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)
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
Pointing and thinking from out of the tank
India pulled off a surprise this week when it successfully tested a prototype anti-ballistic missile system.
States in India's neighbourhood are on the brink --- why so, and why India has become part of the scenery.
Deciphering China is tough (well, not for some). And we need a Chinese Mitrokhin.
Kashmiri separatists --- some who think ethnic cleansing can be explained away by youthful indiscretion, and some whose words are taken a little too seriously. Here's why the jihadis can't stop fighting. Reporting Pakistani duplicity in the war on terror is as dangerous as it was.
On the Sachar Committee's report --- less patronisation and more economic freedom will benefit Muslims (and, for that matter, everyone else)
President Hu Jintao of China came, saw, signed agreements and left for Islamabad (to sign more agreements). Unfinished and inconclusive, the public debate over India's relations with China relations that preceded his visit will soon die down. In this debate, many of those with any experience actually dealing China on political issues had advised caution. Many of those whose primary experience of China has been through trade and investment advocated closer ties. The oversimplified question on everyone's lips was a cliche: Is China a friend or foe?
That, though, is a wrong question to ask. The inherent anthropomorphism in the framing of this question confuses the issue, for relations between states are not like relations between people.
Both Pakistani and foreign commentators have started drawing parallels between the Musharraf regime's killing of Nawab Bugti and the Yahya Khan regime's genocide in East Bengal in 1971. The latter led to the breakup of Pakistan and the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent nation. Bugti's killing, it is being argued, may now cause Balochistan to go the same way. On the face of it, the analogy sounds plausible. But look below the surface and there are several important differences that challenge this argument.
A quick round-up of events in and around the subcontinent, courtesy of Robi Sen and Nitin Pai of The Acorn
