Sino-Indian border tensions: Let the Facts Speak For Themselves

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Setting Boundaries

India must have an honest debate on its diplomatic and military options regarding China.

Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, October 5, 2009 http://ow.ly/sCR1

No one in the Indian government has said
Chinese cross-frontier incursions aren’t happening. Yet to play down the
incursions, New Delhi
has accused the media of overplaying such intrusions. To the delight of the
autocrats in Beijing, who tightly control the
flow of information in their country, including through online censors, New Delhi has made its
home media the whipping boy. The unwitting message that sends to Beijing is that when the
world’s biggest autocracy builds up pressure, the world’s largest democracy is
willing to tame its media coverage, even if it entails dispensing half-truths and flogging
distortions.

The facts, even if unpalatable, should be
allowed to speak for themselves. New
Delhi’s oft-repeated line in recent days has been that
Chinese incursions are at last year’s level, so there is no need to worry. But
2008 brought a record number of incursions, with defence officials reporting
that the number of such intrusions went from 140 in 2007 to 270 last year, or
almost double. In addition, there were 2,285 reported instances of “aggressive border
patrolling” by Chinese forces in 2008. As Defence Minister A.K. Anthony told an
army commanders’ conference last year, “there is no room for complacency” on
the Tibet
border.

That the incursions this year are continuing at
the 2008 level suggests there is every reason to be concerned. After all, the
2008 record pattern is continuing, with China
keeping India
under sustained, unremitting pressure. Yet, from the external affairs
minister and foreign secretary to the national security adviser and army chief,
Indian officials have sought to tamp down public concerns by saying there is
“no significant increase” compared to last year. Do they wish to thank Beijing for keeping
border incidents and other provocations at the 2008 level without seeking to
establish a new record through a “significant” increase in incursions?

The key point to note is that China has opened pressure points against India across the Himalayas, with border incidents occurring in all the four sectors. Chinese forces
are intruding even into Utttarakhand, although the line of control in this
middle sector was clarified in 2001 through an exchange of maps, and into Sikkim, whose 206-kilometer border with Tibet is not in dispute and indeed is recognized
by Beijing.
Yet, gratuitously stretching the truth, Indian officials say the incursions are
the result of differing perceptions about the line of control. That may be so
about Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh, but can that be true about Sikkim
and Uttarakhand? It speaks for itself that Beijing hasn’t offered this lame excuse.

Make no mistake: The Chinese border provocations have resulted both from India’s political pusillanimity and from the withdrawal of China-related army divisions in past years. For example, the 8th Mountain Division, tasked with defending Sikkim, was moved from northern Bengal to J&K and took part in the Kargil War. Tank forces also were moved out from Sikkim. Similarly, a mountain division was moved from the northeast to J&K for counterinsurgency operations. Such relocation of forces emboldened the Chinese. The current Indian moves to beef up defences against China largely involve the return of the forces that were withdrawn a decade or more ago.

Chinese cross-border incursions are designed not only to keep India under military pressure all along the Himalayas, but also to ensure Indian “good behavior” on assorted political issues, including Tibet, Pakistan and military ties with the US. Take the Pakistan factor: At a time when an internally troubled Pakistan is facing US pressure to redeploy a sufficient number of forces to the Afghan front, China wants to shield its “all-weather ally” from Indian military pressure by keeping a sizable number of Indian forces bogged down along the Himalayas.

Had India’s
nuclear deterrent been credible in the eyes of China,
Beijing
wouldn’t have dared to ratchet up border tensions. But the Chinese
muscle-flexing suggests otherwise. In fact, more than three decades after China tested its first intercontinental
ballistic missile, India
doesn’t have an ICBM even on the drawing board. India still hasn’t deployed even a
single, Beijing-reachable missile.

If the threat from an increasingly assertive and ambitious China is to be contained, India must have an honest and open
debate on its diplomatic and military options, including how gaps in its
defences can be plugged and what it will take to build a credible deterrent.
The media has a crucial role to play in such a debate, both by bringing out the
facts and providing a platform for discussion. If New Delhi wishes to ensure Himalayan peace
and stability, pulling the
wool on public eyes at home is certainly not the way.

The author is
Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

China at 60: Dramatic rise but unsettled future

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Pushing The Limits, Day After Day

Since 1949, China has seen a dramatic rise in
its fortunes. But its future is far from settled, says Brahma Chellaney.

Times of India, The Crest Edition, October
3, 2009 http://ow.ly/sCWG

Six decades
after it was founded, the People’s Republic of China can truly be proud of its
remarkable achievements. An impoverished, backward state in 1949, it has risen
dramatically and now commands respect and awe in the world. But such success
has come at great cost to its own people. In fact, China’s future remains more
uncertain than ever. It faces a worrisome paradox: Because of its opaque, repressive
system, the more it globalizes, the more vulnerable it becomes internally.

Unlike India, China first concentrated on
acquiring military muscle. By the time Deng Xiaoping launched his economic-modernization
programme, China
already had tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile and developed a
thermonuclear weapon (also known as a hydrogen or fusion bomb). The military
muscle gave Beijing
the much-needed security to focus on civilian modernization, helping it to fuel
its remarkable economic rise, which, in turn, has armed it with even greater
resources to sharpen its claws.

China’s economy has expanded 13-fold over
the last 30 years. Consequently, China has arrived as a global
economic player, with its state-owned corporate behemoths frenetically buying
foreign firms, technologies and resources. Add to the picture its rapidly swelling
foreign-exchange coffers. Beijing
thus is well-positioned geopolitically to further expand its influence.

Its defence
strategy since the Mao Zedong era has been founded on a simple premise — that
the capacity to defend oneself with one’s own resources is the first test a
nation has to pass on the way to becoming
a great power. So, even when China was poor, it
consciously put the accent on building
comprehensive national power.

Today, its
rapidly accumulating power raises concerns because even when it was backward
and internally troubled, it employed brute force to annex Xinjiang (1949) and Tibet (1950), to
raid South Korea (1950), to invade India (1962), to initiate a border conflict
with the Soviet Union through a military ambush (1969), and to attack Vietnam
(1979). A prosperous, militarily strong China cannot but be a threat to its
neighbours, especially if there are no constraints on the exercise of Chinese
power.

Communist
China actually began as an
international pariah state. Today, it is courted by the world.  Its rise in one generation as a world
power under authoritarian rule has come to epitomize the qualitative reordering
of international power. As the latest US
intelligence assessment predicts, China is “poised to have more
impact on the world over the next 20 years than any other country.”

A long-term vision and
unflinching pursuit of goals have been key drivers. But China’s rise also
has been aided by good fortune on multiple strategic fronts. First, Beijing’s reform process
benefited from good timing, coming as it did at the start of globalization
three decades ago. Second, the Soviet Union’s sudden collapse delivered an
immense 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. And third, there has been a succession of China-friendly U.S. presidents in the past two decades — a
significant period that has coincided with China’s ascension.

China’s rise indeed owes a lot to the
West’s decision not to sustain trade sanctions after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, but
instead to integrate Beijing
with global institutions through the liberalizing influence of foreign
investment and trade. That the choice made was wise can be seen from the
baneful impact of the opposite decision that was taken on Burma from the
late 1980s — to pursue a penal approach centred on sanctions. Had the
Burma-type approach been applied against China
internationally, the result would have been a less-prosperous, less-open and a
potentially destabilizing China.

