India and geostrategy

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In order to get a broader perspective, we do need to go into some history. There is an interesting book by Professor Shlomo Sand, of Tel Aviv University - "When and How the Jewish People Was Invented?" .

This book was reviewed in the Haaretz - since it no longer seems to be available on the Haaretz website, I am posting it in full.

Shattering a 'national mythology'​

By Ofri Ilani

Of all the national heroes who have arisen from among the Jewish people over the generations, fate has not been kind to Dahia al-Kahina, a leader of the Berbers in the Aures Mountains. Although she was a proud Jewess, few Israelis have ever heard the name of this warrior-queen who, in the seventh century C.E., united a number of Berber tribes and pushed back the Muslim army that invaded North Africa. It is possible that the reason for this is that al-Kahina was the daughter of a Berber tribe that had converted to Judaism, apparently several generations before she was born, sometime around the 6th century C.E.

According to the Tel Aviv University historian, Prof. Shlomo Sand, author of "Matai ve'ech humtza ha'am hayehudi?" ("When and How the Jewish People Was Invented?"; Resling, in Hebrew), the queen's tribe and other local tribes that converted to Judaism are the main sources from which Spanish Jewry sprang. This claim that the Jews of North Africa originated in indigenous tribes that became Jewish - and not in communities exiled from Jerusalem - is just one element of the far- reaching argument set forth in Sand's new book.

In this work, the author attempts to prove that the Jews now living in Israel and other places in the world are not at all descendants of the ancient people who inhabited the Kingdom of Judea during the First and Second Temple period. Their origins, according to him, are in varied peoples that converted to Judaism during the course of history, in different corners of the Mediterranean Basin and the adjacent regions. Not only are the North African Jews for the most part descendants of pagans who converted to Judaism, but so are the Jews of Yemen (remnants of the Himyar Kingdom in the Arab Peninsula, who converted to Judaism in the fourth century) and the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe (refugees from the Kingdom of the Khazars, who converted in the eighth century).

Unlike other "new historians" who have tried to undermine the assumptions of Zionist historiography, Sand does not content himself with going back to 1948 or to the beginnings of Zionism, but rather goes back thousands of years. He tries to prove that the Jewish people never existed as a "nation-race" with a common origin, but rather is a colorful mix of groups that at various stages in history adopted the Jewish religion. He argues that for a number of Zionist ideologues, the mythical perception of the Jews as an ancient people led to truly racist thinking: "There were times when if anyone argued that the Jews belong to a people that has gentile origins, he would be classified as an anti-Semite on the spot. Today, if anyone dares to suggest that those who are considered Jews in the world ... have never constituted and still do not constitute a people or a nation - he is immediately condemned as a hater of Israel."

According to Sand, the description of the Jews as a wandering and self-isolating nation of exiles, "who wandered across seas and continents, reached the ends of the earth and finally, with the advent of Zionism, made a U-turn and returned en masse to their orphaned homeland," is nothing but "national mythology." Like other national movements in Europe, which sought out a splendid Golden Age, through which they invented a heroic past - for example, classical Greece or the Teutonic tribes - to prove they have existed since the beginnings of history, "so, too, the first buds of Jewish nationalism blossomed in the direction of the strong light that has its source in the mythical Kingdom of David."

So when, in fact, was the Jewish people invented, in Sand's view? At a certain stage in the 19th century, intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people "retrospectively," out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people. From historian Heinrich Graetz on, Jewish historians began to draw the history of Judaism as the history of a nation that had been a kingdom, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace.

Actually, most of your book does not deal with the invention of the Jewish people by modern Jewish nationalism, but rather with the question of where the Jews come from.

Sand: "My initial intention was to take certain kinds of modern historiographic materials and examine how they invented the 'figment' of the Jewish people. But when I began to confront the historiographic sources, I suddenly found contradictions. And then that urged me on: I started to work, without knowing where I would end up. I took primary sources and I tried to examine authors' references in the ancient period - what they wrote about conversion."

Sand, an expert on 20th-century history, has until now researched the intellectual history of modern France (in "Ha'intelektual, ha'emet vehakoah: miparashat dreyfus ve'ad milhemet hamifrats" - "Intellectuals, Truth and Power, From the Dreyfus Affair to the Gulf War"; Am Oved, in Hebrew). Unusually, for a professional historian, in his new book he deals with periods that he had never researched before, usually relying on studies that present unorthodox views of the origins of the Jews.

Experts on the history of the Jewish people say you are dealing with subjects about which you have no understanding and are basing yourself on works that you can't read in the original.

"It is true that I am an historian of France and Europe, and not of the ancient period. I knew that the moment I would start dealing with early periods like these, I would be exposed to scathing criticism by historians who specialize in those areas. But I said to myself that I can't stay just with modern historiographic material without examining the facts it describes. Had I not done this myself, it would have been necessary to have waited for an entire generation. Had I continued to deal with France, perhaps I would have been given chairs at the university and provincial glory. But I decided to relinquish the glory."

Inventing the Diaspora

"After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people remained faithful to it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom" - thus states the preamble to the Israeli Declaration of Independence. This is also the quotation that opens the third chapter of Sand's book, entitled "The Invention of the Diaspora." Sand argues that the Jewish people's exile from its land never happened.

"The supreme paradigm of exile was needed in order to construct a long-range memory in which an imagined and exiled nation-race was posited as the direct continuation of 'the people of the Bible' that preceded it," Sand explains. Under the influence of other historians who have dealt with the same issue in recent years, he argues that the exile of the Jewish people is originally a Christian myth that depicted that event as divine punishment imposed on the Jews for having rejected the Christian gospel.

"I started looking in research studies about the exile from the land - a constitutive event in Jewish history, almost like the Holocaust. But to my astonishment I discovered that it has no literature. The reason is that no one exiled the people of the country. The Romans did not exile peoples and they could not have done so even if they had wanted to. They did not have trains and trucks to deport entire populations. That kind of logistics did not exist until the 20th century. From this, in effect, the whole book was born: in the realization that Judaic society was not dispersed and was not exiled."

If the people was not exiled, are you saying that in fact the real descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah are the Palestinians?

"No population remains pure over a period of thousands of years. But the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendents. The first Zionists, up until the Arab Revolt [1936-9], knew that there had been no exiling, and that the Palestinians were descended from the inhabitants of the land. They knew that farmers don't leave until they are expelled. Even Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the State of Israel, wrote in 1929 that, 'the vast majority of the peasant farmers do not have their origins in the Arab conquerors, but rather, before then, in the Jewish farmers who were numerous and a majority in the building of the land.'"

And how did millions of Jews appear around the Mediterranean Sea?

"The people did not spread, but the Jewish religion spread. Judaism was a converting religion. Contrary to popular opinion, in early Judaism there was a great thirst to convert others. The Hasmoneans were the first to begin to produce large numbers of Jews through mass conversion, under the influence of Hellenism. The conversions between the Hasmonean Revolt and Bar Kochba's rebellion are what prepared the ground for the subsequent, wide-spread dissemination of Christianity. After the victory of Christianity in the fourth century, the momentum of conversion was stopped in the Christian world, and there was a steep drop in the number of Jews. Presumably many of the Jews who appeared around the Mediterranean became Christians. But then Judaism started to permeate other regions - pagan regions, for example, such as Yemen and North Africa. Had Judaism not continued to advance at that stage and had it not continued to convert people in the pagan world, we would have remained a completely marginal religion, if we survived at all."

How did you come to the conclusion that the Jews of North Africa were originally Berbers who converted?

"I asked myself how such large Jewish communities appeared in Spain. And then I saw that Tariq ibn Ziyad, the supreme commander of the Muslims who conquered Spain, was a Berber, and most of his soldiers were Berbers. Dahia al-Kahina's Jewish Berber kingdom had been defeated only 15 years earlier. And the truth is there are a number of Christian sources that say many of the conquerors of Spain were Jewish converts. The deep-rooted source of the large Jewish community in Spain was those Berber soldiers who converted to Judaism."

Sand argues that the most crucial demographic addition to the Jewish population of the world came in the wake of the conversion of the kingdom of Khazaria - a huge empire that arose in the Middle Ages on the steppes along the Volga River, which at its height ruled over an area that stretched from the Georgia of today to Kiev. In the eighth century, the kings of the Khazars adopted the Jewish religion and made Hebrew the written language of the kingdom. From the 10th century the kingdom weakened; in the 13th century is was utterly defeated by Mongol invaders, and the fate of its Jewish inhabitants remains unclear.

Sand revives the hypothesis, which was already suggested by historians in the 19th and 20th centuries, according to which the Judaized Khazars constituted the main origins of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe.

"At the beginning of the 20th century there is a tremendous concentration of Jews in Eastern Europe - three million Jews in Poland alone," he says. "The Zionist historiography claims that their origins are in the earlier Jewish community in Germany, but they do not succeed in explaining how a small number of Jews who came from Mainz and Worms could have founded the Yiddish people of Eastern Europe. The Jews of Eastern Europe are a mixture of Khazars and Slavs who were pushed eastward."

'Degree of perversion'

If the Jews of Eastern Europe did not come from Germany, why did they speak Yiddish, which is a Germanic language?

"The Jews were a class of people dependent on the German bourgeoisie in the East, and thus they adopted German words. Here I base myself on the research of linguist Paul Wechsler of Tel Aviv University, who has demonstrated that there is no etymological connection between the German Jewish language of the Middle Ages and Yiddish. As far back as 1828, the Ribal (Rabbi Isaac Ber Levinson) said that the ancient language of the Jews was not Yiddish. Even Ben Zion Dinur, the father of Israeli historiography, was not hesitant about describing the Khazars as the origin of the Jews in Eastern Europe, and describes Khazaria as 'the mother of the diasporas' in Eastern Europe. But more or less since 1967, anyone who talks about the Khazars as the ancestors of the Jews of Eastern Europe is considered naive and moonstruck."

Why do you think the idea of the Khazar origins is so threatening?

"It is clear that the fear is of an undermining of the historic right to the land. The revelation that the Jews are not from Judea would ostensibly knock the legitimacy for our being here out from under us. Since the beginning of the period of decolonization, settlers have no longer been able to say simply: 'We came, we won and now we are here' the way the Americans, the whites in South Africa and the Australians said. There is a very deep fear that doubt will be cast on our right to exist."

Is there no justification for this fear?

"No. I don't think that the historical myth of the exile and the wanderings is the source of the legitimization for me being here, and therefore I don't mind believing that I am Khazar in my origins. I am not afraid of the undermining of our existence, because I think that the character of the State of Israel undermines it in a much more serious way. What would constitute the basis for our existence here is not mythological historical right, but rather would be for us to start to establish an open society here of all Israeli citizens."

In effect you are saying that there is no such thing as a Jewish people.

"I don't recognize an international people. I recognize 'the Yiddish people' that existed in Eastern Europe, which though it is not a nation can be seen as a Yiddishist civilization with a modern popular culture. I think that Jewish nationalism grew up in the context of this 'Yiddish people.' I also recognize the existence of an Israeli people, and do not deny its right to sovereignty. But Zionism and also Arab nationalism over the years are not prepared to recognize it.

"From the perspective of Zionism, this country does not belong to its citizens, but rather to the Jewish people. I recognize one definition of a nation: a group of people that wants to live in sovereignty over itself. But most of the Jews in the world have no desire to live in the State of Israel, even though nothing is preventing them from doing so. Therefore, they cannot be seen as a nation."

What is so dangerous about Jews imagining that they belong to one people? Why is this bad?

"In the Israeli discourse about roots there is a degree of perversion. This is an ethnocentric, biological, genetic discourse. But Israel has no existence as a Jewish state: If Israel does not develop and become an open, multicultural society we will have a Kosovo in the Galilee. The consciousness concerning the right to this place must be more flexible and varied, and if I have contributed with my book to the likelihood that I and my children will be able to live with the others here in this country in a more egalitarian situation - I will have done my bit.

"We must begin to work hard to transform our place into an Israeli republic where ethnic origin, as well as faith, will not be relevant in the eyes of the law. Anyone who is acquainted with the young elites of the Israeli Arab community can see that they will not agree to live in a country that declares it is not theirs. If I were a Palestinian I would rebel against a state like that, but even as an Israeli I am rebelling against it."

The question is whether for those conclusions you had to go as far as the Kingdom of the Khazars.

"I am not hiding the fact that it is very distressing for me to live in a society in which the nationalist principles that guide it are dangerous, and that this distress has served as a motive in my work. I am a citizen of this country, but I am also a historian and as a historian it is my duty to write history and examine texts. This is what I have done."

If the myth of Zionism is one of the Jewish people that returned to its land from exile, what will be the myth of the country you envision?

"To my mind, a myth about the future is better than introverted mythologies of the past. For the Americans, and today for the Europeans as well, what justifies the existence of the nation is a future promise of an open, progressive and prosperous society. The Israeli materials do exist, but it is necessary to add, for example, pan-Israeli holidays. To decrease the number of memorial days a bit and to add days that are dedicated to the future. But also, for example, to add an hour in memory of the Nakba [literally, the "catastrophe" - the Palestinian term for what happened when Israel was established], between Memorial Day and Independence Day."

 

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Caroe's lessons​

BY A.G. NOORANI

The book dips into archival material to trace the strategic thinking of Sir Olaf Caroe, a distinguished Foreign Secretary of the Raj.

BOOK FACTS

The Future of The Great Game: Sir Olaf Caroe, India's Independence, and the Defense of Asia by Peter John Brobst; The University of Akron Press, Akron, Ohio; pages 199, $39.95.

SOME time ago I asked Caroe's `Brains Trust' to produce a comparison between India and China as future Great Powers, e.g. in material resources, man power, political stability, organisation. They produced an interesting paper which I read today. The general conclusion was that there was not much in it, but that China was tougher and had been through the fire both of internal revolution and of external invasion, while India had not and was softer." Lord Wavell, the Viceroy, wrote this comment in his Journal on September 18, 1944, when India was under British rule and the Second World War had not ended. (Wavell: The Viceroy's Journal edited by Penderel Moon; page 90).

No Indian politician, academic or journalist thought of the prospect which exercised a foreigner who knew that the Raj would have to end not long after the war came to a close. Wavell was referring to Sir Olaf Caroe, ICS (Indian Civil Service), who was Secretary in the External Affairs Department. It sired the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA).

Olaf Caroe belonged to a distinguished band of Foreign Secretaries who thought afar and left a legacy. Unlike Mortimer Durand and Henry McMahon, his impact was not in the realm of action but in the realm of strategic thinking. He was one of the most cerebral of them. He influenced and helped K.M. Panikkar, K.P.S. Menon and A.S.B. Shah. He read classics at Oxford and served in the Army during the First World War. His forte was geopolitics. He divided the world into "Seven Theatres of Power". The Gulf was an area of particular concern. He learned Urdu, was fluent in Pashto, studied the Akbarnamah and preferred the ICS to the British Foreign Office. In 1923, he joined the Indian Political Service; served as Foreign Secretary (1939-45) and as Governor of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) from March 1946 to June 1947. Jawaharlal Nehru hounded him out of this office after a sustained campaign of vilification. Since Caroe was opposed to the establishment of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah refused to recall him to that post after Partition and appointed George Cunningham, instead.

In retirement, Caroe joined the influential Round Table group, contributed to its journal and to the Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society. He wrote three influential books - Wells of Power (on security in the Gulf), The Pathans (a classic), and Soviet Empire (on Stalin's policies in Central Asia).

The Department of External Affairs then administered British protectorates in the Gulf, including Kuwait, Bahrain and the Trucial States. Until 1937, Aden was governed from Bombay. The External Affairs Department manned consulates in China, Central Asia and West Asia.

Caroe has been greatly misunderstood and his influence was vastly exaggerated. His futurology reflected a paternalistic romanticism. But there was a kernel of sound sense in his assessments, which have stood the test of time. He dared to think and thought creatively, though he was alarmist at times. Nehru's main concern vis-à-vis China was preservation of the McMahon Line. He was dimly aware, if at all, of the Aksai Chin till late in the day. As far back as on November 20, 1950, he said: "Our maps show that the McMahon Line is our boundary and that is our boundary, map or no map... and we will not let anybody come across that boundary."

No official did more to fortify India's case on the Line than Caroe did as Deputy Secretary. London had refrained from publishing the Shimla Convention of 1914 and the India-Tibet exchange of notes on the Line that year in order to give China time to come around. Caroe realised that this created uncertainty. He got published these documents and a map which showed the Line as the boundary. He wrote to R.A. Butler, Under Secretary at the India Office on March 4, 1937, warning him that the consequences of "our failure to publish the 1914 agreement with Tibet" enabled China's cartographers to absorb chunks of Indian territory in that sector. One finds, again and again, British officials in India remonstrating with London when Indian interests were neglected in framing imperial policy.

All this was known. What Prof. Peter John Brobst of the University of Ohio at Athens, Ohio, has done is to delve into the archives in the British Library in London and present instructive chunks from the treasure trove, which reveal the range and depth of Caroe's thought and that of his colleagues in what Wavell called his "Brains Trust". Brobst's comments, for the most part, are apt. The sole blemish is the author's projection of the Great Game, of which Kipling wrote in Kim, to the present day and an obsession with it that drives him mercilessly to irritate the reader with constant and irrelevant references to "the Great Game". This is a truly path-breaking and invaluable work. Not surprisingly, no Indian scholar has cared to explore this path.

Contrary to an Indian myth, India's "partition represented the failure and not the fulfilment of imperial design. Pakistan as the keystone of an Islamic alliance was a rationalisation of partition, not a motive. Indeed Caroe's geopolitical thinking weighed heavily against such a step. Supposedly one of its primary architects, Caroe in fact endorsed the creation of an independent Pakistan only in the difficult last resort, offering compelling evidence of the instinctive aversion that officials of the Raj generally felt toward partition."

As far back as June 28, 1935, when he was Deputy Secretary, Caroe wrote to the Secretary of State for India about "the new political forces... at work in Eastern and Central Asia". He was appalled at the "typical British and British Indian apathy" towards issues of security. In 1942, he set up the "Viceroy's Study Group". In a major paper dated April 26, 1942, he wrote that "a realisation is needed in the highest places that India cannot build a constitution unless the frontiers are held and the ring fence in some manner kept standing". It was entitled "Whither India's Foreign Policy". Two others he wrote bear mention. They are "Some Constitutional Reflections on the Landward Security of the India of the Future" (August 18, 1944) and "The Essential Interests of the British Commonwealth in the Persian Gulf and its Coastal States, with special reference to India" (1944). The Planning Division of the MEA set up in 1966 has been a joke from the inception.

In 1942, Caroe noted that intelligence assessors at the Foreign Office had "with a few exceptions in relation to Japan, been able to give little thought or study to the problems of Asia and none at all to India". India apart, he said, "the countries on the Indian Periphery all the way from the Middle East to Malaya are conspicuous by their absence". As a result, Caroe had "been considering means whereby we in India might be able to do something to fill this lacuna".

THE HINDU PHOTO LIBRARY

Jawaharlal Nehru with Olaf Caroe, then Governor of North West Frontier Province, in Peshawar on October 31, 1946.
Lord Linlithgow was Viceroy then. Even this wooden man felt the need for "some reflection to be undertaken", an exercise which India's leaders and diplomats find irksome and unnecessary. Prof. Brobst rises to the challenge of analysing the material. Archival discoveries supplement his own able research. Unlike some, he does not simply dish out the discovered documents, prefacing them with a perfunctory introduction.

The study group comprised senior officers from both the ICS and the Indian Army. General Sir Alan Hartley, Deputy Commander in Chief of the Indian Army; Major-General Walter Cawthorn, Director of Military Intelligence; Sir Theodore Gregory, an economist; and Sir Everlyn Wrench, in the Finance Department. Sir Maurice Gwyer, C. J. of the Federal Court and one of the principal draftsmen of the 1935 India Act, participated actively. So did Peter Fleming, Ian Fleming's older brother who had travelled extensively in Chinese Central Asia in the 1930s and had come to India in 1942 to organise strategic deception operations. Among the founding members was H.V. Hodson, Constitutional Adviser to the Government of India, who became Editor of The Sunday Times.

Two members especially influenced the agenda of the group. One was Guy Wint, an established expert on the history and politics of Asia. During the war, Wint was officially attached to Britain's Ministry of Information. Another key figure in the study group was Lieutenant-General Sir Francis Tuker, who joined in 1944. In 1946 and 1947, Tuker was GOC-in-C, Eastern Command.

Members presented papers to the study group anonymously, although Caroe kept a master list of the authors that he eventually sent to the India Office. Copies of papers were sent to the Viceroy and the C-in-C. The group met in the homes of members. Minutes of discussions were carefully maintained.

When Caroe emphasised to a colleague in London, on September 13, 1945, the "concept of India and [the] centre of [an] Asiatic System" he articulated a concept which lay at the core of Nehru's vision. "In the modern world it is inevitable for India to be the centre of affairs of Asia." Caroe wrote on August 18, 1944: "All who look forward to the emergence of India as a Great Power must assume and work for her unity." He was a true friend of India whom Nehru woefully wronged.

Caroe told the Study Group in 1941: "It was clear that with India on the threshold of greater industrialisation and increasing world importance, wider and fuller education was necessary on technological grounds to meet the rising demands for labour capable of efficient work with modern machinery in all forms." Use of Indian languages would help to improve the situation. He argued that the dominance enjoyed by English as the language of instruction had historically "acted as a deterrent to students and has thus restricted the spread of education", adding that "in India the second language had not to be acquired as we learn French to widen our outlook and open new doors, but as a medium of actual instruction in, e.g. mathematics". Caroe worried that the effect was "to render higher education unassimilable [sic] save for the ablest of all, and thereby to destroy the basis of all sound education". The use of English had provided a unifying force among India's elite, but like Tuker, Caroe recognised that defence had to be placed on a more popular footing. No longer, he warned, would it suffice to draw India's leadership "solely from the wealthy classes or from those who can afford to pay university fees".

Second to Caroe, if that, was Tuker's strong emphasis of India's importance in the future. He wanted to publicise the "certainty that India would be the centre of (the Indian Ocean) region". Tuker noted an Indian trait before it surfaced after Independence. It was in a paper entitled "Defence and National Efficiency" (1945). It was ignorance married to chauvinism.

Brobst does justice to archival material because his research in published matter is excellent. One dreads the prospect of an academic adventurer proceeding to London to publish the papers with an ignorant and chauvinistic Introduction. Incidentally, besides the papers, the minutes of discussion in the Viceroy's Study Group are also available in that library.

On January 7, 1943, the Group contemplated "a high-class magazine" on defence "appealing to the Indian intelligentsia". It would present "articles on all current important world problems in a way calculated to stimulate thought and encourage ideas which could be contrasted or compared with the affairs on which Indians now concentrate their whole attention".

Sir Maurice Gwyer contributed a paper on "Post-War Security in the Indian Ocean" in May 1944, in which he warned against trying to influence Indian thinking on security lest it be misconstrued "as an ingenious device of imperialism to reimpose control".

The author records in detail Caroe's interaction with and help to Panikkar, K.P.S. Menon and A.S.B. Shah. They shared a passion for strategic literacy. Neglect of India's external relations by British as well as Indian leaders depressed Caroe.

Brobst takes the reader through Caroe's theories on "India's Outer Ring", the Buffer System, much of which became irrelevant after Independence. Guy Wint was much more realistic than Caroe. Advances in military technology and the rise in air power had undermined the traditional role of the buffer states. He wrote on June 7, 1943, a paper entitled "Some Problems of India's Security", in which he pointed out that just "as Louis XIV, when his grandson ascended the throne of Spain, remarked that the Pyranees had ceased to exist, so today have the Hindu Kush virtually ceased".

Caroe's concern with the Soviet Union and China's "expansionism" is well known. But then, Nehru himself voiced the same apprehension in an interview to C.L. Sulzberger of The New York Times reported in The Times of India (April 27, 1950). "More and more" the Soviet Union was following a "nationalistic expansionist policy". The author perceptively notes: "Historians point out that the views represented by Caroe and Wint tended to embed a fossilised Russophobia and to reflect a blinkered ideology of anticommunism. In hindsight, British fears between late 1939 and early 1941 that the Soviets would attack Southwest Asia and perhaps even India itself were exaggerated. British suspicions about the Nazi-Soviet Pacts as an inducement to Soviet expansion at the expense of the British Empire slighted the intricacies of Soviet policy. Such criticism, however, can itself be carried too far. British thinking was complex and far from a knee-jerk response."

Nor has China proved revanchist as Caroe feared. It settled border disputes efficiently and fairly. India remains the sole exception for reasons Indians are not prepared to recognise. Interest in Tibet's autonomy was understandable, but there was scant interest in China's perceptions. Eventually, Caroe's "Inner Ring" (Balochistan, Nepal and the Naga Hills) proved as obsolete as the Outer Ring.

It is unfortunate that Nehru fell out with this dedicated official. He formed the Interim Government on September 2, 1946. Only a month later he began itching for a tour of the tribal areas in the NWFP. He went there against the advice of Gandhi, Patel, Azad, Wavell and Caroe. The four-day trip in October was a disaster. Predictably, the reception was hostile. We have a fair and objective account of the entire episode in Parshottam Mehra's excellent work The North-West Frontier Drama 1945-1947: A Reassessment (Manohar; 1998). It is based on extensive research in British archives and lives up to the high standards of Prof. Mehra's research. Far from conspiring against Nehru, Caroe asked Mountbatten to persuade Jinnah to instruct his followers not to hold demonstrations against Nehru. The Deputy Commissioner, Mardan, C.G.S. Curtis saved Nehru's life. Nehru, sporting his half-baked Marxism, talked of "class conflict" and abused the tribal leaders ("pensioners"). He went there for partisan ends, impetuously enough, and conducted himself arrogantly. Caroe was made a scapegoat for Nehru's follies. Since Nehru was "indispensable" to Mountbatten's success, Caroe had to go. In 1963, Nehru invited him as a state guest to help co-ordinate work for the Tibetan refugees.

India's High Commissioner in London, B.K. Nehru, wrote a note of thanks to Caroe on February 1, 1975, for his support to India's absorption of Sikkim within the Union of India.

Brobst fully demolishes the myth which Selig S. Harrison and Chester Bowles fostered that the United States arms aid to Pakistan was inspired by Caroe's Wells of Power. Caroe's visit to the U.S. State Department in May 1952 left him feeling insulted.

In retirement, Caroe received attention and respect given to few. He foresaw a lot, misunderstood a lot. Brobst makes the perfect comment on his contribution when he writes that "a combination of anachronism and prescience... . characterised so much of his thinking".

Fundamentally, Nehru's world view clashed with Caroe's. Fundamentally, Nehru was right on non-alignment. It is true, of course, that he had in 1948-49 sought an alliance with the U.S. and was rebuffed. Non-alignment is, however, a non. It no more indicates how a country pursues its interests than calling a person non-married indicates how he or she pursues happiness.

