Category Archives: International Security

From Moon Walk to Space Wars

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It is easy to get caught up in escalating strategic competition and conflict on Earth. But, 50 years after the Apollo 11 mission reached the Moon, guaranteeing the freedom to navigate the stars has become no less essential to global peace and security than safeguarding the freedom to navigate the seas.

Spacecraft In The Rays Of Sun. 3D Scene.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

Fifty years after astronauts first walked on the Moon, space wars have gone from Hollywood fantasy to looming threat. Not content with possessing enough nuclear weapons to wipe out all life on Earth many times over, major powers are rapidly militarizing space. Given the world’s increasing reliance on space-based assets, the risks are enormous.

As with the Cold War-era Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union, the new global space race has an important symbolic dimension. And, given the lunar landing’s role in establishing US dominance in space, the Moon is a natural starting point for many of the countries now jostling for position there.

In January, China became the first country to land an unmanned robotic spacecraft on the far side of the Moon. India – which in 2014 became the first Asian country to reach Mars, three years after China’s own failed attempt to leave Earth’s orbit – is scheduled to launch an unmanned mission to the Moon’s uncharted south pole on July 22, a week after the first planned launch was called off at the last minute due to a helium fuel leak. Japan and even smaller countries like South Korea and Israel are also pursuing lunar missions.

But the US will not surrender its position easily. US President Donald Trump’s administration has vowed to “return American astronauts to the Moon within the next five years.” As US Vice President Mike Pence put it, “just as the United States was the first nation to reach the Moon in the 20th century,” it will be the first “to return astronauts to the Moon in the 21st century.”

This escalating space race is not just about bragging rights; countries are also making rapid progress on developing their military space capabilities. Some, like systems that can shoot down incoming ballistic missiles, are defensive. But others, such as anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons technologies that can target space assets, are offensive.

The ability to take advantage of such systems, while denying them to adversaries, is becoming central to military strategies. That is why Trump directed the US Department of Defense to establish the Space Force, an independent military branch that will undertake space-related missions and operations.

The US hopes that such a force can protect its “margin of dominance” in space. Before Patrick M. Shanahan resigned as acting defense secretary last month, he said that that margin is “quickly shrinking,” as newer powers become adept at militarizing commercial space technologies, including those first developed as part of civilian prestige projects. The most notable such powers are Russia and China.

China, which established an independent space force in 2016, is aiming for global leadership in space. And both China and Russia have demonstrated offensive space capabilities in the form of “experimental” satellites that can potentially aid military operations. According to a US Air Force report, the purpose of these countries’ orbiting offensive capabilities is to hold US space assets hostage in the event of conflict.

This highlights the tremendous vulnerability of these assets, and not just those belonging to the US. The existing space infrastructure comprises at least 1,880 satellites owned or operated by 45 countries. These assets support a wide range of activities, including telecommunications, navigation, financial-transaction authentication, connectivity, remote sensing, and weather forecasting. From a security perspective, they facilitate intelligence, surveillance, early warning, arms-control verification, and missile guidance, for example.

There is one more key player in this intensifying space race: India. In March, the country used a ballistic-missile interceptor to destroy one of its own satellites orbiting at nearly 30,000 kilometers (18,641 miles) per hour, making it the fourth power – after the US, Russia, and China – to shoot down an object in space. The test employed some of the same technologies the US used to shoot down an intercontinental ballistic missile in a test conducted just a couple of days before.

Unlike China’s 2007 demonstration of its ASAT capabilities – which left more than 3,000 pieces of debris in orbit – the Indian test faced no international criticism, largely because it was intended to blunt China’s edge in space-war capabilities. In fact, the head of US Strategic Command, General John E. Hyten, defended India’s test: Indians are “concerned about threats to their nation from space,” he said, and thus “feel they have to have a capability to defend themselves in space.”

This sounds a lot like the justification used to build today’s enormous nuclear arsenals, and we know where that logic leads. As with nuclear deterrence, countries continue to upgrade their offensive space capabilities, until “mutually assured destruction” becomes their best hope of protecting themselves and their assets.

Before that happens, international norms and laws must be strengthened. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans space-based weapons of mass destruction, but not other types of weapons or ASAT tests. A new treaty is needed to outlaw all use of force in space, with clearly delineated – and reliably enforced – consequences for violations. Likewise, norms for responsible behavior in space must be established, in order to deter ASAT weapons testing or other actions that endanger space assets.

It is easy to get caught up in the escalating strategic competition and conflict on Earth. Safeguarding, say, freedom of maritime navigation in places like the Persian Gulf and the South China Sea (where China continues to  the territorial status quo unilaterally) is vitally important. But guaranteeing the freedom to navigate the stars has become no less essential to global peace and security.

China’s Tiananmen Reckoning

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The 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre is a reminder that the free ride China has enjoyed internationally in recent decades is ending. It should also serve as a warning to the Communist Party that its continued reliance on brute power to keep China’s citizens in line could eventually leave it on the ash heap of history.

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Tiananmen Square just after the massacre on the night of June 3-4, 1989.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Project Syndicate

The 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre of at least 10,000 people is significant for several reasons. For one thing, the deadly assault on student-led demonstrators remains a dark and hidden chapter in China’s communist narrative. For another, the Chinese government’s arbitrary exercise of power against its own citizens has not only continued since the massacre, but has become more methodical, sophisticated, and efficient, with the country’s internal-security budget now officially surpassing its mammoth defense spending. Yet at the same time, this reliance on brute force carries an ominous message for the Communist Party of China (CPC) itself.

In a night of carnage on June 3-4, 1989, the Chinese authorities crushed the pro-democracy protests with tanks and machine guns. In Eastern Europe, the democratization push led to the fall of the Berlin Wall just five months later, heralding the end of the Cold War. But the West recoiled from sustaining its post-Tiananmen sanctions against China, thereby paving the way for the country’s dramatic rise.

The West not only glossed over the massacre, but also ignored China’s subsequent excesses and unfair trade practices. US President Donald Trump recently lamented how the United States had aided China’s rise and spawned a “monster”: “[China] took advantage of us for many, many years. And I blame us, I don’t blame them,” Trump said. “I don’t blame [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping]. I blame all of our presidents, and not just President [Barack] Obama. You go back a long way. You look at President [Bill] Clinton, [George W.] Bush – everybody; they allowed this to happen, they created a monster.”

Yet, after a long post-massacre boom, China – the world’s largest, strongest, wealthiest, and most technologically advanced autocracy – is entering a period of uncertainty just as it prepares to celebrate a record 70 years of communist rule. (The longest-lasting autocratic system in the modern era, the Soviet Union, survived 69 years.)

China’s many anniversaries in 2019 are making this a politically sensitive year. The Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 were inspired by the watershed May 4, 1919, student demonstrations against Western colonialism at the same site. But whereas Xi recently extolled the May Fourth Movement in a speech marking the centenary of that event, he and the CPC  about the Tiananmen anniversary.

