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NATO's ploy and The Great South Asians blunder

2010-11-28T02:39:00.000-08:00

The summit meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in Lisbon constituted a significant event for South Asia. The alliance is transforming itself into playing a global political-military role. “We are firmly committed to preserving its [NATO's] effectiveness as the globe's most successful political-military alliance.” Its core task will be to defend Europe and ensure the collective security of its 28 members, while the Strategic Concept adopted at Lisbon envisages NATO's prerogative to mount expeditionary operations globally.

The document is explicit: “Where conflict prevention proves unsuccessful, NATO will be prepared and capable to manage ongoing hostilities. NATO has unique conflict-management capacities, including the unparalleled capability to deploy and sustain robust military forces in the field.” The alliance pledged to strengthen and modernise its conventional forces, and develop the full range of military capabilities. It will remain a nuclear alliance while developing a missile defence capability. The Strategic Concept reaffirmed that NATO would forge partnerships globally and reconfirmed the commitment to expand membership to democratic states that meet the alliance's criteria.

As an emerging regional power, India needs to take note of NATO's transformation. Indian discourses blithely assumed that NATO would have no appetite for far-flung operations anymore and was desperately looking for an exit strategy in Afghanistan. But on the contrary, the NATO psyche comes out unscathed. Will NATO be prepared to subject itself to the collective will of the international community as represented in the United Nations or will Article 5 of its Charter be the overriding principle? India hopes to become a permanent member of the Security Council in a not-too-distant future. Historically speaking, India's worldview opposed military blocs and alliances and placed primacy on the U.N. Charter and international law. Again, the world order needs to be factored in — NATO assertively proclaims its transatlantic moorings on a global plane while Europe's (western world) dominance in international politics is on the wane and the locus of power is rapidly shifting to Asia.

But what is of great import for South Asian security is that from a seemingly reluctant arrival in Afghanistan seven years ago in an “out-of-area” operation as part of the U.N.-mandated ISAF (International Security Assistance Force), with a limited mandate, NATO is suo motu stepping out of ISAF, deepening its presence and recasting its role and activities on a long-term basis. South Asian security will never be the same again. This has grave implications for Indian strategies as an emerging power in the Indian Ocean region.

At the Lisbon summit, NATO and Afghanistan signed a Declaration, the thrust of which is on affirming “their long-term partnership” and building “a robust, enduring partnership which complements the ISAF security mission and continues beyond it.” It recognises Afghanistan as an “important NATO partner … contributing to regional security” and, in turn, expects that country to provide the alliance with “necessary assistance to carry out its partnership activities” while recognising the “importance and relevance of broader regionally-owned cooperation, coordination and confidence-building between Afghan and its regional partners, as exemplified in the Istanbul Statement.”

In short, NATO and Afghanistan will “strengthen their consultation on issues of strategic concern” and, to this end, develop “effective measures of cooperation” which would include “mechanisms for political and military dialogue … a continuing NATO liaison in Afghanistan … with a common understanding that NATO has no ambition to establish a permanent military presence in Afghanistan or use its presence in Afghanistan against other nations” (emphasis added). NATO and Afghanistan will initiate discussion on a Status of Forces Agreement within the next three years. The Declaration also provides for the inclusion of “non-NATO nations” in the cooperation framework.

The Lisbon summit confirmed that the NATO military presence in Afghanistan will continue even beyond 2014, the timeline suggested by President Hamid Karzai for Kabul to be completely in charge of the security of the country. United States President Barack Obama summed up: “Our goal is that the Afghans have taken the lead in 2014 and in the same way that we have transitioned in Iraq, we will have successfully transitioned so that we are still providing a training and support function.” Even after 2014, NATO will maintain its counterterrorism capability in Afghanistan “until we have the confidence that the al-Qaeda is no longer operative and is no longer a threat.” NATO may even undertake combat operations beyond 2014 if and when need arises. As Mr. Obama put it, by 2014 the “NATO footprint in Afghanistan will have been significantly reduced. But beyond that, it's hard to anticipate exactly what is going to be necessary … I'll make that determination when I get there.” Clearly, the U.S. will be in the driving seat in the Hindu Kush for the long-term. The billions of dollars the U.S. has been pumping in for upgrading Soviet-era military bases in Afghanistan and constructing new military bases now fall into perspective.

It almost seems that New Delhi has been quietly preparing for this moment, backtracking unobtrusively from its traditional stance of seeking a “neutral” Afghanistan. Of course, the bottom line for the government is that the foreign policy should be optimally harmonised with U.S. regional strategies. But then, the geopolitics of the Afghan war cannot be equated with New Delhi's longing for permanent membership of the Security Council or viewed merely through the prism of U.S.-India “strategic partnership.” Nor can India as a responsible regional power fundamentally regard the NATO military presence in zero-sum terms — or in terms of U.S.-China rivalries. On balance, New Delhi's motivation seems to be tactical — a lingering hope that an open-ended NATO presence may sooner or later prompt the Obama administration to confront the Pakistani military on its policy of using Taliban militants to gain “strategic depth” and of conceiving terrorism as an instrument of state policy. However, this would be a short-sighted approach for two reasons: one, it wrongly assumes that the American and Pakistani objectives in Afghanistan are irreconcilable and, two, it overlooks that a great power invariably distinguishes between tactic and strategy.

The following elements reveal how, despite the prickly nature of their partnership, the U.S. and Pakistan are like Siamese twins: Both seek a peaceful Afghanistan but have divergent approaches to how to achieve it; both agree that durable peace is not possible without legitimising traditional Pashtun aspirations; the U.S. knows that Pakistani military leadership wields influence over the insurgents; it accepts that Pakistan's cooperation is vital not only for reaching a settlement but also ensuring that peace will be durable so that Afghanistan stabilises; Pakistan remains hesitant to give up its “strategic assets” lest Washington overlook its strategic needs; NATO operations will run into serious difficulty without the supply routes via NWFP and Baluchistan but then Pakistan receives billions of dollars in aid annually and it cannot afford to antagonise the U.S. either; the Pakistani military is averse to undertaking operations in North Waziristan but at the same time it tacitly provides basing facilities (and probably intelligence) for the U.S. drone operations in the tribal areas, besides permitting hundreds or thousands of American intelligence operatives to function all over the country; all in all, the U.S. has limits to its capacity to pressure Pakistan, which seamlessly leverages its “all-weather friendship” with China.

Quite clearly, Pakistan and the U.S. are under a strong compulsion to reconcile their divergent approaches and work toward an Afghan settlement. The main sticking point is the strategy currently pursued by U.S. commander David Petraeus, who hopes to degrade the insurgents so that the Americans can eventually talk with the Taliban leadership from a position of strength. Indian pundits shouldn't exaggerate the gravity of this discord.

Overarching these considerations comes the U.S. strategy visualising NATO as the provider of security to the Silk Road that transports the multi-trillion dollar mineral wealth in Central Asia to the world market via the port of Gwadar. The Afghan-Pakistan trade and transit agreement concluded last month was a historic milestone and was possible only because of Washington's sense of urgency. Without doubt, Pakistan is assured of a key role in the U.S. regional strategy. This will keep foreign money flowing into Pakistan's economy and the Pakistani military will willingly accelerate the partnership programmes with NATO, and even upgrade them.

India's ability to tap into the Silk Road depends on the settlement of differences with Pakistan which would, hopefully, encourage the generals in Rawalpindi to jettison their “India-centric” mindset. Being NATO member- countries alone didn't really help Turkey and Greece through four decades and ultimately it was the sustained bilateral initiative by Ankara, keeping in view the imperative of accession talks with the European Union, that improved the climate of relations with Athens.

In name of terrorism we israelies hereby rape you

2010-08-22T06:42:00.000-07:00

Frequent fliers may have become accustomed to intense security checks at airports. Baggage screening has extended to footwear, banned products now include toothpaste, and it may not be long before controversial full-body scans are routine.

A letter to the Ministry of External Affairs, however, suggests that invasive security measures used by some airlines can push even the most seasoned travellers beyond endurance.

Scientist S. Chinniah, in the letter dated August 18, alleges that she was subjected to a four-and-half hour “dehumanising” security check by the Israeli airline El Al at the Mumbai airport.

Ms. Chinniah, who lives with her husband and two daughters in Bangalore, travelled on a vacation on June 24 to Tel Aviv to see her friends from Cornell University, where she studied. At the Mumbai airport, she said, she was subjected to a traumatic interrogation, for no apparent reason, and without explanation.

Having arrived several hours early, she was in the security-check line when El Al security led her to a small room at the back of the airport and kept her there for the next four-and-half hours.

Their aggressive questioning included queries on her recent travel to Malaysia and Dubai, including whom she visited there.

To her mortification, she was asked to remove her trousers and shoes.

Ms. Chinniah was concerned that a woman security was not present. She was left with three men, who refused to show her any identification. She said she was not allowed to eat, drink water or go to the toilet.

“No Indian security personnel were present during this process, given that it was conducted on Indian soil. Only Israeli security personnel (all of whom spoke Hebrew) were present when I was taken aside,” she said.

Ms. Chinniah has sent copies of her letter to El Al Airlines, the Israeli Embassy and the United States consulates in Chennai and Mumbai.

Are you the next one!!!

America's Afghan soccer ball game

2010-04-18T09:06:00.000-07:00

With just a fortnight left for the “jirga” or tribal council to be held in Kabul, the prospects do not look good. Pakistan is determined to torpedo the Afghanistan government's plan to work out a societal consensus for ending the war through the traditional means of a consultative assembly. The convening of the jirga, for May 2-4, was a pledge made by President Hamid Karzai in his inaugural address last November. The idea has been viewed favourably by the bulk of the Afghan society. On the other hand, western powers, especially the United States and the United Kingdom, acquiesced in manifest reluctance.

To what extent the U.S. and the U.K. are acting in concert with Pakistan to sabotage Mr. Karzai's initiative is difficult to judge but all three protagonists seem to be on the same side of the fence. Their concerns appear to converge on a single point — a successful jirga would take the wind out of their sails and put the Afghans in the driving seat and, in the process, Mr. Karzai might succeed in unifying the national opinion behind him.

For sure, the jirga can prove a turning point. Mr. Karzai proposes to invite 1200-1400 representatives from various walks of life — tribal elders from every district, members of Parliament, women, civil society, etc. Masoom Stanekzai, national security adviser and confidant of Mr. Karzai, entrusted with the planning of the jirga, said in a recent interview that the event would give shape to a peace process that is acceptable to the entire country, including all political and ethnic groups. “We don't want a peace that undermines the rights of some. The jirga is about rallying broad support behind the whole policy.”

Second, he said, the jirga would be asked to endorse a government plan for the reintegration of insurgents in line with the decision taken at the London Conference of January 28. Third, it would set the ground rules for holding talks with the insurgents.

Mr. Stanekzai said the government hoped to get endorsement for its three basic principles for holding talks with the Taliban — that the Taliban would sever all links with the al-Qaeda and other extremist groups; abide by the Afghan Constitution; and recognise that in a plural society, all groups have equal rights. As he put it: “We don't want to go back to the era of the Taliban.”

Fourth, the jirga would discuss “what people expect from the government, the international community, and NATO forces,” to quote Mr. Stanekzai. Herein probably lies the bitter pill for the western countries — the jirga may well choose to discuss a timeline for the vacation of foreign occupation of Afghanistan.

It is not difficult to see why Pakistan is opposed to Mr. Karzai's peace plan. Its strategy aims at a Taliban takeover in Afghanistan incrementally, whereas Mr. Karzai's plan intends to precisely prevent such a calamity. His plan will inexorably expose that the militia, despite robust ISI backing, remains unacceptable politically to the majority of the Afghans. What unnerves the Pakistani military leadership is that Mr. Karzai, who hails from a powerful Pashtun tribe, intends forging a peace process which will underscore Afghanistan's plural society.

Mr. Karzai's plan refuses to envisage any centrality for the Inter-Services Intelligence in the peace process. Actually, most Afghans resent the ISI's diabolical role in their country and Mr. Karzai himself does not really need its help to get in touch with the Taliban. The Afghans have always had their own native networking. Even at the height of the conflict in the end-1990s, Northern Alliance leaders kept up their contacts with the Taliban. Mr. Karzai is equally well placed to contact the Taliban as many elements within his coalition maintain communication channels with the insurgents.

The ISI, on the other hand, insists on its being the sole channel for contacting the Taliban so that Pakistan can dictate the terms of any political settlement. This strategy will go awry if Mr. Karzai's jirga succeeds and leads to a genuine pan-Afghan peace process of national reconciliation in line with the Afghan traditions of conflict resolution, and results in the formation of a broad-based government under his leadership. Thus, a systematic disinformation campaign has been let loose to tarnish the image of Mr. Karzai for “appeasing” the Taliban. Many gullible foreigners promptly lapped up the ISI's dissimulation.

The recent arrest of the number 2 in the Taliban hierarchy, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, has virtually snapped an important communication channel between the Afghan government and the Taliban leadership. The Washington Post reported: “Senior Afghan officials in the military and presidential palace accuse Pakistan of orchestrating the arrest of Baradar and others to take down Taliban leaders most amenable to negotiations. Some of them say that Afghans had been in secret contact with Baradar before his arrest and that he was prepared to join the 1400 people descending on Kabul next month for a peace conference [jirga].”

What works to Pakistan's advantage is that there is no unanimity of opinion among the western powers on Mr. Karzai's peace plan, either. Senior U.S. officials continue to maintain that the Taliban needs to be degraded militarily before reconciliation can commence, while some others — especially the U.S. military commanders assigned to Afghanistan — are reportedly more open to Mr. Karzai's thought process that the search for reconciliation need not wait. Whether this schism within the American camp is for real or a smoke-screen remains unclear. But the fact is, added with the strong antipathy to Mr. Karzai — often bordering on a visceral dislike at a personal level — among some key U.S. officials piloting the AfPak diplomacy, Pakistan has secured elbow room to manipulate the peace process.

Above all, Pakistan calculates that time is in its favour as the clock begins to tick for the U.S. presidential election in 2012, and Barack Obama finds himself hard-pressed to show “results” in the Afghan war. The Pakistani estimation is that if Mr. Karzai's jirga fails to gain credibility, Islamabad will have derived political mileage by demonstrating that there can be no viable Afghan peace process that does not recognise the ISI's pivotal role. Islamabad can play these games endlessly and hope to extract maximum concessions from Washington. Typical of the ISI's shenanigans is the reported development that, after getting senior U.S. officials like AfPak special representative Richard Holbrooke to commend Pakistan for arresting some Taliban leaders recently, the ISI has quietly been setting them free.

Sadly enough, the forthcoming jirga is a replay of two defining moments in the Afghan civil war that have faded into oblivion. The first instance was in the period immediately preceding the Soviet withdrawal. Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison describe vividly in their masterly work Out of Afghanistan how Moscow tried desperately to bring about a reconciliation between the communist government in Kabul led by Najibullah and the Afghan Mujahideen. Eduard Shevardnadze, then Soviet Foreign Minister, visited Islamabad in February 1989 to meet Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and the Pakistani military and ISI leadership in a last-ditch mission to persuade Islamabad to accept a temporary sharing of power between Najibullah and the Mujahideen as a means of avoiding a bloody civil war.

The second occasion was the Loya Jirga convened by Najibullah in May 1990, soon after the Soviet withdrawal that formally ended the communist party's monopoly over executive power. To quote Najibullah: “The present Loya Jirga held at a crucial moment will go down in the history of our beloved homeland. Let this Loya Jirga be identified with the notions of National Reconciliation, national unity and peace and tranquillity in Afghanistan.”

Yet, the ISI refused to oblige any Afghan-led national reconciliation. A political compromise was not in its plans as that would have been inconsistent with the Pakistani military's objective of gaining “strategic depth.” History is set to repeat itself next month even as Pakistan actively sabotages Mr. Karzai's jirga.

What is not so obvious, however, are Washington's motives in not only not giving Mr. Karzai a fair chance to hold a successful jirga but also systematically undercutting him. In 1989-90, Washington had the burning desire to avenge the humiliation in Vietnam, no matter how many Afghan lives perished. Therefore, the CIA urged the ISI to stand firm against the Soviets as the U.S. wanted to celebrate a total communist debacle in Kabul. But there is no ideology involved in today's war and there is no conceivable reason why the U.S. should allow itself to view the forthcoming jirga through the prism of the Pakistani military leadership — even if one were to make allowance for elements within Mr. Obama's AfPak team which may be the vestiges of the Afghan jihad of the 1980s and cannot easily break with the past mindset.

Shashi Tharoor farts in the air

2010-02-28T07:04:00.000-08:00

Indian Minister(special) Shashi Tharoor on his visit to Saudi Arabia farted that Saudi Arabia must be made a special interloctur(for who knows what) in the talks with Pakistan.

Well given the number of farts this self-important minister have made and the disaster he has been to India's PR image, it is hard to see how a nation like India tolerates him.

And the slaughter continues!?????

2010-02-28T06:34:00.000-08:00

U.S. special forces in Afghan insurgent dressing getting briefed by a NATO officer on a pseudo-operation that was undertaken earlier (many operations like this have been done before in Afganistan and other NATO theaters of war like Iraq).

A NATO airstrike killed at least 27 civilians in central Afghanistan, the third(?) time a mistaken coalition strike has killed non-combatants since the start of this major offensive aimed at "winning over the population"(!!).

NATO confirmed that its planes fired on what it believed was a group of insurgents on their way to attack a joint NATO-Afghan patrol, but later discovered that women and children were hurt(Oh sure).

Interior Ministry spokesman Zemeri Bashary earlier said the airstrike hit three minibuses travelling on a major road near Uruzgan's border with central Day Kundi province. There were 42 people in the vehicles, all civilians, he said.

Mr. Bashary said local investigators had collected 21 bodies and two people were missing. He said he was checking with Cabinet officials to find out why there was a discrepancy in the toll.

The NATO statement did not say at first as to how many people died or whether all the occupants of the vehicles were civilians.

On Saturday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai admonished NATO troops for not doing enough to protect civilian lives. During a speech at the opening session of the Afghan Parliament, Mr. Karzai called for extra caution on the part of NATO.

“We need to reach the point where there are no civilian casualties,” Mr. Karzai said. “Our effort and our criticism will continue until we reach that goal.”

On Thursday, an airstrike in northern Kunduz province missed targeted insurgents and killed seven policemen.

So given the steady strategy of slaugher that NATO have adopted in killing the Afghans, one starts to ask one-self as to whether the insurgents are insurgents itself or someone else!!!. Maybe the above photos may prove the reality.

Matrydom operation by an Al-qaeda sleeper cell in texas base makes America shudder in fear

2009-11-07T17:54:00.000-08:00

The ease with which an al-qaeda sleeper cell conducted a matrydom operation in the texan base in America makes many a American shudder in fear.

It is also interesting to note that this attack happened a few hours after the American vote against the Goldstone report(which detailed the atrocities which took place against the Palestinians) in the U.N.

In this matrydom operation the Islamic fighter was able to kill 13 infidel soldiers in their own backyard. This success is more important because of the fact that it happened in a so-called secure area inside the American base.

The Islamic Ummah gives a standing ovation to this Islamic Lion, who dared those infidel pathetic lives who were armed to the teeth but still were not able to save their own pathetic ass in any way.

Let this wave of attacks continue and let the whole of America writh in pain and suffering and its allies live in fear of being the next in line to get hit in the face.

Afghan invasion and the arguments to sustain it

2009-10-24T21:25:00.000-07:00

The Pakistanis use an earthy metaphor when they want to put their American interlocutors on the defensive. They complain Pakistan has been used like condom and discarded time and again in the Cold War era. By saying so, they urge the Americans to be constant in friendship.

The Afghans would feel the same way today about the Americans. One look at the CNN on Tuesday afternoon was sufficient to take in the painful sight of Afghan President Hamid Karzai lining up with a slight stoop for the photo-op announcing he lost the presidential election and a runoff will be held on November 7. A cultural mishap has taken place, which leaps out of the famous E.M. Forster novel set in Chandrapore. The Americans didn’t even know a Popolzai chief was being made to admit defeat in front of his people.

Mr. Karzai insisted until last weekend he would not accept interference by foreigners in deciding the outcome of the election, which he claimed he won. Yet, four days later, he retracted in public view without offering explanation. In the Afghan bazaar, he has suffered a lethal blow to his prestige. John Kerry, chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, reportedly sat in the presidential palace and pressured Mr. Karzai for a total of 72 hours not to insist he won the election. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called from London; French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner personally visited Kabul to participate in the arm-twisting; and the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and the NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen made their own contributions from New York and Brussels to the western enterprise to get Mr. Karzai sign up on his political obituary.

Mr. Karzai caved in realising he has irretrievably lost that gravitas without which one cannot hope to be a ruler in Afghanistan. He knows the Afghan bazaar has taken note and it will be impossible for him now to rebuild the charisma he was lately claiming by ostentatiously distancing himself from the western powers. The triumphalism in the western capitals underscores, on the other hand, they haven’t yet quite grasped the gravity of the appalling act they committed. They don’t seem to know — or worse still, if they don’t care — that Afghans do not respect those incapable of giving steady friendship. Whether Mr. Karzai was efficient or corrupt is no longer the issue. The issue is the perception that Westerners use their friends like condoms and then discard them. This tale will be told and retold for a long time in the vales and hills, wooded copses, sunken lanes and meadows of Afghanistan.

Surely, any “Afghanisation” of the war needed to be built around a Prometheus Unbound in Kabul — figuratively put, of course — and that has become impossible now. No matter who wins the November 7 runoff, he will carry the cross of being an American puppet, and forever will the common Afghan sit on the fence dangling his feet and refusing to rally in the fight against the Taliban and forever will the western powers remain in ground zero with their finely chopped “Afghanisation” strategy. The only feasible way of “Afghanisation” is the fashion in which Mr. Karzai hoped to go about it – via incomprehensible coalitions and cutting Byzantine deals with local commanders, “warlords”, Mujahideen, tribal maliks and mullahs. “Afghanisation” crucially depended on a central Pashtun figure like Mr. Karzai who would incessantly network, keeping one eye and one ear closed, seeing and listening when he wanted.

There was a method in Mr. Karzai’s madness in displaying his independence from his American mentors. His political credibility was directly proportional to his defiance of the Americans. His defiance might or might not have been a mere act of optical illusion, but that shouldn’t detract from its worth in the Afghan cultural context. His entire strategy now lies in ruins as he was shepherded before television cameras on a Tuesday afternoon and made to admit he has no mind of his own. The only plausible explanation that can be given to the theatrics by Mr.Kerry in Kabul (which U.S. President Barack Obama has, astonishingly, commended) is that the U.S. is actually not looking for a strong Afghan power structure. All the talk of the Afghan election being fraudulent and the UN-supported electoral watchdog ruled a new round is baloney. When the Afghans heard about the fraudulent election, as the Pakistani author Tariq Ali wrote, “The Hindu Kush mountains must have resounded to the sound of Pashtun laughter”. Make no mistake about it, the runoff too will be largely fraudulent. What else can one expect? After 62 years of democracy, ballot stuffing and impersonation of voters and “booth capturing” happens all the time in India. Mr. Tariq Ali put the finger on the pie: “Nobody in Afghanistan takes elections too seriously and especially not when the country is occupied by the U.S. and its NATO acolytes”.

Mr. Ban told the BBC the UN wants 200 poll fraud officials “fired” so that the runoff could be made “credible”. Pray, who will replace them and also vet the credentials of the other thousand petty officials on election duty manning the polling booths? And all this to be worked out within the next fortnight, which is all the time left. The BBC reported that “the sense of apathy is strengthened because there is a perception in Afghanistan that everything – from money, to the use of state machinery, to violence and intimidation, to registering phantom voters – has already been predetermined”. Such being the fact of life, why the brouhaha that Mr. Karzai lost a clear-cut win by less than one percent of votes in the first round? The problem is Mr. Karzai, stupid. The U.S. fears an assertive Mr. Karzai may become a thorn in the flesh if he gets elected on his own steam by hook or crook. Prima facie, this may appear a contradiction when the war itself is all but lost. However, there is a logical explanation.

Quintessentially, what is unfolding is that in the name of “Afghanisation”, Washington is preparing an exit strategy which will be built around an incremental “Talibanisation” of the Afghan power pyramid. This approach presupposes that any new power structure in Kabul will at best be a mere transitional authority to bridge an interim phase. The man in charge in Kabul — Mr. Karzai II or Abdullah Abdullah — will need to be a Paid Piper who follows the U.S. diktat — and nothing more. The U.S. is expected to kickstart in the very near future a determined effort to co-opt the Taliban. The foreplay has already begun. Troops are being redeployed, abandoning far-flung or remote and indefensible military outposts and instead concentrating on holding major towns and cities. What is on the cards is that the Taliban cadres will be allowed in to fill the local power structures. The gateway opens when the local elections are held in 2010.

The U.S. spokesmen have begun justifying that what suits Afghanistan is a decentralized government with a nominal centre. The Americans, in their slang, call this an ingenious “bottoms-up” approach. What it implies is that devolution of authority to the local government would be the most effective form of governance for a country of such immense diversity like Afghanistan. No doubt, the argument has its merits, but why was it that the erudite Americans took eight long years to make this great discovery about Afghan history? The point is, the overriding American priority today is to ensure that somehow the fighting tapers off so that NATO casualties come down and the alliance’s long-term continuance in Middle Asia becomes politically sustainable, which is crucial for the U.S. global strategy.

Therefore, the Obama administration is adopting a revisionist approach towards the Taliban, saying the latter do not pose any threat to the U.S.’s security. To be fair, Mr. Obama has no reason to be on a revenge act in the Hindu Kush, as was the case with his predecessor eight years ago. Bob Woodward has made riveting revelations in his book “Bush At War” precisely on this issue as to whether the Taliban regime in Kabul in September 2001 was to be regarded as America’s enemy. That 8-year old discussion has come full circle. True, the Taliban aren’t necessarily America’s enemies. Nor should they be excluded from their own country’s body polity. So, if the Taliban pose no threat to the U.S. security and if only the Taliban would agree to severe links with the Al-Qaeda, the U.S. would unscramble the omlette.

All the same, the U.S. officials have begun arguing, the raison d’etre of continued western troop presence in Afghanistan still remains insofar as Pakistan’s stability has now become the new focal point. But then, no one remembers anymore that it was the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan that in the first instance destabilized Pakistan. Thus, the U.S. sidesteps the core issue – a timeline for ending the occupation of Afghanistan.

saudi national to be the special envoy 4 kashmir

2009-10-03T22:07:00.000-07:00

While Osama Bin laden, a Saudi National is being hunted by the whole world, one of his compatriots have got the chance to take the af-pak jihad in kashmir to a whole new level.

The appointment of Abdullah Bin Adbul Rahman Al Bakr, a Saudi national, as the special OIC envoy on J&K, is greeted with suspicion through out the region.

The contact group was addressed by the Foreign Ministers of Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Niger.

The same group that was accused of supporting jihad in most of the countries world wide.

It has been rightly pointed out that it was better to appoint Osama Bin Laden as the special envoy of this region since it wouldn't have made much of a difference.

USA and the legacy of double standards

2009-10-03T20:04:00.000-07:00

Being an Afro-American(not Amero-African where one parent is white and the other is black as in the case of Barack Obama) is bad in america, But being an Asian or African is far worse. Vikram Buddhi, an Asian was at first interrogated in January 2006 by US Secret Service but for some mysterious reason, was recorded as arrested only on April 14, 2006 (remember, this was several years before the 9/11 incident). The charges against him at best can be called as farce.

Among the ways to measure the greatness of a country, the administration of justice ranks the highest and the military might the least.

A comparison of the case of 31 year old Iranian-American journalist Ms. Roxana Saberi sentenced by Iranian Court and the case of 37 year old Indian Graduate Student of Purdue University Mr. Vikram Buddhi awaiting sentencing after a helpless jury found him guilty in US District Court, has much to show the entrenched preferences of the United States of America.

With all the proclaimed adherence to the rule of law, the administration of justice in the United States fails as badly as in any other country of the world and sometimes even more badly. Neither the powerful and pervasive American media nor the recent popularity of President Barack Obama can hide this fact. Of course, like in any other country, there are people in the United States who are justice minded and rational but their role to set right the things is limited.

Saberi is charged in April 2009 of spying for the United States, convicted and sentenced to eight years imprisonment. Buddhi was charged in April 2006 of threatening to kill President Bush and others. The jury, which was deliberately kept ignorant of the law governing the case, found Buddhi guilty in June 2007 and his sentencing is yet to take place. But he has been kept in prison in Chicago, consequent to the jury verdict, awaiting sentence.

According to the media reports, Saberi was at first taken in custody in January 2009 for allegedly buying a bottle of wine, and subjecting her to other charges afterwards. Vikram Buddhi was at first interrogated in January 2006 by US Secret Service for allegedly posting messages on Internet Yahoo space which had called upon the people of Iraq to retaliate the perceived unjust Iraq war and to kill President G W Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others. After thorough interrogation, the US Secret Service set Buddhi completely free in mid-January 2006 and in February 2006 the Secret Service even made a formal report that Buddhi is not a threat to US President or any other person. But for some mysterious reason, the US Secret Service arrested Vikram Buddhi on April 14, 2006 and launched federal prosecution charging that he threatened to kill US President and others.

Saberi’s charge of spying for the United States is criticized because the evidence is not disclosed and the trial is held in secret. Buddhi’s charge of threatening to kill President Bush and others has no evidence at all. If the Internet Messages on Yahoo space were to be treated as the basis for the charge against Buddhi then it is necessary to mention in the charge, the essential fact of Internet Messages and the call given to the people of Iraq through those Messages. But in none of the eleven counts of charge there is even a whisper about the Internet Messages on Yahoo space and the call given to the people of Iraq. Thus the entire charge against Vikram Buddhi is fundamentally flawed. It is not in conformity with the revered Constitution of the United States and the Statutory Law of the United States and the Rules made there under. Moreover, during the jury trial, the Prosecution failed to establish beyond reasonable doubt that those Internet Messages were really posted from Buddhi’s computer.

Saberi’s trial details are still to be known. Whereas Buddhi’s jury trial Transcripts clearly show that the US District Judge James T. Moody discriminated against Buddhi. To assess whether there is ‘true threat’ it was necessary to instruct the jury on the commands of the First Amendment to US Constitution which affords protection when speech is made criminal. By established law Internet Messages are treated as speech. But Judge Moody openly declared his firm resolve to banish First Amendment from the case. Judge Moody boldly threatened the Defense Attorney John E Martin that the Defense Attorney would be embarrassed if he tried to explain to the jury linking the First Amendment and the evidence on record. While struggling to understand the case, the jury noticed a contradiction in a crucial Judge’s Instruction to the jury and sent a written note to the Judge, seeking clarification. Judge Moody sent a prompt written reply to the jury asserting that there is no contradiction in any of his instructions to the jury and therefore the members of the jury should continue their deliberations. In twenty minutes thereafter, the helpless jury delivered guilty verdict.

Saberi’s father was not allowed to witness his daughter’s trial. However, there is no discrimination against Saberi’s father as no public was allowed to witness the trial. Whereas in Vikram Buddhi’s case, the father, Kotasubbarao Buddhi, was deliberately denied opportunity to witness his son’s trial. Fraud was committed on the Court to keep Buddhi’s father away from the trial. The prosecutor Philip C. Benson named Buddhi’s father as a Government witness. There was no summons to give evidence as Government witness. Judge James T. Moody refused to hear the objection of Buddhi’s father who was waiting for one year in the United States to witness his son’s trial. The fraud got confirmed when Buddhi’s father was not called to the Court as a Government witness. Naming him as a Government witness was only a ploy to keep the father away from the Court during the jury trial. Prosecutor Benson knew that Buddhi’s father is an attorney of Supreme Court of India and also a knowledgeable person in computer networks with his Ph.D in technology from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India. US Prosecutor Benson fraudulently planned and succeeded in denying Vikram Buddhi the benefit of his father’s experience and expertise. There is no known such unfair practice and professional misconduct of Prosecutors in Saberi’s case in Iran.

Saberi’s father and mother arrived in Iran to help in their daughter’s case. There is no attempt from Iranian Government to remove Saberi’s father or mother from Iran. Whereas in Buddhi’s case, after the jury’s guilty verdict on June 28, 2007, the Government of the United States has embarked on a meditated plan to remove Vikram Buddhi’s father from the United States, though the father entered the United States on June 7, 2006 with an Emergency Visa issued by the American Consulate, Mumbai, to help in his son’s federal prosecution in the United States.

On July 30, 2007, the US Authorities declined to extend the stay of Buddhi’s father in the United States. On August 21, 2007, the US Authorities forcibly stopped Buddhi’s father on a public road while he was on his way to file timely petition before appropriate forum for review of the decision declining extension of stay. Thus Buddhi’s father, Kotasubbarao Buddhi, was denied his legal right to seek review from appropriate forum. There is no such arbitrary treatment from Iranian Government to Saberi’s father.

