Flying in to Japan on August 30 a few hours after he had received from Washington the text of the initial policy he was to carry out, he paraphrased the actions he was to take: First, destroy the military power. Punish war criminals. Build the structure of representative government. Modernize the constitution. Hold free elections. Enfranchise the women. Release the political prisoners. Liberate the farmers. Establish a free labor movement. Encourage a free economy. Abolish police oppression. Develop a free and responsible press. Liberalize education. Decentralize political power. Separate the church from state.[Winners in Peace]
Sounds like the songsheet for Richard C Holbrooke and General David Petraeus. I thought Winds readers will be interested in the argument I make over at Pragati--The Indian National Interest Review on what the US ought to do in Pakistan. Is the Obama administration audacious enough to face the reality: there's no solution to Afghanistan unless Pakistan is structurally transformed.
The useless (to the Tibetans) charade of visiting the Dalai Lama
"If freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out about Chinese repression in China and Tibet" Nancy Pelosi said, "we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world".
She may not be exaggerating. But the issue is not about the freedom-loving people of the world, who are already speaking up against Chinese repression in Tibet.
Kalashnikovs are getting dearer
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Darra Adam Khel, a small town in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, 'consists of one main street lined with shops, with some alleys and sidestreets containing workshops'. Almost all the shops and the workshops are involved in the business of small, and not-so-small, arms. Officially, you need a permit to get there. Officially, you will not be issued with one.
Well, the news from Darra is that Kalashnikov prices are going up.
Predictions, wags will say, are mostly wrong. Especially when they are about the future.
If that is so, the margin of error in predicting the course of events in Pakistan is near infinite. Predictions, though, have to be made. So here is something, composed in the American intelligence community’s national intelligence estimate (NIE) format. Lazy analysts facing deadlines will find it useful.
(Cross posted from The Acorn)
As the report in Dawn put it, the Musharraf regime used force and guile to send Nawaz Sharif bouncing back to Hotel Saudifornia. But as perspicacious commentators have it, no one in Pakistan actually won this round.
Gen Musharraf may have purchased some breathing room by expelling Nawaz Sharif. But by deciding to violate a Supreme Court decision, he has opened the doors for a new confrontation with the court and Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry. If the court decides to confront him on this--and this will be the acid test of its newfound independence--he might well have to declare martial law. That too is unlikely to work--because the America won't be able to cover him beyond that point. But also because the people might come out on the streets.
America is ignoring the popular movement against Musharraf to its own disadvantage
PostGlobal's Amar Bakshi is going around the world, lugging a laptop and a camcorder, to get a sense of how people in different countries view America. If he ever makes it to Pakistan, he's likely to find a country where anti-Americanism is rife. Pakistanis have genuine reasons to hold a negative opinion of American foreign policy---though not necessarily for the reasons Americans may be inclined to believe. Right now, they have little reason to nurse good feelings towards America, given Washington's determined refusal to demonstrate the smallest amount of sympathy for democracy and freedom in the ongoing confrontation between the people and the dictator.
It's the anniversary of the 1857 uprising after all
Altaf Hussain's Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM) party rules the streets of Karachi. It also runs the provincial government of Sindh province for Gen Musharraf. Its hold over Karachi is such that it does not really need to throw in its lot with Gen Musharraf as he fights his own citizens. That it has done so---and in such a brazen manner---suggests that it has hopes or promises of being part of the ruling establishment beyond the scheduled elections later this year.
For the time being though, it appears that it has badly miscalculated. Last week it forced cable operators off the air in order to prevent them from broadcasting live scenes of Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry's rally in Lahore. Yesterday, it ensured that key roads and thoroughfares of Karachi were blocked, using trucks and vehicles to prevent the flow of traffic. Unknown gunmen shot at the residence of a leading lawyer representing the Chief Justice in his legal battle against the Musharraf regime. The official authorities, who too take orders from the MQM, did what they could to ensure that pro-Chief Justice activists and ordinary people were intimidated, while the MQM went about holding its own rally.
And today, MQM marksmen shot at the crowds.
