Strategic and Nuclear Balancing of China in Asia-Pacific

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Bharat Karnad

United Service Institution National Security Seminar on “Peace & Stability in Asia-Pacific Region: Assessment of the Security Architecture”, Nov 17-18, 2011

Nov 17, 2011 – Paper presented by BHARAT KARNAD in Session 1 on ‘Strategic & Security Environment in the Asia-Pacific Region with  focus on Nuclear Issues’

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Introduction

 The new millennium is turning out to be everything nobody expected it to be. The international power shift from the Atlantic world to Asia has spawned uncertainty and deepened insecurities and mistrust, even as terrorism and economic blight have spread virally. It has fuelled, in some Asian countries, paranoia, and in others, the resolve to protect national interests with whatever mix of political and military policies that promise a modicum of order and stability in the region. The convergence of the two streams has led to enormous flux in policy where every country is at once hedging and maneuvering for slivers of advantage.  

      These developments, moreover, are in the larger context of an economically vibrant China throwing its weight around, so far mostly in Asia, while playing the banker to a heavily indebted United States as well as the European Union (EU); an exhausted America, apparently drained of self-confidence and resources, trying desperately to hang on to its dominant status even as it attempts to deal with the massive war-expenditure induced economic recession and attendant high rates of unemployment;[1] an increasingly irrelevant and diffident EU, habituated to riding the US coattails in all areas, is contributing marginally to the US-led NATO missions (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya), while many of its members (Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal) face bankruptcy and a future in which, not Washington, but Beijing is the economic “savior”;[2] and, the countries in East Asia, South-East Asia, and in the Indian Ocean littoral, face a China that is not a distant entity, even less an abstract ‘celestial economy’,[3] but a relentlessly driven power, hungry for hegemonic substance, standing and recognition, and perceived by almost all other Asian states as imperiling their security and peace of mind and, therefore, requiring counter-balancing with a cautiously willing United States and a hesitant India.[4]

      In such a milieu, what the majority of Asian countries are looking for is reassurance, overlapping guarantees of security from whatever credible sources may be available. Countervailing strategic alliance or partnership with the United States and/or India, both countries nuclear-armed and with strategic heft, and ostensible rivals of, and in sometimes tense relationship with, China, is the policy choice of most of these states. A few of them, while tacking to these winds, are also surreptitiously nursing the capability to produce nuclear weapons just in case it is ever needed.[5] The nuclear-armed regime of Kim Jong Il in North Korea, by successfully warding off the US for over a decade, has proved that the Bomb guarantees its owner protection from molestation by a big power in all circumstances.

      This paper will briefly analyze a couple of inter-connected issues: (1) the attitude and posture vis a vis China of the United States and of India, as perceived by Asian states on the Chinese periphery; smaller Asian countries hope to rely on these two powers to blunt China’s growing power, and (2) considering the difficult security situation Japan, Taiwan, and Vietnam and other ASEAN states find themselves in, the strategic policy choices they are making in terms of cultivating and strengthening politico-military ties with the United States and India. The paper concludes that the strategic and nuclear counter-balancing of China will be the background in which inter-state relations will play out in Asia in the foreseeable future.

 Litmus Test States

 Japan and Taiwan are among the oldest and staunchest allies of the United States, in Asia – their links forged at the start point of the Cold War between Soviet Russia-led Communist bloc of nations and the so-called Free World headed by the US. The security of these two states, both cowering in the shadow of a growingly aggressive China, has been the lynchpin of America’s Far East policy. Any perceived weakening of the US security commitment to either country is seen as bellwether of Washington’s lack of resolve to stay anchored in Asia. As it is Taiwanese and Japanese confidence was shaken by the entente engineered by the Nixon-Kissinger duo and the Shanghai Declaration that eventuated in 1972. For the first time, the US acknowledged Taiwan not as a separate, sovereign, entity but, more ambiguously, as part of the “One China, two systems” concept.

      The US intent was to use Maodezong’s China to balance the Soviet Union. To firm up the value of this geostrategic card, Washington transferred military high technology to gild China’s military muscle[6] and opened up the American market to Chinese exports – an opportunity the far-sighted Chairman Dengxiaoping quickly capitalized on to get the country’s economy rolling on the exports-driven path. The rapprochement, however, ended up leaving Taiwan in the lurch, its security concerns the US sought to address with the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act promising protection in case Beijing tried forceful means of “unification”.  Joining the international mainstream has resulted in sustained skyrocketing growth for China averaging some 9% annually over the last 30 years, and an economy set to overtake the US’ as early as 2015, but no later than 2020. Taiwan, ironically, played a leading role in China’s economic regeneration. It is responsible for over 80% of Foreign Direct Investment in China, with Taiwanese industrialists and entrepreneurs exploiting the low wages and state subsidies to establish that country as a base for exporting low cost manufactures to a global market, and establishing China as the “workshop of the world”. Beijing, on its part, has all along hoped that such linkages would, over time, ease Taiwan’s peaceful absorption into the larger Chinese fold. But the most significant development is not that Taiwan and China are mutually dependent but that, notwithstanding the enormous economic gains accruing to Taiwan, the sentiment for resolutely maintaining its status, independent of and separate from, China’s continues to be strong, and animates much of Taiwanese politics.[7]

      Indeed, the leader of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Tsia Ing-wen’s call, during her September 2011 visit to Washington, for a new basis for US-Taiwan relations and the possibility, moreover, of her winning the general elections in January 2012 has sent unease coursing through Washington and Beijing because of their shared fear that Sino-US relations and the region, generally, may be heading, once again, for a rough ride. [8] When DPP last ruled in Taipei, President Chen Shui-bian, it may be recalled, had mooted a nation-wide referendum on independence, and precipitated a China-US confrontation in the mid-1990s in the Taiwan Straits. In more recent times, the US Government’s faint-hearted approach to helping Taiwan strengthen its armed forces may have placated Beijing but it has, apparently, discouraged not just the Taiwan nationalists such as Tsia but also the ruling Koumintang Party, which would prefer that Taiwan stay engaged with China but also remain a distinct entity, to achieve which goal periodic injections of advanced weapons systems into the island state to counter the arms build-up on the Mainland are necessary.

      Three requests by Taipei since 2006 to replace 66 of its aging F-16 A/Bs from a fleet of 150 such planes with the newer F-16 C/Ds, were hanging fire for over five years before the Obama Administration finally turned them down. Instead, only a mere upgrading of the existing Taiwanese F-16 A/Bs in a pared down deal worth $4.2 billion was approved, which will do nothing to correct a major skewing of the air warfare capabilities in China’s favour. The PLA Air Force units fronting on Taiwan are outfitted with Su-27s, Su-30s, J-10s, and even the fifth generation J-20 combat aircraft. A US Congressional assessment surveying the scene  has observed that “the US paralysis over sales of these aircraft since 2006 has given China time to develop more advanced capabilities…and evaluate capabilities to defeat even more advanced US tactical aircraft such as the F-22”.[9] A relieved Beijing said little unlike its response to President Barack Obama’s 2010 announcement of a $6.4 billion arms package that included missiles, Black Hawk helicopters, and mine-sweepers, when it went ballistic.[10]  

      Washington’s  room for maneuver and, in fact, its ability to take a strong stand on Taiwan’s autonomy is limited by the current economic depression and high unemployment the US is experiencing combined with the resource-draining wars in Iraq and Afghanistan it is embroiled in.[11] While President Obama is beginning to wind down these wars, it is unlikely there will be significant cost savings considering US Special Forces presence will continue in the more active theatre, Afghanistan, for a long time and periodic injections of huge amounts of money into Pakistan will be required as incentive to keep Islamabad from bolting the “global war on terrorism”. The US condition will not be helped by Beijing continuing to buy US Treasury bonds just so its exports to the American market remain at a high level. It is the recognition of limited options America has that led US Vice President Joseph Biden on his return from a state visit to China   categorically to state that Washington does not entertain “visions of a cold war-style rivalry or great power confrontation with China.” In the context of “China’s growing military abilities and intentions”, he volunteered, the US is “engaging with the Chinese military to understand and shape their thinking.”[12] The trouble is it may be China that is actually “shaping” US thinking on Asia and not the other way around, especially because American strategic experts, having conceded a “power shift”,[13] seem to have already thrown in the towel.

      Security-wise, Japan finds itself in much the same unenviable position as Taiwan, caught between the economic pull of China and the security pull of the US. The new Democratic Party government was elected on the promise that it would reconsider that country’s US-centred foreign and military policy. Once in office, however, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has tried to find the middle ground between two policy streams – one tending to China, the other to the United States. The European Union-inspired concept of an East Asian Community proposed by a former premier from his Party, Yukio Hatoyama in 2009, as a means of solidifying the burgeoning economic linkages with China, was in the backdrop of his failure to convince the US Government to reduce the major US military presence in, and move the American base to a less populated part of, Okinawa. The other stream was the hard line adopted by his immediate predecessor, Naoto Kan, in the long simmering territorial dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu island chain.[14] It resulted in 2010 in an incident at sea leading to the Japanese navy arresting and releasing a captain of a Chinese vessel that occasioned a volley of harsh words by Beijing.

    Japan’s Self-Defence Forces, boasting of significant anti-submarine warfare and air superiority capabilities, an air assault brigade, and a navy bigger than most big power navies, are more than competent to handle China by themselves in the conventional military realm. As backstop is the US 7th Fleet in Yokohama, the forward-based American air strike and combat elements, and the land force contingent on Okinawa, which are bound, willy nilly, to get involved in any Japan-China military clash. But over and above that  is the status of Japan as a “para-nuclear state” that can in no time at all convert vast holdings of reprocessed spent fuel plutonium from its many power plants into quite literally “thousands of nuclear warheads”  to deter Chinese threats, as Ichiro Ozawa, the Liberal Party president  warned in 2002. He went on to boast that “If we get serious, we will never be beaten in terms of military power.”[15] This kind of uncharacteristically incautious utterance by a Japanese leader may mirror the rethink going on in Japanese security circles about self-reliance owing to doubts about US as a reliable military ally. It’s a feeling that’s been further fueled by Washington deciding not to sell 40 F-22 Raptors that Tokyo had asked for even before the decision was taken to scrap that aircraft programme. Even the deal for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter for Japan in lieu of the F-22, is minus some of the cutting edge stealth capabilities. It is the sort of attitude that does not inspire confidence.[16] Similar doubts motivated the South Korean nuclear weapons programme started in the 1974 by President Park Chung Hee that Washington pressured Seoul into abandoning, but which went covertly ahead anyway; it however progressively lost steam.[17]

      Unlike Japan, Taiwan has a small and effective “Hsin Chu” nuclear weapons programme at the Chungsan Institute of Science & Technology, initiated in the wake of the Chinese atomic test in October 1964.[18] In the 1970s, CIA was of the view that this programme could produce a nuclear bomb inside of five years. Some forty years  later, it is reasonable to assume they have ready nuclear warheads for the two strategic nuclear-capable missiles developed as part of the so-called “Tiching Project”. The missiles are a 1000 km range, two stage, solid fuel variant, and another with range of 300 kms, both designed to carry the same sized nuclear warhead.[19] In essence then, Taiwan too has a nuclear deterrent in embryo to fall back on. Nevertheless, by way of abundant caution and to keep any conflict this side of the nuclear Rubicon, the clause invoking US military protection in the Taiwan Relations Act is likely to be invoked by Taipei at the first hint of serious trouble with China, despite Taiwan’s quite considerable conventional military preparedness. As the latest US Department of Defence report on the Chinese military capabilities clearly states, other than the small sparsely populated offshore islands, “An attempt to invade Taiwan would strain China’s untested armed forces”, “pose a significant political and military risk” for Beijing  and, in light of “Taiwan’s investments to harden infrastructure and strengthen defensive capabilities” make it difficult for China “to achieve its objectives.”[20]

      It is now evident that Tokyo and Taipei, looking beyond the US strategic umbrella, are seeking to add more arrows to their defensive quiver. India is a country both states hope will join them in their separate endeavours, so far exclusively underwritten by the US military deployment, to fence in China.  The Indian Navy has been exercising frequently  with the Japanese Navy in the waters off Senkaku, and with the navies of South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, and other ASEAN members. While Delhi put off the “trialogue” with Japan and the United States in 2011 lest China see this as a formal ganging up by rival powers,[21] it has been forthcoming in the military field – conducting the annual ‘Malabar’ naval exercise, most recently in summer 2011, with a destroyer flotilla off Okinawa alongside the US naval forces, an exercise the Japanese Navy had to withdraw from owing to its preoccupation with the Fukushima nuclear disaster relief work.[22]One reason India and Japan are increasingly on the same page as far as China is concerned is, perhaps, because Beijing is employing the same strategy with both countries of testing their defences with provocative acts. Incursions across the disputed Sino-Indian border (Line of Actual Control) by the Chinese PLA and the paramilitary People’s Armed Police units and the air space by Chinese helicopters are, apparently, as common now as the 96 incidents (a tripling of such violations over the past year) of intruding Chinese aircraft intercepted by Japanese air defence fighter planes over the outer Japanese islands.[23]  

      Even so, Delhi appears diffident, which problem was sought to be addressed in 2010 by the visiting former Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, who likened Japan’s situation to that of India in its relations with China and advised Delhi not to feel “shy” in joining the United States and Japan to keep the Asian sea lanes open and safe, because such military cooperation will soon draw other Asian states, such as Vietnam and South Korea into a collective security enterprise. He counseled that India and Japan ought to work together to ensure that, in this time of US weakness, there is “no strategic void” and, by implication, that this void is not filled by China. Abe also indicated the direction in which the mutually compatible countries are headed, saying “India’s success is in Japan’s best interests and Japan’s success is in the best interest of India.”[24] Japan has also overcome its earlier reservations about conducting nuclear trade with India, making the distinction between a nuclear weapon state and a nuclear proliferator.[25] This trend of greater Japanese strategic engagement with India is reflected in strengthening economic bonds, such as Japan emerging as the sixth largest source of Foreign Direct Investment.

