Se acabaron los tiempos en que Estados Unidos podía fijar la agenda internacional

Posted on January 17, 2009 by Chellaney

Nueva era en la Casa Blanca Opinión

El cambio que necesitamos

Brahma Chellaney – 17/01/2009 La Vanguardia

Los actuales desafíos y cambios de poder globales simbolizan el difícil alumbramiento de un nuevo orden mundial: es ineludible impulsar reformas institucionales de gran alcance. El cataclismo financiero global provocado por Estados Unidos es sólo la última señal visible de que el mundo se halla en un momento decisivo de su historia, rodeado de retos multifacéticos y cambios sustanciales que personifican el alumbramiento de un nuevo orden global. El mundo ha cambiado esencialmente en los dos últimos decenios. Dado el ritmo de cambio político, económico y tecnológico, los próximos veinte años aportarán posiblemente cambios de envergadura igualmente espectacular. Sin embargo, las estructuras institucionales de alcance global han permanecido prácticamente inmutables desde mediados del siglo XX.

El mundo no puede seguir agobiado bajo el fardo de instituciones obsoletas e ineficaces, circunstancia que a su vez demanda reformas institucionales de gran alcance en lugar de las iniciativas tímidas y esporádicas que hemos visto hasta ahora, dirigidas casi siempre a articular fórmulas para improvisar y tratar de ganar tiempo y posponer auténticas reformas.

Un ejemplo clásico al respecto es la iniciativa del G-8 relativa a países emergentes, más bien un gesto de cara a la galería. Peor ha sido la cumbre del grupo de los 20 (de magras reformas), cuyo anfitrión, un presidente fracasado, será recordado por haber tornado el mundo más inestable, inseguro y dividido merced a una doctrina que ha defendido la actuación preventiva ante la diplomacia, en un intento de dar validez a la tesis de Otto von Bismarck de que "las grandes cuestiones de nuestro tiempo no se deciden mediante discursos y acuerdos por mayoría, sino a sangre y hierro". Los errores de George W. Bush acabaron por provocar la caída del poder blando y desencadenar una fuerte reacción interna que ha impelido la elección del primer presidente afroamericano.

Pero al tiempo que Barack Obama es símbolo de esperanza para muchas personas en el mundo, también hereda problemas de proporciones históricas en un momento en que Estados Unidos – atascado en dos guerras y zarandeado en medio de una crisis financiera que acusa los efectos de la mayor debilidad económica de Estados Unidos en 25 años y un déficit federal que se aproxima a un billón de dólares-ya no puede influir por su cuenta en el curso global de los acontecimientos. Obama, en una palabra, no puede satisfacer todas las elevadas expectativas que el mundo tiene depositadas en él. Al fin y al cabo, no está en las manos de un nuevo presidente detener el ritmo y avance de los cambios de poder a escala global. Se acabaron los tiempos en que Estados Unidos podía fijar la agenda internacional con o sin sus aliados tradicionales.

El verdadero desafío planteado a Obama se cifra en ayudar a liderar la transición estadounidense hacia el nuevo orden mundial, adhiriéndose en todo momento a la idea del cambio y el impulso a las reformas institucionales en el plano internacional.

La actual extensión global del contagio financiero habría podido contenerse en caso de haberse reparado el averiado sistema de Bretton Woods. Confiemos en que no precisemos que se produzca una importante crisis sostenida para que se trague una institución internacional antes de que haya podido reformarse. Algunas instituciones pueden haber sobrepasado el dintel de su posible reparación, de modo que su única opción viable sea su desaparición o sustitución. En todo caso, aun en medio de la peor crisis financiera desde la gran depresión de los años treinta, sólo se habla de reformas, pero no llega a apreciarse un auténtico impulso en favor de una nueva arquitectura financiera.

Las instituciones existentes brotaron de los conflictos y de la guerra, en onda con lo que Winston Churchill dijo una vez: "La historia de la raza humana se cifra en la guerra". No obstante, los cambios del poder son actualmente impulsados no por triunfos militares o realineamientos políticos, sino por un factor característico y peculiar del mundo contemporáneo, el rápido crecimiento económico.

Aunque el achacoso orden internacional emergió de las ruinas de una guerra mundial, su reemplazo debe construirse en el seno de una era de paz internacional y planificarse, por tanto, para reforzar esa paz. No es una tarea fácil, dada la escasa experiencia de la comunidad internacional en crear o rehacer las instituciones en tiempo de paz.

Las reformas se ven asimismo bloqueadas por intereses arraigados, poco dispuestos a ceder parte de su poder y prerrogativas. En lugar de ayudar a rehacer las instituciones a fin de prepararse para una nueva era, los intereses creados ya advierten contra una posible sobrerreacción y evocan medidas a corto plazo ante las múltiples crisis que afronta el mundo. Pero, sin contar con mayor grado de representación, aptitud y eficiencia, las instituciones existentes corren el riesgo de marchitarse en el pozo de lo intrascendente.

Es posible que algunas, como el Fondo Monetario Internacional, no puedan nunca recuperar su importancia, y además nunca se las eche de menos. Otras, incluidos el G-8 y el Organismo Internacional de la Energía Atómica, solicitan su ampliación, mientras que por ejemplo el Banco Mundial, en caso de refundarse y liberarse del poder de veto predominante de Estados Unidos, podría centrarse en el alivio de la pobreza, especialmente en África,la mayor parte de cuyos residentes viven al margen de la globalización. Dejando aparte los conocimientos geográficos verdaderos o falsos de Sarah Palin sobre Áfricacomo continente o país, lo cierto es que sería muy inapropiado que un presidente estadounidense siguiera la senda de la desatención internacional de África,desatención que China ha intentado alegremente explotar.

Sin embargo, otras instituciones, como las Naciones Unidas, pueden reanimarse mediante amplias reformas. Sus detractores retratan a las Naciones Unidas como un foro donde se habla mucho pero no se hace nada yen donde "ninguna cuestión es demasiado nimia como para no abordarla de forma inacabable". No obstante, sigue siendo la única institución verdaderamente representativa de todos los países del mundo. Su debilidad principal radica en una Asamblea General carente de poder efectivo y una camarilla todopoderosa de cinco miembros del Consejo de la Seguridad que intentan negociar en penumbra y no sin esfuerzo las cuestiones entre sí para aparecer a continuación irremediablemente divididos. Las Naciones Unidas deben cambiar para estar a la altura de la naturaleza internacional de los importantes desafíos actuales. Las reformas deben centrarse en una mayor transparencia y en la adopción democrática de las decisiones. El Consejo de Seguridad no puede ser una excepción. Para ayudar a arrancar su atascado proceso de reformas, sería bueno una abolición general del veto y que en su seno se alcance la adopción de decisiones mediante la mayoría simple de tres cuartos.

B. CHELLANEY, profesor de Estudios Estratégicosdel Centro de Investigación Política de Nueva Delhi
Traducción: JoséMaría Puig de la Bellacasa

Power shifts in Asia

Posted on January 13, 2009 by Chellaney

Increasing challenges to stability in Asia

Brahma Chellaney

The Hindu newspaper, January 10, 2009

As a financially strapped U.S., mired in two wars, builds a stronger cooperative relationship with China out of necessity, strains in its existing alliances in Asia will surface, along with uncertainties about co-opting India in a “soft alliance.”

Barack Obama takes office as U.S. President at a time when a qualitative reordering of power is under way in the Asia-Pacific, with tectonic shifts challenging strategic stability. The impact of such shifts on U.S. foreign policy will be accentuated by America’s growing challenges, including a deep economic recession, two separate wars and eroding global influence. Such challenges dictate greater cooperation with China to ensure both continued large Chinese capital inflows and political support on issues ranging from North Korea and Burma to Pakistan and Iran.

