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About Chellaney

Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

China’s dam boom stokes concerns in Asia

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Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asian Review

At a time when geopolitical competition in resource-poor Asia is sharpening over freshwater, mineral ores and fossil fuels, China’s expansionary activities in the hydrocarbon-rich South China Sea have drawn considerable international attention, especially because of their implications for the global maritime order. By contrast, China’s frenzy of dam-building to appropriate internationally shared water resources has not attracted a similar level of attention, despite the specter of potential water wars.

China is almost unparalleled as a source of fresh water. Most of the major river systems of Asia originate from the Tibetan plateau, which was annexed by the People’s Republic of China soon after its establishment in 1949. Xinjiang, another sprawling region it occupied forcibly, is the source of the Irtysh and Ili rivers, which flow to Kazakhstan and Russia. However, Beijing does not have a single water-sharing pact with the dozen countries located downstream of its rivers because it rejects the concept.

Most of Asia’s dams are in China, which boasts slightly more than half of the world’s approximately 50,000 large dams. Yet its great dam boom shows no sign of slowing. Indeed, its dam-building program is now largely concentrated in the borderlands on international rivers.

By quietly and opaquely building large dams on transnational rivers, Beijing is presenting a fait accompli to its downstream neighbors. Its latent capability to control cross-border river flows arms it with significant leverage over neighbors — a leverage it could employ to influence the behavior of those states, including deterring them from challenging its broader regional interests.

Indeed, by seeking to control the spigot for much of Asia’s water, China is acquiring such clout that smaller downriver countries in Southeast and Central Asia now use only coded language  to express their concerns over Chinese dam building. For example, calling for transparency has become a way of referring obliquely to China, which smaller states are wary of mentioning by name.

20160315Dams_middle_320On the Mekong river system — Southeast Asia’s lifeblood — China is building or planning a further 14 dams after completing six. It is also constructing a separate cascade of dams on the last two of its free-flowing rivers — the Salween (which flows into Myanmar and along the Thai border before entering into the Andaman Sea) and the Yarlung Tsangpo, also known as the Brahmaputra, which is the lifeline of northeastern India and much of Bangladesh.

Add to the picture China’s damming of other smaller rivers flowing to neighboring countries, as well as tributaries of major rivers, and it is clear that these dams are set to affect the quality and quantity of downstream flows.

Shift in focus

China recently completed ahead of schedule the world’s highest-elevation dam at Zangmu, Tibet, at a cost of $1.6 billion. It is now racing to complete a series of additional dams on the Yarlung Tsangpo, the world’s highest-altitude river. China is also turning an important Yarlung Tsangpo tributary, the Lhasa (or Kyichu), into a series of artificial lakes by building six dams in close proximity along a 20km stretch of the river.

Several factors are behind China’s drive to tap the resources of international rivers, including an officially drawn link between water and national security, the growing political clout of the state-run hydropower industry, and the rise of water nationalism at a time of increasing water stress in the northern Chinese plains. With dam-building reaching virtual saturation levels in the ethnic Han heartland, the focus has shifted to China’s ethnic minority homelands, where major rivers originate.

China’s centralized, megaprojects-driven approach to water resources is the antithesis of the situation in another demographic titan, India, where the constitution makes water an issue for state governments and where anti-dam nongovernmental organizations are powerful. Thanks to organized protests, the much-publicized Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada river in western India remains incomplete decades after work began. The largest dam India has built since independence — the 2,000-megawatt Tehri Dam on the river Bhagirathi — pales in comparison to gigantic Chinese projects. These include the 22,500-megawatt Three Gorges Dam and Mekong dams such as Xiaowan, which dwarfs the Eiffel Tower in height, and Nuozhadu, which boasts a 190 sq. km reservoir.

Yet the water situation in India is far worse than in China, including in terms of per capita availability. China’s population is marginally larger than India’s but its internally renewable water resources (2,813 billion cubic meters per year) are almost twice as large as India’s. In aggregate water availability, including external inflows (which are sizable in India’s case but negligible for the People’s Republic), China boasts almost 50% more resources than India.

As China’s dam-builders increasingly target transnational rivers, concern is growing among downstream neighbors that Beijing is seeking to turn water into a potential political weapon. China pays little heed to the interests even of friendly countries, from Kazakhstan to Thailand and Cambodia.

To be sure, dams bring important socioeconomic benefits and help to deal with drought or seasonal imbalances in water availability through their water-storage capacity. A river can be dammed in an environmentally considerate manner. But what China is doing is over-damming rivers.

One manifestation of this aggressive approach is the construction of series of dams in close proximity to each other on international rivers such as the Mekong or the Salween just before they flow out of Chinese territory. These cascades of dams, looking like strings of beads on a map, aim to capture large quantities of water.

Keeping the silt

Major dams tend to change water quality and the rate at which it flows, and reduce the amount of nutrient-rich silt that is carried downstream. As the major Asian rivers flow down from forbidding Himalayan heights through the soft, sedimentary rock on the Tibetan plateau, they bring with them high-quality silt — a lifeline for agriculture, fisheries and marine life. Silt helps to re-fertilize overworked soils in downstream plains, sustains freshwater species and strengthens the aquatic food chain supporting marine life after rivers empty into seas or oceans.

China’s upstream damming of rivers originating on the Tibetan plateau is not just obstructing the silt flow to downstream plains; it is also causing the retreat of major deltas. Several scientific studies have underscored the link between extensive silt retention behind upstream dams and the retreat and subsidence of Asia’s big deltas, which are home to megacities like Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Bangkok, Kolkata and Dhaka. In addition, the fall in freshwater disgorged by rivers into the seas is disturbing the delicate balance of salinity needed in estuaries and beyond to support critical species.

China’s reluctance to bind itself to international rules or norms is rooted in the belief that as the source of these rivers it is in a position to reap the benefits of harnessing their water resources, with the costs borne by those downstream. After all, the river-flow hierarchy reflects the geopolitical one, with the most powerful country controlling the headwaters of Asia’s major rivers.

In reality, though, China is inflicting environmental costs not just on the states lower down these rivers but on itself. One example is the impact of its upstream water diversions on its own mega-deltas, which are economic centers, making up a substantial proportion of the country’s total gross domestic product. Thanks to the diminished amount of silt discharged into the seas, there is less sediment to add to the delta land formed and fortified through sustained release or to prevent underground seepage of saltwater into sweet-water aquifers along the coasts.

More broadly, the Asian delta regions have become “much more vulnerable” to the effects of climate change and sea-level rise, according to the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the gold standard in climate science.

In this light, the discussion of China’s damming activities on the Tibetan plateau should extend beyond the potential diminution of cross-border flows to the likely effects on the quality of river waters, including through silt-movement blockage. Such effects are already evident within China: the loss of nature’s gift of highly fertile silt due to the Three Gorges Dam and other upriver dams has forced farmers in the lower Yangtze basin to use more chemical fertilizers, accelerating soil and water degradation.

Renewed efforts are needed in Asia to co-opt China into institutionalized cooperation. Without China on board, it will not be possible to build water cooperation and protect critical ecosystems.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author, most recently, of “Water, Peace, and War.”

© Nikkei Asian Review, 2016.

