Climate change: Risks to India’s national security

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Climate Risks to Indian National Security

Brahma Chellaney
From: Indian Climate Policy: Choices and Challenges, Edited By
David Michel and Amit Pandya (Washington, DC: Stimson Center, November 2009)

India may be a great power-in-waiting, but it probably lives in the world’s
worst neighborhood. Whichever way India looks, it sees crisis across its
frontiers. The tyranny of geography that India confronts is only getting worse,
putting greater pressure on its security. To this picture must now be added the
risks from climate change, which has been correctly identified as a threat
multiplier. What all this underscores is the need for the Indian republic to evolve
more dynamic and innovative approaches to diplomacy and national defense as
well as to build greater state capacity in order to meet contingencies.

Climate change, unfortunately, has become a divisive issue internationally before
a plan for a low-carbon future has evolved. At a time of greater international
divisiveness on core challenges – from disarmament and terrorism to the energy
crisis and the Doha Round of world trade talks – the world can ill afford political
rancor over a climate crisis that threatens to exacerbate security challenges.
While gaps in scientific knowledge make it easy to exaggerate or underestimate
the likely impact of climate change, three broad strategic effects can be
visualized in relation to India.

MULTIPLYING CLIMATE THREATS
1. Climate change would intensify interstate and intrastate competition over
natural resources, making resource conflicts more likely.

A new Great Game over water could unfold, given China’s control over the
source of most of Asia’s major rivers—the Plateau of Tibet. Accelerated melting
of glaciers and mountain snows would affect river water flows, although higher
average temperatures are likely to bring more rainfall in the tropics.

Intrastate water disputes already are endemic in Asia, with India being the most
prominent case. But it is the potential for interstate water conflict in Asia that
ought to be of greater concern because of the strategic ramifications.

Tibet’s water-related status in the world indeed is unique. No other area in the
world is a water repository of such size, serving as a lifeline for nearly half of the
global population living in southern and southeastern Asia and China. Tibet’s
vast glaciers, huge underground springs, and high altitude have endowed it with
the world’s greatest river systems. But China is now pursuing major inter-basin
and inter-river water transfer projects on the Tibetan plateau which threaten to
diminish international river flows into India and other co-riparian states. In fact,
China has been damming most international rivers flowing out of Tibet (Tibet’s
fragile ecosystem is already threatened by global warming). The only rivers on
which no hydro-engineering works have been undertaken so far are the Indus
(whose basin falls mostly in India and Pakistan), and the Salween (which flows
into Burma and Thailand.) Local authorities in China’s Yunnan province,
however, are considering damming the Salween in the quake-prone upstream
region.

Before such hydro-engineering projects sow the seeds of water conflict, China
ought to build institutionalized, cooperative river basin arrangements with
downstream states. Against this background, it is hardly a surprise that water is
becoming a key security issue in Sino-Indian relations and is a potential source of
enduring discord. India has been pressing China for transparency, greater
hydrological data-sharing, and a commitment not to redirect the natural flow of
any river or diminish cross-border water flows. But even a joint expert-level
mechanism – set up in 2007 merely for “interaction and cooperation” on
hydrological data – has proven of little value. The most dangerous idea China is
toying with is the northward rerouting of the Brahmaputra River, known as
Yarlung Tsangpo to Tibetans. Diversion of the Brahmaputra’s water to the
parched Yellow River is an idea that China does not discuss in public because the
project implies environmental devastation of India’s northeastern plains and
eastern Bangladesh and would thus be akin to a declaration of water war against
India and Bangladesh.

China and India already are water-stressed economies. The spread of irrigated
farming and water-intensive industries – together with the demands of a rising
middle class – have led to a severe struggle for more water. Indeed, both
countries have entered an era of perennial water scarcity. Rapid economic
growth could slow in the face of acute scarcity if the demand for water continues
to grow at its current frantic pace. Such a development would transform China
and India – both food-exporting countries – into major importers and would thus
exacerbate the global food crisis.

2. Higher frequency of extreme weather events (such as hurricanes, flooding,
and drought) and a rise in ocean levels are likely to spur greater interstate
and intrastate migration – especially of the poor and the vulnerable – from
the delta and coastal regions to the hinterlands.

Such an influx of outsiders would socially swamp inland areas and upset existing
fragile ethnic balances—provoking a backlash that strains internal and regional
security. It should not be forgotten that many societies in the region are a potent
mix of ethnicity, culture, and religion.

India, for example, could face a huge refugee influx from the world’s seventh
most populous country, Bangladesh. Having been born in blood in 1971,
Bangladesh faces extinction from saltwater incursion, with the International
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) saying that country is set to lose 17 percent of
its land and 30 percent of its food production by 2050. Bangladesh today faces a
rising frequency of natural disasters. In addition to the millions of Bangladeshis
that already have illegally settled in India, New Delhi would have to brace up for
the potential arrival of tens of millions more people.

For India, the ethnic expansion of Bangladesh beyond its political borders not
only sets up enduring trans-border links, but it also makes New Delhi’s alreadycomplex
task of border management even more onerous. As brought out by
Indian census figures, Indian districts bordering Bangladesh have become
Bangladeshi-majority areas. It is perhaps the first time in modern history that a
country has expanded its ethnic frontiers without expanding its political borders.
“Climate refugees,” however, would not all come from across India’s borders.
Within India itself, those driven out by floods, cyclones, and saltwater incursion
would head for settlements on higher ground. In some cases, the effects of such
refugee influxes would be to undermine social stability and internal cohesion
locally.

3. Human security will be the main casualty as climate change delivers a major
blow to vulnerable economic sectors.

Economic and social disparities – already wide in Indian society – would
intensify. The fact that there is a Maoist insurgency in the poorest districts of
India at a time when the country is booming economically is a testament to the
costs of growing inequalities. That ragtag band of rebels wishes to supplant
Indian parliamentary democracy with a proletariat dictatorship inspired by Mao
Zedong’s Little Red Book.

The specter of resource competition, large-scale movement of “climate
refugees,” social and political tensions, and a higher frequency and intensity of
extreme weather events helps underscore the human-security costs. Climate
variability will bring change to the social-economic-political environments on
which the security of individuals and communities rest. Authorities – as well as
communities – will be forced to innovate and manage under a climate changedriven
paradigm. Building greater institutional and organizational capacity,
early-warning systems, more efficient irrigation practices, and new farm varieties
will all become necessary.

THE FRONTLINE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
Against this background, India is likely to find itself on the frontline of climate
change. To deal with these national security implications, India needs to frame
the concept of security more broadly and redefine its defense planning and
preparedness. Unconventional challenges – from transnational terrorism to
illegal refugee inflows – already have become significant in India’s security
calculus. India also needs to build greater state capacity – at federal, provincial,
and local levels – to tackle various contingencies and adapt to a climate changedriven
paradigm. Climate change holds the greatest risks for India in the
agricultural sector—a sector that employs half of the Indian workforce and yet
makes up just 18 percent of the GDP. The challenge of ensuring food security
and social stability demands greater national investments in rural infrastructure
and agriculture and also simultaneously requires finding a way to leapfrog to
green technologies.

A lot can be done to combat climate change outside any regime. India’s US$ 22
billion solar-energy program, US$ 2.5 billion forestation fund, and new national
energy-efficiency mission are initiatives in the right direction.

Internationally, though, Indian diplomacy must ensure that the country is not
saddled with unfair obligations that compound its challenges. Equity in burdensharing
has to be ensured. The challenge is to devise carbon standards that help
protect the material and social benefits of economic growth in the developing
world without damaging prosperity in the developed countries.

