Jiayuguan, the first pass at the western end of the Great Wall of China.

China’s Ethnic Tremors

Brahma Chellaney
Column internationally syndicated by Project Syndicate, August 8, 2011

In the face of spreading civil unrest among China’s Uighur population, the Chinese government’s love-fest with its all-weather ally, Pakistan, may be starting to sour. Indeed, the authorities in China’s Xinjiang province are charging that a prominent Uighur separatist that they captured had received terrorist training in Pakistan. No less embarrassing for Pakistan, the charge came while its intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, was holding talks in Beijing on securing greater Chinese support to blunt the growing U.S. pressure on Islamabad.

No country has done more than China to prop up the Pakistani state – support that has included transfers of missiles and nuclear-weapons technology. By playing the Kashmir card against India in various ways – even deploying People’s Liberation Army units in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir near the line of control with India – China has clearly signaled in recent years its desire to use its alliance with Pakistan to squeeze India. Given the level of China’s strategic investments in Pakistan, the bilateral relationship is unlikely to change.

Yet the charge of supporting Uighur terrorism, even if leveled only by local Chinese officials, reflects China’s irritation with Pakistan’s inability to contain the cross-border movement of some Uighur separatists. China, however, confronts not a proxy war or even foreign involvement in Xinjiang, but rather a rising backlash from its own Uighur citizens against their Han colonizers.

And the Uighurs are hardly alone. Even in Tibet – where resistance to Chinese rule remains largely nonviolent and there is no alleged terrorist group to blame – China is staring at the bitter harvest of policies that have sought to deny native minorities their identity, culture, language, and the benefits of their own natural resources.

To help Sinicize China’s minority lands, the government has used a strategy made up of five key components: cartographic alteration of ethnic-homeland boundaries; demographic flooding of non-Han cultures; historical revisionism to justify Chinese control; enforcement of cultural homogeneity to blur local identities; and political repression. The Manchu assimilation into Han society and the swamping of the locals in Inner Mongolia have left only the Tibetans and the Turkic-speaking Uighurs as holdouts.

But the renewed Tibetan revolt since 2008, the Uighur rebellion since 2009, and the recrudescence this year of large-scale protests by ethnic Mongolians in Inner Mongolia have shown that the strategy of ethnic and economic colonization is beginning to backfire. While a monk-led campaign on the Tibetan Plateau continues to challenge the Chinese crackdown, several dozen people have been killed in Xinjiang since last month as Uighur-Han clashes have spread from the desert town of Hotan to the Silk Road city of Kashgar.

Xinjiang, bordering Afghanistan, Russia, the countries of Central Asia, and the Kashmir areas occupied by Pakistan and China, was annexed by the newly established People’s Republic of China in 1949, a year before it began its invasion of Tibet. That put an end to the East Turkestan Republic in Xinjiang, which Muslim groups, aided by Josef Stalin, established in 1944, while World War II was raging. In the six decades since then, millions of Han Chinese have moved to Xinjiang, sharpening interethnic competition for land and water, not to mention control of the region’s abundant hydrocarbon resources.

The Great Wall was built by the Ming Dynasty (1369-1644) mainly to demarcate the Han Empire’s political frontiers. Today’s China, however, is three times as large as it was under the Ming – the last Han dynasty – with its borders having extended far west and southwest of the Great Wall.

Thus, Han territorial control is now at its zenith: Xinjiang’s cultural capital, Kashgar, is closer to Baghdad than to Beijing, and Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, is almost twice as far from the Chinese capital as it is from New Delhi. Indeed, forced assimilation in Tibet and Xinjiang began only after China created a land corridor between these two regions by gobbling up India’s 38,000-square-kilometer Aksai Chin, part of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, following an invasion of India in 1962.

Yet China’s policies are now exacting rising internal-security costs, as the resurgence of separatism in several regions shows. Given that the restive homelands of ethnic minorities make up 60% of the PRC’s territory – together, Tibet and Xinjiang constitute nearly half of China’s landmass – internal-security problems loom much larger than they do next door, in India.

While India celebrates its diversity, China seeks to impose cultural and linguistic uniformity, although it officially comprises 56 nationalities. And, in enforcing monoculturalism, China is also attempting to cover up the cleavages within the Han majority, lest the historical north-south fault lines resurface. In fact, China is the world’s only major country whose official internal-security budget is higher than its official national-defense budget.

This fixation on what the government calls weiwen, or stability maintenance, has spawned a well-oiled security apparatus that extends from state-of-the-art surveillance and extra-legal detention centers to an army of paid informants and neighborhood “safety patrols” on the lookout for troublemakers. Although the challenge of weiwen extends to the Han heartland, where rural protests are increasing at the same rate as China’s GDP, the traditional ethnic-minority lands have become the country’s Achilles heel.

