India and geostrategy

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India, China engage in great game in Indian Ocean​

India, backed by its rising naval power is flexing its military muscle in the Indian Ocean in its bid to outmanoeuvre China in the region, even as the US and Japan are backing it in the "great game" with its traditional strategic rival,an Australian think-tank has said.

"A new maritime 'great game' is emerging in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR), as strategic competition between India and China becomes evident," the Australian Strategic Policy Institute has said in its report.

Each has fears of being contained by the other - in China's case, because India is supported by Japan and the US and the US continues to dominate the IOR strategically and militarily, it said.

"India promotes itself as the dominant power of the region as it is obsessed by China's entry into the IOR and is making great use of its navy to spread power and influence," it added.
The Indian Ocean has become the focus of increasing strategic and political attention. Australia should be a pre-eminent country in the Indian Ocean region (IOR), but we've neglected it in favour of the Pacific, the report claimed.

"We lack a holistic Indian Ocean policy, despite the fact that we have the largest area of maritime jurisdiction in the IOR.

Australia has extensive strategic, economic and environmental interests in the IOR; it's not in our interests for the region to become an area of major power competition.

The greatest challenges to the protection of our offshore sovereignty and sovereign rights lie in the Indian Ocean," it said. "About one-third of our exports emanate from Western Australia, and major offshore developments underway off the west and northwest of the continent will be a key to our future prosperity. We need to work harder to plan for critical infrastructure protection, and the Australian Defence Force should increase its presence in this area," it added.

 

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Forgotten Victims Of Great Games​

They would have called themselves Katis, but the Muslims surrounding them had for centuries called them Kafirs - infidels - and their land, thus came to be known as Kafiristan

One day in 1897, near the village Brumotul not far from Chitral, then a semi-independent Muslim state high in the Himalayas, a bunch of boys went walking. They were not Chitralis, but refugees from another place that lay west of the newly demarcated Durand Line. They were not Muslims, either. The boys would have described themselves as Katis, but the Muslims surrounding them had for centuries used "Kafir" to describe the boys' ancestors, and "Kafiristan" for their original land. The British had retained that nomenclature for the portion of that land they now controlled, while the Afghan Amir, Abdur Rahman, whose invasion had made the boys refugees, had named his portion "Nuristan" ("The Land of Light").

The boys stopped on a bridge to watch two "Sahibs" fishing in the stream below, not having seen their likes before. One of the sportsmen came over to them and said something in Khowar, one of the several languages spoken among the Kafirs. One Kati boy understood what was said; he asked his friends to find earthworms for the Sahib. Later, he and another boy carried the day's catch to the Sahibs' camp. The man who spoke to the boys was an army doctor named Capt; the Kati boy who understood him was named Azar. Something about the boy struck Harris as exceptional. He sent for him the following day and almost obsessively insisted that Azar—barely ten or eleven at the time—should join his service. Azar offered excuses, his mother cried, but his father, Kashmir, the leader of the clan, gave his permission. Azar became Harris's servant—first for 18 months at Chitral, and then for two years at Peshawar. Meanwhile, Kashmir was killed by some relatives when he was on his way to Kabul—after converting to Islam—to meet the Amir and seek from him his previous high status.

In June of 1900 Harris was dispatched to China to help suppress the "Boxer Rebellion," while Azar stayed with the Captain's spinster sister. However, when she decided to return to England at the end of the year, Azar refused to accompany her. He insisted on staying in service in the army with the Punjabi soldiers he had come to like, and who had been very kind to him. Miss Harris then handed him over to a Capt. A.A. James.

Soon after, Azar fell seriously ill, and during that illness took a vow to become a Muslim on regaining health. After recovery, Azar made his wish known to James, who was not pleased. It was not what Harris had wanted, who, in fact, had given everyone strict instructions against it. (For the record, Harris had never sought to make Azar a Christian.) Seeing Azar's determination, however, James took the necessary steps and obtained the required permission from the Political Department. One Friday, Azar converted to Islam, and took on a new name: Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah Khan. His devotion to Capt. James, however, and the latter's manifold kindness to him remained unchanged.

A few years later, in the summer of 1905, when Abdullah was at the mountain resort of Murree with his master, he was overwhelmed by a longing for his ancestral homeland. A new ambition also took hold of him. He got the idea of accomplishing what his father had died trying to do—return to the original home in Afghanistan and become the leader of his people. With James's help, a petition was prepared and—after Abdullah put his thumbprint on it—sent to concerned authorities. Several British officers helped in forwarding the cause. Abdullah eventually got an audience with the new ruler of Afghanistan when the latter visited India, but, not knowing Persian, he could not converse with him. Promises were made—or so Abdullah thought—but nothing happened. Then James had a serious accident, forcing him to return to England.

That is where Abdullah's story, as told by him, ends. It is now available to us in a remarkable book. (Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah Khan 'Azar', My Heartrendingly Tragic Story, edited by Alberto M. Cacopardo and Ruth Laila Schmidt (Oslo: Novus Press, 2006), pp. xl, 136, 139.) As the narrative closes in Jalandhar Cantonment, Abdullah says: "Now I can feel homesick with a good conscience, because God Almighty has given the Sahib relief and recovery." The learned editors add in a footnote: "This was probably written in early 1908; Abdullah is already planning his return home, which will take place later that year." Abdullah returned to Brumotul, where he lived out the rest of his life. The editors think he died around 1948.

At some stage during the process of petitioning (1906–07), Abdullah dictated to someone an account of his life, containing much more than the bare-bone given above. He also added to that "heartrending" (dilon ko hila-dene-wali) story a separate but detailed account of his Kati people, their history, kinship system, religious rituals, arts, and important myths or lore. Evidently, it was done at the urging of Capt. James, who might have also suggested the topics that needed to be covered. The two narratives are in Urdu, and in first person. But the editors are rightly doubtful of Abdullah's prowess in that language at the time, for it contains patches that are too purple for any novice. Most likely Abdullah's words were recast by his scribe friend. Be that as it may, the preciseness of Abdullah's observation and the poignancy of his feelings draw our respect and attention even if they come in someone else's language. The singular manuscript, formally dedicated to Capt. James, remained in the captain's custody until 1914, at which time it was returned to the author with other papers. It stayed with Abdullah until 1929, when the famous Norwegian scholar Georg Morgenstierne (1892–1972) met him at Bromotul, and bought it from him for thirty rupees. It now reposes in the Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture at Oslo.

Morgenstierne was the first to note the importance of the book—no worthy account of the Kati people existed at the time—and planned to bring out a proper translation. Unfortunately he died before he could make any serious progress. The task was then undertaken by one of his illustrious students, Knut Kristiansen, but he too passed away before the job was finished. Thankfully, the project was not abandoned, and we now have the two accounts accessible to us in the original Urdu as well as in English translation. The latter, done originally by Kristiansen, has been revised and updated by Kandida Zweng and Manzar Zarin, and provided with explanatory notes by the editors. A brief epilogue accounts for Abdullah's life after 1908, while archival photographs allow us to see the faces of these neglected people and their physical environment. There is a wealth of scholarly addenda in the form of an introduction, biographical and explanatory notes, plus an extensive bibliography, resulting in a superbly put together book.



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Kalash tribe: Some call them the descendents of Alexander's army because they prominently have blue eyes and very fair skin. We tried but could not trace the rights for this photograph, which has been taken from here
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Forgotten Victims Of Great Games
They would have called themselves Katis, but the Muslims surrounding them had for centuries called them Kafirs - infidels - and their land, thus came to be known as Kafiristan
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My Heartrendingly Tragic Story
By Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah Khan 'Azar' Edited By Alberto M. Cacopardo and Ruth Laila Schmidt
Oslo: Novus Press, 2006, pp. xl, 136, 139.
One day in 1897, near the village Brumotul not far from Chitral, then a semi-independent Muslim state high in the Himalayas, a bunch of boys went walking. They were not Chitralis, but refugees from another place that lay west of the newly demarcated Durand Line. They were not Muslims, either. The boys would have described themselves as Katis, but the Muslims surrounding them had for centuries used "Kafir" to describe the boys' ancestors, and "Kafiristan" for their original land. The British had retained that nomenclature for the portion of that land they now controlled, while the Afghan Amir, Abdur Rahman, whose invasion had made the boys refugees, had named his portion "Nuristan" ("The Land of Light").

The boys stopped on a bridge to watch two "Sahibs" fishing in the stream below, not having seen their likes before. One of the sportsmen came over to them and said something in Khowar, one of the several languages spoken among the Kafirs. One Kati boy understood what was said; he asked his friends to find earthworms for the Sahib. Later, he and another boy carried the day's catch to the Sahibs' camp. The man who spoke to the boys was an army doctor named Capt; the Kati boy who understood him was named Azar. Something about the boy struck Harris as exceptional. He sent for him the following day and almost obsessively insisted that Azar—barely ten or eleven at the time—should join his service. Azar offered excuses, his mother cried, but his father, Kashmir, the leader of the clan, gave his permission. Azar became Harris's servant—first for 18 months at Chitral, and then for two years at Peshawar. Meanwhile, Kashmir was killed by some relatives when he was on his way to Kabul—after converting to Islam—to meet the Amir and seek from him his previous high status.

In June of 1900 Harris was dispatched to China to help suppress the "Boxer Rebellion," while Azar stayed with the Captain's spinster sister. However, when she decided to return to England at the end of the year, Azar refused to accompany her. He insisted on staying in service in the army with the Punjabi soldiers he had come to like, and who had been very kind to him. Miss Harris then handed him over to a Capt. A.A. James.

Soon after, Azar fell seriously ill, and during that illness took a vow to become a Muslim on regaining health. After recovery, Azar made his wish known to James, who was not pleased. It was not what Harris had wanted, who, in fact, had given everyone strict instructions against it. (For the record, Harris had never sought to make Azar a Christian.) Seeing Azar's determination, however, James took the necessary steps and obtained the required permission from the Political Department. One Friday, Azar converted to Islam, and took on a new name: Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah Khan. His devotion to Capt. James, however, and the latter's manifold kindness to him remained unchanged.

A few years later, in the summer of 1905, when Abdullah was at the mountain resort of Murree with his master, he was overwhelmed by a longing for his ancestral homeland. A new ambition also took hold of him. He got the idea of accomplishing what his father had died trying to do—return to the original home in Afghanistan and become the leader of his people. With James's help, a petition was prepared and—after Abdullah put his thumbprint on it—sent to concerned authorities. Several British officers helped in forwarding the cause. Abdullah eventually got an audience with the new ruler of Afghanistan when the latter visited India, but, not knowing Persian, he could not converse with him. Promises were made—or so Abdullah thought—but nothing happened. Then James had a serious accident, forcing him to return to England.

That is where Abdullah's story, as told by him, ends. It is now available to us in a remarkable book. (Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah Khan 'Azar', My Heartrendingly Tragic Story, edited by Alberto M. Cacopardo and Ruth Laila Schmidt (Oslo: Novus Press, 2006), pp. xl, 136, 139.) As the narrative closes in Jalandhar Cantonment, Abdullah says: "Now I can feel homesick with a good conscience, because God Almighty has given the Sahib relief and recovery." The learned editors add in a footnote: "This was probably written in early 1908; Abdullah is already planning his return home, which will take place later that year." Abdullah returned to Brumotul, where he lived out the rest of his life. The editors think he died around 1948.

At some stage during the process of petitioning (1906–07), Abdullah dictated to someone an account of his life, containing much more than the bare-bone given above. He also added to that "heartrending" (dilon ko hila-dene-wali) story a separate but detailed account of his Kati people, their history, kinship system, religious rituals, arts, and important myths or lore. Evidently, it was done at the urging of Capt. James, who might have also suggested the topics that needed to be covered. The two narratives are in Urdu, and in first person. But the editors are rightly doubtful of Abdullah's prowess in that language at the time, for it contains patches that are too purple for any novice. Most likely Abdullah's words were recast by his scribe friend. Be that as it may, the preciseness of Abdullah's observation and the poignancy of his feelings draw our respect and attention even if they come in someone else's language. The singular manuscript, formally dedicated to Capt. James, remained in the captain's custody until 1914, at which time it was returned to the author with other papers. It stayed with Abdullah until 1929, when the famous Norwegian scholar Georg Morgenstierne (1892–1972) met him at Bromotul, and bought it from him for thirty rupees. It now reposes in the Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture at Oslo.

Morgenstierne was the first to note the importance of the book—no worthy account of the Kati people existed at the time—and planned to bring out a proper translation. Unfortunately he died before he could make any serious progress. The task was then undertaken by one of his illustrious students, Knut Kristiansen, but he too passed away before the job was finished. Thankfully, the project was not abandoned, and we now have the two accounts accessible to us in the original Urdu as well as in English translation. The latter, done originally by Kristiansen, has been revised and updated by Kandida Zweng and Manzar Zarin, and provided with explanatory notes by the editors. A brief epilogue accounts for Abdullah's life after 1908, while archival photographs allow us to see the faces of these neglected people and their physical environment. There is a wealth of scholarly addenda in the form of an introduction, biographical and explanatory notes, plus an extensive bibliography, resulting in a superbly put together book.


Also See: here and here

Who were Azar/Abdullah's people? Only the ancestors knew, and they do not seem to have left any story of origin or migration. Some outsiders, coming much later, have called them the descendents of Alexander's army because they prominently have blue eyes and very fair skin. When in 1888 Rudyard Kipling sent off his two rascally heroes to become kings in Kafiristan, this is how he described their first sighting of the local people: "Then ten men with bows and arrows ran down that valley, chasing twenty men with bows and arrows, and the row was tremenjus. They was fair men, fairer than you or me, with yellow hair and remarkable well built." (Sadly, the 1975 film based on the story was shot in Morocco and not in Chitral, and John Huston's "natives" were swarthy and dark-haired, true only to Hollywood anthropology.) Linguists who studied the relevant languages have declared them as old as the time when Aryan and Iranian languages had not branched away from each other—even older. These people made their home in a remote region, extremely picturesque but not possessing the wealth that attracted marauders and empire builders. Various invading hordes seemingly skirted them. And when the diverse people around them became Muslim, they collectively came to be known as "Kafirs," and their land as "Kafiristan."

However, what could survive ancient marauding failed against the combined might of 19th century colonialism and nationalism. The British in India came to terms with the Pathans in Kabul in 1893 and put down the infamous Durand Line (1896) that cut through the land of the Kafirs. Soon after, the Amir of the new nation of Afghanistan invaded his portion of the divide to establish his sovereignty. Those who could do so fled to Chitral, whose Muslim ruler let them settle near their brethren.

The "Land of Light" is presently controlled by the Afghan Taliban. It gained headlines around the world in October 2009 when The American forward base, "Camp Keating," was attacked, and eight American soldiers were killed. Subsequently, the Americans abandoned the base after turning it into rubble. Things are also perilous in the Chitral valley, with frequent rumours of Osama bin Laden hiding in the region and the CIA having a listening post there. In September 2009, a Greek scholar-volunteer, Athanasios Lerounis, was kidnapped by the Afghan Taliban. Lerounis had been working with the Kalash Kafirs of Chitral for many years because he was struck by their response when he had asked what they wanted most. "A school of our own," they told him, "where we can teach our language and culture to our children." He was now helping the Kalash build an ethnographic museum of their own when the raiders came from across the Durand Line. They now hold him in Nuristan, in ransom for the release of three Taliban leaders in Pakistan's custody. In January 2010, a group of Chitrali Muslims, including some Kalash, traveled to Nuristan for the fourth time to plead for Lerounis' release, and again returned disappointed.

Back in September 2009, a member of the Kalash community had told the Daily Times of Lahore: "If the government doesn't take any serious action we will leave Pakistan and go to some other country, a move which would bring bad name to Pakistan." Who can even begin to imagine the desperation behind that threat, so naïve and so futile? In the 21st century, no people can emigrate at will. The countless "Durand Lines" all over the globe will never allow it.

 

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'The Great Game' comes to South Asia​

By M K Bhadrakumar

Travelers to Bukhara in Uzbekistan seek out an obscure, ill-lit, vermin-infested dungeon not far from the palace in which Arthur Conolly, British intelligence officer of the Sixth Bengal Light Cavalry, was confined for over six months before Emir Nasrullah Khan ordered his execution in June 1842 on charges of spying for the British Empire, and had him buried in an unmarked grave in the town square.

Conolly had set out from Calcutta (now Kolkata) on his perilous mission of espionage and intrigue - and, it so happened, he was also the person to coin the term "Great Game". This was the nearest that India came to the classic great game.

That is, until last Thursday, when a meeting of the Indian cabinet



announced its decision that India would join the US-backed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan gas pipeline (TAP) project. The TAP would stretch from the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan border to Multan in Pakistan, and up to the borders of western India. The project is estimated at US$3.5 billion.

The Indian Petroleum Ministry, which recommended the TAP to the cabinet, was obviously promoting the business interests of Indian petrochemical companies. But, according to Indian media reports, Delhi also took into consideration that the TAP would be "in tune with the latest US strategic thinking for the region".

There is nothing ambivalent about the "latest US strategic thinking for the region". It is clear for anyone who followed the proceedings of the US Congressional hearings in Washington on April 25-26 on "US Policy in Central Asia: Balancing Priorities". In a nutshell, the hearings were devoted to Washington's so-called "Greater Central Asia" policy. The new thinking resulted from a policy review in Washington following the collapse of the US regional policy in Central Asia in the recent past.

At its summit meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan, last June the six-member Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) called on the US to set a timeline for the withdrawal of American troops from the Central Asian region.

Additionally it ignored an American request for observer status and proceeded to consider requests from Iran, India and Pakistan to join the body. Acutely conscious of the US's marginalization, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice undertook a tour of the Central Asian capitals in October to make a first-hand assessment of how US diplomacy could have gone so horribly wrong. The "Greater Central Asia" concept was born out of this self-assessment.

Returning, Rice ordered a revamp of the Central Asia desk in the State Department by merging it with the South Asia Bureau. But this was more than a knee-jerk reaction involving personnel changes. It also reflected new thinking. The US has built up an unprecedented level of influence in the South Asian region in the recent years. Rice estimated that the South Asian countries would serve its interests if they only could be persuaded to play a proactive role in Central Asia. Equally, the Central Asian states should be made to rethink their deepening involvement with SCO.

Washington would be essentially nibbling away at the SCO at no real cost to itself, by simply flagging in the Central Asian political consciousness a "South Asia option". The ultimate nightmare for US regional policy would be if the SCO were to grant full membership to Iran, Pakistan and India. Iran is manifestly keen on SCO membership. So is Pakistan. Western capitals have prevailed on Moscow (for the time being, at least) to factor that any SCO membership for Iran at this juncture would be regarded as a provocation in Washington.

The SCO foreign ministers' meeting in Beijing last week decided to take a "pragmatic and constructive" stand on the issue, even as the SCO invitations to the heads of states/governments of the observer countries to attend the forthcoming SCO summit meeting on June 15 were dispatched.

Iranian President Mahmud Ahmedinejad and Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf have since accepted the invitation. Washington is at a loss to fathom what really happened. US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack asked Russia to give explanations. "I've seen press reports on it, and we want to have certain explanations," McCormack said.

The Congressional hearings in Washington last month threw into relief these criss-crossing tendencies in a highly complex "tournament of shadows" (which is how Russians call the Great Game) - and the US's policy response. Testifying at the hearings, assistant secretary of state for the newly created Bureau of South Asian and Central Asian Affairs, Richard Boucher, claimed a paradigm shift in the region's strategic landscape had taken place, and "exciting new possibilities" had opened up.

Boucher claimed Afghanistan had reached a level of transformation that it now acted as a "bridge" connecting Central and South Asia rather than posing an "obstacle" separating the two. He painted a fascinating panorama: "Students and professors from Bishkek [Kyrgyzstan] and Almaty [Kazakhstan] can collaborate with and learn from their partners in Karachi and Kabul, legitimate trade can freely flow overland from Astana to Islamabad, facilitated by modern border controls, and an enhanced regional power grid stretching from Almaty to New Delhi will be fed by oil and gas from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan and hydropower from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan."

In political terms, Boucher admitted, "a lot of what we do here is to give the countries of the region the opportunity to make choices ... and to keep them from being bottled up between two great powers, Russia and China." But the leitmotif of any grand US geostrategy will always be the region's immense energy reserves.

Boucher said, "Our vision includes new energy routes that will ensure the next generation of South and Central Asian entrepreneurs have access to the resources they need to prosper. We want to give South Asians access to the vast and rapidly growing energy resources in Central Asia, whether they are oil and gas in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, thermal power in Uzbekistan, or hydropower in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan."

"This vision is within our grasp. Within the next few years, we expect to see private investment lead to the establishment of a 500 kilovolt power line transmitting much-needed electricity from Central Asia across Afghanistan to Pakistan and India."

Clearly, the ultimate profitability of the Baku-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline (from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey), which has cost US$2 billion to build and still needs expansion, may depend on the volume of Kazakh oil on this route. But Kazakhstan is fighting shy of committing to a Trans-Caspian pipeline, which the US is seeking, for linking the BTC with Kazakh oil fields. Simply put, Kazakhstan will not ride roughshod over Russian interests.

In a virtual riposte to Cheney's recent criticism of Russia, Kazakh President Nurusultan Nazarbayev said on Saturday after a meeting with President Vladimir Putin in Sochi, "This kind of Russia, the powerful Russia, the Russia that speaks out as a world power, is important to us, Russia's partners and strategic allies, in many ways, from all possible viewpoints."

Boucher would be wrong to assume that Kazakhstan was desperately seeking new transit options. Cooperation with China is already allowing Kazakhstan transit options. Similarly, he overlooks that any export of hydropower from Tajikistan in the foreseeable future would inevitably involve the Russian companies Rusal and UES, which are already the major players in the current power projects in that country.

As for TAP, will the US be in a position to push the project through? The main issue is Turkmenistan's gas reserves. China recently contracted to begin moving up to 30 billion cubic meters of Turkmen gas annually in 2009 via a Central Asian pipeline system. Russia's 25-year agreement with Turkmenistan signed in April 2003 envisages its right to purchase up to 100 billion cubic meters of Turkmen gas annually. Most American analysts say that Turkmenistan's gas production is not sufficient enough to fulfill the contractual obligations to Russia and China.

Besides, transport is the greatest challenge so long as conditions remain unstable in Afghanistan and until such time when India-Pakistan relations reach a certain level of mutual trust and maturity.

The US strategic thinking remains obsessed with minimizing the Russian and Chinese presence in Central Asia. The strategy is fundamentally flawed in so far as it lacks the dynamism and creativity that can only come out of positive energy. It overlooks what is apparent to the naked eye.

The US, in effect, having lost its petty squabbles and having been slighted time and again in the Central Asian capitals, has evacuated itself to South Asia, bringing with it the entire baggage of the Great Game. From the South Asian perspective, Washington may prove to be putting spokes in the wheel of the region's promising cooperation with the SCO.

 

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Britain's Disastrous Retreat from Kabul​

In the 1800s, the British controlled India, and the Russians, to the north, had their own designs on southern Asia. Between these two imperial powers sat the rugged land of Afghanistan. In time the periodic collisions of empire in that unforgiving landscape would become known as "The Great Game."

One of the earliest eruptions in this epic struggle was the first Anglo-Afghan War, which had its beginning in the late 1830s. To protect its holdings in India, the British had allied themselves with an Afghan ruler, Dost Mohammed. He had united warring Afghan factions after seizing power in 1818, and seemed to be serving a useful purpose to the British. But in 1837, it became apparent that Dost Mohammed was beginning a flirtation with the Russians.

Britain Invades Afghanistan

The British resolved to invade Afghanistan, and the Army of the Indus, a formidable force of more than 20,000 British and Indian troops, set off from India for Afghanistan in late 1838. After difficult travel through the mountain passes, the British reached Kabul in April 1839. They marched unopposed into the Afghan capital city.

Dost Mohammed was toppled as the Afghan leader, and the British installed Shah Shuja, who had been driven from power decades earlier. The original plan was to withdraw all the British troops, but Shah Shuja's hold on power was shaky, so two brigades of British troops had to remain in Kabul.

Along with the British Army were two major figures assigned to essentially guide the government of Shah Shuja, Sir William McNaghten and Sir Alexander Burnes. The men were two well-known and very experienced political officers. Burnes had lived in Kabul previously, and had written a book about his time there.

The British forces staying in Kabul could have moved into an ancient fortress overlooking the city, but Shah Shuja believed that would make it look like the British were in control. Instead, the British built a new cantonment, or base, that would prove very difficult to defend. Sir Alexander Burnes, feeling quite confident, lived outside the cantonment, in a house in Kabul.

The Afghans Revolt

The Afghan population deeply resented the British troops. Tensions slowly escalated, and despite warnings from friendly Afghans that an uprising was inevitable, the British were unprepared in November 1841 when an insurrection broke out in Kabul.

A mob encircled the house of Sir Alexander Burnes. The British diplomat tried to offer the crowd money to disburse, to no effect. The lightly defended residence was overrun. Burnes and his brother were both brutally murdered.

The British troops in the city were greatly outnumbered and unable to defend themselves properly, as the cantonment was encircled. A truce was arranged in late November, and it seems the Afghans simply wanted the British to leave the country. But tensions escalated when the son of Dost Mohammed, Muhammad Akbar Khan, appeared in Kabul, and took a harder line.

The British Are Forced to Flee

Sir William McNaghten, who had been trying to negotiate a way out of the city, was murdered on December 23, 1841, reportedly by Muhammad Akbar Khan himself. The British, their situation hopeless, somehow managed to negotiate a treaty to leave Afghanistan.

On January 6, 1842, the British began their withdrawal from Kabul. Leaving the city were 4,500 British troops and 12,000 civilians who had followed the British Army to Kabul. The plan was to march to Jalalabad, about 90 miles away.

The retreat in the brutally cold weather took an immediate toll, and many died from exposure in the first days. And despite the treaty, the British column came under attack when it reached a mountain pass, the Khurd Kabul. The retreat became a massacre.

Slaughter in the Mountain Passes

A magazine based in Boston, the North American Review, published a remarkably extensive and timely account titled "The English in Afghanistan" six months later, in July 1842. It contained this vivid description (some antiquated spellings have been left intact):

On the 6th of January, 1842, the Caboul forces commenced their retreat through the dismal pass, destined to be their grave. On the third day they were attacked by the mountaineers from all points, and a fearful slaughter ensued"¦
The troops kept on, and awful scenes ensued. Without food, mangled and cut to pieces, each one caring only for himself, all subordination had fled; and the soldiers of the forty-fourth English regiment are reported to have knocked down their officers with the butts of their muskets.

On the 13th of January, just seven days after the retreat commenced, one man, bloody and torn, mounted on a miserable pony, and pursued by horsemen, was seen riding furiously across the plains to Jellalabad. That was Dr. Brydon, the sole person to tell the tale of the passage of Khourd Caboul.

More than 16,000 people had set out on the retreat from Kabul, and in the end only one man, Dr. William Brydon, a British Army surgeon, had made it alive to Jalalabad. The garrison there lit signal fires and sounded bugles to guide other British survivors to safety, but after several days they realized that Brydon would be the only one. It was believed the Afghans let him live so he could tell the grisly story.

A Severe Blow to British Pride

The loss of so many troops to mountain tribesmen was, of course, a bitter humiliation for the British. With Kabul lost, a campaign was mounted to evacuate the rest of the British troops from garrisons in Afghanistan, and the British then withdrew from the country entirely.

And while popular legend held that Dr. Brydon was the only survivor from the horrific retreat from Kabul, some British troops and their wives had been taken hostage by Afghans and were later rescued and released. And a few other survivors turned up over the years.

