IIT : World's Best Educational Institutes & Pride Of India

A documentary movie on IIT and its brand reputation. The world's toughest educational institute to get into. Acceptance rate- less than 1.7%. Its a famous saying that combine Harvard, MIT and Princeton - then you will get a feel of the level of IIT. It is very economical and students pay only $700 to study the best-in-the-world education. There are 15 IIt in India, the best ones being Mumbai, Delhi, Kharagpur, Chennai, Kanpur and Roorkee.

Some of Notable alumni include Vinod Khosla, Shailesh Mehta, Narayan Murthy, Rajat gupta, Arun Sarin and many more

The biggest Indian hit movie, '3 Idiots', was based on author Chetan Bhagat's experiences in his engineering life at IIT Delhi.

Students all over India start dreaming of IIt when they are 10 and when they finish their 10th class, they join specialized coaching institutes and study for 10 hours everyday (minimum) for next 2-3 years, and then if they do well then some lucky 3000 people are accepted at these top institutes out of almost 200000 plus applicants. Its a dream.. a way of life.. the best of life.. its best of the India.

The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are a group of 15 autonomous engineering and technology-oriented institutes of higher education established and declared as Institutes of National Importance by the Parliament of India. The IITs were created to train only scientists and engineers.

In order of establishment, they are located in Kharagpur (1950; as IIT 1951[2]), Mumbai (1958), Chennai (1959), Kanpur (1959), Delhi (1961; as IIT 1963), Guwahati (1994), Roorkee (1847; as IIT 2001), Ropar (2008), Bhubaneswar (2008), Gandhinagar (2008), Hyderabad (2008), Patna (2008), Jodhpur (2008), Mandi (2009) and Indore (2009). Apart from these ITBHU Varanasi is also slated for conversion as IIT Varanasi.

For more details Google or Wiki-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology

Confucius on the Campus

http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3035&Itemid=206

Written by Glenn Anthony May
Friday, 04 March 2011


If you are an American academician specializing in Asian affairs, you may have noticed that an organization called the "Confucius Institute" has sprung up on a nearby US college campus.

Not long ago one was launched at my own academic institution, the University of Oregon in Eugene, with much attendant fanfare, including a Kun Opera performance. Since the first institutes came into existence in the last decade, a host of questions have been raised about them. Up to now, however, the major media outlets in the United States have given relatively little attention to the development.

The institutes are "nonprofit" joint ventures – contractual arrangements between colleges (and other institutions) around the world and Hanban, an agency based in the PRC that oversees the entire operation. Hanban is staffed with Chinese government bureaucrats.

In an effort to project China's soft power worldwide via culture and education, Beijing reportedly put up US$10 billion to establish the first 100 institutes. Xinhua, the Chinese state wire service, reported last July that 316 Confucius Institutes have now been established in 94 countries.

Their official function is to promote Mandarin language study and an appreciation of Chinese culture. Hanban provides seed money to get the institutes running (the initial amount is generally in the US$150,000- $250,000 range), ongoing financial support and a variety of perks. For example, campuses with Confucius Institutes are allocated a certain number of Chinese government scholarships – awards that cover "full tuition and living expenses for international students and scholars to study language and China-related studies at Chinese universities."

The University of Oregon recently received word that "approximately" 10 scholarships were available to its students.

The institutes occupy offices on college campuses. They have on-site directors, typically China specialists who are already on the faculty, and paid staff, including language instructors and assistant directors from affiliated Chinese universities. They offer language classes, but not always for college credit, and sponsor or co-sponsor an array of lectures, exhibits, and other events of a cultural nature.

Much of that seems harmless enough, and some of it sounds downright appealing. So what's the problem? Let me focus on a single issue.

They come with visible strings attached. Some of the strings can be seen in the memoranda of understanding that US universities conclude with Hanban. Among other things, they must state their support for the "one China policy" – the decades-old US policy of not recognizing the legitimacy of the Republic of China on Taiwan.

I, for one, consider that policy profoundly misguided, and I'm sure that I'm not the only American who feels that way. At universities, we normally have an opportunity to debate issues like that, allowing professors like me and students to take issue publicly with our government's policy. Hanban, for obvious reasons, wants no such discussion to occur.

What that particular attached string means in practice is that Confucius Institutes will hardly ever provide funding for events relating to Taiwan. It also means that other academic units at Hanban-affiliated universities will not likely fund them either. Once the perks from Hanban begin to arrive, professors at universities with CIs become extremely reluctant to do anything to upset their generous benefactors.

But it's not just Taiwan that receives special treatment. Two other "T" words are anathema to Beijing, and hence to Hanban: Tibet and Tiananmen. Don't expect any universities with CIs to arrange a visit of the Dalai Lama anytime soon or to schedule a symposium on the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. In Canada last year, during riots in Tibet, the head of a Confucius Institute at the University of Waterloo succeeded in reversing the direction of coverage and getting a major Canadian television station to apologize for its previous pro-rebel coverage.

Other issues are verboten – China's treatment of the recent Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo and other human rights activists, China's military buildup, China's currency manipulation, China's appalling environmental record, China's crackdown on the Falun Gong and so on. Hanban wants to paint a portrait of China without any unsightly wrinkles. As one scholar puts it, the People's Republic is intent on emphasizing "happy news."