Such calculations, in turn, are certain to have a bearing on America’s role in Asia — “as a resident power, and as the ‘straddle power’ across the Asia-Pacific,” to quote Robert Gates, who is staying on as Defence Secretary under Mr. Obama. Still, the U.S. will remain a key player in Asia through its security arrangements and other strategic ties with an array of regional states.

However, not since Japan rose to world-power status during the reign of the Meiji emperor in the second half of the 19th century has another non-Western power emerged with such potential to alter the world order as China today. As the latest assessment of the U.S. National Intelligence Council affirms, China is “poised to have more impact on the world over the next 20 years than any other country.”

China’s ascent, though, is dividing Asia, not bringing Asian states closer. Economic-powerhouse Japan — whose economy still is larger than that of China, India and Russia put together — is intent on shoring up its security and ensuring that Beijing does not call the shots in East Asia. Japan is set to reassert itself in world affairs by shedding decades of pacifism anchored in a U.S.-imposed Constitution. Another key actor in Asian geopolitics, India, is unwilling to cede its leadership role in the Indian Ocean rim region, despite China’s creeping influence in southern Asia through growing transportation, trade, port-building and defence links.

Under Mr. Obama, America’s main strategic objectives in the Asia-Pacific are unlikely to change. Indeed, the central U.S. interest in the Asia-Pacific remains what it has been since 1898 when America took the Philippines as part of the spoils of the naval war with Spain — the maintenance of a balance of power.

During the first half of the Cold War, the U.S. chose to maintain a balance by forging security alliances with Japan and South Korea and also by keeping forward bases in Asia. By the time the Cold War entered the second phase, America’s “ping-pong diplomacy” led to the 1972 “opening” with Beijing. It was designed to reinforce the balance by employing a newly assertive, nuclear-armed China to countervail Soviet power in the Asia-Pacific region.

Today, according to the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defence Review Report, America’s interests centre on “maintaining a stable balance” in “the East Asian littoral,” given the likelihood that “a military competitor with a formidable base will emerge in the region” — an allusion to China. At the same time, China’s rising heft is spurring greater American reliance on Beijing for financial and political support.

America’s banker

In fact, China is becoming America’s banker. Mr. Obama’s mammoth stimulus package that is meant to help revive the broken U.S. economy is set to reinforce Washington’s dependence on capital from a foreign power already holding 10 per cent of the U.S. public debt. A creditor-debtor relationship between Washington and Beijing, along with China’s growing sway over states on its periphery, holds major relevance for America’s traditional allies, principally Japan and Taiwan, and new strategic partners, like India. After all, a banker has greater leverage over a customer than vice versa.

In the years ahead, China may not hesitate to assert the leverage over an increasingly indebted America. But the extent of such leverage is likely to remain limited. Although it is now America’s largest external creditor — with two-thirds of its $2 trillion foreign-exchange reserves invested in U.S. dollar-denominated financial instruments — China is locked in a mutually dependent economic relationship with the U.S. For instance, it is as much in China’s interest as in America’s to prop up the value of the dollar because if the dollar sinks, the worth of China’s dollar-denominated assets will plummet.

Also, despite its coffers having swelled 10-fold since 2000, China does not have much room to diversify the foreign investment of its surpluses and savings. For one, the European capital markets remain shallow for a cash-heavy China, with any big induction of Chinese capital likely to prove destabilising. For another, the global oil-price crash crimps China’s diversification ambitions. Had oil prices stayed above $100 a barrel, many oil-exporting nations would have helped bolster the value of the dollar by channelling their high oil earnings into dollar-denominated assets, thus creating space for China to diversify some of its holdings of U.S. debt.

‘Chimerica’

From being allies of convenience in the second half of the Cold War, the U.S. and China have emerged as partners with such close interdependence that economic historian Niall Ferguson has coined the term, “Chimerica” — a fusion like the less-convincing “Chindia.” But as the U.S.-China relationship acquires a wider and deeper base in the coming years, the strains in some of America’s existing military or strategic partnerships will become pronounced.

While South Korea’s importance in the U.S.-led hub-and-spoke alliance system will continue to decline, doubts are bound to grow in Japan and Taiwan over the reliability of Washington’s commitment to their security. In the near term, rising Chinese assertiveness has had the unintended effect of persuading Japan to jettison its doubts about U.S. security commitments and to reinvigorate its military relationship with Washington. In the long run, however, Tokyo will seek to ease its security dependence on the U.S.

Some recent U.S. actions — including the failure to consult Tokyo before removing North Korea from the U.S. list of terrorism-sponsoring states and the refusal to sell Japan the next-generation F-22 Raptor fighter-jets — are likely to sow further doubts among the Japanese. Similarly, Washington turned down new Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou’s request to include diesel-powered submarines and UH-60 Black Hawk attack helicopters in a recent $6.46 billion arms deal the U.S. struck with Taiwan. For the first time, building a stronger cooperative relationship with China is taking precedence in U.S. policy over the sale of advanced weaponry to allies, lest the transfer of offensive arms raise Beijing’s hackles.

In fact, with Washington seeking to revive Sino-U.S. military contacts, suspended by Beijing in reprisal to the latest package of largely defensive arms for Taipei, the Obama administration will not find it easy to sell Taiwan top-of-the-line weapon systems. The U.S. has not only welcomed China’s deployment of battle-ready warships in the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden in its first naval task-force operation beyond the Pacific, but expressed the hope that the move — which brings the Chinese navy into India’s backyard — would be “the springboard for resumption” of military ties.

The U.S. has worked hard in recent years to co-opt India in a “soft alliance” shorn of treaty obligations. Yet, conflicting Indo-U.S. expectations and interests often surface. Take the controversial nuclear deal, which was driven by American non-proliferation considerations but peddled by Indian “neocons” and government managers as a far-reaching strategic initiative to help countervail China’s growing might. As a result, New Delhi strenuously tried to whitewash the progressive attachment of tougher U.S. conditions during the three-and-a-half-year deal-making process.

But just as India has found itself alone in the fight against Pakistani-fomented transnational terror, New Delhi is unlikely to get much comfort on China from American policy. In that light, the Indian ardour in recent years for closer defence ties with the U.S. could gradually give way to more sobering reality.

By contrast, Australia’s growing cozy relationship with distant China, especially under the Sinophile Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, meshes well with the likely trajectory of U.S.-China ties. What Canberra pursues today — to balance its relations with Tokyo and Beijing — Washington is likely to begin doing before long.

The U.S.-China relationship — despite a deepening symbiosis, reflected in the U.S. recession seriously hurting the Chinese economy — is likely to remain uneasy, but overt competition or confrontation suits neither side. For the U.S., however, China’s rising power helps validate American forward military deployments in the Asian theatre. It also helps America keep existing allies and search for new ones. The China factor is thus coming handy to Washington to enlarge its strategic footprint in Asia in the near term.

Caught between an increasingly powerful China and an America narrowly focussed on advancing its strategic interests in Asia, other Asian powers are likely to face tough security choices in the coming years. The recent landmark Japan-India security agreement signals that major changes in the Asian strategic scene are in the offing.

(The writer is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.)

India outmaneuvered by Pakistan again

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Chellaney

Too Crafty A Neighbour

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, January 12, 2009

The unparalleled November 26-29 Mumbai terrorist assaults were supposed to India’s 9/11. They were also expected to be a tipping point in India’s forbearance with Pakistan-fomented terrorism.