Uighurs, Tibetans, and Mongolians in China face a stark choice: fight for their rights or be reduced to the status of the Native Americans in the United States. With or without external assistance, the readiness of an increasing number of them to stand up to China’s decades-old policy of ethnic and economic colonization does not augur well for weiwen.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut and the forthcoming Water: Asia’s New Battlefield.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.

Financial Times, July 20, 2011

Corruption in India is not only pervasive but threatens to reach predatory levels. This has spurred pessimism in some quarters about India’s future. Such gloom, however, misses the larger picture.

No nation’s potential can be measured by one yardstick alone. Corruption poses a serious challenge to India, but to contend that it will block India’s great-power ambitions is to forget history. The United States, for example, rose as a world power in spite its robber barons. And now China is demonstrating that rampant corruption is no barrier to a country’s dramatic rise on the world stage.

The pessimists also miss out one key development in India – there is already a public backlash against corruption that has galvanised judicial activism, sent several important politicians to jail, put the government on the defensive, and created new crusading icons. Contrast this with the Chinese system, which reeks of unbridled and unchecked corruption, with the public helpless.

In world history, periods of rapid economic growth have often been accompanied by rising wealth and income inequality and widespread corruption. It took the US more than half a century to bring the era of robber barons to an end, although big-bucks corruption still remains a challenge. In India, the backlash against crooked politicians and entrepreneurs – and the public campaign for cleaner politics and business practices – has started in earnest barely two decades after the advent of rapid growth.

India’s economic and military rise is threatened neither by corruption nor by its ethnic diversity. India has demonstrated that unlike the traditionally homogenous societies of East Asia, a nation can manage diversity – and thrive on it. As one of the oldest and most-assimilative civilisations in the world, India can truly play the role of a bridge between the East and the West.

Rather, India’s rise is threatened by a political factor – a leadership deficit, which is compounded by a splintered polity. India is still governed by a pre-independence leadership – an anomaly even in Asia, where age is supposed to be wisdom. India today boasts the world’s oldest head of government and oldest foreign minister. Old, tired, risk-averse leadership can hardly propel any country to greatness. Worse, India’s coalition federal governments, which have become a norm, tend to function by the rule of parochial politics – in fact, by the lowest common denominator.

Yet, democracy remains India’s greatest asset. It not only helps instil fear among the corrupt, but also makes India’s future less uncertain than China’s.

The writer is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, and the author of ‘Asian Juggernaut’ and ‘Water: Asia’s New Battlefield’.

(c) FT, 2011.

Brahma Chellaney
CNN World/”Global Public Square”

China’s announcement that its first aircraft carrier is ready to set sail as early as the end of this month has refocused attention on the country’s naval ambitions. So, too, has the Pakistani defense minister’s disclosure that his country recently asked China to start building a naval base at its strategically positioned port of Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea.

Both revelations underscore China’s preference for strategic subterfuge.

After it bought the 67,500-ton, Soviet-era Varyag carrier — still little more than a hull when the Soviet Union collapsed — China repeatedly denied that it had any intention to refit it for naval deployment. For example, Zhang Guangqin, Deputy Director of the Chinese State Commission for Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense, said in 2005 that the Varyag was not being modified for military use. However, work to refit the carrier had already begun in Dalian, China’s main shipyard.

In order to deflect attention from the real plan, the state-run media reported plans to turn the Varyag into a “floating casino” near Macau. And, to lend credence to that claim, the two smaller Soviet-era aircraft carriers that were purchased with the Varyag in 1998-2000 were developed into floating museums.

The first official acknowledgement that China was turning the Varyag into a fully refurbished, deployable aircraft carrier came this month, just when it was almost ready to set sail. And the acknowledgement came from General Chen Bingde, the chief of the People’s Liberation Army, in an interview with Global Times, the Communist Party’s hawkish mouthpiece.

Subterfuge is also apparent in China’s plans at Gwadar, where a Chinese-built but still-underused commercial port opened in 2007. From the time construction of the port began, Gwadar was widely seen as representing China’s first strategic foothold in the Arabian Sea, as part of its strategy to assemble a “string of pearls” along the Indian Ocean rim. It was known that Gwadar, which overlooks Gulf shipping lanes and is near the Iran border, would eventually double as a naval base. Yet, all along, China continued to insist that Gwadar’s only role was commercial.

Not surprisingly, then, Pakistani Defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar’s public comments about a naval base at Gwadar deeply embarrassed China’s government. At the end of a recent visit to Beijing with Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, Mukhtar reported that the Chinese government was more than happy to oblige whatever requests for assistance the Pakistani side made, including reaching an agreement to take over operation of the Gwadar port after the existing contract with a Singaporean government company expires. China also made a gift to Pakistan of 50 JF-17 fighter jets.

More importantly, Mukhtar disclosed that Pakistan had asked China to begin building the naval base. “We would be…grateful to the Chinese government if a naval base is…constructed at the site of Gwadar for Pakistan,” he announced in a statement. He later told a British newspaper in an interview: “We have asked our Chinese brothers to please build a naval base at Gwadar.”

