Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India, and Japan

Preface

U.S. President Barack Obama must face up to the qualitative reordering of power under way in the Asia-Pacific, with tectonic shifts challenging strategic stability. The impact of such shifts on U.S. foreign policy will be accentuated by America’s own challenges, including economic troubles and the two separate wars overseas. Such challenges dictate greater U.S.-China cooperation to ensure both continued large Chinese capital inflows and Beijing’s political support on contentious issues ranging from North Korea and Burma to Pakistan and Iran. Such calculations, in turn, are likely to have a bearing on America’s dual role in Asia — ‘as a resident power, and as the straddle power across the Asia-Pacific’, to quote Defence Secretary Robert Gates.

Asia has come a long way since the creation of two Koreas, two Chinas, two Vietnams and India’s partition. It has risen dramatically as the world’s main creditor and economic locomotive. The ongoing global power shifts indeed are primarily linked to Asia’s phenomenal economic rise, the speed and scale of which has no parallel in world history. How fast Asia has come up can be gauged from the 1968 book, Asian Drama: An Inquiry Into the Poverty of Nations, by Swedish economist and Nobel laureate Gunnar Myrdal, who bemoaned the manner impoverishment, population pressures and resource constraints were weighing down Asia. With the story of endemic poverty turning into a tale of spreading prosperity, today’s Asian drama is very different.

Even so, Asia faces complex security, energy, and developmental challenges in this era of globalization and greater interstate competition. It has to cope with entrenched territorial and maritime disputes, sharpening competition over scarce resources, improved military capabilities, increasingly fervent nationalism and the spread of religious extremism. Diverse trans-border trends — from nuclear proliferation and terrorism, to illicit refugee flows and human trafficking — add to the challenges. At a time when several Asian countries are arming themselves at a fast pace, some disputes in Asia seem intractable and indeed conflict-prone. But Asia also is becoming more interdependent through trade, investment, technology and tourism. The economic renaissance has been accompanied by a growing international recognition of Asia’s soft power, as symbolized by its arts, fashion and cuisine.

With the world’s fastest-growing markets, fastest-rising military expenditures and most-volatile hot spots, a resurgent Asia today holds the key to the future global order. Central to this continent’s own future is the strategic triangle made up of the largest Asian economic and military powers — China, India and Japan. Not since Japan rose to world-power status during the reign of the Meiji Emperor in the second half of the 19th century has another non-Western power emerged with such potential to alter the world order as China today. As the 2009 assessment by the U.S. intelligence community predicted, China stands to more profoundly affect global geopolitics than any other country. China’s ascent, however, is dividing Asia, not bringing Asian states closer. A strong China, a strong Japan and a strong India need to move beyond historical legacies and find ways to reconcile their interests in order to peacefully coexist and achieve greater prosperity.

Actually, never before in history have China, India and Japan been strong at the same time. Despite the international attention on the two demographic titans, China and India, Japan still has a nearly $5-trillion economy, impressive high-technology skills and Asia’s largest navy. Battered by its worst recession in post-war history, Japan, however, is losing its status as the world’s second-largest economy to China. China already has overtaken Japan in having the world’s biggest trade surplus and foreign-currency reserves, although its per-capita income still is less than a tenth that in Japan. Yet, for the foreseeable future, Japan will stay a strong nation. Against that background, ensuring that the Japan-China and China-India competition does not slide into strategic conflict remains a key challenge.

The United States, for its part, will remain a key player in Asia through its security arrangements and other strategic ties with an array of regional states. Its policies and actions will continue to have an important influence on the strategic calculus of the major Asian actors. The central U.S. interest in the Asia-Pacific still centres on a stable balance of power. During the first half of the Cold War, the United States chose to maintain a balance by forging security alliances with Japan and South Korea and also by keeping forward bases in Asia. By the time the Cold War entered the second phase, America’s ‘ping-pong diplomacy’ led to the 1972 ‘opening’ with Beijing, which was designed to reinforce the balance by employing a newly assertive, nuclear-armed China to countervail Soviet power in the Asia-Pacific region. ‘The effect was to change the Cold War’s global chessboard — to the disadvantage of the Soviet Union’, according to Zbigniew Brzezmski. ‘Indirectly, the normalization facilitated Chairman Deng Xiaoping’s decision to undertake a comprehensive economic reform. China’s growth would have been much harder without the expansion in U. S.-Chinese trade and financial relations that followed normalization’.

