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Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

Qualitative reordering of Asian power

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Growing challenges to Asian stability

Caught between China and the U.S., regional powers face tough strategic choices
 
By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
The Japan Times
 
U.S. President-elect Barack Obama takes office at a time when a fundamental and qualitative reordering of power is under way in the Asia-Pacific, with tectonic shifts challenging strategic stability. The impact of such shifts on U.S. foreign policy is bound to be accentuated by America’s growing challenges, including a deep economic recession at home and the two separate wars being waged overseas.
 
Such challenges dictate greater U.S.-China cooperation to ensure continued large Chinese capital inflows, and Beijing’s political support on contentious issues ranging from North Korea and Myanmar to Pakistan and Iran. Such calculations, in turn, are certain to have a bearing on America’s dual role in Asia — "as a resident power and as the straddle power across the Asia-Pacific," to quote Robert Gates, who is to stay on as defense secretary in the Obama administration. According to Gates, the "next U.S. administration seems certain to continue the overlapping, long-standing security partnerships" in Asia but "will also inherit an agenda of worrying issues."
 
Asia has come a long way since the creation of two Koreas, two Chinas, two Vietnams and India’s partition. It has risen dramatically as the world’s main creditor and economic locomotive. The ongoing global power shifts indeed are primarily linked to Asia’s phenomenal economic rise, the speed and scale of which has no parallel in world history. How fast Asia has come can be gauged from the 1968 book, "Asian Drama: An Inquiry Into the Poverty of Nations," by Swedish economist and Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal, who bemoaned the manner in which impoverishment, population pressures and resource constraints were weighing down Asia.
 
With the story of endemic poverty turning into a tale of spreading prosperity, today’s Asian drama is very different. Even so, Asia faces major challenges. It has to cope with entrenched territorial and maritime disputes, sharpening competition over scarce resources, improved military capabilities, increasingly fervent nationalism and the spread of religious extremism.
 
Diverse transborder trends — from nuclear proliferation and terrorism to illicit refugee flows and human trafficking — add to the challenges. But Asia is also becoming more interdependent through trade, investment, technology and tourism. The economic renaissance has been accompanied by a growing international recognition of Asia’s soft power as symbolized by its arts, fashion and cuisine.
 
The United States will remain a key player in Asia through its security arrangements and other strategic ties with an array of regional states. Its policies and actions will continue to have an important influence on the strategic calculus of the important Asian actors. However, not since Japan rose to world-power status during the reign of Emperor Meiji in the second half of the 19th century has another non-Western power emerged with such potential to alter the world order as China today. As the latest assessment by the U.S. intelligence community predicts, China stands to more profoundly affect global geopolitics than any other country. China, according to the National Intelligence Council, is "poised to have more impact on the world over the next 20 years than any other country."
 
China’s ascent, however, is dividing Asia, not bringing Asian states closer. Economic powerhouse Japan — whose economy is larger than that of China, India and Russia combined — is intent on shoring up its security and ensuring that Beijing does not call the shots in East Asia. Japan is set to reassert itself in world affairs by shedding decades of pacifism anchored in a U.S.-imposed Constitution.
 
Another key actor in Asian geopolitics, India, is unwilling to cede its leadership role in the Indian Ocean rim region, despite China’s creeping influence in southern Asia through growing transportation, trade, port-building and defense links.
 
Under Obama, America’s main strategic objectives in the Asia-Pacific are unlikely to change. Indeed, the central U.S. interest in the Asia-Pacific remains what it has been since 1898 when America took the Philippines as spoils of the naval war with Spain — the maintenance of a balance of power.
 
During the first half of the Cold War, the U.S. chose to maintain the balance by forging security alliances with Japan and South Korea, and also by keeping forward bases in Asia. By the time the Cold War entered its second phase, America’s "ping-pong diplomacy" led to President Richard Nixon’s historic handshake with Mao Zedong in 1972 in an "opening" designed to reinforce the balance by employing a newly assertive, nuclear-armed China to countervail Soviet power in the Asia-Pacific region.
 
Today, according to the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review Report, America’s interests center on "maintaining a stable balance" in "the East Asian littoral," given the likelihood that "a military competitor with a formidable base will emerge in the region" — an allusion to China.
 
Washington would not want Japan or India to kowtow to a China seeking to supplant the U.S. as the leading force in Asia. But America also would not want to see the rise of a combative India or Japan.
 
For example, an overt Japan-China conflict in the East China Sea over competing maritime and gas-exploration claims would compel Washington to side with Tokyo or risk wrecking the U.S.-Japanese security relationship, centered on U.S. forward-deployment on Japanese soil. America’s interests in Asia actually lie in hedging its future options and balancing the various powers.
 
The emergence of China as a global player with rising heft is not only transforming the geopolitical landscape in the Asia-Pacific, but also spurring greater American reliance on Beijing for financial and political support. In fact, China is becoming America’s banker, with Obama’s mammoth stimulus package to help revive the U.S. economy set to reinforce Washington’s dependence on Chinese capital.
 
The bipartisan support for a massive fiscal stimulus to help prevent the U.S. recession from turning into a depression will result in a larger budget deficit (already crossing $1 trillion) and greater reliance on foreign capital inflows. A creditor-debtor relationship between Washington and Beijing, along with China’s more muscular foreign policy and growing sway over states around its periphery, holds major relevance for America’s traditional allies, principally Japan and Taiwan, and new strategic partners, like India. After all, a banker has greater leverage over a customer than vice versa.
 
In the years ahead, China may not hesitate to assert the leverage over an increasingly indebted America. But such leverage is likely to stay limited. Although it is America’s largest external creditor — with much of its $2 trillion foreign-exchange reserves invested in U.S. dollar-denominated financial instruments — China is locked in a symbiotic or mutually dependent economic relationship with the U.S. It is as much in China’s interest as in America’s to prop up the value of the dollar because if the dollar sinks, the worth of the Chinese dollar-denominated assets would plummet. Also, despite its overflowing coffers, China does not have much room to diversify the foreign investment of its surpluses and savings. For one, the European capital markets remain shallow for a cash-heavy China, with any big induction of Chinese capital likely to have a destabilizing effect. For another, the global oil-price crash crimps China’s diversification ambitions.
 
Had oil prices stayed at more than $100 a barrel, the oil-exporting nations — particularly the oil sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf — would have helped bolster the value of the dollar by channeling their high oil earnings into dollar-denominated assets, thus creating space for China to diversify some of its holdings of U.S. debt.
 
For the same reason, hundreds of billions of dollars of ridiculously cheap Japanese credit continue to slosh around the U.S. financial markets. However, Tokyo has stopped buying U.S. Treasury bills, making Beijing the principal purchaser of such notes. Besides China’s ascent, the political rise of Russia, Japan and India may pick up momentum in the next decade, despite the uncertain demographic future of the first two. China’s rise, however, spotlights the dissimilarities between Asia and Europe. Consider the following:
 
* While Europe has achieved equilibrium between and among its main powers, the situation in Asia threatens to slide toward overt power disequilibrium.
 
* In Europe, the largest state and economy — Germany — does not aspire for dominance. Rather, in respect to the other European powers, it has learned and accepted to be one among equals. In Asia, the situation is the reverse. China does not hide its ambition to gain Asian pre-eminence.
 
* With the exception of Japan, the other Asian economies are at earlier stages of development. That is why most of them are classified as "developing states" or "emerging economies."
 
* Again, with the exception of Japan, most Asian states, in contrast to many European nations, are distinguished by wide and growing income disparities, and social inequalities.
 
* While democracy has become the norm in Europe, that can hardly be said about Asia. In fact, only a small minority of Asian states are truly democratic. The diverse political systems in Asia make it difficult to build common norms and values or an Asian community.

 

Against this background, Obama and his secretary of state-designate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, are likely to continue the work of their predecessors to reinforce America’s existing military relationships in Asia while searching for new allies or partners that can help build an Asian balance of power.

