South Asia

India is situated in one of the most important locations in the world: in between East Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. This, together with India’s strong economy and large population, means that India is primed to be the pivotal country for Asian security.

Nobody understood this better than Lord George Curzon, the erstwhile British viceroy of India. In 1909, he wrote:

“It is obvious...that India, must, under modern conditions, be the greatest power in the Asiatic Continent, and therefore, it may be added, in the world. The central position of India, its magnificent resources, its teeming multitude of men, its great trading harbors, its reserve of military strength, supplying an army always in a high state of efficiency and capable of being hurled at a moment’s notice upon any given point either of Asia and Africa- all there are assets of precious values.”

Every word that Curzon wrote a century ago holds true today. As the British-run Indian Empire, India was the primary political and military force in Asia and the Indian Ocean basin for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. British-led Indian forces garrisoned Aden and Singapore, fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, and China, and patrolled the high seas from Zanzibar to Hong Kong.

However, after the partition and independence of India in 1947, India’s role as pivot for security in Asia slipped away for two reasons: ideological and geopolitical.

Ideologically, the Indian leadership under its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, rejected the power politics that they saw reminiscent of a bygone, imperialistic era; nonetheless, by envisioning a major role for India in the non-aligned movement, Nehru did not reject the concept of India as a major player in world affairs. His daughter, Indira Gandhi, was less idealistic, but most of her attention focused on domestic issues and when it did come to power politics, on South Asia. But, as events have proven since, history is far from over, and India has since begun to rediscover the vitality of having a security strategy.

Geopolitically, independent India found itself in a very different situation than British India, despite occupying most of the same territory. First, economically, it was weaker and no longer backed by a global financial empire. Its limited resources, moreover, were channeled mostly into development and domestic spending rather than an international security apparatus. Second, India had no need initially to maintain the same posture as the British geopolitically. Most British bases and colonies in Africa and the Middle East were acquired to protect the route between Britain and India, something which was no longer relevant after 1947. Additionally, after World War II, the United States replaced Britain as the primary guarantor of freedom of navigation and security on the oceans. India thus had no great incentive to replace Britain as the main power in the Indian Ocean.

Third, the chief security and geopolitical threat for India after independence was Pakistan, on its northwest frontier. Not only did Pakistan’s emergence cut India off from a direct land route to the Middle East and Central Asia, it focused most of India’s attention on regional geopolitics. Together with the border dispute with China, India’s attention was taken up mostly by its neighboring countries, and was unable to look at a grander strategy.

The end of the Cold War, the decline of the non-alignment ideology, and a changing security situation in both the Middle East—political instability and the rise of terrorism—and in East Asia—the rise of China have changed the Indian calculus. Furthermore, the rise of India to great power or near great power status due to increased economic growth, nuclear weapon capacity and military spending changed the way that Indian leaders, both left and right, viewed the world. If India wants to be a security pivot for Asia again, it needs to roll back the ideological and geopolitical reasons that caused it to stop being a security pivot in the first place.

Ideologically, India for the most part has shed its aversion to power politics. It has actively engaged its neighbors and countries farther afield, such as Tajikistan, Iran, and Vietnam with security and economic proposals. But domestic politics continue to take up an inordinate amount of the attention of its political class. This is to be expected: India, a union of diverse cultures and peoples is almost a continent unto itself. Its political system further encourages an almost constant need to campaign, negotiate, dispense largesse. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has managed to place foreign affairs at the top of India’s agenda, but the initiatives of one prime minister need further institutionalization if they are to be maintained for decades.

