Impact of Kerry-Hagel duo

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

What can India expect with Senator John Kerry replacing Hillary Clinton at the State Department and former Senator Charles Hagel Leon Panetta at the Pentagon? Do these changes herald change in the US foreign and military policies that’ll hurt India?

Uniquely for a country aspiring to great power, the Indian government displays the sensibility of a marginal state surviving on small mercies shown by big powers. Lacking self-confidence, strategic vision, and the will to be assertive, New Delhi accepts that Indian national interests will be defined by others. So, if Iran is deemed a rogue state by Washington, New Delhi rushes to create distance with Tehran.

If President Obama champions a nuclear weapons-free world, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh jumps on to the disarmament bandwagon without realising that this’ll require India to first sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), leaving the Indian thermonuclear deterrent — with no prospect of further fusion weapons testing — the equivalent of a short, blunt, sword. Worse, New Delhi assesses new appointees in the US government in the light of their attitude to Pakistan. That doing so pulls India down to Pakistan’s level apparently concerns nobody, even though every lowly Under-Secretary in MEA is alert to the possibility of re-hyphenation by stealth! Consider the recent brouhaha over an exhumed Hagel statement that India “financed troubles” for Pakistan.

If New Delhi had any real sense of the Indian stake in Afghanistan, our Washington embassy would not have been instructed to react strongly, or even at all. Silence on Hagel’s 2011 videographed talk would at once have signalled that Indian interests are not necessarily convergent with America’s, and that India will do whatever is necessary to protect them.

With Hagel hinting at Indian Intelligence activity out of the consulates in southern Afghanistan, this was no bad message to remind GHQ, Rawalpindi, that two can play at covert warfare, and meddling in Jammu & Kashmir will exact a price that a slowly imploding Pakistan can ill-afford. There was nothing there to get worked up about in the first place anyway, and so the reaction confirmed Indian diplomacy in recent years as being sometimes flecked with unnerving naivete. Surely, it is in the national interest for everyone to believe that India is not helpless and RAW is very much a player on the Afghan scene. In any case, as an ex-member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Hagel was no doubt merely repeating something he heard in an intelligence briefing on the subject, and is not evidence of a bad-mouthing anti-India insider in the Obama Administration.

He has far graver issues to tackle such as managing a declining defence spend and lower readiness levels for the US forces. The American defence budget, frozen at the 2011-level, will combine with the sequestration of funds, resulting in expenditure reductions this year of $85 billion across the board, half of it coming from the Pentagon allocations, and $500 billion less available to it over the next decade. As a consequence, the US naval presence in the Indian Ocean, for instance, will be halved from two deployed carrier task groups to just one. A smaller American military profile in Asia is likely, moreover, owing to Hagel’s experience as an infantry drudge — a sergeant twice wounded, in the Vietnam War and scarred by that military defeat. It led to his opposing US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is bad news for the Manmohan Singh regime, which implicitly relies on the American strategic security cover in any future dustup with China.

It’s a scenario the Indian government and military better wake up to. America’s security coattails are not long enough anymore for a strategic partner such as India to ride on, alongside America’s treaty allies in Asia.

India’s strategic discomfiture may be exacerbated by Kerry. A polished diplomat in the classical mould, who dazzled his audiences in his first trip as Secretary of State to France, Germany, and Italy with flawless French, German, and Italian, Kerry indicated at his confirmation hearings that getting up China’s nose with forceful displays of military strength is counterproductive. “I am not convinced that increased military ramp-up is critical yet….That’s something I’d want to look at very carefully”, he told the senators, who approved his appointment. “But we have a lot more bases out there than any other nation in the world, including China today. We have a lot more forces out there than any other nation in the world, including China today. And we’ve just augmented the president’s announcement in Australia with additional Marines. You know, the Chinese take a look at that and say, what’s the United States doing? They are trying to circle us? What’s going on? And so, you know, every action has its reaction. It’s the old — you know, it’s not just the law of physics; it’s the law of politics and diplomacy. I think we have to be thoughtful about…how we go forward.” With both the Departments of State and Defence headed by persons who are wary of alienating Beijing, conciliators in the Indian government, such as the National Security Adviser, Shivshankar Menon, are no doubt pleased. Just the other day, Menon repeated his stock wisdom that enmity with China is “not inevitable”. The corollary of such thinking is that, capabilities-wise, the Indian military packing a keg or two less of powder will not hurt the country’s security interests much.

But in the world of hard knocks, India may soon discover that a purely defensive posture coupled to virtually zero capacity for sustained offensive warfare in the mountains and a strategic deterrent that’s more “let’s pretend to be thermonuclear”, will beget coercive escalation by the massively ensconced People’s Liberation Army and the Second Artillery Strategic Forces on the Tibetan Plateau.

There’ll be no American help even of the kind available to India in 1962, lest China get upset. Indeed, there’s a growing sentiment in America to pull back altogether from a forward deployed military stance in Asia. That will leave a terminally complacent and security-dependent India, up a creek.

