Reading between the lines

From South Asia Daily for April 25:

Officials confirmed on Monday that the Indian government canceled the visa of Chinese dissident leader and Uighur activist Dolkun Isa on April 23 after pressure from Beijing (Reuters, Time, BBC). Isa is the chairman of the Germany-based World Uighur Congress and was due to attend a conference next week in the northern Indian town of Dharamsala. Uighurs are an ethnic minority community from China's western Xinjiang region and have a long history of discord with Beijing. They are Muslims and regard themselves as culturally and ethnically close to Central Asian nations. Chinese authorities consider Isa as a terrorist and criticized India when the visa was issued. Previous media reports indicated that Delhi granted Isa a visa after China blocked India's bid to get the UN to put Jaish-e-Muhammad chief Masood Azhar on its terrorist list.

And why would China have blocked India's effort to put Azhar on the UN terrorist list? Presumably because Pakistan opposed the move, and China was doing Pakistan, in effect, a favor.  I can't imagine what other reason Beijing would have.

The "subjective impact" of inequality

In discussing post-1949 China in her classic States and Social Revolutions (1979), T. Skocpol quotes (on p.274) a passage from a 1975 article by Martin K. Whyte on how post-revolutionary China addressed the issue of inequality.  The Chinese regime, according to Whyte, aimed not so much to eliminate income and other inequalities as to "mute [their] consequences."  In this 40-year-old article, Whyte wrote:

People in high positions in China are viewed as entitled to certain kinds of differential rewards and authority, but at the same time flaunting authority or engaging in conspicuous consumption is tabooed. There is thus a concerted effort to blunt the subjective impact which existing inequalities might have on the initiative and dedication of the have-nots in whose name the revolution was fought.

The notion of the subjective impact of inequalities clearly relates to inequality's tendency, in some cases, to undermine the social bases of self-respect (as discussed in the comment thread attached to this post).  My impression is that conspicuous consumption is no longer especially discouraged in China; some might consider that one of the acceptable prices to pay for having escaped the more destructive aspects of Maoism, but it's interesting that, 40 years ago at any rate, Chinese policy was apparently very conscious of what Whyte labeled the subjective impact of inequality.  

Though Skocpol thought China was different from post-revolutionary France and Russia in this respect, I'm not so sure.  The addressing of pretty much everyone as "citizen" after 1789, to take one example, might have been one way in which the new French republic tried to, quoting Whyte in this different context, "mute the consequences" of the inequalities that remained after the Revolution. Just a stray thought...

The 1965 Vietnam decisions fifty years on

As has been extensively reported, this month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the famous civil-rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.  It also marks the fiftieth anniversary of the introduction of U.S. ground forces in a combat role in Vietnam.  The immediate justification for the move was the need to protect the U.S. air base at Danang from possible Vietcong attack in response to Rolling Thunder, the bombing campaign that the Johnson administration launched in February 1965.  As one historian writes:

The expanded air war...provided the pretext for the introduction of the first U.S. ground forces into Vietnam.  Anticipating Vietcong attacks against U.S. airbases in retaliation for Rolling Thunder, General Westmoreland in late February urgently requested two Marine landing teams to protect the air base at Danang.... [O]n March 8 [1965], two battalions of Marines..., with tanks and eight-inch howitzers, splashed ashore near Danang where they were welcomed by South Vietnamese officials and by pretty Vietnamese girls passing out leis of flowers. (George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, 2d ed. (1986), pp.130-131)

Several months later, in July, Johnson decided to commit ground forces on a large scale (50,000 immediately, followed by another 50,000 before the end of the year).  Johnson did this without going to Congress for authorization; attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach assured Johnson that bypassing Congress was within his prerogatives (Herring, America's Longest War, p.140, citing Katzenbach to Johnson, June 10, 1965, Johnson Papers, National Security File, Country File: Vietnam, Box 17).     

One of the reasons Johnson decided to take this approach was that "he feared that going to Congress for authority to wage war in Vietnam would destroy his dream of creating the Great Society at home" (Herring, p.140).  He also declined to mobilize the reserves, call up the National Guard, seek a tax increase or do much of anything else to indicate the country was preparing to wage a war (ibid.).  While this might have avoided political problems in the short term, in the long run it helped paved the way for disillusion with the U.S. war in Vietnam, especially as it became clear that the conflict was not going to be short.

The leading explanation in the literature for the Vietnam escalation decisions of 1965 used to be, and perhaps still is, that the general commitment to containment of Communism and the specific commitment to not let a Communist regime take power in Vietnam dictated the decisions.  However, there were different escalation options on the table and containment doesn't explain why particular ones were chosen and others were rejected.  As Y. F. Khong argued in Analogies at War (1992), the Korean War experience and the fear of provoking Chinese intervention weighed heavily on LBJ, inclining him to choose "graduated" escalation options.  One consequence of that choice was to make it very likely that the U.S. would not be able to prevail against an adversary willing to pay almost unlimited costs.  [Clarification added later: I'm not sure, on re-reading, that this makes sense. I guess what I meant to say was that, while no strategy was likely to succeed in attaining its goals, the 'gradual' options chosen were especially unlikely to succeed. I'm not completely sure that's right, but it seems right.] As early as June 1964, North Vietnamese premier Pham Van Dong had told Canadian diplomat J. Blair Seaborn that "the NLF [Viet Cong] and its supporters were prepared to endure regardless of the cost" (Herring, p.119).  That remark proved to be accurate.

----

Note: Vietnam War is a new index label; previous posts here about the Vietnam War can be found under the label Vietnam in the topics index.

