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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: Sri Lanka

Humanitarian Farce

29 Sat Apr 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on Humanitarian Farce

Tags

Antonio Gramsci, Bashar al-Assad, Benjamin Netanyahu, Britain, diplomacy, France, Hardeep Singh Puri, hegemony, India, Iraq, Libya, machtpolitik, matsya nyaya, media, mindfare, Muammar Gaddafi, Paul Wolfowitz, Perilous Interventions, R2P, Right To Protect, Russia, Saddam Hussein, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Syria, terrorism, think tank, Ukraine, United Nations Security Council, United States, veto, Yemen

Perilous InterventionsPuri, Hardeep Singh. Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos. Noida: HarperCollins Publishers, 2016. 280 pp.

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” Marcellus tells Horatio in the opening act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Former diplomat Hardeep Singh Puri probably could not have put it better about the United Nations Security Council and the existing global order. Through his book, Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos, a devastating indictment of Western hypocrisy in international governance, India’s former permanent representative to the United Nations gives readers a ringside seat to some of the discussions that went on in the Security Council during some of the major crises of the past decade. Puri lambasts the existing system and warns that without reforms, faith in multilateralism will soon fade.

Disregarding the advice of German chancellor Otto von Bismarck about the making of sausages and laws, Puri details the discussions within the Security Council on the question of whether the international community should intervene in Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction in 2003. Yet long before then, Iraq had attracted the attention of certain American strategists such as Paul Wolfowitz. They had argued as early as the early 1970s, Puri reminds us, that the removal of Saddam Hussein from power could potentially result in a domino effect of democratisation in the region and with it better partners for the United States. Two other candidates for regime change to accelerate this region-wide democratic revolution were Iran and Iran. Revolution in the former in 1979 and the subsequent Iran-Iraq war extinguished all such thoughts from the White House.

However, they were not forgotten. In Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of the US Congress in 2002, the former and future Israeli prime minister reiterated this same idea. American fears about Iraqi ABCs – atomic, biological, and chemical weapons – rang his message sweeter to Washington. Looking to their own careers, CIA officials funnelled intelligence reports they knew would be prefered by the High Command rather than those undermining the public narrative of state sponsorship of terrorism and WMDs. The United States went to war in Iraq soon afterwards and the Middle East began to unravel – not in a manner either Wolfowitz, Netanyahu, or anyone else had envisioned.

Narrow national interests coloured the deliberations of the Security Council over Libya as well. Puri recounts how Britain, Germany, and especially France, more than the United States, were interested in deposing strongman Muammar Gaddafi from the beginning. Libya’s relations with Western governments had been slowly improving since 2003 when Tripoli reached out through the United Nations to make amends for its role in several acts of terrorism in the late 1980s. That, however, was not the public face of relations between Libya and the Western bloc. The Arab Spring protests gave the West, probably hoping for a quick success, the opportunity required to oust Gaddafi.

Under the guise of humanitarian intervention and R2P – the Right to Protect – Western nations placed onerous conditions upon Tripoli. Puri narrates the arguments over the language of Resolution 1970 and how, through wording that was loose at best and deceptive at worst, the Western powers tried to gain international sanction to bring Gaddafi to heel using “all necessary means to protect civilians and make available humanitarian assistance.” As Libyan government forces started to turn the tide against the rebels in the civil war that had devolved out of earlier protests, France, buoyed by an Arab League resolution calling upon the United Nations to impose a no-fly zone over Libya, pushed through Resolution 1973 that was sufficiently lax in its formulation to allow military action. NATO, led by France and supported by the United States went to war in Libya. Puri strenuously makes the point that this was in complete violation of the spirit of the discussions in the Security Council but the West did not wait until even the inl was dry before invding Libya.

Everything has conequences, and the Western sleight of hand over Libya had got Russia’s back up over Syria. As a result, when the Security Council started deliberating on Bashar al-Assad’s civil war, Moscow was implacable in their opposition to any sort of intervention. It is also possible, Puri admits, that this was due to greater Russian interest in Syria – a naval and ar force base – or because there had been a change in power in Moscow from Dmitry Medvedev to Vladimir Putin. It is also possible that there was no appetite for yet another war in the Middle East in Washington during an election year. Yet the pattern of Western behaviour was similar: hollow humanitarian claims supported by regional powers with vested interests against the incumbent authority. Predictably, the results were also similar: chaos, instability, wanton destruction of life and infrastructure, the rise of private militias, and terrorism – all at the cost of the region. Any chance for an early peace was stymied by unrealistic preconditions such as the abdication of Assad. Furthermore, Washington’s too clever by half notion of ‘good terrorist’ and ‘bad terrorist’ helped spawn its own nemesis – something American politicians, despite several repetitions, are yet to learn from.

