Do international rules apply only to weaker states?

Posted on December 24, 2013 by Chellaney

By Brahma Chellaney

On the face of it, there is nothing in common between China’s Nov. 23 declaration of an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) extending to territories it does not control and America’s Dec. 12 arrest, strip-search and handcuffing of a New York-based Indian diplomat for allegedly underpaying a nanny she had brought with her from India. Still, these actions epitomize these powers’ unilateralist approach to international law.

A just, rules-based global order has long been touted by powerful states as essential for international peace and security. Yet there is a long history of major powers using international law against other states but not complying with it themselves, and even reinterpreting or making new multilateral rules to further their interests. The League of Nations failed because it could not punish or deter some powers from flouting international law.

Today, the United States and China serve as prime examples of a unilateralist approach to international relations, even as they aver support for strengthening international rules and institutions.

Take the U.S.: Its refusal to join a host of critical international treaties — ranging from the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the 1997 UN Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses to the 1998 International Criminal Court Statute — has set a bad precedent. Add to the picture its international “invasions” in various forms, including cyber warfare and Orwellian surveillance, drone attacks, and regime-change interventions.

Unilateralism has remained the leitmotif of U.S. foreign policy, regardless of whether a Democrat or a Republican is in the White House. Forget international law, President Barack Obama bypassed even Congress when he militarily effected a regime change in 2011 in Libya — an intervention that has backfired, sowing chaos and turning that country into a breeding ground for Al Qaeda-linked, transnational militants, some of whom assassinated the American ambassador there.

Carrying out foreign military interventions by cobbling coalitions together under the watchword “you’re either with us or against us” has exacted — as Iraq and Afghanistan attest — a staggering cost in blood and treasure without advancing U.S. interests in a tangible or sustainable manner.

Meanwhile, China’s growing geopolitical heft has emboldened its muscle-flexing and territorial nibbling in Asia, in disregard of international norms. China rejects some of the same treaties that the U.S. has declined to join, including the International Criminal Court Statute and the Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses — the first law that lays down rules on the shared resources of transnational rivers, lakes and aquifers.

China has established a hydro-supremacy unparalleled in the world by annexing the starting places of multiple major international rivers — the Tibetan plateau and Xinjiang — and working to reengineer cross-border flows by building dams, barrages, and other structures. Yet China — the source of transboundary river flows to more countries than any other hydro-hegemon — rejects the very concept of water sharing and refuses to enter into institutionalized arrangements with any neighbor.

At the same time, China has been pressing steadily outward on its borders, intimidating its neighbors through military incursions as part of a relentless territorial creep.

China has never been as large as it is today, except when it was ruled by the foreign Mongol and Manchu dynasties. Yet China remains territorially a revolutionary power bent on upending the status quo in Asia. Its assertive claims rooted in revisionist history, along with its penchant for brinkmanship, threaten Asian peace and stability.

Through a strategy of “extended coercion,” China is waging creeping, covert warfare in Asia while seeking to neutralize U.S. extended deterrence so as to keep America at bay. Washington, far from coming to the aid of its allies and strategic partners, has chartered a course of neutrality on sovereignty disputes to help protect its deep engagement with China.

America’s appeal to China to act as a “responsible stakeholder” in the global system undergirds the need for the two powers to address their geopolitical dissonance. Yet the world’s most-powerful democracy and autocracy have much in common on how they approach international law.

For example, the precedent that the U.S. set in a 1984 International Court of Justice (ICJ) case filed by Nicaragua still resonates globally, underscoring that might remains right in international relations, instead of the rule of law.

The ICJ held that Washington violated international law both by aiding the contras in their insurrection against the Nicaraguan government and by mining Nicaragua’s harbors. The U.S. — which refused to participate in the proceedings after the court rejected its argument that it lacked jurisdiction to hear the case — blocked the judgment’s enforcement by the U.N. Security Council, preventing Nicaragua from obtaining any compensation.

The only important country that has still not ratified UNCLOS is the U.S., preferring to reserve the right to act unilaterally. Yet it seeks to draw benefits from this convention, including freedom of navigation of the seas.

China, for its part, still appears to hew to Mao Zedong’s belief that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” So it will not consider international adjudication to resolve its territorial claims in, say, the South China Sea, more than 80 percent of which it now claims arbitrarily.

Indeed, it ratified UNCLOS only to reinterpret its provisions and unveil a nine-dashed claim line in the South China Sea and draw enclosing baselines around the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. Worse still, China has refused to accept the UNCLOS dispute-settlement mechanism in order to remain unfettered in altering facts on the ground.

The Philippines, which has lost effective control to a creeping China of first the Scarborough Shoal and then the Second Thomas Shoal since 2012, has filed a complaint against Beijing with the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS). Beijing, however, has simply refused to participate in the proceedings, as if it were above international law.

Whatever the tribunal’s decision, Beijing will simply shrug it off. Only the Security Council can enforce any international tribunal’s judgment on a noncompliant state. But China wields a veto there and will block enforcement of an adverse ruling, just as the U.S. did in the Nicaraguan case.

Even so, Beijing has mounted punitive pressures on Manila to withdraw its case, which seeks to invalidate China’s nine-dashed line. Beijing’s precondition that the Philippines abandon its case forced President Benigno Aquino to cancel his visit to the China-ASEAN Expo in Nanning three months ago.

Beijing’s new air-defense zone, while aimed at solidifying its claims to territories held by Japan and South Korea, is provocative because it extends to areas China does not control, setting a dangerous precedent in international relations. China and Japan, and China and South Korea, now have “dueling” ADIZs, increasing the risks of armed conflict, especially between Japan and China, in an atmosphere of nationalist grandstanding over conflicting claims.

Japan has asked its airlines to ignore China’s demand for advance notification of flights even if they are merely transiting the new zone and not heading toward Chinese territorial airspace. By contrast, the Obama administration has advised U.S. carriers to obey the prior-notification demand.

There is a reason why Washington has taken a different stance on this issue than its ally Japan: Although the prior-notification rule in American policy applies only to aircraft headed for U.S. national airspace, the U.S., in actual practice, demands advance notification of all civilian and military flights through its ADIZ, regardless of their intended destination.

If other countries emulated the example set by China and the U.S. to establish unilateral claims to international airspace, a dangerous situation would result. Before every country asserts the right to establish an ADIZ with its own standards, binding multilateral rules must be created to ensure the safety of the fast-growing commercial air traffic. But who will take the lead in this direction — the two countries that have pursued a unilateralist approach on this issue?

Now consider the case of the Indian diplomat, whose treatment India’s national security adviser called “despicable and barbaric.” The 39-year-old diplomat was arrested and handcuffed as she dropped off her daughter at a Manhattan school, then stripped and cavity-searched and kept in a cell with drug addicts and prostitutes for several hours before posting $250,000 bail.

True, this consular official enjoyed only limited diplomatic immunity under the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (VCCR), unlike embassy-based diplomats who have broad protection under the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (VCDR). But the VCCR guarantees freedom from detention until trial and conviction, except for “grave offenses.”

Can a wage dispute between a diplomat and her nanny qualify as a “grave offense” warranting arrest and humiliation? The U.S. would not have dared to arrest a Chinese or Russian diplomat for a similar offense. In fact, just days earlier on Dec. 5, when New York prosecutors charged 49 past or present Russian diplomats and their spouses for an alleged $1.5 million Medicaid fraud, no one was arrested, let alone strip-searched and handcuffed, although some of the defendants still worked in New York at the Russian Consulate and the Russian Mission to the United Nations.

