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Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

Creeping China

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By Brahma Chellaney

A Project Syndicate column internationally syndicated

Brahma Chellaney picks apart China’s self-described “cabbage” strategy, designed to secure hegemony in Asia.

DSCF5649China’s growing geopolitical heft is emboldening its territorial creep in Asia. After laying claim formally to more than 80% of the South China Sea, it has just established a so-called air defense identification zone in the East China Sea, raising the odds of armed conflict with Japan and threatening the principle of freedom of navigation of the seas and skies. Meanwhile, the People’s Republic continues to nibble furtively at territory across the long, disputed Himalayan border with India.

Few seem to fathom the logic behind China’s readiness to take on several neighbors simultaneously. China is seeking to alter the status quo gradually as part of a high-stakes effort to extend its control to strategic areas and resources. President Xi Jinping’s promise of national greatness — embodied in the catchphrase “China dream” — is tied as much to achieving regional hegemony as to internal progress.

China’s approach reflects what the Chinese general Zhang Zhaozhong this year called a “cabbage” strategy: assert a territorial claim and gradually surround the area with multiple layers of security, thus denying access to a rival. The strategy relies on a steady progression of steps to outwit opponents and create new facts on the ground.

This approach severely limits rival states’ options by confounding their deterrence plans and making it difficult for them to devise proportionate or effective counter-measures. This is partly because the strategy — while bearing all the hallmarks of modern Chinese brinkmanship, including reliance on stealth, surprise, and a disregard for the risks of military escalation — seeks to ensure that the initiative remains with China.

The pattern has become familiar: construct a dispute, initiate a jurisdictional claim through periodic incursions, and then increase the frequency and duration of such intrusions, thereby establishing a military presence or pressuring a rival to cut a deal on China’s terms. What is ours is ours, the Chinese invariably claim, and what is yours is negotiable. For example, China says “no foundation for dialogue” with Japan exists unless the Japanese accept the existence of a territorial dispute over the uninhabited Senkaku Islands.

Here, as elsewhere, China has painted its rival as the obstructionist party. As Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi put it, “Japan needs to recognize that there is such a dispute. The whole world knows that there is a dispute.” But there is a dispute only because China has succeeded in shaking the status quo in recent years by popularizing the islands’ Chinese name (“Diaoyu”) and staging incursions into their territorial waters and airspace.

After steadily increasing the frequency of those incursions since September 2012, China has recently begun increasing their duration. The establishment of a new air defense identification zone extending over the islands is its latest cabbage-style security “layer” — a unilateral power grab that US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel quickly branded “a destabilizing attempt to alter the status quo in the region.” The zone even covers the sky over the Leodo (Suyan) Reef, a submerged rock that both South Korea and China claim. As China escalates its campaign of attrition against a resolute Japan, it increases the risk of armed conflict, whether by accident or miscalculation.

China’s strategy has had more success — without provoking serious risks — against the weaker Philippines. This is apparent from China’s effective seizure last year of Scarborough Shoal, located well within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone, and the controlling presence of Chinese vessels this year around the Second Thomas Shoal, part of the disputed Spratly Islands. China has not yet tried to evict the eight Filipino marines still living on the Second Thomas Shoal, but Zhang has included this shoal in the country’s “series of achievements” in the South China Sea.

China is not aiming for control of just a few shoals or other tiny outcroppings; it seeks to dominate the South and East China Seas strategically and corner maritime resources, including seabed minerals. The combined land area of the Senkaku and Spratly Islands amounts to barely 11 square kilometers; but the islands are surrounded by rich hydrocarbon reserves. While seeking to enlarge incrementally its military footprint in the more than 80% of the South China Sea that it claims, China’s aim in the East China Sea is to break out of the so-called “first island chain,” a string of archipelagos along the East Asian coast that includes the Senkaku Islands and Taiwan.

By contrast, vast tracts of disputed land are at stake in the resource-rich Himalayan region. Here, too, China’s incursions, after increasing in frequency, are now being staged intermittently for longer periods.

Make no mistake: China’s territorial creep is contributing to Asian insecurity, fueling political tension, and turning the world’s economically most vibrant continent into a potentially global hot spot.

To be sure, China is careful to avoid any dramatic action that could become a casus belli by itself. Indeed, it has repeatedly shown a knack for disaggregating its strategy into multiple parts and then pursuing each element separately in such a manner as to allow the different pieces to fall into place with minimal resistance.

This shrewdness not only keeps opponents off balance; it also undercuts the relevance of US security assurances to allies and the value of building countervailing strategic partnerships in Asia. In fact, by camouflaging offense as defense, China casts the burden of starting a war on an opponent, while it seeks to lay the foundation — brick by brick  — of a hegemonic Middle Kingdom. Chinese leaders’ stated desire to resolve territorial disputes peacefully simply means achieving a position strong enough to get their way without having to fire a shot.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut; Water: Asia’s New Battleground; and Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.

(c) Project Syndicate, 2013.

Irredentist China Ups The Ante

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Brahma Chellaney, Forbes

China’s territorial creep is now on open display: After laying a formal claim to more than 80 percent of the South China Sea, it has established in the East China Sea a so-called air defense identification zone that encompasses Japanese-controlled islands. China has also ratcheted up territorial tensions with the Philippines, Vietnam, and India. For example, it persists with efforts to disturb the status quo along the long, disputed Himalayan border by repeatedly sending military patrols into Indian territory.

China’s behavior in the South and East China Seas reflects its conduct along the land borders it disputes — a strategy to assert its claims by incrementally changing facts on the ground, with little regard for international norms and rules.

Its incremental encroachments into neighbors’ borderlands can be described as a “salami-slice” strategy — or what Maj. Gen. Zhang Zhaozhong of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) last May called a “cabbage” strategy. This involves asserting a claim, launching furtive incursions into the coveted territory, and erecting — one at a time — cabbage-style multiple layers of security around a contested area so as deny access to a rival. The establishment of an expansive air-defense zone in the East China Sea is its latest cabbage-style security layer move.

By moving quietly and gradually to achieve a strategic transformation in its favor, China undercuts both the relevance of U.S. security assurances to allies like Japan and the Philippines and the value of building countervailing strategic partnerships between and among Asian states and the United States.

The pace at which China’s bit-by-bit strategy proceeds depends on the extent to which the opponents marshal political will and capability to resist it. The strategy, for example, has run into stiffer obstacles vis-à-vis a resolute Japan than with a weak Philippines.

Let’s be clear: Changing the territorial status quo has been the unfinished business of the People’s Republic of China since its founding in 1949, when it set out to forcibly absorb the sprawling Xinjiang and Tibetan plateau — actions that increased the landmass of China by 44 percent.

An emboldened China then went on to seize the Switzerland-size Aksai Chin plateau of the original princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in the 1950s, the Paracel Islands in 1974, the Johnson South Reef in 1988, the Mischief Reef in 1995 and, most recently, the Scarborough Shoal (2012) and the Second Thomas Shoal (2013). Propelled by its growing military might, China is still working to redraw political boundaries.

Along land frontiers, rodent-style surreptitious attacks usually precede its salami slicing. The aim is to start eating into enemy land like giant rodents and thereby facilitate the slicing. The use of this strategy is becoming increasingly apparent along the Himalayan border with India, the world’s longest disputed frontier.

