Resuing Democracy in
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Resuing Democracy in Pakistan
Afghan Worries
During the recent visit to
Nuclear
The Obama Administration has stood by the civil nuclear deal between
Monday, November 23, 2009
OBAMA'S CHINA VISIT
OBAMA’s CHINA VISIT
By Bhabani Sen Gupta
The templates of the world order created by the industrial revolution in Europe have begun to shake. The birthpangs of a new world order are disorienting many actors across the planet. What is known as South and South-East Asia was, until the mid-20th century, colonies of the European powers. The end of empires gave birth to the groups of sovereign countries which now comprise SE and South Asia. India is the largest single
country in the two regions. Mainly because of the partition of India into India and Pakistan, India’s influence remained limited in the post-colonial world.
However, Europe declined, and the United States of America emerged as the leader of the post-European world order. Now, in the 21st century, this U.S.-dominated world order is changing under the pressure of China emerging as a mammoth economic power. The templates of the “Western” world order, which, for the power elite in India, implies, in effect, the Anglo-Saxon world order, are shaking. The ‘awesome economic growth of China’, ( words used in a New York Times report on Obama’s visit to China, the rise of India as a significant economic heavyweight, the relative ease with which Asian countries have broken out of the global economic and financial crisis, the rise of Russia and Brazil as significant aspirants to economic and political height are tell-tale signs of the global economic and political order slipping out of the leadership grip of the Anglo-Saxon( or ‘Western’, club. The corporate media in India, and its political patrons ---- a large segment of the top bureaucracy, the top military brass serving and retired but not unemployed, upper crust of the business houses, a very good portion of the political class including the Congress party, and a majority of academic intellectuals--- have taken a dim view of Barak Obama’s failure to affirm the superiority of U.S.-Western zeitgeist in his transactions with the leaders of China. on democracy, human rights, currency issues,and Tibet. . Rather, the U.S. president seemed to be anxious to build a U.S.-China G2 forum to deal with global issues and problems. No recent world event has engaged the minds of the power elite in India, both within and outside the government, as worrisomely as has Obama’s China visit and the immediate, short-term and medium-term consequences thereof. The corporate media in India is, at times openly, otherwise opaquely, pro-West, more precisely pro-AangloSaxon,___which means American ‘hard power’ softened by seasoning of ‘soft’ British diplomacy,. This disposition is shared by most of the top bureaucracy including the executives of the vast public sector of the economy. And no doubt by the upper crust of the military. This large power elite, assembled primarily in New Delhi, was literally taken aback by what it saw
as Obama’s ‘gift’ to China of a stake in South Asia, regarded by it as
India’s sphere of influence. The Times of India, the largest-circulated English daily in India, and also the most avidly anti-China, suggested that Obama “bowed” to China by giving it “a larger role” in South Asia, and said that “new equations” between
Washington and Beijing “cast a shadow on Manmohan’s US visit” next week.
The PM0 issued immediate instructions forbidding any official, including ministers, to make public comment on Obama’s China visit. After a meeting with the PM, the foreign minister, M. Krishna, issued a terse statement, through the ministry’s spokesman, saying that “a third party role” in India-Pakistan transactions “cannot
be envisaged.” The PMO immediately set out a serious effort to find out whether the relevant 74-word portion in the joint statement issued at the end of Obama’s visit was an American idea or was accepted by the US president at China’s behest. It seemed that the initiative was American. India is not likely to welcome a Sino-American G-2 leadership of world affairs, The concept is unmistakenly American. It was endorsed
Earlier this year by no less a man than by Zbignuiew Brzeznzki, president Carter’s national security adviser. India is comfortable with the G-20 forum which has almost an equal membership from Europe and Asia. G-20 has definitely overtaken
the rubric of G-50 which was the first “Western” digitization of a changing world order to replace the one ushered at the end of World War II that did
not wrap up a peace treaty but gifted the international community an entirely new torrid confection: the Cold War. The Cold War lost its raison d’etre when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Americans claimed that the “soft war” of containment did the
USSR in. Containment was indeed a major factor, but perhaps a greater
Cause of the Soviet collapse was the Brezhnev Doctrine of logistrical support to whatever “Marxist” regimes were set up by whichever brand of
Marxist pretenders anywhere in the world----there were about 35 of them
in the 1980s including the Saur revolution regime in Afghanistan to save
which the Soviets had to send a ‘limited’ army of 100,000 soldiers and
failed to secure it from the U.S.-backed Taliban invasion.
To cap it all, a cold war broke out between the USSR and the People’s
Republic of China, two communist giants who joined together to strike a mortal blow at the long-entertained myth of ‘proletariat internationalism.’
Now, some 20 years after the end of the Soviet brand of a world socialist order, China has scaled tremendous heights in economic power
to claim to be seated at the high table of global leadership with the “West.”
Unlike the USSR, it is not an equal of the U.S. in nuclear and hydrogen weapons, but it is the banker to the United States, and is poised to equal
and then overtake America in wealth. China has rescued the American economy from a depression worse than that of the 1930s. China alone seems
to have the power to lend generously to scores of governments in Africa,
Asia and Latin America keeping so many of them afloat in difficult times.
China alone has shown that it is possible for a long-laggard nation of 1.3
billion people to redeem itself by sheer hard work, iron will to grow and
develop, build a huge mass of poor, impoverished, long-exploited people
into a dynamic humanity of rising living standards and modern social and
economic infrastructure in the incredibly short span of sixty years!
China strides in a world that has shrunk into a global habitat in
which nations need each other to keep the planet afloat. The United States
was on top of the world when China was reborn as the People’s Republic.
Americans have overspent their resources and are now reaping the bitter
harvest of the follies of their leaders. The U.S. has over 300 military bases
across the world, maintains the world’s most expensive military machine,
has hardly spent a year since 1945 without fighting a war somewhere in
the third world, often more than one at the same time, and have invited
its own decline. When Barak Obama came down from the Great Wall of China
and looked around his honest unlined face glowed with a sense of wonder
at a civilization five thousand years old, with a historical continuity unachieved by any other nation and people in history. His own countrymen failed to appreciate the majesty of history that Seemed to have moved their President. They wanted him to hector the leaders of China on what the Chinese people had “lost” under communist
rule--- freedom of speech and association, right to political diversity, blessings of Democracy. They lamented that their President did not rebule
his hosts for denying Tibet and Xinxiang “real autonomy”, that he had
postponed meeting the Dalai Lama until after his China visit.
In Britain, inheritors of the lost empire on which the sun once did not
Set, tried their best to keep up the sangfroid with only the minimum of gasps and yelps. For The Economist, it was Obama’s ‘Asian adventure’
with results dubious at best.The Europeans were less alarmed. They had
achieved something almost of equal importance as China’s. The European
Union united 27 countries of a continent that was the mother of wars for
Centuries including the two World Wars of the 20th. Britain’s magisterial
stature was derived from its ability to exploit Europe’s divisions and conflicts to its own advantage. The Union of Europe has rendered another
world war almost impossible to happen.
Indeed, war and peace in the world of the 21st century will be determined by relations between the United States and China. They fought
In Korea in the 1950s, and a cold war for the next 20-30 years over Taiwan
and learned the need to treat each other with circumspection and respect.
Obama’s visit to China was a culmination of a long process of incremental
mutual understanding that the centre of gravity in the strategic global dynamics had shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and that the issues
of world war or peace would now be determined by dynamics of relations
between the U.S, and China. This of course does not mean that India’s importance in global affairs has shrunk. India and the European Union are the two other principal actors in the current constellation of power in the world. It is imperative for India
and China to live in peace and cooperation to advance the cause of the
countless millions of humanity inhabiting Asia and Africa. And the
addition of Russia to the two Asian giants creates a formidable, indeed
unassailable template for stability, peace and prosperity of the bulk of
the earth’s population as well as geography.
India and China need each other to build a better life of one-third
of humanity. This is one of the stern imperatives of the 21st century that
journalists often fail to appreciate. Gone are the days when regional conflicts
and tensions could be resolved in geopolitical enclaves exclusive of one
another. And here even India’s ministry of external affairs failed to resist
the pressure of the country’s corporate media which saw in Obama’s China
visit as a give-away by America to China at India’s cost.
The United States needs China’s cooperation to douse the war
in Afghanistan and to resolve the Afghan-Pakistan cocundrum.
Obama asked for China’s help and was probably assured that
He would get it. Obama needs Pakistan to move a good number
of its troops from the eastern to the western fronts to fight the Taliban
in Pakistan and help Kabul to get the better of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The Pakistan Army has already asked the United States a quid for quo ----
pressure on India to reopen the negotiations for settling the Kashmir
issue. Obama has apparently asked the Chinese leaders to help persuade the Pakistan Army as well as the bureaucracy to relent on
both demands. If China can persuade Pakistan to relent, it
will be in India’s interest , not against India. And probably China
will try to help in only because it would want to insulate Xinxiang,
a neighbour of Afghanistan with a shared border, from Islamic
insurgency in Pakistan and Afghanistan./////
By Bhabani Sen Gupta
The templates of the world order created by the industrial revolution in Europe have begun to shake. The birthpangs of a new world order are disorienting many actors across the planet. What is known as South and South-East Asia was, until the mid-20th century, colonies of the European powers. The end of empires gave birth to the groups of sovereign countries which now comprise SE and South Asia. India is the largest single
country in the two regions. Mainly because of the partition of India into India and Pakistan, India’s influence remained limited in the post-colonial world.
However, Europe declined, and the United States of America emerged as the leader of the post-European world order. Now, in the 21st century, this U.S.-dominated world order is changing under the pressure of China emerging as a mammoth economic power. The templates of the “Western” world order, which, for the power elite in India, implies, in effect, the Anglo-Saxon world order, are shaking. The ‘awesome economic growth of China’, ( words used in a New York Times report on Obama’s visit to China, the rise of India as a significant economic heavyweight, the relative ease with which Asian countries have broken out of the global economic and financial crisis, the rise of Russia and Brazil as significant aspirants to economic and political height are tell-tale signs of the global economic and political order slipping out of the leadership grip of the Anglo-Saxon( or ‘Western’, club. The corporate media in India, and its political patrons ---- a large segment of the top bureaucracy, the top military brass serving and retired but not unemployed, upper crust of the business houses, a very good portion of the political class including the Congress party, and a majority of academic intellectuals--- have taken a dim view of Barak Obama’s failure to affirm the superiority of U.S.-Western zeitgeist in his transactions with the leaders of China. on democracy, human rights, currency issues,and Tibet. . Rather, the U.S. president seemed to be anxious to build a U.S.-China G2 forum to deal with global issues and problems. No recent world event has engaged the minds of the power elite in India, both within and outside the government, as worrisomely as has Obama’s China visit and the immediate, short-term and medium-term consequences thereof. The corporate media in India is, at times openly, otherwise opaquely, pro-West, more precisely pro-AangloSaxon,___which means American ‘hard power’ softened by seasoning of ‘soft’ British diplomacy,. This disposition is shared by most of the top bureaucracy including the executives of the vast public sector of the economy. And no doubt by the upper crust of the military. This large power elite, assembled primarily in New Delhi, was literally taken aback by what it saw
as Obama’s ‘gift’ to China of a stake in South Asia, regarded by it as
India’s sphere of influence. The Times of India, the largest-circulated English daily in India, and also the most avidly anti-China, suggested that Obama “bowed” to China by giving it “a larger role” in South Asia, and said that “new equations” between
Washington and Beijing “cast a shadow on Manmohan’s US visit” next week.
