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2 China leaves the US and India
trailing By M K Bhadrakumar
Hardly a week passes without Delhi taking
stock of China's creeping "encirclement" of India.
The Indian media reported on Thursday that Delhi
denied permission for China's cargo carrier Great
Wall Airlines to land in Mumbai or Chennai since
the two Indian cities have "key nuclear
facilities" which Chinese aeroplanes might
reconnoiter.
That becomes more grist to
the mill, though no one knows what it could be
that the two aging Indian cities would hide that
Google Earth hasn't yet spotted. Beijing
predictably balked. Some Indian
strategic thinkers go so far
as to call it China's "containment" of India - as
if the Indian rogue elephant has gone berserk in
the Asian courtyard and needs to be shackled.
Actually, the latest irritant shouldn't
have been aerial reconnoitering, but China's upset
win - trumping formidable rivals like the US,
Canada and Russia - in the massive Afghan tender
for copper mines. But the strategic community in
Delhi doesn't know, as the Indian media kept it in
the dark.
The news from the Hindu Kush
would have made Indian thinkers pull their hair in
despair. China has never been a player in
Afghanistan in modern history. Indeed, it is a
needless provocation on the part of the Chinese to
be so utterly fearless of the Taliban and
al-Qaeda. While India prides itself as a major
donor for Afghan reconstruction - building roads,
bridges, hospitals, a Parliament building and
even, intriguingly, public toilets - China marches
ahead and wins the tender for the Aynak cooper
deposit in Afghanistan's Logar province bordering
Kabul, which is billed as one of the world's
largest copper mines.
The project involves
US$4 billion in investment by China Metallurgical
Group, which will be by far the biggest foreign
investment in Afghanistan and is estimated to
provide employment for 10,000 people.
Significantly, the project includes the
development of a railway system linking
Afghanistan to China. (Nepal also has sought the
extension of China's railway system from Lhasa to
Kathmandu.)
Beijing-Tehran oil deal
These audacious Chinese are pole-vaulting
across the impenetrable Himalayan ranges with
merry abandon in their zest to globalize and
integrate.
But the mother of all Chinese
encirclement of India still remains largely
unnoticed in Delhi - the Beijing-Tehran axis.
There is wide recognition that if the United
States hasn't been able to push through another
tougher United Nations Security Council resolution
against Iran over its nuclear program, that has
been largely because of China's reluctance to
concur.
But what happened last Sunday
still came as a bolt from the blue. China
Petroleum Corporation, better known as the Sinopec
Group, signed a contract with the Iranian Oil
Ministry for the development of the Yadavaran oil
and gas fields in southwestern Iran.
The
current estimation is that the project cost will
be $2 billion. Under the contract, China will make
the entire investment necessary to develop the
fields. The first phase is to produce 85,000
barrels of oil per day and the second phase will
add another 100,000 barrels. According to Iranian
estimates, Yadavaran has in place oil reserves of
18.3 billion barrels and gas reserves amounting to
12.5 trillion cubic feet.
Iran is already
China's third-largest supplier of crude oil, but
the Iranians are simply delighted. Oil Minister
Gholam-Hossein Nozari was quick to point out that
the deal with China flies in the face of
Washington's attempts to block foreign investments
in Iran. Sinopec merely said, "We are very happy
to sign this contract ... China is willing to buy
LNG [liquefied natural gas] from Iran and we hope
to talk about an LNG project later."
The
Sino-Iranian deal has been closed within a week of
the US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on
Iran's nuclear program, which has conclusively
debunked any conspiracies hatched by the
neo-conservative coterie within the George W Bush
administration for launching a military strike
against Iran. Beijing has indeed moved fast.
But what stands out is that Beijing
anticipated a long time ago the inevitability of
precisely such a u-turn in US policy towards Iran.
More important, it began plotting how it could
take optimal advantage when the Iran question
inexorably moved toward its denouement. Beijing
estimated that time was of the essence. Beijing
could visualize a day when Tehran would have
competing customers from the Western world seeking
access to its oil and gas.
Beijing's
take on the Iran question As far back as
May, the government newspaper China Daily
commented, "This policy [of Washington refusing to
have dealings with Iran] is no longer workable.
The reality of the Middle East is that the US
cannot ignore Iran."
And by the beginning
of June, Chinese regional experts had already
assessed, "Iran, with no geopolitical competitors,
has become the 'boss' within the Persian Gulf
region. Since the US has fallen into the Iraqi
quagmire, Iran concludes that the United States
dare not use force against Iran. Therefore, it
maintains strong strategic determination and
refuses to make concessions on the nuclear issue.
"This favorable environment, coupled with
a strategic resolve, has earned Iran a certain
status of equilibrium with the United States in
the contest within the Persian Gulf region. It is
this balance of power that has forced the United
States to sit down and talk with Iran. Iran,
hence, has won the battle for survival and the
status of a regional power."
The anonymous
scholar from the Institute of Asia and Africa
under the Chinese Institute of Contemporary
International Relations, who wrote the above
commentary for the People's Daily, went on to give
his prognosis with extraordinary prescience. He
wrote, "Despite many variables and the complicated
situation in the Middle East, there is one thing
that remains clear. The United States cannot
reverse its current downhill trend in the Middle
East. Iran's rise and its challenging gestures
will further accelerate the decline of the United
States' presence within the region. In the
emerging 'new Middle East', Iran will certainly
play a role that cannot be ignored."
By
end-July, Beijing knew its assessment was perfect
and that the US position with regard to Iran was
rapidly eroding.
In the context of the
US-Iran security talks over Iraq in July, the
People's Daily noted, "The United States has
eventually recognized Iran as a 'game player' in
the region ... From the angle of geopolitics or
religious culture, Iran can give scope to its role
of a radiant power or influence over Iraq, which
is exactly what the US refused to acknowledge but
has [now] come to recognize."
India's
Iran policy in tatters How is it that such
wisdom and foresight that immensely strengthens
Beijing's hand today in the Persian Gulf and the
Middle East eluded the strategic community in
Delhi? Admittedly, Indian regional policy in the
Middle East has been shaken to the core in recent
days. The Indian strategic community was
shell-shocked by the NIE.
The trauma was
all the more painful as Delhi had just recently
succumbed to Washington's arm-twisting and imposed
banking restrictions on Iran, beyond what the two
United Nations Security Council resolutions on
that country demanded. That was a disastrous
decision by any diplomatic yardstick. It is
immaterial that Washington pressured Delhi into it
despite knowing that the NIE was to sail into
view. What matters is that Delhi looks very
foolish and naive.
India is, alas, facing
collateral damage from the reverses that the
United States policy is taking in the Middle East
and Persian Gulf. Delhi's estimation that it was
always safe to hitch its diplomatic wagon to the
US-Israeli caravan in the Middle East region has
been put to the test. Delhi must now confront the
reality that playing poodle to Washington didn't
help advance India's medium- and long-term
interests.
Delhi's Middle East policy
rested on assumptions. First, it was assumed that
the Bush administration would ultimately sort out
the Iran question on American terms and the
international community would have to learn to
live with it. Delhi believed that
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