Indo-US ties downgraded

Posted on April 6, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

The health of a relationship between the United States and any other country is best gauged by whether a political appointee has been named as American ambassador to that country, and how close this ambassador-designate is personally and politically to the US President of the day. By these criteria, the Indo-US bilateral ties have slid back to the mundane, diplomatic level. The appointment of a careerist, Nancy Powell, to the Delhi embassy, just cleared by the US Senate, marks the eighth time a professional US diplomat will occupy Roosevelt House out of twenty-one US Ambassadors to India since 1947.

If the same standards are applied at the Indian end, meaning the quality of relations is judged by the appointees to the Washington embassy, then the contrast could not be starker. Out of the 21 Indian ambassadors to the United States to-date, only eight (Asaf Ali, Nehru’s sister Vijayalakshmi Pandit, G.L. Mehta, M.C. Chagla, Nani Palkivala, S.S. Ray, and Karan Singh) carried political weight in India in terms of, if not having the Prime Minister’s ear then being treated with bit more respect than bureaucrats in that post, the rest being career diplomats and retired civil servants, including a couple of retired cabinet secretaries (P.K. Kaul and Naresh Chandra). The exception to the list of Indian careerists in America was, of course, B.K. Nehru – an Indian Civil Service stalwart and the longest-serving ambassador to the US and, importantly, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s cousin.

The difference in the Indian and the American systems of ambassadorial appointments is also reflective of how differently foreign policy gets made in the two countries. In the American milieu, being on the public payroll is  regarded with certain contempt and civil servants are perceived as  people who couldn’t make it in the hurly-burly of the private sector, or wouldn’t brave its hazards. American politicians particularly trust people who have helped them get elected and whose political sensibility is in sync with their own. They also surround themselves with small teams, whose members have wide-area domain skills and expertise, and trust their advice and rarely rely on civil servants and career diplomats constituting the permanent secretariat in government.  Once in office, these advisers assume important cabinet and other positions in the Administration. Thus, candidate George W Bush’s advisory team called  the “Vulcans” led by Condoleeza Rice, monopolized the highest, most desirable, posts in the US government during the two terms of George W’s presidency.  Typically, the advisers in this inner group, in turn, bring in experts in various fields they know personally or by their professional reputation and body of work, and soon is formed a widening circle of talent, resulting in political appointments in the US government. The list of these top positions to be filled by the incoming US President is called the “plum book. Except, those chosen by the president for cabinet and sub-cabinet rank posts, and even ambassadorial posts have to be cleared by a majority in the upper House of the US legislature, the Senate. There is no guarantee that the presidential selection is always confirmed in the post. Partisan politics or a controversial past of the nominee can derail his/her chances.

What such system of appointments does is ensure that the unique outlook of the US President shapes policy and that policy is pushed by his appointees heading important embassies. George W Bush’s world view in which India, as a fellow democracy, was accorded, heightened value and place in the world was mirrored in American policies seeking to help India become, in Rice’s words, a “major power”. It especially helped that another “Vulcan”, Robert Blackwill, sought and was given the Delhi embassy and much of the foreign policy successes racked up during Bush’s first term when major initiatives, such as the nuclear deal, were taken is attributable to Blackwill’s being able to talk to the President directly and to get his way in the vicious bureaucratic in-fighting that’s the norm in Washington. He simply ran around and over such interference as the State Department now and again put up. Equally, political appointees feel accountable and end up resigning if presidential goals are not met, as happened in the case of Timothy J. Roemer, a former legislator, who failed to sell the F-16 or F-18 to the Indian Air Force in the recent Medium-range Multi-Role Combat Aircraft sweepstakes that President Barack Obama had pushed hard for.

The Indian system of ambassadorial selections for important embassies, on the other hand, is usually uninspired, a matter of bureaucratic prerogative, with the serving Foreign Secretary, in recent times, trying his/her damndest to stick on to the post with extensions in service until the Washington position falls vacant, whereupon his/her access to, and personal equation with, the Minister for External Affairs ensures the retiring Foreign Secretary is offered the job of ambassador in America. Lalit Mansingh and now Nirupama Rao fall into this category. Sometimes, senior diplomats such as K. Shankar Bajpai and Meera Shanker, make it as a last posting in their careers or like, Ronen Sen, are despatched post-retirement. For obvious reasons, these workaday diplomats and civil servants preside over less dazzling embassies and enjoy markedly less access to the White House than political appointees – think Vijayalakshmi Pandit and B.K. Nehru, and Palkivala.

