Monthly Archives: September 2013

Southern Asia: A unique nuclear triangle

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Brahma Chellaney

Politics and Strategy: The Survival Editors’ Blog

In the two decades since I published an essay in Survival on South Asian nuclearization, one of my conclusions has been proven right, but another wrong. The South Asian nuclear genie remains uncontrolled, as I anticipated. But contrary to my doubt then, India and Pakistan have completed the transition from covert to overt capabilities by conducting nuclear-explosive tests, adopting a nuclear doctrine and deploying nuclear weapons. More strangely, Pakistan now boasts the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal. Indeed, according to several international estimates, its arsenal of nuclear warheads is larger than that of India, which, with China to its north, faces two closely aligned nuclear-armed neighbours.

India’s recent test launch of the Agni V ballistic missile, which can reach Beijing, served as a fresh reminder that the Indian nuclear-deterrence programme is primarily focused on China, with Pakistan remaining subordinate in nuclear planning. To be sure, it was the Sino-Pakistani nuclear nexus — cemented by transfers of Chinese nuclear and missile technology to Islamabad — that propelled India to shed its posture of nuclear ambiguity and go overtly nuclear in 1998. Since then, China’s rapidly accumulating military and economic power, and its increasing assertiveness on territorial disputes, have increased the importance of the nuclear deterrent for India. Given its retaliation-only posture, India has focused its attention in the past decade on erecting a triad of land-based, air-deliverable and submarine-based nuclear capabilities that can survive an enemy first strike.

Strikingly, neither India’s economic rise nor its graduated action to put in place a ‘small but credible’ nuclear force is seen internationally as a threat, unlike the deep concerns that China’s ascent continues to generate. A 2008 civilian nuclear deal between the United States and India, in fact, has come to symbolise their new strategic partnership. International proliferation-related concern instead has focused on Pakistan’s rapid expansion of its nuclear arsenal that has put it on a path to overtake Britain as the world’s fifth-largest nuclear-weapons power. Unstable Pakistan is heavily dependent on foreign aid, yet it has ramped up production of bomb-grade materials.

Nuclear weapons have not prevented Pakistan’s slide into a jihadist dungeon. Given its military’s sponsorship of jihad under the nuclear umbrella and the jihadist infiltration of the armed forces, the biggest international concern relates to the safety of Pakistani nuclear warheads and fissile materials. Compounding this concern is the fact that Pakistan’s military, intelligence and nuclear establishments remain outside civilian oversight. Such concern, along with major gaps in American intelligence about Pakistan’s weapons of mass destruction, has made that country a principal target of US ‘black budget’ surveillance, according to recent revelations. Yet the only plausible scenario of Pakistani nukes falling into Islamist hands is an intra-military struggle in which the jihadists within the armed forces gain ascendancy.

Southern Asia remains the only region in the world where three contiguous neighbours, sharing disputed land frontiers, form a nuclear triangle that pits two of them against the third party. The regional intersection of nuclear issues, terrorism, territorial disputes, competition over natural resources and nationalism creates complex and dangerous challenges. This region will continue to serve as a reminder that any progress in an inter-state context on nuclear issues, including nuclear confidence-building measures, cannot happen independently of the broader geopolitics.

Brahma Chellaney is a Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research. His article,‘The Challenge of Nuclear Arms Control in South Asia’, appeared in Survival, 35:3 (1993).

America’s Islamist Allies of Convenience

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By Brahma Chellaney, A Project Syndicate column

In just one decade, the United States has intervened militarily in three Muslim-majority countries and overthrown their governments. Now the same coalition of American liberal interventionists and neoconservatives that promoted those wars is pushing for punitive airstrikes in Syria without reflecting on how US policy has ended up strengthening Islamists and fostering anti-Americanism. Indeed, the last “humanitarian intervention” has clearly backfired, turning Libya into a breeding ground for transnational militants.

As the intense US debate about President Barack Obama’s proposed use of military force highlights, the attack-Syria push is not about upholding America’s national interest. Rather, the desire to protect US “credibility” has become the last refuge of those seeking yet another war in the wider Middle East.

If “credibility” were purged from the debate and the focus placed squarely on advancing long-term US interests, it would become apparent that an attack on Syria might not yield even temporary geopolitical gains. Beyond the short term, it would unleash major unintended consequences, potentially including an Iraq-style “soft” partition of Syria and the creation of a haven for extremists stretching across much of Islamist-controlled northern Syria and into the Sunni areas of Iraq.