The PM0 issued immediate instructions forbidding any official, including ministers, to make public comment on Obama’s China visit. After a meeting with the PM, the foreign minister, M. Krishna, issued a terse statement, through the ministry’s spokesman, saying that “a third party role” in India-Pakistan transactions “cannot
be envisaged.” The PMO immediately set out a serious effort to find out whether the relevant 74-word portion in the joint statement issued at the end of Obama’s visit was an American idea or was accepted by the US president at China’s behest. It seemed that the initiative was American. India is not likely to welcome a Sino-American G-2 leadership of world affairs, The concept is unmistakenly American. It was endorsed
Earlier this year by no less a man than by Zbignuiew Brzeznzki, president Carter’s national security adviser. India is comfortable with the G-20 forum which has almost an equal membership from Europe and Asia. G-20 has definitely overtaken
the rubric of G-50 which was the first “Western” digitization of a changing world order to replace the one ushered at the end of World War II that did
not wrap up a peace treaty but gifted the international community an entirely new torrid confection: the Cold War. The Cold War lost its raison d’etre when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Americans claimed that the “soft war” of containment did the
USSR in. Containment was indeed a major factor, but perhaps a greater
Cause of the Soviet collapse was the Brezhnev Doctrine of logistrical support to whatever “Marxist” regimes were set up by whichever brand of
Marxist pretenders anywhere in the world----there were about 35 of them
in the 1980s including the Saur revolution regime in Afghanistan to save
which the Soviets had to send a ‘limited’ army of 100,000 soldiers and
failed to secure it from the U.S.-backed Taliban invasion.
To cap it all, a cold war broke out between the USSR and the People’s
Republic of China, two communist giants who joined together to strike a mortal blow at the long-entertained myth of ‘proletariat internationalism.’
Now, some 20 years after the end of the Soviet brand of a world socialist order, China has scaled tremendous heights in economic power
to claim to be seated at the high table of global leadership with the “West.”
Unlike the USSR, it is not an equal of the U.S. in nuclear and hydrogen weapons, but it is the banker to the United States, and is poised to equal
and then overtake America in wealth. China has rescued the American economy from a depression worse than that of the 1930s. China alone seems
to have the power to lend generously to scores of governments in Africa,
Asia and Latin America keeping so many of them afloat in difficult times.
China alone has shown that it is possible for a long-laggard nation of 1.3
billion people to redeem itself by sheer hard work, iron will to grow and
develop, build a huge mass of poor, impoverished, long-exploited people
into a dynamic humanity of rising living standards and modern social and
economic infrastructure in the incredibly short span of sixty years!
China strides in a world that has shrunk into a global habitat in
which nations need each other to keep the planet afloat. The United States
was on top of the world when China was reborn as the People’s Republic.
Americans have overspent their resources and are now reaping the bitter
harvest of the follies of their leaders. The U.S. has over 300 military bases
across the world, maintains the world’s most expensive military machine,
has hardly spent a year since 1945 without fighting a war somewhere in
the third world, often more than one at the same time, and have invited
its own decline. When Barak Obama came down from the Great Wall of China
and looked around his honest unlined face glowed with a sense of wonder
at a civilization five thousand years old, with a historical continuity unachieved by any other nation and people in history. His own countrymen failed to appreciate the majesty of history that Seemed to have moved their President. They wanted him to hector the leaders of China on what the Chinese people had “lost” under communist
rule--- freedom of speech and association, right to political diversity, blessings of Democracy. They lamented that their President did not rebule
his hosts for denying Tibet and Xinxiang “real autonomy”, that he had
postponed meeting the Dalai Lama until after his China visit.
In Britain, inheritors of the lost empire on which the sun once did not
Set, tried their best to keep up the sangfroid with only the minimum of gasps and yelps. For The Economist, it was Obama’s ‘Asian adventure’
with results dubious at best.The Europeans were less alarmed. They had
achieved something almost of equal importance as China’s. The European
Union united 27 countries of a continent that was the mother of wars for
Centuries including the two World Wars of the 20th. Britain’s magisterial
stature was derived from its ability to exploit Europe’s divisions and conflicts to its own advantage. The Union of Europe has rendered another
world war almost impossible to happen.
Indeed, war and peace in the world of the 21st century will be determined by relations between the United States and China. They fought
In Korea in the 1950s, and a cold war for the next 20-30 years over Taiwan
and learned the need to treat each other with circumspection and respect.
Obama’s visit to China was a culmination of a long process of incremental
mutual understanding that the centre of gravity in the strategic global dynamics had shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and that the issues
of world war or peace would now be determined by dynamics of relations
between the U.S, and China. This of course does not mean that India’s importance in global affairs has shrunk. India and the European Union are the two other principal actors in the current constellation of power in the world. It is imperative for India
and China to live in peace and cooperation to advance the cause of the
countless millions of humanity inhabiting Asia and Africa. And the
addition of Russia to the two Asian giants creates a formidable, indeed
unassailable template for stability, peace and prosperity of the bulk of
the earth’s population as well as geography.
India and China need each other to build a better life of one-third
of humanity. This is one of the stern imperatives of the 21st century that
journalists often fail to appreciate. Gone are the days when regional conflicts
and tensions could be resolved in geopolitical enclaves exclusive of one
another. And here even India’s ministry of external affairs failed to resist
the pressure of the country’s corporate media which saw in Obama’s China
visit as a give-away by America to China at India’s cost.
The United States needs China’s cooperation to douse the war
in Afghanistan and to resolve the Afghan-Pakistan cocundrum.
Obama asked for China’s help and was probably assured that
He would get it. Obama needs Pakistan to move a good number
of its troops from the eastern to the western fronts to fight the Taliban
in Pakistan and help Kabul to get the better of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The Pakistan Army has already asked the United States a quid for quo ----
pressure on India to reopen the negotiations for settling the Kashmir
issue. Obama has apparently asked the Chinese leaders to help persuade the Pakistan Army as well as the bureaucracy to relent on
both demands. If China can persuade Pakistan to relent, it
will be in India’s interest , not against India. And probably China
will try to help in only because it would want to insulate Xinxiang,
a neighbour of Afghanistan with a shared border, from Islamic
insurgency in Pakistan and Afghanistan./////
Saturday, October 24, 2009
AFPAK OR PAKAF? OBAMA’s DILEMMA
By Bhabani Sen Gupta
A long, searing debate has been going on at the White House
in Washington DC on what should be president Barak Obama’s next
strategy in Afghanistan. Vice-president Joe Biden asked at one of
the sessions how much was America spending on Afghanistan and
Pakistan.The answer came as $ 65 billion and $ 2.25 billion. “Well,”
drawled the prolix vice-president, “ by my calculations, that’s 30-to-1
ratio in favour of Afghanistan.” Pausing a few moments of silence
among the select group of national security advisers, Biden asked
a question. “Al-Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan had nuclear
weapons. And yet for every dollar we are spending in Pakistan, we’re
spending $ 30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?”
The debate may consume the rest of the month of October, may extend to November.
President Barack Obama inherited two wars from George W.Bush.
He was not elected to the White House to win the first war Bush had started
-----America invaded Afghanistan way back in 2001! His campaign promise to the American people was to end the war in Iraq; he did not promise to win the war in Afghanistan but to bear with it.. His commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, has asked for 40-60,000 more troops and years of warfare without anything like a victory. The General has publicly confessed that America cannot expect to win the war in Afghanistan. And he has also confessed that the longer he stays in Afghanistan, the less he understands the country., The Economist, inheritor of the imperial ethos of the Raj, felt let down by Obama’s “dithering” in October when he took his time to determine changes in Afghan strategy/.The Economist praised Gordon Brown, British prime minister, for offering 500 more men to fight in Afghanistan. The offer , however, was hedged by several conditions.. Brown could not afford to forget that the British from India had invaded Afghanistan twice, facing defeat both times, but succeeding in dividing the largest ethnic group in the multi\ethnic, multi-lingual population, the Pushtuns, thereby depriving Afghanistan of the principal ingredient of political stability. Neither Brown nor The Economist nor indeed most of the nations of the world want America to get defeated in Afghanistan.
What is needed is an Obama strategy to pull out of Afghanistan. Obama will be better advised to ask the UN to find a settlement of the Afghan conflict or even NATO plus a few chosen neighbours of Afghanistan like Iran, Pakistan, China and Russia.
Obama, in his election campaign, called this war “the right war” ( the “wrong war” was in Iraq) because Afghanistan was seen asthe haven and the largest nest of Taliban, the jihadi offspring of fundamentalist Islam.
That perception seems to be changing at the White House Situation Room. Not
only has the Afghan war cost America $ 65 billion; it has lost support of most of
America’s Coalition of the Willing, and it has no support among a majority of the
American voters who will vote soon in the first Congressional election since Obama
took the White House.
. Osama bin Laden sounded softer than in the past when he addressed
the invading powers from his unknown hideout on the eighth anniversary of 9/11 to tell them that they should quit the war they could hardly win.” You are waging a hopeless and losing war,” Turning to his own followers, said this fugitive man of darkness, “The time has come to liberate ourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neoconservatives.” It could have meant fear to negotiate or fear to fight.
In London, the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, Robert Fisk was
moved by the Al Zazzera video to comment that “Obama and Osama are at least participating in the same narrative For the U.S. president’s critics-indeed for many critics of the West’s military occupation of Afghanistan—are beginning to speak in the same language as Obama’s (and their) greatest enemy.”
Much of the marathon debate at the Situation Room in the White House revolves
around crucial questions about how Al Qaeda and Taliban relate to one another. Are they two different phenomena, each with its own sociology and political objectives?Or are that two faces of one single body of violent, resurgent, fundamentalist Islam committed to turning the entire space ofAfghan-Pakistan into an armed Islamic fortress? The perceptions the Obama administration inherited from that of
He was not elected to the White House to win the first war Bush had started
-----America invaded Afghanistan way back in 2001! His campaign promise to the American people was to end the war in Iraq; he did not promise to win the war in Afghanistan but to bear with it.. His commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, has asked for 40-60,000 more troops and years of warfare without anything like a victory. The General has publicly confessed that America cannot expect to win the war in Afghanistan. And he has also confessed that the longer he stays in Afghanistan, the less he understands the country., The Economist, inheritor of the imperial ethos of the Raj, felt let down by Obama’s “dithering” in October when he took his time to determine changes in Afghan strategy/.The Economist praised Gordon Brown, British prime minister, for offering 500 more men to fight in Afghanistan. The offer , however, was hedged by several conditions.. Brown could not afford to forget that the British from India had invaded Afghanistan twice, facing defeat both times, but succeeding in dividing the largest ethnic group in the multi\ethnic, multi-lingual population, the Pushtuns, thereby depriving Afghanistan of the principal ingredient of political stability. Neither Brown nor The Economist nor indeed most of the nations of the world want America to get defeated in Afghanistan.
What is needed is an Obama strategy to pull out of Afghanistan. Obama will be better advised to ask the UN to find a settlement of the Afghan conflict or even NATO plus a few chosen neighbours of Afghanistan like Iran, Pakistan, China and Russia.
