India and geostrategy

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U.S. Is Said to Expand Secret Actions in Mideast​

WASHINGTON — The top American commander in the Middle East has ordered a broad expansion of clandestine military activity in an effort to disrupt militant groups or counter threats in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and other countries in the region, according to defense officials and military documents. The secret directive, signed in September by Gen. David H. Petraeus, authorizes the sending of American Special Operations troops to both friendly and hostile nations in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa to gather intelligence and build ties with local forces. Officials said the order also permits reconnaissance that could pave the way for possible military strikes in Iran if tensions over its nuclear ambitions escalate.

While the Bush administration had approved some clandestine military activities far from designated war zones, the new order is intended to make such efforts more systematic and long term, officials said. Its goals are to build networks that could "penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy" Al Qaeda and other militant groups, as well as to "prepare the environment" for future attacks by American or local military forces, the document said. The order, however, does not appear to authorize offensive strikes in any specific countries.

In broadening its secret activities, the United States military has also sought in recent years to break its dependence on the Central Intelligence Agency and other spy agencies for information in countries without a significant American troop presence.

General Petraeus's order is meant for small teams of American troops to fill intelligence gaps about terror organizations and other threats in the Middle East and beyond, especially emerging groups plotting attacks against the United States.

But some Pentagon officials worry that the expanded role carries risks. The authorized activities could strain relationships with friendly governments like Saudi Arabia or Yemen — which might allow the operations but be loath to acknowledge their cooperation — or incite the anger of hostile nations like Iran and Syria. Many in the military are also concerned that as American troops assume roles far from traditional combat, they would be at risk of being treated as spies if captured and denied the Geneva Convention protections afforded military detainees.

The precise operations that the directive authorizes are unclear, and what the military has done to follow through on the order is uncertain. The document, a copy of which was viewed by The New York Times, provides few details about continuing missions or intelligence-gathering operations.

Several government officials who described the impetus for the order would speak only on condition of anonymity because the document is classified. Spokesmen for the White House and the Pentagon declined to comment for this article. The Times, responding to concerns about troop safety raised by an official at United States Central Command, the military headquarters run by General Petraeus, withheld some details about how troops could be deployed in certain countries.

The seven-page directive appears to authorize specific operations in Iran, most likely to gather intelligence about the country's nuclear program or identify dissident groups that might be useful for a future military offensive. The Obama administration insists that for the moment, it is committed to penalizing Iran for its nuclear activities only with diplomatic and economic sanctions. Nevertheless, the Pentagon has to draw up detailed war plans to be prepared in advance, in the event that President Obama ever authorizes a strike.

"The Defense Department can't be caught flat-footed," said one Pentagon official with knowledge of General Petraeus's order.

The directive, the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force Execute Order, signed Sept. 30, may also have helped lay a foundation for the surge of American military activity in Yemen that began three months later.

Special Operations troops began working with Yemen's military to try to dismantle Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an affiliate of Osama bin Laden's terror network based in Yemen. The Pentagon has also carried out missile strikes from Navy ships into suspected militant hideouts and plans to spend more than $155 million equipping Yemeni troops with armored vehicles, helicopters and small arms.

Officials said that many top commanders, General Petraeus among them, have advocated an expansive interpretation of the military's role around the world, arguing that troops need to operate beyond Iraq and Afghanistan to better fight militant groups.

The order, which an official said was drafted in close coordination with Adm. Eric T. Olson, the officer in charge of the United States Special Operations Command, calls for clandestine activities that "cannot or will not be accomplished" by conventional military operations or "interagency activities," a reference to American spy agencies.

While the C.I.A. and the Pentagon have often been at odds over expansion of clandestine military activity, most recently over intelligence gathering by Pentagon contractors in Pakistan and Afghanistan, there does not appear to have been a significant dispute over the September order.

A spokesman for the C.I.A. declined to confirm the existence of General Petraeus's order, but said that the spy agency and the Pentagon had a "close relationship" and generally coordinate operations in the field.

"There's more than enough work to go around," said the spokesman, Paul Gimigliano. "The real key is coordination. That typically works well, and if problems arise, they get settled."

During the Bush administration, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld endorsed clandestine military operations, arguing that Special Operations troops could be as effective as traditional spies, if not more so.

Unlike covert actions undertaken by the C.I.A., such clandestine activity does not require the president's approval or regular reports to Congress, although Pentagon officials have said that any significant ventures are cleared through the National Security Council. Special Operations troops have already been sent into a number of countries to carry out reconnaissance missions, including operations to gather intelligence about airstrips and bridges.

Some of Mr. Rumsfeld's initiatives were controversial, and met with resistance by some at the State Department and C.I.A. who saw the troops as a backdoor attempt by the Pentagon to assert influence outside of war zones. In 2004, one of the first groups sent overseas was pulled out of Paraguay after killing a pistol-waving robber who had attacked them as they stepped out of a taxi.

A Pentagon order that year gave the military authority for offensive strikes in more than a dozen countries, and Special Operations troops carried them out in Syria, Pakistan and Somalia.

In contrast, General Petraeus's September order is focused on intelligence gathering — by American troops, foreign businesspeople, academics or others — to identify militants and provide "persistent situational awareness," while forging ties to local indigenous groups.

Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

 

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Geopolitics with Chinese Characteristics​

The emergence of a new power has often profoundly shifted the geopolitical landscape and caused considerable discomfort among the established order. China's current economic and political resurgence is doing that, but apart from the inevitable uncertainty and tension associated with any shift in global power, much of the angst in China's case stems from its failure to engage in behavior concomitant with its increased global responsibilities -- or even to acknowledge an obligation to do so.

China's rise may be unique, for it has ascended rapidly onto the global stage by virtue of its total economic might even as it retains characteristics of a developing country by GDP per capita. China seems to want it both ways -- it plays geopolitical power games as a force to be reckoned with among equals, yet declines to shoulder the burdens of a great power, or even demands to be afforded the benefits due to an underdeveloped charity case. In this regard, China's leadership often appears schizophrenic, nursing a profound grievance against "colonialists" and "aggressors" as it expands its direct political and economic influence across the globe. China's rulers show bravado when on the world stage, but seem deeply paranoid that their rule at home could all fall apart at any time.

While China's public pronouncements may at times appear mercurial, they are more likely part of a well-conceived strategy. On one hand, China seeks to leverage benefits consistent with being a developing country, plays upon the west's historical guilt over colonialism, and exploits the west's continued belief that economic development will inexorably lead to pluralism. On the other hand, it does not hesitate to attempt to parlay its growing power into influence whenever and wherever it can. This Janus-like strategy gives China leeway and flexibility in crafting its international political and economic policy.

At home, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has established Socialism with Chinese characteristics, or, less euphemistically, state capitalism. State capitalism typically involves state powers using markets to create wealth, while ensuring political survival of the ruling class. As a government that now presides over the third (soon to be second) largest economy in the world -- and one that depends intimately on flows of international goods and capital -- the CCP no longer simply practices state capitalism at home: it applies it globally.

Although the west has long played mercantilist games, it has gradually migrated toward the belief that liberalization of international markets is mutually beneficial for all countries. But China continues to see international economics as a zero-sum game. It finds its developing status a convenient cloak and justification for the application of global state capitalism. It engages in beggar-thy-neighbor policies it deems advantageous, and distorts the world's markets according to the dictates of its political demands, while dismissing criticism of such behavior as unfair to a developing country. Similarly, on political issues, China portrays naked self interest as the reasonable demands of a developing country, and displays this behavior in nearly every arena in which it interacts with the world, from foreign aid and investment to multilateral institutions to international relations.

The undervaluation of the yuan is worth reviewing as a representative case, and points to further distortions of international markets by China's state capitalism. The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that the yuan is undervalued by between 20 and 40 percent, amounting to a massive export subsidy. However, the yuan's undervaluation may be the tip of the iceberg. As importantly, Chinese banks receive a hidden subsidy: a wide spread between the rates paid on household deposits and the rates banks charge for loans. Bankers, who are in effect state employees -- given that the banking system is largely government run -- funnel the artificially cheap money to state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Since households have no investment alternative to domestic banks, they in effect provide a huge subsidy to Chinese industry.

The CCP's state capitalism mandates growth and employment through exports and investment at all costs in order to ensure its political supremacy. One price of this systemic export subsidy is the distortion of the domestic economy in favor of export-dependent growth. Another, of course, is the distortion of the global economy resulting from China's $1.4 trillion in estimated exports this year, combined with foreign exchange reserves which will approach $3 trillion this year. Yet China refuses to acknowledge there is a serious problem. Premier Wen Jiabao recently praised the yuan's stability as "an important contribution" to global recovery, and added, "I don't think the yuan is undervalued." Wen then played his rhetorical trump card, alleging that developed countries were seeking to force unfair currency changes "just for the purposes of increasing their own exports." Wen provides insight into China's strategy when it faces legitimate international criticism by first denying that its state capitalism distorts markets (and therefore, that it is playing by different rules of the game than the west), and second, by obfuscating the issue, depicting it as one of developed countries picking on developing countries.

Even as China increases its economic presence through investment and greater influence in multilateral institutions, it continues to reap benefits intended to accrue to the world's truly needy nations. By all rights, China should be a donor nation in multilateral development banks, not a recipient of aid. That China is the Asian Development Bank's largest recipient of Bank funds really is scandalous, and comes at the cost of countries like Bangladesh and Nepal, the poorest of the poor, which truly need the resources. As of 2007, China was ranked in the top 15 of development aid recipients worldwide. But in late April of 2010, China increased its number of voting shares in the World Bank to become the third largest stakeholder, behind the U.S. and Japan. The U.S. and Japan do not receive development assistance from organizations like the World Bank -- at what point does China's absolute strength count for more than its per capita development? And why should donor countries like the U.S. and Japan allow this double standard to occur?

China continues to expand its own program of foreign aid, dubbed official development assistance (ODA), which is closely linked to its outward foreign direct investment (OFDI). Because of the scale of its ODA and OFDI, the two combine as an effective instrument of state policy. This is really no different than how foreign assistance and FDI are deployed by a plethora of other countries - such as Japan - but China's tendency is to 'bulldoze' its way into developing countries, providing cash and assistance in order to secure natural resources. China has closely dovetailed ODA with its OFDI, offering infrastructure projects, soft loans, debt relief, and grants as a package deal to resource rich countries. This projection of Chinese state power, and the frequent result (such as a tendency not to hire locals to complete construction projects and a failure to transfer knowledge from China to the recipient nation) has had negative consequences for recipient nations.

China's OFDI is relatively small, but growing at one of the fastest rates in the world. In 2008, OFDI stock amounted to just 3.5% of GDP. Since officially launching its "go global" program in 2001, China has pushed its OFDI growth rate to 116% annually from 2000-2006, compared to the average global growth rate of 6% over the same period. SOEs dominate OFDI, and more than half operate in the natural resources sector. In 2006, the top three OFDI investors were China Petrochemical Corporation (Sinopec), China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC). Strategic service sector investments to support export and import activity, such as shipping and insurance, account for the largest portion of OFDI to date. The lion's share of Chinese OFDI represents a strategic investment; acquiring firms and footholds in strategic markets and guaranteeing access to commodities necessary to fuel the country's export-oriented economy being the overriding objectives.

Politically, China is an irredentist power that arguably has done more to advance global nuclear proliferation than any other state save Pakistan, while routinely doing business with some of the world's worst governments. Apart from the issues of Taiwan and the Spratly Islands, China lays claim to much of India's state of Arunachal Pradesh, and caused major jitters in 2009 with incursions into the territory combined with strident rhetoric. It has blocked Asian Development Bank projects approved for India over the issue. It helped Pakistan develop its nuclear arsenal and ballistic missile technology. Currently, the largest recipients of Chinese military aid are India's neighbors, including Burma, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka in addition to Pakistan; India fears that China is engaged in a concerted campaign to undermine and contain it. In addition, China is rapidly developing its "string of pearls" strategy in the Indian Ocean, investing significant resources to develop deep water ports in the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Seychelles. These appear to be a basis for the projection of a powerful naval presence into what India considers its backyard.

Meanwhile, China blocks action against or actively supports a rogue's gallery of nations, among them Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. It claims it has no influence over their actions, based on its policy of non-interference, but China's support clearly requires a quid pro quo, be it natural resource wealth, business ties, or a geopolitically strategic use. China has avoided sanctions from the international community, partly due to the image it has cultivated of itself as a non-interfering developing country. While the west has also projected its power and dealt with equally noxious states, domestic political constraints make such "deals with the devil" increasingly difficult to sell to an electorate attuned to human rights, ethics, and governance.

As long as the CCP continues to govern, China will not change. It will continue to comport itself according to its zero sum vision of the world. At best, the west can hope the CCP's interests converge toward those of the larger globalized world. For the moment, even as China speaks of a peaceful rise within the existing international structure, its behavior, which at times may only be described as ruthless, belies the west's faith in its words. Indeed, the west appears to be running out of patience at China's uncompromising approach to the promotion of its own self interest. President Obama has attempted to engage China on a variety of global issues, and for the most part found that his proffered hand was met with a clenched fist. The U.S. may soon discard the illusion that China is gradually transitioning to become a responsible global power and may begin to react to China in a manner consistent with what it really is: an emerging global superpower that will stop at nothing to promote its own interests.

Stephen Goldsmith is an analyst with the International Country Risk Guide. Daniel Wagner is Managing Director of Country Risk Solutions, a Connecticut-based political and economic risk consultancy.

 

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It is time for Israel to understand the new normal​

Posted By David Rothkopf Thursday, May 20, 2010 - 5:10 PM Share

I have met Peter Beinart once or twice. While he seemed like a good guy, I was disturbed by his unsettling combination of youth and smarts. I prefer my young commentators on the rise to be more easily dismissible. Unfortunately, even when I disagree with his views, I find he's one of those voices that is hard to shrug off.

That's particularly salient at the moment given his recent piece in the New York Review of Books that has stirred up such a fuss over its (hard to deny) arguments that many among the younger generation American Jews have turned away from Zionism in part because major "pro-Israel" Jewish organizations embraced hard-line policies that were in conflict with younger Jews' "liberal" values. ("Pro-Israel" is in quotes because I find it hard to describe policies as pro-Israel that are actually in the long-term damaging to Israel... and the policies to which he refers fall into that category. "Liberal" is in quotes because I have no idea what that means anymore.)

I think Beinart is on to something. But I think it is only part of the equation. Something larger and deeper is at work here: the passage of time, specifically that potent cocktail that is the combination of history and demographic change.

Even comparatively young older folks like me and, for example, my former graduate school roommate who is now the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., were 11 or 12 when the 1967 war took place. And we and those older than us starting their careers at the time (the really grey heads today) were heavily influenced by it. (My former roommate, Mike Oren, even wrote the definitive history of the war, a truly great account.)

The story of tiny Israel, surrounded by enemies, greatly outnumbered, fighting for a haven against a world that had only two decades before completed a period of unimaginable atrocities against the Jewish people, was incredibly heroic and compelling. For my father's generation of course, Holocaust survivors and those who lived through that dark era, the story was even more trenchant and Zionism was an even more natural impulse.

Thus for the generations that have dominated the U.S. political and policy scene since the days of the Second World War through 1967 and beyond, that narrative -- Israel fighting against the odds to redress millennia of injustices -- was an inspirational subtext that not only influenced our views but colored countless news stories and government policy decisions not just in Israel but in the U.S. and elsewhere. Of course, there were many other reasons that Israel and the U.S. forged a strong alliance. Many -- like America's strategic interests in the Middle East and the need for strong allies in the context of the Cold War -- were more important than the narrative, but the narrative was very important in selling them and in explaining the U.S.-Israeli special relationship in terms that helped to justify it.

The problem for Israel and Israel's current leadership however, is that even if that old narrative seems as compelling as ever to them, it is increasingly falling on deaf ears in the United States. Indeed, it is clear that many of the problems that exist not only in the Israel-U.S. relationship at the moment but also in Israel's broader relations with the world are associated with a failure to recognize the sea-change in perceptions of Israel and its situation that has taken place.

Let me frame it in terms that are easy to understand.

