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About Chellaney

Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

Dicey dalliances with Islamists

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By Brahma Chellaney, The Japan Times

rebels

Syrian rebels prepare to summarily execute captured soldiers.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s insistence on employing air power to punish Syria even if such a war breaches international law and unleashes major unintended consequences is just the latest chapter in a more than two-year U.S. policy whose calculations have gone wrong in backing jihad against Syrian President Bashar Assad’s dictatorial rule. Military strikes could compound Obama’s policy missteps, including inadvertently strengthening the hands of gun-toting Islamists.

Before an internal insurrection in 2011 turned Syria into a proxy battleground for regional and global powers, the country probably was the most liberal, secular Muslim state in the arc of Islam. Today, it is a broken state — its social fabric in tatters, its physical infrastructure largely wrecked, and its cities pummeled daily by urban warfare, with much of the northern region under the sway of hardline Islamist groups, especially the Al Nusra Front.

As also happened in Afghanistan from the 1980s and more recently in Libya, the spirit of jihad the United States helped instill in Syria to overthrow Assad — along with the supply of petrodollar-funded Western arms through Turkey and Jordan — has spawned hardcore Islamist militants wedded to the al-Qaida ideology. Al Nusra now overshadows the Free Syrian Army, established with help from the U.S. and the region’s old colonial powers, Britain and France.

In another major setback for Obama’s policy, the once-tottering Assad regime has not only survived but consolidated its hold in Damascus and militarily gained the upper hand across much of the central and southern regions, with rebel hold limited to some pockets, including in suburban Damascus.

The setbacks have compelled Obama to fundamentally alter his goals. From aiming to topple the Assad regime — a prospect that seemed so likely until last year that CIA teams in Turkey extended their rebel-support operations to northern Syria before this region came under the sway of the pro-al-Qaida groups — Obama has swung to seeking a military stalemate in Syria.

Obama believes a protracted stalemate, despite its high humanitarian cost, would eventually open up a possible negotiated settlement. Because regime forces currently have the upper hand against the rebels, he wants to level the playing field by degrading their capabilities through concentrated air strikes.

The visceral response to the alleged poison-gas attack — despite the relatively small number of fatalities from it compared with the death toll in the continuing civil war — shows that the chemical-weapon issue is just a fig leaf for Obama’s Mission Stalemate, a scenario that will keep regime and rebel forces at each other’s throats, thereby ensuring the Assad government’s continual bleed and bottling up the independent Islamist groups. Given that Obama’s missteps has left him with only bad options on Syria, he has settled for ensuring a military stalemate where Arabs kill Arabs, with the rebel weapons for killing paid for by Arab sheiks.

The resolve to correct the military balance in Syria by wiping out much of the air capability of the ascendant government forces, however, will exact a heavy price regionally.

The U.S. will not be able to control the developments its attack triggers. Indeed, the larger fallout will likely increase America’s reliance on unsavory Islamist rulers in countries ranging from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. There is also the distinct prospect of an al-Qaida haven stretching across northern Syria and into Iraq.

The spread of Muslim radicalism across large parts of the world has created a fertile ground for greater international terrorism. As an unintended byproduct of U.S. policies in support of or against regimes, al-Qaida type groups have gained ground in the Middle East and North Africa.

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq created a major opening for al-Qaida, whose affiliates now represent the Sunni struggle against Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government. Grisly bombings have become commonplace.

Regime change in Libya has brought chaos and the rise of al-Qaida, leading to the Benghazi killing of the U.S. ambassador. It has also exacerbated human-rights abuses and humanitarian suffering, imposed a system based on Shariah law, and promoted cross-border movement of weapons and militants to haunt neighbors’ security.

America’s propping up of the regimes in Yemen and Saudi Arabia has contributed to the rise of the group, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. Meanwhile, by allowing the Taliban to open a de facto diplomatic mission in Doha, Qatar, Obama has signaled U.S. desperation to cut a deal with this thuggish, Pakistan-backed Afghan militia that enforces medieval Islamic practices in the areas it controls.

So what can be done? The lesson U.S. policymakers must heed is to take the long-range view and not be guided by narrow geopolitical considerations that involuntarily strengthen Islamists.

Unfortunately, U.S. policy’s dalliance with Islamist-leaning rulers has long been guided by the consideration that the cloak of Islam helps to protect the credibility of leaders who might otherwise be seen by their public as foreign puppets.

Washington must now stop condoning the rulers of the oil sheikdoms for their alliance with radical clerics and for exporting militant Islam. It must also cease providing political succor to Islamists elsewhere. Until the military ousted him, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi was America’s man in Cairo.

By supporting Islamist rulers, Washington — even if unintentionally — has promoted a growing conflict between Islamist and secular forces in Muslim countries, best illustrated by Turkey, which was wracked by unprecedented anti-government protests this summer. Obama has mollycoddled Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan by ignoring his heavy-handed efforts to annul secularism and free speech, and turn himself into a 21st-century sultan.

Erdogan, who as Istanbul’s mayor declared that “our only goal is an Islamic state,” has jailed more journalists than any other country, including China, and thrown one in five of Turkey’s generals and half of its admirals in jail since becoming prime minister in 2003. Today, he is Obama’s most hawkish ally against Assad.

Motivated by the larger geopolitical goal of containing Shiite Iran and its regional allies, U.S. policy has myopically embraced Sunni rulers steeped in religious and political bigotry, even though they pose a transnational threat to the values of freedom and secularism. Arab monarchs have continued to fund Muslim extremist groups and madrassas (Islamic schools) in other countries — from the Philippines and India to South Africa and Venezuela.