[Published in the ‘New Indian Express’ March 8, 2013 at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/article1492458.ece

Posted in Afghanistan, Asian geopolitics, Australia, China, China military, disarmament, Europe, Geopolitics, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, Indian Ocean, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Missiles, nonproliferation, Northeast Asia, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan military, South Asia, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States | 15 Comments

Arbitrary priorities

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

The military variant of that old saw about India being a rich country with poor people owing to god-awful governance is that there is no real dearth of monies allotted defence but every reason to doubt these are always spent wisely, or even well.

The sustained downturn of the economy has compelled the Finance Ministry to warn the Ministry of Defence (MOD) of a budgetary cut of almost Rs. 10,000 crores in 2013-14. Finance Minister C. Chidambaram’s forthright statement that “If the [budget] is cut for this year, it is cut; you cannot do anything about it”, was in the context of Defence Minister A.K. Antony demanding Rs 45,000 crores in addition to the Rs 1.93 lakh crore budget in the last fiscal, and his more recent attempt, besides Pakistan, to talk-up the direness of the threat from China, now militarily ensconced in nearby Gwadar as well. The fact that this is unlikely to impress the North Block into loosening the purse-strings, notwithstanding, the three armed services will push their separate expenditure priorities.

The air force will emphasize, in the main, the Rafale medium-range, multi-role combat aircraft acquisition, four squadrons of the “super” Su-30 for the China front, airborne warning and control systems, and tankers, roughly in that order, the army will push for a mountain strike corps, a combat helicopter fleet to fill its newly-formed aviation arm, and 155 mm artillery, and the navy will want the ongoing warship induction schedule to be on track and the import of yet another conventional submarine. This is where things get appalling. The limited resources will ensure the three services remain dissatisfied. But how is inter se prioritisation achieved with the Indian government lacking a mechanism for it?

In the absence of a Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) who, keeping in mind the security threats and challenges, would rank-order the individual service expenditure programmes in a scheme of genuinely integrated procurements, the Chiefs of Staff Committee (COSC) is the only available forum for this task. Ideally, COSC is where the competing demands and requirements would be professionally debated and discussed threadbare with the three service chiefs at the end of this arduous process agreeing amicably on a single tri-service list of acquisition priorities in descending level of importance. In practice, however, every member of the COSC insists on his service’s needs requiring immediate sanction which, if conceded, would leave the fighting abilities of the other two services in the ditch.

Being equal in rank and there being no protocol and rank-wise superior CDS in the chain of command, the services chiefs feel no need to reconcile their differing priorities. The traditional Monday morning meetings of the COSC during the budgeting period, therefore, continue to be what they are in the rest of the year – pleasant meetings of military brass engaged in banter and the business of consuming tea and samosas. According to a former service chief who was Chairman, COSC, he could devote only 15 percent of his working hours to considering the demands of the other services, with most of the time being taken up by his own service-related interests and issues. He conceded that as chairman he favoured his own service, aware that the chiefs of the other services would do the same when occupying this largely ceremonial post held in rotation. The COSC, in other words doesn’t help in untangling issues, or leaving the civilians in the MOD bureaucracy less befuddled.

In the event, the job of slicing a bigger piece of the defence budgetary pie falls to the senior staffs in the services headquarters. This they do by pitching their demands to the Joint Secretary dealing with the concerned service, before the chiefs do much the same thing with the Defence Secretary and, more directly, to the Defence Minister. Because most generalist IAS officers in the defence ministry have no technical competence, nor any feel for the subject, in order to judge which Service deserves to get what, leave alone why it should be prioritised, the difficult decisions are usually kicked up to the Defence Minister. As a workaday politician, the average Defence Minister, his skill-set limited to spouting platitudes about patriotism and self-reliance in defence, and reassuring all and sundry that the armed forces are prepared to meet all threats, is even more clueless. This prompts each of the services chiefs to try and personally hard-sell his service’s needs to him in extreme terms. A seasoned politician may be intimidated by this tactic the first time around. But with each passing year he becomes inured to the fearful scenarios being painted if this or that acquisition doesn’t come through. In the event, he arbitrarily alights on the procurement priorities, allowing all manner of extraneous factors to come into play, including constituency-servicing imperatives and political pressures from the top reaches of his own party to buy this or that piece of hardware. Bureaucrats then generate ex-post facto rationales for the decisions so taken.