Here one form of attacks has involved the Chinese military bringing ethnic Han pastoralists to the valleys along the Himalayan line of control and giving them cover to range across it, in the process driving Indian herdsmen from their traditional pasturelands and opening the path to land grab. This strategy, which can also begin with the Chinese army directly nibbling at an unprotected border area, has been especially employed in the two highly strategic Buddhist regions located on opposite ends of the Himalayan frontier — Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh.

While the Chinese army flexes its muscles in the mountainous borderlands with India, China’s navy and new coast guard assert territorial and maritime claims in the South and East China Seas.

In the East China Sea, China has employed paramilitary agencies, such as the Maritime Safety Administration, the Fisheries Law Enforcement Command, and the State Oceanic Administration, in a campaign of attrition against Japan over the Senkaku Islands — a campaign that has already succeeded in shaking the status quo by making the rest of the world accept that a dispute exists.

This has emboldened Beijing to step up the frequency and duration of its incursions into the uninhabited islands’ territorial waters and to violate the airspace over them. The November 23 establishment of an air-defense zone extending to the Senkakus (which it calls the Diaoyu Islands) is just the latest example of its jurisdictional creep and increasingly muscular approach.

Taking on Japan, its former occupier and historical rival, is part of Beijing’s larger search for new seabed resources and for strategic ascendancy in the western Pacific by breaking out of what it perceives to be “first island chain” — a string of islands and atolls extending along China’s eastern periphery that includes the Senkakus, Taiwan, and the Paracel and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Its longer-term objective is to push U.S. military assets to the “second island chain,” farther out to the Pacific.

In the South China Sea, China aims to gradually legitimize its presence in the more than 80 percent of the sea it now claims formally. Through repeated and growing acts, China is etching a lasting presence in the claimed areas.

Among the ways Beijing has sought to establish new facts on the ground in the South China Sea is to lease hydrocarbon and fishing blocks inside other disputant states’ 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zones (EEZs), as defined by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Such leases are designed to limit the UNCLOS-granted economic rights of the other claimant states while expanding China’s control of the region’s resource wealth, including hydrocarbon reserves.

China has even established “Sansha City” on Woody Island in the Paracels as its administrative base for the South China Sea, setting up a local civilian government and a military garrison there to oversee the entire region. And in its latest effort to present a fait accompli over its occupation of the Paracels, it has started tourist cruises to those disputed islands.

To be sure, Beijing, as a skillful salami slicer, is usually careful to slice very thinly so as to avoid any dramatic action that could become a casus belli by itself. China proceeds in ways not only to undercut its opponents’ deterrence strategy but also to cast the burden of starting a war on them.

Any targeted state is presented with a strategic Hobson’s choice: either put up with China’s territorial creep or face a dangerous and costly war. This is the choice, for example, Manila has faced over China’s 2012 seizure of the Scarborough Shoal, located well within the Philippines’ EEZ, and the controlling presence of Chinese vessels this year near Second Thomas Shoal, part of the Spratly Islands.

China’s strategic aim is not to merely gain control of some shoals (essentially rocks) but to dominate the South China Sea, a critical waterway linking East Asia with the Indian Ocean region and beyond to the Persian Gulf and Europe. In the East China Sea, too, the issue at stake is who will exercise influence over the vast region.

Against this background, China’s tactics and strategy pose an increasing challenge to several of its neighbors, who face a deepening dilemma over how to thwart its expansionism. China’s strategy of constant outward pressure on its borders also threatens to destabilize the economically vibrant but politically volatile Asia.

China’s neighbors must overcome their differences and collaborate strategically.  Separately, they are outclassed by China but, collectively, they have the potential means to rein in China and defend their territorial and economic rights against its expansionism.

(c) Forbes.com, 2013.

Obama’s risky post-2014 Afghan gambit

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BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Japan Times, November 30, 2013

afpakU.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has decided to keep U.S. military bases and conduct counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan after bringing the longest war in America’s history there to an end in 2014. But its decision, centered on keeping a substantial residual military force, risks locking the United States in a low-intensity but never-ending war in that lawless, rugged country.

The Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) reached between Washington and Afghan President Hamid Karzai recently defines a U.S.-led counterterrorism and training mission involving up to 12,000 NATO troops, mostly American, lasting “until the end of 2024 and beyond” unless terminated with two years’ advance notice. This will mean virtually an indefinite U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan with a mandate, as the text says, to “conduct combat operations.”

Obama’s decision in favor of strong military basing in Afghanistan — where there are currently about 45,000 American troops — stands in sharp contrast to his earlier action in pulling out all U.S. forces from Iraq after a decade-long American occupation of that country.

While there has been little U.S. debate about the merits of extended military engagement in Afghanistan, the Loya Jirga, or assembly of Afghan tribal leaders, on November 24 put its imprimatur on the BSA, which grants the U.S. important concessions, including a controversial immunity for American troops from Afghan law and permitting U.S. special operations forces to conduct antiterrorism raids on private Afghan homes. Washington leveraged a pledge of more than $4 billion in annual security aid to secure these provisions.

However, rejecting Washington’s demand that the deal be signed by yearend, Karzai — concerned over leaving behind a legacy as the main facilitator of a long-term U.S. military presence — has threatened to delay that action until his successor is elected in next April’s presidential election. Washington has warned it would begin planning for a complete troop withdrawal if the BSA was not signed by yearend.

In any event, the U.S. needs a separate deal with the Afghan Taliban, or else its military bases would likely come under intense insurgent attacks after 2014. Indeed, the Obama administration is seeking to cut a broader deal with the Taliban to allow it to “honorably end” combat operations next year — an objective that has prompted it to kiss and make up with Pakistan, which shelters the top Taliban leadership.

The U.S. recently restored its $1.6 billion aid flow to Pakistan, which had been blocked because that country never came clean over who helped Osama bin Laden hide for years in a military garrison town near its capital, Islamabad. The aid was suspended also because the Pakistani military establishment harbors the Afghan Taliban’s one-eyed chief, Mullah Mohammed Omar, and other senior Taliban leaders and aids jihadists who carry out cross-border attacks in India and Afghanistan.

Imperial Britain created many unnatural political constructs, including two countries that have searched vainly to shape a national identity — Afghanistan and Pakistan (or “Afpak” in Washingtonese). The Afpak belt, for the foreseeable future, is likely to remain a bastion of transnational terrorists, with the Durand Line legacy making Afghanistan and Pakistan virtual Siamese twins.

The Durand Line — arbitrarily bisecting ethnic Pashtun and Baloch homelands — is the Afghan-Indian border the British demarcated in 1893 and which later became the frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Decades after Pakistan’s creation in 1947, the Durand Line remains a mythical border, with successive Afghan governments refusing to recognize it and the validity of the porous line challenged by daily cross-frontier movement of people and extremists.

