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.

The change we need in the world

Posted on November 18, 2008 by Chellaney

Wanted: Men At Work

Today’s global challenges and power shifts symbolize the birth-pangs of a new world order, making far-reaching institutional reforms inescapable

Brahma Chellaney

The Hindustan Times, November 18, 2008

The U.S.-sparked global financial meltdown is just the latest sign that the world is at a defining moment in its history, with today’s manifold challenges and tectonic power shifts epitomizing the birth-pangs of a new global order. The world has changed fundamentally in the last two decades. Given the pace of political, economic and technological transformation, the next 20 years are likely to bring equally dramatic change. Yet the global institutional structure has remained static since the mid-20th century.

The world cannot remain saddled with outmoded, ineffective institutions and rules. That in turn demands far-reaching institutional reforms, not the half-hearted and desultory moves we have seen thus far, geared mostly at establishing ways to improvise and temporize 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 Twenty summit meeting, hosted last weekend 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 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 has 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 U.S. — mired in two wars and a financial crisis buffeted 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. After all, a new U.S. president 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 financial contagion’s current global spread could have been contained 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. But even in the midst of 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 financial architecture.

Existing institutions were born from conflict and war, in keeping with what 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.

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 be 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 “overreaction” 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 risk fading into irrelevance.

Some, like the International Monetary Fund, may never regain relevance, and not be missed. Some others, including the G-8 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. Even if a geographically challenged Sarah Palin did not know Africa was a continent and not a country, 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.

Yet other institutions, such as the United Nations, can be revitalized through broad reforms. Detractors portray the UN as a “talking shop” where “no issue is too small to be debated endlessly”. But it remains the only institution truly representative of all the 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 between themselves but of late appear irredeemably split. The UN 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 centre on greater transparency and democratic decision-making. The Security Council cannot be an exception. To help jump-start its stalled reform process, 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-quarter majority rule.

Brahma Chellaney is a strategic affairs specialist.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?sectionName=HomePage&id=ccb12e9e-6035-46f7-89ea-60aef667f30e&&Headline=Wanted%3a+Men+at+work

Dalai Lama: Taken for a ride

Posted on November 18, 2008 by Chellaney

Crunch time for the Tibetan movement

The Dalai Lama failed to capitalize on the largest, most-powerful Tibetan uprising since he was forced to flee Tibet in 1959. By resuming talks with Beijing after the March uprising, he actually came to the succour of a regime vilifying him. Now, dejected and lost, he is asking Tibetans to decide the future course of action.

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, November 19, 2008

With the Tibetan movement at the crossroads as China tightens its vise on Tibet, the week-long conclave of exiles now in progress at the Dalai Lama’s initiative in Dharamsala offers an opportunity for a critical self-appraisal so as to find a more pragmatic and workable strategy for the coming years.

A good beginning has been provided by the Dalai Lama’s recent public admissions. He said this month that the path of negotiations with China has failed to yield any results even as the situation in Tibet deteriorates. And late last month, he said: “I have been sincerely pursuing the middle-way approach in dealing with China for a long time now, but there hasn’t been any positive response from the Chinese side”, adding: “As far as I’m concerned I have given up”.

Beijing has pursued the same negotiating strategy with the Dalai Lama that it has with India, which is to take the other side round and round the mulberry bush in never-ending talks aimed at changing the facts on the ground while projecting moderation. This approach also has been employed to try and wheedle out concessions by putting forth new demands at regular intervals and thereby placing the onus for progress on the other side — something China has skilfully practiced in its serial negotiations with India since 1981 on the border issue and with the Dalai Lama’s envoys since 2002.

As for the Dalai Lama’s “middle way”, the Tibetan leader admittedly has secured nothing from Beijing since he moved two decades ago from seeking Tibet’s independence to advocating its autonomy within China. In fact, no sooner had a lot of ballyhooing started about the “middle way” than Tibet witnessed a harsh martial-law crackdown in 1989 under the local communist party boss who today is China’s president.

The Dalai Lama, however, can hardly be faulted for seeking conciliation and accommodation with China. As the Tibetans are in no position to undo China’s conquest of their homeland, he has sagaciously sought a negotiated settlement to guarantee autonomy to Tibet within China, no more than what has been granted to Hong Kong and Macao. Had he not tested China’s sincerity for compromise, he would not have shown to the world that the autocrats in Beijing still prefer repression to reform in Tibet.

If the Dalai Lama has made any mistakes, they have not been strategic but tactical. This year, for example, he strikingly failed to capitalize on the largest, most-powerful Tibetan uprising since he was forced to flee Tibet in 1959. By resuming talks with Beijing after the March uprising, he actually came to the succour of a regime still vilifying him. The talks helped China to forestall a wide international boycott of the Beijing Olympics’ opening ceremony and to deflect criticism of the way it ruthlessly suppressed the Tibetan protests that flared in Lhasa and spread like wild fire even to the Tibetan areas merged in Han provinces.

Now, downcast and lost, the Dalai Lama is holding the conclave — the first of its kind since 1991 — and asking fellow Tibetans to decide the future course of action. He remains the greatest asset for the Tibetan cause — the iconic figure that internationally personifies the struggle against brutal Chinese rule over a vast, resource-rich plateau that historically served as the buffer between the Chinese and Indian civilizations. But he has also shown through some missteps that even a god-king is prone to human failings.

The Dalai Lama confronts a serious predicament. Buffeted by pressures from host India and weighed down by America’s reluctance to pay more than lip service to the Tibetan cause, the aging leader has seen his options crimp in the face of China’s emergence in one generation as a world power. America’s economic interlinks with China, including a growing reliance on Chinese capital inflows, have helped produce a succession of China-friendly US presidents. Barack Obama, saddled with the weakest US economy in 25 years, will be no different.

Other Western states have not been different. The biggest sinner, Britain, has only compounded its colonial-era machinations by its October 29 decision — on the eve of the last round of Chinese-Tibetan talks — to formally scrap the British Indian government’s recognition of China’s suzerainty relationship with Tibet embodied in the 1914 Simla Convention. This action, taken without consulting New Delhi, implies that London now recognizes China’s full sovereignty over Tibet.

