Just What We Need – Another Conflict in Afghanistan

When it comes to foreign policy, the Bush/Cheney regime has been an unmitigated disaster, the perfect storm of indifference, over-confidence and inconsistent goals.

Toppling Saddam was supposed to spark the spread of democracy through the Middle East. Instead it resulted in the ascendancy of fundamentalist Shiite influence from Iraq to Iran, Syria to Lebanon.

In its War (without end) on Terror, the United States has fractured Trans-Atlantic solidarity and undermined NATO unity. Bush has done a lot to try to mend fences over the past two years but it’ll take a new American administration and an awful lot of diplomacy to restore those relationships.

Already faced with being eclipsed economically by an emerging China, the US has driven China and Russia into each other’s arms through clumsy attempts at containment. This is not to say the Shanghai Cooperation Organization wouldn’t have emerged otherwise but US efforts certainly gave it unhelpful impetus.

Then there’s Afghanistan. We’re busy trying to hold the Taliban and al-Qaeda at bay while the country literally rots beneath our feet. Fundamentalist Islamist warlords rule most of the country, barely tolerating a notional central government in Kabul that is both feeble and terminally corrupt. We’re struggling to save the irredeemable.

We keep saying the key to stopping the Taliban is the neighbouring state of Pakistan. Then Washington gives Islamabad ample cause not to cooperate by encouraging rival India to expand its presence in Afghanistan. Bloody minded idiocy!

With warlords, drug barons, insurgents and a corrupt government and security service, what we all need now in Afghanistan is another source of conflict, especially a proxy battle between Pakistan and India. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening.

India has a history of meddling in Afghanistan to bring pressure on Pakistan’s western front. As Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar, a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service, reported in Asia Times Online, Indian-Pakistani rivalries are very much in play in Afghanistan:

“All through the painful twists and turns, Indian policy towards Afghanistan was steeped in pragmatism and remained largely Pakistan-centric. But things seem to be changing. The horizons appear to have vastly expanded. According to Pakistani writer Ahmed Rashid, Kabul is “replacing Kashmir as the main area of antagonism” between India and Pakistan. The Pakistani security establishment has convinced itself that Indian and Afghan intelligence agencies are engaged in undermining Pakistan’s security. American analysts say Afghanistan has explicitly become a theater of Pakistan-India adversarial relations. But there is a much larger dimension.

The Pakistani establishment is also sizing up the new geopolitical reality – the unprecedented pro-India tilt in the US’s regional policy. It is having a hard time coping with the trilateral consensus between Kabul, Delhi and Washington, which pillories Islamabad as the “primary and near-exclusive trouble maker” in the region. The Pakistani establishment cannot accept that while Islamabad remains a key partner for Washington in the “war on terror”, it is Delhi that is on the way to becoming a stakeholder in US global strategies.

…the Pakistani perspective sees the emerging regional equations as a dangerous slide toward Indian military superiority and regional “hegemony”. How does the Pakistani military, weaned on adversarial feelings towards India, countenance such a challenge?

First, Pakistan will assert its legitimate interests in Afghanistan, no matter what it takes. Make no mistake about it. The Pakistani generals know what transpired when American and British top brass met in Britain last month to exchange notes on Afghanistan. The conclave assessed there were huge problems with the Karzai regime’s performance and the war might last for another 30 years, which is a hopeless scenario, as “war fatigue” is setting in among North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies and the tide of public opinion is turning against the war. But that isn’t all.

…though Indian rhetoric on Afghanistan is carefully couched in terms of countering terrorism, Pakistan doesn’t see it that way. Instead, it views it in much larger terms as an Indian thrust, supported by the US, as the pre-eminent regional power in South Asia. In recent weeks, Pakistani military raised the ante along the Line of Control bordering the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. The resurgence of tensions seems a calibrated move. Islamabad is sending some signals.

Nasim Zehra, a relatively moderate, sensible voice in the Pakistani strategic community, wrote recently, “It is time for Pakistan to categorically state: enough of Pakistan bashing, enough of vacuous Kantian moralizing in a Hobbesian world, enough of the do-more mantra and enough of partisan analysis, enough of selective perceptions, enough of double standards … Pakistan will play ‘as clean as the world around it’. Take it or leave it. There is no ‘going it alone’ for any of Pakistan’s neighbors.”

…The message is simple: If Pakistan goes down, it will take India down with it. There is no such thing as absolute security.”

Indian meddling advances the interests of the United States and NATO in Afghanistan very little and, while Karzai may treasure India’s engagement as a foil to Pakistan, it is Pakistan’s help we need in Afghanistan.

 

India Rolls Out Climate Change Initiatives

The Indian government has unveiled a series of climate change initiatives. The eight point programme focuses on solar energy, enhanced energy efficiency, sustainable habitats, water conservation, sustaining the Himalayan ecosystem, developing a ‘green’ India, sustainable agriculture and building a strategic knowledge platform on climate change.

Yada, yada, yada – good luck with that. But what about greenhouse gas emissions? Well, there’s the rub.

