Category Archives: International Security

China’s cultural chauvinism recoils

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China’s false monoculture

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
The Japan Times
 

By blanketing the oil-rich Xinjiang with troops, China’s rulers may have subdued the Uighur revolt, which began in Urumqi, the regional capital, and spread to other heavily guarded towns like Hotan and Kashgar, the ancient cultural center whose old city is to be razed and redeveloped to help drain supposed jihadist swamps. But this deadliest case of minority rioting in decades — along with the 2008 ethnic uprising across the Tibetan plateau — shows the political costs of forcible absorption, shattering the illusion of a monolithic China and laying bare the country’s Achilles’ heel.

The ruling Chinese Communist Party had gone to unusual lengths to block any protests from flaring during this symbolically important year marking the 60th anniversary of its coming to power.

For example, the 20th anniversary of "June 4," the date of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of prodemocracy protesters, went by without any incident because of heavy security in Beijing. A security siege in Tibet similarly ensured that the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan national uprising against the Chinese occupation and the Dalai Lama’s consequent flight to India passed off peacefully. A confident Beijing then provocatively observed March 28 — the 50th anniversary of its declaration of direct rule over Tibet — as "Serf Emancipation Day" with a national holiday, as if it just realized it liberated Tibetans from serfdom half a century ago.

Against that background, the Uighur rebellion — in the 60th-anniversary year of the Chinese annexation of Xinjiang — is a rude jolt to what is now the world’s largest, strongest and longest-surviving autocracy. Tibet, which was forcibly brought under Chinese rule in 1950, remains tense since last year, with foreign reporters still barred from traveling there.

The policies of forced assimilation in resource-rich Tibet and Xinjiang — located at the crossroads of Asian civilizations — began after Mao Zedong created a land corridor link between the two rebellious regions by gobbling up India’s 38,000-square-km Aksai Chin, part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Aksai Chin provides the only accessible Tibet-Xinjiang route through the Kunlun mountains.

Aksai Chin began coming under Chinese control in the 1950s through furtive encroachment, before Mao consolidated and extended China’s hold by waging open war on India in 1962. A year later, Pakistan ceded to China a 5,120-square-km slice of the Kashmir territory held by it.

Today, about 60 percent territory of the People’s Republic comprises territories that historically had not been under direct Han rule. China, in fact, now is three times as large as it was under the last Han dynasty, the Ming, which fell in the mid-17th century. Territorially, Han power thus is at its zenith, symbolized by the fact that the Great Wall was built as the Han empire’s outer security perimeter. Xinjiang and Tibet, by themselves, make up nearly half of China’s landmass.

The Manchu assimilation into Han society and the swamping of the locals in Inner Mongolia have left only the Tibetans and the Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang as the holdouts.

But the events since last year have come as a painful reminder to the Chinese leadership that its strategy of ethnic and economic colonization of the traditional Tibetan and Uighur lands is stoking deep unrest. While government efforts to spread Han language, culture and commercial power have bred local resentment, economic development in those regions — largely geared at exploiting their resource wealth — has helped marginalize the natives. While the locals get the menial work to do, the Han settlers hold the well-paying jobs and run the show, overtly symbolizing an equation between the colonized and the colonizers.

More importantly, the very survival of the major non-Han cultures in China is now threatened. From school-level indoctrination and forced political reeducation to Draconian curbs on native farmland and monastic life, Chinese policies have helped instill feelings of subjugation and resentment in Tibet and Xinjiang.

To help Sinicize the minority lands, Beijing’s multipronged strategy has involved five key components: cartographically altering ethnic-homeland boundaries; demographically flooding non-Han cultures; rewriting history to justify Chinese control; enforcing cultural homogeneity to help blur local identities; and maintaining political repression.

Demographically, what Beijing is pursuing is not ethnic cleansing in these regions but ethnic drowning. This strategy to ethnically drown the natives through the "Go West" Han-migration campaign is tantamount to cultural annihilation. A first step in that direction was the cartographic reorganization of minority regions. In gerrymandering Tibet, Beijing placed half of the Tibetan plateau and nearly 60 percent of the Tibetan population under Han jurisdictions in the provinces of Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan. Tibet’s cartographic dismemberment set the stage to ethnically swamp the Tibetans, both in the separated parts and in the remainder Tibet deceptively named the Tibet Autonomous Region.

The Tibetan and Uighur languages already are disappearing from local schools. Rapid Sinicization of their pristine environment, however, has only sharpened the Tibetan and Uighur sense of identity and yearning for freedom. After all, if current trends continue, Tibetans and Uighurs will be reduced within decades to the status of Native Americans in the United States.

Reliable information on the casualties and continuing arrests in Xinjiang is hard to come by. At the first sign of trouble in Tibet or Xinjiang, Beijing cuts off local Internet and cell-phone services and imposes a security lockdown through curfews and virtual martial law. Few believe the official death toll in Xinjiang. After all, Beijing has insisted only 13 people were killed in spring 2008 in Tibet despite the Tibetan government-in-exile documenting some 220 Tibetan deaths.

Significantly, there are important parallels between the Tibet and Xinjiang violence. The ethnic uprisings in both regions erupted after authorities tried to disperse peaceful protesters in the local capital — Lhasa and Urumqi — where Han Chinese now outnumber the natives. In both regions, the protesters vented their anger on Han settlers. And just as Beijing was quick to link the Dalai Lama to last year’s Tibetan insurrection, it blamed the Xinjiang bloodshed on exiled Uighur leaders, specifically the Washington-based Rebiya Kadeer, helping to lift her from relative obscurity to international prominence. An ex-businesswoman, Kadeer, however, is no advocate of violence, although she spent six years in a Chinese jail and two of her sons are still imprisoned in Xinjiang.

While Beijing was quick to clamp down on information about the events in Tibet and Xinjiang, it applied media-management lessons learned in Tibet to its handling of the news on Xinjiang. One lesson was that it had to go beyond suppression of facts to information spin to tone down coverage of the developments. So, as opposed to the way it shut out the media from Tibet, it readily took foreign journalists to the violence-scarred Urumqi for stage-managed tours.

But as in Tibet earlier, the Chinese propaganda machine focused on portraying the dominant Han settlers in Urumqi as the hapless victims, with the state media showing no images of Han attacking Uighurs or security personnel employing brute force. Indeed, presenting restive, disadvantaged minorities as ungrateful, violent races resistant to the Han civilizing influence has been integral to the regime’s repression.

Alas, the central plank of the Chinese system remains uniformity, with President Hu Jintao’s slogan of a "harmonious society" designed to undergird the theme of conformity. Little surprise Hu’s public response to the Uighur unrest was to ask local authorities to "isolate and deal a blow" to the troublemakers rather than seek to address the causes of the festering discontent. Brutal repression is a sure recipe for more unrest.

