Indian Strategic Studies: 08/03/24

3 August 2024

On China-India Border, Ladakh Blames Modi’s BJP for Unemployment, Stagnancy

Tarushi Aswani

Padma Stanzin has various odd jobs that he needs to do before he can finally sit down to complete the coursework for his Master’s in Sociology degree. Stanzin, 28, resides in Ladakh, a region located on the China-India border, where many like him are on the hunt for opportunities to earn the bare minimum.

On March 8, Sonam Wangchuk, a prominent environmentalist, began a hunger strike, braving extreme sub-zero temperature under open skies, where thousands of locals like Stanzin joined him.

Wangchuk fasted for 21 days, to send a message to the government of India: that Ladakh was disenchanted at the kind of neglect the border region had been enduring under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Unemployed, Uncertain

Jigmet Paljor, a youth activist from Ladakh, regularly receives calls from locals in distress, who want to discuss the rising rate of unemployment in the region.

“Since 2019, Ladakh’s youth had high expectations, but even till today, the government has not planned anything to create more employment opportunities for us,” Paljor told The Diplomat.

Radha Kumar on Kashmir, 5 Years After Article 370 Was Scrapped

Catherine Putz

On August 5, 2019, the government of India hollowed out Article 370 of the Indian Constitution with a presidential order, overturning a status quo that had lasted for nearly 70 years. The erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir had been granted a special status under which it had its own constitution and autonomy in its internal affairs.

At the same time as scrapping Article 370, the Indian Parliament passed a bill reorganizing Jammu and Kashmir into two union territories: Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. Unlike Indian states, union territories are federally governed. In essence, New Delhi had moved decisively to exert control over the region.

Five years later, there is considerable discontent in the Kashmir valley and Jammu, too. Security, a primary reason cited by the government for its decision to vitiate Article 370 and reorganize the region, has not improved significantly either. Civil society, independent media, and the local economy have all suffered under pressure, and although the worst has not come to pass – a resumption of widespread armed conflict as in the 1990s – the seeds of conflict may yet sprout.

Nepal Is Hardly China’s Best Bet in the Himalayas

Saroj Aryal and Jagannath Panda

In July, Nepal’s fractious politics witnessed yet another churning. The 72-year-old veteran politician Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli of the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML) – labeled “pro-China” by the Chinese media itself during his first term – won a vote of confidence in the Parliament soon after being sworn in as prime minister for the fourth time.

Days later, Foreign Secretary Sewa Lamsal left for Kunming, China, to deliver the keynote address and hold bilateral meetings with high-level officials at the fifth China-South Asia Cooperation Forum. The forum is China’s attempt to coalesce South Asian states, notably excluding India, to create a “regional Himalayan bloc” as part of its bid to create a Sino-centric global order.

Do such events imply that China is gaining an irreversible edge over India in the neighborhood? The answer is more complicated than the headlines suggest.

Nepal’s new government is yet another coalition following a series of short-lived political arrangements. Oli’s ascension to power is based on a recent deal forged between the two largest parties, the Nepali Congress (NC) and the CPN-UML, which among other factors also includes the sharing of the prime ministerial position between Oli and NC President Sher Bahadur Deuba. The previous Pushpa Kamal Dahal-led “left-unity” coalition broke down only months after being formed, without any major apparent disagreements.

Myanmar’s Junta Extends State Of Emergency For Yet Another Six Months

Myanmar’s military junta extended a state of emergency for another six months on Wednesday – the sixth time the junta has approved an extension since removing a civilian government from power in 2021.

Members of the National Defense and Security Council unanimously agreed to the extension, which puts off the junta’s often-delayed plans for multi-party national elections until next year.

Myanmar’s Constitution mandates that elections must be held within six months after a state of emergency is lifted.

The extension also gives the military broad extra-constitutional powers amid ongoing armed conflict by resistance forces battling the army in many parts of Myanmar.

“It is necessary to restore peace and stability because of ongoing terrorist activities,” state-run media said of the extension, referring to the armed resistance.

The Hidden War Over Taiwan

Robert Spalding III & Ramon Marks

Consternation grows that China will invade Taiwan. Numerous war games predict horrific outcomes. An invasion would be swift and sharp. As the United States did in the first Gulf War, China would likely knock out Taiwanese radar and air/sea defense capabilities first, followed by drops of airborne troops, including the seizure of airfields and ports. An amphibious assault would follow. The possibility of targeted special operations and cyber actions by embedded PLA assets in Taiwan could also not be discounted. Finally, an EMP attack might happen, shutting down communications and air defense batteries.