India has a far greater stake in the future of Tibet than any other country. Yet its government leaders, far from playing India’s trump card against China — the Dalai Lama — are too shy to openly meet him, even as New Delhi continues to turn the other cheek to China’s provocations. Take the newest Chinese statement irately denouncing the Indian foreign minister’s sterile reassertion of a geographical fact for home audiences — that Arunachal Pradesh is an Indian state.

Beijing’s bizarre logic is that because it “has never recognized the illegal McMahon Line” — and “India knows this” — New Delhi has no business to say Arunachal is part of India. But how does a disputed boundary line justify China’s claim over an entire Indian state that is nearly three times the size of Taiwan — a state the Dalai Lama vouches was never part of Tibet? Tibet’s occupying power is silent on that issue. Yet, instead of summoning the Chinese ambassador the next day, New Delhi kept quiet over Beijing’s latest provocation.

Because China disputes with India the very 1914 boundary line it has accepted with Burma, should New Delhi also lay claim to large chunks of territory — to the north of the McMahon Line, on grounds of cultural links with Arunachal? New Delhi need not pay back Beijing in the same coin. But why has it retreated to a more and more defensive position by allowing Beijing to shift the focus from its annexation of Tibet to the supposed centrality of Arunachal’s future status?

If Beijing’s logic is wacky, New Delhi’s seems absent. Little surprise thus that the poor Dalai Lama appears at a loss to fathom India’s strategic thinking. He shouldn’t even try: As long as India continues to be governed by doddering old men whose only priority is survival in power, its policy will stay feckless. Nor should he ever take his cue from a host country that still mistakes stagecraft for statecraft. India has a track record of betraying friends but respecting enemies.

Clearly, this is crunch time for the Tibetan cause. Abandoning the path of non-violence cannot be a credible option. Violent means against a trigger-happy despotic regime will bring little more than misery to Tibetans. But staying put in a barren negotiating process only works to China’s strategic advantage.

It was overoptimistic to expect the “middle way” to sway rulers who have been proverbial extremists, lurching from one end of the pendulum (hardcore communists) to the other (unashamed capitalists). Whom they denounced as enemies earlier are the very states they zealously befriend today. Their policies have disregarded human costs in the past and environmental costs now.

Against such rulers, the Dalai Lama needs a more flexible, nuanced, reciprocity-tied and leverage-playing approach geared to finding and exploiting right opportunities. He also needs to clarify the rules for choosing his successor, lest a waiting Beijing anoint a puppet Dalai Lama.

Will Obama help renew America’s soft power?

Posted on November 14, 2008 by Chellaney

Obama represents welcome change for India

Reuters November 14, 2008

Columnist Brahma Chellaney says in keeping with Obama’s personality, change under him will be cautious, calibrated and incremental, but packaged to convey a clean break from the Bush era.

(Brahma Chellaney is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own.)

By Brahma Chellaney

Saddled with problems of historic proportions, U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has little time to savour his epochal victory. He is inheriting national and global challenges more formidable than any an American president has faced at inauguration. The necessity to clean up the unprecedented mess that occurred on President George W. Bush’s watch crimps Obama’s ability to pursue major new initiatives.

For the next one year and more, Obama will be preoccupied with finding ways to extricate the U.S. from the economic recessionary trends at home and the military quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In addition, he has to devise more-workable American policies on Russia, Iran and North Korea, re-engage the U.S. in finding an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, and help nuclear-armed but quasi-failed Pakistan pull back from the brink of collapse.

The team Obama assembles will reveal the kind of leadership and change the world can expect. But it won’t be easy for him to live up to the high expectations that the world has of him.

For India, an America that returns to playing a mainstream international role and renews its ability to inspire and lead is better than the rogue superpower that the Bush presidency helped create.

The abdication of American values was symbolized by Bush’s establishment of the infamous prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the revealed network of illegal CIA detention camps elsewhere.

That helped undermine America’s real strength – its ability to inspire and lead. The U.S., after all, won the Cold War not by military means but by spreading the ideas of freedom, open markets and better life that helped drain the lifeblood from communism’s international appeal.

During the Bush presidency, India’s external security environment deteriorated. Thanks to the Bush Doctrine, an arc of contiguous volatility now lies to India’s west, stretching from Pakistan to Lebanon. The war on terror that Bush launched stands derailed, even as the level of trans-national terrorism emanating from the Pakistan-Afghanistan belt has escalated.

The core tenets of the Bush Doctrine were fourfold: the U.S. should pursue pre-emptive strikes where necessary; it should be willing to act unilaterally – alone or with a “coalition of the willing” – if it cannot win the United Nations’ sanction; the primary focus should be on politically transforming the Middle East; and Iraq ought to be the cornerstone in bringing about region-wide democratic change.

When Bush wasn’t chasing pre-emption, he was pushing sanctions. That too had an adverse effect on India’s regional interests. Take Burma and Iran.

In his nearly eight years in office, Bush has signed more punitive executive orders against Burma than against any other country. It is as if impoverished, inwardly focused Burma threatens regional or international security.

The blunt truth is that the Bush approach only helped strengthen the Burmese military junta despite popular discontent. In fact, to India’s detriment, it helped push Burma into China’s strategic lap.

India has also lost out to China in Burma on the energy front. After China torpedoed an early 2007 U.S.-led attempt to impose a Security Council diktat on Burma to improve its human-rights record, the junta thanked Beijing by first withdrawing the status of India’s GAIL company as the “preferential buyer” of gas from the offshore A-1 and A-3 fields and then signing a production-sharing contract with China’s CNPC.

For India, this was a discomforting diplomatic setback because the A-1 and A-3 blocks are partly owned by two Indian state-run companies.

