France loading ASMP-A on Rafale

Posted on June 27, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Now what do we hear? There’s tantalizing talk of France offering, as sweetener for the Rafale MMRCA deal still hanging fire, the Air-launched ASMP-A (Air-Sol Moyenne Portee) cruise missile. The twin objective could also be to displace the Brahmos with the argument that ASMP-A at one ton weight can be carried by MiG-21 (but these are being quickly wasted out of IAF) and even the Tejas LCA (which is simply not possible). Besides, as those in the know point out, the Brahmos may be heavier at 3-ton weight but in no other parameter is it outperformed by the ASMP-A. For instance, the French item can go supersonic in only certain flight regimes (such as high altitudes). The ASMP-A, it may be noted, has also been offered to China. Great business this — make oodles of money arming all sides against each other! But the ASMP-A riding on Rafale is a sign of desperation. But also a means for the entire $22 billion deal to go down easier. Well placed sources particularly refer to the fact of the French having paid up, ahem!, the “commissions” to every one up and down the Indian system starting at the political apex, and expect the beneficiaries will now do their bit.

The ASMP-A offer encompasses the larger issue of foreign arms suppliers doing every thing in their power to kill off indigenous projects –in this case the highly regarded Brahmos made in collaboration with Russians, and the even more local DRDO programme for “hypersonic” cruise missile with the platypus nose which’s coming along nicely and, many knowledgeable people say, will add an additional 200 kms to MIRVed nuclear warheads as glide bombs on A-5 and the coming A-6.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, civil-military relations, Defence Industry, DRDO, Europe, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Politics, Military Acquisitions, Missiles, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Russia, russian assistance, South Asia, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer | 2 Comments

Kerry and India surrendering its strategic options

Posted on June 24, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

A nearly full house at the Stein Auditorium, Habitat Centre, last evening (June 23) heard US Secretary of State, John Kerry, talk like Al Gore — about the desperate need to preserve our pristine environment with clean energy! It took up two-thirds of the time of a lecture billed as “Indo-US strategic partnership”. Had he come out and said that the US has shale gas to spare and would gladly export it to India to reduce its dependence on Iran — that would have been a theme in keeping with the billing. But he didn’t do that.

He prefaced the hardcore of his speech by saying that India and the US were not at all interested in containing or balancing China, or any such thing. And he pleaded for improved India-Pakistan relations, before pitching for more defense sales, of course, lauding India for having more C-17s than any other country in the world, and made the obligatory bow to collaborate in developing “defense systems” that GOI requires foreign visitors to iterate before signing the next big armament import deal!

But, more importantly, he talked, as expected, of India joining with the US in promoting the nonproliferation agenda — he specifically mentioned India’s signing the missile technology control regime (MTCR) and India buying “Westinghous-GE-Toshiba nuclear power plants”, almost in the same breath as he talked of Washington pushing for India’s membership in the nuclear suppliers group (NSG), and other technology-denying cartels. It is clear that India’s NSG enrollment depends on New Delhi getting on board MTCR, CTBT, etc., and buying American reactors. Now we formally know what the carrot is for New Delhi to give up its strategic maneuvering space. And damned if that isn’t just the way the Congress party Manmohan Singh regime is thinking (as stated in previous blogs)! Well, goodbye, India’s strategic options of transferring nuclear missiles to Vietnam, et al to permanently discomfit China as Beijing has done India!! And, India should prepare to junk its Civilian Nuclear Liability Act 2010 (because any purchase of American reactors will require limiting liability of the reactor technology supplier to $300 million — which was expressly negated by the Indian law). Manmohan Singh is therefore going to go the executive order-route to affect reactor sales to American satisfaction while upending an Act of Indian parliament. Cele ve’.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, Defence Industry, disarmament, DRDO, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Politics, Military Acquisitions, Missiles, nonproliferation, Northeast Asia, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, South Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, United States, US. | 1 Comment

Further on the Prague agenda context for Manmohan S’ possible moves

Posted on June 20, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

I ought to have mentioned that Manmohan Singh regime’s moves to sign CTBT and get going on FMCT is in the context of Obama’s declaration in Berlin yesterday that he’d like to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin nuclear drawdowns to the 1,000 weapons-level. Like the reductions negotiated so far in the START (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks), most of the weapons that go off-line will not be decommissioned in the sense of being destroyed but very likely moved to the category of weapons that will be disaggregated and stored in separate sections with plutonium cores kept separate, etc., all of which nuclear armaments can be speedily reconstituted if the situation so demands.

