A Quiet Indian Peace Bid on Kashmir

Just after the conclusion of the general elections and before the results were known, the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy on Kashmir, Satinder Lambah, made a speech in Srinagar laying out the most comprehensive peace plan India has ever made.

He said the speech reflected just his personal views but The Times of India's brief report by Indrani Baghchi (buried at the bottom of page 15 in my edition of the paper), said “the highest levels of government” were involved in crafting it.

The proposal is that that Line of Actual Control (LOC) become the de jure international border while India and Pakistan move to erase it for all practical purposes.

For that to happen, there would have to be a general demilitarization and normalization throughout Kashmir, and the winding up of terrorist training facilities in Pakistan. There would be no tariff or non-tariff barriers to trade and no constraints on the free passage of people or on development of transport infrastructure.

Presumably, somewhere along that continuum, the special constitutional provisions in effect on both sides of the border would be brought in line with the new realities.

What might give the proposal a chance of success is the changed regional dynamic resulting from the projected withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan at the end of 2014.

A significant element of the new dynamic has been the Pakistani response to the American effort to bribe the drug-running Haqqani terrorist network away from control by the ISI: Islamabad is now engaged in bombing the assets of its former client, inflicting heavy losses.

Other aspects include the energized Moscow-Beijing axis in the face of the situation in the Ukraine, Uighur terrorism in China and the tensions boiling up along Asia's eastern seaboard.

From West Asia shell-shocked by what can now be called the Arab Winter to China teetering on an economic precipice, there is a new sense of vulnerability throughout the continent.

That has caused erstwhile supporters (Saudi Arabia and China), to cool towards Pakistani sponsored “Islamic terrorism,” and even the ISI might have begun to see that if the Haqqanis can be turned into a Frankenstein’s monster, so can all its other proxies.

The wild card in all this, of course, is the British interest in continuing to control the $60 billion drug trade out of Afghanistan. That is the glue binding the ISI to British policy, and it remains to be seen if the new regional situation can weaken the bond. .

In the past, India-Pakistan peace initiatives have led to violent provocations to prevent progress. In the current circumstances, that will have to be more than the usual cross-border terrorism or attacks on consulates. It will have to be something of the order of 9/11 or 26/11, precipitating war. As I have noted before, there is evidence the British and their allies in the United States have been trying to set the scene for that.

Among the recent signs that something nasty is in the works is the disappearance from his Karachi residence of noted Indian gangster-terrorist Dawood Ibrahim. He can only be up to no good.

I do not think we will have to wait long to find out if we have chaos in South and Central Asia or a major move towards regional peace.

Another Bizarre Essay from Brookings

Washington-based Brookings Institution has followed up the bizarre essay it published by British propagandist William Dalrymple with a much more complex distortion of history by Oxford Professor Margaret MacMillan.

Dalrymple expressed fears of an India-Pakistan war based on his astounding assertion that Afghanistan’s unending state of war is rooted in their rivalry and not, as anyone who knows history might think, in the proxy Cold War conflict the West financed by trading opium and heroin. That trade is now worth over $60 billion annually, and if there is war in South Asia after the withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan, it will be in the service of its primary beneficiary, Britain, which needs chaotic conditions in an area that can absorb the proceeds without exciting the interest of American-German bank regulators.

MacMillan’s essay comparing the situation in 2014 with the one that in 1914 led into World War I is a more complex assault on truth in that it deliberately blurs what happened, hiding Britain's primary role in shaping the terrible realities of the modern world. Items:

1. There had been “an extraordinary period of general peace since 1815,” MacMillan writes of the century preceding WW I. She obviously thinks the “general peace” was undisturbed by the war of 1857 in India, the two “Opium Wars” in China, the numerous massacres during the European “scramble for Africa” (too one-sided to be called wars), and the genocide of Native Americans, the Maori in New Zealand and the Australian Aborigine. In an essay that notes globalization as a factor in generating international tensions it is deeply racist to ignore conflicts that killed well over a hundred million people. It is no defence that she is merely reflecting the mainstream perspective of European historians. 
2. MacMillan sees no difference between modern migration patterns and what happened in the century before WW I. Then “as now” she writes, “waves of immigrants were finding their way to foreign lands — Indians to the Caribbean and Africa, Japanese and Chinese to North America, and millions of Europeans to the New World and the Antipodes.” Those “waves of immigrants” included slaves from Africa and indentured Chinese and Indian workers – slaves in all but name – carried away from their homes mainly in British vessels.
3. In asserting that the conflicts since 1945 have been “relatively minor … with the number of casualties dwarfed by those sustained in the two world wars,” MacMillan is entirely wrong. Authoritative estimates place the toll of the “proxy wars” of the Cold War era at over a hundred million lives. Since 1990, the conflicts in Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and Somalia have killed additional scores of millions. In South Asia since Indian independence some ten million have been killed in armed conflicts caused by manipulative British policies.
4. Her comparison of the pre-WW I rivalry of Britain and Germany with the current US-China relationship will not bear examination. Britain in the early 20th Century was a savage imperial Power openly glorying in its subjugation and oppression of other nations; Germany was a challenger self-pitying in its lack of imperial “lebensraum” (elbow room). Their cynical drive for dominance was unrestrained by any moral considerations, even concern for their own people, millions of whom were killed and crippled in WW I. The post-Cold War, post-Mao history of Sino-American relations pits a democracy sometimes drunk with its own power against a deeply oppressive tyranny with unsettled borders; but neither is imperialist, and both support the economic and social development of other countries.
5. MacMillan’s description of the Middle East as “made up largely of countries that received their present borders as a consequence of World War I,” sanitizes a history of brutal manipulations by Britain and France. She does that consistently, in overall analysis and on specific issues. In noting “Bashar al-Assad regime’s use of poison gas” she asserts that it was “a weapon first deployed in the trench warfare of 1914, then outlawed because world opinion viewed it as barbaric.” Neither assertion is true. Britain used poison gas against the Kurds in Iraq before WW I – Winston Churchill saw it as useful test of the new weapon – and it was given up not because it was too barbaric but because it could not be controlled: a shift of the wind could blow the gas back into the ranks of those who loosed it.

The essay is too dishonest to be useful to anyone trying to understand what lessons WW I holds for policy makers today.

It pays no attention to the massively obvious lesson of the bloodiest period in world history: that the most lethal dangers lie in the delusions of elite groups capable of manipulating public opinion into supporting violence.

It should be a cause for general alarm that MacMillan’s essay is published by an institution with great influence on American policy.

William Dalrymple's Afghan Diary

Dear Diary,

I'm an "eminent historian" I'll have you know. Strobe Talbot said so in a letter introducing my essay for Brookings. Been getting a lot of mail about that. All good except for a narky note that said it was all nonsense, the Afghan War wasn't about the India-Pakistan rivalry at all but about the $60 billion drug trade out of Afghanistan.

You know, I was thinking perhaps I should have mentioned drugs, just to be on the safe side. But then again, once you mention something like that, there's no telling where it will lead ...

Before long someone will probably rake up the fact that we Brits originated the opium trade in the 18th Century and fought two “Opium Wars” in the 19th Century.

Then someone will surely mention how in the 20th Century, HSBC and Matheson and all the other Brit companies took the drug trade underground when the Americans insisted on banning it.

And inevitably, some busybody will mention that we were up to our chins in creating the Afghan war.

I'm not saying any of that's wrong, but do we have to talk about it all the time!

What good will it do to admit yes, we did create Pakistan and its ISI, Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood. And yes, London also jockeyed all of them into supporting the Mujaheddin who established the Afghan opium trade ... but hey, permanent interests, you know.

Anyway, I like the title: “A Deadly Triangle: Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.”

I don't know if I really made the case that “hostility between India and Pakistan lies at the heart of the current war in Afghanistan,” but even if I didn't there's enough razzle dazzle to distract everyone.

I like the paragraph that goes on about "the existential threat posed by India" to the Pakistan military taking "precedence over all other geopolitical and economic goals.”

Hope no one asks why there should be an existential threat when things are improving between the two countries and the atmospherics are quite friendly.

Also: “The fear of being squeezed in an Indian nutcracker is so great that it has led the ISI to take steps that put Pakistan's own internal security at risk ... For much of the last decade the ISI has sought to restore the Taliban to power so that it can oust Karzai and his Indian friends.”

Wonder if the Yanks really buy that...

Well, MI6 certainly will. They desperately need talk of an Indo-Pak war, or perhaps even a real war, to soften up Delhi’s resistance to Vodafone and BP. With China on the skids and a mega recession looming, what’s The City to do if India continues to hang tough!”