While India celebrates diversity, China honors artificially enforced monoculturalism, although it officially comprises 56 nationalities — the Han nationality (which, according to the last census in 2000, accounted for 91 percent of the total population) and 55 ethnic minority groups. 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 seven or more linguistically and culturally distinct groups — are anything but homogenous. The major languages in China other than those in minority homelands include Mandarin, Hakka (spoken in several southern areas), Gan (Jiangxi province), Wu (Zhejiang province), Xiang (Hunan province), Yue (mostly Guangdong province), Pinghua (an offshoot of Yue), Southern Min (Hokkien/Taiwanese) and Northern Min.

Yet the CCP has used the myth of homogeneity to fan Han nationalism. This myth, originally designed to unify the non-Manchus against the Manchu Qing Dynasty, was invented by Sun Yat-Sen, who led the republican movement that took power in 1911. The subsequent imposition of the northern language, Mandarin, helped establish a lingua franca in a diverse society but, almost a century later, it is not Mandarin but the local languages that remain commonly spoken.

Today, thanks to the greater self-awareness flowing from advances in information and communications technologies, the Hakka, Sichuanese, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Fujianese, Swatow, Hunanese and other communities officially classified as Han are reasserting their distinctive identities and taking pride in their cultural heritage.

China’s ethnic problems won’t go away unless the rulers stop imposing cultural homogeneity and abandon ethnic drowning as state strategy in minority lands.

After the 2008 Tibetan uprising, 2009 will go down as the year the Uighurs revolted. With next year marking 60 years of Chinese occupation of Tibet, the spotlight will stay on China’s internal challenges. And with economic growth slowing and domestic unrest growing at about the same rate as China’s GDP, these challenges indeed extend to the Chinese heartland.

Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.
 
The Japan Times: Wednesday, July 15, 2009
(C) All rights reserved

International democratization push encounters strong headwinds

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Spread of democracy stalls

 

A fusion of autocratic politics and crony, state-guided capitalism has emerged as the main challenge to the global spread of democratic values

 

Brahma Chellaney

The Japan Times

 

Has the global spread of democracy run out of steam? For long, but especially since the end of the Cold War, 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 strong-arm tactics Iranian authorities recently employed to quell demonstrations challenging President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection were no different than the use of state power by Burma’s junta to suppress monk-led protests nearly two years ago. If there was any expectation of a “green revolution” in Iran or a “saffron revolution” in Burma, that hope lies crushed, at least for the time being. Indeed, the demonstrations that broke out in Iran represented not a democratic uprising but a struggle for ascendancy among those empowered by the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

 

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

As the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall nears, it is evident that the spread of democracy 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 small minority of states are true democracies, despite the eastward movement of power and influence. The strategy to use market forces to open up tightly centralized political systems hasn’t worked in multiple cases in Asia — the pivot of global strategic change.

 

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

 

In fact, one autocracy distinctly has emerged stronger and wealthier. That autocracy — China — is the world’s largest and oldest, with its leadership 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 would serve as a double reminder: China has not only weathered the international democratization push, but also has emerged as a potential peer rival to America. Today there is talk of even a U.S.-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 autocracies may be inspired and energized by the international success stories of democratic transition. But the regimes that employ brute power and censorship to subdue protests and dissidence clearly draw encouragement from the China model.

 

Then there is the specter of democracy in retreat, highlighted by the developments in Russia and the regressive path of some of the “color 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 flawed elections, assassination of political rivals and growing influence of organized crime. Georgia’s “rose revolution” also has wilted under President Mikheil Saakashvili’s increasing despotism.

 

In Russia, the political system has moved toward greater centralized control and limits on civil liberties. This mirrors the centralization in a number of Asian states, with some practicing soft authoritarianism and the others hard authoritarianism.

 

China, still in the “hard authoritarianism” category, has stayed abreast with technological innovations to help deny protesters 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 Web sites, patrol  cybercafés, monitor cell-phone text messaging and track down Internet activists. And at the first sign of trouble in Tibet or Xinjiang, authorities cut off Internet and SMS services there. But after the 2008 Tibetan uprising, 2009 is becoming the year of the Uighur revolt, threatening to mar China’s October 1 fiesta. Unlike Iran’s clerically controlled democracy, China holds no elections to elect its leaders, not even sham elections.

 

More broadly, the U.S. occupation of Iraq under the garb of spreading democracy as well as excesses like Guantanamo Bay and illegal CIA detention camps overseas had the effect of undermining the credibility of democratic values by turning them into geopolitical tactics.

 

The point is that 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 centered on political values will carry major implications for international relations because, as modern history attests, regime character can impede observance of global norms and rules. And 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. Such authoritarian capitalism, far from being a stage in the process of political modernization, could well be the face of the future.

 

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of “Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan” (HarperCollins).

 

(c) Japan Times, July 9, 2009.

Opportunity to redefine U.S.-Russia ties

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Don’t bait the Russian bear

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
The Japan Times: July 2, 2009
 

U.S. President Barack Obama’s Moscow visit offers a historic opportunity to avert a new Cold War by establishing a more stable and cooperative relationship between the West and Russia.

Obama has reiterated his "commitment to a more substantive relationship with Russia." This needs to translate into policy moves symbolizing new, broad engagement.

Three important facts about Russia stand out. One, Russia has gradually become a more assertive power after stemming its precipitous decline and drift of the 1990s. Two, it now plays the Great Game on energy. Competition over control of hydrocarbon resources was a defining feature of the Cold War and remains an important driver of contemporary geopolitics, as manifest from the American occupation of Iraq and U.S. military bases or strategic tie-ups stretching across the oil-rich Persian Gulf, Caspian Sea basin and Central Asia.

Three, Russian democracy has moved toward greater centralized control to bring order and direction to the state. During Vladimir Putin’s presidency, government control was extended to large swaths of the economy and the political opposition was systematically emasculated.

Such centralization, 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 insulated themselves from U.S. criticism by willingly serving Western interests. When did you last hear official American criticism of Singapore’s egregious political practices?

Yet Russia faces a rising tide of Western censure for gradually sliding toward autocratic control at home. Actually, ideological baggage, not dispassionate strategic deliberation, tends to often color U.S. and European discourse on Russia.

Another reason is Russia’s geographical presence in Europe, the "mother" of both the Russian and U.S. civilizations. There is thus a greater propensity to hold Russia to European standards, unlike, say, China. Also, Russia was considered a more plausible candidate for democratic reform than China, now the world’s largest, oldest and strongest autocracy. Little surprise Russia’s greater centralization evokes fervent Western reaction.

Today’s Russia, however, bears little resemblance to the Soviet Union. Life for the average Russian is freer and there is no Soviet-style shortage of consumer goods. There are also no online censors regulating Internet content as in China, and criticism of the Russian government is, by and large, tolerated, especially if it does not threaten the position of those in power.

