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Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

Why the U.S. must change policy course on Pakistan

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Stop pampering Pakistan’s military

The Mumbai attacks underscore the importance of rooting out institutional support for terror

By Brahma Chellaney

Christian Science Monitor, December 12, 2008 edition

The recent Mumbai terrorist assaults underscore the imperative for a major change in American policy on Pakistan – a shift that holds the key to the successful outcome of both the war in Afghanistan and the wider international fight against transnational terror.

First, if the US 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 – nearly all from Punjab Province in Pakistan – held India hostage for three days is something jihadists would love to replicate elsewhere.

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 Qaeda-linked groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group reportedly behind the Mumbai attacks.

Facing growing international pressure to hunt down the Mumbai masterminds, Pakistan’s government raided a militant camp in Kashmir Sunday. Yet 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 Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, or even to stop the Army’s meddling in foreign policy. Until civilian officials can stand up to these institutions, Pakistan will neither become a normal state nor cease to be a "Terroristan" for international security.

US 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, US 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 terrorist groups.

One break from this policy approach would be the idea currently being discussed in Washington – to tie further US aid to a reconfiguration of the Pakistani military to effectively fight militants. The nearly $11 billion in US 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.

The US must actively encourage the elected leaders in Pakistan to gain full control over all of their country’s national-security apparatus, including the nuclear establishment and ISI. And to forestall a military coup in response to such action, Washington should warn the generals of serious action, including possible indictment in The Hague.

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

US-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 US aid as well as on US 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 US 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, US diplomacy remains limited by Washington’s continuing overreliance on the Pakistani military.

Before the chickens come home to roost, the US 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 of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1212/p09s01-coop.html

Toward a new international order

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Tall order in a time of ‘peace’

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
Japan Times, December 2, 2008
 

The U.S.-sparked global financial meltdown is just the latest sign that the world is at a defining moment in history. Given the global ace of political, economic and technological transformation witnessed the last two decades, the next 20 years are likely to bring equally dramatic change.

Yet the world cannot remain saddled with outmoded, ineffective institutions and rules. With the rise of non-Western economic powers and the emergence of nontraditional challenges — from global warming to energy and food crises — the institutional structure and mandate need to advance. That demands far-reaching institutional reforms, not the halfhearted and desultory moves seen thus far, geared mostly at establishing ways to improvise and thereby defer genuine reforms.

A classic case is the Group of Eight’s "outreach" initiative, which brings some emerging economies into a special outer tier designed for show.

Worse was the reform-shorn Group of 20 summit meeting, hosted earlier this month by a lame-duck U.S. president who will be remembered in history for making the world more volatile, unsafe and divided through a doctrine that emphasized pre-emption over diplomacy in a daring bid to validate Otto von Bismarck’s thesis that "The great questions of our time are not decided by speeches and majority decisions . . . but by iron and blood."

George W. Bush’s blunders ended up causing the collapse of U.S. soft power and triggering a domestic backlash that propelled the election of the first African-American as president.

But while Barack Obama is the symbol of hope for many in the world, he inherits problems of historic proportions at a time when the United States — mired in two wars and a financial crisis compounded by the weakest U.S. economy in 25 years and a federal deficit approaching $1 trillion — can no longer influence the global course on its own.

Obama simply cannot live up to the high expectations the world has of him. A new U.S. resident cannot stem the global power shifts. The days are over when the U.S. could set the international agenda with or without its traditional allies.

The real challenge for Obama is to help lead America’s transition to the emerging new world order by sticking to his mantra of change and facilitating international institutional reforms. The evolution of a new rule-based architecture of global governance will jibe well with long-term U.S. interests.

The financial contagion’s current global spread could have been contained and its effects limited had the broken Bretton Woods system been fixed. Hopefully, we won’t need a major sustained crisis to engulf each international institution before it can be reformed. Some institutions already may be beyond repair, making their dissolution or replacement the only viable option. Even amid the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, there is still only talk of reform, without a real push for a new international financial architecture.

Existing institutions were born of conflict and war. As Winston Churchill once said, "The story of the human race is war." But global power shifts now are being triggered not by military triumphs or geopolitical realignments but by a factor unique to the contemporary world — rapid economic growth.

The speed and scale of Asia’s economic rise has no parallel in world history. Asia’s growing importance in international relations — best illustrated by authoritarian China’s rise as a world power in one generation — signals a systemic shift in the global distribution of power.

While the present ailing international order emerged from the ruins of a world war, its replacement has to be built in an era of international peace and thus designed to reinforce that peace. That is no easy task, given that the world has little experience establishing or remaking institutions in peacetime.

Reform is also being stymied by entrenched interests unwilling to yield some of their power and prerogative. Rather than help recreate institutions for the changed times, vested interests already are cautioning against "over-reaction" and conjuring up short-term fixes for the multiple crises the world confronts. But without being made more representational, fit and efficient, the existing institutions — from the United Nations to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — risk fading into irrelevance.

Some, like the International Monetary Fund, may never regain relevance, and not be missed. Others, including the G8 and International Energy Agency, are crying for membership enlargement, while the World Bank — if recast and freed of the overriding U.S. veto power — could focus on poverty alleviation especially in Africa, most of whose residents live on the margins of globalization.

It will ill-behoove an African-American U.S. president to continue the international neglect of Africa — a neglect China has sought to blithely exploit. Other institutions, such as the U.N., can be revitalized through broad reforms.

