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The elephant in the India-China theater

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Three's A Crowd In The India-China Theater
 
By Brahma Chellaney 

FAR EASTERN ECONOMIC REVIEW (November 2009)

The renewed Sino-Indian border tensions arising from growing Chinese assertiveness raise an oft-asked question: What has prompted Beijing to up the ante against New Delhi? Until mid-2005, China was eschewing anti-India rhetoric and pursuing a policy of active engagement with India, even as it continued to expand its strategic space in southern Asia, to India’s detriment. In fact, when Premier Wen Jiabao visited New Delhi in April 2005, the two countries unveiled an important agreement identifying six broad principles to govern a settlement of the long-festering Himalayan frontier dispute that predates their 32-day bloody war in 1962.

But by late 2005, the mood in Beijing had noticeably changed. That, in turn, gave rise to a nationalistic streak: Chinese newspapers, individual bloggers, security think-tanks and officially-blessed websites ratcheting up an "India threat" scenario. By early 2006, some Chinese strategic journals and pro-Beijing Hong Kong newspapers like Ming Pao had begun publishing commentaries about a "partial border war" to "teach India" a 1962-style lesson. And in the fall of 2006, Beijing publicly raked up an issue that had remained dormant since the 1962 war—Arunachal Pradesh, India’s remote northeastern state that China claims largely as its own on the basis of putative historical ties with Tibet. In fact, the Chinese practice of describing Arunachal, with 1.3 million residents, as "southern Tibet" started only in 2006.

The following year, Beijing repudiated the most important principle it had agreed to during Mr. Wen’s 2005 visit—"in reaching a boundary settlement, the two sides shall safeguard due interests of their settled populations in the border areas." Since then, China has stepped up military pressure along the Himalayas through cross-frontier incursions and border provocations. New Delhi has been compelled to urgently enhance Indian defenses, including the deployment of new forces and a crash program to improve logistics.

Ominously, commentaries in the official Chinese media now echo the coarse anti-India rhetoric of the Mao era. The People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper, berated India in an Oct. 14, 2009 editorial for its "recklessness and arrogance" and for seeking "hegemony." Even Chinese government statements on India have taken a harsher, more strident tone; the foreign ministry has begun using language such as "we demand" and labeling the Indian prime minister’s recent Arunachal visit a "disturbance."

What happened in the months after Mr. Wen’s visit to prompt such a change of heart? The only major development in that period was the new U.S.-India strategic tie-up, as defined by the defense-framework accord and nuclear deal, but a U.S.-India military alliance has always been a strategic nightmare for the Chinese. Thus, the ballyhooed global strategic partnership triggered alarm bells in Beijing. Today, the relationship between the two Asian powers has deteriorated to the extent that trading verbal blows has become common.

Did Delhi help create the context, however inadvertently, for the new Chinese aggressiveness? In June 2005, India agreed to participate in U.S.-led "multinational operations," to share intelligence and to build military-to-military interoperability, all key elements of the June 2005 defense-framework accord. Delhi also pledged to become Washington’s partner on a new "Global Democracy Initiative," a commitment found in the July 2005 nuclear agreement-in-principle. While Beijing cannot hold a veto over India’s diplomatic or strategic initiatives, Delhi could have avoided creating an impression that it was being primed as a new junior partner in America’s hub-and-spoke global alliance system.

India—with its hallowed traditions of policy independence—is an unlikely candidate to be a U.S. ally in a patron-client framework. The strategic partnership with the America falls short of a formal military alliance. But the high-pitched rhetoric that accompanied the new partnership represented a tectonic shift in geopolitical alignments, and apparently Chinese policy makers began to believe that India was being groomed as a new Australia to America. This perception was reinforced by subsequent security arrangements, defense transactions and an end-use monitoring agreement. New Delhi failed to foresee that its rush to forge close strategic bonds with Washington could provoke greater Chinese pressure and that the U.S. would be able to offer little comfort to India in such a situation.

First, Beijing calculatingly has sought to badger India on three fronts—border (according to the Indian government, Chinese cross-frontier incursions nearly doubled between 2007 and 2008,  with "no significant increase" in 2009); diplomatic (issuing visas on a separate sheet to residents of the Indian-administered state of Jammu and Kashmir so as to set apart that region from India); and multilateral (launching an international offensive to undercut Indian sovereignty over Arunachal; for example, by successfully blocking the Asian Development Bank from identifying that region as part of India in its latest $1.3 billion credit package). As the resistance to its rule in Tibet has grown since last year, Beijing has sought to present Tibet as a core issue to its sovereignty, just like Taiwan. Tibet now holds as much importance in Chinese policy as Taiwan. In ratcheting up the Arunachal issue with India, Beijing seems to be drawing another analogy: Arunachal is the new Taiwan that must be "reunified" with the Chinese state.

The Dalai Lama has said that Arunachal was never part of Tibet, using this to explain why Arunachal was not included in Tibet in a 1914 agreement that demarcated the borders between the then-independent Tibet and British-ruled India. Beijing does not recognize that agreement because China’s acceptance of the 1914 border would be admission that Tibet was once independent, which would seriously undercut the legitimacy of its control over the increasingly restive region.

Beijing originally fashioned its claim to Arunachal, a territory almost three times larger than Taiwan, as a bargaining chip to compel India to recognize the Chinese occupation of the Aksai Chin, a Switzerland-size plateau once part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Thus, China withdrew from the Arunachal areas it invaded in the 1962 war but retained its territorial gains in Aksai Chin, which provides the only passageway between its rebellious regions—Tibet and Xinjiang. The late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping put forth a package proposal: New Delhi accept the Chinese control over Aksai Chin and Beijing drop its claim on Arunachal, subject to "minor readjustments" in the line of control.

But as part of its hardening stance toward India, China has dredged up its long-dormant claim to Arunachal. It openly covets Arunachal as a cultural extension to Tibet—a classic attempt at incremental annexation. Because the sixth Dalai Lama was born in the 17th century in Arunachal’s Tawang district, Beijing claims that Arunachal belongs to Tibet and thus is part of China. By the same argument, it can also lay claim to Mongolia, as the fourth Dalai Lama was born there in 1589. The traditional ecclesiastical links between Mongolia and Tibet indeed have been closer than those between Arunachal and Tibet.

What makes China’s claim even more untenable is that it has hived off the birthplaces of the seventh, 10th, 11th and the present 14th Dalai Lamas from Tibet. Before seeking Arunachal, shouldn’t Beijing first return the traditional Tibetan areas of Amdo and eastern Kham to Tibet?

Second, even though the Indo-U.S. strategic tie-up has served as the key instigator of China’s more muscular stance toward India, Washington is more reluctant than ever to take New Delhi’s side in any of its disputes with Beijing. President Barack Obama’s administration—far from supporting New Delhi—has shied away from even cautioning Beijing against any attempt to forcibly change the territorial status quo. Indeed, on a host of issues, from the Dalai Lama to Arunachal, Washington has chosen not to antagonize Beijing.

In effect that has left New Delhi on its own at a time when some in China seem to believe that a swift, 1962-style victory in a border war with India is attainable to help cut a potential peer rival to size and fashion a Sino-centric Asia.  Accusing India of "walking along the old road of resisting China," an article on the Web site of the China Institute of International Strategic Studies—a think tank run by the PLA General Staff Department’s 2nd Department—warned India "not to requite kindness with ingratitude" and not to "misjudge the situation as it did in 1962." As a result of the bellicose rhetoric on India, 90% of respondents in a June 2009 online poll by Global Times—published by the Communist Party’s information department—cited India as the No. 1 threat to China’s security.

India’s current predicament is a far cry from what former U.S. President George W. Bush had touted in his valedictory speech as one of his signal achievements: "We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India." The Obama administration isn’t unfriendly to India. It just doesn’t see India as able to make an important difference to U.S. geopolitical interests. Another factor is that America’s Asia policy is no longer guided by an overarching geopolitical framework.

Whether one agreed with the Bush foreign policy or not, at least its Asia component bore a distinct strategic imprint. By contrast, the best that can be said about Obama’s Asia policy is that it seeks to nurture key bilateral relationships—with China at the core of Washington’s present courtship—and establish, where possible, trilateral relationships. The upshot is that the Obama team has unveiled a new trilateral security-cooperation framework in Asia involving the U.S., China and Japan.

In deference to Chinese sensitivities, however, the Obama administration has so far failed to even acknowledge another trilateral alliance that started under President Bush, involving the U.S., India and Japan. It is as if this concept has fallen out of favor with Washington, just as the broader U.S.-India-Japan-Australia "Quadrilateral Initiative"—founded on the concept of democratic peace—ran aground after the late-2007 election of the Mandarin-speaking Kevin Rudd as the Australian prime minister.