Careerists presiding over an embassy, however, mean there are no surprises, the boat isn’t rocked, and very little new, in terms of policy wrinkles or suggestions, ever emanate from that source. This is exactly the reverse of what an embassy, which by its very nature should be heavily proactive in a place like Washington, DC, is supposed to be. Political appointees-as-ambassadors usually have better vision and set themselves grander goals than surviving the stint without mishap, which last is what most life-long bureaucrats are focussed on achieving. Reflecting the growing disillusionment with Manmohan Singh’s policies, the Obama Administration too seems to have reeled in its ambitions, fallen in line with the Indian government’s lowered sights, and installed Powell, a careerist, in Delhi.

[Published in the ‘New Indian Express’, Friday, April 6, 2012, at http://expressbuzz.com/opinion/op-ed/indo-us-ties-downgraded/379398.html ]

Posted in Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Strategic Relations with the US & West | 8 Comments

Israelis — doers, ‘karmyogis’ Vs Indians, talkers

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

Earlier this week there was sustained interaction with an Israeli team of former militarymen, policy persons, and researchers including a fighter pilot from the July 1981 sortie that preemptively took out the Iraqi reactor — Osiraq, that was about to go critical. The Israeli concern this time around was, of course, Iran. [Chatham House rules were the norm, so cannot identify the Israeli or the Indian dramatis personnae.]The point the former fighter pilot made very convincingly was not that aerial strikes to destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities would prevent Tehran from pursuing a weapons capability, but rather that such a strike would, at a minimum, delay Iran’s securing nuclear weapons and could also deter that country from pursuing the weapons option owing to the well-founded fear that the capabilities would again be hit once they reached a certain dangerous threshold, reducing their nuclear weapons project to a hopeless, Sisphyean task that will eventually be so frustrating, the Iranians will give up the effort. Had we this kind of Israeli mentality, we would have joined the Israelis to repeatedly attack Pakistani nuclear weapons complex every time it approached certain level, until Islamabad got the nessage. This option is not practicable any more. But it was readily available during the 1970s and early 1980s when Pakistan was cobbling the N-weapons capability tohgether centrally with Chinese design and material  assistance, and America, helpfully, looking the other way. Washington needed Pakistan as base to mount the jihad against the Soviet occupation troops in Afghanistan, remember? [In Greek mythology, Sisyphus tried to steal fire from the Gods and was punished by having repeatedly to roll a large boulder up a mountain only to see it roll down once he had managed to get it almost to the top.] What an exhilerating change this is from hearing our diplomats and official types constantly bellyache about Washington not doing this, not doing that, not doing nearly enough to rein in Pakistan, its terrorist activities, etc. Well, how about the Indian government doing something about it, such as ordering  covert ops to remove Hafeez Saeed from the scene, instead of relying on the $10 million US bounty to reel him in, which won’t catch this fish. Then again, Indians are talkers, and Israelis are doers — the great difference that cannot be bridged.

Posted in civil-military relations, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons | 2 Comments

Fanciful coup détat story

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

It is a pity Indian Express ran with the potential coup détat story that to journalists may have seemed fleshy but that any professional militaryman or domain expert would have warned them was hollow. (It is always advisable, in the circumstances, to have some stalwart armymen respond to such stories before putting it in print.) The trouble is Shekhar Gupta has always fancied himself as someone knowledgeable on, and informed about, military matters, and it was perhaps too juicy a story for him as editor-in-chief to pass up by way of an albeit shared byline. In retrospect, he might wish he had left Ritu Sarin, who has over the years cultivated good sources in the intelligence agencies, to monopolize the (dis)credit. In military terms, the story was so much nonsense, and I said so and explained why to several highly-placed political persons from the opposition who called this morning to find out how much credibility  was packed in this story. If a coup could be prosecuted so easily — with just two army units — in a vastly divided military system of command and control, there might have been many coups or at least coup attempts by now.

Having said that, however, there is no gainsaying the fact that the plausible sounding outlines of the report were likely onpassed to Sarin by her Intel contacts who, in turn, may have been prompted by some civil servants (with a nod and wink from a minister) to see whether it flies and even more if the radioactive dust settles on the COAS, General VK Singh. It hasn’t, and the mud is now stuck on Shekhar Gupta’s face and, perhaps, has considerably soiled his reputation.