This year also marks the 60th anniversary of a failed uprising in Tibet against Chinese occupation. And it is ten years since a Uighur revolt killed hundreds in the Xinjiang region, where more than one million Muslims have now been  as part of a Xi-initiated effort to “cleanse” their minds of extremist thoughts. Then, on October 1, the People’s Republic of China will celebrate its 70th birthday.

But the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown is the most portentous for the CPC’s continued monopoly on power. The massacre was carried out because the party has relied on brute force since its inception, including to seize power. During the rule of the PRC’s founder, Mao Zedong, tens of millions died in the so-called Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and other state-engineered disasters.

Adolf Hitler was responsible for an estimated 11-12 million civilian deaths, and Joseph Stalin for at least six million. But Mao, with some 42.5 million, was the undisputed champion butcher of the twentieth century. And his blood-soaked rule influenced his successor, Deng Xiaoping, who ordered the savage assault on the Tiananmen demonstrators.

The CPC’s survival in power reflects not only its willingness to deploy massive violence, but also its skill at distorting reality with propaganda and snuffing out dissent. But how long can the world’s oldest autocracy continue to sustain itself? By dispensing with collective leadership and orderly succession, Xi has already undermined the institutionalism that made post-Mao China resilient to the forces of change that helped to unravel the Soviet empire.

Until Xi’s lurch to despotism, it seemed that history was by and large going China’s way. Its economy was booming, its control of the South China Sea was steadily expanding, and its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) of transnational infrastructure projects was progressing smoothly. But China is now facing strong international headwinds at a time when its economy has noticeably slowed. BRI partner countries are increasingly concerned about becoming ensnared in sovereignty-eroding debt traps. China’s influence operations in democratic countries – and the Trojan horse of Confucius Institutes at foreign universities – are now meeting increased resistance. And, more fundamentally, the paradigm shift in US policy toward China under Trump is altering the geopolitical landscape for Xi’s government.

Meanwhile, China’s growing economic risks – such as rising local government debt, higher US trade tariffs, and Western pushback against its technological expansion and trade and investment practices – are compounding the CPC’s concerns about social unrest. By prompting some multinationals to move production from China to Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and elsewhere, Trump’s tariffs are further intensifying the party’s anxiety.

As a result, China’s triumphalism has ceased, and Xi has warned that the country faces major new risks at home and abroad that could escalate and ignite turbulence. The CPC fears that it could meet the same fate as its Soviet counterpart, especially if it fails to prevent small incidents from spiraling into major defiance of its authority. This explains Xi’s emphasis on enforcing strict Leninist discipline. Yet Xi himself is undermining the CPC by building a cult of personality around his one-man rule and by inviting international pushback through his overemphasis on China’s strength and power.

The anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre is a reminder that the free ride China has enjoyed internationally over the past 30 years is ending. It should also serve as a warning to the CPC that its continued reliance on brute power to keep China’s citizens in line could eventually leave it on the ash heap of history.

Action needed to save the world’s rivers, especially in China

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  • Brahma Chellaney writes that excessive damming and drastic overuse of water resources are causing the world’s major waterways to run dry.

Brahma Chellaney, South China Morning Post

Urgent action is needed to save the world’s rivers, including improving agricultural practices, which account for the bulk of freshwater withdrawals

Thanks to excessive damming and drastic overuse of water resources, an increasing number of major rivers across the world are drying up before reaching the sea. Nowhere is this more evident than in China, where the old saying, “Follow the river and it will eventually lead you to a sea,” is no longer wholly true.

While a number of smaller rivers in China have simply disappeared, the Yellow River – the cradle of the Chinese civilisation – now tends to run dry before reaching the sea. This has prompted Chinese scientists to embark on a controversial rainmaking project to help increase the Yellow’s flow. By sucking moisture from the air, however, the project could potentially affect monsoon rains elsewhere.

For large sections of the world’s population, major river systems serve as lifelines. The rivers not only supply the most essential of all natural resources – water – but also sustain biodiversity, which in turn supports human beings.

Yet an increasing number of rivers, not just in China, are drying up before reaching the sea. A major new United Nations study published early this month offers grim conclusions: human actions are irremediably altering rivers and other ecosystems and driving increasing numbers of plant and animal species to extinction. “Nature across the globe has now been significantly altered,” according to the study’s summary of findings.

Water sustains life and livelihoods and enables economic development. If the world is to avert a thirsty future and contain the risks of greater intrastate and interstate water conflict, it must protect freshwater ecosystems, which harbour the greatest concentration of species.

Yet, according to another study published in Nature this month humans have modified the flows of most long rivers, other than those found in the remote regions of the Amazon and Congo basins and the Arctic. Consequently, only a little more than one-third of the world’s 246 long rivers are still free-flowing, meaning they remain free from dams, levees and other man-made water-diversion structures that leave them increasingly fragmented.

Such fragmentation is affecting river hydrology, flow of nutrient-rich sediment from the mountains where rivers originate, riparian vegetation, migration of fish and quality of water.

Take the Colorado River, one of the world’s most diverted and dammed rivers. Broken up by more than 100 dams and thousands of kilometres of diversion canals, the Colorado has not reached the sea since 1998.

The river, which originates in the Rocky Mountains and is the lifeblood for the southwestern United States, used to empty into the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. But now, owing to the upstream diversion of 9.3 billion cubic metres (328.4 billion cubic feet) of water annually, the Colorado’s flow into its delta has been reduced to a trickle.

Other major rivers that run dry before reaching the sea include the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, the two lifelines of Central Asia; the Euphrates and the Tigris in the Middle East; and the Rio Grande, which marks the border between Texas and Mexico before heading to the Gulf of Mexico. The overused Murray in Australia and Indus in Pakistan are at risk of meeting the same fate.

More fundamentally, altered flow characteristics of rivers are among the most serious problems for sustainable development, because they seriously affect the ecosystem services on which both humans and wildlife depend. Free-flowing rivers, while supporting a wealth of biodiversity, allow billions of fish – the main source of protein for the poor – to trek through their waters and breed copiously.

Free-flowing rivers also deliver nutrient-rich silt crucial to agriculture, fisheries and marine life. Such high-quality sediment helps to naturally re-fertilise overworked soils in the plains, sustain freshwater species and, after rivers empty into seas or oceans, underpin the aquatic food chain supporting marine life.

China’s hyperactive dam building illustrates the high costs of river fragmentation. No country in history has built more dams than China. In fact, China today boasts more large dams than the rest of the world combined.

China’s chain of dams and reservoirs on each of its long rivers impedes the downstream flow of sediment, thereby denying essential nutrients to agricultural land and aquatic species. A case in point is China’s Three Gorges Dam – the world’s largest – which has a problematic build-up of sediment in its own massive reservoir because it has disrupted silt flows in the Yangtze River.

Likewise, China’s cascade of eight giant dams on the Mekong, just before the river enters Southeast Asia, is affecting the quality and quantity of flows in the delta, in Vietnam. Undeterred, China is building or planning another 20 dams on the Mekong.