After Pakistan revealed the plans for a naval base, China responded with equivocation, saying that “this issue was not touched upon” during the visit. Given China’s proclivity for strategic stealth, even its work on the Gwadar port was launched quietly. Moreover, China does not wish to deepen the concerns that it aroused in Asia last year by openly discarding Deng Xiaoping’s dictum, tao guang yang hui (“conceal ambitions and hide claws”). On a host of issues, including its territorial claims in the South China Sea and against Japan and India, China spent 2010 staking out a more muscular position.

On these issues, too, the gap between Chinese officials’ words and actions is revealing. For example, China persisted with its unannounced rare-earth embargo against Japan for seven weeks while continuing to claim in public that no export restrictions had been imposed. Like its denials last year about deploying Chinese troops in Pakistani-held Kashmir to build strategic projects, China has demonstrated a troubling propensity to obscure the truth.

The Global Times, however, has not been shy about advertising China’s interest in establishing naval bases overseas. In a recent editorial, “China Needs Overseas Bases for Global Role,” the newspaper urged the outside world to “understand China’s need to set up overseas military bases.”

The insurrection against Pakistani rule in the mineral-rich southern province of Baluchistan may impede China’s plan to turn Gwadar into an energy transshipment hub to transport Gulf and African oil to western China by pipeline. But the insurgency is no barrier to China’s use of Gwadar to project power in the Middle East and East Africa, and against peninsula India. Indeed, to get into the Great Power maritime game, China needs Gwadar to redress its main weakness – the absence of a naval anchor in the Indian Ocean region, where it plans to have an important military presence.

What was touted as a floating casino is now being launched as the floating centerpiece of China’s growing naval prowess. In fact, with a second and larger aircraft carrier currently under construction, it may not be long before China displays its naval capabilities by dispatching a carrier battle group to the Indian Ocean – if not basing one at Gwadar.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut and the forthcoming Water: Asia’s New Battlefield.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.

Brahma Chellaney
The Economic Times, June 13, 2011

The verdict in the Chicago trial, which coincided with CIA Director Leon Panetta’s unannounced departure for Pakistan, holds three important lessons for India.

The first lesson is that it was wrong on New Delhi’s part to expect the U.S. to try and legally corner the ISI for its role in 26/11 or to help bring to justice the perpetrators of those grisly attacks. The U.S. has its own foreign-policy interests and compulsions. Since its daring raid that killed Osama bin Laden, it has sent four high-level delegations to Islamabad, including one led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The flurry of visits has been intended to repair its relationship with — not discipline — Pakistan.

In fact, Panetta, who is due to replace Robert Gates as defence secretary on July 1, delivered a positive message to Islamabad that the U.S. wants to rebuild a trusting, constructive relationship. Washington may be unhappy with Pakistan’s counterterrorism efforts. But the last thing it wants to do is to spotlight the ISI’s terror role in a third country, India, when the CIA needs the ISI more than ever to cut a peace deal with the Afghan Taliban, whose top leadership is ensconced in Pakistan.

The second lesson is about the Chicago trial itself. The prosecution — the Federal Bureau of Investigation — had a subtle political focus. It was more interested in securing Tahawwur Hussain Rana’s conviction on the Denmark-related charge than on the more-serious 26/11 charge. Furthermore, the prosecution directly and through its star witness David Headley sought to shield the ISI brass from getting linked with 26/11.

A junior ISI functionary, one Major Iqbal who served as Headley’s handler, was indicted and made the fall guy, without any effort by the prosecutors to delve into the issue whether the ISI’s leadership was in the loop on the 26/11 operation. Headley actually contradicted himself in his testimony, claiming the ISI brass was not aware of the operation, yet admitting that Iqbal’s commanding officer and the wing of the ISI they worked for knew about the 26/11 planning.

Although the case helped highlight the impunity with which serving and retired Pakistani military officers have been aiding Lashkar-e-Taiba, the prosecution was reluctant to go beyond the role played by Iqbal. The prosecution also declined to examine the military antecedents of a Lashkar leader, Sajid Mir, who was caught on tape directing the killings in Mumbai by phone during the terrorist strikes.

The prosecution, of course, did not examine the key question — whether 26/11 could have been prevented had the FBI stopped Headley’s terrorist activities in time? Despite having received six warnings over seven years about Headley’s Lashkar connections, the FBI did not arrest him because he was working as a U.S. agent. Headley, a former drug trafficker with a history of previous arrests in the 1980s and 1990s, reportedly continued to work as a paid U.S. informant even beyond 26/11 until evidence surfaced in October 2009 of his involvement in a plot to target a Danish newspaper that had published cartoons of Prophet Muhammad.

It was thus no accident that the prosecution buried material evidence about Headley’s ties with U.S. law-enforcement agencies. This has left the key issue hanging: Was 26/11 preventable?

