Troubled Waters: Vietnam, China and the South China Sea.

 A recent series of spats in-between Vietnam and China in the South China Sea (or East Sea as it is called in Vietnam) has attracted a fair degree of international media coverage. Over the past weeks, I was interviewed by various Vietnamese media outlets at different stages of the crisis.

 Here you will find the link to a recent article, published by Thanh Nien Weekly, which discusses the announcement by both parties to attempt to resolve their outstanding territorial disputes in a less confrontational manner. I weigh in, along with veteran Vietnam watcher Carlyle Thayer from the Australian Defense Force Academy, and Ian Storey from ISAS in Singapore.
http://www.thanhniennews.com/2010/Pages/20110702161309.aspx

And an interview for BBC World, which appeared on the Vietnamese website a few weeks ago:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/vietnam/2011/05/110530_viet_china_spat.shtml

I have provided below an English translation of the interview:

Understanding China's Intentions:


Vietnamese media has now been flooded for several days with information related to the threatening actions of Chinese ships towards Vietnam seismic survey vessels operating in the East Sea.In the morning of 26/05, three Chinese ships harassed and sabotaged a PetroVietnam survey vessel.
The location of the incident is said to be deep inside Vietnamese waters, only 120 nautical miles off Lanh Phu Yen province. BBC sat down for a short interview with a specialist on regional maritime security, Iskander Rehman, to discuss the implications behind this latest incident.

BBC: 

How should one view this latest incident?

Iskander Rehman:  
 

The recent incident fits into a broader pattern of Chinese behavior in the South and East China Seas, which has increasingly revolved around the use of coercive diplomacy and aggressive military signaling in order to assert Beijing’s territorial claims. This has led to tense situations not only with Vietnamese ships, but also with US, Japanese, and , more recently, Filipino vessels.

China’s approach to its maritime territorial disputes has not only become more assertive, but also more multi-layered. Indeed, Micro-level naval sparring is just one of the techniques employed by Beijing to enforce its claims over the rocky outcrops that straddle the resource-rich sea lanes of the South China Sea. Other forms of aggressive military signaling, such as mass joint exercises and increased naval patrols off the disputed Paracels and Spratly islands, have been increasingly apparent over the past few years. These provocative actions have been accompanied by what Chinese strategists refer to as “legal warfare”, with Chinese government spokesmen openly contesting in legalistic terms some of the more universally accepted features of the law of the sea. 

BBC:

It has been stated that there is a growing concern in China over the burgeoning US-Vietnam rapprochement. Do you think that last week's incident and the seeming hardening of China's position can also be viewed as a response to this?

Iskander Rehman:

Maybe. The recent Sino-Vietnamese naval spat cannot be entirely divorced from the changing geopolitical landscape in Southeast Asia. Vietnam, with its history of potent nationalism and staunch defiance towards the Middle Kingdom, has always been viewed by China as the unruly upstart of Southeast Asia. Although both states have resolved their land border dispute, tensions remain high on both sides over the disputed Paracel and Spratly islands. These tensions have led to small-scale naval clashes in the past, in 1974 and 1988, and it is unfortunately not outlandish to consider that such small-scale skirmishes might reoccur in the short to medium future.

Chinese officials have been rattled by the burgeoning strategic partnership in-between Washington and Hanoi, and have not taken kindly to the staging of joint US-Vietnamese naval exercises in the South China Sea. Beijing may therefore also be adopting  a more hardline position vis-à-vis Vietnam in response to its growing proximity with the US-either as a form of punishment, or as form of not-so-subtle warning of the potential costs of such a rapprochement.

BBC: 

What kind of long-term trends or strategic calculations do you see emerging from China in light of the growing frequency of such incidents?

Iskander Rehman: 

As China’s economic and military clout grows, so too do its power projection aspirations. For Beijing’s increasingly vocal strategic community, control over the area circumscribed by “the first island chain”, (a natural boundary formed by the Aleutians, the Kuriles, Japan's archipelago, the Ryukyus, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Borneo); and over the offshore gas and oil deposits, strategic waterways, and straits it encompasses is considered an absolute prerequisite for the PLAN’s gradual transition from “off-shore defense” to “far-seas operations”, and , in so doing, from regional influence to global reach.

