China respects hard power

Posted on September 7, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

Shyam Saran, the former foreign secretary and Chinese language speaker, the other day delivered in New Delhi a most insightful and enlightening public lecture on China. Equally, there has not been a more damning indictment of India’s China outlook, approach, and policy. It was not intended to be that way. Saran’s aim apparently was to explain the nuance and the complexities involved in dealing diplomatically with the Chinese whose written language, he observed, requires mastery over some 5,000 alphabetic ideograms before a half-way serious analysis in Mandarin can be attempted.

The difficult language empowers Chinese officials at the expense of befuddled foreigners who have to deal with tailored levels of ambiguity that is hard to pin down. What the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) takes to be a firm commitment is later discovered to be just a play of words. Thus, Saran recalls the meeting of the MEA director-general R K Nehru with Zhouenlai in 1962, a few months before the war, in which Zhou indicated that China never said it did not recognise India’s sovereignty over Jammu & Kashmir, which was taken by MEA to mean China accepted India’s position, only to have Zhou later say, with similar composure, that China never said it accepted Indian sovereignty over that state. Saran blamed India’s “not being conversant with Chinese thought processes” for this misunderstanding. He retailed another such episode. In 2003, China conceded Sikkim as part of India and, two years later during Premier Wen Jiabao’s visit, handed over maps of India with Sikkim, only for Chinese scholars to recently point out that because no official statement of the erstwhile kingdom’s status has ever been made, there’s the possibility of China putting Sikkim back on the negotiating table. “The Chinese will insistently demand and sometimes obtain formulations from friends and adversaries alike on issues of importance to their interests,” explained Saran, “but will rarely concede clarity and finality in formulations reflecting the other side’s interests.” If the MEA knows this, then why isn’t it inflexible as well?

However, such Chinese diplomatic success stories surely appear to be less the result of obfuscatory language or some inscrutable machinations on the part of the Chinese than the lack of matching effective diplomatic riposte of getting a lot in return for giving away little. The larger concern is this: the MEA may have been tricked this way one time, ok; shame on it when it was done in the second time, but if this sort of giveaways become a diplomatic habit, then there’s something definitely wrong.

For instance, at the time of the 1996 visit by President Jiang Zemin, the Congress government headed by P V Narasimha Rao signed the accord on peace and tranquillity on the border. It necessitated a virtual demilitarisation of a 40-km-(presumably, as the crow flies)wide belt on either side of the LAC. Except, the Chinese side is, for the most part, the flat Tibetan plateau while, on the Indian side, it is mountain ranges. In a contingency, mandating the rushing of troops to forward posts, guess which side is hugely disadvantaged? So, the question is, were the MEA negotiators unaware of the terrain in question, or didn’t they appreciate the difficulty of our army units having to climb up to the heights, even as Chinese soldiers are trucked to their jump-off line? It may be that the Indian government of the day thought it politic to have such a lopsided agreement for the sake of atmospherics than not having one at all. It shows certain recklessness on the part of the MEA in even allowing this proposal to be tabled highlighting, in the process, the disconnect between the military and the foreign office.

Saran dilated on the near-war incident in 1986 on the Somdurong Chu River, revealing the MEA’s casual attitude to Chinese cartographic creep in the Himalayas. Chinese troops crossed the Thagla Ridge and established a post on the Somdurong Chu in the disputed territory but instead of leaving some evidence of their presence and withdrawing as is normally done by both sides, they built a helipad. The Indian Army reacted fast and furiously, with the chief, General K Sundarji, ordering an airlift of troops, occupation of the parallel Lurongla-Hathungla-Sulunga Ridge overlooking the new Chinese forward station, and setting up of two forward posts on the river just 10 metres from the Chinese presence — all done without consulting with the government. Saran admits that “there was…a reluctance (in government) to take any military counter measures.” As a result of this “over reaction” (in Saran’s words), things eased for India, the Chinese became, according to the ex-foreign secretary, “more polite”, and an invitation from Chairman Deng Xiaoping to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to visit China, ensued.

In the interaction with the audience after his lecture, when I asked Saran if the Somdurong Chu event did not highlight the need for Indian foreign and military policy to be more “proactive”, and whether the country was not better off because Sundarji did not seek the usual advice from the MEA to do nothing, which would have prevented army action and perpetuated the Chinese perception of India as a punching bag, Saran, to my utter surprise and, with some vehemence, iterated the government line that India needn’t be “aggressive” to get its way.

Saran and the MEA’s stand is that all India needs to do to neutralise China, which believes in deception and opportunistic use of force, is to have “cultural exchanges” and “get inside the Chinese mind”, understand its strategic “calculus” and monitor the regional and international “context” and build up a web of partnerships to ensure it doesn’t turn adverse enough for Beijing to exploit with aggression. Such timidity may indeed win India peace but on China’s terms.