The Acorn has been a supporter of the India-US nuclear deal as concluded between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President George Bush in March 2006. It has argued that for India, the benefits of the deal are worth making some difficult concessions---separating civilian nuclear facilities from military ones, and accepting constraints on the amount of fissile material India needs to produce nuclear weapons. The agreement allows India to retain a dynamic credible nuclear deterrent---although the contours of the deterrence need to change---while ending its costly isolation from the international nuclear power industry. The deal, moreover, is also part of a strategic transformation of relations with the United States mandated by convergence of interests in the geopolitics of the twenty-first century.
The Hyde Act, passed by the US Congress last year, introduced a qualitative change in the letter and spirit of the agreement that negotiators worked so hard to achieve. It has raised several contentious issues, but the most significant one involves linking America's keeping its end of the deal (to supply nuclear technology and fuel for India's civilian nuclear power industry) to India's non-testing of nuclear weapons.
Nothing comes in the way of Musharraf's political survival. Not least the rule of law.
The actual story is simple. A military dictator wanted to get rid of a judge who began to take his duties a little too seriously. But this story is set in Gen Musharraf's Pakistan, so a whole lot of farce masquerading as constitutional propriety is in order. The manner in which Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, Chief Justice of Pakistan until last Friday, was rendered "non-functional" has thrown the Pakistani legal fraternity, political establishment and news media into a frenzy of activity. The chances are, all this will be to little effect.
On the very day a 'senior administration official' from the Bush administration had lunch with Gen Musharraf, by sheer coincidence, the Pakistanis arrested a senior administration official from the Taliban.
Such antics apart, Pakistan would like nothing better to get the US off its back in Afghanistan. Here's a post that Winds readers must read on this subject.
Weapons in the final frontier
There are three ways of looking at it: China tested a new way to clean up orbital slots occupied by defunct satellites; it now has a way to take out space-based assets belonging to other countries; or, that it just created a whole lot of hazardous orbital junk up there. But let there be no mistake---it has also started this century's arms race. Star wars, ladies and gentlemen, has received a new lease of life.
What China did is not tremendously difficult to do. Both the United States and the Soviet Union have tested anti-satellite (ASAT) missiles, but the post-cold war world has held back from testing space-related weapons. That unspoken taboo is now broken.
Where is India in all this? At least three air chiefs have publicly talked about the establishment of an Aerospace Command. Although the government has not approved its formation, the Indian air force has started "work on conceptualising (space-based) weapons systems and its operational command system". And then there are accounts of DURGA or Directionally Unrestricted Ray-Gun Array, and KALI or Kinetic Attack Loitering Interceptor. Whether or not these projects exist outside the anyone's imagination is not known. But the folks at DRDO have a way with acronyms. (Actually, these weapons may belong to the family of advanced weapons known to professionals as Vertically Aligned Polar Omnidirectional Uniform Radioactive Weapon And Re-entry Equipment.)
For now, the United States has reacted with reproach at the Chinese for having defected first in this prisoner's dilemma game. But the Chinese may have settled the domestic debate in the United States weapons programmes in space. They may have settled it in India too.
Related Links: Two posts on this at DefenseTech; Theresa Hitchens's report on developments in military space; on China Confidential
The outcome of modern wars is decided in the mind
Armed combat, of course, is not about to disappear, although it may increasingly take the form of 'asymmetric warfare' as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. It could also take the shape of proxy war, like the one India is fighting in Jammu & Kashmir and the United States and NATO are fighting in Afghanistan. But days in which armed combat alone decided the fate of wars ended a long time ago: with World War II and perhaps, the India-Pakistan war of 1971.
This is old hat. All out war became unimaginable as soon as the major powers acquired nuclear weapons. Those that didn't have their own usually came under the umbrella of one of those that did. The game of nuclear deterrence--in spite of bizarrely escalating to the level where there were thousands of warheads--kept the peace. The stability/instability paradox argued that while nuclear deterrence ensured stability at the highest (nuclear) level of escalation, it nevertheless created instability at lower (non-nuclear) levels. The United States relied on this to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. But the Pakistani general staff realised just how low the ceiling was at Kargil in 1999-2000. They were fine so long as they were only arming and injecting jihadis into Jammu & Kashmir. But when they decided to take a step further and actually try to capture and hold territory, they quickly found out exactly where the buck stopped.
But the outcome of most of these asymmetrical, low-intensity wars can go either way.