There has also been speculation in certain quarters that the PLAN wishes to establish a ring of defended maritime watch towers or bastions near Hainan in order to ensure the protection of its “second-strike” nuclear ballistic missile submarine fleet newly based at Sanya. Absolute control over the strategically placed Paracels and Spratly islands would facilitate this defensive configuration.

Global Shift and the Transatlantic Community

The Transatlantic Academy recently released the collaborative report I have worked on with five European and American colleagues over the course of this year. I contributed mostly on the security and global commons section. The report can be downloaded for free by following this link:

http://www.transatlanticacademy.org/sites/default/files/publications/GlobalShift%20TA%202011%20Collaborative%20Report.pdf

While the report provides an excellent overview , it does of course present some of the symptoms encountered when six people of diverse backgrounds work on a vast topic, all under the framework of a relatively brief report.I do not agree necessarily with everything but I believe that it is well worth reading, not least because it presents the China debate from a genuinely transatlantic perspective, which is both rare and valuable.

 One of the key recommendations of the report is to develop an effective division of labor in-between Europe and the US in security matters. Below I have added a copy of the brief presentation I made today during our closing conference. I look forward to your feedback, particularly from my friends that have a far greater grasp of European defense matters and geostrategy.

 What role for Europe under a new Division of Labor?

I’d like to thank you all for being here for the final panel of our closing conference, as well as Steve for bringing me into the Academy. Bringing Europeans and Americans together to work on such an important theme is a challenging task. Writing the report and coming to a consensus on certain issues wasn’t always an easy task either, but I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here at the Academy with my friends and colleagues. One of the chapters which required the greatest degree of reflection was that dealing with security.

For indeed, as we enter an Asia-Pacific Century, and the world’s center of gravity shifts from West to East, it can sometimes appear challenging to perceive a real convergence of interests in-between Europe and the US east of Suez. The US has security commitments in Asia that Europe does not share, and this disconnect seems to be enhanced by the fact that the US’s attention is increasingly being drawn towards Asia. This is reflected officially through documents such as the latest Quadrennial Defense Review, which calls for a gradual transfer of at least 60% of all military assets to Asia, and on a tactical level with the revamping of US bases in places such as Guam, and the crafting of a new force doctrine, the AirSea Battle Concept, designed to offset China’s growing anti-access challenge. In Washington, there is increasingly the feeling that over the past decade; the US has been overweighted in Europe and the Middle East, and underweighted in Asia,  due in part to the continued traction exerted by the bloody land-locked mass counter-insurgency campaigns in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

We recognize that in the future Europe and the US will have to enact an effective division of labor in order to allow the transatlantic community to remain a united, effective and credible actor on the rapidly morphing world stage. How should this translate itself on the ground? We argue that Europe will be compelled to take primary responsibility in its Eastern periphery and Southern neighborhood. This implies the emergence of a genuine European strategic culture, which looks outwards rather than inwards, that lets its vision stretch out to the waters of the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, and not solely to the continental landmass formed by the Eastern and Central European hinterlands.

This is not a call for regional isolationism, however, or for a complete US disinvestment from the wider European neighborhood. We recognize that the US will not be willing, nor will it be able to extricate itself from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict any time soon. What’s more, the recent events that continue to convulse the Arab world mean that the US will have no choice but to continue to focus a degree of its attention on the greater Middle East. Nevertheless, one does wonder however, whether as China continues its naval buildup and sends ripples of unease across the waters of the South and East China Seas , the US will be able-or willing-to continue to maintain the entire Sixth Fleet, comprised of more 40 ships, 175 aircraft and 21,000 servicemen and women, in the Mediterranean.

