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