K.P.S. Menon wrote in his autobiography Many Worlds (1965; page 271): "A Foreign Office is essentially a custodian of precedents. We had no precedents to fall back upon, because India had no foreign policy of her own until she became independent." He was grossly unjust to the Foreign Secretaries who preceded him - like Caroe. The National Archives of India refute him. A Foreign Office is no mere "custodian of precedents" either.

What he added reveals a lot; everything, in fact: "Our policy therefore necessarily rested on the intuition of one man, who was Foreign Minister - Jawaharlal Nehru. Fortunately, his intuition was based on knowledge... " The first part was, tragically, all too right. The second was preposterously wrong.

Nehru had, broadly, two aims in sight - promoting India globally and checking Pakistan, especially on Kashmir. In March 1947, he wrote a memo on Germany's reunification. He dictated - rather tried to - terms to the U.S. on a peace treaty with Japan. Nehru stipulated cancellation of the U.S.' alliance with Japan and surrender of its bases.

His note to Vallabhbhai Patel on November 8, 1950, said: "The fact remains that our major possible enemy [sic] is Pakistan. This has compelled us to think of our defence mainly in terms of Pakistan's aggression. If we begin to think of, and prepare for, China's aggression [in Tibet] in the same way, we would weaken considerably on the Pakistan side" (Sardar Patel's Correspondence; Volume 10; page 344). Nehru's use of the word `enemy' betrayed an outlook he tried to conceal.

Eventually, he lost the friendship of both and drove the two into an embrace in 1963. How? The reason is not addressed at all. The stark truth was that temperamentally Nehru was a unilateralist. His note to Sheikh Abdullah on August 26, 1952, spelt out this line. In Delhi Pakistan's Prime Minister Mohammed Ali was reminded that "in the balance, the Indian army was stronger than the Pakistan army and we would win in the end" (Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru; Volume 28, page 249). To the world he would counsel against a talking from a position of strength: "It is the approach which uses the words: `Let us have a tough policy, let us speak from strength.'"

If vis-à-vis Pakistan he banked on superior armed power, vis-à-vis China he unilaterally altered "all our old maps dealing with this frontier" which would then be treated as a "firm and definite one which is not open to discussion with anybody" (July 1, 1954; SWJN, Vol. 26, page 482). That spelt a deadlock. Here China was the more powerful adversary. But, then, Nehru was unaware of even the concept of limited war and imagined that any armed conflict with China would lead to a world war.

Even on international issues Nehru was a unilateralist; flouting international law and morality he asserted an exclusive right to the upper riparian (India) to deal with the waters as it pleased. This was said in regard to the Farakka Project on March 12, 1960 (Sharing the Ganges; Ben Crow & Ors; page 64). It was unilateralism rampant, throughout.

The country has paid a heavy price in its foreign and domestic policies for practising the personality cult and neglecting professionalism. The Caroes had a lot to teach us.

 

[ajtr]

T H E F U T U R E O F T H E G R E AT G A M E​

Introduction
Reputedly coined by a British officer named Arthur Connolly around
1840 and later popularized by Rudyard Kipling, the "Great Game"
originally described the nineteenth-century contest for mastery in Asia.1
Some Victorians saw at stake nothing less than global supremacy. Lord
Curzon, Queen Victoria's last and probably best-known viceroy in India,
imagined a "chessboard upon which is being played out a game for dominion
of the world."2 The "grand chessboard" still resonates as a
metaphor.3 Observers of the Asian scene today see the beginning of a
new round in the Great Game amid the breakup of the Soviet Union, the
growth of radical Islam, and the potentialities of China as an economic
and military leader.4The British Empire has disappeared and the United
States stands essentially in its place; threats range from terrorism and insurgency
to naval expansion and nuclear rivalry; but the pattern is otherwise
familiar. Flashpoints continue to light up along an arc from the
Persian Gulf through Afghanistan and Kashmir to Nepal and Burma.
India commands the strategic center, the Asian balance hinging, as in the
nineteenth century, on that country's power and the overall stability of
the subcontinent. The Great Game did not end with British rule in August
1947. Nor did officials of the late Raj expect that it would.5
No such authority saw the transcendence of the Great Game more
clearly than Sir Olaf Caroe. He believed that its rules, that the imperaxiii
tives of Asian defense, reflected the permanence of geography versus the
vicissitudes of empire and ideology. His outlook, like Curzon's, was
global. Caroe described a map of the world divided into "Seven Theaters
of Power."6 He explained that Britain's control of the "Indian Ocean
Theater" had during the nineteenth century worked to check Russia's
piecemeal absorption of more than half the colossal "Central Land
Mass Theater." The "Indian Ocean Theater" formed a critical hub of
world communications, enabling the British to more efficiently link the
"European" and "Pacific Theaters," to better diversify markets and resources
and to enjoy greater opportunity for global maneuver in war.
Caroe stressed that all this was in the end the function of a stable and
organized subcontinent. Securing the Cape of Good Hope, Egypt, and
Malacca may have provided sufficient protection against rival navies, but
these "keys," as the Edwardian admiral Lord Fisher famously called them,
did not lock all the doors. Military and economic power based on India
presented the only sure way to seal the most dangerous reentrants. These
were situated at the two points where the Indian Ocean Theater intersected
the "Central Land Mass Theater"—in Afghanistan and Persia (as
British authorities typically called Iran through the 1940s) on the subcontinent's
west and in Burma on the east. This landscape would endure.
As a counterpoise to Soviet and increasingly Chinese power consolidated
in the Asian heartland, India would remain pivotal in the maintenance of
a global balance between land and sea power. India had historically
formed and would continue to be, Caroe wrote, a "central bastion" of
world power well beyond the end of British rule.
Olaf Kirkpatrick Caroe, Knight Commander of the Star of India,
Knight Commander of the Indian Empire, was British India's leading
geopolitical thinker during the final years of the Raj.7 Caroe served as
foreign secretary to Britain's Government of India throughout the Second
World War. He was afterward Britain's last governor of the North-
West Frontier Province, which lies along the border with Afghanistan in
present-day Pakistan. In these capacities Caroe played an important and
controversial role in Britain's transfer of power on the subcontinent. As
a whole his career spanned the transition from an era of world war to
one of cold war, coinciding with the onset of decolonization and the rise
xiv INTRODUCTION
of air power as an organizing conception of global strategy. Caroe carefully
studied and followed new developments in international and military
affairs, but he ultimately emphasized underlying continuities in the
pattern of world power. This book seeks to illuminate those continuities,
trying to clarify the geopolitics behind India's independence and
the historical precedents to the defense of contemporary Asia by focusing
on Caroe's vision of the Great Game and its future.
By background, Caroe epitomized the official mind of the Raj. Of
Danish ancestry, he was born in London in 1892, the son of William
Douglas Caroe, a prominent ecclesiastical architect, and Grace Desborough.
He received his early education at Winchester, before attending
Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read classics. The First World War
began shortly after Caroe completed his university studies. It was the war
that originally took him to India. Caroe arrived on the subcontinent in
late 1914 as an officer attached to the Fourth Territorial Battalion of the
Queen's Regiment. His unit was posted to the Punjab in northern India,
and eventually saw action in classic Great Game country on the Afghan
frontier. Having read and enjoyed Kipling as a boy, Caroe took a lively
interest in the culture and history of his new surroundings in South Asia.
He learned the Urdu language and studied the Akbarnamah, the sixteenthcentury
chronicle of the Mughal emperor Akbar's reign. Convinced that
he wanted to pursue a career in India, Caroe sat for civil service examinations
on his return to England in 1919. Although he qualified for a traditionally
coveted slot in the Treasury or Foreign Office, he requested
appointment to the Indian Civil Service instead.
After an initial assignment in the Punjab, Caroe was detached to the
Indian Political Service in 1923. The Political Service handled relations
with Britain's protectorates on the subcontinent, managed the diplomatic
affairs of the Raj, and administered India's frontier areas.8 The Political
Service was divided into two main departments. The Political Department
dealt with the protectorates; the Foreign Department dealt with
diplomacy and the frontiers. Caroe was assigned to the latter and sent to
the North-West Frontier. He subsequently distinguished himself in a
number of different assignments. He acquired fluency in Pashto, the language
of the region's ethnically predominant Pathans, and developed an
xvi INTRODUCTION
intimate familiarity with frontier geography. By 1933, he had risen to chief
secretary of the North-West Frontier Province, essentially the governor's
primary lieutenant. In 1934, Caroe went to Delhi as a deputy secretary in
the Foreign Department, which had been redesignated as the Department
of External Affairs. Having in this assignment to deal routinely
with policy relating to Tibet and India's northeastern frontier, his vision
of the Great Game expanded to encompass what he called the "Himalayan
Fringe" as well as India's borderlands on the west. Three years
later, Caroe left the capital for temporary duty as acting resident in the
Persian Gulf (the senior official responsible for overseeing the administration
of Britain's several protectorates on the eastern shore of the Arabian
Peninsula). He stayed in the Gulf for about six months before
receiving assignment to Baluchistan, the westernmost territory of the
Raj. There, Caroe served as revenue commissioner and as acting agent to
the viceroy (an office roughly equivalent to a provincial governor).
In the summer of 1939, Caroe took charge of the External Affairs
Department as foreign secretary to the Government of India. He held
this office for the duration of the Second World War. Although Delhi's
conduct of foreign relations was ultimately subject to authority in
London, Caroe's purview was wide. His department administered
Britain's protectorates in the Persian Gulf, including Kuwait, Bahrain,
and the Trucial States; covered British relations with Oman in southeastern
Arabia; and manned consulates in China, Central Asia, and the
wider Middle East. The Foreign Office held formal responsibility for
Britain's legations in Afghanistan and Nepal, but as a matter of practice,
the Indian Political Service staffed both. Caroe was Britain's point
man for questions arising along India's three thousand-mile international
frontier, which marched variously with Persia, Afghanistan,
Nepal, Tibet (which at the time Britain recognized as legally autonomous
and practically independent), and China. He was the senior
British official most directly acquainted on a day-to-day basis with
Central Asian affairs, and Whitehall routinely solicited his opinion on
sensitive issues including British intelligence activities in Soviet and
Chinese Turkestan. In general, it fell to Caroe as foreign secretary in
India to monitor international developments and to advise higher au-
Introduction xvii
thorities on their implications for South Asia and the subcontinent's
surrounding region.
Caroe maintained his close weather eye on the geopolitics of South
Asia through his last post on the subcontinent and retirement in England.
In March 1946, Caroe became governor of the North-West Frontier
Province. It was the office to which he had aspired and prepared
himself since the beginning of his Indian service in 1919. His governorship
ended unhappily, however, amid inaccurate and unfair charges
of pro-Muslim, anti-Hindu, antinationalist bias in his policies. In
1947, Caroe retired to Sussex with neither his energy nor enthusiasm
diminished. He joined the influential Round Table group and soon
emerged as a principal voice among its inner circle and editorial
board—the so-called "Moot." Caroe contributed numerous articles to
the influential journal of the Round Table and also to the Journal of the
Royal Central Asian Society (now the Royal Society for Asian Affairs), on
the council of which he long served. Finally, he authored three major
books: Wells of Power (on Persian Gulf security), The Pathans, and Soviet
Empire (on Stalin's policies in Central Asia), aiming, as in the strategic
forecasting studies he directed while foreign secretary in Delhi, to explain
the geopolitical vision of British India and to argue its relevance
in future strategy.9
Some observers have read into Caroe's efforts the origins of contentious
decisions surrounding Britain's withdrawal from South Asia and
the subsequent expansion of American influence in the region. Scholars,
particularly in India, have suggested that Caroe helped to engineer the
subcontinent's partition and the creation of Pakistan in accordance with
a larger imperial design to build a bulwark of Islamic states against Soviet
expansion. It is true that Caroe, like numerous other erstwhile officials
of the Raj, vigorously advocated military assistance for Pakistan.
The arguments, however, were often improvised and largely made after
the fact of partition. In actuality, the subcontinent's partition represented
the failure and not the fulfillment of imperial design. Pakistan as
the keystone of an Islamic alliance was a rationalization of partition, not
a motive. Indeed, Caroe's geopolitical thinking weighed heavily against
such a step. Supposedly one of its primary architects, Caroe in fact enxviii
INTRODUCTION
dorsed the creation of an independent Pakistan only in the difficult last
resort, offering compelling evidence of the instinctive aversion that officials
of the Raj generally felt toward partition.
Critics of American strategy in South Asia during the Cold War have
also pointed to Caroe as a source of malign influence, imagining Caroe
to have been the gray eminence behind the Eisenhower Administration's
decision to arm Pakistan in the mid-1950s. They argue that that decision
exacerbated regional tensions while accruing no significant strategic advantage.
One study that detects Caroe's hidden hand in American policy
goes so far as to assert that "the United States deliberately extended the
Cold War into South Asia."10 Caroe, however, consistently advised that
Chinese as well as Soviet interests in the region predated and existed independently
of "international communism" and challenges to it from
the United States. While his thinking certainly offers a salutary reminder
that the roots of global competition in South Asia trace much deeper
than anticommunism, Caroe had little if any meaningful influence on
the State Department.
Looking back from the 1990s on Caroe's Great Game futurology,
H. V. Hodson, who worked closely with Caroe as a government adviser
in wartime India, wrote that "the whole exercise, interesting as it was at
the time, seems now a period piece, having no bearing whatever on the
real events that followed."11 Others among Caroe's own contemporaries
similarly suspected that Caroe had never fully come to grips with the
completeness of Britain's withdrawal from the subcontinent, although
few ever doubted his intellect, commitment, or overall integrity. Caroe's
views, particularly on the unique complexities of frontier politics, arguably
reflected a certain amount of romanticism and a more definite
paternalism typical among British administrators in South Asia.12
Caroe's advice did not in the end translate into policy, and his prescriptions
were in hindsight out of step with the political exigencies and prevailing
temper of his times. Financial trouble and changing attitudes
toward empire at home combined with nationalist momentum and the
eruption of widespread communal violence on the subcontinent all but
forced Britain's withdrawal from India in the aftermath of the Second
World War. But while we may thus incline to share Hodson's assessment,
Introduction xix
to understand Caroe's thinking only as a "period piece" underestimates
his geopolitical acuity and enduring relevance as a strategic analyst.
The Great Game continued to play out in the years after India's independence
much as Caroe predicted. Caroe recognized the subcontinent's
geospatial centrality when others typically located South Asia on
the world's strategic periphery. He believed that Russian land power
posed a traditional and future danger to international stability. But when
many tended to fear an implacable enemy, Caroe imagined the long-term
vulnerability of the Soviet Union's multiethnic empire in the heartland
of Asia. He foresaw the resurgence of China as a great power when conventional
wisdom discounted that country's potentialities separate from
external organization. Caroe warned that Afghanistan and the remote
Pathan borderlands of what is today Pakistan formed a political fault
zone of global significance. He anticipated the resilience of Islam in the
face of communism and secularizing ideologies more generally in an era
when fashions were disposed to dismiss religious motivation as a spent
force. And Caroe explained the importance of the Persian Gulf in relation
both to world oil production and as a base area well situated for the
staging of Anglo-American forces throughout the western Indian Ocean
and up into Central Asia. In short, even though the geopolitical vision
that Caroe articulated failed to sustain the empire it had once animated—
hence our difficulty in perceiving its resilience—the Great
Game continues to drive the dynamic of global power and strategic competition
in Asia today and presumably tomorrow.13
xx INTRODUCTION
c h a p t e r 1
The Viceroy's Study Group
In 1942, India's independence came definitively into sight with Britain's
promise for self-governing Dominion status after the war. In response,
Sir Olaf Caroe, then the foreign secretary in Delhi, organized a
secret and high-level group to study the future of the Great Game in anticipation
of a postwar transfer of power in South Asia. Caroe's decision
to form the "Viceroy's Study Group" reflected his long-standing concern
that in official planning for India's independence the imperatives of
strategy and geopolitics received too little attention. In the 1930s, for example,
"new political forces . . . at work in Eastern and Central Asia"
had consumed Caroe's attention as a deputy secretary in British India's
Department of External Affairs.1 He was appalled, however, by what
struck him as "typical British or British Indian apathy" toward such
questions—particularly in view of the basic constitutional reforms then
underway on the subcontinent.2 Frequently the real author of policy advice
put forward under the signature of the foreign secretary, Caroe tried
to provide some corrective himself. In fact, Caroe's concerns about
Britain's withdrawal from the subcontinent in relation to the wider defense
of Asia trace directly to his early recognition that India's independence
was a process already underway by 1919.
1
When Caroe arrived on the subcontinent in that year to take up his
first assignment in the Indian Civil Service, the Raj was still the empire
within an empire that had emerged over the course of the nineteenth century.
Britain's "Indian Empire" was a patchwork of protectorates on one
hand, and territories directly administered by the British Crown on the
other. The protectorates, or "Princely States," accounted for about half
of the subcontinent's land area and a third of its population. Many were
mere pockets of territory, but some, such as Hyderabad and Mysore in
the south and Kashmir in the north, covered very large areas. The various
rulers were each nominally independent but in the end subject to
British control through a system of subsidiary treaties. The remainder of
the subcontinent, and the majority of its population, fell in "British
India" proper. British India was divided into provinces, such as Bengal
and the Punjab, and included the cities of Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta, and
Madras. Day-to-day responsibility for the system fell to the viceroy, who
exercised authority through governors in each of British India's provinces
and through political agents in the various Princely States. The viceroy's
Government of India enjoyed wide if not absolute discretion. When
Caroe arrived in 1919, a viceroy, supported by fewer than two thousand
administrators in the Indian Civil Service and Political Service, ruled
over three hundred million Indians. They were in turn backed by the Indian
Army, whose ranks numbered in the range of one hundred thousand.
Ultimate authority rested with Parliament—exercised from
London by the Cabinet through the India Office.3
By 1919, however, major change was clearly in the offing. The British
Empire had emerged from the First World War at its territorial apogee,
but this was no blessing. The effect was to stretch already taxed resources
even thinner. Moreover, the war had dealt a heavy blow to British prestige
by exposing the limitation of British power. Nationalism intensified
throughout the empire as even the strategic advantages of the British rule
came increasingly into question. The self-governing Dominions (Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa) demanded true independence,
namely the right to set their own foreign policies. In the dependent
empire, calls for self-determination grew louder. On the subcontinent,
nationalist sentiment finally galvanized on an all-India level, and nation-
2 THE FUTURE OF THE GREAT GAME
alist leaders found enough leverage to extract pledges for reform and
gradual self-government.4
The result in 1919 was "dyarchy," a system under which the British entrusted
selected aspects of Provincial administration to local councils
composed of Indians but kept revenues and the police in British hands.
Dyarchy was no huge leap forward, but it was a genuine first step toward
India's independence. The major advance came in 1935. The groundswell
of Indian nationalism had continued to rise through the 1920s with the
advent of Gandhi and civil disobedience. Full and immediate independence
became the objective of the Indian National Congress. In 1931, the
British declared Dominion status to be their intention for India, and by
1934 the Congress had suspended civil disobedience. Parliament subsequently
passed a new Government of India Act in 1935. The new legislation
replaced dyarchy with Provincial ministries responsible to elected
assemblies and envisaged a federal system of self-government that would
ultimately unite the Provinces of British India with the Princely States.
The first elections were held in 1937.
If the 1935 act appeared finally to open a clear path to India's independence,
in reality major obstacles lay ahead. First, many Muslims
feared that their culture and interests would be swamped in an Indian
federation dominated by a Hindu majority. The idea of Pakistan—a separate
homeland for the subcontinent's Muslims, who constituted a substantial
minority that numbered in the tens of millions—consequently
began increasingly to gain appeal. As envisioned by its original proponents,
Pakistan would be formed by bundling the provinces and Princely
States on the northwest, both of which had majority Muslim populations,
as a second federation outside India's core. Even if Muslim leaders
really saw Pakistan as a bargaining chip to win increased autonomy
for Muslims within an all-India federation, their promotion of the idea
during the late 1930s and early 1940s served both to widen and harden
separatist sentiment.5
Second, movement toward India's independence on the basis of the
1935 act stalled with the outbreak of war in Europe. When Britain declared
war on Germany, the viceroy, then Lord Linlithgow, announced
that India was at war as well. As a dependent part of the British Empire

 

[ajtr]

Jaswant and Lord Curzon's legacy ​

By C. Raja Mohan
NEW DELHI, JAN. 27. Is Lord Curzon of Kedleston back in political favour? Two very different men recently invoked his ideas to define India's new standing in the world.

The first was Henry Kissinger, a former American Secretary of State who was talking about India's role in the region stretching from Aden to Singapore. The second was none other than the External Affairs Minister, Jaswant Singh.

At a conclave organised by the India Today magazine last week, Mr. Singh quoted extensively from Lord Curzon's celebrated 1907 Romanes lecture on `Frontiers'. Taking off from Lord Curzon's discussion on the diplomacy of fixing physical frontiers among competing powers at the turn of the 20th century, he was leading to a discourse on the new frontiers that Indian diplomacy must conquer.

Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, Viceroy of India (1898- 1905) and British Foreign Secretary (1919-24), might only be mentioned in our text books as the man who partitioned Bengal. But within the foreign policy elite, he is recalled as the man who outlined the grandest of the strategic visions for India.

* * *

Why should the imperialist vision of Lord Curzon - outlined nearly a century ago for British India - be of any significance to New Delhi's foreign policy? Some diplomatists suggest that the political context might have changed, but geography has not. If geography is destiny, India has a pivotal role in the Indian Ocean and its littoral, irrespective of who rules New Delhi.

While many strategists lament that New Delhi has failed to live up to the potential of Lord Curzon's vision, others insist it is outmoded. They argue that his ideas were drawn with reference to the imperial extension in India of the world's then sole superpower, Britain. New Delhi's strategic condition, they suggest, is not that of London in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

While Indians disagree on the value of the Viceroy's legacy, many in the neighbourhood, in particular Pakistan, have always accused the Indian foreign policy of Curzonian ambitions. For them, independent India's foreign policy has always been a continuation of the British imperial legacy. They believe Jawaharlal Nehru and his successors have only couched the ambition in different words.

The challenge for New Delhi, in balance, is to retain the essence of Curzon's vision that is rooted in India's geography while discarding the hegemonic aspects of it. As India grows stronger, it will inevitably called upon to play a larger role in the Indian Ocean littoral. The real question is not whether but what kind of a role?

* * *

In his book `The Place of India in the Empire', published in 1909, Lord Curzon talks of India's geopolitical significance. ``On the West, India must exercise a predominant influence over the destinies of Persia and Afghanistan; on the north, it can veto any rival in Tibet; on the north-east and last it can exert great pressure upon China, and it is one of the guardians of the autonomous existence of Siam,'' he wrote.

However, much one might dream about India's strategic future, this is not the kind of role India can play now. Nor is the world going to parcel out the Indian Ocean littoral to India. New Delhi can, however, significantly contribute towards the advancement of the region through political cooperation with other great powers.

That precisely is what Mr. Kissinger was talking about when he referred to the ``parallel interests'' of India and the United States from Aden to Singapore. These shared interests include energy security, safeguarding the sea lanes, political stability, economic modernisation and religious moderation.

* * *

Lord Curzon's emphasis on the value of fixing boundaries, conceived in the context of expanding empires, remains very relevant for India. Settled boundaries can make India's frontiers into zones of economic cooperation rather than bones of political contention.

The assessment that ``frontiers, which have so frequently and recently been the cause of war, are capable of being converted into the instruments and evidences of peace'' is even more true in a globalising world. By leaving territorial and boundary disputes with its key neighbours - Pakistan and China - unresolved for so long, India has tied itself down.

Lord Curzon seems to have been aware of the tendency to avoid boundary settlements. ``In Asia,'' he wrote, ``there has always been a strong instinctive aversion to the acceptance of fixed boundaries arising partly from the nomadic habits of the people, partly from the dislike of precise arrangements that is typical of the oriental mind, but more still from the idea that in the vicissitudes of fortune more is to be expected from an unsettled than from a settled frontier.''

Can India take Lord Curzon's advice on frontiers and seek a final resolution of the Kashmir problem with Pakistan and the boundary dispute with China? There may be a historic opportunity for the Government of Atal Behari Vajpayee to move decisively on both the fronts.

 

[ajtr]

very well written book reseaches the partition of india under the context of great game .......

The 1947 partition of the British Raj led to the displacement and death of millions, three wars between India and Pakistan, and chronic instability in Pakistan. The consensus among historians is that the partition was a hastily done effort by a British government eager to divest itself of an imperial burden. Sarila, a former aide-de-camp to the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, has a different view. Utilizing a variety of sources, including previously classified documents, he asserts that the British government supported the creation of Pakistan with the understanding that British military bases there would provide easy access to the oil fields of the Middle East. Sarila cites numerous statements by British officials, particularly Churchill, to support his case. Unfortunately, he has cherry-picked the evidence, ignoring equally strong documentation that supports the conventional view. Still, this is a useful look at a tumultuous series of events. Sarila provides interesting perspectives on key historical figures. Gandhi, for example, is shown as infuriatingly naive and self-righteous. Sarila does not prove his case here, but this is a work likely to engender additional discussion and controversy.

A saga of power and passion and betrayals revealing the true motives of the British at the time of partition

Historians and political analysts have not paid enough attention to the crucial link between India -s partition and British fears about the USSR gaining control of the oil wells of the Middle East - the wells of power . Once the British leaders realized that the Indian nationalists would not join them to play the Great Game against the Soviet Union , they settled for those willing to do so. In the process, they did not hesitate to use Islam as a political tool to fulfil their objectives. How this operation was conceived and carried out, behind a thick smoke screen, forms the theme of this untold story of India -s partition.
The top-secret documentary evidence unearthed by the author throws new light on several prominent figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, Lord Archibald Wavell, Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhash Chandra Bose, Sardar Patel and the two Menons (V.P. and Krishna). The contents also bring out little known facts about the unobtrusive pressure that the USA exerted on Britain in favour of India -s independence - as well as unity - in the hope of evolving a new post-colonial world order. The author also traces the roots of the present Kashmir imbroglio and how the matter was dealt with in the UN.
This timely volume sends out a cautionary signal to present-day Indians: to avoid misplaced idealism, superciliousness and escapism, to which some of their ancestors fell prey.

Book Review: The Shadow of the Great Game – The Untold Story of India's Partition​

Well-researched, demolishes many myths and presents an intriguing perspective on India Pakistan Partition
The Shadow of the Great Game – The Untold Story of India's Partition by Narendra Singh Sarila, Carroll & Graft Publishers, New York, 2006


This is a well researched, extremely readable book that has largely gone unnoticed, just as its main thesis about the geo-strategic drivers and the

Anglo-Russian 'Great Game' has received scant study in the historical events leading up to India's Partition in 1947. This book should serve as a cautionary tale to Indians and Pakistanis alike, although for different reasons for each.

