Indo-Pak Update: A Future of Nudges and Hopes || via Meadia
Few bilateral relationships matter more for the long-term stability of Asia than that between New Delhi and Islamabad. But few, too, are as seemingly intractable….
[A recent report by the International Crisis Group on Indo-Pakistani relations] provides some room for the one resource scarcer in the Indus Basin than water, optimism. The legacy media’s coverage of Indo-Pakistani relations usually takes place through the lens of Kashmir, militaries, and terrorism, but, the Crisis Group report emphasizes, there has actually been significant improvement in trade relations between the two countries. The ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government agreed to grant most favored nation (MFN) status to India in November 2011, to be implemented by the end of 2012, a decision that the largest opposition party, the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) also supported. This decision ‘is not merely an economic concession but also a significant political gesture. Departing from Pakistan’s traditional position, the current government no longer insists on linking normalization of relations with resolution of the Kashmir dispute. India no longer insists on making such normalization conditional on demonstrable Pakistani efforts to rein in India-oriented jihadi groups, particularly the Lashkar-e-Taiba, responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks and hence suspension of the composite dialogue.’
This matters. Decoupling trade from other contentious issues could have significant consequences. Pakistan’s current trade with India represents only one percent of its total balance, while Indian exports to Pakistan accounted for only 0.93 percent of its total exports. ‘India-Pakistan trade is a win-win situation’, says former Pakistan State Bank Governor Ishrat Hussain. Says a Pakistan economist, Asad Sayeed, ‘Economic growth can take place either through major structural transformation or through trade. Since Pakistan’s economic structure has remained the same for at least the last 40 years, the only way to ensure growth is regional trade and investment.’ Pakistan’s two largest industries, textiles and food processing, are sophisticated enough to compete well in Indian markets, while energy-hungry India would benefit from access to the world’s second-largest coal mines in the Thar Desert in Sindh Province.
Nigeria Burns || Via Meadia
In recent days, gunmen and suicide bombers associated with Boko Haram bombed the offices of several prominent Nigerian newspapers; killed fifteen worshippers at a church in just the latest of many attacks on Christian civilians; bombed the convoy of a prominent policeman (who survived, unlike eleven not-so-lucky guards and bystanders); launched an assault on a police station, were repulsed, only to attack another police station down the road, where they freed a number of prisoners and killed two guards. Gunmen in military uniforms kidnapped and executed five people in eastern Nigeria late last week….
The line between criminal gangs and Islamist militants has blurred in Nigeria. Unemployment is high, especially among young people. Boko Haram is no centrally organized group. Some of its members are part of an anti-West, fundamentalist Islamist insurgency. Others are thugs. Most are northerners, disillusioned by what they consider to be the unfair power southern tribes and leaders hold in the central government. They attack symbols of what they see as oppression: police stations and officers, newspaper offices, politicians. But lawlessness in Nigeria is not all attributable to Boko Haram: There are conflicts over land and resources between communities that do not get along, often divided along religious as well as ethnic and linguistic lines in the middle of Nigeria, where the Muslim north meets the Christian south. Nigeria’s social fabric is stretched very, very thin.
The new old lie || The New Criterion
[C]ritics should think again about the implications of their insistence that war is meaningless, especially in the American context. In their effort to direct the culture toward new ideals by dismissing the old ones, they have focused inward and lost sight of an important truth. War requires at least two sides. If war is just meaningless, then the motivations and causes of each side do not matter—they are equally invalid or valid. That conclusion should make even the most dedicated cynic recoil, because in those terms, when the wrong side wins, war, combat, and its aftermath become fraught with meaning. In that sense, at least, the critics should realize that there is coherence, meaning, in the chaos of war.
War, after all, is about competing purposes, competing causes, competing ideals—produced by polities, defined by policymakers, put into action by military professionals, and fought for by average soldiers. War itself does not care about the relative merits of those ideals, but the outcome of war, and therefore the outcome of combat, determines which ideal wins. The outcome of war determines which cause gets to survive, thrive, and guide the lives of people in peace, and just as importantly, which cause does not get to shape the peace. Most vitally, war decides which ideal gets to be fought for again. War is regrettably a part of the human condition, and it is many awful things, but it is never meaningless….
What MacLeish and Jones understood was that no matter what the weaknesses they saw in existing American ideals, those ideals were better than the alternative. That is as true today as ever, and that is what scares the critics. If they accept that truth, then they will have to explore what has made the existing ideals consistently better than the alternative ones. In the process, they will discover that the foundational American ideals are not just relatively good, but that they are inherently good. As such, they can be refined and improved, but they must be preserved, not replaced.