Detractors portray the U.N. as a "talk shop" where "no issue is too small to be debated" endlessly. But it remains the only institution truly representative of all nations. Its main weakness is a toothless General Assembly and an all-powerful cabal of five Security Council members, who opaquely seek to first hammer out issues among themselves but of late appear irredeemably split. The U.N. has to change or become increasingly marginalized.

To mesh with the international nature of today’s major challenges and the consensual demands of an interconnected world, reforms in all institutions ought to center on greater transparency and democratic decision-making. The Security Council cannot be an exception.

To help jump-start stalled reforms, those aspiring to be new permanent members would do well to suggest an across-the-board abolition of the veto, to fashion a liberal democratic institution where decisions are arrived at through a simple three-quarters majority rule.

Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.
 
The Japan Times: Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2008

Preventing more Mumbai-style murderous rampages

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Break the terrorist siege of India

The Mumbai assaults reveal the new face of terror, and unless the effete Indian leadership wakes up, transnational terrorists are sure to carry out more murderous rampages, writes Brahma Chellaney

Economic Times, November 29, 2008

Just as the blazing World Trade Centre in New York came to symbolize the 9/11 events, television footage of the fire raging in Mumbai’s landmark Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels has laid bare yet newer face of terror. The multiple, simultaneous assaults in Mumbai are just the latest example of how the world’s largest democracy has come under siege from terrorist forces. The attacks are also a bloody reminder to US President-elect Barack Obama that even as he seeks to deal with the financial meltdown, the global war on terror stands derailed, with the scourge of terrorism having spread deeper and wider.

International terrorism threatens the very existence of democratic, secular states. Yet the US occupation of Iraq not only helped fracture the post-9/11 global consensus to fight terror, but also handed a fresh cause to Islamists, giving a new lease of life to Al Qaeda. Obama will need to bring the anti-terror war back on course by building a new international consensus and focusing on rooting out terrorist sanctuaries in the Pakistan-Afghanistan belt — the epicentre of international terror.

It will, of course, require a sustained international campaign to eliminate the forces of jihad that pursue violence as a sanctified tool of religion and a path to redemption. The challenge is also broad: The entire expanse from the Middle East to Southeast Asia is home to Islamist groups and troubled by terrorist violence, posing a serious challenge to international and regional security.

But as the Mumbai strikes show, India — because of its location next to the Pak-Afghan belt and its eyesore status for jihadists as the only real democratic, secular state in the vast arc stretching from Jordan to Malaysia — will stay on the frontlines of global terror. To help unravel the Indian republic, the jihadists have sought to undermine its rising economic strength by repeatedly making its financial capital their target since 1993, choosing to carry out their latest strikes at a time when foreigners already have been heavy sellers of Indian equities.

The strikes — the eighth in a spate of attacks in India in the past five months — were exceptionally brazen and daring, even when viewed against the high level of terrorism now tormenting India. Indeed, since 9/11, the world has not witnessed terrorism on this scale or level of sophistication and coordination. Transnational terrorists, including those tied to Al Qaeda, are waging an open war on India, yet the Indian leadership is unable to declare a war on terror.

The question India needs to ask itself is: Why has it turned into a laboratory for international terrorists, who try out new techniques against Indian targets before seeking to replicate them in other pluralistic states? Innovative strikes first carried out against Indian targets and then perpetrated in the West include attacks on symbols of state authority, midair bombing of a commercial jetliner and coordinated strikes on a city transportation system. Now, jihadists, arriving by boat, have innovatively carried out a series of horrific assaults in Mumbai that are not only unmatched in daring, but also set up a model for imitation elsewhere.

What India needs is a credible counter-terror campaign. But what its harried citizens get after each major terrorist attack are stock platitudes. Empty rhetoric is eating into the vitals of internal security. Indeed, after the government’s ritual condemnation of each attack and the standard promise to defeat terror, India puts the strikes behind it and goes back to what now defines it — partisan politics and scandal. That is, until terror strikes again. Worse, the fight against terror has been increasingly politicized and got linked to communal, electoral and vote-bank considerations.

Combating terror 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 is deficient on all four.

Unlike other important victims of terror in the world, India has no published counter-terror doctrine. And a retiring Chief Justice of India was compelled to remind fellow citizens that, “We don’t have the political will to fight terrorism”. Effete leadership, political one-upmanship and an ever-shifting policy approach indeed have spurred on more terrorism. Not a single case of terrorist attack in recent years has been cracked, yet in the ongoing Malegaon bombing probe, the nation has witnessed the bizarre spectacle of authorities deliberately leaking titbits of information on a daily basis.

Terrorists have again exposed the woeful lack of adequate training and preparedness on the part of those tasked to be the first response to terror. The quick and easy manner several high-ranking Mumbai law enforcement officers, including the anti-terrorism squad head, fell to terrorist bullets not only threw the response into disarray, forcing authorities to call out the army, but also revealed police ineptitude.

Against this background, India serves as an exemplar of how not to fight terror. It is extraordinary that a prime minister who embraced the sponsor of terrorism as a partner and set up a joint terror mechanism with it should today allude to Pakistan’s involvement in the Mumbai assaults.

Through its forbearing approach, India has seemingly come to accept terrorist strikes as the products of its unalterable geography or destiny. Its response to the jihadist strategy to inflict death by a thousand cuts has been survival by a thousand bandages. Just as it has come to brook a high level of political corruption, it is willing to put up with a high incidence of terrorism.

Turning this appalling situation around demands a new mindset that will not allow India to be continually gored. That in turn means a readiness to forge a bipartisan consensus to do whatever is necessary to break the terrorist siege of the country. What is needed is a new brand of post-partisan politics, coupled with the political will and vision to combat terror, or else Mumbai-style murderous rampages would be executed elsewhere in India.

