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Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

Bullish partisanship over the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal

Posted on August 13, 2008 by Chellaney

Please don’t nuke facts

Brahma Chellaney

The Asian Age, August 13, 2008

With the future shape of the Indo-US nuclear deal now out of India’s grasp and in the hands of foreigners, two things stand out domestically. The first is that the line between fact and fiction has become so blurred that spin now dominates the discourse. Indeed, such is the bullish partisanship on the issue and the shutting out of parliamentary scrutiny — mirrored in the astonishing postponement of the Parliament’s traditional monsoon session to the end of the monsoon season — that little room has been left for an informed debate.

The second is that the risks of serious misunderstandings and tragedy in the years later have been compounded through deliberate ambiguities in the agreed documents. Ambiguities may be fine with the US and the International Atomic Energy Agency because the leverage lies with them. But for a recipient state to turn a deaf ear to the stated positions and interpretations of other parties is to court trouble.

In fact, New Delhi has publicly prided its ingenuity in fashioning ambiguities. Take the claim that the safeguards accord has been cleverly worded to enable India to take “unspecified sovereign actions” in a contingency — an assertion out of sync with the negotiating record.

Such claims flow out of a contested reference in that accord’s preamble, which records that an “essential basis” of India’s “concurrence to accept Agency safeguards” is the “conclusion of international cooperation arrangements” to help secure “uninterrupted” fuel supply and build a “strategic reserve” of fuel. Whether such rights-empowering international arrangements exist or not is merely a preambular insertion by India without tying the IAEA to anything.

The preamble also notes that India “may take corrective measures” in the event of fuel-supply disruption. But “corrective measures” neither find mention in the numbered articles of the accord nor have been defined in the text, although Section XI on “definitions” spells out simple terms like “facility”, “reactor”, “nuclear material” and “Director General”. In effect, the accord precludes real correction by making safeguards indefinite and legally irrevocable.

IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei, in his statement introducing the accord for board approval, made clear that the preamble merely provided for “contextual background”. He pointed out “the agreement is of indefinite duration” and its termination provisions “are the same as for other INFCIRC/66-type agreements” (designed for non-nuclear-weapons states to cover individual plants and shipments of fuel). The IAEA will enforce inspections until any safeguarded Indian facility — indigenous or imported — is “no longer usable for any nuclear activity”.

Did India contest ElBaradei’s statement? No, although ElBaradei implicitly rubbished the India-specific claim by saying, “The text before you is an INFCIRC/66-type safeguards agreement based on the Agency’s standard safeguards practices and procedures”. Several states also put on the record the cosmetic and non-operational nature of the aforesaid preambular references. Still, despite presenting a three-page statement at the end, India chose not to deny such contentions or even to stress its right to take corrective measures.

So, apart from claims publicly proffered at home by officials, there is nothing in the negotiating record about India explicitly staking any right to take any corrective step. All it has is a dubious reference in the preamble, which the IAEA chief has dismissed as “contextual background”. In his subsequent news conference, ElBaradei went on to say that a “concrete result” would be India’s co-option to help implement the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and conclude the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty.

Against this background, would India have any case if it were stopped from building a strategic fuel reserve or slapped with a fuel cut-off? The onus will always be on India to behave well or risk a double whammy — a fuel squeeze or suspension while saddled with everlasting international inspections on its entire civil nuclear programme. Despite getting none of the rights the five established nuclear-weapons states have vis-à-vis the IAEA, India has accepted the Agency’s paramount authority to settle “any question arising out of the interpretation or application of this agreement”.

The board easily ratified the accord by consensus because it meets non-proliferation standards and opens the path to drafting India into the NPT regime as a de facto party. While this accord sets the technical parameters for co-opting India into the non-proliferation regime, the impending exemption by the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group will set the political parameters.

The potential costs of equivocation primarily flow out of the earlier-negotiated 123 agreement with the US — an accord that fudges or tiptoes around key issues relating to strategic fuel reserves, reprocessing right, corrective measures and a linkage between perpetual safeguards and perpetual fuel supply. It also stands out for its lack of a dispute-resolution mechanism and for merely recording that India would seek the right to corrective measures in the safeguards accord.

Clearly spelled-out provisions, not equivocation and semantic subterfuge, was what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had pledged in Parliament to “ensure there is no repeat of our unfortunate experience with Tarapur”. Yet the accords negotiated with the US and IAEA risk making India an easier prey to external pressures. A quick comparison of these accords with the 1963 Indo-US 123 agreement and the 1971 safeguards pact underscores that danger.

While the 1963 agreement guaranteed fuel “as needed” by India, the equivocation in the latest 123 accord is manifest from the fuel-related assurances left hanging in Article 5.6, which says the US is “willing to incorporate assurances regarding fuel supply in the bilateral US-India agreement” — that is, at some point in the future. The accord arms the US with an open-ended right to suspend supplies forthwith simply by issuing a one-year termination notice on any ground, however extraneous.

While the 1963 agreement permitted India to reprocess after a “joint determination” with the US that the reprocessing facility was “safeguardable”, the latest accord requires India not only to build a new dedicated facility to US satisfaction but also to separately negotiate and sign a congressionally vetted agreement on reprocessing. Although the US overrode the terms of the 1963 agreement through a new 1978 domestic law, the latest 123 accord says its implementation will be governed by national laws, underscoring the Hyde Act’s primacy.

The more-equitable 1971 safeguards accord was trilateral, with the US as a party. The applicability and duration of safeguards were explicitly tied to American fuel supply. Its structure and provisions were uniquely India-specific.

By contrast, the latest accord — modelled on the upgraded, NPT-system safeguards for non-nuclear-weapons states — is little India-specific. Despite a preambular reference to India’s civil-military separation plan — a mention that forms part of what ElBaradei sneeringly calls “contextual background” — the accord in none of its articles acknowledges the existence of an Indian nuclear-weapons programme even for the purpose of defining the scope or limits of safeguards.

The blunt fact is that India secured better agreements in an era in which the Chinese military invasion had shattered its confidence and the US PL-480 aid had fostered the image of a country with a begging bowl than in a period marking its rise as a knowledge powerhouse and nuclear-weapons state.

Little surprise, therefore, that spin is being aggressively employed to shroud inconvenient truths. In his July 22 speech in Parliament, the prime minister stated that while the G-8 passed a “harsh resolution” after the 1998 tests, at the “meeting of the G-8 held recently in Japan, the chairman’s summary has welcomed cooperation in civilian nuclear energy between India and the international community”. Really?

This is what the chair’s summary said: “We look forward to working with India, the IAEA, the NSG and other parties to advance India’s non-proliferation commitments and progress so as to facilitate a more robust approach to civil nuclear cooperation with India to help it meet its growing energy needs in a manner that enhances and reinforces the global non-proliferation regime”. Note the reference to cooperation is secondary. The primary thrust is on advancing “India’s non-proliferation commitments and progress”. Civil nuclear cooperation is just the means to achieve the objective to reinforce the NPT regime. The G-8 leaders, in their separate declaration, actually pledged to “redouble our efforts to uphold and strengthen” the NPT, which perpetuates a five-nation nuclear monopoly.

The prime minister also made the following dream-selling claim on July 22: “It will open up new opportunities for trade in dual-use high technologies, opening up new pathways to accelerate industrialization of our country”. The deal, however, is intended to open commercially lucrative exports for safeguarded Indian facilities while specifically denying dual-use nuclear technologies. Easing high-technology and civilian space export controls is not part of this deal.

New Delhi, after agreeing to more and more conditions, is now threatening to turn its back on the imports-centred deal unless the NSG waiver is “clean” and “unconditional”. This is redolent of what the prime minister told Parliament on August 17, 2006: “It is clear if the final product is in its current form, India will have grave difficulties in accepting the bill. The US has been left in no doubt as to our position”. But when the Hyde Act was passed ignoring that warning, New Delhi didn’t make even a peep.

More misrepresentation will come when the NSG makes multilateral some of the bilateral conditions of the 123 Agreement and unilateral terms of the Hyde Act. The latest US draft submitted to the NSG after consultations with India shows that New Delhi has already acquiesced to its test moratorium being turned into a multilateral legality. But to deflect attention, spinmeisters introduced a red herring — the draft’s “full-scope safeguards” objective, presenting that as the main sticking point and then claiming India has upheld its interest by making the US drop that reference.

Befriend China, Don’t Propitiate

Posted on August 11, 2008 by Chellaney

Sending A Wrong Signal

Sonia Gandhi’s Beijing visit is not good diplomacy

Brahma Chellaney, The Times of India, August 11, 2008

Vision, consistency and tenacity are critical to good diplomacy. Nothing can undermine foreign policy more than spur-of-the-moment initiatives or actions based on personal whims and fancies. Pragmatic foreign policy, as legendary French diplomat Charles-Maurice de Tellyrand-Périgord said, cannot display too much zeal. In that light, Sonia Gandhi’s sudden decision to go to the Beijing Olympics runs counter to the central precepts of sound diplomacy.

That this is her second visit to China in less than a year smacks not just of overzealousness but borders on indiscretion, coming as it does in the face of mounting Chinese assertiveness. Her previous visit last October, in the company of son Rahul Gandhi, was ill-timed because it followed several provocative Chinese actions, including Beijing publicly upping the ante on territorial disputes, compelling India to call off an IAS officers’ tour by denying a visa to an Arunachali officer, and repudiating a 2005 agreement that any border-related settlement should not disturb settled populations. Her latest visit, with members of her extended family, follows more Chinese provocations, including border incidents (like the demolition of makeshift Indian army bunkers at the Sikkim-Bhutan-Tibet trijunction) and the post-midnight summoning of the Indian ambassador.

Reciprocity is the first principle of diplomacy. While no senior Chinese official has visited India since President Hu Jintao’s late 2006 stopover, a steady stream of Indian functionaries have continued to go to Beijing, even as Defence Minister A.K. Anthony put on public record recently India’s concern over rising Chinese cross-border incursions. This year alone, China has played host first to the prime minister, then to the external affairs minister and now to Sonia Gandhi, with Manmohan Singh set to return to Beijing in October for the ASEM summit. Sonia’s visit comes shortly after China slighted External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee by cancelling his scheduled meeting with Premier Wen Jiabao and deputing a junior functionary to receive earthquake-related relief from him.

That was not the only diplomatic snub by China recently. It publicly extended an Olympic opening-ceremony invitation to the most powerful person in India but not to the Indian president or prime minister, although under International Olympic Committee rules such invitations are the prerogative of each participating country’s national Olympic committee. The message was clear: Beijing does not care much for the duly elected Indian government but knows where actual power resides and what strings to pull in India. It also correctly calculated that unlike Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown, Stephen Harper, Donald Tusk and other leaders who are staying away from the Games, Sonia Gandhi will not fuss about the continuing repression in Tibet or China and attend, even though the Tibet issue is much closer to India’s interests than to the boycotters’.

Sonia’s fascination with China, as this writer learned long ago in a one-to-one meeting with her, dates back to her 1988 Beijing visit with late husband Rajiv Gandhi. The Chinese leadership rolled out all the pomp and pageantry, although that visit followed the 1987 Sumdorong Chu military showdown that brought war clouds out of a clear blue sky. Beijing’s perception of Sonia as someone it can work with was reinforced by her visit last October, when it accorded her a welcome fit for a head of state.

