India’s Syria venture

January 28, 2014

Tanvi Ratna

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/indias-syria-venture/article5623835.ece

India must determine what the Syrian conflict would mean to it

After three years of a brutal civil war in Syria, the world is watching the Geneva-II talks, where for the first time, the regime and the opposition are to negotiate. Also, for the first time, India has been invited to this important forum to deliberate on Syria’s future.

In popular debate, India is cursorily grouped with either the American or Russian camps, but India’s own assessment of the conflict is little discussed. While India has an official position for the negotiations, it has largely viewed the conflict from a global perspective.

However, the negotiations and the conflict will continue for a while as both are stalemated. It might now be time for India, as one of the players on the table, to look closely at the conflict, to determine where the tide is turning and what it would mean for the country.

The narratives of the conflict are many and muddled. However, this is no simple fight for democracy; the problem is religious, ethnic and economic as much as it is political. The democracy narrative traces the roots of the conflict to the March 2011 military crackdown of pro-democracy protesters in Daraa which triggered widespread rebellion in Syria. However, the demands for political reform were limited; instead, what drove many was economic frustration. Syria had faced a four-year drought which reduced two-million people to extreme poverty, unemployment and starvation. Overlaid was the long-simmering tension of religious and national identity; many in Syria’s Sunni majority could not accept the rule of Bashar al-Assad with his Alawite, Shiite and Christian associations.

Over two years, all these motivations have spawned a large “opposition” to the Assad regime, which is in reality a tremendously fragmented entity comprising multiple, mutually hostile groups. The opposition also carries out brutal, armed attacks on civilians and rival groups, meaning they are not quite “the good guys.”

For the United States, bringing down Mr. Assad would champion its pro-democracy record, dispose of an anti-U.S. regime and constrict Iranian and Russian influence in the Middle East. It would also appease its ally, Israel. For Russia and Iran, Syria is the last foothold in the Middle East; almost every other regime supports America.

In joining the diplomacy on this issue, India faced an impossible balancing act, given its friendly relations with every rival — the U.S., Russia, Iran, Israel, Syria — a fact that amazes observers. Adroitly manoeuvring out of the tight spot of having to pick a side, India took a position in alliance with BRICS which eventually sided with Russia, an apt choice given Indian priorities.

Syria is home to few Indian expatriates, nor does India source any oil from Syria; the impact of the war on those issues is indirect. An important Indian priority that is commonly discussed is the opportunity for India to conduct itself as a responsible global power, fit for a seat at the U.N. Security Council.

America Is Winning the Syrian Civil War

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

Source URL (retrieved on Jan 27, 2014): http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/america-winning-the-syrian-civil-war-9779

January 28, 2014

Zachary Keck

The Geneva II Conference this month was the product of years of U.S. diplomacy aimed at finding a political solution to the Syrian civil war [3]. America’s interest in quickly ending the fighting in Syria is based on moral concerns, as well as fears that the sectarian war will further engulf neighboring states.

The U.S. is right to seek a quick settlement to the civil war in Syria. The humanitarian costs alone compel America to push for reconciliation between the warring sides. Nonetheless, the legitimate desire to end the conflict does not diminish the reality that the U.S. is winning in Syria. From a purely strategic standpoint, no country has benefitted more from the horrible tragedy in Syria than the United States.

The most significant way the U.S. has benefitted from the Syrian civil war is by seeing its regional and global adversaries undermined by the conflict. Just as the U.S. has been the primary external benefactor of the Syrian civil war, no third party has been a bigger loser in Syria then Iran.

The prospect of the Alawites losing power in Damascus threatened to roll back all the gains Iran made over the last decade, not only undermining Iran’s position in Syria, but also by extension in Lebanon. Not surprisingly, Iranian leaders quickly sprang into action, providing significant assistance to Assad’s regime. They undoubtedly realized the danger of being seen as propping up Assad, as evidenced by their refusal to acknowledge doing so in the beginning. Moreover, Iranian leaders probably believed the rebellion could be suppressed quickly given their experience following the disputed 2009 presidential elections.

With the conflict nearing its third year, it has proven anything but short. Over the past two years, Iran and its ally Hezbollah have been forced to devote considerable blood and treasure into preventing Alawite rule from collapsing in Syria. Although the Alawites’ rule no longer seems to be in imminent danger, they also appear no closer to reasserting control over the entire country. Thus, the material costs for Iran are likely to continue to mount.

No, Fox News Didn't Divide America

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

Source URL (retrieved on Jan 27, 2014): http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/no-fox-news-didnt-divide-america-9777

January 28, 2013

Robert W. Merry

Liberals hate Fox News. Its in-your-face conservatism drives them up the wall. Its founder and driving genius, Roger Ailes, gives them fits. Its success—a billion dollars in profit into Rupert Murdoch’s cash register every year—gets their heads spinning. Liberals just can’t get over it.

And now they have a new opportunity to vent their outrage with publication of Gabriel Sherman’s big new biography, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News—and Divided a Country. According to the reviews, the book offers a portrait of a man with a seemingly congenital need to generate conflict and outrage. And that part of the book naturally has received abundant attention from liberal reviewers. Fair enough. By all accounts Sherman based his portrait on exhaustive research, and a man in Ailes’s position is certainly fair game for such attention.

So, leaving Ailes to his critics and any defenders who may wish to step forward, let’s look at the role of Fox News in American journalism and society. Has Fox News really divided the country in ways and to an extent that wouldn’t have happened if Ailes hadn’t created his news monolith?

