How Spying Props Up the Decaying American Empire

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January 20, 2014

By Alfred McCoy

For more than six months, Edward Snowden's revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany's Der Spiegel, and Brazil's O Globo, among other places. Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA's expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington. The answer is remarkably simple. For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA's latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line -- like, in fact, the steal of the century. Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSA's surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.

For well over a century, from the pacification of the Philippines in 1898 to trade negotiations with the European Union today, surveillance and its kissing cousins, scandal and scurrilous information, have been key weapons in Washington's search for global dominion. Not surprisingly, in a post-9/11 bipartisan exercise of executive power, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have presided over building the NSA step by secret step into a digital panopticon designed to monitor the communications of every American and foreign leaders worldwide.

What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long history of U.S. surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet's last superpower. What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America's closest allies.

Not only does such surveillance help gain intelligence advantageous to U.S. diplomacy, trade relations, and war-making, but it also scoops up intimate information that can provide leverage -- akin to blackmail -- in sensitive global dealings and negotiations of every sort. The NSA's global panopticon thus fulfills an ancient dream of empire. With a few computer key strokes, the agency has solved the problem that has bedeviled world powers since at least the time of Caesar Augustus: how to control unruly local leaders, who are the foundation for imperial rule, by ferreting out crucial, often scurrilous, information to make them more malleable.

A Cost-Savings Bonanza With a Downside

Once upon a time, such surveillance was both expensive and labor intensive. Today, however, unlike the U.S. Army's shoe-leather surveillance during World War I or the FBI's break-ins and phone bugs in the Cold War years, the NSA can monitor the entire world and its leaders with only 100-plus probes into the Internet's fiber optic cables.

Russia's Homegrown Terror Threat

Published on The National Interest (http://nationalinterest.org)

Source URL (retrieved on Jan 21, 2014): http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/russias-homegrown-terror-threat-9734

January 21, 2014

Andrew Foxall

Since at least the autumn of 1999, when the second Chechen war began, Russia has been mired in terrorist-related violence linked to the North Caucasus. What makes the recent suicide bombings in Volgograd, in October and December 2013, stand out—and what has been overlooked in much of the reporting of the events—is the prominence of ethnic Russian converts to Islam amongst the individuals who planned and carried out the attacks. For a long time the sole preserve of Chechens and other individuals from the North Caucasus, increasing numbers of ethnic Russians are joining the insurgency. Converted and radicalised by the situation in the North Caucasus, these ethnic Russian jihadists are looking beyond the region for their next cause célèbre.

While it is true that a Dagestani, Naida Asiyalova, was responsible for the suicide bombing in Volgograd on 21 October 2013, she was helped in preparing the attack by her husband, Dmitry Sokolov, an ethnic Russian who had converted to Islam and fought in the North Caucasus insurgency (under the name ‘Abdul Jabbar’). The bombing in Volgograd on 29 December was carried out by an ethnic Russian, Pavel Pechyonkin, who had converted to Islam in January 2012. It remains unclear who carried out the attack on 30 December, but it would not be surprising if ethnic Russians were involved.

The involvement of ethnic Russian converts to Islam in the North Caucasian insurgency is a recent development. The first known examples are Vitaly Zagorudko and David Fotov, who were killed, in 2004, in Stavropol Krai after planning a terrorist attack in the region. The following year, in 2005, Viktor Semchenko and Yuri Menovshchikov were killed after carrying out four bombings in Voronezh, in which one person was killed. These cases, however, were the exception rather than the rule.

The situation changed after Alexander Tikhomirov (better known as ‘Said Buryatsky’), an ethnic Russian, went to the North Caucasus, in late 2007 or early 2008. Buryatsky quickly began to recruit ethnic Russians into the insurgency, chiefly through his online presence. His message was convincing, if simple: Russia is dying, and only through Islam is your future assured. These recruits carried out a number of high-profile attacks, including that on the Nevsky Express train in 2009, which killed 25 people, and were suspected of being involved in others, including the suicide bombing at Moscow’s Domodedovo International Airport, in 2011, in which 37 people were killed.

So successful was Buryatsky that he became one of the insurgents’ main ideologues. His experience set an example to which other ethnic Russian jihadists would aspire. In 2012, it was reported that Alexei Pashintsev (‘Emir Abdul-Malik’), an ethnic Russian, had assumed the leadership of the ‘Riyad-us Saliheen Suicide Bomber Battalion’ in Dagestan. The Battalion is part of the broader ‘Dagestan Vilaiyat’ group, which Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the Boston marathon bombers, had sought to join when he travelled to the republic in 2012.

Obama's Foreign Policy to Nowhere

James Jay Carafano | 

January 21, 2014

http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/obamas-foreign-policy-nowhere-9741

Sir Hew Strachan, an advisor to the Chief of the British Defense Staff, made some ripples across the pond with his judgment on the U.S. president’s foreign policy. “Obama has no sense of what he wants to do in the world,” Strachan said.

Coming from a world-class military historian, it was a stunning rebuke.

Strachan gives Mr. Obama’s Middle East policy, specifically his muddled approach to Syria, two thumbs down. Obama's initiative there, he says, has taken the situation on the ground "backwards instead of forwards." That’s just one conclusion he delivers in his forthcoming book, The Direction of War, which evaluates how modern political leaders utilize strategy.

Portraying Obama as the Inspector Clouseau of foreign policy may pump Strachan's book sales. (After all, it worked for Gates.) But his assessment seems a bit off the mark.

Since the start of his second term, Mr. Obama has exhibited a pretty clear idea of what he wants to do in the world—and that is to have as little as possible to do with it until he gets out of office. The President's primary objective appears to be "no more Benghazis"—just ride out the second term, go build a library, and then mimic the line of his first former defense secretary: “Hey, everything was fine when I left!”