Obama, in his election campaign, called this war “the right war” ( the “wrong war” was in Iraq) because Afghanistan was seen asthe haven and the largest nest of Taliban, the jihadi offspring of fundamentalist Islam.
That perception seems to be changing at the White House Situation Room. Not
only has the Afghan war cost America $ 65 billion; it has lost support of most of
America’s Coalition of the Willing, and it has no support among a majority of the
American voters who will vote soon in the first Congressional election since Obama
took the White House.
. Osama bin Laden sounded softer than in the past when he addressed
the invading powers from his unknown hideout on the eighth anniversary of 9/11 to tell them that they should quit the war they could hardly win.” You are waging a hopeless and losing war,” Turning to his own followers, said this fugitive man of darkness, “The time has come to liberate ourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neoconservatives.” It could have meant fear to negotiate or fear to fight.
In London, the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, Robert Fisk was
moved by the Al Zazzera video to comment that “Obama and Osama are at least participating in the same narrative For the U.S. president’s critics-indeed for many critics of the West’s military occupation of Afghanistan—are beginning to speak in the same language as Obama’s (and their) greatest enemy.”
Much of the marathon debate at the Situation Room in the White House revolves
around crucial questions about how Al Qaeda and Taliban relate to one another. Are they two different phenomena, each with its own sociology and political objectives?Or are that two faces of one single body of violent, resurgent, fundamentalist Islam committed to turning the entire space ofAfghan-Pakistan into an armed Islamic fortress? The perceptions the Obama administration inherited from that of
George Bush was the apocalyptic vision of a single fanatic Islamic monster
challenging America to nothing short of a civilisational war across undefined battlefronts ; the “war” that was carried to the American homeland on 9/11 must be fought on as many fronts as the Enemy chose to strike from. The American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003 locked two fundamentalist belligerent gospels in a mutually mortal combat.
Humanity demands that the new American president shakes off this terribly
jaundiced vision. From the little narrow windows that have been allowed to open on
the secret Situation Room debate, it seems that two major schools of thought have begun to emerge. One, led by Biden, sees the Taliban in Afghanistan as the country’s own political movement inevitably wearing Islamic masks because the country, battered by 3O years of warfare lacks institutional frames with which to build political parties.
There is indeed an Al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan, but it is a small one, perhaps about 100 dedicated jihadis; Al Qaeda does not drive Taliban in Afghanistan.
But it does so in Pakistan where the Army, cuddled, armed, indoctrinated, financed, and armoured by America, granted it a safe haven in the huge, rugged, tribal borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistsn. Pakistan was created by M.A. Jinnah as a secular republic for the Muslim minority of the British Indian empire. It was midwifed by the Raj in clumsy, desperate haste in 1947. In a mere ten years, it
was usurped by the Army and in another ten given Islamic trappings, until General
Zia-ul Huq, a darling of Washington, proclaimed an Islamic Republic. General Zia
also created Taliban and endowed it with the role of throwing out the Soviet-backed
Saur Revolutionary regime in Afghanistan and proclaim an Islamic regime in Kabul
that would be bound to Pakistan to fight India from a strategic depth. All this military- strategic thinking and planning had the open or implied support or approval of the United States. Obama is now engaged in a thorough review of the inherited wisdom or folly that the Taliban, because it is led by Islamic cleriks trained in Madrasas is a threat to the national security of the United States. As of November 24, when this analysis is being written, it seems that the president and his advisers as well as cabinet colleagues have reached a consensus that the Taliban, as long as it operates only in Afghanistan without Al Qaeda leadership as well as infiltration, it is not a security threat to America, and it can be brought into a network of negotiations leading to a political understanding. The United States can then focus entirely on Al Qaeda which has now dug its toes in the borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and built a compact with Pakistan Taliban . The combination constitutes a formidable Islamic terrorist force, the largest in the world, very well armed for guerrilla warfare of long duration, and seemingly well-supplied with financial and other resources.
If separation of Afghan Taliban from the Al Qaeda-Taliban joint front
in Pakistan informs Obama’s new military-political, that is, strategic thrust
at the end of the debate in the White House, it will mark the end of the short-lived
strategic AFPAK concept of Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy` for the
South Asian front of American diplo-military thrusts.
A new strategic concept will emerge. Americans may be prompted to call
it PAKAF strategy. But it will fall far short of an adequate intellectual under-
standing of the problem. Pakistan has been all these years a major American asset
in the Cold War and even in the 16 years that have glided by since 1991. Will
the friendship endure if the U.S. puts enough pressure on Pakistan to incapacitate, if not kill, the monster the Army itself created and nurtured with America’s tacit
approval and loud economic and military support?END
Humanity demands that the new American president shakes off this terribly
jaundiced vision. From the little narrow windows that have been allowed to open on
the secret Situation Room debate, it seems that two major schools of thought have begun to emerge. One, led by Biden, sees the Taliban in Afghanistan as the country’s own political movement inevitably wearing Islamic masks because the country, battered by 3O years of warfare lacks institutional frames with which to build political parties.
There is indeed an Al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan, but it is a small one, perhaps about 100 dedicated jihadis; Al Qaeda does not drive Taliban in Afghanistan.
But it does so in Pakistan where the Army, cuddled, armed, indoctrinated, financed, and armoured by America, granted it a safe haven in the huge, rugged, tribal borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistsn. Pakistan was created by M.A. Jinnah as a secular republic for the Muslim minority of the British Indian empire. It was midwifed by the Raj in clumsy, desperate haste in 1947. In a mere ten years, it
was usurped by the Army and in another ten given Islamic trappings, until General
Zia-ul Huq, a darling of Washington, proclaimed an Islamic Republic. General Zia
also created Taliban and endowed it with the role of throwing out the Soviet-backed
Saur Revolutionary regime in Afghanistan and proclaim an Islamic regime in Kabul
that would be bound to Pakistan to fight India from a strategic depth. All this military- strategic thinking and planning had the open or implied support or approval of the United States. Obama is now engaged in a thorough review of the inherited wisdom or folly that the Taliban, because it is led by Islamic cleriks trained in Madrasas is a threat to the national security of the United States. As of November 24, when this analysis is being written, it seems that the president and his advisers as well as cabinet colleagues have reached a consensus that the Taliban, as long as it operates only in Afghanistan without Al Qaeda leadership as well as infiltration, it is not a security threat to America, and it can be brought into a network of negotiations leading to a political understanding. The United States can then focus entirely on Al Qaeda which has now dug its toes in the borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and built a compact with Pakistan Taliban . The combination constitutes a formidable Islamic terrorist force, the largest in the world, very well armed for guerrilla warfare of long duration, and seemingly well-supplied with financial and other resources.
If separation of Afghan Taliban from the Al Qaeda-Taliban joint front
in Pakistan informs Obama’s new military-political, that is, strategic thrust
at the end of the debate in the White House, it will mark the end of the short-lived
strategic AFPAK concept of Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy` for the
South Asian front of American diplo-military thrusts.
A new strategic concept will emerge. Americans may be prompted to call
it PAKAF strategy. But it will fall far short of an adequate intellectual under-
standing of the problem. Pakistan has been all these years a major American asset
in the Cold War and even in the 16 years that have glided by since 1991. Will
the friendship endure if the U.S. puts enough pressure on Pakistan to incapacitate, if not kill, the monster the Army itself created and nurtured with America’s tacit
approval and loud economic and military support?END
Monday, September 28, 2009
CININDIA IS MORE THAN INDIA AND CHINA
By Bhabani Sen Gupta
A spectre is haunting an enormous lot of people all over the
Western world and its allies, friends and defenders in India. Its name
is Communist China. The world order that came to be established after
World War II and has melted down to a large extent is known as the
American World Order. China is one of the strongest pillars of a
new emerging world order that will rest, in this century, on a balanced
foundation of equal give and take among the large global community of
sovereign states spanning all continents. However, the building blocks of
the new global architecture reside at this time in Asia. China is in the fore-
front of the emergent pillars of the new world order. There are other
big pillars too---India, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, and, of course,
Japan. Why, then, is there so much nervousness about the specture of
Communist China creating a pall of neurosis, even hallucinations, in
the hall of nations, or ,more precisely, the thinking sections of their
articulate elites?
“The media” occupies the grandstand of the thinking sections
in democracies where the press that is now more electronic than print.
Less articulate and less assertive are the academic communities in
democracies , particularly those engaged in the volatile fields of politics
and international relations. “The media” is a conglomerate of newspapers
and magazines, television, and the vast, and still expanding universe
of internet.
In democracies, the media as a collective entity is given the role of
sentinel of the people’s right to demand accountability from the principal
organs of the state—the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. Of course,
the demand is not always made, nor met. The Fourth Estate, a precious gift
of the French Revolution, is an organic part of the state, and is symbiotically
linked with the economic and political interests that control the state and run
the government, even as the people’s “ownership” of the state is nicely acknowledged. In democracies, this “ownership” is excercised only through
the vote in elections which must be as free and fair as practicable, even permissible,
in generic circumstances.
In democracies, government, too, own print, television and internet media
and thus compete with the ‘independent’ media. Government maintain networks
of control over “facts” and about information about “facts.”Thus is laid out a huge
space of cooperation and attrition between government and media not owned and run by government. In practice, the private media and the government try to keep
each other on the right side.
Democracies vary from one another in many ways, not the least in the
tension-ridden space of information and facts. Only in the United States, citizents
enjoy the constitutional right to information, and this has created major tensions
between presidents and the media. In India, citizens now enjoy right to information
under legislation enacted by parliament.
However, the media must weigh seriously and with a high sense of responsibility the veracity of ‘news’ reported in its columns or in its airwaves.
The test of veracity is the source of ‘news.’ The media often attribute news
to unspecified sources. Recent reports of Chinese ‘incursions’ along the undemarcated undefined 4000km long border between India and China,
both in the eastern and western sectors lacked veracity because these were
attributed to unidentified sources. When one or two retired military officers
working with private think-tanks receiving handsome government grants
found space in India’s largest circulated English daily, confirming ‘aggressive
Chinese patrolling’ in the eastern as well as western sectors, the editors did
not question of the source of the information obtained by the “strategic
experts.” Denial of these reports by spokespersons of the Chinese government
were dismissed with a superior sleigh of hand. The newspaper evidently allowed
its political prejudices against “Communist China’ to prevail over its ethical
and political responsibilities about maintaining peace and cooperation between
India and China.
The India-China relationship is more that relationship between emerging
Asia’s two largest nations who are also among the planets largest neighbours.
There is admittedly a tectonic shift in power equations in the international
arena in the 21st century. If the 19th century was British, and the 20th American,
the 21st is witnessing a balanced, more equitable distribution of power and
wealth among nations of the world. The post=colonial shift that began in
the wake of World War II, with Britain’s negotiated withdrawal from its
Asian empire and, much more assertively, with the communist revolution
in China is now acquiring firm geopolitical stability and acceptance on a global
basis.