The U.S. had no legal grounds to arrest the Indian diplomat because the alleged offense — violating an agreement on the wages of a single employee — cannot pass the “grave” test. The issue was not immunity but inviolability (from arrest, strip-search, and handcuffing) as guaranteed by the VCCR. Instead of treating her as a criminal, why didn’t the U.S. simply ask India to withdraw her? Would the U.S. tolerate similar treatment of one of its consular officers?

The harsh truth is that the U.S. interprets the VCCR restrictively at home but liberally overseas so as to shield even the spies and contractors it sends. A classic case involved the CIA contractor Raymond Davis — supposedly an “adviser” at the American consulate in Lahore, Pakistan — who fatally shot two men in 2011 on a Lahore street. Claiming that Davis was a bona fide diplomat who enjoyed immunity from prosecution, Washington accused Pakistan of “illegally detaining” him, with Obama defending him as “our diplomat.”

The U.S. included the name of Davis on the list of its diplomats serving in Pakistan only after he committed the double murder, according to Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s then ambassador to the U.S. The U.S. ultimately secured his release by paying “blood money” of about $2.4 million to the relatives of the men he killed.

When the U.S. invokes immunity for one of its diplomats, it is never for a trifling offense, such as underpayment to a nanny. In a case last July, the U.S. spirited out a diplomat from Kenya barely 24 hours after he rammed his speeding SUV into a full minibus, killing one and wounding eight others.

China, for its part, has not ratified even the U.N. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It persists with gross human-rights abuses.

Despite a widely held belief that the present international system is pivoted on rules, the fact is that major powers are rule makers and rule imposers, not rule takers. They have a propensity to violate or manipulate international law when it is in their interest to do so.

Given the innately self-calculating and self-aggrandizing human nature, nations — like individuals — have all through history sought to gain dominance over the weaker ones. The advent of new technologies and reduced transportation costs has made the world increasingly interdependent in trade and capital flows, with the interdependencies extending to technological, public-health, environmental, and climate spheres. Globalization, in turn, has spurred new international treaties and rules.

Yet the more the world has changed, the more it has remained the same in one basic aspect — the stronger still dominate the weaker.

While the weak remain meek, strength respects strength. The U.S. and China are careful not to tread on each other’s toes. Neither is willing to challenge the other directly.

China’s assertiveness has been largely directed at its neighbors. It did not veto the U.N. Security Council resolution on Libya that NATO used as a cover to oust the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. The U.S., for its part, has not only refused to take sides in the sovereignty disputes between China and its neighbors, but also failed to honor its Mutual Defense Treaty obligations with the Philippines despite China’s effective seizure of the Scarborough Shoal and the Second Thomas Shoal. Indeed, Washington has looked the other way as Beijing — in defiance of the guidelines of the U.S.-led Nuclear Suppliers Group (of which China is a member) — launched work on two new nuclear-power reactors in Pakistan in November 2013, in addition to the two reactors already in advanced stage of construction.

Universal conformity to a rules-based international order thus is still not on the horizon. Indeed, the real issue is as to who will guard the supposed guardians of the international system.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist. You can follow him on Twitter: @Chellaney.

China’s game of chicken

Posted on December 14, 2013 by Chellaney

BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Japan Times

China’s Nov. 23 declaration of an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) extending to territories it does not control is just the latest example of its jurisdictional creep that reflects a larger strategy to supplant the United States as the preeminent power in Asia. Yet U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has responded to China’s aggression with words of cautious criticism but no castigatory step, not even delaying Vice President Joe Biden’s Beijing visit. China gave no ground to Biden during his Dec. 4-5 visit.

Washington has not explicitly called on China to roll back the ADIZ. Indeed, with its advisory to U.S. airlines to respect China’s new ADIZ, it has opened a rift with ally Japan at a time when the imperative is for presenting a united front against an escalatory action that even Biden admits is “a unilateral attempt to change the status quo in the East China Sea,” causing “significant apprehension in the region.”

Japan has asked its carriers to ignore China’s demand for advance notification of flights even if they are merely transiting the new zone and not heading toward Chinese airspace. This demand, unusual by international ADIZ standards, impinges on the principle of freedom of navigation of the skies.

Washington is signaling that if Beijing backed away from this unusual demand and set up a military hotline with Tokyo to forestall an accidental military flare-up, it may be willing to live with the Chinese ADIZ — a position certain to displease Japan.

Let’s be clear: At stake in the East China Sea are not just some flyspeck islands but regional power balance, a rules-based order, freedom of navigation of the skies and seas, and access to maritime resources, including seabed minerals. If China gets its way, the path to a Sino-centric Asia would open.

As China accumulates economic and military power, it has increasingly taken to flexing its muscles, ratcheting up territorial disputes with multiple neighbors and seeking to alter the status quo in Asia through surprise actions. This is alienating it from its neighbors and further calling into question its “peaceful rise” claim.

The ADIZ establishment was cleverly timed to coincide with the unveiling of the interim Iran nuclear deal in Geneva so as to take advantage of the U.S. and international distraction. Shrewdly timing an action and achieving a major tactical surprise against an opponent are key elements in China’s strategic doctrine.

China’s latest action is a reminder that Obama must turn his attention from the preoccupations of the Middle East to the potentially combustible situation in East Asia. To make the promise of his Asian “pivot” real, he must be willing to assert U.S. leadership in order to help tame China’s belligerence and reassure allies.

Sending two unarmed B-52 bombers on “routine” runs through the Chinese ADIZ was tokenism that cannot obscure the need for crafting a credible response. Unfortunately, Obama seems more interesting in balancing America’s relationships in Asia than in checkmating an aggressive China.

Obama’s Asia policy seeks to reap the benefits of building closer engagement with Asian states — including China, now central to U.S. economic and strategic interests — while charting a course of neutrality on sovereignty disputes. This delicate balancing act, however, implies strategic and moral equivalence, even though the coercion and aggression is largely by China against states that are America’s allies or strategic partners.

For example, in the current geopolitical crisis, Washington is urging restraint also on Japan’s part, lest any escalation force the U.S. to take sides, undermining its policy to manage China’s rise without trying to contain it. Washington is seeking to manage Sino-Japanese tensions, too, by urging both sides to tamp down their nationalistic rhetoric and reduce the risk of escalation or miscalculation through crisis-management and confidence-building measures. This is the message Biden took to Tokyo and Beijing.

Yet the focus on the dual management of China’s rise and Sino-Japanese tensions obfuscates the broader test of power in the Asia-Pacific that Chinese actions represent. It also obscures the then U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ January 2011 warning that China’s long-term goal is to push the United States and its military assets farther out in the Pacific.

In this light, the Obama administration’s stance not to challenge China directly only aids its creeping aggression in Asia.

China is nibbling at territories held by several neighbors, as highlighted by growing Chinese incursions across the long, disputed Himalayan border with India, its success in outwitting the Philippines to gain effective control of the Scarborough Shoal and the Second Thomas Shoal, and its aggressive moves against Vietnam over their unsettled maritime boundary.

Its self-declared ADIZ in the East China Sea even covers the sky over the South Korean-held Leodo Isle (“Suyan Rock” to Beijing), prompting Seoul to expand its own air-defense zone.

China’s ADIZ, while aimed at solidifying its claims to territories held by Japan and South Korea, increases regional tensions and the risks of Sino-Japanese conflict.