A penchant for risk-aversion seems to be the chief hallmark of U.S. foreign policy today. The "red line" over Syria’s use of chemical weapons, a particular target of Strachan's academic scorn, is a case in point. It was a way of doing nothing about that nation’s spiraling civil war. No one appeared more unprepared than the president when it turned out that the red line would actually require the U.S. to get engaged. Likewise, leaping at the chemical weapons deal was all too predictable. It offered the White House a quick exit from getting drawn more deeply into the conflict.

But Obama faces an enduring dilemma. As Syria showed, while he might want to leave the world alone, the world doesn't seem to feel the same way about the United States. There is just too much time left in office to coast till the end, pack up the Nobel Prize, and move back to Hawaii. The Oval Office has found it has to do something to fill the vacuum, opening space for other influences to drive foreign affairs—as long as they don’t push the president too far from his chosen path.

So a second vector has sprouted up to drive the direction of U.S. foreign policy, one not too far from the president's heart: an infatuation with multilateral process. This scratches Mr. Obama's progressive itch. It is an item of progressive faith that, as long as we’re “engaged in a process" and mean well, we must be making progress. Thus, multilateral process became the fallback solution for Syria, once the red line gave way. The U.S. is currently engaged in multiparty talks about Syria in Geneva. Likewise, the administration is upbeat about “progress” between the Israelis and the Palestinians, because Secretary of State John Kerry has worked hard to get peace "talks" going again. And then, there is the ultimate bright, shiny object: nuclear talks with Iran.

Is the New York Times Biased?

Published on The National Interest (http://nationalinterest.org)

Source URL (retrieved on Jan 21, 2014): http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-new-york-times-biased-9743

January 21, 2014

Stan Veuger

Let’s play a little game. We’re going to imagine three scenarios that could play out in American politics, and then we’re going to discuss which one of the three is best suited for a feature-length movie, staggering amounts of media attention, and particularly upset New York Times editorials. And then we’ll see if the world works the way we think it does.

Scenario 1: A prominent politician with a national reputation and presidential ambitions oversees a tax collection agency that uses the power of the federal government to target core supporters of the opposition in the run-up to an election, keeping them from organizing, fund-raising, and educating, violating their constitutional rights and potentially changing the outcome of an election that could bring propel him to the presidency for four more years. His response: he appoints a prominent campaign donor to investigate the scandal.

Scenario 2: A prominent politician with a national reputation and presidential ambitions oversees an agency that is found to have failed to provide sufficient security to diplomats overseas by a bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, resulting in the first murder of a U.S. ambassador in decades. Her response: “What difference, at this point, does it make [3]?”

Scenario 3: A prominent politician with a national reputation and presidential ambitions oversees an agency that shuts down several highway lanes to punish a political opponent, resulting in increased congestion. His response: he fires some of his closest aides, apologizes incessantly, and collaborates with aggressive inquiries of the traffic trouble.

First, the feature-length movie. Federal bureaucrats interpreting the tax code and possibly affecting election outcomes, while not actively stuffing ballot boxes, does not a blockbuster make. We could throw in some romance, but in the absence of whistleblowers there is really not much here in terms of drama. A terrorist attack that leaves four Americans dead, with personal heroism in the face of an enemy and an unresponsive bureaucracy -- yes, that is much better material. The screenplay basically writes itself. And it is certainly better movie material than the story of a traffic jam in a state without known zombie attacks.

Obama's Foreign Policy to Nowhere

Published on The National Interest (http://nationalinterest.org)

Source URL (retrieved on Jan 21, 2014): http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/obamas-foreign-policy-nowhere-9741

January 21, 2014

James Jay Carafano

Sir Hew Strachan, an advisor to the Chief of the British Defense Staff, made some ripples across the pond with his judgment [3] on the U.S. president’s foreign policy. “Obama has no sense of what he wants to do in the world,” Strachan said.

Coming from a world-class military historian, it was a stunning rebuke.

Strachan gives Mr. Obama’s Middle East policy, specifically his muddled approach to Syria, two thumbs down. Obama's initiative there, he says, has taken the situation on the ground "backwards instead of forwards." That’s just one conclusion he delivers in his forthcoming book, The Direction of War, which evaluates how modern political leaders utilize strategy.

Portraying Obama as the Inspector Clouseau of foreign policy may pump Strachan's book sales. (After all, it worked for Gates.) But his assessment seems a bit off the mark.

Since the start of his second term, Mr. Obama has exhibited a pretty clear idea of what he wants to do in the world—and that is to have as little as possible to do with it until he gets out of office. The President's primary objective appears to be "no more Benghazis"—just ride out the second term, go build a library, and then mimic the line of his first former defense secretary: “Hey, everything was fine when I left!”

A penchant for risk-aversion seems to be the chief hallmark of U.S. foreign policy today. The "red line" over Syria’s use of chemical weapons, a particular target of Strachan's academic scorn, is a case in point. It was a way of doing nothing [4] about that nation’s spiraling civil war. No one appeared more unprepared than the president when it turned out that the red line would actually require the U.S. to get engaged. Likewise, leaping at the chemical weapons deal was all too predictable. It offered the White House a quick exit from getting drawn more deeply into the conflict.

But Obama faces an enduring dilemma. As Syria showed, while he might want to leave the world alone, the world doesn't seem to feel the same way about the United States. There is just too much time left in office to coast till the end, pack up the Nobel Prize, and move back to Hawaii. The Oval Office has found it has to do something to fill the vacuum, opening space for other influences to drive foreign affairs—as long as they don’t push the president too far from his chosen path.

