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Saturday, November 30, 2019

Trump and Kashmir: If It Sounds Like Mediation, It Is Mediation


Donald Trump’s latest remarks at the White House are the surest sign that the US president has no intention of backing off from his offer to mediate between India and Pakistan. But then the signs were already there, all around us.
Last Friday, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan spoke to US President Donald Trump for 12 minutes about the situation in Kashmir, in the wake of India’s decision to withdraw J&K’s special status under Article 370.
Three days later, on Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke to Trump and in a 30-minute conversation, complained about his Pakistani counterpart’s incendiary rhetoric which was destabilising the region. The day before, on Sunday, Khan had termed the Modi government as “fascist” and said they were a threat to Pakistan and Indian minorities.
Thereafter, Trump picked up the phone and dialed Khan, and told him that there was a need for him to tone down his rhetoric and reduce tensions. In his conversation, according to a White House readout, Trump “reaffirmed the need to avoid escalation of the situation and urged restraint” on both sides.
Thereafter, Trump tweeted: “Spoke to my two good friends, Prime Minister Modi of India, and Prime Minister Khan of Pakistan… to work towards reducing tensions in Kashmir. A tough situation, but good conversations.”

Now, if this does not sound like mediation, what does? All we have at present are readouts and press releases of the conversations, but you can be sure that given the rhetoric from New Delhi and Islamabad, there must be more happening in the deep recesses of the State Department and the Pentagon.
It stands to reason that the longer the situation takes to return to normality, the more India will be opening itself up to US involvement in the Jammu and Kashmir issue. As for Pakistan, it would be more than happy if the US gets involved. As of now, the situation in the Valley is certainly not normal, especially since thousands of persons, mainly political leaders and activists are detained and communications restricted.
And no one knows exactly how things will unfold in the Valley, not just in the coming days, but also in the weeks and months ahead. You can safely dismiss the propaganda that everything is normal and that there is widespread support for the Centre’s move in the Valley.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only has the Union government’s action added another layer of grievance to those already weighing down the Kashmiris, but it has egregiously also alienated those political elements and parties that had upheld the Indian flag through the thick and thin in the Valley.
We need not take either Pakistan or China’s crocodile tears over the changes in the legal relationship between the state and the Centre seriously.  The step is certainly legally and politically infirm, but neither Islamabad nor Beijing have a legal or moral right to complain. Pakistan had dealt whimsically with the areas of the state that it controls and has never given them even a fraction of the autonomy that J&K had prior to the Article 370 decision. As for China, “autonomous” has, and will always be, a fiction when it comes to its political system.
Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan and US President Donald Trump at Washington on July 22, when Trump said Modi had asked him to mediate on Kashmir. Photo: Twitter/@pid_gov
It is difficult to determine what the government has in mind for the future. The government is deluding itself if it thinks investment and development will now pour into the region and take away the sting of recent events. Just why the population should tamely accept a political demotion for their state is not clear. J&K was never backward by Indian standards and the narrative that Article 370 or 35A were some kind of a hindrance is overblown. Investment could head to the Jammu region, but nothing is likely to go beyond Ramban and Nowshera. By itself, development has never moderated separatism, else we would not have the continuing Basque and Scottish separatism.
Since we are talking of another layer of grievance upon an already ongoing situation, the government has no doubt readied to double down on the “all-out” strategy it initiated in 2016. We are likely to see more repression, police action, arrests, not just of militants, but also their supporters.
We are now in for a longer haul in Kashmir than before the poorly thought-through actions of the Modi government. Pakistan retains the ability to make things difficult in the Valley. With New Delhi egregiously roiling the situation, Islamabad has an opportunity to encourage an escalatory cycle of violence.
Southern Kashmir was a tinderbox before August 5, and you can be sure it will remain one in the coming period. In recent years, Pakistan had scaled down its support for militancy in the Valley, but it may now shift gears again. Given New Delhi’s signal that it will not tolerate this, the possibility of a wider conflict has increased.
And this is where the US comes in. Violence and prolonged disturbances, aided and abetted by Pakistan will paradoxically bring more, not less interference. India successfully foiled US efforts to get involved in the mid-1990s, when things were far worse in the Valley by showing an improvement in the ground situation. Now through acts of commission, it has provided an opening for the US to enter.
Like all countries, the US will act along what it considers are its national interests. Foremost among these, at present, is to prevent the two South Asian neighbours getting involved in a nuclear war and poisoning the global atmosphere. Then comes the need to balance relations with Pakistan, a country that is not only nuclear-armed, but occupies a strategic location in relation to its two-and-a-half adversaries – China, Russia and Iran – and holds the key to peace in Afghanistan.
India is important as a market and also a key to offsetting Chinese power in the Western Pacific, but that only underscores the importance to the US to maintain friendly ties with both India and Pakistan and seeking to mediate between them. This, in fact, has been the leitmotif of US policy to the region since the time of Eisenhower.
The Wire August 21, 2019