U.S.-British-French policies in the arc of Islam, even if by accident, are contributing to an internally driven trend evident from the Maghreb to the Afghanistan-Pakistan belt — Muslims killing Muslims. This trend, of course, has been principally aided by the export of Wahhabi Islam by the sheiks in Riyadh, Doha, Abu Dhabi and elsewhere, and by the consequent rise of Islamist groups. These policies have averted the feared clash between civilizations, yet they have been a factor in the ongoing clash within a civilization. The effects of this clash are likely to be destabilizing regionally and counterproductive to the interests of the free world.

Against this background, Obama would do well to heed tea party icon Sarah Palin’s advice on Syria, “Let Allah sort it out” — unless Obama believes Allah has chosen him to do that.

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

(c) The Japan Times, 2013.

Obama’s Great Asian Dawdle

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BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Washington Times, September 2, 2013

The U.S. is shying away from China’s stealth aggression.

The more assertive Beijing has become, the more reluctant U.S. President Barack Obama has been to take sides in Asian territorial disputes, although they center on a combative China’s efforts to change the territorial status quo with America’s strategic allies or partners. Washington’s feckless Asia policy has helped deepen the security dilemma of several Asian states on how to protect their territorial and economic rights against China’s power grab.

Washington has made it amply clear that despite its “pivot” toward Asia, it will not put American lives at risk to defend its allies’ territorial claims against Beijing or act in ways detrimental to its close engagement with China. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel even said in an August 28 BBC interview that the U.S. does not look at China’s military buildup as a threat.

Indeed, there has been a course correction in the Obama administration’s “pivot” policy. After initially raising Asian expectations about a robust U.S. response to China’s assertiveness, Washington has tamped down the military aspects of its “pivot,” lest it puts it on the path of taking on Beijing. Instead it has started laying emphasis on the economic aspects.

Obama’s Asia policy has treaded a course of neutrality on territorial disputes between China and its neighbors, while seeking to reap the economic and strategic benefits of closer engagement with Asian states.

Washington, for example, is chary of getting drawn into Sino-Japanese territorial disputes, although Tokyo is its close ally and U.S. forward military deployments in Japan are a linchpin of America’s strategy to retain primacy in Asia. In fact, the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands to which China has laid claim are close to Okinawa, home to the largest U.S. military presence in Asia.

Similarly, even as China purposely badgers India along the Himalayan frontier, Washington has shied away from cautioning Beijing against any attempt to change the territorial status quo by force. In fact, on a host of Asian disputes, including China’s claim since 2006 to India’s Austria-size Arunachal Pradesh state, Washington has chosen not to antagonize Beijing and stayed neutral.

Even in a case when China has forcibly changed the status quo — by taking effective control since last year of the Scarborough Shoal, located in the South China Sea within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone — the Obama team has done little more than counsel restraint and talks. With Chinese vessels this year present near the Second Thomas Shoal, the lesson the Philippines is learning that might remains right in international relations and that its security dependence on Washington is no check on the intruding colossus.

The paradox is that China’s rising assertiveness has helped the U.S. to return to Asia’s center-stage, yet Obama is wary of taking sides in the territorial disputes. The only issue on which Washington has spoken up is freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.

The China factor, which has allowed the U.S. to strengthen its existing military relationships and build new strategic partnerships in Asia, can remain useful for America only if it is seen by its allies and partners as a credible guarantor of stability and security in Asia. That is a function not of its military strength but of its political will.

To be sure, Washington has an interest in preventing the emergence of a Sino-centric Asia. But it has no interest in getting entangled in Asia’s territorial feuds. If it can, it would like to find a way to support its allies and partners in their disputes with China, but without alienating Beijing — a tough balancing act.

For example, the Obama administration has said the U.S. security treaty with Japan covers the Senkaku Islands because they “are under Japanese jurisdiction,” yet “we also stress that we don’t take a position on the sovereignty of the Senkaku Islands.” How reassured can Japan be with such doublespeak?

Washington indeed has advised Tokyo and Beijing repeatedly to sort out their dispute peacefully. Some U.S. analysts who have served in the government have urged Washington not to issue a “blank check” to an uncompromising Japan that refuses to negotiate with Beijing on the dispute.

If China were to employ military force in the dispute, would the U.S. take all necessary actions, including the use of its military capability, to repulse a Chinese action that was confined to the 7-square-kilometer disputed real estate in the East China Sea? The Obama administration has simply said that despite China’s increasing intrusions into the Senkaku waters, “we do not envision that this current tension will rise to that level in any foreseeable scenario.”

Tokyo, skeptical that the U.S. will go to war with China to back Japan’s territorial rights, wants a clear U.S. defense guarantee. The Obama administration, however, has balked at Tokyo’s November 2012 proposal that the U.S.-Japan alliance’s defense guidelines be updated to specifically include the Senkakus.

America’s larger chariness has seemingly encouraged China to up the ante against several neighbors. For example, after gradually increasing the frequency of its incursions into Senkaku waters since September 2012, China is now focusing on increasing their duration. Similarly, China’s land incursions into India’s Ladakh region, after going up in frequency, are this year being staged intermittently for longer duration.

This pattern appears designed to pressure an opponent to cut a deal on Chinese terms, in keeping with Beijing’s stratagem on territorial disputes — what is ours is ours and what is yours is negotiable.

China, despite its bluster, is unlikely to wage open war against a determined, well-armed opponent for fear it may get a bloody nose, as happened in 1979 when it invaded Vietnam. Yet the possibility of an overt war resulting from mistake or miscalculation cannot be ruled out.