Geopolitically, India has begun to play a greater role in Asian affairs. In order to achieve a stronger position in Asia, India has to up its game in four realms:

First, and most importantly, India has to consolidate its regional position. As long as it is primarily focused on South Asia, especially Pakistan, but also combating inroads made by China into the region, it will be unable to look at the larger geopolitical and security picture. While India by its sheer size and location can probably remain the dominant power vis-a-vis China in regards to its smaller neighbors and retain influence in Afghanistan, it will have to find a way to deal with Pakistan. South Asia is the world’s least economically integrated region in the world and transportation links are weak. India can attempt two strategies for its region, which I shall loosely dub the “21st Century” and “19th century” strategies. The first strategy would be to pursue integration and cooperation. This would tie Pakistan to India more closely and negate its desire to block Indian land trade. The second strategy would be for India to encourage the disintegration of Pakistan into its component parts, each friendlier to India, something unlikely but becoming likelier as time goes by.

India’s regional position impacts the second factor that India should pursue: its naval capacities. India should fully leverage its oceanic position, because this is a sphere where it has the most to gain. Both terrain and geopolitics limit its ability to project major land forces outside of the subcontinent. India needs to focus more on its navy, with its army having the capacity to be primarily successful in a defensive or amphibious posture.

Third, even if India ought to focus on the sea, it should not neglect becoming a land force in its traditional peripheries, particularly in Central Asia and Afghanistan. While it will not be able to match the enormous influence China and Russia have in Central Asia, it should still ensure that it has a seat at the table. In Afghanistan and Iran, however, India needs to make sure that it remains a major player. It has enormous leverage with Afghanistan that it has not yet fully used to its advantage.

Fourth, India must continue to engage countries all over Asia, both for the sake of concluding friendly bilateral diplomacy, and for the sake of positioning itself as an alternative to other powers in the region. It is behind China, Russia, and the United States as a power to be reckoned with in the great game of Asian geopolitics. However, it can continue to engage countries like Vietnam, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and others.

While India should focus on all four factors, it is likely to have the most success with the first two—consolidating its regional position and expanding its naval capacity. Because of its strong need, cultural ties and the fact that it is the dominant power in South Asia, India can mold the subcontinent to its benefit over the next couple of decades. It also has the advantage of an enormous unfulfilled potential to become the Indian Ocean’s dominant naval power. It can expect some support and cooperation from the United States and little rivalry from anyone else, including China, which is still focused primarily on rivals in the Pacific Ocean. This approach may also aid in relations with the Middle East, where it has strong cultural and political ties.

India’s policy of being friendly with everyone has lead to a security situation where it is the jack of all trades and master of none; this begs the questions whether it should focus on its strengths and matters of particular importance. Only then can it be in a position to become a security pivot in Asia in future years. Again, it remains to be seen if the larger role in international relations that Narendra Modi envisions for India can be institutionalized; however the narrower focus of regional dominance and naval security are likely to be pursued as a matter of course by any government.

Akhilesh Pillalamarri is an international relations analyst, editor and writer, who contributes to The Diplomat and The National Interest. He received his Master of Arts in Security Studies from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he concentrated in international security. You can follow him @akhipill.

The views expressed in this post reflect those of the author and not that of the EastWest Institute.​

In the October 2 episode of Voice of America's International Edition, EWI CEO and President Cameron Munter discussed the new clashes along the Kashmir border between the rivaling neighbors.

Munter, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, said "what happened recently was there was an attack by the Indians across the line of control at suspected terrorists in Pakistan. The dilemma this posed for the Pakistanis was if they were to respond, they would be implying that they supported suspected terrorists."

Click here to listen to the interview. Munter's comments start around the 8:55 mark.

In the lead-up to the Brussels Conference on Afghanistan, the EastWest Institute's Regional Security Initiative has released a major report, Afghanistan Reconnected: Cross-Border Cooperation at a Critical Juncture, which highlights problems in regional cooperation in the areas of trade and transit and energy, offering actionable recommendations that have been developed over three years of consultation with participants in the Afghanistan Reconnected Process, a high-level network including members of governments, the private sector, business leaders, and experts throughout the region. 

This report aims at encouraging government and private sector actors in the region, as well as the broader international community, to sustain momentum and commitment towards the development and stabilization of Afghanistan despite the declining security situation.