Compelling aircraft transiting the zone to accept the new Chinese rules won’t be easy for Beijing, given China’s limited early warning radar and in-flight refueling capabilities and the refusal of some neighboring states, especially Japan, to fall in line. As part of its step-by-step strategy, however, Beijing has no intention to enforce the zone immediately.

Efforts at enforcement will come later when circumstances are more favorable. Right now, the priority of China’s leaders is to prevail in the dangerous game of chicken that they have started.

If China is able to ride out international criticism while holding its ground, it will be emboldened to set up — as Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera has warned — a similarly expansive air-defense zone in the South China Sea, more than 80 percent of which it now formally claims. A Chinese government spokesman said Nov. 27, according to Xinhua, that “China will set up other ADIZs in due time after completing relevant preparations.”

That is why it is important for the U.S. to draw the line now over China’s territorial creep. Otherwise, China — in the absence of any geopolitical blowback — will continue to subvert the status quo in the East and South China Seas, along its border with India, and even on the cross-border flows of Asia’s major rivers, which originate in the Chinese-annexed Tibetan plateau.

Without a concerted U.S.-led effort to push back against China’s aggression in the East China Sea, it won’t be long before another Chinese encroachment occurs.

Brahma Chellaney, a geostrategist, is the author, most recently, of “Water, Peace, and War” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).

Water Woes in Asia

Posted on December 14, 2013 by Chellaney

By Brahma Chellaney, World Policy, Winter 2013/2014

Asia faces a dilemma. The continent has the lowest global per capita freshwater resources, less than half the global annual average of 222,480 cubic feet per head. At the same time, Asia has the fastest growing demand for water in the world. Asia can in no sense remain the engine of global economic growth without addressing its water crisis.

In an increasingly water-stressed Asia, the struggle for water is escalating political tensions and intensifying the impact on eco-systems. The water situation will worsen in the fastest growing Asian economies as well as in less developed countries where fertility rates remain high. In many Asian countries, decisions about where to place new manufacturing or energy plants are increasingly constrained by inadequate local water availability. The World Bank has estimated the economic cost of China’s water shortages at 2.3 percent of its GDP. China, however, is not yet under “water stress”—a term defined as the availability of less than 60,000 cubic feet of water per person per year. But already water-stressed economies, from South Korea to India, are paying a higher price.

It is against this background that water wars are being waged between competing states in several regions. Tactics include building dams on international rivers or, if the country is located downstream, resorting to coercive diplomacy to prevent such construction. In the case of Sino-Indian relations, water is becoming a key security issue and a potential source of serious discord. China, having established hydro-supremacy by annexing the starting places of multiple major international rivers, is now pursuing an increasingly ambitious dam-building program on the Tibetan plateau, which threatens to diminish international river flows into India and other states that share these same upland water sources.

Averting water wars demands rules-based cooperation, water sharing, and dispute settlement mechanisms. China, however, is working to get its hand on Asia’s water tap by constructing an extensive upstream hydro-infrastructure. China does not have a single water-sharing treaty with any of its neighbors.

India, by contrast, has water-sharing treaties with its two downstream neighbors—Pakistan and Bangladesh, covering the Indus and Ganges Rivers and setting new precedents in international water law. In the 1996 Ganges Pact, India guaranteed Bangladesh an equal share of the downstream flows during the difficult dry season. The 1960 Indus Treaty remains the world’s most generous water-sharing arrangement. India agreed to set aside 80 percent of the waters of the six-river Indus system for Pakistan indefinitely, in the hope that it could trade water for peace.

A central issue facing Asia is the need to persuade China’s leaders to institutionalize cooperation with neighboring states on shared resources. Given China’s centrality in Asia’s water map, its rush to build more giant dams promises to upset relations across Asia, imperiling prospects for establishing any rules-based Asian water regime.

Brahma Chellaney is the author of Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) and the earlier book, Water: Asia’s New Battleground, which won the 2012 Bernard Schwartz Award.

Draw the line now on China’s encroachment

Posted on December 5, 2013 by Chellaney

BRAHMA CHELLANEY, Special to The Globe and Mail, December 05, 2013

China’s declaration of a so-called air defence identification zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea, extending to territories it does not control, is just the latest example of a jurisdictional creep that reflects a larger Chinese strategy to supplant the United States as the pre-eminent power in Asia. Yet U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has responded with words of cautious criticism but no castigatory step, not even delaying Vice-President Joe Biden’s visit to Beijing.

Worse still, with its advisory to U.S. airlines to respect the zone, Washington has opened a rift with ally Japan at a time when the imperative is for presenting a united front against an escalatory act that even Mr. Biden admits is “a unilateral attempt to change the status quo in the East China Sea.” Japan has asked its carriers to ignore China’s demand for advance notification of flights even when they are transiting the new zone and not heading toward Chinese airspace. This demand, unusual by international ADIZ standards, impinges on the principle of freedom of navigation of the skies.

Let’s be clear: At stake are not just some flyspeck islands but regional power balance, a rules-based order, freedom of navigation, and access to maritime resources, including seabed minerals. If China gets its way, it will unlock the path to a Sino-centric Asia.

As China accumulates economic and military power, it has increasingly taken to ratcheting up territorial disputes with multiple neighbours. It’s seeking to alter the territorial and maritime status quo.

The ADIZ establishment was cleverly timed to coincide with the unveiling of the interim Iran nuclear deal in Geneva. Shrewdly timing an action and achieving major tactical surprise against an adversary are key elements in China’s strategic doctrine.

It is a reminder that Mr. Obama must turn his attention from the Middle East to the potentially combustible situation in East Asia. To make the promise of his Asian “pivot” real, the President must be willing to assert U.S. leadership in order to help tame China’s belligerence and reassure allies.

Sending two unarmed B-52 bombers on routine runs through the Chinese ADIZ was tokenism that cannot obscure the need for crafting a credible U.S. response. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama seems more interesting in balancing America’s relationships in Asia than in checkmating an aggressive China.

Mr. Obama’s Asia policy seeks to reap the benefits of building closer engagement with Asian states – including China, now central to U.S. economic and strategic interests – while charting a course of neutrality on sovereignty disputes. This delicate balancing act, however, implies strategic and moral equivalence, even though the coercion and aggression is largely by China against states that are U.S. allies or strategic partners.

For example, in the ADIZ crisis, Washington is also urging restraint on Japan’s part, lest any escalation force the U.S. to take sides. Washington is seeking to manage Sino-Japanese tensions by urging both sides to tamp down their nationalistic rhetoric and reduce the risk of escalation or miscalculation through crisis-management and confidence-building measures. This is the message Mr. Biden took to Tokyo and Beijing.

Yet the focus on the dual management of China’s rise and Sino-Japanese tensions obfuscates the broader test of power the Chinese actions represent. It also obscures then U.S. defence secretary Robert Gates’s 2011 warning that China’s long-term goal is to push the United States and its military assets farther out in the Pacific.

In this light, the U.S. position of not challenging China directly only emboldens creeping aggression.

China is nibbling at territories held by several neighbours, as highlighted by its growing incursions across the disputed Himalayan border with India, its success in outwitting the Philippines to gain effective control of the Scarborough Shoal and the Second Thomas Shoal, and its aggressive moves against Vietnam over their unsettled maritime boundary. Its self-declared ADIZ even covers the sky over the South Korean-held Leodo Isle, which Beijing calls the Suyan Rock.