In the academy, we have words to describe this approach to community education and public discussion. "Propagandizing" is one word; "censorship" is another. But don't blame Hanban alone. It merely provides some money and establishes the guidelines; the academics and university administrators carry out the policies.

In my view, those university-based China scholars are most at fault. While a few of them have spoken out against the institutes, most have not, and more than a few have willingly collaborated. Personally, I applaud the outspoken ones and have no use for the collaborators. As for the silent masses, I sympathize to some extent. Many realize that to speak out is to run the risk of being denied a visa to China. The People's Republic is not kind to its critics.

Under the circumstances, the academy cannot expect the China scholars, the supposed experts on things Chinese, to police the activities of the institutes. They are, sad to say, a hopelessly compromised lot. Nor can we expect university administrators to do so either – many of them have played key roles in establishing Confucius Institutes on their campuses. That leaves the rest of us. If you care about free speech and believe that the university should provide an open forum for discussion and debate, you should be concerned.

Glenn Anthony May, professor of history at the University of Oregon, specializes in Southeast Asian history. For the current academic year, he is visiting professor in the Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies at Academia Sinica, Taipei.

Indo-Saudi Camaraderie: A Strategic Alliance?

http://uddipanmukherjee.blogspot.com/2011/02/indo-saudi-camaraderie-strategic.html

by Uddipan Mukherjee

In March 2011, the Indian Army is expected to hold joint military exercises with the Royal Saudi Land Force (RSLF) in Saudi Arabia (SA). It is reported that India will also construct a mountain warfare training school there. However, official details are yet to be public.

As far as information is available, only the RSLF is to be involved in this exercise and not the National Guards of SA. In fact, in 2006, when SA had joint training with Pakistani forces, it was only the RSLF which took part.

Interestingly, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud is expected to visit India at the same time when the joint exercises would be held. Prince Turki is the person who was one of the ‘behind the scenes’ architect of the Mujahideen counterattacks against Soviet troops in Afghanistan during 1979-89.

There are also reports that Pakistan army may establish a mountain warfare school in SA. It is to be constructed in the south-western region of the country in a town known as “Khamis”. Khamis-Mushayt (at an altitude of 6,700 feet) is also the Headquarters of the Southern Area Command and the home of the Field Artillery and Infantry Schools of SA. The general terrain of the area is hilly.

Oil and energy are the major parameters which define the relationship between India and the Gulf countries, which the former treat as its ‘extended neighbourhood’. However, India is pushing to enhance strategic ties with the region in its bid to realize its post-2005 ‘Look West Policy’.

India has already discussed its intention of joining the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) as a permanent member. Hence, a warm relationship with the Gulf countries is a pre-requisite to garner necessary diplomatic support. In that direction, military cooperation with the Gulf countries to deal with common security threats like piracy and Islamic extremism is a feasible weapon.

Thus, a heightened camaraderie between India and Saudi Arabia may have, inter alia, the following implications:

1. India may be attempting to woo SA in order to diplomatically corner Pakistan as SA is a Sunni-Muslim country and a donor to Pakistan. So, having SA by its side, India can try to pressurise Pakistan in the international rostrum.

2. Though behind the scenes maneuvering of White House is hard to be outrightly rejected, however, this cannot be accepted to be the only reason for the joint exercises. It seems natural that Indian Foreign Policy is slowly but surely aligning with USA and its supposed allies in the Middle East: viz Israel and Saudi Arabia.

3. Third, but not altogether insignificant, this joint exercise could be interpreted as fairly routine that Indian armed forces periodically carry out with foreign countries.

India is supposed to have the capabilities to help Riyadh in Mountain Warfare Training as it has a well developed Jungle Warfare School at a place called Variengte in the North-Eastern province of Mizoram (hilly tracts). Incidentally, armed forces of other nation-states (viz. USA) have also been trained in that school. Apart from Variengte, India has recently developed another counter-insurgency school at Kanker, in the Maoist-affected province of Chattisgarh.

Furthermore, Indian ground forces are skillful in desert warfare because it had fought ground wars with Pakistan in the Thar desert region (North-Western part of India). Also, India's Main Battle Tank "Arjun" has specifically been developed for desert warfare.

Presently, a number of Saudi army officers are attending training courses in India. And previously, on 10 May 2008, the then vice chief of Indian Army paid a two-day official visit to Riyadh, aimed at fostering defence cooperation between the two countries.

As far as counterinsurgency is concerned, the general capability of Saudi troops is still under the scanner as they are yet to fight successfully any sustained internal insurgency. Historically speaking, they have defeated the Yemeni forces in 1969 and also took part in the Gulf War in 1991: both of which were conventional battles. Moreover, in terms of rank, SA is at the 24th position and India is at 4th position in the category of military prowess.

Currently, SA wants to upgrade its anti-terrorist skills (the possible Al-Qaeda threat spilling from Yemen) and seeks help in that regard. Some American forces are still residing in SA in the wake of the Gulf War and the country remains a heavy importer of US defence equipments.