However, it is now clear that nothing will change fundamentally. Pakistan’s military-nurtured terror complex will remain intact, so also the cozy ties between the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence and terrorist groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba. The pusillanimity of the Indian leadership has been shown to be too entrenched to be possibly uprooted.

All this means that there will be more Pakistani terrorist attacks in India at phased intervals, with history repeating itself. Furthermore, a now-familiar Indian cycle of empty rhetoric — ritual condemnation of each attack and a hackneyed promise to defeat terror while allowing communal, electoral and vote-bank considerations to influence counter-terrorism action — will inexorably eat into the vitals of India’s internal security.

As if to make up for its faintheartedness, the Indian government has engaged in an almost-daily war of words with Pakistan — a war of words any victim can never win against an attacker. Pakistan, despite its internal disarray and eroding credibility, indeed has played its cards well to outmanoeuvre India. It has also demonstrated that its public-relations machine remains more robust than India’s.

Pakistan demanded evidence and when India, playing into its hands, compiled and handed over a dossier of detailed evidence, Islamabad heaped ridicule on that data, saying it was “little more than propaganda.” Now Islamabad intends to compile its own dossier on India’s alleged involvement in the Baluchi insurrection, although it knows that RAW’s covert wing was disbanded long ago by then Prime Minister I.K. Gujral and that New Delhi has no capability to help the Baluchis regain their stolen independence.

In fact, India kept its demands so modest as to weaken calls for Pakistan to irreversibly and verifiably tear apart its state-reared terror complex. New Delhi basically asked Islamabad to bring the Pakistan-based masterminds of the attacks to justice. Although it said it would prefer that the masterminds were extradited and “brought to Indian justice,” it signalled it would be satisfied if they were put on trial in Pakistan. But even if, at New Delhi’s insistence, Pakistan had agreed to extradite Zarrar Shah and Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi to India, it would have lost nothing other than a little pride. After all, the Lashkar and Jaish-i-Muhammed terrorist infrastructure, including sustenance from the ISI, would have remained in place.

In other words, New Delhi’s demands were such that Islamabad could easily have delivered on them. Yet, with New Delhi doing little more than make public statements, Pakistan refused to yield. All that Pakistan has done is to arrest Lakhvi and Shah, besides — in response to UN Security Council action — detaining the Lashkar chief, Hafiz Sayeed, and outlawing the Lashkar’s reincarnation, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa. But the Lashkar/Jamaat-ud-Dawa is in the process of being reborn under a new name, even as the terrorist body’s Muridke headquarters already remains in business. With the bodies of the nine other attackers still lying unclaimed in Mumbai, Islamabad took more than six weeks to grudgingly admit a fact that had become incontestable — that the sole captured terrorist is a Pakistani. Yet that admission cost the Pakistani national security adviser his job.

New Delhi exerted no pressure to make Islamabad give in to its fairly small demands. An array of discreet options was available to India, including diplomatic, economic and political. Between the two extremes — empty talk and war — New Delhi could have invoked measures commonly available to nations to step up political pressure, such as recalling its own High Commissioner from Islamabad, suspending the composite dialogue process, disbanding the farcical joint anti-terror mechanism and invoking trade sanctions. Yet a feckless leadership did not take the smallest step even as a symbolic expression of India’s outrage over Pakistan’s role as the staging ground for the Mumbai attacks.

Instead it repeatedly tied itself up in knots. Note the hurried manner the external affairs minister first ruled out the military option, only to later say “all options are open.” Note also that India accused state actors in Pakistan of involvement — in the prime minister’s words, “some Pakistani official agencies must have supported” the Mumbai attacks — and then the same day handed a dossier to Islamabad with the naïve expectation that the Pakistani state would act against state actors. India has had weak governments but never a more incompetent and weak-willed national-security team in charge.

India has to defend itself from the forces of terrorism, or else no united, plural, inclusive and democratic India will survive.

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

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1220814

Obama’s “surge, bribe and run” strategy for Afghanistan

Posted on January 8, 2009 by Chellaney

An Afghanistan ‘Surge’ Is a Losing Battle

So why is Mr. Obama betting on it?

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY | From Wall Street Journal, January 9, 2009

Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s visit to Afghanistan this month — even before President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration — will underscore the new administration’s priority to ending the war there. But their planned "surge first, then negotiate" strategy isn’t likely to work.

The Obama-Biden team wants to weaken the Taliban militarily then strike a political deal with the enemy from a position of strength. This echoes what the Bush administration did in Iraq, where it used a surge largely as a show of force to buy off Sunni tribal leaders and other local chieftains. Current Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen has already announced a near-doubling of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, to up to 63,000, by mid-2009.

Sending more forces into Afghanistan is a losing strategy. The Soviets couldn’t tame the country with more than 100,000 troops. With the backing of Robert Gates, whom Mr. Obama will keep on as defense secretary, Central Command Commander General David Petraeus is thus looking for ways to win over local commanders and warlords — the mainstay of the Taliban. General Petraeus wants to explore truces and alliances with local tribal chieftains and guerrilla leaders and set up lightly trained local militias in every provincial district.

This idea turns a blind eye to the danger that such militias could terrorize local populations. It is also naïve to expect an Iraq-style surge-and-bribe experiment to work in Afghanistan, whose mountainous terrain, myriad tribes, patterns of shifting tribal and ethnic loyalties, special status as the global hub of poppy trade and history of internecine conflict set it apart from any other Muslim country. In a land with a long tradition of humbling foreign armies, payoffs won’t buy peace.

Even if the Obama administration could tame the Taliban enough to get them to the bargaining table, inking a political deal would only strengthen their cause. Al Qaeda, the Taliban and Pakistan-based terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba now constitute a difficult-to-separate mix of jihad-spouting soulmates with safe havens in Pakistan. The only difference is that Al Qaeda operates out of mountain caves in the Pakistani-Afghan frontier region while the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba agitate more openly across the borders. A deal with any one such group will only strengthen the global jihadists’ cause.

Mr. Biden contends the U.S. must focus on securing Afghanistan because if it "fails, Pakistan could follow." This is exactly backward. The U.S. can never win in Afghanistan without first dismantling the Pakistani military’s sanctuaries and sustenance infrastructure for the Taliban. The proposed surge could help the already-entrenched Taliban sharpen its claws while strengthening U.S. logistics dependence on the Pakistani military, which fathered that Islamist militia and Lashkar-e-Taiba. As outgoing National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley has pointed out, "You can’t really solve Afghanistan without solving Pakistan."

If America is to reclaim the global fight against terror, it must face up to the lessons from its past policies that gave rise to Osama bin Laden, Mullah Mohammed Omar and "the state within the Pakistani state" — the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, made powerful in the 1980s as a conduit of covert U.S. aid for anti-Soviet Afghan guerrillas. In other words, the U.S. needs to keep the focus on its long-term interests and not be carried away by political expediency. That means encouraging a truly democratic Pakistan that doesn’t support terror groups in any form.

In seeking short-term success, the Obama team is falling prey to a long-standing U.S. policy weakness: The pursuit of narrow objectives without much regard for the security of friends. Perhaps India, America’s strategic partner, could be of help. After all, as the recent Mumbai terrorist assaults show, it’s India that is bearing the brunt of the blowback from failed U.S. policies in the Afghanistan-Pakistan belt. Perhaps New Delhi should be on Mr. Biden’s next travel itinerary.

Mr. Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123143672297764875.html

Qualitative reordering of Asian power

Posted on January 5, 2009 by Chellaney

Growing challenges to Asian stability

Caught between China and the U.S., regional powers face tough strategic choices

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama takes office at a time when a fundamental and qualitative reordering of power is under way in the Asia-Pacific, with tectonic shifts challenging strategic stability. The impact of such shifts on U.S. foreign policy is bound to be accentuated by America’s growing challenges, including a deep economic recession at home and the two separate wars being waged overseas.