China, too, plays balance-of-power politics in Asia, but its balancing is primarily designed to keep peer rivals like Japan and India bottled up regionally, and to carve out more space for itself vis-a-vis the U.S.

During the Bill Clinton presidency, Washington went out of its way to befriend China, even if such courtship slighted Japan. As Condoleezza Rice put it before joining President George W. Bush’s administration, "Never again should an American president go to Beijing for nine days and refuse to stop in Tokyo or Seoul." Yet Bush is leaving the White House with a solid China-friendly legacy, best illustrated by the manner he ignored the bloody suppression of last March’s Tibetan uprising and showed up at the Beijing Olympics. Obama is sure to continue the 36-year record of U.S. presidents being China-friendly — a certainty underscored by America’s greater need, in the midst of a financial meltdown, for capital from a foreign power already holding 10 percent of its public debt.

From being allies of convenience in the second half of the Cold War, the U.S. and China have gradually emerged as partners tied by interdependence. But as U.S.-China ties acquire a wider and deeper base in the coming years, the strains in some of America’s existing military or strategic partnerships would become pronounced.

While South Korea’s importance in the U.S.-led hub-and-spoke alliance system will continue to decline, doubts are bound to grow in Japan and Taiwan over the reliability of Washington’s commitment to their security.

In the near term, rising Chinese assertiveness has had the unintended effect of persuading Japan to jettison its doubts about U.S. security commitments and to reinvigorate its military relationship with Washington. In the long run, however, Tokyo is unlikely to remain comfortable with its security dependency on the U.S.

Some recent U.S. actions — including the failure to consult with Tokyo before removing North Korea from the U.S. list of terrorism-sponsoring states and the refusal to sell Japan the next-generation F-22 Raptor fighter jets — are likely to sow further doubts among the Japanese.

Despite a recent $6.46 billion arms package for Taiwan — which prompted Beijing to break off military contacts with the U.S. — Washington has declined to sell Taipei Aegis ships, diesel-powered submarines and UH-60 Black Hawk attack helicopters. But now that China has decided to send ships to the Gulf of Aden in support of the multinational antipiracy operations there, the head of the U.S. Pacific Command hopes that move would be "the springboard for resumption" of military contacts.

The U.S. has worked hard in recent years to co-opt India in a "soft alliance" shorn of treaty obligations. Yet, conflicting Indo-U.S. expectations and interests often surface. Take the controversial nuclear deal, which was driven by American nonproliferation considerations but peddled by Indian neocons and government managers as a far-reaching strategic initiative to help to counter China’s growing might and assertiveness.

Just as India has found itself alone in the fight against transnational terrorism, with U.S. diplomacy more focused on averting Indo-Pakistan conflict than in the dismantlement of the India-directed Pakistani terrorist infrastructure, New Delhi is unlikely to get much comfort on China from American policy. In that light, the Indian ardor in recent years for closer defense ties with the U.S. is likely to gradually give way to reality at a time when India confronts growing Chinese military assertiveness along the disputed Himalayan frontier and an emerging Chinese threat from the oceans.

By contrast, Australia’s growing cozy relationship with distant China, especially under Sinophile Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, meshes well with the likely trajectory of U.S.-China ties. What Canberra pursues today — to balance its relations with Tokyo and Beijing — Washington is likely to begin doing before long.

Despite increasing interdependence, the U.S.-China relationship is likely to remain uneasy, although neither side would seek overt competition or confrontation. Washington is expected to remain more critical of Moscow than of Beijing, including on a subject where China’s record is egregious — human rights.

For the U.S., China’s rising power helps validate American forward military deployments in the Asian theater. It also helps America to keep existing allies and search for new ones. The China factor is coming in handy for Washington to enlarge its strategic footprints in Asia.

Caught between an increasingly assertive China, and an America focused on advancing its economic and political interests in Asia, other Asian powers are likely to face tough security choices in the coming years. The recent landmark Japan-India security agreement signals that major changes in the Asian strategic scene are in the offing.

Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.
 
The Japan Times: Thursday, Jan. 1, 2009
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Chinese navy aims to challenge India’s preeminence in Indian Ocean

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Dragon in India’s backyard

 

In its first deployment of battle-ready warships outside the Pacific, China is extending its maritime role to the Indian Ocean rim under the anti-piracy banner, thereby challenging India’s long-standing dominance there

 

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, December 31, 2008

 

While India has remained fixated on the “Jihadistan” to its west — with an indecisive Indian leadership’s addiction to empty rhetoric allowing an open-and-shut case against Pakistan over the Mumbai terrorist assaults to go by — Communist China has made its first-ever deployment of a naval task force beyond the Pacific by dispatching battle-ready warships to India’s backyard. The task force comprising two destroyers and a supply ship is starting escorts and patrols along the Indian Ocean rim in the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden.

 

This move, under the banner of internationalism, aims to extend China’s maritime role and presence far from its shores while demonstrating, under United Nations rules of engagement, a capability to conduct complex operations in distant waters where Indian, US, Iranian and Russian navies are already active. Earlier, the anti-piracy plank also came handy to Beijing to agree to joint patrols with Pakistan in the Arabian Sea and extend cooperation to ASEAN.

 

Significantly, Beijing is seeking to chip away at India’s maritime pre-eminence in the Indian Ocean — a theatre critical to fashioning a Sino-centric Asia, if China can assert naval power there to protect its commercial interests and to expand its influence over the regional waterways and states. As the state-run China Daily put it, quoting a military analyst, a “key goal” in battling pirates in Indian Ocean waters off Somalia “is to register the presence of the Chinese navy”.

 

Undergirding the deployment’s larger geopolitical motives was a separate announcement that China is “seriously considering” adding a first aircraft carrier to its navy fleet because, as a military spokesperson put it, aircraft carriers are “a reflection of a nation’s comprehensive power”. This is just the latest indication of China’s commitment to a blue-water navy. In the past, China bought four carriers (three ex-Soviet and one Australian) but, strangely, it inducted none in its fleet, preferring instead to learn from their design.

 

With President Hu Jintao publicly pressing for rapid naval modernization and the 2006 defence White Paper disclosing that “the navy aims to gradually extend its strategic depth”, naval expansion and greater missile prowess are now at the core of China’s force modernization. Since 2000 alone, China has built at least 60 warships. Its navy now has a fleet of 860 vessels, including at least 60 submarines.

 

China’s naval objectives are manifold, including to:

 

·                           safeguard its vast sea frontiers and a 877,020-square-kilometre exclusive economic zone (EEZ);

 

·                           help shift the balance of power in Asia in its favour;

 

·                           strengthen its deterrent capabilities;

 

·                           underpin political, commercial and energy interests through a sea-based power projection force capability;

 

·                           prevent the rise of peer competition from Japan and India, even as it seeks to position itself as a militarily strong and economically dynamic peer competitor to the US;

 

·                           thwart efforts by an outside power to set up new military bases or tie-ups around China’s periphery; and

 

·                           control vital sea-lanes of communication between the Indian and Pacific Oceans through a “string of pearls” strategy.

 

Rising naval power arms China with the heft to pursue mercantilist efforts to lock up long-term energy supplies, assert control over transport routes, and assemble a “string of pearls” in the form of listening posts and special naval-access arrangements along the great trade arteries. As India’s navy chief, Admiral Suresh Mehta, has said, “Each pearl in the string is a link in a chain of the Chinese maritime presence”.

 

In fact, a 2003 article in the Liberation Army Daily had asserted that the contiguous corridor from the Taiwan Straits to the Indian Ocean’s western rim constitutes China’s rightful offshore-defence perimeter. And a recent paper published by the Chinese Institute for International Strategic Studies points to the inevitability of Beijing setting up naval bases overseas, including in the Indian Ocean rim.