Although China has come a
long way since Tiananmen Square, with its citizens now enjoying property
rights, the freedom to travel overseas and other rights that were unthinkable a
generation ago, political power still rests with the same party and system
responsible for the death of tens of millions of Chinese during the so-called
Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution and other state-induced disasters. The
greatest genocide in modern world history was not the Holocaust but the Great
Leap Forward, a misguided charge toward industrialization that left 36 million
people dead, according to Tombstone,
a recent book by long-time Chinese communist Yang Jisheng.

That the communist party
continues to monopolize power despite its past gory excesses indeed is
remarkable. This is now the oldest autocracy in the world. The longest any
autocratic system has survived in modern history was 74 years in the Soviet Union.

Although China has moved
from being a totalitarian state to being an authoritarian state, some things
haven’t changed since the Mao years. Some other things indeed have changed for
the worse, such as the whipping up of ultra-nationalism and turning that into
the legitimating credo of communist rule. Attempts to bend reality to the
illusions the state propagates through information control and online censors actually
risk turning China
into a modern-day Potemkin state.

While India celebrates diversity, China honours
artificially enforced monoculturalism, although it officially comprises 56
nationalities. China
seeks not only to play down its ethnic diversity, but also to conceal the
cultural and linguistic cleavages among the Han majority, lest the historical
north-south fault lines resurface with a vengeance. The Han — split in at least
seven linguistically and culturally distinct groups — are anything but
homogenous.

China’s internal problems — best
symbolized by the 2008 Tibetan uprising and this year’s Uighur revolt — won’t
go away unless Beijing
stops imposing cultural homogeneity and abandons ethnic drowning as state
strategy in minority lands. But given the regime’s entrenched cultural
chauvinism and tight centralized control, that is unlikely to happen. After
all, President Hu Jintao’s slogan of a “harmonious society” is designed to
undergird the theme of conformity with the state.

More fundamentally, if China manages to resolve the stark
contradictions between its two systems — market capitalism and political
monocracy — just the way Asian “tigers” like South
Korea and Taiwan
were able to make the transition to democracy without crippling turbulence at
home, China could emerge as
a peer competitor to the US.
Political modernization, not economic modernization, thus is the central
challenge staring at China.
If it is to build and sustain a great-power capacity, it has to avoid a
political hard landing.

Internationally,
China’s
trajectory will depend on how its neighbours and distant countries like the US manage its
growing power. Such management —
independently and in partnership — will determine if China stays on the positive side of
the ledger, without its power sliding into arrogance.

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

America’s Afghan war is just not winnable

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This column has been syndicated globally by Project Syndicate http://www.project-syndicate.org/
Last Exit from Kabul?

Brahma Chellaney

America’s war in Afghanistan is approaching a tipping point, with doubts about President Barack Obama’s strategy growing. Yet, after dispatching 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, Obama is considering sending another 14,000.

Let’s be clear: America’s Afghan war is not winnable, even though Obama has redefined American goals from defeating the Taliban to preventing Al Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a base to launch attacks on the United States. But Al Qaeda is no longer a serious factor in the Afghan war, where the principal combatants are now the American military and the Taliban, with its associated militias and private armies. Rather than seeking to defeat the Taliban, the US has encouraged the Pakistani, Afghan, and Saudi intelligence services to hold proxy negotiations with the Taliban’s top leadership, holed up in the Pakistani city of Quetta.

The US is fighting the wrong war. After America’s invasion drove Al Qaeda’s leaders from Afghanistan, Pakistan emerged as the main base and sanctuary for transnational terrorists. Support and sustenance for the Taliban and many other Afghan militants also comes from inside Pakistan. Despite this, Obama is pursuing a military surge in Afghanistan but an aid surge to Pakistan, which is now the single largest recipient of US assistance in the world.

To defeat Al Qaeda, the US doesn’t need a troop buildup – certainly not in Afghanistan. Without a large ground force in Afghanistan or even major ground operations, the US can hold Al Qaeda’s remnants at bay in their havens in the mountainous tribal regions of Pakistan through covert operations, Predator drones, and cruise-missile attacks. And isn’t that what the CIA is doing already?

Indeed, US intelligence experts believe that Al Qaeda already is badly fragmented and in no position to openly challenge American interests. According to the latest Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community released last February, “Because of the pressure we and our allies have put on Al Qaeda’s core leadership in Pakistan…Al Qaeda today is less capable and effective than it was a year ago.”

Had Obama’s goal been to rout the Taliban, a further military surge may have made sense, because a resurgent Taliban can be defeated only through major ground operations, not by airstrikes and covert action alone. But if the US administration’s principal war target is not the Taliban but Al Qaeda remnants, why use a troop-intensive strategy based on protecting population centers to win grassroots support? In reality, what the Obama administration calls a “clear, hold, build” strategy is actually a “surge, bribe, run” strategy – except that the muddled nature of the mission and deepening US involvement undermine the “run” component.

Before Afghanistan becomes a Vietnam-style quagmire, Obama must rethink his plan for another troop surge. Gradually drawing down US troop levels makes more sense, because what unites the disparate elements of the Taliban syndicate is a common opposition to foreign military presence.

An American military exit from Afghanistan would not be a shot in the arm for the forces of global jihad, as many in the US seem to fear. On the contrary, it would remove the Taliban’s unifying element and unleash developments – a vicious power struggle in Afghanistan along sectarian and ethnic lines – whose significance would be largely internal or regional.

The Taliban, with the active support of the Pakistani military, would certainly make a run for Kabul to replay the 1996 power grab. But it wouldn’t be easy, owing in part to the Taliban’s fragmentation, with the tail (private armies and militias) wagging the dog.

Moreover, the non-Taliban and non-Pashtun forces are now stronger, more organized, and better prepared than in 1996 to resist any advance on Kabul, having been empowered by provincial autonomy or by the offices they still hold in the Afghan federal government. And, by retaining Afghan bases to carry out covert operations, Predator missions, and other airstrikes, the US would be able to unleash punitive power to prevent a Taliban takeover. After all, it was American air power, combined with the Northern Alliance’s ground operations, which ousted the Taliban in 2001.

In fact, the most likely outcome of any Afghan power struggle triggered by an American withdrawal would be to formalize the present de facto partition of Afghanistan along ethnic lines – the direction in which Iraq, too, is headed.

In this scenario, the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and other ethnic minorities would be able to ensure self-governance in the Afghan areas that they dominate, leaving the Pashtun lands on both sides of the British-drawn Durand Line in ferment. Thanks to ethnic polarization, the Durand Line, or the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, exists today only on maps. On the ground, it has little political and economic relevance, and it would be militarily impracticable to re-impose the line.

As in Iraq, an American withdrawal would potentially unleash forces of Balkanization. That may sound disturbing, but it is probably an unstoppable consequence of the initial US invasion.

An American pullout actually would aid the fight against international terrorism. Instead of remaining bogged down in Afghanistan and seeking to cajole and bribe the Pakistani military into ending their support for Islamic militants, the US would become free to pursue a broader, more balanced counterterrorism strategy. For example, the US would better appreciate the dangers to international security posed by Pakistani terror groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.

The threat of an Islamist takeover of Pakistan comes not from the Taliban, but from groups that have long drawn support from the Pakistani army as part of a long-standing military-mullah alliance. That is where the focus of the fight should be.

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

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.

India’s China problem

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Lest we are caught napping, 1962-style

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, October 1-14, 2009

Recent developments are a sharp reminder that China is muscling up to India. The
rising number of Chinese military incursions and other border incidents, the
hardening of China’s
political stance and the vicious anti-India attacks in the Chinese
state-controlled media underscore that. So, even as China
has emerged as India’s
largest trading partner, the Sino-Indian strategic dissonance and border
disputes have become more pronounced. Beijing
seems intent on strategically encircling and squeezing India by employing its rising clout in Pakistan, Burma,
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal.

