The U.S.-China-India Strategic Triangle

Posted on November 6, 2009 by Chellaney

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

(C) All rights reserved

How post-1989 events transformed the world

Posted on November 3, 2009 by Chellaney

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.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/opinion/04iht-edchellaney.html

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

Posted on November 3, 2009 by Chellaney

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

Posted on October 26, 2009 by Chellaney

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

Winning peace in Sri Lanka

Posted on October 17, 2009 by Chellaney

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?

Posted on October 9, 2009 by Chellaney

Challenges for China concern political future, not economics

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

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.

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.

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

China at 60: Dramatic rise but unsettled future

Posted on October 4, 2009 by Chellaney

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

Posted on September 18, 2009 by Chellaney

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.

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

Eight years after 9/11: America’s Afghan options

Posted on September 11, 2009 by Chellaney

U.S. exit from Afghanistan to bring gains

Brahma Chellaney

An Afghan shopkeeper looks through his shop supplies as he waits for customers in the city of Jalalabad, Afghanistan.

An American military exit from Afghanistan, far from boosting the global-jihad syndicate, is likely to trigger developments largely internal or regional in nature while aiding the global fight against terrorism.

The Hindu newspaper, September 11, 2009

America’s war in Afghanistan is approaching a tipping point, with doubts about President Barack Obama’s strategy rising and three-quarters of the Democratic voters polled opposing continued U.S. combat operations there. Even the main war proponent — the Republican camp — seems split, with prominent conservative voices like George F. Will and Chuck Hagel now calling for an American pullout. Yet Mr. Obama, after dispatching 21,000 additional U.S. forces to Afghanistan, is planning to send another 14,000 combat troops while outsourcing military-support jobs there to create an illusion of no new surge.

Mr. Obama, clearly, is in a major predicament over a war he inherited, with no workable options for him to stabilise Afghanistan by next year or even to pull out military forces while saving face. Still, he is deepening American involvement there, thereby spurring serious apprehensions at home. Eight years after 9/11, an American invasion that started with the objective of winning the war on terror is in danger of becoming Mr. Obama’s Vietnam — a quagmire with a confused political mission.

Vice-President Joe Biden has warned that “more loss” of U.S. lives is “inevitable,” while Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, has admitted, “The enemy’s getting better and tougher. And we need to turn that around in the next 12 to 18 months.” That was exactly the timeframe Mr. Obama had in mind when he launched the military surge. But with every month now proving more deadly, a war-weary U.S. public and Congress may be reluctant to patiently wait that long for the promised turnaround. The Obama narrative — that this is the war of necessity, unlike Iraq — is coming under growing attack.

Put simply, Mr. Obama’s ambitious new war strategy, including doubling the number of American troops on the ground and replacing the top U.S. general in Afghanistan, isn’t working. Not only are more American soldiers dying in Afghanistan than in Iraq, but there has been a 1,000 per cent increase in IED attacks by Afghan militants since mid-2005. It is the alarming rise in the sophistication and frequency of roadside bomb attacks that has made the Afghan war increasingly bloody. Mr. Obama also has been locked in a losing battle in the other part of his Afpak strategy — to win hearts and minds in Pakistan through an unprecedented aid flow to that country.

Let’s be clear: America’s Afghan war is just not winnable for two main reasons. Firstly, Mr. Obama has redefined U.S. goals too narrowly. America’s primary goal now is not to defeat the Taliban but to prevent the al-Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a base to launch an attack on the United States. Mr. Obama candidly told the Associated Press in a July 2 interview: “I have a very narrow definition of success when it comes to our national security interests, and that is that al-Qaeda and its affiliates cannot set up safe havens from which to attack America.” But the al-Qaeda is not really a factor in the Afghan war, where the principal combatants are the American military and the Taliban, with its associated militias and private armies. Rather than seek to defeat the Taliban, Washington indeed has encouraged the Pakistani, Afghan and Saudi intelligence to hold proxy negotiations with the Taliban’s top leadership, holed up in Quetta.

Secondly, the U.S. is fighting the wrong war. Eight years after the American invasion drove the al-Qaeda leaders from Afghanistan, Pakistan has emerged as the main base and sanctuary for transnational terrorists. Support and sustenance for the Taliban and many other Afghan militants also come from inside Pakistan. Yet Mr. Obama pursues a military surge in Afghanistan but an aid surge to Pakistan, to the extent that Islamabad is being made the single largest recipient of U.S. assistance in the world.

In that light, Mr. Obama’s war strategy is questionable. Given that he has abandoned his predecessor’s goal to defeat the Taliban and capture dead or alive its one-eyed leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, his move to induct even more American troops stirs widespread concern.