It also needs to be pointed out that originally the Obama White House had thought of unilateral reductions to the 300 weapons level but then thought better of it. Putin is unlikely to agree to any such shrinkage of the Russian weapons inventories, in the main, because the large nuclear arsenal today solely defines Russia’s strength and power. This means that this initiative is going nowhere.

But it will be enough to kickstart Manmohan Singh’s attempt to “disarm an unarmed” India as the Late KC Pant once aptly and ironically described all Western arms control and disarmament efforts.
—–
P.S. On an unconnected subject, why is the United States, in its haste to depart Afghanistan, not gifting its fleet of massive mines-resistant trucks costing a million dollars a piece to its local ally Afghanistan, or even Pakistan, which would benefit from such transport, rather than reducing it to small scrap metal at considerable expense? What a waste!

Posted in Australia, disarmament, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Russia, russian military, South Asia, United States, US. | 5 Comments

India’s nuclear security imperiled by Manmohan Govt

Posted on June 19, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh so desperately desired a Washington visit to retrieve what little remains of his, originally slight, reputation, that he quite literally invited himself to America, forcing Obama to extend an official invitation for sometime in September this year. The nuclear deal was Manmohan S’s political apogee which “ächievement” he may wish to embellish by this time furthering Obama’s Prague agenda. Early in his first term, Obama, it may be recalled, called for nuclear disarmament in Prague — expression of which sentiment was enough to win him the Nobel Prize for Peace, especially as he articulated no plan other than calling for strengthening of the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty and for nuclear summits every two years!

An important aspect of beefing up the NPT is getting India (Pakistan and Israel) to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and for the negotiations to get underway for a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty. The FMCT talks are, however, being stalled by Pakistan at the UN Committee on Disarmament in Geneva. Islamabad’s case is that an FMCT is fine as long as all the fissile material produced by all the nuclear weapons states up to the present is accounted for and brought within the ambit of the draft-FMCT. It will require nuclear weapons states verifiably to state exactly how much fissmat is there in their respective national stockpiles before the negotiations begin — which, of course, is opposed by NPT-5 because it will reveal the potential or real size of their nuclear weapons arsenals.

The fact is Pakistan’s stand helps India, affording it the time (as it does Pakistan) to produce weapon-grade plutonium at as breakneck a speed as is allowed by national facilities to ensure it doesn’t get caught short by the time an FMCT eventually surfaces, some years down the line. Being deadly serious about its nuclear security, Pakistan is working the two Chinese-transferred dedicated military plutonium producing reactors at Khushab and the one at Chashma at full tilt. India on the other hand is its usual complacent self. It has only the 100 MW Dhruva in Trombay and, with the 49 MW Cirus decativated courtesy Manmohan’s nuclear deal with the US, the second 100 MW WgPu unit in the atomic research centre in Vizag (Vishakhapatnam) going on stream only sometime next year (2014) — nearly two decades after PV Narasimha Rao had approved the building of a second such Pu reactor, India will be limping way behind even Pakistan in terms of stockpiling weapons-usable plutonium.

In this context, common sense would suggest that New Delhi’s policy ought to be slyly to encourage Pakistan to continue stifling any possibility of an FMCT emerging out of the Geneva forum with frequent use of its veto, while pushing the eight CANDU reactors outside the IAEA safeguards net into full low burn-up mode to output WgPu, and speeding up the commissioning of the Vizag reactor in order to beef up the extant holdings to a sufficient level to reach near fissmat parity with China.

And it has to resist the kind of near-idiotic stance adopted by Foreign Secretary Ranjan Mathai in Geneva when he seemed to want FMCT talks urgently to get underway, which’s plainly not in India’s national interest. It has to be borne in mind that India’s fissmat goldings, other than meeting the manifold increases in weapons strength for unforeseen contingencies in the future, will have to be large enough to accommodate open-ended, iterative, N-testing that will have to be ordered later, if not sooner, by the Indian Govt, though sooner would be preferable.

In this context of a paucity of Indian fissmat, it is ridiculous of Mathai (speaking for the Manmohan regime) to if not openly side with Pakistan than at least to not conspicuously come down on the side of the P-5 driving this treaty. But this last is precisely what Mathai did, saying “There is an agreed mandate for the commencement of the negotiations” and India does not favour amending it. This may win brownie points with Washington but hurt India centrally.

