The Indo-Vietnamese Strategic Partnership.

This is a piece I just wrote for BBC World's Vietnam bureau:http://www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/world/2009/09/090917_india_viet_partnership.shtml


Over the past year, a chill wind has been blowing over the South China Sea, and the waters lapping the coast of Vietnam have grown choppy with tension. A distinct increase in the level of Chinese assertiveness in the region has led to multinational companies being pressured out of participating in offshore energy ventures with Vietnam, to the routine rounding up of Vietnamese fishermen by Chinese patrol vessels for ‘fishing in Chinese waters’, as well as to a steady ramping up of Chinese naval activity which has, in some instances, led to tension-fraught stand-offs with the US Navy.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/world/2009/07/090728_rehman_commentary.shtml


This upsurge in Chinese naval self-confidence has sent ripples of unease across Southeast Asia, and most particularly in Vietnam, which has been embroiled in a bitter territorial dispute with China over the possession of the Spratly and Paracel islands for several decades. Vietnamese officials, when in private, frequently lament what they perceive to be Vietnam’s relative isolation on the diplomatic scene, and fear for the future. When discussing these issues recently in Paris with someone with close ties to the Vietnamese leadership, I was issued with the following dire prediction: “We think that the Chinese will press for a final resolution of the sovereignty dispute over the Spratly and Paracel Islands in the next ten to twenty years. If Vietnam has not reinforced its strategic partnerships by then, while simultaneously strengthening its Navy, China will be able to just seize the islands without anyone abroad lifting a hand in protest or even batting an eye-lid. ”

Vietnamese dignitaries seem to believe that their window of opportunity to press an advantageous deal with China is rapidly closing and this has instilled their military diplomacy with a new sense of urgency.

Having taken tentative steps to reinforce its ageing and minute fleet, most notably by ordering a flotilla of six Kilo-class submarines from Russia, Hanoi has also been endeavouring to reinforce its defence ties with several other regional powers such as Singapore, Japan, Australia (which Secretary General Nong Duc Manh paid visit to only a few weeks ago) and India.


A Partnership Grounded in History:


Vietnam’s relationship with India goes back a long way. Indeed, one could say that India, along with ex-Soviet Russia, has been one of Vietnam’s staunchest allies over the years. The Indian Prime Minister Jawahrlal Nehru was the first foreign leader to visit the newly independent North Vietnam in 1954, and throughout most of the Cold War, India and Vietnam were strong political allies. Both had very close ties to the Soviet Union, and both bore the brunt of Chinese border invasions; India in 1962, and Vietnam in 1979. India’s support of Vietnam during the Vietnam war and during its invasion and occupation of Cambodia in the 1980s came at a high political cost, injecting bitterness into Delhi’s difficult relationship with Washington, as well as delaying the process of Sino-Indian normalisation by almost a decade. In return, Vietnam supported India in its conflicts with Pakistan, and was one of the first countries in the world to recognize newly independent Bangladesh in 1971.


The Indo-Vietnamese relationship throughout the Cold War, however, remained mostly diplomatic and political in nature. Bilateral trade was minimal, and the security component of their rapport limited itself, by and large, to information sharing protocols. It was only with the profound restructuring of Asia’s security environment at the end of the Cold War, and the advent of India’s “Look East Policy” in the early 90s that the relationship gradually evolved into a genuine strategic partnership.


The Burgeoning of a Wide Ranging Strategic Partnership:


The abrupt disintegration of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War had an enormous impact on both countries’ diplomacies. Almost overnight, both Hanoi and Delhi lost their most reliable strategic guarantor in Asia. Both countries reacted to this radically new security environment by opening up to the world, liberalizing their economies, and taking steps to normalize their relationships with their neighbours, while making an effort to diversify their strategic partnerships. The end of Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia facilitated its integration into ASEAN in 1995, and in the early 90s India launched what it termed its “Look East Policy”, which heralded a new era of engagement,both diplomatic and economic, with Southeast Asian nations.

It was only with the advent of an intensely nationalistic government in Delhi in the late 90s, however, that bilateral ties began to really pick up speed and take on a genuinely strategic turn. With the nuclear explosions of Pokhran II, in 1998, the BJP governement of Atal Behari Vajpayee signalled to the world, and more particularly to China, that India had become a hard power to be reckoned with.Vietnam, for its part, was intent on extricating itself from an excessive dependence on its timeold Russian partner in terms of both arms procurement and military-to- military diplomacy .Leaders from both countries also recognized that, despite significant progress in their relations with Beijing, both India and Vietnam still share a natural strategic congruence on the need to restrain China.


Since 1998, both countries have thus been steadily strengthening their ties, whether it be on the military or on the diplomatic front.

Vietnam has come out in support of India’s bid for a permanent seat at the UNSC, has lobbied in favour of India’s presence at the first East Asian Summit in 2005, and helped block Pakistan’s inclusion in the ASEAN Regional Forum. India, in return, was in favour of Vietnam’s accession to the World Trade Organization, and helped Vietnam secure a temporary seat at the UNSC in 2007. Bilateral trade has also grown extremely rapidly, surging from little more than 72 million dollars in 1995 to more than two billion in 2008. Indian multinationals such as Tata Steel and ONGC Videsh Limited have started to invest heavily in Vietnam, in what many hope is just the beginning of a new trade pattern in Asia.


The aspect of the Indo-Vietnamese partnership that has known the most progress, however, is the military one.

Strategically placed on the eastern fringe of Southeast Asia, Vietnam is viewed by India as the main obstacle to China’s southwards expansion. Much as China has attempted to constrain India by forming a military nexus with Pakistan, New Delhi has been involved in defence cooperation with, and provided military assistance to its rival’s smaller, militaristic neighbour.

In 2000, George Fernandes, the BJP government’s Defence Minister signed a 15-point Defence Protocol with Vietnam, which promised to provide Vietnam with assistance in the modernization of its armed forces and to intensify defence cooperation between the two countries. Three years later, India and Vietnam stepped up their military cooperation by signing a “Joint Declaration and Framework of Comprehensive Cooperation between the Republic of India and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam as they enter the 21st century.” In 2007, this was followed up by a formalized Strategic Partnership.

India has been providing Vietnam with assistance in the shoring up of its naval and air capabilities in an attempt to deny China total supremacy in the South China Sea. This is greatly facilitated by the fact that Vietnam’s Air Force and Navy’s military hardware have the same Russian origin as their Indian counterparts, which has enabled the Indian armed forces to frequently help their Vietnamese partners overcome their operational difficulties by supplying them with spare parts and by providing advanced repair and maintenance services. New Delhi has repaired and upgraded 125 Mig 21 planes of the Vietnamese Air Force, and supplied them with enhanced avionics and radar systems. Indian Air Force pilots have also been training Vietnamese fighter pilots, and in 2005 the Indian Navy dispatched more than 150 tonnes of spares to Hanoi for its Russian Petya and OSA-11 class missile boats. The Indian and Vietnamese coast guards have engaged in joint patrols, and both navies participated in a joint exercise in 2007.


Indo-Vietnamese military cooperation also extends to their respective ground forces; as both countries have engaged in joint exercises, and Indian army officers have benefited from Vietnamese expertise in jungle warfare and counter-insurgency.

In return, the Vietnamese have been supplied with advanced light helicopters (the Indian made AHLs) at “friendly prices”, and Vietnamese officers have been provided with English lessons at an Indian Language Institute.


A Feeling of Unfulfilled Potential:


Despite all this, there is a feeling, both in India and in Vietnam, that the partnership is far from having achieved its potential, and, what’s more, has started to lose its momentum.