Obama’s counterproductive Pakistan policy

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Brahma Chellaney, Hindustan Times

USPakAmerica, despite a deepening relationship with India, still extends munificent aid to Pakistan — “the ally from hell”, as ex-CIA chief Michael Hayden calls it in his just-released book Playing to the Edge. Pakistan, with one of the world’s lowest tax-to-GDP ratios, has the unique status of being a client state of three powers on which it is more dependent than ever for aid — China, America and the jihad-bankrolling Saudi Arabia. US aid actually bolsters China’s strategy to box in India while encouraging Pakistan to diabolically sponsor terrorism.

Take US President Barack Obama’s latest move to reward Pakistan with 8 more subsidized F-16s and hundreds of millions of dollars in additional aid under the Overseas Contingency Operations fund, dubbed the “slush fund” because it is not subject to the same oversight as the regular Pentagon and state department budgets. Obama’s $860-million aid proposal includes $265 million worth of military hardware under the Foreign Military Financing provision, which, despite its name, permits non-repayable grants. The $700-million deal centred on F-16s is separate.

Two of the objectives cited by the state department in support of additional aid for Pakistan are promoting “improved relations with India” and peace in Afghanistan. How bolstering a renegade Pakistan financially and militarily would encourage it to improve ties with India or Afghanistan has been left unsaid. The US, by persistently rewarding a country that refuses to cut its umbilical ties with terrorists, has only exacerbated India’s security challenges.

Indeed, to continue showering Pakistan with aid (which has totalled a staggering $32.6 billion since 9/11), Obama has bent over backward to shield it from sanctions. Contrast that with his alacritous embrace of sanctions against several other countries in the past seven years.

Obama rebuffed congressional advice last year to suspend some aid to Pakistan and impose travel restrictions on Pakistani officials known to have ties to terrorists. Even when Osama bin Laden was found holed up in a lair next to Pakistan’s top military academy, Obama shied away from imposing sanctions. The issue as to how bin Laden was able to hide in a military town was allowed to fade away for the same reason that Pakistan (or anyone there) was not held to account for running the world’s largest nuclear proliferation ring, led by A.Q. Khan.

Obama’s zeal to shield the double-talking Pakistan has extended to persuading its terror target, India, to hold talks with it. If Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Pakistan policy lies in tatters today, some of the blame must go to Obama, who beguilingly led him up the garden path with specious assurances on Pakistani behaviour.

Modi took office with a prudent approach toward Pakistan — inviting Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to his inauguration but sidelining the Pakistan issue so as to focus on foreign-policy priorities more amenable to progress. In September 2014, Modi told the UN that “a serious bilateral dialogue with Pakistan” was only possible “without the shadow of terrorism”. But after Obama’s last India visit, Modi made a U-turn in his Pakistan policy, only to induce new cross-border terror attacks, from Gurdaspur to Udhampur.

Undaunted, Modi paid a surprise visit to Pakistan. Far from heralding a promising new era, the Christmas Day trip quickly invited daring Pakistani terror attacks at Pathankot and Mazar-i-Sharif. Today, Modi’s silence on Pakistan underscores the dilemma haunting him — how to fix a broken Pakistan policy. Why Modi yielded to a lame-duck US president is a pertinent question that remains unanswered.

Obama, despite a weak, divisive legacy even at home, got the world’s largest democracy to reverse course on Pakistan — an “achievement” whose regional fallout has been only negative, including denting Modi’s credibility and undermining Indian deterrence under his leadership. The net effect has been to present Modi since Pathankot as some sort of a paper tiger.

Still, with the Nuclear Security Summit forthcoming in Washington, there is little sign of Modi salvaging his Pakistan policy from US manoeuvrings. Indeed, by deciding to welcome Pakistani investigators in the Pathankot case, India bought the myth that terror groups like the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) are independent of the Pakistani state. Army chief Dalbir Singh wants Pakistan “isolated” but Modi is doing the opposite — providing it diplomatic succour.

Consider this: Even as India presses Islamabad to prosecute JeM leaders for the Pathankot and Mazar-i-Sharif strikes, an emboldened Pakistan has used Lashkar-e-Taiba to carry out the Pampore attack. Jalalabad has followed Mazar-i-Sharif. Pakistan has also unleashed the mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, Hafiz Saeed, against India. Saeed’s very public life, including leading a recent Islamabad rally, mocks the Obama administration’s $10 million bounty on his head and India’s fond hope that Pakistan would rein in terrorist proxies. Clearly, US’s 2012 bounty was just to placate India and buy its cooperation on Pakistan.

Obama’s disastrous policy has strengthened Pakistan as the world’s leading terrorist sanctuary. The scourge of terrorism emanates more from Pakistan’s Scotch whisky-sipping military generals than from its bead-rubbing mullahs. Yet the White House pampers the generals at the expense of Pakistan’s civilian institutions. Washington highlighted the rot in its Pakistan policy by feting army chief Raheel Sharif in November.  Indeed, Gen. Sharif has been awarded the US Legion of Merit for his contributions to, believe it or not, “peace and security”. Tellingly, Washington’s latest aid and F-16 decisions coincided with its Defence Intelligence Agency chief’s warning that Pakistan’s expanding nuclear arsenal, including low-yield tactical nukes for battlefield use, increases “the risk of an incident or accident”.

By wielding only carrots and no stick, the Obama team has allowed itself to be repeatedly duped by false Pakistani promises, some of which it has religiously fed India. Its counterproductive policy has not only turned Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker but also made it easy for Pakistan to merrily run with the foxes and hunt with the hounds — at grave cost to the security of America’s friend India.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author.

© Hindustan Times, 2016.

Why the U.S. Must Tackle the Saudi Menace of Jihadism

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Brahma Chellaney, China-US Focus

At a time when the conflict within Islam has sharpened between Sunnis and Shias and between fundamentalists and reformers, the House of Saud — the world’s No. 1 promoter of radical Islamic extremism — is increasingly playing the sectarian card, even at the risk of deepening the schisms.

If Saudi Arabia is to be stopped from continuing to export jihad, the U.S. will have to make necessary adjustments in its policy. By wielding only carrots and no stick, the U.S. allows the double-talking Saudi royals to run with the foxes and hunt with the hounds — at grave cost to the security of many countries.

Indeed, the present U.S. policy approach gives the House of Saud the strategic space to keep all options open and cozy up to China, already Saudi Arabia’s largest trading partner and biggest importer of oil. China’s relationship with Saudi Arabia extends beyond trade and investment to arms, including the covert transfer of Chinese DF-21 and DF-3 medium-range ballistic missiles. Following the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal, China agreed during President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia to build that country’s first nuclear power plant.

Jihadism and sectarianism are institutionalized in Saudi Arabia, the only country in the world named after its founder, commonly known as Ibn Saud. Saud, who ruled for 20 years until his death, brought the central part of the Arabian Peninsula under his control with British assistance in 1932, establishing a desert kingdom hewing to Wahhabism, a messianic radicalism from the 18th century that until recent decades was considered a fringe form of Islam.