There may be a nefarious game that Manmohan seeks to play when in Washington. Following up on his Govt’s position on FMCT, he may agree to India signing the CTBT, without ratifying it — the sort of solution Bill Clinton had suggested to Narasimha Rao in the Nineties. It will mean India having to adhere to the main plank of the CTBT which is not to test again, especially because there’s no provision of ratification as such in the Indian system, only for a no-confidence motion. Any damn fool PM can sign any wretched treaty and compromise the country’s security and victimize Indian national interests by doing so. It will be like the July 8, 2008 Parliamentary drama all over again with crores being gifted to MPs and the likes of Mulayam Singh once again citing the so-called “Father of the atom bomb” — APJ Abdul Kalam, which parentage an honour-bound rocket engineer with minimal knowledge of the Bomb such as one believed Kalam was, ought to have rejected but didn’t, and using this to again side with the Manmohan Govt to once and for all cripple the Indian nuclear arsenal. It will win Manmohan S Obama’s and America’s eternal gratitude but will be a parting kick he delivers to the country ere he betakes himself to the Rajya Sabha or, more permanently and profitably, to a sinecure at an elite university in the West. An economics chair at Harvard or Oxbridge for Manmoahn, did you say?

It is the preparatory work for such a game-plan that may be proposed to the visiting US Secretary of State John Kerry and which the latter may be asked to flesh out from the American side by his opposite number, Salman Khurshid, when they meet for the “strategic dialogue” in New Delhi on June 24, 2013.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, disarmament, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, nonproliferation, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan nuclear forces, South Asia, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States, US. | 5 Comments

Kerry’s stilted agenda

Posted on June 19, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

US Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit for a strategic dialogue with his counterpart Salman Khurshid is unlikely to fetch much by way of results in the most part because, with general elections looming, almost any issue with an American stamp has the potential for blowing up as another in a series of Manmohan govt’s capitulations.

News reports talk of US manufacturers being exercised about the revamped Indian rules and regulations encouraging local content and, therefore, local manufacture and industry at the expense of imports. Washington getting huffy about this is ironic considering the Obama Administration has done everything within its power to realize precisely this as a way to spur the manufacturing sector in the US and generate employment — the very reasons for New Delhi subscribing to it as well.

Pharmaceutical exports to India is the other American peeve. With Indian Courts ruling that life-saving drugs can be more cheaply and plentifully produced here, whatever the transgressions of US patent laws and intellectual property rights is a more problematic issue. But if the US
pharma Cos. are mainly interested in profit — not production in bulk at an affordable unit price then isn’t the humane premise of medicine and affordable medical treatment undercut?

Re: foreign policy issues — Af-Pak, curiously, is where there seems to be a convergence of policies. New Delhi, in fact, risked Kabul’s alienation by rejecting President Hamid Karzai’s request for military support in terms of exports of artillery and Mi-17 helicopter spares and servicing support guns in order not to derail the rapprochement the new Nawaz Sharif govt in Pakistan has promised at the very outset. India, moreover, has been proactive in sending an Indian team to negotiate not just export of LNG but also some 500 MW of electricity for which purpose Islamabad appears ready to erect the wherewithal for coupling the grids. But India will also agree to increase its development aid to Afghanistan to ensure the Karzai regime is not completely bereft of assistance and support once the US/NATO forces begin leaving in 2014. The problem is India cannot afford to lose goodwill in Afghanistan, which’s central both from the natural resources point of view and from the perspective of sustaining an active Central Asia policy.

The more strategic aspects of the agenda are elsewhere, however. One is the 2010 Indian civilian nuclear liability Act passed by Parliament exposing the reactor and associated technologies supplier(s) to unlimited liability. It has pretty much shuttered the US from the high-value reactor sales to India, which was the basic motivation for the George W Bush Administration to make the almighty push to realize the India-US nuclear deal that was heatedly opposed by a few of us here for gutting especially the weapons-related aspects of this country’s nuclear energy programme. Not sure what the Manmohan Singh regime that nearly fell in the no confidence vote in July 2008 can do about the N-liability law on the books other than ignore it with an executive order but do so at its own electoral peril. This won’t happen.

