A Missile and Space Rider

Posted on March 10, 2007 by Chellaney

Missile Trap In A Nuclear Plot

(c) Asian Age, January 27, 2007

The nuclear deal-related U.S. law aims to deny India space-related dual-use technology and items even as it demands New Delhi unilaterally but formally adhere to MTCR. What has this to do with nuclear energy?

Brahma Chellaney

The United States, oddly, still maintains greater technology controls against the world’s largest democracy than against communist China, whose January 11 satellite-killing weapon test has underscored for India a pressing imperative: to accelerate the development of its space and missile capabilities. Space-based assets today are critical for civil and military communications, intelligence, navigation and missile guidance. Yet, not only is America loath to undertake strictly civilian space cooperation with India of the kind Russia is proud to do, but also its legislature has used the nuclear deal to decree that India not be let off the hook on dual-use space technology controls.

As the implications of the new U.S. legislation on the nuclear deal sink deeper, an undertow of concern is prompting the Indian government to brace itself for a long, precarious course. Speciously billed as the “enabling legislation,” the law doesn’t enable the deal: it only sets the India-specific preconditions that need to be fully met before Congress grants approval at a future date, subject to the already-legislated post-implementation conditions.

Despite Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s hosannas for the deal, he and the external affairs minister acknowledge that several provisions of this legislation are either “prescriptive” in ways incompatible with the July 18, 2005, agreement-in-principle, or “extraneous” and incongruous to engagement “between friends.” Yet, other than telling Parliament that it “has taken note of certain extraneous and prescriptive provisions in the legislation,” the government has chosen not to publicly identify a single such rider in the so-called Hyde Act.

Dr. Singh indeed told the Lok Sabha last month that “there are areas which continue to be a cause for concern, and we will need to discuss them with the U.S. administration before the bilateral cooperation agreement can be finalized.” How can India’s bona fide concerns about the new law, with its series of congressionally enforceable conditions, be addressed through discussions with the U.S. executive branch, whose own hands the legislation ties? Also, if India is to shield itself from the U.S. law’s “extraneous and prescriptive provisions,” shouldn’t New Delhi at least put on record its specific objections? To be sure, nuclear chief Anil Kakodkar has done well to speak out on same aspects.

One “extraneous and prescriptive” provision mandates the continued applicability of U.S. missile sanctions law to India — a barely disguised attempt to deny space-related dual-use technology and items. At the same time, the legislation makes any Indian infraction of the Missile Technology Control Regime guidelines a cause for re-imposition of civil nuclear sanctions.

First, as is obvious, this has no connection at all with a civil nuclear energy deal. Second, by bringing this issue within its purview through a nuclear cooperation-related legislation, Congress is making it tougher for India to access sensitive technologies. Until the enactment of the Hyde Act, the lifting of the space-related technology controls against India had been an executive-branch prerogative. And third, by mandating that the deal be terminated if India were to violate MTCR guidelines, Congress has laid bare that the deal has less to do with energy and more with the full range of U.S. non-proliferation interests.

This provision, in fact, exemplifies how the new U.S. law, in seeking to conditionally allow India to import commercial power reactors and fuel, aims to hold this country perpetually to a series of good-behaviour stipulations extraneous to the deal’s stated raison d’être. The provision also goes against the rationale of the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership between the U.S. and India — an initiative that supposedly paved the way for the nuclear deal.

The NSSP was founded to help substantially ease U.S. controls on the export of high-technology goods to India, and to permit civilian nuclear and space cooperation. These three issues came to be known as the “trinity,” which later became a “quartet” with the U.S. addition of missile defence. The fourth issue, however, didn’t remain a priority for too long because the Americans realized that missile-defence cooperation with India could chip away at the credibility of the nuclear-deterrent posture of their strategic ally, Pakistan.

Without significant progress in opening U.S. high-technology and space trade with India, the State Department, curiously, announced the “successful completion” of the NSSP process on the eve of the nuclear deal’s unveiling. In the commercial space area, for instance, NSSP had yielded only two Indo-U.S. conferences and modest modification of U.S. export-licensing requirements, along with the Indian Space Research Organization’s removal from the U.S. blacklist, innocuously named the “Entity List.” Post-NSSP, six ISRO subsidiaries were also removed, but four others still remain blackballed.

The NSSP’s forced conclusion — after Washington had shifted ground in the negotiations on some promises — appeared designed to leverage U.S. parleys with India by compartmentalizing each of the “trinity” subjects and bringing into greater play U.S. strategic and commercial interests over a wider range of issues. As the State Department “fact-sheet” of July 18, 2005, put it: “Completion of NSSP … paves the way for greater cooperation on strategic, energy security, and economic matters.”

Indeed, when the nuclear deal was made public, it constituted just four paragraphs in a long joint statement that roped in India as a collaborator on several fronts — from a “Global Democracy Initiative” to a military-to-military “Disaster Response Initiative” for operations in “the Indian Ocean region and beyond.” The statement announced a far-reaching “Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture” embracing both research and outreach in India, as well as new bilateral dialogues on commerce, finance and energy. The security issues had been dealt with in a new defence-framework accord three weeks earlier, with New Delhi agreeing not only to “conclude defence transactions” and share intelligence with the U.S., but also to participate in U.S.-directed “multinational operations” and join the U.S.-led non-proliferation regime.

Actually, the most onerous technology sanctions India has endured for long are not in the nuclear-energy realm but centre on advanced and dual-use technologies. Where export controls against India can be relaxed through executive action, such as in high technology or civilian space, the U.S. has dragged its feet. But where complex action was needed, including congressional waivers from existing U.S. legal provisions and a special exemption by a 45-nation cartel, it concluded a nuclear deal after wringing a heavy price out of India.

Today, the U.S. employs every export control in force as a bargaining chip. In each of the “trinity” areas, the U.S. has sought to impose conditions or extract commitments that go beyond its stated reasoning for maintaining stringent technology controls — concerns that the transfers might be diverted to military applications or leaked to a third party. In the space area, India has tightly segregated its satellite-launch and missile programmes and put in place strict export controls.

Yet the U.S. is still reluctant, despite lengthy negotiations that began much before the nuclear deal, to build broad commercial space cooperation with India by lifting its export controls on U.S.-made components and entering into equitable launch-services and technology-safeguards accords. Washington still draws back from the much-promised launch-services agreement despite securing Indian guarantees against misuse or re-export of technology. Similarly, the U.S.-India High-Technology Cooperation Group, meeting since 2003, has still to create conditions for hassle-free high-technology commerce.

Now, in a new twist, the U.S. Congress has cross-linked its action in one “trinity” area with continual U.S. controls against India in another. The Hyde Act stipulates that U.S. missile sanctions law, with its prohibition of dual-use space exports, will still apply to India even after it meets the required standard of “unilateral adherence” to the U.S.-fashioned MTCR. It is as if Congress is intent on keeping some aspects of the bilateral relationship trapped in the past. How can a strategic partnership be built with one side seeking to sustain penal measures against the other?

The Act draws a creative distinction between an “MTCR adherent” and a “unilateral adherent” to expressly keep India within the sanctions purview of Section 73 of the U.S. Arms Export Control Act. That section decrees wide-ranging trade and other sanctions in case MTCR-controlled items are transferred. But in keeping with MTCR’s status as a cartel that regulates transfers outside the league but not within, Section 73 is not applicable to any export “that is authorized by the laws of an MTCR adherent” or is for “an end user in a country that is an MTCR adherent.”

The Hyde Act’s Section 107 flatly holds: “Congress finds that India is not an MTCR adherent for the purposes of Section 73 of the Arms Export Control Act.” To purge any ambiguity, the Act places on record, through its accompanying Explanatory Statement, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s assurance that because India has “committed to unilaterally adhere” to MTCR, it “would not be considered an ‘MTCR Adherent’ as defined under Section 73.”

Israel, too, is a unilateral adherent to MTCR, but — as underlined by U.S. technology transfers, among others, to the Israeli Arrow anti-ballistic missile programme — neither the U.S. executive branch nor legislature has sought to draw such a contrived distinction in its case. In fact, if America were to apply to India the same standards it does to Israel, it will throw open not only commercial space cooperation but also high-technology commerce with New Delhi.

In singling out India, the Hyde Act goes beyond the Arms Export Control Act, which defines an “MTCR adherent” as either “a country that participates in MTCR or that, pursuant to an international understanding to which the United States is a party, controls MTCR equipment or technology in accordance with the criteria and standards set forth in MTCR.” India cannot “participate” in MTCR as long as the cartel — like the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group — declines to admit it as a full member. But given its deal-related commitments, India will certainly fit the second criterion as an MTCR adherent. Yet the Hyde Act peremptorily dismisses that, even as it peddles the hope that India one day could “enjoy the benefits” of MTCR membership.

