Eric Margolis, author of War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet, discusses the massing of Indian troops on the India/China border, how nearly every border dispute outside the Western world stems from British imperialism, the little-known Chinese presence in Kashmir and the difficulty in keeping tabs on the ‘finger in every pie’ U.S. foreign policy.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Eric Margulies is back.
He was on the show yesterday.
He's back today to talk about something entirely different.
He is a foreign correspondent for Sun National Media.
His website is ericmargulies.com.
Spelt like Margulies.
And you'll find it there.
In all his articles, he also often writes for lewrockwell.com, for Antiwar.com.
His books are War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
Liberation or Domination.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
Glad to be back with you so soon.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
I'm really happy that I always know I can turn to you when it comes to what the hell is going on in the old world over there.
Because what the hell do I know about it?
But you know a lot, and I know that much.
I know a lot, Scott.
In fact, I'd say you're one of the best informed people in the American media.
Oh, God.
Well, if that's true, we're all in real deep trouble.
I'll tell you.
All right, well, so this headline seems like it could be scary, but geez, probably not.
You know, I don't know.
I'm trying to not be worst case scenario here.
But it's something I'm completely ignorant about.
The headline reads, More Indian Troops on China Border.
And this is at the Daily Times, the Pakistan Daily Times today, which I'm not too sure who that is a front for or whatever.
But anyway, and they seem to think that this is a pretty big deal, that they're reinforcing all of their border positions along their shared border with China there.
What's going on?
Well, India and China share a border, depending how you measure it, between 1,500 and 2,000 mile long border.
And from the west in Kashmir, bordering Afghanistan, all the way to the east to Arunachal Pradesh, which is above Burma and above Bangladesh.
So it spans the length of the Himalayan Mountains.
And, you know, we've said on this show before, Scott, that so many of the problems of the modern world were caused by the British, the British imperialists.
Sure enough, here's the granddaddy of all of them, because when India was created in 1947 as an independent state, it inherited this border dispute that British India had with China over this border, which was poorly demarcated because of the wild and inhospitable terrain, some of which is well over 15,000 or 16,000 feet in altitude.
Well, now, please forgive my near total ignorance of this, but there really was no India before the British took it over and made it.
I mean, what we look at geographically as a subcontinent there was a wide and varied culture of whatever kinds of city-states and God knows what through history, but there never was one big centralized India until the British came and created one, right?
That's correct.
So that's where the border dispute comes from, which the British created it by trying to figure out where to draw the line, where before there really was no line, it was a frontier.
Yes, the British kept pushing north into the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush mountains, that would be Afghanistan now, and the Russians were up there and the Chinese empire, which sort of half ruled Tibet, was pushing back, and along came a British lord named MacMahon, who used a thick nibbed pen to draw a borderline in 1914, and that became the de facto border between China and India.
But in those days, as I said, nobody cared much about this very high terrain and barren terrain, but now all of a sudden it's become a big bone of contention between China and India, or it has been for the last two decades, because as they're both growing in power, suddenly they're interested in their borders, and the Chinese and Indians have been bumping up against each other in strategic areas, and in 1962, Scott, India and China fought a war, most people have forgotten this, but they fought a war in the eastern end of the line, which used to be Northeast Frontier Agency, now Arunachal Pradesh, they fought a high mount war in which the Chinese whipped the Indians badly, and the Chinese came within about 90 or 100 miles of Calcutta, when Mao ordered them back, he said they're going to teach the Indians a lesson, and he certainly did.
So there have been tensions for a long time.
Well, is it any consolation that it's such a mountainous area and it makes it difficult to just drive a bunch of tanks over and that kind of thing?
I mean, does that kind of help?
I mean, for example, is that part of Mao's calculation of why not to try to stay?
I mean, you know how most emperors are, they want to take over as much as they can of anything.
I don't know what exactly was Mao's thinking.
I think he wanted to concentrate on internal politics rather than picking a major war with India at the time.
But remember, this is also at the time, well, this is in 19...
Well, and how major was it?
I mean, how many, was it massive battles and, you know, that kind of thing?
How many people died?
No, they were...
How long did it last?
I think it lasted a couple of weeks.
And, no, the Indians didn't suffer very heavy casualties, but they were badly beaten.
It was all infantry battle.
Totally not tank country at all.
