After three days of acrimonious debate, the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group meeting at Vienna lifted the 34-year-old embargo on nuclear trade with India.

“An India-specific exemption from the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) was won only after a flurry of phone calls from President George W. Bush and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice to leaders of a handful of countries opposed to the deal, reports The Tribune.

“Given the time and energy it has invested into the civilian nuclear agreement, the Bush administration now expects something in return: that India will not immediately approach other NSG member states with its nuclear shopping list and disadvantage US businesses, which must wait to begin such commerce until the deal is approved by the US Congress.

“By winning the approval of the NSG, India is free to proceed with individual nuclear commerce agreements with all other NSG members other than the United States. There appears to be no written assurance between the two sides that India must wait before US firms can also compete for nuclear orders…” More here…

Another report adds: “New Zealand and several other countries had expressed fears over granting a waiver to India, which has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.” More here…

The aggressive/obscene/trivial performance of the TV channels in India during the past decade created a public disquiet/uproar. Despite government efforts/threats these channels continued to compete in trashing the basic tenets of journalism.

Finally, the private television broadcasters have realized the folly inherent in such a strategy and have announced their own code of conduct. India, like elsewhere, has a “toothless” media regulatory authority.

India’s leading TV channel (NDTV) says: “In a self-regulatory measure, private television broadcasters have announced the setting up of a News Broadcasting Standards (Disputes Redressal) Authority (NBA) to enforce its code of ethics and broadcasting standards.

The international students/journalists (from teenagers to senior citizens) that I teach in the universities in India, and now in Australia, often express concern about the credibility and role of the mass media.

The recent development is welcome, but it is shameful that the realization about the code of conduct and ethics should come so late in the day. But there would be lingering doubts regarding the effectiveness of the “new” code of conduct.

However, we all live on hope. “A nine-member authority will be chaired by Justice J S Verma, former chief justice (of India’s Supreme Court) and former National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) chairperson.

“Its members are, historian and author Ramachandra Guha, eminent sociologist Dipankar Gupta, former Nasscom chief Kiran Karnik, and economist and former under secretary general of United Nations, Nitin Desai.

“This is the first ever initiative through which the public can put forth their grievances over television content. The Authority will become operational on October 2 (Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday). Read the rest of this entry »

The global reaction to Obama’s choice of Joe Biden has just begun to emerge. Generally in the hours after a story like this breaks, newspapers around the world publish wire copy and only then, do they begin to opine for themselves.

First out of the gate have been the Indians and, as is commonly the case, the British.

Chidanand Rajghatta of The Times of India writes that the choice of Biden indicates where a new Democratic Administration’s focus of attention is likely to be - the Indian Subcontinent.

Rajghatta writes in part:

“Biden is especially intimate with the Indian sub-continent. With Biden, the region, especially Pakistan and Afghanistan, will get greater attention, with better clarity, than at any time in the past…. India won’t be neglected either, given Biden’s leading role in pushing through the nuclear deal.”

After describing how former Senator Allen’s “Macaca” moment, Rajghatta writes of Biden:

“In fact, such is Biden’s familiarity with the Indian community that he once made a faux pas of Macaca-like proportions, but with a happier ending. During a 2006 campaign appearance while still in contention for the presidential ticket, Biden, boasting about his strong relationship with Indian-Americans in his state, said ”You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. … Most Indian-Americans in Delaware didn’t take offense to Biden’s remark.”

Then according to a leading article from The Times of London, with the ‘Untested Obama’ putting Biden on the ticket, “The American presidential battle looks like a thriller.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Nepal and Pakistan provide good lessons in foreign policy to both Barack Obama and John McCain. The democratically-elected new Prime Minister of Nepal, Prachanda (photo above) who led a 10-year guerrilla war, now professes that his country’s era of “capitalist democracy” has begun. He was sworn in by Nepal’s first president, Ram Baran Yadav.

Lesson No. 1: The president or prime minister of any country must not be sponsored/pushed by the USA to remain friendly. Good diplomacy is making friends out of enemies.

Lesson No. 2: If the USA looks for, and sponsors, loyal and subservient leaders in the world, the public in that country would rise against their own subservient/sponsored leaders and the USA.

Lesson No. 3: It is a dangerous foreign policy to bribe foreign leaders/dictators and tempt them to follow the US policy. Only myopic policy needs to find supporters abroad with the help of bribery. Corruption would ultimately corrode the democratic functioning in the USA itself. Unaccounted billions of dollars went to the Musharraf regime from the US administration. In the end the USA has become a staunch enemy of both militants and the Pakistan public.