Her latest visit, at a time when China has stepped up pressure on India, will only help engender more Chinese pressure. By sowing confusion in India’s China policy, it not only sends out a message incongruous with Indian interest, but also unconsciously plays into Beijing’s game-plan to belittle the elected government as ineffectual and rudderless and reach out to her. Beijing is content that the Indian officialdom has fallen into the Chinese trap of talking about talks in a never-ending process. That leaves China free to pursue “congagement” with India, a blend of containment symbolized by aggressive flanking manoeuvres and engagement aided through the instrumentality of Sonia Gandhi.

In a year in which Chinese security forces cracked down harshly on Tibetans, the Olympics have focused global attention on China’s poor human-rights record. Yet, given India’s stake in stable, peaceful ties with China, New Delhi was right not to boycott the Games ceremony, deputing the sports minister to represent India. Befriend, not propitiate, ought to be the thrust of Indian policy. Sonia’s visit, however, throws a spanner in the carefully calibrated Indian approach.

Her visit cannot be defended as personal or apolitical, for her presence at the Games ceremony sends out a potent political message. To go with children and grandchildren and treat the trip as all fun and games will be out of step with her political status. After all, she heads India’s ruling party and her son is its general secretary. A jaunt fraught with foreign-policy implications is irreconcilable with such standing.

Sonia Gandhi’s life story is like a fairy tale come true: an au pair who marries Prince Charming and rises to become the most powerful figure in a distant foreign land she makes her home. Her ascension from humble origins is as much a tribute to her grit as to the openness of her adopted country. But while India celebrates diversity, China honours homogeneity. Sonia has to realize she is dealing with a state that has replaced Maoism with nationalism as the legitimating credo of the 59-year-old communist rule. And the element of homogeny is implanted in both its institutional structures and popular thought.

Ad hoc, personality-driven approach is no way to deal with such a state that calculatedly plays to its national pride and resolutely pursues long-term strategic interests. To upstage your own government through presence at China’s coming-out party is no mean matter. Once the party is over, it may not be long before China takes its gloves off. Given its growing bellicosity, can anyone discount the possibility that it may try to give India a bloody nose through a lightening but localized military expedition?

Jawaharlal Nehru had advised that the 1962 invasion become “a permanent piece of education”. Today, not only have the lessons of 1962 been forgotten, but also the flurry of Indian officials visiting Beijing for the party shows the manner India’s self-esteem is ebbing.

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research.

Climate Change As Threat Multiplier

Posted on August 7, 2008 by Chellaney

Say no to ‘NPT’ of climate change

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY Japan Times, August 7, 2008

Climate change has been correctly identified as a threat multiplier. Yet it has already become a divisive issue internationally before a plan for a low-carbon future has emerged.

Just as the five original nuclear- weapons states helped fashion the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to perpetuate their privileges, states that become wealthy early wish to preserve their prerogatives in a climate-change regime, despite their legacy of environmental damage and continuing high carbon emissions.

This has raised the danger that efforts to lock in the rich nations’ advantages by revising the 1992 Rio bargain and rejiggering the Kyoto Protocol obligations through a new regime could create another global divide between haves and have-nots — an NPT of climate change. In fact, a new bargain is at the heart of the efforts to fashion a 2009 Copenhagen Protocol.

With the Kyoto Protocol’s target of a mere 7 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions below 1990 levels falling by the wayside as global emissions continue to grow at 1.8 percent a year, the standard excuse being trotted out for failing to meet one’s responsibility is that global warming cannot be slowed unless India and China also agree to cut their emissions.

That China and India serve as a convenient pretext for political foot-dragging is apparent from the widely held belief that the climate crisis impact would be borne largely by the developing world and, therefore, the rich nations ought not to slow their economic growth through major emission cuts at a time when they face a growing challenge from the emerging economies.

Such smug beliefs, as U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman acknowledged at a group discussion two months ago in which this writer was involved, have helped foster resistance in Congress to America slashing its high emissions, accounting for almost a quarter of the world’s total. The recent defeat of the Lieberman- Warner cap-and-trade bill on climate change thus is not a surprise.

Ironically, the desired new global bargain would call upon the vulnerable states on the frontline of climate change to shoulder responsibility with those who would supposedly benefit.

The blunt fact is that there will be no winners from climate change. Not only will its effects be global, climate change is likely to make weather patterns more unpredictable in higher latitudes. Indeed, with the upper reaches of the Arctic already warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, climate change could wreak havoc on agriculture, public health and ecosystems in colder lands, besides helping breed unmanageable viruses.

At a time of greater international divisiveness on core challenges — from disarmament and terrorism to the food crisis and the Doha Round of world trade talks — the world can ill-afford political rancor over the climate crisis, which carries the seeds of exacerbating existing security challenges, without necessarily creating a new category of threats.

While it is easy to exaggerate or underestimate the likely impact of climate change owing to the continuing gaps in scientific knowledge, three broad strategic effects can be visualized on the basis of studies so far.

First, climate change would intensify interstate and intrastate competition over natural resources, making resource conflicts more likely. A new Great Game over water, for example, could unfold, with Asia as the hub, given China’s control over the source of all of Asia’s major rivers except the Ganges. Accelerated melting of glaciers and mountain snows would affect river-water flows, although higher average temperatures are likely to bring more rainfall in the tropics.

Second, higher frequency of extreme weather events (such as hurricanes, flooding and drought) and a rise in ocean levels are likely to spur greater interstate and intrastate migration — especially of the poor and the vulnerable — from the delta and coastal regions to the hinterland.

Such an influx of outsiders would socially swamp inland areas, upsetting the existing fragile ethnic balance and provoking a backlash that strains internal and regional security. It should not be forgotten that many societies are a potent mix of ethnicity, culture and religion.

India, for example, could face a huge refugee influx from the world’s seventh most populous country, Bangladesh, which is already losing land to saltwater incursion. Having been born in blood in 1971, Bangladesh faces extinction from water, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) saying that country is set to lose 17 percent of its land and 30 percent of its food production by 2050.

In some cases, the effect of large-scale refugee influx would be to undermine the political stability and internal cohesion of the state. That could even foster or strengthen conditions making the state dysfunctional.

Third, human security will be the main casualty as climate change delivers a major blow to vulnerable economic sectors. Economic and social disparities, already wide in many societies, would intensify. The specter of resource conflicts, failed states, large-scale migrations, growing extremism, and higher frequency and intensity of extreme weather events helps underscore the human-security costs.

The diversion of food for biofuels, for instance, has only helped create a windfall for major farm industries while burdening the world’s poor. Also, buying carbon credits from poor states to exceed one’s own emission targets is environmental grandstanding, at best, and carbon colonialism, at worst.

The hope was that such carbon trading would allow emission cuts to happen where they are the cheapest. But the evidence thus far is that it has done little more than provide a greener reputation to the states promoting the scheme.

A strengthened international regime to combat global warming will have to be anchored in differential responsibility, a concept at the heart of the Climate Change Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol, but also embedded in international law through several other agreements — from the Montreal Protocol to the Maastricht Treaty.

A lot can also be done outside a climate change regime. Take energy efficiency, which can help bring a quarter of all gains. The United States belches twice as much carbon dioxide per person as Japan, although the two countries have fairly similar per capita incomes. Or take the case within the U.S.: California has held its per capita energy consumption essentially constant since 1974, while per capita energy use in America as a whole has jumped during the same period by 50 percent.

Furthermore, given that deforestation accounts for as much as 20 percent of the emission problem, carbon storage is as important as carbon cuts. Each hectare of rainforest, for example, stores 500 tons of carbon dioxide. Forest management is thus important to tackle climate change. In fact, to help lessen the impact of climate change, states need to strategically invest in ecological restoration — growing and preserving rainforests, building wetlands and shielding species critical to our ecosystems.

Climate change is not just a matter of science but also a matter of geopolitics. Without improved geopolitics, there can be no real fight against climate change.

Equity in burden-sharing holds the key to a strengthened regime emerging at Copenhagen. The challenge is to devise carbon standards that help protect the material and social benefits of economic growth in the developing world but without damaging prosperity in the developed countries.

If the emerging economies were to assume obligations of the rich states, emission-cut targets would have to be based on objective criteria calibrating a country’s reduction burden both to its historic contributions to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and to its current per capita emissions. But if the privileged kept their present emission rights and tied any carbon cuts to burden-sharing with the underprivileged, it would constitute an NPT variant.

Brahma Chelleney, a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author, among others, of "On the Frontline of Climate Change: International Security Implications."

The Japan Times: Thursday, Aug. 7, 2008

U.S.-India nuclear deal set to attract more conditions

Posted on August 7, 2008 by Chellaney

A corrupt deal pushed corruptly

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, August 16-31, 2008

Those who egged on the prime minister to take the nuclear deal to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board even if it meant breaking the governing alliance didn’t have much to do: Manmohan Singh himself led the charge. With his V signs for the media cameras, Singh took the lead to survive the confidence vote in Parliament by hook or by crook.

That the government triumphed by winning over or neutralizing a number of opposition MPs through various illicit inducements now hangs as a national shame — a stigma that will haunt Singh forever and undermine his leadership during his remainder months in office. The subsequent terrorist bombings in Bangalore and Ahmedabad, and the popular uprising in the Jammu region, have helped reinforce the image of a weak, irresolute prime minister fixated on one issue, to the detriment of a balanced, forward-looking approach on advancing national interests.

When history is written, Singh will be remembered for the two nasty surprises he sprung on the nation, not for his legacy in continuing high GDP growth. The first was the nuclear deal whose “final draft came to me from the U.S. side”, as he confessed in Lok Sabha on August 3, 2005, after he had already reached Washington in July 2005, without any nuclear scientist in his delegation. And the other was his action, on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, in turning Indian policy on its head by embracing Pakistan as a fellow victim of and joint partner against terror — a blunder that brought more deadly attacks scripted by the Pakistani intelligence. Both the nuclear deal and the joint anti-terror mechanism were the product not of institutional thinking but of personal caprice.

The imports-oriented nuclear deal centres on big bucks, with exporters hoping for a windfall and importers looking forward to commissions and kickbacks. If the deal takes effect, India, over the next two decades, is likely to spend more than $100 billion expanding its national-power capacity, according to Ron Somers, president of the Washington-based U.S.-India Business Council. Such spending would not only help revive the moribund U.S. nuclear-power industry, but also bring billions of dollars worth of business to European, Russian and Japanese firms. The deal additionally comes with auxiliary understandings, including on U.S. arms exports to India. It is such interests that have helped lubricate a deal whose very rationale is fundamentally flawed: Generating electricity from high-priced imported reactors dependent on foreign fuel makes little economic or strategic sense.

Against that background, it should come as no surprise that a corrupt deal has been pushed corruptly. In fact, never before in independent India’s history has a major strategic issue been pushed in such a blatantly partisan way — with no regard to solemn promises made in Parliament. Such has been Singh’s partisan doggedness that, unlike for instance on the Jammu-agitation issue, he never called an all-party meeting on the deal, despite pledging in Parliament to “seek the broadest possible consensus within the country to enable the next steps to be taken”.

With Singh repeatedly acquiescing to goalpost shifting, the deal has acquired more and more conditions at every step of a still-continuing process. The civil-military “Separation Plan”, the Hyde Act, the so-called 123 Agreement and the latest IAEA safeguards accord have helped change the original terms, seeking to firmly tether India to the U.S.-led international non-proliferation regime in order to tame its nuclear waywardness. The way has been cleared to draft India into the NPT as a de facto party. Today, Singh’s pledges to Parliament stand belied, including that India will accept only the “same responsibilities and obligations as other advanced nuclear states like the U.S.”, that it will get “the same rights and benefits” as the U.S., and that it will “never accept discrimination”.

