About Chellaney

Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

India’s Nuclear Charade Unravels

Posted on June 29, 2011 by Chellaney

Nuclear chickens come home to roost

Brahma Chellaney
Mint, June 29, 2011

During the more than three-year-long process to finalize the terms of the nuclear deal with the US, the prime minister kept meretriciously reassuring the nation that he would operationalize the deal only after securing a broad political consensus in support. He even pledged: “Once the process is over, I will bring it before Parliament and abide by the House.”

Yet, he completely bypassed Parliament. And instead of any attempt at consensus building, the nation witnessed a polarizing single-mindedness to clinch the deal at any cost.

Now, with several of Singh’s key assurances to the nation falling by the wayside, the nuclear chickens have come home to roost. The Nuclear Suppliers Group’s (NSG’s) new ban on enrichment and reprocessing (ENR) equipment transfers fulfils one of the last remaining conditions of America’s Hyde Act, highlighting the rising costs for India of a deal whose much-trumpeted benefits are likely to remain elusive. India also has ended up with no legally binding fuel-supply guarantee, despite its bitter experience over the US-built Tarapur plant. And it has secured no right to take corrective measures even if the US again unilaterally terminated cooperation, as did in the 1970s.

That the NSG granted India a clean, unrestricted waiver in 2008 is a myth the politically besieged Singh government created to save face in public. In truth, it had signalled to the US earlier that it could live with a conditional waiver as long as the conditions were not embarrassingly conspicuous. Indian diplomacy sought to ensure that prohibitions on nuclear test and ENR transfers remained implicit, or else the PM would stand exposed at home.

In this light, the NSG, amid a tussle between non-proliferation purists and pragmatists in its ranks, arrived at a waiver whose language was politically palatable to New Delhi but whose basic terms meshed with the stipulations in the Hyde Act and some of the purists’ demands. The waiver text incorporated several layers of riders — some explicit and some implicit — to the decision to open civil nuclear trade with India.

While the bar on Indian nuclear testing was imposed by linking it to the NSG Guidelines’ paragraph 16, which deals with the consequences of “an explosion of a nuclear device,” the prohibition on “transfers of sensitive exports” was fashioned by specifying that such transfers will “remain subject to paragraphs 6 and 7 of Guidelines.” Paragraphs 6 and 7 incorporate a presumption of denial of sensitive items. This linkage to the two paragraphs was devised as an interim step until the NSG formalized a ban on ENR and other sensitive sales.

Now last week’s formal ban — which, in effect, singles out India — meshes with the Hyde Act’s bar on the transfer of ENR and heavy-water equipment to India, other than for a multinational or US-supervised facility. It also jibes both with the Hyde Act’s call for a NSG-wide ban and with the US-India 123 Agreement, which excludes ENR and heavy water equipment transfers by saying they “will be subject to the Parties’ respective applicable laws, regulations and license policies.” Even the Indo-French and Indo-Russian civil nuclear agreements do not include ENR and other sensitive transfers in their scope of cooperation.

India, which committed itself to support NSG moves to halt the spread of ENR technologies “to states that do not have them,” has itself become a NSG target. It will, moreover, have to build a costly new internationally safeguarded reprocessing facility without getting the smallest component for it from overseas.

The NSG ban highlights another fundamental reality about India that is also embedded in the Hyde Act, the 123 Agreement and the Safeguards Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency: Apart from retaining nuclear facilities in the military realm, India is being treated, for all intents and purposes, as a non-nuclear-weapons state and thus subject to the non-proliferation conditions applicable to such states, but with its non-membership in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) carrying additional penalties.

But the ban’s real effect is to expose New Delhi’s charade that it secured a clean, unconditional NSG waiver. Disturbingly, the government expended greater efforts to pull the wool over the Indian public’s eyes than to stick to Singh’s assurances to the nation.

Consider another telling fact: Although the deal was ratified by the US Congress on October 1, 2008, Singh has yet to make even a statement in Parliament on how its final terms square with his August 17, 2006, assurances to the nation. What can he tell Parliament when the US Congress has removed his government’s last possible fig leaf?

Through the ratification legislation — the US-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Non-Proliferation Enhancement Act (NCANEA) — Congress actually busted several myths peddled by New Delhi. First, NCANEA makes explicit that, “Nothing in the [123] Agreement shall be construed to supersede the legal requirements of the Henry J. Hyde Act.” Second, NCANEA stipulates that the US promise of uninterrupted fuel supply is a “political,” not legal, commitment. It cannot be anything else because the 123 Agreement itself confers an open-ended right on the US to suspend or terminate cooperation. And third, the final deal grants America specific rights, but spells out only India’s obligations.

More fundamentally, the deal has come to symbolize the travails of the Singh government — scandals, broken promises, malfeasance, poor public accountability, and the resort to casuistry to camouflage reality. The cash-for-votes scandal in Parliament set the stage for the other scams that have followed.

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

Deception by the Boatload

Posted on June 17, 2011 by Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney
CNN World/”Global Public Square”

China’s announcement that its first aircraft carrier is ready to set sail as early as the end of this month has refocused attention on the country’s naval ambitions. So, too, has the Pakistani defense minister’s disclosure that his country recently asked China to start building a naval base at its strategically positioned port of Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea.

Both revelations underscore China’s preference for strategic subterfuge.

After it bought the 67,500-ton, Soviet-era Varyag carrier — still little more than a hull when the Soviet Union collapsed — China repeatedly denied that it had any intention to refit it for naval deployment. For example, Zhang Guangqin, Deputy Director of the Chinese State Commission for Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense, said in 2005 that the Varyag was not being modified for military use. However, work to refit the carrier had already begun in Dalian, China’s main shipyard.

In order to deflect attention from the real plan, the state-run media reported plans to turn the Varyag into a “floating casino” near Macau. And, to lend credence to that claim, the two smaller Soviet-era aircraft carriers that were purchased with the Varyag in 1998-2000 were developed into floating museums.

The first official acknowledgement that China was turning the Varyag into a fully refurbished, deployable aircraft carrier came this month, just when it was almost ready to set sail. And the acknowledgement came from General Chen Bingde, the chief of the People’s Liberation Army, in an interview with Global Times, the Communist Party’s hawkish mouthpiece.