 

To the east, a rising frequency of Chinese naval patrols indicates that Beijing is seeking to extend its strategic perimeter deep into the Pacific Ocean. What is being subtly suggested by Chinese analysts today — that the Western Pacific is China’s maritime zone of influence — could set the stage for an intensifying strategic competition with another naval power, Japan.

 

Just as China’s land-combat strategy has evolved from “deep defence” (luring enemy forces into Chinese territory to help garrotte them) to “active defence” (a proactive posture designed to fight the enemy on enemy territory, including through the use of forces stationed in neighbouring lands or seas), a shift in its sea-warfare posture has emerged, with the emphasis on greater reach and depth and expeditionary capability.

 

And just as Beijing has used its energy investments in Central Asia as justification to set up at least two offensively configured, armour-heavy mechanized corps — with Xinjiang as their springboard — to fight deep inside adversarial territory and secure strategic assets, China’s growing oil imports from the Persian Gulf and Africa have come handy to rationalize its growing emphasis on the seas.

 

China is determined to build a blue-water naval force before 2025. Chinese warships inducted in recent years have already been geared for blue-sea fleet operations. As Beijing accelerates its construction of warships and begins to deploy naval assets far from its EEZ, Chinese naval power is set to grow exponentially.

 

China is also planning to deploy a fleet of nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines (known as SSBNs). It has already developed its new Jin-class (Type 094) SSBN prototype, with satellite pictures showing one such submarine berthed at the huge new Chinese naval base at Sanya, on the southern coast of Hainan Island. The Sino-Russian gap in nuclear naval forces is narrowing, but within the next 25 years, China could have more nuclear assets at sea than Russia.

 

Against this background, it is no surprise that the Chinese navy is extending its operations to the Indian Ocean — a crucial international passageway for oil deliveries and other trade. The extending role is also manifest from the projects China has launched in the Indian Ocean rim, including the building of a port at Hambantota in Sri Lanka, the modernization of Bangladesh’s Chittagong port, and the construction of a deep-water commercial port and naval base for Pakistan at Gwadar, situated at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz — the only exit route for Gulf oil. Beijing is eyeing Gwadar as a naval anchor.

 

In addition, the Irrawaddy Corridor between China’s Yunnan province and the Burmese ports on the Bay of Bengal is set to become a key economic and strategic passageway involving road, river, rail and harbour links. Commercial satellite imagery shows that China already operates signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection facility on the Great Coco Island.

 

India, with its enormous strategic depth in the Indian Ocean, is in a position to pursue a sea-denial strategy, if New Delhi were to adopt a more forward-thinking naval policy. Just the way India has come under a terrorist siege from Pakistan-based jihadists by doing little more than adopt defensive measures, it will confront — if it retreats to a defensive position — the Chinese navy in its backyard, completing the Chinese encirclement of the country.

 

To safeguard its long-term strategic interests, India has to start exerting naval power at critical chokepoints. That entails arming the Indian navy with the teeth and authority to guard the various “gates” to the Indian Ocean.

 

(c) The Asian Age

India’s leadership: Terror emboldener

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Words are all we have

 

While Pakistan is guilty of sponsoring terror, India’s leadership is guilty of encouraging terror and making the country an easy prey

 

Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, December 31, 2008

 

On the ninth anniversary of India’s Kandahar capitulation, it is evident that its costs continue to multiply. That cave-in set in motion a seemingly inexorable dual process — making India an easy prey for transnational terrorists, and the further softening of the Indian republic. Today, India has the dubious global distinction of suffering the largest number of terrorism-related casualties. Yet, far from waging its own war on terror, it is more interested in collecting evidence on Pakistan’s complicity while obsessively craving international sympathy as a victim.

 

Such a masochist approach raises troubling questions. Are they no limits to India’s patience in the face of increasingly provocative transnational terrorism? How much further can India be assaulted and terrorized before it finally concludes enough is enough? Or is it that the more terrorism it suffers, the greater becomes its capacity to absorb strikes? The 12/13 Parliament attack was supposed to be India’s 9/11. Now it is the 11/26 Mumbai assaults. That is, before a new set of terrorists again expose the Indian leadership’s cravenness.

 

Strategically, India’s imperative not to brook the latest terrorist assaults but to respond effectively parallels America’s post-9/11 attitude. Non-stop live television coverage of the 67-hour strikes has created not only an upsurge of patriotic revulsion and national unity, but also a propitious international setting for Indian counteraction. The providential capture of one fidayeen attacker alive helped unravel the Pakistani-scripted plot. Yet, having offshored India’s Pakistan policy, the aging leadership is throwing away a golden opportunity that won’t repeat itself.

 

The December 12 Parliament resolution on terrorism thus will go the way the Parliament resolutions of 1962 and 1994 on Chinese and Pakistani territorial aggression did — as mere words. The latest resolution, in any case, is long on rhetoric. The terrorists and their patrons certainly will not be taken in by words that palpably ring hallow by spelling out no action, yet smugly declare India will be “victorious in its fight against the barbaric menace of terrorism”.

 

All talk and no action bleeds India. Punitive military action, of course, is at the top rung of the strategic ladder — a daunting choice tied to good timing so that the adversary is taken unawares and snow-blocked Himalayan mountain-passes bar China from opening another front. But Prime Minister Manmohan Singh thus far has not taken the smallest of small steps against the terrorists’ haven, Pakistan. By shying away from invoking the mildest diplomatic or economic sanctions as a token expression of India’s outrage, he has capped India’s response at impotent fury. Instead, Singh bafflingly expects — and indeed urges — the international community to deal “sternly and effectively with the epicentre of terrorism”.

 

Israel’s heavy response to however small a provocation and India’s non-response to frontal attacks on its security and honour make these countries polar-opposites. Still, as the international reaction to Mumbai and Gaza illustrates, it is the meek that get counselled while the intrepid wage action unhindered.

 

While Atal Bihari Vajpayee took India on a roller-coaster ride with an ever-shifting policy on Pakistan and terror, under Singh the chickens have come home to roost. Vajpayee’s blunders — of which Kandahar remains a bleeding shame — have been more than matched by Singh’s bungles, including his surprise action on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 in declaring the sponsor of terror, Pakistan, as a victim of terror like India. To consummate that policy somersault, he established a still-existing joint anti-terror mechanism — a case of unforgettable naïveté, akin to police setting up joint investigations with the mafia.

 

The advent of fidayeen attacks happened under Vajpayee. The manner Vajpayee fought the Kargil War — entirely on Indian territory, on the enemy’s terms — emboldened the invading state to launch fidayeen terrorism no sooner than that conflict had started winding down. Kargil was followed by Kandahar, after which terrorism morphed from hit-and-run strikes to daring assaults on military camps, major religious sites and national emblems of power. But under Singh, suicide attacks have qualitatively escalated to such an extent that India has come under a terrorist siege.

 

Singh now has his own buddy in place of the home minister who was eased out as a scapegoat. Singh expects P. Chidambaram to bring down terrorism the way he brought stock prices crashing down. The new incumbent has told Parliament: “We have to take hard decisions”. But since Chidambaram has announced no hard decision thus far, citizens may wonder whether he too is looking to the international community.

 

Let’s be clear: Had India’s leaders not ignored institutionalized policymaking in favour of an ad hoc, personality-driven approach, not repeated the very mistakes of their predecessors and not insisted on learning on the job, the terrorism problem would not have become so acute. In the manner a fish rots from the head down, the rot in India is at the leadership level.

 

Just the way Pakistan goes through the motions of cracking down on its terror groups, New Delhi responds to each terrorist strike in a perfunctory or mechanical way, without commitment or resolve. And just as Pakistan has a track record of easing up on its terror groups when the spotlight is off, India’s leaders (dubbed “state non-actors”) go back to business as usual no sooner than a terrorist attack has begun to fade from public attention.

 

While Pakistan is guilty of sponsoring terror, India’s leadership is guilty of encouraging terror and making the country an easy prey. Make no mistake: If Pakistan is to dismantle its state-reared terror complex, India’s leaders will have to first dismantle their terror-emboldening outlook.