The answer is no. Or, at any rate, according to Erik Wemple in his perceptive Washington Post review, Sherman failed to back up that assertion in the book. "This promise goes unfulfilled," writes Wemple, adding that nailing down this interpretation would have required a plunge into American politics that Sherman foregoes. Asked recently how precisely Ailes and Fox have driven a wedge through the country’s body politic, Sherman could muster nothing more compelling than this: "Because of his ability to drive a message. He has an unrivaled ability to know what resonates with a certain audience."

Like most news operations, Fox News is a mixed bag, offering some truly excellent journalism mixed with other elements of questionable value. But, before we get into its strengths and weaknesses, it may be helpful to put it and its emergence in a larger context. Three broad points bear notice.

First, Ailes’s success was based on a simple concept—that the news operations of the three traditional networks were all liberal in tone and outlook. Executives of those networks all disputed this vociferously, of course, which only made it easier for Ailes to sneak up behind them and capture the conservative viewers who previously had had nowhere else to go. With the three traditional networks splitting the liberal audience and Ailes galvanizing the conservatives, he quickly emerged as the ratings king.

This is not to say that the traditional networks perpetrated a conscious policy of spoon-feeding their political attitudes to their viewers; rather, they merely mistook their essentially liberal outlook for objective fare. Their news offerings for decades were sophisticated and solid—but tilted to the left. That was the reality, denied by network officials, that Ailes exploited on his road to success.

If You Used This Secure Webmail Site, the FBI Has Your Inbox

BY KEVIN POULSEN

01.27.14

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2014/01/tormail/

While investigating a hosting company known for sheltering child porn last year the FBI incidentally seized the entire e-mail database of a popular anonymous webmail service called TorMail.

Now the FBI is tapping that vast trove of e-mail in unrelated investigations.

The bureau’s data windfall, seized from a company called Freedom Hosting, surfaced in court papers last week when prosecutors indicted a Florida man for allegedly selling counterfeit credit cards online. The filings show the FBI built its case in part by executing a search warrant on a Gmail account used by the counterfeiters, where they found that orders for forged cards were being sent to a TorMail e-mail account: “platplus@tormail.net.”

Acting on that lead in September, the FBI obtained a search warrant for the TorMail account, and then accessed it from the bureau’s own copy of “data and information from the TorMail e-mail server, including the content of TorMail e-mail accounts,” according to the complaint (.pdf) sworn out by U.S. Postal Inspector Eric Malecki.

The tactic suggests the FBI is adapting to the age of big-data with an NSA-style collect-everything approach, gathering information into a virtual lock box, and leaving it there until it can obtain specific authority to tap it later. There’s no indication that the FBI searched the trove for incriminating evidence before getting a warrant. But now that it has a copy of TorMail’s servers, the bureau can execute endless search warrants on a mail service that once boasted of being immune to spying.

“We have no information to give you or to respond to any subpoenas or court orders,” read TorMail’s homepage. “Do not bother contacting us for information on, or to view the contents of a TorMail user inbox, you will be ignored.”

In another e-mail case, the FBI last year won a court order compelling secure e-mail provider Lavabit toturn over the master encryption keys for its website, which would have given agents the technical ability to spy on all of Lavabit’s 400,000 users – though the government said it was interested only in one. (Rather than comply, Lavabit shut down and is appealing the surveillance order).

TorMail was the webmail provider of choice for denizens of the so-called Darknet of anonymous and encrypted websites and services, making the FBI’s cache extraordinarily valuable. The affair also sheds a little more light on the already-strange story of the FBI’s broad attack on Freedom Hosting, once a key service provider for untraceable websites.

Freedom Hosting specialized in providing turnkey “Tor hidden service” sites — special sites, with addresses ending in .onion, that hide their geographic location behind layers of routing, and can be reached only over the Tor anonymity network. Tor hidden services are used by those seeking to evade surveillance or protect users’ privacy to an extraordinary degree – human rights groups and journalists as well as serious criminal elements.

By some estimates, Freedom Hosting backstopped fully half of all hidden services at the time it was shut down last year — TorMail among them. But it had a reputation for tolerating child pornography on its servers. In July, the FBI moved on the company and had the alleged operator, Eric Eoin Marques, arrested at his home in Ireland. The U.S. is now seeking his extradition for allegedly facilitating child porn on a massive scale; hearings are set to begin in Dublin this week.

Climate Wars: Don't Regulate, Innovate!

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

Source URL (retrieved on Jan 27, 2014): http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/climate-wars-dont-regulate-innovate-9772

January 27, 2014

Paul J. Saunders

One of the strongest arguments for a pragmatic approach to public policy—whether foreign or domestic—is that reality almost always trumps noble intentions. Recognizing this sooner rather than later helps skilled leaders to fulfill many of their idealistic ambitions while avoiding unduly high expectations, unnecessary costs, and predictable failures.

The first decade of the twenty-first century has demonstrated convincingly to many Americans that national-level political and social engineering is an expensive and uncertain task, and that wars to win the privilege of pursuing such experiments are rarely a good investment of either taxpayer funds or our soldiers’ lives. The second decade may similarly discredit the idea that governments can improve the world by limiting economic activity—a core belief of the modern environmental movement, and a belief that ignores human nature in much the same way that foreign-policy interventionists fail to understand those whom they seek to reform.

Since the landmark United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change entered into force twenty years ago, in 1994, advocates have sought aggressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming. They have done so primarily by attempting to impose top-down limits on emissions, like those established by the Kyoto Protocol and the European Union’s emissions-trading system. Both are cracking under pressure from reality.