Lesson No. 4: To turn an enemy into a friend needs patience and sincere efforts. In other words SINCERITY and PERSEVERANCE. The BUSH and MUSHARRAF strategy of BLUFF and BLUSTER ultimately boomerangs. It also empowers/strengthens terrorism.

Lesson No. 5: NEVER take foreign policy decisions/actions unilaterally. There is the United Nations. Only dictators act unilaterally. The USA has lost much credibility with its actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even in Afghanistan there should be UN troops, if at all. The US will never be able to justify (or get results) by only taking NATO forces. The Musharraf tangle was solved when the US involved Britain, Saudi Arabia and other countries for parleys.

Lesson No. 6: If my neighbour has begun to treat his family violently, I can only call the police. I can’t force my way into my neighbour’s house and then tell him that I am going to stay there for years to prevent violence (as in Iraq).

Let’s come back to Nepal. After months of bickering among the political parties, a huge majority of the assembly has elected a former rebel as prime minister. The Economist notes many firsts. “(Prime Minister Prachanda) wore Western clothes (another first) but made a gesture to national custom by donning a traditional Nepali cap.

“It has been an astonishing transformation. For over a year the Maoists have been part of Nepal’s transitional government, heading ministries and becoming ambassadors. Many poor Nepalis will wonder whether, after ten years of war costing 13,000 lives, the Maoists will now sink into the comforts of power and prestige and forget them.

“The Maoists will have to prove them wrong. Their election manifesto called this the era of capitalist democracy in Nepal and stressed that the private sector is intrinsic to their plans. More immediately Prachanda must reassert the authority of the state, which has been badly eroded over the past two years as crime has spiralled and ethnic groups clamoured for their rights.”

More here…

NATO’s decision to freeze relations with Moscow and Washington’s inept handling of Pakistan are strategic foreign policy mistakes.

They are interlinked and give cause for celebration to al Qaeda and other rabid anti-Americans. The Western allies may regret them in coming years.

The mistakes stem from a conceit among US leaders including Barack Obama and John McCain that America is much more important for Russia than Russia is for the US. This should be reviewed seriously and with an open mind before it is too late.

At this time, the US needs partnership with Russia more than Moscow needs it. The Russians need only to do more business with the US and Europe, while Washington needs much more from Moscow.

A hostile Moscow can prevent the US from achieving the key foreign policy goal of promoting friendly democracies outside Western and Central Europe. It can delay stability in Kosovo, the Caucasus, Central Asia or the Middle East. It can also lay stumbling blocks to American access to energy sources outside the Middle East and Europe.

Worse, nuclear non-proliferation will be almost impossible making Israel’s long-term security unachievable.

If Europe disdains Moscow, Russia’s geography allows it to more easily turn to China, India, Iran and the Middle East for business and trade. In this sense, Moscow is not a demandeur at Europe’s door.

Instead, Europe needs access to Russia’s increasingly wealthy markets stretching from the North Sea to the Pacific for a vast variety of goods and services. Russia has less need for the full depth of European markets because it sells only oil and gas.

Currently it supplies 25% - 40% of Europe’s needs but in less than 10 years, it could divert much of this to the East. That would also impoverish transit countries like Poland and Ukraine, placing a bigger burden on Western taxpayers to aid them.

Some hardliner US analysts pretend that in a crunch London, New York and Frankfurt could freeze Russian state and private financial assets to coerce good political behavior by Moscow. This is summer silly season talk.

There will be panic if Washington uses American banking giants to punish Russia, because almost all do 45% - 60% of their business outside the US and have major foreign sovereign wealth funds as shareholders. All investors from the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere would lose trust immediately, causing an economic depression in the US and Europe beyond anything imaginable.

In contrast, the wider world may not care if Moscow temporarily punishes Europe by turning off oil and gas because no one else depends so heavily on it.

Now, Washington wants to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO although Russia’s main naval warships are harbored in Crimean ports, which are under nominal Ukrainian sovereignty. This is a formula for war and not just Cold War.

Escalating US-Russia tensions will be a boon for al Qaeda, Taliban and other terrorists. They are already building strong foundations of power because of Washington’s other strategic mistake.

That mistake is the abandonment of Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf. This correspondent wrote before the Pakistani elections that Musharraf’s departure would give al Qaeda and Taliban acolytes the opportunity to destabilize and grab Pakistan.

