International Issues | Prem Shankar Jha

India and China Are on the Verge of Lasting Peace, if Modi Wants It

18-02-2021

Communalism, Diplomacy, Indo China Affairs, International Issues, Security, World

Despite the caution expressed by Indian defence analysts, the de-escalation is likely to hold. But, the agreement to withdraw needs political endorsement from the prime minister.

India and China Are on the Verge of Lasting Peace, if Modi Wants It
File photo of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Photo: Reuters

A policy blunder of the greatest magnitude, a humiliating defeat, and six decades of hiding the truth about what really caused the war between China and India in 1962, has so completely embedded a visceral distrust of China in the Indian mind that whenever there is a turn for the better in our relationship, our media, and the majority of our China-watchers, look for the hidden catch in it first before allowing themselves to believe that our relations might actually start improving.

The reaction of some of our best-known commentators to Beijing’s announcement that China and India would begin a synchronised disengagement on the north and south shores of Pangong lake in Ladakh with the intention of eventually returning to our April 2020 positions, is a case in point. While General H.S. Panag welcomed the development in a recent video interview, his scepticism about China’s intentions was writ large in his words and his body language.

Colonel Ajai Shukla was more forthright in voicing his distrust of the Chinese: “a 10-km stretch between Finger 3 and Finger 8. Indian Army has patrolled this area since the 1962 Sino-Indian war but now cannot enter the zone. …. China has been granted right to patrol to finger 4. that means LAC effectively shifted from finger 8 to finger 4,” he tweeted (emphasis added.) Others, including some in the political opposition, echoed his scepticism.

Criticising Shukla for creating a ‘false perception’, another Twitter user, ‘Sunny Shikhar’, claimed that “China (whose version of the LAC runs through Finger 4, the fourth of eight ridges coming down to the north shore of Pangong lake) has had a road till F4 since 1999 and a naval Radar base on F6 since 2006. “We patrolled till F8,” he points out, “on the road made by China because they let us, not because we controlled it. Now (under the terms of the disengagement)” China cannot even patrol on its own road between F8-F4”.

I have no idea who ‘Sunny Shikhar’ is, but if the facts he cites are correct, it means that China has forfeited as much of its claimed right to patrol as India has.

If that is indeed so, then Shikhar’s clarification substantiates Rajnath Singh’s statement in parliament, that both sides have agreed that neither will patrol the intervening area after the mutual withdrawals, till ‘an agreement is reached through future talks’.

China’s 1960 claim line in Ladakh is marked in yellow, the LAC at Pangong Tso is in pink. As can be seen, Thakung, the site of the latest standoff, is inside the LAC but within the 1960 Chinese claim line. Map: The Wire

A breakthrough has been achieved

To say that this has been a crucial breakthrough in the longstanding border dispute would be an understatement. For the agreement is not only an explicit acknowledgement that a ‘Grey Area’ or ‘No Man’s Land’ has existed between the two countries’ conflicting definitions of the LAC, but also marks a formal elevation of this area to the status of a ‘buffer zone’.

The difference between the two concepts is that whereas both Chinese and Indian patrols were entering “No Man’s Land” frequently, and waving placards stating that ‘This is Chinese/Indian Territory, please withdraw’ at each other when they met, now neither side will enter it till the misunderstandings and apprehensions that have arisen between the two countries are cleared through talks.

To a generation that has grown up in the era of the nation-state, this will look like an unsatisfactory resolution of the issue, for don’t all countries need hard, clearly defined, constantly patrolled borders? What our generation can only learn from the study of history is that hard boundaries replaced porous border regions, or belts, only in the era of the nation-state which first took shape after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and attained its full, malignant form with the widespread introduction of passports as recently as in the 1880s.

For reasons best known to itself, China has been studiously avoiding giving India its maps of the Ladakh-Aksai Chin area ever since the 1993 Agreement was signed. But it has been equally reticent about this in 15 out of the 24 border agreements it has signed. This has created unease in other countries as well, and has vindicated the belief among China watchers here and in the West, that Beijing is following a salami-slicing strategy to acquire more and more territory in Ladakh.

But we need to be as wary of preconceptions and prejudices imported from the West as we are of the inexplicable reticence of the Chinese. For the unalterable fact is that if the disengagement that has now begun at Pangong is completed without any hitches, a similar process is likely to take place all along the LAC, at least in the Western Sector. If that takes place, a de facto border belt, as distinct from a de jure border line, will come into being between the two countries in the Himalayas, in an area that China considers vital to its security, but for reasons totally unconnected with India. That has the potential to finally bring to our countries the lasting peace that both have been seeking ever since they signed the Agreement on the Maintenance of Peace and Tranquility in 1993.

Such historic breakthroughs are usually made at the highest political levels. What makes the present disengagement very different, perhaps unique, is that it has emerged almost entirely out of an intense, and continuous discussion between the two military commands, with no overt intervention by the political leadership.

Since June last year, there have been nine well-publicised conferences between the corps commander of the 14th corps stationed in Leh, and his Chinese counterpart from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Western Theatre Command. But, behind these, there have been between 25 to 30 meetings, many of them online or telephonic, at every level from battalion to brigade to division commander, to answer questions, allay suspicions, and clear misunderstandings that could have led to flare-ups of the kind that so nearly happened on the South Bank of the Pangong Tso when our forces’ foiled the PLA’s attempt to establish its presence opposite Finger 4 in late August by pre-emptively occupying several commanding heights over the area.

That confrontation was the closest China and India came to war, but it showed to the Chinese that India was building up its forces around the lake in earnest, and that any more covert attempts to establish advantageous positions to use as bargaining chips in future negotiations would be met with military force. It, therefore, acquired for the Indian Army a respect that had previously been lacking in the PLA.

Two other factors reinforced this: the first was the Indian Army’s resolute reinforcement of its troop strength, including artillery and armour, throughout the killing winter months. The Chinese were, of course doing the same, albeit outside the Indian definition of the LAC, so they fully understood India’s determination not to give any more ground.

The second was the army’s preparation of launchpads at places where it had the advantage of terrain, from where it could capture ground inside China’s definition of the LAC if the PLA crossed a Lakshmana Rekha into our territory. These preparations sent a clear signal that, should the PLA be tempted to try any more salami slicing of territory in Ladakh, it would become an extremely expensive operation.

But as the tragic Galwan incident (triggered by a Chinese soldier from a newly inducted unit manhandling Colonel Babu) showed, muscle-flexing can be a dangerous strategy if it is not backed up by confidence-building measures that reassure both sides that the promises being made will indeed be kept.
Indian Army vehicles moving towards the Line of Actual Control (LAC) amid border tension with China, in Leh, Sunday, September 27, 2020. Photo: PTI

The crucial ingredient

This is the crucial ingredient in the negotiations that has brought China and India from the brink of war to the brink of peace. For, as of February 2020, the army commander of Northern Command has been Lieutenant General Y.K. Joshi, who has served four tenures at various levels in Ladakh, from brigade commander to army commander in Leh, to the chief of staff of the Northern Command, based in Jammu, and finally Army Commander in February 2020.

What may have been far more important from the point of view of confidence-building is that from 2005 till 2008, General Joshi served as India’s defence attaché in Beijing, and developed a good working knowledge of Mandarin when he was there.

Since the formal talks held so far have been at the corps commanders’ level, General Joshi had to work with the Leh Corps Commander Lt General Harinder Singh, who did a creditable job in the first six rounds of talks despite not having served previously in the Himalayan Theatre, his specialty having been in counter-intelligence.

But on October 15, when General Singh was replaced by General P.G.K. Menon, who had served as a brigadier in the Leh-based XIV corps some years earlier, India finally had a negotiating team that had the necessary knowledge of the terrain and a far better understanding of its Chinese counterparts and was, in turn, understood better by them.

On the Chinese side, although one can at most hazard a guess, it would seem that President Xi Jinping also made a crucial change at the top of the Western Theatre Command that has helped to bring about the present agreement. On December 18, he replaced General Zhao Zongqi with General Zhang Xudong. Relatively little is known here about General Zhang, but General Zhao had headed the Western Theatre Command during the 2017 Doklam standoff. He could hardly not have been miffed at the way that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had claimed a victory of sorts – what the hyper-nationalist section of our media hailed as ‘a draw’ when the PLA withdrew itChinese and Indian Army troops. Photo: PTI/Filess bulldozers from the ridge where the confrontation took place. President Xi may therefore have been advised that after that searing experience, General Zhao would be the least suited person to take the risk that a negotiated withdrawal entailed.

Chinese and Indian Army troops. Photo: PTI/Files

The full story of how the disengagement was achieved will only be available decades later, when official documents get de-classified, if at all they ever are, but what cannot be denied is the magnitude of the achievement. By agreeing to create a buffer zone around Pangong, the two commands have opened the way to the settlement of the seven decade-long border based upon a new, ‘post-national’, concept of an international border. They have therefore taken the first essential step towards a lasting peace between China and India.

But the peace is tenuous, and will not last if Modi and his policymakers do not give it an explicit and public endorsement. For, the Chinese have developed an almost neurotic, and well-founded, distrust of Modi’s sudden, radical and secretive changes of policy towards China and the US, since his government came to power.

This is because in all of the 25-30 less formal interactions that have taken place in the lead up to the agreement, the single, almost neurotic, refrain from the Chinese side has been “will your government live up to the commitments we have chalked out”. The anxiety arises from their lack of understanding of the adversarial way in which democracies function. They are therefore extremely sensitive to the statements of sundry government and opposition political leaders, and to the overt hostility to China they see displayed almost daily by TV anchors and the defence analysts they hear and read in the Indian media.

The nervousness of the Chinese has increased as the two sides have inched closer to an understanding. The Indian interlocutors have therefore had to spend as much as half of the time at each meeting convincing their Chinese counterparts to disregard this ‘democratic noise’ and concentrate on what the government is doing and not saying.

Generals Joshi and Menon have succeeded in conveying the needed reassurance, but if the current agreement is even to last, let alone become the foundation of a final resolution of the border issue, it absolutely needs political endorsement from Prime Minister Modi himself.

This is because it was Modi who, without any prior discussion with his foreign office, and possibly even his national security adviser Ajit Doval, made an unannounced, volte facefrom the long term strategic cooperation with China that had been the policy of all previous governments since 1993, and joined the US-led bid to ‘contain’ China in the Indian Ccean, but also the South China sea.

He did this only 11 days after hosting President Xi in a state visit to India that could have restored China-India relations to where they might have been, had the 1962 war not taken place.

Today, Modi has an opportunity not only to do this, but do it without loss of face. All he has to do is restore all the economic and digital ties with China that he broke so abruptly in May after the Chinese occupation of the grey zone at Pangong lake. The rest will follow.

https://thewire.in/security/india-china-standoff-peace-withdrawal-modi-lac

Pulwama, China and Atmanirbharta: Is Modi at the End of His Tether?