The Chinese border provocations have resulted both from India’s
political pusillanimity and the withdrawal of army divisions from China-related
duty. For example, the 8th Mountain Division, tasked with defending Sikkim, was moved from northern Bengal to Jammu and Kashmir and
took part in the Kargil War. Similarly, a mountain division was moved from
Nagaland/Arunachal area to J&K for counterinsurgency operations. Tank
forces also were moved out from Sikkim.
All those force withdrawals seem to have emboldened the Chinese. The current
Indian moves to beef up defences against China largely involve the return of
the forces that were withdrawn a decade or more ago.

Diplomatically, India is unable to get its act
together. In the face of growing Chinese cross-border forays, the foreign
minister claimed in public the Himalayan border was “most peaceful.”

The External Affairs Ministry (MEA) reacted to the
provocative “dismember India”
essay posted on a quasi-official Chinese website. But the MEA kept mum when the
authoritative People’s Daily taunted India
for lagging behind China in
all indices of power and asked New Delhi to
consider “the consequences of a potential confrontation with China.”
Criticizing the Indian moves to strengthen defences, the paper peremptorily
declared: “China won’t make
any compromises in its border disputes with India.” A subsequent commentary in
that paper warned India to
stop playing into the hands of “some Western powers” by raising the bogey of a
“China
threat.”

Dismember India
is an old failed project China
launched in the Mao years when it trained and armed Naga, Mizo and other
guerrillas. Although such assistance ceased after Mao’s 1976 death, China seems to be coming full circle today, with
Chinese-made arms increasingly flowing to guerrilla ranks in northeast India, including via Burma. India
last year raised this matter with Beijing
at the foreign minister level. Indeed, Pakistan-based terrorists targeting India now carry
Chinese-made grenades and assault rifles.

Like Pakistan,
China has long believed that
the best way to contain India
is to keep it internally preoccupied. In initiating its proxy war against India, Pakistan merely took a leaf out of
the Chinese book. But as Pakistan
has sunk deeper into a jihadist dungeon, China’s
surrogate card against India
has weakened. This, coupled with China’s
economic success going to its head, has helped spawn direct Chinese pressure on
India.

As a power rising faster than India,
China
sees no need to compromise. But even if it is weaker side, India does not need to blur the line between
diplomacy and appeasement, or give greater weight to show than to substance in
its interactions with Beijing.
Power asymmetry in interstate relations does not mean the weaker side must bend
to the dictates of the stronger or seek to propitiate it. Wise strategy is the
art of offsetting or neutralizing power imbalance with another state.

But while Beijing’s
strategy and tactics are apparent, India has had difficulty to define
a game-plan. It has stayed stuck in increasingly meaningless border talks that
have been going on for nearly three decades. To compound matters, India is to observe 2010 — the 60th anniversary
of China becoming India’s neighbour by gobbling up Tibet — as the “Year of Friendship with China.”

We know China
is seeking to constrict India’s
strategic space and stunt its rise. Indeed, China’s
intermittent cyberwarfare and cross-border military forays are nothing but
crude attempts to intimidate India.
Yet the more China acts
aggressively, the more India
assumes an air of injured innocence.

If India is not to be caught napping in 1962 style, it
has to inject greater realism into its China policy by shedding self-deluding
shibboleths, shoring up its deterrent capabilities and putting premium on leveraged
diplomacy.

 (c) Covert, 2009.

The human-rights challenge posed by Sri Lanka

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Sri Lankan peace process in pieces

Brahma
Chellaney

India Abroad, October 2, 2009

If war-scarred Sri Lanka is to re-emerge as a
tropical paradise, it has to build enduring peace through genuine inter-ethnic
equality and by making the transition from being a unitary state to being a
federation that grants local autonomy. Yet even in victory, the Sri Lankan
government seems unable to define peace or outline a political solution to the
long-standing grievances of the Tamil minority.

A process of national reconciliation anchored in
federalism and multiculturalism indeed can succeed only if possible war crimes
and other human-rights abuses by all parties are independently and credibly
investigated. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has acknowledged
civilian casualties were “unacceptably high,” especially as the war built to a
bloody crescendo earlier this year. The continuing air of martial triumph in Sri Lanka,
though, is making it difficult to heal the wounds of war through three
essential “Rs”: Relief, recovery and reconciliation.

In fact, the military victory bears a distinct family
imprint: President Mahinda Rajapaksa was guided by two of his brothers,
Gotabaya, the powerful defense secretary who fashioned the war plan, and Basil,
the presidential special adviser who formulated the political strategy.

Yet another brother, Chamal, is the ports and civil
aviation minister who awarded China
a contract to build the billion-dollar Hambantotta port on Sri Lanka’s
southeast. In return, Beijing provided Colombo not only the weapon systems that
decisively titled the military balance in its favor, but also the diplomatic
cover to prosecute the war in defiance of international calls to cease
offensive operations to help stanch rising civilian casualties.

Through such support, China
has succeeded in extending its strategic reach to a critically located country
in India’s backyard that
sits astride vital sea-lanes of communication in the Indian
Ocean region.

India
also is culpable for the Sri Lankan bloodbath. Having been outwitted by China, India
was compelled to lend critical assistance to Colombo,
lest it lose further ground in Sri
Lanka. From opening an unlimited line of
credit for Sri Lanka to extending naval and intelligence cooperation, India
provided war-relevant support in the face of a deteriorating humanitarian
situation in that island-nation.

Sinhalese nationalists now portray President Rajapaksa as
a modern-day incarnation of Dutugemunu, a Sinhalese ruler who, according to
legend, vanquished an invading Tamil army led by Kind Elara more than 2,000
years ago. But months after the Tamil Tigers were crushed, it is clear the
demands of peace extend far beyond the battlefield.

What is needed is a fundamental shift in government’s
policies to help create greater inter-ethnic equality, regional autonomy and a
reversal of the state-driven militarization of society. But Rajapaksa, despite
promising to address the root causes of conflict, has declared: “Federalism is
out of the question.”

How elusive the peace dividend remains can be seen from Sri Lanka’s
decision to press ahead with a further expansion of its military. Not content
with increasing the military’s size fivefold since the late 1980s to more than
200,000 troops today, Colombo
is raising the strength further to 300,000, in the name of “eternal vigilance.”
Soon after the May 2008 victory, the government, for example, announced a drive
to recruit 50,000 new troops to help control the northern areas captured from
the rebels.

The Sri Lankan military already is bigger than that of Britain and Israel. The planned further
expansion would make the military in tiny Sri
Lanka larger than the militaries of major powers like France, Japan
and Germany.
By citing a continuing danger of guerrilla remnants reviving the insurgency,
Rajapaksa is determined to keep a hyper-militarized Sri Lanka on something of a war
footing.

Yet another issue of concern is the manner the government
still holds nearly 300,000 civilians in camps where, in the recent words of UN
High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, the “internally displaced
persons are effectively detained under conditions of internment.”

Such detention risks causing more resentment among the
Tamils and sowing the seeds of future unrest. The internment was intended to
help weed out rebels, many of whom already have been identified and transferred
to military sites. Those in the evacuee camps are the victims and survivors of
the deadly war. To confine them in the camps against their will is to further
victimize and traumatize them.