This has started. Musharraf tricked Washington into forking over $10 billion in military and other aid. But he was not an Islamic obscurantist like current leader Nawaz Sharif or corrupt like Asif Ali Zardari, who leads Pakistan’s largest party.

At least, he had some control over the heavily Islamized army and intelligence services. His quarrelsome “democratic” successors have no power at all.

Pakistan has suffered over 100 very violent attacks all across its territory in just seven months. It is already slipping into the hands of fanatical anti-Americans hiding within the army and the political parties of Sharif and Zardari.

Lethal attacks on American and NATO forces in Afghanistan have also multiplied, causing more Western fatalities this year than ever before. Their technical sophistication has increased manifold.

Against this backdrop, further isolating Moscow might tempt it to cozy up to radical anti-Americans across Asia. There are many precedents for this. Then, the results of these two strategic mistakes may become unmanageable.

India was split into two countries — Pakistan and India — in August 1947 when the British ended their colonial rule. Pakistan celebrates its independence day today (August 14), while India a day later on August 15. The photograph above shows Muhammad Ali Jinnah and M.K. Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi), both designated as “Father of the Nation” by the newly independent nations respectively.

This is a good occasion to remember the two great leaders and their vision of India and Pakistan.

Here is the quote from Mr Jinnah’s speech in Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly, August 11, 1947: “If we want to make this great State of Pakistan happy and prosperous we should wholly and solely concentrate on the well-being of the people, and especially of the masses and the poor…

“You are free — You are free to go to your temples mosques or any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan.”

“You may belong to any religion, caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the state… in due course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to Muslims- not in a religious sense for that is the personal faith of an individual- but in a political sense as citizens of one state.”

For the complete text of Jinnah’s speech please click here…

And here is the assessment of Mahatma Gandhi’s vision, please click here… “His (Gandhi’s) efforts to achieve reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims eventually brought him death. He was assassinated by a fellow Hindu, Nathuram Godse, who felt that Gandhi had betrayed the Hindu cause.”

I look back with regret that I could not study Greek, Latin and Sanskrit languages. It is easier to get good translations of the Greek and Latin classics than the Sanskrit literature. The ancient Sanskrit literature remains unparalleled its metaphysical as well as erotic flight.

I thank our co-blogger Hollyrob for sending me a write-up by David Shulman, Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, that highlights a major project to translate Sanskrit — the Clay Sanskrit Series.

“The series is named after the generous donor, (New Jersey born) John P. Clay. More than thirty volumes have already appeared in this extraordinary project, with another twenty or more in the pipeline. And so, for the first time in English, we have the beginnings of a representative canon of Sanskrit literary works, well translated and accessible to a wide public.

“The Clay volumes are patterned after the justifiably celebrated Loeb Classical Library for Greek and Latin: small, elegant books, beautifully printed, sparsely annotated, and bilingual. This arrangement naturally delights students of Sanskrit, who may dispense, at least temporarily, with their dictionaries and grammar books; but you do not have to know Sanskrit to enjoy reading these volumes.

“Indeed, their raison d’être is to win for the Sanskrit classics an audience outside India, and certainly beyond the limited scholarly circles that have, for the last two centuries or so, studied these works, produced critical editions and philological commentaries, and sometimes also translated them into Western languages, almost invariably badly.

“The sheer awfulness of most earlier translations from Sanskrit can help to explain the profound ignorance of Sanskrit literature among Western readers. What is not easy to explain is why the standard of acceptable translation was, from the very beginning, set so low–in marked contrast, for example, to translations from classical Chinese and Japanese.

“A part of the trouble no doubt stems from the particular difficulties of Sanskrit — its forbidding morphology, its fondness for extraordinarily lengthy nominal compounds, its vast lexicon, its daunting syntax, and above all its somewhat exotic, or in any case distinctive, world of thought and imagination.” More here…

Let us compare two New York Times reports. First, October 2001 report: “Pakistan’s intelligence service has had a longstanding relationship with Al Qaeda, turning a blind eye to growing ties between Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.” Second, August 2008: “American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan’s powerful spy service (ISI) helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, according to United States government officials.”

Two senior Indian diplomats were among 58 people killed in the July 7 attacks.

India has been pointing out the subversive role of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, for the past three decades and its active encouragement of terrorism. Periodically the US administration agrees about the nefarious role of the ISI. But then again goes off to sleep. And imagine that all this relates to America’s “closest ally in it’s fight against terrorism”!!! This is a theatre of the absurd, what else!!!

