Tag Archive for: South Asia

Dislocation and disruption: climate change in the Indo-Pacific in 2035

This is the first of several edited extracts from a forthcoming ASPI publication, The geopolitics of climate and security in the Indo-Pacific.

The impacts of climate change on the Indo-Pacific, already the most exposed region in the world to climate hazards and home to the world’s fastest growing populations, economies and geopolitical rivalries, will be profound. The scenario described below is an extrapolation from current climate science and observations of recent extreme climate-related hazards and their societal impacts. It isn’t a prediction of the future, but rather a description of a plausible near future for the Indo-Pacific region. The scenario is the reference point for each of the chapters in the forthcoming book.

It’s the year 2035 …

The climate has warmed by more than 1.5°C, the lower target set by countries in the 2015 Paris agreement. Climate hazards are significantly undermining human security in multiple dimensions: economic, political, social and environmental.

Scientists had for decades warned of more frequent, longer and hotter heatwaves; accelerating sea-level rise; increased torrential downpours; intensifying storms; altered distribution of pests and pathogens; ocean heating and acidification; hotter, longer bushfires; and longer and drier droughts. But policymakers greatly underestimated the scale of those hazards, the rapidity with which they would begin emerging, and the compounding and cascading societal disruptions they would cause. That became abundantly clear during the 2032 global food security crisis, triggered by the record-setting El Niño event that brought severe drought to the rice bowls of Vietnam and China, among others.

The crisis accelerated political action to reduce greenhouse gases, although the global energy transformation from fossil fuels to renewables had already been proceeding rapidly. Not surprisingly, venture capitalists, asset managers and financial regulators were among the first to detect the climate change ‘signal’ in the market. By the mid-2020s, they had begun redirecting billions of dollars of investments away from fossil fuels and infrastructure threatened by climate change impacts and into renewable energy and more resilient assets. Today, numerous countries reap the benefits of the energy transformation, but others have been unable to adjust fast enough.

Climate change has disrupted global trade significantly over the past decade. The energy transition has reduced trade linked to fossil fuels while increasing trade linked to new energy products such as hydrogen, high-capacitance batteries and green steel. Climate impacts have disrupted supply chains, markets, customers and facilities. Most global trade is still carried by sea and handled in ports, but the combination of sea-level rise and increasingly intensive storms have closed them, often for months.

Less developed countries have been hit the hardest by climate hazards. Lack of capacity and ineffective government responses to disasters have amplified public discontent over growing inequality, entrenched corruption, lack of government services, and weak institutions of governance. Both governments and their detractors are using digital disinformation to pursue their agendas, with further polarisation often the result.

It isn’t surprising that civil society, separatist movements, terrorism and organised crime have increased in less developed nations, as non-state actors move into the spaces abandoned by government. It was surprising, however, how rapidly those non-state actors developed a regional and global presence. The audacity and effectiveness of the 2033 Summer of Terror attacks across Southeast Asia and elsewhere revealed that those groups are now integrated and operating transnationally.

It’s encouraging that outside powers, when they aren’t internally preoccupied with domestic climate-driven disasters, have continued to provide disaster relief and other humanitarian assistance to countries struggling with climate change. Less encouraging is that the instability in those places has also created opportunities for great-power competition and intervention. This year’s exchange of fire between American and Chinese naval vessels in the South China Sea, the fourth in less than a decade, demonstrated how strategic competition, opportunism, alliance commitments, digital disinformation and miscalculation can contribute to the outbreak of conflict.

The past few years have again confirmed that the Indo-Pacific region, where over half of the earth’s population resides, is highly exposed to climate and other hazards. In Indonesia, for example, the sea level has risen at the fastest rate globally for decades. What was in 2020 a 1-in-100-year extreme flood is now an annual event in many parts of the country, regularly forcing large proportions of Indonesia’s 310 million people to move. Most remain within Indonesia’s borders, but some join the tens of millions of similarly displaced people across the region seeking refuge in other countries. Last year, one Pacific island country relocated its entire population to Australia.

Much of South Asia and Southeast Asia is highly exposed to El Niño and La Niña events. Both phenomena have become more severe. The current La Niña is intensifying, causing record flooding in places that are still recovering from the extreme heat, drought and food security shocks from last year’s El Niño and the devastating 2032 crisis. Humanitarian assistance from outside the region is unlikely, given that another atmospheric blocking event linked to the disrupted jet stream has emerged. It’s causing record-setting extreme heat and fires across North America and much of Europe. The same blocking event is simultaneously affecting the South Asian subtropical monsoon, triggering extreme flooding in parts of the subregion that might otherwise have escaped La Niña–driven inundation.