Now, according to the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defence Review Report, America’s interests centre on ‘maintaining a stable balance’ in ‘the East Asian littoral’, given the likelihood that ‘a military competitor with a formidable base will emerge in the region’ — an allusion to China. Washington would not want Japan or India to kowtow to a China seeking to supplant the United States as the leading force in Asia. But America also would not want to see the rise of a combative India or Japan. For example, an overt Japan-China conflict in the East China Sea over the competing maritime and gas-exploration claims would compel Washington to side with Tokyo or risk wrecking the U.S.-Japanese security relationship, centred on U.S. forward deployment on Japanese soil. Similarly, India-China tensions or border skirmishes over the Himalayan territorial disputes would run counter to the U.S. interest to build closer ties with both sides and not to side with New Delhi. America’s interests in Asia actually lie in hedging its own future options while balancing the various powers.

To be sure, the emergence of China as a global player with rising heft is not only transforming the geopolitical landscape in the Asia-Pacific, but also spurring greater American reliance on Beijing for financial and political support. But as the U.S.-China relationship acquires a wider and deeper base in the coming years, the strains in some of America’s existing military or strategic partnerships could become pronounced. In fact, for the first time, building a stronger cooperative relationship with China is taking precedence in U. S. policy over the sale of advanced weaponry to Asian allies, lest the transfer of offensive arms raise Beijing’s hackles. As a result, doubts could grow in Japan and Taiwan, for example, over the reliability of Washington’s commitment to their security.

In the near term, rising Chinese assertiveness has had the unintended effect of persuading Japan to jettison its doubts about U.S. security commitments and to reinvigorate its military relationship with Washington. In the long run, however, Tokyo may seek to ease its security dependency on the United States. In recent years, the United States has worked hard to co-opt India in a soft alliance shorn of treaty obligations. But New Delhi is unlikely to get much comfort on China or Pakistan from American policy. In that light, the Indian ardour in recent years for closer defence ties with America could gradually give way to more sobering reality, even as U.S.-India ties continue to grow. By contrast, Australia’s cosy relationship with distant China, especially under the Mandarin-speaking prime minister, Kevin Rudd, may mesh with the possible trajectory of U.S.-China ties. What Canberra pursues today — to balance its relations with Tokyo and Beijing — Washington could begin doing before long.

China’s own future, however, remains more uncertain than ever, despite its dramatic rise. It faces a worrisome paradox: Because of an opaque, repressive political system, the more it globalizes, the more vulnerable it becomes internally. At the core of its challenges is how to make a political soft landing. Although China has come a long way since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, with its citizens now enjoying property rights, the freedom to travel overseas and other rights that were unthinkable a generation ago, political power still rests with the same party and system responsible for the death of tens of millions of Chinese during the so-called Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution and other state-induced disasters. The greatest genocide in modern world history was not the Holocaust but the Great Leap Forward, a misguided charge toward industrialization that left 36 million people dead, according to Tombstone, a recent book by longtime Chinese communist Yang Jisheng.

Although China has moved from being a totalitarian state to being an authoritarian state, some things haven’t changed since the Mao Zedong years. Some other things have changed for the worse, such as the whipping up of ultra-nationalism and turning that into the legitimating credo of continued communist rule. Attempts to bend reality to the illusions the state propagates through information control and online censors actually risk turning China into a modern-day Potemkin state. China’s internal problems — best symbolized by the 2008 Tibetan uprising, the 2009 Uighur revolt and spreading peasant discontent — won’t go away unless Beijing stops imposing cultural and political homogeneity and makes the transition to a more-open society.

Internationally, China’s trajectory will depend on how its neighbours and other players like the United States manage its growing power. Such management — independently and in partnership — will determine if China stays on the positive side of the ledger, without its power sliding into arrogance. Against this background, the U.S.-China relationship — despite a deepening symbiosis — is likely to remain uneasy, but overt competition or confrontation suits neither side. For the United States, China’s rising power actually helps validate American forward military deployments in the Asian theatre. It also helps America to keep existing allies and to search for new ones.

There are many books on the tangled China-India and China-Japan relationships. But Asian Juggernaut is the first wide-ranging study that examines Asia in totality, employing the broader framework to focus on the critical China-India-Japan strategic triangle. In that sense, it is a pioneering study, dissecting Asia’s major challenges. Asia may be coalescing economically, but politically it remains deeply divided, with its major powers at loggerheads. The strategic dissonance between China and Japan and the underlying rivalry between China and India can hardly contribute to the building of a stable, secure Asia. Efforts to develop homogeny in Asia constantly run into the unresolved issue of hegemony. While the community in Europe was built among democracies, the political systems in Asia are so varied and some even so opaque that building interstate trust is not easy. In Europe, the bloody wars of the past century have made armed conflict unthinkable today. But in Asia, the wars of the past, such as China’s wars with India and Vietnam, failed to resolve disputes. And while Europe has built institutions to underpin peace, Asia has yet to begin that process in earnest. In fact, in the absence of real institutions in Asia, the United States has sought to keep the peace.

