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About Chellaney

Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

China’s Murky Hydropolitics

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Ties and Troubled Waters

 

China’s hydro-engineering projects in Tibet indicate it is fashioning water as a card against India

 

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India, June 29, 2010

 

New evidence from China indicates that, as part of its planned diversion of the waters of the Brahmaputra, preparations are afoot to start work on the world’s biggest dam at the river’s so-called Great Bend, located at Tibet’s corner with northeastern India. The dam, by impounding water on a gargantuan scale, will generate, according to a latest map of planned dams put up on its Web site by the state-run Hydro China, 38,000 megawatts of power, or more than twice the capacity of the Three Gorges Dam. Such is its scale that this new dam will by itself produce the equivalent of 25 percent of India’s current electricity generation from all sources. 

 

Water is becoming a key security issue in Sino-Indian relations and a potential source of enduring discord. China and India already are water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated farming and water-intensive industries, together with the demands of a rising middle class, have led to a severe struggle for more water. Indeed, both countries have entered an era of perennial water scarcity, which before long is likely to equal, in terms of per capita availability, the water shortages found in the Middle East.

 

Rapid economic growth could slow in the face of acute scarcity if demand for water continues to grow at its current frantic pace, turning China and India — both food-sufficient countries by and large — into major importers, a development that would accentuate the global food crisis. Even though India has more arable land than China — 160.5 million hectares compared to 137.1 million hectares — the source of most major Indian rivers is Chinese-controlled Tibet. The Tibetan plateau’s vast glaciers, huge underground springs and high altitude make Tibet the world’s largest freshwater repository. Indeed, all of Asia’s major rivers, except the Ganges, originate in the Chinese-held Tibetan plateau. Even the Ganges’ main tributaries flow in from Tibet.

 

But China is now pursuing major inter-basin and inter-river water transfer projects on the Tibetan plateau, which threaten to diminish international-river flows into India and other co-riparian states. China’s opaquely pursued hydro-engineering projects in Tibet threaten the interests of India more than those of any other country. The greatest impact of the diversion of the Brahmaputra waters, however, would probably be borne by Bangladesh. The Brahmaputra is Bangladesh’s most-important river, and the Chinese diversion would mean environmental devastation of large parts of Bangladesh. In fact, China is presently pursuing a separate cascade of major dams on the Mekong, the Salween, the Brahmaputra and the Irtysh-Illy, pitting it in water disputes with most of its riparian neighbours — from Kazakhstan and Russia to India and the countries of Indochina Peninsula.

 

In March 2009, the chairman of the Tibetan regional government unveiled plans for major new dams on the Brahmaputra. A series of six big dams will come up in the upper-middle reaches of the Brahmaputra, to the southeast of Lhasa, with construction of the first — Zangmu — beginning in 2009 itself. As part of this cascade, four other new dams will come up downstream from Zangmu at Jiacha, Lengda, Zhongda and Langzhen. The sixth, at Jiexu, is upstream to Zangmu. This cascade is in addition to the more than a dozen smaller dams China already has built on the Brahmaputra and its tributaries, including at Yamdrok Tso, Pangduo, Nyingtri-Payi and Drikong.

 

The most ominous plan China is pursuing is the one to reroute a sizable chunk of the Brahmaputra waters northwards at the Great Bend, the point where the river makes a sharp turn to enter India, creating in the process a canyon larger and deeper than the Grand Canyon in the US. The rapid infrastructure work in this area is clearly geared at such water diversion and hydropower generation. In fact, a new Chinese State Grid map showing that the Great Bend area will soon be connected to the rest of China’s power supply is a pointer to the impending launch of work on the mammoth dam there — a scheme recently supported by leaders of China’s state-run hydropower industry, including Zhang Boting, the deputy general secretary of the Chinese Society for Hydropower Engineering.

 

Through its giant projects in Tibet, China is actually set to acquire the capability to fashion water as a political weapon against India. Such a weapon can be put to overt use in war or employed subtly in peacetime so that the level of cross-border water flows becomes a function of political concession.

 

With China determined to exploit its riparian dominance, New Delhi’s self-injurious acceptance of Tibet as part of China is becoming more apparent. Just as India has retreated to an increasingly defensive position territorially, with the spotlight on China’s Tibet-linked claim to Arunachal Pradesh than on Tibet’s status itself, New Delhi’s policy straitjacket precludes an Indian diplomatic campaign against Beijing’s dam-building projects. Accepting Tibet and the developments there as China’s “internal” affairs has proven a huge misstep that will continue to exact increasing costs. A bold, forward-looking leadership, though, can rectify any past mistake before it becomes too late.

 

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Why American policy is hamstrung on China

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China’s mastery of America’s domain

Military might earns Beijing deference on the economic battlefield

Brahma Chellaney, Washington Times, June 21, 2010

Success breeds confidence, and rapid success spawns arrogance. That, in a nutshell, is the China problem facing Asian states and the West. But no country faces a bigger dilemma on China than the United States because the present American policy simply isn’t advancing its objectives.

Rising economic and military power is emboldening Beijing to pursue a more muscular foreign policy, as exemplified by several developments – from China’s inclusion of the South China Sea in its "core" national interests, an action that makes its claims to the disputed islands non-negotiable, to its vile protests against the Indian prime minister visiting a state of the Indian Union, Arunachal Pradesh, on which Beijing has resurrected its long-dormant claim.

A new chill in relations between American and Chinese militaries, underlined by a Chinese admiral’s carping lecture on American "hegemony," has torpedoed the Obama administration’s hopes to make China a responsible partner in global affairs by giving Beijing a larger stake in solving international problems.

The shift in Beijing’s South China Sea position has resulted in its conveying to the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and other Southeast Asian claimants that any discussions between and among them over their claims would amount to interference in China’s internal affairs. But no less significant is that China’s expanding naval role and maritime claims are beginning to collide with U.S. interests, including the traditional emphasis on freedom of navigation.

Having earlier preached the gospel of its "peaceful rise," China is beginning to take off the gloves, convinced that it has acquired the necessary muscle.

That approach has become more marked since the advent of the 2008 global financial crisis. China has interpreted that crisis as symbolizing both the decline of the Anglo-American brand of capitalism and the weakening of American economic power. That, in turn, has strengthened its twofold belief – that its brand of state-steered capitalism offers a credible alternative and that its global ascendance is unstoppable.

Chinese analysts have gleefully pointed out that after having sung the "liberalize, privatize and let the markets decide" line for so long, the United States and Britain took the lead to bail out their troubled financial giants at the first sign of trouble when the global crisis broke out. By contrast, state-driven capitalism has given China economic stability and rapid growth, enabling it to ride out the international crisis. Indeed, despite the perpetual talk of an overheating economy, China’s exports and retail sales are soaring and its foreign-exchange hoarding is approaching $2.5 trillion even as America’s fiscal and trade deficits remain alarming.