The verdict may reopen old wounds between India and the U.S. over Headley, including the failure to arrest him in time or share with India sooner the intelligence the U.S. had on him. And even after he was arrested in Chicago in 2009, it took months before America granted Indian investigators limited access to question him. Headley’s plea bargain has saved him the death penalty and extradition to India.

The 26/11 acquittal sets back the plaintiffs’ case against ISI in the New York civil suit —in which the ISI chief has been named as a defendant — and facilitates Islamabad’s bid to strike a deal with Washington in that matter.

The third lesson is about India’s own lack of response to 26/11. India did not take the smallest of small steps after 26/11. Instead it responded by fashioning a new counterterrorism tool — dossier bombing. It also delivered lists of Pakistan-based terrorists.

Can such bureaucratic exercises make Pakistan reassess its strategic calculus and abandon a foreign policy that relies on jihadist adventurism? The answer came recently from the Pakistani foreign secretary, who publicly mocked the dossiers as interesting “literature” but not evidence. In fact, after bin Laden’s killing, he heaped scorn on India’s demand that Islamabad arrest and prosecute all the 26/11 perpetrators, calling the demand “a familiar line,” “outdated,” and a line of thinking “mired in a mindset that is neither realistic nor productive.”

Islamabad indeed has had the last laugh: The Pakistan-based masterminds of 26/11 remain untouched and the terrorist-training camps near the border with India continue to operate, yet New Delhi has returned to square one by resuming political dialogue at all levels. U.S. Assistant Secretary Robert Blake recently thanked India for resuming “full comprehensive dialogue” with Pakistan by dropping both its conditions — “that those who had been responsible for the Mumbai bombings had to be brought to justice and the trials had to be completed; and then that there had to be visible progress by the Pakistanis to stop cross-border infiltration.”

The role of the Pakistani state agencies, including the ISI and navy, in scripting 26/11 is clear. It is time the culpability of Indian decision-makers in letting Pakistan off the hook over 26/11 came under public spotlight.

(c) The Economic Times, 2011.

By Brahma Chellaney
Mint, June 10, 2011

The announcement that China’s first aircraft carrier is ready to set sail as early as this month-end has refocused attention on the larger Chinese naval ambitions. So also has the Pakistani defence minister’s disclosure that his country recently asked China to start building a naval base at the strategically positioned Gwadar on the Arabian Sea. More important, the dual revelations underscore China’s preference for subterfuge in making strategic moves.

After it bought the Soviet-era, 67,500-tonne Varyag carrier— which was not fully complete when the Soviet Union dismembered— China repeatedly denied it had any intention to refit it for naval deployment. For example, Zhang Guangqin, vice-director of the Chinese State Commission of Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense, said in 2005 that Varyag was not being modified for military use. However, work to refit Varyag had already begun earlier in Dalian, China’s main shipyard.

Yet, to deflect attention from the real plan, the idea to turn Varyag into a “floating casino” off Macau was put forward through the state-run media. And to lend credence to this idea, the smaller two of the three Soviet-era aircraft carriers, including Varyag, bought by China during 1998-2000 were developed into floating museums—one of them briefly before the carrier itself was scrapped. The first official acknowledgement that China was turning Varyag not into a floating casino, but into a fully refurbished, deployable aircraft carrier came this week, just when it became almost ready to set sail.

Subterfuge is also apparent in China’s additional plans at Gwadar, where a Chinese-built but still-underused commercial port opened in 2007. From the time it began constructing the port, Gwadar was widely seen as representing China’s first strategic foothold in the Arabian Sea and being part of its strategy to assemble a “string of pearls” along the Indian Ocean rim. It was known that Gwadar, which overlooks Gulf shipping lanes, would eventually double up as a naval base. Yet all along, Beijing continued to deny Gwadar had any role other than commercial.

So Pakistani defence minister Ahmed Mukhtar’s public comments on a naval base at Gwadar deeply embarrassed Beijing. Mukhtar accompanied Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani during a recent trip to Beijing. At the end of the visit, Mukhtar reported that whatever requests for assistance the Pakistani side made, the Chinese government was more than happy to oblige, including agreeing to take over operation of the Gwadar port upon expiry of an existing contract with a Singaporean government company. Beijing also decided to gift Pakistan 50 JF-17 fighter jets.

More important, Mukhtar disclosed that Pakistan had asked China to begin building the naval base. “We would be…grateful to the Chinese government if a naval base is…constructed at the site of Gwadar for Pakistan,” he announced in a statement. He later told a British newspaper in an interview: “We have asked our Chinese brothers to please build a naval base at Gwadar.”

After Pakistan spilled the beans on the planned naval base, Beijing responded with equivocation, saying, “this issue was not touched upon” during the visit. Given China’s proclivity to make strategic moves by stealth, even its work on the Gwadar port was launched quietly. So how can work on a naval base be publicized in advance?

China also does not wish to deepen the concerns it aroused in Asia last year by openly discarding Deng Xiaoping’s dictum, tao guang yang hui (conceal ambitions and hide claws). On a host of issues, including its territorial claims in the South China Sea and against India and Japan, China spent 2010 staking out a more-muscular position.

