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The Elephant and the Eagle at Sweet 16

05 Sun Jun 2016

Posted by in India, South Asia, United States

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It has been 16 years since George W Bush fundamentally altered the way the United States looked at India. As the old Cold War with the Soviet Union receded into memory and a new one with China appeared imminent, at least to the Bush White House, India emerged as an important potential ally in the new world order. India’s economy had recently started down the road to liberalisation too, making the South Asian country attractive to US industry as well as the government.

Despite frequent kerfuffles in the media – and there have been plenty – India-US relations have moved from strength to strength over the past 16 years. From the Strategic Quartet – high technology trade, space cooperation, nuclear energy, and missile defence – through the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership to the historic Indo-US nuclear deal and the Defence Technology and Trade Initiative, Washington and Delhi appear poised on the brink of a century-defining partnership. If state visits are any indication of warmth, prime minister Narendra Modi is visiting the United States at this moment for the fourth time in just two years – something his predecessor required nine years to necessitate.

Defence ties are usually the most prominent measure of relations between nations for obvious reasons: not only do they declare how much skin each state has in the other’s security, but they are also a statement of how much states trust each other with their prized technology. No wonder, then, that India’s defence purchases from the United States have attracted so much attention. Between CH-47 Chinooks, AH-64 Apaches, C-17 Globemasters, and C-130J Super Hercules, India’s aggregate defence acquisitions from the United States has crossed $13 billion. The loss of India’s Multirole Medium Range Combat Aircraft contract disappointed Washington but under Modi’s Make in India programme, US defence firms are considering moving the production of the F-16 and F-18 to India.

The United States has moved beyond the role of being a mere supplier of weapons to India: officials have been engaged in talks that, if successful, would result in the co-production of systems. Under the DTTI, the next generation of Raven unmanned aerial vehicle will be jointly developed and produced. Other projects include intelligence gathering and reconnaissance pods for the C-130J, mobile electric hybrid power sources, helmet-mounted digital displays for aircraft and helicopter pilots, high energy lasers, and chemical and biological warfare protection gear for soldiers.

Washington has also been keen to assist India with core defence technologies such as the development of jet engines and the catapult launching system on board US aircraft carriers. India’s Kaveri programme has been a miserable failure and with Delhi’s increasing focus on maritime security, the US offer could provide a healthy boost to Indian capabilities.

India’s change of mind on what the Pentagon calls the foundational treaties – LSA, BECA, and CISMOA – has been a welcome surprise. These agreements formalise the sharing of logistical facilities and align communication protocols between the US military and their partners, greatly enhancing the range and capabilities of both forces in joint humanitarian or security missions. Although the agreements will remain unsigned during Modi’s visit this June, it is reported that they are close to conclusion.

The United States’ support for Indian admission to the permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council and technology export control groups such as the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the Australia Group, and the Wassenaar Group gives some weight to Philip Zelikow’s statement in 2005 that the United States intends to help India become a major power.

Although both India and the United States have come a long way in defence cooperation, one cannot shake the feeling that both sides are still hedging from a complete commitment. India has lost no opportunity to stress that the signing of the foundational agreements with the United States will in no way erode its sovereignty, that it is happy to conduct numerous maritime joint exercises but will not be persuaded to conduct joint patrols, and that India sees itself as a friend and partner of the United States but not quite an ally. On the American side, senators questioned the wisdom of a bill that proposed elevating India to the status of a NATO ally in all but name given that the South Asian country did not see itself in that role. The US bill would have amended the Arms Export Control Act and made defence transfers to India quicker and smoother.

One hurdle in closer ties is Pakistan: India is displeased with the continued sale of US weapons to the Islamic republic despite ample evidence pointing to terrorist ties and an unhelpful disposition towards US goals in South and Central Asia. However, the dynamics of these ties have remained relatively unchanged since the 1950s: Pakistan provides services in the region that the United States cannot get elsewhere in return for White House forbearance on matters Islamabad sees as vital to its interests. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was basing privileges for US reconnaissance aircraft conducting missions over China and the Soviet Union; in the 1970s, Islamabad served as the channel to Beijing and a rapprochement with China; in the 1980s, it was the shipment of arms to the mujaheddin in Afghanistan. In the 2010s, Islamabad has become the conduit to the Taliban, with whom Washington hopes to negotiate a “decent interval.” Even now, though the United States has been urging India to play a greater role in Afghanistan, Delhi has declined, choosing to involve itself more in important but not critical facets of Afghanistan’s development.