China’s zone, while aimed at solidifying its claims to territories held by Japan and South Korea, increases the risks of Sino-Japanese conflict arising from miscalculation or accident. Compelling aircraft to accept the new Chinese rules won’t be easy for Beijing, given China’s limited early-warning radar and in-flight refuelling capabilities and the refusal of some neighbouring states, especially Japan, to fall in line.

As part of its step-by-step strategy, however, Beijing has no intention of enforcing the zone immediately. Enforcement will come later, when circumstances are more favourable. Right now, the priority of China’s leaders is to prevail in their game of chicken.

If China is able to ride out international criticism while holding its ground, it will be emboldened to set up a similar zone in the South China Sea, more than 80 per cent of which it now formally claims. According to Xinhua, a government spokesman “said China will set up other ADIZs in due time after completing relevant preparations.”

That is why it is important for the United States to draw the line now. Without a concerted effort to push back against aggression, it won’t be long before another encroachment.

Brahma Chellaney, a geostrategist, is the author, most recently, of Water, Peace, and War.

An endless stay in Afghanistan

Posted on December 4, 2013 by Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney, Mint, December 4, 2013

Last May, US President Barack Obama recalled the warning of James Madison — America’s fourth president — that “no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare”. Yet, despite ending the decade-long US occupation of war-ravaged Iraq, Obama hasn’t exactly been a man of peace. He militarily engineered a regime change in Libya that has backfired, plunging that country in chaos. He almost went to war against Syria before a Russian initiative forced him to abort the planned attack. CIA’s training and arming of rebels, however, is helping to turn Syria into another Afghanistan.

In this light, it may surprise few that Obama has had second thoughts on his promise to bring home by the end of next year all the 45,000 American troops currently in Afghanistan, where the US is waging what already is the longest war in its history. Indeed, he has opted for US military bases and counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan post-2014 by maintaining a large residual force of up to 12,000 NATO troops, mostly American.

Obama’s recent security accord with Afghan President Hamid Karzai dooms America to a perpetual but low-intensity war post-2014 in lawless Afghanistan. The agreement permits a US-led counterterrorism and training mission lasting “until the end of 2024 and beyond” unless terminated with two years’ advance notice. This will mean virtually indefinite US troop presence in Afghanistan with a mandate, as the text says, to “conduct combat operations”.

Before clinching the accord with Karzai, Obama did not consult with the US Congress about the merits of committing America to long-term military engagement in Afghanistan. Congress had allowed his predecessor, George W. Bush, to use military force against those who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 9/11 attacks, as well as against governments that harboured them — a limited authority that spawned an expansive military intervention that has already cost nearly a trillion dollars and killed tens of thousands of people over the past 12 years.

Even before any US debate on his decision to go in for strong military basing in Afghanistan, Obama has mounted increasing pressure on Karzai to sign the agreement by December end. He sent his national security adviser, Susan Rice, to Kabul recently to warn the Afghan leader that failure to do so would compel Washington to withdraw all troops before 2015.

The Loya Jirga, or assembly of Afghan tribal leaders, has put its imprimatur on the accord, which grants the US important concessions, including a controversial immunity for American troops from Afghan law and permitting US special operations forces to conduct raids on private Afghan homes. Washington leveraged the promise of billions of dollars in annual security and economic aid to cash-strapped Afghanistan to secure these concessions. However, Karzai — concerned about leaving behind a legacy as the main facilitator of a long-term US military presence — has threatened to delay the signing until his successor is elected in next April’s presidential election.

In any event, Obama needs a separate deal with the Afghan Taliban, or else US military bases would likely come under intense insurgent attacks after 2014. Indeed, Washington is seeking to cut a broader deal with the Taliban to allow it to “honourably end” the war next year — an objective that has prompted it to kiss and make up with Pakistan, which shelters the top Taliban leadership. Washington recently restored its $1.6-billion aid flow to Islamabad.

Obama’s post-2014 Afghan strategy risks perpetuating the same mistake that has led America to falter in the ongoing war — limiting US military operations to Afghanistan in the binational Afpak region that has become a single geopolitical unit, with militant sanctuaries, command-and-control structure and support infrastructure for the Afghan insurgency located on the other side of the Durand Line. Terrorism and insurgency have never been defeated anywhere in the world without cutting off transboundary sustenance and support.

In recent years, the US has carried out from Afghanistan a series of air and drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal Waziristan region, targeting the nemesis of the Pakistani military — the Pakistani Taliban. But to preserve the option of reaching a Faustian bargain with its main battlefield opponent — the Afghan Taliban — the US has not carried out a single air, drone or ground attack against that militia’s leadership, which is ensconced in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, to the south of Waziristan.

In seeking to co-opt the Afghan Taliban, Washington seems unconcerned that it is bestowing legitimacy on a terrorist militia which, according to a recent UN report, raised $155 million last year from illicit opium production. Even if Washington succeeded in cutting a deal with the motley Afghan Taliban, powerful factions within the militia may not honour it.

Obama has not explained how a residual American force, even if sizable, would make a difference in Afghanistan when a much larger force is staring at defeat. A long-term US military presence, besides boosting the militants’ cause, will compel Washington to work with the Janus-faced Pakistani army and intelligence. But if the Afghan Taliban returned to power with Pakistan’s support post-2014, the development would unleash a fresh reign of Islamist terror and allow transnational terrorists to re-establish a major base in Afghanistan, thereby sucking US forces into bloody counterterrorism operations. It would be as if history had come full circle.

Brahma Chellaney is a professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Resource crisis threatens Asia’s rise

Posted on December 3, 2013 by Chellaney

BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Nikkie Asian Review

Asian economies facing a domestic resource crunch are being forced increasingly to rely on imported mineral ores, timber and fossil fuels, bringing international supplies under pressure and triggering price volatility. Yet Asia, paradoxically, is the world’s economic locomotive. Its resource constraints raise the question of whether the region can continue to spearhead global economic growth.

Essentially, Asia’s rise has fueled an insatiable appetite for resources it does not have. Unlike North America and Europe, which are well endowed with natural capital, Asia is the world’s most resource-poor continent in per-capita terms.

Resource-poor

This is best exemplified by the world’s two most populous countries, China and India. India has 17.8% of the world’s population but just 0.8% of its known oil and gas reserves. In water resources, India must make do with only 4.3% of the world’s water.

China, for its part, supports 19% of the world’s population on its territory with a 6.6% share of global water resources. It has fairly rich hydrocarbon reserves in Xinjiang, a territory it forcibly absorbed, along with Tibet, a treasure-trove of natural resources. Yet China is a leading importer of oil and gas — a fact that has shaped its aggressive international and domestic strategies to lock up long-term resource supplies.

Even as resource-wealthy countries such as Australia, Brazil, Canada and Russia enjoy commodities export booms, Asia’s resource struggle has brought it to a treacherous point of growing external dependency, geopolitical tensions and environmental degradation.

On the security front, sharpening Asian competition over natural resources has served to aggravate disputes over resource-rich territories, including in the East and South China Seas and in southern and central Asia. For instance, the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands that China now assertively covets occupy just 7 sq. km but are surrounded by rich hydrocarbon reserves. Similarly, the disputed Spratly Islands sprawl over more than 425,000 sq. km of the South China Sea but contain less than 4 sq. km of land area.

The common factor in territorial issues over Kashmir, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, Tibet and Central Asia’s divided Ferghana Valley is that they are more about resources than about land. These territories are desirable as wellsprings of natural resources.