One account, in a history of Afghanistan by former British diplomat Sir Martin Ewans, contends that in the 1920s two elderly women in Kabul were introduced to British diplomats. Astoundingly, they had been on the retreat as babies. Their British parents had apparently been killed, but they had been rescued and brought up by Afghan families.

 

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India and the Great Game​

By Kosla Vepa PhD

The term Great Game popularized by Rudyard Kipling in his famous novel Kim, has its origin in the astonishing conquests of Temujin, the Mongol warrior more popularly known as Genghiz Khan. This child of the steppe , was so effective in subjugating the duchies of Eastern Europe after laying waste many of the cities of Central Asia, that he was called the 'Scourge of God'. At its peak, the Mongol Horde and the successor Khanates controlled not only Central Asia , China , Persia, most of what is now Russia, but had crossed the major rivers of Eastern Europe. It was not until the 15th century, almost 2 centuries after the advent of Temujin that the Muscovites were able to stand up to the successors of the Golden Horde. The small but insignificant Muscovite Duchy eventually laid the foundation for the Great Game and conquered most of Asia. Russia, the name for the land of the Rus, expanded eastward and southward in successive waves, waves so powerful that in the 'course of four centuries, the Czarist empire grew at the remarkable average of fifty five square miles a day'

Thus was born the name Great Game as it was called by the British and as the Tournament of Shadows by the Russians. It was a deadly serious game starting from the late 1700's just about the time the British had consolidated their hold on India. The main players in the game were Czarist Russia and Britain. What is interesting by today's standards and notions is that it was Czarist Russia which was expansionist and the Soviet Union, its successor which eventually dismantled a substantial portion of this empire in 1991. There were many subsidiary players including Napoleon, the Turks, the Germans, the Iranians, the Japanese, the Central Asian Khanates and last but not least the Chinese.

Is it a coincidence that the Great Game started at about the same time as the consolidation of British power in the Indian subcontinent. Not really. Britain was the pre-eminent power during that period. It's navy was unmatched and it ruled the sea lanes of the world. Yet as Victorian scholar J. R. Seeley observes "Every movement in Turkey, every new symptom in Egypt, any stirrings in Persia or Transoxania or Burmah or Afghanistan, we are obliged to watch with vigilance. The reason is that we have possession of India, and a leading interest in all those countries which lie upon the route to India. This and only this involves us in the permanent rivalry with Russia, which is for England in the nineteenth century what the competition with France for the New World was for the eighteenth century. It is very clear , the raison d'etre of the Great Game, was India.

Thus began a series of clandestine 'explorations' to exotic places such as Khiva, Merv, Bokhara, Samarkhand, Tashkent, Kashgar, Khokand, Herat, Kandahar, Chitral, Leh, by intrepid adventurers from both England and Russia. These adventures are chronicled in great detail by Peter Hopkirk in 'The Great Game' and in 'Tournament of Shadows' by Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac. The point to make however is that the purpose of the Great Game was from the point of view of Britain to keep control of India, the Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire and on the part of Russia it was to wrest control of the heartland of Asia to challenge the British control over the oceans and of India.

After the advent of WW II and the consequent break up of the British Empire, there was a change in the nature of the Great Game. The great Game essentially morphed into a Cold War. Now there was an ideological underpinning to what was a merely a land grab by Britain and Russia. Mackinder's hypothesis was that whoever possessed the landmasses would dominate. It was now possible to cloak the suspicion of Russian imperial ambitions and the resulting massive land grab , in an ideological garb, as a fight against Communism. India's compulsions in having to find a steady and reliable supplier of weapons, gave one more excuse for the US/UK alliance to wrest Kashmir from India.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Documents newly released indicate that Lord Wavell, then Viceroy of India had concluded in 1945 that a Congress Party government in Delhi would not support Britain in its endeavors to counter a Soviet thrust downwards towards the oilfields of the Gulf, and it would therefore be prudent on the part of Britain to concede his demand for Pakistan, in the hope that a loyal Muslim League would keep watch on behalf of Britain on the strategic northwest abutting Iran and Afghanistan. Mountbatten had as much as told the Maharaja of Kashmir on June ,1947 that Delhi would have no objection if he acceded his state to Pakistan. In fact it was never the intention of Britain that Kashmir fall into India's hands.

Finally we come to the latest version of the Great Game or as GG3 as some have dubbed it. First let us review the background to the GG3 as it is currently being played. Second we will review the principles under which GG3 operates. The situation changed radically with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The reasons why this happened is not the subject of this column at this time, but the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet union were indeed far reaching. Several countries became independent overnight as a result. Among them were the Central Asian republics Kazakhstan, Kyrghyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tadjikistan, Turkmenistan, where much of the drama of the Great game in the nineteenth century was played out. Countries that were a blur in people's consciousness and could barely be pronounced , suddenly leapt into prominence. What was of interest to the West and to India was that, while these countries had Islamic populations in varying degrees, their world view was colored by their long association with the Soviet Central State and prior to that with Russia. Most importantly many of these countries especially those bordering the Caspian Sea had extensive energy resources of oil and natural gas, without at the same time having the burden of supporting the needs of a large population. The paramount question was how to transport these resources to the countries that needed this energy.

Other issues including religion will continue to play a major role in the region for many more decades. That Afghanistan is particularly crucial as it was during the days of the Great Game is obvious even today , in spite of the failed attempt of Pakistan to play a major role in dominating this region. Afghanistan continues to be the hub of American operations to control the spread of international terrorism.

GG3 revolves therefore around theocracy, resources, drugs, terrorism, trade and territory. The countries vitally interested in these issues and in the region are the US, Russia, China, Iran, India and Pakistan. From India's standpoint recent events have generally tended to favor the long term strategic interest of India. India's relations with Afghanistan are being restored to a level that approaches the friendly relations during the immediate years after 1947. Each of the above factors forms a compelling reason for India to take a keen interest in developing a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with the Central Asian Republics. Srinagar can form the hub of an expanding trade relationship with the region.

The US has now a toehold in more than one country in the region and hence Kashmir loses the importance that it once had during the days when most of central Asia was controlled by the Soviets. Diminished interest on the part of the US does not mean complete neglect of the region however, and it is safe to say that the US motives in Kashmir are driven by more than mere altruism. Even the British are shedding their long held post WW II aversion and allergy to a strong and economically prosperous India.

Thus, while it is a reasonable premise to make that Kashmir is no longer central to the interests of the US/UK alliance, it is obvious that Central Asia remains as important as ever to India as it was to the British during their Imperial era. This realization has definitely taken concrete shape in Delhi , as one sees a steadily increasing presence of India in these republics.

 

[ajtr]

ASARC WP 2007/11

INDIA'S GREAT VULNERABILITY:ENERGY INSECURITY​

Rakesh Ahuja
Director
Axessindia Consultancy Group
The search for energy security is a major driver of change in the world order today. It
is a veritable new great game, engaging players across the globe, industrial and
industrialising countries, energy suppliers and consumers. It is spawning a web of
bilateral and multilateral deals for securing stable access to energy sources in conflict,
competition or cooperation with each other.
Next to water shortage, energy deficit is India's greatest economic vulnerability. Its
incremental energy demand over the coming decade is projected to be among the
highest in the world. This stems from accelerating economic growth, scarcity of
domestic energy resources, increasing population and an expanding cohort of highenergy
consuming middle class with rising incomes. Populist offerings to the rural
population and urban have-nots, who together comprise a majority of the electorate,
are adding to the energy crunch. Within a democratic framework, no federal or state
government can hope to survive without this bank of votes. Hence, the hybrid pricing
models across the country, ranging from free power to a cocktail of subsidies to
turning a blind eye to massive electricity thefts.
The galloping oil bill is costing the exchequer over 30 percent in foreign exchange
reserves. There are no prospects of prices falling in the short to medium term. The
massive industrialisation in China and India, comprising some 2.5 billion people, is
fuelling the competition for scarce resources between traditionally low and high
energy user nations.
According to Prime Minister Singh, an investment of around US$130 billion is
necessary in the power sector alone to boost generation, upgrade transmission and
distribution networks. India needs to install an additional 100,000 MW power
generation capacity to meet the goal of 'Power for All' by 2012. That is considered
the minimum requirement to sustain the Government's target of 8 percent annual
GDP growth rate.
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India and Fossil Fuels – A Snapshot
"¢ India has 17% of the world's population and just 0.8% of known
oil and natural gas reserves.
"¢ After US 1st and China 2nd, India is the 5th largest consumer of
primary energy in the world. Since 2002, only China has exceeded
India's growth rate of energy consumption.
"¢ India is the sixth largest consumer of oil. It will continue to import
70%-75% of its oil and gas needs in the foreseeable future.
"¢ India is the third largest consumer of coal. It has coal reserves for
the next 70-80 years, but their recovery is constrained by difficult
locations, abysmal mining infrastructure, and high ash content of
the coal. Consequent thermal inefficiency of power plants and
environmental degradation are endemic problems.
"¢ India's current domestic and imported gas supply is 85 million
cubic meters per day, well short of demand double that. Gas
consumption is expected to rise to 400 million cm a day by 2015 if
the economy grows 7-8 percent per annum.
"¢ A Price Waterhouse report predicts a shortfall of 36000 engineers
in the oil & gas sector by 2019. In response, the Government is
establishing a centre of excellence, the Institute of Petroleum
Technology.
"¢ India is set to emerge as an export hub for refined petroleum
products. Current refining capacity is 160 Mt slated to rise to 241
Mt by 2011.
"¢ Conscious of fuel supply chain vulnerabilities, India is establishing
strategic reserves of crude oil. The first storage facility for 5
million tonnes will be completed by 2008.
India is aggressively developing alternative environment-friendly energy sources.
Indeed, wind generated installed capacity is more than nuclear power generation. But
alternatives to mainstream energy sources can make a significant contribution to the
national grid only in the long term. The Asian Development Bank has calculated that
while India ranks fifth in the world with hydropower potential of 84000 MW, only 20
percent has been harvested so far. In effect, India's energy outlook will depend
ultimately on how nimbly it navigates on the other two game boards - the hunt for
fossil fuels, and for sanction-free access to nuclear technology and fuel.
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THE QUEST FOR OIL & GAS
India's economic diplomacy is in an overdrive to secure energy assets abroad, pursue
long-term LNG contracts and promote trans-national gas pipeline ventures. It has
also revamped the legal and regulatory regime to encourage the development of
domestic resources. It allows the private sector to play a major role in the sector from
exploration in on-shore and off-shore blocks to retailing oil and gas products.
Equity Buy-Outs and Joint Ventures
Marauding Indian public and private sector corporations are on the prowl world-wide
for hydrocarbon assets and shares in fuel supply chains. The huge state-owned oil
companies now have considerable policy leeway to raise capital for funding
acquisitions and joint ventures stretching from Siberia to Sudan. The $1.5 billion
stake in Russia's Sakhalin gas fields and the 20 percent share in the development of
Iran's biggest on-shore oilfield (of which China holds 30 percent) are prime
examples. Other investment destinations include Yemen, Egypt, Trinidad & Tobago,
Venezuela, Angola, Kenya, Uganda, Indonesia, Nigeria and Vietnam.
Reminiscent of the 19th century, when it was a strategic object of desire for Imperial
Russia and Victorian England, Central Asia is again a coveted prize for India and the
other two foremost consumers of energy – the United States and China. The former
Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucuses, as well as Russian Siberia, have
become theatres of intense US-Russian, Sino-Japanese and Sino-Indian economic and
political rivalry.
Above all, India is in direct competition for energy resources with China as both race
to fuel their charging economic growth. Their relationship on the energy front is best
described as cooperative competition without conflict. Their hunt for oil and gas
traverses most of the globe from Africa, South East Asia and South America to West
and Central Asia. Both are in favour of ending what former Indian Minister of
Petroleum Aiyer called "wretched Western dominance" of the sector. They are
making joint bids, but also competing for equity stakes, exploration rights and
pipeline building contracts.
Overall, India's success has only been modest in face of China's slick and relentless
campaigns, replete with political and economic incentives and string-free aid. Last
year, China trumped the Indian state-owned oil company, ONGC's US$3.6 billion bid
for oil fields in Kazakhstan, largely because of cumbersome and risk-averse decisionmaking
processes in New Delhi. Indian behemoths are in no position to match the
speed of Chinese dragons in closing deals – or their blandishments. The U.S.
Military's National Defense University estimates that China disburses around US$2.7
billion aid in Africa annually. By the end of 2006, China had invested US$11.7
billion in that continent alone, most of it to oil producers Sudan, Angola and Nigeria.
Pipe Dreams
The emergence of independent Central Asian states in the wake of the Soviet Union's
demise, China's growing economic pre-eminence in Greater East Asia, the Sino-
Indian détente and Afghanistan's re-entry into regional equations are expanding the
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scope of trade and other economic links across the entire Eurasian land mass. Roads,
railroads, and technologies for transporting oil, gas and hydroelectric power are in the
making as the 'new silk roads'.
Spurred by India's energy lust, its reserves of technological skills and labour and by
possible collateral benefits of the Indo-Pakistan peace dialogue, several Central and
West Asian inspired proposals are on the anvil: gas pipelines to India from Iran via
Pakistan (with a possible offshoot to Yunnan), from Myanmar via Bangladesh,
undersea pipeline from Oman, and from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan and Pakistan;
Kazakhstan oil via the Caspian Sea to Iran, then piped or shipped to India; and
transmission of Tajikistan and Kirghizstan hydel-power via the Wakhan corridor in
Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Not one of these proposals is anywhere close to implementation. They will remain
pipe dreams to prosperity until conflicting political and security interests of the
participating nations can be melded into viable joint ventures. Oman has long been
under pressure from fellow members in the Organisation of Islamic Conference
against concluding a bilateral deal with India. Bangladesh remains reluctant to grant
India transit rights in respect of proposals aimed at transporting energy to India's
north-eastern states unless it receives concessions pertaining to other (unrelated)
bilateral issues.
The Myanmar project is now very unlikely to proceed. The ruling Junta has
withdrawn India's "preferential buyer" status for two off-shore natural gas fields in
favour of selling the gas to PetroChina. China will build a pipeline in the opposite
direction from Sittwe to Kunming. The decision is blatantly politically motivated;
China's support for keeping Myanmar's human rights record of the UN Security
Council agenda outweighed the economic incentives of selling the gas to India.
Notable as these examples are, there is no better illustration of the convoluted politics
of trans-national energy deals than the proposed Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline.
Politics of Pipelines - The Iran/India/Pakistan Project
The US$8 billion trilateral project was conceived in 1989. It has sound commercial
basis. It remained victim to India-Pakistan acrimony until bilateral tensions abated in
2003. Much progress has been made since on security, project structure and
financing. But it is now stalled on commercial disagreements concerning Iran's
insistence on periodic price revisions and Pakistan's demands for higher transit fees.
These are real enough issues, but they mask deeper, conflicting political motives and
bilateral suspicions.
For India, securing Iranian gas would be a significant step in satisfying its enormous
energy appetite. Accordingly, it has made a series of concessions, including delinking
the project from a long-standing demand for Pakistan to reciprocate the MFN
status and allow transit rights for trade with Afghanistan. It has also abandoned its
insistence on negotiating the project only with Iran, a tactic designed to place
responsibility squarely on the latter to guarantee that Pakistan will meet its
commitments. Still, it remains wary of the leverage a strategic commodity pipeline
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would give Pakistan's unpredictable governing polity irrespective of the bilateral and
trilateral agreements in place.
For Pakistan, the pipeline would be a bonanza worth well over $1bn in transit fees.
However, it remains concerned about making its arch-rival India even stronger
economically. Moreover, Pakistan fears that the Iranian pipeline could become
something of a slippery slope. It will set a precedent, making it difficult to resist calls
by other grasping Central Asian nations for delivery conduits to India. That would
undercut Pakistan's strategic leverage as a geographic barrier between India and West
and Central Asian states.
For Iran, as the guardian of world's second largest gas reserves, the pipeline would
guarantee captive customers over the long-term. The deal would also reaffirm the
traditionally strong political and economic links with India. Notably, while India is
the third largest Muslim nation, it has, after Iran, also the second largest Shia
community in the world.
And then there is the United States, the mover and shaker in the global energy market.
It has unequivocally labelled the project a "bad idea", warning of harsh sanctions
against companies doing business with Iran. That would have serious consequences
for Indian corporations, which have a strong presence in the Middle East and whose
human resources, engineering capabilities and capital would inevitably be required for
pipeline construction and other associated activities. American sanctions would have
a severe spill-over effect on their commercial credibility and operations elsewhere.
Despite American objections, India and Pakistan are negotiating the project's
modalities. They also serve a broader purpose. The Indian Government is facing stiff
domestic opposition to the 123 nuclear agreement with the U.S. President Musharraf
is under attack from the Islamist lobby, which accuses him of being subservient to
America. Continuing bilateral talks on the pipeline imply a disregard for American
concerns, providing a buffer against domestic criticism of their policies towards the
United States. Hard decisions would be inescapable should an agreement be
concluded. Thus India would be forced to choose between the promise of long-term
civil nuclear cooperation with the US and the immediate import of gas from Iran.
Arguably, it is in the interest of both Pakistan and India not to reach an agreement as
long as the US-Iran stand-off is not resolved.
Search at home
The opening of the previously sacrosanct oil and gas sector to private operators,
domestic and foreign, is one of the most visible success stories of India's economic
reforms. State-owned energy giants continue to march ahead profitably – ironically
retarding the possibility of their privatisation – but they are compelled to compete
with home-grown and global majors throughout the sectoral supply chain.
The 1999 New Exploration Licensing Policy was a landmark event under which a
steadily increasing number of on-shore and off-shore blocks are being auctioned – 52
in the sixth round in 2006, 80 this year. According to the Indian Oil Ministry,
companies that won exploration rights in the previous five rounds discovered the
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equivalent of 4.88 billion barrels of oil of which at least 30 percent are likely to lead
to actual production.
Cairn Group's oil strike in Rajasthan has advanced to a stage where it is constructing
a pipeline to supply crude to refineries in western states. Reliance Industries (RIL)
made the world's largest gas discovery of 2002 in the Krishna-Godavari basin in
Andhra Pradesh. More recently, it struck sizeable gas reserves in the Kaveri basin on
the east coast. RIL has embarked on a massive US$12 billion investment programme
of exploration and production, including a 1400 km East-West pipeline as part of its
national gas grid. Over the next five years, nearly 50 percent of India's gas needs are
expected to be met through domestic fields. RIL alone expects to contribute one
quarter of the nation's additional generating capacity during that period.
THE QUEST FOR NUCLEAR ENERGY
The development of nuclear power generation is the most important strand in India's
quest for energy security. It has little choice. Known fossil fuel reserves at home are
limited. There is a measure of insecurity in relying inordinately on cross-border
supplies for a country ocean-locked on three sides and ringed by prickly neighbours
on land. Bringing more domestic hydrocarbon and renewable resources on stream
will not only take time, but even in the best case scenario will not achieve selfsufficiency.
In the context of global warming, 'cleaner' nuclear power clearly has a
major role in the country's energy mix: no less than 67 percent of power generation
comes from environmentally damaging coal fired plants.
India and Nuclear Energy – A Snapshot
"¢ India has 17 operating reactors, 7 under construction and 24 proposed by
2020. Respective figures for China are 9, 2 and 32.
"¢ Indian nuclear industry employs around 50000 highly qualified nuclear
scientists and technicians. This 'public' figure most likely excludes those
employed in the defence establishment.
"¢ Nuclear energy accounts for only 3% (4120 Mw) of India's total energy
output. In China, it is 1.8%.
"¢ Projections to 2030 call for nuclear energy share to rise from 3% to 26% to
sustain the growth of demand for power.
"¢ Conversely, generation from other sources is projected to fall: coal-fired
from 67% to 47%; oil and gas from 20% to 16%; and hydro from 10% to
8%.
"¢ The Government plans to open the nuclear civilian infrastructure to private
sector once the deal with the US is "operationalised". Indian corporates such
as TATA and Reliance have the resources to build nuclear power plants in
partnership with global majors.
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As early as the 50s, the visionary Nehru decreed the harnessing of nuclear power for
civilian consumption a national priority. However, the role of what he described as
the "new temples" in meeting the newly-independent country's power needs was
severely retarded by international sanctions after India's 1974 Pokhran nuclear test.
Its subsequent pariah status was set in stone by fatwas issued by western nonproliferation
ayatollahs after the 1998 nuclear tests.
On the upside, thirty years of international sanctions and nuclear exile have served as
a catalyst for concerted indigenous development of nuclear power stations, R&D
centres, and of an impressive infrastructure of industrial facilities servicing both
military and civilian nuclear establishments. India has steadfastly maintained its three
stage nuclear power programme, based on pressurised heavy water reactors, then fast
breeder reactors, and finally on thorium fueled advanced reactors.
However, the Indian nuclear establishment readily acknowledges that existing nuclear
stations are nowhere the state-of-art, and that they are operating at no more than 65-70
percent of their optimal capacity because of fuel (uranium) shortages. While the
civilian nuclear power programme could chug along without uranium and up to date
technological imports, observers estimate that the share of nuclear energy would, at
best, rise from 3 percent to 10 percent over the next two decades.
Prime Minister Singh has estimated that sustaining 8 percent annual GDP growth
target would require 30000 to 400000 Mw from the nuclear grid. The Government's
immediate goal is to triple nuclear power output to 10000MW by 2012. It calculates
that if the international restrictive nuclear transfer and trade regime were lifted, India
could realistically set a target of 20000 Mw or more by 2020.
The US-India Deal
It is against this background that India has entered into the nuclear 'grand bargain'
with the United States. The crux of this complex, nuanced deal is that the US will
extend "full" nuclear cooperation to India, enabling it to access nuclear hardware and
fuel as if it were a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). In return,
India will separate its military programme from civilian nuclear energy facilities and
place the latter under tight IAEA safeguards.
The so-called 123 Agreement is integral to building a strategic partnership between
the two long-estranged democracies. However, there are several hurdles to cross
before India can come out of the nuclear cold. The US Administration has to
convince an obdurate Congress to dismantle (or by-pass) the firewalls accreted over
the years against nuclear-related dealings with India. It has to persuade the 45-
member, consensus-based Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) to loosen the supply chain,
a process in which China's attitude will be critical. It also has to win over members
of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) to its approach of making India
an "exception" to the NPT.
India too faces a long march. It has to negotiate the complicated Additional Protocol
with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on country-specific safeguards.
But even before it can commence those negotiations, the Singh Government has to
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build a domestic consensus on the 123 deal. The argumentative Indians are at it
again. There is spirited opposition to the nuclear agreement from the Left red-card
cadres as well as the environmentalist green-card holders.
However, indications are that the imperatives of achieving energy security will
ultimately hold sway. Once all the hurdles are crossed, the immediate benefit for
India will be access to uranium ore, which will help achieve optimum operating
capacity of the under-performing existing reactors. Meanwhile, other intangible
benefits are already flowing from the American imprimatur designating India as a de
facto nuclear weapons state.
India has been admitted into the exclusive six-nation International Thermonuclear
Energy Reactor project (ITER), a research and development centre designed to
demonstrate the scientific and technical feasibility of fusion power. Membership of
the US-led Generation IV International Forum (GIF) is very much on the cards. This
eleven-member consortium is investigating innovative nuclear energy systems with
the aim of developing the next generation of nuclear reactors. There are also good
prospects of India being admitted into the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership
(GNEP), which addresses the development of advanced technologies for peaceful
uses of nuclear energy.
Membership of these diverse nuclear-related clubs and the consequent association
with new frontiers of nuclear technology will be invaluable to India for advancing its
nuclear programme. (Of course, that is precisely why several governments and
lobbies world-wide strongly oppose the deal.) However, it is not just one-way traffic.
Other club members have expectations of gaining technical results of India's long and
laborious research and development efforts, albeit often unrealised, and to its
scientific and technical manpower. The significance of this latter aspect should not be
underestimated. Since the Three-Mile Island accident in 1979, civilian nuclear power
has been on a back burner in most western countries, leading to a generational gap in
education and training in nuclear technology. In contrast, a strong base of technical
skills has been coalescing in India since the 1970s.
THE AUSTRALIAN CONNECTION
India faces a stark dilemma. When ratified, the 123 Agreement will open the gateway
to most of the state-of -the art-nuclear technology it can afford. However, that would
serve little purpose without ready and reliable access to uranium fuel, which, in turn,
will depend on the NSG. Australia's attitude at that forum will be critical. Belying its
middle power status, Australia has a disproportionately strong voice internationally on
matters nuclear, underpinned by its 40 percent of the world's reserves of low cost
uranium.
After decades of vociferous domestic debate in Australia on the rights and wrongs of
nuclear power, a bipartisan political consensus has emerged on lifting restrictions on
uranium industry's development to allow greater yellowcake exports. It is intended to
abandon the 25 year old policy against commissioning new uranium mines, which
made the industry not only a sacred cow, but with three operating mines already
supplying 22 percent of the global output, a half pregnant one.
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The Australian Government has welcomed the US-India deal. Following a review of
relations with India, it has also foreshadowed the opening of Australia's yellow
paddock to India. The sale will be subject to the same safeguards as imposed on
China under the Nuclear Transfer and Cooperation Agreement. Despite widespread
reservations in the polity about selling uranium to a country, which has refused to
subscribe to the Holy Grail, the NPT, the government's decision reflects several
considerations relevant to Australia's long-term economic interests in the Indian
market.
One, there can be no sustainable 'planetary' game plan for tackling global warming
without addressing the needs of China and India, which are two of the world's largest
emitters of greenhouse gases. Under the froth and bubble of the debate on combating
global warming, there is a glaring contradiction between identifying India as a major
contributor to the greenhouse gas emissions and denying it the means to deal with that
problem. That is consistent with the stated objectives of the Asia-Pacific Partnership
on Climate (AP6), including Australia and India, which approves the option of
nuclear energy to counter climate change.
Two, Australia can hardly ignore the determination of its ally, the US, to forge a
strategic partnership with India, one objective of which is to place it on no less a
footing than China for accessing nuclear supplies. This reflects its apprehensions
about China's looming might for the balance of power in Asia.
Of course, the US is also driven by the commercial charms of a multiplying, 300
million strong, Indian middle class. American high-tech corporations, in particular
Westinghouse and GE – and Russian, British, French and German companies - are
salivating at the prospect of selling nuclear hardware to India. There is little doubt
that as soon as the decks of the 123 Agreement are cleared, India will embark on a
buying spree, starting with 1000 mw light reactors.
Three, Australia has a growing economic stake in India, its fastest growing export
market since 2002. Provided Australia is flexible on uranium sales to a non-NPT
signatory, its economic and political leverage will increase. But that would be
seriously jeopardised if it were any less responsive to India's energy security needs
than to China's.
Four, the argument that divvying up the yellow cake for sale to India would
undermine the non-proliferation regime holds little water. In contrast to China's less
than transparent record on proliferation, India has an impeccable non-proliferation
record. Indeed, that fact underpins the US case for the nuclear accord with India.
Five, it is in Australia's (and western alliance's) interest to bring 'oiloholic' India into
the nuclear fold to provide sound alternatives to its debilitating dependence on, and
strategic compromises with, problematic countries such as Iran. A nuclear energy
option would certainly diminish the attractiveness of the Iranian pipeline or other
energy projects perceived as inimical to western interests. Besides, in the long-term,
a decrease in demand for conventional energy resources has the potential to reduce
price pressures at the oil pump and the burden on the Australian economy.
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Finally, Australia is in a driving seat for harvesting hundreds of million dollars
annually from uranium exports to India. It has a more mature technological capacity
for 'absorbing' greater quantities of Australian uranium than, say, China. But
Australia has no monopoly in the uranium market. With reserves around half that of
Australia, Canada is the world's largest exporter of uranium. Other potential sellers
to India include Kazakhstan, Namibia, Niger, Russia and Uzbekistan.
Australia's response to satisfying India's energy insecurity will be the single most
decisive issue in determining whether its long-term business interests have a place on
the Indian high table to partake what an up and coming economic superpower has to
offer. For India too, this issue represents something of a litmus test of Australia's
commitment to developing a substantive bilateral relationship.
CONCLUSION
One irony says a great deal about India's energy prospects. Indian companies are
competing worldwide from Indonesia to Nigeria for contracts to build power plants
and construct pipelines. Clearly, it is not the lack of capital or technological skills,
which is retarding India's quest for energy self-sufficiency; it is the lack of
conventional and nuclear resources to which they can be applied.
India faces one incontrovertible fact. Geo-political and economic constraints make
quick fixes by jostling on the fossil fuel game board an unrealistic option. It is also
self-evident that whatever successes India might have in bringing conventional
domestic resources on stream, including alternative fuels, it can not achieve selfsufficiency
in the near future. India's reliance on importing 75 percent of its primary
energy needs, rising oil and gas prices and a vociferous domestic green lobby leave it
little choice but to adopt the nuclear option to feed its booming economy. The
landmark nuclear Agreement with the United States is on the point of providing the
gateway to an exponential leap on that front.
Arguably, apart from its leading global role in the heyday of the non-alignment
movement, India has never engaged in geo-political plays as intensely as it is now
doing to tap energy resources. Indian intelligentsia prides itself on having learnt the
lessons of the Great Game as Kipling described the politics of regional balance of
power in the 19th century. But a new great game on a much wider scale and with very
different objectives is now in progress. India's energy security will depend on how
successfully it employs imaginative, multi-dimensional resource diplomacy to gain
access to diversified energy resources from across the globe.

