From Bush love to Obama autograph

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, April 15-30, 2009

West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya has said he has “great respect” for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh but differs “with his policies, particularly his special love for America.” The way Singh rode roughshod over national institutions, including Parliament, and rammed the controversial Indo-U.S. nuclear deal down the country’s throat did create an impression, however specious, that he was beholden to Washington. In fact, Singh has made not a single statement on the deal — not even to Parliament — even since the much-vaunted deal came to fruition in October 2008.

That silence has to do with the fact that the conditions and riders the U.S. Congress attached while ratifying the deal demolished the solemn assurances Singh had made to Parliament. What may be even more painful for Singh is that the geopolitical advantages the deal was trumpeted to help usher in — including greater U.S. support for India vis-à-vis China and Pakistan — have been belied by the events since, especially the change of administration in Washington. Consequently, as Singh’s term in office ends, there isn’t much of a legacy he can boast of.

Actually, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya would have been more accurate had he referred to Singh’s “special love” for the U.S. president, whoever the incumbent. That personal foible has been highlighted both by Singh’s April 2 meeting with Barack Obama in London, on the sidelines of the G-20 summit, and by his September 25, 2008 joint news conference at the White House with George W. Bush. In London, to the surprise of the Americans present, Singh began his bilateral meeting by asking for Obama’s autograph for his daughter on a book authored by Obama. Addressing Obama, Singh quoted his daughter as saying: “I would cherish [it] if you could get Mr. Obama to autograph the book.” Singh went on to tell Obama: “You are much loved and respected in India.”

Later that day, when Obama was asked straightforwardly at a news conference what “America is doing to help India tackle terrorism emanating from Pakistan,” he began by calling Singh “a wonderful man” and then disclosed that he and Singh had discussed terrorism “not simply in terms of terrorism emanating from Pakistan… But we spoke about it more broadly…” Here is Obama showering Pakistan with billions of dollars in additional U.S. aid. But Singh, rather than focus on the Pakistani-scripted terror attacks in India, discusses the terrorism challenge “more broadly,” and indeed begins his meeting by seeking Obama’s autograph for his daughter. What happens if Obama’s Pakistan gamble doesn’t pay off?

Now consider Singh’s September 25, 2008 news conference with Bush. Singh started by reading a prepared statement. Almost every paragraph in that ended with a schmaltzy tribute to Bush:

·                           “And the last four-and-a-half years that I have been prime minister I have been the recipient of your generosity, your affection, your friendship. It means a lot to me and to the people of India.”

·                           “In these last four-and-a-half years, there has been a massive transformation of India-United States relations. And Mr. President, you have played a most-important role in making all this happen.”

·                           “And when history is written I think it will be recorded that President George W. Bush made an historic goal in bringing our two democracies closer to each other.” 

·                           “And when this restrictive regime ends I think a great deal of credit will go to President Bush. And for this I am very grateful to you, Mr. President.” 

·                           “So, Mr. President, this may be my last visit to you during your presidency, and let me say, Thank you very much. The people of India deeply love you…”

               This will go down in history easily as the most-fawning statement ever made by an Indian prime minister about a foreign leader. America and India, the world’s most-powerful and most-populous democracies, need to build close strategic ties, founded on shared political values and mutual respect and understanding. Singh’s record, however, shows he was unable to pursue such an objective without conducting himself in a manner belittling India, even if inadvertently.

(c) Covert, 2009.

India’s re-hyphenation with Pakistan returns in US policy

From Obama’s call for Indo-Pakistan dialogue to Holbrooke’s second visit in seven weeks, US policy has returned to its traditional position of looking at India through the subcontinental prism while ignoring its security concerns

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, April 8, 2009

Despite America’s broken policy on Pakistan, President Barack Obama has unveiled the largest-ever US aid package for that country. Indeed, Islamabad is being made the biggest recipient of US aid in the world. If military, non-military and counterinsurgency aid and reimbursements to the Pakistani military were totalled, Pakistan — under Obama’s latest proposals — would overtake Israel and Egypt as the single largest recipient of American aid.

To supposedly mend a wrecked policy, Obama is doing more of what helped create the failure — dispensing rewards upfront. He has decided to shower billions of dollars in additional aid on Pakistan without even defining benchmarks for judging progress.

Worse yet, the Obama administration has neither acknowledged Pakistan’s role in staging terrorist strikes in India nor made the slightest effort to help bring the Pakistan-based planners of the unparalleled Mumbai attacks to justice. In the detailed, inter-agency “Afpak” policy unveiled by Obama, there is not even a passing mention of Pakistan’s use of proxies to wage a terror war against India. In other words, when Washington refuses to even recognize the problem, can New Delhi really expect the US to be of any help?