The author, Narendra Singh Sarila, was the aide-de-camp to Earl Mountbatten of Burma, the last Viceroy of India, and had a ring-side view of the events just before and after Partition.

Partition remains a defining historical moment for the Indian Subcontinent, and has received significant scrutiny by many researchers. As the British government selectively publishes historical documents surrounding Partition, researches have access to new materials to rewrite history and challenge conventional theories. In the 1980s, the British government declassified certain theretofore secret documents 40 years after Partition. The eminent Pakistani author, Ayesha Jalal, used this material and provided a new twist to the conventional wisdom on Partition by putting forth a well-researched and plausible thesis that Jinnah used the notion of a sovereign Pakistani state as a bargaining chip to extract greater concessions for Muslim-majority provinces from the Congress Party of India. Her book, The Sole Spokesman, also made the claim that Jinnah never desired an undivided India (despite his public pronouncements and bluster to the contrary), but rather a federated India with provincial autonomy. The eminent Indian jurist, H.M. Seervai, reached approximately the same conclusion in his magnum opus, "Partition Of India: Legend And Reality". Seervai challenged the existing view that blamed the partition of India on the Muslim League. He argued instead that it was the latent bias on the part of Indian National Congress leadership which resulted in partition. Both these books have been controversial, but have also been thoroughly researched.

Sarila decided to write his book, "The Shadow of the Great Game – The Untold Story of India's Partition" after he came across documents in the Oriental and Indian Collection of the British Library, London, in 1997 which revealed that "the Partition of India may not have been totally unconnected with the British concern that the Great Game between them and the USSR for acquiring influence in the area lying between Turkey and India was likely to recommence with even greater gusto after the Second World War and the start of the Cold War. And to find military bases and partners for the same." Sarila also researched other historical British and the US State Department's archives for his book. Incidentally, while many records have been unsealed, some important ones have not. Significantly, most of Mountbatten's official correspondence during the period after Independence with London is still sealed, and unlikely to be made public anytime soon. This further fuels the controversy that the British Government has something to conceal regarding Partition and the question of Kashmir.

Sarila's thesis rests on the fact that for nearly a hundred years prior to Partition, the British had engaged in what came to be known as the 'Great Game' with tsarist Russia over influence in Trans Oxania and Central Asia. The British believed that the safety of their Indian empire and access to the oil fields in the Middle East lay in keeping the Russians at a distance beyond the Oxus river on the northern fringes of Afghanistan. British strategic interests demanded that they have access to and partners in the northwest of India even after India's independence. Indeed, the start of the Cold War even before India's independence made this even more imperative, and the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan nearly 30 years after independence confirmed British fears.

Sarila faults the Congress Party for not understanding the larger geo-political compulsions of Britain and for pursuing naïve policies that were in many cases counterproductive, but reinforced the feeling with both the Churchill and Attlee governments in Britain that Partition of India was necessary to protect British interests. Sarila does give credit, where it is due, to the Congress nationalists for mobilizing the masses in India that eventually made British rule in India untenable.

Some of the examples of Congress' missteps in the late 1930s and the early '40s were: (i) resigning from the provincial ministries in 1939 on the entry of India into WWII, and leaving the field open to Jinnah to assume the reins of government even though the Congress was sympathetic to the Allied cause (ii) launching Quit India movement in the middle of WWII when there were millions of Allied troops in India – the movement was quickly quashed with no effect, (iii) not agreeing to joining the British Commonwealth until almost the 11th hour thereby raising British insecurity, and (iv) not giving any assurance to the British that they would cooperate on diplomatic and military matters after Independence.

These led the British to believe that their strategic interests could not be safeguarded in an India led by the Congress party. The British had other compulsions too: a prudent approach would require not putting 'all eggs in one basket'. They also believed (incorrectly as it turned out later) that India would not survive as a single state given its heterogeneity, whereas Muslim-Pakistan stood a better chance of being a united, strategic partner. Lastly, by 1947, most British politicians and bureaucrats had come to loathe the Congress Party and had become distrustful of Hindu politicians.

A mistake that the Congress Party made was to accept the Muslim League as part of the Interim Government without extracting a concession that the League also join the Constituent Assembly and stop any future 'Direct Actions'. This enabled the League to play an obstructionist role in the Interim Government without facing any consequences.

According to Sarila, "Protected by British power for so long and then focused on a non-violent struggle, the Indian leaders were ill prepared, as independence dawned, to confront the power play in our predatory world"¦They had failed to see through the real British motivation for their support to the Pakistan scheme and take remedial measures. Nor did they understand that, at the end of the Raj, America wanted a free and united India to emerge and to find ways to work this powerful lever".

Jinnah, by contrast, had a better understanding of British motivations and the growing American influence on British policy, and used this to greater effect. He cooperated better with the Allied war effort, did not embarrass the British government, and was rewarded by a British policy that nudged events towards Partition. An example is cited of Nehru's sister, Vijayalaxmi Pandit, leading the charge in 1946 at the UN to pass a resolution critical of apartheid (South Africa was a close British ally at the time) with the support of the developing countries. This was at a time when India's own fate was to be decided. This 'diplomatic success' won India little laurels, except confirmed the fears in the minds of the British about what might come to pass under a Congress-led India. By contrast, when the Communist Chinese finally gained recognition in the UN in 1972, their diplomats were ordered by Peking to stay quiet for several years, and they made no moves at the UN. Even today, Beijing rarely sponsors or vetoes UN resolutions, preferring to reach consensus in back-door deals in advance. There are numerous other examples to cite of Nehru's naïveté in dealing with foreign affairs (too many to summarize in this review).

Jinnah, it is revealed, also had secret correspondence with Churchill during the war and thereafter. The details of this correspondence are not known, except that Jinnah sought his help in reigning in the Viceroys in Delhi and promised support to Britain after independence to make the case for Pakistan. Jinnah's cooperation with the British dovetailed with their efforts to carve out a friendly sphere of influence in the North West. It is also possible that he received advice to be intransigent during negotiations with the Congress, because the reward would be his Pakistan. This he proceeded to do with great flourish, with tacit British support behind the scenes.

Field Marshall Wavell, Viceroy of India, 1943-47, and predecessor of Mountbatten concluded that India had to be partitioned to preserve British interests, and even drew maps (eerily similar to the Sir Cyrill Radcliff division of India) as early as 1946 that showed the desired boundary demarcation. Sarila writes, "While in London, Wavell, on 31 August 1945, called on Churchill. According to Wavell's account: 'He warned me that the anchor [himself] was now gone and I was on a lee shore with rash pilots...His final remark, as I closed the door of the lift was: "keep a bit of India."'. Churchill, no longer Prime Minister, believed that the Attlee government, then in power, having decided to grant India independence, was not in favor of Partition and would sacrifice British interests in their haste to grant freedom to India. Attlee, who served as Churchill's deputy in the War Cabinet and the Defence Committee during the Second World War, was fully alive to British interests.
Indeed, under Attlee, Britain's position at this stage (August, 1945) could be summarized as follows:

1. The British military was emphatic on the value of retaining its base for defensive and offensive action against the USSR
2. Wavell was quite clear that this objective could not be achieved through partition - keeping a bit of India-because the Congress Party after independence would not cooperate with Britain on military and strategic matters;
3. While Labour leaders did not agree with Wavell that all was lost with the Congress Party, Attlee was, nonetheless, ready to support the division of India as long as the responsibility could not be attributed to Britain

Britain, then proceeded to assiduously implement this policy, through both the Churchill and Attlee governments. Mountbatten inherited this policy that Wavell had helped formulate. This policy necessitated that the corridor running from Baluchistan, Sind (for the port of Karachi), NWFP, northern Kashmir to Sinkiang be placed under a friendly regime. At the same time, Britain did not want to place any more territory than minimally necessary to serve their strategic interests.


The British had a few hurdles to overcome:

1. Jinnah had to be installed as the 'sole spokesman' of India's Muslims, even though the Muslim League could muster only two governments in the five provinces of India that the League demanded to be part of Pakistan in the 1946 elections (Bengal and Sind – the latter being possible only through a tie-breaker vote cast by the British governor of Sind). Significantly, Muslim League could not form governments in Punjab (Unionists), NWFP (Congress), and Assam (Congress).
2. Jinnah had to be made to accept a truncated Pakistan with partitioned Punjab and Bengal
3. NWFP, which had a Congress ministry in 1946 and a 95% Muslim population, had to be made part of Pakistan
4. Congress Party had to be persuaded to join the British Commonwealth
5. The Americans, who favored a united India, had to be persuaded that the Partition was the only inevitable outcome given 'Hindu-Muslim' question
6. The blame for Partition had to rest with Indians, not the British


On each of the above issues, the British succeeded brilliantly. They continuously raised the smokescreen of protection of Muslim rights and gave Jinnah an effective veto on all proposals not acceptable to the League. The Cabinet Mission Plan was used successfully to persuade Indians (and world opinion) that the Partition was the only reasonable outcome. These helped Jinnah position himself as the 'sole spokesman'. Jinnah was persuaded to accept a truncated Pakistan by Mountbatten who basically told Jinnah that if didn't accept Partition, there would be no Pakistan. The Cabinet Mission Plan, by providing an alternative to Partition, also persuaded Jinnah to accept a smaller Pakistan. Nehru/Patel were tempted to swallow the bitter pill of losing NWFP by being promised a quick transfer of power. The Congress stabbed the Khudai Khidmatgars and Dr. Khan Sahib, Chief Minister, NWFP by agreeing to a unique referendum that was not implemented in any other British province, even though Congress already had the peoples' mandate in 1946. Congress then boycotted the referendum, and the fate of NWFP was decided by a narrow margin of 50.28% of the electorate. Thus, NWFP was handed to Pakistan without a contest by the thinnest of margins. Had the Congress and the Khudai Khidtmgars (they boycotted for fear of violence by the Muslim League) contested the elections, NWFP may well have voted for India and Pakistan would have been stillborn. Congress agreed to join the Commonwealth after Mountbatten promised all his help in integrating the princely states in India. The British, to their credit, even as they assisted in the birth of Pakistan, ensured that what remained of India was consolidated by the accession of the princely states to it.

Mountbatten did India a huge service by taking independence as an option off the table from the princely states. They had only two choices: accede to India or to Pakistan. The Americans, even though did not want to see India balkanized and favored the emergence of a united India, were made to believe that Partition was the only option by the British. Once the Indian politicians had accepted Partition, the American voice for Indian unity was muted, and the blame for it passed on to Indians.

On Kashmir, the record is also quite clear: once the Pakistani raiders entered Kashmir, Mountbatten goaded Nehru to take the matter to the UN, where the British succeeded in closing military options for India and legitimizing the locus standi of Pakistan. In the open forum of the UN, the British could no longer conceal their bias for Gilgit and Baltistan to be joined with Pakistan as part of an essential corridor to Central Asia.

Sarila writes that the British 'Pakistan Strategy' succeeded brilliantly. Pakistan joined the Baghdad Pact and later, CENTO to form the defensive barrier again Soviet intentions in the Middle East, and went on to provide bases to the US for U-2 overflights. Later Pakistan provided the US access to China to pressurize the Soviets and provided a base against the Soviets in the Afghan war.

Sarila asks, "would the 1962 Sino-India clash have occurred had India remained united? Would the Indian subcontinent have been nuclearized in the 20th century but for Partition? Would the communal virus have spread throughout Pakistan and India in recent years, but for Partition? The genie of Islamist terrorism centered around Pakistan has made British policies come full circle. Some of the roots for its emergence lay in Partition. Would undivided India have been able to absorb 500 millions Muslims today in its midst?

Sarila concludes by saying that, 'the awareness that it was global politics, Britain's insecurity and the errors of judgment of Indian leaders that resulted in Partition of India might help India and Pakistan in search for reconciliation.'

 

[ajtr]

The Making of US Foreign Policy for South Asia
Offshore Balancing in Historical Perspective​

This article on the making of US foreign policy for south Asia examines the US strategy of "offshore balancing" in historical perspective. It spans the cold war period when the US supported Pakistan against India in checking the rise of the latter, the postcold war period when the Clinton administration seemed to be willing to accord recognition to India's overwhelming military, economic and diplomatic preponderance in the region, and the post-September 11, 2001 period during which India is inclined to "bandwagon" with the world's sole superpower.

LLOYD I RUDOLPH,
SUSANNE HOEBER RUDOLPH
How has the making of US foreign policy for south Asia changed in the 30 years since the era of the cold war? The first thing to notice is how much has changed with respect to the context of "governmental pluralism" that
conditions the making of US foreign policy for south Asia. In the case of the making of foreign policy, governmental pluralism is organised around the state department's construction of the geo-strategic world into regional bureaus. They mark the significance of regions in the making of foreign policy. In the mid-1970s there were departmental bureaus for Africa, east Asia, Europe, the near east and south Asia, and Latin America. Each region, we argue, can be profitably dealt with as a separate policy arena with a distinguishable "government". 1
Each has a distinctive constellation of salient bureaus and agencies,congressional committees, interest groups,policy NGOs, attentive publics, and security,economic and cultural determinants.The constellations wax and wane depending on the changing universe of economic and security issues. For example, the geopolitical exigencies of the cold war elevated the European bureau to a preeminent position for almost six decades.The near east and south Asia bureau also attracted a great deal of attention because of the strategic value of oil resources located in and around the Persian gulf and the US' special relationship with Israel.Near east Asia's south Asia appendage appeared only rarely on US policy-makers' radar screen.Enormous changes have occurred since 1975 in the context and parameters of the south Asia "regional government". In the mid-1970s south Asia as a region and India and Pakistan as countries were on the back burner. In 1998 they moved to the front burner after India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons in May and June 1998. Since then, in 1999 in connection
with Pakistan's military occupation of the Kargil salient in Kashmir, and in early 2002 following a terrorist attack in December 2001 on the Indian Parliament by a Pakistan-based group, the nuclear rivals have engaged in conventional and (near) nuclear military confrontations.2

Like the dramatic changes in India's strategic significance, changes in its economic performance and condition have also made India globally more visible. In the years since 1991, when India launched its economic liberalisation policy, its economy has grown rapidly reaching as high as 8 per cent of GDP per annum; its middle class consumers are estimated at 250 million; it has attracted high levels of foreign direct and portfolio investment; its rapidly growing information technology are setting world standards; and jobs in India's business process outsourcing (BPO) firms became an issue in America's 2004 presidential election.3 Major changes in the Indian diaspora also have enhanced India's visibility in the US. In the intervening years, it has grown from half a million to almost two million. The Indian-American community not only has the highest proportion of college and advanced degrees and the highest median family income of any ethnic group in the US,4 it also has one of the most effective foreign policy lobbying groups, the USIndia Political Action Committee (USINPAC)
and the largest country caucus in the US House of Representatives (155 members).5 Indo-Americans are now visible and effective players in US politics and in the making of US foreign policy.Since1975, the state department has been reorganised in ways that take into account the increased significance of India and the south Asia region in US foreign policy concerns. The 1975 report to the National Commission on the Organisation of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy recommended separating south Asia from the near east and locating the region in a separate south Asia bureau. On August 24, 1992 a bureau of south Asia affairs was created as a result of congressional legislation.6 We note too that the south Asian affairs bureau as well as the near eastern affairs bureau has created an office of regional affairs that, hopefully, tries to promote intra-regional coordination. Another arena of change has been America's relation with south Asian states since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.As we have noted, during the cold war, US administrations pursued a global policy of containment. Starting in 1952, containment in south Asia meant Pakistan's participation in the Middle East Treaty Organisation or Baghdad Pact, later Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO). India meanwhile took a leading role in organising the non-aligned movement. Starting with Dwight Eisenhower's secretary of state,John Foster Dulles, US administrations,particularly Republican administrations, followed Dulles' view that if a country isn't with us, it is against us. That made India as a practitioner of non-alignment suspect. In rationalising its de facto support for Pakistan in south Asia during the cold war the US often spoke of parity of treatment for Pakistan and India. Parity and beyond parity, tilting toward Pakistan denied India the possibility of becoming the regional hegemon, a role which India's size, population,
endowments and capabilities made possible. In effect the US acted as an "offshore balancer" for the south Asia region. Selig Harrison put it this way: "During the cold war...American policy assigned a clear priority to relations with Pakistan by providing a total of $3.8 billion in military aid to Pakistani military rulers that was nominally directed against the communist powers but was in practice used to strengthen Pakistan relative to
India."7 Weighing in support of Pakistan had the effect of destabilising the region. Parity and the military support to Pakistan that it entailed bear a good deal of the responsibility for regional instability in south Asia, including three of the four wars that destabilised the region between 1948 and 1999. CENTO's collapse in early 1979 after the Khomeini-led Iranian revolution and the flight of Shah Reza Pahlavi was soon followed by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.Overnight, Pakistan became a "front line state". Once again, as in the hay day of CENTO in the 1950s, billions of dollars of military and economic aid became available to Pakistan, ostensibly for
supporting the resistance movement to the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Ten years later, after the Soviet defeat and withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989,Pakistan for a short time moved to the back
burner, away from presidential attention and largesse. Then came the attacks of September 11, 2001 and president Bush's call for a war on terrorism. Pakistan turned on a dime.8 From the sponsor, mentor and patron (with US money and weapons) of a Taliban regime in Afghanistan that provided Pakistan with "strategic depth" and harboured and protected Al Qaida leader,Osama bin Laden, Pakistan again became a frontline state for the US in an Americanled war against terrorism, a war that included Pakistan's erstwhile ally,Afghanistan's Taliban government. Again the US was "tilting" towards Pakistan in the south Asian region by supplying it with
military and economic aid. In the name of a presidential global strategy, the US was again poised to destabilise the south Asia region by challenging India's potential hegemonic role. Pakistan again became the vehicle for the US to engage in offshore balancing in the south Asia region.9 But there was a difference; this time the US was trying to enlist India as well as Pakistan in a common cause, the "war against terrorism".Sir Olaf Caroe Invents Offshore Balancing in South Asia Why and how did offshore balancing come to the south Asia region? Its origin can be found in the geo-strategic ideas of Sir Olaf Caroe, the last foreign secretary for the British raj in India (1939-45). Winston Churchill thought India was the heart of the British empire and that Britain's capacity to be a world power depended on its rule in India. He succeeded in blocking the viceroy, Lord Irwin's, and the leader
of the Conservative Party, Stanley Baldwin's efforts in 1930-31 to grant dominion status to India.10 The power and influence of British India reached into central, south-east and west Asia, not least into the Persian gulf and the Arabian peninsula; Burma, Sri Lanka and Singapore; Afghanistan and Tibet; and into east Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.The raj's political service11 made foreign and security policy for this vast transregional
space and the British Indian army backed it up.In the dying days of the raj at the close of the second world war, Caroe began to worry about what he came to call, in a prescient phrase, "the wells of power", the oil resources of the middle east in general and of the Gulf and the Arabian peninsula in particular. For a variety reasons he facilitated, then welcomed the partition of India into successor states, India and Pakistan. Indian independence was expected to bring the anti-imperialist Jawaharlal Nehru to power, an eventuality that Caroe feared not least because Nehru couldn't be trusted12 to use the diplomatic and military resources of an independent India to secure middle east oil for British use and, more broadly, for the use of the Atlanticist world of America and Europe.Caroe was attracted to Jinnah's theory of two nations and to his plan to Partition
the subcontinent into a Muslim Pakistan and a Hindu India. Like Kipling before him, Caroe was attracted to Muslim character and culture13 and sympathised with Mohammed Ali Jinnah's call for a Muslim state on the subcontinent. A Jinnah-led Pakistan would be a more suitable vehicle to help secure the "wells of power". He would understand the importance of the spheres of influence, buffer states and protectorates that Caroe and raj foreign secretaries before him had developed into a fine art of imperial security policy. Although the last viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, was an admirer of Jawaharlal Nehru's political ideas and leadership, he,
like his principal, Britain's Labour government, was bent on extricating Britain from India at as early a date as possible, a result that could best be realised by agreeing to India's Partition. By creating an independent Muslim state of Pakistan, Partition favoured Caroe's evolving geopolitical ideas about how to secure "the wells of power". At about this time there were those in Washington, looking for ways to secure the oil resources and practice containment in the middle east. The formulations of Sir Olaf Caroe attracted attention and soon found favour in official circles.14 His article in the March 1949 number of Round Table and his 1951 book, Wells of Power, led
to invitations from the state and defence departments to visit Washington. In his Round Table article he argued that military operations in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Persia (Iran) during the first world war and second world war "were made possible from the Indian base" (i e, by the use of the Indian army). The Partition of India into independent India and Pakistan "entails a new approach to old problems". His new approach substituted Pakistan for Imperial India. "Pakistan", he argued, "has succeeded to much of [undivided British] India's responsibility "for the Indian peninsula" [!] "the North-west Frontier" (e g Afghanistan and its surround) and "the
Gulf" (i e, the Arabian Sea as well as the Persian gulf). Karachi commands the Gulf, a "Muslim lake" whose "littoral states control the fuel on which European powers increasingly depend". Defending the wells of power merged with George Kennan's recently articulated containment policy in Caroe's formulation – the littoral states' security is threatened as "shadows lengthen from the north". By 1951, when Caroe published Wells
of Power he was disillusioned with Nehru's anti-colonialism and non-alignment.India, he announced, "is no longer an obvious base for Middle East defence. It stands on the fringe of the defence periphery.Pakistan on the other hand lies well within the grouping of south-western Asia."15 Caroe wrote The Wells of Power for American consumption. It encouraged the US to step forward as an offshore balancer.The book was an attempt, he said, "to catch and save a way of thought known to many who saw these things from the East (a euphemism for the British empire in India) but now in danger of being lost". "New workers in the vineyard", he wrote, "may
find [his perspective]"¦ something worth regard" as they face "the imminence of Soviet Russia towering over these lands."16 The great game in Asia was being redefined: The British game with Russia in (central, west and south) Asia was now to be played with substitutes, America and Pakistan, as a weary and weakened Britain benched itself and Nehru's India fouled out. Caroe's hopes were soon richly rewarded. Among his early important disciples was Henry Byroade. In December 1951, he had become assistant secretary of state for the near east, south Asia and Africa. A West Point graduate with a military career behind him,17 he knew very little about
the regions and states for which he was responsible. In May 1952 Byroade met Caroe in Washington, and as Caroe tells it, he persuaded not only Byroade but also the new US secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, of the soundness of his views about the role Pakistan should play in the geo-politics of west, central and south Asia. My Pakistani friends regard me as the inventor of the Baghdad Pact! I went on a tour of the US for the British FO (Foreign Office) in 1952 and had talks with state department officials and others on these lines, and perhaps some of the exchanges we had were not without effect. Indeed I have more than once ventured to flatter myself that J F Dulles' phrase "The Northern Tier" and his association of the US with the "Baghdad" countries in Asia were influenced by the thinking in Wells of Power. In that book I called those countries "The Northern Screen" – the same idea really. It is in this context that we can say that Sir Olaf Caroe used the circumstance of India's Partition to help launch Pakistan on a 50-year career as the vehicle of America's practice of offshore balancing
against Indian hegemony in the south Asia region. While this outcome was not necessarily Caroe's overt objective, he did mean to make Pakistan the fulcrum of his strategy to protect the "wells of power" and to contain Soviet Russia and he did mean to sideline Jawaharlal Nehru's India.