Perilous Interventions also describes the paralysis of the Security Council owing to its veto provisions over the crisis in Ukraine caused by the secession of Crimea and its return to Russia. The author stops short of excusing Russian behaviour as he lambasts European and American ambition in seeking to pry Ukraine out of the Russian sphere of influence. From the beginning, military force was out of the question in Ukraine for two reasons: Russia maintained a veto in the Security Council, and it was a major nuclear power that could not be trifled with as the likes of Iraq or Libya. The Western strategy, then, was to try and isolate Russia through economic sanctions. These may have worked partially but were doomed to fail eventually without the support of Moscow’s BRICS partners.

Yemen saw similar inaction from the Security Council. The country, already a regular on the UN body’s agenda even before civil war broke out, has experienced more death and destruction in five months than even Syria after four long years of fighting. Impoverished Yemen has for long been Saudi Arabia’s bete noire: fearful of foreign intervention – Egypt in the 1960s and Iran since the 1980s – in a country bordering its own restive Shia population, Riyadh has been quick and ruthless in its involvement in Yemen. The Saudi campaign, Puri reminds us, has received complete support from the United States and other Western powers despite the horrendous loss of civilian life due to the callousness of Riyadh’s military tactics that ranged from the use of missiles to indiscriminate bombing, which in one case even destroyed a Medecins sans Frontieres hospital.

Puri is not unfair in targetting only Western nations. He has a few choice words for the Indian debacle in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s too. However, the reader may surmise from the tone that the author is more understanding of Delhi’s compulsions than he is with Washington, London, or Paris. Furthermore, India’s reasons for getting involved in its southern neighbour’s affairs are a far more convoluted cocktail of domestic political considerations rather than the relatively straight-forward rapacious realpolitik of the West. The narrative also feels more restrained about the human cost of the tragedy in Sri Lanka compared to Iraq, Libya, Syria, or Yemen – but that may also be because the South Asian island has suffered far less despite a longer lasting conflict.

In each of the chapters is detailed a series of operational blunders that fed on each other and led to the present quagmire. From the insane notion of good and bad terrorism to the arming of certain rebel factions, from an utter disregard of historical follies to an almost stubborn refusal to accept intelligence from the ground, from giving ground to less informed commentators over professionals to cherry-picking intelligence, Puri’s rap sheet of Western political myopia and ideological blindness makes for a discomforting read – each of these mistakes, as we disapssionately read them, cost tens of thousands of lives.

Although Perilous Interventions is an excellent exposition of Great Power hypocrisy and the weakness of the United Nations in both, curbing the predatory instincts of some of its members and the oppressive nature of other members, it does not offer more insight on the crises of the past decade and half than a discerning reader could have gleaned from the regular perusal of the daily newspaper over the years. Why would a seasoned and distinguished diplomat be surprised by an unremarkable display of matsya nyaya?

The real punch of Perilous Interventions comes from its author’s assertion that this behaviour of the Western powers was given intellectual cover by their think tanks and media. In fact, Puri explicitly states that the push towards intervention in Libya came from the Western media over the inclination of a hesitant diplomatic corps. Gaddafi was portrayed negatively, incompletely, and even falsely – he had not, for example, threatened civilians with retaliation – in the tabloids to the extent that it was difficult for him to even get hotel rooms in New York during a 2012 visit. These observations by Puri only cement the cautious view of Western organisations in the rest of the world. They can no longer be seen as sources of intellectually rigorous, methodologically sound, and unbiased information. In fact, reading Puri between the lines, think tanks and media have become a new front for the West to propagate their hegemony through ‘mindfare’ – the war for opinions and minds throughout the world – true hegemony as described by Antonio Gramsci.

Perhaps the only criticism of Perilous Interventions is the author’s discordantly Pollyanna-ish view that India played a positive role during the deliberations over these crises. The Indian stance has always been distant, unhelpful, and predictable – urge a cessation of hostilities, encourage negotiations, and plead for an arms embargo on the region. Although these are perfectly rational recommendations, it is similarly irrational to expect that the agitated actors in a conflict that has already spilled over to violence wish to listen to sense. Consider, for example, the Indian response to international calls for restraint during its wars with Pakistan.