      India’s links with Taiwan are still a work in progress, but proceeding along the lines the two countries have generally agreed upon. Taiwanese Member of Parliament Chen Chiech-Ju, visiting Delhi in October 2011 as head of a DPP delegation, proposed greater cooperation between littoral states, including India, to contain Chinese expansionism and maritime ambitions.[26] The Indian government, while happy with such sentiments, is more focused on getting a big part of the Taiwanese Foreign Direct Investment, presently channeled into the Mainland, diverted to India. But Taipei’s efforts in pushing such diversion of capital have floundered because the Taiwanese businessmen and industrialists find the difficulties of language and the poor quality of infrastructure in India obstacles too big easily to overcome. This reluctance is despite some singular successes racked up by Taiwanese Companies in India, such as Acer Computers and the telecommunications firm, D-Link. Early in the last decade, India broached the subject of sharing intelligence on China with Taiwan, given Taipei’s effective intelligence penetration of the Chinese system. The Taiwanese were however skeptical about what it would get of value in return. But, as Antonio Chiang, former Deputy Secretary General, National Security Council, Taiwan, who visited Delhi a number of times in the last decade, said in 2006: “Both sides have felt good about each other but are still unsure about what to do.”[27] Some of those early doubts may have been settled and cooperation, mostly in the intelligence field, is underway. More substantive cooperation, starting with joint exercises, in the security field may follow.

 South-East Asia: China’s Soft under-belly

 For geographically obvious reasons, South East Asia at once confronts China with danger and opportunities. The littoral states, while wishing to benefit from the surging Chinese economic growth, are nevertheless wary of Chinese intentions and Beijing’s moves are invariably looked upon with suspicion. The strategic problem for China[28] is that one of its two most volatile regions, Tibet (the other being Xinjiang) is proximal to this region, and harsh Chinese Communist rule and oppression of Tibetan people and Tibetan culture are seen as warning signals of the overarching danger posed to South East Asian states by China. The fear inspired by proximity to China has prompted increased defence expenditures and military acquisitions. Malaysia’s military acquisitions budget, for example, has gone up by some 700% in the 2005-2010 period, Singapore’s by 140%, and Indonesia’s by 84%.  Even so, the ASEAN states are not comfortable and seek further bolstering of their security by looking to India, with size, location, and politico-military weight to act as shield and counter. Unfortunately, the Indian government has lacked the strategic vision and the drive sufficiently to cash in on the anxiety triggered in this region by a China fast emerging as a great power.

      To the extent India’s ‘Look East’ policy has succeeded other than in fostering trade and commercial ties with the countries of that region, it’s been in the slow and substantive buildup of security partnerships across South East Asia, led by naval diplomacy. The leading countries with which India is developing special security relationships are Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and particularly Vietnam.[29] The annual ‘Milan’ naval exercise involving the ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) members and Bangladesh, Maldives, et al,  with portions of the on-shore interaction designed to cultivate social bonding between the sailor communities and, at higher levels, allowing officers to exchange views on the evolving military situations they face and to chalk out cooperative and collaborative counter measures. Such confidence building programmes have prompted greater mutual reliance. Thus, Singapore sent its submarine crews to train on Indian ex-German HDW 209 Submarines, also in service with the Singapore Navy, and its Air Force regularly uses Indian air space for training purposes. The Malaysian Air Force pilots flying ex-Russian Mi-29 aircraft and the maintenance crews servicing these planes, are trained by the Indian Air Force. Along with other ASEAN countries, Vietnam sends scores of its senior officers for higher command training to the India’s National Defence College, and depends on the Indian Armed Services for technical support. Delhi finally accepted the logic, that has been articulated for many years now, of arming Vietnam with consequential weaponry,[30] and the strong pitch by Vietnam and Indonesia for the Indian Brahmos supersonic cruise missile. As a result, this missile may soon be found on Vietnamese and Indonesian warships and outfitting their coastal batteries,[31] no doubt to the considerable unease of the Chinese South Seas Fleet operating out of Sanya base on Hainan Island. South China Sea may no longer be exclusively China’s sea as Beijing perceives it with its rather arbitrary drawing of the expansive U-shaped dotted line on maps to claim most of it, a sea territory rich in oil and gas and hence even more vigorously contested by neighbouring countries, including Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, and the Philippines.   

      India is seen by these states as a counter-balancing military presence to China in the extended area, especially with the US naval forces in the strategic mix securing the eastern end of the arc of the Chinese periphery in Asia-Pacific in league with the Japanese and Australian defence forces.[32] The Indian government’s continued hesitation in overtly making common cause against China hasn’t prevented the Indian Navy from participating in joint maneuvers with its US, Australian and Japanese counterparts. Much of the firming up of the collective effort to ring in China is despite most of the countries, including India, having strong trade and economic relations with it. China displaced the United States two years ago as India’s largest trading partner with trade growth exceeding targets. The other states bordering China similarly are plugged into the Chinese manufacturing loop, such as Vietnam and Thailand, or are prime exporters of natural resources (wood, minerals, oil, off shore gas) to meet Chinese industrial demand, such as Myanmar. But all of them share the same high level of distrust where China is concerned owing to historical memory of imperial Chinese aggression and, in many instances, unresolved border disputes, and because of their apprehension of once again being reduced to vassal or tributary status. Some of these countries, in particular Myanmar, expressly blame India for “pushing” it “into Chinese arms” by over-stressing the Human Rights angle,[33] but have quickly grasped the Indian offer of development aid and military assistance to balance the Chinese presence. This even though Myanmar has allowed a rapid north-south road and rail build-up, enabling China to have an opening on the Bay of Bengal through a deep water port it is constructing on the offshore Ramree Island.

      China’s claims on the South China Sea encompassing the disputed Spratly and Paracel Island chains and coveted by many of the other nearby states not little because of rich oil and gas deposits found in those areas, have been arbitrary, transgressing existing maritime laws and conventions. Notwithstanding its being party to the 2002 ASEAN Declaration on Conduct (DOC) of countries with claims on South China Sea, Beijing warned all countries to terminate oil exploration and drilling activities not specifically permitted by it. Oil majors, such as Exxon and British Petroleum were intimidated enough to cease operations. China’s   expansive offshore territorial claims have been vigorously challenged in legal terms by Vietnam. Hanoi has complained about China’s non-conformance with numerous 1982 UNCLOS (UN Law of the Sea) provisions. Elsewhere, Philippines upped the ante when Chinese aircraft and naval vessels tried to run its people off the Reed Bank in the Paracels, by totally rejecting Chinese claims and invoking the 1951 Mutual Defence Treaty with the United States in order to deter China from taking precipitate action. A defensive Beijing fell back on justifying its claims on the basis of these being “formed by history”.[34] It led to the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the ASEAN summit in Hanoi committing America to, in effect, enforcing the international maritime law.[35]

      Vietnam, in furtherance of its proactive stance, also cleverly triggered both an acknowledgement by Delhi of a naval encounter off its coastline with China in order presumably to gauge India’s resolve to back Vietnam, and to test its willingness to protect its energy stake. Having earlier accorded the Indian Navy the right to use the port of Nha Trang on the South China Sea as provisional base whenever its ships are in the vicinity, Vietnam leaked the details of a mid-July 2011 encounter the Indian navy amphibious assault ship, INS Airavat, sailing north to Haiphong, had with a suspected Chinese ship, in which Airavat was ordered out of those waters. The Indian ship did nothing of the kind and the incident made it to the international Press almost a month later. Critical commentaries in Indian newspapers[36] resulted in the Indian Ministry of External Affairs departing from its usual policy line of offering China minimum offence and asserting India’s right, in a joint venture with Vietnam, to drill for oil in an area clearly within Vietnamese claim lines.[37] Hanoi, it may be deduced, hoped to test the seriousness of Delhi’s profession of support for its South China Sea claims in particular, and its readiness to tangle with the Chinese naval forces and, presumably, was delighted with the outcome, what with India providing proof of being a reliable strategic partner. Vietnam and India categorically rejected the Chinese exclusive claim on the South China Sea with India making it clear that the state owned oil exploration firm – ONGC Videsh Ltd, would continue to explore and exploit its resource-rich seabed.[38]  In fact, the new found bounce in bilateral relations can be seen in the Oct 13, 2011 joint statement issued during the state visit to India of Vietnamese President, Truong Tan Sang, which repeatedly harped on their “strategic partnership”.[39] China is watchful and believes the move to involve India in the South China Sea disputes was actually instigated by Vietnam and the Philippines and that, under the circumstances, it may be best to be more confrontationist. Beijing is considering  replacing its policy of “shelv[ing] the dispute and joint[ly] develop[ing]” the oil and gas fields, with one that “must dare and …develop” and otherwise draw “an insurmountable red line” which, it hopes, an “ambitious” but “immature” India will not cross, especially in the context of “reluctant” United States and Japan.[40]

      The “string of pearls” to-date may be more potential than reality. But it does show China’s long term plan to avoid the possible Malacca choke point by developing other trade and access routes via construction of deep water ports on the Indian Ocean littoral, such as Ramree Island in Myanmar and Gwadar on the Baluch coast in Pakistan.[41]

 Conclusion:

 The strategic worries and insecurities sparked by aggressive Chinese policy and the uncertainties attending on the best way to handle a growingly uncontrollable China, manifestly the dominant Asian power, suggest the obvious hedging strategy for countries of Asia-Pacific desirous of constraining China. This strategy will have to rely on the US, Indian, and Japanese militaries, their combined capabilities augmented by  the military wherewithal and locational attributes of smaller countries in the region. The objectives would be to, firstly, strengthen the choke capabilities at the Malacca Straits with India’s integrated Andaman military command in the van; secondly, to reject the exclusionist Chinese notions of  “closed sea” whether in the South China Sea environs or in the Yellow Sea area and, finally, collectively to get into a position to  mobilize and deploy sufficient naval, air, land, and strategic nuclear forces in relatively quick time to dissuade and deter Beijing from embarking on provocative or punitive military actions against any single state or set of countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

—————

End-Notes:

[1] “A declining power” is how much of the world sees the United States per world-wide surveys conducted by Pew Global Attitudes Project. Refer Richard Wike, “From Hyperpower to Declining Power”, September 7, 2011 at www.pewglobal.org

[2] Stefan Shultz, “Europe and China Bound by Mutual Fears”, Spiegel Online, September 14, 2011 at www.spiegel.de

[3] The Economist, September 10, 2011, p. 78.

[4] Ashley  J. Tellis, Travis Tanner, and Jessica Keogh (eds.), Strategic Asia 2011-12 – Asia Responds to Its Rising Powers: China and India [Seattle: The National Bureau of Asian Research, 2011]

[5] Bharat Karnad, India’s Nuclear Policy [Westport, CO, & London: Praeger Security International, 2008], pp. 29-33.

[6] US agreed in the 1980s on joint projects such as “Peace Pearl” to upgrade the avionics suite in the Chinese F-8II fighter aircraft and to help in the production of high caliber ammunition. See David Shambaugh, Modernizing China’s Military: Progress, Problems, and Prospects [Berkeley & Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 2003], pp. 229-230

[7] The recent arrest in Taipei of Taiwan army Major General Lo Hsien-che for divulging details of the most secret command, control, and communications “Po sheng” (Broad Victory) network to China, reveals the extensive espionage and counter-espionage Taiwan and China engage in against each other, to secure every additional bit of military advantage. Andrew Higgins, “In Taiwan military, Chinese spy stirs unease”, Washington Post, September 27, 2011.  

[8] Kathryn Hille, Anna Fifield & Robin Twong, “China and US on edge over vote in Taiwan”, Financial Times, September 16, 2011.

[9] Bill Geertz, “Obama agrees to sell arms to Taiwan”, Washington Times, September 9, 2011.

[10] Keith B. Richburg, “China gives muted response to US-Taiwan arms deal”, Washington Post, September 19, 2011.

[11] To date, the US expenditure in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade and more  have exceeded $2.5 trillion.

[12] See his “China’s Rise Isn’t Our Demise”, New York Times, September 7, 2011.

[13] Robert D Kaplan, “A power shift in Asia”, Washington Post, September 23, 2011.

[14] “Analysis: Japan’s PM Noda: Warm to Washington, Wary of China”, Reuters, Washington Post, September 15, 2011.

[15] “Japan: Weapons of Mass Destruction” at www.globalsecurity.org

[16] “Dogfight over the archipelago”, Economist, Oct 1st , 2011

[17] Peter Hayes & Chung-in Moon, “Park Chung Hee, the CIA & the Bomb”, Global Asia, Volume 6, Number 3, Fall 2011.

[18] “Taiwan: nuclear weapons” at www.fas.org

[19] :Taiwan nuclear missiles:, June 26, 2006 at www.strategypage.com

[20]   Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, 2011, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Dept of Defense, p. 52

[21] “India develops cold feet on talks with Japan, United States”, Times of India, Aug 25, 2011

[22] “India upset over Russia calling off naval exercise”, Times of India, May 31, 2011. The Indian flotilla after ‘Malabar’ was scheduled to steam north for exercises with Russian Far Eastern Fleet off Vladivostok.

[23]  See footnote #16.

[24] “Ex-Japanese PM seeks security tie-up with India”, Times of India, September 21, 2011.

[25] Tsuneo Watanabe, Director, Research, The Tokyo Foundation, in a discussion with this analyst Oct 3, 2011.

[26] “Interaction with a Taiwanese delegation”, Vivekananda International Foundation at www.vifindia.org

[27] Tung I-Tsai, “For Taiwan, India’s in the slightly less hard basket”, Asia Times, February 15, 2006.

[28] T.N. Ninan, “Guns in the east”, Business Standard, Oct 8, 2011.

[29] A series of research articles by David Brewster analyze the evolution of many of these security partnerships. See his “The Strategic Relationship between India and Vietnam: Search for a Diamond on the South China Sea” Asian Survey, January 2009; “India’s Security Partnership with Singapore” Pacific Review, December 2009; and, “The Relationship between India and Indonesia: An Evolving Security Partnership?” Asian Survey, March/April 2011.

[30] I have argued that because China practices realpolitik, the effect of India’s arming Vietnam with nuclear missiles as a tit-for-tat gesture for China’s nuclear missile arming Pakistan, will have a salutary effect on China’s generally aggressive approach to India and the extended region. Bharat Karnad, Nuclear Weapons & Indian Security: The Realist Foundations of Strategy, 2nd edition [New Delhi: Macmillan India, 2005, 2002], pp. 540-542, and  Karnad, India’s Nuclear Policy, pp. 16-37, and Bharat Karnad, “Indian armed forces have China Syndrome“, Asian Age, Oct 13, 2011.