India as Regional Hegemon and US Ally?
For roughly 50 years, the US destabilised the south Asia region by acting as an offshore balancer. Its actions allowed Pakistan to realise its goal of "parity" with its much bigger neighbour and to try to best that neighbour in several wars. With the end of the cold war (1989), the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan (1989) and the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991), little was left to justify the US acting as an offshore balancer in south Asia. By
president Clinton's second term the US saw no need for a special relationship with Pakistan. As Strobe Talbott, Clinton's deputy secretary of state, makes clear in his account of his protracted negotiations with India's then external affairs minister, Jaswant Singh, US diplomacy with India during the Clinton years was deliberately coordinated by knowledgeable professionals."It was", he says, "an extraordinarily collegial process, and it helped keep to a minimum the personal backbiting, bureaucratic warfare, and mischievous leaks that too often accompany policy-making".18 Because Talbott's procedure and attitude capture the essence of deliberative coordination – coordination based on collegiality and persuasion and executed by foreign policy professionals attuned to the long run and knowledgeable about the regional and bilateral as well as the global dimensions of the national interest – they merit being presented in his voice. In preparation for extended discussions with Jaswant Singh about nuclear proliferation Talbott tells us that he ""¦convened a series of meetings with the team that had been working on India and Pakistan the past several years, a mixture of regionalists and functionalists from the key departments and agencies of the US government. The core members from State were Bob
Einhorn and Rick Inderfurth, along with Rick's senior adviser, Matt Daley; Walter Andersen, a career south Asia analyst in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research; and Phil Goldberg, a versatile foreign service officer on my staff who had the unenviable job of meshing the many moving parts of the process and managing my role in it. "¦These gatherings became a regular, often daily feature of our lives for the next two years"¦." 19
We see a new era in Indo-US relations beginning with president Clinton's very successful visit to India in March 2000. Notoriously, the president spent five days in India and five hours in Pakistan. His visit to India was widely acclaimed and much celebrated, his visit to Pakistan, tense and censorious. Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state for most of the Clinton years, put it this way: "Clinton's visit to India – the first by an American president
in 22 years – was, by any standard and in almost every respect, one of the most successful trips ever, not just because of the rhapsodic reception he received, but because it marked a pivotal moment in an important and vexed relationship."20 The pivotal moment was marked by prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee when, in his reply to Clinton's widely acclaimed speech to the Indian Parliament and nation, he referred to the US and India as "natural allies".21 The president's trip to Pakistan stands in stark contrast. Although September 11, 2001 was 18 months in the future, Al Qaida attacks on US embassies in east Africa and the presumed presence of Osama bin Laden in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, led to secret service concern about a threat to the president's safety. As a result, Air Force One leapfrogged ahead to Muscat, Oman. Clinton travelled into Islamabad aboard an
unmarked Gulfstream executive jet with another Gulfstream executive jet painted with Air Force One's colours and the words "United States of America", leading the way. The idea was to deceive terrorists armed with surface-to-air missiles. In a 15 minute speech to Pakistan's parliament broadcast live Clinton told his national audience that Pakistan "can fulfil its destiny as a beacon of democracy in the Muslim world"¦" His message in private to general Pervez Musharraf, who had recently overthrown Nawaz Shariff's democratically elected government, was different: return to democracy; show restraint in Kashmir; exert pressure on terrorist groups; and help in capturing bin Laden.22 The events of Clinton's visit to south Asia in March 2000 signalled that the US now recognised Indian hegemony in the region. The events of September 11, 2001, by restoring Pakistan to front line status in a "war against terrorism", challenged the Clinton administration's policy of treating Pakistan as a failing and an incipient pariah state23 and recognising India as the hegemonic state in south Asia.September 11, 2001 also challenged the corollary of these policies, the Vajpayee government's decision to recognise the US as a "natural ally". Soon after September 11, 2001, in anticipation of waging war in Afghanistan, the Bush administration restored Pakistan to its role as a frontline state. As we have seen, Pakistan responded overnight to an American ultimatum to abandon its support for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and its accommodation of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaida in Afghanistan and to join America's "war on terrorism". The US rewarded the Musharraf government with large-scale military and economic assistance.24 Because the amount and quality of the military equipment went well beyond what was needed for the war on terrorism, many analysts in India, the US and elsewhere saw the massive military aid to Pakistan as rekindling an arms race with India. It looked as though the US was resuming its role as an offshore balancer in south Asia. But there was a difference; this time the US was trying to enlist India as well as Pakistan in a common cause, the "war against terrorism".25 The US, in the words of Ashley Tellis, a quasi-official voice located somewhere between the world of career professionals and president's men,26 "would invest the energy and resources to enable India – the pre-eminent regional state"¦to secure as trouble free an ascent to great power status as possible (emphasis added)."27 Tellis was trying to persuade India to join Pakistan as an ally of the US, the world's only superpower.28 In the language of Stephen Walt, India was being asked to bandwagon29 with the US, i e, o gain the benefits and prestige that go with joining the most powerful and, putatively, the winning side. Another grand strategy that many Indian policy-makers are considering is for India to balance against what they perceive to be a unilateralist and imperial US. Whether India should bandwagon with the US or balance against the US depends in part on
the answer to another question. Should India regard China as more of a threat than the US? If so, to bandwagon with the US is not only to join what appears to be the winning side but also to balance against an increasingly powerful and allegedly dangerous Asian neighbour, China.30 A third grand strategy for India to consider is to work with like-minded actors (such as the EU generally and France and Germany in particular; the six nation China, Russia and central Asia states in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation; Brazil and South Africa) to promote a multipolar balance of power. Such a strategy would be consistent with India's non-alignment policy during the cold war era and with the Clinton administration's orientation to the south Asia region. New Delhi seemed to be taking with a grain of salt Washington's blandishments about being a "pre-eminent regional state"
and a "great power" 31 and its offers of access to what the US labelled "advanced defence equipment".32 Sometimes India seemed inclined to bandwagon with the US, sometimes to balance against it and sometimes to act on its own in a multipolar world.Acting on its own hasn't always suited the Bush administration's global agenda. When secretary of state Condoleezza Rice visited New Delhi on March 16, 2005, she made it clear that America's global security interests took priority over India's efforts to become more energy independent and to do so in ways that encouraged regional cooperation. According to the April 2005 number of India Review, a
publication of the embassy of India, Washington DC: "The two sides differed over their approach to Iran, with secretary Rice expressing her country's 'concern over India's move to source natural gas from Iran through a proposed $ 5 billion pipeline that would run through Pakistan' ". Not only would the gas pipeline project help India meet its increasingly severe need for additional sources of energy33 but also it would break with five decades of Indian and Pakistani intransigence about regional economic and security cooperation. Indian and Pakistani interdependence and mutual benefit on the gas pipeline project would require cooperation and
reduce the risk of regional war between the nuclear-armed neighbours.34 Since its inception in 1985, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) has belied its name and fallen short of its purpose, regional cooperation. As India's foreign secretary, Shyam Saran, put it in March 2005 on the eve of the pipeline agreement, ""¦SAARC is still largely a consultative body"¦. [it] has shied away from undertaking even a single collaborative project in its 20 years of existence. In fact there is a deep resistance to doing anything that could be collaborative." The Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline project and other planned pipeline projects such as those linking India to Turkestan through Afghanistan and Pakistan and to Myanmar through Bangladesh give promise of widening circles of mutual benefit and regional interdependence. But there is a fly in the ointment. According
to some of the president's men in the Bush administration, Iran is a hostile country, an "axis of evil" country, a country that kept US citizens hostage for 79 days, a country that seeks nuclear weapons35 and to enhance its power in the middle east and central Asia, a country that threatens our close ally, Israel, a country that is home for Muslim extremists and state sponsored terrorism, a country that is against "us" in a global war against
terrorism.36 The goal of US policy for some of the president's men in Bush's second term, and that seems to include secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice as well as UN representative John Bolton, appears to be to punish Iran, perhaps to change its regime. Professionals read the situation quite differently. They see a pipeline agreement as not only contributing to regional stability in south Asia but also to strengthening democracy and reform
in Iran. At the end of June 2005, the Indian and US defence ministers, Pranab Mukherjee and Donald Rumsfeld, signed "a new framework for the US-India defence relationship for the next 10 years". The agreement
was designed to strengthen "our countries' security, reinforce our strategic partnership, and build greater understanding between our defence establishments". 37 And at the end of July, prime minister Manmohan Singh and president George W Bush issued a joint statement resolving "to transform the relationship between the countries and establish a global partnership".38 Did these acts of "bandwagoning" with the world's sole superpower preclude India from moving ahead with the Iran – and other – gas pipeline projects? Nothing was said or implied about India's pipeline negotiations. Pranab Mukherjee, India's minister of defence, went out of his way
in the context of signing the 10-year defence relationship with Washington to remind the US that India would continue its longstanding arms purchase relationship with Russia. And the Indo-US joint statement was silent on the energy front – except for "the two leaders [discussing] India's plans to develop its civilian nuclear energy programme". It became clear at the end of August 2005 that India was still able to practise a grand strategy of balancing in a multipolar world when prime minister Manmohan Singh visited Afghan president Hamid Karzai in Kabul. It was the first visit by an Indian prime minister in 29 years. The president and the prime minister not only agreed to implement both the Iran and the Turkmenistan gas pipeline projects but also that Afghanistan, a country closely tied to the US and the EU, should join the SAARC. At a joint press conference Karzai said he
was "glad to have had the same positive response from president Musharraf of Pakistan" as he had from prime minister Manmohan Singh of India.39 India and Pakistan seemed to be poised to cooperate on the economic and security future of Afghanistan. By late summer 2005 there seemed to be a good prospect that Indian petroleum minister Mani Shankar Aiyar's policy of using "pipelines of power" to promote interdependence and cooperation in south Asia might successfully challenge Sir Olaf Caroe's "wells of power" as the dominant geopolitical strategy in south Asia. If "pipelines of power" could displace "wells of power" as Pakistan's as well as India's orienting strategy there was a good prospect that the 50-year reign of "offshore balancing" by the US and its consequence, regional instability, could be brought to a close.40

 

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Offshore Balancing Revisited​

In the wake of September 11, saying that everything has changed has become fashionable. Yet, although much indeed has changed, some important things have not. Before September 11, U.S. hegemony (or primacy,
as some call it) defined the geopolitical agenda. It still does. Indeed, the attack on the United States and the subsequent war on terrorism waged by the United States underscore the myriad ways in which U.S. hegemony casts its shadow over international politics. The fundamental grand strategic issues that confronted the United States before September 11 are in abeyance temporarily, but the expansion of NATO, the rise of China, and ballistic missile defense have not disappeared. In fact, the events of September 11 have rendered the deeper question these issues pose—whether the United States can, or should, stick to its current strategy of maintaining its post– Cold War hegemony in international politics—even more salient. Hegemony is the term political scientists use to denote the overwhelming military, economic, and diplomatic preponderance of a single great power in international politics. To illustrate the way in which U.S. hegemony is the bridge connecting the pre–September 11 world to the post–September 11 world, one need only return to the "Through the Looking Glass" collection of articles in the summer 2001 issue of The Washington Quarterly. A unifying theme runs through those articles: the authors' acknowledgment of U.S. primacy and their ambivalent responses about it.
Collectively, the "Through the Looking Glass" contributors make an important point about U.S. power that policymakers in Washington do not always take to heart: U.S. hegemony is a double-edged sword. In other words,
U.S. power is a paradox. On one hand, U.S. primacy is acknowledged as the most important factor in maintaining global and regional stability. "f not for the existing security framework provided by bilateral and multilateral alliance commitments borne by the United States, the world could, or perhaps would, be a more perilous place."1 On the flip side of the coin, many—indeed most—of the contributors evince resentment at the magnitude of U.S. power and fear about how Washington exercises that power. China, specifically, wants the United States to accommodate its rise to great-power status and stop interfering in the Taiwan issue. The political elite in Moscow wants Washington to treat Russia like a great power equal to the United States and stop meddling in Russia's domestic affairs.2 Warnings are issued that for its own good—and the world's—the United States must change its ways and transform itself into a benign, or "enlightened," superpower. As the contributions to "Through the Looking Glass" demonstrate, the paradox of U.S. power evokes paradoxical reactions to it. U.S. primacy is "bad" when exercised unilaterally or to justify "isolationist" policies, but U.S. hegemony is "good" when exercised multilaterally to advance common interests rather than narrow U.S. ones.3 U.S. Power: The Effects of September 11 The paradox of U.S. power has been very much on display since September 11. U.S. primacy in the war on terrorism has its benefits. First, unrivaled U.S. military power is obviously a plus. In terms of military capabilities, the United States indeed enjoys what the Pentagon calls "full spectrum dominance." Today, the United States can war against virtually any foe, whether big powers, rogue states, or terrorist groups, and prevail on the battlefield at little or no cost. Second, because of its preponderant military and economic power, the United States has been able to organize an international coalition against terrorism. Only an enormously powerful state—a true hegemon— could make stick its admonition to the rest of the world that you are either with us or with the terrorists. No doubt, President George W. Bush's "us or them" declaration carried an implicit element of threat. Certainly, the United States has many sticks to wield. Being a hegemon, however, also means that the United States has plenty of carrots to use as coalition-building inducements. By making "side payments"—the political science jargon for what most would call bribes— Washington, for example, was able to draw a reluctant Pakistan into its antiterror coalition. The United States would have been hard pressed to project its military power into Afghanistan without the use of Pakistan's bases and airspace, but Pakistan's open alignment with the United States was anything but a slam-dunk. After all, for Islamabad, Afghanistan holds crucial strategic importance. Pakistan's need to have a friendly government in control of Kabul explains its pre–September 11 support for the Taliban. At the same time, Pakistan's archenemy, India, backed the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. When you throw into the mix factors such as ethnic kinship (like the Taliban and much of the rest of southern Afghanistan, many Pakistanis are Pashtuns) and Pakistan's tenuous domestic political situation (where support for Islamic fundamentalism purportedly is widespread), the government of Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf had many compelling reasons to distance itself from the United States.4 Washington was well positioned to overcome Pakistan's ambivalence about joining the coalition because the United States had a well-stocked bag of diplomatic and economic goodies into which it could reach to bestow rewards on Islamabad for Pakistani
cooperation. For one, the United States was able to tell Pakistan that it would lift the economic sanctions it had earlier imposed as punishment for Pakistan's nuclear weapons testing. The United States also has promised impoverished Pakistan some $600 million a year in foreign aid for the next two years, plus other economic and trade inducements.5 Moreover, although the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is not supposed to assist states for political reasons, it has done precisely that in Pakistan's case.6 The IMF's decision to reward Pakistan for joining the U.S.-led coalition is in itself another example of U.S. hegemonic power. In international institutions such as the IMF, U.S. power is preponderant, and the United States alone is able to use these institutions to advance its geopolitical interests. The downside of U.S. power also has been evident since September 11.
Given the horrific nature of the September 11 attacks, traditional U.S. security partners such as NATO (and especially Great Britain) rallied strongly to the U.S. side. In many ways, especially in the areas of intelligence cooperation and crackdowns on Europe-based terror cells, U.S. allies have made significant contributions to the war on terrorism. Yet, at the same time, NATO clearly has tried at the governmental level to constrain the exercise of U.S. power, as demonstrated by early admonitions for the United States to obtain United Nations (UN) authorization to use military force in Afghanistan; by pleas for the United States to limit its bombing of Afghanistan; and, perhaps most important, in warnings that Washington should not expand the geo- graphical scope of the war on terrorism, for example, by going after Iraq.7 At the level of public opinion, at least in the war's early stages, a significant number of Europeans opposed the U.S. campaign and openly expressed hostility toward U.S. hegemony itself.8 In Russia, before President Vladimir Putin decided to cast Moscow's lot
with Washington, the highest decisionmaking levels were apparently split on whether Russia should welcome or oppose a U.S. military presence in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. The dissenters on this point in Moscow were fearful that U.S. use of Central Asian bases to prosecute the war in Afghanistan would become the opening wedge to establishing a permanent U.S. presence in the region. In the Islamic world, fear and resentment of U.S. power was more pronounced. Even key U.S. client states such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt only circumspectly supported the U.S. military effort, and their own contributions to the war effort were minimal. Not unexpectedly, on the Arab and Islamic "street," hostility both to the war, especially U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, and to U.S. hegemony was widespread. (The volatile nature of public opinion mostly explains the tepid support for the United States extended by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and others in the region.) In essence, although the coalition held together through the campaign in Afghanistan, the war on terrorism evoked a spectrum of responses to U.S. power, ranging from unease (NATO) to real hostility (the Persian Gulf/Middle East region). Stepping Back to See the View Given the paradox of U.S. power, what should U.S. policymakers make of
perceptions of U.S. hegemony, and how should Washington respond to these perceptions? To answer these questions, one should step back from ongoing events and put the issue of U.S. hegemony in a broader erspective. Obviously, by transforming the international system from its post-1945 bipolarity to unipolarity, the Soviet Union's collapse elevated the United States to a historically unprecedented position of primacy in international politics. Although the Cold War's end did not trigger a "great debate" about U.S. grand strategy, it did elicit a discussion about grand strategy among foreign policy analysts and scholars of strategic studies.9 Contributors to this conversation have adopted U.S. post–Cold War hegemony as a common starting point. The questions they have asked concern whether the current unipolar distribution of power is stable and whether the United States should deliberately seek to maintain its preponderance in the international political system. Policymakers and scholars of strategic studies widely agree that power plays a central role in international politics. If power counts, then embracing the proposition that the United States should seek to amass as much power as it possibly can is not a great leap of faith. Consequently, the United States should do everything possible to maintain its current hegemony, which has been the goal of U.S. grand strategy for more than a decade. If the duchess of Windsor had been a U.S. strategist, she would have said that the United States could never be too rich, too well armed, or too powerful. Under the administrations of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, the overriding aim of U.S. grand strategy has been to ensure that the United States maintains its lofty geopolitical perch by preventing the rise of new great powers (or the resurgence of old ones, such as Russia) that could challenge the United States as king of the hill. (In Pentagon-speak, such powers are called "peer competitors.") In
other words, U.S. grand strategy has sought for the last decade the indefinite prolongation of what one commentator called the United States' "unipolar moment."10 Today, the United States apparently has firmly consolidated its global hegemony. Surely, no great power in the history of the modern international system (since approximately 1500) has ever been as dominant as the United States in global politics. Still, history suggests a note of caution is appropriate. The United States is merely the most recent great power to seek hegemony. When examining the fates of previous hegemonic contenders, a clear lesson emerges: aspiring to hegemony or even attaining it for a short period of time is different than maintaining it. Although at first the conclusion may appear counterintuitive, states that seek hegemony invariably end up being less, not more, secure. Being powerful is good in international politics, but being too powerful is not. The reasoning behind this axiom is straightforward as well as the geopolitical counterpart to the law of physics that holds that, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Simply put, the response to hegemony is the emergence of countervailing power. Because international politics is indeed a competitive, "self-help" system, when too much power is concentrated in the hands of one state, others invariably fear for their own security. Each state fears that a hegemon will use its overwhelming power to aggrandize itself at that state's expense and will act defensively to offset hegemonic power. Thus, one of hegemony's paradoxes is that it contains the seeds of its own destruction. This insight is not merely abstract academic theorizing but is confirmed by an ample historical record. Since the beginning of the modern international system, a succession of bids have been made for hegemony: the Habsburg Empire under Charles V, Spain under Philip II, France under Louis XIV as well as Napoleon, and Germany under Hitler (and, some historians would argue—al- though the point is contested—under Wilhelm II). None of these attempts to gain hegemony succeeded. Why did these hegemonic contenders fail? First, although not actually great powers, one or more states throughout most of international history have clearly been candidates for that status because of their latent power. The threat posed to their security by a rising hegemon
has served as the catalyst for these candidates to adopt the necessary policies to mobilize their resources and transform their latent power into actual great-power capabilities. Two prior "unipolar moments" in international history illustrate this point. When France under Louis XIV briefly attained hegemony in Europe, both England and Austria rose from candidate status to great-power status and used their newly acquired capabilities to end France's geopolitical preeminence. Similarly,England's mid-nineteenth-century global preponderance (the fabled Pax Britannica) spurred the United States, Germany, and Japan to emerge as great powers, largely to offset British supremacy. In each of these instances, for reasons of self-defense, states that were candidate great powers were impelled to come forward and emerge as full-fledged great powers in order to ensure that they would not fall victim to the reigning hegemon.11 Second, hegemons invariably are defeated because other states in the international system, frequently spearheaded by newly emerged great powers, form counterbalancing coalitions against them. Thus, the English and the Dutch defeated Philip II. Various coalitions anchored by Holland, the newly emerged great powers of England and Austria, and an established great power in Spain
undid Louis the XIV. A coalition composed of England, Russia, Austria, and Prussia rebuffed Napoleon's bid for hegemony. Instead of war, the enervating economic effects of trying to maintain primacy against the simultaneous challenges of the United States, Russia, France, and Germany undermined British hegemony in the nineteenth century. The wartime grand alliance of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union defeated Hitler. Commenting on this historical record, Henry Kissinger has rightly observed, "Hegemonic empires almost automatically elicit universal resistance, which is why all such claimants sooner or later exhausted themselves."12 A simple fact explains this pattern: left unbalanced, hegemonic power threatens the security of the other major states in the international system. In the first few decades of the twenty-first century, U.S. primacy will likely prompt the same response that previous hegemonic aspirants provoked: new great powers will emerge to offset U.S. power, and these new great powers will coalesce to check U.S. hegemonic ambitions. Is the United States Different? Nothing suggests that the United States will be exempt from the tendency of others to contest its global preeminence. Yet, in the latest twist on "American exceptionalism," U.S. strategists apparently do believe "it won't happen to us." They think that the United States is a qualitatively different type of hegemon: a "benevolent" hegemon whose "soft power" immunizes it against a backlash, that is, its liberal democratic ideology and culture make it attractive to others. U.S. policymakers also believe that others do not fear U.S. geopolitical preeminence because they believe that the United States will use its unprecedented power to promote the common good of the international system rather than to advance its own selfish aims. As then–national security adviser Sandy Berger put it: We are accused of dominating others, of seeing the world in zero-sum terms in which any other country's gain must be our loss. But that is an utterly mistaken view. It's not just because we are the first global power in history that is not an imperial power. It's because for 50 years we have consciously tried to define and pursue our interests in a way that is consistent with the common good—rising prosperity, expanding freedom, [and] collective security.13 U.S. strategists may believe that others view U.S. hegemony this way, but the "others" do not—a point clearly evident in the articles in "Through the Looking Glass." Well before September 11, indeed throughout most of the past decade, a strong undercurrent of unease on the part of other states about the imbalance of power in the United States' favor has existed. This simmering mistrust of U.S. power burst into the open during the final years of the Clinton administration.
Russia, China, India, and even European allies such as France and Germany feared that the United States was unilaterally seeking to maintain its global military dominance. As history would lead us to expect, others responded to U.S. hegemony by concerting their efforts against it. Russia and China, long estranged, found common ground in a nascent alliance that opposed U.S. "hegemonism" by seeking to reestablish a multipolar world. Similarly, U.S. European allies were openly expressing the view that something must be done geopolitically to rein in a too powerful United States. French president Jacques Chirac and his foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, gave voice to Europe's fears. Arguing that U.S. economic and military dominance is so formidable that the term "superpower" is inadequate to convey the true extent of U.S. preeminence, Védrine called the United States a "hyperpower" and added, "We cannot accept either a politically unipolar world, nor a culturally uniform world, nor the unilateralism of a single hyperpower. And that is why we are fighting for a multipolar, diversified, and multilateral world."14 Ironically, it was U.S. intervention in Kosovo that crystallized fears of U.S. hegemony. As a result, an incipient anti-U.S. alliance comprising China, Russia, and India began to emerge. Each of these countries viewed the U.S.-led intervention in Kosovo as a dangerous precedent establishing Washington's self-declared right to ignore the norm of international sovereignty and interfere in other states' internal affairs. The three states increased their military cooperation, especially with respect to arms transfers and the sharing of military technology, and, like the Europeans, declared their support for a "multipolar" world, that is, a world in which countervailing power offsets U.S. power. The Kosovo conflict—fought in part to validate NATO's post–Cold War credibility—had the perverse effect of dramatizing the dangerous disparity between U.S. and European geopolitical power. It prompted Europe to take its first serious steps to redress that power imbalance by acquiring through the European Defense and Security Policy (EDSP) the kinds of military capabilities it needs to act independently of the United States. If the European Union (EU) fulfills EDSP's longer-term goals, it will emerge as an independent strategic player in world politics. The clear objective of investing Europe with the capacity to brake U.S. hegemonic aspirations will have driven that emergence. If any doubt remained that U.S. hegemony would trigger a nasty geopolitical "blowback," it surely was erased on September 11. The Middle ast is an extraordinarily complex and volatile place in terms of its geopolitics, and the reaction there to U.S. hegemony is somewhat nuanced. Nothing, however, is subtle about the United States' hegemonic role in the Persian Gulf, a role that flows inexorably from the strategy of U.S. primacy. With the onset of the Persian Gulf War, the United States began to manage the region's security directly. The subsequent U.S. policy of "dual containment"—directed simultaneously against the region's two strategic heavyweights, Iran and Iraq—underscored the U.S. commitment to maintaining its security interests through a hegemonic strategy, rather than a strategy of relying on local power balances to prevent a hostile state from dominating the region or relying on other great powers to stabilize the Gulf and Middle East. The U.S. role in the Gulf has rendered it vulnerable to a hegemonic backlash on several levels. First, some important states in the region (including Iran and Iraq) aligned against the United States because they resented its intrusion into regional affairs. Second, in the Gulf and the Middle East, the self-perception among both elites and the general public that the region has long been a victim of "Western imperialism" is widespread. In this vein, the United States is viewed as just the latest extraregional power whose imperial aspirations weigh on the region, which brings a third factor into play. Because of its interest in oil, the United States is supporting regimes—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Gulf emirates—whose domestic political legitimacy is contested. Whatever strategic considerations dictate that Washington prop up these regimes, that it does so makes the United States a lightning rod for those within these countries who are politically disaffected. Moreover, these regimes are not blind to the domestic challenges to their grip on power. Because they are concerned about inflaming public opinion (the much talked about "street"), both their loyalty and utility as U.S. allies are, to put it charitably, suspect. Finally, although U.S. hegemony is manifested primarily in its overwhelming economic and military muscle, the cultural dimension to U.S. preeminence is also important. The events of September 11 have brought into sharp focus the enormous cultural clash, which inescapably has overtones of a "clash of civilizations," between Islamic fundamentalism and U.S. liberal ideology.
The terrorism of Osama bin Laden results in part from this cultural chasm, as well as from more traditional geopolitical grievances. In a real sense, bin Laden's brand of terrorism—the most dramatic illustration of U.S.
vulnerability to the kind of "asymmetric warfare" of which some defense experts have warned—is the counterhegemonic balancing of the very weak.For all of these reasons, the hegemonic role that the strategy of preponderance assigns to the United States as the Gulf's stabilizer was bound to provoke a multilayered backlash against U.S. predominance in the region. Indeed, as Richard K. Betts, an acknowledged expert on strategy, presciently observed several years ago, "It is hardly likely that Middle Eastern radicals would be hatching schemes like the destruction of the World Trade Center if the United States had not been identified so long as the mainstay of Israel, the shah of Iran, and conservative Arab regimes and the source of a cultural assault on Islam."15 (Betts was referring to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.) In the wake of U.S. diplomatic and battlefield success in the first phase of the war on terrorism, some doubtless will conclude that victory has erased the paradox of U.S. power. The United States, after all, stands at the zenith of its hegemonic power—militarily, diplomatically, economically, and culturally. When even potential rivals such as China and Russia have been folded into the U.S.-led coalition against terrorism, concluding that U.S. primacy is secure for a long, long time is tempting indeed. The outlook for U.S. primacy, however, may not be quite so rosy. Appearances can be deceiving, and the paradox of U.S. power remains. Looking into the Crystal Ball In the short term, if the United States expands the war on terrorism, especially by confronting Iraq and Saddam Hussein, fears of U.S. hegemony will resurface quickly. If the United States moves against Iraq, the fracture of its current coalition is a near certainty, with both NATO and Middle Eastern clients refusing to support the United States. In the longer term, even if the coalition holds together for a time (assuming that Washington foregoes attempting to oust Hussein), believing that the wartime coalition represents a permanent accommodation by others to U.S. hegemony would be unwise. To think otherwise is to misunderstand the nature of international politics. The articles in "Through the Looking Glass" are a very good predictor of expected events, both in the war on terrorism and beyond. Other states remain profoundly uneasy about U.S. primacy and, to rein in the United States, will step up calls for Washington to act multilaterally rather than unilaterally. The reasoning is simple: they want to constrain U.S. power by pressuring the United States to refrain from taking actions that the coalition, formal alliances such as NATO, and international institutions such as the UN do not sanction. Their desire to bind U.S. power in a web of multilateral restraints is understandable, but the United States must retain its capacity for acting unilaterally in defense of its national interests. At the same time, to avoid triggering counterhegemonic blowback, the United States must act with self-restraint. Considering whether the United States should act unilaterally r multilaterally involves a false dichotomy. In international politics, great powers always put their self-interest first; they must. International politics is an especially competitive realm, as Realist scholars of international politics have argued since the time of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian Wars. In the jargon of international relations scholars, international politics is an "anarchic" system because no central authority makes and enforces laws and maintains order. Consequently, international politics is also a self-help system in which each actor must rely primarily on its own efforts to ensure its survival and security and in which each can employ the means of its choice, including force, to advance its interests. "States operating in a self-help world almost always act according to their own self-interest and do not subordinate their interests to the interests of other states, or to the interests of the so-called international community. The reason is simple: it pays to be selfish in a self-help world."16 The nature of international politics impels great powers to think of themselves first; their natural inclination is to act unilaterally. Whether confronting Iraq or building a national missile defense, the United States should never subject policies that affect U.S. inter ests to multilateral processes that require others to acquiesce before Washington can act. Unilateralism, the default strategy of great powers, does not mean that they should never cooperate or ally with other states. In alliances, however, a great power must never lose sight of some fundamental tenets of international politics. States that form alliances and coalitions typically have one common interest and many conflicting ones. The interest that binds together allies or coalition partners is the threat that a common adversary poses to the security of all. To defeat that threat, the other, divisive issues among alliance or coalition partners may be forced into the background, but they do not vanish. Even in wartime, coalition partners jockey to gain advantage in the postwar world. Occasionally, coalitions fissure during wartime because reconciliation of the partners' competing interests proves impossible. In any event, once the threat had been disposed, the glue binding an alliance or coalition surely dissolves, and the partners go their separate ways—the inevitable outcome in a self-help system. In concrete terms today, Western Europe, China, Russia, and Japan are aligned with the United States to deal with the common threat of terrorism. Because the coalition partners have differing interests, the coalition may fragment if the United States acts unilaterally to expand the
war on terrorism. Even if the coalition should hold together until the war on terrorism is terminated, the conflicting geopolitical interests that divide the United States and its partners will then surely resurface because coalitions and alliances are never more than marriages of convenience. Western Europe again will seek to counterbalance U.S. "hyperpower." The Europeans, Russia, and China will oppose U.S. missile defense deployment. Russia will be suspicious of NATO expansion into the Baltic States and the projection of U.S. power into Central Asia. China will continue to pursue its great-power emergence and will contest the United States for supremacy in East Asia. The war on terrorism, in other words, is merely an interlude in international politics, not the harbinger of everlasting global harmony based on acceptance of U.S. primacy. Although U.S. policymakers have convinced themselves that the United States is a benign hegemon, no such animal exists in international politics. A hegemon is a threat to the security of others simply because it is so powerful. The United States is not immune to the kind of geopolitical blowback experienced by previous hegemonic aspirants. Thus, in a self-help world the United States must perform the strategic equivalent of threading a needle. It cannot abrogate its freedom to act unilaterally to defend its interests, but Washington needs simultaneously to find a grand strategy that reduces fears of U.S. preponderant power, thereby reducing incentives to engage in counterhegemonic balancing directed at the United States. A good starting point is the war on terrorism itself. Having overthrown the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and rooted out Al Qaeda terrorists based there, sentiment is strong in the Bush administration, Congress, and the foreign policy establishment for settling the Gulf War's unfinished business by toppling Hussein. Opponents of this policy advance military and diplomatic arguments for caution. The military argument is easily dismissed. Given enormous U.S. military superiority, a war against Iraq would be a cakewalk for the United States. The diplomatic argument—that the antiterror coalition would fragment—
is somewhat more serious. Undoubtedly, if the United States launches a fullscale war against Iraq, most, if not all, U.S. Middle Eastern clients would defect from the coalition. Although the alliance's collapse would cause
practical military-logistic reasons for concern (to replay the Gulf War, the United States would need ports of entry and staging bases contiguous to Iraq), the abstract goal of preserving the coalition for its own sake should
not prevent the United States from confronting Iraq. After all, coalitions and alliances are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. Another diplomatic concern is the possibility of an anti-U.S. backlash in the Islamic
world. This worry cannot be dismissed so easily, even though in both the Gulf War and, at least to this point, in the war on terrorism, fears of massive Islamic opposition to U.S. policy have not materialized. Still, the possibility of a strong reaction against the United States must be taken into account. Those who advocate a hard-line policy toward Iraq seldom consider one other concern. What would happen to Iraq once Hussein was removed from power? A post-Hussein Iraq is not going to be a liberal, Western-style democracy. That a successor regime ultimately would prove more pliable than the current one is not guaranteed. If Hussein were femoved, however, the possibility always exists that Iraq would fragment, an outcome that could further destabilize the region. Certainly, the United States does not want to end up "owning" Iraq and being saddled with the difficult and probably dangerous job of imposing a new government there.17 Avoiding a full-scale war against Iraq does not mean that Washington should stand aside and allow Hussein to develop weapons of mass destruction and support terrorists. Instead of using a sledgehammer approach, the United States could use a focused, finely calibrated strategy to remove Iraqi threats to U.S. security. Washington's goal should be to remove the sources of threat. It does not have to force a regime change, which would open a geopolitical Pandora's box, to achieve that goal. As U.S. experiences in Kosovo and Afghanistan have demonstrated, if the United States has good intelligence about where key targets are located, those targets can be destroyed in precision air and missile strikes. Moreover, by developing a full range of intelligence and covert operational capabilities, the United States can sabotage Iraq's (or any other hostile state's) weapons of mass destruction program by interdicting the inflow of key components and materials, destroying plants and research facilities, and eliminating the scientists and engineers without whose expertise such weapons could not be developed. Dealing with the Iraqi problem in this manner would be a much better strategy for the United States because, by reducing its geopolitical footprint in the Middle East, Washington would reduce substantially the dangers that U.S. policy could trigger an antihegemonic backlash. Changing U.S. Grand Strategy to Reflect the Times In the longer term, regardless of future developments in the war on terrorism, the paradox of U.S. power will not disappear. Looking beyond the war, the big question confronting U.S. strategists in coming years is how to reduce
the risks of U.S. hegemony. To lower the risk, the United States must change its grand strategy. One grand strategic alternative to primacy is offshore balancing.18 Like primacy, offshore balancing is a strategy firmly rooted in the Realist tradition. Primacy adherents regard multipolarity—an international system comprised of three or more great powers—as a strategic threat to the United States, while offshore balancers see it as a strategic opportunity for the United States. Offshore balancing is predicated on the assumption that attempting to maintain U.S. hegemony is self-defeating because it will provoke other states to combine in opposition to the United States and result in the futile depletion of the United States' relative power, thereby leaving it worse off than if it accommodated multipolarity. Offshore balancing accepts that the United States cannot prevent the rise of new great powers either within (the EU, Germany, and Japan) or outside (China, a resurgent Russia) its sphere of influence. Offshore balancing would also relieve the United States of its burden of managing the security affairs of turbulent regions such as the Persian Gulf/Middle East and Southeast Europe. Offshore balancing is a grand strategy based on burden shifting, not burden sharing. It would transfer to others the task of maintaining r regional power bal ances; checking the rise of potential global and regional hegemons; and stabilizing Europe, East Asia, and the Persian Gulf/Middle East. In other words, other states would have to become responsible for providing their own security and for the security of the regions in which they live (and contiguous ones), rather than looking to the United States to do it for them. The events of September 11 make offshore balancing an attractive grand strategic alternative to primacy for two reasons. First, looking beyond the war on terrorism, the Persian Gulf/Middle East region is clearly, endemically unstable. If the United States attempts to perpetuate its hegemonic role in the region after having accomplished its immediate war aims, the probability of a serious geopolitical backlash within the region against the United States is high. Second, because the U.S. victory in the war on terrorism will underscore U.S. predominance in international politics, victory's paradoxical effect will be to heighten European, Russian, and Chinese fears of U.S. power. By adopting an offshore balancing strategy once the war on terrorism ends, the United States would benefit in two ways. First, others have much greater intrinsic strategic interests in the region than does the United States. For example, Western Europe, Japan, and, increasingly,China are far more dependent on the region's oil than the United States. Because they live next door, Russia, China, Iran, and India have a much greater long-term security interest in regional stability in the persian Gulf/Middle East than the United States. By passing the mantle of regional stabilizer to these great and regional powers, the United States could extricate itself from the messy and dangerous geopolitics of the Persian Gulf/ Middle East and take itself out of radical Islam's line of fire. Second, although a competitive component to U.S. relations with the other great powers in a multipolar world would be inescapable, multipolar politics have historically engendered periods of great-power cooperation. On the cooperative side, an offshore balancing strategy would be coupled with a policy of spheres of influence, which have always been an important item in the toolbox of great-power policymakers. By recognizing each other's paramount interests in certain regions, great powers can avoid the kinds of misunderstandings that could trigger conflict. Moreover, the mere act of signaling that one country understands another's larger security stake in a particular region, a stake that it will respect by noninterference, allows states to communicate a nonthreatening posture to one another. By recognizing the legitimacy of other interests, a great power also signals that it accepts them as equals. An offshore balancing strategy would immunize the United States against a post–war-onterrorism backlash against U.S. hegemony in one other way. By accepting the emergence of new great powers and simultaneously pulling back from its primacy- driven military posture, the United States would reduce perception of a "U.S. threat," thereby lowering the chances that others will view it as an overpowerful hegemon. In this sense, offshore balancing is a strategy of restraint that would allow the United States to minimize the risks of open confrontation with the new great powers. Being Panglossian about the reemergence of multipolarity in international politics would be silly. Multipolarity is not the best outcome imaginable. The best outcome would be a world in which every other state willingly accepted U.S. hegemony—an outcome about which some may dream, but one that will never be realized in the real world. That outcome, however, is much better than the predictable outcome if the United States continues to follow a grand strategy of primacy. The outcome of that strategy will be really bad: not only will new great powers rise, they will also coalesce against what they perceive to be a U.S. threat.Notwithstanding the events of September 11, U.S. hegemony is the salient fact that defines the U.S. role in international politics. The articles in "Through the Looking Glass" reflect a deep mistrust of U.S.
power that the temporary convergence of interests brought about by the war on terrorism will not wash away. Indeed, the reverse is true. In attaining victory in the war's opening round, the United States underlined its dominant role in the international system, and talk of a "new U.S. empire" echoes inside the beltway. Underscoring the paradox of U.S. power is the paradox of victory. Flushed with triumph and the awesome display of U.S. might, U.S. policymakers may succumb to hubris and overreach strategically in the false belief that U.S. hegemony is an unchallengeable fact of international life.Other states, however, will draw the opposite conclusion: that the United States is too powerful and that its hegemony must be resisted. Now, more than ever, having a great debate about future U.S. grand strategy is imperative. As that debate unfolds, offshore balancing will become the obvious successor strategy to primacy because it is a grand strategic escape hatch by which the United States can avoid the fate that has befallen previous hegemons in modern international history.