In fact, Washington is doing the opposite — making light of Indian concerns vis-à-vis Pakistan by asking New Delhi to adopt a flexible approach toward Islamabad so that the US can win greater Pakistani military cooperation on the Afghan front. Put simply, Washington is making short shrift of India’s interests in order to pursue its narrow regional agenda, centred on Obama’s resolve to extricate the US from the war in Afghanistan.

But make no mistake: Obama, through his rewards-in-advance policy, is only emboldening the Pakistani military establishment to continue its war by terror against the Indian republic.

Asked bluntly at his G-20 London summit news conference what “America is doing to help India tackle terrorism emanating from Pakistan”, Obama’s reply, while evasively long-winded, was revealing. He began by calling Prime Minister Manmohan Singh “a wonderful man”, just as he had described his French counterpart, Nicolas Sarkozy, as “marvellous”. But unlike Sarkozy, Singh had begun his bilateral meeting by asking for Obama’s autograph.

Obama then disclosed that he and Singh had discussed terrorism “not simply in terms of terrorism emanating from Pakistan… But we spoke about it more broadly…” Obama went on to say that “at a time when perhaps the greatest enemy of both India and Pakistan should be poverty, that it may make sense to create a more effective dialogue between India and Pakistan.”

This was before he meandered into a professorial sermon on energy efficiency and “reducing our carbon footprint”.

So the question he was asked went unanswered. The truth is that Obama has no intent to help pull India’s chestnuts out of the Pakistan-kindled fire; rather he wants India’s help on his misbegotten Afpak policy. Indeed, that policy is set to make things more difficult for India by reinforcing America’s dependence on the terror-procreating Pakistani military establishment — not only for the transport of the extra war supplies to meet the US military “surge” in Afghanistan, but also for help to negotiate with and co-opt the Afghan Taliban leadership that the Pakistani intelligence has long sheltered in the Quetta area.

How blind Obama and his special representative, Richard Holbrooke, are to the realities on the ground is evident from their separate claims that the hub of terrorism is Pakistan’s border region with Afghanistan. Little surprise the Afpak policy paper concludes by saying “the international community must work with Pakistan to disrupt the threats to security along Pakistan’s western border”. Holbrooke, ingenuously, has even linked terror attacks in India to elements operating from that ungoverned border area.

It is past time the Obama team faced up to the fact that the real problem is not at the Pakistani frontiers with Afghanistan. Rather it is the sanctuaries deep inside Pakistan that continue to breed and export terrorism. None of the 10 terrorists who attacked Mumbai last November came from Pakistan’s tribal belt. India is being targeted by Punjabi terror groups, like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, operating from Pakistan’s heartland with the military’s connivance.

Yet the naïveté in Washington is astonishing. Almost every Obama policy assumption has an Alice in Wonderland ring to it.

Take, for example, the decision to disburse $3 billion in additional military aid to Islamabad in the name of a “Pakistani Counterinsurgency Capability Fund”. The attempt to get the Pakistani military to focus on counterinsurgency misses the point that what the Obama administration calls insurgents remain prized proxies for the Pakistani generals.

Or take the Obama policy premise that the “surge” can be used, Iraq-style, as a show of force to cut deals with the “good” terrorists. This surge-and-bribe assumption overlooks the fact that the Afghan militants, with cosy sanctuaries across the borders, have more leeway than their Iraqi counterparts.

Also, the new rewards being doled out disregard the reality that the Pakistani generals have little incentive to lend genuine cooperation at a time when Obama has barely disguised his exit strategy. The generals and their surrogates — the Taliban — just need to patiently wait out the American exit to reclaim Afghanistan.

Through his policy contradictions, Obama has tied himself up in knots. His policy rejects his predecessor’s institution-building approach in Afghanistan as an attempt to create “some sort of Central Asian Valhalla”. Yet it proposes $7.5 billion in civilian aid for an increasingly Talibanized Pakistan to win hearts and minds there — a Valhalla even more distant.

The upshot of Obama’s blinkered approach is India’s re-hyphenation with Pakistan in US policy. This is so evident from Holbrooke’s recurring visits to New Delhi and American calls — from the president down — that India reopen dialogue with Islamabad, even if it has to countenance more Pakistan-scripted terror attacks.

For long, Washington has realized that the best way to handle India is to massage its ego. It was thus claimed that in deference to India’s sensitivities, Kashmir had been removed from Holbrooke’s job description and that his mission would stay restricted to the Afpak belt.

In reality, Washington took India and Kashmir out of Holbrooke’s agenda only publicly. As Holbrooke has shown by coming to New Delhi twice in seven weeks — this time with the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman — India is very much part of his mandate. In fact, Washington’s proposals for troop reductions and de-escalation clearly bring in the Kashmir dispute.

Obama’s aides contend it is impossible to disentangle Kashmir from any effort to win Pakistani cooperation. So the way forward, they argue, is to work on Kashmir behind the scenes while pretending the issue is not on the agenda.