Subterfuge is also apparent in China’s plans at Gwadar, where a Chinese-built but still-underused commercial port opened in 2007. From the time construction of the port began, Gwadar was widely seen as representing China’s first strategic foothold in the Arabian Sea, as part of its strategy to assemble a “string of pearls” along the Indian Ocean rim. It was known that Gwadar, which overlooks Gulf shipping lanes and is near the Iran border, would eventually double as a naval base. Yet, all along, China continued to insist that Gwadar’s only role was commercial.

Not surprisingly, then, Pakistani Defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar’s public comments about a naval base at Gwadar deeply embarrassed China’s government. At the end of a recent visit to Beijing with Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, Mukhtar reported that the Chinese government was more than happy to oblige whatever requests for assistance the Pakistani side made, including reaching an agreement to take over operation of the Gwadar port after the existing contract with a Singaporean government company expires. China also made a gift to Pakistan of 50 JF-17 fighter jets.

More importantly, Mukhtar disclosed that Pakistan had asked China to begin building the naval base. “We would be…grateful to the Chinese government if a naval base is…constructed at the site of Gwadar for Pakistan,” he announced in a statement. He later told a British newspaper in an interview: “We have asked our Chinese brothers to please build a naval base at Gwadar.”

After Pakistan revealed the plans for a naval base, China responded with equivocation, saying that “this issue was not touched upon” during the visit. Given China’s proclivity for strategic stealth, even its work on the Gwadar port was launched quietly. Moreover, China does not wish to deepen the concerns that it aroused in Asia last year by openly discarding Deng Xiaoping’s dictum, tao guang yang hui (“conceal ambitions and hide claws”). On a host of issues, including its territorial claims in the South China Sea and against Japan and India, China spent 2010 staking out a more muscular position.

On these issues, too, the gap between Chinese officials’ words and actions is revealing. For example, China persisted with its unannounced rare-earth embargo against Japan for seven weeks while continuing to claim in public that no export restrictions had been imposed. Like its denials last year about deploying Chinese troops in Pakistani-held Kashmir to build strategic projects, China has demonstrated a troubling propensity to obscure the truth.

The Global Times, however, has not been shy about advertising China’s interest in establishing naval bases overseas. In a recent editorial, “China Needs Overseas Bases for Global Role,” the newspaper urged the outside world to “understand China’s need to set up overseas military bases.”

The insurrection against Pakistani rule in the mineral-rich southern province of Baluchistan may impede China’s plan to turn Gwadar into an energy transshipment hub to transport Gulf and African oil to western China by pipeline. But the insurgency is no barrier to China’s use of Gwadar to project power in the Middle East and East Africa, and against peninsula India. Indeed, to get into the Great Power maritime game, China needs Gwadar to redress its main weakness – the absence of a naval anchor in the Indian Ocean region, where it plans to have an important military presence.

What was touted as a floating casino is now being launched as the floating centerpiece of China’s growing naval prowess. In fact, with a second and larger aircraft carrier currently under construction, it may not be long before China displays its naval capabilities by dispatching a carrier battle group to the Indian Ocean – if not basing one at Gwadar.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut and the forthcoming Water: Asia’s New Battlefield.

Three lessons from Chicago trial

Posted on June 12, 2011 by Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney
The Economic Times, June 13, 2011

The verdict in the Chicago trial, which coincided with CIA Director Leon Panetta’s unannounced departure for Pakistan, holds three important lessons for India.

The first lesson is that it was wrong on New Delhi’s part to expect the U.S. to try and legally corner the ISI for its role in 26/11 or to help bring to justice the perpetrators of those grisly attacks. The U.S. has its own foreign-policy interests and compulsions. Since its daring raid that killed Osama bin Laden, it has sent four high-level delegations to Islamabad, including one led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The flurry of visits has been intended to repair its relationship with — not discipline — Pakistan.

In fact, Panetta, who is due to replace Robert Gates as defence secretary on July 1, delivered a positive message to Islamabad that the U.S. wants to rebuild a trusting, constructive relationship. Washington may be unhappy with Pakistan’s counterterrorism efforts. But the last thing it wants to do is to spotlight the ISI’s terror role in a third country, India, when the CIA needs the ISI more than ever to cut a peace deal with the Afghan Taliban, whose top leadership is ensconced in Pakistan.

The second lesson is about the Chicago trial itself. The prosecution — the Federal Bureau of Investigation — had a subtle political focus. It was more interested in securing Tahawwur Hussain Rana’s conviction on the Denmark-related charge than on the more-serious 26/11 charge. Furthermore, the prosecution directly and through its star witness David Headley sought to shield the ISI brass from getting linked with 26/11.

A junior ISI functionary, one Major Iqbal who served as Headley’s handler, was indicted and made the fall guy, without any effort by the prosecutors to delve into the issue whether the ISI’s leadership was in the loop on the 26/11 operation. Headley actually contradicted himself in his testimony, claiming the ISI brass was not aware of the operation, yet admitting that Iqbal’s commanding officer and the wing of the ISI they worked for knew about the 26/11 planning.

Although the case helped highlight the impunity with which serving and retired Pakistani military officers have been aiding Lashkar-e-Taiba, the prosecution was reluctant to go beyond the role played by Iqbal. The prosecution also declined to examine the military antecedents of a Lashkar leader, Sajid Mir, who was caught on tape directing the killings in Mumbai by phone during the terrorist strikes.

The prosecution, of course, did not examine the key question — whether 26/11 could have been prevented had the FBI stopped Headley’s terrorist activities in time? Despite having received six warnings over seven years about Headley’s Lashkar connections, the FBI did not arrest him because he was working as a U.S. agent. Headley, a former drug trafficker with a history of previous arrests in the 1980s and 1990s, reportedly continued to work as a paid U.S. informant even beyond 26/11 until evidence surfaced in October 2009 of his involvement in a plot to target a Danish newspaper that had published cartoons of Prophet Muhammad.

It was thus no accident that the prosecution buried material evidence about Headley’s ties with U.S. law-enforcement agencies. This has left the key issue hanging: Was 26/11 preventable?

The verdict may reopen old wounds between India and the U.S. over Headley, including the failure to arrest him in time or share with India sooner the intelligence the U.S. had on him. And even after he was arrested in Chicago in 2009, it took months before America granted Indian investigators limited access to question him. Headley’s plea bargain has saved him the death penalty and extradition to India.