Interestingly, the NYT’s latest report about revelations regarding ISI came at a time when Pakistan prime minister was in Washington shaking hands with President George W. Bush. As a diplomatic move, Pakistan had announced on the eve of the prime minister’s visit to the US that the wings of the ISI have been clipped (see here…).

So while knowing all along that the ISI has played a tricky role with the blessings of the Pakistan presidents, why is it the US not prepared to call a spade a spade? Is it because the ISI knows too much about sensitive matters and the US administration is not ready to dismount the tiger? It seems that it is easier to remove a particular president or a leader in Pakistan but not tamper with the functioning of the ISI.

Let me quote two paras from the latest NYT report: “The conclusion (about ISI’s involvement) was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack (on Indian embassy in Kabul), the officials said, providing the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region.

“The American officials also said there was new information showing that members of the Pakistani intelligence service were increasingly providing militants with details about the American campaign against them, in some cases allowing militants to avoid American missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas.” More here…
(Meanwhile Pakistan denies the NYT report.)

While Indian leaders have appealed for calm after a series of co-ordinated bombings ripped through the Western Indian city of Ahmedabad on Saturday, leaving at least 45 people dead and more than 100 wounded, some things about the bombings make little sense, says The Independent.

“While Gujarat – whose recently re-elected Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, has been accused of allowing the 2002 killings to take place – is the centre of Hindu-nationalist, or so-called ’saffron’ politics, many of Saturday’s bombs went off in Ahmedabad’s old quarter, which has a largely Muslim population. Some were set off near a hospital.

“Indian media said the organisation (behind the attack) is believed to be a coalition of three well-known militant groups – the Students Islamic Movement of India (Simi), the Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Harkat ul-Jihad-al-Islami – but there was no independent confirmation of that.

“Despite widespread speculation over the bombers’ identity, the Home Minister, Shivraj Patil, refused to point the finger of blame. Arriving in Ahmedabad yesterday, he told reporters: ‘I do not wish to blame anyone right now, this is not in my capacity … It will not be right to give you half-baked information now. After we have received all details, we will shall inform you’.”

More here…

The New York Times says: “Over the past several years, terrorist attacks in India have become an everyday presence in everyday places. The targets seem to have nothing in common except that they are ordinary and brazenly easy to strike.” More here…

In a spirited defence of his stand in the Indian parliament regarding his support to the India-US nuclear deal on Tuesday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said: “Our critics falsely accuse us, that in signing these agreements, we have surrendered the independence of foreign policy and made it subservient to US interests. In this context, I wish to point out that the cooperation in civil nuclear matters that we seek is not confined to the USA.

“Change in the NSG guidelines would be a passport to trade with 45 members of the Nuclear Supplier Group which includes Russia, France, and many other countries. We appreciate the fact that the US has taken the lead in promoting cooperation with India for nuclear energy for civilian use. Without US initiative, India’s case for approval by the IAEA or the Nuclear Suppliers Group would not have moved forward.

“But this does not mean that there is any explicit or implicit constraint on India to pursue an independent foreign policy determined by our own perceptions of our enlightened national interest. Some people are spreading the rumours that there are some secret or hidden agreements over and above the documents made public. I wish to state categorically that there are no secret or hidden documents other than the 123 agreement, the Separation Plan and the draft of the safeguard agreement with the IAEA.

“I state categorically that our foreign policy, will at all times be determined by our own assessment of our national interest. This has been true in the past and will be true in future regarding our relations with big powers as well as with our neighbours in West Asia, notably Iran, Iraq, Palestine and the Gulf countries…” More here…

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US President George W. Bush have a reason to celebrate. In a way the triumphant nail-biting passage on Tuesday of the India-US Nuclear Deal in the Indian Parliament is their personal victory.

“The U.S. will urge other board members of the International Atomic Energy Agency to support an inspection plan tied to the accord during a meeting on Aug. 1,” State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos said in Washington.

“The 2005 accord signed between Singh and Bush gives India access to fuel and nuclear reactors without joining the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It would lift restrictions imposed on suppliers to provide India with atomic technologies since it tested a nuclear weapon in 1974 without being listed as an atomic weapons state.