The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party have drawn lessons from the
internal and international behaviour of the Soviet Union, and continue to
do so. They have cautiously handled foreign policy problems and issues
and generally avoided confrontation.Time magazine, in its issue of September
28, 2009, gave a comprehensive profile of China’s strides of 60 years affirming
unambiguously that China has broadly conducted its external relations within
accepted norms of the United Nations, behaved with considerable responsibility
in handing contentious issues. “Today, the People’s Republic of China is deeply
involved across the globe and is increasingly an upholder of, and contriobuter to,
the existing international order…Today, indeed, the PRC may be the greatest
advocate of the UN among the major powers.”
The Indian Government showed a far greater sense of responsibility
about maintaining cordial relations with China than corporate media
represented by corporate media.The reports of Chinese ‘incursions’ were
firmly denied by the prime minister, the foreign minister and the national
security adviser acting almost in concert. And the intervention worked
immediately. The reports stopped coming in. Those few ‘experts’who relished
finding their names in the hallowed columns of a couple of corporate
dailies vanished.
There are people and interests in India, as in other countries, that
are disturbed, even alarmed, by China’s roll-in. The Obama administration
that got the many millions of Dollars as a loan from China to stem the
most critical crises in global capitalism since the Depression of the 1930s,
have reasons to nurse and strengthen the current tension-free relationship
between the U.S. and China. Mr Obama’s coming visit to Beijing may well
turn out to be a major event in international diplomacy. However, the Obama
presidency does not occupy even the larger than half of the American political
space. Apart from a belligerent Republican Party that has determined to
take on the Obama administration, there are deeply entrenched Amrican
domestic and international interests that are unreconciled to China’s rise-and-
rise. These interests have woven together global arteries of influencing
empathic interests across the planet. These arteries are active in numerous
countries including India.
In the Asia-Pacific region, Japan and Australia receive as much
Attention of makers of China’s foreign policy as does India. Japan’s new
Prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party of Japan
(DPJ) has a solid majority in the lower house of parliament with the
support of two small parties, one of which used to wear the name of
Socialist Party, is expected to lighten the very heavy burden of America’s
Alliance hugs, is expected to invest significantly more in coddling China
than did the Liberal Democratic Party in over 50 years of governing
the world’s second largest economic power. The Chinese government
claimed after president Hu Jintai’s much publicized visit to Japan
earlier this year that for the first time Sino-Japanese relations were
given a greater balance and a stronger template. As the Indian government
weighs carefully the changing dynamics of US-China relations, so do
the government in Beijing as well as the leadership of the Chinese Communist
Party the dynamics of India’s relations with the United States.
India-China relations have to be seen in the larger context of global
change in this century. The bilateral focus is too narrow and is smitten
by fogs of short-sighted patriotism and power chauvinism in both countries.
Even the China-U.S.-India focus is not untarnished by chauvinistic slips of
objectivity and farsight.
The territorial imperative is the most volatile element in relations
between great neighbours. The Chinese made major concessions to
resolve the border disputes with Russia The 15 rounds of talks that have
taken place between India and China have lifted a lot of myths about the
border regions and clarified perspectives. Perhaps the time has come to
draft and sign accords covering most of the border and thus isolating the
few areas in dispute in the western as well as eastern sectors. The sight of
a border treaty will help both governments to focus exclusively on the
points of dispute. It will also be very helpful to show the people of
both countries as well as others how much of trade goes on between Indians
and Tibetans all along the long and rugged borderland extending from the
Korakoram ranges in the west to the Himalayan slopes in the east.
At the same time, both India and China must do more to activate
the BRIC forum where the two are joined by Russia and Brazil. There is ashyness
in both countries to give BRIC a high transcontinental profile. Representatives
of the four powers will hold their meeting next month in Bangalore rather
than New Delhi for reasons not explained to watchers of this momentous
inter-regional group. The Indian media too happens to be shy of the BRIC
profile. Yet BRIC’s silent footprints will speak far more eloquently about
the global shift of power in this century. SININDIA is at this point of time
not a strong soundbyte of global change in the process of time.
By Bhabani Sen Gupta
A spectre is haunting an enormous lot of people all over the
Western world and its allies, friends and defenders in India. Its name
is Communist China. The world order that came to be established after
World War II and has melted down to a large extent is known as the
American World Order. China is one of the strongest pillars of a
new emerging world order that will rest, in this century, on a balanced
foundation of equal give and take among the large global community of
sovereign states spanning all continents. However, the building blocks of
the new global architecture reside at this time in Asia. China is in the fore-
front of the emergent pillars of the new world order. There are other
big pillars too---India, Russia, Brazil, South Africa, and, of course,
Japan. Why, then, is there so much nervousness about the specture of
Communist China creating a pall of neurosis, even hallucinations, in
the hall of nations, or ,more precisely, the thinking sections of their
articulate elites?
“The media” occupies the grandstand of the thinking sections
in democracies where the press that is now more electronic than print.
Less articulate and less assertive are the academic communities in
democracies , particularly those engaged in the volatile fields of politics
and international relations. “The media” is a conglomerate of newspapers
and magazines, television, and the vast, and still expanding universe
of internet.
In democracies, the media as a collective entity is given the role of
sentinel of the people’s right to demand accountability from the principal
organs of the state—the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. Of course,
the demand is not always made, nor met. The Fourth Estate, a precious gift
of the French Revolution, is an organic part of the state, and is symbiotically
linked with the economic and political interests that control the state and run
the government, even as the people’s “ownership” of the state is nicely acknowledged. In democracies, this “ownership” is excercised only through
the vote in elections which must be as free and fair as practicable, even permissible,
in generic circumstances.
In democracies, government, too, own print, television and internet media
and thus compete with the ‘independent’ media. Government maintain networks
of control over “facts” and about information about “facts.”Thus is laid out a huge
space of cooperation and attrition between government and media not owned and run by government. In practice, the private media and the government try to keep
each other on the right side.
Democracies vary from one another in many ways, not the least in the
tension-ridden space of information and facts. Only in the United States, citizents
enjoy the constitutional right to information, and this has created major tensions
between presidents and the media. In India, citizens now enjoy right to information
under legislation enacted by parliament.
However, the media must weigh seriously and with a high sense of responsibility the veracity of ‘news’ reported in its columns or in its airwaves.
The test of veracity is the source of ‘news.’ The media often attribute news
to unspecified sources. Recent reports of Chinese ‘incursions’ along the undemarcated undefined 4000km long border between India and China,
both in the eastern and western sectors lacked veracity because these were
attributed to unidentified sources. When one or two retired military officers
working with private think-tanks receiving handsome government grants
found space in India’s largest circulated English daily, confirming ‘aggressive
Chinese patrolling’ in the eastern as well as western sectors, the editors did
not question of the source of the information obtained by the “strategic
experts.” Denial of these reports by spokespersons of the Chinese government
were dismissed with a superior sleigh of hand. The newspaper evidently allowed
its political prejudices against “Communist China’ to prevail over its ethical
and political responsibilities about maintaining peace and cooperation between
India and China.
The India-China relationship is more that relationship between emerging
Asia’s two largest nations who are also among the planets largest neighbours.
There is admittedly a tectonic shift in power equations in the international
arena in the 21st century. If the 19th century was British, and the 20th American,
the 21st is witnessing a balanced, more equitable distribution of power and
wealth among nations of the world. The post=colonial shift that began in
the wake of World War II, with Britain’s negotiated withdrawal from its
Asian empire and, much more assertively, with the communist revolution
in China is now acquiring firm geopolitical stability and acceptance on a global
basis.
The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party have drawn lessons from the
internal and international behaviour of the Soviet Union, and continue to
do so. They have cautiously handled foreign policy problems and issues
and generally avoided confrontation.Time magazine, in its issue of September
28, 2009, gave a comprehensive profile of China’s strides of 60 years affirming
unambiguously that China has broadly conducted its external relations within
accepted norms of the United Nations, behaved with considerable responsibility
in handing contentious issues. “Today, the People’s Republic of China is deeply
involved across the globe and is increasingly an upholder of, and contriobuter to,
the existing international order…Today, indeed, the PRC may be the greatest
advocate of the UN among the major powers.”
The Indian Government showed a far greater sense of responsibility
about maintaining cordial relations with China than corporate media
represented by corporate media.The reports of Chinese ‘incursions’ were
firmly denied by the prime minister, the foreign minister and the national
security adviser acting almost in concert. And the intervention worked
immediately. The reports stopped coming in. Those few ‘experts’who relished
finding their names in the hallowed columns of a couple of corporate
dailies vanished.
There are people and interests in India, as in other countries, that
are disturbed, even alarmed, by China’s roll-in. The Obama administration
that got the many millions of Dollars as a loan from China to stem the
most critical crises in global capitalism since the Depression of the 1930s,
have reasons to nurse and strengthen the current tension-free relationship
between the U.S. and China. Mr Obama’s coming visit to Beijing may well
turn out to be a major event in international diplomacy. However, the Obama
presidency does not occupy even the larger than half of the American political
space. Apart from a belligerent Republican Party that has determined to
take on the Obama administration, there are deeply entrenched Amrican
domestic and international interests that are unreconciled to China’s rise-and-
rise. These interests have woven together global arteries of influencing
empathic interests across the planet. These arteries are active in numerous
countries including India.
In the Asia-Pacific region, Japan and Australia receive as much
Attention of makers of China’s foreign policy as does India. Japan’s new
Prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party of Japan
(DPJ) has a solid majority in the lower house of parliament with the
support of two small parties, one of which used to wear the name of
Socialist Party, is expected to lighten the very heavy burden of America’s
Alliance hugs, is expected to invest significantly more in coddling China
than did the Liberal Democratic Party in over 50 years of governing
the world’s second largest economic power. The Chinese government
claimed after president Hu Jintai’s much publicized visit to Japan
earlier this year that for the first time Sino-Japanese relations were
given a greater balance and a stronger template. As the Indian government
weighs carefully the changing dynamics of US-China relations, so do
the government in Beijing as well as the leadership of the Chinese Communist
Party the dynamics of India’s relations with the United States.
India-China relations have to be seen in the larger context of global
change in this century. The bilateral focus is too narrow and is smitten
by fogs of short-sighted patriotism and power chauvinism in both countries.
Even the China-U.S.-India focus is not untarnished by chauvinistic slips of
objectivity and farsight.
The territorial imperative is the most volatile element in relations
between great neighbours. The Chinese made major concessions to
resolve the border disputes with Russia The 15 rounds of talks that have
taken place between India and China have lifted a lot of myths about the
border regions and clarified perspectives. Perhaps the time has come to
draft and sign accords covering most of the border and thus isolating the
few areas in dispute in the western as well as eastern sectors. The sight of
a border treaty will help both governments to focus exclusively on the
points of dispute. It will also be very helpful to show the people of
both countries as well as others how much of trade goes on between Indians
and Tibetans all along the long and rugged borderland extending from the
Korakoram ranges in the west to the Himalayan slopes in the east.
At the same time, both India and China must do more to activate
the BRIC forum where the two are joined by Russia and Brazil. There is ashyness
in both countries to give BRIC a high transcontinental profile. Representatives
of the four powers will hold their meeting next month in Bangalore rather
than New Delhi for reasons not explained to watchers of this momentous
inter-regional group. The Indian media too happens to be shy of the BRIC
profile. Yet BRIC’s silent footprints will speak far more eloquently about
the global shift of power in this century. SININDIA is at this point of time
not a strong soundbyte of global change in the process of time.