When the Six Day War took place, Barack Obama was 4. He was just entering elementary school at the time of the Yom Kippur War. The first major regional conflict that could have entered his consciousness and had a major impression on him took place when he was just finishing his junior year of college. It was a year after he had gone on family trips to Indonesia, India and Pakistan. I don't say this to pander to the vile baiting of the fringe elements of American far right, but rather to help set the stage for the intellectual coming of age of the current U.S. president.

In June 1982, the First Lebanon War began. Not only was the war the first major Middle Eastern conflict of Obama's adult years, it was also the trigger for a change in how Israel was viewed internationally that has defined the past three decades. Lebanon was where Israel gave up the moral high ground in its conflict with its Arab neighbors. The massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in September 1982, although conducted by Phalangists seeking retribution for not only the assassination of the Lebanese president but also for past blows inflicted on them, were widely seen as being enabled by the Israeli troops that surrounded the camps and stood by while the massacres were taking place.

Within five years of the massacres, the Palestinian leadership initiated an extraordinarily effective strategy of confronting the Israelis via intifada, uprisings that seemed one-sided to the advantage of the Israelis militarily but were in fact, one-sided to the advantage of the Palestinians politically and strategically. Because the Palestinians recognized long before the Israelis that the balance of power in modern conflicts often lay with those who won the television war for support, those who claimed the narrative. Poor Palestinian boys throwing rocks at Israeli tanks snatched the "against-the-odds" narrative from the State of Israel and brilliantly turned it against them.

During the 1980s, as a consequence, the tide began to turn toward the Palestinians among the American left -- from academia to politicized Hollywood. (It is worth noting that if the Jews do control the media as conspiracy theorists love to suggest, they sure haven't done much to help the image of Israel over the past several decades.)

In the two decades since, a series of other developments have taken place that have transformed the U.S. political environment in terms of support for Israel and in particular in terms of support for the kind of joined-at-the-hip policies that seemed to define the relationship during the sixties, seventies and early eighties.

Each of these changes has had a profound impact which is amplified in its significance by the fact that many in the Israeli leadership seem somewhere between being baffled and in complete denial by them. They include:

The Shift from the Strategic Center, Part I: The End of the Cold War

During the '60s and '70s and '80s it was easy to make the case that America needed a strategic ally in the Middle East. Our oil came from there. It was on the southern flank of our great enemy. And that great enemy was cosy with a lot of Israel's enemies in the region. The Cold War, however, ended and as it did, Israel began to drift away from being strategically central to the United States.

The Shift from the Strategic Center, Part II: The Aftermath of 9/11

In the eyes of many Israelis, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon should have drawn the U.S. and Israel closer. But quite the opposite has happened. Because Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan become more central to the U.S., and because the U.S. put troops on the ground in those countries, we were less in need of a tiny foothold, in fact, we might be building long-term presences in those countries and in the Gulf that make Israel less important relatively speaking. Furthermore, we began to see threats from terrorists or loose nukes in Pakistan as more important to us than the Israeli-Arab tension. Indeed, as American General David Petraeus has observed-representing an increasingly popular view-America's ties to Israel and the unresolved nature of their conflict with the Palestinians may be exacerbating our problems with terrorists and potential supporters throughout the greater Middle East. Not only has our center of attention in the region shifted Eastward, our ties in Israel are seen not as an advantage re: U.S. interests there but as quite the opposite.

The Rise of Partisanship: The Curse of the Neocons and the Realist Corollary

Making matters worse is the fact that the unpopular U.S. invasion of Iraq was seen in part as the product of efforts by a small group of neocons who popular fiction has associated with advancing Israeli interests. Thus, many Democrats blame the war in Iraq on a group of people seen to be sacrificing U.S. interests to advance an Israeli agenda. Whether this is true, an exaggeration or a facile misreading of the facts, this viewpoint has helped partisanize this issue. Polling data shows that Republicans are more willing to associate themselves with strong support of Israel and Democrats are more inclined to see a change in the policies. That's not to say Israel is unpopular. It is more that Democrats increasingly seek to distinguish their policies as being more "balanced" toward Palestinians and moderate Arab states.

The American Retreat and the Advance of the BRICs

On top of the above, America is burdened by domestic economic problems and the economic as well as the human cost of the wars in the region has greatly diminished the country's appetite for further such entanglements. Indeed, the only way the president could justify adding troops in Afghanistan was promising at the same time a firm date for withdrawal. America is not going to get deeply involved in other conflicts in this part of the world if it can avoid it. The bad actors in the region know it. Do the Israelis? At the same time, as the U.S. seeks multilateral solutions for the big diplomatic problems in the region, other players are increasingly important such as the BRICs (see the Iranian issue below). They are almost universally of a school of thought that is skeptical of the Israelis and closer to the moderate Arab states in the region. Since the U.S. is disinclined to go it alone, these new players' views become much more important.

The Shift from the Strategic Center, Part III: The Iranian Nuclear Problem

Nowhere is this shift more clear than with the Iranian nuclear stand off. This is the first major conflict in the region in which the most important international player was not the U.S. but the Chinese. Why? Because if the Chinese don't go along with sanctions, there just can't be effective sanctions. They know it. We know it. And that's why there aren't sanctions today. This also means it is almost certain that Iran will end up being nearly nuclear or nuclear and that the world will be forced to accept it. Israel, anxious for years to get the U.S. to focus on Iran, may regret getting what they wished for. Because once there is a nuclear Iran, the issue becomes containment. And if that's the issue, moderate Arab states are a key part of the strategy. They'll want to go along... but they will want the U.S. to pressure Israel more on reaching a solution with the Palestinians in exchange.

Of course, Israel bears a great deal of responsibility for this. They have utterly disregarded these developments as they took place and have recklessly failed on the public diplomacy front. Today, they are perceived as the aggressor and the bias against them is so acute in the media that when Palestinians launch thousands of missiles against Israel and Israel responds, the world thinks of Israel as the aggressor or when a couple of years ago a missile threat from Lebanon provoked an effective Israeli response, world public opinion concluded both that Israel started the conflict and lost it despite the fact that neither assertion is actually true.

The Israelis are in denial and the clock is ticking. Rather than addressing the question of how to return to strategic centrality for the U.S. or how to reclaim the moral high ground in the conflict and thus win back international support, they play the settlements game, a needless and for all the above reasons, dangerous distraction from the real business at hand.

My own view is that they ought to lean into the peace process and do whatever else they must to reclaim the moral high ground and the narrative they need to underpin the strong U.S.-Israel relationship that is critical to their future. If they fear that this might me concessions that are too great to the Palestinians, I say, it is worth the risk because the alternative is eroding support at critical places in the international foundations of their security.

My sense is this is a lower risk proposition than many hard-liners might think. Because I think that ultimately the Palestinian will cede the moral and political high ground in this fairly easily given their chronic dysfunctionality. As for the issue of restoring strategic centrality, the Syrians and Hezbollah and Iran seem to be working overtime to restore the narrative that it still is tiny Israel against very hostile neighbors who seek regional hegemony rather than to redress the grievances of the poor displaced Palestinians (about whom history shows they care not at all except for what utility they may have as pawns in a greater Middle East chess game.) Lean into peace, show more restraint than is comfortable, win the battle of the Internet and the cable news networks and talk radio because that is the one that is most critical to restoring the political support of the kind Israel needs.

If you wish to argue the specifics of the preceding point, fine. But let's agree on one thing: What will be fatal is waiting and hoping for the good old days to return. Skepticism and the search for a new paradigm -- see the President's Cairo speech for clues -- are not going to retreat. Neither is time, demographic change or history. Things will not go back to normal. This is the new normal. Israel must deal with it or fall victim to it.

 

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Division Exercises​

The Shadow of the Great Game has a fascinating central argument. It situates the partition of India in a global strategic context. Sarila argues that the British had concluded that a divided India, with a Muslim state in the northwest, would serve British strategic interests much more reliably than a united India. During the waning decades of the Empire, the British became increasingly concerned about two sets of strategic interests. First, as Ernest Bevin once famously remarked, the division of India "would help to consolidate Britain in the Middle East." Second, the British were convinced that the most significant threat to their interests would come from a Russian push towards the South.

The British were also increasingly convinced that a Congress government in a united India would not serve British interests. It would be a government that would most likely be hostile to any continued British military presence in India; and it would certainly be more sympathetic to the Russians. Sarila charts with admirable detail the way in which the British came to conclude that a Congress government would not serve its strategic interests. Hence the need for a client state in the subcontinent that would be beholden to the British for their defence, would act as a possible buffer against the Russians and could potentially be a gateway to the Middle East. The British support for the idea of Pakistan was born of such calculations and it succeeded. The Baghdad Pact and later CENTO, of which Pakistan was a part, formed a barrier to Soviet ambitions in the Middle East.

It is this larger context, Sarila argues, that explains the manner in which the British orchestrated domestic politics in India. In some ways, this is a classic divide and rule story with a twist. The British helped build up Jinnah as a counter to the Congress. Jinnah served various purposes: the magnification of divisions within India served to prolong British rule against American pressure. Jinnah was also, on this view, a more amenable pawn in British hands, especially because of his insistence that a Muslim state would have to depend on the British army.

But Sarila is too politically perceptive to believe that simple conspiracy theories can explain an outcome as monumental as partition. He faults Congress tactics during the thirties that allowed Jinnah a political opening. During the forties, the resignation of Congress ministries had the double effect of convincing the British that the Congress was going to be hostile to them and leaving the field open for Jinnah. Sarila sometimes underestimates the internal momentum that was building up in Hindu- Muslim relations. Not all readers will be convinced that India's partition could have been avoided had it not been for the Great Game, but this narrative compels us to overcome simple minded views of what produced partition.

The book has four unequivocal villains: Jinnah for his singleminded, if artful, exploitation of British fears and his willingness to use any means to achieve his objective. Churchill, who in one context said to Roosevelt that in "war truth must have an escort of lies," is again relentless in his determination to divide India and uses Jinnah for this purpose. The third villain is more unusual, though Sarila's account of his motives is less convincing. Sarila argues that Wavell took an intense dislike to Congress and had already mapped out India's partition very much along the lines that Radcliffe was to draw later. But the evidence is more equivocal than Sarila suggests. For one, a lot of Wavell's dispatches, including the maps showing India's partition were more in the nature of spinning out possible scenarios than firm declaration of intent. Wavell had also famously insisted that a United Indian Army was absolutely central to ward off Russia's strategic ambitions. And the fourth minor villain is Krishna Menon whose vehement anti-Americanism drove him to play along with the British. Menon seems to have served as a virtual stooge for Mountbatten's designs.

Sarila's book has four unequivocal villains: Jinnah, Churchill, Wavell and Krishna Menon. Congress leaders come across as uncertain and vacillating Congress leaders by and large come across as uncertain and vacillating. They are neither as united or singleminded or relentless as the Jinnah-Churchill combination turned out be. Often their moralism got in the way of their better political judgement, and they were too swayed by personal affections to be much of a match for the Machiavellian juggernaut that was sweeping them off their feet. Indeed, if Sarila's evidence is anything to go by, few of them were capable of thinking strategically rather than ideologically.

One of the more fascinating under currents of this book is the way in which India refused to so much as acknowledge and take advantage of American support for India's cause. But the monumental irony is that it is difficult to imagine what compelled the British to assume that India would be hostile to their interests.

 

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Pakistan Replays the 'Great Game'​

This article is reprinted with permission from the October issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review. All rights reserved.

For over two years, Abdul Latif Hakimi regularly telephoned Pakistani and Western reporters and described himself as the spokesman for Afghanistan's Taliban. He claimed responsibility on behalf of the Taliban for several terrorist attacks. In June, when a MH-47 helicopter was shot down during an antiguerrilla mission in Afghanistan's Kunar province bordering Pakistan, killing all 16 U.S. troops on board, Hakimi reported the incident to the media before U.S. or Afghan officials. Hakimi's claims were often exaggerated or even totally fabricated. But no one doubted that he was based in Pakistan and that he spoke on behalf of the Taliban.

Hakimi's telephone press conferences and interviews, conducted on satellite and cell phones, offered an embellished version of an emerging ground reality. After being toppled from power in the aftermath of 9/11, the Taliban have reconstituted themselves in part of the Afghan countryside as an insurgent force, especially in provinces dominated by the Pashtun ethnic group along the Pakistan-Afghan border.

Since the beginning of 2005, casualties in Afghanistan have been rising. Some 84 American soldiers and 1,400 Afghans have been killed this year, more than any year since the arrival of U.S. forces in 2001. The Taliban insurgency is weak and not yet as threatening as the challenge in Iraq. But Afghan insurgents are clearly getting arms, money and training. Through propaganda of the type waged by Hakimi, the Taliban are also recruiting new members.

When Pakistani authorities announced on Oct. 4 that Hakimi had been arrested in the southwestern city of Quetta, just across the border from the Taliban's traditional support base of Kandahar, officials in Afghanistan were not impressed. Why had it taken the Pakistanis so long to silence Hakimi when he operated freely in Pakistan for over two years, they asked. What about other Taliban leaders who roam the streets of Quetta and other Pakistani cities and towns quite openly?

Pakistan's decision to arrest the Taliban spokesman was attributed to relentless U.S. pressure. Days before Hakimi's arrest, U.S. officials reportedly raised the issue of the Taliban operating freely in Pakistan during meetings with President Pervez Musharraf in New York.

U.S. officials are usually restrained in publicly criticizing Pakistan, a key U.S. ally in the war against terrorism, for fear of embarrassing the country's pro-U.S. military strong man, Gen. Musharraf. But last summer U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad questioned Pakistan's commitment to eliminating the Taliban in an interview just before leaving Afghanistan for his new assignment in Iraq. Ambassador Khalilzad wondered why Pakistan's security services could not find Hakimi and another deputy to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, Akhtar Usmani, when they were readily available to the media and occasionally gave interviews to Pakistani television channels.

U.S. and Afghan officials realize that it will be difficult to bring lasting peace to Afghanistan if the Taliban and other enemies of President Hamid Karzai's government continue to find sanctuary in Pakistan. Notwithstanding the high profile arrest of the Taliban spokesman, there is no evidence that Pakistan is about to sever all links with the Taliban or to give up its dreams of a client state in Afghanistan.

During the war against the Soviets, Pakistan's military leader General Zia ul-Haq had adopted a policy that would bleed the Soviets without goading then into direct confrontation with Pakistan. Pakistani intelligence officers used the metaphor "the water must not get too hot" to describe that policy.

It seems that Pakistan is pursuing a similar policy in relation to Afghanistan today. By allowing the Taliban to regroup and mount insurgent attacks across the border, Pakistan's hopes to make it clear to Afghan leaders such as Mr. Karzai that they cannot stabilize their country without Pakistan's help. At the same time, Pakistan does not want the situation to reach the point of inviting U.S. reprisals.

Ties between Pakistan and the Taliban date back to the founding of the movement in 1994. Then, the Taliban—Pashtun students of madrassas, or Islamic seminaries—rose to end the bitter civil war that had ravaged Afghanistan for almost two years after the collapse of a pro-Communist government. Pakistan had fueled the civil war as well, trying to promote the cause of its client Islamist leaders, especially Gulbeddin Hekmatyar, who earned notoriety by raining rockets on Kabul in a bid to wrest control of Afghanistan's capital.

Pakistan's role, with U.S. help, as the staging ground for the guerrilla war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1988 is widely known. What is less well known is Pakistan's historic concern with extending its influence into Afghanistan long before the arrival of Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Pakistan's attitude toward Afghanistan was formed largely by historic developments of the 19th century when Britain and Russia competed for influence in Central Asia in the "Great Game" of espionage and proxy wars.

Concerns about security against Russia pushed the frontier of British India westward and the British lost precious lives in their effort to directly control Afghanistan. Recognizing Afghanistan as a buffer between the British and Russian empires saved both from having to confront each other militarily. By accepting a neutral and independent Afghan Kingdom the British sought to pass on the burden of subduing some of the tribes the imperialists considered lawless to a local monarch, albeit with British economic and military assistance.

Afghanistan's frontier with British India was drawn by a British civil servant, Sir Mortimer Durand, in 1893 and agreed upon by representatives of both governments. The border, named the Durand Line, intentionally divided Pashtun tribes living in the area, to prevent them from becoming a nuisance for the Raj. On their side of the frontier, the British created autonomous tribal agencies, controlled by British political officers with the help of tribal chieftains whose loyalty was ensured through regular subsidies. The British used force to put down sporadic uprisings in the tribal areas but generally left the tribes alone in return for stability along the frontier.