India’s reluctance to play a more significant role in its own interests may frustrate observers but this has, understandably, in large part to do with the country’s capabilities. Couched in the rhetoric of multipolarity and morality, India’s inaction misleads the casual observer. The ignored pachyderm in the room is that Delhi lacks the financial and industrial wherewithal to flex its military muscle in Central Asia or the South China Sea, and any attempt to persuade it to do so will fail. The remedy to this is economic growth, technological development, and strategic coalitions.

On the surface of it, economic relations seem to have grown substantially between India and the United States. Both countries are investing more in each other’s economies and trade between the two stands hovers around $70 billion. More and more US companies are setting up shop in India as Indian companies are expanding their business beyond the Atlantic. Washington is the lead partner for developing Allahabad, Ajmer, and Vishakapatnam as smart cities. There is still plenty of room to grow and Modi has ambitiously suggested aiming for $500 billion in trade in a few years. However, there are several issues that will plague relations. The first is subsidies: Washington recently won a case against India at the World Trade Organisation that prohibited the Indian government from giving preferential treatment to domestic solar panel manufacturers. US firms are also pushing Washington to act against subsidies the Indian Space Research Organisation gets from the government for its Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle programme.

A second hurdle is intellectual property. In several sectors, India has brought its laws into alignment with US and international norms yet there remain significant differences in philosophy. Pharmaceuticals is one such field, where Indian courts have been hostile to the US practice of evergreening patents, instead seeing a social dimension to the industry. India has also had disagreements with the United States on its agricultural subsidies and food security programme.

A sector-specific yet politically potent point of friction is nuclear energy. Although the Indo-US nuclear deal was announced in 2005 and came into force in 2008, there has been little movement on that front since. India’s nuclear liability laws were found to be at odds with international norms and it was only in 2015 when US president Barack Obama visited India during the Republic Day celebrations that some headway was made in easing the logjam. The Indian side came up with a convoluted mechanism to bypass its own law without losing face and satisfied Washington but private companies are still uncomfortable with the provisions. As a result, a number of nuclear energy projects have stalled across the country; GE has flatly refused to participate in the Indian nuclear energy market as long as the present law stands and Westinghouse has delayed the submission of its project proposals. The sins committed by the BJP while in Opposition have been visited upon the BJP while in power.

A probable future cause for concern is the US creation of large trading spheres via the Trans Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. India is not party to either of these blocs and its efforts to forge free trade agreements with important partners such as the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has proceeded at a snail’s pace. There is a danger that the implementation of the TPP and TPIP will take trade away from Indian shores to within the bloc, dampening much-needed Indian economic growth.

Many of these frictions arise from the fact that the US and Indian economies are at different points: certain Indian policies may not optimize on economic efficiency but are geared towards lifting more of its population out of poverty or establishing its own industries firmly in the international arena. Delhi and Washington have much work to do to negotiate through the clashing policies that will certainly arise in the future and early recognition and amelioration will insulate relations from harsh market realities.

After 16 years, India-US relations are on a firm footing. Much has been accomplished though a lot more remains to be done. It was feared that the warmth between the two would dissipate after the exit of Bush and the election of Obama but despite the lull due to an international economic slowdown and a paralysed UPA government, ties have started to blossom again in the past two years since Modi took office. India enjoys bipartisan support in the US and Washington a hesitant embrace in Delhi. Can relations be derailed? There will always be swings and roundabouts but it seems to have dawned on both countries that the geopolitics of this century are best navigated as friends than estranged democracies.

This post appeared on FirstPost on June 06, 2016.