The 26/11 acquittal sets back the plaintiffs’ case against ISI in the New York civil suit —in which the ISI chief has been named as a defendant — and facilitates Islamabad’s bid to strike a deal with Washington in that matter.

The third lesson is about India’s own lack of response to 26/11. India did not take the smallest of small steps after 26/11. Instead it responded by fashioning a new counterterrorism tool — dossier bombing. It also delivered lists of Pakistan-based terrorists.

Can such bureaucratic exercises make Pakistan reassess its strategic calculus and abandon a foreign policy that relies on jihadist adventurism? The answer came recently from the Pakistani foreign secretary, who publicly mocked the dossiers as interesting “literature” but not evidence. In fact, after bin Laden’s killing, he heaped scorn on India’s demand that Islamabad arrest and prosecute all the 26/11 perpetrators, calling the demand “a familiar line,” “outdated,” and a line of thinking “mired in a mindset that is neither realistic nor productive.”

Islamabad indeed has had the last laugh: The Pakistan-based masterminds of 26/11 remain untouched and the terrorist-training camps near the border with India continue to operate, yet New Delhi has returned to square one by resuming political dialogue at all levels. U.S. Assistant Secretary Robert Blake recently thanked India for resuming “full comprehensive dialogue” with Pakistan by dropping both its conditions — “that those who had been responsible for the Mumbai bombings had to be brought to justice and the trials had to be completed; and then that there had to be visible progress by the Pakistanis to stop cross-border infiltration.”

The role of the Pakistani state agencies, including the ISI and navy, in scripting 26/11 is clear. It is time the culpability of Indian decision-makers in letting Pakistan off the hook over 26/11 came under public spotlight.

(c) The Economic Times, 2011.

China’s Strategic Subterfuge

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Chellaney

By Brahma Chellaney
Mint, June 10, 2011

The announcement that China’s first aircraft carrier is ready to set sail as early as this month-end has refocused attention on the larger Chinese naval ambitions. So also has the Pakistani defence minister’s disclosure that his country recently asked China to start building a naval base at the strategically positioned Gwadar on the Arabian Sea. More important, the dual revelations underscore China’s preference for subterfuge in making strategic moves.

After it bought the Soviet-era, 67,500-tonne Varyag carrier— which was not fully complete when the Soviet Union dismembered— China repeatedly denied it had any intention to refit it for naval deployment. For example, Zhang Guangqin, vice-director of the Chinese State Commission of Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense, said in 2005 that Varyag was not being modified for military use. However, work to refit Varyag had already begun earlier in Dalian, China’s main shipyard.

Yet, to deflect attention from the real plan, the idea to turn Varyag into a “floating casino” off Macau was put forward through the state-run media. And to lend credence to this idea, the smaller two of the three Soviet-era aircraft carriers, including Varyag, bought by China during 1998-2000 were developed into floating museums—one of them briefly before the carrier itself was scrapped. The first official acknowledgement that China was turning Varyag not into a floating casino, but into a fully refurbished, deployable aircraft carrier came this week, just when it became almost ready to set sail.

Subterfuge is also apparent in China’s additional plans at Gwadar, where a Chinese-built but still-underused commercial port opened in 2007. From the time it began constructing the port, Gwadar was widely seen as representing China’s first strategic foothold in the Arabian Sea and being part of its strategy to assemble a “string of pearls” along the Indian Ocean rim. It was known that Gwadar, which overlooks Gulf shipping lanes, would eventually double up as a naval base. Yet all along, Beijing continued to deny Gwadar had any role other than commercial.

So Pakistani defence minister Ahmed Mukhtar’s public comments on a naval base at Gwadar deeply embarrassed Beijing. Mukhtar accompanied Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani during a recent trip to Beijing. At the end of the visit, Mukhtar reported that whatever requests for assistance the Pakistani side made, the Chinese government was more than happy to oblige, including agreeing to take over operation of the Gwadar port upon expiry of an existing contract with a Singaporean government company. Beijing also decided to gift Pakistan 50 JF-17 fighter jets.

More important, Mukhtar disclosed that Pakistan had asked China to begin building the naval base. “We would be…grateful to the Chinese government if a naval base is…constructed at the site of Gwadar for Pakistan,” he announced in a statement. He later told a British newspaper in an interview: “We have asked our Chinese brothers to please build a naval base at Gwadar.”

After Pakistan spilled the beans on the planned naval base, Beijing responded with equivocation, saying, “this issue was not touched upon” during the visit. Given China’s proclivity to make strategic moves by stealth, even its work on the Gwadar port was launched quietly. So how can work on a naval base be publicized in advance?

China also does not wish to deepen the concerns it aroused in Asia last year by openly discarding Deng Xiaoping’s dictum, tao guang yang hui (conceal ambitions and hide claws). On a host of issues, including its territorial claims in the South China Sea and against India and Japan, China spent 2010 staking out a more-muscular position.

No less revealing was the gap between China’s words and the reality. For example, it persisted with its unannounced rare-earth embargo against Japan for seven weeks while continuing to blithely claim the opposite in public—that no export restriction had been imposed. Like its denials last year on two other subjects— the deployment of Chinese troops in Pakistani-held Kashmir and its use of Chinese convicts as labourers on projects in some countries too poor and weak to protest—China has demonstrated a troubling propensity to obscure the truth.

The Chinese Communist Party’s hawkish mouthpiece, Global Times, however, has not been shy about advertising China’s interest in setting up naval bases overseas. In a recent editorial titled, “China needs overseas bases for global role,” the newspaper urged the outside world to “understand the need of China to set up overseas military bases”.

The insurrection in the mineral-rich, southern province of Baluchistan against Pakistani rule may impede Beijing’s plan to turn Gwadar into an energy trans-shipment hub transporting Gulf and African oil to western China by pipeline. But the protracted insurgency is no barrier to China’s plan to use Gwadar to project power in the Gulf and eastern Africa and against peninsula India. Indeed, to get into the great-power maritime game, it needs Gwadar to plug its main weakness—the absence of a naval anchor in the Indian Ocean region, where it plans to have important military presence.

In fact, with a second and larger aircraft carrier currently under construction, it may not be long before China shows off its naval prowess by dispatching a carrier battle group to the Indian Ocean.