The other matter is increasing defence sales. The trouble is Washington will not be happy and satisfied unless India meets 100% of its military needs from American sources. And this when lack of trust remains an issue. And every major piece of military hardware imported from any country puts off the aim of self-reliance by years. And when there’s no US give whatsoever in terms of transfer of technology. And India is inexorably turned into a client state.

Posted in Afghanistan, Asian geopolitics, Central Asia, Defence Industry, DRDO, Europe, Geopolitics, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Politics, Military Acquisitions, South Asia, Technology transfer, United States, US., Western militaries | Leave a comment

Muddle of succession politics

Posted on June 14, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Contextualizing L.K. Advani’s truculence and sulk-sodden antics that have prevented a smooth transfer of power to a new generation of leaders in the Bharatiya Janata Party is the perennial problem afflicting all politics in the subcontinent – the absence of orderly succession. Not only is there no thought given to succession planning, there is nary a hint of institutional mechanisms and procedures in political parties to engineer such periodically inevitable transitions. It is the old historical failing of Indians (and South Asians, generally) that they seem incapable of, and disinclined to countenance, other than messy power shifts. From the Mughul period on down if it was not Aurangzeb battling Dara Shikoh for the throne in Delhi than it is an Advani resisting Narendra Modi’s rise.

The way around the complexities, wrangling, and the heartaches attending on leadership changes is, of course, dynastic politics. It simplifies, clarifies, and injects predictability into succession norms by eliminating democratic selection of leaders in a milieu where dynastic succession enjoys cultural sanction. Congress party symbolizes the dynast-dominated politics. Ironically, the person who legitimated it in the country post independence was the very leader most committed to liberal values and democratic practices — Jawaharlal Nehru.

It is remarkable how many Nehrus, Kauls, Kouls, Dhars, Dars, Kaos, etc held high government positions when Jawaharlal was in his pomp in the Fifties, which state of affairs continued in the reign of Indira Gandhi. Indeed, the open nepotism involved in the Prime Minister placing his younger sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit who, insofar as one can tell, had no special foreign policy expertise or any other credentials, as India’s ambassador successively in the Soviet Union and the United States, would not be tolerated today. It is the distance the Indian democratic system has travelled since then.

With so many close and distant relatives, and clansmen on the public payroll, it was as nothing for Jawaharlal Nehru to appoint his daughter, Indira, as President of the Congress Party. It is another matter that, driven by her own ruthless brand of politics, she used that post to first sideline the party bosses once she became PM, and thereafter split the party and entrenched dynastic rule in the Indian polity. It encouraged the wild, fungal, growth of splinter parties as family concerns. It is a trend tending towards absurdity. Thus, we have Lalu Prasad Yadav claiming connections with Jayprakash Narayan and his movement against the authoritarianism of Indira Gandhi during the Emergency in the mid-1970s, who currently sides with the Congress party and is best known for swaddling 15 years of grossest misrule in Patna with buffoonery. That he seems intent, moreover, on inflicting his large brood on his long-suffering state in times to come, should make Biharis despair for their future. And yet this same Lalu is actually expected to give Nitish Kumar — as clean and un-nepotistic a provider of good government in Bihar as Narendra Modi is in Gujarat, a run for his money.

Cadre-based parties, such as the BJP, should by now have rooted succession measures that are at once judicious, practical, and fair, affording advancement to emerging leadership talent in the party of the kind existing in Britain. There prime ministerial candidates are voted to lead the party or deposed (as Margaret Thatcher was despite leading the Conservative Party to victory in three successive general elections) by members in party conventions. Backroom shenanigans and relying on the good sense of the top leader to manage the transition to gen-next leadership, doesn’t always work.

Alas, Advani adopted the attitude of Queen Elizabeth II of England – can’t be moved; the designated successor, the Prince of Wales be damned! Midway into his ninth decade of life, he is adamantly optimistic about his chances of making it as Prime Minister in a political milieu that he anticipates will turn murkier and more conducive in the wake of the coming general elections. A fractured vote and a patchwork coalition turning to him as a compromise prime ministerial candidate, a ‘la Deve Gowda or an Inder Gujral, is a scenario the political sage in Advani would instantly dismiss as rubbish. And yet he is convinced that the post he so ardently covets but couldn’t secure in his hey-day will be offered him on a platter in his dotage. But thwarted ambition has clouded his judgment and smashed his fine-tuned political antennae. Hence, a bitter old man plots his big-time return and, in the process, hurts his party. Despite the peace the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has imposed on him and the BJP, there’s no guarantee Advani won’t pursue his game-plan.