Obviously, there is something drastically wrong with this system, starting with the missing role of the political institutions in articulating the primary, secondary, and tertiary threats; laying down clear guidelines for strategies to deal with each of them; outlining the force structures in the short, medium and long term; and tackling meta-strategic issues, such as establishing a programme for sharply reduced dependence on foreign-sourced weapons platforms and making the armed services responsible for the time-bound indigenization programmes. Doing all this is the responsibility of the cabinet in the more advanced democracies, with the legislature exercising severe oversight. In the Indian set-up, however, the first three roles are, for all intents and purposes, expropriated by the military services, which adhere only lightly to conventional security directives from government because the bulk of the politicians are disinterested in national security and foreign policy issues. The government-of-the-day, in the event, mans the financial spigot, MOD bureaucrats concern themselves with the processes of decisionmaking, traffic in files, and act as facilitators of corruption (and should a scam surface, the Central Bureau of Investigation is there to provide comic relief as the dim-witted desi Keystone cops), and Parliament is a rubber stamp.

[Published as “Ä game of monopoly” Feb 28, 2013 in the ‘Ásian Age’at http://www.asianage.com/columnists/game-monopoly-606 and in the ‘Deccan Chronicle’ at http://www.deccanchronicle.com/130228/commentary-columnists/article/game-monopoly ]

Posted in China, China military, civil-military relations, Defence Industry, DRDO, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Indian Politics, Military Acquisitions, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia | 1 Comment

Why retraction on NoKo test?

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Very strange things are happening in the aftermath of the fusion-boosted fission (FBF) device tested at the North Korean N-test site in the Hamgyeong mountains. Readers may care to peruse in sequence the stories here ID-ed. There was the story in ‘Nature’ immediately after the test mentioning both the Russian monitoring station at Petropovlovsk and the Japanese centre at Takasaki having data-reads of, by implication, a sophisticated explosive device. See:
http://news.discovery.com/human/radiation-north-korea-nuclear-test-130219.htm.
The next story features a retraction by ‘Nature’, which ‘talks of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) advising the weekly to retract its story because it says the detection by the Takasaki-sensors of the noble gas Xenon-133 — evidence of tritium used in the FBF device tested, was no big thing as the Japanese station routinely picks up traces of Xenon-133 owing to nearby nuclear facilities, and should not be attributed to the NoKo test. In these stories there’s no mention whatsoever of the Russian radionuclide facility. See:
http://www.nature.com/news/correction-sensors-pick-up-north-korean-radioactivity-1.12464.
The third story in ‘Nature’mentions preparation of the next N-test by NoKo (mentioned by my sources in my original blog a few days back on the NoKo test):
http://www.nature.com/news/correction-sensors-pick-up-north-korean-radioactivity-1.12464.
And finally, there’s this curious turn to the story of the US Air Force deploying the WC-135 “sniffer” aircraft over northwestern NoKo but finding absolutely no evidence whatsover of nuclear particles and concluding without actually concluding that there was no test at all!!! But the Richter scale jumped registering an earthquake-sized event, and therefore it is a bit of mystery! Here:
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/02/21/spy-agencies-scrounge-for-details-on-north-korean-nuclear-test-as-no-traces-of-nuclear-particles-found/

Possible explanation:
The giveaway here is the role of the CTBTO. As stated in my earlier articles/blogs pertaining to Obama’s foreign policy agenda for his 2nd term, written before and after the US presidential elections in Nov 2012, in which disarmament and nonproliferation top the list. The NoKo test has the potential of upsetting this agenda — and robbing Obama of the chance retrospectively to justify his Nobel Peace Prize — of coaxing India into signing this treaty, and this was prospect was enfangered. It could get India all worked up, because as I had stated this would put Pakistan — which had designed the FBF device, aided and assisted by China, which had thereafter refined and vetted the design — way ahead of India. Any national interest and national security-minded Indian government would have issued the demarche to Washington as I had suggested, and ordered preparations for resumption of N-testing to get underway, pronto. That hasn’t happened. To preempt the slim chance of an informed audience and, through them, the Indian people pressuring the politically weak and weak-willed Manmohan Singh regime to get on with the job of open-ended thermonuclear weapons testing in order to produce warheads that work to the satisfaction — as I have always maintained of the military primarily, rather than just Dr R Chidambaram, one-time Chairman, AEC, and as S&T adviser to PM since the early 2000s, all-time retardant against making the Indian arsenal effective, reliable, and safe and at least on par with Pakistan’s weapons inventory — forget the Chinese Second Artillery Strategic Forces. There is no other explanation for the retraction and the deliberate playing down of the NoKo tests results. Hey, but the truth is out.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, civil-military relations, disarmament, Europe, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Army, Indian Politics, Japan, nonproliferation, Northeast Asia, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Pakistan nuclear forces, Russia, South Asia, United States, US. | 27 Comments

Pelf & procurement politics

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Treasury-milking schemes are of two kinds. Those where national assets and natural resources are sold or contracted out, resulting in monies that should rightfully fill the state coffers being diverted instead into private bank accounts of, and property purchases by, ministers, lackeys, and officials entrusted with responsibility to administer the public good (2G, Coalgate, etc). The other kind of financial boondoggle relates to pay-offs by foreign companies and other entities bagging huge contracts for capital systems and construction (Commonwealth Games, turn-key projects). Most such high-value deals fly in under the radar of public scrutiny, quietly ripping off the exchequer. Then there are central ministries, such as power and industry, where corruption is reportedly so entrenched and institutionalised, and the system of pay-offs works with such clockwork precision, there is not a whiff of controversy anywhere, with the vendors allowed seamlessly to pad the contracts.