But just as the five original nuclear weapons states helped fashion the 1970
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to perpetuate their privileges, countries
that became wealthy early wish to preserve their prerogatives in a climate change
regime despite their legacy of environmental damage and continuing high carbon
emissions. This has raised the danger of rich nations locking in their advantages
by revising the 1992 Rio bargain and re-jiggering the Kyoto Protocol obligations
through a new regime. This could create another global divide between haves
and have-nots—an NPT of climate change. An enduring international regime to
combat global warming will have to be anchored in differential responsibility, a
concept at the heart of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change and the Kyoto Protocol (it is a concept also embedded in international
law through several other agreements—from the Montreal Protocol on
Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer to the Treaty of Maastricht.) Climate
change, it is evident, is not just a matter of science but also a matter of
geopolitics.

Prime Minister returns with little from Washington

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A deal gone sour

Brahma Chellaney
DNA newspaper, November 27, 2009

The ritzy state dinner US President Barack Obama hosted in honour of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the White House could not obscure the fact that Singh’s visit yielded little in substance. The elaborate pomp and ceremony also did little to change perceptions in India that it has lost ground in America’s Sino-centric Asia policy. During the presidency of George W Bush, many in India had whipped themselves into rapturous frenzy over what they saw as a tectonic shift in US policy toward India. All it required to shatter their bliss (and belief) was a change of government in Washington.


The lesson: Unlike India’s personality-driven, sentiment-laced approach, US foreign policy is shaped by institutional processes that preclude abrupt U-turns or shifts. To be sure, Bush was India-friendly. But he left office without translating his thinking into concrete policy guidance to various departments to treat India as a strategic priority. In the absence of a national security directive to the powerful State Department, Pentagon and Commerce Department bureaucracies that run day-to-day aspects of India policy, the vaunted Indo-US nuclear deal has failed to deliver tangible strategic benefits, or even to promote joint defence research and development. US export controls on high technology continue to target India like before.

The developments since 2008 actually hold the most-sobering lesson for Singh, who staked his political reputation to push through the nuclear deal. He peddled the deal as a transformative initiative that would help put the Indo-US relationship on a much-higher pedestal. But more than a year after the deal came to fruition there is no sign of its transformative power. Rather, India now is concerned about its diminished role in US foreign policy. Despite a much-celebrated strategic partnership between the world’s most-populous democracies, the US values India more as a market for its goods and services than as a collaborator on pressing strategic issues. Indeed, just as it has been balancing its relationships with India and Pakistan for long, Washington now is balancing its ties with India and China.

The nuclear deal itself is turning sour. It will take a decade or so before the first imported nuclear-power reactor begins to generate electricity. The economics of generating power from imported reactors hasn’t even been discussed. Costs are likely to be so high as to saddle Indian taxpayers with a major subsidy burden. Two nuclear-power plants currently under construction in Finland and France are billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.

Despite a strong US push to bag major reactor contracts and New Delhi’s action in reserving two nuclear parks exclusively for American firms, no reprocessing agreement could be clinched during Singh’s visit. Key differences remain over such an agreement, which would have to pass US congressional muster. Singh went to Washington after getting his Cabinet to approve a nuclear-accident liability bill, which seeks to cap liability at a mere $537 million (Rs2,500 crore) and makes the Indian state-run operator, rather than the foreign supplier, liable for compensation payment. Parliament must seize the opportunity when this bill is tabled to examine in full the nuclear deal, which thus far has escaped legislative scrutiny in India. The bill — intended to provide cover mainly to US firms, which, unlike France’s Areva and Russia’s Atomstroyexport, are in the private sector — seeks to further burden Indian taxpayers, rather than put the onus on the sellers of multibillion-dollar reactors.

If anything, Singh’s visit was a reminder that Obama’s tilt towards China on key Asian issues and growing US reliance on and aid for Pakistan have emerged as major sticking points in the Indo-US relationship. The policy frame in which Washington is viewing India is not the larger Asian geopolitical landscape, but the southern Asian context. But even on regional matters, the US has on occasion sought to pursue approaches antithetical to India’s vital interest. Also, at a time when Sino-Indian border tensions have escalated, Washington has failed to even caution China against any attempt to forcibly change the territorial status quo.

But more than Washington, New Delhi is to be blamed. The deal-peddlers in India allowed their wishful thinking to blind them to the strategic trends that were firmly set long before Obama came to the White House. Take the China factor. Bush left office with a solid China-friendly legacy, best illustrated by the manner in which he ignored the Chinese crackdown in Tibet and showed up at the Beijing Olympics. The talk of a US-China diarchy — a G2 — ruling the world had begun before Obama was elected. It was also under Bush that the US renewed its aid to Pakistan on a massive scale, while pressuring India not to take the mildest diplomatic sanctions against Islamabad after 26/11. Clearly, the deal was oversold.

The writer is Professor Strategic Studies, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/main-article_a-deal-gone-sour_1316954

The elephant in the India-China theater

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Three's A Crowd In The India-China Theater
 
By Brahma Chellaney 

FAR EASTERN ECONOMIC REVIEW (November 2009)

The renewed Sino-Indian border tensions arising from growing Chinese assertiveness raise an oft-asked question: What has prompted Beijing to up the ante against New Delhi? Until mid-2005, China was eschewing anti-India rhetoric and pursuing a policy of active engagement with India, even as it continued to expand its strategic space in southern Asia, to India’s detriment. In fact, when Premier Wen Jiabao visited New Delhi in April 2005, the two countries unveiled an important agreement identifying six broad principles to govern a settlement of the long-festering Himalayan frontier dispute that predates their 32-day bloody war in 1962.

But by late 2005, the mood in Beijing had noticeably changed. That, in turn, gave rise to a nationalistic streak: Chinese newspapers, individual bloggers, security think-tanks and officially-blessed websites ratcheting up an "India threat" scenario. By early 2006, some Chinese strategic journals and pro-Beijing Hong Kong newspapers like Ming Pao had begun publishing commentaries about a "partial border war" to "teach India" a 1962-style lesson. And in the fall of 2006, Beijing publicly raked up an issue that had remained dormant since the 1962 war—Arunachal Pradesh, India’s remote northeastern state that China claims largely as its own on the basis of putative historical ties with Tibet. In fact, the Chinese practice of describing Arunachal, with 1.3 million residents, as "southern Tibet" started only in 2006.

The following year, Beijing repudiated the most important principle it had agreed to during Mr. Wen’s 2005 visit—"in reaching a boundary settlement, the two sides shall safeguard due interests of their settled populations in the border areas." Since then, China has stepped up military pressure along the Himalayas through cross-frontier incursions and border provocations. New Delhi has been compelled to urgently enhance Indian defenses, including the deployment of new forces and a crash program to improve logistics.

Ominously, commentaries in the official Chinese media now echo the coarse anti-India rhetoric of the Mao era. The People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper, berated India in an Oct. 14, 2009 editorial for its "recklessness and arrogance" and for seeking "hegemony." Even Chinese government statements on India have taken a harsher, more strident tone; the foreign ministry has begun using language such as "we demand" and labeling the Indian prime minister’s recent Arunachal visit a "disturbance."

What happened in the months after Mr. Wen’s visit to prompt such a change of heart? The only major development in that period was the new U.S.-India strategic tie-up, as defined by the defense-framework accord and nuclear deal, but a U.S.-India military alliance has always been a strategic nightmare for the Chinese. Thus, the ballyhooed global strategic partnership triggered alarm bells in Beijing. Today, the relationship between the two Asian powers has deteriorated to the extent that trading verbal blows has become common.

Did Delhi help create the context, however inadvertently, for the new Chinese aggressiveness? In June 2005, India agreed to participate in U.S.-led "multinational operations," to share intelligence and to build military-to-military interoperability, all key elements of the June 2005 defense-framework accord. Delhi also pledged to become Washington’s partner on a new "Global Democracy Initiative," a commitment found in the July 2005 nuclear agreement-in-principle. While Beijing cannot hold a veto over India’s diplomatic or strategic initiatives, Delhi could have avoided creating an impression that it was being primed as a new junior partner in America’s hub-and-spoke global alliance system.