By: Prem Jha

31-08-2020

Government, Indo China Affairs, International Issues, Security

The Pulwama attack had faded from public discourse after the 2019 elections. So why are moves afoot to bring it back into the limelight again?

Pulwama, China and Atmanirbharta: Is Modi at the End of His Tether?
Prime Minister Narendra Modi along with Defence Minister Rajnath Singh arrives to take part in the 74th Independence Day celebrations, at Red Fort in New Delhi, Saturday, Aug. 15, 2020. Photo: PTI

A decade, or just seven years ago, I would have treated the recent Hindustan Times’ ‘exclusive’ that the “Pakistani government” had been “directly involved” in planning, training the perpetrators, and executing the February 2019 Pulwama attack as a scoop.

But with the PIB’s accreditation (that gave special correspondents unfettered access to officials) withdrawn from the four most important ministries; with CCTVs recording everyone who goes in and out of a government office, and with officers a reporter wants to see having to come to the reception to receive her or him, I am left with no option but to consider the report as a government plant.

This suspicion is reinforced by a propaganda video inserted as an advertisement on YouTube videos, which I personally saw several times on August 14 and 15. I don’t know who paid for or sponsored the advertisement but it refers repeatedly to the Pulwama suicide attack and carries parts of an interview with external affairs minister S. Jaishankar in which he describes Pakistan as a difficult neighbour that has used terrorism as a diplomatic tool, and refused to normalise relations with India despite several overtures by New Delhi.

The Pulwama attack had faded from public discourse after the 2019 elections. So why are moves afoot to bring it back into the limelight again?

The answer is obvious: it is because Bihar is going to the polls in October, and the single largest contingent of migrant workers, who suffered the most from the sudden lockdown and denial of facilities to travel home in March, belong to that state. With nothing to woo them with, Modi has found himself at the end of his tether and fallen back on the tried and tested weapon of hyper-nationalism.

This may be why the version of the Pulwama attack that the NIA has leaked has gone beyond the accusation that Modi and defence minister Arun Jaitley had made in February 2019, that “Pakistan had orchestrated the attack on the convoy in Pulwama”.

According to the newspaper’s informant, the chargesheet, which will be ready by the end of this month, will prove that “Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and its proxy, Jaish-e-Mohammad, planned and executed the state-sponsored attack, for which highly-trained terrorists were sent to India”.

A damaged CRPF vehicle being taken away after the Pulwama attack. Photo: PTI

More disturbingly, “that Islamabad i.e the elected civilian government, was also in the know of the attack. It claims that ‘strong technical, documentary and material evidence have been collected, apart from experts’ reports and evidence shared by foreign agencies, which prove that the Pakistani government was directly involved in the attack, aimed to create unrest in India”.

The strength of these extremely serious accusations will be known only when the chargesheet becomes public. But the calculated leak has raised a host of questions that, one is sure, Modi would have preferred to remain buried.

The first is, why now, when we are in a standoff with China that is inevitably bringing it and Pakistan closer together? Why bring forward their marriage, instead of seeking ways to postpone, if not prevent it?

The second is, why give your opposition within the country a chance to rake up issues and ask questions whose answers can only hurt you? For the fact is that even if everything the NIA chargesheet reveals is well founded, it will still not explain why Modi, who knew that a serious attack in Kashmir was imminent, did nothing to prevent it, either by warning Pakistan against it in advance, or by putting troops in Kashmir on high alert, and taking steps to minimise their exposure.

Let us take these sins of omission one by one: One week before the suicide attack, which took place on February 14, the Pakistani army suddenly moved to battle stations in Kashmir. This is a huge movement that could not but have been reported to Delhi and Srinagar. There could have been only one reason for making this extremely expensive and, as the radio chatter in the Pakistan army showed, unpopular move, in the dead of winter. Pakistan had planned, or had got to know of, a major attack that was imminent in Kashmir, and felt it necessary to be ready for a reprisal attack by the Modi government.

Analysts in Indian military intelligence leaned towards the view that Islamabad did not get to know of this attack till February 7, because it had received no information about any such impending move from its sources till then. But it could also be because Islamabad had been kept out of the Jaish-ISI loop till the last moment.

Whatever the truth may have been, by the evening of February 7, there was absolutely no way in which Delhi would not have been aware of Pakistan’s sudden action.

It could have been a coincidence, but the very next day, February 8, an intelligence note, marked “extremely urgent” was circulated to all branches of the Central Reserve Police Force, Border Security Force, the Indian Army, the Central Industrial Security Force, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police and the Jammu and Kashmir Police. It warned of a large scale attack using IEDs or improvised explosive devices.

Four days later, on February 12, i.e two days before the attack, the Jammu and Kashmir police shared another vital intelligence input. It was a 33-second video on Twitter of a similar car bomb attack on soldiers in Somalia uploaded by the Jaish-e- Mohammad. J&K police had also prepared a dummy video to explain how militants might carry out such an attack. These inputs too were shared during a meeting held on the same day and all the security and police formations were fully alerted.

On February 12, two convoys with 70 trucks carrying 2,500 soldiers were stuck in Jammu because of heavy snowfall on the Banihal pass. The home and defence ministries both knew from bitter experience that the security forces were at their most vulnerable when they were on the road. So they regularly took elaborate precautions.

The site of the Pulwama attack. Photo: PTI/Files

These included sending road opening parties (ROPs) ahead to inspect the road for buried IEDs and to secure every road crossing before the convoys passed. Even had they not received the warnings of an imminent attack they would have known that such a large convoy (70 buses) would be a tempting target. So the CRPF asked the home ministry to allow it to fly the soldiers into Srinagar.

Inexplicably, the request was denied. It is inconceivable that the home ministry took this decision on its own, without referring it to the Prime Minister’s Office. If this reading is correct, then does it not make whoever took the decision not to let them go by air just as guilty of the deaths of 40-plus jawans as Adil Ahmad Dar, the suicide bomber?

This culpability is highlighted by the fact that five days after the Pulwama tragedy, the central government lifted the ban on airlifting its troops to Kashmir.

The only explanation for the timing of the latest leak to the HT is that it is designed to keep the fires of hyper-nationalism in which the BJP has thrived, warm in the run up to Independence Day and after. Modi had to speak to the people from the Lal Qila. By then he had made up his mind to counteract the immense setback to his popularity caused by his mishandling of the COVID-19 lockdown by painting an alternative, glowing view of India’s future – a future in which there would be jobs aplenty because of the emphasis on Atmanirbharta or self-reliant growth.

Indian army soldiers rest next to artillery guns at a makeshift transit camp before heading to Ladakh, near Baltal,
southeast of Srinagar, June 16, 2020. Photo: Reuters/Stringer

But China was on our border and refusing to go back to its pre-May 5 positions. And the China-Pakistan axis was growing stronger by the day. Thus the flames of hyper-nationalism needed to be stoked to keep the Modi myth alive till Atmanirbharta, hopefully, began to deliver results.

The Pulwama attack remained its best instrument for doing so. But a year and a half after it took place, tempers have cooled and questions have begun to be asked about why the attack had not been averted. So when the NIA chargesheet enters the public domain, there will be one acid test of its integrity. This will be whether it gives a full account not only of the warnings the government got and did not act upon, but who took the decision not to act and why.

If it does not do that it will only harden the suspicion that the government took no action because it wanted to let the attack take place in order to harvest the wave of anger that would follow.

https://thewire.in/government/pulwama-china-and-atmanirbharta-is-modi-at-the-end-of-his-tether

LAC Tensions to Fester Till Modi, Xi Revive Prospects for India-China Strategic Cooperation

By: Prem Jha

01-08-2020

Indo China Affairs, International Issues

If the two leaders succeed in taking a broad view of the bilateral relationship, the current border crisis can not only be transcended but turned into an opportunity.

LAC Tensions to Fester Till Modi, Xi Revive Prospects for India-China Strategic Cooperation
File photo of preparations made ahead of the Narendra Modi-Xi Jinping meet at Mamallapuram in Tamil Nadu in 2019. Photo: PTI

Victor Gao and Prem Shankar Jha

This is the concluding instalment of a two-part article on the continuing military standoff between India and China. The first part was published on July 23, 2020.

Beijing’s repeated use of the word ‘strategic’ is the key to understanding its military posture in Ladakh. In its view, India’s recent actions in the Asia-Pacific region had invalidated the underlying premise of India’s foreign policy upon which the 1993 and subsequent agreements with China had been based. This was that India would use its ‘soft power’ to minimise conflict in Asia and the west Pacific, and create a multipolar, rule-guided, world order in opposition to the US goal of creating a unipolar world. This was also India’s stated goal then, and indeed throughout the Cold War. So this commitment was formalised by the creation of BRICS in 2009, and was made explicit in its Delhi declaration of 2012.

China’s misgivings began to grow when, within months of his coming to power, Prime Minister Narendra Modi signed the US-India Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacificwhich obliged its signatories to maintain freedom of navigation in the South China Sea; became a ‘Major Defence Partner’ of the US; sent a flotilla of warships to join a US-Japan task force in the South China Sea; and began regularly hosting operation Malabar in the Bay of Bengal, one of whose war games is the closing of the straits of Malacca through which 40% of China’s exports and close to 90% of its oil imports have to pass.

When India also signed the Military Logistics Supply Agreements with the US and Japan and began working on one with Australia, China could no longer ignore the fact that under Modi, India did not feel duty bound to abide by the tenets of Panchsheel, which are reiterated in the first paragraph of the 1993 Border Agreement.

Why China wants a strategic partnership

For China, this was hugely disturbing because, unlike Britain in the 19th and the US in the 20th century, its prosperity and growing hegemonic power did not stem from its dominance of global manufacture but from its dominance of global trade. In some categories of consumer goods, China accounts for over 90% of US imports, and nearly 20% of the EU’s total imports – probably amounting to more than half of its consumer goods imports – come from China.

But that is only one half of what accounts for China’s pivotal place in world trade. The other half is that an increasing proportion of its exports contain components and raw materials that China imports from other ASEAN countries, Australia and South America. This complex web of connections, maintained by sea, air and digital communication, can survive only in conditions of peace. War is therefore anathema for China, because it will itself be the first casualty.

Maintaining peace has, however, become more and more difficult as the US has become aware of the speed at which China is converting its growing economic power into hegemony, through investment of its foreign exchange surpluses in developing countries. This awareness had remained dormant in the US through the ‘roaring nineties’ and the ‘dotcom’ boom of the early 2000s, but sprang to life after the financial crash of 2008 because China’s economy powered on, seemingly unaffected by the global crisis.

Within months of its onset, therefore, analysts had begun to credit China’s immense demand, especially for raw materials, for the early end of the recession that had set in after the crash, and to talk of the US and China as the G-2.

