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Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

Dalai Lama: China’s nemesis

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China’s brute power toils against the Dalai Lama’s soft power

Brahma Chellaney

The Japan Times

On the 50th anniversary of his escape to India, the exiled 14th Dalai Lama stands as a bigger challenge than ever for China, as underscored by Beijing’s stepped-up vilification campaign against him and its admission that it is now locked in a “life and death struggle” over Tibet.

 

Travelling incognito, the Dalai Lama, then 24, crossed over into India on March 30, 1959, after a harrowing, 13-day trek through the Tibetan highlands with a small band of aides and family members. His arrival became public only the following day. Since then, he has come to symbolize one of the longest and most-powerful resistance movements in modern world history. Chinese rule over Tibet has created, as he put it recently, “hell on Earth.”

 

Little surprise Beijing now treats the iconic Dalai Lama as its Enemy No. 1, with its public references to him matching the crudeness and callousness of its policies in Tibet, where it has tried everything — from Tibet’s cartographic dismemberment and rewriting history, to ethnically drowning Tibetans through large-scale Han migration and systematically undermining Tibetan institutions.

 

Unnerved that the Dalai Lama’s soft power has stood up to its untrammeled power, China today has taken to haranguing propaganda while enforcing a security lockdown across an increasingly restive Tibetan region, half of which it has hived off from Tibet and merged with Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces.

 

With the Dalai Lama having parlayed his international moral standing into an indomitable influence over global public opinion, a desperate Beijing has had to fall back more and more on Cultural Revolution language. Consider one of China’s recent outbursts against its nemesis: “A jackal in Buddhist monk’s robes, an evil spirit with a human face and the heart of a beast. We are engaged in a fierce battle of blood and fire with the Dalai clique.”

 

The Dalai Lama gave up his demand for Tibet’s independence more than two decades ago, yet the Chinese propaganda machine still brands him a “splittist” and Premier Wen Jiabao demands he renounce separatist activities, as if China holds a historically and legally incontestable entitlement to Tibet.

 

The more Beijing has sought to isolate the Dalai Lama internationally, the deeper a thorn he has become in its side. Recently, China bullied its largest African trading partner, South Africa, into barring the Dalai Lama from attending a peace conference in Johannesburg. Yet it faced major embarrassment when the European Parliament and the US House of Representatives passed separate resolutions on Tibet, with the former calling for “real autonomy for Tibet” and the latter demanding Beijing “lift immediately the harsh policies imposed on Tibetans.” Both legislatures backed the Dalai Lama’s initiative for a durable political solution to the Tibet issue.

 

The Dalai Lama was lucky he fled Tibet in the nick of time before China made him a prisoner. In 1956, when he had travelled to India to participate in the celebrations on the 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha’s Enlightenment, the Sinophile Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, convinced him to return to Lhasa, although the Dalai Lama’s advisers feared for his safety. But after his return, conditions in Tibet began to deteriorate relentlessly.

Had he not escaped from the Chinese-guarded Norbulingka Palace in Lhasa on the night of March 17, 1959, disguised as a Tibetan soldier, the Dalai Lama may have met the same fate as the 11th Panchen Lama, who disappeared in 1995 soon after he was anointed at the age of six. The March 10, 1959, Tibetan mass uprising indeed was triggered by popular fears that the Dalai Lama would be kidnapped after he was asked to come to a Chinese army-camp event without bodyguards.

The uprising was harshly suppressed in a year-long bloodbath. And in the period since, more than more than a million Tibetans reportedly have lost their lives due to official Chinese policies.

In exile, the Dalai Lama has helped keep the Tibetan movement alive and preserved Tibetan language and culture by establishing a network of schools. The transition of the Tibetan government-in-exile to democratically elected executive and legislative branches ought to serve as an example for the autocrats in Beijing. Instead, having turned Tibetans into state serfs under its rule, the communist dictatorship observed a national holiday last Saturday for belatedly discovering that it “emancipated” Tibetans from serfdom through Tibet’s conquest.

 

Had the Dalai Lama not managed to slip away in 1959, China would have installed an imposter Dalai Lama long ago, in the same way it has instated its own Panchen Lama in place of the official appointee it abducted. But now it has no choice but to wait for the exiled Dalai Lama to pass away before it can orchestrate any sham. To frustrate Beijing’s plans, the present Dalai Lama needs to publicly lay down clear rules on succession.

 

In fact, it was the long, 17-year gap between the 1933 death of the 13th Dalai Lama and the November 1950 assumption of full temporal powers by the present incumbent at the age of 15, after the Chinese invasion already had started, that cost Tibet its freedom. The hurried installation of the Dalai Lama in political office could not stop China from completing its conquest of Tibet. Because of its protracted power vacuum, Tibet had not sought to reinforce its independence by becoming a United Nations member in the propitious, pre-1949 period when China was politically torn.

 

A similar long gap in succession and grooming now could strike a devastating blow to the Tibetan cause to regain autonomy. That is why it has become imperative to clarify the rules to choose the 15th Dalai Lama, including whether he is to be discovered in the free world and not in Chinese-controlled Tibet, as the current incumbent had earlier suggested. Another issue that needs to be sorted out is whether the present Karmapa Lama, the third-ranking Tibetan spiritual leader who fled to India in late 1999, can fill in as an unofficial, transitional successor to the Dalai Lama. 

 

For India, Tibet is the core issue with China, which became its neighbor owing not to geography but to guns — by gobbling up the traditional buffer.

 

The recent congressional resolution recognized India for its “generosity” in playing host to the Dalai Lama and Tibetan refugees. But this is more than just munificence: The Dalai Lama is India’s biggest strategic asset because without him, the country would be poorer by several military divisions against China. India thus has a major stake in the succession issue, including in overseeing the training and education of the heir. For now, though, given the stepped-up Chinese intelligence activities — from cyber to land — Indian security agencies must beware of any plot to assassinate the present incumbent.

 

The writer, 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.”

 

The Japan Times: Wednesday, April 1, 2009

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Obama’s Afpak plan won’t work

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Fobbing off the burden

 

Barack Obama’s myopic Afpak plan, with its narrow goals, is bad news for India

 

Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, March 30, 2009

 

Throwing more money at Pakistan, without clarity of goals, and keeping up the pretence that Al Qaeda poses the main threat makes Barack Obama look more like George W. Bush than a U.S. president heralding change. Obama has failed to appreciate that the ‘Afpak’ problem won’t go away without a fundamental break from U.S. policies that helped create this terrifying muddle. 

 

Worse still, Obama wants to regionally contain rather than defeat terrorism, as if the monster of terrorism can be deftly confined to the Afpak belt — a blinkered approach that promises to bring Indian security under added pressure. His aides contend that by refocusing U.S. power to contain and deter, America can diplomatically encircle the terrorist threats from Pakistan and the Taliban. Distant America may afford this, but next-door India will bear the consequences.

 

In unveiling an Afpak plan founded on narrow goals, Obama has fallen prey to a long-standing U.S. policy weakness: The pursuit of near-term objectives without much regard for the security of regional friends. To focus entirely on one’s own security, and to give primacy to what is politically expedient, is to repeat the very mistakes of past U.S. policy that inadvertently gave rise to the scourge of jihadist transnational terror.

