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The Rediff Special/ Brahma Chellaney

The Rogues Gallery

As the United States and India forge a new strategic relationship, one common threat they face is from renegade states exporting terrorism, weapons, narcotics and religious extremism. That the world's most powerful and most populous democracies are the joint target of some rogue players has been underlined by Afghanistan-based Saudi fugitive Osama Bin Laden's call for a jihad, or holy war, against the two.

Although the US state department has now dropped the term 'rogue states' and henceforth will call such nations 'states of concern,' roguish conduct endures in the world and there is nothing to suggest that regimes that murder, maim and menace the innocent are going to turn a new leaf. Export of terrorism, like classical power projection, has become an indispensable component of state power for some regimes.

Not only do such regimes sponsor terrorist groups, they can also act as willing tools of some great powers. In the emerging global order in which no single great power will be able to challenge America's pre-eminence, some major powers will have added incentive to employ outlaw states as levers against the sole superpower and potential peer competitors. Renegade states will be used to build leverage in negotiations and serve as conduits for illicit activity, including export of sensitive technologies.

China has already been showing that by roguishly employing North Korea and Pakistan for its strategic objectives -- as levers in negotiations with the United States and as instruments against regional rivals. Pakistan has been built up by China as a military counterweight against India and North Korea has been used against Japan. When things get too hot, as when Washington steps up its nonproliferation pressure, China begins to route missile technology and components to Pakistan via North Korea.

A Pentagon report says, 'The Chinese are proliferating on a consistent basis without technically breaking agreements with the United States.' However, recent direct missile transfers to Islamabad indicate Beijing's open disrespect for its nonproliferation commitments.

While the United States and India have initiated efforts to co-operate on counter-terrorism, the problem each faces from rogue actors is quite different.

The United States, showing that the only way to deal with nations that operate outside the realm of international law is through resolute unilateral and multilateral counteraction, has largely tamed all those it regarded as 'rogue states.' Libya has handed over for trial two suspects in the 1988 Pan Am bombing case. Iran's containment has helped bring to power reformists eager for rapprochement with Washington. Iraq has been brought to its knees, despite Saddam Hussein's occasional roar, after a decade of several sanctions and intermittent bombing. Cuba's Fidel Castro is a pale shadow of his former self.

North Korea has frozen its nuclear program, suspended missile tests and opened talks with Washington and Seoul. Even Sudan wants to come clean. Alleged roguish leaders are on the run from war crimes tribunals. President Slobadan Milosevic of Yugoslavia finds himself pushed against the wall after his indictment by the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague. It is thus no surprise that with no 'rogue state' left to openly threaten the US or Western interests, Washington has now formally dropped that term.

In contrast, India faces mounting threats to its security from rogue actors in its neighborhood, which bristles with authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. While democracy has spread to other regions, India finds itself surrounded by an arc of undemocratic states stretching from Afghanistan in the west to the world's largest autocracy, China, to Burma in the east. The despots arrayed against India are a formidable lot - the one-eyed Mullah Mohammad Omar of the Taliban, Pakistan's mealy-mouthed General Pervez Musharraf, the wooden-faced President Jiang Zemin of China, and Burma's drug-trafficking junta chief, General Than Shwe.

Before long, US interests are likely to be directly challenged by rogue players found in this arc around India. Elements from the Pakistan-Afghanistan belt have already been blamed for the powerful blasts outside the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-e-Salam, the truck bombing of American facilities in Saudi Arabia, the World Trade Center explosion in New York and the ambush-killing of two CIA officials at Langley. This belt, thriving on soaring profits from heroin trade, has turned into a vast swamp breeding, mosquito-like, international terrorists and narcotics traffickers. Burma could catch up in this sphere one day.

China was once a 'rogue state' until the Nixon-Kissinger 'opening' transformed its status. The present Leninist rulers in Beijing still engage in covert actions in breach of international law, as if the treaties they sign hold only public-relations value. That is most evident from their approach to treaties on weapons of mass destruction, and to the US-led Missile Technology Control Regime. Without formally joining the regime, Beijing pledged to adhere to the MTCR's original guidelines, but the commitment has fallen by the wayside in relation to Pakistan.

To this day, Beijing, through its nuclear transfers to Pakistan, continues to mock Article I of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Moreover, US officials have stated that China is not fully complying with its Biological Weapons Convention obligations. Such a sign-and-violate approach played a role in the US Senate's rejection of the nuclear test-ban treaty. China ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention only after it quietly disposed of its chemical-weapon stockpile, like surrogate Pakistan, instead of admitting (as India did) that it was holding some stocks.

India's security has been brought under increased pressure from rogue states and groups unable to openly challenge US or European interests. These players have turned their attention to safer, softer targets, at least for the time being.

North Korea now behaves responsibly towards the United States but continues to act irresponsibly by exporting missile items to Pakistan. The sanctions-hit Taliban regime in Kabul has pledged to Washington that it will keep a lid on bin Laden's activities and ensure that elements within its control do not export violence to the West. But the Taliban openly works against India's interests, exporting terrorists to Kashmir and providing safe passage out of Afghanistan to the hijackers of an Indian jetliner. China has cut off all missile assistance to Iran and Syria but made it loud and clear that 'Pakistan is our Israel.'

The roguish conduct India confronts is far graver than what the United States faced collectively from all its 'rogue states.' The two countries have also not been threatened by the same international rogues. Almost on a daily basis, Indians (including military men) fall prey to terrorists trained, armed and thrust into India by roguish forces.

Roguish elements clearly hold India's security hostage, while the threat from them to the United States has always been small and easily manageable. In fact, when the United States ran out of enemies post Cold War, it ingeniously employed the rogue states doctrine to conjure up various kinds of lurking threats, to protect its defence spending from deep cuts and to strengthen national export controls and the international nonproliferation regime. More recently, the same doctrine has come handy to justify theater and national missile defences, although the objectives of such defences are larger and farsighted.

The key difference with the United States is that India borders rogue states and thus is constantly at the receiving end. The situation in which India is placed is unique as two of the regional actors that engage in covert actions (singly and jointly) in breach of international law are armed with nuclear weapons. To Pakistan, nuclear weapons clearly are a shield for adventurism, as it showed in Kargil last year. To China, deception is a central (and natural) element of strategy, which precludes conventional or nuclear transparency.

The dangers of further adventurism from Pakistan are inherent in both the choices facing that 'failing state' today: To either keep sinking, or do something remarkable to reverse its international fortunes and re-ignite nationalism at home. No rogue would like to sink without attempting to take its rival down with it. That carries an ominous warning for India.

If roguish forces are to be properly disciplined and new threats to international security deterred, the United States and India have to join hands to fight these elements in the undemocratic arc of Asia. Sharing intelligence is important, so also the promotion of democratic groups. But the key point to remember is that unconventional threats can never be adequately deterred by conventional means alone.

The writer, a columnist and commentator on strategic affairs, is professor of security studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

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