The 15th SAARC Summit: Expectations and Challenges

The South Asian countries will soon gather for the annual regional ritual – Summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). The 15th SAARC Summit is due to take place in Sri Lanka on 2nd-3rd August 2008. Since its inception in 1985 the SAARC is struggling to survive and promising to thrive. The regional forum was inaugurated to strengthen socio-economic cooperation among South Asian countries thereby laying the groundwork for political trust-building. Unfortunately, the programmes of socio-economic and cultural cooperation have been hijacked by political differences and the SAARC is struggling to manage regional animosities.

The upcoming Summit will as usual be conducted in a challenged regional environment. Almost every member country is caught in a whirlwind of political crisis. Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh are being managed through interim political arrangements paving the way for new governments to take control. Bhutan and Afghanistan are experimenting with the modern democratic practices marking an important phase of political transitions within each country. The Left parties in India have withdrawn support from the Congress-led UPA government which is expected to prove its majority before the Summit commences. Maldives is expected to witness the first ever multi-party elections this year. The host, Sri Lanka, is facing a challenging security situation as the LTTE has renewed its assaults against the Singhalese dominated government. Some groups of media activists in Sri Lanka have even threatened to boycott the Summit in protest of the increasing attacks against journalists in the country. It seems ironical that in the midst such national political crisis, SAARC has designated 2008 as the ‘Year of Good Governance’.

The national challenges are further complicated by the deteriorating regional strategic environment. The induction of the Marxist forces into mainstream politics in Nepal is expected to embolden Left wing groups in the region arousing heightened security concerns. Attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, for which Pakistan is being blamed, has created a strategic quagmire for the three states. India is also concerned about the increasing supply of arms to the Sri Lankan government by China and Pakistan. The Armed Forces Division of the Bangladesh has received instruction from the Office of the Chief Advisor to allow surveys by U.S. Marine Corps along the Indo-Bangladesh border for identifying the movement of extremists and terrorists across the border. Such growing influence of extra-regional actors in South Asia is expected to be a cause of concern for India.

India’s relations with most regional states are either strained or are being re-defined in response to changing national and regional realities. The Maoist led government in Nepal is intending to scrap the 58 year old Indo-Nepal Peace and Friendship Treaty and review all existing bilateral arrangements. In 2007, the India-Bhutan Treaty of 1949 had been updated to replace the clause where Bhutan is expected to be guided by India in regard to the former’s external relations with the need for ‘friendly cooperation’ on the issue. The government of Bangladesh has out rightly rejected India’s demand to sign a five year agreement on allowing transit rights to North-East India at the sidelines of the upcoming Summit. India’s National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan has gone to the extent of demanding the scrapping of Pakistan’s ISI following its alleged involvement in the recent attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul.

The repercussions of global developments on the region are expected to further burden the SAARC process. The U.S. is reinforcing its strategic presence in Afghanistan following indications of the resurgence of the Taliban. U.S. army personnel are pressing for attacking suspected militant camps inside Pakistan. The member states are expected to refer to the ongoing discussions on the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal, especially when India had for several years favored the infamous ‘Indira Doctrine’ of minimizing external involvement in region. After attempting to remain insulated from global power politics for more than two decades, SAARC is in need to develop responses on the direct involvement of global actors with the regional states.

The agenda of the Summit compounds the prevalent national and regional and global challenges making this a crucial meeting of regional Heads of States. The theme of 15th SAARC Summit is ‘Towards a South Asian Union: Growing Together”. For realizing the goal of a Union in South Asia, psycho-political issues of leadership and perceptions have to be continuously addressed, rather than rhetorical referrences at Summit meetings. The rising food and oil prices are expected to dominate the Summit proceedings. This would generate additional pressures for operationalizing the SAARC Food Bank, which is yet to be ratified by four member states. The 14th SAARC Summit had emphasized on commencement of the implementation phase of the SAARC programmes and hence the progress on the SAARC Development Fund and South Asia University is expected to be placed before the Colombo Summit. SAARC has for long projected a selected theme for each Summit, supported by elaborated plans for realizing the proposals. The follow-up on issues of combating terrorism and promoting connectivity, highlighted during the previous Summit, is expected to be included on the agenda for reconsidering proposed goals and strategies.