Owing to their ramifications for national security, big defence deals are more in the public eye, and the sensitivity of even the most corrupt governments to perceptions of wrongdoing is high, but so is the brazenness with which monies are siphoned off. The temptation is so great and the opportunity for making a quick buck so easy, it was only a matter of time before a serving armed service chief was caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Rather than be palmed off with pennies Air Chief Marshal S P ‘Bundle’ Tyagi, apparently decided during his term as chief of the air staff (CAS) to play ball with a view ultimately to raking in the pounds. As the Ministry of Defence ‘White Paper’ states, Tyagi re-wrote the specifications in 2005 enabling the Italian firm, Finmeccanica, to sell a dozen AugustaWestland AW-101 helicopters valued at some Rs 3,600 crore, for the VVIP fleet. ‘Bundle’ Tyagi’s strangely named cousins — ‘Julie’ and ‘Dosca’ among them, with Julie, by his own admission, already in the business of middlemaning deals with the power ministry, came in handy. Once retired, the ex-CAS, Tyagi, formally commodified his potential reach into the military by setting himself up as ‘consultant’ for foreign arms suppliers.

Documents from scams, scandals, and loot-minded contracts for foreign sourced-military hardware during Congress rule late 1980s onwards, reveal certain distinguishing features common to all of them, which were first evidenced in the deals for the German HDW-209 diesel submarines, the Italian AugustaWestland WG utility helicopters for the public sector Pawan Hans company and, of course, the Swedish Bofors FH-77B 155mm howitzers, the last-named rendered iconic in the annals of Indian corruption. ‘The family’, Milan, complicated play-making replete with a string of shadow and dummy companies facilitating payoffs, Indian middlemen (with Abhishek Verma’s Bermuda-based Atlas group of companies, having close Congress connections, always in the picture), shady European agents working for vendor firms (Ottavio Quattrocchi who is persona non grata, but not his son who, reportedly, is in Delhi often enough to maintain old contacts and operates out of Le Meridean Hotel when in town; the Britisher Christian Michel, and the Swiss duo Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa) are the constants.

It is not hard to speculate what happened. Haschke, who had previously dealt with Julie Tyagi for power systems, must have firmed up the Tyagi-cousin route to the IAF chief, while Verma, worked to bring in ‘The family’ into the loop as guarantor of the deal. ‘Bundle’ Tyagi (ironically, his last name means someone who sacrifices!) must have reckoned that the role of the ruling party bigwigs provided him political cover. ‘The family’ and the minders of its monies, in turn, must have calculated that with the CAS in the game, they had an insurance against the deal being faulted on technical/military grounds. Central to the deal going through was Finmeccanica meeting the demand of ‘The family’ for Rs. 200 crore. This pay-off was obviously an after-thought requiring the agents to do something unheard of in the business — reduce their own commissions to enable the deal to go through. Knowing how the marbles are stacked in New Delhi, the Europeans would do this for ‘The family’, but surely not for the inconsequential Family Tyagi.

Since the HDW-Bofors deals the modus operandi of Congress governments is clear. The pick is made at the highest level from the shortlisted hardware, which choice, the government approves and the concerned armed service then swallows. The deputy chiefs of staffs of the three armed services, with responsibility for procurement, can prove a hurdle. Here’s the point about the AW-101 deal: Not all deputy chiefs become service chiefs, but seniority decreed that Air Marshal N A K Browne, DCAS at the time of these shenanigans, was in line for the top post. By protesting or making an adverse noting, Browne could have nixed the deal. This he didn’t do, perhaps, fearing that an angry Tyagi and an upset Congress government might contrive to spoil his chances (as has occurred in other cases).

As the administrative head of any armed service, the chief of the staff can ruin promotion prospects of senior officers by moving them to relatively unimportant posts and diluting service records. Browne could have voiced his apprehensions directly to the defence minister. The problem with this option, according to a former army vice chief is that in such a situation the rest of the principal staff officers, as usually happens, side with the chief, whence the deputy chief’s motivation for questioning the purchase of the selected piece of hardware becomes an issue. Deputy chiefs, therefore, prefer to not upset the applecart. Outside the military, the entire defence ministry bureaucracy is a pliant instrument in the hands of the political masters. In the event, per the vice chief I talked to, “It is not possible for any corruption to happen without the defence ministry and the military services knowing about it.” This is to say that the military and the civilian bureaucracy are equally complicit in all defence scams and scandals. That is defence procurement politics in India.