Hanoi has been particularly disappointed in India’s unreliability as a weapons procurement partner. Although India has engaged in some token efforts to help modernize Vietnam’s military, the Vietnamese are frustrated by the fact that New Delhi seems so reticent to supply it with some of the missile systems it had initially promised. Indeed, in 2000 and at several occasions during the BJP governnment’s tenure, India had vouched that it would gift Vietnam with the Prithvi and BrahMos missile systems. The Prithvi is an SRBM (Short Range Ballistic Missile), with a maximum range of approximately 200-350km,whereas the BrahMos Cruise Missile, co-produced by the Indians with the Russians, is a very advanced anti-ship missile, based on the Russian Yakhent anti-ship missile, which has a range of more than 300km and that can fly at more than twice the speed the sound. If the Vietnamese Navy were to acquire such a weapons system, it would prove to be a major challenge to Chinese naval dominance in the South China Sea, and greatly aid Vietnam in its strategy of sea denial and coastal defence. Various theories have been put forward to explain India’s failure to provide Vietnam with the Prithvi and BrahMos. Some claim that India’s Congress government, which has increasingly focused on economic rather than military cooperation with Vietnam, does not want to run the risk of antagonizing China. Others blame it on traditional Indian bureaucratic sloth or have stated that, in the case of the BrahMos, it must first be fully inducted into the Indian Armed Forces before a surplus can be generated for friendly states such as Vietnam. Most analysts concur in saying that Vietnam will probably obtain the Prithvi system in the long run. When it comes to the vaunted BrahMos, however, things are far from certain.


It is believed that frustration at this, as well as at successive delays in amrs deliveries, is what led the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security to purchase sub machine guns and sniper rifles from Pakistan in 2007, in a veiled but nevertheless significant expression of its displeasure. The Indians for their part, are somewhat disappointed that the possibility of the Indian Navy gaining permanent berthing rights at the Vietnamese deep sea port of Cam Ranh Bay now seem to be increasingly remote. While the Vietnamese aired this possibility at the turn of the century, Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Dy Nien declared in 2004 when questioned on the matter that Cam Ranh was “no longer a military port”. Most analysts now concur in viewing Cam Ranh Bay as Vietnam’s strategic trump card, that it occasionally brandishes to balance China, but that it will most probably refuse to give up to a foreign power, unless it is compelled to in extreme circumstances.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/vietnam/2009/06/090626_camranh_analysis.shtml


Things are also far from perfect on the economic front. Indeed, while bilateral trade has grown substantially over the past decade, it is also increasingly unbalanced in nature, with Vietnam suffering from a crippling one billion dollar trade deficit with India. As a net benificiary of this imbalance, India has politely brushed aside the Vietnamese proposal to establish an FTA and has refused to grant tax reductions and exemptions to Vietnamese products.


An Uncertain Future:


While it is clear that ties in-between India and Vietnam have strengthened over the past few years, particularly in the field of defence, it is equally apparent that for it to endure it needs to be put on a more equal footing.

India should consider lowering its trade tarriffs and opening its markets to some Vietnamese products, and should encourage more Indian companies to invest in Vietnam. Indian policy makers that hesitate to provide Vietnamese ships with BrahMos cruise missiles should maybe wonder whether China was beset by the same moral qualms when it supplied Pakistan with its first state-of-the-art F-22P frigate this summer.

Last but not least, the future of the Indo-Vietnamese partnership will increasingly depend on both states’ attitude towards China. India’s Congress government, which has generally shown a slightly more conciliatory attitude towards Beijing than its BJP predecessor; is currently facing renewed tensions along its 4,057 km with China. It may not wish, therefore, to durably aggravate its transhimalyan neighbour by strengthening the military facet of its ties with Vietnam.

Vietnam’s leadership, for its part, is currently riven by factional in-fighting as a prelude to the 11th National Congress in 2011. The recent crackdown on nationalist Vietnamese bloggers and journalists seems to indicate that the China-aligned fringe of the Party, which controls domestic intelligence gathering via the military intelligence unit General Department II, is gradually gaining ascendancy in the struggle in-between conservatives and liberals. If the pro-China conservatives win this subterranean battle for power and influence, it will undoubtedly have a highly negative impact on the Indo-Vietnamese partnership.

Debating the possibility of a Sino-Indian ‘limited’ border war in India’s Northeast.

This is a piece I wrote for an Indian think tank called IPCS.
( http://www.ipcs.org/) Here is the link: http://www.ipcs.org/pdf_file/issue/IB117-Iskander-IndiaChina.pdf

- Mounting tensions in the Northeastern border regions:

India’s Northeast has become the focal point of Sino-Indian diplomatic wrangling over the past few months. Indeed, whereas before Beijing seemed quite content to ‘leave things to history’ when it came to settling both countries’ 4,057 km border; a recent flurry of diplomatic spats and an upsurge in Chinese incursions seem to indicate a growing Chinese intolerance for the status quo.
Last month, for example, it was reported that the PRC had been attempting for months to block a 2.9 billion dollar loan to India from the Asian Development Bank on the grounds that it contained a 60 million dollar package for funding water management projects in Arunachal Pradesh, which is disputed territory. In the same state of Arunachal Pradesh, according to
MP Kiren Rijiju, Chinese incursions have increased fourfold over the past year. The minute Himalayan state of Sikkim has also made a disturbing re-entry into the border dispute, and this after years of what many Indian policymakers had been led to believe was a tacit Chinese recognition of Indian sovereignty in the area. Indeed, when former Prime Minister Vajpayee visited Beijing in 2003, he made a significant gesture towards China by reasserting its sovereignty over Tibet. In return, or so it was thought by some at the time, the PRC gave up its claim over Sikkim. Although there was no official declaration to such effect by the authorities in Beijing, for some time it was thought that the Sino-Indian ‘barter’ had indeed taken place, as official Chinese maps began to show Sikkim as part of India.
Unfortunately, China seems to have reneged on its ‘informal promises’ by frequently sending troops to probe Indian defences over a small tract of Northern Sikkim referred to as the Finger Area, and threatening to destroy ancient stone cairns in the area. Last year, Indian surveyors were alarmed to discover that China was quietly building a new East-West road that cut through the Finger Area. Construction only ground to a halt once Delhi lodged an official diplomatic complaint.
The Sikkim imbroglio brings to mind certain episodes during the optimistically named ‘Hindi Chini bhai bhai era’, in the 1950s, when Chinese officials would show their Indian counterparts maps laying claim to vast tracts of Indian territory and brush off their concerns by stating that they were merely outdated Kuomintang maps. Indian policymakers need to realize once and for all that in the absence of a formalized, signed declaration, informal ‘promises’ from the Chinese are worthless.

For the time being, India’s response to the rise in Chinese hostility seems to have consisted of a rather curious blend of diplomatic timidity and military assertiveness.
The Indian armed forces’ response to PLA incursions has been refreshingly swift and forceful in nature. General J J Singh, the governor of Arunachal Pradesh announced in June that India would be deploying two extra divisions of approximately 25, 000 to 30, 000 each to the region, and that this military presence on the ground would be supplemented in the air by a newly inducted squadron of 18 Sukhoi Su-30MIK Aircraft which would operate from the Tezpur airfield in Assam. In Sikkim, Delhi has decided to re-induct the 27th Mountain Division, while strengthening defensive positions along the northern border and deploying T-72 heavy battle tanks. After these announcements were made, China almost immediately expressed its dissatisfaction via an exceptionally shrill editorial in the Global Times, an English language tabloid which is edited by the People’s Daily which is, in turn, controlled by the CCP. In the short but hard-hitting piece, entitled “India’s Unwise Military Moves”, China rails against India’s recent military moves, declaring that officials in Delhi are “engaging in wishful thinking” by believing that they can compete with China or force the latter “to compromise in its border disputes with India”.
Whereas the Indian government has shown backbone in its military management of the border dispute, it remains remarkably timid on the diplomatic front. Manmohan Singh’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh last year was a surprisingly low key affair; the Prime Minister not even daring to visit the Tawang Monastery for fear of provoking Chinese ire. Similarly, there have been unconfirmed reports that the IAF was urged to cancel or downplay its planned induction ceremony for the Sukhoi aircraft in Assam in order, once again, to not rile the powerful neighbour.