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

Comments are welcome at theirview@livemint.com

China-Pakistan strategic ties deepen

Posted on June 9, 2011 by Chellaney

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
Japan Times, June 9, 2011

After the daring U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden in his hideout next to Pakistan’s premier military academy, Islamabad has openly played its China card to caution Washington against pushing it too hard. And China has been more than eager to show itself as Pakistan’s staunchest ally.

China’s deepening strategic penetration of Pakistan — and the joint plans to set up new oil pipelines, railroads, and even a naval base on the Arabian Sea that will serve as the first overseas location offering support to the Chinese navy for out-of-area missions — are spurring greater U.S. and Indian concerns. For India, the implications of the growing strategic nexus are particularly stark because both China and Pakistan refuse to accept the territorial status quo and lay claim to large tracts of Indian land.

An influx of up to 11,000 soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army into Pakistan’s Himalayan regions of Gilgit and Baltistan to supposedly work on new projects, including a railroad, an upgraded highway, dams and secret tunnels, has raised concerns that those strategic borderlands could come under the Chinese sway. The predominantly Shiite Gilgit and Baltistan are in Kashmir, where the borders of China, India and Pakistan converge.

The PLA influx has resulted, according to India, in the presence of Chinese troops close to Pakistan’s line of control in Kashmir with India. This presents India with a two-front theater in the event of a war with either country.

Despite the bin Laden affair, the United States is seeking to repair its relationship with — not discipline — Pakistan, the largest recipient of American aid. Yet Pakistan and China have made a public show of their close strategic bonds.

Within days of bin Laden’s killing, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani traveled to Beijing. The accompanying defense minister, Ahmed Mukhtar, reported that whatever requests for assistance the Pakistani side made, the Chinese government was more than happy to oblige, including agreeing to take over operation of the strategically positioned but underused port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea upon expiry of an existing contract with a Singaporean government company. Beijing also decided to gift Pakistan 50 JF-17 fighter jets.

More important, Mukhtar disclosed that Pakistan had asked China to begin building a naval base at Gwadar, where Beijing funded and built the port. “We would be … grateful to the Chinese government if a naval base is … constructed at the site of Gwadar for Pakistan,” he said in a statement. He later told a British newspaper in an interview: “We have asked our Chinese brothers to please build a naval base at Gwadar.”

Mukhtar’s comments on the naval base embarrassed Beijing, which wants no publicity.

China usually makes strategic moves by stealth. It launched work even on the Gwadar port quietly. So how can plans on a naval base be publicized?

After Pakistan spilled the beans on the Gwadar naval base, China responded with equivocation, saying “this issue was not touched upon” during the visit. But the Chinese Communist Party’s hawkish Global Times was not shy about advertising China’s interest in setting up bases overseas. In an editorial titled, “China Needs Overseas Bases for Global Role,” the newspaper urged the outside world to “understand the need of China to set up overseas military bases.”

Opened in 2007, the port at Gwadar — which overlooks Gulf shipping lanes and is near the Iran border — was intended from the beginning to represent China’s first strategic foothold in the Arabian Sea and to eventually double up as a Chinese-built naval base. It was widely seen as part of China’s efforts to assemble a “string of pearls” along the Indian Ocean rim. Yet until Mukhtar’s recent statements unmasked the larger plans, China and Pakistan continued to deny that Gwadar had any role other than commercial.

Whereas Pakistan wants to help the Chinese navy counterbalance India’s naval forces, China’s aim is to have important naval presence in the Indian Ocean to underpin its larger geopolitical ambitions and get into great-power maritime game. It thus needs Gwadar to plug its main weakness — the absence of a naval anchor in the region.

China’s plan also is to make Gwadar a major energy hub transporting Gulf and African oil by pipeline to the Chinese heartland via Pakistan-held Kashmir and Xinjiang. Such piped oil would not only cut freight costs and supply time but also lower China’s reliance on U.S.-policed shipping lanes through the Malacca and Taiwan Straits.

Significantly, as China’s involvement in strategic projects in Pakistan has grown, it has started openly started needling India on Kashmir, one-fifth of which is under Chinese occupation. It has used the visa issue and other innovative ways to question India’s sovereignty over Indian-controlled Kashmir. It also has shortened the length of the Himalayan border it claims to share with India by purging the 1,597-km line separating Indian Kashmir from the Chinese-held Kashmir part.

By deploying troops in Pakistani-held Kashmir near the line of control with India and playing the Kashmir card against India, China is clearly signaling that Kashmir is where the Sino-Pakistan nexus can squeeze India. The military pressure China has built up against India’s Arunachal Pradesh state — at the opposite end of the Himalayas — seems more like a diversion.

In truth, the more Pakistan has slipped into a jihadist dungeon, the more China has increased its strategic footprint in that country. And 2011 has been proclaimed the year of China-Pakistan friendship.

Brahma Chellaney, professor at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan” (Harper, New York) and “Water: Asia’s New Battlefield” (Georgetown University Press).

The silent water wars have begun

Posted on May 25, 2011 by Chellaney

By Santha Oorjitham
New Straits Times, May 25, 2011

Tension over precious water resources in Asia is already rising, warns Brahma Chellaney in an interview with SANTHA OORJITHAM

Q: The Tibetan plateau supplies water to 47 per cent of the world’s population. How would you rate cooperation between upstream and downstream countries on managing water resources?

A: There are treaties among riparian neighbours in South and Southeast Asia, but not between China and its neighbours.

For example, the lower Mekong states of Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam have a water treaty. India has water-sharing treaties with both the countries located downstream — Bangladesh and Pakistan.

There are also water treaties between India and its two small upstream neighbours, Nepal and Bhutan. But China, the dominant riparian power of Asia, refuses to enter into water-sharing arrangements with any of its neighbours.

Yet China enjoys an unrivalled global status as the source of trans-boundary river flows to the largest number of countries, ranging from Vietnam and Afghanistan to Russia and Kazakhstan.

Significantly, the important international rivers in China all originate in ethnic-minority homelands, some of them wracked by separatist movements. The traditional homelands of ethnic minorities, extending from the Tibetan Plateau and Xinjiang to Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, actually span three-fifths of the landmass of the People’s Republic of China.

Q: What are the main sources of water stress in the Asia-Pacific region?

A: Many of Asia’s water sources cross national boundaries, and as less and less water is available, international tensions will rise.