Expecting great results from SAARC is a clear defiance of political reasoning. It is important to realize that SAARC is a forum of countries that are still under-going the process of state and nation building and hence it is an inherently challenged group. Nevertheless, the member countries have to make an honest attempt at collectivization of mutual efforts for gaining maximum benefits. Contrary to popular expectation, existence of SAARC cannot positively impact regional relations, but a positive transformation in regional perceptions can stimulate the activities of SAARC.

Attacks on Indian Embassy in Kabul: Global and Regional Implications

The July 7th car bombing incident at the Indian Embassy in Kabul is expected to have major ramification for global politics in general and South Asia in particular. More then 60 Afghan nationals died in the blast along with five members of the Indian diplomatic staff.

This blast is a continuation in the recent series of incidents arousing security concerns in Afghanistan. The Government in Afghanistan has been pointing fingers at Pakistan for the deteriorating situation in the country. The Foreign Minister of Afghanistan Rangeen Dadfar Spanta, has clearly stated that ‘the terrorist enemy behind these operations, which are sustained by a complex set of networks and infrastructure located behind the border of Afghanistan, cannot be defended by military operations inside Afghanistan alone.’ These incidents have aroused concern among the U.S. military personnel striving to bring stability to Pakistan. According to President Bush June 2008 has turned out to be a very challenging month for the Allied security forces in the country. A military out-post in the north-eastern province of Kunar was attacked by insurgents on July 13, killing nine U.S. soldiers. The U.S. has already mobilized additional security measures for coping with increased incidents of bombing in Afghanistan. The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has moved from the Persian Gulf into the Gulf of Oman so its warplanes can fly missions over Afghanistan. The U.S. has also been pressurising the Pakistani government to employ more resources to deal with the militant extremists within the country. But the challenges in Afghanistan are mounting at an alarming pace.

The recent bombing will have major ramifications for the South Asian region as well. It is expected to strain relations between India and Pakistan. India’s National Security Advisor M. K. Narayanan has stated that India has ‘fair amount of intelligence’ on the involvement of Pakistan’s spy agency ISI in July 7th attacks. With the SAARC Summit due later this month, the incident can adversely impact the already challenged process of regional cooperation. SAARC will have another stability- challenged member in the presence of Afghanistan at the up-coming Summit. The attack on the Indian Embassy in Afghanistan for which Pakistan is being blamed has come to involve three SAARC members in an unwanted standoff just few weeks before the annual Summit opens on.
The U.S. aided states (like Afghanistan and Pakistan) appear to be posing greater threat to global peace than the rogue states. The nascent processes of the SAARC forum cannot be expected to put on course the screwed of policies a global superpower.

Developing a Human Terrain System for Jammu and Kashmir

The Government of India has been waging a long battle in state of Jammu and Kashmir since independence. The government has experimented with a variety of economic, political and strategic solutions at the state, regional and trans-national level for resolving the issue. Unfortunately, none of these have worked and the magnitude of the problem has increased. The most disturbing development of this prolonged struggle has been the alienation of the people of J&K. Reports of human rights violations in J&K by the Indian military personnel are widely cited. The army on the other hand accepts and defends a limited degree to coercion given the nature of challenges they encounter in the region. The situation in the state is challenging; the army in the process of defending the people has emerged as a source of apprehension and the common people in distancing themselves from the army have been suspected as supporting terrorists.

No other dimension of the J&K issue requires more urgent attention than bridging this gap between the people and military. The success or failure of the various peace plans, economic proposals, and strategic doctrines will be determined by the equations shared between the local population and the army personnel. The Government of India can take inspiration from the Human Terrain System of the U.S. and apply the programme with necessary modification in J&K.