In that light, it is predictable that the deal would attract more grating conditions as it traverses the final two stages — clearances from the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group and the U.S. Congress. The U.S. ambassador has publicly dismissed India’s demand for an unconditional NSG clearance as “provocative”. In fact, India’s position has been undermined from within, with the prime minister’s irrepressible special envoy, Shyam Saran, terming as “unrealistic” the demand that the NSG put no condition, not even a test ban. When the new conditions come, you can be certain that Singh and his handlers would spin reality to present the outcome as another “victory” for India.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Book review: Pakistan’s descent into chaos

Posted on August 2, 2008 by Chellaney

The Road to Terroristan

Brahma Chellaney, India Today, July 31, 2008

Descent Into Chaos

Ahmed Rashid

(Allen Lane)

This book is more about Pakistan’s tumble into chaos than about Afghanistan’s continuing bedlam. Central Asia appears only in passing, despite its subtitle, “How the War Against Islamic Extremism is Being Lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia”. Written in the narrative style of a reporter, the book recounts the events and actions that have earned Pakistan disparaging labels like “Problemistan”, “Terroristan” and “Al Qaidastan” — epithets that underline its potential threat to global security.

Jihad culture is now deeply woven into Pakistan’s national fabric. Unravelling it won’t be easy. But it is essential for regional and global security. Pakistan remains a common thread in the investigations of most acts of international terrorism. India has officially blamed “elements in Pakistan” for the deadly bombing at its embassy in Kabul.

The book is well-timed, with growing recognition among U.S. analysts of the need for a broader, post-Iraq focus on Pakistan and Afghanistan — a theme central to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s foreign-policy agenda. The book indeed is a trenchant compendium of the Bush administration’s blunders that have undermined the global war on terror and helped fan Islamic extremism. Its author is well-known for a previous, equally well-timed book on the Taliban, published just before 9/11.

Rashid, one of Pakistan’s most-respected journalists, has an unusual background: As a youth, he spent 10 years as a guerrilla fighter and underground revolutionary in the hills of Baluchistan. When the April 1978 Marxist coup occurred in Afghanistan, Rashid was living in exile in Kabul. His mutinous credentials and Afghan links subsequently helped him as a writer to gain access to the Taliban.

Rashid’s objectivity stands out in his latest book. He is unsparingly critical of the Bush administration’s indulgent approach toward Pervez Musharraf in the years the general ran a one-man dictatorship. While then Secretary of State Colin Powell “liked Musharraf enormously and had developed a close relationship with him”, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was reluctant to “put pressure on Pakistan”. Such lenience spilled over into President Bush’s second term, according to Rashid, even as the Pakistan military and its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency aided and abetted the Taliban and the Islamist groups waging a terror campaign against India. The 2003 Iraq invasion only helped derail the war on terror. “Ultimately the strategies of the Bush administration have created a far bigger crisis in South and Central Asia than existed before 9/11”, Rashid writes. “There are more failing states in the Muslim world, while Al Qaeda has expanded around the world”.

Hobbled by a domineering military, militant Islam, endemic corruption and dependency on foreign aid, Pakistan remains a main breeding ground of global terror and the likely hideout of the most wanted terrorists, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri. Yet, as Rashid says, “the Taliban are now expanding in Pakistan much faster than anyone could have imagined”. Pakistan’s success in meeting its central challenge — to move away from militarism and extremism, and toward a stable, moderate state — hinges on “the army and the ISI being pressured or persuaded to give up their twisted logic of insecurity, national pride and expansion in the region, [so as] to help sort out the country’s problems, and to be good friends to Pakistan’s neighbours, instead of constantly trying to undermine them. The army’s insecurity, which since 1947 has essentially bred a covert policy of undermining neighbours, has now come full circle, for Pakistan’s very future is at stake as extremists threaten to undermine Pakistan itself”.

While such writings clearly do not sit well with the military establishment, with the author disclosing that he was once summoned by Musharraf and warned to stop writing about the ISI’s continuing assistance to the Afghan Taliban, Rashid at times is unable to rise above Pakistani prejudices against India in his book, alleging for example “the systematic use of rape as a weapon of terror by Indian soldiers” in Kashmir. He also equates Indian intelligence with the ISI in waging “a non-stop proxy war”.

The book’s main weakness, however, is that it is neither investigative nor scholarly but mainly a collation of events of recent years, up to Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. The author narrates some events at length but other equally significant developments are inexplicably ignored or under reported. For instance, he dismisses the Kargil War in one sentence but spends several pages on the highjacking of Flight IC-814. Still, the book overall is good and worth reading. It rightly argues that without elimination of Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan, Afghanistan cannot be pacified.

Climate Change: Equity in Burden-Sharing Holds the Key

Posted on August 2, 2008 by Chellaney

Share the Burden

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India, July 30, 2008

Climate change has been correctly identified as a threat multiplier. Yet it has already become a divisive issue, with the danger that the rich nations’ efforts to lock in their advantages by revising the 1992 Rio bargain and rejiggering their Kyoto Protocol obligations through a new regime could create another global divide between haves and have-nots — an NPT of climate change. A new bargain is at the heart of the efforts to fashion a 2009 Copenhagen Protocol.

With the Kyoto Protocol’s target of a mere 7 per cent reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions below 1990 levels falling by the wayside, the standard excuse being trotted out for failing to meet one’s responsibility is that global warming cannot be slowed unless India and China also agree to cut their emissions. That China and India serve as a convenient pretext for political foot-dragging is apparent from the widely held belief that the climate-crisis impact would be borne largely by the developing world and, therefore, the rich nations ought not to slow their economic growth through major emission cuts at a time when they face a growing challenge from the emerging economies.

An extension of that belief is the contention that global warming would change the relative strategic weight of nations, with those in the colder climes gaining, like Russia, but many others suffering an erosion of security and status. Such smug beliefs, as Senator Joe Lieberman acknowledged at a group discussion two months ago in which this writer was involved, have helped foster resistance in the US Congress to America slashing its high emissions, accounting for almost a quarter of the world’s total. The recent defeat of the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade bill thus is not a surprise. Ironically, the desired new global bargain would call upon the vulnerable states on the frontline of climate change, like India, to shoulder responsibility with those who would supposedly benefit.

At a time of greater international divisiveness on core challenges — from disarmament and terrorism to the food crisis and the Doha Round — the world can ill-afford political rancour over the climate crisis, which carries the seeds of exacerbating existing security challenges, without necessarily creating a new category of threats. While it is easy to exaggerate or underestimate the likely impact of climate change owing to the continuing gaps in scientific knowledge, three broad strategic effects can be visualized.

First, climate change is likely to intensify interstate and intrastate competition over natural resources. A new Great Game over water, for example, could unfold, with Asia as the hub, given China’s control over the source of all of Asia’s major rivers except the Ganges — Tibet. Accelerated melting of glaciers and mountain snows would affect river-water flows, although higher average temperatures are likely to bring more rainfall in the tropics.

Second, higher frequency of extreme weather events and a rise in ocean levels are likely to spur greater interstate and intrastate migration — especially of the poor and the vulnerable — from the delta and coastal regions to the hinterland. Such an influx of outsiders may provoke a backlash that strains internal and regional security. India, for example, could face a huge refugee influx from the world’s seventh most populous country, Bangladesh, already losing land to saltwater incursion.

Third, human security will be the main casualty as climate change delivers a major blow to vulnerable economic sectors. Disparities would intensify. The spectre of resource conflicts, failed states, large-scale migrations, growing extremism, and higher frequency and intensity of extreme weather events helps underscore the human-security costs.

Unlike other unconventional challenges, climate change is caused not by hostile forces but by production and consumption patterns. While the reluctance of the rich to accept any diminution in their lifestyle comforts is understandable, there is a need to go beyond symbolic approaches. The diversion of food for biofuels, for instance, has only helped create a windfall for major farm industries while burdening the world’s poor. Also, buying carbon credits from poor states to exceed one’s own emission targets is environmental grandstanding, at best, and carbon colonialism, at worst.

A strengthened regime will have to be anchored in differential responsibility, a concept at the heart of the Climate Change Convention and the Kyoto Protocol, but also embedded in international law through several other agreements — from the Montreal Protocol to the Maastricht Treaty. If the emerging economies were to assume obligations of the rich states, emission-cut targets would have to be set on objective criteria calibrating a country’s reduction burden both to its historic contributions to the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and to its current per-capita emissions. But if the privileged were to keep their emission rights and tie any cuts to burden-sharing with the underprivileged, it would constitute an NPT variant. By pledging that its per-capita emissions would never exceed developed countries’, India has ingeniously challenged the rich to help cap its emissions by cutting back on their own.

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research.

(c) Times of India, 2008.

To handle China, be a bit Chinese

Posted on July 31, 2008 by Chellaney

Beat them at their own game

Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, July 30, 2008

As an extension of the truisms of politics, like sunny beats gloomy, Beijing has devised its own positive slogans that its diplomats love to recite, such as a “win-win situation” and “common goals”. Such sloganeering provides diplomatic cover for the assertive promotion of Chinese interests. India needs to similarly strike an upbeat note and emphasize positives like “constructive engagement” and “shared benefits”. And through such catchphrases, New Delhi ought to publicly encourage Beijing to have a more “forward-looking approach” and shed the current negatives in its approach.

For example, China’s harking back to the past — to the unfinished business of 1962 — by laying claim to additional Indian territories runs counter to the constructive spirit essential to a win-win situation. Its pressing of increasingly assertive territorial claims on the basis of Tibet’s putative historical ties to those areas shows a mindset anchored in the past. That is a loss-loss situation, not a win-win situation. Similarly, China’s reluctance, while stepping up cross-border intrusions, to define the frontline with India by hiding behind shibboleths like, “It’s a problem left over from history” and “We need time and patience”, needs to be openly challenged as unconstructive, uncooperative and downright negative, with the intent to keep India under pressure.

India’s use of positives to bring out China’s negatives has become imperative in view of the rising Chinese belligerence, manifest from the proliferation of incursions and other border-related incidents since 2006 along a once-tranquil line of actual control (LAC). Even Defence Minister A. K. Antony was constrained to admit on July 23 that India is “concerned” over the increasing frequency of Chinese incursions. “We don’t take these things lightly”, he said. Such military incidents are proof that China’s negatives do not sit well with its claims.

Beijing, not content that Han territorial power is at its pinnacle, still seeks a Greater China. With 60 per cent of its present landmass comprising homelands of ethnic minorities, modern China has come a long way in history since the time the Great Wall represented the Han empire’s outer security perimeter. Yet, driven by self-cultivated myths, the state fuels territorial nationalism, centred on issues like Tibet and Taiwan, and its claims in the East and South China Seas and on Arunachal Pradesh — a state nearly thrice the size of Taiwan. China’s insistence on further expanding its national frontiers stymies a forward-thinking approach essential to building peace and stability in Asia.

The challenge China poses emanates principally from the character of its regime, not of its people. After all, weapons don’t kill until those holding the reins of power employ them. The military machine has been repeatedly unleashed against China’s own residents. The Chinese regime fans ultra-nationalism because the central tenet of its philosophy is uniformity, with Hu Jintao’s slogan of a “harmonious society” designed to undergird the theme of conformity with the state. While India celebrates diversity, China honours homogeneity. This quality of being uniform is implanted not just in institutions but also in popular thought.

