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Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

Strategic and technical aspects of End-Use Monitoring Agreement

Posted on July 27, 2009 by Chellaney

End-use monitoring woes for India

Brahma Chellaney The Hindu newspaper July 27, 2009

While the U.S. has trumpeted the End-Use Monitoring Agreement as a “landmark event,” the Indian government has fought shy of taking Parliament into confidence, placing on record only two sentences thus far

The U.S. has hailed the End-Use Monitoring Agreement (EUMA) with New Delhi as a “landmark event” and “a very significant agreement” — one that brings India into the “nonproliferation mainstream” and “is part of the fulfilment” of the nuclear deal. U.S. officials say the accord opens the path to mega deals on arms supplies to India. By contrast, New Delhi assiduously has sought to downplay EUMA’s importance and sidestepped its linkage to the nuclear deal, given that the Prime Minister had twice told Parliament — the last time on July 22, 2008 — that there are “no secret or hidden” understandings “over and above the documents made public.”

But EUMA is no insignificant accord: It imposes on India conditions that no other arms-supplying state has ever sought. Yet, the arms the U.S. is selling India are not the top-of-the-line weapons — a reality EUMA’s conclusion is unlikely to change. In fact, the U.S. has transferred to Pakistan weapon systems matching those on sale or offer to India, especially big-ticket items like maritime reconnaissance aircraft, military transport planes and fighter-jets. Today, while Washington seeks to sell India 1970s-era F-16s or F-18s in an $11-billion deal, Japan debates the merits of F-22s versus F-35s for air superiority.

To be sure, India has sought to cement its strategic relationship with the U.S. by buying some American arms. Money, after all, matters a lot to U.S. diplomacy. Buying U.S. arms may jibe with India’s arms-diversification policy, but such imports, by no stretch of imagination, are critical to India’s defence. In fact, much of India’s imported weaponry in the approaching years will continue to come from other suppliers, principally Russia, Israel and France, in that order. But if the U.S. can inflict restrictive and invasive conditions, despite being a new supplier, will it embolden other suppliers to seek end-use rights in India and emulate U.S.-style sales to rivals?

Let’s be clear: EUMA is rooted in the extraterritorial application of U.S. law, which demands “reasonable assurance” that the recipient state is complying with American regulations regarding the use and security of defence articles and services. The avowed aim is to enhance American national-security and foreign-policy objectives.

There are three separate end-use monitoring (EUM) programmes. The Pentagon-administered EUM — known in U.S. parlance as the “Golden Sentry” programme — applies only to government-to-government defence contracts (like the ones signed with India in recent years) and imposes stringent “cradle-to-grave” obligations on the recipient state covering the use and final disposition of transferred items, with the U.S. holding “reversionary rights” to take back equipment no longer needed. Direct commercial sales fall under the State Department’s “Blue Lantern” programme. The Commerce Department’s “Extrancheck” monitors dual-use items exported by U.S. industry via the Export Administration Regulation (EAR).

Negotiated with New Delhi over a three-year period, the all-embracing EUMA has some clauses that few can object to, such as a prohibition on second-hand sales. But it also has several controversial provisions that arm Washington with considerable leverage. EUMA explicitly restricts what India can do with the U.S.-origin defence equipment. Under its terms, India cannot modify the imported weapon system in any form. Also, to keep the importing state dependent on the U.S., EUMA restricts India from getting U.S.-sold defence equipment serviced by any another country without prior American permission. Even spare parts need to be sourced only from America.

More importantly, the U.S. has been granted the right to periodically carry out an inspection and physical inventory of all articles transferred to India. A EUMA provision mandates that “the U.S. government will be permitted, at its discretion, to conduct an inspection and physical inventory of all articles and services transferred” and that, upon request, “the inventory and accountability records maintained by the purchaser will be made available to the U.S. personnel” conducting the inspection.

In the negotiations, India had strenuously objected to physical inspection and instead sought a scrutiny of the records and other accountability measures in place. After all, EUMA requires India to maintain good internal accountability and keep records of inventories and items consumed, expended and damaged. In the end, the Americans had their way, but it was agreed the physical inspection would be done at a time and place granted by India. To carry out an inspection, U.S. officials would need the recipient state’s assistance, including on the equipment’s location. So surprise inspections are precluded anyway. To prevent U.S. personnel from visiting sensitive military sites, the Indian government intends to move U.S.-origin defence equipment to a non-sensitive place before any inspection — an onerous task that at times may involve removing a U.S.-sold system from the platform into which it has been integrated.

No less significant is America’s right to check that India is using any purchased weapon for the purpose for which it was intended. This may mean that a system bought by India to bolster defences against China cannot be deployed against Pakistan, still a valued strategic pawn for U.S. policy. EUMA gives the U.S. the “right to verify” that a transferred system was not being used for purposes other than those agreed upon. Change in the end-use of any U.S.-origin component or system without Washington’s authorisation will constitute a EUMA violation.

It is such restrictions that had prompted the Indian Navy chief last year to publicly reject EUMA as too “intrusive.” The U.S., on an ad hoc basis, already has included end-use rights for itself in the recent defence contracts. In a March 2008 report, the CAG had castigated the grant of such rights, pointing out that the contract for USS Trenton — a 1971-vintage, problem-plagued amphibious transport ship bought by India in 2007 for $50 million — contains even “restrictions on the offensive deployment of the ship.” Now, EUMA, with its comprehensive end-use stipulations, will serve as the umbrella arrangement covering all future defence deals.

Yet, despite the misgivings expressed within and outside the officialdom, a tongue-tied Indian government has shied away from taking Parliament into confidence, with the External Affairs Minister’s July 21 statement in both Houses containing just two sentences on EUMA. Shouldn’t the Prime Minister explain to Parliament how an agreement designed by the U.S. for client states meshes with India’s strategic autonomy and its right of unfettered deployment and use of weapons bought with hard cash? The government bill proposing that Indian taxpayers assume main nuclear-accident liability, with foreign vendors’ maximum liability limited to a mere $62 million, will give Parliament finally a chance to examine the nuclear deal and its connection to accords like EUMA.

Although India is America’s strategic partner, not an ally that is supposed to follow the alliance leader, the U.S. is attempting to co-opt India in a “soft alliance” through assorted arrangements. The 2005 defence framework accord, with its emphasis on U.S. arms sales, force interoperability and intelligence sharing, was designed to build India as a new junior partner (or spoke) in a web of interlocking bilateral arrangements that fit together with America’s hub-and-spoke global alliance system. The subsequent nuclear deal, with its elaborate terms extending beyond the nuclear realm, was an initiative in the same direction that helped give birth to EUMA, which incorporates both routine inspections and “enhanced” end-use monitoring. It seems odd, though, that U.S. policy should attempt to mould India into a “soft” ally in a world in which some of America’s old allies are seeking to discreetly reclaim their foreign-policy autonomy.

Make no mistake: The U.S. has imposed EUMA on states that are under its security protection or classified as allies. But India is a notable exception as the only EUMA-accepting country that has a special defence relationship with Russia, which is transferring to India strategic systems America will not even consider selling — from a nuclear attack submarine to an aircraft carrier. China complains Russia won’t sell it the same class or quality of weapons it gives India.

A close, mutually beneficial relationship with the U.S. is in India’s interest. But as India gets sucked into the U.S. strategic dominion through EUMA and other arrangements — with the Communications Interoperability and Security Memorandum of Agreement (CIS MoA) next on Washington’s list, along with the Mutual Logistic Support Agreement (MLSA) — its special relationship with Moscow is bound to change. If America can merrily sell growing quantities of arms on both sides of the subcontinental divide and yet get New Delhi to accept restrictive measures, an economically struggling Russia has little incentive to stick to its traditional policy of not exporting arms to Pakistan. And with India hopelessly dependent on conventional-arms imports to meet basic defence meets, this means a rougher Indian defence-procurement trajectory in the years ahead. After all, as the pattern of current arms sales and offers underscores, American transfers are intended not to help India gain a combat edge but to promote regional military balance and U.S. leverage.