“India can now seek the nuclear deal’s approval from the IAEA and the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a mandatory requirement before the U.S. Congress can ratify it. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino predicted approval in Congress should the plans succeed with the IAEA and the 45-nation suppliers group.” More here…

It was a tough battle for the Indian prime minister who staked his government’s survival on the parliamentary vote. And it was a close call. The Congress party-led government won with 275 lawmakers voting for it and 256 against. The number of abstentions was not immediately clear, although not all 543 members of Parliament’s lower house took part in the vote.

“The vote capped a week of intense politicking that saw the government rename an airport for a lawmaker’s father, promise a high-level job to another, and — rival politicians allege — hand out millions of dollars to many others in an effort to survive.” More here…

Although this landmark development is a major milestone in India-US economic and strategic relationship, nearly half the Indian lawmakers have opposed the deal in its present form. Meanwhile the ‘Marketing Guru of the World’ Dr. Jagdish Sheth, Professor of Marketing in the Goizueta Business School, Atlanta, USA, today asked India to look at issues in a “multi-centric” way instead of the present US-centric prism.

Sheth predicted that India and China, along with the United States, would form the “emerging geoeconomic triad” replacing the US-Canada, European Union and Japan triad. He said the 21st century would certainly belong to ‘Large Emerging Nations (LEN)’ as the 19th century belonged to America and 18th century to Europe. He said LEN would consist of India, China, Russia, Brazil and other emerging countries.

Author of the famous book ‘Chindia Rising: How China and India will benefit your business’, Dr Sheth predicted redefining of capitalism and democracy with compassionate capitalism, disciplined democracy and worldwide rise of spiritualism. More here…

On Tuesday the crucial vote in the Indian Parliament over the India-US civil nuclear deal would decide the fate of the present coalition government led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. “The Washington establishment is keeping its fingers crossed and lips sealed before Tuesday’s trust vote,” says The Economic Times.

“The White House and the State Department have refrained from offering a comment lest it be taken as interference in another country’s domestic affairs, but officials sure are hoping the Manmohan Singh government would survive. For, the government’s survival alone would give the embattled President George W Bush one last chance to score a major foreign policy success…

“On July 22, Manmohan Singh will find out whether his gamble has paid off - or if it has cost him his four-year-old administration. ‘If they are to keep their jobs, Singh and other Congress party members have to convince voters, as well as lawmakers who are sitting on the fence, that the leadership hasn’t sold out and turned India into a US pawn,’ The Time magazine said.

“Businessweek noted that eyeing more than $100 billion in new reactor construction contracts in just the next 10 years, US companies had been lobbying for the last three years in both New Delhi and the US for the passage of the nuclear deal. In the event of the nuclear deal falling through, the prospect of losing more lucrative contracts to the French and Russians has them worried.” More here…

According to Asia Times: “The latest New Delhi grapevine is that the government has been bribing members of parliament to come on board the deal and that the going rate of purchase of loyalty is US$6.25 million per member. Surely, that is corruption on an epic scale for even a notoriously corrupt country like India, which Transparency International places at somewhere near the bottom of the pit in the world community.

“The Congress party-led UPA faces a no confidence debate in parliament on Tuesday. This follows the withdrawal of support to the government by its left-wing allies in protest against the deal with the US. If the government loses the vote, early elections are likely - they are currently scheduled for May next year - and the deal could be abandoned.

“There is a pronounced non-proliferation agenda in the deal in so far as Delhi virtually surrenders its right to have nuclear tests and agrees to monitoring of its nuclear program, including fissile material production in perpetuity; the deal envisages that Indian foreign policy will be congruent to US global strategies.” More here…
And here…

If the arrival of The Beatles in the 1960s helped boost the backpacker traffic to India, it is now the turn of Americans to help in increasing, what is described as, ‘executive tourism’ to India. “India is now nearly as popular a destination for Americans as Spain,” reports The Canadian Press.

“Travel to India from the United States increased 10 per cent between 2006 and 2007, on top of an eight per cent rise the year before,according to the most recent data from U.S. Department of Commerce.

“The upsurge in Americans visiting India is part of broader boom in India’s tourism industry. In 2007, some five million travellers headed to India, nearly double from 2000, according to the Tourism Ministry. Visitors from the U.S. accounted for 15.7 per cent of the total.