Posted in civil-military relations, Indian Army, Indian Politics, Internal Security | 2 Comments

A Sting in the General’s tale

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

It is hard to say when it is that the military stopped being the paragons of propriety in a social milieu increasingly bereft of basic values that people once saw reflected in men in olive green (or in air force blue and navy white) such as honour and honesty. There are still many officers of the old school for whom military is a career, yes, but also an orderly world of do’s and don’ts and simple pleasures and simpler certainties. There have been Service Chiefs who after demitting office rode bicycles because that’s all they could afford (Admiral R.L. Periera), or repaired without fuss to living in small, cramped, apartments because anything grander their pensions wouldn’t allow (Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat). But the officer cohorts that produced a Periera or a Bhagwat, also threw up Service Chiefs – no names, please, they have law on their side! – verily Kubla Khans who have built pleasure domes on a service chief’s salary and pension.

The Chief of Army Staff, General V.K. Singh, has blown up the comfortable milieu senior military brass cocoon themselves in, where every whim quite literally is a command, revealing just how dirty military life has become, how much corruption has seeped into and become part of the cantonment life. Of course, there were always officers from the support arms in the army — the Service Corps and Ordnance Corps, who were known for accumulating wealth at the public exchequer’s expense. General Singh actually hinted at a conspiracy — of Rs 14 crores being dangled as bait by retired officers he identifies as “the Adarsh lobby” in the hopes of implicating him in a bribery scandal. What the army chief’s revelations have done is loosened the dirt lining the military acquisitions system, permitting the muck and the scum to float to the top. Now all the rumours one heard about payouts to senior military officers years can be freely aired.

Over time, one has heard hearsay accounts, for instance, of a system of under-the-table payments by consortia of contractors and victuals suppliers to officers assuming the highest commands. Thus, an appointee to an army (theatre) commander’s post was richer, one was told a decade back, by Rs 3-4 crores. Today, the sum may be a multiple of this figure. It’s not clear, however, whether this is a one-time booty or recurring prize-money. The trouble is these sorts of payoffs have come to be viewed by many in army circles as perquisites of the job. In like vein, pelf at lower level is tolerated as an “equalization” measure relative to politicians and civil servants who routinely siphon off public funds.

The rot is wide and deep and spreading fast. What General Singh has put his finger on are the vendors, mostly foreign, of weapons systems, spares and service support either directly or through Defence Public Sector factories, involved in assembling imported systems or licensed production, who prop up this system of corruption. With the expenditure on acquisitions rocketing, so have the competitive stakes for foreign Companies, DPSUs, and Indian private sector firms entering the lucrative defence business. Consequently, more and more officers up and down the military acquisitions line – in the weapons and quality control directorates, units tasked with testing and short-listing, and in price negotiation committees, are tempted at every turn, and many succumb.

The Congress Party government’s initial response was remarkable for its insouciance and near indifference – the army chief should have lodged a First Information Report with the police! Par for the course, one supposes for a political party that, during its long years in office first perfected and then institutionalized corruption. Defence Minister A.K. Antony defended himself in Parliament saying General V.K. Singh informed him about the attempted bribery over sixteen months ago all right but was remiss in not following up with a written complaint without which piece of paper, the minister lamented, he couldn’t proceed. Why does that ring false? For one thing because Antony has turned his programme to root out corruption into a fetish, and someone so concerned with cleansing his ministry surely should not have stood on formalities. In the event, he neither reminded the army chief to send his charge in writing nor, in the interim, ordered an investigation, which he could have, and should have, done. Instead, he waited until now, when the story broke sixteen months later and the leads may have gone cold, to bring the Central Bureau of Investigation into the picture. Was this Antony’s Plan B if all this ever came to light?

In the wake of a tsunami of wrongdoing in the military, it is time to initiate two major reforms before it is too late. One is to institute “deep selection” of Service chiefs, with all Lieutenant General rank officers completing two years in that rank made eligible for consideration. This widening of the selection pool will at once weed out those who have advanced in their careers with only seniority to recommend them, leading to just too many duds as Service chiefs for it to be a coincidence, incentivize an entire cohort to strengthen their records with genuine achievements rather than coasting in their last few tenures, and prevent “succession planning” by unscrupulous former army chiefs as has happened in the case of the designated successor to V.K. Singh. The other measure is routinely to do deep and thorough background checks of not just the candidates for appointments to corps commander level up, but also their immediate families. It will prevent persons from becoming army chiefs, like the one who not too long ago held this post and was known for shedding tears usually for the camera, adorning his golf cart with the four stars of his rank, and deploying a large contingent of soldiers from his parent infantry unit at his residence to help run his wife’s textile fashions and export business. With such a man in the chief’s saddle, what message would have been conveyed to military officers except “mis-use your position to the max”?