Making of the CDS

The Prime Minister’s announcement that the country’s military will soon have a Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) has generated a great deal of excitement and speculation. Modi has referred to the fact that the broad recommendation for the appointment came from past expert commissions and the strategic community. But he gave no indication as to how things will now unfold.
The recommendations of the Group of Ministers (GoM) in 2001 and the Naresh Chandra Task Force on National Security 2012 are broadly similar. A CDS, or a permanent chairman, chiefs of staff committee, lay at the heart of any effort to reform and restructure the armed forces and the Ministry of Defence (MoD). As the experience of the GoM report revealed, that while many reform measures were implemented, minus the CDS, they did not give the required synergy to the military.
Experience of other major countries should tell us that the process is not easy and that it requires constant political attention. In the US, the effort goes back to 1947 when the Joint Chiefs of Staff was first established. Over the decades, the weaknesses of the system led to reform under the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) is the senior-most officer in the US military, and individually, the principal military adviser to the President. By law he does not exercise military command over the armed forces, but he is the intermediary, transmitting orders between the Secretary of Defense and Commanders of Combatant Commands. The Chairman JCS also prepares a unified command plan (UCP) which forms the basic guidance for the combatant commanders, establishes their mission, responsibilities and force structure, outlines the geographic area of responsibility and working responsibilities of the functional commanders.
The chiefs of army, navy and air force, commandant of the Marine Corps and the chief of the National Guards Bureau are members of the JCS, but their primary job is to ‘organize, equip and train’ their forces for the use by the combatant commanders. All this is laid out in legislation and has the force of law in the American system.
The Goldwater-Nichols Act was specific that the chain of combatant command went from the President to the Secretary of Defense and then to the combatant commanders who may operate in different geographies or look after specific functions. There are six regional commands spanning the globe from the Northern Command looking after North America, to the Indo-Pacific Command. The four functional commands are the Strategic Command, Special Operations Command, Transportation Command and Cyber Command, with Space Command soon to emerge as the fifth.
In the Chinese system, the chain of command traditionally went downward from the Chairman Central Military Commission (CMC), who, more often than not, was the general secretary of the Communist Party of China and the President of the People’s Republic. Reforms announced in 2013 led to the overhaul of the all powerful CMC into a flatter three-level command structure—CMC-theatres-forces. The CMC created 15 departments ranging from the General Office to the Joint Staff, Logistics Support, and Equipment Development which provide strategic planning and macro-management, R&D and so on.
The old military regions were replaced by five geographical joint theatre commands linked to the  central Joint Operations Command Center. In 2016, Xi Jinping was revealed as the Commander-in-Chief of the Joint Operations Command Center which he visited wearing a military uniform.
A new army chief, along with his air force and navy counterparts, was made responsible for the training, provisioning of troops, and detached from operational responsibilities.
A new functional command—the Strategic Support Force—was created to meld the PLA capabilities relating to space, cyber and electronic warfare.  The Second Artillery force was promoted to the status of a full-fledged Strategic Rocket Force. A new Joint Logistics Support Force was established as well to unify logistics forces at the strategic level to support the five new joint theatre commands.
The Chinese system is unique to China, born out of the history of the PLA being the armed wing of the Communist Party of China, rather than the People’s Republic. In other words, it is a system where the party runs the show and there is no pretense about separation of powers.
On the other hand, countries like the US and India have worried about making the military too powerful. This is what gave rise to the US system where the system has deliberately separated the function of military advice and operations. The former has been the task assigned to the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff and the latter is the work of the combatant and functional commands.
This is the system India is likely to follow. The CDS will be the principal military adviser to the government while the theatre and functional commands which will evolve will be directly under the Minister of Defence who may exercise his authority through the CDS.
A major problem is the non-expert bureaucracy of the system. There is urgent need to correct this by introducing specialisation for bureaucrats and inserting uniformed officers in the MoD hierarchy. Equally important is the need to alter transaction of business rules to empower the uniformed personnel in the system, instead of keeping them out of it. The integration of the civilian MoD and the higher command of the military is as important a task as the integration of the three services.
Tribune August 20, 2019