Well, Dear Diary, don't be too surprised if there is another blatant 26/11 type episode to get things back the way we like them!

Moral Palsy at the UN

The United Nations has just turned down a claim for compensation from Haitians killed and sickened by cholera taken to the island by it peacekeepers.

A UN spokesman told the Press the claim was "not receivable."

That is not because the claim is invalid.

The strain of the disease that has killed some 8000 Haitians and afflicted over a half million is a "perfect match" with the one in Nepal from where a contingent of peacekeepers arrived in October 2010. Their encampment allowed untreated waste to flow into a river that people depended on for drinking water. The contagion first hit  downriver from the camp.

The claim is not receivable because those who made the decision suffer from a contagion far worse than cholera: moral paralysis.

It is a disease with a long history within the United Nations.

Back in the 1960s, UN "development experts" working in the Sahel (the semi-arid southern fringe of the Sahara desert), put in deep bore wells without accommodating for the drought cycles endemic to the region. The wells supported a rapid increase in the animal and human populations of the Sahel but when the next long drought hit the whole ecosystem collapsed under their weight. The result was the great Sahelian famine that killed many thousands.

The UN should have rung the alarm bells about what happened and taken responsibility for its role in the disaster but it never did. I discovered what had happened when researching an article about the 1974 UN Conference on "Desertification" (a word coined for the occasion).

The UN's moral paralysis does not kick in only in the case of distant, poor and anonymous people.

In the 1970s, when a UN staff member in Chile "disappeared" along with thousands of others under Augusto Pinochet's brutal regime, UN brass in New York did nothing. It took a campaign by the UN Staff Union to shame Kurt Waldheim into spastic action.

As the editor of the Staff Union paper, I was feeling chuffed up about that until a senior UN official casually told me over a sandwich in the UN Correspondent's Association club room that there were also "disappeared" UN staff members in other countries. Except they weren't really out of sight. In Afghanistan, one was being tortured in prison; the brass in New York knew about that but considered it a "domestic" matter. (It took a continuing campaign by the Staff Union to identify the victims and bring about even the most minimal official action.)

And it is not just career UN staff who are callous. When I asked the politically appointed head of UNICEF about the arsenic-contaminated killer wells the organization had funded in Bangladesh, her response was astonishing. "The wells probably saved lives" she said.

What causes the basic lack of empathy that underlies the moral irresponsibility of UN brass?

I think it is the diplomatic version of the "vast carelessness" of wealthy people that Fitzgerald described in The Great Gatsby. At the top levels of the UN diplomatic immunity translates into impunity. People are too insulated and removed from the suffering of ordinary people to care.   

Reality Check for David Cameron's India Quest

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain began his three-day visit to India by invoking the "huge ties" between the two countries of "history, language, culture and business."

One wonders which particular aspect of the shared history of the two nations he found supportive of his current quest for broadened economic linkages.

Could it be what the East India Company did  after bribing its way to control of Bengal, the richest province of Mughal India? Within a decade of the so-called "Battle of Plassey" (Pilashi) in 1757, Bengal lay in ruins. The destruction of its economy was so severe a third of the population, some five million people, died of starvation in the first of the great "man-made famines" British rule spread across India. A conservative estimate of the overall toll of such famines is 100 million.

Or perhaps Mr. Cameron found inspiring the theft of the fabled Kohinoor diamond after the British defeated the Sikhs almost a century later. Maharaja Ranjit Singh's 11-year old son went with the diamond to Britain where it became part of the "Crown Jewels" and he was comprehensively debauched with drugs and sex to disable his potential as a leader.

Or maybe the Prime Minister is enthralled by the post-1857 "pacification" that involved the indiscriminate slaughter of some 10 million civilians, men, women and children. 

Mr. Cameron's historic admission that the 1919 Jallianwalla Bagh massacre was a "deep shame" does not begin to address the long line of British atrocities in India, most of which remain officially unacknowledged. They are systematically ignored or downplayed even in works of history by British scholars supposedly engaged in the pursuit of truth.

That is true not just of the colonial era. There is no honest British account of the cold-blooded manipulation of communal violence that led to Partition, the killing of well over a million people and the biggest migration in history as 14 million people were forced from their ancestral lands.

