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.
Monday, September 28, 2009
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///
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