After accosting Buddhi’s father on a public road in West Lafayette of Indiana State, the US Authorities illegally took away from him his Indian Passport on August 21, 2007, handcuffed him, chained him and arrested him without a warrant. Thereafter US Authorities granted $1500 bond. But when a friend of Buddhi’s father came forward to pay the bond amount and requested the release of Buddhi’s father, the US Authorities refused to accept the payment. Only after subjecting Buddhi’s father to inhuman treatment and humiliation for a week in three different jails at long distances apart- Mariano County jail (Indianapolis), Grayson County Detention Center (Kentucky) and McHenry County jail (Chicago), Buddhi’s father was released on bond. But his Indian passport has not been returned to him so far. There is no such known arbitrary and inhuman treatment meted out by the Iranian Government to Saberi’s father.

Buddhi’s father being unable to have a just and fair decision from the Departments of US Government allowing a reasonable opportunity to help in his son’s federal prosecution had to approach US Appeals Court, Seventh Circuit, Chicago. Buddhi’s mother is in India alone remaining in anxiety over her son getting justice in US Courts. Iranian Government has not mounted any such ordeal on Saberi’s father or mother. Instead, the Iranian President Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has urged the Iranian judiciary to allow American-journalist Roxana Saberi a full and fair defense during the appeal process.

Buddhi’s father sent a detailed letter dated October 21, 2008 to the then US Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey explaining the false and frivolous charge against Vikram Buddhi and the unfair trial and the discrimination. There was no response from Mukasey.

After President Barack Obama assumed office, Buddhi’s father sent a concise letter dated February 9, 2009 to President Obama explaining the miscarriage of justice in Vikram Buddhi’s case. The letter also explained that the case of Vikram Buddhi is not an isolated case and there is monumental failure of justice in the United States because of which the population-wise percentage of people in the US jails is the highest compared to any other country in the world. There is no response so far from President Obama. Similar communications have been sent to US Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and he has not responded so far.

On March 27, 2009 Vikram Buddhi’s father sent letters to US Attorney General Eric H. Holder and to Inspector General, Civil Rights & Civil Liberties Complaints Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Justice, explaining the prosecutorial misconduct in Vikram Buddhi’s case. But there is no response so far from either of them.

However, surprisingly, about a week after posting the letters dated March 27, 2009 pointing out the professional misconduct of Philip C. Benson, US Assistant Attorney in Vikram Buddhi’s case, reports appeared informing that US Department of Justice took action to vacate the conviction of former Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens, on the basis of “prosecutorial misconduct.” and in the “interest of justice.”. But so far no action is taken by US Department of justice on prosecutorial misconduct in Vikram Buddhi’s case.

Never the less, notwithstanding US Government’s complete silence over Vikram Buddhi’s case, President Barack Obama promptly said he is “deeply disturbed and his thoughts and prayers are with the family” of Roxana Saberi. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has promptly expressed her “deep disappointment” over Roxana Saberi’s case. “We will continue to vigorously raise our concerns to the Iranian government,” Mrs. Clinton said in a statement released on Saturday April 17, 2009. According to National Public Radio of the United States, on Monday April 20, 2009, Mrs. Clinton in a stepped up call sought immediate release of Roxana Saberi, saying the charges against Saberi are baseless. There is no hesitation to find fault with Iranian Court verdict. What about the false and baseless charges against Vikram Buddhi in US District Court?

President Obama who studied and taught law is surely aware that the loss from erosion of justice cannot be compensated from the sway of eloquence and charm. It is unfortunate President Obama has no hesitation to disagree with a Court verdict in Iran and to express concern for Roxana Saberi, while remaining silent on the grave miscarriage of justice mounted on Vikram Buddhi in US District Court.

Who is there in the United States Government to express any concern over the blatant miscarriage of justice in the United States in Vikram Buddhi’s case?

Justice is universal, not Iranian or American.

Delhi upset over the dragon's move

2009-10-02T19:19:00.000-07:00

In a move that has puzzled and annoyed South Block, the Chinese embassy in New Delhi has begun issuing visas to Indian passport holders from Jammu and Kashmir on a separate sheet of paper rather than stamping them in their passports as is the norm with other Indian citizens. Though it is not clear when the new Chinese policy started or what prompted Beijing to adopt it, immigration authorities at Delhi airport first started noticing the standalone visas a few weeks ago. The Bureau of Immigration, which is run by the Ministry of Home Affairs, initially assumed these visas to be fake and turned the unfortunate travellers – all of them Kashmiri students or businessmen – away. But when some of them returned with letters from the Chinese embassy declaring the visas to be genuine, the matter was referred to the Ministry of External Affairs.

With the Chinese issuing “stapled visas” to the handful of Indian passport holders from Arunachal Pradesh who have travelled to China since 2007, the MEA saw in Beijing’s latest move an attempt to question the status of Jammu and Kashmir. The immigration authorities were told to treat any visa that is not stamped on a passport as invalid for the purposes of travel. Simultaneously, the issue was taken up with the Chinese authorities, MEA officials told this reporter.

Although the People’s Republic of China embassy in Delhi said it would not officially comment on the matter, Chinese diplomats told this reporter that the practice of issuing visas on a separate piece of paper is not new. “This kind of visa is one category of Chinese visa. It is valid. This has been practised for many years. Upon the implementation of this, a note was sent to your immigration authorities. All the visa holders of this kind have not met any problem in the past in your custom/border control,” an embassy official said on condition of anonymity.

The MEA denies the contention that India has only now started objecting to some pre-existing Chinese practice of issuing Kashmiri domicile passport holders visas on a separate sheet of paper. “What the Chinese are doing is definitely new and we have taken a serious view of it,” an MEA official said.

The Delhi's obsession with the engagement of the U.S. seems to have put the country's sovereignty on a back burner.

Investing in safer relationship

2009-10-02T19:09:00.000-07:00

With India’s relationship with the United States and China under relentless focus, it is not surprising that the Indian President’s recent visit to the Russian Federation went almost unnoticed. Yet the trip served to remind both sides of a friendship that they once swore by and whose potential remains high despite years of mutual neglect, changed global circumstances and diversification of interests.

At one level, Pratibha Patil’s trip, like any presidential outing, was all ceremony and nostalgia. Dulcet tunes from the Raj Kapoor-directed Shri 420 filled the Grand Kremlin Palace’s incredibly beautiful gold and red Alexander Hall when President Dmitry Medvedev raised a toast to his Indian guest. If the blast from the past was ever so sweet, so was the ritual recalling of the golden years of “Hindi-Rusi bhai-bhai” and the references to India and Russia’s shared civilisational roots.

Yet as the tour progressed, and the Indian presidential delegation was swept up in a whirlwind of high-level meetings and state events, it became clear that the visit was more than a goodwill exercise, that the rhetorical flourishes in the individual and joint statements were not as ornamental as they seemed; indeed, that there were strains in the once rock-solid bilateral relationship that the trip would strive to address — not through dramatic gestures and agreements as might be expected from a Prime Minister-level summit, but via signals and words conveyed by Ms Patil that Moscow would weigh, interpret and absorb.

On the flight into Moscow, Indian officials had admitted to a “sense of drifting away on both sides.” It was only a perception, they hastened to add, yet they had no answers to why such a perception must undermine a relationship they said was strong and based on high levels of trust. The unease was evident in Moscow too, with the intelligentsia — the media, security analysts, policy wonks, etc., — nearly unanimous that India-Russia relations, never the same after the break up of the Soviet Union, had suffered more recently from India’s “obsessive” engagement of the United States, and Russia, in turn looking elsewhere to consolidate its business and strategic interests.

At the people-to-people level, there was goodwill, yes. Older generation Russians spoke with genuine affection about India; after all, the international friendship had dominated their growing up years. As Russian analysts invariably pointed out, “there is nothing but good feeling for India.” But for the younger lot, exposed much more to the West than their parents, India was a fading, distant memory. Awara and the Kapoors had no name recall among them, and for those of us on the Indian side raised on weekly doses of Soviet Land and stories of India-Soviet bonding, the Russia we were visiting turned out to be not the country of our imagination.

Most Russians had not heard of the ongoing “Year of India in Russia” celebrations just as not many in India knew that 2008 was celebrated in India as the “Year of Russia in India.” The “gala concert” that the Indian side had billed as the high point of Ms Patil’s visit turned out to be an indifferent affair with the organisers struggling to find audiences for the below-par performance put up by Indian artistes at the world famous Bolshoi theatre.

That the Indian side was only too conscious of the tensions was apparent from Ms Patil twice choosing to place the relationship in its own context. At Mr. Medvedev’s banquet, she had spoken of countries, including Russia and India, pursuing “multi-vector” foreign policies. “However,” she added, “I can assure our Russian partners that even as we improve our relations with other countries, it will not be to the detriment of our tried and tested friendship.” The Indian President reiterated the point at her meeting with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. India’s relationship with Russia, she said, will not be “at the expense of its relationship with other countries.”

To observers in Moscow, it was plain that by “other countries” Ms Patil had meant the U.S. India would have no reason to “assure” Russia about any other relationship, nor would a visiting Indian President stress a point like this unless there was a felt need to do so. At an informal briefing by Indian officials, a Moscow-based journalist came quickly to the heart of the matter, asking, “Is it not a fact that India is sitting in the lap of the United States?” Clearly upset at the accusation, the Indian side once again emphasised the “unique” nature of the bilateral relationship which ought not to be “viewed from the prism of any other relationship.” Keeping this relationship on track was not only “one of our top foreign policy priorities but is the cornerstone of our foreign policy.” The visitors also drew the reporter’s attention to Mr. Putin’s own reminder that the relationship was truly and really one of a kind: “Russia’s support for India at the Nuclear Suppliers Group in defence and nuclear cooperation showed the truly strategic nature of our partnership. Russia does not have this kind of a relationship with any other country.”

Back in India, reaction to the outcome of the visit has varied from “usual diplomatic hyperbole” to “there is indeed some recognition that this relationship is strategically important and must come to the front burner.” There is unanimity of opinion that the Soviet Union’s “immeasurable” assistance in defence and heavy industry contributed to making India what it is today. Russia has continued this support and, despite some problem areas, remains India’s most important military supplier even today — at a time when India has started to diversify its purchases. A case in point is the nuclear submarine built with 60 per cent Russian assistance.

Not just this. If the Soviet Union unfailingly backed India on Kashmir, Russia has done its bit for advancing India’s nuclear ambitions and in the face of perceived American attempt to roll back the clean exemption given last year by the NSG. Ms Patil was still on Russian soil when Moscow sent word that Russia would not agree to the Washington-authored G-8 curbs on the sale of Enrichment and Reprocessing items and technology.

Nobody, not even the most enthusiastic backer of closer Indo-U.S. ties, refutes Russia’s crucial place in India’s foreign policy scheme more so given the problematic future shape of the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. The U.S. tilt towards India is no longer as visible as it was in the George Bush days, which means that India would need all the help it can muster in the event of the region exploding into a crisis.

The emerging view in India is that India-Russia relations can never reach the heights scaled by India and the Soviet Union simply because there are 15 countries today where there was just one country earlier. India has necessarily to engage the U.S., and it cannot be faulted either for seeking to diversify its military purchases. But equally, there is a need to be transparent with Russia and invest sincerely and visibly in the relationship. There is a solid reason for doing so. The foreign policy interests of India and Russia almost converge, and the two countries uniquely have no conflict of interest.

Yet all this might come to nothing if India and Russia do not improve the currently abysmal levels of bilateral trade. The two countries are hoping eventually to raise trade volumes from the existing $2.5 billion to $10 billion. To place this in proper perspective, one has only to consider trade volumes between Russia and the European Union, which tripled between 2000 and 2007 to $63 billion and even between Russia and Turkey, which rose from $11 billion in 2004 to $38 billion in 2009.

New Delhi has made much of the annual reciprocal visits to India and Russia by the two Prime Ministers. But there has been far more to-ing and fro-ing between Russia and Germany which recognises the strategic importance of gas-rich Russia and wants it integrated into the European economy. If Germany and Turkey could reach out to Russia despite a history of conflict with it, why cannot India which admittedly has never had a conflict of interest with Russia?

As the world’s largest exporter of natural gas, and second largest of oil, Russia has enough and more to satiate India’s energy security needs. India has spent valuable time revisiting done deals with the U.S. (not signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, civil nuclear deal, etc.). It can surely spare some time to rebuild relations with an old friend.

The American great game in Afganistan.

2009-08-22T09:57:00.000-07:00

The 19th century Prussian military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz, wrote in his famous work, On War: “The great uncertainty of all data in war is a peculiar difficulty, because all action must, to a certain extent, be planned in a mere twilight, which in addition not infrequently — like the effect of a fog or moonshine — gives to things exaggerated dimensions and unnatural appearance.” Unsurprisingly, a Clausewitzean war such as the one in the Hindu Kush has been covered in thick fog.

Yet there are times when the fog abruptly lifts or becomes transparent and nonmaterial, and the atmosphere of uncertainty, hazard and blunder characterising the Afghan war eases a little. It becomes possible to grasp at air and arrest the declining lack of confidence. One such moment presented itself on August 5 when the United States commander of the forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, was called to a meeting in Belgium where Secretary of State Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen told him to go slow on submitting his report, earlier expected in mid-August, to President Barack Obama and await the outcome of the August 20 Afghan presidential elections.

The Pentagon is preparing the ground for expanding the Afghan mission well beyond Mr. Obama’s early focus. Alongside is an attempt at precisely the sort of nation-building plan being integrated into the U.S. military operations in Afghanistan that Mr. Obama seemed to decry in March. Equally, the Americans are in a quandary: if Hamid Karzai secures a renewed mandate, the AfPak strategy cannot roll on.

So far the fog kept from view the full contours of the AfPak strategy, which apparently focussed on a “clear and concise and … attainable goal which is to disrupt, dismantle and prevent the al-Qaeda from being able to operate in its safe havens” — to quote U.S. National Security Advisor General James Jones during his media briefing in Washington, DC, on March 29. Gen. McChrystal reportedly wants to double the number of American civilians working in Afghanistan. The Washington Post reported that the U.S. ambassador to Kabul sought an additional $2.5 billion in expenditure for 2010, which is about 60 per cent more than what Mr. Obama requested from Congress. Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who advises Gen. McChrystal, told The Times newspaper that the U.S. should send another nine combat brigades comprising 45,000 troops, which would bring the total American presence to about 1,00,000.

On Friday, at a press conference, Mr. Gates hinted at a big U.S. troop build-up in Afghanistan. He also underscored the criticality of the Afghan election results for the U.S. policy when he said “close consultation” with the new government was imperative to ensure that the Afghans did not reject too big a U.S. military footprint. While, as of now, the Afghans might be viewing the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation-led coalition as their partner, “I just worry that we don’t know what the size of the military presence might be that would begin to change that,” he said.

Meanwhile, Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Special Representative for AfPak, has been assembling a nation-building team for Afghanistan for the long haul — comprising senior U.S. diplomats, counterinsurgency liaisons from the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, USAID and agricultural experts, and even well-known academics and think tankers. Mr. Holbrooke commands an impressive parallel government. Evidently, the “civilian side” led by Mr. Holbrooke will count on the success of the “military side” led by Gen. McChrystal in killing and trapping the recalcitrant Taliban and smashing up the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It is against such a complex background that the U.S. wishes to tighten its control over the power structure in Kabul. Mr. Karzai’s re-election will pose a major headache for Washington. Mr. Holbrooke is heading for Kabul. Without doubt, the presidential election in Afghanistan has assumed immense significance for the geopolitics of the region. Mr. Holbrooke’s mission to Kabul is of the utmost importance for the future of the AfPak strategy. An election whose outcome was considered a foregone conclusion has become a cliffhanger. Mr. Karzai faces an existential threat from none other than his erstwhile mentors in Washington. For the past several weeks, the U.S. has been fighting a rear-guard battle to ensure that he somehow fails to get an outright victory in Thursday’s first round, which will necessitate a run-off in October.

Surely, the Afghan kaleidoscope is shifting with dizzying speed. Mr. Karzai has built up a coalition involving the erstwhile mujahideen leaders Ismail Khan, Mohammed Fahim, Karim Khalili, Mohammed Mohaqiq and Rashid Dostum. Mr. Dostum’s return from Turkey — defying U.S. warnings — galvanises Jumbish just in time to boost Mr. Karzai’s electoral prospects in the Amu Darya region. The Uzbekis and Hazara Shias account for well over a quarter of the Afghan population. Besides, Ismail Khan, “amir” of western Afghanistan, who is close to Tehran and is allied to the former President, Burhanuddin Rabbani, has come out in support of Mr. Karazi. Mr. Khan’s support for Mr. Karzai at this juncture undermines the U.S.-Pakistani strategy, which was based on the premise that Tajik disunity (and incipient Uzbeki-Tajik rivalries) would hamper Mr. Fahim’s capacity to deliver Tajik votes to Mr. Karzai. Thus, all in all, Mr. Karzai’s prospects have improved. Washington’s strategem to prevent his first-round victory is in jeopardy. In an extraordinary public vent of dismay, the State Department said in Washington on Tuesday: “We have made clear to the government of Afghanistan our serious concern regarding the return of Mr. Dostum and any prospective role in today’s Afghanistan.” Mr. Obama has already asked his national security team to give further material on Mr. Dostum’s “background,” including concerns that he might have been involved in the death of a significant number of Taliban prisoners of war in 2001 during the U.S. invasion.

To be sure, Mr. Holbrooke faces a huge challenge. A clear-cut victory for Mr. Karzai in the first round will bring into power a coalition that Washington will find hard to control what with multiple power centres. In this context, the “operational role of the Pakistani intelligence [ISI]” will assume critical importance. The ISI disfavours Mr. Karzai’s victory. It has scores to settle with almost all the Northern Alliance “warlords” who rally behind Mr. Karzai. These “warlords” may reject the U.S.-British-Saudi-Pakistani game plan to co-opt the Taliban into the Afghan power structure, as they know that Mullah Omar and Co. will go after them one day or the other. Equally, the Pakistani security establishment and the Obama administration cannot easily stomach a democratically elected government dominated by the Northern Alliance “warlords,” who used to enjoy the support of Russia, Iran and India, coming to power in Kabul. The agenda of introducing Islamism for the remaking of Central Asia, NATO’s expansion and long-term military presence in Afghanistan — all these are in the cross hairs. It is a moot point whether Russia or Iran actively promoted Mr. Karzai’s coalition with the Northern Alliance stalwarts. Surely, no one needs to tell Mr. Holbrooke and his interlocutors in the Pakistani security establishment that the destiny of the Afghan war and Mr. Obama’s AfPak strategy hang by a thread and they have a congruence of interests. Indeed, if there could be a ‘do-or-die’ situation in the great game in the Hindu Kush, it is this.

The big question is: how will Mr. Holbrooke tackle this nasty challenge? Will he push for an “Iran-like” situation in Kabul? What could the ISI do to help out Mr. Holbrooke? Long-time observers won’t fail to sense that there is an opaqueness in the air in Islamabad. Whenever the ISI goes into overdrive in the Hindu Kush, Islamabad puts on an appearance of studied indifference. No doubt, Mr. Holbrooke’s extended stay in Islamabad — and the visit to Rawalpindi by Gen. McChrystal on Monday — points to hectic U.S.-Pakistani parleys on the next American move on the Afghan chessboard.

The fog kept out of sight Mr. Karzai’s growing rift with Washington — and his inevitable “Afghanisation” — which began circa 2007 when he began demanding a say in the NATO troop deployment and the scale of military operations by the foreign troops. He sought an Iraqi-style Status of Force Agreement. Mr. Karzai also insisted that the international community work through his government in undertaking aid projects and not bypass it. Most important, he pressed for an intra-Afghan peace process through a Loya Jirgha (tribal council) to reconcile with the Taliban and pave the way for the vacation of NATO occupation. Mr. Karzai’s approach undercuts the U.S. agenda of monopolising conflict resolution in Afghanistan, which is inseparable from the U.S.’ regional strategies.

India’s engagement with the U.S.

2009-07-26T09:04:00.000-07:00

In between lobbying for American arms sales and nuclear reactor parks, Hillary Clinton spent barely two hours out of five days in official discussion with her Indian hosts.

On July 8, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described India as an “emerging” global power. Ten days later she dropped the adjective, India’s entry on the world stage coinciding with her own moment of arrival on Indian shores. Ms Clinton was well advised. There is nothing the Indian elite likes more than having its great power ambitions stoked in this manner. But along with great flattery comes greater responsibility. And having declared India worthy of global power status, American commentators have been breathlessly asking whether the country is “ready” to step up to the plate and play ball. “India wants to be seen as a major world power,” a New York Times editorial noted condescendingly. “For that to happen, it will have to drop its pretensions to nonalignment and stake out strong and constructive positions.”

The purpose behind Ms Clinton’s visit was twofold. First, to build new structures of engagement that might bring Indian thinking on major global issues like climate change, trade and disarmament in line with the “strong and constructive positions” the U.S. takes and away from the alternative consensus India is trying to build at different forums like BRIC, IBSA, G-20, G-77 and NAM. This she did by proposing a strategic dialogue consisting of “five pillars,” ranging from non-proliferation and climate change to trade, investment and agriculture. The second purpose was transactional: how to translate the strategic partnership with India into commercial gains for American businesses.

On both counts, Ms Clinton’s five-day visit was an unqualified triumph. The new strategic dialogue architecture was unveiled, and a strong foundation laid for nuclear and military sales. Both sides pretended to exchange views on burning international issues. But with barely an hour set aside for her official meeting with External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna, it is obvious that Ms Clinton was not particularly interested in hearing what her Indian hosts had to say on Iran and other subjects. Especially since she had already heard the one thing most important to her — end use.

Setting aside the publicly and privately expressed reservations of its armed forces, the United Progressive Alliance government agreed to an end use monitoring (EUM) agreement providing for the physical verification of defence items purchased from the U.S. None of India’s major defence suppliers imposes such a condition, though of course it may welcome the opportunity to do so in the future now that the country has shown a willingness to open its doors. India also gave in to the U.S. request to identify the two nuclear parks where American-supplied reactors will be installed. This at a time when Washington is attempting to renege on its commitment to facilitate full civil nuclear cooperation with India by getting the Nuclear Suppliers Group to introduce an NPT-only rule for the sale of enrichment and reprocessing items.

Much has been said about how the U.S. insists on EUM arrangements with all its defence customers and that India cannot expect to be given a waiver from a requirement that is embedded in American law. Chapter 4.5.7 of the Pentagon’s Security Assistance Management Manual (SAMM) spells out the EUM condition for foreign military sales: “Sales and assistance may be made to countries only for purposes of internal security, legitimate self-defense, for preventing or hindering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and of the means of delivering such weapons, civic action, or regional or collective arrangements consistent with the United Nations (UN) Charter, or requested by the UN… Proper use of U.S.-origin items is a joint responsibility of the recipient and U.S. personnel. U.S. representatives have primary responsibility until items are physically transferred to the recipient. The recipient then assumes this responsibility, based on agreements under which transfers are made, including transfer to a third party or other disposal or change in end-use.”

As the CAG discovered during his scrutiny of the Jalashva (formerly USS Trenton) landing dock ship India bought from the U.S. a few years ago, American weapons contracts come not just with potentially intrusive inspections but also with a “legitimate self-defence” end use requirement whose interpretation is bound to be contingent on wider political equations. For example, Israel has used U.S.-supplied aircraft and munitions in nakedly aggressive acts against its neighbours countless times but Washington has never held these to be a violation of the self-defence condition. But tomorrow, if India uses an American-supplied jet for an anti-terrorist operation outside its borders that the U.S. does not approve of, the end-use language of SAMM 4.5.7 may well be invoked against New Delhi. The Trenton was sold to enable India to deploy troops for humanitarian missions in the region that the U.S. may be unable or unwilling to undertake. If India tries to use it for “offensive” purposes, however, it may well have to contend with U.S. protests.

Every country that sells arms abroad does so for commercial gain. Many countries also use arms sales as a tool of foreign policy. But only the U.S. uses these sales as a tool of military policy as well. Arms transfers help build interoperability. And they also help shape the way the receiving military operates. What is on offer, therefore, is not an off-the-shelf sale but a comprehensive package whose components are not available for cherry picking. After the EUM agreement will come the Communications and Information Security Memorandum of Agreement (CISMOA) and a Logistics Supply Agreement (LSA). It is not a coincidence that almost all of America’s customers for advanced military hardware are either formal alliance partners, major non-Nato allies or client states, none of whom has a problem with providing U.S. inspectors access. Before it plunges headlong into a closer military relationship, India needs to carefully consider what this entails.

Part of the problem has to do with mistaken assumptions and flawed understandings in India of what its strategic partnership with the U.S. involves. India assumes that American interests and strategies in the region are congruent with its own. India also believes a strategic partnership means the Americans will understand and share its concerns and priorities on most big issues and, at a minimum, not act against Indian interests wherever there are divergent views. For the U.S., on the other hand, the partnership is all about shaping India’s choices and priorities. It is about ensuring that India does not bandwagon with other rising powers. And acting against Indian interests (as it is now doing at the G8 and NSG) is not seen as a contradiction. That is why Indian apprehensions about President Barack Obama’s commitment to the strategic ties established by George W. Bush were so misplaced. This partnership helped open the doors of nuclear commerce for India but also led to a number of Indian doors being opened for the American side. Surely it would be most un-American for the new administration to not seek entry.

If India-U.S. 2.0 was all about laying the groundwork for cooperation in a variety of fields, India-U.S. 3.0 is where Washington gets to cash in. The U.S. intends to ensure that India honours the Letter of Intent it gave last September promising to place orders for nuclear reactors capable of generating at least 10,000 MW of electricity. The American arms industry — which lobbied hard for the passage of the nuclear deal through Congress — also intends to collect. And the Pentagon, which, in many ways, spearheaded Washington’s outreach to India in the 1990s and again after 9/11, would like to ramp up military-to-military cooperation using common equipment as a springboard.

In the weeks before the Hillary visit, U.S. officials not only worked out the agenda that was to be covered but also announced their intentions loud and clear. It is not a coincidence that the “five pillars” were identified not in the joint Indo-U.S. statement but in a separate “fact-sheet” issued by the U.S. embassy. Sadly, very little of this ideation and articulation took place on the Indian side. If India had a positive, proactive agenda of what it hoped to get out of the visit, this was kept a tightly guarded secret. Certainly, there was no public expression of it. When difficult issues arose in the public domain — like the attempt by the Obama administration to get the G8 to ban ENR sales to India — these were ducked and a senior Minister fielded to tell Parliament that the government was not unduly concerned.

India’s engagement with the U.S. is one of the most exciting and challenging aspects of the country’s foreign policy today. But unless this high-stakes game is handled properly, with planning, foresight and determination, it could well turn out to be dangerous.

U.S and the epicenter of terror.

2009-07-26T08:18:00.000-07:00

A steadily rising curve of Islamist activities is becoming visible in Central Asia.

In his book Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, noted Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid describes how the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency, Britain’s MI6 and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence drew up a provocative plan in 1986 to launch mujahideen attacks in the Soviet territory, presently within Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The task was given to the ISI’s favourite mujahideen leader, Gulbuddi n Hekmatyar. Of course, the idea itself — the use of militant Islamists as a geopolitical tool to lacerate the “soft underbelly” of the Soviet Union — belonged to the U.S. National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Years later, in 1998, when a Le Nouvel Observateur interviewer asked him whether he regretted using political Islam as a natural ally, Brzezinski was unrepentant. He asked: “What is more important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”

Indeed, it wasn’t an idea that was born in Brzezinski’s clever mind. When the idea of the U.S.’ utilitarian alliance with the benighted version of Islam first appeared in the mid-1950s as the underpinning of the U.S. strategy to gain control of the oil in the Middle East and ward off Arab nationalism, American strategists called it the “Eisenhower Doctrine.” And its current reputation has been ably theorised by ideologues such as Bernard Lewis.

That is why, the latest stirrings on the political accommodation of the neo-Taliban in Afghanistan by the U.S. cause immense anxiety and concern in the region. The issue is not about an Afghan settlement. Surely, for a settlement to be durable, it needs to be inclusive and broad-based and cannot possibly exclude a sizeable group such as the Taliban, which does have indigenous roots. The issue, rather, is about the nature of Afghan reconciliation. Outside powers should not be prescriptive. On the other hand, the process must evolve through an intra-Afghan dialogue.

The Pakistan military’s spokesman, Athas Abbas, recently admitted in an interview with the CNN that the ISI continues to be in contact with the Taliban’s hardcore leader and that it can bring him and other commanders to the negotiating table. No matter what prompted Major General Abbas to open up, Washington chose to let it pass. The fine line of distinction between the “good” and the “bad” Taliban is slowly and steadily blurring, and the vista is opening up for a dialogue with Mullah Omar, Jalaluddin Haqqani and Hekmatyar.

Mr. Abbas’ “chatter” appeared with hardly a few weeks to go for the Afghan presidential election due on August 20. The western capitals are panicky about the prospect of President Hamid Karzai securing a second term. A nasty media campaign against him is under way. But what happens if Mr. Karzai wins the election? Conceivably, an “Iran-like” situation would develop. It is a real possibility. The British commander in Helmand province, Colonel David Haight, has openly speculated that Mr. Karzai’s re-election could trigger a “violent backlash” from the Afghan public.

The western capitals are backing the candidacy of former Afghan Finance Minister and World Bank official Ashraf Ghani. One of the attractions about Mr. Ghani’s electoral platform is that he has openly called for ending the war and offers the Taliban a three-year ceasefire. On the contrary, Mr. Karzai’s two vice-presidential running mates are former Northern Alliance stalwarts Mohammed Fahim, who used to be the intelligence chief under Ahmed Shah Massoud, and Karim Khalili, the Hazara Shia leader from Bamyan. More irksome for the U.S. seems to be the prospect that while Mr. Fahim has had close dealings with Russian intelligence over the years, Mr. Khalili has been Tehran’s steady ally through a quarter century. Thus Mr. Karzai’s ticket is not only pan-Afghan but also enjoys the trust of Russia and Iran (and India). Again, Afghan Uzbeki leader Rashid Dostum and Hazara commander Mohammed Mohaqiq from the Amu Darya region — two key figures in the anti-Taliban resistance in the 1990s — have announced their backing for Mr. Karzai, and they are as equally opposed to the return of a Taliban regime as Mr. Fahim or Mr. Khalili could be.

A Karzai victory, in short, means that any reconciliation with the Taliban can only be on the basis of an inter-ethnic, national consensus among the Afghan people. Neither the U.S. nor Pakistan seems ready for such transparency in the Afghan political process. All in all, therefore, the U.S. may well opt for a regime change in Kabul.

This is a high-stakes game, as the nature of the power structure in Kabul holds profound implications for the security of the Central Asian region and North Caucasus — and Xinjiang. All evidence points to an intensification of the big power struggle for influence in the energy-rich regions of the Caspian and Central Asia. A defining moment is coming up by the year-end when the 7000-kilometre long gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Xinjiang will become operational. The pipeline will be a game-changer. The U.S. is keenly advancing the agenda of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s expansion into the region and it is meeting with resistance from both Russia and China.

Against this backdrop, a steadily rising curve of Islamist activities is becoming visible in Central Asia. Armed attacks by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a group affiliated to the al-Qaeda, resumed since late May. There are reports that the Islamist commander of the Tajik civil war (1992-97), Mullah Abdullo, recently crossed the Afghan border into Tajikistan with some 300 followers and took shelter in Tavildara, which is situated in the Rasht Valley in the rugged Pamir Mountains, some 20 km from the Afghan border. Tavildara used to be the base of the Islamist fighters in the Tajik civil war.

Abdullo had enjoyed the ISI’s backing. He never recognised the 1997 Peace Accord and instead took shelter in Kandahar where he was arrested in 2001 when the U.S. intervened in Afghanistan, but for some obscure reason he was allowed to disappear. Since then, he has been hiding with the Taliban leadership. In the past few months, Russian intelligence repeatedly warned of the imminence of a military conflict and insurgency in Central Asia. The threat perception finally compelled Russia to establish a second military base in Kyrgyzstan in the southern city of Osh. Situated on the edges of the densely populated Ferghana valley, Osh is an extremely strategic location near Afghanistan and Xinjiang. A big-scale Russia-China joint military drill to fight terrorism commences on Wednesday. Curiously, Moscow lost no time expressing support to Beijing over the recent unrest in Urumqi, following a telephone conversation between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi at the latter’s initiative.

The U.S. commentators have given a spin that the Central Asian militants are returning home due to the Pakistani military stepping up its operations along the Afghan border region. According to the local opinion in Afghanistan, however, U.S. special forces are providing the logistics to Central Asian Islamists to reach the Tajikistan border from Pakistan-Afghan tribal areas. Kunduz, Islam Qala, Imam Zahib, Aliabad and Chardara district in northern Afghanistan have become staging points for militants to cross into Tajikistan. There are reports that U.S. special forces facilitated the movement of “foreign fighters” from the Wazir tribes on the Pakistani-Afghan border into Chardara district. (Chardara is a Pashtun enclave.) These are very alarming signals reminiscent of the run-up to the Andizhan uprising in the Ferghana valley in May 2005, which had covert American involvement. Conceivably, the security situation may worsen along the route of the Turkmenistan-Xinjiang pipeline.