Adjacent to the autonomous tribal agencies were the "settled" Pashtuns living in towns and villages under direct British rule. Here, too, the Pashtuns were divided between the Northwest Frontier province and Baluchistan. Although Muslim, the Pashtuns generally sided with the cause of anti-British Indian nationalism and were late, and reluctant, in embracing the Muslim separatism of the All India Muslim League's campaign for Pakistan. When the majority of British India's Muslims voted for the creation of Pakistan, the Pashtuns elected leaders who emphasized ethnic pride over a religious national identity.

After Pakistan's independence from Britain in 1947, Pakistani leaders assumed that Pakistan would inherit the functions of India's British government in guiding Afghan policy. But soon after Pakistan's independence, Afghanistan voted against Pakistan's admission to the United Nations, arguing that Afghanistan's treaties with British India relating to Afghan borders were no longer valid because a new country was being created where none existed at the time of these treaties. Afghanistan demanded the creation of a Pashtun state, "Pashtunistan," which would link the Pashtun tribes living in Afghanistan with those in the nwfp and Baluchistan. There were also ambiguous demands for a Baluch state "linking Baluch areas in Pakistan and Iran with a small strip of adjacent Baluch territory in Afghanistan."

From Pakistan's perspective, this amounted to demanding the greater part of Pakistan's territory and was clearly unacceptable. The Afghan demand failed to generate international backing, and Afghanistan did not have the military means to force Pakistan's hand.

Although India publicly did not support the Afghan claim, Pakistan's early leaders could not separate the Afghan questioning of Pakistani borders from their perception of an Indian grand design against Pakistan. They wanted to limit Indian influence in Afghanistan to prevent Pakistan from being "crushed by a sort of pincer movement" involving Afghanistan stirring the ethnic cauldron in Pakistan and India stepping in to undo the partition of the subcontinent. Pakistan's response was a forward policy of encouraging Afghan Islamists that would subordinate ethnic nationalism to Islamic religious sentiment.

Pakistan's concern about the lack of depth in Pakistan's land defenses led to the Pakistani generals' strategic belief about the fusion of the defense of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistan's complicated role in Afghanistan beginning well before the Soviet invasion of 1979 and through the rise and fall of the Taliban can best be understood in light of this desire.

Pakistan's position as the principal foreign player in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal changed with the arrival of American and NATO forces in the aftermath of Al-Qaeda's terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. Pakistan has recognized that changed situation, deferring a great deal to American concerns. But it has clearly not abandoned its long-term national objective of ensuring that the government in Kabul is subordinate to Pakistan's regional agenda.

Pakistan provided crucial logistics and vital intelligence support when the U.S. went to war to topple the Taliban from power. Initially, Pakistan had hoped for a role for some Pakistani clients in the new government in Kabul and had floated the idea of "moderate Taliban" joining the future Afghan government. Although Taliban leaders were completely excluded from the interim government formed in 2001, they have been allowed by President Karzai to participate in parliamentary elections upon renouncing violence.

But Mr. Karzai and other Afghan nationalists remain unwilling to accept Pakistan's vision of Afghanistan as a subordinate state. Afghanistan maintains close ties with India and expects to pursue an independent foreign policy. Although Pakistan is engaged in a peace process with India, its generals remain fearful of Indian domination. India's size coupled with its economic and military might make its ascendancy inevitable, but that does not deter Pakistan from pursuing options of low intensity and subconventional warfare for greater regional influence. The decision to continue to back or tolerate the Taliban is part of Pakistan's grand design for positioning itself as a major player in a contemporary version of the Great Game.

Pakistan will crack down on the Taliban, and give up the option of supporting Islamist insurgents in Indian-controlled Kashmir, only when it finds the cost of positioning itself as a major regional power unbearable. The U.S. could help Pakistan realize the dangers of persisting with its traditional policies by refusing to publicly pretend that it is unaware of Pakistan's regional double-dealing. An American-brokered accord between Pakistan and Afghanistan to end the latent dispute over the Durand Line, coupled with international guarantees to end Pakistan's meddling in Afghanistan, might be the minimum requirements for durable peace in the region where the 9/11 plot to attack the U.S. was hatched.

 

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Central Asia: Great Game or Graveyard?​

June 25, 2009
By Jon Haron-Feiertag, Contributor

Awash in oil and gas. Congested by the traffic of diplomats. The scene of endless intrigue. Great powers rival for influence. No this is not an essay on the Middle East but rather Central Asia. Draw a circle around the Caucasus states, the seven Stans, Turkey, and Iran and you capture much of the action in international affairs today. Could it be that the Great Game Rudyard Kipling described a century ago in Central Asia is back?

It is not hard to think why. The diplomacy of gas is itself a game of its own. Swings in allegiance, pipeline explosions, invitations to outsider powers—these are all the hallmarks of classic real politik. The contest for control and transit of gas out of Central Asia, particularly around the Caspian Sea, has come to rule regional politics. Putin made it a first priority to lock-in neighboring states, and create a Caspian gas monopoly. The targets of his policy were principally Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. Gazprom, at the behest of Russia, paid high prices to secure Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan's gas supplies. Azerbaijan held out. Now with the world economy sinking, and Russia reeling from the financial crisis, the Central Asian states are nervous Russia can't pay the high price it offered for their gas. Kazakhstan has turned toward China. Turkmenistan is in a furor, and has quickly sent negotiators to Iran and Europe to look for alternate buyers. It looks as though Putin's gas monopoly is coming undone, and a window is opening for U.S., European, and Chinese infiltration.

The gas diplomacy is exhilarating, but focus on that would only tell part of the story. The raging war in Afghanistan and Pakistan has become a feature of its own. No one knows where this war is going, or what will be the consequences in the aftermath. But it is already having major effects in the region. Pakistan's star is perceived to be receding. Other states that had been checked by Pakistan, like India and Iran, may now have an opportunity to exercise new influence. It could be that the old Pashtu policy of Pakistan will give way to the new designs of the Hindus and Persians in Asia's heartland. Be that as it may, in the near term the U.S. has been compelled to create a Central Asian policy—it never had one before. The U.S. first relied on bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan to support the Afghan War. First the Uzbeks forced the U.S. out, then followed the Kyrgyz—in exchange for Russian money. Since then the U.S. has labored hard to reacquire bases. Base agreements imply political agreements. And negotiations with Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and perhaps others, all suggest possible future allies of the US in Central Asia.

Gas and the Afghan War explain most of Central Asia's politics today. But it would be remiss to omit the Russia-Georgia War from the summer of last year. The War was swift, the military outcome decisive, but the political consequences are still uncertain. President Mikheil Saakashvili has survived in power in Georgia, despite all the efforts and intrigues of the Russians to undermine him. As a price for his defeat, two important regions in Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, were allowed to secede under Russian protection. The result was a humiliation for Georgia. The violent partition has caused Europe to recoil in horror at the thought of enlarging NATO to the Caucuses. But the consequences may be greater than just Georgian integrity. Europe's modern economy is dependent on foreign oil. States like Italy, Germany, Hungary, and Slovakia, et al, are all very reliant on gas imports. Pipelines that traverse their way through Georgia, from Azerbaijan, into Turkey, now appear a risky venture. The stakes do not only include Europe's energy independence, they also implicate the orientation of the Caucasus states and the direction of Turkey. Azerbaijan is vulnerable to Russian coercion just like Georgia. It has a mutinous district, similar to South Ossetia, under the protection of Armenian influence, a state in close alliance with Russia. Turkey has tried to negotiate a resolution to the impasse, but so far without avail. The Georgian War may have reversed the drift of these small Caucasus statelets toward the West.

Central Asia therefore is alive with politics and diplomacy. That said, does it really resemble the Great Game of yester year? The answer is, not quite. Consider a few reasons.

Then, the locus of conflict was centered in Afghanistan. The slow creep of empires had slowly brought the outer borders of the British and Russian empires into contact. The North Western Frontier, as the British named it was the main place for confrontation. The British had conquered the Sindh in 1847 and the Punjab in 1849. But the Tsar's armies were coming closer. They captured Samarkand, then Bokhara, and then Merv. The old Khanates, which had been the buffer between the two were nearly gone, only the Afghan emirate remained. India, the crown jewel of the empire, was in jeopardy. A policy of "masterly inactivity" would no longer suffice. The British took action. They first captured Quetta, then Kabul. This was the Great Game at its zenith.

The British strategy then was essentially one of denial: protect the mountain passes that lead into India; keep the Russians at bay. But the conflicts today seem to be the opposite. They are not characterized by denial so much as control—control of pipelines, control of the gas supply, control of territory against insurgents. And the conflicts are no longer centered in the Afghan emirate, they have diffused. Georgia has become a war ground. So has Pakistan.

The geopolitics are different too. The Great Game, like the Scramble for Africa, and the Far Eastern Question, were all the unintended consequence of a static peace in Europe. Bismarck had orchestrated one of the great bargains in the history of diplomacy. The Russo-Ottoman War, which ended decisively for Russia and had threatened to upset the delicate balance of power, was parlayed masterfully into a comprehensive peace. Nearly every major state of Europe received a slice of territory from the moribund Ottoman Empire—all but for France. At the Berlin Conference of 1878, Bismarck essentially fixed the map of Europe until the First World War. The ambitions of the European states were cast outward, in Africa, China, and Central Asia. That was then. Now things are different. Central Asia has not two great powers jousting for influence, but three—Russia, the US, and China. Central Asia has not had united rule since the age of Tamerlane and his Timurid Empire. The fractured politics of the region draw gas-hungry outside powers into the divide. Central Asia is not the only such place in the world, but it does possess a lot of gas.

It is interesting then to ask why some states are lured in, while others remain out. The U.S., Russia, and China clearly are large and growing players for influence in the region. But that doesn't explain why other states, like India, Iran, Turkey, and Ukraine are not. These are large and influential states within their own regions, each with history of dominance across the vast Steppes. Why not them? The reasons can only be speculative.

Indian identity has been scarred by her colonial experience. The leadership of Gandhi and Nehru both espoused that India not indulge in the vulgar imperial ambitions like those of the British. India rather should mark out a different way. She would keep herself unaligned and distant from vain-glories of empire. In any case, India has found another route to the Caspian: Iran. She has maintained the policy of content customer for Persian oil, and so far shown no desire to rule the routes herself. Why pay more when you can pay less? Besides, the conflict with Pakistan effectively checks India's influence into the region. And in the past, Pakistan has out-played India in Afghanistan.

Of course that was then, this is now. And nothing is changing today so much as the circumstances in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But even supposing the rosiest scenario, it's hard to imagine how India could leapfrog Pakistan into Central Asia.

Iran more than India is the truly odd case. Iran would seem the country most suited to rule the inner Asian oases. Why doesn't it? The Safavids and the Sassanids commanded wide swathes of Central Asia—both the Caucasus and the watersheds of the Oxus. Conquerors into Central Asia, like Alexander the Great, passed first through Persia. Conquerors out of Central Asia, like the Turks and the Mongols, made Iran their point of debut. She, before anyone seems the prime contestant for influence. Perhaps once. But Russia has affected a change of mind. Led by Peter the Great, Persia was driven from the Caucasus. Later she would lose control of Ashgabat, the last outpost before the abyss of the Karakum desert. As Russian power multiplied she was forced from the Caspian, and her northern reaches were occupied by Russian troops. Concessions, capitulations, occupations. Some Azeri districts were nearly severed from Iran at the end of the Second World War. Iranian foreign policy has been disfigured ever since. Her attention now focuses on the Gulf and Middle East. Russia it appears has permanently bent Iran away from the center of Asia.

What does it all mean? Some say the Great Game in Central Asia is a fools errand. The region has been the graveyard of empires, not the secret source of riches. It is a really a poisoned chalice, they say. These arguments have merit to them, but they are also half wrong. Britain and Russia were surely distracted by their voyage into inner Asia, but they were not ruined by it. It is doubtful states will be again. But that does not mean the intrigues and combative diplomacy are prudent, or the Great Game in Central Asia is really a game that can be won. Nevertheless the regions located at the intersection of empires eventually draw into them all the force that powerful states can deploy. The situation was similar with the Balkans at the turn of the 19th century, or the Middle East at the latter of the 20th. The stress applied by great powers is tremendous. The outcome of their efforts is often the splintering of states. Because Central Asia sits atop an ocean of oil and gas, the stakes are too high for outside ambitions to relax.

Expect the diplomacy to intensify. Already Georgia may have had to two districts carved away. Azerbaijan seems to have lost a province. Afghanistan and Pakistan look suspiciously fragile. Watch for splits in the other Stans.

 

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The New Great Game​

Why the Bush administration has embraced India.

BY DANIEL TWINING

New Delhi

Three recent events illuminate the contours and fault lines of Asia's emerging strategic landscape, amid the lengthening shadows cast by China's growing power.First, the United States and India consolidated a wide-ranging military, economic, and diplomatic partnership on December 9, when Congress passed legislation enabling U.S.-Indian civilian nuclear cooperation. Then, at a summit in Tokyo on December 15, the leaders of India and Japan declared their ambition for a strategic and economic entente between Asia's leading democracies. This stands in sharp contrast to the intensifying rivalry between India and China: Tensions over territory and Tibet simmered at a summit on November 21, where Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh's assertion that "there is enough [geopolitical] space for the two countries to develop together" sounded more like hope than conviction.

As its relationships with the United States, Japan, and China show, India has reemerged as a geopolitical swing state after decades of marginalization as a consequence of the Cold War, its own crippling underdevelopment, and regional conflict in South Asia. Although its status as a heavyweight in the globalized world of the 21st century is new, India's identity as a great power is not: It was for centuries one of the world's largest economies and, under British rule, a preeminent power in Asia. Today, a rising India flush with self-confidence from its growing prosperity is determined not to be left behind by China's economic and military ascent. "The [Indian] elephant," says an admiring Japanese official, "is about to gallop."

The United States has an enormous stake in the success of a rich, confident, democratic India that shares American ambitions to manage Chinese power, protect Indian Ocean sea lanes, safeguard an open international economy, stabilize a volatile region encompassing the heartland of jihadist extremism in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and prove to all those enamored of the Chinese model of authoritarian development that democracy is the firmest foundation for the achievement of humankind's most basic aspirations.

India is the world's biggest democracy, a nuclear power with the world's largest volunteer armed forces, and the world's second-fastest-growing major economy. Few countries will be more important to American security interests and American prosperity in the coming decades, as five centuries of Western management of the international system give way to a new economic and security order centered in the rimlands of the Indian and Pacific oceans.

India has been a factor in the global balance of power since at least 1510, when the establishment of a Portuguese trading colony at Goa broke a seven-century monopoly on the Indian Ocean spice trade by Muslim empires, unlocking the wealth of the East to European maritime states, which used it to build global empires. Possession of India propelled Britain to the peak of world power in the 19th century. "[T]he master of India," argued Britain's Lord Curzon, "must, under modern conditions, be the greatest power in the Asiatic Continent, and therefore . . . in the world."

During World War II, an Indian army under British command halted the Japanese army's relentless march across Asia, inflicting on Imperial Japan its first military defeat. India's location as an Indian Ocean and Himalayan power, its massive production of armaments, and its armed forces--which fought in Europe, North Africa, and Southeast Asia--contributed decisively to the Allied victory over the Axis powers.

Lord Curzon celebrated India's importance in The Place of India in the Empire (1909):

The central position of India, its magnificent resources, its teeming multitude of men, its great trading harbors, its reserve of military strength, supplying an army always in a high state of efficiency and capable of being hurled at a moment's notice upon any point either of Asia or Africa--all these are assets of precious value. 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 . . . it can exert great pressure upon China, and it is one of the guardians of the autonomous existence of Siam.

Possession of India gave the British Empire its global reach. Britain lost its status as a world power when it lost India.

Independent India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, shared Curzon's expansive vision, declaring India "the pivot round which the defense problems of the Middle East, the Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia revolve." Wary Chinese strategists perceive a continuity of strategic design from Curzon to the Congress party today, accusing Nehru at that time of harboring ambitions for a "greater Indian empire," and more recently criticizing India's aspirations for "global military power."

"China and India," writes the Carnegie Endowment's Ashley Tellis, "appeared destined for competition almost from the moment of their creation as modern states."