- A ‘limited war’ in the course of the next decade?


The deterioration of the security situation along the LAC has led some preeminent Indian analysts such as Bharat Verma, the editor of Indian Defence Review, to issue dire projections on the supposed probability of a Chinese attack on India’s Northeast by 2012 or 2017. (For some reason, these are the two dates that pop up each time)
The motives for such an aggression are multiple. Arunachal Pradesh, which is still stubbornly referred to by the PRC as ‘Southern Tibet’, has immense strategic and symbolic significance for the Chinese, especially with regard to Tibet.
The epicentre of Chinese claims over the 90, 000 km2 state is the 327 year old monastery of Tawang, which was the birthplace of the sixth Dalai Lama, and which is considered by many to be one of the most powerful bastions of freely practiced Tibetan Buddhism in the region. In 2008 the current Dalai Lama, who is ageing and suffering from unspecified health problems, gravely alarmed Beijing by declaring that his successor would most likely be born outside of Chinese occupied Tibet. In the event of the demise of the religious leader, the PLA could be tempted to pre-emptively quash any Tibetan dissent by launching a lightning strike against the Tawang tract, and by taking over the monastery. The young Dalai Lama could then be whisked away by the Chinese authorities and moulded into a perfectly compliant cadre of the Chinese Communist Party. The occupation of the monastery would not only forestall the reincarnation of the next Dalai Lama in Indian administered territory, it would also be a colossal moral blow to the Tibetan independence movement.
Strategically speaking, the occupation of Arunachal Pradesh holds many advantages. Unlike the Tibetan Autonomous region, Arunachal Pradesh is a richly forested area. Furthermore, it is also rich in minerals and natural gas, and would enable China to establish a trijunction with Myanmar, a country in which it has been steadily shoring up its influence over the past twenty years. If Chinese armed forces were to establish a presence in the state, they would strategically overlook the Brahmaputra valley, which would in turn enable them to overrun the plains of Assam. In the case of Sikkim, a Chinese invasion would allow the PRC to absorb some of Tibetan Buddhism’s largest remaining monasteries, and, in the event of a protracted conflict with India, to swoop down on the narrow Siliguri corridor and effectively cut off Delhi from the entirety of its north-eastern provinces. China would also be able to encircle the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan and forcibly drag it into an arc of Chinese influence spreading from Nepal to Bangladesh.
Indian commentators pursue their analysis by stating that a successful lightning border war against India would greatly strengthen Chinese prestige in Asia and ensure Beijing’s supremacy in the continent for the rest of the century. It would also enable China to divert attention from its growing internal unrest, whether it be due to increasingly restive minorities or soaring socioeconomic disparities, by instrumentalizing ever vivacious Han nationalism.



Dire projections and apocalyptic simulations put aside however, what is the real likelihood of such an event actually taking place in the near future?

Both countries’ armed forces have apparently envisioned such a possibility.Indeed, there has been talk, amongst some Chinese military analysts of such institutes as the China Institute of International Strategic Studies, of the tactical benefits of launching what they call a ‘partial’ or ‘limited’ war, and the Indian military recently engaged in a war scenario codenamed ‘Divine Matrix’ , which attempted to predict the outcome of a lightning high-tech Chinese assault before 2017. It is natural, though, for a country’s armed forces to partake in such simulations in order to heighten their state of awareness. It does not mean that such a conflict is a foregone conclusion. There remain many obstacles to the materialization of this doomsday vision.


For one thing, such an act of aggression would engender widespread international condemnation, and throw years of painstaking work in favour of Sino-Indian normalization to wreck and ruin. Furthermore, the PRC’s strategic vision remains, for the most part, trained on its sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea and on the Taiwan issue. The border squabble with India, while important, remains somewhat peripheral when compared to these concerns. The government in Beijing also has to deal with rising internal unrest and fissiparous movements in Xinjiang, Kham and the TAR. And while China holds a sizeable advantage in terms of conventional power in the Himalayas, India is still very much capable of giving the PLA a bloody nose in select areas along the LAC,such as Ladakh, for example, where the recent upgrading by the IAF of high altitude airstrips and the presence of experienced mountain troops such as the Ladakh ‘Snow Tiger’ Scouts unit, put India in a relatively strong position. Nobody in China's strategic community wants a repeat of the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese border war,which was meant to be a 'swift lesson' and which instead saw the Chinese advance falter and then get bogged down due to unexpectedly heavy Vietnamese resistance.
All these elements, when combined, severely mitigate the likelihood of such a war taking place.

There is, nevertheless one major issue that could definitively remove the Sino-Indian border issue from China’s strategic backburner; that being the question of the Dalai Lama’s succession and the fear of further unreset in Tibet after his death. If the security situation in Chinese controlled Tibet was to rapidly deteriorate, chances of a border conflict occurring would be heightened. As Mohan Malik, from the University of Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolul points out in an interview to Asia Times Online, the probability of an all-out conflict is extremely low, but the prospect that some of India's road building projects in disputed areas could lead to tensions, and skirmishes with Chinese border patrols cannot be completely ruled out. An upsurge in such border clashes could then spiral into a conflict, which would most probably take the form of a blitzkrieg PLA assault on Arunachal Pradesh, with the ultimate goal being the seizure once and for all of the Tawang Tract.

- Preparing for a worst-case scenario:


Nevertheless, India cannot afford to remain unprepared. Despite recent efforts in terms of troop deployment, the balance of power along the LAC still tilts firmly in China’s favour. The PRC has been massively building up infrastructure in Tibet over the past few years, and the 2008 riots in Lhasa provided Beijing with the perfect excuse to flood the region with additional military personnel. From what we know, Chinese forces in Tibet now consist of at least two entire mountain brigades (the 52nd and 53rd), of the 149th Mobile Division of the 13th Group Army, and of elements of the Second Artillery. Infrastructure, whether it be via the construction of highways, all-weather roads or the extension of the Golmund Lhasa high altitude railway, has been vastly improved. Infrastructure on the Indian side of the border, however, remains woefully inadequate in comparison. In many places along the LAC, Chinese soldiers can simply drive up to the border while Indian jawans sometimes have to trek more than 10 to 15 km through steep mountainous terrain. Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim are both states with amongst the lowest road density per square km in India.
Indeed, for a long time Delhi’s policy towards its border regions seemed to be one of ‘masterly inactivity’; either in order not to heighten its overbearing neighbour’s suspicions, or, as some have advanced, in order to deny Chinese military forces the use of Indian transport infrastructure if and when they crossed the border.



Whatever the reason, the Indian government seems to have finally done away with its traditionally passive mindset. Over the past three years a bevy of road and other infrastructure projects in the border areas have been given the green light. More than 3 billion dollars have been set aside to address the dearth in roads in the Northeast, and their construction, which was until recently confined to military engineers, has now been opened up to the private sector as well. It will take quite a few years however, and a considerable amount of additional funding to address this glaring strategic deficiency.
Until then, the Indian Air force has been opening and upgrading airstrips all along the border, not only in Assam, but also in West Bengal, Ladakh, and Bihar. The deployment of additional divisions to Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim is only the premise for a major reorientation of India’s armed forces to its northeastern borders. The future of this redirection rests in large part on the evolution of Indo-Pakistan ties. If, in time, tensions in-between both South Asian states subside, India will be able to refocus more effectively on the border it shares with China.
In the meantime, India must pursue the difficult task of continuing to strengthen its presence in the region, while maintaining its efforts to normalize ties with an increasingly susceptible and expansionist neighbour.
Albert Einstein once said that one cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war. Unfortunately,in such a climate of constant uncertainty, that is exactly what India will have to do.