India’s roller-coaster policy on Pakistan

Posted on July 24, 2009 by Chellaney

India needs
statecraft, not stagecraft

Two successive prime
ministers have led India on
a roller-coaster ride on Pakistan,
highlighting the risks of a meandering, personality-driven policy approach, says Brahma Chellaney

The Economic Times, July 24, 2009

The national outcry over Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s
cave-in at Sharm-el-Sheikh may have caught him by surprise. Singh probably
calculated that just as he had got away by embracing the sponsor of terror, Pakistan, as a fellow victim of terror — through
the infamous Joint Anti-Terror Mechanism — he could use another non-aligned
nations’ meeting to reverse India’s
post-26/11 policy at the US
urging. But the chorus of disapproval that has greeted his volte-face shows he
underrated the continuing anger in India over the unparalleled Pakistani
terrorist assaults on Mumbai. After all, India is being uniquely targeted
not just by non-state actors (NSAs), but by state-sponsored non-state actors
(SSNSAs), with Singh himself having admitted earlier that “some Pakistani official agencies must
have supported” the Mumbai attacks.

Like his predecessor, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Singh has taken India on a roller-coaster ride on
counterterrorism, with an ever-shifting policy course on Pakistan. His latest U-turn on Pakistan, however, parallels the manner he
pushed through the controversial nuclear deal with the US. In both
cases, he broke his solemn assurances to Parliament. Also, like the nuclear
deal, Singh’s decision to delink talks with Islamabad from Pakistani action against
terrorism was the product not of institutional
thinking
but of personal choice. Yet another parallel is that the PM has himself moved
the goalpost to help cover his concessions. And just as he tried to spin the
reality on the terms and conditions of the nuclear deal, Singh has turned to
casuistry to camouflage his shift on Pakistan.

Calling Pakistan
“the epicentre of terrorism”, the PM declared in the Lok Sabha on December 11,
2008 that, “The infrastructure of terrorism has to be dismantled permanently.” Pakistan must meet the “minimum pre-condition”
of ensuring its soil will not be used for terror activities against India, Singh
had put on public record. Yet today, his government willy-nilly is moving back
to business as usual with Pakistan, although Islamabad has done nothing — as
New Delhi admits — to shut down terrorist-training camps along the Indian
border or to cut the lifeline its military establishment provides to the terror
groups.

Just as the nuclear deal bore Singh’s personal imprint, the
latest Pakistan-policy shift has been sculpted by him, with little regard for
professional inputs. Indeed, he has ignored the lesson from his 2006 action when he turned Indian policy
on its head and embraced Pakistan
as fellow victim of and joint partner
against terror. The stalled Joint
Anti-Terror Mechanism has
stood out as an astonishing blunder. Still, at Sharm-el-Sheikh, Singh
again obliterated the line between the victim and the aggressor by agreeing that
“terrorism is the main threat to both countries”, and then went one step further
to commit India
to “share real-time, credible and actionable” intelligence on terrorism with the
country still wedded to waging war by terror.

Now take the shifting goalpost. Singh first sought the
dismantlement of Pakistan’s
terror infrastructure against India.
His benchmark then narrowed to bringing to justice the “perpetrators” (the
actual executors, not the masterminds) of the Mumbai attacks. Next, on the way
back home from the G-8 L’Aquila summit, Singh further watered down his stance
by saying India was “willing to walk more than half the distance” if Pakistan undertook
not actual action but merely offered “a renewed reaffirmation” to “bring the
perpetrators of the Mumbai massacre to justice”. That is exactly what happened:
In exchange for Pakistan’s
mere reaffirmation of its anti-terror commitments, Singh changed Indian policy
course. Such a shifting goalpost is redolent of the nuclear deal.

The reliance on spin to cloak concessions has been another
defining characteristic. On Mumbai, India lost twice over — the first time when
10 Pakistani terrorists held its commercial capital hostage for almost three
days, and the second time when Islamabad outmaneuvered it in the diplomatic
game, to the extent that Pakistan managed to formally turn the insurrection in
its Baluchistan province into a bilateral issue to help brand its terror
target, India, as an accused. Yet Singh has followed a familiar pattern to cover up broken promises to the
nation. The Sharm-el-Sheikh statement “does not mean any dilution of our stand. It only
strengthens our stand,” he claimed. Yet, on specifics, he has not explained the
false move on Baluchistan, or the delinking of talks from Pakistani action
against terrorism, or the placing on record India’s interest in a stable, democratic,
“Islamic Republic of Pakistan”, as if to endorse dictator Zia ul-Haq’s
Islamization and the jihad culture it instilled.

Let’s be clear: The inclusion of Baluchistan resulted from US pressure on India
to address Pakistan’s
concerns over Indian consular and other activities in Afghanistan.
And the agreement to share real-time actionable intelligence is part of a CIA
initiative to build cooperation between the Indian and Pakistani intelligence
agencies. Even Hillary Clinton publicly sought “sharing of workable
intelligence”. The Obama administration had made it clear it would wait for the
Indian elections to be over before nudging New Delhi
to reopen talks with Islamabad.
The Sharm-el-Sheikh statement can only boost Washington’s Afpak strategy, a key component
of which is to prop up the Pakistani state financially and politically.

Take yet
another parallel: Just as Singh argued that without the nuclear deal
India’s energy and economic interests would be seriously compromised, he now
contends that without settling differences and making peace with Pakistan,
India cannot be a great power. Every right-minded Indian would want peace. But
to say that the country cannot emerge as a major power without making peace
with the adversary is to go against the grain of world history and to embolden
the foe to stay implacably antagonistic. Did China
become a world power by coming to terms with Taiwan? Even if India surrendered Kashmir, would Pakistan
be willing or able to stop cross-border terror attacks?

India’s meandering approach on Pakistan
is just one example of Indian policy being unable to stay the course on matters
critical to national interest. In the absence of realistic, goal-oriented
statecraft or a distinct strategic doctrine, ad hoc, personality-driven
policy-making is becoming the norm. A secure, prosperous India, however, can emerge only
through institutionalized, integrated policymaking and the unflinching pursuit
of clearly laid-out goals.

The writer is
professor of strategic studies, Centre for Policy Research.

Factsheet on U.S-India accord on end-use monitoring

Posted on July 22, 2009 by Chellaney

End-Use Monitoring Agreement (EUMA): A Backgrounder

Brahma Chellaney India Abroad July 31, 2009

The U.S. had been pressing India to sign three agreements related to defense cooperation:

1. End Use Monitoring Agreement (EUMA).

2. Communications Interoperability and Security Memorandum of Agreement (CIS MoA).

3. Mutual Logistic Support Agreement (MLSA).[*]

All these agreements contain a series of restrictive clauses.

On the eve of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s July 2009 New Delhi visit, the newly appointed U.S. assistant secretary of state for public affairs, Philip J. Crowley, had linked EUMA to the nuclear deal. He told the media in Washington on July 17 that EUMA was “part of the fulfillment of an important initiative that India and the U.S. have signed in the area of nuclear cooperation.”

“We are working with India on an end-use agreement,” said Crowley, the State Department spokesperson. “But clearly, this is part of the fulfillment of an important initiative that India and the United States have signed in the area of nuclear cooperation.” Crowley went on to say that he was “sure” there will be “substantial discussion” during Mrs. Clinton’s visit on “fulfilling the initiative and its various components.”

Contrast this with what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told the Lok Sabha on July 22, 2008: “Some people are spreading the rumors that there are some secret or hidden agreements over and above the documents made public. I wish to state categorically that there are no secret or hidden documents other than the 123 Agreement, the Separation Plan and the draft of the safeguards agreement with the IAEA.”

Earlier, on August 4, 2005, he told the Rajya Sabha: “Sir, what are the commitments that I have taken? I am very clear in my mind and I can assure the House that there is no secret appendage or secret agreement. Everything that I discussed with the President [Bush] is faithfully stated. There is nothing more to our agreement than what is stated in this Joint Statement.”

EUMA CLAUSES

All these three agreements were designed by the U.S. Congress for ensuring American oversight, right-of-access and on-site inspection in client states — states that are under the U.S. security and nuclear umbrella. For example, there are 32 countries under the U.S. nuclear and security umbrella today. In addition, there are states like Pakistan that are officially classified by Washington as Major Non-NATO Ally (MNNA) — a conferred status that gives the U.S. virtually the same rights over them as it has vis-à-vis states formally under the American military umbrella.