Such challenges dictate greater U.S.-China cooperation to ensure continued large Chinese capital inflows, and Beijing’s political support on contentious issues ranging from North Korea and Myanmar to Pakistan and Iran. Such calculations, in turn, are certain to have a bearing on America’s dual role in Asia — "as a resident power and as the straddle power across the Asia-Pacific," to quote Robert Gates, who is to stay on as defense secretary in the Obama administration. According to Gates, the "next U.S. administration seems certain to continue the overlapping, long-standing security partnerships" in Asia but "will also inherit an agenda of worrying issues."

Asia has come a long way since the creation of two Koreas, two Chinas, two Vietnams and India’s partition. It has risen dramatically as the world’s main creditor and economic locomotive. The ongoing global power shifts indeed are primarily linked to Asia’s phenomenal economic rise, the speed and scale of which has no parallel in world history. How fast Asia has come can be gauged from the 1968 book, "Asian Drama: An Inquiry Into the Poverty of Nations," by Swedish economist and Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal, who bemoaned the manner in which impoverishment, population pressures and resource constraints were weighing down Asia.

With the story of endemic poverty turning into a tale of spreading prosperity, today’s Asian drama is very different. Even so, Asia faces major challenges. It has to cope with entrenched territorial and maritime disputes, sharpening competition over scarce resources, improved military capabilities, increasingly fervent nationalism and the spread of religious extremism.

Diverse transborder trends — from nuclear proliferation and terrorism to illicit refugee flows and human trafficking — add to the challenges. But Asia is also becoming more interdependent through trade, investment, technology and tourism. The economic renaissance has been accompanied by a growing international recognition of Asia’s soft power as symbolized by its arts, fashion and cuisine.

The United States will remain a key player in Asia through its security arrangements and other strategic ties with an array of regional states. Its policies and actions will continue to have an important influence on the strategic calculus of the important Asian actors. However, not since Japan rose to world-power status during the reign of Emperor Meiji in the second half of the 19th century has another non-Western power emerged with such potential to alter the world order as China today. As the latest assessment by the U.S. intelligence community predicts, China stands to more profoundly affect global geopolitics than any other country. China, according to the National Intelligence Council, is "poised to have more impact on the world over the next 20 years than any other country."

China’s ascent, however, is dividing Asia, not bringing Asian states closer. Economic powerhouse Japan — whose economy is larger than that of China, India and Russia combined — is intent on shoring up its security and ensuring that Beijing does not call the shots in East Asia. Japan is set to reassert itself in world affairs by shedding decades of pacifism anchored in a U.S.-imposed Constitution.

Another key actor in Asian geopolitics, India, is unwilling to cede its leadership role in the Indian Ocean rim region, despite China’s creeping influence in southern Asia through growing transportation, trade, port-building and defense links.

Under Obama, America’s main strategic objectives in the Asia-Pacific are unlikely to change. Indeed, the central U.S. interest in the Asia-Pacific remains what it has been since 1898 when America took the Philippines as spoils of the naval war with Spain — the maintenance of a balance of power.

During the first half of the Cold War, the U.S. chose to maintain the balance by forging security alliances with Japan and South Korea, and also by keeping forward bases in Asia. By the time the Cold War entered its second phase, America’s "ping-pong diplomacy" led to President Richard Nixon’s historic handshake with Mao Zedong in 1972 in an "opening" designed to reinforce the balance by employing a newly assertive, nuclear-armed China to countervail Soviet power in the Asia-Pacific region.

Today, according to the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review Report, America’s interests center on "maintaining a stable balance" in "the East Asian littoral," given the likelihood that "a military competitor with a formidable base will emerge in the region" — an allusion to China.

Washington would not want Japan or India to kowtow to a China seeking to supplant the U.S. as the leading force in Asia. But America also would not want to see the rise of a combative India or Japan.

For example, an overt Japan-China conflict in the East China Sea over competing maritime and gas-exploration claims would compel Washington to side with Tokyo or risk wrecking the U.S.-Japanese security relationship, centered on U.S. forward-deployment on Japanese soil. America’s interests in Asia actually lie in hedging its future options and balancing the various powers.

The emergence of China as a global player with rising heft is not only transforming the geopolitical landscape in the Asia-Pacific, but also spurring greater American reliance on Beijing for financial and political support. In fact, China is becoming America’s banker, with Obama’s mammoth stimulus package to help revive the U.S. economy set to reinforce Washington’s dependence on Chinese capital.

The bipartisan support for a massive fiscal stimulus to help prevent the U.S. recession from turning into a depression will result in a larger budget deficit (already crossing $1 trillion) and greater reliance on foreign capital inflows. A creditor-debtor relationship between Washington and Beijing, along with China’s more muscular foreign policy and growing sway over states around its periphery, holds major relevance for America’s traditional allies, principally Japan and Taiwan, and new strategic partners, like India. After all, a banker has greater leverage over a customer than vice versa.

In the years ahead, China may not hesitate to assert the leverage over an increasingly indebted America. But such leverage is likely to stay limited. Although it is America’s largest external creditor — with much of its $2 trillion foreign-exchange reserves invested in U.S. dollar-denominated financial instruments — China is locked in a symbiotic or mutually dependent economic relationship with the U.S. It is as much in China’s interest as in America’s to prop up the value of the dollar because if the dollar sinks, the worth of the Chinese dollar-denominated assets would plummet. Also, despite its overflowing coffers, China does not have much room to diversify the foreign investment of its surpluses and savings. For one, the European capital markets remain shallow for a cash-heavy China, with any big induction of Chinese capital likely to have a destabilizing effect. For another, the global oil-price crash crimps China’s diversification ambitions.

Had oil prices stayed at more than $100 a barrel, the oil-exporting nations — particularly the oil sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf — would have helped bolster the value of the dollar by channeling their high oil earnings into dollar-denominated assets, thus creating space for China to diversify some of its holdings of U.S. debt.

For the same reason, hundreds of billions of dollars of ridiculously cheap Japanese credit continue to slosh around the U.S. financial markets. However, Tokyo has stopped buying U.S. Treasury bills, making Beijing the principal purchaser of such notes. Besides China’s ascent, the political rise of Russia, Japan and India may pick up momentum in the next decade, despite the uncertain demographic future of the first two. China’s rise, however, spotlights the dissimilarities between Asia and Europe. Consider the following:

* While Europe has achieved equilibrium between and among its main powers, the situation in Asia threatens to slide toward overt power disequilibrium.

* In Europe, the largest state and economy — Germany — does not aspire for dominance. Rather, in respect to the other European powers, it has learned and accepted to be one among equals. In Asia, the situation is the reverse. China does not hide its ambition to gain Asian pre-eminence.

* With the exception of Japan, the other Asian economies are at earlier stages of development. That is why most of them are classified as "developing states" or "emerging economies."

* Again, with the exception of Japan, most Asian states, in contrast to many European nations, are distinguished by wide and growing income disparities, and social inequalities.

* While democracy has become the norm in Europe, that can hardly be said about Asia. In fact, only a small minority of Asian states are truly democratic. The diverse political systems in Asia make it difficult to build common norms and values or an Asian community.

Against this background, Obama and his secretary of state-designate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, are likely to continue the work of their predecessors to reinforce America’s existing military relationships in Asia while searching for new allies or partners that can help build an Asian balance of power.