[Published in the ‘New Indian Express’, Friday, February 22, 2013, at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/article1473739.ece ]

Posted in civil-military relations, Europe, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Military Acquisitions | 4 Comments

Tritium in NoKo test

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Sources, citing Russian Petropovlovsk reads, say the Russians have detected traces of tritium at the Hamgyeong mountain test site. It confirms the very real fact of the so-called “third” NoKo test being an FBF device of Pakistani design refined and approved by Chinese nuclear weaponeers. There still seems to be a reluctance, especially in Western circles, to admit this aspect or the conclusion. They’d rather not contemplate a future where fusion weapons are wilfully proliferated by a China that cannot be controlled and is loath to restrain itself because it serves to enhance its position, as I have argued elsewhere, as being simultaneously the root-cause of the problem and part of the solution.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, disarmament, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, nonproliferation, Northeast Asia, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Pakistan nuclear forces, Russia, South Asia | 4 Comments

Root of trouble: Article 370

Posted on February 14, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Dipping political fortunes amidst an economic downturn in the run-up to the 2014 general election and the fear of Narendra Modi galvanising the majority community with charges against the Congress Party coalition government of softness towards terrorists led to the jettisoning of considerations of votebank politics and the hanging of Afzal Guru.

Sixty-six years after Partition there’s still little recognition in the country that the problem of Kashmir is actually sustained by Article 370 of the Constitution, which accorded the erstwhile “princely state” of Kashmir a special status within the Indian Union. This article was based on the faulty premise of retaining for the state its territorial and demographic exclusivity, contravening all principles of federalism. It has kept the militancy oxygenated.

Getting rid of this mischievous provision in the Constitution — there’s nothing sacrosanct about it — will, once and for all, change the entire discourse about Kashmir. The mollycoddled Yasin Maliks and Ahmed Shah Geelanis will have the choice of abiding by the fait accompli, or availing of a one-way bus ticket to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), where they can cry hoarse about Indian perfidy for all the good it will do to them. The complication is the wilful conflation of Article 370 with the interests generally of the Muslim community in India by political parties to milk electoral profit even though it drags out the Kashmir issue and hurts the nation.

It must be recalled that the offending article was only a transient political contrivance, an expedient device conjured up by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru during the Constituent Assembly debates to bring the potentially dissonant politics of Sheikh Abdullah’s National Conference within the nation’s fold. It is not some holy covenant to keep Kashmir forever separate and should have been discarded as soon as its utility had ended, certainly by the time the second province-wide elections were held in 1956. Nation states adhere to undertakings only so long as their interests are served. All that Article 370 does is afford the permanently disaffected minority among the Kashmiri population legal and constitutional cover for their violent dissidence.

It is ironic that the ruling Congress Party, which did not flinch from violating the fundamental rights of citizens guaranteed by the Constitution during the Emergency in the 1970s, is in the forefront of preserving this article that offends the basic principles of federalism cementing the Indian Union for sentimental reasons — because Article 370 was a sort of a compact Nehru made with the land of his forebears. The lack of political and strategic foresight is such that the main Opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party, instead of campaigning for the abrogation of this article, has been shouting about the delay in carrying out the death sentence, and now that Afzal Guru has been hanged, finds itself outflanked.

Courtesy Article 370, the belief that Kashmir is not like other states and is not a part of the Indian whole has grown apace with rising discontent, convincing the separatists about the righteousness of their cause. The special status of the state has prevented the social and economic integration of Jammu and Kashmir, with Indians from other states barred from legally purchasing property, establishing businesses, settling down there and obtaining voting rights. Cocooned in this way, many Kashmiris have a heightened sense of grievance against the Indian state, mistakenly believing they are sovereign. The sooner they are disabused of this foolish notion the better for everybody, and for peace in the region.

While New Delhi’s approach to Kashmir is trapped in a mush of minutiae regarding the United Nations resolutions, and confused ideas of legal and moral obligations — factors that are completely extraneous and irrelevant to assimilating Jammu and Kashmir into India — the Pakistan government has from the start exercised common sense. As early as 1953, when the issue of the status of the “Azad Kashmir Forces” came up, the then Army Chief, Gen. Ayub Khan, ordered these to be merged into the Pakistan Army. Other measures followed — reducing the government in Muzaffarabad to a paper Assembly, permitted to do no more than make appropriate noises propping up the fiction of “Azad Kashmir”.

There’s never going to be a plebiscite, so why persist with Article 370, which basically amounts to a standstill policy that only India hews to pending a UN-adjudicated process of self-determination? Indeed, there’s as much chance of Jammu and Kashmir being allowed to go to Pakistan as there is of Pakistan voluntarily merging their nation into the Indian motherland. That both New Delhi and Islamabad are reconciled to the division of Kashmir is evident from the Indian government’s astonishing reluctance to make claims on PoK and the Northern Areas. Islamabad, lately, has sought formalisation of the partition of Kashmir along the present lines, to wit President Pervez Musharraf’s 2006 plan for resolving the Kashmir dispute. The trouble is as long as there is a constitutional impediment such as Article 370, the cementing of the Line of Control (LoC) as an international border cannot proceed, nor normalisation of relations with Pakistan.