That has helped reinforce the Chinese elite’s faith in the country’s fusion of autocratic politics and state capitalism, with the largest companies – all government-owned – aggressively advancing the national strategy to secure long-term resource supplies from overseas.

The biggest loser from the global financial crisis, in Beijing’s view, is Uncle Sam. That the United States remains dependent on Beijing to buy billions of dollars worth of Treasury bonds every week to finance a yawning budget deficit is a sign of shifting global financial power balance – an advantage China is sure to milk politically in the years ahead.

The current spotlight may be on European financial woes, but the bigger picture for Beijing is that America’s chronic deficits and indebtedness epitomize its relative decline. Add to the picture the two wars the U.S. is waging overseas – one of which appears increasingly unwinnable – and what comes to the Chinese mind is a global superpower bogged down in serious troubles.

Against that background, China’s growing assertiveness may not surprise many. Late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s advice, "Hide your capabilities and bide your time," seems no longer relevant. Today, China is not shy to showcase its military capabilities and assert itself on multiple fronts.

Yet America’s economic and military travails are crimping its foreign-policy options vis-a-vis China. Although the Chinese economy is still more dependent for its growth on the U.S. economy than vice versa, Washington seems more reluctant than ever to exercise its leverage to make Beijing correct policies that threaten to distort trade, foster huge trade imbalances and spark greater competition for scarce raw materials.

By keeping its currency ridiculously undervalued and flooding the world markets with artificially cheap goods, China runs a predatory trade policy that undercuts manufacturing in the developing world more than in the West. However, by threatening to destabilize the global economy, China threatens Western interests.

Furthermore, its efforts to lock up supplies of key resources mean it will continue to lend support to renegade regimes. The U.N. Security Council’s latest Iranian-sanctions resolution is a "win-win" outcome for China because it exempts the key sector that matters to both Beijing and Tehran – energy – and opens the path to greater Chinese aid to, and clout in, Iran.

The present U.S. policy on China is a study in contrast to the way Washington unabashedly exercised its leverage when another Asian country – Japan – emerged as a global economic powerhouse in the 1980s. As it rose dramatically to become a potential economic peer to the United States, Japan kept the yen undervalued and erected hidden barriers to the entry of foreign manufacturers into its market. That resulted in the U.S. piling up pressure on Japan and periodically arm-twisting it to make trade concessions.

Today, the United States cannot adopt the same approach against Beijing, largely because China is also a military and political power and Washington depends on Chinese support on a host of international issues – from North Korea and Burma to Iran and Pakistan. By contrast, Japan has remained just an economic power.

It is significant that China became a global military player before it became a global economic player. China’s military power base was built by Mao Zedong, enabling Deng to focus single-mindedly on rapidly building economic power. Before Deng launched his "four modernizations," China had acquired a global military reach by testing its first intercontinental ballistic missile, the 12,000-kilometer DF-5, and developing a thermonuclear warhead.

Over the past three decades, the 13-fold expansion of its economy generated even greater resources for China to sharpen its military claws. But for the growing Chinese military power and political weight, U.S. policy would have treated China as another Japan.

The United States played a critical role in China’s economic rise by not sustaining post-Tiananmen Square sanctions. But the central assumption guiding U.S. policy on China has gone awry – that assisting China’s economic rise would help create both a compatible and cooperative partner and political openness within. The challenge the United States faces today is to reframe its policy before it becomes too late to resist China’s push for a redistributive global order whose institutions and rules respect the centrality of an authoritarian great power.

Brahma Chellaney is author of the international best-seller "Asian Juggernaut" (HarperCollins, New York, 2010).

© Copyright 2010 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

U.S.-funded private armies in Afghanistan

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U.S. is building a new tribe of warlords in Afghanistan

Brahma
Chellaney

The Sunday Guardian, June 20, 2010

Just as the
United States
fattened jihadist militias in the 1980s, short-term interests are again leading
it to fund private Afghan miltias. This will carry serious consequences for
regional security, long after the Americans have pulled out from Afghanistan.

The war in Afghanistan,
in any case, is becoming increasingly unwinnable for the Americans, as
underscored by the recent series of U.S. political
and military setbacks. The Afghan Taliban, with its inner shura (council) ensconced in the Quetta area of Pakistan,
is stepping up attacks across Afghanistan.
That has brought into question the viability of President Barack Obama’s plan to turn around Afghanistan
and begin withdrawing forces by July 2011.

            Faced with a desperate situation,
the administration is rolling out local militias in virtually every Afghan
province. It is racing to secure Afghanistan so
that the president can start pulling out from July 2011 — a deadline he set on
his own, overriding the concerns of a sceptical military.

Under the militia-building plan, designed to
complement Obama’s two successive troop “surges,” local militias are being set
up in the Afghan provinces as part of a strategy to get a handle on the
situation. The militias are being established in two ways — either by training
and arming village recruits, or by bribing insurgent leaders to cross over with
their fighters and become the new law-enforcement force. The latter way has
become increasingly popular with the Americans as it offers the quickest
shortcut.

As a result, a new array of U.S.-backed provincial warlords have emerged across
Afghanistan, with millions of dollars in American funds being paid to them to
provide highway security and run missions with U.S. special forces. The
combination of American-sanctions arms and American funds has made these
warlords, with their private armies, so powerful that they have orchestrated
the removal of local Afghan officials who have dared to defy their diktats.

            For example, in southern Oruzgan Province, the most powerful man today is not the provincial governor or the
local army commander or the police chief, but a U.S.-funded chief of a
1500-strong private army, Matiullah
Khan.

The U.S. support for establishment of private
militias, initiated quietly without any consultation with allies and partners,
flies in the face of the common agreement that the international community must
focus on institution-building, demobilization of existing militias and
reconstruction to create a stable, moderate Afghanistan — goals that have prompted
India to pour massive $1.5 billion aid into that country. The decision ignores
the danger that such militias could go out of control and threaten regional and
international security. That is exactly what happened with the militias President
Ronald Reagan heavily armed in the 1980s, the so-called mujahideen.

            The new U.S.-supported warlords
already are acting as a law unto themselves, undermining state institutions,
conniving with drug dealers and seeking to strike private deals with the
Taliban. As the Taliban
have targeted for assassination former insurgents who have switched sides, some
of the warlords have sought to keep both the Americans and the Taliban happy.
The Americans, for their part, have sought to encourage greater defections from
insurgent ranks by offering new incentives. For example, it has been made
public by British Maj. Gen. Philip Jones, who directs the reintegration effort
for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. that insurgents who cross over to
the NATO side can keep weapons to provide security to local communities.

Confronting grim realities on the ground, Washington is seeking to pursue shortcuts, lest the
Afghan war burn Obama’s presidency in the same way Iraq consumed George W. Bush’s.
Still, it is important to remember the origins of the Afpak problem.