Asian Juggernaut examines ways Asia can build cooperative approaches to tackle its security, energy, territorial, environmental, developmental and history challenges. Given Asia’s fundamental diversity and weak institutional arrangements, the book offers policy-oriented ideas on developing wider cooperation by building upon existing bilateral and regional understandings and mechanisms. This analysis of Asia’s cooperative future and pivotal role is intended for policy analysts, social scientists, military professionals, security experts, journalists, university students and others interested in knowing where Asia is headed.

Brahma Chellaney

Chapter 1

The Asian Renaissance

WITH THE CENTRE OF GRAVITY IN WORLD AFFAIRS moving to a dynamic and thriving Asia, this continent’s significance in international relations is beginning to rival that of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. More than half of the global population lives in Asia, a rapidly changing region that has come up dramatically in less than a quarter century. At the same time, the problems that confront Asia are evident from just one piece of information — the continent accounts for three-quarters of all terrorism casualties worldwide, placing it at the centre of the global war on terror.

Economically and politically, Asia appears poised to determine the new world order. With the world’s fastest-growing markets, fastest-rising military expenditures and most serious hotspots (including the epicentre of international terrorism), Asia holds the key to the future global order.

The Asian renaissance is underscored by the high gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates of Asian states. Such rapid growth is likely to continue in large parts of Asia in the coming years. In fact, Asia is expected to remain the world’s economic locomotive for the next couple of decades or more, with its larger economies increasingly scouring the world for energy and raw materials to feed their growth. The Asia-driven energy and resource competition has sharpened the political dynamics of the global energy markets. A twenty-first-century version of an energy-related Great Game is already on, although in more subtle ways than the colonial-era hunt for raw materials and other resources.

The Cold War produced two Koreas, two Chinas and two Vietnams. Today, with growing competition among the major Asian players and the rise of regional powers, Asia faces new challenges in an era of globalization, including how to move beyond historical legacies and tap the continent’s dynamism and growth for greater security and prosperity. The colossal shift in global geopolitics presents an opportunity for Asia as well as tests its ability to assume a central role in international relations.

Broadly, Asia confronts two contradictory trends. On one side are the territorial and maritime disputes, competition over scarce resources, improved military capabilities and increasingly fervent nationalism that threaten to imperil security and growing prosperity. On the other side is the rising Asian interdependence through trade and investment, communications, technology and tourism. Asia also has to cope with resilient jingoism, protectionism and diverse kinds of negative transborder influences, including terrorism, subversion and illegal migration.

Starting with Japan’s economic success, followed by the emergence of other continental tigers and now the rise of China and India, a resurgent Asia has been bouncing back from its historical decline. That decline began in the period after the nineteenth century, when Asia dropped behind Europe during the Industrial Revolution. The Asian Development Bank has estimated that Asia, after making up three-fifths of the world’s GDP at the beginning of the industrial age in 1820, saw its stake decline to one-fifth in 1940, before dramatic economy recovery has helped bring it up to two-fifths today. By 2025, according to the same estimation, Asia might return to its 1820 position in terms of world product.

Simultaneously, with its rapid economic growth, Asia’s arts, fashion and cuisine are now regaining international recognition. Even Japan’s giant economy has finally rumbled back from the worst recession since the end of World War II. Asia as a whole is on the rise. As home to several information-technology giants, Asia, with its rising soft- and hard-power resources, is likely to help shape the future of globalization.

Indeed, the ascent of Asia, as symbolized by China, India and Japan, has in some quarters conjured up a perceived threat to Western pastures. This found an echo in a State of the Union address of then U.S. President George W. Bush, who said: ‘In a dynamic world economy, we are seeing new competitors, like China and India, and this creates uncertainty, which makes it easier to feed people’s fears. So we’re seeing some old temptations return. Protectionists want to escape competition, pretending that we can keep our high standard of living while walling off our economy. Others say that the government needs to take a larger role in directing the economy, centralizing more power in Washington and increasing taxes’.¹ The reality is that the balance of economic power in the world has been changing recurrently in history, and will continue to do so.

