A fundamental shift in the failed U.S. policy approach that has inadvertently turned Pakistan into Ground Zero for global terrorism seems unlikely despite the bin Laden affair.

Brahma Chellaney
The Hindu, May 6, 2011

For the United States, Pakistan poses a particularly difficult challenge. Despite providing more than $20 billion to Pakistan in counterterrorism and other aid since 9/11, the U.S. has received grudging assistance, at best, and duplicitous cooperation, at worst. Today, amid a rising tide of anti-Americanism, U.S. policy on Pakistan is rapidly crumbling. Yet Pakistan, with one of the world’s lowest tax-to-GDP ratios, has become more dependent on U.S. aid than ever.

While Americans rejoice over the daring helicopter assault that killed Osama bin Laden in his hideout in Abbottabad — the cradle of the Pakistan army — U.S. policy must recognize how its failed approach on Pakistan has inadvertently made that country Ground Zero for global terrorism. Rather than helping to build robust civilian institutions there, the U.S. has invested heavily in the jihadist-penetrated Pakistani military establishment. After dictator Pervez Musharraf was driven out of office, the new Pakistani civilian government ordered the ISI — the only spy agency in the world charged with sponsoring international terrorism — to report to the interior ministry, but received no support from the U.S. for this effort to assert civilian control, allowing the army to quickly frustrate the move.

No sooner had U.S. President Barack Obama assumed office than he implemented a military surge in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, however, he implemented an aid surge, turning it into the largest recipient of American aid. This only deepened U.S. involvement in the wrong war and emboldened Pakistan to fatten the Afghan Taliban, even as sustained U.S. drone and other attacks in Waziristan continued to severely weaken the already-fragmented Al Qaeda.

Make no mistake: the scourge of Pakistani terrorism emanates more from the country’s Scotch whisky-sipping generals than from the bead-rubbing mullahs. It is the self-styled secular generals who have reared the forces of jihad. Yet, by passing the blame for their ongoing terrorist-proxy policy to their mullah puppets, the generals made many in the U.S. believe that the key was to contain the religious fringe, not the puppeteers. In fact, Pakistan’s descent into a jihadist dungeon occurred not under civilian rule, but under two military dictators — Zia ul-Haq who nurtured and let loose jihadist forces, and Musharraf who took his country to the very edge of the precipice.

The bin Laden affair spotlights a fundamental reality — the fight against international terrorism cannot be won without demilitarizing and de-radicalizing Pakistan, including rebalancing civil-military relations there. Without reform of the Pakistani army and the ISI, there can be no end to transnational terrorism — and no genuine nation-building in Pakistan. How can Pakistan be a “normal” state if its army and intelligence agency remain outside civilian oversight and decisive power remains with military generals?

According to classified U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari told U.S. Vice President Joe Biden of his fear that the Pakistani military might “take me out.” And the United Arab Emirates’ foreign minister told U.S. special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke in early 2010 that Zardari had asked “that his family be allowed to live in the UAE in the event of his death.” In such a deviant setting, the risks that jihadists within the military could gain control of Pakistan’s arsenal of nuclear and biological weapons are real.

History attests that decisive opportunities rarely repeat themselves. The U.S. let go of one historic opportunity to help bring the ISI under civilian oversight in July 2008 when, in the aftermath of a dictator’s ouster by people’s power, it did not back the new government’s decision. Now, with the military establishment’s complicity in sheltering bin Laden laid bare, the U.S. has a chance to force reforms on the defensive Pakistani generals by holding out the threat of punitive sanctions and stepped-up drone strikes.

Yet it is very likely the U.S. will miss this opportunity too. After all, what is logical may not be practical at the altar of political expediency.