Actually, the landmark visit of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz to India in January 2006 as the Chief Guest of Republic Day celebrations opened a new chapter in the Indo-Saudi bilateral relations. King Abdullah referred to India as his ‘second home’ and signed the “Delhi Declaration”. It was the first such bilateral document ever signed by a Saudi King. The ‘Delhi Declaration’ provides a comprehensive road map for bilateral relations. Several Agreements/MOUs were signed during the visit including MOU on Combating Crime, Bilateral Investment Protection Agreement and the Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement.

The momentum generated by extensive bilateral interactions after King Abdullah’s visit culminated in the historic visit of the Indian Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, to Saudi Arabia from February 27- March 1, 2010. Dr Singh held discussions with King Abdullah and both leaders signed the “Riyadh Declaration” which outlined a “new era of strategic partnership” between the two countries in security, defence, political and economic areas.

It is not difficult to extract American interests in a better cooperation between India and SA. The sole purpose of the US is to erect an alliance of US-Israel-SA-India in Asia so as to counter Iran and China. How both SA and India react to such a covert American ambition is to be keenly watched.

Jihad Has Come to India

By Richard L. Benkin
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/03/jihad_has_come_to_india.html

Jihad has come to India. The Obama administration and the State Department will tell you that it is nothing more than isolated acts by individuals. The government in New Delhi will say you are stirring up anti-Muslim sentiment. The mainstream media will ask how you can say that when we are hearing nothing about it from them. But it is real, and it is happening now. I have seen it first-hand. The Obama administration's studied denial will find us caught as flat-footed in India as we were in Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere. The difference is that India is an economic and military giant, with nuclear weapons, and could be a cornerstone of any effective fight against radical Islam.

For several years, I have been talking about the progressive radicalization of Bangladesh. Although it is the only country that ranks among the ten most populous and the ten most densely populated, as well as being the second largest Muslim-majority nation, events there do not capture people's imagination. When you talk about India in the same context, however, people take notice. The thought of an Islamist dominated India scares the heck out of them and should. While our own strategic thinkers concentrate on internecine struggles in the Middle East, their obliviousness to the significance of an Islamist India has enabled our enemies to further their agenda.

I have spent several years along India's 2545 mile-long frontier with Bangladesh, and have seen the impact Bangladesh's radicalization has had on its giant neighbor to the west. Amitabh Tripathi, who has been fighting against what he calls his country's "soft policies," noted that Bangladesh's Muslims "are not radicalized but their institutions are." That radicalization and a level of corruption on both sides of the border that makes my fellow Chicagoans look like amateurs has already produced demographic change in many strategic areas of India. It also has given Muslim activists carte blanche throughout the entire country. The process is deliberate, has been going on for decades, and should send us a screaming warning signal, not only because of what it bodes for India, but also because of what sort of future the Obama administration's soft policies and tolerance for an open border to our south mean for the United States.

Each year in districts like Uttar Dinajpur and North and South 24 Parganas directly across from the Islamic state, my colleagues and I find that more and more villages which once had mixed Hindu-Muslim populations are now all Muslim or Muslim-dominated. Gone are the roadside temples characteristic of places where Hindus practice their faith openly; gone are the sights of Hindu women dressed in their colorful saris and other vestments. They have been replaced by mosques and burqas. Last year, Tripathi and I met with Bimal Praminik, Director of the Kolkata-based Centre for Research in Indo-Bangladesh Relations and arguably the foremost authority on these population changes. He is convinced that this population shift is a deliberate and an integral element the jihad that threatens all of us: "Bangladeshi infiltration with Pakistani ideas... trying to 'Pakistanize' the entire region," he said adding that that the dominant culture for South Asian Muslims has become more "Arabic," than South Asian.

In 1947 when the British left, they partitioned the Indian subcontinent into Hindu and Muslim states. West Bengal went to Hindu India, and East Bengal (now Bangladesh) became part of Pakistan. While Hindu and Muslim majorities respectively, remain, exhaustive studies by Pramanik and others hold out little hope that things will continue that way. During the second half of the 20^th century, the Muslim proportion of West Bengal's population rose by 25 percent and its Hindu population declined by nine, a process that has continued into the 21^st. At the same time, Bangladesh's Hindu population dropped from almost a third to nine percent. The process has not been pretty and has involved murder, gang rape, abduction of women and children, forced conversion to Islam, and legalized thievery of ancestral Hindu lands under Bangladesh's anti-Hindu Vested Property Act. And now it is happening in India.

Between 1981 and 1991, Muslim population growth in West Bengal actually exceeded its growth in Bangladesh. The South Asia Research Society concluded that Hindus have been fleeing Islamist persecution in East Bengal since the partition; but that since Bangladesh's emergence as an independent nation in 1971, "there has been large scale voluntary infiltration of Bangladeshi Muslims...to West Bengal and other parts of India" as well. The actual Muslim population growth exceeded Indian government projections that were based on demographic factors (fertility and mortality), internal migration, and the influx of Hindu refugees; thus, there had to be another element driving the change. Pramanik identifies it as "illegal immigration from across the border." Islamist plans have been so detailed and longstanding that since 1951 the Muslim growth rate exceeded that of Hindus in each individual district of West Bengal.

