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About Chellaney

Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

Arming the Elephant

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BRAHMA CHELLANEY

A column internationally syndicated by Project Syndicate

The rise in US arms sales to India is being widely cited as evidence of the two countries’ deepening defense relationship. But the long-term sustainability of the relationship, in which India is more a client than a partner, remains a deep concern for Indians. Does the recently issued Joint Declaration on Defense Cooperation, which establishes intent to move beyond weapons sales to the co-production of military hardware,mark a turning point, or is it merely a contrivance to placate India?

The factors driving the strategic relationship’s development are obvious. Since 2006, bilateral trade has quadrupled, reaching roughly $100 billion this year. And, over the last decade, US defense exports to India have skyrocketed from just $100 million to billions of dollars annually.

With US military spending slowing and other export markets remaining tight, American defense firms are eager to expand sales to India, which is now the world’s largest arms importer. And the political environment is amenable to their plans: India now conducts more joint military exercises with the US than with any other country.

For the US, displacing Russia as India’s leading arms supplier was a major diplomatic triumph, akin to Egypt’s decision during the Cold War to shift its allegiance – and its arms supplier – from the Soviet Union to America. The difference is that India can actually pay for the weapons that it acquires.

And the bills are substantial. In recent years, India has ordered American arms worth roughly $9 billion. It is now purchasing additional US weapons systems – 22 Apache attack helicopters, six C-130J turbo military transport aircraft, 15 Chinook heavy-lift helicopters, and 145 M-777 ultra-light howitzers – worth $5 billion. The value of India’s arms contracts with US firms exceeds that of American military aid to any country except Israel.

Nirupama Rao, India’s ambassador to the US, has called such defense transactions “the new frontier” in US-India relations and “a very promising one at that.” But, while it is certainly a positive development for the US, for India, it represents a new frontier of dependency.

The problem is that India’s defense sector has virtually nothing that it can sell to the US. The country has yet to develop a credible armament-production base like that of, say, Japan, which is co-developing advanced weapons systems with the US. In fact, India depends on imports – not only from major suppliers like the US and Russia, but also from Israel, the world’s sixth-largest arms exporter – to meet even basic defense needs.

Moreover, India’s leaders have not leveraged the bargaining power afforded by its massive arms purchases to advance national interests. They could, for example, try to persuade the US to stop selling arms to Pakistan, or secure better access to the American market for India’s highly competitive IT and pharmaceutical sectors, which are facing new US non-tariff barriers.

Applying the recent declaration on defense cooperation will not be easy. For example, efforts to identify specific opportunities for collaborative weapons-related projects are to be pursued in accordance with “national policies and procedures.” But the two sides cannot truly “place each other at the same level as their closest partners” unless national policies and procedures – especially in the US – evolve sufficiently.

Similarly, the declaration merely reiterates America’s position that it supports India’s “full membership” in the four US-led technology-control regimes: the Wassenaar Arrangement, the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the Missile Technology Control Regime, and the Australia Group. Given that US policy is to deny sensitive technologies to those outside these regimes, India’s admission would make all the difference in facilitating technology sharing. But the declaration does not include any commitment from the US to expedite India’s admission.

All of this suggests that the US is pandering to India’s desire for a more equal defense relationship. It is willing to co-produce with India some smaller defensive systems, such as Javelin anti-tank missiles, in order to pave the way for more multi-billion-dollar deals for US-made systems. The Indian media are doing their part to strengthen the illusion of progress, latching onto the phrase “closest partners” in their acclaim for the agreement.

The irony is that, while America’s pursuit of a stronger defense relationship with India is aimed largely at offsetting an increasingly assertive China, US President Barack Obama has charted a neutral course in Sino-Indian disputes. For example, the US has declined to hold joint military exercises in the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China has claimed as “South Tibet” since 2006.

As it stands, the US sells mainly defensive weapons systems to India, while Russia, for example, offers India offensive weapons, including strategic bombers, an aircraft carrier, and a lease on a nuclear submarine. Would the US be willing to sell India offensive weapons – including high-precision conventional arms, anti-submarine systems, and long-range air- and sea-launched cruise missiles – that could help to deter Chinese military preemption?

As US-India defense cooperation broadens, this question will loom ever larger.

(c) Project Syndicate, 2013.

Tackling new maritime challenges

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The international maritime order will continue to gradually but fundamentally change as new powers acquire greater economic and naval heft

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Hindu, November 5, 2013

Maritime challenges are being fundamentally transformed by new technological and geopolitical realities, shifting trade and energy patterns, and the rise of unconventional threats. The fact that about 50 per cent of the maritime boundaries in the world are still not demarcated accentuates the challenges.

Water covers more than seven-tenths of the planet’s surface, and almost half the global population lives within 200 km of a coastline. It may thus surprise few that 90 per cent of the world’s trade uses maritime routes. With countless freighters, fishing boats, passenger ferries, leisure yachts, and cruise ships plying the waters, a pressing concern is maritime security — a mission tasked to national navies, coast guards, and harbour police forces.

Altering equations

The maritime order has entered a phase of evolutionary change in response to global power shifts. Maritime power equations are beginning to alter. The shifts actually symbolize the birth-pangs of a new world order.

Emerging changes in trade and energy patterns promise to further alter maritime power equations. For example, energy-related equations are being transformed by a new development: the centre of gravity in the hydrocarbon world is beginning to quietly shift from the Persian Gulf to the Americas, thanks to the shale boom, hydrocarbon extraction in the South Atlantic and Canada’s Alberta Province, and other developments.

The United States, for the foreseeable future, will remain the dominant sea power, while Europe will stay a significant maritime player. Yet, the international maritime order will continue to gradually but fundamentally change as new powers acquire greater economic and naval heft.

According to a projection by the recently released Global Marine Trends 2030 report, as the global GDP doubles over the next 17 years, China will come to own a quarter of the world’s merchant fleet. Several other maritime states in the Asia-Pacific, including Japan, South Korea, India, and Vietnam, are also set to significantly enlarge their maritime footprints.

Admittedly, there are real threats to maritime peace and security from the changing maritime power equations and the sharpening competition over resources and geopolitical influence. The Asia-Pacific region — with its crowded and, in some cases, contested sea lanes — is becoming the centre of global maritime competition. Maritime tensions remain high in this region due to rival sovereignty claims, resource-related competition, naval buildups, and rising nationalism.

A lot of attention has focussed on the maritime implications of China’s rise. President Xi Jinping has championed efforts to build China into a global maritime power, saying his government will do everything possible to safeguard China’s “maritime rights and interests” and warning that “in no way will the country abandon its legitimate rights and interests.” China’s increasing emphasis on the oceans was also evident from the November 2012 report to the 18th national congress of the Chinese Communist Party that outlined the country’s maritime power strategy. It called for safeguarding China’s maritime rights and interests, including building improved capacity for exploiting marine resources and for asserting the country’s larger rights.