Equally brassily, the legislation aims to strip India’s July 18, 2005, commitment to abide by MTCR and NSG guidelines of its voluntary quality and turn it into a formal adherence involving the implementation of “specific procedures.” If India were to meet the Act’s condition to unilaterally adhere to these cartels through formal procedures rather than a voluntary public declaration, it will not only undermine its leverage to gain membership, but also become bound by all future cartel decisions, however adverse.

China, denied entry to MTCR thus far, stays a voluntary adherent, spurning formal procedures. Moreover, it spurns the revised, more-stringent MTCR guidelines, recognizing only the original guidelines and annex framed in 1987 when the cartel was secretly formed by America, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Japan and West Germany. But as underscored by its continuing covert missile assistance to Pakistan, China’s observance of even the original guidelines is more in the breach.

In contrast, the Hyde Act demands through its Section 104(b)(6)(B) that India harmonize its export laws and regulations with MTCR’s current guidelines and “practices,” with its Explanatory Statement amplifying that a “unilateral adherent” is also required to abide by “any subsequent changes to the MTCR guidelines and annex.” The perils of an open-ended Indian commitment have been underlined by the move of some MTCR states to institute what they call the International Code of Conduct Against Ballistic Missile Proliferation — a sort of mini-NPT to cover missile development.

In mandating the continued applicability of missile sanctions law to India, the U.S. Congress has sought to underpin the American goal to constrain the Indian development of long-range missiles. Without building longer-range ballistic missiles, India’s nuclear deterrent will remain largely of subcontinental relevance. Hobbling the growth of Indian delivery capability thus holds the key to the U.S. objective of preventing the emergence of India as a full-fledged nuclear-weapons state.

That objective is mirrored, as Dr. Kakodkar has put it, in the Hyde Act’s “fairly large number of sections which essentially seek to, sort of, contain or cap the Indian strategic programme.” Earlier, that objective had found expression in Dr. Rice’s accent on Indo-Pakistan “nuclear balance” and the public demand on Indian soil of her assistant secretary, Richard Boucher, that India “absolutely” define its deterrent in the sole context of Pakistan, now the third-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. As shown by America’s ongoing multibillion-dollar lethal arms transfers to Islamabad, with a huge sale of 500 Amraam and 200 Sidewinder missiles being announced just last week, Washington still uses Pakistan to countervail India, even as it seeks to frame an option to leverage its India ties against China.

The Hyde Act also seeks to hold India to an exceptional standard by linking civil nuclear cooperation to its ensuring inter alia that no “equipment or technology not consistent with MTCR guidelines” is exported “by an Indian person.” The nuclear deal’s continuation thus hinges on India’s good conduct on the missile front! But even with exemplary behaviour, India is to be denied access to space launch vehicle and unmanned aerial vehicle technologies, propulsion and propellant components, launch and ground support equipment, and other MTCR-controlled, space-related items.

To the U.S., strategically leveraging its India ties vis-à-vis Beijing does not mean helping India to militarily emerge as China’s peer. U.S. policy has no intent of compounding the ascent of China as a global military power by encouraging or acquiescing to India’s rise as another military giant with intercontinental-range weaponry. Indian romanticists have yet to grasp a simple fact that no great power in history has helped build another great power. In fact, great powers work to deter the rise of another great power.

While the nuclear deal will permit the U.S. to have its cake and eat it too, India is being called upon to open itself to action from both ends of the MTCR stick — to formally adhere to the regime from outside, yet remain one of its principal targets. This is just one example of how the vaunted deal squarely puts India on the debit side of the ledger. What was intended to herald a new era in U.S.-India relations is being appropriated into a win-win deal for one side and a loss-loss proposition for the other. In this situation, India’s strategic interests have to prevail over its diplomatic interests.

Don’t Nuke the Facts

Posted on March 10, 2007 by Chellaney

Don’t Nuke The Facts

Important to sift the truth from the spin

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India January 9, 2007

The future of the U.S.-India nuclear deal remains uncertain despite President Bush signing into law the enabling bill. The conditions-loaded legislation, in fact, has increased the odds that implementing the deal will be a long, challenging process.

Some have wondered how a president mauled in the recent congressional elections, politically damaged by the growing costs of the Iraq debacle and increasingly seen at home as a lame duck, managed to get Congress to enact a law related to a highly contentious deal. The fact is that it was U.S. big business that got Congress to pass the so-called Hyde Act.

In yielding to big-business interests, Congress, however, tagged on tough conditions that can only cloud the deal’s future. A three-and-a-half-page official bill wound up as 41-page legislation, with the legal intent behind each of its provisions clarified by Congress through a detailed accompanying Explanatory Statement.

The deal has divided India like no other issue in modern times. After all, it centres on the very future of the country’s nuclear programme. With only the first phase of its five-part process complete, the deal is bound to intensify passions in India. That makes it all the more important that spin should not be allowed to obfuscate facts.

It has been contended that the Hyde Act is binding only on the U.S. True, but doesn’t the Act list the various conditions India has to meet before it becomes eligible for civil nuclear cooperation with the US? And doesn’t it overtly apply the principle of extraterritorial jurisdiction to regulate India’s conduct thereafter by perpetually hanging the Damocles’ sword of exports cut-off over its head?

Rarely before in U.S. history has a law been enacted imposing such numerous and onerous conditions on an avowed strategic partner to permit cooperation in just one area as the Hyde Act. What stands out is that several of its conditions have little to do with the deal’s raison d’être — civil nuclear energy. And by mandating the continued applicability of U.S. missile sanctions law to India, the Act seeks to deny it space-related dual-use items.

One commentator writing in these columns (“Don’t Press Panic Button”, Dec. 27) heaped ridicule on a statement by leading nuclear scientists that the Act seeks the return of all U.S.-origin items and materials if India were to conduct a nuclear test. He went on to conclude that it imposes “no additional burdens” on India in the event of a test.

First, the Act explicitly goes beyond the existing provisions of U.S. law that empower the president to continue exports on strategic grounds despite a test. The Act itself admits it goes “beyond Section 129 of the Atomic Energy Act” by decreeing that the waiver for India will necessarily terminate with any Indian test.

Second, as the Explanatory Statement makes clear, Congress expects the president to “make full and immediate use of U.S. rights to demand the return of all nuclear-related items, materials, and sensitive nuclear technology that have been exported or re-exported to India if India were to test…”

Third, the Act goes beyond even the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty by specifying in technical terms what is prohibited for India. In the CTBT negotiations, the US had successfully opposed an Article I definition of a “nuclear explosion” to leave open loopholes for what it calls “permissible activities”. Today, through domestic law, the U.S. aims to impose CTBT-plus obligations on India while refusing to accede to the CTBT itself.

Once India has invested billions of dollars in importing power reactors, the Hyde Act, with its congressionally enforced conditions, will effectively bear it down. Even when the U.S. walked out midway from a binding 30-year bilateral pact over just one plant, Tarapur, New Delhi continued to honour the accord’s terms till the end — and even beyond to this day.

It is important to sift the truth from the spin. Playing to the Indian weakness for cosmetically attractive facets, Congress retained the tough elements from the Senate and House bills but gave softer labels to some. For his part, Bush not only scheduled his signature ceremony to coincide with the important Indian Parliament debate, but also issued a statement geared towards public relations in India.

For example, Bush said he would construe as “advisory” the Act’s Section 103 policy statements, without revealing that these statements had largely been made operative through Section 104. He voiced concern about the potential delegation of “legislative power to an international body” — the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group — but revealingly kept mum over the Act’s precondition: that the NSG first carve out by consensus an exemption for India with the same conditions.

India needs an informed debate on an increasingly complex deal, with the prime minister acknowledging he “still has some concerns” over the Hyde Act. It is thus imperative that facts are understood and respected.

The writer is a strategic affairs analyst.

Future Asia

Posted on March 6, 2007 by Chellaney

Forestalling Strategic Conflict in Asia

Forestalling Strategic Conflict in Asia
(c) Far Eastern Economic Review November 2006

By Brahma Chellaney

A fundamental and qualitative reordering of power in Asia is already challenging strategic stability and affecting equations between the continent’s major powers. As they maneuver for strategic advantage, China, India and Japan are transforming relations between and among themselves in a way that portends closer strategic engagement between New Delhi and Tokyo, and sharper competition between China on one side, and Japan and India on the other.

Yet, given the fact that India and China point across the mighty Himalayas in very different geopolitical directions and that Japan and China are separated by sea, they need not pose a threat to each other. The interests of the three powers are becoming intertwined to the extent that the pursuit of unilateral solutions by any one of them will disturb the peaceful diplomatic environment on which their continued economic growth and security depend.

Ensuring that Japan-China and China-India competition does not slide into strategic conflict will nonetheless remain a key challenge in Asia. Never before in history have all three of these powers been strong at the same time.

The emergence of China as a global player is transforming the geopolitical landscape like no other development. Not since Japan rose to world-power status during the reign of the Meiji Emperor has another non-Western power emerged with such potential to alter the global order as China today. However, as history testifies, the rise of a new world power usually creates volatility in the international system, especially when the concerned power is not a democracy. Such has been the transformation of China that, while preserving communist rule and Confucian culture, it has gone in one generation from all ideology and token materialism, to all materialism and token ideology. China’s ascent, however, is dividing Asia, not bringing Asian states closer.