Despite this, while many consider a Chinese invasion to be inevitable if not imminent, Taiwan is sending a different, less convincing message—evidenced by the fact that it spends less as a percentage of GDP on its defense than the United States (2.6 percent compared to 3 percent). On top of that, Taiwan does not have a strong draft. During the second decade of this century, even as tensions with China grew, Taiwan reduced the term for compulsory conscription from two years to one and then from one year to only four months in 2017. Only since January 2024 has Taipei increased the term again to one year, but that level of commitment still pales when one considers that during the Cold War, the United States, facing no immediate threat of invasion by anyone, maintained a two-year draft. These facts raise the question of whether Taiwan is serious about resisting a Chinese invasion or even if it takes such threats seriously.

Not Just Boots on the Beach

Jude Blanchette

Introduction

On September 18, 1931, a Japanese infantry regiment conducted a “false flag” attack on the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway, detonating an explosive near a stretch of the track and blaming the operation on Chinese troops nearby. The next day, in response to the alleged sabotage, Japanese troops attacked a Chinese military garrison. Within months, the Japanese army had conquered Manchuria and made it a puppet state. Although a commission formed by the League of Nations eventually unraveled the deception and concluded that Japan had illegally invaded China, the international community took no meaningful action, in part because the active period of crisis had settled into a new normal and political will had evaporated.

More than 80 years later, in February 2014, soldiers wearing uniforms without insignias or other identifying information surrounded Ukrainian military bases and seized strategic points in Crimea. Although many observers immediately suspected that these “little green men” were Russian troops, Moscow claimed that they were “local self-defense units” acting on their own initiative. The Ukrainian government quickly lost control of Crimea, which was formally annexed to Russia. Meanwhile, Russian special operations forces began quasi-surreptitiously supporting separatist uprisings in Eastern Ukraine, an operation that eventually led to the full-scale Russo-Ukrainian war that is still underway.

China Has Wiped Out US Military Advantage in Western Pacific: Commission

Micah McCartney

Abipartisan commission has issued Washington a stark warning: China poses the most serious threat to U.S. military supremacy since the Cold War and has particularly narrowed the gap in the Western Pacific.

"In many ways, China is outpacing the United States and has largely negated the U.S. military advantage in the Western Pacific through two decades of focused military investment," the bipartisan Commission on the National Defense Strategy wrote in its 2024 report to Congress, released Monday.

America Outpaced

China now boasts the world's largest navy, with over 370 surface ships and submarines, largely concentrated in the Western Pacific, compared with the U.S.'s less than 300 spread across the world. China is also rapidly expanding and modernizing its air force and nuclear arsenal.

China's cyber and space capabilities are "peer or near-peer" level. The country would likely leverage this to disrupt critical infrastructure to hamper the U.S.'s ability to enter a conflict, such as one over Beijing-claimed Taiwan.

Quotable Decisions

Anushka Saxena

To conclude the proceedings of the Third Plenum, on July 21, the full text of the “Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Further Deepening Reform and Promoting Chinese-Style Modernization” was released. This is a much-anticipated document, for various reasons.

Historically, third plenums have focussed on shaping the economic agenda of the country. For instance, the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee in December 1978 launched the “reform and opening up” in China. Likewise, the Third Plenum of the 14th Central Committee, held in 1993, announced the goal of building China into a “socialist market economy.” Most recently, during the Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee in 2013, unveiled the framework of comprehensively deepening reform. These reforms pertained to transforming the hukou system, reforming state-owned enterprises, loosening the one-child policy, overhauling the judicial system, bridging the urban-rural divide, and so on.

These meetings, which bring together the Party elite, have traditionally taken place in late autumn. So it was anyway rather unusual that the Third Plenum of the 20th Central Committee was being held in July. More importantly, it came at a time when the Chinese economy is facing deep structural challenges.

China’s growing influence in the Middle East

Gedaliah Afterman and Allie Weinberger

China’s economic and political engagement in the Middle East has surged over the past decade, particularly in the aftermath of the Arab Spring and amid growing perceptions of the United States’ withdrawal from the region.