While China seeks to project power in distant lands, including Africa and Latin America, Russia wishes to project power in its own neighborhood, or what it calls its "Far Abroad," including Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, Central Asia and the Caucuses. Given its geopolitical focus on states in its vicinity, not on the "Far Abroad," Russia, with its size and clout, is able to bring pressure and intimidation to bear on such adjacent states. And given its own relative stability, Russia is able to exploit political instability in neighboring states.

But what now looks like a resurgent power faces major demographic and economic challenges to build and sustain great-power capacity over the long run.

Demographically, Russia is even in danger of losing its Slavic identity and becoming a Muslim-majority state in the decades ahead, unless government incentives succeed in encouraging Russian women to have more children. The average age of death of a Russian male has fallen to 58.9 years — nearly two decades below an American. While Japan faces a population decline, Russia confronts depopulation.

Economically, the oil-price crash has come as a warning to Russia against being a largely petro-state.

In fact, Moscow’s economic fortunes for long have been tied too heavily to oil — a commodity with volatile prices. In 1980, the Soviet Union overtook Saudi Arabia as the biggest oil producer. But oil prices began to decline, plummeting to $9 a barrel in mid-1986. U.S. intelligence, failing to read the significance of this, continued to claim Moscow was engaged in massive military modernization. During the Putin presidency, rising oil prices played a key role in Russian economic revival.

The higher the oil prices, the less the pressure there is on Russia to restructure and diversify its economy. The present low prices thus offer an opportunity to Moscow to reform.

Still, it should not be forgotten that Russia is the world’s wealthiest country in natural resources — from fertile farmlands and metals, to gold and timber. It sits on colossal hydrocarbon reserves. It also remains a nuclear and missile superpower. Indeed, to compensate for the erosion in its conventional-military capabilities, it has increasingly relied on its large nuclear arsenal, which it is ambitiously modernizing.

Whatever its future, the big question is: What is the right international approach toward a resurgent Russia? Here two aspects need to be borne in mind.

First, Russia geopolitically is the most important "swing" state in the world today. Its geopolitical swing worth is more than China’s or India’s. While China is inextricably tied to the U.S. economy and India’s geopolitical direction is clearly set toward closer economic and political engagement with the West — even as New Delhi retains its strategic autonomy — Russia is a wild card. A wrong policy course on Russia by the West would not only prove counterproductive to Western interests, but also affect international peace and security. It could push Moscow inexorably in the wrong direction, creating a new East-West divide.

Second, there are some useful lessons applicable to Russia that the West can draw on how it has dealt with another rising power. China has come a long way since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of prodemocracy demonstrators. What it has achieved in the last generation in terms of economic modernization and the opening of minds is extraordinary. That owes a lot to the West’s decision not to sustain trade sanctions after Tiananmen Square but instead to integrate China into global institutions.

That the choice made was wise can be seen from the baneful impact of the opposite decision taken on Burma after 1988 — to pursue a punitive approach relying on sanctions. Had the Burma-type approach been applied against China, the result would not only have been a less-prosperous and less-open China, but also a more-paranoid and possibly destabilizing China. The obvious lesson is that engagement and integration are better than sanctions and isolation.

Today, with a new chill setting in on relations between the West and Russia, that lesson is in danger of getting lost. Russia’s 16-year effort to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) has still to bear fruit, even as Moscow is said to be in the last phase of negotiations, and the U.S.- Russian nuclear deal remains on hold in Washington.

Little thought has been given to how the West lost Russia, which during its period of decline eagerly sought to cozy up to the U.S. and Europe, only to get the cold shoulder from Washington. And even as NATO is being expanded right up to Russia’s front yard and after the U.S.-led the action in engineering Kosovo’s February 2008 self-proclamation of independence, attention has focused since last August on Moscow’s misguided five-day military intervention in Georgia and its recognition of the self-declaration of independence by South Ossetia and Abkhazia — actions that some have tried to portray as the 21st century’s first forcible changing of borders.

But having sponsored Kosovo’s self- proclamation of independence, the U.S. and some of its allies awkwardly opposed the same right of self-determination for the people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Can the legitimacy of a self-declaration of independence depend on which great power sponsors that action?

The world cannot afford a new Cold War, which is what constant baiting of the Russian bear will bring. Fortunately, there are some positive signs. Seeking to heel the rift triggered by the yearlong developments over Georgia, the U.S. and Russia are resuming full military cooperation and have reopened negotiations on nuclear arms control, with the talks centered on quickly establishing a successor to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, whose 15-year term runs out December 5. Also, the U.S. is going slow on missile-defense deployments in Eastern Europe and there is a de facto postponement of NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia.

Russia, for its part, has continued to provide critical logistic assistance to the U.S. and NATO military operations in Afghanistan. As part of what Obama has called a "reset" of the bilateral relationship, a U.S.-Russia joint commission headed by Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is being established, along with several sub-commissions. This is an improvement on the 1993 commission established at the level of No. 2s, Vice President Al Gore and Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.

To be sure, fundamental differences between Washington and Moscow persist on some major international and regional issues — from U.S. opposition to the Russian idea for an international treaty to outlaw cyberspace attacks along the lines of the Chemical Weapons Convention to the continuing discord over Georgia spurring rival military maneuvers in the Caucasus region.

The increasingly authoritarian Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, blamed by some international analysts for provoking last year’s war through a military strike on South Ossetia that killed Russian peacekeepers and civilians, has become for Moscow what Cuba’s then leader Fidel Castro was for Washington — the villain-in-chief.

The key issue is whether the U.S. and Russia will rise above their differences and seize the new opportunity to redefine their relationship before it becomes too late. For Russia, the challenge is to engage a skeptical West more deeply. It also needs to increase its economic footprint in Asia, where its presence is largely military. For the U.S., the challenge is to pursue new geopolitics of engagement with Moscow.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. This article is based on the author’s presentation at the International Press Institute’s recent world congress in Helsinki.
 
The Japan Times: Thursday, July 2, 2009
(C) All rights reserved

BRIC reflects a wish to pluralize global order

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Can Brazil, Russia, India
and China
(BRIC) help change the world order?

Power shifts underscore BRIC’s potential

Brahma Chellaney
Professor, Centre for Policy Research

The Economic Times, June 19, 2009

The
BRIC concept, conceived in 2001 by a Goldman Sachs economist, was embraced by
the four countries themselves only last year when their foreign


ministers met on
the sidelines of the Russia-India-China (RIC) trilateral. The expansion of RIC
into BRIC through Brazil’s addition has created a potentially powerful
bloc, given the projections that the BRIC nations could surpass the present
leading economies by the middle of this century. Yet it is true that there is
little in common among the BRIC states, prompting cynics to call BRIC an
acronymic ingenuity with no substance.

But just because the BRIC
nations do not constitute a unified bloc at present cannot detract from
BRIC’s long-term potential at a time of tectonic power shifts in the
world. The qualitative reordering of power underway, symbolises the birth-pangs
of a new world order. The world clearly is at a defining moment in its history.
In that light, new forums like BRIC could evolve as important instruments to
bring about change in the global architecture. After all, the global
institutional structure has remained static since the mid-20th century even as
the world has changed fundamentally.