China, too, plays balance-of-power politics in Asia, but its balancing is primarily designed to keep peer rivals like Japan and India bottled up regionally, and to carve out more space for itself vis-a-vis the U.S.

During the Bill Clinton presidency, Washington went out of its way to befriend China, even if such courtship slighted Japan. As Condoleezza Rice put it before joining President George W. Bush’s administration, "Never again should an American president go to Beijing for nine days and refuse to stop in Tokyo or Seoul." Yet Bush is leaving the White House with a solid China-friendly legacy, best illustrated by the manner he ignored the bloody suppression of last March’s Tibetan uprising and showed up at the Beijing Olympics. Obama is sure to continue the 36-year record of U.S. presidents being China-friendly — a certainty underscored by America’s greater need, in the midst of a financial meltdown, for capital from a foreign power already holding 10 percent of its public debt.

From being allies of convenience in the second half of the Cold War, the U.S. and China have gradually emerged as partners tied by interdependence. But as U.S.-China ties acquire a wider and deeper base in the coming years, the strains in some of America’s existing military or strategic partnerships would become pronounced.

In the near term, rising Chinese assertiveness has had the unintended effect of persuading Japan to jettison its doubts about U.S. security commitments and to reinvigorate its military relationship with Washington. In the long run, however, Tokyo is unlikely to remain comfortable with its security dependency on the U.S.

Some recent U.S. actions — including the failure to consult with Tokyo before removing North Korea from the U.S. list of terrorism-sponsoring states and the refusal to sell Japan the next-generation F-22 Raptor fighter jets — are likely to sow further doubts among the Japanese.

Despite a recent $6.46 billion arms package for Taiwan — which prompted Beijing to break off military contacts with the U.S. — Washington has declined to sell Taipei Aegis ships, diesel-powered submarines and UH-60 Black Hawk attack helicopters. But now that China has decided to send ships to the Gulf of Aden in support of the multinational antipiracy operations there, the head of the U.S. Pacific Command hopes that move would be "the springboard for resumption" of military contacts.

The U.S. has worked hard in recent years to co-opt India in a "soft alliance" shorn of treaty obligations. Yet, conflicting Indo-U.S. expectations and interests often surface. Take the controversial nuclear deal, which was driven by American nonproliferation considerations but peddled by Indian neocons and government managers as a far-reaching strategic initiative to help to counter China’s growing might and assertiveness.

Just as India has found itself alone in the fight against transnational terrorism, with U.S. diplomacy more focused on averting Indo-Pakistan conflict than in the dismantlement of the India-directed Pakistani terrorist infrastructure, New Delhi is unlikely to get much comfort on China from American policy. In that light, the Indian ardor in recent years for closer defense ties with the U.S. is likely to gradually give way to reality at a time when India confronts growing Chinese military assertiveness along the disputed Himalayan frontier and an emerging Chinese threat from the oceans.

By contrast, Australia’s growing cozy relationship with distant China, especially under Sinophile Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, meshes well with the likely trajectory of U.S.-China ties. What Canberra pursues today — to balance its relations with Tokyo and Beijing — Washington is likely to begin doing before long.

Despite increasing interdependence, the U.S.-China relationship is likely to remain uneasy, although neither side would seek overt competition or confrontation. Washington is expected to remain more critical of Moscow than of Beijing, including on a subject where China’s record is egregious — human rights.

For the U.S., China’s rising power helps validate American forward military deployments in the Asian theater. It also helps America to keep existing allies and search for new ones. The China factor is coming in handy for Washington to enlarge its strategic footprints in Asia.

Caught between an increasingly assertive China, and an America focused on advancing its economic and political interests in Asia, other Asian powers are likely to face tough security choices in the coming years. The recent landmark Japan-India security agreement signals that major changes in the Asian strategic scene are in the offing.

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

The Japan Times: Thursday, Jan. 1, 2009

Chinese navy aims to challenge India’s preeminence in Indian Ocean

Posted on December 30, 2008 by Chellaney

Dragon in India’s backyard

In its first deployment of battle-ready warships outside the Pacific, China is extending its maritime role to the Indian Ocean rim under the anti-piracy banner, thereby challenging India’s long-standing dominance there

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, December 31, 2008

While India has remained fixated on the “Jihadistan” to its west — with an indecisive Indian leadership’s addiction to empty rhetoric allowing an open-and-shut case against Pakistan over the Mumbai terrorist assaults to go by — Communist China has made its first-ever deployment of a naval task force beyond the Pacific by dispatching battle-ready warships to India’s backyard. The task force comprising two destroyers and a supply ship is starting escorts and patrols along the Indian Ocean rim in the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden.

This move, under the banner of internationalism, aims to extend China’s maritime role and presence far from its shores while demonstrating, under United Nations rules of engagement, a capability to conduct complex operations in distant waters where Indian, US, Iranian and Russian navies are already active. Earlier, the anti-piracy plank also came handy to Beijing to agree to joint patrols with Pakistan in the Arabian Sea and extend cooperation to ASEAN.

Significantly, Beijing is seeking to chip away at India’s maritime pre-eminence in the Indian Ocean — a theatre critical to fashioning a Sino-centric Asia, if China can assert naval power there to protect its commercial interests and to expand its influence over the regional waterways and states. As the state-run China Daily put it, quoting a military analyst, a “key goal” in battling pirates in Indian Ocean waters off Somalia “is to register the presence of the Chinese navy”.

Undergirding the deployment’s larger geopolitical motives was a separate announcement that China is “seriously considering” adding a first aircraft carrier to its navy fleet because, as a military spokesperson put it, aircraft carriers are “a reflection of a nation’s comprehensive power”. This is just the latest indication of China’s commitment to a blue-water navy. In the past, China bought four carriers (three ex-Soviet and one Australian) but, strangely, it inducted none in its fleet, preferring instead to learn from their design.

With President Hu Jintao publicly pressing for rapid naval modernization and the 2006 defence White Paper disclosing that “the navy aims to gradually extend its strategic depth”, naval expansion and greater missile prowess are now at the core of China’s force modernization. Since 2000 alone, China has built at least 60 warships. Its navy now has a fleet of 860 vessels, including at least 60 submarines.

China’s naval objectives are manifold, including to:

· safeguard its vast sea frontiers and a 877,020-square-kilometre exclusive economic zone (EEZ);

· help shift the balance of power in Asia in its favour;

· strengthen its deterrent capabilities;

· underpin political, commercial and energy interests through a sea-based power projection force capability;

· prevent the rise of peer competition from Japan and India, even as it seeks to position itself as a militarily strong and economically dynamic peer competitor to the US;

· thwart efforts by an outside power to set up new military bases or tie-ups around China’s periphery; and

· control vital sea-lanes of communication between the Indian and Pacific Oceans through a “string of pearls” strategy.

Rising naval power arms China with the heft to pursue mercantilist efforts to lock up long-term energy supplies, assert control over transport routes, and assemble a “string of pearls” in the form of listening posts and special naval-access arrangements along the great trade arteries. As India’s navy chief, Admiral Suresh Mehta, has said, “Each pearl in the string is a link in a chain of the Chinese maritime presence”.

In fact, a 2003 article in the Liberation Army Daily had asserted that the contiguous corridor from the Taiwan Straits to the Indian Ocean’s western rim constitutes China’s rightful offshore-defence perimeter. And a recent paper published by the Chinese Institute for International Strategic Studies points to the inevitability of Beijing setting up naval bases overseas, including in the Indian Ocean rim.

To the east, a rising frequency of Chinese naval patrols indicates that Beijing is seeking to extend its strategic perimeter deep into the Pacific Ocean. What is being subtly suggested by Chinese analysts today — that the Western Pacific is China’s maritime zone of influence — could set the stage for an intensifying strategic competition with another naval power, Japan.