Sri
Lanka’s interests would be better served
through greater transparency. It should grant the UN, International Red Cross
and nongovernmental organizations at home and abroad unfettered access to care
for and protect the civilians in these camps, allowing those who wish to leave
the camps to stay with relatives and friends.

Then there is the issue of thousands of missing people,
mostly Tamils. Given that many families are still searching for missing
members, the government ought to publish a list of all those it is holding — in
evacuee camps, prisons, military sites and other security centers. Even
suspected rebels in state custody ought to be identified and not denied access
to legal representation.

Bearing in mind that thousands of civilians were killed
just in the final months of the war, authorities should disclose the names of
those they know to be dead — civilians and insurgents — and the possible
circumstances of their death.

The way to fill the power vacuum in the Tamil-dominated
north is not by dispatching additional army troops in tens of thousands, but by
setting up a credible local administration to keep the peace and initiate
rehabilitation and reconstruction after more than a quarter of a century of
war. Yet there is a lurking danger that the government may seek to change
demography by returning to its old policy of settling Sinhalese in Tamil areas.

More fundamentally, such have been the costs of victory
that Sri Lankan civil society stands badly weakened. 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. Public meetings
cannot be held without government permission. Individuals can still be held in
unacknowledged detention for up to 18 months.

For the process of reconciliation and healing to begin in
earnest, it is essential the government give up wartime powers and accept, as
the UN human-rights commissioner has sought, “an independent and credible
international investigation … to ascertain the occurrence, nature and scale of
violations of international human-rights and international humanitarian law” by
all parties during the conflict. According to Ms. Pillay, “A new future for the
country, the prospect of meaningful reconciliation and lasting peace, where
respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms can become a reality for all,
hinges upon such an in-depth and comprehensive approach.”

Rather than begin a political dialogue on regional
autonomy and a more level-playing field for the Tamils in education and
government jobs, the government has seen its space get constricted by the
post-victory upsurge of Sinhalese chauvinism opposed to the devolution of
powers to the minorities. The hard-line constituency argues that the Tamils in
defeat shouldn’t get what they couldn’t secure through three decades of unrest
and violence.

Indeed, such chauvinism seeks to tar federalism as a
potential forerunner to secession, although the Tamil insurgency sprang from
the state’s rejection of decentralization and power-sharing. The looming
parliamentary and presidential elections also make devolution difficult, even
though the opposition is splintered and Rajapaksa seems set to win a second
term.

Add to the picture the absence of international pressure,
despite the leverage provided by a cash-strapped Sri Lankan economy. The United States enjoys a one-country veto in the
International Monetary Fund, yet it chose to abstain from the recent IMF vote
approving a desperately needed $2.8-billion loan to Sri Lanka.

In the face of China’s
stonewalling in the UN, Ban Ki-moon has been unable to appoint a UN special
envoy on Sri Lanka,
let alone order a probe into possible war crimes there. By contrast, the UN
carried out a recently concluded investigation into Israel’s
three-week military offensive in Gaza
earlier this year.

Today, reversing the militarization of society, ending
the control of information as an instrument of state policy and promoting
political and ethnic reconciliation are crucial to post-conflict peace-building
and to furthering the interests of all Sri Lankans — Sinhalese, Tamils and
Muslims. So also is the need to discard the almost mono-ethnic character of the
security forces.

Colombo
has to stop dragging its feet, as it has done for long, on implementing the
Constitution’s 13th amendment, which requires the ceding of some powers at the
provincial level. But these tasks are unlikely to be addressed without
sustained international diplomatic intervention.

As world history attests, peace sought to be achieved
through the suppression and humiliation of an ethnic community has proven
elusive. It will be a double tragedy for Sri Lanka if making peace proves
more difficult than making war.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of
strategic studies at the independent, privately funded Center for Policy
Research in New Delhi, is on the international advisory council of the Campaign for Peace and
Justice in Sri Lanka. 

(c) India Abroad, 2009.

Communist China’s real test begins: How to avoid a political hard landing

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Challenges at 60 year

The problem is politics, not economics

By Brahma Chellaney The Washington Times October 2, 2009

Six decades after it
was founded, the People’s Republic of China can truly be proud of its
remarkable achievements. An impoverished, backward state in 1949, it has risen
dramatically and now commands respect and awe in the world. But such success
has come at great cost to its own people.

In fact, China’s future
remains more uncertain than ever. It faces a worrisome paradox: Because of an
opaque, repressive political system, the more it globalizes, the more
vulnerable it becomes internally. At the core of its challenges is how to make
a political soft landing.

In terms of
post-World War II growth, unlike its Asian peers Japan
and India, China first
concentrated on acquiring military muscle. By the time Deng Xiaoping launched
his economic-modernization program, China already had tested its first
intercontinental ballistic missile, the 7,460-mile DF-5, and developed
thermonuclear weaponry. The military muscle gave Beijing the much-needed security to focus on
civilian modernization, helping it to fuel its remarkable economic rise, which,
in turn, has armed it with even greater resources to sharpen its claws.

China‘s economy has
expanded thirteenfold in the last 30 years. Consequently, China has
arrived as a global economic player, with its state-owned corporate behemoths
frenetically buying foreign firms, technologies and resources. Add to the
picture its rapidly swelling foreign-exchange coffers. Beijing, thus, is well-positioned
geopolitically to further expand its influence.

Its defense strategy
since the Mao Zedong era has been founded on a simple premise – that the
capacity to defend oneself with one’s own resources is the first test a nation
has to pass on the way to becoming a great power. So, even when China was poor,
it consciously put the accent on building comprehensive national power.

Today, its rapidly
accumulating power raises concerns because even when it was backward and
internally troubled, it employed brute force to annex Xinjiang (1949) and Tibet
(1950), to raid South Korea (1950), to invade India (1962), to initiate a
border conflict with the Soviet Union through a military ambush (1969), and to
attack Vietnam (1979). A prosperous, militarily strong China cannot
but be a threat to its neighbors, especially if there are no constraints on the
exercise of Chinese power.

Communist China
actually began as an international pariah state. Today, it is courted by the
world. Its rise in one generation as a world power under authoritarian rule has
come to epitomize the qualitative reordering of international power. As the
latest U.S. intelligence
assessment predicts, China
is "poised to have more impact on the world over the next 20 years than
any other country."

A long-term vision
and unflinching pursuit of goals have been key drivers. But China’s rise
also has been aided by good fortune on multiple strategic fronts. First, Beijing’s reform process
benefited from good timing, coming as it did at the start of globalization
three decades ago. Second, the Soviet Union’s sudden collapse delivered an
immense 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. And third, there has been a succession of China-friendly U.S. presidents in the past two decades – a
significant period that has coincided with China’s ascension.

China‘s rise, indeed,
owes a lot to the West’s decision not to sustain trade sanctions after the 1989 Tiananmen Square
massacre, but instead to integrate Beijing
with global institutions through the liberalizing influence of foreign
investment and trade. That the choice made was wise can be seen from the
baneful impact of the opposite decision that was taken on Burma from the
late 1980s – to pursue a penal approach centered on sanctions. Had the
Burma-type approach been applied against China
internationally, the result would have been a less prosperous, less open and
potentially destabilizing China.

Although China has
come a long way since Tiananmen Square, with its citizens now enjoying property
rights, the freedom to travel overseas and other rights that were unthinkable a
generation ago, the political power still rests with the same party and system
responsible for the death of tens of millions of Chinese during the so-called
Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution and other state-induced disasters.