Although Europe will be called upon to become the prime security and stability provider in its region while the US focuses its attention on Asia, there will be a central region where both poles of the transatlantic alliance overlap and continue to work side by side. The Indian Ocean was famously designated as the center-stage of the XXIst century by Robert Kaplan, largely due to its reemergence as a major hub of maritime trade, but also as a backdrop for the nascent great power rivalry  emerging in-between India and China. I would argue that the Indian Ocean Region will also become the locus of transatlantic cooperation. Both NATO and the EU currently have naval taskforces operating in the Gulf of Aden and off the Horn of Africa, engaging in an effort to combat piracy and protect merchant shipping.  France is an Indian Ocean power, with a permanent naval presence in Djibouti and Reunion, and lays claim to large swathes of offshore territory.  France’s decision to open a new base in Abu Dhabi in 2009 also points to an area of US-EU cooperation: the Persian Gulf. Both Europe and the US rely on the security of the merchant shipping transiting via the Strait of Hormuz, and both Europe and the US share concerns over the instability, fits of bellicosity, and nuclear ambitions of the Iranian regime. So while we argue for an effective division of labor, this is something that goes far beyond the traditional and somewhat limited debate over burden sharing, which is both reductive and not always constructive. Indeed, the question is not so much one of expenditure, but more one of insufficient coordination. After all the European nations combined spend more than 300 billion dollars on defense. The problem as Tomas Valasek of the Centre for European Reform has aptly phrased, is the “great contrast between the cooperative way in which European nations fight wars, and the insular manner in which they prepare for them.” More needs to be done in terms of force pooling. Sporadic efforts by various nations , such as the joint Uk-Netherlands amphibious unit , provide useful benchmarks for future multinational European battlegroups. But that alone will not suffice. Without a thorough attempt to give birth to a common European strategic culture, these measures will prove to be little more than cosmetic. France and Germany failed to make use of their combined brigade in Afghanistan in large part because they could not come to an accord over the caveats under which their troops could be deployed.  Our report calls therefore for the transatlantic community to not only bear witness to the rapidly morphing geopolitical landscape of the XXIst century but also to act upon it, and in so doing, avoid becoming simply a vaporous concept filled with nostalgia but devoid of meaning. In short, the transatlantic community will fade into irrelevance without a renewed effort to achieve some sort of a viable European defense capability. 

The revival and strengthening of the Franco-British entente via the signing of two historic defense treaties in November 2010 does appear to be a step in the right direction, but it does also raise the concern of the emergence of a two-tiers security community in Europe, with those with an “extrovert strategic culture” such as Britain and France cooperating, and those with a more “introvert strategic culture”, such as Germany, drifting off to the sidelines, and in so doing, floating on the edge of geopolitical irrelevance. Although our recent visit to the German MOD did not really give us much cause for optimism, we do hope that over time, the Franco-British entente can be opened up incrementally to countries such as Spain , Italy and Germany. On a more concrete level, we suggest that some of France and Britain’s overseas bases, in Gibraltar, Abu Dhabi, and Cyprus be opened up to other European nations in exchange for European funding for their upkeep and potential expansion. While the idea may not appeal at first glance to some European nations, a chain of interconnected joint European Commands stretching from the Western Mediterranean to the Gulf of Aden would provide Europe with a far greater degree of operational and logistical flexibility in the event of another Libya campaign for example, or in the event of a major humanitarian crisis. We completed this report a few weeks before the initiation of the Libya campaign, and I remember wishing that the report had been published then rather than later. Libya is an interesting test case. Whether it will be heralded as the birth cry of an effective division of labor, or merely as the foreshadowing of an increasingly cavernous intra-European chasm in terms of security matters remains, however, to be seen. Charles De Gaulle once famously said that no European Statesman would unify Europe, and that only the Chinese could. Let us hope that he is both right and wrong, and that the rise of China will compel Europe to better find its voice, and its calling, in this new world. Thank you.

From Down Under to Top Center: Australia, the US, and this Century's Special Relationship.