Regional institutions and organisations, such as ASEAN, the Pacific Islands Forum and the multilateral development banks, have scaled up their efforts over the past two decades to meet the various economic, political, social, security and humanitarian challenges arising from the warming climate. In the Pacific, for example, they’ve been instrumental in building climate resilience and relocating island communities displaced by the rising sea and stronger cyclones. But their efforts are now more typically overwhelmed by the scale of the climate hazards and their cascading impacts.

The latest scientific assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that the rapid transition to renewables and recent more ambitious political action are likely to keep warming below 2.5°C, thereby diminishing the risk of crossing additional dangerous climate thresholds.

The world’s responsibility to help South Asia in its Covid-19 crisis

Almost a quarter of humanity lives on the Indian subcontinent. That fact is easily forgotten elsewhere, as world leaders focus on combating outbreaks of Covid-19 and its new variants in their own countries. But when our descendants pass judgement on this moment in history, they won’t remember just the lockdowns, face masks and vaccination programs. They will also remember India and its neighbours.

They will remember how human remains have been found bloated and decomposing on the banks of the sacred River Ganges; how bodies had to be left in the heat outside crematoriums, owing to a lack of wood for funerary pyres. They will remember how hospitals ran low on oxygen, medication and beds, while people lined up outside emergency departments and clinics begging for someone to save their loved ones.

All of this will be seared in memory and history. Beyond inflicting agony on the sick, the coronavirus outbreak in the world’s most populous democracy is now robbing victims of their dignity in death, too.

At the Asia Society, we hear accounts almost daily from friends and colleagues who have lost their relatives. According to one member of our Asia 21 Young Leaders network, ‘An uncle passed away last evening. Another the day before. A friend’s father last week. Everyone I know has someone they’ve lost.’

There are already too many of these stories, and now this tragedy is spilling across India’s borders. In Nepal, where one out of every two citizens is testing positive for the virus, the hardship is multiplied by the fact that India is the country’s principal supplier of vaccines and oxygen, and that supply line is now shut down.

While these up-close images reveal an unfolding humanitarian calamity, the 30,000-foot perspective shows that things will only worsen as this deadly wave expands unchecked to rural areas of the subcontinent, where essential medical facilities are even scarcer. As fellow members of the human family, and as citizens of democracies that stand up for each other when help is required, we all need to act—governments, businesses and private citizens. The quicker we do, the more lives we might save.

Helping South Asia is not only the right thing to do; it is also in our own self-interest. The rampant spread of the virus anywhere can create more deadly variants that threaten all of us. So, what can be done?

Start with vaccination: we need to put shots into at least a billion arms as fast as possible. To date, fewer than 11% of citizens in each South Asian country (with the exception of Bhutan) have received at least one vaccine dose, according to Our World in Data. We must pull new levers to speed things up.

To that end, the rest of the world should join the United States and more than 100 other countries in backing a temporary World Trade Organization waiver of intellectual-property protections on vaccines. While not a silver bullet, this initiative, coupled with the removal of restrictions on related supplies and equipment, would help India’s sizable pharmaceutical industry to increase production, thereby reducing vaccine shortages domestically and in the region.

It is also incumbent on countries with excess vaccine supplies—particularly those in the developed world—to share the wealth. Earlier in the pandemic, India set an example by sending more than 66 million doses of vaccines to 95 countries around the world when it could have vaccinated its own people more rapidly. It is time to return the favour.

Equally important, more must be done to counter the scourge of misinformation. In an environment where fraudulent miracle cures are being propagated widely on social media, the world should help fund and support vaccine-literacy programs. Campaigns to increase the acceptance of masks, vaccines, social distancing and other measures are needed, especially in rural parts of the subcontinent, where complex sociocultural factors and linguistic diversity pose additional challenges.

Finally, there is the problem of insufficient oxygen—canisters, concentrators and tankers to transport them. Of all the requests we have heard from our friends in the region, the plea for more oxygen has been the most urgent. India has only around 1,600 cryogenic tankers capable of transporting oxygen from production facilities to hospitals. And that includes the tankers it already supplied to Nepal, which itself has such a paucity of oxygen canisters that it is now asking mountaineers returning from Mount Everest to donate their empty ones.

Shipping cryogenic tankers and oxygen canisters to South Asia will help save the lives of those threatened by the shortage, rather than by Covid-19 itself. Here, developed countries with ample production capacity can help in ways that local nongovernmental organisations cannot—and help they must.