[Published in the Asian Age at www.asianage.com and Deccan Chroncile at www.deccanchronicle.com on Thursday, March 29, 2012]

Posted in civil-military relations, Defence Industry, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Military Acquisitions | 1 Comment

The costs of military bloat

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherji in his budget speech announced defence allocations of Rs 1.93 lakh crores with a set aside of Rs 79,579 crores for capital acquisitions adding, portentously in Parliament, that if needed the defence spend would be increased further.  During the year, the armed services will no doubt pitch for precisely such a hike by persuading the government that this or that armament purchase is something the security situation demands and the service absolutely cannot do without. This is the norm primarily because the generalist civil servant populated Ministry of Defence has no competence technically to evaluate the Services demands and arrive at an independent judgement about the slew of military requirements — whether these merit funding, can be kept pending, or are unnecessary. The professionalism of the armed forces is assumed to mean that everything they ask for is ipso facto correct and, therefore, worth buying.

The Finance Ministry, for its part, does not even bother with the pretence of making an informed judgement. Its attitude is that its representatives – the Financial Advisers (FAs) attached to major units, formations, and the various acquisitions wings, etc., are presumed to have ruthlessly wielded the scissors, cut out extraneous or wasteful expenditure, and what sums have survived their scrutiny are not worth vetting all over again. The trouble is, rare exceptions apart, these FAs, despite spending their entire careers looking over military shoulders and monitoring expenditure programmes, are ignoramuses in all but name when it comes to genuine knowledge about, and insights into, the military. Because the metrics used for examining expenditures are institutionalised ones, the premium is on sticking to the script and raising the same sets of questions, rather than on acquiring any expertise.

The FAs, however, pick up clichéd phrases that they have heard bandied about and which they use every now and then to show they are clued in. Thus, a former secretary, defence finance, Vijayalaxmi Gupta, the day after this year’s budget was presented grandly pronounced in a short newspaper article that the goal of the defence ministry ought to be to obtain “lean, mean war machinery”. Wisely, she didn’t venture into providing details. Except, because lean-ness and mean-ness are generally considered qualities any self-respecting military should manifest, she probably repeated them without meaning anybody any harm.

This begs the question: What if the Finance Ministry had a cell with a high-calibre staff of genuine military analysts, trend spotters and technology evaluators, whose assent was mandatory for funding of military programmes? The Finance Ministry then would be like the Treasury was in the United Kingdom in the inter-war years, 1917-1938, which instead of funding more big-gunned Dreadnought-type ships the Admiralty was enamoured of, chose proactively to finance the aircraft carrier to keep this option alive until its value was appreciated. In India, this sort of discriminate forward thinking and funding by the Finance Ministry is  unthinkable, whence the flourishing of the “lean, mean” rhetoric among the uninformed civilians gumming up the defence works in the North and South Blocks.

The “Lean, mean”-phrase is, in fact, the stock rationale of every senior uniformed officer asked to justify the usual mindlessly configured acquisitions plans of his service. This is because the military brass has discovered that it loosens the purse-strings without the Service having to sacrifice any portion of its acquisitions plans. It is another matter that these plans accomplish precisely the reverse – render the military fat and complacent. Thus, legacy combat arms with declining utility, flourish with continued investment and infusions of marginally better weapons systems that gouge huge sums out of the defence spend. For example, the army’s armoured and mechanized formations featuring vast holdings of tanks and armoured personnel carriers and infantry combat vehicles suck up funds, but do not produce proportionate conventional deterrence. This is so, in part, because their deployment in war on the western front is limited by the army brass’ apprehension of the Pakistani nuclear tripwire. It has led to the so-called ‘Çold Start’ doctrine, according to which armour from the pivot corps and the three strike corps are expected, to obtain shallow penetrations inside Pakistan, being publicly disavowed by the army chief, General V.K. Singh even though it is very much the operational philosophy. If this disavowal were taken seriously then there’s every good reason to not maintain such large armoured and mechanized establishments, and pruning these would be in order.

Indeed, consolidating the strike corps into a single corps  plus for any Pakistan contingency but otherwise shifting the trained personnel to man an additional six to eight offensive Mountain Divisions deployed for sustained operations on the Tibetan plateau, would rejuvenate the armoured and mechanized corps as little else could. This will give the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army units, planning to walk en masse across the Line of Actual Control, pause for thought and worry and, moreover, make this combat arm relevant for the future. But that’s not how the army or any other Service sees things. Every new capability is viewed as an additionality involving extra manpower, funds, and new hardware purchases. As far as I know, there’s not a single instance of an armed service transforming a part of itself into a future-appropriate force.