 

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Great game around China's Lanka yard​

Why the teardrop island is catching the eye of America and India:
New Delhi, March 10: The teardrop named Sri Lanka is threatening to light a fire in India's backyard that New Delhi is hoping to douse by killing it with kindness.

The first steps of that policy has unfolded with a military-medical mission landing in Colombo this week in a first sortie by the Indian Air Force. More sorties are to be followed by a series of measures. The reconstruction package coincides with political pressures mounting from Tamil Nadu where Jayalalithaa went on a hunger strike demanding humanitarian intervention.

The demand is catching on during election time and has echoes in Washington where foreign secretary Shiv Shankar Menon met US secretary of state Hillary Clinton last night.

Lurking in the background of the measures that India is taking and the US is pushing for is an increasing presence of the Chinese who are developing roads, expanding a port and filling spaces vacated by India during the years of a hands-off policy before the Sri Lankan armed forces took the battle to the LTTE and cornered it in the island's northeast where the militants' territory is now confined to less than 100sqkm and is shrinking by the hour.

The demand for humanitarian intervention has been strengthened because aid agencies are saying that hundreds of thousands of non-combatants are caught between the guns of the Sri Lankan forces and the Tigers in two patches demarcated as no-fire zones. Each of these zones is roughly about 50sqkm, according to information exchanged by the Sri Lankan government with India.

In South Block, in the defence and external affairs ministries, officials are working on a package of measures that bear a resemblance to the kind of steps that India took in Afghanistan post-2001. Among these are an increase in the number of military-medical teams comprising field medical units. The first one is tasked to be deployed for a month.

Road rebuilding, de-mining, expansion of trade and economic ties, training and educational facilities are some of the other programmes on the agenda that New Delhi has set for a wider engagement with the Mahinda Rajapaksa government.

The US, meanwhile, is understood to have pushed for a more active engagement to evacuate civilians but there is little appreciation of where the evacuees can be taken to. The maritime great game over Sri Lanka is really unfolding around the evacuation of the civilians caught between guns and is not about them.

By landing an Indian military-medical team in Pulmoddai, 49km north of Trincomalee, the port in Sri Lanka's east coast, India has probably put a foot into a situation where it foresees a landing of a number of foreign forces, benign or otherwise, while the US hovers in the background.

A British diplomat in New Delhi points out that western interest in Sri Lanka is currently driven by worries that the LTTE may attempt a terrorist strike in Europe or the US to draw attention to their plight in the face of the advance by Sri Lankan forces.

One strategic analyst in the Indian security establishment says there have been 14 bombings by the LTTE between November 13 and March 10 (including one in Matara today), more than half outside the LTTE's traditional area of operations. The total number of LTTE workers (trained and semi-trained) is still estimated at 2000).

This still gives the LTTE a potential to strike at civilian targets. The US has a base in Diego Garcia, south of Sri Lanka, but its Pacific Command is not actively engaged in any large-scale land-based operation.

Analyst and writer Robert Kaplan foresees US policy in the latest Foreign Affairs journal as a mediator but the US "will have to do so not, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, as a land-based, in-your-face meddler, "¦but as a sea-based balancer lurking just over the horizon. Sea power has always been less threatening than land power: as the cliche goes, navies make port visits, and armies invade".

North of Diego Garcia is the Sri Lankan southern tip of Hambantota where the Chinese are upgrading a port as they are the port of Gwadar on Pakistan's Makran Coast. (The offer was once made to India but New Delhi dragged its feet). The Chinese are also building or expanding three major roads in Sri Lanka — an expressway from the Katunayake Airport to Colombo, a 200-odd-km road from Ambapasa to Trincomalee and about 100km of road from Hambantota to another airport east of it.

Between Diego Garcia and Hambantota is the Sea Lane of Communication through which nearly 70 per cent of China's oil imports pass. A refuelling station at Hambantota, for tankers and/or warships and/or other vessels give the Chinese a huge R&R (rest and recuperation) point in the vastness of the Indian Ocean before they take to the Straits of Malacca.

So much goes into the teardrop called Sri Lanka then that the civilians — and no one knows for certain how many there are — who weep are often lost sight of.

 

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The Great Game Revisited​

India hasn't categorically said no to an overland pipeline through Pakistan. It is seeking to leverage its purchasing power to cut a hard political deal.

There was a time when the visit of an Indian leader to a country like Iran would have been accompanied by a stream of pious platitudes in which terms like Third World, non-alignment, anti-imperialism and South-South cooperation would have been freely over used. It is a commentary on the shifting sands of diplomacy that External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh began his interaction with the accompanying media team in Teheran by referring to a man who, 100 years ago, translated a romantic faith in the destiny of India into a strategic doctrine. In invoking Lord Curzon's writings on Persia, Jaswant wasn't being needlessly obscure. In his inimitable, reflective way, the minister was, perhaps, subtly reviving memories of a time when the imperial responsibilities of India stretched from Aden in the west to Singapore in the east. In this scheme of things, the role of Iran -- with whom India shared a border until 1947 -- was crucial. "A peaceful Persia, a stable Persia, an independent Persia", Curzon felt, were central to safeguarding Indian interests. Under no circumstances, the viceroy felt, could Calcutta afford a policy of masterly inactivity towards Teheran. The imperatives of the Great Game dictated otherwise.

As Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi led Jaswant into a committee room adjoining the sheesh mahal in the grand Foreign Office building for the 11th Indo-Iran Joint Commission meeting last week, it was a variant of the Great Game that was being re-enacted. The details -- particularly national boundaries and the composition of the players -- had changed but the fundamentals were firmly intact, even if the frontier spirit of adventure had yielded way to the hard-nosed demands of commerce.

If laying railway tracks cutting across inhospitable terrain thinly populated by turbulent tribesman had preoccupied the statesmen of the late-19th century, the two delegations now addressed themselves to a similar issue -- a pipeline from Assaluyeh and Bandar Abbas that would transport natural gas from Iran's huge South Pars field to western India.

There was an undeniable logic to the move. Iran has the second-largest reserves of natural gas in the world. Its total reserves are estimated at 812 trillion cubic feet (TCF) but annual production was a measly 1.9 TCF in 1998. Actually, there are few takers for the South Pars gas in the region. Neighbouring Pakistan has huge gas reserves in Baluchistan but produces only 0.7 TCF, all of which is consumed domestically. The country's economy being in a mess, the demand is unlikely to go up substantially and certainly not enough to warrant imports from Iran.

An economically resurgent India, on the other hand, has an enormous, almost insatiable, appetite for energy. "We estimate a 1 per cent GDP growth will lead to a 3 per cent rise in energy needs," said Jaswant. India's consumption of natural gas has risen from 0.6 TCF in 1995 to nearly 1.2 TCF this year. According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), it is estimated to touch 1.9 TCF in 2005.

At present, India's needs are mainly met by importing Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) by sea tankers, a method that involves two additional stages between production and consumption. If more gas was easily and cheaply available, there would be more downstream projects and present projections of future consumption could well turn out to be under-estimates.

It was a combination of Iranian desperation over an under-utilised resource and the Indian hunger for cheap natural gas that prompted the authorities in Teheran to seek changes in the 1993 Indo-Iran MoU for an offshore pipeline. Egged on by potential customers in western India, it unilaterally approached the Pakistan Government for transit rights for an Iran-India land pipeline. On April 3, the military government of General Pervez Musharaff conceded the request on the understanding that Pakistan would earn transit fees that could make its cash-strapped exchequer richer by anything between $600 million and $700 million.

There were more fanciful suggestions -- not emanating from Iran -- that the overland Iran-India pipeline would form the nucleus of an elaborate grid linking the $10 billion Dolphin project, an integrated gas pipeline grid for Qatar, UAE and Oman, with a possible sub-sea Oman-Pakistan link. More adventurous was the hope that the Turkmenistan gas fields would connect to the Iranian grid and, consequently, to India. In short, where the grand railway dreams of the previous century had faltered, the pipelines would establish the definitive link between India, Iran and Central Asia.

Unfortunately for the pipe-dream merchants, Jaswant made it clear at the Joint Commission meeting that New Delhi wasn't amused. He told the Iranians that "India and Iran have a bilateral agreement on gas. The assumption that it is now a trilateral agreement is an over-simplification and premature." India's shirtiness was entirely security-based. There was no way India felt it could agree to a major energy lifeline being at the mercy of Pakistan. Officials brushed aside the contention that the huge transit fees would give Pakistan a vested interest in ensuring a smooth supply of gas to India. "You are applying normal 21st century logic to a country that is gripped by Y1K," said a senior Indian diplomat. India readily conceded that a overland pipeline would be at least 15 to 20 per cent cheaper than a shallow-water pipeline. But Jaswant was clear that there has to be "a survivable marriage between economics and security. There is no way we can agree (to the pipeline) unless the fundamentals are addressed. The discussion is not technical but political."

It is this stress on the political that gives clues to India's approach to today's Great Game. On the face of it, India seems to have said a categorical no to the overland pipeline proposal without saying as much. The Joint Working Group (JWG) headed by the two foreign ministers will examine "all" available proposals. But there is no time frame for arriving at a decision and, more important, the JWG will comprise officials from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). The MEA's opposition to any pipeline transiting Pakistan verges on the fanatical. Such a perception is shared in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO). Both are yet to get over the "betrayal" in Kargil.

However, the story is far from over. Diplomacy being essentially an exercise in engagement, it is unlikely that India is anxious to walk away from the Great Game. Choosing his words with characteristic care, the external affairs minister said as much in Teheran: "India has to recognise its centrality as a major energy consumer. It must be recognised as a strength rather than a weakness. Therein lies the management of the challenge." At the concluding session of the Joint Commission, Jaswant invoked the reformist President Mohammad Khatami's observation to him that "India-Iran relations are not subject to transient occurrences". That's a polite way of saying that there is much more to bilateral relations than the present pipeline hitch.

Indeed there is. With Jaswant's "energy diplomacy" focusing on multiple sources of imports to meet growing domestic demand, there is the parallel belief that the richness of the Indian market can be leveraged to improve the security environment. It is no accident that the joint commission discussions on regional issues focused primarily on Afghanistan where there is a growing convergence of views and interests with Iran. If Iran is worried by Kabul's role in drug trafficking and its harsh treatment of the Shia minority, India has made no secret of the Pakistan-Afghanistan nexus in the so-called Kashmir jehad.

Unfortunately for India, common interests haven't led to a common approach. Jaswant may feel that "without India being on board there can be no lasting solution to the Afghanistan problem" but Indian officials privately acknowledge the "deep reservations", even within Iran, to any Indian involvement in Afghanistan.

This isn't only on account of Iran's chairmanship of the Organisation of Islamic Conference this year. Having abdicated its pre-1947 role in the region in favour of a universalist Third Worldism during the Cold War, India is finding it hard to claw its way back into reckoning. The structures necessary to sustain a more involved regional policy aren't in place and there is little by way of institutional memory of the pre-Independence foreign policy.

In an Iran caught in the midst of an unresolved power tussle between Islamic universalism and Iranian nationalism, India's objective interests lie in the reformists led by President Khatami getting the upper hand. The reformists have a genuine appreciation of India's democracy and the liberal intelligentsia of Teheran can barely conceal their admiration for India's it achievements. And despite the formal ban on satellite dishes, Indian TV channels screening Bollywood films have a tremendous following among the youth. Shah Rukh Khan hasn't reached the levels of popularity that Raj Kapoor enjoyed in the erstwhile Soviet Union but his appeal is still considerable.

Yet, until the reform process gathers greater momentum, India cannot afford to assume a higher profile in the region. Even the West has warned against it. There is, for example, hardly any organised Indian link with the conservative clerics of Qom, the shadowy figures who exercise the ultimate veto in Iran, even in matters of foreign policy. It is to keep that section in good humour that Kharrazi raised the Kashmir issue at one of the joint commission sessions. It was also the fear of conservative displeasure that prompted the Iranian desire to underplay the discussions on Afghanistan. Small wonder there is a section in South Block that feels India should confine itself to a "limited engagement" in Iran and "masterly inactivity" in Afghanistan. The alternative, says an mea official, "is getting sucked into a swamp".

These are cost-effective approaches but ones that presume foreign policy to be a zero sum game. But if the Indian economy keeps growing at its present pace, if India continues to surge ahead in the new economy and if the private sector re-establishes the country's formidable pre-1947 commercial links in the region, a passive foreign policy with an obsessive preoccupation with Pakistan cannot suffice.

Negating the proposed India-Iran pipeline on security considerations makes sense only in terms of skirting risks. After all, without exposure there is no vulnerability. But if India's economy links with Iran, the Gulf states and Central Asia keep growing, and not merely its role as the best customer for hydro-carbon energy, the debate over the pipeline will change unrecognisably. The national consensus won't be determined by the question: is the pipeline safe? It will depend on the multiple options to the poser: how do we ensure a safe pipeline?

For India to even begin raising the second question involves a conceptual breakthrough. So far, the situation didn't warrant audacity. But post-Pokhran, post-Kargil and post-Clinton visit, India's global profile has changed. It has been made to think big. Maybe that's why Jaswant felt the need to reforge an Iran policy by invoking the legacy of a "very superior person" who thought India's vision should match its size. That's what the Great Game was all about then and that's what the Great Game is now.

 

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Iran, India and the 'great game'​

The brief working visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Delhi on April 29 has led to considerable comment -- both before and after the visit -- and this has more to do with the manner in which Iran has become a litmus test for the 'autonomy' of India's foreign policy in the light of the India-US civilian nuclear co-operation agreement of July 2005.

At the outset it merits recall that in the lexicon of international relations, no nation has a truly pristine autonomous or independent foreign policy. A nation's foreign policy is crafted to advance or protect one of the many strands of the complex but abiding national interest (often economic or security related ) -- and to that extent adopting any foreign policy orientation is in itself an exercise in making the most viable of multiple choices in a given strategic context. Thus the normative objective of foreign policy is not about displaying defiance or merely seeking cordiality -- but to sub-serve a national interest determinant.

The man the West loves to hate

Iran has loomed large in the Indian debate due to the divergence between New Delhi and Washington, DC over the manner in which each has perceived Tehran -- particularly after the election of Ahmadinejad as the Iranian President in 2005. Seen as a hardliner in the context of domestic Iranian politics, Ahmadinejad has been very critical of the West as an entity and the intimidation by the US for its characterisation of Iran as being part of 'an axis of evil' apropos its weapons of mass destruction profile.

India does not share this view of Iran and has conveyed as much to the US -- though it does have its own assessment of the nuclear issue in the regional and global context. Paradoxically, India and Iran have held divergent positions in the nuclear domain ever since the inception of the NPT. Iran signed the treaty as a non-nuclear weapon state while India has remained outside the NPT -- as it does today in 2008. Traditionally Iran has neither been helpful nor empathetic to the Indian position on the nuclear issue and this was evident during the 1995 NPT Extension Conference and in the immediate aftermath of the May 1998 Indian nuclear tests. In short -- India and Iran have differed on the nuclear nettle -- but this did not prevent engagement in trade -- specifically in the hydrocarbon sector. Thus India imports up to 8 percent of its oil from Iran and is exploring the possibility of increasing this to include gas -- which is where the current Ahmadinejad visit becomes relevant.

US is collapsing: Iran president

India and Iran have been engaged in sporadic negotiations over the supply of gas since the late 1980's and the transit through Pakistan has given this project a trilateral IPI contour. However there was little meaningful progress due to lack of consensus on the techno-commercial aspects that included pricing of the gas and transit fees, as also the physical security of the pipeline that will extend over 2,600 kms from Iran through Pakistan to India. The latter aspect has become central since three quarters of the transit route will be through the Baluchistan province in Pakistan which has a history of local opposition to gas pipelines and Islamabad has not been able to prevent attacks by Baluch rebels on Pakistan's domestic gas pipelines.

It was this complex ground reality that compelled Prime Minister Manmohan Singh [Images] to note in July 2005 when asked about the viability of the IPI pipeline: "I am realistic enough to realise that there are many risks, because considering all the uncertainties of the situation� I don't know if any international consortium of bankers would probably underwrite this project." The project will call for an investment of almost $7 billion (about Rs 28,000 crore). Since 2005, the IPI stalled over price negotiations -- both for the gas with Iran and the transit with Pakistan -- and in the interim, political and strategic developments further muddied the waters.

IPI pipeline doable: India

India's domestic debate over the US nuclear deal became more contested -- with the Iran policy becoming a lightning rod; Pakistan had not yet overcome its animosity towards India and the fixation that Kashmir must be resolved before there could be any progress on trade; and Iran was going through its own domestic convulsions as regards its nuclear program and its purported breach of commitments to the International Atomic Energy Agency resulting from the revelation about the AQ Khan network It was in this context that India had voted along with the majority against Iran in the IAEA -- a position that has not changed. Here India's stand has been consistent -- that Iran should meet its obligations as a NNWS and satisfy the IAEA over its covert nuclear program -- and again it merits reiteration that India has not arrived at a determination or passed judgment over Iran's nuclear weapon status -- which is a departure from the US position.

It was significant that during the current visit, the Iranian President asserted that the Indian vote at the IAEA was no longer an issue of contention between the two countries and that he hoped that the IPI deal would be finalised in the next 45 days. This is a very optimistic assessment and highly desirable -- given India's growing energy needs and the market reality that oil is now trading at $120 a barrel -- but one would still urge a note of caution. None of the complex constraints that had eluded consensus -- techno-commercial and pipeline security aspects -- have disappeared. The political intent is there in all three countries and the change of stance in Pakistan is to be welcomed. But here again, the transit fee negotiations have not been concluded and fluctuations in the hydrocarbon market add greater complexity to the negotiations.

India should choose Iran, not US

India -- like China -- needs energy from any and every source to sustain its GDP growth and related developmental goals and Iran's importance cannot be ignored. The choice for India is not an 'either-or' option in relation to the US/Iran and the nuclear/oil sector. India needs both and the challenge for Indian foreign policy will be to realise both objectives. As of now India will have to engage with the US through quiet diplomacy as opposed to emotive public statements that stoke inflamed domestic opinion. With oil prices climbing, the compulsions of geo-politics and geo-economics are converging in the energy domain and some very unlikely political accommodations are being initiated.

Central Asia with Iran as a major gas supplier is the arena where the new 'great-game' is being played out and China, India and Japan [Images] are all seeking to protect their respective energy interests for the medium term -- and pipeline politics is the new instrumentality. The Ahmadinejad visit is part of this 21st century strategic chess-game but the fruition of the IPI gas pipeline will be a long haul. The desirability is not in doubt but the feasibility cannot be exaggerated.

 

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Gwadar Port: A Great Development Project Or A Great Game?​

I wanted to write on this topic for many months. Finally I've got around to write on it. Most of our readers know Pakistan inaugurated its third deep sea port in Gwadar in March 2005. It became operational in March 2008 when first the ship carrying 52000 tonnes of wheat from Canada berthed here. In my opinion a great news of development for Pakistan, especially as a project whose foundation stone was laid just three years ago on March 22, 2002 and its first phase got finished on time in March 2005. Phase I includes building of three multipurpose berths. Gwadar port operations are run by the Port of Singapore Authority (PSA) under a 40-year agreement.

So far so good. But what are the strategic and political implications of this project. A quick search on internet will reveal a plethora of conspiracy theories. Some even call it a useless port for Pakistan. Others call it a part of new Great Game being played across the Balochistan province of Pakistan. So what is it? In my opinion this is a brilliantly planned project and a great strategic move by Pakistan. With Pakistan Motorway Project connecting Gwadar to Peshawar via Punjab, a World Class Coastal Highway (N10) connecting Gwadar to Karachi, it may very well become the trade hub for this century. But while Pakistan has played its best move, other regional and global powers are also not sitting silent and they are making their own moves making Gwadar port a project with multi-dimensonal consequences.

Dimension One: Pakistan's Strategic Interests

(1) Gwadar is located only 180 nautical miles from the Strait of Hormuz through which 40% of World's Oil passes. Gwadar could thus emerge as the key shipping hub in the area providing mass trade to central asian republics as well as across Pakistan and China. A road from Gwadar to Saindak is completed. Saindak is already connected to the RCD Highway (N35) and through Quetta-Chaman it provides the shortest route for trade with Central Asian Republics.

(2) Pakistan also needed a deep sea port away from Karachi so that in times of hostilities Pakistan Navy doesn't get blockaded. With all the navy ships concentrated at Karachi port, a blockade of Pakistan had been quite easy in the past. With Jinnah Naval Base at Ormara and Gwadar port, PN should be able to spread out its assets. For reference, Gwadar port is 450 km further away from Indian Border than Karachi Port.

(3) Gwadar port will directly and indirectly bring lots of wealth, trade and infrastructure advancement to the area which has been traditionally left behind in developement. Compare it to how Karachi port transformed a once sleepy fishing village to a megapolis.

This is all good news for Pakistan. Dimension Two: Chinese Interests in Reaching Blue Waters

(1) It is also widely claimed that there is a Chinese interest in reaching the blue waters of Arabian Sea. This is cited as a strategic move by Chinese as they funded US $198 million (out of total phase I cost of US $248 million) and also provided 450 Engineers on site to finish the project on time. It is said that China is trying to develop its Western regions at par with its Eastern regions to reduce the economic gap within China and to stop the internal migration of people from West to East. It is famously called their 'Go West' policy. To market products produced in Western China, ports of Shanghai or other eastern ports are almost 3000 km away from the western production centers where as Gwadar provides access to a port at just 1500 km.

(2) There is another dimension to this project where Gwadar port is considered as the naval outpost for the Chinese. It has been called part of 'String of Pearls' strategy of Chinese where they've got hold of strategic ports in Gwadar, Bangladesh, SriLanka, Burma, Thailand, Combodia, and South China Sea etc. On a world map, these ports form of string (of pearls) which may form as Chinese line of defense to control oil movement. 80% of oil used in China goes through shipping lines of Malacca Straits. This strategy of a series of ports along the oil shipment routes gives China a forward footing. It is said that China is also wary that US may cut off its oil supplies through Malacca straits in case of any increase of hostilities on Taiwan issue.

(3) China has however, always denied that Gwadar will ever be used by Chinese military. Publicly they have always called it a civilian port of Pakistan.

Dimension Three: Iranian and Indian Interests in the Area

(1) Gwadar port is also making regional players nervous. Iran which is only 72 km away from Gwadar considers it as an economic threat taking business away from Iranian ports. So in competition to Gwadar, Iran has developed its own port called Chabahar with the help of India. Chabahar is located in Iranian Balochistan province of Seestan. India is also building 213 km long road to connect this Iranian port with Afghanistan. India is eyeing this Iranian port as its own shortest route to Central Asian markets and may be a counter balance to Chinese influence in Gwadar.

(2) India may also consider the Chinese influence in Gwadar as a move by China to encircle India, hence their interest in developing Iranian port of Chabahar.

Dimension Four: Baloch Nationalist Interests

(1) Now if you thought that was all, don't forget the nationalist angle to Gwadar port. Baluchi people in whose province this port has been developed are not 100% behind the project. Their apprehensions are that other provinces will reap the real economic benefits of this development. There is also a resentment against the labor for the port coming from other provinces as well as the real estate boom that Gwadar is seeing is going to people from outside Balochistan. This has resulted in some violence in the area including some attacks even targeted against the Chinese engineers.

The attacks against the Chinese also gives rise to the speculation that our friendly neighbors may be inciting Balochi nationalism for their own economic agenda but there has to be some truth that Baluchis deserve more share in their province's resources.

I really hope our political leadership use their acumen to pacify feelings of alienation among Balochis otherwise Pakistan will see the benefits from Gwadar port scaling down to none.

 

[ajtr]

The Great Power 'Great Game' between India and China: 'The Logic of Geography'​

Abstract:
The simultaneous rise of China and now India is a fundamental factor for understanding the twenty-first century. In rising as Great Powers, a relative term, they are coming up against each other across Asia and its surrounding waters. Traditional geopolitical models, Mackinder, Spykman and Mahan point to their spatial politics around Central Asia, South Asia, Pacific Asia and the Indian Ocean. Actual spatial settings are combined with perceived spatial outlooks. These powerful neighbouring states seek to continue rising, and constrain the other where necessary through mutual encirclement and alliances/proxies. This type of 'Great Game' is evident in the military-security, diplomatic and economic areas. Globalisation has not replaced regionalism, nor has geoeconomics replaced geopolitics. The stakes are high as is their need for securing access to energy resources for their economics-led rise to Great Power status. Some cooperation is evident, in line with IR liberalism-functionalism. However, geopolitical IR realism and security dilemma perceptions still shape much of their actions.

 

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India's Great Power Plans​

India has long had a strategy for great power status, says N.V. Subramanian. But recent developments mean it can finally happen.

Although India doesn't have a formalised plan for acquiring great power status, the outlines of a consistent grand strategy have been clear for some time—strategic autonomy through interlocking networks of interests with world powers, and the building of military capabilities based on growing economic prowess.

This intuitive two-pronged approach, enunciated by the nation's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, is likely to be in place at least until 2050, when India is expected by some projections to be vying with the United States for the position of world's second-largest economy after China.

Nehru introduced the principle of strategic autonomy so that India wouldn't be sucked into or trapped by the opposing ideologies of an intensifying Cold War. Understanding that India's stance would be unappreciated unless it built a vehicle for its position, Nehru mooted the Non-Aligned Movement, a bloc scorned by both Cold War powers (although both sides were privately grateful for Nehru's brokering efforts in the Korean War).

Yet the bloc survives today—toothless it may be, but it still occasionally provides India with a moral compass. Meanwhile, India has kept up its studiedly 'neutral' position, contributing unflinchingly to UN peacekeeping efforts, while staying out of non-UN-sanctioned endeavours such as Iraq, and ensuring its contribution to Afghanistan has been purely humanitarian and developmental.

The limited brokering success of the Korean War prompted some Indian commentators to suggest a bridging role for India between rival great powers as a key component of its grand strategy—back then the United States and Soviet Union, and now the US and China. Yet India's own strategic competition with China makes such a role far-fetched, and India anyway has no great taste for, nor skill at, brokering, a reality that has apparently solidified its strategic autonomy policy.