Even if no open war flares, Japan and several other Asian states already face China’s war by stealth. Through a clever strategy of furtive, incremental encroachments, China is actually undercutting the value of its opponents’ security relationships with Washington. Compounding this situation is Washington’s signal to its allies and partners that it is their own responsibility to safeguard territories that China covets.

Given Washington’s hands-off approach to Beijing’s creeping, covert warfare — designed to change facts on the ground slowly without having to fire a single shot — the relevance of U.S. security assurances to China’s neighbors risks becoming largely symbolic. In fact, the U.S. has sent out a contradictory message: It wants its allies to do more for their own security, yet it has scowled at Japan’s interest in acquiring offensive capability to deter aggression, asking Tokyo to consider the plan’s potential negative fallout in East Asia.

China’s aggressive stance thus poses difficult challenges for America’s allies and partners. For these states, the logical response to their security predicament would be to bolster defenses; build partnerships with each other to create a web of interlocking strategic relationships; and deepen their strategic engagement with Washington but without expecting the U.S. to come to their aid in a military contingency in which American interests are not at stake directly.

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

 (c) Washington Times, 2013.

Cheek-turners as leaders

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Brahma Chellaney, INDIA TODAY, September 2, 2013, Upfront column, page 10

George Washington famously said, “If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace—one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity—it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.” India, however, has stomached not just insults but also acts of cross-border aggression by Pakistan while continuing to sing peace to its tormentor, a smaller state by every yardstick. No amount of terror has convinced India to change course—not even the Pakistani-scripted attacks on symbols of Indian power, including Parliament, Red Fort, stock exchange, national capital, business capital and IT capital.

Each act of aggression has been greeted with inaction and stoic tolerance. For a succession of prime ministers, every new attack has effectively been more water under the bridge. Manmohan Singh—the weakest and most clueless of them—has put even the internationally unprecedented Mumbai terrorist siege behind him by delinking dialogue from terrorism and resuming cricketing ties.

If anyone questions this approach of turning the other cheek to every Pakistani (or Chinese) attack, government propagandists retort, “Do you want war?” This mirrors the classic argument of appeasers that the only alternative to appeasement is all-out war. As the proverbial extremists, appeasers are able to see only the extreme ends of the policy spectrum: Propitiation and open warfare.

UpfrontThe appeasers thus have presented India with a false choice: Either persevere with pusillanimity or risk a full-fledged war. This false choice, in which the only alternative to appeasement is military conflict, is an immoral and immoderate line of argument designed to snuff out any legitimate debate on rational options. There are a hundred different options between these two extremities that India must explore and pursue. Indeed, only a policy approach that avoids the extremes of abject appeasement and thoughtless provocation can have merit.

The appeasers also argue that neighbours cannot be changed. So, as Singh has said blithely, “a stable, peaceful, and prosperous Pakistan” is in India’s “own interest.” But political maps are never carved in stone, as the breaking away of South Sudan, East Timor and Eritrea has shown. Didn’t Indira Gandhi change political geography in 1971? In fact, the most-profound global events in recent history have been the disintegration of several states, including the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Even if India cannot change its neighbours, it must seek to change their behaviour so that it conforms to international norms.

Yet India has shied away from employing even non-coercive options to discipline a wayward Pakistan, which is waging low-intensity unconventional warfare. Rather than squeeze Pakistan economically and diplomatically, India is doing just the opposite. Similarly, India has stepped up its propitiation of China, in spite of facing a Sino-Pak pincer offensive centred on Jammu and Kashmir: Chinese incursions into Ladakh have increased in parallel with Pakistani ceasefire violations. Still, Singh is determined to meet his Pakistan counterpart in New York and later pay obeisance to an increasingly combative China on yet another trip to Beijing.

By going with an outstretched hand to adversaries still engaged in hostile actions, India repeatedly has got the short end of the stick. Nothing better illustrates India’s clap-when-given-a-slap approach than the way it portrayed the 19-km Chinese encroachment in April-May as a mere “acne” and tried to cover up the Pakistan Army’s role in the recent Indian soldiers’ killing. A hawk is defined in the U.S. as someone who seeks the use of force pre-emptively against another country. But in India—reflecting the ascendancy of cheek-turners and the country’s consequent descent as an exceptionally soft state—a hawk has come to signify someone who merely advises against turning the other cheek to a recalcitrant or renegade neighbour.

An easy way for Indian diplomacy to make the transition from timidity to prudence is to start spotlighting plain facts on cross-border aggression. Yet the Indian political class is so busy feathering its own nests that it is willing to even twist facts about how soldiers were martyred and suppress figures showing a rising pattern of Chinese incursions.

How does one explain that leaders, while shrewd and calculating in political life, have pursued a fundamentally naïve foreign policy that has shrunk India’s regional strategic space and brought its security under siege? The answer lies in one word: Corruption. Untrammelled corruption has spawned a political class too compromised to safeguard national interests. Appeasement thus thrives, with the ministry of external affairs effectively being turned into the ministry of external appeasement. India’s reputation as weak-kneed indeed has become the single most important factor inviting aggression, spurring a vicious circle.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author.

(c) India Today, 2013.

An insecurity trap of India’s own making

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Brahma Chellaney, Mint, August 15, 2013

India can no longer evade the question as to why its regional adversaries are able to carry out cross-border acts of aggression with impunity.

Have you thought of why India faces unending cross-border acts of aggression while persisting with a process of dialogue and peace building? Is it merely because India has scofflaw neighbours? Or can at least part of the blame be pinned on India’s pursuit of a foreign policy driven by neither pragmatism nor statecraft?

