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Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

Arunachal Pradesh in India-China relations

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China’s locus standi on Arunachal?

The basis of its territorial claim is laughable

The Economic Times, October 16, 2009

Does China have any locus standi in relation to the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh? A “yes” answer would be an invitation to India to assert its locus standi in the matter of Tibet, 

Brahma Chellaney, Strategic Affairs Expert

given that China’s claim to Arunachal is based not on any Han connection, but on alleged historical links with Tibet. In making that claim, Beijing indeed advertises that Tibet is the core issue and that it covets Arunachal as a cultural patio to Tibet — a classic attempt at incremental annexation. 

The Dalai Lama has publicly said that Arunachal historically was not part of Tibet. That is why, as he has explained, the 1914 Simla Agreement, of which the then-independent Tibet was a party, did not include present-day Arunachal Pradesh in Tibet. China does not recognise the McMahon Line because its acceptance of the 1914 border will be admission that Tibet was once independent, seriously undercutting the legitimacy of its control over an increasingly restive Tibet. 

Beijing thus fashioned its claim to Arunachal originally as a bargaining chip to compel India to recognise Chinese control over Aksai Chin. That was the reason why in the 1962 war, China withdrew from the Arunachal areas it invaded but retained its territorial gains in Ladakh. 

But as part of its hardening stance toward India, China has since 2006 publicly raked up the long-dormant Arunachal issue. The basis of its territorial claim, however, is laughable. Just because the 6th Dalai Lama was born in the 17th century in Arunachal’s Tawang district, Beijing claims that the state belongs to Tibet and thus is part of China. 

By that argument, it can also lay claim to Mongolia as the 4th Dalai Lama was born there in 1589. The traditional ecclesiastical links between Mongolia and Tibet actually have been closer than those between Arunachal and Tibet. In fact, as part of its cartographic dismemberment of Tibet, China has hived off the birthplaces of the 7th, 10th, 11th and present Dalai Lama from Tibet. 

The issue in India-China relations up to 1962 was Aksai Chin; the issue now is Arunachal. If history is not to repeat itself, India must put the spotlight on the source of China’s claim — Tibet.


(c) Economic Times, 2009.

Can China make a political soft landing?

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Challenges for China concern political future, not economics


Japan Times http://ow.ly/tA57

Six decades after it was founded, the People’s Republic of China has made some remarkable achievements. A backward, impoverished state in 1949, it has risen dramatically to now command respect and awe — but such success has come at great cost to its own people.

In fact, China’s future 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.

Unlike its Asian peers, Japan and 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-km 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 that, 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, and Beijing is well-positioned geopolitically to further expand its influence.

Its defense 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.

Today, its 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 neighbors, especially if there are no constraints on the exercise of Chinese power.

Communist China actually began as an international pariah state. Today, it is courted by the world. Its rise in one generation as a world power under authoritarian rule has come to epitomize the qualitative reordering of international power.

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’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 in the past two decades also has helped. China’s rise indeed 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.

Although China has come a long way since Tiananmen Square, with its citizens now enjoying property rights, overseas travel and other entitlements that were unthinkable two decades ago, political power still rests with the same party responsible for millions of deaths in state-induced disasters like the 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 hard to believe that it can survive for another 60 years. 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 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 2008 Tibetan uprising and this year’s Uighur revolt — won’t go away unless Beijing stops imposing cultural homogeneity and abandons ethnic drowning as state strategy in minority lands. 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 ultranationalism as the legitimizing 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.

More fundamentally, if China manages to resolve the stark contradictions between its two systems — market capitalism and political monocracy — just as the Asian "tigers" South Korea and Taiwan were able to make the transition to democracy without crippling turbulence at home, China could emerge as a peer competitor to the United States.

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.

Internationally, China’s trajectory will depend on how its neighbors and other key players such as the U.S. manage its growing power. Such management — independently and in partnership — will determine if China stays on the positive side of the ledger, without its power sliding into arrogance.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Center for Policy Research, is the author, most recently, of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."
The Japan Times: October 6, 2009
(C) All rights reserved

Why shoot the messenger?

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To China’s
delight, India
reins in its media

The Indian government doesn’t deny recurrent Chinese cross-frontier
border incursions, yet it has unfairly accused the media of overplaying such
border provocations, says Brahma Chellaney

India Abroad and Rediff.com
http://ow.ly/tzWe

At a time
when border tensions with China
have risen, the Indian government has tried to pull the veil over the
Himalayan-frontier situation by targeting the media for allegedly overplaying
Chinese cross-border incursions. Note: No one in the government has denied such
incursions are occurring. Yet the media is being accused of hyping such
incursions, even as a tight-lipped government remains reluctant to come clean
on the actual extent and frequency of the Chinese intrusions.

To
the delight of the autocrats in Beijing, who
tightly control the flow of information in their country, including through
online censors, New Delhi
has reined in its home media. In response to the governmental intervention at the highest level,
Indian news organizations essentially have clamped down on further reporting of
the Chinese incursions. The message this sends to Beijing, however
inadvertently, is that when the world’s biggest autocracy builds up pressure,
the world’s largest democracy is willing to tame its media coverage, even if it
entails dispensing half-truths and flogging distortions.

Beijing is sure to be emboldened by the precedent that
has been set. Next time when it is unhappy with Indian media coverage of another
issue sensitive to its interests, it simply will issue a diplomatic demarche to
New Delhi to
discipline its media the way it did on the border tensions.

Given Beijing’s
growing hardline stance towards India
since 2006, New Delhi’s
attempt to sweep serious issues under the rug is baffling. The facts, even if unpalatable, should be allowed to
speak for themselves. New Delhi’s
oft-repeated line in recent weeks has been that Chinese incursions are at last
year’s level, so there is no need to worry. But 2008 brought a record number of
incursions, with the Indian defence establishment reporting that the number of
such intrusions went from 140 in 2007 to 270 last year, or almost double. In
addition, there were 2,285 reported instances of “aggressive border patrolling”
by Chinese forces in 2008. This summer, as the army chief publicly said, there were “21
incursions in June, 20 in July and 24 in August.”

The key point to note is that
China has opened pressure points against India across the Himalayas, with border incidents occurring in all the four sectors — Ladakh,
Uttarakhand-Himachal, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. Yet, such is the Indian government’s continuing
opacity that it is loath to clarify the actual border situation, even as it
conveniently blames the media for overplaying the incursions, although the
information about them has been coming from official channels.