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

Kashmir and Terrorism

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J&K poll turnout, end of separatism?

It won’t snuff out fundamentalist terror

Brahma Chellaney
Strategic affairs expert

Economic Times, November 28, 2008

As the horrific Mumbai terrorist killings are a reminder, jihadists will stop at nothing. Unravelling the jihad culture will not be easy in Pakistan, Afghanistan or the Kashmir Valley. But it is essential.

India has created a safety valve for all its citizens, including those in Kashmir — true democratic participation that empowers the masses and allows issues to be decided at the ballot box. The high voter turnout in Kashmir is a positive sign of such empowerment.

But “separatism” in the Kashmir Valley is symbiotically tied to fundamentalism, ethnic cleansing, terrorism and external incitement to attacks. Therefore, it will be naive to expect that the high voter turnout can help snuff out those evils.

From the ceaseless meddling by Pakistani intelligence to the promotion of medieval Wahhabist beliefs through infusion of petrodollars, Kashmir remains a happy hunting ground for outside interests. Add to that picture, New Delhi’s own blundering policy, and what you get is a recipe for unremitting political ferment.

Today Pakistan may be tottering on the brink of bankruptcy. But its military continues to infiltrate trained and armed terrorists into Kashmir. After all, Kashmir remains the glue holding a fractious, unruly Pakistan together.

Every Indian admission of Kashmir as an unresolved issue has only whetted Pakistan’s desire for India to yield further ground. It began with the Lahore Declaration defining only one issue by name as an outstanding dispute — J&K. By June 2004, India had committed itself to a “peaceful, negotiated final settlement” on Kashmir and juxtaposed the UN Charter with the Simla Agreement.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh first embraced the sponsor of terrorism as a partner and set up a joint terror mechanism, which formalised Pakistan’s parity with India as a victim of terror.

Not content with that misstep, Singh has peddled a compromise on Kashmir that goes beyond the Line of Control — an LoC-plus settlement that would make frontiers “meaningless and irrelevant” so as to create a “borderless” Kashmir. He has thus opened the path to inevitable concessions to Pakistan, further emboldening the hardliners there.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Et_Debate/It_wont_snuff_out_fundamentalist_terror/articleshow/3766777.cms

Unprecedented terrorist attacks in Mumbai

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Commentary

India Under Terrorist Siege

Brahma Chellaney Forbes.com November 27, 2008
 

Television footage of the landmark Taj Mahal Hotel in flames and a 24-hour gun battle inside Mumbai’s other renowned hotel, the Trident-Oberoi, may have sent shivers down the spines of international investors and tourists, but it also laid bare the new face of terror. The brazen Mumbai terrorist assaults, which bear the hallmarks of Al Qaeda, are just the latest example of how the world’s largest democracy is increasingly coming under siege from the forces of terror. They also serve as a reminder to U.S. President-elect Barack Obama that even as he seeks to deal with the financial meltdown, the global war on terror stands derailed, with the scourge of terrorism having spread deeper and wider.

International terrorism threatens the very existence of democratic, secular states. Yet the U.S. occupation of Iraq not only helped fracture the post-9/11 global consensus to fight terror, but also handed a fresh cause to Islamists and gave a new lease of life to Al Qaeda. The Obama administration will need to bring the anti-terror war back on course by building a new international consensus and focusing on rooting out terrorist sanctuaries in the Pakistan-Afghanistan belt, the epicenter of international terror.

It will, of course, require a sustained international campaign to eliminate the forces of jihad that pursue violence as a sanctified tool of religion and a path to redemption. The challenge is also broad: The entire expanse from the Middle East to Southeast Asia is home to Islamist groups and troubled by terrorist violence, posing a serious challenge to international and regional security.

But as the Mumbai strikes show, India–because of its location next to the Pak-Afghan belt and its eyesore status for jihadists as the only real democratic, secular state in the arc stretching from Jordan to Malaysia–will stay on the frontline of the fight against global terror. To unravel the Indian republic, the jihadists have sought to undermine its rising economic strength by repeatedly making its financial capital their target since 1993, choosing to carry out their latest strikes at a time when foreigners already have been heavy sellers of Indian equities, and Obama is inheriting problems of historic proportions.

The attacks were exceptionally brazen and daring, even when viewed against the high level of terrorism now tormenting India. Indeed, since 9/11, the world has not witnessed terrorism on this scale or level of sophistication and coordination. However, the most troubling questions arising from the latest terrorist attacks–the eighth in a spate of attacks in India in the past five months–relate to why the country has become an easy target for terrorists. Transnational terrorists, including those tied to Al Qaeda, are waging an open war on India, yet the Indian leadership is unable to declare a war on terror.

The question India needs to ask itself is: Why has it turned into a laboratory for international terrorists, who try out new techniques against Indian targets before seeking to replicate them in other pluralistic states? Innovative strikes carried out against Indian targets first and then perpetrated in the West include attacks on symbols of state authority, midair bombing of a commercial jetliner and coordinated strikes on a city transportation system. Now, the jihadists have innovatively carried out a series of horrific assaults in Mumbai that are not only unmatched in scale and daring since 9/11, but also set up a model for imitation elsewhere.

What India needs is a credible counterterror campaign. But what its harried citizens get after each major terrorist attack are stock platitudes, such as a commitment to defeat the designs of terrorist forces. Empty rhetoric is eating into the vitals of internal security. Indeed, after the government’s ritual condemnation of each attack and the standard promise to defeat terror, India puts the strikes behind it and goes back to what now defines it–partisan politics and scandal. That is, until terror strikes again. Worse, the fight against terror has been increasingly politicized and got linked to communal, electoral and vote-bank considerations.