China has traditionally tried to maintain a balancing act in the Middle East, developing relationships with all sides while steering clear of the region’s multiple conflicts. With China’s standing strengthening among developing countries, and superpower competition intensifying, it has adopted a more proactive approach to position itself as a potential alternative and a counterbalance to the United States.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), initiated in 2013, has significantly increased China’s involvement in the region and propelled Beijing to become, since 2016, the primary foreign investor there. Initially focused on energy-sector trade and investment, Beijing has broadened the scope of its regional engagement to encompass infrastructure, technologically advanced smart-city projects, innovation hubs and 5G mobile networks.

Ambassador Nicholas Burns on the U.S.-China Relationship

Jude Blanchette

China has emerged as one of the 21st century's most consequential nations, making it more important than ever to understand how the country is governed. Welcome to Pekingology, the podcast that unpacks China's evolving political system. I'm Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS, and this week I'm joined by Nick Burns, a career diplomat, currently serving as the United States Ambassador to China since 2022. Today we'll be discussing his views on the current state of the US-China relationship.

Ambassador Burns, thank you for joining the podcast.

Ambassador Nicholas Burns: Thanks Jude. Really nice to be with you.

Mr. Blanchette: Ambassador Burns, if I may, I'd like to ask you the question we ask all guests, which is a biographical one. I'm curious how you got interested in Asia and China, any early experiences or formative experiences that drew you to the region?

The UAE’s Secret War in Sudan

John Prendergast and Anthony Lake

In the next four months, two and a half million Sudanese could die of hunger-related causes. That’s twice as many as Pol Pot’s regime starved in Cambodia over four years, and two and a half times as many as died in the 1983–85 famine in Ethiopia that inspired the charity recording “We are the World.” As Martin Griffith, the United Nations’ top humanitarian official, recently put it: “I don’t think we’ve ever had this kind of number at risk of famine.”

Iran’s mortification proves that Israel is quietly winning the war

Jake Wallis Simons

Since October 7, Israel has had one geostrategic imperative: to reinstate deterrence. In the Middle East – and increasingly in Ukraine and further afield – states live or die on the strength of their ability to cow their enemies, and none more so than the Jewish one.

This morning, as the dust settles over the former safe house in Tehran in which the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was living in luxury until death came upon him from the skies, that deterrent is well on the way to being restored.

The Iranian regime is in a state of shock. The last time Israel targeted a terrorist perceived as too high in value to tolerate, Tehran unleashed a night of 300 projectiles on the Jewish state, only one of which hit the target. The west united to play defence, but the Israeli response was surgical and designed to send a message of fear, not pain.

Assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas Leaders Stir Fears of Wider War

Patrick Kingsley, Farnaz Fassihi, Adam Rasgon and Ronen Bergman

The predawn assassinations of a top Hamas leader in Tehran and a senior member of Hezbollah in Lebanon left the entire Middle East on edge Wednesday, as Iran’s leaders vowed revenge and threatened to derail fragile negotiations for a Gaza cease-fire.

The Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, 62, a top negotiator in the cease-fire talks, was killed after he and other leaders of Iran-backed militant groups had attended the inauguration of Iran’s new president.

Both Iran and Hamas accused Israel of killing Mr. Haniyeh, who led the group’s political operations from exile in Qatar, but Israel has not commented on those accusations. It was not immediately clear how the killing was carried out.

Hours before the assassination, Israel said it had struck Fuad Shukr, a senior member of Hezbollah. Hezbollah confirmed on Wednesday that he had been killed.

The Big War No One Wants in the Middle East

Kim Ghattas

Saturday’s rocket strike on a football field in the Golan Heights was precisely the type of large-casualty event that many observers have feared could ignite an all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah. After nine months of contained clashes, mostly along the Lebanon-Israel border, a rocket landed at dusk on Saturday in the Druze village of Majdel Shams and killed 12 young people. Israel and the United States say that Hezbollah was behind the strike, citing pictures of the rocket’s remains and the direction from which it was fired, but the Lebanese militant and political group has denied responsibility.

Hezbollah is usually quick to claim credit for its attacks. Over the past few months, the group has repeatedly aimed volleys of Katyusha rockets at Israeli-army positions in the Golan and announced that it has done so. Also on Saturday evening, Hezbollah took credit for rockets that hit the headquarters of an elite Israeli mountain brigade in the Golan.