Similarly, Bush’s sanctions approach against Iran has failed to either dislodge the clerical regime there or make Tehran fall in line on the nuclear front. But with the Bush administration ratcheting up tensions with Iran, the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project proposal has turned into a geopolitical nightmare for New Delhi, which has faced intense U.S. pressure to side with Washington’s international campaign against Tehran.

The net result has been that India’s relations with Iran have come under strain. Seeking to subtly punish India for its two votes against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board, Tehran has gone back on the terms of a deal to supply 5 million tonnes of liquefied national gas (LNG) annually to India for 25 years from 2009.

Even while waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush had wanted to militarily take on Iran – a confrontation that would have had a cascading effect on the Indian economy by disrupting oil imports.

Yet, underlining how power respects power, Bush mollycoddled the world’s longest-surviving autocracy in China, to the extent that he ignored the brutal suppression of the Tibetan uprising earlier in the year and showed up at the Beijing Olympics in August.

In place of the blustering and blundering Bush, Obama will be a welcome change for India. In keeping with his personality, change under Obama will be cautious, calibrated and incremental, but packaged to convey a clean break from the Bush era.

Yet, there is concern in some quarters in India that Obama may appoint a special envoy on Kashmir and mount non-proliferation pressures on New Delhi.

Such concern has been articulated in particular by Indian neoconservatives (“neocons”), who are feeling orphaned with the end of the Bush era and conjuring up visions of U.S. activism even before Obama has set up his foreign-policy team.

After the vaunted Indo-U.S. nuclear deal – which tethers India firmly to the U.S.-led international non-proliferation regime – there isn’t much non-proliferation room to keep badgering New Delhi.

The deal was a bipartisan U.S. product, with Obama himself contributing to tightening its terms by successfully inserting two legislative amendments – one of which restricts India’s uranium imports to “reasonable reactor operating requirements”, while the other seeks to deter Indian testing by threatening a U.S.-led international nuclear-trade embargo.

As for Kashmir, the truth is that, from Harry Truman to Bush, U.S. presidents have tried to pitchfork themselves as peacemakers between India and Pakistan to help advance American interests.

It was the Bush White House, for example, that helped set up the 2001 Agra summit meeting between then Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pakistani ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf, revealing its dates before New Delhi and Islamabad had a chance to get their act together.

The question is: Why should India be defensive on Kashmir? Is it the terror-exporting irredentist party seeking to redraw frontiers in blood? Even if a special U.S. envoy is appointed, what can he seek that India has not already offered under current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh – from making frontiers “meaningless and irrelevant” so as to create a “borderless” Kashmir, to the “sky is the limit” in negotiations?

Indian interests demand a new U.S. approach on subjects ranging from the challenges in India’s troubled neighbourhood to the global climate crisis. That is exactly what the political change in Washington promises.

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

Why is India so defensive on Kashmir?

Posted on November 11, 2008 by Chellaney

Needless alarm

India should not be defensive about any new U.S. activism on the issue of Kashmir

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, November 11, 2008

Saddled with problems of historic proportions, US president-elect Barack Obama has little time to savour his epochal victory. He inherits national and global challenges more formidable than any American president has faced at inauguration. The necessity to clean up the unprecedented mess that has occurred under the swaggering and blundering George W Bush means Obama will have little time for major new initiatives. Yet, there is concern in India that Obama may appoint ex-President Bill Clinton as his special envoy on Kashmir.

The first question to ask is: Why is India so defensive on Kashmir? Is it the terror-exporting irredentist party seeking to redraw frontiers in blood? Even if a special US envoy is appointed, what can he seek that India has not already offered under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh — from making frontiers “meaningless and irrelevant” so as to create a “borderless” Kashmir to the “sky is the limit” in negotiations? How radically Singh has changed Indian policy under Bush’s persuasion became known in September 2006 when he declared: “The Indian stand was that the borders could not be redrawn, while Pakistan was not prepared to accept the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir as the permanent solution. The two agreed to find a via media to reconcile the two positions”. By peddling an LoC-plus compromise, Singh has opened the path to inevitable concessions to Pakistan.

From Harry Truman to Bush, US presidents have tried to pitchfork themselves as peacemakers on Kashmir to help advance American interests. After all, repeated American attempts at Kashmir mediation or facilitation have helped the US to leverage its Pakistan ties vis-à-vis India. Truman’s suggestions on Kashmir, for example, prompted Jawaharlal Nehru to complain that he was “tired of receiving moral advice from the US”. After China launched a surprise invasion in 1962, Nehru sent two frantic letters to John F Kennedy for help. But the US began shipping arms only after the Chinese aggression had ceased and a weakened India had been made to agree to open Kashmir talks with Pakistan. The Clinton activism on Kashmir was driven by Robin Raphel and, in the second term, by Madeline Albright.

Bush would have attempted to play a more interventionist role on Kashmir had the US military not got bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan and had his pet dictator, Pervez Musharraf, not struggled for political survival at home. Yet, it was the Bush White House that helped set up the 2001 Agra summit meeting, revealing its dates before New Delhi and Islamabad had a chance to get their act together. Also, when Singh sprung a nasty surprise on the nation by embracing Pakistan as a fellow victim of and joint partner against terror on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, he put forward a US-designed proposal — joint anti-terror mechanism.

In fact, the Bush administration’s trumpeted “de-hyphenation” of India and Pakistan in US policy was not a calculated shift but the product of Pakistan’s descent into shambles and India’s political and economic rise after 1998. But US policymakers, making a virtue out of necessity, sought to take credit for the de-hyphenation. Under Bush, US policy simply went from hyphenation to parallelism. That has involved building strategic partnerships with and selling arms to both, and seeking (as Bush did publicly in New Delhi) “progress on all issues, including Kashmir”. Such is Bush’s legacy that the US, for the first time ever, is building parallel intelligence-sharing and defence-cooperation arrangements with India and Pakistan.

