India and her Neighbours

Bhutan	Hydroelectricuty,
Sri Lanka	Implementation of 13th agreement FTA Tourism Construction of bridge over Ram Sethu
Bangladesh	Land transit - Access to Tripura Illegal migrants River water sharing agreement Land Boundary agreement - enclaves. Access to Singapore and Myanmar
Iran	Chabbra port - petrochemical complex India's voting in UN..

India’s influence has cratered over the last decade. Significantly diluted by external interference, competing powers have built strong military relationships and gained access to key ports. A String of Pearls girds the Indian Ocean, while the mountains bristle with highways and ballistic missiles. The strategic fruits of 1971 have been frittered away from a weak state, overridden by parochial concerns, sandwiched between ad hoc reactions and political gain. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made a significant gesture in refocusing foreign policy towards realpolitik. It is now time to revive South Asian amity.

Kautilya’s shadgunya (six-fold) theory prescribes six attributes to foreign policy. A nation should make peace with a stronger one, stay quiet when a rival is equal or more in strength and seek shelter when depleted in power. It ought to use to sama (friendship), dama (gifts), bheda (division) and danda (punishment) to recalibrate its neighbourhood. This ancient strategy is apt for this moment.

Bhutan has been left bereft. A country that is emphatically a model neighbour, it faces similar tensions with China, with claims on the Doklam Plateau, adjacent to India’s Chicken’s Neck area, serving as a strategic threat. Beijing continues to build roads and infrastructure on Bhutanese territory, seeking an altitude advantage. Joint hydropower projects like the 600-MW Kholongchu, 770-MW Chamkarchu, 570-MW Wangchu and 180-MW Bunakha plants have languished, with economic viability reviews pending. Bhutan should be offered greater infrastructure development and a better price for such electricity exports. Losing it is not an option.

India should have a special relationship with Bangladesh. Squandering this potential, due to illegal migration, state-level parochialism and water disputes, has left our North-east wracked with insurgencies and poverty. The Land Boundary Protocol, dating back to the Mujib-Indira LBA of 1974, which addresses the issues of enclaves, exchanges 111 inaccessible enclaves for 51, reduces border conflict, opens up transit and builds regional trust. While necessary constitutional amendments would need to be made, closure on this border dispute would provide mutual benefits. Water-sharing agreements should be explored to ensure equitable distribution. The creation of a special transit facility by the Bangladesh government for shipment of food to Tripura is a welcome step. Illegal migration will only diminish through a close economic partnership, helping to revive Kolkata as a South East Asian hub. The road to Myanmar and Singapore goes through Bangladesh.

Sri Lanka shows reluctance in implementing the ‘Thirteenth Amendment’ in its Constitution, offering greater autonomy to its ethnic Tamils. It must be held to account on this. However, our trade partnership needs to expand as well, with the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, liberalising trade in services and investments, ripe for finalisation. Investments in energy and infrastructure, particularly a proposed bridge across the Ram Setu and a common electricity grid, would elevate this relationship. Higher Indian economic growth will also carry Sri Lanka along, with our tourists mingling in its casinos.

The Maldives has been heavily courted by China. A new port facility, at Uthuru Thila Falhu, northwest of the Maldives capital Male, will provide ship berthing facilities and include naval repair stations. Our shared regional interests and our combined naval security should make India the ideal partner in this project. The airport cancellation fiasco should not be repeated. Islamic radicalism is on the rise there. The String of Pearls continues to enlarge, with China’s proposed Maritime Silk Route an ingenious way of disguising naval outreach. India’s influence should prevail in its ocean.

The West is accepting Iran and we should not shy away. The strategically located Chabbar port, just outside the Persian Gulf, is being built along with a vast petrochemical complex. With an SEZ on offer, India should make strategic investments in this port, helping to build a direct shipping route to Kandla and increase LNG imports. Tehran’s revised oil and gas incentives should draw Indian investments, particularly in the upstream sector. While the bitterness of India’s ad hoc voting against Iran in the UN remains, trade should be boosted; creating a hub for transit to Central Asia.