The U.S. has long been aware of Pakistan’s Janus-faced approach to fighting terrorism, and the discovery of bin Laden’s years-long residence in the shadow of Pakistan’s premier military academy has given Washington fresh evidence of Pakistani duplicity and aroused its anger but without affecting the fundamentals of U.S. policy. That the U.S. has little trust in the Pakistani army and ISI became evident when it deployed a number of CIA operatives, Special Operations forces and contractors deep inside Pakistan without the knowledge of Pakistani authorities — a deployment that triggered the showdown over Raymond Davis but helped open the trail to bin Laden. Indeed, in a damning statement, the CIA director said the Pakistanis were given no advance knowledge of the raid because they might have tipped bin Laden off.

Washington has enough evidence of the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and the cosy relationship between state and non-state actors there. The problem is that U.S. policy continues to be driven by short-term regional interests, in which Pakistan remains central to facilitating a U.S. military exit from Afghanistan, shaping the post-2014 Afghan political landscape, and aiding U.S. squeeze of Iran. In fact, Obama’s narrowing of the Afghan war goals has made the U.S. only more dependent on Pakistan.

By moving away from the Bush-era counterinsurgency strategy toward limited objectives centred on political reconciliation with the Afghan Taliban and ending all combat operations by 2014, Obama now needs the Pakistani generals to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table. After all, these generals provide a haven to the top Afghan Taliban leadership, besides allowing Taliban fighters to use Pakistan as a sanctuary from which to launch cross-border attacks. A face-saving U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is simply inconceivable without Pakistani cooperation.

After bin Laden’s elimination, pressure is already growing on the U.S. and its NATO allies for a quicker withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, making the Pakistani generals an even more critical factor in facilitating America’s reconciling with the Taliban. Although the Taliban was ISI procreation, its birth in the early 1990s was midwifed by the CIA. This is the reason why Washington fervently believes reconciliation with an estranged ex-ally is possible. And this is also the reason why — despite its main foe on the Afghan battlefield being the Taliban, not Al Qaeda — the U.S. military never attempted to wipe out the Quetta shura, eschewing any drone or commando strikes to decapitate the Afghan Taliban.

Significantly, just two-and-a-half months ago, the U.S. publicly eased its terms for reconciliation with the Taliban shura, dropping three key preconditions — renounce violence, embrace the Afghan Constitution, and snap links with al-Qaeda. What were preconditions were turned into “necessary outcomes of any negotiation.” The U.S. National Security Council then formally endorsed the new reconciliation strategy, which offers the Taliban power sharing in Afghanistan. No less significant is that America’s new Af-Pak envoy, Marc Grossman — despite the U.S. outrage over the bin Laden affair — travelled to Islamabad this week and reached agreement to set up a U.S.-Pakistani-Afghan “core group for promoting and facilitating the process of reconciliation and peace in Afghanistan.”

Obama actually believes that bin Laden’s killing serves as a potential catalyst to soften the Pakistani generals and the Taliban shura so as to clinch a peace deal, besides providing an opportunity to quickly conclude a post-2014 Permanent U.S. Bases Agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Obama indeed is set to announce a substantial reduction in U.S. forces starting this summer.

In this light, far from unravelling the remaining threads in the strained U.S.-Pakistan relationship, the bin Laden affair is likely to prove a temporary setback, even if a serious one. Some heads in the Pakistani military establishment may roll to placate Washington, with the blame being conveniently put (as in the past) on rogue elements within what itself is a rogue agency — the ISI. Washington may brandish new sticks, but carrots would still weigh more, with U.S. policy doling out further multibillion-dollar awards to Islamabad. British Prime Minister David Cameron has candidly said that it is “in our national interest” not to have “a flaming great row with Pakistan over this” but rather to “engage with Pakistan.” And Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser has pledged that Pakistan will remain a critical partner in the U.S. counterterrorism strategy.

Narrow geopolitical interests thus are likely to trump the imperative for externally supported Pakistani reforms to help cut the ISI down to size, loosen the military’s vice-like grip on power, rein in militant Islamist groups, and build a moderate, stable Pakistan.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of Asian Juggernaut (Harper Paperbacks, New York) and Water: Asia’s New Battlefield (Georgetown University Press, forthcoming).