The taproots of modern Sino-Indian conflict, argues historian John Garver, are found in the overlapping claims of traditional Indian and Chinese spheres of influence in Asia, and in "conflicting nationalist narratives that lead patriots of the two sides to look to the same arenas in attempting to realize their nations' modern greatness." These conflicts create acute security dilemmas as India and China compete for influence across Central, South, and Southeast Asia, where strategic gains by one power magnify the vulnerabilities of the other.

Indian officials perceive a Chinese design to box India into its subregion, curbing India's ability to project power beyond its borders. China's 1950 invasion of Tibet, traditionally the buffer between China and British India, established the trend. Beijing maintains pressure on New Delhi by politely declining to resolve their 2,500-mile border dispute, a legacy of the 1962 Sino-Indian war. China has deployed nuclear weapons along its disputed border with India in Tibet. "The potential political and psychological impact" of nuclear-armed missiles "literally a few miles from India's border . . . cannot be underestimated," argues political scientist Amitabh Mattoo. China has refused to extend its nuclear "no first use" doctrine to include India.

China's military assistance to Pakistan, including the extensive transfer of nuclear and missile components, inflates the power of a state with which India has fought three wars, enabling Pakistan to challenge Indian primacy in South Asia. Since the 1990s, China has pursued a consistent policy of encircling India by supplying military assistance and training to its neighbors. The top three recipients of Chinese arms exports are Pakistan, Burma, and Bangladesh; China has also established military supply and exchange relationships with Nepal and Sri Lanka. China seeks to create "a string of anti-Indian influence around India" that is "designed to marginalize India in the long term," according to one Indian strategist. Prime Minister Singh laments "the desire of extraregional powers to keep us engaged in low-intensity conflicts and local problems, to weigh us down in a low-level equilibrium."

China is also expending money and manpower to construct strategic road and rail links in India's backyard. A high-altitude rail line linking Qinghai in China with Lhasa in Tibet, which began transporting Chinese military personnel in early December, reportedly features a planned southern spur leading to the disputed Sino-Indian border, enabling the rapid movement of Chinese military forces in the event of conflict. Beijing and Islamabad are conducting surveys for a rail line across the Karakoram mountains linking western China to northern Pakistan, which would tie up with Chinese-funded roads and railways leading to Pakistani ports on the Arabian Sea. China is reported to be considering construction of a rail link to Nepal, traditionally a buffer state under India's influence.

China has reportedly constructed 39 transport routes from its interior to its contested border with India--which Indian planners perceive as more of a military threat than a commercial opportunity, since much of the border is closed to trade. China's program of road and rail works along its border with the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which Beijing claims as Chinese territory, has led New Delhi to accelerate "strategically important" road construction in the region. China is also funding extensive road and rail projects in Burma, traditionally the land corridor for both commerce and armies between East and South Asia.


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Around India, China is constructing deep-water port facilities capable of berthing warships at Gwadar in Pakistan, on the Arabian Sea; at Rangoon, Kyaukpyu, and other harbors in Burma; at Chittagong in Bangladesh; and at Sihanoukville in Cambodia. Chinese engineers are dredging Burma's Irrawaddy River, which will give China a usable waterway connecting Yunnan province to the Bay of Bengal. China operates naval and radar facilities on Burma's Coco Islands, just 30 miles from Indian territory and strategically situated near the Straits of Malacca, through which pass half of all world oil shipments and one-third of all ship-borne cargo. India recently used its influence with the government of the Maldives to veto a Chinese request for naval access rights just off India's south coast.

The Pentagon has highlighted Beijing's design to construct a "string of pearls" of naval facilities stretching from Southeast Asia to the Persian Gulf--a project that will help China protect seaborne trade and, potentially, contain the Indian Navy's projection of power in what it considers its home seas. China's construction of transport infrastructure and port facilities that encircle India, says analyst Vikram Sood, is "designed to put India in pincers."

Amidst the drama of Washington's opening to Beijing in 1971, Henry Kissinger told President Nixon that no country in the world, with the possible exception of Great Britain, shared a greater convergence of strategic interests with America than Mao's China. Modern India's democratic identity, and a striking congruence of interests between Washington and New Delhi after the Cold War, give India the stronger claim to be America's "natural ally" in Asia.

As Prime Minister Singh has said, "If there is an 'idea of India' that the world should remember us by and regard us for, it is the idea of an inclusive and open society, a multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual society. All countries of the world will evolve in this direction as we move forward into the 21st century. Liberal democracy is the natural order of social and political organization in today's world. All alternate systems, authoritarian and majoritarian in varying degrees, are an aberration."

Former ambassador to India Robert Blackwill argues convincingly that New Delhi may more closely share America's core foreign policy goals and perception of threat than any of our traditional allies. More people have been killed by terrorists in India over the past 15 years than in any other country. This makes India a natural partner to America in the campaign against terror, centered in the Pakistan-Afghanistan nexus in India's backyard. Facing an acute missile threat from China and Pakistan, India embraced President Bush's missile defense plans when, in 2001, the president dismayed many traditional allies by withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. India was among the first countries to offer America the use of its military facilities after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

India is encircled by failed and potentially failing states--including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Burma, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. New Delhi shares Washington's interest in helping these countries develop durable democratic institutions. "India would like the whole of South Asia to emerge as a community of flourishing democracies," said Indian foreign secretary Shyam Saran in 2005.

America is India's largest trading partner. Continued annual economic growth of 8-9 percent depends on partnership with the world's largest economic power in trade, investment, technology, and market access. India's dependence on imported energy--and its intense competition with China for control of oil and gas supplies, from Ecuador to Angola--gives it an abiding interest in energy cooperation with America and Japan, including protecting the sea lanes linking the Persian Gulf to Asian waters.

India is committed to balancing Chinese power in Asia. "India has never waited for American permission to balance China," says Indian strategist Raja Mohan. "I tell the Americans: You balanced China from 1949 to 1971, but then allied with Beijing from 1971 to 1989. India has been balancing China since the day the Chinese invaded Tibet in 1950. We have always balanced China--and that's what we'll continue to do." India, Mohan insists, "will never play second fiddle to the Chinese."

The challenge posed to India's security and its identity as a democratic Asian power by the rise of authoritarian China is fueling the new warmth in India's relations with Washington and Tokyo.

"[T]here is a major realignment of forces taking place in Asia," explained India's foreign secretary in 2005. "There is the emergence of China as a global economic powerhouse. There will be increased capabilities that China will be able to bring to bear in this region and even beyond. India also is going to be a major player in Asia. . . . I think India and the United States can contribute to a much better balance in the Asian region."

India, according to Indian Express editor in chief Shekhar Gupta, faces a strategic choice between building economic and military power in partnership with America and playing underdog to China in a global anti-American axis. "Is it a good or bad thing for India that the Cold War is over and that, in a resultant unipolar world, it has a mutually beneficial relationship with the only superpower?" he asks. The alternative is for India "to be to tomorrow's China what Cuba was to yesterday's Soviet Union. . . . [G]o seek a referendum from the people of India on that."

Although Chinese military strategists worry less about India than about America and Japan, the prospect of an enduring Indo-U.S. military partnership attracts Beijing's full attention. Indian strategist Brahma Chellaney recounts, "On my visits to China, I have found as an Indian that the only time the Chinese sit up and listen is when the U.S.-India relationship comes up. India and the United States ganging up militarily is China's worst nightmare."

So, too, could be an emerging strategic entente between India and Japan. Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has said, "It is of crucial importance to Japan's national interest that we further strengthen our ties with India," which he calls "the most important bilateral relationship in the world."

Since assuming office in September, Abe has enthusiastically backed the concept of a quadrilateral security partnership among Japan, India, Australia, and the United States. Abe says the values of "freedom, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law" are central to Japan's identity as an Asian great power. "I believe Japan should play a role in trying to spread such values, for example in the Asian region," he recently told the Washington Post's Fred Hiatt. This makes democratic India a natural strategic partner.

Indian officials are enthusiastic about what Abe calls the development of a "new Asian order" based on strategic cooperation among Asian democracies. As Japan's ambassador in New Delhi, Yasukuni Enoki, recently put it, an Indo-Japanese strategic partnership could become "the driving force behind an emerging Asia," creating what Prime Minister Singh calls "an arc of advantage and prosperity" that will "enhance peace and stability in the Asian region and beyond."

Japan is expected to join India and the United States next year in high-profile naval exercises in the South China Sea. The two countries are pursuing a comprehensive economic partnership that includes Japanese provision of advanced technology to India to accelerate its rise. "India is the key counterweight to China in Asia, along with Vietnam," says one senior Japanese official. According to India's Mohan, "You'll see the India-Japan relationship change more over the next few years than any of our other key relationships. India-Japan is the next big game."

Such cooperation between a rising India and a more muscular Japan raises the prospect of what Chellaney, in his Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India, and Japan, calls the emergence of an Asian "constellation of democracies" dedicated to preserving what the State Department's Nicholas Burns calls "a stable balance of power in all of the Asia-Pacific region--one that favors peace through the presence of strong democratic nations enjoying friendly relations with the United States."

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To foster an Asian balance that safeguards its liberal principles, India will need to wield the appeal of its democratic values as a strategic asset. India played a key role in brokering Nepal's recent agreement to hold democratic elections, but it continues to appease Burma's military junta in ways that alienate its natural allies, the Burmese people. They voted overwhelmingly for the democratic, pro-Indian opposition in the country's last free elections.

"India's regional grand strategy must be based on our belief that what is good for us is also good for our neighbors; in other words, pluralistic political systems, the rule of law, the rights of the individual," argues Hindustan Times columnist Manoj Joshi. From Rawalpindi to Rangoon, Indian leaders will find that democrats make better neighbors than military dictators.

India's quest for strategic autonomy and its identity as a great civilization mean that it will never be the kind of subordinate ally the United States cultivated during the Cold War. The closest historical model for America's ambition to accelerate India's rise to world power may be France's decision to invest in Russia's economic and military modernization in the late 19th century. France's goal was to build Russia up as an equal partner to help manage the rise of German power in Europe--just as the United States today hopes to construct friendly centers of power in Asia to limit China's ultimate ambitions.

"We're fully willing and ready to assist in th[e] growth of India's global power, . . . which we see as largely positive," says Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Turning the caricature of ally-bashing unilateralism on its head, in India, the Bush administration is working concertedly, writes journalist Edward Luce, "to play midwife to the birth of a new great power."

Now the enactment in Washington of legislation enabling Indo-American civilian nuclear cooperation is a compelling riposte to leaders on the left and right of Indian politics who remain skeptical of Secretary Rice's commitment that America will be "a reliable partner for India as it makes its move as a global power." Senator Richard Lugar calls the agreement "the most important strategic diplomatic initiative undertaken by President Bush." India's "normalization" as a nuclear power through agreements with the United States, the Nuclear Suppliers Group, and the International Atomic Energy Agency will encourage it to remain a responsible nuclear state committed to upholding a global nuclear order from which it had previously been excluded.

Civilian nuclear cooperation with Washington gives India even greater incentives to maintain India's "impeccable" (Prime Minister Singh) and "excellent" (Secretary Rice) nonproliferation record. It should also encourage Indian cooperation containing Iran's nuclear weapons program: In February, India voted with the United States to refer Iran to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions.

The notion of a Sino-American partnership to contain India's rise as a nuclear power, as suggested by President Clinton's joint condemnation of India's nuclear tests with Chinese president Jiang Zemin in Beijing in 1998--and more recently by American critics of the U.S.-India nuclear deal--rankles Indian elites. They are confused by the determination of U.S. critics to hold India to a far higher proliferation standard than China has displayed in its transfer of nuclear technology to Pakistan. They are surprised that some American experts believe excluding India from the legitimate nuclear order is more faithful to the cause of nonproliferation than enmeshing India in the rules of the nuclear club. And they are baffled that the West would want to entrench a balance of terror between democratic India and authoritarian China that permanently favors the latter.

Economic dynamism is fueling India's geopolitical ambitions. This new vigor is somewhat mystifying when judged against the bureaucratic incompetence of the Indian state. Despite scandalous underinvestment in education, sanitation, health, and infrastructure, India's economy is growing at an annual rate of 8-9 percent and is forecast to surpass China as the world's fastest-growing major economy next year. India remains burdened by acute poverty, yet possesses an expanding middle class already larger than the entire population of the United States. It suffers from stifling and corrupt government, yet boasts world-beating companies with global reach. Its dizzying politics--which currently pit a profoundly reformist prime minister against old-fashioned Marxists and caste-based populists within his own governing coalition--do not lend themselves to the kind of strategic economic liberalization China's leaders have managed since 1978.

"To race China, first let's get our feet off the brakes," implores the former editor of the reformist Indian Express, Arun Shourie. If and when this happens, Indian power, prosperity, and culture could change the world.

India's rapidly expanding middle class is expected to constitute 60 percent of its billion-plus population by 2020. India is expected to surpass Japan in the 2020s as the world's third-largest economy at market exchange rates, and to surpass China around 2032 as the world's most populous country. India's relative youthfulness should produce a "demographic dividend": While its 400 million-strong labor force today is only half that of China, by 2025 those figures will reverse as China's population rapidly ages.

India's economic growth may be more sustainable than China's. Domestic consumption accounts for nearly two-thirds of India's GDP but only 42 percent of China's, making India's growth "better balanced" than that of China's export-dependent economy, according to Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach. India's combination of private-sector dynamism and state incompetence means that "India is rising despite the state," in the words of economist Gurcharan Das. It is "an organic success from below" rather than one directed by government planners, and is therefore "more likely to endure."

Conventional wisdom that Indian democracy constrains economic growth, and is inferior to the ruthless efficiency of China's authoritarian development model, is wrong. India's curse--like China's until quite recently--has been an overweening state that squeezes out private investment and creates massive opportunities for corruption. "India's problem isn't too much democracy, it's too much socialism," says Prannoy Roy, the founder of India's NDTV.

This is rapidly changing as economic reform transforms India's economic landscape, fueling a vast domestic consumer market and providing a launching pad for Indian companies like Infosys, recently listed on the NASDAQ-100. More fundamentally, its democratic political foundation gives India a long-term comparative advantage by rendering less likely the kind of revolutionary unrest that has regularly knocked China's growth off course throughout that country's long history.

Infused with the missionary spirit and the ideology of the Open Door, Americans have long held a fascination with the prospect of changing China in our own image. Yet authoritarian China's rise and growing nationalism raise questions about when and whether China will embrace political liberalism.

India may be a better template against which to judge the appeal of democratic values on Asian soil--and a surer partner in managing security challenges, from Chinese power to global terrorism, whose threat lies in their lack of democratic control. A durable Indo-American partnership of values promises higher dividends than a century of failed attempts to forge an enduring Sino-American alliance in Asia.

The United States is strangely popular in India. Polling regularly shows Indians to be among the most pro-American people anywhere--sometimes registering warmer sentiments towards the United States than Americans themselves do. But this is not so strange: India and America are the world's biggest and oldest democracies. Both are multiethnic, continental empires with strong cultural-religious identities. Each inherited the rule of law from Britain. Indian and American foreign policies appear equally animated by a self-regarding exceptionalism and a habit of moralizing in international affairs.

Both India and America are revisionist powers intent on peacefully recasting the contemporary international order and ensuring themselves a prominent place in it. America's rise to world power in the 19th and 20th centuries is, in some respects, a model for India's own ambitions. As Indian analyst Pratap Bhanu Mehta told the New York Times, Indians have "great admiration for U.S. power" and want their country to "replicate" it, not oppose it. How many of America's European allies share such sentiments?

The CIA has labeled India the key "swing state" in international politics. It predicts that India will emerge by 2015 as the fourth most important power in the international system. Goldman Sachs predicts that, by 2040, the largest economies on earth will be China, the United States, India, and Japan. A strategic partnership of values among the last three, naturally encompassing the European Union, may defy predictions of a coming "Chinese century"--and set a standard of democratic cooperation and prosperity China itself might ultimately embrace on its own path to greatness.

Daniel Twining, a former adviser to Senator John McCain, is a fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, based in Oxford and New Delhi, and the Fulbright/Oxford Scholar at the University of Oxford.

concluded.