Since the critics hold on to their utopian progressivism with a religious fervor, such an assessment would cause a crisis in faith, so it is exceedingly unlikely for them to undertake it. It is much easier, after all, to call war meaningless butchery, and dismiss all other views as sentimental propaganda—mere entertainment for the uninformed masses.
If the country is an ideal, and the ideal is just, then Horace had it right: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. To say that this is never true, to insist that war is always meaningless, is not art. It is the new old lie, and an ugly one at that.
India to test nuclear-capable missile that could reach Chinese cities of Beijing and Shanghai || AP
India is planning to test launch a new nuclear-capable missile that for the first time would give it the capability of hitting the major Chinese cities of Beijing and Shanghai.
The government has hailed the Agni-V missile, with a range of 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles), as a major boost to its efforts to counter China’s regional dominance and become an Asian power in its own right. The test launch was slated to come as early as Wednesday evening, but Indian media said a delay was likely because of poor weather conditions.
“It will be a quantum leap in India’s strategic capability,” said Ravi Gupta, spokesman for India’s Defense Research and Development Organization, which built the missile.
China is far ahead of India in the missile race, with intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching anywhere in India. Currently, the longest-range Indian missile, the Agni-III, has a range of only 3,500 kilometers (2,100 miles) and falls short of many major Chinese cities.
India and China fought a war in 1962 and continue to nurse a border dispute. India has also been suspicious of Beijing’s efforts to increase its influence in the Indian Ocean in recent years.
Disruptive Thinkers: More Thoughts on Disruption and National Security || Small Wars Journal
[It] reminded me of what is surely fast becoming the quote for our times when Sir Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics, once said to his staff: “Gentleman, we have run out of money. It is time to start thinking.”
In a world of long-term austerity, rapid technological change, declining importance of Westphalian concepts and later generation warfare that almost ceases to have any resemblance to traditional notions of war we can no longer afford to be prisoners to doctrinal precepts and organizational notions that are more applicable to the 1950s. The futility of large, inflexible military bureaucracies, procuring large, complex, over-engineered systems from the few large, inflexible remaining general contractors in a rapidly changing world seems evident. This system, which Anthony Cordesman has described as a “poisoned chalice” has long been broken and is no longer fully relevant to the emerging world of the “rise of the rest” and the proliferation of military technology. We need not only a revolution in military affairs; we need a revolution in military organization, design and procurement. We need to replace the military industrial complex with a military innovation complex, although the word “complex” is probably less than satisfactory to describe the dynamic that is most appropriate for the times. This emerging system would require far expanded notion of jointness: visions of security that extend beyond the battlefield integrating concepts from economic development, flexible manufacturing, commerce and social systems into the mix.
Victim of Assad || The Weekly Standard
In a grim footnote to the ongoing human tragedy in Syria, the country’s cultural heritage as well as its civilian population is now in peril. Syria, a center of civilization in the ancient and medieval eras, boasts some of the finest archaeological sites in the near east, notably the old cities of Damascus and Aleppo as well as the ancient synagogue at Dura Europos. Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which should have the knowledge and ability to protect sensitive sites, has done nothing to spare them. There have been reliable reports of violence at a number of sites, including the so-called “Bride of the Desert,” the Roman city of Palmyra, the Omari mosque in Deraa, the early Christian church of St. Julian in Homs, and the medieval castle known as the “Krak des Chevaliers” outside that city.
Palmyra contains Babylonian, Hellenistic, Roman and Islamic treasures, and was home to the legendary Queen Zenobia who rebelled against the Romans in the third century AD. Abandoned for centuries and in an isolated location, the ruins are—or were—particularly well preserved. Given the popularity of Palmyra as a tourist destination, Assad had in the past been content to leave well enough alone. But in February the troops rolled in and took up positions in the 17th-century Citadel of Ibn Maan overlooking the modern town and adjacent to the Roman ruins. Civilians report heavy gun and tank fire targeting any activity in the site, and the extent of the damage can only be imagined.
Report: Osama bin Laden helped plan Mumbai attacks || The Long War Journal
Osama bin Laden was in close contact with Hafiz Saeed, the wanted chief of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), and helped plan the 2008 Mumbai attack, according to a report in the Hindustan Times. Citing Bruce Riedel, a former advisor to President Obama on Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Hindustan Times says that documents recovered in bin Laden’s Pakistani safe house prove the extensive relationship between al Qaeda’s deceased emir and LeT.