The Human Terrain System (HTS), a programme run by the U.S. Foreign Military Studies Office, is currently being used in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Programme seeks to gather ethnological and cultural intelligence from the ‘war zones’ and thereby assist the U.S. military in employing a more informed and humane approach for post-intervention stabilization in Iraq and Afghanistan. The HTS is an updated version of the CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development) programme, used in Vietnam by President Johnson. Within the HTS several categorizations exist- Human Terrain teams, reach-back research cells, subject-matter expert networks and language specialists.

The operations of the Indian military in J&K cannot be compared to the U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in principle the strategy of HTS can be borrowed from the U.S. experiment. The socio-cultural ethos of J&K (and of every state in India) is distinct and the military training necessarily does not address this reality. The military has been trained to fight enemies and not to protect its own population. Since the operational dynamics of the military has changed, given the realities in J&K, the HTS could contribute significantly in addressing the lacuna.

HTS is an attempt to make available the expertise of the social scientists and regional experts to the military personnel for the purpose of factoring the local sensitivities into the military strategy. The military campaign in J&K is not just about defending a territorial unit but also about integrating the population of the state into the national mainstream. The achievement of national security objectives in J&K largely rests on a clear understanding of the societies where the army is engaged. As the programme over-view of the U.S. HTS explains, the local civilian population in the area of conflict – the human terrain – must be considered as a distinct and critical element of the environment. The HTS in J&K could engage with this human terrain and serve two vital purposes.

The HTS will have to be contextualized for use in J&K. The government will have to put together a Human Terrain Team (HTT) comprising of journalists, academicians, anthropologists, lawyers, economic experts, religious leaders, medical personnel, psychologists and civil engineers from within the state and across the nation. The HTT could would be able to comprehend and respond to the micro needs of the people and emerge as feedback loop not only for the military also the government. The issues of sanitation, education, economic development, viable employment are the micro concerns affecting the daily lives of the people of J&K. The HTT would be better equipped to address the human security concerns of the local population. Since the HTT would operate as an adjunct of the military forces, the negative perceptions towards the army could be neutralized.

The HTT would also operate as an advisory body for the purpose of strategic and political planning. Benefiting from the expertise and experience of the HTT the political and military leadership will be able to devise strategies for providing security with development to the local population. The HTT would create space for the social and human concerns in the macro politico-strategic perspective of the government of India.

The creation of HTT may appear ambitious and a time consuming proposition given the dominance of traditional strategic planning. But it time to realize that J&K is not a traditional theater of war and hence innovative strategies need to be devised for countering the challenge.

[Publised at http://www.ipcs.org/whatsNewArticle11.jsp?action=showView&kValue=2591&status=article&mod=b]

Maximizing on the visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to India

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is expected to be in New Delhi on 29th April for a working visit. Energy issues are on the agenda of talks between India and Iran during the short six-hour visit. The visit has a wider geo-political significance and hopefully the Government of India will avoid diplomatic sluggishness and maximize on the opportunity.

The timing of the visit is crucial. The Bush administration has focused attention on isolating the regime of President Ahmadinejad. In March 2008, the third round of Security Council sanctions was imposed on Iran. Despite the findings published in the National Intelligence Estimate of December 2007, the U.S. continues to view Iran as a major threat and seeks to increase international pressure on Iran to suspend Uranium enrichment. Given the cordiality of Indo-U.S. relations, the visit of President Ahmadinejad can emerge as an unnecessary irritant in bilateral relations. On the other hand, the U.S. has recently lost much international support for branding Iran as a rogue state. President Ahmadinejad has visited the Arab states and even addressed the Gulf Cooperation Council. India will thus need to diplomatically balance the growing regional popularity of President Ahmadinejad and the U.S. abhorrence for the Iranian regime.