BRIC, by acting as a pressure
group, can be a catalyst to international reform, including an overhaul of the
Bretton Woods system and a supranational currency as the world’s reserve
currency. Rather than help recreate institutions for the changed times,
entrenched interests already are conjuring up short-term fixes for the multiple
crises the world confronts — from the global financial tumult to global
warming. To make such interests cede some power, emerging economies need to act
in concert.

BRIC, however, remains a nascent initiative, and its
recent fleeting first summit was piggybacked on the Shanghai Cooperation
Organisation (SCO) meeting. Such piggybacking may have helped the SCO get more
publicity but left BRIC with little space to formulate a unified action plan.
Considering that it represents 25% of the earth’s landmass and 40% of its
population, BRIC needs to emerge as a real bloc.

(c) Economic Times, 2009

Obama wages the wrong war

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EE.UU. libra la guerra equivocada

BRAHMA CHELLANEY*
LA VANGUARDIA  June 1, 2009

El Pakistán más profundo se ha autorrecluido en una mazmorra yihadista
durante los últimos diez años, con mayor intensidad a medida que
Estados Unidos se involucraba más intensamente en la marcha de este
país, apuntalando su vacilante economía merced a una generosa ayuda
bilateral e internacional, orquestando las líneas generales de la
política pakistaní y mimando al establishment militar bien conocido por
su afición a inmiscuirse en la dirección de los asuntos del Estado. Tal
enfoque político contrasta claramente con un redoblado enfoque militar
en Afganistán, donde Estados Unidos se centra actualmente en la
cuestión del refuerzo de tropas y la creación de milicias civiles a
escala local.

La verdad pura y simple es que Estados Unidos está librando la guerra
equivocada. Como consecuencia, corre el riesgo de perder la batalla
contra los islamistas y los terroristas internacionales. La auténtica
guerra debe librarse en Pakistán en defensa de la paz y la seguridad
internacionales.

El objetivo de la intervención militar estadounidense en Afganistán en
el 2001 era impedir que las distintas áreas sin ley y sin acceso al mar
del país sirvieran de base a Al Qaeda y otros terroristas
internacionales.

En gran medida tal objetivo ha sido alcanzado pese a la amenaza de un
rebrote talibán. En la actualidad, la base principal del terrorismo
internacional no es Afganistán, sino Pakistán. El respaldo y el apoyo a
la militancia afgana provienen también del interior de Pakistán. Según
Bruce Riedel, coautor de la revisión de la estrategia sobre Afganistán
y Pakistán a cargo del presidente Obama, Pakistán "tiene más
terroristas por kilómetro cuadrado que cualquier otro lugar de la
tierra y posee un programa de armamento nuclear que avanza más de prisa
que cualquier otro del planeta".

Sin embargo, y mientras libra la guerra en Afganistán, Estados Unidos
impulsa una discutible estrategia política con relación a un Pakistán
crecientemente radicalizado, bien patente en la entrega de un nuevo
paquete de ayuda estadounidense por valor de 7.500 millones de dólares
a fin de ganarse simpatías en un país que parece ahora un cóctel
molotov en espera de la cerilla que lo encienda. Por más que Estados
Unidos intenta sobornar al ejército pakistaní para impedir que
suministre ayuda y refugio a los militantes a lo largo de la frontera
afgana, los principales refugios terroristas se hallan en el Pakistán
profundo, no en sus zonas fronterizas. El azote del terrorismo
pakistaní procede no tanto de los mulás islamistas cuanto de los
generales del ejército que alentaron las fuerzas de la yihad.

El éxito de la inyección de 21.000 efectivos estadounidenses más en
Afganistán dependerá de la situación del campo de batalla en otro país,
un campo de batalla donde el papel de Estados Unidos es, sobre todo,
político. Es evidente, asimismo, que las fuerzas armadas
estadounidenses no pueden garantizar la expedición de un billete de
vuelta de Afganistán sin antes desmantelar los refugios y las
infraestructura de los talibanes y otros militantes afganos en
Pakistán. Gracias a sus resguardados refugios, los militantes afganos
cuentan con mayor margen de maniobra que sus homólogos iraquíes y, en
consecuencia, no es probable que el refuerzo de tropas estadounidenses
en Afganistán al estilo de Iraq vaya a dar paso a una disminución de
violencia también de estilo iraquí. Como señaló Stephen Hadley justo
antes de abandonar su cargo de consejero de seguridad nacional
estadounidense a principios de año, "no cabe solucionar realmente el
problema de Afganistán sin solucionar el de Pakistán".

Sin embargo, Obama no cuenta con más verdadera estrategia para liquidar
la infraestructura terrorista en Pakistán, alentada en su día por los
militares, que la de tentar a las fuerzas armadas y los servicios de
inteligencia pakistaníes con más dinero y armas, estímulos de los que
de buena gana sacarán tajada… para seguir ayudando a los elementos
extremistas. La estrategia de Obama con relación a Pakistán puede
sintetizarse en realidad en sólo cuatro palabras: más de lo mismo. De
hecho, supera incluso lo que no ha funcionado con anterioridad, pues
las políticas estadounidenses fracasadas durante años no han hecho más
que agravar el caos aterrador que aflige a Pakistán.

Aun así, Obama intenta reproducir en sus mismos términos tal enfoque
fracasado a escala mucho mayor, como muestra su plan para convertir a
Pakistán en el mayor destinatario de ayuda estadounidense del mundo sin
puntos de referencia claros para evaluar el progreso realizado. De
hecho, su Administración ha logrado disuadir hasta ahora al Congreso de
la imposición de todo requisito riguroso o estricto concerniente a la
ayuda destinada a Pakistán, cuya primera partida por valor de 2.000
millones de dólares ha obtenido ya luz verde para su entrega inmediata.

La generosa ayuda estadounidense permite de hecho a Pakistán invertir
una parte mayor de sus recursos en armas de destrucción masiva, como
cabe constatar a la vista de los dos reactores de producción de
plutonio actualmente en construcción en Khushab. La actual existencia
de armas de destrucción masiva en un país en combinación con yihadistas
dentro y fuera del sistema es causa de honda preocupación mundial; tal
arsenal en expansión añade a este panorama tintes de pesadilla.

Meter más dinero en Islamabad mimando a quien lleva las riendas del
verdadero poder – los militares-y segar la hierba bajo los pies de los
líderes electos (cosa que se advierte, por ejemplo, cuando Obama
vilipendia públicamente al Gobierno en ciernes del presidente Asif Ali
Zardari tachándolo de "muy débil, ineficaz e incapaz de ganarse el
respaldo y lealtad del pueblo pakistaní" son ejemplos que explican por
qué la nueva Administración ofrece más de lo mismo en lo relativo a la
política estadounidense en esta cuestión. Para disuadir a los militares
pakistaníes de ayudar a los talibanes y a otros militantes, Washington
paga miles de millones de dólares por el rescate de rehenes, sin tener
además garantía alguna de que tales compensaciones modifiquen la
situación.