The report includes an introduction by Ambassador Sabine Sparwasser, Chair of the International Contact Group on Afghanistan, Special Representative of the German Federal Government for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and chapters addressing various issues areas, prepared by project experts.

Please use the following link to access the complete report. 

Click here to learn more about the Afghanistan Reconnected Process and to access previous reports.

The EastWest Institute's Brussels Center hosted a preview of its forthcoming report, "Afghanistan Reconnected: Cross-Border Cooperation at a Critical Juncture" on 7 September, 2016. The preview was held in the presence of H.E. Mrs. Adela Raz, Deputy Foreign Minister for Economic Affairs of Afghanistan. Also in attendance were Ms. Khojesta Fana Ibrahimkhil, Director General of Human Rights and Women's Affairs, and Mr. Shoaib Habibi, Deputy Director General of Economic Cooperation, both of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Afghanistan, as well as representatives of the Embassies of Afghanistan and other interested countries, EU institutions, the European External Action Service, and Brussels-based think tanks and NGOs.

H.E. Mrs. Raz delivered a keynote address detailing the progress Afghanistan has made and the challenges still facing it, with a particular regard to matters of governance and regional economic cooperation. The country has achieved much in terms of the representation of women and youth in the government, and demonstrates a willingness to integrate into the region and play a substantial role in regional affairs. For the past two years under the National Unity Government, a major priority of Afghanistan has been economic development, and for the first time in recent history, Afghanistan's economic strategy is proactive rather than reactive, looking forward and planning ahead instead of simply responding to present circumstances. 

International investments in the country, says H.E. Mrs. Raz, have not been wasted. Significant potential is there, however, challenges remain. Afghanistan has the highest levels of illiteracy and youth unemployment in the region. Corruption and lack or transparency are endemic, and though necessary work is being done to combat this, the problem remains substantial and will not be solved overnight. Security issues and the rise of extremism and terrorism, as well as rampant trafficking of drugs and narcotics, plague not only the country but the region as a whole. 

Now is the time for the region to collectively think about challenges. Large regional projects and initiatives have shown that although geopolitics are a challenge in the region, trade and transit remain matters in which all actors have a mutual interest. In that front, there is strong will from Afghanistan and its neighbors to move forward. As the Brussels Conference on Afghanistan approaches, during which EU donors will likely reaffirm their levels of commitment to Afghanistan, the country and the region are at a critical juncture. What is crucial at this key moment is for the international community to indicate to Afghanistan that it does not stand alone. 

The EastWest Institute's "Afghanistan Reconnected: Cross-Border Cooperation at a Critical Juncture" report, which is scheduled for publication and launch in the coming weeks, outlines the current geopolitical situation and advances made in regional economic cooperation in the fields of trade and transit and energy. The report highlights problems in these areas, and in particular offers actionable recommendations developed over 3 years of consultation with participants in the Afghanistan Reconnected Process, including members of governments, the private sector, business leaders, and experts throughout the region. The following preview outlines the key points and recommendations. 

Below are two select pictures from the event.

The previewed document can be accessed below and downloaded here.

The White House ‘Framework for the U.S.-India Cyber Relationship’ release issued on June 7, soon after the Modi-Obama summit in Washington, has taken cyberspace cooperation to a new level. It was on March 1 last year—the silver jubilee celebrations of Nasscom—that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had highlighted the concern of global leaders for cybersecurity, which according to him presented an opportunity for the Indian IT industry to innovate in services and products, in an attempt to capture parts of the global market. As an avid user of IT, the internet in particular, he is very much aware of the potential of cyberspace for the growth of the Indian economy, as also of the threats and cyberattacks that can disrupt the Digital India programme. No wonder that he has kept cybersecurity on top of his agenda with the US.

Key areas of cooperation that can be gleaned from this text relate to sharing of cybersecurity best practices; practical cooperation to mitigate cyber threats; joint R&D with focus on standards, security testing of products; cooperation between law enforcement agencies (LEAs) on cyber crimes; capacity building of LEAs in cyber forensics; skill development in solving cyber crimes and updating legal frameworks.