Statistics might be the "smoking gun," but jihad's impact is far more powerful in the testimony of individual non-Muslim residents who are its victims. One elderly woman in the Howrah district told us how Muslims are taking over her property piece by piece. She even showed us a wall with a star and crescent on it that local Muslims built to identify it as dar al Islam. In another village, residents showed us the remains of a Hindu temple that Muslims recently destroyed after urinating on its holy objects. Most poignant was the testimony of a crestfallen mother whose 22-year-old daughter was abducted weeks ago by local Muslims. Abduction of Hindu women and girls in the name of Islam has been common in Bangladesh for years and is a key element in jihad: eliminating females of childbearing years from the gene pool and forcing them to "produce" Muslim offspring instead. It is now happening in India, according to victimized parents who told me about it in India's North and Northeast.

Residents of Deganga, only 40 kilometers from the West Bengal capital of Kolkata, lived through an anti-Hindu pogrom last September. The pogrom started -- as these things are wont to do these days -- with a fabricated land dispute in which Muslims claimed a wooded area off the region's main road that Hindus own and on which sits a Hindu shrine that is considered very sacred. As the 2010 Islamic observance of Iftar came to an end, a large group of Muslims attempted to seize the land until local Hindus stopped them. It was then that they started attacking Hindu households and shops indiscriminately, forcing many to flee the area with little more than the clothes on their backs.

I returned to Deganga last month to find that while many homes and shops have been rebuilt, a sense of security by Hindus in their ancestral land has not. Most of the residents spoke about leaving the area; others talked about being fearful of attack, their children unable to attend school, and Hindu women being harassed whenever they go to the market or other places in the area. Many of them showed us charred pieces of their former residences; in other cases we were able to see signs of it bleeding through a new coat of paint. Hindu women and girls showed us where they hid during the attack to avoid being raped or abducted and made concubines; a fate that likely has befallen the missing 22-year old daughter of the mother above.

In every single one of these cases, local authorities have refused to take action. In fact, during the Deganga pogrom, they arrested the community's wealthiest Hindu on the false charge of firing on the jihadis. In the past, this official inaction has been purchased; but it is also a product of the alliance between Islamists and Communists in India. That alliance was announced publicly at a meeting in the south Indian state of Kerala; and it has been policy for West Bengal's three-decade old communist government. Wherever we spoke with these villagers, Muslim neighbors would gather menacingly in an attempt to intimidate our informants. In some cases, they attacked after we left -- again with no action by the authorities.

In Meerut northeast of New Delhi and far from Deganga, the population of this once Hindu-dominated town is now split down the middle between Hindus and Muslims; and the Hindus are living in fear. Just five days ago before my arrival, a Hindu was burned to death and shortly before that a community leader was targeted and killed. These actions are becoming more common in this substantial-sized town with no police re-action; and according to residents and activists, it is only a matter of time before things explode.

Our State Department will tell you that there is no jihad in India. They will hew the official line that the liberal Awami League government in Bangladesh has put an end to anti-Hindu actions there. A similarly weak government in New Delhi will parrot the same platitudes. Yet, their false palliatives bring no comfort to the scores of victims who have told us their stories; or the many others now unable to do so.

They cannot explain away major terrorist attacks in India's largest cities like Mumbai, Pune, in New Delhi, and elsewhere. They cannot explain how insurgents can regularly kidnap minor officials and receive their ransom (usually release of prisoners, cash, and government forbearance from counter terrorist action) every time they do. If the Obama administration and its left-wing counterparts in India do not replace their studied ignorance with effective action, we will be as "surprised" over what becomes of India as we were with Iran, Egypt, and a host of other nations.

Imagine what an Islamist India would mean for us.

Did India Change its Nuclear Doctrine?: Much Ado about Nothing

Vipin Naran March 1, 2011

A recent concern has broken out amongst some analysts that India has shifted its nuclear doctrine away from no first use. The publicly released summary of India’s 2003 official nuclear doctrine pledged “no first use” of nuclear weapons and an additional negative security assurance of “non-use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states.”1 On 21 October 2010, India’s National Security Advisor, Shivshankar Menon, gave a speech to the National Defence College in which the text employs the formulation that India’s nuclear doctrine emphasizes “no first use against non-nuclear weapons states.”2

Some analysts—and, as of this writing, even the relevant Wikipedia entries!3 —have interpreted this phrasing as a sharp departure from India’s official 2003 nuclear doctrine. According to this interpretation, the qualification that India abides by a no first use policy against non-nuclear weapons states implies that it no longer adheres to a similar pledge against nuclear weapons states. That is, if India now pledges to abide by a no first use policy against only non-nuclear weapons states, it thereby suggests that it reserves the option to use nuclear weapons first against nuclear weapons states, including Pakistan and China. Indeed, several scholars from these latter two states have raised this very issue with me recently, arguing that the formulation represents a doctrinal shift toward a nuclear warfighting—as opposed to a purely retaliatory—posture.