¿Cómo puede Pakistán convertirse en un país normal si la política
estadounidense no procura que sus respectivos establishments militar,
de inteligencia y nuclear hayan de responder ante el gobierno electo?
De hecho, mientras el poder de decisión siga en manos de los militares
y los servicios de inteligencia (ISI) procedan por su cuenta y riesgo
como "un Estado dentro del Estado", seguramente Pakistán seguirá
constituyendo un rasgo común apreciable en las investigaciones sobre la
mayoría de los actos de terrorismo internacional. No obstante, la
estrategia de Obama confía precisamente en esas instituciones para
lograr victorias en el campo de batalla afgano. Al manifestar
públicamente que quiere salir de Afganistán, Obama, sin embargo, ha
certificado en cierto modo que las fuerzas estadounidenses no puedan
recabar real y auténtica cooperación de parte de las fuerzas armadas y
los servicios de inteligencia pakistaníes. En la actualidad, estas dos
instituciones y su descendencia, los talibanes, preferirán esperar
indefinidamente a que los estadounidenses recuperen el control de
Afganistán.

Washington empezó hace tiempo a presionar al establishment militar
pakistaní y a respaldar a los líderes electos para que pudieran asumir
plenos poderes frente a las políticas y la mentalidad impuestas por
dirigentes militares. El Gobierno civil actual asume toda la
responsabilidad, pero carece de los recursos necesarios para estar a la
altura. La salida a escena de un gobierno civil con plenas facultades y
de una sociedad civil sólida habrá de propiciar la democracia, marginar
a los elementos radicales y apartar a Pakistán del borde del abismo.

*B. CHELLANEY, profesor de Estudios Estratégicos del Centro de Investigación en Ciencia Política de Nueva Delhi.
Traducción: José María Puig de la Bellacasa

Russia’s Resurgence and the Start of a New Cold War?

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Tuesday, 09 June 2009

World Congress Journal

News from the IPI World Congress and 58th General Assembly at Helsinki

Brahma Chellaney (above) addresses IPI World Congress (Lehtikuva photo)

Russia: A bear at the doorstep?

Colin Peters

Last
year’s short war in Georgia, followed by this winter’s shutdown of
Europe’s gas supply through Ukraine, have left many asking: is Russia’s
recent assertiveness a sign of worse to come?

Three experts representing a spectrum of opinions tackled this question – the Economist’s
Edward Lucas; Brahma Chellaney, a professor at the New Delhi Centre for
Policy Research; and Anatoly Adamishin, a former Russian ambassador to
Britain. Lending a sense of cable news energy and immediacy was
moderator, CNN anchor Jim Clancy. They spoke on 7 June at the IPI World
Congress and 58th General Assembly in Helsinki, in the session “The
Bear at the Doorstep – Russia’s Resurgence and the Start of a New Cold
War? ”

“Who’s in charge of Russia?” fired Clancy at Adamishin
with his first question- the former diplomat responding to dispel the
idea that Russian democracy extends no further than the Kremlin’s top
seat.

A burgeoning and corrupt bureaucracy, coupled with
national apathy, lie at the heart of the problem, Adamishin said.
“Russia is a democratic country without democracy.”

“Please relax,” he said. “The bear is less belligerent than one may judge from its growling.”

Lucas,
on the other hand, fears that a new form of Cold War has already begun,
with Chellaney tempering the debate by saying that a return to past
tensions is still avoidable.

Comments and questions from the
journalists in Finlandia Hall broached tinderbox topics such as the
South Caucasus, Kremlin-backed moves to form an international natural
gas cartel similar to OPEC, and press freedom.

All the panelists
agreed that Russian press freedom has regressed sharply since the
1990s, with Adamishin pointing to Novaya Gazeta editor-in-chief Dmitry
Muratov’s acceptance speech of the IPI Free Media Pioneer Award as all
the indication anyone needs as to the state of media freedom in Russia.

“Some of my friends are dead because they pushed too hard for press freedom [in Russia],” added Lucas.

North Korea and Pakistan: Nuclear Rogue Mates

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The nuclear nightmare

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
The Japan Times, June 3, 2009
 

North Korea and Pakistan present unique nuclear-proliferation risks because they challenge the very premise on which the international anti-proliferation measures have been built.

While North Korea is often compared with Iran, the challenge it poses is more akin to Pakistan’s. Both Pakistan and North Korea are actual proliferation threats as opposed to Iran’s potential proliferation challenge. But while North Korea is a growing regional threat, Pakistan — with its expanding nuclear armory, terrorists and jihadist-infiltrated military and nuclear establishments — presents itself as an international nightmare.

In the past, these two countries have clandestinely bartered Pakistani uranium-enrichment knowhow for North Korean missile technology. Today, they are showing that the nuclear abolition debate is not germane to the key proliferation challenges in Asia, even if movement on the stalled disarmament process helps reduce incentives to proliferation in some other cases.

The present global anti-proliferation measures are tied to three key elements: The continued stability and credibility of the nonproliferation regime; the exercise of punitive power, when necessary, to enforce observance of global norms and rules; and the raising of costs for proliferators.

The outlook of North Korea and Pakistan, however, is founded on a fundamentally antithetical premise, which can be summed up as: Threaten to fail, then reap rewards.

For these two dissimilar nations, potential state failure actually serves as an incentive to extort ransom money internationally. Both have assiduously sought to leverage their weakness into strength diplomatically, with Pakistan more successful than North Korea. "We’ll fail if you don’t come to our support" is their refrain. That is another way of saying: "Pay up or face the consequences."

In that light, it is proving very difficult to hold them to any international standards.

In fact, Pakistan’s success in extracting ever-more international aid has only emboldened North Korea to follow suit. Pyongyang’s latest nuclear test — its second in less than three years — is a desperate move to garner international aid.

If Islamabad can play nuclear poker to shield its export of terrorism and still get rewarded with $23.6 billion in international aid commitments just in the last six months ($5.5 billion of which came at the April donors conference in Tokyo), Pyongyang reckoned it could stage its own nuclear-and-missile show to draw the world’s attention.

While vowing to "take action" against North Korea over its test, U.S. President Barack Obama has set out to make Pakistan the single largest recipient of U.S. assistance in the world, leaving Israel and Egypt behind in the aid sweepstakes.

When Pakistan rakes in a windfall, North Korea can hardly be faulted for using the possibility of becoming a failed state as a means to collect some small change.

If Obama thought that succumbing to Pakistani demand would set no international precedent, North Korea’s ailing "dear leader" has made sure the chickens will come home to roost in Washington.

