To fight terrorism, be proactive

Posted on December 19, 2008 by Chellaney

Defensive measures alone won’t suffice

Terrorism cannot be fought as a law-and-order problem. What India needs is a comprehensive approach that blends different key elements to form a credible counter-terror strategy. An excess emphasis on defensive measures would only play into the terrorists’ designs to instil a siege mentality.

Brahma Chellaney

The Hindu newspaper, December 20, 2008

For nearly a millennium, India was repeatedly invaded, raped and subjugated by those who came primarily to plunder its wealth, with some staying on to rule by conquest. Now again, raiders from the northwest are repeatedly assaulting India, not to cart away its riches but to undermine its rising economic strength after a long historical period of humiliation. That is why India’s commercial capital has been repeatedly attacked by the raiders, who have chosen their targets there carefully — from the stock exchange and financial institutions in 1993 and city trains in 2006 to its landmark luxury hotels in 2008.

That India is an island of stability, economic growth and democratic empowerment in a sea of turbulence stretching from Jordan to Malaysia also makes it a magnet for terrorists from a particular quasi-failed state that seems intent on taking India down with it as it sinks. Such is the tyranny of geography that India is wedged in an arc of failing or authoritarian states that try, in different ways, to undermine its secular, multiethnic, pluralistic character.

Pakistan-based jihadist groups are now carrying out increasingly daring assaults deep across the border. Compounding that threat is the fact that Pakistan is not a normal state but the world’s Terroristan. For the foreseeable future, it will remain the epicentre of global terrorism, with India bearing the brunt.

The big question thus is whether India will keep running to the U.S. for help and sympathy after each terror attack or — despite a growing congruence of Indo-American interests — wage its own fight in a credible, coherent and deterrent fashion. India has been too interested in collecting and presenting evidence of Pakistan’s terror links to the outside world than in initiating its own steps to effectively combat terrorism.

Stemming terrorism demands at least four different elements — a well-thought-out strategy, effective state instruments to implement that strategy, a credible legal framework to speedily bring terrorists to justice, and unflinching political resolve to stay the course. India, unfortunately, is deficient on all four.

It has no published counter-terror doctrine. Furthermore, not only is there no political will, the Indian system has also become so effete that the state instruments are unable to deliver results even on the odd occasion when the leadership displays a spine to act. Nowhere is India’s frailty more apparent today than on internal security, which historically has been its Achilles heel.

If the government did one thing right during the Mumbai terrorist attacks, it was to stick to its newly declared doctrine foreswearing negotiations with hostage-takers. By ordering commando assaults on the terrorists holed up in Mumbai’s two luxury hotels and Jewish Centre, the government denied them and their sponsors the opportunity to help focus international spotlight on a plethora of demands — from the release of “mujahideen” from Indian jails to some Kashmir-related ultimatum. That commendable decision, more importantly, spared the country the humiliation of being held hostage for days on end.

The frontal commando storming of the besieged sites took the terrorists by surprise and forced them to defend themselves, thus helping limit the number of fatalities. Otherwise, the four terrorists in the Taj hotel, for example, would have killed far more than the 32 people they did, many in the initial minutes of their attack. Despite the considerable and extended investments that went into training the attackers, including in imparting military-style amphibious assault skills, the terrorist operation did not go as well as had been plotted by the Pakistan-based masterminds. The capture alive of one of the suicide attackers also helped unravel the plot.

More broadly, one problem is that India is always trying to prevent a repeat of the last attack rather than seeking to forestall the next innovative strike. Almost every major terrorist strike against an Indian target since the 1985 midair bombing of the Air-India Kanishka jetliner has involved novel methodology. The likelihood of a repeat attack by terrorists arriving on inflatable dinghies and striking luxury hotels is thus close to zero. Yet, in a manner akin to closing the barn doors after the horses have bolted, security cordons now ring luxury hotels and resources are being invested in setting up a coastal command.

It is the refusal to think ahead and try and anticipate how and where terrorists would strike next that results in India being taken by surprise again and again. The aim should be to stay at least a few steps ahead of the terrorists, rather than to prevent the last type of attack through beefed-up security. Heavy security at hotels, railway stations, high-rise buildings, malls, etc. will still leave open other targets for innovative terrorist strikes but help portray the country as beleaguered.

Make no mistake: Improved maritime patrols, better police training and preparedness, a new federal agency for investigations, regional commando commands and intelligence revamp — although necessary — are all defensive measures. However well designed and put into practice, such steps by themselves cannot stop terrorist strikes. Yet, in the aftermath of the Mumbai strikes, the government is overly focusing on such defensive mechanisms.

The proposed National Investigative Agency and a strengthened Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act seek to plug some glaring weaknesses. But in a country where, despite the rising incidence of terrorism, not a single terror-related case has been successfully prosecuted in many years other than the one involving the attack on Parliament, the setting up of a new agency can hardly bring much cheer. Also, it doesn’t show India’s leaders in good light that more than 15 years after investigators established clear links between Dawood Ibrahim and the 1993 serial bombings in Mumbai, they do little more than periodically complain that he remains ensconced in Pakistan.

Worse, terrorism has been treated as a law-and-order issue requiring more policing, training and hardware. To regard terrorism as a law-and-order problem is to do what the terrorists want — to sap your strength. No amount of security can stop terrorism if the nation is reluctant to go after terrorist cells and networks and those that harbour extremists.

Against an invisible enemy, defensive mechanisms can only have limited utility. To stay a sitting duck against the sly, murderous extremists is to risk not only the lives of innocent people, but also political and psychological damage to the national psyche.

Defensive measures, in any event, can be meaningful only if they are accompanied by a proactive component that entails going after the terrorists before they strike. That means, among other things, hounding, disrupting and smashing their cells, networks and safe havens; destroying their local network;, cutting off their funding; and imposing deterrent costs (through overt or covert means) on those that promote, finance or tolerate terrorist activity.

Merely to step up defensive measures and build higher fences and VVIP security is to play into the terrorists’ designs to bring India under a terrorist siege. The more India has been terrorized in recent years, the more it has betrayed a siege mentality. Every time India is tested by terror, it characteristically responds by talking tough but doing nothing — the trait of a battered victim.

