Chinks and links

By unanimously seeking India’s help for training their forces in dealing with terrorism, the 10 ASEAN nations have indicated the confidence they have in India’s capabilities and willingness to assist with what is now clearly a global phenomenon. This is part of the agreement for a long-term ‘Partnership for Peace, Progress and Shared Prosperity’ among them inked at Vientiane, Laos, on Tuesday which would also strengthen existing funding mechanism including the ASEAN-India Co-operation Fund. At the same time, it is a tacit recognition that India has been faced with this scourge for quite some time and hence has acquired the experience of dealing with it.

The steady progress toward closer co-operation between ASEAN, both as a grouping as well as individual countries of the group, has predictably led to a landmark agreement to co-operate on a range of issues beyond trade and the consultative process embedded in the ARF system. This is indeed a long way from the situation a decade ago when the ASEAN elites were refusing to even acknowledge such a problem existed! The main focus of the ASEAN since the mid-nineties was on transnational crime although that itself is a key element in transnational terrorism. The fact that the ASEAN region includes one of the world’s key narcotics exporting areas had provided the impetus to that process; and given the rise of terrorism in some of the ASEAN states like Thailand, Indonesia and Philippines, further movement toward counter-terrorism policies was inevitable, even if somewhat hesitant in the beginning. Individual countries have held military exercises with India, including the recent exercise between the air forces of Singapore and India, and joint counter-terrorism working groups with some countries have been set up. Recently, Myanmar and India had carried out joint operations to flush out Indian terrorist groups and destroy the sanctuaries used by them inside Myanmar territory. But so far the security relationship between ASEAN and India has not included active training on counter-terrorism.

ASEAN leaders at Vientiane concluded that terrorism was a profound threat to international peace and security and a direct challenge to the attainment of peace and prosperity, the goals embedded in the ASEAN-India partnership agreement. The 11 countries would now be embarking on a new partnership by “building institutional linkages” for intelligence and information sharing and anti-terrorism co-operation measures, which has the potential of becoming a model for other regional organisations.