US reaction – ‘Containment’

President Obama reacted to the implied threat to US hegemony with his ‘pivot to Asia’ in November 2011. Its purpose was to ‘contain’ China by strengthening its neighbours but it soon became apparent the strengthening being referred to was mostly military. As a result, by 2016 China found itself encircled by a large number of US military installations and bases stretching from Japan through Okinawa, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Thailand, to Australia.

China was acutely aware of the destruction that that these could unleash upon it. It had seen how a single American warship, acting without any legal backing from the UN, had destroyed nearly all of Gaddafi’s air force and radar installations in Tripoli by unleashing more than 132 Tomahawk missiles in a single night. It was also aware that the version of Tomahawk missile that is standard equipment on US warships has a range of nearly 1,600 kms. So the 12-mile exclusion limit for territorial waters enshrined in the UN-drafted Law of the Sea no longer offers any protection against annihilation.

China responded by building an airport on the disputed Fiery Cross reef in the middle of the South China Sea with material dredged up from the ocean floor, and declaring the South China Sea a part of its core security area in which it wants prior notification of the passage of non-commercial craft. This has ratcheted up the tension another notch. Since then, there have been annual confrontations between US-led task forces and Chinese naval vessels in the South China sea.

If not defused, such military confrontations tip over sooner or later into war – cold or hot. To avoid this, China turned to BRICS, and particularly to India with its immense ‘soft power’ for support. In two momentous meetings, between Manmohan Singh and its new president, Xi Jinping, at Durban in 2013, and between Prime Minister Singh and Premier Li Keqiang in Delhi in 2013, China sought to consolidate a long term strategic partnership with India. To remove hurdles in the way, President Xi Jinping offered ‘an early settlement’of the border dispute in the Himalayas.

Enter Narendra Modi

That was the point at which the UPA government fell, the BJP came to power, Modi turned two decades of patient bridge building with both China and Pakistan on its head, and made India a partner of the US in its effort to ‘contain’ China.

Despite that huge setback, China did not give up on India. Instead it turned to its Belt Road Initiative to continue binding the two nations together. The BRI had assumed supreme importance for China not only because it promised to provide a number of escape hatches through which China could carry on its international trade in the remote contingency that its sea routes out of the South China Sea and through the Malacca straits got blocked. But more immediately and urgently, the BRI became important because it offered a way to stave off the severe recession that was enveloping its machine tools and other engineering industries after the fiscal stimulus programme it had launched in 2008-9 to fight the global recession came to an end in 2013.

The problem it faced was exceptionally severe because the planned fiscal stimulus – with a budgeted investment of 4 trillion Yuan ($586 billion dollars) – ended up creating huge excess capacities in steel, power generation, roadbuilding and construction, and an even more crippling excess capacity in the heavy machine building industries that produced the equipment these projects needed.

The resulting unemployment was largely hidden, because the Communist Party ensures that there is virtually no unorganised labour force in the county outside the fringes of agriculture. So prolonged unemployment for the workforce is not an option for the government because it will cost the party its Mandate from Heaven. Xi Jinping therefore turned to the BRI, and to a massive redirection of domestic investment into the western and border regions, in its 13^th Five Year Plan. Both programmes were therefore outcomes of domestic politico-economic concerns, and not of the inherent expansionism of “the Middle Kingdom” that western defence analysts keep harping upon.

How Modi cut off India’s nose to spite China’s face

India’s capacity to absorb new investment in infrastructure and make it yield quick returns is greater than that of the seven next largest countries involved in the BRI put together. While the combined GDP of these seven countries – Russia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Malaysia – was $2.1 trillion in 2015, India’s GDP was $2.256 trillion.

China had hoped that India, with its huge need to modernise its antiquated road, rail and ports infrastructure, would fill the order books of China’s basic and heavy engineering industries for a decade. Therefore, when Modi opted out of the BRI in 2017, it was an even bigger blow than his sudden abandonment of equidistance in foreign policy.

Unfortunately, even that is not the end of the story. The reason Modi gave for refusing to send even a representative to the inaugural conference in Beijing in 2017 was China’s refusal to formally recognise Gilgit as a part of India illegally occupied by Pakistan. This gave Beijing even greater cause for alarm because it showed that Modi would respect neither history nor the commitments of its predecessors if it suited his whim or fancy. For, in its view, not only had the people of Gilgit nothing in common with the Kashmiris of the valley, but, since 1889, the area had been ’leased’ to the British to protect against foreign (i.e Russian) invasion.

In 1947, therefore, when the British terminated their lease and ‘returned’ Gilgit to Maharaja Hari Singh, a section of the local population revolted and declared itself for Pakistan. Gilgit therefore took no part in the Kashmir war, and the question of retaking it never arose in the meetings of the defence committee of the Indian cabinet in 1947 and 1948.

What is more, the Simla agreement of 1972 and the Delhi agreement of 2005 had both explicitly accepted the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir as the de facto border between the two countries. The Modi government’s perversity therefore sowed the suspicion that it would feel few qualms about reneging from the 1993 agreement with China too, if that suited its purpose.

The effective abrogation of Article 370, the bringing of Ladakh directly under Delhi’s rule, and the near simultaneous publication of a new map of India that shows Ladakh and the whole of Aksai Chin as a Union Territory may have been the straw that tipped the scales in favour of sending a warning to India via the PLA.

Turn crisis into opportunity

The acid test of statecraft is the ability to turn crisis into opportunity. India and China can do this today in a manner that makes them both winners. The talks now going on will not serve their purpose, if they do not address the core anxieties of the two nations. Since the signal of growing disquiet has come from China, it is India that needs to take the lead in doing this.

The most important reassurance China needs is that the Modi government’s frequent claims to Gilgit and PoK are nothing more than theatre for its domestic audience – full of sound and fury but signifying nothing. This is supremely important for China because the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which runs through Gilgit, envisages an investment of $68 billion, which will not only be the largest component of the BRI by far, but also China’s most important escape hatch for continuing its trade and ensuring its supply of oil, should some future western coalition decide to blockade the seaways out of the South China sea.

A second way to reassure Beijing would be to lift the various bans on Chinese apps, the import of Chinese goods, the banning of Chinese investment, and the termination of ongoing contracts that PM Modi has decreed since June 19. Since trade with India accounts for only 2.4% of China’s exports, but 14% of India’s imports, this is hurting India more than China. But the far more dangerous message that Prime Minister Modi has unwittingly sent is that since he feels no obligation to respect minor international economic commitments, it would be folly to expect him to uphold major political ones. If that impression is allowed to sink in, then for Beijing force will remain the only alternative.

The least politically sensitive way to repair relations would be for India to join the Belt Road Initiative. Estimates of how much money China has pledged for the BRI vary. According to the US Council on Foreign Relations, China has so far committed $200 billionto projects in 60 countries. But its experience has been mixed. Since China is offering finance in the form of low interest loans and not grants, many smaller countries have over-leveraged their projects and been forced to sell off equity in them to China when demand projections have turned out to be too rosy and they have been unable to service their debt. In sensitive projects like the Hambantota port in Sri Lanka, this has looked far too much like an engineered take-over of a strategic asset, and has made several countries shy away from projects in which they had initially welcomed Chinese financing.

China has been trying to persuade India to join the BRI since well before its inauguration, because India has the financial reserves and markets that can ensure a more balanced funding of projects, and the deep, unsatisfied demand that guarantees immediate returns on investment. By not doing so, Prime Minister Modi has only cut India’s nose to spite China’s face. This would be a good time to correct that error. Revisiting the BRI in the discussions being held now would therefore be the surest way of cementing peace in the Himalayas.

Victor Gao was the English language interpreter for Chairman Deng Xiaoping, from 1984 to 1988. (In this photo he is seen interpreting for Chairman Deng and US Vice President Walter Mondale in Beijing in 1984.) He is currently chair professor, Soochow University and vice president, Centre for China and Globalisation. The CCG is ranked 94th among the world’s top think tanks.

Prem Shankar Jha is a columnist for The Wire, former media adviser to V.P. Singh when he was prime minister and former Editor of the Hindustan Times. He is the author of Managed Chaos: The Fragility of the Chinese Miracle (2009) and Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger: Can China and India dominate the West ( 2010).

Interpreting PM Modi’s Statement on China I Happymon Jacob I Prem Shankar Jha

By: Prem Jha

01-07-2020

Indo China Affairs, International Issues

National Security Conversation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbEztQge0VU.

India and China Need to Dial Back the Tension

By: Prem Jha

20-06-2020

Indo China Affairs, International Issues

f political pusillanimity dressed up as jingoism wins out again at the All-Party meeting on Friday evening, it could turn into tragedy.

India and China Need to Dial Back the Tension
Map of the Galwan Valley region. Credit: Google Maps

It is 1962 all over again. India and China are heading for war, and this time it is not an insecure defence minister (Krishna Menon) and a gung-ho army chief who had never seen a shot fired in action (B.M. Kaul) who are driving India towards it. This time, it is a bunch of retired army officers, many of whom have not even served in the Ladakh region, egged on by television channels that see in the tragedy in Galwan valley an opportunity to increase their TRP ratings and increase their revenues in the future.

The dominant narrative has it that the hand-to-hand fight in the Galwan valley on June 15 took place because the Chinese never intended to honour the disengagement agreement reached on June 6 and were pursuing their seven-decades old policy of slicing off whatever territory they wanted in the Himalayan region. So when a small Indian contingent set off up the Galwan river to confront them and demand that they withdraw, the Chinese responded by ambushing it and killing 20 of our jawans, including their colonel.

What this narrative ignores is that both sides have differing perceptions of where the line of actual control (LAC) runs. In some areas, the lines overlap, creating a grey zone to which both sides lay claim and where the two armies have developed rules of engagement that occasionally come unstuck.

That is why the army’s official statement on the incident was matter of fact:

“During the de-escalation process underway in the Galwan Valley, a violent face-off took place yesterday night with casualties on both sides. The loss of lives on the Indian side includes an officer and two soldiers. Senior military officials of the two sides are currently meeting at the venue to defuse the situation.”

The MEA’s first statement on June 16 blamed the incident on Chinese attempts to alter the status quo: “On the late-evening and night of 15th June, 2020 a violent face-off happened as a result of an attempt by the Chinese side to unilaterally change the status quo there.”

On June 17, the MEA’s readout of external affairs minister S. Jaishankar’s conversation with his Chinese counterpart went one step further,

“The Chinese side sought to erect a structure in Galwan valley on our side of the LAC,”, the MEA spokesperson said. “While this became a source of dispute, the Chinese side took pre-meditated and planned action that was directly responsible for the resulting violence and casualties. It reflected an intent to change the facts on ground in violation of all our agreements to not change the status quo.”

While the increase in the temperature of India’s official statements is noticeable, so is the careful calibration. Regrettably, the electronic media is showing no such restraint. Virtually every channel except NDTV has been ending its programmes by forcing political dignitaries from both the Congress and BJP to choose between advising caution and thereby condoning the death of the Indian soldiers, and demanding a reckoning from China.