For India, terrorism is an existential battle that will determine whether it stays a free, secular, united state. India’s counteraction has to be at multiple levels: domestic policy (formulating a credible counter-terror strategy); legal (forming a political consensus in support of special laws that carry adequate safeguards); law enforcement (identifying and destroying terrorist sleeper cells in cities); intelligence (building assets so as to operate behind “enemy” lines and target a particular car, cell or haven at an opportune moment); strategic (keeping terrorist patrons on tenterhooks); deterrent (imposing calibrated costs on the masterminds); and public relations. It is odd, for example, that sections of the foreign media continue to misleadingly label the predominantly Punjabi, "global jihad"-spouting Laskar-e-Taiba as a “Kashmiri separatist group” without New Delhi mounting any effort to make such news organizations face up to simple facts.

Against external sponsors of terror, a range of discreet options are available to India, including diplomatic, economic and political. Between the two extremes — inaction and military action — lie a hundred different options. These are options that no nation discusses in public. Rather they must be weighed in private and exercised quietly.

The key point is that terrorism cannot be fought as a law-and-order problem. The only way to stem that scourge is to develop a concerted, comprehensive approach that blends different elements into a single, pointed, sustained campaign. To fight the unconventional war being waged against it, India perforce needs to employ a range of unconventional tools to strike at the heart of terrorist networks and disrupt their cohesion, operational capacity and logistic support.

The writer is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

Supping with the devil

Posted on December 17, 2008 by Chellaney

It Ain’t Working

US should stop propping up the Pakistani military

Brahma Chellaney Times of India December 18, 2008

US aid to Islamabad is now close to $2 billion a year, putting Pakistan on par with Israel and Egypt as the top recipients of American assistance. And on the eve of the Mumbai terrorist assaults, the US persuaded the IMF to hand a near-bankrupt Pakistan an economic lifeline in the form of a $7.6 billion aid package, with no strings attached. Despite such largesse, Pakistan is host to the world’s most-wanted men and the main Al Qaeda sanctuary. Recent polling shows that Osama bin Laden is more popular in Pakistan than ever, even as America’s negative rating there has soared.

Let’s be clear: US policy on Pakistan isn’t working, and unless Washington fundamentally reverses course, it risks losing the war in Afghanistan and making the West an increasing jihadist target, including the scene of Mumbai-style murderous rampages. After all, as the history of terrorism since the 1980s attests, innovative terrorist strikes carried out against Indian targets have later been replicated in the West. That includes attacks on symbols of state authority, the midair bombing of a commercial jetliner and coordinated strikes on a city transportation system.

The jihadists’ logic in employing soft-state India as their laboratory has been that if they can bleed the world’s largest democracy through novel and recurrent attacks, they perfect techniques for application against the tougher free societies in the West. If the terrorists can bring the developing world’s most-successful democratic experiment under siege, with the intent to unravel its secular and pluralistic character, it is only a matter of time before Western societies get similarly besieged. That the tourism ad’s “incredible India” is, in reality, little more than a miserable India — which presents itself as an easy target by merely craving international sympathy as a constant victim — does not detract from the danger that the Mumbai-attack masterminds have set up a model for use elsewhere.

Yet the US response, however positive in the diplomatic realm, has failed to recognize that the Mumbai attacks mark a potent new threat to free societies and that unless the masterminds are brought to justice, such cold-blooded rampages are likely to be carried out in the West. The alacrity with which the American media returned to the India-Pakistan hyphenation in covering the Mumbai assaults betrayed superficiality and old mindsets — a failing compounded by media organizations calling the attackers not terrorists but “militants” (like the New York Times) or “gunmen” (including the Washington Post). Diplomatically, it has been déjà vu — the US exerting pressure and Islamabad staging yet another anti-terrorist charade to deflect that pressure and pre-empt Indian retaliation.

Given the easy manner outlawed terrorist outfits in Pakistan resurface under new names, the US knows well that a ban on any group or temporary detention of a terrorist figure is of little enduring value. More Mumbai-type attacks can be prevented only if the masterminds are identified and put on trial and their sponsors in the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment are, with the help of Europeans, indicted in The Hague for war crimes. Yet, despite a broken Pakistan policy, the US seems reluctant to fix its approach. The reason for that is not hard to seek: US policy remains wedded to the Pakistani institution that reared the forces of jihad — the military.

Indeed, US policy is still governed by a consideration that dates back to the 1950s — treating the Pakistani military as central to the pursuit of American geopolitical objectives. As American scholars Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph have put it, “For roughly 50 years, the US destabilized the South Asia region by acting as an offshore balancer. Its actions allowed Pakistan to realize its goal of ‘parity’ with its much-bigger neighbour and to try to best that neighbour in several wars”. The more recent “de-hyphenation” of India and Pakistan was not a calculated US policy shift but the product of Pakistan’s descent into shambles and India’s notable rise after 1998. Under Bush, US policy simply went from hyphenation to parallelism. That has involved building strategic partnerships with and selling arms to both. For the first time ever, the US is building parallel intelligence-sharing and defence-cooperation arrangements with both.

The war in Afghanistan and the containment strategy against Iran have only reinforced the US dependence on the Pakistani military, despite mountains of intelligence indicating the latter is playing both sides — bolstering the Taliban and other terror groups while pretending to be a counter-terror ally. Instead of helping empower Pakistan’s civilian government to gain full control over the national-security system, including the nuclear establishment and the ISI, US policy acts as a stumbling block by continuing to prop up the Pakistani military through generous aid and weapon transfers, including bombers and submarines of relevance only against India.

For its own sake, Washington has to stop pampering and building up the military as Pakistan’s pivot. By fattening the Pakistani military, America has, however inadvertently, allowed that institution to maintain cosy ties with terror groups. A break from this policy approach would be for the Obama administration to embrace the idea currently being discussed in Washington — condition further aid to the reconfiguration of the Pakistani military to effectively fight terror and to concrete actions to end institutional support to extremism. If not, the US is bound to lose two wars — the one in Afghanistan and the other on transnational terror — while staying mired in Iraq.

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Need for course correction in U.S. policy on Pakistan

Posted on December 17, 2008 by Chellaney

DANGEROUS LIAISON

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Japan Times, December 17, 2008

U.S. policy on Pakistan isn’t working, and unless Washington fundamentally reverses course, it risks losing the war in Afghanistan and making the West an increasing target of jihadists. That is the key message emerging from the recent terrorist assaults in Mumbai.