The awe that Indian officials hold China in is difficult to fathom. It disables our diplomacy and sells India short. China is respectful of the military power of adversaries and, even more, the willingness to use it. If only the Indian government appreciated hard power.

[Published in the New Indian Express, September 7, 2012, at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/article602025.ece ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy | 7 Comments

Marginalizing the army

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

It is a mystery why we don’t imitate the Chinese: act nice, talk peace, trade and  challenge China when it steps on our toes

Gen. Bikram Singh, Chief of the Army Staff, is bringing in as his Principal Staff Officers (PSOs) colleagues from his time at the Eastern Command in Kolkata, and others who have served with and under him. This is normal and reasonable practice because a COAS is ultimately judged by what he accomplishes, and who best to advise him and implement his agenda than the people he has confidence in.

Gen. Bikram Singh’s tenure began under a cloud — the Army he leads is divided over whether or not he deserves his post and how much favouritism, stratagem and intrigue by his predecessors, Gen. J.J. Singh and Gen. Deepak Kapoor, and a complicit government, played a part in his elevation. The controversy surrounding his appointment because of their alleged “plan of succession” is history, but the bad blood it may have created should not lead to the discarding of the good schemes former Army Chief Gen. V.K. Singh initiated, the most notable being the Army’s China thrust. Gen. Bikram Singh would be well advised to push that slant as well. It is a particularly awful habit the Armed Services have fallen into, of allowing every new Chief of Staff to inaugurate and nurse his own pet projects. Whatever Gen. Bikram Singh’s take on his predecessor’s focus, unfortunately, the desperately needed China tilt is already endangered.  With the government instructing the three service chiefs to come up with a “joint plan” to deal with the China threat, the concept of the Mountain Strike Corps (MSC) is possibly being readied for burial.

While a joint military plan to counter China militarily is an imperative, shelving the embryonic idea of a Mountain Strike Corps does not make any sense unless that old sentiment from Jawaharlal Nehru’s days is returning, this time dressed up by the China Study Group (CSG) as a pragmatic posture. Since the 1970s, the CSG has been the fount of advice resulting in pusillanimous actions and policies related to our northern neighbour. And it is now proposing that India and China rise peacefully together. Admirable outlook, except we better also have a strike capability to hit back in case they pick a fight.

It is a mystery why we don’t imitate the Chinese — act nice, talk peace, trade as much as the traffic can bear, build up the military for offensive action and challenge China when it steps on our toes. If the overarching concern with not provoking China — India’s main threat, economic competitor, geopolitical rival and military adversary — is to take precedence over acquiring strike forces, then we might as well mentally prepare ourselves for a pummelling.

An Army capability to attack Chinese targets within Tibet has been sorely missing from the start. As envisaged, the MSC comprises several brigades, each able, after being detached from the main force, of mounting independent offensive action across the Line of Actual Control (LAC) on the Tibetan plateau, a capability required to keep the massed Chinese group armies honest. These brigades are conceived as having integral logistics, heli-lift and attack helicopters under their command. Some nine Indian Army divisions are at present arrayed defensively in the eastern sector, and one and half divisions each in the northern and central sectors with an armoured brigade as a divisional component in both cases (to debouch from the Demchok Triangle and the northern Sikkim plains respectively). These two brigades worth of T-72 tanks divided between the central and northern sectors is a daunting mobile military force and it may be tested soon. The pre-positioned stock of shells for the tank guns in those areas cannot last more than a couple of days and recent military field intelligence suggests that the Chinese may be concentrating on an incursion into northeastern Sikkim in the next few months. If logistics support is strengthened, and to this mix is added the independently-operable brigades with T-90 tanks aided by the full aviation complement of the MSC for deployment anywhere along the 4,700 km border and able to affect a breach or two for meaningful ingress into Tibet, then the People’s Liberation Army of China will have reason to sweat a bit.

Is such an option to be left to the mercy of a military talk-shop? One thing is certain, had Gen. Bikram Singh stood firmly behind the MSC concept, it is unlikely the defence ministry, even less the finance ministry, would have written finis to it. A.K. Antony’s defence ministry is, like the rest of the Manmohan Singh caboodle, known for indecision and inaction. That finance ministry has suddenly asserted its fiduciary responsibility and questioned investment in the MSC based on its belief that China poses no threat and that even if it does the threat won’t last long into the future, is laughable.

Could it be that Gen.  Bikram Singh is influenced by one of his benefactors, Gen. J.J. Singh who, as governor of Arunachal Pradesh, put out that the Indian Army needs to concentrate its efforts on the western front, while the government goes about cultivating China’s friendship? Gen. J.J. Singh, rather than ensuring that the road and other infrastructure projects are speeded up on the border east of the Kameng sector where Army forward posts are still serviced by mule packs, is busy shooting off his mouth. It is the sort of unenlightened advice that needs to be trashed publicly, except, tragically, it seems to be in sync with this government’s thinking.