Still, asked by a Senate committee about tension reduction in Kashmir, Centcom chief, General David Petraeus, admitted last week: “Together with my great diplomatic wing man, Ambassador Holbrooke, this effort actually has started”. And National Security Adviser James Jones, while keeping up the pretence that there is no problem on Pakistan’s eastern side, earlier declared “we do intend to help both countries … build more trust and confidence so that Pakistan can address the issues that it confronts on the western side”.

When India is deeply immersed in an election process, why has Holbrooke come a second time in quick succession, knowing New Delhi is anything but happy about his visit? The reason is that he is using this interregnum to show his turf includes India. But more than a turf-defining mission, what Holbrooke desperately needs is a primer on the roots of terrorism, lest he continue to betray his abysmal ignorance.

(c) The Asian Age, 2009.

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

(C) All rights reserved

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

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

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.

China’s maritime chess

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, February 10, 2009

Boastful claims in China’s official media that Chinese warships forced an Indian submarine to surface in a standoff in Indian Ocean waters off Somalia are the latest pointer to the Chinese navy seeking to challenge India in its backyard. They also underline an incipient naval competition for power and influence between the world’s two most-populous nations.

            The claims came soon after the communist regime in Beijing made its first-ever deployment of a naval task force beyond the Pacific by dispatching battle-ready warships to the Indian Ocean rim under the anti-piracy banner. The start of Chinese patrols in the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden is intended to extend China’s naval role and presence far from its shores while demonstrating a capability to conduct complex operations in distant waters.

            With China’s new emphasis on the seas, the Indian navy has been trying to monitor Chinese naval movements. In separate incidents in 2006, it photographed three Chinese submarines in the Mediterranean and a new destroyer off the Yemini coast. In the latest case, an Indian submarine, seeking to “fingerprint” the two Chinese destroyers involved in the anti-piracy mission, recorded their acoustic, propeller and electromagnetic signatures. But according to reports carried by Xinhua and the China Daily, the Indian sub was cornered and compelled to surface — a claim rubbished by the Indian navy, which said no sub can be forced to surface in international waters.

What is clear is the Chinese political resolve to challenge India’s maritime pre-eminence in the Indian Ocean. A paper published by the military-run Chinese Institute for International Strategic Studies last May points to the inevitability of Beijing setting up naval bases overseas, including in the Indian Ocean rim. It warned that without naval assets overseas, “China’s maritime fleet will face an extremely dangerous situation,” adding: “Most of the world’s major powers have overseas bases, and China can be no exception”. An earlier article in the Liberation Army Daily had asserted that the contiguous corridor stretching from the Taiwan Straits to the Indian Ocean’s western rim constitutes China’s legitimate offshore-defence perimeter.

In that light, China has aggressively moved to build ports in the Indian Ocean rim, including in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Burma. Besides eyeing Pakistan’s Chinese-built port of Gwadar as a naval anchor, Beijing has sought naval links with the Maldives, Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar. It aims to control vital sea-lanes of communication between the Indian and Pacific Oceans through a “string of pearls” strategy. Its latest “pearl” is the billion-dollar port its engineers are building in Hambantota, Sri Lanka.

Today, the geopolitical importance of the Indian Ocean is beginning to rival that of the Pacific. Much of the global oil-export supply passes through the Indian Ocean rim region, particularly through two constricted passageways — the 89-kilometer-wide Strait of Hormuz between Iran and Oman, and the piracy-plagued Strait of Malacca, which is barely 2.5 kilometers wide at its narrowest point between Indonesia and Singapore. In addition, the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the nuclear standoff with Iran undergird the critical importance of the Indian Ocean region. Asserting naval presence in the Indian Ocean is part of the high-stakes game of maritime chess that China is now ready to play.

More broadly, China is seeking to underpin political, commercial and energy interests through a sea-based power projection force capability and position itself as a militarily strong and economically dynamic peer competitor to the U.S. while, at the same time, seeking to prevent the rise of peer competition from Asia’s other two main powers, India and Japan. Just as the need to battle pirates along the so-called Barbary Coast of North Africa in the early 19th century helped spur the rise of a powerful U.S. navy, China is today seeking to add force to its global power ambitions by taking on pirates under the placard of internationalism. Indeed, that same plank came handy to Beijing earlier to agree to joint anti-piracy patrols with Pakistan in the Arabian Sea and to extend similar cooperation to ASEAN.

The U.S., oddly, has welcomed the Chinese task-force deployment in the Indian Ocean rim. As if to underline its attempt to propitiate Beijing by overlooking Indian concerns, Washington has hoped that the Chinese deployment would be “the springboard for resumption” of Sino-U.S. military contacts — suspended by Beijing in reprisal to a recent U.S. package of largely defensive arms for Taiwan. But India, with its enormous strategic depth in the Indian Ocean, cannot afford to allow China to chip away at the Indian navy’s dominant role in the Indian Ocean.