Nor is there admission that Britain created Pakistan as its proxy in South Asia and that it is the real sponsor of the terrorist "war of a thousand cuts" against India.

Such denial is not to safeguard national pride and honor. It is to hide the fact that Britain has maintained its imperial interests in the region, and indeed, globally, without benefit of the apparatus of colonialism. This has been achieved primarily by keeping control of the illicit trade in drugs, which Britain pioneered in the 18th Century by exporting Indian opium to China. It is now far and away the most lucrative sector of the world economy, with revenues of over $500 billion annually.

In South Asia the control of the drug trade has involved the use of the ISI, Pakistan's notorious spy agency established in 1948 by a serving British Army officer, to godfather Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Together, they have kept Afghanistan as the lawless badlands necessary to produce opium; it now supplies over 90 percent of the world's illicit supply.   

Where Britain does not maintain operational control of drug trafficking, as in Latin America, it provides money laundering facilities. Last year American authorities slapped a $1.98 billion fine on HSBC, Britain's largest bank, after investigators discovered that it had been laundering billions of dollars of Mexican drug money into the United States. The fine made not a blip in the stock market value of HSBC shares because investors have known of its primary source of profit since traffickers established the company during Britain's 19th Century "Opium Wars" to force the drug into China.

An interesting sidelight to the increased American pressure on British money laundering is that the terrorist "Left" insurgency in Colombia that has for decades provided the cover for drug running, has sued for peace and is now engaged in talks with the government.

The global money laundering system Britain put in place as its colonies dwindled is the core element of its new Empire. It consists of a string of tax havens around the world operating with London as a global hub. The system now caters to all sorts of criminals, ranging from super-rich tax evaders and corporate bigwigs hiding the proceeds of mispricing of trade to mafiosi engaged in garden variety organized crime. 

The tax haven system washes an estimated $2 trillion annually into the "legitimate" world economy. According to a recent report from Washington-based Global Financial Integrity, an NGO headed by a former World Bank economist, it also drained about $6 trillion out of poor countries over the last decade . Adding up the estimates made by a number of experts indicates that the total of illicit assets in tax havens is some $30 trillion, double the GDP of the United States.

That massive pool of money generates the multi-billion dollar "hedge funds" that have made a travesty of free market mechanisms, especially commodity markets. Indians struggling with the ever increasing cost of petrol and diesel can blame it on hedge fund manipulations that have kept oil prices over $100 per barrel amidst the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. They can also blame the system for India's pandemic of mega scams: without a convenient way to stash black money the corrupt would be far less prone to steal on such a scale.

All this is becoming generally known because Germany and the United States, increasingly irate at the loss of billions of dollars in revenues to tax havens, have begun to push for change. Mr. Cameron's recent threats of a referendum that might take Britain out of the European Union is a response to pressure from Germany for uniform application of EU banking standards on all its members. The announcement last week that the next head of the Bank of England will be a Canadian is probably the result of pressure from the United States to clean up the City (financial center) of London.  

Against this background, Mr. Cameron's push for India to open up its financial sector to British investment should be seen as an invitation to national suicide. His vision of a string of "business centres" around the country to facilitate British-Indian trade should be seen in the same light.

So what is the future of the British-Indian "partnership"?

It is difficult to see how we can build one when Britain is using its proxies to subvert and destabilize India. Perhaps the only way to make a new beginning is to be utterly blunt about Indian perceptions of and expectations from Britain.

Britain should stop whitewashing its colonial record and consider the grim reality that its Empire was the bloodiest construct of power the world has ever seen. In Africa, Asia and the Americas no nation has been as oppressive of other races. Britain was by far the leading slave trader out of Africa and transporter of indentured labor out of Asia. It has killed with famine, sword and fire more people than Genghis Khan, Atilla the Hun, Hitler or Stalin. In the defense of its imperial interests it has precipitated two World Wars and is now presiding over an empire of crime that drains the poorest countries of their hard earned wealth. During the days of Empire and now, treachery has been a staple in Britain's international relations.

How can Britain respond to such criticism? 

At the minimum it can review its history books and initiate soul-searching among academic propagandists of the imperial record like Niall Ferguson, touted by The Times of London as the “most brilliant British historian of his generation.” A "Truth Commission" such as the one that eased South Africa out of the apartheid era might help. So could a national discourse on the value and meaning of life. In that journey of mind and spirit the British might find useful guides in the Sermon on the Mount, the Eightfold Path and the Bhagavad Gita.