At a time when Asia is in transition, with the specter of power disequilibrium looming large, it has become imperative to invest in institutionalized cooperation and regional integration in order to help underpin long-term power stability. After all, not only is Asia becoming the pivot of global geopolitical change, but Asian challenges are also playing into international strategic challenges. But the Obama administration seems fixated on the very country whose rapidly accumulating power and muscle-flexing threaten Asian stability. The new catchphrase coined by Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg in relation to China, "strategic reassurance," signals an American intent to be more accommodative of China’s ambitions.

China’s primacy in the Obama foreign policy has become unmistakable. Indeed, Obama’s Asia tour is beginning in Japan and ending in China but skipping India entirely. But playing to India’s well-known weakness for flattery, Obama is massaging its ego by honoring it with his presidency’s first state dinner. In fact, such a ritzy event fits well with Washington’s current focus on promoting business interests in India, including big-ticket export items like nuclear reactors and conventional weapons.

Obama is committed to a strategic partnership with India, including developing close military ties. New Delhi has placed arms-purchase orders, according to the Indian ambassador to the U.S., worth a staggering $3.5 billion just last year. But he also has signaled that such a relationship with India will not be at the expense of Washington’s fast-growing ties with Beijing. America needs Chinese capital inflows as much as China needs U.S. consumers—an economic interdependence of such importance it has been compared to mutually assured destruction. Even politically, China, with its permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council and other leverage, counts for more in U.S. policy than India or Japan. As the U.S.-China relationship acquires a wider and deeper base in the coming future, the strains in some of America’s existing military or strategic tie-ups in Asia are likely to become pronounced.

Against this background, it is no surprise that Washington now intends to abjure elements of its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including a joint military drill of any type in Arunachal or a 2007-style naval exercise involving the U.S., India, Australia, Japan and Singapore. Even trilateral U.S. naval maneuvers with India and Japan now are out so as not to raise China’s hackles. In fact, Washington is quietly charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal dispute, just as its ally Australia has done rather publicly.

Despite the Obama administration bending over backward to ease its concerns, Beijing remains suspicious of the likely trajectory of U.S.-India strategic ties, including pre-1962-style CIA meddling in Tibet. This distrust found expression in a recent People’s Daily editorial that accused New Delhi of pursuing a foreign policy of "befriending the far and attacking the near." But the mocking newspaper commentaries on India’s power ambitions indicate that Beijing is also angered by what it sees as its neighbor’s audacity in competing with it.

Left to fend for itself, New Delhi has decided to steer clear of any potential confrontation with Beijing. But while seeking to publicly tamp down military tensions with China, the Indian government—under attack at home for being "soft" on China—has begun asserting itself at the political level. While Obama declined to meet the Dalai Lama during his recent Washington visit, India is allowing the Tibetan leader to go ahead with his scheduled Arunachal tour—a red rag to the Chinese bull. It also has announced an end to the practice of Chinese companies bringing thousands of workers from China to work on projects in India. And in a public riposte to Beijing’s raising of objections to multilateral funding of any project in Arunachal, India has asked China to cease its infrastructure and military projects in another disputed region—Pakistan-held Kashmir.

Diplomatically, however, India cannot afford to be out on a limb. The vaunted Indo-U.S. partnership has turned into an opportunity for Washington to win multibillion-dollar Indian contracts and co-opt India into strategic arrangements, without a concomitant obligation to be on India’s side or to extend political help on regional and international matters. Joint military exercises, for example, have become a basis to make India buy increasing quantities of U.S. arms so as to build compatibility and interoperability between the two militaries. Even counterterrorism is emerging as a major area of defense sales to India.

With Obama pursuing a Beijing-oriented Asia policy, and with China-friendly heads of government ensconced in Australia, Japan and Taiwan, New Delhi’s diplomatic calculations have gone awry. Yet the present muscular Chinese approach paradoxically reinforces the very line of Indian thinking that has engendered Chinese belligerence—that India has little option other than to align with the U.S. Such thinking blithely ignores the limitations of the Indo-U.S. partnership arising from American policy’s vicissitudes and compulsions. Washington is showing through its growing strategic cooperation with China and Pakistan that it does not believe in exclusive strategic partnership in any region.

As was the case before the 1962 war, the China-India-U.S. triangle today is at the center of the Himalayan tensions. The Obama team, however, has yet to propose establishing a trilateral initiative to help contain growing Sino-Indian friction. Having declared that America’s "most important bilateral relationship in the world" is with China, the Obama team must caution Beijing against crossing well-defined red lines or going against the self-touted gospel of its "peaceful rise." The U.S. message should be that any military adventure—far from helping fashion a Sino-centric Asia—would prove very costly and counterproductively trigger the rise of a militaristic, anti-China India.

New Delhi, for its part, has to adroitly manage its relationships with Beijing and Washington in a way that it does not lose out. A stable equation with China is more likely to be realized if India avoids a trans-Himalayan military imbalance, as well as security dependency on the third party that has emerged as the elephant in the India-China theater.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author ofAsian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan, published by HarperCollins, with a new U.S. edition scheduled for release in January.

http://www.feer.com/essays/2009/november51/threes-a-crowd-in-the-india-china-theater

How Asia became important in international relations

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Berlin, Birthplace of Modern Asia

Brahma Chellaney

A column globally syndicated by Project Syndicate

NEW DELHI – By marking the Cold War’s end and the looming collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago transformed global geopolitics. But no continent benefited more than Asia, whose dramatic economic rise since 1989 has occurred at a speed and scale without parallel in world history.

For Asia, the most important consequence of the fall of the Berlin Wall was that the collapse of communism produced a shift from the primacy of military power to economic power in shaping the international order. To be sure, rapid economic growth also occurred during the Industrial Revolution and in the post-WWII period. But in the post-Cold War period, economic growth by itself has contributed to altering global power relations.

Another defining event in 1989 was the Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protestors in Beijing. If not for the Cold War’s end, the West would not have let China off the hook over those killings. Instead, the West adopted a pragmatic approach, shunning trade sanctions and helping to integrate China into the global economy and international institutions through the liberalizing influence of foreign investment and trade. Had the United States and its allies pursued an approach centered on punitive sanctions, as with Cuba and Burma, the result would have been a less prosperous, less open, and potentially destabilizing China.

Indeed, China’s phenomenal economic success – illustrated by its world-beating trade surplus, world’s largest foreign-currency reserves, and highest steel production – owes a lot to the West’s decision not to sustain trade sanctions after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Having vaulted past Germany to become the world’s biggest exporter, China now is set to displace Japan as the world’s second largest economy.

India’s rise as an economic giant is also linked to the post-1989 events. India was heavily involved in barter trade with the Soviet Union and its communist allies in Eastern Europe. When the East Bloc unraveled, India had to start paying for imports in hard cash. That rapidly depleted its modest foreign-exchange reserves, triggering a severe financial crisis in 1991, which in turn compelled India to embark on radical economic reforms that laid the foundations for its economic rise.

More broadly, the emblematic defeat of Marxism in 1989 allowed Asian countries, including China and India, to pursue capitalist policies overtly. Although China’s economic renaissance had already begun under Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Communist Party, after 1989, was able publicly to subordinate ideology to wealth creation. That example, in turn, had a constructive influence on surviving communist parties in Asia and beyond.

Geopolitically, the post-1989 gains extended far beyond the West. The Soviet Union’s sudden collapse was a strategic boon to Asia, eliminating a menacing empire and opening the way for China rapidly to pursue its interests globally. Russia’s decline in the 1990’s became China’s gain.

For India, the end of the Cold War triggered a foreign-policy crisis by eliminating the country’s most reliable partner, the Soviet Union. But, as with its 1991 financial crisis, India was able to emerge with a revamped foreign policy – one that abandoned the country’s quixotic traditions and embraced greater realism and pragmatism. Post-Cold War India began pursuing mutually beneficial strategic partnerships with other key players in Asia and the wider world. The new “global strategic partnership” with the United States – a defining feature of this decade – was made possible by the post-1989 shifts in Indian policy thinking.

Of course, not all post-1989 developments were positive. For example, the phenomenon of failing states, which has affected Asian security the most, is a direct consequence of the Cold War’s end. When the Cold War raged, one bloc or the other propped up weak states. But, with the Soviet Union’s disappearance, the US abandoned that game.

As a result, dysfunctional or failing states suddenly emerged in the 1990’s, constituting a threat to regional and international security by becoming home to transnational pirates (Somalia) or transnational terrorists (Pakistan and Afghanistan), or by their defiance of global norms (North Korea and Iran). Asia has suffered more casualties from the rise of international terrorism than any other region.