Furthermore, Puri’s suggestion that the permanent members of the Security Council volunatrily give up their veto powers – de facto if not de jure – is laughable. Such largesse may be expected only from foreign policy neophytes of the kind India has been blessed with but not anywhere else. Yet even if the Permanent Five were to surrender their veto powers, the question then arises as to who will bell the cat. Is the international community truly willing or capable of conducting a military intervention in China, for example, for any reason?

Perilous Interventions will certainly feed those who are already deeply sceptical of the West and subliminally hostile to it. However, rather than adding ghee to the fire of conspiracy theories, Puri records in detail, with evidence, genuine cases of opportunism and hypocrisy. His call for reforms in the United Nations is likely to go unheeded for the same reasons he gives for the crises of the past decade and half – machtpolitik and opportunism. As a result, Puri’s admonition that the Security Council and multilateralism will lose credibility may indeed come true.

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India’s Choices

21 Sat Jan 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

China, diplomacy, foreign policy, India, Inter Services Intelligence, ISI, MEA, Ministry of External Affairs, No First Use, nuclear, Pakistan, Shivshankar Menon, Sri Lanka, terrorism

choicesMenon, Shivshankar. Choices: Inside the Making of Indian Foreign Policy. New Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2016. 224 pp.

Memoirs by retired, senior Indian government officials are an occupational hazard for a historian. On the one hand, they may contain valuable insights or data and offer a peek behind the scenes into the world of policy-making, but on the other, remain the memories and interpretations of one person, usually years after the events. This is true of memoirs everywhere, but what makes them even more perilous in India is the lack of periodically declassified archives. For example, imagine understanding the United States’ role in international affairs through Henry Kissinger’s three-volume memoir.

Shivshankar Menon’s Choices, however, cannot truly be described as a memoir. The book discusses five important decisions India has had to make over the past 25 years, and in each of these, Menon was either intimately involved or at least a senior official in the process. However, the author’s tone is that of a professor than a practitioner. Each of the decisions is placed in its historical context and the rationale for the way things unfolded is broadly explained. Rarely does the reader get the sense that the author was one of the central dramatis personae in what he is reading!

This is not a weakness in itself, but Choices is, unfortunately, very short on the details in terms of the dynamics between the key actors and how the various variables influenced their thinking. How did the decision evolve? What were the hurdles? Whose minds were changed? What were the turf battles? The answers to these sorts of questions come through in government documents and paint a comprehensive picture for historians. Memoirs ought to reveal at least one side of the puzzle, but Menon is reticent on the matter. This could very well be due to India’s secrecy rules, but it still leaves the story incomplete.

The subject matter for Choices is the Border Peace and Tranquility Agreement with China in 1993, civil nuclear cooperation with the United States in 2005, the Pakistani terrorist attack on Bombay in 2008, Delhi’s role in the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, and the rationale behind the nuclear no-first-use policy. Little of what Menon goes over is new to anyone who has followed these events in the newspapers, except to lend a particular line of thought an air of gravitas now that a former foreign secretary and national security advisor is also extending it.

Menon is no hawk on China and in fact thinks that India is entering an era of opportunities with China. As he argues, there are facets to the relationship other than the border. The reason for the delay in settling the border dispute, to Menon’s mind, is that both sides think that time is on their side. For the 1993 accord, the then joint secretary for the North East gives credit to Atal Behari Vajpayee for his many ideas and putting country above party. Regarding China’s present assertiveness, Menon does not believe that encircling China will help; in fact, it will only confirm their worst suspicions, Menon argues, and diminish trust. Similarly, India is too large for China to attempt to encircle.

During the nuclear negotiations with the United States, Menon was foreign secretary. He attributes the willingness of most countries to support India to commercial interests of varying intensity. However, the former foreign secretary has harsh words for the small states with big egos, or the mini-six – Austria, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, and Switzerland. These states had no interest in nuclear commerce and had little stake in India anyway; the Nuclear Suppliers Group gave them some importance and that was they stage upon which they could pontificate.

Although Menon had argued for military reprisal in the aftermath of the Bombay attack in 2008, in retrospect, he defends India’s decision to abjure from the use of force and instead seek a diplomatic route. Menon argues that this has been more successful in that Pakistan has been isolated in the international community and India received cooperation from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar – all Pakistan’s traditional partners. By working through international fora, Delhi was able to bring the heat on Islamabad through Washington, the Europeans, and even its patron, Beijing.