The risks of maritime conflict arising from mistake or miscalculation are higher between China and its neighbours than between China and the United States.

There has been a course correction in the Obama administration’s “pivot” toward Asia, lest it puts it on the path of taking on Beijing. Washington has bent over backward to tamp down the military aspects of that policy. Even the term “pivot” has been abandoned in favour of the softer new phrase of “rebalancing.”

The U.S., moreover, has pointedly refused to take sides in sovereignty disputes between China and its neighbours. It has sought the middle ground between seeking to restrain China and reassure allies but, as former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg has put it, “without getting ourselves into a shooting war.”

China has also shied away from directly challenging U.S. interests. It has been careful not to step on America’s toes. Its assertiveness has been largely directed at its neighbours.

After all, China is seeking to alter the territorial and maritime status quo in Asia little by little. This can be described as a “salami-slice” strategy or, what a Chinese general, Zhang Zhaozhong, this year called a “cabbage” strategy — surround a contested area with multiple security layers to deny access to a rival nation.

Bit-by-bit strategy

This bit-by-bit strategy increases the risk of maritime conflict through overreach, and the inadvertent encouragement it provides to neighbouring countries to overcome their differences and strategically collaborate.

The new international maritime challenges, however, go beyond China’s jurisdictional “creep.”

The oceans and seas not only have become pivotal to any power’s security and engagement with the outside world but they also constitute the strategic hub of the global geopolitical competition. The growing importance of maritime resources and of sea-lane safety, as well as the concentration of economic boom zones along the world’s coastlines, has made maritime security more critical than ever.

The maritime challenges extend to non-traditional threats such as climate security, transnational terrorism, illicit fishing, human trafficking, and environmental degradation. The overexploitation of marine resources has underscored the need for conservation and prudent management of the biological diversity of the seabed.

Deep seabed mining has emerged as a major new strategic issue. From seeking to tap sulphide 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 interstate competition over seabed-mineral wealth underscores the imperative for creating a regulatory regime, developing safe and effective ocean-development technologies, finding ways to share benefits of the common heritage, and ensuring environmental protection.

Interstate competition over seabed minerals is sharpening in the Indian Ocean, for example. 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.

More broadly, some of the outstanding boundary, sovereignty and jurisdiction issues — extending from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean — carry serious conflict potential. The recrudescence of territorial and maritime disputes, largely tied to competition over natural resources, will increasingly have a bearing on maritime peace and security.

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.

However, some important maritime powers, including the U.S., are still not party to the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

Iran recently seized an Indian oil tanker, holding it for about a month, but India could not file a complaint with the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea because Tehran has not ratified UNCLOS. The seizure of the tanker, carrying Iraqi oil, appeared to be an act of reprisal against India’s sharp reduction of Iranian oil purchases, under U.S. pressure.

The threats to navigation and maritime freedoms, 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.

Great-power rivalries, however, continue to complicate international maritime security. The rivalries are mirrored in foreign-aided port-building projects; attempts to assert control over energy supplies and transport routes as part of a 21st-century-version of the Great Game; and the establishment of listening posts and special naval-access arrangements along the world’s great trade arteries.

The evolving architecture of global governance will determine how the world handles the pressing maritime challenges it confronts. The assertive pursuit of national interest for relative gain in an increasingly interdependent world is hardly a recipe for harmonious maritime relations. Another concern is the narrow, compartmentalized approach in which each maritime issue is sought to be dealt with separately, instead of addressing the challenges in an integrated framework.

(Brahma Chellaney, a geostrategist, is the author, most recently, of Water, Peace, and War — Rowman & Littlefield, 2013)

(c) The Hindu, 2013.

Singh’s Sham Water Accord

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A new agreement between China and India doesn’t require Beijing to institutionalize rules-based cooperation on shared resources.

  • By Brahma Chellaney

    • Zuma

    The Brahmaputra River in Tibet, site of the Zangmu hydroelectric project. Zuma Press

    For the past decade, China has pursued a series of ambitious dam-building projects in Tibet, making water a source of significant discord in Sino-Indian relations. Yet last week Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh returned from a much-publicized visit to Beijing with an accord on water cooperation that offers only jingles and slogans.

    The memorandum of understanding signed during Mr. Singh’s visit merely records that both parties “recognized that transborder rivers and related natural resources and the environment are assets of immense value,” and that they “agreed that cooperation on transborder rivers will further enhance mutual strategic trust and communication.” India even “expressed appreciation to China for providing flood-season hydrological data.”

    With the help of the planeload of journalists he took with him at taxpayer expense, Mr. Singh has presented this trivial accord as a diplomatic success. In truth, the deal hands China a propaganda lever without addressing India’s concerns.

    In an increasingly water-stressed Asia, China has established a hydro-supremacy unparalleled in the world by annexing the starting place of Asia’s major rivers—the Tibetan plateau—and working to reengineer cross-border flows through dams, barrages and other structures. More transboundary rivers flow from China than from any other hydro-hegemon.

    Having already built more large dams than the rest of the world combined, Beijing has in the past decade shifted focus from dam-saturated internal rivers to international rivers. This year alone it has approved the construction of 54 new dam projects mainly concentrated in southeastern Tibet, including on rivers flowing to South and Southeast Asia.

    India is particularly vulnerable because it directly receives more than 48% of the 718 billion cubic meters of surface water that flows out of Chinese territory every year. In addition, Nepal’s Tibet-originating rivers empty into India’s Ganges basin. India has more arable land than China, but the source of most major Indian rivers is Chinese-controlled Tibet.

    If Beijing continues on its present unilateralist path, its upstream projects could complicate India’s water-sharing with Bangladesh and Pakistan. In the 1996 Ganges Treaty, India guaranteed Bangladesh an equal share of the downriver flows during the difficult dry season. But China is now planning to build a cascade of dams on the Ganges tributaries that contribute significantly to such downstream flows.

    The 1960 Indus Treaty remains the world’s most generous water-sharing arrangement, under which India agreed to set aside 80.52% of the waters of the six-river Indus system for Pakistan indefinitely, hoping it could trade water for peace. Two of these six rivers are now targeted by China’s dam builders.

    New Delhi has been pressing Beijing for transparency on its dam projects and a commitment not to redirect the natural flow of any river or to diminish cross-border flows. But even a joint expert-level mechanism between China and India—set up in 2007 for “interaction and cooperation” on hydrological data—has proven of little value. China has limited its cooperation to the sale of flood-season hydrological data. India provides such data free to Pakistan year-round.