A covert U.S.
war against the nine-year Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan
helped instil an Afpak jihad culture and create Frankensteins like Osama bin
Laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar. It was at a mid-1980s White House ceremony
attended by some turbaned and bearded Afpak “holy warriors” that President
Ronald Reagan proclaimed mujahideen leaders the “moral equivalent of the
founding fathers” of America. Now a
second military intervention in Afghanistan
since 2001 — this time by the U.S.,
with the aid of NATO and other allied troops — has further destabilized the
region.

Yet, in trying to salvage the overt U.S. war in Afghanistan, Obama is ignoring the
lessons of the earlier covert war and unwittingly seeking to repeat history. In
the same way the U.S.
created mujahideen by funnelling
billions of dollars worth of arms to them in the 1980s, Washington is now
setting up local militias and warlords across Afghanistan. And just as the covert
war’s imperatives prompted the U.S. in the 1980s to provide multibillion-dollar
aid packages to Pakistan while turning a blind eye to its nuclear-smuggling and
other illicit trans-border activities, Washington is now showering
unprecedented aid on that country while seeking to neither bring the rogue
Inter-Services Intelligence under civilian oversight nor subject the now-free A.Q.
Khan to international questioning. The U.S.
indeed has increased its cooperation with the Pakistani military, including new
joint CIA-ISI missions in tribal areas, commando training to Frontier Corps and
sharing of U.S.
intercepts of militant cellular and satellite phone calls.

Before long, the new militias would be
terrorizing local populations. The new breed of warlords would likely foster
anarchy. The Americans will leave behind an Afghan
government too weak to enforce its writ and a new tribe of warlords eager to
challenge central authority.

Today, America
is unable to stop the misuse of its large annual military aid by Pakistan or
account for the arms it has supplied to Afghan security forces. Controlling
non-state actors is even harder. That
is the lesson from the rise of the Afghan Taliban, fathered by the ISI and
endorsed by U.S. policy as a
way out of the chaos that engulfed Afghanistan after President
Najibullah’s 1992 ouster.

Just because Afghan security forces are not yet
sufficiently large or adequately groomed to take over the fight cannot justify
the setting up of more militias in a country already swarming with armed
militiamen.

Obama’s Afghan strategy should be
viewed as a shortsighted strategy intent on repeating the very mistakes of
American policy on Afghanistan
and Pakistan over the past
three decades that have come to haunt U.S. security and that of the rest
of the free world. Obama is giving
priority to what is politically expedient than to long-term interests — the
very mistake that gave rise to the phenomenon of jihadist transnational terror.

China’s unsustainable Korean gameplan

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Decks are stacked against China keeping its stake in Korea game
By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
Japan Times, June 6, 2010

KOREAN DEMILITARIZED ZONE — One of the last Cold War relics, the Demilitarized Zone that cuts the Korean Peninsula in half, is the world’s most fortified frontier. Although this division has prevailed for almost six decades, it is unthinkable that it can continue indefinitely, despite renewed inter-Korean tensions over the deaths of 46 South Korean sailors in the sinking of a warship.

Just as the last two decades since the end of the Cold War have geopolitically transformed the world, the next two decades are likely to bring no less dramatic international change. One place where major geopolitical change seems inescapable is the Korean Peninsula.

Today, however, the spotlight is on the return of the Cold War between North and South Korea. Relations between the two Koreas have sunk to their worst point in many years, as South Korea’s neoconservative president — holding Pyongyang responsible for the sinking of the ship on the basis of a multinational inquiry that he ordered — has redesignated the North as his country’s archenemy. The North, in reprisal, has frozen ties with the South and banned its ships and airplanes from using the North’s territorial waters and airspace.

The deterioration in North-South relations, however, predates the March 26 sinking of the South Korean warship, Cheonan. It began soon after South Korean President Lee Myung Bak took office in 2007 and reversed the decade-long "sunshine policy" with the North that had been pursued by his two immediate predecessors, Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun. As part of his policy of squeezing the regime in Pyongyang, Lee also effectively cut off bilateral aid.

Lee’s strategy has little to show in terms of results. If anything, the Stalinist regime in Pyongyang has demonstrated a proclivity to throw caution to the wind, best illustrated by the manner it conducted a second nuclear test, launched a long-range rocket and fired several missiles — all in the span of a few weeks in April-May 2009.

Although none of the four powers with a history of intervention on the Korean Peninsula — China, Japan, Russia and the United States — has any interest at present in disturbing the political status quo there, events could occur that are beyond the control of any internal or external force. The trigger for unleashing a cascading effect can come only from an increasingly isolated, impoverished and unstable North Korea.

North Korea’s economic crisis is deepening, with food shortages and widespread malnutrition rife in a nation of more than 24 million people. Desperate government attempts at currency reform have only spurred hyperinflation and simmering social unrest. The South’s reversal of the sunshine policy has added to North Korea’s economic woes.

Another indicator of the looming uncertainty is the poor health of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Despite surviving an apparent stroke in August 2008 and returning to his feet, a shriveled Kim today looks palpably sick. On a recent visit to China, he was seen dragging his feet.

Kim Jong Il seems to be grooming his third son, the 26-year-old Kim Jong Un, to succeed him. In the coming months, Kim Jong Un is likely to assume a party position. But Kim Jong Un is too young and inexperienced to command popular respect and authority by succeeding an ailing father who may not last too long.

Given the worsening economy and the uncertainty over how long Kim Jong Il will survive, the decks seem stacked against the prolongation of North Korea’s totalitarian system for many more years.

Yet, China seems more intent than ever to maintain the North Korean regime, with or without Kim Jong Il. China continues to prop up the regime with economic aid, military hardware and political support. In fact, without the political protection it has continued to provide North Korea in the U.N. Security Council, the regime would have by now collapsed under the weight of international sanctions.

It is with such political protection that North Korea became the first nonnuclear member of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to breach its legal obligations and go overtly nuclear. It is also because of Chinese policy and protection that the now-dormant six-nation talks on the North Korean issue made no progress.

Yet, China has cleverly played its diplomatic cards to emerge as the central player on the North Korean issue, with U.S. policy more dependent than ever on Beijing for any forward movement. But Beijing, intent on shaping a regional order under its influence, has little interest in helping out U.S. policy.

The reality is that China is being guided by its ancient zhonghwa ideology, which calls for an East Asian order led by China. According to zhonghwa, the entire region stretching from the Korean Peninsula to the Japanese archipelago is supposed to be within China’s sphere of influence, thus requiring it to exercise leadership through aid, leverage and diplomatic maneuver.

That may explain why Beijing, ignoring sensitivities in South Korea, warmly received Kim Jong Il on a recent state visit — a visit about which Seoul learned only after the North Korean strongman had arrived in China.

The fact is that China sees its interest best served by preservation of the status quo on the Peninsula. Korean reunification would not only change the geopolitical dynamics in Northeast Asia by creating a resurgent united Korea, but also bring U.S. influence and military to China’s doorstep.