Moreover, two decades after the Berlin Wall fell, the spread of democracy has stalled. Between 1988 and 1990, as the Cold War was winding down, pro-democracy protests erupted far from Eastern Europe, overturning dictatorships in countries as different as Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Chile. After the Soviet disintegration, even Russia emerged as a credible candidate for democratic reform.

But, while the overthrow of totalitarian or autocratic regimes shifted the global balance of power in favor of the forces of democracy, not all the pro-democracy movements succeeded. And the subsequent “color revolutions” in places like Ukraine only instilled greater caution among the surviving authoritarian regimes, prompting them to implement measures to counter foreign-inspired democratization initiatives.

Aside from the retreat of democracy in Russia, China – now the world’s oldest autocracy – is demonstrating that when authoritarianism is entrenched, a marketplace of goods and services can stymie the marketplace of political ideas. Twenty years after communism’s fall, authoritarian capitalism has emerged as the leading challenger to the spread of democratic values.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.
http://www.project-syndicate.org

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The U.S.-China-India Strategic Triangle

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China-India tensions rising

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
Japan Times, November 14, 2009

The India-China relationship has entered choppy waters due to a perceptible hardening in the Chinese stance. Anti-India rhetoric in the state-run Chinese media has intensified, even as China has stepped up military pressure along the disputed Himalayan frontier through cross-border incursions. Beijing also has resurrected its long-dormant claim to the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, nearly three times as large as Taiwan.

The more muscular Chinese stance clearly is tied to the new U.S.-India strategic partnership, symbolized by the nuclear deal and deepening military cooperation. As President George W. Bush declared in his valedictory speech, "We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India."

The Obama administration, although committed to promoting that strategic partnership, has been reluctant to take New Delhi’s side in any of its disputes with Beijing. This has emboldened China to up the ante against India, with the Chinese Foreign Ministry employing language like "we demand" in a recent statement that labeled the Indian prime minister’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh a "disturbance."

New Delhi has hit back by permitting the Dalai Lama to tour Arunachal Pradesh and announcing an end to the practice of letting Chinese companies bring thousands of workers from China to work on projects in India. And in a public riposte to Beijing’s raising of objections to multilateral funding of any project in Arunachal, India has asked China to cease its infrastructure and military projects in another disputed region — Pakistan-held Kashmir.

The present pattern of border provocations, new force deployments and mutual recriminations is redolent of the situation that prevailed 47 years ago when China routed the unprepared Indian military in a surprise two-front aggression. Today, amid rising tensions, the danger of border skirmishes, if not a limited war, looks real.

Such tensions have been rising since 2006. Until 2005, China actually was eschewing anti-India rhetoric and pursuing a policy of active engagement with India, even as it continued to expand its strategic space in southern Asia, to New Delhi’s detriment. In fact, when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited India in April 2005, the two countries unveiled six broad principles to help settle their festering border dispute. But after the Indo-U.S. defense-framework accord and nuclear deal were unveiled in quick succession in subsequent months, the mood in Beijing perceptibly changed.

That gave rise to a pattern that now has become commonplace: Chinese newspapers, individual bloggers, security think tanks and even officially blessed Web sites ratcheting up an "India threat" scenario. A U.S.-India military alliance has always been a strategic nightmare for the Chinese, and the ballyhooed Indo-U.S. global strategic partnership triggered alarm bells in Beijing.

The partnership, though, falls short of a formal military alliance. Still, the high-pitched Indian and American rhetoric that the new partnership represented a tectonic shift in geopolitical alignments apparently made Chinese policymakers believe that India was being groomed as a new Japan or Australia to America — a perception reinforced by subsequent arrangements and Indian orders for U.S. arms worth $3.5 billion in just the past year.

Clearly, New Delhi failed to foresee that its rush to forge close strategic bonds with Washington could provoke greater Chinese pressure and that, in such a situation, the U.S. actually would offer little comfort. Consequently, India finds itself in a spot today.

For one, Beijing calculatedly has sought to pressure India on multiple fronts — military, diplomatic and multilateral. For another, the U.S. — far from coming to India’s support — has shied away from even cautioning Beijing against any attempt to forcibly change the territorial status quo. Indeed, on a host of issues — from the Dalai Lama to the Arunachal dispute — Washington has chosen not to antagonize Beijing. That, in effect, has left India on its own.

The spectacle of the president of the most powerful country in the world seeking to curry favor with a rights-abusing China by shunning the Dalai Lama during the Tibetan leader’s Washington visit cannot but embolden the Chinese leadership to step up pressure on India, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile.

U.S. President Barack Obama also has signaled that America’s strategic relationship with India will not be at the expense of the fast-growing U.S. ties with Beijing. The Obama team, after reviewing the Bush-era arrangements, now intends to abjure elements in its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including any joint military drill in Arunachal or a 2007-style naval exercise involving the U.S., India, Australia, Japan and Singapore. Even trilateral U.S. naval maneuvers with India and Japan are being abandoned so as not to raise China’s hackles.

As his secretary of state did in February, Obama is undertaking an Asia tour that begins in Japan and ends in China — the high spot — while skipping India. In fact, Washington is quietly charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal dispute. Yet Beijing remains suspicious of the likely trajectory of U.S.-India strategic ties, including pre-1962-style CIA meddling in Tibet.

This distrust found expression in the latest People’s Daily editorial that accused New Delhi of pursuing a foreign policy of "befriending the far and attacking the near." Left to fend for itself, New Delhi has decided to steer clear of any confrontation with Beijing.

Still, even as it seeks to tamp down tensions with Beijing, New Delhi cannot rule out the use of force by China at a time when hardliners there seem to believe that a swift, 1962-style military victory can help fashion a Beijing-oriented Asia.

Having declared that America’s "most important bilateral relationship in the world" is with Beijing, the Obama team must caution it against crossing well-defined red lines or going against its gospel of China’s "peaceful rise."

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan," published by HarperCollins, with a new U.S. edition scheduled for release in January.
The Japan Times: Saturday, Nov. 14, 2009
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How post-1989 events transformed the world

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OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR November 4, 2009

Europe Got Freedom, Asia Got Rich

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

NEW DELHI — On its 20th anniversary, the fall of the Berlin Wall stands out as the most momentous event in post-World War II history. The end of the Cold War transformed geopolitics, thereby changing the world. But no continent benefited more than Asia, as has been epitomized by its dramatic economic rise, the speed and scale of which has no parallel in world history.

An important post-1989 effect was the shift from the primacy of military power to a greater role for economic power in shaping global geopolitics.

That helped promote not only an economic boom in Asia, but also led to an eastward movement of global power and influence, with Asia emerging as an important player on the world stage.

Global power shifts, as symbolized by Asia’s ascent, are now being triggered not by military triumphs or geopolitical realignments but by a factor unique to our contemporary world — rapid economic growth.

Rapid growth was also witnessed during the Industrial Revolution and in the post-World War II period. But in the post-Cold War period, economic growth by itself has contributed to qualitatively altering global power equations.

Another defining event in 1989 was the Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing. But for the end of the Cold War, the West would not have let China off the hook for those killings.

The Cold War’s end, however, facilitated the West’s pragmatic approach to shun trade sanctions and help integrate China with global institutions through the liberalizing influence of foreign investment and trade. Had the United States and its allies pursued the opposite approach, centered on punitive sanctions — as have been applied against Cuba and Burma, for example — the result would have been a less-prosperous, less-open and a potentially destabilizing China. Instead, China now is set to displace Japan as the world’s No. 2 economy.

India’s rise as a new economic giant also is linked to the post-1989 events. India was heavily into barter trade with the Soviet Union and its Communist allies in Eastern Europe, so when the East bloc began to unravel, India had to start paying for imports in harsh cash.

That rapidly depleted its modest foreign-exchange reserves, triggering a severe financial crisis in 1991. The crisis, in turn, compelled India to embark on radical economic reforms, which laid the foundations for India’s economic rise.

More broadly, the emblematic defeat of Marxism in 1989 allowed Asian countries, including China and India, to overtly pursue capitalist policies. Although China’s economic renaissance already had begun under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Communist Party, after 1989, was able to publicly subordinate ideology to wealth creation.

So, while Mao Zedong gave China unity, nationalism and self-respect, Deng helped make it prosperous. That example, in turn, has had a constructive influence on surviving Communist parties in Asia and beyond.

Geopolitically, the post-1989 gains extended far beyond the West. China and India were both beneficiaries. The Soviet Union’s sudden collapse came as a great strategic boon, eliminating a menacing empire and opening the way for Beijing to rapidly increase strategic space globally. Russia’s decline in the 1990s became China’s gain.

