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

(c) Project Syndicate, 2012. Reprinting this article without written consent from Project Syndicate is a violation of international copyright law. To secure permission, please contact us.

Hindustan Times, December 13, 2012

Brahma Chellaney

The recent October 20–December 1 fiftieth anniversary of China’s invasion of India attracted a lot of Indian discussion, yet the debate shied away from drawing the broader, long-term lessons. The lessons are also relevant for China’s other neighbours because 1962 helped uncover the key elements of Beijing’s war-fighting doctrine — a doctrine it brought into play in 1969 (provoking border clashes with Soviet forces), 1974 (occupying the Paracel Islands), 1979 (invading Vietnam), 1988 (seizing Johnson Reef), and 1995 (grabbing Mischief Reef). In each of those aggressions, the major 1962 elements were replicated.

As a 2010 Pentagon report citing 1962 put it, “The history of modern Chinese warfare provides numerous case studies in which China’s leaders have claimed military pre-emption as a strategically defensive act.” In fact, a 2010 essay in the influential Qiu Shi Journal — the ideological and theoretical organ of the Chinese Communist Party’s central committee — underscored the centrality of “offense as defence” in Chinese policy by declaring that, “Throughout the history of new China, peace in China has never been gained by giving in, only through war. Safeguarding national interests is never achieved by mere negotiations, but by war.”

Unlike India — which still naïvely believes that it gained independence through non-violence, not because a world-war-debilitated Britain could no longer hold on to its colonies — “new China” was born in blood after a long civil war. And it was built on blood, with Mao Zedong and fellow revolutionaries ever ready to employ force internally and externally.

No sooner had the new China been established than it swiftly doubled its territorial size by forcibly absorbing Xinjiang and Tibet. Domestically, countless millions perished in witch-hunts, fratricidal killings and human-made disasters. In fact, Mao attacked India after his “Great Leap Forward” created the worst famine in recorded world history, with the resulting damage to his credibility, according to Chinese scholar Wang Jisi, serving as a strong incentive for him to reassert his leadership through a war.

Yet, like a rape victim being scolded for inviting the attack, India was repeatedly rapped during the anniversary debate for having brought on the Chinese aggression through “provocative” gestures and moves. When the Chinese military marched hundreds of miles south and occupied Tibet, resulting in a major Han military presence along the Himalayas for the first time in history and setting the stage for China’s furtive encroachments on Indian territory, this supposedly did not constitute sufficient grounds for India to try to guard its undefended Himalayan borders. So when India belatedly deployed some units of its then scrappy army, the action became, in Beijing’s words, a “forward policy” — a term lapped up by biddable analysts and still being bandied about.

India does not commemorate war anniversaries the way the U.S. does — with an annual ceremony honouring its fallen heroes. For example, at the exact time the Japanese began bombing Pearl Harbour 71 years earlier, commemorations were held last weekend at Pearl Harbour and memorials elsewhere, drawing thousands of Americans. India, in fact, has not built a single special memorial to honour those who were martyred in 1962 or any of the other wars it has fought. China, by contrast, has a 1962 war memorial in Tibet and its Beijing military museum exhibits depict India as the “aggressor.”

In this light, the fiftieth anniversary of what American scholar Roderick MacFarquhar has dubbed “Mao’s India War” ought to have served as a time for Indian reflection on its larger and enduring lessons. Instead, it regrettably became an occasion for some commentators to recycle myths about 1962, including that it was a “brief war.”

Actually, this was one of the longest and bloodiest of all wars India has faced since 1947. The length of a war, however, is usually irrelevant to its outcome: Israel fundamentally changed the land and water map of its region in a six-day war in 1967, while India carved out Bangladesh in a 13-day war in 1971.

The 1962 war lasted 42 days, longer than the 1965 war (38 days). Even after China unilaterally declared a ceasefire on November 21, 1962, its troops kept firing on the outgunned and outnumbered Indian troops in the east. The war really ended on December 1 when China, while holding on to its territorial gains on the Aksai Chin plateau, began withdrawing its forces from the east, simply because it did not have the logistics capability to maintain forces across the McMahon Line once snow cut off mountain passes.

The war — which ranks as the world’s highest-altitude full-blown war in post-World War II history — left 3,270 Indian troops dead, compared with over 1,100 military men killed in the 1947-48 war; 3,264 in 1965; 3,843 in 1971; 1,157 in Operation Pawan in Sri Lanka; and 522 in Kargil. Yet a couple of analysts at a Mumbai seminar last week had the temerity to call 1962 a “skirmish.”

By baring key elements of Beijing’s strategic doctrine, 1962 indeed holds lasting lessons for India and other countries locked in territorial disputes with China. Here are just some of the 1962 principles China replicated in its subsequent aggressions:

• take the adversary by surprise to maximize political and psychological shock.
• strike only when the international and regional timing is opportune.
• hit as fast and as hard as possible by unleashing “human wave” assaults.
• be willing to take military gambles.
• mask offense as defence.
• wage war with the political objective to “teach a lesson” — an aim publicly acknowledged in the 1962 and 1979 invasions.

New China hews to ancient theorist Sun Tzu’s advice: “All warfare is based on deception … Attack where the enemy is unprepared; sally out when it does not expect you. These are the strategist’s keys to victory.”

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research.

(c) Hindustan Times, 2012.

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Japan Times, November 30, 2012

At a time when China’s economy and society are under considerable strain and the country is embroiled in increasingly tense border disputes with its neighbors, the relatively peaceful once-in-a-decade political transition in Beijing has helped deflect attention from the underlying turbulence in the Chinese system. The fact is that China is at a turning point, and the next decade under the new leadership of Xi Jinping is likely to decisively shape the country’s trajectory.