So a second vector has sprouted up to drive the direction of U.S. foreign policy, one not too far from the president's heart: an infatuation with multilateral process. This scratches Mr. Obama's progressive itch. It is an item of progressive faith that, as long as we’re “engaged in a process" and mean well, we must be making progress. Thus, multilateral process became the fallback solution for Syria, once the red line gave way. The U.S. is currently engaged in multiparty talks about Syria in Geneva. Likewise, the administration is upbeat about “progress” between the Israelis and the Palestinians, because Secretary of State John Kerry has worked hard to get peace "talks" going again. And then, there is the ultimate bright, shiny object: nuclear talks with Iran.

Misreading Obama

Published on The National Interest (http://nationalinterest.org)

Source URL (retrieved on Jan 21, 2014): http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/misreading-obama-9739

January 21, 2014

David Shorr

Vali Nasr doesn’t think very highly of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. In his book Dispensable Nation [3], Nasr charges the President with foreign-policy malpractice, flouting basic standards of American international leadership. To catch an administration in this kind of flagrant incompetence is quite scathing stuff, and especially juicy coming from one who served in that very government.

Unless, of course, the critique actually represents the author’s mere disagreement with the policy rather than the administration’s violation of objective principles. Nasr slams his former colleagues for being blind to realities in today’s world, when they simply see the world differently. And in at least one case, the Iranian nuclear program, the months since the book’s publication have put Nasr’s analysis to the test.

The interim deal reached recently in Geneva does no more than lay the groundwork for a possible diplomatic resolution. Yet according to Nasr’s confident appraisal of the policies in Washington and Tehran, we shouldn’t even have been able to reach this point. From the American side, a president hypersensitive about any perceived softness had supposedly backed himself into a corner—turning down multiple diplomatic openings in favor of sanctions, threats of force, and even more sanctions. Meanwhile, Washington’s heavy reliance on pressure tactics could only stiffen Iranian leaders’ resistance to compromise:

Column: The future of war includes drones, cyber-sieges and space

An unmanned drone is used to patrol the U.S.-Canadian border.

By Thomas E. Ricks, Foreign Policy

Posted: 01/20/14,

Changes in the nature of warfare profoundly shape both the manner in which the state is organized and the law itself. An obvious example of this is how the adoption of gunpowder warfare and the emergence of small standing armies helped to produce the absolute monarchies of the 16th and 17th centuries. In turn, the levee en masse — the mass mobilization of conscripts — by Napoleon’s revolutionary armies helped spell the beginning of the end for those monarchies. The need to raise and maintain ever-larger armies also required the creation of the apparatus of the modern state such as a census, universal taxation and basic education.

Today, we are at another major inflection point, one in which technology is reshaping the way wars are fought. The future of warfare will be shaped by the role of ever-smaller drones; robots on the battlefield; offensive cyber war capabilities; extraordinary surveillance capabilities, both on the battlefield and of particular individuals; greater reliance on Special Operations Forces operating in non-conventional conflicts; the militarization of space, and a Moore’s Law in biotechnology that has important implications for bio-weaponry.

Consider a few examples:

The Manufacture of Life: Scientists can now manufacture living organisms, including new viruses. These breakthroughs are useful to scientists but also, potentially, to terrorists or unscrupulous states.

Drones: Drones allow us to assassinate individuals a world away by remote control and they are proliferating in unexpected ways. Already, the brief monopoly that the United States, Britain and Israel have had on armed drones has evaporated. China took the United States by surprise in 2010 when it unveiled 25 drone models at an air show, some of which were outfitted with the capability to fire missiles. This year, the Chinese disclosed that they had planned to assassinate a notorious drug lord hiding in a remote part of Myanmar with an armed drone but opted to capture him instead.

Cyber Command Budget More Than Doubles

Aliya SternsteinNextgovJanuary 14, 2014

The House approved a short-term federal spending bill on Tuesday to allow time for the expected passage of a fiscal 2014 spending package that includes $447 million for the Pentagon component that launches cyber weapons and deflects hacks against civilian and military networks. That’s more than a two-fold increase over Cyber Command’s fiscal 2013 budget of $191 million. The Senate was expected to clear the bill shortly. 

The funding jump is mostly attributed to the growth of cyber mission forces, Pentagon officials told Nextgov on Tuesday. In March 2013, about 834 active duty military and civilian personnel were on staff, Cyber Command chief Gen. Keith Alexander told lawmakers at the time. The goal is to grow cyber forces by 2,000 personnel annually, until 2016.

AUTHOR

Aliya Sternstein reports on cybersecurity and homeland security systems for Nextgov. She has covered technology for nine years at such publications as National Journal's TechnologyDaily, Federal Computer Week and Forbes. Before joining Government Executive, she covered agriculture and derivatives ...Full Bio

The boundary where the military takes over network defense from the Homeland Security Department is unclear, since cyberspace is not demarcated by geographic lines. For example, Cyber Command is bulking up “national mission forces” that will thwart incoming digital threats to American power, healthcare and other critical infrastructure sectors. Homeland Security is responsible for “leading a coordinated national response to significant cyber incidents,” a DHSspokesman said last year.

Vietnam's 'Cyber Troops" Take Fight to the U.S. and France

Source Link

January 20, 2014

By Chris Brummitt

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) -- Working on her blog in California one day, Vietnamese democracy activist Ngoc Thu sensed something was wrong. It took a moment for a keystroke to register. Cut-and-paste wasn't working. She had "a feeling that somebody was there" inside her computer. Her hunch turned out to be right.

A few days later, her personal emails and photos were displayed on the blog, along with defamatory messages. She couldn't delete them; she was blocked out of her own site for several days as her attackers kept posting private details.

"They hurt me and my family. They humiliated us, so that we don't do the blog anymore," said Thu, who is a U.S citizen. She has resumed blogging, but now the Vietnamese government is blocking her posts.

Activists and analysts strongly suspect Hanoi was involved in that attack and scores of others like it.

They say a shadowy, pro-government cyber army is blocking, hacking and spying on Vietnamese activists around the world to hamper the country's pro-democracy movement.

