What follows is a description of my experience, in fanboyish detail, of Robert Kaplan’s speech at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation on March 12, 2010. I was lucky enough to sit and chat with Mr Kaplan for more than a half hour after the event, at an exclusive reception. I will describe that in my next post. Today I would like to fill you in on the speech itself, and provide you with my notes which I think will give you insight into his new book Monsoon, due later this year. Also, Kaplan will be publishing an article about Chinese geography in the next issue of Foreign Affairs, a topic he broached a bit in the speech.

Read the rest of this entry »

Robert D. Kaplan supplies a chapter on Chinese naval strategy to a Center for a New American Security report entitled China’s Arrival: A Strategic Framework for a Global Relationship. Much of the chapter is based on his previous work in Foreign Affairs and The Atlantic with a healthy dose of James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, two academics many will be familiar with. Kaplan’s primary contention is that in the long-term, China is pursuing a two-ocean strategy for its navy:

… the Chinese Navy would prefer to be not a one-ocean, but a two-ocean power, with multiple access routes between the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific to ease its dependence on the Strait of Malacca. (pp. 53-54)

Unfortunately much of the analysis is based on the Mahanian concept of physical protection of the sea lanes. This type of thinking has been criticized by naval thinkers in the West, but is considered the norm in Chinese strategic circles (see Mao Zedong, Meet Alfred Thayer Mahan: Strategic Theory and Chinese Sea Power (PDF) by Holmes and Yoshihara). Much of China’s resources pass through the Malacca Strait from the Indian Ocean. It is to this end that China has set up its string of pearls strategy (one being Gwadar Port), contemplating a Kra Canal as well as beefing up its naval power projection capabilities into the Indian Ocean. Thus, quoting Chinese naval analyst Zhang Ming, “India is perhaps China’s most realistic strategic adversary.” Kaplan points out that 90 percent of Chinese arms sales are to Indian Ocean littoral countries, virtually surrounding India on three sides.

This all sounds very ominous but before you begin accusing Kaplan of being a war-monger realize that much of this article is about justifying China’s expansion. Kaplan stresses that “there is nothing illegitimate about the rise of the Chinese military.” and “… it is too facile to suggest that China is acquiring naval power as a means to the end of regional or perhaps global hegemony.”(pp. 46) Chinese expansion is a function of expanding trade, giving rise to economic and strategist interests overseas. Furthermore, Chinese naval expansion, argues Kaplan, is “an indication that its land borders are for the first time in ages not under threat.” (pp. 48)

Kaplan once again makes the comparison of China’s rise to that of America’s rise in the 19th century. He even makes a reference to the Indian Wars and the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. Reader beware, one must tread carefully when using historical metaphors and analogues. There is learning from history, and there is being blinded by history. A good book to read on this subject is Neustadt and May’s excellent Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers. That said, I think Kaplan is doing something more subtle here. Rather than making an argument about the progress of a rising power, he is offering a moral argument to counter anti-Chinese sentiment in the US. Basically he is saying: hey, we went the same route and the world didn’t turn out so bad did it? For some that may seem a very egocentric argument, but remember that the entire report is directed at the American and Chinese decision makers and is titled: A Strategic Framework for a Global Relationship. Kaplan argues that China’s naval rise can present the US with opportunities for engagement (eg. the Chinese dispatch to the Gulf of Aden as an example), and we know from his previous work that Kaplan supports the military as the harbingers of diplomacy. Furthermore, Kaplan advises that rather than leveraging allies like Japan and India to isolate China, the US should leverage these relationships to bind China in an Asia-centric alliance system. A moment of institutional liberalism from the self-proclaimed pessimistic realist Kaplan?

The rest of the report is written by name-brand academics such as John Ikenberry, Michael Green and Richard Weitz. Often Kaplan is criticized for writing in academic settings. The situation is no different here as he makes a number of claims without sufficient evidence. At least this time he uses endnotes (a whole 16 of them!). Since this is really a think piece, an exploration of a potential naval strategy from a decidedly American point of view, it might not require such adherence to the rigour of the academy. Unless you are a professional academic working on SLOC issues or are familiar with Holmes and Yoshihara’s work, this article is probably worth the read.

h/t to Lex who passed this on oh so long ago!

Given that territorial disputes and separatism are great interests of mine, I took note of yesterday’s news that a new state will be created in India. It is important to note though that, “The process of forming the state of Telangana will be initiated” and thus while likely, there is no guarantee.