As it is, the Manmohan Singh regime has tried to marginalise the Army by making the Navy and the Air Force the main elements in tackling the Chinese threat. In war, the Navy should interdict China’s energy and trade traffic transiting the Indian Ocean. But in short, intense conflicts, when territory will be at stake, naval actions cannot replace a land attack option, which will be at a premium for a riposte for immediate effect. In this context, jettisoning the MSC is to not take the fight to the Chinese. Gen. Bikram Singh would be responsible for ditching a potential capability that any self-respecting Army would want to have.

[Published as “Delhi is in a China daze, again. Beware!” on August 30, 2012 in the ‘Asian Age’ at www.asianage.com/columnists/delhi-china-daze-again-beware-869 and in the ‘Deccan Chronicle’ at www.deccanchronicle.com/columnists/bharat-karnad/delhi-china-daze-again-beware ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Pakistan, Pakistan military | 10 Comments

Unfinished business of Partition

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

Think of an India without Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, animists, whoever, in our composite culture, in our everyday lives — it is inconceivable, it is unthinkable. Minority communities are part of the warp and woof of what India is. This India was not lost at Partition. In this country it has flourished, even prospered.

That India is, however, lost to Pakistan. At the parting, West Pakistan had as many Hindus as India had Muslims, roughly 13% of the population. Systematic, officially-condoned, pogroms led to Hindus and Sikhs being terrorized, evicted, and reduced to less than 2%, with this figure zeroing out with every new atrocity. Pakistan is diminished as it loses social equanimity and democratic ballast that minorities provide a country. That wonderful patchwork of communities living, at times fist by jowl, unravels, a handful of threads at a time. The next outflow may well be of Ahmediyyas as, even the  luminaries among them, such as the late physics Nobelist, Abdus Salam, are hounded, finding no peace even in death – their graves desecrated because the headstones carry Quranic verses.

Who is next in line? Probably the shias because, according to a Pew public opinion poll fully half of the majority sunnis surveyed in Pakistan thought shias were not Muslim. Little wonder sunni lumpen these days roam the streets of Pakistani towns shouting “shia kafir”. In recent days, shias returning to their homes in Gilgit, Hunza and the Northern Territories – part of the erstwhile “princely state” of Kashmir under Pakistani occupation – were pulled out of buses, lined up, and shot. Islamabad has since arranged for C-130 transport aircraft to ferry shias to their homes.

The kidnapping and forced marriage and conversion of Hindu girls, the open season on the god-forsaken Ahmediyyas, whose persecution is legalized in Pakistan, and now the increased killings of shias is the result of the spread of the Wahabbi values of desert Islam conflated with the even less tolerant Salafi strain nurtured in Saudi Arabia and propelled outwards by the Saud ruling family eager to divert this fanaticism to other climes. In South Asia, the Saudi and Gulf “charitable” funds have incubated the Hafeez Saeeds of a disordered world, the various Lashkars, and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan — outfits the Pakistan Army thinks are ideal weapons of asymmetric warfare, and tools of asymmetric diplomacy to be deployed against India. Except, 49% of the Pakistani people in a recent poll, reported by Raza Rumi of the Jinnah Institute in the Express Tribune (Aug 20), identified America as the enemy, and only 26% India. Then again, these weapons have long since been turned on the Pakistani state, or haven’t the Generals noticed?

They apparently did when the jihadis, following upon the attack in May 2011 on the naval base, Mehran, in Karachi, last week struck the Minhas Air Force base in Kamra – home to the country’s main aeronautical complex, two fighter squadrons, the Saab 2000 AWACs complement, and a lot of de-mated nuclear weapons. A shaken General Parvez Kayani, Pakistan army chief, promised a “war against extremism and terrorism”. Let’s see if he delivers.

Surely, the fact that Pakistan has come to this pass is no surprise. A state built on religion invariably fractures along the lines of strict and stricter belief. Fundamentalists pushing their interpretation as the only true path confront society with peril, because the slightest deviation is apostasy punishable in their medievalist minds by death. But, which is the true Islam in a context where the argument should long ago have been settled on the basis of the natural inclination of the people of the subcontinent towards the easy going and joyful sufi variant, replete with song, dance, and music? Pakistan will likely be consumed by the antics of extremist Islamists. The trouble is India will have to pick up the pieces.

