Why China, Pakistan and US are eyeing India's 'string of pearls'
National Security Advisor Ajit Doval's visit to Myanmar beginning tomorrow (June 17) is being closely watched by China, Pakistan and the United States. Myanmar is an important piece of the geopolitical jigsaw that India is putting together. When complete, it will be India's "own string of pearls", a phrase used to describe China's maritime ambitions in the Indian Ocean and beyond.
Myanmar shares long borders with both China and India. Following the successful Indian army cross-border strike against militants operating in camps in Myanmar, New Delhi and Yangon are working to raise their partnership to a new level. Though China resolved its border dispute with Myanmar in six months of negotiations with Yangon, it has deliberately kept its border dispute with India in limbo for 34 years. The reason: China wants to bog India down as a regional power in what Beijing expects will soon be a bipolar world led by itself and Washington. Keeping India in a state of low-intensity attrition is part of this Machiavellian strategy.
Meanwhile, Beijing is clinically pursuing its "string of pearls" agenda in the Indian Ocean to encircle India. China is building military and commercial outposts in an arc from its mainland across to Sudan, passing through the Strait of Mandeb, the Strait of Malacca, the Strait of Hormuz and Lombok Strait. This maritime "garland" would encompass ports in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the Maldives and Somalia.
India must develop a clear counter-strategy. And it now has the ingredients to do so. The key countries in India's own string of pearls: Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, the Maldives and Seychelles.
India's relations with Myanmar are now excellent. Doval's visit beginning June 17 is meant to partly assess the precise outcome of last week's strike on militants in Myanmar by 21 Para, the special forces unit of the Indian army. Around 25 commandos from this special forces battalion took part in the operation.
But NSA Doval's visit is also designed to plan future joint operations against militants on Myanmar soil and strengthen India's ties with Yangon. Myanmar's government, led by Thein Sein since 2011, shares an increasingly uneasy relationship with China. This is the right time, therefore, to deepen India's security and strategic partnership with Myanmar. (Yangon is, in particular, unhappy with Chinese president Xi Jinping for breaking protocol last week to meet opposition leader Aung San Su Kyi in Beijing.)Myanmar, with several deep sea ports, including Yangon and Dawei, is the first pearl in India's garland, sweeping south into the Indian Ocean before rising up to the port of Chabahar in southern Iran. Along the way are a friendly Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Both have significant ports - Chittagong in Bangladesh and Colombo and Hambontota in Sri Lanka. Leaders in both countries, too, lean towards India rather than China or Pakistan. The Maldives and Seychelles are small but key components in India's string of pearls which when complete would begin in Myanmar in the east, dip south to Sri Lanka and link up with Iran in the west.
What do Islamabad, Beijing and Washington make of India's evolving strategy in the Indian Ocean? China and Pakistan have developed a client-vendor relationship. China pays, Pakistan provides the real estate, much as it has done for decades to the United States. With the drawdown of US troops in Afghanistan, China has replaced Washington as Pakistan's principal paymaster.
India's string of pearls strategy, along with the close relations New Delhi has forged with Nepal and Bhutan - both of which share long borders with China - places India in a stronger geopolitical position than it has enjoyed for decades. Pakistan is relatively isolated in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). Its belligerent reaction to India's commando strike in Myanmar reflects deep-seated insecurity.
Disgraced former president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, underscored this by invoking the nuclear bogey with his usual crude bluster: "We do not want to use our nuclear capability but if our existence comes under threat, who do we have these nuclear weapons for? If I say, in Chaudhary Shujaat's style, do we have nukes to be used on Shab-e-Baraat?"
It is time India called Pakistan's nuclear bluff. Islamabad did not dare use nuclear weapons during its defeat in the 1999 Kargil conflict. (It had carried out a nuclear test in June 1998 and had weaponised well before Kargil, Musharraf's brainchild.) Pakistani commentators boast that Kargil is no indicator of the future. Islamabad has in recent years developed short-range tactical nuclear weapons in response to India's "cold start" doctrine. These weapons can be used on the battlefield to balance India's conventional military superiority.
All this is braggadocio. Pakistan's Scotch-guzzling generals know that India would retaliate massively in the event of first-use of small battlefield tactical nuclear weapons by Pakistan. Rawalpindi's generals value their lifestyle and paychecks (in dollars and renminbi) far too much to risk a nuclear exchange which would wound India but destroy Pakistan.
What Rawalpindi GHQ will instead do, post-Myanmar, is ratchet up its proxy terror war on India. Pakistan cannot afford to fight a conventional war with India - a war which it will lose. It cannot use nuclear weapons except as empty rhetoric. State-sponsored terrorism is its only option. If Islamabad doesn't continue to sponsor terrorism, the Pakistani army will go out of business. Terrorism is a revenue stream for it because it ensures a regular supply of aid and arms from China and the US on the pretext of an existential confrontation with India. Without proxy terror, the revenue which finances the lifestyle of Pakistan's army brass would dry up.
The US meanwhile is already into its presidential season. Hillary Clinton is almost certain to win the Democratic nomination. According to the latest opinion polls, she enjoys the support of 60 percent of Democratic voters. If she wins the presidency in November 2016, she is unlikely to change Washington's decades-old South Asia policy. Like China, the US does not want a too-powerful India and uses Pakistan to contain it.
The US has been a ruthless deployer of covert intelligence operations in countries it wishes to influence or keep on leash. It does so through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), paid NGOs and media. (One well-known Mumbai-based monthly features magazine, founded in the 1960s, was a front for a CIA operation.) The US was built on free markets, enterprise and hard work - but also on slavery and segregation. It is a legacy that still permeates its ruthless foreign policy mindset.
In India, however, what passes off as "liberal" opinion would be considered left-wing doctrinaire in democracies like the US and Britain. Real liberals in those countries would have unequivocally and publicly hailed an anti-terrorist operation like India's strike in Myanmar. (India's counterfeit liberals had, unsurprisingly, blanched at President Obama's speech lauding the US special forces who assassinated Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan.)
In sharp contrast Prime Minister Narendra Modi hasn't uttered a word publicly congratulating the 21 Para commandos who carried out the strike in Myanmar. Commentators instead quibble over how many militants were killed, using unverified body counts and anonymous sources to belittle the success of the operation. Often this "enemy within" is India's biggest hurdle as it unshackles itself from centuries of colonial self-doubt and compromised opinion-makers.
If, however, it successfully builds its geopolitical string of pearls, India will inevitably emerge as the third angle in a new US-China-India triangle of power that will define this century.