Take the challenge from Pakistan, a country 1/13th India’s size economically: After suffering each attack since the late 1990s, India has had the same debate, largely centred on the merit of staying put in the process of talks with Islamabad. Few ask the real questions: How many more attacks is India willing to bear? Is there no limit to India’s patience? What has outraged the country over the two recent back-to-back Pakistani acts of aggression — the suicide raid on the Indian consulate in Jalalabad and the ambush-killing of five soldiers along the line of control (LoC) — is more the government’s meek response and prevarications than the attacks themselves.

A key plank of Pakistan’s jihad strategy against India is deniability. Carry out an attack, deny involvement, keep India engaged in talks to serve as a continuing cover, and execute the next attack. This strategy can fool no one. But India’s political class is so corrupt and compromised that it has little time to look beyond self-interest.

Indian leaders are very protective of their own interests. Indeed they have an overinflated view of themselves. Their hard-headedness in serving personal interests contrasts with their faint-heartedness in shielding national interests. If they had spent just a quarter of their time on their primary duty — protection of national interest — the country wouldn’t be in the mess it is today, with the economy sinking, national security under siege, and pessimism reigning.

The foundation of India’s present weak-kneed foreign policy was actually laid between 1999 and 2004 by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who executed more policy U-turns than probably any other prime minister since independence. Vajpayee’s roller-coaster policy on Pakistan exacted a major toll on institutionalized policy-making, exposing India’s glaring inadequacy to set and unwaveringly pursue clear goals.

Under Vajpayee — who also surrendered India’s Tibet card in a 2003 Beijing visit — personal rather than professional characteristics defined India’s foreign policy. His shifting Pakistan stance traversed through Lahore, Kargil, Kandahar, Agra, and Parliament, before culminating in Islamabad on his second trip to Pakistan as prime minister. It was Vajpayee’s 2001 Agra invitation that helped Pervez Musharraf to come out of the international doghouse for staging a military coup.

In an operation with no parallel in modern world history, the Indian military was kept in war-ready position against Pakistan for 10 months, ostensibly to force Pakistan to dismantle its terrorist infrastructure. Yet, without accomplishing any objective, Vajpayee called off the costly, self-debilitating operation, which the then Navy chief later labelled the “most punishing mistake.” Worse still, Vajpayee during his 2004 Islamabad visit hailed as a big gain Pakistan’s commitment on paper to not let its territory to be used for cross-border terrorism — the very assurance Musharraf had given before Operation Parakram began.

Vajpayee’s swinging policy pendulum emboldened his successor, Manmohan Singh — a foreign-policy greenhorn — to pursue a blinkered approach that blended naiveté with appeasement, thereby inviting greater acts of aggression against India. Mistaking tactics for strategy, Singh has treated the process of engagement with Pakistan (and China) as an end in itself, losing sight of the purpose — putting an end to acts of aggression.

Singh’s fixation on quasi-failed Pakistan has paralleled Vajpayee’s quest to make peace with that implacable enemy. The Vajpayee and Singh eras will also be remembered for the corruption in public life, with scandals at times sought to be deflected through peace building with Pakistan. A famous son-in-law in each of the two eras came to symbolize unbridled corruption.

In this light, is it any surprise that personal and not professional characteristics have shaped India’s foreign policy for almost 15 years now? This trend marks goodbye to institutionalized policymaking.

Singh, of course, has taken appeasement to unmatched levels. In 2006 at Havana, he equated the exporter of terrorism with the victim of its terrorism, setting up the infamous and now-defunct joint anti-terror mechanism. Three years later at Sharm el-Sheikh, Singh included Baluchistan in the agenda — grist for the Pakistani propaganda mill that India was fomenting the insurrection there. This blunder allowed Pakistan to externalize the Baluch problem by turning its terrorism target, India, into the principal accused.

Even the savagery last January when Pakistani troops chopped two Indian soldiers and took away one severed head as a “trophy” failed to stop Singh from returning to business as usual with Pakistan, in spite of his own promise to the nation that it won’t be business as usual. The result is that Singh’s constant engagement of Pakistan has yielded uninterrupted Pakistani acts of military brutality and terror. In fact, the worst acts of cross-border aggression have occurred during Singh’s stint as prime minister.

Instead of dictating terms to Pakistan, India allows Pakistan to retain initiative. Each time India is caught by surprise, it does little more than react passively. Whereas Pakistan’s India policy has remained consistent for long, India’s ad hoc Pakistan policy continues to inflict self-injury.

Make no mistake: India has fashioned its own insecurity trap. To break out of it, it must pursue a clearheaded, goal-oriented foreign policy focused on an assertive promotion of national interests. That process can begin only if India stops looking at inter-country relations through rose-coloured glasses and establishes professional policymaking.

Brahma Chellaney is a professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

(c) Mint, 2013. 

The Battle for Water

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Portrait of Brahma Chellaney

A Project Syndicate column internationally distributed

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NEW YORK – The sharpening international geopolitical competition over natural resources has turned some strategic resources into engines of power struggle. Transnational water resources have become an especially active source of competition and conflict, triggering a dam-building race and prompting growing calls for the United Nations to recognize water as a key security concern.

Water is different from other natural resources. After all, there are substitutes for many resources, including oil, but none for water. Similarly, countries can import fossil fuels, mineral ores, and resources from the biosphere like fish and timber; but they cannot import water, which is essentially local, on a large scale and on a prolonged – much less permanent – basis. Water is heavier than oil, making it very expensive to ship or transport across long distances even by pipeline (which would require large, energy-intensive pumps).