Jihadism and sectarianism are institutionalized in Saudi Arabia, the only country in the world named after its founder, commonly known as Ibn Saud. Saud, who ruled for 20 years until his death, brought the central part of the Arabian Peninsula under his control with British assistance in 1932, establishing a desert kingdom hewing to Wahhabism, a messianic radicalism from the 18th century that until recent decades was considered a fringe form of Islam.

Oil wealth helped transform the once-barren state, the world’s largest country without a river.

Since the oil-price boom of the 1970s that dramatically increased its wealth, Saudi Arabia has spent more than $200 billion on its global jihad project, including funding Wahhabi madrassas, mosques and books. Wahhabism legitimizes violent jihad with its call for a war on “infidels.”

Saudi funding has helped spread radical Sunni extremism across Africa and Asia and opened a new threat to European nations with significant Muslim minorities. Indeed, Wahhabism’s export is making the tolerant and heterodox Islamic traditions in many South and Southeast Asian countries extinct.

Yet the rest of the world — in thrall to Saudi money and reliant on Saudi oil — has largely turned a blind eye to the kingdom’s jihadist agenda.

Make no mistake: Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi fanaticism is the root from which Islamist terrorist groups ranging from the Islamic State to al-Qaeda draw their ideological sustenance. As U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden said in a 2014 Harvard speech, Saudi and other “allies’ policies wound up helping to arm and build allies of al-Qaida and eventually the terrorist Islamic State.”

Saudi Arabia has faced little international pressure even on human rights, despite having one of the world’s most tyrannical regimes.

How the kingdom buys up world leaders is apparent from the Malaysian attorney general’s recent disclosure that the $681 million deposited in Prime Minister Najib Razak’s personal bank account was a “personal donation” from the Saudi royals and that $620 of it was returned. Saudi Arabia has given between $10 million and $25 million to the Clinton Foundation, which last year also received a separate donation from a charitable foundation established by Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

Saudi Arabia is today engaged in war crimes in Yemen, where it is waging an air war against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. A United Nations panel of experts said in October that the Saudi-led coalition had committed “grave violations” of the Geneva Conventions by targeting civilian sites in Yemen. Still, the Saudi military is failing in its war in Yemen; the rebels remain in control of Sanaa, the capital.

With its own future more uncertain than ever, the House of Saudi is increasingly playing the sectarian card in order to shore up support among the Sunni majority at home and to rally other Islamist rulers in the region to its side.

Having militarily crushed the Arab Spring uprising in Sunni-led but Shia-majority Bahrain, Saudi Arabia early this year executed its own Arab Spring leader who had led anti-regime Shia protests in 2011.  By executing Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr — a Shia cleric and scholar who had become the symbol of the Arab Spring protests in its oil-rich, mainly Shia Eastern Province — Saudi Arabia ignored U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s warning that the action would stoke major tensions with Iran.

Before the execution, the kingdom formed an alliance of Sunni states purportedly to fight terrorism. The coalition included all the main sponsors of international terror, including Qatar, Pakistan and, of course, Saudi Arabia. It was like arsonists pretending to be fire wardens.

When the coalition quickly became the butt of international ridicule, King Salman of Saudi Arabia resorted on a mass scale to what his country is notorious for as the global leader in beheadings. He ordered the execution on terrorism charges of 47 people on a single day, including Nimr al-Nimr. Most were beheaded in a style associated with the Islamic State.

The royals seem to mistakenly believe that widening the sectarian fault lines across the Islamic world will keep them in power. The crash in oil prices is already compounding the royals’ challenges at home. Discontent is growing quietly, even as King Salman pursues aggressive activism in his foreign policy.

By drawing legitimacy from jihadism and by being beholden to sectarianism, the royals could be digging their own graves. After all, fueling jihadism and sectarianism threatens to empower extremists at home and devour the royalty.

Against this background, it has become imperative for the U.S. to stop looking the other way as Saudi Arabia exports radical Islamic extremism. Unlike the ties between Saudi Arabia and China — two major autocracies — oil can no longer provide the glue for the Saudi-U.S. relationship, which is largely bereft of shared strategic interests or values. Moreover, America’s oil production at home is surging.

The U.S.-led war on terror must target not just the effect but the cause of terrorism, especially the central role Saudi Arabia plays through its religious-industrial complex in spreading jihadism. For example, proselytizing efforts by Saudi Arabia — and, to a lesser extent, by Qatar and some other oil sheikdoms — have helped train thousands of imams or teachers in Wahhabism to deliver radical sermons at petrodollar-funded mosques in many countries.

The war on Islamist terror cannot be won without closing the wellspring that feeds it — Wahhabi fanaticism. Wahhabism is the ultimate source of the hatred that triggered the September 11, 2001, strikes in the U.S., the 2008 Mumbai attacks and the Paris terror in November. Shutting that wellspring demands that America drop Saudi Arabia as an ally and treat it as a core part of the problem.

The world’s chief ideological sponsor of jihadism must be held to account for spawning the kinds of dangerous extremists that are imperiling regional and international security.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author, most recently, of “Water, Peace, and War” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).

India’s Pakistan policy unravels

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Brahma Chellaney, Rediff

APTOPIX Pakistan Walk With Taliban

Despite Pakistan’s unending aggression against India ever since it was created as the world’s first Islamic republic in the post-colonial era, successive Indian governments have failed to evolve a consistent, long-term policy toward that country. In stark contrast, Pakistan has maintained the same India policy since its establishment — to spotlight Kashmir as the unfinished business of partition and to undermine Indian security by whatever means, fair or foul. 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power talking tough about Pakistan. But in office, he has failed to translate his election-campaign talk into a coherent policy. Indeed, his Pakistan policy has already lost both direction and purpose. Worse still, Modi has failed to learn the lessons from the Pakistan blunders of his predecessors.

Thanks to the boomerang effect generated by his Lahore visit on Christmas Day, it has taken less than three months for Modi’s Pakistan policy to unravel. By paying a surprise visit with little preparation to a state whose hostility toward India is inborn, Modi ingenuously thought he was making history. Yet what the trip yielded is a continuing series of terrorist attacks of Pakistani origin on Indian targets — from Pathankot and Mazar-i-Sharif to Pampore and Jalalabad.

In fact, after Modi’s much-publicized bear hug of his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, in Lahore, it took barely a week for the terror masters controlling Pakistan to thank him for his visit by carrying out terror attacks through surrogate Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) on India’s Pathankot air base and on the Indian consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan. The Pathankot attack was the military equivalent of the 2008 Mumbai strikes on civilian targets by terrorists from Pakistan.

After New Delhi began pressing the Sharif government for action against Azhar Masood and other JeM terrorist leaders for carrying out the New Year’s terror attacks at Pathankot and Mazar-i-Sharif, Pakistan used another terrorist proxy — the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) group — to carry out an attack in Pampore, India. Afghan intelligence and former Afghan President Hamid Karzai have also linked the Jalalabad attack on the Indian consulate to Pakistan.

Yet the Modi government is preparing to welcome a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) from Pakistan that was set up to supposedly probe the Pathankot attack. It is like accepting arsonists as firefighters. Indeed, the JIT openly includes one officer of the rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

In truth, the JIT was set up not to bring the Pathankot masterminds to justice but to investigate the operational deficiencies of the Pathankot strike and to ensure that the next surrogate attack leaves no telltale signs of the involvement of Pakistanis. This is why Pakistan is seeking even more evidence from India. It was naïve of India to think that by supplying Pakistan communication intercepts and other evidence linking the Pathankot attackers with their handlers in that country, the terror masters there would go after their terror proxies.