America’s post-2014 strategy risks perpetuating the same mistake that has led it to falter in the ongoing 12-year war, which has cost it nearly a trillion dollars — limiting its military operations to Afghanistan in a binational region that has become a single geopolitical unit, with militant sanctuaries, command-and-control structure and support infrastructure for the Afghan insurgency located on the other side of the Durand Line. Terrorism and insurgency have never been defeated anywhere in the world without cutting off transboundary sustenance and support.

waziristanIn recent years, the U.S. has carried out from Afghanistan a series of air and drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal Waziristan region, targeting the nemesis of the Pakistani military — the Pakistani Taliban. But to preserve the option of reaching a Faustian bargain with its main battlefield opponent — the Afghan Taliban — the U.S. has not carried out a single air, drone or ground attack against that militia’s leadership, which is ensconced in Pakistan’s sprawling Baluchistan province, located to the south of Waziristan.

The Afghan Taliban was created in the early 1990s by the Pakistani intelligence as part of Pakistan’s strategy to install a pliable regime in Kabul and acquire “strategic depth” against India. In reality, it is the Afghan Taliban — enjoying a safe haven across the border after its ouster from power by the U.S.-led military intervention — that has secured “strategic depth.”

In seeking to co-opt the Afghan Taliban, the Obama administration seems unconcerned that it is bestowing legitimacy on a terrorist militia that enforces medieval practices in the areas currently under its control and which, according to a recent United Nations report, raised $155 million last year from illicit opium production, besides skimming profit off illegally mined gemstones, including rubies and emeralds.

Even if Washington succeeded in cutting a deal with the motley Afghan Taliban, powerful factions within the militia may not honor it. As the U.N. report has pointed out, an increasingly fragmented insurgency has led to the rise of a new generation of local commanders operating largely independent of the Taliban’s command and control. A better U.S. strategy would be to try and undermine ethnic-Pashtun support for the Taliban by clinching a series of deals with local tribal chieftains and commanders.

Obama, who had earlier promised to bring all troops home, has not explained how a residual American force, even if sizable, would make a difference in Afghanistan when a much larger force is staring at defeat. In fact, last May, he recalled the warning of James Madison — America’s fourth president — that “no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

A long-term U.S. military engagement, besides compelling Washington to work with Afpak elements that have a long record of duplicitous conduct, could boost the militants’ cause. Yet if the U.S. completely washed its hands of Afghanistan, Afpak could sink deeper into a jihadist dungeon. The U.S. faces difficult choices, compounded by the White House’s failure to clarify strategic goals.

With violence soaring, Afpak’s future remains more uncertain than ever. There is considerable risk of an Iraq-style “soft” ethnic partition of Afghanistan.

The worst scenario would be the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul, with the thuggish militia’s control extending across much of Afghanistan. That would not only unleash a fresh reign of Islamist terror but also allow transnational terrorists to re-establish a major operational base, thereby sucking U.S. forces into bloody counterterrorism missions. It would be as if history had come full circle.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author.

(c) The Japan Times, 2013.

Bridge between Europe and Asia — Strategic Challenges in the Indian Ocean

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Brahma Chellaney, Körber Policy Brief No. 1

  • Geopolitical rivalry in the Indian Ocean has increased. Several boundary, sovereignty and jurisdiction disputes threaten freedom of navigation. China has become the most active power in the region and is challenging the existing balance of power.
  • With interstate competition over resources in the Indian Ocean sharpening, the EU should assist in creating a predictable regulatory regime and contribute to monitoring and enforcement of internationally agreed rules.
  • The EU is already playing a limited security and political role in the Indian Ocean region, where it has important economic interests at stake. It should support regional cooperation to reduce the risks of unilateral action by any side and to help build long-term regional crisis stability.

The Indian Ocean, which links Europe with Asia, is becoming the new global center of trade and energy flows. Spanning more than 73 million square kilometers, this critical ocean region is likely to determine the wider geopolitics, maritime order, and balance of power in Asia and beyond. In fact, in no part of the world is the security situation so dynamic and in such flux as in the Indian Ocean. This region, extending from Australia to the Middle East and Southern Africa, promises to become the hub of global geopolitical competition.

indian-oceanThe challenges in this region extend from traditional security threats to nontraditional and emerging challenges. The challenges are linked to its vast size: It is home to a third of the global population, with the littoral states there also accounting for 25 percent of the world’s landmass, 55 percent of its proven oil reserves, and 40 percent of its gas reserves. As symbolized by the 2004 Christmas-eve tsunami and by recurrent cyclones, the region is regularly battered by natural disasters. According to one estimate, 70 percent of the world’s natural disasters occur in this region alone.

The region’s littoral states are linked by a common history of sea faring. Yet, given that it has the world’s largest concentration of fragile or failing states, as exemplified by Somalia, Pakistan and the Maldives, this region represents the symbolic center of the global challenges of the 21st-century world — from terrorism and extremism to piracy and safety of sea lanes of communication. The Indian Ocean indeed covers the entire arc of Islam — from the Horn of Africa and the Saudi Arabian desert to Malaysia and the Indonesian archipelago — and is racked by the world’s highest incidence of transnational terrorism.

The region is on the frontlines of climate change. It thus has states whose future is imperiled by global warming. Such states extend from the island-nations of Mauritius and the Maldives to Bangladesh, whose land area is less than half the size of Germany but with a population more than double. Because it is made up largely of low-lying floodplains and deltas, Bangladesh risks losing 17 percent of its land and 30 percent of its food production by 2050 due to saltwater incursion resulting from the rising ocean level, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If, in the future, states like the Maldives and Mauritius were submerged, what would be the legal status of their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) and the mineral wealth that these zones hold?

In the Indian Ocean region the old world order coexists uneasily with the new order.

The Indian Ocean illustrates other nontraditional security challenges as well — from environmental pollution, as exemplified by the brown cloud of sooty haze hanging over South Asia, and degradation of coastal ecosystems to a mercantilist approach to energy supplies and the juxtapositioning of energy interests with foreign-policy interests. Put simply, this is the region where old and new security challenges converge. In this region, the old order — as epitomized by the Anglo-American military base at Diego Garcia and the French-administered Réunion and other islands — coexists uneasily with the new order.

Because of the Indian Ocean’s importance to global trade and energy flows and the potential vulnerability of the chokepoints around it, sea-lane security has become a pressing concern. Important regional and extra-regional powers have sought to build maritime security by forging strategic partnerships with key littoral states in the Indian Ocean rim. The partnerships, principally aimed at safeguarding the various “gates” to the Indian Ocean, incorporate trade accords, naval training and joint exercises, counter-piracy operations, energy cooperation, and strategic dialogue.

The chokepoints, and the states adjacent to them, include the Strait of Malacca (Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia), the Strait of Hormuz (Iran and Oman), the Horn of Africa (Djibouti, Eritrea and Yemen), as well as the Cape of Good Hope and the Mozambique Channel (South Africa, Mozambique and Madagascar).

There are, however, a range of other strategic concerns in the Indian Ocean. Some players, including Iran and the United States, are not yet party to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). China, although a party, has sought to unilaterally interpret UNCLOS’s provisions in its favor to assert maritime claims, while refusing to accept the Convention’s dispute-settlement mechanism. The Philippines, with apparent U.S. support, has filed a complaint against China with the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), but China has simply declined to participate in the proceedings. Iran seized an Indian oil tanker in the autumn of 2013, holding it for nearly a month, but India could not file a case against Teheran with the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.

Boundary, sovereignty, and jurisdiction issues carry serious conflict potential.