Thus, several tendencies are concurrently appearing on the geopolitical landscape — possible “regime change” in Kabul; prospects of the U.S. reconciliation with the Taliban under the ISI’s mediation; “homecoming” by Central Asian Islamists from their bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan; role of U.S. special forces; militant activity in the Ferghana valley; commissioning of the gas pipeline connecting Turkmenistan and Xinjiang; unrest in Urumqi, etc.

The security situation in Russia’s North Caucasus region — primarily in the eastern part, including Ingushetia, Dagestan, Chechnya and Kabardino-Balkaria — has also taken a turn for the worse. A Carnegie scholar recently wrote that the Russian Caucasus is returning to “some ancient period” and “gunshots, explosions, assassination attempts have become daily routine.” Traditional Caucasian Islam, Sufism, is giving way to Wahhabism and is becoming a political tool while the “secular and religious elites have been fusing.” In an interview with the U.S. government funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty recently, Russia’s most wanted terrorist, Doku Umarov, claimed that he was mobilising for stepped-up insurgency in Chechnya, where Moscow previously announced a successful end to counter-insurgency operations.

To be sure, a second post-Soviet wave of Islamism is appearing in the region. Islamist fighters are arriving on the Silk Road, poking Russia’s — and China’s — “soft underbelly” in a way that will do Brzezenski proud.

India agrees defence pact

2009-07-20T18:57:00.000-07:00

The US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, on a visit to India, said the two sides had agreed an "end-use monitoring" accord.

This aims to help the US ensure that its military technology is not transferred to other countries.
Mrs Clinton also held talks with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

During Monday's meeting, Mr Singh accepted an invitation from Mrs Clinton to visit the US in November, officials said.

The end-use monitoring agreement was announced in a joint news conference between Mrs Clinton and the Indian Foreign Minister SM Krishna.

End-use agreements are required under US law for weapons sales.

India is seeking to buy fighter aircraft and nuclear reactors - deals that are expected to generate multi-billion dollar contracts, for which several US companies are bidding.

India also announced on Monday that it had approved sites where American companies will build two nuclear power plants.

It is part of a civilian nuclear deal signed by the US and India last year.

Mrs Clinton is spending three full days in India. She departs on Tuesday.

Correspondents say Mrs Clinton's visit aims to show the US is committed to broadening its ties with Delhi.

Addressing students at Delhi University ahead of the talks, Mrs Clinton said the US wanted to "deepen our strategic understanding" with India and find more common ground.

Mrs Clinton also held talks with the leader of the opposition, Lal Krishna Advani.

India's relations with neighbouring Pakistan were also expected to feature prominently in discussions.

Our correspondent says that publicly Mrs Clinton has insisted that what Pakistan and India do is completely up to them.

But he says everyone in Delhi is clear it was pressure from Washington that pushed the countries to hold talks in Egypt last week.

Great game Asia with the pawns called Asians

2009-07-20T18:35:00.000-07:00

Last week, Washington apparently showed India a big favour, “de-hyphenating” its relationship with Pakistan and India. The Nelson Report, the matchless daily chronicler of men and matters in Washington DC, reported on Monday that top diplomat Richard Holbrooke would be the new administration’s special envoy for India and Pakistan. The New York Times corroborated this information.

In the event, however, it seems Mr. Holbrooke will be special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan only — apart from “related regional issues.” From all appearances, the Barack Obama administration will not “hyphenate” India and Pakistan.

But Indian diplomacy needs to tread softly. Unfortunately, the UPA government’s overdependence on the U.S. to get Pakistan to bend a little on the Mumbai attacks complicates this task. We now know that “a lot” of the Indian dossier was prepared by the Federal Bureau of Investigation so that it looks “credible.” We also know that an FBI team has obtained visa to travel to Pakistan to continue the probe. Meanwhile, we remain focussed on the rhetoric while keeping an eagle’s eye on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis on any American politician, bureaucrat or soldier passing through Islamabad.

And we ponder: Has Islamabad bent a little? What keeps this tragi-comedy from descending into a farce is Mr. Holbrooke’s appointment. It is plain common sense that any “related regional issues” connected with Pakistan that form part of Mr. Holbrooke’s brief will inevitably include India-Pakistan relations, including the “core issue” of Kashmir.

Therefore, leaving aside the diplomatic quibbling about the semantics of “de-hyphenation,” one has to be truly moronic to miss out on the U.S.’ so-called regional strategy towards the war on terror in Afghanistan, which is crystallising even as the transition is set to begin in Washington with President Obama contemplating his options in the swathe of land that Americans call Southwest Asia but stretches westward to the Mediterranean as well, forming the so-called Greater Middle East that includes the vast geo-strategic landscape from the Levant to Central Asia.

What is the regional strategy? Quintessentially, it involves negotiating a matrix of interlocking “grand bargains” between the U.S. and relevant regional players that aim at pacifying Iraq and Afghanistan and restoring stability to the Greater Middle East, which in turn, would help to reduce a financial drain of $15 billion a month the U.S. incurs on the two wars and help bring down the hostility of the world’s one billion Muslims towards the U.S. In an address at the Washington Convention Centre last Friday, General David Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command, summed up: “We have to demonstrate [our] commitment to sustain comprehensive, coordinated approaches and build and execute a regional strategy that includes Pakistan, India, the Central Asian states and even the army in Russia along with, some day, perhaps at some point, Iran.”

The “grand bargain” in its application to the Afghan situation first sailed into view with all guns blazing in the by-now famous Foreign Affairs article in November by regional experts Ahmed Rashid and Barnett Rubin, whom, of course, Gen. Petraeus consulted. Their axiom is that the co-relation of the Afghan problem with the international system has changed and Afghanistan is no longer a buffer state, which historically separated conflicts but is now linking them. Proceeding from this, they questioned the efficacy of the traditional notions of the key elements of stability in the Hindu Kush devolving upon a mere concord among the big powers not to interfere inside Afghanistan or exploit Afghanistan’s weaknesses in their great game so that their contestation of the Afghan state remains minimal while a neutralised, demobilised Afghanistan serves as a buffer.

Today, the experts argue, the restraining rules of the great game in the Hindu Kush have given way to a virtual importation of innumerable regional and sectarian conflicts into Afghanistan, which make the restoration of its status as a buffer state unrealisable. Therefore, it is impossible to solve the Afghan problem without solving the international issues that are linked to the conflict in the Hindu Kush. These issues have been identified principally as the “war on terror,” India-Pakistan tensions, Shia-Sunni conflict, future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, U.S.-Russia relations and the U.S.-Iran standoff.

From the Indian perspective, the “grand bargain” involves high-level diplomatic initiative by the U.S. to address the “legitimate sources of Pakistan’s insecurity,” which of course requires India to be brought in to provide the necessary assurances. At the same time, on a parallel track, Saudi Arabia will finesse the Taliban to give up its ties with the al-Qaeda and become part of a coalition government in Kabul.

It stretches credulity that the U.S. actually believes in such an ethereal hypothesis. But then, why is it being pedalled so systematically? In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Defence Secretary Robert M. Gates gives an intellectual construct to the regional strategy against the backdrop of the U.S.’ emergent compulsions in the global system. With disarming candour, he admits that the “defining principle” of the U.S. strategy is “balance.” Much as some form of U.S. presence will continue in Iraq “for years to come” and considering that to fail or to be seen as failing is not an option in Afghanistan (as it would be a “disastrous blow” to the U.S.’ credibility among both friends and allies and among potential adversaries), Washington must “set priorities and consider inescapable tradeoffs and opportunity costs,” Dr. Gates wrote. Given the imperatives of the war on terror — “grim reality, a prolonged, worldwide irregular campaign” — and the growing financial constraints of sustaining higher defence budgets, the U.S. needs to be pragmatic.

Dr. Gates acknowledges that the U.S. is unlikely to “repeat another Iraq or Afghanistan … anytime soon,” but that is not the point. The fact of the matter is that the U.S. cannot take its global military dominance for granted, although it is sustainable for the medium term as per current trends. “Both Russia and China have increased their defense spending and modernization programmes to include air defense and fighter capabilities that in some cases approach the United States’ own.”

Again, Russia and China “may be unwilling to challenge the United States fighter to fighter, ship to ship, tank to tank. But they are developing the disruptive means to blunt the impact of U.S. power, narrow the United States’ military options, and deny the U.S. military freedom of movement and action.” Dr. Gates singles out China as an ascendant state with the potential to compete with the U.S., whose investments in cyberwarfare, anti-satellite warfare, anti-aircraft and anti-ship weaponry, submarines and ballistic missiles could “threaten the United States’ primary means to project its power…[and] put a premium on the United States’ ability to strike from over the horizon and employ missile defenses.”

Indeed, the U.S.’ 2008 National Defence Strategy underscores the need for “local partnerships” for hedging preceisely against Russia and China’s military modernisation and the impact of their strategic choices upon international security. It emphasises building the capacities of a broad spectrum of local partners as the basis of the U.S.’ long-term security. The NDS cited India as a prime example of one such “growing partnerships” within which the U.S. intended to pursue its global interests.

Thus it is obvious where the U.S. “regional strategy” in Afghanistan is leading to. Plainly put, it is integral to the U.S. winning the long war for global dominance in the 21st century. It is sheer sophistry to say Afghanistan is “linking” regional conflicts such as Kashmir. The regional strategy provides the context for the U.S. to undertake what the NDS calls “efforts to understand and address the grievances that often lie at the heart of insurgencies.” It acts like a crossbar with which the U.S. can lever regional tensions and extract geopolitical advantage.

The choice of a tough negotiator to address the “related regional issues” in South Asia is significant. Most people know Mr. Holbrooke as the brilliant master of ceremonies in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. But less known is the fact that he is a co-founder — along with James Woolsey, former CIA Director, and Dennis Ross, former special Middle East coordinator in the Clinton administration — of a group called United Against Nuclear Iran, which propagates Israel’s apocalyptic vision of Iran. In The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Holbrooke wrote in September last, “Iran is a deadly and irresponsible world actor, employing terrorist organizations including Hezbollah and Hamas to undermine the existing regimes and foment conflict.”

Fasten seat belts, Southwest Asians. Air pockets lie ahead. All the more reason why the UPA government should not put all its eggs in the American basket to end the impasse over the Mumbai attacks.

Target Islam

2009-07-18T23:40:00.000-07:00

The body of an Islamic student militant who was killed while fighting NATO troops hangs from an electricity pole with a paper attached to his body bearing a slogan which translates as “ultimate fate of Islamic student militants and miscreants,” in Swat valley, on Monday.

Each and every day, bodies like this appear on the streets of Afganisthan, a grim reminder to each and every muslim that their life is considered "not worth a dime" in the western civilization.

Not even one coloumn is spared for reporting these deaths in the western print media and not a second in the western TV shows.

Michael Jackson 'The King of Pop' is DEAD!!!

2009-06-26T10:01:00.000-07:00

Michael Jackson, the black child star turned King of Pop who set the world dancing to exuberant rhythms for decades is dead. A look at Jackson over the years. In photo: US singer Michael Jackson announces that he is set to play ten live concerts at the London O2 Arena in July, which he announced at a press conference at the London O2 Arena, Thursday, March 5, 2009. The singer also stated that this would be his final performances in London.

The reclusive pop-star, who debuted at age 5 with the Jackseon Five, has emerged from town years of professional dormancy with a new music video, 'Black or White'.

Michael Jackson was unquestionably the biggest pop star of the '80s, and certainly one of the most popular recording artists of all time. In his prime, Jackson was an unstoppable juggernaut, possessed of all the tools to dominate the charts seemingly at will: an instantly identifiable voice, eye-popping dance moves, stunning musical versatility, and loads of sheer star power. His 1982 blockbuster Thriller became the biggest-selling album of all time (probably his best-known accomplishment), and he was the first black artist to find stardom on MTV, breaking down innumerable boundaries both for his race and for music video as an art form.

'We will miss him.'

Divide and rule

2009-06-13T22:47:00.000-07:00

Even as the Second World War raged on, the General-Officer-Commanding of Imperial Britain’s Indian Army Eastern Command had begun work on the making of a new nation. Hindu-majority India, Sir Francis Tucker had come to believe, was dangerously mired in “superstition and formalism;” ripe to be seized by “a material philosophy such as Communism.” For this calamity to be averted, he argued, it was “very necessary to place Islam between Russ ian Communism and Hindustan.”

By 1944, Tucker was advocating the need for “a new Muslim power supported by the science of Britain.” “If such a power could be produced,” he wrote in his memoirs, India’s Partition and Human Debasement, “and if we could orient the Muslim strip from North Africa through Islamia Deserta [sic.], Persia and Afghanistan to the Himalayas, upon such a Muslim power in northern India, then it had some chance of halting the filtration of Russia towards the Persian Gulf.”

Pakistan lived up to Tucker’s hopes, allying itself with the anti-Communist powers during the Cold War and offering its services to the United States of America’s war-by-proxy against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Now, the enemy flies the stark, black-and-white banners of the al-Qaeda and the Taliban but Tucker’s vision of Pakistan continues to influence the geo-strategic imagination of the U.S. policy establishment.

Even as a Lahore court released Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Mohammad Saeed from house arrest last week, President Barack Obama’s special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, was announcing an additional $200 million in civilian aid to Pakistan. Pious protestations notwithstanding, it is unlikely the U.S. largesse is driven by a concern for human life: internationally-reviled economic sanctions against Cuba, which does not provide a platform for terrorism, are yet to be lifted despite their well-documented impact on nutrition and healthcare.

Islamabad, in fact, enjoys impunity for its failure to credibly act against the Lashkar or the Jaish-e-Mohammad because of its role in fighting the al-Qaeda and the Taliban, as a keystone of what President Obama described as the “partnership between America and Islam.” But does the war in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province live up to its billing as a decisive showdown between Pakistan’s jihadists and the state which helped give birth to them?

Three reasons

Military experts say there are at least three good reasons why the ongoing war in the NWFP should be seen as a spanking delivered to the state’s errant children, not a death blow to mortal enemies.

First, there is no sign that the Pakistan Army is, in fact, prepared for the kind of long-term military commitment needed to degrade an insurgency. Data are difficult to come by but expert estimates made by independent military analyst Mandeep Bajwa suggest that the Pakistan Army has committed between 70,000 and 80,000 personnel to its campaign in the NWFP. That number appears impressive — until one considers the fact that India has committed similar numbers to fighting the far less fierce insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir.

Pakistan’s X Corps has been assigned the responsibility for Operation Rah-e-Rast, the high-profile assault on the Swat region. Elements of the 23 Division, normally stationed along the Line of Control facing Naushera, have targeted Mingora, along with the Jalalpur Jattan-based 333 Brigade, the 54 Brigade from XXX Corps, and the 30 and 212 Brigade from IV Corps. Buner, in turn, has been assigned to the Rahwali-headquartered 37 Division, part of Pakistan’s northern army reserve, the I Corps. Operation al-Mizzan, targeting north and south Waziristan, is spearheaded by the 19 and 7 Division of Pakistan’s XI Corps. In addition, the XXXI Corps’ 14 Division has been given a defensive role, guarding the Bannu-Dera Ismail Khan axis against potential Taliban thrusts in Punjab.

History suggests that these troops could be headed home as soon as victory can credibly be declared. Back in 2008, Pakistan had pumped troops into the NWFP for high-profile offensive operations against the Taliban. Three brigades of the Peshawar-based XI Corps, two brigades of the Quetta-based XII Corps, and one brigade of the Bahawalpur-based XXXI Corps, were pushed westward to join the fight. Pakistan even committed troops from its India-focussed strike formations, notably two brigades of the Kharian-based 17 Infantry Division of the I Corps, to the fight. Taliban fighters responded to the pressure by melting back into the countryside. In time, the troops withdrew — and the Taliban reasserted its authority.

“Pakistan’s strategy in the NWFP is strikingly similar to that of the United States in Afghanistan,” notes Gurmeet Kanwal, Director of the New Delhi-based Centre for Land Warfare Studies. “They use massive force,” he points out, “to evict the adversary but then allow the territory they have just won to be taken all over again by the Taliban.”

Second, Pakistani formations have had little success in capturing or killing key Taliban leaders, raising the disturbing prospect that the military establishment continues to see at least some of them as potential strategic partners.

Late last month, Pakistan raised bounties on key Taliban chiefs active in Swat, including Mullah Fazlullah, his deputy Shah Doran, Mingora-based spokesperson Muslim Khan, and the al-Qaeda’s Tora Bora Brigade commander, Ibn Amin. Pakistan increased the price for information leading to Fazlullah’s arrest or killing from PNR 5 million to PNR 50 million, while rewards for the heads of 20 other Swat-based Taliban have been raised to PNR 15 million. For reasons that are unclear, Pakistan is yet to offer rewards for information on top Taliban commanders like Baitullah Mehsud — the man Islamabad claims is responsible for a string of terrorist attacks across the country, including former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.

Nine senior al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders have been reported to have been killed on its territory since January 2008 — but only three are in fact now confirmed to be dead. Military affairs commentator Bill Roggio noted in a recent article: “all three of the dead al-Qaeda leaders were killed in U.S. cross-border Predator airstrikes, not during Pakistani offensive operations.”

Finally, Pakistan has made no serious attempt to dismantle jihadist infrastructure outside the NWFP. Lashkar and Jaish offices in southern Punjab remain open. So, too, do recruitment operations that lead cadre from the region’s impoverished villages to cross-Line of Control infiltration launch-pads in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Last month, the Lashkar was found to have resumed fundraising operations through a charitable front, the Falah-i-Insaniyat. All of this raises the fear that Pakistan is punishing unruly allies like the Taliban — while continuing to patronise client jihadists willing to further the state’s agenda in India and Afghanistan.

The Islamist paradox

Why, though, would Pakistan wish to patronise jihadists who, to the rest of the world, seem a self-evident threat to the survival of the state? Part of the answer could lie in the fact that the Islamist jihad in Pakistan emerged not as an adversary of the government but as a product of the official Islam propagated by the state itself.

In a thoughtful 2002 essay, scholar Saeed Shafqat noted that groups like the Jamaat-ud-Dawa had profoundly influenced Pakistan’s “process of identity formation.” “Negating Islamic identity,” he argued, “is equated with opposing Pakistan.” “Over the years,” Shafqat argued, “the religio-political groups have become not only militant in responding towards imagined or real enemies — ‘the West’ or ‘India’— but have also become the champions of ‘Pakistan ideology’.”

Elite-led political organisations have failed to mount a coherent ideological challenge to this project — or to address the conditions in which Islamist groups have flourished. Lashkar recruitment in southern Punjab is known to prey on the increasingly angry children of landless peasants and the urban poor. In Pakistan’s north-west, too, disputes over land, resources and development have fed and informed the rise of the Taliban.

Handing out aid will do little to solve these crises. Writing the The Washington Post, scholar C. Christine Fair noted that the U.S. handouts had “allowed Pakistan to avoid having to choose between guns and butter.” “Such choices,” she argued, “define the democratic process. But successive Pakistani governments have successfully wagered that chronic instability and the imminent dangers of terrorism and nuclear black-marketing would leave the world with no choice but to bail them out, regardless of their failures.” She concluded: “The world needs a smarter way to help Pakistan.”

Like Tucker, President Obama appears to believe that Pakistan holds the key to what is sometimes called the “Muslim World” — an ugly, colonial-era semantic construction that suggests that the region’s inhabitants, unlike people in “the West” or “the East” are bound together and driven primarily by fanatical religious belief. Finding those smarter ways will need the U.S. to see Pakistan for what it is: the site of multiple conflicts produced by unaddressed social conflicts and a dysfunctional, even pathological, state.

The holy perversions of clergy

2009-06-06T23:25:00.000-07:00

The shocking scale of sexual and physical abuse in educational institutions in Ireland run by the Catholic Church was revealed on Wednesday in a report describing how thousands of boys and girls were raped, abused and exploited by the religious brothers and nuns who were supposed to look after them.

The 2,600-page report by Ireland’s Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse found that for decades rape was “endemic” in more than 250 Irish Catholic care institutions from the 1930s to the 1990s, and that the Church in Ireland protected paedophiles in its ranks from arrest.

“A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from,” it said.

Children in industrial schools and reformatories were treated more like convicts and slaves than people with human rights, it said. Rape was particularly common in boys’ homes and industrial schools run by the Christian Brothers.

There were angry scenes outside the hotel in Dublin where the report was launched yesterday afternoon after about 20 former residents of industrial schools were prevented from attending the press conference.

Speaking outside the hotel, John Kelly of the Irish Survivors of Child Abuse, or SOCA, said: “We were treated as criminals as children when we were sent to these places and even now... there were Garda officers on call to arrest us if we tried to get in [to the press conference]. It was an absolute disgrace.”

Mr. Kelly described the failure of the report to recommend criminal prosecutions as a complete whitewash.

The five-volume report confirmed allegations from thousands of former pupils from the institutions. The Ryan Commission said that beatings in institutions run by both priests and nuns were commonplace.

“In some schools a high level of ritualised beating was routine... Girls were struck with implements designed to maximise pain and were struck on all parts of the body.”

It criticised the failure of the Irish state, notably the Department of Education, for allowing the abuse and exploitation to continue for decades.

The Department aided this culture “through infrequent, toothless inspectors” that always deferred to the Catholic Church’s authority, the report said. The inspections even failed to ensure that children were adequately fed, clothed and educated.

The commission proposed 21 ways in which the Irish government could recognise past wrongs, including building a permanent memorial, providing counselling and education to victims and improving child protection services.

After the revelations of systematic clerical abuse, Pope Benedict was challenged to hold a Vatican inquiry into the role of Catholic religious orders in Ireland’s orphanages and industrial schools. SOCA said it was now up to the Vatican to investigate the scandal further.

Mr. Kelly said: “Now that the Ryan commission is finished we call upon Pope Benedict to convene a special consistory court to fully investigate the activities of Catholic religious orders in Ireland. Among other things, such a court could establish the whereabouts of Irish state assets that were misappropriated over many years by the religious orders and make restitution to the Irish state exchequer.”

Mr. Kelly said SOCA was disappointed that members of the religious orders who abused children, and the government officials who turned a blind eye to abuse in places like the Artane industrial school, would not be prosecuted.

The commission investigated more than 100 schools run by Catholic religious orders — the majority by the Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy.

The commission’s original judge, Justice Mary Laffoy, resigned from her post in 2003 over claims that the Department of Education, which was in charge of inspecting the orphanages and industrial schools, was holding back documents from her inquiry.

Nine-tenths of the bill for compensating victims of the institutionalised abuse will be shouldered by Irish taxpayers rather than the Church. In June 2002, a deal between the Catholic hierarchy and the government of Bertie Ahern, agreed that the Church would pay only €128 million in compensation. The overall cost of compensation, according to official figures, will be €1.3 billion.

A second damning report, due to be published by the end of June, will detail the abuse of hundreds of children in the Dublin archdiocese from 1940 onwards. More than 100 priests are facing allegations and 400 people have been identified as victims.

America cautions North Korea against Nuclear ambitions.

2009-05-31T08:34:00.000-07:00

America have issued a strong statement in line with it's past standards. It has reiterated the fact it is not acceptable that North Korea acquires nuclear missiles in any state of its progress. It also reiterated that being a noble state which doesn't pose any risk to any other nations (forget Vietnam,Iraq,Korean,Bosnian and other innumerable invasions) only U.S and its Western allies have the right to develop nuclear arsenals and Weapons of Mass Destruction.

In its statement the U.S and its Western supporters also emphasises the fact that North Korea's action is in defiance of the U.N request & resolutions(don't even dare to think of Iraq or any other invasions after all it is we who decide as to what to pass and what not to pass)and that this calls for sanctions to be placed upon the country and leaders(well weren't Nixon, Monroe, Bush and others bared from travelling abroad and their foreign assets frozen by the U.N. after the invasions of Yugoslavia,Iraq and other countries).

This is a test case for both America and North Korea, for the former, a case which will display as to whether a nuclear state can be invaded without any problem and for the latter a litmus test of resilience.The world waits in anticipation....

Iran bans one of the western cybersluts- facebook

2009-05-25T18:09:00.000-07:00

Iran bans facebook for preventing the repetation of West-inspired Moldova's Twitter revolution.

The spectre of coloured revolutions loomed again over the former Soviet Union earlier this month, when young protesters in Moldova stormed government offices in capital Chisinau in what eerily resembled the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003.

Violence erupted on April 7 when about 10,000 students thronged the streets of Chisinau protesting alleged rigging in the April 5 parliamentary election, even as Russian and European observers certified the vote generally free and fair. The ruling Communist Party, which is in fact a centre-right party, trounced the opposition, winning 60 seats in the 101-member Parliament.

The protesters in Moldova used the same tactics as did adopt the organisers of the Rose Revolution. In the wake of a parliamentary election in November 2003, student protesters led by Mikheil Saakashvili stormed Parliament claiming that the vote had been rigged. The prime target of attacks in Moldova was also the Parliament building. The rioters broke into the building, smashing furniture and setting rooms on fire. They moved on to the office of the President, shattering windows and hurling stones at the police. Two men died and about 200 were wounded. As in Georgia five years earlier, the Moldovan protesters called for the ouster of the government and a rerun of the parliamentary election.

In Georgia, the coup succeeded because the police and the security forces crossed the lines, whereas in Moldova they stood by the President. Also, leaders of the main opposition parties in Moldova flinched, dissociating themselves from the protests when they turned violent.

What made the Moldovan protests different was that the demonstrators demanded re-unification with neighbouring Romania. They shouted, “We are Romanians,” and waved Romanian flags. The Moldovan and Romanian people have common ethnic roots and speak the same language. Romanians call themselves Europe’s last divided nation and say they should eventually reunite with Moldova along the German model, that is, Romania with a population of 20 million would absorb the 4-million strong Moldova, Europe’s poorest state sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine. The protests petered out after the Moldovan authorities arrested the organisers, closed the border with Romania and expelled its ambassador.

President Vladimir Voronin rejected charges of election fraud and agreed to the Opposition demand for a vote recount (it confirmed the Communist victory). He accused Romania of trying to overthrow his government by staging a “coloured revolution.” “We know that certain political forces in Romania are behind this unrest,” Mr. Voronin said. The Romanian flags fixed on the government buildings in Chisinau attest to this.

Romania’s embassy in Chisinau has issued hundreds of thousands of Romanian passports to Moldovans seeking jobs in Europe. Romania is known to have been financing the Opposition parties. According to Moldova’s Central Election Commission, half of all Opposition deputies elected to Parliament on April 5 hold Romanian passports.

From Russia’s perspective, Romania’s plan to annex Moldova is an attempt to drag another ex-Soviet republic into NATO through the back door. Moscow said it was deeply disturbed by the attempts to destroy Moldovan statehood. Neither the European Union nor the U.S. condemned Bucharest’s interference or demanded a probe into its role in the Moldova violence. The western media also took the side of the protesters as they did during other coloured revolutions, and accused the authorities of police brutality.

President Voronin not only denounced Romania’s expansionist plans but also hinted at the involvement of other foreign forces in the Chisinau riots. He said the police identified nine Serb nationals among those who led the protests.

It may be recalled that Serb activists from the Otpor opposition group, who were trained in U.S.-funded camps, helped to topple Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and coached young revolutionaries in Ukraine, Georgia and Belarus.

As in the earlier coloured revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzia, Russian politicians saw a U.S. hand in Moldova as well. “We are witnessing the continuation of the negative trend involving attempts by security services of some western states, above all the U.S., to destabilise former Soviet republics and incite protests that would trigger a rose or orange revolution,” said the head of the Duma committee for CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) relations, Alexei Ostrovsky.

Analysts find it improbable that Romania, a NATO and European Union member and which hosts two U.S. military bases on its territory, could have acted without consulting Washington. The Moldovan protests came to be known as the Twitter Revolution because the organisers used online social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to mobilise supporters. The U.S. government’s Agency for International Development (USAID) has been active in Moldova providing, among other things, free Internet access and training in information technology to local NGOs and students.

The U.S. has reason to feel frustrated with Moldova’s recent drift towards Russia. Mr. Voronin, who has always advocated Moldova’s integration in Europe, has sharply criticised Brussels’ new Eastern Partnership programme for former Soviet states, calling it a plot to encircle Russia. He has also opposed attempts to turn the U.S.-sponsored GUAM (Georgia-Ukraine-Azerbajian-Moldova) group into a full-fledged anti-Russian bloc.

Finally, Mr. Voronin last month agreed to revive talks on a Moscow plan for Moldova’s reunification with its Russian-speaking separatist region of Transdniestr, which he spurned five years ago under strong pressure from Washington and Brussels. He also dropped the demand for Russian peacekeepers pulling out of Transdniestr, which is a key point of disagreement between Moscow and Brussels. With Mr. Voronin’s term in office expiring and Moldova’s new Parliament due to choose a new President, organisers of the coup attempt apparently sought to tip the scales in favour of a pro-western candidate.

The failure of the Twitter Revolution in Moldova underscored the general disillusionment with the West-inspired coloured revolutions in the former Soviet Union. As Moldovan protesters were re-enacting the Rose Revolution, a much bigger crowd demonstrated in Georgian capital Tbilisi, calling for the resignation of President Saakashvili, hero of the revolution. The Georgian Opposition leaders vowed to keep up continuous protests until he quit. The former U.S. President, George W. Bush, described Mr. Saakashvili as a beacon of democracy, but Georgian politicians who helped to install Mr. Saakashvili in power five years ago now denounce him as a dictator.

“Georgia’s record on democracy today is far worse than it was in 2003,” says a former Saakashvili ally and Parliament Speaker Nino Burjanadze. “The media are under the total control [of the President], business is under total control, courts are terrorised and manipulated, and we have a real police state and an autocratic system of justice.”

Experts say the opposition in Georgia is too fragmented to oust Mr. Saakashvili anytime soon, but the current protests show that he is being hated as intensely as he was lauded five years ago. The Rose Revolution withered away after Mr. Saakashvili dragged Georgia into a war against Russia last August in which the Georgian army was routed and two Georgian provinces gained independence.

The Orange Revolution in Ukraine has, likewise, sunk into a morass of crippling political infighting, rampant corruption and economic meltdown. If elections were held today, Ukraine’s orange President Viktor Yushchenko would get 1.9 per cent of the votes, according to a recent survey.

As coloured revolutions melted into twilight, Russia has expanded its influence in the former Soviet Union. Moscow convincingly demonstrated a readiness to project its hard power when it pummelled Georgia in the five-day war. This had a strong impression on its neighbours. Kyrgyzstan, the target of a Tulip Revolution four years ago, recently decided to close the only remaining U.S. airbase in Central Asia even as Russia enlarged its airbase in Kyrgyzstan.

The NATO plans to give membership to Ukraine and Georgia have gone awry, while Russia is busy setting up military bases in Georgia’s breakaway territories of Abkhazia and Ossetia, whose independence Moscow recognised after the August war with Georgia. Moscow’s strong support for Moldova’s sovereignty during the Twitter Revolution is likely to push Moldova further closer to Russia and facilitate Moscow’s strategic goal of securing a non-NATO status for Moldova.

The abortive attempt to stage a coloured revolution in Moldova has cast a new shadow over Russia’s relations with the West just as Moscow and Washington agreed to push the reset button on their ties.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow had no problem cooperating with the U.S. in the former Soviet Union provided the U.S. policies were transparent and free from under-the-carpet scheming and secret agendas.

The chill caused by the Moldova crisis deepened when NATO announced plans to hold three-week military exercises in Georgia next month. President Dmitry Medvedev denounced the war games as muscle-flexing and dangerous. Russia’s Foreign Ministry said the U.S. plan to rearm Georgia amounted to nothing but encouragement of the aggressor. Such policies can well derail the efforts to reset Russian-American relations.

Drain of India

2009-05-17T02:23:00.000-07:00

Economic Exploitation and the Drainage of Wealth during British Raj.
By B Shantanu

Whenever the issue of economic exploitation and the "drain of wealth" during the 200 years of British colonial rule comes up, the one rebuttal from western historians is that there is scant evidence to prove it. To bolster the argument, the point is then made that Indian historians are nationalist, biased (sometimes as a consequence) and do not pay attention to figures and statistical evidence.

In my analysis of this topic, I have therefore, relied heavily on recent research by Western historians and tried to draw conclusions based on that.

Even by the accounts of western historians, the positive impact of British rule, which PM Sh. Man Mohan Singh had so pointedly mentioned during his speech at Oxford in Jul 05, is questionable.

The "drain of wealth" from India to Britain during the two centuries of colonial rule was very real, very substantial and there are strong reasons to believe that India may have looked significantly different (and far better) economically and socially had it not been for the two centuries of British rule.

