The supply of American F-16s to Pakistan has been a red flag issue in India-US as well as Pakistan-US relations for so long that its symbolism has overshadowed its real significance. When the Americans did not deliver on promised F-16s in 1990, it became for Islamabad a symptom of America’s bad faith. For Delhi, resuming supplies of advanced American hardware to Pakistan will encourage its general irredentism and adventurism in Kashmir. But larger developments have been changing the context of the F-16 debate, and need to be taken into account. Following its economic success, Beijing has registered double digit growth in its arms spending annually over the last decade. That has prompted Delhi to unveil its own modernisation plans, including fighters for the IAF worth Rs 43,000 crore, the largest ever defence deal involving India.
Ongoing arms race Then came the US initiative which, besides granting Islamabad’s wish for F-16s, is offering Delhi the licence to co-produce F-16s and the more advanced F-18 fighters. Along with this came offers of cooperation in other sectors, including space, missile defence and most significantly, civilian nuclear energy. The goal of all these moves, in the words of a state department spokesman, is to “help India become a major world power in the 21st century.” The last statement is unprecedented in the history of Indo-US relations. Historically, the US has looked at India through the grid of its nuclear non-proliferation concerns, and its policy has been to use Pakistan to balance India. The present set of policy initiatives, if they come to fruition, would get rid of the “hyphen” between India and Pakistan. They would also get rid of the assumption of technology denial when it came to India. Taken together, they amount to a paradigm shift in Indo-US relations. The Left has reacted predictably, stating that the American intention is to start an arms race in the subcontinent. Less predictably, the BJP too has taken up this refrain. From the sequence of events set out above, however, it should be clear that an arms race has been ongoing long before the US stepped in. As a consequence of it, the IAF picked the French Mirage 2000-V, the Russian Mig-29 M2, and the Swedish Grippen as contenders for a massive arms purchase. It had also sent out an enquiry about, guess what, the F-16. In other words, it is not so much the Americans trying to start an arms race as Delhi who invited the Americans in. And along with them the French, the Russians and Swedish. If there is a lot of arms hustling going on, then the Americans are not the only players. To put things in perspective, Beijing has just undertaken to manufacture F-22P frigates for the Pakistani navy and JF-17 fighters for the airforce. The frigates are equipped with surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, and helicopters for anti-submarine warfare. The Americans are offering to supply more advanced hardware to India than to Pakistan. The Chinese supply military hardware only to Pakistan. Yet there is no brouhaha about this from the Communists, or even the BJP. Do we take it that because the Chinese supply only to Pakistan, they are exonerated from the charge of having mercenary or commercial motives? Statements by Indian politicians are often emotive and demonstrative, the downside of which is that they lack clarity. In the context of a burgeoning arms race in the region, is it our position that we are unilaterally bowing out of it? That we will be relying on, say, Track 2 diplomacy when settling our problems with Pakistan? What if there is another attack on Parliament, as in December 2001? Then the same politicians will be baying for war. But they will not have acted, in the interim, to widen our strategic options, or equip our armed forces for that war.
Getting it right The reality is that if a peace process is underway in Kashmir it is because Delhi is getting ahead, for the first time, in the strategic game with Islamabad. Looked at in a broader context it is astonishing that Islamabad should be able to conduct such a forward-leaning policy on Kashmir and elsewhere for such a long time, against a country with eight times its population and resources. Emotive considerations aside, it is because Delhi has not been able to strategically leverage its resources, whereas Islamabad has. The rules of the game, however, changed with 9/11 and the globalisation of the Indian economy. India has been growing at a faster pace while Pakistan is in an economic rut since the 1990s; the spotlight has shifted to jehadi militancy, a principal locus of which is Pakistan; Indian diplomats have been making the right connections; and Delhi demonstrated capabilities of military coercion following the attack on Parliament in December 2001. In other words Delhi has been learning to play realpolitik, instead of underpinning its foreign policy with quixotic idealism and selective pacifism. What is interesting is that Washington is prepared to go some way towards addressing Delhi’s fears that it will not be a reliable supplier of military equipment. It is offering Delhi a technology transfer deal, whereby it could produce 126 fighters, including F-16s and F-18s, to its own specifications and on its own soil. Delhi prefers technology transfer deals, and Washington rarely makes this kind of offer, which suggests that it is serious in wanting to improve ties with Delhi. Washington has also removed hurdles in supplying to Delhi the Phalcon, an advanced early warning system that would act as a force multiplier in combat. The Phalcon is not available to China or Pakistan, as isn’t the Patriot anti-missile system that Washington has offered Delhi. Of greatest significance, however, is the decision to make civilian nuclear technology available to India. A Goldman Sachs projection has found that due to structural and long-term reasons oil prices could double from currently high levels, and go up to as much as $105 a barrel. This could cripple India’s growth aspirations, unless alternative sources of energy are found quickly. Nuclear power could fill the gap, but since nuclear technology can be dual-use India’s civilian nuclear sector has been under sanctions since the Pokharan blasts in 1974. It operates under severe handicap as India’s nuclear power plants are old, expensive, inefficient and potentially unsafe. With access to American technology the nuclear sanctions are effectively over. Nuclear energy can play a significant role in India’s power grids, while Delhi gains de facto acceptance as a responsible nuclear power. If, indeed, Washington is serious about offering Delhi advanced military, nuclear and space technology, that would redefine the Indo-US relationship, exorcising the Cold War legacy and bringing it definitively into the 21st century.