An Unofficial Alliance

15 Tue Dec 2015

Posted by in India, Security, South Asia, United States

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The outcome of Indian defence minister Manohar Parrikar’s recent visit to the United States to meet with his counterpart Ashton Carter has met with approval from all corners. Even critics of the Narendra Modi government were somewhat muted for once, as several columns reported that the agenda for the visit indicated a shift in Indian foreign policy from style to substance. Two projects critical to Indian defence modernisation, the development of jet engines and aircraft carrier technology, have received greater impetus under the Defence Technology and Trade Initiative (DTTI). Calling the US-India relationship an anchor of global security, Carter expressed satisfaction with the new pace defence cooperation between the two states has taken. “We’ve done so much more in the last year, probably than we’ve done in the 10 years before that,” Carter said. “And I’m guessing that in the next 10 months, we will do yet again more than we’ve done in the last year.”

The United States’ approach to India underwent a sea change during the presidency of George W Bush. Although the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 would end up absorbing much of the administration’s energy, Bush and his team had come to office with the aim of curbing the rise of China. The Bush White House moved from the previous regime’s view of China as a strategic partner to one where the Asian giant was a strategic competitor. The neoconservative world view, as David Frum, speechwriter for Bush, explained it later, sought close ties with India and a pragmatic relationship with China that combined economic engagement with military containment. Part of the US strategy was to make India a part of the international system and midwife its rise asa counterbalance to China. The Indo-US nuclear deal was part of that plan, as was the DTTI. As Philip Zelikow, a counselor for the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, had said, the goal was “to help India become a major world power in the 21st century.”

From the US point of view, however, defence relations could have developed much faster had India accepted what the Pentagon calls “foundational agreements.” These pacts, typical military alphabet soups like the LSA (Logistics Sharing Agreement), CISMOA (Communication Interoperability and Security Memorandum of Agreement), and BECA (Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement for Geo-spatial Cooperation), facilitate military-to-military cooperation primarily at a tactical level though they can be developed further into strategic cooperation.

The LSA, for example, allows the navies and air forces of each country to share each other’s facilities for berthing and refueling without making payments each time; instead, accounts would be settled periodically. The LSA also negotiates several practices that are presently decided upon on a case-by-case basis such as the pre-positioning of military materiel in each other’s countries (Cooperative Security Location – CSL), playing host during exercises, and permitting operations of the other in-country. The LSA is similar to the Acquisition and Cross Servicing Agreement (ACSA) that the United States has with over 75 countries, including its NATO partners and Sri Lanka in India’s own neighbourhood.

Similarly, the CISMOA allows interoperability of Indian and US equipment. For example, if Indian troops wish to call in a US airstrike at a certain location, or if US Special Forces are “lighting up” a target for a precision munitions strike by an Indian bomber, their hardware, which is normally encrypted, must be able to communicate with each other to relay information accurately and quickly. In a crowded theatre of operations that nowadays involves non-state actors, drones, Improvised Explosive Devices (IED), coalition militaries, and electronic warfare, spectrum management is crucial.

Admittedly, the Indian Navy has been able to operate the Boeing P-8I Multi-mission Maritime Aircraft without the advanced communications equipment it would have come with had India signed the CISMOA. The gaps were filled with indigenous electronic equipment that did not diminish the aircrafts’ capabilities. However, in a multi-nation environment, be it during a humanitarian relief mission or anti-piracy operations, these gaps would have been felt acutely.

The purpose of BECA is to facilitate the exchange of geospatial information between governments for military as well as civilian use. It includes maps, charts, satellite imagery, geodetic, geophysical, geomagnetic, and gravity data. One practical application of this for the military is that aircraft such as the C-17 Globemaster III and the C-130 Hercules can fly very close to the ground and evade enemy radar; another is improved accuracy of munitions. India cannot rely on foreign global positioning system in times of war and has therefore developed its own Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System. However, the coverage of this system is yet limited and geospatial data from the United States can improve its performance. The civilian application of geospatial data can contribute to infrastructural and other requirements as well.

The United States’ eagerness for closer ties with India is plain. The Bush White House made that very clear, as did Wikileaks in a collection of cables that expressed Washington’s priorities in the Indo-Pacific region and suggestions on how to achieve them. As the US embassy in New Delhi wrote to the Under Secretary for Defence, Michelle Flournoy, in October 2009, the way forward lies in “nudging India to expand their commitments by signing the foundational agreements and by moving forward with military sales [which] will provide opportunities for a sustained relationship far more robust than exercises and exchanges. If we can continue our trend of major military sales, we will cement a relationship for the next several decades with the most stable country in South Asia.” India is not doing the United States a favour by signing the foundational documents and nor is the case vice versa.