“The documents and files found in Abbottabad showed a close connection between Bin Laden and Saeed, right up to May 2011,” Riedel told the newspaper. Riedel added that the captured files “suggested a much larger direct al Qaeda role in the planning of the Mumbai attacks than many assumed” and bin Laden may have seen surveillance reports prepared by David Headley, the LeT operative who scouted out locations for the Mumbai siege.
The revelation of Hafiz Saeed’s ties to bin Laden led the US to offer a $10 million bounty for the LeT chieftain, according to the report.
Such collusion would hardly be surprising. Al Qaeda and LeT have had a strong relationship for more than two decades. Abdullah Azzam, a mentor to bin Laden and co-founder of Maktab al Khadamat, a forerunner to al Qaeda, also helped found the LeT organization. In more recent years, the LeT’s network helped al Qaeda operatives flee Afghanistan in late 2001 and early 2002 after the fall of the Taliban. Al Qaeda terrorists have trained in LeT camps, and LeT members have fought alongside al Qaeda and the Taliban against Coalition forces in Afghanistan.
Strategy and Perception, Part II || zenpundit
I think Jason has put his finger on another problem altogether here. His description of “perception” in that paragraph is one of political perception of a foreign audience of our actions as they constitute an ongoing, apparently unending process to which there is no conclusion in the sense of a defined End, just an arbitrary time limit (to which we are only kinda, sorta, maybe sticking to). Actually “audience” is not even the right word, as the Afghans are interested participants and actors as well as onlookers who happen to be on the weaker side of an asymmetric dynamic. Weak does not equate to “powerless”, and as we have stupidly set very high strategic goals that require the voluntary consent, adoption and cooperation of the Afghan people to reach, withholding of consent, passive or active resistance or armed insurgency are Afghan bargaining alternatives to abject submission to our wishes. As occupation in the form of unending process looks a lot like foreign domination of Afghanistan by infidels and their corrupt and predatory collaborators, it is not surprising that the Afghans of all stripes are bargaining hard after ten long years.
American civilian leaders running the Afghan war are politicians and lawyers, for whom unending process (like for example, the Federal budget) rather than results is familiar and comfortable and for whom irrevocable choice making is anathema. Crafting a usefully effective military strategy is difficult if one of the unspoken, sub rosa, goals is to “keep all options open as long as possible” which precludes commitment to and vigorous pursuit of a prioritized, specific End to the exclusion of others in as short a time as possible.
This perspective, while perhaps a career advantage for a politician, is over the long haul ruinous for a country in a statesman, as the net result becomes burning money and soldier’s lives to garner nothing but more time in which to avoid making a final decision, hoping to be rescued by chance (Once in a blue moon in warfare, a Tsarina dies or an Armada sinks and changes fortunes, but most nations losing a war ultimately go down to defeat).
A defined and concrete End, by contrast, yields a different perceptual effect because uncertainty for soldiers and onlookers alike is reduced. Foreigners can calculate their own interests and costs with accuracy and decide if opposition, neutrality or alliance will be to their advantage. Now it may be that a desired strategic End is so provocative that it is best kept secret until a sudden victory can be presented to the world as fait accompli, but that is still a very different thing from elevating process of Ways and Means over distant, ambiguously unrealistic and vaguely defined Ends. Loving policy process and tactical excellence above strategic results when employing military force gets you a very long and likely unsuccessful war.
Tuareg Forces Take Tessalit || Weekly Standard
With the fall last weekend of the northern Mali garrison town of Tessalit, and its airstrip, to Tuareg secessionist forces, U.S. counter-terror policy in Africa is dealt a stunning setback. A USAF airlift brought supplies on February 14 to the besieged town, which reportedly was overwhelmed by a column of Tuareg fighters in early February only to be retaken by a Mali Defense Forces (MDF) column a few days later, which then found itself – with the military families – surrounded by a more numerous and better armed rebel detachment. Bu there are no reports of further U.S. involvement.
Mali is a lynchpin of U.S. strategy in the region. This defeat, qualified by the Tuareg as a rout and by the Malian government as an orderly tactical retreat, is certain to cause consternation in at least some corridors of Washington, which for the most part does not know where Mali is.
The State Department and AFRICOM (U.S. Army Africa Command) were silent on the implications of last week’s event other than to reassert support for Mali’s liberal political and economic reforms.