Combating terror 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 is deficient on all four.

Unlike other important victims of terror in the world, India has no published counterterror doctrine. And a retiring Chief Justice of India was compelled to remind fellow citizens that, “We don’t have the political will to fight terrorism”. Weak leadership, political one-upmanship and an ever-shifting policy approach indeed have spurred on more terrorism. Not a single case of terrorist attack in recent years has been cracked, yet in the ongoing Malegoan bombing probe, the nation has witnessed the bizarre spectacle of authorities deliberately leaking tidbits of information on a daily basis.

The Indian system has become so effete that terrorists have again exposed the woeful lack of adequate training and preparedness on the part of those tasked to fight terror. Such was the level of police ineptitude that several high-ranking law enforcement officials, including the anti-terrorism squad head, were killed soon after the terrorists struck. As a result, the army had to be called in to deal with the situation.

Against this background, India serves as an exemplar of how not to fight terror. In fact, through its forbearing approach, the country has come to accept terrorist strikes as the ostensible products of its unalterable geography or destiny. Its response to the jihadist strategy to inflict death by a thousand cuts has been survival by a thousand bandages. Just as it has come to brook a high level of political corruption, it is willing to put up with a high incidence of terrorism.

Turning this appalling situation around demands a new mindset that will not allow India to be continually gored. That in turn means a readiness to forge a bipartisan consensus to do whatever is necessary to end the terrorist siege of the country. What is needed is a new brand of post-partisan politics, coupled with political will and vision.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the privately-funded Center for Policy Research, New Delhi.

http://www.forbes.com/home/2008/11/27/india-mumbai-terrorism-oped-cx_bc_1127chellaney.html

Forestalling water conflict in Asia

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Beware of Water Wars

 

China’s hydro-engineering projects in Tibet raise serious concerns

 

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India, November 24, 2008

 

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s disclosure that during his recent Beijing visit he raised the issue of international rivers flowing out of Tibet underscores the enormous implications of China’s hydro-engineering projects and plans. Through its control over the Tibet plateau, China controls the flow of several major river systems that are a lifeline to southern and southeastern Asia. Yet China is toying with massive inter-basin and inter-river water transfer projects. Its Great South-North Water Transfer Project is an overly ambitious engineering attempt to take water through manmade canals to its semi-arid north. The diversion of waters from the Tibetan plateau in this project’s third leg is an idea enthusiastically backed by President Hu Jintao, a hydrologist by training whose 1989 martial-law crackdown in Tibet helped facilitate his swift rise in the communist party hierarchy.

            Water is getting tied to security in several parts of the world. The battles of yesterday were fought over land. Those of today are over energy. But the battles of tomorrow will be over water. And nowhere else does that prospect look real than Asia, the largest and most densely populated continent that awaits a future made hotter and drier by global warming. According to a 2006 UN report, Asia has less fresh water — 3,920 cubic metres per person — than any other continent other than the Antarctica.

With the world’s fastest-rising military expenditures, most-dangerous hot spots and fiercest resource competition, Asia appears the most likely flash-point for water wars — a concern underscored by attempts by some states to exploit their riparian position or dominance. Riparian dominance impervious to international legal principles can create a situation where water allocations to co-riparian states become a function of political fiat.

Upstream dams, barrages, canals and irrigation systems can help fashion water as a political weapon — a weapon that can be wielded overtly in a war, or subtly in peacetime to signal dissatisfaction with a co-riparian state. Even denial of hydrological data in a critically important season can amount to the use of water as a political tool. Such leverage could in turn prompt a downstream state to build up its military capabilities to help counterbalance the riparian disadvantage.

Except for Japan, Malaysia and Burma, Asian states already face water shortages. A different water-related problem confronts some low-lying states like Bangladesh and the Maldives, whose very future of is at stake due to creeping saltwater incursion and frequent flooding. Bangladesh today has too much water, yet not enough to meet its needs. Born in blood in 1971, it faces the spectre of a watery grave.

China and India already are water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated farming and water-intensive industries and a rising middle class are drawing attention to their serious struggle for more water. The two giants have entered an era of perennial water shortages, which before long are likely to parallel, in terms of per-capita availability, the Mideast scarcity. Their rapid economic growth could slow if their demand for water continues to grow at the present frenetic pace. Water shortages, furthermore, threaten to turn food-exporting China and India into major importers — a development that would seriously accentuate the global food crisis.

 

Even though India’s usable arable land is larger than China’s — 160.5 million hectares compared to 137.1 million hectares — the source of all the major Indian rivers except one is the Tibetan plateau. While the Ganges originates on the Indian side of the Himalayas, its two main tributaries flow in from Tibet. This is the world’s largest plateau, whose vast glaciers, huge underground springs and high altitude have endowed it with the greatest river systems. Almost all the major rivers of Asia originate there. Tibet’s status thus is unique: No other area in the world is a water repository of such size, serving as a lifeline for much of an entire continent.

 

In the stark words of Premier Wen Jiabao, water scarcity threatens the very “survival of the Chinese nation”. But in seeking to address that challenge, China’s gargantuan projects threaten to damage the delicate Tibetan ecosystem. They also carry seeds of inter-riparian conflict. The hydropolitics in the Mekong river basin, for example, can only get sharper as China, ignoring the concerns of downstream states, completes more upstream dams on the Mekong.

