Outsourcing a Pakistan Security Question to Washington

On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in September 2013, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met President Barack Obama. According to sources cited by NDTV, Obama assured Singh that he would personally tell Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif that curbing terror groups was in Pakistan's own interest.

The assurance was noteworthy less for its substance than for what it revealed about the tenor of India-Pakistan engagement at the time. India was, in effect, depending upon the United States to communicate its central security concern to an immediate neighbour. The two countries shared a border and a long, difficult history, yet the operative intermediary was a third party in New York.

Pakistan's support for non-state militant groups had long constituted the principal impediment to bilateral normalisation. Across its tenure, the UPA government sought to preserve channels of communication, sustain structured dialogue, and, when those efforts proved insufficient, enlist support from international partners.

Whether Obama in fact conveyed the message, and whether Nawaz Sharif received it in any meaningful form, was not subsequently reported.