Why Rajnath Singh’s Nuclear Policy Rejig is Not That Surprising

Pakistan seems to have become the principal focus of the Narendra Modi government’s foreign policy. On a day when the United Nations Security Council held a rare closed door meeting to discuss Jammu & Kashmir, Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh weighed in on nuclear doctrine.
The UNSC move is not expected to go beyond formalities. As for Singh’s declaration, we need to see if they are fleshed out in some way in the coming months.
At first sight, Singh’s statement that, “Till today, our nuclear policy is ‘No first use’ (NFU). What happens in future depends on circumstances”, seemed like so much bombast.
But the timing of the statement, and the place where it was made, suggested that it may be part of a deeper messaging exercise of the government. A message that was being sent to Islamabad in a period of heightened tensions between the two countries.
But on nuclear matters, Pakistan is not our only interlocutor. Any policy shift has implications for our posture in relation to China.
Singh, though a member of the Political Council of the Nuclear Command Authority (NCA) is not a principal actor when it comes to nuclear decision-making. That responsibility belongs to the prime minister. As for articulating policy, again, it is not the Ministry of Defence that is a player, but the National Security Adviser who chairs the Executive Council of the NCA.

Articulation of NFU Was a Political Decision

Questions about India’s NFU are not new. The articulation of the policy was a political decision aimed at mitigating the concerns of the international community in the aftermath of the May 1998 nuclear weapons tests.
Initially, the government sought to rope in Pakistan in a bilateral NFU. But Islamabad did not bite. On 4 August 1998, speaking on a debate on foreign policy in the Lok Sabha, former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was more or less unequivocal by offering a universal no-first-use pledge – that India would not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states, and not be the first to use them against the nuclear weapons states.
But the only official version of the pledge comes from the press statement of 4 January 2003, following a Cabinet Committee on Security discussion.
It says that India would adopt a posture of “no first use” and that nuclear weapons would “only be used in retaliation against a nuclear attack on Indian territory or on Indian forces anywhere.” 
However, it expands the exception by adding that even if Indian forces were attacked “ by biological or chemical weapons, India will retain the option of retaliating with nuclear weapons.”

Pak’s Nuclear Threats Enough for India to Stay Committed to NFU

Questions about India’s commitment to NFU began to pour in following the development of Pakistani theatre nuclear weapons (TNWs) and its repeated statements that it would not hesitate to use such weapons first in the event India crossed its red lines, which were themselves suitably ambiguous.
This threat of nuclear retaliation has been sufficient to prevent India from responding effectively against grave Pakistani provocations, be the terrorist attack on Parliament House in December 2001, or the repeated terrorist outrages in Mumbai, culminating in the horrific attack of November 2008, or the continuing proxy war in Jammu & Kashmir.

The First Challenges to NFU

Amongst those who began raising their voices against NFU were people like former defence minister Jaswant Singh, who was once an ardent advocate of NFU. The former deputy to the National Security Adviser Satish Chandra, too, noted that the Pakistani development of TNWs was one of the principal reasons for the need to revisit the NFU commitment.
In June 2014, the former Strategic Forces Commander Lieutenant General (retd) Balraj Nagal declared in an article that NFU was virtually tantamount to inviting “large scale destruction in own country.”
He urged a doctrine of ambiguity, covering a range of areas from “first use, to launch on warning, launch on launch and NFU.”
However, the government did not feel any compelling need for change. On 24 April 2013, in a lecture to the Subbu Forum (named after K Subrahmanyam) Shyam Saran, chairman of the non-official National Security Advisory Board of the National Security Council, provided a succinct portrait of the Indian deterrent, committed to NFU, which he said was developing a triad “at a measured pace”.
As part of this, India had created a rugged and EMP-proof (electromagnetic pulse) command and control infrastructure that could survive a first strike. As an aside, he noted that the Indian system, too, worked on a two-person rule for access to armaments and delivery systems.
Reiterating the NFU pledge, he said that even with the complexity arising from the Pakistan-China nexus, India would continue to insist on the "central tenet" of its nuclear doctrine – that any nuclear attack, tactical or strategic, will be met with "nuclear retaliation which will be massive... "