----

Added later: Re anniversaries, March 9 was the 70th anniversary of the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo; see here. (I may have something more to say about the linked piece later.)

----

(Post edited slightly after initial posting.)

CCP to Dalai Lama: you will return

Via: an NYT piece about the latest clash between Chinese officialdom and the Dalai Lama:

Tensions over what will happen when the 14th Dalai Lama, who is 79, dies, and particularly over who decides who will succeed him as the most prominent leader in Tibetan Buddhism, have ignited at the annual gathering of China’s legislators in Beijing. Officials have amplified their argument that the Communist government is the proper guardian of the Dalai Lama’s succession through an intricate process of reincarnation that has involved lamas, or senior monks, visiting a sacred lake and divining dreams. Party functionaries were incensed by the exiled Dalai Lama’s recent speculation that he might end his spiritual lineage and not reincarnate. That would confound the Chinese government’s plans to engineer a succession that would produce a putative 15th Dalai Lama who accepts China’s presence and policies in Tibet.

Someone in Dharamsala must be having a quiet chuckle about this, wouldn't you think?

Once more with the Asian pivot

A WaPo piece by David Nakamura -- quick reading because so much of it is what might be called 'mainstream-media foreign-policy boilerplate' -- concludes that the Obama admin's Asian pivot is falling short of expectations. The, by implication, obstructionist Dems are blocking the TransPacific Partnership 'free trade' pact (did it ever occur to the WaPo that maybe the TPP has problems?); the State Dept, according to a recent Senate report, is not focusing much of its resources on Asia; and as a result (gasp, what a surprise) the pivot has come to be seen in the region as militarily-focused, the piece informs us.

Also (how shocking), the Chinese believe the aim of the pivot is containment, the Obama administration's protests to the contrary notwithstanding. Of course the piece does mention, in quick passing, the placement of a rotating contingent of U.S. Marines in Australia that was announced shortly after the pivot was launched. What if China placed a rotating contingent of its soldiers in, say, Cuba or, less plausibly, Jamaica? Wouldn't the U.S. admin think China's aim was containment of the U.S.? The distinction between containment and hedging, mentioned in the article, seems not worth wasting all that much time on: China likely will view the redeployment of U.S. military assets to the region as containment, regardless of what the U.S.'s  preferred label is.

There is however at least one success story, or semi-success story, from the pivot, and that is Burma. Hillary Clinton made two trips there as Sec. of State, the second time accompanied by Pres. Obama, and Burma is on what seems to be a gradual path to political liberalization, with emphasis on "gradual." (Jeffrey Brown on the NewsHour had a report from Burma/Myanmar the other day, which I heard on the radio but haven't watched yet.)

More on Crimea

From a post at a new blog (found courtesy of Reddit):

Much like in 2008, Putin has fashioned the narrative underlying his expansionist maneuver into Crimea on the basis of ethnicity, rather than territory. The reason why China objected to South Ossetian and Abkhazian independence then, and is objecting to Crimean independence now, is...  because it sets the wrong kind of precedent. Rather than paving the way for a Chinese incursion into Taiwan, a territory to which China argues to have a historical claim, it underlines and legitimates the political cleavages between ethnicities. This runs directly counter to the CCP’s domestic policy, which has historically been to nip all claims to independence made by ethnic minorities (of which over 55 exist in China) firmly in the bud....

And speaking of Putin's claim to be protecting ethnic Russians from discrimination/oppression, Charles King's March 1 op-ed in the NYT ended with this:

...Mr. Putin’s reserving the right to protect the “Russian-speaking population” of Ukraine is an affront to the basis of international order. Not even the alleged ultranationalists who Mr. Putin claims now control the Ukrainian government have tried to export their uprising to Ukrainian speakers in Poland, Moldova, or Romania, or indeed Russia itself. It is Mr. Putin who has made ethnic nationalism a defining element of foreign policy.

Russia was in fact a pioneer of the idea that, in the jargon of international affairs, is now called R2P: the responsibility to protect. Under Czar Nicholas I, Russia asserted its right to guarantee the lives and fortunes of Orthodox Christians inside the territory of its chief strategic rival, the Ottoman Empire. In 1853 Russia launched a preemptive attack on the Ottomans, sending its fleet out of Sevastopol harbor to sink Ottoman ships across the Black Sea. Britain, France and other allies stepped in to respond to the unprovoked attack. The result was called the Crimean War, a conflict that, as every Russian schoolchild knows, Russia lost.

The future of Ukraine is now no longer about Kiev’s Independence Square, democracy in Ukraine or European integration. It is about how to preserve a vision of Europe — and, indeed, of the world — where countries give up the idea that people who speak a language we understand are the only ones worth protecting.

King's statement that Russia "pioneered" R2P by "guaranteeing the lives of Orthodox Christians" in the Ottoman Empire is extremely misleading. Whatever one thinks of R2P, one of its basic features is that it is not limited to the protection of those who share ethnicity, religion or language with the intervenors.

Khilnani on Bass and Raghavan

Sunil Khilnani's review, in the New Republic (Nov. 25, 2013), of Gary Bass's The Blood Telegram and Srinath Raghavan's 1971 is informative, but I do have a couple of small criticisms (well, the first point is a criticism, the second point is more of an observation).

(1) Khilnani twice refers to India as "militarily weak" (the first reference is to India in 1971 as "the world's largest democracy but also one of its poorest and militarily weakest"), and he writes that, during the months of the crisis leading up to the Indian intervention, "the Indians were aware that Pakistan's American weaponry gave it an edge over India...." Yet, as Khilnani also observes, once the war was launched in December it was a "swift and decisive" Indian victory. This doesn't compute. If India was so militarily weak, why was the victory so quick and decisive? Even if one agrees with Raghavan's view that the Indian victory "was considerably influenced by chance and contingency" (1971, p.235), Khilnani's emphasis on India's military weakness seems a bit odd.