Just as China’s land-combat strategy has evolved from “deep defence” (luring enemy forces into Chinese territory to help garrotte them) to “active defence” (a proactive posture designed to fight the enemy on enemy territory, including through the use of forces stationed in neighbouring lands or seas), a shift in its sea-warfare posture has emerged, with the emphasis on greater reach and depth and expeditionary capability.

And just as Beijing has used its energy investments in Central Asia as justification to set up at least two offensively configured, armour-heavy mechanized corps — with Xinjiang as their springboard — to fight deep inside adversarial territory and secure strategic assets, China’s growing oil imports from the Persian Gulf and Africa have come handy to rationalize its growing emphasis on the seas.

China is determined to build a blue-water naval force before 2025. Chinese warships inducted in recent years have already been geared for blue-sea fleet operations. As Beijing accelerates its construction of warships and begins to deploy naval assets far from its EEZ, Chinese naval power is set to grow exponentially.

China is also planning to deploy a fleet of nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines (known as SSBNs). It has already developed its new Jin-class (Type 094) SSBN prototype, with satellite pictures showing one such submarine berthed at the huge new Chinese naval base at Sanya, on the southern coast of Hainan Island. The Sino-Russian gap in nuclear naval forces is narrowing, but within the next 25 years, China could have more nuclear assets at sea than Russia.

Against this background, it is no surprise that the Chinese navy is extending its operations to the Indian Ocean — a crucial international passageway for oil deliveries and other trade. The extending role is also manifest from the projects China has launched in the Indian Ocean rim, including the building of a port at Hambantota in Sri Lanka, the modernization of Bangladesh’s Chittagong port, and the construction of a deep-water commercial port and naval base for Pakistan at Gwadar, situated at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz — the only exit route for Gulf oil. Beijing is eyeing Gwadar as a naval anchor.

In addition, the Irrawaddy Corridor between China’s Yunnan province and the Burmese ports on the Bay of Bengal is set to become a key economic and strategic passageway involving road, river, rail and harbour links. Commercial satellite imagery shows that China already operates signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection facility on the Great Coco Island.

India, with its enormous strategic depth in the Indian Ocean, is in a position to pursue a sea-denial strategy, if New Delhi were to adopt a more forward-thinking naval policy. Just the way India has come under a terrorist siege from Pakistan-based jihadists by doing little more than adopt defensive measures, it will confront — if it retreats to a defensive position — the Chinese navy in its backyard, completing the Chinese encirclement of the country.

To safeguard its long-term strategic interests, India has to start exerting naval power at critical chokepoints. That entails arming the Indian navy with the teeth and authority to guard the various “gates” to the Indian Ocean.

India’s leadership: Terror emboldener

Posted on December 30, 2008 by Chellaney

Words are all we have

While Pakistan is guilty of sponsoring terror, India’s leadership is guilty of encouraging terror and making the country an easy prey

Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, December 31, 2008

On the ninth anniversary of India’s Kandahar capitulation, it is evident that its costs continue to multiply. That cave-in set in motion a seemingly inexorable dual process — making India an easy prey for transnational terrorists, and the further softening of the Indian republic. Today, India has the dubious global distinction of suffering the largest number of terrorism-related casualties. Yet, far from waging its own war on terror, it is more interested in collecting evidence on Pakistan’s complicity while obsessively craving international sympathy as a victim.

Such a masochist approach raises troubling questions. Are they no limits to India’s patience in the face of increasingly provocative transnational terrorism? How much further can India be assaulted and terrorized before it finally concludes enough is enough? Or is it that the more terrorism it suffers, the greater becomes its capacity to absorb strikes? The 12/13 Parliament attack was supposed to be India’s 9/11. Now it is the 11/26 Mumbai assaults. That is, before a new set of terrorists again expose the Indian leadership’s cravenness.

Strategically, India’s imperative not to brook the latest terrorist assaults but to respond effectively parallels America’s post-9/11 attitude. Non-stop live television coverage of the 67-hour strikes has created not only an upsurge of patriotic revulsion and national unity, but also a propitious international setting for Indian counteraction. The providential capture of one fidayeen attacker alive helped unravel the Pakistani-scripted plot. Yet, having offshored India’s Pakistan policy, the aging leadership is throwing away a golden opportunity that won’t repeat itself.

The December 12 Parliament resolution on terrorism thus will go the way the Parliament resolutions of 1962 and 1994 on Chinese and Pakistani territorial aggression did — as mere words. The latest resolution, in any case, is long on rhetoric. The terrorists and their patrons certainly will not be taken in by words that palpably ring hallow by spelling out no action, yet smugly declare India will be “victorious in its fight against the barbaric menace of terrorism”.

All talk and no action bleeds India. Punitive military action, of course, is at the top rung of the strategic ladder — a daunting choice tied to good timing so that the adversary is taken unawares and snow-blocked Himalayan mountain-passes bar China from opening another front. But Prime Minister Manmohan Singh thus far has not taken the smallest of small steps against the terrorists’ haven, Pakistan. By shying away from invoking the mildest diplomatic or economic sanctions as a token expression of India’s outrage, he has capped India’s response at impotent fury. Instead, Singh bafflingly expects — and indeed urges — the international community to deal “sternly and effectively with the epicentre of terrorism”.

Israel’s heavy response to however small a provocation and India’s non-response to frontal attacks on its security and honour make these countries polar-opposites. Still, as the international reaction to Mumbai and Gaza illustrates, it is the meek that get counselled while the intrepid wage action unhindered.

While Atal Bihari Vajpayee took India on a roller-coaster ride with an ever-shifting policy on Pakistan and terror, under Singh the chickens have come home to roost. Vajpayee’s blunders — of which Kandahar remains a bleeding shame — have been more than matched by Singh’s bungles, including his surprise action on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 in declaring the sponsor of terror, Pakistan, as a victim of terror like India. To consummate that policy somersault, he established a still-existing joint anti-terror mechanism — a case of unforgettable naïveté, akin to police setting up joint investigations with the mafia.

The advent of fidayeen attacks happened under Vajpayee. The manner Vajpayee fought the Kargil War — entirely on Indian territory, on the enemy’s terms — emboldened the invading state to launch fidayeen terrorism no sooner than that conflict had started winding down. Kargil was followed by Kandahar, after which terrorism morphed from hit-and-run strikes to daring assaults on military camps, major religious sites and national emblems of power. But under Singh, suicide attacks have qualitatively escalated to such an extent that India has come under a terrorist siege.

Singh now has his own buddy in place of the home minister who was eased out as a scapegoat. Singh expects P. Chidambaram to bring down terrorism the way he brought stock prices crashing down. The new incumbent has told Parliament: “We have to take hard decisions”. But since Chidambaram has announced no hard decision thus far, citizens may wonder whether he too is looking to the international community.

Let’s be clear: Had India’s leaders not ignored institutionalized policymaking in favour of an ad hoc, personality-driven approach, not repeated the very mistakes of their predecessors and not insisted on learning on the job, the terrorism problem would not have become so acute. In the manner a fish rots from the head down, the rot in India is at the leadership level.

Just the way Pakistan goes through the motions of cracking down on its terror groups, New Delhi responds to each terrorist strike in a perfunctory or mechanical way, without commitment or resolve. And just as Pakistan has a track record of easing up on its terror groups when the spotlight is off, India’s leaders (dubbed “state non-actors”) go back to business as usual no sooner than a terrorist attack has begun to fade from public attention.