U.S. aid to Islamabad is now close to $2 billion a year, placing Pakistan as one of the three top recipients of American assistance along with Israel and Egypt. In fact, on the eve of the Mumbai attacks, the United States persuaded the International Monetary Fund to hand a near-bankrupt Pakistan an economic lifeline in the form of a $7.6 billion aid package, with no strings attached.

Despite such largesse, Pakistan is host to the world’s most-wanted men and the main al-Qaida sanctuary. Recent polling shows that Osama bin Laden is more popular in Pakistan than ever, even as America’s negative rating there has soared.

A shift in U.S. policy on Pakistan holds the key to the successful outcome of both the war in Afghanistan and the wider international fight against transnational terror.

First, if the U.S. does not insist on getting to the bottom of who sponsored and executed the attacks in India’s commercial and cultural capital, the Mumbai attacks will probably be repeated in the West. After all, India has served as a laboratory for transnational terrorists, who try out new techniques against Indian targets before seeking to replicate them in other pluralistic states.

Novel strikes first carried out against Indian targets and then perpetrated in the West include attacks on symbols of state authority, the midair bombing of a commercial jetliner and coordinated strikes on a city transportation system.

By carrying out a series of simultaneous murderous rampages after innovatively arriving by sea, the Mumbai attackers have set up a model for use against other jihadist targets. The manner in which the world was riveted as a band of 10 young terrorists — all from Punjab province in Pakistan — held India hostage for three days is something jihadists would love to replicate elsewhere.

Given the easy manner in which outlawed terrorist outfits in Pakistan resurface under new names, the U.S. knows well that a ban on any group or the temporary detention of some terrorist figures (as happening now in Pakistan under international pressure) is of little enduring value. More Mumbai-type attacks can be prevented only if the masterminds are identified and put on trial and their sponsors in the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment are, with the help of Europeans, indicted in The Hague for war crimes.

Second, let’s be clear: The scourge of Pakistani terrorism emanates not so much from the Islamist mullahs as from generals who reared the forces of jihad and fathered the Taliban and al-Qaida-linked groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group blamed by India, the U.S. and Britain for the Mumbai attacks.

Civil-military relations in Pakistan are so skewed that the present civilian government is powerless to check the sponsorship of terrorist elements by the military and the latter’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, or even to stop the army’s meddling in foreign policy. Until civilian officials can stand up to the military, Pakistan will neither become a normal state nor cease to be a "Terroristan" for international security.

U.S. policy, however, still props up the Pakistan military through generous aid and weapon transfers. Even as Pakistan has emerged as a common thread in the investigations of most acts of international terror, U.S. policy continues to be governed by a consideration dating back to the 1950s. Washington has to stop viewing, and building up, the military as Pakistan’s pivot. By fattening the Pakistani military, America has, however inadvertently, allowed that institution to maintain cozy ties with terror groups.

A break from this policy approach would be for the Obama administration to embrace the idea currently being discussed in Washington — to condition further aid to the reconfiguration of the Pakistani military to effectively fight terror, and to concrete actions to end institutional support to extremism. The nearly $11 billion in U.S. military aid to Pakistan since 9/11 has been diverted to beef up forces against India. Such diversion, however, is part of a pattern that became conspicuous in the 1980s when the ISI agency siphoned off billions of dollars from the covert CIA assistance meant for anti-Soviet guerrillas in Afghanistan.

For too long, Washington has allowed politically expedient considerations to override its long-term interests.

It is past time U.S. policymakers actively encouraged elected leaders in Pakistan to gain full control over all of their country’s national-security apparatus, including the nuclear establishment and ISI.

The ISI — a citadel of Islamist sentiment and the main source of support to the Taliban and other terrorist groups supporting jihad in Kashmir, Afghanistan and elsewhere — should be restructured or disbanded. State-reared terror groups and their splinter cells, some now operating autonomously, have morphed into a hydra.

U.S.-led NATO forces in Afghanistan, like border troops in India, have been trying to stop the inflow of terrorists and arms from Pakistan. The real problem, however, is not at the Pakistani frontiers with Afghanistan and India. Rather it is the terrorist sanctuaries deep inside Pakistan that continue to breed extremism and export terrorism.

Since the economic viability of Pakistan depends on continued U.S. aid flow as well as on American support for multilateral institutional lending, Washington has the necessary leverage. Further aid should be linked to definitive measures by Pakistan to sever institutional support to extremism. Only when the institutional support for terrorism is irrevocably cut off will the sanctuaries for training, command, control and supply begin to wither away.

Unless the U.S. reverses course on Pakistan, it will begin losing the war in Afghanistan. While America did make sincere efforts in the aftermath of the Mumbai assaults, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen personally visiting Islamabad to exert pressure, U.S. diplomacy remains hamstrung by Washington’s continuing overreliance on the Pakistani military.

Before the chickens come home to roost, the U.S. pampering of the Pakistani military has to end.

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."

The Japan Times: Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2008

Dealing with a roguish Pakistani military establishment

Posted on December 16, 2008 by Chellaney

Attack, then demand bribes

The Indian leadership’s naïveté is more than matched by the rascality of the Pakistani military establishment, which demands a bribe for every move on its part — generous US aid flow to help rein in the Taliban, and a Kashmir resolution to sever its institutional support to India-directed terrorism.

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, December 17, 2008

“Terrorists are still coming in from Pakistan”, India’s lumbering external affairs minister lamented in Parliament last week. India can be sure terrorists will keep arriving from across the borders, emboldened as they and their patrons would be from New Delhi’s pusillanimity in not taking 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.

After every major terrorist assault, India can expect — as has been the case since the Mumbai attacks — visits by high-ranking public figures from overseas who will offer loads of sympathy, heartily pat the septuagenarians and octogenarians governing India for their restraint, and then peddle their eclectic wares — from seeking access for their police to investigate terrorist strikes in India and question arrested suspects, to urging New Delhi to use the latest tragedy to resolve the Kashmir issue with Pakistan.