Needless to say, nearly all party representatives on TV agree that China has to be taught a lesson, and that the best way to do this is to break every international trade agreement and convention India has signed, drive every Chinese product and every Chinese company out of the Indian market and be prepared for war.

The storm of jingoism that the media has created has already forced Prime Minister Modi to abandon some of his initial caution and say that India will give “a befitting reply to provocation”. It has also given him an opportunity to merge his atma-nirbharta (self-reliance) campaign, conceived to divert public attention away from the failure of his COVID lockdown, with the clarion call to nationalism which has served him so well before. Should he now decide to ‘stand up to the Chinese dragon’ it is difficult to see any political party that will have the courage and strength to oppose him and advise caution.

War is therefore only one fatal misstep away. Should that step be taken, India will once again be embroiled in a conflict that, given the nature of the terrain, it cannot possibly win.

What happened at Galwan

The only way the government can avert this is by telling the public everything that had been decided on June 6 and June 13, set the record straight about what happened at Galwan on June 14-15, and hope that better sense will prevail. This, to the best of my knowledge, is what happened:

At the corps commander-level meeting on Saturday, June 13, the two sides had agreed to withdraw their forces to a distance of two kilometres from where they were then. Where the Chinese were then, both in the Galwan river area and above Pangong lake was not indisputably on the Indian side of the LAC but on the Chinese side as defined by them, and thus in the grey zone. At Pangong it was the ridge above Finger 4 of the lake. In the Galwan valley it was at a point the Indian army called PP (Patrol Point) 14. The Indian definition of the LAC was some distance east of the Chinese at Pangong, and pretty much contiguous with it at Galwan except at a few places.

It is important to make this clear because at no point, except for the location of one little tent, did the Chinese try to “slice off” any fresh territory, as TV anchors are claiming. Everything they did was within their understanding of the de facto LAC established after the 1962 war and accepted in principle by both countries in the Agreement On Peace And Tranquility In The Border Regions, of 1993.

This is also true of the Chinese military build-up at various points in Aksai Chin since May. In fact, the support base of the troops in the Galwan valley is 40 kms to the east, beyond even the Indian definition of the LAC in the area. This is equally true of the support bases for the build up at Pangong lake and the three other points in Ladakh.

When the 14th corps headquarters realised on June 15 that the Chinese had not only not begun their withdrawal as stipulated in the agreement, but had set up a tent on the Indian side of PP14 and a fresh observation post on the Chinese side, it sent a detachment to remove the tent, and request the Chinese to withdraw from the observation post in line with the agreement of June 13.

Indian soldiers removed the tent on the 15th. The same day, Col Babu and his men proceeded to the observation post at the China-defined LAC, reaching there at 4 pm. When he asked the Chinese why they had set up the observation post after the June 13 agreement, he was given the possibly disingenuous answer that it was to make sure that the Indian troops were withdrawing to the stipulated distance first, before doing so themselves. As of now, one can only speculate on how this discussion turned into an altercation and then into the lethal battle that followed. Suffice it to say that the Chinese were prepared to fight with improvised weapons, and a tragedy ensued that can end by changing the course of Indian, and possibly world history in the months and years to come.

China tamps down rhetoric, somewhat

The Chinese government has made it clear that it does not want the incident to derail China-India relations any more than they have already been derailed in the past six years. To do this, it has, in addition to its official statement on Wednesday, resorted to its unofficial mouthpiece on foreign policy, Global Times, to cool tempers in China and send a message to India that it does not want a war.

In an article titled “Chinese netizens call for restraint and reason in wake of China-India border clash”, the author, Chen Xi warned his readers against the wave of xenophobia that was sweeping China and highlighted message after message that did the opposite: “Some Chinese netizens took to social media Twitter to state that the incident should not undermine the common development of the two countries” .

He particularly singled out one from a Chinese netizen who calls himself Hubei_Peasant: “I really hope friends and comrades don’t provoke Indian people on Twitter or engage with any bad-faith provocations. It tarnishes what soft power we have left, and any inflammation of Indian public opinion is contrary to our interests. Silence is golden”.

China has sent a second signal by agreeing on June 17th to release 10 soldiers whom they had captured at the observation post.

While the soldiers were indeed freed within 24 hours of the agreement, some hardening of the Chinese stand was evident too by June 18 with the Global Times editor putting out a video and tweet warning India not to underestimate China’s resolve.

China’s aims

In all this, there is a question that needs answering: If Beijing is not following a policy of cloaking incremental expansionism in subterfuge, and genuinely does not want the conflict to escalate, why did its soldiers do what they did in Galwan, bringing the two countries to the brink of war?

There is one other possible explanation: It has been apparent for some time that China’s sudden hardening of stance over the boundary issue is designed to warn Delhi against reneging on the implicit and explicit understandings that have sustained peace in the border region since 1993. Foremost among these is the maintenance of equidistance from all power blocs in the post Cold War world.

India has gone back on this in the past six years. It has signed an agreement with the US to force freedom of navigation in the south China sea, sent warships to join a US-Japanese task force to do so; joined Operation Malabar with the US and Australia – one of whose “ war games” is the closing of the straits of Malacca through which 90 percent of China’s imported oil passes; and signed three military logistics agreements with the US that have made India a de facto military ally of the US in a future war.

Had Modi stopped there, China might not have reacted. But he has also reneged on past understandings with China over Indian non-intervention in its construction of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) through Gilgit, and on the understanding reached with Pakistan by two Indian prime ministers, Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, that the LOC in Kashmir will be turned into a ‘soft border’ between the two countries, thereby leaving the CPEC alone.

Under Modi, India reneged on this understanding not only in words but deeds, for in 2018 he made China’s acceptance of India’s claim to Gilgit a precondition for signing the Belt Road Initiative (BRI). By doing this, he literally cut off India’s nose to spite China’s face, because the Chinese were depending upon India’s insatiable need to modernise its infrastructure to fill the order books of the huge ‘mother machine’ heavy industries that were lying idle after its 2009-14 domestic fiscal stimulus ended.

The end of Article 370

Mod did not stop there. Not only did he and defence minister Rajnath Singh state more than once that India will take back every inch of its territory including PoK and Aksai Chin.

Following on from the abolition of Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional status and its division into two union territories, India released a new political map in November 2019.

Like all official Indian maps, it shows neither the line of control with Pakistan nor the LAC with China and did not alter the external boundaries of India in Ladakh in any way. Its purpose may have only been to remind the faithful of the BJP’s great achievement in eliminating Article 370 and breaking up Jammu and Kashmir into two but its release may have also been misunderstood by the Chinese. This was not the first time New Delhi was reasserting its stand that Aksai Chin is a part of India. But when the airstrip at Daulat Beg Oldi – barely 20 kms as the crow flies from the Karakoram Pass – has just been been repaired and a fairly good modern road linking it to Pangong, Durbuk and Leh has been completed, Beijing may well have convinced itself that Modi could no longer be relied upon not to try to put a spoke in the CPEC project.

China’s sudden decision to unilaterally define the LAC, by militarising its side of it, is therefore a political message. A return to the status quo ante required political discussions, and these had begun at both the diplomatic and military headquarters level. But military commands do not explain the political rationale of the orders they give to soldiers on the ground. The Chinese troops at Galwan were no doubt told to hold their territory without using firearms until they received further orders. That they made elaborate preparations to do so, including damming rivulets to provide water for the use of water cannons, is now apparent.

Col. Babu and his men were similarly not kept in any political loop. They too had been given simple orders: clear the tent, find out what the Chinese are up to and persuade them to withdraw as per the June 13 agreement. The rest is now history. If political pusillanimity dressed up as jingoism wins out again at the All-Party meeting on Friday evening, it could turn into tragedy.

Are China and India Going Back to 1962?

By: Prem Jha

04-06-2020

Diplomacy, Foreign Policy, Indo China Affairs, International Issues, Security

From China’s point of view, India has reneged upon a fundamental, albeit tacit, premise of the 1993 Agreement: going back to the strategic cooperation on international issues that had existed at the height of the Cold War.

Are China and India Going Back to 1962?
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi shake hands as they visit the Hubei Provincial Museum in Wuhan, Hubei province, Photo: China Daily via Reuters.

China’s near-simultaneous incursion into two areas of Ladakh, one of which it has recognised in the past as being on India’s side of the Line of Actual Control, has caught the government by surprise. The media, especially television, has reacted with its usual mixture of incomprehension and bravado, but fortunately, both the Army command and South Block have exercised a mature restraint. Apart from rushing reinforcements to the two areas of Chinese incursion – the Galwan river valley and Pangong lake – the Northern Army command has continued to try and resolve differences through flag meetings between progressively higher levels of command in both armies.

Unlike similar confrontations in the past, these are unlikely to bear fruit. The reason is that, from China’s point of view, India has reneged upon a fundamental, albeit tacit, premise upon with the 1993 Agreement on Peace and Tranquility in the Border Regions, was based. This is that, with the end of the deep freeze in relations that had existed since 1962, China and India would go back to the strategic cooperation on international issues that had existed between them at the height of the Cold War.

A man walks inside a conference room with Indian and Chinese flags in the background. Photo: Reuters/Adnan Abidi/File

That premise remained valid so long as India, under both Congress and BJP-led governments, maintained a policy of equidistance from power blocs and deepening economic engagement with all. It became explicit during a meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Premier Wen Jiabao, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference at Hua Hin, Thailand in 2009. The meeting was triggered by a period of rising tension between the two countries over Delhi’s permission to the Dalai Lama to visit Tawang, in what Beijing then frequently referred to as South China.

To the Indian media’s uncomprehending surprise, it was China that took the initiative to hold the meeting. India did not withdraw its permission to the Dalai Lama but so managed his visit that it did not become the international spectacle that China had feared. Delhi’s unqualified success in allaying China’s long term anxieties both over immediate border issues and India’s continued adherence to its policies of equidistance laid the base for the strategic cooperation that China was seeking. This became apparent in the content and tenor of the annual meetings of BRICS, at Sanya, in China, in 2011, and more unambiguously at Delhi in 2012

At Delhi, in a joint statement that was twice the length of its predecessor, the member countries voiced the most comprehensive criticism of the failures of the West that had been articulated by any group of countries since the end of the Cold War. It demanded that the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all states, be respected. It condemned the attacks on Libya and Syria, and warned that the threats to Iran “must not be allowed to escalate into conflict”. And it explicitly called for the establishment of a multi-polar world order.

At the Durban meeting of BRICS the next year, Xi Jinping, who had replaced Hu Jintao as president of China, accelerated the development of Sino-Indian cooperation by stating explicitly that it was his intention to settle the border dispute ‘as early as possible’, instead of the previous formulation of ‘gradually over time’.

