324. Memorandum From the President’s Special Assistant (Rostow) to President Johnson1
SUBJECT
- India/Pakistan Aid, Tashkent, and Military Expenditures
I should like you to know that I have told State and AID that they should not read your relatively benign attitude on the India/Pakistan aid papers the other day as a signal that you were not deeply concerned about Indian and Pakistan performance with respect to the normalization of their relations and the limitation of military expenditures.
I am a little concerned that unless we keep the heat on, they might begin to resume assistance without sufficiently concrete performance in these two respects.
The problem is to find specific actions which represent progress.
With respect to Tashkent and normalization, there are two things that might be done:
- —a new round of ministerial meetings between India and Pakistan;
- —the beginnings of some work on multi-national India/Pakistan projects which would commit them to interdependence. Pakistan gas to India and Indian coal shipments to Pakistan are one possibility; the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Teesta River complex is another.
With respect to military expenditures, we apparently reached an agreement with the Indians some time ago about their overall military budget. The Paks are trying to get agreement that they should position themselves at a level somewhere between 25% and 33% of the Indian expenditures; say, 2/7.
On the whole, this is probably too high for both of them. But, given the agreement, it may be difficult to get India down right away, which George Woods would like to do; but at the minimum, we should make sure that the present Indian (and Pak) military budget levels do not continue to rise, but level off.