Economic powerhouse Japan is determined to shore up its security and, despite its concerns over the fraying ties with Beijing, wishes to ensure that China does not call the shots in East Asia. After its World War II ignominy, Japan turned a necessity into a virtue by defining an antiwar identity anchored in its U.S.-imposed constitution and a strategy emphasizing economic modernization and global peace. Now, it is starting to shed decades of pacifism and reassert itself in world affairs. India’s continued economic rise, coupled with its political realism and growing self-confidence, has made it a key factor in Asian geopolitics. It will be unwilling to cede its leadership role in southern Asia.

In the emerging Asia, the two major non-Western democracies, India and Japan, look like natural allies as China drives them closer together. An India-Japan strategic partnership, involving naval cooperation to protect vital sea lanes of communication, could help adjust balance-of-power equations in Asia and build long-term stability and equilibrium.

The deepening mistrust and nationalistic chauvinism in Asia could create conditions that seriously harm the interests of all the major players. Take the divisive issue of history. The emphasis on past grievances only engenders nationalistic hostility and, as seen from the trends in China, South Korea and Japan, creates congenial conditions for the virus of xenophobia to spread in such homogenized societies. In order not to jeopardize stability and peace across Asia, sustained efforts need to be made to overcome the harmful historical legacies and the negative stereotyping of a rival state. China’s communist leaders will have to refrain from using the history card against Japan, just as Japanese right-wing politicians, intent on reviving a spirit of militarism, need to stop peddling myths about the benevolence of Japan’s imperial past.

The international community cannot be a silent spectator to the motivated resurrection of unpleasant history today. Such revivalistic actions may be designed to bolster political legitimacy at home and whip up nationalism, but they harm regional growth and stability and challenge international norms on good-neighborly conduct. A sustained Asian renaissance demands a more hospitable political atmosphere to help Asia sharpen its competitive edge and innovative skills through greater intra-Asian cooperation and larger investments in the sciences. The setting aside of historical issues and inculcation of positive political values in education are essential to the building of genuine, enduring interstate partnerships in Asia.

Priority should also be given to a resolution of territorial and maritime disputes in Asia. The China-India-Japan strategic triangle cannot become stable without progress on that front. A first step to a settlement of any dispute is clarity on a line of control or appreciation of the “no go” areas in order to eschew provocative or unfriendly actions. China’s gunboat diplomacy in September 2005 across the median line in the East China Sea, for instance, only aided the reelection campaign of Japanese leader Junichiro Koizumi. In his five years in office, Mr. Koizumi not only built popular support for revision of the pacifist Japanese Constitution but also laid the foundation for the emergence of a more muscular Japan.

The best way for China and Japan to explore for hydrocarbons in the East China Sea is through the joint development of fields there, given the intricate, difficult-to-resolve claims and legal ambiguities. Emulating the example of bilateral cooperative agreements set by disputants in the North Sea, Japan and China could jointly develop hydrocarbon deposits around the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, which have become symbols of potent nationalism. As a first step, Beijing and Tokyo need to reach agreement not to change the status quo. Joint development of fields where the Sino-Japanese maritime-boundary claims overlap can help bridge the dispute between the two countries.

Through a joint-development agreement under which they agree to share costs and benefits, China and Japan can positively transform the security environment in East Asia and help establish regional cooperation and multilateral security mechanisms. With the East China Sea potentially holding up to 100 billion barrels of oil, Japan and China have a strong incentive to reach a compromise.

The two most populous nations on earth, China and India, have been scowling at each other across a 4,057-kilometer disputed frontier for more than half a century. Since 1981, India has been negotiating with China to settle the Indo-Tibetan frontier. These border talks are the longest between any two nations in modern world history. Yet, not only have the negotiations yielded no concrete progress on a settlement, but they also have failed so far to remove even the ambiguities plaguing the long line of control. Beijing has been so loath to clearly define the frontline that it suspended the exchange of maps with India several years ago. Consequently, India and China remain the only countries in the world not separated by a mutually defined frontline.

China’s reluctance to fully define its long frontier with India may be linked to its strategy to keep its neighbor under pressure by pinning down a large number of Indian troops along the inhospitable slopes and valleys of the Himalayas. But through such reluctance China only advertises itself as a problem state for India. It has, for example, accepted the colonial-era McMahon Line with Burma but not with India. It has also not defined its 470-kilometer frontier with Bhutan, with crossborder Chinese incursions occurring periodically.

The China-India frontline, without prejudice to rival territorial claims, can be clarified through a mutual exchange of maps showing each other’s military positions. A Chinese disinclination to trade such maps translates into a greater aversion to clinch an overall border settlement. Rather than present itself as a practitioner of classical balance-of-power politics, China can profit more by fostering genuine political cooperation with New Delhi so that India is not driven into the U.S. strategic camp.

A genuine China-India rapprochement fundamentally demands a resolution of the Tibet issue through a process of reconciliation and healing initiated by Beijing with its Tibetan minority. Such a process will aid China’s own internal security. Despite decades of ruthless repression, China has failed to win over the Tibetan people, whose struggle for self-rule remains a model movement. Such is the suppression in Tibet that even having a photograph of the Dalai Lama constitutes a criminal offence. Yet the Tibetans have not lost their sense of mission or the will to regain their rights.

It is an illusion that China and India can build enduring peace and cooperation without Beijing reaching out to Tibetans and solving the problem of Tibet. A problem that defines the origins of the China-India divide will stay at the center of that troubled relationship even if it were set aside indefinitely. China’s own journey towards great-power status would be aided if it helped preserve Tibet’s unique culture and religion, involved Tibetans in the development of their land, and reached a deal to bring the Dalai Lama back from his exile in Dharamsala, India. A placated Tibet could help bridge the China-India chasm.

Taiwan is another Asian dispute that is far larger than the size of that island’s population and area. Sitting astride vital sea lanes, Taiwan truly holds the key to whether China emerges as a stabilizing force or an arrogant power seeking unchallenged ascendancy in Asia. By staking its claim to a role in the security of Taiwan, Japan is signaling that it will not allow China to change East Asia’s strategic balance in Beijing’s favor. This signaling was best symbolized by the February 2005 U.S.-Japan security declaration that identified the peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue as a shared strategic objective. Japan’s interest to play a role in Taiwan’s future is reflected in the growing view among Japanese politicians that Tokyo must come to the island’s aid in the event of a Chinese invasion. A takeover of Taiwan will not only allow China to absorb the island’s technology, weaponry and large foreign-exchange reserves, but it will also arm Beijing with the power to control shipping lanes to Japan and position missiles just 100 kilometers from the nearest Japanese territory.

Taiwan may be far from Indian shores but its political future also matters to India. In strategic terms, Taiwan can be to India what Pakistan is to China. Translated into policy that could entail close strategic collaboration between India and Taiwan, with the goal to aid each other’s security through shared objectives and means, and help build equilibrium in Asia. Economically, the new Taiwan-India Cooperation Council symbolizes the island’s effort to reduce its economic dependence on mainland China, which accounted for some 70% of Taiwan’s accumulated offshore investment and 38% of its total exports in 2005.

A new Indian strategic thrust towards Taiwan, however, may have to await a generational political change in India. In the near to medium term, strategic cooperation between Japan and Taiwan appears more conceivable, despite occasionally insensitive Japanese rhetoric, such as Foreign Minister Taro Aso’s reported remark in February 2006 that Taiwan owes its high educational standards to enlightened Japanese policies during the island’s 50-year occupation. Japan and India cannot be oblivious to the prospect that a Beijing-obedient Taiwan may presage movement towards a Beijing-oriented Asia.

Time clearly is on Taiwan’s side. For more than a century, Taiwan has been outside the control of mainland China. A continuation of the status quo for another quarter-century will only bolster Taiwan’s de facto independence, making it more difficult for Beijing to undo that.

Energy is another critical area where strategic friction can be forestalled through shared Asian interests to safeguard energy supplies and maximize resource conservation and efficiency in order to underpin economic growth and commercial competitiveness. Such common interests can be the basis of a cooperative approach in Asia that emphasizes the development of secure new energy assets and the adoption of energy-saving technologies and methods. Japan, a leader in energy efficiency, can offer valuable assistance to the rapidly growing Asian economies. According to Japan’s Natural Resources and Energy Agency, the Japanese industry’s energy use is so efficient that it uses one-ninth the amount of oil that China does to generate the same profit.

A cooperative energy approach, of course, cannot be built without taming the two main Asian monsters—resurgent nationalism and the recrudescence of fiery historical grievances. Such an approach also will not be possible if any power seeks to control an ever-larger percentage of the world’s energy resources. The present zero-sum game on energy impedes the development of new oil and gas fields in a high-potential resource area—the East China Sea. Furthermore, it obstructs cooperation on bringing Russian oil and gas to consumers in Northeast Asia in a major way so that the region’s reliance on the volatile Persian Gulf region could be reduced.