“And while there are still plenty of Westerners seeking low-budget Eastern spirituality, India has recently started attracting a different class of visitors…These include a large number of business travellers, wealthy retirees out to explore India from the comfortable confines of an air-conditioned luxury bus or train…”

“More Americans visited India last year than went to Ireland or Thailand, according to the most recent data from U.S. Department of Commerce.” More here…

And here…

It is celebration time at my in-laws house in the hill State of Himachal Pradesh in India. A century-old Kalka-Shimla rail line that passes through their sprawling ancestral lower Himalayan farmland, has been finally chosen by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) as a world heritage site. More here…

During holidays I often walk along part of the rail track which, the Guinness Book of World Records states, offers steepest rise in altitude in the space of 96 kilometers, and whose more than two-thirds of the track is curved, sometimes at angles as sharp as 48 degrees. The picturesque rail journey begins at 640 meters above sea level at Kalka to the lofty heights of Shimla (former summer capital during the British colonial days) at 2,060 meters.

A living example of the extraordinary engineering feat of the early mechanical age, this narrow gauge train track - 2 ft 6 in (762 mm) - climbs steep cliffs and the train huffs and puffs at a leisurely pace of maximum 22-km an hour through deodar, pine, ficus, oak and maple woods and completes its 96-km journey in five hours. (The rail track passes through my in-laws farms where they grow apple, plum, apricot, walnut and cherries.)

The memorabilia of the British Raj in the form of old wall clocks, semi-porcelain hand-painted crockery, vintage communication and track control system, called Neals Token Instrument System, is still in use on the rail stations en route. In 1827, Lord Amherst, the Governor-General of India, spent the summer at Shimla and found the place to his liking. It was under his successor, Lord William Bentinck, that Shimla became the summer headquarters of the government of (British) India.

The Kalka-Shimla rail was formally opened on November 9, 1903. (The same year when Orville Wright flew an aircraft with a petrol engine at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.) Read the rest of this entry »

Pakistan has come under a blistering attack from Afghanistan and India. Afghanistan alleges that Pakistan’s intelligence service (ISI) and army are behind the bloody Taliban-led insurgency, calling the security forces the “world’s biggest producers of terrorism and extremism.” While India has blamed Pakistan’s ISI for the suicide attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul, and said: “ISI is playing evil. The ISI needs to be destroyed.” (What is ISI?…Click here…)

Could it be that Pakistan’s ISI believes that Taliban would be the ultimate winner in Afghanistan?

Last year the newly released US official documents stated that the Pakistani government gave substantial military support to the Taliban in the years leading up to the September 11 attacks, sending arms and soldiers to fight alongside the militant Afghan movement. The suspicion has lingered that some elements of Pakistani intelligence are still protecting the Taliban and its al-Qaida allies in the autonomous tribal areas along the Afghan border.

Islamabad has acknowledged diplomatic and economic links with the Taliban but has denied direct military support, The Guardian reported. The US intelligence and state department documents, released under the country’s freedom of information act, show that Washington believed otherwise.

Afghanistan has accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of involvement in a number of recent attacks in the country — an attempted assassination of President Hamid Karzai in April, the July 7 suicide bomb attack outside Indian Embassy in Kabul that left over 60 people killed and a spate of suicide bombings and roadside bombs blamed on Taliban militants. More here…

The New York Times says: “Afghanistan is in some ways the test case of the extent to which India is willing to use its hard power to advance its strategic and commercial interests.” The NYT quotes Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, a research fellow at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies: “As India’s influence grows it will become increasingly involved in the local politics of a foreign country. It cannot afford to see itself as an innocent bystander anymore.”

The NYT adds: “C. Raja Mohan, an Indian foreign policy analyst, said the time had come for India and Pakistan to look beyond their traditional rivalries and fuse a joint strategy to confront extremists operating on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Such an initiative, he argued, would be to both countries’ advantage.” More here…

Another Indian expert has this to say: “Neither the Afghans nor the Pakistanis, as distinct from their governments, concede that they and the US-led forces have a common enemy. The ‘war on terror’ is perceived widely as a war on the people, and not only because of allegedly accidental strikes on Pashtun homes and hamlets in the border areas. The fact is that the antiterrorist credentials of ‘the Americans and the agencies’ lack credibility because of a pro-Taliban past.

“Nor do the governments of the triangle see a common enemy in terrorism as such. On paper, New Delhi, Islamabad and Kabul may be allies in a US-headed antiterror front. But, in practice, they have only been busy trying to turn the alliance and its leader against each other. There would seem to be no sound reason to hope for early arrival of a time when the region won’t reverberate with terrorist blasts.” More here…

Meanwhile here is how Taliban recenly breached NATO base in a deadly clash…Please click here.. And here…

Even Pakistan’s capital city Islamabad is under serious militant threat with foreign diplomats making preparations to flee at short notice. Read the full story here…

It’s fair to say that at the just-concluded G-8 Summit in Japan, the world’s leading industrialized nations haven’t covered themselves in glory.