Thanks to Bush’s cowboy diplomacy, however, an arc of contiguous volatility now lies to India’s west, stretching from Pakistan to Lebanon. Even while waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, he had been itching for a military showdown with the only country in this arc not on fire — Iran. The war on terror he launched today stands derailed, even as the level of terrorism emanating from the Pak-Afghan belt has escalated. The recrudescence of major violence in Kashmir thus owes a lot to the baneful effects of the Bush Doctrine and a misguided approach on Pakistan that put a premium on political expediency.

Whatever may be the shape of Obama’s foreign policy, he has already acknowledged that Kashmir represents “a potential tar pit for American diplomacy”. In any event, Washington’s ability to intervene in Kashmir is tied to Indian acquiescence, however half-hearted or forced. Expressions of concern in India over the Obama administration playing an activist role on Kashmir thus reflect a lack of confidence in New Delhi not ceding space to US diplomacy — a diffidence borne from the historical record.

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

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1205234&pageid=0

Book review of Tariq Ali’s “The Duel”

Posted on November 9, 2008 by Chellaney

A Question of Survival

Brahma Chellaney

India Today, November 17, 2008

The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power

Tariq Ali

London: Simon & Schuster £12.99

At a time when Pakistan is sinking, with its economy tottering on the brink of bankruptcy and its Talibanization spreading, the book raises fundamental questions about that country’s direction. The London-based Tariq Ali is anything but optimistic about Pakistan’s ability to come to grips with its existential challenges. Ali’s first Pakistan book had prophetically predicted the country’s break-up just two years before East Pakistan seceded. His second study, published during General Zial ul-Haq’s dictatorial rule, was titled, “Can Pakistan Survive?”, a question provocative enough to prompt Islamabad to do what it did with his first book — ban it. Now, in his third book, Ali raises the tantalizing question whether Pakistan can be “recycled”. By that he means whether there could be a social and political revival in “a land of perpetual dictatorships and corrupt politicians”.

More than six decades after it was created, Pakistan remains in search of a national identity. The questions about its future indeed have become more pressing, with many wondering whether it will be able to pull back from the brink. Between Ali’s second and third Pakistan books, the country has gone from being a regional concern to being a threat to international security. Today, Pakistan is disparaged as “Problemistan”, “Terroristan” and “Al Qaidastan”, with outgoing U.S. President George W. Bush calling it “wilder than the Wild West”. By setting up state-run terrorist complexes, Pakistan became its own enemy — and victim. The military’s domination of the country — which Ali repeatedly brings out — has been shaken but not shrunk with the installation of a civilian government following elections that the author says “were cautiously rigged to deny any single party an overall majority”.

The book, however, is largely about America’s long-standing interventionist role in Pakistan that has helped create, according to Ali, a “U.S.-backed politico-military elite” out of sync with the masses. His thesis is that Pakistan’s problems today “are a direct result of doing Washington’s bidding in previous decades”. To be sure, a succession of U.S. presidents, giving primacy to narrow, short-term geopolitical interests, have helped fatten the very institution that constitutes the core problem — the Pakistan military. Because the U.S. is distant, they thought the fallout of their policies would be largely confined to the region. Then came the blowback from 9/11 and the subsequent events — a reminder that U.S. policy would reap what it had sowed. But has U.S. policy learned anything? As Ali reminds his readers, the U.S.-brokered deal with Benazir Bhutto was really designed to help the despotic Pervez Musharraf stay on as president. The continuing supply of offensive, India-directed weapon systems shows that U.S. policy remains wedded to the Pakistani military because it employs Pakistan as a gateway to combat operations in Afghanistan, a potential base against Iran and a vehicle for other geopolitical objectives.

But can all of Pakistan’s ills be blamed on U.S. policy? The book is less clear on that score. In its 61-year history, Pakistan has already had four military takeovers and four Constitutions. Benazir’s murder was a horrific reminder that unravelling Pakistan’s jihad culture won’t be easy but is essential. Neither the war on international terror can be won nor Afghanistan be pacified without de-radicalizing Pakistani society and truly democratizing its polity. Ali argues Pakistan needs to break free from U.S. “satrapy”. But the next U.S. president is likely to pursue a more-activist Pakistan policy. Political expediency will continue to guide U.S. policy, not long-term considerations. For example, Centcom commander Gen. David Petraeus wants to do in Afghanistan what he has showcased in Iraq — buy up tribal warlords and insurgent leaders. Disregarding the fact that the Taliban ideology poses a bigger long-term threat than even Al Qaeda, Petraeus has said he is looking for ways to negotiate with and co-opt local Taliban chieftains. India will be left to bear the brunt of an enduringly Talibanized Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Ali, as a gutsy, forthright writer, has written an engrossing account of Pakistan’s travails since birth. The book’s main failing is its poor structure, with some sections disjointed and arguments rambling. Besides better editing, it could have benefited from fact-checking to eliminate mistakes like the “1959 India-China war”. Yet, this book will rank as one of the most-objective accounts of Pakistan’s troubled history.

Kashmir in U.S.-India Relations

Posted on November 8, 2008 by Chellaney

Obama’s epochal win and a defensive India

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, November 16-30, 2008

Barack Obama’s landslide victory in the presidential election symbolizes a non-violent revolution in U.S. politics. Despite the idle speculation in India that the president-elect may appoint ex-President Bill Clinton as his special envoy on Kashmir and step up non-proliferation pressures on New Delhi, the blunt fact is that India does not figure in his leading priorities.

For the next one year and more, Obama will be preoccupied with finding ways to extricate the U.S. from the economic recession at home and the military quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, devising more-workable American policies on Russia, Iran and North Korea, promoting an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, and helping nuclear-armed but quasi-failed Pakistan pull back from the brink of collapse. Notwithstanding an inflated sense in India of the country’s importance to U.S foreign policy, there was not even a passing reference to India in the foreign policy-centred first debate between Obama and his Republican opponent, John McCain.

In any case, the foreign-policy agenda, especially the skewed emphasis on some issues, including the pursuit of an idée fixe, is shaped by the personalities that form a U.S. presidential team. The Clinton administration’s obsession with Kashmir, for example, owed a lot to Robin L. Raphel (who helped engineer the formation of the Hurriyat) and Madeline Albright (who had been swayed by her father’s UN stint there). Obama has yet to assemble his foreign-policy team. It is thus too early to say that he will seek to play an interventionist role on Kashmir or mount greater non-proliferation pressure.