US, India, China What does Washington gain from all this? Indo-US cooperation in IT and BPO is helping American businesses stay competitive, a growing India would be a bigger market for its goods, it would also help stabilise South Asia which is currently a nexus of jehadi militancy. Indian institutions are Western oriented, whereas Washington is threatened by the growth of Chinese power. This was evident in the fury in the US Congress when Europe proposed lifting its ban on arms sales to China. That this opposition has had some echoes in Europe and Japan as well, shows that the West is still basically uncomfortable with China. Delhi should work on resolving the boundary dispute with Beijing, and on improving trade and other ties. But it should be aware of the fact that there are inherent brakes on the relationship, stemming from the fact that China is a dictatorship. Beijing’s opening up to the world will make its people increasingly resent this fact, and the last thing its leaders would like to see is a successful democracy next door. This is the factor that makes China uncomfortable in dealing with Japan, ASEAN or Taiwan, and make an “all-weather” friend out of an autocratic Pakistan. This will also make it uncomfortable in dealing with India. It would be folly, of course, to enter into a strategic alliance with the US against China. But the US is the biggest player in the world, and any offer it makes should be evaluated on its merits, rather than processed according to pre-conceived notions. From the March 25 announcement, it would seem that Washington is willing to make a break from obsolete Cold War notions on South Asia. Delhi should have the courage to do the same. It messed up its strategic options before, and bled heavily for it, most notably in Kashmir. It should not do so once again.
Sino-India ties marred by the 'P' word By Sudha Ramachandran
Apr 9, 2005
BANGALORE - Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's four-day visit to India starting on Saturday is expected to put Sino-Indian bilateral relations on a higher plane. But even as India and China shake hands and reach agreement on various issues, China's "all-weather friendship" with Pakistan will cast a long shadow on the Sino-Indian interaction.
The Pakistan leg of Premier Wen's South Asia visit was very successful. China and Pakistan signed a "Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Good-Neighborly Relations" under which they agreed to safeguard each other's unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity, and maintain a regular high-level strategic dialogue. Twenty-two agreements and memoranda of understanding to enhance bilateral cooperation in defense, trade, development, diplomacy, education and research were signed. These include a deal for the construction of four F-22P frigates for the Pakistan navy. China has also agreed to provide financial assistance of US$350 million to Pakistan's Chashma-II power project.
The interaction between Wen and his hosts would no doubt have been closely monitored by India. After all, the Sino-Pakistan defense and security cooperation has serious implications for India's national security.
New Delhi believes that it is a desire to contain India that brought China and Pakistan together and provides the glue for the decades-long Sino-Pakistan relationship. There are other benefits that China and Pakistan draw from their bilateral bonding. For instance, it was Pakistan that brought China and the United States together in the 1970s, and continues to be a useful link between Beijing and the Islamic countries. However, it is their common hostility to India that is the main factor that fuels their "all-weather friendship".
A strategic partnership between China and Pakistan presents India with pressure on two fronts in the event of Indian military confrontation with either country. India therefore is compelled to spread its forces thin along two fronts.
What bothers India about the Sino-Pakistan military and security cooperation is that Pakistan, which on its own would have been a far less potent threat to India, has with China's help become a threat. In an essay in P Kumaraswamy's book Security Beyond Survival, J Mohan Malik, a Sino-Indian specialist, argues: "For India, Pakistan is not and cannot be a threat without China's military support just as Taiwan cannot constitute a threat to China without the support of the US."
What is more, India believes that the military muscle and shield that China has provided Pakistan has encouraged the latter to indulge in military adventurism against India. "It was the provision of Chinese nuclear and missile shield to Pakistan during the late 1980s and early 1990s [at the height of India-China rapprochement] that emboldened Islamabad to wage a 'proxy war' in Kashmir without fear of Indian retaliation," points out Malik.