 

Let’s be clear: Pakistan and Afghanistan, two artificially created states with no roots in history, constitute the most dangerous region on earth. Additionally, Pakistan is where state-nurtured terrorism and state-reared nuclear smuggling uniquely intersect. Yet Obama’s central objective is not to clean up the mess but to extricate the U.S. from the war in Afghanistan by winning over the bulk of the Taliban, including by pandering to Pakistan, the terrorist procreator and sanctuary provider.

 

Obama has abandoned the international goal of institution-building in Afghanistan, disparagingly equating it with nation-building. In place of creating a unified, stable, democratic Afghanistan, Obama has defined a short-term mission: “to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan”. But given that Al Qaeda already is badly splintered and weakened and in no position to openly challenge U.S. interests, Obama can declare ‘mission accomplished’ any time he wants. As the latest Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community presented to a Senate committee on February 12 admits, “Because of the pressure we and our allies have put on Al Qaida’s core leadership in Pakistan … Al Qaeda today is less capable and effective than it was a year ago”.

 

Obama’s lowering of the bar is to facilitate an end to U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan much before he comes up for re-election. And his playing up the threat from Al Qaeda — whose remnants are holed up in mountain caves — helps create room to negotiate a political deal with the more-formidable Taliban.

 

In what passes for grand strategy, Obama’s plan, in theory, clubs Pakistan (with its militant safe havens) and Afghanistan in a single theatre of operation. But in practice, it follows opposite tracks: Showering billions of dollars in additional aid on Pakistan and promising not to deploy troops there, while stepping up military operations in Afghanistan to force the Taliban to the negotiating table. It is good though that he wants to build up the size and strength of the Afghan national army — the only institution he has named. But that is to facilitate a U.S. military exit.

 

To make his plan more presentable, Obama proclaimed “benchmarks and metrics to measure our performance and that of our allies” — Islamabad and Kabul. Yet he shied away from defining the benchmarks or explaining how the stepped-up aid flow to Islamabad will be calibrated to meeting them. As he acknowledged, the benchmarks are yet to be developed by his team, in concert with Congress.

 

The blunt truth is that by unveiling new rewards for Pakistan upfront, in the form of a quantum jump in aid — even as Washington admits that Islamabad has misused past aid — Obama has undercut his benchmark-setting endeavour. The talk of new “benchmarks and metrics” thus is just public relations to market what otherwise would have been a difficult decision to justify — the tripling of non-military aid to renegade Pakistan while maintaining the existing munificent level of military assistance.

The way to bring a near-bankrupt Pakistan to heel is to threaten suspension of all bilateral and multilateral aid flow — a threat that will have a lightening effect. Yet, Obama first unveils new goodies and then expects the Pakistani intelligence to stop underwriting the Taliban. (He has still to name Lashkar-e-Taiba and other Pakistan-based terror groups that serve as proxies against India.) At a time when Pakistan is most vulnerable to international pressure, including to a threat to place it on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terror, Obama is reluctant to exercise leverage, proposing instead the largest-ever annual U.S. aid flow to that country. Before long, more lethal, directed-at-India U.S. weapons also will flow to Islamabad — “like whiskey to an alcoholic”, to quote the Indian foreign secretary.

 

America and India must embed counterterrorism cooperation in an institutional framework so that their collaboration over the Pakistan-scripted Mumbai terror strikes does not prove a one-shot affair. But can such an institutional process be built if America both disregards the interests of India — already bearing the brunt of the blowback from past failed U.S. policies — and continues to heap rewards on Pakistan without so much as helping to bring the Mumbai-attack planners to justice? Kashmir’s exclusion from Obama’s plan was inevitable, given that Washington’s priority is to reduce its load, not to add more. But having devised his hallucinatory loop of delusion without detailed consultations with India, Obama now wants to co-opt New Delhi in the plan’s implementation, especially by persuading it to emulate his kid-gloves treatment of Pakistan.

 

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?sectionName=HomePage&id=22084576-ed5b-4623-8a52-b028fdc6807b&Headline=Fobbing+off+the+burden

The unfolding cut-and-run strategy

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Obama’s five-pillar Afpak plan to add to India’s woes

 

A shortsighted, dangerous Afpak strategy has prompted Washington to extend technical assistance to India over the Mumbai attacks, but not the much-needed political assistance to bring its planners to justice

 

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, March 25, 2009

 

By sketching out in advance five key pillars of his strategy on Afghanistan and Pakistan (“Afpak” in Washingtonese), President Barack Obama has preempted the inter-agency review of US options that he had himself ordered on his most difficult foreign-policy challenge. The review, to be unveiled next Tuesday, will be reduced to a public-relations exercise to market decisions already taken, especially by packaging them in better light and camouflaging their real intent.

 

The review is set to overlook the central reality on Afghanistan and Pakistan — that the political border between these two artificially-created countries has ceased to exist in practice. The so-called Durand Line, in any event, was a British-colonial invention that left the large Pashtun community divided into two.

 

Today, that 1893-drawn line exists only in maps. On the ground, it has little political, ethnic and economic relevance. A de facto Pashtunistan, long sought by Pashtuns, now exists on the ruins of an ongoing Islamist militancy but without any political authority in charge.

 

The momentous disappearance of the Afpak political border seems irreversible. In that light, “Afpak” is a fitting term because by fusing the two countries, it suggests they now need to be tackled as a single geopolitical entity. Yet in the Obama strategy, there is still no meaningful integration in the policy approaches toward the two countries.

 

In short, Obama is set to cut and run from Afghanistan. As he has told CBS News, “there’s got to be an exit strategy.” He wants to seek re-election on the plank of having ended America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — wars that already have tied up the US military for a period longer than World War II. His timeframe for an Afghanistan exit appears the same as for Iraq — by 2011.

That does not mean that the 190,000 US troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined (including the 17,000 additional forces being sent to Afghanistan) would all be home by 2011-end. Once their missions officially end, some of these troops would be reassigned to military bases Washington intends to maintain indefinitely in the two countries.

The five pillars of Obama’s Afpak strategy are:

● Shift from the current approach of counter-insurgency and institution-building in Afghanistan to a narrower objective to regionally confine terrorism and deter attacks against US interests from the Afpak belt. Having formally ended the global “war” on terror initiated by his predecessor, Obama has no intent to prosecute a regional war on terror in the Afpak belt.

Although in the election campaign Obama repeatedly said the Iraq invasion had diverted US attention from the war of necessity in Afghanistan, he now realizes that defeating Afpak terrorism and building civilian and military institutions to create a stable Afghanistan are long-drawn-out missions that threaten to consume his presidency the way Iraq seared his predecessor’s reign. So he is lowering the bar and seeking shortcuts. Indeed, his defence secretary has described a cohesive, democratic Afghanistan as an impractical objective to create “some sort of Central Asian Valhalla.”

● Pursue a minimalist “surge” of US forces in Afghanistan as a show of force to pursue political rather than military goals. Obama knows that sending more US forces into Afghanistan is a losing strategy. After all, the Soviet Union, with 100,000 troops, couldn’t pacify a country that historically has been “the graveyard of empires.” Last year proved the deadliest for American forces in Afghanistan even though the number of NATO and US troops nearly doubled in the first half of 2008.