In terms of state policy, a renewed British-Indian relationship will require Britain to withdraw support from terrorist groups and insurgencies, wind up its involvement in the drug trade, and stop running the global black market.

If all this seems a very tall order, it indicates how far Mr. Cameron's proposals stand from Indian perceptions of reality.

Too Much of a Coincidence?

First, American soldiers in Afghanistan burn copies of the Koran. Now one of them goes on a rampage and kills a bunch of Afghan civilians.

In an election year for President Barak Obama this is more than just bad luck. It smells of conspiracy.

 Seems like someone's trying to make it impossible for the United States to stay on in Afghanistan.

Who and why?

The choice of answers is very limited. It must either be an inside job -- someone with a lot of clout in the line of military command -- or someone with the means to corrupt and turn the individuals involved.

The first is highly unlikely unless a strategic decision has been made high up that the chaos that would necessarily follow a precipitate withdrawal would serve long term American interests. Such a decision too is not likely, but it is possible: if the United States is to remain the world's preeminent power, Asia must be kept in check, and a regional war would do that very nicely.  It would also help bring Pakistan and Iran to heel.

The second explanation is far more likely: that those who profit from the drug trade out of Afghanistan (to the tune of some $60 billion a year according to the latest estimate of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime), have suborned the individuals responsible. Their acts have made it difficult for any Afghan to consider Americans with a friendly eye.

American investigators into the two incidents would do well to look into whether the individuals involved or their family members have suddenly and quietly struck it rich. Of course, the payoff might have been through a numbered account in a "tax haven," in which case there would be no trace.

Whatever the case, if Project Afghanistan comes a cropper the implications for India can be dire. New Delhi should be prepared for the return of Nadir Shah -- the Persian raider who laid low the mighty Mughal Empire after Aurangazeb's death. He left the door open for the British to steal in.

If something like that happens I just hope Mamta and Patnaik and Jayalalitha with their talk of "Federalism" will remember their history.  

Af-Pak Plot Thickening into War

The scenario projected in my post on "Ilyas Kashmirir: The Trend" (5 June 2011) is playing out to the letter. While militant pressure grows in Pakistan's tribal frontier, Islamabad has developed a new sincerity in attacking the problem of terrorism. It even discovered that a serving Brigadier was providing aid and comfort to terrorist organizations. 

Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have gone south rapidly. On 6 July Pakistani Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani called Afghan President Hamid Karzai to express “serious concern” about the activities of militants on their border. That followed several days of intense Pakistani rocket attacks across the border, about which Afghanistan lodged a formal complaint. 

Pakistani officials told reporters that Gilani's call followed what they described as an attack on the north-western Upper Dir region by "hundreds of militants" and clashes with local tribesmen and soldiers. Militants also attacked Pakistani Army forces in the town of Miran Shah.

In a statement issued on the evening of the 6th, Gilani's office said the Pakistani army was exercising the “utmost restraint, despite repeated cross border incursions by the militants." It urged that the situation be “defused quickly” and offered to send representatives to a meeting on how the two countries could thwart the militants.

Meanwhile, Britain has moved to strengthen its representation in Kabul by having UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appoint British diplomat Michael Keating as Deputy to the UN's Special Representative there. Since 2008 the British have been on the diplomatic backfoot in Kabul because two of its senior officials working for multilateral agencies were summarily expelled by President Karzai, who also shot down the proposed appointment of Paddy Ashdown, a former MI-6 agent turned politician, to a proposed new post combining UN, EU and NATO representation (see post of 10 February 2008: "Why Karzai Nixed Paddy Ashdown").

On 6 July British Chief of the Defence Staff General David Richards was in Islamabad for the first meeting of an "Enhanced Strategic Dialogue" with Pakistan that was set up during Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit to   the country in April. Speaking to reporters about the event, Pakistan's new Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, the beauteous Hina Rabbani Khar, recalled President Zardari’s recent visit to Britain and expressed satisfaction at the excellent bilateral relations between the two countries She welcomed Cameron’s "support and solidarity" with Pakistan and Britain's positive and constructive role in the region.