How the drying up of rivers affects seas and oceans is apparent from the Aral Sea, which has shrunk 74 per cent in area and 90 per cent in volume, with its salinity growing nine-fold. This change is the result of the Aral Sea’s principal water sources, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, being so overexploited for irrigation that they are drying up before reaching what was once the world’s fourth-largest inland lake.

Compounding the challenges is the increasing pollution of rivers. Aquatic ecosystems have lost half of their biodiversity since the mid-1970s alone.

Urgent action is needed to save the world’s rivers. This includes action on several fronts, including improving practices in agriculture, which accounts for the bulk of the world’s freshwater withdrawals.

Without embracing integrated water resource management and other sustainable practices, the world risks a parched future.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of nine books, including Water, Peace, and War.

© South China Morning Post, 2019.

Modi’s win will cement India’s multi-aligned foreign policy

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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s landslide win in national elections represents a fresh mandate for him to reinvent India as a more secure, confident and competitive country and forge closer ties with natural allies. Modi’s second five-year term in office will help cement India’s multi-aligned foreign policy, which has sought to build close partnerships with all powers central to long-term Indian interests.

Domestically, Modi’s big win has averted a nightmare scenario for Indian democracy — an indecisive election verdict fostering political paralysis. Faced with a choice between a stable, firm government and a possible retreat to political drift, voters in the world’s largest democracy reposed their faith in Modi and his Bharatiya Janata (Indian People’s) Party, or BJP.

Internationally, India’s profile has continued to rise under Modi. India appears to be moving from its long-held nonalignment to a globalized practicality — multi-alignment. A Cold War legacy, nonalignment implies a passive approach, including not taking sides and staying on the sidelines. Multi-alignment, by contrast, calls for a proactive approach.

India, although a founding leader of the nonaligned movement, now makes little mention of nonalignment. Instead it is building close partnerships with key powers to pursue a variety of interests in diverse settings, not only to advance its core priorities but also to shore up its strategic autonomy, in keeping with its longstanding preference for an independent foreign policy. Balancing these different partnerships, of course, is proving a challenge for New Delhi.

Modi’s reelection has come after a series of elections in southern Asia. In the past 18 months, elections have brought pro-China communists to power in Nepal and a military-backed party to office in Pakistan, while voters have booted out a quasi-dictator in the Maldives, elected a new government in Bhutan, and, in Bangladesh, retained a prime minister who has turned the country into one of Asia’s fastest-growing economies. The only country in the region not to go to the polls recently is Sri Lanka, where the Supreme Court forced the country’s president to roll back a coup after he unconstitutionally dismissed the prime minister and called fresh parliamentary elections.

India’s biggest neighbor, however, is the world’s largest, strongest and longest-surviving autocracy, China — a reminder that the new Indian government’s most-pressing security challenges relate to the country’s combustible neighborhood, not least a deepening strategic nexus between China and Pakistan. Both these nuclear-armed allies stake claims to vast swaths of Indian territory and employ asymmetric warfare.

Not surprisingly, national security weighed on the Indian voters’ minds, especially because, in the run-up to the elections, a Pakistan-based, United Nations-designated terrorist group claimed responsibility for a massacre of more than 40 paramilitary troops in Indian Kashmir. An Indian retaliatory airstrike on the group’s hideout in the Pakistani heartland helped burnish Modi’s credentials as a strong leader.

Now, after his reelection, Modi will have to consider urgently the foreign-policy challenges, above all an ascendant China’s muscular revisionism. China has stepped up its military pressure along the long, disputed Himalayan border with India, including deploying new offensive weapons and advertising live-fire combat exercises. Chinese encroachments in India’s maritime backyard have also increased.

Yet, vexed by the unpredictability of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, Modi has sought to mend ties with China, or at least stop them from deteriorating further. At an “informal” summit in Wuhan, China, in April 2018, Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to “reset” relations. Another Wuhan-style summit between the two leaders has been planned for this autumn in India.

For Xi, however, such summitry has served as a cover to kill two birds with one stone. While encouraging Modi’s overtures to help instill greater Indian caution to openly challenge China, Xi has embarked on a major military buildup along the Himalayas. Meanwhile, Chinese exports have flooded India, with Beijing more than doubling its bilateral trade surplus, on Modi’s watch, to over $66 billion a year. This trade surplus is more than 50% larger than India’s defense spending, underscoring how India unwittingly is underwriting China’s hostile politics.

India is now a “major defense partner” of the U.S., with which it holds more military exercises than with any other country. The U.S. has also emerged as India’s largest arms supplier, overtaking Russia. Indeed, the Cold War-era India-Russia camaraderie has been replaced by India-U.S. bonhomie.

However, India still sees Russia as a natural ally and a “tested and tried” friend. Modi has been holding annual summit meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin to bolster the bilateral relationship, whose trade component has shrunk.

India relies on Russian spare parts for its Russian-made military hardware. More importantly, Russia has transferred to India offensive weapons that the U.S. does not export, such as an aircraft carrier and a nuclear-powered submarine. So ties to Moscow remain important.

The Trump administration’s new sanctions against Russia and Iran are accentuating the Modi government’s challenge in balancing India’s bilateral relationships. How to navigate America’s extraterritorial sanctions targeting Iran and Russia has become an important diplomatic test for India, which is increasingly concerned about Trump’s pursuit of aggressive unilateralism.

India, for example, has taken an economic hit, in the form of a higher oil-import bill, from Trump’s targeting of Iran. Over the years, Iran has been an important oil supplier to energy-poor India and is the route for a transportation corridor that India is building to Afghanistan that bypasses Pakistan.

In fact, the Trump administration’s ongoing direct talks with the Afghan Taliban to finalize a “peace” deal are helping to renew the salience of Iran and Russia in India’s Afghanistan policy. If the Pakistan-backed Taliban were to recapture power in Kabul, the relevance of these ties would redouble.

Against this background, the challenges to Modi’s policy of multi-alignment are likely to mount in his second term. Meanwhile, China’s spreading influence in India’s backyard — from Nepal to Sri Lanka — is underscoring the imperative for New Delhi to arrest its eroding regional clout.

Modi’s foreign policy, however, will continue to be guided by a non-doctrinaire vision. Shorn of ideology, Indian foreign policy has sought to revitalize the country’s economic and military security, while avoiding having to overtly choose one power over another as a dominant partner.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

Pathways to tackling the plastic waste problem

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Beach pollution

Bottled water has a huge environmental footprint. About 1.6 liters of water are needed to produce one liter of bottled water, demand is depleting precious groundwater resources, and most of the recyclable PET bottles are buried in landfills or end up as litter.

Brahma Chellaney, The Japan Times

Is the human species becoming a cancer on the planet? This question arises from the grim findings of a new United Nations study that human actions are irremediably altering natural ecosystems and driving increasing numbers of plant and animal species to extinction.