Power transition rarely has occurred without bloodshed and chaos in Chinese history. From the first Shang dynasty, political change is usually violent, with force also being employed to retain power. Chinese analyst Xiao Han has called this the “ax gang” tradition — the ax has been the symbol of power since ancient times. In modern times, as Mao Zedong once famously said, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

The People’s Republic of China — born in blood in 1949 — has pursued endless domestic witch hunts and political purges. Mao and Deng Xiaoping between them got rid of at least five anointed successors who were discarded abruptly, or died mysteriously or under detention.

The first leadership transition without turmoil or bloodshed was in 2002, when Jiang Zemin stepped down in favor of Hu Jintao. This year, Mr. Xi’s ascension was preceded by a vicious power struggle that led to the ouster and disappearance of a rising star, Bo Xilai, and the swift conviction of his wife for the murder of a British national in what probably ranks as the mother of all orchestrated trials.

Power in China today may not flow from the barrel of a gun to the extent it did under Mao — who was responsible for the deaths of countless millions — but it is significant that Mr. Xi has risen to the top with close military ties and support. In fact, what sets Mr. Xi apart from China’s other civilian leaders is his strong relationship with the military, which regards him as its own man.

As Mr. Xi rose through the Communist Party ranks, he forged close ties with the military as a reservist, assuming leadership of a provincial garrison and serving as a senior aide to the defense minister. His wife, Peng Liyuan, is also linked to the military, having served as a civilian member of the army’s musicale troupe.

The real winner from the appointment of the conservative-dominated, seven-member Politburo Standing Committee is the military, whose rising clout in policy already has created an increasingly assertive China. The party has ceased to be a rigid monolith obedient to a single leader. Instead, it has become dependent on the military for its political legitimacy and to ensure domestic order. With rural protests increasing officially by more than 10 percent a year, and separatist unrest growing in the sprawling Tibetan plateau, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, China is now the only important country whose annual internal security budget surpasses its national defense spending.

The rise of a new dynasty of “princelings,” or sons of revolutionary heroes who have widespread contacts in the military, is another indicator that nationalism and militarism likely will strengthen in China. The princelings such as Mr. Xi, numbering in the hundreds, dominate the new Standing Committee and play a key role in the government and economy, in spite of their internecine power squabbles.

An examination of the new members of the 205-member Central Committee, the 25-member Politburo and the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee shows that political patronage and family connections were critical factors in their selection.

Indeed, the new leadership lineup is pretty much what the foreign media reported beforehand, suggesting that despite a secretive selection process, some party bosses had an interest in leaking out the information in advance of the official announcement.

Another striking feature is the dominance of ethnic Han men in the party’s upper levels in a country that claims to represent 56 nationalities and trumpets gender equality. Although the restive ethnic-minority homelands make up more than 60 percent of China’s landmass, there is not even one token minority representative in the Politburo.

These developments have important internal and external implications. Internally, with several reformers losing out to old conservatives in the power struggle for top positions, prospects for major reforms look bleak.

The factional infighting, recently witnessed for the slots in the party’s upper echelons, is even more intense at the provincial level, making bold policymaking difficult despite greater social instability and slower economic growth. The messy politics is an important driver of the flight of capital and professionals from China.

Since the Deng era, China has dumped the Marxist half of Marxism-Leninism but retained the Leninist part. Dictatorship is one thing that is not open to reform. China’s corrupt, faction-ridden political culture and bloody history, in any event, are conducive not to political reform but to political revolution.

China’s internal politics has an important bearing on its external policy. Stepped-up internal repression and aggressive external moves to change the territorial status quo in China’s favor are two sides of the same coin.

The stronger the military has become at the expense of the civilian leadership (every Chinese leader since Mao has been weaker than his predecessor), the more muscular Beijing’s approach has been toward its neighbors. Recent revelations about how some senior civilian leaders have amassed vast wealth even as their privileged children remain unbound by law or consequences only help to accentuate the party’s legitimacy problem.

China’s future is likely to be determined not by its hugely successful economy, which has turned the country into a global player in just one generation, but by its murky politics and the growing sway of the People’s Liberation Army. The leadership transition, far from cleaning up or stabilizing China’s politics, may actually allow the military to increasingly call the shots. We may see more military generals speak out of turn on strategic issues. The plain fact is that the foreign ministry is the weakest branch of the Chinese government because it is often overruled or simply ignored by the military and security establishments.

In this light, China’s neighbors and the U.S. military would be wise to brace themselves to face a less restrained China championing ever-expanding “core interests.”

Brahma Chellaney is the author of Asian Juggernaut (Harper, 2010) and Water: Asia’s New Battlefield (Georgetown University Press, 2011), which won the 2012 Bernard Schwartz Award.

(c) Japan Times, 2012.

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times, November 14, 2012

At a time when Asia’s power dynamics remain fluid, with new military capabilities and resurgent border disputes challenging regional stability, U.S. President Barack Obama and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are embarking on separate Asian tours that culminate with their participation in the East Asia Summit meeting in Phnom Penh. Singh’s Tokyo visit seeks to cement a rapidly growing relationship between Japan and India — two natural allies — while Obama’s historic visit to Myanmar promises to aid India’s “Look East” policy by marking a formal end to a 24-year U.S. policy of punitively isolating a country that is the Indian gateway to Southeast Asia.