The RSS likes Modi, perhaps, even less than does Advani. After all, Narendra-bhai marginalized it and other Hindu outfits in Gujarat. But it acknowledges Modi’s salience in the evolving political situation in the country for many of the same reasons that it reconciled to Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s taking control of the BJP in the mid-1990s – it will win the party votes. Vajpayee’s shambling, easygoing, nature reassured the people, persuading them to give the National Democratic Alliance a chance in the face of advertisements of Hindu extremism by opposing political parties. The more purposeful Modi has the galloping prosperity and good record of governance in his home state to counter alarms and rabid propaganda by the Congress and others about the dangers of a supposed “polarizer” running the country.

In fact, it is Modi’s promise of extending the business-friendly economic model, successfully implemented in Gujarat, to the rest of the country that has enthused the electorate, handing BJP the early advantage. It was last afforded the opportunity by the people fed up with Congress party corruption (Bofors) and a series of ineffective small-party “Third Front” regimes stitched together on the run that followed. This time around it is years of paralyzed government and brazen Congress party corruption again but on an unimaginably vast scale that’s motivating voters to move to the BJP camp. Except now Modi’s economic philosophy and administrative acumen is the magnet.

http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/Muddle-of-succession-politics/2013/06/14/article1633470.ece

Posted in Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Politics, Internal Security | 4 Comments

A curdled old codger and BJP-NDA’s game-theoretic future

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Much of the contretemps in the BJP boils down to the thwarted ambition of the one-time “loh purush” who, with time, has rusted into a heap of scrap metal but entertains notions of himself as the central pillar of the party. It is a pitiable scene to see L.K. Advani so tragically reducing himself into a sullen, sulky, old man who will be remembered, if at all, for his turning a page-turning chapter in the country’s life into a personal melodrama. For the first time in independent India’s short history there is the possibility of Narendra Modi — the hard-charging, no-nonsense, right-of-centre ideologue firing up young and aspiring sections of society — the bulk of the electorate in 2014 and, perhaps, assuming helmsmanship of the country. And then Advani has to go play the rancid old codger without the political wit and wisdom to espy a polity on the cusp of radical change and economic betterment.

Advani has in a huff resigned from all party posts but not given up the chairmanship of the the National Democratic Alliance. Strange, but he is presumably the chairman on account of his leadership of the BJP so, to be consistent, should’t he surrender the NDA position as well? Maybe he sees his continuing occupation of this post as offering him the outside chance at PM-ship. It is a self-serving ruse then to keep alive his candidacy. But should BJP garner more Lok Sabha seats than in 2009 –thanks mainly to Narendra Modi’s galvanizing efforts, say, in the 180 range, and BJP require the help of allies and coalition partners to bid for power, would Advani at that moment in time have the political currency to be hoisted to head an NDA government by acclamation? Doubtful, in the main because a person who will have contributed nothing to the party’s electoral success cannot remotely hope to mobilize support behind himself — least of all among the elected BJP MPs and the party cadre, who will owe him nothing, and sentiments about his past role in founding BJP will count for even less. Politics is hard business not fueled by sentimentality but success.

The more likely prospect is Advani setting himself up as spoiler, fully cognizant of and canny enough to know what he is doing but determined to harm the chances of his own party at the hustings any way, whatever it takes. This will be sad denouement for a man who has lived by his political acumen but will be brought down by hubris. History will pass a curdled Advani by and very fast with whatever love, respect, and goodwill he has generated among the people over the years dissipating like a thin wisp of smoke.

Of course, the Congress party clutching at straws, will keep alive the Advani issue with snarky comments by Messrs Digvijay Singh and Co., in the hope that BJP partners like JD(U) will be sufficiently alarmed to desert the NDA in the next general elections. Except, if BJP needs Nitish Kumar, the JD(U) equally desperately needs the upper caste and urban votes in Bihar that Modi and BJP can attract. After nearly a decade of misrule, misgovernance, and rank bad and grossly corrupt government, it will be a wonder if the Congress Party will be able to fill the space vacated by BJP in Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s scheme of things. This is no small consideration because Lalu Yadav threatens to storm his bastion. (Lalu does not stand a chance, but damned if, together with Paswan, he doesn’t spice up life for Nitish!) The prospect staring Nitish in the face will be this: He has not a snowball’s chance in hell to be Prime Minister of any coalition; worse, he may not even have Bihar to lord over! He will be reduced, you guessed it, to being a JD(U) version of Manmohan Singh — no political support base, no constituency, no future.