Voiding Article 370 should be the first order of business of the Indian state, a necessary step to bring closure to this dispute. It has to be followed up with a comprehensive resettlement policy that prioritises land grants to communities of retired soldiers in order to firm up continuous habitations in depth on the Indian side of the LoC. These armed communities, like the kibbutzes on Israel’s borders, meshed into the Army’s defence grid, will have vested interests in safeguarding their properties, consolidating the border and minimising cross-border infiltration. It should be part of an unapologetic national policy aimed at changing the demographic of the state in the manner Pakistan is changing the demographic profile of Gilgit-Baltistan in the Northern Areas, for instance, by encouraging Sunni settlers from the plains. Those opposing such a policy ought to recall world history — “self determination” has never been a factor in building a composite nation, and Kashmir is no exception.
[Published Feb 14, 2013 as “Article 370 must go” in the ‘Ásian Age’ at http://www.asianage.com/columnists/article-370-must-go-855%5D

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Central Asia, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's Pakistan Policy, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia, Terrorism | 13 Comments

NoKo/Pak H-bomb test superior to Indian S-1

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Several conclusions in my previous blog (“Rogue Triad and H-Bomb Tests”) have been borne out. According to a source, it is confirmed that what was exploded was a fusion-boosted fission device of Pakistani design that was vetted/refined by Chinese weapons scientists. Officially, South Korean siesmic sensors read 4.7+ on the Richter scale, the US 4.9+, Japanese 5.2+, but the most reliable read is from the Russian station at Petropovlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula nearest to the test site with 5.3-5.5+ Richter. Petropovlovsk also has, according to this source, a radionuclide detection facility. While the Granite stratum of the Hamygeong test site dampened/suppressed the shock waves, the 5.5 on Richter translates into a certifiably estimated 20-30 Kiloton explosion. This, on the face of it, is a better performing design than the S-1 device tested in Pokhran on May 11, 1998. This should worry GOI enough for it to order resumption of N-testing, because now there’s no doubt whatsoever about Pakistan obtaining, centrally with Chinese help and assistance, thermonuclear armaments.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, disarmament, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Japan, nonproliferation, Northeast Asia, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Pakistan nuclear forces, Relations with Russia, Russia, South Asia, Technology transfer, United States | 27 Comments

Rogue Triad and H-Bomb Tests

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported on February 3 that a third nuclear test by North Korea was imminent at its Punggye test site in the Hamgyong Mountain range in the northeastern part of that country adjoining the Chinese Jiangsu province. According to another news story, this specific site has three unevenly horizontal L-shaped tunnels bored into the 7,000-feet high granite mountain, Mount Mantap, each with nine bulkheads to absorb the shock waves from nuclear tests. The granite prevents venting of noble gases, such as xenon, that can help outside experts divine the nature of the device.

The Washington think-tank, Institute for Science and International Security, is of the view that the Punggye complex, inclusive of the instrumentation bunker to record the test data, closely resembles the Pakistani Ras Koh nuclear testing facility in the Chagai Hills. The Yonhap account revealed that North Korea’s National Defence Committee decided on a ‘high level’ test to be carried out in the western-most shaft as early as mid-February 2013. That the phrase ‘high level’ referred to a thermonuclear test was confirmed by the Japanese newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, on January 25 mentioning that a fusion-boosted fission (FBF) device using plutonium as ‘primary’ in a staged thermonuclear weapon — which by itself is a ‘mini thermonuclear’, would be triggered by North Korea. A second near-simultaneous test of a uranium device is possible both to test the explosive cladding of the ‘secondary’ in the thermonuclear package, and to mask the results of the FBF. Indeed, the weekly science journal, Nature, on February 3 contends that scientists re-examining isotopic data have concluded that the North Koreans conducted two low-yield tests in 2010, one of which may have been an FBF.

In the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Siegfried Hecker, a former US nuclear weapons designer, revised his earlier conclusion that the first North Korean nuclear test was a failure with just 1-2 kiloton (KT) yield, to suggest that it was actually a successful test of a small, light warhead/weapon packing over 8 KT of destructive power. Hecker, who has been allowed to access sensitive North Korean nuclear facilities, reported that during a visit three years ago he saw an installation with 2,000 centrifuges, presumably of the P-1 type of Pakistani origin. This number, however, indicates that North Korea doesn’t have enough of them. A minimum 10,000 uranium centrifuges are required to output a reasonable amount of weapon-grade uranium enriched to 92 percent plus level. Also, a new centrifuge plant takes five years to tune up and another five years to output the 14 kg of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) required for the ‘secondary’.

The situation raises the question: Which country transferred the thermonuclear fuel, tritium, for the FBF and the large stock of HEU to North Korea? The answer, by connecting the dots, points to China and Pakistan.