 

(c) Hindustan Times.

Repeating past mistakes of U.S. policy

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New Afghan strategy will compound U.S. problem

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Japan Times

Even before U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has been sworn in, the contours of his new strategy on Afghanistan have become known: A "surge" of U.S. forces, not to militarily rout the Taliban but to strike a political deal with the enemy from a position of strength.

Put simply, the United States intends to pursue in Afghanistan what it has done in Iraq, where it used a surge largely as a show of force to buy off Sunni tribal leaders and other local chieftains.

Linking Afghanistan, Pakistan and India together in the same security equation, Obama has made known a dual strategy of outwitting the Taliban while ensuring Indo-Pakistan peace, even if it means the Pakistan-based masterminds of the recent 67-hour Mumbai terrorist attacks are not brought to justice.

This strategy is likely to make things more difficult for Indian security, both by reinforcing U.S. dependence on the Pakistani military (more than three-quarters of all NATO supplies for the war in landlocked Afghanistan are transported through Pakistan) and by seeking to co-opt the Taliban behind the cover of a surge of U.S. forces.

In keeping with Obama’s pledge during the presidential election campaign to send more American combat brigades to Afghanistan, Adm. Michael Mullen, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, has announced a near-doubling of U.S. troops there by summer. There already are about 33,000 U.S. troops and 35,000 allied forces in Afghanistan.

At issue, however, is not the number of forces (the Soviets couldn’t tame Afghanistan even with more than 100,000 troops), but the strategy. Obama has expressed confidence in the new Centcom commander, Gen. David Petraeus, who is openly looking for ways to win over local commanders and warlords — the mainstay of the Taliban. Petraeus wants to explore truces and alliances with local tribal chieftains and guerrilla leaders to take them off the battlefield.

That is precisely what Petraeus did as the U.S. military commander in Iraq during the surge, and it is a strategy whose extension to Afghanistan has the full backing of Robert Gates, staying on as defense secretary under Obama. The "surge first, then negotiate" plan is to build up security in Afghan cities with new U.S. troop arrivals before initiating talks with the Taliban.

For the talks to be successful, the U.S. intends to squeeze the Taliban first, including by taking another page from its experiment in Iraq (where more than 100,000 Sunni gunmen have been pressed into government service) and setting up lightly trained local militias in every provincial district in Afghanistan. The move turns a blind eye to the danger that such militias could become a law unto themselves, terrorizing local populations.

If a resurgent Taliban is now on the offensive, with 2008 proving to be the deadliest year for U.S. forces, it is primarily because of two reasons: the sustenance the Taliban still draws from Pakistan; and a growing Pashtun backlash against the seven-year-old presence of foreign forces on Afghan soil.

A U.S. surge will not intimidate local Taliban commanders and tribal chieftains to negotiate peace deals, especially when some countries with forces in Afghanistan are exhibiting war fatigue and a desire to pull out troops. If anything, the pressure would be on the Obama administration to show quick results at a time when Afghan popular support for the war is ebbing.

Indeed, it will be naive to expect an Iraq-style surge-and-bribe experiment to work in Afghanistan, whose mountainous terrain, myriad and splintered tribes, patterns of shifting tribal and ethnic loyalties, special status as the global hub of poppy trade and a history of internecine civil conflict set it apart from any other Muslim country. In such a land with a long tradition of humbling foreign armies, payoffs won’t buy peace. Yet Petraeus wants to devise a 21st-century version of a divide-and-conquer imperial strategy.

If there is any certainty, it is that the Petraeus plan will help the already- entrenched Taliban sharpen its claws. However, to help justify "surge and bribe," a specious distinction is being drawn between al-Qaida and the Taliban to portray the former as evil and the latter as a different force with whom a compromise ought to be pursued.

The blunt fact is that al-Qaida and the Pakistani military-reared organizations like the Taliban, Laskar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad now constitute a difficult-to-separate mix of jihad-spouting soul mates with safe havens in Pakistan. A deal with any one such group will only strengthen the global-jihad syndicate, plus the Pakistani military establishment.

In that light, the surge-and-bribe strategy should be viewed as a shortsighted approach intent on repeating the very mistakes of American policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past three decades that have come to haunt U.S. security and that of the rest of the free world.

If America is to reclaim the global fight against terror, it will need to face up to the lessons from its past policies that gave rise to Frankensteins like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar and to "the state within the Pakistani state" — the directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, made powerful in the 1980s as a conduit of covert U.S. aid for anti-Soviet Afghan guerrillas.

The primary lesson is to keep the focus on long-term interests and not be carried away by political expediency. Yet again, Washington is itching to give primacy to near-term considerations.

Even if — in the best-case scenario — the Obama administration managed to bring down violence in Afghanistan by cutting deals, the Taliban would remain intact as a fighting force, with active ties to the Pakistani military. Such a tactical gain would exact serious long-terms costs on regional and international security.

In seeking such short-term success, the Obama team is falling prey to a long-standing U.S. policy weakness: the pursuit of narrow objectives without much regard for regional security or the interests of friends. Why ignore the interests of new strategic partner India, which already is bearing the brunt of the blow-back from past failed U.S. policies in the Afghanistan-Pakistan belt?

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is a regular contributor to The Japan Times.
 
The Japan Times: Monday, Dec. 29, 2008
(C) All rights reserved

Why not lend Pakistan a helping hand to self-destruct?

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Explore other options

 

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, December 25, 2008  

 

Fundamentalism, extremism and militarism have eaten into the vitals of Pakistan to the extent that it has become a de facto failed nation by Westphalian standards, with the tail (the military establishment) wagging the dog (the state) and with military-reared terror groups and the Taliban operating with impunity. The country’s president, with no control over the national-security apparatus, may be excused for making conflicting and confusing statements since the 67-hour Mumbai terrorist assaults, for he is little more than the mayor of Islamabad, albeit with the pomp and pageantry befitting a head of state. But the military establishment still fomenting terrorism across Pakistan’s borders with India and Afghanistan can hardly be excused. It cannot escape culpability in acts of terror by whipping up war hysteria at home.

 

It is the terrorist sanctuaries deep inside Pakistan, not just on its borders, that threaten world security, with terror groups enjoying a cozy relationship with “the state within the state” — the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). That may outwardly convey that it is incumbent on the international community to bring the Pakistani military, especially the ISI, to heel or risk the further spread of the scourge of terrorism.

 

Yet, unless New Delhi is willing to take the lead on countering Pakistan-sponsored terrorism through clear political direction and resolve, the international community is going to offer little more than sympathy to victim India. The only voice of the international community — the United Nations — is in decline, with its Security Council a seat of big-power intrigue. India needs no great power’s approval to defend its security and honour. If India acts on its own and succeeds, it will win international respect.

 

If it fails, some nations will make a little noise before ignoring the failure. But if it does little more than collect evidence to try and influence those pursuing their own narrow strategic interests, it will invite more Mumbai-style murderous rampages.

 

For the promotion of its near-term interests in the region, the U.S. continues to prop up the Pakistani military through generous aid and weapon transfers, instead of helping empower the civilian government in Islamabad. Had it supported the bold move of President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani last July to bring the ISI under the control of the interior ministry, civilian oversight would have been established over a key terror-harbouring instrument. But by not backing the government, it allowed the Army to frustrate the attempt to bring the ISI under civilian control. The Army, similarly, has refused to hand over control of Pakistan’s nuclear assets to the civilian government. All this has happened despite Gen. Ashfaq Kayani’s professed intent to move the Army away from politics to its core functions.

 

Still, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has declined to take the smallest of small steps against Pakistan even as a token expression of India’s outrage over the Mumbai assaults by 10 terrorists — all from Pakistan’s Punjab province. Instead, he has reposed his faith in the international community, urging it again this week to “use its power to persuade Pakistan” to dismantle its state-reared terror complex.