The special rights the U.S. has with client states are understandable because America is responsible for their security and it thus seeks to underpin its own obligations and those of its allies through such agreements.

But India is not a client state, but a strategic partner of the United States. Unlike an ally who has to follow the alliance leader, a strategic partnership is built on the principle of equality. Thus, a strategic partner is an equal, at least in theory.

Yet, the U.S. has succeeded in imposing the End Use Monitoring Agreement (EUMA) on India.

The Pentagon is in charge of implementation of
EUMA, known in U.S.
parlance as the “Golden Sentry” program, with the mission to “monitor the use of defense
articles and services provided to foreign customers or international
organizations through government-to-government programs.” The Pentagon says the Golden Sentry’s main
objective is to “minimize security risks through compliance with arms-transfer provisions supporting U.S. national
security and foreign-policy objectives.”

The legal basis of EUMA — or Golden Sentry — is a
1996 amendment to the U.S. Arms Export Control Act (AEC). Section 40A of the
AECA on end-use monitoring of defense articles and defense services calls for
“reasonable assurance” of compliance of U.S. laws and regulations by
recipient states. This is just one example of how the United States
seeks to give extra-territorial jurisdiction to its laws and regulations.

The Pentagon’s Golden Sentry rules
apply to government-to-government defense contracts and impose “cradle-to-grave”
obligations, starting from shipment of a defense article to its use and final
disposition. By contrast, the State Department-run “Blue Lantern” program
focuses on Direct Commercial Sales (DCS)/Export Licensing (USML articles). “Blue
Lectern” end-use checks cover direct military sales and are conducted by U.S. mission personnel abroad or personnel from
the State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) to verify
the destination and specific end-use and end-users of U.S. commercial
defense exports. The “Golden Sentry,” in contrast, requires a comprehensive end-use monitoring
program for arms transfers authorized by the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) and the Foreign Assistance Act
of 1961 (FAA), as amended.

Negotiated with New Delhi over a three-year period, the
Indo-U.S. EUMA is controversial.

Some of its clauses may not be a subject of concern, such as prohibitions on second-hand sales without approval of the United States.

But its contentious clauses impose restrictions on what India may do with the equipment it buys from USA.

►EUMA will allow the U.S. to periodically carry out an inspection and inventory of all articles transferred to India. In the negotiations, India strenuously objected to physical inspection and instead sought an inspection of the records and other measures in place. In the end, the Americans had their way, but it was agreed that the physical inspection would be done at a time and place granted by India. Supplying-state officials, in any case, would need visas and other assistance from the recipient state, including about the location of the equipment, to carry out an inspection. So surprise inspections are precluded anyway. But to prevent U.S. personnel from visiting sensitive military sites, the Indian government intends to move U.S.-origin defense equipment to a non-sensitive place before any inspection.

►The U.S. will have the right to check that India is using any purchased weapon for the purpose for which it was intended. This could mean that a weapon system bought by India to bolster defenses against China cannot be deployed against Pakistan, a failing state American policy just won’t let fail.

►EUMA restricts what the purchasing country, India, can do with the U.S.-origin defense equipment, even within its own borders.

►Under the terms of EUMA, India cannot modify the purchased defense article or system in any form.

►Also, to prevent the buyer country from freeing itself from dependency on the United States for maintenance, EUMA restricts India from getting U.S.-origin defense equipment serviced by any another country without prior American permission. Even spare parts need to be sourced only from the United States.

These "cradle-to-grave" restrictions arm Washington with continuing leverage over the recipient country. After all, any equipment or system needs maintenance. Such leverage, in turn, can help ensure that the recipient country cooperates with Washington on larger political matters.

THE AGREED TEXT

A key element of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s India trip was the announcement that the two sides had reached accord on EUMA. Although the "Golden Sentry" is a Pentagon program, Mrs. Clinton’s desire to show her visit as successful prompted her to exert sufficient pressure on India to clinch EUMA during her stop in New Delhi. The Joint Statement issued at the end of her visit recorded: "External Affairs Minister Krishna announced that both sides had reached agreement on End-Use Monitoring for U.S. defense articles."

The agreed text of EUMA was exchanged by External Affairs Minister Krishna and Clinton on July 20, 2009. It, however, was not formally signed because it takes the form of agreed language to be included in contracts for all future U.S. defense sales to India.

Although the agreed language deviates in some aspects from the standard EUMA text applicable to client states, the United States managed to get India to accept the core conditions.

The United States already has been including end-use monitoring rights for itself in the sale of all defense equipment to India. Such end-use monitoring rights have been incorporated in the Letter of Offer and Acceptance (LOA) relating to every defense contract with India in recent years, including the contracts for:

(i) USS Trenton — a 1971-vintage amphibious transport ship, bought by India in 2007 for $50 million and renamed “INS Jalashva.”

(ii) The $2.2 billion deal with Boeing for eight P-8I maritime patrol aircraft.

(iii) Six C130-J Hercules military transport aircraft worth more than $1 billion.

(iv) Three VVIP Boeing business jets.

The U.S. right to end-use monitoring is also incorporated in the export contracts of U.S. high-term items to India, starting with the Cray X-MP-14 supercomputer in the late 1980s. But EUMA relates to defense-equipment transfers and contains detailed and elaborate restrictions.

Now the EUMA language agreed to between India and the U.S. will become the standard in all future Indo-U.S. defense contracts. "We have agreed on the end-use monitoring arrangements that will henceforth be referred to in letters of acceptance for Indian procurement of US defense technology and equipment,” External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna told Parliament on July 21, 2009. “This systematizes ad hoc arrangements for individual defense procurements from the USA entered into by previous governments.”

EUMA comes as a major boost to American arms companies like Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp. eying megadeals in India, one of the world’s largest importers of conventional weapons.

Indeed, EUMA opens the path for the U.S. and India to agree to the terms of the Communications Interoperability and Security Memorandum of Agreement (CIS MoA), which is still under negotiation.

As its name suggests, that agreement seeks to promote interoperable
tactical communications (“comms”) systems, including Spread Spectrum
comms systems, and to institute secure comms interoperability between the two
sides through the U.S.
supply of Communications Security (COMSEC) equipment and services.

OFFICIAL CONCERN IN INDIA

The Indian government has embraced EUMA despite concerns expressed within the official establishment over its restrictive and invasive clauses.

For example, Navy chief Admiral Suresh Mehta had publicly described EUMA as “intrusive.” Speaking at an April 2008 conference organized by the London-based International Strategic Studies Institute in New Delhi, Admiral Mehta said:

"There are certain things we can’t agree to. As a sovereign nation, we can’t accept intrusiveness into our system, so there is some fundamental difficulty."

He added: “The U.S. may have this kind of (end user) agreements with everyone. I don’t believe in that. We pay for something and we get some technology. What I do with it, is my thing.’‘

In fact, India’s Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) in a March 2008 report criticized the end-use monitoring clauses in the contract for USS Trenton/INS Jalashva. (No sooner the U.S. had transferred that transport ship to India than a gas leak killed an Indian officer and five sailors on board.)[†]

The CAG report stated: “Restrictive clauses raise doubts about the real advantages from this deal… For example, (there are) restrictions on the offensive deployment of the ship and permission to the (U.S.) government to conduct an inspection and inventory of all articles transferred under the end-use monitoring clause of the LOA (Letter of Offer and Acceptance issued by the US government).”

Note that
the contract contains even “restrictions on the offensive deployment of
the ship.”

Given this background, the Indian government ought to have taken Parliament into
confidence on the EUMA, rather than place on record just the two sentences on the
agreement found in Krishna’s statement on Mrs.
Clinton’s visit. While
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government fights shy to reveal the terms of
the agreement to Parliament and to answer specific concerns, State Department
has called the EUMA with India “a landmark event,” with spokesman Robert
Wood going on to say: “We’re very proud, and we believe that this agreement
between the U.S. and India is important in our overall global nonproliferation
efforts, and we believe that this agreement has brought India into the nuclear
nonproliferation mainstream.”

[*] The MLSA envisages exchange of services and logistics. If it gets signed, the Indian and American militaries will provide logistic support, berthing and refueling facilities to each other’s warships and aircraft on a barter or equal-value exchange basis. But given that the Indian military, including the navy, has no deployments or operations outside the region, the MSLA, in effect, would be a one-sided arrangement.