Interstate cooperation on energy can help stem escalating tensions in Asia while allowing the harvesting of new resources to aid prosperity. But energy cooperation cannot be institutionalized or sustained on a long-term basis without expanded political and security cooperation as well as increased transparency on military expenditures. The unremitting pace of China’s ambitious military modernization even as its diplomacy becomes increasingly sophisticated indicates its intent to follow Theodore Roosevelt’s dictum: “Speak softly, but carry a big stick.” With opacity in planning and continuous, double-digit spending increases since before 1990, China’s military buildup has advanced well beyond what most analysts envisaged just a decade ago. Beijing’s barely disguised ambition is to establish a blue-water navy ostensibly to secure its energy-supply lines. In that light, building interstate transparency on defense-spending levels in Asia has become necessary to help set up multilateral maritime-security and energy-cooperation arrangements.

The rise of strategic rivalries in Asia is also worrying because of the continent’s conflicting political and strategic cultures and weak regional institutions. China, India and Japan, in fact, epitomize three distinct strategic cultures. The evolving equations between and among them confirm that globalization, far from sweeping away national identities, is helping to reinforce them. As a consequence, replicating European-style integration in Asia appears more problematic than ever.

Yet there is a greater need in Asia for political pragmatism and judicious diplomacy to ensure that China, India and Japan emerge as positive forces in international politics. If these powers and the other Asian states eschew nationalism-mongering and develop long-term cooperation, Asia will truly prosper and become stronger as the global pivot.

The central challenge now is not so much to create an Asian Union as to find ways to stabilize major-power relationships in Asia and promote cooperative approaches that can tackle security, energy, territorial, environmental, developmental and history issues. Rather than become the scene of a new cold war, Asia can chart a more stable future for itself through shared security and prosperity among its states. An inability to resolve all the disputes and problems should not hold up cooperation on issues that can be addressed. Nor should competition discourage collaboration.

Mr. Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. This passage is excerpted from his book, Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan, published by HarperCollins in October 2006.

Christian Science Monitor op-ed

Posted on March 6, 2007 by Chellaney

Quote

Christian Science Monitor op-ed

from the February 22, 2007 edition – http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0222/p09s01-coop.html

Musharraf’s choice: president of Pakistan or dictator of ‘Problemistan’?

Pakistan needs true democratic participation to empower the masses and decide issues at the ballot box.

By Brahma Chellaney

NEW DELHI

The fight against international terrorism cannot be won without demilitarizing and deradicalizing Pakistan. That’s what makes Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s latest move so worrisome.

Mr. Musharraf took power more than seven years ago in a military coup. Since then, national conditions have markedly worsened. A military dictatorship justified as essential for bringing stability has actually taken the country to the edge.

Now, without drawing international attention, Musharraf has unveiled a plan that will make Pakistan’s greatly awaited elections a farce. Under this plan, the outgoing parliament and four provincial legislatures would "elect" him to a new five-year term as president in the fall, before he oversees national polls a few months later. Five years ago, Musharraf orchestrated another charade – a referendum – to extend his self-declared presidency.

Musharraf’s maneuver is the latest in a long series of broken promises to return his country to democracy. And it does not bode well for Pakistan’s central challenge: moving away from militarism, extremism, and fundamentalism, and toward a stable, moderate state.

The perils of ‘partnership’ in the war on terror

Although the United States compelled Pakistan post-9/11 to abandon the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and become an ally in the war on terrorism, that partnership has yielded dubious results. To be sure, Musharraf’s cooperation led to the capture of some Al Qaeda figures such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that he is unwilling or unable to crack down on the terrorist radicals in his midst. His foreign minister boasted that Pakistan had not handed "a single Pakistani" to America and that all the Al Qaeda men captured and transferred to US authorities were foreigners.

Pakistan‘s home-grown, Al Qaeda-linked Islamist militias continue to operate openly. Indeed Musharraf’s main benefactor, President Bush, said last week: "Taliban and Al Qaeda figures do hide in remote regions of Pakistan. This is wild country; this is wilder than the Wild West."

Musharraf’s sinking popularity has spurred speculation that he might declare a state of emergency to smother vocal opposition. But the more power he usurps, the more dependent he becomes on his military and intelligence. That limits his ability to sever their cozy ties with extremist and terrorist elements.

Musharraf oils his dictatorship with generous American aid. Mr. Bush is too preoccupied with a self-created mess in Iraq to bother about the latest election shenanigan, especially when the Taliban resurgence (supported by Pakistani aid, critics charge) has made the NATO use of Pakistani airspace even more vital for military operations in Afghanistan. Bush’s intensifying confrontation with Iran has only enhanced Pakistan’s importance as a staging ground for US anti-Iranian operations.

The Commonwealth of Nations, which reinstated Pakistan’s membership after a 4-1/2-year suspension following the coup, has looked the other way ever since Musharraf reneged on the very promise that won his country reentry – to give up his dual role as president and Army chief by 2005. Don’t expect the Commonwealth to make even a peep when Musharraf stays on as Army chief beyond the next deadline of Nov. 15, 2007 – set by a constitutional amendment he himself engineered to miss the first deadline.

Although the only times when India and Pakistan have come close to peace have been during the brief periods of democratic rule in Islamabad, New Delhi has played no small role in helping Musharraf gain legitimacy from the time it invited him out of the blue to a 2001 peace summit. Today, India not only refrains from speaking about the lack of democracy in Pakistan but, in a major policy reversal, has come to see Musharraf as a partner against terrorism.

A dictatorship that is part of the problem has ingeniously presented itself to the outside world as part of the solution. The scourge of Pakistani terrorism ema- nates 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-i-Tayyaba. Yet by passing the blame for their disastrous jihad policy to their mullah puppets, Musharraf and his fellow generals have made many outsiders believe that the key is to contain the religious fringe, not the puppeteers.

Why military rule must end

Musharraf perpetuates the self-serving myth that his rule helps prevent an Islamist takeover. But military rule would persist in the event of his sudden death.

Until the military’s viselike grip on power is broken and the rogue Inter-Services Intelligence agency is cut to size, Pakistan is likely to remain a common thread in the investigations of most acts of international terrorism.

In the absence of open elections, military rule has created a pressure-cooker society. What Pakistan needs is a safety valve – true democratic participation that would empower the masses and decide issues at the ballot box.

Jihad culture is now deeply woven into Pakistan’s national fabric. Unraveling it won’t be easy. But it is essential. Heavy-handed rule from Musharraf – or any other general – won’t eliminate Pakistan’s extremist elements. The development of a robust civil society – though painful in the short term – will aid democracy, marginalize radicals, and bring Pakistan back from the brink.

Some may think that Musharraf’s scheme to stay enthroned is a necessary evil in the service of a greater good. That’s half right: It is evil, but it’s not necessary. The West needs to exert pressure on him to show real courage – and to bring real reform – by holding himself accountable to voters and making coming elections an honest affair.

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

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Climate Change and Asian Security

Posted on March 6, 2007 by Chellaney

The Asian Age, February 10, 2007 www.asianage.com

When Hot Air Is Real

Brahma Chellaney

While it is tempting to make linear strategic projections into the future on the basis of present trends, such straight-line forecasts rarely come true in history. In the 1980s, Japan-bashing came in vogue in the United States as concerns grew that the fast-rising Japan threatened America’s industrial might. That foreboding is laughable today, when concern has switched to China’s dramatic rise, even as a politically resurgent Japan remains the world’s second largest economic powerhouse after the US.

Similarly, American triumphalism has rapidly dissipated as events from Iraq to the changing world-power relations have both discredited neoconservative notions that there no consequences to pre-emption and unilateralism as well as shown that globalization is no longer driven primarily by the US. Who foresaw the American colossus stumbling in a unipolar world?

The future may well belong to China and India, which together make up a third of humanity. The two are coming into their own at the same time in history, highlighting the ongoing major shifts in global politics and economy. In fact, having constituted nearly half of the world’s GDP at the beginning of the industrial age in 1820, India and China are only bouncing back from a relatively short period of decline in their long history.

Yet the linear projections on their economic growth over the next four decades are too one-dimensional. Goldman Sachs, for instance, forecasts that China will surpass the size of the U.S. economy around 2035 and India will do the same about a decade later. This could happen but it is hardly certain. Statistical probability — the sole tool in forecasting — has little application in strategic analyses.

To be sure, economic growth is essential to underpin political and social stability. It is doubtful the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly on power will survive without it continuing to deliver high economic growth. But such growth in any country hinges on several factors, endogenous and exogenous.

One factor beyond the control of policymakers in India and China that could slow down economic growth and create major societal challenges for them is climate change, whose strategic dimensions have received scant attention. Global warming is now the focus of attention after the UN-created Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) called for concerted action in its latest report released last weekend, which came close on the heels of reports by the United Nations Environment Programme and a British government-sponsored panel. The British panel, led by economist Nicholas Stern, has warned that the world economy is in danger of shrinking 20% over time due to climate change.