After the vaunted Indo-U.S. nuclear deal — which tethers India firmly to the U.S.-led non-proliferation regime and crimps the long-term credibility of the nascent Indian nuclear deterrent through eclectic fetters — there isn’t much non-proliferation room to keep badgering New Delhi. The deal was a bipartisan U.S. product, with Obama himself contributing to tightening its terms by successfully inserting two legislative amendments — one of which restricts India’s uranium imports to “reasonable reactor operating requirements”, while the other seeks to deter Indian testing by threatening a U.S.-led international nuclear-trade embargo.

As for Kashmir, the truth is that, from Harry Truman to George W. Bush, U.S. presidents have tried to pitchfork themselves as peacemakers between India and Pakistan to help advance American interests. Truman’s suggestions on Kashmir, for example, prompted then Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to complain that he was “tired of receiving moral advice from the U.S.”

Take another president, John F. Kennedy, perhaps the most India-friendly U.S. leader thus far. After China launched a surprise invasion in 1962, Nehru sent two frantic letters to Kennedy for help. But the U.S. began shipping arms only after the Chinese aggression had ceased and a weakened India had been made to agree to open Kashmir talks with Pakistan. In fact, when the People’s Liberation Army launched a second, more-vicious round of attacks after a gap of three weeks during that 32-day war, the U.S. carrier force, USS Enterprise, steamed not towards the East or South China Sea but toward the Bay of Bengal to serve as a mere psychological prop to besieged India.

The outgoing incumbent, with his strong interventionist impulse, may have attempted to play a more-activist role on Kashmir had the U.S. military not got bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan and had his pet dictator not come under siege at home and been eventually driven out of office by the Pakistani people. After all, repeated American attempts at Kashmir mediation or facilitation over the decades have helped the U.S. to leverage its Pakistan ties with India.

Let’s not forget it was the Bush White House that helped set up the 2001 Agra summit meeting between Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Pakistani ruler General Pervez Musharraf. In fact, the U.S. let the cat out of the bag by revealing the summit dates before New Delhi and Islamabad had a chance to get their act together. On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh sprung a nasty surprise on the nation by embracing Pakistan as a fellow victim of and joint partner against terror, he put forward a U.S.-designed proposal — joint anti-terror mechanism. That move helped embolden the Pakistani intelligence to step up attacks on Indian targets — from the Embassy in Kabul to public places in India’s northeast.

Singh made public his penchant for gabble when he waxed lyrical in January 2007: “I dream of a day when one can have breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Kabul”. But how fundamentally Singh had changed Indian policy under U.S. persuasion became known earlier when, returning from Havana, he declared: “The Indian stand was that the borders could not be redrawn, while Pakistan was not prepared to accept the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir as the permanent solution. The two agreed to find a via media to reconcile the two positions”. By peddling a LoC-plus compromise, he opened the path to inevitable concessions to Pakistan.

In fact, the Bush administration’s trumpeted “de-hyphenation” of India and Pakistan in U.S. policy was not a calculated shift but the product of Pakistan’s descent into shambles and India’s political and economic rise after 1998. But U.S. policymakers, making a virtue out of necessity, sought to take credit for the de-hyphenation. Hyphenating India with a country a fifth of its size in terms of territory and a seventh of its size in terms of population was an abnormality that had been perpetuated partly with the aid of India’s own irrational fixation on Pakistan.

Old policy habits, however, die hard. Under Bush, U.S. policy simply went from hyphenation to parallelism. That approach has involved following separate parallel tracks with India and Pakistan, thereby permitting America to advance its interests better. When Bush visited India and Pakistan in 2006, he touted the tour as aimed at building strategic partnerships with both countries for — believe it or not — “fighting terrorism” and “advancing democracy”. With a beaming Singh by his side in New Delhi, he publicly sought Indo-Pakistan “progress on all issues, including Kashmir”. Such is Bush’s legacy that the U.S. is now building parallel intelligence-sharing and defence-cooperation arrangements with India and Pakistan.

No sooner had Bush initiated the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP) with India than he designated Pakistan as a Major Non-Nato Ally (MNNA) under the 1961 U.S. Foreign Assistance Act. Bush’s rearming of Pakistan coincided with his push to sell weapons to India, thus allowing the U.S. to reap profits and gain leverage on both sides of the subcontinental divide. Indeed, the very day Bush announced his decision to sell F-16 fighter-jets to Pakistan, Washington patronizingly offered to “help India become a major world power in the 21st century”. Today, even as he readies to relinquish office, Bush has pushed for an $891-million upgrade of Pakistan’s India-directed F-16s at a time when Islamabad is struggling to avert an international-debt default.

Against this background, it is fair to ask: Why does India remain so defensive on Kashmir? Is it the aggressor state that now exports terror? Is it the irredentist party seeking to redraw frontiers in blood? Even if a special U.S. envoy is appointed, what can he seek that India has not already offered under the weak-kneed Singh — from “soft borders” and a “borderless” Kashmir, to the “sky is the limit” in negotiations and a LoC-plus compromise? It is the search for a solution to an intricate, irresolvable issue, including by some Indians, which has kept alive the problem and engendered more bloodshed.

Unlike the meandering nature of the Indian state, U.S. policy pursues its long-term goals with unflinching resolve, and a change of administration may change nuance but not intent. Continuity in objectives is ensured through a robust structure of institutionalized policymaking, a 77-day transition period before the president-elect is sworn in, and intelligence instruments like the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) that Obama started receiving no sooner than he had been elected. Any U.S. initiative, even with an altruistic core, is required to serve America’s national interest first and foremost.