This status quo persists only because of a deeply flawed system of national security decision-making that, far from being shaped for 21st century travails, hasn’t even been dragged out of the colonial age! Pre-1947, the Imperial General Staff (IGS) in London strategized and issued orders for C-in-C, India, to implement. The empire is long extinct, but the IGS was not replaced by an Indian Chief of Defence Staff, recommendation to set up which by the Higher Defence Re-Organization Committee has been disregarded by successive governments in Delhi. The three Services, in the event, prepare to fight wars mostly separately, thereby cumulatively running the country’s national security interests into the ground and at increasingly unaffordable cost to the exchequer.  What the country ends up with is suffering the ill-effects of the blind (politicians) being led by the ignorant (bureaucrats), aided and abetted by the blinkered (the military).

[Published in the ‘New Indian Express, Friday, March 23, 2012, and at http://expressbuzz.com/opinion/op-ed/the-costs-of-military-bloat/375048.html]

Posted in civil-military relations, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Indian Politics, Military Acquisitions | 5 Comments

U.S. Wrong on India’s Iran Policy

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

The nuclear deal was supposed to be emblematic of a burgeoning strategic relationship between India and the United States. After some forty or so years of frosty relations, the beginning of the 21st Century saw leaders in Washington and Delhi touting a grand strategic partnership. To realize this, the George W. Bush and Manmohan Singh administrations courted great political risk in taking on the entrenched mindsets opposed to the nuclear agreement.

In Washington, opposition from the non-proliferation community nearly sank the deal during negotiations. In Delhi, the signing of the deal was so controversial it almost brought down the Congress Party’s coalition government in the 2008 vote in parliament. An upside to the tortuous negotiations was supposedly the empathy and understanding Indian and U.S. diplomats developed for the political constraints the other side operates under.

The Indian policy establishment and strategic community were therefore taken aback when Nicholas Burns, former undersecretary of state and the chief American negotiator on the nuclear deal, slammed India for its Iran policy in The Diplomat. Having reaffirmed India’s “immense strategic importance to the United States” in the Boston Globe a mere 10 days prior, Burns now argued that Delhi’s unwillingness to support U.S.-led sanctions amounted to a failure “to meet its obvious potential to lead globally,” thereby equating, in a spurious sort of way, India’s leadership ambitions with toeing the American line. Despite recognizing some of India’s votes against Iran at the U.N., Ambassador Burns went further in accusing India of “actively impeding the construction of the strategic relationship it says it wants with the United States.”

In actuality, it’s Washington’s unbending attitude towards accommodating India’s vital interests in Iran that potentially threatens the Indo-U.S. bilateral relationship. Burns and others U.S. critics of India’s Iran policy are, in effect, forcing Indo-U.S. relations back into a version of the old, inappropriate, and eminently discardable, “If you are not with us, you are against us” policy mold. By framing the issue in dichotomous terms, critics in Washington ignore the economic and domestic context in which India’s Iran policy is made.

In downplaying Delhi’s economic interests in Iran, Burns dismisses the fact that India gets 12 percent of its oil from Iran as a “weak defense” of its policy, because Delhi has had many years to find new suppliers. This ignores the fact that many of India’s government-owned refineries are geared to processing Iranian crude. If India were to switch to other sources, this would require a substantial upfront investment to retrofit its refineries to process other types of crude. Already facing a budget shortfall that is equal to 5.6 percent of GDP, the Singh administration is in no mood to incur these costs.

Moreover, it’s not at all clear that India could procure enough oil from other sources to make up for its loss of Iranian crude. Many suggest Saudi Arabia as both willing and able to make up the gap. But Riyadh’s spare capacity has come under severe strain after a decade of global supply interruptions elsewhere, and the rapid increase in demand caused by rising powers like India and China. Meanwhile, Saudi oil production is already at historically unprecedented levels, and it was unable to supplement the loss of Libya’s rather insignificant oil exports last summer, forcing Western nations to tap into their strategic reserves. Furthermore, both the International Energy Agency and the U.S. Energy Information Administration see Riyadh’s spare capacity continuing to diminish throughout 2012.

