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ANALYSIS
China and the South Asia
circle
By Rahul Bedi
NEW
DELHI - India and its nuclear neighbors, Pakistan and
China, are busy weaving a complex web of treaties,
defense alliances and covert agreements with South,
Central and East Asian nations to strategically
"encircle" one another.
Through concentric,
sometimes overlapping military and inter-linked
intelligence sharing and economic agreements with these
states, India hopes to "surround" Pakistan - its
"immediate" adversary - and to "contain" China, its
"long-term" security threat.
China and Pakistan,
both of which India has gone to war with since
independence in 1947 over unresolved territorial
disputes, are pursuing similar aims of strategically
"squeezing" Delhi. China, with which India fought a
border war in 1962 and came out worse for it, looms
menacingly in the background for Delhi, despite the
improvement in diplomatic and political relations and
Defense Minister George Fernandes' week-long diplomatic
visit to Beijing that ended on Sunday.
Before
leaving for China, Fernandes said that Delhi would
test-fire a longer-range version of its nuclear-capable
Agni intermediate-range ballistic missile later this
year. Defense research officials said that the proposed
ballistic missile, with a range of over 3,000
kilometers, would place portions of China within
striking range. This is in keeping with a recent defense
ministry report that declares that India was "fine
tuning" its nuclear delivery systems to counter the
"asymmetry" with Beijing's larger nuclear arsenal and
the help it provided Pakistan in developing its missile
and atomic weapons capability. China and Pakistan deny
all such collaboration, although this has frequently
been corroborated by Western intelligence.
Earlier, India's Prime Minister Atal Bihari
Vajpayee cited the fear of China as the principal reason
behind the country's May 1998 nuclear tests and for
developing long-range missiles to deliver weapons of
mass destruction. "India is trying to break free of its
inward-looking strategic insularity in an attempt to
carve out a larger regional role for itself, in keeping
with its perceived vision and strength and to deal with
the Chinese threat," a senior army officer said,
declining to be identified.
Consequently, it had
recently grabbed the initiative by firming up
arrangements to train the Afghan National Army and
opening a military base in Tajikistan - its first
outside the country. It also plans on conducting
military maneuvers with the Tajik army in order to
register a presence in the rich Caspian region.
India is also forging closer military links with
Myanmar, where China plays a dominant security and
military role, and cementing defense and naval ties with
Vietnam. It has agreed "in principle" to supply Hanoi
its locally developed surface-to-surface Prithvi missile
with a 150 kilometer range and to train Vietnamese
nuclear scientists.
India's new strategic thrust
has also led to the United States and India forging a
long-term defense and security alliance aimed at
containing China, which both view as an emerging
regional and global power. According to the 130-page
report "Indo-US Military Relationship: Expectations and
Perceptions", prepared for US Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, China "represents the most significant
threat to both countries' security in the future as an
economic and military competitor".
The analysis
quotes an unidentified US admiral as declaring that a
positive relationship with India was a "hedge" against
future Chinese ambitions. "The United States and India
both view China as a strategic threat and share an
interest in understanding Chinese strategic intent,
though we do not discuss this publicly," he said.
The report revealed that Indian and US views of
China were "strikingly similar", predicated on keeping
Beijing out of the Indian Ocean region where, over the
past decade, it has been making swift inroads. US
officials consider strategically engaging India as a
"future investment", particularly since Asia could
become hostile and dangerous to continuing US military
presence in the region.
"American military
officers are interested in India as a partner for the
long-term strategic competition, including in the words
of an American general as a 'promising countervailing
force to China'," the report declared. If Washington's
relationships with its traditional allies - Japan, South
Korea and Saudi Arabia - become more fragile, India will
emerge as a critical component of US strategy, it adds.
The analysis was produced with material from
interviews with 82 senior US and Indian officials,
mostly military personnel linked closely with furthering
security ties between Washington and Delhi. Of the 26
Indian military interviewees all of whom were one-star
officers and above - 10 were serving and 16 were retired
personnel. Of the 42 US respondents, 23 of 24 military
personnel were on active duty while 15 others were
senior civil servants.
"If China emerges as a
major power, the US needs to have friends - preferably
friends who share the same values [like democracy]. In
the future, India will have more clout and weight [in
the region]," the US Department of Defense analysis
declares.
It adds that "as the US military
engages India, as much as we say we do, we cannot
separate our thinking on India from our thinking on
China. We want a friend in 2020 that will be capable of
assisting the US militarily to deal with a Chinese
threat," a US official said.
"As the US and
India develop a closer military relationship, China will
respond. Where and how China will respond remains
unclear, but India faces the reality that it lives in a
neighborhood where China supplies nuclear and missile
technology to Pakistan, weapons to Bangladesh and is
building a 12,000-foot runway near Mandalay [in Myanmar]
and a deep-water port in Gwadar in Pakistan," declared
the report, quoting an Indian air commodore.
Meanwhile, a small cog in the US-Indian military
alliance aimed at containing China is already in place.
For over a year, the Indian and US navies have been
jointly patrolling the Malacca Straits, a region over
which China's rapidly modernizing navy exercises
considerable control. The US is keen to police the
straits through which over 80 percent of Japan's oil
supplies from the Middle East are transported and to
establish its long-term presence in the region, given
the brewing North Korean crisis and the potential, long
term threat posed by the Beijing and Taiwan spat.
The United States has acknowledged the Indian
navy as a "stabilizing force" in the Indian Ocean and
wants a closer working relationship with it as it
straddles the strongest area of strategic convergence -
sea lane protection.
(Inter Press Service)
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