The visitors are not stupid not to know that cross-border terrorism would not end even if India were to offer Kashmir on a platter to Pakistan. After all, the self-declared mission of the Lashkar-e-Taiba — still actively aided by the Pakistani intelligence — is “global jihad”, with the specific goal to set up a caliphate across southern, central and southeastern Asia. And as was shown by the 1999 Kargil invasion, when Pakistani Army regulars encroached masquerading as “mujahideen”, a thin line can separate the military establishment from its pet terror groups.

India’s becoming an easy prey for terrorists is linked not to the Kashmir issue but to its effete leadership, which won’t impose any costs on the sponsors of terror, yet unabashedly appeals to other states to fight India’s war on terrorism. Unable to think and act strategically, the leadership has helped turn India into a classic lamb state that can be continually gored without fear of retribution. Tellingly, if Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has made any vow after Mumbai, it is — to quote his words in Parliament — “to galvanize the international community into dealing sternly and effectively with the epicentre of terrorism which is located in Pakistan”.

Making the most of such bloated Indian expectations, the visiting dignitaries seek to push their countries’ own geopolitical agendas, centred on narrow tactical considerations than on a larger strategy to deracinate Pakistan’s jihad culture. In being guided by politically expedient considerations, however, they play right into the hands of the extortionist Pakistani military and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

At the crux of the problem are the bribes the Pakistani military establishment openly seeks from the international community for any move on its part:

· To help rein in the Taliban — which it continues to bolster while pretending to be an ally in the US-led war on terror — it demands generous US military aid, although it has already diverted (according to American admissions) much of the received assistance to beef up forces against India.

· To sever its institutional support to India-directed terror groups, it demands a resolution — to its satisfaction — of the intractable and unsolvable Kashmir dispute.

· Having stunted nation-building and turned Pakistan into the world’s Problemistan, it now warns the Pakistani state would implode unless the US continues its aid flow, totalling nearly $2 billion a year.

· To patrol Pakistan’s own border with Afghanistan, it demands — and gets — a special US payment of around $100 million a month.

· It scripts terror attacks in India and then immediately spotlights the Kashmir issue. The Mumbai attackers could have learned their amphibious assault skills only from military handlers, not non-state actors. Yet, shortly after the Mumbai assaults, Pakistan told the UN Security Council that, “The best outcome of the tragedy would be the resolution of the issue of Kashmir”.

Given the ruthlessness with which the military-style terrorist assaults were executed, the capture of one supposed suicide attacker alive and the relatively moderate death toll of 32 in the Taj Mahal Hotel and 33 in Oberoi-Trident (more civilians died at a major train station than at either of the two besieged hotels) indicate the operation did not go the way it had been planned by the masterminds in Pakistan. Had New Delhi not ordered the commando storming but gone in for negotiations, the four terrorists in the Taj and the two each at the Oberoi-Trident and the Jewish Centre would have held India hostage for days on end while putting the international spotlight on a plethora of demands — from Kashmir to jailed terrorists in India.

The real issue is not Kashmir but the Pakistani military, which, after six decades of direct and indirect rule, has become too fat to return to the barracks. Indeed, it won’t fit in the barracks. To retain its power and prerogative in society, the military needs the India-threat bogey. The military genuinely believes that a Pakistan stripped of its core cementing element — eternal enmity with India — would be reduced to a battlefield for its five feuding ethnic groups. It has thus kept alive the Kashmir issue.

Had India been an irredentist state, seeking to reclaim the Kashmir territories now held by Pakistan (35 per cent) and China (20 per cent), the Pakistani military may have been justified in projecting an India threat. But India is for maintaining the territorial status quo — a position not acceptable to the Pakistani military, which over the years has sought to change the status quo through open war and now unconventional conflict.

In recent years, India has worked with Pakistan to create a virtually borderless Kashmir to help facilitate the free movement of people, goods and services. New transportation links have been established as a first step. Given that Kashmir’s division into Indian, Pakistani and Chinese parts cannot be undone, what does a “resolution” of the Kashmir dispute entail beyond such steps?

The blunt truth is that Kashmir is not the cause but the symbol of India-Pakistan differences, which are rooted in history and the politics of revenge, besides epitomizing competing worldviews and a divide along civilizational fault lines. As General Pervez Musharraf candidly put it in a 1999 speech, Pakistan’s low-intensity war with India would continue even if the Kashmir issue were magically resolved. The military for long has fancied India’s Balkanization as Pakistan’s salvation.

The way out of this situation is for the US, Britain and others to help empower Pakistan’s civilian government, which today is neither in charge of the country’s national-security apparatus nor in a position to stop the Army’s meddling in foreign policy. To pressure the victim, India, to pander to the Pakistani military’s insatiable demands on Kashmir is to promote greater roguishness and to overlook the fact that the Pakistani Army is waging a mortal combat with the Indian republic.

But why blame international figures when India’s own leaders fail to grasp the nature of the mortal combat? India’s leadership deficit is manifest from the innocent pleas to Pakistan, including the extradition of 42 fugitives and the dismantlement of the state-run terrorist infrastructure.

Which Pakistan is going to do that? The powerless civilian government? The Janus-faced military establishment? Did the latter set up the terror complex to wage a war of a thousand cuts against India or to dismantle it at the enemy’s bidding? If they really wish to bring that establishment to heel, what costs are India’s leaders ready to impose?

Why the U.S. must change policy course on Pakistan

Posted on December 11, 2008 by Chellaney

Stop pampering Pakistan’s military

The Mumbai attacks underscore the importance of rooting out institutional support for terror

By Brahma Chellaney

Christian Science Monitor, December 12, 2008 edition

The recent Mumbai terrorist assaults underscore the imperative for a major change in American policy on Pakistan – a shift that holds the key to the successful outcome of both the war in Afghanistan and the wider international fight against transnational terror.

First, if the US does not insist on getting to the bottom of who sponsored and executed the attacks in India’s commercial and cultural capital, the Mumbai attacks will probably be repeated in the West. After all, India has served as a laboratory for transnational terrorists, who try out new techniques against Indian targets before seeking to replicate them in other pluralistic states.

Novel strikes first carried out against Indian targets and then perpetrated in the West include attacks on symbols of state authority, the midair bombing of a commercial jetliner, and coordinated strikes on a city transportation system.