 

For India, the options are narrow yet clear. When the seat of official power and the seat of real power are far apart in a rotting state plagued by government atrophy, no effective action can be expected against military-nurtured groups fomenting terrorism against India unless the latter is willing to inflict pain on the real wielders of authority in Pakistan and show beyond doubt that the costs of continuing complicity in transnational terror are unbearably high for them. After all, the terror complex was set up by the Pakistani military to wage a war of a thousand cuts against India, not to dismantle it at the enemy’s bidding or the international community’s urging.

 

Between the two extremes — inaction and military strikes — are several dozen options for India, including economic and political opportunities against an increasingly vulnerable, near-bankrupt Pakistan. Such options cannot be the subject of a public debate though. Calibrated counteraction not only will demonstrate Indian intent but also help step up pressure on the international community to act.

 

Also, given the communications intercepts that link the Mumbai attackers to Pakistan-based masterminds and ISI handlers, why not add the name of the ISI head, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, to the Indian list of terrorist figures in Pakistan? Pasha cannot feign ignorance about his own agency’s aid to the Laskar-e-Taiba figures who masterminded the Mumbai assaults.

 

Make no mistake: India will have to fight its own war against Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. In essence, that would entail lending Pakistan a helping hand to stay embroiled in growing problems at home, with the hope that an ungovernable state that already is a threat to regional and international security self-destructs.

 

The writer is an expert on security affairs

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1216472&pageid=0

Oil sheikhdoms and the rise of Islamist threat

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Oiling transnational terrorism

Oil prices are sure to rebound before long, ensuring that the Gulf sheikhdoms enjoy overflowing coffers and a growing heft to fund extremist groups, like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, long fattened with Saudi petrodollars, says Brahma Chellaney

The Economic Times, December 24, 2008

There is an inverse correlation between the price of oil and the price of freedom, as has been pointed out by American commentator Thomas Friedman. An oil-price spike not only spurs greater transfer of wealth to the oil-exporting nations, but also undercuts the spread of freedom by instilling or strengthening authoritarianism and arming the Gulf states with greater clout to fund fundamentalism and extremism elsewhere.

The current oil-price crash might create an illusion that the era of sky-high international prices is over. Before plummeting below $50 a barrel in November-end, the price of crude oil had gone from $30 in 2001 to as high as $147 in July 2008, creating an unprecedented bonanza for oil-exporting nations.

But for many oil-consuming states in the developing world, the high price of oil created an unfavourable balance-of-payments position. One such state, the terror-exporting Pakistan, has just been pulled back from the brink of bankruptcy through US munificence, including a $7.6 billion IMF bailout package announced on the eve of the Mumbai terrorist assaults. The precipitous drop in the oil price, on the other hand, spells trouble not only for petro-states like Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Bolivia, but also nations like Egypt and Jordan where gulf money has helped shore up strained economies.

When viewed against a long-term picture of demand and supply, the sudden price crash is just not sustainable. Compared to the 1974 level, the price of oil, if adjusted against inflation, ought to be about $100 a barrel today. Given that there are 159 litres in one barrel of oil, the current price of “black gold”, as oil is called, is indeed cheaper than that of bottled mineral water.

Unlike the oil-price increases in the 1970s and early 1980s — triggered by cartelization and deliberate supply restriction — the price spike in recent years arose from two fundamental factors: mounting demand, especially in the emerging economies; and the flattening of production in key non-OPEC countries.

Finding new sources of oil is already becoming harder, with the environment now more difficult geographically and geologically. Also, as history attests, every phase of cheaper oil prices has carried the seeds of the next price spike and energy shock. For example, when in 1985-86 the price crashed from $45 to $9, energy saving and efficiency fell out of fashion. Today, suppliers are already cutting back on production and postponing new projects.

In that light, the oil price is sure to rebound before long. However, even if the price were to stay ridiculously low at $50 a barrel, the oil sheikhdoms of the Gulf will still receive more than $350 billion a year at their current rate of production. And if the price spirals to $150, their oil revenue will surpass $1 trillion a year. Such continuous transfers of immense wealth to the sparsely populated sheikhdoms — which have more foreign workers than citizens — holds major long-term strategic implications, including for the global fight against fundamentalism and terrorism.

Soaring wealth, coupled with their control over the world’s most-bountiful oil resources, gives these weak, feudal, internally-troubled sheikhdoms a disproportionate clout in world affairs — a heft they have misused.

After the 1970s’ oil-price shocks opened the flow of rising revenues, several sheikhdoms began funnelling some of their earnings to the promotion of Wahhabi Islam, including the establishment of jihad-spouting madrassas overseas. It was not an accident that the rise of Islamic conservatism and extremism — from Morocco and Sudan to Malaysia and Indonesia — began from the 1980s with the aid of petrodollars. Today, funds continue to be channelled to Islamist groups.

Take the Al Qaeda-linked Lashkar-e-Taiba. Although it was established as a front organization of the Pakistani intelligence to bleed India, this Punjabi-dominated outfit has long been fattened with Saudi petrodollars. As Husain Haqqani, now Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, put it in a 2005 article, the Lashkar-e-Taiba is a Wahhabist group, “backed by Saudi money and protected by Pakistani intelligence services”, that targets India, Israel and the US as “existential enemies of Islam”. 

From the United Arab Emirates’ sheltering of international fugitives and terrorism-financing conduit role to Saudi Arabia’s continued bankrolling of jihadist groups overseas, the oil sheikhdoms have shown contempt for international norms. Their post-9/11 promises to clean up their alleged philanthropic acts have not been fully honoured.

This state of affairs is simply intolerable. Can the security of secular, pluralistic states be allowed to be undermined by despots whose wealth and power flow from the gigantic oil reserves on which they sit, often by usurping the resources of minorities?

Saudi Wahhabi wealth has been built from Shiite resources. The two million Shiites of Saudi Arabia may constitute only up to 15 per cent of the national population. But they dominate the oases of Qatif and al-Hasa in the Eastern Province, the source of 90 per cent of Saudi oil production and the seat of the world’s greatest oil reserves. In Iraq, too, the oil resources are concentrated in non-Sunni areas. The US occupation has helped end, however inadvertently, the Iraqi Sunni domination of the majority Shiite population.

Take another Sunni-governed oil sheikhdom, Bahrain, where the Shiites form up to 75 per cent of the population. The Bahraini Sunni elites have cosy tribal affiliations with the Saudi elite (going to the extent of granting Bahraini citizenship to Saudi Sunnis on demand) but maintain a distance from the majority Shiite population at home. 

Shiites have been suppressed and treated as second-class citizens in a number of societies since the time the Prophet’s grandson, Hussein, was beheaded by Sunnis in A.D. 656. Today, there is a Shiite reawakening across West Asia, with Jordan’s King Abdullah II even raising the spectre of a “Shiite crescent” stretching from Iran and Iraq to Syria and Lebanon.

Given that the Sunni-run sheikhdoms plus Iran hold some two-thirds of the global oil reserves and that Saudi Arabia alone is projected by 2025 to produce more oil than Africa and the Caspian Sea basin combined, international security will be better served by actively promoting democratization in the region than by propping up tyrannical regimes such as the one run by the House of Saud. 

(The writer is a strategic affairs expert.)

(c) The Economic Times

To fight terrorism, be proactive

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Defensive measures alone won’t suffice

 

Terrorism cannot be fought as a law-and-order problem. What India needs is a comprehensive approach that blends different key elements to form a credible counter-terror strategy. An excess emphasis on defensive measures would only play into the terrorists’ designs to instil a siege mentality.