But read between the lines, and it's clear that India's autonomy policy has anyway actually morphed from its Cold War incarnation with the changing international environment, and is now geared instead at making it a great power in a non-polar world.

The key to understanding India's strategy is the so-called Mandala approach to geo-strategy and the theory that Indian security lays in concentric circles. The most immediate of these circles radiates from its centre to its neighbours, the second touches the Gulf of Aden and Singapore on either side, and the third circle reaches around the rest of the globe to embrace the great powers. This theory suggests that India cannot truly be secure until all three circles are pacified.

Such a theory is nothing new—indeed it has prevailed continuously from the third century BC, when Chanakya—India's own Machiavelli—propounded it. But recent decades have shown India may now be on the path to mastering these circles.

The critical change that has allowed India to continue to move forward was the end of the Cold War, from which it emerged both territorially intact (many had predicted India would go the way of the Soviet Union) and with a newly-opened economy that has since grown at an average rate of about eight percent a year. This growth has been mostly based on its domestic market, unlike the export-oriented economy of China, thus shielding India from the brunt of the recent global recession. Such growth has also unbound India's appetite for embracing an interlocking network of interests with nations across the globe, weak and strong—a necessary development to ensure its continued rise and security. For example, India has partially co-opted the Burmese regime with money and materials in an effort to contain Chinese influence and guerrilla groups operating in India's north-east.

Meanwhile, the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal was implemented in an effort to overcome Non-Proliferation Treaty and Nuclear Suppliers Group-related proscriptions on dual-use technology exports to non-parties such as India, something that has helped the country tackle uranium fuel shortages while giving long-term stakes to US, Russian, French and perhaps Japanese nuclear power reactor manufacturers.

In addition, it is political as much as technical considerations that are weighing on India's choice of where to purchase 126 multi-role combat aircraft—a major defence deal—with India warning the United States that it will be out of the reckoning if it sells F-16s to Pakistan as part of the Afghanistan bailout package.

Such defiance of the United States on the fighter aircraft issue marks a shift from the Cold War years as India seeks to bolster its regional, South Asian hegemony. This shift has also seen a recent effort to renew ties with Russia, which has been the quickest nation to sign up new reactors for India; price disputes on the Gorshkov aircraft carrier have also been resolved.

And, despite recent tensions, there has been progress on building pragmatic relations with China, overcoming the emotionalism of the 1962 war between the two (a war that India lost). For example, India and China were part of the BASIC group that prevented the United States and Europe from hijacking the Copenhagen Summit agenda, while India also has placed considerable value on intense consultation with Russia, Iran and China on Afghanistan, where the terrifying prospect of an Islamic caliphate looms, with snatchable Pakistani nukes nearby.

It would be a spectacular strategic breakthrough if India could dissuade China from encouraging Pakistani bellicosity (an attitude emboldened by earlier Chinese nuclear and missile proliferation). But India likely doesn't yet have enough strategic weight to make that possible, and in the near-term can only count on a failing Pakistan becoming everyone's headache, something that would prompt a range of international countermeasures.

There is, of course, a flip side to India's approach. Because it sees no value, so far at least, in intercontinental power projection outside of the Indian Ocean littoral, India is limiting its great power ambitions by stunting its huge and growing military prowess; it is also so far yet to gain significant experience of foreign combat or intervention. It is therefore a victim of its own relative insularity in South Asia, meaning it can be effectively blackmailed by even weak states like Pakistan (although this approach still has the merit, for now, of meaning there are generally few questions raised about whether India's rise is a peaceful one).

It's clear that taming the three concentric circles of interest—a principle that has survived 23 centuries and recurs regularly in internal strategic discourse—is the key to India becoming a great power. Circumstance may have prevented this occurring until now, but recent developments suggest India is working to a time, perhaps not too far away, when it is a leading economy and a power able to reorder the world to its liking.

 

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The "Great Game" Enters the Mediterranean: Gas, Oil, War, and Geo-Politics​

By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

Global Research, October 14, 2007

Preface: The Caspian Sea Summit and the Historical Crossroads of the 21st Century

This article is part of The Sino-Russia Alliance: Challenging America's Ambitions in Eurasia (September 23, 2007). For editorial reasons the article is being published by Global Research in three parts. It is strongly advised that readers also study the prior piece.

History is in the making. The Second Summit of Caspian Sea States in Tehran will change the global geo-political environment. This article also gives a strong contextual background to what will be in the backdrop at Tehran. The strategic course of Eurasia and global energy reserves hangs in the balance.

It is no mere chance that before the upcoming summit in Tehran that three important post-Soviet organizations (the Commonwealth of Independents States, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, and the Eurasian Economic Community) simultaneously held meetings in Tajikistan. Nor is it mere coincidence that the SCO and CSTO have signed cooperation agreements during these meetings in Tajikistan, which has effectively made China a semi-formal member of the CSTO alliance. It should be noted that all SCO members are also members of CSTO, aside from China.

This is all in addition to the fact that the U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, and the U.S. Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates, were both in Moscow for important, but mostly hushed, discussions with the Kremlin before Vladimir Putin is due to arrive in Iran. This could have been America's last attempt at breaking the Chinese-Russian-Iranian coalition in Eurasia. World leaders will watch for any public outcomes from the Russian President's visit to Tehran. It is also worth noting that NATO's Secretary-General was in the Caucasus region for a brief visit in regards to NATO expansion. The Russian President will also be in Germany for a summit with Angela Merkel before arriving in Tehran.

On five fronts there is antagonism between the U.S. and its allies with Russia, China, and their allies: East Africa, the Korean Peninsula, Indo-China, the Middle East, and the Balkans. While the Korean front seems to have calmed down, the Indo-China front has been heated up with the start of instability in Myanmar (Burma). This is part of the broader effort to encircle the titans of the Eurasian landmass, Russia and China. Simultaneous to all this, NATO is preparing itself for a possible showdown with Serbia and Russia over Kosovo. These preparations include NATO military exercises in Croatia and the Adriatic Sea.

In May, 2007 the Secretary-General of CSTO, Nikolai Bordyuzha invited Iran to apply to the Eurasian military pact; "If Iran applies in accordance with our charter, [CSTO] will consider the application," he told reporters. In the following weeks, the CSTO alliance has also announced with greater emphasis, like NATO, that it too is prepared to get involved in Afghanistan and global "peacekeeping" operations. This is a challenge to NATO's global objectives and in fact an announcement that NATO no longer has a monopoly as the foremost global military organization.

The globe is becoming further militarized than what it already is by two military blocs. In addition, Moscow has also stated that it will now charge domestic prices for Russian weaponry and military hardware to all CSTO members. Also, reports about the strengthening prospects of a large-scale Turkish invasion of Northern Iraq are getting stronger, which is deeply related to Anglo-American plans for balkanizing Iraq and sculpting a "New Middle East." A global showdown is in the works.

Finally, the Second Summit of Caspian Sea States will also finalize the legal status of the Caspian Sea. Energy resources, ecology, energy cooperation, security, and defensive ties will also be discussed. The outcome of this summit will decide the nature of Russo-Iranian relations and the fate of Eurasia. What happens in Tehran may decide the course of the the rest of this century. Humanity is at an important historical crossroad. This is why I felt that it was important to release this second portion of the original article before the Second Summit of the Caspian Sea States.

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Ottawa, October 13, 2007.


The haunting spectre of a major war hangs over the Middle East, but war is not written in stone. A Eurasian-based counter-alliance, built around the nucleus of a Chinese-Russian-Iranian coalition also makes an Anglo-American war against Iran an unpalatable option that could turn the globe inside-out. [1]

America's superpower status would in all likelihood come to an end in a war against Iran. Aside from these factors, contrary to the rhetoric from all the powers involved in the conflicts of the Middle East there exists a level of international cooperation between all parties. Has the nature of the march to war changed?

Tehran's Rising Star: Failure of the Anglo-American attempt to Encircle and Isolate Iran

Shrouded in mystery are the dealings between Iran and the Republic of Azerbaijan during an August, 2007 meeting between President Ahamdinejad and President Aliyev. Both leaders signed a joint declaration in Baku on August 21, 2007 stating that both republics are against foreign interference in the affairs of other nations and the use of force for solving problems. This is a direct slur at the United States. Baku also reemphasized its recognition of Iran's nuclear energy program as a legitimate right.

However, the meetings between the two sides took place after a few months of meetings between Baku and the U.S. together with NATO officials.

Baku seems to be caught in the middle of a balancing act between Russia, Iran, America, and NATO. At the same time as the meetings between the Iranian President and Aliyev in Baku, Iranian officials were also in Yerevan holding talks with Armenian officials.

This could be part of an Iranian attempt to end tensions between Baku and Yerevan, which would benefit Iran and the Caucasus region. The tensions between Yerevan and Baku have been supported by the U.S. since the onset of the post-Cold War era, with Baku within the U.S. and NATO spheres of influence.

At first glance, Iran has been busy engaging in what can be called a counter-offensive to American encroachment. Iranian officials have been meeting with Central Asian, Caucasian, Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and North African leaders in a stream of talks on security and energy. The SCO meeting in Kyrgyzstan was one of these. The importance of the gathering was highlighted by the joint participation of the Iranian President and the Secretary-General of the Supreme Security Council of Iran, Ali Larijani.

Iran's dialogue with the presidents of Turkmenistan, the Republic of Azerbaijan, and Algeria are part of an effort to map out a unified energy strategy spearheaded by Moscow and Tehran. Iran and the Sultanate of Oman are also making arrangements to engage in four joint oil projects in the Persian Gulf. [2]

Iran has also announced that it will start construction of an important pipeline route from the Caspian Sea to the Gulf of Oman.[3] This project is directly linked to Iranian talks with Turkmenistan and the Republic of Azerbaijan, two countries that share the Caspian Sea with Iran. Furthermore, after closed-door discussions with Iranian officials, the Republic of Azerbaijan has stated that it is interested in cooperating with the SCO. [4] In addition, Venezuela, Iran, and Syria are also coordinating energy and industrial projects.

The Nabucco Project, Eurasian Energy Corridors, and the Russo-Iranian Energy Front

Across Eurasia strategic energy corridors are being developed. What do these international developments insinuate? A Eurasian-based energy strategy is taking shape. In Central Asia, Russia, Iran and China have essentially secured their own energy routes for both gas and oil. This is one of the reasons all three powers in a united stance warned the U.S. at the SCO's Bishkek Summit, in Kyrgyzstan, to stay out of Central Asia. [5]

In part one of the answers to these questions leads to the Nabucco Project, which will transport natural gas from the Caucasus, Iran, Central Asia, and the Eastern Mediterranean towards Western Europe through Turkey and the Balkans. Spin-offs of the energy project could include routes going through the former Yugoslav republics. Egyptian gas is even projected to be connected to the pipeline network vis-à-vis Syria. There is even a possibility that Libyan gas from Libyan fields near the Egyptian border may be directed to European markets through a route going through Egypt, Jordan, and Syria which will connect to the Nabucco Pipeline.

At first glance, it appears that the transport of Central Asian gas, under the Nabucco Project, through a route going through Iran to Turkey and the Balkans is detrimental to Russian interests under the terms of the Port Turkmenbashi Agreement signed by Turkmenistan, Russia, and Kazakhstan. However, Iran and Russia are allies and partners, at least in regards to the energy rivalry in Central Asia and the Caspian Sea against the U.S. and the European Union.

In May, 2007 the leaders of Turkmenistan, Russia, and Kazakhstan also planned the inclusion of an Iranian energy route, from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf, as an extension of the Turkmenbashi Agreement. A route going through either Russia or Iran is mutually beneficial to both countries. Both Tehran and Moscow have been working together to regulate the price of natural gas on a global scale. If Turkmen gas goes through Russian or Iranian territory, Moscow will profit either way. Both Tehran and Moscow have hedged their bets in a win-win situation.

Russia is also involved in the Nabucco Project and has secured a Balkan energy route for the transportation of fuel to Western Europe from Russia vis-à-vis Greece and Bulgaria. To this end on May 21, 2007 the Russian President arrived in Austria to discuss energy cooperation and the Nabucco Project with the Austrian government. [6] One of the outcomes of the Russian President's visits to Austria was the opening of a large natural gas storage compound, near Salzburg, with a holding capacity of 2.4 billion cubic metres. [7] The Nabucco Project and a united Russo-Iranian energy initiative are also the main reasons that the Russian President will visit Tehran for an important summit of leaders from the Caspian Sea, in mid-October of 2007.

Map: Contours of the Nabucco Project
© Jan Horst Keppler, European Parliament (Committee on Foreign Affairs), 2007.

One might ask if Russia, Iran, and Syria are surrendering to the demands of America and the E.U. by providing them with what they sought in the first place.

The answer is no. The Franco-German entente is very interested in the Nabucco Project and through Austria has much at stake in the energy project. French and German energy firms also want to get involved as are Russian and Iranian companies. This is also one of the reasons Vienna has been vocally supporting Syria and Iran in the international arena. Total S.A., the giant French-based energy firm, is also working with Iran in the energy sectors.

Tehran, Moscow, and Damascus have not been fully co-opted; they are acting in their national and security interests. However, the national interests of modern nation-states should also be scutinized further. The leverage Moscow and Tehran now have can be used to drive a wedge between the Franco-German entente and the Anglo-American alliance. A case in standing is the initial willingness of France and Germany to accept the Iranian nuclear energy program. It is believed in Moscow and Tehran that the Franco-German entente could be persuaded to distance itself from the Anglo-American war agenda with the right leverage and incentives.

This could also be one of the factors for the marine route of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, which runs from Russia through the Baltic Sea to Germany and bypasses existing energy transit routes going through the Baltic States, Ukraine, Belarus, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Poland. Eastern Europe is part of what is called "New Europe" as a result of Donald Rumsfeld's 2003 comments that only "Old Europe," meaning the Franco-German entente, was against the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. [8] For example Poland is an Anglo-American ally and could block the transit of gas from Russia to Germany if it was prompted to do so by Britain and America. Moreover, Russia could exert pressure on these Eastern European countries by cutting their gas supplies without effecting Western Europe. Several of these Eastern European states also were pursuing transit fee schemes and reduced gas prices because of their strategic placements as energy transit routes.

Russia and Iran are also the nations with the largest natural gas reserves in the world. This is in addition to the following facts; Iran also exerts influence over the Straits of Hormuz; both Russia and Iran control the export of Central Asian energy to global markets; and Syria is the lynchpin for an Eastern Mediterranean energy corridor. Iran, Russia, and Syria will now exercise a great deal of control and influence over these energy corridors and by extension the nations that are dependent on them in the European continent. This is another reason why Russia has built military facilities on the Mediterranean shores of Syria. The Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline will also further strengthen this position globally.

Map: Nabucco Gas Pipeline Project Gas Supply Sources for Nabucco
© Nabucco Gas Pipeline International GmbH, 2007.

Map: Levantine Energy Corridor
© Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Global Research, 2007.

Map: Gas-Pipeline vom Iran bis Österreich
English translation from German: Gas Pipeline from Iran to Austria
© Der Standard, 2007.

The Baltic-Caspian-Persian Gulf Energy Corridor: The Mother of all Energy Corridors?

To add to all this, American and British allies by their very despotic and self-concerned natures will not hesitate to realign themselves, if presented with the opportunity, with Russia, China, and Iran. These puppet regimes and so-called allies, from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to Egypt, have no personal loyalties and are fair-weather allies. If they can help it, the moment they believe that they can no longer benefit from their relationships as clients they will try to abandon the Anglo-American camp without hesitation. Any hesitation on their part will be in regards to their own political longevity. Iran, Russia, and China have already been in the long process of courting the leaders of the Arab Sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf.

The ultimate aim of Russo-Iranian energy cooperation will be the establishment of a north-south energy corridor from the Baltic Sea to the Persian Gulf and with the Caspian Sea as its mid-axis. An east-west corridor from the Caspian Sea, Iran, and Central Asia to India and China will also be linked to this. Iranian oil could also be transported to Europe through Russian territory, hence bypassing the sea and consolidating Russo-Iranian control over international energy security. If other states in the Persian Gulf were included into the equation a dramatic seismic shift in the global balance of power could occur. This is also one of the reasons that the oil-rich Arab Sheikhdoms are being courted by Russia, Iran, and China.

Eurasian Energy Corridors: Two-Edged Knives?

However, the creation of these energy corridors and networks is like a two-edged sword. These geo-strategic fulcrums or energy pivots can also switch their directions of leverage. The integration of infrastructure also leads towards economic integration. If other factors in the geo-political equations are changed or manipulated, the U.S., Britain, and their partners might wield control over these routes. This is one reason why Zbigniew Brzezinski stated that the creation of a Turkish-Iranian pipeline would benefit America. [9] It should also be noted that Turkey will also be jointly developing three gas projects in the South Pars gas fields with Iran. [10]

If regime change were initiated in Iran or Russia or one of the Central Asian republics the energy network being consolidated and strengthened between Russia, Central Asia, and Iran could be obstructed and ruined. This is why the U.S. and Britain have been desperately promoting covert and overt velvet revolutions in the Caucasus, Iran, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Central Asia. To the U.S. and E.U. the creation of a Baltic-Caspian-Persian Gulf energy grid is almost the equivalent, in regards to energy security, of a "Unipolar World," but only not in their favour.

The "Great Game" Enters the Mediterranean Sea

The title "Great Game" is a term that originates from the struggle between Britain and Czarist Russia to control significant portions of Eurasia. The term is attributed to Arthur Conolly. A romanticized British novel, Kim, written by Rudyard Kipling and published in 1901 arguably immortalized the concept and term. This Victorian novel was a suspenseful story about the competition between Czarist Russia and Britain to control the vast geographic stretch that included Central Asia, India, and Tibet. In reality the "Great Game" was a struggle for control of a vast geographic area that not only included Tibet, the Indian sub-continent, and Central Asia, but also included the Caucasus and Iran. Additionally, it was London that was the primary antagonist, because of British attempts to enter Russian Central Asia. In fact the British had spying networks and facilities in Khorason, Iran and in Afghanistan that would operate against the interests of St. Petersburg in Russian Central Asia.

A contemporary version of the "Great Game" is being played once again for control of roughly the same geographic stretch, but with more players and greater intensity. Central Asia became the focus of international rivalry after the collapse of the former U.S.S.R. and the end of the Cold War. For the most part Central Asia, aside from Afghanistan, has been insulated. It has been the Middle East and the Balkans where this contest has been playing itself out violently.

The "Great Game" has also taken new dimensions and has entered the Mediterranean. This gradual outward movement has been creeping in a westward direction from the Middle East and the Balkans as the area of contention is expanded. This is not a one-directional competition. With the drawing in of Algeria, this push has reached the Western Mediterranean or the "Latin Sea" as Halford J. Mackinder refers to it, whereas before it was limited to the Eastern Mediterranean. This extension of the area of the "Great Game" is also a result of the outward push from Eurasia of the Eurasian-based alliance of Russia, Iran, and China. Examples of this are the emerging inroads China is making in the African continent and Iran's alliances in Latin America.

However, in reality the Mediterranean region is no stranger to international rivalry or conflicts similar to the "Great Game." The Second Turkish-Egyptian War (1839-1849), also called the Syrian War, was a historical example of this. It was during this war that Beirut was bombarded by British warships. The Ottoman Empire, supported by Britain, Czarist Russia, and the Austrian Empire, was facing-off against an expansionist Egypt, which was supported by Spain and France. The whole conflict had the overtones of underlying rivalries between Europe's major powers. Another example is the three Punic Wars between the ancient Carthagians and the Romans.

Gas, Oil, and Geo-Politics in the Mediterranean Sea

The Mediterranean has literally become an extension to the international and dangerous rivalries for control of Central Asian and Caucasian energy resources. Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Algeria, and Egypt are all Arab countries involved. Algeria already supplies gas to the E.U. through the Trans-Mediterranean Pipeline which runs to the Italian island of Sicily via Tunisia and the Mediterranean Sea. Niger and Nigeria are also building a natural gas pipeline that will reach the E.U. via Algerian energy infrastructure. Libya also supplies gas to the E.U through the Greenstream Pipeline which connects to Sicily via an underwater route in the Mediterranean Sea.

Russia and Iran are spearheading a move to bring Algeria into their orbit in order to establish a gas cartel. If Algeria, and possibly Libya, can be brought into the orbits of Moscow and Tehran the leverage and influence of both would be greatly increased and both would tighten their control over global energy corridors and European energy supplies. Approximately 97 percent of the projected amount of natural gas that will be imported by continental Europe would be controlled by Russia, Iran, and Syria under such an arrangement, whereas without Algeria approximately 93.6 percent of the natural gas exported would be controlled. [11] Algeria is also the sixth largest exporter of oil to the U.S., following behind Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Nigeria.

Western and Central European energy security would be under tight controls from Russia, Iran, Turkey, Algeria, and Syria because of their control over the geo-strategic energy routes. This is one of the reasons that the E.U. has unsuccessfully tried to force Russia to sign an E.U. energy charter that would obligate Moscow to supply energy to the E.U. and one of the reasons that NATO is considering using Article 5 of its military charter for energy security. [12] In addition, the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America obligates America's top energy sources, Canada and Mexico, to supply the U.S. with oil and gas. Worldwide the securing of energy resources has become an issue of force and involuntary compulsion.

Map: Missing link between giant sources (in bcm) and potential markets
Note: The missing link implied is the Nabucco Pipeline, giant sources are the Middle East and former Soviet Union, and potential markets are the western and central members of the European Union.
© Nabucco Gas Pipeline International GmbH, 2007.

Oceania versus Eurasia in the Mediterranean Littoral

"...we might weld together the West and the East, and permanently penetrate the Heartland with oceanic freedom."

-Sir Halford J. Mackinder (Democratic Ideals and Reality, 1919); In regards to "oceanic freedom" refer to George Orwell's definition or warning in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It was also in the Mediterranean Sea that the geo-strategic paradigm of sea-power versus land-power that was observed by Halford Mackinder first came into play. [13] Mackinder put forward the concept, which one is tempted to almost label as organic, that rival powers or entities, as they expand, would compete for dominance in a certain area and as they reached maritime areas this competition would eventually be taken to the seas as both powers would try and turn the maritime area into a lake under their own total control. This is what the Romans did to the Mediterranean Sea. It was only once a victor emerged from these competitions that the emphasis on naval power would decline in the maritime areas.

According to Mackinder, the First World War was "a war between Islanders [e.g., Britain, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Japan] and Continentals [Eurasians; e.g., Germany, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire], there can be no doubt about that." [14] Also, according to Mackinder it was dominant sea-power that won the First World War.

Naval power has clearly had a cutting edge over land-power in establishing empires. Western European nations like Britain, Portugal, and Spain are all examples of nations that became thalassocracies, empires at sea. Through the control of the seas an island-nation with no land borders with a rival can invade and eventually expand into a rival's territory.

The Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) is a modern embodiment of Halford J. Makinder's oceanic-power versus land-power paradigm. [15] The Anglo-American alliance and their allies represent oceanic-power, while the Eurasian-based counter-alliance, based around the nucleus of a Chinese-Russian-Iranian coalition, represents land-power.

It can also be observed that historically Eurasian economies did not require far-reaching trade and could exist within a smaller geographic trading area, while the economies of the oceanic powers such as Britain and the U.S., also called "trade-dependent maritime realms" by some academics, have depended on maritime and international trade for economic survival. If the Eurasians were to exclude the U.S. and Britain from the trade and economic system of the Eurasian mainland, there would be grave economic consequences for these "trade-dependent maritime realms." This was what Napoléon Bonaparte was trying to impose through his Continental System in Europe against Britain and this is also one of the reasons for the survival of the Iranian economy under American sanctions.

Two blocs are starting to manifest themselves in similarity to the geographic boundaries of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and Mackinder's Islander versus Continental scheme; a Eurasian-based bloc and a naval-based, oceanic bloc based on the fringes of Eurasia as well as North America and Australasia. The latter bloc is NATO and its network of regional military alliances, while the former is the reactionary counter-alliance formed by the Chinese-Russian-Iranian coalition as its nucleus.

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is an independent writer based in Ottawa specializing in Middle Eastern affairs. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

 

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India must return to Eurasian energy game​

M.K. Bhadrakumar
Central Asia is a difficult region, but with the right mix of political and financial capital, India could still make headway.

If the great game over the energy resources of the Caspian Sea and Central Asia were to be compared to a five-act Shakespearean play, we might say Act III, Scene I has just begun. On a Venice street, Shylock famously posits to Salarino the metaphorical relationship of intricate counter-balances: "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?"

The geopolitics of energy in the Central Asian steppes cannot have a better description. The interlocking trends are several. Russia remains the lead player but the United States is aggressively striving to retake some of the territory it lost. Central Asian countries have become savvier in creating space for themselves as energy exporters. Meanwhile, an ancient traveller has appeared on the Silk Road leading from Kashgar. China has raised its head above the parapet. This holds the prospect of transforming the great game over energy into a "multipolar" affair in the spirit of our times.

Russia presses ahead
To be sure, the robustness and sense of direction in the Kremlin's energy diplomacy in recent years have inevitably come to be associated with President Vladimir Putin's leadership. During the last two months, despite the Russian leader's watch of the Kremlin apparently ending, he continued to press ahead with his string of successes. On November 27, 2007, Russia's Gazprom and Italy's Eni signed a deal on the South Stream project, a 900-km under the Black Sea from Russia to Bulgaria. The 30 billion cubic metre capacity pipeline will strengthen Russia's position as Europe's main energy supplier and further diminish the viability of U.S.-sponsored projects such as the Trans-Caspian Pipeline and the Nabucco gas pipeline project, envisaging the transportation of Caspian oil and gas bypassing Russia.

On December 12, Russia agreed with Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan on constructing a Caspian littoral pipeline for transporting Turkmen and Kazakh natural gas to Russia. During the visit of Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis to Moscow in mid-December, Russian-Greek cooperation in South Stream was fleshed out and an accord was initialled on the so-called Burgas-Alexandroupolis project, an oil pipeline almost parallel to South Stream.

On January 18, Russia and Bulgaria signed a multilateral agreement on South Stream, which could have potential branches reaching Greece, Italy, Serbia, Hungary, Austria, Croatia, and Slovenia. A spectacular deal concluded in Moscow on January 25 envisages Gazprom's takeover of Serbia's entire energy sector, shifting the locus of geopolitics of the Balkans. An American commentator warned: "Moscow plans to use Serbia's territory as a gateway to break into Central Europe."

Again, on January 25, 2008, Gazprom signed a deal with Austrian energy company OMV to jointly operate Europe's third largest energy trading hub at Baumgarten. On the same day, Kyrgyz Prime Minister Igor Chudinov announced, while on a visit to Moscow, that Kyrgyzstan would be selling its national gas company to Gazprom.

Washington is scrambling to react to Russia's strategic coup. A new office has been created in the State Department — Coordinator of Eurasian Energy Diplomacy. A search is on for a special envoy on energy diplomacy. Washington seems to be reverting to its strategy of the early 1990s of gaining access to energy reserves before working on transportation routes. The diplomatic focus will be on Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan.

The high profile visits in January by the former chairman of the U.S. senate foreign relations committee, Senator Richard Lugar (who remains a major force in the foreign policy establishment), to Baku — two other Congressional delegations also visited Baku earlier in January — and by Admiral William Fallon, head of the U.S. Central Command, to Tashkent underscored this. Clearly, there is a sense of urgency on the part of the George W. Bush administration for achieving diplomatic results in the Caspian Basin during its remaining term in office.

Geopolitically, the revamped U.S. diplomacy will almost certainly speed up the integration of Georgia and Azerbaijan into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. NATO is poised to discuss energy security issues at its coming summit meeting in Bucharest, Romania, in April. But despite strong efforts, Washington has not succeeded in getting the European Union to rally behind it in confronting Russia, much as the EU is committed to diversifying its energy imports. Thus, it came as a big disappointment for Washington when the EU spokesman described South Stream as a complementary project, and not a competing one, to Nabucco.