There are outstanding boundary, sovereignty, and jurisdiction issues, some of which carry serious conflict potential. Bangladesh and Myanmar have set an example by peacefully resolving a dispute over the delimitation of their maritime boundaries in the Bay of Bengal. They took their dispute to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea for adjudication. The Tribunal’s verdict, delivered in 2012, ended a potentially dangerous dispute that was fuelled in 2008 when, following the discovery of gas deposits in the Bay of Bengal, Myanmar authorized exploration in a contested area, prompting Bangladesh to dispatch warships to the area.

The threats to navigation and maritime freedoms in the Indian Ocean, including in critical straits and exclusive economic zones (EEZs), can be countered only through adherence to international rules by all parties as well as through monitoring, regulation, and enforcement. Significantly, several states in the region have sought to deny other powers freedom of navigation in their EEZs when they are engaged in military activity, such as surveillance by ship.

Deep seabed mining has emerged as a major new strategic issue.

Deep seabed mining has emerged as a major new strategic issue, given the region’s mineral wealth. Interstate competition over seabed minerals is sharpening. From seeking to tap sulfide deposits — containing valuable metals such as silver, gold, copper, manganese, cobalt, and zinc — to phosphorus nodule mining for phosphor-based fertilizers used in food production, the competition is underscoring the imperative for creating a predictable regulatory regime, developing safe and effective ocean-development technologies, finding ways to share benefits of the common heritage, and ensuring environmental protection. Even China, an extra-regional power, has secured an international deep-seabed block in southwestern Indian Ocean from the International Seabed Authority to explore for polymetallic sulphides.

Great-power rivalries, meanwhile, are complicating maritime-security issues. The rivalries are mirrored in foreign-aided port-building projects along vital sea lanes; attempts to assert control over energy supplies and transport routes as part of a 21st-century-version of the Great Game; the building of inter-country energy corridors involving the construction of pipelines to transport oil or gas sourced by sea from third countries, as China is doing in Myanmar and Pakistan; and strategic plans to assemble a “string of pearls” in the form of listening posts and special naval-access arrangements along the great trade arteries.

China has become the most active power in the Indian Ocean and is challenging the existing balance of power.

Of all the powers, China has become the most active in the Indian Ocean, as underscored by the new port it has built in Pakistan at Gwadar (which sits strategically at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz) and in Sri Lanka at Hambantota; a Chinese container facility in Chittagong (Bangladesh); and Chinese port projects in Myanmar, including developing a deep-sea port at Kyaukpyu as its international gateway. Such developments have sharpened China’s geopolitical rivalry with India, which enjoys an immense geographic advantage in the Indian Ocean.

With this region having the most-adverse ratio between land size, population, and natural resources, environmental degradation has emerged as an important challenge. The degradation is extending to coastal ecosystems, which sustain diverse species of marine life and are the source of livelihood for many people. The increasing role of external states in overexploiting the region’s marine resources has underscored the need for conservation and management of the biological diversity of the seabed in areas that are beyond national jurisdiction. There is also need for enforcing coastal-protection regulations and for surveillance and policing to stop illegal fishing and to protect structures for deep-sea mining.

Against this background, it is apparent that maritime-security challenges in the Indian Ocean need to be addressed in a holistic strategic framework. Nontraditional issues — from energy security and climate security to transnational terrorism and environmental degradation — have become as important as traditional issues, such as freedom of navigation, security of sea lanes, maritime boundary and domain security, arms proliferation, and challenges to law and order (including piracy and sea robbery, criminal activities like drug, people, and arms smuggling, illicit fishing, illegal immigration, and maritime terrorism).

The Indian Ocean is the maritime center of the world and of critical importance to the European Union’s economic and energy interests. The flow of trade through the maritime Silk Road of the Indian Ocean follows the same route and pattern from which the littoral states drew wealth and strength in history.

Europe could serve as a guide on how to build institutionalized cooperation in this region, where, with maritime boundaries still to be finalized, jurisdictional “creep” threatens to impede freedom of navigation. Seabed mining, for its part, is presenting both new challenges and opportunities on the high seas.

Europe has a role to play on environmental protection and resource sustainability. Environmental degradation in the Indian Ocean, after all, can influence climatic patterns and atmospheric general circulation in the entire Northern Hemisphere. Good governance, built through interstate cooperation and collaboration, can help stem the threats to maritime security and ecosystems.

France and Britain, through their military presence in the Indian Ocean, are promoting their own geopolitical interests in the region. European states, however, can collectively play a role to support peace and stability and environmental sustainability in the Indian Ocean. After all, the Indian Ocean, which accounts for 50 percent of the world’s container traffic and 66 percent of its seaborne trade in oil, is of critical importance to European trade.

The EU should help promote rules-based cooperation in the Indian Ocean region.

The European Union, by citing its own efforts to resolve maritime-boundary questions and other issues in Europe, can lend a helping hand to create a regulatory regime and to promote environmental protection in the Indian Ocean region. In this endeavor, the EU must collaborate with the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA), which consists of 20 diverse member-nations ranging from India, Indonesia, and Australia to small island-countries such as the Comoros and Seychelles.

Given its own institutionalized framework of cooperation, the EU, more than any other institution in the world, can help promote rules-based cooperation in the Indian Ocean region. The threats to navigation and maritime freedoms, including in critical straits and EEZs in the Indian Ocean region, can be countered only through adherence to international rules by all parties, as well as through monitoring, regulation and enforcement. In this context, NATO is already playing a limited security and political role in the region, with its contribution to combating piracy in the Horn of Africa.

The EU can also encourage collaborative projects between regional states so that they adopt new technologies and best practices to protect environmental security and build maritime cooperation. Collaborative projects will yield significant peace dividends by helping to reduce the risks of unilateral action by any side and by contributing to building regional crisis stability. European wealth is dependent on peace and stability in the Indian Ocean. This region serves as a test case of Europe’s ability to translate its economic heft into political influence to help shape regional developments in a positive direction.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author, most recently, of “Water, Peace, and War” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).

© Körber Foundation, Hamburg 2013. All rights reserved

Körber Policy Briefs solely reflect the author’s views.

www.koerber-stiftung.de

Obama’s security deal dooms U.S. to endless war

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By Brahma Chellaney, The Washington Times, November 27, 2013

President Obama has decided to maintain U.S. military bases and conduct counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan after bringing the longest war in America’s history there to an end next year. His decision, though, centered on keeping a substantial residual military force, risks locking the United States in a never-ending, low-intensity war in that lawless, rugged country post-2014, including continued cross-border drone strikes on targets in Pakistan.

The Bilateral Security Agreement reached between Washington and Afghan President Hamid Karzai last week defines a U.S.-led counterterrorism and training mission involving up to 12,000 NATO troops, mostly American, and lasting “until the end of 2024 and beyond” unless terminated with two years’ advance notice. This will make the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan virtually indefinite.

Mr. Obama’s decision in favor of strong military basing in Afghanistan — where there are currently about 45,000 American troops — stands in sharp contrast to his earlier action in pulling out all U.S. forces from Iraq after a decade-long American occupation of that country.