In reality, Britain has played a deeply destructive role in Pakistan since creating the country as a proxy in South Asia when India gained independence in 1947. It has been the main architect of "Islamic terrorism," working through Pakistan and Saudi Arabia (which it also created in dismantling the Ottoman Empire). As the central node of the global black market it created as the British Empire slipped away, London has also been the world's primary money laundering hub, with Hong Kong as the main portal servicing the criminally corrupt regime in China.

Among the most ominous developments is that Pakistan has brought Beijing firmly into the South Asian picture by giving it what looks like a military role in Occupied Kashmir. Beijing's incentive to cooperate is rooted in its fear that the economic armageddon it faces will dislodge Tibet from its colonial grip. All in all, it really looks as if the London-Islamabad-Beijing Axis is ready to put up a fight to protect overlapping national interests in drug trafficking, terrorism and tyranny.

For India, these developments have a positive aspect. Pakistan has moved the bulk of its troops to the Afghan border, and as Foreign Secretary Nirupama Sen found at the recent meeting with her counterpart in Islamabad, there seems to be a newly serious attitude to tackling terrorism in Pakistan. Looking farther ahead, that will not matter much if the Afghan-Pakistan scenario deteriorates into regional war.  

Why Afghanistan is Not Vietnam

George McGovern had a piece in the Sunday Washington Post recalling how, during his run for the presidency in 1972, he told audiences across the country “that the only upside of the tragedy in Vietnam was that its enormous cost in lives and dollars would keep any future administration from going down that road again.”

He was wrong, he declares: Obama is going down the same path that Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon did.

McGovern should know better.

Afghanistan is not Vietnam. Here are the reasons why:

1. Vietnam was in the midst of an entirely legitimate nationalist, anti-colonial struggle that had the massive support of the Vietnamese people.

The fighting in Afghanistan is against the Taliban, a terrorist group that sustains itself by trafficking drugs. Based on their experience of Taliban rule, Afghans are massively opposed to the group.

2. The United States slipped into the Vietnam war by slow degrees, first supporting the French, then the corrupt regimes in South Vietnam, and finally subjecting the country to massive military intervention. Its motivation was fear that if the Viet Cong won, then the balance of power in Southeast Asia would tip towards the Chinese communists. That fear, as it turned out, was entirely misplaced; the Vietnamese have a historical hatred of Chinese domination.

The United States is in Afghanistan because it was attacked on 9/11 by terrorists who were based there and enjoyed the support of the Taliban regime. The need to fight them is not abstract or ideological; democracies around the world have suffered gratuitous attack because terrorists based in Afghanistan and Pakistan have been driven by a medieval Islamic vision of world conquest.

3. The Viet Cong fighters American troops faced in Vietnam were financed and supplied by North Vietnam, a State recognized by the overwhelming majority of the international community.

In Afghanistan American troops confront combatants who are financed with drug money and are universally considered to be criminal and illegitimate.

4. The withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam led to the end of the war there, and eventually, the emergence of a stable and unified Vietnam. The country is now a member of the strongly free-market Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).

If American troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan the result will be the renewed spread of terrorism throughout the region and the world. Afghanistan itself will sink into civil war, and that will destabilize Central and South Asia. This is not a new “Domino Theory;” the forecast is actually a look back at what happened when the Taliban were in power.

Quite obviously, McGovern’s attempt to draw an analogy between American interventions in Vietnam and Afghanistan is not credible. He seems to acknowledge that in a final argument for withdrawal: ”Even if we had a good case for a war in Afghanistan, we simply cannot afford to wage it. With a $12 trillion debt and a serious economic recession, this is not a time for unnecessary wars abroad.”

That too is not a credible argument. The post-Cold War spread of democracy is not a settled and irreversible fact. To withdraw from Afghanistan prematurely would endanger vulnerable democracies not only in its immediate region but throughout the Islamic world. Authoritarian States like China and Iran would feel much less pressure to democratize. India, already seriously affected by terrorism exported from Pakistan, would be in much greater danger. Not to confront the sworn enemies of democracy in Afghanistan is to ensure that the fight, when it becomes unavoidable later, will be much more difficult.

How to flip the Taliban

Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the influential Council on Foreign Relations in New York, has just circulated an article titled "Know thine enemy: why the Taliban cannot be flipped."