The beginning of this period can probably be traced back to the Battle of Plasssey. As Prof. Richards writes in the introduction to his paper Imperial Finance Under the East India Company 1762-1859 [i], On June 23,1757, Robert Clive, commanding a small force of East India Company professional troops, defeated and killed Siraju-ud-daula, the ruling Nawab of Bengal, on the battlefield of Plassey. The battle marked a significant turning point in world history, for it permitted the English East India Company to gain control over the rich resources of the Mughal successor state in northeastern Bengal and Bihar. This was the starting point for a century-long process of British conquest and dominion over the entire Indian subcontinent and beyond. To help grasp the full extent of this exploitation, I have split my analysis into five parts. In Part 1, I look at the tax regime and the burden of administrative machinery. In Part 2, I try to get behind the assertion that the British contributed much to the improvement of education and public works in India. In Parts 3 and 4, I look at unfair trade practices and the drain of wealth. In the final part, I have tried to summarize the impact of these 200 years of servitude.

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TAXES & ADMINISTRATIVE BURDEN

In their recent research on deindustrialization in India[ii], Profs Williamson and Clingingsmith mention that while the maximum revenue extracted by the Mughals as high as 40%, this paled in comparison to the effective tax rate in the early years of colonial rule: as central Mughal authority waned, the state resorted increasingly to revenue farming (raising) the effective rent share to 50% or more.

Further, There is no reason to believe that when the British became rulers of the successor states the revenue burden declined (pg 7).

After initial attempts at revenue farming, Company officials aggressively introduced new taxes in an attempt to reduce their dependence on agrarian production, thus worsening the tax burden on the common man.

As Prof Richards points out in his paper (Ref 1), Land revenue continued to be the mainstay of the regime until the end of British rule in India, but its share of gross revenues was far less than under the Mughal emperors. To a larger degree, however, new taxes not imposed by the Mughals accounted for land revenue's declining share. Company officials began early to diversify their tax base so that the new regime was not so overwhelmingly dependent upon agrarian production.

In his research on the subject, Prof Maddison[iii] mentions the burden imposed by the administrative machinery of the State: British salaries were high: the Viceroy received 25,000 a year, and governors 10,000. From 1757 to 1919, India also had to meet administrative expenses in London, first of the East India Company, and then of the India Office, as well as other minor but irritatingly extraneous charges. The cost of British staff was raised by long home leave in the UK, early retirement and lavish amenities in the form of subsidized housing, utilities, rest houses, etc.

Prof. Richards mentions that although the Company raised their revenue demands in each territory to the highest assessments made by previous Indian regimes, they were still insufficient to meet the combined administrative, military and commercial expenses of the Company.

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SPENDING ON EDUCATION & PUBLIC WORKS

Although there is a prevalent myth around British contribution to development if education and infrastructure in India, in reality, the situation was quite different.

Prof Maddison writes that as late as 1936, the bulk of government expenditure was focused more on ensuring the stability of the empire than anything else: Even in 1936, more than half of government spending was for the military, justice, police and jails, and less than 3 per cent for agriculture (pg 4).

Amidst all the paraphernalia of the Raj, public works and social expenditure was completely forgotten. As Prof. Richards notes, the Company allocated negligible funds for public works, for cultural patronage, for charitable relief, or for any form of education.(confining) its generosity to paying extremely high salaries to its civil servants and military officers. Otherwise parsimony ruled.

The following excerpt from Prof Maddison's essay squarely debunks the notion that the British did a lot for education and were conscious of the wealth of ancient knowledge some of which was still extant at the time. The contempt that Macaulay felt towards the knowledge and wisdom of ancient Hindus is evident from this quote:

We are a Board for wasting public money, for printing books which are less value than the paper on which they are printed was while it was blank; for giving artificial encouragement to absurd history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, absurd theology … I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic … But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value … Who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia … all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England. (pg 5)

Unsurprisingly, (pg 6) The education system which developed was a very pale reflection of that in the UK. Three universities were set up in 1857 in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, but they were merely examining bodies and did no teaching. Drop-out ratios were always very high. They did little to promote analytic capacity or independent thinking and produced a group of graduates with a half-baked knowledge of English, but sufficiently Westernized to be alienated from their own culture.The great mass of the population had no access to education and, at independence in 1947, 88 per cent were illiterate at independence only a fifth of children were receiving any primary schooling.Education was used as a tool to turn a tiny elite into imitation Englishmen and a somewhat bigger group into government clerks.

If we turn our eyes to other areas of development, the picture does not improve.

In spite of agriculture being - by far - the most significant part of the economy, Little was done to promote agricultural technology. There was some improvement in seeds, but no extension service, no improvement in livestock and no official encouragement to use fertilizer. Lord Mayo, the Governor General, said in 1870, I do not know what is precisely meant by ammoniac manure. If it means guano, superphosphate or any other artificial product of that kind, we might as well ask the people of India to manure their ground with champagne (Pg 11).

In his analysis of the various charges and expenses that the Company incurred, Professor Richards mentions how Company officials were extremely wary of any public works spending uinless it was for projects of direct use to the state.

The following sentences are instructive and effectively blast the myth that the British did lasting good by building modern infrastructure in India: The Company even failed to repair and maintain roads, river embankments, and bunded storage tanks for irrigation that had been the responsibility of earlier regimes. When, in 1823, the Governor General in Council decided to devote a portion of anticipated surplus revenues to works of public improvement, the Court of Directors rejected this proposal. When, the Directors learned of heavy expenditures on buildings in the mid 1820's, they wrote to the Governor General to condemn this extravagance.

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MONOPOLY & UNFAIR TRADE PRACTICES

To comprehend the extent of unfair trade norms, just one example would suffice (excerpted from this excellent essay: The Colonial Legacy - Myths and Popular Beliefs [iv])As early as 1812, an East India Company Report had stated “The importance of that immense empire to this country is rather to be estimated by the great annual addition it makes to the wealth and capital of the Kingdom…..”

Few would doubt that Indo-British trade may have been unfair - but it may be noteworthy to see how unfair. In the early 1800s imports of Indian cotton and silk goods faced duties of 70-80%. British imports faced duties of 2-4%!As a result, British imports of cotton manufactures into India increased by a factor of 50, and Indian exports dropped to one-fourth! A similar trend was noted in silk goods, woollens, iron, pottery, glassware and paper millions of ruined artisans and craftsmen, spinners, weavers, potters, smelters and smiths were rendered jobless and had to become landless agricultural workers. The monopoly on trade in salt and opium was an important mainstay of the Company's finances. Prof. Richards notes that Together opium and salt produced on average 18.9 percent of gross revenues. In last fifteen years of Company rule their share climbed to 25.1 percent, as opium became one of the most valuable commodities sold in world commerce.

Prof. Richards has noted Edmund Burke's report that accompanied the Select Committee of Parliament meetings in 1782-1783 to investigate the Company's affairs. To quote Edmund Burke:

But at, or very soon after, the Acquisition of the Territorial Revenues to the English Company a very great Revolution took place in Commerce as well as in Dominion;.From that Time Bullion was no longer regularly exported by the English East India Company to Bengal, or any part of Hindustan;. A new Way of supplying the Market of Europe by means of the British Power and Influence, was invented; a Species of Trade (if such it may be called) by which it is absolutely impossible that India should not be radically and irretrievably ruined.

This is how the pernicious system worked: A certain Portion of the Revenues of Bengal has been for many Years set apart, to be employed in the Purchase of Good for Exportation to England, and this is called The Investment, The Greatness of this investment has been the standard by which the merit of the Company's Principal Servants has been generally estimated; and this main Cause of the Impoverishment of India has generally been taken as a Measure of its Wealth and Prosperity.

This Export from India seemed to imply also a reciprocal Supply, which the Trading Capital employed in these Productions was continually strengthened and enlarged. But the Payment of a Tribute, and not a beneficial Commerce to that Country, wore this specious and delusive Appearance.

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THE DRAIN OF WEALTH

However, the high taxes, the heavy burden of state, the neglect of education and public works and unfair trade practices, these were only the tip of the iceberg.

The most damning evidence of British exploitation was the irrefutable "drain of wealth" that took place over the period of two centuries.

Prof. Williamson and Clingingsmith have noted that between 1772 and 1815 there was a huge net financial transfer from India to Britain in the form of Indian goods. The drain resulting from contact with the West was the excess of exports from India for which there was no equivalent import included a bewildering variety of cotton goods for re-export or domestic [consumption], and the superior grade of saltpeter that gave British cannon an edge Javier Cuenca Esteban estimates these net financial transfers from India to Britain reached a peak of 1,014,000 annually in 1784-1792 before declining to 477,000 in 1808-1815 (Pg 9). However even this high figures are significantly lower than the estimates by Prof John Richards (cited later in this essay).

Like all other commentators, Maddison too has mentioned the debilitating effect of the drain of funds from India: Another important effect of foreign rule on the long-run growth potential of the economy was the fact that a large part of its potential savings were siphoned abroad.This ‘drain’ of funds from India to the UK has been a point of major controversy between Indian nationalist historians and defenders of the British raj. However, the only real grounds for controversy are statistical. There can be no denial that there was a substantial outflow which lasted for 190 years. If these funds had been invested in India they could have made a significant contribution to raising income levels. (Pg 20)The total drain due to government pensions and leave payments, interest on nonrailway official debt, private remittances for education and savings, and a third commercial profits amounted to about 1.5 per cent of national income of undivided India from 1921 to 1938 and was probably a little larger before that about a quarter of Indian savings were transferred out of the economy, and foreign exchange was lost which could have paid for imports of capital goods.

Separately, Dadabhai Naoroji estimated the economic costs and drain of resources from India to be at least at 12m per annum. Here is an extract from one of his essays, The Benefits of British Rule [v], 1871.

Financially: All attention is engrossed in devising new modes of taxation, without any adequate effort to increase the means of the people to pay; and the consequent vexation and oppressiveness of the taxes imposed, imperial and local. Inequitable financial relations between England and India, i.e., the political debt of ,100,000,000 clapped on India’s shoulders, and all home charges also Materially: The political drain, up to this time, from India to England, of above ,500,000,000, at the lowest computation, in principal alone. The further continuation of this drain at the rate, at present, of above ,12,000,000 per annum, with a tendency to increase.

Prof. Richards mentions in his research that: Between 1757 and 1859. Officials of the East India Company tapped the productive people and resources of Bengal and the eastern Gangetic valley to fund the protracted military campaigns necessary to conquer India. Over the same century, these same resources also supplied the wherewithal for a century-long transfer of wealth from India to Great Britain. Burke estimated that in the four years ending in 1780 the investment averaged no less than one million sterling and commonly Nearer Twelve hundred thousand pounds. This was the value of the goods sent to Europe for which no Satisfaction is made. The transfer continued without interruption and with formal approval from Parliament. In 1793, this devious system of extortion was given official sanction and thus was paved the path to financial ruin: By this 1793 Parliamentary directive, the Company was enjoined to take ten million current rupees (1 million sterling) each year for the investment from the territorial revenues of colonial India. After 1793, the Company zealously maintained its annual investments. Between 1794 and 1810, the average annual cost of the investment was 1.4 million sterling. In a recent contribution, Javier Cuenca Esteban puts the arguably minimum transfers from India to Britain between 1757 and 1815, Plassey and Waterloo, at 30.2 million sterling. This figure is the estimate of exports from which there was no compensating import for India. Post 1833, when the Company's commercial operations ceased, the drain took the form of Home Charges which represented the expenses in Britain borne by the Indian treasury.

These Home Charges were a huge burden on the finances and contributed to a sustained and continuous deficit in the budget throughout the 19th century.

As Prof Richards notes, (pg 17) there were few years in which the Indian budget was not in deficit. For the entire period (1815 - 1859), deficits reached a cumulative total of 76.9 million sterling or an annual average of 1.7 million sterling.

This systematic drain was nothing short of a loot albeit carried over 200 years and under the cover of colonial trade. It left the economy in shambles and reduce this great country from one of the powerhouses of the world economy to a laggard which was barely able to sustain itself.

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THE IMPACT

The collective impact of these policies and system of exploitation was severe.

In their preface to the research, Profs. Clingingsmith and Williamson have this to say: India was a major player in the world export market for textiles in the early 18th century, but by the middle of the 19th century it had lost all of its export market and much of its domestic market. While India produced about 25 percent of world industrial output in 1750, this figure had fallen to only 2 percent by 1900.

This table eloquently depicts the impact of almost two centuries of British colonial rule over India

The cumulative effect of this greed, neglect and rapacity led to the situation where From the beginning of British conquest in 1757 to independence per capita income probably did not increase at all. In the UK itself there was a tenfold increase in per capita income over these two centuries. (Maddison)

And thus a country that was famed for its riches and wealth and prosperity in the came to resemble a basket case with an economy in shambles and its people bereft of any prosperity, struggling for a decent livelihood.

At this dawn of a new age of prosperity, it is even more important to remember these lessons from history. Eternal vigil is the price of continued prosperity and progress.

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REFERENCES

[i] Imperial Finance Under the East India Company 1762-1859 by John F Richards, Duke University (citing P J Marshall's 1988 book Bengal: the British bridgehead: eastern India)
[ii] India's Deindustrialization in the 18th and 19th Centuries by David Clingingsmith, Jeffrey G. Williamson, Harvard University, August 2005 http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/jwilliam/papers/GEHNIndianDeind.pdf
[iii] The Economic and Social Impact of Colonial Rule in India (Chapter 3 of Class Structure and Economic Growth: India & Pakistan since the Mughals, 1971), Prof. Maddison
[iv] http://india_resource.tripod.com/colonial.html
[v] http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1871britishrule.html

Pakistan takes blood money

2009-05-02T22:12:00.000-07:00

Pakistani government takes blood money from America and western nations for systematically

eradicating the Muslims in that country. The blood money that is pumped to the Pakistani

government is to the tune of 5 billion $ per year.

This amount will be given every year as token of their gratitude to the Pakistani government for
taking this international 'quotation' on its own fellow brothers.

The unfinished agenda; The unearthing of money from crime, tax evasion and corruption

2009-04-27T11:32:00.000-07:00

The issue of tax havens and illicit money flows from criminal activity, tax evasion, corruption and embezzlement of public funds and was the focus of much media attention before the London summit. In 1998 the then IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus estimated that the scale of money laundering activities at “almost beyond imagination” at 2 to 5 per cent of the global economy — which would give a figure of $800 billion to $2 trillion in current dollars. A more recent (2005) estimate by Raymond Baker quoted by the World Bank in a report puts the annual flow of illicit money at a little over $1 trillion, $500 billion coming from criminal activities, $500 billion from tax evasion and $20 to $40 billion from corrupt public officials.

It is uncertain if the same proportion — corruption and embezzlement by public officials accounting for 2 to 4 per cent of the total illicit money flows — would apply to India. The Global Financial Integrity programme of the Washington DC-based Center for International Policy in its report published in December 2008 estimated the average annual flow of illicit money from India between $22.7 billion and $27.3 billion during the period 2002 to 2006. This would place India fifth among 160 countries ranked by the amount of illicit flows after China ($233.5 billion), Saudi Arabia ($54.3 billion), Mexico ($41.7 billion) and Russia ($32 billion). Beyond such figures, there are no reliable estimates of the total amount of money held by Indians in accounts abroad.

Much of the money is held in hard currency in offshore financial centres and tax havens but it also finds its way ultimately into the major financial centres of Europe and North America. Low or nil tax rates, particularly on income earned abroad, banking secrecy, shell companies and trusts operated by lawyers and accountants, a policy of non-cooperation with tax investigators in other countries and a generally non-questioning, permissive atmosphere characterise the functioning of tax havens. To counter illicit flows, three types of international programmes are currently in operation. The first is the anti-money laundering initiative of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) set up by the G7 and functioning at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development secretariat. This focuses on measures to combat laundering the money from crime including drug running and comprises a set of 40 recommendations on criminalising money laundering, customer due diligence to be exercised by banks, not providing anonymous accounts or accounts in fictitious names, verifying the identity of the beneficiaries and the source of funds and monitoring accounts for suspicious activity, as well as cooperating with investigators in other countries.

The second coordinated effort is to counter tax evasion and the OECD is at the forefront of this initiative. It has formulated a code for exchange of tax information and Article 26 of its Model Tax Convention on Income and Capital which is the gold standard for tax treaties requires all countries to lift banking secrecy and “exchange such information as is foreseeably relevant” to the enforcement of tax laws of another country. It adopted a policy of naming and shaming countries that do not comply with this requirement, and many former tax havens and financial centres that were for long reluctant to help in investigations of tax evasion committed themselves to the OECD standard, among them Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, Hong Kong and Singapore. At the end of the London summit, the OECD published three lists: the first included countries that had substantially implemented the tax information standard, the second that had committed but had not yet implemented it and the third group included countries that had not committed themselves to the standard. Four non-cooperative jurisdictions, Costa Rica, Malaysia (Labuan), Philippines and Uruguay, formed the third group but subsequent to the London summit they declared their commitment to the OECD standard and were removed from the black list that is now empty.

The third area of international action that is of particular relevance to the debate in India is the recovery of the proceeds of corruption. Under the FATF guidelines, banks to avoid risk to their own reputation are required to look out for “politically exposed persons”, that is political office holders, bureaucrats and managers of public enterprises, keep a close watch on their accounts, check their genuineness and the source of funds. A more interesting programme is the Stolen Assets Recovery (StAR) initiative of the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime and the World Bank that provides the framework and even legal assistance for recovery of the money secreted abroad. Estimates of money stashed away by dictators and heads of governments vary widely but the World Bank report drawing from the “extremely approximate” estimates of Transparency International attributed chiefly to journalistic sources lists Suharto of Indonesia ($15 to 35 billion), Ferdinand Marcos of Philippines ($5 to 10 billion), Mobutu Seso Seko of Zaire ($5 billion), Sani Abacha of Nigeria ( $2 to 5 billion) and Slobodon Milosevic of Serbia ($1 billion) as heading the list of kleptocrats. It took Philippines 18 years to finally recover (in February, 2004) $624 million of Marcos’s money from banks in Switzerland while Nigeria recovered $500.5 million of Abacha’s money in early 2006 after a five year battle in the Swiss courts.

The most important multilateral agreement that provides the framework for combating corruption and recovering stolen money is the United Nations Convention Against Corruption that came into force in December, 2005. There are 140 signatories to the convention of whom 115 have also ratified it; India which signed the convention in December 2005 is yet to ratify it. The UNCAC calls for transparency and better governance practices, criminalising of a wide range of activities including trading in influence and obstruction of justice, and international cooperation, waiving banking secrecy, in the investigation of corruption and in the recovery of assets.

After the G20 London summit, the international environment has turned much less permissive to the holding of criminal or tax evaded money or money stolen from the public coffers. Yet, going after it is no easy task and involves three major challenges for any new government. First, it needs to summon the political will to go after all kinds of money that has been illicitly taken out — and this includes the funds stashed away by politicians from corrupt deals, by businessmen through trade mispricing and transfers of unaccounted money and by major criminals. Secondly, the new government needs to pursue the task of unearthing the money hidden abroad aggressively with other governments. It must ratify the UNCAC without further delay and enter into OECD-type tax conventions for the removal of banking secrecy for tax investigations with all the major financial centres.

Thirdly, the domestic investigative and legal framework needs to be strengthened to gather credible evidence and lead on to the quick conclusion of trials and forfeiture of property. The evidence gathered domestically has to form the basis for any request for assistance from other countries that will not entertain general or fishing enquiries. The names of the account holders in the LGT Bank in Liechtenstein bought by the German government from a former employee of the bank or the list of American account holders given over to the United States by the UBS of Switzerland to settle charges of violating Securities and Exchange Commission regulations are exceptional events that do not change the general rule that there must be a substantiated request naming a specific person and the bank. It is no doubt a long and hard road that is ahead but the scale is so vast and the rewards are so huge that the task needs to be attempted with seriousness and resolve.

Twitter Revolution; The failure of a CIA plot

2009-04-26T07:49:00.000-07:00

The spectre of coloured revolutions loomed again over the former Soviet Union earlier this month, when young protesters in Moldova stormed government offices in capital Chisinau in what eerily resembled the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003.

Violence erupted on April 7 when about 10,000 students thronged the streets of Chisinau protesting alleged rigging in the April 5 parliamentary election, even as Russian and European observers certified the vote generally free and fair. The ruling Communist Party, which is in fact a centre-right party, trounced the opposition, winning 60 seats in the 101-member Parliament.

The protesters in Moldova used the same tactics as did adopt the organisers of the Rose Revolution. In the wake of a parliamentary election in November 2003, student protesters led by Mikheil Saakashvili stormed Parliament claiming that the vote had been rigged. The prime target of attacks in Moldova was also the Parliament building. The rioters broke into the building, smashing furniture and setting rooms on fire. They moved on to the office of the President, shattering windows and hurling stones at the police. Two men died and about 200 were wounded. As in Georgia five years earlier, the Moldovan protesters called for the ouster of the government and a rerun of the parliamentary election.

In Georgia, the coup succeeded because the police and the security forces crossed the lines, whereas in Moldova they stood by the President. Also, leaders of the main opposition parties in Moldova flinched, dissociating themselves from the protests when they turned violent.

What made the Moldovan protests different was that the demonstrators demanded re-unification with neighbouring Romania. They shouted, “We are Romanians,” and waved Romanian flags. The Moldovan and Romanian people have common ethnic roots and speak the same language. Romanians call themselves Europe’s last divided nation and say they should eventually reunite with Moldova along the German model, that is, Romania with a population of 20 million would absorb the 4-million strong Moldova, Europe’s poorest state sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine. The protests petered out after the Moldovan authorities arrested the organisers, closed the border with Romania and expelled its ambassador.

President Vladimir Voronin rejected charges of election fraud and agreed to the Opposition demand for a vote recount (it confirmed the Communist victory). He accused Romania of trying to overthrow his government by staging a “coloured revolution.” “We know that certain political forces in Romania are behind this unrest,” Mr. Voronin said. The Romanian flags fixed on the government buildings in Chisinau attest to this.

Romania’s embassy in Chisinau has issued hundreds of thousands of Romanian passports to Moldovans seeking jobs in Europe. Romania is known to have been financing the Opposition parties. According to Moldova’s Central Election Commission, half of all Opposition deputies elected to Parliament on April 5 hold Romanian passports.

From Russia’s perspective, Romania’s plan to annex Moldova is an attempt to drag another ex-Soviet republic into NATO through the back door. Moscow said it was deeply disturbed by the attempts to destroy Moldovan statehood. Neither the European Union nor the U.S. condemned Bucharest’s interference or demanded a probe into its role in the Moldova violence. The western media also took the side of the protesters as they did during other coloured revolutions, and accused the authorities of police brutality.

President Voronin not only denounced Romania’s expansionist plans but also hinted at the involvement of other foreign forces in the Chisinau riots. He said the police identified nine Serb nationals among those who led the protests.

It may be recalled that Serb activists from the Otpor opposition group, who were trained in U.S.-funded camps, helped to topple Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and coached young revolutionaries in Ukraine, Georgia and Belarus.

As in the earlier coloured revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzia, Russian politicians saw a U.S. hand in Moldova as well. “We are witnessing the continuation of the negative trend involving attempts by security services of some western states, above all the U.S., to destabilise former Soviet republics and incite protests that would trigger a rose or orange revolution,” said the head of the Duma committee for CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) relations, Alexei Ostrovsky.

Analysts find it improbable that Romania, a NATO and European Union member and which hosts two U.S. military bases on its territory, could have acted without consulting Washington. The Moldovan protests came to be known as the Twitter Revolution because the organisers used online social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to mobilise supporters. The U.S. government’s Agency for International Development (USAID) has been active in Moldova providing, among other things, free Internet access and training in information technology to local NGOs and students.

The U.S. has reason to feel frustrated with Moldova’s recent drift towards Russia. Mr. Voronin, who has always advocated Moldova’s integration in Europe, has sharply criticised Brussels’ new Eastern Partnership programme for former Soviet states, calling it a plot to encircle Russia. He has also opposed attempts to turn the U.S.-sponsored GUAM (Georgia-Ukraine-Azerbajian-Moldova) group into a full-fledged anti-Russian bloc.

Finally, Mr. Voronin last month agreed to revive talks on a Moscow plan for Moldova’s reunification with its Russian-speaking separatist region of Transdniestr, which he spurned five years ago under strong pressure from Washington and Brussels. He also dropped the demand for Russian peacekeepers pulling out of Transdniestr, which is a key point of disagreement between Moscow and Brussels. With Mr. Voronin’s term in office expiring and Moldova’s new Parliament due to choose a new President, organisers of the coup attempt apparently sought to tip the scales in favour of a pro-western candidate.

The failure of the Twitter Revolution in Moldova underscored the general disillusionment with the West-inspired coloured revolutions in the former Soviet Union. As Moldovan protesters were re-enacting the Rose Revolution, a much bigger crowd demonstrated in Georgian capital Tbilisi, calling for the resignation of President Saakashvili, hero of the revolution. The Georgian Opposition leaders vowed to keep up continuous protests until he quit. The former U.S. President, George W. Bush, described Mr. Saakashvili as a beacon of democracy, but Georgian politicians who helped to install Mr. Saakashvili in power five years ago now denounce him as a dictator.

“Georgia’s record on democracy today is far worse than it was in 2003,” says a former Saakashvili ally and Parliament Speaker Nino Burjanadze. “The media are under the total control [of the President], business is under total control, courts are terrorised and manipulated, and we have a real police state and an autocratic system of justice.”

Experts say the opposition in Georgia is too fragmented to oust Mr. Saakashvili anytime soon, but the current protests show that he is being hated as intensely as he was lauded five years ago. The Rose Revolution withered away after Mr. Saakashvili dragged Georgia into a war against Russia last August in which the Georgian army was routed and two Georgian provinces gained independence.

The Orange Revolution in Ukraine has, likewise, sunk into a morass of crippling political infighting, rampant corruption and economic meltdown. If elections were held today, Ukraine’s orange President Viktor Yushchenko would get 1.9 per cent of the votes, according to a recent survey.

As coloured revolutions melted into twilight, Russia has expanded its influence in the former Soviet Union. Moscow convincingly demonstrated a readiness to project its hard power when it pummelled Georgia in the five-day war. This had a strong impression on its neighbours. Kyrgyzstan, the target of a Tulip Revolution four years ago, recently decided to close the only remaining U.S. airbase in Central Asia even as Russia enlarged its airbase in Kyrgyzstan.

The NATO plans to give membership to Ukraine and Georgia have gone awry, while Russia is busy setting up military bases in Georgia’s breakaway territories of Abkhazia and Ossetia, whose independence Moscow recognised after the August war with Georgia. Moscow’s strong support for Moldova’s sovereignty during the Twitter Revolution is likely to push Moldova further closer to Russia and facilitate Moscow’s strategic goal of securing a non-NATO status for Moldova.

The abortive attempt to stage a coloured revolution in Moldova has cast a new shadow over Russia’s relations with the West just as Moscow and Washington agreed to push the reset button on their ties.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Moscow had no problem cooperating with the U.S. in the former Soviet Union provided the U.S. policies were transparent and free from under-the-carpet scheming and secret agendas.

The chill caused by the Moldova crisis deepened when NATO announced plans to hold three-week military exercises in Georgia next month. President Dmitry Medvedev denounced the war games as muscle-flexing and dangerous. Russia’s Foreign Ministry said the U.S. plan to rearm Georgia amounted to nothing but encouragement of the aggressor. Such policies can well derail the efforts to reset Russian-American relations.

A head-on slap for U.S.

2009-04-26T07:30:00.000-07:00

The country which is used to sanctioning others found itself shocked when faced with isolation in the summit.

Heads of states and governments of all countries in the Americas, except Cuba, gathered for the Fifth Summit of the Organisation of American States (OAS) in Trinidad and Tobago from April 17 to 19. They discussed some of the most serious challenges facing the region to advance a regional agenda for the promotion of human prosperity, energy security and environmental sustainability. One of the dominant issues at the Summit was Cuba, which has been excluded from the activities of the OAS for 47 years. While there is no reference to that country in the Declaration, many governments and the OAS Secretary-General called for Cuba to be reinstated. Many governments also called for the lofting of the U.S. trade and economic embargo against it. This further reaffirms the changing regional and political scenario in the Americas.

Cuba was such a burning issue that a number of governments, including Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Honduras, indicated that they were not prepared to formally sign the Declaration. Leaders agreed, instead, to adopt it by consensus and have Trinidadian Prime Minister Manning sign on behalf of all leaders. The governments which had registered objections felt that the Declaration did not deal adequately with the current global economic crisis. Simultaneously, they wanted to see strong references made to Cuba’s reintegration into the OAS and the lifting of the U.S. embargo.

Cuba was excluded from the 35-member OAS in 1962 because the communist system created by Fidel Castro, after he took power in a 1959 revolution, was judged ‘incompatible’ with the organisation’s principles. While all Latin American and Caribbean nations have slowly bridged their differences with Cuba, the U.S. government maintains a policy of isolation that has reached its limits, and is impeding Cuba’s growth and development. Now the U.S. is the only country in the Americas which does not maintain diplomatic relations with Cuba. There were several campaigns in the past demanding that the U.S. government lift the nearly five decades-long economic and trade embargo, as it is detrimental to the fulfilment of the economic and social rights of Cubans. It obstructs and constrains efforts by the Cuban government to purchase essential medicines, medical equipment and supplies, food and agricultural products and construction materials, and secure access to new technologies. The embargo also denies Cuban-Americans their right to travel freely to their country of origin. The embargo has been overwhelmingly rejected by the United Nations General Assembly for the past 17 years.

Although the U.S. administration has recently eased remittances and travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans and has allowed U.S. companies more flexibility in selling food and medicines to Cuba, these measures are limited to the end of the current fiscal year. Nevertheless, there are hopes that they will herald a comprehensive review of the U.S. foreign policy towards Cuba. This policy has also led to the denial of travel visas to two of the wives of Cubans imprisoned in the U.S. since 1998, a measure that is unnecessarily punitive and contrary to basic standards of humane treatment of prisoners.

In the wake of the surge in support for Cuba at the OAS, Mr. Castro is still unmoved in his stand towards the organisation. He has recently written that Cuba had no desire to rejoin the OAS, as called for by some of his allies, and did not even want to ‘hear the vile name of that institution.’ Mr. Castro, in his column published last Tuesday, said the OAS “has a history that collects all the trash of 60 years of betrayal of the people of Latin America.” He said the organisation had been involved in ‘aggressive actions’ that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Mr. Castro has criticised the group for years, calling it the ‘Ministry of Colonies’ of the United States.

The Summit came at a time of economic turmoil throughout the Americas and around the world. And in the specific context of its focus — human prosperity, energy security and environmental sustainability — Cuba has also shown positive and alternative ways of development amidst extreme adversities. This was another reason for the unprecedented focus on Cuba at the Summit. The Draft Declaration noted that deep and persistent inequalities continue to exist in the Americas, especially in education, income levels, health and nutritional status, and access to basic services. It emphasised the need for the governments’ provisions to act on a wide range of issues, including working conditions, economic growth, protection of women and children from economic exploitation, food security, access to basic health services, spread of HIV/AIDS, access to education, technological gap and respect for cultural diversity. The struggle to protect women from violence and discrimination has still far to go. Racism continues to be a glaring problem in all countries in the Americas. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals are subjected to harassment, violence and other forms of discrimination in much of the Americas, and such prejudices continue to be institutionalised in law or condoned in practice by many states. Deepening poverty continues to fuel human rights violations, and national laws and institutions for the protection of rights are often either nonexistent or inadequate.

Even at the level of rhetoric on human rights, the OAS states are far behind: None of the OAS human rights treaties has been adopted by all countries and the overall level of ratification remains low. Only two regional treaties — the American Convention on Human Rights and the Convention dealing with violence against women — have been ratified by more than half of the OAS membership. The over-arching American Convention on Human Rights has not been ratified by nine of the member-states and a tenth of them have renounced its previous ratification. These same countries are among the 13 which do not recognise the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Canada and the U.S. have not ratified any of the seven key Inter-American human rights treaties and protocols, including those dealing with economic, social and cultural rights; death penalty; torture; enforced disappearances; disabilities; and the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention and Eradication of Violence against Women, the only treaty in the world that deals specifically with violence against women.

Throughout the Americas, indigenous people, Afro-descendants and subsistence farmers are particularly vulnerable to serious human rights violations associated with energy projects, including oil exploration and production, natural gas pipelines, and hydroelectric developments that dam rivers and flood traditional lands. Such projects often go forward in violation of the indigenous people’s land and resource rights and without any effort to obtain free, prior and informed consent of the people affected. National and international financial institutions have violated their obligations to ensure that their involvement in energy projects does not cause or contribute to human rights violations. Funding bodies like the Inter-American Bank and the World Bank, national export credit agencies and other financial bodies played quite a negative role in financing and supporting major controversial energy projects.