Building consensus in democratic states entails reaching out to political opponents. In China, consensus is contrived simply through censorship, which snuffs out dissent. To stay healthy and to improve, a society needs an open, vigorous debate of its failings. But when a regime blocks such discussion, it can mean trouble for its inhabitants (as the latest repression in Tibet shows) and for its neighbours (as underlined by Beijing’s increasingly muscular foreign policy). The greatest genocide in modern history was not the Holocaust but Mao’s so-called Great Leap Forward.

That record, coupled with the counterproductive approach toward Tibet and India, belies the myth that Chinese rulers are pragmatic and farsighted. Indeed, the record shows them as proverbial extremists, lurching from one end of the pendulum (hardcore communists) to the other extreme (unabashed capitalists). Whom they denounced as China’s enemies in the past are the very nations they zealously befriend today. They pursued policies previously that had no regard for human costs. Today, they pursue policies with little respect for the environment.

The secretive, suspicious and paternalistic culture in which Chinese leaders have been reared is reflected in their shadowy and shifty policy toward India. To tackle a regime wedded to nationalism as state religion and opacity as strategy, New Delhi needs greater clarity and resolve on the ends and means of its China policy. In fact, to outwit this regime at its own game, New Delhi should be willing to employ some of the Chinese tactics and tools. In order words, to handle China, emulate the Chinese.

While publicly speaking the language of conciliation, New Delhi has to brace up to the prospect that once the Olympics are over, Beijing may be tempted to provoke more military incidents, especially if India’s domestic politics remain murky and policy in disarray. A full-scale war will militate against the regime’s portrayal of China as a peaceful rising power. But can anyone discount the possibility that it may seek to achieve limited strategic objectives through short, swift, localized forays across a couple of points along the LAC that give India a bloody nose? A lightening Chinese military expedition may be designed to cut a peer rival down to size in the eyes of the world and help end the now-fashionable China-India pairing the regime viscerally detests.

Growing Chinese assertiveness against India

Posted on July 22, 2008 by Chellaney

China’s next India war

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, July 16-31, 2008

China’s rapidly accumulating power is emboldening Beijing to pursue a more muscular foreign policy. After having touted its “peaceful rise”, it has shown a creeping propensity to flex its muscles — a tendency that has become more pronounced since it surprised the world with an anti-satellite weapon test in January 2007. Once the Beijing Olympics are over, it may not be long before China takes its gloves off. In fact, over the past year, its actions have ranged from provocatively seeking to assert its jurisdiction over islets claimed by Vietnam and staging large-scale war games in the South and East China Seas, to showcasing its new nuclear submarine capability and whipping up diplomatic spats with countries that grant official hospitality to the Dalai Lama.

What stands out the most is the perceptible hardening of China’s stance towards India. This is manifest from the Chinese military assertiveness on the ground (reflected in rising cross-border incursions), the supply of Chinese arms to rebels in India’s northeast, the instigation of the Gorkhaland agitation via Nepal connections, and the waging of intermittent cyberwarfare by targeting official Indian Web sites. From Chinese forces in November 2007 destroying some makeshift Indian army bunkers near Doka La, at the Sikkim-Bhutan-Tibet trijunction, to the Chinese foreign minister’s May 2007 message that Beijing no longer was bound by a 2005 agreement that any border-related settlement should not disturb settled populations, bellicosity has been writ large.

Recent unfriendly actions include the post-midnight summoning of the Indian ambassador in Beijing, slighting visiting External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee by cancelling his scheduled meeting with Premier Wen Jiabao, and deputing a junior functionary to receive earthquake-related relief from Mukherjee. These and other actions run counter to the stated aim of the high-level visits between the two countries to build a stable Sino-Indian relationship based on equilibrium and forward thinking. The public statements coming out from such visits, of course, are deceptively all sweetness and light.

The big question is: What objectives is China seeking to achieve by hardening its position? Indeed, it has gone to the extent of warning India of another 1962-style invasion through one of its state-run institutes. In a recent Mandarin-language commentary posted on the Web site of the International Institute of Strategic Studies of China, http://www.chinaiiss.org/, the author, using an assumed name, cautioned an “arrogant India” not “to be evil” or else Chinese forces in war “will not pull back 30 kilometres” like in 1962. Such belligerence, which has led to more than three dozen Chinese military forays into Sikkim alone this year, has prompted India to redeploy forces by beefing up defences in the vulnerable Siliguri Corridor, stationing Sukhoi-30s in Tezpur and initiating moves to reactivate seven abandoned airstrips along the Himalayas.

China’s motives remain a puzzle. Yet there are several disturbing parallels between what is happening now and the events between 1959 and 1962 that led to the Chinese invasion. That aggression had been cleverly timed to coincide with the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of a nuclear Armageddon. Consider the following parallels:

■ Like in the pre-war period, it has now again become commonplace internationally to speak of India and China in the same breadth. The aim of “Mao’s India war” in 1962, as Harvard professor Roderick MacFarquhar has called it, was mainly political: to cut India to size by demolishing what it represented — a pluralistic, democratic model to China’s totalitarian political system. As Premier Zhou Enlai publicly admitted then, the war was intended “to teach India a lesson”. The swiftness and force with which Mao Zedong managed to teach India a lesson not only discredited the Indian model in the eyes of the world, but boosted China’s international image and consolidated the Chinese strongman’s internal power to the extent that he could go from his disastrous 1957-61 Great Leap Forward — the greatest genocide in modern history, surpassing even the Holocaust — to wreaking more damage in the name of the Cultural Revolution.

It has taken India more than 45 years to again be paired with China — a comparison Beijing viscerally loathes.

■ In the Mao years, China instigated and armed major insurgencies in India’s northeast. That included the Naga rebels, with the China-trained Thuingaleng Muivah still the military chief of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah faction); the Mizo guerrilla movement whose leader Laldenga was openly embraced by Chinese leaders; and Manipur’s so-called People’s Liberation Army. Such assistance ceased after Mao’s death. But today, China may be coming full circle, with Chinese-made arms increasingly flowing into guerrilla ranks in the northeast. Although an 11-year-old ceasefire between Naga militants and New Delhi has brought peace to Nagaland, several other parts of the northeast are today wracked by insurgencies, allowing Beijing to fish in troubled waters.

■ Like in the period up to 1962, there is a mismatch today between Indian talk and capability, offering a potential incentive to China to try and put India in its place. India’s power pretensions today are such that it believes it can punch above its weight. Yet the gaps in its defences make the parallel with the pre-1962 period glaring.

More than a decade after it went overtly nuclear, the country still lacks a barely minimal deterrent against China. To have peace with China, India needs to be able to defend peace. The advantages China has over India in military infrastructure and logistics, size of conventional forces and being on the upper heights can be neutralized only through an effective nuclear-missile capability. But India has still to deploy its first Beijing-reachable missile. Three decades after China tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile, India doesn’t have an ICBM programme even in the pipeline, although it is spending a staggering $3.4 billion on a lunar project bereft of security benefits. While Jawaharlal Nehru made the mistake of chasing romantic goals, the present prime minister has consciously chosen deal-making over deterrent-building.

■ Mirroring the confusion in New Delhi’s Beijing policy from the mid-1950s to 1962, India today lacks clarity on the ends and means of its strategy vis-à-vis China. Just as there was a propensity in the pre-war period to take Chinese statements at face value and condone furtive Chinese moves, including the nibbling at Indian territory, the Indian establishment today willingly makes allowances for China’s assertiveness. Nothing better illustrates this than army chief Gen. Deepak Kapoor’s public assertion that India is as culpable as China in committing cross-border intrusions. His shocking statement not only made light of the increasing number of Chinese incursions, but also implicitly condoned China’s calculated refusal to clarify the frontline. To say the “Chinese have a different perception” of the frontline, as he did, is to disregard the fact that it suits China not to clarify the line of control and keep India under military pressure.

Such wanton indulgence — reminiscent of India’s pre-war miscalculations — can only embolden China to step up intrusions. In another reminder of that era, New Delhi first sought to sweep under the rug the November 2007 Chinese military action near Doka La, only to sheepishly admit the truth four months later, with Pranab Mukherjee telling Parliament last March that although Beijing accepts the Sikkim-Tibet border “as settled in the Anglo-Sikkim Convention of 1890”, “some bunkers have been destroyed and some activities have taken place”.

■ Just as India retreated to a defensive position in the border negotiations with Beijing at the beginning of the 1960s after having undermined its leverage through its formal acceptance of the “Tibet region of China”, New Delhi today has drawn back to an untenable negotiating position. Instead of gently shining the spotlight on the core issue of Tibet and China’s continuing occupation of Aksai Chin, India is willing to discuss the newly assertive Chinese claim on Tawang. By contrast, Beijing sticks to its tested old line that what it occupies is Chinese territory and what it claims is also Chinese territory. So what it claims has to on the negotiating table — a cynical stance India meekly countenances.

As a consequence, the wounds of that 32-day war have been kept open by China’s claims to additional Indian areas even as it holds on to the territorial gains of that conflict.

The reality is that the trans-Himalayan military equations have been significantly changed by China’s July 2006 opening of the new railway to Lhasa. The railway, which is now being extended southward to Xigatse and then beyond to Nepal and to two separate points along the Indian border, arms Beijing with a rapid military deployment capability. It may not be a coincidence that China’s growing hardline approach has followed its infrastructure advances on the vast but sparsely populated Tibetan plateau, including the building of the railway and new airfields and highways. It is now constructing the world’s highest airport at Ngari, on the southwestern edge of Tibet.

India can expect little respite from the direct and surrogate pressure China is mounting. Through Burma, Bangladesh and Nepal, it will seek to destabilize the northeast. It will continue to prop up Pakistan militarily to help keep India boxed in on the subcontinent. In fact, it is now seeking to do a Burma in Sri Lanka by emerging as a key arms supplier to Colombo and building a billion-dollar port at Hambantota. More broadly, China has aggressively pursued port-related projects in the Indian Ocean rim countries. The symbols of such Chinese activity include Hambantota, Chittagong and Gwadar, now being expanded into a deepwater naval base.

China’s ravenous pursuit of resources, including in India’s periphery, is another factor New Delhi cannot ignore. Constraints on resources are likely to become pronounced as more and more Indians and Chinese gain income to embrace modern comforts. The global demand for resources is set to soar, along with their prices. Beijing’s energy-import needs have come handy to expand Chinese maritime presence along vital sea-lanes.

An imperial energy age indeed appears to be dawning as a result of China’s aggressive resources-related diplomacy. Consider the following developments:

● The emergence of a 21st-century, energy-related Great Game, with China outmanoeuvring India. Beijing has used its rising energy imports as justification for openly advancing military objectives. While conserving its own oil-and-gas reserves, it has stepped up imports — a strategy it is also pursuing on key minerals. For example, it has more iron-ore reserves than India, yet 52 per cent of Indian exports to China now consist of just one item — iron ore.

● Determined efforts to assert control over energy supplies and transport routes, including mercantilist moves to lock up long-term supplies. Such is China’s emphasis on legal ownership that it has been buying energy assets in faraway lands often at inflated prices.

The popular perception is that Chinese and Indian energy companies are engaged in fierce bidding wars to acquire overseas assets. But the cash-rich Chinese companies have easily beaten Indian competition everywhere. The only exception was the Akpo deepwater oil field in Nigeria, where India’s ONGC won the right to buy South Atlantic Petroleum’s 45 per cent stake. The irony, however, is that New Delhi blocked ONGC from picking up that stake on grounds that the $2-billion investment entailed unacceptable risks as the Nigerian majority stakeholder was a dubious, politically manipulated shell company. But no sooner had ONGC backed out from the deal than the state-run China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC) Ltd., China’s largest offshore oil producer, signed an accord on January 9, 2006, to pay $2.27 billion for the same 45 per cent stake.