China has been the most egregious proliferator of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) technology to Pakistan, North Korea, Libya and, per Western sources, to Iran. North Korea, as a pariah state is a pliable instrument for Beijing and Islamabad to exploit. As Pyongyang doesn’t give a damn, it is utilised as a proxy to, in one case, stir up trouble and, in the other case, possibly to test a Pakistani FBF design vetted by Chinese scientists. With great strategic forethought, Beijing spawned these proliferation dangers and, thereafter, positioned itself as part of the solution to, for instance, keep the unpredictable North Koreans in check, and Iran from reaching the nuclear weapons threshold. Beijing bolsters its ‘mediator’ credentials by occasionally feigning anger at Pyongyang’s brinksmanship and at Islamabad for the Sunni mullahs radicalising the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang. Elsewhere, there is evidence showing Beijing has clandestinely transferred thermonuclear materials along with technical expertise to a Pakistan craving fusion weapons to match India’s arsenal. Islamabad, however, cannot afford to test its own hydrogen bomb but can use the Punggye site to do so. North Korea is happy to oblige as long as it shares in the data, notoriety, and fusion weapons skills, combining these to extort food aid and development assistance from the international community.

Some experts maintain that Pakistan sourced the HEU for the North Korean FBF, except it is under close observation. In view of the state-of-the-art nuclear forensics available with the US, Islamabad cannot risk moving HEU to North Korea for fear of punitive actions and sanctions, which it cannot survive. However, there is no reason for Pakistan to attempt such a foolhardy venture considering China can easily transport the HEU, along with the tritium, undetected across the mountainous land border.

Beijing prizes its mediatory role between the West and particularly North Korea called a ‘weak and crazy’ state by George Friedman of Stratfor. It is a description that fits Pakistan as well. Controlling both these states equipped with thermonuclear capabilities constitutes a powerful negative leverage — something that Beijing has used effectively over the years to keep the proliferation issues simmering, but not boiling over, in the process winning the gratitude of the West. Besides, a hydrogen bomb armed-Pakistan will have India obsessing even more about its smaller neighbour, thereby at once reducing itself and taking itself out of the big power game afoot in Asia, which serves China’s purpose just fine.

Whether or not North Korea explodes a thermonuclear device anytime soon, this is the direction in which the rogue triad of China, Pakistan and North Korea is moving or manoeuvring to move. It is imperative that New Delhi issue an immediate demarche to Washington, stating unequivocally that nuclear testing by North Korea and its acting as proxy for China and Pakistan is pushing India towards resumption of nuclear testing. Open-ended fusion tests, desperately needed since the failure of the hydrogen device in 1998, will render the country’s thermonuclear stance credible. Tragically, the feeble-minded Manmohan Singh government has not stood up for the national interest all these years, and is unlikely to muster the gumption to issue this demarche in its last months in office.

[Published as “China hand in N-proliferation””in the ‘New Indian Express’ February 8, 2013 as http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/article1454134.ece ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, disarmament, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Missiles, nonproliferation, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, Terrorism, United States, US., West Asia | 10 Comments

U.S. Wrong on India’s Iran Policy

Posted on February 5, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

[This is almost a year old, but may still be of interest. The piece reproduced here was published in ‘The Diplomat’ out of Washington on March 19, 2012.]

India has been criticized for not doing enough to pressure Iran. But Delhi has sound economic and domestic reasons for what it’s doing.

The signing of the 2006 civilian nuclear deal was supposed to be emblematic of a burgeoning strategic relationship between India and the United States. After some forty or so years of frosty relations, the beginning of the 21st Century saw leaders in Washington and Delhi touting a grand strategic partnership. To realize this, the George W. Bush and Manmohan Singh administrations courted great political risk in taking on the entrenched mindsets opposed to the nuclear agreement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Published in ‘The Diplomat’, March 19, 2012 at http://thediplomat.com/2012/03/19/u-s-wrong-on-india%e2%80%99s-iran-policy/

Posted in Afghanistan, Asian geopolitics, Central Asia, China, China military, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Indian Politics, Internal Security, nonproliferation, Pakistan, Relations with Russia, Russia, South Asia, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Terrorism, United States, US. | 4 Comments

Submarine import trap

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

The Indian Navy has quietly and without fuss built up a great reputation for itself as a strategic-minded service. Its plans for distant defence are the best articulated, and its procurement of naval hardware is mission-appropriate, reason why the government has accorded it the pivotal role in the strategic defence of the country.