The paradox of water is that it sustains life but can also cause death when it becomes a carrier of deadly microbes or takes the form of a tsunami, flash flood, storm, or hurricane. Many of the greatest natural disasters of our time – including, for example, the Fukushima catastrophe in 2011 – have been water-related.

Global warming is set to put potable-water supplies under increasing strain – even as oceans rise and the intensity and frequency of storms and other extreme weather events increase. Rapid economic and demographic expansion has already turned adequate access to potable water into a major issue across large parts of the world. Lifestyle changes, for example, have spurred increasing per capita water consumption, with rising incomes promoting dietary change, for example, especially higher consumption of meat, production of which is ten times more water-intensive, on average, than plant-based calories and proteins.

Today, the earth’s human population totals slightly more than seven billion, but the livestock population at any given time numbers more than 150 billion. The direct ecological footprint of the livestock population is larger than that of the human population, with rapidly rising global meat consumption becoming a key driver of water stress by itself.

Political and economic water wars are already being waged in several regions, reflected in dam construction on international rivers and coercive diplomacy or other means to prevent such works. Consider, for example, the silent water war triggered by Ethiopia’s dam building on the Blue Nile, which has elicited Egyptian threats of covert or overt military reprisals.

A report reflecting the joint judgment of US intelligence agencies warned last year that the use of water as a weapon of war or a tool of terrorism would become more likely in the next decade in some regions. The InterAction Council, comprising more than 30 former heads of state or government, has called for urgent action to prevent some countries battling severe water shortages from becoming failed states. The US State Department, for its part, has upgraded water to “a central US foreign policy concern.”

In many countries, inadequate local water availability is increasingly constraining decisions about where to set up new manufacturing facilities and energy plants. The World Bank estimates that such constraints are costing China 2.3% of GDP. China, however, is not yet in the category of water-stressed states. Those that are, stretching from South Korea and India to Egypt and Israel, are paying an even higher price for their water problems.

These countries already understand that water is a renewable but finite resource. Nature’s water-replenishment capacity is fixed, limiting the world’s usable freshwater resources to about 200,000 cubic kilometers. But the human population has almost doubled since 1970, while the global economy has grown even faster.

Major increases in water demand, however, are being driven not merely by economic and demographic growth, or by the additional energy, manufacturing, and food production to meet rising consumption levels, but also by the fact that the global population is getting fatter. The average body mass index (BMI) of humans has been increasing in the post-World War II period, but especially since the 1980’s, with the prevalence of obesity doubling in the past three decades.

Heavier citizens make heavier demands on natural resources, especially water and energy. The issue thus is not just about how many mouths there are to feed, but also how much excess body fat there is on the planet. For example, a study published in the British journal BMC Public Health has found that if the rest of the world had the same average body mass index as the US, this would be the equivalent of adding almost one billion people to the global population, greatly exacerbating water stress.

With the era of cheap, bountiful water having been replaced by increasing supply and quality constraints, many investors are beginning to view water as the new oil. The dramatic rise of the bottled-water industry since the 1990’s attests to the increasing commodification of the world’s most critical resource. Not only are water shortages likely to intensify and spread, but consumers also will increasingly have to pay more for their water supply.

This double whammy can be mitigated only by innovative water management and conservation, and by developing nontraditional supply sources. As in the oil and gas sector – where tapping unconventional sources, such as shale and tar sands, has proved a game changer – the water sector must adopt all unconventional options, including recycling wastewater and desalinating ocean and brackish waters.

In short, we must focus on addressing our water-supply problems as if our lives depended on it. In fact, they do.

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

(c) Project Syndicate, 2013.

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Wages of prolonged leadership drift

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Brahma Chellaney, The Economic Times, August 8, 2013

Two back-to-back attacks on Indian targets scripted by the Pakistani military since last weekend — a terror strike on the consulate in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and the ambush-killing of five soldiers on the Indian side of the line of control — highlight the escalating costs of India’s prolonged leadership drift. India has never before presented itself as being so directionless, weak, impotent and vulnerable. This same factor has created a sinking feeling economically, dragging the stock markets and the rupee down.

Clipboard01Ominously, Pakistan and China are now harassing and provoking India on opposite flanks of Jammu and Kashmir, as if they were acting in concert. Chinese military forays into Ladakh have increased in parallel to the Pakistani ceasefire violations this year.

The question whether the two “all-weather” allies are pursuing a pincer strategy to squeeze India must be examined in context of Beijing’s open use of the Kashmir card. With India deploying additional forces to guard Arunachal Pradesh, especially its critical Tawang Valley, China has focused on Kashmir, disputing India’s sovereignty over J&K, stepping up raids into Ladakh, and enlarging its strategic footprint in Pakistan-held Kashmir.

Yet time and again, when faced with an act of cross-border aggression, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s beleaguered government has turned the other cheek, as if India’s only options are appeasement or all-out war. To cover up its timidity, it has also sought to make light of virtually every onslaught.

In the way the external affairs minister — as if reading from the aggressor’s script — belittled the 19-km Chinese encroachment in April-May by calling it a “small little spot” of “acne”, the defence minister contradicted the army’s written statement implicating the Pakistani military directly in the latest killings. The defence minister has no independent way to assess what happened, yet he twisted the army’s version unconscionably for narrow political ends.

Make no mistake: The ministers in charge of national security — including an equally bungling home minister, whose heedless comments have come handy to Pakistan and its terrorist proxies like Hafiz Saeed — have emerged as millstones around the country’s neck.