For India, the end of the Cold War triggered a foreign-policy crisis by eliminating the country’s most reliable partner, the Soviet Union, described as “a trusted and tested friend.” That crisis helped lay the base for a revamped foreign policy.

It compelled India to overcome its didactically quixotic traditions and inject greater realism and pragmatism into its foreign policy. Post-Cold War, India began pursuing mutually beneficial strategic partnerships with other key players in Asia and the wider world.

The new Indo-U.S. “global strategic partnership” — a defining feature of this decade — was made possible by the post-1989 shifts in Indian policy thinking.

To be sure, not all post-1989 developments were positive. The phenomenon of failing states, which has affected Asian security the most, is a direct consequence of the end of the Cold War. While the Cold War raged, weak states were propped up by one bloc or the other. Without the Soviet Union, the United States got out of that game.

That is the reason why dysfunctional or failing states began to emerge in the 1990s — a phenomenon that has contributed to making such states a threat to regional and international security either because they are home to transnational pirates (like Somalia) or transnational terrorists (Pakistan and Afghanistan), or because of their defiance of global norms (North Korea, Iran). Asia has suffered more casualties from international terrorism than any other region.

Between 1988 and 1990, as the Cold War was winding down, pro-democracy protests broke out in several parts of the world — from China and Burma to Eastern Europe. The protests helped spread political freedoms in Eastern Europe and inspired popular movements elsewhere that overturned dictatorships in countries as disparate as Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan and Chile. After the Soviet disintegration, even Russia emerged as a credible candidate for democratic reform.

The overthrow of a number of totalitarian or autocratic regimes did shift the global balance of power in favor of the forces of democracy. But not all the pro-democracy movements were successful. And the subsequent “color revolutions” only instilled greater caution among the surviving authoritarian regimes, prompting them to set up countermeasures to foreign-inspired democratization initiatives.

Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the spread of democracy has stalled. China, now the world’s oldest autocracy, is demonstrating that when authoritarianism is deeply entrenched, a marketplace of goods and services is able to stymie a marketplace of political ideas. Authoritarian capitalism indeed has emerged as the leading challenge to the international spread of democratic values.

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.”

Why the U.S. must re-frame its Afghanistan strategy

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An Unwinnable Battle

Brahma Chellaney The Times of India 3 November 2009

With no viable option in sight to salvage America’s faltering Afghan war, Barack Obama faces a critical test in his young presidency. Sending tens of thousands of more troops into battle, as the top US general in Afghanistan wants, risks a Vietnam-style quagmire. Slashing troop levels to concentrate on counterterrorist operations through air power and special ground forces will expose Obama to political attacks at home. Obama thus is searching for the illusory middle ground. 

Going big and going long in Afghanistan will serve no country’s interests other than Pakistan’s. Indeed, as long as NATO’s Afghan war rages, US policy will stay hostage to Islamabad, even though it is Pakistan’s duplicitous policy of aiding militants while pretending to be on America’s side that has resulted in the Taliban gaining the momentum. Only a military exit can help free US policy. After all, with US supply lines to Afghanistan running through Pakistan, waging the Afghan war has entailed supporting Pakistan through multibillion-dollar US aid, to the extent that Islamabad this year has emerged as the largest recipient of American assistance in the world. 

In that light, is it any surprise that top Pakistanis have lined up to plead against a US withdrawal? Munificent aid to Pakistan traditionally has flown only when the US has been involved in war – hot or cold. Absence of war usually has fostered US neglect of Pakistan. If the US decides to draw down forces in Afghanistan, it will not only stop raining dollars in Islamabad, but also Pakistani sanctuaries for the top Afghan Taliban leaders and other terrorist figures are likely to become US targets. 

An Obama decision not to get deeper involved in Afghanistan won’t be an admission of defeat but a course correction on a war that presently is just not winnable. Obama has limited the US goal narrowly "to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda". But the US military’s real foe in Afghanistan is not the badly fragmented and enfeebled al-Qaeda, but a resurgent Taliban. Instead of seeking to rout the Taliban, Washington has encouraged the Pakistani, Afghan and Saudi intelligence services to hold proxy negotiations with the Taliban shura members, holed up in Quetta, Pakistan. 

In fact, the US is fighting the wrong war. How can the Afghan war be won when America has limited its ground military campaign to just one side of the Af-Pak border even though the Taliban and other militants openly use the Pakistani side as a haven and staging ground for attacks? Not allowed to pursue the militants across the border, US troops in Nuristan, Kunar and other Afghan border regions find themselves as sitting ducks for surprise attacks orchestrated from Pakistani territory. 

Had Washington sought to defeat the Taliban, a further military surge may have made sense, because an ascendant Taliban can be defeated only through major ground operations, not by airstrikes and covert action alone. But to rout an already-weakened al-Qaeda, the US doesn’t need to scale up the war. While acknowledging that al-Qaeda’s capability has been degraded to the extent that it is in no position to openly challenge US interests, American proponents of a bigger war contend that the real danger is of al-Qaeda reconstituting itself if a US pullback leads to the Taliban’s return to power. 

Firstly, without large ground forces in Afghanistan or even major ground operations, the US can hold al-Qaeda remnants at bay in their havens in the mountainous tribal regions of Pakistan through covert operations, Predator drones and cruise-missile attacks, as it already is doing. Secondly, US air power and special-force operations, in combination with the support of ground forces of ethnic minorities and non-Taliban Pashtun warlords, can prevent the Taliban from grabbing power in Kabul again. That was the same combination that helped oust the Taliban from power. Even if the US pulls out most of its troops, it will have such punitive-denial capability as it intends to maintain military bases in Afghanistan in the long run. 

American and international interests will be better served by gradually drawing down US troop levels. What unites the disparate insurgent elements is a common opposition to foreign military presence. A measured US pullback, far from bolstering the forces of global jihad, will eliminate the common unifying factor and unleash developments with largely internal or sub-regional significance. The most likely outcome of an Afghan power struggle triggered by a US decision to scale back the war would be the formalisation of the present de facto partition of Afghanistan along ethnic lines. 

The possible emergence of smaller, more-governable states in the world’s "Terroristan" belt cannot be bad news. In such a scenario, the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and other ethnic minorities would be able to ensure self-governance in the Afghan areas they dominate, leaving the Pashtun lands on both sides of the British-drawn but now-disappearing Durand Line in ferment. Pakistan ultimately is bound to pay a price for creating and nurturing the Taliban monster. And that price is likely to directly impinge on its territorial unity. 

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research. 

Tensions in the China-India-U.S. triangle

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Wrong move in Sino-Indian chess

The Indo-US strategic tie-up has served as the key instigation in China’s hardening stance towards India

Brahma Chellaney Mint October 26, 2009

The India-China relationship has entered choppy waters due to a perceptible hardening in the Chinese stance. Anti-India rhetoric in the state-run Chinese media has intensified, even as China has stepped up military pressure along the disputed Himalayan frontier through frequent cross-border incursions. Beijing also has resurrected its long dormant claim to Arunachal Pradesh.

The more muscular Chinese stance clearly is tied to the new US-India strategic partnership, symbolized by the nuclear deal and deepening military cooperation. As former US president George W. Bush declared in his valedictory speech, “We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India.”

The Barack Obama administration, although committed to promoting that strategic partnership, has been reluctant to take New Delhi’s side in any of its disputes with Beijing. This has emboldened China to up the ante against India.

Indeed, the present pattern of border provocations, new force deployments and mutual recriminations is redolent of the situation that prevailed 47 years ago when China—taking advantage of the advent of the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of a nuclear Armageddon—routed the unprepared Indian military in a surprise two-front aggression.

The new tensions are of recent origin. Until mid-2005, China was eschewing anti-India rhetoric and pursuing a policy of active engagement with India, even as it continued to expand its strategic space in southern Asia, to New Delhi’s detriment. In fact, when Premier Wen Jiabao visited India in April 2005, the two countries unveiled an important agreement identifying six broad principles to govern a border settlement.

But after the separate unveiling of the Indo-US defence framework accord and nuclear deal in 2005, the mood in Beijing perceptibly changed. That gave rise to a pattern that has become commonplace since: Chinese newspapers, individual bloggers, security think tanks and even officially blessed websites ratcheting up an “India threat” scenario.

A US-India military alliance has always been a strategic nightmare for the Chinese, and the ballyhooed Indo-US global strategic partnership, although it falls short of a formal military alliance, triggered alarm bells in Beijing. That raises the question whether New Delhi helped create the context, however inadvertently, for the new Chinese assertiveness by agreeing to participate in US-led “multinational operations”, share intelligence and build military-to-military interoperability (key elements of the defence framework accord) and to become the US’ partner on a new “global democracy initiative”—a commitment found in the nuclear agreement-in-principle.