BBC South China Sea Backgrounder.

This is a very brief backgrounder on recent Sino-American tensions in the South China Sea I wrote for BBC World Service.

Here is the link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/world/2009/07/090728_rehman_commentary.shtml

I'm afraid it's not as well written or structured as I would like it to be as it was written under a deadline.

Growing Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea over the past few months:

2009 has been marked by a distinct increase in the level of Chinese assertiveness, both diplomatic and military, in the region.
The Spratly dispute has resurfaced to overshadow Sino-Philippine relations and Vietnamese fishermen are routinely being rounded up by Chinese patrol vessels for "fishing in Chinese waters".
British and American companies have been pressured out of participating in offshore energy ventures with Vietnam, Beijing threatening to bar them from engaging in any future lucrative energy contracts in China. The PRC has been steadily ramping up its naval activities in the region, more than doubling its patrols around the disputed Paracel and Spratly islands. When an American oceanographic survey vessel, the USNS Impeccable was harassed by Chinese ships in international waters in March, the incident made world headlines. In reality, this was no isolated affair, but just one of the latest developments in a string of Sino-American naval spats in the South China Sea. The USNS Victorious, another unarmed surveillance ship, for example, was also harassed by Chinese aircraft and patrol boats in the course of the same month. Only a few weeks ago Chinese state-run media reported a mysterious ‘collision’ in-between a Chinese submarine and an underwater sonar apparatus towed by a U.S. destroyer. Meanwhile Chinese Foreign Ministry officials have been repeatedly claiming that their entire EEZ, which extends over 200 miles beyond their coastline, and covers thus a major portion of the South China Sea, implies their absolute sovereignty over the region rather than just their exclusive right to explore and exploit the zone's natural resources. The UNCLOS EEZ convention is an incredibly complex and subtly worded text, and the Chinese have been seeking to exploit the 'grey ' jurisdictional areas in-between traditional territorial waters (which only extend 12 miles beyond the coastline) and those falling under the purview of their self-declared EEZ, which appears to encompass the entire South China Sea, which it characterises in its official documents as its “natural territorial waters”.



What can explain this increased Chinese assertiveness? In my opinion there are two main reasons for this behaviour. First of all, as the Pentagon's most recent annual report on the PLA predicted, the PLAN's extensive military modernization has put in a much better position to project power in the region and has thus given birth to a more aggressive form of Chinese self-confidence in the defence of its maritime claims. Secondly, it is possible that Beijing is seeking to probe the new Obama administration, by engaging in a series of deliberate provocations in order to assess the 'hardness' of the latest American president. It may be somewhat premature to detect a pattern, but the USNS Impeccable incident does bear a lot of similarities with the EP-3 spy plane imbroglio in July 2001. Both occurred off the Chinese nuclear submarine base of Hainan, and both happened during the very first months of a new American administration.


The Obama Administration’s response:

The Obama Administration has revealed itself to be both firm and measured in its dealings with the PRC. After the USNS Impeccable incident, the US promptly dispatched destroyers to escort its surveillance vessels in the South China Sea while repeatedly stressing the importance of establishing effective military to military dialogue in-between both states in order to prevent such events from occurring on a regular basis. Since then, much to the aggravation of the more hawkish elements of the PLAN, the US has continued to conduct surveillance operations, both maritime and by air, within China's EEZ.
The PRC's claim that it has absolute sovereignty over its EEZ has been repeatedly rebuffed by the State Department officials, who quote article 58 of the UNCLOS convention which stipulates the following, " In the EEZ, all states...enjoy the freedoms referred to in Article 87 of navigation and overflight..and other internationally lawful uses of the sea related to such freedoms".
China's instrumentalization of the principle of national sovereignty thus enters directly in conflict with America’s time old defence of navigational freedom. American officials have even pointed out at Congressional hearings that even during the height of the Cold War, "Soviet intelligence-collection ships, hydrographic research vessels (....) and military reconnaissance flights regularly operated off US coastlines without US legal objection.”
Jurisdictional squabbles put aside, the reality is that the PRC has historically viewed the South China Sea as little more than a 'Chinese lake', and now has the diplomatico-military wherewithal to pursue the geopolitical materialization of its geographical perceptions with an ever growing self-confidence.
The United States, which has been gradually reducing its naval forces in the region, and which, to the eyes of certain Chinese strategists, has seemed to be displaying signs of 'imperial overstretch' in Iraq and Afghanistan, does not inspire the same level of deference that it used to.



This may be about to change however. The US's withdrawal from Iraq and concentration on Afghanistan has provided it with a greater degree of focus to deal with other international flashpoints. A recent US Foreign Relations Committee on the issue of East Asia tensions reveals that the South China Sea maritime disputes have become a major issue for the Obama Administration. In the course of the hearing, high ranking defence and state department officials repeatedly highlighted the threat growing Chinese military assertiveness poses for regional stability, and all seemed to advocate the pursuit of a more efficient "stick and carrot policy".
Stick, because the US has clearly indicated that it will not brook any further harassment of any of its vessels, be they military or non-military, in China's EEZ. Carrot, because the Obama Administration is intent on re-establishing dialogue with the PRC on such matters, and on reviving the military to military dialogue that was frozen in 2008, due to Chinese fury over the Bush Administration's decision to go ahead with a 16 billion dollars arms transfer to Taiwan.
During the hearing, American officials reasserted US neutrality in the maritime border dispute in the South China Sea, but also brushed aside the Chinese legal basis for its claims of sovereignty over Vietnamese and Philippine waters. Both countries were openly referred to as friends and strategic partners in the region, which is, in the case of Vietnam, something of a novelty. Chinese pressures on American energy firms were also mentioned, the participants stating that in the future the US government should take action in order to shield them from such blackmail.

You can watch the Senate Subcommittee Hearing in its entirety by following this link:

http://www.senate.gov/fplayers/CommPlayer/commFlashPlayer.cfm?fn=foreign071509p&st=435

The Future of American Policy in the Region: A Delicate Balancing Act:

. The US now faces the difficult challenge of endeavouring to reassure other Asian countries uneasy over the PLA’s increased assertiveness, while striving to abide by its professed neutrality in the South China Sea sovereignty disputes. China’s strategy until now has been to deal with Southeast Asian countries one on one, in the hope, no doubt, of browbeating them into submission. Washington should up its efforts to level the diplomatic playing field by getting Beijing to sit down with ASEAN as a group unified around a common consensus. Unfortunately, the persistence of territorial disputes in the region in-between Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia; makes the emergence of such a common consensus in the near future seem somewhat improbable. One can imagine that in the coming years, State Department officials will discreetly intensify their mediation of intra-ASEAN territorial disputes, in the hope of nudging the member states towards a common resolution which, ideally, would build upon the 2002 ASEAN DOC or Declaration of Conduct in the South China Sea.

All, in all, American policy towards the South China Sea will continue to be a subtle balancing act, in-between public displays of resolve and private efforts to re-establish dialogue, and in-between professed claims of neutrality and rather more circumspect efforts to strengthen Southeast Asian unity in the face of Chinese expansionism.