The visit of President Ahmadinejad was not a planned one. The Indian Government had received request for re-fuelling the Iranian President’s plane in India on a flight from Sri Lanka to Tehran. The technical stop-over was tactically turned into an official visit by India. This was an intelligent gesture for correcting the seemingly negative perceptions of the Indian government towards Iran. India has further demonstrated diplomatic deftness by refusing to be unduly pressurized by the U.S. The U.S. has advised India to use the upcoming visit of President Ahmadinejad as an opportunity to insist Iran for complying with the Security Council resolutions and give-up Uranium enrichment. The Government of India in response has refused to be guided by any third party in defining its bilateral relations with Iran. Moreover, India has asserted the legality of the IAEA, rather than the U.S., in judging Iran’s non-compliance to the non-proliferation commitments.

The U.S. has attempted in the past to dictate India’s Iran policy. In January 2006 U.S. Ambassador to India David Mulford, stated that the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal could be stalled in the U.S. Congress if India did not vote against Iran at the IAEA. After the visit of Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister to Delhi in September 2007, Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary for State, expressed concerns over India’s military relationship with Iran. On both the occasions India had countered the U.S. pressures through verbal statements. The visit of President Ahmadinejad provides an opportunity to go beyond rhetoric and make substantial improvements in the relations with Iran.

India appears to be involved in a damage control exercise following its vote against Iran in the IAEA in September 2005. The Indian government realizes that Iran is in a position to fulfill India’s energy requirements in the next decade. The proposed Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline is expected to provide crucial energy supplies for India. Apart from being traditional friends Iran has supported India on the Kashmir issues in the OIC. The huge Shia Muslim population in India shares a natural bondage with the Iranian Shiites. Iran and India have agreed to join hands in the reconstruction of Afghanistan and to support the development of alternate access routes to that country via Iran’s Chahbahar. Hence India’s relations with Iran do not represent mere traditional symbolism, but have immense diplomatic advantage for the future. The Iran policy needs to go beyond publicizing India’s non-alignment to concretizing the national foreign policy objectives.

The tests of India’s diplomatic capabilities lie in consolidating relations with Iran, without unduly antagonizing the U.S. India has traditionally encountered the problem of balancing relations with other countries. India tends to displease and appease other countries at regular intervals. The clue for India lies in being unapologetic about pursuing her national interests by building bilateral, regional and global partnerships. For realizing these goals it is essential that India remains committed, in letter and spirit, to the agreements concluded with the U.S. and Iran. The 2004 New Delhi Declaration on strategic partnership with Iran needs to be treated as important as the Indo-U.S. Nuclear Civilian Agreement of 2005. For ensuring the stability of Afghanistan, India needs to cooperate with the U.S. and Iran.

According to Morgenthau’s Realism, nation states are not judged by the universal moral principles; the success of a nation-state is dependent on its ability to define national interest in terms of power. Hopefully Indian diplomacy realizes that interactions with the Iranian President should be guided by the goals of serving India’s national interest rather than for appeasing either Iran or the U.S.

[The article was published at http://www.ipcs.org/whatsNewArticle1.jsp?action=showView&kValue=2569&status=article&mod=b]