● China is actively pursuing access-gaining projects along the major trade arteries in the Indian Ocean rim. Consequently, it is beginning to position itself along the sea-lanes from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea.

With an increasingly assertive China to the north, a China-allied Pakistan on the west, a Chinese-influenced Burma to the east, and growing Chinese naval interest in the Indian Ocean, India has to foil its strategic encirclement. India’s energy-security interests, in fact, demand that its navy play a greater role in the Indian Ocean, a crucial international passageway for oil deliveries. In addition to safeguarding the sea-lanes, the navy has to protect the country’s large energy infrastructure of onshore and offshore oil and gas wells, liquefied natural gas terminals, refineries, pipeline grids and oil-exploration work within the vast Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).

● The establishment of interstate energy corridors (which also double up as strategic corridors) through the planned construction of pipelines to transport oil or gas sourced from third countries. China is busily fashioning two such corridors on either side of India through which it would transfer Gulf and African oil for its consumption, reducing its reliance on U.S.-policed shipping lanes through the Malacca and Taiwan Straits and also cutting freight costs and supply time in the process.

One corridor extends northwards from the Chinese-built Pakistani port of Gwadar, which represents China’s first strategic foothold in the Arabian Sea. Located at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz, Gwadar is to link up with the Trans-Karakoram Strategic Corridor to western China.

The second is the Irrawaddy Corridor designed to connect Chinese-aided Burmese ports with China’s Yunnan, Sichuan and Chongqing provinces through road, river, rail and energy links.

● Strategic plans to assemble a “string of pearls” in the form of listening posts and special naval-access arrangements along the Indian Ocean sea-lanes. With its new blue-water navy and access arrangements around peninsula India, China is threatening to turn the Indian Ocean into the Chinese Ocean one day. As navy chief Adm. Suresh Mehta said in a speech last January, “Each pearl in the string is a link in the chain of Chinese maritime presence”. That presence is now being extended all the way to Mauritius, where China is opening a trade development zone at a cost of some $730 million, making it the largest foreign direct investment in that island-nation.

Add to this picture another resource issue, the one with the greatest strategic bearing on the long-term interests of India and China — water. Although 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 the Ganges is the Chinese-held Tibetan plateau. But even the two main tributaries of the Ganges flow in from the Tibetan plateau — the source of the great river systems of China, South-East and South Asia, including the Brahmaputra, Indus, Mekong, Salween, Yangzi and Yellow. These rivers, fed by Himalayan snowmelt, are a lifeline to the 1.4 billion people living in their basins.

Given China’s ambitious inter-basin and inter-river water transfer projects in the Tibetan plateau and its upstream damming of the Brahmaputra, Sutlej and other rivers, water is likely to become a cause of Sino-Indian tensions. If President Hu Jintao — a hydrologist by training who has served as party secretary in Tibet — begins China’s long-pending project to divert the waters of the Brahmaputra northwards to the parched Yellow River, it would constitute the declaration of a water war on lower-riparian India and Bangladesh. Climate change, in any event, will have a significant impact on the availability and flow of river waters from the Himalayas and Tibetan highlands, making water a key element in the national-security calculus of China and India.

The centrality of the Tibet issue has been highlighted both by China’s Tibet-linked territorial claim to Arunachal Pradesh and by its hydro projects on the plateau. Through its water-transfer projects, Beijing is threatening to fashion water into a weapon against India. Also, given the clear link between Tibet’s fragile ecosystem and the climatic stability of the Indian subcontinent, China’s reckless exploitation of Tibet’s vast mineral resources and its large engineering works there are already playing havoc with the ecology.

India and China may be 5,000-year-old civilizations, but it is often forgotten that the two have been neighbours for only the past 58 years. After all, it wasn’t geography but guns — the sudden occupation of the traditional buffer, Tibet, soon after the communists came to power in Beijing — that made China India’s neighbour. Nehru later admitted he had not anticipated the swiftness and callousness with which China forcibly absorbed Tibet because he had been “led to believe by the Chinese foreign office that the Chinese would settle the future of Tibet in a peaceful manner by direct negotiation with the representatives of Tibet”.

Latest developments are a reminder that the 1962 war did not fully slake China’s geopolitical or territorial ambitions. In fact, instead of building a win-win relationship with India based on a constructive, forward-looking approach, China still harks back to the past, to the unfinished business of 1962, by assertively laying claim to additional Indian territories while blocking progress on defining the long line of control separating the two countries. Such intransigence and expansionist intent come even as it continues to occupy one-fifth of the original state of Jammu and Kashmir and steps up its cross-border incursions into India.

It is against this background that a key question emerges: what if China sets out to “teach India a lesson” again? This is a question that can no longer be brushed aside, considering China’s growing proclivity to up the ante against India. Henry Kissinger once said China is a closed society with an open mind, while India is an open society with a closed mind and a know-all attitude. It was that attitude — and the refusal to heed the warning signs — that caught India by surprise when the Chinese army poured in from two separate fronts in 1962.

Today, two words define India’s China policy: confusion and forbearance. Caution with prudence is desirable. But can India afford to be overcautious, clueless and indulgent? In the celebrated words of Edmund Burke, those who fail to learn from history are sure to repeat history. Whatever India learned from 1962 seems to have been forgotten, with the country now torn by internal squabbling and policy disarray.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

http://www.covert.co.in/brahma.htm

One Man’s Nuclear Brinkmanship

Posted on July 20, 2008 by Chellaney

Don’t court nuclear trouble

The U.S.-India nuclear deal will institutionalize India’s status in an anomalous third category — neither a nuclear power nor a non-nuclear-weapons state, but an errant nation with a rudimentary arsenal to be tethered to the non-proliferation regime in order to tame its nuclear waywardness. Civil nuclear cooperation is the lure to achieve that aim.

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, July 21, 2008

Two issues stand out on the partisan battle to push through the knotty US-India nuclear deal. The first is New Delhi’s agreement to place its entire civilian nuclear programme under NPT-system safeguards designed for non-nuclear-weapons states (NNWSs), with none of the rights the five established nuclear-weapons states (NWSs) have vis-à-vis the International Atomic Energy Agency. India is embracing not the voluntary, token and revocable inspections the NWSs accept on a few facilities. Rather, India is the first nuclear-armed state to agree to perpetual, legally immutable inspections covering its full civilian programme.

Contrast this with the Prime Minister’s assurances to the Lok Sabha on July 29, 2005: “We shall undertake the same responsibilities and obligations as other advanced nuclear states like the US”; “we expect the same rights and benefits” as the US; and “India will never accept discrimination”.

The second issue centres on New Delhi’s blithe readiness to import high-priced, foreign fuel-dependent reactors without securing any definite fuel-supply guarantee, or an unequivocal right to build a strategic fuel reserve to guard against a Tarapur-style cut-off, or an enforceable right to take specific corrective steps in case fuel supplies were unilaterally suspended. Had such rights undeniably been built into the deal, India’s placing of a host of indigenous facilities under permanent external inspection, including eight power reactors, three heavy water plants and six fuel-fabrication installations, could have been somewhat justifiable.

The India-IAEA “framework” safeguards accord is modelled not just on the INFCIRC/66 system (which was designed for NNWSs to cover individual plants and shipments of fuel), but also on the INFCIRC/153 inspections applicable to all NNWSs party to the NPT. For example, the clause on “subsidiary arrangements” between India and the Agency has been picked up from the INFCIRC/153 system.

Since it was first unveiled in 1972, the NPT-system INFCIRC/153 has been strengthened and expanded, including through the Agency’s “Programme 93+2”. The India-IAEA framework accord — read with the Hyde Act — meshes with key provisions of this upgraded NPT-system safeguards, now known as INFCIRC/153 (Corrected), with one major exception: Unlike the “full-scope” safeguards of the INFCIRC/153 system covering all nuclear facilities and materials in a state, the IAEA inspections in India will extend only to the facilities and materials designated by New Delhi as civilian.

The IAEA has fashioned three instruments to ensure not just the non-diversion of declared nuclear materials, but also to prevent undeclared nuclear activity. The Agency, oddly, will have all these three instruments available against a nuclear-armed India: (i) “special inspections”, also known as “challenge” inspections; (ii) the early provision of design information by the state to deter the secret building of a facility, as has been alleged in the recent case of Syria; and (iii) the Additional Protocol, which greatly expands the IAEA’s rights of access to information and locations in a NNWS.

Special inspections and the early provision of design information are part of both the INFCIRC/66 and the INFCIRC/153 systems, while the “model” Additional Protocol, published as INFCIRC/540, has been fashioned to further strengthen the INFCIRC/153 system in NNWSs. While the shape of the Additional Protocol for India will be known only after it has been negotiated, the Hyde Act demands that it be “based on a Model Additional Protocol as set forth in IAEA information circular (INFCIRC) 540”. Indeed, one of the conditions the Act stipulates for the deal to win congressional ratification is presidential determination that “India and the IAEA are making substantial progress toward concluding an Additional Protocol”.

By hastily taking the safeguards accord to the IAEA board for approval before the contours of India’s Additional Protocol with the Agency have been clarified, the Prime Minister is only undermining the country’s leverage and making it more likely that the final product will be close to INFCIRC/540.

In fact, with the India-IAEA framework accord incorporating the standard provisions designed for NNWSs — from special inspections and the early provision of design information, to the upholding of the GOV/1621 (1973) document that enshrines the “perpetuity” and “pursuit” clauses and asserts the Agency’s overriding authority on termination matters — it will be little surprise if the Additional Protocol India concludes resembles the one for NNWSs.

Such an Additional Protocol will offer the Agency the means to create civil-military “firewalls” in India and deter the transfer of specialized equipment, trained personnel, designs and operating manuals to the strategic programme. With the invasive access it grants, the Additional Protocol is a much-more useful tool for the IAEA than special inspections, which have been formally invoked only twice up until now, including once at Romania’s request to clear up outstanding discrepancies from Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime.

Against this background, the safeguards arrangements India is entering into are far-reaching and cannot be compared with the facility-specific agreements it currently has with the IAEA over the reactors at Kundakulam, Tarapur and Rajasthan, even though the 1988 Kundakulam safeguards accord is a typical INFCIRC/66 accord. The new framework accord, designed to supersede all these individual agreements, opens the path to drafting India into the NPT regime as a de facto party, without recognizing its nuclear-armed status.

The only deviation from a standard safeguards agreement with a NNWS found in this accord — apart from the preambular contextual noting that the necessity of safeguards application flows from India’s “understandings” with the US (as opposed to NPT requirements) — is the “general principle” that the Agency’s safeguards-related work shall not “hinder or otherwise interfere with any activities involving the use by India of nuclear material, non-nuclear material, equipment, components, information or technology produced, acquired or developed by India independent of this agreement for its own purposes”.

Given the standardized NNWS safeguards model this agreement represents, one wonders why it took Indian negotiators nearly six months to finalize the text with the IAEA. Were the negotiations largely about preambular references to help New Delhi save face? When a country with nuclear weapons, without utilizing the leverage emanating from its readiness to place an array of indigenous facilities under safeguards, initials a comprehensive agreement that is a virtual replica of a standard safeguards accord for NNWSs, can it then credibly claim — on the basis of mere preambular references — to have won special rights unavailable to NNWSs?