But this strike is different. Both sides had been avoiding attacks that could cause large loss of life and a regional conflagration. What’s more, Hezbollah had been trying to repair frayed ties with the Druze community not only in Lebanon but in Syria, where for years the Lebanese group has been involved on President Bashar al-Assad’s side of a bloody civil war.

$35 Trillion — And Counting – OpEd

Peter C. Earle

Barely halfway through 2024, the rapidly rising tower of US public debt has reached yet another milestone. Two hundred and six days after reaching $34 trillion, America’s debt pile has reached $35 trillion. To put this in perspective, the debt at the end of World War II was about $259 billion, making the current debt more than 135 times that amount. The US has now borrowed amounts larger than the combined GDPs of China, Japan, and Germany.

It is increasingly difficult to grasp that only a bit more than four decades ago the US national debt was $907 billion, and that the surpassing of the $1 trillion mark in 1981 was seen as a watershed moment. The amount of debt undertaken by the Biden administration alone now stands at $7.2 trillion, an amount equal to the amount of national debt incurred between the presidencies of two Georges: Washington (who assumed office in 1789) and the younger Bush (who left office in 2009). This is still less than was taken on by the Trump administration ($7.8 trillion), but if the borrowing needs of the current administration are what they are projected to be, the Biden administration may set a new record by having added over $8 trillion in debt.

We Reap The Harvest Of Lies – OpEd

David Bell

Public life has become disorienting. Most people, by and large, previously expected to hear the truth, or some semblance of it, in daily life. We would generally expect this from each other, but also from public media and authorities such as governments or international agencies set up ostensibly for our benefit. Society cannot function in a coherent and stable way without it, as so much in our lives requires us to place trust in others.

To navigate the complexity of existence, we generally look for guidance to certain trusted sources, freeing up time to sift through the more questionable ones. Some claim they always knew everything was fake, but they are wrong, as it wasn’t (and still isn’t). There were always liars, campaigns to mislead, and propaganda to drive us to love or to hate, but there was a core within society that had certain accepted norms and standards that should theoretically be followed. A sort of anchor. Truth is indestructible but the anchor cable connecting us to it, ensuring its influence, has been cut. Society is being set adrift.

This really broke in the past four or five years. We were already in trouble, but now public discourse is broken. Perhaps it broke when governments elected to represent the people openly employed behavioral psychology to lie to their constituencies on a scale we had not previously seen. They combined to make their peoples do things they rationally would not; accept bans of family funerals, cover faces in public, or accept police brutality and the isolation and abandonment of the elderly. The media, health professionals, politicians, and celebrities all participated in this lie and its intent. Virtually all our major institutions. And these lies are continuing, and expanding, and have become the norm.

Full-Blown War Between Israel And Iran-Backed Hezballah ‘Not In The Interests’ Of Tehran – Analysis

Kian Sharifi

For months, Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hizballah have traded constant cross-border attacks that have killed dozens and displaced thousands of people.

Now there are fears of a full-blown war between the foes amid the fallout from a deadly rocket attack from Lebanon hit the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Hizballah quickly denied it was responsible for the July 27 attack that killed 12 people, including children. But Israel has vowed to retaliate against Iran-backed Hizballah.

Experts say no side wants an all-out war in a region that has been reeling since Israel in October launched its war against Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that runs the Gaza Strip and has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States and European Union.

Michael Horowitz, head of intelligence at the Bahrain-based Le Beck International consultancy, said Israel and Hizballah are on the brink of a major escalation.

“Though, I do think that neither side is interested in one,” he said, adding that “a conflict between Israel and Hizballah is very dangerous” for Iran.

What Is Digital Solidarity, and Why Does the U.S. Want It?

Akash Kapur

The RSA Conference was founded in 1991, as a single-panel discussion focused on cryptography. Over the years, the conference, now held in multiple locations around the globe, has grown into the world’s preeminent cybersecurity event, a high-powered confab that attracts some 40,000 participants annually, including eminences such as Bill Gates and Michio Kaku, celebrities such as Chris Stapleton and Christopher Lloyd, and a trickle of government officials.

Killing of Two Israeli Enemies Puts Middle East on Brink of Wider War

Rory Jones & Carrie Keller-Lynn

Apair of provocative strikes that killed enemies of Israel has pushed the Middle East to the brink of a wider war the U.S. has worked hard to head off.