What began as supply of conventional weapon systems to Pakistan came to include over the years nuclear and missile technology and systems. For several years now, India has been drawing international attention to their nuclear and missile cooperation. Beijing has not only provided Pakistan with missile-related technology, it has transferred complete M-11 missiles to Pakistan. China has played a major role in the development of Pakistan's nuclear infrastructure.
It has supplied Pakistan with nuclear materials, expertise and provided critical assistance in the construction of its nuclear facilities. In fact, China's significant role and input in Pakistan's nuclear program prompted former Indian defense minister George Fernandes to describe China as the mother of Pakistan's nuclear bomb. Given the serious implications that the Sino-Pakistan military and defense cooperation has for India's security, it would seem that India would raise the issue during Wen's four-day visit to India. But as Raja Mohan, professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, points out in the Indian Express, "Going by recent tradition in Sino-Indian relations, not a word about Pakistan is likely to figure in the conversation between Wen and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi."
Although India is seriously concerned about the Sino-Pakistan entente cordiale, it has been reticent about raising the matter in its interactions with the Chinese. Drawing attention to "this curious Indian silence on Sino-Pak strategic collaboration", Raja Mohan observes that "while the subject of Pakistan pops up in the very first five minutes of any official conversation between India and the US, it hangs like Banquo's ghost over the meetings between Indian and Chinese leaders".
Explaining India's reluctance to raise the P word with China, a retired Indian diplomat points out that the Sino-Indian war of 1962 - when China inflicted a humiliating defeat on India - has cast a long shadow over India's diplomacy with China. "It seems India has reservations over direct confrontation with China whether on the battlefield or the negotiating table," he told Asia Times Online. A sense of powerlessness pervades India's interaction with China as India does not have significant leverage to use against China, he said.
However, an official in India's Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said that India's diplomatic strategy toward China is based on the principle of not allowing the bilateral relationship to be held hostage by contentious issues. That is, India and China will build on issues of agreement and not allow issues of disagreement to dominate the relationship. Consequently, India and China are working on building their economic relationship. "While we are not ignoring the contentious issues such as the border dispute and the question of Sino-Pakistan military collaboration, we are not allowing these issues to define our ties," the MEA official told Asia Times Online. India is hoping that China will come to see the gains in economic cooperation with India and that as this consolidates, the anti-India content of the Sino-Pakistan relationship will gradually fall.
A Beijing-based Chinese journalist told Asia Times Online that India's diplomacy with China is based on a realistic assessment of the situation. India is not calling on China to downgrade its relations with Pakistan, as that will not happen. "The relationship has endured for decades and China is not going to abandon Pakistan because Delhi demands it," he pointed out.
Indeed, the most remarkable aspect of the Sino-Pakistan relationship is its durable quality. As John Carver points out in his book Protracted Contest: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century, while China's relations with other countries "have waxed and then waned into coldly proper relations at best, [its] partnership with Pakistan, however, emerged during the mid-1950s, when China was trying to make friends with all developing countries, deepened during the radical anti-imperialist phase of Chinese foreign policy in the early 1960s, persisted unmolested under the direct protection of Mao Zedong during the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution, proved useful during the anti-Soviet hegemony phase of Chinese policy in the 1970s and 1980s and continued with vitality after the dissolution of the USSR and the end of the Cold War".
Given the enduring nature of the Sino-Pakistan relationship, India's strategy appears to be to build economic ties with China. "India expects its growing economic engagement with China to prompt Beijing to adopt a more even-handed policy in South Asia," explained the MEA official, adding that confronting China on the impact that its military co-operation with Pakistan is having on regional stability is unlikely to be rewarding.
The government's approach of not uttering the P word in Sino-Indian discussions has several critics. They insist that by not standing up to the Chinese on the question of Beijing's military cooperation with Islamabad, India has gained little. In fact it has allowed China's "creeping hegemony to go unchecked".
However, others point to the fact that China's position on the Kashmir issue has undergone significant change and in favor of India. If in the 1960s China was calling for the resolution of the Kashmir dispute in accordance with the wishes of the people of Kashmir, incremental pro-India shifts were evident in Beijing's Kashmir policy as the Sino-Indian rapprochement gathered momentum in the 1990s. In fact by 1996, China stated its opposition to the internationalization of the Kashmir issue. Addressing the Pakistani senate during his visit to Pakistan in 1996, former president Jiang Zemin urged resolution of India-Pakistan disputes via "consultations and negotiations".