(c) The Hindu, 2011

The Geopolitical Message from Libya

Brahma Chellaney
Column internationally syndicated by Project Syndicate

Will “mission creep” in the West’s intervention in Libya end up creating, inadvertently, a jihadist citadel at Europe’s southern doorstep?

Of course, the Western powers must be applauded for their efforts, with the support of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, to prevent a slaughter of Libya’s civilian population. The democratic world should never stand by idly while a tyrant uses military force to massacre civilians. But, if despots are to be deterred from untrammeled repression, any intervention — whether military or in the form of economic and diplomatic sanctions — must meet the test of impartiality.

The current political upheaval in the Arab world could transform the Middle East and North Africa in the same way that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 fundamentally changed Europe. Indeed, 1989 was a watershed, producing the most profound global geopolitical changes in the most compressed timeframe in history. But, in the decades since, the Arab world’s rulers, regimes, and practices seemed to have remained firmly entrenched.

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama claimed in a famous essay that the Cold War’s end marked the end of ideological evolution, “the end of history,” with the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Yet, two decades on, the global spread of democracy has been encountering increasingly strong headwinds. Only a small minority of states in Asia, for example, are true democracies.

In fact, a new bipolar, Cold War-style ideological divide has emerged. The rise of authoritarian capitalism — best symbolized by China, but also embraced by countries as disparate as Malaysia, Singapore, Kazakhstan, and Qatar — has created a new model that competes with (and challenges) liberal democracy.

The popular upsurge in the Arab world shows that democratic empowerment hinges on two key internal factors: the role of security forces and the technological sophistication of the state’s repressive capacity. In recent weeks, security forces have shaped developments in different ways in three Arab states.

Yemen’s popular uprising has splintered the security establishment, with different military factions now in charge of different neighborhoods in the capital, Sana. In Bahrain, by contrast, the monarchy has used the foreign Sunni mercenaries that dominate its police force to fire on demonstrators, who are predominantly Shia.

In Egypt, it was the military’s refusal to side with former President Hosni Mubarak that helped end his 30-year dictatorship. Long used to wielding power, the military had become increasingly wary of Mubarak’s efforts to groom his son as his successor. Yet today’s heady talk of freedom cannot obscure the reality that the people’s “revolution” has so far led only to a direct military takeover, with the decades-old emergency law still in force and the country’s political direction uncertain.

As for the second key internal factor, a state’s ability to police mobile and electronic communications and Internet access has become as important as jackboots and truncheons. China, for example, is a model of despotic efficiency: its internal-security system extends from state-of-the-art surveillance and extralegal detention centers to an army of paid informants and neighborhood patrols that look out for troublemakers.

In response to calls by some overseas Chinese for people to gather on Sundays at specific sites in Shanghai and Beijing to help launch a molihua (jasmine) revolution, China has revealed a new strategy: preemptively flood the protest-designated squares with police to leave no room for protesters. More importantly, as the world’s leader in stringent, real-time censorship of electronic communications, China is strongly placed to block any Arab contagion from reaching its shores.

External factors are especially important in smaller, weaker countries. Nothing illustrates this better than Bahrain, where Saudi Arabia — which has contributed more than any other country to the spread of global jihad — sent forces under the Gulf Cooperation Council banner to crush peaceful protests. Indeed, Saudi Arabia’s effort to prop up the Bahraini regime parallels the Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 to bolster a besieged allied regime — an invasion that led to the multibillion-dollar, CIA-scripted arming of Afghan rebels and the consequent rise of transnational Islamic terrorists.

Libya, too, is a weak, divided country. Indeed, with the CIA conducting covert operations inside Libya and aiding the rebels there, the danger is that the West could be creating another jihadist haven. After all, the broadening of the NATO-led mission from a limited, humanitarian goal to an all-out assault on Libya’s military signals to some Arabs that this war is really about ensuring that the region does not slip out of Western control. The intervention has seemingly been driven by a geopolitical imperative to bottle up or eliminate Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi so that his regime cannot exploit the political vacuum in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia.