BATTLES FOR PAKISTAN
By Bhabani Sen Gupta
Four battles are raging in Pakistan with increasing fury, borders of
the battles merging on wider levels and building up, steadily and inexorably,
to a ferocious countrywide encounter threatening the entire state. It happens
to be the second largest Muslim country in the world after Indonesia, with a population
of 168 million growing at the annual rate of 1.8 percent. Its geographical location lends
it considerable geopolitical importance. It borders the Arabian Sea , between India on
the east, Iran and Afghanistan on the west. It has been, and continues to be, one of the
largest outposts of American and Western military and strategic power since the
1950s.
Pakistan was midwifed by the British as an intrinsic component of the historic agreement reached between the great imperial establishment in London and Indian nationalists bred and nursed in the political and intellectual hothousee of the Raj. The Raj had brought the entire
geographic area of India under its control It had helped the ancient Idea of India to
get flesh and blood as a single political entity. Before folding up the Empire,
the Raj, with willing collaboration of majority as well as minority nationalist forces
in India, succeeded in partitioning the subcontinental into two mutually hostile
neighbours. They fought three wars in a span of 55 years before settling down to an
uneasy and gingerly cooperative neighbourliness. But not before Pakistan itself fell
apart and lost its eastern wing which proclaimed itself a sovereign republic in 1971
with warm, passionate Indian approval and support. In the four wars raging in Pakistan, the army is fighting two. One with American troops against Islamic militants, the other with fleeting armies of a motley of tribal chiefs in two of its four provinces as well as the vast expanse of rugged mountain lands that lie between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The third battle is being waged by America’s worldwide military power: scores of drones dropping bombs on
Pakistan’s western borderlands and, on an increasing scale, American and British
troops fighting the Taleban in southern Afghanistan.
Taliban is not an organized army of Islam led by elusive Al Queda
Heroes like Osama Bin Laden and the one-armed Mullah Omar who are believed
to be living in the Pakistan-Afghanistan bprderlands. Taliban is a collective
name given to an amorphous number of soldiers of Islam, or Talibs, trained
in numerous madrassas located in the large expanse of upper Pakistan and
lower Afghanistan. Armed with Kalashnikovs and shoulder-firing missiles
and powerful bombs, they are martyrs of Islam ready to die for Allah.
The Taleban was created jointly by the CIA and General Zia-ul Haque
In the early 1980s to fight the Soviet forces after the Kramlin had committed
the fatal blunder of armed intervention in Afghanistan to defend the mortally
flawed Saur revolutuion of 1978 spearheaded by the foolinshly romantic
Afghan communist party. The Soviet force was drawn mostly from Central
Asians of the vast Red Army, themselves believing Muslims. The Soviets
pulled out. The Taliban stayed on to give Afghans a taste of militant Islam
delivered by a motley group of tribal chiefs. The chiefs turned Afghanistan
into th world’s largest poppyfield. A gun held in one hand and a cake of
opium in the other, the Taliban became the bizarre symbol of a socially
conservative, fundamentalist faith that falsely flew the flag of Islam in
Afghanistan.
The Taliban required the Christian fundamentalist George Bush to
Become president of the United States of America to turn Afghanistan into
a cataclysmic battleground of the world’s two evangelical faiths, Christianity
And Islam. Now, in the summer of 2009, the mother of all battles threaten to
engulf the state of Pakistan.
A tribal guerrilla force that called itself Taliban and was also called
By that name by New York Times reporter in Islamabad, Jane Perilez, crossed
the rubicon around the third week of April, 20099, apparently from Swat Valley
in the wake of the Presidernt of Pakistan, Asif Ali Dardari. Signing a deal with
the Islamic force that had taken over Swat Valley and proclaimed a Shariah
regime. This Taliban force leisurely took over, without shedding a single
drop of blood, a district of the North-West Frontier Province bordering the
Rawalpindi=Islamabad region . The district is known as Baner ( procounced
Ba-nair) which is located 70 miles from Islamabad.
Baner is home to a million Pakistanis. It bears no military outpost.
The police force that maintained law and order turned its face away and
Retreated to its barracks and Taliban soldiers rolled over the entire
District, proclaimed Sharia raj, and asked non-Pathans to leave the town.
Jane Perlez reported that the Taliban met with no resistance at Baner, and
that the Zardari regime in Islamabad just caved in..
It seems that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S.
Armed forces, Admiral Mike Mullen, was in Islamabad when the Taliban
“invaded” Bamer. This was his second visit to the Pakistani capital in
two weeks. Admiral Mullen met with top military officials of the armed
forces and intelligence agencies of Pakistan, apparently to prepare
the ground for President Obama’s Afghan strategy---to conduct the
“good war” in Afghanistan after closing the “bar war” in Iraq.
And secretary of state Hilary Clinton was to appear before the
Powerful Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives on
Capitol Hill on April 22, a day before the New York Times came out with
the ‘invasion’ report. She had known of it before she faced the committee.
Mrs Clinton accused the Pakistan government of cowing down before the
Taliban, mking too many concessions. “I think that the Pakistan government
is basically abdicating to the Taliban and to the extremists”. The new develop-
ment in Pakistan “poses a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country
and the world.”
What now? Asked millions of Pakistan wqtchers all over the world,
Including in India. Has the Mother of Battles been joined in Pakistan?
Between the sprawling Jihadi warrorrs of Islam and the Pakistan army
that once created the Taliban? Will the Army and the American troops
stationed in Pakistan fight the Taliban together? Will the Americans get out
of Pakistan leaving it to it fate and to Islam?
Perhaps the best response to the latest developments in Pakistan
will be for the UN Secretary-Genera; to summon an emergency session
of the Security Council, expanded with the inclusion of India, Brazil,
South Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Kazakistan, to formulate a regional
resolution of the crises building up in Pakistan0Afghanistan region. Will
the U.S. take the lead?
By Bhabani Sen Gupta
Four battles are raging in Pakistan with increasing fury, borders of
the battles merging on wider levels and building up, steadily and inexorably,
to a ferocious countrywide encounter threatening the entire state. It happens
to be the second largest Muslim country in the world after Indonesia, with a population
of 168 million growing at the annual rate of 1.8 percent. Its geographical location lends
it considerable geopolitical importance. It borders the Arabian Sea , between India on
the east, Iran and Afghanistan on the west. It has been, and continues to be, one of the
largest outposts of American and Western military and strategic power since the
1950s.
Pakistan was midwifed by the British as an intrinsic component of the historic agreement reached between the great imperial establishment in London and Indian nationalists bred and nursed in the political and intellectual hothousee of the Raj. The Raj had brought the entire
geographic area of India under its control It had helped the ancient Idea of India to
get flesh and blood as a single political entity. Before folding up the Empire,
the Raj, with willing collaboration of majority as well as minority nationalist forces
in India, succeeded in partitioning the subcontinental into two mutually hostile
neighbours. They fought three wars in a span of 55 years before settling down to an
uneasy and gingerly cooperative neighbourliness. But not before Pakistan itself fell
apart and lost its eastern wing which proclaimed itself a sovereign republic in 1971
with warm, passionate Indian approval and support. In the four wars raging in Pakistan, the army is fighting two. One with American troops against Islamic militants, the other with fleeting armies of a motley of tribal chiefs in two of its four provinces as well as the vast expanse of rugged mountain lands that lie between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The third battle is being waged by America’s worldwide military power: scores of drones dropping bombs on
Pakistan’s western borderlands and, on an increasing scale, American and British
troops fighting the Taleban in southern Afghanistan.
Taliban is not an organized army of Islam led by elusive Al Queda
Heroes like Osama Bin Laden and the one-armed Mullah Omar who are believed
to be living in the Pakistan-Afghanistan bprderlands. Taliban is a collective
name given to an amorphous number of soldiers of Islam, or Talibs, trained
in numerous madrassas located in the large expanse of upper Pakistan and
lower Afghanistan. Armed with Kalashnikovs and shoulder-firing missiles
and powerful bombs, they are martyrs of Islam ready to die for Allah.
The Taleban was created jointly by the CIA and General Zia-ul Haque
In the early 1980s to fight the Soviet forces after the Kramlin had committed
the fatal blunder of armed intervention in Afghanistan to defend the mortally
flawed Saur revolutuion of 1978 spearheaded by the foolinshly romantic
Afghan communist party. The Soviet force was drawn mostly from Central
Asians of the vast Red Army, themselves believing Muslims. The Soviets
pulled out. The Taliban stayed on to give Afghans a taste of militant Islam
delivered by a motley group of tribal chiefs. The chiefs turned Afghanistan
into th world’s largest poppyfield. A gun held in one hand and a cake of
opium in the other, the Taliban became the bizarre symbol of a socially
conservative, fundamentalist faith that falsely flew the flag of Islam in
Afghanistan.
The Taliban required the Christian fundamentalist George Bush to
Become president of the United States of America to turn Afghanistan into
a cataclysmic battleground of the world’s two evangelical faiths, Christianity
And Islam. Now, in the summer of 2009, the mother of all battles threaten to
engulf the state of Pakistan.
A tribal guerrilla force that called itself Taliban and was also called
By that name by New York Times reporter in Islamabad, Jane Perilez, crossed
the rubicon around the third week of April, 20099, apparently from Swat Valley
in the wake of the Presidernt of Pakistan, Asif Ali Dardari. Signing a deal with
the Islamic force that had taken over Swat Valley and proclaimed a Shariah
regime. This Taliban force leisurely took over, without shedding a single
drop of blood, a district of the North-West Frontier Province bordering the
Rawalpindi=Islamabad region . The district is known as Baner ( procounced
Ba-nair) which is located 70 miles from Islamabad.
Baner is home to a million Pakistanis. It bears no military outpost.
The police force that maintained law and order turned its face away and
Retreated to its barracks and Taliban soldiers rolled over the entire
District, proclaimed Sharia raj, and asked non-Pathans to leave the town.
Jane Perlez reported that the Taliban met with no resistance at Baner, and
that the Zardari regime in Islamabad just caved in..
It seems that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S.
Armed forces, Admiral Mike Mullen, was in Islamabad when the Taliban
“invaded” Bamer. This was his second visit to the Pakistani capital in
two weeks. Admiral Mullen met with top military officials of the armed
forces and intelligence agencies of Pakistan, apparently to prepare
the ground for President Obama’s Afghan strategy---to conduct the
“good war” in Afghanistan after closing the “bar war” in Iraq.
And secretary of state Hilary Clinton was to appear before the
Powerful Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives on
Capitol Hill on April 22, a day before the New York Times came out with
the ‘invasion’ report. She had known of it before she faced the committee.
Mrs Clinton accused the Pakistan government of cowing down before the
Taliban, mking too many concessions. “I think that the Pakistan government
is basically abdicating to the Taliban and to the extremists”. The new develop-
ment in Pakistan “poses a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country
and the world.”
What now? Asked millions of Pakistan wqtchers all over the world,
Including in India. Has the Mother of Battles been joined in Pakistan?
Between the sprawling Jihadi warrorrs of Islam and the Pakistan army
that once created the Taliban? Will the Army and the American troops
stationed in Pakistan fight the Taliban together? Will the Americans get out
of Pakistan leaving it to it fate and to Islam?