By undertaking an Asian tour shortly after his re-election, Obama has signaled that Asia will move up in importance in his second-term agenda. His previously announced “pivot” toward Asia actually chimes with India’s “Look East” policy, which has graduated to an “Act East” policy, with the original economic logic of “Look East” giving way to a geopolitical logic.

The thrust of the new “Act East” policy — unveiled with the United States’ blessings — is to contribute to building a stable balance of power in Asia by re-establishing India’s historically close ties with countries to its east. India, in fact, has little choice but to look east because when it looks west, it sees only trouble. The entire belt to India’s west from Pakistan to Syria is a contiguous arc of instability, volatility and extremism. A “Look East” policy allows India to join the economic dynamism that characterizes Southeast and East Asia.

It is in the east again that Indian and U.S. interests now converge significantly. The fundamental shift in the U.S. policy on Myanmar eliminates an important constraint on India’s closer engagement with continental Southeast Asia.

India’s new strategic ties with countries as varied as Japan, Australia, Indonesia, South Korea and Vietnam are important moves on the grand Asian chessboard to increase its geopolitical leeway. The U.S., for its part, has strengthened and expanded its security arrangements in Asia in recent years by making the most of the growing regional concerns over China’s increasingly muscular approach on territorial and maritime disputes.

Both the U.S. and India have deepened their ties with Japan, which has a $5.5 trillion economy, impressive high-technology skills and Asia’s largest naval fleet. The first serious Japan-India naval exercise was held five months ago involving a search-and-rescue operation.

India and Japan, despite their messy domestic politics and endemic scandals, actually boast the fastest-growing bilateral relationship in Asia today. Since they unveiled a “strategic and global partnership” in 2006, their engagement has grown dramatically. A free-trade agreement between the two countries entered into force last year. Their 2008 security declaration was modeled on Japan’s 2007 defense-cooperation accord with Australia — the only other country with which Japan, a U.S. military ally, has a security-cooperation arrangement. The India-Japan security declaration, in turn, spawned a similar India-Australia accord in 2009.

Singh’s Tokyo visit will likely set the stage for building closer bilateral security cooperation in the wider Indo-Pacific region, marked by the confluence of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. At a time when India is reflecting on the lessons of its rout by the invading Chinese forces 50 years ago — the only foreign war communist China has won — Japan has been concerned by a new war of attrition China has launched by sending patrol ships daily to the waters around the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands group that Beijing claims.

This physical assertiveness, which coincidentally began around the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Chinese military attack on India, followed often violent anti-Japanese protests in China in September and a continuing informal boycott of Japanese goods that has led to a sharp fall in Japan’s exports.

India and Japan are set to sign a formal agreement for the joint development of rare-earth minerals in India. This will be the latest of several such international agreements since China used its monopoly on rare-earths production to cut off such exports to Japan and restrict sales to Western countries in 2010, prompting the U.S., the European Union and Japan to file a World Trade Organization complaint alleging that Beijing was using that monopoly as a weapon. Thanks to the various new agreements, production of these critical minerals is expanding at plants outside China, undercutting the Chinese monopoly.

At a time when Asia is troubled by growing security challenges, trilateral U.S.-India-Japan security consultations and cooperation are also taking place. These three democratic powers recently held their third round of security consultations in New Delhi, after similar meetings earlier in Washington and Tokyo.

These consultations are just one sign of their shift from emphasizing shared values to seeking to trilaterally protect shared interests. Their trilateral cooperation could lead to trilateral coordination, with a potentially positive impact on Asian security and stability.

The U.S. has conducted more joint defense exercises with India than with any other country. Japan has twice joined the annual U.S.-India Malabar naval exercises, and may do so again next year. U.S. defense sales to India, meanwhile, are booming, with America emerging as the largest arms seller to India. But now Japan could bag its first defense contract with India: In response to the Indian Navy’s global request for information for nine amphibious search-and-rescue aircraft, Japan has offered to sell its ShinMaywa US-2, which can land on and take off from water.

More broadly, the nascent trilateral security cooperation may signal moves to form an entente among the three leading democracies of the Asia-Pacific, along the lines of the pre-World War I Franco-British-Russian “Triple Entente,” which was designed to meet the challenge posed by the rise of an increasingly assertive Germany. The present steps, however, are still tentative, and meaningful trilateral security collaboration can emerge only in response to important shifts in the U.S., Japanese and Indian strategic policies, including a readiness to build trilateral military interoperability.

Such an entente’s geopolitical utility, however, is likely to transcend its military value. A geopolitical entente, for example, can help strengthen maritime security in the Indo-Pacific region — the world’s leading trade and energy seaway — and contribute to building a stable Asian power equilibrium.

A fast-rising Asia has become the defining fulcrum of global geopolitical change. Asian policies and challenges now help to shape the international security and economic environment. Yet Asia, paradoxically, is bearing the greatest impact of such shifts, as underscored by the resurgence of Cold War-era territorial and maritime disputes.

A constellation of powers linked by interlocking bilateral, trilateral, and possibly even quadrilateral strategic cooperation has thus become critical to help institute power stability in Asia and to ensure a peaceful maritime domain, including unimpeded freedom of navigation.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of Water: Asia’s New Battlefield (Georgetown University Press, 2011), which won the 2012 Bernard Schwartz Award.