 

While making half-hearted attempts to stanch Indian fears about the prospective diversion of the Brahmaputra northward, Beijing has identified the bend where the Brahmaputra forms the world’s longest and deepest canyon, just before entering India, as holding the largest untapped reserves for meeting China’s water and energy needs. A Sino-Indian conflict over the sharing of the Brahmaputra waters, for instance, would begin no sooner than China begins to build the world’s largest hydropower plant on the river’s Great Bend. Upstream projects already have been held responsible for flash floods in Arunachal and Himachal Pradesh.

 

The way to forestall or manage water disputes in Asia is to build cooperative river-basin arrangements involving all riparian neighbours. Such institutional arrangements ought to centre on transparency, information sharing, pollution control and a pledge not to redirect the natural flow of trans-boundary rivers or undertake projects that would diminish cross-border flows. The successful interstate basin agreements (such as over the Indus, the Nile and the Senegal) are founded on such principles. In the absence of institutionalized cooperation over shared resources, peace will be the casualty in Asia as water becomes the new battleground.

 

The writer is a strategic affairs analyst.

 

 (c) Times of India, 2008.

The change we need in the world

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Wanted: Men At Work

 

Today’s global challenges and power shifts symbolize the birth-pangs of a new world order, making far-reaching institutional reforms inescapable

 

Brahma Chellaney

The Hindustan Times, November 18, 2008

 

The U.S.-sparked global financial meltdown is just the latest sign that the world is at a defining moment in its history, with today’s manifold challenges and tectonic power shifts epitomizing the birth-pangs of a new global order. The world has changed fundamentally in the last two decades. Given the pace of political, economic and technological transformation, the next 20 years are likely to bring equally dramatic change. Yet the global institutional structure has remained static since the mid-20th century.

 

The world cannot remain saddled with outmoded, ineffective institutions and rules. That in turn demands far-reaching institutional reforms, not the half-hearted and desultory moves we have seen thus far, geared mostly at establishing ways to improvise and temporize and thereby defer genuine reforms.

 

A classic case is the Group of Eight’s “outreach” initiative, which brings some emerging economies into a special outer tier designed for show. Worse was the reform-shorn Group of Twenty summit meeting, hosted last weekend by a lame-duck U.S. president who will be remembered in history for making the world more volatile, unsafe and divided through a doctrine that emphasized pre-emption over diplomacy in a bid to validate Otto von Bismarck’s thesis that “the great questions of our time are not decided by speeches and majority decisions … but by iron and blood.” George W. Bush’s blunders ended up causing the collapse of U.S. soft power and triggering a domestic backlash that has propelled the election of the first African-American as president.

 

But while Barack Obama is the symbol of hope for many in the world, he inherits problems of historic proportions at a time when the U.S. — mired in two wars and a financial crisis buffeted by the weakest U.S. economy in 25 years and a federal deficit approaching $1 trillion — can no longer influence the global course on its own. Obama simply cannot live up to the high expectations the world has of him. After all, a new U.S. president cannot stem the global power shifts. The days are over when the U.S. could set the international agenda with or without its traditional allies.

 

The real challenge for Obama is to help lead America’s transition to the emerging new world order by sticking to his mantra of change and facilitating international institutional reforms. The financial contagion’s current global spread could have been contained had the broken Bretton Woods system been fixed. Hopefully, we won’t need a major sustained crisis to engulf each international institution before it can be reformed. Some institutions already may be beyond repair, making their dissolution or replacement the only viable option. But even in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, there is still only talk of reform, without a real push for a new financial architecture.

 

Existing institutions were born from conflict and war, in keeping with what Winston Churchill once said: “The story of the human race is war.” But global power shifts now are being triggered not by military triumphs or geopolitical realignments but by a factor unique to the contemporary world — rapid economic growth.

 

While the present ailing international order emerged from the ruins of a world war, its replacement has to be built in an era of international peace and thus be designed to reinforce that peace. That is no easy task, given that the world has little experience establishing or remaking institutions in peacetime.  

 

Reform is also being stymied by entrenched interests, unwilling to yield some of their power and prerogative. Rather than help recreate institutions for the changed times, vested interests already are cautioning against “overreaction” and conjuring up short-term fixes for the multiple crises the world confronts. But without being made more representational, fit and efficient, the existing institutions risk fading into irrelevance.

 

Some, like the International Monetary Fund, may never regain relevance, and not be missed. Some others, including the G-8 and International Energy Agency, are crying for membership enlargement, while the World Bank — if recast and freed of the overriding U.S. veto power — could focus on poverty alleviation especially in Africa, most of whose residents live on the margins of globalization. Even if a geographically challenged Sarah Palin did not know Africa was a continent and not a country, it will ill-behoove an African-American U.S. president to continue the international neglect of Africa — a neglect China has sought to blithely exploit.

 

Yet other institutions, such as the United Nations, can be revitalized through broad reforms. Detractors portray the UN as a “talking shop” where “no issue is too small to be debated endlessly”. But it remains the only institution truly representative of all the nations. Its main weakness is a toothless General Assembly and an all-powerful cabal of five Security Council members, who opaquely seek to first hammer out issues between themselves but of late appear irredeemably split. The UN has to change or become increasingly marginalized.

 

To mesh with the international nature of today’s major challenges and the consensual demands of an interconnected world, reforms in all institutions ought to centre on greater transparency and democratic decision-making. The Security Council cannot be an exception. To help jump-start its stalled reform process, those aspiring to be new permanent members would do well to suggest an across-the-board abolition of the veto to fashion a liberal democratic institution where decisions are arrived at through a simple three-quarter majority rule.

 

Brahma Chellaney is a strategic affairs specialist.