“Nature across the globe has now been significantly altered,” with 75 percent of the land surface extensively modified, 85 percent of the wetlands lost, and two-thirds of the oceans bearing mounting cumulative impacts, according to the study’s just-released summary of findings. Another study published in this month’s Nature, the journal of science, reports that humans have modified the flows of most long rivers other than those found in remote regions.

Not surprisingly, biodiversity is declining rapidly across the world. Aquatic ecosystems, for example, have lost 50 percent of their biodiversity since the 1970s. One major driver is plastic pollution.

Bottled water has become an important source of plastic waste, along with single-use straws, cutlery, food containers and other plastic items. Plastic debris is clogging up landfills, blocking drains, polluting waterways and contributing to biodiversity loss. Plastic litter on roadsides and beaches and in other public spaces is an eyesore.

Mass production of plastics began just six decades ago. The bottled-water industry, however, took off after the commercial advent in the 1990s of single-serve bottles made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET), or polyester plastic. Fabricated from crude oil and natural gas, PET has helped turn water — and other drinks — into portable and lightweight consumer products. But PET takes hundreds of years to biodegrade and, if incinerated, generates toxic fumes.

Other forms of plastics are also polluting land and water. They include low-density polyethylene, which creates shopping bags, bubble wrap, flexible bottles and wire and cable insulation; high-density polyethylene used for making toys, garden furniture, trash bins, detergent and bleach bottles, buckets and jugs; and polypropylene found in bottle tops, diapers, drinking straws, lunch boxes, insulated coolers, and fabric and carpet fiber.

Barely 18 percent of plastic waste is recycled globally — and slightly more in Japan. The rest ends up as trash and litter. For example, tens of billions of easily recyclable PET bottles are discarded as garbage every year.

Chinese and Indian bans on import of plastic waste for recycling are accentuating the global plastic crisis. Many cities in advanced economies, faced with mountains of plastic waste, are struggling to expand landfill capacities. Japan, for example, confronts spiraling plastic waste despite shipping more such trash to Southeast Asia following China’s imposition of import restrictions in late 2017. Japan now must recycle more of its waste at home, an imperative that has prompted Japanese firms to pour investments into plastic recycling plants. With virgin plastic cheaper than recycled plastic, Japan could offer manufacturers tax concessions to switch to recycled plastic.

Against this background, about 180 countries agreed on May 10 to a new U.N. accord to regulate the export of plastic waste, some eight million tons of which ends up in the oceans each year — the equivalent of one garbage truck of plastic being tipped into the sea every minute. The accord amends the 1989 Basel Convention on the control of hazardous wastes to include plastic trash.

Plastic pollution of oceans has increased tenfold since 1980 alone. By affecting many species of marine life, such pollution threatens human food chains. Microplastics, the tiny particles into which plastic degrades into, have been found in many fishes’ guts.

A similar challenge to human health is posed by a different class of plastic particles called microbeads, used as abrasives in cosmetics and toothpaste. Such fine particles are not filtered out by most wastewater treatment plants. Despite efforts in some countries to prohibit or regulate their use, microbeads have entered freshwater bodies, such as the Great Lakes, where they can become coated with cancer-causing chemicals known as PCBs. Mistakenly eaten by fish, these particles then enter human bodies.

As the U.N. study warns, “Plastic microparticles and nanoparticles are entering food webs in poorly understood ways.”

Not enough is being done to address the plastic waste scourge. Some popular consumer products are a source of environmental degradation even without the plastic containers in which they are marketed. Bottled water is a prime example. Bottled water carries a large environmental footprint: It entails use of significant resources to source, process, bottle and transport the water. For example, 1.6 liters of water, on average, are used to package one liter of bottled water. Processing and transportation of bottled water result in a notable carbon footprint.

Much of the bottled water sold globally is extracted groundwater that has been subjected to reverse osmosis or other treatment of the kind given to tap water. Yet more and more people don’t trust tap water and rely on bottled water, making it the largest commercial growth area among drinks. Tapping subterranean water reserves on a large scale for bottling depletes not just aquifers but also rivers and streams that draw water from aquifers. Premium bottled water, sourced from glaciers’ runoff, is also compounding human impacts on fragile ecosystems.

It is past time for the international community to deal with its plastics-centered environmental health challenges. Why allow the use of plastics for products (including plates, cups, straws, cutlery, drink stirrers and cotton swabs) where non-plastic alternatives are available and commercially affordable? Beverage companies, for example, should be made to use biodegradable or eco-friendly reusable containers, instead of PET bottles.

In fact, there is a dire need for a global ban on single-use plastics, whose increasing use is triggering a slow-onset disaster. Japan and other countries may be reluctant, but a legally binding, global phase-out of most single-out plastics has become inescapable.

A global prohibition would need to be strictly enforced. In the absence of enforcement, current partial bans on single-use plastic shopping bags in more than 100 countries, for example, have proved ineffective.

Creating a more sustainable world demands effective management of plastic waste, innovations toward eco-friendly substitutes, and monetary incentives to help clear the plastic debris. It also calls for reducing consumer demand for environmentally harmful products that also generate a lot of plastic waste, like bottled water.

The right policies and regulations can promote high rates of recycling and prevent plastic waste in public spaces. Japan has been slow to respond to the plastic-waste crisis, although it produces the largest amount of such waste per capita after the United States. Japan could learn from Germany, the world’s recycling champion that recycles nearly all plastic bottles. In Berlin, for example, the poor perform an environmental service by scavenging public trash bins for bottles yielding deposit return from machines at supermarkets.

Imagine if an attractive monetary incentive was offered to the poor in all countries to collect bottles and other plastic waste and deposit them with retailers. It would help to dramatically control plastic trash and litter.

Waste pickers hold the key to effective waste management, including recycling, but they need a living wage to serve the public. Deposit return schemes are necessary but not sufficient as they are usually restricted to bottles. An environmental tax on plastics could help governments to raise sufficient money to incentivize the collection of all plastic debris. Consumer goods companies should also be made to help cover the costs of waste management and cleanup.

Make no mistake: The plastic waste scourge is seriously imperiling the world’s environmental well-being, including contaminating our freshwater and food chain. Without urgent action to arrest the problem, there will be, as research shows, more plastic than fish by weight in the oceans by 2050. And more people might be dying from cancer and other environmental diseases.

Longtime Japan Times contributor Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist.

© The Japan Times, 2019.

The Global War on Terrorism Has Failed. Here’s How to Win.

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Targeting terrorists and their networks brings only temporary success. A long-term strategy needs to focus on discrediting the ideology that spawns suicide killers.

By Brahma Chellaney

Foreign Policy journal| May 2019

The jihadi bombings in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday are the latest reminder that terrorism is not driven by deprivation or ignorance. As with the 2016 cafe attack on foreigners in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the slaughter of churchgoers and hotel guests in Sri Lanka was carried out by educated Islamists from wealthy families. Two of the eight Sri Lankan suicide bombers were sons of one of the country’s wealthiest businessmen. Several of the attackers had the means to study abroad.