While it is now clear that much of the Arab world is in transition, the end point is not yet clear. But Barack Obama’s administration apparently has concluded that Arab monarchs are likely to survive, whereas Arab presidents are more likely to fall, and that it is acceptable for the United States to continue to coddle tyrannical kings.

Unfortunately, this double standard sends a message that democratic empowerment in any society is possible only if it is in the interest of the great powers. No one has a greater interest in broad acceptance of this noxious idea — that promotion of human freedom is nothing more than a geopolitical tool — than the world’s largest, oldest, and most powerful autocracy, China.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India, and Japan (Harper Paperbacks, 2010) and Water: Asia’s New Battlefield (Georgetown University Press, 2011).

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.

Saving civilians: Murky geopolitics

The mission creep in the Western military intervention in Libya shows how narrow geopolitical interests, even at the risk of creating another Iraq or Afghanistan, are driving a professed humanitarian campaign.

Brahma Chellaney
The Hindu, April 6, 2011

From initially seeking to protect civilians to now aiming for a swift, total victory in Libya, the mission creep that has characterized the Western powers’ military attack raises troubling questions about their Libyan strategy and the risk that it could end up creating a jihadist citadel at Europe’s southern doorstep. After having tacitly encouraged and endorsed the Saudi military intervention in Bahrain to crush peaceful protests against a totalitarian monarchy, the military intervention in a tribally divided Libya indeed has helped highlight a selective approach to the promotion of freedom and the protection of civilians — an approach reinforced by these powers’ continuing support to other Western-backed Arab regimes that have employed disproportionate force to quell popular uprisings or unrest.

Ivory Coast — where rampant abuses and widespread killings have led about one million residents to flee Abidjan city alone — was clearly a more pressing case for international intervention than Libya, given strongman Laurent Gbagbo’s months-old defiance of the United Nations writ. But because Ivory Coast lacks strategic importance or oil, the exodus of Ivorians to Liberia and the influx of Liberian mercenaries continued unchecked, triggering civilian massacres.

The political upheaval in the Arab world is tectonic in nature, with the potential to transform the Middle East and North Africa in the same way as the 1989 Berlin Wall’s fall fundamentally changed Europe. Indeed, 1989 was a watershed, producing the most-profound global geopolitical changes in the most compressed timeframe in history. But the Arab world, with the same regimes and practices firmly entrenched for decades, had escaped change. Now, the tumult represents a belated reaction — a yearning for change that signals a grassroots democratic awakening.

But will this awakening lead to democratic empowerment of the masses? After all, there is a wide gulf between democratic awakening and democratic empowerment. The air of expectancy in the Arab world today parallels the new hope that emerged in the East bloc in 1989. Yet history rarely moves in a linear or predictable fashion. While it is now clear that much of the Arab world is in transition, the end point is not yet clear.

In 1989, an American scholar, Francis Fukuyama, smugly claimed in a famous essay that the Cold War’s end marked the end of ideological evolution, “the end of history,” with the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Yet two decades after the Cold War’s end, the global spread of democracy is still encountering strong headwinds.

Latest developments indeed are a reminder that democratic empowerment hinges on complex factors in any society — both endogenous and exogenous. Internally, two factors usually hold the key: the role of security forces, and the technological sophistication of an autocracy’s repressive capacity.

In recent weeks, security forces have helped shape developments in different ways in three Arab states. While the popular uprising in Yemen has splintered the security establishment there, with different military factions now in charge of different neighbourhoods in the capital Sanaa and the United States seeking to replace the Yemeni president with his No. 2, the Bahraini monarchy has employed foreign Sunni mercenaries that dominate its police force to fire on the predominantly Shiite demonstrators.