It is likely that debates on the exclusion of Cuba will further intensify in the coming days and will greatly influence the contours of regional cooperation, developmental politics and social movements in the region.

Nuclear mullahs !!!?

2009-04-25T23:20:00.000-07:00

Islamic school chief with British passport and nationality was apprehended in Bangladesh following a tip off.

A judge in southern Bhola town remanded Faisal Mustafa, a British citizen who heads the Green Crescent charity that runs the Islamic school, for further questioning.

During the interrogation it was revealed that he works with the British security services for destabilising South Asia and thus making a situation were by Western Bases could be set up in South Asia.

Officers raided the Islamic seminary, or madrassa, on the remote island last month, uncovering firearms, ammunition and explosive devices. Lots of weapons and bomb-making equipment were found in the premises. Jihadi literature was also found during the raid, including books that encouraged Muslims to take up arms.

Did the US national have drugs????

2009-04-18T21:55:00.000-07:00

The Trombay police on Friday morning nabbed two more accused in the rape of an American TISS student. The two - identified as Jaskaran Singh Bhullar alias Karan and Hershvardhan - were arrested from a friend’s place in South Mumbai.

Police had earlier suspected that the two - along with co-accused Vinamra Soni - had fled to their native place Jamshedpur. “We had sent our team to Jamshedpur but did not find them there. We later got information that they were hiding somewhere in South Mumbai. We carried out searches and nabbed them.”

On Friday afternoon, they were produced in Kurla court, which remanded them in police custody till April 28.

With these arrests police now have five of the six accused in their custody. Those already under custody include Anish Borkataki, Kundan Gohain and Darayaus Colabawala. Police are now looking for the lone absconding accused, Vinamra Soni, who was neither found at his native place nor at the Mumbai hideout with his friends.

Police suspect that Soni, who is the son of a Jamshedpur-based jeweller, may have been sent to an undisclosed location by his parents who may fear he will be caught. “He may have left the city and gone to some friend’s or relative’s place. We do not exactly know, but we are working on all possible angles,” said the officer.

Karan, Hersh and Vinamra are believed to have played major roles in the incident. They not only insisted the girl drink more, but were also identified in her statement as the boys who molested her while she was still in her senses.

The six boys, who are all students of reputed colleges in the city, have been accused of raping the TISS student on the night of April 11. The girl had accompanied them to a party at a nearby café. After the party, the boys accompanied her to Andheri by autorickshaw, where they took her to a friend’s flat and allegedly raped her.

Meanwhile, SP Jain Institute of Management and Research denied that any of the accused was a student of their college. It was earlier reported that Anish Borkataki was a student of the institute, but was later found to be pursuing an MA degree from Mumbai University.

Victim taken to Nagpada Hospital

Police took the victim to Nagpada Police Hospital on Thursday for medical examination, where all rape victims are examined. The doctors at the hospital, however, did not examine her, saying that she had already been examined at Rajawadi Hospital and that two different medical reports could weaken the case.

Meanwhile, police said that it was difficult to ascertain whether the victim and the accused had consumed drugs because a considerable amount of time had passed before the complaint was filed.

Vinamra kept kissing me though I told him to stop

2009-04-18T21:25:00.000-07:00

The 23-year-old TISS student from USA, who was allegedly raped by six of her friends on Saturday night, was just about to finish her course at the institute and leave for her home in Idaho, USA. Born to American parents who embraced Hinduism through ISKCON, the girl had come to India on a religious visit in the beginning .

In her statement, a copy of which is with this reporter, she recounts her horror and details how the friends, whom she trusted , raped her despite the fact that she was having her periods. We reproduce the statement:

COMPLAINANT: NAME WITHHELD, RELIGION: HINDU, AGE: 23, OCCUPATION: STUDENT

I came to India from USA in October 2008 to attend a religious pilgrimage... I am a student of Gender and Development at the TISS, Deonar. I have been in Mumbai to attend the said course since January 2009.

After coming to Mumbai, I met Annie Brown, 21, who is also a student of TISS and stays in Hostel no. 6. Shruti Chakravarthy is the course co-ordinator .

On 11/4/2009, at about 10.30 pm, I went to Annie's room... She said she was working and once done, she would go out with her friends... She asked me whether I would like to go along, and I said that I would...

After that, Annie and I left TISS at about 11 pm and met her friends just outside the gate of the Nowroji Campus. Her friends were: 1) Vinamra Soni, 2) Jaskaran Singh Bhullar, also known as Karan, 3) Hersh, 4) Anish, and 5) Devsi. I had met Vinamra, Karan and Anish at Annie's birthday party in February. All of us proceeded to Cafe XO, which is a lounge bar at Deonar.

At Cafe XO, the boys ordered 10 bottles of Kingfisher strong beer (650 ml). They kept saying that they wanted to drink a lot and get drunk. I did not want to drink... but they kept insisting that I drink with them. Finally, I ordered a Cranberry Vodka...

After some time, Hersh said that he wanted to smoke and... asked me to join him. I said I did not smoke but would accompany him... He also told me that I should try the drug LSD.

We went back inside and the waiter brought some more beer... Hersh kept pressuring me to drink more. So, I drank a little more beer... Outside , one of the boys rolled a joint and some of the guys smoked it. Then we went back in. Once more Hersh insisted that I drink... He poured beer in a glass and put it in front of me, asking me to finish it immediately. I did not want to but I drank the beer. After some time, I started feeling dizzy and a bit light-headed . Then, all of us went outside again... I said we should leave, and we all left... a little after 1 am.

Karan and Hersh asked what my plans were for the night. I said I wanted to meet up with my friend Ahmed in Andheri at Club Bling, Hotel Leela Kempenski. I told them that they were welcome to join me. The boys insisted that Annie should join us, but Annie said that she had to leave... After that, at about 1.30 am, I sat in an autorickshaw along with Vinamra and Karan. Anish, Hersh and Devsi, sat in another. We told the driver to take us to Club Bling.

After 20 minutes, the other rickshaw stopped... and Hersh told me that before going to Club Bling, we would first go to their friend's house at Andheri... and then go to Club Bling. I said that I didn't want to go.

After about half an hour, the rickshaw stopped somewhere in Andheri, near a building. We got out and went to the sixth floor... We saw a man aged about 24 to 25 years. He took us into his flat. He was introduced as Kundan.

After sometime, I went into the bedroom. Vinamra and Jaskaran were in the bedroom. Kundan came in the room, put on some music and left the room. Vinamra and I sat on the thin mattress that was kept on the floor against the wall in the room. We then lay down on the mattress . He hugged me and started kissing me. I told him to stop, but did not heed my request. He said that he loved me and started kissing me again. Karan also came there and started kissing me. Karan lifted the T-shirt up, and also pushed my bra up. He started sucking my breasts. I tried to stop him but he continued to do so.

I went into the bathroom, and tried to call my friend Ahmed but he did not answer his phone. I then also called my friend Vikram Pathak, who lives in Los Angeles, USA, but as he was busy, he could not speak to me. As I was in the bathroom for a long time, someone knocked on the bathroom door. I came out of the bathroom. At this point, I was unable to walk properly. I went into the bedroom again, and lay down on the mattress. I was not feeling well at all. I was also scared and feeling very uncomfortable . I just wanted to leave that place. I tried to get up, but I could not stand steadily. I fell down on the floor.

I woke up at about 10 am. At that time, I was unable to open my eyes. With great difficulty, I opened my eyes. I saw that Vinamra was sleeping on my right hand side. Hersh was sitting near me, playing with my hair. Karan was sleeping next to Hersh. I felt very disgusting and dirty, and scared. I did not like him playing with my hair. Then he covered my body with a blanket, up further, to my shoulders. I realised that my bra was undone. I also realised that my belt was unbuckled and my jeans had been pulled off, all the way down, and were around my ankles. My underwear was also pulled down to my ankles. I was very scared and worried. I was scared that they had raped me, that they had stuck their penises inside me. I also was on my periods, my menses, so I checked to see if I could feel my tampon, still inside of me. At first I could not, and I was very worried. I pulled my pants up, zipped up my pants and buckled my belt, and then went into the bathroom. In the bathroom, I found that my tampon was still inside me, it was just pushed very far up. I was experiencing a lot of pain in the area around my vagina.

When I went outside the bathroom, all the boys started waking up. Hersh insisted that I should go to a chemist. So Hersh, Vinamra, and I got into a rickshaw and drove to a chemist, just around the corner from their friend's house. When we got to the chemist, Hersh insisted that I should take a contraceptive pill. I thought that he had sex with me, and that is why he was telling me to take the pill. Hersh asked the chemist for an I-Pill . I took the pill. I was feeling very scared and uncomfortable and so I left immediately and went back to my hostel.

On 12/04/2009, I informed my course co-ordinator , Ms Chakravarthy, about the incident. I went to Rajawadi Hospital with her. I was medically examined. I handed over my underwear, bra, T shirt and jeans worn at the time of the incident to the doctor who conducted the medical examination. The doctor referred me to the police. I waited for the police, but they did not turn up. Thereafter, we left the hospital.

I was so traumatised by the incident I was unable to come to the police station till today. After speaking to my mother and friends, and Ms Chakravarthy, I felt supported, and comfortable to come to the police station and register a complaint.

I state that from my condition, and as my clothes had been removed, and as there was pain around my vagina, I feel that I was administered a drug in the beer that I was forced to drink by Hersh at Cafe XO, and later, taking advantage of the effect of the drug, or stupefying substance, I was raped by Hersh, Vinamra, Karan, Kundan, Anish and Devshi. All of them, conspired together to commit this offence.

I read the statement. It is true and correct, and as per my narration.

The 23-year-old US national had gone out to a night club !!!

2009-04-18T21:17:00.000-07:00

Two more persons were arrested on Friday in connection with the gang rape of an American student of Tata Institute of Social Science here, police said.

"Both persons who have been arrested are from the same group," Deputy Commissioner of Police Dilip Sawant said. However, he refused to divulge the identity of the duo. Earlier, three youths -- Anish Pradip Borkataki (22), Kundan Raj Balinkumar Borgonain (22) and Dev Cyrus Kulabawala (21) were sent to police custody till April 28 by a local court after Trombay police said their custody was necessary for interrogation and conducting identification parade and certain tests.

On April 11, the 23-year-old US national had gone out to a night club with a group of six men. She was allegedly raped by them in the suburban Andheri home of Kundan where she was taken by the accused to rest.

The victim had gone partying !!!

2009-04-18T21:00:00.000-07:00

The six boys, accused of raping the TISS student from the US, never thought that the girl would complain to the police about being sexually abused.

In fact, during their interrogation, the three boys - who have been in police custody since Tuesday - said that the girl behaved “so normally after the incident that they didn’t think she would file a police complaint”.

“They were so emboldened that they even gave the girl a contraceptive pill after the rape, and the fact that she consumed it without saying anything, assured them that she was not going to file a police complaint,” a Trombay police officer disclosed.

The victim had gone partying with her hostel-mate, Annie Brown, and five of Brown’s male friends on Saturday.

The group ate and drank at Deonar’s Cafe XO, where the victim was allegedly forced to drink beyond her capacity, after which she and the five boys proceeded to Andheri.

There, the group crashed at the Seven Bungalows flat of a friend - the sixth accused - identified as a certain Kundan Gohain, who is a student at Rajiv Gandhi Engineering College in Versova.

The girl soon fell unconscious and was allegedly raped by the six boys.

“The boys had decided at Cafe XO itself that they were going to sexually abuse the girl once they reached Andheri.

That is why they kept insisting that she drink some more. The boys said that they never thought that the victim would complain to the police, especially since she looked quite normal after the incident," an officer privy to the investigations said.

"And that is why, they say, they did not threaten her or leave the city immediately," he added.

The three other boys who left for Jamshedpur - their native place - also left two days after the incident, and that too because they were already scheduled to go that day, the police said.

Who are the boys

The police disclosed that the boys come from business families and that they are second/third year students of reputed colleges in the city.

The five boys who accompanied the girl from TISS have been identified as Vinamra Soni (a student at Jai Hind college), Jaskaran Singh Bhullar alias Karan (student at HR College), Hershvardhan (student at Sydenham college), Anish Borkataki (student at SP Jain Management and Research Institute) and Darayaus Colabawala (student at Hinduja college, and whom the victim identifies as Devsi).

All the five boys were staying at the International Boys Hostel at Churchgate, the police said.

While Vinamra, Karan and Hersh hail from Jamshedpur, Anish is from Assam.

Colabawala is foreign national, while Kundan - the sixth accused - is also from Assam, but lives with his mother in a rented apartment at Seven Bungalows. Kundan's mother had recently left for their native place, which is why Kundan allowed his friends to use his flat.

How the police nabbed the culprits

After the FIR, the police had a tough time tracing the six accused as the girl did not know their true identity, or even where they lived.

"In fact, she didn't even know where in Andheri they had taken her," the officer said.

The police only gleaned that the accused were young college students who perhaps visited TISS often.

"We enquired from the students at the TISS campus on Tuesday night itself and found that the accused lived at the International Hostel in Churchgate. We went there immediately and started searching the hostel… We identified two of the culprits, Anish and Darayaus, when they made an attempt to escape as soon as they saw us," the officer disclosed. "These two, in turn, led us to Kundan."

Police action now

The Trombay police on Thursday produced the three accused in Kurla court, which remanded the trio to police custody till April 28.

Police said they have confiscated the clothes that the accused were wearing on the day of the incident and have sent the same for forensic examination.

The officials have now also formed three investigation teams, one of which has been sent to Jamshedpur to arrest the other accused.

"We don't believe that they are still in Jamshedpur, but we hope to catch them soon," the officer said.

"We are also looking into a drug angle. Although we have not recovered any drug from their hostel rooms, we have taken the blood samples of the accused as well as the victims to establish if they had taken drugs. We will also be interrogating the suspects on this issue," the official added.

American national 'gang-raped'

2009-04-18T20:47:00.000-07:00

A 23-year-old student of Tata Institute of Social Sciences was allegedly gang-raped by six friends on Saturday night. The girl, an American national of Indian origin, lodged a complaint with the Trombay police station on Tuesday. The police have already arrested three of the six boys, two of whom are students of Sydenham College and SP Jain Institute of Management and Research.

According to police, the girl is a graduate doing a four-month course at TISS. She lives at the TISS hostel.

A police officer said, “The boys are from good families and study in top colleges in the city. They live at a private hostel as they are not from Mumbai. They knew her through another friend at the TISS hostel.

”Police said on Saturday evening one of the boys called the victim and asked her to join him and others for dinner and drinks. She agreed. They went to Govandi where they consumed alcohol and had dinner.

Later, say police, they went to a friend’s place at Marol. She says in her statement to police, that in the morning when she woke up, she found herself naked and realised that she had been sexually abused.

However, she could not muster the courage to inform the police. It was only on Tuesday that she approached the Trombay police station and lodged a complaint. Though the offence took place at Andheri, Trombay police, taking note of the sensitivity of the case, lodged an FIR and started investigations. Police said the girl had preserved the clothes she was wearing that night. They said this will help in forensic investigations.

On Wednesday, the police rounded up three of the accused and are interrogating them on the whereabouts of the other three accused. DCP (Zone VI) Dilip Sawant said, “We have registered a case of rape under section 376 (2)(G) (gang rape) and 34 (common intention) of the IPC against the six accused.”

A TISS spokesperson said, “TISS as an institution has always been committed to the well-being and safety of its students, and strongly condemns this incident. It is taking all necessary steps to ensure that justice is done. The student is being provided all support, including legal assistance and counselling.”

NATO reportcard.

2009-04-11T22:02:00.000-07:00

The shocking fact is that there is no response at all to these genocides that the world had witnessed. The perpetrators of these crimes are running around scot-free. They have been visiting other countries and have not been arrested even once!!!

Saudi prince ill ?

2009-04-11T21:40:00.000-07:00

The Saudi royal prince Bandar bin Sultan is said to have been critically ill and is said to be under treatment in America. Even if the nature of his illness has been shrouded in secrecy it is speculated that he may have contracted AIDS during his stay in America or in Europe.

It is a well known fact that AIDS is wide spread among Americans & Europeans.

"It is time for you to carry our shit" says America

2009-04-11T21:25:00.000-07:00

US special envoy for AF-PAK have made it clear that it is time for India to carry their shit in Afganistan and elsewhere. The Indian cabinet is set to meet in the coming days for rubber-stamping the deal.

The U.S. henchmen in the PM's chair(wheather it is before or after the election) have already given their approval for this dirty game. After all, in politics patriotism is a dead word isn't it???

Note:- The third front says it will make a difference if it comes to power in the center (interestingly it was this same left parties which took bribe for awarding some multibillion projects to the western companies).

Revisiting the past glory???

2009-04-11T19:49:00.001-07:00

It is time to remember the past, it is time to remember the lost glory and strength that was lost to us when we split ourselves into different pieces.

Maybe one day we will unite again like Germany,France etc:- A day when no-one strikes at us without thinking twice. Better late than never.

Terror, U.S. style

2009-04-05T04:38:00.000-07:00

“Nothing has changed for us in this new Afghanistan,” said 16-year-old Seema, in early 2007, whose father was killed by a U.S. “liberating” bomb in October 2001.

IN a widely quoted recent interview (on the National Public Radio network), Sarah Chayes proclaims, “Taliban Terrorising Afghanistan”. Sarah Chayes has long been an advocate of a “better” intervention and nation-building. She shines as a paragon amongst the humanitarian imperialists. In suggesting that earlier and broader North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) engagement could have solved Afghanistan’s problems, Sarah Chayes implies that Afghanistan’s troubles call for military solutions. Give birth to “human rights” and electoral democracy with U.S. precision bombs and Special Forces.

One officer in the U.S. military, recommending her as a speaker, wrote, “She’s like no journalist you’ve ever seen. She’s a hawk!” She does not view the foreign presence in Afghanistan as imperial, and she attempts to work with the armed forces and the U.S. government. She has harsh words for warlords but remains mostly silent about the death and widespread destruction caused by U.S. and NATO actions.

At the same time, those like President Hamid Karzai, Lt. Col. Owen McNally of the British Army and me who focus upon Afghan civilians killed by U.S./NATO actions are either respectively silenced, arrested or ignored. U.S. forces are guilty of terrorising innocent Afghans as will be argued herein. This in no way implies that the Taliban and its allies do not engage in comparable practices. The difference is that those practices get front-line coverage in the Western media, whereas the former remain shrouded in silence and media spin.

U.S. corporate media spin involves both lying by omission and commission. For example, how many Americans know that U.S. forces burned the bodies of alleged Taliban fighters after laying them out facing Mecca? Had the burning of dead Taliban fighters not been recorded by the Australian reporter Stephen DuPont, employed by SBS Dateline, the outrageous action would no doubt have gone unnoticed (as have presumably numerous other such actions by U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan). The incident took place on October 1, 2005, above the village of Gonbaz in Shah Wali Kot district of Kandahar province. The day before, the U.S. unit had been ambushed and the firefight had left one U.S. occupation soldier dead (Staff Sgt. John Doles). The U.S. occupation forces of the 1st Battalion, 508th Infantry Regiment of the 173rd Army Airborne Brigade, laid out the bodies of two Taliban men also killed on September 30 on a ridge line facing Mecca, then burnt the bodies and taunted their opponents about the corpses, in a manner profoundly offensive to Muslims and in breach of the Geneva Conventions. Cremation is not a Muslim custom and the Geneva Conventions stipulate that the enemy dead should be honourably buried. A U.S. army psychological operations unit then taunted villagers in the local language:

You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burnt. You are too scared to retrieve their bodies. This just proves you are the lady boys we always believed you to be….You attack and run away like women. You call yourself Taliban but you are a disgrace to the Muslim religion and you bring shame upon your family. Come and fight like men instead of the cowardly dogs you are!

The video showed U.S. military vehicles fitted with loudspeakers broadcasting the taunts. The SBS footage showed flames licking two charred corpses and a group of five U.S. soldiers standing watching from a rocky ledge.

The facts on the ground are very clear: U.S./NATO forces kill three to four Afghan civilians for every foreign occupation soldier who dies. If we safely assume that the occupation soldiers die at the hands of the Taliban and its allies, then U.S./NATO occupation force actions against innocent Afghan civilians are three to four times as deadly as Taliban actions against the occupation forces.

No one denies that the Taliban and its allies kill Afghan and occupation forces and Afghan civilians. Indeed, their weapons’ relative imprecision is proportional to their low cost. As was so brilliantly pointed out by Mike Davis, the suicide car bomber is the “poor man’s air force”. But the very expensive weapons of the foreign occupiers should translate into a level of precision that largely spares civilians as is endlessly repeated by the so-called defence intellectuals and their mainstream media acolytes. As I have demonstrated for now over seven years, such is not the case. Anyone familiar with the history of the development of precision aerial weapons knows that they were primarily developed to save pilot lives and reduce the cost of striking a target from the air. They succeeded admirably in doing just that.

Sparing civilians was something that was later conveniently employed as a public relations step to assuage and convince the general public in the aggressor nation. That general public needed to be convinced that our side only kills accidentally and possesses the weaponry to spare innocent civilians. Anyone or any evidence that contradicts these sacred cows of the Pentagon, the mainstream media and the humanitarian imperialists (such as Harvard’s Carr Centre or Human Rights Watch) will be either ignored or discredited by whatever means is necessary – whether ignored, silenced or ultimately arrested. As Joshua Foust cogently put it, “lots of bombs go off in Afghanistan, but the media only seem to report the ones that hit internationals”.

The propaganda war takes on yet greater importance as the military war has reached at best a stalemate (if not a progressing defeat of the U.S. and NATO as has been widely noted with the resurgence of the Taliban). In the past few months, many – from Hamid Karzai to the United Nations and The New York Times – have commented upon the urgent need for the U.S./NATO to reduce the number of civilians they kill. The recent emphasis has been to advocate allegedly less deadly ground force action in lieu of deadly close air support aerial strikes. U.S. military data show that beginning in June 2008, the number of bombs dropped decreased even as ground combat increased. At the same time, ground combat was more deadly for U.S. occupation soldiers – from June-October 2008, as many as 96 soldiers died in combat compared with 51 in 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Defence. The problem for U.S./NATO forces is that greater reliance upon ground forces leads to greater military casualties – 14 foreign occupation soldiers were killed in January 2008, whereas the figure was 24 in January 2009, which, in turn, fuels public criticism on the home front.

The Taliban and its allies have developed a winning strategy as I have pointed out elsewhere: create a sufficient level of instability by selective attacks upon aid workers, schools and the like in the countryside to forestall reconstruction and by use of very low-cost tactical weapons (suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices, or IEDs) to hit Afghan forces and the foreign occupiers. Such instability and violence combined with high levels of civilian casualties turn the population against the foreign occupiers in what has become an anti-colonial dynamic in which the flames of nationalism burn red-hot. Lack of opportunity and a hatred of foreigners are motivating the new generation of Afghan resistance fighters. As Mehran Bozorgnia and Alex Thomson noted,

“…these local, Afghan fighters enjoy real support. It is simply wrong to say it is just coercion and terror. Just like the Mujahideen did. Indeed, on this evidence the so-called Taliban might be changing into something far more like the Mujahideen than the madrassa-produced Pakistani Taliban. Have NATO allowed themselves to become the new Russians? Many an Afghan would say yes.”

The failure of U.S. counter-insurgency is well illustrated in Khost province. According to the U.S., its aid through the provincial reconstruction team has built or renovated a dozen kilometres of roads, eight administration buildings, 27 health centres and 48 schools during 2001-2009. But the level of violence has kept on soaring: resistance attacks in 2004, 50 in 2005, 107 in 2006, 165 in 2007 and 196 in 2008, according to the provincial counter-insurgency chief in Khost. An association tribal leader in Khost, Raza Nawaz Tani, says: “Today the people in this region hate Americans, whereas they were welcomed when they arrived in 2001.”

Another tribal leader said: “Ninety per cent of the victims of their [U.S.] operations are civilians”. An Afghan working for an international organisation in Khost emphasised that night-time raids and searches of women deeply offend the conservative and proud Pashtuns:

“For the Pashtuns, if a man comes uninvited into my home at night and touches a woman in my family, I have the right to kill him, without facing consequences, because that is a crime.”

A U.S. military spokesman in Khost, Patrick Seiber, blandly asserted that night raids were “effective – that’s what we do when the enemy is there”.

Midnight assaults, whether by air or ground, by U.S./NATO forces increase the likelihood of greater civilian casualties, especially of women and children. A recently released report by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) noted that “the combination of abusive behaviour and violent breaking and entry into civilians’ homes in the middle of the night stokes almost as much anger and resentment toward… [pro-government forces] as the more lethal air strikes…. Most of the time these night raids end up killing civilians in their houses. People are afraid to complain.”18 In July 2008, an early morning U.S. air strike decimated a wedding procession in the mountains of Nangarhar, killing some 50 members of the party. The bridegroom’s father remembers: “When I got (to the site of the air strike), I saw pieces of bodies scattered around. I couldn’t even make out which part was which. It was just flesh, everywhere.”

Who is terrorising whom?

Most often, raids by foreign forces are accompanied by abductions and later abuse. For example, even Amnesty International noted such in its 2005 assessment of Afghanistan:

Evidence emerged that U.S. forces had tortured and ill-treated detainees in the “war on terror” in Afghanistan. Former detainees reported being made to kneel, stand or maintain painful postures for long periods, and being subjected to hooding, sleep deprivation, stripping and humiliation. Suspects were detained without legal authority and held incommunicado, without access to lawyers, families or the courts.

A typical U.S.-led night-time raid took place on May 9, 2008. The entry in The Afghan Victim Memorial Project reads:

During the evening of Friday, May 9, 2008, in a hamlet of the Marko area of Ghanikhel district, Nangarhar province, a U.S. occupation force raid killed three civilians, according to local residents. The U.S. attacked the home of Abdul Malik. An elderly man was shot in a mosque and two other men employed as drivers were killed in their homes. Four other civilians were injured in the raid and seven were abducted to a fate unknown. “The Americans killed three civilians,” said demonstrator Pizwan Khan. “They were my neighbours and I knew they were not Taliban,” he told Agence France Presse.

“The coalition claimed they were fired upon from a house and the enemy was gathered there, but the villagers claim those people who were killed were innocent civilians,” said Mohammad Hashem Ghamsharik, spokesman for the Nangarhar Governor. Malik Sohail, the tribal chief of the Shinwaris, said seven people were abducted by U.S. troops during the night-time raid. He added that all those killed, injured and abducted were members of one family. The independent Pajhwok Afghan News service published a photo of one of the victims (something the Associated Press rarely does though it frequently publishes photos of Taliban suicide attack victims – so-called “good bodies”).

Predictably, the U.S. military propaganda machine in Kabul said its troops had only killed “militants” who had attacked troops searching for a “foreign fighter network”. The font of military propaganda, International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) occupation spokesman Portuguese Brigadier General Carlos Branco, said: “If we see that there is the possibility of 0.1 per cent of civilian casualties, we do not launch the operations.” On Saturday, up to a thousand protesters took to the main road protesting the deaths. They showed the corpses of the three dead victims (Reuters published a photo, but the Associated Press barely mentioned the incident preferring to headline its wire report with “U.S. Coalition: Militants killed in Afghanistan”). The protesters chanted “Death to America”, “Death to Bush, Death to Karzai”. The local Afghan police shot at the stone-throwing demonstrators, killing three and injuring four others.

For many years, prisoner abuse at the Bagram and U.S. Special Forces’ operating bases was routine and may still very well be. In September 2008, a 38-year-old U.S. Special Forces Green Beret soldier was charged with killing an innocent Afghan civilian and cutting off his ear. Countless individual cases of abduction and abuse are described in The Afghan Victim Memorial database.

At least two secret U.S. Special Forces teams – one operating out of Camp Gecko in Kandahar and the other nicknamed Shaheen, based in Nangarhar – have been operating with utter impunity, carrying out executions. In the middle of the night, some time in October 2007 in Toube village in the area of Garmser, Helmand province, a U.S. Special Forces-led death squad with Afghan troops acted upon information that two high-level Taliban targets were living in Toube. Witnesses told the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) that the soldiers broke down doors, shot a number of people, including children in their beds, and in one house slit the throats of two brothers, one of whom survived. The U.S. soldiers came from the infamous base, Camp Gecko (now called Firebase Maholic), located some 15 km outside Kandahar in what was once Mullah Omar’s fortified residence.

On May 15, 2008, Philip Alston, a professor at New York University’s Law School and special investigator for the U.N. Human Rights Council, revealed that U.S. intelligence agents had been carrying out secretive night-time killer raids on “suspected insurgents”. Such raids by international forces had reportedly killed 200 Afghan civilians often in aerial bombings just during 2008. Alston emphasised that these U.S. Special Forces were acting with complete impunity, refusing to provide any information whatsoever. Afghan forces working with the foreign units were not under the control of the Afghan government. Alston wrote:

It is absolutely unacceptable for heavily armed internationals accompanied by heavily armed Afghan forces to be wandering around conducting dangerous raids that too often result in killings without anyone taking responsibility for them.

U.S. and NATO bombing has already contributed to a huge population suffering from permanent physical disability. U.S. cluster bombs caused great damage during the first three months of the bombing campaign in 2001. Flying bomb shrapnel is a major cause of amputation and life-long handicap, especially in a poor country like Afghanistan where most labour involves using one’s body.

The U.S. air attack on Afghanistan began at 4:20 GMT, October 7. The next day, Reuters carried an interview with a 16-year-old ice-cream vendor from Jalalabad injured in a cruise missile strike on the Jalalabad airfield near his home. “There was just a roaring sound, and then I opened my eyes and I was in a hospital,” said the boy, called Assadullah, speaking in Peshawar after being taken across the border for medical help. “I lost my leg and two fingers. There were other people hurt. People were running all over the place.”

Assadullah wants revenge for having part of his leg and two fingers taken away by the U.S. missile: “I wish my God destroys their houses, villages, their cities.”

Who is terrorising whom?

An estimated 1.5 million Afghan war widows, victims of 30 years of continuing war, struggle to survive in a society where widowhood is socially frowned upon and where no system of social security exists. “The average age of an Afghan widow is just 35 years, and 94 per cent of them are unable to read and write,” Deborah Zalesne, a board member of Beyond 9/11 and a law professor at the City University of New York, told IRIN (Integrated Regional Information Networks). “About 90 per cent of Afghan widows have children, and the average widow has more than four,” Deborah Zalesne added. To survive, many Afghan widows weave carpets, do tailoring, beg or even engage in prostitution. In urban areas where women have better access to employment and other services than in conservative rural areas, an average working widow earns about $16 a month, experts estimate.

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy writes:

“War widows often stand outside government buildings holding frayed photographs of their late husbands, hoping to be noticed. ‘They should be the government’s top priority,’ says Ms Akrami. ‘These women are uneducated; they lack basic job skills and cannot fend for themselves. If America invaded us to liberate our women, this is a clear sign that they are failing miserably.’”

U.S./NATO bombing and ground attacks have contributed to Afghan widowhood, especially when, as is usually the case, attacks are carried out in the middle of the night.

For example:

Every morning Gul, who was widowed when an American bomb hit her house in 2001, leaves her two daughters to go begging on the streets of Kabul. “If I’m lucky, I’ll make about 50 afghanis (80 p), enough to buy two pieces of bread,” she says…. Kabul, it is said, is the widows’ capital of the world. As many as 50,000 women like Gul live in the city, and many make their home in the abandoned buildings that dot the suburbs, often living in horrific conditions…. On the southern edge of Kabul, among the rubble and bombed-out buildings, Gul and her two daughters, Zeba and Seema, live in a simple one-room flat with no heating or water in a city where winter temperatures can plummet as low as -170C. Inside, Gul’s daughters prepare tea for their tired mother. They would like to attend school but do not have money to buy school supplies. “I want to become a teacher,” says 14-year-old Zeba, “I wish I could go to school. I am happiest when I am learning.”

Sixteen-year-old Seema, meanwhile, is angry at the Afghan government’s empty promises. “I don’t think our lives will improve,” she says. “My mother is a beggar; the government doesn’t care about us. They do not offer to help us; nothing has changed for us in this new Afghanistan.”

A similar story describes Magul’s fate in Kandahar in December 2001, described in The Afghan Victim Memorial Project:

“In memory of Magul’s (38) husband and one child killed in early December 2001 during the heavy bombing of Kandahar city. A U.S. bomb killed her husband and a child, also taking away any form of regular income. Magul ekes out a hand-to-mouth existence, washing other people’s clothes when she gets a chance. Her 16-year-old son looks for a job but cannot find one. Magul collects cattle feed in a bag under her voluminous head-to-toe burka and feeds it to her seven children. She says, ‘Animals eat this stuff, but it’s all I have to take home to them.’ She could not remember (in late January 2002) when she last had a hot meal of rice and beans. Every morning Magul joins an army of several thousand burka-clad women besieging the interim government’s planning department in Kandahar, seeking assistance which never materialises. Killed by a U.S. ‘precision’ bomb.”