In the case of the Kyoto Protocol, the treaty’s so-called first commitment period—the years from 2008 to 2012, during which its signatories agreed to binding emissions reduction targets—has ended and parties to the agreement have so far failed to negotiate new binding limits despite efforts to creatively redefine what “binding” means. Attempts to bring the United States, China and India into the regime have stalled even as some current parties, including Japan, Canada and Russia, have wavered. The current goal is to negotiate a new deal by 2015 to take effect in 2020. It looks unlikely to succeed.

Now comes the news that European Union bureaucrats [3]—usually the champions of statist solutions—have proposed putting an end to binding national-level emissions limits within the EU. The reason is eminently predictable: national governments facing severe economic pressure and declining competitiveness are less willing to inflate energy prices to promote low-emission alternative energy. (Japan’s new reservations about the Kyoto Protocol, previously a source of pride for the nation in which it was negotiated, stem from a similar source; after the Fukushima nuclear accident removed a substantial share of Japan’s nuclear power from its energy mix, wind, solar and the like are just too expensive to make up the difference.) But in the absence of national limits, meeting an EU-wide limit will be virtually impossible—a classic problem of collective action that discourages action and rewards free-riding—especially one made even more stringent in what looks like an unsuccessful effort to appease activist groups.

The Real Problem with the U.S. Air Force

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

Source URL (retrieved on Jan 27, 2014): http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-real-problem-the-us-air-force-9778

January 28, 2014

Robert Farley

I would like to thank Dr. Lowther for his contribution [3], and for his role [4] in this ongoing debate [5] [5]over the future of American airpower [6]. I would like to offer a rebuttal to his commentary that centers around my forthcoming book, Grounded.

Foundations

With respect to the founding of the United States Air Force, Lowther makes the common error of mistaking a retrospective “origin story [7]” [7]for arguments that were actually important at the creation. For the USAF, the important arguments focused almost solely on strategic airpower, and on the ability of airpower to win decisive victories without significant contribution from the other two services. Aviators and airpower theorists built their advocacy around explicit denigration of the contribution of the other two services [8]. The birth of the Air Force would be similar to the creation of the Navy if the latter had involved a bitter, decades long effort to argue that the Army was ignorant and irrelevant, followed by decades of effort to scourge any ounce of joint capability from the force [9]. This history [10] [10]is well documented [11]. Faced with it, we can either adopt the (defensible) position that the history doesn’t matter, or we can get the history right. I think that it does matter, which is why I dedicate two chapters of Grounded [12] to a history of early airpower advocacy. Pretending that the Air Force exists because of concern over “penny packets” (small, ineffective air elements attached to individual ground units) does no one any favors.

Logic of Service Responsibilities

Why do we have separate services? As I detail in the book, “domain” is only one of several answers that strategic planners have given over the past century. Mission coherence, the need to protect certain capabilities, and the need to preserve redundancy are other common answers. Dr. Lowther’s casual attitude towards the creation of new services is remarkable, although I doubt that it is shared by many in the United States Air Force. In focusing on a “domain” approach to service responsibilities, he inadvertently advocates for an independent space force and an independent cyber force. While we’re creating new services, we might as well imagine separate services for submarines, ballistic missiles [13] [13]and special forces [14]. Founding a new service, of course, entails creating a political lobby for a certain kind of warfare within the Pentagon, and empowering a group of bureaucratic advocates for a particular kind of military power.

But of course the US services have never been divided solely by domain; we currently operate five air forces (six if you count the CIA), each dedicated to support of a specific mission set. The reason we don’t divide services solely by domain should be obvious; it would quickly degenerate into an incoherent mess, with bureaucratic walls separating different elements of the joint fight from one another. The problem of interservice friction [15] is hardly conjectural; every analyst and historian is familiar with the dreadful problems associated with ground-air cooperation in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada and the first Gulf War. And the problems of interservice competition are well captured in Secretary of Defense Robert Gates new memoir, Duty [16]. Secretary Gates found himself repeatedly frustrated by the Air Force’s attitude towards drones, which he summarized as “The Air Force was grasping for absolute control of a capability for which it had little enthusiasm in the first place.” In the system we have, the Air Force has little choice but to challenge the right of other services to aircraft, just as it steadily gnawed away at Army tactical aviation during the Cold War.

How Much is a Drone Base Worth?

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

Source URL (retrieved on Jan 27, 2014): http://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/how-much-drone-base-worth-9780

January 27, 2014

Paul R. Pillar

In searching and scratching for a reason for continuing the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014, after thirteen years of warfare, the most commonly stated rationales come up short. The original purpose of the military intervention involved, of course, responding to an attack by a terrorist group that at the time had a presence in Afghanistan. But what is left of that group has not been based in Afghanistan for a long time. There also are still the questions of how much Afghanistan is to be considered unique as a potential base for terrorist attacks, and how much any physical base in a faraway place affects the level of terrorist threat to the United States. Other rationales involving human rights or democracy in Afghanistan run up against questions both about how much any U.S. military effort in Afghanistan can accomplish on those fronts and about the priority such objectives have or ought to have among U.S. interests.

Those inside and outside the administration who have thought hardest about what is and is not being accomplished by a U.S. military presence in Afghanistan keep coming back to a different reason: that we need that presence to provide enough security to operate unmanned aerial vehicles from Afghanistan (and perhaps to do enough for other aspects of Afghan security so that the government of Afghanistan will permit the continued operation of the drones from Afghan soil), and we need the drones to keep whacking at terrorists next door in Pakistan. David Sanger and Eric Schmitt's article [4] on this subject in the New York Times is on the mark regarding the thinking on this subject. There are two undeniable facts involved in this particular rationale for staying in Afghanistan. One is that a base in Afghanistan affords a geographic advantage given where many of the targets are located. The second is that missiles fired from drones have eliminated a significant number of malevolent individuals in northwest Pakistan.