India has invested blood and treasure in stabilising Afghanistan. However, the Taliban’s rehabilitation, despite the Haqqani Network’s continued terrorism against Indian consulates, is paradoxical. Returning them to power, even in a coalition, would undo Afghanistan’s shaky democracy. With the upcoming US withdrawal, a concert of nations should help stabilise Afghanistan, providing it with budgetary support, infrastructure investments, linkages to Iran and Central Asia and security training. India has its part to play here.

Pakistan will continue to be a vexed neighbour. With recent attacks on the naval base and airports in Karachi, the Pakistani deep state will soon have to engage in a power struggle. Quick wins can be achieved by agreeing on Siachen and Sir Creek and expanding trade. With the Pakistani military increasingly tied up, talks should be held with Nawaz Sharif. The Most Favoured Nation status should be granted by Pakistan. Making some borders irrelevant, through increased trade and transit, should be initiated. Kashmir, however, will have to wait for another generation.

Saarc needs to be revived, with the Safta and the South Asian University given additional impetus. Our shared cultural heritage should be celebrated, through visa-free travel and PIO-like benefits. Rebuilding our relationships, through a just combination of Kautilya’s four precepts will require strong leadership, with a realpolitik sense of the national interest. Fate has given India a strong government again. This opportunity should not be frittered away. India’s diplomats remain too few. India’s hard power remains scattered. With a fresh approach at the Centre, this will hopefully be set straight.

(Varun Gandhi is BJP national general secretary and a Lok Sabha MP. The views expressed by the author are personal.)

- See more at: http://www.hindustantimes.com/comment/analysis/pursue-the-kautilya-line/article1-1231370.aspx#sthash.LdnuFHuT.dpuf

Critique of US foreign policy

US has had two policy failures - Iraq & Afghanistan

• Post-intervention, it has hastily retreated.
  
• Iraq - it has not done much to build inclusive policies, leading to shia-sunni divisions.
  
• Afghanistan might see similar fate.
  
• US president is a reciepent of Nobel peace prize! 
• West has entered and is exiting the nation with only a myopic, military-focussed strategy, and an utter lack of appreciation for the complex social and political realities that inexorably shape the balance of power on the ground.

How not to end a war

Narayan Lakshman

At the heart of the gloomy nadir in Washington’s foreign policy engagement are several profound lessons that, regrettably, are never likely to be recognised

MYOPIC STRATEGY:The reason why Afghanistan is poised to head ‘back to the future’ is that yet again the West has entered and is exiting the nation with only a military-focussed strategy. Picture shows U.S. Army soldiers in Afghanistan in 2011.—Photo: Reuters

June can be an uncomfortably hot month in Washington but no one must have felt the heat more in the beltway in recent weeks than U.S. President Barack Obama, a man on the verge of witnessing his most cherished campaign promises bite the dust.

The 44th President may be ruing the day he vowed to wind down two wars, flushed as his 2008 dream run to the polls was with the idea of “Hope.”

Nearly six years on, the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s vision lies in tatters, courtesy of a toxic combination of terrorists from al-Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the Afghan Taliban and their vicious cousins across the Durand Line.

Delivering the death blow

This month ISIS in particular appeared to strike the death blow to the prospect of Mr. Obama claiming peace in Iraq as his enduring legacy, even as Twitter was flooded with images showing what seemed to be the militant group’s squads gunning down Iraqi air force recruits in Tikrit, some 1,700 of them, if propaganda materials were to be believed.

After capturing Tikrit, Mosul and possibly Tal Afar, ISIS was said to be no more than 60 kilometres from Baghdad and U.S. military personnel are being rushed in to protect their embassy in the city.

A much-vaunted “no-boots-on-the-ground” moment turned into an international joke.

In the face of this menace, the words of Qubad Talabani, son of the Iraqi president, are most ominous: “The Iraq that we know has come to an end,” he said in a recent media interview.

In Afghanistan, the murky saga of Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier of questionable conduct who was held prisoner by the Taliban for five years and then swapped for five senior Taliban commanders held in Guantanamo Bay, has again exposed Mr. Obama’s keenness to tie a bow on his legacy at any cost, regional security concerns be damned.

Could there be any scenario under which the Taliban’s intelligence chiefs, chief of army staff, interior minister, provincial governor, and one prisoner linked to a joint Taliban al-Qaeda cell would not seek revenge on the Western power that stuffed them into orange jumpsuits, and then force-fed and brutalised them in a myriad of ways for the better part of a decade?