If the threat from an increasingly assertive and ambitious China is to be contained, India must have
an honest and open debate on its diplomatic and military options, including how
gaps in its defenses can be plugged and what it will take to build a credible
deterrent. The media has a crucial role to play in such a debate, both by
bringing out the facts and providing a platform for discussion.

Still,
New Delhi has
sought to make its home media the scapegoat. Even more odd is that it has taken
its cue from Beijing.
It was the Chinese foreign ministry which first accused Indian media of
stirring up tensions. “I have noted that some Indian media are
releasing inaccurate information; I wonder what their aim is,” spokeswoman
Jiang Yu had said. Soon thereafter, Beijing
discreetly began exerting diplomatic pressure on New Delhi to domesticate its media.

In response, Indian
government functionaries have rushed, one by one, to make light of the Chinese
incursions, although the Chinese leadership has
studiously kept mum on border-related developments. Not a word has come from
any Chinese leader. By contrast, the almost entire Indian security leadership from
the prime minister down has gone public — not to clarify what is happening
along the border, but to claim there is no cause for alarm. But by being
disturbingly opaque, New Delhi
only adds to the public unease.

The Indian public
indeed has been offered mostly one-line statements from government
functionaries. Here’s a sample:

■ In
September’s first week, the neophyte external affairs minister offered this
one-liner: ‘‘Let me go on record to say that this
has been one of the most peaceful boundaries that we have had as compared to
boundary lines with other countries.” From the Maurya Sheraton’s presidential
suite, where S.M. Krishna was ensconced for more than 100 days, everything
looks “most peaceful,” not just the India-China border.

■ In the
following week, the foreign secretary claimed there has been “no significant
increase” in Chinese incursions. That suggests the incursions have increased
but not significantly. But who is to judge whether any increase is significant
or insignificant if those in authority divulge no information?

■ The foreign secretary was followed by the prime
minister, who laconically indicated he was in touch with the “highest levels”
of the Chinese government while implicitly acknowledging that a better flow of
government information was necessary to improve media reporting.

■ A day
later, the army chief was asked to speak up. “The
Prime Minister has just made a statement that there has not been any more
incursions or transgressions as compared to last year. They are at the same
level. So there is no cause of worry or concern,” Gen. Deepak Kapoor declared
on September 19. If the level of intrusions remains at last year’s level, that
should be a cause for concern because it shows China
is keeping India
under unremitting pressure.

■ Then came
the national security adviser, who was loquacious but not enlightening in a TV
interview. “Almost all the so-called incursions
which have taken place have taken place in areas which in a sense are viewed as
being disputed by one side or the other,” said M.K. Narayanan. Really? What
about Sikkim, whose border
with Tibet is formally
recognized by China?
And what about Uttarakhand —  the middle
sector — where the line of control was clarified through an exchange of maps
with China
in 2001? More fundamentally, why should New Delhi offer explanations or
justifications for the Chinese incursions? If such intrusions really are due to
differing perceptions about the line of control, let the Chinese say that. But
note: Beijing
hasn’t proffered that excuse.

Significantly, the NSA admitted the Chinese have started intruding a
“little deeper” than before, even as he maintained the government’s
now-familiar line that there has been “hardly any increase” in Chinese
cross-frontier forays. He went on to say, “China certainly sees us as a rival. They wish to be numero uno in this part of the world.”
Yet he complacently concluded, “I don’t think there is any reason for us to
feel particularly concerned as to what’s happening.” Didn’t such smugness bring
the surprise 1962 invasion?

Unfortunately, even while denying any media
report, New Delhi
tends to be so economical with words that it leaves questions hanging. For
example, the government has yet to categorically deny that Chinese forces
opened fire across the settled Sikkim
border in late August. It merely described as “factually inaccurate” a
September 15 newspaper report that two Indo-Tibetan Border Police soldiers were
wounded in such firing. But another national newspaper had earlier front-paged
on August 28 the trading of cross-border fire in the same Sikkim area — Kerang.

If New Delhi
wants to ensure Himalayan peace, pulling the wool on public eyes is certainly not the way. It is the government’s responsibility to keep the public
informed through media of new security threats and the steps it is taking to
effectively defend the borders.

Journalists seeking
information from the government on the Himalayan frontier complain they get the
runaround. Rather than stonewall or obfuscate, the
government ought to readily disseminate information. Not all information
released in the public domain can be venomous to diplomacy.

Good public diplomacy, at home and abroad,
indeed can complement official diplomacy and defense preparedness. Indian
opacity on Chinese-triggered border incidents only helps bolster China’s projection of its “peaceful
rise."

By trying to mask the actual border situation, New Delhi seriously risks playing into Beijing’s hands and spurring on greater
Chinese belligerence.

Brahma Chellaney,
professor of strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Centre for
Policy Research, is the author, most recently, of “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise
of China, India and Japan.”

How India lost out in Sri Lanka

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Behind The Sri Lankan Bloodbath

Brahma Chellaney, 10.09.09 Forbes

Colombo’s victory over the Tamils shows India’s power on the wane.


Thousands of noncombatants, according to the United Nations, were killed in the final phase of the Sri Lankan war this year as government forces overran the Tamil Tiger guerrillas. Nearly five months after Colombo’s stunning military triumph, the peace dividend remains elusive, with President Mahinda Rajapaksa setting out–in the name of "eternal vigilance"–to expand by 50% an already-large military. Little effort has been made to reach out to the Tamil minority and begin a process of national reconciliation.

China, clearly, was the decisive factor in ending the war through its generous supply of offensive weapons and its munificent aid. It even got its ally Pakistan to actively assist Rajapaksa in his war strategy. Today, China is the key factor in providing Colombo the diplomatic cover against the institution of a U.N. investigation into possible war crimes, or the appointment of a U.N. special envoy on Sri Lanka. In return for such support, Beijing has been able to make strategic inroads into a critically located country in India’s backyard.

Unlike China’s assistance, India’s role has received little international attention. But India, too, contributed to the Sri Lankan bloodbath through its military aid, except that it has ended up, strangely, with its leverage undermined.