One reason why these attacks keep taking place is that the U.S.-led global war on terrorism has failed—and that is because it has focused on eliminating terrorists and their networks, not on defeating the jihadi ideology that inspires suicide attacks around the world. The bombings in a place as unlikely as Sri Lanka—a country with no history of radical Islamist terrorism—underscore how far militaristic theology can spread and why the world needs to tackle it at its roots.

When it comes to radical Islamist terrorism, the ideological roots can most often be traced back to Wahhabism, an extreme form of Sunni Islam promoted by Saudi Arabia. Wahhabism legitimizes violent jihad with its call for a war on “infidels.” According to the Saudi Muslim scholar Ali al-Ahmed, it advocates that nonbelievers are “to be hated, to be persecuted, even killed.” Such is the power of this insidious ideology that the two sons of a Sri Lankan spice tycoon, Mohammad Yusuf Ibrahim, chose martyrdom over a continued life of comfort and luxury, including living in a palatial villa and traveling in expensive chauffeured cars.

Make no mistake: Wahhabism’s phony idea of a paradise full of sensual delights for martyrs foments suicide killings. The so-called benefits it espouses make a would-be attacker believe that he will be delivered 72 virgins in heaven. (This claim finds no mention in the Quran but is found in a supposed ninth-century hadith—a record of the traditions or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad.)

Founded in the 18th century by the cleric Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Wahhabism remained a fringe form of Islam until the dawn of the oil price boom in the 1970s. Flush with funds, Saudi Arabia has since spent $200 billion funding Wahhabi madrassas (religious seminaries), mosques, clerics, and books to promote its form of Islam and gain geopolitical influence. But the oil price boom was not the only factor contributing to Wahhabism’s rapid spread. The export of this jihad-fostering ideology was also promoted by the United States and its allies to stem, for example, the threat from Soviet communism: The CIA, according to the author Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (the nephew of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy), “nurtured violent jihadism as a Cold War weapon.”

Gradually, Wahhabism has been snuffing out the diverse, more liberal Islamic traditions in non-Arab countries with large Muslim communities and created a toxic environment in which extremism can thrive. Pluralistic interpretations of Islam are being stifled so that this hard-line strain makes inroads. By promoting militant Islamic fundamentalism, Saudi Arabia and its ideological partners have in effect promoted modern Islamist terrorism. The sponsorship of extremism has fostered hatred, misogyny, and violence, and it has deepened differences between Sunnis and Shiites. And that divide, in turn, has roiled regional geopolitics and incited anti-Shiite attacks in predominantly Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Against this background, it is past time for the global war on terrorism to be reoriented. U.S. counterterrorism policy should focus not merely on foes like the Islamic State and al Qaeda but also on Arab monarch friends pushing a jihadi agenda by, among other means, turning a blind eye to charities in their countries that fund Islamist militancy around the world. Despite steps taken by Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region to disrupt terrorist financing, Persian Gulf-based charities—as the U.S. State Department’s annual country reports on terrorism acknowledge—continue to play a role in the sponsorship of terrorist groups.

Saudi Arabia—perhaps the largest sponsor of radical Islam and one of the world’s most repressive states—has faced little international pressure even on human rights. In fact, the total ban on Iranian oil exports ordered by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration from May 3 will financially reward Saudi Arabia and the other jihad-financing countries. Iran, to be sure, is a destabilizing regional force. But it is certainly not “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism,” as the Trump administration calls it. The largest acts of international terrorism—including the recent Sri Lanka bombings, the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., and the 2008 Mumbai siege—were carried out by brutal Sunni organizations with connections to Saudi-sponsored Wahhabism but none to Iran. Indeed, all major Islamist terrorist organizations, despite their differing jihadi philosophies and goals, draw their ideological sustenance from Wahhabism, the source of modern Sunni jihad.

The United States lists Iran, Sudan, Syria, and North Korea as state sponsors of terrorism but not Saudi Arabia, despite Trump calling the country “the world’s biggest funder of terrorism.” Recently, the Trump administration added Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to its list of foreign terrorist organizations. But still missing from that list is a major terrorism-exporting force—Pakistan’s military—which maintains cozy ties with transnational terrorist groups, including providing, as Trump has acknowledged, “safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan.”

The politicization of the global war on terrorism must end so that a concerted and sustained international onslaught on the perverted ideology of radical Islam can begin. Such an offensive is essential because, as long as violent jihadism is perceived as a credible ideology, suicide bombers will be motivated to carry out horrific attacks.

In fact, the only way to defeat an enemy driven by a pernicious ideology is to discredit that ideology. The West won the Cold War not so much by military means as by spreading the ideas of freedom and capitalism that helped suck the lifeblood out of communism’s international appeal, thereby making it incapable of meeting the widespread popular yearning for a better, more open life.

Today, jihadi theology helps link diverse Islamist groups around the world. Because the cross-border linkages of these outfits are often based not on structured coordination but simply on a shared ideology, the global jihadi movement is essentially self-organizing. The movement’s strength remains unaffected even if any individuals or bands are eliminated in government counterterrorism actions. Another ominous fact is that when individuals embrace the ideology of violent jihadism, their leap to actual terrorism can be swift and sudden.

The focus of the global war on terrorism must shift to crushing this ideological movement. One way to do this is to deploy a sustained information campaign to discredit the ideology of radical Islam. For example, it would not be difficult to mock and run down the jihadi notion that a martyr in heaven will enjoy the company of 72 virgins. And the concept of jihad itself can be attacked as antithetical to the fundamental principles of contemporary civilization, while the Islamist drive to impose sharia, or Islamic law, should be exposed as an assault on science and modernity, as fostering gender inequality and discrimination against women and non-Muslims, and as legitimizing child rape through the marriage of young girls to adult men.

While working to systematically bring into disrepute the jihadi ideology, punitive sanctions should be slapped on Saudi and other Persian Gulf terrorist financiers as well as charities still funding overseas Islamist seminaries, clerics, and groups. The Middle East and North Africa Financial Action Task Force should develop more effective ways to stop nonstate terrorist financiers from exploiting informal financial systems.

Only a robust response—from governments and civil societies—to the mounting threats from Islamist ideology can help contain the spread of terrorism. In combating that dangerous ideology, the United States must take the lead and help bring the global war on terrorism back on track.

Brahma Chellaney, the author of nine books, is a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and a Richard von Weizsäcker fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.

© Foreign Policy, 2019.

Sri Lanka bombings carry a stark message for India

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Brahma Chellaney, The Hindustan Times

The Sri Lanka bombings — one of the world’s deadliest acts of terrorism — highlight the growing terrorist threat to democratic, secular states. Far from a concerted and sustained global war on terror, the anti-terrorism fight is being undermined by geopolitics. The global ideological movement fuelling terrorism is Wahhabi jihadism. Yet, the U.S.-ordered total ban on Iranian oil exports from May 3 will reward this jihadism’s main financiers.