 

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Great Game in Afghanistan ​

India's constructive role should continue
by Anita Inder Singh

THE talks between President Hamid Karzai and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi on April 26 were a reminder of the friendly ties between India and post-Taliban Afghanistan. India supported Afghanistan's entry into SAARC at the New Delhi summit in 2007. And any differences between the Karzai government and New Delhi over the nature of reconciliation and power-sharing with the Taliban can hide the fact that India, which has given $1.3 billion aid for reconstruction since 2001, is favoured by 71 per cent of Afghans.

Pakistan, which has been lambasted by Mr Karzai for trying to destabilise his country with its extremist exports, is favoured by a mere 2 per cent.

India is the sixth largest bilateral regional donor-country and has supported a number of projects, including those related to health care, agriculture and education in Afghanistan. Afghans enjoy Bollywood movies and pop music. As a supporter of the Northern Alliance, which helped the US topple the fundamentalist Taliban regime in 2001, New Delhi is on good terms with both Mr Karzai and Dr Abdullah Abdullah, his main electoral challenger last August.

But what are the chances that the road to success for President Obama's Afghanistan strategy will run through India? A complex mix of national interests and international politics is likely to prevent India from having much say in the future of Afghanistan.

Indian nonalignment rules out troop contributions which would mean that Indian soldiers fight under NATO's command – and perhaps give it greater influence in Kabul and Washington. India also has limited influence in western capitals on Afghanistan. Since the US overthrew the Taliban in 2001 India has failed to persuade the US to brand Pakistan as a terrorist exporting state, although the US has since long tried to persuade Islamabad to crack down on the Afghan Taliban. With Islamabad providing logistical support to NATO, Washington cannot drop its Pakistan card to please New Delhi. Indeed, Gen Stanley McChrystal, the current NATO commander in Afghanistan, annoyed New Delhi last September when he advised Washington that "increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions." And Pakistan's influence over London was evident at the London Conference on Afghanistan last January, when it persuaded Foreign Secretary David Miliband to exclude India from a regional council to debate Afghanistan's political future.

More importantly, unlike Mr Karzai and his western backers, India is against reconciliation with the Taliban, for it sees all extremists as bad, not the least because the Taliban have had links with fundamentalist groups waging war on India in its half of Kashmir. Wanting NATO to stay the course and quash extremists, India is dismayed and alarmed that the US and its NATO allies plan to start withdrawing troops from Afghanistan after June 2011.

NATO cannot defeat the Afghan Taliban unless Pakistan stops giving them sustenance and training in the north-western city of Quetta and takes military action against them. But while Pakistan has taken on its domestic Taliban, it has yet to move against the Afghan Taliban whom it sees as a useful counterweight to Indian influence in Afghanistan. American plans to start pulling out troops in 2011 give Pakistan no incentive to hunt down the Taliban. For Pakistan, a stable, secure and friendly Afghanistan would be resistant to Indian influence while being steered by Islamabad.

At the moment, Pakistan fears the loss of its clout in Afghanistan. Indian influence and popularity have grown since the overthrow of the Taliban government. In recent months, Islamabad has alleged that India's consulates in the Afghan cities of Kandahar and Jalalabad are behind terrorist activity in Pakistan, particularly in the rebellious province of Balochistan. No evidence has been offered to substantiate the claims, which have been dismissed by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Islamabad is also annoyed that London and Washington are keen on Indian training for Afghan police forces, especially as Mr Karzai rejected an offer made by Gen Ashfaq Kayani, Pakistan's army chief, of Pakistani training for Afghanistan's burgeoning army. This is at least partly because Mr Karzai is suspicious of Islamabad's motives. And if relations between Afghanistan and Islamabad remain prickly, an American-trained Afghan army could threaten Pakistan if it were to grow to 2,50,000 soldiers.

Reconciliation may not be against India's interests if the Taliban accept Mr Karzai's terms — which include their adherence to the democratic Afghan constitution. In that event, the US will not be able to give Pakistan the decisive say in negotiations on Afghanistan if Mr Karzai is opposed to it. Time and again, he has shown the US that his dependence on American military and economic aid is not synonymous with his being a submissive client.

India is also cultivating Iran, Russia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan on Afghanistan. None of these countries would like to see the Taliban back in the saddle. All five Central Asian countries have given military facilities to the US and could reduce its dependence on Pakistan. But there is no doubt that President Obama's announcement of America's withdrawal from Afghanistan has started a new great game.

India, for its part, should keep up the good work in Afghanistan. It has already completed the construction of a 220-KV transmission line from Pul-e-Khumri to Kabul and a sub-station at Chimtala to bring additional power from the northern grid to Kabul, and is helping in the restoration of telecommunication infrastructure in 11 of the 34 provinces in Afghanistan. India is helping with the Salma Dam project in western Herat province and the construction of Afghan parliament building in Kabul (both to be completed by 2011). It is also developing a port at Chabahar in Iran, which could become a key point of entry for Indian goods and materiel into Afghanistan because Pakistan refuses India land transit rights to the Afghan border.

India runs an air base at Farkhor in Tajikistan on Afghanistan's northeastern border — a facility it secured with Russian support. New Delhi, Moscow and Tehran do not wish to see the Taliban return to power. But much will depend on NATO's ability to make headway against the Taliban — and that is India's uppermost concern in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, amicable ties between India and Afghanistan can only benefit both countries.

The writer, an established author,is Visiting Professor, Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution, New Delhi.

 

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In On The Great Game​

Throughout the 19th century, Russia and Britain sparred for control of Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan. The "Great Game" ended in stalemate. The Afghans remained fiercely independent. As the saying goes, you can rent a Pathan but you can't buy one.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and new national security adviser Shiv Shankar Menon the same team that delivered the Indo-US nuclear deal have decided that engaging Pakistan will be more effective in the long run than isolating it. This is a gamble. Will it work?

The Pakistan army, which negotiates with one gun held to its own head and another to India's, knows America's weakness. It has been Washington's errand boy since the 1950s, receiving generous dollar tips in return. The sacrificial lamb in all of this has always been India. America believes might is right and practises its geopolitics accordingly. India believes right is might and formulates its strategy by this high moral principle.

Squeezed between a sympathetic but ruthlessly self-interested America and a Pakistan obsessed with acquiring "parity" with India, New Delhi continues to fumble. Conventional wisdom in South Block is fearsomely defeatist: "Terror if we talk, more terror if we don't. So perhaps let's talk it can't get worse." Hence the resumption of "non-composite" dialogue. Pakistan revels in India's moralistic defeatism and reliance on an America whose sights are set elsewhere.

Despite these odds, winning the new Great Game is not impossible. To do so, India needs to deploy strategies with clarity and ruthless self-interest. The only reason America has not been attacked after September 11, 2001 is because it has made terrorists pay a terrible price. Nearly 3,000 Americans were killed in the 9/11 attack. Since then, the US has through military and covert operations killed in retaliation well over 10,000 terrorists and their sympathisers in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere. Gauntanamo Bay may be the worst case of human rights abuse in decades but it has put fear into terrorists who target the US mainland. Not one has dared do so, and certainly not one has succeeded, in nearly nine years.

Indian policymakers, immersed in traditional geopolitical timidity, say we can't do the same. We don't have America's military muscle, money or leverage over Pakistan. But that does not mean we should do nothing. Terrorists are deterred only if they know they will pay a price for murder. America has made them pay and safeguarded US citizens, especially at home.

India's defeatist approach has ensured Indian citizens are unsafe in their own country. Terrorists from the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad and their Pakistani sponsors fear no costs or consequences from India. They can fend off American pressure with their cynical chase-with-the-hounds and run-with-the-hares strategy. They remain brazenly unconcerned about Indian policymakers whose default reflex action for decades has been to turn the other cheek after a terror strike. So how can India make terrorists who freely use Pakistan's infrastructure of terror pay?

By, for once, playing tough with both Islamabad and Washington. For too long has India played the good guy waiting for other good (but stronger) guys like the US to help deal with the neighbourhood thug. "Oh", goes the plaintive refrain, "we can't choose our neighbours." Obviously not. But we can choose how we control their behaviour.

The US has long taken India for granted over Pakistan-funded terrorism with platitudes and homilies. Washington must be told firmly that the era of tea and sympathy is over. No longer will we script our Pakistan policy to suit America's self-interest. India is vital to America's long-term geopolitical strategy to counter superpower China and that gives us more leverage over Washington than we think. Pakistan may have short-term advantages as a hired gun. But it is India already the world's third largest economy after the US and China with a GDP of $4.9 trillion (by purchasing power parity norms) which really matters. Pakistan has one-tenth of India's GDP. Its nuisance value as an obsessed stalker of India far outweighs its geopolitical influence.

A tougher line with the US on Pakistani-funded terror must be combined with a tougher line with Islamabad during talks. Those talks must deliver this blunt message: from now on, zero tolerance on terror. Coercive diplomacy, economic sanctions and covert operations are all options India can exercise if talking with Islamabad does not end terror. Over 40,000 Indian citizens have been killed by Pakistani-sponsored terror attacks since 1989. No responsible government can allow its citizens to be targets of terrorism on this unprecedented scale.

India needs to rise above a toxic Pakistani state and fashion a strategy for a world in 2020. By then, India's military, technology and economy will give it global salience. A tough but flexible Pakistan policy can convert South Asia into a peaceful, prosperous region of 1.50 billion people nearly a quarter of humanity. In contrast, a policy of compromise and concession will keep the region hostage to what home minister P Chidambaram rightly calls the "dark forces" of terror.

The writer is the chairman of a media group.

 

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Page 1 of 3

India plays catch-up in the great game ​

By M K Bhadrakumar

The Central Asian question is no more the same as it was in the 1990s. No one speculates anymore that it was inevitable that the region would descend into anarchy. However, the problems endemic to a critical period of state formation linger. The transition economies were just about switching gear when the global economic crisis struck. Growth slackened. Foreign investment dwindled. Commodity prices crashed.

Regional cooperation has far from gained traction. There is widespread poverty and deprivation. The glass is half full. On the positive side can be noted an appreciable consolidation of national independence and sovereignty. The region's integration into the international system is already advanced. On the contrary, terrorism and religious terrorism continue to pose a threat to



regional stability, which explains the raison d'etre of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Equally, the SCO provides a forum of collective security that categorically rejects the ideology of "color revolution". The international community may have begun to grasp that political reality. (The SCO comprises China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.)

The turning point came with the abortive "Tulip Revolution" in Kyrgyzstan and the bloody uprising in Andizhan in Ferghana Valley in successive months in 2005 when the SCO moved into the driving seat to dispel the specter of "regime change". The result is there for all to see.

The Central Asian states have created much strategic space around them so that they can maneuver to their best advantage. They have made it obligatory for outside powers to negotiate with them - be it regarding military bases on lease, the price of natural gas, access routes to Afghanistan or partnerships with collective security bodies - rather than assume that the terms of engagement can be dictated from a position of strength.

Clearly, Central Asian states have an important strategic significance in contemporary world politics.

The region has figured in the geostrategies of major powers in one way or another. Many players reached out to the region, even as the newly independent states groped for a way forward in an extremely complicated process of transition. Among them were pretenders who sought a leadership role on account of their so-called Turkic or Islamic identity and also big powers.

Of the three major players active today, one is an "external" party - the United States - insofar as it has no shared borders with the region while the two others - Russia and China - are neighboring countries. Russian influence has been historical and remains preponderant. The United States has had its ups and downs in the more recent past, but remains tenacious about expanding its presence. China, on the other hand, has had an extraordinary run in making its way to the top rungs of the big league operating in the region, circumnavigating with great adroitness the massive backlog of the region's Soviet history in such a short period of time.

After consolidating its presence in Afghanistan, the United States' policy toward Central Asia has shifted gear. Through different, flexible modes of cooperation in the fields of security, transportation and energy as well as through continued efforts to bring about "regime change" in the region, the US hopes to remodel the region. Meanwhile, the continuous expansion of US influence in South Asia has come in handy, as Afghanistan is a vital link that can connect Central Asia with South Asia.

China: A game-changer
The regional challenge that the US encounters in Central Asia is twofold: One, Russia's resurgence, and two, China's rise as a world power. The US has been so far focusing on Russia, while carefully watching the implications of the lengthening shadows of China.

In the US understanding up until recently, a strategic alliance between Russia and China in Central Asia within the framework of the SCO was a long way from materializing and there was scope to work on the differing priorities of Russia and China within the SCO. Unsurprisingly, the US strategy has been pursuing a differentiated approach toward China aimed at creating a wedge between Russia and China, which would prove the nemesis of the SCO.

Washington's comfort level with China was attributable to several factors. In the short term at least, the US pursued a careful policy to engage China in the region and assuring that China's emergence didn't clash with US interests. This indeed helped Washington to focus on the immediate task in hand, namely, to roll back Russia's traditional stature in the region, which was standing right in the way of the expansion of US influence there.

However, this state of play may be about to change - or the process may already have begun - even as China's rapid expansion of influence in the region and its deep access to the region's energy resources in particular are beginning to hurt Western interests.

A historic watershed is indeed approaching in the region's transition by the end of this year when the 7,000-kilometer natural gas pipeline leading all the way from Turkmenistan through Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan and leading to China's Xinjiang becomes operational. China has also taken an early lead in gaining access to Turkmenistan's Yolotan-Osman gas fields, apart from its strident gains in energy cooperation with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

To be sure, the West is rattled as its own prospects of gaining access to the Caspian energy come under threat. Turkmenistan, in particular, is viewed as a major source of gas for the European Union's proposed Trans-Caspian projects, which the US has been promoting as a means to reduce Europe's energy dependence on Russia. But the West has no effective answer to the growing Chinese influence in Central Asia. Certainly, the US is hard-pressed to find "counterweights" to challenge China's profile as an all-round stakeholder in the region. Potential "counterweights" such as Turkey and Japan do not look convincing either.

The challenge the US faces in the region in countering China's new clout is comparable to what it faces in Africa. Clearly, the US today has less leverage to advance its interests than in the 1990s. The US continues to enjoy enormous "soft power" in Central Asia, which probably no country other than Russia can match. But China's presence is cutting into its leverage in advancing US interests in the form of increasing American business involvement or promoting democracy.

Like Africa, Central Asia has options. Central Asian elites' perceptions have changed. They no longer see the US in the "uniploar moment" right after the Cold War. In contrast with America with its financial crisis, they see China as a rising power with capital surplus and financial muscle and a properly defined strategy towards the region and its problems.

Thus, China is buying up the region's resources and breaking into Soviet-era industries that have been in a state of serious disrepair. China complicates Western aid efforts by undertaking projects across the board. US companies do not build railways or pipelines or highways and dams. They do not do energy infrastructure, but they focus on the extractive sectors - oil, gas, minerals - and the Central Asians take note of the West's exploitative instinct.

Beyond oil, US companies are shirking opportunities in the region. Except for oil, where investment money goes in no matter what, there hasn't been much Western investment in recent years. To sum up, the core difference is that to most Americans, Central Asia is still a region of crisis, whereas to China it is a region of opportunity with which the fortunes of China's "Go West" policy is closely intertwined in political, strategic and economic terms.

To the West's dismay, belying the prognosis of most Western analysts and regional experts, China and Russia have also been harmonizing their regional policy in Central Asia and no serious contradictions have surfaced. Of course, Moscow remained vigilant about US ploys to create a wedge between Russia and China. What emerges is that Russia has been pragmatic enough to come to terms with the impressive growth of China's influence in the Central Asian region, while China on its part has taken care not to tread on Russian sensitivities or to challenge Russia's legitimate interests.

All this may be leading to a rethink in Washington about the Chinese presence in Central Asia. Indeed, there are potential seeds of discord in China's relations with the region. Much will depend on how the unrest in Xinjiang plays out. That external forces have muddied the waters of disaffection in Xinjiang is beyond doubt. Interestingly, Central Asian countries and Russia have shown a high degree of understanding towards the Chinese authorities' handling of the unrest in Xinjiang.

'Reset' in the US's Russia ties
On the other hand, Russian-American relations have plunged to their lowest point in a quarter of a century. Under then-president and now Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's leadership, Russia strengthened its statehood, began modernizing its economy and addressing extensive social tasks, and, most important, ensuring its security more effectively. Also, for the first time in its history perhaps, Russia today has the capacity and resolve to cope with all these tasks simultaneously. Russia has also concurrently strengthened its positions in the global economy and in global finances. In short, Putin has created a solid foundation for formulating Russia's foreign policy strategy.