The Israeli model, the former national security advisor opines, has been misquoted in India. It has not brought peace or deterrence to Israel and it will not do so to India. “Mowing the grass,” as the Israelis call it, seeks cumulative deterrence, not absolute deterrence. However, he misunderstands the purpose of Israeli anti-terror operations: they have not been, at least for the past 20 years, for deterrence but for attrition. India’s war against terror is a protracted one and it cannot be solved. Temporary silencing is the best Delhi can hope for, which, according to Menon, is much lower on the list of national priorities than the socioeconomic transformation of India.

Menon is under no illusion that Pakistan continues to be a hotbed of terrorism but he reminds the reader of the more complicated geopolitical web. For example, the United States has restricted India’s access to David Headley, one of the chief reconnoiters for Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence. Additionally, when Ahmed Shuja Pasha, then director general of the ISI, visited the United States, he was given diplomatic immunity to protect him from law suits brought against him by the families of Americans killed in Bombay.

Insisting that nuclear weapons are only political signifiers and not meant for war, Menon defends India’s nuclear NFU policy. His defence could interest only a lay reader, unfortunately, for it completely ignores the counter arguments to such a policy. In all fairness, Choices is not a exegesis of nuclear deterrence theory and a thorough explanation would skew the balance of the topics covered. Essentially, the two strands of Indian nuclear thinking, one represented best by General Krishnaswamy Sundarji and the other by nuclear scientist Raja Ramanna, either viewed the super weapons as necessary to redress a conventional imbalance or as an enabler of political goals. The second strand held sway in the discussions after the 1998 nuclear tests.

On the whole, Menon’s view is that Indian nuclear policy is sober and realistic even though it has been couched in moral terms. He is not particularly fond of the international non-proliferation regime either, for it has not addressed any of India’s concerns such as China’s proliferation of nuclear weapons and missile technology to Pakistan or the danger of rogue nuclear actors within the Pakistani Army. However, there is no gain to India by flouting it and staying within earns diplomatic goodwill. This should not be construed to mean that India is a status quo power.

The most interesting part of the book is Menon’s brief airing of his views about India’s place in the world. Despite being taken to task by Bharat Karnad in his Why India Is Not A Great Power (Yet), Menon insists that he does believe that India is destined to become a great power and not by soft power alone. The former foreign secretary does believe that there is a particular Indian style to foreign policy, as Deep Datta-Ray argues, though it is difficult to put a finger on it. Nonetheless, Menon attempts to describe it:

If there is an Indian way in foreign policy, it is marked by a combination of boldness in conception and caution in implementation, by the dominant and determining role of the prime minister, by a didactic negotiating style, by a fundamentally realistic approach masked by normative rhetoric, by comfort in a plural and diverse world or multiverse, and, most consistently, by a consciousness of India’s destiny as a great power.

This caution, Menon allows, could be due to systemic failures – the Ministry of External Affairs is desperately understaffed and centralised foreign policy under the prime minister’s office has meant that no other player has the authority to contemplate on grand strategy or vision. In other words, Indian foreign policy (also) suffers from weak institutions. The structured and formal decison-making is always preceded by considerable informal consultations and discussions. In light of this, it makes sense why an MEA official asked Datta-Ray why he wanted to see their documents since they only indicated process and not thinking.

Interestingly, Menon believes in an Indian exceptionalism and his belief in India’s destiny to become a great power smacks of the same Nehruvian arrogance when contraposed with India’s shortcomings in health, infrastructure, education, society, law, governance, and military. Geography and demographics are necessary but not sufficient conditions of becoming a great power.

All things considered, Choices is a disappointing production given the senior positions in government that its author achieved and the knowledge and experience that must have come with them. Anyone expecting a fresh or insightful exposition of Indian foreign policy will instead find an elegant rehashing of what columnists have already said umpteen times. This is a wasted opportunity to reveal, to scholars and the public alike, how choices are made in the PMO and MEA. Its saving grace is that it reads well and is short.

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Modi’s Travels

13 Mon Apr 2015

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, South Asia

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Australia, Bhutan, Fiji, France, India, Japan, Mauritius, Narendra Modi, Nepal, non-alignment, Seychelles, Sri Lanka, United States

It has now been almost a year since Narendra Modi took office and by the time the year passes, he will have visited 15 countries, not counting attendance at the state funeral of former Singapore prime minister Lee Kuan Yew or the five multilateral summits he participated in. Modi is undoubtedly the most well-travelled prime minister in Indian history and this has been an unexpected yet interesting development, for he was known primarily for his clear domestic vision before the general elections of 2014. In addition to his own visits, Modi has also received several delegations and sent his external affairs minister, Sushma Swaraj, to meet with leaders from other countries. All this adds up to a substantial foreign policy effort on the part of India’s new government and points to what some had suggested before the elections as a programme for a potential Modi government.