While the developed world is largely responsible for global warming, it is the developing world that is likely to bear the brunt because it has a larger concentration of hot and low-lying regions and lesser resources to technologically adapt to climate change. Even today, on a per capita basis, the developing world’s carbon-dioxide emissions are only about one-fifth the level of rich countries. While it is easy to exaggerate or underestimate climate change, viewing it in balance is important to understand its true strategic implications and to explore ways to move from the current sound bites to action.

The bad news for India and China is that when their rise is already sharpening global competition for resources and driving up commodity and energy prices, climate change threatens to cast a further burden on them. Climate change is not a distant threat but one whose impact is already beginning to be felt.

The Tibetan plateau — Asia’s water repository and source of 10 major glacially-fed rivers — has just recorded its warmest winter since meteorological data began being collected there in 1970. Another manifestation are the ever-growing sandstorms in China that not only blanket Beijing but also threaten to speed up the spread of barren wasteland to the heartland, as the diversion of water resources for irrigation has left northern land open to desertification.

Asia is already facing a serious fresh-water crisis, with deforestation, overgrazing, poor management of river basins, water contamination and inefficient irrigation systems aggravating scarcity. The growing use of subterranean supplies of groundwater due to inadequate availability of surface water also threatens to quicken environmental degradation.

The key anthropogenic factor contributing to greenhouse gases is growing fossil-fuel combustion — a scenario unlikely to reverse at least in the near term. Given that nearly four-fifths of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels, global warming is set to accelerate, with the still-nascent international efforts merely directed at slowing down the pace of climate change. This means that states will have to brace up to climate change and develop new technologies and methods to adapt to it.

Several important scientific studies since the 1990s have assessed the likely impact of climate change in major Asian regions, including in terms of temperature-change scenarios (Climate Impact Group, 1992), affect on monsoon circulation and precipitation (R. Suppiah, 1994), availability of water resources (P. Whetton, 1994), and rise of sea levels (IPCC, 2001). With the help of those studies and the latest reports, it is possible to draw three major conclusions on the security implications of climate change for India and China.

● First, given India’s and China’s heavy dependence on water resources flowing from the Himalayan glaciers, climate change is likely to increasingly affect their capacity to meet water needs, spurring competition for securing supplies. It is probable that intrastate water disputes in China and India would sharpen. If hydropower or other engineering projects upstream in the Tibetan plateau sought to divert the present southward river-water flows, interstate tensions would arise, given the impact of any rerouting on downstream states like India, Burma or Thailand.

China has not only built a dam close to the source of the Sutlej river but also is considering a mega-project to channel water from the Brahmaputra river (Yarlung Tsangpo) to the Yellow river to feed its growing needs in the north. While the director of the Yellow River Water Conservancy Committee has said publicly that the mega-project enjoys official sanction and will begin as early as 2010, China’s water resources minister told a meeting at the University of Hong Kong that, in his personal “academic” opinion, this plan “is unnecessary, not feasible and unscientific.”

If Beijing does start the mega-scheme, it will constitute a declaration of water war on India. In fact, the mammoth Three Gorges Dam hydroelectric project, which China proudly advertises as an engineering feat, has whetted the ambition of some in Beijing to search for cost-effective ways to divert rivers cascading from the Tibetan highlands in the Himalayas, with some former officials last year publishing a book titled, Tibet’s Water Will Save China.

On the whole, climate change will have an adverse bearing on interstate and intrastate disputes in Asia over water issues. That in turn could exacerbate or reopen disputes over territories that are either the original source of water or through which major rivers flow, such as Tibet and Jammu and Kashmir. It could also help cast renewed spotlight on China’s incorporation of parts of traditional Tibet in the provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan. For example, the Yellow, the Yangtze and the Mekong rivers originate in Qinghai, which is the northeastern Amdo region of ethnic Tibet and birthplace of the present Dalai Lama.

Given that the Tibet plateau’s water resources constitute a lifeline for hundreds of millions of Asians, the retreat of glaciers due to accelerated thawing will have devastating effects downstream. Coastal Chinese cities like Shanghai already are reporting acute water shortages, leaving authorities with only two choices — desalinized water or imports of water from the glacier melt on the Tibetan plateau. Tibet’s fragile ecosystem, however, is already threatened by China’s reckless exploitation of Tibet’s vast mineral and water resources.

The Tamil Nadu agriculture minister’s proffered solution to his state’s water woes — the linking of the Ganges with the Cauvery — disregards the likely global-warming impact on the Uttarakhand glaciers like Gangotri (India’s largest) that feed the Ganges, which supports more than 5% of the world population living in its catchment areas.

Increased monsoon precipitation — an expected consequence of higher average temperatures — could potentially compensate for loss of melt-water from the rapidly thawing Himalayan glaciers if India were to find technical means to harvest and store rainwater on a mammoth scale.

It is obvious that if water becomes a factor in interstate and intrastate tensions and increasingly a scarce and precious commodity, economic growth would stall and water wars might follow.

● Second, the projected rise of both sea levels and extreme weather events like droughts, hurricanes and monsoon flooding are likely to foster greater interstate and intrastate migration — especially of the poor and the vulnerable — from delta and coastal regions to the interior regions. Such an economically disruptive relocation would socially swamp inland areas, upsetting the existing ethnic balance and provoking in some regions a backlash that strains local harmony and security.

India, now officially home to some 20 million illegal Bangladeshi settlers, could see an influx of tens of millions of more crossing over an international border too porous to effectively patrol. Such an avalanche of refugees would have a serious bearing on internal cohesion and security. Climate change indeed could imperil the very survival of Bangladesh, a largely delta land that ranks as the world’s most densely-populated country with the exception of island-nations and city-states.

In China, climate change could prompt millions of Han Chinese to move from low-lying coastal areas to the sparsely-populated regions of ethnic minorities in the southwest and west. The southwest, with its vast glacially-sourced water resources, is likely to be a magnet. With 60% of its territory comprising traditional homelands of minorities, who today constitute barely 8% of its total population, China has expanded vastly since the time the Great Wall was built as the outer Han security perimeter.

While the rise in sea levels is likely to lead to retreating coasts, those living deep in the interior would suffer increased heat waves, with metastasizing droughts expected to ravage semi-arid areas.

● Third, human security is likely to be the main casualty of climate change. Economic disparities in India and China would widen as vulnerable sectors of the economy and low-lying coastal and delta areas suffer a bigger blow. The rise in temperatures could hit the major source of employment — agriculture — and thereby accelerate movement of the jobless to the already-crowded cities. Also, warmer winters would negatively influence the vector of disease control by making it easier for worm eggs and bugs to survive the cold. Sustainable development is expected to become more challenging than ever.

If there is any good news, it is that the hot air in the enhanced greenhouse conditions would strengthen monsoon circulation and bring increased rainfall of up to 10% to the subcontinent by 2070, but without making monsoons more predictable. As accelerated glacier melt compels India to reduce its reliance on the natural bounty of the Himalayas, it would need to find novel ways to store rainwater for the dry season from the monsoonal bounty.

Given that at best it can be slowed but not stopped, climate change needs to be elevated from the current scientific-firmament discourse to a national-security issue — but not in the way the Pentagon has toyed with developing weather-modification technologies for military applications. Large states like India and China need to start seriously looking at ways they can innovate and get along in a climate change-driven paradigm. It will become imperative to build greater institutional and organizational capacity, along with efficient water management, early warning systems and new farm varieties.

China-India: The Threat From Anti-Satellite Lethality

Posted on March 6, 2007 by Chellaney

Hindustan Times, February 6, 2007

China’s anti-satellite weapon test should spur India to plug gaps in its defences

It’s not only rocket science

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Three issues stand out on China’s January 11 anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon test. First, such is Beijing’s ingrained opacity that it did not own up to the test until diplomatic pressure intensified. Two, a lot of unsafe space debris likely to last years has been left in low orbit by China’s conversion of a rocket to kill one of its aging satellites. And three, the test sets a treacherous precedent by marking the first ASAT kill by any power in more than two decades.

Whatever its motivation, the test will have lasting global impact like no other military event in recent years. While China’s message, in line with its growing geopolitical ambitions, may have been directed at America, it is its immediate neighbours that are likely to be more rattled by its precision in timing a high-speed rocket carrying a ‘kinetic’ weapon to kill a circling satellite. Although the rocket probably was the KT-1, similar to India’s PSLV, it is the overall sophistication displayed that brings down wishful thinking about averting militarization of space.

To India, the test is not just a reminder of the glaring gaps in its defences but also a wakeup call to start addressing them. That India has lagged behind its minimal-deterrent requirements is conspicuous. But instead of accelerating its space-launch and missile programmes, New Delhi has allowed the asymmetry to widen to a point where China has now laid bare India’s battlefield vulnerability.