The new international clout of Asia can be seen not only from China’s long streak of fast economic growth but also from the fact that Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Southeast Asia alone hold $2.5 trillion in Western debt. China in particular inspires both admiration and unease. As a U.S. national-security strategy report put it, ‘China encapsulates Asia’s dramatic economic successes, but China’s transition remains incomplete. In one generation, China has gone from poverty and isolation to growing integration into the international economic system. China once opposed global institutions; today it is a permanent member of the UNSC (United Nations Security Council) and the WTO (World Trade Organization)’.² The report added: ‘China’s leaders must realize, however, that they cannot stay on this peaceful path while holding on to old ways of thinking and acting that exacerbate concerns throughout the region and the world. These old ways include: Continuing China’s military expansion in a nontransparent way’.

The opportunities and challenges faced by Asia need to be seen in the context of the larger global trends and developments. Internationally, conflict remains rife, and only the forms and dimensions of conflict have changed,³ as evidenced by the rise of both intrastate strife and unconventional aggression in the form of terrorism.⁴ Interstate war, however, is unlikely to disappear as a feature of international relations. In fact, ‘the only thing more common than predictions about the end of war has been war itself’.⁵

Equally significant is the manner momentous international events continue to be shaped by changes in political geography. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the crumbling of Yugoslavia and the separation of East Timor from Indonesia have had far-reaching ramifications. Despite the sanctity attached to existing interstate frontiers and the prevailing international norms against redrawing borders in blood, the desire of some states to extend their frontiers to territories they covet is a major cause of regional tensions. Examples in Asia of such irredentism include China’s claims over Taiwan and India’s Arunachal Pradesh and Pakistan’s belligerence on Kashmir. Export of terror as an instrument of state policy is also tied to regional ambitions.

Centre of Transnational Terrorism

The scourge of transnational terrorism in the twenty-first century is both a response to, and derives assistance from, rapid technological change. Terrorism, drawing sustenance from murderous ideologies, seeks to get round the military-deterrent capabilities of target-states by employing unconventional means. The growing gap between the technologically advanced and backward nations also inspires terrorists to take recourse to unconventional methods in an asymmetrical situation.

The rise of extremism in totalitarian Muslim states is linked not only to the lack of avenues for free expression and debate but also to the sense of disillusionment over the widening technology gap between Islamic states and the rest of the world. The oil boom of the 1970s created an ‘illusion that power had come to the Islamic world’.⁶ Subsequent events have shown that despite their huge oil revenues, the oil-exporting Muslim states from West Asia to Southeast Asia face an increasing ‘knowledge gap’ with the West.⁷ The internal dynamics in Islamic states — many trapped in a cauldron of political tyranny, religious bigotry and social tensions — have helped spur militancy. What the world is witnessing, according to Wafa Sultan, a Syrian-American psychiatrist, is not a clash of religions or civilizations, but a battle between modernity and barbarism — a battle that the forces of violent, reactionary Islam are destined to lose.⁸ It is more a clash about civilization than a clash between civilizations.

Technological forces today are playing a greater role in shaping geopolitics than at any other time in history. In the same way textiles, railways and coal built up the power and wealth of some countries after the advent of the Industrial Revolution, information technology is at the centre of power and force today.⁹ Real military prowess and dominance over the battlefield are now derived from the ability of a great power like the United States to collate, process, amalgamate and harness militarily useful information from space-based surveillance, high-speed computers and other instruments of the information age.

The unprecedented pace of technological progress can be seen from the fact that the globe has amassed more scientific knowledge after World War II than was generated in the previous 5000 years. The swiftest advances in technology, however, have been occurring since the late 1980s with the advent of the information age, with scientific information now increasing twofold about every five years.¹⁰ Asia has impressive information-technology resources, and there is every possibility that by 2050, the global economy will be led, in addition to the United States, by Asia’s three behemoths — China, India and Japan.

In the face of continual technological revolution, the tolerance for rapid change is one important characteristic distinguishing the successful cultures from the no-so-successful ones. Insular, conservative, inward-looking societies are less competent to rapidly exploit or absorb new innovations. A liberal culture and professional work ethics are certainly an advantage.

The more the world changes, however, the more it remains the same in some critical aspects. The information revolution and globalization have not changed the nature of international relations or the make-up of the international system, even as they have helped trigger fundamental changes in polity, economy and security. The rapid pace of technological change is itself a consequence of nations competing fiercely and seeking relative advantage in an international system based not on collective security but on national security. While state sovereignty remains paramount,¹¹ the principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of another state has come under open pressure as a result of internal wars, externally driven ideological battles and transborder challenges. State sponsorship or protection of terrorism makes this principle even more difficult to uphold.