India—with its hallowed traditions of policy independence—is an unlikely candidate to be a U.S. ally in a patron-client framework. The strategic partnership with the America falls short of a formal military alliance. But the high-pitched rhetoric that accompanied the new partnership represented a tectonic shift in geopolitical alignments, and apparently Chinese policy makers began to believe that India was being groomed as a new Australia to America. This perception was reinforced by subsequent security arrangements, defense transactions and an end-use monitoring agreement. New Delhi failed to foresee that its rush to forge close strategic bonds with Washington could provoke greater Chinese pressure and that the U.S. would be able to offer little comfort to India in such a situation.

First, Beijing calculatingly has sought to badger India on three fronts—border (according to the Indian government, Chinese cross-frontier incursions nearly doubled between 2007 and 2008,  with "no significant increase" in 2009); diplomatic (issuing visas on a separate sheet to residents of the Indian-administered state of Jammu and Kashmir so as to set apart that region from India); and multilateral (launching an international offensive to undercut Indian sovereignty over Arunachal; for example, by successfully blocking the Asian Development Bank from identifying that region as part of India in its latest $1.3 billion credit package). As the resistance to its rule in Tibet has grown since last year, Beijing has sought to present Tibet as a core issue to its sovereignty, just like Taiwan. Tibet now holds as much importance in Chinese policy as Taiwan. In ratcheting up the Arunachal issue with India, Beijing seems to be drawing another analogy: Arunachal is the new Taiwan that must be "reunified" with the Chinese state.

The Dalai Lama has said that Arunachal was never part of Tibet, using this to explain why Arunachal was not included in Tibet in a 1914 agreement that demarcated the borders between the then-independent Tibet and British-ruled India. Beijing does not recognize that agreement because China’s acceptance of the 1914 border would be admission that Tibet was once independent, which would seriously undercut the legitimacy of its control over the increasingly restive region.

Beijing originally fashioned its claim to Arunachal, a territory almost three times larger than Taiwan, as a bargaining chip to compel India to recognize the Chinese occupation of the Aksai Chin, a Switzerland-size plateau once part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Thus, China withdrew from the Arunachal areas it invaded in the 1962 war but retained its territorial gains in Aksai Chin, which provides the only passageway between its rebellious regions—Tibet and Xinjiang. The late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping put forth a package proposal: New Delhi accept the Chinese control over Aksai Chin and Beijing drop its claim on Arunachal, subject to "minor readjustments" in the line of control.

But as part of its hardening stance toward India, China has dredged up its long-dormant claim to Arunachal. It openly covets Arunachal as a cultural extension to Tibet—a classic attempt at incremental annexation. Because the sixth Dalai Lama was born in the 17th century in Arunachal’s Tawang district, Beijing claims that Arunachal belongs to Tibet and thus is part of China. By the same argument, it can also lay claim to Mongolia, as the fourth Dalai Lama was born there in 1589. The traditional ecclesiastical links between Mongolia and Tibet indeed have been closer than those between Arunachal and Tibet.

What makes China’s claim even more untenable is that it has hived off the birthplaces of the seventh, 10th, 11th and the present 14th Dalai Lamas from Tibet. Before seeking Arunachal, shouldn’t Beijing first return the traditional Tibetan areas of Amdo and eastern Kham to Tibet?

Second, even though the Indo-U.S. strategic tie-up has served as the key instigator of China’s more muscular stance toward India, Washington is more reluctant than ever to take New Delhi’s side in any of its disputes with Beijing. President Barack Obama’s administration—far from supporting New Delhi—has shied away from even cautioning Beijing against any attempt to forcibly change the territorial status quo. Indeed, on a host of issues, from the Dalai Lama to Arunachal, Washington has chosen not to antagonize Beijing.

In effect that has left New Delhi on its own at a time when some in China seem to believe that a swift, 1962-style victory in a border war with India is attainable to help cut a potential peer rival to size and fashion a Sino-centric Asia.  Accusing India of "walking along the old road of resisting China," an article on the Web site of the China Institute of International Strategic Studies—a think tank run by the PLA General Staff Department’s 2nd Department—warned India "not to requite kindness with ingratitude" and not to "misjudge the situation as it did in 1962." As a result of the bellicose rhetoric on India, 90% of respondents in a June 2009 online poll by Global Times—published by the Communist Party’s information department—cited India as the No. 1 threat to China’s security.

India’s current predicament is a far cry from what former U.S. President George W. Bush had touted in his valedictory speech as one of his signal achievements: "We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India." The Obama administration isn’t unfriendly to India. It just doesn’t see India as able to make an important difference to U.S. geopolitical interests. Another factor is that America’s Asia policy is no longer guided by an overarching geopolitical framework.

Whether one agreed with the Bush foreign policy or not, at least its Asia component bore a distinct strategic imprint. By contrast, the best that can be said about Obama’s Asia policy is that it seeks to nurture key bilateral relationships—with China at the core of Washington’s present courtship—and establish, where possible, trilateral relationships. The upshot is that the Obama team has unveiled a new trilateral security-cooperation framework in Asia involving the U.S., China and Japan.

In deference to Chinese sensitivities, however, the Obama administration has so far failed to even acknowledge another trilateral alliance that started under President Bush, involving the U.S., India and Japan. It is as if this concept has fallen out of favor with Washington, just as the broader U.S.-India-Japan-Australia "Quadrilateral Initiative"—founded on the concept of democratic peace—ran aground after the late-2007 election of the Mandarin-speaking Kevin Rudd as the Australian prime minister.

At a time when Asia is in transition, with the specter of power disequilibrium looming large, it has become imperative to invest in institutionalized cooperation and regional integration in order to help underpin long-term power stability. After all, not only is Asia becoming the pivot of global geopolitical change, but Asian challenges are also playing into international strategic challenges. But the Obama administration seems fixated on the very country whose rapidly accumulating power and muscle-flexing threaten Asian stability. The new catchphrase coined by Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg in relation to China, "strategic reassurance," signals an American intent to be more accommodative of China’s ambitions.

China’s primacy in the Obama foreign policy has become unmistakable. Indeed, Obama’s Asia tour is beginning in Japan and ending in China but skipping India entirely. But playing to India’s well-known weakness for flattery, Obama is massaging its ego by honoring it with his presidency’s first state dinner. In fact, such a ritzy event fits well with Washington’s current focus on promoting business interests in India, including big-ticket export items like nuclear reactors and conventional weapons.

Obama is committed to a strategic partnership with India, including developing close military ties. New Delhi has placed arms-purchase orders, according to the Indian ambassador to the U.S., worth a staggering $3.5 billion just last year. But he also has signaled that such a relationship with India will not be at the expense of Washington’s fast-growing ties with Beijing. America needs Chinese capital inflows as much as China needs U.S. consumers—an economic interdependence of such importance it has been compared to mutually assured destruction. Even politically, China, with its permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council and other leverage, counts for more in U.S. policy than India or Japan. As the U.S.-China relationship acquires a wider and deeper base in the coming future, the strains in some of America’s existing military or strategic tie-ups in Asia are likely to become pronounced.

Against this background, it is no surprise that Washington now intends to abjure elements of its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including a joint military drill of any type in Arunachal or a 2007-style naval exercise involving the U.S., India, Australia, Japan and Singapore. Even trilateral U.S. naval maneuvers with India and Japan now are out so as not to raise China’s hackles. In fact, Washington is quietly charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal dispute, just as its ally Australia has done rather publicly.

Despite the Obama administration bending over backward to ease its concerns, Beijing remains suspicious of the likely trajectory of U.S.-India strategic ties, including pre-1962-style CIA meddling in Tibet. This distrust found expression in a recent People’s Daily editorial that accused New Delhi of pursuing a foreign policy of "befriending the far and attacking the near." But the mocking newspaper commentaries on India’s power ambitions indicate that Beijing is also angered by what it sees as its neighbor’s audacity in competing with it.