These were fighting for high mountain passes that were 13,000 feet, 12,000 feet altitude.
I'm doing this from memory now.
But, you know, in 1950, China had occupied Tibet, and the Tibetan Plateau, average altitude 14,000 feet, towers over India, and the Indians were enormously alarmed that here's China, which has got to fight today, has 500,000 troops deployed on the Tibetan Plateau, and all kinds of missiles, missile bases and air bases pointing at India.
The Indians feel very vulnerable because the Chinese are up there in Tibet looking directly down on them.
So now there's skirmishes on both other ends of the border, on either side of Tibet, to the west in Kashmir, where the Chinese have a big chunk of Kashmir called Aksai Chin that nobody's ever heard of, but they occupied it, and India claims it's part of India.
And then in the east, the disputed areas we just talked about.
That part of Kashmir is still occupied by China.
Yes, it is.
It's very high.
There was nothing but fog and yaks grazing there, but it's very strategic.
It's in the northern part of Ladakh, which used to be called Little Tibet.
And it's a completely barren area, but it controls one of the road routes that China needed to go into Xinjiang province, where there's trouble right now in Uyghurs.
It's very obscure geography.
I've been up in those mountains.
There's hardly any air up there.
You get altitude sickness, as I did, very quickly.
And on another side note, the Indians and Pakistanis have been fighting up there, right nearby, in a place called the Siachen Glacier at 15,000 feet, for over a decade, the world's highest war, where they have actually mountaineer troops, with guns, ropes, pitons and things, fighting for control of these remote, airless ridges.
Man, a war at the top of the world, indeed, huh?
Well, that's what my first book was about, yes, and it included the Siachen War, but one of the theses in my book, in War at the Top of the World, was that eventually China and India would come into a clash, and these two great Asian superpowers, and that a clash was inevitable, and that the flashpoints would be Kashmir, and would be near Burma, because Burma's at the other end, and very strategic too, and is under great Chinese influence now.
And, of course, along this area, this Arunachal Pradesh, the eastern end of the border, where India's eastern border is made up of tribal states.
We know very little about them, but they're indigenous people, Nagaland being one of the most important, Manipur, Tripura, names that are not very familiar, but...
Are you talking about where now, in western China?
No, the eastern...
If you can imagine a map of India, this is the eastern end of India, kind of sticks out to the east, over Bangladesh and Burma.
Oh, yeah.
So, in that area, there have been revolts going on against the Indian central government there for decades.
Well, here's the thing, though.
I mean, there's a lot of low-level warfare, and there are a lot of tense standoffs over borders, and after all, states are states, and they do the evil things they do, but, I mean, what kind of chance are you really putting on some kind of major conflict between India and China?
I mean, think of all the negatives on the balance sheet, such as both sides armed with atomic weapons, and nobody wants to sacrifice their country to atomic weapons, Eric.
And both are each other's biggest trading partner.
Yeah, there you go.
So, chances are there will not be a war, but you never know, and, you know, wars are often blundered into.
The Indian press right now is beating the war drums, screaming bloody murder, and that the Chinese have massed 50,000 troops on the eastern end of the border, and that India is rushing two divisions up there north of Assam.
You know where the tea comes from?
You're Darjeeling?
That's the region, very hilly foothills of the Himalayas.
They could stumble into a war over just a clash in the mountain that spreads along the length of what they call the line of actual control, not the border, because both sides don't accept it.
You know, when you have a big disputed border like that, it's dangerous.
Yeah, especially something that never has been really settled.
All right, well, so there were some headlines a couple of days ago, I think, about some massive battles or refugees or something from conflict between India and Pakistan in Kashmir.
Well, that's been going on since 1947.
It's probably the world's oldest dispute.
It predates even the Arabs and the Israelis, I think, by a couple of months.
But there is constant violence going on in Kashmir between the Muslim majority.
India is the only Muslim-majority state, but it's ruled by India and very harshly and corruptly ruled.
And a major rebellion broke out in 1989 against very harsh Indian rule, and it's been going on.
And it was aided by Pakistan across the border from the Pakistani third of Kashmir.
It's divided between India and Pakistan, and this is very dangerous because this has led to constant fighting along the border between Indian and Pakistani troops.
I've been there.