(2) Khilnani writes: "...as Bass and Raghavan each make clear, Pakistan was not the only route available to the Americans [Nixon and Kissinger] to pursue their China goals. The United States could have restrained Pakistan's military actions while still securing the China opening." I think this is probably a correct historical judgment, but it's a bit more definite than what Raghavan says (I'm leaving aside Bass here because I haven't read the Bass book). Raghavan (as mentioned in my review of 1971, below) says Nixon's and Kissinger's refusal to "squeeze" Yahya was "understandable" (1971, p.92) through early July, when Kissinger made his secret trip to Beijing. It is after that point that Pakistan was no longer needed as a conduit to China. On the other hand, Raghavan also suggests that Nixon and Kissinger could have put effective economic pressure on Pakistan in late April or early May (p.266), probably without jeopardizing the China opening. But his overall judgment on this particular issue seems less definite than Khilnani's. It's a matter of nuance, not sharp disagreement. (Romania was the other possibility Nixon and Kissinger considered as a conduit to China, but "the line through Pakistan was the better bet" for reasons Raghavan explains on p.86, from which the quoted phrase is taken.)

Book review: Raghavan on the birth of Bangladesh

Srinath Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh.  Harvard University Press, 2013.  358 pp.

The crisis that led to the creation of Bangladesh was a major episode in the history of South Asia and had implications that reached beyond the subcontinent.  It raised issues that would recur frequently in subsequent decades, as humanitarian catastrophes increasingly took place in the context of civil wars and/or secession.  The creation of Bangladesh also had lasting geopolitical consequences: Srinath Raghavan writes in 1971 that it “was the most significant geopolitical event in the subcontinent since its partition in 1947” (4).  

Raghavan’s book is marked by narrative detail and backed by extensive research: among other things, he has gone into various archives (though Pakistan’s archives on the episode remain closed), read many memoirs and other sources, and also made use of the substantial amount of recent work on the international history of the 1960s and 1970s.  He maintains that the birth of Bangladesh was not inevitable but the product of “choice and chance” (8) and should be viewed in light of “the interplay between the domestic, regional, and international dimensions” (9).  Raghavan deals with the stances of many countries during the crisis and also pays attention to actors such as the press, celebrity musicians, NGOs, and the UN. However, the classic figures of diplomats, soldiers, and heads of state occupy center stage in his account.

This post focuses on what 1971 says about the roles in the crisis of the Soviet Union and the United States, and how these roles were complexly entangled with those of some of the other main players, notably China.  As will be seen, Raghavan is highly critical of Nixon and Kissinger, particularly the latter’s overemphasis on U.S. ‘credibility’ and his tendency to see linkages everywhere.

One general impression that emerges from this history is that none of the main actors wanted the crisis to escalate into a direct great-power military confrontation.  The dominant, though certainly not exclusive, diplomatic-strategic note was one of caution.  This impulse toward restraint, however, also meant that no decisive action was taken to stop the Pakistani army’s rampage in East Pakistan until India went beyond supplying aid to the indigenous independence forces and eventually intervened with its own soldiers (and Raghavan thinks India should have intervened earlier).       

The Nine-Month Crisis

Raghavan’s account starts with the fall of Pakistan’s ruler Ayub Khan in early 1969 and his replacement by a military regime led by Gen. Yahya Khan.  The catalyst for Ayub’s departure was student-led protests, part of the global wave of protests in 1968.  The protests “not only deposed Ayub Khan but also radicalized the movement for autonomy” in East Pakistan (266).  In December 1970, Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League, running on an autonomy platform, won a majority in parliamentary elections, including all but two seats in the East. 

Negotiations on forming a new government ensued between the Awami League and Yahya Khan.  When the negotiations broke down despite the League’s willingness to be flexible on some key points, the Pakistani army launched its crackdown in East Pakistan on March 25, 1971.  A description of the initial assault, written by a UN Development Program official in Dacca (the capital of E. Pakistan), referred to “Army trucks loaded with the dead bodies of civilians” (quoted, 148).  The army shot students in the halls at the university in Dacca (now Dhaka) and also hit Old Dacca (52).  Estimates of the dead from the initial attack varied from 5,000 to 25,000 (149).  Subsequent continued brutality by the Pakistani army led millions of Bengalis to flee into India.

Had India decided quickly to intervene militarily, the crisis would not have lasted long.  However, for reasons Raghavan details in chapter 3 India did not intervene early, and the episode unfolded over a period of nine months: April-December 1971.  When India did decide to launch full-scale operations, the war was short: it “formally began” (234) in the early hours of December 4 (though Pakistan launched a preemptive air strike in the west on Dec. 3), and it ended when the Pakistani army in the east surrendered on Dec. 16. 

Maneuvering in the Whirlwind

The birth of Bangladesh, as this book makes clear, occurred at a turbulent time in world politics.  The intense Cold War crises of the early 1960s – the Berlin crisis and the Cuban missile crisis – were in the past, but parts of the Third World (as it was then called) had become an arena in the superpower contest.  The U.S. was still mired in the Vietnam War (and had expanded its operations into Cambodia), while the Soviet Union and China had barely been on speaking terms since 1961 and had come to blows on the Ussuri River in 1969.  China was reeling internally from the effects of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Prague Spring had been suppressed by the Soviets, and, particularly in the West, non-state actors and the emergence of human rights as an international-political issue both were having an increasing if uneven impact on the conduct of foreign policy.  At the same time the relatively new postcolonial states generally opposed secessionist movements wherever they occurred.        