Russia's post-Soviet transformation hasn't gone the way that Washington scripted. Moscow no longer feels it has to behave in deference to the US. Russians are now ready to say whatever they want and are bent on rebuilding their traditional empirical power.

Therefore, the fundamental objective of the US regional strategy in Central Asia during the recent years has been to weaken Russian influence in a region which constitutes Russia's "soft underbelly", no matter Russia's legitimate interests there. From this perspective, the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will be of profound consequence for the geopolitics of the Central Asian region. The expansion essentially reflects the American strategy. Its forays into new areas of activity, such as energy security or cyber crime, go hand-in-hand with the US's global strategy. The US's determination to transform NATO as a global organization is never in doubt.

NATO's continued expansion squeezes Russia's strategic space and impacts on its national-security concerns. On its part, NATO has spared no efforts in recent years to advance its relations with the countries of the Central Asian region. The alliance runs into obstacles in its effort to get a firm foothold in the region, but the US's determination to press ahead remains unshaken.

Despite repeated urgings by Russia through the past three years for a cooperative relationship between NATO on the one hand and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the SCO on the other, the US has balked. The US prefers that NATO deals with Central Asian capitals on a bilateral basis which will not concede any regional leadership role for Russia or legitimize the aspirations of the CSTO and the SCO as organizations integral to regional stability and security.

On balance, NATO failed to gatecrash into a region where Russia's traditional influence is overwhelming and where Russia is determined to keep things that way no matter what it takes. But the alliance has made incremental gains. Over the past two-year period, Moscow has rapidly built up the CSTO as a bulwark against NATO in Central Asia. Some Russian commentators have forecast that the CSTO is destined to become Warsaw Pact II.

 

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Page 2 of 3
India plays catch-up in the great game
By M K Bhadrakumar

A "reset" in US-Russia ties, which the Barack Obama administration promised, can work as a potential game-changer in the great game in Central Asia. But a profound "reset" is a long haul. The US is still opting for a selective engagement of Russia specific to areas that are of pressing relevance to current US interests, such as the nuclear non-proliferation agenda and terrorism and the situation around Iran. Russia, on the other hand, is seeking an all-round engagement with the US on the basis of an equal partnership and mutuality of interests and concerns. There is no evidence, however, that the US is in a mood to grant such an elevated status to Russia as an equal partner on the global stage.

All signs are that the Obama administration will not concede



Russia's special interests in its so-called "near abroad" in the post-Soviet space. On the contrary, the US is accelerating the contestation for influence in the Caucasus, the Caspian and in Central Asia.

Of late, the great game, which has been keenly pursued in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, has spilled over into Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. The change of leadership in Ashgabat in 2007 has provided an opportunity for the US to modulate that country's policy of "positive neutrality" in favor of greater engagement with the West.

The prospects for sourcing Turkmen gas for the Trans-Caspian projects have significantly improved. Turkmenistan also offers transit facilities for the US to ferry supplies to Afghanistan. Ashgabat is steadily moving out of the Russian orbit and edging close to the US. The Turkmen efforts to directly access the world energy market without the Russian middleman can have a domino effect on other energy producing countries in the region. In turn, it holds the potential to erode Russia's overall standing in Central Asia and to render ineffectual the Moscow-led regional integration processes.

But what is unfolding over Tajikistan is vintage great game from the 19th century. Tajikistan's importance has increased as a gateway to Central Asia for the US influence entrenched in Afghanistan. Tajikistan's strategic importance can't be understated:
It is a corridor leading to the turbulent Ferghana Valley.
It borders Xinjiang.
It is a hotbed of militant Islam.
It is an oasis of Iranian (Persian) culture.
It controls the region's watersheds.
It is a principal route for drug traffickers.
It is Russia's furthest military outpost on the territory of the former Soviet Union.

Over and above, of course, Tajikistan is integral to the stabilization of Afghan polity, while Tajik nationalism can be a potent weapon in the hands of Uzbekistan's adversaries.

Thus, for any number of good reasons, prising Tajikistan away from the orbit of traditional Russian influence has become a key objective of US diplomacy. The thrust of the US's so-called "Great Central Asia" strategy aims at pulling Tajikistan toward Afghanistan so that a new dynamic will generate, which would incrementally draw the Central Asian region away from Russian and Chinese influence and toward South Asian countries, with Afghanistan acting as a hub or a revolving door. The US has brought in international financial institutions to explore the possibility of funding trans-regional projects that strengthen the infrastructure and communication links between the countries of the Central Asian region and the South Asian region.

The huge expansion of US influence in South Asia has come in handy in this effort, as Afghanistan is a vital link that can connect Central Asia with South Asia. The US's so-called "Great Central Asia" strategy under the George W Bush administration aimed at drawing the Central Asian states away from the SCO toward a regional cooperation arrangement with the South Asian region.

However, trans-border infrastructure projects of the sort envisaged in the US's "Great Central Asia" strategy can be advanced only if intra-regional relations between the countries of South Asia and their equations with the US pan out. The standoff between the US and Iran remains a negative factor seriously impeding regional cooperation.

Regional cooperation can advance and India's involvement in the Central Asian region can gain in substance only if it can address the vexed issue of a viable access route to the region. As things stand, the South Asian region as a whole lacks a basic regional identity, let alone an awareness of the imperatives of regional cooperation with the neighboring Central Asian region.

India and Pakistan are far from dispelling the mutual mistrust in their relationship. There is opposition within India to resolving even "doable" issues, pending the settlement of intractable problems. India also has turned its back on the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project, which could have been a potential stabilizer in the regional equations.

A Sino-Russian concord
Be that as it may, China appreciates that the contradictions and struggles between Russia and the Western powers in the post-Cold War years are at a defining moment. In comparison, the Sino-Russian relationship, with its difficult history, reached an almost unparalleled level of mutual understanding. That indeed helped the SCO gain flesh and blood. On the face of it, the SCO is everything that former US president Richard Nixon and national security advisor Henry Kissinger - who sought to keep Russia and China apart - tried to prevent.

In respect of the geopolitics of Central Asia, China has shared concerns with Russia, especially on two aspects. First, like Russia, China also harbors misgivings about NATO's designs toward Central Asia and appreciates the Russian efforts to keep the Western alliance out of the region. Second, Russia and China have been thinking hard about the concept of Central Asia. The point is, it is unrealistic for Russia and China (and for the SCO) to deal with the processes which are going on in the Central Asian region without taking into consideration the developments in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan.

The SCO encounters the reality that even though Central Asia and South Asia used to belong to different geopolitical templates until quite recently, this is no longer so, especially after 9/11 provided the opportunity to the US to establish a long-term presence in Afghanistan.

There are definite signs that extremist elements based in Afghanistan, which, unsurprisingly, come under the covert influence of various external players, will continue to test the resolve of Russia and China (and the SCO) as guarantors of regional security and stability. In short, the unrest in Andizhan in the Ferghana Valley in May 2005 was not a mere flash in the pan.

This is an added reason why the Xinjiang developments assume importance. What muddies the waters is that the forces of militant Islam have had a controversial history of lending themselves as geopolitical tools during the Cold war era. Then, there are serious question marks about the exact credentials of movements such as Hizb ul-Tahrir, which is based in London, though ostensibly given to virulent anti-Zionist rhetoric, and is very active in Pakistan and the Central Asian countries.

Given the convergence of Chinese-Russian interests with regard to Central Asia's security and stability, the question has often arisen as to the SCO's prospects of evolving into a NATO-like military alliance. The core issue is the extent to which Russia and China will work together to safeguard their common concerns and shared interests. If at all the SCO develops into a "NATO of the East", that can only happen in the distant future. Neither Russia nor China is looking for a military alliance between them. But, in the meanwhile, security cooperation within the SCO is assuming new dimensions and may intensify, especially if the Afghan situation continues to deteriorate.

China tacitly concurs with the Russian idea of a tandem arrangement involving the CSTO and the SCO. There is a lot of overlap in the membership of the two organizations. Five of the seven CSTO member states are in the SCO, while five of the six SCO member states are in the CSTO. (CSTO comprises Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.)

Similarly, there are overlaps in the spheres of responsibility of the two organizations. What may well happen is that the SCO may focus on the range of so-called "new threats" rather than on the conventional form of military threats, while the CSTO (which is, incidentally, developing a rapid-reaction force similar to NATO's), maintains a common air-defense system, training of military personnel, arms procurement, and so forth.

How does the West tackle the SCO's "challenge"? Arguably, the West doesn't necessarily have to see the SCO as an antagonist. The stability and security of Central Asia, which is the core mission of the SCO, is as much in the West's interests as Russia's or China's. The modern-day "foreign devils on the Silk Road" - drug traffickers, Islamic warriors or plain terrorists - are as much of concern to the West's security as to the SCO member countries.

But we live in a real world. US efforts to weaken the SCO will continue. The efforts may even be stepped up. By current indications, Washington is moving on the basis of the assessment that the SCO is still some way from becoming a strategic alliance and there is still time to weaken it. Equally, the US counter-strategy toward any SCO role in Afghanistan will be by way of binding Pakistan even closer to NATO. Washington is under compulsion to accommodate Pakistan's legitimate interests in Afghanistan. The AfPak strategy serves this purpose.

The rationale of the SCO having to move south from the Central Asian region is obvious. Both Russia and China view with growing concern the deepening crisis in Afghanistan. They adopt a two-track approach. First, they work closely on a bilateral track with the government headed by President Hamid Karzai. At the same time, they look for ways to involve the SCO. Russia and China are greatly worried about the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan, though Russian statements have been more forthright.

The so-called "hidden agenda" in the US's Afghan strategy has always intrigued capitals in the region. The fact is that the eight-year "war on terror" in Afghanistan has not only led to the establishment of a military presence in Central Asia and the first "out-of-area" operations for NATO, which in itself holds immense significance for international security, but has also substantially reduced or even eliminated the threat of international terrorism staged from the Hindu Kush for Western countries. Unfortunately, this much cannot be said for the region itself. On the contrary, the Afghan war has:
Seriously destabilized Pakistan.
Led to the cross-border insurgency directed against Iran.
Promoted drug-trafficking.
Spurred activities by Islamist-driven insurgent elements based in Afghanistan in Central Asia, Xinjiang and North Caucasus.
Made India a victim of terrorism originating from Pakistani soil.

Indeed, there is a degree of ambivalence on the part of the US with regard to engaging the hardline Taliban. There are reports that the Pakistani military has openly acknowledged its continuing contacts with the hardcore Taliban leadership of Mullah Omar and Jalaluddin Haqqani and has offered to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table, provided the US curbs India's involvement in Afghanistan.

 

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Page 3 of 3
India plays catch-up in the great game
By M K Bhadrakumar

This is a blatant admission that the Taliban enjoy safe haven in Pakistan and still continue to be an instrument of regional policy for the Pakistani establishment. The Taliban's political rehabilitation at this juncture is certain to cause disquiet among regional powers. Conceivably, Iran and India's resistance to the Taliban would seem to be fundamental. They have consistently seen a connection between Islamic extremism in the region and the Taliban. They would worry that once the radical movement is allowed entry into mainstream political life, Afghanistan could easily get "Talibanized" almost overnight. The ground reality is that the Taliban are today by far the best-organized force in Afghanistan. It can easily eclipse other groups and establish its dominance.

India's China syndrome
Curiously, among the key players in the Central Asian region - Russia, the US, China, Iran and the European Union - India's



commonality of interests is at its maximum with China.

India, too, shares China's aversion to a bloc mentality or any extravagant indulgence in the great game as such. India's priorities in fighting terrorism, religious extremism and separatism are no less than China's. As with China, these are contemporaneous issues that are "felt in the blood" and directly impact on India's national security, sovereignty and territorial integrity. Like China, India follows a policy of scrupulously steering clear of any interference in the internal affairs of the Central Asian states.

Ideally, therefore, China provides a fine example for India to emulate. Through a sophisticated matrix of interlocking and mutually reinforcing regional and bilateral formats, China has effectively advanced the pursuit of its national interests in the region. Such an approach enabled China to leap over the large morass of hostility and suspicion regarding Chinese intentions, which was a backlog of the region's Soviet history. It also enabled China to harmonize with Russia and avoid treading on Russian sensitivities regarding a region that forms part of Russia's historical consciousness.

But just as China's is a story of diplomatic and political success, India's has been a chronicle of dismal failure. The Central Asian region is a glaring example of the lop-sided priorities in India's foreign policy. No serious power can ignore the regions neighboring to it or its "near abroad". History testifies to the importance of geography in foreign policy. Yet, India's relations with the Central Asian region are virtually in a state of neglect. (India's robust effort lately to source nuclear fuel from Kazakhstan is a noble exception.) India's regional policy in Central Asia can only be summed up as one of "masterly inactivity".

India started off brilliantly in the early 1990s, when the countries of Central Asia appeared as independent sovereign entities. Thanks to Soviet propaganda, which unfailingly preached the idealism of Indo-Soviet friendship, India was a role model for the Central Asian states. Their leaderships, schooled in the Kremlin's worldview, instinctively warmed to India. They solicited deep and seamless involvement by India in their formative years of state formation.

Despite the big changes in the character of Delhi's ties with Moscow during the period since 1991, Russia is still viewed as a traditional ally by India and Russian influence in the Central Asian region as a positive factor for regional stability and security. At the very minimum, India has no real clash of interests with Russia in Central Asia.

But by the middle of the 1990s, it began to dawn on the Central Asian capitals already that India wasn't focused enough on the region and that its priorities lay elsewhere - in the faraway West. India was niggardly in making investments in Central Asia; India neglected its trade with the region and failed to assist the region to resuscitate its Soviet-era high-tech industry or even to commercially tap its mineral resources; and India did nothing to develop its communication links with the region.

Why is the SCO so important for India?
First and foremost, it is a security organization that focuses on regional security and stability. Fighting terrorism, religious extremism and political separatism forms the core of the SCO's agenda. In this sphere, India has shared concerns.
The SCO is a comfortably large enough umbrella for a country of India's size to take its due place. There is so single overbearing presence in the tent. All decisions taken by the SCO are on the basis of consensus. The SCO is adamant that it will not preach or prescribe any particular way of life to the world community.
The SCO stands for a democratized world order based on multilateralism and respect of international law. It gives primacy to the United Nations in world affairs. It makes no distinction between countries, big and small. It believes that security is indivisible. It respects national sovereignty in the conduct of international relations. India should completely feel at home with the SCO charter.
The SCO can creatively supplement India's "Look East" policy of engaging the countries of the Southeast Asian and the Asia Pacific regions.
The SCO offers vast scope for economic cooperation. The organization may undertake regional projects in infrastructure development, energy and communications. It may develop in future common banking facilities and a common market.
Indian diplomacy can aspire to utilize the SCO forum for tempering India's relations with the organization's member countries - and observers.

However, there are troubling questions about the orientation of Indian policy toward the SCO. India has largely adopted a lukewarm attitude towards it. Most certainly, India has been wary of making any moves in the SCO's direction that might be construed by the US as a "strategic defiance" of its regional policy in Central Asia. The unsubstantiated Indian claim is that China has been "blocking" India's membership of the SCO.

But the actuality seems to lie somewhere between. Washington has been eyeing New Delhi as a partner in the pursuit of its "Great Central Asia" strategy. This was most pronounced during the eight years of the George W Bush presidency when the so-called US-India strategic partnership rapidly began getting "militarized". Indian analysts began harboring a notion that India was poised to play the role of a "balancer" in the international system and as a "counterweight" to China in the US's Asian strategies.

Fortunately, given the "disconnect" between Indian strategic analysts and policymakers in the establishment, official thinking mostly remained impervious to these strange ideas. But a bizarre idea gained ground in the Indian establishment that with kindred "Asian democracies" like Australia, Singapore and Japan, Delhi could checkmate China's march in the region - a sort of Wilsonian pipedream that belied ground realities.

At any rate, the illusions inculcated in the Indian mind during the Bush era seem to be fast dissipating, thanks to a variety of factors that have compelled a rethink about the US's role in the contemporary world, especially the shadows cast by the global economic crisis. Fortuitously, India has also put behind it the ill-conceived idea of a quadripartite alliance of "Asian democracies", with the US, Japan and Australia as its partners.