India announced on Thursday that it planned to create the country’s 29th state, after a hunger strike by a regional leader and escalating protests from supporters. Home Minister P. Chidambaram said the government would begin work to found the separate state of Telangana, which will be carved out of Andhra Pradesh in the southeast. [...]

Since the partition of British-ruled India in 1947, various separatist and state movements have raged across the vast nation. Three new states were created in 2000, when Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh were divided to give rise to Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand.

Although a precedent by no means, it may still take years to actually come into being and around 60 state legislaters that day turned in resignations in protest. By today, that number is up to around 130.

Background

After Indian independence in 1947, events not unlike today’s played out. In an effort to gain an independent state, and protect the interests of the Telugu people of Madras State, Amarajeevi Potti Sreeramulu fasted until death. Public outcry and civil unrest after his death forced the government to announce the formation of a new state for Telugu speaking people. Andhra attained statehood on 1 October 1953, with Kurnool as its capital.

And yet, three years later, on 1 November 1956, the Andhra State merged with the Telangana region of Hyderabad State to form the state of Andhra Pradesh. Hyderabad, the former capital of the Hyderabad State, was made the capital of the new state Andhra Pradesh.

Just over a year ago, in November 2008, the Nava Telangana Party declared the region’s statehood. Thus, today’s announcement is no surprise given the regions 60+ years of unrest and seeking autonomy/independence.

Questions

1) Will this new state be economically viable? How will it earn revenue with a smaller, poorer tax base?

2) Will a new smaller state with a more homogenous population and thus government actually be able to govern more effectively?

3) Will this further propel the Hyderabad region upwards as it no longer has the anchor of poorer regions dragging it down?

4) How will this affect the balance of power between the individual states? And how will it affect the balance between political parties? Andhra Pradesh will lose voting power nationally with the creation of a new state and the new Telangana is far more likely to gravitate left than right. What does this mean for the major politically parties like the INC and BJP?

5) How will this affect the endless other separatist groups (violent and nonviolent) and ethnic minorities agitating for more autonomy? Will this make India more or less stable?

6) What will the long term effects be of this new states success or failure?

Final Comments
Although it is unlikely this issue will receive much more international attention, it will be of interest to India watchers and especially those interested in devolution, separatism and related issues. Newly independent states such as Kosovo are often the most studied while developments such as this inside functioning states and that are legally sanctioned receive less attention. I’ll try to keep an eye on this and would always appreciate further comments from readers who may have more to add.

Robert Kaplan has a new article out in The Atlantic called Talking to the Taliban (via Arab Media Shack).

Kaplan points out that Obama’s new strategy, which consists of convincing Pakistan to sever ties with its long time ally the Taliban, and increase them with its long time foe, India, makes no sense whatsoever and has little chance of success.

No matter how much leverage you hold over a country, it is rare that you can get it to act against its core self-interest. [...] The U.S. demands that Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), its spy agency, sever relations with the Taliban. Based on Pakistan’s own geography, this makes no sense from a Pakistani point of view. First of all, maintaining lines of communications and back channels with the enemy is what intelligence agencies do. What kind of a spy service would ISI be if it had no contacts with one of the key players that will help determine its neighbor’s future?……

Read the rest. As always, it’s well worth it and spot on.

Robert Kaplan has a new article up at The Atlantic discussing India (Hat tip to Lexington Green). Below are the opening paragraphs.

India’s New Face

If the spirit of modern India has a geographic heartland it is Gujarat, the northwestern state bordering Sindh, in Pakistan. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the mahatma—Sanskrit for “great soul”—was a Gujarati, born in Porbandar, on the Arabian Sea, in 1869. The signal event of the Indian independence movement was the Salt March that Gandhi, joined by thousands, led in March 1930 across Gujarat, from the Sabarmati Ashram 241 miles south to Dandi, on the Gulf of Cambay. There Gandhi picked up a handful of salt on the beach and defied the British law prohibiting the collection or sale of salt by anyone but the colonial authorities. “Next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life. It is the only condiment of the poor,” Gandhi wrote. In a letter to the viceroy he argued, “I regard this tax to be the most iniquitous of all from the poor man’s standpoint. As the independence movement is essentially for the poorest in the land, the beginning will be made with this evil.”

Gandhi’s identification with the poor was intrinsic to his universalist philosophy. As he put it:

I do not believe in the doctrine of the greatest good of the greatest number. It means in its nakedness that in order to achieve the supposed good of 51 per cent the interests of 49 per cent may be, or rather, should be sacrificed. It is a heartless doctrine and has done harm to humanity. The only real dignified human doctrine is the greatest good of all.