The Sino-Soviet split and the U.S. determination to capitalize on it by a rapprochement with China provide the backdrop for much of the diplomatic maneuvering that surrounded the East Pakistan crisis.  The superpowers, Raghavan writes, took fundamentally different approaches to it: Nixon and Kissinger viewed the events through the lens of their grand geopolitical plans, whereas the USSR’s perspective was primarily regional (115). 

The Soviets, having mediated in Tashkent the settlement that restored the status quo after the 1965 Pakistan/India war over Kashmir, saw themselves as peacemakers on the subcontinent (and for a brief period they sold arms to Pakistan and India at the same time).  Premier Alexei Kosygin, for example, favored a “‘trade and transit agreement’ between India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan which would be ‘beneficial for the whole region’” (114).  In line with this approach the Soviets, at least through most of the crisis, sought to discourage Indian military intervention in East Pakistan and to push Yahya Khan “toward a peaceful, political resolution of the problem” (116).  It was only toward the end of the crisis that the Soviets gave up hope that Yahya might release Mujibur Rahman from jail and negotiate a resolution with him (see below).         

The USSR and India signed a “friendship and cooperation” treaty on August 9, 1971.  According to Raghavan, it was a statement by Kissinger that finally pushed India to sign the treaty.  Having returned from his secret trip to China (see below), Kissinger informed the Indian ambassador to the U.S. on July 17 “that if China intervened in an India-Pakistan war, the United States would be unable to help India”; this led Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi, who had been hesitating, to move to finalize the treaty with the USSR (127).  The treaty’s key provision, Art. IX, called for “mutual consultations” between the parties with a view to “remov[ing]” any threat of an attack on either one; it also, in effect, ruled out Soviet assistance to Pakistan if India-Pakistan hostilities broke out.

However, a gap remained between the USSR and India on the proper approach to the crisis, since the Soviets for some time thought that the refugee issue could be resolved separately from the political issue of East Pakistan’s future (124) and were reluctant to give even conditional approval for Indian military action or to confer about “contingencies.”  The day after the treaty was signed, Soviet foreign minister Gromyko urged Mrs. Gandhi to view “the situation in a cold blooded way…The heart should be warm but the mind should be cool as we say” (quoted, 130).  It was only later, specifically in late September, that the Soviet leadership, having concluded that Yahya Khan “was unwilling to work toward any reasonable solution,…decided to throw its weight behind India” (226).  By late October, the Indian foreign minister was able to tell a parliamentary committee “that India could count on ‘total support’ from the Soviet Union” (226).  To the end, however, the Soviets remained determined not to become directly involved militarily in the crisis and worried about the possibilities of an escalation that would drag them into a great-power confrontation.                   

Tilting at Windmills

Now to the matter of the U.S. stance.  Although “Nixon wheeled with him to office a trolley of biases against India and in favor of Pakistan” (82), Raghavan contends that it was not these prejudices, for the most part, but rather the planned opening to China, and Pakistan’s role in it, that dominated Nixon’s and Kissinger’s calculations.  As the crisis erupted, Nixon ordered his people not to “squeeze” Yahya Khan (81).  The Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, had suggested that Yahya Khan’s good offices could be used to facilitate the China opening, and “[i]n this context, Nixon and Kissinger’s desire to refrain from squeezing Yahya…was understandable” (92), at least until after Kissinger’s secret trip to China in early July.  Incidentally, contrary to Kissinger’s claim in his memoir White House Years that “Pakistan’s leaders…never sought any reciprocity” (quoted, 87) for their role as conduit to China, Pakistan pressed for a resumption of arms sales, which the U.S. did resume on a one-time basis in October 1970 (84, 87).   

Nixon and Kissinger’s refusal to pressure Yahya Khan elicited a strong protest from the U.S. consul in Dhaka, Archer Blood, who sent cables in late March and early April 1971 “detailing the terror being unleashed on the populace by the Pakistani army” (89).  Nixon and Kissinger were unmoved, and the U.S. ambassador in Islamabad chimed in, deprecating “righteous indignation” (quoted, 89) as a basis for policy.  Raghavan suggests that, however “understandable” was the U.S. softness toward Yahya because of his role as channel to China, the U.S. could have  exercised economic leverage on Pakistan, which was “facing a major liquidity crisis” (94), without undermining the China opening.  Raghavan thinks it “highly probable” that U.S. pressure of this sort "in late April to early May" would have forced Yahya to grant the Awami League’s autonomy demands (266).  (This must remain somewhat conjectural, of course, since the leverage was not exercised.)

After Kissinger’s secret trip to China (July 9th-11th), U.S. policy, Raghavan notes, “began shifting from a disinclination to squeeze Yahya to an active tilt in favor of Pakistan” (105).  (Among major powers, the U.S. was mostly alone in this; Edward Heath’s government in Britain, for example, took a quite different tack; see 162-69.  For the positions of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and others, see chapter 7.)    

Why the tilt?  “After all, following Kissinger’s trip to Beijing, Pakistan was no longer important as a diplomatic conduit to China” (106).  The answer, according to Raghavan, boils down to Kissinger’s and Nixon’s “excessive concern with reputation” (198) – their belief that if they failed to tilt toward Pakistan and thereby failed to stand with an ally, the nascent U.S.-China connection would be damaged. 