[31] “India to sell Brahmos missile to Vietnam”, Asian Age, Sept 20, 2011.

[32] Provisions of the new US-Australian defence and security treaty will likely be instrumental in facilitating operational military cooperation in China-related contingencies. Refer Anna Fifield, Peter Smith and Kathryn Hille, “US and Australia tighten military ties”, Financial Times, Sept 14, 2011.

[33] Myanmar Foreign Minister in an informal interaction at the Indian Council of World Affairs.

[34] “Don’t explore oil at (sic) South China Sea, warns Beijing”, Economic Times, Sept 16, 2011.

[35] Mark J. Valencia, “Diplomatic Drama: The South China Sea Imbroglio”, Global Asia, Vol 6, Number 3, Fall 2011.

[36] Bharat Karnad, “No buckling down to China”,  New Indian Express, Sept 24, 2011.

[37] Anupama Airy & Jayanth Joseph, “China objects to oil hunt, India says back off”, Hindustan Times, Sept 15, 2011.

[38] “Vietnam takes on China, says India can explore its oil”, Press Trust of India news agency, Tribune, Oct 9, 2011.

[39] See the text of the Joint Statement at www.saigon-gpdaily.com.vn. It states, for example, that both sides seek not merely to “deepen” the “strategic partnership” but to “broaden it to new areas of cooperation” in “the fields of defense and security” with a view, among other aims, to ensure “the safety, security and freedom of navigation in the high seas”, and that both countries abhor the “the threat or use of force” to resolve “disputes in the East Sea.”

[40] “Breaking up the coalition on the South China Sea”, a commentary published in Huanqiu and reprinted in Xinhua, Oct 7, 2011.

[41] Vivian Yang, “Is China’s String of Pearls Real?”, FPIP (Foreign Policy Institute Forum), July 18, 2011 at www.fpip.org

 

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India & America: The Future of a Strategic Partnership

Posted on November 18, 2011 by Bharat Karnad

Third Annual Symposium, Center for International Security Studies, Princeton University, Nov 10-12, 2011

Nov 12

1st Session: “Military Challenges and Defense Cooperation”/Bharat Karnad

1)    State and trajectory of India-Pakistan military balance and the India-China military balance

The India-Pakistan military balance is an irrelevance. It has skewed the Indian strategic vision, policy, focus, and military effort resulting in India being over-prepared against the weaker adversary but under-prepared to tangle credibly with the main threat – China.  The India-China military equation matters but the imbalance in capabilities is serious, less because of any paucity of advanced air, land, and sea weapons platforms and systems in the Indian order-of-battle, than because of the lack of physical infrastructure to sustain war-fighting and maximize the effectiveness of modern armaments in Indian employ. The absence of a network of “9-tonner” border roads along the 4,000 km disputed border with China, for example, restricts India to defensive, positional warfare in the mountains along a built-up line of pre-positioned stores and supplies some 60-90 kms behind LAC (Line of Actual Control). Then again, construction of a border road network, after years of neglect, is being carried out with more urgency now. And a number of advanced landing grounds (ALGs) at Beg Oldi, Nyoma, and Thoise, are being refurbished to enable both fighter aircraft and heavy transport planes, such as C-17, to operate off them. But, a constellation of surveillance satellites for 24/7 real-time coverage of land and sea approaches, and of target tracking and guidance capable satellites to home the missiles and airborne and seaborne guided munitions to the desired over-the-horizon and distant impact points, is behind schedule.

More salient is the balance of capabilities in case of a Sino-Pakistani operational link-up, a fairly remote scenario because it assumes India-Pakistan and India-China relations will plummet simultaneously to a point where military hostilities become imminent. Even so, the Indian Army has plans for a two front war. Insufficient forces for offensive warfare to enable fighting on the Tibetan plateau, — with two new offensive-tasked mountain Divisions plus two more Divisions under raising  – means that while the army will fight a holding operation in the north and east with the four new Divisions  beefing up the Indian defensive line manned by the existing 10 Divisions, an offensive war will be waged against Pakistan. To do more than just blunt determined PLA thrusts, a minimum of 9-13 Divisions are needed to prosecute meaningful and sustained offensive actions against China, even as serious dissuasion will be offered the PLA were atomic demolition munitions (ADMs) to be placed along likely avenues of Chinese ingress. ADMs will at once make the defensive tasks less onerous and, more emphatically deter China from a conventional military adventure alone or in cahoots with Pakistan.

In the two-war context, other than the distraction factor, the situation will not advantage Pakistan much, because eight Indian independent armor/mechanized battle groups for initial forays and three strike corps for follow-up actions will still be there for its army to contend with.  A realistic assessment in this situation is that India will likely fight both China and Pakistan to an impasse, with increasingly greater military and national effort being mustered against China to deal with the bigger, more potent, threat.

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The burdens of counter-insurgency on the Indian Army and its impact on its war-fighting role.

The continuous counter-insurgency (CI) operations the Indian Army has been involved in since Independence, first in the seven North-East provinces and, since 1989,  in Jammu& Kashmir (and, in the future, perhaps, against the Maoists in the so-called “red corridor” stretching from Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Jharkand to the Nepal border) is the best thing that could have happened to the Indian land forces. It has resulted in an army, blooded in actual and sustained combat, remaining sharp and in fighting trim, and emerging as second to none in counter-insurgency  and anti-guerilla warfare. This is all to the good. The harsh “live fire” training and experience of fighting mujahideen in the mountains of Kashmir and rebels in the North-East, moreover, has been widely acquired, not by a few specialized units, but by the bulk force, with mainline infantry units rotating through counter-insurgency tasks and led by young officers from all arms (and not exclusively combat arms – infantry, armored/mechanized, artillery). The officers, the intermediate strata of Junior Commissioned officers, and the common soldier, as a consequence, have alike become operationally more versatile across the conflict spectrum and better suited to man the “dual-purpose” Divisions in the “pivot corps” (holding formations) deployed in the west that can be rapidly switched, without need for retraining, etc., to the eastern theater to tackle the Chinese. Despite these obvious benefits, the army top brass nevertheless continue to oppose the deployment of the army to CI and, more generally, “aid-to civil” tasks.

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2)    Indian Air Force’s perception of its role in future conflicts.

IAF is the most schizophrenic of the Indian Armed Services. Despite the “strategic” medium it operates in and its professed doctrine of “aero-space power”, and an advanced aircraft inventory and support wherewithal, it has remained a singularly non-strategic-minded Service, preferring short-legged aircraft to strategic capability. Thus, infamously, in 1971 when it was offered the Tu-22 ‘Backfire’ strategic bomber, it opted for the medium range MiG-23BN instead. Its senior echelon spouts the rhetoric of air power as decisive in modern war – something in vogue since the 1st Gulf War in the 1990s, but, not yet, with any great conviction. Ironically, the record of the USAF in that war has reinforced IAF’s traditional antipathy for ground attack missions in support of land forces while emphasizing air superiority and strike roles. Even with a whole new bunch of sophisticated combat aircraft that are already in the air order-of-battle — 100 each of Mirage 2000 & MiG-29, 250-300 Su-30MKI, and the aircraft that will be inducted in the next decade  -– 126-200 Rafale/Eurofighter MMRCA and 250-300 Su-50 PAK/AF Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA), the new Chief of Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal NAK Browne, recently declared the IAF conceived of no “expeditionary role”, even though the Defence minister AK Antony has approved precisely this role for the Indian military, telling a conference of senior naval brass in mid-October 2011 that the Indian navy was “mandated” to be “net security provider for island nations in the Indian Ocean region”. But in a recent conversation ACM Browne explained to me that it was more rhetorical caution on his part because of what he claims are negative connotations of  the word “expeditionary”, and that the IAF as a “strategic” AF is ready for missions to protect Indian pol-mil and economic interests even in distant locations.

However, in the wake of the security cooperation accord signed recently, especially with Afghanistan and Vietnam, the Indian military may be compelled to think and act strategic. For one, the Ainee base in Tajikistan will now be refurbished and will act the forward post in Central Asia, hosting as much as a squadron of Su-30s. These will also be useful for possible action in case of  Pakistan-China operational military link-up. But IAF is still to obtain a full-fledged strategic habit of mind. Even with a fleet of 6-7 Il-78 MK aerial tankers and another six in the process of being acquired, IAF has still not permanently positioned a consequential force fraction – a minimum of 1-2 squadron(s) of Su-30s plus a tanker — on the Grand Nicobar island airfield, as part of the Integrated Andaman Command, to dissuade the PLAAF Su-27s from Hainan straying too far from home field. Certainly, a couple of Su-30 squadrons will be better employed out in the Andaman Sea than, as presently is the case, deployed on the mainland at the Kalaikunda AFB in West Bengal, and two squadrons earmarked for against Pakistan with the South-Western Air Command. Currently, 3-4 Su-30s pull short, three month, stints on Car Nicobar, except this air base has still to fully recover from the ravages of the tsunami. Rebuilding an upgraded  infrastructure to host a much larger Su-30 fleet is underway.

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3)    The kind of navy India is likely to build and its implications for the Indian Ocean region

By 2030, the Indian naval plans envisage a 150 ship strong navy, with 50 major combatants — aircraft carriers, stealth missile destroyers, and multi-role frigates. With three carriers, each able to carry a mix of around 12-16 combat aircraft (MiG-29K) and multi-role helicopters plus the aircraft in reserve, the Indian naval aviation strength, afloat and on-shore, will total some 150 fixed wing and rotary aircraft, including the existing squadron of navalised Jaguar low level strike aircraft, belonging to IAF, that will be upgraded with new nav/attack systems and missiles. With the entry of five large tankers/replenishment ships, the tanker to capital ship ratio – a metric for judging the ability to carry out blue water missions on sustained basis, will be an acceptable 1:5. It’ll have a substantial expeditionary capability as well with 6 Landing Platform Dock (LPDs) and some eight LSUs (Landing Ship Utility), among other amphibious warfare assets. For sea denial, some 20 diesel submarines will be available and, for the strategic deterrence mission, 6 SSBNs and another 6 SSNs.

Defense Minister AK Antony recently informed the navy that it was “mandated” to be “the net security provider for island nations in the Indian Ocean region.” But whether the navy’s strength of 50 capital ships will be enough  for it simultaneously to be the gendarme keeping peace and order in the Indian Ocean basin, undertake anti-piracy missions, be responsible for coastal security, aggressively contain the fast-growing Chinese Navy to east of Malacca, and protect Indian oil assets in the sea territory claimed by Vietnam and farther afield, is questionable.  It also remains to be seen if the Indian government and the Indian navy will muster the will to establish a near permanent flotilla-sized forward presence based in the Vietnamese port of Nha Trang, where the Indian Navy was recently  accorded rights by Hanoi, with ships rotating out of the Andaman Command and the main Eastern and Western Fleets, and develop the Mauritian island of Agalega as full-fledged naval base to establish Indian naval presence in the western Indian Ocean.

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4)    The trajectory of India’s missile and nuclear programs

The trajectory of the missile program is fine, but absent resumption of open-ended iterative explosive testing of various designs and types of fusion weapon designs, the business end of the thermonuclear armaments will always remain of unproven quality and, the nuclear deterrent will be inherently unreliable. This fact means that India will test again sometime in the future – the only question being “when”. In other words,  India can get a nuclear weapon on to target with fair bit of accuracy at extreme range with the Agni series of ballistic missiles, but without any guarantee that the high yield thermonuclear warheads in the nosecone or as glide bombs dropped by aircraft, will work as they are supposed to. This fact majorly undermines the credibility of the country’s deterrence posture, especially against China with its standard issue warhead of 1 MT yield on the DF-21 Mod 2s, among other missiles, targeted at India.

The Brahmos supersonic cruise missile, along with its air-launched and sea-borne variants – all three able to carry both conventional and nuclear ordnance, will permit considerable operational flexibility. A couple of regiments each are already deployed, per press reports, in the mountains facing Chinese PLA concentrations in Tibet, and opposite Pakistan in the Thar-Cholistan desert sector. With a hypersonic version, which is under development, the Brahmos will be a truly formidable weapon.

The rail-mobile versions of the Agni missile are being limited to the two missile trains already plying, with the preference being accorded, for good reasons, to the Agni IRBMs based in a series of well-stocked tunnel complexes excavated in the Himalayan mountain ranges – an option that renders these missiles virtually invulnerable. An Indian ICBM is into its development stage and will be ready for first test-firing by next year, assuming the Indian government okays it. Many of the Indian missiles are MARV-ed, but the MIRVing technology, while developed many years back, is on the shelf, ready for testing and only awaits the go-ahead from government. An indigenous ballistic missile defense (BMD) system covering the National Capital Region is expected to be operational in a few years time. There have so far been three successful test-firings of the interceptor missiles. A slight rejig of this BMD, and it is transformed into an anti-satellite weapon system.

The first of the Arihant-class SSBNs is undergoing harbor trials, will go to sea trials in 2012, and be inducted into service by 2013 or so. Two more Boats in this class will are under construction. A project for additional three SSBNs of more advanced design is expected to soon follow.

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5)    India’s capacity to project power outside South Asia over next 10-20 years

India, was among only 5 countries in the world, to have power projection capabilities in 1945 with two air-borne Divisions. These Divisions were, however, demobilized – the result of extreme strategic myopia of the army Generals in the early years after Independence – all of them essentially ramped up Brigadiers and senior Colonels, with little experience of strategy-making. But the army is a tested professional force that has been providing substantial peacekeeping forces for the UN – whose mission-roles may be regarded as peaceful-expeditionary. In Congo, Indian army peacekeepers have engaged in successful military operations against regime opponents. Elsewhere, the 108 Infantry Brigade is tasked for amphibious warfare and assigned permanently to the Integrated Andaman Command.  The army has an infantry Division-sized force to spare for out-of-area employment. It may be recalled that in 2003, an Indian army Division almost embarked on the defense of Kirkuk in Iraq at the US Government’s request, but which deployment fell through for whatever reasons. There are also some 10 battalions of Special Forces (SFs) with the army, including three paratroop battalions, that can be used as the cutting edge of an expeditionary or power projection capability requiring on-shore presence, and an additional battalion each with the navy (Marine Commandos) and the Air Force (‘Garud’ SF) for distant operations.