While Pakistan is guilty of sponsoring terror, India’s leadership is guilty of encouraging terror and making the country an easy prey. Make no mistake: If Pakistan is to dismantle its state-reared terror complex, India’s leaders will have to first dismantle their terror-emboldening outlook.

Repeating past mistakes of U.S. policy

Posted on December 30, 2008 by Chellaney

New Afghan strategy will compound U.S. problem

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Japan Times

Even before U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has been sworn in, the contours of his new strategy on Afghanistan have become known: A "surge" of U.S. forces, not to militarily rout the Taliban but to strike a political deal with the enemy from a position of strength.

Put simply, the United States intends to pursue in Afghanistan what it has done in Iraq, where it used a surge largely as a show of force to buy off Sunni tribal leaders and other local chieftains.

Linking Afghanistan, Pakistan and India together in the same security equation, Obama has made known a dual strategy of outwitting the Taliban while ensuring Indo-Pakistan peace, even if it means the Pakistan-based masterminds of the recent 67-hour Mumbai terrorist attacks are not brought to justice.

This strategy is likely to make things more difficult for Indian security, both by reinforcing U.S. dependence on the Pakistani military (more than three-quarters of all NATO supplies for the war in landlocked Afghanistan are transported through Pakistan) and by seeking to co-opt the Taliban behind the cover of a surge of U.S. forces.

In keeping with Obama’s pledge during the presidential election campaign to send more American combat brigades to Afghanistan, Adm. Michael Mullen, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, has announced a near-doubling of U.S. troops there by summer. There already are about 33,000 U.S. troops and 35,000 allied forces in Afghanistan.

At issue, however, is not the number of forces (the Soviets couldn’t tame Afghanistan even with more than 100,000 troops), but the strategy. Obama has expressed confidence in the new Centcom commander, Gen. David Petraeus, who is openly looking for ways to win over local commanders and warlords — the mainstay of the Taliban. Petraeus wants to explore truces and alliances with local tribal chieftains and guerrilla leaders to take them off the battlefield.

That is precisely what Petraeus did as the U.S. military commander in Iraq during the surge, and it is a strategy whose extension to Afghanistan has the full backing of Robert Gates, staying on as defense secretary under Obama. The "surge first, then negotiate" plan is to build up security in Afghan cities with new U.S. troop arrivals before initiating talks with the Taliban.

For the talks to be successful, the U.S. intends to squeeze the Taliban first, including by taking another page from its experiment in Iraq (where more than 100,000 Sunni gunmen have been pressed into government service) and setting up lightly trained local militias in every provincial district in Afghanistan. The move turns a blind eye to the danger that such militias could become a law unto themselves, terrorizing local populations.

If a resurgent Taliban is now on the offensive, with 2008 proving to be the deadliest year for U.S. forces, it is primarily because of two reasons: the sustenance the Taliban still draws from Pakistan; and a growing Pashtun backlash against the seven-year-old presence of foreign forces on Afghan soil.

A U.S. surge will not intimidate local Taliban commanders and tribal chieftains to negotiate peace deals, especially when some countries with forces in Afghanistan are exhibiting war fatigue and a desire to pull out troops. If anything, the pressure would be on the Obama administration to show quick results at a time when Afghan popular support for the war is ebbing.

Indeed, it will be naive to expect an Iraq-style surge-and-bribe experiment to work in Afghanistan, whose mountainous terrain, myriad and splintered tribes, patterns of shifting tribal and ethnic loyalties, special status as the global hub of poppy trade and a history of internecine civil conflict set it apart from any other Muslim country. In such a land with a long tradition of humbling foreign armies, payoffs won’t buy peace. Yet Petraeus wants to devise a 21st-century version of a divide-and-conquer imperial strategy.

If there is any certainty, it is that the Petraeus plan will help the already- entrenched Taliban sharpen its claws. However, to help justify "surge and bribe," a specious distinction is being drawn between al-Qaida and the Taliban to portray the former as evil and the latter as a different force with whom a compromise ought to be pursued.

The blunt fact is that al-Qaida and the Pakistani military-reared organizations like the Taliban, Laskar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad now constitute a difficult-to-separate mix of jihad-spouting soul mates with safe havens in Pakistan. A deal with any one such group will only strengthen the global-jihad syndicate, plus the Pakistani military establishment.

In that light, the surge-and-bribe strategy should be viewed as a shortsighted approach intent on repeating the very mistakes of American policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past three decades that have come to haunt U.S. security and that of the rest of the free world.

If America is to reclaim the global fight against terror, it will need to face up to the lessons from its past policies that gave rise to Frankensteins like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar and to "the state within the Pakistani state" — the directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, made powerful in the 1980s as a conduit of covert U.S. aid for anti-Soviet Afghan guerrillas.

The primary lesson is to keep the focus on long-term interests and not be carried away by political expediency. Yet again, Washington is itching to give primacy to near-term considerations.

Even if — in the best-case scenario — the Obama administration managed to bring down violence in Afghanistan by cutting deals, the Taliban would remain intact as a fighting force, with active ties to the Pakistani military. Such a tactical gain would exact serious long-terms costs on regional and international security.

In seeking such short-term success, the Obama team is falling prey to a long-standing U.S. policy weakness: the pursuit of narrow objectives without much regard for regional security or the interests of friends. Why ignore the interests of new strategic partner India, which already is bearing the brunt of the blow-back from past failed U.S. policies in the Afghanistan-Pakistan belt?

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

The Japan Times: Monday, Dec. 29, 2008

Why not lend Pakistan a helping hand to self-destruct?

Posted on December 25, 2008 by Chellaney

Explore other options

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, December 25, 2008

Fundamentalism, extremism and militarism have eaten into the vitals of Pakistan to the extent that it has become a de facto failed nation by Westphalian standards, with the tail (the military establishment) wagging the dog (the state) and with military-reared terror groups and the Taliban operating with impunity. The country’s president, with no control over the national-security apparatus, may be excused for making conflicting and confusing statements since the 67-hour Mumbai terrorist assaults, for he is little more than the mayor of Islamabad, albeit with the pomp and pageantry befitting a head of state. But the military establishment still fomenting terrorism across Pakistan’s borders with India and Afghanistan can hardly be excused. It cannot escape culpability in acts of terror by whipping up war hysteria at home.

It is the terrorist sanctuaries deep inside Pakistan, not just on its borders, that threaten world security, with terror groups enjoying a cozy relationship with “the state within the state” — the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). That may outwardly convey that it is incumbent on the international community to bring the Pakistani military, especially the ISI, to heel or risk the further spread of the scourge of terrorism.

Yet, unless New Delhi is willing to take the lead on countering Pakistan-sponsored terrorism through clear political direction and resolve, the international community is going to offer little more than sympathy to victim India. The only voice of the international community — the United Nations — is in decline, with its Security Council a seat of big-power intrigue. India needs no great power’s approval to defend its security and honour. If India acts on its own and succeeds, it will win international respect.

If it fails, some nations will make a little noise before ignoring the failure. But if it does little more than collect evidence to try and influence those pursuing their own narrow strategic interests, it will invite more Mumbai-style murderous rampages.

For the promotion of its near-term interests in the region, the U.S. continues to prop up the Pakistani military through generous aid and weapon transfers, instead of helping empower the civilian government in Islamabad. Had it supported the bold move of President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani last July to bring the ISI under the control of the interior ministry, civilian oversight would have been established over a key terror-harbouring instrument. But by not backing the government, it allowed the Army to frustrate the attempt to bring the ISI under civilian control. The Army, similarly, has refused to hand over control of Pakistan’s nuclear assets to the civilian government. All this has happened despite Gen. Ashfaq Kayani’s professed intent to move the Army away from politics to its core functions.