To protect the poor against the ravages of capitalism, which benefits only the majority rather than everyone, India would adopt socialism after independence. More to the point, although the Hindus would numerically dominate, they could not ignore or trample the rights of tens of millions of Muslims. Indeed, the “greatest good” necessitated that the conscience of the new nation and the ruling Congress Party be avowedly secular.

But the spirit of India has undergone an uneasy shift in this new era of rampant capitalism and of deadly ethnic and religious tensions, which arise partly as violent reactions against exactly the social homogenization that globalization engenders. Gujarat finds itself once again at the heart of what is roiling India, and what singularly menaces the country’s rise to “Great Global Power” status. India is home to 154 million Muslims, the third-largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia and Pakistan. India has arguably more to lose from extremist Islam than any other country in the world. Yet, as Dwijendra Tripathi, a historian based in Gujarat, lamented to me, “The Hindu-Muslim divide here is worse than at any time since the partition.” Not coincidentally, this rift is deepening even as Gujarat booms economically, with brand-new malls, multi plexes, highways, and private ports transforming it into a pulsing region-state athwart Indian Ocean trade routes.

Gujarat’s heightened religious tensions stem from “2002,” as it is simply called by everybody in Gujarat and the rest of India. In the local lexicon, that year has attained a symbolism perhaps as resilient as the force of “9/11” for Americans. It connotes an atrocity that will not die, a sectarian myth-in-the-making that constitutes a hideous rebuke to Gandhi’s Salt March. And at its epicenter stands another charismatic Gujarati, Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, an icon of India’s economic growth and development, and a leading force in the Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janata (Indian People’s) Party, or BJP.

What local human-rights groups label the “pogrom” began with the incineration of 58 Hindu train passengers on February 27, 2002, in Godhra, a town with a large Muslim population and a stop on the rail journey from Gujarat to Uttar Pradesh, in north-central India. The Muslims who reportedly started the fire had apparently been taunted by other Hindus who had passed through en route to Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh, on their way to demonstrate for a Hindu temple to be built on the site of a demolished Mughal mosque. Recently installed as chief minister, Modi decreed February 28 a day of mourning, so that the passengers’ funerals could be held in downtown Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s largest city. “It was a clear invitation to violence,” writes Edward Luce, the Financial Times correspondent in India, in his book, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India. “The Muslim quarters of Ahmedabad and other cities in Gujarat turned into death traps as thousands of Hindu militants converged on them.” In the midst of the riots, Modi approvingly quoted Newton’s third law: “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” Mobs coalesced and Hindu men raped Muslim women, before pouring kerosene down their throats and the throats of their children, then setting them all on fire. Muslim men were forced to watch the ritualistic killings before they, too, were put to death. More than 400 women were raped; 2,000 people, overwhelmingly Muslim, murdered; and 200,000 more made homeless throughout the state.

The killers were dressed in saffron scarves and khaki shorts, the uniform of the RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (Organization of National Volunteers)—the umbrella group of the Hindu nationalist movement—and came armed with swords and gas cylinders, as well as electoral registers and computer printouts of addresses. The police stood by and observed the killings, and in some cases, according to Human Rights Watch, helped the rioters locate Muslim addresses. As for the 200,000 made homeless, the Gujarati state government provided very little in the way of relief, or compensation for the loss of life and businesses. Today, much of Ahmedabad’s Muslim population remains sequestered in squalid relief communities that Modi once called “baby-making factories.”

Read the rest at The Atlantic.

While the US missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic have consistently made the news, few realize that other countries are equally interested in ballistic missile defense (BMD). Unsurprisingly, those are Japan, Israel and India (Russia to some extent).

And while Russia has the experience, expertise and technology to build some countermeasures, others do not. Therefore, when I read about Indian BMD, I wonder how Islamabad will react as they have a far smaller capacity to do so with most of their technology being Chinese or North Korean.

Buoyed by the successful testing of its fledgling ballistic missile defence, India is pushing ahead with an ambitious version of the star wars project capable of shooting down incoming ICBMs in the 5,000 km range. The phase-II of the BMD systems, likely to be deployed by 2014, will be an important part of India’s defence as both China and Pakistan possess nuclear capable missiles. Once the BMD is in place it will place India in a fairly exclusive club alongside US, Russia and Israel.