The Indian navy now has some four large tankers/provisions ships (and one in the pipeline), substantially increasing the reach of its major surface combatants — the aircraft carriers – the aging Vikrant alongside Vikramaditya (ex-Gorshkov) joining service in 2012, and stealth multi-role missile frigates and missile destroyers, increasingly with CODOG propulsion, totaling some 50 capital ships by 2030 and a fleet of maritime reconnaissance and strike aircraft – Il-76s and 4 P-8Is (with another four on order).

The range and mission sustainability and the punch of the IAF’s combat aircraft fleet – Mirage 2000, Su-30, MMRCA, FGFA, will be increased considerably with the augmentation of its aerial tanker fleet from the present six aircraft to 18 by the end of this decade, and the addition of some 14-15 AWACS in all, including 4-5 of the limited capability being developed using the Brazilian Embraer platform.

Indeed, with the Indian government, apparently, sanctioning an expeditionary policy, the three Services can be expected quickly to follow up by fleshing out plans for joint expeditionary and distant missions in the arc Simonstown-Singapore, with possibly a forward naval and air presence in the South China Sea at Nha Trang, Vietnam (where Hanoi has recently accorded Indian Navy basing rights) and in Agalega. All these capabilities combined with the sizeable amphibious warfare clout that’s being obtained and the navy’s extant fleet of 16 corvettes bristling with SSMs, will enable India impressively to project power, particularly in the Indian Ocean littoral.

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6)    The prospects for Indo-US cooperation in defense matters, e.g., naval, intelligence, weapons systems development and procurement

If the criteria for judging the degree, depth and scale of Indo-US strategic cooperation is narrowly legalistic, with cooperation judged in terms of whether or not India signs, CISMOA (Communication Interoperability and Security Memorandum Agreement), BECA (Basic Exchange and Cooperative Agreement for Geo-Spatial Cooperation) and LSA (Logistics Support Agreement), then the prospects are bleak because India is unlikely, anytime soon, to sign these agreements – much as these may be desirable  from the military efficacy point of view –something readily acknowledged, especially by senior Air Force and Naval officers. The main concerns about LSA, for instance, is the need to designate ports and bases where the US would set up its logistical infrastructure, which, as MEA (Ministry of External Affairs) sees it, raises issues of sovereignty, and about CISMOA that it involves establishing backward linkages to the heart of the secure Indian Services’communications systems and networks. Given a fundamental mistrust about the US and the fear that such linkages will permit the US to penetrate and potentially disrupt and subvert the intra and inter Service communications setup and the military’s communications with the Ministry of Defense and other agencies of the Government of India,  involving extremely sensitive information, data, etc, it is something that sits ill with the requirements of national security. Thus, a “strategic partnership” with the United States, based on the signing of such accords, is a politically hot-button issue and even a BJP-led NDA coalition regime, were it to return to power in 2014, will be loath to expend scarce political capital on overcoming political opposition to it.

The prospects, therefore, are for the two countries to carry on as they have done since the First Gulf War. American aircraft will continue to refuel at Indian air fields, US naval ships to berth and replenish freely at Indian ports, and US armed services regularly to exercise with their Indian counterparts, along the way building up mutual respect, trust and confidence, but without any of this activity creating much of a political stir. While popular support in India for changing the status quo may be lacking, there’s enough support for Delhi to continue with its ad hoc policy of military cooperation and collaboration with the US. In other words, there’s already a “strategic partnership” and the US desire to formalize and give it legal form may only create political discomfort and disruption in Delhi without fetching any positive results.

Joint Indo-US R&D in weapons systems, if properly planned and pursued by the two countries, has the potential for gaining America tremendous goodwill, approval and support for vastly improved bilateral relations and military cooperation, and who knows, even for signing CISMOA, LSA, etc. Russia is still benefitting from its Cold War-era role as the main supplier to the Indian military of advanced equipment (whatever the cost, quality, and spares-servicing support problems Indian user Services may have ended up experiencing).

A more relevant recent example is the manner in which Israel has rapidly climbed up the charts as a reliable source of military hardware and advanced technologies. Its willingness, moreover, unstintingly to transfer even the most sophisticated military technology and to join in sensitive Indian projects has won for Israel quite considerable respect and trust in India. Indeed, so successful has this trend been, Israeli defense sector Companies are now actively exploring avenues of cross-investment and equity sharing arrangements, involving the Indian defense industry, both public sector and private sector. Such linkages have rapidly consolidated Israel’s military political-military presence and influence, especially in Indian military circles and inside the government. And within the Indian society, the positive impression created by Israel  (also by its outreach programs, such as familiarizing Indian agriculturists with hydroponic farming and transferring relevant technology, etc.) has rendered  the “Indian Muslim” factor in Indian domestic politics, that previously held a veto on relations with Israel, irrelevant and beyond the pale of political criticism. And, no small point this, defense trade with India has generated enormous profits for the Israeli defense industry.

For the United States, the Israeli model of building a close military-industrial relationship without much drum-beating, may be worth exploring and  emulating. And now, with the Indian government finally and belatedly recognizing that for the Indian defense industry to survive, the Indian private sector will have to be majorly involved, this may be the right time for major American defense firms to put down roots by linking up with reputed Indian corporations stepping into the defense industrial sector.

7)    Important factors in the short-listing and selection of the MMRCA

Briefly, the context: For the US Companies in the fray – Lockheed and Boeing, selling India F-16 or F-18 was never all that crucially important a deal, it was ultimately a secondary market concern. For Dassault and EADS, on the other hand, the Indian sale virtually will decide whether France can anymore afford to produce combat aircraft, and whether the European consortium’s first and last foray into the combat aircraft business will be remotely profitable. With so much riding on the sale, it was natural that France and the Europeans would put out more, sweeten the deal in ways the US suppliers and US government simply cannot or wouldn’t. It essentially means India is in a position to extract a lot more, per the Indian offsets policy, even in technology areas unrelated to the aircraft in question. The recent offer of the Joint Strike Fighter to IAF, has not changed this situation.

With the criterion, moreover, being the level of combat aircraft technology offered, the US Companies stumbled at the very first hurdle. The US handicapped itself by offering upgraded versions of essentially late Sixties weapons platforms that, in design terms, are at the end of their tether. Even with the JSF F-35 in the fray, there’s unlikely to be a rethink of the MMRCA shortlist both because it will delay the acquisitions process and because there’s no guarantee cutting edge technologies, like the Block 3 systems software, will be included in the package the US nor that these will be transferred to India in toto, including the source codes. This is in contrast to the French and the European consortium that are prepared to hold nothing back.

Rafale has the edge because it already has the ground attack role configured into the aircraft with its on-board AESA radar. The Eurofighter is slightly handicapped by the fact that it was originally designed for continental air defense, with the ground attack role being an after-thought. Reason why EADS is still working on an AESA radar and expects to rely on Indian monies to finance its full development. Moreover, time delay and performance uncertainty concerning the Typhoon AESA radar favors Rafale.

In other respects, there’s parity. EADS partner, BAE Systems, has promised India its Taurus turbofan cruise missile as part of the Eurofighter package. The French have allowed India to choose any missile now in its inventory or under development to outfit the Indian Rafale. Dassault will also likely match the EADS scheme of establishing R&D centers in India and use it to source new combat aircraft and avionics technologies for the EADS Eurofighter and other underway programs. But where France will likely win out is that it can offer cooperation in other strategic areas, that EADS is in no position to provide.

Throughout the MMRCA selection process, the Indian government took care to pacify the US and Russia for losing out in the MMRCA sweepstakes by purchasing six C-17s (with six more in the process of being ordered) and the C-130Js, and agreeing, in effect, to subsidize the full development of the Russian Su-50 PAK/AF FGFA.

Posted in Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Navy, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West | 1 Comment

Weak Lightning

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Bharat Karnad

A multi-role combat aircraft is one of those things air forces the world over love for no good reason other than the desire to fly a plane that can do everything. Some 30 years ago, when as an MRCA (Multi-Role Combat Aircraft) IAF selected the Jaguar, only a low level short range strike plane, I had pointed out that the trouble with aircraft designed for multiple missions is that they cannot perform any particular role very well. Nothing has changed, except now “medium range” is added to the Air Staff Quality Requirements, two planes have been shortlisted, and the US is trying to scramble the competition by offering the Lockheed Martin Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) F-35 Lightning-II just as the bids by Dassault Avions for its Rafale fighter and by the European consortium EADS for its Typhoon warplane were being opened. This offer, while sudden, was not entirely unexpected, and has a whiff of the spoiler  even though there’s a more substantive reason behind it. In any event, if aircraft quality and performance is what matters, scrutinizing the JSF makes sense.

JSF can, at best, be considered a work in progress, and at worst an enormously expensive failure, that has already racked up 89% cost-over-run and time delays of several years, with no end in sight to major design and technology problems confronting it. Winslow Wheeler, a combat aviation expert formerly with the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) and ex-staff adviser to several US senators, deems this aircraft “a bad idea that shows every sign of turning into a disaster as big as the F-111 fiasco of the 1960s.”

The serious nature of F-35’s troubles is not a secret. According to news reports, the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test & Evaluation (DOTE) earlier this year pointed to a raft of problems afflicting the JSF, among them, the “transonic wing roll-off  [and] and greater than expected sideslip during medium angle of attack testing”, unreliability of the components, the after-burner on the Pratt & Whitney F-135 engine disrupting the air flow causing severe vibrations and preventing realization of maximum power, helmet-mounted display that has restricted testing to the preliminary Block 0.5 and Block 1 mission systems software,  and the inability of the on-board  inert gas generation system to obviate the buildup of oxygen in fuel tank that can result in fire and explosion. A news story additionally revealed significant structural weakness in the “forward root rib” providing “core strength of the wings” and, a recent GAO Report, referred to the faulty manufacturing of the outer mold of the aircraft that has undermined its stealth characteristics, rectifying which, it said, has major cost and time impacts.

JSF, it turns out, is an over-weight (49,500 pounds at takeoff in air-to-air role), under-powered (with an engine rated at 42,000 pounds of thrust) aircraft with a relatively small wing span (460 square feet) rendering it, in Wheeler’s words, “appallingly unmaneuverable” and in the same league as the short-lived F-105. Worse, it has only two tons of ordnance carrying capacity in its internal bays; loading additional bombs and weapons on outer wing stations will light up the aircraft like a Christmas tree on enemy radar, making nonsense of its vaunted stealth qualities. And in ground support mission, it is seen as a “non-starter” — “too fast to independently identify targets, too fragile to withstand ground fire”, and too lacking in payload capacity, including fuel, to pull useful loiter time over battlefield. The crux of the problem, according to Wheeler, is that the JSF “has mortgaged its success on a hypothetical vision of ultra long-range [air-to-air] radar….that has fallen on its face many times in real war”, eventuating in performance that is “embarrassing in the air-to-air role” even when compared to “elderly” aircraft such as the A-10.

But that’s not the half of it! The F-35 when it enters service will be the least test-proven of any new aircraft. In this regard, the GAO report mentions that “Open air testing [is] constrained by range limitations that are incapable of providing realistic testing of many key [Block 3 systems software-driven] capabilities” that are available, but mostly on paper. What this means, according to Wheeler, is that 97% of “flight testing [is] still unflown” and eventually only 17% of JSF’s flight characteristics will be physically tested and proven. Dismayed as much by the sub-standard aircraft in the offing and the escalating costs as by the unwillingness of the US to share “critical technologies”, many of the NATO partners have reduced their requirement of this aircraft. Britain, for instance, has cut back to 40 F-35s from its initial order of 138 aircraft, and Israel, which contracted for 20 JSFs, is seeking refurbished F-16s and F-18s instead, as a near and middle-term solution.

The F-35 has been pushed into a virtual death spiral also by the seemingly insurmountable difficulties facing its vertical take-off variant, compelling the Royal Navy to junk it, a decision the US Navy and the US Marines are expected to soon follow. Costly attempts to rectify design flaws and to meet performance criteria amidst slashed domestic and foreign sales have raised the programme expenditure to the one trillion dollar-level and the unit price of this platform to a “catastrophically high” $200 million, leading the US Congress to threaten a cut-off in funding.

It is the imperative to save the JSF programme that has prompted Washington to offer this plane to IAF. Delhi has to decide which combat aircraft industry – American, French or European, it will play the white knight to. Lockheed will flourish even if India rejects the F-35. But failure to sell Rafale or the Eurofighter will respectively put the survival of future combat aircraft development and production in France at risk and severely dent the prospects of EADS. With so much at stake and the urge to recover some of the costs,  France and the consortium of European countries will be prepared to give far more in return and by way of offsets to get a deal done.

[Published in ‘Asian Age’ and ‘Deccan Chronicle’ as “Why is US peddling a hangar queen?”, Nov 10, 2011 at www.asianage.com/columnists/why-us-peddling-hangar-queen-134

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Posted in India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Military Acquisitions, Strategic Relations with the US & West | 4 Comments

Nuclear reactor politics

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Bharat Karnad

What’s with the stir over the Koodankulam nuclear power plant? Over the years, India has constructed 20 nuclear power plants — four units in Kaiga, Karnataka, two in Kakrapar, Gujarat, two in Kalpakkam, Tamil Nadu, two in Narora, Uttar Pradesh, six in Rawatbhatta, Rajasthan, and four in Tarapur, Maharashtra, and has additional eight under construction (one in Kalpakkam, two in Kakrapar, two in Rawatbhatta, and two in Banswara, Rajasthan). Never have the local populations at any time at any of these various sites risen up as they have done in Koodankulam. It’s a mystery worth probing.

It cannot be the case that the people protesting in Koodankulam have suddenly become knowledgeable about the dangers posed by a nuclear power station in their backyard. The bulk of the protesters seem to be the bus-ed in crowd, prepared to shout slogans and sit-in for a price as the organisers strut about mouthing stuff the audience barely comprehends about Koodankulam being a horrendous nuclear accident waiting to happen. The disaster at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power complex has provided them a handle. Unfortunately for the world, Japan has provided two intertwined benchmarks — the catastrophic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic weapons, and the Fukushima civilian nuclear plant disaster, until now when Fukushima is portrayed as a Hiroshima by other nuclear means.

It does not seem to matter that the anti-nuclear rhetoric of the Koodankulam demonstrators has only a passing connection with the Fukushima reality — a ‘low probability-high cost’ incident triggered by a combination of earthquake and tsunami that ended up tripping the safety devices and negating the automatically activated safety measures, to a point where all control systems were overwhelmed, and the nuclear core reached melt-down condition. In such instances, the trade-off is between plant safety and cost. One can engineer the most stringent safety standards in building nuclear power stations to cater for the remotest contingency, if one is also willing to foot the enormously enhanced bill. So, a via media usually involves a compromise that eliminates the risk from extreme circumstances.

What has rendered Koodankulam an emotive issue, is the supposed shortfalls in nuclear safety that have ended up conjuring popular visions of a Fukushima in waiting. It brooks no reasonable debate as the issue has transited into the realm of faith, the physics and engineering of it be damned. This seems literally the case with the recently elected Koodankulam panchayat president Sandal V Muthuraja, who revealed to the Press that his election owed much to a parish priest of nearby Idinthakarai throwing his support behind him in return for opposing the nuclear power plant. It is possible that, unusual for a cleric, he is equally well-versed in Catholic liturgy and radiation risk analysis. More likely, however, he is an average Joe and a nuclear know-nothing convinced he is doing god’s work if it also results in the filling of church coffers. The question then is the identity and motivation of the donors. The anti-nuclear lobby in India, unlike the well-off Green Movement in the West, is cash poor and so marginalised it has become irrelevant. But along with local opinion leaders, it has been co-opted by the well-funded Greens from abroad, to lead the fight against Koodankulam. This is what S K Jain, chairman, Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd believes has happened, referring darkly to “Foreign nationals who are green from the US, Finland, France, Australia and Germany…. and backing locals in their agitation.”

Of the five countries Jain has mentioned, the United States (partnering Japan), France and Germany, it turns out, are centrally involved in trying to sell India unproven reactors run on imported enriched uranium fuel and related technologies and, in such matters, Australia habitually plays the dummy to Washington’s ventriloquist. The sales of the American Westinghouse-Toshiba AP 1000 reactor and the Franco-German 1600 MW power plant (with the French Company, Areva, providing the principal nuclear systems and assemblies and the German giant, Siemens, the high-voltage, low loss, transmission technology) did not go through because of insistence by these supplier countries that they be exempted from Indian law, specifically the Civilian Liability for Nuclear Damage Act 2010, that does not cap the liability of purveyors of nuclear reactor technology. The AP 1000 reactor, for instance, has failed to win certification from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission on safety grounds. The new Areva reactor has yet to establish its bonafides with the only 1600 MW reactor, under construction in Olkiluoto, Finland, suffering huge time and cost over-runs.

Paris made common cause with Washington but only until it was assured a sale, when France decided to accept Indian government assurances and prepared to set up a 9,900 MW Areva nuclear complex at Jaitapur in Maharashtra whereas the US, trying to avoid future complications, wanted a binding Indian commitment that the Convention on Supplementary Compensation (CSC), limiting liability payouts to $300 million that Delhi signed in October 2010, will be adhered to — a legal obligation the Manmohan Singh government finds it politically infeasible to undertake given the contrary Indian law passed by Parliament.

The US reactor deals are thus hanging fire pending, at best, papering over of the differences between the Indian liability law and CSC. Russia, having grandfathered the Koodankulam plant under a 1988 bilateral agreement, has contracted to build four more VVER 1000 reactor units at the same location, which is seen by Washington as unfair advantage accruing to Moscow. This Russian edge is perhaps sought to be blunted by funnelling monies into a popular movement against the Koodankulam plant just before its commissioning. Considering its predicament, Russia may have encouraged the Communist Party (Marxist) to form the ‘National Committee in Support of Jaitapur Struggle’ and do in this Konkan fishing village what the Western countries may be doing to it in Koodankulam — using environmental and safety concerns to rouse the ire of people to stop the Areva plants from getting off the ground. This is equalisation process at work where the dog-eat-dog and dog-in-the manger principles of international politics intrude into the domain of high value nuclear reactor sales.

[Published in ‘The New Indian Express’, Nov 3, 2011, at http://expressbuzz/op-ed/opinion/Nuclear-reactor-politics/329583.html    ]

Posted in Indian Politics, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Relations with Russia, Strategic Relations with the US & West | 2 Comments

No nuclear war, but an arms race?

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Bharat Karnad

[Published in South Asian Journal (Lahore), Issue No. 33, July-September 2011]

                 

Talk of a four-node vicious circle! Pakistan is perennially at loggerheads with India, whose conventional military handicap it seeks to overcome with significant arms transfers by China and a stiffening nuclear missile muscle it acquired courtesy Beijing’s stance strategically to distract India and keep it preoccupied with the subcontinent. Pakistan’s “chronic sense of insecurity”, write Howard and Teresita Schaffer, old South Asia hands formerly at the US State Department,  is sought to be addressed centrally with “efforts to counter-balance the Indian threat.”[1] China and the United States have helped Pakistan deal with India in the past, and will calibrate their military assistance so as not to alienate India. Indeed, given the precipitous slide in its relations with Pakistan triggered by the special forces operation to kill Osama bin Laden,[2] Washington may not  play ball at all if the ties don’t recover.

 

     Considering its size and all-round heft, India is willy-nilly the natural ideological, political, and economic rival to China in Asia against whom India’s nuclear and conventional forces are principally orientated, even as it maintains sufficient military wherewithal to deter Pakistan’s adventurism.[3] Besides, India is concerned about the entrenched Sino-Pakistan strategic nexus. China, on its part, apprehends the United States with quite considerable military capabilities in Asia as its main adversary, one that props up an independent Taiwan, which China ferociously covets, and in alliance with Japan and South Korea in the Far East, limits its options, Pacific-wards, and in league with many Asian states, encourages resistance against its territorial claims and prevents the spread of its influence.[4] Then there is the United States seeking to extend its status as the predominant power into the new century, and in Asia to fence in China using its own significant military presence, but also in cooperation with traditional allies (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) and new strategic partners, including India, on the Chinese periphery.[5]

 

     Add to this combustible mix the likely fuze in the subcontinent of the al-Qaeda-inspired global jihadi terrorism that was initially nurtured by the US as a means of unsettling the Soviet occupation order in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and has since been seen by Pakistan as a sometime useful asymmetric sub-conventional military asset to deploy against India. But in its Taliban guise, the militants established themselves as the ruling regime in Kabul and, in the wake of 9/11, have been relentlessly targeted by the US and NATO and, in turn, have waged a protracted war against the foreign interventionist forces in Afghanistan and north Waziristan region of Pakistan. Post-9/11, the al-Qaeda-Taliban are feared by the West as potential perpetrators of spectacular acts of terrorism, especially nuclear terrorism. To fight this scourge, an ambivalent Pakistan has been shoehorned by Washington into a frontline role which the former finds difficult to play. Among other reasons, because of the Pakistan army Inter-Services Intelligence directorate’s continuing links with the al-Qaeda-Taliban and the Lashkar affiliates at home.[6]  At the same time, Pakistan is not in a position to tell Washington where to get off. The unsatisfactory compromise has resulted in the Pakistan army fitfully  fighting certain factions of the home grown Tehreek-i-Taliban and sections of the Haqqani tribal network at America’s bidding, prompting unending terrorist attacks by the TTP and its offshoots such as Lashkar-i-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammad it had previously nurtured, against the Pakistani state itself.[7] It has added immeasurably to the prevailing unsettled domestic condition — the breakdown of law and order, social and religious violence, and the ongoing secessionist movements, such as the one in Baluchistan.

 

     In this confused milieu with cross-cutting motivations and interests of the four nodal players, isolating the India-Pakistan nuclear tangle is difficult.  This has not, however, stopped professional Track-2ers to try and do just this. Many of them, trained in concepts such as nuclear risk reduction centres conceived by the Sandia Corporation, seek to implement them in the India-Pakistan context. This may not work because, for starters, both sides will have to disclose the size and quality of their respective nuclear-missile inventories. These Second Trackers talk of the two sides withdrawing their early generation short-range ballistic missiles – Prithvi-I, Abdali, Ghaznavi, as part of nuclear confidence building measures, which action they hope the Foreign Secretary-level talks will formalize.[8] By making missile drawdowns a two-way street, India essentially has conceded parity which will complicate its nuclear arsenal buildup to meet the greater threat from China without spooking Pakistan and rendering agreements on mutual reductions infructuous. Except, India has lost the opportunity of making serious headway in diluting mistrust and psychologically blunting Pakistani threat perceptions of India, which reciprocal action will not do. What would have worked, as this analyst had suggested over ten years ago, is India’s unilaterally and unconditionally withdrawing its nuclearized Prithvi-I SRBM from forward deployment on the Pakistan border. This could have been safely done as all target-sets inside Pakistan are covered by longer-range Agni missiles fired from hinterland launch points.[9]

 

     India, China and Pakistan alike profess “minimum deterrence”. But for each of these countries deciding what is the “minimum” nuclear force necessary and “how much is enough” presents insuperable difficulties. It requires each country to ascertain exactly what nuclear forces of what range and other attributes are in the others’ inventories. From India’s point of view, China’s arsenal is the primary concern particularly if things get rough owing to internal upheavals within China,[10] with Pakistan being a secondary worry. From China’s perspective the issue relates to American nuclear wherewithal and, regionally, the Indian nuclear weapons holdings. Pakistan’s imperative is simpler. Given its India-centric security focus, the quality and quantity of Indian nuclear weapons systems and the manner of, and preconditions for, their use are its only concern.

 

     In their different calculi, each government also faces the task of gauging the enemy’s intentions, to do which, with any certitude, is almost impossible. Pakistani perceptions of the supposed Indian animus are stark enough. But, India has no such reciprocal fear. What has begun to preoccupy Delhi are the imponderables attending on China’s two-pronged non-linear strategic policy of seeking increased trade and friendly exchanges (including an “annual strategic dialogue”) on the one hand and, at the same time, diverting the Brahmaputra River, massing troops on the Tibetan plateau and pressuring the Indian military units stationed along the nearly 3,000 km-long-border, particularly opposite Tawang – the center of Tibetan Lama-ist tradition China, possessing which will enable Beijing to get a handle on the Tibetan “splittist” problem, are hugely troubling. A separate concern is what China may next transfer by way technology, materials and expertise to its “all weather friend” Pakistan – know-how for boosted fission weapon? Thermonuclear weapons design data? If such transfers do take place, even the most circumspect Indian government (of the Manmohan Singh kind) will be compelled to respond in tit-for-tat fashion and, as I have been advocating for some 15 years now, level the strategic playing field by nuclear missile arming Vietnam and other interested states that fear Chinese expansionism, which will roil the over-all strategic “correlation of forces” in Asia.[11]

 

     As the third side of this triangle, China is keyed to dealing with the significant US forward military presence offshore on its eastern and southern flanks, and to keeping India off-balance but quiet (with promises of good relations that the Manmohan Singh government has swallowed whole but successor governments may not) by selectively pressing the pressure points, not excluding reviving aid and assistance to rebel movements in the Indian north-east.[12]

 

     Governments in these countries, in the circumstances, find themselves reasonably assuming the worst about each other and building up so they are not caught short in a strategic contingency.[13] In this situation, it is futile to preach the merits of small nuclear forces as the US and West European governments, and the globally active US arms control and nonproliferation lobby have been doing but, which they have learned to their dismay, doesn’t work. Asian nuclear dynamics are not susceptible to outside influence and blandishments and have, in fact, now become an immutable part of Asia’s strategic reality. In the event, India, China and Pakistan will build to whatever level each state believes will best protect and safeguard its national security interests. By substituting for actual conflict, arms races help bad situations – such as the one existing during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and that, of and on, afflict India and Pakistan relations and, to a lesser extent, India and China ties, stabilize.[14] The only constraint is how much each country is willing and able to spend for how long on beefing up its nuclear forces, an investment that has an “opportunity cost” in terms of strengthening and modernizing the conventional military. In this regard, the question is whether Pakistan can sustain a nuclear arms race for very long.[15]

 

Pursuing the Chimera of Parity

 

     Double-digit growth rates ensure that India and China will not lack the financial resources for military build-up[16] but the sheer paucity of resources handicaps Pakistan. Defence allocations in Fiscal 2011-2012 of Rs 495 billion (approximately US$ 6 billion), an increase of 12% over last year’s level but, in absolute terms, around a third less than Pakistan’s annual debt servicing obligations of some $700 billion, and projected gross domestic product growth of 4.25% and an inflation rate of 12% amounts in real terms to a receding Pakistani defence budget.[17] Compare this with the US$ 37 billion current year Indian subvention for defense and rising and the US$ 92 billion for like purpose by China, to begin to understand both the extent of disparity and its inevitable impact. Indeed, this level of defense expenditure accounts for only 2.2% of the galloping Indian GDP, for instance. Worse, capital hardware acquisition costs annually rise by roughly 50%-250% depending on the equipment. For Pakistan, even armaments that are “gifted” by China, such as the 50 JF-17s or stuff obtained at cut-rate prices, suck up scarce resources as operating and maintenance costs as India has learned from its long experience of running ex-Russian military hardware acquired at “friendship prices”. There is the other thing Islamabad has to be mindful of.  Supplying military hardware and nuclear materials and information is one thing. Getting directly involved in shoring up Pakistan’s military position vis a vis India is something else altogether, because that will have a  bearing on the tolerance thresholds of not just India but the US and the West, that China will not brashly cross. It is the reason why China publicly declined to build and develop the Gwadar naval base even when implored by the visiting Pakistan Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani.[18] So, beyond a point Pakistan cannot depend on China and the West to do the rescue act. This realization would actually work to temper the bellicosity Pakistan affects with India, unless Pakistan army means to sequester all the national resources to indulge its conceit of nuclear parity with India.