    Averting water wars demands rules-based cooperation, water-sharing and dispute-settlement mechanisms. Yet China rejects the very concept of water-sharing and doesn’t have a single water-sharing treaty with any of its neighbors. India has such treaties with both of its downstream neighbors, Pakistan and Bangladesh, including mechanisms to help resolve disputes that flare intermittently.

    Prime Minister Singh pleaded for a bilateral water treaty in separate meetings this year with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang, asking at least for a joint commission to ensure transparency in upstream dam-building on the Brahmaputra River (which runs from Tibet to eastern India and Bangladesh) and other southerly-flowing rivers. India currently has to rely on aerial reconnaissance and other intelligence inputs to know of Chinese dam-building activities. Messrs. Xi and Li rebuffed Mr. Singh’s plea.

    Now, with his job-approval rating plummeting to an all-time low and corruption scandals swirling, Mr. Singh didn’t wish to return empty-handed from Beijing. So he accepted what China was willing to offer—a token accord bereft of substance. Beijing will henceforth flaunt this accord to rebut criticism that it is unwilling to cooperate on shared water resources.

    This accord cannot obscure the importance of persuading Beijing to institutionalize rules-based cooperation on shared resources. The failure to build such cooperation between China and its neighbors will have long-term consequences, including making China the master of Asia’s water taps.

    China’s geographic advantage and rising military and economic might limit India’s bargaining power. To influence Beijing, then, India must leverage China’s growing Indian-market access. Yet India’s trade deficit with China in the past decade has climbed at about four times the pace of aggregate bilateral commerce. Perpetuating such a lopsided economic relationship while China disturbs the territorial and river-flow status quo is a double whammy for India.

    China’s dam-building spree is a reminder that Tibet remains at the heart of the India-China divide. This sprawling region ceased to be a political buffer when China annexed it more than six decades ago. For Tibet to turn into a political bridge between China and India, water has to become a source of cooperation, not conflict.

    Mr. Chellaney is the author, most recently, of “Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.”

  • Copyright 2013 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

    • Dancing in the dragon’s jaws

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    Why India’s new border pact with China won’t work

    Brahma Chellaney, Mint, October 22, 2013

    Seeking to compensate for his low political stock at home, Manmohan Singh has undertaken more overseas trips as prime minister than any predecessor, visiting China multiple times. Yet, India punches far below its weight internationally, while its regional security has come under siege, with Singh’s tenure witnessing a sharp deterioration in ties with China.

    The highlight of the latest China visit of India’s most-travelled prime minister will not be progress on any of the core issues dividing the two countries but a Chinese-ordained border accord designed to supplant existing frontier-peace and confidence-building agreements that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has undermined through repeated cross-frontier raids and other incursions. No Indian official has explained the rationale for entering into a new agreement demanded by the party that has breached existing border-peace accords with impunity.

    New Delhi’s willingness to let China dictate the so-called Border Defence Cooperation Agreement (BDCA) mirrors its broader strategic timidity in permitting Beijing to lay down the terms of the bilateral relationship. China has fashioned an asymmetrical commercial relationship, reaping a swelling trade surplus, even as it stymies any progress on issues of core concern to India, including the territorial and water disputes, recurrent cross-border military raids, China’s continuing nuclear and missile collaboration with Pakistan, and the growing Chinese strategic footprint in Pakistani-held Kashmir.

    China’s most-insidious warfare against India is in the economic realm, yet India has done little to stop Beijing from turning it into a raw-material supplier to the Chinese economy and from subverting Indian manufacturing through dumping of goods. Official statistics show that India’s trade deficit with China in the past decade has soared at about four times the pace of aggregate bilateral commerce. The widening trade imbalance with China, in fact, has become a major contributor to India’s worsening current account deficit.

    Perpetuating such a lopsided economic relationship gives Beijing little incentive to bridge the political divide. If anything, it aids China’s strategy to prevent India’s rise as a peer competitor.

    Even as Beijing disturbs the territorial and water-flow status quo, New Delhi won’t leverage China’s growing India-market access to influence Chinese conduct. China, however, does not shy away from mixing politics and business. It has a record of quietly using trade to punish countries it quarrels with. For example, Japanese exports to China, which sank 13.2% in the first seven months of this year, began falling after Beijing unsheathed its trade sword in September 2012 over the Senkaku Islands dispute.

    Singh’s visit will likely yield the usual platitudes about friendship and cooperation while leaving India’s concerns unaddressed. With an unresolved border arming China with leverage to keep India under military pressure, Beijing has been reluctant to even clarify what the two sides farcically call “the line of actual control” (LAC). And even as it turns Tibet into the new hub of its dam-building spree, China has brazenly sought to turn the tables on India, accusing it through a state mouthpiece last week of “attempting to reinforce its actual control and occupation of” Arunachal Pradesh through water projects there.

    Singh, acquiescing to China’s sidelining of the core issues, told reporters before leaving that, “The two governments are addressing them with sincerity and maturity without letting them affect the overall atmosphere of friendship and cooperation”. Even by his pusillanimous standards, making a Chinese-dictated accord the highlight of his official visit marks a new low in Indian diplomacy.

    Consider the humiliating circumstances that spawned this agreement: the PLA intruded deep into Ladakh’s Depsang Plateau by stealth before Beijing embarked on coercive diplomacy, forcing India’s hand on BDCA, whose draft it had sent earlier. In return for China withdrawing its encamped troops from Indian land, India demolished a line of defensive fortifications in Chumar—much to the south of Depsang—and ended forward patrols in the area, besides agreeing to wrap up negotiations on BDCA, which until then it had baulked at.

    The Depsang encroachment inflicted permanent damage to the existing border-peace accords, including the 2005 mutual commitment to “strictly respect and observe” the LAC. Yet, paradoxically, China demanded a new agreement to take precedence over the more equitable 1993, 1996 and 2005 border-peace accords.

    Indeed, such was the bloodless victory China scored by deploying a single platoon of no more than 50 soldiers in Depsang that India, in the manner of a vanquished nation, merely offered its comments and suggestions on the Chinese-imposed draft and sent its national security adviser and defence minister in rapid succession to Beijing to commit itself to BDCA’s “early conclusion.”

    Now, by personally paying obeisance in Beijing, Singh culminates this mortifying process, lending his imprimatur to an agreement that can only embolden China to up the ante. In fact, since India’s virtual capitulation to Chinese demands more than five months ago, China’s military provocations have included multiple daring raids and other forays across the Himalayan frontier, the world’s longest disputed border.