Today, by continuing to play the North Korea card, Beijing is able to wield political leverage against the U.S. At the same time, it is able to keep the economically powerful South Korea — a U.S. ally that is double the size of North Korea demographically — at bay. The logic on which Chinese policy operates is simple: Outside forces like the U.S. cannot be allowed to exercise power in China’s backyard.

Yet, such is China’s growing clout that none will dare to criticize the political protection it provides North Korea — not even Lee’s government, despite the dual diplomatic snub Beijing has recently delivered, first by hosting Kim Jong Il and then shielding Pyongyang over the Cheonan crisis.

Through his hardline policy on Pyongyang, Lee has played into China’s hands. Beijing can only thank him for pushing North Korea onto its strategic lap.

Given the fact that it will be South Korea, like West Germany, that will have to bear the costs of reunification, the South should actively be seeking to open up the North, rather than working to further isolate it. The way to reduce the costs of reunification would be for the North to be integrated with the South economically before moves are made toward political integration. But Lee’s policy, in reversing the inter-Korean detente, has blocked such a path.

China has not tried to export its economic model to its client states. It is actually afraid that if North Korea begins to reform, its own ailing system could collapse under the weight of its contradictions. After all, despite its economic success, China itself must walk a tightrope on opening up to the outside world. Because of its opaque, repressive system, the more it globalizes, the more vulnerable it becomes internally. China has sought to open up only to the extent necessary to underpin economic growth.

It is doubtful it can prop up the North Korean system for very long. When Kim Jong Il passes away, events over three to four years could create an unstoppable momentum toward radical change in the North — and on the Peninsula as a whole.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of "Asian Juggernaut" (HarperCollins, 2010).
The Japan Times: Sunday, June 6, 2010
(C) All rights reserved

China’s counterproductive actions in Asia

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China pushes
Japan and India closer to the U.S.

Brahma
Chellaney

The Sunday Guardian, May 30, 2010

China’s rise in one
generation as a global player under authoritarian rule has come to epitomize the
qualitative reordering of power in Asia and the
wider world. Not since
Japan rose to world-power
status during the reign of the Meiji
emperor in the second half of the 19th century has another non-Western power
emerged with such potential to alter the world order as China today. As the
2009 assessment by the U.S.
intelligence community predicted, China stands to more profoundly
affect global geopolitics than any other country. China’s ascent, however, is dividing Asia, not bringing Asian states closer.

            A fresh
reminder of that came recently when provocative Chinese actions prompted the new
Japanese government to reverse course on seeking a “more equal” relationship
with the United States and agree to keep
the American military base in Okinawa island.
That outcome is similar to the way Beijing has
been pushing India closer to
the U.S. through continuing military and
other provocations.

Given that the balance of power
in Asia will be determined by events as much in the Indian Ocean rim as in East Asia, Tokyo
and New Delhi
are keen to work together to promote Asian peace and stability and help
safeguard vital sea lanes of communication.
Japan and
India indeed are natural
allies because they have no conflict of strategic interest and share common goals to build
institutionalized cooperation and stability in Asia. There is
neither a negative historical legacy nor any outstanding political issue between them. If anything, each
country enjoys a high positive rating with the public in the other
state.

Prime Minister Yukio
Hatoyama’s visit to India
last December, soon after coming to office, showed he is keen to maintain the
priority on closer engagement with India that started under his four
immediate predecessors, especially Junichiro Koizumi, Shinzo Abe, Yasuo
Fukuda and Taro Aso of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), now in the
opposition. Mr. Hatoyama and his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) came to power
vowing to reorient Japanese foreign policy and seek an “equal” relationship with
the United
States. But events have forced a rethink.

How unstable the security environment
is in Japan’s own
neighborhood has been brought home by two recent incidents with
China and the renewed
tensions on the Korean Peninsula following the sinking of the South Korean naval ship.

One incident involving China occurred less than two months ago, on April
8, when a helicopter from a Chinese naval vessel in international waters south
of Okinawa flew to within 92 meters of a
Japanese defense force escort ship — so close that Japanese sailors could
clearly see a gun-wielding Chinese soldier. To compound matters, not only was
Tokyo’s diplomatic protest summarily dismissed by Beijing, but Chinese naval ships less
than two weeks later, on April 21, sailed between Okinawa and another Japanese
island chain to conduct a large-scale exercise. Once again, a Chinese naval
helicopter buzzed a Japanese escort ship. A Chinese military analyst called on
Japan to get used to
China‘s navy appearing in
Japan‘s exclusive economic
zone.

The second
incident happened last month. Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi flew into a
rage after his Japanese counterpart, Katsuya Okada, politely suggested that
China cut its nuclear arsenal. At the
May 15 meeting in the South Korean city of Gyeongju, Mr. Yang yelled that his relatives had been
killed by Japanese forces in northeastern China during Japan’s occupation of China.
He almost walked out of the meeting.

The upshot of
such incidents and the greater volatility in the regional security environment is that
Prime Minister Hatoyama and his Cabinet are now convinced that this is not the
time to move the Futenma air base off Okinawa, even if it means breaking one of his DPJ’s
election campaign promises.

Significantly, there also have a number of
incidents that suggest that China is starting to muscle up to India.
The renewed Sino-Indian border tensions have resulted from growing Chinese
assertiveness on several fronts — border (Chinese
cross-frontier incursions have increased in a major way); diplomatic
(resurrecting its long-dormant claim to India’s Arunachal Pradesh state, which
is three times bigger than Taiwan); and multilateral (launching an international offensive to undercut Indian
sovereignty over Arunachal; for example, by successfully blocking the
Asian Development Bank from identifying that region as part of India in its $1.3
billion credit package last year). As the resistance to its rule in
Tibet has grown since last
year, Beijing has sought to present
Tibet as a core issue to its
sovereignty, just like Taiwan. Tibet now holds as much importance in Chinese
policy as Taiwan. In ratcheting up the
Arunachal issue with India,
Beijing seems to be drawing another analogy:
Arunachal is the new Taiwan that must be “reunified” with
the Chinese state.

In fact, the incidents with
Japan and India serve as another reminder that Chinese
policies and actions are counterproductively pushing these countries closer to
the U.S.

There is
realization in Japan and
India that each is located in
a very dangerous neighborhood and that their security ties with the U.S.
are critical.

India and Japan,
although dissimilar economically, have a lot in common politically. They are
Asia’s largest democracies, but with fractured,
messy politics. Just as India has progressed from doctrinaire
nonalignment to geopolitical pragmatism, Japan —
the “Land of the Rising Sun” — is moving toward greater realism in its foreign
policy.