Perhaps the best response to the latest developments in Pakistan
will be for the UN Secretary-Genera; to summon an emergency session
of the Security Council, expanded with the inclusion of India, Brazil,
South Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Kazakistan, to formulate a regional
resolution of the crises building up in Pakistan0Afghanistan region. Will
the U.S. take the lead?
Afghanistan
Afghanistan which, together with Pakistan, is snowballing to become
the most critical issue for the United States as well as India, albeit for very
different reasons, also promises to bring together the NATO and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) for bringing peace and order
to Afghanistan. The SCO session held in Moscow at the end of March
was also the first bridge, thin and lean though was it, between the strategic
divide between the US and China. It got little space in the world media
but made its mark on the emerging world atlas of diplomacy.
For the sheer attendance it received from the strategic groups of
Nations on the two sides of the strategic divide if not for the depth and substance of the explorations that took place at the two-day event, the Moscow session of SCO marked a watershed.
The core group of the Shaighai Six---China, Russia and the four
Central Asian countries ( seven, with the full membership of Mongolia)
was joined by an astonishing an array of observers from the United States,
Western Europe, NATO, Afghanistan and India. The most high profile
personality present was the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon.
The Group of Six turned out to be a Group of 36.
The Government of India sent to the Moscow meeting a former
Diplomat, Satiinder K Lumba, picked up by prime minister Manmohan Singh
to represent his govt at parleys related to the Afpak Agenda of the US
President, Barack Obama Lumba is a former High Commissioner to
Pakistan. It should be noted that exchanges with Obama’s trouble-
shooter for issues packed together with the Afpak acronym is, so far,
the foreign secretary, Menon. Richard Halbrooke, during his day-long
visit to New Delhi on April 7, after his half-a-week long diplomatic
explorations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, met with Menon, and not with
the foreign minister or with the minister of state at the Foreign Office.
India has not so far been involved in depth at the political level with
Obama’s Afpak strategy.
The European Union and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in
Europe were represented by senior officials, Britain and France were
conspicuously absent.
The SCO session in Moscow proved to be completely non-confrontational in discussions. The foreign ministers of China and Russia
Stressed that neither the economic recession nor the financial crisis nor
Indeed the political-strategic issues and regional conflicts could be resolved
Without cooperation between and among the nations poralised by the
Bush administration in the eight years of the new century. Both welcomed
Barack Obama’s offer to bridge and if possible close the divides that plague
The global world order.
There was a consensus that problems posed by militant Islam in
The Pak-Afghan region and other areas needed increasing cooperation
Between and among nations globally as well as in the conflictual regions.
Foreign ministers of the Central Asian countries affirmed their readiness
to work with Pakistan and the US for resolving the conflicts if their
cooperation is sought on the basis of equality of status, respect for
mutual political, religious and cultural systems, and an agreed praxis of
international relations free of unilateralism, hegemony, and trade, racial
and ideological barriers.
Indeed, foreign ministers of these countries and also of Afghanistan
affirmed that full cooperation of the Central Asian republics, Iran, China
and Russia was essential for resolution of the problems of multiple,
inter=secting conflicts raging in Pakistan and Afghanistan’
The Moscow session of SCO provided opportunities for informal
Contacts, including ice-breaking ones, between governments locked in
Conflicts---such as the U.S. and Iran and Afghanistan and Iran. Ice-breaking
Contacts were established between representatives of NATO and the
Shanghai Six relating to cooperation for resolving the Afghan-Pakistan
Or Afpak problems.
Satindra Lumba stressed the importance of increasing coordination
Between various groups exploring separately prospects and problems of
Regional and global cooperation .His point was supported by several
Foreign ministers attending the session, including those of China, Russia and
Kazaghstan///
Afghanistan which, together with Pakistan, is snowballing to become
the most critical issue for the United States as well as India, albeit for very
different reasons, also promises to bring together the NATO and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) for bringing peace and order
to Afghanistan. The SCO session held in Moscow at the end of March
was also the first bridge, thin and lean though was it, between the strategic
divide between the US and China. It got little space in the world media
but made its mark on the emerging world atlas of diplomacy.
For the sheer attendance it received from the strategic groups of
Nations on the two sides of the strategic divide if not for the depth and substance of the explorations that took place at the two-day event, the Moscow session of SCO marked a watershed.
The core group of the Shaighai Six---China, Russia and the four
Central Asian countries ( seven, with the full membership of Mongolia)
was joined by an astonishing an array of observers from the United States,
Western Europe, NATO, Afghanistan and India. The most high profile
personality present was the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon.
The Group of Six turned out to be a Group of 36.
The Government of India sent to the Moscow meeting a former
Diplomat, Satiinder K Lumba, picked up by prime minister Manmohan Singh
to represent his govt at parleys related to the Afpak Agenda of the US
President, Barack Obama Lumba is a former High Commissioner to
Pakistan. It should be noted that exchanges with Obama’s trouble-
shooter for issues packed together with the Afpak acronym is, so far,
the foreign secretary, Menon. Richard Halbrooke, during his day-long
visit to New Delhi on April 7, after his half-a-week long diplomatic
explorations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, met with Menon, and not with
the foreign minister or with the minister of state at the Foreign Office.
India has not so far been involved in depth at the political level with
Obama’s Afpak strategy.
The European Union and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in
Europe were represented by senior officials, Britain and France were
conspicuously absent.
The SCO session in Moscow proved to be completely non-confrontational in discussions. The foreign ministers of China and Russia
Stressed that neither the economic recession nor the financial crisis nor
Indeed the political-strategic issues and regional conflicts could be resolved
Without cooperation between and among the nations poralised by the
Bush administration in the eight years of the new century. Both welcomed
Barack Obama’s offer to bridge and if possible close the divides that plague
The global world order.
There was a consensus that problems posed by militant Islam in
The Pak-Afghan region and other areas needed increasing cooperation
Between and among nations globally as well as in the conflictual regions.
Foreign ministers of the Central Asian countries affirmed their readiness
to work with Pakistan and the US for resolving the conflicts if their
cooperation is sought on the basis of equality of status, respect for
mutual political, religious and cultural systems, and an agreed praxis of
international relations free of unilateralism, hegemony, and trade, racial
and ideological barriers.
Indeed, foreign ministers of these countries and also of Afghanistan
affirmed that full cooperation of the Central Asian republics, Iran, China
and Russia was essential for resolution of the problems of multiple,
inter=secting conflicts raging in Pakistan and Afghanistan’
The Moscow session of SCO provided opportunities for informal
Contacts, including ice-breaking ones, between governments locked in
Conflicts---such as the U.S. and Iran and Afghanistan and Iran. Ice-breaking
Contacts were established between representatives of NATO and the
Shanghai Six relating to cooperation for resolving the Afghan-Pakistan
Or Afpak problems.
Satindra Lumba stressed the importance of increasing coordination
Between various groups exploring separately prospects and problems of
Regional and global cooperation .His point was supported by several
Foreign ministers attending the session, including those of China, Russia and
Kazaghstan///
Afghanistan
Afghanistan which, together with Pakistan, is snowballing to become
the most critical issue for the United States as well as India, albeit for very
different reasons, also promises to bring together the NATO and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) for bringing peace and order
to Afghanistan. The SCO session held in Moscow at the end of March
was also the first bridge, thin and lean though was it, between the strategic
divide between the US and China. It got little space in the world media
but made its mark on the emerging world atlas of diplomacy.
For the sheer attendance it received from the strategic groups of
Nations on the two sides of the strategic divide if not for the depth and substance of the explorations that took place at the two-day event, the Moscow session of SCO marked a watershed.
The core group of the Shaighai Six---China, Russia and the four
Central Asian countries ( seven, with the full membership of Mongolia)
was joined by an astonishing an array of observers from the United States,
Western Europe, NATO, Afghanistan and India. The most high profile
personality present was the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon.
The Group of Six turned out to be a Group of 36.
The Government of India sent to the Moscow meeting a former
Diplomat, Satiinder K Lumba, picked up by prime minister Manmohan Singh
to represent his govt at parleys related to the Afpak Agenda of the US
President, Barack Obama Lumba is a former High Commissioner to
Pakistan. It should be noted that exchanges with Obama’s trouble-
shooter for issues packed together with the Afpak acronym is, so far,
the foreign secretary, Menon. Richard Halbrooke, during his day-long
visit to New Delhi on April 7, after his half-a-week long diplomatic
explorations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, met with Menon, and not with
the foreign minister or with the minister of state at the Foreign Office.
India has not so far been involved in depth at the political level with
Obama’s Afpak strategy.
The European Union and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in
Europe were represented by senior officials, Britain and France were
conspicuously absent.
The SCO session in Moscow proved to be completely non-confrontational in discussions. The foreign ministers of China and Russia
Stressed that neither the economic recession nor the financial crisis nor
Indeed the political-strategic issues and regional conflicts could be resolved
Without cooperation between and among the nations poralised by the
Bush administration in the eight years of the new century. Both welcomed
Barack Obama’s offer to bridge and if possible close the divides that plague
The global world order.
There was a consensus that problems posed by militant Islam in
The Pak-Afghan region and other areas needed increasing cooperation
Between and among nations globally as well as in the conflictual regions.
Foreign ministers of the Central Asian countries affirmed their readiness
to work with Pakistan and the US for resolving the conflicts if their
cooperation is sought on the basis of equality of status, respect for
mutual political, religious and cultural systems, and an agreed praxis of
international relations free of unilateralism, hegemony, and trade, racial
and ideological barriers.
Indeed, foreign ministers of these countries and also of Afghanistan
affirmed that full cooperation of the Central Asian republics, Iran, China
and Russia was essential for resolution of the problems of multiple,
inter=secting conflicts raging in Pakistan and Afghanistan’
The Moscow session of SCO provided opportunities for informal
Contacts, including ice-breaking ones, between governments locked in
Conflicts---such as the U.S. and Iran and Afghanistan and Iran. Ice-breaking
Contacts were established between representatives of NATO and the
Shanghai Six relating to cooperation for resolving the Afghan-Pakistan
Or Afpak problems.
Satindra Lumba stressed the importance of increasing coordination
Between various groups exploring separately prospects and problems of
Regional and global cooperation .His point was supported by several
Foreign ministers attending the session, including those of China, Russia and
Kazaghstan///
Afghanistan which, together with Pakistan, is snowballing to become
the most critical issue for the United States as well as India, albeit for very
different reasons, also promises to bring together the NATO and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) for bringing peace and order
to Afghanistan. The SCO session held in Moscow at the end of March
was also the first bridge, thin and lean though was it, between the strategic
divide between the US and China. It got little space in the world media
but made its mark on the emerging world atlas of diplomacy.
For the sheer attendance it received from the strategic groups of
Nations on the two sides of the strategic divide if not for the depth and substance of the explorations that took place at the two-day event, the Moscow session of SCO marked a watershed.
The core group of the Shaighai Six---China, Russia and the four
Central Asian countries ( seven, with the full membership of Mongolia)
was joined by an astonishing an array of observers from the United States,
Western Europe, NATO, Afghanistan and India. The most high profile
personality present was the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon.
The Group of Six turned out to be a Group of 36.