The Japan Times: Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2012. (C) All rights reserved

Brahma Chellaney

Survival | vol. 54 no. 2 | April–May 2012 | pp. 143–156, DOI: 10.1080/00396338.2012.672806

Of all the natural resources on which the modern world depends, water is the most critical. There are replacements for oil, but there is no substitute for water. It is essential to produce virtually all the goods in the marketplace, from food to industrial products, as well as to produce electricity, to refine oil and gas, and to mine coal and uranium. Put simply, water scarcity and rapid economic advance cannot go hand in hand.[1] Yet water scarcity now affects more than two-fifths of the people on Earth, and by 2025 two-thirds of the global population is likely to be living in water-scarce or water-stressed conditions.[2] Water-scarce nations face very tough choices and serious socioeconomic consequences. And the majority of the world’s people living in water-related despair will be in Asia.

Water has emerged as a key issue that will determine if Asia heads toward greater cooperation or greater competition. Asia is the world’s driest continent, with availability of freshwater less than half the global annual average of 6,380 m³ per inhabitant. Asia’s rivers, lakes and aquifers give it, per capita, less than one-tenth the water of South America or Australia and New Zealand, less than one-fourth of North America, almost one-third of Europe, and moderately less than Africa.[3] Yet the world’s fastest-growing demand for water is in Asia, which now serves as the locomotive of the world economy. Today, the most dynamic Asian economies, including China, India, Indonesia, South Korea and Vietnam, are all in or close to being in conditions of water stress. The exceptions are few: Bhutan, Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea.

Yet Asia continues to draw on tomorrow’s water to meet today’s needs.[4] Worse still, Asia has one of the lowest levels of water efficiency and productivity in the world. Against this background, it is no exaggeration to say that the water crisis threatens Asia’s economic and political rise and its environmental sustainability. For investors, it carries risks as potentially damaging as non-performing loans, real-estate bubbles, infrastructure overbuilding and political corruption. The water crisis means that the cost of doing business in Asia is set to rise. Water has also emerged as a source of increasing competition and discord within and between nations, spurring new tensions over shared basin resources and local resistance to governmental or corporate decisions to set up water-intensive industries.

Asia’s water challenges

In the face of rising populations, rapid growth of the middle class, expanding irrigation and water-intensive industries, and spiralling household consumption, per capita water availability in Asia is actually declining by 1.6% per year. The decline is greater across central, southern, southwestern and western Asia as well as in semi-arid northern China. In areas where water availability has traditionally been very low, such as the Near East and the Arabian Peninsula, even small declines or annual variation in precipitation can exacerbate the vulnerabilities of entire communities by creating drought-like conditions. The spreading water stress in Asia has direct consequences for economic and human development as well as environmental protection.

With aquifers being drained to dangerously low levels, a number of cities in Asia that rely on groundwater, such as Yemen’s capital Sana’a and Quetta in Pakistan, face the spectre of running out. Beijing increasingly depends on water brought in from elsewhere. In an ever-deeper search for water, millions of pump-operated wells threaten to suck Asia’s subterranean reserves dry, even as the continent confronts river depletion. Asian economies can import fossils fuels, mineral ores and timber from distant lands, but they must make do with their own water resources.

Pressure on national water resources is said to be high when water withdrawal exceeds 25% of total renewable water resources. This ratio is 34% for India and 26% for South Korea. China’s 18.57% may be relatively decent, but the country remains chronically unable to meet its water needs in the north, where almost half its population lives and where rivers are dying. In contrast, Japan, at 21.26% is doing a better job than China in managing its water resources by maintaining water quality.[5]

The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) captured the Asian crisis through its 2009 Index of Water Available for Development, a measure of per capita water availability for human, economic and ecological uses per year on the basis of each country’s internal renewable water resources minus total water used. This index reveals that there have been steep declines in water availability for development since the baseline year of 1980 in a number of Asian nations, including the two giants, China and India, that make up nearly two-fifths of the global population.[6] The water situation in India looks particularly ominous. The report warned that ‘water shortfalls on this scale heighten competition for a precious resource and frequently lead to conflicts, which are emerging as new threats to social stability’.[7]

Although Asia’s overall population growth has slowed, an important factor driving the water crisis is growth in consumption due to rising prosperity. This is best illustrated by changes in diet, especially a greater intake of meat, whose production is notoriously water intensive. In China, for example, meat consumption rose fourfold between 1980 and 2010, with its beef sector growing from almost nothing to become the third largest in the world. By 2030, Chinese meat consumption is projected to double further. This shift from traditional rice and noodles to a meatier diet has already fuelled a doubling of China’s water footprint for food production since 1985: it takes ten times more water to raise a kilo of beef than grow a kilo of rice or wheat.[8]

Once plagued by serious food shortages and recurrent famines, Asia opened the door to its dramatic economic rise by emerging as a net food exporter on the back of an unparalleled expansion of irrigation: total irrigated cropland in Asia doubled between 1960 and 2000. It is notable that few advanced industrial countries depend on other countries to feed their populations; many of them, on the contrary, are important food exporters.

This may explain why Asian nations have attached great strategic importance to food security, often equating that goal, rather imprudently, with food sovereignty. Yet the extension of agriculture to semi-arid and arid areas in Asia has necessitated intensive irrigation, which, in turn, has created serious waterlogging and soil-salinity problems and undercut crop-yield growth. Even in Asia’s fertile valleys drained by major river systems, irrigation is usually necessary in the dry season; much of the continent’s rainfall is concentrated in a three- or four-month monsoon period. By contrast, Europe, with its temperate climate and long rainy periods, is able to produce most of its food through rain-fed crops. In fact, such is the widespread prevalence of rain-fed agriculture among rich nations that industry, not agriculture, is their leading water consumer, except in Australia and New Zealand.