 

[ajtr]

If one look into the great game and then all the pictures become clear.Patition of india was just one part of the great game.Another picture being that of how usa and NATO has been popping up pakistan against india for past 6 decades just to keep south asia unbalanced so no major power emerge in IOR thus completing the usa triad of hegemony in the IOR region and acquisition Diego Garcia by usa was to implement the 2nd part of the great game..People will be surprised to know that however imbecile fools indian leaders and bureaucrats look like but they have been always good/silent players of great game.They have been thwarting usa plans in south asia for long.

 

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WHITHER INDIA'S FOREIGN POLICY? S L Rao​

The Past
1. Non-alignment in practice must have three aspects: political, economic and military. India appeared politically and militarily non-aligned but was certainly not economically so. Evidence:
a) The Bandung Conference in 1955 said "colonialism in all of its manifestations was condemned". The 10 point "declaration at the end of the conference on promotion of world peace and cooperation" led to the Non Aligned Movement in 1961. . It underlined the need for developing countries to loosen economic dependence on leading industrialized nations.
b) Between 1955 and 1971 India received food grains from the USA of 50 million tones, and was the largest recipient.
c) Economic aid to India from 1951 to 2006 according to US estimates was $14 billion (at current prices $ 57 billion).
d) India was economically aligned on economic policy, having tried to imitate the Soviet model of a command and control economy, aiming at distributive justice, with a private sector and a "mixed economy".
e) In 1961 when China invaded India, we sought American military aid.
2. Non-alignment helped to keep us out of the Cold War, get support from each Power for food and economic aid for development, and military aid and support. It balanced one Power against the other. It enabled India to put on an air of moral superiority; preaching to the world. Goa in 1960 punctured this; so did earlier unremarked invasions of Hyderabad, & take over of Junagadh. The J & K accession raised doubts about our non-violent and non-imperialist credentials.
3. The August 1971 Treaty with the Soviet Union was about military assistance and kept the U.S. from intervening directly in East Pakistan. But our tilt towards the Soviet Union was much older; we did not protest the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Thus the alignment with the Soviets was military as well as political.
4. Three events changed the basic approach to foreign policy, with the BJP in government active in the last two:
a) the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War,
b) the opening of the Indian economy in 1991 and
c) the nuclear explosions of 1998. The sanctions that followed the nuclear explosions did not adversely affect India because liberalization was making the economy robust and resilient. It led to the Strobe Talbot dialogues and beginning of rapprochements with USA.
5. New Context: Mercenary approach of Russia-witness, price of Sukhov aircraft and Gorshkov being raised after agreement.;
China as power in Asia;
Continuing volatility in MiddleEast and threat to out energy supplies,
Gas and Oil finds in India;
Pakistan-Afghanistan as unstable countries on our borders
The CPM Stand
In an article in "People's Democracy" Prakash Karat objects to India's policies leading to deepening collaboration with Israel, diminishing support to the Palestine cause and friendship with Arab countries, and increasing military exercises with the U.S., Japan and Australia, and vote against Iran at the IAEA. Underlying this is the opposition to India positioning itself as a counterforce to China in this region.
The Present
1. India's goals in the foreseeable future must be economic growth with equity, in a secure environment.
2. Non-alignment under any name is still valid if it encompasses a bloc of with common conerns; witness Doha round of WTO negotiations.
Future blocs will be about trade and investment and security cooperation-Brazil, South Africa, India, Russia (?), ASEAN, Japan and S Korea among rich countries
ISSUES of TODAY:
The issues of today are not what they were in the past years:.
a. ISLAM: regarded by some as above national loyalties & the rise of global Islamic terrorism
"¢ Home grown terror;
"¢ Need for communal harmony and even treatment (for example, trials of Muslim versus Hindu terrorists)
"¢ Equitable Development-Sachar committee
"¢ Need to involve ourselves in resolution of Palestine issue
"¢ Good ties with Islamic countries; make South Asia more stable-use trade; hence closeness to Pakistan, Bangladesh;
"¢ Be wary of Islamic fundamentalism and Islam placing religion about nation.
b) ECONOMIC GROWTH: with resources for improving social and economic conditions for the poorest and lowest in society
"¢ Requires Peace; USA is te most powerful military power that can help to keep peace in the world, despite the aberration of Iraq..
"¢ Markets-USA is the dominant market.
"¢ Investment inflows
"¢ Energy supplies; India is very import dependent.
"¢ Technology sanctions must be removed since they affect many industries
c) ENERGY SECURITY Related also to climate change issues; nuclear fuel and technology, other clean technologies; research for improving coal efficiencies; clean energy; crude supplies (Middle East, Iran, Russia, Central Asia) and prices; safe sea lanes- JACIK
"¢ Pakistan stability essential for land based pipeline-Iran, Central Asia
"¢ Sea Lanes-Iran as guard
"¢ Indian investment in overseas petroleum assets
"¢ Nuclear cooperation for uranium supplies and plant
"¢ Nuclear energy useful in a marginal way; will not meet demand, maximum of20% of capacity in 30 years
"¢ Must become more efficient in generation and use, rationalize prices and subsidies, exploit domestic reserves and resources (hydro, wind), R & D
"¢ JICK buyer cartel; encourage Japanese investment and China trade
d) INDIAN GAS
"¢ Why are we so fixated on importing Iran, Burma, Bangladesh, Tazhikistan gas?
"¢ Domestic pricing issues with power and fertilizer being capped prices
"¢ Our Gas finds enables more flexibility
e) TRADE- FTA's in Asia and South Asia; Asian Economic Community; BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) WTO
"¢ WTO: Rich vs Poor-agriculture subsidies; free movement of labour; recognition of professional qualifications
"¢ FTA's with Sri Lanka, Nepal, starting in Bangladesh
"¢ Tighter border control on Bdesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka
"¢ New relations with Brazil, Russia in trade
"¢ China as largest trading partner and security implications
"¢ Energy-Asian Economic /Energy Community; JACIK
"¢ Indian Ocean initiatives-e.g., BIMSTEC
"¢ USA-trade and investment especially nuclear and arms
f) FOREX -decline of dollar and diversification into other currencies-Euro and Yen
"¢ Growing reserves but largely on FII and NRI-not FDI
"¢ M & AS activity as Indian firms globalize
"¢ Need to add value to IT and other exports
"¢ Thrust to manufacturing
"¢ Scope in Agriculture
"¢ Mangers now moving across borders both ways
g) TILT TO USA. Russia no longer as reliable as in past, witness recent price and delivery hitches on aircraft carrier and deliver of fighter planes
"¢ Big imports-nuclear energy, defence, civil aviation
"¢ USA might really, for foreign policy reasons, (as balance to China), want to encourage us as nuclear power. Bombs and Not Energy the main focus of 123 agreement. Nuclear Energy will take decades to make difference to our Energy Balance. But Bombs are more imminent.
"¢ Nuclear business might go more to France; Defence may not go mainly to untrustworthy USA; civil aviation might split to Airbus
"¢ American desire for India to balance China in region
"¢ Yet Russia not as reliable a defence supplier as earlier
"¢ Indian skilled labour imports to the USA
"¢ American FDI & FII
"¢ Rising Rupee will make help US exports
"¢ Indian cooperation with USA unlikely on IRAN: BUT Islam has Islamic fundamentalists in power. We cannot be intimate with Iran while we may not want to be subservient to US interests and policies. consequences?

4. Is the nuclear agreement with the USA and other members of the nuclear club including China and Russia, a sell-out to the USA?
a) USA wants India support on Iran, in Middle East and to sell to India;
b) USA sees 2001 as the year of India and China; needs our markets, skills, products and services.
c) Nuclear power will not be significant for India for 30 years. Meanwhile our research and development must not stop. The agreement does not stop it.
d) We need uranium supplies. Testing is not an immediate issue. Hyde Act is an internal American matter. Sending back equipment in use and uranium not a simple or easy matter.
e) Perhaps the real significance of the agreement is the recognition of India as a nuclear power and the overt support to increasing our nuclear arsenal.
f) Taking back equipment in use and uranium: logistical problems in removing and transporting contaminated stuff.
g) Russia has become unreliable on time and cost of defence materials; need for other suppliers.
h) Regional security is seen to depend on India. ASEAN wants closeness with India; Japan sees India as alternative investment channel because of China hostility
i) China possibly more interested in keeping itself together by sustaining high growth; will use periodic belligerence to keep India in line.
(j) India lobby in USA very strong and can help;

 

[ajtr]

In the period preceding the runup to partition, Wavell was the viceroy. Along with Caroe, he and Penderal Moon were the three very important personalities formulating policies for India. Mountbatten was a mere hatchet man, he came in just to gett he British out of India while keeping India and Pakistan in the commonwealth. This he do so flawlessly.

About Penderal Moon:

Penderel Moon was a brilliant Oxford scholar and Fellow of All Souls who joined the Punjab cadre of the Indian Civil Service in the late 1920s. He did his job efficiently, while also cultivating friendships with many Indians. Among them was the great Punjabi nationlist Rajkumari Amrit Kaur. In 1942, Amrit Kaur was put in jail owing to the Quit India movement. Moon, however, continued to write letters to her. When his superiors chastised him, he answered that he had never let personal friendships come in the way of official duties, and vice-versa. If a friend broke the law he would put her in jail, but continue to speak to her afterwards.

The explanation was not accepted, so Moon resigned from the I.C.S.. But India stayed in his blood. After the end of the Second World War, he advised Lord Wavell on how best to hasten the end of the British Raj. After Independence, he held several high offices under the Government of India. He served as Chief Commissioner of both Manipur and Himachal Pradesh, and as an Adviser to the Planning Commission. It was only in 1961 that he finally returned to England, where he divided his time between All Souls and a home in the country.

Moon was deeply knowledgable about India. And he was a scholar, the author of fine books about Warren Hastings and Mahatma Gandhi, and of an authoritative history of the rise and fall of the Raj. (He was also Associate Editor of the landmark Transfer of Power volumes.) He, and possibly he alone, had the wisdom, experience, and understanding to write that remarkable essay in the Economic Weekly of 1958. It would still be nice to think that the author was Nehru, but were I a betting man, my money would be on Penderel Moon.

http://www.hindu.com/mag/2005/04/24/stories/2005042400270300.htm

I read his book "Divide and Quit" a while ago.

This was the opinion in British circles about China, when compared with India.

SOME time ago I asked Caroe's `Brains Trust' to produce a comparison between India and China as future Great Powers, e.g. in material resources, man power, political stability, organisation. They produced an interesting paper which I read today. The general conclusion was that there was not much in it, but that China was tougher and had been through the fire both of internal revolution and of external invasion, while India had not and was softer." Lord Wavell, the Viceroy, wrote this comment in his Journal on September 18, 1944, when India was under British rule and the Second World War had not ended. (Wavell: The Viceroy's Journal edited by Penderel Moon; page 90).

Breaking India into manageable states may have been Wavell or Moon's idea (using Jinnah as a stalking horse) but all they got was partition. It will interesting to find out what Moon was upto when he served in independent India.

Added later:

Major Short who was subsequently invited to India to pacify the Sikhs also told Lord Mountbatten that Sikhs were not happy with the Partition Plan. Consequently, Lord Mountbatten arranged meetings between Sikh leaders and Muslim League leaders so that they should come to some understanding on the demands of Sikhs who wanted creation of Sikh State. Jinnah was not prepared to give anything in writing. He wanted the Sikhs to withdraw the demand of Partition of Punjab and accept Pakistan, then he would create Sikh State within Pakistan. Meantime Penderal Moon, brought out a scheme by which East Punjab was to be made a Sikh Province and it should be given the option to join India or Pakistan.

Moon wanted the state to go to Pakistan. Note that he was ICS officer of Punjab cadre. Ref: sikhstudies.org

**comments courtesy paul...

 

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How America dislodged Britain from Pakistan​

How America dislodged Britain from Pakistan the title is misleading! it should be "How to extricate the brits from getting the blame for partition of India

Anita Inder Singh

Archival material shows that by early 1951, the Americans were for an understanding with Pakistan. The British could not rebuff the Americans, but they thought Middle East defence should hinge on Egypt, not Pakistan.

THE IDEA of the United States replacing Britain as a world power is familiar. Why and how the U.S. stepped into Britain's place in South Asia in 1954 has been revealed from British and American archival sources since the 1970s. The evidence dispels two common Indian assumptions: first, that the British created Pakistan in 1947 to shore up their military position in the "Islamic" Middle East and the Indian subcontinent; and secondly, that the British influenced the Americans into giving military aid to Pakistan in 1954.

Both assumptions are wrong. Indian and Pakistani archives on the subject are not open to the public. Evidence from a range of British archives after 1940, including files of the British Cabinet, Viceroys, chiefs of staff, military intelligence, and war staff has shown that British officials debated the pros and cons of Pakistan after the Muslim League demanded it in March 1940. But the British preference was always for a transfer of power to a united India, which they could continue to use as the base for imperial defence. Pakistan would only be accepted as a last resort if the British could not persuade the League against it. In that event, they would consider a military alliance with Pakistan, but the general feeling among British officials was that Pakistan would divide the Indian army and destroy the foundations of imperial security.

Despite the creation of Pakistan, in August 1947 the British chiefs of staff hoped for early talks with independent India on its participation in imperial defence. Indian non-alignment ruled that out. But British officials remained against defence ties with Pakistan. They continually turned down pleas by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Liaquat Ali Khan, and Ayub Khan for military largesse on the grounds that it would offend India without securing any great advantages in the Middle East. They perceived Pakistan as a South Asian power having little influence in the Middle East.

There is no evidence that Olaf Caroe, or any other British official, influenced the U.S. State Department to give military aid to Pakistan. The Indian idea of a British conspiracy to weaken India probably stemmed from London's public endorsement of the American decision to give military assistance to Pakistan. In doing so, London was simply accepting the inevitable — nothing less, nothing more.

Differences over Pakistan


The British and Americans had very different ideas about the role of South Asia — and Pakistan — in Middle East Defence. In the 1950s, Britain's Middle Eastern policy focussed on Egypt. For London, the Middle East comprised Egypt, Iran, Palestine, Iraq, and Jordan. Material on India and Pakistan is listed under the South Asian and Far Eastern departments of the Foreign Office. In contrast, Pakistan is listed in American records under several headings: South Asia, Near and Middle East, Middle East Defence, and Mutual Security.

The one point on which British and American officials concurred was that there was no Soviet military threat to South Asia after 1945. The subcontinent was therefore not a major theatre of the Cold War. This was one reason why the British were unresponsive to Pakistan requests for a military alliance after 1947. They thought India and Pakistan should contribute jointly to imperial defence. They did not revise their strategic planning immediately after Partition, and so clung on to their traditional image of the subcontinent as a single strategic entity. And India was for them the coveted, if elusive, military prize.

Like the British, the Americans turned down Pakistani requests for military aid between 1947 and 1951. They did not rate Pakistan highly as a potential ally and were happy to have the British as their surrogate in South Asia. The Communist takeover of China in 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 aroused American interest in Pakistan. These events prompted a reappraisal of the American reliance on the British in South Asia and the Middle East.

On September 18, 1950, George McGhee, then Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern, South Asian, and African Affairs, told British officials that the U.S. had no confidence in Egypt; and, "looking elsewhere for leadership, we were bound to think of Pakistan, which was the most progressive of Moslem countries and was in a good position to point out the inconsistency of backward economic and social conditions with Moslem principles." By January 1951, the State Department was seeing British influence declining in the Middle East but no American security pacts with countries there or in South Asia were then envisaged.

McGhee wanted a military alliance without too much American involvement, but there were few signs of local allies. Only two countries offered the U.S. an opening to the Middle East — Pakistan, which had proclaimed its keenness to join forces with the West, and Turkey, which was already a member of NATO.

Following the assassination of the Iranian Prime Minister, General Razmara Ali, and the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in March-April 1951, the Americans thought of distancing their concerns from those of the reactionary British; "partnership" would serve American interests better than imperial domination.

A U.S. search for allies was now on. On February 26, 1951, McGhee proposed that the Americans consider on "an urgent basis" the desirability of an understanding with Pakistan, which would provide for American training and equipment for its armed forces. On April 3, he told British officials that it was "vital" to have Pakistan in Middle East Defence. The British could not rebuff the Americans, but they thought that Middle East defence should hinge on Egypt, not Pakistan. But on May 2, 1951, McGhee told the U.S. Chiefs that the Middle East could not be defended without Pakistan. The Policy Planning Staff of the State Department suggested in a working paper on May 23, 1951 that Pakistan, Arab countries, Israel, and Iran should be invited to join a Middle East Command.

Going ahead without Britain



Events in the Middle East heightened American discomfiture with the British. In October 1951, Egypt's refusal to join the Middle East Defence Organisation enhanced American interest in Pakistan's inclusion in Middle East defence. Anti-British demonstrations in Cairo in January 1952 only increased Washington's impatience with London. By September 1953, when General Ayub Khan, Pakistani C-in-C, visited Washington with yet another request for military largesse, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told him that "he hoped General Ayub would get what he came for." He was ready to arrange a meeting between Ayub and President Eisenhower in mid-October.