At the heart of this gloomy nadir in Washington’s foreign policy engagement are several profound lessons that, regrettably, are never likely to be recognised, for they all have to do with ending the ‘long wars’ that the U.S. seems to have an irrepressible taste for.

Consider Iraq, for example, where the toppling of Saddam Hussein was followed not by any lasting, inclusive agreement assuring a fair deal for the country’s Sunni minority, but rather a backsliding Shia Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who sought to steadily degrade that community, ever more since the withdrawal of U.S. forces in December 2011.

Initially Mr. Maliki was said to have targeted Sunni vice-president Tariq al-Hashemi, who is now in exile, and then along with others manoeuvred against the cross-sectarian Iraqi National Movement, or Iraqiyya coalition that had been a vehicle for the representation of Sunni Arabs in the 2010 parliamentary elections.

The U.S. adopted an aggressive sanctions regime against Iran over disputed claims about nuclear enrichment violations; why could it not bring itself to exert similar pressure on Mr. Maliki to include Iraqi Sunnis in his country’s grand bargain? Or, thinking creatively, why not help all parties involved explore the prospect of a bifurcated or trifurcated nation respecting hard-to-bridge ethnic divisions?

The defence that this would be tantamount to meddling in a sovereign nation’s domestic political affairs is eyewash given the U.S.’ willingness to embark on the military occupation in the first place, based on a proven-disingenuous Weapons of Mass Destruction allegation.

As it turned out, Iraq’s refusal to sign a bilateral security accord with Washington was the coupe de grace for any hope that a small contingent of U.S. troops may remain in the country after 2011.

The breathtakingly quick dash for the exits that this precipitated seems to be paralleled only by the ferocity of the ISIS-led insurgency scarcely three years down the line.

Looking beyond this emerging vortex of regional instability, the fact of greatest concern to policymakers as far away as New Delhi is that the mirror image of events in Iraq 2010-11 is Afghanistan 2014-15.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has similarly refused to approve the bilateral security agreement with the U.S. and NATO.

Resilience of Taliban

If there is one thing the Bergdahl saga demonstrates, it is the resilience of the Taliban, who, similar to Sunni extremists in Iraq, are likely to step in to fill the security vacuum left by departing Western forces.

Finally, just as ISIS took over vast tracts of neighbouring Syria and used these to establish safe havens for recruiting and training thousands of jihadists for the Iraq offensive, so too a neighbour to Afghanistan’s east has both government and militant-linked groups that would be delighted at the prospect of setting up terror training camps, networks for illicit weapons-and-drugs trade and much, much more.

The reason why Afghanistan is poised to head ‘back to the future’ — essentially to where it stood in the early 1990s — is that yet again the West has entered and is exiting the nation with only a myopic, military-focussed strategy, and an utter lack of appreciation for the complex social and political realities that inexorably shape the balance of power on the ground.

Mr. Obama once called the Iraq occupation a “dumb war.” A dumber war-ending there never was.

narayan@thehindu.co.in

The U.S. adopted an aggressive sanctions regime against Iran over disputed claims about nuclear enrichment violations; why could it not exert similar pressure on Mr. Maliki to include Iraqi Sunnis in his country’s grand bargain?

Printable version | Jun 20, 2014 11:04:31 AM | http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/how-not-to-end-a-war/article6131914.ece

Significance of Wikileaks to society

1. We learned a lot about the illegal activities of the U.S. and other great powers.
   
2. WikiLeaks revelations put secret services on the defensive and set in motion legislative acts to better control them.
   
3. WikiLeaks has achieved much more: millions of ordinary people have become aware of the society in which they live. Something that until now we silently tolerated as unproblematic is rendered problematic.

Has it also caused a change in stance of US in Internet Governance?

Source :
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/how-wikileaks-opened-our-eyes-to-the-illusion-of-freedom/article6131915.ece
We remember anniversaries that mark the important events of our era: September 11 (not only the 2001 Twin Towers attack, but also the 1973 military coup against Allende in Chile), D-day, etc. Maybe another date should be added to this list: 19 June.

