A leading American expert on South Asia on Tuesday said President-elect Barack Obama made his first foreign policy mistake by pledging US intervention in the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan.
A Kashmir initiative by America, however veiled, can undermine improving Indo-US ties, Selig S Harrison, director of Asia Programme at the Centre for International Policy and a senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International, observed in an opinion piece published in The Washington Times.
In an interview to the Time magazine in October last year, Obama had said Kashmir was a place he wanted to "devote serious diplomatic resources to get a special envoy in there, to figure out a plausible approach".