Modi’s China policy

Unfortunately, when Xi came the following year to discuss long term strategic cooperation and possibly suggest some form of closure to the border dispute, Narendra Modi had replaced Manmohan Singh. Instead of taking up the reigns where Manmohan Singh had dropped them, Modi turned the visit into a Gujarati tamasha designed to enlarge his own image, and discussed nothing of consequence. This was because, less than a fortnight earlier, he had met President Brack Obama in Washington, sacked his foreign secretary, committed India to signing three comprehensive defence agreements with the US, aligned India with the US on the key issue of the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea on which the US and China had come close to conflict, and invited Obama to be the state guest at the next Republic Day.

In spite of all these disquieting developments, China pulled out all the stops to welcome Modi during his return visit to China in June 2015. Xi took an entire day out of his calendar to spend it with him in Xian. Prime minister Li Keqiang spent in all 13 hours with him. The joint statement issued after the visit began by acknowledging “the simultaneous re-emergence of India and China as two major powers in the region (emphasis added)”. But aside from that, it was barren of content.

Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) guides Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to a meeting room in Xian, Shaanxi province, China, May 14, 2015. Photo: REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon

A year later, in May 2016, Modi ended China’s seven-year bid to enlarge its strategic cooperation with India by sending four Indian warships to join a US-Japan task force for nearly three months in the South China sea. The sole purpose of this exercise was to foil China’s bid for hegemony over this maritime region by enforcing the maritime border limit of 12 nautical miles enacted by the UN Conference on the Law of the Sea.

The subsequent rapid deterioration of relations has been described by me in earlier columns and will take too long to describe. Suffice it to say that China avoided blaming India directly, preferred to accuse the US of playing a ‘divide and rule’ game to create a schism between the two countries, and waited to see if time, or the next general election, would bring about a change of policy.

When, to the delight of the US, Modi also brusquely rebuffed every enticement by China to send at least a representative to the inaugural Belt Road Initiative (BRI) conference in Beijing, China put its relations with India on hold till the next elections. One suspects that the BJP’s second victory ended that and made Beijing start looking for an alternative policy towards India.

The sites for confrontation are not a random choice

Only against this background does the current Chinese military action make any sense. Its choice of Pangong lake and the Galwan river region as the sites for confrontation is not random. For Pangong lake is the starting point of a road India completed two years ago that runs along the west side of the Shyok river past its confluence with the Galwan river to Daulat Beg Oldi.

From a cartographic point of view, this gives the road considerable strategic importance. The Galwan river starts in the south of Xinjiang, and runs a long way through a narrow valley before joining the Shyok river in the Nubra valley. It could therefore become an access route between Xinjiang and Ladakh.

The valley is an old flashpoint. In May 1962, overriding the objections of the Western Command, Army HQ in Delhi ordered it to set up a post on the Galwan river. The Western Command advised against supplying the post through a land route and urged that this be done only from the air, but New Delhi overruled it once more and ordered it to use the land route.

When it was set up in July, it was immediately surrounded by 70 or more Chinese soldiers. The Chinese forced the supply columns back, day after day, for four days and withdrew only after 12 days. In October, when the Sino-Indian war began, the Chinese overran Galwan in hours. 33 of its 68 defenders were killed, and the rest taken prisoner. As the Henderson Brooks report pointed out, this was part of the Forward Policy adopted in November under defence minister Krishna Menon in November 1961, which became the trigger for the 1962 war.

After the Chinese withdrew again, the Indian army could have left the valley alone as part of a no man’s land between the two countries. The 1993 agreement gave it an added reason for doing so. But the Chinese had, over the years steadily expanded their claim to the Galwan valley, and the surrounding region, so to pre-empt further changes the army had set up a post once more. In the last year, it had been building a road to connect it to the Pangong-DBO road.

Daulat Beg Oldi sits at the foot of the Karakoram range on its eastern side, but only a short distance away from the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor through the Karakoram pass. This seems to have become a source of unease for the Chinese military, so much so that in 2013, three weeks before Premier Li Keqiang’s visit to India, a Chinese platoon had penetrated 10 km into Indian territory to create an incident there. At that time, there were only a few buildings there, but recent satellite photos show that it too has been expanded into a substantial forward base with a large number of sheds and buildings.

Pakistan and China flags. Photo: Reuters

None of these three recent developments poses any military threat to China. The Pangong-DBO road is a supply road for light vehicles similar to the ones that now link every Chinese outpost on the other side of the LOAC. The connection across the Shyok to the Galwan post is a footbridge. The post itself has no more military capability now than it had in 1962.

Similarly, Daulat Beg Oldi is a jumping off point to nowhere because, although only a short distance from the Karakoram pass, any military action there would involve a war with both Pakistan and China.

No sane government in India, or for that matter any country, would take on two powerful adversaries at the same time. But Modi has been harping upon Pakistan’s illegal occupation of two-fifths of Kashmir, and opposing the creation of CPEC ever since he has come to power. So DBG too has acquired a strategic significance to China because it is now convinced that it faces a government that not only does not respect the commitments made by its predecessors, but is driven by the impulses of a prime minister who has made a habit of leaping before he looks.

The purpose of China’s choice of this particular area for its intrusions is therefore clear. Although it has not formally abrogated the 1993 agreement, it believes that the Modi government has thoroughly undermined the underlying premise upon which it was based. It has therefore gone back to the age-old strategy of minimising potential risks when faced by a potential enemy.

But, as China’s ambassador to India, Sun Weidong, has made clear, the door back to 2014 is not closed. It lies in rediscovering “our strategic mutual trust”. These are not idly chosen words. They require a rediscovery of our common strategic aims, as were enunciated in BRICS’ Delhi declaration, and a rebuilding of mutual trust. If that does not happen, then China will treat the 1993 agreement as no longer binding and do what it feels is necessary to safeguard its long term best interest.

Prem Shankar Jha is a Delhi based former journalist and editor. He is the author of Managed Chaos: The Fragility of the Chinese Miracle, and Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger—Can China and India Dominate the West.

Modi’s Kashmir Policy Is Playing Right Into the Hands of Pakistan’s ISI

By: Prem Jha

26-07-2018

Foreign Policy, International Issues

Shujaat Bukhari’s killing was the most cold-blooded and meticulously planned assassination in recent years and was, beyond a shadow of doubt, instigated by Pakistan’s ISI.

Modi's Kashmir Policy Is Playing Right Into the Hands of Pakistan's ISI

Photo edit: The Wire

Since the fateful evening when I heard that Shujaat Bukhari, my friend and colleague for the past 26 years, had been assassinated in Srinagar while going home to break his Ramzan fast with his family, I have often wondered who his assassins could have been, and what could have been going through their minds as they sat on their motorcycle waiting for him to emerge from his office. Were they simply semi-educated youth with no future in civilian life, brainwashed into believing that Shujaat was a traitor to Kashmir who was taking money from the state and Central governments to undermine the fight for freedom? Or were they mercenaries who were lining their pockets and soothing their consciences by pretending that they were doing Allah’s work?

Till today, more than a month after his death, there is no answer. Speculation still is rife. The majority view is that Shujaat’s murder was the outcome of the radicalisation and Islamisation that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has unleashed upon the Valley. Writing in Firstpost, Khalid Shah concluded that “the situation in the state has slipped from contemporary timelines and is back to the 1990s now”. In the Washington Post, Barkha Dutt echoed this: “Kashmir is sliding into a black hole of possibly no return.”

But Shujaat’s assassination was not a by-product of the tidal wave of anger created by the Modi government’s relentless use of brute force to crush Kashmiri separatism. It was the most cold-blooded and meticulously planned assassination in recent years, on par with those of Mirwaiz Maulvi Farouq in 1990 and Abdul Ghani Lone in 2002.

And it was, beyond a shadow of doubt, instigated by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Four video cameras caught the assassins riding on their motorbike before and after the assassination. But not one caught them loitering for 45 minutes as they waited for Shujaat to emerge from his office because they had chosen the only ten-metre stretch of road that was not covered by any of the CCTV cameras scanning this high security area. Only inside information, possibly from within the police, could have made them choose that precise spot.

Since 1990, 19 journalists have been killed in Jammu and Kashmir, including Bukhari. Credit: Twitter

Weapon of choice

For the ISI, assassination has been a weapon of choice not only in Kashmir, but much more so in Pakistan itself. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, nearly 10,000 people have gone missing in the country since 2001, with nearly 3,000 still unaccounted for. In 2016 alone, there were 728 disappearances.

Journalists have figured prominently on the ISI’s hit list, two of the most celebrated being Hamid Mir, the host of Geo TV’s ‘Capital Talk’, and Shahzad Saleem, the former bureau chief of Asia Times (online). Mir miraculously survived six bullets in his stomach because, knowing that an ISI car was following him, he drove straight to a hospital to seek shelter there, and was shot at its doorstep. Saleem was tortured and killed ten days after the publication of his book detailing links between the ISI, various rogue officers of the Pakistan army and terrorist organisations like the Tehrik-e-Taliban-i-Pakistan (TTP). In the same year, 12 other Pakistani journalists met a similar fate, though perhaps not all at the hands of the ISI.

In Kashmir, the ISI has a 28-year record of killing any leader who has shown willingness to negotiate peace with the Indian government. The list of its victims begins with Mirwaiz Maulvi Farouq, the father of Mirwaiz Umar Farouq, on May 21, 1990, and the elimination of all the six other Kashmiri leaders with whom George Fernandes had held secret talks in the first few months of that year. It stretches through Qazi Nissar, the leader of the Muslim United Front, in 1993; professor Abdul Ghani Butt’s brother in 1996; Abdul Majid Dar, the area commander of the Lashkar-e-Tayabba, who declared a unilateral ceasefire, in July 2,000; Abdul Ghani Lone, who had decided to take the Hurriyat into the 2002 elections, on May 21, 2002; Mir Mushtaq, the uncle of Mirwaiz Umar Farouq, in 2006; and the failed assassination of Fazal Qureshi, the senior most member of the Hurriyat (M)’s executive council in 2007 only weeks after he formally announced its acceptance of the Manmohan Singh-Pervez Musharraf four-point formula for settling the Kashmir dispute.

ISI’s ambition to wrest Kashmir from India had dwindled during the years of peace and reconciliation that had followed Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s historic 2004 meeting with Musharraf. They dwindled further when, in 2012, the Pakistan army command officially revised its threat perception and stated that this lay mainly to its west and not its east .

Its ambitions were revived when the surreptitious hanging of Afzal Guru by Delhi in February 2013 caused a spike in the number of young men joining the armed militancy, just as the hanging of Maqbool Butt had done in 1986.

But it was Modi’s policies, of humiliating the Hurriyat, spurning Nawaz Sharif’s overtures for peace, destroying the Peoples Democratic Party by entering into an alliance with it that it had no intention of respecting, ignoring and trivialising the remaining mainstream parties in the Valley, putting ever moderate nationalist leader in Kashmir – from Mirwaiz Umar Farouq, Yasin Malik and Ali Shah Geelani, to Shabbir Shah, Naeem Khan and Shahid-ul-slam – into jail or under house arrest, and adopting a “ten for one” policy of retaliation for firing across the Line of Control that claimed the better part of 832 civilian lives in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir that sent the ISI and the Pakistan army onto a full offensive in Kashmir.