Asia now boasts the lion’s share, about 70%, of the world’s irrigated land. Three sub-regions — South Asia, China and Southeast Asia — by themselves account for about 50% of the global total. It is thus hardly a surprise that Asia leads the world in the total volume of freshwater withdrawn for agriculture. Indeed, almost 74% of the total global freshwater withdrawals for agriculture by volume are made in Asia.[9] As a proportion of its own renewable water resources, Asia’s yearly agricultural water withdrawals aggregate to 81%, or at least 10 percentage points higher than the global average. By contrast, that figure is just 29% in Europe and 38% in North America. Water withdrawals for industrial purposes account for a mere 11.4% in Asia; and for household needs the figure is 7.3%.

Yet the growth of rice and wheat output in Asia, after the dramatic increases of the previous quarter century, has slowed since the late 1990s, raising concerns that Asian countries such as China and India that are largely self-sufficient in food will become major food importers, disturbing the international market, which is not large enough to meet such demands. With population, consumption and developmental pressures growing and increases in yield gains flattening, Asia needs a second green revolution, for which water will be the single biggest constraint.

The fastest increase in water demand in Asia, however, is coming not from agriculture but from the industrial sector and urban households. The United Nations projects that industrial water withdrawals in the world will double between 2000 and 2025, with much of the increase likely to occur in the Asia-Pacific region, ‘given its rapidly rising status as a global industrial production centre and the fast growth in subsectors with high water consumption, such as the production of transportation equipment, beverages and textiles’.[10] The fastest rise is projected for India, whose economy is currently led by the services sector but where industrial water use is expected to almost quadruple by 2050 as manufacturing rapidly expands. But water shortages are already impeding this rapid industrial expansion in Asia; water scarcity is, for example, causing billions of dollars’ worth of annual losses in industrial output in China.[11]

A final factor underlying water stress in Asia is the long-term environmental impact of large-scale sequestration of water resources through dams, barrages, reservoirs and other structures. Dams do bring important benefits: if appropriately designed and scaled, they aid economic and social development by regulating water supply, controlling floods, facilitating irrigation, generating hydroelectricity and bringing drinking water to cities. But they can affect water quality and quantity downstream, alter fluvial ecosystems, damage biodiversity and promote coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion.

Large dams have caused sedimentation, inundation, habitat damage, destruction of fish species, and other environmental and public-health problems in Asia. Equally significant is the fact that heavy damming upsets a river’s natural tropical flooding cycle, which is critical to fisheries and the re-fertilization of soil. The Aral Sea in Central Asia has shrunk by more than half owing to the over-damming of its sources, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, and the heavy extraction of their waters for irrigation.

The vast majority of dams in the world have been built since the 1950s. The construction of large dams has, by and large, petered out in the West but continues in full swing in Asia, where a host of countries from Japan to Turkey are involved in major dam-building activities. Over the next decade, the number of dams in developed countries is likely to remain about the same, while much of the dam building in the developing world (in terms of aggregate storage-capacity build-up) will be concentrated in China, which already has slightly more than half of the approximately 50,000 large dams on the planet.[12] But most of the best dam sites in Asia are already in use.

New dam construction to boost water supply may no longer be a viable option other than in underdeveloped countries such as Laos, Myanmar and Nepal that have not adequately exploited their water resources or in autocracies that can effectively stifle grassroots opposition. Yet the numerous new projects in Asia show that the damming of rivers is still an important priority for national and provincial decision-makers.

This focus on dam building has intensified water disputes and tensions in Asia, with implications for regional security and stability. These disputes are bound to worsen, given China’s new focus on erecting mega-dams on international rivers, exemplified by its latest addition on the Mekong River (the 4,200MW Xiaowan Dam, which dwarfs Paris’s Eiffel Tower in height) and a 38,000MW dam planned on the Brahmaputra at Metog, close to the disputed border with India. The Metog Dam will be twice as large as the 18,300MW Three Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest, construction of which officially uprooted at least 1.7 million Chinese. Turkey, too, is building big dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

The countries likely to bear the brunt of such massive diversion of waters are those located farthest downstream on rivers such as the Brahmaputra, Mekong and Tigris–Euphrates: Bangladesh, whose very future is threatened by climate and environmental change; Vietnam, a rice bowl of Asia; and Iraq, still internally torn. China’s water appropriations from the Illy River threaten to turn Kazakhstan’s Lake Balkhash into another Aral Sea.

Continued dam building in a number of Asian nations is also creating new intra-state tensions and challenges. Degraded watersheds constitute one of the most serious problems for sustainable development in Asia. Dams are also having other impacts, including changing river hydrology, sediment load, riparian vegetation, patterns of stream-bank erosion, migration of fish, and water temperature.

Rising security risks

With increasingly fierce intra- and inter-state water competition, the risk of water conflict is higher in Asia than elsewhere in the world. Water is a new arena in the Asian Great Game. In fact, political, diplomatic or economic ‘water wars’ are already being waged between riparian neighbours in several parts of Asia, fuelling a cycle of bitter recrimination and fostering mistrust that impedes broader regional cooperation and integration. The resources of transnational rivers, aquifers and lakes have become targets of rival appropriation plans. Securing larger portions of shared resources has become a flashpoint in inter-country relationships; there is no incentive to conserve or protect supplies for users beyond national borders, unless there are specific water-sharing arrangements in place.