    Via the planeload of journalists he takes, Singh trumpets almost every overseas visit as a diplomatic success. His spinmeisters are also marketing BDCA as positive for India, highlighting features that in reality are dubious.

    Why would a new military hotline with China make a difference when a similar hotline with Pakistan hasn’t worked? Given that India timorously deploys border police (such as the Home Ministry-administered Assam Rifles and Indo-Tibetan Border Police) to fend off incursions by the aggressive PLA, the clause on “no tailing” of each other’s patrols is really applicable to China. But any accord for China is just a political tool to advance its interests, including by lulling the other party into complacency and creating exploitable opportunities.

    Any Chinese leader combines an India visit with a visit to his country’s “all-weather ally,” Pakistan, but Singh declined to club his China visit with a pending trip to Japan. Singh, in fact, will be in Beijing at the same time as the Russian and Mongolian prime ministers, with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev beginning his Beijing trip while Singh was still in Moscow on an official visit.

    Singh’s China policy, by leaving India more vulnerable to Chinese belligerence, represents a case study in how meekness attracts bullying. BDCA is a symbol of that.

    Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

    (c) Mint, 2013.

    Age of the water wars

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    As competition for this precious resource grows, water will be a key to war and peace 

    BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Globe and Mail, Published Wednesday, Oct. 09, 2013

    In an increasingly water-stressed world, shared water resources are becoming an instrument of power, fostering competition within and between nations and exacerbating impacts on ecosystems. This week’s Budapest World Water Summit is the latest initiative in the search for ways to mitigate the pressing challenges.

    Consider some sobering facts: Bottled water at the grocery store is already more expensive than crude oil on the spot market. More people today own or use a cellphone than have access to water-sanitation services.

    Unclean water is the greatest killer on the globe, yet a fifth of humankind still lacks easy access to potable water. More than half of the global population currently lives under water stress — a figure projected to increase to two-thirds during the next decade.

    Potentially calamitous water shortages in the coming decades in the densely populated parts of Asia, the Middle East and North Africa — the world’s most-parched regions — could produce large numbers of “water refugees” and overwhelm some states’ institutional capacity to contain the effects. The struggle for water is already escalating interstate and intrastate tensions.

    108_2013_b1-chellany-water-w8201_s640x467Downstream Egypt, for example, uses the bulk of the Nile River’s water, yet it is now threatening unspecified reprisals against Ethiopia’s ongoing construction of the Grand Renaissance Dam. China, already the world’s most-dammed nation and unrivaled hydro-hegemon, has approved the construction of 54 new dams — many of them on rivers that are the lifeblood for countries in Southeast and South Asia — as it seeks to build a strategic grip on transboundary water flows.

    Turkey, like China, is trying to reinforce its regional riparian dominance by accelerating an ambitious dam-building program, which threatens to diminish cross-border flows into Syria and Iraq. The internal war in Syria and the continuing sectarian bloodletting in Iraq have muted regional opposition to Turkey’s dam-building spree.

    Meanwhile, intrastate water-sharing disputes have become common, although they receive little coverage in the international media. Water conflicts within culturally diverse nations, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Sudan, often assume ethnic dimensions, thereby accentuating internal-security challenges.

    But as illustrated by the disputes, for example, within the United States, Spain and Australia, intra-country water conflict is not restricted to the developing world. Water conflicts in America have spread from the arid west to the east. Violent water struggles, however, occur mostly in developing nations, with resource scarcity often promoting environmental degradation and perpetuating poverty.

    Adequate access to natural resources has been a key factor, historically, in peace and war. Water, however, is very different from other natural resources. A person can live without love but not without water.

    There are substitutes for a number of resources, including oil, but none for water. Countries can import, even from distant lands, fossil fuels, mineral ores, and resources originating in the biosphere, such as fish and timber. But they cannot import the most vital of all resources, water — certainly not in a major or sustainable manner. Water is essentially local and very expensive to ship across seas.

    Scarce water resources generate conflict. Even the origin of the word “rival” is tied to water competition. It comes from the Latin rivalis, or one who uses the same stream.

    Water’s paradox is that it is a life preserver, but it can also be a life destroyer when it becomes a carrier of deadly bacteria or comes in the deluge of a tsunami, a flash flood, or a hurricane. Many of the greatest natural disasters of our time have been related to water. A recent example is the Fukushima disaster, which triggered a triple nuclear meltdown.

    Because of global warming, potable water is set to come under increasing strain even as oceans rise and the intensity and frequency of storms and other extreme weather events increases.

    Rapid economic and demographic expansion has already turned potable water into a major issue across large parts of the world. Lifestyle changes, for example, have spurred increasing per-capita water consumption in the form of industrial and agricultural products.

    It is against this background that water wars, in a political and economic sense, are already being waged between competing states in several regions, including by building dams on international rivers or, if the country is located downstream, by resorting to coercive diplomacy to prevent such construction. U.S. intelligence has warned that such water conflicts could turn into real wars.

    According to a report reflecting the joint judgment of U.S. intelligence agencies, the use of water as a weapon of war or a tool of terrorism appears more likely in the next decade in some regions. The InterAction Council, comprising more than 30 former heads of state or government, meanwhile, has called for urgent action, saying some countries battling severe water shortages risk failing. The U.S. State Department, for its part, has upgraded water to “a central U.S. foreign policy concern.”

    Water stress is also imposing mounting socioeconomic costs. Commercial or state decisions in many countries on where to set up new manufacturing or energy plants are increasingly being constrained by inadequate local water availability.

    The World Bank has estimated the economic cost of China’s water problems at 2.3 percent of its GDP. But thus far China isn’t even under water stress — a term internationally defined as the availability of less than 1,700 cubic meters of water per head per year. Economies that are already water-stressed, ranging from South Korea and India to Egypt and Morocco, are paying a higher price.

    Water is a renewable but finite resource. Nature’s fixed water-replenishment capacity limits the world’s renewable freshwater resources to nearly 43 trillion cubic meters per year. But the human population has almost doubled since 1970 alone, while the global economy has grown even faster.

    Consumption growth has become the single biggest driver of water stress. Rising incomes, for example, have promoted changing diets, especially a greater intake of meat, the production of which is notoriously water-intensive. It is about 10 times more water-intensive to produce beef than to produce plant-based calories and proteins.

    In this light, water is becoming the world’s next major security and economic challenge.

    Although no modern war has been fought just over water, this resource has been an underlying factor in several armed conflicts. With the era of cheap, bountiful water having been replaced by increasing supply and quality constraints, the risks of overt water wars are now increasing.