Indeed, of all the major countries, the Chinese ASAT lethality arguably holds the greatest import for India The only counter to ASAT weapons is a capability to pay back in kind. The US and Russia, armed to their teeth, can cripple China’s communications and expose its ground assets if it dared strike their space assets. Japan, also concerned over the test, is ensconced under a US security umbrella.

India, by contrast, stands out for a binary lack of deterrent capabilities: it neither has the missile reach for a counter-offensive in the Chinese heartland nor seeks ASAT power to deter the destruction of its space assets. Fighting a 21st-century war with one’s key space assets disabled will be worse than facing an adversary with one hand tied behind. Such assets are critical not just for communications but also for imagery, navigation, interception, missile guidance and delivery of precision munitions.

To be sure, an ASAT scenario can arise only in a conflict situation. But deterrence is required precisely to avert war. India’s commitment was to building a “credible minimal deterrent”. Before long, the ‘credible’ element fell by the wayside. Now, as underscored by India’s increasing vulnerability against China, even the ‘minimal’ part is slipping.

To sustain peace with China, India needs to be able to defend peace. Can it be forgotten that India was caught napping in 1962 because the invasion was totally unexpected? Or that in 1986-87 war clouds emerged out of a clear blue sky on the Sino-Indian horizon? The key lesson of 1962 was that what matters is adversarial capability, not intent, which can change suddenly.

In today’s world, one side can impose its demands not necessarily by employing force but by building such asymmetric capabilities that a credible threat constricts the other side’s room for manoeuvre and ability to withstand pressure. Yet, curiously, the more India has fallen behind minimum deterrence, the more it has sheltered behind calcinatory and delusional rhetoric.

It is not lack of resources but a reluctance to get its priorities right that has left India far short of meeting its minimal-deterrent needs. The way India squanders resources is unspeakable. Embarrassed neither by its emergence as the world’s largest arms importer nor by its continued lack of priority to building an armament-production base at home, India intends to spend at least $20 billion over the next five years to import weapons. Such imports ostensibly will seek to equip India for the next conventional war, when what it faces increasingly are unconventional threats, the latest being ASATs.

Rather than prepare to fight war, shouldn’t India give greater priority to preventing aggression? A full-fledged war remains remote 35 years after the last one India fought. Preventing war demands systems of deterrence. Such systems have to be developed indigenously because no power will sell them. But as they come with no kickbacks, incentives to speedily develop them have been weak. India can easily cut its proposed arms imports by half and invest the savings to build deterrence.

Take another egregious case: India plans to spend $3.4 billion to land a man on the moon by 2020, with its first lunar orbiter scheduled for 2008, first unmanned lunar landing for 2010 and first manned space flight for 2014. Such an ambitious mission can be a priority for a country like China that has met its basic national-security needs and amassed $1 trillion in the world’s largest foreign-exchange hoard. But for India this is an extravagance when it still cannot launch its own telecommunications satellites. Shouldn’t India’s interests on planet earth and its outer space take precedence over a lunar dream?

If it truly aspires to be a great power, India has to meet the first test of greatness — the capacity to defend oneself independently. It is past time it calibrated its priorities to fix defence-related weaknesses. Before it can think of developing a counter-capability to shield itself from an ASAT menace, it will have to deal with two obtrusive mismatches that hobble its deterrence promise.

The first mismatch is between its satellite and launch capabilities. Greater operational capability necessitates large satellites. While India has first-rate satellite-manufacturing expertise, it still needs a foreign commercial launcher like EADS’s Ariane 5 to place its INSAT-4 series satellites in geostationary orbit. Even when the vaunted GSLV becomes operational with indigenous cryogenic technology, its 2,000-kilogram payload limit will fall short of what India’s needs even today.

The second mismatch is in the military realm — between the technical sophistication to build nuclear warheads and the extent to which they can be delivered reliably by missiles. Nearly a decade after it went overtly nuclear and almost a quarter-century after the missile programme launch, India still lacks the full reach against China. The thermonuclear warhead India tested with a controlled yield still awaits a delivery vehicle of the right payload range.

Why should a country with one-sixth of humanity to defend still seek incremental progress in the intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) field rather than aim to technologically leapfrog to an intercontinental ballistic missile? Without ICBM capability, India can be neither in the global league nor able to deter ASAT threats. If it were to marshal unwavering political will, India could, with its latent capabilities, build an ICBM in a crash programme with half the lunar-project budget and well before an Indian spacecraft lands an astronaut on the moon.

Just as several Indian companies are emerging as global players in their own right, the Indian state will be a behemoth on the world stage if it remedied its vulnerability problem. It has a lot to learn from China on how to take care of its security. Indeed it owes a thank-you to Beijing for delivering another reminder of its shortcomings. The ASAT test, at a minimum, ought to help clear the policy cobwebs arising from India’s defence indolence.

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India’s Pakistan policy: Out of sync

Posted on March 5, 2007 by Chellaney

Hindustan Times, March 6, 2007

Just when international pressure is building up on Musharraf, India is cozying up to him

Out of Sync, Out of Mind

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

In the absence of a long-term strategy, foreign-policy swings are inevitable. The pendulum has moved back and forth on India’s Pakistan policy with such frequency in the past eight years since Atal Bihari Vajpayee rode a bus to Lahore that any pretence of consistency in approach has long been lost. Yet, even by that standard, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s surprise embrace of military-ruled Pakistan as a fellow victim of and joint partner against terror puts India out of sync with the growing international focus on that country’s descent as the fount of transnational terrorism.

Just when Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf has come under mounting pressure from his chief benefactor, America, over his unwillingness or incapacity to crack down on terrorist radicals in his midst, the first meeting of the joint Indo-Pakistan anti-terror mechanism is being held in Islamabad from Tuesday. That meeting, dissonantly signifying that the victim has joined hand with the assailant, is strikingly at odds with the stern warnings a stream of US officials have delivered to Musharraf, including two secrecy-shrouded visitors to Islamabad — Vice President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Robert Gates.

As in May 2001 when the sphinx-like Vajpayee blithely helped lift Musharraf’s international-pariah status by inviting him all of a sudden to Agra, India is out of step again. It has eased the pressure on Pakistan just when the rest of the world is beginning to exert pressure over its metastasizing terrorism. Since Dr. Singh made Pakistan a joint partner against terror, Western officials increasingly are speaking up about the Pakistani terrorist threat.

In January, then US National Intelligence Director John Negroponte testified that Pakistan is the hub of a global Al Qaeda web and “home for some top terrorist leaders”. Now his successor, Mike McConnell, says the US is “very worried” that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri are helping establish Qaeda training camps in Pakistan similar to those that operated pre-9/11 in Afghanistan.

Earlier, Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of British domestic intelligence, said that terrorist plots in Britain “often have links back to Al Qaeda in Pakistan” and that such links are “on an extensive and growing scale”. In the face of rising terror flow to Afghanistan, General Karl Eikenberry, the departing commander of coalition forces there, suggested last month that the US launch “a steady, direct attack” against terrorist command and control sanctuaries in Pakistan.

Now a senior US military official, General Douglas Lute, has disclosed that US forces in Afghanistan are engaging in hot pursuit of terrorists across the border into Pakistan. Lute contended that “we have all the authority we need to pursue, either with artillery fire or on the ground, across the border”.

As the third largest recipient of US aid, including counter-terrorism subsidies that alone totalled $4.8 billion between 2002 and 2006, Pakistan has become critically dependent on such assistance. Washington is now playing to that vulnerability.

It, however, has no intent to dump Musharraf. Just as it helped keep the jihad-spewing General Zia ul-Haq in power to take on Soviet forces in Afghanistan, it needs a pliant ruler in Islamabad today because it employs Pakistan as a gateway to military operations in Afghanistan, a base for clandestine missions into Iran and a vehicle for other geopolitical objectives, including vis-à-vis India.

Although President George W. Bush has made the spread of freedom a rallying cry, the democracy plank is merely to target regimes that defy the US. In the case of friendly but dictatorial regimes, like in Pakistan and most Arab nations, US policy recognizes that such governments can further American interests only if they stay insulated from the popular pressures of a democracy.

But what has India to gain by lending respectability to the Musharraf regime? Promoting regional peace is a sensible policy track. Yet let’s be clear: can New Delhi make peace with the Pakistan military whose power and prerogative flow from the absence of peace with India? This institution still values terrorist proxies to wage an unconventional war against India.

Make no mistake: the fight against international terrorism is very much tied to the future of Pakistan and the central challenge that country faces — to move away from militarism, extremism and fundamentalism, and toward a stable, moderate state. Today Pakistan is disparaged as “Problemistan”, “Terroristan” and “Al Qaidastan” — epithets that underline its potential threat to global security. Bush recently called Pakistan “wilder than the Wild West”.

Pakistan can deal with its central challenge only by building genuine democratic processes. Yet Bush and company, giving primacy to narrow, short-term geopolitical interests, still rely on the very institution that is part of the problem — the Pakistan military. They can do so because the US is distant and the fallout of their policy is still largely confined to the region. Recent US statements on Pakistan’s terrorist infrastructure have all been about its impact on NATO operations in Afghanistan, with not even a passing reference to the effect on India, suffering the world’s highest rate of terrorism.