However, this is probably an erroneous interpretation for two reasons. First, the formulation is, in itself, consistent with India’s declaratory policy: India has always had a no first use policy against non-nuclear weapons states. So, the language is not ipso facto a departure from official policy—it is the qualification seemingly restricted, by implication, to non-nuclear weapons states that has triggered alarm. But, critically, the National Security Advisor did not state that India had abandoned its no first use policy for any subset of states. And if India were now attempting to deter conventional conflict by a nuclear-armed adversary by threatening the first use of nuclear weapons, deterrence logic requires that it would clearly have to make any such shift glaringly public. After all, to paraphrase a classic, what good is a Doomsday Machine if you keep it a secret? Such a sharp shift in declaratory nuclear doctrine would most likely be more explicit and certainly not be buried deep on the MEA website.

Second, given that the surrounding context of the speech largely focuses on the minimal nature of India’s nuclear doctrine, it is unlikely that the National Security Advisor was attempting to boldly change the foundational core of India’s nuclear doctrine through subtle reformulations. Indeed, the most plausible explanation is that the NDC formulation was simply the product of an innocent typographical or lexical error in the text of the speech. The original 2003 clause was sometimes variously formulated as “no use against non-nuclear weapons states” and, given the context, it is likely that this was what the National Security Advisor was reiterating and emphasizing to the NDC. All the available evidence suggests that India does not discriminate between nuclear and non-nuclear states insofar as its no first use policy is concerned. Against non-nuclear weapons states, India’s nuclear doctrine continues to pledge a further negative security assurance that it will unconditionally refrain from using nuclear weapons against them. If one simply drops a single “first” from the text of the speech, it is perfectly consistent with India’s officially declared nuclear doctrine. Furthermore, with respect to no first use, on 11 January 2011, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao publicly used the traditional formulation that “India has a no-first use policy,” without qualification, suggesting that there has been no revision to India’s nuclear doctrine.4

There is no question that India’s nuclear capabilities are evolving, particularly with respect to delivery vehicles and command and control procedures. But the striking feature of India’s nuclear posture has been the consistency with which it has adopted an assured retaliation orientation. All the capabilities that India has developed over the past decade, and is seeking to develop in the future, are designed to bolster either the ability to retaliate against a range of key strategic targets in its envisioned adversaries (e.g. the Agni III), or enhancing the assurance with which that retaliation would be meted (e.g. the future SSBN). If anything, there has been increasing consideration to de-emphasize the short-range Prithvi family for nuclear missions—the delivery system most suitable for nuclear warfighting roles—in order to enhance crisis stability, focusing instead on systems with truly strategic capabilities such as the Agni family for deterrence.5 In short, India’s core nuclear posture which emphasizes nuclear retaliation following WMD use on India or its forces seems to have largely persisted.

Although there are some within India who might like to see it—and many outside, particularly in China and Pakistan, who are afraid that it might— move toward a nuclear warfighting posture, there is no evidence that it is contemplating doing so. There is certainly nothing publicly available to suggest that revisions are being made in stewardship or command and control procedures that would support a nuclear first use policy against any state. And, as noted earlier, nuclear deterrence logic requires that any shift to a first-use doctrine to deter conventional conflict by a nuclear-armed adversary must be transparent and publicly articulated. As such, any interpretations that India is moving toward a more aggressive nuclear doctrine based on parsing what is likely nothing more than an innocuous typographical error is almost certainly making much ado about nothing.

1. 1. The caveats for retaliation against chemical or biological attacks notwithstanding; these have been discussed elsewhere, but it is fair to characterize the 2003 doctrine as pledging a no first use policy barring WMD use against India or its forces.
2. 2. National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon, “The Role of Force in Strategic Affairs,” Speech to the NDC, October 21, 2010. Available on the Indian Ministry of External Affairs at: http://www.mea.gov.in/mystart.php?id=530116584.
3. 3. “No First Use,” Wikipedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use#India (Accessed 28 February 2011); “India and Weapons of Mass Destruction,” Wikipedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#Doctrine (Accessed 28 February 2011).
4. 4. Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, Speech to Delhi Policy Group Seminar with MIT on Asian Security Challenges, January 11, 2011. Available at http://mea.gov.in/mystart.php?id=530117069.
5. 5. See Brig. (Retd) Gurmeet Kanwal’s remarks in “Nuclear CBMs and Risk Reduction Measures in South Asia,” Center for Land Warfare Studies, September 12, 2010. Available at http://www.claws.in/index.php?action=master&task=693&u_id=36.

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Rights groups concerned about `missing' Baloch people

Quetta / London, March 07: Pakistan is not sparing any effort in silencing Baloch voices that are raised in protest. On February 22, mutilated bodies of Mehboob Wadela of the Baloch National Movement and Rehman Arif of the Baloch Republican Party were found in the coastal town of Ormara. Both activists suspected to have been kidnapped by Pakistan intelligence agencies a few months ago, bore marks of extreme torture. The incident sparked protests in different parts of the province. The "Kill and Dump" tactics by central agencies are on the rise as is clear from the number of bodies of missing Baloch people that are being recovered. According to the NGO, Voice for Baloch Missing Persons, as many as 101 bullet-riddled bodies of missing persons have surfaced over the past seven months.

The $110 Billion Question

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: March 5, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/opinion/06friedman.html?ref=opinion

When one looks across the Arab world today at the stunning spontaneous democracy uprisings, it is impossible to not ask: What are we doing spending $110 billion this year supporting corrupt and unpopular regimes in Afghanistan and Pakistan that are almost identical to the governments we’re applauding the Arab people for overthrowing?