The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties precludes India from seeking any right not defined in the agreement just because the preambular language notes New Delhi’s point that an “essential basis” of its “concurrence to accept Agency safeguards” is the “conclusion of international cooperation arrangements creating the necessary conditions for India to obtain … reliable, uninterrupted and continuous access to fuel supplies from companies in several nations, as well as support for an Indian effort to develop a strategic reserve of nuclear fuel…” Whether such purported international arrangements have been concluded or not is merely an assertion by India with no attempt to tie the Agency to them.

Also, by holding New Delhi to everlasting obligations, the accord leaves no room for any corrective step, even if India is faced with a fuel cut-off. Once India has voluntarily opened indigenous facilities to IAEA inspections, it is unlikely to be able to withdraw any from safeguards.

Not only are the accord’s terms stringent, with inspections to continue until “the facility is no longer usable for any nuclear activity relevant from the point of view of safeguards”, such attempted withdrawal would unacceptably turn the original US-India bargain on its head. The US agreed to give India limited access to imported uranium in return for New Delhi’s decision to place 20 indigenous nuclear facilities (plus nine research institutions) under safeguards and to shut down by 2010 the Cirus research reactor, which produces one-third of the country’s weapons-grade plutonium.

If the official claim is that the safeguards accord has been cleverly worded to help India take “unspecified sovereign actions” in a contingency — as nuclear chief Anil Kakodkar has contended — such ingenuity in fashioning ambiguities could carry serious long-term strategic costs. The equivocation indeed may be spring-loaded to produce tragedy later. If India will not learn from its Tarapur experience, despite the clearly worded 123 agreement with the US in 1963 and an equally good safeguards accord with the IAEA in 1971, it is bound to court bigger trouble. In fact, the greater the Indian investments in imported power reactors, the greater will be the risks and constraints New Delhi will face.

The risks of misunderstandings and hard times later have only been underscored by the polar-opposite US and Indian public stance today on some key aspects of the deal. The wide gap in the Indian and American positions, even if partly geared toward garnering political support at home, would stand exposed if the US government, for example, lifted its gag order on the written answers it submitted to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on critical questions, such as whether India will be permitted to stockpile nuclear fuel.

The safeguards accord shows that the deal will institutionalize India’s status in an anomalous third category — neither a NWS nor a NNWS, but an errant nation with a rudimentary arsenal to be tethered to the non-proliferation system through stringent international inspections and other fetters designed to tame its nuclear waywardness. Civil nuclear cooperation is the lure to help retard the Indian nuclear-weapons capability while reaping billions of dollars in reactor sales, with the Hyde Act openly targeting India’s arsenal for “reduction and eventual elimination”.

Once all the Indian facilities currently classified as “civilian” come permanently in the IAEA-inspection grip it would actually bring under safeguards the majority of the present “unsafeguarded” nuclear facilities in operation worldwide outside the Club of Nuclear Five — a huge gain for the U.S.-led international non-proliferation regime.

The deal poses one of the most divisive challenges India has ever faced. Whether the government survives the vote of confidence in Parliament or not, the partisan rancour will only deepen unless genuine efforts are made to bridge the divide over an issue that centres on the future of India’s nuclear programme and strategic autonomy. Thanks to the crusading zeal with which it has been pushed and the furtive way it was taken to the IAEA board, the deal will haunt India for long.

India-IAEA Safeguards Agreement Fact Sheet

Posted on July 12, 2008 by Chellaney

LET FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES

Brahma Chellaney

The safeguards accord with the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was initialled by India on July 7, 2008, and thereafter the IAEA set in motion the process for the ratification of the agreement by its governing board. According to an IAEA press release dated July 9, 2008: “The Chairman of the Board is consulting with Board Members to agree on a date for a Board meeting when the Agreement would be considered”.[1] Titled, “An Agreement with the Government of India for the Application of Safeguards to Civilian Nuclear Facilities”,[2] the accord brings out the following facts:

■ The accord largely resembles IAEA agreements with non-nuclear-weapons states and incorporates few India-specific features. With the exclusion of the first two pages that contain the preamble, and an acknowledgement in the General Principles that the “application of safeguards under this agreement is intended to facilitate implementation of relevant bilateral or multilateral arrangements to which India is a party” (in other words, arrangements unrelated to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), the text is largely modelled on IAEA safeguards agreements with non-nuclear-weapons states. The text has been drawn from the strengthened INFCIRC-66/Rev.2 (16 September 1968) model,[3] available at: http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Infcircs/Others/inf66r2.shtml

In fact, there is no direct reference in this accord to the existence of an Indian nuclear military programme or an acknowledgement of India’s special status — a nuclear-weapons state uniquely doing what no other nuclear power has done: putting its entire civilian nuclear programme under permanent, legally irrevocable international inspections.

All that the accord contains is a oblique reference in the preamble in the following words: “Noting the relevance for this Agreement of the understandings between India and the United States of America expressed in the India-U.S. Joint Statement of 18 July 2005, in which India, inter alia, has stated its willingness: to identify and separate its civilian and military nuclear facilities and programmes in a phased manner”.

In fact, the accord lays the ground for IAEA inspectors to enforce safeguards with the same stringency applicable to non-nuclear-weapons states.

Contrast this with the repeated assurances the Prime Minister had given to Parliament. For example, speaking in Parliament on March 7, 2006, the Prime Minister had said: “India will approach the IAEA to discuss and fashion an India-specific safeguards agreement, which will reflect the unique character of this arrangement”.

■ India will have none of the rights that the five established nuclear-weapons states have vis-à-vis the IAEA. Nuclear-weapons states accept only voluntary, revocable inspections, with just a total of 11 facilities in the U.S., China, Britain, France and Russia currently open to IAEA inspection. The IAEA conducts only token inspections on these facilities offered for safeguards. Moreover, these five nuclear powers have the sovereign right to terminate their safeguards agreement with the IAEA.

The India-IAEA safeguards accord comes with perpetual, legally irrevocable obligations, which India cannot suspend or end, even if the supplier-states cut off supply of fuel and replacement parts. The IAEA inspections in India will not be nominal but stringent and invasive, of the type applicable to non-nuclear-weapons states.

While the five established nuclear powers have offered only 11 facilities in total for IAEA safeguards, India has agreed to place 35 of its facilities under IAEA inspection, according to the civil-military separation plan presented to Parliament by the Prime Minister in 2006.[4] These facilities include 14 power reactors; three heavy-water plants at Thal-Vaishet, Hazira and Tuticorin; six installations at the Nuclear Fuel Complex in Hyderabad; the PREFRE reprocessing plant at Tarapur; and nine research facilities, such as the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Board of Radiation and Isotope Technology and Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics. In addition, the Prime Minister has agreed to shut down by 2010 the Cirus research reactor, which is one of the two research reactors in India producing weapons-grade plutonium.[5]

The provisions of the safeguards accord contradict Dr. Manmohan Singh’s assurances to Parliament that India will accept only the “same responsibilities and obligations as other advanced nuclear states like the U.S.” For example, speaking in the Lok Sabha on July 29, 2005, the Prime Minister said: “We shall undertake the same responsibilities and obligations as … the US”; “we expect the same rights and benefits” as the US; and “India will never accept discrimination”.

Unlike the five established nuclear-weapons states, India will have no right under the safeguards accord to take any facility out of IAEA inspections merely by changing its classification from “civilian” to “military”. Contrast this with the confident claim the Prime Minister’s Office made in its July 29, 2005 “Backgrounder” on the deal: “Nuclear weapon states, including the U.S., have the right to shift facilities from civilian category to military and there is no reason why this should not apply to India”.

■ The accord carries a cosmetic reference to “corrective measures” in the preamble, but gives India no actual right to take corrective measures. The earlier 123 agreement with the U.S., instead of granting India the right to take corrective measures in response to a fuel-supply disruption, merely recorded that New Delhi will seek such a right in the IAEA accord. But in the India-IAEA accord, no such right has been secured in definable terms. In fact, the agreement makes that India’s safeguards obligations will be irrevocably final once it enters into force.

There is only one reference to “corrective measures” in the entire text of the India-IAEA accord, and that reference occurs in the preamble. That reference reads: “India may take corrective measures to ensure uninterrupted operation of its civilian nuclear reactors in the event of disruption of foreign fuel supplies”. The use of the term “may” instead of “shall” shows there is no legal entitlement.

Moreover, far from “corrective measures” being defined, the accord explicitly forecloses that option by making it clear that, under no circumstance, will India be allowed to withdraw from its safeguards obligations, which are legally immutable.

The term, “corrective measures”, indeed does not figure in the accord’s Section XI on “Definitions”. So, is it any surprise that not one corrective measure has been identified in the accord even by way of a preambular statement?

As IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei noted on August 1, 2008, in his introductory statement to the Governing Board meeting, "the agreement is of indefinite duration. There are no conditions for the discontinuation of safeguards other than those provided by the safeguards agreement itself. The termination provisions contained in the agreement are the same as for other 66-type agreements. Naturally — as with all safeguards agreements — this agreement is subject to the general rules of international law. Therefore, the agreement should be read as an integral whole. The preamble provides for contextual background and safeguards are implemented in accordance with the terms of the agreement" [emphasis added].

Contrast this with the Prime Minister’s solemn assurances to Parliament on several occasions. For example, speaking in Parliament on March 7, 2006, the PM had given the following assurance: “In essence, an India-specific safeguards would … permit India to take corrective measures to ensure uninterrupted operation of its civilian nuclear reactors in the event of disruption of foreign fuel supplies. Taking this into account, India will place its civilian nuclear facilities under India-specific safeguards in perpetuity and negotiate an appropriate safeguards agreement to this end with the IAEA”. Then, on August 17, 2006, the PM said in Parliament: “In the event of disruption of fuel supplies despite the assurances, India will have a right to take corrective measure to ensure the operation of its nuclear reactors”.

■ The accord provides for no guaranteed fuel supply and, contrary to the PM’s assurances in Parliament, has no link between perpetual IAEA inspections and perpetual fuel supply.

Put simply, India has willingly forfeited the right to enforce lifelong fuel supply for safeguarded reactors by agreeing to remain powerless in a Tarapur-style fuel cut-off situation.

Indeed, the only reference to fuel supply occurs in the preamble, in the form of a note by India. It reads: “An essential basis of India’s concurrence to accept Agency safeguards under an India-specific safeguards agreement (hereinafter referred to as “this Agreement”) is the conclusion of international cooperation arrangements creating the necessary conditions for India to obtain access to the international fuel market, including reliable, uninterrupted and continuous access to fuel supplies from companies in several nations, as well as support for an Indian effort to develop a strategic reserve of nuclear fuel to guard against any disruption of supply over the lifetime of India’s reactors”. There is, however, no reference in the body of the text to “fuel supply” or to a “strategic reserve of nuclear fuel”.

The ornamental reference in the preamble was inserted to save face because its language makes explicit that India is not tying the IAEA to assured fuel supply but merely recording that the safeguards accord follows the “conclusion of international cooperation arrangements creating the necessary conditions for India to obtain access” to assured fuel supply and to receive support to build a strategic fuel supply. But the harsh truth is that no such international arrangements have thus far been concluded.

This attempt to pull the wool on public eyes flows from India’s failure to secure its rights in the 123 agreement, which confers enforceable powers only on the supplier-state. In fact, the Indian fuel supply-related claims about the 123 agreement have bordered on comedy: The U.S. assurances in Article 5.6 are all prospective, not present-day, with the U.S. “committed to seeking agreement from the U.S. Congress to amend its domestic laws” and “prepared to take” additional steps.