[†] The purchase of the USS Trenton was severely criticized by the Comptroller and Auditor General, which in its report raised several questions, including why the ship was bought when the U.S. Navy itself had concluded in 2003 that the ship was not suitable for modernization and ought to be decommissioned by 2006. The report pointed out that gas leaks on board other Trenton-type ships had killed three American sailors.

(c) India Abroad

China’s cultural chauvinism recoils

Posted on July 14, 2009 by Chellaney

China’s false monoculture

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times

By blanketing the oil-rich Xinjiang with troops, China’s rulers may have subdued the Uighur revolt, which began in Urumqi, the regional capital, and spread to other heavily guarded towns like Hotan and Kashgar, the ancient cultural center whose old city is to be razed and redeveloped to help drain supposed jihadist swamps. But this deadliest case of minority rioting in decades — along with the 2008 ethnic uprising across the Tibetan plateau — shows the political costs of forcible absorption, shattering the illusion of a monolithic China and laying bare the country’s Achilles’ heel.

The ruling Chinese Communist Party had gone to unusual lengths to block any protests from flaring during this symbolically important year marking the 60th anniversary of its coming to power.

For example, the 20th anniversary of "June 4," the date of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of prodemocracy protesters, went by without any incident because of heavy security in Beijing. A security siege in Tibet similarly ensured that the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan national uprising against the Chinese occupation and the Dalai Lama’s consequent flight to India passed off peacefully. A confident Beijing then provocatively observed March 28 — the 50th anniversary of its declaration of direct rule over Tibet — as "Serf Emancipation Day" with a national holiday, as if it just realized it liberated Tibetans from serfdom half a century ago.

Against that background, the Uighur rebellion — in the 60th-anniversary year of the Chinese annexation of Xinjiang — is a rude jolt to what is now the world’s largest, strongest and longest-surviving autocracy. Tibet, which was forcibly brought under Chinese rule in 1950, remains tense since last year, with foreign reporters still barred from traveling there.

The policies of forced assimilation in resource-rich Tibet and Xinjiang — located at the crossroads of Asian civilizations — began after Mao Zedong created a land corridor link between the two rebellious regions by gobbling up India’s 38,000-square-km Aksai Chin, part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Aksai Chin provides the only accessible Tibet-Xinjiang route through the Kunlun mountains.

Aksai Chin began coming under Chinese control in the 1950s through furtive encroachment, before Mao consolidated and extended China’s hold by waging open war on India in 1962. A year later, Pakistan ceded to China a 5,120-square-km slice of the Kashmir territory held by it.

Today, about 60 percent territory of the People’s Republic comprises territories that historically had not been under direct Han rule. China, in fact, now is three times as large as it was under the last Han dynasty, the Ming, which fell in the mid-17th century. Territorially, Han power thus is at its zenith, symbolized by the fact that the Great Wall was built as the Han empire’s outer security perimeter. Xinjiang and Tibet, by themselves, make up nearly half of China’s landmass.

The Manchu assimilation into Han society and the swamping of the locals in Inner Mongolia have left only the Tibetans and the Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang as the holdouts.

But the events since last year have come as a painful reminder to the Chinese leadership that its strategy of ethnic and economic colonization of the traditional Tibetan and Uighur lands is stoking deep unrest. While government efforts to spread Han language, culture and commercial power have bred local resentment, economic development in those regions — largely geared at exploiting their resource wealth — has helped marginalize the natives. While the locals get the menial work to do, the Han settlers hold the well-paying jobs and run the show, overtly symbolizing an equation between the colonized and the colonizers.

More importantly, the very survival of the major non-Han cultures in China is now threatened. From school-level indoctrination and forced political reeducation to Draconian curbs on native farmland and monastic life, Chinese policies have helped instill feelings of subjugation and resentment in Tibet and Xinjiang.

To help Sinicize the minority lands, Beijing’s multipronged strategy has involved five key components: cartographically altering ethnic-homeland boundaries; demographically flooding non-Han cultures; rewriting history to justify Chinese control; enforcing cultural homogeneity to help blur local identities; and maintaining political repression.

Demographically, what Beijing is pursuing is not ethnic cleansing in these regions but ethnic drowning. This strategy to ethnically drown the natives through the "Go West" Han-migration campaign is tantamount to cultural annihilation. A first step in that direction was the cartographic reorganization of minority regions. In gerrymandering Tibet, Beijing placed half of the Tibetan plateau and nearly 60 percent of the Tibetan population under Han jurisdictions in the provinces of Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan. Tibet’s cartographic dismemberment set the stage to ethnically swamp the Tibetans, both in the separated parts and in the remainder Tibet deceptively named the Tibet Autonomous Region.

The Tibetan and Uighur languages already are disappearing from local schools. Rapid Sinicization of their pristine environment, however, has only sharpened the Tibetan and Uighur sense of identity and yearning for freedom. After all, if current trends continue, Tibetans and Uighurs will be reduced within decades to the status of Native Americans in the United States.

Reliable information on the casualties and continuing arrests in Xinjiang is hard to come by. At the first sign of trouble in Tibet or Xinjiang, Beijing cuts off local Internet and cell-phone services and imposes a security lockdown through curfews and virtual martial law. Few believe the official death toll in Xinjiang. After all, Beijing has insisted only 13 people were killed in spring 2008 in Tibet despite the Tibetan government-in-exile documenting some 220 Tibetan deaths.

Significantly, there are important parallels between the Tibet and Xinjiang violence. The ethnic uprisings in both regions erupted after authorities tried to disperse peaceful protesters in the local capital — Lhasa and Urumqi — where Han Chinese now outnumber the natives. In both regions, the protesters vented their anger on Han settlers. And just as Beijing was quick to link the Dalai Lama to last year’s Tibetan insurrection, it blamed the Xinjiang bloodshed on exiled Uighur leaders, specifically the Washington-based Rebiya Kadeer, helping to lift her from relative obscurity to international prominence. An ex-businesswoman, Kadeer, however, is no advocate of violence, although she spent six years in a Chinese jail and two of her sons are still imprisoned in Xinjiang.

While Beijing was quick to clamp down on information about the events in Tibet and Xinjiang, it applied media-management lessons learned in Tibet to its handling of the news on Xinjiang. One lesson was that it had to go beyond suppression of facts to information spin to tone down coverage of the developments. So, as opposed to the way it shut out the media from Tibet, it readily took foreign journalists to the violence-scarred Urumqi for stage-managed tours.

But as in Tibet earlier, the Chinese propaganda machine focused on portraying the dominant Han settlers in Urumqi as the hapless victims, with the state media showing no images of Han attacking Uighurs or security personnel employing brute force. Indeed, presenting restive, disadvantaged minorities as ungrateful, violent races resistant to the Han civilizing influence has been integral to the regime’s repression.

Alas, the central plank of the Chinese system remains uniformity, with President Hu Jintao’s slogan of a "harmonious society" designed to undergird the theme of conformity. Little surprise Hu’s public response to the Uighur unrest was to ask local authorities to "isolate and deal a blow" to the troublemakers rather than seek to address the causes of the festering discontent. Brutal repression is a sure recipe for more unrest.

While India celebrates diversity, China honors artificially enforced monoculturalism, although it officially comprises 56 nationalities — the Han nationality (which, according to the last census in 2000, accounted for 91 percent of the total population) and 55 ethnic minority groups. 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 seven or more linguistically and culturally distinct groups — are anything but homogenous. The major languages in China other than those in minority homelands include Mandarin, Hakka (spoken in several southern areas), Gan (Jiangxi province), Wu (Zhejiang province), Xiang (Hunan province), Yue (mostly Guangdong province), Pinghua (an offshoot of Yue), Southern Min (Hokkien/Taiwanese) and Northern Min.

Yet the CCP has used the myth of homogeneity to fan Han nationalism. This myth, originally designed to unify the non-Manchus against the Manchu Qing Dynasty, was invented by Sun Yat-Sen, who led the republican movement that took power in 1911. The subsequent imposition of the northern language, Mandarin, helped establish a lingua franca in a diverse society but, almost a century later, it is not Mandarin but the local languages that remain commonly spoken.