Still, the Modi government continues to play into Pakistan’s hands. The latest example is the terror alert it has sounded across western and northern India after receiving a “tip-off” from Sharif’s National Security Adviser that 10 LeT and JeM terrorists had infiltrated into Gujarat state from across the international border.

The LeT and JeM are nothing but front organizations of the ISI. No cross-border infiltration of LeT or JeM terrorists happens without help from the Pakistani military. The alleged tipoff from Naseer Khan Janjua — an army general appointed as Sharif’s NSA at the military’s behest — helps to advertise Pakistan’s “cooperation” on terror while putting India knowingly on a wild-goose chase.

It is significant that the alleged Pakistani tipoff was leaked to the media not by the Pakistani government but by New Delhi. By leaking it in order to highlight Pakistan’s “cooperation” on terrorism, the Modi government might be seeking to create political space at home for a Modi-Sharif meeting in Washington this month-end on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit. Creating political space for further top-level engagement with Pakistan has become necessary because Modi’s famous hug of Sharif in Lahore on Christmas Day backfired. That hug, like Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s hug of Sharif at the Wagah border in 1999, brought not peace but greater terrorism.

Make no mistake: Pakistan has little interest in honouring international norms or its own solemn commitments. When Sharif visited the White House in October 2015, the joint statement said the visiting Pakistani leader apprised U.S. President Barack Obama about Pakistan’s resolve to take “effective action against United Nations-designated terrorist individuals and entities, including Lashkar-e-Taiba and its affiliates, as per its international commitments and obligations under U.N. Security Council resolutions and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).”

Obama did not question Sharif about the public activities of Hafiz Saeed, Azhar and other terrorist proxies or about Pakistan’s violation of the Security Council and FATF requirements in the case relating to Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, a LeT leader whom Pakistan arrested and charged with involvement in the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Pakistan failed to investigate the source of funds used to bail out Lakhvi in April 2015.

Obama, however, has exerted Pakistan-related pressure on India. After Obama’s New Delhi visit in early 2015, Modi’s Pakistan policy transformed conspicuously. He resumed bilateral dialogue with Pakistan, only to invite new terror attacks in Punjab and Kashmir states. Still, he paid an unannounced visit to Pakistan.

The attack on the Pathankot base by Pakistani gunmen constituted an act of war. Yet Modi’s only public comment up until now on that attack has been to blame it on “enemies of humanity.” Even when he visited the base after the attack, Modi said nothing. If Obama had said nothing when he visited San Bernardino, California — where a married couple of Pakistani origin killed 14 people in December — he would have been roasted by his critics. Modi has stayed mum on Pakistan even in Parliament despite Rahul Gandhi’s taunt that he has “singlehandedly” bailed out the sponsor of terror by messing up Pakistan policy.

In fact, despite the Pathankot attack, the Modi government allowed the Pakistani high commissioner in New Delhi to meet a hardcore Kashmiri separatist, Ali Shah Geelani. Will Pakistan allow an Indian diplomat to meet a Pakistani separatist?

Today, Modi’s Pakistan policy looks little different than his predecessor’s, indicating that the more things change, the more they stay the same in India.

While welcoming Pakistani investigators in the Pathankot case, India has brushed aside the reality that Pakistan has failed to bring anyone to justice for the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks or even to commence trial in that case despite sending an investigation team to India in 2012 and 2013 that examined witnesses and collected other evidence. While Manmohan Singh rebuffed Pakistan’s request to allow its investigators visiting India to interrogate Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving terrorist involved in the Mumbai attacks, Modi is considering granting the Pakistani team in the Pathankot case access to the Indian forward air base.

Assisting Pakistani investigators in the Pathankot case amounts to treating cross-border terrorism as a policing issue, as Islamabad wants, when, in reality, it is a strategic weapon that Pakistan diabolically wields to bleed India through a “war of a thousand cuts.” Indeed, helping Pakistan to investigate a terror attack in India is the equivalent of allowing a drug cartel to be in charge of counternarcotics.

When Pakistan openly permits United Nations-designated terrorist groups and terrorist leaders like Hafiz Saeed to operate from its soil and publicly threaten India with more terror attacks, it is nothing but foolhardiness to build counterterrorism cooperation with the Pakistani government. The risk is that, by expecting terror sponsors to go after their terror surrogates, Pakistan’s use of terrorism as a state instrument could be unwittingly legitimated by its victim, India.

More fundamentally, it is a false argument that India has only one choice — to continue useless talks with Pakistan or wage a full-fledged war. An extension of that argument is that India has no option but to keep battling Pakistan’s unconventional war on Indian territory. Such a self-injurious approach means treating cross-border terrorism as an internal law-and-order problem and bringing yourself under siege.

Wisdom actually lies in fighting an unconventional war with an unconventional war that is taken to the enemy’s own land so as to drive home the message that the foe’s aggression is not cost-free. According to Army chief General Dalbir Singh, 17 terrorist-training camps in Pakistan close to the border with India are still operating. If India remains directionless, further acts of cross-border terrorism will follow.

Unfortunately, India’s Pakistan policy has become unhinged. It remains unmoored in reality. If India wants history to stop repeating itself, it must tether its Pakistan policy to reality and develop a credible counterterrorism strategy.

Brahma Chellaney, a geostrategist and author of nine books, is professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research.

The Limits of Capitalism with Communist Characteristics

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, Project Syndicate

a814068c9282d4cb2bae1dc7343a7797.landscapeAs US President Barack Obama prepares to embark on an historic visit to Cuba, the future of the communist-ruled island is the subject of widespread speculation. Some observers are hoping that the ongoing shift toward capitalism, which has been occurring very gradually for five years under Raúl Castro’s direction, will naturally lead Cuba toward democracy. Experience suggests otherwise.

In fact, economic liberalization is far from a surefire route to democracy. Nothing better illustrates this than the world’s largest and oldest autocracy, China, where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) maintains its monopoly on power, even as pro-market reforms have enabled its economy to surge. (A key beneficiary of this process has been the Chinese military.)

The belief that capitalism automatically brings democracy implies an ideological connection between the two. But the dominance of the CCP – which currently boasts 88 million members, more than Germany’s total population – is no longer rooted in ideology. The Party, represented by a cloistered oligarchy, endures by employing a variety of instruments – coercive, organizational, and remunerative – to preclude the emergence of organized opposition.

A 2013 party circular known as “Document No. 9” listed seven threats to the CCP’s leadership that President Xi Jinping intends to eliminate. These include espousal of “Western constitutional democracy,” promotion of “universal values” of human rights, encouragement of “civil society,” “nihilist” criticisms of the party’s past, and endorsement of “Western news values.”

In short, communism is now focused less on what it is – that is, its ideology – and more on what it is not. Its representatives are committed, above all, to holding on to political power – an effort that the economic prosperity brought by capitalism supports, by helping to stave off popular demands for change.