Who is terrorising whom?

The intense U.S. and NATO bombing has demolished homes, torn up fields and orchards and killed villagers’ animals.

Conclusion

The aforementioned vectors of U.S/NATO terrorising Afghanistan are part of a larger field of costs resulting from aerial bombing campaigns .

A full accounting would need to assess these multiple effects, which rarely get mention in mainstream accounts of the Afghan war. On the other hand, the discussed vectors of U.S./NATO actions provide evidence to answer “Who is Terrorising Whom in Afghanistan”.

Pencil Pistol

2009-03-28T12:21:00.000-07:00

Pen Pistol & Bullets that were recovered from terrorists in Kashmir. The bullets were coated with chemicals.

Inside the shadowy S Wing of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence.

2009-03-28T12:08:00.000-07:00

The Taliban’s widening campaign in southern Afghanistan is made possible in part by direct support from operatives in Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, despite Pakistani government promises to sever ties with militant groups fighting in Afghanistan, according to American government officials.

The support consists of money, military supplies and strategic planning guidance to Taliban commanders who are gearing up to confront the international force in Afghanistan that will soon include some 17,000 American reinforcements. Support for the Taliban, as well as other militant groups, is coordinated by operatives inside the shadowy S Wing of Pakistan’s spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, the officials said. There is even evidence that ISI operatives meet regularly with Taliban commanders to discuss whether to intensify or scale back violence before the Afghan elections.

Details of the ISI’s continuing ties to militant groups were described by a half-dozen American, Pakistani and other security officials during recent interviews in Washington and the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. All requested anonymity because they were discussing classified and sensitive intelligence information.

The American officials said proof of the ties between the Taliban and Pakistani spies came from electronic surveillance and trusted informants. The Pakistani officials interviewed said that they had firsthand knowledge of the connections, though they denied that the ties were strengthening the insurgency.

American officials have complained for more than a year about the ISI’s support to groups like the Taliban. But the new details reveal that the spy agency is aiding a broader array of militant networks with more diverse types of support than was previously known — even months after Pakistani officials said that the days of the ISI’s playing a “double game” had ended. Pakistan’s military and civilian leaders publicly deny any government ties to militant groups, and American officials say it is unlikely that top officials in Islamabad are directly coordinating the clandestine efforts. American officials have also said that midlevel ISI operatives occasionally cultivate relationships that are not approved by their bosses.

Western officials resigned

In a sign of just how resigned western officials are to the ties, the British government has sent several dispatches to Islamabad in recent months asking that the ISI use its strategy meetings with the Taliban to persuade its commanders to scale back violence in Afghanistan before the August presidential election there, according to one official.

But the inability, or unwillingness, of the embattled civilian government, led by President Asif Ali Zardari, to break the ties that bind the ISI to the militants illustrates the complexities of a region of shifting alliances. Obama administration officials admit that they are struggling to understand these allegiances as they try to forge a strategy to quell violence in Afghanistan, which has intensified because of a resurgent Taliban. Fighting this insurgency is difficult enough, officials said, without having to worry about an allied spy service’s supporting the enemy. But the Pakistanis offered a more nuanced portrait. They said the contacts were less threatening than the American officials depicted and were part of a strategy to maintain influence in Afghanistan for the day when American forces would withdraw and leave what they fear could be a power vacuum to be filled by India, Pakistan’s archenemy. A senior Pakistani military officer said, “In intelligence, you have to be in contact with your enemy or you are running blind.”

The ISI helped create and nurture the Taliban movement in the 1990s to bring stability to a nation that had been devastated by years of civil war between rival warlords, and one Pakistani official explained that Islamabad needed to use groups like the Taliban as “proxy forces to preserve our interests.” A spokesman at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington declined to comment for this article.

Over the past year, a parade of senior American diplomats, military officers and intelligence officials have flown to Islamabad to urge Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders to cut off support for militant groups, and Washington has threatened to put conditions on more than $1 billion in annual military aid to Pakistan. On Saturday, the director of the CIA, Leon E. Panetta, met with top Pakistani officials in Islamabad.

Little known

Little is publicly known about the ISI’s S Wing, which officials say directs intelligence operations outside of Pakistan. American officials said that the S Wing provided direct support to three major groups carrying out attacks in Afghanistan: the Taliban based in Quetta, Pakistan, commanded by Mullah Muhammad Omar; the militant network run by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar; and a different group run by the guerrilla leader Jalaluddin Haqqani.

Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, recently told senators that the Pakistanis “draw distinctions” among different militant groups.

“There are some they believe have to be hit and that we should cooperate on hitting, and there are others they think don’t constitute as much of a threat to them and that they think are best left alone,” Blair said.

The Haqqani network, which focuses its attacks on Afghanistan, is considered a strategic asset to Pakistan, according to American and Pakistani officials, in contrast to the militant network run by Baitullah Mehsud, which has the goal of overthrowing Pakistan’s government.

Top American officials speak bluntly about how the situation has changed little since last summer, when evidence showed that ISI operatives helped plan the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, an attack that killed 54 people.

“They have been very attached to many of these extremist organizations, and it’s my belief that in the long run, they have got to completely cut ties with those in order to really move in the right direction,” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said recently on The Charlie Rose Show on PBS.

The Taliban has been able to finance a military campaign inside Afghanistan largely through proceeds from the illegal drug trade and wealthy individuals from the Persian Gulf. But American officials said that when fighters needed fuel or ammunition to sustain their attacks against American troops, they would often turn to the ISI.

When the groups needed to replenish their ranks, it would be operatives from the S Wing who often slipped into radical madrasas across Pakistan to drum up recruits, the officials said.

The ISI support for militants extends beyond those operating in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. American officials said the spy agency had also shared intelligence with Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based militant group suspected of conducting the Mumbai attacks, and provided protection for it.

Few immediate alternatives

Zardari took steps last summer to purge the ISI’s top ranks after the United States confronted Pakistan with evidence about the Indian Embassy bombing. Zardari pledged that the ISI would be “handled,” and that anyone working with militants would be dismissed.

Yet with the future of Zardari’s government uncertain in the current political turmoil and with Obama officials seeing few immediate alternatives, American officials and outside experts said that Pakistan’s military establishment appears to see little advantage in responding to the demands of civilian officials in Islamabad or Washington.

As a result, when the Haqqani fighters need to stay a step ahead of American forces stalking them on the ground and in the air, they rely on moles within the spy agency to tip them off to allied missions planned against them, American military officials said.

Ground realities of Afghanistan

2009-03-28T11:57:00.000-07:00

Ahmed Rashid, whose book Descent into Chaos has deservedly been widely acclaimed, reveals that in 1988 Pakistan could have extracted a recognition of the Durand Line as part of the agreement that ended the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, but that it never raised the issue, despite considerable prodding by the United Nations. After 9/11, says Mr. Rashid, many Pakistanis maintained that if only Afghan President Hamid Karzai had recognised the Durand Line, he would have appeased Islamabad sufficiently to halt its military support to the Taliban. Yet the military refrained from insisting on Afghanistan recognising the Durand Line — despite several opportunities to do so. Neither the Afghan mujahideen government in 1992 nor the subsequent Taliban regime — which depended on Islamabad’s support — was asked to recognise the Line.

Mr. Rashid cites Sahebzada Yaqub Khan, who was Pakistan’s Foreign Minister during a period of the 1980s, as admitting that the military deliberately never asked for an Afghan recognition of the Line. At that time, President Zia-ul-Haq passionately worked toward creating a pro-Pakistan Islamic government in Kabul, to be followed by the Islamisation of Central Asia. This was, according to Mr. Rashid, part of Pakistan’s strategy to secure ‘strategic depth’ in relation to India. General Zia’s vision depended on an undefined border with Afghanistan, so that the army could justify any future interference in that country and beyond. The logic, according to Mr. Rashid, was that as long as there was no recognised border there could be no international law to break if Pakistan forces were to support surrogate Afghan regimes such as the one led by the Taliban.

Mr. Rashid’s observations are relevant in today’s context when we bear in mind that he is reported to be a close adviser to General David Petraeus and is even said to have directly briefed President Barack Obama. The fact that he is from Pakistan should not detract from his insights; he impresses one as being a reasonably objective analyst. Mr. Rashid confirms what India has experienced over the past decades, namely, the Pakistan establishment’s obsession with India, and its tendency to evaluate every situation through the prism of its impact on India. If something will help India in any way, Pakistan will oppose it. And if something will hurt India Pakistan will support it, even if, in the process, Pakistan itself might get hurt. As of today, the establishment means the Pakistan Army, of which Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is an integral part. If, at some time in the future, democracy gets genuine acceptance in Pakistan, when the civilian government would not have to look over its shoulders to worry about the Army’s reaction, this India-centric obsession might get diluted and, eventually, hopefully, disappear.

Until then, however, the international community will be making a serious mistake if it does not take into consideration this basic fact of life in the subcontinent. Bruce Reidel, who has been tasked by Mr. Obama to oversee the final version of the review of the “Af-Pak” region undertaken by Richard Holbrooke, will surely recognise the significance of this reality.

Several responsible leaders, including the Prime Minister of Canada and a former British Ambassador to Kabul, have said candidly that the war in Afghanistan is not winnable. The principal preoccupation of the United States currently is to formulate an exit strategy, which would enable it to leave behind an Afghanistan which can more or less maintain its own internal security and one where, the U.S. will persuade itself to believe, Al-Qaeda will not find a safe heaven from where it can plan and carry out anti-West attacks.

Influential voices in Washington are already calling for a lowering of the goals by excluding the establishment of a functioning democracy in Afghanistan. Dialogue with the so-called moderate elements of the Taliban is an important, perhaps the most important, element of this strategy in the making.

In theory it makes sense to try to divide the opposition and win over a section of it to one’s side, but this seldom works out in practice. It is early days to pass a definitive judgment on whether General Petraeus’ tactics of co-opting, by whatever means, a number of Sunni tribal chiefs to work alongside the Americans will ensure stability in Iraq in the long term. But it certainly seems to have provided enough of a cover for the administration to announce a kind of pull-out from Iraq. There are many examples where such methods have not worked, including of Vietnam. Even in Somalia this experiment has failed to restore stability. The “traitors” expose themselves and their families to targeted assassinations and hostage situations.

The horrible record of the Taliban does not seem to worry those who advocate an accommodation with the ‘good’ Taliban. Experts such as Mr. Rashid, who encourage the administration in this direction, are perhaps motivated by the desire to help the U.S. to extricate itself from the Afghan quagmire. It will not be fair, or helpful, to impute other motives to them, even though the end result of this approach could be the establishment of precisely the kind of regime in Kabul as is desired, short-sightedly, by Pakistan. For India as well as other neighbours, not excluding Pakistan, such an outcome will have extremely negative consequences, which need not be spelt out here.

Is it possible to think of some other direction in which to try to solve the intractable situation that Afghanistan is in at present?

Henry Kissinger, in an article in the International Herald Tribune (February 28, 2009) argued: “Afghanistan is almost the archetypal international problem requiring a multilateral solution for the emergence of a political framework.” Such an outcome would be possible, he suggests, only if Afghanistan’s neighbours, principally Pakistan, agree on a policy of restraint and opposition to terrorism. Mr. Kissinger did not propose any details of a possible framework.

In an article published in The Hindu some six years ago on December 24, 2003, which this writer had the privilege to co-author with Hamid Ansari, now the Vice President of India, we suggested the possible provisions of a political framework for Afghanistan. We proposed to combine Afghanistan’s traditional preference for neutrality with external guarantees of respect for such neutrality as well as of non-interference in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. We argued that only a combination of the two would negate the desire to interfere from without and the impulse to seek it from within. We felt that the Agreement on the Neutrality of Laos of 1962 offered a possible model for Afghanistan. That agreement spelt out the reciprocal commitments of the Laotian government on the one side and of the 14 co-signatories on the other. In Afghanistan’s case, the package would include the settlement of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The Obama Administration has taken a positive initiative by convening the ‘umbrella’ meeting in The Hague on March 31, inviting all the regional players, including Iran, to participate in it. India will be represented by an able and experienced hand. Hopefully, the ideas expressed here could be of some help.

Switzerland breaks banking secrecy tradition

2009-03-14T19:03:00.000-07:00

The Swiss government said on Friday it would cooperate on cases of international tax evasion, breaking with a long-standing tradition of protecting wealthy foreigners accused of hiding billions of dollars in the Alpine nation.

The government insisted it would hold on to its cherished banking secrecy rules; but said other countries could now expect Swiss cooperation in cases where they provide compelling evidence of tax evasion.

“We want assistance to be restricted to individual cases to prevent fishing expeditions,” President Hans-Rudolf Merz told a news conference, referring to the practice of seeking information about many individuals in the hope of discovering a few tax evaders.

A number of countries are hoping to avoid being blacklisted by world powers when they meet in April to discuss stepping up their fight against tax cheats.

Austria and Luxembourg also said Friday they would step up cooperation on tax probes.

But the greatest pressure has been on Switzerland, which is embroiled in a dispute with the United States over wealthy Americans that have stashed money in its biggest bank, UBS AG.
Swiss authorities have provided the U.S. with the bank details of up to 300 wealthy Americans suspected of tax fraud, but refuse to identify about 50,000 more U.S. account holders Washington wants.

The bank and the government have said further cooperation would violate Swiss law, which makes an unclear distinction between the serious crime of tax fraud and the minor offence of tax evasion.

Merz’s announcement came a day after Switzerland’s tiny neighbor Liechtenstein bowed to outside pressure by adopting the standards in a similar attempt to shed its label as a tax haven where foreigners can safely hide their money.

Several others tax havens — including Andorra, Bermuda and the islands of Jersey and Guernsey in the English Channel — also have signalled over the past month that they would open their books to foreign tax inspectors.

Swiss bank vaults hold an estimated $2 trillion of foreign money.

The Swiss Bankers Association said it supported the decision, but now wants “an end to all improper international criticism of Switzerland and its legal system, and also an end to threats to put Switzerland on a so-called ‘black list.’”

The UBS case represents the most serious crisis in the Swiss banking community since the uproar in the 1990s over Jewish accounts left unclaimed after World War II. After reacting slowly, Swiss banks eventually agreed on a $1.25 billion out-of-court settlement with the descendants of Holocaust survivors(?).

Switzerland passed its banking secrecy laws in 1934 during a worldwide depression and under the threat of espionage by France and Nazi Germany, which aggressively courted Swiss bank employees to divulge the names and data of customers. Strict penalties were imposed for violating bank confidentiality.

Once partners in crime turns against each other when it comes to self-interest

2009-03-13T10:33:00.000-07:00

Increasingly, the story of the West’s complicated love-hate relationship with Pakistan is becoming less and less about love, and its reaction to the Lahore terror attack on Sri Lankan cricketers illustrates how much the post-9/11 honeymoon has gone sour.

If Islamabad expected a degree of support from its western allies in its moment of grief, it must have been terribly disappointed. It is hard to recall very many occasions — none, in fact, in recent memory — when a country still reeling under the impact of a terror attack has been so rudely treated by its allies as Pakistan after the Lahore tragedy.

Beyond the mandatory expressions of condemnation, there was little sympathy for it. While the country was still trying to make sense of what had happened, it found itself dragged through the mud and lectured on why instead of sympathy it needed some good old-fashioned flogging. The anger in London and Washington — arguably Pakistan’s closest allies — appeared directed not so much against the terrorists as against the Pakistan government which was effectively accused of bringing it upon itself.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband lambasted Pakistan’s feuding political leadership, saying if it did not get its act together the country would face a “mortal threat” from internal militancy. “I think that the degree of political disunity that exists at the moment is only contributing to the problem,” he said and warned that a “grave situation” was getting “worse.” The warning from America was grimmer with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton branding Pakistan the “nerve centre” of international terrorism. Terrorists in Pakistan, she confided, could be plotting another attack even as she was speaking. “We must recognise that one, tiny remote corner of the world — the borders of Pakistan — is the nerve centre for extremists who planned 9/11, the bombings in Madrid and London, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and the recent carnage in Mumbai … They are planning similar attacks right now,” she told NATO Foreign Ministers in Brussels.

There can be no quibbling about what has been said about Pakistan’s nexus with extremist groups and its approach to terrorism. But doesn’t all this plainspeaking sound so different from the line we heard after 9/11 when the equally valid criticism of America’s record of flirting with elements like Osama bin Laden was contemptuously dismissed as an attempt to deflect attention from the attacks themselves? The argument then was that raising questions about what caused 9/11 at a time when America was under attack meant playing into the hands of terrorists, if not actually justifying acts of terrorism. The former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, repeatedly and angrily warned against the danger of what he was fond of calling “moral equivalence” when confronted with terrorism.

So, what’s changed?

Again, much has been made of the fact that the Lahore attack happened in the “heart” of the city — a “proof,” it is argued, that the Pakistani state has lost “control.” But, hold on, what about 9/11? That too happened in the heart of New York. And didn’t 7/7 happen bang in the heart of the British capital?

If anything, given America and Britain’s intelligence and security apparatus vastly superior to Pakistan’s (routinely dubbed a “failed” or “failing” state in the western media), the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks represented a far more serious failure of both intelligence and security than the Lahore attack.

Meanwhile, the British media have been bubbling with dark conspiracy theories based mostly on bazaar gossip including a suggestion that Pakistan may in fact have “engineered” the attacks to cast itself as a victim of terror.

A lot of play has been given to speculation why the Pakistan cricket team left its hotel seven minutes after Sri Lanka’s “thus avoiding” the terror attack. The sub-text, clearly, is that it might have been an “inside job” with the Pakistani cricketers being deliberately held back while the terrorists set out to attack the Sri Lankans.

The Times went to town on it with a two-page spread under the dramatic headline, “Seven-minute delay that kept Pakistan’s players from harm.” The questions being asked, it said, were: did the militants know of the delay? How did they get to know the route that the Sri Lankan team was to take? Did they know that the vehicle they attacked was not the Pakistan bus? And how did they manage to overwhelm the police and escape so easily?

Conspiracy theories may make interesting reading but must they be reported at such length and so seriously? Similar theories about 9/11 were dispatched (and quite rightly) with withering contempt by the same media that now seem to be hanging on to every word uttered by any nutter. Certainly, not a very nice way to treat an ally.

Use of chemical warfare to eradicate drugs; A policy promoted and funded by the U.S..

2009-03-13T10:21:00.000-07:00

The aerial assault on cocaine is wiping out everything — apart from coca plants.

The counter-drugs strategy of the United States is clearly failing. U.N. figures cited in this week show that the cultivation of coca, the plant from which cocaine is derived, has surged in the Andes. The most dramatic rise has been in Colombia, the only country in the region that allows the use of pesticides to eradicate coca leaf - a policy promoted and funded by the U.S..

I recently received a disturbing email from southern Colombia warning that the fragile Amazonian soil could “soon be turned to desert.” They were the words of a Catholic priest, so I rang a church worker whose parish lies deep in the Amazonian state of Caqueta. Military planes targeting coca farms, funded by the US, had been spraying mists of pesticides over food crops, grazing animals and even areas where children were playing, she said: locals were complaining of breathing problems and rashes; “strips of skin” have been peeling off cows, and chickens have died; and maize, yucca, plantain and cacao crops have wilted and shrivelled. “We fear there will soon be a very serious food shortage in the region,” she said. The local parish has issued an urgent appeal. The U.S. has been funding the spraying campaign for more than two decades, but 70 per cent of the world’s coca leaf is grown in Colombia. Glyphosate is the most frequently used pesticide; its biggest selling commercial formulation is Roundup, made by Monsanto. The company acknowledges that contact with glyphosate may cause mild eye or skin irritation. But independent studies have suggested a far greater range of symptoms, including facial numbness and swelling, rapid heart rate, raised blood pressure, chest pains, nausea and congestion.

In Colombia, glyphosate is mixed with other chemicals, and because the exact composition has not been made public it has been impossible to test its toxicity. One addition, a surfactant, makes the corrosive liquid stick to the surface — leaf or skin — on which it is sprayed. The pesticide is used at higher concentrations than stipulated in the U.S., and is sprayed from above the recommended height of 10 metres. Farm workers in the US are advised to keep clear of weedkillers, yet in Colombia aerial spraying takes place with no warning, showering humans and animals with chemicals.

All Colombia’s neighbours — Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela and Brazil — oppose the “fumigation” policy. The Andean and European parliaments have called for its suspension, as have numerous environmentalists, scientists and politicians in Colombia. But spraying has intensified since the launch in 2000 of Plan Colombia, the U.S.-funded counter-narcotics strategy.

It was in that year that I first went to meet coca growers in Caqueta. One woman told me a familiar story. Sara’s parents were landless, and had travelled south to set up a farm. In this remote region, with no paved roads, they found that coca was the only crop from which they could make a living.

Sara showed me the weather-beaten wooden press she uses to grind the coca leaves. Peasants here turn the coca leaves into a paste, which is then sold on to a middleman who takes it to a jungle laboratory to refine it into cocaine.
Sara also grows maize, yucca, sugar cane and tropical fruit, but these products don’t make much money. It would take days to transport them along rivers or dirt paths to the nearest big market. In contrast, coca paste is easy to transport and, crucially, always in demand. But the peasants here are not rich. They receive just 0.1 per cent of the final street price of cocaine. The U.S. focuses on one element of the trafficking chain, the poverty-stricken peasant. But the policy is not even effective. When their land is poisoned, peasants migrate and start growing coca again. They have no alternative. Spraying simply displaces the problem. Despite decades of spraying, coca cultivation in Colombia has grown by 500 per cent since the 1980s, according to U.S. State Department figures. US politicians heralded a drop in cultivation after the launch of Plan Colombia, but the area of land covered by coca crops is now larger than when the plan was launched. Perhaps the clearest indication that the policy is failing is the falling price of cocaine, suggesting more, not less, of the drug is entering the U.S. market.

Back in Caqueta, the church worker described how pesticides have run into rivers and streams, killing fish. Locals wait days before they dare drink the water. One of the most fragile ecosystems in the world “is being poisoned.”

Irish freedom fighters shoots down three British officers.

2009-03-10T10:42:00.000-07:00

Of the three, the two soldiers of the occupational force were shot dead by the Irish freedom fighters at a base in Antrim.

The other was a police official of the occupying power who was shot dead at Lismore Manor, Craigavon, County Armagh on Monday.

US navy surveillance vessel caught by Chinese

2009-03-10T10:20:00.000-07:00

The US Navy ship Impeccable broke international law and Chinese laws and regulations.

Under international law, Chinese territorial waters extend 12 nautical miles (22km) off its coast and its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) extends 200 nautical miles.

The US navy surveillance vessel was 75 miles (120km) south of Hainan island.

Any intelligence data gathering by foreign governments within its EEZ is illegal - but the US does not agree with this.

The Impeccable is used to map the ocean floor with sonar. The information is used by the US navy to steer its own submarines or track those of other nations.

There is a large Chinese submarine base on Hainan island.

Western broad's in the SriLankan team spits out the European stance on sports in Asia

2009-03-06T09:55:00.000-08:00

Western broad's in the SriLankan team have at last spitted out the European stance on sports in Asia. They have declared that they are not in favour of -white controlled ICC scheduling another match in Asia. They have stated the security concern as a reason for this.

It is interesting to note that none of the Asian teams had stated a security concern in the aftermath of the London and Spain bombings. This makes one wonder as to whether the Asian teams are headed by western pimps.

conversion to Islam

2009-03-01T01:45:00.000-08:00

An alarming new study shows that at least two women of other communities are raped per day by Muslim men in India.

This number doesn't include the number of women of other communities who are kidnapped or are tricked into eloping with Muslim men.

It also doesn't include the number of women that are being converted to Islam by them.

U.S. troops desecrates the Holy Quran

2009-02-28T21:10:00.000-08:00

The incident took place in Deh Khodaidad village in Ghazni, southwest of the capital, Kabul. Police said a government team had been sent to investigate claims that foreign troops had raided some mosques, rounded up worshippers and tore apart copies of the Holy Quran on Thursday night.

A spokesman for the U.S. military said he was aware of a "peaceful protest". They said that any injuries had been caused by "saboteurs" in the crowd.

Development. what !!!?

2009-02-21T23:41:00.000-08:00

Chronic mismanagement and profligacy are blighting reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, international aid officials have warned, wasting up to a third of the $15bn in funding already delivered and deepening local resentment towards foreign troops stationed there.

Senior British, U.S. and local aid workers have described a number of problems including bribery, profiteering, poor planning and incompetence. The overall effect has been to cripple the development effort structured under the Bush administration’s insistence on an unregulated and profit-driven approach to reconstruction.

“The major donor agencies operate on the mistaken assumption that it’s more efficient and profitable to do things through market mechanisms,” a senior American contractor working in Afghanistan said on condition of anonymity. “The notion of big government is a spectre for American conservatives and this [the reconstruction process] is an American conservative project.”

The contractor said the “original plan was to get in, prop up Karzai, kill Al-Qaeda, privatise all government-owned enterprises and get out. It wasn’t a development project, that wasn’t a concern. Development was an afterthought."

“The process of directing aid and development resources is completely haphazard. The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.”

The contractor, who has worked across the governance, security and development sectors of the reconstruction process, also said the lack of tangible development had hampered Nato’s effort to win the support of Afghans.

Amid blast barriers, checkpoints and foreign troop patrols, the badly finished schools, crumbling clinics and sinking roads stand as monuments to the shortfalls of reconstruction. There have been notable improvements in education and healthcare, but despite the billions dispersed in aid the majority of Afghans still lack access to safe drinking water and sanitary facilities. The country’s child mortality rates remain among the highest in the world, with more than 25 per cent dying before their fifth birthday, according to Unicef.

An Afghan contractor, who has handled reconstruction contracts for some large foreign donors since Nato took over, said he was routinely asked to pay bribes or kickbacks to western construction firms. “If we want a contract from a foreign firm we have to pay a 10 per cent bribe, that’s the culture ... [but] our profits are nothing in comparison to the money that is made at the top, by the foreigners,” he said.

He also accused some foreign companies of profiteering, describing a school construction project he worked on for one of the largest U.S. firms in Afghanistan. He said nearly 75 per cent of the $260,000 budget was swallowed as the project was subcontracted out, first to an American firm and then to two Afghan companies.

Sayeed Jawed, the chairman of the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief (Acbar), an umbrella organisation for local and international NGOs operating in Afghanistan, made similar allegations about profiteering. “The budgets should not be subcontracted away like this,” he said. “Maybe once, but not six times. There should be a limit to the amount of money made. There really are no records of how much money is spent, where it goes and where it came from. There is corruption but there is no way of documenting it.”

The Afghan government now says $5b, a third of all the international aid delivered, cannot be accounted for.

More than two-thirds of all aid bypasses the government in Kabul completely, and according to a recent Acbar report, less than 40 per cent of technical assistance to Afghanistan is coordinated with the government. Some aid officials attribute this to high levels of corruption within the government itself.

Among the greatest drains on the aid budget are the sums paid to foreign consultants. “We have seen massive waste in technical assistance in the form of expatriate consultants,” said Matt Waldman, who heads Oxfam’s Kabul office and who authored the Acbar report.

“Despite the fact that thousands have come and gone with very little impact, the cost of these consultants remains between $200,000 and $300,000 a year [each].” Such a salary equates to about 200 times the amount paid to a local Afghan employee.

More than 40 per cent of aid goes back to donor countries in corporate profits — an estimated $6b since the start of reconstruction seven years ago.

According to Acbar, profit margins for foreign contractors are sometimes as high as 50 per cent.

The U.K. connection in the war on terror

2009-02-21T22:15:00.000-08:00

The former head of the British Security Service — MI5 —, Stella Rimington, who made her career running her department’s dirtiest operations in the 1980s, against the U.K.’s miners’ union and the IRA, has warned that Gordon Brown’s government has given terrorists the chance to find “greater justification” by making people feel they “live in fear and under a police state.” Naturally, ministers described her remarks as nonsense and accused her of playing “into the hands of our enemies.”

But the damage is done. To have the woman once hailed as Britain’s Queen of Spies accusing the U.K. government of recklessly counter-productive authoritarianism carries a special weight — and incidentally turns the traditional relationship between Labour and the secret state on its head. Rimington went further, denouncing the U.S. for Guantanamo and torture, but reverted to type by insisting MI5 “doesn’t do that.”

No, as we now know, it contracts out that job to others, while its officers stand by promising to arrange “more lenient treatment” if the victim cooperates. In case after case, British collaboration in the hidden crimes of the war on terror has now been laid bare. But none more so than in the seven-year ordeal of Binyam Mohamed, the last British resident in Guantanamo, the details of whose CIA kidnapping and U.S.-orchestrated torture across four countries the U.K. Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, has twisted and turned to prevent being made public.

As it now turns out, the U.S. letter warning that intelligence-sharing with Britain would be damaged if the torture evidence was published — used to strong-arm the high court into suppressing it — was in fact issued at the request of Miliband’s own department. Perhaps that’s hardly surprising, when the court has already heard that MI5 officers questioned the freshly tortured Mohamed in illegal Pakistani detention under government guidelines and fed questions to CIA interrogators as he was secretly “rendered” from Pakistan to Afghanistan to Morocco.

Mohamed was hung from leather straps and beaten in Pakistan, and had his genitals slashed in Morocco, while other British terror suspects questioned by MI5 had their fingernails ripped out. Mohamed ended up confessing under torture to a fantasy “dirty bomb” plot, though all charges have been dropped and he is finally due to be returned to Britain any day now.

But the British Labour Party’s sins in the war on terror are catching up with it. And it’s not only officials, but politicians, up to and including Tony Blair, who could be in the legal frame as a result of British collusion with torture, “extraordinary rendition” — illegal abductions to third countries — and “ghost” prisons.

No doubt a battery of state powers and immunities will be deployed to head off such humiliation. But as this week’s chilling International Commission of Jurists’ report on the counter-terrorist free-for-all put it: “The framework of international law is being undermined ... the U.S. and U.K. have led that undermining.”

Of course that’s no coincidence, since Britain is the state that most faithfully followed the U.S. in invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. And now that the Afghan imbroglio is to be escalated, with Barack Obama’s announcement that 17,000 more U.S. troops are to be sent to fight the unwinnable war, the kidnapping and collusion with torture look certain to continue.

Although Obama has pledged to close Guantanamo, ban U.S. torture and shut secret prisons, that doesn’t apply to “short-term facilities,” and U.S. intelligence officials have even promised an “expanded role” for extraordinary rendition. And as Wednesday’s decision by the House of Lords, the highest court in the U.K., to allow the deportation of the cleric Abu Qatada to Jordan showed, torture will still be outsourced to others.

But don’t imagine there won’t be a cost for this bitter fruit of imperial war. In January, Gordon Brown’s security minister, Lord West, became the first member of the government to acknowledge the connection between the horrors of the seven-year assault on the Muslim world and the threat of terror attacks in Britain. The claim, much repeated by Blair as prime minister, that there was no link with foreign policy was, West declared, “clearly bollocks.”

But in other parts of the U.K. government, the refusal to face up to that link is becoming ever more obtuse, underpinned by a growing tendency to criminalise political dissent in the Muslim community. That seems bound to give terrorists exactly the “greater justification” Rimington was talking about.

A leak of the government’s latest draft counter-terrorist strategy includes the extraordinary proposal to label “extremist” any British Muslim who supports armed resistance anywhere, including the Palestinian territories; favours sharia law; fails to condemn attacks on British occupation troops in Iraq or Aghanistan; regards gay sex as sinful; or supports the restoration of a pan-Islamic caliphate in the Muslim world.

The idea would then be to sever all official links with such people and their organisations, following the announcement by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith (Minister of the Interior) that counter-terrorism needs to move beyond tackling violent groups to challenging “non-violent extremists.”

This is the most transparent folly. Since polling shows most Muslims hold one or more of these views (as do millions of non-Muslims, in the case of resistance), the effect would be to brand the whole community extremist and further alienate Muslim youth.

Tacit British support for Israel’s onslaught on Gaza has radicalised a whole new swath of young Muslims and non-Muslims alike. And a taste of what this new drive to blur the distinction between political violence and non-violent protest is likely to mean was on show last weekend, when police arrested 10 people on the M65 motorway near Preston in northern England, on their way to join a 110-vehicle aid convoy to Gaza.

U.K. security sources were quoted as claiming the arrests were in connection with a “potential threat of terrorism in the Middle East.” But seven have already been released without charge, and the timing of the operation is seen locally as an attempt to smear and intimidate the Muslim community.

The U.K. government’s counter-terrorism strategy is a recipe for creating terrorists.

US gets kicked out

2009-02-21T22:08:00.000-08:00

Grounded

Parliament in Kyrgyzstan voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to shut a strategic U.S. airbase, the Pentagon’s last foothold in Central Asia.