Besides, it is doubtful whether the distractions over Iraq and growing worries over the U.S. economy will allow the Bush administration to focus on energy diplomacy with the same high-level attention that the Kremlin devotes. The U.S. may lack the political influence to overcome Russian opposition. Russia is an established partner and the Central Asian countries need to be convinced that Western companies are a better option. Also, Russia is flush with funds for investment.

Big gains by China
But another worry for the U.S. will be China's growing access to Kazakh oil and Turkmen gas. China is virtually replacing the U.S. in Kazakhstan's energy policy. The phenomenal economic development of Xinjiang opens up for Kazakhstan a market next door with an unlimited capacity to absorb its energy exports. The China National Petroleum Corporation is finalising a production-sharing agreement on the Darkhan oil field in the eastern Caspian, which is estimated to hold more than 11 billion barrels of oil. Construction of the $1 billion 750-km long Kenkiyak-Kumkol oil pipeline is to commence in March and is expected to be completed by October 2009, forming the second phase of the multistage Kazakh-Chinese pipeline projects.

Work has begun on a 7,000-km pipeline with an annual capacity of 30 billion cubic metres that will take Turkmen gas to China by 2009. [The pipeline is extendable to Iran.] China is separately building a massive 7,000-km West-to-East pipeline grid costing $5 billion that will transport Central Asian gas from Xinjiang to Guangzhou, capital of the southern province of Guangdong, and further eastward to end at Shanghai. Chinese investors are developing under production-sharing agreements the gas fields in the Bagtyyarlyk region of the eastern side of Amu Darya and in Uzbekistan for feeding the pipeline to Xinjiang.

India's absence noticeable
It is very obvious, as a leading Russian expert wrote recently, that the "big Eurasian oil and gas war" is far from over. The skyrocketing oil prices are prompting consumer countries to flock to the Caspian and Central Asian oil and gas reserves. Therefore, India's absence from the scene is extraordinary. Delhi lacks coherent energy diplomacy toward the region. Our oil majors seem more interested in taking billion dollar stakes in Canada's oil sands assets than in the pursuit of energy reserves nearer home. True, Central Asia is a difficult region, but with the right mix of political and financial capital, India could still make headway.

The opportunity lies ahead for exploring and developing oil and gas fields in Central Asia — specifically Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. The primary task will be to convince the Central Asian leaderships to grant Indian firms the opportunity. There is hardly any time to waste in wooing the Central Asian leaderships. So far we have been confining ourselves to pious declarations. As an American official said with biting sarcasm, "Pipeline declarations are a dime a dozen. If declarations counted, we would have seen pipelines criss-crossing Afghanistan into India. You only know that a pipeline is real when you get to financial close."

The energy game in the Caspian Basin will never be the same in the coming months following Kazakhstan's stunning success in renegotiating and doubling its stake in the Kashagan project in a deal with a powerful foreign-dominated consortium that includes Eni SpA, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Total, and ConocoPhillips. Again, the implications of Iran's imminent entry into the international energy market are going to be far-reaching. Significantly, talk has revived about the major gas-producing countries forming a cartel as early as June when the Gas Exporting Countries Forum holds its next session in Moscow.

So, where indeed does India's problem lie? At the institutional level, the problem seems to be that the External Affairs Ministry, which has expertise in the region, plays only a peripheral role in energy diplomacy. It is a catch-22 situation. Without a presence in the hydrocarbon sector, economic interaction with Central Asian countries becomes difficult.

That limits the intertwining of India's geopolitical interests with the interests of those countries. In turn, the inability to intertwine puts us at a disadvantage while bidding for energy deals.

China came from far behind and overtook India. Its success offers useful lessons. Like in a Shakespearean playhouse, watching the great game involves using the imagination. There are no backdrops, no lighting, no horrific acoustics — only exaggerated movements on the 5 feet high main stage, and the actors are not even shouting their lines to be heard by all.

 

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The new great game​

Saudi Arabia's rising influence in South Asia
Business Standard / New Delhi March 03, 2010, 0:16 IST
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's long-planned and much-delayed visit to Saudi Arabia has certainly contributed to strengthening of bilateral relations as well as to India's long-term energy security. As India's economic growth rate picks up, and given the uncertainties in the Gulf region, Saudi Arabia's assurances to keep oil supplies flowing and to invest in India's energy security must be welcomed. There has been some criticism in India about Indian diplomatic references to Saudi Arabia's potential role in improving India-Pakistan relations. Whatever our domestic sensitivities, and however discouraging the past record of Saudi Arabia in the region, the fact is that the Saudis have enormous influence in Pakistan and can exert helpful pressure on the Pakistan Army if they so wish. According to strategic policy analysts, Saudi Arabia funds up to 40 per cent of Pakistan's defence budget. Recall also the fact that when the late Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto dubbed Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme as the "Islamic Bomb", his message was aimed at the one country he knew would fund it, namely Saudi Arabia. While Pakistan got its nuclear technology from China, it got the funding from Saudi Arabia. But, while China's strategists may view Pakistan as an "all-weather" friend in keeping India off balance, the Saudis have other uses for Pakistan. Placed as they are between the undeclared nuclear capability of a Jewish Israel and a Shia Iran, Saudi Arabia's Sunni rulers may well view the Pakistan bomb as their own. This fact must be borne in mind in understanding the big power rivalry in Afghanistan and Central Asia. Along with the US and Russia, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia also have a strategic interest in the region. A "new great game" is being played out in which India has a huge stake.

Thus, strong and stable relations with Saudi Arabia must constitute the foundation of India's "Look West Policy". In befriending Saudi Arabia, India seeks energy security, security of the sea lanes of communication, security of livelihood for 3.5 million Indians working in the region and, above all, regional security and stability. West Asia is, and has in all history been, an integral part of India's neighbourhood. Saudi Arabia can contribute to South Asia's development by playing a positive role, both geo-politically and economically. But to be a factor for good, it must not only play a decisive role in fighting jihadi terrorism in the region, but also in limiting the negative consequences of radical Wahabism across Asia. Saudi Arabia has emerged as a major Asian power, now also a member of the G-20, and so bears the responsibility of ensuring that Asia's economic rise is not harmed by the spread of religious extremism and jehadi terrorism. India and Saudi Arabia can forge a win-win strategic partnership given the complementary structures of their economies. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit would prove fruitful in the long run if it has helped get this message across to a younger and modern Saudi leadership.

 

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Modeling the Great Game in Asia Part Two: UML Profile and Transformation
David H. Fado​

Abstract
The Great Game provided an analytical framework that organized successful efforts by
imperial Britain to build a stable and secure Asian rimland long before automated machines
allowed the rapid accumulation and processing of information. The Great Game framework
provided structured forms of argumentation for the production of intelligence that resulted in
improved monitoring and analytical capability. However, these insights do not translate readily
into current analytical frameworks and cannot work with automated reasoning tools. The
authors combine historical knowledge with UML, model-based transformations, and
computational analysis to configure the Great Game framework to a more formal and modern
assessment. The models will generate structured information about the system as input to
computational tools, using in this instance ORA from CMU. The resulting information analysis
offers the opportunity for a feedback loop that can improve the model and structure useful
discussion about the framework.


Translating the insights of the VSG into a working model presents a number of challenges. The basic approach
taken by the authors followed these steps. 1) A specialized UML profile for the Great Game captured key features
of the VSG's work. 2) The UML profile provided the basis for the UML structural model of scenarios. 3) Each
time snapshot and perspective analyzed resulted in the models shown above. 4) Based on these models, a snapshot
of the system as a network was transformed from UML's XML export into DynetML. 5) DynetML was then
analyzed using a tool from CMU called Organizational Risk Analyzer (ORA). 6) The results from two different
snapshots were compared in ORA. 7) The results of the analysis suggest profile refinements to improve the insights
into the key features of the system. Future work can instantiate the objects as software agents to participate in a
simulation. By expressing the model in UML, this work has the flexibility to transform to different environments.1
This is the first step in a broader research agenda, the initial thread through a formal model-based approach to
assessment of international systems.
The Core Model
Figure three shows the Great Game model that provides the profile of the core model entities. The classes on
this diagram carry the stereotype <<metaclass>>, indicating that they each define their own stereotype for use in a
model applying this profile. The attributes and relationships suggest properties and constraints. Once applied in a
model, the resulting stereotyped elements will retain all the additional behavior and syntax of UML, making this
framework a guide but allowing great creativity in implementation. Not shown on this diagram are the UML
metamodel elements that these entities extend. "GreatGameRelationship" extends the UML "relationship" while
"AllegianceRelationship" extends the UML "generalization" while the rest extend a UML "classifier".

Figure 1: Core Great Game Model
Why bother with the metamodel? These stereotypes and properties give the modeler the power to isolate key
elements and values from the UML transformation to XML, enabling the relatively easy extraction of information
into a form useful for computation or consumption by other tools, such as a Java-based agent system or any tool
consuming models. The managed profile provides a framework for use on many episodes of the Great Game or
other areas of conflict. Each <<metaclass>> on the diagram provides crucial input. Not visible in the property field
for each element are important common attributes held by all the metaclasses, including the integer "certainty",
"version", "date", and "description". The certainty attribute opens the opportunity to blend these Great Game
models with Bayesian analysis to allow for probabilistic reasoning. Figure 4 shows what the model of the Great
Game scenario looks like in a spreadsheet, with the property values used for sorting. In this case, agents with high
autonomy scores found their way into the network analysis tool. Additional attributes can be added as needed
depending on the target for the model. Note the most UML 2 tools save direct to XML, so one can have the subject
matter experts modify the values in a spreadsheet and not bother with a complicated modeling tool.

Figure 4: XML version of the model viewed in a spreadsheet to prepare for analysis in another tool.
Agent
The agent represents the player in the game. As with most elements in this model, the agent has a property that
describes the type of agent. Here, the types include "individual:, "institution", "occupational group" "social
network", "ethnic group", "caste" with additional types easy to add. In most cases, models will deal with agents as
institutions and groups, recognizing the capability exists to analyze them as individuals, if needed.
Each <<agent>> also has an integer (by convention a value from a low of one to a high of ten) that shows the
autonomy of that agent. In modeling out a scenario from an individual perspective, the agents will typically reside
in an elaborate inheritance hierarchy, with lower elements showing allegiance to higher elements. For Britain's
Indian empire, such a relationship hierarchy organized the hundreds of groups that held allegiance to the Crown.
For the analysis of the Great Game, the primary concern resides with actors that have high autonomy scores, reside
toward the top of the hierarchy, and hold ambitions relevant to the effective control over territory. The agent's
relationships also provide a filtering mechanism to focus on the agents important for a particular scenario. Each of
the lines radiating from the agent indicates a relationship, with the line label providing a description: agents hold
values, seek goals, acquire skills, monitor developments, control resources, and can move in a location. Note that all
the navigation arrows point away from the agent, indicating that it is the agent that knows about the relationship and
not the target entity. The only bidirectional relationship in the model is the relationship between two agents, as each
agent will know the nature of the relationship with the other agent. The resulting models from this profile will
emphasize decoupled entities with many contradictory and fissiparous forces. Territorial goals provide the
constraints to focus the analyst to make the model manageable.
Goals and Location
An agent seeks to achieve goals. A goal in the Great Game always includes a target location. The focus on the
unchanging reality of geography provides structure to the debates about the Indian system. A goal will target at
least one location, as described by geospatial coordinates or some other type of coordinates. Locations refer to fix
points that are unique, although one can nest locations inside of each other.
A <<location>> entity will have an importance derived from the territorial ambitions of all the different actors
in the system. The location will also have attributes indicating the population density and the degree of organization
over the population. Highly organized locations have effective methods of social control. An agent has a
relationship with a location independent of their territorial goals showing the degree of agent maneuverability. In
some scenarios, an agent will require the capability to deploy troops, in others the ability to simply monitor the
activities of another agent. An agent can have a gap between the desired capability for maneuver and the actual, a
situation that indicates potential for conflict. Geographic features will constrain the types of activities that can take
place in any location. For example, geospatial coordinates that lack land (such as the ocean), constrain the
capability to place fixed buildings at the location. Finally, locations also provide access to resources that translate
into money and material that an agent can use, provided they have the skills to take advantage of these.
While the goals of an agent unambiguously indicates the locations they target and what they need in that
location, one cannot determine from the goals the values that will drive territorial ambition. The value realm remains
distinct and requires a modeling effort decoupled from the review of location.

Values
A number of reasons animate an agent to seek a location, from control over water for crops to a desire to
promote a religion to a desire to ameliorate suffering or stop a perceived evil, such as slavery or genocide.
Important from the vantage point of Great Game goals is the value and territorial ambition remain decoupled, with
the nature of the control required over that territory also left as a variable. This decoupling in the models indicates a
dynamic and constantly changing system of alliances. Note that the decoupling does not leave a system without
values nor does it indicate Great Game agents lacked values. The framework, however, only analyzed those values
in the fashion that they resulted in territorial ambitions or provided instruction on how to organize society in a
territory. The focus of the Great Game on effective organization of territory on the globe did not derive from
hostility to values in social organizations but from a decoupling that this model strives to replicate. Surprisingly, the
decoupling of the value realm which some could see as denigrating values in foreign policy actually provided a
space for consideration of moral questions to flourish. The debate about values could continue over time in this
model in a way that the debate about geographic features, which for practical purposes don't change, could not.
In this context, consider the attributes of the <<value>> classifier. An agent can hold values with no constraint
on their coherence. All values have a priority used by each agent to prioritize conflicting claims in the practical
translation of values into goals. The types of values available include religious beliefs, perceptual truths, cultural
norms, ideological positions, and aesthetic preferences. These values not only navigate towards a territorial goal, as
mentioned, but they also navigate toward a preference for a type of social control. For example, agents in the Great
Game could seek to implement their version of Islamic law. Other agents, such as Pathans on the Northwestern
frontier sought to maintain their distinct local authority structures in the face of the expansion of civil service and
legal bureaucracies. The system can tolerate a proliferation of values and social control aims leading to a constantly
changing constellation of polities, ideologies, cultural practices, and religions.
Social Control
Agents holding values will promote particular mechanisms of social control consistent with those values. The
types of authority for this social control available in the model include legal (statutory), constitutional (common law
precedent), religious, or familial.
An instance of <<social control>> will indicate one to many locations where this control is exercised. The
British more than any other Empire emphasized multiple, overlapping, and even contradictory methods of social
control over a location.2 The federal idea in constitution making provides the expression of this in practice, with the
many federal polities organizing continental spaces a testimony to this approach. Government can allow agents to
express their desire for a particular method of social control at a local level while higher level organizations would
focus on items of common concern, such as defense. That the Great Game players on the British side did not
demand a single form of social control guaranteed the proliferation of competing forces and jurisdictions.
This tolerance for different forms of local rule had limitations: it did not function as a universal rule applied to
all circumstances, but only in those that did not contradict the ability of the British to maneuver in a location that
they required. These various entities are all illustrated in the Afghanistan model described above. How can one
change this model into something for computational analysis?
Model Transformation
Finding entities to populate the model for portraying the Great Game scenario in Afghanistan proved easy. On
the agent side, one could easily load in all 100+ princely states in India, as well as any number of political, religious,
occupational, caste, and religious groups. Such a massive model would do little to improve the core model.
Ultimately, a model could scope to include that scale of detail, but prior to analysis in a computation tool, the
relevant entities would emerge based on the situation. For this model, only the most important entities were placed
in the model. The model produced stereotypes as follows: 34 <<agent>>, 22 <<skill>>, 25 <<values>>, 23
<<resources>>, 50 <<locations>>, with 23 <<goals>>.
The UML model on its own does not provide the computational rigor to improve the analysis. From UML, one
can transform to any number of targets. This paper argues that the VSG's emphasis on argumentation that analysts
could falsify represents a strength. Without exposing the constructed model to some feedback system, knowledge
will advance slowly, if at all. The initial target transformation was DynetML, with long term aspirations to move
the model to an Agent-Based simulation. DynetML feeds into a tool called ORA. ORA has been supported by a
program from the Air Force Research Lab called Topsail that looks to provide cognitive aids to support intelligence
analysis.3 This model provides an opportunity to demonstrate the type of analysis that such computational tools can
perform in the context of more traditional diplomatic history.
From the 200 entities and roughly 500 relationships in the core model, the relevant subset was transformed into
DynetML using the profile entities and their attributes to drive the process. Agent mapped to agent while location
and resource mapped to resource, knowledge and values to skill, and goal to task. The mapping was not always
clear, but any mapping for the first thread provides a baseline: we can refine the transformation based on the results.
Future versions of the profile can more clearly highlight values needed for producing edge weights in this target and
for filtering out entities not needed for the scenario analyzed. ORA produced a rich set of measures to review and to
compare networks. Figure 5 below shows the UML 2 model as viewed in the XML browser. The ability to
manipulate the model and model properties in XML proved essential for carrying out this transformation in a timely
manner.

Figure 5: XML version of the Great Game model viewed using an XML browser
Findings
The table below shows the ORA results at a high level for the afterPartition and beforePartition models. Note
that ORA analyzed the entire relevant subset of the model and the model properties, not just the entities in the model
diagram shown above. The ORA analysis even at such a coarse-grained understanding shows a system after
partition that handles resources differently with a different cluster of players, resource allocation, and task focus.
The before and after partition scores demonstrate the network differences. Note the system after partition has far
more cliques as well as nodes with more demand placed on them, illustrating the VSG's argument that partition
diverted attention inward, inviting Soviet expansion in Afghanistan as well as the formation of hostile fringe forces
attacking regional stability, such as the Taliban.
The debate in official circles regarding the impact of air power on Indian defense provides another interesting
element of these findings. Our initial scenario focused on the air power debate as this reflected actual discussion in
the VSG. The results of this analysis, however, illustrate why Caroe regarded air power as ultimately a minor issue
in the larger question of defense. The result of analyzing the Indian system as a network in the context of the great
game illustrates the point that compared to partition there is no event related to technology that comes even close in
terms of the impact on the region.
One puzzling result was the centrality of Gandhi to the network. That Mohandas Gandhi emerged here as a
more central figure in 1947 compared to 1935 prove more startling. Reviewing the model and the network export
indicated that to the system Gandhi had a particular focus on Indian unity over other goals, which made him a more
central figure. In a more fractured system, Gandhi was even more central as measured by "Betweeness". What this
means, in terms of the tool, is that Gandhi represented a node more capable of acting as a mediator between the
different groups. Gandhi certainly straddled a number of goals and issues in the political evolution of India, and this
interpretation of Gandhi's increased importance post-partition fits with the fact that his assassination came after
independence at the hands of one of the groups focused on more regional goals and values. Other nationalist leaders
such as Nehru focused on the modernization of a truncated India over controlling the frontiers while the Muslim
League leaders such as Jinnah wanted to have a central government with a Muslim majority. Explained in this way,
the network analysis produced a result that made sense given the input model. Where a result might not make sense,
we suggest the best way forward is to review the model inputs, change the model properties, and then repeat the
network analysis. Even where the result does not on the first iteration make sense, it could provoke discussion and
clarify the role of key actors in the scenario.There are a number of areas for analysis and discussion based on the terms of the concepts set in the model: this
effort was designed to make those conversations possible in a structured manner with some objectivity and model
complexity. Knowledge advances with a feedback loop where the discussions of how different groups handle the
continuous factors in international relations can progress. The goal for this exercise was to get from diplomatic
history, to model, to export, to analytical tool. With that done, one can see a number of additional scenarios one can
run that will prove interesting. Conversations about the model and the network analysis will only improve the
vision; the point of the exercise is to support a virtual study group where discussion improves knowledge.

Figure 6: Results from ORA
Conclusion and Next Steps
The models of the VSG Great Game scenario demonstrated how the framework provides continuity in
international assessment, showing an ability to provide insight on both the Cold War and the War on Terror. The
transfer of model information from UML into a common tool for analytical analysis proved successful, providing an
additional method for assessing international systems. The value added for a rich model of the region would bring
substantial payoff using this approach primarily because arguments can link into an overarching framework. This
scenario has demonstrated the feasibility of a thread all the way from an instance model of a Great Game scenario
based on the VSG through a UML profile through a model transformation into a network format for analysis. Those
who might disagree with the assessment of aspirations of the key Great Game players can participate in the debate
within the model and run their scenarios through analytical tools.

 

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Endogenizing geopolitical boundaries with agent-based modeling​

Lars-Erik Cederman*
+ Author Affiliations

Department of Government, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 1033 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138

Next Section
Abstract

Agent-based modeling promises to overcome the reification of actors. Whereas this common, but limiting, assumption makes a lot of sense during periods characterized by stable actor boundaries, other historical junctures, such as the end of the Cold War, exhibit far-reaching and swift transformations of actors' spatial and organizational existence. Moreover, because actors cannot be assumed to remain constant in the long run, analysis of macrohistorical processes virtually always requires "sociational" endogenization. This paper presents a series of computational models, implemented with the software package REPAST, which trace complex macrohistorical transformations of actors be they hierarchically organized as relational networks or as collections of symbolic categories. With respect to the former, dynamic networks featuring emergent compound actors with agent compartments represented in a spatial grid capture organizational domination of the territorial state. In addition, models of "tagged" social processes allows the analyst to show how democratic states predicate their behavior on categorical traits. Finally, categorical schemata that select out politically relevant cultural traits in ethnic landscapes formalize a constructivist notion of national identity in conformance with the qualitative literature on nationalism. This "finite-agent method", representing both states and nations as higher-level structures superimposed on a lower-level grid of primitive agents or cultural traits, avoids reification of agency. Furthermore, it opens the door to explicit analysis of entity processes, such as the integration and disintegration of actors as well as boundary transformations.

A decade ago, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, Yugoslavia started to disintegrate, and Germany reunified. Marking the end of the Cold War, these epochal events illustrate vividly that change in world politics features not just policy shifts but also can affect states' boundaries and, sometimes, their very existence. Clearly, any theory aspiring to explain such transformations or, more generally, the longue durée of history, must endogenize the actors themselves.

The current paper describes how agent-based modeling can be used to capture transformations of this boundary-transforming kind. This is a different argument from that advanced by most agent-based modelers, who resort to computational methods because they lend themselves to exploring heterogeneous and boundedly rational, but otherwise fixed, actors in complex social environments (1, 2). Without discounting the importance of this research, I will use illustrations from my own modeling framework to illustrate how it is possible to go beyond this mostly behavioral agenda. The main emphasis will be on the contribution of specific computational techniques to conceptualization of difficult-to-grasp notions such as agency, culture, and identity. Although a complete specification of the models goes beyond the current scope, the paper closes with a discussion of some of their key findings.

Because historians and historical sociologists relying on qualitative methods have pioneered the study of boundary change, the power of formal modeling remains almost entirely untapped. The crux is that conventional formal methods are not very helpful in these contexts because they treat actors as either reified or implicit. Rational-choice theorists build stable and fixed actors into their assumptions (3) and are even reluctant to let preferences vary (4, 5). In quantitative models, actors' identities figure only indirectly as "cases", although a somewhat stronger sense of agency can be restored through a merger with the rational-choice modeling. At any rate, both approaches converge on an "essentialist" and "variable-oriented" position that postulates "that the social world consists of fixed entities (the units of analysis) that have attributes (the variables)" and thus "ignores entity change through birth, death, amalgamation, and division" (6).

As illustrated by the process after the Cold War, however, it is precisely these "entity processes" that call for explanation. We cannot explain what is explicitly held constant or treated as an implicit assumption. Therefore, a "sociational" perspective seems more promising. Pioneered by Georg Simmel (7, 8), such a sociational (vergeselleschaftung) approach has had many followers who use similar concepts including "figuration" (9), "structuration" (10), and "relationalism" (11). This family of views claims that "relations between terms or units as preeminently dynamic in nature, as unfolding, ongoing processes rather than as static ties among inert substances" (10). Processes of this kind exhibit path-dependence and sensitivity to initial conditions. Moreover, rather than always following time-invariant laws, social action and boundary processes take place specifically in relational and/or geographic space. Whereas the essentialist perspective subscribes to a one-way explanation according to the formula "actions produce interactions", sociational theory insists on processes in which "actions produce interactions that in turn transform the actors."

Previous Section
Next Section
Toward Sociational Modeling of Geopolitics

Although the sociational alternative offers ontological flexibility, it also complicates theory-building by relying on more moving parts. Paradoxically, the high degree of endogeneity makes formal tools, which help guarantee internal consistency and conceptual clarity, even more needed than in the simpler settings studied by essentialist theories. With few exceptions (12), however, scholars relying on sociational principles have refrained from formalizing their theories.

Given the inherent level of complexity of macrohistorical processes, it would seem natural that computers could help fill this analytical void (13). Yet, traditionally, computational methods have centered on variable-oriented simulation, such as global modeling with predictive aims (14). Although its structural approach differs from the individualism of rational-choice theory, such research relies on similar essentialist assumptions as does statistical modeling (15). By contrast, agent-based modeling is a computational methodology that allows the analyst to create, analyze, and experiment with artificial worlds populated by agents that interact in nontrivial ways and that constitute their own environment. Instead of studying variables that measure the actors' attributes, these models can (but do not have to) represent social actors as inherently changeable processes.

In fact, most agent-based models are used to tackle essentialist research puzzles. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of social-science applications capture the behavior of human individuals, such as consumers (16) and voters (17). Although evolutionary game theory (18) and ecological organization theory (19) have made some progress toward analyzing existential entity processes, endogenous boundary formation remains mostly beyond the reach of deductive techniques. Other agent-based frameworks analyze boundary change explicitly: computational organization theory is, perhaps, the best example (20). Here, I will focus on boundary change (merger and division) as it applies to geopolitics, although existential entity processes (creation and destruction) will also receive some attention.

Boundary processes express themselves both physically in spatio-temporal terms and organizationally. Because of the positivist quest for general laws expressed in terms of context-free variables, the spatio-temporal context of actors remains notoriously understudied in the social sciences, although there are exceptions, e.g., (21, 22). The endogenization of organizational boundaries leaves even more to be desired. Drawing on Simmel's work (7, 8) and more recent research by the sociologist Harrison White (23), I classify organizational boundaries as either relational or categorical. Relational boundaries demarcate organizations in terms of direct interpersonal or interorganizational contacts such as friendship networks. By contrast, categorical membership criteria operate indirectly through identification with cultural symbols (24). As will become clear below, agent-based modeling lets us express this fundamental difference explicitly.

Table 1 summarizes four types of social contexts in which actors can be embedded. The rows separate social processes, which do not affect actors' boundaries, from sociational ones that do affect actors' boundaries. The columns distinguish between actors with relational and categorical boundaries. This taxonomy creates four quadrants, with the upper left one (i) representing the standard mode of analysis in the vast majority of social-scientific modelsThe remaining three possibilities are the ones that are relevant to this paper. Contexts of type ii transform actor boundaries that are relationally defined. As the next section shows, state formation before the era of nationalism approximates this context together with i. Quadrant iii captures actors constellations with categorical but fixed boundaries where the interaction processes are influenced by boundary categorization. A second example, drawn from the international relations literature, illustrates this mode of analysis. The phenomenon of evolving clusters of cooperative democracies combines quadrants i, ii, and iii. Finally, a third nested model of nationalism in a dynamic-state system brings together all four contexts.

Previous Section
Next Section
Power Politics as a Relational Entity Process: The EP Model

Although the sociational perspective rejects the notion of presocial actors, it needs to start somewhere. Rather than privileging either the micro or macro level, as essentialist theories do, the solution is to postulate a "soup of preexisting actors" (25) that will serve as the "raw material" for the construction of higher-level actors. Although some of these primitive agents may assume a particularly pivotal role, most of them are no more interesting than single pixels on a computer screen. Because it is the macrolevel patterns that are of interest, this "finite-agent method" of sociational analysis treats the primitive agents as constant and presocial "atomic units" throughout the analysis without running the risk of reifying agency at higher levels of aggregation.