As Asia illustrates, the rise of international terrorism is a reminder that the information age is both an integrating and a dividing force. Greater public awareness flowing out of the advances in information and communications technologies has encouraged individuals in many societies to search for their roots and more clearly define their identity. At a time of greater international fluidity and uncertainty,¹² the rise of religious orthodoxy, ethnic or localist affiliation, jingoism and even xenophobia in some societies in an era of supposed internationalism and a single ‘global village’ raises troubling questions about international peace and stability. So does the location of four-fifths of the world’s oil resources in politically troubled areas,¹³ especially when international competition for oil and other natural resources is sharpening as a consequence of the rapid economic growth in Asia.

Terrorism is a challenge that stares squarely at Asia, which is home to several failed or failing states. Asia, which already accounted for 75 per cent of all terrorism casualties worldwide by 2000,¹⁴ has been facing mounting terrorist and extremist violence in recent years. Growing terrorism carries the risk of economic disruption, besides threatening the freedoms and tolerant spirit of pluralistic societies. The challenges Asia faces are apparent from the fact that the epicentre of international terrorism is located in the Pakistan–Afghanistan belt. The U.S. State Department has diplomatically called South Asia ‘a central theatre of the global war on terrorism’,¹⁵ while Steven Hadley, the then U.S. national security adviser, characterized a nuclear, Talibanized, Sunni Pakistan as ‘both an ally in the war on terror and, in some sense, a site where the war is being carried about’.¹⁶

The U.S. occupation of Iraq made the world forget that the September 11, 2001, terrorist strikes in the United States happened not because of Iraq but because of the terrorist nurseries in the Pakistan–Afghanistan belt, some of which remain in business, especially in the northern and western parts of Pakistan. Pakistan remains a principal recruiting ground and logistical centre for global terrorists. As the Pakistani military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, acknowledged on July 21, 2005, in an address to the nation after the London subway bombings, ‘Wherever these extremist or terrorist incidents occur in the world, a direct or indirect connection is established with this country’.¹⁷ Ominously, Pakistan has emerged as a common thread in the investigations of most acts of international terrorism.

The global spread of the jihad culture is rooted in the Afghan war of the 1980s and the U.S. and Saudi funnelling of arms to the anti-Soviet guerrillas through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. To fight Soviet-style atheism, then U.S. President Ronald Reagan did not hesitate to use Islam in Afghanistan, just as he readily utilized the Catholic Church in his intense anti-Marxist campaign in Central America. Islam was employed to unite the Muslim world and spur the spirit of jihad against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Terrorism and the modern-day Frankensteins are the haunting byproducts of the war against atheism and communism that the West was supposed to have won.

The Afghan war veterans came to haunt the security of India, the West and several Muslim states. Many members of the Afghan war alumni returned to their homelands to wage terror campaigns against governments they viewed as tainted by Western influence. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s 1981 assassination was one of the first to be linked to such inspired terror. Large portions of the multibillion-dollar military aid to the anti-Soviet Afghan rebels by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was siphoned off by the conduit¹⁸ — the ISI — to ignite a bloody insurgency in Indian Kashmir from 1990 after the agency had failed to trigger an uprising in India’s Punjab state despite arming Sikh dissidents.

Against that background, draining the existing terrorism-breeding swamps in Asia will not be easy, given the way the culture of jihad is now deeply woven into the social fabric of certain communities. For instance, some of Pakistan’s 15,000 madrasas are not just seats of medieval theology but also schools imparting training in arms. What has made this incendiary radicalization so difficult to reverse is that it claims the imprimatur of religion.¹⁹ U.S. National Intelligence Director John Negroponte told the Senate Intelligence Committee in February 2006 that, ‘Pakistani militant groups represent a persistent threat to regional stability and U.S. interests in South Asia and the Near-East. They also pose a potential threat to our interests worldwide’.²⁰

To be sure, the entire expanse from West Asia to Southeast Asia is home to militant groups and wracked by terrorist, insurgent and separatist violence in a manner unmatched elsewhere in the world. This poses a serious challenge to international and Asian security. The radicalization of Muslims in Southeast and Central Asia, where Islamist groups such as the Jemaah Islamiyah, Mujahidin Kompak and Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan are becoming increasingly entrenched, demonstrates the ideological power of religious extremism. With the radicalization has come virulent anti-Americanism. The visceral hatred towards America has drawn sustenance from the polarizing effects of the Iraq conflict and potent symbols of abuse, such as the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the Guantánamo Bay detention centre in Cuba and the secret rendition, or transfer, of suspected terrorists to countries that have engaged in torture. In addition, there has been outrage over the massacre of Iraqi men, women and children by U.S. Marines in the Iraqi village of Haditha and the killings at American camps in Afghanistan.