While such policies may seem both convoluted and complex to the outsider, one thing has been made clearly apparent: if the PRC was hoping to destabilise the new American administration by engaging in a series of actions designed to test its mettle, it has failed: the US still very much has its eye on the ball. For the time being at least, the South China Sea shows no signs of becoming a Chinese lake.

The Franco-Indian Partnership.

This is a piece I just wrote for an Indian think tank. It will appear on this website in the next day or two:

http://sspconline.org/

From Sporadic Cooperation to an Enduring Partnership: The Evolution in Franco-Indian Ties.

On the 14th of July, a contingent comprised of more than 400 Indian troops, drawn from the Army, Navy and Air Force will march down Paris’s Champs Elysées, in order to take part in France’s annual commemoration of the French storming of the Bastille on July the 14th 1789. They will be watched by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. While it is clear that Mr. Sarkozy is returning a favour (he was India’s guest of honour during the Republic Day Parade in January 2008); the presence of Indian troops on the Champs Elysées is also indicative of a more profound trend in Franco-Indian ties, which have been steadily growing over the past decade or so.

During much of the Cold War, relations in-between the two republics were cordial but relatively distant. Neither country loomed large on their counterpart’s strategic radar screen , and their relationship over those long decades has been variously described as “not bad but lethargic”, “cordial but stagnant”, or “lacking dynamism”.

The relative lack of tensions between both states during the Cold War can largely be explained by France’s quest for a degree of strategic autonomy from the rest of its NATO allies, and the US in particular. This aspiration for a certain degree of strategic flexibility in its dealings with the rest of the world most notably led to France’s decision to develop its own military nuclear capacity or “force de frappe” in 1958, and President Charles De Gaulle’s unilateral decision to pull out of NATO’s integrated military command structure in 1966 (this decision has just been reversed by Sarkozy). France’s refusal to consistently toe to Washington’s line meant that it often harboured a slightly more sympathetic attitude towards India than its allies.
For example, during the first decades following independence, Western countries almost invariably sided with Pakistan rather than India over the Kashmiri dispute. This was due, in part, to the fact that Pakistan, by joining the Baghdad Pact, had become an important ally in the region. Paris, although allied with the West, frequently took a more measured attitude, refusing to systematically side with Islamabad. France was one of the first western countries, for example, to lift the arms embargo that hit both India and Pakistan in the aftermath of the 1965 conflict. Similarly, during the 1971 war, Paris was one of the only Western capitals to comment on the legitimacy of India’s concerns vis-à-vis of the refugee crisis in its border regions with Bangladesh. Such gestures were duly noted and appreciated in Delhi.
This is not to say, however, that both countries’ relations were completely devoid of tension. France remained entrenched in its five minute colonial dominions in India until 1954, and when, in 1947, the French government asked for a ten year extension of the 1945 agreement allowing military cargo planes to fly over Indian airspace, Prime Minister Nehru, while agreeing, did not hesitate to voice his disapproval of French “imperialism” in the strongest possible terms. After the Sino-Indian border war in 1962, Delhi, by virtue of necessity, remained avowedly “non-aligned” while drifting ever closer to the Soviet Union, signing a treaty of Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation. This was viewed with concern by French officials, as was De Gaulle’s decision to recognise the People’s Republic of China in 1964 by their Indian counterparts. Overall, however, both countries’ ties lacked the degree of acrimony and mistrust that characterized Indo-US relations for so long.

In fact, the Indo-French relationship during much of this period can best be defined by its very lack of sentimentality. Their rapport was business like and mainly restricted to arms sales. Indeed, India and France have a long history of defence cooperation. Few people know, for example, that in-between 1950 and 1962, France’s total arms sales to India, at 794 million dollars, ranked second after those of Great Britain (far ahead at more than 4.5 billion).
France was subsequently overtaken by Russia, and the US, but remained a major arms supplier to India, supplying it over the years with reliable, high-tech equipment such as Bréguet Alizés and Mirage 2000 aircraft, AS-30 air-to-surface missiles, Milans anti-tank missiles, and Cheetak and Alouette combat helicopters.



In the aftermath of the Cold War, France took a few years to realize that India, with its growing and liberalised economy, vibrant democracy and increasingly capable armed forces was a major rising power. When it did, however, things began to move very fast.
1998 is generally recognized as being the ‘watershed year’ in Franco-Indian relations. With President Jacques Chirac’s state visit to India in January 1998 and PM Vajpayee’s visit to Paris in September of the same year, the relationship changed from one that was politely indifferent to one of a genuine strategic partnership. A broad and wide ranging Indo-French strategic dialogue was established, and France publicly came out in support of India’s bid for a permanent seat at the UNSC. The growing warmth in Franco-Indian ties was further revealed in the course of that year when Paris remained silent after the BJP’s government decision to go ahead with the Pokhran nuclear testings, which were almost universally condemned at the time. Since the late 1990s, France has been a steadfast and unwavering supporter of Delhi’s nuclear energy needs. Even before the India-US nuclear deal was validated by the NSG and ratified by the American Congress, French and Indian officials were busy fine-tuning a bilateral nuclear agreement, which, amongst other things, institutionalises cooperation in-between India’s Department of Atomic Energy and its French equivalent. The French flagship company Areva, which is one of the world leaders in the field of civilian nuclear technology, has been visiting India and engaging in preliminary talks on the development of Jules Horowitz nuclear reactors.

The area in which Franco-Indian ties have made the most progress however, remains that of defence cooperation, moving from the short term tactical relations of the Cold War, to the more long term and genuinely strategic. France has now become one of India’s most trusted Western defence partners, and Franco-Indian defence cooperation has been described by French officials as ‘discreet but wide-ranging and efficient’, both countries regularly trading information on terrorism, security in Asia and the Middle-East, and maritime piracy, amongst a host of other issues. There has also been talk in some quarters of a ‘Status of Force Agreement’, which governs the stationing of troops in mutual territory.
Annual bilateral military exercises are held, and whether they involve both countries’ airforces ( as is the case in the Garuda exercises) or both countries’ navies (the Varuna exercises), have gradually increased in scale and complexity. Indo-French naval cooperation is particularly intense. This is due to the fact that France, which still holds sway over a dozen islands and more than two million square kilometres of territory in the Indian Ocean, is a major naval power in the region, and views the Indian Navy as a vital partner in the preservation of local maritime security. Both navies are currently deployed in anti-piracy patrols off the coast of Somalia, and the latest Varuna exercises, which took place just a few weeks ago off the coasts of Britanny, and which involved Indian and French destroyers and frigates, various French aircraft, and a French SNA, were the most complex yet. All this shows that France no longer considers India solely as a defence client, put as a bona fide defence partner.

Much remains to be done, however, to further amplify the depth of Franco-Indian relations. Economic exchanges, for example, at only 6.5 billion euros per annum, remain remarkably low, considering the size of both countries’ economies. Acutely aware of this, French and Indian officials have fixed a target of 12 billion euros by 2012. Progress also needs to be made in the field of educational and cultural exchanges. Only 1300 Indians are currently studying in France, which is minute compared to other Western countries such as the US, the UK or Germany. In order to address this and facilitate student mobility in-between both countries, a CIFU or Consortium of Indo-French Universities was set up in 2008.


The future of the Franco-Indian arms trade is another cloud over the horizon.
Indeed, while France remains one of India’s top defence suppliers, winning in 2005 a multibillion dollar contract for the purchase and co-manufacturing of six highly advanced diesel electric Scorpene submarines, it is also increasingly threatened by the ferocity of American, Israeli and Russian competition. In 2007, the Indian Air Force issued a Request for Proposal for 126 new medium multirole combat aircraft (MMRCA). Estimated at at least 10 billion dollars, the deal is one of the biggest since the early 1990s. It is also one of the most competitive, with more than six global firms competing for the deal. Dassault’s Rafale is thus facing competition from Boeing’s F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet, Saab’s Gripen NG, Eurofighter’s Typhoon, Lockheed Martin’s F-16, and Mikoyan’s MiG-35. Most analysts believe that France’s Rafale, which has already been temporarily excluded for failing to meet certain qualitative parameters, has little chance of winning the deal, and will most likely lose out to the Russian MiG-35.