In the U.S. and other important democracies, any act of aggression prompts a quick statement by the country’s top leader. But Singh typically responds by staying mum initially as he works to ensure the “peace” process is not derailed.

Had the PM forthrightly spoken up promptly like Sonia Gandhi — who said the latest killings mirrored Pakistan’s “blatant acts of deceit” — he would have shocked a nation that has come to regard him as irremediably meek. After all, he has put the internationally unprecedented Mumbai terrorist siege behind him.

Even when Pakistani troops raided Indian territory seven months ago and chopped two soldiers, taking away one severed head as a “trophy”, that savagery did not deter Singh from quickly returning to business-as-usual with Pakistan. Every Pakistani or Chinese act of aggression is just more water under the bridge for him.

The leadership deficit is exacting a serious toll on national security and Singh’s own credibility, with even markets and investors losing faith and the economy lurching towards a potential balance-of-payments crisis. Having been catapulted into public life by the 1991 BoP crisis, Singh now risks coming full circle.

Tellingly, Singh has greeted each cross-border ambush or intrusion with inaction and stoic tolerance, thereby emboldening India’s adversaries to up the ante. As a result, his Pakistan and China policies enjoy little public support, crimping the political space for any bold action by a government that, in any event, is now on its last legs.

It should not be forgotten that Singh has already granted Islamabad a series of unilateral political concessions, including delinking dialogue from terrorism. He has also pursued a host of goodwill gestures, including resuming cricketing ties and introducing a less-restricted visa regime for Pakistanis. All these moves have failed to tame Pakistani military belligerence.

The latest attacks actually accentuate India’s policy dilemma. India would like to do its bit to strengthen the hands of Pakistan’s civilian government, including through a genuine peace-building process. But its efforts can prove meaningful only if the Pakistani government reclaims authority from the powerful military to run the country’s foreign policy, especially its India policy.

Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has made little effort to assert such authority. In fact, throughout his political career during which he has thrice served as PM, Sharif has danced on both sides of the civil-military faultline. Sharif is no sharif. He rose to prominence in politics as the military’s front man before eventually running afoul of the military. The lesson he has learned is not to clash with the military again.

So, with the military effectively running Pakistan’s India policy, whom can India engage to help chart a new direction to bilateral ties? Singh, in his gushy chase of peace and open borders with Pakistan, has ducked this question, even though he risks making the same mistake with Sharif that his predecessor, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, did in 1999 when he admitted that his peace bus to Lahore was “hijacked” to wage war in Kargil.

The hard fact is that subcontinental peace hinges on Pakistan’s internal dynamics — on the ability of its government and people to correct the heavily skewed civil-military relations. Unless that happens, India-Pakistan dialogue cannot yield a breakthrough. Indeed, without the structural correction, such dialogue will only encourage the military to undermine that process through direct or surrogate acts of aggression.

(c) The Economic Times, 2013.

Japan’s security dilemma is tied to the U.S. dilemma

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BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY  Japan Times  August 7, 2013

Japan’s alliance with the United States remains the centerpiece of its strategic policy, yet Washington appears increasingly reluctant to get drawn into Sino-Japanese territorial disputes. If anything, the U.S. seems concerned that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe may view U.S. treaty guarantees as a shield for Japan to confront an increasingly assertive China in the East China Sea.

The hard fact is that Washington seems as concerned about a muscular China as it is about a revisionist Japan.

The U.S. has a major stake in maintaining mutually beneficial relationships with both Japan and China. Although Japan remains under the U.S. security umbrella, China — as a permanent U.N. Security Council member, an emerging great power, and the biggest buyer of U.S. Treasuries — matters more to U.S. interest now than possibly any other Asian county.

In fact, the more geopolitical heft China has accumulated and the more assertive it has become in pushing its territorial claims with its neighbors, the more reluctant the U.S. appears to be to take sides in the Asian territorial disputes, although they involve its strategic allies or partners, with Beijing seeking to change the status quo by force.

Washington has made it amply clear that despite its “pivot” toward Asia, it will be neither willing to put Americans at risk to defend its allies’ territorial claims against China nor act in ways that could damage its close political and economic engagement with Beijing.

After all, the “pivot” is intended not to contain China but to undergird the permanence of America’s role as Asia’s balancing power — an objective that has led Washington to tread a course of tacit neutrality on territorial disputes between China and its neighbors. The U.S. has been willing to speak up only when Chinese actions threaten to impinge on its interests, such as ensuring freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.

To be sure, the U.S. has an interest in preventing the emergence of a Sino-centric Asia. But it has no interest in getting entangled in Asia’s territorial feuds. If it can, it would like to find a way to support Japan without alienating China, a tough balancing act.

America’s tightrope-walk imperative seemingly has encouraged China to up the ante against Japan through a campaign of attrition over the control of the Senkakus. Incursions by Chinese ships into the five uninhabited islands’ territorial waters have become almost a daily affair, raising the risks of unintended military escalation. Yet China is unlikely to back off from this confrontation.

Chinese military planners have probably calculated that in a conflict confined to China and Japan in the East China Sea, with U.S. interests not directly at stake, America is unlikely to threaten devastation of China.

The dilemma for the U.S., however, is that if it did little to come to the aid of Japan in this scenario, it would seriously damage the credibility of American “extended deterrence” globally. That is why Washington is intent on averting a Sino-Japanese military conflict.