    Avoiding water wars will require rules-based cooperation, water sharing and dispute-settlement mechanisms. However, there is still no international water law in force, and most of the regional water agreements are toothless, lacking monitoring and enforcement rules and provisions formally dividing water among users. Worse still, unilateralist appropriation of shared resources is endemic in the parched world, especially where despots rule.

    The international community thus confronts a problem more pressing than peak oil, economic slowdown and other oft-cited challenges. Indeed, this core problem holds the key to other challenges because of water’s nexuses with global warming, energy shortages, stresses on food supply, population, pollution, environmental degradation, global epidemics and natural disasters.

    Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author, most recently, of “Water, Peace, and War”(Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).

    (c) The Global and Mail, 2013.

    Wages of Mishandling Pakistan

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      Brahma Chellaney, The Economic Times, October 9, 2013

    Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent state visit to Washington generated a lot of media coverage, not in the U.S. (where the media literally took no note of it) but in India, thanks to the planeload of journalists that Singh took with him. Rarely before had an Indian prime minister’s state visit to U.S. been so invisible to Americans.

    If the American media did notice Singh, it was only at the fag end of his trip when he met with his Pakistani counterpart in New York. That put the spotlight, however briefly, on the India-Pakistan equation rather than on the Indo-U.S. relationship. New Delhi doesn’t like the India-Pakistan hyphenation, yet its own actions can be counterproductive. Singh defiantly met Nawaz Sharif, disregarding both public opinion at home and the Pakistani military’s increased hostility.

    But before meeting Sharif, Singh complained to US President Barack Obama about Pakistan’s continuing export of terrorism — a complaint that prompted Sharif to purportedly compare Singh with a whining “dehati aurat.” By grumbling to Obama, Singh implicitly expressed his government’s helplessness in countering Pakistani terrorism, besides signalling that his meeting with Sharif was at the U.S. request. In fact, the state department welcomed his discussion with Sharif, saying “dialogue is a positive step forward and we’ll continue to encourage that.”

    If Singh believed that holding political dialogue with Pakistan’s new civilian government was important, a New York meeting at the foreign minister level would have sufficed at this stage, especially since no one expected a meeting between the two PMs to break new ground.

    Yet the extent to which Singh went to save his September 29 meeting with Sharif can be gauged from one troubling fact: news about the September 24 Pakistani cross-border raid into the Keran sector — which triggered a two-week gunbattle between Indian army troops and the intruders — was not released by the government until after the Singh-Sharif meeting. It is unfortunate the government allowed the political exigencies of a meeting in New York to take precedence over the imperative to inform the nation about a major intrusion involving Pakistani special forces.

    It is crystal clear that India’s Pakistan policy has lost all sense of direction. Indeed, it is so adrift that it has emboldened the Pakistan army to carry out multiple acts of aggression across the line of control this year without fear of Indian retribution — from the decapitation of two Indian soldiers and the separate killing of five troops to the Samba raid and the Keran incursion. Sadly, the government has also sowed factionalism in the army’s senior hierarchy by playing favourites and targeting the ex-chief, Gen. V.K. Singh, through media plants.

    Worse still, the government has restrained the army both from responding appropriately and effectively to cross-border aggression and from giving out any information to the media on Pakistani (or Chinese) border violations. The restraint order has crimped the army’s traditional leeway to act preemptively against an impending aggression and to inflict a just retribution for any cross-border attack.

    Can any force be turned into a veritable sitting duck struggling to fend off repeated aggression? By allowing the army’s operational imperatives to be trumped by the government’s meandering and clueless foreign policy, army chief Gen. Bikram Singh faces an unflattering reality on his record: His stint as chief has coincided with a pattern of rising cross-border aggression by Pakistan (and China).

    Let’s be clear: Battling repeated cross-border encroachments on terms dictated by the enemy — a tradition India set in 1999 when it fought the entire Kargil War on Indian territory on Pakistan’s terms — is anything but sound strategy. Indeed, it is an invitation to bringing the country’s border security under siege.

    More fundamentally, why has it become a virtual custom since the late 1990s for an Indian prime minister’s meeting with Pakistan’s leader to invariably spell trouble for India? Atal Bihari Vajpayee publicly bemoaned that his peace bus to Lahore in February 1999 was “hijacked and taken to Kargil.” Still, he went to Pakistan in early 2004 for a second time as PM — a trip that sowed the seeds of Pakistan’s stepped-up export of terrorism in the subsequent years.

    With his blow-hot-blow-cold approach, the sphinx-like Vajpayee executed several U-turns in his Pakistan policy, which traversed through Lahore, Kargil, Kandahar, Agra, and Parliament House, before culminating in Islamabad on his second trip to Pakistan.

    The scandal-tainted Singh has brought a nasty “gift” for his nation from each meeting with a Pakistani counterpart.

    Apart from the latest Keran surprise, Singh came back from Sharm el-Sheikh after arming Pakistan with the Baluchistan card against India, while he returned from Havana earlier after declaring that the exporter of terrorism is actually a “victim of terrorism” like India.

    In the absence of a long-term strategic blueprint, coupled with the marginalization of the ministry of external affairs and other professional bodies, Indian foreign policy increasingly is being driven by ad hoc, personal interventions of the prime minister — with serious costs to national interest.

    Brahma Chellaney is a strategic affairs expert.

    (c) The Economic Times, 2013.

    Another Afghanistan in the making?

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    By Brahma Chellaney, Washington Times, October 1, 2013

    Clipboard01

    President Obama has aborted his planned military attack on Syria, but the proxy war that pits America and its allies against Russia is set to intensify in that critically located nation, with further horrific consequences for civilians and the likely proliferation of transnational terrorists.

    The proxy war injects greater volatility into the Arab world, where internal tumult risks recasting the entire Arab state system, centered on a series of artificial states created in the last century by departing colonial powers.

    The Washington-Moscow deal to strip Syria of its chemical arms will have little effect on the internal war there, one of the world’s bloodiest conflicts. This conflict has been fueled by Russian and Western arms supplies to rival sides. Indeed, Russia and the U.S.-British-French combination are determined to continue their 2-year-old proxy war in an already fractured Syria. Who cares for civilians?

    Most of the estimated 100,000 deaths in the Syrian violence have been caused by foreign-origin weapons, largely made in the proxy-war-waging countries that have shed crocodile tears over civilian deaths in an Aug. 21 sarin attack in suburban Damascus. The U.S. arms supply to rebels is primarily bankrolled by the oil sheikdoms.

    In this light, the key questions relate to Syria’s future: Will a new international-terrorist hub emerge that stretches across much of northern Syria and into the Sunni areas of Iraq? Will Syria’s fate be different from that of Afghanistan?