Indeed, an attack would most likely increase America’s reliance on unsavory Islamist rulers in countries ranging from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Some Arab monarchs have pledged to bankroll the U.S. attack — an investment that they would easily recover, given that the war talk has already increased oil prices.

Al Qaeda-type groups already have gained ground in the Middle East and North Africa as an unintended byproduct of US policies, creating fertile conditions for stepped-up international terrorism in the coming years. The US invasion and occupation of Iraq, for example, created a major opening for Al Qaeda, whose affiliates now represent the Sunni struggle against the Shia-dominated government.

Likewise, regime change in Libya aided the rise of Al Qaeda-linked militants, leading to the killing in Benghazi of the US ambassador. A system based on sharia (Islamic law) has been imposed, human-rights abuses are legion, and cross-border movement of weapons and militants has undermined the security of Libya’s neighbors.

Meanwhile, America’s support for the regimes in Yemen and Saudi Arabia has contributed to the rise of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In parts of southern Yemen, an Al Qaeda affiliate, Ansar al-Sharia, functions as a de facto government.

In Syria, where sizable chunks of territory are already under Islamist control and the pro-Al Qaeda Al Nusra Front overshadows the US-backed Free Syrian Army, the Obama administration is staring at the bitter harvest of its previous policy choices. Airstrikes now would merely make matters worse by undercutting the FSA’s grassroots legitimacy and aiding Islamist forces.

Farther east, the US wants an “honorable” exit from Afghanistan — the longest war in its history — through a peace deal with the Taliban, its main battlefield opponent. In seeking to co-opt the Taliban — an effort that has resulted in the Taliban establishing what amounts to a diplomatic mission in Doha, Qatar — the US is bestowing legitimacy on a thuggish militia that enforces medieval practices in the areas under its control.

America’s dalliances with Islamist-leaning political forces — and governments — have been guided by the notion that the cloak of Islam helps to protect the credibility of leaders who might otherwise be seen as foreign puppets. That simply will not work, even in the short term. On the contrary, until the Egyptian army removed him from the presidency, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi was coming to be seen by many as America’s man in Cairo.

In the long term, the US will gain nothing — and risk much — by continuing to back oil sheikhdoms that fund Muslim extremist groups and madrasas from the Philippines and India to South Africa and Venezuela. By supporting Islamist rulers, the US is contributing to a trend evident from the Maghreb to the badlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan — Muslims killing Muslims.

American policy has also contributed to a growing conflict between Islamist and secular forces in Muslim countries. This is best illustrated by Turkey, where Obama has ignored Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s heavy-handed efforts to annul free speech and turn himself into a twenty-first-century Sultan.

There and elsewhere, the US, motivated by the larger geopolitical goal of containing Shia Iran and its regional allies, has embraced Sunni rulers steeped in religious and political bigotry, even though they pose a transnational threat to the values of freedom and secularism. Moreover, the clash within Islam is likely to be destabilizing regionally and counterproductive to the interests of the free world.

Against this background, Obama should heed the doctrine proposed in 1991 by General Colin Powell. The Powell doctrine stipulates that the US should use military force only when a vital national-security interest is at stake; the strategic objective is clear and attainable; the benefits are likely to outweigh the costs; adverse consequences can be limited; broad international and domestic support has been obtained; and a plausible exit strategy is in place.

Given the US record since the doctrine was formulated, another criterion should be added: the main beneficiaries of military intervention are not America’s mortal enemies.

(c) Project Syndicate, 2013.

Chemical Weapons: Fact and Fiction

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Chemical arms, a poor nation’s deterrent, are far less effective than modern conventional weapons

Brahma Chellaney, The Japan Times, September 13, 2013

U.S. President Barack Obama’s plan to bomb Syria for alleged use of poison gas has raised two questions that remain pertinent despite the proposed international monitoring and eventual destruction of that country’s chemical-weapon arsenal: Is gassing people more inhumane or reprehensible than killing with Tomahawk missiles, drones and other conventional weapons? And are chemical weapons inherently prohibited in international law, just like genocide and slavery?

These questions are also important because Obama’s request to Congress for authorization to attack Syria was not about any specific threat to U.S. or international security. Rather, the planned attack was intended for retribution to save the president’s credibility that he believed was on the line.

Let’s be clear: Chemical weapons — including choking agents like chlorine gas, blister agents such as mustard gas, arsenic- or cyanide-based blood agents, and nerve agents like sarin — are far less effective than modern conventional weapons, which kill with greater precision and lethality.

Technological advances, in fact, have made conventional weapons capable of leaving a greater trail of death than any poison gas. They kill, maim and terrorize in ways not much different than chemical weapons. Some conventional explosives and napalm (a petrochemical incendiary whose use against military targets remains lawful despite the notoriety it gained during the Vietnam War) indeed can cause lingering, painful death.