Even as America worries about Iran’s potential nuclear-weapons capability, its handling of the actual problem thrown up by Pakistan’s military-controlled weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and military-nurtured terrorists threatens to send the wrong signal to Tehran. According to a just-released Congressional Research Service report, Pakistan has approximately 60 nuclear warheads. It also has biological weapons, including pathogens no less dangerous than the H1N1 virus

Bountiful U.S. aid, in fact, is allowing Pakistan to divert more of its scarce resources to expand WMD capability, as illustrated by the two new plutonium-production reactors now under construction in Khushab with Chinese assistance. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chie’s of Staff, has been constrained to acknowledge at a May 14 congressional hearing that there is evidence showing Pakistan is expanding its nuclear arsenal.

Existing WMD in a country with jihadists are a matter of deep global concern; an expanding arsenal makes the scenario terrifying.

America has little incentive to start the flow of major international aid to North Korea, which, as U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates admitted recently at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, poses no direct military threat to the U.S. at present. Strategically, North Korea is of little positive value to U.S. policy.

By contrast, China over the decades has maintained close ties with Pyongyang and Islamabad and, besides providing direct WMD aid to both, may have even encouraged North Korean-Pakistani technology exchanges. But Beijing lacks the leverage to control their steps and gets surprised now and then by their actions, as exemplified by the latest North Korean nuclear and missile testing.

More broadly, the traditional carrots-and-sticks approach of the nonproliferation regime has been derailed by the North Korea and Pakistan cases. The derailment happened because the punitive component was rendered blunt by the continuing intent of the major geopolitical players not to let North Korea or Pakistan become a failed state.

So, the more North Korea and Pakistan appear likely to become failed states, the more it becomes evident that the international response is constrained by the objective not to let them fail. The international approach toward them thus is to bark but not to bite.

In dealing with North Korea, China, Russia, the United States and Japan do not want to go so far as to cause the collapse of the regime. Although not necessarily motivated by the same interest, these powers are not geopolitically ready for Korean reunification, which will be a logical corollary to the regime collapse in Pyongyang. South Korea, too, is not prepared for that development because it would unleash a torrent of refugees and saddle Seoul with colossal reunification costs, as the continuing domestic costs of German reunification attest. So, not wanting the Stalinist North Korean state to unravel, the external players do little more than pass tough resolutions or statements.

Pakistan, for its part, has for long served as a useful pawn in Chinese and American policies. It remains Beijing’s "all-weather ally," although its utility to U.S. policy has eroded to the extent that today it appears more of a strategic liability than an asset. Yet the old mind-set in Washington has not sufficiently changed. As a result, the deeper Pakistan has dug itself into a jihadist dungeon, the more the U.S. has gotten involved in that country. Such growing involvement, far from serving U.S. interests, has fueled an Islamist backlash in Pakistan, where anti-American sentiment is among the strongest in the world and where America is unfairly blamed for everything.

Washington also does not face up to another reality: Pakistan’s political border with Afghanistan has ceased to exist in practice. The so-called Durand Line — a British-colonial invention that left the large Pashtun community divided into two — now exists only in maps. Its disappearance is irreversible. Given that reality, how can U.S. policy expect to prop up the Pakistani state within political frontiers that, in part, no longer exist?

It is sad but true: The only way the international community can regain leverage against North Korea and Pakistan is to unflinchingly pursue a forward-thinking nonproliferation course that is not constrained by the specter of state collapse. That means standing up to them to disable their nuclear terror.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan" (HarperCollins).
 
The Japan Times: Wednesday, June 3, 2009
(C) All rights reserved

How U.S. policy on Pakistan has encouraged North Korea

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More terrorists per square mile

 

Pakistan’s success in employing nuclear blackmail to extort growing international aid has only emboldened North Korea

 

Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, May 27, 2009

 

The deeper Pakistan has dug itself into a jihadist dungeon over the past decade and more, the more the US has gotten involved in that country, including in propping up its tottering economy through generous aid, macro-managing Pakistani politics and mollycoddling the powerful military. This political approach contrasts starkly with the current stepped-up US military approach in Afghanistan, exemplified by a troop “surge”.

 

By fighting the wrong war, the US risks losing the battle against Islamists and transnational terrorists. The real war needs to be fought in Pakistan.

 

The 2001 U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan was intended to deny that landlocked country’s lawless regions as a base for transnational terrorists. To a large extent, that goal has been realized, despite the threat from a resurgent Taliban. Today, the main global-terrorist base is not Afghanistan but Pakistan. Support and sustenance for Afghan militants also comes from inside Pakistan, which — according to the co-author of President Barack Obama’s “Afpak” strategy review, Bruce Riedel — “has more terrorists per square mile than anyplace else on earth” and a nuclear armoury “growing faster than anyplace else on earth.”

 

Still, while revving up its war machine in Afghanistan, America pursues a dubious political strategy in Pakistan, best illustrated by its new $7.5 billion aid package to win hearts and minds in a country that resembles a Molotov cocktail waiting for a match. Even as the US seeks to bribe the Pakistani military to stop providing succour and sanctuary to militants along the Afghan frontier, the major terrorist safe havens remain deep inside Pakistan, not at its borders. And while it frets over the Pakistani Taliban, the scourge of Pakistani terrorism still emanates from military generals who reared the forces of jihad.

 

Pakistan’s success in employing blackmail to extort ever-more ransom money has only emboldened North Korea to follow suit. Pyongyang’s latest nuclear test is a desperate move to garner international aid. If Islamabad can play nuclear poker to shield its export of terrorism and still get rewarded with $23.6 billion in international aid commitments over the past six months, Pyongyang reckoned it could stage its own nuclear show to draw the world’s attention. When Pakistan’s threat to become a failed state rakes in a windfall, North Korea can hardly be faulted for using the same menace to collect some small change.

 

If Obama thought that succumbing to Pakistani blackmail would set no international precedent, North Korea’s ailing “dear leader” has made sure the chickens will come home to roost in Washington. And even as America worries about the potential proliferation problem posed by Iran, its handling of the actual problem thrown up by Pakistan’s military-controlled weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and military-nurtured terrorists threatens to send the wrong signal to Tehran. Munificent US aid, in fact, is allowing Pakistan to divert more of its scarce resources to expand WMD capability.

 

Today, no country challenges international security like Pakistan. Obama cannot hope to secure a US ticket out of Afghanistan without dismantling the Pakistani military’s sanctuaries and sustenance infrastructure for Afghan militants. As Stephen Hadley pointed out just before leaving office as the US national security adviser, “You can’t really solve Afghanistan without solving Pakistan”. Yet Obama has no real strategy to uproot Pakistan’s terror complex other than to entice the Pakistani military establishment with larger funds and more weapon transfers — inducements that it will gladly grasp, only to continue aiding extremists. Obama’s Pakistan strategy indeed can be summed up in just four words: More of the same.