 

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Dalai Lama: Taken for a ride

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Crunch time for the Tibetan movement

 

The Dalai Lama failed to capitalize on the largest, most-powerful Tibetan uprising since he was forced to flee Tibet in 1959. By resuming talks with Beijing after the March uprising, he actually came to the succour of a regime vilifying him. Now, dejected and lost, he is asking Tibetans to decide the future course of action.

 

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, November 19, 2008

With the Tibetan movement at the crossroads as China tightens its vise on Tibet, the week-long conclave of exiles now in progress at the Dalai Lama’s initiative in Dharamsala offers an opportunity for a critical self-appraisal so as to find a more pragmatic and workable strategy for the coming years.

 

A good beginning has been provided by the Dalai Lama’s recent public admissions. He said this month that the path of negotiations with China has failed to yield any results even as the situation in Tibet deteriorates. And late last month, he said: “I have been sincerely pursuing the middle-way approach in dealing with China for a long time now, but there hasn’t been any positive response from the Chinese side”, adding: “As far as I’m concerned I have given up”.

 

Beijing has pursued the same negotiating strategy with the Dalai Lama that it has with India, which is to take the other side round and round the mulberry bush in never-ending talks aimed at changing the facts on the ground while projecting moderation. This approach also has been employed to try and wheedle out concessions by putting forth new demands at regular intervals and thereby placing the onus for progress on the other side — something China has skilfully practiced in its serial negotiations with India since 1981 on the border issue and with the Dalai Lama’s envoys since 2002.

 

As for the Dalai Lama’s “middle way”, the Tibetan leader admittedly has secured nothing from Beijing since he moved two decades ago from seeking Tibet’s independence to advocating its autonomy within China. In fact, no sooner had a lot of ballyhooing started about the “middle way” than Tibet witnessed a harsh martial-law crackdown in 1989 under the local communist party boss who today is China’s president.

 

The Dalai Lama, however, can hardly be faulted for seeking conciliation and accommodation with China. As the Tibetans are in no position to undo China’s conquest of their homeland, he has sagaciously sought a negotiated settlement to guarantee autonomy to Tibet within China, no more than what has been granted to Hong Kong and Macao. Had he not tested China’s sincerity for compromise, he would not have shown to the world that the autocrats in Beijing still prefer repression to reform in Tibet.

 

If the Dalai Lama has made any mistakes, they have not been strategic but tactical. This year, for example, he strikingly failed to capitalize on the largest, most-powerful Tibetan uprising since he was forced to flee Tibet in 1959. By resuming talks with Beijing after the March uprising, he actually came to the succour of a regime still vilifying him. The talks helped China to forestall a wide international boycott of the Beijing Olympics’ opening ceremony and to deflect criticism of the way it ruthlessly suppressed the Tibetan protests that flared in Lhasa and spread like wild fire even to the Tibetan areas merged in Han provinces.

 

Now, downcast and lost, the Dalai Lama is holding the conclave — the first of its kind since 1991 — and asking fellow Tibetans to decide the future course of action. He remains the greatest asset for the Tibetan cause — the iconic figure that internationally personifies the struggle against brutal Chinese rule over a vast, resource-rich plateau that historically served as the buffer between the Chinese and Indian civilizations. But he has also shown through some missteps that even a god-king is prone to human failings.

 

The Dalai Lama confronts a serious predicament. Buffeted by pressures from host India and weighed down by America’s reluctance to pay more than lip service to the Tibetan cause, the aging leader has seen his options crimp in the face of China’s emergence in one generation as a world power. America’s economic interlinks with China, including a growing reliance on Chinese capital inflows, have helped produce a succession of China-friendly US presidents. Barack Obama, saddled with the weakest US economy in 25 years, will be no different.

 

Other Western states have not been different. The biggest sinner, Britain, has only compounded its colonial-era machinations by its October 29 decision — on the eve of the last round of Chinese-Tibetan talks — to formally scrap the British Indian government’s recognition of China’s suzerainty relationship with Tibet embodied in the 1914 Simla Convention. This action, taken without consulting New Delhi, implies that London now recognizes China’s full sovereignty over Tibet.

 

India has a far greater stake in the future of Tibet than any other country. Yet its government leaders, far from playing India’s trump card against China — the Dalai Lama — are too shy to openly meet him, even as New Delhi continues to turn the other cheek to China’s provocations. Take the newest Chinese statement irately denouncing the Indian foreign minister’s sterile reassertion of a geographical fact for home audiences — that Arunachal Pradesh is an Indian state.

 

Beijing’s bizarre logic is that because it “has never recognized the illegal McMahon Line” — and “India knows this” — New Delhi has no business to say Arunachal is part of India. But how does a disputed boundary line justify China’s claim over an entire Indian state that is nearly three times the size of Taiwan — a state the Dalai Lama vouches was never part of Tibet? Tibet’s occupying power is silent on that issue. Yet, instead of summoning the Chinese ambassador the next day, New Delhi kept quiet over Beijing’s latest provocation.

 

Because China disputes with India the very 1914 boundary line it has accepted with Burma, should New Delhi also lay claim to large chunks of territory — to the north of the McMahon Line, on grounds of cultural links with Arunachal? New Delhi need not pay back Beijing in the same coin. But why has it retreated to a more and more defensive position by allowing Beijing to shift the focus from its annexation of Tibet to the supposed centrality of Arunachal’s future status?