With a particular river or groundwater basin often tied into a country’s identity and self-image, ownership and control over such resources can be perceived as crucial to national interest. This has helped give rise to grand but environmentally questionable ideas: China’s Great Western Route to divert river waters from the Tibetan Plateau to its parched north; South Korea’s politically divisive Four Rivers Project; India’s proposal to link up its important rivers; and Jordan’s plan to save the shrinking Dead Sea by bringing water from the Red Sea through a 178-kilometre-long canal (which is also to serve as a source for desalinated drinking water). India’s river-linking plan was conceived by a poet prime minister, which may explain why it never took off and was abandoned by the current government. In contrast, the Great Western Route plan was conceived by the engineers who dominate China’s top political leadership.

Asia’s water map fundamentally changed after the 1949 Communist victory in China. Most of the continent’s important international rivers originate in territories that the People’s Republic of China either forcibly annexed or reasserted Chinese control over. The annexed Tibetan Plateau, for example, is the world’s largest freshwater repository and the source of Asia’s greatest rivers, including those that are the lifeblood of mainland China and South and Southeast Asia. Other such Chinese territories contain the headwaters of rivers such as the Irtysh, Illy and Amur, which flow to Russia and Central Asia.

This makes China the source of cross-border water flows to more countries than any other upstream power in the world. Beijing now controls the headwaters of more than a dozen important international river basins. Yet China rejects the notion of water sharing or institutionalized cooperation with downstream countries. Whereas riparian neighbours in Southeast and South Asia are bound by water pacts that they have negotiated between themselves, China does not have a single water treaty with any coriparian country.

For example, it is a dialogue partner but not a member of the Mekong River Commission, suggesting a desire to listen to discussions among other basin states without agreeing to abide by the commission’s rules or taking on legal obligations by becoming a party to the 1995 Mekong Treaty. Moreover, while promoting multilateralism on the world stage, China has given the cold shoulder to multilateral cooperation among river-basin states. The lower Mekong countries view China’s strategy as an attempt to divide and conquer. It is hardly a surprise, then, that China is at the centre of much of the current water-related tension in Asia.

Although China publicly favours bilateral initiatives over multilateral institutions in addressing water issues, it has not shown any real enthusiasm for meaningful bilateral action. As a result, water has become a new political issue in the country’s relations with neighbours such as India, Kazakhstan, Nepal and Russia. China deflects attention from its refusal to share water, or to enter into institutionalized cooperation to manage common rivers sustainably, by promoting the accords it has signed on sharing flow statistics with riparian neighbours. These are not agreements to cooperate on shared resources, but rather commercial accords to sell hydrological data that other upstream countries provide free to downriver states.

Beyond China, there are water tensions between India and Pakistan, among the Central Asian nations, between Turkey and its downriver neighbours, and between Israel and the Palestinians. But given China’s unique riparian position and role, it will not be possible to transform Asian water competition into cooperation without its active participation.

Internal water disputes are also rife across the continent. The lopsided availability of water within some Asian nations (abundant in some areas but deficient in others) has given rise to plans for mega-dam projects or grand diversion structures, which have run into stiff grassroots opposition over issues of population displacement and submergence of land. To compound matters, governmental or commercial decisions on where to set up new manufacturing or energy plants are increasingly being influenced by local availability of adequate water resources.

Where availability is already low, a decision to establish a new plant often triggers local protests because it is likely to spur greater competition over scarce water resources. It has become virtually impossible to site nuclear power plants along freshwater bodies in water-scarce Asia, the centre of the so-called global nuclear renaissance. These water-guzzling plants must instead be built on coastlines where they can rely on seawater for their operations. Yet, Fukushima has served as a warning of the vulnerability of coastal nuclear facilities to extreme events, which are likely to become more common as the climate changes.

Water conflict within nations, especially those that are multi-ethnic and culturally diverse, often assumes ethnic or sectarian dimensions, accentuating internal security challenges. Such intrastate water disputes rarely get the kind of international attention that interstate discords do, but as the internal conflicts in Yemen and Afghanistan show, recurrent drought and water scarcity can poison inter-ethnic or inter-sectarian relations and trigger bloodletting. Endemic local conflicts over water in some drought-ridden areas in Asia have even led villagers to engage security guards to protect their sources of freshwater, such as wells or water trucks. Asia’s experiences over the past quarter century show that internal water conflicts tend to be more damaging and violent than disputes between countries.

Containing the risks

To underpin strategic stability, protect continued economic growth, promote environmental sustainability and prevent the struggle for water resources from tipping into overt conflict, Asian states must invest more in institutionalized cooperation on transboundary basin resources. Water has emerged as a test case of Asia’s ability to build cooperation rather than competition over a critical resource.

National dependency on waters from transnational rivers or aquifers is widespread across Asia. China is an exception: with less than 1% of its water resources dependent on cross-border inflow (one of the lowest rates in the world) it is happily placed. There are at least 57 transnational river basins in Asia, and most lack any kind of cooperative institution. The exact number of transnational groundwater basins is unknown as no scientific assessment has been undertaken.

Yet some of the shared aquifer systems have already become targets of rival appropriation plans and political tensions, for example al-Disi, which straddles the Saudi Arabian–Jordanian border. The existence of inter-country water agreements can be deceptive: most such accords in Asia relate to more mundane issues than sharing waters or sustainably managing transboundary basin resources. Commercial contracts, joint research or flood-control projects, use of river islands, hydropower development, and non-binding memoranda of understanding masquerade as water agreements.

In fact, only four of the transnational river basins in Asia are subject to treaties covering water sharing or other institutionalized cooperation. These are the Mekong (where the non-participation of China, the dominant upper riparian nation, has stunted development of a genuine basin community), the Ganges (between Bangladesh and India), the Indus (between India and Pakistan, with the greatest guaranteed cross-border flows of any treaty regime in the world) and the Jordan (a four-nation basin whose resources are the subject of a treaty arrangement restricted to Israel and Jordan).