By carrying out a series of simultaneous murderous rampages after innovatively arriving by sea, the Mumbai attackers have set up a model for use against other jihadist targets. The manner in which the world was riveted as a band of 10 young terrorists – nearly all from Punjab Province in Pakistan – held India hostage for three days is something jihadists would love to replicate elsewhere.

Second, let’s be clear: The scourge of Pakistani terrorism emanates not so much from the Islamist mullahs as from generals who reared the forces of jihad and fathered the Taliban and Al Qaeda-linked groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group reportedly behind the Mumbai attacks.

Facing growing international pressure to hunt down the Mumbai masterminds, Pakistan’s government raided a militant camp in Kashmir Sunday. Yet civil-military relations in Pakistan are so skewed that the present civilian government is powerless to check the sponsorship of terrorist elements by the military and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, or even to stop the Army’s meddling in foreign policy. Until civilian officials can stand up to these institutions, Pakistan will neither become a normal state nor cease to be a "Terroristan" for international security.

US policy, however, still props up the Pakistan military through generous aid and weapon transfers. Even as Pakistan has emerged as a common thread in the investigations of most acts of international terror, US policy continues to be governed by a consideration dating back to the 1950s. Washington has to stop viewing, and building up, the military as Pakistan’s pivot. By fattening the Pakistani military, America has, however inadvertently, allowed that institution to maintain cozy ties with terrorist groups.

One break from this policy approach would be the idea currently being discussed in Washington – to tie further US aid to a reconfiguration of the Pakistani military to effectively fight militants. The nearly $11 billion in US military aid to Pakistan since 9/11 has been diverted to beef up forces against India. Such diversion, however, is part of a pattern that became conspicuous in the 1980s when the ISI agency siphoned off billions of dollars from the covert CIA assistance meant for anti-Soviet guerrillas in Afghanistan.

For too long, Washington has allowed politically expedient considerations to override its long-term interests.

The US must actively encourage the elected leaders in Pakistan to gain full control over all of their country’s national-security apparatus, including the nuclear establishment and ISI. And to forestall a military coup in response to such action, Washington should warn the generals of serious action, including possible indictment in The Hague.

The ISI, a citadel of Islamist sentiment and a key source of support to the Taliban and other terrorist groups supporting jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan, should be restructured or disbanded. State-reared terror groups and their splinter cells, some now operating autonomously, have morphed into a hydra.

US-led NATO forces in Afghanistan, like border troops in India, have been trying to stop the inflow of terrorists and arms from Pakistan. The real problem, however, is not at the Pakistani frontiers with Afghanistan and India. Rather it is the terrorist sanctuaries deep inside Pakistan that continue to breed extremism and export terrorism.

Since the economic viability of Pakistan depends on continued US aid as well as on US support for multilateral institutional lending, Washington has the necessary leverage. Further aid should be linked to definitive measures by Pakistan to sever institutional support to extremism. Only when the institutional support for terrorism is irrevocably cut off will the sanctuaries for training, command, control, and supply begin to wither away.

Unless the US reverses course on Pakistan, it will begin losing the war in Afghanistan. While America did make sincere efforts in the aftermath of the Mumbai assaults, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, personally visiting Islamabad to exert pressure, US diplomacy remains limited by Washington’s continuing overreliance on the Pakistani military.

Before the chickens come home to roost, the US pampering of the Pakistani military has to end.

• Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1212/p09s01-coop.html

Toward a new international order

Posted on December 3, 2008 by Chellaney

Tall order in a time of ‘peace’

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Japan Times, December 2, 2008

The U.S.-sparked global financial meltdown is just the latest sign that the world is at a defining moment in history. Given the global ace of political, economic and technological transformation witnessed the last two decades, the next 20 years are likely to bring equally dramatic change.

Yet the world cannot remain saddled with outmoded, ineffective institutions and rules. With the rise of non-Western economic powers and the emergence of nontraditional challenges — from global warming to energy and food crises — the institutional structure and mandate need to advance. That demands far-reaching institutional reforms, not the halfhearted and desultory moves seen thus far, geared mostly at establishing ways to improvise and thereby defer genuine reforms.

A classic case is the Group of Eight’s "outreach" initiative, which brings some emerging economies into a special outer tier designed for show.

Worse was the reform-shorn Group of 20 summit meeting, hosted earlier this month by a lame-duck U.S. president who will be remembered in history for making the world more volatile, unsafe and divided through a doctrine that emphasized pre-emption over diplomacy in a daring bid to validate Otto von Bismarck’s thesis that "The great questions of our time are not decided by speeches and majority decisions . . . but by iron and blood."

George W. Bush’s blunders ended up causing the collapse of U.S. soft power and triggering a domestic backlash that propelled the election of the first African-American as president.

But while Barack Obama is the symbol of hope for many in the world, he inherits problems of historic proportions at a time when the United States — mired in two wars and a financial crisis compounded by the weakest U.S. economy in 25 years and a federal deficit approaching $1 trillion — can no longer influence the global course on its own.

Obama simply cannot live up to the high expectations the world has of him. A new U.S. resident cannot stem the global power shifts. The days are over when the U.S. could set the international agenda with or without its traditional allies.

The real challenge for Obama is to help lead America’s transition to the emerging new world order by sticking to his mantra of change and facilitating international institutional reforms. The evolution of a new rule-based architecture of global governance will jibe well with long-term U.S. interests.

The financial contagion’s current global spread could have been contained and its effects limited had the broken Bretton Woods system been fixed. Hopefully, we won’t need a major sustained crisis to engulf each international institution before it can be reformed. Some institutions already may be beyond repair, making their dissolution or replacement the only viable option. Even amid the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, there is still only talk of reform, without a real push for a new international financial architecture.

Existing institutions were born of conflict and war. As Winston Churchill once said, "The story of the human race is war." But global power shifts now are being triggered not by military triumphs or geopolitical realignments but by a factor unique to the contemporary world — rapid economic growth.

The speed and scale of Asia’s economic rise has no parallel in world history. Asia’s growing importance in international relations — best illustrated by authoritarian China’s rise as a world power in one generation — signals a systemic shift in the global distribution of power.

While the present ailing international order emerged from the ruins of a world war, its replacement has to be built in an era of international peace and thus designed to reinforce that peace. That is no easy task, given that the world has little experience establishing or remaking institutions in peacetime.