The story is similar in Vietnam and Laos. Both began decentralizing economic control and encouraging private enterprise in the late 1980s, and are now among Asia’s fastest-growing economies. Vietnam is even a member of the incipient 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership. But the one-party state remains entrenched, and continues to engage in considerable political repression.

Things do not seem set to change anytime soon. In Vietnam, Nguyễn Tấn Dũng, the reform-minded prime minister, recently failed in his bid to become General Secretary of the Communist Party (the country’s supreme leader); the 12th National Congress reelected the incumbent, Nguyễn Phú Trọng.

Beyond providing sufficient material gains to keep the population satisfied, capitalism strengthens a communist-ruled state’s capacity to increase internal repression and control information. One example is the notorious “Great Firewall of China,” a government operation that screens and blocks Internet content, creating a realm of politically sanitized information for citizens. China is the only major country in the world whose official internal-security budget is larger than its official national-defense budget.

In the face of China’s current economic turmoil, control of information has become more important than ever. In order to forestall potential challenges, China’s leadership has increasingly muzzled the press, limiting, in particular, reporting or commentary that could adversely affect stock prices or the currency. Xi has asked journalists to pledge “absolute loyalty” to the CCP, and closely follow its leadership in “thought, politics, and action.” A state-run newspaper, warning that “the legitimacy of the party might decline,” argued that the “nation’s media outlets are essential to political stability.”

Clearly, where communists call the shots, the development of a free market for goods and services does not necessarily lead to the emergence of a marketplace of ideas. Even Nepal, a communist-dominated country that holds elections, has been unable to translate economic liberalization into a credible democratic transition. Instead, the country’s politics remain in a state of flux, with political and constitutional crises undermining its reputation as a Shangri-La and threatening to turn it into a failed state.

Democracy and communism are, it seems, mutually exclusive. But capitalism and communism clearly are not – and that could be very dangerous.

In fact, the marriage of capitalism and communism, spearheaded by China, has spawned a new political model that represents the first direct challenge to liberal democracy since Fascism: authoritarian capitalism. With its spectacular rise to become a leading global power in little more than a single generation, China has convinced autocratic regimes everywhere that authoritarian capitalism – or, as Chinese leaders call it, “socialism with Chinese characteristics” – is the fastest and smoothest route to prosperity and stability, far superior to messy electoral politics. This may help to explain why the spread of democracy worldwide has lately stalled.

Obama’s impending Cuba visit should be welcomed as a sign of the end of America’s inapt policy of isolation – a development that could open the way to lifting the 55-year-old trade embargo against the country. But it would be a serious mistake to assume that Cuba’s economic opening, advanced by the Obama-initiated rapprochement, will necessarily usher in a new political era in Cuba.

© Project Syndicate, 2016.

Refugees, jihad and the specter of terrorism

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Europe’s refugee crisis threatens to exact a security price as high as what nations next to the Afghanistan-Pakistan jihadist belt are paying

Brahma Chellaney, The National

Europe today is focused on the refugee crisis, with NATO instituting patrols in the Agean Sea to intercept migrants trying to reach Greece. But in some years, Europe’s focus could shift to internal-security threats. After all, the refugee flows from the Middle East, where grassroots radicalization and arms training are widespread in the war-torn states, hold important security implications for the destination countries.

Indeed, U.S. National Intelligence Director James Clapper has warned that the Islamic State terrorist group is infiltrating refugees escaping from Iraq and Syria so as to operate in the West, while Rob Wainwright, the head of the European Union’s law enforcement agency, Europol, has warned that Europe is facing its biggest terror threat in more than a decade. According to Clapper, Islamic State terrorists are “taking advantage of the torrent of migrants to insert operatives into that flow,” adding that they are “pretty skilled at phony passports so they can travel ostensibly as legitimate travelers.”

Germany, the prime destination of the current migrant flows, welcomed around one million refugees last year. But unlike the roughly three million migrants from Turkey that came to Germany from the 1960s onward to meet the demand for labor in the booming German economy, those arriving today are from countries battered by growing jihadist extremism and violence. Turkey itself is being Pakistanized, in keeping with the maxim: “If you light a fire in your neighborhood, it will engulf you.”

The refugee exodus is just one manifestation of a deeper problem — how interventionist policies of outside powers in recent years have unraveled fragile states, such as Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan. Following World Wars I and II, European colonial powers and the United States sat around tables and redrew political frontiers in the Middle East, creating artificial new nations with no roots in history or preexisting identity.

The net effect of the latest round of interventionist policies is the emergence at Europe’s southern doorstep of a jihadist citadel that extends from the Maghreb to the Sahel, with Libya at its hub, and the rise of another jihadist stronghold in the Syria-Iraq belt. Dealing with the threats from these two jihadist citadels will challenge Europe in the coming years even more than the refugee crisis, in the same way that countries next to the Afghanistan-Pakistan jihadist belt are paying a high price in terms of their security.

In this context, the Paris terror attacks’ larger lesson should not be forgotten: Unless caution is exercised in training and arming Islamic militants in another region, the chickens could come home to roost. Jihad cannot be confined within the borders of a targeted nation, however distant, as the examples of Afghanistan, Syria and Libya indicate. The fact that French and Belgian nationals were behind the Paris attacks has shown how difficult it is to geographically contain the spread of the jihad virus.

Indeed, internal-security challenges in Europe have been compounded by Western foreign-policy missteps and misplaced priorities. Take the situation in battle-worn Syria and Iraq: Defeating the Islamic State is a pressing issue on which an international consensus — and coalition — can be built. But the Western-led camp first needs to get its act together, including by prioritizing the Islamic State’s eradication over regime change in Damascus and by stopping its members from working at cross-purposes. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar continue to aid al-Qaeda-linked militant groups in Syria and Iraq.

Even without considering the specter of Islamic State fighters hiding among innocent civilians to reach the West, the flow of refugees poses a security challenge for the countries they enter, because they are arriving from violence-scarred lands. In the refugee-producing conflict zones, the call to jihad has indoctrinated many to see violence as a sanctified tool of religion. Large numbers of men have not only received arms training but also used weapons in combat.

More than half of the slightly over one million refugees who flocked to Europe in 2015 were men of fighting age. This year, due to pressure for families to reunify, children and women make up 54 percent of the new arrivals up to now, according to United Nations data.

The risks from jihadist indoctrination cannot be discounted, as was highlighted by what happened in San Bernardino, California, where a married couple of Pakistani origin massacred 14 people in December.

Moreover, former combatants in a civil war — just like ground troops returning from a regular war — are prone to suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). According to medical research, about 30 percent of the men and women who have spent time in war zones experience PTSD, which is associated with an increased risk of violence.

In this light, addressing the refugee crisis will be no easy task for Europe. Building higher fences to secure Fortress Europe cannot be the answer by itself. Refugees will do anything to escape from war and chaos, including risking their lives, as they are doing by taking unseaworthy boats.

More fundamentally, how can any European nation ensure that the refugees it takes do not include radical jihadists who extol mass murder as a tool of jihad?  Integrating the refugees already admitted will be a major challenge, as Germany has experienced with its Turkish immigrants, who remain poorly integrated in German society.

Let us be clear: No country can accept an unrestrained influx of refugees, because it would get swamped economically, socially and culturally and face major political fallout domestically. The issue is how to control the migrant flow in a humane way, in accordance with international law, while admitting a limited number of genuine, properly vetted refugees.