Whatever may be the shape of Obama’s foreign policy, he has already acknowledged that Kashmir represents “a potential tar pit for American diplomacy”. In any event, Washington’s ability to intervene in Kashmir is tied to Indian acquiescence, however half-hearted or forced. Expressions of concern in India over the Obama administration playing an activist role on Kashmir thus reflect a lack of confidence in New Delhi not ceding space to U.S. diplomacy — a diffidence borne from the historical record.

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

What Obama’s election means for India

Posted on November 6, 2008 by Chellaney

After the blundering Bush, a cautious Obama suits India better

Brahma Chellaney

Strategic affairs expert

Economic Times, November 7, 2008

After a historic win, U.S. President-elect Barack Obama confronts problems of historic proportions. Given the unprecedented mess that occurred on his predecessor’s watch, Obama will find himself dealing with the baneful Bush legacy for years to come.

The challenges are made starker by the fact that Obama fashioned his triumph through the power of inspiration but without any executive experience. The team he assembles will reveal the kind of leadership and change the world can expect.

For India, an America that returns to playing a mainstream international role and renews its ability to inspire and lead is better than the rogue superpower that President George W. Bush helped create.

During the Bush presidency, India’s external security environment deteriorated. Thanks to misguided U.S. policies, an arc of contiguous volatility now lies to India’s west, stretching from Pakistan to Lebanon. The war on terror that Bush launched stands derailed, even as the level of terrorism emanating from the Pak-Afghan belt has escalated.

To India’s east, with Bush expanding the web of U.S.-led sanctions, Burma faces a looming humanitarian catastrophe. Even while waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush has longed to militarily take on Iran — a confrontation that would have a cascading effect on the Indian economy by disrupting oil imports.

Yet, underlining how power respects power, Bush mollycoddled the world’s largest and longest-surviving autocracy in China, to the extent that he ignored the brutal suppression of the Tibetan uprising and showed up at the Beijing Olympics.

In place of the blustering and blundering Bush, Obama will be a welcome change. In keeping with his personality, change under Obama will be cautious, calibrated and incremental, but packaged to convey a clean break from the Bush era.

Indian interests demand a new U.S. approach on challenges ranging from the Pak-Afghan shambles to the climate crisis. But new U.S. policies alone cannot be enough. The multiple crises India confronts underscore the need for change there, too.

When Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh shortly meets his buddy Bush — whose proffered nuclear deal undermines the long-term viability of India’s nuclear deterrent — it will be the coming together of waning stars.

End of a dangerous era

Posted on November 4, 2008 by Chellaney

Liberation from Bush

If there is anyone who claims to have got a sense of Bush’s soul, it is Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, now preparing for his last Bush White House visit. Singh looked into Bush’s eyes and ostensibly read three words: love for India. History may spell those words differently: trouble for India.

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, November 5, 2008

When the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized the end of the Cold War, there was common hope that the world would finally reap the peace dividend. But nearly two decades later, potent new dangers and divisions confront the world. The credit for making the world more unsafe and divided goes largely to President George W. Bush, who will go down in history as an extraordinarily reckless and blundering leader. The greatest damage from his cowboy diplomacy was to America’s own interests and international standing. Little surprise he is leaving office as the most unpopular president in the history of U.S. polling.

The unprecedented mess that has occurred on Bush’s watch crimps his successor’s options. This raises the troubling question whether things could get worse before they start becoming better.

After all, America has not only exported its financial crisis to the rest of the world, but also is still waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan and trying to avert war with Iran and North Korea. Iraq is in a mess even if the number of monthly deaths has dropped to its lowest since May 2004. A resurgent Taliban is tearing apart the U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan. A nuclear-armed, terror-wedded Pakistan is sinking. Osama bin Laden is still at large. And international terrorism is on the rise. All this has happened when U.S. neoconservatives (or “neocons”) were boasting that America has a monopoly on power unrivalled since the Roman Empire.

The abdication of American values has been epitomized by Bush’s establishment of the infamous prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the revealed network of illegal CIA detention camps elsewhere. That has helped undermine America’s real strength — its ability to inspire and lead. The United States, after all, won the Cold War not by military means but by spreading the ideas of freedom, open markets and better life that helped drain the lifeblood from communism’s international appeal.

Had Bush not landed his country in costly, intractable military quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, he may have been tempted to unleash America’s untrammelled power elsewhere — by going after the next fire-snorting dragon on the neocons’ target list, be it Syria, Iran or North Korea. Thus, a silver lining of his blunders was that some countries were saved and that the initial neocon triumphalism gave way to a hard-to-conceal erosion of U.S. soft and hard power, with much of the world seeing Iraq, Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina, the Patriot Act and Guantanamo as symbols of such decline.

The epoch-shaping U.S. presidential election marks the end of the misbegotten Bush era. Not unsurprisingly, the liberation from Bush is bringing a collective sigh of relief in the world.

Bush’s flub diplomacy was fashioned by the neocons, for whom 9/11 came as a blessing in disguise to gain ascendancy in policymaking. Given Bush’s provincial background, his knowledge of foreign affairs was minimal when he came to the White House. Indeed, after becoming president, he once confessed that “this foreign policy stuff is a little frustrating”.

The neocons were the architects of the Bush Doctrine, founded on the belief that aggression pays and that naked aggression pays handsomely. The core tenets of the Bush Doctrine were fourfold: the United States should pursue pre-emptive strikes where necessary; it should be willing to act unilaterally — alone or with a “coalition of the willing” — if it cannot win the United Nations’ sanction; the primary focus should be on politically transforming the Middle East; and Iraq ought to be the cornerstone in bringing about region-wide democratic change.

Enunciating the doctrine’s most-controversial tenet — pre-emptive action — Bush, in his June 2002 address at West Point, had said deterrence and containment were no longer enough to defend U.S. interests and America thus “must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act”.

The neocons, in views expressed through the Project for the New American Century, the American Enterprise Institute, the journals Weekly Standard and First Things, and their own website, had for long vented their messianic ambition to remake the Middle East and then the rest of the world. Their rise in policymaking accentuated their estrangement in the Republican Party from conservative realists, whose mouthpiece, the National Review, once ran a mocking headline: “You can’t spell ‘messianic’ without mess”.