Their growing congruence of
strategic interests led to a Japan-India security agreement in 2008, a
significant milestone in building Asian power stability. A constellation of
Asian states linked by strategic cooperation and sharing common interests is
becoming critical to ensuring equilibrium at a time when major shifts in
economic and political power are accentuating Asia’s security challenges. The Japan-India security
agreement was modelled on the 2007 Australia-Japan defense accord. Now the
Japan-India security agreement has spawned a similar Australia-India
accord.

The path has been opened to
adding strategic content to the Indo-Japanese relationship, underscored by the
growing number of bilateral visits by top defence and military officials. As
part of their “strategic and global partnership,” which was unveiled in 2006,
India and Japan
are working on joint initiatives on maritime security, counterterrorism,
counterproliferation, disaster management and energy security. But they need to
go much further.

India and Japan, for
example, must co-develop defence systems. India and Japan have missile-defense cooperation with
Israel and the U.S.,
respectively. There is no reason why they should not work together on missile
defense and on other technologies for mutual defense. There is no ban on weapon
exports in Japan’s U.S.-imposed Constitution,
only a long-standing Cabinet decision. That ban has been loosened, with
Tokyo in recent
years inserting elasticity to export weapons for peacekeeping operations,
counterterrorism and anti-piracy. The original Cabinet decision, in any event,
relates to weapons, not technologies.

As two legitimate
aspirants to new permanent seats in the UN Security Council, India and Japan should
work together to push for the Council’s long-pending reform. Asian peace and
stability would be better served if all the three major powers in Asia —
China, Japan and India — are in
the Council as permanent members. Beijing’s
provocative actions indeed underscore the risks of China remaining Asia’s sole representative among the Council’s permanent
members.

Impact of China’s rise on Asian security

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Beware China’s Determination to Choke Off Asian Competition

Brahma Chellaney
The Sunday Guardian, May 16, 2010
 
The ascent of China, while a symbol of the ongoing global power shifts, has been accentuated by major geopolitical developments — from the unravelling of the Soviet Union that eliminated a mighty empire to China’s north and west, to the manner the American colossus has stumbled after the triumphalism of the 1990s. The free world’s mounting problems, including Europe’s worries about its future, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the West’s troubled relationships with Moscow and Tehran, Japan’s uncertain demographic future and India’s internal challenges, have all helped Beijing to increase its strategic space, not just in Asia, but also in Africa and Latin America.
 

While Asia’s growing importance in international relations signals a systemic shift in the global distribution of power, it is the rising heft of a single country — China — that by itself is transforming the international geopolitical landscape like no other development. As world history attests, the dramatic rise of a new power usually creates volatility in the international system, especially when the concerned power is not transparent about its strategic policies and military expenditure. Therefore, China’s rise constitutes a strategic challenge by itself in Asia — a challenge that needs to be managed wisely, so that Beijing stays on the positive side of the ledger, not the negative side.

After all, in 25 years from now, China will clearly be more powerful and influential than it is today, with a greater propensity to assert itself on issues while projecting power far beyond its shores. China’s rapidly accumulating power already is emboldening Beijing to pursue a more muscular foreign policy. After having touted its “peaceful rise,” it has shown a creeping propensity to flex its muscle.

China’s economy has expanded 13-fold over the last 30 years, thanks to surging exports and copious investments. As a result, China already has arrived as a global economic player. Today, with its burgeoning foreign-exchange reserves, it is courted around the world to help resolve a host of financial problems. At the same time, it is true that China’s global ambitions get weighed down by its vulnerabilities, including authoritarian rule, an opaque culture, failure to accommodate ethnic nationalities like the Tibetans and Uighurs, and growing disparities in Chinese society.

Militarily, China is likely to continue to put the emphasis on indigenous research and development to further augment its capabilities. China already spends far more on its military than any other country in Asia.

It is also set to develop clear and deep linkages between trade and foreign policy, and between trade and power projection. That will mean a proactive, assertive Chinese foreign-policy posture in relation to countries and issues of vital interest. The creeping extension of China’s security perimeter is bound to increase international concerns about the opacity of its strategic doctrine and military spending.

China’s priority, of course, will remain what it has been for long: Boosting indigenous capabilities, especially its conventional and nuclear deterrence, and working to shift the balance of power in the Asia-Pacific in its favor. China’s increasingly sophisticated missile force remains at the heart of its military modernization. As part of a calculated strategy to project power far beyond its frontiers and strengthen its deterrent capabilities, China has placed missile prowess at the center of its force modernization. It is developing a range of land-attack and anti-ship cruise missiles, long-range surface-to-air missiles and anti-radiation missiles. As its nuclear-force modernization gains further momentum, shifts in China’s nuclear doctrine — from a defensive orientation to a more offensively-configured posture — would inevitably occur.

Broadly, Chinese naval power is set to grow exponentially, as Beijing expands its indigenous ship production and deploys naval assets far from its exclusive economic zone. Little surprise the Chinese Navy is beginning to show open interest in extending its reach and operations to the Indian Ocean — a crucial international passageway for oil deliveries and other trade.

That interest is manifest from the Chinese projects in the Indian Ocean rim region, including the building of a port at Hambantota in Sri Lanka, the modernization of the Bangladeshi port of Chittagong, and the construction of a deep-water naval base and commercial port for Pakistan at Gwadar, situated at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz — the only exit route for Persian Gulf oil. In addition, the Irrawaddy Corridor between China’s Yunnan province and the Burmese ports on the Bay of Bengal is set to become a key economic and strategic passageway involving road, river, rail and harbor links.

In the Pacific Ocean, as underlined by the rising frequency of Chinese naval patrols, Beijing also is seeking to extend its strategic perimeter there. What is being subtly suggested by Chinese analysts today — that the Western Pacific is China’s maritime zone of influence — could set the stage for an intensifying strategic competition with Japan.

Beijing, not content that Han territorial power is at its pinnacle, still seeks a Greater China. With 60 percent of its present landmass comprising homelands of ethnic minorities, modern China has come a long way in history since the time the Great Wall represented the Han empire’s outer security perimeter. Yet, driven by self-cultivated myths, the state fuels territorial nationalism, centered on issues like Tibet and Taiwan, and its claims in the East and South China Seas and on India’s northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh. China’s insistence on further expanding its national frontiers stymies a forward-thinking approach essential to building peace and stability in Asia.

It is thus not an accident that as its power grows, China seems more determined than ever to choke off Asian competitors, a tendency reflected in its hardening stance toward India. Hopes of a politically negotiated settlement of the lingering territorial disputes have dissipated amid Chinese muscle-flexing along the long, 4,057-kilometer Himalayan frontier. Indeed, it is approaching three decades since China and India began border negotiations, making them already the longest and the most-barren process between any two countries in modern history. In this period, the world has changed fundamentally.

Against India, the PLA is now better geared to wage a short, swift war by surprise, thanks to the significant upgrading of the military infrastructure and logistics on the Tibetan plateau. The state-directed demographic changes under way in Chinese-ruled Tibet also carry long-term military significance vis-à-vis India.