However, there is no European or international policy on refugees. The two instruments of international law — the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Refugee Protocol — are scarcely adequate for dealing with the current refugee flows.

For Europe, the Mediterranean holds the key for its security. Yet little attention has been paid in European security policies to shoring up security along the continent’s southern flank. Instead, identity politics in the form of nationalism is back in Europe — a development set to accentuate internal-security challenges relating to refugees.

Long-time Japan Times contributor Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author, most recently, of “Water, Peace, and War” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). 

© The National, 2016.

China’s Thirst Threat

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China, with its frenzied damming of rivers and unbridled exploitation of mineral wealth on the resource-rich Tibetan Plateau, is compounding the damage to Himalayan ecosystems by encouraging its bottled-water companies to tap the already-stressed glaciers.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Project Syndicate

HONG KONG – When identifying threats to Himalayan ecosystems, China stands out. For years, the People’s Republic has been engaged in frenzied damming of rivers and unbridled exploitation of mineral wealth on the resource-rich Tibetan Plateau. Now it is ramping up efforts to spur its bottled-water industry – the world’s largest and fastest-growing – to siphon off glacier water in the region.

12Nearly three-quarters of the 18,000 high-altitude glaciers in the Great Himalayas are in Tibet, with the rest in India and its immediate neighborhood. The Tibetan glaciers, along with numerous mountain springs and lakes, supply water to Asia’s great rivers, from the Mekong and the Yangtze to the Indus and the Yellow. In fact, the Tibetan Plateau is the starting point of almost all of Asia’s major river systems.

By annexing Tibet, China thus changed Asia’s water map. And it is aiming to change it further, as it builds dams that redirect trans-boundary riparian flows, thereby acquiring significant leverage over downriver countries.

But China is not motivated purely by strategic considerations. With much of the water in its rivers, lakes, and aquifers unfit for human consumption, pristine water has become the new oil for China – a precious and vital resource, the overexploitation of which risks wrecking the natural environment. By encouraging its companies to tap Himalayan glaciers for premium drinking water that can satisfy a public skeptical about the safety of tap water, China is raising the environmental stakes throughout Asia.

Though much of the bottled water currently sold in China comes from other sources – chemically treated tap water or mineral water from other provinces – China seems to think that the bottling of Himalayan glacier water can serve as a new engine of growth, powered by government subsidies. As part of the official “Share Tibet’s Good Water with the World” campaign, China is offering bottlers incentives like tax breaks, low-interest loans, and a tiny extraction fee of just CN¥3 ($0.45) per cubic meter (or 1,000 liters). According to a ten-year plan unveiled by Chinese authorities in Tibet last fall, extraction of glacier water will increase more than 50-fold in just the next four years, including for export.

Some 30 companies have already been awarded licenses to bottle water from Tibet’s ice-capped peaks. Two popular brands in China are Qomolangma Glacier, sourced from a supposedly protected reserve linked to Mount Everest, on the border with Nepal, and 9000 Years, named after the assumed age of its glacial source. A third, Tibet 5100, is so named because it is bottled at a 5,100-meter-high glacial spring in the Nyenchen Tanglha range that feeds the Yarlung Tsangpo (or Brahmaputra River) – the lifeblood of northeastern India and Bangladesh.

Ominously, the Chinese bottled-water industry is sourcing its glacier water mainly from the eastern Himalayas, where accelerated melting of snow and ice fields is already raising concerns in the international scientific community. Glaciers in the western Himalayas, by contrast, are more stable and could be growing. Even the Chinese Academy of Sciences has documented a sharp decrease in the area and mass of eastern Himalayan glaciers.

Himalayan_2074484bOne of the world’s most bio-diverse but ecologically fragile regions, the Tibetan Plateau is now warming at more than twice the average global rate. Beyond undermining the pivotal role Tibet plays in Asian hydrology and climate, this trend endangers the Tibetan Plateau’s unique bird, mammal, amphibian, reptile, fish, and medicinal-plant species.

Nonetheless, China is not reconsidering its unbridled extraction of Tibet’s resources. On the contrary, since building railways to Tibet – the first was completed in 2006, with an extension opened in 2014 – China’s efforts have gone into overdrive.

Beyond water, Tibet is the world’s top lithium producer; home to China’s largest reserves of several metals, including copper and chromite (used in steel production); and an important source of diamonds, gold, and uranium. In recent years, Chinese-controlled companies have launched a mining frenzy on the plateau that not only damages landscapes sacred to Tibetans, but also is eroding Tibet’s ecology further – including by polluting its precious water.

These are precisely the kinds of actions that caused China’s water crisis in the first place. Instead of learning the lessons of its past mistakes, China is compounding them, forcing a growing number of people and ecosystems to pay the price for its imprudent approach to economic growth.

Indeed, China has implemented no effective safeguards against adverse impacts from intensive water mining. Bottled water is being sourced even from protected reserves where glaciers are already in retreat. Meanwhile, the glacier-siphoning boom is attracting highly polluting ancillary industries, including manufacturers of plastic water bottles.

Make no mistake: Glacier-water mining has major environmental costs in terms of biodiversity loss, impairment of some ecosystem services due to insufficient runoff water, and potential depletion or degradation of glacial springs. Moreover, the process of sourcing, processing, bottling, and transporting glacial water from the Himalayas to Chinese cities thousands of miles away has a very large carbon footprint.

Bottling glacier water is not the right way to quench China’s thirst. A better alternative, both environmentally and economically, would be to boost investment in treatment facilities to make tap water safe in cities. Unfortunately, China seems determined to remain on its current course – an approach that could do irreparable and severe damage to Asia’s environment, economy, and political stability.

© Project Syndicate, 2016.

When drama undercut diplomacy

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BY , The Japan Times

downloadIt has taken just weeks for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Pakistan policy to break down, thanks to his peace overture generating a boomerang effect. Modi thought he was making history by paying a surprise visit to Pakistan on Christmas Day. Few in India dared to ask whether visiting an adversary state unannounced and unprepared could really bring peace.

Today, Modi’s silence on Pakistan underscores the dilemma haunting his government — how to fix a broken Pakistan policy. New Delhi seems to be at a loss as to what to do next.

After Modi’s much-publicized hug of his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, in the Pakistani city of Lahore, it took the terror masters who rule the roost in Pakistan barely a week to thank him for his visit by carrying out terror attacks through their surrogate Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) group on an Indian air base at Pathankot and on the Indian consulate in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan. The Pathankot attack, which killed seven Indian troops, was the military equivalent of the 2008 Mumbai strikes on civilian targets by terrorists from Pakistan.

Now, as India presses the Sharif government for action against Azhar Masood and other JeM terrorist leaders for carrying out the New Year’s terror attacks at Pathankot and Mazar-i-Sharif, Pakistan has let loose Hafiz Saeed, the mastermind of the 2008 cataclysmic Mumbai terrorist strikes. The United States in 2012 put a $10 million bounty on the head of Saeed, a United Nations-designated terrorist who founded the Lashkar-e-Taiba group.

In an example of how the Pakistani military, including the rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, uses terrorist surrogates, Saeed has justified the Pathankot attack and warned India of more terror strikes.