Left to fend for itself, New Delhi has decided to steer clear of any potential confrontation with Beijing. But while seeking to publicly tamp down military tensions with China, the Indian government—under attack at home for being "soft" on China—has begun asserting itself at the political level. While Obama declined to meet the Dalai Lama during his recent Washington visit, India is allowing the Tibetan leader to go ahead with his scheduled Arunachal tour—a red rag to the Chinese bull. It also has announced an end to the practice of Chinese companies bringing thousands of workers from China to work on projects in India. And in a public riposte to Beijing’s raising of objections to multilateral funding of any project in Arunachal, India has asked China to cease its infrastructure and military projects in another disputed region—Pakistan-held Kashmir.

Diplomatically, however, India cannot afford to be out on a limb. The vaunted Indo-U.S. partnership has turned into an opportunity for Washington to win multibillion-dollar Indian contracts and co-opt India into strategic arrangements, without a concomitant obligation to be on India’s side or to extend political help on regional and international matters. Joint military exercises, for example, have become a basis to make India buy increasing quantities of U.S. arms so as to build compatibility and interoperability between the two militaries. Even counterterrorism is emerging as a major area of defense sales to India.

With Obama pursuing a Beijing-oriented Asia policy, and with China-friendly heads of government ensconced in Australia, Japan and Taiwan, New Delhi’s diplomatic calculations have gone awry. Yet the present muscular Chinese approach paradoxically reinforces the very line of Indian thinking that has engendered Chinese belligerence—that India has little option other than to align with the U.S. Such thinking blithely ignores the limitations of the Indo-U.S. partnership arising from American policy’s vicissitudes and compulsions. Washington is showing through its growing strategic cooperation with China and Pakistan that it does not believe in exclusive strategic partnership in any region.

As was the case before the 1962 war, the China-India-U.S. triangle today is at the center of the Himalayan tensions. The Obama team, however, has yet to propose establishing a trilateral initiative to help contain growing Sino-Indian friction. Having declared that America’s "most important bilateral relationship in the world" is with China, the Obama team must caution Beijing against crossing well-defined red lines or going against the self-touted gospel of its "peaceful rise." The U.S. message should be that any military adventure—far from helping fashion a Sino-centric Asia—would prove very costly and counterproductively trigger the rise of a militaristic, anti-China India.

New Delhi, for its part, has to adroitly manage its relationships with Beijing and Washington in a way that it does not lose out. A stable equation with China is more likely to be realized if India avoids a trans-Himalayan military imbalance, as well as security dependency on the third party that has emerged as the elephant in the India-China theater.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author ofAsian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan, published by HarperCollins, with a new U.S. edition scheduled for release in January.

http://www.feer.com/essays/2009/november51/threes-a-crowd-in-the-india-china-theater

Obama should speak up for India in Beijing

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Obama should stop China from provoking India

By Brahma Chellaney

Financial Times, November 13 2009

The economic rise of China and India draws ever more attention. But the world has taken little notice of the rising border tensions and increasingly visible differences between the two giants.

With Barack Obama, US president, headed to Beijing and the Dalai Lama’s tour of the remote north-eastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh provoking an angry Chinese response, the China-India-US triangle and Tibet have emerged at the centre of escalating tensions.

China has resurrected its long-dormant claim to Arunachal Pradesh – almost three times as large as Taiwan – and stepped up military pressure along the 4,057km frontier with India through frequent incursions.

Beijing seems to be drawing the analogy that Arunachal is the new Taiwan that must be “reunified” with the Chinese state.

Tibet, however, has always been the core issue in Sino-Indian relations. China became India’s neighbour not by geography but guns – by annexing buffer Tibet in 1951. Today, Beijing is ready to whip up spats with western nations that extend hospitality to the Dalai Lama. But India remains the base of the Tibetan leader and his government-in-exile.

The key cause of the more muscular Chinese stance towards India is the US-Indian tie-up, unveiled in 2005.

Since then, the official Chinese media has started regurgitating the coarse anti-India rhetoric of the Mao Zedong era, with one commentator this week warning New Delhi not to forget 1962, when China humiliated India in a 32-day, two-front war.

Yet the Obama administration is reluctant to take New Delhi’s side in its disputes with Beijing. Washington has also shied away from cautioning Beijing against attempts to change the territorial status quo forcibly.

Mr Obama is committed to the partnership with India as part of which New Delhi has placed arms-purchase orders worth $3.5bn last year alone. But he has also signalled that any relationship will not be at the expense of fast-growing ties with Beijing.

Washington now intends to abandon elements in its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including a joint military drill in Arunachal or a 2007-style naval exercise involving the US, India, Australia, Japan and Singapore. Even US naval manoeuvres with India and Japan are out. Washington is charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal issue.

As his secretary of state did in February, Mr Obama has started his Asia tour in Japan and will end in China – the high spot – while skipping India. But playing to India’s well-known weakness for flattery, he will honour it with his presidency’s first state dinner later this month.

Left to fend for itself, New Delhi has steered clear of confrontation with Beijing. It has sought to damp down military tensions and cut off all information to the media on the Himalayan border situation, including Chinese intrusions.

But faced with attacks at home for being “soft” on China, the government has asserted itself politically. It rebuffed repeated Chinese diplomatic appeals and allowed the Dalai Lama to travel to Arunachal. It also announced an end to the practice of Chinese companies bringing thousands of workers from China to work on projects in India.

But India cannot afford to be isolated. With Mr Obama pursuing a Sino-centric Asia policy, and with China-friendly heads of government in Australia, Japan and Taiwan, New Delhi’s diplomatic calculations have gone awry. But the hardline Chinese approach reinforces the Indian thinking that engendered Chinese belligerence: that India has little option other than to align with the US.

New Delhi has to manage its relationships with Beijing and Washington wisely so it does not lose out. Meanwhile, the US cannot ignore the pattern of Sino-Indian border provocations and new force deployments similar to what happened 47 years ago when China, taking advantage of the Cuban missile crisis, routed the Indian military in a surprise invasion.

When Mr Obama is in Beijing, his message should be that any military adventure will prove costly and trigger the rise of a militaristic, anti-China India. Mr Obama should propose a US-China-India initiative and encourage his hosts to begin a process of reconciliation and healing in Tibet.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of ‘Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan’

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After the Berlin Wall’s fall, Asia gained salience

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As the Wall fell, Asia rose

The Berlin Wall’s collapse changed many things, but it also helped shift the balance of power towards Asia

 

Brahma Chellaney

Mint newspaper, November 9, 2009

 

On its 20th anniversary, the fall of the Berlin Wall stands out as the most momentous event in post-World War II history. By triggering the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, it helped transform global geopolitics. It also set in motion developments that helped significantly raise Asia’s profile in international relations, with the two demographic titans — China and India — benefiting in important but different ways.

 

Globally, some nations lost out, but many others gained. The events arising from the Berlin Wall’s fall transformed Europe’s political and military landscape. But no continent benefited more than Asia, as has been epitomized by its dramatic economic rise — the speed and scale of which has no parallel in world history.

Illustration: Jayachandran / Mint

At a time when tectonic global power shifts are challenging strategic stability, Asia has become the world’s main creditor and economic locomotive. With the world’s fastest growing markets, fastest rising military expenditures and most volatile hot spots, a resurgent Asia today holds the key to the future global order. The Asian economic renaissance has been accompanied by a growing international recognition of Asia’s soft power, as symbolized by its arts, fashion and cuisine. Even so, Asia faces complex security, energy and developmental challenges in this era of globalization and greater interstate competition.

An important post-1989 development was the shift from the primacy of military power to a greater role for economic power in shaping international geopolitics. That helped promote not only an economic boom in Asia, but also led to an eastward movement of global power and influence, with Asia emerging as an important player on the world stage.