Deputies voted 78-to-1 to approve a government proposal to remove the base set up at the Manas international airport in 2001 to support the U.S. operations in Afghanistan. President Kurmanbek Bakiyev called for evicting the U.S. military in Moscow earlier this month after being offered over $2 billion in Russian aid and investment. He is expected to sign the bill within the next 10 days, after which the U.S. has 180 days to leave the base. Russia also has an air base in Kyrgyzstan established in 2003 and expanded last year.

Manas has been the only U.S. transit hub in Central Asia after Uzbekistan shut a U.S. airbase on its territory in 2005 after the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation demanded that the U.S. set a deadline for withdrawing its bases from the region.

The decision to close the Manas airbase came shortly after Russia allowed overland transit of U.S. non-military supplies to Afghanistan. The first train with around 100 U.S. containers is about to leave from Latvia for Russia. U.S. diplomats said 20 to 30 trainloads could transit Russia every week. This would give the Pentagon a safe alternative to the current supply lines through Pakistan, which have become increasingly vulnerable to militant attacks over the last year.

Alternate history

2009-02-16T09:24:00.000-08:00

The world believes that the colonialism is over and that there is no more colonies anywhere in the world.

But the truth is stranger than fiction b'coz if the colonialism had in fact gone how come B.I.O.T (British Indian Ocean Territories) exists. How come that Falklands is still under British Occupation. And so are many other countries under various pretexts.

And to my surprise most of these are under UN auspicious. Well no wonder why many consider UN as the donkey that carry the US & NATO.

US virus spreads to SriLanka.

2009-02-06T09:22:00.000-08:00

Deployment of ISAF troops

Camp Marmal at Mazar-i-Sharif

USA is planning to set-up a permanent base like Camp Bondsteel in SriLanka. It is build so as to curtail the growth of China & India and other developing nations in some way or the other.

This new development has put most countries on the edge, since this is the newest one in the chain of bases that are run in the Asian & African continent by the US and its extensions like NATO, ISAF etc:-

CIA plans to split India as soon as possible.

2009-02-03T09:53:00.000-08:00

In a shocking revelation, an intelligence officer, one of the 452 witnesses in the September 29 Malegaon blast case, has revealed in his statement that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have a grand design to split India into "smaller manageable independent countries" by 2020. It is thought that this move will help America to manipulate the "Asian theatre" to its advantage.

According to the statement, the officer had attended one of the meetings held by the Malegaon blast accused on April 12, 2008 at the Ram temple in Bhopal. The officer said that he was shocked by the proceedings.

"Al-Battar", the Al Qaeda Manual on kidnapping Issue no. 10 of Al-Battar, al-Qaeda’s training manual has a special coverage of "kidnapping".

2009-02-03T09:14:00.000-08:00

Kidnapping

A. Reasons for detaining one or more individuals by an enemy:

i) Force the government or the enemy to succumb to some demands.
ii) Put the government in a difficult situation that will create a political embarrassment between the government and the countries of the detainees.
iii) Obtaining important information from the detainees.
iv) Obtaining ransoms. Such was the case with the brothers in the Philippines, Chechnya, and Algiers. Our brothers from Muhammad’s Army in Kashmir received a two million dollar ransom that provided good financial support to the organization.
v) Bringing a specific case to light. This happened at the beginning of the cases in Chechnya and Algeria, with the hijacking of the French plane, and the kidnapping operations performed by the brothers in Chechnya and the Philippines.

B. Requirements needed in forming a kidnapping group:

i) Capability to endure psychological pressure and difficult circumstances. In case of public kidnapping, the team will be under a lot of pressure.
ii) Intelligence and quick reflexes in order to deal with an emergency.
iii) Capability to take control over the adversary. The brother is required to possess fighting skills that will enable him to paralyze the adversary and seize control of him.
iv) Good physical fitness and fighting skills.
v) Awareness of the security requirements, prior to, during, and after the operation.
vi) Ability to use all types of light weapons for kidnapping.

C. Types of kidnapping:

Secret Kidnapping: The target is kidnapped and taken to a safe location that is unknown to the authorities. Secret kidnapping is the least dangerous. Such was the case of the Jewish reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped from a public place, then transferred to another location. It is also the case of our brothers in Chechnya who kidnap the Jews in Moscow, and the kidnapping operations in Yemen.

Public kidnapping: This is when hostages are publicly detained in a known location. The government surrounds the location and conducts negotiations. The authorities often attempt to create diversions and attack the kidnappers. That was the case of the theater in Moscow,and the Russian officers’ detention by Shamil Basayev and the Mujahideen brothers. A counter terrorism officer once said: "There never was a successful kidnapping operation in the world". This saying was intended to discourage the so-called terrorists. History is full of facts proving the opposite. Many operations by the Mafia, or the Mujahideen were successful. There areexamples of many successful operations, such as those of Muhammad’s Army, and Shamil in Moscow. Although not all the goals were met, some of them were. The leader ShamilBasayev’s operation was 100% successful, because it brought the case back to the attention of the international scene, therefore the Mujahideen got their reward, thanks to God.

Stages of Public Kidnapping:

• Determining the target: A target must be suitably chosen, to force the government to achieve your goals. Therefore, it is mandatory to make sure the kidnapped individuals are important and influential.

• Gathering enough information on the location (kidnapping stage), and the people inside it.
For example: If the people are inside a building: A thorough study of the fences around the building as well as the security and protection teams and systems. A plan of the building with information on its partitions should be reviewed. The kidnappers could use cars that enter the building without inspection to smuggle their equipment. They should also spot individuals who are exempt from inspection when entering the building. When the cars are parked outside the building, the driver could be kidnapped while parking, or the important people when entering with their cars. High places overlooking the building could be set for snipers, and to prevent the enemy from taking advantage of those strategic spots.
If the people are on a bus: It is essential to know the nationalities of the people on the bus, as nationalities determine the effect of the operation. All information concerning the bus routing, stops for fuel or rest, protection procedures, the program set for the tourists, and other information should be obtained in order to determine the weak spots, and allow easy control of the group.
If the target is on a plane: It is important to determine the destination of the plane. A connecting flight is a better option. Transit areas are more vulnerable where little inspection is provided. Our brothers in Nepal took advantage of such situation, put the weapons on the Indian plane, and hijacked it. Hijackers must be creative in bringing weapons or explosives on a plane. They must also be familiar with the inspection process at airports.
If the target is in a convoy: The same rules for assassination in a convoy apply for kidnapping.

• Besides specifying the targets, and gathering information on them, leaders must put together asuitable plan made at the level of the weakest team member. It has been said: "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link".

• Execution of the abduction:
The abductors’ roles vary, based on the location of the kidnapping operation. They are grouped in three categories:
A) Protection group whose role is to protect the abductors.
B) The guarding and control group whose role is to seize control of the hostages, and get rid of them in case the operation fails.
C) The negotiating group whose role is extremely important and sensitive. In general, the leader of this group is the negotiator. He conveys the Mujahideen’s demands, and must be intelligent, decisive, and determined.

• Negotiations: The enemy uses the best negotiator he has, who is normally very sly, and knowledgeable in human psychology. He is capable of planting fear in the abductors’ hearts, in addition to discouraging them. Kidnappers must remain calm at all times, as the enemynegotiator will resort to stalling, in order to give the security forces time to come up with a plan to storm the hostages location. The duration of the detention should be minimized to reduce the tension on the abducting team. The longer the detention is, the weaker the willpower of the team is, and the more difficult the control over the hostages is. One of the mistakes that the Red Army made in the Japanese Embassy in Lima, Peru - where they detained a large number of diplomats - was to allow the hostage situation to continue for over a month. In the meantime, the storm team excavated tunnels under the Embassy, and was able to liberate the hostagesand end the kidnapping. In case of any stalling, starting to execute hostages is necessary. The authorities must realize the seriousness of the kidnappers, and their dedicated resolve and credibility in future operations.

• Hostage exchange process: This is a very delicate stage. If the enemy submits to the demands, and the purpose of the operation is to release our imprisoned brothers, it is essential to make sure that the brothers are in good and healthy condition. If the purpose of the kidnapping is to obtain money, you have to ensure that all the money is there, that it is not fake, nor traceable. You must be sure there are no listening or homing devices planting with the money. The brothers must be constantly on alert for possible ambushes. In Bosnia, the UN set up an ambush for the Brothers during the exchange; however, the brothers were prepared for it, and prepared a counter-ambush. When the enemy realized that the brother’s readiness and high sense ofalert, they let the hostages go without interception. Our Jihadi operations have proven that security forces are not capable of completely seizing control inside the cities. Therefore, the brothers should find ways to transport their liberated brothers even under tight security measures.

• Hostage Release: The Brothers should be careful to not release any hostage until they have received their own people. It is essential for the brothers to abide by our religion and keep their word, as it is not allowed for them to kill any hostage after our demands and conditions have been met.

• Withdrawal Process: For the withdrawal, some hostages - preferably the most important - must be detained until the brothers have safely withdrawn.

Security measures for public kidnapping:

• Detention must not be prolonged.
• In case of stalling, hostages must be gradually executed, so that the enemy knows we are serious.
• When releasing hostages such as women and children, be careful, as they may transfer information that might be helpful to the enemy.
• You must verify that the food transported to the hostages and kidnappers is safe. This is done by making the delivery person and the hostages taste the food before you. It is preferable that an elderly person or a child brings in the food, as food delivery could be done by a covert special forces’ person.
• Beware of the negotiator.
• Stalling by the enemy indicates their intention to storm the location.
• Beware of sudden attacks as they may be trying to create a diversion which could allow them to seize control of the situation.
• Combating teams will use two attacks: a secondary one just to attract attention, and a main attack elsewhere.
• In case your demands have been met, releasing the hostages should be made only in a place that is safe to the hostage takers.
• Watch out for the ventilation or other openings as they could be used to plant surveillance devices through which the number of kidnappers could be counted and gases could be used.
• Do not be emotionally affected by the distress of your captives.
• Abide by Muslim laws as your actions may become a Da’wa [call to join Islam].
• Avoid looking at women.

Stages of secret kidnapping: They are very similar to the stages for public kidnapping.

• Specifying the target.
• Collecting enough information on the target.
• Setting the plan and providing appropriate training.
• The execution team must be formed of 5 groups:
The alarming group that reports the movements of the target; the protection group that protects the kidnappers from any external intervention; the kidnapping group which kidnaps the target and delivers him to a sheltering group; the sheltering group whose role is to keep an eye on the hostage until it is time for exchange or get rid of them; the pursuit deterring group which will ensure the shelter group is not followed or watched.
• Transporting the target to a safe place.
• Getting rid of the target after the demands have been met by transporting him to a safe place out of which he can be freely released. The hostage should not be able to identify the place of his detention.

Security measures for secret kidnapping:

• The location where the hostage is transferred to must be safe.
• Beware of the Police patrol.
• While the hostage is being transported, you must beware of Police patrols by identifying their points of presence, to avoid sudden inspection.
• Look for listening or homing devices that VIPs often carry on their watches or with their money. VIPs could have an earpiece microphone that keeps him in touch with his protection detail.
• Everything you take from the enemy must be wrapped in a metal cover and should only be unwrapped in a remote place far from the sheltering group.
• Never make contact from the location where the hostage is detained and never mention him during phone calls.
• Use an appropriate cover to transport the hostage to and from the location. At some point in time the "Allat" party were drugging the hostage and transporting him in an ambulance.
• It is imperative to not allow the hostage to know where he is.
• In this case, it is preferable to give him an anesthetizing shot or knock him unconscious.

How to deal with hostages in both kidnapping types:
• You must check the hostages and take possession of any weapon or listening device.
• Separate the young people from the old, the women and the children. The young people have more strength, hence their ability to resist is high. The security forces must be killed instantly. This prevents others from showing resistance.
• Dealing with the hostages within the lawful control.
• Do not approach the hostages. In case you must, you need to have protection, and keep a minimum distance of one and a half meters from them.
• Speak in a language or dialect other than your own, in order to prevent revealing your identity.
• Cover the hostage’s eyes so that he cannot identify you or any other brothers.
• Wire the perimeter of the hostage location to deny access to the enemy.

[At the end of the issue, a section is devoted to instructions on how to join the Jihad.]

CORRESPONDENCE:

1. To all the brothers who inquired on how to join the camp, following are brief instructions:
• Use the Al Battar training instructions and keep exercising.
• Try to obtain a firearm (i.e. Kalashnikov), and practice shooting and handling the weapon in the wilderness.
• In the name of God, try forming a cell or a group, through which you can work on fighting the blasphemers, until you get the chance to join the Mujahideen brothers in Al-Haramain country [Saudi Arabia].

2. To all the brothers who inquired on explosives and how to get them, we say:
Manufacturing explosives is not as hard as the enemies of God are projecting it to be. They are doing so, in order to keep the young generation from using this effective and scary device against them. When the time is right, we shall provide training on how to make/assemble explosive materials, in the Al Battar magazine, under the "sword of victory" section. Should you be in a hurry to obtain this information, you may use the Jihad Encyclopedia as a reference.

War crimes of NATO

2009-02-01T02:34:00.000-08:00

The pictures that you see here are just samples of what is happening out there. Expect the same in your neighbourhood.

What have these women and children done? Nothing.

Well, "what goes around, comes around."

"Brace yourself."

The way of the CIA

2009-02-01T02:15:00.000-08:00

Spy Boss Allegedly Drugged Muslim Women, Made Secret Sex Videos

The CIA's station chief at its sensitive post in Algeria is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly raping at least two Muslim women who claim he laced their drinks with a knock-out drug, U.S. law enforcement sources tell ABC News.

The suspect in the case is identified as Andrew Warren in an affidavit for a search warrant filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. by an investigator for the State Department's Diplomatic Security Service.

Officials say the 41-year old Warren, a convert to Islam, was ordered home by the U.S. Ambassador, David Pearce, in October after the women came forward with their rape allegations in September.

According to the affidavit, the two women "reported the allegations in this affidavit independently of each other."

The affidavit says the first victim says she was raped by Warren in Sept. 2007 after being invited to a party at Warren's residence by U.S. embassy employees.

She told a State Department investigator that after Warren prepared a mixed drink of cola and whiskey, she felt a "violent onset of nausea" and Warren said she should spend the night at his home.

When she woke up the next morning, according to the affidavit, "she was lying on a bed, completely nude, with no memory of how she had been undressed." She said she realized "she recently had engaged in sexual intercourse, though she had no memory of having intercourse."

According to the affidavit, a second alleged victim told a similar story, saying Warren met her at the U.S. embassy and invited her for a "tour of his home" where she said he prepared an apple martini for her "out of her sight."

The second victim said she suddenly felt faint and went to the bathroom where "V2 [victim 2] could see and hear, but she could not move," the affidavit says.

She told investigators Warren "was attempting to remove V2's her pants." The affidavit states, "Warren continued to undress V2, and told her she would feel better after a bath."

The alleged victim said she remembers being in Warren's bed and asking him to stop, but that "Warren made a statement to the effect of 'nobody stays in my expensive sheets with clothes on.'" She told investigators "as she slipped in and out of consciousness she had conscious images of Warren penetrating her vagina repeatedly with his penis."

The second victim told investigators she sent Warren a text message accusing him of abusing her and he replied, "I am sorry," the affidavit says.

According to the affidavit, when Warren was interviewed by Diplomatic Security investigators, he claimed he had "engaged in consensual sexual intercourse" and admitted there were photographs of the two women on his personal laptop. He would not consent to a search or seizure of the computer, leading investigators to seek the warrant.

According to the affidavit, a search of Warren's residence in Algiers turned up Valium and Xanax and a handbook on the investigation of sexual assaults.

The affidavit says toxicologists at the FBI laboratory say Xanax and Valium are among the drugs "commonly used to facilitate sexual assault."

"Drugs commonly referred to as date rape drugs are difficult to detect because the body rapidly metabolizes them," said former FBI agent Brad Garrett, an ABC News consultant. "Many times women are not aware they were even assaulted until the next day," he said.

The CIA refused to acknowledge the investigation or provide the name of the Algiers station chief, but the CIA Director of Public Affairs, Mark Mansfield, said, "I can assure you that the Agency would take seriously, and follow up on, any allegations of impropriety."

State Department Acting Spokesman Robert Wood issued a statement saying, "The U.S. takes very seriously any accusations of misconduct involving any U.S. personnel abroad. The individual is question has returned to Washington and the U.S. Government is looking into the matter."

U.S. officials were bracing for public reaction in the Muslim world, following the report of the allegation.

"It has the potential to be quite explosive if it's not handled well by the United States government," said Isobel Coleman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in women's issues in the Middle East.

"This isn't the type of thing that's going to be easily pushed under the carpet," she said.

U.S. Officials Say They Found Video Tapes very enjoying

Both women have reportedly since given sworn statements to federal prosecutors sent from Washington to prepare a possible criminal case against the CIA officer.

Following the initial complaints, U.S. officials say they did obtain a warrant from a federal judge in Washington, D.C. in October to search the station chief's CIA-provided residence in Algiers and turned up the videos that appear to have been secretly recorded and show, they say, Warren engaged in sexual acts.

Officials say one of the alleged victims is seen on tape, in a "semi-conscious state."

The time-stamped date on other tapes led prosecutors to broaden the investigation to Egypt because the date matched a time when Warren was in Cairo, officials said.

As the station chief in Algiers, Warren played an important role in working with the Algerian intelligence services to combat an active al Qaeda wing responsible for a wave of bombings in Algeria.

In the most serious incident, 48 people were killed in a bombing in Aug. 2008 in Algiers, blamed on the al Qaeda group.

The Algerian ambassador to the United Nations, Mourad Benmehid, said his government had not been notified by the U.S. of the rape allegations or the criminal investigation.

Repeated messages left for the Warren with his parents and his sister were not returned.

No charges have been filed, but officials said a grand jury was likely to consider an indictment on sexual assault charges as early as next month.

"This will be seen as the typical ugly American," said former CIA officer Bob Baer, reacting to the ABC News report. "My question is how the CIA would not have picked up on this in their own regular reviews of CIA officers overseas," Baer said.

"From a national security standpoint," said Baer, the alleged rapes would be "not only wrong but could open him up to potential blackmail and that's something the CIA should have picked up on," said Baer. "This is indicative of personnel problems of all sorts that run through the agency," he said.

"Rape is ugly in any context," said Coleman, who praised the bravery of the alleged Algerian victims in going to authorities. "Rape is viewed as very shameful to women, and I think this is an opportunity for the U.S. to show how seriously it takes the issue of rape," she said.

The NATO's achivement.

2009-01-31T10:43:00.000-08:00

One thousand three hundred children were maimed or killed in the battle between Israel and Palestine in Gaza.

All of the NATO members (except Turkey) applauded this achivement in one way or the other.

No wonder as to why the muslims want to strike back. Maybe this is why the September and July bombings happened!!!

War crimes of the West

2009-01-31T10:13:00.000-08:00

Depleted uranium weapons used in the West-sponsored wars in the Gulf and the Balkans have posed serious health hazards to soldiers and civilians, but the Western powers involved show no remorse.

THE West has finally been forced to react to the trail of devastation left by the depleted uranium (D.U.) weapons it deployed in the wars in the Gulf and the Balkans. But it is not the suffering of poor Iraqi civilians who forced the North Atlantic Trea ty Organisation (NATO) to react; it was the complaints of many European governments that made the United States and NATO to set up a crisis centre to exchange information on health risks that result from D.U. munitions. Last year, Italy started an inquir y into the mysterious illness of 30 of its Balkan war veterans. Seven Italian soldiers have already died of cancer, five of them from leukaemia. French and Portuguese peacekeepers in the Balkans have also been diagnosed with cancer. Italy has now formally asked for a ban on D.U. munitions.

An eight-year-old Iraqi boy, who was born blind and suffers from brain tumour and abdominal cancer, at a shop near the Ibn-Gazwan children's hospital in Basra.

Backing the Italian position, German Chancellor Gerard Schroeder said that it was not "right" to use such munitions. All the "facts must be laid on the table", he said. Norwegian soldiers are refusing to sign contracts to go to the Balkans for peacekeepi ng duties; they demand clarifications about the risks posed by D.U. weapons. A group of Belgian soldiers have sued their government for the health problems caused to them by service in the Balkans. Five Belgian soldiers who served in Bosnia and Croatia died of cancer.

A four-year-old Iraqi girl with tumour in the eye.

The President of the European Union (E.U.), Romano Prodi, recently admitted that the NATO-ignited war in the Balkans had "created a horrible environmental problem that is for us to take care of". Prodi called for a ban on such weapons "even if there is m inimal risk". The European Parliament voted on January 17 for a temporary ban on D.U. weaponry. Last year, Finland's Environment Minister Sattu Hassi had appealed to his E.U. counterparts for a ban on D.U. weaponry, which "contaminates by its dust the lo calities where it is used and threatens both soldiers and civilians". Less than a month after the war in Yugoslavia ended in 1999, the British National Radiological Protection Board warned British citizens about the dangers from staying in Kosovo because of the contamination of its territories by D.U. weapons.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have already fallen victim to the deadly effects of D.U. weapons employed in the Gulf war. Many American and British veterans of the Gulf war also developed symptoms that were euphemistically called the "Gulf war syndrome" . It manifested itself in many ways, ranging from memory loss to various forms of cancers. Children of many Gulf war veterans were born without limbs and with other birth defects.

Thousands of people in Iraq have the same symptoms too. The incidence of cancer has increased rapidly and at abnormal rates. Leukaemia in children is especially rampant: it has shown a four-fold rise after the Gulf war. The incidence of breast cancer amo ng women below 30 is around four times higher than it was before 1990. Abnormal births have drastically increased since the war.

The Pentagon, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, continues to insist that D.U. is only "very, very mildly radioactive" and that the shells are not radioactive enough to be classified as a "radiological weapon". It has argued that tank crews firin g rounds of depleted uranium shells received little radiation, the equivalent of one chest X-ray a day. It is common knowledge that even mild radiation is dangerous and increases the risk of cancer. The health risk becomes greater after the shells are fi red because broken shells emit uranium particles. The particles can enter the body easily and deposit themselves on bones, organs and cells.

Bosnian Serb children under treatment for respiratory ailments share a hospital bed.

The shell, developed by the Pentagon in the late 1970s, is a radioactive byproduct of the enrichment process used to make atomic bombs and nuclear fuel rods. The material is provided free of cost to weapons manufacturers by the nuclear arms industry. A c onfidential report by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, prepared in 1991, described the presence of D.U. in Iraq and Kuwait as a "significant problem". The report concluded that there was enough uranium there to cause "tens of thousands of potential deaths".

It was during the Gulf war that tank armour and armour-piercing rounds made of depleted uranium were used in a big way. The weapons proved to be very effective against Iraqi targets. The Tomahawk missiles, which were launched from the very first day of O peration Desert Storm, were tipped with D.U. The U.S. Army reports that a total of 14,000 D.U. tank rounds were used during the course of the Gulf war, while 7,000 rounds were fired during training in the sands of Saudi Arabia.

There are indications that the U.S. military establishment had some clues about the lethal nature of D.U. A U.S. Navy instruction manual notes that teams involved in recovering Tomahawk cruise missiles during test rounds must have radiological protection clothing, gloves, respirators and dosimeters. Some 300 tonnes of uranium from spent rounds lies scattered across the battlefields of Iraq and Kuwait.

When a D.U. projectile strikes a hard surface, around 70 per cent of the tip is oxidised and gets scattered as small particles. The U.S. Army Armaments, Munitions and Chemical Command (AMCCOM) states: "When a D.U. penetrator impacts a target surface, a l arge portion of the kinetic energy is dissipated as heat. The heat of the impact causes the D.U. to oxidise or burn momentararily. This results in smoke which contains a high concentration of D.U. particles. These uranium particles can be ingested or inh aled and are toxic." A leading American military contractor, Science Application International Corporation, had warned AMMCOM before the Gulf war that "combat conditions will lead to the uncontrolled release of D.U.-aerosol. D.U. exposures to soldiers on the battlefield could be significant with potential radiological and toxicological effects."

There were reports in the mid-1990s that the toxic effects of D.U. had become evident in the Balkans. In 1996, there were newspaper reports that around a thousand children in Bosnia were suffering from an unknown disease which caused headaches, muscle pa in, abdominal pain, dizziness, respiratory pains and other problems. Similar symptoms were reported in the so-called Gulf war syndrome. In the mid-1990s U.S. combat aircraft used limited amounts of D.U. ammunition against former Yugoslavia. In the war ov er Kosovo in 1999, NATO resorted to saturation bombing of Yugoslavia using D.U. weapons, despite documented evidence of the extremely harmful effects of D.U. piling up in the Gulf region. NATO soldiers were not given any warning about the deadly nature of the munitions they were using.

Bernard Kouchener, the U.N. Administrator of Kosovo and a former head of the humanitarian agency Medecins sans Frontieres, also brought up the issue of the dangers that D.U. posed to the regions. More than 100 places in Kosovo itself have been affected. But NATO, which has now been forced to address the issue, seems worried only about the health of its soldiers stationed in the region and not about the local people. It has issued circulars warning about the lingering "heavy metal toxicity" in armour str uck by D.U. bombs in Kosovo.

Only in the second week of January, were signs put up by the U.N. and NATO warning civilians to exercise caution while approaching areas in Kosovo where D.U. was dropped. NATO troops stationed in the Balkans have now been advised to use heavy protection gear while approaching armour struck by D.U.-tipped weapons. Two years since the war against Yugoslavia, the World-Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has found dangerous levels of toxins at the ground level in Kosovo and Serbia. The former government in Yugoslav ia had characterised the NATO war as "ecocide" against the people of the region. NATO has admitted to dropping 12 tonnes of D.U. in Kosovo alone. In all, an estimated 31,000 D.U. shells with a total weight of over 10 tonnes were dropped over Yugoslavia.

In Slovakia's main military hospital, a Slovak soldier who served in Yugoslavia undergoes tests as part of a medical evaluation programme for possible health damage caused by depleted uranium weapons used during the 1999 NATO offensive in Yugoslavia.

The newly elected President of Yugoslavia, Vojislav Kostunica, has characterised the use of D.U. weapons as a crime against humanity. He wants the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague to look expeditiously into the matter and apportion blame. T o show his displeasure with the War Crimes Tribunal, he refused recently to meet its chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, whose only agenda seems to be to get former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic extradited to The Hague to stand trial for "war crim es". Kostunica has called the War Crimes Tribunal a tool of U.S. foreign policy. The Pentagon, the E.U. and the U.N. have all set up commissions to investigate the risk posed by D.U. but efforts are on to whitewash the investigations.

Scientists close to the Pentagon have rushed to judgment saying that it is biologically impossible for D.U. to cause leukaemia. Physicist Frank von Hippel, professor at Stanford University is one prominent academic who has joined the campaign to give D.U . a clean chit. The outgoing U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, even advised the Europeans to not become "excessively nervous and hysterical" about D.U.

After what happened during the Gulf war, countries like Russia had repeatedly warned NATO about the dangers of using D.U. Boris Alexeyev, head of Russia's environmental department in the Defence Ministry, said that following the Desert Storm, the inciden ce of cancer among the people of Iraq had increased almost five-fold. He said that it was a well-known fact but the West did not care. The West woke up only after its own soldiers started dying. By using D.U. ammunition, NATO has wilfully violated the ag reements on radiation security, he said.

Racism in the British armed forces

2009-01-18T09:11:00.000-08:00

Muslims who served in the army like, Nassir Khan, dismissed the idea that calling someone a “Paki” had anything to do with banter. “This is an incredibly insulting term, it’s the sort of thing people from the [far right] National Front or Combat 18 say before attacking Asian families and I don’t understand why, just because he is third in line to the throne and in the army, we are supposed to accept it.”

Mr. Khan, who served in the army from 1988 to 1999 before being forced to retire through injury, said he was regularly subjected to verbal and physical attacks because of his background. “When I took the oath of allegiance the man said to me, here’s the king’s shilling for a cup of tea and a chapati, and although that might sound humorous it was just the start of the racism I experienced.” He added that he had received death threats and had been physically attacked because of his background.

“I was told by other soldiers when I was serving in the 1991 Gulf war that I was on the wrong side and to watch my back because they would shoot me if they got a chance. I got death threats through the post saying if I returned to work I would be killed and I was also badly beaten up by two Paras. None of this was banter — it was pure racism, and when someone like Prince Harry is caught describing someone he works with as a Paki it convinces me nothing much has changed.”

Mr. Khan, who says his family has an association with the British army dating back to the First World War, sued the MoD for race discrimination and received an out-of-court settlement in 2000. “I have children who are now talking about wanting to join, but after my experience there is no way I would let then sign up to an institution that accepts that level of racism or tries to dismiss what Prince Harry says as banter.”

Is Susan Rice's statement a warning shot ?

2009-01-18T00:48:00.000-08:00

Does the US ambassador designate to the UN, Susan Rice's statement about Kashmir betray the intention of the US to build a permanent base at the 'roof of the world' and occupy the most strategic position in military terms ? If so, will the rest of the world(except the Indian leadership) sit and watch!!!

Well most probably Yes is the answer as is demonstrated by the cases of the other places like Balkans, East Timor, Liberia, Cyprus, Golan Heights etc:- that she mentioned.

The questions that needs answer now is as to in which guise will these deployments will be ? And who will be the puppet Secretary of UN who will help them get it ? Or will it be like the case of Iraq ?

Britain’s tax havens fuel crime and corruption.

2009-01-10T22:41:00.000-08:00

If you want to know why Britain has never completed the process of decolonisation, look at two lists side by side. One is the official register of tax havens, compiled by the OECD. The other is the list of British overseas territories and crown dependencies. Over a quarter of the world’s tax havens are British property. More than half of Britain’s colonial territories and dependencies are tax havens. Strip out Antarctica, the military bases and the scarcely habited rocks and atolls and, of the 11 remaining properties, only the Falkland Islands is not a recognised haven. The obvious conclusion is that Britain retains these colonies for one purpose: to help banks, corporations and the ultra-rich to avoid tax.

These figures scarcely do justice to the U.K.’s responsibility for this menace. The website Shelter Offshore, which helps people to avoid their obligations to society, has just published its list of the world’s “top 5 tax havens.” Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man come first. “These highly respectable British offshore tax havens,” the site tells us, “can be very attractive indeed,” offering “superior levels of investor privacy.” Privacy is the polite word for the secrecy and obstruction that helped to bring down the world’s financial systems.

Last month, the British government announced that it will introduce new laws to prevent piracy: the armed forces will be allowed to detain ships and arrest suspected robbers on the high seas. Yet the same government offers an attractive portfolio of tropical and temperate islands in which pinstriped pirates can bury their treasure. That comparison is unfair — to pirates. The freebooters who use these havens are responsible for thousands of times more deaths even than the notorious Abdul Hassan, known on the Somali coast as ‘”the one who never sleeps.” Because of the secrecy surrounding the treasure islands, no one knows how much money they divert from developing countries. Christian Aid’s estimate — $160 billion a year — is the lowest figure, though 60 per cent greater than the international aid the poor world receives. The Pope suggests $255b; the U.S. research group Global Financial Integrity proposes $900b. In all cases we’re talking about the means by which hundreds of thousands of lives could have been preserved in the world’s poorest countries. But Britain’s network of tax havens permits multinational companies, dodgy businessmen and corrupt leaders to snatch money from the poor.

The U.K. Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, wrings his hands over the plight of the poor, and urges impoverished countries to earn more money through trade. But by keeping our tax havens open for business, this mumbling Christian hypocrite ensures that even when the poor nations do trade successfully, they are unable to keep hold of the income.

This authorised theft, of course, affects us too. We are robbed twice by these gangsters: once when they avoid the taxes the rest of us have to pay, again when the tax havens’ secret banking arrangements cause the crises which oblige us to rescue the banks. As the Tax Justice Network points out, the banking system collapsed because it became indecipherable. The banks lost confidence in each other when they could no longer tell who owns what or who owes whom, and could no longer trust each other’s financial statements. Nothing has done more to promote this distrust than the lucrative secrecy the tax havens offer to their clients.

Organised crime also depends on tax havens. The OECD uses four criteria to determine that a place is a haven: it imposes no tax, there’s a lack of transparency, it has laws preventing the effective exchange of information with other governments, and the money that changes hands bears no relation to the business done there. The last three criteria are all essential prerequisites for large-scale crime. In fact it’s doubtful whether the traditional piracy now flourishing off the Horn of Africa would be possible without the more respectable piracy taking place in the English Channel, the Irish Sea and off the Spanish Main. Anyone who wanted to stamp out drug smuggling, kidnapping, gun-running and fraud would start by shutting down tax havens.

But the crime havens have become so respectable that even the British government is now depriving itself of revenue. It has become the major shareholder in the Royal Bank of Scotland, which has offshore subsidiaries in Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man and Gibraltar. Have the bank’s new owners, in return for our generosity in bailing it out, demanded that it shuts these operations? No. And that’s not the worst of it. HM Revenue and Customs, responsible for collecting tax in this country, signed a private finance initiative deal transferring its buildings to a company called Mapeley Steps. Mapeley Steps, which is registered in one tax haven (Bermuda) is owned by Mapeley, registered in another (Guernsey). Mapeley has boasted of paying no income or corporation tax in any jurisdiction. Why does the government keep these havens open? There’s an answer in Geraint Anderson’s book Cityboy — a crude but gripping exposure by a former research analyst at a bank in the City of London, the U.K.’s financial hub. “Eighteen years out of power has made these jokers so paranoid about being viewed as old Labour that every time Cityboys and entrepreneurs asked for business-friendly reforms they rolled over and allowed tax and regulatory changes.”