IT experts who investigated last year's attack on Thu said the hackers secretly took control of her system after she clicked on a malicious link sent to her in an email. By installing key-logging software, the hackers were able to harvest passwords, gaining access to her private accounts.

Subsequent investigation also found that an upgraded version of the malicious software, sent by the same group, was emailed to at least three other people: a British reporter for the Associated Press reporter based in Hanoi; a France-based Vietnamese math professor and democracy activist; and an American member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online activist group, living in the United States. None of the three clicked the link.

It appears to be the first documented case of non-Vietnamese being attacked by a pro-government hacking squad that had already conducted attacks well beyond the borders of this Southeast Asian nation. Its actions would appear to violate the law in the United States at least.

"You see campaigns being waged against Vietnamese voices of dissent in geographically disparate regions. Now we have seen an escalation against people who report on those voices," said Morgan Marquis-Boire, a University of Toronto researcher and online privacy activist who dissected the malware and published the findings with the EFF. "It's unlikely that this is the work of an opportunist individual."

Suspicion of state involvement is based in part on the fact that attackers have spent tens of thousands of dollars hiring servers around the world from which to launch attacks, often changing them after a few days. This is because the attackers know activists will ask service providers to take them down, said Dieu Hoang, an Australian computer engineer who, along with several other activists, works to help defend the Vietnamese activists online.

Lions and donkeys: 10 big myths about World War One debunked

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25776836

Much of what we think we know about the 1914-18 conflict is wrong, writes historian Dan Snow.

No war in history attracts more controversy and myth than World War One.

For the soldiers who fought it was in some ways better than previous conflicts, and in some ways worse.

By setting it apart as uniquely awful we are blinding ourselves to the reality of not just WW1 but war in general. We are also in danger of belittling the experience of soldiers and civilians caught up in countless other appalling conflicts throughout history and the present day.

1. It was the bloodiest war in history to that point

Fifty years before WW1 broke out, southern China was torn apart by an even bloodier conflict. Conservative estimates of the dead in the 14-year Taiping rebellion start at between 20 and 30 million. Around 17 million soldiers and civilians were killed during WW1.

Although more Britons died in WW1 than any other conflict, the bloodiest war in our history relative to population size is the Civil War which raged in the mid-17th Century. It saw a far higher proportion of the population of the British Isles killed than the less than 2% who died in WW1. By contrast around 4% of the population of England and Wales, and considerably more than that in Scotland and Ireland, are thought to have been killed in the Civil War.

Understanding War’s Enduring Nature Alongside its Changing Character

Christopher Mewett

January 21, 2014 · 

Technological advances are driving “changes in the nature of warfare”, according to the New America Foundation’s Future of War program. Few would argue that the tools and methods used to wage war change with the times, but students of Clausewitz are skeptical about supposed changes in what we believe to be war’s enduring nature. According to the Prussian, war’s nature does not change—only its character. The way we use these words today can seem to render such a distinction meaningless, but careful attention to semantics can reveal real problems in how we think about war, society, and the future. 

The nature of war describes its unchanging essence: that is, those things that differentiate war (as a type of phenomenon) from other things. War’s nature is violent, interactive, and fundamentally political. Absent any of these elements, what you’re talking about is not war but something else. 

The character of war describes the changing way that war as a phenomenon manifests in the real world. As war is a political act that takes place in and among societies, its specific character will be shaped by those politics and those societies—by what Clausewitz called the “spirit of the age.” War’s conduct is undoubtedly influenced by technology, law, ethics, culture, methods of social, political, and military organization, and other factors that change across time and place. 

Even more fundamentally for Clausewitzians, the character of a specific war is defined by the variable relationship between the three elements of the trinity: passion and primordial violence, chance and uncertainty, and purpose (or the controlling hand of policy). 

Further confusion in this case stems from the Future of War team’s formulation: “changes in the nature of warfare.” War and warfare are different words with a different meaning, and we should be careful about their use. Warfare, of course, doesn’t have an enduring, unchanging phenomenological “nature,” as it is merely the way war is made. 

In their discussion of changes in warfare, the Future of War team puts forward an argument that is both interesting and contentious. Do changes in warfare – the way war is waged – really “profoundly shape both the manner in which the state is organized and the law itself”? This is probably a fair statement. But it’s almost certainly more true that the manner in which the state is organized shapes the character of its wars.

Kashmir: fewer troops, more peace

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PRAVEEN SWAMI

Long-term deployment of soldiers inevitably leads to friction with local communities. In Kashmir, the tensions have been heightened by the failure of the government to sanction the prosecution of military personnel involved even in egregious human rights violations

In 1947, as Pakistani forces raced east in an audacious effort to take Srinagar, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru outlined the strategic challenge that has haunted every Indian Prime Minister since. “The invasion of Kashmir,” he observed pithily, “is not an accidental affair resulting from the fanaticism or exuberance of the tribesmen, but a well-organised business with the backing of the State […] We have in effect to deal with a State carrying out an informal war, but nevertheless a war.”

Earlier this month, the lawyer and Aam Aadmi Party leader Prashant Bhushan issued a radical proposal for the troops that Mr. Nehru despatched into Kashmir’s towns and villages.

“People should be asked whether they want the Army to handle the internal security of Kashmir,” Mr. Bhushan told the television station Aaj Tak. “If people feel that the Army is violating human rights and they say they don’t want the Army to be deployed for their security then the Army should be withdrawn from the hinterland”. The proposal was assailed by political rivals, and mocked by critics. The AAP itself was soon scrambling to disassociate itself from the idea.

Mr. Bhushan’s idea of law-enforcement-by-referendum might be eccentric, even dangerous — but the idea of phasing out the Army from its counter-terrorism commitments in Kashmir deserves serious debate. Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has also long advocated a drawdown of troops from the State’s populated areas, a demand New Delhi has summarily rejected.