Ironically, after having been elected on the slogan of change, Obama has set out to do in Afghanistan what his predecessor did in Iraq, where behind the cover of a surge, local tribal chieftains were bought off. The attempt to replicate the Iraq strategy in Afghanistan overlooks several dissimilarities, including the key fact that Sunni insurgents in Iraq —  unlike Afghan militants — have had no safe havens across the borders.

 

● Pretend the badly weakened and splintered Al Qaeda is the main enemy while quietly seeking a political deal with the Taliban leadership. Al Qaeda remnants operate not on the battlefield but furtively out of mountain caves. Those that openly challenge the US and NATO forces are the Taliban and private armies led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and others. Yet, the Obama administration has blessed secret negotiations by Saudi, Pakistani and Afghan agencies and individuals with the Taliban and Hekmatyar (who is aligned with the Taliban).

 

The “reconcilables” (the good terrorists, or what Obama meretriciously calls the “moderate” Taliban) are to be offered amnesty, payoffs and a stake in power. The “unreconcilables” (the bad terrorists) are to be hunted down with the help of the “reconcilables” and eliminated.

 

To pressure the top Taliban leaders to negotiate and cut a deal, Washington is threatening military strikes on their sanctuaries in Pakistan’s Quetta area. Taliban chief Mullah Omar and members of his supreme shura (council) have been ensconced for years in Quetta under Pakistani intelligence protection, but the US military has thus far not carried out a single air, missile or drone attack on their known hideouts. Obama indeed is agreeable to bring the Taliban shura into the Afghan political fold.

 

But the Taliban leaders and their main patron, the Pakistani military, know that the US — with a faltering military campaign — is desperate for a ticket out of Afghanistan. All they have to do is to bide their time.

 

● In the same way the US in the 1980s established the so-called “mujahideen” (the “good” terrorists until they turned on their creators), Washington has unilaterally embarked on a plan to set up local civil militias in every Afghan province. The internationally agreed goal to build institutions is degenerating into militia-building in a country already swarming with heavily armed militiamen.

 

Long after the US war has ended, the new militias would be terrorizing populations.

 

● Prop up the Pakistani state, including through a quantum jump in US aid. Just as the imperatives of its covert war in Afghanistan in the 1980s prompted the US to provide multibillion-dollar aid packages to Pakistan while turning a blind eye to the latter’s rogue activities, the current overt war is prompting Obama to significantly boost the already-generous level of aid and help the tottering Pakistani state stay solvent. As the CIA steps up cooperation with the Pakistani intelligence, history is repeating itself.

 

The greater US reliance on the terror-rearing Pakistani military establishment explains why America has extended technical assistance to India in the Mumbai probe, but not political assistance. Washington is unwilling to put pressure on Islamabad to even secure FBI access to those arrested by Pakistani authorities. Four months after the unparalleled terrorist strikes, there is distinct possibility its key planners may go scot-free.

 

Instead of formulating his Afpak strategy in coordination with allies and friends, Obama is presenting them with a fait accompli even while seeking their cooperation to help implement a plan likely to create a more unstable and terrorist-infested Afpak belt.

 

Not only is institution-building now being disparaged as nation-building, the new administration also is shifting the military goal. Having failed to rout the Taliban, the US, Obama believes, should return to what it traditionally is good at — containing and deterring.

 

But the consequence of abandoning the goal to establish a functioning Afghan state and a moderate Pakistan will be greater pressure on Indian security. The brunt of escalating terrorism will be borne by next-door India, which already has been described by ex-US official Ashley Tellis as “the sponge that protects us all.”

 

(c) Asian Age, 2009.

 

China’s eventful year of anniversaries

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Year of big anniversaries: Defining moment for China

 

Just when China’s internal challenges are being highlighted by major anniversaries this year, a growing U.S. reliance on Chinese capital inflows has prompted Washington to demote human rights

 

By Brahma Chellaney

Japan Times

Large parts of the Tibetan plateau today have been turned into militarized zones and made off-limits to foreigners. De facto martial law prevails on much of the plateau after the largest troop deployment since the March 2008 Tibetan upheaval.
 
Yet the more ruthless China is, the more resilient (and innovative) the Tibetan resistance to Chinese rule becomes.
 

The latest Chinese clampdown began in response to a grassroots Tibetan campaign to boycott celebrations of Losar, the Tibetan New Year, and to use the holiday period from Feb. 25 instead to mourn Tibetans who were killed by troops last March and express concern for those arrested or tortured. That a refusal to celebrate a joyous Tibetan event can become a tool of mass protest rattled the autocrats in Beijing, who responded by pouring in troops.

The security lockdown in Tibet also has been prompted by the 50th anniversaries this month of the Tibetan national uprising against the Chinese occupation and the Dalai Lama’s consequent flight to India. On March 17, 1959, the then 24-year-old Dalai Lama escaped from the Chinese-guarded Norbulingka Palace in Lhasa. After a harrowing trek through inhospitable terrain, he arrived on March 30 in India, where he has lived in exile ever since.

It was the 49th anniversary of the March 10 revolt that became the trigger for last year’s Tibetan protests — the largest in territorial scale since 1959. This year, thanks to a deliberate Chinese provocation, another anniversary threatens to incite Tibetan disturbances, thus necessitating continued Chinese military presence in full force across the Tibetan plateau.

Like waving a red rag at a bull, China has decided to mark March 28 — the 50th anniversary of its action dissolving the Tibetan government and declaring direct rule over Tibet — as "Serf Emancipation Day," as if China just realized it liberated Tibetans from serfdom 50 years ago.

That anniversary is now to be celebrated every year for bringing — believe it or not — "democratic reform" to Tibet. But what about bringing democratic reform to Han China? That issue will haunt the communist dictatorship in the runup to another anniversary this year — the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square massacre of student-led, prodemocracy demonstrators.

China’s leaders are devoted to celebrating anniversaries to help glorify communist actions. So besides the March 28 celebrations, they have planned a mammoth military parade — the largest ever — along with a repeat of some of the Beijing Olympics glitz at the 60th anniversary of the communist revolution on Oct. 1.

But anniversaries are also precious for the suppressed to catalyze grassroots action and inspire a popular awakening. Luckily for China’s oppressed, it’s raining anniversaries this year. For example, July 22 will mark 10 years since the communist rulers, perceiving a threat even from a nonviolent spiritual movement, banned Falun Gong and set out to arrest and torture thousands of its Han followers, with an undetermined number dying in police custody.

The Chinese Communist Party’s visceral antagonism toward Falun Gong and the brutal official crackdown arose from the movement’s attempt to offer Chinese a spiritual alternative to the state-dispensed religion: communism.

The communist fear of nonviolent ideas is also mirrored in Beijing’s vile attacks against the Dalai Lama, as though he were China’s enemy No. 1. For long, Beijing had denounced the Dalai Lama as a "splittist," as if China has an indisputable ownership over Tibet. But since last year, it has been hurling juicier epithets at him — "a wolf wrapped in monk’s robes," "an evil spirit with a human face and the heart of a beast," and a "serial liar."

Such foul language against the Tibetan god-king comes from a party and system responsible for the death of tens of millions of Chinese during the "Great Leap Forward," "Cultural Revolution" and other state-induced disasters. The greatest genocide in modern 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 longtime Chinese communist Yang Jisheng.

Nothing scares those wedded to violence more than ideas of peace, reconciliation and nonviolent dissent. Little surprise the party has been unnerved by Tibetans turning the Losar festival into a dirge to memorialize those killed by Chinese forces.