Modi’s foreign policy so far views the world in elegantly simple terms – there are states that can help India and there are states that India can help. Both of these categories are, of course, mutual but the description marks the dominant flow of power. In essence, the prime minister understands that a key ingredient in India’s stability, security, and economic revival is its region. Yet to carry the region, India will need tremendous assistance from countries that have the technological and financial wherewithal to support its ambitious growth. As a result, India is courting countries in its region such as Nepal, Seychelles, Sri Lanka, and Mauritius with as much enthusiasm as it is reaching out to economic powers such as the United States, France, Japan, and Australia. There is an enamourment among scholars as well as the public for doctrines and though it may be tempting to term this emphasis on the region as the ‘Modi Doctrine,’ it is nothing but a common sensical approach to one’s neighbourhood that finds long precedence in history.

India has paid more attention to its neighborhood since Modi took office than it probably has in the past decade. Though Manmohan Singh had visited Mauritius in 2005 and Bhutan in 2008, the last visit by an Indian prime minister to Nepal was in 1997, to Sri Lanka was in 1987, to Fiji in 1981, and to Seychelles also in 1981. Modi’s state visits to these countries on its borders and in the ocean that bears its name all saw promises of increased trade, assistance with infrastructure development, cooperation in matters of mutual security, and the easing of travel restrictions. These relations build Indian influence in these countries as well as in regional fora where India might need more voices to support its agenda. For India, these links are not just about economics but also strategic assets as it seeks to modernise and expand its military capabilities while the states of the Indian Ocean Region gain by piggybacking on an expanding Indian economy. The trick is, for India, never to cause its neighbours to fear its expansion or they will resent it and seek to balance it with other powers within or without the region. If India’s neighbours feel that they too have a stake in her success, there will be little cause for suspicion as China experiences in Southeast Asia. To that end, missions like Operation Rahat – the rescue of civilians from war-torn Yemen – are valuable.

The rekindling of India’s ties with its neighbours depends to a large extent on the growth of the Indian economy. This requires a huge influx of capital as well as technology in almost all sectors of the Indian economy – infrastructure, education, industry, finance, security, and more. Modi has reached out to potential partners among the developed nations of the world who may have not only a financial interest to invest in India but strategic reasons as well. India has concluded or is close to concluding agreements on civil nuclear cooperation with Australia, France, Canada, and the United States; this will bring in reactors and fuel to power Modi’s ‘Make in India’ campaign that seeks to boost manufacturing in the country. Modi hopes to double India’s exports by the end of his first term. As companies like Airbus move parts of their operations to India, Modi is also taking his country militarily closer to the United States, Australia, Japan, and France with joint training exercises, intelligence sharing, and defence equipment procurements. A greater Indian role in the regional security commons is of interest to almost all parties in the region and beyond and Modi is capitalising on this sentiment to build India into a regional power.

There are undoubtedly domestic tasks that require the prime minister’s attention. Yet India’s needs cannot be met by domestic spring cleaning alone and requires international involvement, particularly if the country wants to leapfrog some of the technologies and learning of the second half of the 20th century. Modi’s moves on the international chessboard so far have not been merely formality but have begun to redefine Indian strategy and thinking. Most importantly, they are a distinct departure from Delhi’s policies during the Cold War as well as the quasi-governmental position of Non-Alignment 2.0. For such a momentous course correction, the visibility of the prime minister on the international stage is indispensable.

The fruits of Modi’s labours abroad will likely not be fully seen for at least a decade but there should be some signs of the results by the end of his term in 2019. For the first time in the history of independent India, the country seems to have a foreign policy that puts Indian ambitions at the centre. In the early years of independence, Jawaharlal Nehru’s non-alignment was structurally defined by a struggle that had little to do with India; later, foreign policy became subject to ad hocism and the personality of the prime minister rather than a coherent, cogent, and continuous programme. Now, under Modi, India is finally acting on the role that has been advised her and expected of her by her neighbours or decades.


This post appeared on Daily News & Analysis on April 13, 2015.

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