Reform is also being stymied by entrenched interests unwilling to yield some of their power and prerogative. Rather than help recreate institutions for the changed times, vested interests already are cautioning against "over-reaction" and conjuring up short-term fixes for the multiple crises the world confronts. But without being made more representational, fit and efficient, the existing institutions — from the United Nations to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development — risk fading into irrelevance.

Some, like the International Monetary Fund, may never regain relevance, and not be missed. Others, including the G8 and International Energy Agency, are crying for membership enlargement, while the World Bank — if recast and freed of the overriding U.S. veto power — could focus on poverty alleviation especially in Africa, most of whose residents live on the margins of globalization.

It will ill-behoove an African-American U.S. president to continue the international neglect of Africa — a neglect China has sought to blithely exploit. Other institutions, such as the U.N., can be revitalized through broad reforms.

Detractors portray the U.N. as a "talk shop" where "no issue is too small to be debated" endlessly. But it remains the only institution truly representative of all nations. Its main weakness is a toothless General Assembly and an all-powerful cabal of five Security Council members, who opaquely seek to first hammer out issues among themselves but of late appear irredeemably split. The U.N. has to change or become increasingly marginalized.

To mesh with the international nature of today’s major challenges and the consensual demands of an interconnected world, reforms in all institutions ought to center on greater transparency and democratic decision-making. The Security Council cannot be an exception.

To help jump-start stalled reforms, those aspiring to be new permanent members would do well to suggest an across-the-board abolition of the veto, to fashion a liberal democratic institution where decisions are arrived at through a simple three-quarters majority rule.

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

The Japan Times: Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2008

Preventing more Mumbai-style murderous rampages

Posted on November 28, 2008 by Chellaney

Break the terrorist siege of India

The Mumbai assaults reveal the new face of terror, and unless the effete Indian leadership wakes up, transnational terrorists are sure to carry out more murderous rampages, writes Brahma Chellaney

Economic Times, November 29, 2008

Just as the blazing World Trade Centre in New York came to symbolize the 9/11 events, television footage of the fire raging in Mumbai’s landmark Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels has laid bare yet newer face of terror. The multiple, simultaneous assaults in Mumbai are just the latest example of how the world’s largest democracy has come under siege from terrorist forces. The attacks are also a bloody reminder to US President-elect Barack Obama that even as he seeks to deal with the financial meltdown, the global war on terror stands derailed, with the scourge of terrorism having spread deeper and wider.

International terrorism threatens the very existence of democratic, secular states. Yet the US occupation of Iraq not only helped fracture the post-9/11 global consensus to fight terror, but also handed a fresh cause to Islamists, giving a new lease of life to Al Qaeda. Obama will need to bring the anti-terror war back on course by building a new international consensus and focusing on rooting out terrorist sanctuaries in the Pakistan-Afghanistan belt — the epicentre of international terror.

It will, of course, require a sustained international campaign to eliminate the forces of jihad that pursue violence as a sanctified tool of religion and a path to redemption. The challenge is also broad: The entire expanse from the Middle East to Southeast Asia is home to Islamist groups and troubled by terrorist violence, posing a serious challenge to international and regional security.

But as the Mumbai strikes show, India — because of its location next to the Pak-Afghan belt and its eyesore status for jihadists as the only real democratic, secular state in the vast arc stretching from Jordan to Malaysia — will stay on the frontlines of global terror. To help unravel the Indian republic, the jihadists have sought to undermine its rising economic strength by repeatedly making its financial capital their target since 1993, choosing to carry out their latest strikes at a time when foreigners already have been heavy sellers of Indian equities.

The strikes — the eighth in a spate of attacks in India in the past five months — were exceptionally brazen and daring, even when viewed against the high level of terrorism now tormenting India. Indeed, since 9/11, the world has not witnessed terrorism on this scale or level of sophistication and coordination. Transnational terrorists, including those tied to Al Qaeda, are waging an open war on India, yet the Indian leadership is unable to declare a war on terror.

The question India needs to ask itself is: Why has it turned into a laboratory for international terrorists, who try out new techniques against Indian targets before seeking to replicate them in other pluralistic states? Innovative strikes first carried out against Indian targets and then perpetrated in the West include attacks on symbols of state authority, midair bombing of a commercial jetliner and coordinated strikes on a city transportation system. Now, jihadists, arriving by boat, have innovatively carried out a series of horrific assaults in Mumbai that are not only unmatched in daring, but also set up a model for imitation elsewhere.

What India needs is a credible counter-terror campaign. But what its harried citizens get after each major terrorist attack are stock platitudes. Empty rhetoric is eating into the vitals of internal security. Indeed, after the government’s ritual condemnation of each attack and the standard promise to defeat terror, India puts the strikes behind it and goes back to what now defines it — partisan politics and scandal. That is, until terror strikes again. Worse, the fight against terror has been increasingly politicized and got linked to communal, electoral and vote-bank considerations.

Combating terror demands at least four different elements — a well-thought-out strategy, effective state instruments to implement that strategy, a credible legal framework to speedily bring terrorists to justice, and unflinching political resolve to stay the course. India is deficient on all four.

Unlike other important victims of terror in the world, India has no published counter-terror doctrine. And a retiring Chief Justice of India was compelled to remind fellow citizens that, “We don’t have the political will to fight terrorism”. Effete leadership, political one-upmanship and an ever-shifting policy approach indeed have spurred on more terrorism. Not a single case of terrorist attack in recent years has been cracked, yet in the ongoing Malegaon bombing probe, the nation has witnessed the bizarre spectacle of authorities deliberately leaking titbits of information on a daily basis.

Terrorists have again exposed the woeful lack of adequate training and preparedness on the part of those tasked to be the first response to terror. The quick and easy manner several high-ranking Mumbai law enforcement officers, including the anti-terrorism squad head, fell to terrorist bullets not only threw the response into disarray, forcing authorities to call out the army, but also revealed police ineptitude.

Against this background, India serves as an exemplar of how not to fight terror. It is extraordinary that a prime minister who embraced the sponsor of terrorism as a partner and set up a joint terror mechanism with it should today allude to Pakistan’s involvement in the Mumbai assaults.