Fortunately, these ideas can be translated readily into computational language. In an experimental model of ecological morphogenesis called ECHO, John Holland lets "primitive agents" amalgamate into "multiagents" through a process of boundary formation where one agent becomes the head of the new composite entity, and others are relegated to the status of "agent-compartments" (26). This particular way of forming collective actors strongly resembles state formation.

In fact, already in 1977, Bremer and Mihalka (27) introduced a model of this type featuring conquest in a hexagonal grid, which was later extended and further explored by Cusack and Stoll (28). While drawing inspiration from this line of research, my own framework was implemented from scratch. After a first implementation in PASCAL (29), I ported it to the software package SWARM, and shortly thereafter to REPAST (available at http.//repast.sourceforge.net.). Modeled on SWARM, REPAST is an object-oriented software library for agent-based simulations. Like its predecessor, it facilitates model representation and offers infrastructural routines for running simulations, the display of graphics and charts, and data collection. Because REPAST is entirely based on Java, it provides a number of advantages that make it particularly well suited for the modeling of entity processes. First, Java's object orientation allows for convenient representation of actors in memory with a unique identity (30). Unlike variables, actors modeled as object instances reside dynamically in memory and, thus, can both be born and die. Second, Java's standardized collection library and REPAST's powerful support for two-dimensional grids facilitate the modeling of both territorial and organizational boundaries of higher-level actors as hierarchical or flat networks. Geopolitical change affects the relational portfolio of states constantly, thus requiring a flexible representation. Third, in terms of programming, garbage collection makes life easier in modeling very complex frameworks. Fourth, the powerful visualization techniques of Repast help researchers discover patterns that then can be further explored in systematic replications, which are also well supported by the software package.

The basic version of the formal framework is called the Emergent Polarity (EP) model, because it treats polarity, i.e., the number of sovereign states, as an emergent feature (29). As in Bremer and Mihalka's original setup, the EP model usually starts with a territorial grid of fixed and indivisible primitive agents that can be thought of as villages or counties. The states that survive grow and their boundaries expand endogenously through a repeated process of conquest. The resulting states become hierarchical organizations linking capitals to their respective provinces through direct, asymmetric relations of domination. Denoting state borders as lines and capitals as dots, Fig. 1 illustrates a system that evolves from an initial setup featuring 15 by 15 states to 9 states. Thus, as its name suggests, the very polarity of the state system emerges as a consequence of the state-formation process itself. Thanks to the hierarchical design, the capitals retain full control of their foreign policy and decide on peace and war on behalf of their provinces. In the simplest version of the EP model, conquered provinces lose all of their agency rights. The capitals, by contrast, hold relational portfolios recording interactions with each sovereign territorial neighbor."  As opposed to Bremer and Mihalka's framework, all actions proceed in quasi-parallel as a Markovian process using the portfolios as a double buffer. This synchronous design allows for protracted and simultaneous conflicts that do not follow a preset protocol and that expose the states to geo-strategic problems of front allocation.

Because the focus in this paper is on how to endogenize actor boundaries, I will not provide a full description of the model's behavior. The interested reader is referred to ref. 31 for a detailed specification of the model. In brief, each simulation cycle comprises five stages: resource allocation, decisions, interactions, resource updating, and structural change. First, all states allocate resources to the local fronts partly in proportion to the overall resources possessed by their sovereign neighbors. Then, a phase of decision-making ensues. Each state plays a strategy of "grim trigger" with the neighbors, which means that they reciprocate any conflictual moves and pursue conflict until the battle is over. In addition, the states attempt to launch unprovoked attacks against their neighbors, provided that the local power balance exceeds a certain threshold in their favor and that they are not already engaged in combat. Typically, this probabilistic threshold is set to a value in the range of two to three. In the interaction phase, the consequences of the states' decisions are derived. If the local resource balance tips decisively in favor of one party, that state wins the battle and can advance a territorial claim. Otherwise, the battle continues, or it may end in stalemate. Normally, an aggressor can count on winning, but attacking states may weaken their other fronts, thus inviting attacks from other parties (32)."¡ Finally, structural change follows, the rules of which will be explained in greater detail.

To simplify the system's topology, it is assumed that territorial boundaries have to enclose a contiguous space. In contrast to single primitive agents, compound states can undergo all four entity processes: (re)emergence, disappearance, secession, and unification. While some states continue to exist since "primordial" times, most of them are eliminated when their capitals are occupied. However, such dominated territories can regain sovereignty as a consequence of the dominating state's collapse (or through secession, if two-level action is enabled). Whereas the political decisions leading to war between two states are made at the state level, conquest is a local process that always concerns the territory of a primitive agent rather than a whole state. This modeling choice eliminates the complicated division-of-spoils procedures in previous models (27, 28). The conquering state A randomly selects one of its own provinces as the attacking agent a from all units that border on the target state B. Then, it stochastically chooses a target province b that is adjacent to a. Together, the attacking and target agents constitute a battle path (a, b). Depending on the status and location of the target b, four types of outcomes are possible: if b is an "atomic" state, then b is absorbed in its entirety; if b is a capital of B, b is absorbed, whereas all other provinces regain sovereignty; if b is a province in B state and absorption b does not cut off access from the capital of B to any of its provinces, then the province is absorbed without any further changes; finally, if b is a province but absorption does cut off access between B and some of its provinces, then b is absorbed and the provinces that are cut off regain sovereignty.§

This set of simple rules allows us to endogenize sovereign states' boundaries in a parsimonious way. In addition, the EP model also can be extended to feature a simple mechanism for defensive alliance formation that allows states to balance against threatening states (29, 31). This extension has two behavioral consequences. First, they affect the potential challengers' force calculus by pooling their aligned, would-be victims' resources. Should deterrence fail all of the same, an alliance obliges all aligned states to come to the rescue of any attacked member by opening a front against the threatening state.

Note that whereas the EP model succeeds in endogenizing specific state boundaries, sovereignty itself is "hard-wired" into the specification. Thus, a deeper sense of emergence would require the institution of sovereignty to emerge from a Medieval backdrop of overlapping jurisdictions and fuzzy borders. For examples that outline ways to formalize a more radical sense of emergent actorhood, see Axelrod's "tribute model" (33) and Fontana and Buss (34).

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Democratic Cooperation as a Categorical Social Process: The DP Model

So far, we have only considered relational boundaries. The next modeling step introduces social processes including categorically defined coalitions of states (see category iii in Table 1). It is a well established fact that democracies do not fight each other (35). What is less obvious, however, is that this pattern has evolved as a macrohistorical process spreading democratic cooperation in time and space (36).

Fortunately, the literature on computational modeling provides conceptual solutions. In a pioneering contribution, Axelrod (37) suggests that spatial contexts and labels provide opportunities for mutual cooperation to take root. An inherent property of the international system, territoriality enables cooperative agents to cluster spatially, thus rendering predatory invasions harder and thus increasing the chances of stable and lasting cooperation. Suggestive findings indicate that localized interactions seem to facilitate the emergence of cooperative clusters. For example, Grim (38) employs two-dimensional cellular automata to demonstrate that once explicit spatial representation is introduced, even more generous strategies thrive (39). Although interactions within the international system are not exclusively local, logistical constraints on military operations remain considerable (40). Thus, the inherently territorial nature of world politics may in fact contribute to the emergence of democratic security communities.

The idea of label-induced collaboration conceives of democracies as conditional cooperators that make their behavior conditional on an abstract category, or a "tag" (41). Tags are reasonably stable actor-specific characteristics that are observed by other agents during interactions and on which their behavior can be predicated. Benign actors tend to profit from selection mechanisms that allow them to adjust their strategies to similarly peaceful partners while minimizing exposure to more aggressive players. Recent computational studies have confirmed that tags can have a considerable positive effect on cooperation. For example, Riolo (42) shows that under a broad range of conditions, agent populations that use tags attain a higher level of cooperation because of faster initial emergence of reciprocity and higher resistance to invasion by mutual defectors (43).

These theoretical ideas are highly relevant to the democratic peace. It is conceivable that democracy could serve as a tag reinforcing the development of a pacific norm regulating interdemocratic relations. Without specifying the specific internal mechanisms of democratic decision-making, the Democratic Peace (DP) model extends the EP model by introducing a second type of actor: democracies (31). These actors are able to recognize each others' regime type so that they never attack each other. The tagging is implemented in such a way that it prohibits democratic states from selecting out other democracies as victims of unprovoked attacks. In addition, thanks to their mutual trust, such states do not have to allocate resources to their interdemocratic fronts.

In accordance with Kant's theory, the DP model also assumes that these states would band together in a liberal coalition, thus defending themselves collectively against nondemocratic incursions. As briefly mentioned in the previous section, the basic EP model can be extended to include alliances as well. In the DP model, a modified democracy-sensitive alliance mechanism introduces behavioral differentiation according to regime type. Whereas purely expansionist states behave according to power-related principles, democracies let ideology influence their alignment decisions. Both types of states align against threatening states, although democracies never feel threatened by other democracies and thus never balance against them. As in the EP model, it is assumed that alliances have both a deterrent and a combat effect.

Marking democracies as white actors and nondemocracies as yellow ones, Fig. 2 displays two snapshots of a sample run that starts with a mere 10% conditional cooperators. By time period 1,000, the entire system has reached a state "perpetual peace", to use Kant's terminology, which is entirely dominated by mutually cooperating democracies. Note that several small enclaves have managed to survive because there are no predatory actors that could absorb them. Although this is merely a sample run, it illustrates that together, tagged clusters with tag-sensitive alliances can produce perfectly peaceful worlds despite intense geopolitical competition.


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Fig. 2. The emergence of perpetual peace in a system with ideological alliances.
To some extent, ideological alliances anticipate categorical entity processes of type iv (see Fig. 1). At least partially, their boundaries are determined by democratic tags in that democracies only align themselves against nondemocratic states, but the main threat-driven logic remains relational and short term. In this sense, the DP model exemplifies categorical social, rather than sociational, processes. To find a true example of the latter we need to turn to a qualitatively different actor type, namely, the nation.

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Nationalism as a Categorical Entity Process: The NSC Model

Nations are stable actor configurations entirely based on categorical membership criteria rather than relational calculations. Distinct from states in the classical Weberian sense, nations already enjoy, or strive for, the possession of their own state (44). When states and nations coincide, the result becomes a nation-state. Nevertheless, this is a contingent outcome, for sometimes states span over more than one nation, and vice versa (29, 45). It is precisely in these complicated situations that the principles of territorial and popular sovereignty clash, thus generating tensions that drive conflict.

As opposed to reified perspectives that resort to "groupism" (46), the sociational focus on the very existence of national collective identities forces the analyst to consider the puzzle of how nationalism ties together large numbers of people and spans over long time periods and vast territories. In contrast to premodern society which was based on direct interpersonal relationships, the large scale of the nation requires abstract categorization (47).

Thus, modern national identities should not be confused with premodern, ethnic cores: "Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist—but it does need some preexisting differentiating marks to work on, even if "¦ these are purely negative" (48). Note that this constructivist perspective draws on the same "finite-agent" solution as Abbott's conception of boundaries, although here the soup of primitive elements is not the actors themselves but a set of cultural differences.

How could one formalize this conception of nationhood computationally? The following describes an extension of the EP model under the label of the Nationalist Systems Change (NSC) model.¶ Cultural landscapes constitute a good starting point for such a modeling exercise (49), because they provide the cultural building blocks out of which communities can be constructed. Suppose that each primitive agent is equipped with a cultural string with, for example, eight traits, each of which can assume 1 of 25 values. Fig. 3 shows a grid where all of the unitary actors are endowed with cultural strings that form a landscape in aggregation. The darker shading represents cultural differences compared with the surrounding sites.


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Fig. 3. A cultural landscape with three highlighted states and a nation.
Inspired by Stuart Kaufmann's notion of tunable landscape, the initial cultural configuration can be made dependent on just two parameters (50). In this case, landscapes are defined by the number of distinct tribes that originally populated the map and by the cultural drift characterizing their settlement of the grid. A large number of tribes and great drift make the landscape more "rugged". This process guarantees that there will be both dialectal nuances as one moves from province to province as well as more abrupt ethnic cleavages.

Although the cultural map has an impact on identity formation, there is no one-to-one correspondence between culture and national identities, because only politically relevant traits count in national identity formation. Fortunately, there is a computational solution to this conceptual problem as well. In an attempt to formalize sets of symbol strings to be used in schemata representing rules, John Holland (51) introduces wildcards (#) for those traits that could be of any value. For example, the string {4, #, #, 19, 18, #, #, #} represents an identity template to which the cultural strings {4, 17, 18, 19, 18, 1, 2, 1} and {4, 17, 25, 19, 18, 7, 9, 11} could belong. It is convenient to represent national identities in a similar way. Let us assume that nations form as "imagined communities" in the public domain and that states could become members of them as long as their culture strings match them. To the left of the grid, Fig. 3 illustrates national affiliations of three states with arrows. Nations are denoted by green thick boundaries to distinguish them from states.

Nation formation could follow a number of plausible rules. In this particular model, any primitive agent, whether sovereign or not, can take the initiative of forming or joining a nation. Whereas both capitals and provinces are eligible members of nations, the probability of launching a nationalist movement depends crucially on the geopolitical status of the territory in question. Thanks to their resources, capitals have a much higher likelihood of founding their own nations, but provinces may sometimes create their own nationalist platforms in opposition to their respective capitals.

Like alliances, nations change profoundly the behavior of the lower-level actors: "Group behavior is the behavior of individuals acting on the basis of a categorization of self and others at a social, more 'inclusive' or 'higher order' level of abstraction than that involved in the categorization of people as distinct, individual persons" (52). Thus, the model introduces nationalist action as a distinct type of group behavior operating in tandem with power-seeking motivations. If nationalist behavior ensues, the state searches for a nationalist "other", i.e., a nation that is dominating the state's conational kin. If these conationals inhabit a neighboring state, the state in question will be motivated to trigger an "irredentist" invasion to incorporate the kin group. Nationalist mobilization also typically implies a higher level of societal research extraction, which can be easily implemented by making the logistic distance function depend on whether a province belongs to the same nation as the capital. Nonnationalist actions follow the same rules as in the previous models, with the important distinction that two-level action is always enabled, for nationalism without the possibility of secession is hard to imagine.

The operation of the nationalist microlevel mechanisms depends on the specific geopolitical settings. In cases where political and cultural borders do not coincide, national self-determination expresses itself through integration and disintegration. In some irredentist situations, as explained by Myron Wiener (53), both processes are at work at the same time. As a way to capture the dynamics, Fig. 4 displays two subsequent snapshots cut out from a larger system. Graphically, national communities are marked with gray boundaries and an index number. At time 708, state A has already acquired the national identity 9 (hence the index 9 in the capital province). There are another few national communities visible in this figure (i.e., 2, 8, 14, and 16). Despite several communities of 9-nationals inside the territory of state B (and one small community of 8 nationals), the capital remains unmobilized. This configuration violates the self-determination of the members of nation 9 inside state B, which is why they are rebelling (see the crosses). At the same time, irredentist warfare is underway, because A wants to incorporate its nationalist kin currently residing within B's territory. In addition, a few communities in the north west of state B have taken the opportunity to rebel as well, but their secessionist attempt is not motivated by any particular nationalist claim, because these provinces have not yet acquired their own national identities.


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Fig. 4. An example of irredentism.
Many iterations later, at time step 896, A's borders coincide much more closely with nation 9. But the correspondence is not perfect, for a few 9-nationals were, in fact, incorporated by foreign states in the east (see especially state C). The reason for A's having lost control of these territories relates to its having spread its own forces thin while redeeming its kin in B. Although this process did entail some voluntary unification events of recently liberated territories, most of this incorporation required costly irredentist warfare with B.

In general, nationalist capitals seek to liberate their nationalist kin in other states if these populations do not enjoy "home rule." Provinces that belong to a nation modify their strategy such that they try to jointly break out of "foreign rule". This calculation implies that the national communities' decision making can be coordinated and that their resources can be pooled within the national community across state borders. On the whole, these rules are more prone to drag nationalist actors into armed struggle than the purely geopolitical strategy, as the near collapse of A illustrates. Other irredentist projects may lead to a "Kurdish" situation, as the "homeland" state loses its sovereignty.

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Sociational Modeling: Rationales and Results

The main purpose of this paper has been to illustrate how agent-based modeling does a better job at representing complex actor transformations than do conventional approaches of the essentialist type. Still, the critical reader may retort: why bother? Ultimately, sociational analysis would be of marginal interest were all important social outcomes ultimately reducible to patterns resulting from the interactions among fixed sets of actors. However, there are good reasons to suspect that this is not the case.

To identify "value added" of sociational modeling beyond heuristic representation, it is useful to revisit the basic rationale for computational modeling. In Schelling's classical rendering, social scientists should seek to explain "macrobehavior" in terms of "micromotives" (54). By drawing attention to sociational processes, I have tried to show that individual motivations may be too narrow a category of causal mechanisms. Indeed, there are many similarities between the present formalizations of geopolitical boundary change and Schelling's segregation model. The latter illustrates how relatively tolerant individual households "voting with their feet" may produce a powerful segregation pattern at the macrolevel. In such a setting, the outcome derives from local attempts to reduce the "frustration" of being surrounded by unlike neighbors. Similarly, the geopolitical models feature interactions that serve to reduce imbalances in the local balance of power, and, in the NSC model, also serve to reduce violations of national self-determination. Yet, these sociational models differ from Schelling's segregation scenario in that the adjustment mechanisms involve boundary adjustments, such as conquest, secession, and unification, rather than migration. Seen from this perspective, international politics resembles a repeated search process that selects out border configurations that satisfy specific organizational principles.

In addition, the sociational models presented here go beyond traditional approaches to computational modeling in terms of the macrobehavior explored. Most commonly, analysts validate the macrobehavior of their models in terms of end points. But, as Schelling stresses, it is also possible to treat the emergent properties of on-going processes as the main object of validation (see Table 2). Setting aside the (overly) ambitious goal of replicating real outcomes numerically, a second distinction separates qualitative from distributional modes of validation (55). Whereas the former is the least demanding because it establishes merely qualitative resemblance with the pattern to be explained, the latter requires empirical validation of the model's distributional properties.∥

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Table 2. Four types of macro-level"‰validation
Viewed together, the two distinctions create four types of macrolevel validation. My geopolitical research program has shifted from a validation strategy focusing on qualitative properties of end points (a) to one that prioritizes distributional process evaluation (d). To start with a, the original EP model yields surprising insights relating to the effect of defensive behavioral orientation on equilibria. Many qualitative theorists expect defensive technology and alliances to stabilize the "pluralistic" nature of the international system. By contrast, the sociational setup indicates that precisely the opposite may be true: the more defensive the system is, the weaker the balance of power gets, thus increasing the likelihood of unipolar outcomes (29, 56). Examples of this effect could be seen in Renaissance Italy, where a well working system supported by defensive alliances prevented the Italian city states to grow enough to prevent foreign domination.

Also illustrating qualitative equilibrium validation (a), the DP model shows that the state perpetual peace is a possible outcome thanks to clustered democratic collaboration together with ideology-sensitive defensive alliances. By freezing state borders from the outset of the analysis, essentialist theories make things both too easy and too hard at the same time: too easy because they assume away the threat of conquest, and too hard because their lack of spatial representation overlooks the contribution of contextual cooperation (36).

So far, I have not subjected my models to validation of type b, although this is perfectly possible. For example, it would be possible to collect data on polarity structures and state sizes in the international system and compare those results to the computational findings. Epstein and Axtell's (1) analysis of skewed Pareto welfare distributions in their "sugarscape" model exemplifies this type of validation in another setting.

Going beyond the artificial endpoints imposed by equilibrium analysis, the frameworks also invite process validation at the qualitative level (see type c). With nationalism "switched on", the NSC model can be shown to generate warfare that is much more damaging than in the counterfactual case without national mobilization. Although this basic result confirms the intuition about nationalist warfare of von Clausewitz (57) and many historians (58), it has been lost on most contemporary analysts of international relations, who generally fail to distinguish between states and nations. Moreover, the model also suggests that national unification has a strongly destabilizing effect on the balance of power. Although many scholars have put the blame on Germany for the outbreak of the First World War, this finding opens a new line of inquiry linking the war to structural conditions relating to boundary change.

It is also instructive to explore distributional properties of model processes (type d). Within specific parameter regimes, the EP model generates power-law-distributed war sizes, which correspond closely to empirically observed patterns (L.-E. Cederman, unpublished work). As with earthquakes, there are many events with few casualties, fewer large ones, and a very small number of huge disasters. More precisely, power laws tell us that the size of an event is inversely proportional to its frequency. In other words, doubling the severity of wars leads to a decrease in frequency by a constant factor regardless of the size in question. This remarkable finding belongs to the most accurate and robust ones that one is likely to find in world politics (59).** This result resembles strongly a similar finding about firm-size distributions recorded in entity processes involving the creation, growth, and death of firms (60). Even more generally, if it can be shown that the international system obeys the principles of self-organized criticality (61), a number of interesting consequences would follow. First, in contradiction with attempts to link power-law regularities to simple social diffusion processes (62), the computational models indicate that power-law-distributed wars may be a side-effect of profound boundary-transforming processes. Second, these findings cast doubt on the focus on equilibria that is dominant in social-scientific theorizing because warfare ensues when the system moves between metastable equilibria. Third, tensions typically build up during potentially long periods in the system, which means that efforts to match causes with events based on conventional microlevel explanations, be they game-theoretic, statistical, or qualitative, fail to do justice to the different time scales involved in the sociational transformations. Although more research is needed to corroborate these initial findings, sociational agent-based models remain the only ones that have managed to reproduce statistical regularities of this sort.

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Conclusion

In this paper, I have argued that, in addition to the advantages usually attributed to agent-based modeling, such as its ability to capture bounded rationality and heterogeneous agent populations, this technique also promises to overcome the reification of actors. Whereas this common, but limiting, assumption makes a lot of sense during periods characterized by stable actor boundaries, other historical junctures, such as the end of the Cold War, exhibit far-reaching and swift transformations of actors' spatial and organizational existence. Moreover, because actors cannot be assumed to remain constant in the long run, analysis of macrohistorical processes virtually always requires sociational endogenization.

Computational modeling provides a set of formal tools that assists the analyst in tracing complex macrohistorical transformations of actors, be they hierarchically organized as relational networks or as collections of symbolic categories. With respect to the former, dynamic networks featuring emergent compound actors with agent compartments represented in a spatial grid capture organizational domination, as in Weber's notion of the territorial state. In addition, models of tagged social processes allow the analyst to show how such actors predicate their behavior on categorical traits. Finally, categorical schemata that select out politically relevant cultural traits in ethnic landscapes formalize a profoundly constructivist notion of national identity in conformance with the qualitative literature on nationalism. The "finite-agent method" models both states and nations as higher-level structures superimposed on a lower-level grid of primitive agents or cultural traits and avoids reification of agency, thus opening the door to explicit analysis of entity processes. Although my examples have centered on international politics, it should be clear that this mode of analysis is by no means limited to such settings. More generally, history-dependent institutionalism (63) promises to capture entity processes in a variety of sociational contexts wherever actors' boundaries and existence are up for grabs, as in the case of the coevolution of firms, political parties, bureaucracies, interest groups, and churches.

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Footnotes

↵ * E-mail: [email protected].
This paper results from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, "Adaptive Agents, Intelligence, and Emergent Human Organization: Capturing Complexity through Agent-Based Modeling," held October 4–6, 2001, at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center of the National Academies of Science and Engineering in Irvine, CA.
↵ "  An extension featuring two-level action allows the provinces to enjoy the possibility of seceding on their own initiative and, in that case, they have relations only with their capital. In that scenario, the capitals have to deter attacks both externally and internally. See ref. 29.
↵ "¡ Because of the quasi-parallel design of the model, victorious parties cannot be allowed to incorporate disputed territory directly. Instead, they raise "claims" that are processed once that all interactions are over. Structural change is then executed in random order, while skipping those campaigns that would lead to boundary inconsistencies.
↵ § If two-level action is operational, secession proceeds along similar lines. Here, there are two topological situations similar to the two last cases just enumerated. If the province can leave B without compromising the access paths within B, then only the secessionist province becomes independent. If secession cuts other provinces off, then those provinces also are made sovereign.

 

[ajtr]

Seeing Around Corners​

The new science of artificial societies suggests that real ones are both more predictable and more surprising than we thought. Growing long-vanished civilizations and modern-day genocides on computers will probably never enable us to foresee the future in detail—but we might learn to anticipate the kinds of events that lie ahead, and where to look for interventions that might work


By Jonathan Rauch

In about A.D. 1300 the Anasazi people abandoned Long House Valley. To this day the valley, though beautiful in its way, seems touched by desolation. It runs eight miles more or less north to south, on the Navajo reservation in northern Arizona, just west of the broad Black Mesa and half an hour's drive south of Monument Valley. To the west Long House Valley is bounded by gently sloping domes of pink sandstone; to the east are low cliffs of yellow-white sedimentary rock crowned with a mist of windblown juniper. The valley floor is riverless and almost perfectly flat, a sea of blue-gray sagebrush and greasewood in sandy reddish soil carried in by wind and water. Today the valley is home to a modest Navajo farm, a few head of cattle, several electrical transmission towers, and not much else.
Yet it is not hard to imagine the vibrant farming district that this once was. The Anasazi used to cultivate the valley floor and build their settlements on low hills around the valley's perimeter. Remains of their settlements are easy to see, even today. Because the soil is sandy and the wind blows hard, not much stays buried, so if you leave the highway and walk along the edge of the valley (which, by the way, you can't do without a Navajo permit), you frequently happen upon shards of Anasazi pottery, which was eggshell-perfect and luminously painted. On the site of the valley's eponymous Long House—the largest of the ancient settlements—several ancient stone walls remain standing.

Last year I visited the valley with two University of Arizona archaeologists, George Gumerman and Jeffrey Dean, who between them have studied the area for fifty or more years. Every time I picked up a pottery shard, they dated it at a glance. By now they and other archaeologists know a great deal about the Anasazi of Long House Valley: approximately how many lived here, where their dwellings were, how much water was available to them for farming, and even (though here more guesswork is involved) approximately how much corn each acre of farmland produced. They have built up a whole prehistoric account of the people and their land. But they still do not know what everyone would most like to know, which is what happened to the Anasazi around A.D. 1300.

"Really, we've been sort of spinning our wheels in the last eight to ten years," Gumerman told me during the drive up to the valley. "Even though we were getting more data, we haven't been able to answer that question." Recently, however, they tried something new. Unable to interrogate or observe the real Long House Valley Anasazi, they set about growing artificial ones.

Mr. Schelling's Neighborhood
Growing artificial societies on computers—in silico, so to speak—requires quite a lot of computing power and, still more important, some sophisticated modern programming languages, so the ability to do it is of recent vintage. Moreover, artificial societies do not belong to any one academic discipline, and their roots are, accordingly, difficult to trace. Clearly, however, one pioneer is Thomas C. Schelling, an economist who created a simple artificial neighborhood a generation ago.