Afghanistan’s Loya Jirga, or assembly of tribal leaders, put its imprimatur last Sunday on the agreement, which grants the United States important concessions, including a controversial immunity for American troops from Afghan law and permission for U.S. special operations forces to conduct antiterrorism raids on private Afghan homes. Washington leveraged the more than $4 billion annual security aid it has promised to secure these provisions.

However, rejecting Washington’s demand that the deal be signed by year’s end, Mr. Karzai — concerned over leaving behind a legacy as the key facilitator of a long-term U.S. military presence — has threatened to delay that action until his successor is elected in next April’s presidential election.

In any event, the United States needs a separate deal with the Afghan Taliban, or else its military bases would likely come under intense insurgent attacks post-2014. Indeed, the Obama administration is seeking to cut a broader deal with the Taliban to allow it to “honorably” end combat operations next year — an objective that has prompted it to kiss and make up with Pakistan, which shelters the top Taliban leadership.

The United States recently restored its $1.6 billion aid flow to Pakistan, which had been blocked because that country never came clean over who helped Osama bin Laden hide for years in a military garrison town near its capital, Islamabad. The aid was suspended also owing to the fact that the Pakistani military establishment harbors the leaders of the Afghan Taliban, who kill American troops, and aids jihadists who carry out cross-border attacks in India and Afghanistan.

Imperial Britain created many unnatural political constructs, including two countries that have searched vainly to shape a national identity — Afghanistan and Pakistan (or “Afpak” in Washington-speak). The Afpak belt, for the foreseeable future, is likely to remain a bastion of transnational terrorists, with the Durand Line legacy making Afghanistan and Pakistan virtual Siamese twins.

The Durand Line — arbitrarily bisecting ethnic Pashtun and Baloch homelands — is the Afghan-Indian border the British demarcated in 1893 and which later became the frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Decades after Pakistan’s creation in 1947, the Durand Line remains a mythical border, with successive Afghan governments refusing to recognize it and the validity of the porous line challenged by daily cross-frontier movement of people and extremists.

America’s post-2014 strategy risks perpetuating the same mistake that has led it to falter in the ongoing 12-year war, which has cost nearly $1 trillion and killed tens of thousands of people — limiting its military operations to Afghanistan in a binational region that has become a single geopolitical unit, with militant sanctuaries, command-and-control structure and support infrastructure located on the other side of the Durand Line. Terrorism and insurgency have never been defeated anywhere in the world without cutting off transboundary sustenance and support.

In recent years, the United States has carried out from Afghanistan a series of air and drone strikes on Pakistan’s tribal Waziristan region, targeting the nemesis of the Pakistani military, the Pakistani Taliban. To preserve the option of reaching a Faustian bargain with its main battlefield opponent — the Afghan Taliban — America has not carried out a single air, drone or ground attack against that militia’s leadership, which is ensconced in Pakistan’s sprawling Baluchistan province, located to the south of Waziristan.

In seeking to co-opt the Afghan Taliban, the Obama administration seems unconcerned that it is bestowing legitimacy on a terrorist militia that enforces medieval practices in the areas currently under its control. Even if the administration succeeded in cutting a deal with the motley Afghan Taliban, powerful factions within it may not honor it. A better strategy would be to undermine ethnic-Pashtun support for the Taliban by clinching a series of deals with local tribal chieftains.

Mr. Obama, who had earlier promised to bring all troops home, has not explained how a residual American force, even if sizable, would make a difference in Afghanistan when a much larger force is staring at defeat.

A long-term U.S. military presence, besides compelling Washington to work with Afpak elements that have a long record of duplicitous conduct, could boost the militants’ cause. Yet if the United States completely washed its hands of Afghanistan, Afpak could sink deeper into a jihadist dungeon. The White House faces difficult choices, compounded by the administration’s failure to clarify long-term goals.

Afpak’s future remains more uncertain than ever, with considerable risk of an Iraq-style “soft” ethnic partition of Afghanistan.

The worst scenario would be the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul, with the militia’s control extending across much of Afghanistan. That would not only unleash a fresh reign of Islamist terror, but also allow transnational terrorists to re-establish a major operational base, thereby sucking U.S. forces into bloody counterterrorism missions. It would be as if history had come full circle.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author.

(c) The Washington Times, 2013.

@washtimes on Twitter

Border-talks charade

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Why India risks repeating its Himalayan territorial blunder vis-à-vis China

Brahma Chellaney, Mail Today, November 29, 2013

An Indian soldier stands guard at the ancient Nathu La border crossing between India and Chinese-ruled Tibet.

India has held regular border-settlement negotiations with China since 1981 in what is the longest such continuous process between any two nations in post-World War II history.  The negotiations, which began as “senior-level talks”, were rechristened first in 1988 as “joint working group” talks and then in 2003 as talks between “special representatives”. Yet, after 32 years of border-related talks, India has failed to persuade China to agree to the bare minimum — a mutually defined line of control — even as the two sides continue to farcically call their disputed frontline the “Line of Actual Control”, or LAC.

In fact, China has strengthened its leverage against India by upping the ante, both by hardening its stance in the negotiations and by stepping up military pressure, including nibbling at Indian territory through stealthy incursions. The pattern to disturb the status quo little by little and mount increased pressure is in keeping with China’s preferred approach to territorial disputes: What is ours is ours and what is yours is negotiable.

Having annexed the Switzerland-size Aksai Chin plateau in the western Himalayas, China has focused its attention on the Austria-size Arunachal Pradesh in the east, aggressively laying its claim since 2006 to that rugged Indian state, which borders Bhutan and Myanmar and is almost three times larger than Taiwan. In a clever ploy to turn Arunachal into an internationally recognized dispute, China has started calling it “South Tibet”, a term that was unknown before it invented it in 2006. Yet a timid India has retreated to an increasingly defensive position in the border talks.

The spotlight now is on China’s Tibet-linked claim to Arunachal rather than on Tibet’s status itself. China’s revival of its claim to Arunachal, in fact, drew encouragement from the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s 2003 recognition of Tibet as part of the People’s Republic. Beijing’s success in securing that recognition has helped narrow the dispute to what it claims. As a result, a politically adrift India has been left to fend off China’s increasingly assertive territorial demands.

What does India gain by persisting with the border-talks charade? By staying put in a barren and counterproductive process, India only aids China’s containment-behind-engagement strategy. As long as India remains directionless, China will continue to press its claims by whatever means — fair or foul — it deems advantageous. And as India gets sucked into a 1950s-style trap, history is in danger of repeating itself.

The issue then was Aksai Chin; the issue now is Arunachal. As a result, whenever an Indian president or prime minister visits Arunachal — which is once in several years — Beijing rakes up its territorial demand by publicly condemning the trip. China feels emboldened to up the ante because of Indian pusillanimity. For example, when President Pranab Mukherjee visited Arunachal in November 2013 — the first visit by an Indian president to the state in more than five years — he avoided going to Arunachal’s Tibetan Buddhism pilgrimage valley of Tawang, just like Prime Minister Manmohan Singh did during his visits to that state in 2008 and 2009. Singh’s predecessor, the self-styled nationalist Atal Bihari Vajpayee, didn’t even set foot in Arunachal.