America’s dilemma, however, means that Japan must assume greater responsibility to protect itself, without being unduly dependent on the U.S. After a decade in which Japanese military spending slumped more than 5 percent while China’s jumped 270 percent, this means making investments to build requisite defense capabilities to ward off aggression.

In addition to mitigating its structural economic problems, this task, paradoxically, entails recourse to the very factor that has instilled disquiet in some quarters — Japanese revisionism. Japan’s U.S.-imposed antiwar Constitution must be changed to allow its “Self-Defense Forces” to become a full-fledged military and to acquire offensive weapon systems.

With 6,800 far-flung islands, Japan needs a more credible air-sea deterrent capability, including first-strike weapon systems like cruise missiles and strategic bombers as well as amphibious infantry forces that can defend the outlying islands. Japan also must accelerate moves to create a single, unified command for its army — the Ground Self-Defense Forces — which, during U.S. occupation, were deliberately divided into several regional commands to keep them institutionally weak as a voice in policymaking.

The U.S. — to help undergird its long-standing role in Asia — has an important stake in maintaining forward military deployments in Japan, especially in Okinawa. Yet Tokyo has legitimate reasons to worry that the U.S. might hesitate to militarily defend Japan if it is attacked by China over the Senkaku dispute.

Then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s declaration that the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty applies to the Senkaku Islands does not mean that if China employs military force in the dispute, the U.S. would take all necessary actions, including the use of its military capability, to repulse the Chinese action.

After the staggering cost in blood and treasure exacted by the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, a war-weary U.S. has absolutely no desire to get involved in another war, especially one where its interests are not directly at stake.

Indeed, Americans are not just war-weary, they are also war-wary. Significantly, the U.S. has taken no position on the Senkaku sovereignty issue.

Put bluntly, Japan must not overly rely on America for protection against China. In fact, the more powerful China grows, the less Japan can depend on U.S. security guarantees. The logical response to its security predicament is for Japan to strengthen its own conventional deterrent capability.

Japan, territorially, is a status quo power vis-a-vis China. Given that defense is always easier than offense, Japan, with more robust air and sea assets, can give China a bloody nose if it were attacked.

As for the U.S., the changing geopolitical landscape in the Asia-Pacific is diminishing the importance of its security alliance with Japan. With the U.S.-China equation at the center of the geopolitics in the Asia-Pacific, the obsolescence of the U.S.-Japan alliance as the strategic anchor of regional stability is now conspicuous, despite occasional claims to the contrary. In the coming years, Japan will find itself increasingly buffeted by developments in the U.S.-China relationship.

China will clearly prefer a Japan that remains dependent on America for its security than a Japan that plays a more independent role. The fact, however, is that the post-1945 system erected by the U.S. is more suited to keep Japan as an American protectorate than to allow Japan to effectively aid the central U.S. objective in the Asia-Pacific — a stable balance of power.

A subtle U.S. policy shift that encourages Tokyo to cut its dependence on America and do more for its own security can assist Japan in building a more secure future for itself that helps block the rise of a Sino-centric Asia.

Whatever Washington decides, it is past time for Japan to get serious about bolstering its defenses, reasserting the right to collective self-defense as permitted under international law, and forging countervailing geostrategic partnerships with like-minded Asian states.

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

(c) The Japan Times, 2013.

Beijing works incessantly to redraw political boundaries

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By Brahma Chellaney, Washington Times, August 6, 2013

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China’s furtive, incremental encroachments into neighboring countries’ borderlands have emerged as a key destabilizing element in Asia. While China’s navy and a part of its air force focus on asserting revanchist territorial and maritime claims in the South China and East China seas, its army has been active in the mountainous borderlands with India, trying to alter the line of control bit by bit.

Beijing’s favored frontier strategy is pivoted on “salami slicing.” This involves a steady progression of small actions, none of which serves as a casus belli by itself, yet which over time lead cumulatively to a strategic transformation in China’s favor.

By relying on stealth aggression, China’s strategy aims to seriously limit the options of the targeted countries by confounding their deterrence plans and making it difficult for them to devise proportionate or effective counteractions.

Changing the territorial status quo has been the unfinished business of the People’s Republic of China since its founding in 1949. The early, forcible absorption of the sprawling Xinjiang and Tibetan plateau more than doubled the landmass of China.

This was followed by the advent of the earliest incarnation of the salami-slicing strategy, which led to China gaining control, step by step between 1954 and 1962, of the Switzerland-size Aksai Chin plateau of the original princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. An emboldened China then went on to seize the Paracel Islands in 1974, the Johnson Reef in 1988, the Mischief Reef in 1995 and, most recently, the Scarborough Shoal in 2012.

At the core of the challenge posed by China to Asian security today is its lack of respect for existing frontier lines. In other words, China is still working to redraw political boundaries.

Along land frontiers, surreptitious attacks usually precede its salami-slicing. The aim is to start eating into enemy land like giant rodents and thereby facilitate the slice. 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 use of ethnic Han pastoralists to drive Indian herdsmen from their traditional pasturelands and open the path to military encroachment.

To assert its claims in the South China and East China seas, the incremental tools China employs range from granting hydrocarbon-exploration leases to asserting expansive fishing rights — all designed to advance its territorial and maritime claims.

In the East China Sea, China has employed paramilitary agencies in a campaign of attrition against Japan over the Senkaku Islands — an offensive that has already succeeded in shaking the status quo by making the rest of the world recognize the existence of a dispute. Taking on Japan, its former occupier and historical rival, is part of China’s larger search for new seabed resources and for strategic ascendancy in the western Pacific by breaking out of what it perceives to be the “first island chain” — a string that includes the Senkakus, Taiwan and some islands controlled by Vietnam and the Philippines.