Contrast all this with the repeated assurances the PM gave to Parliament since March 2006 that the perpetual safeguards would be tied to perpetual fuel supply. In August 2006, he told Parliament, for instance, that: “An important assurance is the commitment of support for India’s right to build up strategic reserves of nuclear fuel over the lifetime of India’s reactors”.

The accord carries no reference to the continuation of India’s safeguards obligations being contingent on perpetual fuel supply. The agreement indeed explicitly blocks India from ever undertaking real correction in response to a fuel supply cut-off — the lifting of IAEA safeguards.

■ Preambular references confer no entitlement on India. Just because the preambular language takes note of India’s point that the “basis” of its “concurrence to accept Agency safeguards” is the “conclusion of international cooperation arrangements” does not give India any right not specified in the agreement.

It is well-established in international law that no rights to any party flow from preambular references — which are usually intended to provide background or context to an agreement — unless any such reference is spelled out in the body of the accord or treaty to confer a definable entitlement or to impose a specific obligation. As IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei pointed out on August 1, 2008, the agreement’s "preamble provides for contextual background".

Thus, the mere appearance in the preamble of the terms, “reliable, uninterrupted and continuous access to fuel supplies”, “a strategic reserve of nuclear fuel” and “corrective measures” (to record professed arrangements other than with the IAEA), cannot be used to claim rights or obligations not contained in the operative parts of the agreement.

In any case, the safeguards accord identifies the IAEA board as the final arbiter of any dispute over interpretation or compliance, with India entitled only to make its submission to the board.

It is significant that after having trashed the Hyde Act’s Sections 102 and 103, titled “Sense of Congress” and “Statements of Policy”, as preambular references not binding on the US president, New Delhi has taken refuge in the preamble of its safeguards accord with the IAEA. While most of the Hyde Act’s Section 102 and Section 103 items have been spelled out in the body of the legislation, the preambular references in the safeguards accord that New Delhi cites have not been defined or elaborated in the text.

The key point is that the safeguards accord enforces no obligation on the Agency to guarantee uninterrupted fuel supply for the lifetime of India’s safeguarded reactors or to underwrite the building of an Indian strategic fuel reserve. The IAEA, under its statute, does not, in any event, have a role to play in providing fuel-supply or strategic-reserve assurances.

■ The safeguards accord, like the 123 agreement, is consistent with the provisions of the Hyde Act.

Section 104(b)(2) of the Hyde Act stipulates that the U.S. Congress can consider ratifying the final deal only after, inter-alia, “India and the IAEA have concluded all legal steps required prior to signature by the parties of an agreement requiring the application of IAEA safeguards in perpetuity in accordance with IAEA standards, principles and practices (including IAEA Board of Governors Document GOV/1621 (1973)) to India’s civil nuclear facilities, materials, and programmes…”

While India’s desire was for a special, “India-specific” safeguards arrangement with the IAEA, the Hyde Act’s stipulation was for India to embrace the same standards and practices as applicable to non-nuclear-weapons states. In addition to the safeguards accord, India will have to separately negotiate and conclude an “Additional Protocol” with the IAEA. The “Additional Protocol” will seek to ensure that specialized equipment, trained personnel, and designs and operating manuals are not transferred from the civilian programme to the military programme. The Hyde Act demands that the “Additional Protocol” for India be “based on a Model Additional Protocol as set forth in IAEA information circular (INFCIRC) 540” — that is, the Protocol applicable to non-nuclear-weapons states. In contrast, the Prime Minister had assured Parliament on August 17, 2006, that, “As a country with nuclear weapons, there is no question of India agreeing to a safeguards agreement or an Additional Protocol applicable to non-nuclear-weapons states of the NPT”.

As mandated by the Hyde Act, the India-IAEA safeguards accord is firmly anchored in the GOV/1621 (1973) document. For example, the safeguards accord’s Paragraph 29 reads: “The termination of safeguards on items subject to this Agreement shall be implemented taking into account the provisions of GOV/1621 (20 August 1973)”.

Although the text of the GOV/1621 document is not public, its central stipulation is well-known — that facility-specific safeguards shall be “in perpetuity”, allowing for no suspension of international safeguards and shutting out room for corrective measures. Such are the known conditions of GOV/1621 that the rights and obligations of the parties continue perpetually on all nuclear materials until the materials have been returned or all the fissionable material supplied, produced or processed goes out of the inventory.

■ Even the accord’s termination and non-compliance provisions are identical to those for non-nuclear-weapons states, creating potential risks since India possesses a nuclear military programme.

India has accepted the IAEA board as the final arbiter on any issue of non-compliance. Paragraph 103 states, “If the Board determines in accordance with Article XII.C of the Statute of the Agency that there has been any non-compliance by India with this Agreement, the Board shall call upon India to remedy such non-compliance forthwith, and shall make such reports as it deems appropriate. In the event of failure by India to take full remedial action within a reasonable time, the Board may take any other measures provided for in Article XII.C of the Statute”.

Such measures include what the IAEA board has done in the case of Iran — refer the case to the UN Security Council for sanctions — although the Agency thus far has found no clear evidence of Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear-weapons programme in violation of its legal obligations. The Iran case has shown that the IAEA, although a technical body, is open to political pressures and can be pressed to take political action. The IAEA board, however, has a record of staying conservative on most matters, by erring on the side of caution.

Under Paragraph 32 of the India-IAEA accord, New Delhi can withdraw a facility from safeguards with the prior consent of the IAEA but only after “the facility is no longer usable for any nuclear activity relevant from the point of view of safeguards,” which means the installation’s nuclear capability has been dismantled or permanently disabled to the Agency’s satisfaction.

That is in keeping with the fact that all INFCIRC/66/Rev.2 agreements since 1974 have been tied to the actual use in the recipient-state of supplied material or items, rather than to fixed periods of time. The safeguards, however, extend to all subsequent generations of produced nuclear material derived from original supplies. The INFCIRC/66.Rev.2 standard also precludes a country withdrawing any designated civilian facility from safeguards on national security grounds.

Once the India-IAEA safeguards accord enters into force, its “pursuit” and “perpetuity” clauses would irreversibly come into play, with inspections chasing the by-products wherever they go.

Paragraph 29 of the India-IAEA accord (“the facility is no longer usable for any nuclear activity relevant from the point of view of safeguards"), however, raises the interesting question whether India, faced with a fuel cut-off, will have the right to withdraw from safeguards the eight indigenous power reactors it is opening to outside inspection. According to papers by two legal experts on GOV/1621, Antonio F. Perez[6] and Laura Rockwood[7], the answer may be yes, if India first removes, to IAEA’s full satisfaction, all supplied fissionable material used or processed in those reactors.

However, the answer may be no, if one goes by the safeguards accord’s stringent termination proviso (“the facility is no longer usable for any nuclear activity relevant from the point of view of safeguards”) and the American intent in getting India to place eight indigenous power reactors under safeguards in return for opening up limited access to imported uranium. It would turn that bargain on its head if India withdrew those power reactors from safeguards.

■ A nuclear-armed India has agreed to be subject to intrusive “challenge” inspections of the type the IAEA is empowered to carry out in non-nuclear-weapons states. “Challenge” inspections are officially known as “special inspections” (as distinct from systematic or routine inspections).

Refusal to allow a special inspection could lead to an IAEA report to the UN Security Council on non-compliance, as happened in the North Korean case. However, till date, the IAEA has formally invoked special inspections only twice — in 1992, at Romania’s request to clear up outstanding discrepancies that occurred under Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime, and in 1993, when the IAEA, with the aid of information provided by the U.S., became aware of inaccuracies in North Korea’s initial report.

In his book, Arms control: The New Guide to Negotiations and Agreements (Sage, 2002), Jozef Goldblat states, “An inspection is considered ‘special’ when it is either additional to routine inspection or involves access to information or locations in addition to the access specified for routine inspections in the agreement”.[8]

Paragraph 63 of the India-IAEA accord states the “Agency may carry out special inspections if: (a) the study of a report indicates that such inspection is desirable; or (b) any unforeseen circumstance requires immediate action. The Board shall subsequently be informed of the reasons for and the results of each such inspection”.

In other words, the Agency will have the right to carry out “special inspections” if it believed any activity at a safeguarded Indian facility or any report raised questions. In the North Korean case, the board had approved the special inspections which the Pyongyang refused to allow.[9] But India, in its accord with the IAEA, has consented to be subject to special inspections without the board’s prior consent.

■ In addition to special inspections, India has consented to another provision intended to preclude undeclared activity in a non-nuclear-weapons state — the early provision of design information.

IAEA safeguards in non-nuclear-weapons states are not just about the non-diversion of declared nuclear materials. They are also designed to credibly ensure that there no undeclared nuclear materials or activities in the state concerned. Toward that end, the Agency has fashioned three instruments that are now part of the INFCIRC/153 agreements that apply “full-scope” or comprehensive safeguards to cover all facilities and materials in non-nuclear-weapons states: (i) “special inspections”; (ii) the early provision of design information to deter the secret building of a facility, as has been alleged in the recent case of Syria; and (iii) Additional Protocol, which greatly expands the IAEA’s rights of access to information and locations in a state.

Oddly, the Agency will have all the three instruments vis-à-vis India, even though the safeguards accord is based on India’s sovereign decision to segregate its civil and military nuclear facilities and open the civilian part to IAEA inspection in perpetuity. Given that undeclared activity in a country with a nuclear military programme is an oxymoron, it is remarkable that the IAEA is applying to India the very standards designed for non-nuclear-weapons states.

India’s commitment to the early provision of design information to the IAEA is contained in Paragraphs 34 and 39-42 of the accord. The idea behind these paragraphs is to secure preliminary information — in the name of effectively applying safeguards later — as soon as India makes a decision to build or modify a facility.

Just as the India-IAEA safeguards accord has been largely modelled on INFCIRC-66/Rev.2 standards and principles, as expanded by the GOV/1621 (1973) document, the Additional Protocol is also likely to follow the prescription of the U.S. Congress. The Hyde Act has stipulated that the Additional Protocol for India be “based on a Model Additional Protocol as set forth in IAEA information circular (INFCIRC) 540” — that is, the Protocol applicable to non-nuclear-weapons states.

■ India will not only open its entire civil programme to external safeguards, but also help pay for such inspections. The costs of IAEA inspections will be high because, under the accord, India has agreed to be subject to rigorous safeguards, not the token inspections the Agency carries out in nuclear-weapons states.

The accord estimates the cost of inspection of each Indian facility at 1.2 million euro annually. India is to place 26 nuclear facilities under safeguards in a phased manner. (This figure excludes the nine research institutions listed on the civil side of the separation plan. There may be no reason for the IAEA to inspect them if they contain no nuclear material.)

Commercial power reactors, reprocessing and other facilities with an annual throughput of more than 60 kilograms of nuclear material are to be subject to “continuous inspection”, with the IAEA having the right of access at all times. The Agency, however, has agreed to implement the accord in a manner not to hamper “India’s economic or technological development, and not to hinder or otherwise interfere with any activities involving the use by India of nuclear material, non-nuclear material, equipment, components, information or technology produced, acquired or developed by India independent of this agreement for its own purposes”. It has also agreed that the “number, duration and intensity of inspections actually carried out shall be kept to the minimum consistent with the effective implementation of safeguards…” (Paragraph 57).