There is a standard British procedure for dealing with problems like this — by which I mean problems that generate bad publicity but which you don’t want to address. You commission a review and you choose the right man to conduct it. Confronted with a vocal international campaign and a new U.S. president determined to address this issue, the government has selected a man called Michael Foot.

Until last year, Foot was the inspector of banks and trust companies for the Central Bank of the Bahamas in Bermuda, a British tax haven. Though the review was launched only a fortnight ago, he already seems to have decided what it will say. Speaking about tax havens to the magazine Accountancy Age, he claimed that they had been given a clean bill of health by the IMF, and observed, “I can’t see where the regulation failure is supposed to be.” The Tax Justice Network maintains that throughout his long career in Bermuda, at the Financial Services Authority and elsewhere, he has never raised any public concerns about systemic problems in the financial sector. The identity of the person the government appoints is an index to the outcome it desires. Foot sounds like just the man for the job. Even as it was commissioning this review, Brown’s government tried to undermine international efforts to address the problem. Teaming up with that revolting little monarchy Liechtenstein, the U.K. sought to strike out a paragraph from the Doha trade agreement that aimed to eradicate tax evasion. Thanks in part to British lobbying, the draft commitment was substantially weakened. Were Britain to release its remaining colonies, they would quickly succumb to pressure from the Obama government and the European countries trying to stamp out international evasion and organised crime. The U.K. holds on to the Falkland Islands for their oil and fish. It holds on to the other territories for something far more valuable: secrecy.

CIA training camp

2009-01-04T02:18:00.000-08:00

Even if this video may look like a training camp of the CIA in Afghanistan it is not so. This one is run on Pakistan for the training of Jundullah by CIA!!!.

Don't be upset they are good at training terrorists, did you forget as to how well they trained Al-Qaeda.

Remember Dien Bien Phu.

2009-01-04T01:43:00.000-08:00

General Vo Nguyen Giap, right, seen with Ho Chi Minh, centre, in 1954 before starting the Dien Bien Phu campaign.

The historic defeat of the French colonial forces in Dien Bien Phu 50 years ago, seen by the people of the Third World as a significant event in the struggle against colonialism, offers valuable lessons to the United States which faces strong resistance in Iraq.

SPEAKING on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the legendary Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap reminded the world that we can learn many lessons from Vietnam's unbreakable and indomitable will. Fifty years after the event, it is necessary to recall the significance of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu.

Dien Bien Phu is located in the valley bordering Laos and Vietnam. As part of a grand strategy, the Vietminh forces laid a trap in Dien Bien Phu while striking simultaneously at the French forces in Laos and central Vietnam. Outnumbered and outmanoeuvred, the French garrison surrendered on May 7, 1954. It represented one of the most glorious moments in Asia's anti-colonial struggles. It struck the death knell of French colonialism in Indo-China. As Professor Tran Quoc Vong, who in 1954, as a student volunteer in the Vietminh, brought rice to the soldiers in the front, told a British Broadcasting Corporation correspondent that Dien Bien Phu became a "metaphor for great victory" in many languages.

The fall of Dien Bien Phu unfortunately did not usher in an era of peace and stability in South-East Asia. It set in motion a series of events that made South-East Asia, especially Indo-China, a cockpit of superpower rivalry. During the first Indo-China conflict, which lasted from 1945 to 1954, there was the inevitable confrontation between the forces of French colonialism and the resurgent nationalist aspirations of the Indo-Chinese peoples. The ideological conflict and Washington's refusal to reconcile itself to political realities led to the Second Indo-China War (1959-1975), which began first in Vietnam and later on spread in Laos and Cambodia. It was rationalised as an attempt to defend the "free world" against "monolithic communism"; however, it gradually turned out to be a bitter conflict between the United States and its allies and the radical nationalist forces in Indo-China, supported for their own reasons by China and the Soviet Union. On April 29, 1975, the curtain finally came down on the U.S. misadventure in Indo-China, when the last American soldier was airlifted from Saigon.

During the Third Indo-China War, there was a vicious attempt in the U.S. and the rest of the Western world to distort the true nature of the Vietnamese revolution. The U.S. protagonists maligned and vilified the Vietnamese as war-mongers and tried to legitimise, in retrospect, the U.S. military intervention in Indo-China. We must be on our guard against this distortion of history. The revolution in Vietnam, under the dynamic leadership of Ho Chi Minh, Vo Nguyen Giap and Phan Van Dong, forms one of the most brilliant chapters in modern history. With support both from the Soviet Union and China, but only with their reluctant assent and occasionally even against their wishes, the heroic people of Vietnam humbled the U.S. and struck a death blow to imperialism and neocolonialism. No amount of mudslinging and distortion can erase the glory of the Vietnamese revolution.

During the summer of 1975, Nayan Chanda, the well-known journalist, visited Hanoi. Nayan Chanda has given an account of the jubilant mood that prevailed in the Vietnamese capital at that time. After going through the ordeal of fire and defeating the most powerful nation on earth, Vietnam was ready to take its rightful place in the world. A senior official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs quoted a fifteenth century poem written after the last of the Ming invaders had been driven out of the country:

There are no more sharks in the sea

There are no more beasts on earth

The sky is serene

Time is now to build peace for ten thousand years.

Unfortunately, after 1975, the hitherto concealed antagonisms among the three socialist states - China, the Soviet Union and Vietnam - burst into the open, leading to Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia, China's "punitive expedition" against Vietnam, and the confrontation between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), supported by the U.S., and China and Vietnam - all major strands in the Third Indo-China conflict. The U.S. played a dangerous game in escalating the Sino-Vietnamese conflict. Beijing came out openly against Vietnam only after Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, visited China in May 1978 and denounced "regional hegemonism", implying the foreign policy of Vietnam. What is more, Brzezinski's reference to regional hegemony implied support to China against Vietnam. The U.S. successfully played off Hanoi against Beijing as Vietnam strove for diplomatic recognition and economic aid and China sought American technology and support against the Soviet Union. The shared concerns about China and the U.S. brought Hanoi and Moscow closer.

Cambodia suffered the most during the Third Indo-China War. The Pol Pot regime embarked on a revolution that led to the evacuation of urban areas and establishment of forced labour sites and an extensive network of torture camps. It was a spectacle of violence and genocide unparalleled in history. It turned Cambodia into "killing fields"; nearly 1.5 million people (out of eight-million population) were tortured or starved to death. The government alienated the people and weakened the country so much that it could offer little resistance when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978 and installed Heng Samrin in power. Heng Samrin, who was a close associate of Pol Pot earlier, had got disenchanted with the leadership and sought political asylum in Vietnam.

The ideological pronouncements of the Khmer revolution, as Karl Jackson has pointed out, mirrored radical Maoism, especially the primacy of human will over machine and weapons, the superiority of the wisdom of the common people over academic learning and the power of heroic labour to overcome all natural and material obstacles. Apparently, Mao Zedong was delighted with Pol Pot's "achievements"; he told Pol Pot that "you have achieved with one stroke what we failed with our masses". The moderate section of Chinese leadership was, however, unhappy with Khmer adventurism. In his absorbing book, The Brother Enemy, Nayan Chanda has written that Zhou Enlai, from his deathbed, entreated Kieu Samphan: "Please go slowly towards communism. You cannot reach communism in one step, but step by step. Please take many steps, slowly and surely." Even more poignant was his advice: "Do not follow our example of the Great Leap Forward."

The new configuration of forces kept not only the Heng Samrin government out of the United Nations, it also provided legitimacy to the genocidal Pol Pot regime. Except India and, later on Australia, no country pointed an accusing finger at the Khmer Rouge. It was a strange paradox that three decades after going to war in Vietnam to fight "Chinese expansionism", the U.S. became a silent partner in China's war against Vietnam. The end of the Cold War led to the gradual disengagement of the U.S. from South-East Asia. The bases in the Philippines were closed down and political commentators pointed out that the U.S. would no longer deploy its forces in South-East Asia.

Like the Bourbons of France, the U.S. does not learn from history, and Washington once gain has embarked on a policy of expansionism in different parts of the world. As part of the global war on terrorism Washington has enhanced its military presence in South-East Asian countries. After September 11, the Bush Administration has rapidly seized the opportunity; it has opened a "second front" in South-East Asia. Security links with the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand have been stepped up.

It is in this context that Vo Ngueyn Giap's prophetic words assume great significance. Giap said: "Nothing is more precious than freedom and independence." He added that powerful countries should not underestimate weaker nations' desire for independence. Giap said that he had not visited Iraq, so he could not comment specifically on the war strategy of the coalition forces led by the U.S. But he had one piece of advice: "Any force that wishes to impose its will on other nations will certainly face failure."

Giap's ringing words should be analysed in the backdrop of one major factor that has contributed to the rise and fall of great powers. Paul Kennedy, the Yale University historian, in his monumental book Rise and Fall of the Great Powers has analysed how imperial powers reached a point of over-reach that eventually carried seeds of their own destruction. Too much obsession with security and disproportionate spending on defence were associated with the fall of all empires, including more recently, the Soviet Union. Is the U.S. embarking on a policy of over-reach? Will the over-reach have similar effects that led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union? Time alone will provide the answer.

The right salute

2009-01-03T23:39:00.000-08:00

The USA has issued a directive to the world to address its citizens and its allies in a new style.

Most of the countries citizens have agreed to abide by this directive. Well, isn't it the right decision!!!

The Chinese touch.

2009-01-03T23:15:00.000-08:00

While India’s trade with China has developed significantly in recent years, there are concerns at not only the spiralling trade deficit, but also the predominant percentage of raw materials in India’s exports. Ultimately, China’s approach to India will be determined primarily on the basis of its assessment of India’s economic and military strength and the sagacity and acumen of its political leadership.

Ridiculing the leadership of the CPI (M) for its anachronistic postures and policies, during the July 22, 2008 Parliamentary debate, the Finance Minister, Mr P. Chidambaram, noted that while India had done well by averaging an annual 8.9 per cent economic growth, China had adopted pragmatic policies to ensure continuing and rapid economic growth . He averred: “I do not envy China, I wish to emulate China”. Implicit in the Finance Minister’s comments, was the assertion that India’s modern day Communists were articulating policies, which would ensure that whether it was on the question of its independent nuclear deterrent or its strategic relations with the US, India remained weak and vulnerable to Chinese pressures. Mercifully, the Manmohan Singh Government has belatedly broken free of being a “bonded slave” of its “supporting” parties.

‘Great global power’

China’s rulers have a very clear understanding of how they should go about acquiring “comprehensive national power,” which is essential for China becoming a “global great power that is second to none” by 2049, which marks the centenary of the establishment of the Peoples’ Republic. China seeks to achieve this by sustained economic growth backed by unhindered access to global natural resources and joining the process of globalisation. All this is to be backed by a strong military muscle, including expanding maritime power and a powerful nuclear deterrent, capable of global deterrence, in protecting Chinese interests.

Despite differences over Taiwan, China seeks to engage the US extensively and benefit from American educational and technological advances and access to the American markets and investment. Moreover, while China finds its marriage of convenience with Russia useful in moderating American aggressiveness on international issues, especially in the UN Security Council, it uses American-Russian rivalries to acquire weapon, space technology and energy resources from the Russians. It deals with Japan by promoting fears of a revival of Japanese militarism, while deriving immense benefit from Japanese investments and trade.

Nuclear weapons

Historically, China has treated those it regards as less than equal as a “vassal state”. But despite all the rhetoric of “Hindi Chini Bhai-Bhai” China does not regard India as an equal, but as a “South Asian Regional Power” that can and should be “contained”. This is evident from its demand that India should give up its nuclear weapons — a view echoed by its Stalinist comrades in India. China has addressed the nuclear deal with India, which would end India’s global nuclear isolation, alleging that the deal has “strong symbolic significance for India in achieving its dream of a powerful nation”.

China has lobbied discretely with NSG members to reject moves to end global nuclear sanctions against India. The Chinese went to extraordinary lengths to pressurise South-East Asian nations against inviting India as a member of the East Asia Summit. They joined Pakistan to sabotage India’s efforts to secure Permanent Membership of the Security Council.

While forging a Sino-US Axis during the Nixon, Carter and Clinton Administrations, primarily to contain and confront India and even Vietnam, the Chinese have cried foul every time India has sought to bolster multilateral cooperation with democracies such as the US and Japan. In this effort, they find our Communists, like their Pakistani “all weather” friends, as useful allies.

Russian-Chinese bonhomie

China’s recent assertiveness in laying claim to Tawang and indeed the whole of Arunachal Pradesh makes it clear that, like with its other neighbours, China will settle its border problems with India only when it detects that a weakened and isolated India will yield to its demands. To this end, China will continue to boost Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and missile potential and provide Pakistan with its latest weapons, built with technology obtained primarily from Russia and to a lesser extent from countries such as Israel and Ukraine. China has agreed to provide and co-produce 250 advanced JF-7 fighter aircraft and two squadrons of J-10 multirole attack aircraft to Pakistan. The Chinese received design assistance and the engine for the JF-17 fighter from the Russians.

The J-10 is based on the design of the Israeli LAVI fighter and on knowhow of the F-16, which China obtained from F-16 fighters supplied by the US to Pakistan. Here again, the engine is Russian. Thus, while our DRDO struggles to deliver a Light Combat Aircraft to the Air Force, China pragmatically uses foreign designs and equipment to its advantage. China is now developing a fifth generation ‘Stealth’ fighter to match the latest aircraft in the American armoury. One hopes that India and particularly the DRDO will show greater realism in collaboration with the Russians, in building a similar futuristic aircraft for our air force.

While the US, Russia and Japan believe that China’s power has to be “managed” by increasing engagement and cooperation, they realise the need for a viable balance of power in Asia. Behind the facade of Russian-Chinese bonhomie, are growing Russian apprehensions of China’s misuse of advanced military space technology that Russia provided to China in the recent past. The Chinese have illegally replicated and reverse-engineered Russian space and Defence technology.

Russian concerns have also risen because of Chinese inroads into what they regard as their backyard in Central Asia and the move of around three million Chinese settlers into the vast open spaces of Russian Siberia. Demographic change in Siberia is a frightening prospect for the Russians.

Balance of power

While the US finds it necessary to seek China’s co-operation in the UN Security Council and in dealing with issues like North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme, there appears to be growing consensus in the US on India’s role in developing a viable balance of power in Asia. Japan also holds similar views.

The real challenge to Indian diplomacy lies in how to utilise this situation to India’s advantage by securing enhanced cooperation in areas such as space and military technology transfers and in promoting ties on issues ranging from agriculture and infrastructure development, to energy security.

China’s policies of ‘containment’ need to be dealt with by a network of measures of counter-containment involving countries such as Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam and Japan, apart from more self-assured handling of economic relations with Taiwan and a less apologetic approach than we currently have on Tibet.

While India’s trade with China has developed significantly in recent years, there are concerns at not only the spiralling trade deficit, but also the predominant percentage of raw materials in India’s exports. More seriously, there are concerns in both Bangladesh and India at reports that China is considering diversion of the waters of the Brahmaputra River, for its own use.

Given India’s size and potential, it is inevitable that any relationship with China will have elements of cooperation and competition. China and India have demonstrated recently how they share common interests on issues, such as world trade and global warming.

This was evident in the Doha Round WTO discussions, where India and China found themselves ranged against the US and the EU. But, in an ultimate analysis, China’s approach to relations with India will be determined primarily on the basis of its assessment of India’s economic and military strength and the sagacity and acumen of India’s political leadership.

India in the 21 C

2009-01-03T22:49:00.000-08:00

The condition of India in the 21st C due to its own people is what is shown in these videos.

It shows how the people of India still shows the attitude of a donkey when it comes to caste system. It is high time that they change this attitude.

Blitz

2008-12-28T03:33:00.000-08:00

Blitzkrieg means "lightning war".

Blitzkrieg was first used by the Germans in the II WW. It was a spectacular tactic based on speed and surprise and needed the military force to be based around light tank units supported by air force and infantry (the ship-based cruise missiles had not been developed in those days). The tactic was developed in Germany by an army officer called Hans Guderian. He had written a military doctrine called "Achtung Panzer" which was presented to Hitler.

As a tactic it was used with devastating effect in the years of WW II and resulted in the British and French armies being pushed back in just a few weeks to the beaches of Dunkirk and the Soviet army being devastated in the attack on USSR in June 1941.

Khyber Pass ; A death trap for NATO.

2008-12-28T01:09:00.000-08:00

The Khyber Pass, (also spelled Khaiber or Khaybar) (altitude: 1,070 m or 3,510 ft) is the mountain pass that links Pakistan and Afghanistan. It has been an important trade route between Central Asia and South Asia and a strategic military location.

The frontier city of Peshawar boasts a major air base and Pakistani army and paramilitary garrisons. But the 200 Taliban guerrillas were in no rush as they methodically ransacked a NATO supply depot here two weeks ago.

The militants began by blocking off a long stretch of the main road, giving them plenty of time to burn everything inside, said one guard, Haroon Khan, who was standing next to a row of charred trucks.

After assuring the overmatched guards they would not be killed — if they agreed never to work there again — the militants shouted “God is great” through bullhorns. They then grabbed jerrycans and made several trips to a nearby gas station for fuel, which they dumped on the cargo trucks and Humvees before setting them ablaze.

The attack provided the latest evidence of how extensively militants now rule the critical region east of the Khyber Pass, the narrow cut through the mountains on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border that has been a strategic trade and military gateway since the time of Alexander the Great.

The area encompasses what is officially known as the Khyber Agency, which is adjacent to Peshawar and is one of a handful of lawless tribal districts on the border. But security in Khyber has deteriorated further in recent months with the emergence of a brash young Taliban commander who calls news conferences to thumb his nose at NATO forces, as well as with public fury over deadly missile attacks by American remotely piloted aircraft.

Khyber’s downward spiral is jeopardising NATO’s most important supply line, sending American military officials scrambling to find alternative routes into Afghanistan through Russia and Central Asia. Three-quarters of troop supplies enter from Pakistan, most of the goods ferried from Karachi to Peshawar and then 40 miles west through the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan.

A half-dozen raids on NATO supply terminals here have already destroyed 300 cargo trucks and Humvees this month. American officials insist that troop provisions have not suffered, but with predictions that the American deployment in Afghanistan could double next year to 60,000 soldiers, the pressure to secure safer transportation is even more intense.

For NATO the most serious problem is not even the terminals in Peshawar but the safety of the road that winds west to the 3,500-foot Khyber Pass. The route used to be relatively secure: Afridi tribesman were paid by the government to safeguard it, and they were subject to severe penalties and collective tribal punishment for crimes against travellers.

But now the road is a death trap, truckers and some security officials say, with routine attacks like one on Sunday that burned a fuel tanker and another last Friday that killed three drivers returning from Afghanistan.

"The road is so unsafe that even the locals are reluctant to go back to their villages from Peshawar,” said Gul Naseem, who lives in Landi Kotal, a town near the border.

The largest truckers’ association here has gone on strike to protest the lack of security, saying the job action has sidelined 60 per cent of the trucks that normally haul military goods. An American official denied that the drop-off had been that severe.

“Not a single day passes when something doesn’t happen,” said Shakir Afridi, leader of the truckers’ group, the Khyber Transport Association. He said at least 25 trucks and six oil tankers had been destroyed this month. “Attacks have become a daily affair,” he said.

There are new efforts to deter Taliban raids, including convoy escorts by a Pakistani paramilitary group, the Frontier Corps. But now militants are attacking empty — and unguarded — trucks returning to Pakistan. The road from Peshawar to the border has become far more perilous than the route on the other side in Afghanistan, truckers say.

“Our lives are in danger and nobody cares,” said Shah Mahmood Afridi, a driver who was in the returning convoy attacked riday. “They fired at the trucks and killed three men inside. There is no security provided when we are empty.”

Escalating violence on the Khyber road has paralleled the rise of Hakimullah Mehsud, a young Taliban commander and lieutenant of Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the main Pakistani Taliban faction.

Earlier this year, Hakimullah Mehsud’s forces took control of Orakzai Agency and instituted the strict Islamic laws known as Shariah. At a news conference there one month ago, Mehsud declared his intention to intensify attacks on NATO supply convoys. Some security officials say they believe he was behind the assassination in August of a rival militant leader, Hajji Namdar, in Khyber.

At the same time, another powerful Khyber warlord, Mangal Bagh, who officials say has not been attacking the convoys, has seen his influence shrink somewhat, easing the path for Mehsud’s authority to expand inside Khyber. “I have no love for Mangal Bagh, but the fact remains that Mangal Bagh does not do these attacks,” said Tariq Hayat, the Khyber political agent, the top government official in the region.

Increased missile attacks by American remotely piloted aircraft — like one that killed seven people in the South Waziristan Agency on Monday — have enraged residents in Khyber and other tribal areas near the border, increasing sympathy for attacks on convoys.

Afridi, of the truckers’ association, condemns the strikes and blames them for increased assaults on his drivers. “We are a tribal people, and if the Americans hit innocent people in Waziristan, we also feel the pain,” he said.

Raising the prospect of an even wider threat to the convoys, an influential Islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islami, staged a rally last week in Peshawar, turning out thousands to condemn the missile strikes. The marchers demanded that Pakistan end the NATO convoys, and they vowed to cut the supply lines themselves.

Taliban militants have also moved into Khyber after Pakistani military campaigns in nearby areas like Bajaur Agency. Their migration is reminiscent of a tactic that bedevilled the American military in Iraq for years — dubbed “whack a mole” by combat officers — in which guerrillas eluded large American combat operations and moved to take up positions in areas with understaffed troop contingents.

All those factors have been amplified, in the view of some officials, by the torpor of the Pakistani government. Mahmood Shah, a retired Pakistani army brigadier who until 2006 was in charge of security in the western tribal regions, said the government had the manpower to drive militants out of Khyber but had mounted only a weak response.

He recounted a recent conversation with a senior Pakistani government official. “You have the chance to wake up,” he said he told the official. “But if you don’t wake up now, there is a good chance you won’t wake up at all.”

Marriott targeted for becoming hub of International spies.

2008-12-14T06:42:00.000-08:00

It has been confirmed that deadly suicide attack on Luxury Marriott hotel was a well designed surgical operation against secret agents of US and its allies countries. “It is obvious that Marriott had become the main hub of international spies now a day”, An Islamabad based analyst disclosed.

She told that two floors of the Marriott were reserved for US officials and secret agents. “It is open secret that hotel lifts were not stopped at these floors”, She added, on condition of anonymity. She disclosed that an officer of British Scotland Yard was also a permanent resident of the hotel. “These spy rackets were the original target of the blast”, she asserted.

The Pentagon Officials confirmed the deaths of two US marines in blast who were staying in the hotel. Pentagon officially announced that its two marines succumbed to injuries in the blast. These agents were posted in US embassy in Islamabad; their names have yet not been disclosed.

Furthermore Danish foreign minister Per Stig Moeller also confirmed that an embassy official was dead but a secret agent of Denmark intelligence agency PET was gone missing since the deadly blast. 53-year-old Detective Inspector Karsten Krabbe, a security adviser to the Danish mission, had now been identified as being among those killed in the bombing. “It is with deep sorrow that we have learnt with certainty that PET has lost a competent, trusted and highly appreciated officer,” PET Director General Jakob Scharf said.

“We have lost all contact with him, he was talking about a member of the intelligence service stationed at Islamabad”, he told a local channel. The missing officer had been sent to Pakistan to improve security for Danish staff here. The Danish intelligence agency, PET, said in a separate statement that one of its agents, a security advisor, was missing, presumed dead. A second PET official was unhurt, it said.

It would deemed worthy to mention that an Urdu national daily The Jung has pointed out towards the secret activities going on in Marriot Hotel. It was reported that suspicious Steel Boxes were allowed entering without any particular scanning few days back this suicide blast took place.

However The Adviser to Prime Minister on Interior Rehman Malik had declined The theory that the presence of two US marines in hotel was the total attraction to the terrorists in a press briefing when he issued footage of how the suicide bomber along with dumper truck loaded with 600kg of explosive; blew himself in front of Hotel gate causing deadliest ever attack in Islamabad.

"Political analysts predict decline and breakup of U.S."

2008-12-14T05:47:00.000-08:00

Some leading political analysts have said that the economic turmoil in the United States has confirmed their long-held view that the country is heading for collapse, and will divide into separate parts.

In an interview with some respected dailies published on Monday: "The dollar is not secured by anything. The country's foreign debt has grown like an avalanche, even though in the early 1980s there was no debt. By 1998, when we first made our prediction, it had exceeded $2 trillion. Now it is more than 11 trillion. This is a pyramid that can only collapse."

The papers said that these dire predictions for the U.S. economy, initially made at an international conference in Australia 10 years ago at a time when the economy appeared strong, have been given more credence by this year's events.

When asked when the U.S. economy would collapse, the analysts said: "It is already collapsing. Due to the financial crisis, three of the largest and oldest five banks on Wall Street have already ceased to exist, and two are barely surviving. Their losses are the biggest in history. Now what we will see is a change in the regulatory system on a global financial scale: America will no longer be the world's financial regulator."

When asked who would replace the U.S. in regulating world markets, they said: "Two countries could assume this role: China, with its vast reserves, and Russia, which could play the role of a regulator in Eurasia."

Asked why they expected the U.S. to break up into separate parts, he said: "A whole range of reasons. Firstly, the financial problems in the U.S. will get worse. Millions of citizens there have lost their savings. Prices and unemployment are on the rise. General Motors and Ford are on the verge of collapse, and this means that whole cities will be left without work. Governors are already insistently demanding money from the federal center. Dissatisfaction is growing, and at the moment it is only being held back by the elections and the hope that Obama can work miracles. But by spring, it will be clear that there are no miracles."

They also cited the "vulnerable political setup", "lack of unified national laws", and "divisions among the elite, which have become clear in these crisis conditions."

They predicted that the U.S. will break up into separate parts like- the Pacific coast, with its growing Chinese population; the South, with its Hispanics; Texas, where independence movements are on the rise; the Atlantic coast, with its distinct and separate mentality; five of the poorer central states with their large Native American populations; and the northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong.

They even suggested that "Russia could claim Alaska - it was only granted on lease, after all."

On the fate of the U.S. dollar, they said: "In 2006 a secret agreement was reached between Canada, Mexico and the U.S. on a common Amero currency as a new monetary unit. This could signal preparations to replace the dollar. The one-hundred dollar bills that have flooded the world could be simply frozen. Under the pretext, let's say, that terrorists are forging them and they need to be checked."

When asked how Russia should react to this vision of the future, they said: "Develop the ruble as a regional currency. Create a fully functioning oil exchange, trading in rubles... They must break the strings tying them to the financial Titanic, which in our view will soon sink."

Time to answer some questions tells Whashington.

2008-12-07T08:39:00.000-08:00

Indian govt. have been asked by Washington to explain the circcumstance in which its citizens were killed by some terrorists in Mumbai. Well, don't be suprised, You heard it right!!! Perhaps the Indian may not want to know the circcumstance in which its citizens were slaughtered by americans in the past few months, but the Americans do want to know as to how it happened to their citizens.

Is it time for some introspection!!!?.

Was there any british nationals among terrorists?

2008-11-30T07:47:00.000-08:00

It has been reported by many sources that some of the terrorists that had attacked the hotels in Mumbai are of 'British nationality'.

This report have been denied by British PM who have told that it is impossible for a "white-land" national to carry out a terrorist attack.

"There are questions to be answered?"

2008-11-30T07:40:00.000-08:00

Politicians across the party lines have started to ask that obvious question which have been disturbing them for the last few days. Is the encounter that happened for the last few days at Taj Hotel,Nariman House and Trident Hotel a drama!!!?

The deaths of the security personnels appears to be an 'eye-washer' as was told by a "samaj sevak" to this reporter.He was wondering as to how a terrorist could fire at a security personnel since he is wearing a uniform. He has expressed concern at the deaths of so many terrorists who as per his explanation may have been just mistook the roads and Hotels for some rifle firing range or urban warfare training centers.

He has also wondered whether the security personnel was killed by their on collegues for the cover story of the encounter.Well, it is natural to feel so since it is the politicians style to stab at the back of others and not the security forces. As was said by a bystander "jealousy is the word for that!!!?."

Will history repeat itself !!!?

2008-11-23T06:33:00.000-08:00

The Soviet Union fought in Afghanistan from December 1979 till February 1989. Right now, U.S. and NATO operations in Afghanistan are coming to resemble a Soviet-style scenario and timeframe.

The two wars have some interesting similarities.

In 1986, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev voiced Moscow's decision to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan. Gorbachev's statement came seven years after the U.S.S.R. deployed its troops in the country. The Soviet side officially said it was impossible to solve the Afghan problem solely by using military force.

Although Moscow's decision to pull out from Afghanistan shocked many people, the then Afghan leader, Dr. Najibullah, and his entourage quickly recovered and proclaimed the so-called "national reconciliation" policy.

Najibullah then moved to convene the Loya Jirga, or Grand Assembly, which was originally attended only by Pashtun tribes, but later included other ethnic groups. He also called on the armed opposition to negotiate.

History tends to repeat itself. The U.S.-led anti-terrorist coalition, which also includes Russia, has been fighting in Afghanistan since October 2001. The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a NATO-led security and development mission in Afghanistan, was established by the United Nations Security Council in December 2001.

Although a troop withdrawal is still out of the question, the parties concerned have already started talking about the need to negotiate with the Afghan opposition.

On November 16, Afghan President Hamid Karzai called on Taliban leaders to launch talks. His somewhat categorical statement was addressed to part of the international community supporting the struggle against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

If Mullah Omar Mohammad, the Taliban leader, tells me that he wants to return to Afghanistan or to conduct peace talks, I will do anything to guarantee his safety, President Karzai said.

He said the international community should either oust him or not interfere with his actions, even if it opposed his plan.

NATO is so far the only international organization to support Karzai's move. If President Karzai and the government of Afghanistan make this choice, then we will support it, NATO spokesman James Appaturay said.

NATO believes that there is no purely military solution to this problem, Appaturay said.

It appears that all 40 nations that have contributed their troop contingents to ISAF share this position, all the more so as NATO virtually represents ISAF interests.

Russia, the only country to oppose the proposed talks, was indirectly supported by Washington.

Ambassador George A. Krol, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, said the talks could get underway if the Taliban laid down their weapons, returned to civilian life, renounced all ties with Al-Qaeda, recognized the primacy of the Afghan Constitution and president, and if they recognized the U.S. government as their partner.

However, this resembles the terms of surrender, rather than a format of future talks.

The United States should admit that it missed an excellent chance to convert Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), the official name used by the U.S. government for its contribution to the war in Afghanistan, into a peace-enforcement operation. Washington should have done this right after the creation of the interim Afghan administration in Kabul. A peace-enforcement operation should have been conducted on the initiative of that administration and should have also stipulated talks with the Taliban.

That opportunity was missed, however, and the Taliban have now seized the initiative. Naturally, the Taliban turned down Karzai's offer and said there could be no talk of a ceasefire agreement pending the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan.

The Taliban also noted Washington's obvious tactical mistake and inquired why President Karzai didn't think about negotiations in 2001.

Although the Afghan leader pondered and repeatedly noted the need for such dialogue, his stand had many opponents both inside Afghanistan and among international community members.

It turns out that President Karzai was right, after all. But the Taliban is unlikely to negotiate on Washington's terms.

There would be no need for peace talks, if the Taliban lay down their weapons, return to civilian life, renounce all ties with Al-Qaeda, recognize the primacy of the Afghan Constitution and president, and if they recognize the U.S. government as their partner.

Still this seems unlikely because the Taliban has seized military initiative and because any local peace talks should be preceded by a ceasefire. The current situation is no exception either.

Dr. Najibullah was a skilled politician who knew the feelings of ordinary Afghans. By proclaiming the national reconciliation policy and calling on the armed opposition to negotiate, he retained political initiative and won people's sympathies. He also got rid of state symbols that irritated the Afghan population and initiated a ceasefire agreement.

Right now, the traditionally influential ulems (experts on Islamic law) and the Muslim clergy of western Afghan provinces support the idea of negotiating with the Afghan Taliban, but do not want to hold talks with foreign members of the Taliban movement.

The national reconciliation program launched by Dr. Najibullah is appropriate in the present-day context. Most importantly, the international community should not hinder the efforts of President Karzai and the Afghan nation to negotiate with the Taliban because no one else knows this problem better.

No matter what we say about the allegedly pointless talks and a flawed ceasefire agreement with the Taliban, this choice belongs to the people of Afghanistan, and nobody else.