The sharpening hydropolitics in Asia is centred on international rivers such as the Amu Darya, Syr Darya, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Salween, Indus, Jordan, Tigris-Euphrates, Irtysh-Illy, and Amur. There is also the stoking of political tensions over the resources of transnational aquifers, such as al-Disi, which is shared between Saudi Arabia and Jordan, or the ones that link Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

Q: Are there intra-state tensions over location and approval of dam sites?

A: Intra-state water disputes are rife across Asia. The more democratic a country, the more raucous the intra-country water disputes tend to be.

In repressive political systems, water protests are quickly muffled. Yet China is discovering the hard way that it is difficult even for an autocracy to fully suppress grassroots protests over new water projects that displace residents or over diversion of water from farmlands to industries and cities.

Q: You have also written about possible interstate tension over reduced water flows. Has this already happened?

A: According to the United Nations, growing competition over water resources has “led to an increase in conflicts over water” in Asia between provinces, communities, and countries. Asia illustrates how rapid rates of population growth, development, and urbanisation, together with shifts in production and consumption patterns, can place unprecedented demands on water resources, bringing them under growing pressure and fostering domestic discord.

Water conflict within nations, especially those that are multiethnic and culturally diverse, often assumes ethnic or sectarian dimensions, thereby accentuating internal security challenges.

If the feuding provinces or areas are ethnically distinct, their water dispute also rages along ethnic lines. This pattern has been most visible on the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia and between Han settlers and ethnic minority people in Xinjiang.

In Central Asia, much of the freshwater comes from the Pamir and Tian Shan snowmelt and glacier melt that feed the region’s two main rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya. The resources of these two overexploited rivers have become the target of appropriation and competition.

One of the underlying causes of the mid-2010 bloody riots in the Fergana Valley — a minefield of religious fundamentalism and ethnic animosities — was the local ethnic-Kyrgyz fear that Uzbekistan wanted to absorb that water-rich region of Kyrgyzstan.

Q: What are the policies and strategies you suggest in “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (to be released in Asia in June) to prevent “water wars”?

A: The water crisis and competition test Asia’s ability to forge a more cooperative future. How Asia handles this challenge will shape not only its water future, but also its economic and political future.

Given that Asia has the fastest-growing economies and the fastest-rising demand for food, its water shortages will only worsen without major efficiency gains in use.

Three strategies are specifically recommended.

The first is to build Asian norms and rules that cover trans-boundary water resources. The second is to develop inclusive basin organisations encompassing transnational rivers, lakes, and aquifers in order to manage the water competition.

And the third is to develop integrated planning to promote sustainable practices, conservation, water quality, and an augmentation of water supplies through nontraditional sources.

Q: Should water be “securitised”?

A: Whether we like it or not, the “securitisation” of water resources has been going on for years. Indeed, in a silent hydrological warfare, the resources of transnational rivers, aquifers, and lakes have become the target of rival appropriation, with these watercourses being treated as national-security assets.

Water has become an important security issue in several important bilateral relationships in Asia, including those between China and India; between China and the other Mekong River basin states; and among states in South Asia, Central Asia, and West Asia.

Singapore also “securitised” the water issue, using its concerns over a potential Malaysian cut-off of water supply to build a stronger military capability.

Brahma Chellaney, professor at New Delhi’s Centre for Policy Research, will be speaking at the 25th Asia Pacific Roundtable next week

Chilling Echoes From 26/11

Posted on May 24, 2011 by Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney
The Economic Times, May 24, 2011

Pakistan, the world’s leading terror sponsor and haven, loves to calls itself a victim of terrorism, with President Asif Ali Zardari going to the extent of saying his country is “perhaps the world’s greatest victim of terrorism.” More than $3.2 billion in annual U.S. aid has not been enough to persuade Pakistan to sever its rogue links with terrorists or slow down its rapidly expanding rogue nuclear-weapons programme. Instead, Pakistan has created a convenient narrative of victimhood at home to help cloak its self-deception.

The terrorist assault on Pakistan’s main naval air base is a chilling reminder that those who play with fire will get burnt and, ultimately, be consumed by fire. The attack was carried out in the coldblooded, professional style taught by Inter-Services Intelligence to its proxies, including those that struck Mumbai in November 2008. Having created a terrorist manual and a sprawling terror infrastructure, the Pakistani military and its spy agency are now reaping a bitter harvest.

The Pakistani Taliban, which staged the attack on the naval base in Karachi, is the illegitimate child, like the Afghan Taliban, of the Pakistani military establishment. The difference is that the Pakistani Taliban has become the principal nemesis of the Pakistani military, whose favourite proxies now are the Afghan Taliban headed by the one-eyed Mullah Omar, Sirajuddin Haqqani, head of the eponymous network aligned with the Afghan Taliban, and Hafiz Saeed and his Laskhar-e-Taiba.

While continuing to provide succour and sanctuary to the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani military has waged offensives in Bajaur, Mohmand, Buner and other tribal districts against the Pakistani Taliban. It was at Pakistan’s instance that a U.S. missile strike killed that group’s chief, Baitullah Mehsud, in August 2009 — a slaying that prompted his successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, to orchestrate a suicide bombing of a CIA base in southeast Afghanistan in late 2009 that killed five agency officers and two American contractors.

The more the Pakistani military has gone after the Pakistan Taliban, the more the latter has retaliated against the former, staging daring attacks on Pakistani military and ISI facilities across the country, including on the army headquarters in Rawalpindi in 2009.

More important, these attacks, including the latest, have been aided by elements within the Pakistani military establishment. Without such insider support, the attackers simply would not been able to deeply penetrate the naval air base, easily locate key targets, and systematically wreck installations and aircraft, including two P-3C maritime surveillance planes. The P-3C aircraft, along with Harpoon anti-ship missiles and F-16s, have been supplied by the U.S. to help counterbalance conventional Indian military power.

The insiders’ role highlights a larger concern — the jihadist threat to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons (its “crown jewels”) comes not from non-state actors but from within the jihadist-infiltrated military, nuclear and intelligence establishments. In fact, the more Pakistan has begun to look like a failing state, the more it has accelerated its nuclear-weapons programme.

Nuclear weapons are for deterrence, they are not an answer to failed national-building, which is what Pakistan confronts. Yet Pakistan values nuclear weapons more for their political utility than their military utility.