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

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1229198

Incredulous !ndia

Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, January 27, 2009

The Indian republic is now a mature 59-year-old. Whether it is a world power in the making or just a large subcontinental state with global-power pretensions is a moot question. What is beyond dispute is that India, home to more than one-sixth of the human race, continues to punch far below its weight. Internationally, it is a rule-taker, not a rule-maker.

Among India’s strengths is that it has a long, historical record of being a great power and of playing a mainstream, cooperative role in international relations. In 1820, at the advent of the industrial revolution, India and China alone made up nearly half of the world income. But by the time India emerged as a republic, its share of global GDP had shrunk to a mere 3.8 per cent.

Another one of India’s strengths is that it symbolizes unity in diversity. It is the most diverse country in the world. Indeed, it is more linguistically, ethnically and religiously diverse than the whole of Europe. India is where old traditions go hand-in-hand with post-modernity. More importantly, India has shown that unlike the traditionally homogenous societies of East Asia, a nation can manage and thrive on diversity.

A third strength is that democracy remains India’s greatest asset. India is the only real democracy in the vast contiguous arc from Jordan to Singapore. While the concepts of democratic freedoms and the rule of law are normally associated with the West, India can claim ancient traditions bestowing respect to such values. Basic freedoms for all formed the lynchpin of the rule in 3rd century BC of Emperor Ashoka who, as Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has pointed out, “did not exclude women and slaves as Aristotle did”.

Through forward thinking and a dynamic foreign policy, India — the world’s most-assimilative civilization — can now truly play the role of a bridge between the East and the West, including a link between the competing demands of the developed and developing worlds. But its manifold weaknesses weigh it down. National security remains its most-glaring failing. Put simply, India has failed to heed the principal lesson from an inglorious history of having been raped, plundered and subjugated repeatedly over more than eight centuries — from the forays of Mahmud of Ghazni to the colonial interventions of European powers.

Nowhere is India’s frailty more apparent than on what historically has been its Achilles’ heel: internal security. Wedged in an arc of failing or authoritarian states that seek, in different ways, to unravel its multiethnic, pluralistic character, India confronts a tyranny of geography. As a result, it faces serious threats from virtually all directions. Just as India has been battered by growing trans-border terrorism because of its location next to the global epicentre of terror, its security has come under pressure from its geographical proximity to an overly ambitious China, which trained and armed Naga and Mizo guerrillas long before Pakistan fashioned proxy war as an instrument.

Yet, despite cross-border security challenges now emanating even from Bangladesh and Nepal, India manifests a triple deficit in key aspects of national power — a leadership deficit, a strategic foresight deficit, and a national-security planning deficit. Nothing better illustrates that than the manner in which it has handled the unparalleled Pakistani-scripted amphibious terrorist assaults on its commercial capital two months ago. By firing only empty rhetoric and playing victim once again, it is inviting more Mumbai-style carnages.

The best description of today’s India comes from its tourism ad campaign’s themes, including its ‘Incredible India’ slogan. An ‘incredible’ country that has allowed its national-security challenges to become so acute as to bring the very future of a united, inclusive India under a cloud. A real ‘land of the Buddha’ that has confronted a continuous Pakistan-waged unconventional war since the 1980s but to date is unable to shed his pacifist blinkers, let alone initiate any concrete counteraction to stem a rising existential threat.

A true ‘land of adventure’ that has no articulated national-security strategy, or a defined defence policy, or a declared counterterrorism doctrine, yet is the world’s only large country dependent on other powers to meet basic conventional-defence needs. Although the authoritative Grimmitt report of the Congressional Research Service lists India as the world’s No.1 arms importer during the 2000-2007 period, this ‘incredible’ country has seen its military strength actually erode in the face of such a shopping binge, to the extent that its officials openly doubt that it has the capability to decisively defeat a near-bankrupt Pakistan. It’s clearly a ‘land of the tiger’ where ad hoc, personality-driven actions customarily trump institutionalized, holistic policymaking. A blithe ‘land of festivals’ where the bigger the state failure, the less the republic learns.

In sum, an ‘Incredible India’ that has all the talent, yet displays a paucity of rationality in policy approach. Welcome to the authentic India.

India is incredible in every sense. As if to underscore that, the slogan in the current multimillion-dollar international campaign has an exclamation mark instead of a capital ‘I’ in India. The blunt truth is that India cannot be understood through plain logic. With its spiritual heritage, India transcends earthly reasoning and rationality. Still, if it wishes to be a world power playing a role commensurate with its size, it will have to transform itself from an incredible to credible India.

Brahma Chellaney is a strategic affairs specialist.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?sectionName=HomePage&id=b51befc5-2886-4bf4-bf88-bf65b76d6841&&Headline=Incredulous+!ndia