China’s aim in the South China Sea is to slowly but surely legitimize its presence in the 80 percent of the sea it now claims formally. Through repeated and growing acts, China is etching a lasting presence in these zones.

Among the ways Beijing has sought to establish new “facts” on the ground in the South China Sea is to lease hydrocarbon and fishing territories inside other disputant states’ 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zones, as defined by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Such leases are designed to circumscribe the treaty-granted economic rights of other claimant states while expanding China’s control of the region’s oil and gas wealth.

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. 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 usually is careful to slice very thinly so as to avoid any dramatic action that could become a cause of war. Indeed, it has shown a knack of disaggregating any action into several parts and then pursuing each element separately in such a manner as to allow the different pieces to eventually fall in place.

This shrewdness helps to keep its opponents off balance and in a bind on how to respond. In fact, as a skillful salami-slicer that camouflages offense as defense, China acts in ways not only to undercut its opponents’ deterrence, but also to cast the burden of starting a war on them. Any targeted state is presented with a strategic Hobson’s choice: either endure the loss or face a dangerous and costly war with an emerging great power.

China’s tactics and strategy thus pose an growing challenge to several of its neighbors, which face a deepening dilemma over how to thwart the aggression. Exchanging notes with each other — and with the United States, the geographically nonresident Asian power — may be necessary to find ways to try and stop this creeping, covert warfare. After all, China’s multipronged actions, cumulatively, carry the potential of fundamentally altering the Asian power dynamics to shape a Sino-centric region.

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

(c) The Washington Times, 2013.

India’s Mountain Strike Farce

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BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Wall Street Journal

The Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) in training.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government has announced the formation of a “mountain strike corps” to defend India’s Himalayan border with China. With its 50,000 troops and action-movie name, the new outfit might seem like the muscular response New Delhi needs to counter this summer’s spate of Chinese border incursions. But the announcement represents another example of Indian strategic timidity in the face of Chinese aggression.

The Chinese army’s Himalayan campaign is a stealthier counterpart to Beijing’s naval aggression in the South and East China seas. Beijing is pursuing a strategy of “salami slicing”—a steady progression of small actions, none of which serves as a casus belli by itself, that over time leads to a strategic transformation in China’s favor.

Nuclear-armed India, despite its size and capability, has been paralyzed in responding to this strategy. Time and again Mr. Singh’s beleaguered government has chosen concession over confrontation, as if India’s only options are appeasement or all-out war.

This weakness was on full display in April and May when the Chinese army seized land inside India’s Ladakh region. China withdrew its encamped troops only after three weeks of negotiation ended in virtual Indian capitulation. In exchange for China’s withdrawal from territory it had no right to occupy, India demolished a line of defensive fortifications in Ladakh’s Chumar area and ended forward patrols in the area. It also agreed to consider a Chinese-drafted “Border Defense Cooperation Agreement.”

That agreement would replace more equitable 1993, 1996 and 2005 border accords with one that ratifies China’s preferred approach to territorial disputes: What is ours is ours and what is yours is negotiable.

Encouraged by this bloodless victory, China has since upped the ante. Its military provocations include multiple raids and other forays across the Himalayan frontier, the world’s longest disputed border. On June 17, a People’s Liberation Army platoon raided Chumar, smashing up Indian surveillance and other equipment and taking away security cameras.

The Indian government kept China’s raid under wraps for three weeks for fear that it would provoke public pressure to cancel its defense minister’s early July visit to Beijing. Despite that visit going ahead, four separate PLA incursions into Chumar have been reported this month alone.

To cover up its timidity, Mr. Singh’s government flaunts its decision to establish the mountain strike corps—which should have come several years ago and without media hype. As China develops and deploys capabilities quietly, New Delhi advertises any deterrence move, however nascent.

India will need several years to assemble the new strike corps. Mr. Singh has already betrayed his trademark meekness by deciding to deploy the corps not in a region vulnerable to a surprise Chinese military blitzkrieg—such as the state of Arunachal Pradesh, claimed by Beijing since 2006—but in provinces such as West Bengal, Jharkhand and Assam that do not border China. Thus New Delhi allows Beijing to dictate the terms of the bilateral relationship.

India should fix its Himalayan policy by first (and quietly) redirecting its strike forces toward more vulnerable areas. These include Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh, two highly strategic Buddhist regions located on opposite ends of the Himalayas.  These areas are not unfamiliar territory for India’s military. In fact it was only after Mr. Singh replaced Ladakh’s army troops with border police in 2010 that China gained an opening to step up incursions.

Second, New Delhi should reject the recent border cooperation agreement as a basis for future negotiations. At the moment India is doing just the opposite, offering comments and suggestions on China’s imposed draft accord. In Beijing, Indian Defense Minister A.K. Anthony even consented to a joint statement in which New Delhi “agreed to the early conclusion of negotiations” over the Chinese draft.

India should instead pursue an agreement based on the principle of mutual respect of status quo on territory and river-water flows. After all, China is seeking to change not only the line of control but also the transboundary flows of rivers by building cascades of dams on them. As the downstream nation, India is particularly vulnerable to a water war. More than 300 billion cubic meters of surface water runs directly from Chinese territory into India each year.

India’s current China policy illustrates how meekness attracts bullying. The more timorous India has been, the more belligerent China has become. Until India gets a government willing to defend the country’s rights, China will continue to stage cross-border incursions to create new facts on the ground and build new dams to appropriate the resources of shared rivers.

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

 (c) The Wall Street Journal, 2013.