 

Actually, it is more of what hasn’t worked in the past. In making Pakistan the largest recipient of US aid in the world, Obama has set out to replicate the past failed approach on a bigger scale. His administration has even managed to dissuade Congress thus far from imposing any rigid condition on the unprecedented $10.5-billion aid for Pakistan — the first $2-billion tranche of which already has been cleared for release. Throwing more money at Islamabad, pampering the Pakistani army and intelligence, and undermining Pakistan’s elected leaders (with Obama publicly excoriating President Asif Ali Zardari’s fledgling government as “very fragile,” ineffectual and unable “to gain the support and loyalty” of the Pakistani people) are examples of more of the same in US policy.

 

How can Pakistan become a “normal” state if US policy encourages its military, intelligence and nuclear establishments to stay not accountable to the elected government? As long as the army continues to hold the real power and the rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) remains unreformed, Pakistan is likely to stay a common thread in the investigations of most acts of international terrorism. Yet the Obama strategy relies on these very institutions for gains on the Afghan battlefield. By publicizing his intent to exit Afghanistan, Obama, however, has undercut his own objective. Now the Pakistani military and its progeny, the Taliban, will prefer to just wait out the Americans to reclaim Afghanistan.

 

The choice before Washington is to stop treating Pakistan as its favoured pawn or risk letting its egregious policy egg on other renegade nations. The right course is to cut the Pakistani military establishment down to size by actively assisting the country’s elected leaders to undo policies and mindsets implanted by a succession of army rulers. The civilians in office today take all the blame but do not have the power to deliver. The emergence of a fully empowered civilian government and robust civil society will foster democracy, marginalize radicals and bring Pakistan back from the brink.

 

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. 

The real war needs to be fought in Pakistan, not Afghanistan

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U.S. fighting the wrong war

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times

The deeper Pakistan has dug itself into a jihadist dungeon over the past decade and more, the more the United States has gotten involved in that country, including in propping up its tottering economy through generous bilateral and international aid, macro-managing Pakistani politics and pampering the powerful, meddling military establishment.

This political approach contrasts starkly with a stepped-up military approach in Afghanistan, where currently the U.S. focus is on a troop "surge" and the establishment of local-level civil militias.

The blunt truth is that the U.S. is fighting the wrong war. As a result, it is in danger of losing the fight against Islamists and transnational terrorists. The real war needs to be fought in Pakistan, in defense of international peace and security.

The 2001 U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan was intended to deny use of that landlocked country’s lawless regions as a base by al-Qaida and other transnational terrorists. To a large extent, that goal has been realized, despite the threat from a resurgent Taliban.

Today, the main base of international terrorists is not Afghanistan, but Pakistan. Support and sustenance for Afghan militants also comes from inside Pakistan. According to Bruce Riedel, the coauthor of U.S. President Barack Obama’s review of Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy, Pakistan "has more terrorists per square mile than any place else on Earth, and it has a nuclear-weapons program that is growing faster than anyplace else on Earth."

Yet, while waging war in Afghanistan, the U.S. pursues a dubious political strategy in an increasingly radicalized Pakistan, best illustrated by the new American $7.5 billion aid package to win hearts and minds in a country that now looks like a Molotov cocktail waiting for a match. Even as the U.S. seeks to bribe the Pakistani military to stop providing succor and sanctuary to militants along the Afghan frontier, the major terrorist safe havens remain deep inside Pakistan, not at its borders. The scourge of Pakistani terrorism still emanates not so much from the Islamist mullahs as from military generals who reared the forces of jihad.

The success of the ongoing induction of 21,000 additional American troops in Afghanistan will depend on the battlefield in another country — a battlefield where America’s role is largely political.

It is also apparent that the U.S. military cannot secure a ticket out of Afghanistan without first dismantling the Pakistani military’s sanctuaries and sustenance infrastructure for the Taliban and other Afghan militants.

Yet, Obama has no real strategy to uproot Pakistan’s military-reared terror infrastructure other than to entice the Pakistani Army and intelligence with larger funds and more weapon transfers — inducements that they will gladly grasp, only to continue aiding extremists.

Obama’s Pakistan strategy indeed can be summed up in just four words: More of the same. Actually, it is more of what hasn’t worked in the past. Unsuccessful U.S. policies over the years have helped produce a terrifying mess in Pakistan.

Even U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was constrained to admit on May 19 that "our policy toward Pakistan over the last 30 years has been incoherent. I don’t know any other word to use."

Still, Obama is seeking to replicate the failed approach of the past on a much-bigger scale, as exemplified by his plan to make Pakistan the largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world without setting clear benchmarks for judging progress. In fact, his administration has been successful in dissuading Congress thus far from imposing any rigid condition on the new record-level aid for Pakistan, the first $ 2 billion tranche of which already has been cleared for release.

Bountiful U.S. aid indeed permits Pakistan to plow more of its domestic resources into weapons of mass destruction (WMD), as exemplified by the two plutonium-production reactors now under construction at Khushab. Existing WMD in a country teeming with jihadists within and outside the system are a matter of deep global concern; an expanding Pakistani arsenal makes the scenario nightmarish.

Throwing more money at Islamabad, pampering the wielder of real power — the military — and undermining Pakistan’s elected leaders (with Obama publicly excoriating President Asif Ali Zardari’s fledgling government as "very fragile," ineffectual and unable "to gain the support and loyalty" of the Pakistani people) are examples of why the new administration is offering more of the same in U.S. policy. To persuade the Pakistani military against helping the Taliban and other militants, Washington is paying billions of dollars in additional ransom money, with no assurance that such payouts will make any difference.

How can Pakistan become a "normal" state if U.S. policy does not seek to make its military, intelligence and nuclear establishments accountable to the elected government? Indeed, as long as the decisive power continues with the military, and the rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency remains "a state within the state," Pakistan is likely to stay a common thread in the investigations of most acts of international terrorism.

Yet the Obama strategy relies on these very institutions for gains on the Afghan battlefield. By publicizing his intent to exit Afghanistan, Obama, however, has ensured that U.S. forces will get no genuine cooperation from the Pakistani Army and ISI. Now these two institutions and their progeny, the Taliban, will prefer to just wait out the Americans to reclaim Afghanistan.

It is past time Washington began squeezing the Pakistani military establishment and actively assisting the country’s elected leaders to assume full powers and undo policies and mind-sets deeply implanted by a succession of military rulers. The civilian government today takes all the blame but does not have the power to deliver.

The emergence of a fully empowered civilian government and a robust civil society will foster democracy, marginalize radicals and bring Pakistan back from the brink.

Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and author of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."
 
