June 19, 2020 View On Website
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Why the Himalayas Are Worth Fighting For
The ocean is the reason Chinese and Indian soldiers have died over this rugged, seemingly irrelevant piece of land.
By: Phillip Orchard
It says quite a bit about the sheer improbability of a major China-India war in the Himalayas that this week’s deadly clash in the Galwan Valley – which produced the first fatalities along the disputed high-altitude border since 1975 – played out the way it did. No shots were fired, no explosives detonated. Rather, it was just two nuclear powers going at it the old-fashioned way: with fists and clubs and whatever else their troops could find lying around. The 20-odd Indian soldiers and their two dozen or so Chinese counterparts who reportedly lost their lives are believed to have done so by falling off a cliff and/or into a river turgid with spring snowmelt. The unforgiving terrain impeded rescue efforts on both sides, leaving the wounded exposed to sub-zero temperatures.
Both China and India have been building out ambitious networks of roads and outposts in order to be able to bring substantial firepower to the frontline. Yet, evidently, neither side is capable of truly taming the unforgiving geography of the Himalayas to the extent needed to conduct complicated operations, much less stage an overland invasion into the other’s heartland. But this doesn’t mean that the high ground isn’t strategically important, or that the soldiers died merely in defense of national honor and abstract notions of sovereignty over barely inhabitable land. Its value just needs to be understood in the context of the broader competition between China and India.
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Big Mountains, Big Problems
The difficulty of extreme-altitude combat is hard to overstate. There are, obviously, unpredictable weather patterns, extreme temperatures and treacherous roads. With enough grit, gear and engineering, some of these obstacles can be overcome. But the Himalayas are so tall and so steep that communications breakdowns are inevitable, resupply helicopters can become useless, and commanders are stuck with the unsavory prospect of moving troops and supply convoys through an endless series of exposed chokepoints. Even in the best of circumstances, moving personnel in from the lowlands is a weekslong process. In the 1962 India-China war, for example, an estimated 15 percent of troops India rushed to the frontlines developed severe altitude sickness. A fighting force is only as good as its supply lines, and the Himalayas are a logistical nightmare.
Along the Line of Actual Control, the loosely defined border between Indian and Chinese territories, this environment creates low-level instability by putting a premium on controlling key chokepoints and areas conducive to infrastructure development. This is why many standoffs over the past decade have typically been triggered by attempts from one side or the other to build new roads or bridges. But it also creates high-level strategic stability, since the probability for escalation to an all-out conventional war is extremely low. In a way, the LAC provides a safe space for the two nuclear powers to work out their differences – to signal displeasure over unrelated issues, to please nationalists at home, to keep their armies well-trained and preoccupied with matters other than politics, and so forth – without risking catastrophe.
But there’s more at stake. China has relatively few direct strategic interests in dominating the Himalayas. It doesn’t rely on them as a trade route or consider them a source of resources (except the headwaters of its major rivers, which it comfortably controls). Still, they are valuable to China in two main ways: One is as a defense against a foreign force from meddling in Xinjiang and Tibet; keeping its buffer zones intact is a core Chinese imperative, even if India is a long way from having either the capability or reason to want to make a move on the Tibetan plateau. The second is how the Himalayas can take India’s attention away from where it can truly threaten China: the ocean.
The High Seas
India should be a maritime power. It inherited invaluable naval expertise from the British. It sits astride the world’s busiest sea lanes. It does little overland trade with any of its neighbors. Its prosperity relies on distant markets in Europe and the U.S., and, even more so, on unhindered imports of energy from the Middle East. And with a robust navy, it could exploit an immense geographic advantage over China on the high seas. China’s foremost external challenge is its own reliance on trade, most of which flows through chokepoints along the first island chain and the Strait of Malacca. Though it’s rapidly developing a bluewater navy, and though it’s investing heavily in the so-called “string of pearls” – a network of ports built along the Indian Ocean basin under the purview of the Belt and Road Initiative – China is decades away from being able to credibly threaten critical Indian supply lines. India, in contrast, is ideally positioned to do just that to China. Everything China sends to Europe and imports from the Middle East flows right by the subcontinent. And India’s superbly located Andaman and Nicobar islands to the east in the Andaman Sea theoretically enable it to shut down the mouth of the Malacca Strait – particularly in joint operations with the U.S. and/or Australia.
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The problem for India is that it’s had a devil of a time shifting resources from its army and air force to the navy. While it’s been touting grand plans for a 200-ship navy by 2027 (up from 130 today) and quietly laying the groundwork for its own “string of pearls” in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the navy is still getting just 15 percent of this year’s budget, compared to 23 percent for the air force and 56 percent for the army (the bulk of which goes to pensions). The navy’s share of the pie is actually down from 18 percent in 2012. India’s efforts to turn the Andaman and Nicobars into a major deterrent are still in the very early stages. In January, India’s chief admiral effectively admitted defeat on the navy’s shipbuilding goals. Simply put, a bluewater force can’t be built cheaply. The economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic won’t make things any easier.
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China has every intention of keeping India bogged down on land. The main way it’s doing so is through its vast military and economic support for Pakistan – support that has the added benefit of denying militants access to Xinjiang and, potentially, the development of a naval base at Gwadar or farther east. But it’s also a way to ensure that India remains overwhelmingly focused on Kashmir.
Deterring China in the Himalayas is a comparably lesser concern for India. But China doesn’t need to do a lot to ensure that New Delhi continues devoting manpower and resources to the theater. Though China cannot credibly threaten the Indian heartland from the Himalayas, it could use the high ground to destabilize certain strategically vulnerable areas of India. The disputed region in the west, for example, overlooks Pakistan. The one in the east overlooks the Siliguri Corridor – the 14-mile wide belt connecting West Bengal to India’s restive northeastern provinces – potentially giving China the leverage that comes with the ability to sever India in two. And while China also needs to prioritize the needs of the navy over those of the army, its Himalayan investments are comparatively easier to stomach. It has deeper pockets, superior infrastructure expertise, a desire to keep the People’s Liberation Army busy, and a geographic advantage from being able to stage operations from the Tibetan plateau rather than the Indian lowlands. As a result, India has always felt like it was at an inherent disadvantage. In this light, it’s notable that Chinese forces have deviated from their historical pattern by trying to pressure India in multiple disputed areas all at once, effectively tempting India to devote even more resources and manpower to the mountains.
The risk for China is that its coercion in the Himalayas encourages India to further embrace the Quad partners (the U.S., Japan and Australia) and to deepen its strategic engagement with key Southeast Asian nations such as Indonesia, Vietnam and Singapore. But this was probably inevitable since the Chinese and Indian spheres of influence increasingly overlap. China has no choice but to try to secure its interests in the Indian Ocean basin, making India feel increasingly encircled and willing to shed its cherished predilection for nonalignment. Beijing’s only real option is to find ways to prevent India from playing a meaningful role in a coalition aimed at containing China’s rise on the high seas. Brawling in the high Himalayas is one such way.