The war Mr. Nehru so evocatively described is now entering a new and dangerous phase, fuelled by the meltdown of Pakistan and the looming crisis in Afghanistan. Yet, having fewer troops in Kashmir, rather than more, might just be the right thing to do.

Even while maintaining a robust presence on the Line of Control (LoC) and retaliating hard against Pakistani military provocation, pulling out troops from counter-terrorism duties in inhabited areas could help address the resentments that long-term deployment of troops inevitably engenders. It could also breathe energy into J&K’s democratic system.

Fifth column: Remember Kashmiri Pandits?

Source Link

January 18, 2014

More than two decades later, hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits continue to be unable to go home. (Photo: Reuters)

Let me begin by admitting that I would not be writing about the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits today if I had not been shamed into doing so. I would have written about the flip-flop currently going on in the Congress over whether Rahul Gandhi should be declared their future prime minister or not. The whole debate is pointless because we all know that whether he is officially anointed heir apparent or not, he is, and will continue to be, the most powerful Congress leader after his Mummy. Nobody else matters. Not even the prime minister. There really is almost nothing more to be said on the subject. So when a young man called Rashneek Kher called to remind me that today (January 19) was the anniversary of the Pandit exodus from Kashmir and asked if I would write something, I started off by making excuses. Then I thought about what he had asked and felt ashamed that I had never written about something as important as the only instance of ethnic cleansing in the history of India. I happened to be in Srinagar around the time this happened and, like a lot of others, thought then that the overnight exodus was simply a cynical move by the hated Governor Jagmohan to clear the way for aerial attacks on the mass protests in the Valley. Jagmohan had been so brutal in the manner he dealt with unarmed protesters that the worst rumours about him were believed. But, more than two decades later, hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits continue to be unable to go home, and somehow this bothers hardly anyone except those who are victims of the tragedy. When Rashneek called me, he told me that his own home had been burned and that he had lost relatives in the violence and that the hostility of ordinary Kashmiri Muslims to their Hindu brethren made it impossible for even those living in pitiful conditions in camps in Jammu to go home. So why does nobody speak for the Kashmiri Pandits? Where are those noisy human rights types who shriek nightly on national television about ‘internally displaced’ people in Muzaffarnagar? Where are the Hindutva wallahs and why did a Bharatiya Janata Party government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee make no effort to rehabilitate the Pandits? As for us in the media, why have we done no more about this horrible tragedy than write token remembrance articles every anniversary? When I thought about these questions, I found myself wondering if this was not of a piece with the false secularism that our political parties have propagated ever since Partition. Under this ‘secular’ worldview, the only victims of communal violence can be Muslims. And, even here, some victims are more equal than others. So if the refugee camps in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli had been in Gujarat, there would have been much greater outrage. Can you imagine the names that Narendra Modi would have been called if his government had allowed 40 children to die of cold? But, Akhilesh Yadav is a ‘secular’ chief minister, so he is treated more indulgently. Ever since Modi burst upon the national political stage, ‘secular’ politicians and journalists have fallen over themselves trying to have him disqualified as a possible prime minister on the grounds that he is a ‘mass murderer’. But, if you so much as try to say that Rajiv Gandhi was for a while a very popular prime minister despite being a ‘mass murderer’, you will find yourself shouted down and reviled. Has something not gone very seriously wrong with the Indian idea of secularism? Has it not become a tool that is used mostly to perpetuate a sense of grievance among Indian Muslims? I have written before in this column that if we stop thinking of Muslims as an aggrieved minority community and start thinking of them instead as India’s second most powerful majority community, some of the distortions in our secularism may begin to disappear. Instead of thinking along these lines, we have in the rule of Dr Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi spent the past decade convincing Muslims that they really have every reason to be constantly aggrieved. First, there was that very dodgy Sachar report, and now we have the Home Minister order state governments to ensure that Muslim youths are not detained wrongly in prison. Are all India’s 2.41 lakh undertrials Muslim? Kashmir is India’s only Muslim-majority state, and it happens to be the only state that has been responsible for ethnic cleansing. So today, on this tragic anniversary, can we stop thinking of Indian Muslims as an oppressed minority and think of them instead as our second most powerful majority community? India has the second largest Muslim population in the world. It has been ghettoised and handicapped by fake secularism.

Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter @ tavleen_singh

Nation's Security Overlooked for Petty Individual Gains!

ByLt Gen Prakash Katoch

IssueNet Edition| Date : 20 Jan , 2014

http://www.indiandefencereview.com/news/nations-security-overlooked-for-petty-individual-gains/

It is amazing how issues of national security are given the short shrift in India. Whether it is by design or inadvertent can continue to be guessed. That there is political interference is without doubt but whether such interference is because of mere vote-bank politics, mafia links or external pressures is the moot point, latter being the most dangerous. Recently, a gentleman put his comments on Facebook after meeting a CRPF soldier on leave from the Maoist insurgency area. As per him, there are many instances where Maoists nabbed by CRPF have to be let off because of political pressure. This would well be the case where local politicians are ready to look askance to matters of national security despite the Maoists insurgency being described as the biggest threat to national security. But if the local politicians look for the support of the Maoists to retain power, it does not stop there. In fact it goes all the way up through the political spiral right to the national apex.

While foreign links and massive funding of NGOs, politicians and political parties in India may never be investigated including the instant case of NGO Kabir because of calculative assessments to stay in power…

That is the reason terrorism and insurgency thrives in India undermining the blood and sacrifices of the security forces. That is why political parties brush aside even statements by idiotic so called political leaders that soldiers are meant to die. That is why a fledgling political party now governing Delhi, while claiming to be the most righteous in the country, does not even rebuke its members for openly preaching secession against the Indian State much to the glee of our enemies and those who want continued instability and a weak government in India. While foreign links and massive funding of NGOs, politicians and political parties in India may never be investigated including the instant case of NGO Kabir because of calculative assessments to stay in power any which way, we really should heed Ashley Tellis of Carnegie Foundation saying, “India being subjected to terrorism suits many ………. India is a sponge that absorbs terror”.