Asia’s overexploitation of its own natural resources, meanwhile, has spurred an environmental crisis which, in turn, is contributing to regional climate change. Asia confronts three interlinked crises — focused on resources, environment and climate change — that threaten its economic, social, and ecological future. From Asian cities that dominate the list of the world’s most polluted cities to many urban areas suffering acute water shortages, the region faces intensifying resource-related stresses.

Whereas Asian economies can import fossil fuels, mineral ores and timber, they cannot import the most vital resource — water, shortages of which are accentuating food-security challenges. Increases in crop yields and overall food production in Asia are now lagging demand growth. Rising incomes have driven a shift in diets, especially towards meat, which requires a notoriously water-intensive production process.

The resource competition has also intensified interstate tensions over the direction of oil and gas pipelines. China has managed to secure new hydrocarbon supplies through pipelines from Russia, Kazakhstan and Myanmar. But other major Asian economies, such as Japan, India and South Korea lack direct access to such pipeline supply routes and will remain largely dependent on energy imports by sea from the increasingly unstable Persian Gulf region.

Strained relations

Historically, access to resources has been a critical factor in both war and peace. For example, Japan — a U.S. ally in World War I — became America’s principal foe in World War II after launching a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in desperation over U.S. oil, steel and scrap-metal embargoes. America’s invasion of oil-rich Iraq a decade ago had a resource motive. Today, natural resources are at the hub of various Asian conflicts.

Asia’s resource-related “Great Game” can be prevented from injecting greater instability only by establishing rules-based cooperation and competition. Lamentably, there has been little headway in this direction. For example, 53 of Asia’s 57 transnational river basins have no water-sharing arrangement or other cooperative mechanisms. This reality needs to be seen in the context of strained political relations in most Asian subregions.

Those who believe that Asia’s continued rise is unstoppable and the West’s decline inevitable should consider whether Asian economies can keep making impressive economic strides without mitigating their resource challenges through greater efficiency of use, recycling and other innovative means. Ultimately, Asia must find ways to build a more sustainable and peaceful future for itself.

Brahma Chellaney, a geostrategist, is professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and is an author, most recently, of “Water, Peace, and War” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).

Creeping China

Posted on December 3, 2013 by Chellaney

By Brahma Chellaney

A Project Syndicate column internationally syndicated

Brahma Chellaney picks apart China’s self-described “cabbage” strategy, designed to secure hegemony in Asia.

China’s growing geopolitical heft is emboldening its territorial creep in Asia. After laying claim formally to more than 80% of the South China Sea, it has just established a so-called air defense identification zone in the East China Sea, raising the odds of armed conflict with Japan and threatening the principle of freedom of navigation of the seas and skies. Meanwhile, the People’s Republic continues to nibble furtively at territory across the long, disputed Himalayan border with India.

Few seem to fathom the logic behind China’s readiness to take on several neighbors simultaneously. China is seeking to alter the status quo gradually as part of a high-stakes effort to extend its control to strategic areas and resources. President Xi Jinping’s promise of national greatness — embodied in the catchphrase “China dream” — is tied as much to achieving regional hegemony as to internal progress.

China’s approach reflects what the Chinese general Zhang Zhaozhong this year called a “cabbage” strategy: assert a territorial claim and gradually surround the area with multiple layers of security, thus denying access to a rival. The strategy relies on a steady progression of steps to outwit opponents and create new facts on the ground.

This approach severely limits rival states’ options by confounding their deterrence plans and making it difficult for them to devise proportionate or effective counter-measures. This is partly because the strategy — while bearing all the hallmarks of modern Chinese brinkmanship, including reliance on stealth, surprise, and a disregard for the risks of military escalation — seeks to ensure that the initiative remains with China.

The pattern has become familiar: construct a dispute, initiate a jurisdictional claim through periodic incursions, and then increase the frequency and duration of such intrusions, thereby establishing a military presence or pressuring a rival to cut a deal on China’s terms. What is ours is ours, the Chinese invariably claim, and what is yours is negotiable. For example, China says “no foundation for dialogue” with Japan exists unless the Japanese accept the existence of a territorial dispute over the uninhabited Senkaku Islands.

Here, as elsewhere, China has painted its rival as the obstructionist party. As Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi put it, “Japan needs to recognize that there is such a dispute. The whole world knows that there is a dispute.” But there is a dispute only because China has succeeded in shaking the status quo in recent years by popularizing the islands’ Chinese name (“Diaoyu”) and staging incursions into their territorial waters and airspace.

After steadily increasing the frequency of those incursions since September 2012, China has recently begun increasing their duration. The establishment of a new air defense identification zone extending over the islands is its latest cabbage-style security “layer” — a unilateral power grab that US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel quickly branded “a destabilizing attempt to alter the status quo in the region.” The zone even covers the sky over the Leodo (Suyan) Reef, a submerged rock that both South Korea and China claim. As China escalates its campaign of attrition against a resolute Japan, it increases the risk of armed conflict, whether by accident or miscalculation.

China’s strategy has had more success — without provoking serious risks — against the weaker Philippines. This is apparent from China’s effective seizure last year of Scarborough Shoal, located well within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone, and the controlling presence of Chinese vessels this year around the Second Thomas Shoal, part of the disputed Spratly Islands. China has not yet tried to evict the eight Filipino marines still living on the Second Thomas Shoal, but Zhang has included this shoal in the country’s “series of achievements” in the South China Sea.

China is not aiming for control of just a few shoals or other tiny outcroppings; it seeks to dominate the South and East China Seas strategically and corner maritime resources, including seabed minerals. The combined land area of the Senkaku and Spratly Islands amounts to barely 11 square kilometers; but the islands are surrounded by rich hydrocarbon reserves. While seeking to enlarge incrementally its military footprint in the more than 80% of the South China Sea that it claims, China’s aim in the East China Sea is to break out of the so-called “first island chain,” a string of archipelagos along the East Asian coast that includes the Senkaku Islands and Taiwan.

By contrast, vast tracts of disputed land are at stake in the resource-rich Himalayan region. Here, too, China’s incursions, after increasing in frequency, are now being staged intermittently for longer periods.

Make no mistake: China’s territorial creep is contributing to Asian insecurity, fueling political tension, and turning the world’s economically most vibrant continent into a potentially global hot spot.

To be sure, China is careful to avoid any dramatic action that could become a casus belli by itself. Indeed, it has repeatedly shown a knack for disaggregating its strategy into multiple parts and then pursuing each element separately in such a manner as to allow the different pieces to fall into place with minimal resistance.

This shrewdness not only keeps opponents off balance; it also undercuts the relevance of US security assurances to allies and the value of building countervailing strategic partnerships in Asia. In fact, by camouflaging offense as defense, China casts the burden of starting a war on an opponent, while it seeks to lay the foundation — brick by brick — of a hegemonic Middle Kingdom. Chinese leaders’ stated desire to resolve territorial disputes peacefully simply means achieving a position strong enough to get their way without having to fire a shot.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, **is the author of Asian Juggernaut; Water: Asia’s New Battleground; and Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.**

Irredentist China Ups The Ante

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney, Forbes

China’s territorial creep is now on open display: After laying a formal claim to more than 80 percent of the South China Sea, it has established in the East China Sea a so-called air defense identification zone that encompasses Japanese-controlled islands. China has also ratcheted up territorial tensions with the Philippines, Vietnam, and India. For example, it persists with efforts to disturb the status quo along the long, disputed Himalayan border by repeatedly sending military patrols into Indian territory.