Think even harder and more broadly, however, and this rationale for a continued military presence in Afghanistan exhibits several patterns of thought that in most other circumstances would be considered fallacious.

One is to confuse availability of use with desirability of use. The drone strikes often have been considered “the only game in town” in terms of getting at undesirables in the wilds of Waziristan. But this in effect means that because the tool we happen to have is a hammer (and a very nifty hammer at that), not only do things start looking like nails, but we also feel an uncontrollable urge to keep pounding, whether or not pounding is apt to do us more good than harm.

Another pattern is to confuse ends and means. We are not using a particular lethal tool to, say, provide security and stability in a country. We are trying to provide enough security and stability in a country to be able to use the tool. There was some similar ends/means confusion earlier in the war in discussion about the role of NATO. An alliance is normally considered to be an instrument for doing something such as fighting a war, but some of the discussion was about how the war ought to be fought to maintain the health of the alliance.

The Fifth Element: Enhancing Conventional Deterrence in East Asia

January 26, 2014

Source Link

PACIFIC OCEAN (Jan. 22, 2014) Aviation Boatswain's Mate (Handling) 1st Class Reynaldo Acuna directs an E-2C Hawkeye, assigned to the Sun Kings of Carrier Airborne Early Warning Squadron (VAW) 116, on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70). Carl Vinson is underway conducting Tailored Ship's Training Availability off the coast of Southern California. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Scott Fenaroli/Released)

The following contribution is written by Robert C. Rubel, Dean, Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the Naval War College.

In a 21 January post on this blog, guest contributor Bryan McGrath extolled an article in the Winter 2013 Strategic Studies Quarterly by Jonathan Solomon entitled “Demystifying Conventional Deterrence: Great Power Conflict and East Asian Peace.” I too found the article worth extolling as it not only takes my favored challenge-response approach to analysis but produces conclusions generally consistent with the work we have done here at the Naval War College over the past decade. In the article, Solomon identifies four factors - or elements - which he considers central to conventional deterrence: capabilities, quantities, positioning and readiness. While I agree with this list of elements, I would like to offer one more to it that I believe is as important: operational concept.

The term operational concept will be interpreted in different ways if left undefined, so let me offer a temporary definition to be used only in the context of this post: it is the general approach to using military force to achieve strategic objectives. To make this clearer, let me nest it within a kind of strategic dialectic that Solomon uses: counter-force and counter-value. These are two different approaches to military strategy, the first being concerned with denial and disarming, and the second with coercion. Solomon correctly points out the dangers and imponderables associated with counter-value strategies and in the end advocates a deterrence posture based on a denial or counter-force approach. Within that general category of strategy there are a number of possible operational concepts. T. X. Hammes, in his treatises on offshore control, and Solomon seem to advocate a robust operational concept of control. Hammes envisions a more rigorous regime – control of waters inside the first island chain - than does Solomon, whose approach is at least implicitly more modest in advocating denial. However both of these “operational concepts” set the bar pretty high for what we say we must achieve. Given the number of land-based systems that compose the Chinese A2AD edifice, achieving control or denial seems to imply strikes on them or, in Hammes’ strategy, somehow dealing with them without strikes on the mainland. Alternatively, a concept I have been thinking about is “disruption.”

Tombstones do not remain mute

 January 27, 2014

Rahul Pandita

Source Link

The HinduLeft bereaved by the protector: A State-ordered exhumation revealed, in 2000, that the bodies that the Army claimed belonged to militants were those of the missing men picked up from villages around Pathribal by security agencies. Here, the kin of a victim hold up a photograph of his. Photo: Nissar Ahmad

The Army’s clean chit to the accused in the Pathribal fake encounter case is an insult to the sacrifices made by its men in Kashmir

Let us not go to Pathribal first. Let us go to Shopian instead, not very far from Pathribal. In May 2009, two women went to work in their orchard in this town in south Kashmir and did not return till late in the night. In the ensuing search, the two were found dead by a rivulet. The separatist machinery in the Kashmir Valley was quick to cash in on this tragedy. The deaths were immediately dubbed as rape and murder, committed by — who else? — the Indian security forces. Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah had assumed office only a few months before and he was keen to prove that he meant business. He issued orders in haste. Four police officers were suspended and later jailed for almost two months.

It was a CBI investigation that brought out the truth after a few months. The investigation revealed that the two women had drowned in the flooded rivulet while they were attempting to cross it. The CBI filed a charge sheet against six doctors and others, including the brother of one of the deceased, for fabricating evidence. One of the doctors, the CBI found, had fudged the vaginal swab samples to prove that the women were raped.

The fake murder case had led to violent protests across Kashmir Valley. But, in the wake of the CBI charge sheet the separatist propaganda rang hollow. Though once in a while, the Delhi lobby of sympathisers still brings it up in TV discussions.

Around three years before its investigation in the Shopian incident, the CBI filed a charge sheet against seven men of the Army’s 7 Rashtriya Rifles unit, accusing them of killing in cold blood five innocent villagers and passing them off as foreign militants. On the night of March 20, 2000, the eve of American President Bill Clinton’s visit to India, suspected militants of Lashkar-e-Taiba had shot dead 35 Sikhs in the village of Chittisinghpora, near Pathribal. Five days later, the Army said that it had, in a joint operation with the police in Pathribal, eliminated five foreign militants responsible for the Chittisinghpora massacre. Prior to this, five men had been picked up from villages around Pathribal on the nights of March 23 and 24, 2000. The picking up of youth by various security agencies was a routine practice those days in Kashmir. But the families of the five missing men got suspicious after the Army’s press conference on the encounter. Subsequent protests forced the State government to orderan exhumation of the bodies of the ‘foreign militants’. It was done two weeks after the killings. They turned out to be the bodies of the five missing men. Apart from being shot, the bodies were badly charred and their body parts were chopped off.