Despite specific and detailed Indian intelligence warnings, Sri Lanka failed to avert the bombings, in large part because of a divided and dysfunctional government. However, in keeping with an international anti-terrorist practice, Sri Lanka was quick to detain the bombers’ family members for questioning once the suicide killers were identified. By contrast, the Pulwama bomber’s family members not only remained free but also gave media interviews rationalizing the suicide attack.

Sri Lanka has a blood-soaked history, but the scale and intensity of the latest attacks were unprecedented. The coordinated bombings, in less than 30 minutes, killed more people than the 2008 Mumbai terrorist siege, which lasted nearly four days. Actually, in terms of sophisticated methods and synchronized lethality, they were eerily similar to the 1993 serial bombings that targeted Mumbai landmarks. Jihadists have long used India as a laboratory: Major acts of terror first tried out in India and then replicated elsewhere include attacks on symbols of state authority, midair bombing of a commercial jetliner and coordinated strikes on a city transportation system.

The series of extraordinary steps Sri Lanka took after the bombings — blocking social media, imposing a daily dusk-to-dawn curfew, closing schools until April 29 and proclaiming an emergency law — may seem unthinkable in terrorism-scarred but rights-oriented India. But such measures were necessary to maintain control and to deter large-scale reprisal attacks against Muslims.

Ironically, in the days leading up to the Sri Lanka bombings, the 2008 Mumbai attacks were back in the news in India because of Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Pragya Thakur’s controversial comment on Hemant Karkare, the police officer gunned down in that siege. The irony of ironies is that those 26/11 attacks received more Indian attention this month than on their 10th anniversary five months ago. This underscores a troubling truth: Nothing draws the attention of Indians more than political controversy, however petty.

The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. This is especially true of India, which — far from heeding the 26/11 lessons — doesn’t remember its martyrs. How many Indians know the name of Tukaram Omble, the “hero among heroes” of 26/11?  An ex-army soldier who became a police assistant sub-inspector, Omble — by ensuring terrorist Ajmal Kasab’s capture alive — provided the clinching evidence of Pakistan’s involvement in 26/11. Kasab was captured after the ambush killing of six cops, including Karkare and additional commissioner Ashok Kamte. Omble grabbed the barrel of Kasab’s AK-47 and took a volley of fired bullets, allowing others to seize Kasab.

All the 10 Pakistani terrorists involved in 26/11 wore red string wristbands for Hindus that Pakistani-American David Headley got for them from Mumbai’s Siddhivinayak Temple. But for Kasab’s capture (and confession) helping to indisputably establish Pakistan’s direct involvement, Pakistan’s wicked plan was to portray 26/11 as exemplifying the rise of Hindu terrorism by capitalizing on the then Manmohan Singh government’s classification of the 2006-07 blasts in Malegaon, Ajmer Sharif, Mecca Masjid and Samjhauta Express as “Hindu terror”.

Omble’s extraordinary bravery thus should never be forgotten. Nor the sacrifices of the other 26/11 martyrs awarded the Ashok Chakra — Sandeep Unnikrishnan, Gajender Singh, Vijay Salaskar, Karkare and Kamte. The 26/11 siege affected the national psyche more deeply than any other terrorist attack. Yet such is India’s lack of a sense of remembrance that it laid the Kartarpur Corridor’s cornerstone on the 10th anniversary of 26/11, with an oblivious Indian vice president calling it a “historic day”. The 26/11 perpetrator, Pakistan, couldn’t have received a better gift from India.

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Suspected ringleader Zaharan Hashim

Make no mistake: The Sri Lanka attacks hold major implications for Indian security, in part because the main group behind the bombings, the National Thowheed Jamat (NTJ), is an ideological offspring of the rapidly growing, Saudi-funded Tamil Nadu Thowheed Jamat (TNTJ). The TNTJ, wedded to fanatical Wahhabism, rails against idolaters. It helped establish the Sri Lanka Thowheed Jamat, from which the bomber outfit NTJ emerged as a splinter.

Like the 2016 brutal Dhaka café attack, the Sri Lanka slaughter was carried out by educated Islamists from well-off families. And just as Bangladesh blamed Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) for the attack, the NTJ has ties with ISI’s front organization, Lashkar-e-Taiba, which, through its Sri Lanka operations, has sought links with the TNTJ in India. NTJ leader Zaharan Hashim was inspired by fugitive Indian preacher Zakir Naik’s sermons and received funds from Indian jihadists. It would be paradoxical if India, which tipped off Sri Lanka about the bombing plot, became a victim itself of Thowheed Jamat terror. First of all, it must outlaw the TNTJ.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist.

© The Hindustan Times, 2019.

India’s elusive deterrence against Pakistani terror

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In seeking to demonstrate resolve and strengthen deterrence, India ended up snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

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Brahma Chellaney, The Hindustan Times

Deterrence theorists have long underscored that a deterrent’s credibility is in the eye of the beholder — namely, is the target of deterrence (the potential aggressor) sufficiently convinced that the other side has both the capability and the will to act so as to make aggression not worth the risk? Whether a foe is deterred is thus a function of its understanding of the deterrer’s strengths and intentions.

Pakistan has waged a protracted proxy war by terror against the much-stronger India since the 1980s because it has repeatedly tested the will of successive Indian governments and found it wanting. No prime minister after Indira Gandhi has been willing to impose sufficient costs on Pakistan to dissuade it from continuing to inflict upon India death by a thousand cuts.

The February 26 Balakot airstrike was a potential game-changer. It revived bitter Pakistani memories of the 2011 US raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Even before India said a word, Pakistan admitted Indian warplanes struck at Balakot without being interdicted or challenged. That India struck a target in the Pakistani heartland with impunity was momentous. The extent of damage or the death toll was immaterial. However, boastful toll-related claims, starting with the foreign secretary’s statement that “a very large number” of terrorists were “eliminated”, generated partisan controversy that undercut the chilling message that the Indian Air Force (IAF) delivered to Pakistan’s terror masters — the military generals.

Worse still, India has allowed a defining moment to slip away by failing to retaliate against Pakistan’s aerial blitz. Pakistan’s military regards its terrorist surrogates as de facto special operations forces, employing them cost-effectively as a force multiplier against India. So, India’s contention that it struck a “non-military” target at Balakot did not wash with the Pakistani generals, who responded barely 30 hours later with a daring, daytime aerial onslaught, in which India lost a MiG-21 — and, in perhaps friendly fire, a Mi-17 helicopter.

Voltairenet-org_-_1-657-2fc4aThe F-16 downing issue has not only detracted from Balakot’s main message but also obscured the absence of Indian retribution for the Pakistani blitz. The IAF is sure its MiG-21 shot down an attacking F-16. What is remarkable is that a short, sketchy April 4 US news report, which quoted anonymous sources to claim a US inventory probe found none of Pakistan’s F-16s missing, attracted front-page Indian press coverage and was quickly seized upon by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s critics at home and abroad — until the Pentagon said “we weren’t aware of any investigation like that”.