On October 9, 1953, the British were told that the Americans had decided to give military aid to Pakistan. London was stunned. Washington had not consulted them: it had presented London with a fait accompli.

On December 7, Dulles told Prime Minister Anthony Eden at Bermuda that the U.S. was undecided on the form of aid to be given to Pakistan. He did not tell Eden that the Americans were already working on the procedures to be followed to establish a Turco-Pakistani pact. On December 29, 1953, the British embassy in Washington was informed that the U.S. had decided in principle to give military aid to Pakistan within the framework of a Turco-Pakistani alliance. Once more the British were taken by surprise. "This is rather startling," minuted Eden on the telegram from Roger Makin, then British ambassador in Washington. "[W]hat do we think?"

Even as the British thought of objections to the Turco-Pakistani pact, the Americans went full steam ahead. On January 5, 1954, Eisenhower agreed in principle to military aid to Pakistan. And on February 18, he gave formal approval to the State Department's plan.

British indignation at being kept in the dark by the United States was not lessened by their feeling that the Americans were out to replace them as the primary power in the Middle East and South Asia. But they could do little about it.

And so began the process by which Pakistan moved into the ambit of U.S. influence. American plans to give military aid to Pakistan went against British interests. London did not influence Washington at any time on the issue. In February 1954, Washington's decision to give largesse to Pakistan reflected Anglo-American differences over Middle East defence. At the same time, it symbolised America's success in supplanting Britain as the primary foreign influence in Pakistan.

That influence has prevailed into the 21st century. In October 2001, the U.S.' war against the Taliban was launched from Pakistani military bases, and established the U.S. as the dominant South Asian power. That is one of the long-term consequences of America's decision to enter into a military alliance with Pakistan in 1954.

(Dr. Singh is Ford Foundation Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and author of a book, The Limits of British Influence: South Asia and the Anglo-American Relationship 1947-56.)

 

[ajtr]

The following is based on a reading of two books: "War & Diplomacy in Kashmir" by Dasgupta and "the US & Pakistan" by Dennis Kux.

Cawthorne was tasked by Liaquat Ali to ask for British help in 1948. At that point of time, the fear among the Pakistani Army commanders (generally the Brits) was that if India would push from Poonch to Kotli and then Mirpur, they would control the Mangla headworks on Jhelum and also quite close to Rawalpindi. Alarmed by this appreciation, Liaquat Ali Khan dispatched Major General Cawthorn to meet British Home Office and possibly Attlee for help. Obviously, Cawthorn should have enjoyed the immense confidence of the Prime Minister to be entrusted with such a sensitive task. He was Dy. Chief of the Pakistani Army at that time.

Another character that we should certainly discuss is Noel-Baker Philip, who was at that time Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations (and head of CRO, Commonwealth Relations Office). He played a huge role patently detrimental to India and far too advantageous to Pakistan. He strongly criticized India for accepting Kashmir's accession. He criticized India for sending Sikh soldiers into Kashmir. Overall, he was rabidly anti-Indian. Having had been Secretary for Air Force, he was aware of the plans of the military for bases in Pakistan etc. He advised Mountbatten to link the the withdrawal of the tribesmen with a solution for Kashmir in his meeting with the Pakistanis at Lahore in Nov. 1947.

Anyhow, it was this character Noel Baker that Cawthorn met in London. Cawthorn spoke of the fears of Pakistan regarding the spreading of communism and the help it needed to defend itself. Noel-Baker welcomed the Pakistani appreciation of the world situation and arranged for a meeting with Attlee. Atlee welcomed the suggestion to help Pakistan and it was endorsed by all the UK service chiefs. Cawthorn was informed that a proposal from Pakistan was welcome. Cawthorn returned to Pakistan and informed a delighted Liaqat accordingly. Liaqat had extensive and secret talks with Noel-Baker and Attlee the very next month in London and several things were decided. One was that the Kashmir question would be taken to the UN and the UK would not tolerate any Indian offensive against West Punjab. Pakistan was therefore able to re-deploy the forces used to defend W. Punjab in Kashmir.

In Dec. 1948, the defence proposals were more or less formalized between Pakistan and the UK, except for two sticky points. One was that Pakistan did not want the UK to have a similar deal with India and the second was that the deal should cover regional-conflicts also apart from global ones. The Brits said that initially the deal was exclusively between the UK and Pakistan alone and that they could not get involved in regional conflicts especially between Commonwealth countries. To assuage the bitterness caused by the second point, they decided to allow a disproportionately large influx of arms into Pakistan under the guise of the defence deal that would help the Pakistanis take care of India. The only country that could sustain such large military supplies was the USA and the Brits arranged for the same.

This is further borne out by the turnaround in the US approach to supplying Pakistan with military hardware. In Sep. 1947, Jinnah had warned that Russia wa sbehind Afghanistan's call for Pashtunistan and Pakistan was too strategically important for such a division. He dispatched immediately his special emissary to Washington for a USD 2 Billion loan for meeting both defence and economic needs. The US turned it down and offered USD 10 M instead. However, things began to change soon. Immediately after Liaqat's meeting with Attlee and Noel-Baker in London and the successful conclusion of secret talks (upon Cawthorn's initiative), Liaqat met US Secretary of State Marshall and brought up the issue of communism and how the US could help Pakistan defend itself. Marshall always let the British decide the US foreign policy on India and Pakistan. From then on, the US-British-Pakistani nexus grew enormously.

** courtesy ssridhar

 

[ajtr]

A Turkish theater for World War III*​

By Chan Akya

Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf is on record stating his ambitions to make his country a modern and secular state modeled on the Turkish republic under Kemal Ataturk. Ironically, even as that goal appears mind bogglingly unachievable for Pakistan, recent events will conspire to push Turkey in the direction of Pakistan; into becoming a breeding ground for a new class of Islamic militants. The transition of Turkey into a new front for Saudi interests will follow typical ideological, strategic and political trends.

The age-old rivalry of the House of Saud with Turkey, which saw the overthrown of the Ottoman Empire from the lands of what is now Saudi territory, helps create enough energy and urgency for the latest Saudi enterprise. It is no mere coincidence that the Saudis need a functioning Sunni army to counter the likely



expansionism of Iran, a matter that they simply cannot risk leaving to the putative next president of the United States, Democratic Senator Barrack Obama.

The House of Saud, in its bargain with the Wahhabi establishment, needs to use its fabulous oil wealth to further Islamic - and more pointedly Wahhabi - causes. That is why it bankrolled Pakistan's military and intelligence services in fighting their war in Afghanistan against the Russians, and it is precisely why it needs to create a large fighting force to contain Iran.

Neither the timing nor the direction of these events can be considered fortuitous. America has in effect sold Turkey's Kemalist generals down the river, in favor of keeping the avowedly-Islamic Justice and Development Party in power. The fact that Turkey's modern military represents the exact opposite vision of Islamic rule, compared with the feudal Saudi clan, represents the key flash point here, a particular grievance given the largely Sunni nature of Turkey's Muslim population.

Evaluating the possible - in my view likely - descent of Turkey towards the Pakistani morass can only be done by first looking briefly at the major factors that led to the latter's maladroit evolution. From there, we can look at the social and demographic factors that will compel Turkey into the Islamist fold, in turn creating a new front for the coming civilizational war.

How Pakistan was sold on the cheap
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the first leader of Pakistan when it was founded as a secular republic with a Muslim majority in 1947, envisaged Pakistan as a rapidly modernizing, Western-friendly country that would value education and engineering over feudalism and farming. In the first few years, this was indeed the direction that the country took. With the death of Jinnah in 1948 and the assumption of military power at the behest of the Americans, always chary of potential communist infiltration, Pakistan soon emerged as a two-tier state, with an elite that disdained the machinations of democracy, instead viewing itself as capable of setting the country on an elevated path.

To stay in power, the middle-class men who constituted Pakistan's top army brass needed the wealth and support of feudal lords and businessmen, thus entrenching a social schism in the economic structure. Middle-class Pakistanis without the benefit of being in the army were consigned to more mundane existences, with the pretence of democracy holding them in place.

The emergence of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto from a landed Shi'ite clan changed the equation somewhat for here were wealthy, non-Punjabi lords of the soil who commanded mass adulation for their embrace of socialist principles and upholding secular values (by and large). The fact that Bhutto succeeded Field Marshall Ayub Khan proved to be both his making and undoing. While being a dictator and anti-democratic, Ayub did make the correct economic choices for Pakistan, as well as embracing its most important strategic relationship, namely a long-term friendship with China that even today serves as the bedrock of its geopolitical standing.

After the 1965 war with India, Pakistan signed the Tashkent agreement, which proved deeply unpopular within the country, already buffeted by declining prosperity. The split of the charismatic ex-foreign minister Bhutto from the Ayub government was timely and paved the way for the creation of the Pakistan People's Party, which went on to sweep the general elections in 1970 in Western Pakistan but failed to win any seats in the East.

The resulting crackdown on the East that led to genocide, Indian intervention and finally the creation of Bangladesh also paved the way for Bhutto to become the prime minister of Pakistan.

Taking a cue from the disastrous economic leadership of his bitter foe in India, Indira Gandhi, Bhutto set about nationalizing all of Pakistan's major industries. His embrace of socialist mores however proved fatal for Pakistan's economy, leading to increasing dissent - more importantly, the linkage between the country's wealthy and its military had been broken. Being Shi'ite, Bhutto was never trusted by Arab rulers, least of all those in Saudi Arabia; his embrace of socialism and the Non-Aligned Movement meant that he was considered untrustworthy by the US.

India had just completed its first nuclear test in 1975, even as the Middle Eastern embargo on exporting oil to the West had caused a stunning descent into recession for many developed countries. It was perhaps at this stage that an ideological bargain was struck between the US and Saudi Arabia that paved the way for the removal of Bhutto from power. For his part, Bhutto believed that it was the US that wanted him dead for Pakistan's avowed intention to possess a nuclear device. He wrote of an alleged warning from US statesman Henry Kissinger ("make a horrible example of you") as the precursor to his incarceration [2].

Socialism as always failed to deliver as a substitute for nationalism, thus paving the way for a takeover by religion as the main guiding force of Pakistan. The wily General Zia ul-Haq, who staged a coup against Bhutto in 1977 and declared himself president, in due course set about re-establishing the authority of the military and Pakistan's elite businessmen. Keeping the restive public from embracing the next demagogue though would prove to be easier said than done, and this is where the embrace of Islam worked to the military's advantage.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and continued losses in the Kashmir "freedom struggle" in the backdrop of a giant sucking sound emanating from the economy all meant that the availability of cannon fodder to fight America's battles had suddenly increased exponentially. This is what the Saudi-sponsored religious schools and rich mosques helped to propagate in Pakistan. Unable to pay for any education in the face of its collapsing economy and escalating military expenditure, Pakistan in effect outsourced the training of its youth to the Saudis, who in turn turned to the Wahhabi establishment. The corrupt military were perfectly happy as long as they remained in power.

From there on, Pakistan's descent into a tragicomedy only accelerated. Split between the conflicting and contradictory forces of capitalism and socialism, military rule and democratic charades in the backdrop of an indifferent economy, people took whatever path presented the greatest opportunities in their particular existence. This is from where the steady supply of militants willing to commit suicide for the Wahhabi cause came.

History repeats itself
At first glance, the decision of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government to arrest last week 86 people (and a further 20 on Wednesday) for an alleged coup plot doesn't look anything like what happened when Zia arrested Bhutto. For one thing, the tables are turned here in that a democratically elected government has sequestered its military. That is, however, where the differences end.

For a long time now, Turkey's secular generals have run the country in the image of Kemal's republic, which embraced modern Islam, secularism and pro-Western behavior. This is well in keeping with the interests of the US and therefore continued for a long time.

More recently though, the generals have become a thorn in the flesh of the Saudi royal family as well as possibly various US interest groups. Their assistance to the talks between Syria and Israel, opposition to any US strike on Iranian nuclear facilities and steadfast repression of Kurds have all put them at odds with either explicit US policy or its interests.

In contrast, key members of the Erdogan government who embrace the traditional Sunni values of Islam face being banned by a military-backed case that could see yet another setback to the Islamist cause in Turkey. That is the likely reason for the current bout of Saudi intervention.

As the price of oil increased rapidly in the past three years, Saudi influence has grown. The rapid decline of the US into a credit crisis has also prompted the need for rich friends in high places, particularly to rescue moribund banks and continue buying bonds issued by bankrupt federal agencies. It now appears that instead of a share of US banks or its corporate that "lesser" Arab rulers may be happy with, Saudi Arabia has been slowly pushing the US to capitulate its Turkish fiefdom.

After stabilizing the Islamist government, the true costs of this bargain for Turkey will become more visible. As the US Army plans to leave Iraq, it will leave in its wake an independence-seeking if not functionally autonomous Kurdistan that embraces territory in the north of Iraq and Iran as well as the eastern part of Turkey. On its western front, Turkey has already been outmaneuvered by Greece on its claims on Cyprus by using the illusory carrot of potential European Union membership.

Turkish nationalism will thus receive two severe blows in the next few years. Coalescing at the center, it is likely that Turks will turn to religion for succor, much as Pakistanis did after the creation of Bangladesh. That they will become cannon fodder in the age-old conflict between Sunni and Shi'ite forces is another matter.

In perhaps less than a decade from now, Saudi Arabia could well control and call on two Wahhabi-inspired armies on either side of Iran, and seek to deal a death blow against the Shi'ites when a convenient excuse presents itself. It is only after Islamic forces consolidate around the Wahhabi establishment that the next phase of the civilizational war against the West will begin.

 

[ajtr]

India and the new great game​

The dust seems to have settled on the Indian Embassy Bombing in Kabul – well at least figuratively. In reality it has muddled the already complex real poltik game in Afghanistan and raised a much larger cloud then the attackers bargained for.

The attack brought all round condemnation from countries across the world and a denial from Pakistan that the ISI was involved. India's foreign secretary visited Kabul and we will now have to play a wait and watch game till the government decides on what to do.

In this post I plan to discuss the alternatives that the Government of India has with respect to its Afghan policy. However, since anything with respect to Afghanistan necessarily needs to be hyphenated with respect to Pakistan we would time and again deviate into the events in Pakistan and its impact on the geo-political scenario.

But before we start our discussion on the topic of this blog I would like to communicate my extreme disgust at the Executive , the Politicians and the Judiciary in Pakistan for the hash they have made of the situation. The damn place is a mess and there aren't words to describe it more equivocally without entering the realms of "NON-PARLIAMENTARY LANGUAGE".

The Indian Embassy bombing in Kabul was a act of terror that was directed towards a government that has been a friend of the afghan people for a very very long time. As a matter of fact the Indian Government was among the few governments that continued to support the North Alliance against the Pakistan supported Taliban movement. Further amongst all the donor countries that are active in Afghanistan, Indian Aid has been directed to creating grass root infrastructure which will strengthen local and national democracy. This effective aid has in fact created enemies for the India among Afghanistan's neighbours.

Background
Pakistan as a country has always lacked strategic depth and often it has harboured ambitions to overcome this lack of strategic depth by using Afghanistan as a hinterland or a buffer state. As a matter of fact control over Afghanistan Government is critical for the very survival of Pakistan as a state. Lets examine this point in a little more detail.

Map 1 : Afghan-Pakistan Border

The border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan has traditionally been populated by the fiercely autonomous Pashtun tribes. These tribes have been able to maintain their independence over multiple centuries. The Sikh confederation used the Pashtun's as a buffer state and when the British took over the control of the area from the Sikhs they decided to impose the boundary through the creation of the Durrand Line, which bisected the traditional Pashtun Heartland between British India and Afghanistan. Pakistan upon its creation inherited the Durrand line from the British. While the British India was a state that provided a strategic depth like none others, Pakistan was venerable form day one. As a matter of fact I will not be surprised if archives of British India and Britain indicate that it was designed that way. This lack of strategic depth was made even more evident by the defeat that Pakistan suffered at the hands of India in 1965 and 1971. In order to overcome this evident geopolitical deficiency Military Planners have thought it necessary for Pakistan to have a enormous amount of influence on Afghanistan. Pakistan exerted this influence in past via the diplomatic channels as also through the funding of Afghan Movements against the Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan. Subsequent to the Soviet withdrawal Pakistan tried to control Afghanistan through the Taliban Movement.The Taliban was the creation of the Pakistan Army and was funded, directed and controlled by the ISI.

The second reason for Pakistan's need to continuously engage and dominate Afghanistan is related to its very survival as a country. At the time of independence of Pakistan from British rule the Pashtun people had asked for a country of their own straddling the Pakistan and Afghan frontiers. The Khudai Khitmatgar was created with this singular purpose of the creation of the Pashtun Nation. This ambition of a independent homeland has still not died and has been further strengthened due to the weakening of the Central Government in Pakistan. The problem gets further exuberated due to the fact that Pakistan has never had effective control on these areas and NWFP has continued to been governed through tribal agencies rather then through established civil administration. The lack of a effective civil administration, the ambitions for a separate Pashtunistan and the growth of militant Islam have presented themselves as a potent challenge to the government of Pakistan.

The third compulsion that drives Pakistan's policies in Afghanistan is the preservation of its trade. For years together Pakistan has provided Afghanistan its only access to a seaport. This arrangement has made many a generations of the Peshawar/ Rawalpindi Truck Mafia prosperous beyond their wildest dreams. Afghanistan also provides Pakistan access to the Central Asian Republics and their rich Hydrocarbon reserves. One of the main reasons why Pakistan needs to have a subservient Afghanistan is to ensure that Pakistan and only Pakistan can ensure and assure any investor in the CIS Hydrocarbon Sector of security of his investments. This will make Pakistan strategically important for countries that want to secure their energy security and this place them in a position of advantage in trade and commerce. Further, Pakistan would like to retain its strategic position as the sole and preferred port for Imports into Afghanistan

The Fourth and a reversible influence on the Pakistan's Afghan policy is Saudi Arabia. Even after the departure of the Soviets from Afghanistan the Saudi Arabian Monarchy and its Cahoots continue to support the spread of militant Islam in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The specific reason for this is the Saudi Royal family's dependence on Pakistan's Military as the mercenaries of last resort. This was clearly demonstrated when the House of Saud was faced with a internal rebellion from the household militia and the use of Pakistani Commando's during the Seize of the Mecca Mosque. By spreading its brand of Islam the Saudi Royals are in a position to ensure the continued availability of Pakistan and its resources when in need.

India in Afghanistan
India has traditionally maintained friendly relationship with Afghanistan. The primary motive of this was to effectively counterbalance the Pakistani strategy region. However, the effectiveness of this policy has largely depended on the disposition of the regime in Kabul. India was one of the few countries welcome the invasion of Afghanistan by Soviet Union and recognise the government of Afghanistan. The Indian Intelligence agencies shared a strong working relationship with its Afghan counterparts the KHAD. India has also traditionally helped Afghanistan in capacity building and a sizable number of Afghan students have completed their higher education in India. India also maintained a medical mission in Kabul for over 2 decades. Its also said that President Najib's family received political asylum in the days prior and post the fall of the Najib regime in Afghanistan.

Post the collapse of the Najib government and during the Afghan Civil War that followed, the indian presence and influence in afghanistan waned to near zero. as a matter of fact when the Indian Airlines flight IC 814 was hijacked to Kandhahar, the Indians has no political levers or contacts to fall back on in order to secure the release of the hostages.India however did have a presence in afghanistan in the Panjshir Valley in support of the Northern Alliance and operated a 25 bed Military Hospital in Farkhor, Tajikistan. It was in this hospital that the Lion of Panjshir, Ahmed Shah Massud was brought post the fatal suicide attack on him on the 9th Sept 2001. Post 9/11 and the American entry in the Global War on Terror Indian Intelligence agencies helped the US secure the foot hold in afghanistan.

India participation and presence in afghanistan has greatly increased substantially. The Indians are the largest regional Aid providers to Afghanistan and have committed close to $750 Million Dollars of Aid over the last couple of years. The Indian Government is in the form of a Major Highway construction project [Zaranj-Delaram Highway] and the reconstruction of the afghan parliament. The latter is of huge symbolic importance and conveys the desire of the Indian people of see a health democracy in Afghanistan. The Highway project on the other hand is extremely strategic to afghanistan. This project will create world class highway in afghanistan and linkup with a Iranian highway that connects with Bandar Abbas. Effectively the proposed new highway will allow Afghanistan to break the stranglehold of Pakistan on its economy and its foreign affairs. Its important to note that a couple of years ago India had helped Iran to strengthen the rail link between Bandar Abbas and the Turkmenistan Border and the same link could be extended to link up into afghanistan. Its believed that this new highway will allow India to increase its trade with Afghanistan. There is also a huge amount of investment that India is committing to the Afghan Telecommunication and Information and Broadcasting sector. This investment is in the form of funding as well as technical expertise that India is contributing. The Indian investments in roads, ICT and the electricity sector will help better integrate the Afghan country. More importantly all of the above is also likely to weaken Pakistan's capability to control Afghanistan. A summary of some of the key Indian Projects in Afghanistan is mentioned below:

Around 400 BRO personnel involved in Zaranj-Delaram highway.
Afghanistan's Parliament Building
Power transmission line from Pul-e-Khumri to Kabul
Reconstruction of Salma Dam power project, Herat
Telephone exchanges in 11 provinces
Television network uplink from Kabul, downlinks in all provincial capitals
CII project for training 3,000 Afghans in vocations ranging from carpentry, plumbing to masonry and tailoring.
The objective of the Indian aid program is to help the afghan people to create a political and economic system which does not make it dependent on Pakistan. This the Indians assume will help decrease the influence of the Pakistani's in Afghanistan.

A strong and independent Afghanistan will also help India accomplish its surround strategy of Pakistan, tie down at least part of the Pakistani army along the Durrand line and thus reduce the capacity of Pakistan to undertake military adventure like Kargil in the future. It will also reduce the capability of Pakistani Army to foster militancy in Jammu and Kashmir for the foreseeable future.

The success of the Afghan policy of India will benefit India in the following ways:

Help India to increase its share in its trade with afghanistan.
Provide India with access to the CIS energy reserves via the Chabahar Free Port that India is helping develop in Iran.
It will increase it capability to bring to bear appropriate interventions in support of ethnic groups within Pakistan and thus tie down the Pakistani Army and the ISI for the foreseeable future.
Recent India specific developments in Afghanistan
Off late there have been a number of attacks on Indian Assets in Afghanistan. These attacks come in the background of a worsening security situation in Pakistan more specifically in the agency governed areas of Pakistan. In this section we will analyse we will analyse the pattern of the attacks and more specifically the reasons for the same.In the last section of this post I will discuss the long term ramifications of a successful Afghan Policy on India and why I would call the successful execution of the same as a master stroke.

Last one year has witnessed a increase in the frequency of attacks on Indian Assets.

July 7, 2008: A suicide attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul killed 41 persons and injured over 140. The killed included two senior diplomats, Political Counsellor V. Venkateswara Rao and Defence Adviser Brigadier Ravi Datt Mehta, and Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) staffers Ajai Pathaniya and Roop Singh.
June 5, 2008: An ITBP trooper was killed and four others injured in an attack by the Taliban in the south-west Province of Nimroz.
April 12, 2008: Two Indian nationals, M.P. Singh and C. Govindaswamy, personnel of the Indian Army's Border Roads Organisation (BRO), were killed and seven persons, including five BRO personnel, sustained injuries in a suicide-bomb attack in the Nimroz Province.
January 3, 2008: In the first-ever suicide attack on Indians in the country, two ITBP soldiers were killed and five others injured in the Razai village of Nimroz Province.
December 15, 2007: Two bombs were lobbed into the Indian consulate in Jalalabad, capital of the Nangarhar province in Afghanistan. There was however, no casualty or damage.
May 7, 2006: An explosion occurred near the Indian Consulate in the fourth police district of the western Herat Province. There were no casualties.
April 28, 2006: An Indian telecommunications engineer working for a Bahrain based firm in the Zabul Province, K Suryanarayana was abducted and subsequently beheaded after two days.
February 7, 2006: Bharat Kumar, an engineer working with a Turkish company, was killed in a bomb attack by the Taliban in the western province of Farah.
November 19, 2005: Maniappan Kutty, a driver working with the BRO's project of building the Zaranj-Delaram highway, was abducted and his decapitated body was found on a road between Zaranj, capital of Nimroz, and an area called Ghor Ghori, four days later.
December 9, 2003: Two Indian engineers – P Murali and G Vardharai working on a road project in Zabul province were abducted. They were released on December 24 after intense negotiations by Afghan tribal leaders with the Taliban militia, which was demanding the release of 50 imprisoned militants in return for the Indian engineers.
November 8, 2003: An Indian telecommunications engineer working for the Afghan Wireless Company was shot dead.
As a matter of fact even a cursory glance at the timelines and the severity of the attacks indicate that 2008 has witnessed both a increase in the frequency and the intensity of these attacks. A couple of days after the attack on the Indian Embassy alert Engineers working on a Road construction project detected a bomb on board their bus. The same was defused thus averting a major tragedy.

The real question that would baffle a common man is why are all of these attacks suddenly happening. Basis the information that is appearing on Blogs, Internet Forums, News Articles, Editorial and other open sources the key reasons of the increased attacks can be attributed to the following reasons:

India's increasing influence in Afghanistan
The influence of the Indians in the affairs of Afghanistan has been on the rise. India has not only been successful in completing all its committed projects on time but more importantly has ensured that most of the aid is used to create work in the local economy rather then for paying foreign expatriates. The Indians have also increased the quantum of aid in the form of Student scholarships to the Indian University System as also the number of seats available to Afghan National Army in the Defence Training Schools. Overall Pakistan seems to be loosing its control over the Afghan Psychic and that means its time to hit the panic button for the Pakistani establishment.

Completion of the Chabahar-Melek-Zarang-Delaram Transportation Route
The successful completion of the Zarang-Delaram Highway will provide Afghanistan with a alternate route to the sea via the Chabahar-Melek-Zarang-Delaram axis. Its important to note that a rail and road link from Chabahar to Zarang already exist and the extension to Delaram will potentially close the chapter on the imports via Karachi/Gadwar in Pakistan. The Taliban/Pakistani's need to stop/delay this route atleast until they are not powerful enough to cause long term disruption.

Indian support to Nationalist movements in Pakistan
I have always thought of a day when the Indian Government would finally start paying back Pakistan in the same coin and I think that that day came as soon as the Indians decided to fund the Zarang-Delaram Highway project. The Indian BRO contingent provides RAW with the perfect cover for deploying its folks in Afghanistan. The physical proximity to Iran as well as Balochistan, Pakistan makes things a lot more convenient. It would be naive for us to assume that India has not deployed its strategic assets in the region. As a matter of fact there have been Blog and Forum posting that suggest that India has deployed both CIT-J AND CIT-X elements into afghanistan. There have also been unconfirmed reports that Baitulla Meshud is being funded by the RAW and that it has atleast some role in the attacks on the Pakistani Army in Balochistan and the areas of Pakistan bordering the Helmund province.