No less revealing was the gap between China’s words and the reality. For example, it persisted with its unannounced rare-earth embargo against Japan for seven weeks while continuing to blithely claim the opposite in public—that no export restriction had been imposed. Like its denials last year on two other subjects— the deployment of Chinese troops in Pakistani-held Kashmir and its use of Chinese convicts as labourers on projects in some countries too poor and weak to protest—China has demonstrated a troubling propensity to obscure the truth.

The Chinese Communist Party’s hawkish mouthpiece, Global Times, however, has not been shy about advertising China’s interest in setting up naval bases overseas. In a recent editorial titled, “China needs overseas bases for global role,” the newspaper urged the outside world to “understand the need of China to set up overseas military bases”.

The insurrection in the mineral-rich, southern province of Baluchistan against Pakistani rule may impede Beijing’s plan to turn Gwadar into an energy trans-shipment hub transporting Gulf and African oil to western China by pipeline. But the protracted insurgency is no barrier to China’s plan to use Gwadar to project power in the Gulf and eastern Africa and against peninsula India. Indeed, to get into the great-power maritime game, it needs Gwadar to plug its main weakness—the absence of a naval anchor in the Indian Ocean region, where it plans to have important military presence.

In fact, with a second and larger aircraft carrier currently under construction, it may not be long before China shows off its naval prowess by dispatching a carrier battle group to the Indian Ocean.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

Comments are welcome at theirview@livemint.com

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
Japan Times, June 9, 2011

After the daring U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden in his hideout next to Pakistan’s premier military academy, Islamabad has openly played its China card to caution Washington against pushing it too hard. And China has been more than eager to show itself as Pakistan’s staunchest ally.

China’s deepening strategic penetration of Pakistan — and the joint plans to set up new oil pipelines, railroads, and even a naval base on the Arabian Sea that will serve as the first overseas location offering support to the Chinese navy for out-of-area missions — are spurring greater U.S. and Indian concerns. For India, the implications of the growing strategic nexus are particularly stark because both China and Pakistan refuse to accept the territorial status quo and lay claim to large tracts of Indian land.

An influx of up to 11,000 soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army into Pakistan’s Himalayan regions of Gilgit and Baltistan to supposedly work on new projects, including a railroad, an upgraded highway, dams and secret tunnels, has raised concerns that those strategic borderlands could come under the Chinese sway. The predominantly Shiite Gilgit and Baltistan are in Kashmir, where the borders of China, India and Pakistan converge.

The PLA influx has resulted, according to India, in the presence of Chinese troops close to Pakistan’s line of control in Kashmir with India. This presents India with a two-front theater in the event of a war with either country.

Despite the bin Laden affair, the United States is seeking to repair its relationship with — not discipline — Pakistan, the largest recipient of American aid. Yet Pakistan and China have made a public show of their close strategic bonds.

Within days of bin Laden’s killing, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani traveled to Beijing. The accompanying defense minister, Ahmed Mukhtar, reported that whatever requests for assistance the Pakistani side made, the Chinese government was more than happy to oblige, including agreeing to take over operation of the strategically positioned but underused port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea upon expiry of an existing contract with a Singaporean government company. Beijing also decided to gift Pakistan 50 JF-17 fighter jets.

More important, Mukhtar disclosed that Pakistan had asked China to begin building a naval base at Gwadar, where Beijing funded and built the port. “We would be … grateful to the Chinese government if a naval base is … constructed at the site of Gwadar for Pakistan,” he said in a statement. He later told a British newspaper in an interview: “We have asked our Chinese brothers to please build a naval base at Gwadar.”

Mukhtar’s comments on the naval base embarrassed Beijing, which wants no publicity.

China usually makes strategic moves by stealth. It launched work even on the Gwadar port quietly. So how can plans on a naval base be publicized?

After Pakistan spilled the beans on the Gwadar naval base, China responded with equivocation, saying “this issue was not touched upon” during the visit. But the Chinese Communist Party’s hawkish Global Times was not shy about advertising China’s interest in setting up bases overseas. In an editorial titled, “China Needs Overseas Bases for Global Role,” the newspaper urged the outside world to “understand the need of China to set up overseas military bases.”

Opened in 2007, the port at Gwadar — which overlooks Gulf shipping lanes and is near the Iran border — was intended from the beginning to represent China’s first strategic foothold in the Arabian Sea and to eventually double up as a Chinese-built naval base. It was widely seen as part of China’s efforts to assemble a “string of pearls” along the Indian Ocean rim. Yet until Mukhtar’s recent statements unmasked the larger plans, China and Pakistan continued to deny that Gwadar had any role other than commercial.

Whereas Pakistan wants to help the Chinese navy counterbalance India’s naval forces, China’s aim is to have important naval presence in the Indian Ocean to underpin its larger geopolitical ambitions and get into great-power maritime game. It thus needs Gwadar to plug its main weakness — the absence of a naval anchor in the region.

