Russia, India and China go their ways
By M K Bhadrakumar
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is virtually peerless. Only a handful of
foreign ministers can match him in professionalism honed over decades in
international diplomacy. He seldom leaves the ring empty-handed.
However, one such rare occasion came when he boarded his aircraft with his
entourage last week and warily began the 6,000-kilometer journey home from
Bangalore, the capital of the southern state of Karnataka, where he had
attended a meeting of the Russia-India-China (RIC) trilateral format.
Moscow has tried its level best over recent months to draw India and China
closer together on a common regional initiative on Afghanistan. The RIC meeting
in Bangalore took place against the backdrop of the eight-year war in the Hindu
Kush radiating negative energy all across neighboring regions - the Caucasus
and Central Asia, China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region, Iran's Sistan-Balochistan
province and Pakistan's tribal areas. However, Russian diplomats watched
helplessly as eddies in Sino-Indian ties began polluting their efforts to
bring Beijing and Delhi closer in Bangalore on the core issues of regional
security. They finally called it a day.
Russia puts on a brave face
The Russians, whose pet project is the RIC, must have felt exasperated with
their "time-tested" Indian friends. But they wouldn't have been surprised. They
could have anticipated that the disequilibrium within the RIC format would
impact the Bangalore meeting. Russia and China are intensifying their
cooperation; India has largely neglected its ties with Russia in the post-Cold
War years, although most recently it has signaled renewed interest in reviving
the atrophied relationship; India and China, on the other hand, have drawn
closer incrementally over the past decade, but only to pull apart dramatically
in the recent period.
Moscow usually generates a lot of hype when a RIC meeting approaches. This
time, it adopted a low-key approach. An article in the influential Nezavisimaya
Gazeta newspaper by Vladimir Skosyrev, a leading commentator, underlined that
bilateral Sino-Indian problems - border disputes and the activities of the
exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, in India - were negatively
impacting the work of the RIC.
After the RIC meeting, Lavrov went out of his way to put a brave face on
Skosyrev's prognosis. He said, "I want to say that no bilateral problems
between India and China had any impact on today's [RIC] meeting. In no way did
these themes surface." True, the Indian and Chinese foreign ministers held a
separate 90-minute meeting to devote to the hot issues in their bilateral
relations.
Lavrov took pains to explain that the RIC was shaping up to be "a highly
promising format", given its "dialogue" on agriculture, health and business. He
minimized the RIC's role in crafting any initiative on Afghanistan. Lavrov
offered a lengthy explanation:
RIC is a group of countries that are
integrally needed to mobilize regional efforts. But they are not enough. All of
Afghanistan's neighbors are needed. The US, the main supplier of troops ... is
needed. Iran is needed. The Central Asian countries are needed.
RIC is a group that was not created for Afghan affairs at all, but for other
reasons ... Although India, Russia and China have an influence on how to
normalize the situation in Afghanistan, our efforts are not enough. The three
nations can and are willing to work with other major actors to develop a
collective strategy, meaning exactly collective.
Delhi faces
isolation
Not that the RIC format lacks a raison d'etre - as the pro-American elements in
the Indian strategic community and media constantly try to establish. Its
relevance is acute, as three big countries with common concerns in the Asian
continent come together within an exclusive format to discuss shared interests
on the core issues of regional security - terrorism, religious extremism,
political separatism, etc - and coordinate their policies.
Without doubt, regional cooperation has become the leitmotif of international
politics within the new reality of a polycentric world. World politics is
beginning to operate in a new coordinate system. Regional formats so far remain
mostly in dialogue formats with relatively modest agendas, but all understand
that this format sets a certain standard of equal, cooperative relations.
Regionalization of global politics attends to various compulsions. A need often
arises to find regional solutions to conflicts and crisis situations. Again,
regionalization fills in where global mechanisms are either insufficient or are
lacking. At other times, a safety net is simply required in case of any likely
"de-globalization" (as in Afghanistan) so that fragmentation is arrested.
Clearly, regional formats provide additional possibilities for the formation of
unifying agendas.
But, unlike Russia and China, which take to regional formats with zest, Indian
diplomacy generally holds back. India's preponderant size in its region and its
problematic relationships with China and Pakistan partly account for its
reticence. But the crisis building up in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region shows
up the inadequacies of India's "solo approach". Delhi's inability to partake of
regional initiatives on Afghanistan virtually isolates it in the region.