Chemical weapons have a low kill ratio, which makes them scarcely effective on the battlefield. If anything, they are more effective off the battlefield than on the battlefield. Moreover, their employment often demands favorable weather and geographic conditions. If the military intent were to incapacitate enemy army units without killing them, chemical weapons potentially make for more humane warfare than conventional weapons.

But because they are cheap, easy to manufacture, and serve as a poor nation’s deterrent, chemical arms have fallen out of favor with the powerful, who portray them as “immoral weapons.” To protect their advantage in conventional weapons, great powers have promoted a taboo against chemical-weapon use.

To be sure, chemical arms can become weapons of terror in the hands of extremists, as exemplified by the Aum Shinrikyo cult’s 1995 sarin attack in the Tokyo subway that killed 13 commuters.

Chemical arms have been used by combatants since ancient times, with the oldest archeological evidence of chemical warfare being found, ironically, in modern-day Syria. Before the advent of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons came to be regarded as weapons of mass destruction. Their extensive use in World War I, especially in the form of mustard or chlorine gas, created revulsion and fear of future chemical attacks. However, the use made little difference to the military outcome.

A corpse from the napalm attack on Tokyo

In fact, the total fatalities from the chemical-weapon strikes accounted for much less than one percent of the World War I deaths, and were lower than the toll from a single U.S. napalm attack on Tokyo on March 10, 1945. At least 100,000 Japanese died on that day when some 300 B-29 bombers dropped 1,700 tons of incendiary bombs — the deadliest air raid of World War II.

Against this background, why do the hundreds allegedly killed by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in an August 21 sarin attack count for more than the estimated 100,000 slain in Syria’s grinding civil war, including many killed by insurgents aided by the U.S. and its repressive Islamist allies, such as the rulers of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey? Why is it any worse to be killed by sarin than to be decapitated by insurgents, a growing number of whom hew to al-Qaeda ideology?

The Obama administration’s visceral, bomb-Syria stand has obscured such questions.

International efforts since the late 19th century to outlaw chemical weapons have been hampered by repeated national breaches of legal obligations. The 1899 Hague Convention prohibited the use of projectiles with the “sole object” of diffusing “asphyxiating or deleterious gases” — a ban that was openly flouted in World War I. The violations spawned the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning the use of poison gas as a weapon — a still-binding prohibition breached with impunity by several parties.

The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) went further and outlawed the production, stockpile, transfer and use of chemical weapons. Some countries have not signed or ratified it, including Syria, Israel, North Korea, Egypt and Myanmar. Some parties strongly suspected of possessing chemical weapons, including China and Pakistan, did not declare any stockpile. By declaring former production facilities, China, however, tacitly admitted that it had built chemical weapons and destroyed them before ratifying the CWC.

Of the seven declared possessor states under the CWC, the largest arsenals are held by the U.S. and Russia, which have both missed the convention’s final extended deadline of 2012 for the destruction of all stockpiles. What impact will this contravention have on the CWC’s integrity?

Only India, South Korea and Albania among the seven declared possessor states verifiably eliminated their stockpiles by the initial deadline of March 2009. The U.S. says its stockpile destruction will not finish before 2023, more than a decade after the extended cut-off date.

When the U.S. sprayed 76 million liters of Agent Orange, a toxic defoliant, during the Vietnam War, it was not a party to the Geneva Protocol, which it embraced soon after that war ended.

But America’s use of white phosphorus as an incendiary weapon and direct tool of warfare during the 2004 siege of Falluja city in occupied Iraq raised a troubling question about its compliance with international obligations. Studies have reported a sharp rise in cancer, leukemia and congenital birth defects in Fallujah in the years since.

White phosphorous, like other chemicals not listed in the CWC schedules, can be legally employed for noncombat purposes (for example, as a flare to illuminate the battlefield or to produce smoke to disguise troop movements) but not “as a method of warfare” relying on its “toxic properties.”

Before Iraqi President Saddam Hussein fell out of favor with Washington, the Reagan administration acquiesced in his regime’s gassing of Iranian troops during the protracted Iraq-Iran war.

Declassified CIA papers and interviews with former officials, as highlighted by the journal Foreign Policy recently, confirm what has long been known — that Washington not only turned a blind eye to Iraq’s repeated use of sarin and mustard gas from 1983 to 1988, but also facilitated the gassing of Iranian troops by providing Saddam Hussein with satellite reconnaissance data on location of Iranian units.