The ascendance of the neocons, many of them Jewish, was facilitated by their intellectual partnership with the Christian Right — a constituency dear to Bush, a born-again Christian, and his wife, Laura. A foreign-policy focus on the Biblical lands meshed well with the neocon and Christian Right worldview.

Yet, such were the simplistic calculations that an occupied Iraq was visualized as a profit hub for U.S. energy, infrastructure, construction and other firms and as an everlasting American military outpost. Occupation, however, turned out not only to be a huge financial burden on the United States, but also has transformed a stable, secular Iraq into a failed state whose ruins fan Islamist trends. No thought was given to how, in an era of globalization, imperialism moulded on conquest could be practiced, even if under the garb of democracy promotion. Democracy, in any event, centres on the exercise of free choice, which presupposes that the state enjoys sovereignty.

The neocons advocated — and Bush blithely accepted — an expansion of U.S. military bases across Eastern Europe, the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, and Southwest and Central Asia. Using the war on terror as justification, Bush exerted pressure on several states to win permission for US forces to set up bases for the long haul. The new bases have helped establish the largest-ever U.S. military presence overseas since World War II.

But all that assertiveness and interventionism only made the United States unpopular. The Bush Doctrine, in its zeal to identify and target “rogue” states, helped turn — as American commentator Nicholas Kristof has put it — “a superpower into a rogue country”.

From Bush’s refusal to back family planning through the UN Population Fund to his wife’s missionary diplomacy against the Burmese military regime, Christian fundamentalist beliefs have played havoc with U.S. foreign policy.

The extent to which Bush was influenced by his religious beliefs can be seen from the manner his relationship with Vladimir Putin bloomed the moment the now Russian prime minister told Bush in 2001 that he had been given a cross by his mother. According to Bob Woodward’s Bush At War, Bush instantly said to Putin: “That speaks volumes to me, Mr. President. May I call you Vladimir?” Bush then said publicly: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward… I was able to get a sense of his soul”. The curmudgeonly John McCain also claims to have looked into Putin’s eyes and seen not soul, but three letters: K-G-B.

By contrast, if there is anyone who claims to have got a sense of Bush’s soul it is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, now preparing for his last Bush White House darshan. Singh looked into Bush’s eyes and ostensibly read three words: love for India. History may spell those words differently: trouble for India.

With the end of the loathed Bush era, it is curtains for America’s neocons. But what about Indian neocons who hailed the Bush Doctrine, cheered on the invasion of Iraq, advocated the dispatch of Indian forces to aid the US occupation of Iraq, pushed for aligning Indian policy with the misguided Bush stance on Pakistan, Iran and Burma, and until recently wanted New Delhi to consider sending troops to Afghanistan? Will they disown their past, or change colours, or simply wait to latch on the next U.S. presidential doctrine?

Building Asian Power Stability

Posted on November 2, 2008 by Chellaney

Different playbooks aimed at balancing Asia’s powers

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times, November 3, 2008

The Japan-India security agreement signed recently marks a significant milestone in building Asian power equilibrium. A constellation of Asian states linked by strategic cooperation and with shared common interests is becoming critical to instituting stability at a time when major shifts in economic and political power are accentuating Asia’s security challenges.

What Tokyo and New Delhi have signed is a framework agreement that is to be followed by "an action plan with specific measures to advance security cooperation" in particular areas, ranging from sea-lane safety and defense collaboration to disaster management and counterterrorism. How momentous this Oct. 22 accord is can be seen from the fact that Japan has such a security agreement with only one other country — Australia.

Tokyo, of course, has been tied to the United States militarily since 1951 through a treaty designed to meet American demands that U.S. troops remain stationed in Japan even after the American occupation ended. Today that treaty — revised in 1960 — is a linchpin of the American forward-military deployment strategy in the Asian theater.

The Indo-Japanese defense accord adds another pillar to the idea of building quadrilateral strategic cooperation among the four major democracies in the Asia-Pacific region — Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. The only missing link in this quad is an Australia-India defense pact. The three states other than India are not only tied together through bilateral security arrangements, but also have a trilateral strategic-dialogue mechanism.

India, Japan and the U.S., for their part, held their first trilateral naval maneuvers near Tokyo in April 2007, and the three then teamed with Australia and Singapore for major war games in the Bay of Bengal five months later. Furthermore, the close coordination established among the Indian, Japanese, Australian and U.S. military contingents in rescue operations following the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami helped spawn a disaster-relief mission.

It is only a matter of time before Australia and India forge closer defense ties. Canberra actually took an important first step in that direction by initialing a memorandum of understanding on defense cooperation with New Delhi in 2006. This was followed by a bilateral arrangement to share classified information on maritime security, fragile states, counterterrorism and peacekeeping.

During a recent visit to India, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said: "Australia wants to further strengthen our defense links with India, and we are particularly pleased to have reached an agreement this year that our chiefs of defense forces will meet annually."

The Indo-Japanese security agreement, signed during Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Tokyo, is modeled on the March 2007 Japan-Australia defense accord. Both are in the form of a joint declaration on security cooperation. And both, while recognizing a common commitment to democracy, freedom, human rights and the rule of law, obligate the two sides to work together to build not just bilateral defense cooperation, but also security in the Asia-Pacific.

But unlike distant Australia with its relatively benign security environment, India and Japan are China’s next-door neighbors and worry that Beijing’s accumulating power and growing assertiveness could create a Sino-centric Asia. Canberra, in contrast, wishes to balance its relations with Tokyo and Beijing, and loves to cite the new reality that, for the first time, Australia’s largest trading partner (China) is no longer the same as its main security anchor (U.S.).

But there is nothing unique about this situation. It is a testament to Beijing’s rising global economic clout that China is also Japan’s largest trade partner and is poised to similarly become India’s in a couple of years. On the other hand, two of India’s most-important bilateral relationships — with Russia and Japan — suffer from hideously low trade volumes.