During Kissinger’s July trip he and Zhou Enlai had discussed the crisis, and in their last conversation before Kissinger left, “Zhou asked Kissinger to ‘please tell President Yahya Khan that if India commits aggression, we will support Pakistan’” (106).  This statement was vague – “we will support Pakistan” could mean a range of different things.  But Kissinger interpreted it as a Chinese test of U.S. commitment to Pakistan, such that if the U.S., in Raghavan’s words, “stood aside and allowed Pakistan to be humiliated by India, [U.S.] credibility in the eyes of Beijing would suffer -- resulting in deep, possibly irreparable harm to the budding relationship with the People’s Republic” (106; cf. 198, 247). 

Thus when the crisis reached its climax in December, Nixon and Kissinger sent a U.S. naval task force steaming from the coast of South Vietnam toward the Bay of Bengal, told the Soviets that the situation on the subcontinent jeopardized U.S.-Soviet détente, and urged – unavailingly – the Chinese to move soldiers to the border with India (Nixon to Kissinger: “I tell you a movement of even some Chinese toward that border could scare those goddamn Indians to death” [quoted, 247].)  Kissinger’s remarks to Nixon at this point are laced with urgency: e.g., “the world’s psychological balance of power” is at stake (quoted, 248); and “at least we’re coming off like men” (quoted, 256).   

Nixon and Kissinger claimed credit in their memoirs for saving West Pakistan from Indian aggression, although the only concrete evidence of Indian intentions in that respect that they had was a single-sourced CIA report of early December (244).  Raghavan argues that an attack on West Pakistan was never India’s aim. He writes: “Nixon and Kissinger overplayed the importance of an intelligence source, mainly because it helped them rationalize their desire to demonstrate resolve to China and the Soviet Union…. The only practical consequence of the aggressive U.S. posturing was to spur the Indians to capture Dhaka and seal their victory – objectives that had not been on their strategic horizons when the war began.  This was Nixon and Kissinger’s war of illusions. In retrospect, they come across not as tough statesmen tilting toward their ally but as a picaresque pair tilting at windmills” (262-63).

***  

A few concluding remarks.  1971 covers a lot of ground, and I’ve left out much in this post.  For instance I’ve mostly passed over Raghavan’s discussion of how trends in the global normative/political environment of the time affected the crisis and the reactions to it (see chapter 6), a topic which could occupy a post by itself (and which, from my standpoint, would involve taking issue with one or two of the author’s interpretations, albeit on somewhat tangential points).  The book’s wide scope coupled with attention to detail will make it valuable to historians, IR scholars, and others.  Finally, a minor point: 1971 has a full scholarly apparatus and two maps, but in addition a timeline/chronology would have been helpful.

P.M. linkage

[note: last post before break]

-- China loosens its one-child policy.

-- Akash Kapur reports (paywalled) on the impact of development (or 'development') on an Indian village, and Pankaj Mishra critiques (paywalled) Perry Anderson's The Indian Ideology.

-- The Nation has a database compiling civilian casualties caused by ISAF and Afghan government forces' operations in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2012. (H/t FP's AfPak [now renamed South Asia] Daily Brief, which says that the total is in a range between about 2,800 and 6,500.) This is quite a bit less than Taliban-caused civilian casualties -- which does not excuse them, of course.

-- Latest UN estimates on global child mortality: available via this page.

Bringing North-South relations back in

Duck of Minerva is currently running a symposium on "The end of IR theory?" special issue of European Journal of International Relations. In his article in that issue, "The Poverty of Grand Theory," Chris Brown (of LSE) calls for "critical problem-solving theory," i.e. theory which addresses real-world problems from the perspective of the powerless (or the underdog, to use the word in his abstract). I commented on Brown's DofM post (summarizing his article), and Nicholas Lees has a post on Brown's article here.

I think Brown is pretty much right that poststructuralist IR has not been sufficiently engaged with the real world and that both realist and liberal IR theory, while often quite engaged with the world, aren't concerned enough (or at all) with issues of global poverty and inequality. As Nicholas and I both point out, IR theorists could draw on resources in the literatures of international political economy, development, and applied ethics if they were to decide to make more concerted efforts to fill the gap(s) Brown identifies. 

One might ask why it matters who is working on a subject (in this case, global inequality and related issues) as long as it is being addressed by someone. I would suggest it's important that more IR academics focus on these issues partly because they do connect to the discipline's main concerns, in addition to being highly important in their own right. The other side of the equation, as Nicholas suggests, is that there need to be 'addressees,' people who are willing to consider the scholarship that's produced and who are or might be in a position to try to act on whatever is actionable.

Writing this post has led me to take a quick look at a piece I have long been intending to read: Giovanni Arrighi and Lu Zhang, "Beyond the Washington Consensus: A New Bandung?" (It was published in an edited volume [link] a couple of years ago but I have it in a separate pdf.) From a glance, Arrighi and Zhang contend that the economic rise of China may create the conditions for the formation of a new Southern bloc, held together as much or more by economic interest as by political/ideological solidarity. China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, the key countries in this scenario, are consciously promoting intra-South economic cooperation and activity. The focus on the possibility of 'a new Bandung' draws attention to issues that used to have a more central place in IR, including questions about how the interests of states and governments connect (or don't) to those of struggling individuals. If one wants to make a start on the tall order of 'critical problem-solving' theory ('grand' or otherwise), perhaps bringing North-South relations back to the field's center stage would be a good first step.

'Cold' boundaries and 'hot' boundaries

Journalistic discussions of issues involving land boundaries between countries (or between states, to use the rough synonym) sometimes fail to distinguish between two possible kinds of disagreement: disagreement over a boundary's location and disagreement over a boundary's status.