What India did not reckon with at Partition was the incapacity of the Pakistani state and people to firm up their nationhood and a national identity, even after 65 years of desperately trying. This either means that Islam as defining characteristic of a country in a polyglot, multiethnic, multi-cultural setting was a mistake because there are as many Islams centred around the Quran, as there are varieties of Hindu beliefs, and no one brand of Islam can claim supremacy and, hence, religion is not the glue many people had thought it would be in cementing a nation from a collection of disparate peoples. Worse, the infirmity of the state has compounded the problem with a visionless political leadership –  Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Liaqat Ali Khan gone early in the game — that never rose above the opportunistic.

India is stuck with having to tackle the infection of certain Indian Muslims by the Wahabbi-Salafi thought at the ideological end and, at the physical end, a large and growing Muslim fraction of its population with the unending seepage of Bangladeshi Muslims into lower Assam – that KPS Gill, the saviour of Punjab and former Director-General Police, Assam, had warned some two decades back would result in the colonization of a belt around Bangladesh.

This is a damned difficult task for India, a country barely able to keep its head above water, to manage. Official rhetoric requires it to live up to its secular pretensions and, as a matter of practical politics, the system is wedded to vote-banks. Can the Congress party, for instance, win in Assam without the votes of an ever-growing bloc of illegal Muslim immigrants beholden to it for legalizing their presence?  If the Congress party cannot politically afford other than to encourage such covert Muslim infiltration in the northeast, it cannot come down hard for the same reasons on the growing number of Wahabbi-Salafists in the country either, who are responsible for terrorism, communalization, and for fanning the recent panic among northeasterners living in the southern states, once considered oases of social harmony.

The unfinished business of Partition is not Kashmir, as Pakistan claims, but the fact that Pakistan cannot find social peace and Bangladesh cannot keep its people within its borders.

[Published as “Partition woes continue’ in the ‘New Indian Express’ on August 24, 2012, available at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/article594721.ece ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, India's Pakistan Policy, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Terrorism | 6 Comments

Cyber terrorism

Posted on August 18, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

The method, discipline, and the singular purpose evident in the messaging and texting of dire warnings against Indians from the Northeast in southern India does not seem to be the work of local “miscreants” gone viral, but rather a well-defined cyber offensive to unsettle social and communal peace. This is another brand of terrorism and how adversary states will be laid low in the future — not by wars but by such cyber campaigns to attack the soft core of societal peace in composite societies such as ours. Those who initiated this campaign are in-country and should be hunted down and given exemplary punishment. Such as life imprsonment. It is not difficult to trace them and, assuming the National Intelligence Agency is already on the job, and the NTRO is not too busy doing nothing, the instigators should be collared fairly easily. Electronic footmarks aren’t easy to eraze. The trouble will be that once these people are caught there will always be those from “secular” parties demanding lenient treatment. Govt of India is nowhere in tune with the cyber potential for mayhem.

Posted in Cyber & Space, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Terrorism | 8 Comments

Bandar of Arabia

Posted on August 17, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

Re: my passing reference to the Saudi Intel chief Bandar bin Sultan’s death by bomb explosion in “Hand in the Hornets Nest”; it was based on the July 31 story  — “Saudi silence on intelligence chief Bandar’s fate, denotes panic”  on Debka File at www.debka.com/article/22225/

Posted in Asian geopolitics, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Terrorism | Leave a comment

Dedicated Nuclear Cadre

Posted on August 16, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

The Task Force on National Security, chaired by Naresh Chandra, the all-purpose bureaucrat, had an open-ended brief. The one area, however, the Task Force was expressly told to keep off  by the National Security Adviser related to the country’s nuclear deterrent in all its aspects. This may be because the Manmohan Singh regime is intent on leaving a legacy — a spruced up nuclear secretariat. It didn’t want the Task Force to muck around, disturbing and complicating the efforts already underway with its  recommendations. The former Commander-in-Chief, Strategic Forces Command (SFC), Lieutenant General B.S. Nagal, was hired after his retirement to, in effect, fashion in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) an Indian version of the professional and effective Pakistani nuclear secretariat — Strategic Plans Division (SPD), Chaklala.

What Lt. Gen. Nagal picked up about nuclear strategic issues during his tenure at SFC is hard to say. As an infantry officer (Jat Regiment) he has left no paper trail in terms of articles in professional journals, etc. to betray his thinking, certainly nothing on strategic subjects. Then again, maybe he was selected because of the PMO’s confidence that he will implement plans it had chalked out.

Actually, as I have argued in my books and other writings, Pakistan SPD’s professionalism and competence in nuclear strategic matters is principally the result of painstaking and rigorous efforts over a long period of time to seed and nurture a force manned by a specialist cadre, and this is no bad thing for our SFC and the nuclear cell in the PMO to emulate. It will be an improvement on what presently exists. The capacity for deterrence heuristics requires considerable acquaintance with nuclear deterrence history and practice, enabling the SFC and the PMO nuclear cell to give the intellectual lead in shaping nuclear strategy or to input creatively into nuclear policy construction.