To be sure, Bush is only emulating his predecessors who found Pakistani military rulers politically expedient to advance American interests. Sadly though, Vajpayee and more so Dr. Singh, in their exuberance to curry favour with the US, sought to align Indian policy with US policy on Pakistan in some critical respects. The Agra summit, for instance, was designed to bring Musharraf out of the international doghouse, with the White House taking New Delhi by surprise by peremptorily announcing its dates.

If India today finds itself internationally out on a limb, the blame lies with its mushiness on Musharraf. Smarmy zeal sans strategy also denies it geopolitical opportunity from the Baluchi insurrection and a resurgent Pashtun nationalism on both sides of the contentious Durand Line.

One expected New Delhi to insist that the US, in response to Musharraf’s dubious anti-terror record, suspend the sale of lethal, India-directed weapons to Pakistan. But mum is the word. Indeed such is the salient incongruity that a US protégé, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, speaks plainly about Pakistan’s cross-border terrorism while India toasts the terror sponsor as a partner. Is it thus any surprise that India is not even among the 12 nations identified as victims of terror in the White House’s national-security strategy report?

Few states put as much faith in diplomacy alone as India does. Yet Musharraf has a track record of yielding only to direct pressure. Within hours of Cheney reading the riot act to him, Musharraf had one of the Taliban’s top three leaders arrested. That man, Obaidullah Akhund — like other terrorist leaders captured in Pakistan after 9/11 — was found comfortably living in a Pakistani city!

Tellingly, all the terrorist figures captured and transferred to US authorities thus far have been non-Pakistanis. Pakistan’s home-grown, Al Qaeda-linked terrorist militias — cyclically changing their identities — continue to operate openly.

New Delhi must summon the vision and the will to do what is strategically right on Pakistan to help protect security at home. India needs to side with the Pakistani people and their democratic aspirations, not with a dictatorship that already has a lot of blood of innocent victims on its hands through a relentless proxy war.

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Terror threat emanating from Pakistan

Posted on March 1, 2007 by Chellaney

Thursday, March 1, 2007 Japan Times

Musharraf moves to stay

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

NEW DELHI — The fight against international terrorism is very much tied to the future of Pakistan and the central challenge that country faces: to move away from militarism, extremism and fundamentalism, and toward a stable, moderate state. That’s what makes Pakistani military ruler President Pervez Musharraf’s latest move so worrisome.

Quietly, without drawing international attention, Musharraf has unveiled his plan to stay enthroned for five more years beyond 2007. He intends to get the outgoing Parliament and four provincial legislatures to "elect" him to a new presidential term in the fall, before he oversees the long-awaited national polls a couple of months later.

Musharraf’s maneuver is the latest in a long series of broken promises to return his country to democracy. Although the new national polls are likely to be no different than the rigged voting of 2002, the advance re-election ruse indicates that Musharraf wishes to play it safe. His sinking popularity has spurred speculation that he might actually declare a state of emergency to smother vocal opposition.

But the more powers Musharraf has progressively assumed since the 1999 bloodless coup, the more dependent he has become on his military and intelligence, and thus the less capable he is to sever their cozy ties with extremist and terrorist elements.

It has become evident that the international war on terror cannot be won without deradicalizing Pakistan. Indeed, Musharraf’s chief benefactor, U.S. President George W. Bush, reportedly will send Musharraf a tough warning that the Democratic-led Congress may cut aid to Pakistan if it doesn’t do more to crack down on terrorism. On Monday, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney pressed Musharraf to do more to crack down on militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Despite global concerns about terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction, the current international spotlight on Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran helps obscure the danger that Pakistan — with terrorists and nuclear weapons controlled by Islamist generals — could be just one step away from our worst nightmare.

Indeed, Western officials have recently pointed to Pakistan’s centrality in the war on terror. In January, then U.S. National Intelligence Director John Negroponte told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that Pakistan is the hub of a global web of al-Qaida connections and "a major source of Islamist extremism and the home for some top terrorist leaders."

Hobbled by military rule, militant Islam, endemic corruption and dependency on foreign aid, Pakistan remains a main breeding ground of global terror and the likely hideout of the most wanted terrorists, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri. U.S. counterterrorism officials say bin Laden and al-Zawahri now feel more secure as al-Qaida has rebuilt its training camps in Pakistan’s tribal region of Waziristan.

With its use of Islam for legitimacy and promotion of militant groups as proxies, military rule in Pakistan has helped create greater opportunities for Islamists. Today, a military dictatorship that is part of the problem has presented itself to the outside world as part of the solution.

Musharraf oils his dictatorship with American aid, as did the previous Pakistani dictator, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, who spurred on the rise of the forces of jihad. Sadly, America’s narrow, immediate geopolitical objectives have continued to take precedence over longer-term interests. Just as the U.S. propped up Zia to take on Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s, it needs a pliant ruler today because it uses Pakistan for multiple objectives, including as a gateway to NATO military operations in Afghanistan and for reconnaissance missions into Iran. Bush’s looming confrontation with Iran has only enhanced Pakistan’s importance as a staging ground for U.S. anti-Iranian operations.

With Musharraf benefiting more than any other ruler in the world from the 9/11 events, Pakistan has emerged the third largest recipient of U.S. aid, including counterterrorism subsidies. In addition, America has helped Pakistan reschedule repayment of international debt totaling $ 13.5 billion, and is currently providing $ 5.1 billion in credit guarantees for Pakistani purchase of 62 F-16 fighter-jets.

Yet Pakistan’s internal problems have exacerbated. In a recent Transparency International survey, two-thirds of Pakistanis said this was the most corrupt regime since 1988, when Pakistan began experimenting with democracy for a decade following the previous dictator’s death in a mysterious plane crash. The 2006 Failed States Index of the Washington-based The Fund for Peace ranked Pakistan as the world’s ninth most dysfunctional state.

Musharraf has kept alive the myth that his rule helps prevent an Islamist takeover. But even if he were to leave, another general would succeed him. Far from being a bulwark against radicals, Musharraf has only helped marginalize and splinter mainstream parties, and allowed Islamists to gain political space.

Increasingly, many Pakistanis are acknowledging that at the root of their country’s problems is military rule. For example, columnist Ayaz Amir, writing in the Karachi-based Dawn newspaper, said, "Military rule has been the mother of extremism in Pakistan," adding, "We must return to being a normal country."

Without the military’s viselike grip on power being broken and the rogue Inter-Services Intelligence agency being cut to size, there is little hope of any real, sustained movement toward democracy or to deracinate the jihad culture in Pakistan.

In the absence of open elections and public accountability, military rule indeed has helped engender a pressure-cooker syndrome in Pakistani society, spurring greater extremism.

More ominously, Pakistan has emerged as a common thread in the investigations of most acts of international terrorism. As Musharraf himself acknowledged on July 21, 2005, in an address to the nation after the London subway bombings, "Wherever these extremist or terrorist incidents occur in the world, a direct or indirect connection is established with this country."

A key lesson from the rise of international terrorism is that export-oriented jihad structures do not flourish in democratic societies. Terrorism not only threatens the free, secular world but also springs from the rejection of democracy and secularism.

Helping drain the terrorism-breeding swamps in Pakistan won’t be easy. But it’s essential. The answer is not the jackboot, but the development of a robust civil society that can act as a check on the deleterious undercurrents. A well-developed civil society can emerge only on the back of sustained democracy.

Pakistan cannot put off forever its evolution toward a democratic polity. Democratization will cause pain in the short run but bring long-term benefits.

If free and fair elections were permitted, the mainstream political forces could still recover quickly. A civilian government will be both moderate and more inclined to stem rising extremism.

Musharraf’s move thwarts the key building block to deradicalize Pakistani society — true democratic participation. By empowering the masses and deciding issues at the ballot box, such participation establishes a safety valve in society. That is what Pakistan needs urgently.

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

Japan-India

Posted on February 28, 2007 by Chellaney

Thursday, Dec. 14, 2006 Japan Times

Japan-India partnership key to bolstering stability in Asia

Brahma Chellaney

NEW DELHI — Japan and India are natural allies because they have no conflict of strategic interests and actually share common goals to build stability, power equilibrium and institutionalized multilateral cooperation in Asia. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Tokyo this week offers an opportunity to the two countries to add real strategic content to their fast-developing relationship.

The ascension of Shinzo Abe as postwar-Japan’s youngest prime minister has symbolized the rise of an assertive, confident Japan eager to shape the evolving balance of power in Asia. Faced immediately with the crisis triggered by North Korea’s provocative nuclear test, Abe has pursued a pragmatic foreign policy while seeking to accelerate the nationalist shift in policy instituted by his predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi.

India, for its part, has moved from doctrinaire nonalignment to geopolitical pragmatism, reflected in the greater realism it displays in its economic and foreign policies. It has come to recognize that it can wield international power only through the accretion of its own economic and military strength. A close strategic and economic partnership with Japan chimes with its vision of a dynamic, multipolar Asia.