BJP’s Shifting Stance on NFU

But this debate had another fallout, the BJP manifesto for the 2014 election contained a pledge to study “in detail” India’s nuclear doctrine and “revise and update it to make it relevant to challenges of current times”.
Some BJP leaders and experts close to the party suggested that a re-look at the NFU may be in order. But PM candidate Modi himself scotched all the speculation, declaring in an interview in April 2014 that "No first use was a great initiative of Atal Bihari Vajpayee – there is no compromise on that. We are very clear. No first use is a reflection of our cultural inheritance."
Little or nothing has happened in the intervening period on the NFU issue. In his 2016 book, ‘Choices’, former NSA Shivshankar Menon said that there was “a potential gray area” where India could breach its NFU pledge.
This was against a country which had a first-use policy and which appeared to be making preparations for a strike. “India’s present public nuclear doctrine is silent on this scenario.” But, he did not say what the classified doctrine had to say.
In July 2018, the then Union Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar had said that India should pledge to use its nuclear weapons “responsibly” and not necessarily give an NFU commitment. He also declared that this was his personal view and did not reflect government policy.
Modi, too, changed his tone earlier this year, especially during the Lok Sabha election campaign. In April, he said that India had called Pakistan’s nuclear bluff in striking at Balakot.
Later, he declared that India’s nuclear weapons were ‘not for Diwali’. India, he said, was not scared of Pakistan’s threat on account of nuclear weapons.
At the bottom of it all is whether our adversaries believe that we will truly adhere to NFU under all circumstances. China, with hugely superior forces, has the luxury of accepting our pledges, but not Pakistan – with all its neuroses relating to India.
And, if one nuclear armed country does not accept the integrity of the pledge, there is need to modify our posture suitably if we want to deter that country from any misadventure.
Quint August 17, 2019

Modi cuts Gordian Knot: Announcement of CDS position was overdue. Make this the beginning of serious military reform

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s problem solving technique hearkens to the method of Alexander of Macedon. Instead of unloosening the intractable Gordian Knot, Alexander hacked it with his sword. Whether it was the tangle on Article 370, triple talaq or black money, Modi has used unorthodox solutions rather than follow the conventional path of persuasion and compromise. This style characterised his Independence Day announcement of appointing a chief of defence staff. The proposal has been doing the rounds for 30 years, but has been skillfully blocked, sometimes by the vested interests of the armed forces themselves, sometimes by pusillanimous politicians and always by the non-expert civilian bureaucracy.
The decision could only have come the way it did: a political pronouncement of a strong and self-confident PM. In his remarks Modi said that the new CDS would provide synergy and effective leadership to the army, navy and air force. This implies that the CDS would be primus inter pares, unless Modi again applies the Alexandrian method and gives him a five-star rank. The government deserves credit for not going down the usual path of appointing yet another commission to deal with the issue. As the PM pointed out, but for minor differences, past recommendations for a CDS were unanimous. Everyone knew what had to be done, but did not have the gumption to do it. In 2012 the Naresh Chandra Task Force saw the CDS as being responsible for a single acquisition plan for all three services, administering tri-service institutions like the strategic forces command or the ones planned for space and cyber operations, leading the forces in out-of-country exigencies, encouraging integrated administration and logistics, in short being the principal military adviser to the government.
The logic of technology as well as the exponential cost of equipment has pushed other militaries to integrate. But the Indian armed forces stood out in splendid isolation as a force stuck in the World War II era. Now, with a CDS, it can be reformed and restructured to make it a force capable of fighting and winning 21st century wars. Having displayed perspicacity here, presumably the government understands that this is the beginning of the process, not its end. Its end point, at least in the first phase, should lead to joint theatre commands and an insistence on uniformed and civilian expertise in the defence ministry chain of command. A situation where the army’s Eastern Command works from Kolkata, the navy’s from Vishakhapatnam and air force’s from Shillong, is an absurdity.
The political leadership needs to keep a sharp eye out for efforts to sabotage the decision. But first, they must avoid a self-goal of handing out the position as a sinecure to some favoured general for services rendered. The CDS’s task on hand will be enormous and requires great intellectual and executive skills to make up for lost time. Equally, the government must show how serious it is by formally amending its archaic, but crucial, internal business allocation and transaction rules. These lay out the executive responsibilities and powers of officials and, in their current iteration, ignore the role of uniformed personnel. Unless the CDS is inserted into these rules, things will not changeThe wars of today no longer involve just the military. They often present a bewildering overlap of conventional warfare, terrorism, legal and psychological instruments and the use of information through conventional and social media. This requires better coordination not just among the three services, but between the military, civilians and political leadership. Actually, when it comes to rules of business, it may be a good idea to include the national security adviser as well. In April 2018, the government had set up a defence planning committee under the NSA and authorised him to deal with a range of issues relating to defence at the apex level. With the appointment of the CDS this higher command system “with Indian characteristics” requires some urgent clarification.
Times of India August 17, 2019