Regional observers, as well as spokesmen for the competing forces, remain sharply divided regarding the significance of the battle for Tessalit, whose military base and airstrip give it a strategic significance in the continuing low-level conflicts for the control of the southern Sahara. The Tuareg MNLA (from the French acronym for the Mouvement National de Liberation de l’Anawad) insist they are a secular movement concerned with liberating their “colonized” homeland, defined as the northern third of Mali and possibly some real estate in neighboring Niger to the east, Mauritania to the west, and Algeria to the north. The Mali government claims the MNLA is a small group of “armed bandits,” not representative of the Tuareg, who have made common cause with Salafists and ordinary gangsters who have used the southern Sahara as a sanctuary for many years.
The Legal Case For Striking Iran || The Corner
[This] analysis can be boiled down to one sentence: Iran hasn’t launched an “armed attack” against America, so no, America cannot strike Iran.
But this argument ignores a fundamental reality of the American–Iranian and Israeli–Iranian conflicts. There has, in fact, been an “armed attack” against the United States. Iran has been waging a low-intensity war against America and Israel — both directly and by proxy — for more than two decades. Iran’s Quds Force has planned and directed attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and on Israelis in Israel and abroad. Iran has directly supplied our enemies with deadly weaponry in Iraq and Afghanistan, and is responsible for hundreds of American military deaths — including the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut and the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia.
In other words, Iran attacked us long ago, and our forbearance to this point is neither required by international law nor does it bind us to continued forbearance.
Joseph Kony is not in Uganda (and other complicated things) || Foreign Policy
It would be great to get rid of Kony. He and his forces have left a path of abductions and mass murder in their wake for over 20 years. But let’s get two things straight: 1) Joseph Kony is not in Uganda and hasn’t been for 6 years; 2) the LRA now numbers at most in the hundreds, and while it is still causing immense suffering, it is unclear how millions of well-meaning but misinformed people are going to help deal with the more complicated reality.
First, the facts. Following a successful campaign by the Ugandan military and failed peace talks in 2006, the LRA was pushed out of Uganda and has been operating in extremely remote areas of the DRC, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic — where Kony himself is believed to be now. The Ugandan military has been pursuing the LRA since then but had little success (and several big screw-ups). In October last year, President Obama authorized the deployment of 100 U.S. Army advisors to help the Ugandan military track down Kony, with no results disclosed to date.
Additionally, the LRA (thankfully!) does not have 30,000 mindless child soldiers. This grim figure, cited by Invisible Children in the film (and by others) refers to the total number of kids abducted by the LRA over nearly 30 years….
There are many reasons uninformed and oversimplified advocacy can cause trouble, and Siena Antsis catalogues some of them here, noting that Invisible Children expertly “commodifies white man’s burden on the African continent.” Buy a bracelet, soothe some guilt.
But as researcher Mark Kersten notes, after “stopping Kony”, then what? Or what if the activism just results the the 100 U.S. advisors staying but no Kony?…
In addition to the problems of poverty and nodding disease Izama highlights, Uganda is barely (if at all) democratic, and the president Yoweri Museveni ushered himself to a 4th term last year, taking him to over 25 years in power. Corruption is rampant, social services are minimal, and human rights abuses by the government common and well documented. Oh, and oil is on the way.
Stopping Kony won’t change any of these things, and if more hardware and money flow to Museveni’s military, Invisible Children’s campaign may even worsen some problems. [More information and links if you click through]
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and its record of double talk || Washington Post
Amid new strains in U.S.-Egypt ties, some in Washington are studying the tensions and results of recent voting for indications that democracy can take hold. Those who say the Muslim Brotherhood is showing new signs of moderation should compare its message to outsiders, in English, with its message to Egyptians and other Arabs, in Arabic.
Take the Brotherhood’s official English and Arabic Web sites, IkhwanWeb and IkhwanOnline, from one day this month. In English, the home page featured no fewer than eight articles on the solicitude of the Brotherhood toward Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority. The Arabic home page, by contrast, included just two small pieces on this theme. The contrast is sharper on other key issues. On democracy, the English home page one January day featured several articles with headlines such as “Why Islamists Are Better Democrats” and “Democracy: One of the Objectives of Shariah?” There was nothing comparable in Arabic. Instead, Arabic readers saw three pieces against freedom of the press, attacking two top independent Egyptian dailies for printing criticisms of the Brotherhood.