To defeat the al-Qaeda, the U.S. doesn’t need a troop build-up — certainly not in Afghanistan. Without a large ground force in Afghanistan or even major ground operations, the U.S. can hold the al-Qaeda remnants at bay in their havens in the mountainous tribal regions of Pakistan through covert operations, Predator drones and cruise-missile attacks. Isn’t that precisely what the CIA already is doing, having killed more than a dozen suspected Qaeda figures in Pakistan in recent drone and missile attacks?

Actually, the U.S. intelligence believes that the al-Qaeda already is badly fragmented and weakened and thus is in no position to openly challenge American interests. According to the latest Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community, “Because of the pressure we and our allies have put on Al Qaeda’s core leadership in Pakistan … Al Qaeda today is less capable and effective than it was a year ago.”

Had the Obama goal been to rout the Taliban, a further military surge may have made sense because a resurgent Taliban can be defeated only through major ground operations, not by air-strikes and covert actions alone. Yet, having abandoned the international goal of institution-building in Afghanistan by equating it with nation-building, the Obama administration presses ahead with a “clear, hold, build” strategy. When the administration’s principal war target is not the Taliban but the al-Qaeda remnants on the run, why chase a troop-intensive strategy pivoted on protecting population centres to win grassroots support? In reality, what it calls a “clear, hold, build” strategy is actually a “surge, bribe, run” strategy, except that the muddled nature of the mission and the deepening U.S. involvement crimp the “run” option.

America’s quandary is a reminder that it is easier to get into a war than to get out. In fact, Mr. Obama undermined his own unfolding war strategy last March by publicly declaring, “There’s got to be an exit strategy.” The message it sent to the Taliban and its sponsor, the Pakistani military, was that they ought to simply outwait the Americans to reclaim Afghanistan.

Before Afghanistan becomes a Vietnam-style quagmire for the U.S., Mr. Obama must rethink his plan for another troop surge. Gradually drawing down U.S. troop levels indeed makes more sense because what holds the disparate constituents of the Taliban syndicate together is a common opposition to foreign military presence.

An American military exit from Afghanistan will not come as a shot in the arm for the forces of global jihad, as many in Washington seem to fear. To the contrary, it will remove the common unifying element and unleash developments whose significance would be largely internal or regional. In Afghanistan, a vicious power struggle would break out along sectarian and ethnic lines.

The Taliban, with the active support of the Pakistani military, would certainly make a run for Kabul to replay the 1996 power grab. But it won’t be easy to repeat 1996. For one, the Taliban is too splintered today, with the tail (private armies and militias) wagging the dog. For another, the non-Taliban and non-Pashtun forces now are stronger, more organised and better prepared than in 1996 to resist the Taliban’s advance to Kabul, having been empowered by the autonomy they have enjoyed in provinces or by the offices they still hold in the Afghan federal government. By retaining Afghan bases to carry out covert operations and Predator missions and other air-strikes, the U.S. military would be able to unleash punitive air power to prevent a 1996 repeat. After all, it was the combination of American air power and Northern Alliance’s ground operations that ousted the Taliban from power in 2001.

In fact, the most likely outcome of the Afghan power struggle triggered by an American decision to pull out would be the formalisation of the present de facto partition of Afghanistan along ethnic lines. Iraq, too, is headed in the same direction. 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 Durand Line in ferment. Thanks to ethnic polarisation, the Durand Line today exists only in maps. On the ground, it has little political, ethnic and economic relevance, and it will be militarily impracticable to re-impose the line.

As in Iraq, an American withdrawal would potentially let loose forces of Balkanisation in the Afpak belt. That may sound disturbing. But this would be an unintended and perhaps unstoppable consequence of the U.S. invasion.

An American pullout would also aid the fight against international terrorism. Instead of staying bogged down in Afghanistan and seeking to cajole and bribe the Pakistani military from continuing to provide succour to Islamic militants, Washington would become free to pursue a broader and more balanced counterterrorism strategy. Also, minus the Afghan-war burden, the U.S. would better appreciate the dangers to international security posed by Pakistani terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammed. The threat of an Islamist takeover of Pakistan comes not from the Taliban but from these groups that have long drawn support from the Pakistani army as part of a deep-rooted military-mullah alliance.

(Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.)

Reengage Burma

Posted on August 29, 2009 by Chellaney

U.S. should engage Burma

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times August 29, 2009

Driven by their legendary pioneering spirit, Americans have a penchant to do dangerous things and then create an international crisis if they get arrested. Just consider the events of recent months: Two female journalists stray into North Korea; three students trekking in Iraq lose their way into Iran; and a military veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder enters Burma illegally and then swims three kilometers across a lake to sneak into opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s heavily guarded home. He spends two days at Suu Kyi’s home — even though she is supposed to be under house arrest — to warn her that he had had a vision in which she was killed by terrorists.

What is more bizarre is that such adventures were directed at the three countries that currently face the most-severe U.S. sanctions. These nations thus had no reason to be amused by the exploits, let alone to pardon the individuals.