Global power shifts, as symbolized by Asia’s ascent, are now being spurred not by military triumphs or geopolitical realignments but by a factor unique to our contemporary world—rapid economic growth. Rapid economic growth also was witnessed during the Industrial Revolution and in the post-World War II period. But in the post-Cold War period, rapid economic growth by itself has contributed to qualitatively altering global power equations. So, economic power is now playing a unique role in instigating contemporary power shifts, even as the United Nations Security Council’s permanent-membership structure continues to undergird the importance of military power.

Another defining event in 1989 was the Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing. But for the end of the Cold War, the West would not have let China off the hook over those killings.

The Cold War’s end, however, facilitated the West’s pragmatic approach to shun trade sanctions and help integrate China with global institutions through the liberalizing influence of foreign investment and trade. Had the United States and its allies pursued the opposite approach centred on punitive sanctions, like they are still doing against Cuba and Burma, the result would have been a less-prosperous, less-open and a potentially destabilizing China. 

 

China’s phenomenal economic success — illustrated by its emergence with the world’s biggest trade surplus, largest foreign-currency reserves and highest steel production — thus owes a lot to the West’s decision not to sustain trade sanctions after Tiananmen Square. Without the expansion in U.S.-Chinese trade and financial relations, China’s growth would have been much harder. Today, having vaulted past Germany to become the world’s biggest exporter, China is set to displace Japan as the world’s No. 2 economy. Yet, for the foreseeable future, Japan — with its nearly $5-trillion economy, impressive high-technology skills, Asia’s largest navy and a per-capita income more than 10 times that of China — is likely to stay a strong nation.

 

India’s rise as a new economic giant also is linked to the post-1989 events. India was so much into barter trade with the Soviet Union and its communist allies in Eastern Europe that when the East bloc began to unravel, India had to start paying for imports in harsh cash. That rapidly depleted its modest foreign-exchange reserves, triggering a severe balance-of-payments crisis in 1991. The financial crisis, in turn, compelled India to embark on radical economic reforms, which laid the foundation for India’s economic rise.

 

More broadly, the emblematic defeat of Marxism in 1989 allowed Asian countries, including China and India, to overtly pursue capitalist policies. Although China’s economic-modernization programme already had begun under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Communist Party, after 1989, was able to publicly subordinate ideology to wealth creation. That example, in turn, had a constructive influence on surviving communist parties in Asia and beyond.

 

Geopolitically, the post-1989 gains extended far beyond the West. China and India were both beneficiaries. For China, the Soviet Union’s sudden collapse came as a great strategic boon, eliminating a menacing empire and opening the way to rapidly increase strategic space globally. Russia’s decline in the 1990s became China’s gain.

 

For India, the end of the Cold War triggered a foreign-policy crisis by eliminating the country’s most reliable partner, the Soviet Union. But as in the economic realm, that crisis had a positive outcome: It led to a revamped foreign policy.

 

The crisis compelled India to overcome its didactically quixotic traditions and inject greater realism and pragmatism into its foreign policy — a process still on. Post-Cold War India began pursuing mutually beneficial strategic partnerships with all key players in Asia and the wider world, including European powers and Japan. The new Indo-U.S. “global strategic partnership” — a defining feature of this decade — was made possible by the post-1989 shifts in Indian policy thinking.

 

As India has moved from Jawaharlal Nehru’s nonalignment to a contemporary, globalized practicality, it is becoming multialigned, while tilting more towards the West. But it intends to preserves the core element of nonalignment — strategic autonomy. A multialigned India pursuing omnidirectional cooperation for mutual benefit with key players, clearly, is better positioned to advance its interests in the changed world.

 

In that light, it is hardly a surprise that Russia remains India’s “tried and tested friend” — a relationship whose value for both sides is being reinforced by the China factor. By contrast, the escalating India-China rivalry and tensions over the Himalayan territorial disputes run counter to the U.S. interest to build closer ties with both sides and not to overtly side with New Delhi. It is not an accident that Washington, locked in deepening symbiosis with Beijing, is today quietly charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal dispute.

 

To be sure, not all developments post-1989 were positive. For instance, the phenomenon of failing states, which has affected Asian security the most, is a direct consequence of the end of the Cold War. While the Cold War raged, weak states were propped up by one bloc or the other. But with the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the U.S. got out of that game.

 

That is the reason why, suddenly, dysfunctional or failing states emerged in the 1990s — a phenomenon that has since contributed to making such nations a threat to regional and international security because they are home to transnational pirates (Somalia) or transnational terrorists (Pakistan and Afghanistan), or they defy global norms (such as North Korea and Iran). Asia has suffered more casualties from the post-Cold War rise of international terrorism than any other region.

 

Between 1988 and 1990, as the Cold War was winding down, pro-democracy protests broke out in several parts of the world — from China and Burma to Eastern Europe. The protests helped spread political freedoms in Eastern Europe and inspired popular movements elsewhere that overturned dictatorships in countries as disparate as Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan and Chile. After the Soviet disintegration, even Russia emerged as a credible candidate for democratic reform.

 

Although the overthrow of a number of totalitarian or autocratic regimes did shift the global balance of power in favour of democratic forces, not all the pro-democracy movements were successful. Indeed, the subsequent “colour revolutions” only instilled greater caution among the surviving authoritarian regimes, prompting them to set up measures to counter foreign-inspired democratization initiatives.

 

Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the spread of democracy unmistakably has stalled. Aside from the feared retreat of democracy in Russia, China — now the world’s oldest and largest autocracy — is demonstrating that when authoritarianism is deeply entrenched, a marketplace of goods and services can stymie the marketplace of political ideas. A new model, authoritarian capitalism — now well-established in Asian countries as different as Singapore, Malaysia and Kazakhstan — has emerged as the leading challenger to the international spread of democratic values.

 

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

(c) Mint, 2009

India’s little-known role in Sri Lankan conflict

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India’s dirty role in Sri Lankan war

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, November 1-4, 2009

Six months after Sri Lanka’s stunning military triumph in the 26-year-old civil war at the cost of thousands of
civilian lives in the final weeks alone, the peace dividend remains elusive, with President Mahinda Rajapaksa setting out — in the name of “eternal vigilance” — to expand by 50% an already-large military. China, clearly, was the decisive factor in helping end that war through its generous supply of offensive weapons
and its munificent bilateral aid. It even got its ally Pakistan actively involved in Rajapaksa’s war strategy.

India’s role, although it has received little international attention, was also deplorable. For years, India had pursued a hands-off approach toward Sri Lanka in response to two developments — a disastrous 1987-90 peacekeeping operation there; and the 1991 assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. But
having been outmanoeuvred by China’s success in extending strategic reach to Sri Lanka in recent years, New Delhi got sucked into providing major assistance to Colombo, lest it lose further ground in that island-nation.

From opening an unlimited line of military credit for Sri Lanka to extending critical naval and intelligence
assistance, India provided sustained war support in defiance of a deteriorating humanitarian
situation there.  A “major turning point” in the war, as Sri Lankan navy chief Admiral Wasantha Karannagoda acknowledged, came when the rebels’ supply ships were eliminated, one by one, with Indian naval intelligence inputs, cutting off all supplies to the rebel-held areas. That in turn allowed the Sri Lankan ground forces to make rapid advances and unravel the de facto state the Tigers had established in Sri Lanka’s north and east.

Indeed, Rajapaksa deftly played the China, India and Pakistan cards to maximize gains. After key Tamil Tiger leaders had been killed in the fighting, Rajapaksa — to New Delhi’s acute mortification — thanked China, India and Pakistan in the same breath for Sri Lanka’s victory. Today, India stands more marginalized than ever in Sri Lanka. Its natural constituency — the Tamils — feels not only betrayed, but also looks at India as a colluder in the bloodbath. India already had alienated the Sinhalese in the 1980s, when it first armed the Tamil Tigers and then sought to disarm them through an ill-starred peacekeeping foray that left almost three times as many Indian troops dead as the 1999 Kargil war with Pakistan.