So what was the motive behind the Bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul. I personally think that the objective of the ISI could be two folds. First was to send a warning to the Indians telling them that the ISI can attack and hurt the Indians when and where ever they want to. The second plausible explanation could be that it was a attack on two specific high value targets namely Mr. Venket V Rao and Brig R D Mehta. It needs to be noted that Press and Political Counsel is typically a role that is taken up by RAW operatives in the Foreign Missions abroad. Brig Mehta would have been a target because he was the Military Attache to the Indian Embassy and was said to be deeply involved in capacity building for the Afghan National Army(ANA).

Conclusion
A long term peace in the Indian Sub-continent would be possible only through the containment of Pakistan. India and other stakeholders in the region will have to make some difficult decisions in order to achieve this. The ideal scenario for India would be if Pakistan was to officially give up terrorism as a instrument of state policy. However, if this was not possible then a host of options including the balkanisation of Pakistan will have to be explored. This second option is the easiest way forward. The presence of the state has already disappeared in large parts of NWFP and Balochistan. If foreign actors were to decide they could create all the factors that would be favourable for the creation of a separate Balochistan state and a Federation between Pashtunistan and Afghanistan. That will leave Pakistan with only Sindh and Punjab, which would automatically propel Sindh to break off due to the intense rivalry between the Sindhi and Punjabi politicians, effectively Pakistan will be reduced to a ghost of its past.

This second scenario would however create problems of a different type and may not be desirable unless there is a central power that can control all of these micro actors. This would also work in favour of India from a long term perspective because it will effectively jeopardise China's quest for a port in the Indian Ocean. More on that some other day..

 

[ajtr]

This situation is still the same as it is today. Replace the british with today's western powers and replace the Sheikh Abdullah with today's Kashmir politicians. And replace Nehru with ManMohan Singh.

Kashmir politicians appose POK accession to India for exactly same reason - POK population is non-kashmiri, not good for them. 60 years have passed but things are so same. So strange that noone from our side is calling the bluff.

The truth about Jammu and Kashmir, Does Pakistan have a Locus Standi -II ​

August 31, 2000

By Lieutenant Colonel Thakur Kuldip S Ludra (Retd.)

The British complicity was obvious. The following additional circumstantial evidence leads to the justification about the accusation being made:-

There is some justification in the Pakistani accusation that the British had planned the entire affair when as a result of the Partition they gave Gurdaspur District, a Muslim majority district to India. (However, it must also be realised that the so-called Muslims were mainly Ahemdiyas, whom Pakistan subsequently declared as non-Muslims.) This gave India an access to the State of Jammu and Kashmir. Had this district gone to Pakistan and Lahore to India as was justified at that time, as a result of the population, India would have never been able to sustain her operations in Jammu and Kashmir.
Most of the senior officer cadre, both in the Indian and Pakistan Armies was British. It was obvious that the entire operation was planned by the British. For them to say that they were not in the know of the whole affair is a blatant lie. Especially as it was a British Officer who led the coup in Gilgit, by the Gilgit Scouts giving the entire Northern area of Gilgit (Agency and Wazarat) as well as Baltistan, including Nagar and Hunza, to Pakistan. This was also known to the British Commander-in-Chief of the State Forces, General Scott, as early as June 1947, when he had accompanied Brigadier Ghansara Singh to take over the Gilgit Agency from the British.
Major General O S Kalkat, then a major, had over heard Pakistan Army Officers talking about the planned invasion. He managed to leave his brigade, where he was a Brigade Major, with a British Commander, and managed to reach India, in spite of being placed under house arrest. He reported the matter to all the senior officers, as well as the political leadership, right up to the Prime Minister. No body believed him. Or more correctly his information was ignored. To the extent that there was no contingency plan even. It was obvious that the Indian leadership, guided by Nehru, believed Mountbatten, rather than its own officer cadre.
To quote from Bleoria's book, "It is reasonable to believe that at least the C-in-C of Indian Army, Rob Lockhart, and Field Marshal Auchinleck, the Supreme Commander, were kept informed of the invasion plans by General Messervy, who was in constant touch with both of them.
In spite of the fact that all the depots were in India, and Pakistan had got only one third of he strength of the old Indian Army and hardly any Air Force, British Officers of the Indian Army, kept on talking about the Pakistani threat to Indian Punjab and denied the Indian Commanders, in the field, any additional reinforcements. Even after the culmination of the Hyderabad Operations, in September 1948, additional troops were not made available.
The Indian Air Force was never allowed to take part in the tactical operations. In fact, it appears to have been an unwritten agreement between the Indian and Pakistani Commander-in-Chiefs that India will not use her Airforce. In this connection according to Bleoria,to quote from de-classified records from the India Office, London, reports, "Only a day earlier the British High Commissioner to Pakistan had asked the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations in London to work for a renewed assurance from the British Air Chief in India that, 'Gentleman's Agreement' will be enforced regarding the use of the air force.
The Operation code named 'Operation Gulmarg' had the orders personally signed by the British C-in-C, Pakistan Army.
Even while Pakistan was supporting these operations, the British Officers were sending Pakistan, ammunition from India, by the train loads.
It appeared that the two C-in-Cs had decided that the Indian Forces were not to be allowed to go beyond the line Naushera-Poonch-Tithwal and thereafter along the line of Krishan Ganga. The moment the Indian Forces showed any inclination to do that, there were impediments on their advance. Right at the beginning as General, then Brigadier, 'Bogey' Sen's 161 Brigade had reached Uri, he was ordered, by the Army Headquarters to stop his advance and change the direction of his advance towards Poonch. Thereby, breaking the momentum of his advance, just when both Kohala and Muzaffarabad were in his reach. Similarly, when General, then Brigadier Harbaksh had reached Tithwal in his brilliant outflanking movement, towards Muzaffarabad, from the North-east, he was denied the extra battalions so essential to maintain the momentum of his attack. Again, in June/July 1948 when Gurez was cleared, General Thimmaya was denied extra forces to help raise the siege of Skardu. In fact he was ordered to withdraw the two battalions, he had used for the clearing of Gurez. Surprisingly, it was the Army Headquarters who were deciding the conduct of operations instead of the local field commanders. To detriment of the Indian interests.
It was a known fact that the two Cs-in-C talked every day about the development of operations. Every time the Indians planned a big offensive, beyond the above line of Naushera-Poonch-Uri-Tithwal, either additional troops were denied or when the offensive was with resources from within those already available to the local commander, the Pakistani Forces seemed to know the exact plans and were in position to thwart the Indian operations. Eventually, General Cariappa, the then General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Western Command stopped informing the Army Headquarters of his planned operations and achieved surprise every time. For this he was warned by the British Commander-in Chief.
The sequence of events that preceded the Tribal invasion of Jammu and Kashmir, showed remarkable military acumen, in that the so called armed uprisings of the Muslims were so spread out that the much vaunted Jammu and Kashmir Forces had to be split in small penny packets, spread all over the borders of that State with Pakistan, since all these incidents were along the frontiers. Thus split, they were mopped up in detail by the invading Tribals. Since the actual conduct of the operations at tactical level lacked this acumen, the suspicions arise that the agency planning the entire operation at the strategic level was completely different, definitely the British, than that involved at the tactical level.
It was unfortunate for India that the interests of Sheikh Abdullah coincided with those of the British. For him Neither the Northern Areas, nor Muzzaffarabad, or Mirpur and Kotli were of any importance, In fact they would have been a positive hinderence to his plans. Being a Sunni he would not have been able to establish any rapport with the residents of the Northern Areas who were Shias. Nor would have been able to get the people of the region now with Pakistan to support him being essentially from the same stock as the Punjabis. As a Kashmiri he would have had no control over them. Thus with his interests coinciding with the British the two were able to influence Nehru very easily.

THE TRUTH ? OR BRITISH DUPLICITY ABOUT KASMIR MILITARY OPERATIONS ​

IDU Presentation On Infantry Day IDU Update (October 2007)

Lt Col Sam Sharma has sent us some facts of the Kashmir Incursion By Pakistan in 1947 which has kept Indian Infantry engaged 24X7 since. The veracity needs to be confirmed and publicised. Indeed one had heard that Pandit Nehru was told of some duplicity of the British Generals as Mountbatten did say, "Kashmir has more Muslims and Hari Singh should have opted for Pakistan". This has been quoted and all Nehru( who loved Edwina) did, was tell the Indian Army 'then keep the British Officers out of the Kashmir operations" and Gen Thimayya conducted the operations and Gen Cariappa took over Western Command from Gen Russel. I append extract from Chapter on Wars and India's flawed Politico Military Structure from book Indians Why We Are What We Are( Manas 1997).

QUOTE
Lord Mountbatten wanted Kashmir to join Pakistan realising that the population was 85% Muslim, but he deferred to the wishes of Hari Singh the Hindu ruler.Mountbatten labeled the Maharaja a fool in private,a sentiment that the British officers were aware of. In fact Mountbatten had insisted the Andaman and Nicobar Islands be part of India, going against the recommendation of Whitehall, which wanted one Island go to Pakistan, as a staging post between East and West Pakistan.

Mountbatten had assumed Kashmir would go to Pakistan some day but Pakistan in its anxiety violated the status quo and in October of 1948 abetted by their British C-in-C, Gen Meservy, organised tribal raids into various parts of Jammu and Kashmir. By 24 October a full scale offensive in the valley of J&K was launched by Pakistan, under the guise of a tribal uprising. Hari Singh looked to India for help, which was provided only on 26 Oct 47 when J&K acceded to India formally by signing the Instrument of Accession. Appeals from India to Pakistan to stop the offensive were ignored and so began India's first India Pakistan War. Interestingly British officers were in charge of Armies, Navies and Air Forces on both sides. They were aware of Lord Mountbatten's views and his sympathies towards Pakistan on this issue. The CinCs of India Gens Lockhart till 27 Nov 47 and Roy Boucher thereafter left matters to Gen Russel of the Western Command in Shimla who was directly incharge of the operations to quell the offensive.

The British Officers on the Indian side termed mercenaries were not permitted to enter the fighting zone by an edict from Britain but they still advised on the Operations. No restriction was placed on British Officers in Pakistan. The British Officers in India played truant. Their sympathies were with Pakistan.= It has now come to light that then a Major OS Kalkat, in North West Frontier saw a plan for this operation code named Gulmarg addressed to Brigadier CP Murry by the C-in-C Pakistan General Meservy. When Maj OS Kalkat (later Maj Gen) escaped to Delhi in October 47 he had revealed this information to his superiors but it was withheld from the PM Pt Nehru and the Defence Minister Baldev Singh, by the British Staff Officers.

The Indian Army went in to action by air transport in Dakotas spearheaded by 300 men of 1 Sikh under Lt Col Rai on 27 Oct,a day after the Ruler signed the Instrument of accession to India. Srinagar airfield was secured and battle to oust the raiders who were in the valley was commenced. In defending Baramulla Lt Col Rai died and was awarded the Maha Vir Chakra equivalent of MVC posthumously. Another Major Som Nath Sharma (whose brother rose to become Chief of Army Staff after Gen K Sundarji) led his company of 4 Kumaon.He died defending Srinagar against some 700 tribesmen disguised as Kashmiris. It is propitious that the Indian Army went in before Srinagar fell. A day or two later it would have been futile or disastrous. A few days Maj Gen (later Lt Gen) Kalwant Singh had arrived to take Command of the valley. Brigadier and (later Lt Gen) LP Sen arrived with 161 Inf Bde and soon the tide turned in favour of the Indian Army. However progress was slow due to extraneous factors, not military.

In treacherous actions by the British, the plans of the Indian side were leaked to the British on the Pak side. After all they were blood brothers and colleagues in arms. A British officer Maj Brown learning of state forces weaknesses at Gilgit and South Kardu over ran these two vitally strategic posts, now in Pak held Kashmir. On 20 Jan 48 Lt Gen KM Cariappa took over as Western Command Army Cdr from Gen Russell. His leadership was timely and is legendary.

He learnt that General Roy Boucher CinC Indian Army who was well known to the newly appointed CinC Pak Army SirDouglas Gracey regularly spoke to his Pak counterpart and leaked plans made by Cariappa. It was outrageous. Pleas to the Defence Minister and Pandit Nehru to pull up the British General were of no avail and Nehru permitted Cariappa and his team to keep the Ops Orders out of reach of their British CinC. By early 48 Maj Gen KS Thimayya, DSO another distinguished field commander and an ex Burma campaign vetran arrived with newly formed 19th Division. His Division was given orders to plan for a summer offensive as soon as the snows began to melt. Maj Gen Yadunath Singh whose, distinguished son Admiral, Madhavendra Singh (a shipmate of mine,)was given three Brigades to capture the area of the Thana Mandi.A ding dong battle ensued.

FROM COL SAM SHARMA . Was there British Duplicity? IDU asks. The IAF transport sorties were the largest since World War 11 but never publcised enough. IDU does it.

Rawalpindi, Dominion of Pakistan, 26th October 1947. Being number 2, General Sir Douglas Gracey; one time Commanding Officer (CO) of the 2nd Battalion The 3rd (Queen Alexandra's Own) Gurkha Rifles; got it direct from Jinnah, as General Frank Messervy Commander-in-Chief Pakistani Army was away on home leave. He was being hustled into rushing Pakistani troops into the Indian State of Jammu & Kashmir on 27th October 1947. This was a tall order, indeed; therefore, he picked up the telephone and referred his brief to Field Marshal Auchinlek; the Supreme Commander in the Un-Divided India; who was still trying to divide the British Indian Army. The Supreme Commander was dumb-founded and confounded! Soon after first light on the following day, therefore, the Great Auk air-dashed to Lahore and informed the Governor General of Pakistan; that, as officially J&K had acceded to the Dominion of India on 26th October 1947, it had the full right to fly in Indian troops to the threatened Srinagar airfield. He; however, was constrained to acquiesces to Jinnah's orders only at the pain of having to pull out all British officers from the Pakistani Army. Getting this straight talking to from Auchinlek, Jinnah was quite stumped, completely flabbergasted, furious and hopping mad, but calmed down soon; and in the event had the good sense to climb down and rescind his firman to Gracey then and there. He; nevertheless, gave the word 'go' to the North West tribals, qabbailis, irregulars and Pakistani regulars masquerading as some of them to launch Operation Gulmarg with the aim of seizing Bramullah, Srinagar and the Banihal Pass and investing the the Mirpur district.

New Delhi,Dominion of India, 26th October 1947. Brigadier (later Lieutenant General) Kalwant Singh; formerly of the 16 Punjabis; the then Acting Chief of General Staff; did not loose a minute; despite General Boucher being away and not in his chair of the Commander-in-Chief India at the Army Head Quarters. He 'flashed' an OP(eration)IMMEDIATE signal giving out an op instruction to Lt Col D S Rai; CO 1 Sikh Regiment in Gurgaon to flyin to the besieged Srinagar airfield in Phase 1 of Op JAK on 27th October 1947. Phase 11 was the move of a Brigade Group to Jammu.

Technical Area, Palam Air Field/ Safdarjung Air Port, 27th October 1947. Flights A,B,C,D take off between 0500 hours and 1300 hours for Srinagar. In the flight manifest of these civil and Royal Indian Air Force air craft, were listed the Tactical Head Quarters of 1 Sikh; Able Company, 1 Sikh; and one composite company of Royal Indian Artillery.

Srinagar Air Field, 27th October 1947. Six Dakotas of Flight A touch down between 0830 and 1000 hours at the Srinagar airfield amidst effective fire from Pakistani raiders. Col Rai thinks on his feet and after making a quick mental appreciation of the deteriorating tactical situation decides to rush his 'A' Company to go forward and reinforce the two platoons of State Forces barely holding out against the marauding hordes 5 kilometers East of Baramullah.. This is accomplished by1200 hours. The enemy; however, presses on with guile and cunning and by 1500 hours the ransacking of Baramullah is in full swing, the women raped enmasse and the town put to the torch. AHQ gets the sit(uation)rep(ort) signal around the same time. Col Rai asks for the balance of his paltan to be flown in post haste, else his position would be by passed by the raiders as soon as they found time after their plundering of the town.

 

[ajtr]

Old article but quite relevant with The new great Game targeting china.First part of which was played last year with riots in Xinjiang and before that in tibet.

US-UK Intel Readies Turkestan Islamic Terror Gambit For Beijing Olympics ​

By Webster G. Tarpley
8-2-8

Washington, August 1, 2008 * Reliable Australian intelligence sources have issued a warning that US-UK intelligence is attempting to mount a false flag terror operation against China, quite possibly featuring a gaggle of patsies calling themselves the "Turkestan Islamic Party," at the upcoming Beijing Olympics, where the eyes of the world will be concentrated next week. The goal of the operation will be to duplicate or surpass the bloodbaths the Mexico City 1968 and/or Munich 1972 summer games. Commandant Seyfullah of the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) claims in a video tirade displayed by a US company's website to represent the Turkish Moslems of Sinkiang province or Chinese Turkestan, where the Anglo-Americans have long sponsored an abortive separatist movement. Patsy leader Seyfullah and his Turkestan Islamic Party have been indirectly mentioned twice over the past two years by Ayman Zawahiri, the veteran British agent who functions as the real leader of "al Qaeda," in effect sheep- dipping the little known TIP in the vast pool of "al Qaeda" notoriety. If the planned operation actually takes place, the current Chinese leadership will * in the hopes of the plotters -- loose face and forfeit the mandate of heaven, the prerequisites for continued rule. This could then be the prelude to the installation of a new Chinese government far less committed to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and to cooperation with Russia. It might be a first step towards splitting the SCO and turning Beijing against Moscow, which is the current goal of Anglo-American grand strategy.

An article from the Sydney Morning Herald describing the general outlines of the danger is appended. The Turkestan Islamic Party claims to have already organized serious terror attacks in Shanghai, on the mainland coast opposite Taiwan, in Kunming in southwest China, and in Guangzhou (Canton in south China, near Hong Kong. Despite ample international attention to the Beijing Olympics by the controlled media, these considerable terror attacks have scarcely been reported, suggesting that some form of information management regime may be in place, as it was before 9/11.

The threatened Olympic terror event may have a second phase, designed to prevent a wave of world sympathy for the Chinese and other victims of whatever happens. An attempt to disrupt the world- wide operations of the internet may ensue, presented as the retaliation or riposte by the Chinese for what has been done to them by the foreign devils. Logic bombs or more sophisticated means could be used to disrupt the world-wide internet, shutting it down in whole or in part for days or weeks. International financial transactions might also become chaotic. Someone might begin dumping US Treasury paper, with the controlled western media blaming the Chinese government, even though the prospect of any direct or immediate Chinese government retaliation is remote. The massive hardships that can be inflicted by computer and cyber-based disruption would be used to whip up resentment and hatred in the west against the Chinese, changing the world strategic climate dramatically.

Some patsy group calling itself a Chinese secret society might announce that it had finally become fed up with the arrogance, the interference, and the aggression of the Anglo-Americans, and that it had decided to strike back on its own. This would allow the US and UK to demanded that the Chinese government hand over these malefactors in a humiliating gesture, leading to an escalating diplomatic and strategic crisis. These are but a few crude hypotheses drawn from the immense pool of possibilities. In many of these we see that the scope of terror could suddenly become much larger, due to the immense strategic potential on the Anglo- American and Chinese sides.

The direct terror attack may also be supplemented by large scale provocations, chaos and confusion operations, and mass demonstrations by Falun Gong fanatics, by Tibetans loyal to the feudal latifundist and US-UK intelligence asset who calls himself the Dalai Lama, and/or by democracy and human rights activists assembled by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and various NGOs in the orbit of US-UK and NATO intelligence. But the vigilance of the Chinese regime may be enough to defeat these plans.

A POSSIBLE PHASE CHANGE OF TERRORISM

If any such attack occurs, it would represent the beginning of a whole new phase of false flag terrorism on a world scale. From the mid-1990s until about 2005-2006, patsy organizations like "al Qaeda" in many cases received the blame for false flag terror attacks carried out by the US-UK invisible government networks against their own countries or their own national assets abroad, as in the case of the 9/11 attacks in the US and the 7/7/2005 attacks in London. The goal of these operations was to whip up hysteria in the western countries, and to provide pretexts for direct aggression under neocon auspices against Afghanistan and Iraq. There was also a parallel track of NATO-backed Chechen terrorist attacks against Russia. Henceforth, patsy groups like the TIP are to be used increasingly against "enemy states" like China and Russia, the two targets who have gone to the top of the list, displacing the earlier focus on the far less significant Iran and North Korea. Any attacks by the TIP on Chinese territory will of course represent acts of war by the US-UK against China, and could easily generate incalculable consequences over time. Under the Brzezinski Plan, the US-UK will be messing with the biggest country in the world, and one which comes equipped with ICBMs and H-bombs that can strike US territory.

Pentagon boss Robert Gates, a Brzezinski man going back to the Carter NSC in 1977-79, said this week that irregular warfare and soft power are the wave of the immediate future, and that may be exactly what we are about to get in spectacular form. This speech may well have been a signal that something big and very messy in the irregular warfare department is about to happen at the Olympics. "Al Qaeda," the CIA's Islamic Legion, traces its origins back to the Carter-Brzezinski years, just after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in response to Brzezinski's playing of the Islamic fundamentalism card against them.

A TOTALLY NEW HIT LIST FOR THE PRINCIPALS' COMMITTEE

The new target list is being dictated by the Principals' Committee, which currently rules in Washington. Among the Principals are Rice at State, Gates at Defense, Paulson at Treasury, and Admiral Mullen as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, plus some others. This group is now running the US government. Bush and Cheney are little better than figureheads, lame ducks who have virtually ceased to influence government affairs as they fade away. The top neocons are either in jail, like Lord Conrad Black, or running for cover. The playbook for the Principals is the Brzezinski Plan, with its focus on working towards a global showdown with Russia and China. A US-UK attack on Iran is now virtually excluded, but instead large-scale bombing and preparations for a land invasion of northwest Pakistan are proceeding apace. The pretext cited here is the search for Bin Laden and the need to combat the Taliban, but the real goal is to start the breakup of Pakistan into five or six petty states * because Pakistan is a Chinese ally, and all allies and trading partners of China are presently being targeted for regime change, destabilization, and Balkanization, from Sudan to Zimbabwe to Burma to Venezuela to Pakistan. It is time for opponents of false flag terrorism to ditch their maps of the Persian Gulf in favor of much larger world maps, with special attention for the geopolitical features of the Eurasian landmass discussed by Obama backer Brzezinski in his book, The Grand Chessboard.

The atmosphere in Washington today is eerily reminiscent of the final years of Iran-contra, when many personalities who had become too openly compromised in these picaresque operations were liquidated. The Iran-contra networks had to be cleaned up, and many heads rolled. The past weeks have brought word that bacteriological warfare expert Dr. Steven Hatfill, the FBI's former person interest in the October 2001 anthrax attacks, has been taken care of with a $6 million damages award. His former biowar colleague Bruce Ivins was found dead this morning near Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, in what has been ruled a suicide. The death of Ivins comes in the wake of another purported suicide, that of Deborah Palfrey, the so-called DC Madam. Are these inconvenient persons in fact being suicided to keep them quiet? Tonight there is word that Ayman Zawahiri, the MI-6 man at the top of "al Qaeda" may be either dead or seriously wounded. If Zawahiri is dead or knocked out, this event may be comparable to the execution of Timothy McVeigh on June 11, 2001, which officially closed the era of terrorism under right wing anarchist cover in the US, just before a new phase of false flag operations began three months later, on September 11, 2001.

August 8, 2008, the formal opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing summer games, emerges as a possible date for some attempted action in the context described. In a paper which should be read in conjunction with this article, Gillian Norman makes a case for the occult significance of 8-8-8 in the irrationalist numerology which may be considered meaningful by certain rogue network factions. But the events in question could occur at almost any time over the next several weeks.

Those who mobilized in the spring of 2007 to stop Operation Bite, the planned Good Friday US-UK attack on Iran, or who spread the word of the Kennebunkport Warning in late August 2007, are urged mobilize now on a much larger scale to inoculate world publics against which may now be in the offing. The US, Europe, and Japan need good relations with China, the world's largest country. Peaceful coexistence, not a new round of inter-imperialist rivalry, is required. No band of desperados can be allowed to initiate a Sino-American confrontation under cover of a new false flag provocation.
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Muslim group declares war on Olympics ​

July 27, 2008

A CHINESE terrorist organisation has warned it will create havoc at next month's Olympics and has claimed responsibility for a deadly Shanghai bus bombing in May. A group monitoring terrorism threats on the internet said Commander Seyfullah of the Turkestan Islamic Party claimed responsibility for several attacks in China less than a fortnight out from the Olympics. "Through this blessed jihad in Yunnan this time, the Turkestan Islamic Party warns China one more time," Seyfullah said in a video dated July 23, a transcript from a US-based intelligence centre shows. "Our aim is to target the most critical points related to the Olympics. We will try to attack Chinese central cities severely using the tactics that have never been employed," he said. The warnings come just a day after Chinese police claimed they cracked a terrorist cell planning to attack Shanghai Stadium where the Australian men's soccer team will open its Olympic campaign on August 7. Seyfullah claimed responsibility for the May 5 Shanghai bus bombing, which killed three; another Shanghai attack; an attack on police in Wenzhou on July 17 using an explosives-laden tractor; bombing of a Guangzhou plastics factory on July 17, and bombings of three buses in Yunnan province on July 21.

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Pre-Olympics Jihadi Terrorist Strike In Xinjiang - International Terrorism Monitor---Paper No. 424​

by B. Raman

Sixteen border police guards of China's Ministry of Public Security were killed and 16 others injured when two unidentified terrorists, who came in a truck, jumped out of it outside their barracks compound near Kashgar(Chinese name Kashi) in the Xinjiang province at 8 AM on August 4,2008, and threw hand-grenades at a group of police guards doing their morning physical exercise. After throwing the hand-grenades, they took out two knives and attacked some of the injured policemen before they could be over-powered and captured. Fourteen police guards died on the spot and two others succumbed to their injuries subsequently. According to one report, the terrorists tried to slit the throats of the injured police guards before they were overpowered. It was not an attack of suicide terrorism. The terrorists did not try to kill themselves before they were overpowered and arrested.