Today, thanks to the greater self-awareness flowing from advances in information and communications technologies, the Hakka, Sichuanese, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Fujianese, Swatow, Hunanese and other communities officially classified as Han are reasserting their distinctive identities and taking pride in their cultural heritage.

China’s ethnic problems won’t go away unless the rulers stop imposing cultural homogeneity and abandon ethnic drowning as state strategy in minority lands.

After the 2008 Tibetan uprising, 2009 will go down as the year the Uighurs revolted. With next year marking 60 years of Chinese occupation of Tibet, the spotlight will stay on China’s internal challenges. And with economic growth slowing and domestic unrest growing at about the same rate as China’s GDP, these challenges indeed extend to the Chinese heartland.

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

The Japan Times: Wednesday, July 15, 2009

International democratization push encounters strong headwinds

Posted on July 9, 2009 by Chellaney

Spread of democracy stalls

A fusion of autocratic politics and crony, state-guided capitalism has emerged as the main challenge to the global spread of democratic values

Brahma Chellaney

The Japan Times

Has the global spread of democracy run out of steam? For long, but especially since the end of the Cold War, democracy and free markets were touted as the twin answer to most ills. But while free-market tenets have come under strain in the present international financial crisis, with the very countries that espoused the self-regulating power of markets taking the lead to embrace principles of financial socialism to bail out their troubled corporate colossuses, the spread of democracy is encountering increasingly strong headwinds.

The strong-arm tactics Iranian authorities recently employed to quell demonstrations challenging President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection were no different than the use of state power by Burma’s junta to suppress monk-led protests nearly two years ago. If there was any expectation of a “green revolution” in Iran or a “saffron revolution” in Burma, that hope lies crushed, at least for the time being. Indeed, the demonstrations that broke out in Iran represented not a democratic uprising but a struggle for ascendancy among those empowered by the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Between 1988 and 1990, as the Cold War was winding down, pro-democracy protests broke out in several parts of the world — from China and Burma to Eastern Europe. The protests helped spread political freedoms in Eastern Europe and inspired popular movements elsewhere that overturned dictatorships in countries as disparate as Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan and Chile. After the Soviet disintegration, even Russia emerged as a credible candidate for democratic reform.

The overthrow of a number of totalitarian or autocratic regimes helped shift the global balance of power in favor of the forces of democracy. But not all the pro-democracy movements were successful. And the “color revolutions” only instilled greater caution among surviving authoritarian regimes, prompting them to set up countermeasures to foreign-inspired democratization initiatives.

As the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall nears, it is evident that the spread of democracy has stalled.

Democracy may have become the norm in much of Europe, but in the world’s largest and most densely populated continent, Asia, only small minority of states are true democracies, despite the eastward movement of power and influence. The strategy to use market forces to open up tightly centralized political systems hasn’t worked in multiple cases in Asia — the pivot of global strategic change.

Political homogeneity may be as incongruous as the parallel pursuit of market capitalism and political autocracy. But where authoritarianism is deeply entrenched, a marketplace of goods and services does not allow a marketplace of political ideas.

In fact, one autocracy distinctly has emerged stronger and wealthier. That autocracy — China — is the world’s largest and oldest, with its leadership now preparing to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. To help glorify the communist revolution, the leadership has planned a mammoth military parade — the largest ever — along with a repeat of some of the Beijing Olympics glitz at the October 1 anniversary.

Those Olympic-style celebrations would serve as a double reminder: China has not only weathered the international democratization push, but also has emerged as a potential peer rival to America. Today there is talk of even a U.S.-China diarchy — a G-2 — ruling the world.

China’s spectacular rise as a global power in just one generation under authoritarian rule represents the first direct challenge to liberal democracy since the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Through its remarkable success story, China advertises that authoritarianism is a more rapid and smoother way to prosperity and stability than the tumult of electoral politics.

Freedom advocates in autocracies may be inspired and energized by the international success stories of democratic transition. But the regimes that employ brute power and censorship to subdue protests and dissidence clearly draw encouragement from the China model.

Then there is the specter of democracy in retreat, highlighted by the developments in Russia and the regressive path of some of the “color revolutions,” not to mention Central America’s first military coup since the end of the Cold War in Honduras. The “tulip revolution” in Kyrgyzstan has turned sour in the face of flawed elections, assassination of political rivals and growing influence of organized crime. Georgia’s “rose revolution” also has wilted under President Mikheil Saakashvili’s increasing despotism.

In Russia, the political system has moved toward greater centralized control and limits on civil liberties. This mirrors the centralization in a number of Asian states, with some practicing soft authoritarianism and the others hard authoritarianism.

China, still in the “hard authoritarianism” category, has stayed abreast with technological innovations to help deny protesters the latest means to denounce injustice. The widespread use of Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging and cellular phones by Iranian protesters cannot be emulated by Chinese dissidents because Beijing employs cyberpolice to regulate Web sites, patrol cybercafés, monitor cell-phone text messaging and track down Internet activists. And at the first sign of trouble in Tibet or Xinjiang, authorities cut off Internet and SMS services there. But after the 2008 Tibetan uprising, 2009 is becoming the year of the Uighur revolt, threatening to mar China’s October 1 fiesta. Unlike Iran’s clerically controlled democracy, China holds no elections to elect its leaders, not even sham elections.

More broadly, the U.S. occupation of Iraq under the garb of spreading democracy as well as excesses like Guantanamo Bay and illegal CIA detention camps overseas had the effect of undermining the credibility of democratic values by turning them into geopolitical tactics.

The point is that liberal democratic norms, far from becoming universal, have come under attack at a time when a qualitative reordering of global power is empowering non-Western economies. That raises the possibility that, in the coming decades, economies driven by a fusion of autocratic politics and crony, state-guided capitalism could gain the upper hand.

A divide centered on political values will carry major implications for international relations because, as modern history attests, regime character can impede observance of global norms and rules. And even if democratic governments are not more wedded to peace than autocracies, it is well established that democracies rarely go to war with each other. Today, the main challenge to the global spread of democracy comes from the model blending political authoritarianism and state-steered capitalism together. Such authoritarian capitalism, far from being a stage in the process of political modernization, could well be the face of the future.

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

(c) Japan Times, July 9, 2009.

After Tibet, Xinjiang exposes China’s Achilles’ heel

Posted on July 8, 2009 by Chellaney

Chinese Checkers

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper

July 10, 2009

By blanketing the oil-rich Xinjiang with troops, China’s rulers may have subdued the Uighur revolt, which began in Urumqi, the regional capital, and spread to other heavily guarded cities like Kashgar. But this deadliest case of minority rioting in decades — along with the 2008 uprising across the Tibetan plateau — shows the costs of forcible absorption, laying bare China’s Achilles’ heel.

About 60 per cent territory of the People’s Republic comprises territories that historically had not been under direct Han rule. In fact, the Great Wall was built as the Han empire’s outer security perimeter. Today, Xinjiang and Tibet, by themselves, make up nearly half of China’s landmass.

The ruling Chinese Communist Party had gone to unusual lengths to block any protests from flaring during this symbolically important year marking the 60th anniversary of its coming to power — an occasion the party is preparing to celebrate with the biggest-ever party. The 20th anniversary of “June 4”, the date of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protesters, went by without any incident because of heavy security in Beijing. A security siege in Tibet similarly ensured that the 50th anniversaries of the Tibetan national uprising against the Chinese occupation and the Dalai Lama’s consequent flight to India passed off peacefully in March. A confident Beijing went to the extent of provocatively observing March 28 this year — the 50th anniversary of its declaration of direct rule over Tibet — as “Serf Emancipation Day”, as if it just realized it liberated Tibetans from serfdom half a century ago.

The Uighur uprising — in the 60th-anniversary year of the Chinese annexation of East Turkestan (renamed Xinjiang) — thus is a rude jolt to what is now the world’s largest, oldest and strongest autocracy.

The Manchu assimilation into Han society and the swamping of the locals in Inner Mongolia have left only the Tibetans and the Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang as the holdouts. But the events since last year have come as a painful reminder to the Chinese leadership that its policies in Tibet and Xinjiang aren’t working. Economic development in those regions, largely geared at exploiting their resource wealth, has only helped marginalize the natives. While the locals get the menial work to do, the Han settlers run the show and hold the well-paying jobs, symbolizing an equation between the colonized and the colonizers.