Let’s be clear: Nuclear weapons have not prevented Pakistan’s slide into a jihadist dungeon. Nor can they stop Pakistan from imploding. Today, the very viability of Pakistan as a nation-state is at stake. In its existing frontiers, Pakistan has proven an ungovernable and unmanageable state.

China and the U.S., however, continue to prop up the Pakistani state in different ways. A reminder of that was the presence at the Karachi naval base of six Americans and 11 Chinese aviation engineers who escaped unharmed during the terrorist assault.

To ensure that the Pakistani state does not unravel, the U.S. has kept sending more money to Islamabad, turning it into the largest recipient of American aid in the world.

China has played a more dubious game. This is best illustrated by its actions in the aftermath of the Osama bin Laden affair, which caught the Pakistani military with pants down. To blunt U.S. pressure on Pakistan and tie down India, it has decided to gift Islamabad a second batch of 50 JF-17 fighter jets and agreed to run Gwadar port, which Pakistan now says will double up as a Chinese-built naval base. After repeated denials by Islamabad and Beijing that the Gwadar project had any military or strategic significance, the mask has finally fallen.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of Asian Juggernaut (Harper, New York) and Water: Asia’s New Battlefield (Georgetown University Press, forthcoming).

Some sticks yet more carrots for Pakistan

Posted on May 5, 2011 by Chellaney

A fundamental shift in the failed U.S. policy approach that has inadvertently turned Pakistan into Ground Zero for global terrorism seems unlikely despite the bin Laden affair.

Brahma Chellaney
The Hindu, May 6, 2011

For the United States, Pakistan poses a particularly difficult challenge. Despite providing more than $20 billion to Pakistan in counterterrorism and other aid since 9/11, the U.S. has received grudging assistance, at best, and duplicitous cooperation, at worst. Today, amid a rising tide of anti-Americanism, U.S. policy on Pakistan is rapidly crumbling. Yet Pakistan, with one of the world’s lowest tax-to-GDP ratios, has become more dependent on U.S. aid than ever.

While Americans rejoice over the daring helicopter assault that killed Osama bin Laden in his hideout in Abbottabad — the cradle of the Pakistan army — U.S. policy must recognize how its failed approach on Pakistan has inadvertently made that country Ground Zero for global terrorism. Rather than helping to build robust civilian institutions there, the U.S. has invested heavily in the jihadist-penetrated Pakistani military establishment. After dictator Pervez Musharraf was driven out of office, the new Pakistani civilian government ordered the ISI — the only spy agency in the world charged with sponsoring international terrorism — to report to the interior ministry, but received no support from the U.S. for this effort to assert civilian control, allowing the army to quickly frustrate the move.

No sooner had U.S. President Barack Obama assumed office than he implemented a military surge in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, however, he implemented an aid surge, turning it into the largest recipient of American aid. This only deepened U.S. involvement in the wrong war and emboldened Pakistan to fatten the Afghan Taliban, even as sustained U.S. drone and other attacks in Waziristan continued to severely weaken the already-fragmented Al Qaeda.

Make no mistake: the scourge of Pakistani terrorism emanates more from the country’s Scotch whisky-sipping generals than from the bead-rubbing mullahs. It is the self-styled secular generals who have reared the forces of jihad. Yet, by passing the blame for their ongoing terrorist-proxy policy to their mullah puppets, the generals made many in the U.S. believe that the key was to contain the religious fringe, not the puppeteers. In fact, Pakistan’s descent into a jihadist dungeon occurred not under civilian rule, but under two military dictators — Zia ul-Haq who nurtured and let loose jihadist forces, and Musharraf who took his country to the very edge of the precipice.

The bin Laden affair spotlights a fundamental reality — the fight against international terrorism cannot be won without demilitarizing and de-radicalizing Pakistan, including rebalancing civil-military relations there. Without reform of the Pakistani army and the ISI, there can be no end to transnational terrorism — and no genuine nation-building in Pakistan. How can Pakistan be a “normal” state if its army and intelligence agency remain outside civilian oversight and decisive power remains with military generals?

According to classified U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari told U.S. Vice President Joe Biden of his fear that the Pakistani military might “take me out.” And the United Arab Emirates’ foreign minister told U.S. special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke in early 2010 that Zardari had asked “that his family be allowed to live in the UAE in the event of his death.” In such a deviant setting, the risks that jihadists within the military could gain control of Pakistan’s arsenal of nuclear and biological weapons are real.

History attests that decisive opportunities rarely repeat themselves. The U.S. let go of one historic opportunity to help bring the ISI under civilian oversight in July 2008 when, in the aftermath of a dictator’s ouster by people’s power, it did not back the new government’s decision. Now, with the military establishment’s complicity in sheltering bin Laden laid bare, the U.S. has a chance to force reforms on the defensive Pakistani generals by holding out the threat of punitive sanctions and stepped-up drone strikes.

Yet it is very likely the U.S. will miss this opportunity too. After all, what is logical may not be practical at the altar of political expediency.

The U.S. has long been aware of Pakistan’s Janus-faced approach to fighting terrorism, and the discovery of bin Laden’s years-long residence in the shadow of Pakistan’s premier military academy has given Washington fresh evidence of Pakistani duplicity and aroused its anger but without affecting the fundamentals of U.S. policy. That the U.S. has little trust in the Pakistani army and ISI became evident when it deployed a number of CIA operatives, Special Operations forces and contractors deep inside Pakistan without the knowledge of Pakistani authorities — a deployment that triggered the showdown over Raymond Davis but helped open the trail to bin Laden. Indeed, in a damning statement, the CIA director said the Pakistanis were given no advance knowledge of the raid because they might have tipped bin Laden off.

Washington has enough evidence of the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and the cosy relationship between state and non-state actors there. The problem is that U.S. policy continues to be driven by short-term regional interests, in which Pakistan remains central to facilitating a U.S. military exit from Afghanistan, shaping the post-2014 Afghan political landscape, and aiding U.S. squeeze of Iran. In fact, Obama’s narrowing of the Afghan war goals has made the U.S. only more dependent on Pakistan.

By moving away from the Bush-era counterinsurgency strategy toward limited objectives centred on political reconciliation with the Afghan Taliban and ending all combat operations by 2014, Obama now needs the Pakistani generals to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table. After all, these generals provide a haven to the top Afghan Taliban leadership, besides allowing Taliban fighters to use Pakistan as a sanctuary from which to launch cross-border attacks. A face-saving U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is simply inconceivable without Pakistani cooperation.