India-China Talks: Who’s Calling The Shots — Jaishankar Or Doval?

Besides dealing with the fallout of India’s decision to make some constitutional changes in Jammu & Kashmir, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s meetings with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Beijing were cordial and purposeful.
On Kashmir, both sides said what they had to say. Wang Yi expressed China’s concerns over the situation and its fallout on India-Pakistan relations.

He repeated the Chinese position, that the change in Article 370 could change the status quo and cause regional tensions, and as such, they affected China’s sovereign rights and interests.
Jaishankar reassured Wang that the constitutional changes were domestic and did not alter issues relating to sovereignty, neither would they affect the Indo-Pak Line of Control (LoC) with Pakistan, nor for that matter, the Line of Actual Control (LaC) between India and China.

Sino-Indian Relations Amid Turbulence: “Differences Shouldn’t Become Disputes”

That said, they got down to business—to do the ground work for the forthcoming second informal summit between Modi and Xi to be held in October this year, and trying to provide shape to Sino-Indian relations in a period of great turbulence.
The agenda for the 2nd informal summit is huge—besides the “legacy” issues relating to the Sino-Indian border and India’s NSG membership, are those related to trade, and India’s approach towards the Belt an Road Initiative (BRI). Added to this are the potential fallout of the Kashmir, Hong Kong, and Afghanistan developments.
In his remarks to Wang, S Jaishankar recalled a phrase he had, as Foreign Secretary, picked up from the meeting between  Prime Minister Modi and President Xi at Astana on the sidelines of the SCO summit in 2017.
This was that, that though the two countries had differences, it was important “that differences should not become disputes”.
In this era of turbulence, both sides are keen not to rock the Sino-Indian boat. India needs to focus on J&K, and China on Hong Kong. Things going south in both areas is a very live possibility, and let’s not kid ourselves, the Chinese are capable of making things difficult for us via Pakistan.

This Time, Jaishankar Took The Lead, Not NSA Doval

The Indian view was encapsulated in another phrase that echoes Jaishankar’s term as Ambassador in Beijing: both sides should show “mutual sensitivity to each other’s core concerns.” The Chinese have for long signalled their “core concerns”—Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, and the political system of the country. Jaishankar is turning this around to tell Beijing that others, too, have red lines.
An important angle in Jaishankar’s visit to Beijing was that it was he who is leading the charge, rather than his colleague, National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval who hithertofore anchored China policy.
The visit gives us a new picture of the dynamics of the foreign and security policy of the Modi 2.0 government.
This is a government which has seen the induction of two new and key actors—Union Home Minister Amit Shah and EAM Jaishankar, as well as the promotion of NSA Doval. All these individuals have the ear of the PM and are hence powerful, but they are also having to readjust the equations of Modi 1.0, where neither the Home Minister nor the EAM had an inside track.
Further, their boss has now, in political terms, not just gathered greater political authority in his hands, but has also, the experience he did not have in his first term.