While Beijing cannot hold a veto over New Delhi’s diplomatic or strategic initiatives, couldn’t India have avoided creating an impression that it was potentially being primed as a new junior partner (or spoke) in the US’ hub-and-spoke global alliance system?

India—with its hallowed traditions of policy independence—is an unlikely candidate to be a US ally in a patron-client framework. But the high-pitched Indian and American rhetoric that the new partnership represented a tectonic shift in geopolitical alignments apparently made Chinese policymakers believe that India was being groomed as a new Japan or Australia to the US—a perception reinforced by subsequent arrangements and defence transactions.

New Delhi failed to foresee that its rush to forge close strategic bonds with Washington could provoke greater Chinese pressure and that, in such a situation, the US actually would offer little comfort to India. Consequently, India finds itself in a spot.

For one, Beijing calculatedly has sought to badger India on multiple fronts: military—Chinese cross-border incursions nearly doubled in one year, from 140 in 2007 to 270 in 2008, according to Indian defence officials, with “no significant increase”, to quote the foreign secretary, in the 2009 level; diplomatic—for instance, strongly protesting a prime ministerial visit to Arunachal Pradesh and issuing visas on a separate sheet to Jammu and Kashmir residents; and multilateral—launching a diplomatic offensive to undercut Indian sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh, as at the Asian Development Bank. For another, the US—far from coming to India’s support—has shied away from even cautioning Beijing against any attempt to forcibly change the existing territorial status quo. Indeed, on a host of issues—from the Dalai Lama to the Arunachal Pradesh issue—Washington has chosen not to antagonize Beijing.

That, in effect, has left India on its own. The Obama administration isn’t unfriendly to India. It just doesn’t see India as able to make an important difference to US geopolitical interests. As his secretary of state Hillary Clinton did in February, US President Obama is undertaking an Asia tour that begins in Japan and ends in China—the high spot—while skipping India.

But playing to India’s weakness for flattery, Obama is to massage its ego by honouring it with his presidency’s first state dinner. Such a glitzy affair jibes with Washington’s current business focus on India: Promoting big-ticket export items such as nuclear power reactors and conventional weapons, while prodding New Delhi to be helpful on the Af-Pak (Afghanistan-Pakistan) front.

To be sure, Obama wants to advance the Indo-US partnership, as part of which New Delhi has placed arms purchase orders, according to the Indian ambassador to the US, worth a staggering $3.5 billion just last year. But he also has signalled that such a relationship with India will not be at the expense of Washington’s fast-growing ties with Beijing. The US needs Chinese capital inflows as much as China needs US consumers—an economic interdependence of such import that snapping it would amount to mutually assured destruction (MAD). Even politically, China, with its international leverage, counts for more in US policy than New Delhi or Tokyo. Indeed, as the US-China relationship acquires a wider and deeper base in the coming years, the strains in some of the US’ existing military or strategic tie-ups in Asia will become pronounced.

Against that background, it is no surprise that Washington now intends to abjure elements in its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including any joint military drill in Arunachal Pradesh or trilateral naval manoeuvres with India and Japan. In fact, Washington is quietly charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal Pradesh issue, just as its ally Australia has done rather publicly.

Left to fend for itself both on the China and Af-Pak fronts, New Delhi has decided to steer clear of any potential aggravation or confrontation with Beijing. Discretion, after all, is the better part of valour. India, however, cannot afford to be out on a limb. The Indo-US partnership has turned into a great opportunity for Washington to win multi-billion dollar Indian contracts and co-opt India in strategic arrangements, without a concomitant obligation to be on India’s side or to extend political help on regional and international issues.

Joint military exercises indeed have become a basis to make India buy increasing quantities of US arms so as to build compatibility and interoperability between the two militaries. Even counterterrorism is emerging as a major area of defence sales to India, despite the US doing little to help dismantle Pakistan’s state-run terror complex against India or bring the real masterminds of the Mumbai attacks to justice.

With Obama pursuing a Sino-centric Asia policy, and with China-friendly heads of government ensconced in Australia, Japan and Taiwan, it is apparent that New Delhi’s diplomatic calculations have gone terribly wrong. In its exuberance, the government had convinced itself that the way for India to carve out a larger international role was to bandwagon with the US, instead of following China’s example and rapidly developing comprehensive national power.

Yet the present muscular Chinese approach, paradoxically, reinforces the very line of Indian thinking that engendered greater Chinese assertiveness—that India has little option other than to align with the US. Such thinking blithely ignores the limitations of the Indo-US partnership arising from the vicissitudes and compulsions of US policy. Washington indeed is showing through its growing strategic cooperation with China and Pakistan that it does not believe in exclusive strategic partnership in any region.

India can wield international power only through the accretion of its own economic and military strength. In fact, the only way China can be deterred from making a land grab across the line of control or nibbling further at Indian territories is for India to have sufficient nuclear and missile capability. So, augmenting India’s deterrent capabilities to credible but minimal levels has to be priority No. 1. A stable, mutually beneficial equation with China is more likely to be realized if there is no trans-Himalayan military imbalance or Indian security dependency on a third party.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research, is the author, most recently, of Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan (2006). Comment at theirview@livemint.com

Copyright © 2009 HT Media All Rights Reserved

Winning peace in Sri Lanka

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Sri Lanka’s Elusive Peace Dividend

by Brahma Chellaney

Far Eastern Economic Review (October 2009)

Such is the misfortune of war-scarred Sri Lanka that even after military victory in the civil war, the island nation is unable to find peace. Months after the Tamil Tiger guerrillas were crushed and their top leadership eliminated, Sri Lanka has done little to begin addressing the root causes of conflict or to outline a possible answer to the longstanding cultural and political grievances of the Tamil minority, which makes up 12% of the 21.3 million population. Consequently, the government risks squandering the hard-won peace. It will be a double tragedy for Sri Lanka if winning peace proves more difficult than winning the war.

From being a self-proclaimed “island of paradise” in the early 1980s, Sri Lanka became an island of tremendous bloodshed for more than a quarter of a century. But even by the country’s gory record, the bloodletting this year was unparalleled as the Asia’s longest civil war built to a bloody crescendo. Thousands of noncombatants, according to the United Nations, were killed in the final months of the war as government forces overran the Tamil Tigers, who had established a de facto state in Sri Lanka’s north and east. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon acknowledged that civilian casualties were “unacceptably high.”

Ignoring international calls to suspend offensive military operations to help save lives of trapped civilians, President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother, Defense Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, a naturalized United States citizen, pressed ahead with their military campaign, under the command of General Sarath Fonseka, a U.S. green card holder. The offensive actually bore a distinct family imprint, with another brother, Basil Rajapaksa, the president’s special adviser and architect of the political strategy. A third brother, Ports and Civil Aviation Minister Chamal Rajapaksa, awarded China a contract to build Sri Lanka’s billion-dollar Hambantota port, which Beijing today values as a prized jewel in its “string of pearls” strategy in this region—the thoroughfare for much of the international oil-export supply and nearly half of all global seaborne trade. An increasingly sea-minded China, instead of competing with the U.S. in the Pacific, has turned its attention to the Indian Ocean, employing its rising oil exports as justification.

Such is Sri Lanka’s vantage location that it sits astride vital sea lanes of communication. Beijing, in return for being allowed to make strategic inroads, provided Sri Lanka with offensive weapon systems that helped break the long-pending military stalemate on the island. Chinese Jian-7 fighter-jets, antiaircraft guns, JY-11 3D air surveillance radars and other weapons played a central role in helping government forces unravel the Tigers’ de facto state. Chinese weapons began pouring in from 2007 when, in response to a daring 2007 raid by the Tigers’ air wing that wrecked 10 government military aircraft, Beijing quickly supplied six warplanes on long-term credit.

China also came to the rescue of a tottering Sri Lankan economy, increasing its bilateral aid fivefold in one year to $1 billion in 2008 to emerge as Sri Lanka’s largest donor. It even got Pakistan, its ally, actively involved. With Chinese encouragement, Pakistan—despite its own faltering economy and rising Islamist challenge—boosted its annual military assistance loans to Sri Lanka to nearly $100 million last year while supplying Chinese-origin small arms and training Sri Lankan air force personnel in precision-guided attacks.

Put simply, China gave Sri Lanka the military and economic power as well as the diplomatic cover to prosecute the war as it wished in defiance of international condemnation. As in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Uzbekistan, North Korea, Burma and elsewhere, Chinese support directly contributed to the Sri Lankan bloodbath. In fact, Sri Lanka is just the latest case illustrating how China aggressively pursues strategic interests by employing its U.N. Security Council veto power to provide political protection to a human-rights abusing government.