The India-China tensions explain why soaring bilateral trade is not a barometer of how well a relationship is doing. Trade in today’s market-driven world is not constrained by political differences — unless political barriers have been erected, as the U.S. has done against Cuba and Burma, for example. 

Asia’s Water Crisis: Strategic Implications

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Water emerges as a potential constraint on Asia’s rapid
growth

Brahma Chellaney

The Sunday Guardian, May 9, 2010

As the most-pressing resource, water holds the strategic
key to peace, public health and prosperity. With its availability coming under
pressure in many parts of the world due to greater industrial, agricultural and
household demands, water is likely to serve as the defining crisis of the
21st century. This is most evident when one looks at Asia, the world’s largest
continent.

In Asia, growing populations, rising affluence, changing
diets and the demands of development already are already putting strain on two
resources linked to climate change. One is energy, the main contributor to the
buildup of planet-warming greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And the other is
water, whose availability will be seriously affected by climate change,
increasing the likelihood of water-related conflicts there, as the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned.

The sharpening Asian competition over energy resources, driven
in part by high GDP growth rates and
in part by mercantilist attempts to
lock up supplies, has obscured the other danger — that water shortages
in much of Asia are
becoming a threat to rapid economic
modernization, prompting the
building of upstream
hydro-engineering projects on transnational rivers, with little concern for the
interests of co-riparian states. If water geopolitics were to spur
interstate tensions through reduced
water flows to neighboring countries, the Asian renaissance could stall in the
face of inter-riparian conflicts.

Today, no region better
illustrates the dangers of water wars in the future than Asia, which has less
fresh water — 3,920 cubic meters per person — than any other continent, according to a 2006 United Nations report. This fact often
gets obscured by the spotlight on the sharpening energy competition. Indeed, at
a time when the assertive pursuit of national interest has begun to replace ideology, idealism and
morality in international relations, there is a danger that
interstate conflict in Asia
in the coming years could be driven by competition not so much
over political influence as over
scarce resources.

The UN report has pointed
out that when the estimated reserves of lakes, rivers and groundwater are added
up, Asia has marginally less water
per person than Europe or Africa, one-quarter that of North America, nearly
one-tenth that of South America and 20 times less than Australia and Pacific
islands. Yet Asia is home to almost 60 percent
of the world’s population.

In Asia, two broad water-related effects of climate change
can be visualized. First, climate change is likely to intensify interstate and intrastate competition over water resources. That
in turn could trigger resource
conflicts within and between states,
and open new (or exacerbate existing)
political disputes. Second, the likely increased frequency of extreme weather
events like hurricanes, droughts and flooding, as well as the rise of ocean levels, are likely
to spur greater interstate and
intrastate migration — especially of
the poor and the vulnerable — from delta and coastal regions to the
hinterland. Such an influx of outsiders would socially swamp
inland areas, upsetting the existing fragile ethnic balance and provoking a backlash that strains internal and regional security. Through such
large-scale migration, the political stability and internal cohesion of some nations could be
undermined. In some cases, this could
even foster or strengthen conditions that could make the state dysfunctional.

In water-deficient
Asia, most societies are agrarian, and the
demand for water for farming is soaring. Asia’s
rapid industrialization and
urbanization, additionally, are boosting demand for water considerably.

Household water consumption
in Asia is also rising rapidly, but such is the water paucity that not
many Asians can aspire for the lifestyle of Americans, who daily use 400 liters
per person, or more than 2.5 times the average in Asia.
Agriculture, however, remains the major consumer of water. Some three-fourths of
all water withdrawals in Asia are for
agriculture.

Asis’s vast irrigation
systems helped usher in the Green Revolution. Today, irrigated croplands produce
60 percent of Asia’s rice, wheat and other
staple food grains. But in a new era of growing water shortages, the
water-intensive and wasteful nature of Asian irrigation practices are becoming
apparent, including the growing of rice in saturated paddy fields, old and
inefficient irrigation canals and the widespread use of electric and diesel
pumps to recklessly extract groundwater.

Add to this picture the
fast-rising demand for food in Asia. But to
grow more food will require more water — a resource now under the greatest
strain. Pollution, too, is threatening Asia’s
freshwater resources.

The spread of prosperity is
changing diets in Asia, with people tending to
eat less grain and more meat, dairy products and fruit as they rise to the
middle class. In China, for example, meat consumption
has doubled in the past 20 years and is expected to again double by 2035. A
shift from traditional rice and noodles to a meatier diet has helped double
East Asia’s “water footprint” for food
production since 1985, given the fact that it takes 12 times more water to grow
a kilogram of beef as compared to a kilogram of rice or wheat.

Take China and India, which
already are water-stressed economies.  As China and India
gain economic heft, they are increasingly drawing international attention. The
two demographic titans are coming
into their own at the same time
in history, helping to highlight the
ongoing major shifts in global politics and economy.  However, when one
examines natural endowments — such as arable land, water resources, mineral
deposits, hydrocarbons and wetlands — the picture that emerges is not exactly
gratifying for India and
China.

The two giants have entered
an era of perennial water shortages, which are likely to parallel, in terms of
per-capita water availability, the scarcity in the Middle
East before long. India and China
face the prospect that their rapid economic modernization may stall due to
inadequate water resources. This prospect would become a reality if their
industrial, agricultural and household demand for water continues to grow at the
present frenetic pace.

Water presents a unique
challenge. While countries can scour the world for oil, natural gas and
minerals to keep their economic machines humming, water cannot be secured
through international trade deals. Sustainable and integrated management of
national water resources is essential to prevent degradation, depletion and
pollution of water. To meet the gap between supply and demand, water
conservation, water efficiency, rainwater capture, water recycling and drip
irrigation would have to be embraced at national, provincial and local levels.

One can hope that advances in clean-water
technologies would materialize before water conflicts flare.
Low-cost, energy-efficient technologies for treating and
recycling water could emerge from the scientific progress on nanoparticles and
nanofibres and membrane bioreactors. But until that becomes a reality, Asian
states have little choice but to upgrade their antiquated irrigation systems and
adopt more water-efficient agricultural practices.

Two contending ideologies reemerge in the world

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The 60th Year of China’s Tibet Invasion

Brahma Chellaney

The Sunday Guardian, May 3, 2010

Francis Fukuyama, a deputy director in the
U.S. state department then, gained
intellectual
stardom by making the
self-righteous claim
in a 1989 essay that the conclusion of the Cold War marked the end of
ideological evolution, “the end of history,” with the
“universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government.” Today’s world demonstrates that Western liberal democratic values
and practices are anything but universal.

But, more importantly, just as they were two contending
ideologies during the Cold War, two contending ideologies are again staring the
world in the face — international capitalism, spearheaded by an America whose
political and economic pre-eminence is on the wane even as it retains its
military supremacy, and authoritarian capitalism, led by a fast-rising China.