I've been under fire a number of times on the Pakistani side by Indian troops, and there's always a danger that that could erupt into a major war.
In 1999, I think it was, the Pakistani irregular forces moved into Indian Kashmir.
They outfoxed the Indians.
They took some very high ground above Kargil and I think at about 13,000 or 14,000 feet altitude.
And they had very heavy fighting, very heavy losses, and the Indian generals were demanding that they be allowed to unleash their tank corps against Pakistan further down the line where it was flatter terrain.
So very close to a war between two nuclear-armed powers.
How many people live in Kashmir?
Nine million.
Oh, well, yes.
So I guess the only pictures I've ever seen of Kashmir are like people out in the wilderness somewhere, but that's the fighters.
Kashmir really, I mean, the UN mandated that there be a referendum, a plebiscite held in Kashmir to determine what its people wanted.
And they would either want to go independent or join Pakistan, but India refuses.
No, it's an integral part of India.
India, we're never going to discuss it, and so the thing goes.
But there's more fighting and killing going on.
Right now, there are 500,000 Indian regular army troops in Kashmir.
Relatively small area.
I think it's certainly smaller than Texas.
And 500,000 troops there.
And then there are another 500,000 paramilitary police deployed in and around the region.
So India has a huge military commitment to Kashmir.
And it's really a scimitar drawn with Pakistan.
And even though the U.S., we forced Pakistan to stop supporting the Kashmiri independence fighters, there's still some support coming from Pakistan covertly.
Well, in fact, there was a quote from a sheriff, which who knows if what he says is right, but he was in the papers the other day saying that, yeah, I did take American money and spend it beefing up defenses along where we face India there.
And, you know, I was just thinking, because I interviewed Robert Perry last week, and we were talking about how Reagan, as a policy in the 1980s, the Reagan White House deliberately turned a blind eye to Pakistan's development of nuclear weapons because they were helping with the Mujahideen war against the Russians.
And, of course, certainly in the last eight years, we've seen American cooperation with the Indians on their nuclear programs and nuclear weapons programs.
And who knows?
I don't know.
I guess maybe somewhere in the back of my mind, I'm remembering that there was some American help for the Indian nuclear weapons program all along, but I don't remember what that might have been anymore.
But in any case, we've certainly been helping them lately.
And so if there ever is a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, then the American government and the people who supported these politicians and these positions of power are going to bear a hell of a lot of responsibility for that.
You know, if a war breaks out between India and China and whatever, that's bad, but at least we didn't give China their nukes.
You know?
That's right.
Well, we certainly did help India.
And now we're doing it in a very hypocritical way because under the Bush administration, what the U.S. agreed to do was to supply India's civilian nuclear reactors with fuel and technology, all for peaceful purposes.
But India had a shortage of nuclear fuel, so what this allowed was that the existing fuel could then be used in their military reactors to produce weapons.
So we were in effect subsidizing and aiding the development of India's nuclear weapons, which, you know, the Bush administration saw as aimed against China, and this would be a good counter for it.
There was great concern deep in the Bush administration that China, you know, is as big as the next enemy of the United States, and let's turn the Indians against them, and let's bend the Indians to our will.
But the Indians are smart, and they're very clever, and they're too clever to be arm-twisted into becoming tools of United States foreign policy.
They'll cooperate where it benefits them, but they won't where it won't, i.e., U.S. demands that India join sanctions against Iran.
The Indians have told the Americans politely to go to hell on this.
But we've played a major role in building up India's nuclear power, and as you say...
Well, we're working to build them up as a power in Afghanistan, too, right?
Can you explain, you know, to what extent that that's really true?
I mean, how much of a foothold are we giving the Indians on the other side of Pakistan, and how might the Pakistanis react to that?
We have, by sort of defusing the surge of the uprising against India in Kashmir, which the U.S. played a major role in that, that freed the Indians up to some extent to focus on Afghanistan.
But the U.S. has opened the doors in numerous ways, intelligence operations, particularly in Afghanistan, to the Indians as part of an anti-Islamic coalition, if you want, and has been abetting it.
So the Pakistanis regard Afghanistan as their backyard, and they're, of course, up in arms about this.
The Indians have many intelligence agents set up consulates all over, and they have been funding the Karzai regime.
They've been training his military and police forces and really establishing a very powerful position in Afghanistan.
Oh, man.
