Abstract
Mohan talks about Obama’s new framework for South Asia. Quite early on in his campaign, Obama outlined the interconnection between the developments on Pakistan’s western borderlands and its problems on the east with India. Obama and his advisers on South Asia made a bold leap in underlining the need to address Pakistan’s larger security dilemmas in resolving the US problem in Afghanistan. By 2007, US decisionmakers began to appreciate the challenges in Pakistan, a country that is simultaneously a US forward base and a strategic rear for al Qaeda and the Taliban in the Afghan theatre. They also saw that the Pakistani Army and its intelligence arm, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), were playing both sides of the US war in Afghanistan. Washington also struggled to cope with the internal political dynamics in Pakistan that acquired a new democratic edge in 2007 and further complicated the successful pursuit of al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Obama sought to break through this problem by focusing on Pakistan and looking at its security politics in an integrated manner.