The rise of China as a world player in one generation under
authoritarian rule is the single most-profound geopolitical development since
after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its
rise epitomizes the qualitative reordering of power that is under way in the
world.

China’s future, however, remains more uncertain
than ever. It faces a worrisome paradox: Because of an opaque, repressive
political system, the more it globalizes, the more vulnerable it becomes
internally. At the core of its internal challenges is how to make a political
soft landing.

Political modernization, not economic modernization,
thus is the central challenge staring at China.
But it won’t be easy for the communist leadership to open up politically without
unraveling a system that now survives on a mix of crony capitalism and
calibrated, state-dispensed patronage.

Unlike India, China first concentrated on acquiring
military muscle. By the time Deng Xiaoping launched his economic-modernization
program in 1978, China already had tested its first
intercontinental ballistic missile, the 12,000-kilometer DF-5, and developed
thermonuclear weaponry. The military muscle gave Beijing the much-needed security to focus on
civilian modernization, helping it to fuel its remarkable economic rise, which,
in turn, has armed it with ever greater resources to sharpen its claws. 

China’s economy has expanded 13-fold over the
last 30 years. Consequently, China has arrived as a global
economic player, with its state-owned corporate behemoths frenetically buying
foreign firms, technologies and resources. Add to the picture its rapidly
swelling foreign-exchange coffers, already the world’s largest. Beijing is well-positioned
geopolitically to further expand its influence.

Its defence strategy since the Mao Zedong era has been
founded on a simple premise — that the capacity to defend oneself with one’s own
resources is the first test a nation has to pass on the way to
becoming a great power. So, even when
China was poor, it
consciously put the accent on building comprehensive national power.

Communist China actually began as an
international pariah state. Today, it is courted by the
world.  As the latest
U.S. intelligence assessment
predicts, China is “poised to have more impact
on the world over the next 20 years than any other country.”

A long-term
strategic vision and unflinching pursuit of goals have been key drivers. But
China’s rise also has been aided by
good fortune on several fronts. Deng Xiaoping’s reform process, for instance,
benefited from good timing, coinciding with the start of globalization. The
Soviet Union’s sudden collapse also came as a great strategic boon, eliminating
a menacing empire and opening the way for Beijing to rapidly increase strategic space
globally. A succession of China-friendly U.S. presidents
since Richard Nixon also has helped.

The most important international factor in
China’s rise, however, is rarely
discussed. China’s rise owes
a lot to the West’s decision not to sustain trade sanctions after the
1989 Tiananmen
Square massacre, but instead to integrate Beijing with global
institutions through the liberalizing influence of foreign investment and trade.

The end of the Cold War allowed the United States and its allies to take a more
tolerant approach toward China by abjuring sanctions. Had the
U.S. treated
China post-1989 in the way
countries like Burma,
Iran and Cuba have been targeted for long, a less
prosperous and more insecure China would have
emerged.

Although China has come a long way since Tiananmen
Square, with its citizens now enjoying property rights, the freedom to travel
overseas and other entitlements that were unthinkable two decades ago, political
power still rests with the same party responsible for the death of tens of
millions of Chinese in state-induced disasters like the so-called Great Leap
Forward and the Cultural Revolution.  That the communist party continues to
monopolize power despite its past horrific excesses indeed is astonishing. This
is now the oldest autocracy in the world. And it is unthinkable that it can
survive for another 60 years. Before long, economic progress will challenge the adamantine political
system. The longest any autocratic system has
survived in modern history was 74 years in the Soviet
Union.

The threat
to the communist dictatorship extends beyond the ethnic and social unrest.
Reported incidents of grassroots violence have grown at about the same rate as
China’s GDP. The ethnic challenges —
best symbolized by the Tibetan uprising and the Uighur revolt — won’t go away
unless Beijing
stops imposing cultural homogeneity and abandons ethnic drowning as state
strategy in minority lands. But given the regime’s entrenched cultural
chauvinism and tight centralized control, that is unlikely to happen. After all,
President Hu Jintao’s slogan of a “harmonious society” is designed to undergird
the theme of conformity with the state.

China’s challenges actually center on its
political future. Although China has moved from being a
totalitarian state to being an authoritarian state, some things haven’t changed
since the Mao years. Some others indeed have changed for the worse, such as the
whipping up of ultra-nationalism as the legitimating credo of continued
communist rule. Unremitting attempts to bend reality to the dangerous illusions
the state propagates through information control and online censors risk turning
China into a modern-day Potemkin
state.

Today, China’s rapidly accumulating power raises
concerns because even when it was backward and internally troubled,
it
employed brute force to annex Xinjiang (1949) and Tibet (1950), to raid South Korea (1950), to invade India (1962), to initiate a border conflict with
the Soviet Union through a military ambush (1969), and
to attack Vietnam (1979). A prosperous,
militarily strong China cannot but be a threat to its
neighbours, especially if there are no constraints on the exercise of Chinese
power.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of China
becoming India’s neighbour — by gobbling up the traditional buffer, Tibet, which
was almost two-thirds the size of the European continent. As a result of that
event, Han soldiers arrived for the first time on India’s
borders. Yet India is officially celebrating 2010
as the year marking 60 years of Sino-Indian diplomatic relations. Does this
reflect low self-esteem or a refusal to face up to a harsh six-decade-old
reality?  

How to salvage climate change negotiations

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EARTH IN THE BALANCE

Confronting the Geopolitics of Climate Change

Brahma Chellaney

Project Syndicate

International climate-change negotiations are to be renewed this year. To be successful, they must heed the lessons of last December’s Copenhagen summit.

The first lesson is that climate change is a matter not only of science, but also of geopolitics. The expectation at Copenhagen that scientific research would trump geopolitics was misguided. Without an improved geopolitical strategy, there can be no effective fight against climate change.

The second lesson from Copenhagen is that to get a binding international agreement, there first must be a deal between the United States and China. These two countries are very dissimilar in many respects, but not in their carbon profiles: each accounts for between 22% and 24% of all human-generated greenhouse gases in the world. If a deal can be reached between the world’s two greatest polluting nations, which together are responsible for more than 46% of all greenhouse-gas emissions, an international accord on climate change would be easier to reach.

In Copenhagen, China cleverly deflected pressure by hiding behind small, poor countries and forging a negotiating alliance, known as the BASIC bloc, with three other major developing countries – India, Brazil, and South Africa. The BASIC bloc, however, is founded on political opportunism, and thus is unlikely to hold together for long. The carbon profiles of Brazil, India, South Africa, and China are wildly incongruent. For example, China’s per-capita carbon emissions are more than four times higher than India’s.

China rejects India’s argument that per-capita emission levels and historic contributions of greenhouse gases should form the objective criteria for carbon mitigation. China, as the factory to the world, wants a formula that marks down carbon intensity linked to export industries. As soon as the struggle to define criteria for mitigation action commences in future negotiations, this alliance will quickly unravel.