Without making clear what will be New Delhi’s share of the costs, Paragraph 101 of the accord says: “India and the Agency shall each bear any expense incurred in the implementation of their responsibilities under this agreement”. But with the Hyde Act mandating “fallback US safeguards” in case “budget or personnel strains in the IAEA” render it “unable” to fully enforce inspections, India may be compelled to pick up most of the IAEA expenses to avoid parallel US inspections — a possibility National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan has already alluded to.

■ The key benchmarks enshrined in the original July 18, 2005, deal today stand jettisoned.

Those benchmarks, in the Prime Minister’s own words in the Lok Sabha on July 29, 2005, include India acquiring “the same benefits and advantages as other states with advanced nuclear technology” and undertaking “the same responsibilities and obligations as such countries, including the United States.” The PM had said: “Reciprocity is the key to the implementation of all the steps… Indian actions will be contingent at every stage on actions taken by the other side.”

The PM, however, has acquiesced to the shifting of the July 18, 2005, goalposts despite his unequivocal assurances to Parliament that the principles embodied in the original accord were inviolable and constitute the sole criteria. After pledging that “we will never accept discrimination”, the PM has ended up doing just that.

The blunt fact is that the deal has got mangled beyond recognition since it was unveiled three years ago. Indeed, the deal has progressively picked up such tougher conditions that today few remember that the July 18, 2005, agreement-in-principle had promised India “the same benefits and advantages” as America. While the five main nuclear-weapons states have the unfettered right to shift facilities from the civilian sector to the military, India has agreed to lock its entire civilian programme in legally immutable safeguards.

Once all the currently designated Indian civilian facilities come under IAEA inspection it would mean the majority of the present “unsafeguarded” nuclear facilities in operation worldwide outside the Club of Nuclear Five becoming “safeguarded” — a huge gain for the U.S.-led international non-proliferation regime.

[1] IAEA press release at: http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/PressReleases/2008/prn200808.html

[2] Full text of the India-IAEA agreement is available at:

Part I http://chellaney.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!4913C7C8A2EA4A30!633.entry

Part II http://chellaney.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!4913C7C8A2EA4A30!632.entry

[3] The IAEA’s first model safeguards document (INFCIRC/26) was adopted in January 1961. A completely revised document applicable to larger reactors was approved by the board in September 1965 and became known as INFCIRC/66. Annex I to INFCIRC/66, containing provisions for reprocessing plants, was adopted in 1966, and Annex II, incorporating provisions for safeguarded nuclear material in conversion and fuel fabrication plants, was agreed to in 1968. With its two annexes, the strengthened safeguards document (INFCIRC/66/Rev.2) was adopted by the board after the NPT opened for signature on July 1, 1968. Under an INFCIRC/66/Rev.2 agreement, a recipient-state is barred from suspending or terminating its safeguards obligations, even if the supplier-state reneges on its commitments.

[4] Full text of India’s Separation Plan available at: http://chellaney.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!4913C7C8A2EA4A30!429.entry

[5] The decision to shut down Cirus goes against the official contention that the deal has no bearing on the strategic programme. Before the Separation Plan was negotiated with the U.S., the Prime Minister had committed himself in the Lok Sabha on August 3, 2005 in the following words: “This separation will be decided voluntarily, solely on the basis of our own judgement. Nobody can from outside, say: ‘Well, this is civilian, this is nuclear’. That determination will be made by the people of India, by our government, by our atomic energy establishment…” On August 4, 2005, he was equally emphatic in Rajya Sabha: “It will be an autonomous Indian decision as to what is ‘civilian’ and what is ‘military’. Nobody outside will tell us what is ‘civilian’ and what is ‘military’.” But although Dr Singh had foresworn actions “limiting or inhibiting our strategic nuclear-weapons programme”, he decided to shut down by 2010 the research reactor that contributes one-third of India’s annual weapons-grade plutonium production. Tellingly, no replacement reactor has come under construction thus far.

[6] Antonio F. Perez, “Survival of Rights Under The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: Withdrawal and the Continuing Right of International Atomic Energy Agency Safeguards”, 34 Va. J. Int’l L. 749 (Summer 1994).

[7] Laura Rockwood, “Legal Instruments Related to the Application of the Safeguards”, available at: http://www.opanal.org/Articles/Jamaica/jam-Rockwood.htm

[8] Relevant excerpt from Jozef Goldbat’s book at: http://books.google.co.in/books?id=XW7sediIGVsC&pg=PA321&lpg=PA321&dq=%22challenge%22+inspections+IAEA&source=web&ots=GcOHN8k8-K&sig=3Yml_u4KIoMG-71DJXs2GPdcNmY&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=10&ct=result

[9] Fiona Simpson, “IAEA Special Inspections After Israel’s Raid on Syria”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 10, 2008.

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America’s NSG proposal: Implications for India

The cleverly worded U.S. draft to the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG) for carving out an exemption for India from the NSG rules (called “guidelines”) seeks to irrevocably tether New Delhi to the nuclear non-proliferation regime. What is significant is that this draft proposal was submitted on August 8, 2008, to the NSG chair, Germany, after consultations with the Indian government.

Although New Delhi may have expressed satisfaction with its inoffensively packaged wording, the draft proposal carries serious implications for India. The draft is likely to attract even more India-specific conditions when it is taken up for consideration by the NSG, given the cartel’s consensual decision-making process. But consider the following implications of the existing draft, which in essence conforms to the Hyde Act provisions:

1. India is being brought under a wider non-proliferation net, with the US draft tying it to compliance with the entire set of NSG rules. Apart from being allowed to retain some nuclear facilities in the military realm, India will be treated, for all intents and purposes, as a non-nuclear-weapons state by the NSG and thus subject to the non-proliferation conditionalities applicable to such states. India, in other words, is to be drafted into the NPT as a de facto party.

Except for exempting India from one key NSG provision, the draft permits exports to “safeguarded” Indian facilities “provided the transfer satisfies all other provisions” of Part 1 & 2 of the NSG Guidelines — that is, all the rules pertinent to non-nuclear-weapons state.

The exemption relates to the “full-scope” (comprehensive) safeguards rule listed in paragraphs 4(a), 4(b), 4(c) of Part 1 and 4(b) of Part 2 of the NSG Guidelines, which have been published by the International Atomic Energy Agency as document INFCIRC/254. India had to be exempted from the application of safeguards on each and every nuclear facility, given the fact that it has some nuclear military facilities.

2. India is acquiescing to its unilateral test moratorium being turned into a multilateral legality. The draft US proposal, in Section 2, first lists India’s commitments, including to “continuing its unilateral moratorium to nuclear tests”. Then, in Section 3, it recommends permitting exports to India for peaceful purposes for use in safeguarded civilian nuclear facilities, “provided that the transfer satisfies all other provisions” of Part 1 & 2 of the NSG Guidelines.

Bearing in mind that the NSG Guidelines relate to transfers to non-nuclear-weapons states, India will have to live up to all the stipulated non-proliferation commitments and abjure activities proscribed for non-nuclear-weapons states. What was a unilateral test moratorium is to become, in effect, a requirement for civil nuclear cooperation with other states. The implication of treating India as a non-nuclear-weapons state and of implicitly “multilateralizing” its voluntary test moratorium is that India will face a fuel supply cut-off if it ever dared to test, leaving its imported power reactors high and dry.

This has to be seen against the backdrop of the Hyde Act and the so-called 123 Agreement. The 123 Agreement incorporates an implicit test ban by: (i) granting the U.S. the right to seek the return of supplied items and materials on account of a US-determined Indian non-compliance with non-proliferation conditions; and (ii) arming the U.S. with an open-ended right to suspend supplies forthwith simply by issuing a one-year termination notice on any ground, however extraneous.

The Hyde Act’s Section 106 explicitly bans Indian testing forever. That section is the mother of all prohibitions.

In effect, India is being dragged through the backdoor into the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

3. Instead of the “full” civil nuclear cooperation that the original July 18, 2005 deal promised, India access to civil enrichment and reprocessing technologies will be restricted through the proposed NSG waiver. The US draft to the NSG, in Section 3b, states that transfers may take place to safeguarded facilities in India, “provided that the transfer satisfies all other provisions of Part 2”. But Part 2 of the NSG Guidelines incorporates a presumption of denial of reprocessing and enrichment equipment and technology even under safeguards.

The presumption of denial in Part 2 of the Guidelines is contained in the following words in its Section 4: A supplier-state “should exercise prudence in order to carry out the basic principle and should take relevant factors into account, including … Whether the equipment, materials, software, or related technology to be transferred is to be used in research on or development, design, manufacture, construction, operation, or maintenance of any reprocessing or enrichment facility”.

That India will face a continued embargo on importing equipment and components related to reprocessing and enrichment, even when such activities are under IAEA inspections and for peaceful purposes, has been underscored both by the 123 Agreement and the Hyde Act.

Not only does the Hyde Act debar transfer to India of any “sensitive” civil nuclear equipment or technology, but also its Section 105(a)(5) directs Washington to “work with members of the NSG, individually and collectively, to further restrict the transfers” of reprocessing, enrichment and heavy-water technologies to India. And to underscore the primacy of the Hyde Act, the 123 Agreement’s Article 5(2) states, “Transfers of dual-use items that could be used in enrichment, reprocessing or heavy water production facilities will be subject to the Parties’ respective applicable laws, regulations and license policies.”

Contrast such restriction with what the Prime Minister had pledged in Parliament on August 17, 2006 — that India will only settle for the “removal of restrictions on all aspects of cooperation and technology transfers pertaining to civil nuclear energy, ranging from nuclear fuel, nuclear reactors, to reprocessing spent fuel”.

4. The various good-faith declarations made by India in the July 18, 2005 joint statement with the U.S. are all being turned into binding, enforceable commitments multilaterally through the NSG, after having been incorporated into the Hyde Act. In other words, the NSG is being asked to allow exports to “safeguarded” Indian facilities as long as India continues to fully meet the non-proliferation and safeguards commitments it voluntarily made on July 18, 2005. Those commitments have been listed in Section 2 of the US draft.

Furthermore, by additionally linking transfers to India to compliance with Part 1 and Part 2 of the NSG Guidelines, the US draft enlarges the non-proliferation net. For example, paragraph 4(e) of Part 2 of the NSG Guidelines demands that a supplier-state first consider, before making any transfer, “Whether governmental actions, statements, and policies of the recipient state are supportive of nuclear non-proliferation and whether the recipient state is in compliance with its international obligations in the field of non-proliferation”.

5. The good-faith commitments being multilateralized include the following: India’s adhere to the NSG rules unilaterally, although the NSG will not admit India as a member. The implication for India of entering into cooperation on the basis of unilateral adherence to the NSG guidelines is that this cartel could change its guidelines in the future to impose new conditions on India — and India would have no recourse to being at the receiving end, after having invested billions of dollars in imported reactors.

The Hyde Act actually holds out the threat of termination of cooperation if NSG amends its rules by saying, “No item subject to the transfer guidelines of the NSG may be transferred to India if such transfer would be inconsistent with the guidelines in effect on the date of the transfer”.

The US draft to the NSG merely suggests consultations with India on future amendments to the NSG guidelines, but gives India no say in the final decisions. As stated in Section 4 of the draft proposal, the NSG will “solicit such comments” from a non-member like India on proposed new amendments as to “facilitate their implementation by India”. The objective of soliciting “comments” would be to ensure India’s acceptance and compliance with a future amendment.

Stagecraft and Statecraft

Author Archives: Chellaney

About Chellaney

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