France not only has to deal with India’s growing diversification in terms of arms procurements, but also with the growing multifariousness of its strategic ties. Indeed, whereas in 1998, France retained relatively privileged and rarefied position as India’s strategic partner, Delhi now holds high-level strategic dialogues with a wide range of foreign powers, whether it be Israel, the US or Singapore. Indo-US ties, in particular, have taken quantum leaps over the past few years, and far exceed Indo-French relations in terms of scope and ambit.

Paris, does, however, hold a sizeable advantage over the US. Indeed, many in India’s strategic community, while recognizing the strategic import of the recent Indo-Us rapprochement, fret over Washington’s real motives, worrying if India is destined to become America’s Asian proxy in its containment strategy of Beijing. There is also a fiercely anti-American streak amongst the more left leaning elements of India’s political intelligentsia. Indian policy makers’ vision of France remain bereft of such lingering suspicions. This mutual trust, a rare thing in the oft convoluted world of diplomacy, is something that both Indian and French officials should choose to build upon in their efforts to bring the burgeoning Indo-French partnership to a whole new level.

BBC Article on Cam Ranh Bay.

The following is an English translation of the original article, which was written in Vietnamese. For some reason, when I cut and paste it onto here, the formatting comes out strange. Sorry.
You can find the original on the BBC Vietnam page here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/vietnamese/vietnam/2009/06/090626_camranh_analysis.shtml

Vietnam’s trump card in the South China Sea disputes?
By Quynh Le – BBCVietnamese.com

As tension in the South China Sea rises, there is rumour that the US is seeking lease of
Vietnam's Cam Ranh Bay.
Hong Kong-based Wen Wei Po newspaper recently claimed the US is seeking to lease
the military base in Cam Ranh, completing its attempt to "encircle" China.
However, Western observers doubt Vietnam would once again allow foreign armies'
presence on its soil.

'Encircling China'

Such rumours have surfaced occasionally since the day the Russian flag was lowered the
last time in Cam Ranh in 2002.
Given recent Sino-US confrontations in the South China Sea, it's no surprise there are
concerns that China's interests can be affected if the US decides to involve deeper in the
disputes.
The Wen Wei Po argues, "The US already has two strategic island chains in the Pacific,
not including Cam Ranh Bay. Once the US successfully leases it, the chain of islands will
be enhanced."
However, David Brewster, from Australian National University's Strategic and Defence
Studies Centre, said it was "extremely unlikely" that either Vietnam or the US would
want such a deal.
"It is very unlikely Vietnam would play its major strategic trump card in this manner in
the current security environment."
"Such a move would have major repercussions for both Vietnam and the United States
and it is difficult to see why either would make that move," he told the BBC.




Iskander Rehman, a PhD student at the CERI (Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches
Internationales) in Paris, concurred that there are major obstacles to the realization of a
permanent US military presence in Cam Ranh.
"Many in Vietnam’s defence establishment fear any prolonged American presence could
be viewed by the Chinese as a ‘casus belli and jeopardise the entire painstaking process of
Sino-Vietnamese normalisation," he said.
According to Prof. Carlyle Thayer, a professor at the Australian Defence Force Academy,
the Americans are interested in "places rather than bases", given the public backlash they
saw in countries like South Korea.
Although Cam Ranh Bay is deemed by many to be the finest natural deep sea port in
Southeast Asia, Thayer, a veteran Vietnam watcher, said the military facilities there had
been left to run down from the Soviet time.
"It would take millions of dollars to bring the facilities up to international standards," he
said.

Navy power

The latest briefing paper by the Washington D.C.-based Jamestown Foundation noted a
recommendation by General Zhang Li, former deputy chief of the General Staff of the
People's Liberation Army (PLA), to build an airport and seaport in the Spratly Islands.
General Zhang Li claimed that China only has eight operational naval vessels deployable
to the region, which means its response capacity in the South China Sea is limited.
Russell Hsiao, the analyst at the Foundation, saw this as a likely signal that China is
increasingly willing to use force in resolving territorial disputes.
A recent report that Vietnam had signed a $1.8 billion deal with Russia for six Kilo-class
submarines was seen by many in China as a tough message to Beijing.
Of course, Vietnam alone is no match for China, and as a Hong Kong paper said,
"Vietnam's main strategy is to internationalize the South China Sea issue, attracting
Western powers to counter China".

Vietnam's trump card?

To a certain extent, Cam Ranh seems to be an asset Vietnam can promise to interested
external powers.
Dr. David Scott, a professor at Brunel University who has written a trilogy on China,
noted Cam Ranh's role was a striking one.
"Vietnam has been careful not to antagonise China too far, but remains ready to dangle
Cam Ranh Bay access as a military and also commercial carrot, amidst rising friction in
the South China Sea," he said.
India, China's likely rival in the region, has shown some interest in Cam Ranh Bay.
In its so-called String of Pearls strategy, China has constructed lots of ports in Asia,
including many countries which don't have easy relationships with India.
Beijing financed a port complex for Pakistan in Gwadar, resulting in India's concern that
there was a concerted attempt to neutralize its influence in South Asia.
China also reportedly helped Burma construct several naval facilities on the Bay of
Bengal, which may be upgraded for military purposes.
Last year, for the first time a Chinese warship visited Cambodia and some believe that
Beijing managed to secure access to Cambodia's ports.
Therefore some hawkish analysts in India are advocating closer ties with Vietnam and a
bigger presence in South East Asia.


(Indian President Pratibha Patil reviewing Vietnamese troops)

But Walter Ladwig, a doctoral student at Oxford University, argued the capabilities of
India's navy, though steadily expanding, have not caught up with their ambition.
"It would be hard to envision, in the near-term, that Indian ships could be based in
Vietnam. The Indian Navy could not secure the sea-lines of communication (SLOC) so
far from home and so close to China," he noted.
David Brewster said some sections of India's security establishment would like to see
their country having a maritime security role in the South China Sea, largely in response
to the growth of China's capabilities in the Indian Ocean.
But he said "this seems quite unrealistic in light of India's limited naval capabilities and
India's lack of real interests in the South China Sea".
In a more realistic scenario, according to Prof. Carlyle Thayer, Vietnam will be
transformed into "a transit point" for foreign warships.

Many warships - from the US, Russia, India and China - have made port calls in
Vietnam. This indicates there is money to be made for Vietnam if the country can make
better use of its strategic location and infrastructure.
From Vietnam's point of view, the best option seems to open Cam Ranh Bay to private
commerce, while granting military access to other countries on a case-by-case basis,
similar to what happened to the Philippines's Subic Bay.
Iskander Rehman said, "Vietnam can maintain a greater degree of strategic flexibility, if it
can continue to balance the US, India and China by granting berthing rights on a
temporary and conveniently non-committal basis".

My next entry, which will be posted over the next few days, will delve into the growing Indo-French strategic partnership.

MEA CULPA

I know, I know. I have been neglecting this blog over the past few months, and the few readers there are must have thought it was dead.
I've been a bit overwhelmed over the past few months, what with changing apartments, going on lengthy field trips in India, finishing articles etc, and this blog has been the sacrificial victim of all this hyperactivity.
Well no longer. Here for starters, is a link, to an article I penned on India's Counter-Containment of China in Asia and which has FINALLY been published in Asian Security Journal.