The ISI concluded that its chance had finally come when his government began to gun down Kashmiri youth, branding them all as “terrorists”, often without giving them a chance to surrender and then boasting about its ‘kills’ to the national press. This had the opposite of the desired effect because from a mere 16 in 2013, the number of young men who joined the militancy in south Kashmir rose to 126 in 2017. More disturbing still, data collected by the Kashmir police showed that most of new recruits are coming from the villages where “encounters” had taken place, and that the maximum recruitment was taking place after the funerals of slain ‘terrorists’.

Jammu and Kashmir Police personnel take positions during an encounter with the militants at Nowhatta in Srinagar.
Credit: PTI

From the ISI’s point of view, therefore, the Modi government was a gift from heaven. The very last thing it wanted was for anything to impede India’s accelerating descent into self-destruction in Kashmir. Asad Durrani, a former director general of the ISI and convinced “peacenik”, summed this up at a recent book launch in Delhi. When asked what the ISI would do next, he said, “Nothing. You have done everything it wanted.”

The one obstacle that remained was the ordinary Kashmiris’ aversion to Pakistan and the overwhelming desire for peace. A Chatham House survey carried out as recently as in 2009 had shown that even in the four most estranged districts of Kashmir valley, only 2.5 to 7.5% of the respondents had said that they wished to be a part of Pakistan. This was changing thanks to Modi, but the last thing the ISI wanted was the sudden emergence of a civil society movement in Kashmir that would give a voice and direction to this inchoate desire for peace.

That emergence took place in 2015 and Shujaat was one of its principal architects. That year, he and Ershad Masood, an academic and journalist based in Rawalpindi and Islamabad, set up a Kashmir Initiative Group, whose stated purpose was to take the now stalled dialogue on peace to civil society. The group started working in a small way by organising a tour of PoK by ten journalists from Jammu and Kashmir, and held meetings in the two parts of Kashmir. It gained strength when it obtained the financial backing of Conciliation Resources, an international NGO with impeccable credentials.

The group’s work gained importance, however, when even after Burhan Wani’s death had shut down the Valley for four months, Delhi refused to change its one track policy of repression by even a jot. But it became a threat to the ISI’s plans only after it organised a large conference in Dubai on July 31 last year. The two-day meeting was attended by 28 people belonging to political parties in both parts of Kashmir and national parties in India and Pakistan, including the BJP, and a number of eminent observers who included two former director generals of the ISI – Durrani and Ehsan-ul Haq – and Air Vice-Marshal Kapil Kak.

The Dubai meeting turned out to be a roaring success. Despite disagreements on many issues, the conference arrived at a strong consensus on several key points. These were: the need for both the Indian and Pakistani governments to make human security their paramount concern and therefore declare an immediate and complete ceasefire on the LoC and take strong measures against extremism in all its forms in both parts of Kashmir; to encourage their respective governments to re-engage in a political dialogue, in consultation with Kashmiri groups; and for these groups to keep talking to each other despite their differences, to explore creative proposals that did not involve an immediate shift in their stated positions. Lastly, the conference was unanimous that civil society in Kashmir, as well as in India and Pakistan, had an important role to play in creating an atmosphere conducive to dialogue.

Had this conference taken place during former prime minister Manmohan Singh’s rule, both governments might have welcomed the initiative. But in August 2017, the quality and eminence of the participants, and the sheer breadth of consensus, came as a rude shock to the Pakistan army and the ISI because it threatened not only to derail its plans in Kashmir but perhaps more importantly its use of the threat from Modi’s India to restore a creeping military rule within Pakistan.

The attempt to do so began with the leaking of an open quarrel at a national security meeting in October 2016 between Nawaz Sharif and key members of his cabinet and the army chief, over the latter’s refusal to reign in the Lashkar-e-Tayabba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, and the Haqqani network, to Pakistan’s premier newspaper Dawn. Since then, with the help of a quiescent judiciary, the army has succeeded in ousting, charging and now jailing Nawaz Sharif and members of his family, placing an exit ban on the journalist who wrote the story for Dawn, and now placing a similar ban on General Asad Durrani for having taken part in the book launch in Delhi. Modi’s continuing his policy of killing Kashmiri militants has therefore become a necessity for the Pakistan army’s continued seizure of power in the country.

This is what turned the Kashmir Initiative Group into a target for the ISI. Shujaat Bukhari had always been an outspoken champion of peace. His entire career in journalism had been built on the conviction that negotiations based upon misconceptions were doomed to fail. Only truth and honesty in reporting what was happening on the ground could create the essential bedrock upon which the edifice of peace could be constructed. When the Modi government abruptly closed all doors to dialogue with Hurriyat in Kashmir, by force of circumstance, he and his newspaper became the ISI’s targets.

Shujaat Bukhari, editor of the Rising Kashmir, was laid to rest on Friday at his ancestral village,
Kreeri, near Baramulla. Credit: Rising Kashmir

The ISI might even then have done nothing if it had believed that Modi would return to power in 2019. But the growing unity of the opposition, the succession of bye-election defeats suffered by the BJP, and the coming together of the Congress and JD(s) in Karnataka have made its return less and less likely. This may have been the final straw that made it take the decision to crush any possible revival of dialogue in Kashmir, by killing its current principal icon of peace.

Shujaat is not, however, the only ‘peacenik’ that the ISI might attack in coming months. In the months after the Dubai conference, two Kashmiris who head NGOs that had not been invited to the conference – Nazir Gilani and Athar Masood Wani, a former adviser to the prime minister of PoK – condemned the conference as a “sell out” for not insisting on the right to self-determination on the basis of UN resolutions. Pakistan based Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin also described the participants in the conference as being on the payroll of India. In Pakistan, the attack upon it became so shrill that one paper headlined it as “Kashmir Blood Was Sold in the Air Conditioned Halls of Dubai”.

In Srinagar, this theme was picked up by the Kashmir Reader, and Hurriyat (Gilani) general secretary general Ghulam Nabi Sumji, but later rejected by Gilani. Shujaat began to receive warnings that he and two other participants in the conference were on the hit list of the ISI.

The campaign ended abruptly in October after Ershad Masood and a colleague met Salahuddin in Islamabad. Salahuddin denied playing any part in the campaign against the conference, said that he had initially been misinformed about its proceedings, and assured Masood that he was not so mean as to order the killing of a journalist.

However it revived again, abruptly in April, two months before his assassination, with virulent attacks on the participants in the conference and specific threats to the lives of Shujaat and two or three others who attended it. Shujaat took these threats very seriously, went to the Kashmir police and gave them the names of the principal attackers. For the record, they were Nazir Gilani in London, Sheikh Tajamul Islam, Abdullah Geelani, Raees Mir, Aslam Mir, and Athar Masood Wani in Islamabad and Muzaffarabad, and Iftikhar Rajput in Brussels.

It is difficult not to link this revival of threats to the declining fortune of the BJP in India. Suffice it so say that Shujaat took the attack on the internet very seriously and lived in fear of his life. Two days before he was killed he had confided to a friend in his office, “I have young children, I don’t want to die”.

Hours after Shujaat died, one of his young reporters told me in a voice choked with grief, “Sir, we have lost everything, everything!”

But he and his colleagues had not lost everything. On the contrary, they had kept the one thing Shujaat had given them – raw courage. So, after accompanying Shujaat’s body to the hospital and giving their accounts to the police, his staff came back to the office not only to bring out the paper, but fill the front page with his picture and words that will be graven on every Kashmiri heart: “We won’t be cowed down by the cowards who snatched you from us. We will uphold your principle of telling the truth howsoever unpleasant it may be…” And in a magnificent act of defiance, they carried links on the editorial page to every recent article Shujaat had written.

The message they sent was unambiguous: terrorists, and their puppet masters, could kill a man but not the ideals he embodied. The next day, between 60,000 and 200,000 mourners who attended his funeral at Kreeri, his home village 23 km from Srinagar, drove the same message home to their fellow Kashmiris, to Pakistan, and the world. Burhan Wani and Sabzar Bhatt were not the only people who could make lakhs of Kashmiris grieve for them. Those who fought and gave their lives for peace, for a future in which ordinary Kashmiris could plan and dream without fear, could do so too.

https://thewire.in/security/shujaat-bukhari-assasination-modi-kashmir-policy-pakistan-isi

After the Bombings in Syria, the West Is Drifting Towards a Big War

By: Prem Jha

26-07-2018

Arab Spring, Articles, International Issues, Others

Missiles were rained on Syria by the US, UK and France without any credible reason and with no international sanction.

After the Bombings in Syria, the West Is Drifting Towards a Big War

A boy sits on a chair along a damaged street at the city of Douma in Damascus, Syria April 16, 2018. Credit: Reuters/Ali Hashisho

In an article published in The Wire on April 9, I had expressed deep foreboding that, with the American century in its twilight years, the danger of war being used by weak, confused Western leaders as a distraction from the terminal decline of their global hegemony had grown exponentially.

Hours after it was published, the US and UK accused the Bashar al-Assad government of launching a gas attack on the last rebel stronghold in Ghouta, the once verdant but now heavily populated oasis that adjoins Damascus. Four days later, the US, UK and France fired 105 Tomahawk missiles into Syria from ships scores of miles offshore. This attack reflects, in microcosm, every facet of the breakdown of order and reversion to a barbaric, ‘State of Nature’, that is dragging the world ever closer to War.

Their justification for the attack reeked of moral self-righteousness: Theresa May claimed it was necessary “to protect innocent people in Syria from the horrific deaths and casualties caused by chemical weapons… We cannot allow the erosion of the international norm that prevents the use of these weapons.”

Emmanuel Macron of France said: “The facts and the responsibility of the Syrian regime are beyond doubt. The red line set by France in May 2017 has been crossed. We cannot tolerate the trivialisation of the use of chemical weapons, which is an immediate danger for the Syrian people and for our collective security.”

Trump knew within minutes of the attack that ‘Animal Assad’ was responsible, so he warned that “missiles are coming”.

Their self-satisfaction after the attack was equally odious: It was a ‘precision’ attack. It was 100% successful. Three known Syrian chemical weapons production sites were destroyed. There had been no civilian casualties. Syria had been taught a lesson. The West had upheld international law.

These is something obscene about this haste to condemn; to affirm the right to bomb and kill without provocation, without conclusive proof of wrongdoing, and without any prior sanction from a quasi-juridical body like the UN Security Council or General Assembly. It shows a contemptuous disregard not only for the international law enshrined in charter of the United Nations which the US itself largely drew up, but a disdain for the moral principles upon which civilisation itself is founded.