Saeed’s very public life mocks not just the Obama administration’s bounty but also the Modi government’s fond hope that Sharif — Pakistan’s impotent prime minister who has ceded key powers to the military — would rein in his country’s terrorist proxies. Indeed, Saeed’s latest actions, including staging rallies across Pakistan, including one that he himself led in the Pakistani capital, have helped to highlight the Modi government’s strategic naivete. They also show that the U.S. bounty on his head is just to placate New Delhi and buy its cooperation on Pakistan.

Pakistan has never honored international norms or its own solemn commitments. For example, when Sharif visited the White House in October, the joint statement said the visiting Pakistani leader apprised Obama about Pakistan’s resolve to take “effective action against U.N.-designated terrorist individuals and entities, including Lashkar-e-Taiba and its affiliates, as per its international commitments and obligations under U.N. Security Council resolutions and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).”

U.S. President Barack Obama did not question Sharif about the public activities of Saeed, Azhar and other terrorist proxies or about Pakistan’s violation of the Security Council and FATF requirements in the case relating to Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, a Lashkar-e-Taiba leader whom Pakistan arrested and charged with involvement in the Mumbai attacks. Pakistan failed to investigate the source of funds used to bail out Lakhvi in April 2015.

Modi took office in May 2014 with a prudent approach toward Pakistan — inviting Sharif to his inauguration but sidelining the Pakistan issue so as to keep the focus on foreign policy priorities where progress could be made. In September 2014, while addressing the U.N., Modi made clear that “a serious bilateral dialogue with Pakistan” was only possible “without the shadow of terrorism,” urging that country to “create an appropriate environment” for talks.

But later Modi succumbed to pressure from the lame-duck U.S. president, who has not only shielded Pakistan from international sanctions but has also boosted American aid significantly to that renegade state. The U.S. heavily funds the Pakistani military even as sections of the Pakistani Army and intelligence actually work against it, including aiding the killing of American troops next door in Afghanistan through their surrogates, the Taliban and the Haqqani network.

After Obama’s New Delhi visit in early 2015, Modi’s Pakistan policy transformed conspicuously. He resumed bilateral dialogue unconditionally, only to invite new terror attacks in India’s Punjab and Kashmir states. Still, he paid a surprise visit to Pakistan.

The attack on the Pathankot air base by Pakistani gunmen constituted an act of war. Yet Modi’s only public comment thus far on that attack has been to blame it on “enemies of humanity.” Even when he visited the air base after the attack, he said nothing. If Obama had said nothing when he visited San Bernardino, California — where a married couple of Pakistani origin killed 14 people in December — he would have been roasted by his critics.

It was naive of Modi to think that by supplying Pakistan communication intercepts and other evidence linking the Pathankot attackers with their handlers in that country, the terror masters there would go after their terror proxies. Pakistan is currently carrying out investigations into the Pathankot strike, not to prosecute those behind it but to identify the attack’s operational deficiencies so that the next attack by its terrorist proxies is better planned. That is why it is seeking even more evidence from India.

According to a flawed argument, the only choice for India is between continuing useless talks with Pakistan and waging a full-fledged war. Worse still, some Indians believe that India has no choice but to keep battling Pakistan’s unconventional war on Indian territory. This means treating cross-border terrorism as an internal law-and-order problem and bringing yourself under siege.

Wisdom lies in fighting an unconventional war with an unconventional war that is taken to the enemy’s own land so as to drive home the message that the foe’s aggression is not cost-free.

Today, however, Modi’s Pakistan policy lies in tatters. Modi’s Pakistan visit, in fact, illustrated the difference between diplomacy and drama. By putting the emphasis on drama, Modi undermined Indian diplomacy.

The Indian public is sick and tired of the national leadership’s acts of commission and omission that have made the country repeatedly relive history. According to Indian Army chief Gen. Dalbir Singh, 17 terrorist-training camps in Pakistan close to the border with India are still operating. So, India must brace itself to further cross-border terrorism. The enemy will strike at a time and place of its choosing.

With Modi’s credibility at stake, it is difficult to believe that he will continue with a business-as-usual approach toward Pakistan. But if his government wants history to stop repeating itself, it must develop a credible counterterrorism strategy.

Long-time Japan Times contributor Brahma Chellaney, a geostrategist and author of nine books, is a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and a Richard von Weizsacker Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.

© The Japan Times, 2016.

China Flexes Its Naval Muscles to Project Power Far Beyond Its Shores

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Since 1949, China has been redrawing its frontiers. This still remains an unfinished task for its rulers.

Brahma Chellaney, China-US Focus

china-economy

Boosting naval prowess and projecting power as far away as the Middle East are at the center of China’s ambition to fashion a strongly Sino-centric Asia. This will be at the back of U.S. President Barack Obama’s mind when he hosts ASEAN leaders at a February 15-16 summit in Sunnylands, California, with his secretary of state John Kerry already urging Southeast Asia to show unity in response to Beijing’s territorial encroachments in the South China Sea.

Several developments underscore China’s determination to take the sea route to achieve regional dominance — from its frenzied creation of artificial islands in the South China Sea and its rapidly expanding submarine fleet, to its recent admission that it is establishing its first overseas military base in the Indian Ocean rim nation of Djibouti, located on the Horn of Africa. The Middle East base at Djibouti represents a transformative moment in its quest for supremacy at sea, a goal highlighted by its official white paper “China’s Military Strategy,” which last summer outlined a plan for the navy to shift focus from “offshore waters defense” to “open seas protection.”

After China’s inroads into strategically located Indian Ocean nations like Sri Lanka and the Maldives, President Xi Jinping’s latest trip to Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt point to the broader Chinese ambitions in the Middle East, a region where political turmoil and Russia’s military intervention in Syria are already altering the delicate balance of power. China has thrown down the gauntlet to the U.S. by deciding to set up its base in Djibouti, which serves as the Pentagon’s main intelligence-gathering post for the Arab world and the critical shipping lanes through the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.

China boasts one of the fastest-growing undersea fleets in the world. It has already surpassed the U.S. submarine fleet in quantity but not quality. But as it works to further expand its force of diesel and nuclear attack submarines, its territorial and maritime assertiveness and muscular actions are prompting neighboring countries, from Japan to India, to strengthen their anti-submarine capabilities.

Beijing’s increasing submarine forays into the Indian Ocean — the bridge between Asia and Europe — draw strength from its more assertive push for dominance in the adjacent South China Sea, where it continues to push its borders far out into international waters in a way that no power has done before elsewhere.

Possession is nine-tenths of the law, and Beijing understands that very well, especially because its claim of historic right over virtually all the resource-endowed South China Sea is weak and legally untenable. China thus has set out to achieve effective control, a key principle in international law for determining legitimate ownership of a territory.

This is exactly the same strategy the People’s Republic employed in the past to advance its territorial claims elsewhere, such as the Himalayas. In fact, no sooner had the communists seized power in Beijing than China began gobbling up the then-independent Tibet — a conquest that enlarged its landmass by more than one-third and changed Asia’s water map. Decades later, the redrawing of national frontiers remains an unfinished task for the rulers in Beijing.