In addition, if India stopped buying Iranian oil, there’s little reason to believe China would follow suit. Beijing is yet to pay a price for being, as Bruce Loudon pointed out in The Australian early this month, “the constant contrarian on the global scene.” Washington has demonstrated time and time again that it has no leverage worth the name vis-a-vis Beijing. Although China has recently been cutting back on its purchase of Iranian oil, it continues to be a major customer. Beijing would possibly increase the amount of Iranian crude it uses were Iran to further reduce prices after India announced its exit from the market. Thus, Tehran will only be slightly discomforted by the sanctions. India, meanwhile, would have surrendered much.

Oil isn’t India’s only economic interest in Iran. In the wake of an official Indian delegation’s visit to Tehran, the Associated Chambers of Commerce announced that two-way trade reached $13.7 billion in 2010-2011 and will likely increase to $30 billion by 2015. In response to China’s infrastructure projects in Central Asia  progressing at breakneck speed, India has fast-forwarded its plans for a “north-south corridor” linking the Iranian port of Chabahar on the North Arabian Sea with a railway line to Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Russia via Hajigak, a mineral-rich area in Afghanistan where an Indian consortium has secured mining concessions. In parallel, India is helping build a highway connecting Chabahar to Milak and Zaranj, which has a road link to Dilaram in Afghanistan, a 213 kilometer stretch constructed by the Indian Border Roads Organization. The Chabahar port has been enlarged with Indian assistance and is now capable of annually handling 6 million tons of cargo and will serve as the entrepot for Indian business. This route has a strategic element too; namely, India uses it as a conduit to sustain ties with the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and to firm up goodwill with the Afghan people generally and the Hamid Karzai regime in particular. In the past year, for instance, India has shipped over 100,000 metric tons of food grain to Kabul from Chabahar. More significantly, Chabahar allows India to outflank the Chinese presence in the Pakistani port of Gwadar, 72 kms to the east.

There’s an important domestic political rationale to India’s Iran policy, which the self-consciously “secular” Indian government is loath to admit. India’s Shi’a population is the second largest in the world after only Iran itself. In contrast to Sunni Islam in the subcontinent, which has evolved around local seminaries with distinct schools of thought, India’s Shi’a community maintains strong links with their Iranian counterparts.  This is especially true among the clergy who closely monitor theological developments and pronouncements emanating from the Iranian religious center in Qom. The Iranian government has carefully cultivated these cultural ties with the Indian Shi’a religious institutions, politicians, and intelligentsia, and translates them into political clout to deter any Indian government from prosecuting unfavorable policies towards it. This is democracy at work, something Washington can surely appreciate.

The Obama administration’s foreign policy pivot to the Asia-Pacific and India is meant to contain China, a goal that is served by India’s strong and growing relations with Iran. As India and the United States discovered in Burma, leaving a vacuum for China to fill is an act of high strategic folly. India is unwilling to repeat that mistake in Iran.

Israel and Iran will thrash out their problems in their own way and it makes no sense to hold the Indo-U.S. partnership hostage to that situation, even less, to Iran’s proliferation status. By creating friction over Indo-Iranian ties, America is in danger of achieving the smaller, regional, objective at the expense of the larger, overarching, strategic goal.

[published in  ‘The Diplomat’, March 19, 2012 at http://the-diplomat.com/2012/03/19/u-s-wrong-on-india%e2%80%99s-iran-policy/2/?all=true]

Posted in Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Indian Politics, Strategic Relations with the US & West | Leave a comment

Tediously Needling Kissinger

Posted on March 17, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

At the gala dinner at the India Today Conclave yesterday evening, poor Henry Kissinger was badgered and needled about, what else, Pakistan by the MC/host MJ Akbar. It was more the latter’s insecurities as an Indian Muslim trying to prove his patriotism than Dr K’s slightly bemused responses, that was in evidence. Kissinger did not reveal or say anything new even though Akbar kept asking him about his  “deal” with Indira Gandhi in 1971, and K kept repeating his stock stuff. The fact that Kissinger said that dismantling West Pakistan was seen as not being in the US interest at the time, is no great revelation. It’s featured in his writings, even though Akbar made much of it saying this was being said for the first time.  Kissinger said Pakistan was the only channel to China  THIS IS PATENTLY UNTRUE. THE US NEVER NEEDED THE PAKISTAN CHANNEL TO CHINA. FROM THE 1960s THERE WAS THE COMMUNICATION CHANNEL THROUGH WARSAW, POLAND.  Yes, Pakistan proved a convenience — it was easier to scoot off secretly to Beijing  from Islamabad, than from Warsaw in 1971.

But at the Conclave, Kissinger’s interaction with, and especially Akbar’s amateurish provocations, were tedious in the extreme, even grating on the ear and nerve.