Japan, India and the balance of power

January 27, 2014

K. Shankar Bajpai

Source Link

The HinduSymbolic: The recent six-day India visit of Japan's Imperial Majesties presages a relationship that can influence the global power structure. Photo: Kamal Narang

India and Japan can honestly say that they are not building relations in hostility against China; but it is right for them to plan for the eventuality of Chinese hostility

Within two months, we have received from Japan, first that rare, and symbolically greatest, gesture, the visit of Their Imperial Majesties, then the Defence Minister’s, and now, the Premier’s. It is heartening that such an important country attaches such importance to us, despite our best efforts to prove ourselves unready, if not unable, to play the role clearly expected of us. Formally, we have so many ‘strategic partners,’ the term has lost meaning, but Japan surely could give it solid contents. The economic component is obvious, limited largely by our own non-performance; the strictly strategic part is even more important but even less attended to. We could grow economically even without making the most of Japan’s cooperation, but to our national security interests, it is irreplaceably valuable. Moreover, the relationship’s significance is more than bilateral; it will influence others and the global power structure.

The power-politics and balance-of-power calculations we denounce are facts of life, standard practice for all serious countries which plan for their national security interests with evaluations of the international distribution of power. Having multiple, often conflicting, interests to manage, all countries need some organising principle. During practically all of India’s first half-century, the Cold War furnished that principle for everyone, the pursuit of other interests being conditioned by this central fact of international life. Since its end, all countries have been at sea, casting around for some new sextant to guide them. We Indians, like all others who only took charge of their own destinies just before or during the Cold War, are dealing for the first time with the interplay of multiple powers, some rising and some weakening. They all act without the constraints, indeed the discipline, imposed by the Cold War, but one development provides a major sort of organising principle, for many states if not all: the enormous rise of China.

No country has divined the ramifications of this for itself or globally — not even China. How far it will prove an alarmingly assertive power, throwing its weight about aggressively, and how far a constructive, if self-centred, leader in shaping a new, equitable world order, is a question that has spawned quite an industry, but leaving everyone guessing. Great powers have, historically, been both, usually more the former. China should prove no exception, but in a very new setting.

Most countries cop out with the banality that one must build on areas of cooperation with China while remaining wary of unwelcome possibilities. The first depends on Chinese attitudes, the latter on your own capabilities. Since no regional country comes anywhere near China’s present capabilities, leave alone tomorrow’s, each must strengthen its own, which includes building partnerships. Each will strenuously — and genuinely — maintain these are not aimed at harming, or even containing, China, but that is what China will consider them. Is that a reason for eschewing them?Territorial integrity paramount

The enigma of terminology

January 27, 2014

A.S. Panneerselvan

Source Link

The Hindu A.S. Panneerselvan. Photo: S.R. Raghunathan

Last week there was a story filed from Islamabad on trade between India and Pakistan across the Line of Control. Some readers have taken objection to the use of the terms ‘Indian occupied Kashmir’ and ‘Azad Jammu and Kashmir’ while quoting the Pakistan’s foreign affairs spokesperson. Newspapers have inherent difficulties in describing contested territories while adhering to the fundamental rules of reporting. In this case, the terms were not an invention of the reporter and the story was a faithful report of the Pakistani side of the story. The reporter has not endorsed it but merely reported a statement.

In the last two decades there had been constant interactions between journalists from India and Pakistan about fair coverage of Kashmir which has been trapped in the nationalistic narratives of the two neighbours. In 2005, when some of the influential editors of Indian and Pakistani media met at Istanbul one of the issues they discussed was what the media can do to lower the cross-border tensions and change the prevailing attitude of confrontation to reconciliation. They came up with a suggestion to use terms that capture the reality rather than the respective countries’ stated positions. Accordingly, for a very short period, many media outlets, both in India and in Pakistan, used ‘India Administered Kashmir’ instead of ‘India Occupied Kashmir’ and ‘Pakistan Administered Kashmir’ instead of ‘Pakistan Occupied Kashmir’. But soon the nationalist narratives gained precedence over the terminological exactitude.

In this context, I also realise my own transition from a journalist to an ombudsman. The crucial difference between a journalist and an ombudsman is the source, the beginning point, from which their respective writings flow. While the journalists report on events and developments, ombudsmen write about the quality of journalistic writings, and whether they adhere to the prescribed standards and whether they stand up to the meticulous scrutiny of informed readers. The journalistic skills evolved over a period of three centuries and the best practices have now been well documented and have become curriculum in various journalism schools across the world. But, the literature about ombudsmanship is not so rich. We, about hundred odd ombudsmen, learn from each other’s experience to hone our skills.

One of the interesting voices I follow is Craig Silverman, an award-winning journalist and the founder of Regret the Error, a blog that reports on media errors and corrections, and trends regarding accuracy and verification. The Poynter Institute hosts his blog where he is an adjunct faculty.

Let me discuss two postings in the Regret the Error blog that may have some resonance with the use of right terms to describe Kashmir on two sides of the Line of Control. The postings are about corrections carried that two important publications in the United States recently about events happened more than a century ago. I consider them significant because the act of correction is crucial to any newspaper that wants to be a media institution of record.