 

If Beijing’s logic is wacky, New Delhi’s seems absent. Little surprise thus that the poor Dalai Lama appears at a loss to fathom India’s strategic thinking. He shouldn’t even try: As long as India continues to be governed by doddering old men whose only priority is survival in power, its policy will stay feckless. Nor should he ever take his cue from a host country that still mistakes stagecraft for statecraft. India has a track record of betraying friends but respecting enemies.

Clearly, this is crunch time for the Tibetan cause. Abandoning the path of non-violence cannot be a credible option. Violent means against a trigger-happy despotic regime will bring little more than misery to Tibetans. But staying put in a barren negotiating process only works to China’s strategic advantage.

It was overoptimistic to expect the “middle way” to sway rulers who have been proverbial extremists, lurching from one end of the pendulum (hardcore communists) to the other (unashamed capitalists). Whom they denounced as enemies earlier are the very states they zealously befriend today. Their policies have disregarded human costs in the past and environmental costs now.

Against such rulers, the Dalai Lama needs a more flexible, nuanced, reciprocity-tied and leverage-playing approach geared to finding and exploiting right opportunities. He also needs to clarify the rules for choosing his successor, lest a waiting Beijing anoint a puppet Dalai Lama.

(c) Asian Age, 2008.

Will Obama help renew America’s soft power?

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Obama represents welcome change for India

Reuters November 14, 2008
 
Columnist Brahma Chellaney says in keeping with Obama’s personality, change under him will be cautious, calibrated and incremental, but packaged to convey a clean break from the Bush era.
 

(Brahma Chellaney is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own.)

By Brahma Chellaney

Saddled with problems of historic proportions, U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has little time to savour his epochal victory. He is inheriting national and global challenges more formidable than any an American president has faced at inauguration. The necessity to clean up the unprecedented mess that occurred on President George W. Bush’s watch crimps Obama’s ability to pursue major new initiatives.

For the next one year and more, Obama will be preoccupied with finding ways to extricate the U.S. from the economic recessionary trends at home and the military quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In addition, he has to devise more-workable American policies on Russia, Iran and North Korea, re-engage the U.S. in finding an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, and help nuclear-armed but quasi-failed Pakistan pull back from the brink of collapse.

The team Obama assembles will reveal the kind of leadership and change the world can expect. But it won’t be easy for him to live up to the high expectations that the world has of him.

For India, an America that returns to playing a mainstream international role and renews its ability to inspire and lead is better than the rogue superpower that the Bush presidency helped create.

The abdication of American values was symbolized by Bush’s establishment of the infamous prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the revealed network of illegal CIA detention camps elsewhere.

That helped undermine America’s real strength – its ability to inspire and lead. The U.S., after all, won the Cold War not by military means but by spreading the ideas of freedom, open markets and better life that helped drain the lifeblood from communism’s international appeal.

During the Bush presidency, India’s external security environment deteriorated. Thanks to the Bush Doctrine, an arc of contiguous volatility now lies to India’s west, stretching from Pakistan to Lebanon. The war on terror that Bush launched stands derailed, even as the level of trans-national terrorism emanating from the Pakistan-Afghanistan belt has escalated.

The core tenets of the Bush Doctrine were fourfold: the U.S. should pursue pre-emptive strikes where necessary; it should be willing to act unilaterally – alone or with a “coalition of the willing” – if it cannot win the United Nations’ sanction; the primary focus should be on politically transforming the Middle East; and Iraq ought to be the cornerstone in bringing about region-wide democratic change.

When Bush wasn’t chasing pre-emption, he was pushing sanctions. That too had an adverse effect on India’s regional interests. Take Burma and Iran.

In his nearly eight years in office, Bush has signed more punitive executive orders against Burma than against any other country. It is as if impoverished, inwardly focused Burma threatens regional or international security.

The blunt truth is that the Bush approach only helped strengthen the Burmese military junta despite popular discontent. In fact, to India’s detriment, it helped push Burma into China’s strategic lap.

India has also lost out to China in Burma on the energy front. After China torpedoed an early 2007 U.S.-led attempt to impose a Security Council diktat on Burma to improve its human-rights record, the junta thanked Beijing by first withdrawing the status of India’s GAIL company as the “preferential buyer” of gas from the offshore A-1 and A-3 fields and then signing a production-sharing contract with China’s CNPC.

For India, this was a discomforting diplomatic setback because the A-1 and A-3 blocks are partly owned by two Indian state-run companies.

Similarly, Bush’s sanctions approach against Iran has failed to either dislodge the clerical regime there or make Tehran fall in line on the nuclear front. But with the Bush administration ratcheting up tensions with Iran, the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project proposal has turned into a geopolitical nightmare for New Delhi, which has faced intense U.S. pressure to side with Washington’s international campaign against Tehran.

The net result has been that India’s relations with Iran have come under strain. Seeking to subtly punish India for its two votes against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board, Tehran has gone back on the terms of a deal to supply 5 million tonnes of liquefied national gas (LNG) annually to India for 25 years from 2009.

Even while waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush had wanted to militarily take on Iran – a confrontation that would have had a cascading effect on the Indian economy by disrupting oil imports.

Yet, underlining how power respects power, Bush mollycoddled the world’s longest-surviving autocracy in China, to the extent that he ignored the brutal suppression of the Tibetan uprising earlier in the year and showed up at the Beijing Olympics in August.

In place of the blustering and blundering Bush, Obama will be a welcome change for India. In keeping with his personality, change under Obama will be cautious, calibrated and incremental, but packaged to convey a clean break from the Bush era.

Yet, there is concern in some quarters in India that Obama may appoint a special envoy on Kashmir and mount non-proliferation pressures on New Delhi.