India’s waning leverage over Sri Lanka is manifest from the way it now has to jostle for influence there with archrivals China and Pakistan. Hambantota — the billion-dollar port Beijing is building on Sri Lanka’s
southeast — symbolizes the Chinese strategic challenge to India from the oceans.

Even as some 250,000 displaced Tamils — equivalent to the population of Belfast — continue to be held incommunicado in miserable conditions in barbed-wire camps to this day, India has been unable to persuade Colombo to set them free. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said recently that India
has conveyed its “concerns in no uncertain terms to Sri Lanka on various occasions, stressing the need for them to focus on resettling and rehabilitating the displaced Tamil population at the earliest.” But India seems unable to make a difference even with messages delivered in “no uncertain terms.”

Yet, such has been the unstinted Indian support that even after the crushing of the Tigers, India went out the way to castigate the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, in June for shining a spotlight on the deplorable human-rights situation in Sri Lanka. India accused Ms. Pillay — a distinguished
South African judge of Indian descent who has sought an independent international investigation into alleged war crimes committed by all sides in Sri Lanka — of going beyond her brief, saying “the independence of the high commissioner cannot be presumed to exceed that of the UN Secretary General.”
Subsequently, India voted in the IMF for a $2.8 billion loan desperately needed by cash-strapped Colombo.

The costs for lending such support have been high. New Delhi today is groping to bring direction to its Sri
Lanka policy, even as it struggles to respond to the Chinese strategy to build maritime choke points in the Indian Ocean region. The current upsurge of Sinhalese chauvinism flows from the fact that the Sri Lankan military accomplished a task whose pursuit forced the mightier Indian army to make an ignominious exit 19 years ago. Consequently, Colombo is going to be even less inclined than before to listen to New
Delhi.

Against this background, the least India can do is to help improve the humanitarian situation in Sri Lanka. It cannot impotently watch as the Sri Lankan government continues to hold more than a quarter of a
million innocent Tamil refugees as prisoners in internment camps in the north. The arrival of the annual winter monsoon rains is causing a further deterioration of living conditions in these camps, threatening the health and safety of the internally displaced persons (IDPs). To make up for the sins of its policy, India — more than 100,000 Sri Lankan refugees camping in Tamil Nadu — can do quite a few things.

●First, India must start exerting open, intense pressure on Colombo to free the more than 250,000 IDPs from internment. They must be granted freedom of movement. Also, the 11,000 suspected rebels being separately detained at military sites should be identified and not denied access to legal
representation.

●Second, it has to insist the government resettle the IDPs in their hometowns and villages. As Walter Kaelin, the UN secretary-general’s representative on the human rights of IDPs, recently said: “It is imperative to immediately take all measures necessary to de-congest the overcrowded camps in northern Sri Lanka with their difficult and risky living conditions. The IDPs should be allowed to leave these camps voluntarily and in freedom, safety and dignity to their homes. If this is not possible in the near future, the displaced must be allowed to stay with host families or in open transit sites.”

●Three, India must warn Colombo of serious consequences if it seeks to change local demography by settling Sinhalese in Tamil areas. With overt official encouragement, thousands of Sinhalese already have flocked to the east to regain farming and other land from which they claim to have been driven out in the 1980s by the Tamil Tigers. Attempts to “Sinhalise” the north and east will not only deprive local Tamils and Muslims of their livelihood, but also sow the seeds of another cycle of conflict. Rajapaksa, post-victory, has not only rejected federalism and regional autonomy, but also — to the chagrin of Tamils — demerged the northern and eastern provinces.

●Four, India should demand that the IDP camps be opened up for effective monitoring through the grant of full access to humanitarian organizations, including the UN and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and to the media.

●And five, India ought to join hands with the co-chairs of the so-called Friends of Sri Lanka — the US, European Union, Norway and Japan — to oppose further disbursement of the IMF loan until Colombo meets the commitments on IDP resettlement it made in its July letter of intent to the Fund. In the letter, it
pledged to resettle 70 to 80 per cent of the IDPs by the year-end — a further shift in its deadline. Democratic players must employ further disbursements as leverage to relieve a deteriorating humanitarian situation.

More broadly, India should lean on Rajapaksa to restore democratic freedoms. The wartime
suppression of a free press and curtailment of fundamental rights continues in peacetime, undermining democratic freedoms and creating a fear psychosis. Sweeping emergency regulations remain in place, arming the security forces with expansive powers of search, arrest and seizure of property. Individuals can
still be held in unacknowledged detention for up to 18 months.

For national reconciliation and healing to begin, it is essential the government shed its war-gained powers. Unfortunately, Colombo still seeks to hold onto its special powers while suppressing the truth. Peace sought to be achieved through the brutal humiliation of an ethnic community has always proven elusive in world history. If Sri Lanka is to go from making war to making peace, the present opportunity has to be
seized before there is a recrudescence of violence. That can happen only if Colombo is diplomatically nudged by an India that works in tandem with other important players. With its leverage undermined, New Delhi no longer can operate on its own.

 (c) Covert, 2009.

How Asia became important in international relations

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Berlin, Birthplace of Modern Asia

Brahma Chellaney

A column globally syndicated by Project Syndicate

NEW DELHI – By marking the Cold War’s end and the looming collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago transformed global geopolitics. But no continent benefited more than Asia, whose dramatic economic rise since 1989 has occurred at a speed and scale without parallel in world history.

For Asia, the most important consequence of the fall of the Berlin Wall was that the collapse of communism produced a shift from the primacy of military power to economic power in shaping the international order. To be sure, rapid economic growth also occurred during the Industrial Revolution and in the post-WWII period. But in the post-Cold War period, economic growth by itself has contributed to altering global power relations.

Another defining event in 1989 was the Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protestors in Beijing. If not for the Cold War’s end, the West would not have let China off the hook over those killings. Instead, the West adopted a pragmatic approach, shunning trade sanctions and helping to integrate China into the global economy and international institutions through the liberalizing influence of foreign investment and trade. Had the United States and its allies pursued an approach centered on punitive sanctions, as with Cuba and Burma, the result would have been a less prosperous, less open, and potentially destabilizing China.

Indeed, China’s phenomenal economic success – illustrated by its world-beating trade surplus, world’s largest foreign-currency reserves, and highest steel production – owes a lot to the West’s decision not to sustain trade sanctions after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Having vaulted past Germany to become the world’s biggest exporter, China now is set to displace Japan as the world’s second largest economy.

India’s rise as an economic giant is also linked to the post-1989 events. India was heavily involved in barter trade with the Soviet Union and its communist allies in Eastern Europe. When the East Bloc unraveled, India had to start paying for imports in hard cash. That rapidly depleted its modest foreign-exchange reserves, triggering a severe financial crisis in 1991, which in turn compelled India to embark on radical economic reforms that laid the foundations for its economic rise.

More broadly, the emblematic defeat of Marxism in 1989 allowed Asian countries, including China and India, to pursue capitalist policies overtly. Although China’s economic renaissance had already begun under Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Communist Party, after 1989, was able publicly to subordinate ideology to wealth creation. That example, in turn, had a constructive influence on surviving communist parties in Asia and beyond.

Geopolitically, the post-1989 gains extended far beyond the West. The Soviet Union’s sudden collapse was a strategic boon to Asia, eliminating a menacing empire and opening the way for China rapidly to pursue its interests globally. Russia’s decline in the 1990’s became China’s gain.

For India, the end of the Cold War triggered a foreign-policy crisis by eliminating the country’s most reliable partner, the Soviet Union. But, as with its 1991 financial crisis, India was able to emerge with a revamped foreign policy – one that abandoned the country’s quixotic traditions and embraced greater realism and pragmatism. Post-Cold War India began pursuing mutually beneficial strategic partnerships with other key players in Asia and the wider world. The new “global strategic partnership” with the United States – a defining feature of this decade – was made possible by the post-1989 shifts in Indian policy thinking.