Take the recent case of Delhi Police claims to evidence that Pakistan based terror group LeT is attempting to recruit operatives in the riot hit district of Muzaffarnagar. As reported, the Delhi Police had even arrested two persons in this connection; Mohammed Rashid and Mohammed Shahid from Mewat in Haryana. The arrests were made after locals of Muzaffarnagar had alleged that Rashid and Shahid had approached them to discuss carrying out kidnappings and other nefarious activities. As per media reports, the IB had been tracking the movement of these two, who had already visited Muzaffarnagar six times since end of riots in September last year at the behest of Abdul Subhan, a leader of LeT. Then came news that MHA had capped the issue by saying there was not enough evidence. This, by a small news item inserted in an inconspicuous part of newspapers. Unfortunately in India, it is very easy to switch viewer attention quickly from one event to the other. A dispassionate analysis would tell you that the powers that be have successfully used these tactics through a TRP hungry media – an event suddenly brushed aside and forgotten (read erased). Therefore, for days on end, full media glare was shifted to Bollywood stars gyrating in the Saifai festival, the deaths and status of the Muzaffarnagar camps and the so-called multiple countries “educational” tours of some jaundiced politicians, only silver lining being the lucky correspondents who also got to visit the same countries covering the exploits of the scoundrels.

Will South Sudan reshape Indian peacekeeping?

http://pragati.nationalinterest.in/2014/01/will-south-sudan-reshape-indian-peacekeeping/

by Richard Gowan — January 17, 2014 

Having taken a central role in the UN’s efforts to save lives in South Sudan, India should encourage an open debate – domestically and internationally.

Two names currently dominate discussions of Indian diplomacy at the United Nations: Devyani Khobragade and Sangeeta Richard. It might be better to talk about Dharmesh Sangwan and Kanwar Pal Singh. Khobragade is, of course, the Indian deputy consul general in New York who was arrested on charges relating to her treatment of Richard, her housekeeper. She was formally transferred to the Indian mission to the UN last week, gaining full diplomatic immunity. While her case has received immense publicity, even experts on Indian foreign policy might struggle to identify Sangwan and Singh.

This should be a matter of regret: they were the two Indian peacekeepers killed alongside another UN official and over thirty civilians by a mob in South Sudan on 19 December. Their murder came in the first days of a crisis that has since claimed thousands more lives and put the UN mission in the country, UNMISS, on the defensive. The seven and a half thousand peacekeepers in South Sudan – two thousand of them Indian troops – are guarding over 60,000 civilians on their bases. This is an act of considerable courage, and may have prevented an already horrific crisis from spiraling to a far more appalling level.

Yet the crisis has also highlighted the shortcomings of UNMISS, which lacked the personnel, military assets and political clout to deter the South Sudanese government and rebels from plunging into war. The mission has not yet suffered a humiliation comparable to that the UN faced in Sierra Leone – where hundreds of peacekeepers including Indian personnel were taken hostage in 2000 – and the Security Council has authorised other UN missions in Africa to send reinforcements. But UNMISS will need a longer-term reorganisation if it is to move beyond protecting its own compounds to providing broader security, monitoring any ceasefire the South Sudanese manage to agree and deterring future violence.

Barely inside the siege

Source Link

by Toral Varia — January 17, 2014

Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy’s The Siege is a good and a fast paced read. But it is not an account recommended for the facts and the history of Mumbai terror attacks.

If Mohammad Ajmal Amir Kasab has become the face of 26/11 attacks, then the smoke and fire emerging out of the majestic Taj Mahal hotel has become the defining image of the carnage. Intricately orchestrated by Lashkar-e-toiba, the attacks are undoubtedly the most well coordinated and precisely executed terrorist operation in the recent history of terrorism. The carnage, which threw India out of gear for over 60 hours, is also the most reported story. Within weeks publishers had released books on the subject. Last year, on the 5th anniversary of the attacks, Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark’s The Siege was added to that list. For a book written by investigative journalists and released five years after the incident, it is more of a narrative and less of investigation and disappoints on several counts.

While The Siege makes for a thrilling racy read, it occasionally falters on the accuracy of its facts and analysis. The authors bring to life the fear, chaos and devastation felt by the victims, security officials and the terrorists themselves. Through personal stories of the dramatis personae, the book raises the curtain on how India’s security establishment was completely caught off guard and miserably disorganised before it got its act together and neutralised the young terrorists.

The Siege is at best an incomplete compilation of the voluminous information available in the public realm. The language and style of writing does not redeem the authors from the fact that it only marginally offers any new information. Perhaps the only intriguing detail that has possibly never been reported before comes on page number 44, when Pakistan’s Major Iqbal “boasted they had a super agent at work in New Delhi who was known as “Honey Bee”. The authors offer no insight to the identity of this person, who was providing “classified Indian files” that had been obtained from within the Indian police and army and which “revealed their training and limitations”. The authors, known for their investigative account of the 1994 kidnapping and hostage crisis in Kashmir, have no answer to the question – Who is Pakistan’s ‘Honey Bee’ in India?

Reimagining India: Creating partnerships for the future

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January 2014 | byHoward Schultz and Miles White

The power of partnership

Howard Schultz

In short excerpts from Reimagining India, two CEOs from very different industries reflect on how global companies can succeed in India.

We hope to have thousands of stores in India. I look forward to a day in the not-too-distant future when India takes its place alongside China as one of our two largest markets outside North America. But we know getting there won’t be easy. And our successful beginning in India has not been without hurdles; on the contrary, it was a complicated six-year journey. Along the way, we learned a lot about India and ourselves.