China’s behavior in the South and East China Seas reflects its conduct along the land borders it disputes — a strategy to assert its claims by incrementally changing facts on the ground, with little regard for international norms and rules.

Its incremental encroachments into neighbors’ borderlands can be described as a “salami-slice” strategy — or what Maj. Gen. Zhang Zhaozhong of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) last May called a “cabbage” strategy. This involves asserting a claim, launching furtive incursions into the coveted territory, and erecting — one at a time — cabbage-style multiple layers of security around a contested area so as deny access to a rival. The establishment of an expansive air-defense zone in the East China Sea is its latest cabbage-style security layer move.

By moving quietly and gradually to achieve a strategic transformation in its favor, China undercuts both the relevance of U.S. security assurances to allies like Japan and the Philippines and the value of building countervailing strategic partnerships between and among Asian states and the United States.

The pace at which China’s bit-by-bit strategy proceeds depends on the extent to which the opponents marshal political will and capability to resist it. The strategy, for example, has run into stiffer obstacles vis-à-vis a resolute Japan than with a weak Philippines.

Let’s be clear: Changing the territorial status quo has been the unfinished business of the People’s Republic of China since its founding in 1949, when it set out to forcibly absorb the sprawling Xinjiang and Tibetan plateau — actions that increased the landmass of China by 44 percent.

An emboldened China then went on to seize the Switzerland-size Aksai Chin plateau of the original princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in the 1950s, the Paracel Islands in 1974, the Johnson South Reef in 1988, the Mischief Reef in 1995 and, most recently, the Scarborough Shoal (2012) and the Second Thomas Shoal (2013). Propelled by its growing military might, China is still working to redraw political boundaries.

Along land frontiers, rodent-style surreptitious attacks usually precede its salami slicing. The aim is to start eating into enemy land like giant rodents and thereby facilitate the slicing. The use of this strategy is becoming increasingly apparent along the Himalayan border with India, the world’s longest disputed frontier.

Here one form of attacks has involved the Chinese military bringing ethnic Han pastoralists to the valleys along the Himalayan line of control and giving them cover to range across it, in the process driving Indian herdsmen from their traditional pasturelands and opening the path to land grab. This strategy, which can also begin with the Chinese army directly nibbling at an unprotected border area, has been especially employed in the two highly strategic Buddhist regions located on opposite ends of the Himalayan frontier — Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh.

While the Chinese army flexes its muscles in the mountainous borderlands with India, China’s navy and new coast guard assert territorial and maritime claims in the South and East China Seas.

In the East China Sea, China has employed paramilitary agencies, such as the Maritime Safety Administration, the Fisheries Law Enforcement Command, and the State Oceanic Administration, in a campaign of attrition against Japan over the Senkaku Islands — a campaign that has already succeeded in shaking the status quo by making the rest of the world accept that a dispute exists.

This has emboldened Beijing to step up the frequency and duration of its incursions into the uninhabited islands’ territorial waters and to violate the airspace over them. The November 23 establishment of an air-defense zone extending to the Senkakus (which it calls the Diaoyu Islands) is just the latest example of its jurisdictional creep and increasingly muscular approach.

Taking on Japan, its former occupier and historical rival, is part of Beijing’s larger search for new seabed resources and for strategic ascendancy in the western Pacific by breaking out of what it perceives to be “first island chain” — a string of islands and atolls extending along China’s eastern periphery that includes the Senkakus, Taiwan, and the Paracel and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Its longer-term objective is to push U.S. military assets to the “second island chain,” farther out to the Pacific.

In the South China Sea, China aims to gradually legitimize its presence in the more than 80 percent of the sea it now claims formally. Through repeated and growing acts, China is etching a lasting presence in the claimed areas.

Among the ways Beijing has sought to establish new facts on the ground in the South China Sea is to lease hydrocarbon and fishing blocks inside other disputant states’ 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zones (EEZs), as defined by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Such leases are designed to limit the UNCLOS-granted economic rights of the other claimant states while expanding China’s control of the region’s resource wealth, including hydrocarbon reserves.

China has even established “Sansha City” on Woody Island in the Paracels as its administrative base for the South China Sea, setting up a local civilian government and a military garrison there to oversee the entire region. And in its latest effort to present a fait accompli over its occupation of the Paracels, it has started tourist cruises to those disputed islands.

To be sure, Beijing, as a skillful salami slicer, is usually careful to slice very thinly so as to avoid any dramatic action that could become a casus belli by itself. China proceeds in ways not only to undercut its opponents’ deterrence strategy but also to cast the burden of starting a war on them.

Any targeted state is presented with a strategic Hobson’s choice: either put up with China’s territorial creep or face a dangerous and costly war. This is the choice, for example, Manila has faced over China’s 2012 seizure of the Scarborough Shoal, located well within the Philippines’ EEZ, and the controlling presence of Chinese vessels this year near Second Thomas Shoal, part of the Spratly Islands.

China’s strategic aim is not to merely gain control of some shoals (essentially rocks) but to dominate the South China Sea, a critical waterway linking East Asia with the Indian Ocean region and beyond to the Persian Gulf and Europe. In the East China Sea, too, the issue at stake is who will exercise influence over the vast region.

Against this background, China’s tactics and strategy pose an increasing challenge to several of its neighbors, who face a deepening dilemma over how to thwart its expansionism. China’s strategy of constant outward pressure on its borders also threatens to destabilize the economically vibrant but politically volatile Asia.

China’s neighbors must overcome their differences and collaborate strategically. Separately, they are outclassed by China but, collectively, they have the potential means to rein in China and defend their territorial and economic rights against its expansionism.

Obama’s risky post-2014 Afghan gambit

Posted on November 29, 2013 by Chellaney

BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Japan Times, November 30, 2013

U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has decided to keep U.S. military bases and conduct counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan after bringing the longest war in America’s history there to an end in 2014. But its decision, centered on keeping a substantial residual military force, risks locking the United States in a low-intensity but never-ending war in that lawless, rugged country.

The Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) reached between Washington and Afghan President Hamid Karzai recently defines a U.S.-led counterterrorism and training mission involving up to 12,000 NATO troops, mostly American, lasting “until the end of 2024 and beyond” unless terminated with two years’ advance notice. This will mean virtually an indefinite U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan with a mandate, as the text says, to “conduct combat operations.”

Obama’s decision in favor of strong military basing in Afghanistan — where there are currently about 45,000 American troops — stands in sharp contrast to his earlier action in pulling out all U.S. forces from Iraq after a decade-long American occupation of that country.

While there has been little U.S. debate about the merits of extended military engagement in Afghanistan, the Loya Jirga, or assembly of Afghan tribal leaders, on November 24 put its imprimatur on the BSA, which grants the U.S. important concessions, including a controversial immunity for American troops from Afghan law and permitting U.S. special operations forces to conduct antiterrorism raids on private Afghan homes. Washington leveraged a pledge of more than $4 billion in annual security aid to secure these provisions.

However, rejecting Washington’s demand that the deal be signed by yearend, Karzai — concerned over leaving behind a legacy as the main facilitator of a long-term U.S. military presence — has threatened to delay that action until his successor is elected in next April’s presidential election. Washington has warned it would begin planning for a complete troop withdrawal if the BSA was not signed by yearend.

In any event, the U.S. needs a separate deal with the Afghan Taliban, or else its military bases would likely come under intense insurgent attacks after 2014. Indeed, the Obama administration is seeking to cut a broader deal with the Taliban to allow it to “honorably end” combat operations next year — an objective that has prompted it to kiss and make up with Pakistan, which shelters the top Taliban leadership.