Ultimately, this pandemic, and the legacy of our global response, belongs to all of us. Each generation is confronted by challenges great and small, and this one is ours. Unless we can truly protect people everywhere by arresting the virus and slowing its mutations, we may find ourselves facing the prospect of a permanent pandemic.

Editors’ picks for 2020: ‘Beyond the pandemic’

Originally published 7 April 2020.

The Australian government is properly focused on managing the domestic effects of Covid-19. But we must also think about a changing external environment.

Middle powers are not generally prime movers in major international shifts, tending rather to react to changes wrought by others. But that is no reason for policy stasis.

The government is right in thinking in the short term about our Pacific neighbours and Timor-Leste. As the major external power, we have a moral requirement to assist these countries, as well as a strategic interest is doing so.

We would, however, be making a mistake if we focused our resources solely in the immediate neighbourhood at the expense of Southeast Asia—above all, Indonesia—claiming that domestic imperatives preclude help.

During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Prime Minister John Howard provided $1 billion in standby credits to Indonesia. After the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, he also decided that Australia should give $1 billion in a recovery package to that country.

Howard was right. The stability of Southeast Asia, and particularly Indonesia, is a paramount Australian national interest.

Indonesia is now facing a crisis of the same dimension as those of 1997 and 2004–05. Prime Minister Scott Morrison should respond with the same far-sightedness and seek to have others—notably Japan, South Korea and the United States—act similarly.

Doubtless, there will be little appetite in government for such actions in Southeast Asia.

But even were we commit an additional $4 billion to both the South Pacific and Southeast Asia over two years in both grants and soft loans, in ballpark terms that would still be less than 2% of what we have committed domestically to counter Covid-19 so far and about the same in real terms as the sum of our two earlier emergency commitments to Indonesia alone. If the Morrison government, like Howard’s before it, were to explain its reasoning in terms of the Australian national interest, it is a fair bet that Australians would accept it.

Looking to the medium term, there’s a human tendency in times of crisis to see everything changing. Not so. We still need to trade and invest. Military tensions will continue in Europe and the South China Sea. International institutions will not vanish. People will worry about climate change.

But the adages that history accelerates in times of crisis have validity. American soft power, already squandered under Trump, has ebbed ferociously in recent weeks. The divisions between China and the United States have deepened.

The global trend towards nationalism has intensified. The relevance of international institutions is increasingly questioned. What have the G7 and G20 done? What has happened to the UN Security Council?

Australia must recognise, not just intellectually but emotionally, that our US security shield is not enough.

American resilience has been underestimated in the past and could be again. Nonetheless, we have seriously to think beyond our security blanket of a dominant US presence in the region and more towards common regional approaches to constrain and balance China. This is no easy task given the different interests of the main players and the internal dynamics of some of them, such as India. But we have to make that adjustment in our strategic thinking.

And weak multilateral structures are not a reason to avoid multilateralism. Covid-19 should not be allowed further to weaken multilateral institutions, but rather must stimulate efforts to repair them.

While Australians rightly decry the sclerotic nature of many multilateral institutions, we should remember that small and middle powers need rules more than big ones. We particularly need a good trading system. We should as a national priority work where we have most influence, namely with like-minded democracies and regional friends, to repair the authority of global and regional institutions, the better to serve the post-Covid-19 world.

Few serious thinkers risk forecasting where Covid-19 will leave us in the longer term—say, a decade hence. As former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai is alleged (inaccurately) to have said on the impact of the French Revolution, ‘It is too early to tell.’

When the Soviet Union collapsed, we didn’t foresee the rise of Vladimir Putin. The pundits didn’t guess that the global financial crisis presaged a Donald Trump presidency or Brexit. Americans didn’t imagine that 20 years after 9/11, their troops would still be in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the Covid-19 crisis will have its own unique chain reaction, probably a massive one. The world will be different. If we as a nation are to deal effectively with the coming global changes, our leadership will have to put the same policy grunt, political energy and resources into our international dealings as into our domestic challenges.

Ugly stability: our nuclear future

Back in the late 1990s, Ashley Tellis characterised South Asia’s nuclear balance as ‘ugly stability’—a condition, he believed, that would probably last for a decade and perhaps longer.

This peculiar form of stability derives substantially from the inability of both India and Pakistan to attain what may be desired political objectives through war. Consequently, premeditated conventional conflicts will remain absent for some time to come, though security competition will continue through subconventional violence waged with varying levels of intensity … [T]his stability will be “ugly” in that it entails a relatively high degree of subconventional violence on at least one side, perhaps both.

So, 2019’s a long way from the late 1990s, but the concept of ugly stability is still applicable to South Asia. Indeed, in its broad dimensions, it seems to be increasingly relevant to the future global nuclear order as well.