The Dalai Lama has repudiated the Chinese claim that Arunachal, or even just the Tawang Valley, was historically part of Tibet. China, however, insists on securing at least the Tawang Valley — the gateway to the Dalai Lama’s 1959 escape from his homeland — so as to complete its assimilation of traditional Tibetan-inhabited lands and obliterate the remaining evidence of Tibet’s historical status as an independent entity. The strategic Tawang Valley is a critical corridor between Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, and the Assam plains because it can militarily open the way for China to throttle India’s hold on its entire northeastern region.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author.

(c) Mail Today, 2013.

Asia’s new strategic allies

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For a politically rising Japan that is beginning to shed its pacifist blinkers, India is central to both its economic-revival and security-building strategies.

Brahma Chellaney, The Hindu newsaper, November 27, 2013

Asia’s balance of power will be determined principally by events in East Asia and the Indian Ocean. In this light, the emerging Indo-Japanese entente is likely to help shape Asia’s strategic future as much as China’s ascent or America’s Asian “pivot.” Japan and India, as Asia’s natural-born allies, have a pivotal role to play in preserving stability and helping to safeguard vital sea-lanes in the wider Indo-Pacific region — a region defined not only by the confluence of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, but also by its significance as the global trade and energy-supply hub.

LANDMARK EVENT

The India visit of Japan’s Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko from November 30 promises to be a landmark event in the already fast-developing partnership between Asia’s two leading democracies, which are strategically located on opposite flanks of the continent. In the more than 2,600-year history of the Japanese monarchy — the world’s oldest continuous hereditary royalty — no emperor has been to India, although India has traditionally been referred to in Japan as Tenjiku, or the heavenly country.

Customarily, the Japanese Emperor’s visit to any country is highly significant because it symbolises a watershed in relations with that nation. It was in recognition of the momentous nature of the royal trip that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appointed Ashwini Kumar as his special envoy with Cabinet rank in August to “prepare for the upcoming visit” of the imperial couple, and for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit early next year. Indeed, the India tour could be the last overseas visit of Emperor Akihito, who has undergone coronary and prostate-cancer surgeries in the past decade and will turn 80 a couple of weeks after he returns home from Chennai.

India has been specially chosen for an imperial visit to signal Japan’s commitment to forge closer ties. Japan is already doing more for India than any other economic partner of this country: it is the largest source of aid, and is playing a key role in helping India to improve its poor infrastructure, as illustrated by the Japanese-financed Western Freight Corridor, the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor, and the Bangalore Metro Rail Project. Tokyo is also keen to add concrete strategic content to the bilateral ties.

The relationship, remarkably free of any strategic dissonance or bilateral dispute, traces its roots to the introduction of Buddhism in Japan in the 6th century CE. The Todaiji Temple in the ancient capital city of Nara is home to Japan’s most famous and biggest statue — a great gilt bronze image of Lord Buddha. The statue’s allegorical eyes-opening ceremony in 752 CE was conducted by a priest from India in the presence of Emperor Shômu, who declared himself a servant of the “Three Treasures” — the Buddha, the Buddhist law, and the monastic order. Japan’s cultural heritage from India via China extends to Sanskrit influence on the Japanese language.

Japanese still bless a newly married couple by reciting an ancient proverb that they are the best bride and bridegroom across the three kingdoms of Kara (China), Tenjiku (India) and Hinomoto (Japan). Akihito is not unfamiliar with India: A year and a half after marrying Michiko — the daughter of a wealthy businessman — he came to India in 1960 as the crown prince, along with his wife. During that visit, he laid the cornerstone of New Delhi’s India International Centre and planted a sapling at the Japanese Embassy that has grown into a huge tree.

Today, the contrast between the disciplined Japanese society and tumultuous India could not be more striking. India has the world’s largest youthful population, while Japan is ageing more rapidly than any other developed country. And whereas India has always valued strategic autonomy, Japan remains a model U.S. ally that hosts not only a large U.S. troop presence but also pays generously for the upkeep of the American forces on its soil.

Yet, the dissimilarities between the two countries increase the potential for close collaboration. Japan’s heavy-manufacturing base and India’s services-led growth — as well as their contrasting age structures — make their economies complementary, opening the path to generating strong synergies. India’s human capital and Japan’s financial and technological power can be a good match to help drive India’s infrastructure development and great-power aspirations, and catalyse Japan’s revival as a world power.

‘NATURAL AND INDISPENSABLE’

For India, Japan is a critical source of capital and commercial technology. Indeed, there cannot be a better partner for India’s development than the country that was the first non-western society to modernise and emerge as a world power, spearheading Asia’s industrial and technological advances since the 19th century. Dr. Singh has underscored the importance of also building security collaboration with it, saying Indians “see Japan as a natural and indispensable partner in our quest for stability and peace in the vast” Indo-Pacific region.

For a politically rising Japan that is beginning to shed its pacifist blinkers, India is central to both its economic-revival and security-building strategies. After prolonged economic stagnation, Japan faces difficult challenges, including a shrinking population, a spiralling public debt, a fundamentally deflationary environment, and a security dilemma compounded by constraints arising from the U.S.-imposed, post-war Constitution. However, Mr. Abe’s dynamic leadership and control of both houses of parliament is aiding his moves to place Japan on the right track.

Japan and India, as energy-poor countries heavily reliant on oil imports from the unstable Persian Gulf region, are seriously concerned over mercantilist efforts to assert control over energy supplies and the transport routes for them. So the maintenance of a peaceful and lawful maritime domain, including unimpeded freedom of navigation, is critical to their security and economic well-being. That is why they have moved from emphasising shared values to seeking to protect shared interests, including by holding joint naval exercises.

These facts explain why India and Japan boast the fastest-growing bilateral relationship in Asia today. Since they unveiled a “strategic and global partnership” in 2006, their political and economic engagement has deepened at a remarkable pace. Their free-trade pact, formally known as the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), came into force in 2011. They have even established an alliance to jointly develop rare-earth minerals so as to reduce their dependence on China.

The level and frequency of India-Japan official engagement have become extraordinary. In addition to holding an annual Prime Minister-level summit, the two also conduct several yearly ministerial dialogues: A strategic dialogue between their Foreign Ministers; a security dialogue between their Defence Ministers; a policy dialogue between India’s Commerce Minister and Japan’s Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry; and separate ministerial-level energy and economic dialogues. And, to top it off, they also hold a trilateral strategic dialogue with the United States.

According to Dr. Singh, “India and Japan have a shared vision of a rising Asia.” Translating that vision into practice demands strengthening their still-fledgling strategic cooperation and working together to ensure a pluralistic, stable Asian order.

Japan, in keeping with its pacifist Constitution, does not possess offensive systems, such as nuclear submarines, large aircraft carriers, and long-range missiles. But with the world’s sixth largest defence budget, it has a formidable defensive capability, an impressive armament-production base, and Asia’s largest naval fleet, including top-of-the-line conventional subs, large helicopter-carrying destroyers, and Aegis-equipped cruisers capable of shooting down ballistic missiles.

India — the world’s largest arms importer that desperately needs to develop an indigenous arms-production capability — must forge closer defence ties with Japan, including co-developing weapon systems and working together on missile defence. The most stable economic partnerships in the world, such as the Atlantic community and the Japan-U.S. partnership, have been built on the bedrock of security collaboration. Economic ties that lack the underpinning of strategic partnerships tend to be less stable and even volatile, as is apparent from China’s economic relationships with India, Japan and the U.S. Through close strategic collaboration, Japan and India must lead the effort to build freedom, prosperity and stability in the Indo-Pacific region.