It is by Barbara Elias, who directs the Afghanistan, Pakistan and Taliban Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. She argues that the "main Taliban leaders will never abandon al-Qaeda " because they are too invested in their Islamic identity and that more moderate leaders have no chance of replacing the hard core Islamists because "Pakistani intelligence services will not support governments in the tribal areas or in Afghanistan that do not help it in its campaign against India."

It sounds credible enough until one stops to consider that in the entire article she never once mentions the drug trade out of Afghanistan.

The Taliban and Al Qaeda cannot be taken seriously as Islamic, for they are both up to their necks in the entirely un-Islamic drug trade, Also, they have done more damage to Muslims globally than America could ever do. It is quite clear that the drug trade is what they are about, and profit their only motive; it is the only thing that holds them together.

The real reaaon the Taliban cannot be “flipped” is that the United States cannot hope to bribe them more than what they get from exporting opium and heroin.

The only chance of winning the war against the Taliban-Al Qaeda combination is to cut off their income from drugs – and that means action against the money launderers in developed countries, especially Britain, which provides the nexus of institutional intelligence, money and elite criminality that makes illicit trafficking possible

Mumbai Postmortem

In all the comment and analysis that has followed the 26/11 terrorist invasion of Mumbai there seems to be a general consensus that jihadists sponsored by Pakistan's spy agency, the ISI, were responsible for the attack. The United States and Britain have energetically taken up this traditionally Indian view, and even China, a strong ally of Pakistan, joined in the unanimous call by the United Nations Security Council urging Islamabad to act.

Amidst this heartening consensus there is a niggling question that remains unaddressed: what has the ISI to gain from an attack on India at this time? Even the most die-hard India-haters in the ISI leadership must surely see that improved ties with New Delhi have eased the mounting pressures on Pakistan from a set of potentially disastrous problems that include terrorism at the hands of drug mafias pretending to be Islamists, and a national economy on tenuous life-support from the International Monetary Fund. In this situation it makes little sense for New Delhi to blame Pakistan for the Mumbai attack or threaten military action. No matter how "surgical" the strike on terrorist training camps, its only real effect will be to derail a peace process that is critically important to both countries. Which brings us back to the question: who benefits from the Mumbai attack?

For an answer we must look to Indian history, specifically to the creation of Pakistan at the time of Indian independence from British colonial rule in 1947. Though billed as a homeland for Indian Muslims, Pakistan was conceived by British policy-makers primarily as a tool to defend and promote their strategic interests in the region. That required animosity between the two newly independent countries, which was achieved by the conflict over Kashmir, initiated when both Indian and Pakistani armies were still under British command. (The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi at this time removed from the scene the major agent for peace.)

Pakistan’s Directorate of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which was established by a British officer serving as Deputy Chief of the Pakistani Army after the country's independence, has been a primary tool for manipulating the region. Set up to coordinate action against Indian forces in Kashmir in 1948, its primary aim has remained unchanged for six decades. However, its roles and capacities grew enormously during the Cold War, when Pakistan emerged as a key Western proxy. In the 1950s and 1960s it was the base for American U-2 surveillance aircraft operating over the Soviet Union and China, and in the 1980s it became the staging area for the Mujaheddin, with the ISI serving as the conduit for massive financial and arms aid from the United States. After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pakistan became the pivot of a Western effort during the 1990s to control the rich resources of the newly independent Central Asian republics. That involved the ISI in promoting jihadist groups, organizing the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, and overseeing the rise of Al-Qaeda.

During most of this period British and American interests in South Asia were coherent, but that began to change after 1998, when, in the wake of the Indian declaration that it had become a nuclear-weapon State, the United States initiated a major revaluation of its policies towards the region. The Indo-US strategic relationship that emerged, and American interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, accelerated the growing UK-US divergence; Tony Blair’s “poodle” reputation and his resignation from office were rooted in his attempt to continue traditional support for Washington.

The transatlantic split became more visible in January 2008 when London failed to gain firmer control of Afghanistan by having one of its former intelligence operatives take charge of the UN, EU and NATO operations in the country. Word of the appointment was leaked at the UN, and generally taken to be a fait accompli till Afghan President Hamid Karzai refused to endorse it; his opposition was a clear signal that Washington and London were not on the same page. At just about the same time, the Karzai government told two senior British officials in Afghanistan, one working for the UN and other for the EU, to leave the country within 48 hours; they had been conducting unauthorized negotiations with the Taliban insurgents.