The Government of India sent to the Moscow meeting a former
Diplomat, Satiinder K Lumba, picked up by prime minister Manmohan Singh
to represent his govt at parleys related to the Afpak Agenda of the US
President, Barack Obama Lumba is a former High Commissioner to
Pakistan. It should be noted that exchanges with Obama’s trouble-
shooter for issues packed together with the Afpak acronym is, so far,
the foreign secretary, Menon. Richard Halbrooke, during his day-long
visit to New Delhi on April 7, after his half-a-week long diplomatic
explorations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, met with Menon, and not with
the foreign minister or with the minister of state at the Foreign Office.
India has not so far been involved in depth at the political level with
Obama’s Afpak strategy.
The European Union and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in
Europe were represented by senior officials, Britain and France were
conspicuously absent.
The SCO session in Moscow proved to be completely non-confrontational in discussions. The foreign ministers of China and Russia
Stressed that neither the economic recession nor the financial crisis nor
Indeed the political-strategic issues and regional conflicts could be resolved
Without cooperation between and among the nations poralised by the
Bush administration in the eight years of the new century. Both welcomed
Barack Obama’s offer to bridge and if possible close the divides that plague
The global world order.
There was a consensus that problems posed by militant Islam in
The Pak-Afghan region and other areas needed increasing cooperation
Between and among nations globally as well as in the conflictual regions.
Foreign ministers of the Central Asian countries affirmed their readiness
to work with Pakistan and the US for resolving the conflicts if their
cooperation is sought on the basis of equality of status, respect for
mutual political, religious and cultural systems, and an agreed praxis of
international relations free of unilateralism, hegemony, and trade, racial
and ideological barriers.
Indeed, foreign ministers of these countries and also of Afghanistan
affirmed that full cooperation of the Central Asian republics, Iran, China
and Russia was essential for resolution of the problems of multiple,
inter=secting conflicts raging in Pakistan and Afghanistan’
The Moscow session of SCO provided opportunities for informal
Contacts, including ice-breaking ones, between governments locked in
Conflicts---such as the U.S. and Iran and Afghanistan and Iran. Ice-breaking
Contacts were established between representatives of NATO and the
Shanghai Six relating to cooperation for resolving the Afghan-Pakistan
Or Afpak problems.
Satindra Lumba stressed the importance of increasing coordination
Between various groups exploring separately prospects and problems of
Regional and global cooperation .His point was supported by several
Foreign ministers attending the session, including those of China, Russia and
Kazaghstan///
Monday, August 24, 2009
WANTED AN ASIAN INITIATIVE FOR AFGHANISTAN
WANTED AN ASIAN INITIATIVE FOR AFGHANISTAN
By Bhabani Sen Gupta
India’s foreign policy and diplomacy went into recession during the first term of Dr Manmohan Singh’s ascendance to leadership of the
Government in 2004. His first four+ years stood out for a persevering,
And finally successful, quest for a close friendly relationship with the United States, an osmosis in relations with the nations of the world
That could not be achieved during the cold war. To balance the strategic alliance with the United States, the prime minister concluded
A low-level ‘strategic partnership’ with China, and embraced Russia as a substitute of India’s oldest ally, the USSR ( mysteriously and unceremoniously dead in 2001) .
In his characteristically quiet and unassuming style, the prime
Minister took control of foreign policy as soon as Natawar Singh resigned after a year’s uneasy tenure at South Block.He operated
through a competent foreign secretary, Shyam Saran, and drew heavily
on another quiet and efficient bureaucract, the national security adviser, N.K. Narayanan, former intelligence chief to the Union Government.. Pranab Mukherjee as defence minister helped
in concluding the ‘strategic alliance’ with the U.S. His political weight had diminished as a result of his electoral dependence on the CPI-M
in Murshidabad. When Mukherjee was given external affairs in the last
year of the first term of the UPA coalition, he was kept busy with chairmanship of a raft of GOM===group of ministers---and hardly made a distinctive contribution to foreign policy and diplomacy.
In his second term as prime minister, Dr Singh enjoys a very
elevated stature in the government as well as the country. He was Mrs
Sonia Gndhi’s only choice to head the second UPA coalition in which
the Congress party commands a near majority in the Lok Sabha on its own strength. And the prime minister asserted his primacy by keeping foreign affairs under his own control by appointing a former
Congress chief minister of Karnataka who knows little of world affairs
And has shown less interest in diplomacy. Mr Krishna.s highest qualification is his total loyalty to the party boss; he is a thorough gentlemen, as nimble in appearance as in private and public manners.
He is also impeccably attired.
The second UPA regime, however, has failed to make the capital of the great electoral victory that was thrust upon the Congress party in
the general election of May. It is hobbled by a rainless summer with
a slump in food production, and, inevitably, a lot of hunger and thirst.
Politically, only the Trinamul Congress chief. Mamata Bannerjee has
fully exploited the collapse of the CPI-M and the Left Front in West
Bengal. Sonia Gandhi,, perched at the pinnacle of power, seems to be
frozen in a narcissist state of political dyslexia, unable to read the meaning of the writings on the wall. She has not convened a meeting
of the AICC. The four or five general secretaries of the Congress party
who have been given berths in the new Central cabinet continue to retain their party offices. Not only does this amount to be burial of
the one-man-one-office norm she announced several years before, it
mutilates performance at both governmental and party levels.
After two heart surgeries, Dr Manmohan Singh is not in the best
of health. He also happens to be 77-78 years old. Maybe he would have
liked to retire from public life. But who would have led the UPA coalition at the Centre? The party woefully lacks in leadership material.
There are certain unwritten geopolitical rules in the politics of India.
The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty has acquired an imperial flavour. The world’s largest second largest political party ( after the Communist Party of China), the Congress is also the enduring Mughal of post-
colonial India. The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is the great Mughal of
the huge political space that is the Congress party.
Herein lies great opportunities for Dr Manmohan Singh. Not
so much in the domestic space as in the global arena. The economy
has maintained respectable growth, one of the best in the world that
is now trying to writhe out of global recession. The very impressive
performance of the Asian economies in 2007-09 has enabled Asia
to decouple itself from the US-led Western economy. The ‘astounding
feat’ has driven an unmistakable message to the world. The global
economic ( and therefore political ) order is now evenly balanced between the West led by the United States and Asia led by China and
India.
The Economist, of London, regarded worldwide as the mirror of
the Western leadership of the global economic order, carried on the
cover of its issue of August 15-21 a herald of this tremendous change.
“Asia’s Astounding Rebound” was narrated in two long reports and
captured in the first editorial. It noted:
“Emerging Asia’s average growth rate of almost 8% over the past
two decades -----three times the rate in the rich world----has brought huge benefits to the rest of the world. Its rebound now is all the mote
useful when growth in the West is likely to be slow. Asia cannot replace
the American consumer: emerging Asia’s total consumption amounts
to only two-fifths of America’s. But it is growth in spending that really
matters. In dollar terms, the increase in emerging Asia’s consumet
spending this year will more than offset the drop in spending in America and the euro area. This shift in spending from the West to the
East will help rebalance the world economy.”
It is not enough to rebalance the world economy. There must be
rebalancing of world politics. Since the end of World War II, Asia has
bore the brunt of all American wars---the Korean war, the war in Vietmam, the American war in Iraq, and the American war in Afghanistan. America’s presidents have had no hesitation to acknowledge that the US and its allies fought these wars in ‘legitimate
defence’ of its own national interests.
It is high time that Asian countries, now that they have established the continent’s coming of age after centuries of domination
by the Western imperialists, join together to defend their own legitimate
national interests. This does not mean a polarization between Asia and the West. It means recognition by the West that Asian countries have their individual and regional interests to be protected and secured in
cooperation with the West on the basis of equality.
Even as the ‘emerging’ countries of Asia have proved that they can outdo the West in the economic areas, they lack unity of minds and
muscles in the political space. History has witnessed long years of ‘collective imperialist conquest of Chinese territories including ports and big cities; British colonization of India got European and American
backing after initial years of armed rivalries among European colonizers. The wars in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq rallied most European powers behind the American superpower.
If the West still lost each of these three major wars of the post
second world was period, it was because they were fighting wrong wars,
they were fighting against the inevitability of historical change, because
even collective military might of colonialists could not keep resurgent
nationalist forces of Asia.
The last of the West’s post-colonial wars has been raging in Afghanistan for three decades. This war showed the ugly Western face of the USSR when it invaded Afghanistan to defend a ramshackle
“Marxist “ regime in 1979, a misadventure that was probably the
single most fatal factor that led to the collapse of the Soviet state itself.
Taliban was the ferocious offspring of American militarism and its
foster child, the Pakistan Army. The Taliban, spearheaded by Pushtoons, the largest ethic group in Afghanistan easily won the war
in Afghanistan as it was fighting for Afghan nationalism mobilized
by militant Islam, an entirely new mighty ‘non-State’ actor in
international politics. Backed by the Pakistan army, the Taliban regime
in Afghanistan might have endured for years if its militant leaders
were not swallowed by far more radical and aggressive Islamic fundamentalists that have grown into a veritable force in the secret
alleys and bylanes of Saudi Arabia’s claustrophobic, ultra-orthodox
Wahabi Islamic political system.
It is the Wahabi militant Islamic elements in Saudi Arabia who
spearheaded the 9/11 air attack on New York and Washington DC,
which turned out to be a massive blow at one of the four foundation
planks of America’s post-War global leadership.-----Western Europe,
led by Britain as the principal ally, Wahabi Islam as the basis of
U.S,-friendly social and political stability in the vast Islamic space
Extending from West Asia to North Africa, total and unconditional
support for Israel, and cultivation of as many authoritarian, dictatorial
nationalist regimes in Asia as could be enticed by offers of weapons and
Dollars as the two arms of Uncle Sam’s embrace.
The United States has been, for decades, the world’s strongest
Economy, as well as the world leader in technology and innovation.
Indeed, American hegemony in these crucial areas has been
spectacular, even awesome; the US will remain the leader despite
strong strades made by the European Union, Japan, China, India
and other Asian countries. Wars and high military spending
have not eaten into America’s technological, educational, innovative
and economic leadership. But something else also has happened.
There is a slump in America’s status and prestige in the world
community, and a steady decline in the world’s esteem for its
leading position. As a hugely narcissist nation, Americans can hardly
endure the current big downturn in the world’s image of their
country. They now seem to share the global feeling that the
U.S. is in decline, and that it days of global dominion will soon
Come to an end.
Fareed Zakaria has argued that America has failed in its domestic politics rather than in its economy and technology. He has
written in his excellent book The Post-American World ( penguin, 2008)
that what distinguishes the current period of world affairs is not so much as the decline of the United States as the ‘rise of others.” Where
Americans have failed, he adds, is in the field of politics. “As it enters
the twentyfirst century, the United States is not fundamentally a weak
economy or a decadent society. But it has developed a highly dysfunctional politics. An antiquated and overly rigid political system to
begin with------about 225 years old---has been captured by money, special interests, a sensationalist media, and ideological attack groups.
The result is a ceaseless virulent debate about trivia----politics as theatre---and very little substance, compromise, and action. A ‘can-do’
country is now saddled with a ‘do=nothing’ political process, designed
for partisan battle rather than problem solving. By every measure===
the growth of special interests, lobbies, pock-barrel spending---the
political process has become partisan and effective over the last three
decades.”