One key to our success has been our partnership with the Tata Group. We announced our joint venture with Tata in January 2012. Ten months later, the Indian government loosened restrictions on foreign investment in the retail industry. From a legal standpoint, we could have tried to set up shop in India on our own. But I can’t imagine bringing Starbucks to India without the assistance we’ve received from Tata. They helped us find great locations for our stores. They helped with store design and in getting the food menu right (tandoori paneer rolls and cardamom-flavored croissants!). They helped us overcome the many logistical and infrastructure obstacles to make sure everything on our India menu is fresh. They also helped with recruiting, which is crucial for us because no matter how big we get, the essence of Starbucks is to make that human connection: serving coffee one person, one cup, one neighborhood at a time.

The other unique aspect of our alliance with Tata is the ability to source and roast coffee beans locally in India. India is the only major market in the world where we can do that, and it is only because of our relationship with Tata, which is the largest coffee-estate owner in all of Asia. They not only own farms but also operate their own roasting facilities. We were able to work with them to develop an India-only espresso roast, designed specifically for India, that is every bit as good as the espresso we serve all over the world.

Developing that blend required us to do some things differently. We created a unique blend for India, and it’s not roasted by our team, which is something we had never done before. It was a real test of our trust in our new partner because it required us to share with Tata some of the roasting secrets we have perfected over four decades and guarded very closely. But the result has been well worth it. In the process, we learned that not everything needs to be invented in Seattle, and that with the right partner, we can collaborate and coauthor, as long as there is a foundation of trust.

How they killed our factories

Jaithirth Rao

January 20, 2014

Source Link

We are one hundred per cent different from China, at least as far as manfacturing and factories go. 

SUMMARY

The government of India, it seems, has decided that factories must not be allowed to come up or to run.

Uday Kotak said a few months back, in the course of an interview, that he was amazed that in his new office in Mumbai, not one of the furniture or fixture items were made in India. My friend Rahul Bhasin conducted a similar exercise in his office in Delhi and discovered pretty much the same thing. The carpet is from China, the furniture is from Malaysia, the light fixtures are from China, the glass partition is from all places, Jebel Ali in the Middle East and so on. Kotak went on to add that even Ganesha statues are no longer made in India. They are imported from China.

Our great, glorious, imperial, imperious government in Delhi, I am told, organises what is called a cabinet meeting every week. The first item on the agenda is to take stock of how well the country has progressed in destroying its manufacturing base; the second item is to think up Machiavellian new ways to further emasculate what is left of Indian manufacturing. I am told that it is during one of these sessions that it was decided that the income tax department should mount a strong and no-holds-barred campaign against Nokia, a defenceless Finnish company which had shown the temerity and gumption to not only bring FDI into the country, but to actually be one of the few (only?) investors to set up a manufacturing facility.

The super-patriotic, super-matriotic cabinet of the super-intelligent republic of India has decided that land must not be made available to factories, electricity should be denied to factories, factory managements should be harassed by various super-inspectorates and flexible labour policies must be denied to factories, thus discouraging the employment of labour in our factories. The reason this is being done is clear. We must be different from China in every single way. In China, land is easily made available to factories; in China, good quality electric power is made available to factories; in China, local government officials do not harass factory managements — au contraire, local officials encourage factory managements; in China, factories are allowed flexibility in labour practices; paradoxically China’s factory managers hire lots of labour. Our hyper-patriotic, hyper-matriotic, hyper-intelligent cabinet has succeeded brilliantly in achieving what it set out to do. We are one hundred per cent different from China, at least as far as manufacturing and factories go. I teach young engineers at IIT Bombay. These days, quite a few of them are interested in becoming entrepreneurs rather than in taking up salaried corporate jobs. Their enthusiasm is boundless and quite impressive. The interesting thing is when I ask them as to what kind of enterprises they plan to start, they all talk about dotcom companies, data analytics companies, mobile software applications companies and so on. Not a word, not a whisper about factories or manufacturing. And these, mind you, are some of the brightest engineers in the land. When questioned, they tell me that the very thought of starting a factory is so daunting that they give up. These young persons all seem to be aware that it is the objective of the great government of India not to have factories in the country. Being patriotic youngsters, they are merely following the directions of our benevolent government.

Nation's Security Overlooked for Petty Individual Gains!

ByLt Gen Prakash Katoch

IssueNet Edition| Date : 20 Jan , 2014

It is amazing how issues of national security are given the short shrift in India. Whether it is by design or inadvertent can continue to be guessed. That there is political interference is without doubt but whether such interference is because of mere vote-bank politics, mafia links or external pressures is the moot point, latter being the most dangerous. Recently, a gentleman put his comments on Facebook after meeting a CRPF soldier on leave from the Maoist insurgency area. As per him, there are many instances where Maoists nabbed by CRPF have to be let off because of political pressure. This would well be the case where local politicians are ready to look askance to matters of national security despite the Maoists insurgency being described as the biggest threat to national security. But if the local politicians look for the support of the Maoists to retain power, it does not stop there. In fact it goes all the way up through the political spiral right to the national apex.

While foreign links and massive funding of NGOs, politicians and political parties in India may never be investigated including the instant case of NGO Kabir because of calculative assessments to stay in power…

That is the reason terrorism and insurgency thrives in India undermining the blood and sacrifices of the security forces. That is why political parties brush aside even statements by idiotic so called political leaders that soldiers are meant to die. That is why a fledgling political party now governing Delhi, while claiming to be the most righteous in the country, does not even rebuke its members for openly preaching secession against the Indian State much to the glee of our enemies and those who want continued instability and a weak government in India. While foreign links and massive funding of NGOs, politicians and political parties in India may never be investigated including the instant case of NGO Kabir because of calculative assessments to stay in power any which way, we really should heed Ashley Tellis of Carnegie Foundation saying, “India being subjected to terrorism suits many ………. India is a sponge that absorbs terror”.