First, a correction carried out on November 14, 2013 by a U.S. paper, The Patriot-News. On the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg address, The Patriot-News issued a retraction of its editorial of 1863. The paper was then called, the Patriot & Union, and it ridiculed the address. Its editorial then read: “We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of.” And the retraction of last November was: “In the editorial about President Abraham Lincoln’s speech delivered Nov. 19, 1863, in Gettysburg, the Patriot & Union failed to recognize its momentous importance, timeless eloquence, and lasting significance. The Patriot-News regrets the error.”

Cryogenic success

MOST rocket propulsion is achieved through chemical propellants, where chemical energy is converted into the kinetic energy of hot gases...»

INFOGRAPHICS
GSLV timeline

In a major breakthrough that promises to make India self-reliant in space technology, an indigenised cryogenic engine powers the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle GSLV-D5 to put the 1,982-kilogram communication satellite GSAT-14 into a precise orbit. By T.S. SUBRAMANIAN

AT 4:35 p.m. on January 5, India’s 20-year-long “tapasya” ended when its Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle GSLV-D5 put GSAT-14 into a perfect orbit. A welter of emotions—pride, joy, patriotism and, perhaps, anger—engulfed the rocket and satellite engineers seated in the Mission Control Centre (MCC) at the spaceport at Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh. What was remarkable about the mission was that GSLV-D5 was powered by a cryogenic engine developed indigenously by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). It was this powerful, uppermost cryogenic stage, that imparted a velocity of 36,000 kilometres/hour to the three-stage vehicle to put the 1,982-kilogram communication satellite into a precise, geo-synchronous transfer orbit (GTO) with a perigee of 179.60 km and an apogee of 35,950 km against the targeted 180 km by 36,000 km. Of the 17 minutes of flight duration, the cryogenic stage fired for 12 minutes, a testimony to its importance in the mission.

Warplanes: India Gets More Herons To Deal With China

January 25, 2014: At the end of 2013 India ordered another 15 Heron UAVs from Israel in addition to having the 25 it already has upgraded with better communications equipment and some other improvements. All this will cost $300 million and is largely in response to Chinese aggressiveness along the 4,000 kilometer border both nations share. Most of this frontier is in thinly populated mountains and hills, some of it covered with forests but a lot of it with little vegetation. The additional Herons are ideal for patrolling all this.

In late 2012 India spent $1.1 billion to upgrade the sensors on some 150 largely Israeli UAVs owned by the Indian armed forces (army, air force, and navy). For the larger UAVs this meant high resolution radar (which provides black and white video of whatever is down there, in any weather) as well as high res video cameras. These sensors tend to be housed in a gimbaled stabilized turret. That means the operator can quickly point the sensor in any direction and get a stable image. Since the cameras are digital, the zoom feature is very quick and can reveal amazing levels of detail if you have high resolution cameras.

There is a growing body of evidence making it clear that you get the best results from your UAVs by having the best sensors you can afford installed. In many cases the sensor costs as much as the UAV itself. India is not going that far, as the United States and other Western nations (including Israel) have, but they were quite close with this upgrade program. While India’s UAVs tend to be smaller than those used in Western nations, more compact, lighter, and more powerful sensors make it possible to equip smaller UAVs with very capable radars and other (video and heat) sensors.

India's largest UAV, costing about $6 million each, is the Heron 1. This aircraft has a wingspan of 16.6 meters (58.4 feet), max take-off weight of 1.2 tons, and carries a 250 kg (550 pound) payload. With a max endurance of up to 50 hours (depending on payload carried), the Herons came with day and night vidcams or a naval search radar. Cruising at about 100 kilometers an hour and flying as high as 10 kilometers (32,000 feet), the Heron is very similar in cost and performance to the United States Predator.

Defeat in Bali

The Bali ministerial of the WTO ignores the original development agenda of the Doha Round, but India proclaims as victory an unfair deal meted out to it. By AMITI SEN

The meeting of Trade Ministers from 159 member countries of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in December in Bali, Indonesia, managed to revive global interest in the deadlocked Doha Round launched. But a closer look at what was achieved there shows that not only have members digressed from the original course of the Doha Round, but the development agenda, which was its cornerstone, too has disappeared into thin air.

The subsidy question

A simple request made by India and other developing members of the G33 alliance to delete subsidies given on account of public stockholding programmes from the category of actionable subsidies met with mammoth resistance from developed countries.

Given the fact that this request, if granted, would allow developing countries to give price support to poor farmers and also help implement their food security programmes without facing retaliatory action, developed countries should not have had any problem in going along with it. But the United States, the European Union and many others raised a hue and cry claiming that the provision would distort global prices, without paying heed to India’s assurance that crops obtained through the programme would not be released in the international market.

Double standards

When one takes into account the $100-billion-worth of farm subsidies given annually by the U.S. and an equal amount given by the E.U. countries, India’s food security programme, valued at $20 billion, is a pittance. But the argument did not seem to make any sense to the developed world. The unfairness of the existing regime that calculates subsidies on the basis of market prices prevailing in 1986 was also ignored.

Al-Qaeda strikes back

January 27, 2014
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/editorials/al-qaeda-strikes-back/0/

Obama has done what can be done to help the Afghans defend themselves against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

SUMMARY

But that is not an argument for US troops to stay on in Afghanistan.

Bruce Riedel

Al-Qaeda has staged a remarkable comeback in Iraq in the last year. Former National Security Advisor Jim Jones has called it “al-Qaeda’s renaissance”. Al-Qaeda could stage another renaissance in South Asia if the American drawdown from Afghanistan is botched.