2. The Kashgar area has been in a state of ferment since July 9, 2008, when the Chinese authorities announced the public execution of two Uighurs whose names (Chinese version, not their original ethnic names) were given out by them as Muheteer Setiwalidi and Abdulwaili Yiming after they had been convicted by a Kashgar court on November 9, 2007, on charges of separatist activities, attending a terrorist training camp and manufacturing explosives. According to the announcement, the court had awarded three other Uighurs suspended death sentences and sentenced 12 other Uighurs to various terms of imprisonment. All of them were accused of being members of the Islamic Movement of East Turkestan (IMET). They were reported to have joined the IMET in August 2005 and were arrested by the Police in January, 2007. The public announcement of the sentences awarded to the 17 Uighurs came a day after the police of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, forcibly entered a flat to arrest 15 Uighurs, who were also projected as members of the IMET. Five of them were killed by the police when they allegedly resisted arrest. The Chinese also ordered the closure of 40 mosques in Xinjiang on the ground that they had been started illegally.

3.The Chinese authorities have not yet revealed the identities of the two terrorists who carried out the attack of August 4. They are presumed to be Uighurs, but normally the Uighurs do not follow the modus operandi of slitting the throats of their victims. This is the typical MO of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU),the Islamic Jihad Union (IMU), another Uzbeck organisation, and the Pakistani terrorist organisations as well as of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

4. The attacked border post was near the border with Tajikistan. The two terrorists are suspected to have infiltrated into the area from Tajikistan. The IMET, which is the main organisation of the anti-Beijing Uighurs, the IMU, the IJU and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) of Pakistan had operated in the bordering areas of Tajikistan in the past. Before 9/11, the HUJI used to have a training camp in Tajikistan for training recruits from Xinjiang and the Central Asian Republics.

5. In January,2008, the Ministry of Public Security had claimed to have neutralised an Uighur sleeper cell in Urumqi. This was followed on March 7, 2008, by an aborted attempt by three Uighurs---one of them a woman--- to blow up a civil aviation plane going from Urumqi to Beijing with the help of gasoline concealed inside a soft drink can, which had been smuggled into the plane. The attempt was thwarted by alert security guards on board the plane. The fact that the airport security at Urumchi allowed the can to be carried---- when all over the world there is a ban on such cans and bottles being carried--- spoke poorly of the physical security at some Chinese airports,

6. The 'News" of Pakistan reported online on March 21, 2008, that two of the suspects arrested---- a woman and a man--- travelled with Pakistani passports. The woman was described as an Uighur living in Pakistan and trained in a Pakistani jihadi camp and the man as a Central Asian (Uzbeck?). The third person, who escaped, but was subsequently arrested, was described as a Pakistani, who had masterminded the plot. The meagre facts given out by the Chinese authorities about the thwarted plot indicated deficiencies in the physical security set-up in China. It is such deficiencies, which the jihadi terrorists wanting to disrupt the Olympics will exploit.

7. There was a demonstration against the Chinese authorities at Khotan in the Xinjiang province on March 23, 2008. About 1,000 Uighurs, including many women, participated in the demonstration. The protest was triggered off by two events. Firstly, the alleged death in the custody of the Ministry of Public Security of Mutallip Hajim, a wealthy jade trader and popular philanthropist, who had been arrested on a charge of belonging to the sleeper cell discovered in January, 2008. Secondly, the anger of the local women over a long-standing order banning women from wearing scarves over their heads. Many of the Uighur women, who participated in the demonstration, defiantly covered their heads with scarves. According to a statement from the Khotan government in the Xinjiang region, "extremist forces" tried to incite an uprising in a local market place on March 23. "A small number of elements... tried to incite splittism, create disturbances in the market place and even trick the masses into an uprising," an official statement issued by the authorities said. It added: "Our police immediately intervened to prevent this and are dealing with it in accordance with the law." The local authorities undertook house-to-house searches in the area looking for extremist suspects. Over 100 Uighur Muslims were detained for interrogation.

8.The fact that the two terrorists could mount the attack on August 4 despite the round-up of over a hundred suspected Uighur militants by the Chinese Police since the beginning of this year underlines the continuing weaknesses of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, which is responsible for internal intelligence, The Ministry was taken by surprise in Tibet in March when there was a revolt by Tibetan monks and youth. Now, it has been taken by surprise by the Uighur terrorist strike. Its continuing weaknesses should be a matter of concern to the organisers of the Olympics.

 

[ajtr]

India's Stake in Afghanistan​

In the last two years, there has been non-stop coverage in the media and in the diplomatic circles about Bosnia, but very little about the happenings in Afghanistan. From the angle of ethnic conflict, both represent a dimension which needs to be fully grasped while from the strategic point of view, Afghanistan's historical importance is unmatched.

For a century-and-a-half, Afghanistan has been the battleground of rival Great Powers, so much so that the moves and the counter-moves between Russia and Britain had come to be known as the Great Game. Diplomatic, political and military moves on the part of London and St Petersburg converged, to a considerable extent, upon Afghanistan. And both these great powers of the time had designs to capture Afghanistan, at least so manage that the country did not come under its rival. The British made three military attempts to capture Afghanistan, but failed as they could not overcome the fierce spirit of autonomy on the part of the major tribes which refused to permit any power to dominate over their country. For both, Afghanistan was the key area. Whoever conquered Afghanistan, the road to Delhi would be open. And on the other side, from Kabul to Tashkent and beyond, into the heart of the Czarist Empire would have been open.

When the Czarist Empire fell in 1917 and the Bolsheviks under Lenin captured power, the importance of Afghanistan did not diminish. The British, as the leading imperial power at the time, played the foremost role in the protracted war of intervention waged by the Western powers together against the new Soviet state as part of the crusade against Communism. Operations, both open and sub rosa, against the arrival of the Bolshevik power into Central Asia was conducted mainly from Delhi, at that time and key regional base of Britain's imperial exploits raging all the way from Suez to Shanghai. Well-known figures in the Political Department of the Raj in Delhi like Sir Francis Younghusband, Col. Bailey and Sir Olaf Caroe all worked from their base in India. For Afghanistan, particularly active was Sir Olaf Caroe, as his interventions were directed against Central Asia where he stirred up the regional tribal leaders and mullahs against the new regime in Moscow. It may be worth recalling that one of Caroe's trusted lieutenants was Iskander Mirza, who later on overthrow the democratic regime in Pakistan in the late fifties and established the military dictatorship. Incidentally, Caroe dedicated his book on Pathans to Iskander Mirza.

At the end of World War II, when the British had to quit the subcontinent and the independent states of India and Pakistan were formed, the Great Game took a new turn. The British openly admitted their inability to lead the Great Game against the Soviet Union. In the international sphere, London openly became the subservient junior partner of Washington. Sir Olaf Caroe personally went to Washington and handed over his entire dossier on Central Asia to the US authorities, as by the terms of the Cold War, the leadership role of the anti-Soviet coalition passed on to the USA.

It was in this changed context that the importance of Pakistan became crucial in the geo-strategic map of the US. President Eisenhower offered the Mutual Security Pact to Pakistan in 1954—a landmark for which Nehru accused the USA for bringing the Cold War to this part of the world. Followed Pakistan's participation in CENTO and SEATO. The military alliances of the USA had their domestic impact. Within two years of the 1954 military accord with the US, Pakistan witnessed the end of its First Republic and the military takeover, first under Iskander Mirza, followed by General Ayub Khan.

It is important to note here that more than any alliance on the civilian side, the link-up between the Pentagon and the CIA on one side and the Pakistan military junta on the other became an abiding feature of this relationship. And for its external operations, the responsibility was mainly placed on the so-called Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan which has throughout been working as an extended arm of the Pentagon and the CIA, an arrangement which has by no means ceased with the end of the Cold War or been affected by the vagaries of the US-Pak relations on the political front.

Pakistan's importance in the US geo-strategic map was enhanced with the worsening crisis in Afghanistan. After three years of hide-and-seek within the political spectrum of Afghanistan, the two superpowers came out openly for the capture of the country itself. The Soviet military intervention into Afghanistan in December 1979 immediately touched off the US counter-move. Brezezinski as the head of President Carter's National Security outfit rushed to Pakistan and went up to the Afghan border and instantly decided on a massive supply of arms and financial aid to Pakistan on the plea of building up resistance to the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan. The Afghan mujahideen groups were stationed in Pakistan, and the ISI took charge of training and directing the armed Afghan guerillas with the full backing of the USA. It was in this period during General Ziaul Haq's presidency that the ISI as the extended arm of Washington was really consolidated as a parallel autonomous establishment to the Pakistan Government.

One of the first signs of the end of the Cold War could be seen in Afghanistan when the Russian troops pulled out in 1989. Then came the real test of the ISI. A smooth take-over by a mujahideen coalition did not follow. To cut the story short, the situation became precarious as diverse contending tribal coalitions ranged against one another. The American dream of a subservient Afghanistan acting as its intelligence-cum-intervention station against the turbulence in Central Asia with the collapse of the USSR has not materialised, nor can Afghanistan today be regarded as a convenient base for US operations against Iran, which is today Washington's Number One target in the Gulf region.

The ISI calculations that its trusted forces under Hekmatyar would be able to capture power in Kabul ended up in a fiasco. So, a new regrouping of ISI-led forces has taken place under the brand name of Taliban. It is the ISI-directed Taliban which has been carrying on a full-scale war against the mujahideen leader Rabbani's government in Kabul. Even if Rabbani's forces fall, the Taliban can hardly take over the entire Afghanistan, as the forces in the North and the West would not permit a regime which depended on Pakistan.

It is the present phase of the Afghan war, which directly brings out the commonality of interests between India and Afghanistan. It is now widely acknowledged in India and abroad that the armed secessionism in Kashmir is being directed by the ISI, more than any other elements in Pakistan. And it is the same ISI which is directing the Taliban operation against the government in Kabul. If the ISI wins in Afghanistan, it will have more effective political control within Pakistan and its military intervention in the Kashmir Valley will be stepped up. Therefore, whenever New Delhi raises the question of armed terrorism from across the border into Kashmir, it has to remind itself and the world that the very same force—the ISI—is conducting military intervention in Afghanistan. This linkage between Kashmir and Afghanistan needs to be stressed by our government and political parties whenever they talk about foreign intervention into Kashmir. And who backs the common bandit force, the ISI?

Since the ISI admittedly owes its origin and survival most decisively to the patronage it enjoys from the Pentagon and the CIA, it would be short-sighted not to face the reality; it is imperative that the real face of the ISI is shown up as the common enemy of Afghanistan, Kashmir and the democratic forces within Pakistan.

 

[ajtr]

India in the World Order
By Baldev Raj Nayar, T. V. Paul

Two highly regarded scholars come together to examine India's relationship with the world's major powers and its own search for a significant role in the international system. Central to the argument is Indiaas belief that the acquisition of an independent nuclear capability is key to obtaining such status. The book details the major constraints at the international, domestic and perceptual levels that India has faced in this endeavor. It concludes, through a detailed comparison of India's power capabilities, that India is indeed a rising power, but that significant systemic and domestic changes will be necessary before it can achieve its goal. The book examines the prospects and implications of India's integration into the major-power system in the twenty-first century. Given recent developments, the book is extremely timely. Its incisive analysis will be illuminating for students, policy makers, and for anyone wishing to understand the region in greater depth.

India in the World Order: Searching for Major-Power Status​

India in the World Order: Searching for Major-Power Status. By Baldev Raj Nayar and T.V. Paul. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003. 291 pages. $60.00 ($22.00 paper). Reviewed by Dr. Amer Latif, Deputy Director, Operations, Joint Warfare Analysis Center (JWAC) and adjunct professor with Mary Washington College, Fredericksburg, Va.

Over the past two decades, India has been touted as the next major rising power that cannot be ignored by the international community. We are told by scholars and Indian policymakers that India is knocking on the door of the exclusive club of states that comprise the major powers (US, PRC, Russia, UK, France). Despite a number of indicators that seem to indicate India's impending status as a major power, however, there are reasons why India has not achieved this status. This new book by Baldev Nayar and T.V. Paul, two prominent South Asia scholars at McGill University, explains why India has fallen short of its aspiration to join this collection of states. The authors begin their discussion with an examination of how India stacks up among the major powers--the United States, China, Russia, the United Kingdom, and France. In this respect, India presents a mixed picture. Although India lags in economic and military power, India does have a substantial population growth rate vis-a-vis the other major powers, except China.

Nayar and Paul assert that in terms of the various measures of "hard power"--military strength, economy, technology, and demographics--India has promising potential for the future. India's military is trying to improve its power-projection capabilities through the development of several variants of the Agni missile that will increase its reach to various parts of Asia. Additionally, India has been improving its conventional capabilities in the areas of air and sea power, albeit haltingly. However, the authors are on shaky ground with their assessment when they appear to equate the accumulation of arms with the effective exercise of military capability. India has traditionally had difficulties in conducting joint military operations and projecting power beyond its region with conventional forces. One could question whether India's military is on a trajectory to become a military worthy of a major power anytime soon. The authors believe that India appears to be on its way to becoming one of the leading economies by the middle of the 21st century. However, slow internal privatization reforms, sustaining a healthy rate of growth, and an inability to capture a larger share of global trade will harm India's ability to become a significant economic power. India's staggering poverty and its dismal performance on UN development indicators are also issues that Indian policymakers must address.

Technologically, India has made substantial gains in some areas, while in others it lags behind. India has developed high-end technology for space and nuclear capabilities, but has neglected low-end technology for addressing some of its most pressing social problems. The authors also believe that the nation's growing population, combined with the projected population decline of many industrialized states, will increase the demand for Indian labor abroad. Curiously, Nayar and Paul neglect to discuss the AIDS problem in India and its effect on Indian aspirations for major-power status. A recent National Intelligence Council study identified India (along with Russia and China) as one of the states where the next AIDS epidemic could occur. Such an epidemic could undermine the elements of hard power discussed above.

As far as soft power is concerned, India has an uneven record in exercising resources such as international institutional power, state capacity, strategic vision, and national leadership. Although India does project a robust worldwide cultural influence in a number of areas, the other elements of soft power will have to mature rapidly in order to keep pace with the development of India's hard-power resources.

India also has encountered a number of other obstacles in its bid to become a major power. At the systemic level, for example, the authors believe that major powers such as the United States and China do not wish to see the emergence of growing powers such as India for fear that it may upset the established system of power. India's domestic constraints also have hindered its ability to obtain a key leadership role in the world. Indian economic growth has been hindered by many factors such as autarkic economic policies, lack of emphasis on education, and neglect of infrastructure. Despite a drive toward privatization in the late 1980s, reforms have been slow and have not produced the expected growth. Social factors also hinder India's progress, with high rates of illiteracy and a lack of basic social services in many areas. Cultural factors also are obstacles for India as it struggles with issues of caste, communal relations, and the treatment of women in its society. Unfortunately the authors have forgotten the paradigm that what usually makes a state powerful is by being strong at home before being strong abroad. The authors are less than convincing in making the case that major powers such as the United States and China have been the main obstacles to India achieving its rightful place in the world. The book provides the reader with a good historical account of India's foreign policy odyssey over five decades. Although India does have significant potential to achieve major-power status, it must first overcome the obstacles at home before tackling the obstacles abroad.

 

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Text of the 1907 Romanes Lecture on the subject of FRONTIERS by Lord Curzon of Kedleston, Viceroy of India (1898-1905) and British Foreign Secretary 1919-24)​

Part 1

WHEN, at the end of December, 1905, the then Vice-Chancellor asked me to be the Romanes Lecturer in the following year, just after my return from India, I felt that the honour was one which it was impossible for me, as a devoted son of this ancient and illustrious University, to decline. But when he informed me that the entire field of Science, Literature, and Art was at my disposal for the choice of a subject, and that among my many predecessors were to be found the great names of Gladstone, Huxley, and John Morley, I was more appalled at my temerity in venturing to tread in their footsteps than I was gratified at the almost illimitable range that was opened to my ambition. In these circumstances, I concluded that my best course would be to select some topic of which I had personal experience, and upon which I could, without presumption, address even this famous and learned University. I chose the subject of Frontiers. It happened that a large part of my younger days had been spent in travel upon the boundaries of the British Empire in Asia, which had always exercised upon me a peculiar fascination. A little later, at the India Office and at the Foreign Office, I had had official cognizance of a period of great anxiety, when the main sources of diplomatic preoccupation, and sometimes of international danger, had been the determination of the Frontiers of the Empire in Central Asia, in every part of Africa, and in South America. Further, I had just returned from a continent where I had been responsible for the security and defence of a Land Frontier 5,700 miles in length, certainly the most diversified, the most important, and the most delicately poised in the world; and I had there, as Viceroy, been called upon to organize, and to conduct the proceedings of, as many as five Boundary Commissions.
I was the more tempted to undertake this task because I had never been able to discover, much less to study, its literature. It is a remarkable fact that, although Frontiers are the chief anxiety of nearly every Foreign Office in the civilized world, and are the subject of four out of every five political treaties or conventions that are now concluded, though as a branch of the science of government Frontier policy is of the first practical importance, and has a more profound effect upon the peace or warfare of nations than any other factor, political or economic, there is yet no work or treatise in any language which, so far as I know, affects to treat of the subject as a whole. Modern works on geography realize with increasing seriousness the significance of political geography; and here in this University, so responsive to the spirit of the age, where I rejoice to think that a School of Geography has recently been founded, it is not likely to escape attention. A few pages are sometimes devoted to Frontiers in compilations on International Law, and here and there a Frontier officer relates his experience before learned societies or in the pages of a magazine. But with these exceptions there is a practical void. You may ransack the catalogues of libraries, you may search the indexes of celebrated historical works, you may study the writings of scholars, and you will find the subject almost wholly ignored. Its formulae are hidden in the arcana of diplomatic chancelleries; its documents are embedded in vast and forbidding collections of treaties; its incidents and what I may describe as its incomparable drama are the possession of a few silent men, who may be found in the clubs of London, or Paris, or Berlin, when they are not engaged in tracing lines upon the unknown areas of the earth.

FRONTIERS IN HISTORY

And yet I would invite you to pause and consider what Frontiers mean, and what part they play in the life of nations. I will not for the moment go further back than a century. It was the adoption of a mistaken Frontier policy that brought the colossal ambitions of the great Napoleon with a crash to the ground. The allied armies might never have entered Paris had the Emperor not held out for an impossible Frontier for France. The majority of the most important wars of the century have been Frontier wars. Wars of religion, of alliances, of rebellion, of aggrandisement, of dynastic intrigue or ambition - wars in which the personal element was often the predominant factor - tend to be replaced by Frontier wars, i.e. wars arising out of the expansion of states and kingdoms, carried to a point, as the habitable globe shrinks, at which the interests or ambitions of one state come into sharp and irreconcilable collision with those of another.
To take the experience of the past half-century alone. The Franco-German War was a war for a Frontier, and it was the inevitable sequel of the Austro-Prussian campaign of 1866, which, by destroying the belt of independent states between Prussia and her Rhenish provinces, had brought her up to the doors of France. The campaign of 1866 was itself the direct consequence of the war of 1864 for the recovery by Germany of the Frontier Duchies of Schleswig-Holstein. The Russo-Turkish War originated in a revolt of the Frontier States, and every Greek war is waged for the recovery of a national Frontier. We were ourselves at war with Afghanistan in 1839, and again in 1878, we were on the verge of war with Russia in 1878, and again in 1885, over Frontier incidents in Asia. The most arduous struggle in which we have been engaged in India in modern times was waged with Frontier tribes. Had the Tibetans respected our Frontiers, we should never have marched three years ago to Lhasa. Think, indeed, of what the Indian Frontier Problem, as it is commonly called, has meant and means; the controversies it has provoked, the passions it has aroused; the reputations that have flashed or faded within its sinister shadow. Japan came to blows with China over the Frontier-state of Korea; she found herself gripped in a life-and-death struggle with Russia because of the attempt of the latter to include Manchuria within the Frontiers of her political influence. Great Britain was on the brink of a collision with France over the Frontier incident of Fashoda; she advanced to Khartoum not to avenge Gordon, but to defend an imperilled and to recover a lost Frontier. Only the other day the Algeciras Conference was sitting to determine the degree to which the possession of a contiguous Frontier gave France the right to exercise a predominant influence in Morocco. But perhaps a more striking illustration still is that of Great Britain and America. The two occasions on which in recent times (and there are earlier examples [1]) the relations between these two allied and fraternal peoples - conflict between whom would be a hideous crime - have been most perilously affected, have both been concerned with Frontier disputes - the Venezuelan and the Alaskan Boundary.

The most urgent work of Foreign Ministers and Ambassadors, the foundation or the outcome of every entente cordiale, is now the conclusion of Frontier Conventions in which sources of discord are removed by the adjustment of rival interests or ambitions at points where the territorial borders adjoin. Frontiers are indeed the razor's edge on which hang suspended the modern issues of war or peace, of life or death to nations. Nor is this surprising. Just as the protection of the home is the most vital care of the private citizen, so the integrity of her borders is the condition of existence of the State. But with the rapid growth of population and the economic need for fresh outlets, expansion has, in the case of the Great Powers, become an even more pressing necessity. As the vacant spaces of the earth are filled up, the competition for the residue is temporarily more keen. Fortunately, the process is drawing towards a natural termination. When all the voids are filled up, and every Frontier is defined, the problem will assume a different form. The older and more powerful nations will still dispute about their Frontiers with each other; they will still encroach upon and annex the territories of their weaker neighbours; Frontier wars will not, in the nature of things, disappear. But the scramble for new lands, or for the heritage of decaying States, will become less acute as there is less territory to be absorbed and less chance of doing it with impunity, or as the feebler units are either neutralized, or divided, or fall within the undisputed Protectorate of a stronger Power. We are at present passing through a transitional phase, of which less disturbed conditions should be the sequel, falling more and more within the ordered domain of International Law.

The illustrations which I have given, and which might easily be multiplied, will be sufficient to indicate the overwhelming influence of Frontiers in the history of the modern world. Reference to the past will tell a not substantially different tale. In our own country how much has turned upon the border conflict between England and Scotland and between England and Wales? In Ireland the ceaseless struggle between those within and those outside the Pale has left an ineffaceable mark on the history and character of the people. Half the warfare of the European continent has raged round the great Frontier barriers of the Alps and Pyrenees, the Danube and the Rhine. The Roman Empire, nowhere so like to our own as in its Frontier policy and experience - a subject to which I shall have frequent occasion to revert - finally broke up and perished because it could not maintain its Frontiers intact against the barbarians.

I wonder, indeed, if my hearers at all appreciate the part that Frontiers are playing in the everyday history and policy of the British Empire. Time was when England had no Frontier but the ocean. We have now by far the greatest extent of territorial Frontier of any dominion in the globe. In North America we have a Land Frontier of more than 3,000 miles with the United States. In India we have Frontiers nearly 6,000 miles long with Persia, Russia, Afghanistan, Tibet, China, Siam, and France. In Africa we have Frontiers considerably over 12,000 miles in length with France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and the Congo State, not to mention our Frontiers with native states and tribes. These Frontiers have to be settled, demarcated, and then maintained. We commonly speak of Great Britain as the greatest sea-power, forgetting that she is also the greatest land-power in the Universe. Not much is heard of this astonishing development in Parliament; I suspect that even in our Universities it is but dimly apprehended. Nevertheless, it is the daily and hourly preoccupation of our Foreign Office, our India Office, and our Colonial Office; it is the vital concern of the greatest of our colonies and dependencies; and it provides laborious and incessant employment for the keenest intellects and the most virile energies of the Anglo-Saxon race.

My main difficulty is not how to deal with such a topic adequately, but how to deal with it in the compass of an academic lecture. As my investigations have progressed, I have seen the horizon expand before me, until it has appeared to embrace all history, the greater part of geography, and a good deal of jurisprudence. I have alternately seen my Essay swell into a volume, and have contemplated reducing that volume into a tabloid for passing consumption in this theatre. It is obviously impossible for me to treat of Frontiers in the space of an hour or of many hours; on the other hand I have found neither the leisure nor the health to write the volume which at one time I had in view. The result must be a compromise. Large portions of my subject, and indeed of my manuscript, must be ignored today. Before my Essay assumes a final form, I hope that it may acquire a character more in consonance with the magnitude and the unity of the theme.

I will not pause to dilate upon the obvious truisms that lie at the threshold of my subject. The influence of region upon race, and the correlative influence of race upon region, are speculations belonging to the wider subject of which Frontiers are only a part. That a country with easily recognized natural boundaries is more capable of defence and is more assured of a national existence than a country which does not possess those advantages; that a country with a sea Frontier, such as the British Isles, particularly if she also possesses sea-power, is in a stronger position than a country which only has land Frontiers and requires a powerful army to defend them; that a mountain-girt country is the most secure of internal States - these are the commonplaces of political geography. More pertinent is it to say in passing that in the study of such a subject as ours, we must be very careful not to generalize too hastily as to the influence of physical agencies, either upon character or action: for the Same causes are apt to produce very different results in different places or at different times. There is a passage, for instance, in an English poet which typifies that I mean. Cowper wrote in 'The Task (Book II)

Lands intersected by a narrow forth
Abhor each other. Mountains interposed
Make enemies of nations who had else
Like kindred drops been mingled into one.

Many instances can doubtless be found in which both these propositions are true. The intervention of a narrow forth has certainly been one of the main causes of the inveterate estrangement of the English and the Irish: it has been largely responsible for the conventional hostility between England and France. But quite as many instances can be found in which the peoples on two sides of a strait or narrow sea have been on friendly terms. The generalization about mountains is equally unscientific. Nor is the inverse in either case any truer, viz. that States which are not separated from each other, either by narrow seas or by mountains, are therefore naturally friends. The fact is that in all such cases a great many causes are at work, of which geographical position or environment is but one. A safer procedure is that of deduction only from established facts. Macaulay, in his 'Frederick the Great', wrote in his pictorial manner, but with incontrovertible truth:

Some states have been enabled by their geographical position to defend themselves with advantage against immense forces. The sea has repeatedly protected England against the fury of the whole Continent. The Venetian Government, driven from its possessions on the land, could still bid defiance to the Confederacy of Cambray from the arsenal amid the lagoons. More than one great and well appointed army, which regarded the shepherds of Switzerland as an easy prey, has perished in the passes of the Alps.

Here the philosophy of Frontiers is demonstrated by concrete facts.

 

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Maps From Caroes book

If one looks at the Caroe's seven theaters jgp, the Middle East impacts four theaters. After the oil crisis of the 70s, and the Iraq wars it impacts all the theaters. Again after collapse of FSU theater 7 dominates every other theater.
Next see the countries in theater 4. Now it explains Cawthorn's role in ISI. He was hedging for his country.

This map is a key to understanding world news even now.

Unfortunately Indian thinking is limited, as Alberuni was saying, to only the confines of the borders of India let alone the frontiers or the theater it is situated in.
The other chart shows the area of influence for India and 'near abroad'. Again note the countries. But even this has changed with golablization and has spread beyond the areas envisaged by Caroe.

The idea of these charts is to stimulate Indian thinking beyond what has been the norm since 1947.

**courtesy Ramna