More importantly, the very survival of the major non-Han cultures in China is now threatened. From school-level indoctrination and forced political re-education to draconian curbs on native farmland and monastic life, Chinese policies have helped instil feelings of subjugation and resentment in Tibet and Xinjiang. Demographically, what Beijing is pursuing there is not ethnic cleansing but ethnic drowning. This strategy to ethnically drown the natives through the “Go West” Han-migration campaign is akin to cultural annihilation. The Tibetan and Uighur languages already are disappearing from local schools. Rapid Sinicization of their pristine environment, however, has only sharpened the Tibetan and Uighur sense of identity and yearning for freedom.

We may never get to reliably know the number of casualties and arrests in Xinjiang. At the first sign of trouble in Tibet or Xinjiang, Beijing cuts off local Internet and cellphone services and imposes a security lockdown through curfews and virtual martial law. Few believe the official death toll in the Xinjiang violence. After all, Beijing had insisted that only 13 people were killed in spring 2008 in Tibet despite the Tibetan government-in-exile documenting some 220 deaths.

There are important parallels between the Tibet and Xinjiang violence. The ethnic uprisings in both regions erupted after authorities tried to disperse peaceful protesters in the local capital — Lhasa and Urumqi — where Han Chinese now outnumber the natives. And just as Beijing was quick to accuse the Dalai Lama of inciting the Tibetan rebellion, it has blamed the Xinjiang bloodshed on exiled Uighur leaders, specifically the Washington-based Rebiya Kadeer. But Kadeer, an ex-businesswoman, is no advocate of violence, although she spent six years in a Chinese jail and two of her sons are still imprisoned in Xinjiang.

The policies of forced assimilation in Tibet and Xinjiang began after Chairman Mao Zedong created a land corridor link between the two rebellious regions by gobbling up India’s 38,000-square-kilometre Aksai Chin. This area — almost the size of whole Switzerland — started coming under Chinese control through furtive encroachment in the 1950s, before Mao consolidated and extended China’s hold by waging open war on India in 1962. Aksai Chin provides the only accessible Tibet-Xinjiang passageway through the Kunlun Mountains.

China’s ethnic problems won’t go away unless it stops enforcing cultural homogeneity. After the 2008 Tibetan uprising, 2009 will go down as the year the Uighur revolted, sullying Communist China’s 60th birthday.

The writer is the author of Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan.

(c) DNA, 2009.

Afpak strategy doomed to fail

Posted on July 2, 2009 by Chellaney

Afpak policy will blow up in Obama face

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, July 1-15, 2009

The situation in the Afghanistan-Pakistan (“Afpak”) belt
is deteriorating rapidly. Despite President Barack Obama’s troop “surge” in
Afghanistan, June witnessed a level of militant attacks not seen since late
2001, when the United States launched its military intervention in that
landlocked country. In Pakistan,
notwithstanding Obama’s generous aid “surge” designed to make Islamabad the single largest recipient of
American assistance in the world, the forces of militancy and extremism
continue to gain ground. His Afpak strategy’s prospects are beginning to dim
just three months after it was unveiled with fanfare.

Yet pressure is growing on New Delhi to actively assist a strategy that
is detrimental to Indian interests and, in any event, doomed to fail. This puts
New Delhi in a difficult predicament: It would
like to stay on the right side of Washington
but without jeopardizing its own interests. Obama wants victim India to come to the aid of terror-exporting Pakistan,
including by offering new “peace” talks and redeploying troops, even if it
means more terrorist infiltration. While seeking to prop up the Pakistani state
through munificent aid, Washington continues
to pretend that terrorist safe havens exist only along Pakistan’s
western frontier. India is
being targeted by Pakistan-based, military-backed Punjabi terror groups, like
the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, that are of little interest to U.S. policy.
Far from helping to bring the Pakistan-based planners of the Mumbai attacks to
justice, the Obama strategy can only encourage Islamabad
to continue its terror war against India.

But even if New Delhi were
to bend to Washington’s
wishes, Obama’s Afpak strategy is likely to blow up in his face, with serious
consequences for international security. Apart from setting out to give another
$10.5 billion in aid to Pakistan, on top of the $14 billion already provided
since 2001, Obama’s strategy increases U.S. dependence on the very institutions
responsible for the terrifying mess in Pakistan — the Pakistani army and intelligence. The Afghan
war is now costing American taxpayers more than $60 billion a year. But after
7½ years of waging war, the U.S.
military is no closer to winning a ticket out of Afghanistan, despite Obama’s public
declaration, “There’s got to be an exit strategy”.

Let’s be clear: Even though the Obama administration is
already holding back-channel negotiations over a political deal with the Afghan
Taliban shura through Saudi, Pakistani and Afghan intelligence officials, there
can be no exit for American forces until Afghanistan has a functioning army
and national police that can hold the country together. In Pakistan, the
task to build stability centers on strengthening civilian institutions and
reining in the powerful, meddling military establishment.

Building national institutions in Afghanistan and Pakistan and defeating
transnational terrorism are long-drawn-out missions requiring a generational
commitment. But Obama doesn’t want the Afpak problem to burn his presidency the
way Iraq
consumed Bush’s. That has meant the following: (i) institution-building is now
being openly disparaged as nation-building; (ii) instead of seeking to defeat
terrorism, the Obama plan is to regionally contain terrorism in the Afpak belt,
as if the monster of terrorism can be hermitically confined to a region; (iii)
redefine success; and (iv) take shortcuts to achieve politically expedient
objectives. A classic example of how shortcuts are being taken, without regard
for regional security, is the ongoing programme to set up U.S.-funded local
militias in every Afghan province. In a country already teeming with militias,
new local militias are being established, with the first militia unit made up
of 240 Afghan villagers having been rolled out recently in Wardak province
after receiving just three weeks of training. Like the old militias, the new
militias will begin terrorizing the local populations before long.

Obama fails to recognize the structural character of the
Afpak problem. Worse still, he has made public comments that potentially have
the effect of undercutting the legitimacy of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari. How can he seek to implement a strategy
by undermining the elected heads of state in both countries? Little surprise
his strategy is already beginning to unravel.

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

Obama’s China-centric Asia policy

Posted on July 2, 2009 by Chellaney

Courting The Dragon

Washington’s Asia policy gives Beijing pride of place

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India, July 2, 2009

The key reason why India ranks lower in the policy profile of the Barack Obama administration than it did under President George W Bush is that America’s Asia policy is no longer guided by an overarching geopolitical framework. In fact, after nearly six months in office, Obama’s approach on Asia lacks a distinct strategic imprint and thus appears fragmented. His administration may have a policy approach towards each major Asian country and issue, but still lacks a strategy on how to build an enduring power equilibrium in Asia.

The result is that Washington is again looking at India primarily through the Pakistan prism. That translates into a US focus on India-Pakistan engagement, revived attention on the Kashmir issue and counter insurgency in the Af-Pak region, including implications for U.S. homeland security. For instance, not content with making Islamabad the largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world, Obama wants victim India to come to the aid of terror-exporting Pakistan, including by offering new "peace" talks and redeploying troops, even if it means more terrorist infiltration.

In a recent Asia-policy speech in Tokyo to a small group, of which this writer was a member, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg did not mention India even in passing — as if India wasn’t part of Asia. Whether one agreed or differed with Bush’s foreign policy, at least its Asia component was driven by a larger geopolitical blueprint. By contrast, the best that can be said about Obama’s Asia policy is that it seeks to nurture key bilateral relationships — with China at the core of Washington’s present courtship — and establish, where possible, trilateral relationships.

The upshot is that the Obama team has just unveiled a new trilateral security framework in Asia involving the United States, China and Japan. While announcing this initiative, Washington failed to acknowledge another trilateral — the one involving the U.S., India and Japan. It is as if that trilateral has fallen out of favour with the new U.S. administration, just as the broader US-Australia-India-Japan "Quadrilateral Initiative" — founded on the concept of democratic peace — ran aground after the late-2007 election of the Sinophile Kevin Rudd as the Australian prime minister.