The U.S. recently restored its $1.6 billion aid flow to Pakistan, which had been blocked because that country never came clean over who helped Osama bin Laden hide for years in a military garrison town near its capital, Islamabad. The aid was suspended also because the Pakistani military establishment harbors the Afghan Taliban’s one-eyed chief, Mullah Mohammed Omar, and other senior Taliban leaders and aids jihadists who carry out cross-border attacks in India and Afghanistan.

Imperial Britain created many unnatural political constructs, including two countries that have searched vainly to shape a national identity — Afghanistan and Pakistan (or “Afpak” in Washingtonese). The Afpak belt, for the foreseeable future, is likely to remain a bastion of transnational terrorists, with the Durand Line legacy making Afghanistan and Pakistan virtual Siamese twins.

The Durand Line — arbitrarily bisecting ethnic Pashtun and Baloch homelands — is the Afghan-Indian border the British demarcated in 1893 and which later became the frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Decades after Pakistan’s creation in 1947, the Durand Line remains a mythical border, with successive Afghan governments refusing to recognize it and the validity of the porous line challenged by daily cross-frontier movement of people and extremists.

America’s post-2014 strategy risks perpetuating the same mistake that has led it to falter in the ongoing 12-year war, which has cost it nearly a trillion dollars — limiting its military operations to Afghanistan in a binational region that has become a single geopolitical unit, with militant sanctuaries, command-and-control structure and support infrastructure for the Afghan insurgency located on the other side of the Durand Line. Terrorism and insurgency have never been defeated anywhere in the world without cutting off transboundary sustenance and support.

In recent years, the U.S. has carried out from Afghanistan a series of air and drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal Waziristan region, targeting the nemesis of the Pakistani military — the Pakistani Taliban. But to preserve the option of reaching a Faustian bargain with its main battlefield opponent — the Afghan Taliban — the U.S. has not carried out a single air, drone or ground attack against that militia’s leadership, which is ensconced in Pakistan’s sprawling Baluchistan province, located to the south of Waziristan.

The Afghan Taliban was created in the early 1990s by the Pakistani intelligence as part of Pakistan’s strategy to install a pliable regime in Kabul and acquire “strategic depth” against India. In reality, it is the Afghan Taliban — enjoying a safe haven across the border after its ouster from power by the U.S.-led military intervention — that has secured “strategic depth.”

In seeking to co-opt the Afghan Taliban, the Obama administration seems unconcerned that it is bestowing legitimacy on a terrorist militia that enforces medieval practices in the areas currently under its control and which, according to a recent United Nations report, raised $155 million last year from illicit opium production, besides skimming profit off illegally mined gemstones, including rubies and emeralds.

Even if Washington succeeded in cutting a deal with the motley Afghan Taliban, powerful factions within the militia may not honor it. As the U.N. report has pointed out, an increasingly fragmented insurgency has led to the rise of a new generation of local commanders operating largely independent of the Taliban’s command and control. A better U.S. strategy would be to try and undermine ethnic-Pashtun support for the Taliban by clinching a series of deals with local tribal chieftains and commanders.

Obama, who had earlier promised to bring all troops home, has not explained how a residual American force, even if sizable, would make a difference in Afghanistan when a much larger force is staring at defeat. In fact, last May, he recalled the warning of James Madison — America’s fourth president — that “no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

A long-term U.S. military engagement, besides compelling Washington to work with Afpak elements that have a long record of duplicitous conduct, could boost the militants’ cause. Yet if the U.S. completely washed its hands of Afghanistan, Afpak could sink deeper into a jihadist dungeon. The U.S. faces difficult choices, compounded by the White House’s failure to clarify strategic goals.

With violence soaring, Afpak’s future remains more uncertain than ever. There is considerable risk of an Iraq-style “soft” ethnic partition of Afghanistan.

The worst scenario would be the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul, with the thuggish militia’s control extending across much of Afghanistan. That would not only unleash a fresh reign of Islamist terror but also allow transnational terrorists to re-establish a major operational base, thereby sucking U.S. forces into bloody counterterrorism missions. It would be as if history had come full circle.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author.

Bridge between Europe and Asia — Strategic Challenges in the Indian Ocean

Posted on November 29, 2013 by Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney, Körber Policy Brief No. 1

Geopolitical rivalry in the Indian Ocean has increased. Several boundary, sovereignty and jurisdiction disputes threaten freedom of navigation. China has become the most active power in the region and is challenging the existing balance of power.

With interstate competition over resources in the Indian Ocean sharpening, the EU should assist in creating a predictable regulatory regime and contribute to monitoring and enforcement of internationally agreed rules.

The EU is already playing a limited security and political role in the Indian Ocean region, where it has important economic interests at stake. It should support regional cooperation to reduce the risks of unilateral action by any side and to help build long-term regional crisis stability.

The Indian Ocean, which links Europe with Asia, is becoming the new global center of trade and energy flows. Spanning more than 73 million square kilometers, this critical ocean region is likely to determine the wider geopolitics, maritime order, and balance of power in Asia and beyond. In fact, in no part of the world is the security situation so dynamic and in such flux as in the Indian Ocean. This region, extending from Australia to the Middle East and Southern Africa, promises to become the hub of global geopolitical competition.

The challenges in this region extend from traditional security threats to nontraditional and emerging challenges. The challenges are linked to its vast size: It is home to a third of the global population, with the littoral states there also accounting for 25 percent of the world’s landmass, 55 percent of its proven oil reserves, and 40 percent of its gas reserves. As symbolized by the 2004 Christmas-eve tsunami and by recurrent cyclones, the region is regularly battered by natural disasters. According to one estimate, 70 percent of the world’s natural disasters occur in this region alone.

The region’s littoral states are linked by a common history of sea faring. Yet, given that it has the world’s largest concentration of fragile or failing states, as exemplified by Somalia, Pakistan and the Maldives, this region represents the symbolic center of the global challenges of the 21st-century world — from terrorism and extremism to piracy and safety of sea lanes of communication. The Indian Ocean indeed covers the entire arc of Islam — from the Horn of Africa and the Saudi Arabian desert to Malaysia and the Indonesian archipelago — and is racked by the world’s highest incidence of transnational terrorism.

The region is on the frontlines of climate change. It thus has states whose future is imperiled by global warming. Such states extend from the island-nations of Mauritius and the Maldives to Bangladesh, whose land area is less than half the size of Germany but with a population more than double. Because it is made up largely of low-lying floodplains and deltas, Bangladesh risks losing 17 percent of its land and 30 percent of its food production by 2050 due to saltwater incursion resulting from the rising ocean level, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If, in the future, states like the Maldives and Mauritius were submerged, what would be the legal status of their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) and the mineral wealth that these zones hold?

In the Indian Ocean region the old world order coexists uneasily with the new order.

The Indian Ocean illustrates other nontraditional security challenges as well — from environmental pollution, as exemplified by the brown cloud of sooty haze hanging over South Asia, and degradation of coastal ecosystems to a mercantilist approach to energy supplies and the juxtapositioning of energy interests with foreign-policy interests. Put simply, this is the region where old and new security challenges converge. In this region, the old order — as epitomized by the Anglo-American military base at Diego Garcia and the French-administered Réunion and other islands — coexists uneasily with the new order.