At a critical juncture, unfortunately, the United States, out of strategic compulsion, is willing to turn a blind eye to growing Chinese human-rights abuses. With U.S. President Barack Obama’s stimulus package making America even more reliant on its banker, China, to finance a budget deficit now officially set to reach $1.75 trillion, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made it easy for Chinese repression to continue by publicly demoting human rights.

While thanking China for underscoring the "intertwined" nature of the U.S. and Chinese economies through continued purchases of U.S. government debt, she went out of her way during her recent Beijing visit to demote human rights and emphasize economic, environmental and security relations. With Japan no longer buying U.S. Treasury bills, whose 10-year yield currently is just 2.84 percent, China has emerged as America’s main creditor.

U.S. foreign policy indeed is veering to the view that Asian stability and China’s own rise can best be managed by building a stronger cooperative relationship with Beijing and respecting Chinese sensitivities.

A more indulgent U.S. policy can help mitigate international pressures on Beijing. But China’s internal challenges are set to grow. And 2009 is fraught with politically treacherous anniversaries for a nominally communist party that seeks to perpetuate its political monopoly in an explosively capitalist country.

Even the leadership’s plan to re-enact Olympic-style celebrations at the Oct. 1 anniversary of the establishment of communist China threatens to renew some of the controversies that plagued the Beijing Games and stir up protests and security-related concerns. Such grand revelry risks provoking critics.

The 90th anniversary on May 4 of the 1919 student-led revolt against imperial rule is symbolically important, too, because it is a potent reminder to the present leadership that people can turn against their rulers when they become impervious to popular concerns. After all, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests were modeled on the 1919 movement.

Add to the picture Beijing’s attempt to incite Tibetans by observing as "Serf Emancipation Day" the date when Tibetans lost even the pretense of autonomy. By seeking to turn into a national celebration an anniversary that actually marks China’s formal betrayal of its May 1951, postinvasion "17 Pacts" promising autonomy to Tibet, the leadership has sought to provoke Tibetans at a time when the wounds from last year’s bloody events are still to heal.

This underlines the propensity of a power-drunk leadership to pursue counterproductive policies — the very predisposition that could unravel the world’s oldest autocracy in Beijing.

After China’s 2008 coming-out party, this year of anniversaries could prove a turning point in Chinese history, with even the state-run Outlook magazine warning of "a peak period for mass incidents." Little surprise a high-powered special committee constituted by President Hu Jintao to prevent disorder is known as Committee 6521, an order of numbers representing this year’s 60th, 50th, 20th and 10th anniversaries of big events. The economic slowdown, rising unemployment and social tensions, and new signs of restiveness threaten to trigger events whose own anniversaries may become major occasions of observance.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."
 
The Japan Times: March 12, 2009
(C) All rights reserved

Sri Lankan bloody crescendo

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Dangerous games

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, March 9, 2009

The 26-year civil war in Sri Lanka has built up to a bloody crescendo. Yet the killing of a growing number of non-combatants and the plight of large numbers of displaced or trapped Tamils has generated a muted international response.One country, however, continues to make hay while Asia’s longest civil war rages on little-noticed battlefields.

In Sri Lanka, as in Burma, Uzbekistan, North Korea, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Zambia and elsewhere, China has been an abettor of human-rights abuses. Chinese military and financial support has made possible Colombo’s no-holds-barred campaign to score a decisive military victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

But with secretary of state Hillary Clinton publicly emphasising that the global financial, climate and security crises are more pressing priorities for US policy than China’s human-rights record, Beijing has little reason to stop facilitating overseas what it practices at home –repression.

Sri Lanka is just the latest case underlining China’s blindness to the consequences of its aggressive pursuit of strategic interests. No sooner had the US ended direct military aid to Sri Lanka last year over its deteriorating human-rights record than China stepped in to fill the breach — a breach widened by India’s hands-off approach towards Sri Lanka since a disastrous 1987-90 peace-keeping operation there. Beijing started selling larger quantities of arms, and dramatically boosted its aid fivefold since 2008 to almost $1 billion to emerge as Sri Lanka’s largest donor.

In recent months, Chinese Jian-7 fighterjets, anti-aircraft guns, JY-11 3D air surveillance radars and other supplied weapons have played a central role in the Sri Lankan military successes against the Tamil Tigers. Beijing has even got its ally Pakistan actively involved in Sri Lanka.

At Beijing’s prodding, Pakistan –despite its own faltering economy and internal disorder — has boosted its annual military assistance loans to Sri Lanka to nearly $100 million while supplying Chinese-origin small arms and training Sri Lankan air force personnel in precision guided attacks.

China has become an enabler of repression in a number of developing nations as it seeks to gain access to oil and mineral resources to market its goods and to step up investment. Still officially a communist state, its support for brutal regimes is driven by capitalist considerations. But while exploiting commercial opportunities, it also tries to make strategic inroads.

Little surprise thus that China’s best friends are pariah or other human rights-abusing states. Indeed, with its ability to provide political protection through its UN Security Council veto power, Beijing has signed tens of billions of dollars worth of energy and arms contracts in recent years with such problem states — from Burma and Iran to Sudan and Venezuela.

In the case of Sri Lanka, China has been particularly attracted by that country’s vantage location in the centre of the Indian Ocean — a crucial international passageway for trade and oil. Hambantota — the billion-dollar port Chinese engineers are now building on Sri Lanka’s southeast — is the latest "pearl" in China’s strategy to control vital sea-lanes of communication between the Indian and Pacific Oceans by assembling a "string of pearls" in the form of listening posts, special naval arrangements and access to ports.

While Beijing has aggressively moved in recent years to construct or modernise ports in the Indian Ocean rim, none of the port-building projects it has bagged in recent years can match the strategic value of Hambantota, which sits astride the great trade arteries.
China’s generous military aid to Sri Lanka has tilted the military balance in favour of government forces, enabling them to unravel the de facto state the Tigers had run for years.

After losing more than 5,600 square kilometres of territory, the Tigers now are boxed into a sliver of jungle area in the northeast. But despite the battlefield triumphs, the government is unable to define peace or outline a political solution to the Tamils’ long-standing grievances. The Tigers, after being routed in the conventional war, are gearing up to return to their roots and become guerrilla fighters again.

With an ever-larger, Chinese-aided war machine, the conflict is set to grind on, making civil society the main loser. That is why international diplomatic intervention has become imperative.

India, with its geostrategic advantage and trade and investment clout over a war-hemorrhagic Sri Lankan economy that is in search of an international bailout package, must use its leverage deftly to promote political and ethnic reconciliation rooted in federalism and genuine inter-ethnic equality.

More broadly, the US, European Union, Japan and other important players need to exert leverage to press Beijing to moderate its unsettling role and to make Colombo accept a ceasefire.

The writer is a strategic affairs expert.

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1237549

A flawed Afpak strategy

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Why U.S. policy risks repeating history

Brahma Chellaney  The Hindu  March 3, 2009

 

In setting out to deal with the Afghanistan-Pakistan predicament, Barack Obama is seeking to repeat some of the very Reagan-era mistakes that created this mess


 

At a time when the Taliban, with its inner shura (council) ensconced in the Quetta area, is making deeper inroads into Pakistan, U.S. President Barack Obama’s policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan (“Afpak” in Washingtonese) raises fundamental questions: Is Washington serious about solving what it helped bring about? And can a solution involve doing more of what caused the problem?