Still, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has declined to take the smallest of small steps against Pakistan even as a token expression of India’s outrage over the Mumbai assaults by 10 terrorists — all from Pakistan’s Punjab province. Instead, he has reposed his faith in the international community, urging it again this week to “use its power to persuade Pakistan” to dismantle its state-reared terror complex.

For India, the options are narrow yet clear. When the seat of official power and the seat of real power are far apart in a rotting state plagued by government atrophy, no effective action can be expected against military-nurtured groups fomenting terrorism against India unless the latter is willing to inflict pain on the real wielders of authority in Pakistan and show beyond doubt that the costs of continuing complicity in transnational terror are unbearably high for them. After all, the terror complex was set up by the Pakistani military to wage a war of a thousand cuts against India, not to dismantle it at the enemy’s bidding or the international community’s urging.

Between the two extremes — inaction and military strikes — are several dozen options for India, including economic and political opportunities against an increasingly vulnerable, near-bankrupt Pakistan. Such options cannot be the subject of a public debate though. Calibrated counteraction not only will demonstrate Indian intent but also help step up pressure on the international community to act.

Also, given the communications intercepts that link the Mumbai attackers to Pakistan-based masterminds and ISI handlers, why not add the name of the ISI head, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, to the Indian list of terrorist figures in Pakistan? Pasha cannot feign ignorance about his own agency’s aid to the Laskar-e-Taiba figures who masterminded the Mumbai assaults.

Make no mistake: India will have to fight its own war against Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. In essence, that would entail lending Pakistan a helping hand to stay embroiled in growing problems at home, with the hope that an ungovernable state that already is a threat to regional and international security self-destructs.

The writer is an expert on security affairs

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1216472&pageid=0

Oil sheikhdoms and the rise of Islamist threat

Posted on December 24, 2008 by Chellaney

Oiling transnational terrorism

Oil prices are sure to rebound before long, ensuring that the Gulf sheikhdoms enjoy overflowing coffers and a growing heft to fund extremist groups, like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, long fattened with Saudi petrodollars, says Brahma Chellaney

The Economic Times, December 24, 2008

There is an inverse correlation between the price of oil and the price of freedom, as has been pointed out by American commentator Thomas Friedman. An oil-price spike not only spurs greater transfer of wealth to the oil-exporting nations, but also undercuts the spread of freedom by instilling or strengthening authoritarianism and arming the Gulf states with greater clout to fund fundamentalism and extremism elsewhere.

The current oil-price crash might create an illusion that the era of sky-high international prices is over. Before plummeting below $50 a barrel in November-end, the price of crude oil had gone from $30 in 2001 to as high as $147 in July 2008, creating an unprecedented bonanza for oil-exporting nations.

But for many oil-consuming states in the developing world, the high price of oil created an unfavourable balance-of-payments position. One such state, the terror-exporting Pakistan, has just been pulled back from the brink of bankruptcy through US munificence, including a $7.6 billion IMF bailout package announced on the eve of the Mumbai terrorist assaults. The precipitous drop in the oil price, on the other hand, spells trouble not only for petro-states like Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Bolivia, but also nations like Egypt and Jordan where gulf money has helped shore up strained economies.

When viewed against a long-term picture of demand and supply, the sudden price crash is just not sustainable. Compared to the 1974 level, the price of oil, if adjusted against inflation, ought to be about $100 a barrel today. Given that there are 159 litres in one barrel of oil, the current price of “black gold”, as oil is called, is indeed cheaper than that of bottled mineral water.

Unlike the oil-price increases in the 1970s and early 1980s — triggered by cartelization and deliberate supply restriction — the price spike in recent years arose from two fundamental factors: mounting demand, especially in the emerging economies; and the flattening of production in key non-OPEC countries.

Finding new sources of oil is already becoming harder, with the environment now more difficult geographically and geologically. Also, as history attests, every phase of cheaper oil prices has carried the seeds of the next price spike and energy shock. For example, when in 1985-86 the price crashed from $45 to $9, energy saving and efficiency fell out of fashion. Today, suppliers are already cutting back on production and postponing new projects.

In that light, the oil price is sure to rebound before long. However, even if the price were to stay ridiculously low at $50 a barrel, the oil sheikhdoms of the Gulf will still receive more than $350 billion a year at their current rate of production. And if the price spirals to $150, their oil revenue will surpass $1 trillion a year. Such continuous transfers of immense wealth to the sparsely populated sheikhdoms — which have more foreign workers than citizens — holds major long-term strategic implications, including for the global fight against fundamentalism and terrorism.

Soaring wealth, coupled with their control over the world’s most-bountiful oil resources, gives these weak, feudal, internally-troubled sheikhdoms a disproportionate clout in world affairs — a heft they have misused.

After the 1970s’ oil-price shocks opened the flow of rising revenues, several sheikhdoms began funnelling some of their earnings to the promotion of Wahhabi Islam, including the establishment of jihad-spouting madrassas overseas. It was not an accident that the rise of Islamic conservatism and extremism — from Morocco and Sudan to Malaysia and Indonesia — began from the 1980s with the aid of petrodollars. Today, funds continue to be channelled to Islamist groups.

Take the Al Qaeda-linked Lashkar-e-Taiba. Although it was established as a front organization of the Pakistani intelligence to bleed India, this Punjabi-dominated outfit has long been fattened with Saudi petrodollars. As Husain Haqqani, now Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, put it in a 2005 article, the Lashkar-e-Taiba is a Wahhabist group, “backed by Saudi money and protected by Pakistani intelligence services”, that targets India, Israel and the US as “existential enemies of Islam”.

From the United Arab Emirates’ sheltering of international fugitives and terrorism-financing conduit role to Saudi Arabia’s continued bankrolling of jihadist groups overseas, the oil sheikhdoms have shown contempt for international norms. Their post-9/11 promises to clean up their alleged philanthropic acts have not been fully honoured.

This state of affairs is simply intolerable. Can the security of secular, pluralistic states be allowed to be undermined by despots whose wealth and power flow from the gigantic oil reserves on which they sit, often by usurping the resources of minorities?

Saudi Wahhabi wealth has been built from Shiite resources. The two million Shiites of Saudi Arabia may constitute only up to 15 per cent of the national population. But they dominate the oases of Qatif and al-Hasa in the Eastern Province, the source of 90 per cent of Saudi oil production and the seat of the world’s greatest oil reserves. In Iraq, too, the oil resources are concentrated in non-Sunni areas. The US occupation has helped end, however inadvertently, the Iraqi Sunni domination of the majority Shiite population.

Take another Sunni-governed oil sheikhdom, Bahrain, where the Shiites form up to 75 per cent of the population. The Bahraini Sunni elites have cosy tribal affiliations with the Saudi elite (going to the extent of granting Bahraini citizenship to Saudi Sunnis on demand) but maintain a distance from the majority Shiite population at home.

Shiites have been suppressed and treated as second-class citizens in a number of societies since the time the Prophet’s grandson, Hussein, was beheaded by Sunnis in A.D. 656. Today, there is a Shiite reawakening across West Asia, with Jordan’s King Abdullah II even raising the spectre of a “Shiite crescent” stretching from Iran and Iraq to Syria and Lebanon.

Given that the Sunni-run sheikhdoms plus Iran hold some two-thirds of the global oil reserves and that Saudi Arabia alone is projected by 2025 to produce more oil than Africa and the Caspian Sea basin combined, international security will be better served by actively promoting democratization in the region than by propping up tyrannical regimes such as the one run by the House of Saud.

(The writer is a strategic affairs expert.)