Trade in today’s market-driven world is not constrained by political differences — unless political barriers have been erected, as the U.S. has done against Cuba and Burma, for example. In fact, as world history testifies, booming trade is not a guarantee of moderation and restraint between states. The new global fault lines show that that it was a mistake to believe that greater economic interdependence by itself would improve international geopolitics. Better politics is as important as better economics.

Close security ties, however, serve as the bedrock of an economic partnership, as between America and Japan, and between the U.S. and Europe.

Canberra has consciously sought to downplay its defense accord with Tokyo to the extent that, nearly a year after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd took office, a visitor seeking to access the text of that agreement on the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) Web site is greeted by this message: "Sorry, the page you asked for has been temporarily removed from the site. . . . Following the recent Australian federal election, the content of this page is under review until further notice." Indeed, Rudd’s Labor Party, while in the opposition ranks, had openly cast doubt on the utility and wisdom of that agreement.

In that light, it is no surprise that beyond their similarly structured format, including the mirrored requirement for a followup action plan, the Japanese-Australian and Indo-Japanese agreements carry different strategic import. The one between Tokyo and New Delhi is plainly designed to contribute to Asian power equilibrium. The partnership, as the two prime ministers said in their separate Oct. 22 joint statement, forms an "essential pillar for the future architecture" of security in the Asia-Pacific.

By contrast, the Australian-Japanese agreement carries little potential to become an abiding element of a future Asia-Pacific security architecture, given the two parties’ contrasting strategic motivations and Canberra’s attempts from the outset to package it as a functional arrangement devoid of geopolitical aims.

Tellingly, the push for that accord had come from then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the architect of the Quadrilateral Initiative — founded on the concept of democratic peace. And it was the Mandarin-speaking Rudd who this year pulled the plug on that nascent initiative, which had held only one meeting.

In fact, the significance of the Indo-Japanese agreement truly parallels the 2005 Indo-U.S. defense framework accord, which signaled a major transformation of the once-estranged relationship between the world’s most-populous and most-powerful democracies. Both those agreements focus on counterterrorism, disaster response, safety of sea lanes, nonproliferation, bilateral and multilateral military exercises, peace operations, and defense dialogue and cooperation. But the former has not only been signed at a higher level — prime ministerial — but also comes with a key element: "policy coordination on regional affairs in the Asia-Pacific region and on long-term strategic and global issues."

This is an agreement between equals on enhancing mutual security. By contrast, the U.S.-India defense agreement, with its emphasis on U.S. arms sales, force interoperability and intelligence sharing, aims to build India as a new junior partner (or spoke) as part of a web of interlocking bilateral arrangements that mesh with America’s hub-and-spoke global alliance system undergirding U.S. interests.

It is doubtful, however, that the U.S., despite the defense accord and the subsequent nuclear deal, would succeed in roping in India as a new ally in a patron-client framework. In a fast-changing world characterized by a qualitative reordering of power — with even Tokyo and Berlin seeking to discreetly reclaim their foreign-policy autonomy — U.S. policymakers are unlikely to be able to mold India into a Japan or Germany to America.

In keeping with its long-standing preference for strategic independence, India is likely to retain the option to forge different partnerships with varied players to pursue a variety of interests in diverse settings. That means it is likely to become multialigned.

The security agreement with Japan — still the world’s second-largest economic powerhouse after the U.S. — jibes well with India’s desire to pursue omnidirectional cooperation for mutual benefit with key players.

Japan and India indeed are natural allies, with no negative historical legacy and no conflict of strategic interest. Rather, they share common goals to build stability and institutionalized cooperation in Asia and make the 20th-century international institutions and rules more suitable for the 21st-century world. They are establishing a "strategic and global partnership" that is driven, as their new agreement states, "by converging long-term political, economic and strategic interests, aspirations and concerns."

Both countries are energy-poor and heavily dependent on oil imports by sea from the Persian Gulf region. They are seriously concerned by mercantilist efforts to assert control over energy supplies and transport routes.

Such is the fast-developing nature of their relationship that the two, besides holding a yearly summit meeting, have now instituted multiple strategic dialogues involving their foreign and defense ministers and national security advisers, as well as "service-to-service exchanges including bilateral and multilateral exercises." The Indian and Japanese space agencies are also to cooperate as part of capacity-building efforts in disaster management.

The proposed broad-based strategic collaboration makes sense because the balance of power in Asia will be determined as much by events along the Indian Ocean rim as in East Asia.

However, it will be simplistic to see such cooperation one-dimensionally as aimed at countervailing China’s growing might. Beijing itself is pursuing a range of bilateral and multilateral initiatives in Asia to underpin its strategic objectives and help shape Asian security trends — from weapon sales to countries from Iran to Indonesia and port-building along the Indian Ocean rim, to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and strategic corridors through Pakistan and Burma.

Given China’s territorial size, population (one-fifth of the human race) and economic dynamism, few can question or begrudge its right to be a world power. In fact, such is its sense of where it wishes to go that China cannot be dissuaded from the notion that it is destined to emerge, to quote then President Jiang Zemin, as "a world power second to none."

Yet at the core of the challenge that an opaque China poses to Asian stability is the need for like-minded states to engineer subtle limits that could help forestall Chinese power from sliding into arrogance or strategic confrontation. With U.S. clout in Asia beginning to erode and American interests getting increasingly intertwined with the Chinese economy, Japan and India are interested not in gaining pre-eminence in Asia but in thwarting ambitions of pre-eminence.

Against that background, why begrudge the efforts of Asia’s two largest and most-established democracies to work together to avert Asian power disequilibrium? Never before in history have China, India and Japan all been strong at the same time.

Today, they need to find ways to reconcile their interests in Asia so that they can peacefully coexist and prosper. But there can be no denying that these three leading Asian powers and the U.S. have different playbooks: America wants a unipolar world but a multipolar Asia; China seeks a multipolar world but a unipolar Asia; and India and Japan desire a multipolar Asia and multipolar world.

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

The Japan Times: Monday, Nov. 3, 2008