The Geneva Conference on Syria: What Will It Deliver?

IDSA COMMENT

K. P. Fabian

Source Link

January 20, 2014

The UN has convened an international conference on Syria to meet in Montreux, Switzerland, starting from January 22, 2014. Thirty odd states, including India, will attend. The US is standing in the way of Iran’s participation. Secretary of State John Kerry has contended that Iran should accept the decisions taken at the first conference on Syria held in June 2012 in Geneva. Iran did not attend that conference, it was not even invited. Incidentally, though the forthcoming conference is not going to be held in Geneva, for convenience, it is called Geneva 2.

Kerry is not entirely right in insisting that Iran should accept the decisions or conclusions of the previous conference. The final communiqué in June 2012 said that there should be a transitional government consisting of members of the government in power and the opposition. About President Assad’s role or non-role in the transition there was no agreement. The US announced post-conference that it was agreed that he should go, but Russia made it clear that there was no such agreement.

No concrete results came out of that conference and in protest the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan resigned. If Kerry is expecting Iran to announce publicly that it will agree to Assad’s exit or even to negotiate that, he is not being realistic. Obviously, he wants to prevent Iran’s participation. His earlier proposal for Iran to participate ‘from the sidelines’ has been, as expected, rejected by Iran.

Russia has stated clearly that Iran’s absence will prevent the conference from delivering the intended results. Most observers will agree with Russia on this. Without Iran’s support, military, economic, and moral, President Assad might not have survived till now. According to the US sources, since signing the interim nuclear deal on November 24, 2013, Iran has sent 330 truck loads of arms and equipment to Syria through Iraq. This is in addition to whatever is sent by air through Iraqi airspace. Any expectation that the interim nuclear deal would change Iran’s stand on Syria has proved wrong. The US has so far failed to stop Iraq from letting Iran use its territory for sending supplies to Syria. Both Iraq and Iran support President Assad.

The US has another problem in agreeing to Iran’s participation. It has strained relations with Saudi Arabia. That country was expecting a US military strike on Syria after President Obama made an announcement months ago clearly indicating an imminent strike. When Obama changed his mind owing to opposition from the Congress, partly triggered by the UK Prime Minister’s failure to get approval from the Commons for joining in such a strike, Saudi Arabia was much upset. It refused to accept the Security Council seat it won. If Iran is invited, Saudi Arabia might not attend and in any case its discord with the US will get worse. One may assume that Kerry knows the cost of preventing Iran from attending, but he does not have much room for maneuvering.

Afghanistan: Can India and Pakistan work Together?

http://www.vifindia.org/article/2014/january/15/afghanistan-can-india-and-pakistan-work-together

Lt General (Retd) R K Sawhney, Distinguished Fellow, VIF

Sushant Sareen, Senior Fellow, VIF

With the US drawdown (perhaps even complete withdrawal) from Afghanistan looming large over the horizon, there is growing pessimism (a lot of it unwarranted) over the prospect of the Afghan state’s ability to survive without the crutches of foreign security forces. Clearly, the impact of any collapse of the Afghan state as a result of ceaseless onslaughts by Islamist radicals (the Taliban/Al Qaeda combine) will not remain limited to Afghanistan. If anything, a destabilised Afghanistan will severely destabilise the entire region. Countries like India and Pakistan are very likely to be buffeted by developments in Afghanistan. This is one of the main reasons that has given rise to talk among academics, think-tanks and policy wonks about the two countries which most fear the fallout of Afghanistan descending into chaos working together to ensure that such a catastrophe doesn’t occur. While on a theoretical plane such cooperation between India and Pakistan might sound like a great idea, on a more practical level, the possibility of such cooperation is nothing but a pipedream.

Much of what has gone wrong in Afghanistan is the result of Pakistan trying to compete with, counter and check India and to now expect it to change tack and cooperate with India at this rather late stage is quite unrealistic. Apologists for Pakistan and Western academics who discovered the Afpak region only after 9/11 often dumb down the spectre of instability in Afghanistan by attributing it to “the hostility between India and Pakistan” which according to these people “lies at the heart of the current war in Afghanistan”. Equally egregious is the peddling of the illogical theory that the road to Kabul passes through Kashmir. Obviously, the purveyors of such specious theories deliberately try to pin some, if not most, of the blame on India for Pakistan's malignant acts against Afghanistan.

By equating India’s benign and beneficial development oriented involvement in Afghanistan with Pakistan's malign and destructive interference in Afghan affairs, a disingenuous attempt is made to draw some sort of moral equivalence between India and Pakistan in Afghanistan, blithely ignoring the fact that India has no, repeat no, interest in making Afghanistan a proxy battlefield against Pakistan. The same however cannot be said for Pakistan which has not only used Islamist terror networks to target India in Afghanistan but has forged its entire Afghan policy with an eye on denying India any presence inside Afghanistan. If therefore a proxy war is being fought inside Afghanistan, it isn’t India that’s fighting it but Pakistan and to club the two countries together is nothing but a travesty.

While it is true that India has a vital interest in Afghanistan’s stability, security and independence, this interest is far transcends a desire to use Afghanistan to only poke a finger in Pakistan's eye, much less ‘encircle’ Pakistan and catch it in a ‘pincer’. If anything, India sees Afghanistan as critical for ensuring regional stability because an unstable Afghanistan will inevitably destabilise the entire region. Unlike Pakistan, India has imbibed this immutable lesson of history and is therefore committed to helping Afghanistan stabilise politically, economically and militarily. Ironically enough, this is also what is in Pakistan's interest because more than anyone else, it is Pakistan that will suffer the immediate fallout of any instability in Afghanistan. Indeed, over the last three decades, Pakistan has faced the brunt of the various wars that have been fought inside Afghanistan.