Many readers might find that unsettling, especially those who like their nuclear orders finely-wrought, as a managed system of deterrence interlinked with a managed system of abstinence, for example. Western publics typically undervalue deterrence and overvalue arms control agreements, in part because they see those agreements as the principal barrier to nuclear war. Hence their anxiety about disruption in the arms-control world. And, because most Western states are democracies, that anxiety translates into pressure on Western governments to ‘fix’ problems in nuclear arms control, even when those problems aren’t theirs to fix.

That view’s wrong, of course. Yes, arms control agreements bring a level of detail and reassurance to nuclear relationships. And they might properly be seen as early-warning indicators of looming difficulties in those relationships—mainly the US–Russia nuclear relationship, because that’s the foundation for much of the current arms control architecture. Still, it isn’t the management of nuclear deterrence that’s the principal barrier to war, but deterrence itself. Similarly, it isn’t the management of nuclear abstinence that stops proliferation, but abstinence itself—for most states, the simple judgement that proliferation isn’t in their interests.

When managed stability falters, the result isn’t unmanaged instability. Rather, it might be better described as unmanaged stability—or what Tellis would call ugly stability. And ugly stability has a value of its own: it works when other systems don’t. The South Asian nuclear balance doesn’t work by carefully-measured arms control agreements. Its ‘stability’ derives from other factors, including: each side’s constrained political objectives; the absence of easy, quick, conventional military options; the implausibility of successful nuclear decapitation strategies; the expected horror of actual nuclear conflict.

For a world that seems to be witnessing the formal demise of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and—perhaps—the early onset of a post-arms-control era, there’s a measure of comfort to be found in ugly stability. It underlines the fact that nuclear deterrence, at its core, isn’t a carefully-crafted bargain but a swirl of fear and uncertainty about the imminent prospect of large-scale, escalating, and uncapped destruction.

True, the measure of comfort to be found in ugly stability isn’t great. India and Pakistan have made the best of the condition to keep the subcontinent safe for over a quarter of a century. But events over recent weeks have helped to underline the fact that the crude lumpiness of nuclear deterrence sometimes makes for difficult signalling. Moreover, context matters. Indian Prime Minister Modi’s in the middle of an election campaign, making bargaining and accommodation even more challenging than usual. His chest-thumping after India’s ‘surgical strikes’ in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir in response to an attack on India’s military base in Uri in 2016 made it essential for him to authorise a more robust retaliation after the terrorist attack in Pulwama in February this year. Back then, Islamabad used plausible deniability to refute India’s claims of having entered Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, thereby avoiding the need to respond. This time around, however, Pakistan’s newly-elected prime minister, Imran Khan, had to be seen to be acting, especially given the fact that India had conducted air strikes within undisputed Pakistani territory.

In an age of social media and 24/7 news channels, it’s harder to control messaging—a fact that’s been underlined by recent events. Both India and Pakistan were seeking a way out of the crisis but were boxed in by public expectations and past rhetoric. Ultimately, both fed their own narratives of victory to their citizens and stepped back from their escalation options. The ugliness of the relationship persists—in continuing ceasefire violations, among other things—but stability prevails.

So we’re not arguing that ugly stability is an ideal condition upon which to base the long-term future of the global nuclear order. Rather, it’s a safety net that adds a layer of security to nuclear balances when the high-wire competitors over-reach. And because of that safety net, we should be less nervous about either a fraying of the rope, or the limited skills of the trapeze artists.

A faltering of arms control does not automatically mean nuclear war is more likely. Similarly, an escalating strategic competition between the great powers does not mean that a return to nuclear arms racing, reminiscent of the early days of the Cold War, is inevitable. Even in a world without INF and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, nuclear-armed states are unlikely to see benefit in either nuclear war or arms racing.

The downside of ugly stability is that between safety net and hard ground there are few things that might break any further fall. Domestic political transformation might be one such thing: fans of Tom Clancy’s novel Red Storm Rising will remember that a quickening slide towards nuclear war is arrested by a military coup in the Soviet Union. International intervention might be another: a mixture of exhortation and coercive pressure might be sufficient to de-escalate a nuclear conflict.

But even in those conditions—where the nuclear threshold may have been crossed—the most effective barrier to escalation would still be nuclear deterrence itself. Fear and uncertainty, the animating principles of deterrence, rise steeply as the prospects of unconstrained war increase. Therein lies the greatest incentive for war termination.

The Counterterrorism Yearbook 2017: South Asia

Image courtesy of Flickr user Wings of Destiny Social Media Team.