SAARC – A Case of Perceptual Divergence

Four blind men decided to help each other in collectively exploring the world around them. They ventured to the zoo and came across an elephant. Each one decided to touch, feel, comprehend and then communicate what the elephant looked like. One man held the tusk and explained, “The elephant is like a heavy drain pipe!” The other touched the legs and declared, “The elephant resembles the trunk of a strong old tree!” The third felt the ears and claimed that the animal was fan shaped and the fourth examined the tail to conclude that the elephant was a hairy textured flute like creature.
Each of the men was right in their assessments given the specific examination they had made. The different and partially erroneous judgments were the result of two vital facts. The first was that all four of them were visually handicapped and hence needed to rely on each other’s assistance. Secondly, each of them examined the elephant from only a specific angle and did not assimilate the different viewpoints to create a holistic picture.
The eight members South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) presents a similar case. SAARC is a regional grouping of developing countries in South Asia facing similar political, economic and nation-building challenges. This similarity in the nature of problems makes cooperation among them necessary and desirable. Hence the South Asian countries decided to initiate regional cooperation as a system of collective help. But like in the case of four blind men, their endeavor did not prove to be a success. The expectations from and approach towards cooperation has varied among the member countries. Though the respective national positions may be tenable but the cultivation of a shared perspective essential to guide the regional programme is missing.
The common regional problems do not lead to a commonality of approach among the countries because each views and assesses the problem from a purely nationalistic perspective which creates divergence in final analysis. The usual approach in SAARC has been to make the member countries conscious of the common challenges that they have to encounter. The existence of these challenges is not something that emerged after SAARC was formed and will survive even if SAARC withers away. For example state building is a common challenge for South Asian countries, but each national unit faces the challenge at different levels. In India the issue may involve greater participation of the people in state functioning. Issues of judicial activism, right to information, coalitional power sharing dominate the democratization discourse in India. While in Nepal the efforts are focused on shaping the political institutions for ensuring democratic stability and in Pakistan the debate over the form and substance of democracy holds sway. Hence though the nature of the challenge is similar its specifities are different which lead to obvious differences in remedial suggestions.
In international economic negotiations though South Asia appears to support the collective demands of the South, there are several divergence in their specific demands. In global negotiations on agriculture one common demand is the provision of Special Products and Special Safeguard Mechanism, in Non-Agricultural Market Access (Nama). On this issue the South Asian Less Developed Countries (LDCs) are more concerned about compensation for the likely preference erosion resulting from multilateral tariff reduction. Although, the development-related problems of South Asian countries are common, the negotiating strategies are not similar. While in agriculture India and Pakistan have both offensive and defensive interests, the remaining countries have largely defensive interests. Another difference is that LDCs and Sri Lanka are net food importing countries and may face negative consequences of dismantling of farm subsidies. In Nama, the divergence is sharper. LDCs want some compensatory package in lieu of the likely preference erosion. Both Pakistan and Sri Lanka have expressed their reservations over such a package. In services, too, there are divergences. India is more aggressive on services compared with its neighbors, because of a robust growth in services sector in the 90s, which grew at an average annul rate of 9%, contributing to nearly 60% of overall growth rate.
All countries of South Asia face massive challenges from demands of ethnic, regional and religious conglomerations. The specific demands of each state in the region are different and require unique corrective measures. The Nepalese political process has recently facilitated the Maoists to join mainstream politics under certain conditions, while the Sri Lankan government is struggling to respond to the aggressive onslaughts of the LTTE. In dealing with issues of unemployment and poverty some sub-regions in South Asia are prioritizing micro-financing while others are keen on attracting greater amounts of foreign direct assistance.
The reassertions by regional states about their handicap has not changed the situation in the region. It’s like the four blind men promising to help each other to explore the world better in the hope that their collectivity would counter their handicap. But as long as they stick to their exclusive interpretations a holistic view of the animal will not emerge. Likewise the South Asian countries need to evolve strategies for complimentary analysis which will create a common vision rather than individual assessments which can rarely be fitted together.
The story of the four blind men went a little further. Having failed to assist each other in picturing the elephant, they called their acquaintances, who were visually fit to guide their endeavor. With the instructions from friendly sources the blind men were able to picture the elephant. However, the caveat is that since all four were blind they had no way of confirming their findings and excessive faith on the group of outsiders could mislead them. Moreover, the group of outsiders could only help the blind to piece their vision together and not re-vision their specific assessments. Similarly SAARC has opened doors to outsiders, but the same caution holds good.
Finally did the blind men succeed in correctly picturing the elephant?
Time only can provide an objective answer.