Of course, not all post-1989 developments were positive. For example, the phenomenon of failing states, which has affected Asian security the most, is a direct consequence of the Cold War’s end. When the Cold War raged, one bloc or the other propped up weak states. But, with the Soviet Union’s disappearance, the US abandoned that game.

As a result, dysfunctional or failing states suddenly emerged in the 1990’s, constituting a threat to regional and international security by becoming home to transnational pirates (Somalia) or transnational terrorists (Pakistan and Afghanistan), or by their defiance of global norms (North Korea and Iran). Asia has suffered more casualties from the rise of international terrorism than any other region.

Moreover, two decades after the Berlin Wall fell, the spread of democracy has stalled. Between 1988 and 1990, as the Cold War was winding down, pro-democracy protests erupted far from Eastern Europe, overturning dictatorships in countries as different as Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Chile. After the Soviet disintegration, even Russia emerged as a credible candidate for democratic reform.

But, while the overthrow of totalitarian or autocratic regimes shifted the global balance of power in favor of the forces of democracy, not all the pro-democracy movements succeeded. And the subsequent “color revolutions” in places like Ukraine only instilled greater caution among the surviving authoritarian regimes, prompting them to implement measures to counter foreign-inspired democratization initiatives.

Aside from the retreat of democracy in Russia, China – now the world’s oldest autocracy – is demonstrating that when authoritarianism is entrenched, a marketplace of goods and services can stymie the marketplace of political ideas. Twenty years after communism’s fall, authoritarian capitalism has emerged as the leading challenger to the spread of democratic values.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.
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The U.S.-China-India Strategic Triangle

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China-India tensions rising

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
Japan Times, November 14, 2009

The India-China relationship has entered choppy waters due to a perceptible hardening in the Chinese stance. Anti-India rhetoric in the state-run Chinese media has intensified, even as China has stepped up military pressure along the disputed Himalayan frontier through cross-border incursions. Beijing also has resurrected its long-dormant claim to the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, nearly three times as large as Taiwan.

The more muscular Chinese stance clearly is tied to the new U.S.-India strategic partnership, symbolized by the nuclear deal and deepening military cooperation. As President George W. Bush declared in his valedictory speech, "We opened a new historic and strategic partnership with India."

The Obama administration, although committed to promoting that strategic partnership, has been reluctant to take New Delhi’s side in any of its disputes with Beijing. This has emboldened China to up the ante against India, with the Chinese Foreign Ministry employing language like "we demand" in a recent statement that labeled the Indian prime minister’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh a "disturbance."

New Delhi has hit back by permitting the Dalai Lama to tour Arunachal Pradesh and announcing an end to the practice of letting Chinese companies bring thousands of workers from China to work on projects in India. And in a public riposte to Beijing’s raising of objections to multilateral funding of any project in Arunachal, India has asked China to cease its infrastructure and military projects in another disputed region — Pakistan-held Kashmir.

The present pattern of border provocations, new force deployments and mutual recriminations is redolent of the situation that prevailed 47 years ago when China routed the unprepared Indian military in a surprise two-front aggression. Today, amid rising tensions, the danger of border skirmishes, if not a limited war, looks real.

Such tensions have been rising since 2006. Until 2005, China actually was eschewing anti-India rhetoric and pursuing a policy of active engagement with India, even as it continued to expand its strategic space in southern Asia, to New Delhi’s detriment. In fact, when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited India in April 2005, the two countries unveiled six broad principles to help settle their festering border dispute. But after the Indo-U.S. defense-framework accord and nuclear deal were unveiled in quick succession in subsequent months, the mood in Beijing perceptibly changed.

That gave rise to a pattern that now has become commonplace: Chinese newspapers, individual bloggers, security think tanks and even officially blessed Web sites ratcheting up an "India threat" scenario. A U.S.-India military alliance has always been a strategic nightmare for the Chinese, and the ballyhooed Indo-U.S. global strategic partnership triggered alarm bells in Beijing.

The partnership, though, falls short of a formal military alliance. Still, the high-pitched Indian and American rhetoric that the new partnership represented a tectonic shift in geopolitical alignments apparently made Chinese policymakers believe that India was being groomed as a new Japan or Australia to America — a perception reinforced by subsequent arrangements and Indian orders for U.S. arms worth $3.5 billion in just the past year.

Clearly, New Delhi failed to foresee that its rush to forge close strategic bonds with Washington could provoke greater Chinese pressure and that, in such a situation, the U.S. actually would offer little comfort. Consequently, India finds itself in a spot today.

For one, Beijing calculatedly has sought to pressure India on multiple fronts — military, diplomatic and multilateral. For another, the U.S. — far from coming to India’s support — has shied away from even cautioning Beijing against any attempt to forcibly change the territorial status quo. Indeed, on a host of issues — from the Dalai Lama to the Arunachal dispute — Washington has chosen not to antagonize Beijing. That, in effect, has left India on its own.

The spectacle of the president of the most powerful country in the world seeking to curry favor with a rights-abusing China by shunning the Dalai Lama during the Tibetan leader’s Washington visit cannot but embolden the Chinese leadership to step up pressure on India, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile.

U.S. President Barack Obama also has signaled that America’s strategic relationship with India will not be at the expense of the fast-growing U.S. ties with Beijing. The Obama team, after reviewing the Bush-era arrangements, now intends to abjure elements in its ties with New Delhi that could rile China, including any joint military drill in Arunachal or a 2007-style naval exercise involving the U.S., India, Australia, Japan and Singapore. Even trilateral U.S. naval maneuvers with India and Japan are being abandoned so as not to raise China’s hackles.

As his secretary of state did in February, Obama is undertaking an Asia tour that begins in Japan and ends in China — the high spot — while skipping India. In fact, Washington is quietly charting a course of tacit neutrality on the Arunachal dispute. Yet Beijing remains suspicious of the likely trajectory of U.S.-India strategic ties, including pre-1962-style CIA meddling in Tibet.

This distrust found expression in the latest People’s Daily editorial that accused New Delhi of pursuing a foreign policy of "befriending the far and attacking the near." Left to fend for itself, New Delhi has decided to steer clear of any confrontation with Beijing.

Still, even as it seeks to tamp down tensions with Beijing, New Delhi cannot rule out the use of force by China at a time when hardliners there seem to believe that a swift, 1962-style military victory can help fashion a Beijing-oriented Asia.

Having declared that America’s "most important bilateral relationship in the world" is with Beijing, the Obama team must caution it against crossing well-defined red lines or going against its gospel of China’s "peaceful rise."

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan," published by HarperCollins, with a new U.S. edition scheduled for release in January.
The Japan Times: Saturday, Nov. 14, 2009
(C) All rights reserved

How post-1989 events transformed the world

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OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR November 4, 2009

Europe Got Freedom, Asia Got Rich

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

NEW DELHI — On its 20th anniversary, the fall of the Berlin Wall stands out as the most momentous event in post-World War II history. The end of the Cold War transformed geopolitics, thereby changing the world. But no continent benefited more than Asia, as has been epitomized by its dramatic economic rise, the speed and scale of which has no parallel in world history.

An important post-1989 effect was the shift from the primacy of military power to a greater role for economic power in shaping global geopolitics.

That helped promote not only an economic boom in Asia, but also led to an eastward movement of global power and influence, with Asia emerging as an important player on the world stage.

Global power shifts, as symbolized by Asia’s ascent, are now being triggered not by military triumphs or geopolitical realignments but by a factor unique to our contemporary world — rapid economic growth.

Rapid growth was also witnessed during the Industrial Revolution and in the post-World War II period. But in the post-Cold War period, economic growth by itself has contributed to qualitatively altering global power equations.

Another defining event in 1989 was the Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing. But for the end of the Cold War, the West would not have let China off the hook for those killings.