The only treaties that incorporate a sharing formula on cross-border river flows are those covering the Indus and Ganges. But even these are far from perfect and often rife with dispute, especially in the Indus basin. They nevertheless serve useful purposes. In fact, all four Asian treaties demonstrate that inter-country basin arrangements can be concluded even among rival states and that such arrangements can survive political tensions and conflicts.

One imperative is to build Asian norms over shared transnational basin resources, using as a guide the codification of the principles of customary water law by the United Nations Convention on the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses, even though this 1997 convention’s entry into force still seems distant. The only real way to avert or manage water disputes in Asia is to build basin arrangements involving all riparian neighbours. If a dominant riparian state refuses to join, such institutional arrangements will be ineffective. The arrangements must be centred on transparency, information sharing, equitable distribution of benefits, dispute settlement, pollution control, joint projects and a mutual commitment to refrain from any projects that would materially diminish transboundary flows.

Water institutions, by facilitating constructive dialogue and structured cooperation, help stem the risk that disputes over water sharing or water quality could escalate to open conflict. Building such regimes is never easy, given the complex physical, geopolitical and economic factors at play, including mismatched levels of economic development and the unilateral harnessing of shared waters by one or more coriparian states. Their legal, institutional and consultative mechanisms are designed not only to forestall interstate competition and conflict, but also to ensure that national water policies serve as a catalyst for social progress and economic growth through a stake in the integrated management of basin resources. Such cooperative arrangements can actually help improve water quality and availability.

Asia has little choice but to improve its water efficiency and productivity levels. Improvements in efficiency of water use in agriculture, energy and industry have stagnated at 1% or less per year for two decades.[13] Greater investment is also needed to upgrade and maintain the water-supply infrastructure; losses from leaks amount to up to 29 billion m³ of treated water a year, valued conservatively at $9 billion.[14]

Asia’s water crisis is opening opportunities for investment and technological innovation in two main areas. One is securing higher water efficiency and productivity gains, including through micro-irrigation systems and industrial water-use efficiency. The other area is clean-water technologies, including wastewater treatment and recycling, desalination, and cleaning up contaminated or brackish water. These technologies hold the key to containing Asia’s mounting water challenges.

Given Asia’s exceptionally high water withdrawals for farming, savings will need to come primarily from water conservation and efficiency in agriculture so that more waters can be channelled to industries and cities. Asian states have little choice but to upgrade their old irrigation systems and promote drip-feed irrigation, which is yet to be widely adopted. This technology, which directs water flow straight to the root zone of plants, can help slash agricultural water consumption by 50–70% compared to gravity irrigation, and by 10–20% compared to sprinkler irrigation. Agricultural water productivity can also be increased through development of new grain varieties that are more tolerant of drought and flooding.

The Asian experience shows that the more populous a sub-region, a nation, or an area within a country, the greater are its water challenges, with water stress often being accompanied by a fall in water quality. But when water quality is maintained, the scarcity of water can be better managed. For example, Japan and South Korea have low per capita availability of freshwater compared with the global average, yet their good water quality overall better positions them to meet their national needs.

In cases where water quality and productivity have both appreciably increased, conditions of water stress tend to perceptibly lessen. South Korea’s per capita water availability is close to Pakistan’s, but it has done a much better job of building water quality and improving productivity. As a result, South Korea, while prone to the ravages of drought, does not face the serious crisis situation haunting Pakistan. There is, in fact, much scope to increase water quality and productivity in many Asian countries, including those with already high efficiency and quality standards, such as South Korea, Japan and Singapore.

Even if energy- and cost-efficient clean-water technologies become available, the cost of water is set to rise sharply in Asia, especially for businesses. Solar-powered desalination and wastewater recycling will help improve the situation, but the cost of supply is still bound to escalate because of additional infrastructure and maintenance needs. Desalination and wastewater-treatment technologies remain expensive as well as energy- and greenhouse-gas intensive.

* * *

Despite its rich history, ancient cultures and an ongoing economic renaissance, Asia is the only continent other than Africa where regional integration has yet to take hold. In fact, Asia’s political and cultural diversity has acted as a barrier to collaboration and integration. Consequently, Asia lacks institutions to avert or manage conflict, even as greater prosperity and rising nationalism are stoking territorial and resource disputes. Yet given that water now is a key factor in instigating global geopolitical change, the continent needs to be better integrated, with institutionalized collaboration on shared resources. Asia needs a new strategic approach to water centred on conservation, efficiency and productivity gains, and, more broadly, integrated resource management involving all states sharing a particular basin. The rivalries over water will test Asia’s ability to manage its resource problems.

Brahma Chellaney

Mohamed Nasheed who was ousted at gunpoint as president of the Maldives

From the virtual coup d’état that deposed Maldives’ first democratically elected president to the undermining of an elected but toothless government in Pakistan by its Supreme Court, South Asia is witnessing a backsliding on democratic advances, just as the democratic awakening triggered by the “Arab Spring” movements has brought not democratic empowerment but more human-rights abuses in much of the Arab world.

The recent abortive coup attempt in Bangladesh has served as a warning that the world’s seventh most-populous country — while struggling to remain a democracy — is vulnerable to renewed army intervention. In its four-decade-long history, Bangladesh has experienced 23 coup attempts — some successful.

The forced resignation at gunpoint of its president, Mohamed Nasheed, a week ago has made the Maldives the third country in the region after Nepal and Sri Lanka where a democratic transition has gone wrong. The Maldives now seems in for prolonged instability.