Most of us like to take a stroll during the day to get a breath of fresh air. There must be a good reason for those who cannot do it — maybe they have a job that prevents it (miners, submariners), or a strange illness that makes exposure to sunlight a deadly danger. Even prisoners get their daily hour’s walk in fresh air.

Today, 19 June, marks two years since Julian Assange was deprived of this right: he is permanently confined to the apartment that houses the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Were he to step out of the apartment, he would be arrested immediately. What did Assange do to deserve this? In a way, one can understand the authorities: Assange and his whistleblowing colleagues are often accused of being traitors, but they are something much worse (in the eyes of the authorities).

Assange designated himself a “spy for the people.” “Spying for the people” is not a simple betrayal (which would instead mean acting as a double agent, selling our secrets to the enemy); it is something much more radical. It undermines the very principle of spying, the principle of secrecy, since its goal is to make secrets public. People who help WikiLeaks are no longer whistleblowers who denounce the illegal practices of private companies (banks, and tobacco and oil companies) to the public authorities; they denounce to the wider public these public authorities themselves.

We didn’t really learn anything from WikiLeaks we didn’t already presume to be true — but it is one thing to know it in general and another to get concrete data. It is a little bit like knowing that one’s sexual partner is playing around. One can accept the abstract knowledge of it, but pain arises when one learns the steamy details, when one gets pictures of what they were doing.

When confronted with such facts, should every decent U.S. citizen not feel deeply ashamed? Until now, the attitude of the average citizen was hypocritical disavowal: we preferred to ignore the dirty job done by secret agencies. From now on, we can’t pretend we don't know.

It is not enough to see WikiLeaks as an anti-American phenomenon. States such as China and Russia are much more oppressive than the U.S. Just imagine what would have happened to someone like Chelsea Manning in a Chinese court. In all probability, there would be no public trial; she would just disappear.

The U.S. doesn’t treat prisoners as brutally — because of its technological priority, it simply does not need the openly brutal approach (which it is more than ready to apply when needed). But this is why the U.S. is an even more dangerous threat to our freedom than China: its measures of control are not perceived as such, while Chinese brutality is openly displayed.

In a country such as China the limitations of freedom are clear to everyone, with no illusions about it. In the U.S., however, formal freedoms are guaranteed, so that most individuals experience their lives as free and are not even aware of the extent to which they are controlled by state mechanisms. Whistleblowers do something much more important than stating the obvious by way of denouncing the openly oppressive regimes: they render public the unfreedom that underlies the very situation in which we experience ourselves as free.

Back in May 2002, it was reported that scientists at New York University had attached a computer chip able to transmit elementary signals directly to a rat’s brain — enabling scientists to control the rat’s movements by means of a steering mechanism, as used in a remote-controlled toy car. For the first time, the free will of a living animal was taken over by an external machine.

How did the unfortunate rat experience its movements, which were effectively decided from outside? Was it totally unaware that its movements were being steered? Maybe therein lies the difference between Chinese citizens and us, free citizens of western, liberal countries: the Chinese human rats are at least aware they are controlled, while we are the stupid rats strolling around unaware of how our movements are monitored.

Is WikiLeaks pursuing an impossible dream? Definitely not, and the proof is that the world has already changed since its revelations.

Not only have we learned a lot about the illegal activities of the U.S. and other great powers. Not only have the WikiLeaks revelations put secret services on the defensive and set in motion legislative acts to better control them. WikiLeaks has achieved much more: millions of ordinary people have become aware of the society in which they live. Something that until now we silently tolerated as unproblematic is rendered problematic.

This is why Assange has been accused of causing so much harm. Yet there is no violence in what WikiLeaks is doing. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the character reaches a precipice but goes on running, ignoring the fact that there is no ground underfoot; they start to fall only when they look down and notice the abyss. What WikiLeaks is doing is just reminding those in power to look down.

The reaction of all too many people, brainwashed by the media, to WikiLeaks’ revelations could best be summed up by the memorable lines of the final song from Altman’s film Nashville : “You may say I ain’t free but it don’t worry me.” WikiLeaks does make us worry. And, unfortunately, many people don’t like that. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2014

(Slavoj Žižek is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.)