The debacle in Iraq, and the civil war there resulting from America’s hubris, are likely to serve as a humbling lesson for future generations of U.S. leaders. In fact, by deceptively linking Iraq with Al Qaeda to justify its invasion, Washington created a self-fulfilling prophecy that now haunts it. More broadly, the U.S. invasion proved divisive in international relations, splitting the world and fracturing the global consensus to fight terror. Not only has the direction of the international war on terror been derailed, but also the global image of America has yet to fully recoup from the losses of the Bush years, according to a 2009 world-opinion poll²¹ In fact, despite the spreading jihad culture, President Barack Obama, with the stroke of his pen, effectively ended Bush’s global ‘war’ on terror as dramatically as his predecessor had initiated it.

Not calling it a war any longer but labelling it ‘an enduring struggle’ doesn’t change the ground realities. Secular, pluralistic states, depending on their location, have come under varying pressures from the forces of terror. Vulnerability to terrorist attacks is critically linked to a state’s external neighbourhood. A democracy geographically distant from the Muslim world tends to be less vulnerable to frequent terrorist strikes than a democracy proximate to Islamic states. The luxury of geography of the U.S. and Australia, for instance, contrasts starkly with the tyranny of geography of India and Israel. It is such realities that no change of lexicon can address.

Winning the war on global terror means winning the battle of ideas, for it is evil ideas that turn ordinary persons into murderers. But the battle of ideas can be won by example, not by force. Even the Cold War was won by the West not so much by military means as by spreading market capitalism to other regions that helped suck the lifeblood out of communism’s international appeal, making it incapable of meeting the widespread popular yearning in societies worldwide for a better life. Similarly, the way to keep further recruits away from the lure of jihad, which instils and then exploits an identity of victimhood, is not so much through military action as by ideas and example that confute the jihadist arguments.

Combined with the rise of terrorism in Asia is the emergence of failing or renegade states pursuing nuclear ambitions at a time when popular concerns in the world have increased over terrorist groups possibly getting hold of nuclear materials for blackmail, such as a radiological ‘dirty’ bomb. Although nuclear weapons will continue to play a ‘critical role’ because they possess ‘unique properties’, as the 2002 U.S. Nuclear Posture Review stated, few want a world bristling with weapons of mass destruction (WMD), especially in the hands of failing or outlaw states.

In the Asian context, there are three sets of pressing concerns. The first is the potential nexus between terrorism and WMD, a concern underscored by the ease with which for years the Abdul Qadeer Khan-led network in Pakistan sold nuclear blueprints and equipment to states like Iran, North Korea and Libya, with the active participation or connivance of the Pakistani military and intelligence.²² As a U.S.-trained nuclear scientist of Pakistani origin cautioned, ‘Whitewashing Pakistan’s official complicity in such activities … will only result in rogue proliferators sprouting up everywhere’.²³ Yet the entire blame was put on one individual, Khan.

It was Libya, seeking to re-enter the international mainstream, that first disclosed the existence of the Pakistani proliferation ring, but the United States took the credit by stage-managing an event in October 2003. With the help of documents Tripoli had turned over to Washington, a German cargo ship, BBC China, was intercepted en route to Libya with uranium-enrichment components routed through Dubai. The exposure prompted a self-protective Pakistani military and intelligence to make A.Q. Khan the scapegoat — a charade that saw General Musharraf in early 2004 pardon Khan and then place him under house detention to help shield him from international investigators.

Following the uncovering of the Pakistani proliferation ring, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1540, which obliges all states to establish domestic controls to ensure that WMD and related materials do not reach terrorists. The extent of the covert Pakistani nuclear dealings should have persuaded Islamabad’s Western allies to distance themselves from the military there and invest in the only real guarantee for Pakistan’s future as a stable, moderate state — its civil society. Instead, Washington went along with Musharraf’s charade because it traditionally has viewed the Pakistan military as central to U.S. strategic interests in that country.

The United States invaded Iraq to eliminate WMD that were not there but allowed terrorist-haven Pakistan, with real WMD, to escape international censure for