Through its forbearing approach, India has seemingly come to accept terrorist strikes as the products of its unalterable geography or destiny. Its response to the jihadist strategy to inflict death by a thousand cuts has been survival by a thousand bandages. Just as it has come to brook a high level of political corruption, it is willing to put up with a high incidence of terrorism.

Turning this appalling situation around demands a new mindset that will not allow India to be continually gored. That in turn means a readiness to forge a bipartisan consensus to do whatever is necessary to break the terrorist siege of the country. What is needed is a new brand of post-partisan politics, coupled with the political will and vision to combat terror, or else Mumbai-style murderous rampages would be executed elsewhere in India.

The writer is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Kashmir and Terrorism

Posted on November 28, 2008 by Chellaney

J&K poll turnout, end of separatism?

It won’t snuff out fundamentalist terror

Brahma Chellaney
Strategic affairs expert

Economic Times, November 28, 2008

As the horrific Mumbai terrorist killings are a reminder, jihadists will stop at nothing. Unravelling the jihad culture will not be easy in Pakistan, Afghanistan or the Kashmir Valley. But it is essential.

India has created a safety valve for all its citizens, including those in Kashmir — true democratic participation that empowers the masses and allows issues to be decided at the ballot box. The high voter turnout in Kashmir is a positive sign of such empowerment.

But “separatism” in the Kashmir Valley is symbiotically tied to fundamentalism, ethnic cleansing, terrorism and external incitement to attacks. Therefore, it will be naive to expect that the high voter turnout can help snuff out those evils.

From the ceaseless meddling by Pakistani intelligence to the promotion of medieval Wahhabist beliefs through infusion of petrodollars, Kashmir remains a happy hunting ground for outside interests. Add to that picture, New Delhi’s own blundering policy, and what you get is a recipe for unremitting political ferment.

Today Pakistan may be tottering on the brink of bankruptcy. But its military continues to infiltrate trained and armed terrorists into Kashmir. After all, Kashmir remains the glue holding a fractious, unruly Pakistan together.

Every Indian admission of Kashmir as an unresolved issue has only whetted Pakistan’s desire for India to yield further ground. It began with the Lahore Declaration defining only one issue by name as an outstanding dispute — J&K. By June 2004, India had committed itself to a “peaceful, negotiated final settlement” on Kashmir and juxtaposed the UN Charter with the Simla Agreement.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh first embraced the sponsor of terrorism as a partner and set up a joint terror mechanism, which formalised Pakistan’s parity with India as a victim of terror.

Not content with that misstep, Singh has peddled a compromise on Kashmir that goes beyond the Line of Control — an LoC-plus settlement that would make frontiers “meaningless and irrelevant” so as to create a “borderless” Kashmir. He has thus opened the path to inevitable concessions to Pakistan, further emboldening the hardliners there.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Et_Debate/It_wont_snuff_out_fundamentalist_terror/articleshow/3766777.cms

Unprecedented terrorist attacks in Mumbai

Posted on November 27, 2008 by Chellaney

Commentary

India Under Terrorist Siege

Brahma Chellaney Forbes.com November 27, 2008

Television footage of the landmark Taj Mahal Hotel in flames and a 24-hour gun battle inside Mumbai’s other renowned hotel, the Trident-Oberoi, may have sent shivers down the spines of international investors and tourists, but it also laid bare the new face of terror. The brazen Mumbai terrorist assaults, which bear the hallmarks of Al Qaeda, are just the latest example of how the world’s largest democracy is increasingly coming under siege from the forces of terror. They also serve as a reminder to U.S. President-elect Barack Obama that even as he seeks to deal with the financial meltdown, the global war on terror stands derailed, with the scourge of terrorism having spread deeper and wider.

International terrorism threatens the very existence of democratic, secular states. Yet the U.S. occupation of Iraq not only helped fracture the post-9/11 global consensus to fight terror, but also handed a fresh cause to Islamists and gave a new lease of life to Al Qaeda. The Obama administration will need to bring the anti-terror war back on course by building a new international consensus and focusing on rooting out terrorist sanctuaries in the Pakistan-Afghanistan belt, the epicenter of international terror.

But as the Mumbai strikes show, India–because of its location next to the Pak-Afghan belt and its eyesore status for jihadists as the only real democratic, secular state in the arc stretching from Jordan to Malaysia–will stay on the frontline of the fight against global terror. To unravel the Indian republic, the jihadists have sought to undermine its rising economic strength by repeatedly making its financial capital their target since 1993, choosing to carry out their latest strikes at a time when foreigners already have been heavy sellers of Indian equities, and Obama is inheriting problems of historic proportions.

The attacks were exceptionally brazen and daring, even when viewed against the high level of terrorism now tormenting India. Indeed, since 9/11, the world has not witnessed terrorism on this scale or level of sophistication and coordination. However, the most troubling questions arising from the latest terrorist attacks–the eighth in a spate of attacks in India in the past five months–relate to why the country has become an easy target for terrorists. Transnational terrorists, including those tied to Al Qaeda, are waging an open war on India, yet the Indian leadership is unable to declare a war on terror.

The question India needs to ask itself is: Why has it turned into a laboratory for international terrorists, who try out new techniques against Indian targets before seeking to replicate them in other pluralistic states? Innovative strikes carried out against Indian targets first and then perpetrated in the West include attacks on symbols of state authority, midair bombing of a commercial jetliner and coordinated strikes on a city transportation system. Now, the jihadists have innovatively carried out a series of horrific assaults in Mumbai that are not only unmatched in scale and daring since 9/11, but also set up a model for imitation elsewhere.

What India needs is a credible counterterror campaign. But what its harried citizens get after each major terrorist attack are stock platitudes, such as a commitment to defeat the designs of terrorist forces. Empty rhetoric is eating into the vitals of internal security. Indeed, after the government’s ritual condemnation of each attack and the standard promise to defeat terror, India puts the strikes behind it and goes back to what now defines it–partisan politics and scandal. That is, until terror strikes again. Worse, the fight against terror has been increasingly politicized and got linked to communal, electoral and vote-bank considerations.

Combating terror demands at least four different elements–a well-thought-out strategy, effective state instruments to implement that strategy, a credible legal framework to speedily bring terrorists to justice, and unflinching political resolve to stay the course. India is deficient on all four.