For years, India had pursued a hands-off approach toward Sri Lanka in response to two developments–a disastrous 1987-1990 peacekeeping operation there; and the 1991 assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by a member of the Tamil Tigers. But having been outmaneuvered by China’s success in extending strategic reach to Sri Lanka in recent years, New Delhi got sucked into providing major assistance to Colombo, lest it lose further ground in Sri Lanka.

From opening an unlimited line of military credit for Sri Lanka to extending critical naval and intelligence assistance, India provided sustained war support despite a deteriorating humanitarian situation there. A "major turning point" in the war, as Sri Lankan navy chief Admiral Wasantha Karannagoda acknowledged, came when the rebels’ supply ships were eliminated, one by one, with input from Indian naval intelligence, cutting off all supplies to the rebel-held areas. That in turn allowed the Sri Lankan ground forces to make rapid advances and unravel the de facto state the Tigers had established in the island nation’s north and east.

Sri Lanka, for its part, practiced adroit but duplicitous diplomacy: It assured India it would approach other arms suppliers only if New Delhi couldn’t provide a particular weapon system it needed. Yet it quietly began buying arms from China and Pakistan without even letting India know. In doing so, Colombo mocked Indian appeals that it rely for its legitimate defense needs on India, the main regional power. It was only by turning to India’s adversaries for weapons, training and other aid that Colombo pulled off a startling military triumph. In any event, Colombo was emboldened by the fact that the more it chipped away at India’s traditional role, the more New Delhi seemed willing to pander to its needs.

Indeed, Rajapaksa deftly played the China, India and Pakistan cards to maximize gains. After key Tamil Tiger leaders had been killed in the fighting, Rajapaksa–to New Delhi’s mortification–thanked China, India and Pakistan in the same breath for Sri Lanka’s victory.

Today, India stands more marginalized than ever in Sri Lanka. Its natural constituency–the Tamils–feels not only betrayed, but also looks at India as a colluder in the bloodbath. India already had alienated the Sinhalese majority in the 1980s, when it first armed the Tamil Tigers and then sought to disarm them through an ill-starred peacekeeping foray that left almost three times as many Indian troops dead as the 1999 Kargil War with Pakistan.

India’s waning leverage over Sri Lanka is manifest from the way it now has to jostle for influence there with arch-rivals China and Pakistan. Hambantota–the billion-dollar port Beijing is building in Sri Lanka’s southeast–symbolizes the Chinese strategic challenge to India from the oceans.

Even as some 280,000 displaced Tamils–equivalent to the population of Belfast–continue to be held incommunicado in barbed-wire camps, India has been unable to persuade Colombo to set them free, with incidents being reported of security forces opening fire on those seeking to escape from the appalling conditions. One of the few persons allowed to visit some of these camps was U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who said after his tour in May: "I have traveled around the world and visited similar places, but these are by far the most appalling scenes I have seen …" Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said recently that India has conveyed its "concerns in no uncertain terms to Sri Lanka on various occasions, stressing the need for them to focus on resettling and rehabilitating the displaced Tamil population at the earliest." But India seems unable to make a difference even with messages delivered in "no uncertain terms."

The story of the loss of India’s preeminent role in Sri Lanka actually begins in 1987, when New Delhi made an abrupt U-turn in policy and demanded that the Tigers lay down their arms. Their refusal to bow to the diktat was viewed as treachery, and the Indian army was ordered to rout them.

Since then, Sri Lanka has served as a reminder of how India’s foreign policy is driven not by resolute, long-term goals, but by a meandering approach influenced by the personal caprice of those in power. The 1987 policy reversal occurred after then Sri Lankan President J.R. Jayewardene–a wily old fox–sold neophyte Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi the line that an "Eelam," or Tamil homeland, in Sri Lanka would be a dangerous precursor to a Greater Eelam uniting Tamils on both sides of the Palk Straits. In buying that myth, Gandhi did not consider a simple truth: If Bangladesh’s 1971 creation did not provoke an Indian Bengali nationalist demand for a Greater Bangladesh, why would an Eelam lead to a Greater Eelam?

Actually, the Tamils in India and Sri Lanka have pursued divergent identities since the fall of the Pandyan kingdom in the 14th century. While the Eelam struggle is rooted in the treatment of Tamils as second-class citizens in Sri Lanka–where affirmative action has been instituted for the majority Sinhalese and a mono-ethnic national identity sought to be shaped–the Tamils in India face no discrimination and have been fully integrated into the national mainstream.

Another personality driven shift in India’s Sri Lanka policy came after the 2004 change of government in New Delhi, when the desire to avenge Gandhi’s assassination trumped strategic considerations, with the hands-off approach being abandoned. That handily meshed with the hawkish agenda of Rajapaksa, who began chasing the military option soon after coming to power in 2005. "It is their duty to help us in this stage," Rajapaksa said about India. And Indian help came liberally.

In fact, such has been the unstinting Indian support that even after the crushing of the Tamil Tigers, India went out of the way to castigate the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, in June for shining a spotlight on the deplorable human-rights situation in Sri Lanka, including the continuing internment of internally displaced Tamils. India accused Pillay–a distinguished South African judge of Indian descent who has sought an independent international investigation into alleged war crimes committed by all sides in Sri Lanka–of going beyond her brief, saying "the independence of the high commissioner cannot be presumed to exceed that of the U.N. secretary-general."

The costs of lending such support have been high. New Delhi today is groping to bring direction to its Sri Lanka policy by defining its objectives more coherently, even as it struggles to respond to the Chinese strategy to build maritime choke points in the Indian Ocean region. Indeed, India has ceded strategic space in its regional backyard in such a manner that Bhutan now remains its sole pocket of influence. In Sri Lanka, India has allowed itself to become a marginal player despite its geostrategic advantage and trade and investment clout.

More fundamentally, the pernicious myth Jayewardene planted in Gandhi’s mind triggered a chain of events still exacting costs on Indian security and interests. In fact, nothing better illustrates the fallacy Jayewardene sold Gandhi than the absence of a Tamil backlash in India to the killings of thousands of countless Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka this year, and to the continued incarceration in tent camps of 280,000 Tamil refugees, including 80,000 children. In fact, even as the Sri Lankan war reached a gory culmination, India’s Tamil Nadu state voted in national elections for the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) led by Gandhi’s widow, Sonia Gandhi, although that governing coalition had shied away from raising its voice over the Sri Lankan slaughter.