There are no longer many disagreements of consequence over state boundaries' location. Most boundaries are settled, or 'cold' -- to use a term one occasionally sees (or used to). Among the unsettled or 'hot' boundaries there is Israel/Palestine, of course, which is something of a special case. There is the disputed India-China boundary, which has just recently flared up again (see also here). And there are, no doubt, a few others, e.g. the disputed India-Pakistan boundary in the Siachen glacier. (There are also, notably, disputes about islands but those necessarily involve maritime boundaries and are therefore in a different category.)

More common, I think, than disputes about location are disputes about a boundary's status. These disputes don't have to do with where the boundary is drawn but rather about the status of the territory it marks out. Take the cases of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, mentioned here. Supporters of Abkhazian independence presumably don't want a different location for the boundary marking out Abkhazia; rather, they want a change in the boundary's status, from a provincial to an international boundary. When an article about secessionist or independence movements refers to "the rigidity of boundaries," this distinction can get lost, because the reader may infer that a secessionist movement wants to change a boundary's location when it doesn't. The Balochistan independence movement, for example, would presumably be happy with the current location of the boundary marking out Balochistan as a province of Pakistan, but it wants the status of that boundary changed to an international boundary. (Note however that some cases, such as that of an independent Kurdistan were it to be achieved, might involve changes in boundaries' locations.)

Then there can be tensions and disagreements that involve boundaries in some way but are not about either the boundary's location or its status. Two states that share a boundary can disagree, for instance, over how to manage the movement of people and/or goods across it. There can also be violence along a boundary that doesn't, strictly speaking, have much to do with the boundary itself but is an expression of hostility between the countries involved that happens to erupt along the boundary for various reasons.

For instance, the recent clashes between Afghan and Pakistani soldiers along the Afghan-Pakistan border may not have much to do with the border itself. According to a May 2 NYT story (h/t FP's AfPak Daily Brief):

Afghan forces claimed on Thursday that they had overrun and destroyed a Pakistani-held border crossing in a remote area, an event that provoked a spontaneous outpouring of nationalist sentiment here, sending thousands of students into the streets to demonstrate and setting off lively debate on social networking sites. A funeral for Qasim Khan, an Afghan border policeman who was the only confirmed victim of the clash, turned into a patriotic rally.

The NYT piece goes on to note that the outcry over the death of one Afghan soldier at the hands of Pakistani soldiers contrasts with the relative silence about the deaths of "eight Afghan Local Police officers [who] were killed on Thursday morning by a [Taliban] roadside bomb that blew up as their truck passed by in the village of Pashtunabad in Logar Province."

That young Afghans pour into the streets when an Afghan soldier is killed by Pakistani soldiers, but do not react similarly when eight American-trained Afghan local policemen are killed by the Taliban, is worth noting. One could draw several possible conclusions. But the  clashes between Afghan and Pakistani soldiers along the border may, to repeat, have little to do with the border itself, despite the NYT piece's mention of the Durand Line; in this sense it is different from the India-China border dispute. (I realize this is a debatable proposition, so reasoned disagreement is welcome.)

Islands in the storm

One of the more significant quotes in this WaPo piece about the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute is buried at the end: the Japanese professor saying there's no possibility of a major war between China and Japan.

Andrew Marshall and 'Air-Sea Battle'

You don't have to be a Beltway think-tanker, defense policy wonk or avid consumer of varied news sources to know the name of Andrew Marshall -- all you have to do is glance at the acknowledgments in books by certain academics (Stephen Rosen, for example). Marshall, head of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, is a legend in Washington, D.C. by virtue of his longevity and influence. Still, it's not all that often that Marshall figures prominently in a story in the mainstream press. Thus this WaPo piece, about the kerfluffle over Pentagon contingency planning for a conflict with China, may be worth noting. I've only read the first page (it's rather late and I'm tired); I intend to read it more properly later.

P.s. The break resumes tomorrow.

Cheney in the twilight zone

Via PM, quoting Steve Coll, comes the nugget that Cheney thought the last chapter of Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics was a bit too "softhearted." This is fairly mind-boggling. Mearsheimer's basic line in that chapter was that the U.S. had to take deliberate measures to slow down China's economic growth, because otherwise security competition would increase, leading to a higher likelihood of military conflict, presumably on terms increasingly unfavorable to the U.S. Short of advocating a preventive war, which no one in his/her right mind would, I'm not sure how much more hardheaded (or whatever the opposite of softhearted is) one could get. (Of course, Mearsheimer was not right, I think.)

The mantra of growth; or, Bhagwati vs. Pogge

Given the nature of the news cycle, the debate sparked by Pres. Obama's (successful) nomination of Jim Yong Kim to head the World Bank has long since been eclipsed by a spate of fresher stories. But I wanted to write this post before the Kim story faded into complete oblivion, because the debate over Kim raised again some fundamental questions about economic growth, inequality, and poverty.

In a column published last month criticizing the choice of Kim, Jagdish Bhagwati asserted that the Obama administration has the wrong view of development. He wrote:

...perhaps the most compelling factor in Obama’s choice [of Kim] seems to have been a fundamental misunderstanding of what "development" requires. Micro-level policies such as health care, which the Obama administration seems to believe is what "development" policy ought to be, can only go so far. But macro-level policies, such as liberalization of trade and investment, privatization, and so forth, are powerful engines of poverty reduction; indeed, they are among the key components of the reforms that countries like India and China embraced in the mid-1980’s and early 1990’s....

[I]t is the rapid acceleration of economic growth in the major emerging countries that has reduced poverty, not only directly, through jobs and higher incomes, but also by generating the revenues governments need to undertake the public-health, education, and other programs that sustain poverty reduction – and growth – in the long term.