The Obama administration has set out to train and arm local militias in every Afghan province, even as Defence Secretary Robert Gates has triggered alarm bells by declaring in Krakow, Poland, that the U.S. “would be very open” to a Swat Valley-style agreement in Afghanistan with the Taliban. Faced with grim realities on the ground, the new administration is seeking to pursue shortcuts, lest Afpak burn Mr. Obama’s presidency in the same way Iraq consumed George W. Bush’s. Still, it is important to remember the origins of the Afpak problem.

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

Yet, in trying to salvage the overt U.S. war in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama is ignoring the lessons of the earlier covert war and unwittingly seeking to repeat history. In the same way the U.S. created “mujahideen” by funnelling billions of dollars worth of arms to them in the 1980s, Washington has now embarked on a plan to set up local militias across Afghanistan. And just as the covert war’s imperatives prompted the U.S. in the 1980s to provide multibillion-dollar aid packages to Pakistan while turning a blind eye to its nuclear-smuggling and other illicit trans-border activities, Washington is now unveiling a quantum jump in aid to that country while seeking to neither bring the rogue Inter-Services Intelligence under civilian oversight nor subject the recently-freed A.Q. Khan to international questioning.

While pursuing major changes domestically, Mr. Obama is demonstrating a degree of caution that makes his foreign policy look like a repackaged version of Mr. Bush’s. Besides retaining Mr. Bush’s defence secretary and rendition policy, the once anti-war Mr. Obama is in less of a hurry to exit Iraq, with his full troop withdrawal to be completed in 2011 in accordance with Mr. Bush’s plan. While asking his aides to come up with an Afpak strategy before he goes to Europe for the April 2 NATO summit, Mr. Obama has already made key decisions — from sending more troops to Afghanistan to pushing ahead with new civilian militias. In Pakistan, U.S. cooperation has been stepped up with the military, including new joint CIA-ISI missions in tribal areas, commando training to Frontier Corps and sharing of U.S. intercepts of militant cellular and satellite phone calls.

Under the militia-building plan, designed to complement Mr. Obama’s troop “surge,” lightly trained militias are being set up in the Afghan provinces as part of a supposed game-changing strategy. The first such militia units are almost ready to be rolled out in Wardak province, near Kabul. The costs to the U.S. to train and maintain such provincial militias will depend on how many recruits the programme is able to draw. But the financial costs can only be small compared to the likely costs to regional security.

The plan, initiated quietly without any consultation with allies and partners, flies in the face of the common agreement that the international community must focus on institution-building, demobilisation of existing militias and reconstruction to create a stable, moderate Afghanistan — goals that have prompted India to pour massive $1.2 billion aid into that country and start constructing the new Afghan Parliament building. The decision ignores the danger that such militias could go out of control and threaten international security. That is exactly what happened with the militias Reagan heavily armed in the 1980s, the so-called “mujahideen.”

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

Prodded by the intense lobbying of Unocol, a U.S. firm that was seeking to build energy pipelines from Turkmenistan, the Clinton administration called the Taliban’s 1996 ascension to power “an opportunity for a process of national reconciliation to begin.” Some 13 years later, as if no lesson has been learned from the Taliban’s rampages, Secretary Gates has used the same term “reconciliation” to suggest compromise with that rabidly Islamist militia.

To be sure, building civilian and military institutions to recreate a unified, stable Afghanistan out of the ashes of three decades of war is not easy. But the shortcuts Mr. Obama is seeking are likely to impose enduring costs. Just because Afghan security forces are not yet sufficiently large or adequately groomed to take over the fight cannot justify the setting up of more militias in a country already swarming with armed militiamen. When the United Nations-sponsored programme to disarm and demobilise existing militias is in limbo, the move to create new militia units in the name of an “Afghan Public Protection Force” risks seriously undermining the secular Afghan national army and triggering more ethnic and sectarian bloodletting.

The real threat today is from the disparate militias that have been at loggerheads in the past but now oppose foreign intervention. The insurgency is made up of the ragtag Taliban — oiled by drug money and petrodollars — and a number of private armies, including Jalaluddin Haqqani’s militia force, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami and Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi. To create more armed militiamen is to play with fire.

Just as the Pakistani army and the ISI served as America’s most critical eyes and ears in the 1980s’ covert war, U.S. logistics and intelligence dependence on them in the current overt war is being reinforced by several factors — a troop surge to steady a faltering military campaign; the desire to cut a deal with the Taliban; and the recent Kyrgyz decision to shut down the American air base at Manas, a major hub for troops and cargo to Afghanistan. Despite the Manas loss, Mr. Obama, at this stage, is unlikely to seriously explore the only possible alternative he has to greater U.S. reliance on Pakistan: Do a deal with Tehran to gain access to Afghanistan through the Iranian port of Chabahar and the Indian-built Zaranj-Delaram highway, which links up to the ring road to Kandahar and Kabul.

If Richard Holbrooke’s appointment as special representative is not merely intended to sell decisions already made in Washington, such as to set up militias and increase troop levels, genuine prior consultations with partners and friends are essential, or else Mr. Obama would be following Mr. Bush’s much-criticised footsteps. Yet Mr. Obama made his first presidential telephone call to Afghan President Hamid Karzai to merely convey an Afghanistan-related decision he had already made — to send 17,000 more U.S. troops.

In fact, while pampering the Pakistani military establishment that is working to undermine the civilians in power, the U.S. is undercutting the present civilian government in Kabul by directly reaching out to provincial governors and seeking their help, among other things, to establish militias. While Mr. Gates scoffs at a cohesive, stable, democratic Afghanistan as “some sort of Central Asian Valhalla,” Mr. Obama is itching to dump Mr. Karzai. Mr. Obama’s scaled-back objective is not to rout the Taliban but, as he told a joint session of Congress, “to defeat al-Qaeda.”

The Afpak problem won’t go away without a clear break from failed U.S. policies and unceasing investments in institution-building. Continuing more of what hasn’t worked in the past, such as throwing more money at Pakistan and pouring more foreign troops into Afghanistan without a sustained commitment to uproot terrorism, is like feeding the beast. A U.S. deal with the Taliban will not only repeat history, but also reinforce Afpak’s position as a global narco-terrorist beachhead.

Building institutions and defeating transnational terrorism, of course, are long-drawn-out missions. But Mr. Obama wants to demonstrate change in keeping with his election-campaign slogan. That means giving priority to what is politically expedient than to long-term interests — the very mistake that gave rise to the phenomenon of jihadist transnational terror. It also means redefining success and taking shortcuts, including using the troop surge as a show of force to cut grotty deals and rear new armed thugs. “Surge, bribe and run” sums up Mr. Obama’s unfolding strategy. Little surprise Pakistani generals are smiling. 

(c) The Hindu, 2009.

Beijing’s blindness to consequences of aggressive pursuit of strategic interests

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China fuels Sri Lankan war

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
The Japan Times March 4, 2009
 

Sri Lanka, the once self-trumpeted "island of paradise," turned into the island of bloodshed more than a quarter-century ago. But even by its long, gory record, the bloodletting since last year is unprecedented. The United Nations estimates that some 1,200 noncombatants are getting killed each month in a civil war that continues to evoke a muted international response even as hundreds of thousands of minority Tamils have fled their homes or remain trapped behind the front line.