Ajit Doval’s Time As Special Representative on Sino-Indian affairs

It is a fact that Doval is currently preoccupied with developments in Jammu & Kashmir where he has been camping for the past week.
But in recent decades, it was the NSA, who also doubled as the Special Representative on the Sino-Indian issues, who had the overall charge of the China policy, which is naturally run by the PM himself.
Doval handled the key aspects of the Sino-Indian relations prior to this. It was he who met with his Chinese counterpart Yang Jichei in Beijing in July 2017, at the sidelines of a BRICS event, even as the Doklam confrontation was going on.
Whether or not it was because of this meeting, a month later the two sides disengaged. And that September, when Modi met his counterpart Xi at the sidelines of a BRICS Summit, the two sides could declare that henceforth they would take a “forward-looking approach” and ensure that incidents like Doklam did not recur.
We have no direct confirmation, but more likely than not, by this time, both leaders  realised that their ties were becoming hostage to minor incidents and issues, and required higher-level strategic attention and better high-level communication.
Three months later, in December 2017, Doval and Yang met for their 20th round of Special Representatives talks in New Delhi.
These talks were held 20 months after their previous round, the 19th, that had been held in Beijing.  Yang did meet his ministerial counterpart, Sushma Swaraj during the visit, but the real business was conducted with Doval.

What Matters Is The Equation Jaishankar & Doval Share With Their Boss

Doval met Yang again on the sidelines of an SCO meeting in Shanghai in mid-April 2018 when the finer details of the Wuhan summit, held at the end of that month, were ironed out. It was just after this that Wang was promoted to the position of State Councillor, and became SR for the talks with India.
As of now, Jaishankar and Wang represent one level of the Sino-Indian discourse, and Doval and Yang represent the other.
What needs to be noted is that though Wang has been promoted as a State Councillor and designated SR, his predecessor Yang was promoted as a member of the powerful Communist Party of China Politburo in the 2017 Party Congress.
In fact, when it comes to foreign policy, Wang is not a member of the apex Chinese Foreign Affairs Commission which is headed by Xi Jinping. Its other members are Premier Li Keqiang and Vice President Wang Qishan. Yang Jichei is both member and the member secretary of the Commission, which is where the real power to make Chinese foreign policy resides.
In India, Jaishankar is a member of the Cabinet Committee on Security and Doval is not. But in the Modi government that means little by itself, and Doval is, after all, the SR for China and much more else. However, what really matters is their respective equation with their boss.
Quint August 13, 2019

Pak’s Anti-India Actions: Revert To Pre-9/11 ‘Free-For-All’ Era?

Pakistan’s decision to expel the Indian High Commissioner, stop trade, and close an air corridor, is a signal that we may be returning to a free-for-all era of the 1990s that culminated in 9/11.
At first sight, the Pakistani action could be self-defeating since it is equally, if not more, affected by cutting off ties with India. But Islamabad has always had the ability to cut its nose to spite its own face, when it comes to Kashmir
Those in India who thought that close ties between New Delhi and Washington would tilt the global scales in India’s favour have been proved wrong.
Initially, the Ministry of External Affairs let it be known that India had kept the US informed about its Kashmir plans, and indeed run it by them as far back as February.
But on Wednesday, 7 August, US officials pointedly denied this. A tweet by Alice G Wells, the ranking US State Department official dealing with South Asia, said: “Contrary to press reporting, the Indian government did not consult or inform the US Government before moving to revoke Jammu & Kashmir’s special constitutional status.”

India-Pakistan Row: What US’s Potential Role As ‘Honest Broker’ Means

In fact, an official spokeswoman was quoted by Reuters as saying that Washington supports “direct dialogue between India and Pakistan on Kashmir and other issues of concern”.
According to a PTI report, the official said that the US was following the Indian legislation on the issue and was aware of “the broader implications of these developments, including the potential for increased instability in the region.” The spokesperson went on to add that the US would urge “respect for individual rights, compliance with legal procedures, and inclusive dialogue with those affected.”
Now, it has been revealed that Wells will be traveling to the region for an extended 10-day tour. Clearly, the US is concerned about the potential of India-Pakistan tensions to undermine its Afghan policy, with the sub-theme that the region is returning to its status as the “most dangerous place in the world.” More importantly, Washington has signalled that it will play the role of an ‘honest broker’, rather than the friend or ally of India that many in New Delhi had clearly hoped it would.
Clearly, Washington now believes that it needs to keep Pakistan close, given the evolving Afghan situation.
As for New Delhi, it has been a bit of a disappointment when it comes to aligning with US interests in the Indo-Pacific.