As commendable is the Navy’s role in driving the country’s agenda for self-sufficiency in armaments in the teeth of sustained efforts over the years by the bumbling Indian government with the defence ministry and its department of defence production (DPP) to undermine it. The DPP conceives its remit as only ensuring custom for defence public sector units while trying to trip up the private sector whose built-up capacity and capability can more quickly and substantively attain for the country the goal of self-reliance, which has so far only remained rhetoric. The Navy is the only service to have had a main weapon design directorate, generating designs for 43 of the 45 warships under construction in the country. The Navy, moreover, has prevented indigenous projects such as the Tejas Light Combat Aircraft programme from sinking, by investing in the development of a navalised variant, managing a technical consultancy with US Navy’s aviation experts to iron out design kinks and shepherding this aircraft to the prototype stage.

But the singular success story and its greatest accomplishment is the strategic submarine project. Starting from scratch, it has got to a point where the basic Russian Charlie-II class nuclear-powered ballistic missile firing submarine (SSBN) design has been enhanced, which changes will be reflected in the second and third units of the Arihant-class boats, and a nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarine (SSN) as follow-on to the Akula-II class boat (INS Chakra) on lease from Russia, is in the works. The most heartening aspect is the driven nature of this programme leading to the Navy mastering the tasks of prime integrator and with, great foresight, nurturing this expertise in the private sector, which has acquired strategic submarine-production expertise and wherewithal.

The tragedy, alas, is that despite the success of the SSBN and the technology transferred from two earlier diesel-powered hunter-killer submarine (SSK) projects — the German HDW-209 and the French Scorpene, the Indian Navy still espies a gap in the indigenous design, development and production wherewithal, especially in “silencing” technologies and in producing “workshop drawings” to allow designs to be translated into actual manufacturing schemes, individual component up. This gap is sought to be bridged by importing yet another SSK for Project 75I (I for India). The Navy could, at the time the contracts were signed, have insisted on comprehensively complete transfer of technology in the deals for the HDW-209 or, much later, the Scorpene trumpeted for its stealth and “silencing” technologies. This was not done. The result is, other than creating multiple opportunities for corruption at all levels, this piece-meal purchase of technology may end up costing the taxpayer 300-400 per cent more for three separate submarine projects to obtain a conventional submersible manufacturing capability.

The argument that importing is necessary to be technologically in-date and meet “immediate need” is a hackneyed one. Considering the stretched HDW and Scorpene submarine delivery timelines, local Indian companies contracted to build a new line of SSKs may take no longer than the transaction with a foreign supplier, involving numerous stages — request for information, request for proposals, extensive trials, shortlisting, selection and elaborate price and contract-content negotiations, at the end of which the DPSUs will get to assemble the boat. In the context of the hard-won indigenous SSBN capability, naval stalwarts such as Vice-Admiral Raman Puri (retd.), former head of the Eastern Naval Command, have opposed the import option. It is incomprehensible that ignoring the huge sunk costs in developing, with Russian help and technical assistance, in-house/in-country infrastructure to design, develop and manufacture whole nuclear submarines, the Navy, astonishingly, is not confident about a lower-technology diesel submarine being produced indigenously! It is like a person proficient in calculus seeking help with arithmetic. Air-Independent-Propulsion (AIP) technology (enabling subs to remain underwater for longer duration) is the official justification for importing, but it is a weak reed to hang the deal on, especially because AIP units can be separately bought on transfer-of-technology basis, and fitted into a modern conventional submarine out of a new production line that an enabled private sector can readily establish.

The rub here is that left to Indian companies, the first product may, quality-wise, be sub-par. However, Vice-Admiral R.K. Dhowan, Vice Chief of the Naval Staff, warned at a naval symposium on January 31, 2013, that indigenisation cannot be at the expense of the “combative edge”. The trouble with this formulation is that it perpetuates dependence on external sources. The services have to accept the fact that the Mark-I of any locally produced weapons-platform will not be as good as the best available in the market, but by the time the Mark-III version rolls out it will be world-class. This much grace the military will have to allow the indigenous efforts if Indian industry is to at all have a chance. Ultimately, this is a political decision the government has to make. What’s in collision are two philosophies — the nuclear visionary Homi Bhabha’s “learn as you make” thinking versus “import when you can” attitude of the military encouraged by venal politicians, a short-sighted government, and a DPP covering up for the inefficient defence public sector that has proved itself incapable of sustained technology absorption or innovation via offsets or any other route. The fatal reliance on imported armaments only underlines India’s second-rate military status.

Besides revising the “30-year submarine plan” of 1990s vintage in light of the currently available capacity at home and reversing the P-75I import decision, the Navy needs to spearhead the amalgamation of nuclear and conventional submarine design and manufacturing capabilities to achieve synergy and economy of scale such that India never looks to a foreign supplier again. Instead of just talking self-reliance, defence minister A.K. Antony can, for a change, do something about it by ensuring these steps are immediately taken.
[Published January 4, 2013 in the ‘Asian Age’ at http://www.asianage.com/columnists/submarine-import-trap-507%5D

Posted in Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, Defence Industry, DRDO, Europe, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Navy, Indian Politics, Military Acquisitions, Relations with Russia, Russia, russian assistance, russian military, South Asia, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, Western militaries | 2 Comments