In game theoretic terms, it is Nitish and JD(U) confronting enormous uncertainties. Narendra-bhai’s problem is a more straightforward one by comparison — to win as many seats for the BJP as possible, every additional Lok Sabha seat secured firming up his right to run the country. When it comes down to it, Nitish has no choice other than to blink!

Posted in Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Politics | 6 Comments

Dump the Gerontocratic Principle in BJP Meet in Goa

Posted on June 8, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

The meeting of the BJP top brass in Goa to settle on the party’s command structure and strategy for the next general elections must occasion the deepest apprehension in the minds of those who long for a conservative, right-of-centre government. Such a change is required not only to reverse the precipitous fall in the standard of public life during the past nine years of Congress party-led coalition rule characterized by horrendous levels of corruption in all strata of government, but to give new direction to the nation desperately seeking a way out of the economic morass the country finds itself in, stressing individual effort and initiative not dole and handouts in various guises. The fact is, as Edmund Burke emphasized long ago, government that does least is best. In India, that means the government being concerned mainly with evening out the playing field for everyone. It is an aim to be primarily achieved by remedial education to pull the poor and socially disadvantaged out of the dependency cycle they are caught in and bring them merit and competence-wise up to the more advantaged lot, rather than pull the top level down as is the instincts of the state and central governments in India. Narendra Modi promises this with his signature declaration that “Government has no business to be in business” and efficient and effective system of delivery of cash and other benefits to the deserving poor (rather than tolerating, as by this government, the siphoning off in plain sight of the bulk of development and social welfare funds by politicians and petty and not so functionaries of the state).

The proverbial “fly in the ointment” is LK Advani, who is long past his sell-by date but who persists in politicking in the hope that his ambition to don the mantle of PM will somehow fall on his elderly shoulders — which chance, he calculates, may come his way by denying Narendra Modi the anointment as the BJP standard-bearer. His retinue of supporters all of them leaders with small or no mass base or popular appeal — people like Sushma Swaraj and Ananth Kumar, independently nursing their own private ambitions. None of this augurs well for the country and shows up the extant BJP leadership as cut from the same whole cloth Congress leaders have been cut from — of serving self and family before nation.

The country has to be provided a real alternative and Advani isn’t it. But who can persuade the old man that his time is up in the context of Indian politics where the gerontocratic principle still reigns? Can one even imagine a country with average age of 25-plus in the year 2014 having Advani as PM aspirant already in the ninth decade of his life helming it, when elsewhere the leaders are going younger and have the drive and display the enthusiasms of youthfulness.

Posted in Indian Politics, South Asia | 1 Comment

Disengagement

Posted on June 8, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

As of June 2, the ‘Security Wise’column has disengaged from the Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle newspapers, owing to disagreement on its contents.

Posted in Indian Army | 4 Comments

Warlords, opium, & core calculus

Posted on May 31, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Amidst the expected wholesale turnovers in governments in South Asia, Pakistan has been first off the block, voting the opposition Muslim League (Nawaz) party to power. The ruling Congress-led coalition government here could topple next. But it is the future of Afghanistan after the 2014 elections that is the most intriguing.

If an independent-minded regime hewing generally to the Karzai-ian brand of representative government emerges with the so-called ‘1400 Movement’ taking wing, it will be evidence that the decade-long campaign by the United States to graft democracy on a traditional tribal polity has succeeded, albeit after a fashion. (‘1400’ is the Year 1984 in the Islamic calendar, and the Movement with this designation refers to the democratically-inclined tribal groups and parties who hope to win next year’s general elections.)

While the success of the Karzai regime may be judged by the fact of its survival, it provided nothing more than a veneer of representative government. The unchanged underlying reality since the 1960s when the demand for the locally-grown poppy rocketed with the surging market in Western societies for opiates, and the tribal leaders-qua-warlords turned to opium farming to increase their earnings manifold, is that Afghanistan is a full-blown narco-state. The monies from the trade in opium farmed in 12 of the 34 Afghan provinces led by Helmand, Farah, and Kandahar in the southwest is the life-blood of the national economy.