 

     Considering, moreover, that Pakistan invests very little on education and health, it finds it has booby-trapped itself. The pauperization of the people has led to more families in urban and rural Pakistan consigning the futures of their children to the tender mercies of the fundamentalist madrassas. These last are talent pools, supplying masses of religiously motivated illiterates and semi-literates that constitute cannon fodder for the jihadi cause, and fill the ranks of affiliates of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Mass-produced terrorists and suicide bombers, once believed by ISI to be easily diverted to Kashmir, end up, as is happening now, attacking the Pakistani society and fighting the army.[19]  Apparently, the Pakistan Chief of Army Staff General Parvez Ashfaq Kayani, has belatedly recognized the country is stuck on the horns of a dilemma. Why else would he urge the channeling of US military aid into “reducing the burden of the common man”?[20]

 

Talking up Nuclear First Use

 

     In the circumstances, Pakistan’s reliance on nuclear weapons to deter India, is understandable even if the resulting nuclear stance assumed by an impoverished country resembles, in Maozedong’s words, “a poor man or beggar [walking] out in a beautiful suit.”[21] The central pillar of this deterrence scheme is to talk up the credibility and imminence of their use in hostilities with India. Except, Pakistan may have succeeded only too well! It is, after all, the sort of thing that Western audiences are predisposed to hear anyway as it reinforces their prejudiced views of Pakistan – an immature nuclear up-start. It motivates the US and West European governments, strategic enclaves, and powerful arms control lobbies to launch relentless campaigns to bring Pakistan, as also India, somehow into the nonproliferation net and to shackle their nuclear programs in the belief that nothing less will suffice to ensure regional and international peace. The doom-sayers have not moderated their tune over the years despite their worst case-scenarios not panning out. South Asian nuclear ambitions are not that easily reined in. Not the strictest adherence to the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty provisions nor the imposition of the numerous capability denial regimes (Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, Fissile Materials Cutoff Treaty, Wassenar Agreement, the Australia Group, Nuclear Suppliers Group, Missile Technology Control Treaty), has quite worked.   

 

     However, home-grown fright-mongers among the local intelligentsia on the two sides have joined their Western counterparts in stoking nuclear paranoia at home owing to few among them understanding the India-Pakistan conflict characteristics and even fewer appreciating the nuclear dynamics at work. The fear is Delhi and Islamabad simply cannot be trusted to be cool in a military crisis and not to stumble into doing the “unthinkable”.[22]  It is in the country’s deterrence interests believes the Pakistan army’s Strategic Plans Division (SPD), Chaklala — the nuclear secretariat of the Nuclear Command Authority in Pakistan, to make more of the possibility of a nuclear calamity in the offing than is actually warranted by reality. Erstwhile stalwarts – serving and retired – from SPD arms control directorate (such as Brigadier Feroze Hassan Khan), are sent out to, and are absorbed in, Western strategic communities, where they paint word pictures of a situation on the brink, as a means of reinforcing the stereotyped views of Indians and Pakistanis pushing the supposedly hair-trigger nuclear situation existing between them over the edge. But how “hair trigger” can the situation be if both countries keep their nuclear weapons safely in a disassembled state? It is nevertheless a line indefatigably pushed by US institutions (like the unit at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory working on geopolitics and the Sandia corporation), a host of American and other thinktanks, and by US officials, such as Peter R. Lavoy, responsible for South Asia – god help us! — on the US Intelligence Council.[23]

 

     The SPD calculation seemingly is that by raising the spectre of imminent or even immanent nuclear war and rooting the idea of this impending catastrophe in Western minds, the United States, Britain, and other NATO states, will be primed to intervene to save Pakistan’s goose in an actual nuclear crisis. What the Pakistan army, government and people have to consider is whether and how much such a thesis mainly hurts Pakistan’s credibility as a responsible nuclear weapon state and the prospect of legitimating its nuclear status and standing, particularly when juxtaposed against the prevailing view in international circles of a perennially unstable Pakistan in the throes of social and religious chaos, and emerging as both a full-blown “failed state” and “epicenter of global terrorism”.

 

     The Indian counterparts of the SPD-Chaklala gang (or Chaklalus, for short) purvey the same “Kashmir-flashpoint, Danger!, minimal deterrence”-thesis as they circumambulate the international seminar circuit with ears cocked to whatever their mainly Western audiences want to hear. In these ranks are opinionated retired civil servants and long-in-the-tooth soldiers reaching for second careers as strategic analysts, liberal, left-leaning, jhola-wallahs (as they were earlier called), denizens of local think-tanks — whose “research” is funded by Western Foundation monies, and Indian academic types who have got on to the American arms control gravy train and mean to stay on board and newer ones eager for a ticket to ride on it. (Luckily for India, many of the leading lights from this group left for lucrative stints in Singapore at the cash-rich Rajaratnam School of International Relations at the National Technical University, even as some of them, unfortunately for the cause of clear, realistic, thinking on nuclear deterrence, have returned to muddy the waters!) The views of this latter group invariably converge with those of the Chaklalus, and of the usual nonproliferation-fixated US academics and thinktankers in the business of scaring uninformed audiences witless. Except, after years of hearing the same old alarms, the audiences are becoming inured to the block-buster nuclear fright scenarios (witness how few international seminars and conferences these days anymore deal with this topic). But to reiterate, SPD is convinced that all this brouhaha helps their cause of drawing attention to their nuclear plight vis a vis India.

 

     In fact, Pakistan’s tom-tomming of its program of nuclear weapons augmentation and the implied threat of use have had an unintended effect. Given the quite considerable stockpile of spent fuel/fissile material at hand, the Indian government merely orders accelerated production of weapons/warheads to augment the weapons inventory in response to credible reports of Pakistan’s nuclear buildup, and, typically, turns the subject around to the accessibility of Pakistani nuclear weapons to terrorist outfits and their vulnerability to terrorist action, and highlights the risk of the Pakistani program leaking fissionable material and expertise for the al-Qaeda-Taliban to fashion “dirty bombs” or radiation diffusion devices (RDDs).[24] It results in an up-tick in concerns being voiced in the US and Western policy quarters about nuclear terrorism, and ultimately in more pressure on the Pakistan army and government to contain the potential menace, and in greater covert efforts by major countries to “map” Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and facilities, perhaps, as a prelude to preemptively grab and/or destroy them in a crisis.[25] The net-effect of nuclear chest-thumping by Pakistan, in the event, is negative.

 

     There are three reasons for the Indian government’s relaxed attitude to Pakistani provocations these days. One, the quiet confidence that no matter what Pakistan does by way of beefing up its nuclear production wherewithal, India has enough reprocessable spent fuel and weapon grade plutonium holdings to ratchet up the pace of weapons production. So far this action-reaction sequence has remained relatively slow and low-key. But should Islamabad force the pace, Delhi will resignedly embark on a nuclear arms race that Pakistan will find impossible to catch up, let alone win. In this regard, it must be borne in mind that, notwithstanding the limitations imposed by the 2006 US-Indian civilian nuclear deal, India has the 100 MW Dhruva dedicated military-use reactor plus eight natural uranium fueled 220 MW power reactors that can run at “low burnup” to produce weapon-grade plutonium at will versus 3-4 plutonium-outputting reactors at Khushab gifted and erected by China. The second factor is a better understanding in Indian official quarters of a fact this author has been stressing since well before the 1998 test, namely, that the salience of nuclear weapons is somewhat tangential to the essentially limited nature of India-Pakistan conflicts, meaning that none of the classical deterrence notions of the Cold War really apply to the South Asian situation, primarily because, ultimately, the extant disparity will be mirrored in the “exchange ratio” that is extremely unfavorable to Pakistan in an all-out nuclear exchange.[26] And finally, that the Indian National Technical Research Organization has built up its nuclear forensics data and capability to a point where it can identify any Pakistan-sourced fissile material that the ISI may leak to the jihadi elements under its wings to detonate “dirty bombs” in Indian cities. Such a terrorist act will at once catapult the ensuing conflict into the nuclear realm, which Pakistan cannot afford to let happen.[27]

 

The Nature of India-Pakistan Wars

 

     In order, however, to dissect Pakistan’s stated nuclear first-use strategy, it is important to establish the socio-cultural context in which India-Pakistan conflicts occur. To reprise the arguments I have made at length in my writings regarding the essentially constrained nature of India-Pakistan conflicts (which, curiously Indian and Pakistani analysts/commentators are unwilling to acknowledge and Western experts are unable to refute and, therefore, end up ignoring, the more easily to purvey their unsupportable theories of India-Pakistan conflicts):[28] These have been remarkably tame and controlled affairs, more “communal riots with tanks” as the late Indian army Major General D.K. Palit observed with tongue firmly not in cheek, than real wars. Like riots, India-Pakistan “wars” are, firstly, restricted in geographic space, with most of the action localized to the desert and semi-arid tracts of the Thar fronting on Rajasthan and northern Gujarat where there is room for thrust and parry by armored and mechanized formations, and which space for maneuver is unavailable in the plains terrain of the Punjab (on either side) with ditch-cum-bund anti-tank defenses, and the aerial bombardment of each other’s cities is eschewed.  Secondly, the action is limited in time: The longest slugfest, incidentally, were the first operations in Kashmir in 1947-48 that stretched to one and half years; the 1971 fight lasted all of 12 days, and the 1965 War ended in less than a fortnight with both sides, in the last case, coming perilously close to exhausting their ammunition and spares stocks – Pakistan had only a week’s war materiel left, India 10 days worth by the time closure was applied. Thirdly, the intensity levels (“intense rates of fire”) usually high at the start of hostilities quickly petered out into desultory fighting, with both sides extra careful in husbanding their scarce holdings of POL (petroleum, oil, lubricants), ammunition, and spares. And, finally, except in 1971 – when the military opportunity was too inviting for India to ignore — all the extended skirmishing, which is what the vigorous to-ing and fro-ing around the border by tanks and mechanized infantry in the India-Pakistan “wars” have amounted to, eventuated in the usual impasse and, after the inevitable post-conflict confabulations, a return to status quo ante, i.e. a return to the territorial situation as existed prior to hostilities, which included the return by India after the 1965 war of the strategic Haji Pir salient in disputed Jammu & Kashmir, which international law permitted India to keep.

 

     This unique nature of India-Pakistan wars is because of the still strong organic links of religion, (classical and popular) culture, language and ethnicity between the two societies and nations and, most importantly, owing to kith and kinship ties that are continually renewed by communities and families (albeit to a lessening extent as time passes) – across the social spectrum, keeping cross-border family ties in tact and forging new links of marriage. While Pakistan, post-Zia ul-Haq’s rule, is more radicalized, these social links have not frayed (as is reflected in the fact that the first point on any bilateral “normalization” agenda is usually a mutual easing of visa regulations). Moreover, a politically conscious Muslim electorate in India that wields the swing vote in nearly half of the Lok Sabha constituencies will patriotically countenance bloodying Pakistan’s nose but may not as readily accept a “war of annihilation” against it, assuming any Indian government would be fool enough to carry out a war that will end in an additional 180 million Muslims pickled in fundamentalist juices, willy-nilly joining the Indian fold.[29]

 

A Brief Dissection of Pakistan’s Nuclear First Use Strategy

 

     The most commonsensical view of nuclear weapons is Maozedong’s circa September 1961. Nuclear weapons, he asserted, are “something to scare people [with], [but while producing them absorbs] a lot of money  [they are] useless.” However, he added that “the more [of them] there are, the harder it will be for nuclear wars to break out”. And further, that if a war nevertheless breaks out in a nuclearized milieu, “it will be a war of conventional weapons.” He thereby implicitly supported the notion that a nuclear arms race resulting in more weapons is a stabilizing factor because it will make it harder for nations indulging in conventional military skirmishing to cross the nuclear Rubicon. Mao then explained to the visiting Field Marshal Montgomery just why he did not care for nuclear weapons (and why most conventional militaries have not either). Unlike nuclear weapons, “If conventional weapons are used,” he said, “the arts of war, such as strategies and tactics, can be emphasized, and commanders can change plans to suit the situation.” In a nuclear war, in contrast, the Chinese Communist Party Chairman rued, “it will be just a matter of pressing buttons, and the war will be over after a few presses.”[30]

 

     The Pakistan army, despite enjoying parity with the Indian army in deployable armored and mechanized forces is, apparently, not confident enough about its warfighting capability or the qualities of its generalship, for it to consider initiating first use of nuclear weapon as soon as the situation begins turning bad on the battlefield. In this regard, the testing and induction of the Hatf-9 (Nasr) 60 km range nuclear warheaded short range ballistic missile has occasioned a bit of euphoria in Pakistani circles. The Pakistan army now believes that this particular missile provides them the means of stanching a determined Indian armored advance into their country. The strategy seemingly is for the Hatf-9 to be used first, in the full knowledge that India will respond, its declaratory stance of massive retaliation notwithstanding, with its own like missile, the nuclearized Prithvi-II, on similar Pakistani targets. With this exchange, the Pakistan military is convinced, the hostilities will be brought to an abrupt halt by the big powers, unwilling to tolerate further escalation.[31] Indian Track-2ers, like Rear Admiral Raja Menon, incidentally, believe that a whole bunch of Hatf-9 missiles will enable Pakistan to prosecute a counterforce strategy. How a 60-km mainly battlefield missile can be considered a counter-force weapon is anybody’s guess, unless Rear Admiral Raja Menon and his ilk think of Pakistani counterforce only in terms of advancing Indian tanks, armored personnel carriers, and infantry combat vehicles![32] 

 

     The weakness in Pakistani strategy are many. It is wrongly assumed, for instance, that the Indian army’s ‘Cold Start’ strategy can, in fact, register the kind of advance by armored formations — the eight independent battle groups (IBGs) re-constituted from the mechanized elements of the holding corps positioned along the border — into Pakistani territory, with the thrust being deepened once the three strike corps go into action from the points where the IBGs have reached. This is to buy into the Indian army’s brochures! The truth is ‘Cold Start’ will permit the Indian armor to penetrate on the same old Rahim Yar Khan-axis but only to a marginally greater extent than in conflicts past. Moreover, what will still be “shallow” penetration is sought mostly as a  “bargaining chip” in the post-war negotiations. Indian armored advance, moreover,  is unlikely to reach deep enough to threaten, say, the north-south Karachi-Peshawar lifeline – a credible “red line” that can be inferred from  the albeit opaque enunciation of the four tripwires by Lieutenant General Khalid Kidwai, Director General, SPD, some years back. In any case, the IBGs have no great staying power to affect very deep penetration in the initial phase to establish a jump-off line for the strike corps, I have argued, in the main, because of the inherent limitations of the logistics load these formations can carry into battle, and the difficulty of firming up, sustaining, and safeguarding a vulnerable supply line stretching into Pakistan territory to fuel the advance.[33]

 

     For the purpose of analyzing Pakistan military’s logic, however, let us assume that, whatever the depth of Indian ingress, Pakistan army will hit the Indian units in the vanguard with the Hatf-9, fully expecting that it will have to absorb the loss of some of its forward units to an Indian tactical counter-strike. The first thing to remember is that Pakistan’s first use of a nuclear weapon will break an extremely strong taboo against such use that has held in the most trying circumstances post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki and is now accepted as an inviolable international norm.[34]  Even China – that most brazen transgressor of international rules, has disavowed nuclear first use.  “How can an atom bomb be used irresponsibly?” asked Maozedong. “That won’t do. We can’t use it irresponsibly…To use it irresponsibly means committing a crime.”[35] Besides, it will be an unprecedented action and break the mould of contained India-Pakistan conflicts. Coming as it would, in the wake of a conflict that, going by the past record, Pakistan will have started[36] or substantively provoked, it could be calamitous for Pakistan. While such use will be intended by Pakistan as first and only use, it could turn out to be the first blow in an ostensibly limited nuclear war that is unlikely to remain limited for the simple reason that an Indian retributive strike in the circumstances will naturally go beyond the contours of “proportional” response and be manifestly punitive. China, United States, and other Western states that Pakistan is expecting to step into the imbroglio at this stage may refuse to do so. If they do get involved, they might demand an immediate termination of hostilities all right but, equally, will deem the disproportionate and hard-hitting Indian punitive retaliatory strike(s) valid, reasonable, and maintainable under international law. The violator of the nuclear taboo will have to pay the price.