A fourth country, Pakistan, has yet to begin a genuine democratic transition because the army chief remains its effective ruler. How can democratization begin if Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence stay outside civilian oversight and decisive power remains with military generals?

To make matters worse, Pakistan’s Supreme Court seems to be playing the army’s game in moving to ease the prime minister out of office. A constitutional coup, instead of a military coup, will be a win-win situation for the army and ISI, allowing them to rule from behind the curtain through a more-pliable government, on which all the blame can be pinned for the violence and economic mess.

Sri Lanka’s human-rights situation under President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s quasi-dictatorship continues to evoke international concern. Reversing the militarization of society, ending the control of information as an instrument of state policy, and promoting political and ethnic reconciliation remain daunting tasks in Sri Lanka.

The end of the 26-year civil war actually has emboldened Rajapaksa to step up attempts to fashion a mono-ethnic identity for a multiethnic Sri Lanka. This has important strategic implications for India in terms of the plight of Tamil civilians, refugee flows, and the potential for renewed civil strife.

In Nepal — a strategic buffer between India and restive Tibet, where China says it is launching a “war against secessionist sabotage” — the political disarray persists, with parties continuing to bicker over a new constitution. Nepal remains in danger of becoming a failed state, a development that will have major implications for India’s security.

More broadly, the political developments in the region underscore that regular elections, as in Pakistan or Sri Lanka, are no measure of progress on democratic transition. Genuine democratic empowerment at the grassroots demands more than the holding of elections.

The backsliding on democratization leaves India as the sole country in the region with a deeply rooted democracy and pluralism. But it also seriously weakens India’s interests.

India’s neighbourhood remains so chronically troubled that it confronts what can be called a tyranny of geography. As a result, India faces serious external threats from virtually all directions.

To some extent, this tyranny of a combustible neighbourhood is self-inflicted. If India faces security concerns over Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka or even Pakistan, it is because of failures of past policy. And the rollback of democracy in South Asia only exposes India’s lack of clout to influence political developments in its backyard.

Today, the political chaos and uncertainty in the neighbourhood heighten the danger of spillover effects for India. It is no accident that India’s internal security is coming under growing pressure. An increasingly unstable neighbourhood also makes it more difficult to promote institutionized cooperation and integration in the region, including free trade.

Institutions are products — not drivers — of the political environment. In any continent, institutions have flourished only if there is political and economic compatibility between their member-states. When member-states have conflicting political and economic systems, the institutions have stunted. Divergent political systems are a major reason why Asia has failed to build real institutions. In South Asia, the underdeveloped SAARC, as a retarded institution, is more a hindrance than a help to regional cooperation. If all South Asian states became real democracies, the present barriers to open trade would erode.

More fundamentally, the rise of Islamist groups in several South Asian countries poses a direct challenge to Indian security. In 2001, the Taliban destroyed the monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. And on the day Nasheed was ousted, Islamists ransacked Maldives’ main museum in Male, the capital, and smashed priceless Buddhist statues. By destroying the 12th-century artefacts made of coral stone and limestone, they erased virtually all evidence of Maldives’ pre-Islamic past.

Encouraged by opposition politicians, Islamist groups in the Maldives are “getting more powerful,” according to Nasheed. And in Pakistan and Bangladesh, the military intelligence agency has nurtured jihadist groups, employing them for political purposes at home and across the national frontiers.

Regional experience has shown that autocratic rule, due to the absence of public accountability, tends to promote extremist elements, especially when those in power form opportunistic alliances with such forces. For example, Pakistan’s descent into a jihadist dungeon occurred not under civilian rule, but under two military dictators — one who nurtured and let loose jihadist forces, and another who took his country to the very edge of the precipice. Even today, the scourge of Pakistani terrorism emanates more from the country’s Scotch whisky-sipping generals than from the bead-rubbing mullahs.

When a democratic experiment gains traction, as in Bangladesh under Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, it crimps the extremist forces’ room for manoeuvre.

A broader lesson that the regional retreat of democracy holds is that democratic progress will remain tenuous and reversible unless the old entrenched forces are cut to size and the rule of law firmly established.

For example, Maldives’ 2008 democratic election, which swept away decades-old authoritarian rule, became a beacon of hope, only to dissipate in less than four years. As Nasheed reminded all after being deposed, “Dictatorships don’t always die when the dictator leaves office … long after the revolutions, powerful networks of regime loyalists can remain behind and can attempt to strangle their nascent democracies.”

In fact, Nasheed has a message for the Arab Spring movements: “The problems we are facing in the Maldives are a warning for other Muslim nations undergoing democratic reform. At times, dealing with the corrupt system of patronage the former regime left behind can feel like wrestling with a Hydra: when you remove one head, two more grow back. With patience and determination, the beast can be slain. But let the Maldives be a lesson for aspiring democrats everywhere: the dictator can be removed in a day, but it can take years to stamp out the lingering remnants of his dictatorship.”

With India’s tyranny of geography only getting worse and putting greater pressure on its external and internal security, India has to evolve more-dynamic and innovative approaches to diplomacy and national defence. For example, if it is to advance its national interest by supporting democracy and pluralism in its neighborhood and beyond, it will need to go beyond government-to-government channels for disbursing its increasingly large aid. Its aid diplomacy must reach out to civil-society groups and other liberal constituencies that can take on retrograde elements. Only through forward thinking and more-vigorous defence and foreign policies can India hope to ameliorate its regional-security situation and play a bigger role on the world stage.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the Center for Policy Research, is the author, mostly recently, of Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

A version of this article appeared in The Economic Times, February 14, 2014.