Pierre Rousselin writes for France’s Le Figaro newspaper:

“Confronted with skyrocketing oil prices, the rising cost of food, the financial crisis, chaos in the money markets and finally, global warming, the powerful have no convincing response to provide the world.

On all of these issues - and without forgetting the Iranian nuclear threat, the G-8 Summit in Japan has illustrated the impotence of the major industrialized nations which, until recently, were able to impose their views to the rest of the planet.”

And the culprit - especially in regard to climate change?:

“The absence of vision is largely the result of the now-concluding American administration, which only recently recognized the existence of the problem.”

Read the rest of this entry »

The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has emerged as the first leader in the world who seems to have understood the implications of the looming food crisis and taken a practical step. Brown has issued a clarion call to his countrymen to wake up and stop wasting food. Will the G8 leaders support him in making this a worldwide campaign?

(More than 1,300,000 tonnes of food grain - worth millions of dollars - went rotten in storage over the past decade in India, officials admit.) (Read the BBC report here…)

The Independent reports: “Supermarkets (in Britain) will be urged to drop ‘three for two’ deals on food that encourage shoppers into bulk-buying more than they need, often leading to the surpluses being thrown away. The scandal of the vast mountains of food that are thrown away in Britain while other parts of the world starve is revealed in a (British) Cabinet Office report today. It calls for a reduction in food waste: up to 40 per cent of groceries can be lost before they are consumed due to poor processing, storage and transport.”

Ironically, a top British leader is now acknowledging the accuracy of the vision of Mahatma Gandhi, the arch foe of the British empire, that mindless consumerism would create a crisis sooner than later. Gandhi’s oft quoted words: “There is enough for everyone’s need…but not enough for everyone’s greed.” (For more on Gandhi pl click here…)

Let’s get back to The Independent story: “The (Cabinet) report says UK households could save an average of £420 per year by not throwing away 4.1 million tonnes of food that could have been eaten. The Government is to launch a campaign to stamp out Britain’s waste food mountains as part of a global effort to curb spiralling food prices.

“Gordon Brown said he would make action to tackle the soaring cost of food a priority at the G8 summit starting today in Japan. At his first G8 summit as Prime Minister, Mr Brown will argue that the world’s richest nations must do more to tackle the food price crisis. He will urge them to halt the decline in funding for agricultural projects in Africa, so the continent can boost farm production by 6 per cent a year.” More here…

And here is the The Times report… And here…

“World leaders are not renowned for their modest wine selections or reticence at the G8 summit’s cheese board. Shortly after calling for us all to waste less food, Gordon Brown joined his fellow G8 premiers and their wives for an eight-course Marie Antoinette-style ‘Blessings of the Earth and the Sea Social Dinner’.” More here…

Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, a former Chief of Staff of the Indian Army, led India to victory against Pakistan in the 1971 war that resulted in the partition of Pakistan, and the formation of Bangladesh (earlier known as East Pakistan).

The Guardian obituary here…

Manekshaw (April 3, 1914 - June 27, 2008) died aged 94. Silloo, his wife, passed away in 2001. He is survived by his daughters (Sherry and Maja), and was born into a Parsi family.

The Times obituary here…

Senator Barack Obama’s condolence message on his website: “I offer my deep condolences to the people of India, on the passing of Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw. He was a legendary soldier, a patriot, and an inspiration to his fellow citizens. Field Marshal Manekshaw provided an example of personal bravery, self-sacrifice, and steadfast devotion to duty that began before India’s independence, and will deservedly be remembered far into the future.”

Click here to read what some other bloggers have to say…

Photo (above) of the cover page of a book on Sam Manekshaw. To read a review of the book please click here…

Oy. As if Senator Obama’s team doesn’t already have a full time job swatting down rumors that he’s a double secret Muslim, over in India the Hindus are trying to help out Obama’s campaign. They are doing so by praying for him and sending a gift half way around the world.

NEW DELHI: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama can now expect help from an unexpected quarter — Lord Hanuman.

All-India Congress Committee member Brij Mohan Bhama has organised a 11-day religious ceremony at Karol Bagh here for his success in the U.S. elections.

