Tibet – The Most Dangerous Place in the World
At the start of the month, Director of US National Intelligence James Clapper, told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the Indian Army is strengthening itself for a limited conflict with China. “Despite public statements intended to downplay tensions between India and China, we judge that India is increasingly concerned about China’s posture along their disputed border and Beijing’s perceived aggressive posture in the Indian Ocean and Asia Pacific region”. “The Indian Army believes a major Sino-Indian conflict is not imminent, but the Indian military is strengthening its forces in preparation to fight a limited conflict along the disputed border, and is working to balance Chinese power projection in the Indian Ocean”. http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-02-01/news/31012988_1_india-and-china-chinese-army-sino-indian

In May 2007 Walkers World said “The most dangerous place on Earth right now may not be in Iraq, nor in the Gaza Strip nor even in some underground nuclear laboratory in Iran or North Korea. It is on the roof of the world at a place called Namcha Barwa on the eastern plateau of Tibet”. So whats going on?
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2007/05/14/Walkers-World-The-most-dangerous-place/UPI-87261179157455/

These warnings refer to a potential water crisis that I have previously written about. It is China’s Water Diversion project, and in particular what that means to the Brahmaputra River. Tibet is the water super power. It is the source of water for most of Asia and some of Central Europe and as such is of extreme importance, highlighting just how far ahead China was thinking when, in October 1950, under the cover of the Korean War, the People’s Liberation Army entered the Tibetan Plateau defeating the Tibetan army. Three of the world’s largest rivers by discharge originate in Tibet, and of course the third part of the South-North Water Transfer project involves rivers that flow across the border into the rest of Asia.

India’s total annual renewable water resources, ie both rivers and replacement into aquifers etc, is 1907.8 cubic kilometres a year, of which it uses 761 cubic kilometres or 40%, a figure that is growing each year. Whilst this may sound like there is significant spare capacity, 80% of the water comes in the monsoon season, and would need massive infrastructure projects to retain. The Brahmaputra is the world’s 4th largest river and the water diversion plan aims to transfer at least 200 cubic kilometres a year from it according to the book Water, Asia’s New Battleground, as well as water from the Mekong and Salween which feed into the Vietnam peninsula and Burma etc. Just focusing on India, the 200 cubic kilometres is 10% of its entire annual renewable resources or 17.4% of the excess capacity.

India is already the largest user of groundwater in the world withdrawing 230 cubic kilometres a year from aquifers according to the World Bank, which is around 2.5 times replacement. More than 60% of irrigated agriculture and 85% of drinking water supplies are dependent on aquifers, and of those 29% are semi-critical, critical, or over exploited, and the situation is deteriorating rapidly such that more than 60% will be in critical condition by 2030. “Moreover, aquifers are depleting in the most populated and economically productive areas”. Even before considering the implications of the Water Diversion Project, The World Bank says the depletion of aquifers will have serious implications for the sustainability of agriculture, long term food security let alone economic growth. Farms that rely on surface water alone have less than half the yield of those that are irrigated.
http://www.worldbank.org.in/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/SOUTHASIAEXT/INDIAEXTN/0,,contentMDK:22489346~pagePK:141137~piPK:141127~theSitePK:295584,00.html

A UN report Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security in Asia and the Pacific says that lifting waters from aquifers and irrigating fields already consumes 30% of India’s electricity. With every metre of aquifer depletion, the energy required to lift the water becomes that much larger, such that the energy intensity of agricultural production is growing. The energy intensity of desalination is on another scale altogether. Unfortunately the problem is India already has massive power shortages which are only going to get worse, with the knock on effect that the cost of water extraction will become ever larger. Like water, India drastically lacks the infrastructure necessary to access more coal. I would personally suggest that it is becoming increasingly clear that India’s miracle is already looking extremely vulnerable.

The water transfer programme goes back to Mao Zedong and probably before that, gradually moving up the agenda and through government approval. Mao recognised that China’s standard of living and economic expansion depended on Tibet’s resources. The simple reality is China needs the water if it is to support its population with its present standard of living, let alone advance to a new one. It has a stated policy of no water to reach the sea and have plans to extract 95% of the power from all their river systems which will mean a continued massive infrastructure programme. This leaves Asia, and India in particular in a real problem. The book The Politics of Water In the Middle East highlights that the Israeli water deficit, without surface water from the Golan Heights or underground water from the West Bank would be far in excess of a pricing or economic problem. It would be a strategic problem impinging on the very physical survival of the country. It seems to me that India is already starting to face the economic problem, which will mean continued high inflation, and when China does start turning the taps off, it will mean significantly more than an economic crisis. Back in 2000 General Zhao Nanqi said “Even if we do not begin this water diversion project, the next generation will. Sooner or later it will be done”.

Should China turn off the water to India, the implications would not just be for India. Bangladesh receives around 97% of its water from cross border transfers, and then there is Pakistan which relies on the Indus which originates in Tibet but flows through India on the way to Pakistan. Clearly India would have no choice but to turn that tap off which would almost certainly cause an already volatile situation to get totally out of hand. We have a situation therefore where we have 3 nuclear powers whose economic and potentially physical future is increasingly dependent on these declining resources; there is simply not enough to go around.

As I highlighted in the piece The Brahmaputra – another elephant in the room back in 2010, after repeated denials China finally admitted that it was starting to build various dams on the river. India’s satellite imagery has identified 24 mainly small dams but also the building of infrastructure needed to transport materials to the various sites. It is also relocating 250,000 Tibetans (almost 10% of those living in the remote Himalayan country) from scattered settlements to new “socialist villages” clearing the ground for flooding etc that would happen, under the pretext offering them a better future.

The building of the dams will take time, and the water transfer would need a huge storage facilities referring again to the book Water Asia’s New Battleground as the scale of transfer is simply too big to release onto the Yellow River without some sort of control. That reservoir would be significantly larger than the one behind the Three Gorges Dam which measures over 600km in length, and would need to be built with PNE’s or peaceful nuclear explosions as would some of the tunnelling through the mountains, both of which could only really be done with nuclear power. Having held out signing the CTBT (Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty) for nuclear testing, eventually in 1996 they did sign it with the proviso that PNE’s would be revisited within 10 years. In the end they never ratified the treaty.

Both Bangladesh and India are clearly anxious. They feel they have time on their side, but of course such appeasement may come back and haunt them as the further China progresses, the worse the situation will become. So going back to James Clapper’s statement that “The Indian Army believes a major Sino-Indian conflict is not imminent, but the Indian military is strengthening its forces in preparation to fight a limited conflict along the disputed border”, this sounds like he believes India may be looking to head off a problem before it becomes too big.

In no way am I saying a war, or even a limited fight is imminent, but the water situation across most of the continent is critical, and will not support the aspiration of everyone in that region, and to quote Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (then vice premier) back in 1999, “The survival of the Chinese nation is threatened by the country’s shortage of water”.