Such concern has been articulated in particular by Indian neoconservatives (“neocons”), who are feeling orphaned with the end of the Bush era and conjuring up visions of U.S. activism even before Obama has set up his foreign-policy team.

After the vaunted Indo-U.S. nuclear deal – which tethers India firmly to the U.S.-led international non-proliferation regime – there isn’t much non-proliferation room to keep badgering New Delhi.

The deal was a bipartisan U.S. product, with Obama himself contributing to tightening its terms by successfully inserting two legislative amendments – one of which restricts India’s uranium imports to “reasonable reactor operating requirements”, while the other seeks to deter Indian testing by threatening a U.S.-led international nuclear-trade embargo.

As for Kashmir, the truth is that, from Harry Truman to Bush, U.S. presidents have tried to pitchfork themselves as peacemakers between India and Pakistan to help advance American interests.

It was the Bush White House, for example, that helped set up the 2001 Agra summit meeting between then Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pakistani ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf, revealing its dates before New Delhi and Islamabad had a chance to get their act together.

The question is: Why should India be defensive on Kashmir? Is it the terror-exporting irredentist party seeking to redraw frontiers in blood? Even if a special U.S. envoy is appointed, what can he seek that India has not already offered under current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh – from making frontiers “meaningless and irrelevant” so as to create a “borderless” Kashmir, to the “sky is the limit” in negotiations?

Indian interests demand a new U.S. approach on subjects ranging from the challenges in India’s troubled neighbourhood to the global climate crisis. That is exactly what the political change in Washington promises.

(Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.)

© Thomson Reuters 2008. All rights reserved

Why is India so defensive on Kashmir?

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Needless alarm

 

India should not be defensive about any new U.S. activism on the issue of Kashmir

 

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, November 11, 2008

 

Saddled with problems of historic proportions, US president-elect Barack Obama has little time to savour his epochal victory. He inherits national and global challenges more formidable than any American president has faced at inauguration. The necessity to clean up the unprecedented mess that has occurred under the swaggering and blundering George W Bush means Obama will have little time for major new initiatives. Yet, there is concern in India that Obama may appoint ex-President Bill Clinton as his special envoy on Kashmir.

The first question to ask is: Why is India so defensive on Kashmir? Is it the terror-exporting irredentist party seeking to redraw frontiers in blood? Even if a special US envoy is appointed, what can he seek that India has not already offered under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh — from making frontiers “meaningless and irrelevant” so as to create a “borderless” Kashmir to the “sky is the limit” in negotiations? How radically Singh has changed Indian policy under Bush’s persuasion became known in September 2006 when he declared: “The Indian stand was that the borders could not be redrawn, while Pakistan was not prepared to accept the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir as the permanent solution. The two agreed to find a via media to reconcile the two positions”. By peddling an LoC-plus compromise, Singh has opened the path to inevitable concessions to Pakistan.

From Harry Truman to Bush, US presidents have tried to pitchfork themselves as peacemakers on Kashmir to help advance American interests. After all, repeated American attempts at Kashmir mediation or facilitation have helped the US to leverage its Pakistan ties vis-à-vis India. Truman’s suggestions on Kashmir, for example, prompted Jawaharlal Nehru to complain that he was “tired of receiving moral advice from the US”. After China launched a surprise invasion in 1962, Nehru sent two frantic letters to John F Kennedy for help. But the US began shipping arms only after the Chinese aggression had ceased and a weakened India had been made to agree to open Kashmir talks with Pakistan. The Clinton activism on Kashmir was driven by Robin Raphel and, in the second term, by Madeline Albright.

Bush would have attempted to play a more interventionist role on Kashmir had the US military not got bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan and had his pet dictator, Pervez Musharraf, not struggled for political survival at home. Yet, it was the Bush White House that helped set up the 2001 Agra summit meeting, revealing its dates before New Delhi and Islamabad had a chance to get their act together. Also, when Singh sprung a nasty surprise on the nation by embracing Pakistan as a fellow victim of and joint partner against terror on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, he put forward a US-designed proposal — joint anti-terror mechanism.

In fact, the Bush administration’s trumpeted “de-hyphenation” of India and Pakistan in US policy was not a calculated shift but the product of Pakistan’s descent into shambles and India’s political and economic rise after 1998. But US policymakers, making a virtue out of necessity, sought to take credit for the de-hyphenation. Under Bush, US policy simply went from hyphenation to parallelism. That has involved building strategic partnerships with and selling arms to both, and seeking (as Bush did publicly in New Delhi) “progress on all issues, including Kashmir”. Such is Bush’s legacy that the US, for the first time ever, is building parallel intelligence-sharing and defence-cooperation arrangements with India and Pakistan.

Thanks to Bush’s cowboy diplomacy, however, an arc of contiguous volatility now lies to India’s west, stretching from Pakistan to Lebanon. Even while waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, he had been itching for a military showdown with the only country in this arc not on fire — Iran. The war on terror he launched today stands derailed, even as the level of terrorism emanating from the Pak-Afghan belt has escalated. The recrudescence of major violence in Kashmir thus owes a lot to the baneful effects of the Bush Doctrine and a misguided approach on Pakistan that put a premium on political expediency.

Whatever may be the shape of Obama’s foreign policy, he has already acknowledged that Kashmir represents “a potential tar pit for American diplomacy”. In any event, Washington’s ability to intervene in Kashmir is tied to Indian acquiescence, however half-hearted or forced. Expressions of concern in India over the Obama administration playing an activist role on Kashmir thus reflect a lack of confidence in New Delhi not ceding space to US diplomacy — a diffidence borne from the historical record.

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

 

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