The central point about the success of the SPD and every other nuclear force is that the nuclear secretariat is run by a corps of officers with real expertise — top to bottom, who are recruited after intensive tests and psychological profiling, including their ability to handle extreme stress. In a recent book, retired Vice Admiral Verghese Koithara delves into some of the complexities of operationalising the nuclear arsenal and refers to appropriate “socialisation” of the personnel involved without, however, once mentioning the need for a dedicated nuclear officer cadre. Such a body of officers is at the core of professionalising the nuclear forces.

Indeed, without a specialist cadre that is fully versed and immersed in all aspects of nuclear deterrence — from designs of nuclear weapons and missiles to conceiving and designing command and control networks, from nuances in deterrence theory to practical problems of mobility, and from nuclear forensics to technology for secure command links — the country will be stuck with what we have: a Strategic Forces Command with military officers on its rolls who are professionals in conventional warfare but rank amateurs in the nuclear field. They have to perforce learn on the job, only for such learning to go waste once their three-year term ends, and they are posted elsewhere.

Appointments at all SFC levels are considered by the regular military officers as posting to be ticked before returning to the parent Service. There’s simply no incentive for them to even seriously consider becoming experts. This is not how a professional and competent SFC and secretariat will be obtained.

And yet such a strategic force leadershipis an absolute imperative because someone needs to keep their head about them in a crisis when, umpteen incidents have revealed in the past, that the Indian government panics, loses its composure or goes comatose at the first sign of trouble.

The lack of nuclear specialists in SFC ranks should concern the military but apparently it doesn’t. Most uniformed officers are contemptuous of Indian Administrative Service officers looking after child and family welfare one day, rural electrification the next, and on the third day landing up as defence secretary with not a clue and nothing to recommend such posting other than their ability to negotiate the bureaucratic maze of regulations and rules of business. This is no different from the SFC staffing pattern. Conventional military officers manning SFC, whatever their individual service records, come into the Command with minimal to non-existent familiarity with nuclear security issues. This doesn’t, of course, stop the SFC top brass from assuming airs of nuclear strategist and expert, any more than it prevents IAS officers from talking with authority on things they know little about.

On nuclear security matters, everybody in and out of uniform seems to have an opinion. It is the mark of a generalist culture which pervades the military as well, and is the reason why it will be difficult to wean the conventional military services away from the system of rotational postings in SFC. Nuclear security discipline-specialization can happen only if a “nuclear forces” option is made available to newly-minted officers at the National Defence Academy stage with a follow-on course before commissioning exclusively into SFC service.

We will know soon enough what Lt. Gen. Nagal has been up to at PMO. But whatever he is doing, it wouldn’t have hurt to have the Task Force on National Security report on the nuclear forces. Much of what the Task Force has recommended in the conventional military sphere seems reasonable and, even though there was no nuclear security-knowledgeable person as such in the group, it would have been useful to juxtapose their thoughts on the restructuring and functioning of SFC with what the PMO is doing to revamp nuclear decision-making and nuclear command and control systems.

[Published on Aug 16, 2012 as “INS: Indian Nuclear Service” in the ‘Ásian Age’ at www.asianage.com/columnists/ins-indian-nuclear-service-094 and in the ‘Deccan Chronicle’ at www.deccanchronicle.com/comunists/bharat-karnad/ins-indian-nuclear-service ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Indian Politics, Missiles, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Strategic Forces Command, Western militaries | 5 Comments

Managing Indian nuclear forces

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Bharat Karnad
Secured a copy of Vice Admiral Verghese Koithara’s book — ‘Managing India’s Nuclear Forces’.
The only original stuff — and the core of the book — is in the penultimate two chapters dealing with nuclear force management and operationalization. His  implication, however, that the Indian nuclear forces are stuck somewhere between “launch readiness” and “combat preparedness” while, perhaps, correct within the theoretical parameters of his choosing, surely does not mirror reality in that the Strategic Fores Command (SFC) must surely  have worked out the more practical aspects of weapons use.
I was particularly struck, moreover, by how closely Koithara adheres to the official US viewpont, now subscribed to by the powerful non-proliferation lobby in Washington as well that India does not need (1) to resume nuclear testing, (2) proven, reliable, and upgraded, nuclear and thermonuclear armaments, (3) a force elastic enough to keep pace with the qualitative and quantitative Chinese strategic force augmentation (continue to keep the deterrence minimal, he advises, in effect), and (4) delivery options, such as MIRVs, etc!!
Wonder, in the event, whether and how seriously to take the VADM.
Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, civil-military relations, Defence Industry, DRDO, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Missiles, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, United States, US. | 12 Comments

Hand in the Hornets Nest

Posted on August 11, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

Considering there are some 170-180 million Muslims in India and about 25-30 percent of this population are shias, the country’s West Asia policy, not unreasonably, has walked on eggshells. It has refused to tilt the majority sunni or the minority shia way and inertness of posture has, for once, been a virtue – commended as much by realpolitik as common sense. And then in February this year, the Congress party coalition government seemed to throw it all away, jettisoning caution and the long-nursed attitude of aloofness to the usual tumult in that region. As temporary member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), India voted against the Alawaite-shia regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Following upon the vote for intervention against Gaddafi’s Libya the year before, it heralded India’s tacking to a new policy of supporting interventions at the behest of major sunni states backed by Western powers.