Today, the upsurge of Sinhalese chauvinism flows from the fact that the Sri Lankan military accomplished a task whose pursuit forced the mightier Indian army to make an ignominious exit 19 years ago. Consequently, Colombo is going to be even less inclined than before to listen to New Delhi. Indeed, the manner in which Colombo played the China and Pakistan cards in recent years to outsmart India is likely to remain an enduring feature of Sri Lankan diplomacy, making Sri Lanka a potential springboard for anti-India maneuvers.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.

(c) 2009 Forbes.com

The lessons the U.S.-India nuclear deal holds

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Counting the costs of a vaunted deal

Brahma Chellaney

The Hindu newspaper, October 9, 2009

On the first anniversary of its coming to fruition, the much-trumpeted Indo-U.S. nuclear deal stands out as an overrated initiative whose conclusion through patent political partisanship holds sobering lessons for India.

For United States President George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the nuclear deal was a prized legacy-building issue. Mr. Bush ensured the deal wasn’t a divisive subject at home by forging an impressive bipartisan consensus. By contrast, Dr. Singh’s polarising single-mindedness on the ballyhooed deal and refusal to permit parliamentary scrutiny injected intense partisan rancour into the debate. Given that India may have to assume new international legal obligations on other fronts too — from climate change to the Doha Round of world-trade talks — the noxious precedent set by the deal must be corrected in national interest.

The deal indeed was a milestone, symbolising the deepening ties between the world’s oldest democracy and largest democracy. But on the first anniversary of its coming to fruition, the deal stands out as an overvalued venture whose larger benefits remain distant for India, including an end to dual-use technology controls and greater U.S. support in regional and global matters. The deal offers more tangible benefits to the U.S. While significantly advancing U.S. non-proliferation interests, the deal — embedded in a larger strategic framework — fashions an instrumentality to help co-opt India in a “soft alliance.” It also carries attractive commercial benefits for the U.S. in sectors extending from commercial nuclear power to arms trade.

To be sure, the deal-making was a tortuous, three-year process, involving multiple stages and difficult-to-achieve compromises. At its core, the deal-making centred on India’s resolve to safeguard its nuclear military autonomy and America’s insistence on imposing stringent non-proliferation conditions, including a quantifiable cap on Indian weapons-related capabilities. Eventually, a deal was sealed that gave India the semblance of autonomy and America some Indian commitments to flaunt, best epitomised by the decision to shut down Cirus — one of India’s two research reactors producing weapons-grade plutonium. No sooner had Congress ratified the deal package than the White House made clear the deal was predicated on India not testing again, with “serious consequences” to follow a breach of that understanding.

The more recent G-8 action barring the transfer of enrichment and reprocessing (ENR) equipment or technology to non-NPT signatories even under safeguards is a fresh reminder that while New Delhi is taking on legally irrevocable obligations that tie the hands of future Indian generations, America’s own obligations under the deal are unequivocally anchored in the primacy of its domestic law and thus mutable. If there were any doubts on that score, they were set at rest by the American ratification legislation that gave effect to the deal, the U.S.-India Nuclear Cooperation Approval and Non-Proliferation Enhancement Act of 2008, or NCANEA. This Hyde Act-plus legislation unabashedly declares that the bilateral 123 Agreement is subservient to existing U.S. law and “any other applicable United States law” enacted henceforth.

That the U.S. has used the G-8 mechanism to deny India the “full” cooperation it bilaterally pledged shouldn’t come as a surprise because the NCANEA obligates Washington to spearhead a Nuclear Suppliers Group ban on ENR transfers. Having formally proposed such a ban in the NSG, Washington got the G-8 to act first — a move that puts pressure on the NSG to follow suit and, more importantly, brings on board in advance all potential ENR-technology suppliers to India. Even on the unrelated and unresolved issue of granting India an operational right to reprocess U.S.-origin spent fuel, the U.S. government has notified Congress that such permission, while subject to congressional approval, would be revocable.

For years to come, the deal will generate eclectic controversies because it is rife with unsettled issues, ambiguities and the avowed supremacy of one party’s variable domestic law. To help the beleaguered Indian government save face, some issues — ranging from a test prohibition to the political nature of fuel-supply assurances — were spelled out not in the bilateral 123 Agreement but in the subsequent U.S. presidential statements and NCANEA. As a result, the final deal gives America specific rights while saddling India with onerous obligations.

Politically, the deal was oversold as the centrepiece, if not the touchstone, of the new Indo-U.S. partnership to the extent that, a year later, New Delhi seems genuinely concerned about India’s declining profile in American policy. Clearly, New Delhi had over-expectations about what the deal would deliver.

Still, there are some key lessons New Delhi must draw from the way it handled the deal. The first is the importance of building political bipartisanship on critical national matters. Had the Prime Minister done what he repeatedly promised — “build a broad national consensus” — India would have strengthened its negotiating leverage and forestalled political acrimony. Dr. Singh’s approach was to play his cards close to his chest and rely on a few chosen bureaucrats. Not a single all-party meeting was called. Consequently, the government presented itself as deal-desperate on whom additional conditions could be thrust.

A second lesson relates to Parliament’s role. Even if there is a lacuna in the Indian Constitution that allows the executive branch to sign and ratify an international agreement without any legislative scrutiny, a forward-looking course would be to plug that gap by introducing a constitutional amendment in Parliament, rather than seek to exploit that weakness.

Sadly, the government chose not to place the final deal before Parliament even for a no-vote debate before it rushed to sign the 123 Agreement on September 10, 2008, just two days after Mr. Bush signed NCANEA into law. This extraordinary haste occurred despite Dr. Singh’s July 22, 2008 assurance in the Lok Sabha that after the entire process was complete, he would bring the final deal to Parliament and “abide” by its decision. But no sooner had the process been over than the government proceeded to sign the 123 Agreement without involving Parliament, although the deal imposes external inspections in perpetuity and leaves no leeway for succeeding governments. A year later, Dr. Singh has yet to make a single statement in Parliament on the terms of the concluded deal, lest he face questions on the promises he couldn’t keep, including the elaborate benchmarks he had defined on August 17, 2006.