In Egypt, it was the military’s refusal to side with Hosni Mubarak that helped end that ex-air force commander’s three-decade-long dictatorial rule. The military, long part of the political power structure, had become increasingly wary of Mubarak’s efforts to groom his son as his successor. Today, the heady talk of freedom cannot obscure the reality that the people’s revolution in Egypt thus far has spawned only a direct military takeover, with the 30-year emergency law still in force and the country’s political direction uncertain. Although the ruling military council has scheduled parliamentary elections in September, the fact is that in no country has the military voluntarily ceded power without mass protests or other pressures.

As for the second key internal factor, an autocracy’s ability to police cellphone calls, electronic communications and Internet access has become as important as jackboots and truncheons. The use of social networking sites and instant messaging to organize mass protests has made a nation’s capability to enforce stringent, real-time censorship of electronic communications critical.

External factors are especially important in small or internally weak countries. The House of Saud sent forces into Bahrain under the Gulf Cooperation Council banner to crush peaceful protests, yet it is civil war-torn Libya that became the target of a Western military attack. The blunt fact is that no nation has contributed more to the spread of global jihad than Saudi Arabia. Indeed, this terror-bankrolling state’s military intervention to prop up the Bahraini regime parallels the 1979 Soviet intervention to bolster a besieged Afghan regime in Kabul — an invasion that led to the multibillion-dollar, CIA-sponsored arming of Afghan rebels and the consequent rise of transnational Islamic terrorists, including Al Qaeda.

Yet today, with the CIA conducting covert operations inside Libya and aiding rebels, Washington is in danger of coming full circle, having failed to learn from past mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq, where quick initial military victories proved deceptive.

The broadening of the Libya intervention from a limited, humanitarian mission to an all-out assault on the Libyan military suggests that this war is really about ensuring that the Arab world does not slip out of Western control. The intervention has seemingly been driven by a cold geopolitical calculation: to bottle up or eliminate Muammar Qaddafi so that his regime doesn’t exploit the political vacuum in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia. Yet few have examined the costs that democracies are being made to pay — in the form of rising Islamic extremism and terrorism — for the overpowering U.S. intent to have only puppet Arab regimes, an objective that has fostered an alliance with inimical Wahhabi forces.

At a time when America needs comprehensive domestic renewal, it has slid — under a president who won a Nobel peace prize in his first year in office — into a third war when the other two wars already carry an aggregate $150-billion annual price tag. A quick military victory in Libya is what Barack Obama badly needs to reverse his declining popularity at home and win re-election.

But even if the Qaddafi regime collapses quickly under the mounting military attacks, recreating a unified, stable Libya free of Islamist groups may prove difficult. Saddam Hussein’s ouster by the invading U.S. forces did not secure the desired political objectives; rather a once-stable, secular Iraq has been destabilized, radicalized and effectively partitioned. With Libya set to become Obama’s Iraq, a plausible scenario there is a protracted stalemate, coupled with a tribally partitioned country.

The paradox is that while aiding Libyan contras even at the risk of creating another Afghanistan, the U.S. is desperately seeking a deal with medieval forces — the Taliban — to stave off certain defeat in the decade-long Afghan war. U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates recently rebuked allies for effectively abandoning the Afghan war. Why blame allies when the U.S. itself has abandoned the goal of victory and now seeks only a face-saving exit? And even as the U.S. fires hundreds of missiles at Libyan targets, its policy on Pakistan — the main sanctuary for transnational terrorists — is crumbling, with Washington clueless on how to stem the rising tide of anti-Americanism in a country that is now its largest aid recipient.

Still, with popular revolts sweeping much of the Arab world, the White House has concluded that Arab monarchs are likely to survive, whereas Arab presidents are more likely to fall, and that it is acceptable for the U.S. to continue to coddle tyrannical kings. The effort to draw specious distinctions between “good” or valuable despots and “bad” or discardable despots is redolent of the manner in which the arming of “good” contras has exacted heavy international costs.