Even the possibility of effective BMD presents a major threat to Pakistan’s strategic weapons. Given that their warheads will be delivered by a combination of missiles and F16s, and that the Indian Air Force would likely intercept at least some of those planes, what are Pakistan’s options for countering India’s BMD program? They have neither the money or indigenous capabilities to develop their own, nor are they likely to find a country willing to sell them the technology. Even a partially successful Indian BMD program could have a major destabilizing effect on relations with Pakistan at a time when Pakistan is fighting for its very existence from internal threats.

Robert Kaplan, Kishan Rana and former Indian ambassador Satinder Lambah discuss the relationship between India and its neighbors, including from the global perspective. Hosted by the Aspen Institute, The 2008 Aspen Ideas Festival will engage its participants in a variety of programs, tutorials, seminars and discussion events which together are guaranteed to charge the atmosphere with vibrant intellectual exchange. Think of it as a week-long summer university for the mind—remarkable lectures and classes across a stimulating array of topics.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Robert Kaplan gave a brief outlook of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in The Atlantic last month. He followed up those brief thoughts in The New York Times this Sunday in an op-ed entitled Trouble in the Other Middle East.

Kaplan argues that with the Mumbai attacks we have returned to an era of an “elongated” Middle East “stretching from the Mediterranean to the jungles of Burma with every crisis from the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in the west to the Hindu-Muslim dispute in the east interlocked with the one next door.” India is part of the Middle-East-Afghanistan-Pakistan chain of jihad, all thanks to globalization doing away with 20th century concepts of national boundaries. Old school “arc-of-instability” and new school Core/Gap afficianados get your rulers and maps out!

Here is the juicy bit for the policy wonks out there:

Our notion of the “peace process” is antiquated and needs expanding. We need a second special negotiator for the Middle East, a skilled diplomat shuttling regularly among New Delhi, Islamabad and Kabul.

Read the full article

H/T to the Chief.

Robert Kaplan just spent a month in Gujarat reporting on Hindu-Muslim relations (does trouble follow this guy or what?). He has a few brief words on the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Kaplan argues that “India has more to lose from extremist Islam than arguably any other country in the world” and that despite the terrorist’s call to history “this is not an ancient historical divide so much as a recreated modern one.” Some “rudimentary” background from Kaplan:

The Mumbai terrorists announced themselves as the Deccan Mujahideen. The Deccan is a rugged plateau region in south-central India that Aurangzeb, the fierce Sunni emperor of the Mughals (India’s most historically significant Muslim dynasty) could never subdue and in fact died trying in 1707. The Islamic Mughals vanquished all of northern India, Pakistan, and a good part of Afghanistan, but they could never consolidate the Deccan against the Hindu Maratha warriors.

Although a McCain supporter and admittedly skeptical of Obama, if the latest CS Monitor is true, then I am very pleased to read about one of his major foreign policy goals: Kashmir. As the war in Afghanistan has gotten worse, the usual echos have continued: Pakistan supports terrorism, elements of the ISI support AQ or other militants. My response? Duh!

Yet, no matter how often these and similar lines are repeated, few ask why Pakistan supported (and supports) the Taliban and various militant and terrorist groups. A key reason is India. Pakistan’s conventional forces are far inferior to India’s and Islamabad has lost many a war and minor clash to New Delhi before. Only through its nuclear arsenal and support for terrorism as a foreign policy tool can Pakistan equalize the situation. The primary reason for this is the ongoing dispute over Kashmir. Obama seems to get that before you get to Afghanistan, you must go through Pakistan, and before them, you must go through Kashmir.

Secondly, NATO is not exactly sending comforting signals to Pakistan. European nations are constantly complaining, refuse to engage the enemy (excluding NL) and discuss pulling out. Considering Pakistan and Afghanistan will be neighbors forever and few in Pakistan are betting on a long term NATO presence, much less success. As part of a hedging strategy, Pakistan continues to support the Taliban to ensure a friendly future neighbor against India.

As part of his push to find new solutions to the war in Afghanistan, President-elect Barack Obama is considering a new diplomatic push on Kashmir, reversing eight years of American silence on the issue.Mr. Obama has argued that Pakistan will not fully commit to fighting the insurgency it shares with Afghanistan until it sheds historic insecurities toward India. Talks about Kashmir, the central point of contention between the two nuclear rivals, are among the “critical tasks for the next administration,” Obama said in an interview last month with Time magazine.

It is a strategy that worries Indians, who suggest the Pakistani Army is blackmailing Obama to support its claims. Yet security analysts say the Afghan insurgency has roots in the power struggle between India and Pakistan and cannot be solved without a regional approach.

Read the whole thing. While not new, it would seem to be news to some. I look forward to seeing how this develops.