Against this background, the Emperor’s visit promises to live up to Mr. Abe’s hope of being a “historic event.” It is likely to herald an enduring Indo-Japanese strategic partnership.

(Brahma Chellaney, a geostrategist, is the author, most recently, of Water, Peace, and War)

(c) The Hindu, 2013.

The Emperor’s New Goal

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BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Photo of Brahma ChellaneyBrahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut; Water: Asia’s New Battleground; and Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.

A Project Syndicate column internationally syndicated

Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko, in a rare overseas trip, are scheduled to begin a tour of the Indian cities of New Delhi and Chennai on November 30. The imperial couple’s weeklong visit is likely to mark a defining moment in Indo-Japanese relations, fostering closer economic and security ties between Asia’s two leading democracies as they seek a pluralistic, stable Asian order.

Traditionally, a visit from the Japanese emperor – except for a coronation or royal anniversary celebration – signified a turning point in a bilateral relationship. While the emperor is merely the “symbol of the state” under Japan’s US-imposed postwar constitution, he retains significant influence, owing to Japanese veneration of the imperial dynasty – the world’s oldest continuous hereditary monarchy, the origins of which can be traced to 660 BC. Indeed, the emperor’s overseas visits remain deeply political, setting the tone – if not the agenda – for Japan’s foreign policy.

Consider Akihito’s 1992 visit to China – the first such visit by any Japanese emperor. Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s government – grateful for Japan’s reluctance to maintain punitive sanctions over the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and eager for international recognition, not to mention Japanese capital and commercial technologies – had extended seven invitations over two years.

Akihito’s trip, which came at the height of Japan’s pro-China foreign policy, was followed by increased Japanese aid, investment, and technology transfer, thereby cementing Japan’s role in China’s economic rise. The improved diplomatic relationship lasted until the recent flare-up of territorial and other bilateral disputes.

Although no Japanese emperor has visited India before, the bilateral relationship runs deep. In traditional Japanese culture, India is Tenjiku (the country of heaven). Today, Japan is India’s largest source of aid and has secured a key role in supporting infrastructure development, financing projects like the Western Dedicated Freight Corridor, the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor, and the Bangalore Metro Rail Project.

With these natural allies seeking to add strategic bulk to their rapidly multiplying ties, Akihito’s tour is the most significant visit to India by any foreign leader in recent years. Indeed, it is expected to be one of the last foreign trips for the 79-year-old emperor, who has undergone several major surgeries in the past decade.

Akihito’s travel schedule contrasts sharply with that of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Despite having had open-heart surgery during his first term, India’s 81-year-old leader has sought to offset his low domestic political stock by flying more than one million kilometers on overseas trips – including visits to Japan, China, Indonesia, Russia, Thailand, and the United States in the last six months alone.

The paradox of Akihito’s tour – for which Singh has appointed a special envoy with ministerial rank to oversee preparations – is that Japan is investing substantial political capital to build a strong, long-term partnership with India’s government at a time when India is gripped by policy paralysis. Japan’s leaders are perhaps counting on the continuity of India’s strategic policies, which would require the Indian government that emerges from next year’s general election to sustain the momentum of cooperation.

But, more important, Japan is adjusting to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing regional environment, characterized by rising geopolitical competition with China. In a historical reversal, Japan has found itself on the defensive against the increasingly muscular foreign policy of its former colony and old rival.

This situation is forcing the Japanese government to reconsider its postwar pacifism, revise its defense strategy, and increase its military spending. In this context, Japan knows that a deeper strategic collaboration with India – which is also seeking to blunt increasing military pressure from China – is its best move.

In modern history, Japan has had the distinction of consistently staying ahead of the rest of Asia. During the Meiji era, in the second half of the nineteenth century, it became the first Asian country to modernize. It was also the first Asian country to emerge as a world power, defeating Manchu-ruled China and Czarist Russia in separate wars. And after its defeat in World War II, Japan rose from the ashes to become Asia’s first global economic powerhouse.

With per capita GDP of more than $37,000, Japan still ranks among the world’s richest countries, specializing in the highest-value links of global supply chains. And income inequality in Japan ranks among the lowest in Asia.

Nonetheless, almost two decades of economic stagnation have eroded Japan’s regional clout. This raises the question of whether Japan’s current problems –sluggish growth, high public debt, and rapid population aging – presage a similar trend across East Asia. Similar problems are already appearing in South Korea, while China has been driven to loosen its one-child policy and unveil plans for economic reforms aimed at reviving growth.

For India, Japan is indispensable as both an economic and a security partner. It is central to India’s “Look East” policy, which has evolved into more of an “Act East” policy, whereby the original strategy’s economic logic has been amplified by the larger geopolitical objective of ensuring Asian stability and a regional balance of power. It is in this light that Akihito’s historic visit should be viewed.

Hug first, repent at leisure

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Singh returned from Beijing with a sham river-waters accord and a China-dictated border pact that crimps Indian military response to any incursion by the PLA

Brahma Chellaney, India Today, November 25, 2013, Upfront Column, Page 12

Diplomacy, to be effective, must be backed by leverage and cross-linkages to minimize the weaker side’s disadvantages and help maintain a degree of equilibrium in a bilateral relationship. The Indian leadership, however, has ignored that imperative, embracing diplomatic showmanship. Its engagement with China is bereft of even the first principle of diplomacy—reciprocity—thus allowing Beijing to reap a soaring trade surplus even as it undermines Indian interests. Showcasing the “success” of a bilateral summit takes precedence over safeguarding national interest—a “hug first, repent at leisure” approach.

Clipboard01Nothing can illustrate this better than the recent Beijing visit of Manmohan Singh, India’s most-travelled prime minister ever. He returned with a completely hollow river-waters accord that effectively hands China a propaganda tool to blunt any Indian criticism of its dam-building spree in Tibet. Rarely before have two major countries signed an accord so steeped in empty rhetoric as this memorandum of understanding unveiled during Singh’s visit. The accord, incorporating not a single Chinese commitment or anything tangible, seeks to pull the wool over the Indian public’s eyes.

It is just a public-relations text with only platitudes—that the “two sides recognized that trans-border rivers and related natural resources and the environment are assets of immense value”; that they “agreed that cooperation on trans-border rivers will further enhance mutual strategic trust and communication”; and that they also “agreed to further strengthen cooperation on trans-border rivers” and “exchange views on other issues of mutual interest”. As if to add insult to injury, the accord extracts India’s “appreciation to China” for selling “flood-season hydrological data”, although India provides such data free to downstream Pakistan and Bangladesh year-round.

Another much-trumpeted accord signed during the visit—the Chinese-dictated Border Defence Cooperation Agreement (BDCA)—contains nothing to halt the increasingly frequent Chinese border incursions or prevent a Depsang-style deep encroachment again. Defence Minister A.K. Anthony has admitted this, saying the accord “does not mean nothing will happen” on the frontier. Beijing wanted a new accord to wipe the slate clean over its breaches of the border-peace agreements signed in 1993, 1996 and 2005. But why did India accede to the violator’s demand for new border rules?