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) was quick to put out, however, that the February resolution did no more than ask for a cessation of hostilities by all sides and, in that sense, was unobjectionable. Except, the campaign against Damascus was kick-started by this resolution, and the groundwork was laid for a more intrusive approach. Sure enough, a resolution in the General Assembly followed on August 4 with Saudi Arabia and Qatar taking the lead in crafting a resolution that imposed sanctions and demanded that Assad step down. Much politicking later, the resolution was whittled down to merely urging Assad to go. But Indian Permanent Representative at the UN, Hardip Puri, explained that the offending part was its reference to a previous Arab League resolution, absent which, he indicated, India may well have supported the resolution and, perhaps, got the country deeper into a jam.

The fact that the Arab League has been turned by Saudi Arabia into an essentially sunni Muslim platform is not a surprise – oil and money speak.  Riyadh’s using it to oust shiite governments in the region is a new development. The Saud family fears both physical endangerment and the possibility of Tehran and Damascus instigating a Saudi shia rebellion. Were a separate shia homeland within Saudi Arabia to be carved out, Riyadh will lose most sources of its oil found in the Nejd and other provinces populated by the shias. That this is also, quite literally, a fight to the death was brought home to the Sauds with the killing on July 23 of Bandar bin Sultan – former ambassador in Washington and close to the US government — by a bomb that exploded in the offices of the General Intelligence Agency he headed. If Bandar couldn’t be protected, no one in the Saud family is safe. It explains the Saudi vehemence in dealing with Iran and Assad.

Or just, may be, terrorism that the Sauds have spawned for decades is coming home to roost. So far Riyadh escaped the winds of Islamic extremism because it had managed to direct the extremist-wahabbist impulses outward. No regime has been more responsible for spreading terror world-wide than the Sauds. This has been done through the Islamic charities that channel funds, especially to trusts in South Asia. The result is a profusion of Hafiz Saeeds frothing at their mouths and the various Lashkars active in Pakistan. And in India Saudi monies have incubated communalism by polarizing previously peaceful societies, such as in Kerala, for instance, and funded the building of a series of new mosques in India’s terai region to propagate wahabbist beliefs, as the Intelligence Bureau has been reporting to government. For Saudi Arabia to blame Bashar for the violence in Syria then is a bit rich. And for India to associate itself in any way with Saudi moves is to get sucked inexorably into the big sunni-shia conflagration in the making. The timid Congress-coalition government has yet to issue a demarche to Riyadh to cease and desist on the wahabbist funding front or even to implement some basic policing – like monitoring just how and where the Saudi and Gulf funds go to do what.

Consider the larger picture. Four Russian warships, presumably laden with military hardware and stores, have docked at the Tartarus naval base on the Mediterranean in northern Syria that Damascus has provided for Russian naval use. A Chinese missile destroyer has entered the Mediterranean ostensibly for naval exercises with Russian and Syrian warships off Syria’s coast. With Russia and China committing military support for the Assad regime, it is even less likely Bashar will bow to external pressure. With U.S. President Barack Obama deciding overtly to arm the sunni rebels and making it Washington’s business to oust Assad, the fat may be on fire because Russian President Vladimir Putin is determined to restore Russia’s lost status and stand up to the United States. Syria is the regional hotspot where Russia may decide to eye-ball America.

Worse, Turkey is being drawn into the fray. With Turkish Alawites sympathetic to Syria and insurgent Turkish Kurds likely to join with the opportunistic Syrian Kurds in seeking independence, a largely sunni Turkey may get together with the U.S. and the Sauds, though this will not restore the status quo ante that would, other than Bashar, benefit it the most. With the Battle for Aleppo developing into a decisive encounter and Aleppo bordering Turkey, American material assistance is bound overland to transit through this sunni majority town, seriously compromising Ankara.

West Asia is a hornets nest. Russia and China are doing the heavy lifting of vetoing UN resolutions targeting Syria. It is best for India, in the circumstances, to abstain on all UN votes relating remotely to West Asia and otherwise distance itself, foreign policy-wise, from the unfolding drama in those parts. There is no other way of minimizing the adverse fallout on the law and order situation in this country when the situation blows up. Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde better anticipate trouble, alert the state intelligence agencies, order strict policing, and take pre-emptive measures now, unless he wants again to be in the dark when the crisis hits.