On Tuesday night, an Israeli airstrike in Beirut killed a top official with Hezbollah, setting off concerns the Lebanese militant group would feel compelled to respond. Hours later, after midnight, Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in a mysterious strike in Tehran, vastly complicating the calculus and raising concerns about a regional escalation to some of their highest levels so far in nearly 10 months of war in Gaza.

With Israel’s military eager to wind down its operations in the Gaza Strip as fighting intensifies on the border with Lebanon and tension rises with Tehran, the war threatened to be evolving into the sort of regional battle on several fronts that U.S. diplomats have shuttled around the region for months to prevent.

The strikes came as Iran used this week’s inauguration of its new president to show off the powerful collection of militias it has assembled around the Middle East. Representatives of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Yemen’s Houthis and Lebanon’s Hezbollah all gathered in Tehran, where Hamas leader Haniyeh hugged new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian amid chants of “Death to Israel.”

The Assassination of Hamas Leader Ismail Haniyeh Will Only Embolden Resistance

Jeremy Scahill

At approximately 2 a.m. local time, Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran in an apparent Israeli strike. It is not yet known what precise weapons were used, but Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency described it as a “projectile.” The U.S. has denied it was aware of the strike beforehand, though it is unlikely any American officials would publicly confirm prior knowledge—not to mention involvement—in the assassination.

“This is something we were not aware of or involved in. It's very hard to speculate,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who is on an official visit to Singapore.

“I don’t have anything on that for you,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said during a press briefing aboard a Navy ship in the Philippines when asked if the U.S. had advance knowledge or notice of the strike.

What will happen to the Houthis as tensions continue? - opinion

AMOTZ ASA-EL

Having died two years earlier, the great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (1862-1935) didn’t get to enjoy the excitement with which his last work, Mohammed and Charlemagne, was received when published posthumously.

Recognized to this day as one of the greatest historians of medieval Europe, Pirenne’s imaginative thesis argued that the Middle Ages began not with the decline of Rome, as previously agreed, but with the rise of Islam.

The new faith, Pirenne claimed, was hostile to trade.

The urge to subdue Christendom inspired an anti-commercial strategy that sought to stifle the Mediterranean’s vibrant commerce by driving a wedge between its Christian north and Muslim south.

That, argued Pirenne, is what shuttered Europe’s horizons, choked its economy, and condemned it to epochal stagnation.

The Road to Israel-Hezbollah Peace Runs Through Gaza

Bilal Y. Saab

The fatal attack against Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, which Israel accused Hezbollah of perpetrating but the Shiite militant group denied, could be the act that disrupts the delicate balance of deterrence between these two old enemies.

Ukraine Is Still Too Corrupt to Join the West

Anchal Vohra

Ukraine’s strategy of defeating Russia by joining the West’s political community and security institutions has been undermined by its continued struggles with corruption, a problem that is still far beyond Western standards. The issue extends to the center of the Ukrainian state. Top judges, politicians, and officials have faced corruption charges, and the Ministry of Defense has been at the heart of many corruption scandals, such as procuring overpriced eggs and winter jackets, buying 100,000 mortar shells that were never delivered, or accepting bribes from men who wanted to escape conscription.

The U.S. Must Prepare to Fight Simultaneous Wars, Oversight Panel Says

Jack Detsch

The U.S. Defense Department should go back to resourcing and planning to fight wars in multiple parts of the world, according to a formal review of U.S. defense strategy ordered by Congress. That recommendation is a direct contradiction of the Trump-era strategy—echoed by U.S. President Joe Biden—that called for the U.S. military to narrowly focus on the Indo-Pacific.

Microsoft says cyber-attack triggered latest outage

Graham Fraser & João da Silva

A global outage affecting Microsoft products including email service Outlook and video game Minecraft has been resolved, the technology giant said in an update.

The firm said preliminary investigations show the outage was caused by a cyber-attack and a failure to properly defend against it.

Earlier, the company issued an apology for the incident, which lasted almost 10 hours and caused thousands of users to report issues with Microsoft services.

It comes less than two weeks after a major global outage left around 8.5 million computers using Microsoft systems inaccessible, impacting healthcare and travel, after a flawed software update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

"While the initial trigger event was a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack... initial investigations suggest that an error in the implementation of our defences amplified the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it," said an update on the website of the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform.