It was just twenty years ago that Anita Inder Singh and Robert McMahon blazed new trails with the first archivally based studies of Anglo-American policy towards South Asia. In the years since Singh's The Limits of British Influence (1993) and McMahon's The Cold War on the Periphery (1994), the Third World has moved from the periphery to the center of scholarly concerns. Now comes a worthy successor to Singh's and McMahon's accounts: Paul McGarr's impressively researched and well-told The Cold War in South Asia. McGarr expands upon Singh's chronology (she ends her story in 1956) and McMahon's geography (by accounting more fully for British foreign policy) in the light of new archival findings, especially from American and British records made available since the early 1990s.

The fruits of McGarr's intensive research are apparent in The Cold War in South Asia, which tracks the ups and downs – in his telling, mostly the downs – of American and British policy in South Asia from the eve of independence through the aftermath of the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War. McGarr is sharply critical of Anglo-American, and especially American, policies in the region. These criticisms are relatively muted in the text but are stated forcefully in the book's conclusion, which castigates Anglo-American diplomats in South Asia for acting upon “inflated fears of nebulous external threats” (362). American officials come in for especially harsh criticisms; their policies, McGarr concludes, “invariably” amounted to “the responses … to a series of (largely illusory) anxieties” (346).

To support this assessment, McGarr mobilizes a stunning amount of American and British documentary material, using it to map the ebbs and flows of conflict and cooperation among four governments: India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Many of the chapters are organized around US presidential administrations, though each of the major regional crises of the eventful early 1960s gets its own chapter as well: the Indian takeover of the former Portuguese colony of Goa in 1961; the Sino-Indian War of 1962, the renewed diplomatic efforts to resolve the Indo-Pakistan conflicts over Kashmir, and finally the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War. McGarr treats 1965 events as a major turning point, in which British and American policymakers reaped the failure of their decade-long efforts to influence the region. After a decade of extensive economic aid for both India and Pakistan, and a commitment to the Indian military that deepened after the Sino-Indian War of 1962 (though still not close to the extent of Anglo-American military aid to Pakistan), both the US and the UK suspended their aid programs in the wake of armed hostilities. As The Economist drily observed early in the crisis, American President Lyndon Baines Johnson pulled off “the unusual diplomatic feat” of offending India and Pakistan at the same time (300).

The 1965 war, indeed, hardly redounded to Anglo-American advantage. In the wake of the aid cutoff, each South Asian power sought to diversify its alliances by strengthening its ties to a resolute opponent of the West: Pakistan with the People's Republic of China and India with the USSR. The mid-1960s tumult, furthermore, revealed the general impotence of Great Britain in a region that had, only a generation earlier, been the jewel of its imperial crown. Given McGarr's interest in the dynamics between the anglophone powers, his focus on the 1965 crisis is hardly a surprise – but his relative inattention to prior tensions is. After all, long-standing British ties to both India and Pakistan had already been subsumed to American power a few years earlier, in the aftermath of the 1962 war. The joint Anglo-American efforts to support the Indian military had already established the UK as a junior partner.

More importantly, the resolute focus on London and Washington, which pays off in understanding the internal dynamics of American and British foreign-policy formulation and execution, also comes with some costs. Important archivally based scholarship on Indian foreign policy (for instance, accounts by Manu Baghavan and Srinath Raghavan) is absent from McGarr's bibliography. And the wealth of sources about Washington and London, which McGarr mines so impressively, provides little evidence about Soviet and Chinese designs on South Asia – which would seem essential to support McGarr's argument that Anglo-American officials greatly exaggerated the communist threat in the region.

These caveats aside, McGarr's Cold War in South Asia provides rich evidence, strong arguments, and compelling insights about Anglo-American policy in South Asia; it is, in short, a new standard in the field.