The rise of al-Qaeda affiliates in the fertile crescent from Beirut to Baghdad has been dramatic. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, once wrongly proclaimed defeated by many, has regenerated, more deadly than ever, as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS). Today, it is fighting to once again take control of the Anbar province. It has already successfully given birth to a Syrian franchise, the al-Nusra Front, and now competes with its own offspring for power in Syria. Together, the ISIS and al-Nusra are trying to destroy the century-old borders of the region, tearing down the hated Sykes-Picot borders drawn by London and Paris in the aftermath of World War I. Thousands of jihadis from across the Muslim world, many from Europe, have already flocked to Syria to join the fight against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Sunni-Shia sectarian violence is multiplying, feeding a fire that al-Qaeda has long stoked.

Al-Qaeda’s Lebanese franchise, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, is trying to import the Syrian civil war into Lebanon. Named after the Palestinian ideologue who was Osama bin Laden’s key partner in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades took credit for the attack on the Iranian embassy in Beirut last November and have been linked to other car bombings since. The death of its leader, Majid bin Muhammad al-Majid, a Saudi Arabian, is not likely to put an end to its efforts.

There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq before 9/11, of course. The terror organisation moved into Iraq only when bin Laden saw that then US President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were getting ready to invade Iraq in 2003. He set a trap. By 2006, al-Qaeda in Iraq had plunged the country into civil war, pitting Shia against Sunni. Only the brave efforts of American Marines and GIs prevented the complete collapse of the state. Now al-Qaeda has come back in Iraq, raising its black flag over territory once fought over so hard by the Americans.

Can the same tragedy be repeated in Afghanistan and Pakistan? The longest war in American history will largely end for Americans this year. But it will not end for Afghans or Pakistanis. Pakistan will continue to be the principal supporter and patron of the Afghan Taliban. Pakistan provides the Taliban with safe haven and sanctuary to train and recruit its fighters, and protects its leaders, including Mullah Omar. The Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, helps train and fund the Taliban.

For the last few years, the US has also fought a second war from Afghanistan, the counter-terrorist war inside Pakistan. Al-Qaeda found a new base in Pakistan after the rout of Mullah Omar’s Afghan emirate in 2001. The highlight of this second covert war was the Seal raid to kill bin Laden in Abbottabad. Drone missions to disrupt al-Qaeda operations in Pakistan have been more frequent: by one count, there have been 340 lethal missions since President Barack Obama took office and more than two dozen just last year.

SPEAKING FREELY A way out for new army chief

By Atif Salahuddin

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/SOU-02-240114.html

General Raheel Sharif's succession as Pakistan's new army chief, after a victory over other aspirants to the powerful and coveted position, has finally ended the enduring six-year tenure of General Ashfaq Kayani.

During his time at the helm, General Kayani oversaw a rapidly deteriorating internal and external security situation. This included numerous domestic terror attacks - Iraq-style killings that claimed thousands of Pakistani lives - infiltration attacks on the Mehran naval and Kamra air bases and an audacious attack on the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi itself.

If this was not enough, Pakistan's purported "ally", the US, launched the embarrassing Abbottabad raid which killed Osama bin Laden, and the murderer of two Pakistanis in Lahore - CIA agent Raymond Davis - was simply allowed to go home as a free man.

US drone attacks, which have become symbolic of American impunity and intransigence in dealing with Pakistan, increased exponentially with thousands of men, women and children being slaughtered in the tribal areas all in the name of fighting terrorism.

Amid all these incidents, it was perhaps the slaughter of 24 Pakistani troops in Salala at the hands of the US-led NATO forces which most undermined Kayani's position - if the commander-in-chief could launch operations in the tribal areas under American pressure but not lift a finger to defend and avenge his troops, what faith could the rest of Pakistan have in him? 

General Kayani's weak leadership, lack of robustness and caving into American pressure will characterize his legacy.

Incoming General Raheel Sharif rightly has some weighty expectations to bear; he has to reverse the decline overseen by his predecessors and improve the security situation of the country, all while restoring the prestige of the army.

Raheel has had the advantage of holding a clean slate. Having served as the inspectorate of training and evaluation for the Pakistan army in his last position, he was perceived as having relatively clean hands as far as the fighting in the tribal areas is concerned.

Lessons from the Battle of the Paracel Islands

Forty years on, the battle has enduring lessons for Vietnam’s naval modernization.

By Ngo Minh Tri and Koh Swee Lean Collin

January 23, 2014 

On January 16, 1974, the Republic of Vietnam Navy (RVN) discovered the presence of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the Crescent Group in the western Paracel Islands, which was held by South Vietnam. This was an unexpected development, because notwithstanding the reduced U.S. military assistance to Saigon after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, and subsequent reduction of South Vietnamese garrisons on the islands, the Chinese had not taken unilateral actions to subvert the status quo – by which the Amphitrite Group in the eastern Paracels and the Crescent Group were respectively under Chinese and South Vietnamese control.

Over the next two days, the opposing naval forces jostled with one another in close-proximity maneuvers off the islands, before a firefight erupted as the South Vietnamese troops attempted to recapture Duncan Island. The skirmish subsequently escalated with overwhelming Chinese reinforcements deployed to the clash zone, including close air support staged from nearby Hainan Island and missile-armed Hainan-class patrol vessels. Shorn of American naval support, given that the U.S. Navy Seventh Fleet was then scaling down its presence in the South China Sea following the peace accords of 1973, the RVN was utterly defeated. Beijing swiftly exploited the naval victory with an amphibious landing in force to complete its control of all the Paracel Islands.