What is the reason for the US-UK split over South Asia?

The cause is not ephemeral policy; it is rooted in basic differences in the nature of American and British power. The United States is a large country with a continental economy, global military reach, and a fundamentally democratic society; it is the dominant force in international affairs, confident of meeting any challenge to its power. Britain is a medium/small country with an unspectacular economy, governed by a social/political elite that grew rich on the criminalities of the colonial era, including the slave and opium trades, and the economic strangulation of dependent territories. Because of that, and despite centuries of parliamentary democracy and a free Press, the British impact on the world has been fundamentally undemocratic; globally, Britain’s power now continues to depend on its capacity to subvert and manipulate developing countries, especially the resource-rich countries of Africa, and the populous countries of Asia.

The new Indo-US strategic relationship that has emerged over the last decade has thus been inherently threatening to Britain. So is the more recent détente between India and Pakistan. Add Afghanistan to the mix, and a war directed at the drug lords who finance “Islamic terrorism” – the prime instrument for manipulating societies across Asia and Africa – and we have panic time for the remnants of imperial Britain. Over the last decade, just as all these developments were in train, terrorist attacks on India, Pakistan and Afghanistan have risen to an unprecedented crescendo. All three governments would do well to take seriously the declarations of innocence by the official authorities of their neighbors. They should also look to British proxies within the region if they want to defend their people from gratuitous assaults.

UN Says 2007 Worst Year Yet in Afghanistan

The United Nations says there was a dramatic worsening of the situation in Afghanistan in 2007. Some 8000 people were killed in the continuing conflict with the Taliban, 1500 of them civilians. That is the highest death toll recorded in the six years the United Nations has kept tabs on the international effort to reclaim the country from the harsh rule of the Taliban.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has reported to the UN Security Council that there were, on average, 566 incidents per month. There were 160 suicide attacks; the deadliest of them was on 17 February 2008 in Kandahar Province when more than 67 people were killed in a single blast. Taliban insurgents killed the most civilians, but US and NATO forces also took many innocent lives in indiscriminate bombing and artillery attacks.

There have been increasing attacks on aid workers: over 130 incidents in 2007, involving the murder of 40 and the abduction of 89, of whom seven were later killed.

Why Karzai Nixed Paddy Ashdown

Afghan President Hamid Karzai's refusal to accept Paddy Ashdown as "High Representative" overseeing foreign support for the country needs more of an explanation than it has received in mainstream media. Ashdown is always described as a "British politician" on the strength of his leadership of the rump Liberal Democrats, but his background is much more interesting.

Jeremy John Durham Ashdown (dubbed "Paddy" by English schoolmates) was born in colonial India in 1941 in a traditionally military family. His father, a captain in the 14th Punjab Regiment, left India in 1945 to settle in Northern Ireland as a farmer. Paddy joined the Royal Marines after high-school in England. From the Marines he graduated to the Foreign Service and postings, reportedly as an operative of MI-6, Britiain's external spy service, to Hong Kong (where he learned to speak Mandarin), and Geneva. After resigning from the Foreign Service he worked for arms manufacturer Westlands (which was, for a while, part of US defense contractor Sikorsky).

Ashdown entered politics as a member of the Liberal Party, later the Liberal Democrats, of which he became the leader. His main claim to political fame was the 1992 revelation of a nine-month affair with his secretary, which earned him the nickname "Paddy Pantsdown" from Britain's ever ribald tabloids. After quitting politics in 1999 he was made Baron Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon in 2000, and appointed High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2002. Two months before that appointment he told the International Criminal Court in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic that in June 1998 he had been at Junik on the Kosovo-Albanian border, and had seen through binoculars the shelling of several villages by Serbian forces; the defense then presented photographs showing that heavily wooded hills lay between Junik and the villages in question, making his claim impossible. Ashdown countered by producing coordinates of a position from which he could have seen the villages.

The appointment of a British political/intelligence operative to a post combining the authority of the United Nations, the European Union and NATO, at a time when some 90 per cent of the country's administrative and development budget is drawn from foreign aid, would have made Karzai a political cypher. Perhaps more importantly, the appointment would have done nothing to improve the situation in Afghanistan. Neither the corruption in government nor the Taliban insurrection is responsive to more coherent administration of foreign support; both would become far worse if such coherence came to be applied to political manipulation and control.