 

Brahma Chellaney

The Hindu newspaper, December 20, 2008

 

For nearly a millennium, India was repeatedly invaded, raped and subjugated by those who came primarily to plunder its wealth, with some staying on to rule by conquest. Now again, raiders from the northwest are repeatedly assaulting India, not to cart away its riches but to undermine its rising economic strength after a long historical period of humiliation. That is why India’s commercial capital has been repeatedly attacked by the raiders, who have chosen their targets there carefully — from the stock exchange and financial institutions in 1993 and city trains in 2006 to its landmark luxury hotels in 2008.

 

That India is an island of stability, economic growth and democratic empowerment in a sea of turbulence stretching from Jordan to Malaysia also makes it a magnet for terrorists from a particular quasi-failed state that seems intent on taking India down with it as it sinks. Such is the tyranny of geography that India is wedged in an arc of failing or authoritarian states that try, in different ways, to undermine its secular, multiethnic, pluralistic character.

 

Pakistan-based jihadist groups are now carrying out increasingly daring assaults deep across the border. Compounding that threat is the fact that Pakistan is not a normal state but the world’s Terroristan. For the foreseeable future, it will remain the epicentre of global terrorism, with India bearing the brunt.

 

The big question thus is whether India will keep running to the U.S. for help and sympathy after each terror attack or — despite a growing congruence of Indo-American interests — wage its own fight in a credible, coherent and deterrent fashion. India has been too interested in collecting and presenting evidence of Pakistan’s terror links to the outside world than in initiating its own steps to effectively combat terrorism.

 

Stemming terrorism demands at least four different elements — a well-thought-out strategy, effective state instruments to implement that strategy, a credible legal framework to speedily bring terrorists to justice, and unflinching political resolve to stay the course. India, unfortunately, is deficient on all four.

 

It has no published counter-terror doctrine. Furthermore, not only is there no political will, the Indian system has also become so effete that the state instruments are unable to deliver results even on the odd occasion when the leadership displays a spine to act. Nowhere is India’s frailty more apparent today than on internal security, which historically has been its Achilles heel.

 

If the government did one thing right during the Mumbai terrorist attacks, it was to stick to its newly declared doctrine foreswearing negotiations with hostage-takers. By ordering commando assaults on the terrorists holed up in Mumbai’s two luxury hotels and Jewish Centre, the government denied them and their sponsors the opportunity to help focus international spotlight on a plethora of demands — from the release of “mujahideen” from Indian jails to some Kashmir-related ultimatum. That commendable decision, more importantly, spared the country the humiliation of being held hostage for days on end.

 

The frontal commando storming of the besieged sites took the terrorists by surprise and forced them to defend themselves, thus helping limit the number of fatalities. Otherwise, the four terrorists in the Taj hotel, for example, would have killed far more than the 32 people they did, many in the initial minutes of their attack. Despite the considerable and extended investments that went into training the attackers, including in imparting military-style amphibious assault skills, the terrorist operation did not go as well as had been plotted by the Pakistan-based masterminds. The capture alive of one of the suicide attackers also helped unravel the plot.

 

More broadly, one problem is that India is always trying to prevent a repeat of the last attack rather than seeking to forestall the next innovative strike. Almost every major terrorist strike against an Indian target since the 1985 midair bombing of the Air-India Kanishka jetliner has involved novel methodology. The likelihood of a repeat attack by terrorists arriving on inflatable dinghies and striking luxury hotels is thus close to zero. Yet, in a manner akin to closing the barn doors after the horses have bolted, security cordons now ring luxury hotels and resources are being invested in setting up a coastal command.

 

It is the refusal to think ahead and try and anticipate how and where terrorists would strike next that results in India being taken by surprise again and again. The aim should be to stay at least a few steps ahead of the terrorists, rather than to prevent the last type of attack through beefed-up security. Heavy security at hotels, railway stations, high-rise buildings, malls, etc. will still leave open other targets for innovative terrorist strikes but help portray the country as beleaguered.

 

Make no mistake: Improved maritime patrols, better police training and preparedness, a new federal agency for investigations, regional commando commands and intelligence revamp — although necessary — are all defensive measures. However well designed and put into practice, such steps by themselves cannot stop terrorist strikes. Yet, in the aftermath of the Mumbai strikes, the government is overly focusing on such defensive mechanisms.

 

The proposed National Investigative Agency and a strengthened Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act seek to plug some glaring weaknesses. But in a country where, despite the rising incidence of terrorism, not a single terror-related case has been successfully prosecuted in many years other than the one involving the attack on Parliament, the setting up of a new agency can hardly bring much cheer. Also, it doesn’t show India’s leaders in good light that more than 15 years after investigators established clear links between Dawood Ibrahim and the 1993 serial bombings in Mumbai, they do little more than periodically complain that he remains ensconced in Pakistan.

 

Worse, terrorism has been treated as a law-and-order issue requiring more policing, training and hardware. To regard terrorism as a law-and-order problem is to do what the terrorists want — to sap your strength. No amount of security can stop terrorism if the nation is reluctant to go after terrorist cells and networks and those that harbour extremists.

 

Against an invisible enemy, defensive mechanisms can only have limited utility. To stay a sitting duck against the sly, murderous extremists is to risk not only the lives of innocent people, but also political and psychological damage to the national psyche.

 

Defensive measures, in any event, can be meaningful only if they are accompanied by a proactive component that entails going after the terrorists before they strike. That means, among other things, hounding, disrupting and smashing their cells, networks and safe havens; destroying their local network;, cutting off their funding; and imposing deterrent costs (through overt or covert means) on those that promote, finance or tolerate terrorist activity.

 

Merely to step up defensive measures and build higher fences and VVIP security is to play into the terrorists’ designs to bring India under a terrorist siege. The more India has been terrorized in recent years, the more it has betrayed a siege mentality. Every time India is tested by terror, it characteristically responds by talking tough but doing nothing — the trait of a battered victim.

 

For India, terrorism is an existential battle that will determine whether it stays a free, secular, united state. India’s counteraction has to be at multiple levels: domestic policy (formulating a credible counter-terror strategy); legal (forming a political consensus in support of special laws that carry adequate safeguards); law enforcement (identifying and destroying terrorist sleeper cells in cities); intelligence (building assets so as to operate behind “enemy” lines and target a particular car, cell or haven at an opportune moment); strategic (keeping terrorist patrons on tenterhooks); deterrent (imposing calibrated costs on the masterminds); and public relations. It is odd, for example, that sections of the foreign media continue to misleadingly label the predominantly Punjabi, "global jihad"-spouting Laskar-e-Taiba as a “Kashmiri separatist group” without New Delhi mounting any effort to make such news organizations face up to simple facts.

 

Against external sponsors of terror, a range of discreet options are available to India, including diplomatic, economic and political. Between the two extremes — inaction and military action — lie a hundred different options. These are options that no nation discusses in public. Rather they must be weighed in private and exercised quietly.

 

The key point is that terrorism cannot be fought as a law-and-order problem. The only way to stem that scourge is to develop a concerted, comprehensive approach that blends different elements into a single, pointed, sustained campaign. To fight the unconventional war being waged against it, India perforce needs to employ a range of unconventional tools to strike at the heart of terrorist networks and disrupt their cohesion, operational capacity and logistic support.

 

The writer is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

 

(c) Copyright 2000 – 2008 The Hindu

Supping with the devil

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It Ain’t Working

US should stop propping up the Pakistani military

Brahma Chellaney Times of India December 18, 2008

US aid to Islamabad is now close to $2 billion a year, putting Pakistan on par with Israel and Egypt as the top recipients of American assistance. And on the eve of the Mumbai terrorist assaults, the US persuaded the IMF to hand a near-bankrupt Pakistan an economic lifeline in the form of a $7.6 billion aid package, with no strings attached. Despite such largesse, Pakistan is host to the world’s most-wanted men and the main Al Qaeda sanctuary. Recent polling shows that Osama bin Laden is more popular in Pakistan than ever, even as America’s negative rating there has soared.