It is simply amazing how much time we spend with Pakistan on our minds.

What the audience should have been attentive to was Kissinger’s repeated assertions that the US-China relations will be the paramount consideration for Washington. The implication was that the US would rather cut a deal with Beijing than “partner” any country in “containing” China — a fact I have been stressing in my writings, and at every fora.

Posted in Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Strategic Relations with the US & West | 2 Comments

The defence budget and getting military priorities right

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

The existing year-to-year defence budgeting scheme means that the armed services cannot be sure their capital acquisitions plans will be funded as per their preferred time-frame. This is because the government commits itself financially, but only notionally, to the entire programme, with no guarantee that any particular hardware purchase will be funded in regular annual tranches. This last does not always happen because the defence budget is subject to the availability of resources, the relative weightage accorded defence compared, say, to food subsidies and MNREGS, and the individual Service’s expenditure priorities. Thus, in the annual budget to be announced tomorrow by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherji, the defence spend may result in the acquisition cycle of many weapons systems being, willy-nilly, stretched, as in the past, over a longer period of time.

The year-to-year budgeting is, however, only part of the trouble.  The far bigger, more serious, problem is the helter-skelter military acquisitions plans that the Defence Acquisitions Council usually approves, and is the result as much of individual service-oriented planning processes as the current Service chiefs’ pet projects that get inserted as priority buy for no rhyme or reason other than as the Chief of Staff’s prerogative. But this sort of thing illustrates the desperate need for an institutional mechanism for inter se prioritisation both within each Service and between the Services’ requirements. What occurs at present is the Chief who has the defence minister’s ear or is in thick with the Defence Secretary ends up with his Service’s top requirements getting the push, especially in meetings the defence minister invariably has with the finance minister in the last days before the Union budget is finalized. This, of course, is a ridiculous way for the defence ministry of a would-be great power to function, but that’s the operating norm, not a rational procedure. The absence of joint acquisitions planning leads to a mindless kind of military modernization predicated on haphazard purchases of virtually whatever armament comes to hand and is a damning indictment particularly of army and air force, the navy being a bit better in this respect. It is good reason why India is not taken seriously as a military power.

It is not as if the Indian government is unaware of the problems. The Chief of Defence Staff organization would have eased such problems, but that’s nowhere on the horizon. The existing tri-Service Integrated Defence Staff, because it is reduced to acting as secretariat for the Chiefs of Staff Committee, is denied an independent joint-Service  acquisitions planning role and, in any case, is not devoid of individual Service pulls.  The outcomes of this fairly anarchic state of affairs were outlined by me, as adviser, defence expenditure, in the classified report to the (Tenth) Finance Commission chaired by former Defence Minister K.C. Pant, and accepted in toto by, the Narasimha Rao government in January 1995. It argued for re-working the expenditure priorities of the Services, for a mechanism for inter se prioritisation, and for shifting the military focus from Pakistan to China. The report recommended a corresponding diversion of resources from fighting assets with an exclusive Pakistan-front utility to forces deployable against China, including a sizeable offensive mountain warfare-capability, and  greatly augmented sea control and sea denial strength.

But no government has bitten the bullet and implemented the Finance Commission recommendations for restructuring the military forces. It would have required, in the main, the reorganizing of the vast armoured and mechanized formations that eat up a disproportionate amount of the defence monies in such a way as to retain a corps plus several independent armoured brigades to deal with any Pakistan contingency, but otherwise transferring the skilled personnel and establishment to offense-capable Mountain Divisions. Equipped with light howitzers, light tanks, lightly armoured Infantry Combat Vehicles, and integral heli-lift, and able to debouch from the “Demchok Triangle” in the Aksai China area and the northern Sikkim plains, these forces would take the fight into Tibet. Quite apart from rendering the army more relevant for wars of the future and give it a genuinely offensive sheen, it would have created novel options to deal with the Peoples Liberation Army. Instead, the army is stuck with the four new Mountain Divisions it got sanctioned, which will inevitably end up on the pre-positioned line behind the Line of Actual Control. Indeed, according to a commander of one of these new Divisions, his troops are doing picket duty, guarding a road well behind the border! For all the brave talk of an offensive Mountain Corps amounts to nought. If the Indian Army lacks the foresight and drive to reconfigure itself, the air force persists in its fighter folly, securing hideously expensive and newer combat planes, at a time when drones are becoming the future.