Josh Haner/The New York Times

Thomas L. Friedman

Ever since 9/11, the West has hoped for a war of ideas within the Muslim world that would feature an internal challenge to the violent radical Islamic ideology of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. That contest, though, never really materialized because the regimes we counted on to promote it found violent Muslim extremism a convenient foil, so they allowed it to persist. Moreover, these corrupt, crony capitalist Arab regimes were hardly the ideal carriers for an alternative to bin Ladenism. To the contrary, it was their abusive behavior and vicious suffocation of any kind of independent moderate centrist parties that fueled the extremism even more.

Now the people themselves have taken down those regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, and they’re rattling the ones in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Oman and Iran. They are not doing it for us, or to answer bin Laden. They are doing it by themselves for themselves — because they want their freedom and to control their own destinies. But in doing so they have created a hugely powerful, modernizing challenge to bin Ladenism, which is why Al Qaeda today is tongue-tied. It’s a beautiful thing to watch.

Al Qaeda’s answer to modern-day autocracy was its version of the seventh-century Caliphate. But the people — from Tunisia to Yemen — have come up with their own answer to violent extremism and the abusive regimes we’ve been propping up. It’s called democracy. They have a long way to go to lock it in. It may yet be hijacked by religious forces. But, for now, it is clear that the majority wants to build a future in the 21st century, not the seventh.

In other words, the Arab peoples have done for free, on their own and for their own reasons, everything that we were paying their regimes to do in the “war on terrorism” but they never did.

And that brings me back to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Last October, Transparency International rated the regime of President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan as the second most corrupt in the world after Somalia’s. That is the Afghan regime we will spend more than $110 billion in 2011 to support.

And tell me that Pakistan’s intelligence service, ISI, which dominates Pakistani politics, isn’t the twin of Hosni Mubarak’s security service. Pakistan’s military leaders play the same game Mubarak played with us for years. First, they whisper in our ears: “Psst, without us, the radical Islamists will rule. So we may not be perfect, but we’re the only thing standing in the way of the devil.” In reality, though, they are nurturing the devil. The ISI is long alleged to have been fostering anti-Indian radical Muslim groups and masterminding the Afghan Taliban.

Apart from radical Islam, the other pretext the Pakistani military uses for its inordinate grip on power is the external enemy. Just as Arab regimes used the conflict with Israel for years to keep their people distracted and to justify huge military budgets, Pakistan’s ISI tells itself, the Pakistani people and us that it can’t stop sponsoring proxies in Afghanistan because of the “threat” from India.

Here’s a secret: India is not going to invade Pakistan. It is an utterly bogus argument. India wants to focus on its own development, not owning Pakistan’s problems. India has the second-largest Muslim population on the planet, more even than Pakistan. And while Indian Muslims are not without their economic and political grievances, they are, on the whole, integrated into India’s democracy because it is a democracy. There are no Indian Muslims in Guantánamo Bay.

Finally, you did not need to dig very far in Egypt or Jordan to hear that one reason for the rebellion in Egypt and protests in Jordan was the in-your-face corruption and crony capitalism that everyone in the public knew about.

That same kind of pillaging of assets — natural resources, development aid, the meager savings of a million Kabul Bank depositors and crony contracts — has fueled a similar anger against the regime in Afghanistan and undermined our nation-building efforts there.

The truth is we can’t do much to consolidate the democracy movements in Egypt and Tunisia. They’ll have to make it work themselves. But we could do what we can, which is divert some of the $110 billion we’re lavishing on the Afghan regime and the Pakistani Army and use it for debt relief, schools and scholarships to U.S. universities for young Egyptians and Tunisians who had the courage to take down the very kind of regimes we’re still holding up in Kabul and Islamabad.

I know we can’t just walk out of Afghanistan and Pakistan; there are good people, too, in both places. But our involvement in these two countries — 150,000 troops to confront Al Qaeda — is totally out of proportion today with our interests and out of all sync with our values

QUOTES OF THE DAY

"This is a brilliantly written and clinically analysed paper by Dr. Kapila UNITED STATES-PAKISTAN DENOUEMENT: STRATEGIC IMPLICATIONS FOR INDIA exposing the inability of our rulers to either comprehend what our national interests are, let alone deal pro-actively to promote these interests. "

"One is tired of the Prime MInister encouraging the hawks in the Pakistan establishment by voicing his oft repeated Mantra that India cannot attain its "full potential" till its relations with Pakistan improve. The absurdity of this assertion by Dr. Manmohan Singh is that contrary to what he says, Indians do best when they are challenged. Indian economic growth has piked up and accelerated despite Pakistani malevolence. Has Dr.Manmohan Singh forgotten this simple economic reality? "--- G Parthasarathy

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So true! Besides, why does the GoMMS links and allows India's destiny to be held hostage to Pakistani Army/ISI machinations? A stable Pakistan has always created instablity in the region (post 1989 flushed with American arms and Soviet exit, they started jihad against India).

An unstable Pakistan (battiling the jehadi-blowback within, with relentless U.S. military pressure) is what keeps Pakistan all tied-up within. It is best for them to stew in their own juice (with apologies to Kao).