Let’s be clear: US policy on Pakistan isn’t working, and unless Washington fundamentally reverses course, it risks losing the war in Afghanistan and making the West an increasing jihadist target, including the scene of Mumbai-style murderous rampages. After all, as the history of terrorism since the 1980s attests, innovative terrorist strikes carried out against Indian targets have later been replicated in the West. That includes attacks on symbols of state authority, the midair bombing of a commercial jetliner and coordinated strikes on a city transportation system.

The jihadists’ logic in employing soft-state India as their laboratory has been that if they can bleed the world’s largest democracy through novel and recurrent attacks, they perfect techniques for application against the tougher free societies in the West. If the terrorists can bring the developing world’s most-successful democratic experiment under siege, with the intent to unravel its secular and pluralistic character, it is only a matter of time before Western societies get similarly besieged. That the tourism ad’s “incredible India” is, in reality, little more than a miserable India — which presents itself as an easy target by merely craving international sympathy as a constant victim — does not detract from the danger that the Mumbai-attack masterminds have set up a model for use elsewhere.

Yet the US response, however positive in the diplomatic realm, has failed to recognize that the Mumbai attacks mark a potent new threat to free societies and that unless the masterminds are brought to justice, such cold-blooded rampages are likely to be carried out in the West. The alacrity with which the American media returned to the India-Pakistan hyphenation in covering the Mumbai assaults betrayed superficiality and old mindsets — a failing compounded by media organizations calling the attackers not terrorists but “militants” (like the New York Times) or “gunmen” (including the Washington Post). Diplomatically, it has been déjà vu — the US exerting pressure and Islamabad staging yet another anti-terrorist charade to deflect that pressure and pre-empt Indian retaliation.

Given the easy manner outlawed terrorist outfits in Pakistan resurface under new names, the US knows well that a ban on any group or temporary detention of a terrorist figure is of little enduring value. More Mumbai-type attacks can be prevented only if the masterminds are identified and put on trial and their sponsors in the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment are, with the help of Europeans, indicted in The Hague for war crimes. Yet, despite a broken Pakistan policy, the US seems reluctant to fix its approach. The reason for that is not hard to seek: US policy remains wedded to the Pakistani institution that reared the forces of jihad — the military.

Indeed, US policy is still governed by a consideration that dates back to the 1950s — treating the Pakistani military as central to the pursuit of American geopolitical objectives. As American scholars Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph have put it, “For roughly 50 years, the US destabilized the South Asia region by acting as an offshore balancer. Its actions allowed Pakistan to realize its goal of ‘parity’ with its much-bigger neighbour and to try to best that neighbour in several wars”. The more recent “de-hyphenation” of India and Pakistan was not a calculated US policy shift but the product of Pakistan’s descent into shambles and India’s notable rise after 1998. Under Bush, US policy simply went from hyphenation to parallelism. That has involved building strategic partnerships with and selling arms to both. For the first time ever, the US is building parallel intelligence-sharing and defence-cooperation arrangements with both.

 

The war in Afghanistan and the containment strategy against Iran have only reinforced the US dependence on the Pakistani military, despite mountains of intelligence indicating the latter is playing both sides — bolstering the Taliban and other terror groups while pretending to be a counter-terror ally. Instead of helping empower Pakistan’s civilian government to gain full control over the national-security system, including the nuclear establishment and the ISI, US policy acts as a stumbling block by continuing to prop up the Pakistani military through generous aid and weapon transfers, including bombers and submarines of relevance only against India.

For its own sake, Washington has to stop pampering and building up the military as Pakistan’s pivot. By fattening the Pakistani military, America has, however inadvertently, allowed that institution to maintain cosy ties with terror groups. A break from this policy approach would be for the Obama administration to embrace the idea currently being discussed in Washington — condition further aid to the reconfiguration of the Pakistani military to effectively fight terror and to concrete actions to end institutional support to extremism. If not, the US is bound to lose two wars — the one in Afghanistan and the other on transnational terror — while staying mired in Iraq.

 

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. 

 

(c) The Times of India, 2008.

Need for course correction in U.S. policy on Pakistan

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DANGEROUS LIAISON

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
Japan Times, December 17, 2008
 

U.S. policy on Pakistan isn’t working, and unless Washington fundamentally reverses course, it risks losing the war in Afghanistan and making the West an increasing target of jihadists. That is the key message emerging from the recent terrorist assaults in Mumbai.

U.S. aid to Islamabad is now close to $2 billion a year, placing Pakistan as one of the three top recipients of American assistance along with Israel and Egypt. In fact, on the eve of the Mumbai attacks, the United States persuaded the International Monetary Fund to hand a near-bankrupt Pakistan an economic lifeline in the form of a $7.6 billion aid package, with no strings attached.

Despite such largesse, Pakistan is host to the world’s most-wanted men and the main al-Qaida sanctuary. Recent polling shows that Osama bin Laden is more popular in Pakistan than ever, even as America’s negative rating there has soared.

A shift in U.S. policy on Pakistan holds the key to the successful outcome of both the war in Afghanistan and the wider international fight against transnational terror.

First, if the U.S. does not insist on getting to the bottom of who sponsored and executed the attacks in India’s commercial and cultural capital, the Mumbai attacks will probably be repeated in the West. After all, India has served as a laboratory for transnational terrorists, who try out new techniques against Indian targets before seeking to replicate them in other pluralistic states.

Novel strikes first carried out against Indian targets and then perpetrated in the West include attacks on symbols of state authority, the midair bombing of a commercial jetliner and coordinated strikes on a city transportation system.

By carrying out a series of simultaneous murderous rampages after innovatively arriving by sea, the Mumbai attackers have set up a model for use against other jihadist targets. The manner in which the world was riveted as a band of 10 young terrorists — all from Punjab province in Pakistan — held India hostage for three days is something jihadists would love to replicate elsewhere.

Given the easy manner in which outlawed terrorist outfits in Pakistan resurface under new names, the U.S. knows well that a ban on any group or the temporary detention of some terrorist figures (as happening now in Pakistan under international pressure) is of little enduring value. More Mumbai-type attacks can be prevented only if the masterminds are identified and put on trial and their sponsors in the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment are, with the help of Europeans, indicted in The Hague for war crimes.

Second, let’s be clear: The scourge of Pakistani terrorism emanates not so much from the Islamist mullahs as from generals who reared the forces of jihad and fathered the Taliban and al-Qaida-linked groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group blamed by India, the U.S. and Britain for the Mumbai attacks.

Civil-military relations in Pakistan are so skewed that the present civilian government is powerless to check the sponsorship of terrorist elements by the military and the latter’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, or even to stop the army’s meddling in foreign policy. Until civilian officials can stand up to the military, Pakistan will neither become a normal state nor cease to be a "Terroristan" for international security.

U.S. policy, however, still props up the Pakistan military through generous aid and weapon transfers. Even as Pakistan has emerged as a common thread in the investigations of most acts of international terror, U.S. policy continues to be governed by a consideration dating back to the 1950s. Washington has to stop viewing, and building up, the military as Pakistan’s pivot. By fattening the Pakistani military, America has, however inadvertently, allowed that institution to maintain cozy ties with terror groups.

A break from this policy approach would be for the Obama administration to embrace the idea currently being discussed in Washington — to condition further aid to the reconfiguration of the Pakistani military to effectively fight terror, and to concrete actions to end institutional support to extremism. The nearly $11 billion in U.S. military aid to Pakistan since 9/11 has been diverted to beef up forces against India. Such diversion, however, is part of a pattern that became conspicuous in the 1980s when the ISI agency siphoned off billions of dollars from the covert CIA assistance meant for anti-Soviet guerrillas in Afghanistan.

For too long, Washington has allowed politically expedient considerations to override its long-term interests.

It is past time U.S. policymakers actively encouraged elected leaders in Pakistan to gain full control over all of their country’s national-security apparatus, including the nuclear establishment and ISI.