What none of these agreements do is compel India to side with the United States in any conflict, allow Washington to permanently station troops on Indian soil yet under the jurisdiction of American courts (that would be the Status of Forces Agreement – SOFA), or permit hostile military action against other countries from bases in India. These agreements are also reciprocal, giving the Indian military access to American facilities around the world. This could come in particularly handy at Diego Garcia or Guam, for example, in anti-piracy or regional collective security operations. The sharing of supplies has not only a strategic argument but an economic one as well: Indian forces can resupply at any US facility and pay back in kind when American forces travel through the Indian Ocean, an especially useful arrangement during extended war games.

It is unlikely that the Indian side has not seen the material benefits of these agreements. Certainly, the Indian military can operate without subscribing to an American framework but doing so will drastically expand its capabilities until such a time as when Delhi develops its own defence network. When the subject of India signing on to the foundational agreements was first broached, several senior Indian military officials played down their importance, saying that the pacts make no difference to the Indian operational scope. Such opinions might be dismissed as being bound by political views of the time – non-alignment, and an intellectual inertia that was sold as pacifism. However, with a new and more ambitious government in Delhi, the time might be ripe to conclude these agreements.

India’s equivocal response to the Pentagon’s protocols does have a legitimate basis – a deep-rooted suspicion of the United States. For earlier generations, this was ideological: India eschewed the free market, embraced state socialism, and was in closer orbit to the Soviet Union diplomatically and militarily than it was to the West. For the younger generation, mistrust of Washington stems from what appears from Delhi as unwavering support of a hostile neighbour, Pakistan. Despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, Foggy Bottom sees Islamabad as a close non-NATO ally and supplies it with advanced military equipment that includes nuclear-capable F-16 fighter jets. The United States has also earned a reputation as an unreliable patron, ironically from both India and Pakistan. Foggy Bottom cut off arms supplies in 1965 as well as in 1971 when war broke out between India and Pakistan; in 1974 and in 1998, after India’s nuclear tests, it became the subject of US sanctions. Delhi worries that if it relies too much on an American defence framework, it might find its options in a conflict circumscribed by US interests and worldview. More recently, Washington’s ridiculous good Taliban/bad Taliban routine got no chuckles in Delhi.

Delhi’s greater concern is that forging closer military-to-military relations with the United States may appear to other important powers, particularly Russia and China, as an Indo-American alliance. Given the proximity of these powers to India and an overt US desire to contain their power, Indian action might speak louder than Indian intentions and antagonise them into a firmer response. Indian accession to the treaties will certainly stir otherwise friendly waters with Russia and likely precipitate a reaction from China that India is not ready for yet. Russia is already flirting with the idea of weapons sales to Pakistan and seeing US warships in Vishakapatnam might tilt the scales unfavourably to India. These treacherous diplomatic waters must be navigated by the Indian Foreign Service, convincing India’s partners that logistical cooperation with the United States would not hurt their interests. It might even be worth considering expanding logistical support to Russian, Australian, or Japanese naval vessels at Indian bases. In the meantime, India might also consider the spate of weapons deals and joint military exercises it as had with the United States – there is no need of deals to divine which way the geopolitical winds are blowing.

In January this year, it was reported that Modi gave his officials a non-paper on the Pentagon’s foundational agreements. It is a new India now, and the ambitions of the Modi government are substantially more than the timid considerations of the Congress regime. Delhi is striving to forge strong bonds around the Indian Ocean rim as well as with Japan and contribute to regional security and stability. Its aims of taking a no-nonsense approach to its borders in the northeast as well as the west demand better infrastructure, logistics, and hardware. While there might have been no need for India to consider the Pentagon’s pacts earlier, an India aspiring to fill the role of a regional power certainly does. Modi’s muscular foreign policy needs a defence doctrine to match, and loose coalitions are a healthy way to test the waters. As the subhashita advises,

न अभिशेको न संस्कार: सिम्हस्य क्रियते वने |
विक्रमार्जिता सत्वस्य स्वयमेव मृगेन्द्रता ||

There is no official coronation ceremony held to declare lion king of jungle He becomes king by his own attributes and heroic actions.

This post appeared on FirstPost on December 22, 2015.