[Published as “Avoid the West Asia drama” in the New Indian Express on August 11, 2012 at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/article587034.ece ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, civil-military relations, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, Terrorism, United States, US. | 12 Comments

Surely, you jest Mr. Tharoor!

Posted on August 5, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

The frightfully talented Shashi Tharoor, the Congress Party MP from Thiruvananthapuram, cannot be accused of lacking in ambition or drive. From chief public relations officer, United Nations, to seeking the Secretary-Generalship of this body, to winning a Lok Sabha seat secured for him as compensation by the UPA-I government for embarrassing him by not pushing his candidature for the top job at the UN very hard, or even at all, to appearing on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS show on CNN where he was introduced as the “Indian Foreign Minister” (which mislabelling by the host  he didn’t flinch from), to being appointed a junior minister in MEA tasked, by his own admission, with minor responsibilities, to finally getting embroiled in the get-rich-quick scheme of T-20 cricket team ownership in partnership with the sprightly Sunanda, his third wife – lucky devil (most of us  barely survive the one marriage we tripped into). Had the trajectory ended there, it would have resembled, in its title, Hemingway’s “Short, Happy, Life of Francis Macomber”.

Except Tharoor is no mean writer. His literary ambition saw him produce ‘The Great Indian Novel’ – something no doubt the literary world had waited for with bated breath, although whether his book with this moniker was the genuine article, I cannot say. Now he has penned ‘Pax Indica’. I suspect the market-savvy Tharoor thinks up intriguing titles for his books first – such as ‘The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell-phone’, another non-fiction work, before wrapping seemingly appropriate ideas and material seamlessly around them. There’s an object lesson here for other authors and would-be novelists. I mean, would you plonk down Rs 800 for a book mind-numbingly called ‘Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security’?

If you pick up ‘Pax Indica’ expecting, as I did, to be revealed a thoughtful game-plan for the country to achieve great power and attendant state of grace, rest assured, you have made the wrong buy. What Tharoor means by this title is not a system of extended regional or world peace imposed by India on Indian terms but rather, as he explains it only in the last two pages, it is building and sustaining “the principles and norms that India holds dear”, namely, pluralism (which he prefers to secularism) and a democratic world order. Ah, so!

It is a tour d’horizon light of Indian foreign policy, replete with repeated invocations of the ruling party’s holy trinity — Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi, and Indira Gandhi. The book, in fact, reads like a decadel version of what, Tharoor claims, the policy planning department produces by way of the Annual Report of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), albeit livelier, with a sprinkling of personal anecdotes, ministerial experiences, and historical tid-bits.

But suddenly he changes gears for the one chapter dealing with the “domestic underpinnings of foreign policy”. Writing crisply, purposefully, and with genuine insight into how and why Indian diplomacy is handicapped by the relatively small cadre of mostly generalist foreign service (IFS) officers who prevent both the bulking up of the service by lateral entry from other services and the military, and the injection of domain specialists from outside at the Joint Secretary-level to provide vital expert technical inputs into the making of foreign policy, and why a separate examination to recruit young adults for the IFS schooled in International Relations and Diplomatic History, may be a good idea.

He reverts to flummery about the UN and the global commons, and rounds off with views on “multialignment”, except aligning India with too many powers will have the effect of leaving India unaligned on the same principle that when everything is classified, nothing’s secret! Of course, prima facie, Tharoor’s notions of a Pax are passing strange. Other than a few cursory references to defence, there is no hint anywhere of the  hard power requirement of a state aspiring to big things, illustrating precisely the vast  knowledge gap of the average “generalist” civil servant and politician, who knows little about national security, even less about military matters, and does not care to learn beyond the odd newspaper op/ed piece on offer and is, therefore, unaware of the huge hard power deficit, leave alone analyze its relevance to India’s rise in the 21st century.

The author’s touching belief in the soft power of the state imaginatively deployed doing the trick, reveals the delusional thinking of the Indian policy elite, such as it is. It will absolutely ensure that India, even though whale-sized, will continue to wallow in the shallows among the minnows of the international system.

[Published in an altered form as “Small Shiny Picture of the Big India” in the ‘Sunday New Indian Express’, Aug 5, 2012 at http://newindianexpress.com/lifestyle/books/ ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Politics | 3 Comments

Streamlining Defence

Posted on August 2, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

When talking to uniformed officers in higher military training institutions and forums, I try to emphasise the perils of an industrial age military. The country has far to go to get anywhere near the technologically-efficient, cyber-savvy, 21st century modern armed forces of the world. By this measure the United States military, on a scale of one to ten, scores 10. The next most proficient armed services in terms of being operationally networked with modern weapons is the British military, scoring seven. The Indian armed services, by this reckoning, rate a miserable two or less.