The German Marshall Fund has released my in-depth report on Australia, its strategic culture, defense reforms, and role in AirSea Battle. For copyright reasons I can't reproduce it here, but you will find the link to downloading it below:


http://www.gmfus.org/cs/publications/publication_view?publication.id=1698

Below you will find an article published in the New Zealand Herald which mentions the report:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/australia/news/article.cfm?l_id=15&objectid=10730219


As well as my interview on an Australian radio show:

http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2011/06/sea_20110604_0730.mp3

A Step too Far: Why CPGS is the Wrong Answer to China's Anti-Access Challenge

Here is a link to an Asia-Pacific Bulletin I recently penned for the East-West Center here in DC:

http://www.eastwestcenter.org/fileadmin/stored/pdfs/apb102_1.pdf

For those interested here is the abstract featured on their website:

In March 1996, the waters of the Taiwan Strait were roiled by Chinese live missile firings and massive military exercises. Washington answered Beijing's blunt demonstration of coercive military diplomacy by promptly dispatching two aircraft carriers to the scene. This event set the stage for a changing tactical environment in the Western Pacific. Iskander Rehman argues that the ensuing US response of radically reconsidering its doctrine and force posture in the Western Pacific may result in greater tactical advantage but deteriorating strategic stability.

In the next week or two, an in-depth paper on Australia's new geostrategic centrality in the Asia-Pacific Theater.

Shadowboxing in Lahore

http://www.transatlanticacademy.org/blogs/iskander-rehman/shadowboxing-lahore-raymond-davis-affair-and-rift-between-american-and-pakista

The dramatic incident that unfolded in Lahore last month, when a mysterious consular employee, later revealed to be a CIA contractor, gunned down two equally shadowy assailants in broad daylight, has become a major issue of dispute in-between Islamabad and Washington.

Beyond the broader diplomatic and legal squabbles revolving around the issue of his diplomatic immunity and the contested decision of the Lahore High Court to keep Raymond Davis in custody, the incident has shed light on a murky underworld where the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI or Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, have been playing out an increasingly deadly form of shadowboxing, rife with deception and mistrust.

Pakistan’s ISI, or Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, is the largest intelligence service in Pakistan. Founded in 1948, the agency only really came into its own during the decade long-war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which pitted the Soviet invaders against US funded jihadists. During that brutal period, the ISI acted as an intermediary for the CIA, training tens of thousands of mujahedeen and smuggling them across the porous Afghan border. In return, the ISI was flooded with funds, sophisticated arms and equipment, and several of its officers were trained by CIA handlers.

Since then, the organization has become sadly notorious for the extent of its influence over Pakistan’s foreign policy, as well for its long history of meddling in the nation’s internal politics. The ISI is a military organization, led by a Director General, and as such is expected to act in concordance with the army’s overarching strategic objectives. These have been consistent over the years and can be broadly summarized as the following:

• Preserve Pakistan’s fragile unity by combating ethnic and separatist movements.

• Weaken India by instrumentalizing non state actors and using them as proxies to wage its ‘war of a thousand cuts’ against its more powerful neighbor.

• Bolster Pakistan’s influence in the region by attempting to obtain a form of “strategic depth” in Afghanistan, most notably by supporting the Taliban.

When the United States decided to go after Al Qaeda and their Taliban associates in 2001, the ISI was thus confronted with a seemingly intractable dilemma: how could it appear to support its American allies in the war on terror, while not severing its ties with its Taliban allies? The ISI has striven to extricate itself from this quandary by pursuing an elaborate double-track policy, or what experts such as Professor Sumit Ganguly have adequately phrased as “hunting with the hounds and running with the hares.”

This has largely consisted in the ISI finding means to covertly support its Afghan Taliban allies, while attempting to occasionally placate the US and its NATO allies by periodically handing over foreign Al Qaeda operatives. Pakistan’s long-term vision of its national interests means that while it may engage in combat operations against militants that threaten its own security, it will be highly reticent to do so against groups that are seen as aligned with its strategic objectives.

One of these groups is the Lashkar-e-Taiba or “Army of the Pure”, spawned in the late 1980s, and which conducted the brutal massacre in Mumbai in 2008. Since then, extensive investigations and interrogations of the organization’s captured or defected operatives have detailed how ISI field officers would be detached to train militant recruits, screen new additions, and then provide them with crates of weapons with filed off serial numbers . Some leading counterterrorism experts also believe that the youthful Sajid Mir, who directed the Mumbai attacks over the phone from a safehouse in Pakistan, may be an army officer.