India won’t commit to GHG caps except to assure us that per capita emissions in India won’t exceed those of the developed world.

Relax. For India and China to get to North American carbon footprint levels we’d need about three times the maximum sustainable energy our environmentally besieged planet can produce. Since that is a geological impossibility, we can see that assurance for what it is – telling the developed world to take their racist carbon policies and shove them.

 

Arms Race Update – Space in India’s Crosshairs

The Chinese-Indian arms race is one of the least mentioned but most interesting now underway (yes there are a few others).

The world’s two most populous states have been pursuing military co-operation even as they stoke the boilers of military rivalry. There’s a great naval race underway with both countries eager to deploy true “blue water” naval muscle to secure their sea lane access to the Persian Gulf and the oil that serves as the lifeblood of their economic miracles. Washington is actively courting India to assist it in containing China.

It’s Chinese advances in space, however, that now have India’s military worried. China has already achieved manned space flight and has developed proven anti-satellite missiles. From The Times:

“General Deepak Kapoor, India’s Chief of Army Staff, has spoken publicly for the first time of his fears about China’s military space programme and the need for India to accelerate its own.

“The Chinese space programme is expanding at an exponentially rapid pace in both offensive and defensive content,” he told a conference attended by India’s military top brass this week. “The Indian Army’s agenda for exploitation of space will have to evolve dynamically. It should be our endeavour to optimise space applications for military purposes.”

Beijing’s space programme is already several years ahead of Delhi’s: China sent its first man into space in 2003, the third country to do so after the Soviet Union and the US. The Indian Space Research Organisation said last year that it aimed to send a manned mission to the Moon by 2020 — four years before China — but did not plan to send its first astronauts into orbit until 2014.

What really shocked India was China’s shooting down of one of its own weather satellites in January last year — again placing it alongside Russia and the United States as the only countries capable of such a feat. By comparison, India does not yet have a single dedicated military satellite, relying instead on the dual-use telecommunications satellites for surveillance and reconnaissance.

One of the military’s priorities is to match the technology China used to shoot down its satellite with a ballistic missile about 860km (535 miles) above the Earth’s surface. Abdul Kalam, a former President of India and missile engineer, said in February that India already had the capability to “intercept and destroy any spatial object or debris in a radius of 200km”.

 

Population Control – Indian Style

Next Monday a report will be released in London that looks at trends in population, development and reproductive health in today’s India.

The report, Disappearing Daughters, prepared by the NGO Actionaid and Canada’s International Development Research Centre, outlines India’s growing “sex selection” crisis. This arises out of the spreading practice of sex selection abortion used to ensure male children by aborting female fetuses. From Reuters Alternet:

“Findings from sites across five states in north and northwest India reveal that the sex ratio of girls to boys has not only worsened but is accelerating compared to the last national census in 2001.

Latest figures from one site in the Punjab, India’s richest state, show the number of girls has plummeted to just 300 compared to 1000 boys amongst higher cast families.

In a culture that predominantly views girls as an expense rather than an asset, women are put under intense pressure to produce sons.

The trend for smaller families is also deepening the aversion to daughters, with the use of ultrasound technology now being used to plan families. This is despite the existence of laws banning prenatal sex detection and sex selective abortion.

ActionAid has also found that girls are more likely to be born but less likely to survive in areas with more limited access to public health services and modern ultrasound technology. In rural Morena and Dhaulpur, deliberate neglect of girls, including allowing the umbilical cord to become infected, is used as a way to dispose of unwanted daughters. Such neglect ensures fewer surviving daughters, with the best chances of being born and surviving as a girl depending on the birth order in your family. “

 

They Call It "Reproductive Outsourcing"

A fascinating item in the International Herald Tribune about a new and rapidly expanding industry in India – surrogate motherhood.

India, widely known for the destination of a variety of outsourced jobs is now fielding a corps of housewives available for artificial insemination – at bargain prices!

“Reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding enterprise in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe in recent months, as word spreads of India’s combination of skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices.

“Commercial surrogacy, which is banned in some European countries and subject to a wide spectrum of regulation in U.S. states, was legalized in India in 2002. The cost of the medical procedures, air tickets and hotels for two trips to India (one for the fertilization and a second to collect the baby) comes to around $25,000, roughly a third of the typical price in the United States.”

“Under guidelines issued by the Indian Medical Council, surrogate mothers sign away all their rights to the child. In cases where the surrogate provides a womb for an embryo formed from the sperm and egg of the prospective parents, it is only the names of these genetic parents that appear on the birth certificate. If an egg donor is involved, her name does not appear on the document, either; only that of the father.”

There are so many moral and ethical issues that leap out from this and they’ll never, ever come up for serious consideration. Yes, your own baby and for less than the price of a Volkswagen!

 

Arms Race Update

India this time. The country has successfully test-fired its first, submarine launched, nuclear capable missile, the Brahmos.

Naturally it’s got Pakistan all in a tizzy with Pakistan’s top sailor claiming this will spark a new arms race between the countries.