China’s plan also is to make Gwadar a major energy hub transporting Gulf and African oil by pipeline to the Chinese heartland via Pakistan-held Kashmir and Xinjiang. Such piped oil would not only cut freight costs and supply time but also lower China’s reliance on U.S.-policed shipping lanes through the Malacca and Taiwan Straits.

Significantly, as China’s involvement in strategic projects in Pakistan has grown, it has started openly started needling India on Kashmir, one-fifth of which is under Chinese occupation. It has used the visa issue and other innovative ways to question India’s sovereignty over Indian-controlled Kashmir. It also has shortened the length of the Himalayan border it claims to share with India by purging the 1,597-km line separating Indian Kashmir from the Chinese-held Kashmir part.

By deploying troops in Pakistani-held Kashmir near the line of control with India and playing the Kashmir card against India, China is clearly signaling that Kashmir is where the Sino-Pakistan nexus can squeeze India. The military pressure China has built up against India’s Arunachal Pradesh state — at the opposite end of the Himalayas — seems more like a diversion.

In truth, the more Pakistan has slipped into a jihadist dungeon, the more China has increased its strategic footprint in that country. And 2011 has been proclaimed the year of China-Pakistan friendship.

Brahma Chellaney, professor at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan” (Harper, New York) and “Water: Asia’s New Battlefield” (Georgetown University Press).

The Japan Times: Thursday, June 9, 2011. (C) All rights reserved

By Santha Oorjitham
New Straits Times, May 25, 2011

Tension over precious water resources in Asia is already rising, warns Brahma Chellaney in an interview with SANTHA OORJITHAM

Q: The Tibetan plateau supplies water to 47 per cent of the world’s population. How would you rate cooperation between upstream and downstream countries on managing water resources?

A: There are treaties among riparian neighbours in South and Southeast Asia, but not between China and its neighbours.

For example, the lower Mekong states of Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam have a water treaty. India has water-sharing treaties with both the countries located downstream — Bangladesh and Pakistan.

There are also water treaties between India and its two small upstream neighbours, Nepal and Bhutan. But China, the dominant riparian power of Asia, refuses to enter into water-sharing arrangements with any of its neighbours.

Yet China enjoys an unrivalled global status as the source of trans-boundary river flows to the largest number of countries, ranging from Vietnam and Afghanistan to Russia and Kazakhstan.

Significantly, the important international rivers in China all originate in ethnic-minority homelands, some of them wracked by separatist movements. The traditional homelands of ethnic minorities, extending from the Tibetan Plateau and Xinjiang to Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, actually span three-fifths of the landmass of the People’s Republic of China.

Q: What are the main sources of water stress in the Asia-Pacific region?

A: Many of Asia’s water sources cross national boundaries, and as less and less water is available, international tensions will rise.

The sharpening hydropolitics in Asia is centred on international rivers such as the Amu Darya, Syr Darya, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Salween, Indus, Jordan, Tigris-Euphrates, Irtysh-Illy, and Amur. There is also the stoking of political tensions over the resources of transnational aquifers, such as al-Disi, which is shared between Saudi Arabia and Jordan, or the ones that link Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

Q: Are there intra-state tensions over location and approval of dam sites?

A: Intra-state water disputes are rife across Asia. The more democratic a country, the more raucous the intra-country water disputes tend to be.

In repressive political systems, water protests are quickly muffled. Yet China is discovering the hard way that it is difficult even for an autocracy to fully suppress grassroots protests over new water projects that displace residents or over diversion of water from farmlands to industries and cities.

Q: You have also written about possible interstate tension over reduced water flows. Has this already happened?

A: According to the United Nations, growing competition over water resources has “led to an increase in conflicts over water” in Asia between provinces, communities, and countries. Asia illustrates how rapid rates of population growth, development, and urbanisation, together with shifts in production and consumption patterns, can place unprecedented demands on water resources, bringing them under growing pressure and fostering domestic discord.

Water conflict within nations, especially those that are multiethnic and culturally diverse, often assumes ethnic or sectarian dimensions, thereby accentuating internal security challenges.

If the feuding provinces or areas are ethnically distinct, their water dispute also rages along ethnic lines. This pattern has been most visible on the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia and between Han settlers and ethnic minority people in Xinjiang.

In Central Asia, much of the freshwater comes from the Pamir and Tian Shan snowmelt and glacier melt that feed the region’s two main rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. The resources of these two overexploited rivers have become the target of appropriation and competition.

One of the underlying causes of the mid-2010 bloody riots in the Fergana Valley — a minefield of religious fundamentalism and ethnic animosities — was the local ethnic-Kyrgyz fear that Uzbekistan wanted to absorb that water-rich region of Kyrgyzstan.

Q: What are the policies and strategies you suggest in “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (to be released in Asia in June) to prevent “water wars”?