Well, you know what?
We ought to go back to China and India, or else we're going to do this whole discussion of Afghanistan again.
But that, at least, is extremely important to note, I think, that, you know, from the Pakistani point of view, here they've got India surrounding them, and I guess it must be really hard for the American empire to keep track of whose side they're on versus who, I guess, as they try to just back every regime everywhere and blackmail and bribe them and, you know, figure out ways to get a base in there or whatever it is they've got to do to every country in the world, and it all balances out somehow.
You know, Scott, when I was a student at Georgetown University in Washington, my friends and I, we used to call up different embassies of countries there, and, like, we'd call up Ecuador or something and say, this is the embassy of Bolivia calling.
We've just advised that we are declaring war on you at midnight.
Things like that.
And we'd call up the State Department and do the same.
Those were in the days before everybody's phones were tapped.
Yeah, before Star 69 callbacks.
And say, this is the republic of other Armenia, and we're reneging on the fishing treaty we just signed with you.
And, you know, we figure there are people up, you know, for days trying to figure out where the hell this country is.
But that is the case in Washington.
Now, I'm sure that a large part of the State Department and the Pentagon are still trying to figure out the difference between Bosnians and Serbs and Croats and where is Herzegovina?
They've lost it.
They still can't find it.
Yeah, these are the people deciding, you know, who we ought to back in the killing or stopping of killing of which side win.
The fate of all these small countries is being decided by people in Washington who couldn't find them on a map if they had to.
Now, it would never mind.
Well, I mean, and here's the thing.
I've got to find these places on a map, and I can find them, you know.
But, boy, you wouldn't want me running the world either, you know what I mean?
If they are more ignorant than me, then we're in real trouble.
Scott, you are remarkably well-informed.
I must say, I have to say about my fellow Americans that due to our lousy educational system and becoming brain-dead from watching too much TV, Right, this is strictly comparative value.that we can't find anything in the world.
All the geographical surveys show that.
It's one of our great weaknesses as a country that we are ignorant about the rest of the world and remain so in spite of television.
There's only any internet and everything.
But, look, the government's analysis.
They're trying to figure out about Shiites and Sunnis and Kurds.
And now they're stuck in Pakistan.
They're trying to figure out who's who in Somalia.
They're just exhausted from too much information inflow and unable to deal with all these different problems.
Yeah, and you know what's funny too is that if only they would do their very limited mandate, we might be able to actually, you know, use our democracy to get them to do the right thing.
You know, have a just prison policy or, you know, some kind of thing like that.
But instead, they take on every responsibility in the world that they're not supposed to be doing, and they screw up everything.
Well, you know, when I...
Not to blow my own horn, but when I wrote my second book, American Raj, it's called Liberation or Domination.
And that was exactly my point, Scott, that we in the United States have so much good things to teach the rest of the world, and good governance.
You wouldn't believe it these days, but we can, and proper institutions and development.
And yet we're, at least in the Muslim world, all we've got is domination.
And it's tragic to see it because, you know, when the British Empire collapsed and was long gone, it left some very positive things in its wake.
Whereas when the American Empire is gone, I'm not sure how much positive we will have left.
Yeah, no balance at all, just corpses.
McDonald's, yes.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, which is our highest value.
All right, well, okay, on the question of India and China and their border dispute, I wanted to leave on a happy note, at least according to the translation from the Times of India here, that the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said, I have replied to this question earlier, meaning I already told you this is no big deal, it amounts to nothing, and we're ramping tensions down, not up.
So stop asking me the same question again.
I like that, right?
That's a positive sign.
You know, maybe there's chess beating going on on one side, but the other is deciding not to respond in kind, at least for now.
If you accuse us once more of not being peaceful people, we're going to launch an attack on you.
Yeah.
The Chinese have consistently downplayed these alarms on the border and have said their policy is to mend fences with India and keep good relations.
It is important to note that China and Russia also have very significant border problems along the Amur and Ussuri rivers in Siberia and Manchuria, and they settled all of the border disputes between China and Russia.
So their border is completely demarcated now, whereas the Indian-Chinese border is not.
And it is time for India and China to start really sitting down and negotiating.
They've been talking about doing this for over 10 years.
All right, everybody, that's Eric Margulies, ericmargulies.com.
Thanks very much.
You're welcome.