The ISI — a citadel of Islamist sentiment and the main source of support to the Taliban and other terrorist groups supporting jihad in Kashmir, Afghanistan and elsewhere — should be restructured or disbanded. State-reared terror groups and their splinter cells, some now operating autonomously, have morphed into a hydra.

U.S.-led NATO forces in Afghanistan, like border troops in India, have been trying to stop the inflow of terrorists and arms from Pakistan. The real problem, however, is not at the Pakistani frontiers with Afghanistan and India. Rather it is the terrorist sanctuaries deep inside Pakistan that continue to breed extremism and export terrorism.

Since the economic viability of Pakistan depends on continued U.S. aid flow as well as on American support for multilateral institutional lending, Washington has the necessary leverage. Further aid should be linked to definitive measures by Pakistan to sever institutional support to extremism. Only when the institutional support for terrorism is irrevocably cut off will the sanctuaries for training, command, control and supply begin to wither away.

Unless the U.S. reverses course on Pakistan, it will begin losing the war in Afghanistan. While America did make sincere efforts in the aftermath of the Mumbai assaults, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen personally visiting Islamabad to exert pressure, U.S. diplomacy remains hamstrung by Washington’s continuing overreliance on the Pakistani military.

Before the chickens come home to roost, the U.S. pampering of the Pakistani military has to end.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."
 
The Japan Times: Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2008
(C) All rights reserved

Dealing with a roguish Pakistani military establishment

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Attack, then demand bribes

 

The Indian leadership’s naïveté is more than matched by the rascality of the Pakistani military establishment, which demands a bribe for every move on its part — generous US aid flow to help rein in the Taliban, and a Kashmir resolution to sever its institutional support to India-directed terrorism.

 

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, December 17, 2008

 

 “Terrorists are still coming in from Pakistan”, India’s lumbering external affairs minister lamented in Parliament last week. India can be sure terrorists will keep arriving from across the borders, emboldened as they and their patrons would be from New Delhi’s pusillanimity in not taking the smallest of small steps against Pakistan even as a token expression of India’s outrage over the Mumbai assaults by 10 terrorists — all from Pakistan’s Punjab province.

After every major terrorist assault, India can expect — as has been the case since the Mumbai attacks — visits by high-ranking public figures from overseas who will offer loads of sympathy, heartily pat the septuagenarians and octogenarians governing India for their restraint, and then peddle their eclectic wares — from seeking access for their police to investigate terrorist strikes in India and question arrested suspects, to urging New Delhi to use the latest tragedy to resolve the Kashmir issue with Pakistan.

The visitors are not stupid not to know that cross-border terrorism would not end even if India were to offer Kashmir on a platter to Pakistan. After all, the self-declared mission of the Lashkar-e-Taiba — still actively aided by the Pakistani intelligence — is “global jihad”, with the specific goal to set up a caliphate across southern, central and southeastern Asia. And as was shown by the 1999 Kargil invasion, when Pakistani Army regulars encroached masquerading as “mujahideen”, a thin line can separate the military establishment from its pet terror groups.

India’s becoming an easy prey for terrorists is linked not to the Kashmir issue but to its effete leadership, which won’t impose any costs on the sponsors of terror, yet unabashedly appeals to other states to fight India’s war on terrorism. Unable to think and act strategically, the leadership has helped turn India into a classic lamb state that can be continually gored without fear of retribution. Tellingly, if Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has made any vow after Mumbai, it is — to quote his words in Parliament — “to galvanize the international community into dealing sternly and effectively with the epicentre of terrorism which is located in Pakistan”.

Making the most of such bloated Indian expectations, the visiting dignitaries seek to push their countries’ own geopolitical agendas, centred on narrow tactical considerations than on a larger strategy to deracinate Pakistan’s jihad culture. In being guided by politically expedient considerations, however, they play right into the hands of the extortionist Pakistani military and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

At the crux of the problem are the bribes the Pakistani military establishment openly seeks from the international community for any move on its part:

 

·         To help rein in the Taliban — which it continues to bolster while pretending to be an ally in the US-led war on terror — it demands generous US military aid, although it has already diverted (according to American admissions) much of the received assistance to beef up forces against India.

 

·         To sever its institutional support to India-directed terror groups, it demands a resolution — to its satisfaction — of the intractable and unsolvable Kashmir dispute.

 

·         Having stunted nation-building and turned Pakistan into the world’s Problemistan, it now warns the Pakistani state would implode unless the US continues its aid flow, totalling nearly $2 billion a year.

 

·         To patrol Pakistan’s own border with Afghanistan, it demands — and gets — a special US payment of around $100 million a month.

 

·         It scripts terror attacks in India and then immediately spotlights the Kashmir issue. The Mumbai attackers could have learned their amphibious assault skills only from military handlers, not non-state actors. Yet, shortly after the Mumbai assaults, Pakistan told the UN Security Council that, “The best outcome of the tragedy would be the resolution of the issue of Kashmir”.

 

Given the ruthlessness with which the military-style terrorist assaults were executed, the capture of one supposed suicide attacker alive and the relatively moderate death toll of 32 in the Taj Mahal Hotel and 33 in Oberoi-Trident (more civilians died at a major train station than at either of the two besieged hotels) indicate the operation did not go the way it had been planned by the masterminds in Pakistan. Had New Delhi not ordered the commando storming but gone in for negotiations, the four terrorists in the Taj and the two each at the Oberoi-Trident and the Jewish Centre would have held India hostage for days on end while putting the international spotlight on a plethora of demands — from Kashmir to jailed terrorists in India.

 

The real issue is not Kashmir but the Pakistani military, which, after six decades of direct and indirect rule, has become too fat to return to the barracks. Indeed, it won’t fit in the barracks. To retain its power and prerogative in society, the military needs the India-threat bogey. The military genuinely believes that a Pakistan stripped of its core cementing element — eternal enmity with India — would be reduced to a battlefield for its five feuding ethnic groups. It has thus kept alive the Kashmir issue.

 

Had India been an irredentist state, seeking to reclaim the Kashmir territories now held by Pakistan (35 per cent) and China (20 per cent), the Pakistani military may have been justified in projecting an India threat. But India is for maintaining the territorial status quo — a position not acceptable to the Pakistani military, which over the years has sought to change the status quo through open war and now unconventional conflict.

 

In recent years, India has worked with Pakistan to create a virtually borderless Kashmir to help facilitate the free movement of people, goods and services. New transportation links have been established as a first step. Given that Kashmir’s division into Indian, Pakistani and Chinese parts cannot be undone, what does a “resolution” of the Kashmir dispute entail beyond such steps?

 

The blunt truth is that Kashmir is not the cause but the symbol of India-Pakistan differences, which are rooted in history and the politics of revenge, besides epitomizing competing worldviews and a divide along civilizational fault lines.  As General Pervez Musharraf candidly put it in a 1999 speech, Pakistan’s low-intensity war with India would continue even if the Kashmir issue were magically resolved. The military for long has fancied India’s Balkanization as Pakistan’s salvation.

 

The way out of this situation is for the US, Britain and others to help empower Pakistan’s civilian government, which today is neither in charge of the country’s national-security apparatus nor in a position to stop the Army’s meddling in foreign policy. To pressure the victim, India, to pander to the Pakistani military’s insatiable demands on Kashmir is to promote greater roguishness and to overlook the fact that the Pakistani Army is waging a mortal combat with the Indian republic.

But why blame international figures when India’s own leaders fail to grasp the nature of the mortal combat? India’s leadership deficit is manifest from the innocent pleas to Pakistan, including the extradition of 42 fugitives and the dismantlement of the state-run terrorist infrastructure.

Which Pakistan is going to do that? The powerless civilian government? The Janus-faced military establishment? Did the latter set up the terror complex to wage a war of a thousand cuts against India or to dismantle it at the enemy’s bidding? If they really wish to bring that establishment to heel, what costs are India’s leaders ready to impose?

(c) The Asian Age, 2008.