The intruding Pakistani warplanes brazenly tried to bomb Indian military sites. Although “no significant” damage was caused, according to the Indian military, Pakistan’s trans-border targeting of army formations opened a long-sought opportunity for the Indian armed forces to wreak massive punishment. Underscoring this opportunity is the fact that a near-bankrupt Pakistan cannot afford a military conflict. Indeed, such is Pakistan’s vulnerability to a punitive attack that, as this newspaper reported, only one Pakistani submarine currently is operational — that too partially.

Yet, India’s political leadership held back the armed forces from retaliating. New Delhi chose to defer to Washington’s assurances on Pakistan. Consequently, it was US President Donald Trump who signalled de-escalation, saying the tensions were “going to be coming to an end”. Hours after Trump’s announcement, an overcautious India finally allowed its armed forces to brief the media. But by then, parts of Pakistani propaganda had already taken hold internationally.

Modi has oddly relied on the ministry of external affairs to issue statements about a military crisis. Naturally, MEA has been out of its depth in that role, as was illustrated during the Doklam crisis, when India had no answer to China’s full-throttle information warfare. In the Balakot saga, MEA’s tardy, unforthcoming briefings ceded perception management to a mendacious Pakistani military, whose claim of downing two Indian warplanes dominated international news for days. Indeed, MEA’s February 26 statement inexcusably failed to identify where Balakot is located. This led the international media to wrongly assume it is in Pakistan-held Jammu and Kashmir and to spotlight the Kashmir dispute.

Despite Modi letting go the opportunity to wreak vengeance on Pakistan, the threshold-breaching Balakot strike after years of Indian inaction has helped sharpen his strong-leader image at election time. Pakistan, however, still fears Indian reprisals to its blitz, which explains why its airspace remains closed to most commercial overflights. It has reopened just one of its 11 airways for flights between Asia and Europe — that too a marginal route over Balochistan to Iran.

Meanwhile, international pressure on Pakistan to take verifiable actions to root out terrorist groups has started easing. The US lists North Korea, Iran, Sudan and Syria as “state sponsors of terrorism” but not the main sponsors — Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Its latest action in designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as “terrorist” but not the biggest terror-exporting force — Pakistan’s military — highlights the increasing politicization of the war on terror.

India, alas, has yet to build a reputation for resolve, which, as the social scientist and Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling wrote, is a prerequisite for deterrence. All the weapons India is frenetically importing can offer no effective deterrence in the absence of political will. India failed to capitalize on the Balakot strike to compel the Pakistani generals to start cleaning up their terror act. Far from imposing deterrent costs to prevent further terrorist attacks, India reinforced the Pakistani generals’ belief that its bark is worse than its bite. This is why the present lull is likely to prove only an interlude.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist.

© The Hindustan Times, 2019.

Global Silence on China’s Gulag

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Brahma Chellaney, an internationally syndicated column from Project Syndicate

In the absence of international censure, China has stepped up its systematic persecution of Muslims, under the dubious pretense that it is fighting “terrorism” and protecting its economic interests. But more than just an attack on human rights, the crackdown is representative of President Xi Jinping’s totalitarian ambitions.

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For more than two years, China has waged a campaign of unparalleled repression against its Islamic minorities, incarcerating an estimated one-sixth of the adult Muslim population of the Xinjiang region at one point or another. Yet, with the exception of a recent tweet from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling on China to “end its repression,” the international community has remained largely mute.

In its reliance on mass detention, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has followed the Soviet Union’s example. But China’s concentration camps and detention centers are far larger and more technologically advanced than their Soviet precursors; and their purpose is to indoctrinate not just political dissidents, but an entire community of faith.

Although independent researchers and human-rights groups have raised awareness of practices such as force-feeding Muslims alcohol and pork, the Chinese authorities have been able to continue their assault on Islam with impunity. Even as China’s security agencies pursue Uighurs and other Muslims as far afield as Turkey, Chinese leaders and companies involved in the persecution have not faced international sanctions or incurred any other costs.

Chief among the culprits, of course, is Chinese President Xi Jinping, who in 2014 ordered the policy change that set the stage for today’s repression of ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Hui, and other Muslim groups. The forcible assimilation of Muslims into the country’s dominant Han culture is apparently a cornerstone of Xiism – or “Xi Jinping Thought” – the grand “ism” that Xi has introduced to overshadow the influence of Marxism and Maoism in China.

To oversee this large-scale deprogramming of Islamic identities, Xi, who has amassed more power than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, reassigned the notorious CPC enforcer Chen Quanguo from Tibet to Xinjiang and elevated him to the all-powerful Politburo. Though Chen’s record of overseeing human-rights abuses is well known, the Trump administration has yet to act on a bipartisan commission’s 2018 recommendation that he and other Chinese officials managing the gulag policy be sanctioned. In general, financial and trade interests, not to mention the threat of Chinese retribution, have deterred most countries from condemning China’s anti-Muslim policies.

With the exception of Turkey, even predominantly Muslim countries that were quick to condemn Myanmar for its treatment of Rohingya Muslims have remained conspicuously silent on China. While Pakistan’s military-backed prime minister, Imran Khan, has feigned ignorance about the Xinjiang crackdown, Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has gone so far as to defend China’s right to police “terrorism.”

Emboldened by the muted international response, China has stepped up its drive to Sinicize Xinjiang by demolishing Muslim neighborhoods. In Urumqi and other cities, once-bustling Uighur districts have been replaced with heavily policed zones purged of Islamic culture.

9099340c-dd10-4392-80c6-8d7a1f90175eThe irony is that while China justifies its “reeducation hospitals” as necessary to cleanse Muslim minds at home of extremist thoughts, it is effectively supporting Islamist terrorism abroad. For example, China has repeatedly blocked UN sanctions against Masood Azhar, the head of the Pakistan-based, UN-designated terrorist group responsible for carrying out serial attacks in India, including on Parliament and, most recently, on a paramilitary police convoy. As Pompeo tweeted, “The world cannot afford China’s shameful hypocrisy toward Muslims. On one hand, China abuses more than a million Muslims at home, but on the other it protects violent Islamic terrorist groups from sanctions at the UN.”

An added irony is that while China still harps on its “century of humiliation” at the hands of foreign imperial powers, it has for decades presided over the mass humiliation of minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet. Ominously, by systematically degrading Muslim populations, it could be inspiring white supremacists and other Islamaphobes around the world. For example, the Australian extremist arrested for the recent twin mosque massacres in Christchurch, New Zealand, declared an affinity for China’s political and social values.

There has been a good deal of reporting about how China has turned Xinjiang into a laboratory for Xi’s Orwellian surveillance ambitions. Less known is how Xi’s trillion-dollar “Belt and Road Initiative” is being used as a catalyst for the crackdown. According to Chinese authorities, the establishment of a surveillance state is necessary to prevent unrest in the province at the heart of the BRI’s overland route.