 

     The Pakistan army could, of course, shrug off the international pressure to end the conflict, and decide to call the intruding great powers’ bluff and escalate unleashing, in the process, spiraling strikes and counter-strikes. It will prove the senior official who served in both the Nixon and Reagan Administrations right, when he likened limited nuclear war to limited pregnancy, saying “there’s no such thing”.[37]  Its great power patrons, after their futile good faith attempt, will withdraw, leaving Pakistan to its condign fate. And that’s when that little matter of a seriously adverse exchange ratio will kick in. The loss of 2-3 Indian cities and economic “value targets” will not be recompense enough for the certain extinction of Pakistan.[38] The critical question is: Will the Pakistan army place “national pride” above the nation’s survival?  Past record of pragmatic decisions suggests the Pakistan army will not allow the situation to come to this pass.

 

Conclusion

 

     As I have written elsewhere, “Whatever one may think of the Pakistan army, it is a professional force driven by cold calculation. If it thinks it can get away with some outré action against India, it does not hesitate to prosecute it (think Kargil). Equally, it will do an about turn and sue for ‘honorable peace’ if some adventurist action misfires (recall Pervez Musharraf’s prodding Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to seek US intervention in the Kargil conflict, and his virtual mea culpa of January 12, 2002, after the December 13 attack on the Indian Parliament the previous year), in order to preempt a punitive Indian response and potentially uncontrollable escalation.”[39] When the chips are down, the Pakistan army always makes the right decision and extricates itself from tight corners. Bluff, bluster, and belligerent posturing aside, the question of nuclear war between India and Pakistan, does not arise.

 

End-Notes

 

[1]Howard B. and Teresita C. Schaffer, “Dealing with India in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship”, Hindu, June 13, 2011.

 

[2] Karen DeYoung and Griff White, “Pakistan-U.S. security relationship at lowest point since 2001, officials say”, Washington Post, June 15, 2011 at www.washingtonpost.com.

 

[3]Former Pakistani Ambassador, Air Vice Marshal Shahzad Chaudhry writes: “Dissension, chaos and uncertainty”, which he believes have been endemic to Pakistan are, he writes “anathema to a state; when that happens, the void engenders adventurism.” See his “Setting the course right”, Daily Times, June 20, 2011.

 

[4]Edward Wong, “China Navy Reaches Far, Unsettling the Region”, New York Times, June 14, 2011, at http://global.nytimes.com/

 

[5] For the current nuclear inclinations and trends in Asian countries, see Bharat Karnad, India’s Nuclear Policy [Newport, RI, and London: Praeger Security International, 2008], ch. 1.

 

[6] Recently, CIA Director Leon E Panetta made an unannounced trip to Islamabad to provide evidence of ISI links with the Taliban the US is fighting in Afghanistan and on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border areas, and to warn the Pakistan Army to cease and desist from such ties. See Elizabeth Bumiller, “CIA Director Warns Pakistan on Collusion with Militants”, New York Times, June 11, 2011 at http://global.nytimes.com.

 

[7] “Taliban vow attacks on Pak govt, military”, Press Trust of India, Indian Express, June 4, 2011.

 

[8] Raja Menon and Lalit Mansingh, “Reaching Across the Border”, Times of India, June 20, 2011. Menon is a retired  Rear Admiral and Mansingh a former Foreign Secretary and both are participants in the officially sponsored Track-II talks.

 

[9] Bharat Karnad, Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security: The Realist Foundations of Strategy, 2nd edition [New Delhi, Chennai: Macmillan India Ltd, 2005, 2002], pp. 572-573.

 

[10] The 18th Communist Party Congress in September 2011 is expected to feature clashes  between various factions as the Fifth generation leadership, under Xi Jiping, takes charge. The fear is that the deep differences in dealing with internal dissent and equitable development could mean a hard struggle between the neo-Maoist, Bo Xilai, party secretary of the Chongqing Municipality and the Deng-ist moderate Wang Yang, party secretary from the prosperous Guangdong region. If the ultra-nationalists subsume the Maoist line. it could eventuate in aggressive policies in the neighborhood. See Bhaskar Roy, “Red Song Over China”, June 9, 2011 at www.southasianalysis.org/papers46/paper4537.html; Kathryn Hille and Jamil Anderlini, “Red Alert”, Financial Times, June 3, 2011.

 

[11] Karnad, Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security, pp.  and Karnad, India’s Nuclear Policy, pp. 30-31.

 

[12] See Jagdamba Mall, “Vultures (sic) eye of China on Northeast Bharat”, Parts I and II, April 3, 2011 at www.epao.net

 

[13] China has a fissile material stockpile equivalent of over 1,000 weapons/warheads. And, according to SIPRI, India and Pakistan are enlarging their fissile material stocks and machining weapons, with each country’s arsenal attaining the 100 weapons/warheads threshold.  Refer “India. Pak added 20-30 N-warheads each in 2010: Study”, Times of India, June 8, 2011.

 

[14] For a mathematical validation of this proposition (viewed from the economic angle), see K.K. Shjak, “Competitive Analysis of the Arms Race”, Annals of Economic and Social Measurement, Vol. 5, No. 3, July 1976 at www.nber.org/booksaesm76-3

 

[15] Karnad, Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security; pp. 563-564.

 

[16] Chairman Chiefs of Staff Committee and the Indian Air Force Chief, Air Chief Marshal PV Naik has called for India, as a would-be great power, to design, produce and deploy inter-continental range ballistic missiles. Refer Rahul Singh, “Air chief in favor of flexing missile power”, Hindustan Times, June 11, 2011 – a development this analyst has been urging for a long time, see Karnad, Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security; pp.614-647; Karnad, India’s Nuclear Policy; p. 79.

 

[17] Imtiaz Ahmad, “Pakistan hikes defence budget by 12%”, Hindustan Times, June 4, 2011.

 

[18] “China declines to build naval base in Pakistan”, Nation, June 6, 2011. For the adverse Western reaction to such Chinese involvement that will enable China to interfere with the Western oil shipping routes, see Peter Hartcher, “Best pals pact puts wind up the world”, Sydney Morning Herald, May 24, 2011.

 

[19]Yaawar Abbas, “Pakistan’s H Bombs”, India Today, June 20, 2011

 

[20] Quote in Griff  White, “Pakistan army chief: Give US military aid to civilians”, Washington Post, June 6, 2011 at www.denverpost.com.

 

[21] Maozedong, “Nuclear Weapons Are to Scare People, Not to Use”, Sept 24, 1961 (in a meeting in Beijing with the visiting Field Marshal Montgomery) , On Diplomacy, [Beijing: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Language Press, 1st  ed., 1998], p. 365.

 

[22] See James J. Wirtz, “Introduction” and Lewis A. Dunn, Peter R Lavoy, Scott D. Sagan, “Conclusion: Planning the Unthinkable” in Peter R. Lavoy, Scott Douglas Sagan and James J. Wirtz, eds., Planning the Unthinkable: How New Nuclear Powers Will Use Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapons [Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2000].

 

[23] Lavoy has talked of India and Pakistan not gaining in “international standing and prestige”, of “the risk of India-Pakistan conventional war seem[ing] higher than ever before, and India’s relations with China hav[ing[ deteriorated”. He has also ballyhooed the “risks of inadvertent or accidental use because [of] unsophisticated nuclear command and control systems and poorly defined nuclear doctrines.” See his “The costs of nuclear weapons in South Asia”, in US Foreign Policy Agenda, [Washington: United States Information Service, September 1999]. In hindsight, everyone of these conclusions and observations  have been proved wrong, at least as regards India. Also see end-note # 21 for all the dire prognostications that have been belied.

 

[24]In a recent interaction with the Press, the Indian Defense Minister A.K. Antony in part said:   “We know Pakistan is strengthening  its nuclear arsenal. We are also taking care [to build our arsenal]. We are not unduly worried by it because we are capable of meeting any threat…Our only worry about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is that there is always the danger of it going into the hands of militants and terrorists.”  ‘Not Pak nukes, but their vulnerability a worry’ ”, Times of India, June 11, 2011.

 

[25] Brigadier (ret) Farooq Hameed Khan, “Targeting Pak nukes!”, Nation, June 16, 2011.

 

[26] Bharat Karnad, “South Asia: The Irrelevance of Classical Nuclear Deterrence Theory”, India Review, Volume 4, Number 2, April 2005.  

 

[27] Bharat Karnad, “Preempting and Preventing Nuclear Terrorism” in Maroof  Raza, ed., Confronting Terrorism [New Delhi: Penguin-Viking India, 2009].

 

[28] Bharat Karnad, “Key to Peace in South Asia: Fostering ‘Social Links’ between the Armies of India and Pakistan”, The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, No. 338, April 1996, and  Karnad, Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security, pp. 564-572.

 

[29] From my experience, this is a sensitive point with the Muslim intelligentsia in India  and especially with Muslim officers in the Indian military, who think that  raising such an issue is tantamount to questioning their loyalty and patriotism.

 

[30] Maozedong, “Nuclear Weapons Are to Scare People, Not to Use”, p.365

 

[31]Pakistan’s position on nuclear Hatf-9 first use was gleaned from a discussion on the subject principally with Defence and Army Adviser, Pakistan High Commission, Brigadier Sarfraz S. Chaudhri, and secondarily with the Naval Adviser, Pakistan High Commission, Captain Muhammad Saleem, at a recent dinner party in Delhi.

 

[32] Menon and Mansingh, “Reaching Across the Border”.

 

[33] Karnad, India’s Nuclear Policy, pp. 115-119.

 

[34] George Quester, Nuclear First Strike: Consequences of a Broken Taboo [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005].

 

[35] Maozedong, “Talk with Edgar Snow on Taiwan and other questions”, October 22, 1960, On Diplomacy; p. 347.

 

[36] Former Pakistan Air Force Chief, Air Marshal Asghar Khan, and other well known Pakistanis, military and civilian, endorse the historical record that shows Pakistan initiating all the conflicts, ranging from Kashmir in 1947 to Kargil in 1999. See Sheikh Asad Rahman, “Myths versus realities”, Daily Times, June 14, 2011.

 

[37]  Quote in Steven Kull, Minds of War: Nuclear Reality and the Inner Conflicts of Defense Policymakers [NY: Basic Books, 1986], p.120.

 

[38] Paul Nitze, senior staffer in the US National Security Council, in 1956 wrote that while nuclear war cannot be won, victory can be denoted by “a comparison of the post war position of one of the adversaries with the post-war position of the other adversary.  In this sense it is quite possible that in a general nuclear war one side or the other will ‘win’ decisively.” Ibid, p.83

 

[39] Bharat Karnad, “Rethinking Pakistan”, Asian Age, March 31, 2011.

Posted in Great Power imperatives, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons | Leave a comment

Expeditionary future

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Bharat Karnad

The closely packed state visits by three heads of governments in South Asia and the extended region – Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Truong Tan Sang of Vietnam, and Thein Sein of Myanmar signified something the Manmohan Singh government did not think through, and the Indian Armed Services may not have bargained for. India has made a military commitment requiring insertion of Indian boots on the ground, IAF planes in foreign airspace, and naval presence afloat and ashore in distant waters. The agreements signed with these three countries will, at once, increase manifold India’s involvement and  profile in the arc “Central South Asia” (as Karzai called it)-South China Sea by way of the Irrawaddy, thereby establishing India as the “go to” option for regional countries feeling insecure and facing an uncertain future.

These countries, it is clear, want to leverage India’s friendly heft for their own purposes. By forging security links with India, Karzai means to derail Pakistan’s plans for “strategic depth” at Afghanistan’s expense and deter it from meddling in Afghanistan’s internal affairs, courtesy the Afghan Taliban and Jalaluddin Haqqani’s Waziri tribal group controlled by the ISI. Vietnam means to exploit the oil and gas-rich seabed of South China Sea claimed by several countries and principally disputed with China, which has made an expansive claim based, it says, on “history”, not international maritime law and encompassing the contested Spratly and Paracel Island chains and the oil and gas fields. With the powerful Chinese South Seas Fleet berthed at Sanya on Hainan Island at the northern end of South China Sea, Vietnam feels exposed and threatened, and sees an India with an energy stake in Vietnam’s offshore oil as an effective counterpoise to China. Likewise, the Thein Sein regime in Yangon,  having discovered that China’s  economic stranglehold on the country doesn’t serve Myanmar’s national interests is seeking the counter-balancing involvement of India in its national life. After all the well-being of Afghanistan, Vietnam and Myanmar is central to Indian security.

In each instance, the visiting head of state has felt encouraged and reassured because of the promise, such as the one publicly made by the External Affairs Minister, S.M. Krishna to Karzai that Delhi will, at all times, “be guided” by the beneficiary state in how and when Indian material support and assistance is used by the recipient state, which is the right attitude for Delhi to adopt. This will require Delhi to be prepared to militarily deliver should Kabul, Hanoi, and Yangon demand a more direct Indian role in stiffening up their defensive military stance vis a vis China or, as in  Afghanistan’s case, require deployment of regular Indian military units , which may be more imminent than the Indian government has so far let on.