What stands out is “sharing information on a real-time or near real-time basis, when practical and consistent with existing bilateral arrangements, about malicious cybersecurity threats, attacks and activities, and establishing appropriate mechanisms to improve such information sharing”. It is a positive development, since India too is a victim of major cyberattacks, and with information about attackers being locked in servers in the U.S.

However, India needs to scale up its own capabilities—notably in online national network of criminals, online feeds on cyber threats from networks across the country into a central repository for collating and relaying them to all those likely to be impacted. Above all, the capabilities of LEAs in understanding the nature of threats, the changes in digital forensics analysis tools and techniques, and the manner of collecting evidence to present in courts of law—these have to be long-term sustained efforts, because the threat landscape and attack vectors are changing rapidly.

Digital India will spawn more cyber crimes. Because of the borderless nature of the cyberspace, evidence has to be collected from trails that maybe in networks and servers anywhere in the world. Partnership with the United States augurs well for India, because most of the services emanate from there; accessing these trails requires cooperation with the U.S. But we need to update our own laws too.

There is no encryption policy under section 84A of the IT Act 2008, even after eight years. The government was supposed to have promulgated it long ago. Moreover, data retention by service providers and enterprises—the metadata—under section 67C was to be mandated by the government. There is no word on that either. Then there is the need of state-of-the-art forensic labs—and these are to be set up, and notified as expert examiners of digital evidence under section 79C of the IT Act. Due to lack of these facilities, the forensic data collected in several crimes cannot be presented in courts; criminals go unpunished.

Training our police officers in cyber forensics is a mammoth task considering the sheer numbers in all the states. Bureau of Police Research and Development is ill equipped to carry out this job. Data Security Council of India (DSCI), a Nasscom initiative, had set up cyber labs in cyber crime police stations in eight major cities, to train police officers in cyber forensics, some eight years ago. But to expand and sustain the programme, the ministry of home affairs refused to own the programme at the minimum level—costing no more than Rs 5-10 crore.

While the U.S.-India agreement is a great step, India must wake up to digital governance that calls for change of mindset in the ministries and bureaucracies. Can they keep pace with PM Modi?

Dr. Kamlesh Bajaj was the founder and CEO of the Data Security Council of India (DSCI). He was also the founder and director of the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). 

To read this article on The Economic Times, click here.

Introduction to the paper: 

For more than a decade, government assistance to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan (the so-called AIP countries) has dominated United States aid efforts. And nowhere have the results of these billions of dollars of expenditure been so hard to measure and the impact of such effort so elusive. As the examples below illustrate, American institutions and mindsets found it extraordinarily difficult to adjust to aid in unsafe places.

For the U.S. government, the unusual experiences of the AIP countries may be an anomaly. If, as many hope, we are no longer involved in major conflicts or conflict areas in these ways, we may be able to go back to a less overheated, less politicized kind of assistance that may be quieter and more effective. But a note of caution: my United States Agency for International Development (USAID) friends who romanticize the old days when they were engineers and social workers out among foreign friends should remember that even the one-size-fits-all assistance of the 20th century was not always a big success. Therefore, it’s time for a very hard look at the way we organize assistance: it’s one thing to measure our commitment to a cause (peace in Sri Lanka or public health in Ghana) by how much we spend, and quite another to figure out how to do it right.

I draw on my experience as the head of the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Mosul, Iraq in 2006 and as Ambassador of the U.S. to Pakistan in Islamabad in 2011. What follows is less a systematic assessment than a description of U.S. reconstruction and state-building, from which we may find lessons to consider in the future. Both of these experiences were, in a sense, “start-ups”: later work by PRTs throughout Iraq doubtless learned from our mistakes and misconceptions in 2006, and the final implementation of projects in Pakistan doubtless benefited from our experiences in the early days of Kerry-Lugar-Berman applications. But should we choose again to engage in major assistance projects in war zones, the process is certainly going to be difficult.