Today Schelling is eighty years old. He looks younger than his age and is still active as an academic economist, currently at the University of Maryland. He and his wife, Alice, live in a light-filled house in Bethesda, Maryland, where I went to see him one day not long ago. Schelling is of medium height and slender, with a full head of iron-gray hair, big clear-framed eyeglasses, and a mild, soft-spoken manner. Unlike most other economists I've dealt with, Schelling customarily thinks about everyday questions of collective organization and disorganization, such as lunchroom seating and traffic jams. He tends to notice the ways in which complicated social patterns can emerge even when individual people are following very simple rules, and how those patterns can suddenly shift or even reverse as though of their own accord. Years ago, when he taught in a second-floor classroom at Harvard, he noticed that both of the building's two narrow stairwells—one at the front of the building, the other at the rear—were jammed during breaks with students laboriously jostling past one another in both directions. As an experiment, one day he asked his 10:00 A.M. class to begin taking the front stairway up and the back one down. "It took about three days," Schelling told me, "before the nine o'clock class learned you should always come up the front stairs and the eleven o'clock class always came down the back stairs"—without, so far as Schelling knew, any explicit instruction from the ten o'clock class. "I think they just forced the accommodation by changing the traffic pattern," Schelling said.

In the 1960s he grew interested in segregated neighborhoods. It was easy in America, he noticed, to find neighborhoods that were mostly or entirely black or white, and correspondingly difficult to find neighborhoods where neither race made up more than, say, three fourths of the total. "The distribution," he wrote in 1971, "is so U-shaped that it is virtually a choice of two extremes." That might, of course, have been a result of widespread racism, but Schelling suspected otherwise. "I had an intuition," he told me, "that you could get a lot more segregation than would be expected if you put people together and just let them interact."

One day in the late 1960s, on a flight from Chicago to Boston, he found himself with nothing to read and began doodling with pencil and paper. He drew a straight line and then "populated" it with Xs and Os. Then he decreed that each X and O wanted at least two of its six nearest neighbors to be of its own kind, and he began moving them around in ways that would make more of them content with their neighborhood. "It was slow going," he told me, "but by the time I got off the plane in Boston, I knew the results were interesting." When he got home, he and his eldest son, a coin collector, set out copper and zinc pennies (the latter were wartime relics) on a grid that resembled a checkerboard. "We'd look around and find a penny that wanted to move and figure out where it wanted to move to," he said. "I kept getting results that I found quite striking."

To see what happens in this sort of artificial neighborhood, look at Figure 1, which contains a series of stills captured from a Schelling-style computer simulation created for the purposes of this article. (All the illustrations in the article are taken from animated artificial-society simulations that you can view online, at www.theatlantic.com/rauch.) You are looking down on an artificial neighborhood containing two kinds of people, blue and red, with—for simplicity's sake—no blank spaces (that is, every "house" is occupied). The board wraps around, so if a dot exits to the right, it reappears on the left, and if it exits at the top, it re-enters at the bottom.

In the first frame blues and reds are randomly distributed. But they do not stay that way for long, because each agent, each simulated person, is ethnocentric. That is, the agent is happy only if its four nearest neighbors (one at each point of the compass) include at least a certain number of agents of its own color. In the random distribution, of course, many agents are unhappy; and in each of many iterations—in which a computer essentially does what Schelling and his son did as they moved coins around their grid—unhappy agents are allowed to switch places. Very quickly (Frame 2) the reds gravitate to their own neighborhood, and a few seconds later the segregation is complete: reds and blues live in two distinct districts (Frame 3). After that the border between the districts simply shifts a little as reds and blues jockey to move away from the boundary (Frame 4).

Because no two runs begin from the same random starting point, and because each agent's moves affect every subsequent move, no two runs are alike; but this one is typical. When I first looked at it, I thought I must be seeing a model of a community full of racists. I assumed, that is, that each agent wanted to live only among neighbors of its own color. I was wrong. In the simulation I've just described, each agent seeks only two neighbors of its own color. That is, these "people" would all be perfectly happy in an integrated neighborhood, half red, half blue. If they were real, they might well swear that they valued diversity. The realization that their individual preferences lead to a collective outcome indistinguishable from thoroughgoing racism might surprise them no less than it surprised me and, many years ago, Thomas Schelling.

In the same connection, look at Figure 2. This time the agents seek only one neighbor of their own color. Again the simulation begins with a random distribution (Frame 1). This time sorting proceeds more slowly and less starkly. But it does proceed. About a third of the way through the simulation, discernible ethnic clusters have emerged (Frame 2). As time goes on, the boundaries tend to harden (Frames 3 and 4). Most agents live in areas that are identifiably blue or red. Yet these "people" would be perfectly happy to be in the minority; they want only to avoid being completely alone. Each would no doubt regard itself as a model of tolerance and, noticing the formation of color clusters, might conclude that a lot of other agents must be racists.

Schelling's model implied that even the simplest of societies could produce outcomes that were simultaneously orderly and unintended: outcomes that were in no sense accidental, but also in no sense deliberate. "The interplay of individual choices, where unorganized segregation is concerned, is a complex system with collective results that bear no close relation to the individual intent," he wrote in 1969. In other words, even in this extremely crude little world, knowing individuals' intent does not allow you to foresee the social outcome, and knowing the social outcome does not give you an accurate picture of individuals' intent. Furthermore, the godlike outside observer—Schelling, or me, or you—is no more able to foresee what will happen than are the agents themselves. The only way to discover what pattern, if any, will emerge from a given set of rules and a particular starting point is to move the pennies around and watch the results.

Schelling moved on to other subjects in the 1970s. A few years later a political scientist named Robert Axelrod (now at the University of Michigan) used a computer simulation to show that cooperation could emerge spontaneously in a world of self-interested actors. His work and Schelling's work and other dribs and drabs of research hinting at simulated societies were, however, isolated threads; and for the next decade or more the threads remained ungathered.

Sugarscape and Beyond
I have office space at The Brookings Institution, which is the oldest of Washington's think tanks. Since it is one of the more staid places in town, it was probably inevitable that I would notice Joshua Epstein. Epstein is tall and portly, with a wild tuft of graying hair above each ear, a round face, and the sort of exuberant manner that brings to mind a Saint Patrick's Day parade more readily than a Washington think tank. "No foam!" he roared, grinning, to a Starbucks server one day when we went out for coffee. "Keep your damn foam!" Anyone who notices Epstein is soon likely to encounter Robert Axtell, his collaborator and alter ego. A programming wizard with training in economics and public policy, Axtell is of medium height, quiet, and as understated as Epstein is boisterous. When he speaks, the words spill out so quickly and unemphatically that the listener must mentally insert spaces between them.

Epstein was born in New York City and grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts. His father was a logician and a philosopher of science. Nonetheless, Epstein never managed to finish high school. Instead he got into college on a piano audition and, after composing a series of chamber-music pieces, ended up switching to the study of mathematics and political economy. That led to a Ph.D. in political science in 1981 and then a position at Brookings, plus the realization that he was fascinated by mathematical models. One day in the early 1990s, when he was giving a talk about his model of arms races, he met Axtell, who was then a graduate student. He wound up bringing Axtell to Brookings, in 1992.

Not long after, Epstein attended a conference at the Santa Fe Institute—renowned as a pioneering center for research on "complexity," the generation of spontaneous order and intricate patterns from seemingly simple rules. At Santa Fe just then a big subject was artificial life, often called A-life. "All of the work was about coral reefs, ecology, growing things that look like trees, growing things that look like flocks of birds, schools of fish, coral, and so on," Epstein told me. "And I thought, jeez, why don't we try to use these techniques to grow societies?" Fired up, he returned to Brookings and discussed the idea with Axtell.

There followed the inevitable napkin moment, when the two of them sat in the cafeteria and sketched out a simple artificial world in which little hunter-gatherer creatures would move around a landscape finding, storing, and consuming the only resource, sugar. When they brought Sugarscape, as they called it, to life with the computer, they were startled to see that almost immediately their rudimentary A-society produced a skewed distribution of sugar that looked very much like the skewed distribution of wealth in human societies, even though nothing about the agents' simple behavioral rules pointed to any such outcome. For several years they built up and elaborated Sugarscape, and discovered that simple rules could produce complex social phenomena that mimicked migrations, epidemics, trade. "Every time we build one of these things, it does some shocking thing," Epstein told me. "You can make it as simple as you want, and it will do something surprising, almost certainly."

Epstein and Axtell then began applying their technique, which they called agent-based modeling, to a variety of problems and questions, and as they did so they quietly inverted a number of tenets of the more conventional varieties of social modeling. In Sugarscape, and in the other artificial societies that followed, Epstein and Axtell made their agents heterogeneous. That is, the artificial people, like real people, were different from one another. Each Sugarscape agent has its own "genetic code": a distinctive combination of metabolic rate (how much sugar each agent needs in order to stay alive), vision (how far the agent can "see" as it hunts for sugar), and so forth. This was a small move that was actually quite radical, and not just because of the daunting computational requirements. In most conventional social-science models people are assumed to be more or less the same: multiple copies of a single representative person. Even in Thomas Schelling's artificial neighborhood all the agents are alike except in color. Moreover, conventional models tend to assume that all their clonelike individuals have complete or near complete knowledge of their world. In Schelling's model unhappy agents, like the modeler himself, could survey the whole scene to find a better situation. In ordinary economic models, by the same token, people all see essentially the same big picture, so if a stock is underpriced, for example, traders will quickly spot the anomaly. Epstein and Axtell instead built models in which agents' vision and knowledge were limited; agents knew only what was going on nearby or what they "heard" from their "friends" (often a unique social network was assigned to every agent). Each agent, therefore, had unique preferences and unique knowledge.

It took me a little while to understand why in some respects this is a whole new ball game. In years of writing on economics I had grown comfortable with the sort of equation-based modeling that is common and, unquestionably, indispensable in the social sciences. The modeler looks at social patterns in the real world and tries to write equations that describe what's going on. The modeler, that is, views the world from on high and attempts to fit it to regular lines and curves, which are then used to make predictions. A simple and elegant artificial society created by Ross Hammond brought home to me what I had been missing.

Hammond is well over six feet tall and reed thin, with a broad forehead and a pointed chin that make his face a neat triangle. When I met him, last year, he worked as an assistant to Epstein and Axtell (he has since moved on to graduate school at the University of Michigan), but he originally devised his world in 1999, for a senior thesis at Williams College. He decided to make an abstract model of social corruption. He created an artificial world populated with two kinds of agents: citizens and bureaucrats. Each of these agents has his own susceptibility to corruption and his own network of friends. Every time a citizen meets a bureaucrat, the two conduct a transaction. If they collude corruptly, both pocket a nice kickback, whereas if both behave honestly, neither gets payola. If a mismatch occurs, and only one agent is willing to cheat, the honest agent "reports" the corrupt one to an unseen policing authority.

So far the setup is conventional game theory. Less conventional is this: no agent knows exactly how many reports of corruption will land him in jail, or how many other agents are honest or corrupt, or what most other agents are doing. He knows only what has happened recently to himself and his friends. If suddenly many of them land in jail, he will assume that the cops are cracking down and will behave more honestly until the coast looks clearer. (This excludes a sprinkling of George Washingtons—agents who are incorruptibly honest.) The agents, in other words, have varying personalities and limited information, and they display what economists call "bounded rationality"—that is, they make the most rational choices they can based on that limited information.

Hammond had no idea what his stipulations would produce. Somewhat surprisingly, he found that within many plausible ranges of corruption payoffs, punishments, and agent characteristics, his artificial society quickly settled down into rampant honesty. But there were some plausible parameters (big payoffs and short jail terms) that produced a truly startling result. To see it, look at Figure 3, below.

This shows Ross Hammond's little A-society, a world of citizens (bureaucrats are omitted for simplicity's sake) who at any given moment can be either corrupt, honest, or in jail. Schelling's checkerboard represented a physical space; the space in Figure 3, in contrast, is purely abstract. Whether agents are near each other makes no difference. What does matter is whether in any given transaction they behave honestly or corruptly. A corrupt agent is a yellow rectangle, an honest one blue, and a jailed one red. The population at any given moment stretches along a thin horizontal ribbon one rectangle deep, so the window actually portrays society over time. Thus a long vertical blue bar represents a single agent who is incorruptible (a George Washington), whereas an isolated blue rectangle represents an agent who usually behaves corruptly but on that occasion chooses honesty.

At the top of the first frame, as the agents begin doing business, they are randomly distributed. The field is almost entirely yellow, which means that corruption is the norm. Only occasionally does a yellow agent turn blue—presumably when a bunch of his friends have gone to jail (the friends are not necessarily near him physically, and the social networks are not displayed in this demonstration). Frame 2, captured later, shows more of the same; in this society, clearly, corruption pays and is the norm. Look closely, though, a little more than halfway down Frame 2, and you may notice a vaguely horizontal cluster of reds. Just randomly, in the course of things, there has been a surge of agents going to jail. That turns out to be important for reasons that become clearer when you look at Frame 3, captured later still. Here, just above the bottom of the frame, an unusually large number of agents are again being jailed—and suddenly everyone turns blue. This predominantly corrupt society has become uniformly honest. But for how long? As the last frame shows, honesty is the new norm. With everybody behaving honestly, there is no payoff for corruption (payoff requires two corrupt dealers), so the A-society stays honest. If the simulation continued running, it would show nothing but blue.

In the jargon, a dynamic system's sudden shift from one kind of behavior to another is typically referred to as "tipping" (and has been since well before the term became a fashionable metaphor for sudden change of whatever sort). Hammond's little world, despite its almost brutal simplicity, had tipped.

Hammond was astonished, so he ran the simulation again and again. No two runs were the same, because each began from a different random starting point, and no run was predictable in its details, because the agents' interactions, even in so simple a world, were unfathomably complicated. Sometimes the A-society would tip from corrupt to honest almost immediately; sometimes it would tip only after running for hours on end; but always, sooner or later, it tipped. The switch appeared to be inevitable, but its timing and the path taken to reach it were completely unpredictable. What was going on?

Every so often, in the course of random events, a particularly large number of corrupt agents, who happen to have particularly large networks of friends who perhaps themselves have large social networks, will be arrested. That, Hammond figures, has a doublebarreled effect: it leads a lot of agents to notice that many of their friends are under arrest, and it also increases the likelihood that they will encounter an honest agent in the next transaction. Fearing that they will meet their friends' fate, the agents behave more honestly; and in doing so they heighten yet further the odds that a corrupt agent will be nailed, inspiring still more caution about corruption. Soon—in fact, almost instantly—so many agents are behaving honestly that corruption ceases to pay, and everyone turns honest.

From the archives:
"THINKING ABOUT CRIME"
(September 1983) The debate over deterrence. By James Q. Wilson
"There are plenty of different cities and countries that have gone from a high degree of corruption to a low degree of corruption," Hammond says. His A-society suggests that in such a transition, the fear of being caught may be at least as important as the odds of actually being caught. To test that possibility, Hammond re-ran his simulation, but this time he allowed all the agents to know not just how many of their friends were in jail but how many people were jailed throughout the whole society: in other words, the agents knew the odds of arrest as well as the police did. Sure enough, fully informed agents never got scared enough to reform. Hammond's A-society seemed to have "grown" a piece of knowledge that many law-enforcement agencies (think of the Internal Revenue Service, with its targeted, high-profile audits) have long intuited—namely, that limited resources are often more effectively spent on fearsome, and fearsomely unpredictable, high-profile sweeps than on uniform and thus easily second-guessed patterns of enforcement.

Hammond also wondered what would happen if he made all the agents alike, instead of giving each a personality marked by a randomly varied proclivity to cheat. What if, say, all agents preferred honesty exactly half the time? The answer was that the A-society never made a transition; it stayed corrupt forever, because everyone "knew" how everyone else would behave. A social model that viewed individuals as multiple copies of the same fully informed person could thus never "see" the social transformation that Hammond found, for the simple reason that without diversity and limited knowledge, the transformation never happens. Given that human beings are invariably diverse and that the knowledge at their disposal is invariably limited, it would seem to follow that even societies in which unsophisticated people obey rudimentary rules will produce surprises and discontinuities—events that cannot be foreseen either through intuition or through the more conventional sorts of social science.

Growing Zipf's Law
Every so often scientists notice a rule or a regularity that makes no particular sense on its face but seems to hold true nonetheless. One such is a curiosity called Zipf's Law. George Kingsley Zipf was a Harvard linguist who in the 1930s noticed that the distribution of words adhered to a regular statistical pattern. The most common word in English—"the"—appears roughly twice as often in ordinary usage as the second most common word, three times as often as the third most common, ten times as often as the tenth most common, and so on. As an afterthought, Zipf also observed that cities' sizes followed the same sort of pattern, which became known as a Zipf distribution. Oversimplifying a bit, if you rank cities by population, you find that City No. 10 will have roughly a tenth as many residents as City No. 1, City No. 100 a hundredth as many, and so forth. (Actually the relationship isn't quite that clean, but mathematically it is strong nonetheless.) Subsequent observers later noticed that this same Zipfian relationship between size and rank applies to many things: for instance, corporations and firms in a modern economy are Zipf-distributed.

Nature is replete with such mysteriously constant statistical relationships. "Power laws," scientists call them, because the relationship between size and rank is expressed as an exponent. Earthquakes, for instance, follow Zipf-style power laws. Large earthquakes are rare, small ones are common, and the size of each event multiplied by its rank is a rough constant. In the 1980s scientists began to believe that power-law relationships are characteristic of systems that are in a state known as self-organized criticality, of which the textbook example is a trickle of sand pouring onto a tabletop. At first the sand merely piles up, but eventually it reaches a point where any additional sand is likely to trigger an avalanche—often very small, occasionally quite large. The sand pile now maintains itself at a roughly constant height, and the overall distribution of large and small avalanches follows a power law, even though the size of any particular avalanche is always unpredictable.

That sand and other inanimate things behave in this way is interesting, even striking. That human societies might display similar patterns, however, is weird. People are (generally) intelligent creatures who act deliberately. Yet their cities, for example, sort themselves out in a mathematically regular fashion, a fact that I confirmed by glancing at the World Almanac. In 1950 and 1998 the lists of the top twenty-five cities in America were quite different, yet the cities' relative sizes were almost exactly the same. The biggest city (New York in both years) was about four times as big as the fourth biggest (Los Angeles in 1950, Houston in 1998), which was about three times as big as the sixteenth biggest (New Orleans in 1950, Baltimore in 1998)—not an exact fit, but close. It was as though each city knew its permitted size relative to all the others and modulated its growth to keep the relationships constant. But, obviously, people moving to one city have not the faintest notion how their movements will affect the relative sizes of all cities. What might be going on? One plausible inference is that societies are like sand piles: complex systems whose next perturbation is unpredictable but whose behavior, viewed on a large scale and over time, follows certain patterns—patterns, moreover, that the individual actors in the system (grains of sand, human beings) are quite unaware of generating.

The day I started getting really excited about artificial societies was the day Rob Axtell mentioned that he had created artificial companies and cities, and that the companies and cities both followed Zipf's Law. According to Axtell, conventional economic theory has yet to produce any accepted explanation for why the size distribution of firms or cities follows a power law. Perhaps, Axtell thought, the trick is not to explain Zipf's Law but to grow it. He went to his computer and built an artificial world of diverse agents ranging from workaholics to idlers. Axtell's workers start out self-employed but can organize themselves into firms and job-hop, always in search of whatever combination of money and leisure fits their temperament. When individuals join forces to form companies, their potential productivity rises, because of companies' efficiency advantages. At the same time, however, as each company grows larger, each agent faces a greater temptation to slack off, collect the paycheck, and let colleagues carry the load.

The resulting universe of A-firms, Axtell found, is like the sand pile, full of avalanches small and large as firms form, prosper, grow lazy, lose talent to hungrier firms, and then shrink or collapse. As in real life, a few A-firms live and thrive for generations, but most are evanescent, and now and then a really big one collapses despite having been stable for years. Sometimes the addition of one slacker too many can push a seemingly solid firm into instability and fission; but you can't be sure in advance which firm will crumble, or when.

In such a world you might expect no regularity at all. And yet, Axtell told me, "The first time we turned it on, we got Zipf!" Despite the firms' constant churning, the distribution of large and small firms maintained the same sort of mathematical regularity seen in real life. Axtell and Richard Florida, a professor of regional economic development at Carnegie Mellon University, took the logical next step and built a model of cities, which were assumed to be basically agglomerations of firms. Same result: with no tuning or tweaking, the artificial cities unfailingly lined themselves up in a Zipf distribution and then, as a group, preserved that distribution even as particular cities grew and shrank in what looked to the naked eye like random turmoil. "All of a sudden," Florida told me, "I looked at Rob's model and it dawned on me. This creates the city system." The artificial cities and their artificial residents were all unknowingly locked in a competition for talent, but they could retain only so much of it before they lost ground relative to other clusters of talent. Richard Florida, to whom the Zipf distribution of cities had previously seemed a mere curiosity, infers that the Zipf relationship is much more than a pretty anomaly or a statistical parlor trick. It bespeaks the higher-order patterns into which human beings, and thus societies, unconsciously arrange themselves.

Artificial Genocide
If societies can order themselves systematically but unconsciously, it stands to reason that they can also disorder themselves systematically but unconsciously. As societies, the Balkans, Rwanda, Indonesia, and South Central Los Angeles have little in common, yet all have experienced, in recent memory, sudden and shocking transformations from a tense but seemingly sustainable communal peace to communal disorder and violence. Obviously, riots in America are in no way morally comparable to genocide in Rwanda, but what is striking in all these cases is the abruptness with which seemingly law-abiding and peaceable people turned into looters or killers. Scholars often use the metaphor of contagion in talking and thinking about mass violence, because the violence seems to spread so quickly from person to person and neighborhood to neighborhood. Yet sociologists who have studied mass behavior have learned that people in crowds and groups usually remain rational, retain their individuality, and exercise their good judgment; that is, they remain very much themselves. The illusion that some larger collective mind, or some sort of infectious hysteria, has seized control is just that: an illusion. Somehow, when communal violence takes hold, individuals make choices, presumably responding to local incentives or conditions, that make the whole society seem to have suddenly decided to turn savage. Might it be that rampant violence is no more the result of mass hysteria than the rampant segregation in Thomas Schelling's artificial neighborhood is the result of mass racism?

Figure 4 shows Joshua Epstein's artificial society containing two kinds of people, blues and greens. As usual in Epstein's models, each agent has his own personality—the relevant traits being, in this case, the agent's degree of privation or discontent, his level of ethnic hostility, and his willingness to risk arrest when the police are around. Also as usual, agents can "see" what is going on only in their immediate neighborhoods, not across the whole society. The agents' environment is one of ethnic tension between blues and greens; the higher the tension, the more likely it is that the agents will, in Epstein's term, "go active"—which in real life could mean looting a neighbor's store or seizing his house, but which in the current instance will mean killing him. When an agent turns red, his discontent or hatred has overcome his fear of arrest, and he has killed one randomly selected neighbor of the other color. Those are the rules. They are very simple rules.

In Figure 4 none of the agents are red. There is not enough ethnic tension to inspire them to go active, so they coexist peacefully, and indeed fill up the screen as their populations grow (they can procreate). Between Frames 1 and 2 all that happens is that blues and greens move around and occupy previously empty spaces. The situation looks safe and stable, but it is not. In Figure 5, below, ethnic tension has increased only slightly, but that increment has shifted the society into a radically different state. In Frame 1 the randomly distributed agents have set about killing one another, so their world is awash with red dots. Shortly afterward, only a few seconds into the simulation, the population has thinned dramatically (Frame 2), with most of the agents who live in ethnically mixed zones having been picked off. By Frame 3 blues and greens have separated, with violence flaring along the borders and blues predominating.

Epstein has run this simulation countless times from different random starting points, and it turns out that neither color enjoys an inherent advantage: blues and greens are equally likely to prevail, with the outcome depending on random local events that tilt the balance one way or the other. No two runs are quite alike. But all are the same in one respect: once a side has attained the upper hand, its greater numbers allow it to annihilate the other side sooner or later. In Frame 4 greens are confined to a single ethnic enclave (the bottom of the frame wraps around to join the top), where they huddle in beleaguered solidarity as blues continue to nibble at them. The rest of the story, in Frames 5 and 6, speaks for itself.

Epstein then added a third element, one that might be of special interest to the United Nations: cops, or, if you prefer, peacekeepers. In Figure 6, below, cops are represented by black dots. Like other agents, they can "see" only in their immediate vicinity. Their rule is to look around for active agents and put them in jail. The less hotheaded agents will behave peaceably when a cop is nearby, so as to avoid arrest. The result is a markedly different situation.

In Frame 1 agents and cops are scattered randomly, and the bolder agents (in red) are setting upon their victims. When they commit murder near a cop, the agents go to jail. Even so, the cops are initially overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of violence, and in Frames 2 and 3 an enclave of embattled greens forms, just as before. Now, however, there is an important difference: the enclave is stable. Once it has dwindled to a certain size, the cops are able to contain the violence by making arrests along the border. As long as the cops stay in place, the enclave is safe. But what if the cops are withdrawn? The result is exactly the same as what happened when peacekeepers abandoned enclaves in Bosnia and Rwanda. In Frame 4 the cops have all departed. Again, Frames 5 and 6 speak for themselves.

I don't think I'm alone in finding this artificial genocide eerie. The outcome, of course, is chilling; but what is at least as spooky is that such complicated—to say nothing of familiar—social patterns can be produced by mindless packets of data following a few almost ridiculously simple rules. If I showed you these illustrations and told you they represented genocide, you might well assume you were seeing a schematic diagram of an actual event. Moreover, the model is designed without any element of imitation or communication, so mass hysteria or organized effort is literally impossible. No agent is knowingly copying his peers or following the crowd; none is consciously organizing a self-protective enclave. All the agents are separately and individually reacting "rationally"—according to rules, in any case—to local conditions that the agents themselves are rapidly altering. As hotheads begin to go active, the odds that any one misbehaving agent will be arrested decline, emboldening more-timid agents nearby to act up, reducing the odds of arrest still further, emboldening more agents, and so on. As in real life, the violence, once begun, can spread rapidly as cops are overwhelmed in one neighborhood after another. Although the agents are atomized and disorganized, the violence is communal and coherent. It has form and direction and even a sort of malevolent logic.

At a Brookings conference last year, where Epstein presented his artificial genocide, Alison Des Forges was in attendance. Des Forges, a senior adviser to Human Rights Watch Africa, is one of the world's leading authorities on the Rwandan genocide of 1994. After the session I asked her what she made of Epstein's demonstration. Neither she nor anyone else, Epstein included, believes that an array of little dots explains the Rwandan cataclysm or any other real-world event; the very notion is silly. What the simulation did suggest to Des Forges is that disparate social breakdowns, in widely separated parts of the world, may have common dynamics—linking Rwanda, for instance, to other horrors far away. She also told me that Epstein's demonstration reminded her of Hutu killers' attack on Tutsis who had gathered on a Rwandan hilltop: the torches, the fires, the killing working its way up the hill.

Cyber-Anasazi
In 1994 Epstein went back to the Santa Fe Institute, this time to lecture on Sugarscape. He told me, "I came to a run in the Sugarscape that we called the Protohistory, which was really this made-up toy history of civilization, where it starts with some little soup of agents and they go to peaks on the Sugarscape and coalesce into tribes and have lots of kids and this forces them down in between the peaks and they smash into the other tribe and they have all this assimilation and combat and all this other stuff. And I showed that toy history to this typically unlikely Santa Fe collection of archaeologists and biologists and physicists, and I said, 'Does this remind anyone of anything real?' And a hand shot up, and it was George Gumerman's hand. I had never met George. And he said, 'It reminds me of the Anasazi.' I said, 'What the heck is that?' And he told me the story of this tribe that flourished in the Southwest and suddenly vanished. And why did they suddenly vanish? I thought, That's a fascinating question."