This kind of double talk is part of a pattern. Last February, right after Hosni Mubarak was overthrown, the Brotherhood published what it called an English-language version of Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie’s message to the Egyptian people, celebrating their revolution. In that version, he supposedly spoke mainly of democracy, tolerance, pluralism and coexistence between Egypt’s Muslims and Christians. But the text of his statement, published simultaneously in Arabic, had a totally different tone. In his authentic message, Badie wrote at great length on how Egypt’s uprising was a blessing from Allah — and how much Egyptians needed to stay firm in their Muslim faith to reap its real rewards. The following headlines on the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) led the English site in recent months: “FJP and Christians Stem Sedition,” “FJP Denounces Attack on Israeli Embassy” and “FJP Women’s Committee Provides Free Medical Services in Sharqiyyah City.” But not one of those stories appeared on the Arabic home page. Throughout the past year, women often are referred to by the Brotherhood in English — but almost never in Arabic. The same is true for the English and Arabic Web sites of the FJP, which now controls Egypt’s parliament.
Some might note that all political parties, to at least an extent, engage in mixed messaging. But when this degree of duplicity is demonstrated, the group’s credibility is, or should be, compromised accordingly.
In Syria, world inaction fuels armed revolt || Washington Post
Growing indications that a deeply divided international community is either unable or unwilling to intervene to halt the violence in Syria are fueling an armed rebellion that risks plunging the country, and perhaps the region, into a wider war.
…
Evidence has mounted for months that the once-peaceful Syrian opposition has been resorting to arms, but the fading hope of outside help is hardening the conviction that only violence will dislodge Assad, activists say.
“Until now there is not civil war, but if the international community continues like this, just watching and doing nothing, there will be,” said Omar Shakir, an activist in the Bab Amr neighborhood of Homs, which has emerged as the epicenter of the armed rebellion.
An Arab League monitoring mission has been unable to stop the killing, the Syrian opposition’s mostly exiled political leadership has proved too divided to present a coherent alternative to the Assad government, and the daily death toll tallied by both sides shows the steadily escalating bloodshed.
…
“This is not going to stop. It’s becoming an armed rebellion, it’s going to be chaos, and I don’t know why the world doesn’t understand that,” said Rami Jarrah, a Syrian activist living in Cairo who was forced to flee Damascus in October after the security forces learned his identity.
Jarrah and other observers say they fear the inaction will not only encourage opponents of the government to fight but also encourage a drift toward extreme ideologies.
“People are getting more angry now as they realize there won’t be any help,” he said. “It’s building up hatred to the West, and it’s becoming extremism. It’s very dangerous now.”
Protesters have clamored for a NATO no-fly zone similar to the one that helped bring about the fall of Moammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya, but as they come to realize that Western intervention in Syria is unlikely, Islamist groups are winning support, said Wissam Tarif, a human rights campaigner with the activist group Avaaz.
“The only people who are organized and credible are the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis,” he said. “The dangerous thing is almost no one believes in peaceful struggle anymore. They want weapons.”
Iranian scientist involved in nuclear program killed in Tehran bomb attack || Washington Post
A scientist linked to Iran’s nuclear program was killed in his car by a bomb-wielding assailant on Wednesday, a bold rush-hour attack that experts say points to a further escalation in a covert campaign targeting the country’s atomic officials and institutions.
The precision hit in a northern Tehran neighborhood killed the 32-year-old chemical engineer employed at Iran’s main uranium-enrichment facility and brought to four the number of Iranian scientists killed by bombs in the past two years. No one asserted responsibility for the bombing, which prompted a swirl of accusations and denials as well as renewed concerns about worsening tensions between Iran and the West.
Iranian officials immediately accused the United States and Israel of orchestrating the attack on scientist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, who was killed along with his bodyguard when an assailant on a motorcycle slapped a magnetic bomb on his car as he commuted to work, according to Iranian news reports. Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimiblamed the attack on “Zionists” and “those who claim they are against terrorism,” the semiofficial Fars News Agency reported.
Breaking the Kim Dynasty || Wall Street Journal
Dictatorships tend to split when they are under economic and diplomatic pressure. The best policy going forward is not to offer new inducements in exchange for more promises of the kind Kim Jong Il always broke. China has wanted to keep the North as a client and buffer state, but this may be a moment when it too begins to rethink its interests in Pyongyang.
Whatever China’s choice, the U.S. needn’t be complicit in maintaining the Kim dynasty. Better to wait for meaningful signs from the North that it wants to change. This would mean dismantling its nuclear program or opening to the world in a far larger way than it ever has. Until that day, the West should keep sanctions and other pressure on North Korea and seek to liberate as many of its people as possible.