With the world preoccupied by pressing challenges, President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother, Defense Minister Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, a naturalized U.S. citizen, press on with their brutal military campaign with impunity. The offensive bears a distinct family imprint, with another brother the president’s top adviser.

Chinese military and financial support — as in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Uzbekistan, North Korea, Burma and elsewhere — has directly aided government excesses and human rights abuses in Sri Lanka. But with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly emphasizing that the global financial, climate and security crises are more pressing priorities for U.S. policy than China’s human rights record, which by her own department’s recent admission has "remained poor and worsened in some areas," Beijing has little reason to stop facilitating overseas what it practices at home — repression.

Still, the more China insists that it doesn’t mix business with politics in its foreign relations, the more evidence it provides of cynically contributing to violence and repression in internally torn states. Sri Lanka is just the latest case demonstrating Beijing’s blindness to the consequences of its aggressive pursuit of strategic interests.

No sooner had the United States ended direct military aid to Sri Lanka last year over its deteriorating human rights record than China blithely stepped in to fill the breach — a breach widened by India’s hands-off approach toward Sri Lanka since a disastrous 1987-90 peacekeeping operation in that island-nation.

Beijing began selling larger quantities of arms, and dramatically boosted its aid fivefold in the past year to almost $1 billion to emerge as Sri Lanka’s largest donor. Chinese Jian-7 fighter jets, antiaircraft guns, JY-11 3D air surveillance radars and other supplied weapons have played a central role in the Sri Lankan military successes against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (or "Tamil Tigers"), seeking to carve out an independent homeland for the ethnic Tamils in the island’s north and east.

Beijing even got its ally Pakistan actively involved in Sri Lanka. With Chinese encouragement, Pakistan — despite its own faltering economy and rising Islamist challenge — has boosted its annual military assistance loans to Sri Lanka to nearly $100 million while supplying Chinese-origin small arms and training Sri Lankan air force personnel in precision guided attacks.

China has become an enabler of repression in a number of developing nations as it seeks to gain access to oil and mineral resources, to market its goods and to step up investment. Still officially a communist state, its support for brutal regimes is driven by capitalist considerations. But while exploiting commercial opportunities, it also tries to make strategic inroads. Little surprise thus that China’s best friends are pariah or other states that abuse human rights.

Indeed, with its ability to provide political protection through its U.N. Security Council veto power, Beijing has signed tens of billions of dollars worth of energy and arms contracts in recent years with such problem states — from Burma and Iran to Sudan and Venezuela.

In the case of Sri Lanka, China has been particularly attracted by that country’s vantage location in the center of the Indian Ocean — a crucial international passageway for trade and oil. Hambantota — the billion-dollar port Chinese engineers are now building on Sri Lanka’s southeast — is the latest "pearl" in China’s strategy to control vital sea-lanes of communication between the Indian and Pacific Oceans by assembling a "string of pearls" in the form of listening posts, special naval arrangements and access to ports.

China indeed has aggressively moved in recent years to build ports in the Indian Ocean rim, including in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma. Besides eyeing Pakistan’s Chinese-built port-cum-naval base of Gwadar as a possible anchor for its navy, Beijing has sought naval and commercial links with the Maldives, Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar. However, none of the port-building projects it has bagged in recent years can match the strategic value of Hambantota, which sits astride the great trade arteries.

China’s generous military aid to Sri Lanka has tilted the military balance in favor of government forces, enabling them in recent months to unravel the de facto state the Tamil Tigers had run for years. After losing more than 5,594 square km of territory, the Tigers now are boxed into a 85-square-km sliver of wooded land in the northeast.

But despite the government’s battlefield triumphs, Asia’s longest civil war triggered by the bloody 1983 anti-Tamil riots is unlikely to end anytime soon. Not only is the government unable to define peace or outline a political solution to the Tamils’ long-standing cultural and political grievances, the rebels are gearing up to return to their roots and become guerrilla fighters again after being routed in the conventional war.

While unable to buy peace, Chinese aid has helped weaken and scar civil society. Emboldened by the unstinted Chinese support, the government has set in motion the militarization of society and employed control of information as an instrument of war, illustrated by the muzzling of the media and murders of several independent-minded journalists. It has been frenetically swelling the ranks of the military by one-fifth a year through large-scale recruitment, even as it establishes village-level civilian militias, especially in conflict-hit areas.

With an ever-larger, Chinese-aided war machine, the conflict is set to grind on, making civil society the main loser. That is why international diplomatic intervention has become imperative. India, with its geostrategic advantage and trade and investment clout over a war-hemorrhagic Sri Lankan economy that is in search of an international bailout package, must use its leverage deftly to promote political and ethnic reconciliation rooted in federalism and genuine interethnic equality. More broadly, the U.S., European Union, Japan and other important players need to exert leverage to stop the Rajapaksa brothers from rebuffing ceasefire calls and press Beijing to moderate its unsettling role.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.
 
The Japan Times: Wednesday, March 4, 2009
(C) All rights reserved

Establishing new militias in Afghanistan is playing with fire

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A Dangerous Plan for Afghanistan

Obama’s about to repeat a Soviet-era mistake

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY | Wall Street Journal | February 24, 2009

President Barack Obama has unveiled a troop surge in Afghanistan that will put 17,000 more American soldiers on the ground. But his plan still lacks clarity on how to save a faltering military mission.

His administration risks repeating the very mistakes that have come to haunt the security of the free world. In the same way the United States created mujahedeen (holy warriors) by funneling billions of dollars worth of arms to them in the 1980s, Washington has now embarked on a plan to establish local militias in various Afghan provinces.

Hamid Karzai

The U.S. covert war against the nine-year Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan helped create Frankensteins like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar. That war, fuelled by the CIA, contributed to the jihad culture that today plagues Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now, while trying to salvage the overt war that the U.S. has waged in Afghanistan since 2001, Mr. Obama is unwittingly seeking to repeat history.

Under this new program, designed to complement the U.S. surge, lightly trained militias will be set up in the provinces to help enforce order. According to the Afghan interior minister, America will pay for the upkeep of the militias and provide them with Kalashnikov automatic rifles as well as other arms. The militia are modeled on the U.S.-established Sunni "Awakening Councils" in Iraq, which have been credited with significantly reducing violence. The first such Afghan militia units, already being trained, are set to be rolled out shortly in Wardak province.

At the same time, Washington is unveiling a quantum jump in aid to Pakistan, tripling its nonmilitary assistance to an annual $1.5 billion and maintaining its existing munificent level of military aid, without seeking to bring the rogue Inter-Services Intelligence agency under civilian oversight. This is also a repeat of the 1980s, when the ISI was the main conduit in the covert war and the U.S. provided multibillion dollar aid packages to Pakistan while turning a blind eye to the ISI’s nuclear-smuggling and other illicit transborder activities.

There is real danger that the new Afghan militias could go out of control and threaten regional and international security. Already, according to a Government Accountability Office report, the Pentagon cannot account for 87,000 weapons handed out to Afghan security forces, and Washington admits misuse of its military aid by Pakistan. These abuses will only grow under Mr. Obama’s plan.