While the Syrian army was an obvious first choice in any search for culprits because it was in the process of cleaning out the last remaining rebel stronghold in Ghouta, Russia, which has a Reconciliation Team on the ground that has been supervising the evacuation of civilians from Ghouta through three humanitarian corridors, has not only dismissed the accusations as ludicrous, but claims it has evidence that it was a false flag operation actually instigated by the British.

It was, therefore, all the more essential to wait for a detailed examination of the site of the alleged attack by experts. A team of experts from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had already arrived in Damascus and was scheduled to hold its first meeting with the vice-foreign minister Feisal Mekdad, on Sunday, April 15. So what was the urgency that made the three countries decide to fire 105 Tomahawk missiles into Syria the previous night?

There is one possible answer: the strong likelihood that the OPCW might not endorse the conclusion that there had been a gas attack, or that the Syrian army had made it. This, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, had happened once before already: Two days before Barack Obama was to launch a devastating missile attack backed by B-52 bombers on Syria in August 2013, the British Chemical and Biological Weapons Research Centre at Porton Down had informed Prime Minister David Cameron that the Sarin gas used in the August 21 attack could not possibly have come from the Syrian army. In Hersh’s words “analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal”. This was the reason why Cameron decided at the last minute to refer his decision to the parliament, and Obama called off the strike a few hours later.

France, UK and the US fired 105 Tomahawk missiles into Syria last week. Credit: Reuters

Macron is still a relative newcomer to the twisted power game going on in the Middle East, but the need to avoid another Iraq-sized blunder should have made at least the British and American governments pause and make doubly sure that they were doing the right thing. The fact that neither government chose to remember Iraq shows that the attack wasn’t about punishing Syria at all.

This assessment, which is widely shared in the US and been expressed with withering elegance by Jeremy Corbin, the leader of the Labour party in the UK, explains two other anomalous features of the assault: First, if Syria had chemical weapons complexes and supply depots operational in 2018, how did the OPCW certify in 2016 that Syria had destroyed all of its chemical weapons and its manufacturing facilities?

If its experts were not fooled, (or bribed) how had Syria, which has fought, and been bankrupted by, the most vicious and brutal war in recent history, managed to rebuild even a rudimentary chemical weapons capability in just two years? Could it be that Russia has given them the plants/laboratories? Or China? or Iran?

Sensing this absurdity, a source in the US government has pointed the finger of suspicion at that other member of the Axis Of Evil, North Korea, by leaking a so far confidential UN report on it’s violation of UN sanctions to the New York Times. This report detailed a brisk trade that North Korea was doing in chemical plant equipment with Syria. It reported that there had been 40 shipments to Syria of acid resistant tiles, valves, thermometers, and other equipment that could be used to manufacture chemical weapons.

But as one American commentator pointed out in an article in the paper’s online edition (now deleted), these are used in many other chemical industries. In fact, a similar finding of dual use capability had briefly blocked even the import of lead pencils by Iraq in the nineties on the grounds that the graphite in them could be extracted and used to manufacture the heat shields of missile cones!

There could, in fact, be a more innocent explanation for these purchases: By 2012 (when I visited Syria) rebel attacks targeting Syria’s chemicals industry had almost wiped it out. The principal target had been its pharmaceutical sector, possibly because the same equipment could also be used to produce chemical weapons. As a result, the shortage of life-saving medicines had become so acute that WHO had launched a world-wide appeal for funds to supply Syria with these medicines. But so complete was the demonisation of the Assad regime by then that it was able to raise only $60 million.

Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. Credit: Reuters

The Syrians could not have forgotten this. So it would have been surprising indeed if rebuilding the pharmaceuticals industry had not been one of the first tasks the government undertook after regaining control of central Syria.

The second anomaly is even harder to explain. In the reams of reporting and opinion-making not one commentator has raised the question of motive? In murder trials, the absence of motive is the single greatest obstacle to proving guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Why then has no one asked what Assad could possibly have hoped to gain from launching a single chemical bomb or rocket at an already beleaguered remnant of a rebel force in the last stronghold it still held in Ghouta?

By the end of March, Assad had regained control of all but one last rebel stronghold in Ghouta. A tally kept by the Syrian Red cross (Red Crescent) and the Russian Reconciliation Centre showed that 1,166,644 civilians, well over half of its population, had left Ghouta through the three humanitarian corridors created by Syria before the gas attack. These included thousands of rebels, their families and sympathisers. What need was there for him to risk all by using one lone chemical warhead now?

Precisely this accusation had brought him within a hairsbreadth of annihilation in August 2013. What is more, a single chemical bomb allegedly dropped by a Syrian air force fighter plane upon Khan Shaykhun, in April 2017, had brought 59 Tomahawk missiles down on his airbase in Lattakia. So Assad would have had to be a half-witted idiot not to know what would happen if he did it again. Needless to say, he is not a half-wit. But nor are the rebels, for whom this was the fourth attempt to drag the West into overt war against the Assad regime

Writing in the Washington Post a few days before the attack Carrie A. Welch gave one succinct explanation for the US-EU attack:

“The real reason for the attack threats is probably this: Midterms (elections to the Congress and the Senate in the US) are approaching, the Russia investigation ( of tampering in the US elections to put Trump in power) is escalating and former FBI director James B. Comey’s book is being released.

Research shows that diversionary wars — wars started to distract the public from domestic unrest — are hard to start in democracies and rarely have the intended effect. Military operations in an already existing conflict are much easier to manipulate — and are not as risky as starting a war.

My research finds that, during periods of political fragility, U.S. presidents systematically manipulate the timing and tempo of military operations. That’s true most often in the lead-up to elections, when public opinion quite literally determines the fate of a president. However, presidents also manipulate military operations when they need support from their domestic political base — for example, during negotiations over major pieces of legislation, bids for legacy, midterms or while threatened with impeachment.”

Since the attack was limited, no civilians were apparently killed, and no Russian and Iranian personnel killed or assets destroyed, there have been no repercussions. But Russia has warned the US and its NATO allies that if any of its assets in Syria are attacked, it will not only destroy the missiles in the air but also their launch platforms. That means the US naval task force in the Mediterranean. For the next eight months therefore, and possibly for the two years after that as well, the world will continue to teeter on the edge of a world war.

https://thewire.in/world/syria-airstrike-us-uk-france-war

John Bolton’s Appointment Signals the End of the American Century

By: Prem Jha

26-07-2018

International Issues, Others

Bolton’s appointment has come when the US is trying to come to terms with the unsustainability of its three-quarter century hegemony over the modern world.

John Bolton's Appointment Signals the End of the American Century

In his 14 months at the White House, Donald Trump has administered several shocks to the American public. But none has been as severe as his appointment of John R. Bolton as the national security advisor. Bolton is known as one of the most radically hawkish voices in American foreign policy. He was a member of the American Enterprise Institute group that coached George W. Bush on foreign policy before he was elected, and then pushed him into invading and destroying Iraq.

In recent years, he has urged that the US declare war on both North Korea and Iran. It is no surprise then that Wendy Sherman has described him as a man who “has never met a war he didn’t want”.

President Trump has hired and fired 60 people from top jobs in his administration in the past 14 months, so placing bets on Bolton’s longevity could be risky. But the appointment of such a man to a post that, more than any other in the US government, determines whether the country gets embroiled in another war or not, could not have come at a worse time for it has come when the US is trying to come to terms with the unsustainability of its three-quarter century hegemony over the modern world, and does not know which way to turn. It is at such moments that the possibility of a military conflict, i.e. a war, reaches a peak.

Hegemony must not be confused with dominance. The latter can be achieved through the exercise of military power alone. Hegemony, by contrast, is control, exercised without, or at best with a minimal, use of force. Subordinate countries then follow the hegemon’s lead because its restraint convinces them that it will use force wisely, and only as a last resort.

The US enjoyed this hegemony when it was being openly confronted by the Soviet Union but, paradoxically, began to lose it within months of the USSR’s collapse at a time when, in President Clinton’s words, Americans did not have “a single over-riding threat to their sovereignty”. The decline began, almost unnoticed, in 1994 when Clinton declared that the US no longer felt itself bound by the UN Security Council’s resolutions on Iraq and would not permit the lifting of UN sanctions on Iraq so long as Saddam Hussein remained in power. This was the beginning of its destruction of the United Nations and its attempt to replace the Westphalian international order enshrined in its Charter, with one that was fashioned by it in its own image.

Since then, the covert or overt use of force to secure regime change has become the central tenet of American foreign policy. This was demonstrated by its unprovoked carpet-bombing of Iraq in 1998, its aerial invasion of Serbia to ‘liberate’ Kosovo 1999 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Post US invasion, Iraq became a breeding ground for Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Credit: Reuters

For none of these actions did the US seek, let alone obtain, even a token nod from the UN Security Council. Its hegemony could have survived if anything good had resulted from them. But Iraq has emerged as a frail, poor and unstable country riven with sectarian strife, and a breeding ground for al-Qaeda and ISIS. Kosovo is a trans-shipment centre for drugs destined from Afghanistan to Europe; and having had no compelling reason for declaring war on Iraq and Afghanistan, the US found itself unable to end them for years on end.

It, therefore, lost close to 7,000 soldiers, crippled another 60,000, traumatised a quarter of a million, spent trillions of dollars and ran up a national debt of nearly $20 trillion, while its infrastructure mouldered away and its cities began to resemble those of the Third World.

But none of this dented the huge sense of entitlement the US had inherited from its victory in the Cold War. Liberal interventionism therefore revived with a bang with the advent of the so-called Arab Spring. In 2011, Obama joined France and Britain in a disastrous destruction of Libya. In the same year he allowed Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia to drag the US into an equally misguided attack on Syria.

As in the first round of military intervention, the UN Security Council was first misled and then excluded again from decision-making on war and peace. But the resemblance between these and the first round of American interventions ends there.

First, the US is no longer willing, or indeed able, to shoulder the burden of intervention alone. Instead, it created a more broad-based ‘transatlantic’ coalition to undertake its ‘humanitarian’ interventions. Its favoured instrument is NATO, which provides a sufficiently wide umbrella of consensus to sustain the illusion of multilateralism, but is flexible enough to allow every member to decide the level of its involvement.

Second, responding to the profound aversion of the American public to the loss of American lives in places they cannot identify on a map, the Obama administration became determined not to send American troops into combat again. To avoid any further unnecessary entanglements, Obama placed an ever increasing reliance upon diplomacy to contain potential threats. Iran, Cuba and the containment of China were his major successes. But the benevolent impact of this upon public perception in smaller nations has been offset by the US’s increasing reliance on drones to wage its never-ending “war on terror”.

Machines have no feelings, so the target groups cannot negotiate with them, cannot surrender to them, cannot even fight them. So drone warfare leaves no room for a hegemonistic relationship. Engaging in it is a tacit abandonment of the quest for hegemony and a conscious decision to rule the world through terror alone.