The artificial islands in the South China Sea — a global trade and maritime hub — not only arm China with a great bargaining chip but allow it to forward deploy military forces hundreds of miles from its shores. In the process, China is positioning itself at the mouth of the Indian Ocean.

Indeed, Beijing appears to be using the South China Sea as a testing ground for changing the Asian geopolitical map. To advance its larger geostrategic interests, China is assertively using geoeconomic tools, such as the Maritime Silk Road and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which was launched January 16 by Chinese President Xi Jinping at a ceremony in Beijing. The Maritime Silk Road — designed to link China’s eastern coast with the Indian Ocean region and the Middle East — presents itself as a benign-sounding new banner for the country’s “string of pearls” strategy.

Make no mistake: China’s expanding submarine fleet is suited not for Southeast Asia’s shallow sea basin but for the Indian Ocean’s deep, warm waters. This explains why China is setting up a naval hub in Djibouti, building a naval base at Gwadar, Pakistan, and wanting access to port facilities around India, like it has already secured in Sri Lanka.

China’s territorial expansions in the South China Sea, without incurring any international costs, are whetting its growing interest in the Indian Ocean and the western Pacific. This shows that the South China Sea is critical to the contest for influence from the Middle East to the Pacific.

Yet, the Obama administration has focused its concern on safeguarding freedom of navigation through the South China Sea, not on finding ways to stop China from altering the status quo in its favor. ASEAN disunity has also aided China’s strategy.

Emboldened by international inaction and a series of crises that have helped divert global attention, Beijing has been feverishly turning low-tide elevations in the South China Sea into small islands by dredging seabed material and then dumping it using pipelines and barges. In the process, it has been creating new “facts on the ground,” including military facilities, for enforcing an air defense identification zone without having to declare one.

China’s militarization of the South China Sea not only threatens freedom of navigation in the South China Sea but is also encouraging aggressive Chinese coastguard patrolling. Hanoi, for example, has accused Chinese patrols of frequently intercepting Vietnamese fishing boats, ramming them, damaging equipment, and beating up crews.

Against this background, the South China Sea has emerged as the symbolic center of the international maritime challenges of the 21st century. The region is important even for countries in the Middle East and Europe because what happens there will impinge on larger maritime security. Indeed, developments in the South China Sea — the world’s newest maritime hot spot — carry the potential of upending even the current liberal world order by permitting brute power to trump rules.

The sea’s centrality to the international maritime order should induce likeminded states to work closely together to positively shape developments, including by ensuring that continued unilateralism is not cost-free. Only sustained pressure can persuade Beijing that its future lies in cooperation and not confrontation.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including, most recently, “Water, Peace, and War.” He is also Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research.

© China-US Focus, 2016.

Why a Stable Balance of Power in Asia Calls for a Resurgent Japan

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2014-chellaney-headBRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Globe and Mail, February 3, 2016

The international spotlight on Japan’s prolonged economic woes has helped obscure one of Asia’s farthest-reaching but least-noticed developments – the political rise of the world’s third-largest economy. By initiating national-security reforms and seeking a more active role in shaping the evolving balance of power in Asia, Japan wants to stop punching below its weight and take its rightful place in the world.

Japan’s quiet political resurgence is reflected in various ways – from the government strengthening security arrangements with the United States and building close strategic partnerships with other major democracies in the Asia-Pacific region, to a grassroots movement at home pressing for changes in the country’s U.S.-imposed pacifist constitution.

Tokyo’s recent landmark deal with South Korea to settle a bitter history dispute over wartime “comfort women” promises to open up greater diplomatic space for it in East Asia.

Already, Japan’s passive chequebook diplomacy is giving way to a proactive approach focused on the Asian mainland and the oceans, including the western Pacific and Indian Ocean. Japan is shoring up ties with other major Asia-Pacific democracies, from Canada and Australia to India and Indonesia.

The single biggest factor driving Japan’s political rise is the ascent of a muscular China.

Japan is the world’s first constitutionally pacifist nation. The constitution’s Article 9 says, “land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.” No other national constitution in the world goes so far as to bar acquisition of the means of war or to renounce “the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.”

The American postwar success in disarming Japan by disbanding its military, imposing a 1946-drafted constitution and overhauling its education system, however, engendered its own challenges. It did not take long for the United States to realize that it had gone too far in creating a demilitarized Japan.

In 1953, then-U.S. vice-president Richard Nixon called the constitution “a mistake.” That reflected a changing U.S. approach toward Japan, owing to America’s Cold War with the Soviet Union, the Communist takeover in China and the protracted Korean War. Through a major reinterpretation of the very constitution it had imposed, the United States encouraged Japan to reconstitute its military as “Self-Defence Forces” in order to make the country the linchpin of America’s Asian strategy.

Japan’s recent constitutional reinterpretation to assert its right to collective self-defence is small in comparison. Tokyo has also relaxed its long-standing, self-imposed ban on export of arms, thus opening the path to building closer security co-operation with other Asia-Pacific democracies.

With Japan’s nationalist impulse to play a bigger international role now rising, its domestic debate on national-security and constitutional reform is set to intensify. However, further national-security reform beyond what Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has carried out is linked – from a legal standpoint – to constitutional reform.

The Japanese constitution is unique in that it defines no head of state. It stripped the emperor of all but symbolic power. This was by design: The United States wanted to have the emperor as merely the symbol of Japan so that it could use him during the 1945-52 occupation years without the monarch being able to rally his people.

Likewise, the force-renouncing Article 9 was designed to keep Japan as America’s client state so that it would never pose a threat to the United States again.

But today, U.S. security interests would be better served by a more confident and secure Japan that assumes greater responsibility for its own defence and for regional security.

The Japanese constitution, however, is among the hardest in the world to revise. It is doubtful that any proposed constitutional change – even after winning approval with the mandated two-thirds vote in both chambers of parliament – can secure majority support in a national referendum in order to take effect.

The large protests against Mr. Abe’s 2015 security legislation permitting the Self-Defence Forces to engage in “collective defence” were a reminder that the U.S.-instilled pacifism remains deeply rooted in Japanese society. A 2014 survey revealed that just 15 per cent of Japanese (compared with almost 75 per cent of Chinese) were willing to defend their country – the lowest figure in the world.

Make no mistake: Enduring peace in Asia demands a proactive Japan. If Japan fails to carry out further reforms of its postwar institutions and policies to meet the new regional challenges, it could erode its security.

Having spawned the problem that Japan now confronts – how to cast off the constitutional albatross – the United States must be part of the solution. Its own geostrategic interests demand that Tokyo play a proactive role in regional affairs and do more for its own defence, within the framework of the U.S.-Japan security treaty. If the United States were to openly support constitutional revision in Japan, it would help blunt criticism from the country’s powerful pacifist constituency and from China.

Constitutional and national-security reform in Japan will help underpin the central goal of America’s Asia-Pacific strategy – a stable balance of power. Although rising powers tend to be revisionist powers, a politically resurgent Japan, strikingly, is seeking to uphold the present Asian political and maritime order.

Washington thus ought to aid the continued political rise of this status quoist country, which is determined to reinvent itself as a more competitive and secure state.

Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and author, most recently, of Water, Peace and War.

© The Globe and Mail, 2016.