Israel’s eastward march: arming India and stirring the Asian pot
Israel is selling its Phalcon Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS), one of the most advanced such aircraft in service, to India in a $1.1 billion deal that underlines the growing connectivity between two of the most explosive regions in the world and which could exacerbate tensions in both.
The sale is going ahead with the approval of the Bush administration and it is clear that, as has often happened in the past, Israel is helping the US as well as boosting its own position. India wants the Phalcon not just to boost its military capabilities offensive and defensive against its old rival Pakistan, but against an increasingly powerful China which one day in the not-too-distant future will seriously challenge US military and economic power.
Washington wants to use India as a counterweight to the rising Chinese behemoth and would seem to be actively striving toward a new force that bestrides the new Middle East, the US-Israel-India axis.
Even so, the sale’s timing, just as India and Pakistan are engaged in their most profound negotiations to end more than half a century of conflict, is puzzling since it could impede, if not stall, the peacemaking process. Israeli sources say that it is because of the easing of tensions that the Americans approved the sale.
That explanation has a hollow, self-serving ring to it. More realistically, it has more to do with the vision of the Bush administration’s pro-Israel neoconservatives who find a Christian-Judeo-Hindu alliance against the threat of Islamic terrorism a natural progression.
Israeli officials talk of an “unwritten and abstract” axis stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean that links the “functional democracies” of Israel and India to the US in a liberal triad to fight the common foe, one that in the end must exclude the less-than-democratic regimes in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan the new order. Saudi Arabia is relentlessly being elbowed out and presumably Pakistan, when it has served its purpose, will be ditched as well.
Whatever the logic involved in this emergent new order, Pakistan has, of course, protested against the Phalcon sale, complaining that the transfer of such technology to India will upset the delicate conventional military equilibrium in Asia.
The Phalcon, which comprises a Russian-built Il-76 transport jet packed with Israeli surveillance systems, can detect hostile aircraft hundreds of kilometers away in all weather and can intercept and decode radio transmissions, allowing the Indians to “see” deep inside their adversaries’ territory. Islamabad, which has nothing like the Phalcon, is seeking weapons to counter the Israeli system. One of the leading contenders is China’s “AWACS killer,” the FT-2000 surface-to-air missile, designed to knock out such sophisticated surveillance aircraft.
Beijing is also concerned and is particularly peeved about the Phalcon going to India. Washington blocked a similar deal between Israel and China in 2000, claiming Beijing would be able to use the three Phalcons it sought against US ally Taiwan and to endanger US pilots in the event of war with China. The Bush administration clearly has no such qualms about upsetting the military balance in South Asia, and apparently believes that its growing influence some might say dominance in Pakistan will not be threatened by the Phalcon sale to India.
US approval for selling the Phalcon to India, whose often bumpy relationship with the US has strengthened immensely since the events of Sept. 11, 2001, has prompted the belief that Washington may also sanction the sale of Israel’s Arrow-2 Anti-Tactical Ballistic Missile, designed to destroy hostile ballistic missiles, to New Delhi as well. The Indians, concerned about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and burgeoning missile force, have had their eye on the Arrow, the world’s only operational anti-missile missile system, for some time. It has been largely funded by the US and so Washington must approve its sale to a third party.
India’s acquisition of such a defense system would bolster its military capabilities even further, making it significantly less vulnerable to attacks from either Pakistan or China, or the two in tandem. The Indians already have the Green Pine radars that are part of the Arrow system, so integrating the missiles would not be a problem. According to reports from New Delhi, the US is prepared to give Israel the go-ahead to sell the Arrow to India.
Given the hold Washington now has over President Pervez Musharraf after the disclosures that Pakistan scientists sold nuclear technology to Iran and Libya, that may well be true. Whatever, such a deal would be worth billions of dollars to Israel and would most emphatically cement the Jewish-Hindu alliance.
The Americans have often used Israel as a stalking horse in extending US influence. General Ahmed Abdel Halim of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs noted recently: “The US has allowed Israel to become a broker for procuring weapons in cases where the US does not want to demonstrate direct engagement, such as in the case of India, or when the US desires to improve its political and economic relations by consolidating direct technological and military cooperation between Israel and India.”
In Israeli eyes, Pakistan’s clandestine sale of nuclear technology to countries hostile to the Jewish state has no doubt justified efforts to forge strong bonds with India, which like Israel is fighting Islamic extremists and has endured international alienation over the years because of its nuclear weapons program.
“The rapprochement between India and Israel is an important component of a new strategic landscape in the greater Middle East that includes Central Asia and parts of the Indian Ocean littoral,” Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, recently wrote for the bitterlemons-international website.
“The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the ensuing war against international terror appear to have created a political climate even more conducive to Indo-Israeli collaboration … Washington has good grounds to encourage Indian-Israeli cooperation as its own interests in the Indian Ocean will likely grow.”
If the Arab world shares Muslim Pakistan’s concerns about Israel’s expanding ties with India, especially in the military, intelligence and security fields, it has only itself to blame. Throughout most of the Cold War, the Arabs generally rebuffed overtures from Hindu India, the leader of the Non-Aligned Movement during that period, because they viewed India through the Pakistani prism.
Israel simply took advantage of Arab indifference to develop a strategic relationship to India. This provides it with other openings, such as developing its economic and intelligence interests in Central Asia, where India is also increasingly active. This, too, suits the Americans, for whom establishing military bases in the region for the “war against terrorism” has become a key strategic objective.
The Phalcon deal is an important milestone in Israel’s relationship with India, whose Hindu fundamentalist government under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vaypayee sets much store in an alliance with Israel. India established diplomatic relations with Israel only in January 1992, but close links between Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, and its Indian equivalent, the Research and Analysis Wing, had been established as far back as 1968.
India decided that there was more to be gained in strategic terms from allying itself with Israel, technologically light years ahead of its Arab adversaries and plugged into Washington, than in any dalliance with Arab states that were Muslim, like its archrival Pakistan.
India and Israel are generally seen as nuclear partners, to what extent exactly remains unclear. But it is no accident that Israel is now one of India’s main military suppliers and intelligence partners with arms sales worth $4.2 billion in 2002, slightly less in 2003, but likely to rise again this year. Israel’s satellite technologies are likely to be a big seller.
Ed Blanche, a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, is a Beirut-based journalist who has covered Middle Eastern affairs for three decades. He is a regular contributor to THE DAILY STAR |