Like Marxism-Leninism, Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism, which left millions of people dead, Xiism promises to impose significant long-term costs on untold numbers of innocent people. It is the impetus behind China’s ruthless targeting of minority cultures and communities, as well as its aggressive expansion into international waters and introduction of digital totalitarianism.

Thanks to Xiism, the world’s largest, strongest, and oldest autocracy finds itself at a crossroads. As the People’s Republic of China approaches its 70th birthday, its economy is slowing amid escalating capital flight, trade disruptions, and the emigration of wealthy Chinese. The Chinese technology champion Huawei’s international travails augur difficult times ahead.

The last thing China needs right now is more enemies. Yet Xi has used his unbridled power to expand China’s global footprint and lay bare his imperial ambitions. His repression of Muslim minorities may or may not lead to international action against China. But it will almost certainly spawn a new generation of Islamist terrorists, compounding China’s internal-security challenges. China’s domestic security budget is already larger than its bloated defense budget, which makes it second only to the United States in terms of military spending. The Soviet Union once held the same position – until it collapsed.

© Project Syndicate, 2019.

The looming specter of Asian space wars

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The Indian test is clearly a warning shot across China’s bow. (Handout photo from India’s Press Information Bureau.)

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asian Review

When China demonstrated its antisatellite weapon capability in 2007, it spurred international concern and criticism over the potential militarization of outer space.

The muted response to a similar Indian test on March 27 shows that great-power capabilities in this field have so advanced that such an event is no longer a surprise. Indeed, the technology has developed to such an extent that defense planners must deal with the looming specter of wars in space.

The linkages between antisatellite, or ASAT, weapon technologies and ballistic missile defense systems, which can shoot down incoming missiles, underscore how innovations favor both offense and defense. Space wars are no longer just Hollywood fiction.

India’s ASAT test is a reminder that the Asia-Pacific region is the hub of the growing space-war capabilities. The United States and Russia field extensive missile defense systems and boast a diverse range of ground-launched and directed-energy ASAT capabilities. China’s ASAT weaponry is becoming more sophisticated, even as it aggressively seeks theater ballistic missile defenses.

Japan and South Korea are working with the U.S. separately to create missile defense systems. Although aimed at thwarting regional threats, these systems are interoperable with American missile defenses. Australia, for its part, participates in trilateral missile-defense consultations with the U.S. and Japan.

Space-based assets are critical not just for communications but also for imagery, navigation, weather forecasting, surveillance, interception, missile guidance and the delivery of precision munitions. Taking out such assets can blind an enemy.

India’s successful “kill” of one of its own satellites with a missile — confirmed by the U.S. Air Force Space Command — has made it the fourth power, after the United States, Russia and China, to shoot down an object in space. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, facing a tight reelection race, made a rare televised address to announce India’s entry into this exclusive club of nuclear-armed countries that can destroy a moving target in space.

India’s technological leap is being seen internationally as a counter to China’s growing ASAT capabilities, which include ground-based direct ascent missiles and lasers, which can blind or disable satellites.

The international development of ASAT capabilities mirrors the nuclear-weapons proliferation chain. Like nuclear weapons, the U.S. was the first to develop satellite-kill technologies, followed by the former Soviet Union. China, as in nuclear weapons, stepped into this realm much later, only to provoke India to follow suit.

The Indian test was clearly a warning shot across China’s bow, although Modi claimed that it was not aimed against any country.

India finds itself boxed in by the deepening China-Pakistan strategic nexus. China has transferred, according to international evidence, technologies for weapons of mass destruction to Pakistan to help tie down India south of the Himalayas. Beijing currently is seeking to shield Pakistan even from international pressure to root out transnational terrorist groups that operate from its territory.

The Indian ASAT demonstration holds strategic implications also for Pakistan, which values nuclear weapons as an antidote to its conventional military inferiority and thus maintains a nuclear first-use doctrine against stronger India. By shielding it from retaliation, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons enable its nurturing of armed jihadists as a force multiplier in its low-intensity proxy war by terror against India.

An ASAT capability, by potentially arming India with the means to shoot down incoming missiles, could erode Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent. After all, an ASAT capability serves as a building block of a ballistic missile defense system.

However, China remains at the center of Indian security concerns. Without developing ASAT weaponry to help underpin deterrence, India risked encouraging China to go after Indian space-based assets early in a conflict.

In today’s world, one side can impose its demands not necessarily by employing force but by building capabilities that can mount a coercive threat.

China’s ASAT capabilities arguably hold the greatest significance for India, which has no security arrangements with another power and thus is on its own. Japan, South Korea and Australia, by contrast, are ensconced under the U.S. security umbrella. The U.S. and Russia, armed to their teeth, can cripple China’s space-based assets if it dared to strike any of their satellites.

India thus had stood out for its lack of a deterrent against China’s ASAT prowess. Against this background, India’s successful “kill” of a satellite is an important milestone in its quest to plug the vulnerability of its space assets.

To be sure, a space war scenario can arise only in a conflict. But preventing war demands systems of deterrence. And the only counter to ASAT weaponry is a capability to pay back in kind.

The rivalry between the demographic titans, China and India, has ominously moved into space.

India, by placing a low-cost spacecraft in orbit around Mars in 2014, won Asia’s race to the Red Planet. And in 2017, India set a world record by launching 104 satellites into orbit with a single rocket. This beat the previous record of 37 satellites that Russia established in 2014.

China, for its part, has sent six crews into space and launched two space labs into the Earth’s orbit. In 2013, it became the third country, after the U.S. and Russia, to land a rover on the moon. And last December, it landed another probe and a rover on the far side of the moon — the first time this had ever been done. Its first mission to Mars is scheduled for next year.

But it is the extension of the China-India space race to the military realm that underscores the Asian specter of space wars. India’s feat in shooting down a satellite orbiting at 30,000 kilometers an hour highlights its determination to catch up with China’s advances.

According to the Pentagon, China, like Russia, has demonstrated offensive space capabilities through “experimental” satellites able to conduct on-orbit activities. China has used a ground-based laser to “paint,” or illuminate, an American satellite, as if to demonstrate a nascent capability to blind targeted satellites.

India’s ASAT test, like the 2007 Chinese satellite “kill” and the 2008 U.S. strike against a malfunctioning satellite, underscores how the environmental degradation haunting our planet is being extended to outer space. The Indian test, according to the U.S., created 270 pieces of debris in space — a number that will likely grow as the fragments decay. But since the remnants are from a low-earth-orbit satellite, many of the pieces are expected to fall onto the Earth within weeks.

The test highlights the international imperative to prevent the weaponization of outer space, including by strengthening the legal framework. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, aimed at establishing basic international space law, does not prohibit the stationing of weapons in space or ASAT tests.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Award.

© Nikkei Asian Review, 2019.