After bin Laden’s elimination, pressure is already growing on the U.S. and its NATO allies for a quicker withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, making the Pakistani generals an even more critical factor in facilitating America’s reconciling with the Taliban. Although the Taliban was ISI procreation, its birth in the early 1990s was midwifed by the CIA. This is the reason why Washington fervently believes reconciliation with an estranged ex-ally is possible. And this is also the reason why — despite its main foe on the Afghan battlefield being the Taliban, not Al Qaeda — the U.S. military never attempted to wipe out the Quetta shura, eschewing any drone or commando strikes to decapitate the Afghan Taliban.

Significantly, just two-and-a-half months ago, the U.S. publicly eased its terms for reconciliation with the Taliban shura, dropping three key preconditions — renounce violence, embrace the Afghan Constitution, and snap links with al-Qaeda. What were preconditions were turned into “necessary outcomes of any negotiation.” The U.S. National Security Council then formally endorsed the new reconciliation strategy, which offers the Taliban power sharing in Afghanistan. No less significant is that America’s new Af-Pak envoy, Marc Grossman — despite the U.S. outrage over the bin Laden affair — travelled to Islamabad this week and reached agreement to set up a U.S.-Pakistani-Afghan “core group for promoting and facilitating the process of reconciliation and peace in Afghanistan.”

Obama actually believes that bin Laden’s killing serves as a potential catalyst to soften the Pakistani generals and the Taliban shura so as to clinch a peace deal, besides providing an opportunity to quickly conclude a post-2014 Permanent U.S. Bases Agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Obama indeed is set to announce a substantial reduction in U.S. forces starting this summer.

In this light, far from unravelling the remaining threads in the strained U.S.-Pakistan relationship, the bin Laden affair is likely to prove a temporary setback, even if a serious one. Some heads in the Pakistani military establishment may roll to placate Washington, with the blame being conveniently put (as in the past) on rogue elements within what itself is a rogue agency — the ISI. Washington may brandish new sticks, but carrots would still weigh more, with U.S. policy doling out further multibillion-dollar awards to Islamabad. British Prime Minister David Cameron has candidly said that it is “in our national interest” not to have “a flaming great row with Pakistan over this” but rather to “engage with Pakistan.” And Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser has pledged that Pakistan will remain a critical partner in the U.S. counterterrorism strategy.

Narrow geopolitical interests thus are likely to trump the imperative for externally supported Pakistani reforms to help cut the ISI down to size, loosen the military’s vice-like grip on power, rein in militant Islamist groups, and build a moderate, stable Pakistan.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of Asian Juggernaut (Harper Paperbacks, New York) and Water: Asia’s New Battlefield (Georgetown University Press, forthcoming).

(c) The Hindu, 2011

A “kill” highlights flawed policies

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Chellaney

After Osama: Triumph for one, but lessons for all

When the dust settles, it is likely to be business as usual: Indians impotent as ever, Pakistanis playing both ally and enemy, and the US doling out further multibillion-dollar awards to Pakistan

Brahma Chellaney
Mint, May 4, 2011

Conducted without the cooperation or even advance knowledge of Pakistan, the US helicopter assault that killed Osama bin Laden in his hideout beside a Pakistani military academy has exposed that country’s Janus-faced policy — a supposed ally on counterterrorism that in reality acts as an ally of transnational terrorists, harbouring them in its bosom covertly. The new spotlight on Islamabad’s duplicitous role raises uncomfortable questions for US policy, including about the billions of dollars in annual aid still being lavished on Pakistan. Yet the US is unlikely to heed the renewed call, among others, of Amrullah Saleh, Afghanistan’s intelligence director until last summer, to “wake up to the fact that Pakistan is a hostile state exporting terror”.

In a potential lesson for India, which has stoically put up with Pakistan-orchestrated acts of cross-border terrorism for years without retaliating even once, the US assault team managed to breach Pakistani defences by slipping deep inside Pakistan, with President Barack Obama informing his Pakistani counterpart about the successful operation only after the mission crew safely crossed back into Afghan airspace with Osama’s body.

In fact, the breakthrough came only after the US, even at the risk of rupturing its longstanding ties with the Pakistani army and ISI, deployed a number of CIA operatives, Special Operations forces and contractors deep inside Pakistan without the knowledge of the Pakistani military. Just last month, Pakistan’s main power brokers, generals Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and Ahmed Shuja Pasha, were stridently demanding the removal of all “undeclared” CIA operatives and contractors. But the prized “kill” has only reinforced the need for independent US intelligence operations in the Pakistani heartland, where the real terrorist sanctuaries are located, not on Pakistan’s borders.

In different ways, Osama in death has paradoxically exposed Pakistani, US and Indian policies. After all, a raid — even if spectacularly triumphant for one side, mortifying for another, and welcomed by the third party — cannot cover up or atone for flawed policies.

Take India: With the Hafiz Saeeds and Dawood Ibrahims in Pakistan mocking this country, the raid inadvertently shows up the naivety of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s basic assumptions about why refraining from exerting pressure and relying merely on engagement is the best way to persuade Pakistan to stop sponsoring terror.

Whereas Obama proudly declared that the US had “kept its commitment to see that justice is done”, India believes in delivering not justice but dossiers. That is why India’s reaction to 26/11 was to avoid taking the smallest of small steps — such as the recall of its own high commissioner from Islamabad — as just a token expression of outrage over Pakistan’s role as the staging ground for those daring terrorist attacks.

As for Pakistan, it can no longer be regarded as a reliable US ally. But no one has been more exposed than the two generals there who were making stroppy demands of the US until recently. Although the superannuated Kayani and Pasha have succeeded in staying on in office, their credibility at home and abroad is set to take a beating.

More important, the raid has exposed US policy, underlining a failed strategy that has unintentionally turned Pakistan into Ground Zero for global terrorism.