It is the final difference that has given the coup-de grace to the American Century. The US is now too broke to finance its interventions by itself, so it has begun to pass the hat around. Supposedly it does so only among its allies. But the main financiers with whom the CIA teamed up to arm the insurgents in Libya and Syria have been precisely the countries that had the most to gain from toppling the existing regimes in them – Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates of the Persian Gulf. This has turned the US into a new kind of mercenary – a state that is available for hire.

No man, and therefore no state, can be both ruler and vassal at the same time. Therefore, when the US began to fight wars with other peoples’ money, the American Century became history. No one has taken a greater delight in rubbing this in than the US’s staunchest ally, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. Netanyahu attacked Obama on American television in June 2014 for deciding to cooperate with Iran in halting the ISIS’s advance into Iraq, and went uninvited to the US and denounced the American president before the US Congress on American soil for crafting a nuclear agreement with Iran.

Former US President Barack Obama (R) meets with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House
in Washington October 1, 20

The US’s loss of hegemony is only one part of the story. The other part is the West’s loss of moral hegemony in the post-Cold War years. The US and its allies have justified the assaults on Iraq, Libya and Syria by depicting their rulers as tyrants. Removing them would open the way for a transition to democracy. But what they chose to overlook was that the freedom to vote is not an end in itself, but only the means for securing other ends. These are the freedom to think, speak and write, freedom to worship and freedom from gender discrimination.

The states the West destroyed were modern states with high rates of literacy and women’s participation in the workforce, striving to be secular and gender neutral. Their authoritarianism was designed not to prolong but to root out obscurantism, tribalism and religious extremism in their own countries.

By the yardstick of the ends democracy is intended to serve, the assaults on Iraq, Libya and Syria are morally indefensible for they have eliminated the very freedoms that they were supposed to bestow. It is not surprising therefore that the power vacuum their destruction has created has been filled not by democracy but by al-Qaeda and ISIS.

The sudden spate of terrorism and the rebirth of crude nationalism in the heart of Europe is a direct consequence. Brexit is its most flagrant example. But similar racist-nationalist impulses have sprung up in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Austria. A new wave of home-grown terrorism is sweeping across Europe. An unwanted flood of immigrants, in large part caused by the wars unleashed by the West, has triggered a resurgence of racist nationalism in Europe.

An unwanted flood of immigrants, in large part caused by the wars unleashed by the
West, has triggered a resurgence of racist nationalism in Europe. Credit: Reuters

As country after country has been convulsed by these challenges, people have begun to turn to strong leaders like Putin, Erdogan, Xi Jinping, Duterte and Narendra Modi, to preserve the essential security without which their world will turn into a living hell. But the more authoritarian that a regime becomes, the greater is the insecurity its leaders feel. The stronger, therefore, becomes the temptation to focus the public’s attention on real or imagined external threats.

It is in such conditions that declining, but still dominant, regimes have sought a solution to their domestic problems, in small, manageable, wars. The Habsburg empire found itself in such a situation at the close of the nineteenth century, and the first decade of the 20th century. In 1914, it tried to tame its fractious minorities by invading Serbia, where an extreme nationalist group had succeeded in assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the Hapsburg throne. It ended by triggering its own complete destruction and the First World War.

Sixty-five years later, the Soviet Union, which was similarly caught in a cycle of irresistible economic decline, sought to reinforce its hegemony over the Warsaw Pact countries through a limited military intervention in Afghanistan. It ended by getting enmeshed in a decade-long war it could not win, and brought about its own demise.

The US and Europe are facing a similar crisis today, and succumbing to a similar temptation to contain it by highlighting external threats. Russia, China, North Korea and Iran have been elected as the villains. Russia has to be punished for illegally wresting Crimea from Ukraine, for propping up the Assad regime in Syria, for intervening in the US elections to ensure the victory of Trump, and most recently for the attempted assassination of a former Russian agent, Sergei Skripal on British soil.

North Korea has to be punished for continually violating its obligations as a signatory of the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and daring to develop missiles that can carry nuclear warheads to the American mainland. China has to be punished for trying to extend its control over the South China Sea in violation of the 12-mile limit enshrined in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.Iran has to be punished for just being Iran.

Economic sanctions have been imposed on Russia, and further strengthened on North Korea. Trump is threatening to resile from the nuclear treaty with Iran and not lift the UN sanctions that the US and EU are committed to removing. And he has imposed tariffs on imports, mainly aimed at China, that are on the brink of triggering a trade war.

A joint American, Japanese and, regrettably, Indian naval task force has steamed through the length and breadth of the South China Sea for months to enforce the freedom of militarynavigation outside the 12-mile limit.

Trump has threatened to obliterate North Korea and sent a submarine, followed by an American task force armed with thousands of Tomahawk missiles to underline his threat.

Britain’s shaky Prime Minister Theresa May has not only expelled scores of Russians from the UKin retaliation for the killing of Skripal (which she has a sovereign right to do) but invoked the treaty obligations imposed by NATO upon its members to persuade them to do the same.

It was a similar invocation of treaty obligations that made Russia back Serbia, Germany back Austria, and Britain and France back Russia and Serbia in 1914, and start a war that none of them wanted, but killed nearly 20 million people and ended monarchical rule in Europe. Russia’s warning to Britain, and by implication NATO, not to ‘play with fire’ is therefore a reminder not to repeat the mistakes of history.

It is into this maelstrom that Trump has dropped Bolton, a self-avowed apostle of war.

https://thewire.in/world/bolton-national-security-advisor-donald-trump

Neither Win Nor Loss, the End of the Doklam Standoff is an Opportunity

By: Prem Jha

06-10-2017

Foreign Policy, International Issues

Today, the standoff has opened a route to the resolution of the long simmering boundary question. Can Modi turn the present draw into a victory for both India and China?

Even before news that the standoff between China and India on the Doklam plateau was ending with India withdrawing its 40 troops and one bulldozer was an hour old, the BJP’s spin doctors had begun to paint it as “certainly India’s win over a bullying neighbour”. In an unsourced opinion piece posted by the Economic Times the writer/s claimed that “China tried every threat to bully India – from starting a war to sponsoring insurgency within India. These threats make the Chinese climbdown very significant … The message that goes to smaller countries is that China might not back its threats with substantial action. While the Chinese retreat can encourage smaller countries to look it in the eye, it will also give India an aura of a regional power … Effectively, disengagement means China has been beaten back by India.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Indian withdrawal is an admission by New Delhi that it had no legal justification for its military presence in Doklam. For while there was a dispute over ownership of the plateau, it was between Bhutan and China and there is no record in the public domain of Bhutan asking for India’s help in dealing with the Chinese incursion. Beijing had warned India that it regarded the presence of Indian troops in Doklam as an act of aggression, not once, but four times in the past six weeks – in a 15 page statement of its legal position issued in July, in a formal demand by foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying on August 22 that said India must remove its troops from the Doklam side of the watershed as a prerequisite for peace, and in two categorical statements by its ambassador in Delhi following these declarations.

What is more, China has hastened to puncture the balloon of Indian hyper-nationalism by stating categorically that while Indian troops have already withdrawn from the disputed area, this fulfilling China’s precondition for a stand down, Chinese troops will “continue fulfilling [China’s] sovereign rights to safeguard territorial sovereignty in compliance with the stipulations of the border-related historical treaty.”

What, then, is the compromise that has enabled both countries to back off? Could it be that the two sides have reached an understanding on the one subject that neither country has mentioned in its statements – the road that China was building towards the Doklam plateau. Or that there is no agreement on this issue at all but that both sides thought it best to end the standoff anyway. If this is so, then Monday’s redeployment is neither a victory nor a defeat for either country. It is, at best, a draw.

Also read: The Bhutan Stand-Off Is an Opportunity, Not a Threat

The Bhutan Stand-Off Is an Opportunity, Not a Threat

Only time will tell whether this surmise is correct, but what cannot be denied is that the Chinese have seen the full extent of India’s paranoia about the vulnerability of the Chicken’s Neck stretch of territory between Bangladesh and Sikkim and will not hesitate to use it in future to put pressure upon New Delhi when the need arises. On the other hand, should Delhi ever overcome it, Nathu La can become a major asset in building a durable relationship of mutual benefit with China.

The first step in overcoming India’s paranoia is for Delhi to recognise that the vulnerability of the Chicken’s Neck is a cartographic illusion that has been taken advantage of by armchair strategists to create their stock-in-trade – fear. To start with, Nathu La is at an altitude of 4310 metres, almost 14,500 feet above sea level and is snow-bound for at least four months of the year. This means that any force that crosses it to the Indian side, runs the risk of getting stuck there for up to four months at the mercy of whatever India chooses to throw at it.

Second, the Chicken’s Neck itself is not all that narrow – its narrowest part is actually between Nepal and Bangladesh and that is more than 200 km as the crow flies, from Nathu La.

Third, the distance from Nathu La to Kalimpong on the West Bengal border is 136 kms and an estimated five hours in a passenger car. There are innumerable bridges, culverts and tunnels on this road that can easily be blown up. So how would an invading force from China be able to get to the Chicken’s Neck in the first place and how would it maintain its supply lines?

The alarmists’ memories are also extremely short. In the early 1980s, it was India that drove the Chinese out of the Chumbi valley, using its newly acquired Bofors guns to fire over the Himalayan ridges down into it from distances of 40 kms and more. India is far stronger now than it was in the ’80s and China has far more to lose in the Chumbi valley, which has become a hub of economic activity after it became a rail head, than it had 30 years ago. If anything, China has had more to fear from the worsening of relations between it and India, than India does.

Today, the Doklam standoff has opened a route to the resolution of the long simmering Himalayan border dispute that had been closed by the failure of Chinese premier Chou Enlai to establish common ground with Jawaharlal Nehru during his visit to India in 1960 and the 1962 war. For to establish the illegality of India’s incursion into Doklam, it has emphasised its acceptance (in the 1890 treaty) of the watershed principle of boundary demarcation that was the basis, however hastily and casually delineated, of the MacMahon line. By re-opening this possibility within a framework of increased intra-BRICS cooperation at Xiamen next week, Narendra Modi can turn the present draw into victory for both countries. Whether he has the sagacity to do so remains to be seen.

https://thewire.in/171715/doklam-standoff-ends/

India and China Are on the Verge of Lasting Peace, if Modi Wants It

Pulwama, China and Atmanirbharta: Is Modi at the End of His Tether?

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Today, the standoff has opened a route to the resolution of the long simmering boundary question. Can Modi turn the present draw into a victory for both India and China?

Also read: The Bhutan Stand-Off Is an Opportunity, Not a Threat

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Today, the standoff has opened a route to the resolution of the long simmering boundary question. Can Modi turn the present draw into a victory for both India and China?

Also read: The Bhutan Stand-Off Is an Opportunity, Not a Threat

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