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a911807510~db=all?bios=true

Of course I would encourage you to part with 30 dollars and purchase it from the website, but those friends who would like to read it and who would really rather not spend all that money, message me and we can work something out ;)

In the next entry, I'll be posting the English translation of a BBC World story I helped contribute to on the strategic deep-sea water port of Cam Ranh Bay, in Vietnam.

Reining in the ISI.

A state within a state: Pakistan's Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence:

Pakistan's ISI, or Inter-Services Intelligence, has become notorious for the extent of its influence over the country's foreign policy, as well as for its history of meddling in Pakistan's internal politics.

In a country plagued by chronic instability, ethnic and religious divides , and which has historically oscillated between weak civilian governments and brutal military dictatorships, the ISI has become a sort of state within the state, which conducts operations in accordance with its own strategic goals; goals which are frequently at odds with those of impotent civilian governments, and even, sometimes and more disturbingly, with those of its military overseers.

Based now in Islamabad ( the HQ was previously located in the garrison city of Rawalpindi), the ISI is the largest intelligence service in Pakistan, some experts estimating that the organization contains more than 10 000 officers and operatives. Founded in 1948, the agency only really came into its own during the decade long war in Afghanistan, which pitted the Soviet invaders against the US funded djihadis. During that period of time, the ISI acted as an intermediary for the CIA, training tens of thousands of mujahideen and smuggling them across the Afghan border. In return, the ISI was flooded with funds, sophisticated arms and equipment, and several ISI officers received training from CIA handlers.

Since then, the ISI has cast its shadow over the entire region, operating from countries such as Nepal and Bangladesh; supporting the Khalistani movement in Punjab in the 1980s, waging a war of attrition against Indian security forces in Kashmir, and aiding and abetting the Taliban throughout Afghanistan's non-ending factional strife.

The ISI is a military organization, led by a Director General, who is required to be a serving Lieutenant General in the Pakistani Army. The 'DG' answers to the Army Chief of Staff, not to the President or Prime Minister. Various attempts by elected governments to place the ISI under civilian control have, until now, as we shall see, met with failure.


Understanding the strategic reasoning behind the ISI's double-track policy:

The ISI's overarching objectives over the years have been the following:

-Preserve Pakistan's fragile unity by combating separatist movements, such as the Balochi or Sindhi movements.
-Weaken India in Kashmir and the region by instrumentalizing non state actors and then using them as proxies to wage its war 'of a thousand cuts' against its more powerful neighbour.
- Bolster Pakistan's influence in the region by attempting to obtain a form of "strategic depth" in Afghanistan.

The notion of strategic depth is popular amongst the Pakistani military establishment. The idea is that when confronted with a far stronger and larger neighbour, it is necessary for Pakistan, a far smaller and narrower country, to be able to counter an eventual Indian invasion by retreating into the Afghan hinterlands, and call on allied friendly forces in order to continue the fight. In order to do so, Islamabad needs to rely on a friendly regime in Kabul. As I pointed out in a previous entry, Pakistan was a fervent supporter of the Taliban during the long period of factional struggle that followed the Soviets' departure from Afghanistan.

When the United States decided to go after Al Qaeda and their Taliban associates in 2001, the ISI was 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?

As Tariq Mahmud Ashraf demonstrates in a recent Terrorism Monitor Volume Issue:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/7513649/Taming-the-ISI-Implications-for-Pakistans-Stability-and-the-War-on-Terrorism



" From the Pakistani perspective, supporting the Taliban stemmed from the country's security imperative of strategic depth, predicated on having a friendly regime on the north-western frontier. President Musharraf's decision to withdraw all support for the Taliban created a quandary that left ISI stuck in the middle-it could neither go against what Musharraf wanted not could it allow its influence and linkage with the Taliban to be completely broken. As such, a dichotomy crept up in Pakistan's posture towards Afghanistan in general and its support for the US led war on terrorism in particular. It is highly probable that Musharraf went along with this duplicitous policy of simultaneously supporting the United States without compromising the ISI's links with the Taliban."


In fact, the ISI has done far more than simply refusing to sever links with the Taliban; it has provided them with financial and logistical support, and sometimes even with covering artillery fire when they creep over the porous Afghan border to attack NATO troops. The frontier town of Quetta, in Balochistan, has become the Taliban movement's unofficial headquarters.

Renowned Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid explains in great detail the intricacies of Pakistan's double-track policy in his latest book Descent into Chaos, The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.


"By 2004 they (NATO intelligence agents) had confirmed reports of the ISI running training camps for Taliban recruits north of Quetta, funds and arms shipments arriving from the Gulf countries, and shopping sprees in Quetta and Karachi in which the Taliban bought hundreds of motorbikes, pickup trucks, and satellite phones. In 2003 and 2004, American soldiers at firebases along the border in eastern Afghanistan and U.S drones in the skies watched as army trucks delivered Taliban fighters to the border at night to infiltrate Afghanistan and then recover them on their return a few days later". (p.223)

Since 2001, the ISI has therefore pursued its pro Taliban policy under the glare of Western Intelligence agencies, while attempting to placate them from time to time by periodically handing over Arab or foreign Al Qaeda operatives. This enables the Pakistani military to openly claim that it is a partner in the war on terror while conserving the Taliban as a strategic reserve force.

ISI operatives have a long term vision of Pakistan's national interest, and many do not believe that the United States will maintain a permanent presence in the region. The election of Barack Obama, however, who has placed a renewed emphasis on Afghanistan, may have proven them wrong. As I detailed in a previous blog entry "The Indo-Pakistani silent war in Afghanistan", the ISI is exceedingly concerned by the growing friendliness of the ties in-between New Delhi and Kabul, and as Tariq Mahmud Ashraf once again points out, "...the possibility of an unfriendly Northern Alliance-dominated and pro-Indian regime in Kabul is certainly not in line with Pakistan's national aims and objectives. From the Pakistani perspective, the war in Afghanistan must end with a favorable and supportive regime in Kabul, even if this is made up of the Taliban. From the U.S point of view, the possibility of the Taliban being allowed to come into power is not considered. It is against this backdrop that one must view the involvement of the ISI with the Taliban-not as abetting terrorism but as protecting Pakistan's national interest."


A certain level of plausible deniability has been maintained by creating a new form of intelligence structure, which is composed of retired ISI operatives and military officers rehired on contract and working undercover as NGO workers in Afghan refugee camps, bureaucrats or professors with an "untraceable system of command and control".

A powerful but increasingly fragmented institution:

Mounting Western aggravation over ISI's nefarious policy towards NATO forces in Afghanistan have led, as we shall see in more detail later on, to a reshuffling of the top brass.
But, all in all, these changes are little more than cosmetic in nature, as the ISI is an enormous structure, which is increasingly fragmented and riven by the actions of different lobbies, groups, and rogue operatives.

In the following article, journalist Mark Urban claims that there is both a generational and an ideological divide in-between younger, junior field officers, who have been in direct contact with militant Islamic outfits, and their senior, more pragmatic commanders.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/markurban/2008/12/pakistans_dept_for_reconciling.html

He says the following; "The view of some of those in Western organisations that liaise professionally with the ISI is that there is an educated, politically sensitive, senior management who have become de-coupled from some of the foot soldiers-the captains or majors who have trained insurgents or run sources in Lashkar-e-Taiba or the Taleban."



Andrew D. Bishop, in the Asia Sentinel, agrees with this analysis, claiming that the problem lies not so much with the top brass, which is periodically reshuffled, but with the "middle and lower ranks of the agencies" which "still have Islamist militant sympathies and which will be hard to dislodge."

http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1633&Itemid=180


Any proper reform of the ISI will therefore have to be bottom up rather than top down.