At a time when Asia is in transition, with the spectre of power disequilibrium looming large, it has become imperative to invest in institution-building to help underpin long-term stability. After all, Asia is not only becoming the pivot of global geopolitical change, but also Asian challenges are playing into international strategic challenges. But the Obama administration is fixated on the very country whose rapidly accumulating power and muscle-flexing threaten Asian stability.

This is not to decry deeper U.S. engagement with China at a time when Washington’s dependence on Beijing to bankroll American debt has only grown. From being allies of convenience in the second half of the Cold War, the U.S. and China now have emerged as partners tied by such close interdependence that economic historians Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick have coined the term, ‘Chimerica’ — a fusion like the less-convincing ‘Chindia’. An article in China’s Liaowang magazine describes the relationship as one of "complex interdependence" in which America and China "compete and consult" with each other.

But China’s expanding naval role and maritime claims threaten to collide with U.S. interests, including Washington’s traditional emphasis on the freedom of the seas. U.S.-China economic ties also would stay uneasy: America saves too little and borrows too much from China, while China sells too much to the U.S. and buys too little. Yet, such is its indulgence towards China that Washington holds Moscow to higher standards than Beijing on human rights and other issues, even though it is China that is likely to mount a credible challenge to America’s global pre-eminence.

The new U.S.-China-Japan trilateral re-emphasises Washington’s focus on China as the key player to engage on Asian issues. Slated to begin modestly with dialogue on non-traditional security issues before moving on to hard security matters, the latest trilateral already is being billed as the centrepiece of Obama’s Asia policy. Such is its wider significance that it is touted as offering a new framework for deliberations on North Korea to compensate for the eroding utility of the present six-party mechanism.

Despite its China-centric Asia policy, the Obama team, however, has not thought of a U.S.-China-India trilateral, even as it currently explores a U.S.-China-South Korea trilateral. That is because Washington now is looking at India not through the Asian geopolitical prism but the regional, or Af-Pak, lens — a reality unlikely to be changed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s forthcoming stop in New Delhi more than five months after she paid obeisance in Beijing. While re-hyphenating India with Pakistan and outsourcing its North Korea and Burma policies to Beijing, the U.S. wants China to expand its geopolitical role through greater involvement even in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The point is that India’s role will not diminish in Asia just because the Obama administration fails to appreciate its larger strategic importance.

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research.

(c) The Times of India, 2009.

Opportunity to redefine U.S.-Russia ties

Posted on July 2, 2009 by Chellaney

Don’t bait the Russian bear

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times: July 2, 2009

U.S. President Barack Obama’s Moscow visit offers a historic opportunity to avert a new Cold War by establishing a more stable and cooperative relationship between the West and Russia.

Obama has reiterated his "commitment to a more substantive relationship with Russia." This needs to translate into policy moves symbolizing new, broad engagement.

Three important facts about Russia stand out. One, Russia has gradually become a more assertive power after stemming its precipitous decline and drift of the 1990s. Two, it now plays the Great Game on energy. Competition over control of hydrocarbon resources was a defining feature of the Cold War and remains an important driver of contemporary geopolitics, as manifest from the American occupation of Iraq and U.S. military bases or strategic tie-ups stretching across the oil-rich Persian Gulf, Caspian Sea basin and Central Asia.

Three, Russian democracy has moved toward greater centralized control to bring order and direction to the state. During Vladimir Putin’s presidency, government control was extended to large swaths of the economy and the political opposition was systematically emasculated.

Such centralization, though, is no different than in, say, Singapore and Malaysia, including the domination of one political party, the absence of diversified media, limits on public demonstrations and the writ of security services. But in contrast to Russia, Singapore and Malaysia have insulated themselves from U.S. criticism by willingly serving Western interests. When did you last hear official American criticism of Singapore’s egregious political practices?

Yet Russia faces a rising tide of Western censure for gradually sliding toward autocratic control at home. Actually, ideological baggage, not dispassionate strategic deliberation, tends to often color U.S. and European discourse on Russia.

Another reason is Russia’s geographical presence in Europe, the "mother" of both the Russian and U.S. civilizations. There is thus a greater propensity to hold Russia to European standards, unlike, say, China. Also, Russia was considered a more plausible candidate for democratic reform than China, now the world’s largest, oldest and strongest autocracy. Little surprise Russia’s greater centralization evokes fervent Western reaction.

Today’s Russia, however, bears little resemblance to the Soviet Union. Life for the average Russian is freer and there is no Soviet-style shortage of consumer goods. There are also no online censors regulating Internet content as in China, and criticism of the Russian government is, by and large, tolerated, especially if it does not threaten the position of those in power.

While China seeks to project power in distant lands, including Africa and Latin America, Russia wishes to project power in its own neighborhood, or what it calls its "Far Abroad," including Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, Central Asia and the Caucuses. Given its geopolitical focus on states in its vicinity, not on the "Far Abroad," Russia, with its size and clout, is able to bring pressure and intimidation to bear on such adjacent states. And given its own relative stability, Russia is able to exploit political instability in neighboring states.

But what now looks like a resurgent power faces major demographic and economic challenges to build and sustain great-power capacity over the long run.

Demographically, Russia is even in danger of losing its Slavic identity and becoming a Muslim-majority state in the decades ahead, unless government incentives succeed in encouraging Russian women to have more children. The average age of death of a Russian male has fallen to 58.9 years — nearly two decades below an American. While Japan faces a population decline, Russia confronts depopulation.

Economically, the oil-price crash has come as a warning to Russia against being a largely petro-state.

In fact, Moscow’s economic fortunes for long have been tied too heavily to oil — a commodity with volatile prices. In 1980, the Soviet Union overtook Saudi Arabia as the biggest oil producer. But oil prices began to decline, plummeting to $9 a barrel in mid-1986. U.S. intelligence, failing to read the significance of this, continued to claim Moscow was engaged in massive military modernization. During the Putin presidency, rising oil prices played a key role in Russian economic revival.

The higher the oil prices, the less the pressure there is on Russia to restructure and diversify its economy. The present low prices thus offer an opportunity to Moscow to reform.

Still, it should not be forgotten that Russia is the world’s wealthiest country in natural resources — from fertile farmlands and metals, to gold and timber. It sits on colossal hydrocarbon reserves. It also remains a nuclear and missile superpower. Indeed, to compensate for the erosion in its conventional-military capabilities, it has increasingly relied on its large nuclear arsenal, which it is ambitiously modernizing.

Whatever its future, the big question is: What is the right international approach toward a resurgent Russia? Here two aspects need to be borne in mind.

First, Russia geopolitically is the most important "swing" state in the world today. Its geopolitical swing worth is more than China’s or India’s. While China is inextricably tied to the U.S. economy and India’s geopolitical direction is clearly set toward closer economic and political engagement with the West — even as New Delhi retains its strategic autonomy — Russia is a wild card. A wrong policy course on Russia by the West would not only prove counterproductive to Western interests, but also affect international peace and security. It could push Moscow inexorably in the wrong direction, creating a new East-West divide.

Second, there are some useful lessons applicable to Russia that the West can draw on how it has dealt with another rising power. China has come a long way since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of prodemocracy demonstrators. What it has achieved in the last generation in terms of economic modernization and the opening of minds is extraordinary. That owes a lot to the West’s decision not to sustain trade sanctions after Tiananmen Square but instead to integrate China into global institutions.

That the choice made was wise can be seen from the baneful impact of the opposite decision taken on Burma after 1988 — to pursue a punitive approach relying on sanctions. Had the Burma-type approach been applied against China, the result would not only have been a less-prosperous and less-open China, but also a more-paranoid and possibly destabilizing China. The obvious lesson is that engagement and integration are better than sanctions and isolation.

Today, with a new chill setting in on relations between the West and Russia, that lesson is in danger of getting lost. Russia’s 16-year effort to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) has still to bear fruit, even as Moscow is said to be in the last phase of negotiations, and the U.S.- Russian nuclear deal remains on hold in Washington.

Little thought has been given to how the West lost Russia, which during its period of decline eagerly sought to cozy up to the U.S. and Europe, only to get the cold shoulder from Washington. And even as NATO is being expanded right up to Russia’s front yard and after the U.S.-led the action in engineering Kosovo’s February 2008 self-proclamation of independence, attention has focused since last August on Moscow’s misguided five-day military intervention in Georgia and its recognition of the self-declaration of independence by South Ossetia and Abkhazia — actions that some have tried to portray as the 21st century’s first forcible changing of borders.