It is against this backdrop that Obama — facing both international isolation and congressional defeat — sought to build a legal case to bomb Syria. His task was made uphill by factors extending beyond the varied and often-shifting justifications proffered by his team and his decision to bypass the United Nations.

First, Syria is not a party to the CWC, whose enforcement, in any event, vests with the Security Council. Syria in 1968 did sign the 1925 Geneva Protocol, yet that protocol provides no basis for use of force because it relates to interstate war, not intrastate conflict. Second, in a world in which national stockpiles of chemical arms still exist, few can argue that such weapons are inherently prohibited in international law, regardless of treaties. The “norm” against their use indeed has repeatedly been violated since 1925.

Allegations and counter-allegations of chemical-weapon use in the Syrian civil war have been rife since last year. Several instances of alleged use were reported in the spring of this year, eventually prompting the United Nations to send a team of investigators to Syria in August.

While the inspectors were probing those cases, another instance of alleged use in suburban Damascus on August 21 made international headlines because of a rebel video. Even as the UN inspectors turned to investigating the newest incident, Obama peremptorily declared his intent to punitively bomb Syria.

Why did Obama zoom in on the August 21 incident and ignore the earlier instances? One plausible explanation is that while some of the earlier incidents appeared to point to chemical-weapon use by insurgents, with Syrian army soldiers among the victims, the August 21 victims were all civilians in a rebel-held neighborhood.

Carla del Ponte, a leading member of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, told Swiss TV in May that there were “strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof” that rebels had used sarin. Ms. Del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney-general and prosecutor with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, said: “I was a little bit stupefied by the first indications we got… they were about the use of nerve gas by the opposition.” The comments prompted the commission to issue a statement that stressed — without denying Ms. Del Ponte’s remarks — that it had “not reached conclusive findings.”

Contrast that with the August 21 incident claims, which have been ratcheted up progressively. The British reported “at least 350” civilians were killed in that attack; the Americans then released a much higher but incredulously precise fatality toll of 1,429; immediately thereafter, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry thundered that the world cannot allow Assad to gas “thousands” of his people. The French followed up by claiming the attack involved “massive” use of sarin — an assertion picked up by the White House.

The full truth on the various incidents may never be known. Still, it cannot be discounted that the rebels probably were the first to carry out a chemical-weapon attack in the civil war.

In this light, the Russian proposal to make Syria sign the CWC and have monitors take control of its chemical-weapon armory opens a possible diplomatic solution, including reducing poison-gas-related risks in that country.

It could also bail out an isolated Obama from a predicament of his own making — his insistence that he will break international law to punish Syria for breaching a fanciful international legal tradition.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author, most recently, of “Water, Peace, and War” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013). 

(c) The Japan Times, 2013.

Dicey dalliances with Islamists

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By Brahma Chellaney, The Japan Times

rebels

Syrian rebels prepare to summarily execute captured soldiers.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s insistence on employing air power to punish Syria even if such a war breaches international law and unleashes major unintended consequences is just the latest chapter in a more than two-year U.S. policy whose calculations have gone wrong in backing jihad against Syrian President Bashar Assad’s dictatorial rule. Military strikes could compound Obama’s policy missteps, including inadvertently strengthening the hands of gun-toting Islamists.

Before an internal insurrection in 2011 turned Syria into a proxy battleground for regional and global powers, the country probably was the most liberal, secular Muslim state in the arc of Islam. Today, it is a broken state — its social fabric in tatters, its physical infrastructure largely wrecked, and its cities pummeled daily by urban warfare, with much of the northern region under the sway of hardline Islamist groups, especially the Al Nusra Front.

As also happened in Afghanistan from the 1980s and more recently in Libya, the spirit of jihad the United States helped instill in Syria to overthrow Assad — along with the supply of petrodollar-funded Western arms through Turkey and Jordan — has spawned hardcore Islamist militants wedded to the al-Qaida ideology. Al Nusra now overshadows the Free Syrian Army, established with help from the U.S. and the region’s old colonial powers, Britain and France.

In another major setback for Obama’s policy, the once-tottering Assad regime has not only survived but consolidated its hold in Damascus and militarily gained the upper hand across much of the central and southern regions, with rebel hold limited to some pockets, including in suburban Damascus.

The setbacks have compelled Obama to fundamentally alter his goals. From aiming to topple the Assad regime — a prospect that seemed so likely until last year that CIA teams in Turkey extended their rebel-support operations to northern Syria before this region came under the sway of the pro-al-Qaida groups — Obama has swung to seeking a military stalemate in Syria.