We are lucky the minor foe the Indian military considers its chief adversary and is most prepared to fight — Pakistan — has armed forces on par with our own, quality-wise. It is the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), however, that in bulk may resemble its Indian counterpart, but is undergoing transformation. Because anything the Chinese undertake to do they do with thoroughness, strategic foresight and speed, the PLA, with rapid modernisation underway, expects to get near enough to the U.S. standard of military proficiency by 2035, give or take five years. The danger is real, in the event, that the Indian military will be left so far behind that inside of 15 years it may be reduced to near impotence in hostilities involving the PLA.

That the country is stuck with a military that apparently cannot think straight is in part because there is so little meaningful strategic thinking being done by the uniformed brass when making force planning and acquisition decisions. Modernising, for example, is just another word for a series of programmes to replace one-for-one weapon systems already in the employ of the various combat arms.

This sad state of affairs persists because there is no single officer in the military tasked with the responsibility for creating an integrated force. Thus, the three Armed Services are on different wave-lengths and time-tables to achieve intra-service connectivity, for instance, without any regard to connecting with each other. Hence, the Air Force claims it will be on a comprehensive communications grid by 2015, the Navy is almost there, while the Army still has far to go.

The Task Force on National Security has submitted its report to the government. Cleverly, it has recommended the appointment of a fourth four-star rank officer as chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee (CCOS), with the three service chiefs as members along side. This gets around the tricky problem of a five-star rank officer as Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), out-ranking and, therefore, lording it over the services’ Chiefs of Staff. In theory, the Service Chiefs would be free to disagree with the chairman but, with the Integrated Defence Staff and the Strategic Forces Command, with nuclear weapons under its control, reporting to CCOS, what the military will, in effect, have is a CDS by another name. Together with recommendations to establish a desperately needed Special Forces Command controlling the Army paratroopers and para-commando, the Navy’s marine commando, and the IAF’s Garud detachments, a genuine integration of the acquisition process, and commonality of all logistics structures across the three services — except for the operational logistics arms that will stay with the Services, and which reform is, presumably, a precursor to a separate and unified Logistics Command — some organizational transformation may finally get underway.

Actually the Task Force has had a wide scope. It has, for instance, suggested separating the posts of head of DRDO and Science Adviser to defence minister to avoid a conflict of interests. After all, one of the reasons for DRDO getting its way all these years without delivering performance commensurate with financial investments in its projects is because the same person overseeing DRDO projects also tells the defence minister about the indigenous projects to prioritise and fund. What is proposed, instead, is a National Technology Council chaired by the Defence Minister that will include a representative of not just the Defence Public Sector Units (DPSUs) but also of the budding private sector defence industry. This will even out the playing field somewhat, depending on whether the defence minister prevents the combined megaphone of DPSUs and the Department of Defence Production from drowning out the voice of the private sector.

Also mooted is a scheme for cross-postings of military officers in the Ministry of External Affairs at many levels, including as Joint Secretaries, the creation of a Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, endowing the Vice Chiefs of Staff of the three Armed Services with financial powers akin to that of the Defence Secretary, and posting of a Major General-rank officer or equivalent from Navy or Air Force as additional secretary in the Ministry of Defence (MOD). Further, the Task Force has advised drafting a National Security Doctrine (NSD), and for each of the Services to configure their separate service doctrines in line with the NSD.

But the government in its wisdom made the Task Force’s report and recommendations run the gauntlet of inter-ministerial process of consultation. A decade ago the recommendation for a CDS by the Committee on Higher Defence Organisation chaired by K.C. Pant had been killed by a similar process. This time around though, the inter-ministerial process is sought to be constrained and time-bound. The concerned ministries whose reactions are being elicited – with the response of the Ministry of Defence (MOD) carrying the most weight – are required to furnish detailed explanations for opposing any of the Task Force’s recommendations. And all the reactions are to be submitted to the Prime Minister’s Office within three months. The Cabinet Committee on Security will then be convened to weigh the Task Force’s recommendations in the light of MOD’s formal reactions, should these differ, and approve, amend, or turn down each recommendation in turn. With Cabinet approval in hand, the recommendations are expected to be swiftly implemented.

The fact that the consultative process is not an open-ended, time wasting, bureaucratic obstacle race, and that no individual Armed Service or Ministry can veto the Task Force’s recommendations, is at once the main innovation and a relief this time around.

[Published Aug 2, 2012 in the ‘Ásian Age’ at www.asianage.com/columnists/streamlining-defence-991 and in the ‘Deccan Chronicle’ at www.deccanchronicle.com/columnists/bharat-karnad/streamlining-defence ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China military, DRDO, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Military Acquisitions, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Special Forces, US., Western militaries | 4 Comments