    The Syria issue is about more than just President Bashar Assad or chemical weapons: It is integral to the geopolitical clash between the Sunni Middle East, which remains under the U.S.-British-French sway, and the Shiite crescent stretching from Iran through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean Syrian port of Tartus, Russia’s only military base outside the former Soviet Union. With Russia emerging as a great-power patron in the Shiite crescent, the United States and the region’s two former colonial powers, Britain and France, are seeking to safeguard the regional geopolitical hegemony that they have enjoyed since the early 1970s, when Egypt switched sides.

    Over the decades, the United States has cemented close ties with Sunni Islamist rulers, including the cloistered Arab monarchs who fund Muslim extremist groups and madrassas overseas. Washington has already forgotten the main lesson from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strikes — that it must focus on long-term strategic goals rather than short-term tactical victories. One reminder of that is President Obama’s current effort to strike a Faustian bargain with the thuggish Afghan Taliban.

    Since the 1990s, espousing military action as humanitarianism has been the common leitmotif uniting American neoconservatives and liberal interventionists — the hawks on the left who were most vocal recently in promoting a war against Syria. The serial interventionists have failed to take a good, hard look at the lessons of America’s past interventions. For example, those who took the United States to war in Libya have ignored how that “humanitarian” intervention has boomeranged, creating a lawless Islamist state affecting its neighbors’ security.

    In backing jihad against Mr. Assad’s autocratic rule, Mr. Obama’s policy has inadvertently strengthened the hands of radical Islamists. The CIA-aided, faction-ridden Free Syrian Army is in danger of being eclipsed by the pro-al Qaeda insurgent groups designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S. State Department — the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

    The risk of an Iraq-style “soft” partition of Syria is high. Indeed, in a July 18 briefing, Mr. Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, declared that Mr. Assad “will never rule all of Syria again.” This was a reminder that the unstated goal of Mr. Obama’s military stalemate in Syria is an eventual partition, with Mr. Assad’s power confined to a rump Syria. As former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has acknowledged, “A stalemate is in our interest” — a Machiavellian scenario to lock regime and rebel forces in mutually debilitating combat.

    However, with jihadists already in control of much of northern Syria, the danger, as the CIA’s former deputy director, Michael J. Morell, has warned, is that an al Qaeda haven could emerge. This is exactly what happened earlier in Afghanistan as an unintended byproduct of America’s proxy war against the Soviet forces there.

    In fact, the transition from covert to overt aid to Syrian rebels by the CIA has occurred much faster than it did in the 1980s Afghanistan, although Syria has already become a magnet for foreign Sunni jihadists. As happened when the United States armed the Afghan mujahedeen, the CIA’s arms supply — far from winning loyal surrogates in Syria — is likely to end up empowering radical forces with transnational ties that extol and perpetrate violence as a religious tool.

    For some in Washington and for America’s regional allies — the petro-sheikdoms, Israel and Turkey — the proxy war in Syria is really part of a larger proxy war to contain Iran. The grinding proxy war in Syria thus promises to exact increasing costs regionally and internationally while allowing the U.S.-allied regional autocrats from Abu Dhabi to Ankara to step up their repression at home without fear of international censure. Russia, meanwhile, will continue to prop up the Assad regime.

    Given the increasingly murky geopolitics in spite of a rising tide of Syrian civilian displacement, suffering and death, Syria seems set to meet the fate of Afghanistan, a source of regional instability for more than a generation and where the United States is seeking to end its longest-ever military conflict, which has already cost it nearly $1 trillion dollars.

    Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of “Water, Peace, and War” (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013).

    (c) The Washington Times, 2013.

    Southern Asia: A unique nuclear triangle

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    Brahma Chellaney

    Politics and Strategy: The Survival Editors’ Blog

    In the two decades since I published an essay in Survival on South Asian nuclearization, one of my conclusions has been proven right, but another wrong. The South Asian nuclear genie remains uncontrolled, as I anticipated. But contrary to my doubt then, India and Pakistan have completed the transition from covert to overt capabilities by conducting nuclear-explosive tests, adopting a nuclear doctrine and deploying nuclear weapons. More strangely, Pakistan now boasts the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal. Indeed, according to several international estimates, its arsenal of nuclear warheads is larger than that of India, which, with China to its north, faces two closely aligned nuclear-armed neighbours.

    India’s recent test launch of the Agni V ballistic missile, which can reach Beijing, served as a fresh reminder that the Indian nuclear-deterrence programme is primarily focused on China, with Pakistan remaining subordinate in nuclear planning. To be sure, it was the Sino-Pakistani nuclear nexus — cemented by transfers of Chinese nuclear and missile technology to Islamabad — that propelled India to shed its posture of nuclear ambiguity and go overtly nuclear in 1998. Since then, China’s rapidly accumulating military and economic power, and its increasing assertiveness on territorial disputes, have increased the importance of the nuclear deterrent for India. Given its retaliation-only posture, India has focused its attention in the past decade on erecting a triad of land-based, air-deliverable and submarine-based nuclear capabilities that can survive an enemy first strike.

    Strikingly, neither India’s economic rise nor its graduated action to put in place a ‘small but credible’ nuclear force is seen internationally as a threat, unlike the deep concerns that China’s ascent continues to generate. A 2008 civilian nuclear deal between the United States and India, in fact, has come to symbolise their new strategic partnership. International proliferation-related concern instead has focused on Pakistan’s rapid expansion of its nuclear arsenal that has put it on a path to overtake Britain as the world’s fifth-largest nuclear-weapons power. Unstable Pakistan is heavily dependent on foreign aid, yet it has ramped up production of bomb-grade materials.

    Nuclear weapons have not prevented Pakistan’s slide into a jihadist dungeon. Given its military’s sponsorship of jihad under the nuclear umbrella and the jihadist infiltration of the armed forces, the biggest international concern relates to the safety of Pakistani nuclear warheads and fissile materials. Compounding this concern is the fact that Pakistan’s military, intelligence and nuclear establishments remain outside civilian oversight. Such concern, along with major gaps in American intelligence about Pakistan’s weapons of mass destruction, has made that country a principal target of US ‘black budget’ surveillance, according to recent revelations. Yet the only plausible scenario of Pakistani nukes falling into Islamist hands is an intra-military struggle in which the jihadists within the armed forces gain ascendancy.

    Southern Asia remains the only region in the world where three contiguous neighbours, sharing disputed land frontiers, form a nuclear triangle that pits two of them against the third party. The regional intersection of nuclear issues, terrorism, territorial disputes, competition over natural resources and nationalism creates complex and dangerous challenges. This region will continue to serve as a reminder that any progress in an inter-state context on nuclear issues, including nuclear confidence-building measures, cannot happen independently of the broader geopolitics.