The ISI is not only riven by ideological divisions, but also by the diverse ethnicities of its field agents, which can sometimes lead to conflicting loyalties. In his book "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia", Ahmed Rashid recounts how the ISI relied heavily on intelligence officers of Pashtun origin to act as intermediairies in-between Islamabad and the Taliban throughout much of the 1990s. He suggests that these field agents have formed a sort of "Pashtun lobby" in the midst of the Punjabi dominated military, a lobby which is more sympathetic to the idea of a "greater Pashtunistan" upheld by their fellow Pachtun brothers, the Taliban, than to the idea of Pakistan as a unified nation.


The ISI is thus a very fragmented institution, and this became brutally apparent in December 2003, when Pakistani president Musharraf's armoured convoy was targeted twice by suicide bombers in the space of a week. As Ahmed Rashid details in Descent into Chaos, "these attacks shocked the world because they demonstrated the worst-case scenario: disaffected military personnel on the inside linked to terrorist groups on the outside. Only a handful of military officers knew the route and timing of Musharraf's travel plans or which of his several identical armored-plated cars he would be using." (p.231)

These assassination attempts suggested that rogue elements in the ISI, angered with Musharraf's alignment with Washington against Al Qaeda, had decided to act of their own accord.

The 'Frankenstein' or 'magical broom' syndrome:

Indeed, by its consorting with terrorist groups over the years, the ISI has created a cancer that risks consuming it from within, as the militants it took under its wing gradually wean themselves from its influence.

The ISI has helped create, fund and has provided safe haven for South Asian terrorist groups such as HuJ ( Harkat-ul-Jihadi-al-Islami) or LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba), the group that carried out the recent massacre in Mumbai, for several decades. Experts say that LeT, for example, "received instruction and funding from Pakistan's intelligence agency , the Inter-Services Intelligence, during the 1990s, in exchange for a pledge to target Hindus in Jammu and Kashmir and to train Muslim extremists on Indian soil."

For more information on the alleged links in-between the ISI and LeT see this CFR backgrounder on the subject:

http://www.cfr.org/publication/1164/isi_and_terrorism.html

Recently, however, the ISI has been losing control over South Asian Islamic terrorist outfits, which have been falling under the sway of Al Qaeda. The goals of LeT or HuJ militants are becoming more panislamic, more ambitious. Whereas before they were almost exclusively focused on the Kashmir issue, and therefore in sync with the strategic vision of the ISI, they are now increasingly aligned with Al Qaeda's vision of global dijhad, which means that they cannot tolerate Pakistan's cooperation, however limited in scope, with the United States in the war on terror. It is this realignment which explains, in part, the LeT's explicit targeting of British, American and Israeli citizens during the recent tragic events at Mumbai.

The 'emancipation' of these groups has been likened by some analysts to the story of "Frankenstein", in which an artificially created monster attacks its creator, or more recently, in this article by Sumit Ganguly and S.Paul Kapur, to the magic brooms in Goethe's tale, "The Sorceror's Apprentice".

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/15/ED7K...

" During the late 1980s and the 1990s, the Pakistani government created terrorist organizations such as Lashkar-e-Taiba as tools of asymmetric warfare against Indian rule in Jammu and Kashmir. In recent years, however, the jihadis, like the magic brooms on Goethe's tale, "The Sorceror's Apprentice", have taken on a life of their own; along with the government, the army and the intelligence services, such groups now compris one of the main centers of gravity within Pakistan.(.....) The question, then, is not whether the Pakistani government was responsible for the Mumbai attacks, but who will play the role of sorceror and rein in the jihadis."

Pakistan, conclude the authors, has no choice put to act against these terrorist groups and "recognize that the costs of supporting militancy outweigh its benefits."


Reforming the ISI: a nigh on impossible task:

Pakistan's new civilian leadership realises the utmost importance of a revamping of the ISI, and has been struggling over the past few months to bring the unruly behemoth under its control. So far, however, as we shall see, its efforts have been only moderately successful , and the reforms that have taken place seem to be the result either of factional struggles in the army itself, or of mounting American pressure.

The United States has been showing signs of exasperation over Pakistan's double-track policy in Afghanistan, as well as over its lack of resolve in confronting homegrown terrorism. In the summer of 2008 the Bush Administration signed executive orders authorising covert commando strikes in Pakistan's militant infested tribal areas ,and on the 12th of July several high ranking American intelligence officials went to Islamabad to confront their Pakistani counterparts with evidence of collusion between the ISI and militants. Similarly, when Prime Minister Gillani visited the United States, he was reportedly put under a lot of pressure to curtail ISI's links with terrorist groups. It seems obvious that the United States believes that the advent of a new civilian government in Islamabad provides it with the perfect opportunity to cut the ISI down to size and put an end to its nefarious double dealing. This may be, however, a serious overestimation of the strength of the Zardari-Gillani government in a country where the military has always called the final shots.

As Tariq Mahud Ashraf points out " Beset as it is with enormous internal challenges ranging from soaring inflation to extreme insecurity to crippling energy shortages, the Zardari-Gillani government truly finds itself in a bind. While the US Administration might incorrectly assume that the civilian government is now in a strong enough position to take on the Army by attempting to transform the ISI, the truth is that the ever-present danger of yet another military take-over is precisely what must be giving the Zardari and Gillani sleepless nights."


So far, the civilian government's attempts to wrest control of the ISI from the military have been largely unsuccessful. Shortly after Gillani's visit to Washington in the summer of 2008, the government declared that the ISI would be placed under the control of the Interior Ministry, which would mean that it would be removed from the military's purview. In a humiliating reversal of position, the PPP government was forced, under pressure from General Kayani, the Chief of Army Staff, to withdraw its declaration only a day later. The impotence of the civilian government was further demonstrated more recently, when Prime Minister Gillani had to go back on a promise he had made to send the ISI chief, Lt.Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, to India as a sign of good will after the Mumbai terror attacks.

It would be unfair, however, to say that absolutely no progress has been made in the reforming of the ISI. Its current director general, Lt.Gen Ahmad Shuja Pasha, was the former leader of counter-terrorist operations in the restless Federally Administrated Tribal Areas and there is hope that his anti-Taliban views will influence the future conduct of the ISI. There is speculation amongst some experts that he was appointed in September 2008 under American pressure, in order to replace his predecessor Nadeem Taj, who was viewed with a great deal of suspicion by most Western Intelligence Agencies. It seems more likely, however, that it was a shrewd move by Kayani to solidify his influence in the military (Pasha is a close friend of the Chief of Army Staff) and rid himself of remaining Musharraf loyalists such as Nadeem Taj.

In a recent article in Asia Times, Syed Saleem Shahzad points out that even though the civilian government has not established full control over the ISI, its "wings have been clipped", and this is largely due to informal interactions in-between American and Pakistani military officials, rather than efforts from the the Zardari regime.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JL25Df01.html

The political cell of the ISI, which used to dabble in Pakistan's elections, has reportedly been shut down and a mysterious new group, the '909 Intelligence Group' , which works directly under the military command, has supposedly been formed in order to take over issues of cross-border intelligence. Reliable information on these reforms is, however, somewhat scarce, and only time will tell whether they are indicative of any real desire on part of the military to engage in a profound revamping of their intelligence structure.

One thing remains certain however- in the absence of a massive overhaul of the Pakistani intelligence apparatus- which amounts to more than a simple reshuffling of the top brass, and of an unfeigned foreswearing of the ISI's tradition of wet nursing militancy, there will never be a long- lasting peace in the region.