At the time of his arrest, Raymond Davis had been scouring the bustling streets of Lahore looking for ties in-between the ISI and LeT. The two armed men tailing the burly ex Special Forces were attempting to forcefully demonstrate that he, as well as the rest of his task force, was crossing an invisible, but deeply etched, red line. This had already been signaled in December when the CIA station chief in Pakistan was compelled to suddenly leave the country after his identity was mysteriously made public. US officials have speculated in private that the leak was the Pakistan’s intelligence community’s response to a recent civil lawsuit filed in New York by the families of the six American victims of the Mumbai carnage, and in which the ISI and its chiefs are named as plaintiffs. Since the Davis shooting, the ISI has continued to vociferously express its dissatisfaction, even going so far as to send an irate letter to the Wall Street Journal and demanding detailed data on every CIA contractor working in Pakistan.

While the ISI’s labyrinthine nature means that its top brass’s official sanctioning of Mumbai cannot be absolutely certified, the recent clear revelation of the links in-between certain ISI officers and the tragedy is a watershed moment in the US-Pakistan relationship. More specifically, it should lead to an urgent reassessment on the wisdom of channeling millions of US taxpayers’ dollars into an organization that has not only stubbornly continued to abet the Taliban, but has also more directly coordinated attacks in which both American and British civilians lost their lives.

Unfortunately, necessity requires that the US and its partners continue to rely on Pakistani cooperation in order to establish a modicum of stability in Afghanistan. It is clearly only by encouraging a major overhaul of the Pakistani intelligence apparatus, from the bottom up, and by influencing the perennially Indo-centric military’s mindset that any form of lasting success can be achieved. However, these tasks will require great finesse, as well as much time and effort. In the meantime, the US should not only display resolve by withholding the funding that has flooded the ISI’s coffers, but should also behave more tactically by encouraging the emergence of a rival intelligence apparatus affiliated to the civilian government rather than to the military. For example, Washington could henceforth gear most of its efforts towards bolstering the Federal Investigation Agency of Pakistan, and its Special Investigation Unit, which was founded in 2003 in order to deal with counter-terrorism. This would probably prove more effective in strengthening civil society’s hold on power than a host of other more direct initiatives, and would hopefully help prize the future of Afghanistan away from the clutches of a group of profoundly paranoid and murderous generals.

Is the PLA Now Driving China's Foreign Policy?

http://www.transatlanticacademy.org/blogs/iskander-rehman/military-now-driving-chinas-foreign-policy

To the bewildered outside observer, attempting to fathom the sources, foundations and architecture of China’s foreign policy can seem like peering over the top of a very high, and dangerously slippery wall. And indeed, China’s great wall has provided in the eyes of some informed China watchers such as Ian Buruma, author of a detailed study of China’s democratic movements, an apt metaphor for the opacity of Chinese elite politics, “with its rulers’ enduring preoccupation with controlling an enclosed, secretive, autarchic universe, a walled kingdom in the middle of the world.”

It is this very opacity of Chinese politics which renders the precise nature of civil-military relations at the senior level incredibly challenging to ascertain. China hands thus frequently have to resort to indirect sources and conjecture when speculating about PLA/CCP interactions. Conventional wisdom over the years has been to define the relationship as being symbiotic rather than transactional or competitive in nature. The PLA is, after all, the army of the party, not of the state, and Hu Jintao, the Chinese President, heads the Central Military Commission, the highest military command structure. The Politburo Standing Committee, or PSC, China’s highest ranking political body, has not hosted a member of the military since the recently deceased Admiral Liu Huaqing, the visionary founder of the modern Chinese Navy, left the organization in 1997.

Nevertheless, certain recent events, such as the “surprise” unveiling of the new Chinese J-20 stealth fighter during Secretary of Defense Robert Gate’s recent visit to Beijing, which President Hu Jintao claimed to not have been notified of, have sent out ripples of unease in the strategic community. Indeed, it would seem that over the past few years there have been an increasing number of incidents in which assertive actions by the PLA at the tactical level have appeared to surprise or preempt China’s formal foreign policy establishment. For instance, when in 2001 Sino-US relations were rocked by the collision in-between a US EP-3E reconnaissance plane and a Chinese J-8II interceptor fighter jet, which resulted in the tragic death of the Chinese fighter pilot and an emergency landing of the EP-3 on the island of Hainan; it was revealed that the PLA withheld critical information from the central government with the goal of driving it to take a more assertive stance. Likewise, it was noted that after the 2007 Anti-Satellite Test, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs seemed almost as taken aback as the US State Department. This, of course, could be a form of refined ploy or elaborate strategy of “plausible deniability”, which would allow China’s political establishment to distance themselves from forceful military posturing while tacitly egging them on from the sidelines. It does seem, after all, somewhat difficult to believe that the ever cryptic President Hu Jintao had no idea of what was unfolding on the tarmac of Chengdu.