A: The water crisis and competition test Asia’s ability to forge a more cooperative future. How Asia handles this challenge will shape not only its water future, but also its economic and political future.

Given that Asia has the fastest-growing economies and the fastest-rising demand for food, its water shortages will only worsen without major efficiency gains in use.

Three strategies are specifically recommended.

The first is to build Asian norms and rules that cover trans-boundary water resources. The second is to develop inclusive basin organisations encompassing transnational rivers, lakes, and aquifers in order to manage the water competition.

And the third is to develop integrated planning to promote sustainable practices, conservation, water quality, and an augmentation of water supplies through nontraditional sources.

Q: Should water be “securitised”?

A: Whether we like it or not, the “securitisation” of water resources has been going on for years. Indeed, in a silent hydrological warfare, the resources of transnational rivers, aquifers, and lakes have become the target of rival appropriation, with these watercourses being treated as national-security assets.

Water has become an important security issue in several important bilateral relationships in Asia, including those between China and India; between China and the other Mekong River basin states; and among states in South Asia, Central Asia, and West Asia.

Singapore also “securitised” the water issue, using its concerns over a potential Malaysian cut-off of water supply to build a stronger military capability.

Brahma Chellaney, professor at New Delhi’s Centre for Policy Research, will be speaking at the 25th Asia Pacific Roundtable next week

(c) New Straits Times, 2011.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

West is on a slippery slope

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
Japan Times

From initially seeking to protect civilians to now aiming for a swift, total victory in Libya, the mission creep that has characterized the Western powers’ military attack raises troubling questions about their Libyan strategy and the risks that it could end up creating — however inadvertently — a jihadist citadel at the southern doorsteps of Europe.

After having tacitly encouraged and endorsed the Saudi military intervention in Bahrain to crush peaceful protests against a totalitarian monarchy, the military intervention in a tribally divided Libya indeed has helped highlight a selective approach to the promotion of freedom and the protection of civilians — an approach reinforced by these powers’ continuing support to other Western-backed Arab regimes that have employed disproportionate force to quell popular uprisings or unrest.

The Western powers must be applauded for enunciating the goal to prevent civilian slaughter. The free world cannot stand by while tyrants use military forces to massacre civilians. But any intervention — whether military in nature or in the form of economic and diplomatic sanctions — must meet the test of impartiality, if despots are to be stopped from unleashing untrammeled repression.

Ivory Coast — where rampant abuses and widespread killings have led up to one million residents to flee Abidjan, as strongman Laurent Gbagbo openly defies the international community — was clearly a more-pressing case for international intervention than Libya. But because it lacks strategic importance or oil, the exodus of Ivorians into Liberia and the influx of Liberian mercenaries have continued unchecked.

The political upheaval in the Arab world is tectonic in nature, with the potential to transform the Middle East and North Africa in the same way that the 1989 Berlin Wall’s fall fundamentally changed Europe. Indeed, 1989 was such a watershed in world history that the most profound geopolitical change has occurred in the period since in the most compressed historical time frame. Yet, with the same regimes and practices firmly entrenched for decades, the Arab world had escaped change.

Now, the tumult in the Arab world represents a belated reaction — a yearning for change that signals a grassroots democratic awakening. But will this awakening lead to democratic empowerment of the masses? After all, there is a wide gulf between democratic awakening and democratic empowerment.

The air of expectancy in the Arab world today parallels the new hope that emerged in the East bloc in 1989. Yet history rarely moves in a linear or predictable fashion. While it is now clear that much of the Arab world is in transition from the present order, it is not clear what it is in transition to.

In 1989, an American scholar, Francis Fukuyama, smugly claimed in an essay that made him famous that the Cold War’s end marked the end of ideological evolution, “the end of history,” with the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Yet two decades after the Cold War’s end, the global spread of democracy is still encountering strong head winds, with only a small minority of states in Asia, for example, being true democracies.

In fact, a new bipolar, Cold War-style ideological divide has re-emerged in the world. The rise of authoritarian capitalism — best symbolized by China but embraced by countries as disparate as Malaysia, Singapore, Kazakhstan and Qatar in different forms, soft or hard — has created a new international model that competes with (and openly challenges) liberal democracy.

Latest developments indeed are a reminder that democratic empowerment hinges on complex factors in any society — both endogenous and exogenous. Internally, two factors usually hold the key: the role of security forces, and the technological sophistication of a state’s repressive capacity.

In recent weeks, security forces have helped shape developments in different ways in three Arab states. While the popular uprising in Yemen has splintered the security establishment there, with different military factions now in charge of different neighborhoods in the capital San’a, the Bahraini monarchy has employed foreign Sunni mercenaries that dominate its police force to fire on the predominantly Shiite demonstrators.

In Egypt, it was the military’s refusal to side with Hosni Mubarak that helped end that ex-air force commander’s three-decade-long dictatorial rule. The military, long part of the political power structure, had become increasingly wary of Mubarak’s efforts to groom his son as his successor.