In the future, Parliament must not be reduced to being a mere spectator on India’s accession to another international agreement, even as the same pact is subject to rigorous legislative examination elsewhere. In fact, when the government tables the nuclear-accident liability bill, Parliament ought to seize that opportunity to examine the nuclear deal and its subsidiary arrangements. The bill — intended to provide cover mainly to American firms, which, unlike France’s Areva and Russia’s Atomstroyexport, are in the private sector — seeks to cap foreign vendors’ maximum accident liability to a mere $62 million, although each nuclear power station is to cost several billion dollars.

Yet another lesson is to stem the creeping politicisation of top scientists. This trend has drawn encouragement from two successive governments’ short-sighted use of topmost scientists for political purpose. Such politicisation was on full display during the nuclear deal process. The top atomic leadership made scripted political statements in support of deal-related moves, only to be rewarded with special post-superannuation extensions beyond established norms. The current unsavoury controversy among scientists over India’s sole thermonuclear test in 1998 — and the atomic establishment’s frustration over the attention dissenting views are receiving — is a reflection of the damage to official scientific credibility wrought by the deal politics. All this only underscores the need to bring the cosseted nuclear programme under oversight.

If truth be told, national institutions have been the main losers from the partisan approach and divisive politics that the deal came to embody. The deal divided the country like no other strategic issue since Indian independence, with the deteriorating national discourse reaching a new low. Such divisiveness, in turn, seriously weakened India’s hand in the deal-related diplomacy. A new brand of post-partisan politics must define India’s approach in Copenhagen and the Doha Round.

A final sobering lesson: Key national decisions must flow from professional inputs and institutional deliberations, not from gut opinions in which near-term considerations or personal feelings and predilections of those in office prevail over the long view of national interest. The lodestar to avoid disconnect between perception and reality is to ensure that any agreement bears the imprint of institutional thinking, not personal fancy.

(Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.)


© Copyright 2000 – 2009 The Hindu

Sri Lanka’s continuing tragedy: Unable to be at peace even in victory

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Sri Lanka’s double tragedy 

By Brahma Chellaney

The New Indian Express, October 7, 2009

If
war-scarred Sri Lanka
is to re-emerge as a tropical paradise, it has to build enduring peace through
genuine inter-ethnic equality and by making the transition from being a unitary
state to being a federation that grants local autonomy. Yet even in victory,
the Sri Lankan government seems unable to define peace or outline a political
solution to the long-standing grievances of the Tamil minority.

A process
of national reconciliation anchored in federalism and multiculturalism indeed
can succeed only if possible war crimes and other human-rights abuses by all
parties are independently and credibly investigated. United Nations
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has acknowledged that civilian casualties were
“unacceptably high,” especially as the war built to a bloody crescendo. The
continuing air of martial triumph in Sri Lanka,
though, is making it difficult to heal the wounds of
war through three essential “Rs”: Relief, recovery and reconciliation.

Months after the Tamil
Tigers were crushed, it is clear the demands of peace extend far beyond the
battlefield. What is needed is a fundamental shift in government policies to
help create greater inter-ethnic equality, regional autonomy and a reversal of
the state-driven militarization of society. But President Mahinda Rajapaksa already
has declared: “Federalism is out of the question.”

How elusive
the peace dividend remains can be seen from Sri Lanka’s decision to press ahead
with a further expansion of its military. Not content with increasing the
military’s size fivefold since the late 1980s to more than 200,000 troops
today, Colombo
is raising the strength further to 300,000, in the name of “eternal vigilance.”
The Sri Lankan military already is bigger than that of Britain and Israel. The planned further
expansion would make the military in tiny Sri
Lanka larger than the militaries of major powers like France, Japan
and Germany.
By citing a continuing danger of guerrilla remnants reviving the insurgency,
Rajapaksa is determined to keep a hyper-militarized Sri Lanka on something of a war
footing.

Yet another issue of
concern is the manner the government still holds nearly 300,000 civilians in
camps where, in the recent words of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, the “internally
displaced persons are effectively detained under conditions of internment.”
Such detention risks causing more resentment among the Tamils and sowing
the seeds of future unrest. The internment was
intended to help weed out rebels, many of whom already have been identified and
transferred to military sites.

Those in the evacuee camps
are the victims and survivors of the deadly war. To confine them in the camps
against their will is to further victimize and traumatize them. Sri Lanka’s
interests would be better served through greater transparency. It should grant
the UN,
International Red Cross and nongovernmental organizations at home and abroad
unfettered access to care for and protect the civilians in these camps,
allowing those who wish to leave the camps to stay with relatives and friends.

Then
there is the issue of thousands of missing people, mostly Tamils. Given that
many families are still searching for missing members, the government ought to
publish a list of all those it is holding — in evacuee camps, prisons, military
sites and other security centres. Even suspected rebels in state custody ought
to be identified and not denied access to legal representation. Bearing in
mind that thousands of civilians were killed just in the final months of the
war, authorities should disclose the names of those they know to be dead —
civilians and insurgents — and the possible circumstances of their death.

The way to fill the power
vacuum in the Tamil-dominated north is not by dispatching additional army
troops in tens of thousands, but by setting up a credible local administration
to keep the peace and initiate rehabilitation and reconstruction after more
than a quarter of a century of war. Yet there is a lurking danger that the
government may seek to change demography by returning to its old policy of settling
Sinhalese in Tamil areas.

More fundamentally, such
have been the costs of victory that Sri Lankan civil society stands badly
weakened. The wartime suppression of a free press and curtailment of
fundamental rights continues in peacetime, undermining democratic freedoms and
creating a fear psychosis. Sweeping emergency regulations remain in place,
arming the security forces with expansive powers of search, arrest and seizure
of property. Public meetings cannot be held without government permission. Individuals
can still be held in unacknowledged detention for up to 18 months.

For the process of reconciliation
and healing to begin in earnest, it is essential the government give up wartime
powers and accept, as the UN human-rights
commissioner has sought, “an independent and credible international
investigation … to ascertain the occurrence, nature and scale of violations of
international human-rights and international humanitarian law” by all parties
during the conflict. Rather than begin a political dialogue on regional
autonomy and a more level-playing field for the Tamils in education and
government jobs, the government has seen its space get constricted by the
post-victory upsurge of Sinhalese chauvinism opposed to the devolution of
powers to the minorities. The hardline constituency argues that the Tamils in
defeat shouldn’t get what they couldn’t secure through three decades of unrest
and violence.