Close ties with Japan is an objective dear to Singh, whose host in Tokyo is a friend of India. Abe, in his book, Toward A Beautiful Country, published last July, declares that, “It is of crucial importance to Japan’s national interest that we further strengthen our relations with India.” Indeed, Abe optimistically states that “it will not be a surprise if in another 10 years, Japan-India relations overtake Japan-U.S. and Japan-China relations.”

To realize that scenario, Tokyo and New Delhi have to focus sustained attention on boosting their now-stagnant trade and building a multidimensional political relationship. The two also need to hold closer consultations on Asian economic and political issues, given that neither would like to see the emergence of a Sino-centric Asia.

Such is the international hype about China’s growth that it is frequently forgotten that Japan remains the world’s largest economic powerhouse after the United States, with an economy that is today double the size of China’s, with only a tenth of the population.

Tokyo may not share Beijing’s obsession with measures of national power, but Japan’s military establishment, except in the nuclear sphere, is already the most sophisticated in Asia.

Encouraged by economic recovery, with a 2% yearly Japanese growth translating into an additional output almost the size of the entire annual gross domestic product of Singapore and the Philippines, Japan is going through a quiet transition from pacifism to being a “normal” state. Today, even as it has reinvigorated military ties with the United States, it is beginning to cautiously shape an independent foreign policy and rethink its security.

India has also strengthened its relations with America. But from being non-aligned, India is likely to become multi-aligned, even as it preserves the kernel of nonalignment — strategic autonomy.

A key challenge for both Tokyo and New Delhi is to manage their increasingly intricate relationship with an ascendant China determined to emerge as Asia’s dominant power. Yet it makes sense for Japan and India to play down the competitive dynamics of their relationship with Beijing and put the accent on cooperation. This is what Abe and Singh have sought to do.

An emphasis on cooperation also suits China because it is in accord with its larger strategy to advertise its “peaceful rise.” China’s choir book indeed has been built around a nifty theme: its emergence as a great power is unstoppable, and it is thus incumbent on other nations to adjust to that rise.

A strong Japan, a strong China and a strong India need to find ways to reconcile their interests in Asia so that they can peacefully coexist and prosper. Never before in history have all three of these powers been strong at the same time. China’s emergence as a global player, however, is dividing, not uniting, Asia.

The sharpening energy geopolitics in Asia also undergirds the need for a strategic partnership between Japan and India, both heavily dependent on oil imports by sea from the Gulf region. Mercantilist efforts to assert control over energy supplies and transport routes, and strategic plans to assemble a “string of pearls” in the form of listening posts and special naval-access arrangements along vital sea-lanes of communication, certainly risk fueling tensions and discord.

Before the United States and India unveiled plans to build a global strategic partnership, it was Tokyo and New Delhi that agreed in August 2000 during Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori’s visit to develop a “Global Partnership of the 21^st Century.” Yet that proposal has moved forward rather slowly, even as India has overtaken China as the largest recipient of Japanese Overseas Development Assistance (ODA).

A recently released global-opinion poll by the Washington-based Pew Research Center showed the high positive rating Japan enjoys in India, and India in Japan, reflecting their close historical and cultural ties.

There is expectation that a true Indo-Japanese strategic partnership will now take off, given the foundation laid by an increasing number of high-level visitors. In the past year alone, Japan’s chief of joint staff as well as the chief of each of the three self-defense forces has visited India, while the Indian defense minister and the navy and air force chiefs have been to Japan.

Their partnership should seek to build greater defense cooperation, intelligence-sharing and joint initiatives on maritime security, counterterrorism, disaster prevention and management, and energy security. To maintain a peaceful environment that promotes security and economic growth, Tokyo and New Delhi need to promote institutional cooperation in Asia.

In that context, Abe’s idea of a four-sided strategic dialogue among Japan, India, Australia and the United States deserves careful reflection. A constellation of democracies tied together by strategic partnerships can help build Asian power equilibrium.

In the emerging Asia, the two major non-Western democracies, Japan and India, are set to become close partners. Their strategic relationship would help adjust balance-of-power equations in Asia and aid long-term stability.

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

Rising Nationalism in Asia

Posted on February 27, 2007 by Chellaney

Political parties that pander to nationalism and spread xenophobia threaten Asia’s economic and social renaissance. For example, Japanese politicians insist on making pilgrimages to war shrines, refusing to admit any remorse for atrocities committed during World War II. Countries, including China and Japan, tend to overlook history or develop their own warped version to invade territory, seize resources or insult old enemies. It’s in the best long-term interest of countries to reach a common understanding of history and past mistakes, express regret and then move on to focus on future goals – relying more on diplomacy and less on ugly rhetoric that benefits only a few political careers. – YaleGlobal

Japan-China: Nationalism on the Rise

Brahma Chellaney

The International Herald Tribune, 16 August 2006

With China and South Korea expressing anger after the visit Tuesday by Japan’s prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, to the Yasukuni war shrine, it will be tempting for the rest of the world to draw a simplistic message. A halt to such pilgrimages, one might think, could put an end to strategic antagonisms in East Asia.

The reality is that revisionist history is being employed as a political tool not only by Japan but also by those who have turned Yasukuni, where 14 top war criminals are honored, into a potent symbol of friction between countries. In fact, resurgent nationalism has become the single biggest threat to Asia’s renaissance.

For more than half a century, both China and Japan have been dominated by a single party that now finds pandering to nationalistic sentiment attractive in the face of an eroding political base. The spats over history also represent a tussle for leadership in East Asia at a time when China’s dramatic rise has begun to influence geopolitics.

China uses the Nanjing massacre and Japan uses the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings as national symbols of crimes by outsiders. Since China became Communist, it has employed purported history to gobble up Tibet, seize Indian territories, assert its claims in the East and South China Seas, and demand Taiwan’s "return."

Today, unassuaged historical grievances not only engender ugly nationalism but also help spread the virus of xenophobia to the homogenized societies of East Asia. Focusing on unsavory history amplifies mistrust and runs counter to the liberalizing elements of globalization.

Yasukuni, a private Shinto memorial to Japan’s war dead, is a symptom of the Asian malady, not the cause.

Koizumi’s annual visits as prime minister to Yasukuni, a legacy of pre-1945 Japanese militarism, have certainly been provocative, particularly his latest – his first on the highly symbolic Aug. 15 anniversary of Japan’s World War II surrender. Yet it would be naïve to assume that nationalism-mongering in East Asia will end if his successor were to avoid the shrine.

China’s use of the history card against Japan predates Koizumi’s Yasukuni visits. Even if Koizumi’s successor were to change course, Beijing would still be able to exploit the issue of controversial Japanese history textbooks and what it sees as Japan’s insufficient penitence for its 1931 occupation of Manchuria and 1937 invasion of Han China.

In fact, it was in the 1990s, when Japan was still China-friendly and the main aid provider to Beijing, that the Chinese Communists began a "political education" campaign demonizing Japan for its past atrocities. That campaign laid the groundwork for the upsurge of nationalism and the deterioration of China- Japan relations.

In seeking to address domestic political imperatives to replace the increasingly ineffectual Communist ideology with fervent nationalism, China’s rulers have helped whip up Japanese nationalism. That is the kind of political shortsightedness that could one day spell doom for the Communist hold on power.

Those who seek to turn Yasukuni into a bigger issue than it really is are not only taking sides but also playing into the hands of Japanese nationalists, gratuitously arming them with leverage and even encouraging them to raise the stakes.

It is thus little surprise that Foreign Minister Taro Aso last week called for turning Yasukuni into a state memorial, while Koizumi’s most likely successor, Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, publicly questioned the legitimacy of the Allied tribunal that convicted as "Class A" war criminals – guilty of "crimes against peace" – 14 leading figures who in 1978 were added to Yasukuni’s rolls. For his part, Koizumi has used Yasukuni to stand up to China and fashion an extraordinary legacy pivoted on a nationalist shift in policy.

In his five years in office, Koizumi has not only built popular support for revision of the U.S.-imposed pacifist Constitution but also laid the foundation for the emergence of a more muscular Japan. To the nationalists, his Yasukuni visits epitomize Japan’s return to being a "normal" state.

Both Japan and China need to break free from history. Yet in April 2005, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China demanded that Japan "face up to history squarely," setting the stage for his country’s scripted anti-Japanese mob protests.

While railing against the risk of renewed Japanese militarism in Asia, Wen appeared oblivious to the fact that while Japan has fought no conflict in the past 60 years, China has waged wars on several flanks in the years since it came under Communist rule. Before asking Japan for yet another apology for its atrocities, China should face up to its more recent history of aggression by apologizing to the Tibetans, Indians and Vietnamese.

Disputes over Yasukuni, history textbooks, war museums and xenophobic cultural programming need to be resolved through quiet diplomacy, not an outpouring of inflammatory rhetoric that incites more forbidding nationalism.

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

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