The Cold War’s end, however, facilitated the West’s pragmatic approach to shun trade sanctions and help integrate China with global institutions through the liberalizing influence of foreign investment and trade. Had the United States and its allies pursued the opposite approach, centered on punitive sanctions — as have been applied against Cuba and Burma, for example — the result would have been a less-prosperous, less-open and a potentially destabilizing China. Instead, China now is set to displace Japan as the world’s No. 2 economy.

India’s rise as a new economic giant also is linked to the post-1989 events. India was heavily into barter trade with the Soviet Union and its Communist allies in Eastern Europe, so when the East bloc began to unravel, India had to start paying for imports in harsh cash.

That rapidly depleted its modest foreign-exchange reserves, triggering a severe financial crisis in 1991. The crisis, in turn, compelled India to embark on radical economic reforms, which laid the foundations for India’s economic rise.

More broadly, the emblematic defeat of Marxism in 1989 allowed Asian countries, including China and India, to overtly pursue capitalist policies. Although China’s economic renaissance already had begun under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Communist Party, after 1989, was able to publicly subordinate ideology to wealth creation.

So, while Mao Zedong gave China unity, nationalism and self-respect, Deng helped make it prosperous. That example, in turn, has had a constructive influence on surviving Communist parties in Asia and beyond.

Geopolitically, the post-1989 gains extended far beyond the West. China and India were both beneficiaries. The Soviet Union’s sudden collapse came as a great strategic boon, eliminating a menacing empire and opening the way for Beijing to rapidly increase strategic space globally. Russia’s decline in the 1990s became China’s gain.

For India, the end of the Cold War triggered a foreign-policy crisis by eliminating the country’s most reliable partner, the Soviet Union, described as “a trusted and tested friend.” That crisis helped lay the base for a revamped foreign policy.

It compelled India to overcome its didactically quixotic traditions and inject greater realism and pragmatism into its foreign policy. Post-Cold War, India began pursuing mutually beneficial strategic partnerships with other key players in Asia and the wider world.

The new Indo-U.S. “global strategic partnership” — a defining feature of this decade — was made possible by the post-1989 shifts in Indian policy thinking.

To be sure, not all post-1989 developments were positive. The phenomenon of failing states, which has affected Asian security the most, is a direct consequence of the end of the Cold War. While the Cold War raged, weak states were propped up by one bloc or the other. Without the Soviet Union, the United States got out of that game.

That is the reason why dysfunctional or failing states began to emerge in the 1990s — a phenomenon that has contributed to making such states a threat to regional and international security either because they are home to transnational pirates (like Somalia) or transnational terrorists (Pakistan and Afghanistan), or because of their defiance of global norms (North Korea, Iran). Asia has suffered more casualties from international terrorism than any other region.

Between 1988 and 1990, as the Cold War was winding down, pro-democracy protests broke out in several parts of the world — from China and Burma to Eastern Europe. The protests helped spread political freedoms in Eastern Europe and inspired popular movements elsewhere that overturned dictatorships in countries as disparate as Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan and Chile. After the Soviet disintegration, even Russia emerged as a credible candidate for democratic reform.

The overthrow of a number of totalitarian or autocratic regimes did shift the global balance of power in favor of the forces of democracy. But not all the pro-democracy movements were successful. And the subsequent “color revolutions” only instilled greater caution among the surviving authoritarian regimes, prompting them to set up countermeasures to foreign-inspired democratization initiatives.

Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the spread of democracy has stalled. China, now the world’s oldest autocracy, is demonstrating that when authoritarianism is deeply entrenched, a marketplace of goods and services is able to stymie a marketplace of political ideas. Authoritarian capitalism indeed has emerged as the leading challenge to the international spread of democratic values.

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

Why the U.S. must re-frame its Afghanistan strategy

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An Unwinnable Battle

Brahma Chellaney The Times of India 3 November 2009

With no viable option in sight to salvage America’s faltering Afghan war, Barack Obama faces a critical test in his young presidency. Sending tens of thousands of more troops into battle, as the top US general in Afghanistan wants, risks a Vietnam-style quagmire. Slashing troop levels to concentrate on counterterrorist operations through air power and special ground forces will expose Obama to political attacks at home. Obama thus is searching for the illusory middle ground. 

Going big and going long in Afghanistan will serve no country’s interests other than Pakistan’s. Indeed, as long as NATO’s Afghan war rages, US policy will stay hostage to Islamabad, even though it is Pakistan’s duplicitous policy of aiding militants while pretending to be on America’s side that has resulted in the Taliban gaining the momentum. Only a military exit can help free US policy. After all, with US supply lines to Afghanistan running through Pakistan, waging the Afghan war has entailed supporting Pakistan through multibillion-dollar US aid, to the extent that Islamabad this year has emerged as the largest recipient of American assistance in the world. 

In that light, is it any surprise that top Pakistanis have lined up to plead against a US withdrawal? Munificent aid to Pakistan traditionally has flown only when the US has been involved in war – hot or cold. Absence of war usually has fostered US neglect of Pakistan. If the US decides to draw down forces in Afghanistan, it will not only stop raining dollars in Islamabad, but also Pakistani sanctuaries for the top Afghan Taliban leaders and other terrorist figures are likely to become US targets. 

An Obama decision not to get deeper involved in Afghanistan won’t be an admission of defeat but a course correction on a war that presently is just not winnable. Obama has limited the US goal narrowly "to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda". But the US military’s real foe in Afghanistan is not the badly fragmented and enfeebled al-Qaeda, but a resurgent Taliban. Instead of seeking to rout the Taliban, Washington has encouraged the Pakistani, Afghan and Saudi intelligence services to hold proxy negotiations with the Taliban shura members, holed up in Quetta, Pakistan. 

In fact, the US is fighting the wrong war. How can the Afghan war be won when America has limited its ground military campaign to just one side of the Af-Pak border even though the Taliban and other militants openly use the Pakistani side as a haven and staging ground for attacks? Not allowed to pursue the militants across the border, US troops in Nuristan, Kunar and other Afghan border regions find themselves as sitting ducks for surprise attacks orchestrated from Pakistani territory. 

Had Washington sought to defeat the Taliban, a further military surge may have made sense, because an ascendant Taliban can be defeated only through major ground operations, not by airstrikes and covert action alone. But to rout an already-weakened al-Qaeda, the US doesn’t need to scale up the war. While acknowledging that al-Qaeda’s capability has been degraded to the extent that it is in no position to openly challenge US interests, American proponents of a bigger war contend that the real danger is of al-Qaeda reconstituting itself if a US pullback leads to the Taliban’s return to power. 

Firstly, without large ground forces in Afghanistan or even major ground operations, the US can hold al-Qaeda remnants at bay in their havens in the mountainous tribal regions of Pakistan through covert operations, Predator drones and cruise-missile attacks, as it already is doing. Secondly, US air power and special-force operations, in combination with the support of ground forces of ethnic minorities and non-Taliban Pashtun warlords, can prevent the Taliban from grabbing power in Kabul again. That was the same combination that helped oust the Taliban from power. Even if the US pulls out most of its troops, it will have such punitive-denial capability as it intends to maintain military bases in Afghanistan in the long run. 

American and international interests will be better served by gradually drawing down US troop levels. What unites the disparate insurgent elements is a common opposition to foreign military presence. A measured US pullback, far from bolstering the forces of global jihad, will eliminate the common unifying factor and unleash developments with largely internal or sub-regional significance. The most likely outcome of an Afghan power struggle triggered by a US decision to scale back the war would be the formalisation of the present de facto partition of Afghanistan along ethnic lines. 

The possible emergence of smaller, more-governable states in the world’s "Terroristan" belt cannot be bad news. In such a scenario, the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and other ethnic minorities would be able to ensure self-governance in the Afghan areas they dominate, leaving the Pashtun lands on both sides of the British-drawn but now-disappearing Durand Line in ferment. Pakistan ultimately is bound to pay a price for creating and nurturing the Taliban monster. And that price is likely to directly impinge on its territorial unity. 

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research.