Indeed, such chauvinism seeks to tar
federalism as a potential forerunner to secession, although the Tamil
insurgency sprang from the state’s rejection of decentralization and
power-sharing. The looming parliamentary and presidential elections also make
devolution difficult, even though the opposition is splintered and Rajapaksa
seems set to win a second term.

Add to the picture the
absence of international pressure, despite the leverage provided by a
cash-strapped Sri Lankan economy. The United
States enjoys a one-country veto in the International
Monetary Fund, yet it chose to abstain from the recent IMF vote approving a
desperately needed $2.8-billion loan to Sri Lanka. In the face of China’s stonewalling in the UN, Ban Ki-moon has
been unable to appoint a UN special envoy on Sri Lanka, let alone order a probe
into possible war crimes there. Beijing provided Colombo not only the weapons
that decisively titled the military balance in its favour, but also the diplomatic cover to
prosecute the war in defiance of international calls to cease
offensive operations to help stanch rising civilian casualties. Through such
support, China has succeeded
in extending its strategic reach to a critically located country in India’s backyard that sits astride vital
sea-lanes of communication in the Indian Ocean
region.

Today, reversing the
militarization of society, ending the control of information as an instrument
of state policy and promoting political and ethnic reconciliation are crucial
to post-conflict peace-building. So also is the need to discard the almost
mono-ethnic character of the security forces.

As world history attests,
peace sought to be achieved through the suppression and humiliation of an
ethnic community has proven elusive. It will be a double tragedy for Sri Lanka if
making peace proves more difficult than making war. 

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

(c) New Indian Express, 2009.

Sino-Indian border tensions: Let the Facts Speak For Themselves

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Setting Boundaries

India must have an honest debate on its diplomatic and military options regarding China.

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, October 5, 2009 http://ow.ly/sCR1

No one in the Indian government has said
Chinese cross-frontier incursions aren’t happening. Yet to play down the
incursions, New Delhi
has accused the media of overplaying such intrusions. To the delight of the
autocrats in Beijing, who tightly control the
flow of information in their country, including through online censors, New Delhi has made its
home media the whipping boy. The unwitting message that sends to Beijing is that when the
world’s biggest autocracy builds up pressure, the world’s largest democracy is
willing to tame its media coverage, even if it entails dispensing half-truths and flogging
distortions.

The facts, even if unpalatable, should be
allowed to speak for themselves. New
Delhi’s oft-repeated line in recent days has been that
Chinese incursions are at last year’s level, so there is no need to worry. But
2008 brought a record number of incursions, with defence officials reporting
that the number of such intrusions went from 140 in 2007 to 270 last year, or
almost double. In addition, there were 2,285 reported instances of “aggressive border
patrolling” by Chinese forces in 2008. As Defence Minister A.K. Anthony told an
army commanders’ conference last year, “there is no room for complacency” on
the Tibet
border.

That the incursions this year are continuing at
the 2008 level suggests there is every reason to be concerned. After all, the
2008 record pattern is continuing, with China
keeping India
under sustained, unremitting pressure. Yet, from the external affairs
minister and foreign secretary to the national security adviser and army chief,
Indian officials have sought to tamp down public concerns by saying there is
“no significant increase” compared to last year. Do they wish to thank Beijing for keeping
border incidents and other provocations at the 2008 level without seeking to
establish a new record through a “significant” increase in incursions?

The key point to note is that China has opened pressure points against India across the Himalayas, with border incidents occurring in all the four sectors. Chinese forces
are intruding even into Utttarakhand, although the line of control in this
middle sector was clarified in 2001 through an exchange of maps, and into Sikkim, whose 206-kilometer border with Tibet is not in dispute and indeed is recognized
by Beijing.
Yet, gratuitously stretching the truth, Indian officials say the incursions are
the result of differing perceptions about the line of control. That may be so
about Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh, but can that be true about Sikkim
and Uttarakhand? It speaks for itself that Beijing hasn’t offered this lame excuse.

Make no mistake: The Chinese border provocations have resulted both from India’s political pusillanimity and from the withdrawal of China-related army divisions in past years. For example, the 8th Mountain Division, tasked with defending Sikkim, was moved from northern Bengal to J&K and took part in the Kargil War. Tank forces also were moved out from Sikkim. Similarly, a mountain division was moved from the northeast to J&K for counterinsurgency operations. Such relocation of forces emboldened the Chinese. The current Indian moves to beef up defences against China largely involve the return of the forces that were withdrawn a decade or more ago.

Chinese cross-border incursions are designed not only to keep India under military pressure all along the Himalayas, but also to ensure Indian “good behavior” on assorted political issues, including Tibet, Pakistan and military ties with the US. Take the Pakistan factor: At a time when an internally troubled Pakistan is facing US pressure to redeploy a sufficient number of forces to the Afghan front, China wants to shield its “all-weather ally” from Indian military pressure by keeping a sizable number of Indian forces bogged down along the Himalayas.

Had India’s
nuclear deterrent been credible in the eyes of China,
Beijing
wouldn’t have dared to ratchet up border tensions. But the Chinese
muscle-flexing suggests otherwise. In fact, more than three decades after China tested its first intercontinental
ballistic missile, India
doesn’t have an ICBM even on the drawing board. India still hasn’t deployed even a
single, Beijing-reachable missile.

If the threat from an increasingly assertive and ambitious China is to be contained, India must have an honest and open
debate on its diplomatic and military options, including how gaps in its
defences can be plugged and what it will take to build a credible deterrent.
The media has a crucial role to play in such a debate, both by bringing out the
facts and providing a platform for discussion. If New Delhi wishes to ensure Himalayan peace
and stability, pulling the
wool on public eyes at home is certainly not the way.

The author is
Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

China at 60: Dramatic rise but unsettled future

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Pushing The Limits, Day After Day

Since 1949, China has seen a dramatic rise in
its fortunes. But its future is far from settled, says Brahma Chellaney.