If you wish to test the viability of the stability/instabiltiy thesis, wait until the Americans exit AfPak (if they do, which is another question). Stable and flush with U.S. arms, Pakistanis will unleash jehadis against the Afghans and India and spread the virus of islamic fundamentalism all over again in South and Central Asia.

In any case, the writer (Stewart, was it?) in the last Stratfor article was literally begging Pakistan to give us another 9/11. Such is our deadly embrace of Pakistan. There is no riddle in what Riedel writes. This has been consistent U.S. foreign policy towards the subcontinent for the past sixty years (go back to Albright's father!).

Unless India comes with a game-changer (and no, handing Kashmir over to Pakistan is not one of them), India ALWAYS will be the collateral damage in any USA-Pakistan bonhomie. No softs and hards about it!

As horrible as this video is (and the alleged Pakistani army torturing Pashthus cannot be verified), I would like us Americans watch our tax dollars support to a terrorist army! (warning: graphic, and moderator, please delete if found offensive). It is a Sunday, a day for prayers, and as an American, I seek forgiveness for my money directly funds these terrible atrocities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80guzmu76po

Reggie Sinha

The US-Saudi-Wahabi Nexus !

"History is ruled by an inexorable determinism in which the free choice of major historical figures plays a minimal role", Leo Tolstoy

By K Gajendra Singh www.informationclearinghouse.info/article16041.htm

01/01/07 "Information Clearing House" -- -- When the powerful US Vice-President Dick Cheney made a rare long haul to Riyadh in November , reportedly it was to create against Iran , Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon , a new US led Sunni alliance in the region, composed of the six Gulf Co-operation Council states, pro-US Arab governments in Cairo and Amman and willing NATO allies with covert support from Israel.-----

But donot hold your breath .Democracy , even like US (2000 elections ) or India's (thoroughly corrupt and callous ) will emerge .First step will be military rule .Does Riyadh have a military.From which tribes it recruits soldiers !!.

Once the fat is in fire in the Gulf where millions of Indians are employed.What will happen .

I had evacuated 138,000 Indians by air from Amman in 1990-91 .I know how disorganised MEA and the govt is .

Persia , which used to influence events upto Eastern Libya, across Dardanelles and later contest Iraq with Romans and Byzantines , must be watching and trying to influence the events .

I used to enjoy having the French and Iranian ambassadors for lunch and watch them discussing the events .The Iranian , a former Pasardani ( intelligence ) was alleged to have encouraged the Kuwaitis , while posted there in 1990s to defy the Iraqis .With what results ! He was later declared persona non-grata and had to leave Turkey.

We would have enjoyed the fun if we were not saddled with a dysfunctional anarchy .

Cheers and take care

.....surprise surprise, Al Jazeera/BBC etc. forgot this one.....sshhh the saudi regime is nice and friendly to Qatar and (most important) to the US, even to Israel!!!!

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/63652c86-46a7-11e0-967a-00144feab49a.html#axzz1FnpxRg82

Protests build across Saudi Arabia

By Abeer Allam in Riyadh

Published: March 4 2011 22:05 | Last updated: March 4 2011 22:05

Demonstrators staged a rare rally after Friday prayers in Riyadh, marking the first such protest in the Saudi capital, as the kingdom braced itself for an Egypt-inspired “Friday of Rage” next week.

Meanwhile, small protests continued in the oil-rich Eastern Province towns of al-Ahsa and Qateef, with demonstrators demanding the release of political prisoners.

In Riyadh, security helicopters hovered over protesters gathered in front of Al-Rajhi mosque, in the east of the capital, in what an unknown opposition group described as a “Friday of mobilisation”.

Some protesters chanted “thieves, thieves, where is the 200bn”, “God is great”, and “God will destroy the arrogant and unjust”, as well as “peaceful, peaceful”.

Meanwhile, in a YouTube internet video seen by the Financial Times, a man carried a banner that said “Youth of March 4”. The video claimed that 2,000 people took part in the rally, later dispersed by police. Others said there were merely dozens of protesters. It was not possible to verify either estimate.

It is not clear who was behind the protests, or who the “Youth of March 4” are, though they are apparently inspired by Egypt’s “Youth of April 6”.

Pro-democracy activist Mohamed Fahd al-Qahtani said at least half of those who led the protests support the London-based Islamist opposition Saad al-Faqih. Others, he said, are frustrated citizens with no affiliation.

“There is a general sense of disappointment, people want serious reforms,” said Mr Qahtani. “There is a different mood now inspired by Egyptian and Tunisian revolts and the current uprising in Libya. People want the government to show real intention for reform. They feel worthless; we lag behind other countries and excluded from the political process.”

In Saudi Arabia protests and public displays of dissent are outlawed. The government has become increasingly nervous about the protests that have taken the Arab world by storm, toppling the Egyptian and Tunisian presidents, and which recently reached Oman and Bahrain. Saudi reformists had hoped that after King Abdullah returned from a three-month medical trip to the US and Morocco, he would announce reforms. Instead, he announced an estimated SR135bn ($36bn) in financial and unemployment benefit measures.