The greatest
genocide in modern world history was not the Holocaust but the Great Leap
Forward, a misguided charge toward industrialization that left 36 million
people dead, according to "Tombstone," a recent book by longtime
Chinese communist Yang Jisheng.

That the Communist Party
continues to monopolize power despite its past gory excesses is remarkable.
This is now the oldest autocracy in the world. The longest any autocratic
system survived in modern history was 74 years in the Soviet
Union.

Although China has moved
from being a totalitarian state to being an authoritarian state, some things
haven’t changed since the Mao years. Some other things have changed for the
worse, such as the whipping up of ultranationalism and turning that into the
legitimating credo of communist rule. Attempts to bend reality to the illusions
the state propagates through information control and online censors actually
risk turning China
into a modern-day Potemkin state.

While India celebrates diversity, China honors
artificially enforced monoculturalism, although it officially comprises 56
nationalities. China
seeks not only to play down its ethnic diversity, but also to conceal the
cultural and linguistic cleavages among the Han majority, lest the historical
north-south fault lines resurface with a vengeance. The Han – split in at least
seven linguistically and culturally distinct groups – are anything but
homogenous.

China‘s internal problems
– best symbolized by the 2008 Tibetan uprising and this year’s Uighur revolt –
won’t go away unless Beijing
stops imposing cultural homogeneity and abandons ethnic drowning as state
strategy in minority lands. But given the regime’s entrenched cultural
chauvinism and tight centralized control, that is unlikely to happen. After
all, President Hu Jintao’s slogan of a "harmonious society" is
designed to undergird the theme of conformity with the state.

More fundamentally,
if China manages to resolve
the stark contradictions between its two systems – market capitalism and
political monocracy – just the way Asian "tigers" like South Korea and Taiwan
were able to make the transition to democracy without crippling turbulence at
home, China could emerge as
a peer competitor to the United
States. Political modernization, not
economic modernization, thus is the central challenge staring at China. If it is
to build and sustain a great-power capacity, it has to avoid a political hard
landing.

Internationally, China’s trajectory will depend on how its
neighbors and other players like the United States manage its growing
power. Such management – independently and in partnership – will determine if China stays on
the positive side of the ledger, without its power sliding into arrogance.

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

Copyright 2009 The Washington
Times, LLC 

Sri Lankan bloodbath yet to yield peace dividend

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Colombo risks squandering Sri Lanka’s hard-won peace

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan
Times

If Sri
Lanka is to become a tropical paradise
again, it must build enduring peace. This will only occur through genuine
interethnic equality, and a transition from being a unitary state to being a
federation that grants provincial and local autonomy.

Yet even in victory the Sri Lankan government seems
unable to define peace or outline a political solution to the long-standing
cultural and political grievances of the Tamil minority, which makes up 12
percent of the 21.3-million population. A process of national reconciliation
anchored in federalism and multiculturalism can succeed only if human-rights
abuses by all parties are independently investigated. United Nations Secretary
General Ban Ki Moon has acknowledged that civilian casualties were
"unacceptably high," especially as the war built to a bloody
crescendo.

The continuing air of martial triumph in Sri Lanka,
though, is making it difficult to heal the wounds of war through three
essential "Rs": relief, recovery and reconciliation. In fact, the
military victory bears a distinct family imprint: President Mahinda Rajapaksa
was guided by two of his brothers, Gotabaya, the defense secretary who authored
the war plan, and Basil, the presidential special adviser who formulated the
political strategy. Yet another brother, Chamal, is the ports minister who
awarded China a contract to build the billion-dollar Hambantotta port, on Sri
Lanka’s southeast.

In return, Beijing provided Colombo not only the weapon
systems that decisively tilted the military balance in its favor, but also the
diplomatic cover to prosecute the war in defiance of international calls to
cease offensive operations to help stanch rising civilian casualties. Through
such support, China has
succeeded in extending its strategic reach to a critically located country in India’s backyard that sits astride vital
sea-lanes of communication in the Indian Ocean
region.

Sinhalese nationalists now portray Rajapaksa as a
modern-day Dutugemunu, a Sinhalese ruler who, according to legend, vanquished
an invading Tamil army led by Kind Elara more than 2,000 years ago. But four
months after the Tamil Tigers were crushed, it is clear the demands of peace
extend far beyond the battlefield. What is needed is a fundamental shift in
the government’s policies to help create greater interethnic equality, regional
autonomy and a reversal of the state-driven militarization of society.

But Rajapaksa, despite promising to address the root
causes of conflict, has declared: "Federalism is out of the
question." 

How elusive the peace dividend remains can be seen from Colombo’s decision to
press ahead with a further expansion of the military. Not content with
increasing the military’s size five-fold since the late 1980s to more than 200,000
troops today, Colombo
is raising the strength further to 300,000, in the name of "eternal
vigilance." Soon after the May victory, the government, for example,
announced a drive to recruit 50,000 new troops to help manage the northern
areas captured from the rebels.

The Sri Lankan military already has more troops than that
of Britain or Israel. The
planned further expansion would make the military in tiny Sri Lanka larger than the militaries of major
powers like France, Japan and Germany. By citing a continuing
danger of guerrilla remnants reviving the insurgency, Rajapaksa, in fact, seems
determined to keep a hyper-militarized Sri Lanka on something of a war
footing. 

Yet another issue of concern is the manner the nearly 300,000 Tamil
civilians still held by the government in camps where, in the recent words of
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, the "internally
displaced persons are effectively detained under conditions of
internment."

Such detention risks causing more resentment among the
Tamils and sowing the seeds of future unrest. The internment was intended to
help weed out rebels, many of whom already have been identified and transferred
to military sites. 

Those in the evacuee camps are the victims and survivors of
the deadly war. To confine them in the camps against their will is to further
victimize and traumatize them.

Sri
Lanka’s interests would be better served
through greater transparency. It should grant the U.N., International Red Cross
and nongovernmental organizations at home and abroad full and unhindered access
to care for and protect the civilians in these camps, allowing those who wish
to leave the camps to do so and live with relatives and friends. Otherwise, it
seriously risks breeding further resentment.

Then there is the issue of thousands of missing people,
mostly Tamils. Given that many families are still searching for missing
members, the government ought to publish a list of all those it is holding — in
evacuee camps, prisons, military sites and other security centers. Even suspected
rebels in state custody ought to be publicly identified and not denied access to legal
representation. Authorities should disclose the names of those they know
to be dead — civilians and insurgents — and the possible circumstances of their
death. 

Also, the way to fill the power vacuum in the Tamil-dominated north is
not by dispatching additional army troops in tens of thousands, but by setting
up a credible local administration to keep the peace and initiate
rehabilitation and reconstruction after more than 25 years of war. Any government move to return to the old policy of
settling Sinhalese in Tamil areas is certain to stir up fresh problems. 

More
fundamentally, such have been the costs of victory that Sri Lankan civil
society stands badly weakened and civil liberties curtailed. The wartime
suppression of a free press and curtailment of fundamental rights continues in
peacetime, undermining democratic freedoms and creating a fear psychosis.

Public meetings cannot be held without government
permission. Sweeping emergency regulations also remain in place, arming the
security forces with expansive powers of search, arrest, detention and seizure
of property. Individuals can still be held in unacknowledged detention for up
to 18 months. For the process of reconciliation to begin in earnest, it is
essential the government shed its war-gained powers and accept, as Ms. Pillay says,
"an independent and credible international investigation . . . to
ascertain the occurrence, nature and scale of violations of international
human-rights and international humanitarian law" by all parties during the
conflict.