There have, however, been other troubling trends which have given pause to China observers. The heightened attempts by the PLA to influence the public debate, whether by allowing its officers to serve as jingoistic television commentators, or by publicly diffusing articles and briefings by PLA Research Institutions are one such trend. In the spring of 2010, I found, to my surprise, that one of my recent articles detailing India’s aircraft carrier acquisition plans had been translated and posted on the China’s Daily website the day following its publication. Six months later, while in Beijing with the Transatlantic Academy, I was informed that the ‘naval lobby’ in the PLA had undoubtedly pushed for its translation and publication, in order to justify its own aircraft carrier ambitions.

The Chinese Navy’s truculent muscle-flexing in the South and East China Seas is another major source of concern. Several times over the past decade, tense international incidents have been sparked by the increasingly predatory behavior displayed by Chinese vessels, whether it be via the mass capture and detention of Vietnamese fishermen off the disputed Spratlys and Paracels, the illegal entry of submerged Chinese submarines into Japanese territorial waters, or the more recent harassment of the USNS Impeccable in the South China Sea. Some of these actions, such as the helicopter buzzing of a Japanese destroyer in early 2010, or the sudden surfacing of a Chinese Song Class submarine in the middle of the USS Kitty Hawk task force three years prior seem needlessly provocative, reckless even. This has raised the question of the extent of Chinese civilian oversight over individual military actions. In the US, a clear and strict chain of command ensures that every American naval maneuver in “sensitive areas” is carefully vetted by the NSC in order to prevent an isolated event from spiraling out of control. Judging by the PLAN’s recent actions, this does not seem to be the case in China. And this, combined with the fact that there the Military Maritime Consultative Agreement (or MMCA)currently in effect in-between Washington and Beijing contains no provision for real-time vessel-to-vessel tactical communication in the evident of an incident, is hardly reassuring.

One must proceed with caution, however, when examining the PLA/PRC relationship. In the past, China watchers have made the mistake of overstating the PLA’s latent influence over politics. For example, few thought that the decision by the political leadership in 1998 to divest the PLA of the bulk of its commercial activities would go down as smoothly as was the case. At the time, analysts had envisioned that in the face of Army opposition, the political leadership would be compelled to delve into the state coffers and dish out massive payoffs, or enter into a transactional, rather than a symbiotic rapport with the military. In fact, it was shown that the decision to engage in divestiture was conducted in concordance, rather than in opposition to the military elite, as they wished to preserve the PLA’s institutional image and foster speedier professionalization and modernization rather than drift towards a Pakistan-style military kleptocracy.

In reality, the PLA’s seemingly increased clout can be in large part explained by two phenomena. The first is that is has been shown empirically that in times of intra-leadership conflict or competition, the PLA is sucked into China’s labyrinthine elite politics and wields greater influence. The Chinese leadership is at present in the turmoil of a leadership transition, prior to the 2012 18^th Party Congress, and no aspiring Chinese political grandee wishes to appear weak or subservient to the US and its allies during this fraught period. The PLA therefore has greater latitude to push its hawkish agenda.

Secondly, Chinese foreign policy is becoming, as a whole, more omnidirectional in nature, with a multiplicity of voices, policy advocates and foreign policy actors, ranging from banks to state owned multinationals to China’s increasingly vociferous community of netizens conspiring to render China’s foreign policy increasingly complex in nature. To the point of which, as former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft recently stated, “There is a remarkable amount of chaos in the system.”

It is these troubled waters that the US foreign policy establishment will have to gradually learn to navigate, in the hope that the 2012 leadership transition will lend a greater degree of unity, and, let us pray, a heftier dose of restraint to Chinese foreign policy.