The idea of sending an idol of Hanuman dawned on him after friends in the United States mentioned a “prominent American politician who carried a miniature Hanuman idol in his pocket for luck,” Mr. Bhama said speaking on the first day of the ceremony on Tuesday.

The idol in question is 21 inches long, weighs 15 kilograms (more than thirty pounds) and is made of gold plated brass. The statue will go through an eleven day series of ceremonies and isolation in a temple before being sent to Obama in time for the Democratic Convention.

It’s a nice touch - a thoughtful gift and it seems to come from a genuine desire for Obama to do well. However, it may just be a wee bit naive in terms of political reality. I simply can’t wait to see what the Right wing pundits will make of this when it arrives.

Some attention is being given to an only partly humorous video from reason.tv which takes a fairly disparaging look at American reactions to various labor threats. The phrasing is worth noting:

Sometimes the threat comes from China, Japan, or outsourcing to India. Today, it’s NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement—you know, all those Mexicans taking our jobs.

The article then goes on to quote Drew Carey ranting about “the robot threat.”

“Now, think about it,” says Reason.tv host Drew Carey. “How are we supposed to compete against something that doesn’t get paid, doesn’t get health insurance, and never goes on breaks?”

“No job is safe from the robot threat!”

A couple of the usual sources have a good guffaw over this. (Give a wave to James Joyner and Professor Bainbridge.) However, the subtext of the original article follows an all too common theme. Anyone expressing concern over the so called “free trade” (which is quite obviously unfair trade in a cheap costume) effects on workers in the United States should immediately be lumped in with Luddites and those fretting over “brown skinned people sneaking over the border and taking our jobs.” The fact, of course, is that we’re talking about three very different issues here.

While many of us maintain a soft spot in our hearts for John Henry’s epic struggle against the rise of the machine age, the Luddite movement was dead before it was fully born. Worries about illegal immigrants sneaking over the border at night to “steal our jobs” is yet another distraction. Few, if any, high end, lucrative jobs are going to be filled by undocumented migrant workers. The real issue there speaks to a failure to enforce existing employment laws and is a discussion for another day.

The true annoyance here is the obvious conflation of the above two scenarios with the very real issue of job outsourcing and the government’s reaction to it. Anyone thinking that such things don’t happen or are the griping of “old world thinkers” who are standing in the way of progress and globalization are simply in denial. The issue is real and it confronts us today. Advancements in technology have allowed telecommuting to provide great benefits in a wide variety of areas. These include computer application development, engineering, CAD/CAM, graphics design and customer service among others. But far too many large corporations immediately made the jump from “remote working” to “very remote working” by handing these jobs off to basement rate cheap labor markets.

Usually these transitions come in the form of attractive sounding “offers” where employees are informed that their positions are being reallocated to “global resources.” The “offer” ensures that the worker will be given first choice for other, parallel positions inside the company or the lure of a “bridge to early retirement.” The reality, of course, is that other positions are scarce when every department is under similar pressure to globalize. The offer of “retirement” is not attractive to people who were still years from their target retirement date. More often than not the workers find themselves - well into middle age - suddenly tossed out into a fiercely competitive labor market and winding up in positions where they have to learn entire new sets of technical jargon involving phrases like, “grande, latte and half-caf.”

At the same time, many of these companies are recording record profits while collecting huge tax benefits at both the federal and state levels. Take a look at the list of companies, many of which are heavy hitters in the job outsourcing debacle, who wound up paying ZERO taxes in 2007 while sending our jobs overseas.

The survey said the following 16 companies, whose profits ranged from $42 million to $2.9 billion, paid no Federal tax last year: I.B.M., General Motors, Aetna Life and Casualty, Baxter Travenol Laboratories, Carolina Power and Light, Illinois Power, Corning, Hewlett-Packard, Ashland Oil, Greyhound, Ogden, Sequa, Pennzoil, Goodyear Tire and Rubber, Consumers Power and Gulf States Utilities.

It is not the Federal government’s place to tell industry who and where they can hire workers. But by the same token, the Feds are under no obligation to give such huge benefits to the worst offenders. When you operate your company in the country which made it possible for you to achieve such success, you have a responsibility to give something back to that country. Make a profit? Yes. But you owe some loyalty beyond the circle of your board of directors and largest investors. You also owe some loyalty to the workers who helped you get there. The government needs to stop turning a blind eye to this. Incidentally, this is a subject which John McCain gets wrong, Obama gets occasionally right (but then often back peddles in his next speech) and Bob Barr nails right on the head.