Pillay has gone on to say: "A new future for the
country, the prospect of meaningful reconciliation and lasting peace, where
respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms can become a reality for all,
hinges upon such an in-depth and comprehensive approach."

Unfortunately, Colombo
still seeks to hold back the truth. Those who speak up are labeled
"traitors" (if they are Sinhalese) or accused of being on the payroll
of the Tamil diaspora. Last year, a Sri Lankan minister accused the U.N.
undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, John Holmes, of being on the
rebels’ payroll after Holmes called Sri Lanka one of the world’s most dangerous
places for aid workers.

The media remains muzzled, and a host of journalists have
been murdered or imprisoned. Lawyers who dare to take up sensitive cases face
threats. Recently, a well-known astrologer who predicted the president’s ouster
from power was arrested. And this month, the U.N. Children’s Fund
communications chief was ordered to leave Sri Lanka after he discussed the
plight of children caught up in the government’s military campaign.

Rather than begin a political dialogue on regional
autonomy and a more level-playing field for the Tamils in education and
government jobs, the government has seen its space get constricted by the
post-victory upsurge of Sinhalese chauvinism opposed to the devolution of
powers to the minorities.

The hardline constituency argues that the Tamils
shouldn’t get in defeat what they couldn’t secure through three decades of
unrest and violence. Indeed, such chauvinism seeks to tar federalism as a
potential forerunner to secession, although the Tamil insurgency sprang from
the state’s rejection of decentralization and power-sharing. The looming
parliamentary and presidential elections also make devolution difficult, even
though the opposition is splintered and Rajapaksa seems set to win a second
term.

Reversing the militarization of society, ending the
control of information as an instrument of state policy and promoting political
and ethnic reconciliation are crucial to postconflict peace-building and to
furthering the interests of all Sri Lankans — Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims. So
also is the need to discard the almost mono-ethnic character of the security
forces. Colombo
has to stop dragging its feet on implementing the Constitution’s 13th
amendment, which requires the ceding of some powers at the provincial or local
level.

Sadly, there is little international pressure on Colombo, despite the
leverage offered by the Sri Lankan economy’s need for external credit. The U.S. can veto any decision of the International
Monetary Fund, but it chose to abstain from the recent IMF vote to give Colombo a $2.8 billion
loan. In the face of China’s
stonewalling at the U.N., Ban has been unable to appoint a special envoy on Sri Lanka. A
U.N. special envoy can shine an international spotlight to help build pressure
on a recalcitrant government. But on Sri Lanka,
the best the U.N. has been able to do is to send a political official to Colombo this month for
talks.

It is thus important for the democratic players,
including the United States, the European Union, Japan and Norway — co-chairs
of the so-called Friends of Sri Lanka — and India, to coordinate their policies
on Sri Lanka. If Rajapaksa continues to shun true reconciliation, these
countries should ratchet up pressure on Colombo
by lending support to calls for an international investigation into the
thousands of civilian deaths in the final weeks of the war.

The International Criminal Court has opened an initial
inquiry into Sri Lankan rights-abuse cases that could turn into a full-blown
investigation. Sri Lanka, however, is not an ICC signatory and thus would have
to consent — or be referred by the U.N. Security Council — for the ICC to have
jurisdiction over it. 

As world history attests, peace sought through the
suppression and humiliation of an ethnic community proves to be elusive.

If Rajapaksa wants to earn a place in history as another
Dutugemunu, he has to emulate that ancient king’s post-victory action and make
honorable peace with the Tamils before there is a recrudescence of violence. It
will be a double tragedy for Sri
Lanka if making peace proves more difficult
than making war. 

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the
independent, privately funded Center for Policy Research in New
Delhi, is on the international advisory council of the Campaign for
Peace and Justice in Sri
Lanka.

The Japan Times: Saturday, Sept. 19, 2009
(C) All rights reserved

Global spread of democracy comes under challenge

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The Rise of Authoritarian Capitalism
 

A fusion of autocratic politics and state-guided capitalism has emerged as the leading challenge to international spread of democratic values.

Brahma Chellaney
The Economic Times
 
Has the global spread of democracy run out of steam? For long, democracy and free markets were touted as the twin answer to most ills. But while free-market tenets have come under strain in the present international financial crisis, with the very countries that espoused the self-regulating power of markets taking the lead to embrace principles of financial socialism to bail out their troubled corporate colossuses, the spread of democracy is encountering increasingly strong headwinds.

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 favour of the forces of democracy. But not all the pro-democracy movements were successful. And the subsequent “colour revolutions” only instilled greater caution among the surviving authoritarian regimes, prompting them to set up countermeasures to foreign-inspired democratisation initiatives.

Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the spread of democracy unmistakably has stalled. Democracy may have become the norm in much of Europe, but in the world’s largest and most densely populated continent, Asia, only a small minority of states are true democracies, despite the eastward movement of global power and influence. The strategy to use market forces to open up tightly centralised political systems hasn’t worked in multiple cases in Asia — the pivot of global strategic change.

Political homogeneity may be as inharmonious with economic advance as the parallel pursuit of market capitalism and political autocracy. But where authoritarianism is deeply entrenched, a marketplace of goods and services simply does not allow a marketplace of political ideas.

In fact, one such model distinctly has emerged stronger. China is now the world’s largest and oldest autocracy, with leadership there now preparing to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. To help glorify the communist revolution, the leadership has planned a mammoth military parade — the largest ever — along with a repeat of some of the Beijing Olympics glitz at the October 1 anniversary. Those Olympic-style celebrations will serve as a double reminder: China has not only weathered the international democratisation push, but also has emerged as a potential peer rival to America. Today there is talk of even a US-China diarchy — a G-2 — ruling the world.

China’s spectacular rise as a global power in just one generation under authoritarian rule represents the first direct challenge to liberal democracy since the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Through its remarkable success story, China advertises that authoritarianism is a more rapid and smoother way to prosperity and stability than the tumult of electoral politics. Freedom advocates in existing autocracies may be inspired and energised by the international success stories of democratic transition. But the regimes that employ brute power and censorship to subdue dissidence clearly draw encouragement from the China model.

Then there is the spectre of democracy in retreat, highlighted by the developments in Russia and the regressive path of some of the “colour revolutions,” not to mention Central America’s first military coup since the end of the Cold War in Honduras. The “tulip revolution” in Kyrgyzstan has turned sour in the face of rigged elections, assassination of rivals and growing influence of organised crime. Georgia’s “rose revolution” also has wilted under President Mikheil Saakashvili’s increasing despotism.

In Russia, government control has been extended to large swaths of the economy and the political opposition systematically undermined without reopening Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago. Such centralisation, though, is no different than in, say, Singapore and Malaysia, including the domination of one political party, the absence of diversified media, limits on public demonstrations and the writ of security services. But in contrast to Russia, Singapore and Malaysia have largely insulated themselves from official US criticism by serving western interests.

China, for its part, has stayed abreast with technological innovations to help deny dissidents the latest means to denounce injustice. The widespread use of Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging and cellular phones by Iranian protesters cannot be emulated by Chinese dissidents because Beijing employs cyberpolice to regulate websites, patrol cybercafés, monitor cellphone text messaging and track down internet activists. And unlike Iran’s clerically controlled democracy, China holds no elections to elect its leaders, not even sham elections.