In fact, by rendering its sanctions instrument blunt through overuse, Washington has dissipated its leverage against Burma, North Korea and Iran and run out of viable options. The new U.S. administration, therefore, has wisely sought to open lines of communication with these countries and review policy options.

The humanitarian imperative to help free jailed Americans provided the impetus to this political undertaking. The individuals’ dangerous exploits thus came as a blessing in disguise for U.S. diplomacy, presenting an opportunity to try and open the door to engagement while providing the humanitarian shield to deflect attacks by hard-line critics at home.

Just this month, even as the White House kept up the pretence that these were “private, humanitarian missions unlinked to U.S. policies,” the United States was able to reopen lines of communication with North Korea and Burma, with ex-President Bill Clinton’s trip to Pyongyang winning the release of the two women and Senator James Webb’s lower-profile mission to Rangoon and Naypyidaw, the new Burmese capital, actually yielding more tangible political results. Webb also secured the release of the ex-military man who was recently convicted and sentenced to seven years in hard labor.

A formal U.S. opening to Iran, however, would have to await the outcome of the current intense struggle for supremacy there among those empowered by the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Let’s be clear: U.S. policy increasingly has pushed Burma into China’s strategic lap through an uncompromisingly penal approach since the mid-1990s — to the extent that the Bush administration began turning to Beijing as a channel of communication with the junta, even though the U.S. has maintained non-ambassadorial diplomatic relations with Burma, unlike with Iran and North Korea. A policy that has the perverse effect of weakening America’s hand while strengthening China’s, clearly, demands a reappraisal.

The weight of the U.S.-led sanctions has fallen squarely on the ordinary Burmese, while the military remains largely unaffected. The sanctions-only approach indeed has made it less likely that the seeds of democracy will sprout in a stunted economy.

The U.S. also cannot forget that democratization of an autocratic state is a challenge that extends beyond Burma. Democracy promotion thus should not become a geopolitical tool wielded only against the weak and the marginalized.

Can one principle be applied to the world’s largest autocracy, China — that engagement is the way to bring about political change — but an opposite principle centered on sanctions remain in force against impoverished Burma? Going after the small kids on the global bloc but courting the most-powerful autocrats is hardly the way to build international norms.

Against this background, the Obama administration is doing the right thing by exploring the prospect of a gradual U.S. reengagement with Burma, with American diplomats holding two separate meetings with the Burmese foreign minister in recent months. Webb’s Burma mission was a big boost in that direction.

Webb, who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia and Pacific Affairs, held separate face-to-face discussions with the junta’s top leader, Gen. Than Shwe, and Prime Minister Gen. Thein Sein. He also was allowed to meet Suu Kyi, just weeks after UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had been denied such a meeting.

In fact, after Suu Kyi was convicted of violating the terms of her house detention by sheltering the American intruder, the junta instantly commuted her sentence to allow her to return to her villa and not spend time in a jail. If Suu Kyi were to reverse her decision to boycott next year’s national elections, the generals might even be willing to lift her house detention. In any case, Suu Kyi remains free to leave the country, but on a one-way ticket.

The elections are unlikely to be free and fair. But make no mistake: By agreeing to hold the polls, the military is implicitly creating a feeling of empowerment among the people. However unintended, the message citizens will draw is that the next government’s legitimacy depends on them. Which other entrenched autocracy in the world is offering to empower its citizens to vote on a new government?

The electoral process creates space for the Burmese democracy movement. The regime will have to allow political parties to campaign and take their message to the people. That, in turn, will allow the parties to galvanize support for democratic transition. Getting a foot in is necessary before the door to political change can be forced open.

That is why many parties representing the large ethnic minorities have decided to participate in the elections, even though the polls will be fought on the skewed terms set by the military. If Suu Kyi stays out, she and the aging leadership of her party, the National League for Democracy, will miss an important opportunity for the democracy movement to assert itself under the military’s own rules.

Just the way Washington today is reassessing its hard line toward Burma, India was compelled to shift course after a decade of foreign-policy activism from the late 1980s — but not before paying dearly. In the period New Delhi broke off all contact with the junta and became a hub of Burmese dissident activity, China strategically penetrated Burma, opening a new flank against India. That period’s sobering lessons have helped instill greater geopolitical realism in Indian policy. While still seeking political reconciliation and democratic transition in Burma, New Delhi now espouses constructive engagement with the junta.

After all, years of sanctions have left Burma bereft of an entrepreneurial class but saddled with the military as the only functioning institution. That means a “color revolution” is unlikely and that democratic transition will be a painfully incremental process.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is a regular contributor to The Japan Times.

The Japan Times: Saturday, Aug. 29, 2009

Stagecraft and Statecraft

Category Archives: International Security