India’s role also has been deplorable. For years, India had pursued a hands-off approach toward Sri Lanka in response to two developments: a disastrous 1987-90 peacekeeping operation and the 1991 assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Having been outmaneuvered by China’s success in extending its strategic reach into the Indian Ocean, New Delhi got sucked into providing major assistance to Colombo over the last few years, lest it lose further ground. From opening an unlimited line of military credit for Sri Lanka to extending naval and intelligence cooperation, India provided important war-relevant support in a deteriorating humanitarian situation.

President Rajapaksa deftly played the China, India and Pakistan cards to maximum advantage for his war strategy. After key Tamil Tiger leaders had been killed in the fighting, including some who committed suicide by cyanide poisoning to avoid capture, President Rajapaksa—to New Delhi’s acute mortification—thanked China, India and Pakistan in the same breath for the victory. With its leverage undermined, India today is groping to bring direction to its Sri Lanka policy by defining its objectives more coherently, even as it struggles to respond to the apparent Chinese strategy to control naval choke points in the region. Indeed, the extent to which India has ceded strategic space in its backyard is evident from the fact that Bhutan remains its sole main pocket of influence. In Sri Lanka, India has become a marginal player despite its geostrategic advantage and trade and investment clout.

President Rajapaksa has been basking in the glory of his military triumph, lionized by nationalists as a modern-day incarnation of Dutugemunu, a Sinhalese ruler who according to legend vanquished an invading Tamil army led by Kind Elara some 2,000 years ago. His real test, however, begins now. As more evidence trickles out from Sri Lanka about the brutal military campaign he directed, allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity are likely to dog President Rajapaksa unless he decides to emulate the ancient Sinhalese king’s post-victory action in making honorable peace with the Tamils. So far, though, President Rajapaksa has had difficulty coming out of war mode.

How elusive the peace dividend remains can be seen from his decision to press ahead with the further expansion of an already-large military. The Sri Lankan military is bigger in troop strength than the British and Israeli armed forces, having been expanded fivefold since the late 1980s to some 200,000 regular soldiers today. In victory, that strength is being raised by 50% to 300,000 troops in the name of “eternal vigilance.” After the May 2009 victory, the government announced a drive to recruit 50,000 new troops to help control the northern areas captured from the rebels. The expansion would make the Sri Lankan military larger than those of major powers such as France, Japan and Germany.

Indeed, by citing a continuing danger of guerrilla remnants reviving the insurgency, President Rajapaksa seems determined to keep a hypermilitarized Sri Lanka on a war footing. Since he came to power, he has sought to frenetically swell the ranks of the military and establish village-level civil militias, especially in conflict-hit areas. With an ever-larger war machine, civil society has been the main loser.

Stable peace can be built only through genuine interethnic equality. Sri Lanka needs to transition from a unitary state to a federation that grants provincial and local autonomy. After all, the issues that triggered the 26-year civil war were rooted in the nation’s post-independence moves to fashion a monoethnic national identity, best illustrated by the 1956 “Sinhalese only” language policy and the 1972 Constitution that eliminated a provision against minority discrimination. Beside Malaysia, Sri Lanka is the only state in the world with affirmative action for a majority ethnic community.

The air of martial triumph pervading Sri Lanka is making it difficult to heal the wounds of war through three essential “R’s”: relief, recovery and, most importantly, reconciliation. A process of national reconciliation anchored in federalism and multiculturalism can succeed only if human-rights abuses by all parties are independently investigated, including claims that Sri Lankan troops indiscriminately shelled civilians caught up in the fighting.

The danger of renewed conflict in Sri Lanka cannot be dismissed. The killing of hundreds of civilians, possibly up to 3,000, in the still-uninvestigated 1983 anti-Tamil riots triggered a quarter-century cycle of bloody conflict. The killing of countless thousands this year could engender another cycle of violence unless there is genuine reconciliation.

This was a war with no witnesses, with the government having barred independent journalists and observers from the war zone. In that light, as Navi Pillay, the U.N. human-rights commissioner, has said, “a new future for the country, the prospect of meaningful reconciliation and lasting peace” all hinge on “an independent and credible international investigation … to ascertain the occurrence, nature and scale of violations of international human-rights and international humanitarian law” by all sides during the conflict. Such a probe, however, seems a long way off, with Prime Minister Rajapaksa rejecting even regional autonomy and, to the chagrin of Tamils, demerging the northern and eastern provinces.

Another issue of concern is the manner in which the government still holds some 280,000 Tamil civilians in barbed-wire camps where, in the recent words of Ms. Pillay, the “internally displaced persons are effectively detained under conditions of internment.” Such detention, including of 80,000 children, risks causing more resentment among the Tamils and sowing the seeds of future unrest. The internment was officially justified as necessary to help weed out rebels. But authorities have had months to identify such suspects, and those that have been singled out already have been transferred to undisclosed military sites.

Those in the evacuee camps are the victims and survivors of the deadly war. To confine them in the camps against their will is to further victimize and traumatize them. While the government has promised to resettle 80% of those in the camps by mid-November, it has yet to state a clear resettlement plan. One person allowed to visit some of these camps was Ban Ki-moon, who said after his tour last May: “I have traveled round the world and visited similar places, but these are by far the most appalling scenes I have seen.” Sri Lanka’s interests would be better served through greater transparency. It should grant the U.N., International Red Cross and nongovernmental organizations at home and abroad unfettered access to care for and protect the civilians in these camps, allowing those who wish to leave the camps to stay with relatives and friends.

There also is the issue of thousands of missing people, mainly Tamils. Given that many are still searching for missing loved ones, the government ought to publish a list of all those it is holding in evacuee camps, prisons, military sites and other security centers. Even suspected rebels in state custody should be identified and not denied access to legal representation. More than 4,000 rebels reportedly surrendered in the final days of the war. Authorities should disclose the names of those they know to be dead—civilians and insurgents—and the possible circumstances of their death.

Yet such are the costs of victory that Sri Lankan civil society stands badly weakened and civil liberties curbed. The wartime suppression of a free press and curtailment of fundamental rights continues in peacetime, undermining democratic freedoms and creating a fear psychosis. Sweeping emergency regulations remain in place, arming the security forces with expansive powers of search, arrest and seizure of property. Public meetings cannot be held without advance government permission. Individuals can still be held in unacknowledged detention for up to 18 months. On Aug. 7, Colombo announced that the Tigers’ new chief, Selvarasa Pathmanathan (known as “kp”), was in its custody, after he reportedly was abducted by Sri Lankan intelligence from a Kuala Lumpur hotel. The Thailand-based “KP”—the self-designated interim successor to Velupillai Prabhakaran, who died with his son and daughter on the battlefield—has yet to be produced before a magistrate or judge.

The Road Not Taken

For the process of reconciliation and healing to begin in earnest, it is essential the government shed its war-gained powers. Unfortunately, Colombo still seeks to hold onto its special powers and hold back the truth. Those who speak up are labeled “traitors” (if they are Sinhalese) or accused of being on the Tamil diaspora’s payroll. Last year, a Sri Lankan minister accused John Holmes, U.N. undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, of being on the rebels’ payroll after Mr. Holmes called Sri Lanka one of the world’s most dangerous places for aid workers. Recently, a well-known astrologer who predicted the president’s ouster from power was arrested. The U.N. Children’s Fund communications chief was ordered to leave Sri Lanka after he discussed the plight of children caught up in the government campaign. All this has made U.N. officials in Sri Lanka wary of saying anything critical of the handling of the situation.

In fact, the media remains muzzled. Journalists have been beaten up, abducted, imprisoned or killed. According to international organizations, at least 16 journalists have been murdered in Sri Lanka since 2004. Lawyers who dare take up sensitive cases face threats, so it is difficult for relatives of those missing to file habeas corpus petitions.

Another factor at play is the postvictory upsurge of Sinhalese chauvinism. Rather than begin a political dialogue on creating a more level-playing field for Tamils in education and government jobs, the government has seen its space get constricted by such chauvinism that is opposed to the devolution of powers to the minorities. This has compelled President Rajapaksa to declare, “Federalism is out of the question.” The hard-line constituency argues that the Tamils in defeat shouldn’t get what they couldn’t secure through three decades of unrest and violence. Indeed, such chauvinism tars federalism as a forerunner to secession, although the Tamil insurgency sprang from the state’s rejection of decentralization and power-sharing. The looming parliamentary and presidential elections also make devolution difficult, even though the opposition is fragmented and President Rajapaksa seems set to win a second term.