The Japan Times: Saturday, May 23, 2009
(C) All rights reserved

Doomed to fail

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The march of folly: Obama’s four-word Afpak strategy

In its first foreign-policy test, the new Indian government will have to contend with pressing U.S. proposals that India assist Obama’s politically expedient “Afpak” strategy, which actually threatens to bring Indian security under added pressure

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, May 20, 2009

Now that the national election is over, Indian diplomacy will face demands to aid US President Barack Obama’s strategy on Afghanistan-Pakistan (“Afpak”). To win greater Pakistani military cooperation on the Afghan frontier, Obama is seeking New Delhi’s assistance on at least two fronts — border-troop reductions and a resumption of “peace” talks with Islamabad.

 

India can assist to the extent that its own interests are safe. India has no offensively-configured troop formations along the Pakistan border, and any cut in border deployments must not provide the Pakistani military an opening to infiltrate more armed terrorists into India. New Delhi has no quarrel with Pakistan’s fledgling civilian government, but a renewed bilateral dialogue can be meaningful only if Islamabad goes beyond cosmetic measures against its military-nurtured, India-directed Punjabi terror groups, like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad.

 

The Obama team also had sought an easing of Pakistani concerns that India is seeking to encircle Pakistan through its role in Afghanistan. But Obama’s special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, has rubbished Pakistani claims of Indian intelligence operations there, saying that contrary to the alleged presence of “hundreds” of Indian operatives in Kandahar, his inquiry revealed that the Indian consulate there has merely “six or eight people”. India has a major stake in the future of Afghanistan and will stay an important player there. This is exemplified by the constructive role it is currently playing to help rebuild that landlocked country through a $1.2 billion aid programme.

 

The real issue is Obama’s Afpak approach. For a president elected on the slogan of change, his Afpak strategy hardly represents consequential change. In fact, Obama doesn’t have one integrated, comprehensive strategy but distinctly separate plans on Pakistan and Afghanistan.

 

Take his Pakistan strategy. It can be summed up in just four words: More of the same. Actually, it is more of what hasn’t worked in the past. Unsuccessful US policies have helped generate a terrifying mess in Pakistan, which today resembles a Molotov cocktail waiting for a match.

 

Yet Obama is seeking to copy that failed approach on a much-bigger scale, as illustrated by his plan to make Pakistan the largest recipient of US aid in the world without setting clear benchmarks for judging progress. In fact, his administration currently is seeking to dissuade Congress from imposing any rigid benchmark on the unparalleled aid for Pakistan.

 

Throwing more money at Islamabad, pampering the wielder of real power — the military — and undercutting Pakistan’s civilian leaders are examples of why Obama is offering more of the same in US policy. To persuade the Pakistani military establishment against providing terrorist succour and sanctuary along the Afghan border (but not the India frontier), Washington willingly is paying billions of dollars in ransom money, with no assurance that such payouts will make any difference.

 

What’s the Obama strategy on Afghanistan? Again, it can be summed up in four words: Surge, bribe and run. Obama actually has lifted this strategy lock, stock and barrel from his predecessor, but from a different theatre (Iraq), and without giving George W. Bush any credit.

 

Obama has set out to replicate in Afghanistan his predecessor’s experiment in Iraq. As happened in Iraq from early 2007, Obama intends to employ a military surge more as a show of force to pursue largely political objectives, especially to explore truces and alliances with tribal chieftains and insurgent leaders. Just as many Sunni tribal leaders were bought off in Iraq, the Obama plan is to cut deals with the Taliban leaders and field commanders.

 

For such deal-making to be successful, Obama intends to squeeze the Taliban first, including by putting 21,000 more American troops on the battlefield and taking yet another page from Bush’s Iraq experiment to establish US-funded local civil militias in every Afghan district. The first such militia unit, compromising 240 Afghans, was armed and deployed in Wardak province last month after receiving just three weeks of training.

 

In a country already teaming with militiamen, more militias are being set up. But just as the existing Afghan militias took to terrorism after being armed during the Ronald Reagan presidency to fight Soviet forces, the new militias will begin terrorizing local populations before long. Yet such is the rush to establish new militias that in an unusual decision to remove a wartime commander, the Obama administration last week fired the top American general in Afghanistan, David McKiernan, because he was overly cautious in creating such militias.

 

It is unlikely that the dubious Iraq experiment can work in Afghanistan, whose mountainous terrain, myriad tribes, militants operating from across national frontiers, patterns of shifting tribal and ethnic loyalties, low level of literacy, lack of natural resources, special status as the global hub of poppy trade and a history of internecine civil conflict set it apart from any other Muslim country. Also, unlike the internally confined Iraq conflict, the Afpak belt already is the springboard of international terrorism.

Still, Obama’s Afghanistan plan borrows so heavily from Bush’s Iraq ideas that the military general who implemented the surge-and-bribe experiment in Iraq has been pressed into service to replicate that in Afghanistan. David Petraeus, the former commander of American forces in Iraq who now heads the US Central Command, is the inspiration and leading light of the “surge, then negotiate” plan for Afghanistan. “Obama for Change” also has retained Bush’s defence secretary and rendition policy, revived Guantánamo military tribunals, flip-flopped on releasing detainee-abuse photos, and set the same year as his predecessor — 2011 — for a military exit from Iraq.

The blunt truth is that Obama doesn’t want the Afpak problem to burn his presidency the way Iraq consumed Bush’s. As a result, his aides are panning the internationally agreed goal of institution-building in Afghanistan as nation-building — a business in which the US shouldn’t get into.

Before he comes up for re-election, Obama wants to earn acclaim for ending his predecessor’s two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That objective is necessitating both a redefinition of “success” and the taking of shortcuts, as exemplified by his Afghan militia-building plan.

To compound matters, Obama has made the mistake — however inadvertently — of undercutting the legitimacy of the Afpak elected leaders. No sooner had he assumed office than his aides began calling Afghan President Hamid Karzai corrupt, incompetent and a millstone for US policy. Such talk died down when the Obama team realized there was no credible substitute to Karzai, now set to be re-elected. More surprising was Obama’s act, at the news conference marking his 100th day in office, in excoriating President Asif Ali Zardari’s government as “very fragile,” ineffectual and unable “to gain the support and loyalty” of the Pakistani people. Undermining civilian leaders is no recipe for success of a cut-and-run strategy.

Obama’s strategy essentially fails to recognize the structural character of the Afpak problem and attempts to deal with only the symptoms. Today, counterinsurgency (or “COIN” in US military jargon) has replaced institution-building and the “war on terror” in American policy. Accordingly, the Afpak strategy aims not to defeat terrorism, but to regionally contain terrorism — an approach that is set to bring Indian security under greater pressure.

While Obama cannot be faulted for wanting to exit Afghanistan, why did he have to advertise his intent? He publicly declared, “There’s got to be an exit strategy”. Now, the Taliban and their sponsors, the Pakistani military, just need to wait out the Americans to reclaim Afghanistan.

Rather than merely respond to US demands, strategic-partner India needs to be up-front on Obama’s unworkable Afpak strategy. That strategy is doomed to fail, with serious security consequences for India and the rest of the free world.

(c) Asian Age, 2009.