A third lesson from Copenhagen is the need for a more realistic agenda. Too much focus has been put on carbon cuts for nearly two decades, almost to the exclusion of other elements. It is now time to disaggregate the climate-change agenda into smaller, more manageable parts. After all, a lot can be done without a binding agreement that sets national targets on carbon cuts.

Consider energy efficiency, which can help bring one-quarter of all gains in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Energy inefficiency is a problem not only in the Third World, but also in the developed world. The US, for instance, belches out twice as much CO2 per capita as Japan, although the two countries have fairly similar per-capita incomes.

Furthermore, given that deforestation accounts for as much as 20% of the emission problem, carbon storage is as important as carbon cuts. Each hectare of rainforest, for example, stores 500 tons of CO2. Forest conservation and management thus are crucial to tackling climate change. In fact, to help lessen the impact of climate change, states need to strategically invest in ecological restoration – growing and preserving rainforests, building wetlands, and shielding species critical to our ecosystems.

The international community must also focus on stemming man-made environmental change. Environmental change is distinct from climate change, although there is a tendency on the part of some enthusiasts to blur the distinction and turn global warming into a blame-all phenomenon.

Man-made environmental change is caused by reckless land use, overgrazing, depletion and contamination of surface freshwater resources, overuse of groundwater, degradation of coastal ecosystems, inefficient or environmentally unsustainable irrigation practices, waste mismanagement, and the destruction of natural habitats. Such environmental change has no link to global warming. Yet, ultimately, it will contribute to climate variation and thus must be stopped.

Climate change and environmental change, given their implications for resource security and social and economic stability, are clearly threat multipliers. While continuing to search for a binding international agreement, the international community should also explore innovative approaches, such as global public-private partnership initiatives.

As the international community’s experience since the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change shows, it is easier to set global goals than to implement them. The non-binding political commitments reached in principle at Copenhagen already have run into controversy as well as varying interpretations, dimming the future of the so-called “Copenhagen Accord,” an ad hoc, face-saving agreement stitched together at the eleventh hour to cover up the summit’s failure. Only 55 of the 194 countries submitted their national action plans by the accord’s January 31 deadline.

The climate-change agenda has become so politically driven that important actors have tagged onto it all sorts of competing interests, economic and otherwise. That should not have been allowed to happen, but it has, and there can be no way forward unless and until we confront that fact.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010.
http://www.project-syndicate.org

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India’s missing hard power

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One missile to rule them all

Developing intercontinental ballistic missiles is crucial if India is to have credible deterrence and power-projection force as it aspires to become a global power

Brahma Chellaney

Mint newspaper, April 21, 2010

With China engaged in ambitious missile force modernization and the US building new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) as part of its “Prompt Global Strike” programme, the question we need to ask is: When will India develop its first ICBM? Without such capability, India has little hope of emerging as a major power.

ICBMs are the idiom of power in international relations. Even as economic might plays a greater role in shaping international power equations, hard power remains central both for national deterrence and for power-projection force capability. For example, all countries armed with intercontinental-range weaponry hold permanent seats in the United Nations Security Council, and all aspirants for new permanent seats have regionally confined military capabilities.

India has glaring deficiencies on both the deterrence and power-projection fronts. It urgently needs a delivery capability that can underpin its doctrine of minimum but credible nuclear deterrence. The current heavy reliance on long-range bomber aircraft is antithetical to a credible deterrence posture.
Such a posture bereft of long-range missile reach only helps typecast India as a subcontinental power. In fact, in the absence of “strategic” or long-range missile systems, India’s deterrent capability remains sub-strategic.

If India seriously desires to project power far beyond its shores in order to play an international role commensurate with its size, it cannot do without ICBMs. Indeed, the only way India can break out from the confines of its neighbourhood is to develop intercontinental-range weaponry. With its current type of military capabilities, India will continue to be seen as a regional power with great-power pretensions.

To embark on an ICBM programme, India needs to shed its strategic diffidence. The National Democratic Alliance government told Parliament: “India has the capability to design and develop ICBMs. However, in consonance with the threat perception, no ICBM development project has been undertaken.” That policy inexplicably remains unchanged under the United Progressive Alliance government, even as India faces a growing threat from the new ICBMs in China’s increasingly sophisticated missile armoury.

An ICBM has a range of 5,500km and more. Rather than aim for a technological leap through a crash ICBM programme, India remains stuck in the intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) arena, where its frog-like paces have taken it—more than two decades after the first Agni test—to Agni III, a sub-strategic missile still not deployed. Even the Agni V project, now on the drawing board, falls short of the ICBM range.

No nation can be a major power without three key attributes: (1) a high level of autonomous and innovative technological capability; (2) a capacity to meet basic defence needs indigenously; and (3) a capability to project power far beyond its borders, especially through intercontinental-range weaponry.

India is today the world’s largest importer of conventional weapons, ordering weapons worth at least $5 billion per year. Far from making the nation stronger, such large arms imports underscore the manner in which the country is depleting its meagre defence resources and eroding its conventional military edge. The Indian military today can achieve many missions, including repulsing an aggression and inflicting substantial losses on invaders. It can even carry out limited pre-emptive or punitive action and fend off counteraction. But it cannot do what any major military should be trained and equipped for—decisively win a war against an aggressor state.

The reason is not hard to find: Modernization outlays mainly go not to develop the country’s own armament production base, but to subsidize the military-industrial complex of others through import of weapons, some of questionable value. None of the weapon mega deals India has signed in recent years will arm its military with the leading edge it needs in an increasingly volatile and uncertain regional security environment.

Its military asymmetry with China has grown to the extent that it has fostered disturbing fecklessness in India’s China policy, best illustrated by external affairs minister S.M. Krishna’s recent Beijing visit. And in the absence of a reliable nuclear deterrent, India has become ever more dependent on conventional weapon imports. Among large states in the world, India is the only one that relies on imports to meet even basic defence needs.

Last year’s launch of the country’s first nuclear-powered submarine, INS Arihant, for underwater trials received a lot of media attention. A nuclear-powered, ballistic missile-carrying submarine (known as SSBN) is essential for India to bridge the yawning gap in its deterrent force against China. But even if everything goes well, India’s first SSBN will be deployed in the years ahead with a non-strategic weapon—a 700km submarine-launched ballistic missile now under development. That would further underpin the regional character of India’s deterrence.

Without hard power, India will continue to punch far below its weight and be mocked at by critics. One well-known India baiter, journalist Barbara Crossette, claims: “…today’s India is an international adolescent, a country of outsize ambition but anemic influence.” That India still does not have an ICBM project—even on the drawing board—is a troubling commentary about the lack of strategic prudence. China built its first ICBM even before Deng Xiaoping initiated economic modernization in 1978. A generation later, the Indian leadership has yet to grasp international power realities.

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