BDCA’s provisions are so vaguely worded as to allow China—a master at reinterpreting texts—to cast the burden of compliance mainly on India. For example, Article II, without elaboration, calls for exchange of “information about military exercises, aircrafts, demolition operations and unmarked mines”. Does this mean that India must inform China about its military-cargo flights to forward landing strips such as Daulat Beg Oldi and its demolition work to build Himalayan road tunnels?

Or take Article VI, which says minimally: “The two sides agree that they shall not follow or tail patrols of the other side in areas where there is no common understanding of the line of actual control (LAC)”. The Home Ministry-administered Assam Rifles and Indo-Tibetan Border Police (not regular army troops) that India timorously deploys to fend off the aggressive People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have a defensive mindset and are in no position to tail the Chinese. But if PLA troops intrude and pitch tents, claiming they are on Chinese land, Beijing is likely to interpret this provision as barring Indian patrols from encircling them or setting up their own Depsang-style camp to keep an eye on the raiders. The provision indeed will constrain Indian border guards from attempting to drive back any intruding Chinese patrol.

Given China’s claims on Indian territories and its refusal to even clarify the LAC, Article VI, in effect, ties only India’s hands. No less suspect is Article VII, which gives either side the right to seek “clarification” from the other if “any activity” occurs in “areas where there is no common understanding” of the LAC. If India were to seek clarification over a Chinese penetration, it would likely get the stock reply that the “Chinese troops are on Chinese soil”. Contrary to the pre-visit claim, BDCA contains no commitment to set up a hotline between the Indian and Chinese military headquarters; it only says the two sides “may consider” doing that.

Any Chinese leader combines an India stopover with a visit to his country’s “all-weather ally”, Pakistan, but a meek Singh declined to club his China visit with a trip to Japan or Vietnam. Singh, in fact, was in Beijing at the same time as the Russian and Mongolian premiers, with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev beginning his Beijing trip while Singh was cooling his heels in Moscow on an official visit.

Yet, with the help of the planeload of journalists he takes with him on any overseas visit, Singh marketed his China trip as a major success. In truth, as the two accords attest, he wilfully played into China’s hands.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author.

(c) India Today, 2013.

Supping with the devil

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Brahma Chellaney, The Japan Times, November 19, 2013

The cover of the 2010 book by Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef

The image of then Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh — after having just chaperoned three jailed terrorists to freedom — walking hand-in-hand with the Afghan Taliban regime’s foreign minister, Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawakil, on the runway at Kandahar Airport in late 1999 still haunts. Mutawakil was later imprisoned by the U.S. military at the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan.

Now Indian Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram has greeted Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef in Goa, best known for its beaches. Zaeef, the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan until the U.S.-led military intervention in Afghanistan, spent four years in America’s notorious detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

Spanish-born U.S. philosopher George Santayana’s warning is particularly true for India: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

In 1999, no sooner had a hijacked Indian Airlines flight landed in Kandahar than a hallucinating Jaswant Singh began briefing newspaper editors about the great opportunity it presented to drive a wedge between the Afghan Taliban and its sponsor, Pakistan. In truth, he was preparing ground for what became an ignominious cave-in unparalleled in modern world history — a foreign minister flying to known terrorist territory in a special aircraft to hand-deliver three terrorists so as to secure the release of a planeload of hostages.

Now fast-forward 14 years: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his advisers are feeding the Indian public their hallucination that engagement with the Taliban can help drive a wedge between that thuggish militia and Pakistan and thereby aid India’s interests in Afghanistan.

Zaeef’s Goa visit, in reality, was part of a broader U.S.-initiated effort to make an American deal with the Afghan Taliban internationally acceptable. Washington is seeking a deal with the Taliban as a face-saving way to end its war in Afghanistan next year as planned and also to safeguard the military bases it intends to keep in that rugged, landlocked country after 2014.

To bolster that effort, the United States has kissed and made up with Pakistan, resuming generous aid to that country and working closely with the Army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chiefs there.

The restored $1.6 billion aid had been blocked because Pakistan never came clean about who helped Osama bin Laden hide for years in a military garrison town near its capital, Islamabad.

U.S.-Pakistan relations also came under strain because the Pakistani military establishment both shelters the top leadership of the Afghan Taliban, who kill American soldiers, and aids jihadists who carry out cross-border attacks in India and Afghanistan.

Yet with his 2014 deadline to end combat operations in Afghanistan approaching, President Barack Obama has reached out to Pakistan. After talks with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif at the White House last month, Obama “commended the resolve” of Pakistan “to defeat terrorists.” He also praised Pakistan — “an essential partner” — for its helpful role in the Afghan peace process.

In recent years, the U.S. has carried out from Afghanistan a series of air and drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal Waziristan region against the Pakistani Taliban, the nemesis of the Pakistani military. U.S. drone strikes have killed two successive chiefs of the Pakistani Taliban — Baitullah Mehsud in 2009, and Hakimullah Mehsud at the beginning of this month.

But, tellingly, the U.S. has not carried out a single air, drone or ground attack against the Afghan Taliban leadership, ensconced in Pakistan’s sprawling Baluchistan province, located to the south of Waziristan.

To justify the planned Faustian bargain with the Afghan Taliban — despite the major regional implications it holds — the Obama team is drawing a specious distinction between al-Qaida and the Taliban and differentiating between “moderate” Taliban amenable to a deal (the good terrorists) and those that rebuff deal-making (the bad terrorists). Zaeef is a “good” terrorist and has been rewarded (like the Taliban’s rehabilitated ex-foreign minister Mutawakil) with a plush house in Kabul.

The U.S., moreover, has facilitated both the Afghan Taliban’s opening of a de facto diplomatic mission in Doha, Qatar, and the overseas visits of some “good terrorists” to places ranging from Berlin to Tokyo. It has now roped in India to lend legitimacy to its effort.

In seeking to co-opt its main battlefield opponent — the Afghan Taliban — the U.S. seems unconcerned that it is bestowing legitimacy on a terrorist militia that enforces medieval practices in the areas under its control. This is in keeping with a long-standing U.S. policy weakness: The pursuit of narrow geopolitical objectives without much regard for the long-term consequences or the interests of friends in the region.

The Afghan Taliban, al-Qaida and groups like the ISI-sponsored Lashkar-e-Taiba are a difficult to separate mix of soul-mates who together constitute the global jihad syndicate and who still enjoy state sanctuaries or support. The scourge of transnational terrorism cannot be stemmed if deceptive distinctions are drawn between such groups. If any state were to cut a deal with a constituent of the global terror syndicate, it would likely encourage more international terrorism.

In this light, India’s hosting of a Taliban leader is not statecraft. It is not even stagecraft. In reflecting a desire to cozy up to the Taliban, it reeks of diplomatic witchcraft.

By playing host to Zaeef, India has only exposed the lack of consistency and direction in its foreign policy. No sooner had Prime Minister Singh decided to boycott the Commonwealth summit in Sri Lanka owing to human rights concerns there than his corruption-tainted government welcomed the Taliban mafiaso.

Lost in the U.S. and Indian diplomatic maneuvers is the age-old wisdom: He who sups with the devil should have a long spoon.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author.