To read the entire paper on Brookings, click here. 

When U.S. President Barack Obama hosts leaders from the 10 countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on Monday and Tuesday, he will symbolically reinforce the concept of ASEAN centrality—traditionally the idea that the group’s diverse states should economically integrate and gradually develop a collective voice in the world.

But other kinds of centrality will also be apparent as observers and officials confront regional security issues in which two of ASEAN’s strongest suitors, the United States and China, are on opposing sides.

U.S. officials have, with some legitimacy, sought to deemphasize the U.S.–China narrative in U.S. relations with ASEAN. Speaking Thursday at the Center for American Progress, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes described an agenda emphasizing economic growth and innovation and a variety of security challenges, including counterterrorism and disaster response. Rhodes also described the Obama administration’s strategy as using ASEAN as a hub—“a platform to build out a broader series of engagements, and that ultimately is what the East Asian Summit became.”

That East Asia Summit—which now includes the ASEAN 10, plus Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, South Korea, and the United States—supports another notion of “ASEAN centrality,” in which regular ASEAN meetings become occasions for even broader summits at the same time. Obama became the first U.S. president to attend the East Asia Summit in 2011, on the same trip during which he announced a greater emphasis on the Asia-Pacific.

The U.S. engagement with ASEAN as a group is, on its own, broad and evolving. But any time the U.S. media see East Asia on the agenda, the China story of the day comes to mind. In a briefing for reporters, when the first questioner raised ASEAN countries’ diverse relationships with China, both the chief White House Asia adviser and the top U.S. diplomat for the region said the summit is “not about China.”

Clearly, that’s not entirely true. Drawn out by a question on the South China Sea, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Russel described the present summit, which will last a full day and does not come with the usual structured agenda, as a unique opportunity: “What the leaders can do that they often are unable to do, partly due to the constraints of time, is to delve a little more deeply into what they see as the realm of the possible in terms of lowering tensions in the South China Sea and setting up a dynamic that can build on, for example, the decision of the tribunal in the Hague.”

Here, Russel is referring to the legal case brought by the Philippines under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) that challenges Chinese claims in the South China Sea. Though the arbitral tribunal found that it has jurisdiction to decide a number of the questions raised by the Philippines, the Chinese government has declared the proceedings illegitimate, called the tribunal’s decision on jurisdiction “null and void,” and refused to participate in the process.

It is entirely reasonable for regional governments to discuss what might happen after the tribunal releases its decision, but doing so is surely, at least partly, “about China.”

The reality is that ASEAN is a unique institution that plays a central role in convening regional governments, coordinating their efforts, and confronting challenges. And in East Asia, if not everywhere in the world, China is involved in opportunities, challenges, initiatives, and disputes. The scale of Chinese economic, security, and diplomatic efforts is one reason ASEAN has gained such prominence.

Holding this month’s summit in California at Sunnylands, where Obama hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping for their first major meeting in 2013, sends an unmistakable signal that the Obama administration places an emphasis on strong independent ties with ASEAN as a group.

Administration officials in briefings said part of the intention is to cement the U.S.–ASEAN relationship so that the next president can build on the Obama team’s efforts. That seems true, but this kind of diplomatic courtship also raises expectations of a continued U.S. commitment. From the current administration’s perspective, this move can help to lock in deeper engagement. For the next president, raised expectations would make a shift of priorities away from ASEAN more costly in terms of U.S. credibility.

With the presidential campaign wide open and even the candidate closest to the administration, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, now opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, this summit should be seen in the context of efforts to make Obama’s policies stick.

ASEAN is not just central to its members’ priorities or playing off the two Pacific giants of the United States and China. For two days, ASEAN is also central to struggles over the future of U.S. foreign policy.

To read this article on The Diplomat, click here. 

Graham Webster (@gwbstr) is a researcher, lecturer, and senior fellow of The China Center at Yale Law School. Sign up for his free e-mail brief, U.S.–China Week.

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