Obama, after taking office, implemented a military surge in Afghanistan, but an aid surge to Pakistan, turning the latter into the largest recipient of US aid, although the Afghan Taliban leadership and Al Qaeda remnants remained ensconced in Pakistan. That only deepened US involvement in the wrong war and emboldened Pakistan to fatten the Afghan Taliban even as US drone strikes in Waziristan continued to severely weaken Al Qaeda. Rather than help build robust civilian institutions in Pakistan, Washington has continued to pamper the jihadist-penetrated Pakistani military establishment, best illustrated by the fresh $3 billion military aid package earmarked for next fiscal.

Logically, there must now be a redefinition of the US-Pakistan relationship. After all, the US military’s main foe in Afghanistan is not the badly fragmented and incapacitated Al Qaeda, but a resurgent Taliban enjoying safe havens in Pakistan, which has brazenly egged on the Afghan president to dump the Americans for Chinese support. Yet Obama’s narrowing of the Afghan war goals has ironically made the US more dependent on Pakistan. By moving away from the Bush-era counterinsurgency strategy towards limited objectives centred on political reconciliation with the Afghan Taliban, Obama now needs Pakistan’s Scotch whisky-sipping but jihadist-rearing military generals to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table.

That is why when the dust settles, it is likely to be business as usual: Indians impotent as ever, Pakistanis playing both an ally and an enemy, and Americans doling out further multibillion-dollar awards to Islamabad. With Osama’s death boosting his flagging political fortunes, Obama no longer looks like a one-termer, but rather a president who will last to shape the endgame in Afghanistan.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.
Comment at views@livemint.com

Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Chellaney

After bin Laden, spotlight on Pakistan

Brahma Chellaney

Column internationally syndicated by Project Syndicate

The killing of Osama bin Laden by United States special forces in a helicopter assault on a sprawling luxury mansion near Islamabad recalls the capture of other Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistani cities. Once again, we see that the real terrorist sanctuaries are located not along Pakistan’s borders with Afghanistan and India, but in the Pakistani heartland.

This, in turn, underlines another fundamental reality — that the fight against international terrorism cannot be won without demilitarizing and de-radicalizing Pakistan, including by rebalancing civil-military relations there and reining in the country’s rogue Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

Other terrorist leaders captured in Pakistan since 9/11 — including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda’s third in command; Abu Zubeida, the network’s operations chief; Yasser Jazeeri; Abu Faraj Farj; and Ramzi Binalshibh, one of the coordinators of 9/11 — were also found living in cities across Pakistan. If there is any surprise about bin Laden’s hideout, it is its location in a military town, Abbottadad, in the shadow of an army academy.

This only underscores the major protection that bin Laden must have received from elements of the Pakistani security establishment to help him elude the US dragnet for nearly a decade. The breakthrough in hunting him down came only after the US, even at the risk of rupturing its longstanding ties with the Pakistani army and ISI, deployed a number of CIA operatives, Special Operations forces, and contractors deep inside Pakistan without the knowledge of the Pakistani military.

In recent years, with its senior operations men captured or killed and bin Laden holed up in Pakistan, the badly splintered Al Qaeda had already lost the ability to mount a major international attack or openly challenge US interests. With bin Laden’s death, Al Qaeda is likely to wither away as an organization.

Yet its dangerous ideology is expected to live on and motivate state-sponsored non-state actors. It will be mainly such elements that will have the capacity to launch major transnational terrorist attacks, like the 2008 Mumbai strikes. Even in Afghanistan, the US military’s main foe is not Al Qaeda but a resurgent Taliban, which enjoys safe haven in Pakistan.

That is why the spotlight is likely to turn on the terrorist nexus within Pakistan and the role of, and relationship between, state and non-state actors there. Significantly, as the CIA closed in on bin Laden, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullens, for the first time publicly linked the Pakistani military with some of the militants attacking US forces in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s homegrown Islamist militias continue to operate openly, and the Pakistani army and intelligence remain loath to sever their cozy ties with extremist and terrorist elements.

For the US, Pakistan poses a particularly difficult challenge. Despite providing $20 billion to Pakistan in counterterrorism aid since 9/11, the US has received grudging assistance, at best, and duplicitous cooperation, at worst. Today, amid a rising tide of anti-Americanism, US policy on Pakistan is rapidly unraveling. Yet Pakistan, with one of the world’s lowest tax-to-GDP ratios, has become more dependent than ever on US aid.

Even as Americans exult over bin Laden’s killing, the US government must recognize that its failed policy on Pakistan has inadvertently made that country the world’s main terrorist sanctuary. Rather than helping to build robust civilian institutions there, the US has pampered the jihadist-penetrated Pakistani military establishment, best illustrated by the fresh $3 billion military aid package earmarked for the next fiscal year. After dictator Pervez Musharraf was driven out of office, the new Pakistani civilian government ordered the ISI to report to the interior ministry, but received no support from the US for this effort to assert civilian control, allowing the army to quickly frustrate the effort.

After coming to office, US President Barack Obama implemented a military surge in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, however, he implemented an aid surge, turning it into the largest recipient of US aid, even though the Afghan Taliban leadership and Al Qaeda remnants remained ensconced in the country. This only deepened US involvement in the wrong war and emboldened Pakistan to fatten the Afghan Taliban, even as sustained US attacks continued to severely weaken Al Qaeda.

Make no mistake: the scourge of Pakistani terrorism emanates more from the country’s Scotch whisky-sipping generals than from the bead-rubbing mullahs. It is the self-styled secular generals who have reared the forces of jihad and fathered the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jalaluddin Haqqani militia, and other groups. Yet, by passing the blame for their ongoing terrorist-proxy policy to their mullah puppets, the generals have made the US believe that the key is to contain the religious fringe, not the puppeteers.

In fact, Pakistan’s descent into a jihadist dungeon occurred not under civilian rule, but under two military dictators — one who nurtured and let loose jihadist forces, and another who took his country to the very edge of the precipice.

Without reform of the Pakistani army and ISI, there can be no end to transnational terrorism — and no genuine nation-building in Pakistan. How can Pakistan be a “normal” state if its army and intelligence agency remain outside civilian oversight and decisive power remains with military generals?

With bin Laden dead, the only way that Al Qaeda can reconstitute itself is if the Pakistani military succeeds in reinstalling a proxy regime in Afghanistan. Until the Pakistani military’s vise-like grip on power is broken and the ISI cut down to size, Pakistan is likely to remain Ground Zero for the terrorist threat that the world confronts.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut and the forthcoming Water: Asia’s New Battlefield.

Stagecraft and Statecraft

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