Because of the Indian Ocean’s importance to global trade and energy flows and the potential vulnerability of the chokepoints around it, sea-lane security has become a pressing concern. Important regional and extra-regional powers have sought to build maritime security by forging strategic partnerships with key littoral states in the Indian Ocean rim. The partnerships, principally aimed at safeguarding the various “gates” to the Indian Ocean, incorporate trade accords, naval training and joint exercises, counter-piracy operations, energy cooperation, and strategic dialogue.

The chokepoints, and the states adjacent to them, include the Strait of Malacca (Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia), the Strait of Hormuz (Iran and Oman), the Horn of Africa (Djibouti, Eritrea and Yemen), as well as the Cape of Good Hope and the Mozambique Channel (South Africa, Mozambique and Madagascar).

There are, however, a range of other strategic concerns in the Indian Ocean. Some players, including Iran and the United States, are not yet party to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). China, although a party, has sought to unilaterally interpret UNCLOS’s provisions in its favor to assert maritime claims, while refusing to accept the Convention’s dispute-settlement mechanism. The Philippines, with apparent U.S. support, has filed a complaint against China with the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), but China has simply declined to participate in the proceedings. Iran seized an Indian oil tanker in the autumn of 2013, holding it for nearly a month, but India could not file a case against Teheran with the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.

Boundary, sovereignty, and jurisdiction issues carry serious conflict potential.

There are outstanding boundary, sovereignty, and jurisdiction issues, some of which carry serious conflict potential. Bangladesh and Myanmar have set an example by peacefully resolving a dispute over the delimitation of their maritime boundaries in the Bay of Bengal. They took their dispute to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea for adjudication. The Tribunal’s verdict, delivered in 2012, ended a potentially dangerous dispute that was fuelled in 2008 when, following the discovery of gas deposits in the Bay of Bengal, Myanmar authorized exploration in a contested area, prompting Bangladesh to dispatch warships to the area.

The threats to navigation and maritime freedoms in the Indian Ocean, including in critical straits and exclusive economic zones (EEZs), can be countered only through adherence to international rules by all parties as well as through monitoring, regulation, and enforcement. Significantly, several states in the region have sought to deny other powers freedom of navigation in their EEZs when they are engaged in military activity, such as surveillance by ship.

Deep seabed mining has emerged as a major new strategic issue.

Deep seabed mining has emerged as a major new strategic issue, given the region’s mineral wealth. Interstate competition over seabed minerals is sharpening. From seeking to tap sulfide deposits — containing valuable metals such as silver, gold, copper, manganese, cobalt, and zinc — to phosphorus nodule mining for phosphor-based fertilizers used in food production, the competition is underscoring the imperative for creating a predictable regulatory regime, developing safe and effective ocean-development technologies, finding ways to share benefits of the common heritage, and ensuring environmental protection. Even China, an extra-regional power, has secured an international deep-seabed block in southwestern Indian Ocean from the International Seabed Authority to explore for polymetallic sulphides.

Great-power rivalries, meanwhile, are complicating maritime-security issues. The rivalries are mirrored in foreign-aided port-building projects along vital sea lanes; attempts to assert control over energy supplies and transport routes as part of a 21st-century-version of the Great Game; the building of inter-country energy corridors involving the construction of pipelines to transport oil or gas sourced by sea from third countries, as China is doing in Myanmar and Pakistan; and strategic plans to assemble a “string of pearls” in the form of listening posts and special naval-access arrangements along the great trade arteries.

China has become the most active power in the Indian Ocean and is challenging the existing balance of power.

Of all the powers, China has become the most active in the Indian Ocean, as underscored by the new port it has built in Pakistan at Gwadar (which sits strategically at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz) and in Sri Lanka at Hambantota; a Chinese container facility in Chittagong (Bangladesh); and Chinese port projects in Myanmar, including developing a deep-sea port at Kyaukpyu as its international gateway. Such developments have sharpened China’s geopolitical rivalry with India, which enjoys an immense geographic advantage in the Indian Ocean.

With this region having the most-adverse ratio between land size, population, and natural resources, environmental degradation has emerged as an important challenge. The degradation is extending to coastal ecosystems, which sustain diverse species of marine life and are the source of livelihood for many people. The increasing role of external states in overexploiting the region’s marine resources has underscored the need for conservation and management of the biological diversity of the seabed in areas that are beyond national jurisdiction. There is also need for enforcing coastal-protection regulations and for surveillance and policing to stop illegal fishing and to protect structures for deep-sea mining.

Against this background, it is apparent that maritime-security challenges in the Indian Ocean need to be addressed in a holistic strategic framework. Nontraditional issues — from energy security and climate security to transnational terrorism and environmental degradation — have become as important as traditional issues, such as freedom of navigation, security of sea lanes, maritime boundary and domain security, arms proliferation, and challenges to law and order (including piracy and sea robbery, criminal activities like drug, people, and arms smuggling, illicit fishing, illegal immigration, and maritime terrorism).

The Indian Ocean is the maritime center of the world and of critical importance to the European Union’s economic and energy interests. The flow of trade through the maritime Silk Road of the Indian Ocean follows the same route and pattern from which the littoral states drew wealth and strength in history.

Europe could serve as a guide on how to build institutionalized cooperation in this region, where, with maritime boundaries still to be finalized, jurisdictional “creep” threatens to impede freedom of navigation. Seabed mining, for its part, is presenting both new challenges and opportunities on the high seas.

Europe has a role to play on environmental protection and resource sustainability. Environmental degradation in the Indian Ocean, after all, can influence climatic patterns and atmospheric general circulation in the entire Northern Hemisphere. Good governance, built through interstate cooperation and collaboration, can help stem the threats to maritime security and ecosystems.

France and Britain, through their military presence in the Indian Ocean, are promoting their own geopolitical interests in the region. European states, however, can collectively play a role to support peace and stability and environmental sustainability in the Indian Ocean. After all, the Indian Ocean, which accounts for 50 percent of the world’s container traffic and 66 percent of its seaborne trade in oil, is of critical importance to European trade.

The EU should help promote rules-based cooperation in the Indian Ocean region.

The European Union, by citing its own efforts to resolve maritime-boundary questions and other issues in Europe, can lend a helping hand to create a regulatory regime and to promote environmental protection in the Indian Ocean region. In this endeavor, the EU must collaborate with the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA), which consists of 20 diverse member-nations ranging from India, Indonesia, and Australia to small island-countries such as the Comoros and Seychelles.

Given its own institutionalized framework of cooperation, the EU, more than any other institution in the world, can help promote rules-based cooperation in the Indian Ocean region. The threats to navigation and maritime freedoms, including in critical straits and EEZs in the Indian Ocean region, can be countered only through adherence to international rules by all parties, as well as through monitoring, regulation and enforcement. In this context, NATO is already playing a limited security and political role in the region, with its contribution to combating piracy in the Horn of Africa.

The EU can also encourage collaborative projects between regional states so that they adopt new technologies and best practices to protect environmental security and build maritime cooperation. Collaborative projects will yield significant peace dividends by helping to reduce the risks of unilateral action by any side and by contributing to building regional crisis stability. European wealth is dependent on peace and stability in the Indian Ocean. This region serves as a test case of Europe’s ability to translate its economic heft into political influence to help shape regional developments in a positive direction.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author, most recently, of “Water, Peace, and War” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).

Körber Policy Briefs solely reflect the author’s views.

By Brahma Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut; Water: Asia’s New Battleground; and Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.

BY BRAHMA CHELLANEY, The Japan Times, November 30, 2013

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, **is the author of Asian Juggernaut; Water: Asia’s New Battleground; and Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis.**