Evidently, its nationalist isolationism is reducing India to being a bystander
when momentous regional processes are unfolding. There has been a systematic
attempt by influential sections of the Indian strategic community to deride or
downright rubbish and undermine India's involvement in regional processes -
such as the RIC - that exclude the US or towards which Washington remains
antithetical.
India has the maximum to lose in the absence of a regional initiative on the
settlement of the Afghan problem. Delhi holds an archaic view of the Taliban.
While there is wide recognition in the region that the Taliban are an Afghan
political reality, Delhi stands apart. The security establishment in Delhi sets
the pace for Indian diplomacy and in its vision, the Taliban are the progeny of
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and therefore India cannot countenance a
role for the Taliban in Afghanistan's power structure.
But then, the Afghan conflict is first and foremost a fratricidal strife, and
an enduring solution needs to be all-inclusive. Besides, who are Indians to
prescribe what is good for the Afghan people? Delhi would have gained by
working together with like-minded countries that broadly share India's
misgivings about the ascendancy of radical forces in the region and yet accept
the inevitability of a broad-based pan-Afghan settlement.
Principal among such major regional countries would be China, Russia and Iran.
Now, these three countries are ahead of India in forging regional matrixes
within which they advance their national interests. Russia and China work
together within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Russia also has an
alliance system in the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Iran has
initiated its own trilateral format with Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Obama's Chinese takeaway
To be sure, Washington heaved a big sigh of relief that the RIC process failed
to mature. The dreadful moment, from the US perspective, would be if and when
the RIC began bearing the fruits of regional activism. Therefore, the RIC's
state of health has all along been of intense curiosity to Washington. The US
has been stalking the RIC - just as it is doing with regard to Tokyo's nascent
idea of an East Asian community. As the president of the influential Japan
Foundation, Kazuo Ogoura, wrote last week, "It is intolerable [for Washington]
to see Asians considering their relations among each other in a form that
excludes the US."
Moscow will feel concerned. Lavrov candidly admitted to Russian journalists
accompanying him, "[The George W] Bush administration sinned by a lopsided
interpretation of collective efforts ... Obama has announced a different
philosophy - that of collective action, which calls for joint analysis,
decision-making and implementation rather than for all others to follow
Washington's decisions. [But] so far inertia lingers at the implementers' level
in the US, who still follow the well-trodden track ... This is a process which
will take time before the president's will is translated into the language of
practical actions by his subordinates ... a need for joint analysis is still
evident in Afghanistan."
The RIC's failure at Bangalore to work substantially on a regional initiative
regarding Afghanistan ensures that the US can now press ahead with its own
strategy of striking "grand bargains" individually with the three major
regional powers - Russia, China and India.
Conceivably, the "Chinese takeaway" will be a substantial outcome of US
President Barack Obama's forthcoming visit to Beijing. The Pentagon press
release on the talks in Washington between US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
and the visiting vice chairman of China's People's Liberation Army Central
Military Commission, General Xu Caihou, said the two sides "agreed on the need
to work together" on Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said, "The takeaway is that there was
broad agreement on the importance of, and how to deal with, the situation in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the need to work together to create a more stable
and secure environment in both those places."
Writing in the New York Times newspaper last Friday, two influential American
voices - Mark Brzezinski, who served on the National Security Council in the
Bill Clinton administration, and Mark Fung of Harvard University, who is an old
Beijing hand - argued that Obama must carry a purposive "China List" when he
travels Beijing. They wrote:
Three overarching "deliverables" could be
identified that if implemented would significantly reshape the US-China
relationship and address serious challenges the two countries face together.
One, establish a formal mechanism among the leaders of the United States, China
and Pakistan. China is Pakistan's most important supporter both because of
their geographical proximity and China's perception of Pakistan as a
counterweight to India ...
The interests for the United States and China are consonant in Pakistan:
removing extremist fundamentalist activity, stabilizing the leadership and
encouraging economic growth ... The United States should make it clear it does
not want to displace Beijing's influence in Islamabad, but a tripartite
approach would advance shared interests ... The Obama trip to Beijing provides
an opportunity to elevate the relationship to include constructive engagement
in concentric areas of shared interest - stabilizing Pakistan, advancing soft
power interests in Afghanistan, and cooperating on security matters and shared
challenges in East Asia.
The Afghan crisis is most certainly
prompting a shift in geopolitical templates. What if the Chinese side has its
own "Obama List"? Beijing will be justified in asking: How could China possibly
cooperate in the security sphere with the US and the Western alliance in
Afghanistan when the West maintains a 20-year-old arms embargo on China?
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign
Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka,
Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
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