The generalist bureaucrats, manning the Defence Ministry, alas, simply do not have the knowledge base and the skill sets to think up innovative solutions for force transformation and, understandably, prefer making safe decisions on the basis of precedent which last doesn’t require any expertise or application of mind. In turn, they compel defence ministers, who rely on them for advice, to stay with the status quo, tethering the Services to the orders-of-battle of yester-years. The country, of course, ends up being the loser and paying the price in war.

The government is apparently reconciled to deficits in the air and land forces capabilities. Something called the offsetting strategy (propagated in the quasi-official document ‘Nonalignment 2.0’) entails responding in the maritime sphere to any aggressive Chinese action across LAC. So a Chinese attack on Tawang, for instance, will be countered by sinking Chinese merchant marine or even a warship or two in the Indian Ocean. In that case, the country should be prepared to lose all the territory China has claimed, this time without any prospect of its return as happened in 1962, which is  politically unacceptable. The offsetting strategy makes as much sense as the army’s fighting a reactive war on Chinese terms, and IAF signing on for the MMRCA and the fifth generation Su-50 PAK/FA fighter.

Posted in civil-military relations, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Military Acquisitions | 1 Comment

Chinese ASBM validation by Indian team, but huge Questions utility-wise

Posted on March 10, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

The Chinese anti-ship ballistic missile system has been touted as the great “game changer” mainly by commentators outside China. There’s however some confusion about the status of this ASBM system. PACOM CINC Admiral Willard in December 2010 stated that it was operational. But the Pentagon has held back from even confirming this.  There’s for good reasons huge question marks hanging around it. Except now a high-powered team from NIAS (National Institute for Advanced Studies) – the Ramanna-founded outfit under the aegis of DRDO and led by a rocket propellant expert Rajaram Nagappa yesterday briefed a gathering of mostly Navy and DRDO types. The team, after doing fine work of gleaning DF-21D missile characteristics  from published photographs and using data on the Chinese Yaogon constellation of satellites and the accompanying OTH radar that will facilitate the targeting of US  Carrier Strike Groups, ran a simulation exercise and, in essence, validated the workability of the ASBM system. The DF-21D is expected to fly a ballistic course for most of its flight path, but change to boost-glide to target, in its terminal phase.  It was suggested by VADM (ret) Ravi Ganesh, former head of the ATV (SSBN) program, introducing the NIAS study that the conventional warhead on the missile was meant to prevent a retaliatory escalation by  the US forces to the nuclear stage and thus lengthen the nuclear fuze. As a panelist along with RADM (ret) Raja Menon, discussing the strategic ramifications of the Chinese ASBM, in the afternoon, I brought up that old problem — how is the targeted country to know the missile is conventional and not N-warheaded, and will it wait around for the missile to impact, meaning take out the Carrier, before mounting retaliation? Absent new and novel technology able to distinguish the type of warhead on an incoming missile, the reaction to any launch of a ballistic missile, including ASBM, by an adversary state and so detected, will, in the first instance,  result in an immediate counter-launch of an N-missile.

The  trouble here, I pointed out, is that the US has actually muddied the waters by equipping its Ohio-class SSBNs with conventional ICBMs in its strategy of “global strike”, which does not make any sense whatsoever. But neither does the Chinese ASBM, except as a means of creating turmoil in the US Navy, and unsettling America’ senior armed service — a psychological ploy to unhinge the enemy!!  This last is something China is phenomenally good at doing. There’s no reason, as Raja Menon said that the OTH cannot be turned Bay of Bengal-wards, and the Yaogon satellites re-oriented. In which case, I wondered if the original plan for a small carrier/AD ship at 28,000 tons, wouldn’t have served Indian interests better? The carrier now being built at Kochi is getting onto 45,000 tons plus.

Posted in Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Military Acquisitions, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Strategic Relations with the US & West | Leave a comment

Chappell on dot

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

Greg Chappell was an obvious failure as  cricket coach to the indian team. But he seems to have read Indian nature and character perfectly well.  Honestly, did he not speak the truth? His take on Indians rings true as much  for those on the cricket greens as for the rest of us off it. And it throws a harsh light  on the strategic mindset of the country, Indian govt, and of the Indian military. Chappell essentially said Indians had no fighting spirit, no sense of individual responsibility for the collective outcome, that we are too selfish and self-centered to put a larger cause above us, and that we are basically motivated by the the promise of petty, monetary, gain. And then he thrust his dagger into the Indian solar plexus. The British, he said, had beaten down the Indians so much, every last bit of initiative and self-respect had been squeezed out of them.  Hey, he is not wrong.

Posted in civil-military relations, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Politics | Leave a comment