Today, the heady talk of freedom cannot obscure the reality that the people’s revolution in Egypt thus far has spawned only a direct military takeover, with the 30-year emergency law still in force and the country’s political direction uncertain. Although the ruling military council has scheduled parliamentary elections in September, the fact is that is no country has the military voluntarily ceded power without mass protests or other pressures.

As for the second key internal factor, an autocracy’s ability to effectively police cell-phone calls, electronic messages, e-mail and access to the Internet has become as important as a well-oiled security apparatus. The use of social networking sites and instant messaging to organize mass protests has made national capability to enforce stringent, real-time censorship of electronic communications critical.

Take China: its internal-security system extends from state-of-the-art surveillance and extralegal detention centers to an army of paid informants and neighborhood patrols looking out for troublemakers. In response to Internet calls for people to gather on Sundays at specific sites in Shanghai and Beijing to help launch a jasmine revolution, China has bared a new strategy: pre-emptively flood the protest-designated squares with police to leave no room for protesters.

As the world leader in stringent, real-time censorship of electronic communications, China appears strongly placed to block the contagion from the Arab world reaching its shores.

External factors are especially important in small or internally weak countries. Nothing illustrates this better than Bahrain: The House of Saud sent forces into that nation under the Gulf Cooperation Council banner to crush peaceful protests, yet it is civil war-torn Libya that became the target of an international military attack.

The blunt fact is that no nation has contributed more to the spread of global jihad than Saudi Arabia. Indeed, this terror-bankrolling state’s military intervention to prop up the Bahraini regime parallels the 1979 Soviet intervention to bolster a besieged Afghan regime in Kabul — an invasion that led to the multibillion-dollar, CIA-scripted arming of Afghan rebels and the consequent rise of transnational Islamic terrorists, including al-Qaida.

Yet, as the CIA conducts covert operations in Libya to aid rebels, Washington is in danger of coming full circle and spurring the rise of a jihadist haven at Europe’s southern gates.

The broadening of the Libya intervention from a limited, humanitarian mission to an all-out assault on the Libyan military suggests that this war is really about ensuring that the Arab world does not slip out of Western control. The intervention has seemingly been driven by a cold geopolitical calculation: to bottle up or eliminate Moammar Gadhafi so that his regime doesn’t exploit the political vacuum in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia.

Yet few have examined the costs the free world is made to pay — in the form of rising Islamic extremism and terrorism — for the overpowering U.S. intent to have only puppet Arab regimes, an objective that has fostered an alliance with inimical Wahhabi forces.

At a time when America needs comprehensive domestic renewal, it has slid — under a president who won a Nobel peace prize in his first year in office — into a third war when the other two wars already carry an aggregate $150 billion annual price tag. A quick military victory in Libya is what President Barack Obama badly needs to reverse his declining popularity at home and win re-election.

But even if the Gadhafi regime collapses quickly under the mounting military attacks, re-creating a unified, stable Libya free of Islamist groups may prove difficult. Saddam Hussein’s ouster by the invading U.S. forces did not yield the desired results. Instead, a once-stable, secular Iraq has been destabilized, radicalized and effectively partitioned.

With Libya set to become Obama’s Iraq, a plausible scenario there is a protracted stalemate, coupled with a tribally partitioned country. The paradox is that while aiding Libyan contras even at the risk of creating another Afghanistan, the U.S. is desperately seeking a deal with medieval forces — the Taliban — to stave off certain defeat in the decade-long Afghan war.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently rebuked allies for effectively abandoning the Afghan war. Why blame allies when the U.S. itself has abandoned the goal of victory and now seeks only a face-saving exit? And even as the U.S. fires hundreds of missiles at Libyan targets, its policy on Pakistan — the main sanctuary for transnational terrorists — is unraveling fast, with Washington clueless on how to stem the rising tide of anti-Americanism in a country that is now its largest aid recipient.

In fact, with popular revolts sweeping much of the Arab world, the White House has concluded that the Arab monarchs are likely to survive but the Arab presidents are more likely to fall and, therefore, it is OK for the U.S. to continue to coddle tyrannical kings.

The effort to draw specious distinctions between “good” or valuable despots and “bad” or discardable despots is redolent of the manner in which the arming of “good” contras has exacted heavy international costs.

The resort to different standards and practices in the name of promoting human freedom, unfortunately, sends the message that democratic empowerment in any society is possible only if it is in the great powers’ geopolitical interest. This also plays into the hands of the world’s largest, oldest and most-powerful autocracy, China, which has long accused the West of using promotion of democracy as a geopolitical tool.

More fundamentally, the issue is whether there should be a rules-based international order or an order pivoted on military might and driven by the narrow interests of the most powerful.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of “Asian Juggernaut” (Harper Paperbacks) and “Water: Asia’s New Battlefield” (Georgetown University Press, forthcoming).

The Japan Times: Thursday, April 7, 2011