In retrospect, Indian analysts
Failed to fathom the volatility in the international system.
Underestimated the growing tendencies of multilateralism.
Overlooked Russia's resurgence.
Failed to comprehend the centrality of Pakistan in the US's regional strategies in South Asia, Central Asia and the Persian Gulf.
Refused to take cognizance of the extent of interdependence developed in the US-China relationship through the past decade, which made redundant for the US any need of India as a "counterweight" to China.

Germane to all this was India's inability to come to terms with China's rise and a lack of comprehension of the profound changes that swept over "communist" China.

On balance, India's "China syndrome" seems to have come in the way of rational long-term thinking towards the Central Asian region. The Indian strategic community remained dogmatically wedded to the thesis regarding a pattern of Chinese "encirclement" of India. Indian analysts lapped up the so-called "string of pearls" thesis, propounded by a junior ex-Pentagon analyst. What they overlook is that China's neighborhood policy is not necessarily and/or invariably India-centric; that Pakistan, Nepal and Myanmar also happen to be critically important neighboring countries for China in intrinsic terms; and that it is unrealistic to expect Beijing to subject its relations with its neighbors to a state of benign neglect as a gesture of friendliness toward India.

Unlike India, China accords the highest priority in its foreign policy to relations with its neighbors. The stability and friendliness of Nepal has a direct bearing on Tibet's security. The communication links via Pakistan or Myanmar by far shorten China's long-winded routes existing today via the Malacca Strait. The Gulf region accounts for almost 90% of China's oil imports. China is keenly seeking the export of its products to the booming Gulf markets and in the newly developed African markets.

Second, what prevents India from pursuing a dynamic policy towards its neighboring countries? Sri Lanka first offered the Hambantota port development project to India, and China figured only as a second option. Besides, it is not as if China disrupts India's efforts to develop its relations with its neighbors like Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.

Again, the animated discourses in India about Sino-Pakistani military ties fail to factor in that Pakistan, too, is entitled to keep up its defense preparedness just as New Delhi has been justifiably vigilant about the Indian military capability to handle threat perceptions vis-a-vis China or Pakistan. India has very substantially jacked up its defense budget in recent years. This scale of massive expenditure on military buildup finds acceptability in Indian public opinion. Besides, China is not the only country that supplies weapons to Pakistan. China's access to sophisticated military technology is actually far more limited than that of France or the US or Russia or Israel. Pakistan today is one of the biggest recipients of military assistance from the US, next only to Israel.

Ultimately, therefore, a mutual understanding with China becomes the imperative need if Indian policies are to be anywhere near optimal in tackling the challenges of regional security and stability.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.

 

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'India playing great game with China'​

Washington: Beijing's increasing influence in immediate neighbourhood of India has made it a bit nervous, but bilateral trade between the two Asian giants would be the stabilising force in Indo-China relationship, a noted American expert on China has said.

"India is contiguous with China. Whereas China is authoritarian, India is a democracy. I think India is playing a great game with China over Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and to an extent in Nepal," Robert Kaplan, Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said.

Kaplan, a noted journalist, said both China and India are offering the governments in these countries various aid packages.

"I think it was loans that India offered the Prime Minister of Bangladesh back last January were a result of what China was offering them," he said.

"China has been basically supplying the Sri Lankan armed forces from top to bottom, from assault rifles up to fighter jets, and was an indirect influence in helping the Sri Lankan government winning the civil war against the Tamil tigers.

This makes India very nervous obviously," he noted. "India and China have, I think, the world's largest bilateral trading relationship. Their economies are complementary rather than competitive. This will be a stabilising force in Indian-Chinese relations," said Kaplan.

In his piece 'The Geography of Chinese Power" in the latest issue of the Foreign Policy magazine, Kaplan said it is India that can balance the military power of China in Asia.

"Europe is declining as a military -- as a sphere of military power as Asia is increasing. India will balance against China. India's building a great navy, going from the fifth-largest navy in the world to perhaps the third. So this is an area of the world where nationalism still lives, where militaries are not something to be embarrassed or ashamed about the way they are in parts of Europe," he said.

"As China moves south -- in other words, expanding its influence along the Indian Ocean littoral -- India seeks to move in terms of influence east and west, out to the borders of former British India, and this is going to mean a very tense relationship between India and China in the future," Kaplan said.

China's growing influence, which would be a geo-political challenge, would become a sort of hegemony in the eastern hemisphere like the US' in the western hemisphere, he added.

 

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The Great India-China Game​

PART-I
The roots of our problem with China go back a couple of hundred years when Emperor Napoleon and Tsar Alexander met in July 1807 on a great raft moored on the river Niemen at Tilsit in east Prussia to conclude a treaty of partnership against the British, thereby beginning 'The Great Game.' This expression was first found in the papers of Arthur Connolly, a British artillery officer and adventurer whose Narrative Of An Overland Journey To The North of India [ Images ] chronicled his travels in the region in the service of the British empire. As the Russian empire began its eastward expansion, which many felt was to culminate in the conquest of India, there was a shadow contest for political ascendancy between the British and Russian empires -- The Great Game.

Napoleon's waterloo at Waterloo did not see a let-up in the fervour with which the game was played. The Russian longing for a colonial empire and a warm water port did not diminish any and so the game continued. The British response to meet the Russian threat was to establish a forward defensive line in the northern region so that a Russian thrust could be halted well before the plains of Hindustan.

This called for making Afghanistan and Tibet [ Images ] into buffer states and for fixing suitable and convenient borders with these states. At various times, several such lines were proposed.

The most notable of these was the 1865 Ladakh-Tibet/Sinkiang alignment proposed by W H Johnson, a junior civilian sub-assistant with the Survey of India. This line was to link Demchok in the south with the 18,000 feet high Karakorum pass in the north, but it took a circuitous route beyond the Kuen Lun mountains and thus included the barren and cold Aksai Chin desert.

It is believed that Johnson may have had some personal reasons for doing this. He was an Indian born 'Englishman' and in the subtle social graduations that guided an individual's destiny under the Raj, there were limits to where he could go. Johnson could not aspire to either a commissioned rank or a high civilian status with the Survey of India and what better way to improve his prospects than by entering the Kashmir maharaja's service? By greatly enlarging the size of the maharaja's domain by incorporating Aksai Chin, Johnson caught the maharaja's eye.


That the British were undecided about Johnson's line is evident by the recommendation in 1889 by Ney Elias, joint commissioner of Leh. Elias, who was an authority on trans-Karakoram territories, advised against any implicit endorsement of the Johnson line by a claim on Shahidulla in the far off Karakash valley about 400 kilometres from Leh, as it could not be defended. On the other hand, responding to Captain Younghusband's report on his meeting with the Russian explorer, Colonel Grombchevsky near Yarkand, Major General Sir John Ardagh, director of military intelligence at the war office in London [ Images ], recommended claiming the areas 'up to the crests of the Kuen Lun range.' Before Whitehall could make up its mind, the Chinese occupied Shahidulla in 1890. To this, the opinion of the secretary of state for India in Whitehall was: 'We are inclined to think that the wisest course would be to leave them in possession as its is evidently to our advantage that the tract of territory between the Karakorum and Kuen Lun mountains be held by a friendly power like China.'

The Indian case for ownership of the Aksai Chin or the white desert rests essentially on the cartographic exertions of a man such as Johnson and we must begin to think about its validity. It's also not without some irony that another Kashmir maharaja's grandiose dreams of an independent state resulted in India's other major problem with another neighbour.

Though Jammu and Kashmir [ Images ] was an independent kingdom, the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar [ Images ] gave the British the responsibility of its security. This made the British responsible for Kashmir's northern and eastern borders with Sinkiang and Tibet. The British, however, never really got around to fixing the border along this line. In 1899, another line was suggested. This was the MacCartney-Macdonald line that excluded most of the Aksai Chin. The British tried to get the Chinese to sign an agreement to this effect. The Chinese did not respond to these moves and Lord Curzon concluded their silence could be taken as acquiescence and decided that, henceforth, this should be considered the border, and so it was. Interestingly this line, by and large, corresponds with the Chinese claim line, which in turn, by and large, coincides with the Line of Actual Control.

But in 1940-1941, things began to change again. British intelligence learnt that Russian experts were conducting a survey of the Aksai Chin for the pro-Soviet Sinkiang government of the warlord Sheng Shih-tsai. It was obviously time for the Great Game again. Once again, the British went back to the Johnson claim line. But nothing else was done to clearly demarcate the border. No posts were established in Aksai Chin and neither were any expeditions sent there to show the flag, as is normal in such situations. For all practical purposes the Raj ceased at the Karakoram range, but by the rules of the Great Game it went further beyond just in caseÂ…

On the eastern sector the Game was also being played, but a little differently. In 1826, the British annexed Assam, which then mainly meant the Brahmaputra valley. The hills were first penetrated in 1886 when an expedition went up the Lohit valley at the far end of what is now Arunachal Pradesh. But in the western end of this sector, immediately east of Bhutan, a Tibetan-administered wedge known as the Tawang tract, located alongside the east of Bhutan up to its southern alignment and running eastwards till just west of Bomdila, was considered by the British to be open country.

In 1903, Lord Curzon concluded that Tibet too had now become a possible launching pad for a Russian thrust and by the rules of the Great Game the Russians were to be pre-empted. Thus came about the celebrated Younghusband mission to Lhasa the following year. But in 1907, the British and the Russians came to an agreement that it suited both their interests to leave Tibet 'in that state of isolation from which, till recently, she has shown no intention to depart.' Thus Tibet, like Afghanistan, was to be a buffer state between the two European imperial powers. But by mid 1910, the Chinese were back in Tibet exercising full control. This reassertion of Chinese power caused concern to the British once again. A consequence of this was a renewed urgency to the perceived need to have a buffer between the Chinese and the precious British investments in Assam.

Another forward line was now mooted. This line called the Outer Line included the entire tribal belt except the Tawang tract. Though the then viceroy, Lord Hardinge, initially saw this as incurring too many risks and expenses, he ordered the establishment of 'a sound strategic boundary' in 1911, citing the Chinese policy of expansion as a cause. Thus, by September 1911, the British had decided that the Outer Line, but now including the Tawang tract, should be the boundary with Tibet-cum-China.

With the collapse of the British and Soviet empires, the only inheritors of this squalid and sometimes bloody game are the Chinese and Indians. The other significant difference is that it is no longer a game played by armchair empire builders in Europe with their assortment of secret agents, cartographers, commercial travellers and explorers, but a deadly serious game between the world's two largest nations with the fastest growing economies, and two of the world's major military powers made even more formidable by their openly deployed nuclear forces. The prize now is no longer an entire subcontinent, but merely a barren and desolate desert high amidst cold wind-swept mountains where, in Jawaharlal Nehru's [ Images ] words, 'not even a blade of grass grows.'

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Part II: The battle for the border​

The next major development with China and Tibet [ Images ] was when the British called for a conference at Simla in October 1913. The Chinese attended reluctantly, but the Tibetan authorities came quite eagerly as they were now engaged in conflict with their Chinese suzerains. Henry McMahon, then foreign secretary to the 'government of India [ Images ],' led the British delegation. McMahon was some sort of an expert at drawing boundary lines, having spent two years demarcating the Durand Line at the northwest frontier.

The boundary that followed was the now famous McMahon Line. This boundary now extended British India up to the edge of the Tibetan plateau. It was not really a cartographers delight as it violated several rules of boundary demarcation. But it was an ethnic boundary in the sense that the area, except for the Tawang tract, was non-Tibetan in character.

The Chinese soon repudiated the Simla Convention and thus the McMahon Line. All through this period, the British never challenged Chinese suzerainty over Tibet. The new boundary was not made effective till Olaf Caroe, an ICS officer, urged the British authorities to do so in 1935. Thus, in 1937, the Survey of India for the first time showed the McMahon Line as the official boundary. But confusion still abounded.

In 1938, the Survey of India published a map of Tibet, which showed the Tawang tract as part of that country. Even the first edition of Jawaharlal Nehru's [ Images ] Discovery Of India showed the Indo-Tibetan boundary as running at the foot of the hills. The Tibetans did not accept this 'annexation' of the Tawang tract and challenged the British attempts to expand their government into this area. But they tacitly accepted the rest of the McMahon demarcation. It is clear that, but for the Tawang tract, there is little basis for the Chinese claim on the whole of Arunachal Pradesh. Even the claim they might have on the Tawang tract is rendered invalid in the sense that it becomes a geographical anachronism and incompatible with India's security interests.

The Japanese thrust towards India in World War II gave urgency to the British need to fix this boundary firmly and securely. Thus, in 1944, J P Mills, the then government's advisor on tribal affairs, established a British administration in the entire belt from Walong in the east to Dirang Dzong in the west. Several posts of the Assam Rifles were established and soon Tibetan government officials were packed off from the Tawang tract also.


The purpose of this laborious recitation of the events of nearly a century-and-a-half of the Great Game is to only show that borders were either never clearly demarcated or established. Lines kept shifting on maps as political contingencies arose. The Indian people were, for this entire period, passive spectators to these cartographic games.

In 1947, the British finally left India. Our choice then was to either call an end to the Great Game or continue playing it with all the intensity and commitment it called for. We did neither. When the Chinese Communists occupied Tibet, we acquiesced. Neither did we firmly move into the areas claimed by the British as Indian territory, particularly in the western sector. How well we looked after territory we claimed as our own is seen by the fact that, in the early 1950s, the Chinese had built a road connecting Tibet to Sinkiang across the Aksai Chin and we did not have a clue about it for several years.

The Indian government did move into the Tawang tract in force in 1951, overriding Chinese/Tibetan protests. In this sector, at least, it was clear that the Indian government was firm about its control of all the territory claimed by the British. There are several signs that indicate the Chinese too seem to have accepted the McMahon Line as the boundary in this sector.

The situation in the western sector was entirely different. Here no definite British Indian boundary line existed. The only two points accepted by both sides were that the Karakoram Pass and Demchok, the western and eastern ends of this sector, were in Indian territory. Opinions on how the line traversed between the two points differed.

India's boundary was inclined towards the Johnson claim line whereas as the Chinese, having built their road through the Aksai Chin, naturally preferred an alignment closer to the McCartney/MacDonald line of 1899. The Chinese claim line however went further west and included the Chip Chap valley, Samzungling, Kongka La, Khurnak Fort and Jara La. More importantly, as far as the Great Game was concerned, the Chinese had occupied all this territory by the early 1950s.

This is how matters were by the end of 1952 and by and large how things are today. The Chinese hold all territory, give or take some, within their claim line in Ladakh. In the east, India holds most of the territory below the McMahon line give or take some. These de facto boundaries could have been a basis for a permanent settlement of our boundaries. But we did not pursue it, though there are indications from time to time that the Chinese might want to settle on this basis.

Now the question that arises is: Why did the Government of India not extend its control to the boundaries it claimed in the western sector as it did in the east? This was mostly due to the terrain. The boundary claimed lies beyond two high mountain ranges and is logistically and militarily indefensible. Besides, the Chinese were already in control of much of the area by 1951. The question then is: Why did the government of India not make serious diplomatic or military efforts to assert control over territories it believed was ours?

The answer obviously lies in the fact that, legally, there was not a very good case. Besides, the military price this barren uninhabited windswept desolation would demand did not make it a worthwhile cause. Despite all this, there abounded the zealous spirit with which recently freed nations regarded their inherited boundaries that were often without regard to geography, ethnicity and history. Even in 1954, the most advanced Indian post was at Chushul. Barring a couple of patrols to Lanak La, no attempt was made to show the new flag. Even Lanak La was well south of Aksai Chin and short of the Sinkiang-Tibet highway, which passed east of it at that point.

The main rule of the Game for the previous 150 years was that it be played as quietly and surreptitiously as possible. In the 1950s, these rules still seemed to prevail. The two contesting governments decided to keep the lid on the problems while jockeying around for local advantages. On the surface it was all 'Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai' and the practice of the Panchsheel philosophy. Underneath was the realisation the titles to large tracts of territory under the control of both parties were under dispute. The lid on this roiling cauldron blew away when in March 1959 the Dalai Lama [ Images ] fled to India and was given political asylum.