The big news that seems to have escaped much attention is that India is planning on building its own submarines to carry the missiles. An Indian capability to deploy submarine launched, nuclear missiles goes far beyond issues of Pakistan, all of which is already vulnerable to Indian land based nukes. It would, in fact, extend India’s nuclear reach throughout the intended range of India’s navy – from the Middle East to the Sea of Japan.

 

Afghanistan’s Newest Benefactor – China

No, they’re not going to help NATO fight the Taliban or al-Qaeda. Instead the Chinese will be helping themselves to one of the largest copper deposits in the world. It’s the Aynak copper mine in Logar province and the Chinese beat out rivals from Canada, the US and Russia to get it.

China Metallurgical Group has committed $4-billion to the project which will also see a direct rail line constructed linking Afghanistan and China. I wonder if the Chinese project will be using electricity generated by the Kajaki dam NATO has been struggling to defend against the Taliban? Maybe NATO will even wind up providing security for China’s investment.

It’s believed that part of the investment is a desire, on China’s part, to “push back” against India and the Indian/US efforts to contain China. Now it’s seen in some quarters that it’s China working to encircle India. This is the take of M K Bhadrakumar, a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for over 29 years, published in Asia Times Online:

“…the mother of all Chinese encirclement of India still remains largely unnoticed in Delhi – the Beijing-Tehran axis. There is wide recognition that if the United States hasn’t been able to push through another tougher United Nations Security Council resolution against Iran over its nuclear program, that has been largely because of China’s reluctance to concur.

But what happened last Sunday still came as a bolt from the blue. China Petroleum Corporation, better known as the Sinopec Group, signed a contract with the Iranian Oil Ministry for the development of the Yadavaran oil and gas fields in southwestern Iran.

The current estimation is that the project cost will be $2 billion. Under the contract, China will make the entire investment necessary to develop the fields. The first phase is to produce 85,000 barrels of oil per day and the second phase will add another 100,000 barrels. According to Iranian estimates, Yadavaran has in place oil reserves of 18.3 billion barrels and gas reserves amounting to 12.5 trillion cubic feet.

China outmaneuvered both the US and India on Iran. When the American National Intelligence Estimates collapsed Bush’s claims of Iran’s imminent nuclear threat to the world, China was ready to move – and quickly. India, meanwhile, found itself shut out, having succumbed to US pressure to sanctions against Iran.

Indian diplomacy has a lot of catching up to do. In the short term, Delhi will have to pay a price for overlooking the geopolitical reality that Iran is the only really viable regional power in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. Delhi’s best hope is that true to their innate pragmatism, Iranians will let bygones be bygones.

 

The Sleeping Bear Awakes

There’s an arms race underway, maybe it’s more than one.

On the side of the West, it’s pretty much limited to the United States where George Bush has been picking up the pace of testing and development of new aircraft, nuclear weapons, anti-missile systems and a myriad of advanced technologies. Looking at all of the lethality rolling out of American factories the one word on everyone’s mind but almost no one’s lips is – China.

China is seen as a competitor to America as a natural result of it’s newfound wealth and industrial might. Along with new factories, China sought to modernize its military. The Chinese have been whittling down the size of their massive army but making rapid strides in developing their air and naval forces. To do this the Chinese have relied heavily on fairly modern, highly capable weaponry purchased from Russia but lately a new generation of Chinese-made ships and aircraft has begun to emerge.

Because China is a good sea voyage away from the US and because the American military presence in that region has been shrinking ever since the fall of South Vietnam, Washington has sought to find other means of containing the People’s Republic. This has been accomplished by developing an alliance with another emerging industrial power, India.

The United States is rearming, China is rearming, so is India. India already has a highly capable army and air force. Like China it has equipped its forces with the best the Russians sell, along with a smattering of aircraft, etc. from the West. The big deal for India is the rapid expansion of its navy to become a true “blue water fleet.” The Indian navy is looking to add about 40-warships to its fleet in order to allow it to maintain a region of influence extending all the way over to the Sakhalin islands which, entirely coincidentally, would mask China’s entire coastline.

A powerful Indian navy presents China with several problems. One is the challenge it poses to China’s sea routes to the Middle East and the dwindling oil bounty for which the two are competing. Another is having a foreign and not entirely friendly navy establishing a maritime blockade threat. India doesn’t have to do anything to provoke China with that one.

America, China and India – all racing in the quest for more and better. Bad as that is, it’s about to get worse. Russia, flush with new found oil wealth and an increasingly autocratic government, has decided it wants in. Moscow has announced plans to begin acquiring new ICBMs (in case you’ve forgotten – intercontinental ballistic missiles), new submarines and even possibly new aircraft carriers.

The Russian military has languished on a scrap heap since the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991 and we all breathed a sigh of relief for that. For all its woes, Russia still maintains 1.13 million in uniform.

Where is this headed? Who knows? As Gwynne Dyer noted in his book Future Tense the Bush administration has worked very hard to undermine the United Nations and the international treaties and protocols associated with it, paving the way for a return to 19th century secret alliances, hostility, distrust and even paranoia.

Ladies and gentlemen, there is the true Bush legacy.