Mr. Obama must abandon the program to establish local Afghan militias or he risks enlarging the community of gun-toting militants and expanding the militancy-triggered Islamist ruins to Pakistan’s east and Afghanistan’s west. Instead, Mr. Obama should step up funding to train and build a larger multiethnic Afghan national army. The international goals for Afghanistan agreed on after the U.S. intervention remain pertinent: stronger secular national institutions; accelerated reconstruction and development; an elected, multiethnic government; suffrage for women; and a better economy to help reduce the drug trade.
 

Institution building holds the key to a more moderate, viable Afghanistan and Pakistan. These two countries are a tangled web of competing tribes and ethnic communities, and their ultimate stability depends on national institutions like a secular educational system and security forces that are under civilian oversight. Building such institutions is not easy in the face of mushrooming madrassas — the Islamic schools that have become jihad factories — and spreading militancy. But it is the objective that the international community must continue to focus on — a goal that has prompted India to pour $1.2 billion in development aid into Afghanistan.

Mr. Obama is right to give priority to this region and to try to rectify a war that had been undermanned and underfinanced for so long because of Iraq. But to establish militias is to seek a dangerous shortcut in a region already swarming with armed militiamen.

Genuine prior consultations with partners and friends actively engaged in Afghanistan are essential. Richard Holbrooke’s job as special representative is not merely to market decisions already made in Washington. So far, however, the signs aren’t good: Mr. Obama last week made his first presidential telephone call to Afghan President Hamid Karzai only to convey an Afghanistan-related decision he had already made — to send 17,000 more U.S. troops.

If Afghanistan is not to unravel or split into distinct sectarian parts, skillful negotiations with clan leaders are needed to beef up Afghan security forces, not to establish new provincial militias. The insurgency can be contained not by foreign forces but by an Afghan national army that is sufficiently large and adequately trained. It is only when Afghans take over the fight that the thuggish Taliban and other militias will loose ground.

The avowed mission of the U.S., NATO and other states has been nation-building. It should not degenerate into militia-building. The answer to the warlords’ power is a more capable national army, not more private armies.

Mr. 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, 2007).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123541054607849715.html

Sri Lanka’s elusive peace

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In Asia’s longest civil war, peace more elusive than ever

With the world engrossed by pressing challenges and India marginalized, Colombo has displaced large numbers of Tamils with a brutal military campaign aided by Chinese and Pakistani arms supplies and media curbs

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, February 25, 2009

Sri Lanka, the once self-trumpeted “island of paradise,” turned into the island of bloodshed more than a quarter century ago. But even by its long, gory record, the bloodletting since last year is unprecedented, with the United Nations estimating that about 40 non-combatants are now getting killed each day, or 1,200 every month. Such is the humanitarian crisis that hundreds of thousands of civilians have fled their homes or remain trapped behind the front line.

Yet, with the world preoccupied by pressing challenges and India more marginalized than ever, President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother, Defence Minister Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, a naturalized U.S. citizen, press on with a brutal military campaign with impunity. There is no real international pressure on Colombo over an offensive that bears a distinct family imprint, with another brother the president’s top adviser.

Indeed, Chinese military and financial support — as in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Zambia, North Korea, Burma and elsewhere — has directly aided government excesses and human-rights abuses in Sri Lanka. The more Beijing insists that it doesn’t mix business with politics in its foreign relations, the more evidence it provides of cynically contributing to violence and repression in internally torn states. Sri Lanka is just the latest case demonstrating China’s blindness to the consequences of its aggressive pursuit of strategic interests.

No sooner had the U.S. ended direct military aid to Sri Lanka last year over its deteriorating human-rights record than China blithely stepped in to fill the breach. It began selling larger quantities of arms, and dramatically boosted its aid fivefold in the past year to almost $1 billion to emerge as Colombo’s largest donor. Its Jian-7 fighters, anti-aircraft guns, JY-11 3D air surveillance radars and other supplied weapons have played a central role in the Sri Lankan military successes against the Tamil Tigers.

The manner India has ceded strategic space in its backyard is evident from its declining role in states that traditionally have been in its sphere of influence. Bhutan now remains its only pocket of influence. In Sri Lanka, India has allowed itself to become a marginal player despite its geostrategic advantage and trade and investment clout over a cash-strapped economy that today is in search of an international bailout, with the war costing some $2 billion annually.

 

More than two decades after it militarily intervened in Sri Lanka at Colombo’s request to disarm the Tamil Tigers, only to make an ignominious exit after losing nearly three times the number of troops it did in the subsequent Kargil war, India today has to jostle for influence in that island-nation with other players, including archrivals China and Pakistan. Hambantota — the billion-dollar port Chinese engineers are building on Sri Lanka’s southeast — is China’s latest “pearl” in its strategy to control vital sea-lanes of communication between the Indian and Pacific Oceans by assembling a “string of pearls.”

 

Pakistan, too, has become actively involved in Sri Lanka, supplying multi-barrel rocket launchers and varied small arms and training Sri Lankan air force personnel in precision guided attacks. Such attacks have been critical to the recent battlefield triumphs. Pakistan’s sharply rising annual military assistance loans to Sri Lanka now total nearly $100 million.

 

In hindsight, the 1987-1990 peacekeeping operation in Sri Lanka cost India dearly, alienating Sinhalese and Tamils alike and undermining Indian interests. The disastrous foray into the civil war of another country also instilled a hands-off approach in Indian policy toward Sri Lanka. While other powers seek to advance commercial or strategic objectives in the country they intervene in, such as to gain access to oil and mineral resources or to effect regime change or to set up a strategic base, the Rajiv Gandhi government ingenuously intervened in Sri Lanka and the Maldives for altruistic reasons — and to earn goodwill.

Today, New Delhi itself advertises its waning influence in Sri Lanka through its unwillingness to exert leverage over a looming humanitarian catastrophe and its muted voice over the plight of Tamils trapped in the fighting or held incommunicado in evacuee camps — camps the New York-based Human Rights Watch calls “internment centres masquerading as ‘welfare villages’ … where entire families detained in these military-controlled, barbed-wire camps are denied their liberty and freedom of movement.”

Spurred on by the DMK threat to withdraw support to the UPA government, Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee did visit Colombo late last month. But other than a 48-hour civilian safe-passage ploy, his discussions with President Rajapaksa yielded little to arrest a worsening situation. A barren outcome also greeted National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan when he went to Colombo last year to voice concern that growing Chinese and Pakistani arms sales and strategic involvement could make Sri Lanka a springboard for anti-India manoeuvres.

 

Narayanan’s plea that Colombo rely on the main regional power, India, for its legitimate defence requirements was laughed off. After all, it is by turning to India’s enemies for weapons and training that Colombo unravelled the de facto state run by a group originally armed by the Indira Gandhi government.

Strangely, the more Colombo plays hardball, the more New Delhi seems willing to pander to it. Echoing the Rajapaksa brothers’ line, Mukherjee told the Lok Sabha last week that after “years of conflict, there is today a political opportunity to restore life to normalcy in the Northern Province and throughout Sri Lanka.” Actually, normalcy and peace are more elusive than ever, as Colombo wages a dual struggle to wipe out the Tamil Tigers and stay solvent in the face of a sinking economy.

With foreign-currency reserves that are, according to the last official disclosure, sufficient to fund just over seven weeks of imports, Colombo has no resources to take on the onerous task of post-conflict reconstruction. In development, the minority regions of the north and east lag the Sinhalese areas by several decades. There can be no enduring peace without addressing this gap and the Tamils’ genuine grievances.

