Given the amount of your coverage, presumably PM Manmohan Singh's visit was mostly show and little substance?

Or did important things happen that are classified?

The US sought new role or courted new strategic partnership with India regarding US-Indo joint role in tackling the menace of religious extremism in Afghanistan (as the prescience politics warns that)it would or may escalate or create the perils of centrifugal forces/ political disintegration in the region.

Pakistan has attacked India several times with free US arms and free military training. This was routinely aimed at India. India has never attacked any country and is loath to do so if any alternative solution to a oonflict is at all possible. Indians in the US are called a model community providing doctors, lawyers, astronauts and NASA engineers, etc.

Immediately after independence when the Britsh had left India totally poor, India asked US companies like Aramco to help with oil investigation. The US terms were so prohibitive that ultimately it turned to the USSR which accepted Indian rupees, tea, etc. India was forced to seek Soviet assistance.

Also the US flatly refused to help Tibet. China attacked India for giving refugee to the Dalai and to thousands of illiterate poor Tibetans.

This is history. Yes, India is a democracy. Does the US prefer friendship with dictators, military generals, theocracies?

So while Indians show the most positive feelings, as the PEW reports indicate, for Americans they remain concerned about US foreign policy.

The US based Pakistani community has also played positive role in revitalizing the US civil society. The question here is not that which country the US policy thinkers should consider more beneficial in the South Asia, as has been correctly clarified by President Brack Obama- while responding the question erected by a US journalist on the eve of the joint statement issued by the core leaderships -that for the US Pakistan is as equally significant in South Asia as that of India.

The point of my advocating perception is that since the US administration is attempting at making India a strategic partner in Afghanistan ,this kind of arrangement may not generate positive results in so far as the majority of the Afghan people, already infused in by the feelings of anti-Americanism would mot accept this partnership as they would perceive this newly made political Indo-US honeymoon as a new foreign plan to dominate the Afghan community.

While India wants to maintain good relationships with the US because it fears Pakistan and China, I think the US has to remain a fair broker, which it certainly shall. India is a major world player and a major economy. However, I don't really see closer US-India relations as a realignment, especially since India's archrival (Pakistan) is one of the most important allies the US has.

With India we should always seek to improve things like the environment and to maintain the war against terrorists and work against international threats like Iran and North Korea.

Nigel