Yet, reversing the state-driven militarization of society, ending the control of information as an instrument of state policy and promoting political and ethnic reconciliation are crucial to postconflict peace-building and to furthering the interests of all Sri Lankans—Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims. So also is the need to discard the almost monoethnic character of the security forces by recruiting more Tamils. Colombo has to stop dragging its feet on implementing the Constitution’s 13th amendment, which requires the ceding of some powers to the provincial level. But even if the process of devolution were to begin, it cannot succeed without an end to the present pattern of regular violations of human rights.

Sadly, there is little international pressure on Colombo, despite the leverage offered by a cash-strapped Sri Lankan economy’s need for external credit. The United States enjoys a one-country veto in the International Monetary Fund, yet it chose to abstain from the recent IMF vote approving a $2.8 billion loan that Sri Lanka desperately needed. In the face of China’s stonewalling in the U.N., Mr. Ban has been unable to appoint a U.N. special envoy on Sri Lanka, let alone order a probe into possible war crimes. The best the U.N. has been able to do is to send a political official to Colombo in September to discuss resettlement of the detained Tamil refugees. Indeed, in the absence of international pressure, there is a lurking danger that the government may seek to change demography by returning to its old policy of settling Sinhalese in Tamil areas.

It is thus important for the democratic players, including the U.S., the European Union, Japan and Norway—co-chairs of the so-called Friends of Sri Lanka—and India, to coordinate their policies on Sri Lanka, even though these players were remiss in discharging their responsibilities while the war raged. If President Rajapaksa continues to shun true reconciliation, these countries should ratchet up pressure on Colombo. The International Criminal Court has opened an initial inquiry into Sri Lankan rights-abuse cases; donor nations could lend support to calls for an international investigation into the thousands of civilian deaths and allegations of extrajudicial killings.

Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.

http://www.feer.com/essays/2009/october/sri-lankas-elusive-peace-dividend

Can China make a political soft landing?

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Challenges for China concern political future, not economics


Japan Times http://ow.ly/tA57

Six decades after it was founded, the People’s Republic of China has made some remarkable achievements. A backward, impoverished state in 1949, it has risen dramatically to now command respect and awe — but such success has come at great cost to its own people.

In fact, China’s future remains more uncertain than ever. It faces a worrisome paradox: Because of an opaque, repressive political system, the more it globalizes, the more vulnerable it becomes internally. At the core of its internal challenges is how to make a political soft landing.

Unlike its Asian peers, Japan and India, China first concentrated on acquiring military muscle. By the time Deng Xiaoping launched his economic- modernization program in 1978, China already had tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile, the 12,000-km DF-5, and developed thermonuclear weaponry. The military muscle gave Beijing the much-needed security to focus on civilian modernization, helping it to fuel its remarkable economic rise that, in turn, has armed it with ever greater resources to sharpen its claws.

China’s economy has expanded 13-fold over the last 30 years. Consequently, China has arrived as a global economic player, with its state-owned corporate behemoths frenetically buying foreign firms, technologies and resources.

Add to the picture its rapidly swelling foreign-exchange coffers, already the world’s largest, and Beijing is well-positioned geopolitically to further expand its influence.

Its defense strategy since the Mao Zedong era has been founded on a simple premise — that the capacity to defend oneself with one’s own resources is the first test a nation has to pass on the way to becoming a great power. So, even when China was poor, it consciously put the accent on building comprehensive national power.

Today, its rapidly accumulating power raises concerns because, even when it was backward and internally troubled, it employed brute force to annex Xinjiang (1949) and Tibet (1950), to raid South Korea (1950), to invade India (1962), to initiate a border conflict with the Soviet Union through a military ambush (1969), and to attack Vietnam (1979). A prosperous, militarily strong China cannot but be a threat to its neighbors, especially if there are no constraints on the exercise of Chinese power.

Communist China actually began as an international pariah state. Today, it is courted by the world. Its rise in one generation as a world power under authoritarian rule has come to epitomize the qualitative reordering of international power.

As the latest U.S. intelligence assessment predicts, China is "poised to have more impact on the world over the next 20 years than any other country." A long-term strategic vision and unflinching pursuit of goals have been key drivers. But China’s rise also has been aided by good fortune on several fronts. Deng’s reform process, for instance, benefited from good timing, coinciding with the start of globalization.

The Soviet Union’s sudden collapse also came as a great strategic boon, eliminating a menacing empire and opening the way for Beijing to rapidly increase strategic space globally. A succession of China-friendly U.S. presidents in the past two decades also has helped. China’s rise indeed owes a lot to the West’s decision not to sustain trade sanctions after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, but instead to integrate Beijing with global institutions through the liberalizing influence of foreign investment and trade.

Although China has come a long way since Tiananmen Square, with its citizens now enjoying property rights, overseas travel and other entitlements that were unthinkable two decades ago, political power still rests with the same party responsible for millions of deaths in state-induced disasters like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

That the communist party continues to monopolize power despite its past horrific excesses indeed is astonishing. This is now the oldest autocracy in the world. And it is hard to believe that it can survive for another 60 years. The longest any autocratic system has survived in modern history was 74 years in the Soviet Union.

The threat to the communist dictatorship extends beyond ethnic and social unrest. Reported incidents of grassroots violence have grown at about the same rate as China’s GDP. The ethnic challenges — best symbolized by the 2008 Tibetan uprising and this year’s Uighur revolt — won’t go away unless Beijing stops imposing cultural homogeneity and abandons ethnic drowning as state strategy in minority lands. Given the regime’s entrenched cultural chauvinism and tight centralized control, that is unlikely to happen. After all, President Hu Jintao’s slogan of a "harmonious society" is designed to undergird the theme of conformity with the state.

China’s challenges actually center on its political future. Although China has moved from being a totalitarian state to being an authoritarian state, some things haven’t changed since the Mao years. Some others indeed have changed for the worse, such as the whipping up of ultranationalism as the legitimizing credo of continued communist rule. Unremitting attempts to bend reality to the dangerous illusions the state propagates through information control and online censors risk turning China into a modern-day Potemkin state.

More fundamentally, if China manages to resolve the stark contradictions between its two systems — market capitalism and political monocracy — just as the Asian "tigers" South Korea and Taiwan were able to make the transition to democracy without crippling turbulence at home, China could emerge as a peer competitor to the United States.

Political modernization, not economic modernization, thus is the central challenge staring at China. But it won’t be easy for the communist leadership to open up politically without unraveling a system that now survives on a mix of crony capitalism and calibrated, state-dispensed patronage.

Internationally, China’s trajectory will depend on how its neighbors and other key players such as the U.S. manage its growing power. Such management — independently and in partnership — will determine if China stays on the positive side of the ledger, without its power sliding into arrogance.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Center for Policy Research, is the author, most recently, of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."
The Japan Times: October 6, 2009
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China at 60: Dramatic rise but unsettled future

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Pushing The Limits, Day After Day

Since 1949, China has seen a dramatic rise in
its fortunes. But its future is far from settled, says Brahma Chellaney.

Times of India, The Crest Edition, October
3, 2009 http://ow.ly/sCWG

Six decades
after it was founded, the People’s Republic of China can truly be proud of its
remarkable achievements. An impoverished, backward state in 1949, it has risen
dramatically and now commands respect and awe in the world. But such success
has come at great cost to its own people. In fact, China’s future remains more
uncertain than ever. It faces a worrisome paradox: Because of its opaque, repressive
system, the more it globalizes, the more vulnerable it becomes internally.

Unlike India, China first concentrated on
acquiring military muscle. By the time Deng Xiaoping launched his economic-modernization
programme, China
already had tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile and developed a
thermonuclear weapon (also known as a hydrogen or fusion bomb). The military
muscle gave Beijing
the much-needed security to focus on civilian modernization, helping it to fuel
its remarkable economic rise, which, in turn, has armed it with even greater
resources to sharpen its claws.

China’s economy has expanded 13-fold over
the last 30 years. Consequently, China has arrived as a global
economic player, with its state-owned corporate behemoths frenetically buying
foreign firms, technologies and resources. Add to the picture its rapidly swelling
foreign-exchange coffers. Beijing
thus is well-positioned geopolitically to further expand its influence.

Its defence
strategy since the Mao Zedong era has been founded on a simple premise — that
the capacity to defend oneself with one’s own resources is the first test a
nation has to pass on the way to becoming
a great power. So, even when China was poor, it
consciously put the accent on building
comprehensive national power.

Today, its
rapidly accumulating power raises concerns because even when it was backward
and internally troubled, it employed brute force to annex Xinjiang (1949) and Tibet (1950), to
raid South Korea (1950), to invade India (1962), to initiate a border conflict
with the Soviet Union through a military ambush (1969), and to attack Vietnam
(1979). A prosperous, militarily strong China cannot but be a threat to its
neighbours, especially if there are no constraints on the exercise of Chinese
power.