Times of India, The Crest Edition, October
3, 2009 http://ow.ly/sCWG

Six decades
after it was founded, the People’s Republic of China can truly be proud of its
remarkable achievements. An impoverished, backward state in 1949, it has risen
dramatically and now commands respect and awe in the world. But such success
has come at great cost to its own people. In fact, China’s future remains more
uncertain than ever. It faces a worrisome paradox: Because of its opaque, repressive
system, the more it globalizes, the more vulnerable it becomes internally.

Unlike India, China first concentrated on
acquiring military muscle. By the time Deng Xiaoping launched his economic-modernization
programme, China
already had tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile and developed a
thermonuclear weapon (also known as a hydrogen or fusion bomb). 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 even 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. Beijing
thus 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.

Today, its
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.

Communist
China actually began as an
international pariah state. Today, it is courted by the world.  Its rise in one generation as a world
power under authoritarian rule has come to epitomize the qualitative reordering
of international power. As the latest US
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 vision and
unflinching pursuit of goals have been key drivers. But China’s rise also
has been aided by good fortune on multiple strategic fronts. First, Beijing’s reform process
benefited from good timing, coming as it did at the start of globalization
three decades ago. Second, the Soviet Union’s sudden collapse delivered an
immense strategic boon, eliminating a menacing empire and opening the way for Beijing to rapidly
increase strategic space globally. Russia’s
decline in the 1990s became China’s
gain. And third, there has been a succession of China-friendly U.S. presidents in the past two decades — a
significant period that has coincided with China’s ascension.

China’s rise indeed 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. That the choice made was wise can be seen from the
baneful impact of the opposite decision that was taken on Burma from the
late 1980s — to pursue a penal approach centred on sanctions. Had the
Burma-type approach been applied against China
internationally, the result would have been a less-prosperous, less-open and a
potentially destabilizing China.

Although China has come a
long way since Tiananmen Square, with its citizens now enjoying property
rights, the freedom to travel overseas and other rights that were unthinkable a
generation ago, political power still rests with the same party and system
responsible for the death of tens of millions of Chinese during the so-called
Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution and other state-induced disasters. The
greatest genocide in modern world history was not the Holocaust but the Great
Leap Forward, a misguided charge toward industrialization that left 36 million
people dead, according to Tombstone,
a recent book by long-time Chinese communist Yang Jisheng.

That the communist party
continues to monopolize power despite its past gory excesses indeed is
remarkable. This is now the oldest autocracy in the world. The longest any
autocratic system has survived in modern history was 74 years in the Soviet Union.

Although China has moved
from being a totalitarian state to being an authoritarian state, some things
haven’t changed since the Mao years. Some other things indeed have changed for
the worse, such as the whipping up of ultra-nationalism and turning that into
the legitimating credo of communist rule. Attempts to bend reality to the
illusions the state propagates through information control and online censors actually
risk turning China
into a modern-day Potemkin state.

While India celebrates diversity, China honours
artificially enforced monoculturalism, although it officially comprises 56
nationalities. China
seeks not only to play down its ethnic diversity, but also to conceal the
cultural and linguistic cleavages among the Han majority, lest the historical
north-south fault lines resurface with a vengeance. The Han — split in at least
seven linguistically and culturally distinct groups — are anything but
homogenous.

China’s internal problems — best
symbolized by the 2008 Tibetan uprising and this year’s 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.

More fundamentally, if China manages to resolve the stark
contradictions between its two systems — market capitalism and political
monocracy — just the way Asian “tigers” like South
Korea and Taiwan
were able to make the transition to democracy without crippling turbulence at
home, China could emerge as
a peer competitor to the US.
Political modernization, not economic modernization, thus is the central
challenge staring at China.
If it is to build and sustain a great-power capacity, it has to avoid a
political hard landing.

Internationally,
China’s
trajectory will depend on how its neighbours and distant countries like the US manage its
growing power. Such management —
independently and in partnership — will determine if China stays on the positive side of
the ledger, without its power sliding into arrogance.

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

America’s Afghan war is just not winnable

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This column has been syndicated globally by Project Syndicate http://www.project-syndicate.org/
Last Exit from Kabul?

Brahma Chellaney

America’s war in Afghanistan is approaching a tipping point, with doubts about President Barack Obama’s strategy growing. Yet, after dispatching 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, Obama is considering sending another 14,000.

Let’s be clear: America’s Afghan war is not winnable, even though Obama has redefined American goals from defeating the Taliban to preventing Al Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a base to launch attacks on the United States. But Al Qaeda is no longer a serious factor in the Afghan war, where the principal combatants are now the American military and the Taliban, with its associated militias and private armies. Rather than seeking to defeat the Taliban, the US has encouraged the Pakistani, Afghan, and Saudi intelligence services to hold proxy negotiations with the Taliban’s top leadership, holed up in the Pakistani city of Quetta.

The US is fighting the wrong war. After America’s invasion drove Al Qaeda’s leaders from Afghanistan, Pakistan emerged as the main base and sanctuary for transnational terrorists. Support and sustenance for the Taliban and many other Afghan militants also comes from inside Pakistan. Despite this, Obama is pursuing a military surge in Afghanistan but an aid surge to Pakistan, which is now the single largest recipient of US assistance in the world.

To defeat Al Qaeda, the US doesn’t need a troop buildup – certainly not in Afghanistan. Without a large ground force in Afghanistan or even major ground operations, the US can hold Al Qaeda’s remnants at bay in their havens in the mountainous tribal regions of Pakistan through covert operations, Predator drones, and cruise-missile attacks. And isn’t that what the CIA is doing already?

Indeed, US intelligence experts believe that Al Qaeda already is badly fragmented and in no position to openly challenge American interests. According to the latest Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community released last February, “Because of the pressure we and our allies have put on Al Qaeda’s core leadership in Pakistan…Al Qaeda today is less capable and effective than it was a year ago.”

Had Obama’s goal been to rout the Taliban, a further military surge may have made sense, because a resurgent Taliban can be defeated only through major ground operations, not by airstrikes and covert action alone. But if the US administration’s principal war target is not the Taliban but Al Qaeda remnants, why use a troop-intensive strategy based on protecting population centers to win grassroots support? In reality, what the Obama administration calls a “clear, hold, build” strategy is actually a “surge, bribe, run” strategy – except that the muddled nature of the mission and deepening US involvement undermine the “run” component.