The Battle of the Paracel Islands has since gone down history as the first Sino-Vietnamese naval skirmish in the quest for control over the South China Sea isles. The Sino-Vietnamese naval skirmish in the nearby Spratly Islands in 1988 was the second and final such instance. Since then, tensions have eased. There have been continued exchanges at the ruling party level and between the countries’ militaries (including the hosting of a PLA Navy South Sea Fleet delegation to a Vietnamese naval base). Beijing and Hanoi have also recently inaugurated mutual consultations on joint marine resource development in the South China Sea.

However, the Battle of Paracel Islands in 1974 yields some useful and enduring lessons for Hanoi and its ongoing naval modernization in the South China Sea, particularly in the face of geopolitical developments.

Enduring Lesson #1: Diplomacy is the First Recourse… But Not the Sole Recourse

No international and regional treaties constitute perfect safeguards against unilateral action, including threat or use of force. The landmark Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea inked in 2002 between China and the Southeast Asian claimants has not been entirely successful. In fact, unilateral actions aimed at subverting the status quo in the South China Sea by threat or use of force has continued to dominate. Recent video footage revealed by China’s CCTV in January 2014 showed a standoff between Chinese and Vietnamese law enforcement ships off the Paracel Islands back in 2007. More recent, recurring incidents included the harassment of Vietnamese survey ships by Chinese vessels, the Sino-Philippine maritime standoff in the Scarborough Shoal in April 2012 and, later, the show of force by Chinese surveillance ships and naval frigates off the Philippine-held Second Thomas Shoal. These episodes bear an eerie resemblance to the sort of naval jostling that led to the skirmish back in 1974.

Even as the South China Sea claimants engaged in consultations on a Code of Conduct, upon unilaterally declaring an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) over the East China Sea in December 2013, Beijing declared indisputable rights to create ADIZs in other areas if it so desired. An ADIZ over the South China Sea, if ever established, would undoubtedly strengthen Beijing’s hand over the disputed waters, augmenting regular unilateral fishing bans, an earlier expanded maritime law enforcement authority for the Hainan authorities as well as the latest Chinese fisheries law requiring foreign fishing vessels to seek permission from Beijing to operate in much of the South China Sea. These developments, if they continue unabated, will only heighten the risk of accidental or premeditated clashes in the disputed waters.

Why China and the Philippines are Battling Over Rocks, Reefs

By Trefor Moss

MANILA—The Philippines cried foul this week when China announced plans to begin regular patrols of the South China Sea, known here as the West Philippines Sea. The two countries have been engaged in a tense dispute over the region since 2012, when Chinese ships took control of Scarborough Shoal, which is just one of the areas Beijing and Manila contest.


Government spokesman Raul Hernandez insisted any such patrols would be illegal because the area in question is Filipino, not Chinese, territory: Under international law, he said in a statement sent by text message to reporters on Jan. 22, China’s Exclusive Economic Zone, or EEZ, “cannot extend beyond 200 nautical miles” from the Chinese mainland and Hainan Island, a province at the southernmost end of China.

* What does that mean? Every country with a coastline has ownership of the seas immediately around it. This area of “territorial sea” extends 12 miles from the coast, and foreign ships are not allowed to enter those waters without permission. Every country with a coastline also has an EEZ. This zone stretches 200 miles from the coast, and the controlling country has exclusive rights to exploit the resources within that area. That includes fishing and undersea drilling. Foreign ships are free to sail through an EEZ.

* And beyond that? These are the high seas, and global commons: All nations have the right to sail them and to exploit their natural resources.
A Hamilton class high cutter from the United States in the seas around the northeastern Philippines on Aug. 2, 2013. The country has been working to update its naval fleet amid increased tension with China over disputed waters in the South China Sea.Reuters

Will the Next World War Start in the Middle East?

JANUARY 25, 2014

BY ISAAC CHOTINER @ichotiner
The centenary of the First World War is upon us, and it has been marked by a slew of books, articles, remembrances, and commentary. The origins of one of civilization’s greatest catastrophes are still disputed. Was German aggression the cause of the war, or should blame be more widely spread?

Richard Evans, the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, is the author of many books about Europe (including a trilogy about the Third Reich), and is one of the most prominent intellectuals in the United Kingdom. This week, he has a cover story in theNew Statesman looking back at the war, and comparing 1914 to today. We spoke over the phone about who caused the disaster, the best books to read on it, and whether the modern Middle East will spark the next World War.

Isaac Chotiner: What is the major difference between 1914 and 2014? Are you worried about another major conflict breaking out anytime soon?

Richard Evans: I think we have to recognize that the instability and violence of the Balkan states in 1914 was the trigger for the war. It was not an excuse used by the Germans or anybody else. The region was pretty much out-of-control. I think the obvious parallel here is with the Middle East today, where again you have a number of smallish states, heavily armed, with religious differences, political differences, and instability. The situation is very difficult for the major powers to control.

IC: You say that it was not just an excuse to start the war, but don’t you think other events, like thecrisis in Morocco in 1911, or something else, could have been the spark to start the war?

RE: Well, the Moroccan issue was settled, the Middle East was more or less settled by 1914, and the naval arms race was settled because Britain had won and everyone recognized that, including the Germans. So I think it really had to be the Balkans.

It was a multipolar world in the late 19th century, which then became a bipolar world, split between two camps in Europe itself. That mirrors the cold war, but the cold war is over, and we now have once more the multipolar world that you had in Europe in the 1880s and 1890s. And also, you have institutions of collective security now, just as you had then—the United Nations may not be all that effective but it is better than nothing.