If the U.S. is now caught in political decay----old age, mental and
intellectual inertia and a slump in its own ability to handle complicated
global issues---it will be even more incapable of facing up to its own foreign policy mistakes and blunders. And as the US fumbles with the war in Afghanistan, the currently last of its Asian wars since World War II, it is imperative that Asian powers themselves step in to help
President Barack Obama to walk out of Afghanistan with his head
nwot too bent. Indeed, I have reason to believe that if China and India,
with the helpof several other Asian countries step forward to find an
Asian solution for Afghanistan, Obama will be much relieved, and indeed to bow out to such a desirable Asian initiative.
An Asian initiative for Afghanistan is in fact both desirable
and possible. It is also eminently achievable. Both Pakistan and the
freshly re-elected president of Afghanistan will be glad to cooperate.
since the Asian Initiative must come jointly from a cluster of Asian
countries----certainly including India, China, Iran, Pakistan,Indonesia
and Afghanistan----the Islamic radicals of Pakistan and Afghanistan
will certainly welcome it.
I earnestly beckon the UPA government, specially prime minister
Manmohan Singh and foreign Minister Krishna, as well as the new foreign secretary Nirupama Rao ( fresh from the embassy in Beijing)
to mull over the idea of an Asian Initiative in Afghanistan and start
sounding China, Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia////////
By Bhabani Sen Gupta
India’s foreign policy and diplomacy went into recession during the first term of Dr Manmohan Singh’s ascendance to leadership of the
Government in 2004. His first four+ years stood out for a persevering,
And finally successful, quest for a close friendly relationship with the United States, an osmosis in relations with the nations of the world
That could not be achieved during the cold war. To balance the strategic alliance with the United States, the prime minister concluded
A low-level ‘strategic partnership’ with China, and embraced Russia as a substitute of India’s oldest ally, the USSR ( mysteriously and unceremoniously dead in 2001) .
In his characteristically quiet and unassuming style, the prime
Minister took control of foreign policy as soon as Natawar Singh resigned after a year’s uneasy tenure at South Block.He operated
through a competent foreign secretary, Shyam Saran, and drew heavily
on another quiet and efficient bureaucract, the national security adviser, N.K. Narayanan, former intelligence chief to the Union Government.. Pranab Mukherjee as defence minister helped
in concluding the ‘strategic alliance’ with the U.S. His political weight had diminished as a result of his electoral dependence on the CPI-M
in Murshidabad. When Mukherjee was given external affairs in the last
year of the first term of the UPA coalition, he was kept busy with chairmanship of a raft of GOM===group of ministers---and hardly made a distinctive contribution to foreign policy and diplomacy.
In his second term as prime minister, Dr Singh enjoys a very
elevated stature in the government as well as the country. He was Mrs
Sonia Gndhi’s only choice to head the second UPA coalition in which
the Congress party commands a near majority in the Lok Sabha on its own strength. And the prime minister asserted his primacy by keeping foreign affairs under his own control by appointing a former
Congress chief minister of Karnataka who knows little of world affairs
And has shown less interest in diplomacy. Mr Krishna.s highest qualification is his total loyalty to the party boss; he is a thorough gentlemen, as nimble in appearance as in private and public manners.
He is also impeccably attired.
The second UPA regime, however, has failed to make the capital of the great electoral victory that was thrust upon the Congress party in
the general election of May. It is hobbled by a rainless summer with
a slump in food production, and, inevitably, a lot of hunger and thirst.
Politically, only the Trinamul Congress chief. Mamata Bannerjee has
fully exploited the collapse of the CPI-M and the Left Front in West
Bengal. Sonia Gandhi,, perched at the pinnacle of power, seems to be
frozen in a narcissist state of political dyslexia, unable to read the meaning of the writings on the wall. She has not convened a meeting
of the AICC. The four or five general secretaries of the Congress party
who have been given berths in the new Central cabinet continue to retain their party offices. Not only does this amount to be burial of
the one-man-one-office norm she announced several years before, it
mutilates performance at both governmental and party levels.
After two heart surgeries, Dr Manmohan Singh is not in the best
of health. He also happens to be 77-78 years old. Maybe he would have
liked to retire from public life. But who would have led the UPA coalition at the Centre? The party woefully lacks in leadership material.
There are certain unwritten geopolitical rules in the politics of India.
The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty has acquired an imperial flavour. The world’s largest second largest political party ( after the Communist Party of China), the Congress is also the enduring Mughal of post-
colonial India. The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is the great Mughal of
the huge political space that is the Congress party.
Herein lies great opportunities for Dr Manmohan Singh. Not
so much in the domestic space as in the global arena. The economy
has maintained respectable growth, one of the best in the world that
is now trying to writhe out of global recession. The very impressive
performance of the Asian economies in 2007-09 has enabled Asia
to decouple itself from the US-led Western economy. The ‘astounding
feat’ has driven an unmistakable message to the world. The global
economic ( and therefore political ) order is now evenly balanced between the West led by the United States and Asia led by China and
India.
The Economist, of London, regarded worldwide as the mirror of
the Western leadership of the global economic order, carried on the
cover of its issue of August 15-21 a herald of this tremendous change.
“Asia’s Astounding Rebound” was narrated in two long reports and
captured in the first editorial. It noted:
“Emerging Asia’s average growth rate of almost 8% over the past
two decades -----three times the rate in the rich world----has brought huge benefits to the rest of the world. Its rebound now is all the mote
useful when growth in the West is likely to be slow. Asia cannot replace
the American consumer: emerging Asia’s total consumption amounts
to only two-fifths of America’s. But it is growth in spending that really
matters. In dollar terms, the increase in emerging Asia’s consumet
spending this year will more than offset the drop in spending in America and the euro area. This shift in spending from the West to the
East will help rebalance the world economy.”
It is not enough to rebalance the world economy. There must be
rebalancing of world politics. Since the end of World War II, Asia has
bore the brunt of all American wars---the Korean war, the war in Vietmam, the American war in Iraq, and the American war in Afghanistan. America’s presidents have had no hesitation to acknowledge that the US and its allies fought these wars in ‘legitimate
defence’ of its own national interests.
It is high time that Asian countries, now that they have established the continent’s coming of age after centuries of domination
by the Western imperialists, join together to defend their own legitimate
national interests. This does not mean a polarization between Asia and the West. It means recognition by the West that Asian countries have their individual and regional interests to be protected and secured in
cooperation with the West on the basis of equality.
Even as the ‘emerging’ countries of Asia have proved that they can outdo the West in the economic areas, they lack unity of minds and
muscles in the political space. History has witnessed long years of ‘collective imperialist conquest of Chinese territories including ports and big cities; British colonization of India got European and American
backing after initial years of armed rivalries among European colonizers. The wars in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq rallied most European powers behind the American superpower.
If the West still lost each of these three major wars of the post
second world was period, it was because they were fighting wrong wars,
they were fighting against the inevitability of historical change, because
even collective military might of colonialists could not keep resurgent
nationalist forces of Asia.
The last of the West’s post-colonial wars has been raging in Afghanistan for three decades. This war showed the ugly Western face of the USSR when it invaded Afghanistan to defend a ramshackle
“Marxist “ regime in 1979, a misadventure that was probably the
single most fatal factor that led to the collapse of the Soviet state itself.
Taliban was the ferocious offspring of American militarism and its
foster child, the Pakistan Army. The Taliban, spearheaded by Pushtoons, the largest ethic group in Afghanistan easily won the war
in Afghanistan as it was fighting for Afghan nationalism mobilized
by militant Islam, an entirely new mighty ‘non-State’ actor in
international politics. Backed by the Pakistan army, the Taliban regime
in Afghanistan might have endured for years if its militant leaders
were not swallowed by far more radical and aggressive Islamic fundamentalists that have grown into a veritable force in the secret
alleys and bylanes of Saudi Arabia’s claustrophobic, ultra-orthodox
Wahabi Islamic political system.
It is the Wahabi militant Islamic elements in Saudi Arabia who
spearheaded the 9/11 air attack on New York and Washington DC,
which turned out to be a massive blow at one of the four foundation
planks of America’s post-War global leadership.-----Western Europe,
led by Britain as the principal ally, Wahabi Islam as the basis of
U.S,-friendly social and political stability in the vast Islamic space
Extending from West Asia to North Africa, total and unconditional
support for Israel, and cultivation of as many authoritarian, dictatorial
nationalist regimes in Asia as could be enticed by offers of weapons and
Dollars as the two arms of Uncle Sam’s embrace.
The United States has been, for decades, the world’s strongest
Economy, as well as the world leader in technology and innovation.
Indeed, American hegemony in these crucial areas has been
spectacular, even awesome; the US will remain the leader despite
strong strades made by the European Union, Japan, China, India
and other Asian countries. Wars and high military spending
have not eaten into America’s technological, educational, innovative
and economic leadership. But something else also has happened.
There is a slump in America’s status and prestige in the world
community, and a steady decline in the world’s esteem for its
leading position. As a hugely narcissist nation, Americans can hardly
endure the current big downturn in the world’s image of their
country. They now seem to share the global feeling that the
U.S. is in decline, and that it days of global dominion will soon
Come to an end.
Fareed Zakaria has argued that America has failed in its domestic politics rather than in its economy and technology. He has
written in his excellent book The Post-American World ( penguin, 2008)
that what distinguishes the current period of world affairs is not so much as the decline of the United States as the ‘rise of others.” Where
Americans have failed, he adds, is in the field of politics. “As it enters
the twentyfirst century, the United States is not fundamentally a weak
economy or a decadent society. But it has developed a highly dysfunctional politics. An antiquated and overly rigid political system to
begin with------about 225 years old---has been captured by money, special interests, a sensationalist media, and ideological attack groups.
The result is a ceaseless virulent debate about trivia----politics as theatre---and very little substance, compromise, and action. A ‘can-do’
country is now saddled with a ‘do=nothing’ political process, designed
for partisan battle rather than problem solving. By every measure===
the growth of special interests, lobbies, pock-barrel spending---the
political process has become partisan and effective over the last three
decades.”
If the U.S. is now caught in political decay----old age, mental and
intellectual inertia and a slump in its own ability to handle complicated
global issues---it will be even more incapable of facing up to its own foreign policy mistakes and blunders. And as the US fumbles with the war in Afghanistan, the currently last of its Asian wars since World War II, it is imperative that Asian powers themselves step in to help
President Barack Obama to walk out of Afghanistan with his head
nwot too bent. Indeed, I have reason to believe that if China and India,
with the helpof several other Asian countries step forward to find an
Asian solution for Afghanistan, Obama will be much relieved, and indeed to bow out to such a desirable Asian initiative.
An Asian initiative for Afghanistan is in fact both desirable
and possible. It is also eminently achievable. Both Pakistan and the
freshly re-elected president of Afghanistan will be glad to cooperate.
since the Asian Initiative must come jointly from a cluster of Asian
countries----certainly including India, China, Iran, Pakistan,Indonesia
and Afghanistan----the Islamic radicals of Pakistan and Afghanistan
will certainly welcome it.
I earnestly beckon the UPA government, specially prime minister
Manmohan Singh and foreign Minister Krishna, as well as the new foreign secretary Nirupama Rao ( fresh from the embassy in Beijing)
to mull over the idea of an Asian Initiative in Afghanistan and start
sounding China, Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia////////
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