Unlike other important victims of terror in the world, India has no published counterterror doctrine. And a retiring Chief Justice of India was compelled to remind fellow citizens that, “We don’t have the political will to fight terrorism”. Weak leadership, political one-upmanship and an ever-shifting policy approach indeed have spurred on more terrorism. Not a single case of terrorist attack in recent years has been cracked, yet in the ongoing Malegoan bombing probe, the nation has witnessed the bizarre spectacle of authorities deliberately leaking tidbits of information on a daily basis.

The Indian system has become so effete that terrorists have again exposed the woeful lack of adequate training and preparedness on the part of those tasked to fight terror. Such was the level of police ineptitude that several high-ranking law enforcement officials, including the anti-terrorism squad head, were killed soon after the terrorists struck. As a result, the army had to be called in to deal with the situation.

Against this background, India serves as an exemplar of how not to fight terror. In fact, through its forbearing approach, the country has come to accept terrorist strikes as the ostensible products of its unalterable geography or destiny. Its response to the jihadist strategy to inflict death by a thousand cuts has been survival by a thousand bandages. Just as it has come to brook a high level of political corruption, it is willing to put up with a high incidence of terrorism.

Turning this appalling situation around demands a new mindset that will not allow India to be continually gored. That in turn means a readiness to forge a bipartisan consensus to do whatever is necessary to end the terrorist siege of the country. What is needed is a new brand of post-partisan politics, coupled with political will and vision.

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

http://www.forbes.com/home/2008/11/27/india-mumbai-terrorism-oped-cx_bc_1127chellaney.html

Forestalling water conflict in Asia

Posted on November 24, 2008 by Chellaney

Beware of Water Wars

China’s hydro-engineering projects in Tibet raise serious concerns

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India, November 24, 2008

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s disclosure that during his recent Beijing visit he raised the issue of international rivers flowing out of Tibet underscores the enormous implications of China’s hydro-engineering projects and plans. Through its control over the Tibet plateau, China controls the flow of several major river systems that are a lifeline to southern and southeastern Asia. Yet China is toying with massive inter-basin and inter-river water transfer projects. Its Great South-North Water Transfer Project is an overly ambitious engineering attempt to take water through manmade canals to its semi-arid north. The diversion of waters from the Tibetan plateau in this project’s third leg is an idea enthusiastically backed by President Hu Jintao, a hydrologist by training whose 1989 martial-law crackdown in Tibet helped facilitate his swift rise in the communist party hierarchy.

Water is getting tied to security in several parts of the world. The battles of yesterday were fought over land. Those of today are over energy. But the battles of tomorrow will be over water. And nowhere else does that prospect look real than Asia, the largest and most densely populated continent that awaits a future made hotter and drier by global warming. According to a 2006 UN report, Asia has less fresh water — 3,920 cubic metres per person — than any other continent other than the Antarctica.

With the world’s fastest-rising military expenditures, most-dangerous hot spots and fiercest resource competition, Asia appears the most likely flash-point for water wars — a concern underscored by attempts by some states to exploit their riparian position or dominance. Riparian dominance impervious to international legal principles can create a situation where water allocations to co-riparian states become a function of political fiat.

Upstream dams, barrages, canals and irrigation systems can help fashion water as a political weapon — a weapon that can be wielded overtly in a war, or subtly in peacetime to signal dissatisfaction with a co-riparian state. Even denial of hydrological data in a critically important season can amount to the use of water as a political tool. Such leverage could in turn prompt a downstream state to build up its military capabilities to help counterbalance the riparian disadvantage.

Except for Japan, Malaysia and Burma, Asian states already face water shortages. A different water-related problem confronts some low-lying states like Bangladesh and the Maldives, whose very future of is at stake due to creeping saltwater incursion and frequent flooding. Bangladesh today has too much water, yet not enough to meet its needs. Born in blood in 1971, it faces the spectre of a watery grave.

China and India already are water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated farming and water-intensive industries and a rising middle class are drawing attention to their serious struggle for more water. The two giants have entered an era of perennial water shortages, which before long are likely to parallel, in terms of per-capita availability, the Mideast scarcity. Their rapid economic growth could slow if their demand for water continues to grow at the present frenetic pace. Water shortages, furthermore, threaten to turn food-exporting China and India into major importers — a development that would seriously accentuate the global food crisis.

Even though India’s usable arable land is larger than China’s — 160.5 million hectares compared to 137.1 million hectares — the source of all the major Indian rivers except one is the Tibetan plateau. While the Ganges originates on the Indian side of the Himalayas, its two main tributaries flow in from Tibet. This is the world’s largest plateau, whose vast glaciers, huge underground springs and high altitude have endowed it with the greatest river systems. Almost all the major rivers of Asia originate there. Tibet’s status thus is unique: No other area in the world is a water repository of such size, serving as a lifeline for much of an entire continent.

In the stark words of Premier Wen Jiabao, water scarcity threatens the very “survival of the Chinese nation”. But in seeking to address that challenge, China’s gargantuan projects threaten to damage the delicate Tibetan ecosystem. They also carry seeds of inter-riparian conflict. The hydropolitics in the Mekong river basin, for example, can only get sharper as China, ignoring the concerns of downstream states, completes more upstream dams on the Mekong.

While making half-hearted attempts to stanch Indian fears about the prospective diversion of the Brahmaputra northward, Beijing has identified the bend where the Brahmaputra forms the world’s longest and deepest canyon, just before entering India, as holding the largest untapped reserves for meeting China’s water and energy needs. A Sino-Indian conflict over the sharing of the Brahmaputra waters, for instance, would begin no sooner than China begins to build the world’s largest hydropower plant on the river’s Great Bend. Upstream projects already have been held responsible for flash floods in Arunachal and Himachal Pradesh.

The way to forestall or manage water disputes in Asia is to build cooperative river-basin arrangements involving all riparian neighbours. Such institutional arrangements ought to centre on transparency, information sharing, pollution control and a pledge not to redirect the natural flow of trans-boundary rivers or undertake projects that would diminish cross-border flows. The successful interstate basin agreements (such as over the Indus, the Nile and the Senegal) are founded on such principles. In the absence of institutionalized cooperation over shared resources, peace will be the casualty in Asia as water becomes the new battleground.

The writer is a strategic affairs analyst.