Before Afghanistan becomes a Vietnam-style quagmire, Obama must rethink his plan for another troop surge. Gradually drawing down US troop levels makes more sense, because what unites the disparate elements of the Taliban syndicate is a common opposition to foreign military presence.

An American military exit from Afghanistan would not be a shot in the arm for the forces of global jihad, as many in the US seem to fear. On the contrary, it would remove the Taliban’s unifying element and unleash developments – a vicious power struggle in Afghanistan along sectarian and ethnic lines – whose significance would be largely internal or regional.

The Taliban, with the active support of the Pakistani military, would certainly make a run for Kabul to replay the 1996 power grab. But it wouldn’t be easy, owing in part to the Taliban’s fragmentation, with the tail (private armies and militias) wagging the dog.

Moreover, the non-Taliban and non-Pashtun forces are now stronger, more organized, and better prepared than in 1996 to resist any advance on Kabul, having been empowered by provincial autonomy or by the offices they still hold in the Afghan federal government. And, by retaining Afghan bases to carry out covert operations, Predator missions, and other airstrikes, the US would be able to unleash punitive power to prevent a Taliban takeover. After all, it was American air power, combined with the Northern Alliance’s ground operations, which ousted the Taliban in 2001.

In fact, the most likely outcome of any Afghan power struggle triggered by an American withdrawal would be to formalize the present de facto partition of Afghanistan along ethnic lines – the direction in which Iraq, too, is headed.

In this scenario, the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and other ethnic minorities would be able to ensure self-governance in the Afghan areas that they dominate, leaving the Pashtun lands on both sides of the British-drawn Durand Line in ferment. Thanks to ethnic polarization, the Durand Line, or the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, exists today only on maps. On the ground, it has little political and economic relevance, and it would be militarily impracticable to re-impose the line.

As in Iraq, an American withdrawal would potentially unleash forces of Balkanization. That may sound disturbing, but it is probably an unstoppable consequence of the initial US invasion.

An American pullout actually would aid the fight against international terrorism. Instead of remaining bogged down in Afghanistan and seeking to cajole and bribe the Pakistani military into ending their support for Islamic militants, the US would become free to pursue a broader, more balanced counterterrorism strategy. For example, the US would better appreciate the dangers to international security posed by Pakistani terror groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.

The threat of an Islamist takeover of Pakistan comes not from the Taliban, but from groups that have long drawn support from the Pakistani army as part of a long-standing military-mullah alliance. That is where the focus of the fight should be.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India, and Japan.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.

India’s China problem

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Lest we are caught napping, 1962-style

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, October 1-14, 2009

Recent developments are a sharp reminder that China is muscling up to India. The
rising number of Chinese military incursions and other border incidents, the
hardening of China’s
political stance and the vicious anti-India attacks in the Chinese
state-controlled media underscore that. So, even as China
has emerged as India’s
largest trading partner, the Sino-Indian strategic dissonance and border
disputes have become more pronounced. Beijing
seems intent on strategically encircling and squeezing India by employing its rising clout in Pakistan, Burma,
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal.

The Chinese border provocations have resulted both from India’s
political pusillanimity and the withdrawal of army divisions from China-related
duty. For example, the 8th Mountain Division, tasked with defending Sikkim, was moved from northern Bengal to Jammu and Kashmir and
took part in the Kargil War. Similarly, a mountain division was moved from
Nagaland/Arunachal area to J&K for counterinsurgency operations. Tank
forces also were moved out from Sikkim.
All those force withdrawals seem to have emboldened the Chinese. The current
Indian moves to beef up defences against China largely involve the return of
the forces that were withdrawn a decade or more ago.

Diplomatically, India is unable to get its act
together. In the face of growing Chinese cross-border forays, the foreign
minister claimed in public the Himalayan border was “most peaceful.”

The External Affairs Ministry (MEA) reacted to the
provocative “dismember India”
essay posted on a quasi-official Chinese website. But the MEA kept mum when the
authoritative People’s Daily taunted India
for lagging behind China in
all indices of power and asked New Delhi to
consider “the consequences of a potential confrontation with China.”
Criticizing the Indian moves to strengthen defences, the paper peremptorily
declared: “China won’t make
any compromises in its border disputes with India.” A subsequent commentary in
that paper warned India to
stop playing into the hands of “some Western powers” by raising the bogey of a
“China
threat.”

Dismember India
is an old failed project China
launched in the Mao years when it trained and armed Naga, Mizo and other
guerrillas. Although such assistance ceased after Mao’s 1976 death, China seems to be coming full circle today, with
Chinese-made arms increasingly flowing to guerrilla ranks in northeast India, including via Burma. India
last year raised this matter with Beijing
at the foreign minister level. Indeed, Pakistan-based terrorists targeting India now carry
Chinese-made grenades and assault rifles.

Like Pakistan,
China has long believed that
the best way to contain India
is to keep it internally preoccupied. In initiating its proxy war against India, Pakistan merely took a leaf out of
the Chinese book. But as Pakistan
has sunk deeper into a jihadist dungeon, China’s
surrogate card against India
has weakened. This, coupled with China’s
economic success going to its head, has helped spawn direct Chinese pressure on
India.

As a power rising faster than India,
China
sees no need to compromise. But even if it is weaker side, India does not need to blur the line between
diplomacy and appeasement, or give greater weight to show than to substance in
its interactions with Beijing.
Power asymmetry in interstate relations does not mean the weaker side must bend
to the dictates of the stronger or seek to propitiate it. Wise strategy is the
art of offsetting or neutralizing power imbalance with another state.

But while Beijing’s
strategy and tactics are apparent, India has had difficulty to define
a game-plan. It has stayed stuck in increasingly meaningless border talks that
have been going on for nearly three decades. To compound matters, India is to observe 2010 — the 60th anniversary
of China becoming India’s neighbour by gobbling up Tibet — as the “Year of Friendship with China.”

We know China
is seeking to constrict India’s
strategic space and stunt its rise. Indeed, China’s
intermittent cyberwarfare and cross-border military forays are nothing but
crude attempts to intimidate India.
Yet the more China acts
aggressively, the more India
assumes an air of injured innocence.

If India is not to be caught napping in 1962 style, it
has to inject greater realism into its China policy by shedding self-deluding
shibboleths, shoring up its deterrent capabilities and putting premium on leveraged
diplomacy.

 (c) Covert, 2009.