    Brahma Chellaney is a Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research. His article,‘The Challenge of Nuclear Arms Control in South Asia’, appeared in Survival, 35:3 (1993).

    America’s Islamist Allies of Convenience

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    By Brahma Chellaney, A Project Syndicate column

    In just one decade, the United States has intervened militarily in three Muslim-majority countries and overthrown their governments. Now the same coalition of American liberal interventionists and neoconservatives that promoted those wars is pushing for punitive airstrikes in Syria without reflecting on how US policy has ended up strengthening Islamists and fostering anti-Americanism. Indeed, the last “humanitarian intervention” has clearly backfired, turning Libya into a breeding ground for transnational militants.

    As the intense US debate about President Barack Obama’s proposed use of military force highlights, the attack-Syria push is not about upholding America’s national interest. Rather, the desire to protect US “credibility” has become the last refuge of those seeking yet another war in the wider Middle East.

    If “credibility” were purged from the debate and the focus placed squarely on advancing long-term US interests, it would become apparent that an attack on Syria might not yield even temporary geopolitical gains. Beyond the short term, it would unleash major unintended consequences, potentially including an Iraq-style “soft” partition of Syria and the creation of a haven for extremists stretching across much of Islamist-controlled northern Syria and into the Sunni areas of Iraq.

    Indeed, an attack would most likely increase America’s reliance on unsavory Islamist rulers in countries ranging from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Some Arab monarchs have pledged to bankroll the U.S. attack — an investment that they would easily recover, given that the war talk has already increased oil prices.

    Al Qaeda-type groups already have gained ground in the Middle East and North Africa as an unintended byproduct of US policies, creating fertile conditions for stepped-up international terrorism in the coming years. The US invasion and occupation of Iraq, for example, created a major opening for Al Qaeda, whose affiliates now represent the Sunni struggle against the Shia-dominated government.

    Likewise, regime change in Libya aided the rise of Al Qaeda-linked militants, leading to the killing in Benghazi of the US ambassador. A system based on sharia (Islamic law) has been imposed, human-rights abuses are legion, and cross-border movement of weapons and militants has undermined the security of Libya’s neighbors.

    Meanwhile, America’s support for the regimes in Yemen and Saudi Arabia has contributed to the rise of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In parts of southern Yemen, an Al Qaeda affiliate, Ansar al-Sharia, functions as a de facto government.

    In Syria, where sizable chunks of territory are already under Islamist control and the pro-Al Qaeda Al Nusra Front overshadows the US-backed Free Syrian Army, the Obama administration is staring at the bitter harvest of its previous policy choices. Airstrikes now would merely make matters worse by undercutting the FSA’s grassroots legitimacy and aiding Islamist forces.

    Farther east, the US wants an “honorable” exit from Afghanistan — the longest war in its history — through a peace deal with the Taliban, its main battlefield opponent. In seeking to co-opt the Taliban — an effort that has resulted in the Taliban establishing what amounts to a diplomatic mission in Doha, Qatar — the US is bestowing legitimacy on a thuggish militia that enforces medieval practices in the areas under its control.

    America’s dalliances with Islamist-leaning political forces — and governments — have been guided by the notion that the cloak of Islam helps to protect the credibility of leaders who might otherwise be seen as foreign puppets. That simply will not work, even in the short term. On the contrary, until the Egyptian army removed him from the presidency, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi was coming to be seen by many as America’s man in Cairo.

    In the long term, the US will gain nothing — and risk much — by continuing to back oil sheikhdoms that fund Muslim extremist groups and madrasas from the Philippines and India to South Africa and Venezuela. By supporting Islamist rulers, the US is contributing to a trend evident from the Maghreb to the badlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan — Muslims killing Muslims.

    American policy has also contributed to a growing conflict between Islamist and secular forces in Muslim countries. This is best illustrated by Turkey, where Obama has ignored Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s heavy-handed efforts to annul free speech and turn himself into a twenty-first-century Sultan.

    There and elsewhere, the US, motivated by the larger geopolitical goal of containing Shia Iran and its regional allies, has embraced Sunni rulers steeped in religious and political bigotry, even though they pose a transnational threat to the values of freedom and secularism. Moreover, the clash within Islam is likely to be destabilizing regionally and counterproductive to the interests of the free world.

    Against this background, Obama should heed the doctrine proposed in 1991 by General Colin Powell. The Powell doctrine stipulates that the US should use military force only when a vital national-security interest is at stake; the strategic objective is clear and attainable; the benefits are likely to outweigh the costs; adverse consequences can be limited; broad international and domestic support has been obtained; and a plausible exit strategy is in place.

    Given the US record since the doctrine was formulated, another criterion should be added: the main beneficiaries of military intervention are not America’s mortal enemies.

    (c) Project Syndicate, 2013.

    Chemical Weapons: Fact and Fiction

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    Chemical arms, a poor nation’s deterrent, are far less effective than modern conventional weapons

    Brahma Chellaney, The Japan Times, September 13, 2013

    U.S. President Barack Obama’s plan to bomb Syria for alleged use of poison gas has raised two questions that remain pertinent despite the proposed international monitoring and eventual destruction of that country’s chemical-weapon arsenal: Is gassing people more inhumane or reprehensible than killing with Tomahawk missiles, drones and other conventional weapons? And are chemical weapons inherently prohibited in international law, just like genocide and slavery?

    These questions are also important because Obama’s request to Congress for authorization to attack Syria was not about any specific threat to U.S. or international security. Rather, the planned attack was intended for retribution to save the president’s credibility that he believed was on the line.

    Let’s be clear: Chemical weapons — including choking agents like chlorine gas, blister agents such as mustard gas, arsenic- or cyanide-based blood agents, and nerve agents like sarin — are far less effective than modern conventional weapons, which kill with greater precision and lethality.

    Technological advances, in fact, have made conventional weapons capable of leaving a greater trail of death than any poison gas. They kill, maim and terrorize in ways not much different than chemical weapons. Some conventional explosives and napalm (a petrochemical incendiary whose use against military targets remains lawful despite the notoriety it gained during the Vietnam War) indeed can cause lingering, painful death.

    Chemical weapons have a low kill ratio, which makes them scarcely effective on the battlefield. If anything, they are more effective off the battlefield than on the battlefield. Moreover, their employment often demands favorable weather and geographic conditions. If the military intent were to incapacitate enemy army units without killing them, chemical weapons potentially make for more humane warfare than conventional weapons.

    But because they are cheap, easy to manufacture, and serve as a poor nation’s deterrent, chemical arms have fallen out of favor with the powerful, who portray them as “immoral weapons.” To protect their advantage in conventional weapons, great powers have promoted a taboo against chemical-weapon use.