If tyrants are to be stopped from unleashing untrammelled repression, any international intervention — whether military in nature or in the form of economic and diplomatic sanctions — must meet the test of impartiality.

The resort to different standards and practices in the name of promoting human freedom, unfortunately, sends the message that any society’s democratic empowerment is possible only if it jibes with the great powers’ geopolitical interest. The fundamental issue is whether there should be a rules-based international order or an order pivoted on military might and driven by narrow, politically expedient interests of the most powerful.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of Asian Juggernaut (Harper Paperbacks) and Water: Asia’s New Battlefield (Georgetown University Press, forthcoming).

UNIVERSAL VALUES DO MATTER

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
The Japan Times
January 26, 2011

With a Nobel Peace Prize to his credit, U.S. President Barack Obama was widely expected to advance universal values. Yet he has signaled that promotion of human rights is a tool to be used only against the small kids on the global block who hold no major economic benefits for the United States — the Burmas and the Belaruses.

In relation to the world’s largest and oldest autocracy, China — which has intensified its crackdown on democracy activists, Internet freedom and ethnic minorities — Obama has only compounded the mistake of his secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who in 2009 said that the U.S. will not let the human-rights issue “interfere” with closer Sino-American relations.

Chinese President Hu Jintao’s just-concluded U.S. tour was noteworthy not for his grudging admission that his country has a subpar human-rights record, with China’s state-run media promptly expurgating his comment that “a lot still needs to be done in China in terms of human rights.” Rather the visit was notable for the manner Obama bent over backward at the joint news conference with Hu to virtually rationalize China’s human-rights abuses.

Asked by a questioner to explain “how the U.S. can be so allied with a country that is known for treating its people so poorly [and] for using censorship and force to repress its people,” Obama replied that “China has a different political system than we do”; that “China is at a different stage of development than we are”; and that “there has been an evolution in China over the last 30 years” and “my expectation is that 30 years from now we will have seen further evolution and further change.”

In truth, Obama followed in the footsteps of Hillary Clinton by publicly downgrading human rights in America’s China policy, contending that differences over “the universality of certain rights” will not come in the way of better relations with China because “part of human rights is people being able to make a living and having enough to eat and having shelter and having electricity.”

Although citizens in China now enjoy property rights, freedom to travel overseas and other rights that were unthinkable a generation ago, some things have changed for the worse, such as the greater repression in Tibet and Xinjiang, more-sophisticated information control and online censorship, and whipping up of virulent nationalism as the legitimating credo of communist rule. Yet Obama affirms that China is moving in the right direction and wants its suppressed citizens to patiently wait 30 years for further change.

The proffered rationalizations for repression, including earlier stage of development and the importance of alleviating poverty, beg the question: Why the macho approach, for example, against impoverished Burma, which, unlike China, has no record of routine executions, or employing gulag labor to make goods for export, or dispatching convicts as laborers on overseas projects?

During his recent Asian tour, Obama attacked Burma three times while in India, and then in Indonesia sung a line opposite to the one he intoned in Hu’s presence: “Prosperity without freedom is just another form of poverty.”

If Tunisia’s popular uprising holds a broader message, it is that U.S.-backed despots in the Arab world have created pressure-cooker societies, where the pent-up anger takes the form of fundamentalism, extremism and even terrorist violence. What Arab nations need is a safety valve — true democratic participation that would empower the masses and decide issues at the ballot box.

Yet narrow geopolitical interests crimp U.S. ability to promote democratic empowerment in the Arab world. A quiet cold war that pits the U.S., Israel and the Sunni oil sheikdoms against Iran, Syria and their allies, Hamas and Hezbollah, ostensibly validates Washington’s cozy relationships with despotic Sunni Arab regimes, including a jihad-bankrolling Saudi Arabia.