More broadly, the US occupation of Iraq under the garb of spreading democracy as well as excesses like Guantanamo Bay and secret CIA detention camps overseas had the effect of undermining the credibility of democratic values by presenting them as a geopolitical tool. Today, liberal democratic norms, far from becoming universal, have come under attack at a time when a qualitative reordering of global power is empowering non-western economies. That raises the possibility that, in the coming decades, economies driven by a fusion of autocratic politics and crony, state-guided capitalism could gain the upper hand.

A divide centred on political values will carry major geopolitical implications because, as modern history attests, regime character can impede observance of global norms and rules. Even if democratic governments are not more wedded to peace than autocracies, it is well established that democracies rarely go to war with each other. Today, the main challenge to the global spread of democracy comes from the model blending political authoritarianism and state-steered capitalism together. What if such authoritarian capitalism becomes the face of the future in large parts of the world?

 
The author is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research.

 
(c) The Economic Times: September 17, 2009

A Way Out of Afghanistan

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An advantageous U.S. exit

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

The Japan Times

America’s war in Afghanistan is approaching a tipping point, with doubts about President Barack Obama’s strategy rising. Yet, after dispatching 21,000 additional U.S. forces to Afghanistan, Obama is considering sending another 14,000 combat troops there. Let’s be clear: America’s Afghan war is just not winnable.

First, Obama has redefined U.S. goals too narrowly. America’s primary goal now is not to defeat the Taliban but to prevent al-Qaida from using Afghanistan as a base to launch an attack on the United States.

Obama told the Associated Press in a July 2 interview, "I have a very narrow definition of success when it comes to our national security interests, and that is that al-Qaida and its affiliates cannot set up safe havens from which to attack America."

But al-Qaida is not really a factor in the Afghan war, where the principal combatants are the U.S. military and the Taliban plus associated militias. Rather than seek to defeat the Taliban, Washington has encouraged Pakistani, Afghan and Saudi intelligence to hold proxy talks with the Taliban’s top leadership holed up in the Pakistani city of Quetta.

Second, the U.S. is fighting the wrong war. After the American invasion drove al-Qaida leaders from Afghanistan, Pakistan has emerged as the main base and sanctuary for transnational terrorists. Support and sustenance for the Taliban and many other Afghan militants also comes from inside Pakistan. Yet Obama pursues a military surge in Afghanistan but an aid surge to Pakistan, to the extent that Islamabad is being made the single largest recipient of U.S. assistance in the world.

In that light, Obama’s war strategy is questionable. To defeat al-Qaida, the U.S. doesn’t need a troop buildup — certainly not in Afghanistan. Without a large ground force in Afghanistan or even major ground operations, the U.S. can hold al-Qaida remnants at bay in their havens in the mountainous tribal regions of Pakistan through covert operations, Predator drones and cruise-missile attacks. Isn’t that precisely what the CIA already is doing?

U.S. intelligence believes that al-Qaida already is badly fragmented and weakened and thus is in no position to openly challenge American interests. According to the 2009 Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community: "Because of the pressure we and our allies have put on al-Qaida’s core leadership in Pakistan . . . al-Qaida today is less capable and effective than it was a year ago."

Had the Obama goal been to rout the Taliban, a further military surge may have made sense because a resurgent Taliban can be defeated only through major ground operations, not by airstrikes and covert actions alone. Yet, the Obama administration presses ahead with a "clear, hold, build" strategy.

When the administration’s principal war target is not the Taliban but rather al-Qaida remnants on the run, why chase a troop-intensive strategy pivoted on protecting population centers to win grassroots support? In reality, what it calls a "clear, hold, build" strategy is actually a "surge, bribe, run" strategy, except that the muddled nature of the mission and the deepening U.S. involvement crimp the "run" option.

America’s quandary is a reminder that it is easier to get into a war than to get out. In fact, Obama undermined his unfolding war strategy last March by publicly declaring, "There’s got to be an exit strategy." The message that sent to the Taliban and its sponsor, the Pakistani military, was that they ought to simply out-wait the Americans to reclaim Afghanistan.

Before Afghanistan becomes a Vietnam-style quagmire, Obama must rethink his plan for another troop surge. Gradually drawing down U.S. troop levels indeed makes more sense because what holds the disparate constituents of the Taliban syndicate together is a common opposition to foreign military presence.

An American military exit from Afghanistan will not come as a shot in the arm for the forces of global jihad, as many in Washington seem to fear. To the contrary, it will remove the common unifying element and unleash developments whose significance would be largely internal or regional. In Afghanistan, a vicious power struggle would break out along sectarian and ethnic lines. The Taliban, with the active support of the Pakistani military, would certainly make a run for Kabul to replay the 1996 power grab.

But it won’t be easy to repeat 1996. For one, the Taliban is splintered today, with the tail (private armies and militias) wagging the dog. For another, the non-Taliban and non-Pashtun forces now are stronger, more organized and better prepared than in 1996 to resist the Taliban’s advance to Kabul, having been empowered by the autonomy they have enjoyed in provinces or by the offices they still hold in the Afghan federal government.

Also, by retaining Afghan bases to carry out covert operations and Predator missions and other airstrikes, the U.S. military would be able to unleash punitive air power to prevent a 1996 repeat. After all, it was the combination of American air power and the Northern Alliance’s ground operations that ousted the Taliban from power in 2001.

Against this background, the most likely outcome of the Afghan power struggle triggered by an American decision to pull out would be the formalization of the present de facto partition of Afghanistan along ethnic lines. Iraq, too, is headed in the same direction.

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 Durand Line in ferment. Thanks to ethnic polarization, the Durand Line, or the Afpak border, exists today only on maps. On the ground, it has little political, ethnic and economic relevance.

As in Iraq, an American withdrawal would potentially let loose forces of Balkanization in the Afpak belt. That may sound disturbing, but this would be an unintended and perhaps unstoppable consequence of the U.S. invasion.

An American pullout actually would aid the fight against international terrorism. Instead of staying bogged down in Afghanistan and seeking to cajole and bribe the Pakistani military from continuing to provide succor to Islamic militants, Washington would become free to pursue a broader and more-balanced counterterrorism strategy.

Also, minus the Afghan-war burden, the U.S. would better appreciate the dangers to international security posed by Pakistani terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e- Mohammed. The threat of an Islamist takeover of Pakistan comes not from the Taliban but from these groups that have long drawn support from the Pakistani army as part of the deep-rooted military-mullah alliance.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is a regular contributor to The Japan Times.
 
The Japan Times: Monday, Sept. 14, 2009
(C) All rights reserved

Deadlocked Sino-Indian border talks

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Clueless on China

Brahma Chellaney

India Abroad, September 18, 2009

The latest round of the unending and fruitless India-China talks on
territorial disputes was a fresh reminder of the eroding utility of this
process. It is approaching nearly three decades since China and India began these negotiations. In
this period, the world has changed fundamentally. Indeed, with its rapidly
accumulating military and economic power, China
itself has emerged as a great power in the making, with Washington’s
Asia policy now manifestly Sino-centric. Not
only has India allowed its
military and nuclear asymmetry with China
to grow, but also New Delhi’s
room for diplomatic maneuver is shrinking. As the Indian navy chief, Admiral
Suresh Mehta, has put it plainly, the
power “gap between the two is just too wide to bridge and getting wider by the
day.”

Of course, power asymmetry in interstate relations does not mean
the weaker side must bend to the dictates of the stronger or seek to propitiate
it. Wise strategy, coupled with good diplomacy, is the art of offsetting or
neutralizing military or economic power imbalance with another state. But as Admiral
Mehta warned, “China
is in the process of consolidating its comprehensive national power and
creating formidable military capabilities. One it is done, China is likely
to be more assertive on its claims, especially in the immediate neighborhood.”