South Asia in 2016 presented a mixed picture for counterterrorism. Excluding those in Afghanistan, fatalities from terrorist violence among all categories of victim—members of the public, security forces and, indeed, terrorists—are at their lowest levels in more than a decade. Civilian casualties have fallen every year since 2013, standing at 857 in 2016, around 6% of the decade’s peak of 14,196 in 2009. Progress has been most significant in Pakistan, in part owing to a years-long military offensive against Pakistani Taliban strongholds.

However, these relative gains have had limited overall impact: South Asia continues to have two of the five countries with the highest proportions of deaths from terrorism, and three of the top eight countries affected by terrorism. Analysis shows elevated levels of terrorism in the late 2000s, driven upwards by the Pakistani Taliban, falling thereafter and then showing another significant period of decline from 2013 to 2016. Despite national and international CT efforts, the Afghan Taliban have made substantial territorial gains across Afghanistan. Islamic State (IS) has continued to mount attacks and Pakistani terrorist groups escalated their attacks in India during this period.

An examination on the counterterrorism situation in South Asia drive five general conclusions about the region’s CT prognosis.

First, at the broadest level, terrorism in South Asia is declining, but is still at high levels and is changing in shape. Both al-Qaeda and IS have been placed under sustained and severe military pressure in Afghanistan, with the result that IS is shrinking and is now confined to a small geographical area. However, IS remains capable of capitalising on the weakness and fragmentation of larger insurgent groups both in Afghanistan and Pakistan. There’s a threat of sectarian terrorism from IS and local groups and partnerships between the two groups in Pakistan. Existing counterterrorism measures have impacted the Pakistani Taliban hard, but are failing to prevent mass-casualty and sectarian attacks.

Second, South Asian CT policy is especially challenging because of state sponsorship of terrorist groups, notably by Pakistan. Larger terrorist acts are consequently seen by regional countries as acts of war, and it’s harder to observe, disrupt and degrade groups being sheltered on foreign soil. The reinvigoration of JeM, the continued activity of LeT, mass protest and unrest in Kashmir, and India’s new willingness to conduct public strikes over the LoC point to significant risks of conflict in the absence of meaningful, sustained and visible actions by Pakistan against those proxy forces. Pakistan has intensified its claims that India and Afghanistan sponsor Islamist, nationalist and ethnic armed groups within Pakistan. Although Afghanistan has in the past engaged with and tolerated elements of the Pakistani Taliban on its soil, the evidence for Pakistan’s sweeping claims remains very limited. However, such accusations are likely to grow in significance over 2017 as regional tensions grow and as New Delhi seeks to apply diplomatic pressure on Islamabad.

Third, the most important shift in regional counterterrorism in 2016 was India’s willingness to conduct publicly announced cross-border military raids. While such raids have occurred in the past, their public avowal increases popular support for this type of action and creates greater escalatory pressures. Whether the raids have a deterrent effect on the Pakistan Army’s support for terrorist groups can only be judged some time into 2017, particularly as a new Pakistan Army chief settles into office. India will continue to place CT at the heart of its diplomacy and military preparedness, not least as important state-level elections across the country raise the stakes for Indian politicians.

Fourth, counterterrorism policy in South Asia continues to be highly politicised, and civil society groups claim that counterterrorism legislation and anti-terrorism forces are used to curb legitimate political activity. Those concerns have been greatest in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, although India has also used broad legislation to target dissent on the issue of Kashmir. That’s in part a function of highly contentious politics, in which the rules of the political game aren’t settled and incumbents sometimes use state institutions to increase the barriers to entry for opponents. At the international level, strategic rivalries also politicise counterterrorism, as seen with China’s repeated efforts through 2016 to shield Pakistan-based terrorists from designation at the UN.

Fifth, South Asia is characterised by limited state capacity in law enforcement, intelligence and broader national security. That’s most evident during terrorist attacks, when poor standards of defensive and offensive equipment, low preparedness and poor management and oversight have led to incidents being more prolonged and destructive than might otherwise have been the case. Even India, which is the wealthiest South Asian nation and has undertaken significant institutional improvements since the 2008 Mumbai attacks, has had uneven operational responses to attacks in and around Kashmir over 2015 and 2016.

In Pakistan’s case, during the October 2016 Quetta attack, the attackers were able to breach a mud wall at the police academy, which had not been hardened despite two previous attacks on the same site. Other institutional failings include poor investigative techniques, limited cooperation between competing intelligence and security agencies and poor border security, which in turn facilitates the flow of people, arms and illicit substances in a trade that may benefit terrorist organisations. Addressing these failings and building resilience is likely to be one of the most effective forms of counterterrorism that could be pursued.