    To be sure, chemical arms can become weapons of terror in the hands of extremists, as exemplified by the Aum Shinrikyo cult’s 1995 sarin attack in the Tokyo subway that killed 13 commuters.

    Chemical arms have been used by combatants since ancient times, with the oldest archeological evidence of chemical warfare being found, ironically, in modern-day Syria. Before the advent of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons came to be regarded as weapons of mass destruction. Their extensive use in World War I, especially in the form of mustard or chlorine gas, created revulsion and fear of future chemical attacks. However, the use made little difference to the military outcome.

    A corpse from the napalm attack on Tokyo

    In fact, the total fatalities from the chemical-weapon strikes accounted for much less than one percent of the World War I deaths, and were lower than the toll from a single U.S. napalm attack on Tokyo on March 10, 1945. At least 100,000 Japanese died on that day when some 300 B-29 bombers dropped 1,700 tons of incendiary bombs — the deadliest air raid of World War II.

    Against this background, why do the hundreds allegedly killed by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in an August 21 sarin attack count for more than the estimated 100,000 slain in Syria’s grinding civil war, including many killed by insurgents aided by the U.S. and its repressive Islamist allies, such as the rulers of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey? Why is it any worse to be killed by sarin than to be decapitated by insurgents, a growing number of whom hew to al-Qaeda ideology?

    The Obama administration’s visceral, bomb-Syria stand has obscured such questions.

    International efforts since the late 19th century to outlaw chemical weapons have been hampered by repeated national breaches of legal obligations. The 1899 Hague Convention prohibited the use of projectiles with the “sole object” of diffusing “asphyxiating or deleterious gases” — a ban that was openly flouted in World War I. The violations spawned the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning the use of poison gas as a weapon — a still-binding prohibition breached with impunity by several parties.

    The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) went further and outlawed the production, stockpile, transfer and use of chemical weapons. Some countries have not signed or ratified it, including Syria, Israel, North Korea, Egypt and Myanmar. Some parties strongly suspected of possessing chemical weapons, including China and Pakistan, did not declare any stockpile. By declaring former production facilities, China, however, tacitly admitted that it had built chemical weapons and destroyed them before ratifying the CWC.

    Of the seven declared possessor states under the CWC, the largest arsenals are held by the U.S. and Russia, which have both missed the convention’s final extended deadline of 2012 for the destruction of all stockpiles. What impact will this contravention have on the CWC’s integrity?

    Only India, South Korea and Albania among the seven declared possessor states verifiably eliminated their stockpiles by the initial deadline of March 2009. The U.S. says its stockpile destruction will not finish before 2023, more than a decade after the extended cut-off date.

    When the U.S. sprayed 76 million liters of Agent Orange, a toxic defoliant, during the Vietnam War, it was not a party to the Geneva Protocol, which it embraced soon after that war ended.

    But America’s use of white phosphorus as an incendiary weapon and direct tool of warfare during the 2004 siege of Falluja city in occupied Iraq raised a troubling question about its compliance with international obligations. Studies have reported a sharp rise in cancer, leukemia and congenital birth defects in Fallujah in the years since.

    White phosphorous, like other chemicals not listed in the CWC schedules, can be legally employed for noncombat purposes (for example, as a flare to illuminate the battlefield or to produce smoke to disguise troop movements) but not “as a method of warfare” relying on its “toxic properties.”

    Before Iraqi President Saddam Hussein fell out of favor with Washington, the Reagan administration acquiesced in his regime’s gassing of Iranian troops during the protracted Iraq-Iran war.

    Declassified CIA papers and interviews with former officials, as highlighted by the journal Foreign Policy recently, confirm what has long been known — that Washington not only turned a blind eye to Iraq’s repeated use of sarin and mustard gas from 1983 to 1988, but also facilitated the gassing of Iranian troops by providing Saddam Hussein with satellite reconnaissance data on location of Iranian units.

    It is against this backdrop that Obama — facing both international isolation and congressional defeat — sought to build a legal case to bomb Syria. His task was made uphill by factors extending beyond the varied and often-shifting justifications proffered by his team and his decision to bypass the United Nations.

    First, Syria is not a party to the CWC, whose enforcement, in any event, vests with the Security Council. Syria in 1968 did sign the 1925 Geneva Protocol, yet that protocol provides no basis for use of force because it relates to interstate war, not intrastate conflict. Second, in a world in which national stockpiles of chemical arms still exist, few can argue that such weapons are inherently prohibited in international law, regardless of treaties. The “norm” against their use indeed has repeatedly been violated since 1925.

    Allegations and counter-allegations of chemical-weapon use in the Syrian civil war have been rife since last year. Several instances of alleged use were reported in the spring of this year, eventually prompting the United Nations to send a team of investigators to Syria in August.

    While the inspectors were probing those cases, another instance of alleged use in suburban Damascus on August 21 made international headlines because of a rebel video. Even as the UN inspectors turned to investigating the newest incident, Obama peremptorily declared his intent to punitively bomb Syria.

    Why did Obama zoom in on the August 21 incident and ignore the earlier instances? One plausible explanation is that while some of the earlier incidents appeared to point to chemical-weapon use by insurgents, with Syrian army soldiers among the victims, the August 21 victims were all civilians in a rebel-held neighborhood.

    Carla del Ponte, a leading member of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria, told Swiss TV in May that there were “strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof” that rebels had used sarin. Ms. Del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney-general and prosecutor with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, said: “I was a little bit stupefied by the first indications we got… they were about the use of nerve gas by the opposition.” The comments prompted the commission to issue a statement that stressed — without denying Ms. Del Ponte’s remarks — that it had “not reached conclusive findings.”

    Contrast that with the August 21 incident claims, which have been ratcheted up progressively. The British reported “at least 350” civilians were killed in that attack; the Americans then released a much higher but incredulously precise fatality toll of 1,429; immediately thereafter, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry thundered that the world cannot allow Assad to gas “thousands” of his people. The French followed up by claiming the attack involved “massive” use of sarin — an assertion picked up by the White House.

    The full truth on the various incidents may never be known. Still, it cannot be discounted that the rebels probably were the first to carry out a chemical-weapon attack in the civil war.

    In this light, the Russian proposal to make Syria sign the CWC and have monitors take control of its chemical-weapon armory opens a possible diplomatic solution, including reducing poison-gas-related risks in that country.

    It could also bail out an isolated Obama from a predicament of his own making — his insistence that he will break international law to punish Syria for breaching a fanciful international legal tradition.

    Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author, most recently, of “Water, Peace, and War” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013). 

    (c) The Japan Times, 2013.