Obama believes a protracted stalemate, despite its high humanitarian cost, would eventually open up a possible negotiated settlement. Because regime forces currently have the upper hand against the rebels, he wants to level the playing field by degrading their capabilities through concentrated air strikes.

The visceral response to the alleged poison-gas attack — despite the relatively small number of fatalities from it compared with the death toll in the continuing civil war — shows that the chemical-weapon issue is just a fig leaf for Obama’s Mission Stalemate, a scenario that will keep regime and rebel forces at each other’s throats, thereby ensuring the Assad government’s continual bleed and bottling up the independent Islamist groups. Given that Obama’s missteps has left him with only bad options on Syria, he has settled for ensuring a military stalemate where Arabs kill Arabs, with the rebel weapons for killing paid for by Arab sheiks.

The resolve to correct the military balance in Syria by wiping out much of the air capability of the ascendant government forces, however, will exact a heavy price regionally.

The U.S. will not be able to control the developments its attack triggers. Indeed, the larger fallout will likely increase America’s reliance on unsavory Islamist rulers in countries ranging from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. There is also the distinct prospect of an al-Qaida haven stretching across northern Syria and into Iraq.

The spread of Muslim radicalism across large parts of the world has created a fertile ground for greater international terrorism. As an unintended byproduct of U.S. policies in support of or against regimes, al-Qaida type groups have gained ground in the Middle East and North Africa.

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq created a major opening for al-Qaida, whose affiliates now represent the Sunni struggle against Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government. Grisly bombings have become commonplace.

Regime change in Libya has brought chaos and the rise of al-Qaida, leading to the Benghazi killing of the U.S. ambassador. It has also exacerbated human-rights abuses and humanitarian suffering, imposed a system based on Shariah law, and promoted cross-border movement of weapons and militants to haunt neighbors’ security.

America’s propping up of the regimes in Yemen and Saudi Arabia has contributed to the rise of the group, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. Meanwhile, by allowing the Taliban to open a de facto diplomatic mission in Doha, Qatar, Obama has signaled U.S. desperation to cut a deal with this thuggish, Pakistan-backed Afghan militia that enforces medieval Islamic practices in the areas it controls.

So what can be done? The lesson U.S. policymakers must heed is to take the long-range view and not be guided by narrow geopolitical considerations that involuntarily strengthen Islamists.

Unfortunately, U.S. policy’s dalliance with Islamist-leaning rulers has long been guided by the consideration that the cloak of Islam helps to protect the credibility of leaders who might otherwise be seen by their public as foreign puppets.

Washington must now stop condoning the rulers of the oil sheikdoms for their alliance with radical clerics and for exporting militant Islam. It must also cease providing political succor to Islamists elsewhere. Until the military ousted him, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi was America’s man in Cairo.

By supporting Islamist rulers, Washington — even if unintentionally — has promoted a growing conflict between Islamist and secular forces in Muslim countries, best illustrated by Turkey, which was wracked by unprecedented anti-government protests this summer. Obama has mollycoddled Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan by ignoring his heavy-handed efforts to annul secularism and free speech, and turn himself into a 21st-century sultan.

Erdogan, who as Istanbul’s mayor declared that “our only goal is an Islamic state,” has jailed more journalists than any other country, including China, and thrown one in five of Turkey’s generals and half of its admirals in jail since becoming prime minister in 2003. Today, he is Obama’s most hawkish ally against Assad.

Motivated by the larger geopolitical goal of containing Shiite Iran and its regional allies, U.S. policy has myopically embraced Sunni rulers steeped in religious and political bigotry, even though they pose a transnational threat to the values of freedom and secularism. Arab monarchs have continued to fund Muslim extremist groups and madrassas (Islamic schools) in other countries — from the Philippines and India to South Africa and Venezuela.

U.S.-British-French policies in the arc of Islam, even if by accident, are contributing to an internally driven trend evident from the Maghreb to the Afghanistan-Pakistan belt — Muslims killing Muslims. This trend, of course, has been principally aided by the export of Wahhabi Islam by the sheiks in Riyadh, Doha, Abu Dhabi and elsewhere, and by the consequent rise of Islamist groups. These policies have averted the feared clash between civilizations, yet they have been a factor in the ongoing clash within a civilization. The effects of this clash are likely to be destabilizing regionally and counterproductive to the interests of the free world.

Against this background, Obama would do well to heed tea party icon Sarah Palin’s advice on Syria, “Let Allah sort it out” — unless Obama believes Allah has chosen him to do that.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author, most recently, of “Water, Peace, and War” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).

(c) The Japan Times, 2013.