Why China Is Unlikely To Participate in Pakistani Adventurism

Indeed, if there is a silver lining in the international reaction to the Kashmir issue, it is the position of China. On Tuesday, the official foreign ministry spokesman had voiced “serious concern” about the move by the Indian Parliament to split the state.
In fact, spokeswoman Hua Chunying had specifically criticised the creation of the Ladakh Union Territory saying that it undermined Chinese sovereignty.
But, this was a pro forma response which both India and China indulge in when it comes to the issue of their disputed border. India has criticised China for its development projects in Gilgit Baltistan on this score.
Beijing claims and occupies Aksai Chin in the new UT of Ladakh, as well another area in PoK, the Shaksgam Valley, which was handed over by Pakistan to China as part of a border settlement.
There has been a distinct shift in the tone and tenor of Sino-Indian relations post-Wuhan, and in October 2019, Modi is expected to host Xi at a return informal summit in India.
Chinese telecom giants are doing good business in India, and New Delhi is expected to soon take a decision on Huawei’s participation in India’s 5G roll-out.
Given all this, and the Chinese troubles with the US, they are unlikely to encourage or get involved in Pakistani adventurism.

J&K Remains An ‘International Dispute’ In Eyes Of US & China

Even so, both US and China’s responses make it clear that no matter what steps India has taken, in the eyes of China, US, and indeed other powers, J&K remains an international dispute that needs to be resolved through dialogue between India and Pakistan.
But a lot of this depends on the emerging ground situation in the Kashmir Valley. It is much too early to predict which way it will go.

Why Modi Govt Shouldn’t Have Gone After ‘Pro-India’ Parties

If you believe that the people will quietly make a 180 degree turn and hail closer integration with India, you can also believe that pigs can fly. Where there was 70 percent alienation in the Valley, today it is likely to be 100 percent.
The Modi government has egregiously gone after the ‘pro-India’ parties like the National Conference and the People’s Democratic Party who have played a stellar role in blunting the edge of separatist sentiments in the Valley in the last thirty years.
The danger is the J&K Police, which was reportedly disarmed before the 370 action.
J&K Police have played a key role in defeating the insurgency, and if there is disaffection there, it could have consequences for the counter-militancy campaign in the Valley.

Will Pakistan Renew Proxy War Or Be Satisfied With Diplomatic Action?

This is where Islamabad comes in. For the past several years it has not been able to push either trained cadre or weapons into the Valley. If it steps up the effort, it will certainly find willing local recruits.
So, what remains to be seen is, whether Pakistan decides to renew its proxy war campaign in the Valley, or whether it will be satisfied with its diplomatic action, and by raising the issue in international forums.
If the proxy war intensifies, the international community, led by the US, is bound to increase pressure on India and Pakistan to resolve their dispute.
Trump’s repeated mediation offers are pointers to this, as is the official American reaction to the Pakistani decision to snap ties with India.

What New Delhi Must Do Amidst Dire Global Geopolitics

We are in a very different and difficult geopolitical conjuncture today. There may be superficial similarities between the pre-9/11 world and today, but as American political scientist and commentator Ian Bremmer has pointed out, the reality is that the global situation is probably much more dire: relations between China and the US are on a track of no return; Hong Kong may be on the verge of a PLA crackdown; climate change is signalling its onset repeatedly with little mitigative action; US and Iran are an incident away from war; even stable allies like Japan and South Korea are at each other’s throats; and Brexit is upon us.
Responding to all these will demand that New Delhi undertake agile diplomacy, create fluid coalitions, and take decisive actions.
At the same time, it must ensure that we do not become collateral casualties in other people’s wars. Modi and Amit Shah may have dealt with the domestic aspects of Jammu and Kashmir with great artifice and self-confidence. But there is an international aspect as well involving Pakistan, US and China, which is immune to the magic wand they have wielded.
Quint August 8, 2019