Now, there's no question that economic growth in India and especially in China has enabled millions of people to improve their living standards and leave the ranks of the extremely poor. And it's also true that economic growth generates revenues that governments, if they have wise priorities and some administrative resources, can use for public-health, education, and similar purposes. But Bhagwati failed to ask an important question: Could 'emerging countries' have reduced poverty even more by following a different, more equitable growth path?

A 2008 article by Thomas Pogge suggests that the answer is yes.* Pogge used China to illustrate his case. He argued that although poverty in China has gone down substantially, "it is likely that more equitable growth," i.e., growth accompanied by less income inequality, "would have been much better for the Chinese poor." Pogge pointed out that although China's gross national income (GNI) increased dramatically from 1990 to 2004, the relative income share of the bottom ten percent (decile) of China's population decreased from 30.8% in 1990 to 16.0% in 2004. This decrease in its relative share meant that the absolute income of the poorest decile increased "by only 75 percent" at a time when China's GNI was going up by a whopping 236 percent (see section 5.3 of the article as reprinted in Pogge's Politics as Usual, pp.100ff.).

What if China had preserved the income distribution as it existed in 1990, even if that meant sacrificing some growth? Pogge assumed, for the sake of argument, that preserving the existing income shares would have cost China 2.3 percentage points in per capita GNI growth from 1990 to 2004. Under this assumption, the poorest decile "would have done much better..., ending the period [in 2004] at an average income of $715, rather than $500, thus with a gain of 150 rather than 75 percent." (p.101) Slower, more equitable growth also would have caused less environmental degradation, a consideration that, coupled with equity, suggests that "all countries should conceive growth much more from the standpoint of their poorer population segments" (p.102, italics in original). He also pointed out that economic inequality is much easier to create (or generate) than to reverse, because the better-off are able to change the relevant rules in their favor (ibid.). There are, in other words, lock-in effects (though Pogge does not use that phrase).

Pogge also highlighted the growth in global income inequality from 1988 to 2002, with the relative share of "the poorest 30 percent of humanity" down by about 20 percent during that period, "from 1.52 to 1.22 percent of global household income" (p.106). Again, inequality translates into differential influence over the rules that shape the distribution of global income and wealth (p.107).

These are the sorts of considerations one should keep in mind when reading the celebratory assertions of Bhagwati and others about rapid economic growth in 'the emerging countries' and its effect on poverty. Of course such growth has reduced poverty, in some cases substantially, but poverty would have been reduced even more if that growth had been more equitable, even if less rapid. Neoliberal globalization, heralded by its supporters for reducing poverty, has likely not reduced poverty as much as a more equitable form of globalization would have, and it has perpetuated the unequal structure of influence in global institutions. The appointment of Kim to the Bank will obviously not drastically change this, since no single appointment could have such an effect and the institution will no doubt exert its organizational pull over any leader. But Kim's critical stance toward neoliberal globalization -- or what was his critical stance some years ago, at any rate -- perhaps offers a bit of hope. In any event, Bhagwati's critique was completely off the mark.

-----
*T. Pogge, "Growth and Inequality: Understanding Recent Trends and Political Choices," Dissent (Winter 2008), reprinted (in slightly different form) in his Politics as Usual: What Lies Behind the Pro-Poor Rhetoric (Polity Press, 2010), pp.93-109.

The Pentagon's response to China's 'threat'

I ran across this piece in Commentary (not on my usual circuit) by Bill Gertz last night. I haven't read it all and don't agree with the tone and general perspective, but it appears to be informative about internal U.S. policy debates on China and the Chinese military, so I'm passing it on here fwiw.

The Asian "pivot" revisited: show me the threat

You may remember the line that Cuba Gooding uttered in that Tom-Cruise-as-sports-agent movie (yeah, 'Jerry MacGuire' or whatever it was called): "Show me the money."

Well, here's a slight tweak: Show me the threat.

Last September, Aaron Friedberg wrote an NYT piece (h/t here) in which he asserted that China's military preparations

...do not mean that China wants war with the United States. To the contrary, they seem intended mostly to overawe its neighbors while dissuading Washington from coming to their aid if there is ever a clash. Uncertain of whether they can rely on American support, and unable to match China’s power on their own, other countries may decide they must accommodate China’s wishes.

In the words of the ancient military theorist Sun Tzu, China is acquiring the means to “win without fighting” — to establish itself as Asia’s dominant power by eroding the credibility of America’s security guarantees, hollowing out its alliances and eventually easing it out of the region.

If the United States and its Asian friends look to their own defenses and coordinate their efforts, there is no reason they cannot maintain a favorable balance of power, even as China’s strength grows. But if they fail to respond to China’s buildup, there is a danger that Beijing could miscalculate, throw its weight around and increase the risk of confrontation and even armed conflict. Indeed, China’s recent behavior in disputes over resources and maritime boundaries with Japan and the smaller states that ring the South China Sea suggest [sic; should be "suggests"] that this already may be starting to happen.

I sort of, kind of get this argument, which seems to provide the theoretical basis, such as it is, for the Obama admin's much-ballyhooed pivot to Asia. The argument is: if China thinks the U.S. is withdrawing in some way from the region, China may go a step too far, tell Japan to get off some tiny goat island that's hiding a ton of oil (or whatever), whereupon Japan mobilizes its navy (such as it is), and all of a sudden they're on the verge of, or into, what IR types are wont to call a militarized interstate dispute. Solution: strengthen U.S. presence in the region, put Marines in Australia, sell jets to Indonesia, etcetera, and China will be less likely to, in Friedberg's words, "miscalculate."