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Part III: Peace with China​

The Dalai Lama's [ Images ] flight to India was followed by two ominous incidents. On August 25, 1959, Indian and Chinese forces clashed over the possession of Longju, a small village in the eastern sector. We said it was on the McMahon line and, therefore, ours, the Chinese said it was two miles north of it and, therefore, theirs. There were a few casualties on both sides. On October 20 the same year, the Chinese ambushed an Indian patrol sent to probe the Aksai Chin at Kongka La, in which nine Indian frontier policemen were killed and seven were taken prisoner. With this, public opinion in India was inflamed. A democracy is nothing but a government sensitive to public opinion and governments that ignore this do so at theirs own peril. But public opinion, even when not inflamed, is quite often ill informed. Even among the leadership, many never really understood the historical background of the dispute.

We claimed what the Chinese were claiming and occupying was our 'sacred land' and this was accepted by almost all, except the doctrinaire Marxist Communists who may have done this for reasons not related to history. The Indian government knew better, but allowed itself to be swept by the tide of public opinion and, true to the manner the great game of democracy is played here, the opposition did nothing to bail it out.

The influence of the domestic imperative in the international politics of democratic countries must never be underestimated. It is also an inherent characteristic of democratic societies that very little flexibility is given to the decision-makers in choosing a policy from a wide spectrum of options. If for instance, Nehru accepted Chou En Lai's offers of a settlement on a give and take basis, he would have been accused of giving up our 'sacred' territory. As it is, the opposition was exploiting Nehru's discomfiture over his failed China policy and his naïve reliance on Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai and the Panchsheel policy with the world's foremost practitioners of realpolitik.

In the highly partisan atmosphere that characterised our politics then, as it is even now, any stick is good enough for the opposition to beat the government with and vice versa. The opposition, though small in number then, made up for lack of quantity with quality. Eminent leaders like Ram Manohar Lohia, Acharya Kripalani, Asoka Mehta, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, Minoo Masani and C Rajagopalachari, known for their incisive intellect and oratorical abilities and smarting at their electoral inconsequence, tore into the government in Parliament and outside. Others like Atal Bihari Vajpayee [ Images ], who is now the prime minister of India, were well known for their fiery demagoguery.

Many of Nehru's colleagues, upset by his 'loftiness' and his fondness for Krishna Menon, often preferred to be bemused observers enjoying these blistering attacks. China was treated as Nehru's problem. To be fair to them, Nehru had for long kept the problems with China to himself as he did with most matters pertaining to external relations. To get over this uncomfortable 'debating' situation in Parliament, Nehru often had to sound tough and uncompromising. This would have been fine, if he had the military strength to back him up. Unfortunately for the country, this was not so.

The Indian Army [ Images ] then was poorly equipped, short-staffed and generally in a bad way. Krishna Menon as defence minister squabbled with the generals in public and wrought havoc with the morale of the military's top brass. Aiding him in good measure was a Nehru kinsman, Lieutenant General B M Kaul, a soldier with no combat experience. In his bid to be one up over his peers, he would agree to do things the politicians wanted done, but the general staff baulked at.
The press in those troubled days was not very helpful either. The major English language papers shrilly, and almost in unison, demanded the Chinese be expelled and often accused the government of not doing its duty. The influential English language media, with few notable exceptions, were still conditioned by their pro-British past. They were generally pro-West and found this a good opportunity to needle the government on its policy of non-alignment, seen by them in Dullesian terms as being pro-Soviet. The editors and pundits, never comfortable with Nehru's non-alignment, went hammer and tongs at him. Given this atmosphere, partisan political interests took precedence over national interests. This is not unfamiliar even today. The need to develop a non-partisan national consensus based on a rational survey of facts and events never was greater, yet was as far as it often seems even now.

Against this surcharged backdrop, Nehru had to come up with something. This something was the Forward Policy. This policy called for establishing posts in the disputed areas often behind the Chinese line of forward posts. Thus a number of small forward posts were set up with meagre resources, poor communications and extremely vulnerable supply lines. Most of these posts had to be supplied by air drops and quite a bit of the supply would end up in Chinese hands. The Chinese People's Liberation Army would then hand them over to our men to derive a psychological advantage.

Nothing describes the Forward Policy better than the words of an Indian Army officer: 'We thought it was a sort of game. They would stick up a post and we would stick up a post and we did not think it would come to much more.' It came to be much more, as it had to, and the consequences were felt in 1962 when a full-scale border war broke out. The Forward Policy was against all sound military advice.

Lieutenant General Daulat Singh, GOC, Northern Command, bitterly criticised this policy in his memo to the government on August 17, 1962. He wrote: 'It is imperative that political direction is based on military means.' Singh's warning, like those of many other senior officers, was ignored. Then defence minister Krishna Menon, Intelligence Bureau director B N Mullick and Lieutenant General B M Kaul, who had conjured up this policy, had Nehru's ear and that was what mattered. If Nehru had learnt a little from the much-publicised Bay of Pigs fiasco the new American administration of then President John Kennedy had landed itself into in 1961, he would have been very wary of this threesome.

In Kennedy's case, he allowed the legendary Richard Bissell, the Central Intelligence Agency's then director of operations, to awe him, his cabinet and his military chiefs into approving an operation that was based on little hard intelligence and a lot of wishful thinking. Also, in Kennedy's case, the pressures of the domestic imperative were overwhelming. The planning of the operation had begun in Eisenhower's time with Richard Nixon playing a leading part in it. If Kennedy aborted the plan, he would have been accused of being 'soft on communists' and what greater crime can there be in that bastion of 'freedom and liberty' than this? He succumbed to the fear of an inflammable public opinion just as Nehru was to do later. In both cases, the policies ended up as unmitigated disasters that almost irretrievably hardened positions and thus shaped the future course of national direction and domestic politics.

Incidentally, the order to 'throw the Chinese out,' was given on September 22, 1962 by K Raghuramiah, then minister of state in the defence ministry. Raghuramiah was in the chair, Krishna Menon being in New York to deliver yet one more of those long harangues he was so fond of, when then army chief General K N Thapar gave his appreciation of the situation in the Dhola area. The then foreign secretary then gave his appreciation that the Chinese were unlikely to react strongly and, for good measure, repeated the prime minister's 'instructions' on the subject. We went to war!

In the 41 years that have followed the debacle of 1962, little has changed. We in India have not yet been able to get together a non-partisan consensus on crucial issues such as this. We do not seem to have as yet grasped the real and futile nature of the border dispute. In an overpopulated, overcrowded and primarily agricultural country with a relatively small landmass to share, the concern and obsession with land is understandable. Land is our primary economic resource and hence it is an ingrained national characteristic to be possessive about it. Our leaders, notorious for their land grabbing ways, have not surprisingly acquired an estate agent's mentality as far as territory goes. It seems that, to us, our country no longer means people but land. Why would we care so little about our people and their interests and honour and care so much for an inhabitable desert?

While it is possible for us to settle our eastern border disputes with China on the basis of a clearly demarcated McMahon line, there seems little or no chance that the Chinese could be persuaded to hand over Aksai Chin to us, thereby de-linking Tibet [ Images ] from Sinkiang. There also seems an equally remote chance that we might be able to retrieve it from the Chinese by military means. Even if we summon the political will to stake a fortune, the sheer lack of any tangible benefits, material or spiritual, will only make this even more foolhardy.

There are many indications that the Chinese would settle along these lines. We in India still seem prisoners of our past and continue to take an excessively legalistic view of past events and present inheritances. We have even bound ourselves in knots with a jingoistic and unrealistic parliamentary resolution that binds us to an undefined boundary bequeathed to us and to the 'liberation' of occupied territory, so desolate and inhospitable that let alone animal life, even plant life is hard pressed to exist upon it! By freeing ourselves from this mindset, we could meaningfully negotiate a settlement with the Chinese, whose only aim in this sector seems to secure the Sinkiang-Tibet highway through the Aksai Chin. While this will not entirely dissipate the rivalry between the two countries, it will remove a cause of frequent tension that only serves to underline our unfavourable strategic position.

The challenge now for our national leadership is to harmonise reality with sentiment, pragmatism with unhistorical belief and national aspirations with imperialistic legacies. To be able to do this we first need to extricate such sensitive and critical issues from the ambit of partisan politics. The responsibility for this lies with the government of the day, which alone can orchestrate such an exercise. By doing this, we can once again bring into alignment our political objectives, with military means and reality. We can then negotiate from a position of strength and give ourselves secure, defensible and natural boundaries in the north at least. And who knows this may even lead to lasting good relations between the two great countries.

 

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India-Pakistan Talks--Rapprochement or Renewed Great Game​

India's offer last week to resume high level talks with Pakistan after a fifteen-month hiatus is cause for renewed optimism between the two countries. However, concerns remain about the efficacy of talks amid the evolving situation in Afghanistan.
For months now, India had resisted calls for restarting negotiations with Pakistan for the latter's failure to convict those accused of the attacks. So far Pakistan "has filed charges against seven people in connection with the Mumbai attacks, (but) perceptions persist in India that Pakistan has pursued a half-hearted effort in pursuing the perpetrators of the attacks" with "militants...like Hafiz Saeed...still at large."
Despite official denials, back-channel diplomacy had continued over the past several months with US facilitation and backing. In recent weeks, however, tensions again mounted between India and Pakistan following increased cross-border attacks along the Line of Control (LOC), the Indian army chief's incendiary remarks with respect to India's cold war doctrine, and "heightening of border tensions with incidents of violation of the working boundary in the Lahore and Sialkot sectors".
Thus, this sudden change in official Indian policy with respect to negotiations has left some to wonder whether this "shift represents a real change of heart", how much of it is "substantive" as opposed to "tactical" and whether this would in fact lead to progress on outstanding issues between the two countries? While the actual agenda for talks has yet to be chalked out and agreed upon, all indications are that India still would like to see terrorism on top of the agenda, while Pakistan hopes to resume the 'composite dialogue'-- the "broad-gauge structure of Pakistan-India diplomatic engagement drawn up in 1997 and sustained for twelve years (and) enabled multi-track and multilayered talks that covered the entire gamut of issues..." These included: Siachen, Tulbul Navigation Project/Wullar Barrage, Sir Creek, economic and commercial cooperation and friendly exchanges, terrorism and drug trafficking, peace and security, and, critically Jammu and Kashmir.
In recent years, both Musharraf and Singh had acknowledged that the two countries had come very close to 'clinching a deal' in 2007 and the basis of the talks had been Musharraf's 4-point formula: "make the LoC irrelevant; demilitarize Kashmir; give self-governance to the Kashmiris; and have a joint mechanism comprising Pakistan, India and Kashmiris to oversee the transition and make it work"
At the time both governments were beset with internal political problems and were not able to pursue the process consistently. The political situation has changed dramatically in India with "the Indian National Congress (Congress)-led United Progressive Alliance government holding a strengthened mandate and facing a weakened opposition following its re-election last May". Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the Pakistani government, where Zardari faces legitimacy issues following the annullment of the National Reconciliation Ordinance. Zardari's flagging domestic support and increased tensions with the miltiary has left many in India to wonder about the utility of talks with a weak civilian government that lacks the power to dictate policy on Kashmir.

India's recent overture to Pakistan therefore has left some believing that the impetus for talks is not driven by a desire to the resolve the Kashmir issue but merely a "'measured engagement'...designed to defuse international pressure...at a time when Western officials see their Afghan project to have reached a critical juncture". Experts believe India's position in Afghanistan was sidelined during the London and Istanbul conferences since the international community has recognized the centrality of Pakistan in helping resolve the Afghan crisis. Thus, "growing talk of Western exit strategies from Afghanistan has undoubtedly increased India's discomfiture...and...Delhi's offer to end the bilateral impasse may be a way to maintain
diplomatic leverage in a shifting strategic landscape"
Pakistan has made clear that in "return for trying to rein in the Haqqanis, Pakistan will be looking for a friendly Afghanistan and for ways to stem the growing Indian presence there".
The Pakistani military reportedly "spelled out that Washington must make sure any Indian involvement does not go beyond development work in Afghanistan and that Delhi plays no part in any overall strategy concerning Afghanistan".
At the same time while emphasizing "Pakistan's strategic paradigm to NATO" where "India remains a natural, long-term threat and Afghanistan is part of Pakistan's sphere of influence", Pakistani army chief, Kayani publicly offered to train the Afghan army and police.
Apparently, this offer was made months ago directly to Afghanistan's army chief, Bismillah Khan. Kayani has not yet received a response primarliy because of concerns that "the ISI would recruit Afghan army officers if they are sent for training to Pakistan which would use them for its strategic goals in Afghanistan"
While steps towards an Indian-Pakistani rapprochement were taken to ameliorate security and political conditions in Afghanistan, the fear is that competing interests in Afghanistan might only serve to exacerbate relations between the two nuclear-armed neighbours.

 

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Great Game Redux​

Is India losing the Great Game? There are no shortage of those forecasting a return of the Taliban less than a decade after being toppled. "The Taliban seem to be winning. If they win, we lose," says Gurmeet Kanwal, director of the Centre for Land Warfare Studies.
There are two schools of thinking in New Delhi today. One is that India has left an outsize impression among Afghans and this will pay dividends in the long term. Pakistan's present ascendancy, it argues, will not last for long.
The other argues the US will soon withdraw from Afghanistan and the Taliban will fill the vacuum. "The day the Americans leave, we'll be on the next flight out," said an Indian official. And the new Taliban regime will mean a wave of terror attacks against India.
Two questions
The future of Afghanistan depends on two imponderables. The first is whether the US will withdraw its troops in a manner that lets the Taliban take over. Though it still publicly talks of leaving, the Barack Obama administration is signalling privately to India and others that the US isn't budging. There is pressure for him to leave and pressure for him to stay, says Teresita Schaffer, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, "At the moment, that second set of pressures is what he's responding to."
The second is whose tune the most important Taliban leader, Jalaluddin Haqqani, will dance to. Pakistan, for whom he attacked the Indian embassy in Kabul, believes he's their man. Yet he's been having talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai for months. The US State Department sees him as "the real wild card — the only significant power who's neither been coopted nor is completely beyond the pale." India also believes Haqqani has more of a mind of his own than Islamabad realises.
The point is that none of this is predetermined — they will shift depending on the way the Afghan winds blow.
Triple bluff
India's analysis is that the situation is far more nuanced than most outsiders recognise. "There is a game of triple bluff going on in Kabul," said one official. The US is telling Pakistan that it will never leave if that allows the Al Qaeda and the Taliban to return.
Pakistan believes the US is going to go anyway, so it safeguards its Taliban allies. Karzai talks of joining the Taliban, of setting up an alliance with northern Afghans, and otherwise dumping the Americans. "That's a bluff. The Taliban will string him up if they get the chance," said a diplomatic source.
Where is India in all of this?
India's ambassador in Kabul, Jayant Prasad, says the country's strategic objectives in Afghanistan are not Pakistan-focused. "Our first goal is the stabilisation of Afghanistan "¦ Our second goal is to have an Afghan government that can stand on its own feet."
The Indian calculation is that history shows that no foreigner can bend the Afghans to their will for long, so its focus has been to build goodwill across Afghan society. Polls say Indians enjoy the highest approval ratings of any foreigners among Afghans, Pakistanis the lowest. This will exacerbate long-standing tensions. Says Khadim Hussain of the Aryana Research Institute, "There have been rare moments of peace between Kabul and Islamabad."
India limited

Sceptics see this policy as passive, with India failing to shape events in its favour. They cite how India was either not invited or blindsided at major global conferences on Afghanistan. They note how the US is succumbing to Pakistani pressure — most recently on disallowing Afghan officers to come to India to train. "We are being marginalised," says former diplomat G. Parthasarathy.
New Delhi argues Indian hard options are severely limited north of the Hindu Kush for reasons of geography and capacity. India struggles with the logistics of maintaining its small base in Tajikistan. "We can't function unilaterally there," says Kanwal. "We would need international support."
New Delhi believes that given the few cards India has to play in Afghanistan, it's done well. "Where we were once never a player, we now have a role," said one official.
India is less worried about US policy today. Obama has personally spurned Pakistani demands that India's Afghan consulates be closed. "US frustration with two-facedness on the part of Pakistan military should not be underestimated," says one Democratic Party lobbyist. Another positive for India: "The important Karzai-Obama relationship is coming out of its present crisis okay," says Schaffer.
But with the anti-Pakistan Taliban on the backfoot and the West still wobbly in Afghanistan, Islamabad still believes it's the favourite in the Great Game. India believes its quiet strategy will win out over time. "The endgame has just begun," said an official.