With Washington reluctant to push powerful Russia on human rights, the weight of democracy sanctions or pressures falls on the small, economically vulnerable states. Because such actions bring no economic pain in the form of job losses in the West or higher oil prices, the Cubas and Zimbabwes of the world have become the kickable “Chinas.”

But this raises a larger question: Can promotion of human freedom and the rule of law become a geopolitical tool wielded only against the weak and the marginalized? When the small, poor states fall victim, the world tends to turn a blind eye to even genocide. As the cases of Burundi and Rwanda showed, the world did nothing to stop genocidal killings there.

Obama’s leniency toward the big human-rights abusers overlooks an important connection between their internal and external policies. How China, for example, treats its citizens has an important bearing on the way it treats neighbors and other states. Freed from real pressure to adhere to universal values, any powerful autocracy will be less willing to play by the rules on trade, resource, security, currency and other issues. If anything, this opens up space for it to subtly help shape new international rules in the years ahead.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of “Asian Juggernaut” (HarperCollins USA, 2010).

Economía y cooperación > Brahma Chellaney: «El nuevo papel de India en el mundo es el de puente entre Oriente y Occidente»
Brahma Chellaney: «El nuevo papel de India en el mundo es el de puente entre Oriente y Occidente»

02/02/2011

Casa Asia ha organizado la conferencia «El papel de la India en el nuevo orden mundial», con la que el profesor Brahma Chellaney ha inaugurado el ciclo dedicado a la India que ha organizado la institución junto con la Fundación Areces. La ponencia del profesor de estudios estratégicos del Centro de Investigación Política de Nueva Delhi ha proporcionado las claves para entender el papel de su país como potencia emergente en el nuevo orden mundial, en el que destaca el auge económico de Asia en el contexto internacional.

En su nueva faceta como potencia emergente, India ha demostrado que posee tres fuerzas y tres debilidades. Las fuerzas se resumen en el papel de India como puente en el diálogo político internacional (lo que hoy es de una importancia vital, como es en el caso de la lucha contra el cambio climático); la unidad de la diversidad y la capacidad para beneficiarse de ella y, finalmente, la modernización de la democracia por la que ha pasado India en los últimos tiempos (hecho que se contrapone a otros países emergentes, como China).

En cuanto a las debilidades, Brahma Chellaney se ha referido a su situación geoestratégica y sus «difíciles vecinos, que no respetan las normas internacionales» (India se encuentra entre países y zonas en conflicto como Pakistán, Irak, Birmania o Bangladesh): «La paradoja de la proximidad es tal que India tiene mejores relaciones con Estados Unidos o con la Unión Europea que con sus vecinos», ha afirmado. Este hecho tiene como consecuencia una segunda debilidad: el efecto de «derrame» que tiene estar en esta zona de conflicto, por lo que se ha encontrado en el ojo del huracán del terrorismo, por ejemplo. Finalmente, una tercera debilidad han sido sus numerosos gobiernos de coalición y los problemas de gobernabilidad que éstos han provocado.

Pese o gracias a estas debilidades y fuerzas, este país ve hoy en día cómo hay diversos factores que afectan a su perfil internacional: el más importante, su crecimiento económico, que hace que sea necesario, según Chellaney, una reestructuración de las instituciones internacionales. La India ha pasado de ser un país no alienado a «multialienado».

El resurgimiento de Asia en el mundo deja vislumbrar los retos a los que se enfrenta en cuanto a seguridad, desarrollo y recursos (sobre todo agua y energía). En este contexto, la India ve, además de los retos, las oportunidades, sobre todo como puente entre Oriente y Occidente, entre el mundo desarrollado y el mundo en vías de desarrollo. «En estos días en que el mundo redefine su momento histórico, la estabilidad en la India y en Asia es básica para garantizar la seguridad internacional. Es ahí donde India puede dejar claro su nuevo papel como puente», concluyó el que está considerado internacionalmente como uno de los principales intelectuales políticos de India.

Otros enlaces
Conferència: “El paper de l’Índia en el nou ordre mundial”

– En los medios