The new India-Afghanistan security cooperation accord and changes in US tactics of targeting the Taliban-Haqqanis with drones in cities like Miran Shah where the militants have taken refuge undeterred by concerns about collateral damage, will make Pakistani ISI all the more determined to make life difficult for India. Terrorist attacks will be marshalled against Indian diplomatic presence and Indian PSUs and private sector Companies building roads, constructing Parliament House in Kabul, involved in other development works, and entering the mineral and oil extraction sectors, with Afghan reserves of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and lithium valued in excess of $1 trillion. A point will soon be reached when the ITBP or Industrial Security Force units posted there will prove inadequate for protecting the enhanced Indian economic interests in Afghanistan, and the deployment of Indian armed forces will become imperative. The army can muster a Division-sized force at relatively short notice. In early 2003, it may be recalled, an infantry Division (ex-Lucknow) all but embarked on the defence of Kirkuk in Iraq at President George W Bush’s request.  Equally, the Indian Air Force can, with few hiccups, station half a dozen of its strike aircraft at Bagram base outside Kabul, for contingent use.

The copious references to the “strategic partnership” in the Indo-Vietnamese Joint Statement and its playing up of India’s role in developing that country’s South China Sea oil deposits, in effect, defines the Indian navy’s prospective roles in upholding the principle, as Defence Minister, A.K. Antony stated of free passage in the oceanic highway, but also in safeguarding India’s oil assets in South China Sea. Hanoi has apparently concluded that according Indian navy the rights to use the port of Nha Trang on Vietnam’s South China Sea coastline, will help firm up its claim over the disputed sea territory. But, to make the right sort of impression India will have to have at least a naval flotilla presence out of Nha Trang, with ships in it rotating from their home bases in the Andaman Command, the Western Fleet in Mumbai, and the Eastern Fleet in Vishakapatnam. South China Sea will provide the Indian navy what it has never had – a challenging milieu to project power it has so far mostly talked about. It will also afford it the occasion and opportunity to blood its officers and men in tough situations when crises and live fire engagements could happen at any time. The analogue of this is the Indian army’s continuous involvement in counter-insurgency campaigns since 1947 in the North-East and Jammu & Kashmir, which has resulted in its being blooded and tested in action, and emerging as amongst the sharpest, most effective and battle-ready land forces anywhere.

Military leaders actually have to play catch-up because the government has already transitioned into an expeditionary policy mode with Antony recently informing the naval brass that the navy’s “mandate” is to be “net security provider for island nations in the Indian Ocean region.” Drawing Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Myanmar inside the Indian security perimeter is a mere extension of that mandate. Of course, tackling China and limiting its influence will be a difficult task, but one that will be the making of the Indian military as a meaningful force for peace and stability in 21st Century Asia.

[Published as “India must show muscle”, lead op-ed page article, ‘The New Indian Express’, Oct 21, 2011, at http://expressbuzz/op-ed/opinion/India-must-show-muscle/325427.html ]

Posted in Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East | Leave a comment

Myanmar-India

Posted on October 15, 2011 by Bharat Karnad

India has finally woken, a bit late in the day, to Chinese advances in Myanmar. Like, in many other areas, the Indian govt rushes into a stance prompted by “political correctness” — in this case of human rights violations and the incarceration of Aung san su kyi, before realizing that the costs India has had to pay for thus alienating the military junta in Yangbon were too heavy to bear in terms of the expanded Chinese role and presence in that country — something simply unacceptable from India’s strategic and regional perspectives. Hopefully, we can recover lost ground by cashing in on the traditional enmity with China and begin taking the first substantive steps to elbowing out the Chinese from that country.

Posted in India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East | 3 Comments

Indian armed forces have China Syndrome

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Bharat Karnad

Over the years, the Indian Armed Services have become more and more like the Indian government – cautious, defensive, incremental in thought and action, and risk-averse when it comes to China, an adversary that’s, perhaps, better endowed, if not more competent in fighting wars. Willingness to tangle with an equal or superior foe is the measure by which would-be great powers are judged; it is also a reasonable criterion for the citizenry to gauge whether the country, in fact, has secured military value and muscle for the vast monies expended on national defence. Except, as soon as China heaves into view our military leadership, much like the Indian government, freezes up, its reluctance reflecting less the actual correlation of forces than a deep down conviction that it cannot cope. This Establishment attitude is everywhere, reflected most recently in former National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra on a weekend television show saying point blank that India should do nothing by way of riling China until it is economically in a position to offer resistance, which is a recipe essentially to do nothing.

The Army Chief, General V.K. Singh, has talked forthrightly of Chinese violations of the disputed border but, like his predecessors, done precious little to rid the army of its Pakistan fixation and transform it into a land force capable of taking the fight to the Chinese on the Tibetan plateau. To crow about two Mountain Divisions and additional two Divisions under raising as meaningful offensive warfare capability in the Himalayas, is misleading, as these constitute a force that is neither large enough, nor potent enough, to do more than beef up the defensive line 40-50 miles behind the Line of Actual Control, which pre-positioning ends up ceding this wide belt of border land to China before the hostilities even begin. The Indian Air Force, likewise, is air defence minded in the eastern theatre, despite its having the largest complement of Tezpur and Chabua-based Su-30MKI, arguably the best combat and strike aircraft flying bar the F-22 Raptor, that can, if offensively deployed, keep the Chinese PLA on tenterhooks.

But whatever the army and air force dispositions, the navy is at the sharp end of imminent military confrontations, which are bound increasingly to determine the nature of the Sino-Indian strategic equilibrium obtaining in the future. But the Indian Navy seems to be in no frame of mind proactively to protect national interests in the South China Sea, or anywhere else that Chinese ships may venture. This much may be gleaned from the op-ed piece by retired Admiral Arun Prakash (“Where are our ships bound?”, Indian Express, Oct 1, 2011). Astonishingly, Prakash blames ONGC Videsh Ltd and MEA for  trying to precipitate a confrontation in the South China Sea which, the former naval Chief deems too distant for Delhi to “take a stand on principle or adopt an assertive posture vis a vis China” particularly in the absence of “a viable trans-national capability”. His reference is to the mid-July challenge by a suspected Chinese naval vessel to the amphibious assault ship INS Airavat steaming north from Nha Trang to Haiphong that went unreported until, possibly Hanoi, mindful of the fact that an aggressive China has the effect of leaving the Indian government and the Armed Services in a tizzy, sought to test Delhi’s resolve to help protect India’s energy stake in the South China Sea and Vietnam’s “territorial integrity”, by leaking the news of this non-incident to the international press. The Indian Government and MEA’s instincts to run away from a fight with China were forestalled by the then impending, and now underway, state visit of the Vietnamese President, Truong Tan Sang, resulting in surprisingly strong statements supportive of Vietnamese interests by the External Affairs Minister, S.M. Krishna.

The more troubling thing is Admiral Prakash’s implied contention that the Navy, in effect, ought to be allowed to choose its fights. That’s not how it works. Wars are imposed by situation and circumstance or triggered by sustained violation of sovereignty or chance trampling of national interests. The military, navy included, better damn well be prepared for any contingency at all times. There is no excuse for trying to escape a fight by pleading logistical void and absence of wherewithal. Because then the question will be asked: What exactly has the navy, which ballyhoos its strategic mindset as much as it does its blue water capability build-up, been preparing for?

The military’s unwillingness to tangle with China, the only consequential foe India faces, is rooted in a host of reasons, among them the fact that the country is still to get a Service Chief of Staff who calls a spade a shovel, and shakes up the national security establishment by ruthlessly restructuring his Service with the Chinese threat primarily in mind, thereby seeding an operational reorientation of the Indian military as a whole north and eastward – something desperately required if it means to be relevant in the unfolding geostrategics of the extended region and Asia. Dealing with China demands finesse and forcefulness. So far what has been on view is the former, as configured by the ingloriously ambivalent MEA and a little known body of appeasers comprising the ‘China Study Group’. Too much nuance and too little counter-force has resulted in China gaining massive psychological and political advantage, further encouraging it to do as it pleases.

Whatever the Indian military’s level of eagerness or the lack of it to go toe-to-toe with China, it may be prudent to arm on priority basis a bold and plucky Vietnam, that has repeatedly shown it takes no guff from anybody, with everything Hanoi desires, including the nuclearised Brahmos supersonic cruise missile. If we lack the stomach for a fight let’s at least equip a country that does have the guts to take on China. It will keep a worried Chinese South Seas Fleet tied to its Sanya base on Hainan Island because, sure as hell, it won’t be the Indian Navy, which shies away from stressful encounters east of Malacca.

[Published in ‘Ásian Age’ at  www.asianage.com/columnists/indian-armed-forces-have-china-syndrome-410, and ‘Deccan Chronicle’ on Oct 13, 2011]

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East | 1 Comment

Buying out of trouble

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Bharat Karnad

A quick Quiz: what’s common about India’s North-East, Kashmir, and Afghanistan? It’s money. The Indian government’s attitude to any insurgency-infected state and, indeed, its solution to ending rebellion and bring distant communities within the Indian fold, is essentially to tempt the “freedom fighters” into getting hooked on easy money. It is a successful strategy. For the guerillas, it is better by far to forego traipsing around in the jungle, hunted like vermin by security forces and no knowing when a bullet gets you. Moreover, after a few years living as outlaws, when the romance has worn off, and the fatigue of living meagrely off the land, of being always on the run, sets in, the insurrectionists give up the ghost, make peace with the Indian state, decide to enter the political process, parley their hard-earned reputation as underground leaders into votes, get elected chief minister, and lo and behold! discover they never had it so good – the state treasury at their disposal to use it for the good of the people or, if they are so inclined, to siphon off the monies into personal accounts. This is preferable to running extortion rackets – the norm of the North-Eastern insurgent groups Ask Lalthanhawla, head of the Manipur Liberation Front and later Chief Minister of Manipur.

Lalthahawla’s example has proved irresistible. Leaders of the United Liberation Front of Asom, for instance, too have come in from the cold, and those of other separatist outfits, such as the Isak Swu-Thuingaleng Muivah faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland, are in the line for rapprochement with the Indian government. What they seek is a face-saving way to re-enter normal life and join the political mainstream.

Kashmir is the oldest of these boondoggles. Political life in that state, as the US Ambassador reported to the State Department, is “as dirty as the Dal Lake” with every “political family” and religio-political group in sight, such as Mirwaiz Umar Farooq’s and Yaseen Mallik’s, prospering by being on the take, and benefitting one way or another from access to public funds. (Thank you, Wikileaks!) There’s something homey, democratically comforting, and richly comic, about the Indian tax-payer, good naturedly or otherwise, subsidising the lifestyles of Kashmiri politicians and separatists alike.

This modus operandi of the Indian state to buy and retain the loyalty of often times cantankerous outlier peoples is, at one level, a mark of political genius. After all, this is how India, a hugely heterogeneous, composite state, cements its nationhood. Except, the lure of easy money to fuel the local politics and sustain the separatist cause become damn good reasons for the beneficiaries to do whatever is necessary to ensure the enormously gainful status quo never ends. Thus, Mallik, Ali Shah Geelani (charged with “money laundering”), and the Mirwaiz, the MGM of Kashmir, for example, dutifully meet visiting Pakistani dignitaries in Delhi, make pro-independence noises, and generally keep the kettle on the boil even as the more mainline parties such as the ruling Abdullahs’ National Conference and the Peoples Democratic Party of Mehbooba Mufti talk of reviving the 1953 Constitution. Their potential for mischief is the leverage.

Afghanistan has posed much the same problems to the United States in over a decade of hard fighting and negotiating. When the outgoing Chairman, US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral “Mike” Mullen lashed out at Pakistan, saying the Haqqani shura was the “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, he was expressing Washington’s frustration with its inability to sift the “good” Taliban from the “bad” Taliban – the measure of goodness determined by which sections among the followers of Mullah Omar and the Haqqani Waziri tribal network are buyable and pliable and, once bought, will stay bought.  Had such amenable Taliban been found – and it was not for want of trying these many years — Washington’s justification for military withdrawal would have seemed more credible. Instead, the departing American military units will carry the taint of defeat and, worse, confirm the widely held belief in the world, that while America jauntily jumps into “bushfire” wars without much prior thought, it lacks the will and the stomach to see the fight to a successful end. It is a bad reputation to lug around, as it will end up costing the United States allies and partners it seeks the next time, as a self-appointed international policeman, it despatches expeditionary forces to fight terrorism, impose democracy, enforce peace and order, or to obtain stability in distant parts of the globe.

In this imbroglio, Pakistan is worst affected. The US has about given up on it, but Beijing is not eager to replace Washington and won’t pick up the yellow man’s burden and become the principal benefactor, patron, and strategic ally of Pakistan as this may exhaust the Chinese treasury before the returns roll in; in other words, that such involvement is simply not worth the dubious honour of being counted as Pakistan’s “all weather friend”. So that country is left by its supposed well-wishers to twist slowly in the wind. But you’d never know of Pakistan’s predicament after hearing their Ministers and Generals talk. The effervescent Foreign Minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, is a revelation. Good looks combined with a keen mind, the gift of eloquence, and an imperturbable nature meant that, whilst recently in America, she used television not just to press home the Pakistani view but to turn the tables on the US. After reminding interviewers that the Taliban are a CIA creation, she rounded on American intelligence. If it is, in fact, as good as its reputation, how come, she asked tartly, the Haqqani-sourced suicide bombers were not apprehended during their longish journey from the badlands of North Waziristan to Kabul, where they struck the US embassy? The head of ISI, Lieutenant General Shuja Ahmed Pasha, on his part, warned of dire consequences if the US dared to attack Pakistan. What tremendous display of brio and offense-mindedness, and that too from a losing position!

[Published in ‘The New Indian Express’, Oct 7, 2011, at http://expressbuzz/op-ed/opinion/Buying-out-of-trouble/320732.html

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Posted on October 13, 2011 by Bharat Karnad

Curious, how Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and visiting Vietnam President Truong Tan Sang talked of piracy, etc as shared threats — that is the text, but did not mention China as the common danger — which is the sub-text!

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