But having sponsored Kosovo’s self- proclamation of independence, the U.S. and some of its allies awkwardly opposed the same right of self-determination for the people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Can the legitimacy of a self-declaration of independence depend on which great power sponsors that action?

The world cannot afford a new Cold War, which is what constant baiting of the Russian bear will bring. Fortunately, there are some positive signs. Seeking to heel the rift triggered by the yearlong developments over Georgia, the U.S. and Russia are resuming full military cooperation and have reopened negotiations on nuclear arms control, with the talks centered on quickly establishing a successor to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, whose 15-year term runs out December 5. Also, the U.S. is going slow on missile-defense deployments in Eastern Europe and there is a de facto postponement of NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia.

Russia, for its part, has continued to provide critical logistic assistance to the U.S. and NATO military operations in Afghanistan. As part of what Obama has called a "reset" of the bilateral relationship, a U.S.-Russia joint commission headed by Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is being established, along with several sub-commissions. This is an improvement on the 1993 commission established at the level of No. 2s, Vice President Al Gore and Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.

To be sure, fundamental differences between Washington and Moscow persist on some major international and regional issues — from U.S. opposition to the Russian idea for an international treaty to outlaw cyberspace attacks along the lines of the Chemical Weapons Convention to the continuing discord over Georgia spurring rival military maneuvers in the Caucasus region.

The increasingly authoritarian Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, blamed by some international analysts for provoking last year’s war through a military strike on South Ossetia that killed Russian peacekeepers and civilians, has become for Moscow what Cuba’s then leader Fidel Castro was for Washington — the villain-in-chief.

The key issue is whether the U.S. and Russia will rise above their differences and seize the new opportunity to redefine their relationship before it becomes too late. For Russia, the challenge is to engage a skeptical West more deeply. It also needs to increase its economic footprint in Asia, where its presence is largely military. For the U.S., the challenge is to pursue new geopolitics of engagement with Moscow.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. This article is based on the author’s presentation at the International Press Institute’s recent world congress in Helsinki.

The Japan Times: Thursday, July 2, 2009

Obama’s China itch

Posted on June 25, 2009 by Chellaney

Dancing with the dragon

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times

Nearly six months after U.S. President Barack Obama entered the White House, it is apparent that America’s Asia policy is no longer guided by an overarching geopolitical framework as it had been under President George W. Bush. Indeed, Washington’s Asia policy today appears fragmented. The Obama administration has developed a policy approach toward each major Asian subregion and issue, but still has no strategy on how to build enduring power equilibrium in Asia — the pivot of global geopolitical change

China, India and Japan, Asia’s three main powers, constitute a unique strategic triangle. The Obama administration has declared that America’s "most important bilateral relationship in the world" is with China, going to the extent of demoting human rights to put the accent on security, financial, trade and environmental issues with Beijing.

But it has yet to fashion a well-defined Japan policy or India policy. While a narrow East Asia policy framework now guides U.S. ties with Japan, Washington is again looking at India primarily through the Pakistan prism. That translates into a renewed U.S. focus on India-Pakistan engagement, resurrection of the Kashmir issue and preoccupation with counterinsurgency in the "Afpak" region, including implications for American homeland security.

Obama’s choice of ambassadors says it all. While Obama named John Huntsman — the Utah state governor and a rising Republican star seen even as a potential 2012 rival to the president — as his ambassador to China, he picked obscure former Congressman Timothy Roemer as envoy to India and a low-profile Internet and biotechnology lawyer, John Roos, as ambassador to Japan. Obama underlined China’s centrality in his foreign policy by personally announcing his choice of Huntsman. In contrast, Roemer and Roos were among a slew of ambassadors named in an official news release.

Huntsman has old ties with China, but Roemer and Roos hardly know the countries to which they have been named as ambassadors. Having served on the 9/11 investigation commission, Roemer, though, fits with the Afpak and homeland-security policy frame in which India is being viewed by the Obama team.

Whether one agreed with the Bush foreign policy or not, at least its Asia component was driven by a larger geopolitical blueprint. By contrast, the best can be said about Obama’s Asia policy is that it seeks to nurture key bilateral relationships — with China at the core of Washington’s present courtship — and establish, where possible, trilateral relationships.

The upshot of this is that the Obama team has just unveiled a new trilateral security-cooperation framework in Asia involving the United States, China and Japan. While announcing this initiative, the Obama administration has failed to acknowledge another trilateral — the one involving the U.S., Japan and India.

It is as if the U.S.-Japan-India trilateral has fallen out of favor with the new U.S. administration, just as the broader U.S.-India-Japan-Australia "Quadrilateral Initiative" — founded on the concept of democratic peace and conceived by then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — ran aground after the late-2007 election of Kevin Rudd as the Australian prime minister. Without forewarning New Delhi or Tokyo, the Sinophile Rudd publicly pulled the plug on that nascent initiative, which had held only one meeting.

Now the Obama administration seems intent to bring down the U.S.-Japan-India trilateral. While announcing the new U.S.-China-Japan trilateral, it did not forget to cite the U.S.-Australia-Japan and U.S.-Japan-South Korea trilaterals. But there was no mention of the U.S.-Japan-India trilateral, as if that Bush-endorsed enterprise had become history like Bush.

At a time when Asia is in transition, with the specter of power disequilibrium looming large, it has become imperative to invest in institution-building to help underpin long-term power stability and engagement. After all, Asian challenges are playing into global strategic challenges. But the Obama administration is fixated on the very country whose rapidly accumulating power and muscle-flexing threaten Asian stability.

The U.S., of course, has every reason to engage China more deeply at a time when its dependence on Beijing to bankroll American debt has only grown. Just as America and the Soviet Union achieved mutually assured destruction (MAD), America and China are now locked in MAD — but in economic terms. The two today are so tied in a mutually dependent relationship for their economic well-being that attempts to snap those ties would amount to mutually assured financial destruction. Just as the beleaguered U.S. economy cannot do without continuing capital inflows from China, the American market is the lifeline of the Chinese export juggernaut.

From being allies of convenience in the second half of the Cold War, the U.S. and China now have emerged as partners tied by such interdependence that economic historians Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick have coined the term, "Chimerica." An article in China’s Liaowang magazine describes the relationship as one of "complex interdependence" in which America and China "compete and consult" with each other. Together, the two countries make up 31 percent of global GDP and a quarter of world trade.

But China’s expanding naval role and maritime claims threaten to collide with U.S. interests, including Washington’s traditional emphasis on the freedom of the seas. U.S.-China economic ties also are likely to remain uneasy: America saves too little and borrows too much from China, while Beijing sells too much to the U.S. and buys too little. Yet, such is its indulgence toward Beijing that Washington seeks to hold Moscow to higher standards than Beijing on human rights and other issues, even though it is China that is likely to mount a credible challenge to America’s global pre-eminence.

The new U.S.-China-Japan trilateral re-emphasizes Washington’s focus on China as the key player to engage on Asian issues. Slated to begin modestly with dialogue on nontraditional security issues before moving on to hard security matters, this latest trilateral is being billed as the centerpiece of Obama’s Asia policy. Such is its wider significance that it is also touted as offering a new framework for deliberations on North Korea to compensate for the stalled six-party talks.

Despite its China-centric Asia policy, the Obama team, however, has not thought of a U.S.-China-India trilateral, even as it currently explores a U.S.-China-South Korea trilateral. That is because Washington now is looking at India not through the Asian geopolitical framework but the subregional lens — a reality unlikely to be changed by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s forthcoming stop in New Delhi six months after she paid obeisance in Beijing. While re-hyphenating India with Pakistan and outsourcing its North Korea and Burma policies to Beijing, Washington wants China to expand its geopolitical role through greater involvement even in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It is shortsighted of the Obama team to lower the profile of India and Japan in America’s Asia policy. Tokyo may be ceding political capital and influence in Asia to Beijing, and India’s power might not equal China’s, but Japan and India together can prove more than a match. The Japan-India strategic congruence with the U.S. is based as much on shared interests as on shared principles.

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

The Japan Times: June 25, 2009

Stagecraft and Statecraft

Author Archives: Chellaney

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