I am not fully convinced, however. By Friedberg's own estimate, China does not want war with the U.S., it just wants to be "Asia's dominant power." Well, yes. And the U.S. wants to be, and is, the Western hemisphere's dominant power. And it's OK for the U.S. to be the Western hemisphere's dominant power but evidently it's not OK for China to be Asia's dominant power. Why not? Because China is an authoritarian regime? Because it puts dissidents in jail and suppresses bloggers it doesn't like? Because it wants the Spratly Islands for itself? Because it's not serious about reducing its greenhouse gas emissions? Because its construction codes are shoddy, with the result that large numbers of its people die in earthquakes? Because its government takes land from peasants without compensation for development? What exactly is the problem with China being Asia's dominant power? Don't just hand-wave about maritime boundaries. Show me the threat, in concrete terms, to U.S. national security and to regional "stability". To be impolite about it: put up or shut up.

P.s. See this and this.

Is Walt right about China?

Short answer: I don't think so. (Hat tip here for drawing my attention to Walt's post.)

Elaboration: Walt says that if China were to establish a secure sphere of influence in its region, that would free up China to devote more attention to the stirring up of trouble in the western hemisphere. It could forge closer ties with countries in the U.S. backyard and ratchet up tensions. Remember the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Etc. I'm not convinced by this notion that the U.S. must prevent any other great power from achieving a regional sphere of influence. (Walt reaches back for authority to Kennan's American Diplomacy but a more recent statement of this view is in Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.)

In my view, this is the most misleading paragraph in Walt's post:

... this logic reflects the realist view that it is to U.S. advantage to keep Eurasia divided among many separate powers, and to help prevent any single power from establishing the same sort of regional hegemony that the United States has long enjoyed in the Western hemisphere. That is why the United States eventually entered World War I (to prevent a German victory), and it is why Roosevelt began preparing the nation for war in the late 1930s and entered with enthusiasm after Pearl Harbor. In each case, powerful countries were threatening to establish regional hegemony in a key area, and so the United States joined with others to prevent this.

The problem with this analysis is that Nazi Germany and imperial Japan were not just seeking "to establish regional hegemony in a key area"; they were expanding by military aggression and conquering and occupying other sovereign states. Nazi domination of Europe was unacceptable not only on strategic but also on moral grounds. Until someone comes up with a more detailed, convincing scenario about how a Chinese sphere of influence or regional hegemony threatens the U.S., I will remain skeptical.

However, I will concede this much to Walt's view: intentions are difficult to read precisely and there is a case for hedging bets by maintaining U.S. alliances with South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and other countries in the region. But does the U.S. need to send Marines to northern Australia? Does it need to sell advanced F-16 jets to Indonesia? For that matter, does it need as many as 28,500 soldiers in South Korea?

Views that emphasize a "contest" between the U.S. and China (see e.g. W.R. Mead's recent post) can be self-fulfilling prophecies, as Walt himself acknowledges in passing. In the lingo of contemporary bureaucratic diplomat-ese, this is unhelpful.

Chinese "aggression"?

English is a funny language. You can be a competent native speaker and still not grasp anywhere near all the nuances.

Item: I just heard a brief three-minute top-of-the-hour NPR news broadcast. The announcer said that the new U.S. 'security arrangement' with Australia is widely seen as a response to "growing Chinese aggression." My inner antenna switched on: What Chinese aggression? Nothing China has done recently (or not so recently, for that matter) amounts to aggression as I use the word -- that was my reaction.

Then I went to my dictionary. (Dictionaries are not deities, of course, but they're better than nothing.) The first definition of "aggression": "an unprovoked attack or warlike act; specif., the use of armed force by a state in violation of its international obligations" -- yes, that was the sense of the word I had in mind. There is also a second definition: "the practice or habit of being aggressive or quarrelsome" -- that's somewhat looser or broader. Then I went down to the adjective "aggressive"; one of the definitions is: "full of enterprise and initiative; bold and active; pushing." Then there is a little further section which draws fine distinctions among aggressive, militant, assertive, and pushing.

Bottom line? Where I might have said "growing Chinese assertiveness," the NPR guy said "growing Chinese aggression." Is that wrong? Strictly speaking, perhaps not. But I think it's misleading, since "aggression" triggers in most hearers the first sense of the word (unprovoked attack, etc.).

As is well known, China is a rising power in terms of economic and demographic weight (though it also has many problems, which I won't go into here). Rising powers tend to be somewhat "assertive". It's par for the course. That doesn't mean China is going to start a war. Its military is still well behind technologically. Chinese leaders have shown no evidence of exceptional bellicosity. Yes, there are a few possible flash points, but it's nothing to get one's knickers all in a bunch about. Scholars who study Chinese foreign policy closely, like Taylor Fravel of MIT, have shown that China's stance on territorial disputes has been one of compromise more often than not.
----------
Btw, I think having U.S. Marines in northern Australia is not an especially good idea.

Biden and China's one-child policy (brief interruption in the break)

I just read this WaPo editorial about V.P. Biden in China. The Republicans apparently jumped all over Biden's remark that he "understood" China's one-child policy even though it was "unsustainable" from the standpoint of future worker-to-retiree ratios. Biden's office then issued a statement "clarifying" that the V.P. opposes not only the coercive aspects of the one-child policy but also the policy as a whole.

Although the coercive aspects of the policy are bad, if the policy were based on incentives alone would it warrant a denunciation? Probably not. The Chinese government did have rational reasons, when the policy was adopted, to want to moderate the pressures of population on resources, infrastructure etc., and those reasons probably remain somewhat valid. No one, of course, can approve of forced sterilizations or coerced abortions, but a non-coercive one-child policy would not be irrational, despite the concern about worker-to-retiree ratios. It's a bit annoying that Biden's office, in its clarification, apparently did not draw this distinction.