But even amid military triumphs, Colombo is unable to define peace. Indeed, it is not even making an attempt to outline a political solution to the Tamils’ long-standing cultural and political grievances.

That is why Asia’s longest civil war is unlikely to end anytime soon. The Tigers’ retransformation from a conventional force to a guerrilla force seems inevitable, even if their chief gets killed.

The Rajapaksas’ military campaign is set to produce more than a new phase of protracted guerrilla warfare. A severely weakened and scarred civil society already is emerging. While abandoning the ceasefire in 2006 and the Norwegian-brokered peace process in early 2008, the brothers set in motion the militarization of society and control of information, best illustrated by the muzzling of the media and government-orchestrated murders of several independent-minded journalists.

While the Tigers have forced every Tamil family to send at least one member into battle, the government busily has been setting up village-level militias, especially in conflict-hit areas. Besides already training and arming 45,000 mostly Sinhalese villagers, the government is frenetically swelling the ranks of the military by one-fifth a year. With some 1,630 recruits now being added every week, the rate of army “surge” will further accelerate this year.

The Rajapaksas have shown the will to wage war but not to make peace. Through their hubris and an ever-larger war machine, they actually are girding Sri Lanka to be at war indefinitely.

(c) Asian Age, 2009.

U.S. seems set to strike political deal with the thuggish Taliban

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Barack Obama’s Taliban itch

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times

How gun-toting Islamists are expanding their hold on western Pakistan has been laid bare by Islamabad’s U.S.-condoned peace agreement effectively ceding the once-pristine Swat Valley to the Taliban to set up a mini-state barely 160 km from the Pakistani capital. The deal came even as Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari warned that the Taliban wants to take over his country. The Taliban’s sway on territory on both sides of the British- drawn Durand Line shows that the Afghanistan-Pakistan ("Afpak") border no longer exists in practice.

Less obvious is the Obama administration’s interest to seek a political deal with the Taliban behind the cover of a U.S. troop "surge" in Afghanistan. Having failed to rout that Islamist militia, Washington is now preparing the ground to strike a deal with the Taliban leadership, but from a position of strength. That is why the surge has been initiated.

The very day Obama announced the surge, he acknowledged in an interview that "you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban and the spread of extremism in that region solely through military means." In that light, U.S. officials are expanding contacts with the Taliban.

The Taliban leadership — with an elaborate command-and-control structure oiled by Wahhabi petrodollars and proceeds from the $720-million opium trade — has been ensconced for long in the Quetta area of Pakistan’s southwestern Baluchistan province, which abuts the insurgency-wracked provinces of southern Afghanistan.

Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. Central Command chief, is openly looking for ways to win over local Taliban commanders. Petraeus sees higher troop levels as increasing U.S. leverage for political deals with the Taliban just as his use of the Iraq surge co-opted Sunni tribal chieftains.

His boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, has gone one step further to say Washington could accept a Swat Valley-style agreement with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Speaking at the close of a NATO meeting in Krakow, Poland, Gates recently said: "If there is reconciliation, if insurgents are willing to put down their arms, if the reconciliation is essentially on the terms being offered by the government then I think we would be very open to that."

The scourge of transnational terrorism cannot be stemmed if attempts are made to draw distinctions between good and bad terrorists, and between those who threaten their security and those who threaten ours. But, unfortunately, that is what the Obama administration is itching to do, first by drawing a specious distinction between al-Qaida and the Taliban, and then seeking to illusorily differentiate between "moderate" Taliban (the good terrorists) and those that rebuff deal-making (the bad terrorists).

Worse yet, Obama is following in his predecessor’s footsteps by taking friends and allies for granted. Several decisions — to induct 17,000 more troops, set up local Afghan militias in a country already bristling with armed militiamen, and open lines of communication with the Taliban — have been taken without prior consultations with partners, including NATO allies, Japan and India.

The decision to train and arm local militias in every Afghan province flies in the face of the commonly agreed objective that the international community must focus on institution-building to create a stable, moderate Afghanistan — a goal that has prompted India to pour massive $1.2 billion development aid into that country. When the United Nations-sponsored program to disarm and demobilize existing militias is in limbo, the U.S. move to create new militia units risks seriously undermining the secular Afghan Army and triggering more bloodletting.

Indeed, to arrest further deterioration in the Afghan war, the U.S. military needs to focus less on al-Qaida — a badly splintered and weakened organization whose leadership operates out of mountain caves — and more on a resurgent Taliban that openly challenges NATO forces and terrorizes local populations. As CIA chief Leon Panetta acknowledged in his Senate confirmation hearing, "al-Qaida today is less capable and effective than it was a year ago." Yet advocates of a Taliban deal exaggerate the threat from al-Qaida while underplaying the Taliban’s evil role.

Tellingly, unmanned U.S. drones have targeted senior figures from al-Qaida and other insurgent groups holed up in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, but not the Taliban leadership operating with impunity from Pakistan’s Baluchistan, even though most drone aircraft reportedly fly out of Baluchistan’s CIA-run Shamsi airfield.

U.S. ground commando raids from Afghanistan into Pakistan also have spared the Taliban’s command- and-control in Baluchistan. Even as the CIA’s covert war expanded this month to take on Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud — a major thorn in the side of the Pakistani military establishment — the Afghan Taliban’s Baluchistan-based core leadership has been left unscathed so that the U.S. can potentially pursue a deal with it.

The CIA still maintains cozy ties with the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which has sheltered the Taliban’s top Afghan leadership. Created by the ISI and midwifed by the CIA in 1994, the Taliban rapidly emerged as a Frankenstein’s monster. Yet the Clinton administration acquiesced in the Taliban’s ascension to power in Kabul in 1996 and turned a blind eye as that thuggish militia, in league with the ISI, fostered narco-terrorism and swelled the ranks of the Afghan war alumni waging transnational terrorism.

With 9/11, however, the chickens came home to roost. The U.S. came full circle in October 2001 when it declared war on the Taliban, which had given sanctuary to al-Qaida. Now, desperate to save a faltering military campaign, U.S. policy is edging to come another full circle, as Gates and Petraeus seek to employ the surge to strike deals with "moderate" Taliban (as if there can be moderates in an Islamist militia that enforces medieval practices).

If the U.S. were to conclude a political deal that rehabilitates the Taliban chief, the one-eyed Mullah Muhammad Omar, and his top associates, it would be a powerful vindication of the Pakistani military’s role in rearing the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba as force multipliers vis-a-vis Afghanistan and India respectively. Indeed, it would buoy up its long-running asymmetrical war against India, waged through militants like those who carried out the unparalleled Mumbai terrorist attacks recently.

The tactical gains Obama is seeking in the Afpak belt will come at strategic costs. The notion that attacks against America can be prevented not by defeating terrorism but by regionally confining it is preposterous. Terrorism cannot be boxed in hermetically in a region that already is the wellspring of global terror.

A U.S. deal with the Taliban will be a bad bet. It won’t yield a ticket out of Afghanistan for the U.S. military; rather it will reinforce Afpak’s position as the narco-terrorist beachhead.

Obama must rethink his Afpak strategy and resist the temptation to pursue narrow, short-term objectives.

Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.
 
The Japan Times: Thursday, Feb. 26, 2009
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