It is thus obvious that the longer the process of border-related talks continues
without yielding tangible results, the greater the space Beijing
will have to mount strategic pressure on India and the greater its leverage
in the negotiations. After all, China
already holds the military advantage on the ground. Its forces control the
heights along the long 4.057-kilometer Himalayan frontier, with the Indian
troops perched largely on the lower levels. Furthermore, by building new railroads,
airports and highways in Tibet,
China is now in a position
to rapidly move additional forces to the border to potentially strike at India at a time
of its choosing.

Diplomatically, China
is a contented party, having occupied what it wanted — the Aksai Chin plateau,
which is almost the size of Switzerland
and provides the only accessible Tibet-Xinjiang route through the Karakoram passes of the Kunlun Mountains.
Yet it chooses
to press claims on additional Indian territories as part of a grand strategy to
gain leverage in bilateral relations and, more importantly, to keep India under military
and diplomatic pressure.

At the core of its strategy is an apparent resolve to indefinitely hold off
on a border settlement with India
through an overt refusal to accept the territorial status quo. In not hiding
its intent to further redraw the Himalayan frontiers, Beijing only helps highlight the futility of
the ongoing process of political negotiations. After all, the territorial
status quo can be changed not through political talks but by further military
conquest. Yet, paradoxically, the political process remains important for Beijing to provide the façade of engagement behind which
to seek India’s
containment.

Keeping India
engaged in endless talks is a key Chinese objective so that Beijing can continue its work on changing the
Himalayan balance decisively in its favor through a greater build-up of military
power and logistical capabilities. That is why China
has sought to shield the negotiating process from the perceptible hardening of
its stance towards New Delhi and the
vituperative attacks against India
in its state-run media. Add to the picture the aggressive patrolling of the
Himalayan frontier by the People’s Liberation Army and the growing Chinese
incursions across the line of control.

Let’s be clear: Chinese negotiating tactics have shifted markedly over
the decades. Beijing originally floated the swap idea — giving up its claims in
India’s northeast in return for Indian acceptance of the Chinese control over a
part of Ladakh — to legalize its occupation of Aksai Chin. It then sang the
mantra of putting the territorial disputes on the backburner so that the two
countries could concentrate on building close, mutually beneficial relations. But
in more recent years, in keeping with its rising strength, China has escalated border tensions
and military incursions while assertively laying claim to Arunachal Pradesh.
According to a recent report in Ming Pao, a Hong Kong paper with close ties to the
establishment in Beijing, China is seeking “just” 28 percent
of Arunachal. That means an area nearly the size of Taiwan.

In that light, can the Sino-Indian border talks be kept
going indefinitely? Consider two important facts.

First, the present border negotiations have been going on continuously
since 1981, making them already the longest and the most-barren process between
any two countries in modern history. The record includes eight rounds of senior-level talks between 1981 and
1987, 14 Joint Working Group meetings between 1988 and 2002, and 13 rounds of
talks between the designated Special Representatives since 2003. 

It seems the only progress
in this process is that India’s
choice of words in public is now the same as China’s. “Both countries
have agreed to seek a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable settlement of
this issue,” Indian External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna told Parliament on
July 31. “The matter, of course, is complex and requires time and lots of
patience.” It was as if the Chinese foreign minister was speaking. Isn’t it odd
for India
— the country at the receiving end of growing Chinese bellicosity — to plead
for more time and patience after nearly three decades of negotiations?

Second, the authoritative People’s Daily — the
Communist Party mouthpiece that reflects official thinking — made it clear in a
June 11, 2009 editorial: “China
won’t make any compromises in its border disputes with India.” That reflects the Chinese
position in the negotiations. But when Beijing
is advertising its uncompromising stance, doesn’t New Delhi get the message?  The recent essay posted on a Chinese
quasi-official website that called for India
to be broken into 20 to
30 sovereign states cannot obscure an important fact: Dismember India is a
project China
launched in the Mao years when it trained and armed Naga and Mizo guerrillas. In
initiating its proxy war against India,
Pakistan
merely took a leaf out of the Chinese book. 

Today, China’s
muscle-flexing along the Himalayas cannot be
ignored. After all, even when China
was poor and backward, it employed brute force to annex Xinjiang (1949) and Tibet (1950), to raid South
Korea (1950), to invade India
(1962), to initiate a border conflict with the Soviet Union through a military
ambush (1969)
and to attack Vietnam
(1979). A prosperous, militarily strong China cannot but be a threat to its
neighbors, especially if there are no constraints on the exercise of Chinese
power.

So, the key question is: What does India gain by staying put in an interminably
barren negotiating process with China?
By persisting with this process, isn’t India
aiding the Chinese engagement-with-containment strategy by providing Beijing the cover it
needs? While Beijing’s strategy and tactics are
apparent, India
has had difficulty to define a game-plan and resolutely pursue clearly laid-out
objectives. Still, staying put in a barren process cannot be an end in itself
for India.

India indeed has retreated to an
increasingly defensive position territorially, with the spotlight now on China’s Tibet-linked claim to Arunachal Pradesh than
on Tibet’s
status itself. Now you know why Beijing invested so much
political capital over the years in getting India
to gradually accept Tibet
as part of the territory of the People’s Republic. Its success on that score
has helped narrow the dispute to what it claims. That neatly meshes with China’s
long-standing negotiating stance: What it occupies is Chinese territory, and
what it claims must be on the table to be settled on the basis of give-and-take
— or as it puts it in reasonably sounding terms, on the basis of “mutual
accommodation and mutual understanding.”

As a result, India
has been left in the unenviable position of having to fend off Chinese territorial
demands. In fact, history is in danger of repeating itself as India gets
sucked into a 1950s-style trap. The issue then was Aksai Chin;
the issue now is Arunachal. But rather than put the focus on the source of
China’s claim — Tibet — and Beijing’s attempt to territorially enlarge its
Tibet annexation to what it calls “southern Tibet,” India is willing to be
taken ad infinitum around the mulberry bush. Just because New
Delhi has accepted Tibet
to be part of China should
not prevent it from gently shining a spotlight on Tibet as the lingering core issue.

Yet India’s
long record of political diffidence only emboldens Beijing. India
accepted the Chinese annexation of Tibet
and surrendered its own British-inherited extraterritorial rights over Tibet on a
silver platter without asking for anything in return. Now, China wants India to display the same “amicable
spirit” and hand over to it at least the Tawang valley.

Take the period since the border talks were “elevated” to
the level of special representatives in 2003. India
first got into an extended exercise with Beijing
to define general principles to govern a border settlement, despite China’s
egregious record of flouting the Panchsheel principles and committing naked
aggression in 1962. But no sooner had the border-related principles been
unveiled in 2005 with fanfare than Beijing
jettisoned the do-not-disturb-the-settled-populations principle to buttress its
claim to Arunachal.

Yet, as the most-recent round of talks highlighted this
month, India has agreed to
let the negotiations go off at a tangent by broadening them into a diffused strategic
dialogue — to the delight of Beijing.
The process now has become a means for the two sides to discuss “the entire gamut of bilateral relations and regional and
international issues of mutual interest.”

This not only opens yet another chapter in an increasingly
directionless process, but also lets China condition a border settlement
to the achievement of greater Sino-Indian strategic congruence. Worse still, New Delhi is to observe 2010 — the 60th anniversary of China becoming India’s
neighbor by gobbling up Tibet
— as the “Year of Friendship with China”
in India.

(c) India Abroad,
2009.