Communist
China actually began as an
international pariah state. Today, it is courted by the world.  Its rise in one generation as a world
power under authoritarian rule has come to epitomize the qualitative reordering
of international power. As the latest US
intelligence assessment predicts, China is “poised to have more
impact on the world over the next 20 years than any other country.”

A long-term vision and
unflinching pursuit of goals have been key drivers. But China’s rise also
has been aided by good fortune on multiple strategic fronts. First, Beijing’s reform process
benefited from good timing, coming as it did at the start of globalization
three decades ago. Second, the Soviet Union’s sudden collapse delivered an
immense strategic boon, eliminating a menacing empire and opening the way for Beijing to rapidly
increase strategic space globally. Russia’s
decline in the 1990s became China’s
gain. And third, there has been a succession of China-friendly U.S. presidents in the past two decades — a
significant period that has coincided with China’s ascension.

China’s rise indeed owes a lot to the
West’s decision not to sustain trade sanctions after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, but
instead to integrate Beijing
with global institutions through the liberalizing influence of foreign
investment and trade. That the choice made was wise can be seen from the
baneful impact of the opposite decision that was taken on Burma from the
late 1980s — to pursue a penal approach centred on sanctions. Had the
Burma-type approach been applied against China
internationally, the result would have been a less-prosperous, less-open and a
potentially destabilizing China.

Although China has come a
long way since Tiananmen Square, with its citizens now enjoying property
rights, the freedom to travel overseas and other rights that were unthinkable a
generation ago, political power still rests with the same party and system
responsible for the death of tens of millions of Chinese during the so-called
Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution and other state-induced disasters. The
greatest genocide in modern world history was not the Holocaust but the Great
Leap Forward, a misguided charge toward industrialization that left 36 million
people dead, according to Tombstone,
a recent book by long-time Chinese communist Yang Jisheng.

That the communist party
continues to monopolize power despite its past gory excesses indeed is
remarkable. This is now the oldest autocracy in the world. The longest any
autocratic system has survived in modern history was 74 years in the Soviet Union.

Although China has moved
from being a totalitarian state to being an authoritarian state, some things
haven’t changed since the Mao years. Some other things indeed have changed for
the worse, such as the whipping up of ultra-nationalism and turning that into
the legitimating credo of communist rule. Attempts to bend reality to the
illusions the state propagates through information control and online censors actually
risk turning China
into a modern-day Potemkin state.

While India celebrates diversity, China honours
artificially enforced monoculturalism, although it officially comprises 56
nationalities. China
seeks not only to play down its ethnic diversity, but also to conceal the
cultural and linguistic cleavages among the Han majority, lest the historical
north-south fault lines resurface with a vengeance. The Han — split in at least
seven linguistically and culturally distinct groups — are anything but
homogenous.

China’s internal problems — best
symbolized by the 2008 Tibetan uprising and this year’s Uighur revolt — won’t
go away unless Beijing
stops imposing cultural homogeneity and abandons ethnic drowning as state
strategy in minority lands. But given the regime’s entrenched cultural
chauvinism and tight centralized control, that is unlikely to happen. After
all, President Hu Jintao’s slogan of a “harmonious society” is designed to
undergird the theme of conformity with the state.

More fundamentally, if China manages to resolve the stark
contradictions between its two systems — market capitalism and political
monocracy — just the way Asian “tigers” like South
Korea and Taiwan
were able to make the transition to democracy without crippling turbulence at
home, China could emerge as
a peer competitor to the US.
Political modernization, not economic modernization, thus is the central
challenge staring at China.
If it is to build and sustain a great-power capacity, it has to avoid a
political hard landing.

Internationally,
China’s
trajectory will depend on how its neighbours and distant countries like the US manage its
growing power. Such management —
independently and in partnership — will determine if China stays on the positive side of
the ledger, without its power sliding into arrogance.

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

Global spread of democracy comes under challenge

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The Rise of Authoritarian Capitalism
 

A fusion of autocratic politics and state-guided capitalism has emerged as the leading challenge to international spread of democratic values.

Brahma Chellaney
The Economic Times
 
Has the global spread of democracy run out of steam? For long, democracy and free markets were touted as the twin answer to most ills. But while free-market tenets have come under strain in the present international financial crisis, with the very countries that espoused the self-regulating power of markets taking the lead to embrace principles of financial socialism to bail out their troubled corporate colossuses, the spread of democracy is encountering increasingly strong headwinds.

Between 1988 and 1990, as the Cold War was winding down, pro-democracy protests broke out in several parts of the world — from China and Burma to Eastern Europe. The protests helped spread political freedoms in Eastern Europe and inspired popular movements elsewhere that overturned dictatorships in countries as disparate as Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan and Chile. After the Soviet disintegration, even Russia emerged as a credible candidate for democratic reform.

The overthrow of a number of totalitarian or autocratic regimes did shift the global balance of power in favour of the forces of democracy. But not all the pro-democracy movements were successful. And the subsequent “colour revolutions” only instilled greater caution among the surviving authoritarian regimes, prompting them to set up countermeasures to foreign-inspired democratisation initiatives.

Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the spread of democracy unmistakably has stalled. Democracy may have become the norm in much of Europe, but in the world’s largest and most densely populated continent, Asia, only a small minority of states are true democracies, despite the eastward movement of global power and influence. The strategy to use market forces to open up tightly centralised political systems hasn’t worked in multiple cases in Asia — the pivot of global strategic change.

Political homogeneity may be as inharmonious with economic advance as the parallel pursuit of market capitalism and political autocracy. But where authoritarianism is deeply entrenched, a marketplace of goods and services simply does not allow a marketplace of political ideas.

In fact, one such model distinctly has emerged stronger. China is now the world’s largest and oldest autocracy, with leadership there now preparing to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. To help glorify the communist revolution, the leadership has planned a mammoth military parade — the largest ever — along with a repeat of some of the Beijing Olympics glitz at the October 1 anniversary. Those Olympic-style celebrations will serve as a double reminder: China has not only weathered the international democratisation push, but also has emerged as a potential peer rival to America. Today there is talk of even a US-China diarchy — a G-2 — ruling the world.

China’s spectacular rise as a global power in just one generation under authoritarian rule represents the first direct challenge to liberal democracy since the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Through its remarkable success story, China advertises that authoritarianism is a more rapid and smoother way to prosperity and stability than the tumult of electoral politics. Freedom advocates in existing autocracies may be inspired and energised by the international success stories of democratic transition. But the regimes that employ brute power and censorship to subdue dissidence clearly draw encouragement from the China model.

Then there is the spectre of democracy in retreat, highlighted by the developments in Russia and the regressive path of some of the “colour revolutions,” not to mention Central America’s first military coup since the end of the Cold War in Honduras. The “tulip revolution” in Kyrgyzstan has turned sour in the face of rigged elections, assassination of rivals and growing influence of organised crime. Georgia’s “rose revolution” also has wilted under President Mikheil Saakashvili’s increasing despotism.

In Russia, government control has been extended to large swaths of the economy and the political opposition systematically undermined without reopening Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago. Such centralisation, though, is no different than in, say, Singapore and Malaysia, including the domination of one political party, the absence of diversified media, limits on public demonstrations and the writ of security services. But in contrast to Russia, Singapore and Malaysia have largely insulated themselves from official US criticism by serving western interests.

China, for its part, has stayed abreast with technological innovations to help deny dissidents the latest means to denounce injustice. The widespread use of Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging and cellular phones by Iranian protesters cannot be emulated by Chinese dissidents because Beijing employs cyberpolice to regulate websites, patrol cybercafés, monitor cellphone text messaging and track down internet activists. And unlike Iran’s clerically controlled democracy, China holds no elections to elect its leaders, not even sham elections.

More broadly, the US occupation of Iraq under the garb of spreading democracy as well as excesses like Guantanamo Bay and secret CIA detention camps overseas had the effect of undermining the credibility of democratic values by presenting them as a geopolitical tool. Today, liberal democratic norms, far from becoming universal, have come under attack at a time when a qualitative reordering of global power is empowering non-western economies. That raises the possibility that, in the coming decades, economies driven by a fusion of autocratic politics and crony, state-guided capitalism could gain the upper hand.

A divide centred on political values will carry major geopolitical implications because, as modern history attests, regime character can impede observance of global norms and rules. Even if democratic governments are not more wedded to peace than autocracies, it is well established that democracies rarely go to war with each other. Today, the main challenge to the global spread of democracy comes from the model blending political authoritarianism and state-steered capitalism together. What if such authoritarian capitalism becomes the face of the future in large parts of the world?

 
The author is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research.

 
(c) The Economic Times: September 17, 2009