MEA officials maintain that while China might be expressing happiness over Pakistan's role in tackling terrorism, India remains dissatisfied with Islamabad's efforts. The infrastructure of terrorism has not been dismantled in Pakistan and this is a point that India will raise when Wen comes. As for the issue of Sino-Pakistan military collaboration, officials insist that Indian concerns will be raised quietly. India is hoping that concrete progress will be made with regard to the resolution of the border dispute during Wen's visit to India and this, together with economic cooperation, will be the focus of the diplomatic engagement.
Indian officials point out that after many years of leaving the border dispute on the backburner, India and China have now reached a position where they can negotiate the border in a spirit of give and take. Similarly, India is hoping that China will in a few years be willing to address India's concerns on the Sino-Pakistan defense relationship.
India's concerns over Sino-Pakistan defense cooperation seem likely to remain on the backburner in the foreseeable future.
Sudha Ramachandran is an independent journalist/researcher based in Bangalore.
American bribe to India could trigger World War III Monday, 18 April 2005
IT WASN'T the sort of statement that sets the blood racing: "We have more or less reached agreement with regard to the political parameters and the guiding principles for the settlement of the boundary dispute." But Indian National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan's announcement on April 10, during Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's four-day visit to India, is good news for those who hope their children or grand-children will not die in World War III.
There will have to be further talks before India and China actually start demarcating their long Himalayan frontier, where the existing uncertainties led to a brief border war between the two Asian giants in 1962.
More things also need to happen if China and India are to avoid confrontation as both countries take their place in the front rank of the great powers over the next generation - a free trade area would help, and a mutual security pact wouldn't hurt - but this is a step in the right direction. And not a moment too soon.
It has become urgent because the Bush Administration is trying to lure India into an alliance with the United States that would implicitly define China as the enemy. When US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited New Delhi last month, she told Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that it was now America's policy to "help India become a major world power in the 21st century", and the State Department briefing note emphasised that the US "understands fully the implications, including the military implications, of that statement".
The biggest American bribe on the table is the recent announcement that India would be allowed to buy the next generation of advanced combat aircraft from the US, which would give it definitive air superiority over China (and Pakistan). Other inducements will be deployed in coming months, and the White House hopes that by the time Bush visits India later this year, the two can reach understanding - it won't actually be called an alliance - on military cooperation in Asia.
The neo-conservatives in the Bush Administration have a high opinion of their own strategic abilities, and they imagine that they are replaying the Nixon-Kissinger strategy of 30 years ago. Then America's great strategic adversary was the Soviet Union, and Nixon's rapprochement with China gave the Russians something else to worry about by completing their encirclement. Now, the neo-conservatives see China as the emerging strategic rival, and want to draw India into a military alliance against it.
Except that the US strategy of encircling China is more likely to convince China that it must build up its military power in order to protect itself. The right analogy for what is happening now is not Nixon's China policy of the early 1970s. It is the period before 1914, when the traditional great powers who were facing a future of relative decline, Britain and France, sought to contain the rapid growth of German industrial power by making an alliance with the other rising power, Russia. And that led to World War I.
Germany's rapid industrial growth after unification in 1870 triggered the old balance-of-power reflex in the existing top dogs, Britain and France, who got together to "contain" it. That persuaded the Germans that they were encircled - as indeed they were, once Russia, the other rising industrial power, had been drawn into an alliance with the Western great powers.
No analogy is perfect, but this one feels pretty convincing. America is playing the role of Britain and France, China is being cast in the role of Germany, and India gets to play Russia. We have seen this film before, and it did not end well even last time, when we were only playing with machine-guns and trenches.
This time we are playing with nuclear weapons. If China were hell-bent on conquering the planet, other countries might have to accept the risk that a "containment" policy entails; but it isn't.
Even under the current communist regime, China has not been expansionist. The various border quarrels that led to brief outbreaks of shooting 30 or 40 years ago with the Soviet Union, India and Vietnam were driven by genuine boundary disputes and prickly Chinese nationalism, but the territories at issue were not large or important. China's forces never pushed past the specific territories they claimed, and in most cases they were withdrawn again after making their point.
China's occupation of Tibet and its claim to Taiwan are both contentious issues, but they are seen in China essentially as domestic issues, to do with the country's historic territorial integrity. They are not proof of more general Chinese expansionism - which would be, in any case, pretty pointless in the current era of the global economy.
The master strategists in the Bush Administration are trapped in an old paradigm that no longer served the true interests of the great powers even a hundred years ago, and certainly will not make America or anybody else safer now.
If India falls for their blandishments, they will drive China into a needless military confrontation with its neighbours and destroy the fragile hope of reconciliation between India and Pakistan.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries
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