The size of the Afghan narcotics trade may be judged by a 2006 estimate of the total proceeds from it at British retail prices touching $124.4 billion; some seven years on that value may have at least doubled — to a staggering $250 billion. Authoritative data reveal that Afghan opium constitutes 80% of the world production and in 2012 increased by 18% over the previous year despite over 9,000 hectares being subjected to UN-supervised eradication measures, and as much forty-fold in the last decade.

With this scale of monies to be made, the Quetta shura headed by the deposed Afghan Taliban chief, the one-eyed Mullah Omar, has been fiercely protective of the opium economy, extracting hefty zakat from farmers, traders, and processors alike with sharply rising imposts (in percentage terms) depending on whether the end-product is morphine base or heroin crystal. The reason why Indian development projects have remained largely unmolested by the Taliban is because schemes such as the Delaram-Ziranj highway, for instance, help in transportation of the opium to the Iran border, where a chain of processing centres convert it to morphine and heroin for international consumption.

The shura, moreover, shrewdly employs the excess opium agricultural labour as Taliban fighters and, with a leavening of armed cadres from foreign outfits, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, conducts effective guerrilla operations. Except there is no religious bent to the Taliban that periodic delivery of satchels of money cannot overcome. This is the Afghan way, an has always been. In the event, Mullah Omar and the patchwork of tribes he leads are each jointly and singly susceptible to the lucre. What’s in play is an old extortion game — if you pay your interests are safe. In the context, the Taliban’s fight against the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) is typical blood sport. With drone attacks on the Taliban command nodules, which compensated for the weaknesses in the fighting power of the ANSF that’ll surface with the revised drone usage policy announced by US President Barack Obama on May 23. The ANSF situation is bound to worsen.

Karzai has turned to India to balance Pakistan and fill the vacuum created by a departing America. Hence, he asked for howitzers, 105mm guns, Mi-16 helicopters with spares and service support as mark of Indian military engagement and interest. But, as is usual, New Delhi is hesitating, unsure whether such arms aid will spur Pakistan’s fears of a consolidating Indian military presence in Afghanistan and imperil the rapprochement promised by the in-coming Nawaz Sharif government. But not responding to Kabul’s request will rob India of the opportunity to increase leverage with the Afghan government, and broad-base its support with amenable Pashtun tribes beyond the traditionally strong links with the “Northern Alliance” of Tajiks and Uzbeks under General Abdul Rashid Dostum. It will help India carve out a role for itself in the larger game afoot in Afghanistan with China entering the fray in strength.

New Delhi’s calculation that restraint in arming the ANSF may cut Nawaz some slack with the Pakistan army can be countered by the fact that GHQ, Rawalpindi, is unlikely to be mollified by such Indian gestures considering it has keyed all along on the supposed intelligence activity out of the Indian consulates in Jalalabad, Kandahar, and Herat ringing outer Afghanistan that Pakistanis allege involves cultivating even the Afghan Taliban and making life difficult for the Pakistan army fighting them in Waziristan, besides firing up the Baluch insurgency with monetary and material help. In this respect, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, a confidante of Mullah Omar, said revealingly on an Indian TV channel that as far as the Afghan Taliban are concerned “There’s no difference between India and Pakistan”.

Because the Pakistan army’s main concern is with the RAW role on the Durand Line separating Pakistan and Afghanistan, and considering that New Delhi is unlikely to close down its 40-year old consulates to please the ISI, the possibility that India’s holding back arms supplies to Karzai will influence Islamabad is slight. If Karzai’s demand for arms is not met, India could end up with less traction in Kabul, fewer options in the region, and little goodwill in Pakistan.

The politics of Afghanistan revolves around the tribal chiefs – the balance of power between them deciding the way Kabul tilts. India’s core interests are to protect its traditional presence, mining concessions in the resources-rich Hajigak region, and physical access to Central Asia from Iran’s Chahbahar port through Afghanistan. To achieve these aims will require keeping the ruling cabal-of-the-day (even if it’s the Taliban) happy, and buying off the warlords in the opium business, and of fighting each other, the Afghan government, and foreign forces.

[Published in the New Indian Express May 31, 2013 at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/Warlords-opium-core-calculus/2013/05/31/article1612945.ece ]

Posted in Afghanistan, Asian geopolitics, Central Asia, China, Geopolitics, guerilla warfare, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia, Terrorism, United States, West Asia | 2 Comments