The greatest challenge for A-society researchers is to show that their wind-up worlds bear on anything real. Epstein asked Gumerman if he had data on the Anasazi, and Gumerman replied that there were lots of data, data covering a span of centuries and recording, year by year, environmental conditions, settlement patterns, demographic trends, and more. "I thought, jeez," Epstein says, "if there's actual data, maybe we can actually reconstruct this civilization computationally. I came back all excited and told Rob. We built this terrain in a computer and we literally animated this entire history, looking down on it as if it were a movie. We said, Okay, that's what really happened. Let's try to grow that in an agent-based model. Let's create little cyber-Anasazi and see if we can equip them with rules for farming, moving, mating, under which you just leave them alone with the environment changing as it truly did, and see if they reproduce—grow—the true, observed history."

Gumerman and Jeffrey Dean (and several other scholars who joined in the effort) were equally interested, for reasons of their own. Some scholars believed that drought and other environmental problems caused the Anasazi to leave; others blamed marauders or internecine warfare or disease or culture, as well as drought. The argument had waxed and waned ever since the 1920s. "We've thought the environment was important," Gumerman told me, "and other archaeologists said they didn't think it was that important, and that's been the level of argument until now." The prospect of growing artificial Anasazi in cyberspace suggested a new way to get some traction on the question.

So they created a computerized replica of the Long House Valley environment from A.D. 800 to A.D. 1350 and populated it with agents—in this case, digital farmers. Each agent represents a household and is given a set of what the scholars believed to be realistic attributes: family size, life-spans, nutritional needs, and so on. Every year each artificial household harvests the corn on its land during the growing season and draws down its stocks in the winter. If a household's land produces enough corn to feed the family, the family stays and farms the same land again the next year; if the yield is insufficient, the family moves to the nearest available plot that looks promising and tries again; if the family still cannot eke out sustenance, it is removed from the simulation. I have simplified the parameters, which allow for the formation of new households, the birth of children, and so on. Still, the rules are fairly straightforward, basically directing the artificial Anasazi to follow the harvest and to leave or die off if the land fails to support them.

To see what happens, look at Figure 7. You are looking down, as if from a helicopter, on paired images of Long House Valley starting in the year 800. Within the valley blue zones represent places where water is available for farming (darker blue means more water). In both images the red circles represent Anasazi settlements. But—the crucial difference—the right-hand image shows where real Anasazi settlements were, whereas the left-hand one shows where cyber-Anasazi settled.

As always, no two simulations are alike; but once again, this one is pretty typical. In the first frame, as the simulation begins, both the real and the artificial populations are sparse, but the settlements' locations have little in common—to be expected, since this simulation begins randomly. In Frames 2 and 3 (A.D. 855 and A.D. 1021) the real Anasazi population grows and spreads to farmland in the south of the valley; the artificial population also grows and spreads, but with a considerable lag, and the cyber-settlements are more likely than real ones to cling to the edges of fertile zones. Nonetheless, by 1130 (Frame 4) the real and artificial populations look strikingly similar, except that the artificial farmers appear to have overlooked some desirable land in the extreme south. By 1257 (Frame 5) the real population is well along in its decline, and the virtual one continues to track it. (Note that reality and simulation agree that by this point the southern portion of the valley supports only one family, though they disagree about where that family lived.) But in Frame 6, at the end of the period, real history and cyber-history have diverged: the real Anasazi have vanished, whereas several families hang on in the simulation.

What does all this tell us? Nothing for certain; but it suggests two things. First, environmental conditions alone can indeed explain much of what is known about Anasazi population and settlement patterns. Differences between reality and simulation are many; still, given the relative simplicity of the rules and the fact that all but environmental factors are excluded, what is remarkable is how much the simulation manages to look like the real thing. But, second, environmental hardship does not, at least in this model, explain the final disappearance. A steep decline, yes; but a small population could have stayed. Perhaps some unknown force drove them out; or perhaps, more likely, the last few gave up and chose collectively to leave; or perhaps there is a turning point that this first, still relatively crude model has not found.

Even if the modelers fail to explain why the Anasazi left, they will have shown that artificial societies can come within hailing distance of replicating, in a general but suggestive way, the large trends of real societies, and even some of the smaller trends. In Long House Valley, Gumerman and Dean led me up a sandstone slope to the site of the ancient Long House settlement. Gumerman planted himself in the midst of the ruin and put his arms out and shouted, over an icy morning wind that lashed the valley in early spring, "It boggles the mind. More than half the simulations produce the biggest site right here—where the biggest site actually was."

Learning From Lumpiness
"There is no such thing as society," Margaret Thatcher famously said in 1987. "There are individual men and women, and there are families." If all she meant was that in a liberal democracy the individual is sovereign, then she was right. But if she also meant that, as some conservatives believe, the notion of a capital-S Society is a collectivist fiction or a sneaky euphemism for the nanny state, then it appears that she was demonstrably wrong; and the artificial societies I have shown you are the demonstrations. They are, it is true, almost laughably simple by comparison with real people and real societies, but that is exactly the point. If even the crudest toy societies take on a life and a logic of their own, then it must be a safe bet that real societies, too, have their own biographies. Intuition tells us that it is meaningful to speak of Society as something greater than and distinct from the sum of individuals and families, just as it is meaningful to speak of the mind as something greater than and distinct from the sum of brain cells. Intuition appears to be correct.

That, however, should not provide a lot of comfort to liberals and progressives. They like the idea of Society because it is not an It but an Us, a group project. For them, Society can be built like a house, or guided like a child, by a community of enlightened activists and politicians who use their own intuition as a blueprint. Artificial societies suggest that real ones do not behave so manageably. Their logic is their own, and they can be influenced but not directed, understood but not anticipated. Not even the Olympian modeler, who writes the code and looks down from on high, can do more than guess at the effect of any particular rule as it ricochets through a world of diverse actors. The diversity of individuals guarantees that society will never be remotely as malleable or as predictable as any person.

Assimilating this style of thinking took me a while, but then I began seeing human society as both more complicated and less strange than before. Many of the seminal changes in American life have been characterized by the sorts of abrupt discontinuities and emergent patterns that also characterize artificial societies. Why, after twenty-five years of rapid growth, did productivity in America suddenly shift to a dramatically lower gear in the early 1970s? That event, probably more than any other, shaped the discontents of the 1970s and the political and social changes that followed, yet conventional economics still has not mustered an accepted explanation. Why did the homicide rate in New York City, after more than a century of relative stability at a remarkably low level, quadruple after 1960? Why did the rate of violent crime in America as a whole triple from 1965 to 1980? Why did the percentage of children born out of wedlock quadruple from 1965 to 1990? Why did crack use explode in the 1980s and then collapse in the 1990s? If we think of societies in terms of straight lines and smooth curves, such landslides and reversals seem mystifying, bizarre; if we think in terms of sand piles and teeming cyber-agents, it seems surprising if avalanches do not happen.

Washington, D.C., is a place deeply committed to linearity. Want to cut crime in half? Then double the number of cops or the length of prison sentences. That is how both Washington and the human brain are wired to think. Yet in recent years many people even in Washington have come to understand that something is amiss with straight-line or smooth-curve thinking. In fact, the notion of unintended consequences has become almost a cliché. Policy measures sometimes work more or less as expected, but often they misfire, or backfire. So far the trouble has been that the idea of unintended consequences, important and well founded though it may be, is an intellectual dead end. Just what is one supposed to do about it? One cannot very well never do anything (which, in any case, would have unintended consequences of its own), and one also cannot foresee the unforeseeable. And so Washington shuffles along neurotically in a state of befuddled enlightenment, well aware of the law of unintended consequences but helpless to cope with it.

It is at least possible that with the development of artificial societies, we have an inkling of an instrument that can peer into the black box of unintended consequences. That is not to say that A-societies will ever predict exact events and detailed outcomes in real societies; on the contrary, a fundamental lesson of A-societies seems to be that the only way to forecast the future is to live it. However, A-societies may at least suggest the kinds of surprises that could pop up. We won't know when we will be blindsided, but we may well learn which direction we are most likely to be hit from.

Moreover, A-societies may also eventually suggest where to look for the sorts of small interventions that can have large, discontinuous consequences. "It may be that you could learn of minimally costly interventions that will give you a more satisfactory outcome," Thomas Schelling told me—interventions not unlike his trick of reordering the traffic flow in Harvard's stairwells by changing the behavior of a single class. I used to think that the notion of government funding for late-night basketball was silly, or at best symbolic. In fact it may be exactly the right approach, because pulling a few influential boys off the streets and out of trouble might halt a chain reaction among their impressionable peers. It now seems to me that programs like President Clinton's effort to hire 100,000 additional police officers and spread them in a uniform film across every jurisdiction are the gestural, brain-dead ones, because they ignore the world's lumpiness. Increasingly, cops themselves are coming to the same conclusion. More than a few cities have learned (or relearned) that pre-emptively concentrating their efforts on key areas and offenders can dramatically reduce crime across an entire city at comparatively little cost.

The flip side of learning to find small interventions with large returns, and at least as important, is learning to avoid large interventions with small returns. In the stretches between avalanches and other discontinuities, A-societies are often surprising not by being capricious but by being much more stable than intuition would suggest. For example, in his model of communal violence Epstein tried adding more and more artificial peacekeepers to see how many were necessary to reliably prevent genocide. The result was disconcerting, to say the least. Even saturating the population with peacekeepers—one for every ten civilians—did not significantly reduce the odds that genocide would ultimately occur; it merely delayed the end. Why? Epstein's artificial peacekeepers are passive, reacting to nearby violence rather than striking pre-emptively; eventually a rash of clustered killings will always overwhelm their ability to respond, at which point the violence quickly gets out of hand. Epstein concludes that simply throwing forces at an ethnic conflict is no answer; intervention needs to anticipate trouble. That, of course, would not have come as news to the reactive and largely ineffective peacekeeping forces in, say, Rwanda, Bosnia, or Sierra Leone. In Rwanda frustrated peacekeepers pleaded for permission to seize arms caches and intimidate extremists before large-scale killing could begin. Their pleas were denied, at a cost apparent in Figure 6. (See "Bystanders to Genocide," by Samantha Power, September 2001 Atlantic.)

The science of artificial societies is in its infancy. Whether toy genocides will truly be relevant to real ones remains an open question. But the field is burgeoning, and a lot is going on, some of which will bear fruit. Researchers are creating cyber-models of ancient Indians of Colorado's Mesa Verde and Mexico's Oaxaca Valley; they are creating virtual Polynesian societies and digital mesolithic foragers; they are growing crime waves in artificial neighborhoods, price shocks in artificial financial markets, sudden changes in retirement trends among artificial Social Security recipients, and epidemics caused by bioterrorism. At least two sets of researchers are growing artificial polities in which stable political parties emerge spontaneously (conventional political science has never satisfactorily explained why political parties appear to be a feature of every democracy). To me, the early results of this work suggest that social engineering can never be as effective as liberals hope, but also that it need not be as clumsy as conservatives insist.

Today's universities and think tanks are full of analysts who use multivariate equations to model the effects of changes in tax rates or welfare rules or gun laws or farm subsidies; I can easily envision a time, not long from now, when many of those same analysts will test policy changes not on paper but on artificial Americas that live and grow within computers all over the country, like so many bacterial cultures or fruit-fly populations. The rise and refinement of artificial societies is not going to be a magic mirror, but it promises some hope of seeing, however dimly, around the next corner.

Computer animations of the artificial societies discussed in this article can be viewed online, at www.theatlantic.com/rauch.

 

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India-China: Dangerous Hysteria​

By B. Raman

A dangerous hysteria has taken hold of India-China relations since the anti-Beijing uprising in Lhasa in March last year. This hysteria is not due to any actions or rhetoric by the two Governments, which have been conducting themselves in a balanced and restrained manner. They have been trying to preserve and expand the gains in bilateral relations since the famous visit of Rajiv Gandhi to China in 1988. They have been sincerely trying to adhere to the bilateral agreement on maintaining peace and tranquility till a final solution is reached to the border dispute between the two countries. This hysteria has been the creation of some sections of the non-governmental strategic communities in the two countries.

2. There are issues on which the two Governments have reasons to be concerned and unhappy with each other. India has reasons to be concerned over past Chinese contacts with the Naga and Mizo insurgents in the North-East and with their present contacts, as suspected, with the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA). Similarly, China has reasons to be concerned over the activities of the set-up of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC) from the Indian territory and over the reported presence in the Indian territory of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) of the US which they blame for part of their troubles in Xinjiang and Tibet. The two Governments have refrained from publicly articulating these concerns and have taken care to see that these concerns do not come in the way of the further development of the bilateral relations.

3. Even in respect of the bilateral dispute over the border, one has to take note of the fact that there has been no attempt by either Government to change the status quo by setting up an illegal territorial presence in any sector of the border. In respect of the Ladakh sector, India feels that the status quo favours the Chinese because of the Chinese occupation of large parts of our territory in this sector after the People's Republic of China came into existence in 1949. The Chinese have consolidated the status quo, which favours them, by constructing roads, setting up border posts and creating border habitations in areas which used to be unpopulated. India, while not accepting the status quo de jure, has not tried to disturb it de facto.

4. In the Eastern sector (Arunachal Pradesh), the status quo, which we inherited from the British, favours us. The Chinese disturbed it briefly during the Sino-Indian war of 1962 by occupying large parts of it by taking advantage of our weak military and administrative presence in that area, but they unilaterally restored the status quo by withdrawing from the area occupied by them. If they had not withdrawn unilaterally, our Army was not in a position to eject them and we would have been confronted in the Eastern sector with a situation similar to the one in the Western sector---that is, with a new post-1949 status quo set up by the Chinese which we are not in a position to change. The Chinese have been trying to change the status quo in the Eastern sector in their favour not through military means, but by claiming a large part of this territory and insisting on our conceding their demand over some (Tawang) if not all of this territory as part of a border settlement.

5. Unfortunately, we find ourselves in an unequal position with the Chinese. This is because while the Chinese have consolidated the status quo in the Western sector and made sure that India will not be able to change it militarily, we have similarly not consolidated the status quo in the Eastern sector and made sure that the Chinese will not be able to change this militarily. Our long-neglect of the North-East and our failure to consolidate the status quo in Arunachal Pradesh have placed China in a strategically advantageous position in the Eastern sector. Only in the last two or three years have we realised the importance of consolidating the status quo in the Eastern sector by strengthening our military and administrative presence in the area through the construction of roads and inducting fresh military units to protect this area from any adventurist Chinese action.

6. While the Chinese have not sought to change the status quo in the Arunachal Pradesh sector militarily, they have created for themselves a capability for doing so eventually if the border talks fail. They have done this by developing road and rail communications in Tibet and by strengthening military deployments in Tibet. We have only recently realised the importance of giving ourselves a capability in the Arunachal Pradesh sector to thwart any Chinese attempt to change the status quo militarily if the bilateral border talks fail to break the deadlock.

7. The Chinese long-term strategy with regard to India has many facets. The trans-border developments are only one---but the most important--- component of their strategy. There are other components---namely, strengthening their relationship with Pakistan in order to confront India with the danger of a two-front war should it try to change militarily the status quo either in respect of China or in respect of Pakistan with regard to Jammu & Kashmir; giving Pakistan a nuclear and missile capability for threatening India; weakening the Indian influence in the rest of South Asia and strengthening their presence and influence in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal; creating a presence for their Navy in the Indian Ocean region and opposing India's attempts to emerge as an Asian power on par with China.

8. Till recently, we had no well thought-out long-term strategy with regard to China----neither in the border region, nor in South Asia nor in the Indian Ocean region. Only recently the initial rudiments of such a strategy have been appearing. Our attempts to strengthen our strategic relationship with the US and Japan is one such building-block of this comprehensive strategy. Our proactive Indian Ocean policy is another building block. But we find ourselves handicapped in further developing such a comprehensive strategy because we have let our influence be weakened in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal.

9. The post-March 2008 hysteria in the bilateral relations has not been the creation of the two Governments. It has been the outcome of a new activism with regard to each other in the non-governmental strategic communities of the two countries. Sections of the Indian strategic community saw in the Lhasa uprising an opportunity to change the status quo in Tibet by playing the Tibet card against China through helping the Tibetans in securing their legitimate rights from the Han Chinese. By changing the status quo in Tibet----not militarily which is out of question, but politically by backing the Tibetan people's efforts to change the status quo themselves--- India might be able to change the status quo in the Western sector and preserve the status quo in the Eastern sector. So these analysts believed and started advocating vigorously a policy of playing the Tibet card against China.

10. The activism in the Chinese non-governmental strategic community is partly the result of what they see as the Indian activism on Tibet and partly the result of the Indian activism in Arunachal Pradesh for consolidating the status quo. They want their Government to be more assertive in playing the Arunachal Pradesh card and to take advantage of the difficulties faced by India in the North-East to counter any attempt by India to play the Tibet card. This hysteria has resulted in a campaign of mutual demonisation and mutual sabre-rattling. This sabre-rattling is only at the non-Governmental level. The two Governments have maintained a distance from this hysteria without trying to discourage it.

11. The danger of such hysteria is that it could acquire an uncontrollable momentum and take the two countries towards a precipice from where they may not be able to withdraw. Any confrontation as a result of this hysteria would damage the interests of both the countries. This hysteria has to be defused in time by the top leaderships of the two countries interacting with each other more frequently and more directly than now and taking initiatives to remove wrong perceptions about each other. It is unwise for Indian analysts to talk of the Tibetan card. The international community has recognised Tibet as a part of China. While it will be sympathetic to any Tibetan attempts to free themselves of Chinese control, it will not support any Indian initiative or move in this regard. By frequently talking of the Tibetan card, we will only be adding to the suspicions and concerns in the Chinese mind.

12. It is equally unwise for Chinese analysts to talk of the Arunachal Pradesh (southern Tibet as they call it) or the North-East card. The international community looks upon these areas as a part of India and will not support any Chinese move to change the status quo. Much of this hysteria will die down automatically if the two countries reach a border settlement. The only border settlement, which will be equally advantageous, is for India to accord de jure recognition to the status quo in the Western sector in return for China recognising the status quo in the Eastern sector. The present difficulties in the Eastern sector are apparently due to the fact that China wants a face-saving formula by India handing over at least Tawang to it. India cannot do this because Tawang is a populated area. Its inhabitants are Indian citizens. No India political leader will be able to sell to the people and the parliament any concession, which would involve any population transfer.

13. So, what are the options? Either go on holding one meeting after another without any forward movement or think of some idea which could break the present deadlock. One idea could be to explore the possibility of a 'status quo plus' solution under which China will recognise the status quo in Arunachal Pradesh in return for India accommodating some of the Chinese interests in Tawang.

14. Once the border dispute is solved to our mutual satisfaction, the danger of a military confrontation between the two countries across the Himalayas will lessen considerably. But the competition between the two countries for influence in the region and outside will remain in the near and medium-term future, but this competition need not lead to a military confrontation.

(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. He is also associated with the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: [email protected])

 

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CHINA'S STRATEGIC INTRUSIONS IN INDIA'S NEIGHBOURHOOD ​

B.RAMAN

"The Chinese long-term strategy with regard to India has many facets. The trans-border developments are only one---but the most important--- component of their strategy. There are other components---namely, strengthening their relationship with Pakistan in order to confront India with the danger of a two-front war should it try to change militarily the status quo either in respect of China or in respect of Pakistan with regard to Jammu & Kashmir; giving Pakistan a nuclear and missile capability for threatening India; weakening the Indian influence in the rest of South Asia and strengthening their presence and influence in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal; creating a presence for their Navy in the Indian Ocean region and opposing India's attempts to emerge as an Asian power on par with China.

Till recently, we had no well thought-out long-term strategy with regard to China----neither in the border region, nor in South Asia nor in the Indian Ocean region. Only recently the initial rudiments of such a strategy have been appearing. Our attempts to strengthen our strategic relationship with the US and Japan is one such building-block of this comprehensive strategy. Our proactive Indian Ocean policy is another building block. But we find ourselves handicapped in further developing such a comprehensive strategy because we have let our influence be weakened in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. "

---From my article of September 8,2009, titled "India-China: Dangerous Hysteria" available at http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers34/paper3398.html

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Despite all the abusive mails and comments that I have been getting and to which I am used over my article deploring the hysteria that is being created by some of our strategic analysts and the media over the trans-border developments, I am not unduly concerned over the reports of continuing Chinese troop intrusions into Indian territory. These intrusions were initially confined to the Eastern sector and now are being reported from other sectors too.

2. When a border is not demarcated on the ground and when there is no common understanding between the two sides as to what constitutes the line of actual control due to the Chinese reluctance to exchange with us maps indicating their understanding of the LAC, such intrusions are bound to take place from both sides. Such intrusions used to be a recurring feature across the India-Myanmar border before the two countries demarcated the border except in the trijunction areas to the north and the south. Such intrusions were also a normal feature across the Sino-Myanmar border in the Northern Shan State and the Kachin State before the Sino-Myanmar border was demarcated in the 1970s except in the northern trijunction where the borders of India, China and Myanmar meet, which remains undetermined and undemarcated till today.

3.What I would be worried about is any illegal occupation by the Chinese of territory claimed by them either in the Arunachal Pradesh or in the Ladakh sector. The 1962 war occurred not because the Government of India ignored reports of intrusions, which are instances of trespass, but because it ignored and played down intelligence reports of illegal occupation of Indian territory by the Chinese in sectors such as Aksai Chin in Ladakh and their incorporating them into Chinese territory. It is our failure and reluctance to counter such outrageous instances of illegal occupation of Indian territory which inexorably led to 1962.

4.The Chinese used to have the habit of illegally occupying territory claimed by them if they had an opportunity of doing so, They did it in Indian territory before 1962. They did it in Myanmar in the late 1960s.They did it with regard to the Philippines when they quietly occupied in 1995 the South China sea island of Mischief Reef, which the Philippines claimed as its territory. After the furore caused by their illegal occupation of the Mischief Reef, I am not aware of any further instance of illegal occupation of foreign territory by the Chinese. If there is, I would be happy to stand corrected.

5. I have stated this many times before and I state this again that the Chinese would continue to stall the border talks with India by even not exchanging maps on the LAC till the Dalai Lama dies. They are not satisfied that that they have pacified Tibet once and for all. The Lhasa uprising of March 2008 has created fresh doubts in their mind about the prospects for continued political stability in Tibet. They are determined to impose on the Tibetans a successor to His Holiness, when he dies, chosen by the Communist Party of China. They do fear that there will be opposition to their nominee from the Tibetans and that this could lead to disturbances in Tibet, in which the Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC) will play an important part. They want to keep a pressure point which they can use against India in order to make it control the TYC. A continuing dispute with India over Arunachal Pradesh will, in their calculation, help them in dealing with any-post Dalai Lama instability. It has been my assessment that the border talks will show some movement for the better or for the worse only after the death of His Holiness and not before.

6. The question for our policy-makers is whether we facilitate the Chinese game of stalling till His Holiness dies or whether we insist on a settlement here and now and if so, what are the options that could be explored. It was in that context that I suggested that we explore the possibility of a status quo plus solution under which in return for the Chinese accepting the status quo in Arunachal Pradesh, we could consider accommodating some of their interests in Tawang, about which they seem to be doing a song and dance. I was amazed by a flood of mails accusing me of suggesting that we hand over Tawang to the Chinese. Where have I said so?

7. What are the Chinese interests in Tawang? Nobody knows for certain. I have asked many retired military officers whether Tawang would have any military significance for the Chinese. They said no. The Chinese themselves have cited what they consider as the historic and religious links of Tawang with Tibet. They even claim that there are records to show that the residents of Tawang paid their taxes to the set-up of the Dalai Lama in Lhasa and not to the British Government in New Delhi. They have not made a similar claim regarding the rest of Arunachal Pradesh. They have also pointed out that one of the previous Dalai Lamas was born in Tawang. The Singapore Foreign Minister, who had recently visited Lhasa, has been quoted as saying that the Chinese are worried that after the death of His Holiness, his followers might proclaim a child of Tawang as the incarnation of His Holiness. If that is so, they should try to get hold of Tawang before His Holiness dies instead of waiting till his death.

8. I have been suggesting to many think tanks in India that instead of getting hysterical over Tawang, we must do a detailed research, analysis and assessment of the Chinese obsession with Tawang. Nobody has done so till now.

9. In a commentary on the observations of the Singapore Foreign Minister contributed to the South Asia Analysis Group (http://www.southasiaanalysis.org), Brig.Subash Kapila, a fine military intelligence officer with whom I had the pleasure and privilege of being associated, has raised a very important question: the Chinese did not show the same obsession with Tawang in the past as they seem to be doing now. He has pointed out that the Chinese even withdrew from Tawang in 1962 after having occupied it. If Tawang was that important to them, they should not have withdrawn from there. Why did they do so?

10. The answer is simple. Long after they withdrew from Tawang, sections of the US media carried reports, based on interviews with the Tibetan Khampas, that the Khampa revolt in the 1950s against the Chinese occupation of Tibet was orchestrated by the USA's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and India's Intelligence Bureau then headed by the legendary B.N.Mullick. One does not know whether these claims or allegations were correct, but the Chinese presumed that they were. The fact that after the failure of the Khampa revolt, His Holiness and his entourage made a dash for Tawang has added to the strength of the Chinese presumption. The Chinese fear that if there is a joint attempt by the Indian and US intelligence to destabilise Tibet after His Holiness, that attempt could be directed from Tawang. .

11. I am not a military expert. But I have spent nearly three decades in the intelligence profession. From whatever little I know of the craft of intelligence, I could say that if there is one place on the Indo-Tibetan border from where a covert action to destabilise Tibet can be mounted with some success that is Tawang. I am, therefore, not surprised that the Indian presence in Tawang gives them the creeps. When I suggested a status quo plus formula what I had in mind was an Indian guarantee that New Delhi would not allow Tawang to be used to destabilise Tibet after the death of His Holiness in return for a Chinese acceptance of the status quo in Arunachal Pradesh, including Tawang. I do not know whether this will work with the Chinese, but it is worth trying.

12. I am not unduly worried over the continuing reports of Chinese troop intrusions. We are fortunate in having a competent, professional army, which is capable of taking care of them. There is no need for a hysteria over the intrusions. I am more worried about the diplomatic,economic and strategic intrusions which the Chinese are quietly making in our neighbourhood and the inability of our diplomacy to counter them. What are those strategic Chinese intrusions around us in our neighbourhood?


- The winning of the contract for the second stage of the Hambantota port development project in Sri Lanka.
- The winning of the contract for the Colombo-Kalutara road in Sri Lanka.
- The winning of the contract for the improvement of the Kyaukpu port on the Arakan coast of Myanmar.
- The winning of the permission from the military junta of Myanmar for the construction of two pipelines---one for gas and the other for oil--- from Kyaukpu to Yunnan.These pipelines will carry not only gas and oil produced locally but also brought by Chinese tankers from West Asia and Africa. We claim to have great influence over the junta in Myanmar.It has reportedly agreed to sell to China gas found by a consortium of which an Indian public sector company was a member. After millions of rupees of Indian investment, gas is struck and the Myanmar junta sells that gas to the Chinese. We watch it sucking our thumbs.
- The reported furtive negotiations with the Government of Bangladesh for a pipeline to carry gas from Bangladesh to Yunnan via the Arakan area of Myanmar.
- The proposal for a railway line from Gwadar on the Mekran coast of Pakistan to Xinjiang for which a feasibility study was ordered by the Pakistan Government two weeks ago.
- Talks with the Pakistani and the Iranian authorities for a gas pipeline to take Iranian gas to Xinjiang.

13. What contracts of strategic significance India has won in our neighbourhood? Zilch.

14. What progress India has made in strengthening its strategic presence in its neighbourhood? Zilch.

15. How effective Indian strategic and economic diplomacy has been in our neighbourhood? Zilch.

16. It is time to be worried and howling over the way China has made strategic inroads in our neighbourhood and over the failure of our diplomacy to counter it.

17. Our Army can take care of China. Can our diplomats take care of China? ( 14-9-09)