“This is a very proud family, they do not want to be seen as afraid of instability that is shaking other regimes,” said a western analyst close to members of the royal family. “They will take their time because they do not want to be seen as succumbing to pressure.”

Waleed Sulais, a Shia activist, said: “The government is very tense right now. The authorities do not like mosques or Friday sermons being used to discuss politics, they warned against it. But the numbers are increasing every day as people become bolder. There has to be serious steps [towards reform] or anger will explode.”

The governor of the Eastern Province is reportedly meeting with leading Shia figures tomorrow to discuss grievances, including release of so-called “forgotten prisoners”.

Separately, anti-government protests resumed in Bahrain on Friday amid rising sectarian tensions. Demonstrators marched from government buildings to the Pearl roundabout, the focal point for the youth-driven movement demanding the downfall of the government.

Fights broke out between Shias and Sunnis in the country on Thursday night, raising the spectre of sectarian violence.

As protests enter their third week, the street battles mark the first escalation into intercommunal violence, amid increasingly bitter rhetoric.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.

Huntington’s Clash Revisited

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: March 3, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/opinion/04brooks.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Samuel Huntington was one of America’s greatest political scientists. In 1993, he published a sensational essay in Foreign Affairs called “The Clash of Civilizations?” The essay, which became a book, argued that the post-cold war would be marked by civilizational conflict.

Josh Haner/The New York Times

David Brooks

Human beings, Huntington wrote, are divided along cultural lines — Western, Islamic, Hindu and so on. There is no universal civilization. Instead, there are these cultural blocks, each within its own distinct set of values.

The Islamic civilization, he wrote, is the most troublesome. People in the Arab world do not share the general suppositions of the Western world. Their primary attachment is to their religion, not to their nation-state. Their culture is inhospitable to certain liberal ideals, like pluralism, individualism and democracy.

Huntington correctly foresaw that the Arab strongman regimes were fragile and were threatened by the masses of unemployed young men. He thought these regimes could fall, but he did not believe that the nations would modernize in a Western direction. Amid the tumult of regime change, the rebels would selectively borrow tools from the West, but their borrowing would be refracted through their own beliefs. They would follow their own trajectory and not become more Western.

The Muslim world has bloody borders, he continued. There are wars and tensions where the Muslim world comes into conflict with other civilizations. Even if decrepit regimes fell, he suggested, there would still be a fundamental clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. The Western nations would do well to keep their distance from Muslim affairs. The more the two civilizations intermingle, the worse the tensions will be.

Huntington’s thesis set off a furious debate. But with the historic changes sweeping through the Arab world, it’s illuminating to go back and read his argument today.

In retrospect, I’d say that Huntington committed the Fundamental Attribution Error. That is, he ascribed to traits qualities that are actually determined by context.

He argued that people in Arab lands are intrinsically not nationalistic. He argued that they do not hunger for pluralism and democracy in the way these things are understood in the West. But it now appears as though they were simply living in circumstances that did not allow that patriotism or those spiritual hungers to come to the surface.

It now appears that people in these nations, like people in all nations, have multiple authentic selves. In some circumstances, one set of identities manifests itself, but when those circumstances change, other equally authentic identities and desires get activated.

For most of the past few decades, people in Arab nations were living under regimes that rule by fear. In these circumstances, most people shared the conspiracy mongering and the political passivity that these regimes encouraged. But when the fear lessened, and the opportunity for change arose, different aspirations were energized. Over the past weeks, we’ve seen Arab people ferociously attached to their national identities. We’ve seen them willing to risk their lives for pluralism, openness and democracy.

I’d say Huntington was also wrong in the way he defined culture.

In some ways, each of us is like every person on earth; in some ways, each of us is like the members of our culture and group; and, in some ways, each of us is unique. Huntington minimized the power of universal political values and exaggerated the influence of distinct cultural values. It’s easy to see why he did this. He was arguing against global elites who sometimes refuse to acknowledge the power of culture at all.

But it seems clear that many people in Arab nations do share a universal hunger for liberty. They feel the presence of universal human rights and feel insulted when they are not accorded them.

Culture is important, but underneath cultural differences there are these universal aspirations for dignity, for political systems that listen to, respond to and respect the will of the people.

Finally, I’d say Huntington misunderstood the nature of historical change. In his book, he describes transformations that move along linear, projectable trajectories. But that’s not how things work in times of tumult. Instead, one person moves a step. Then the next person moves a step. Pretty soon, millions are caught up in a contagion, activating passions they had but dimly perceived just weeks before. They get swept up in momentums that have no central authority and that, nonetheless, exercise a sweeping influence on those caught up in their tides.

I write all this not to denigrate the great Huntington. He may still be proved right. The Arab world may modernize on its own separate path. But his mistakes illuminate useful truths: that all people share certain aspirations and that history is wide open. The tumult of events can transform the traits and qualities that seemed, even to great experts, etched in stone.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on March 4, 2011, on page A27 of the New York edition.

Libya, Kaddafi and Lockberie

“Every time I read an op-ed in the New York Times that was written by a ‘senior scholar’ from the Hoover Institute or a “fellow” from the Cato Institute, I want to scream, please replace that with “paid whore funded by psychotic right-wing billionaire.” Which is significantly more accurate-“ Larry Beinhart , an American author.

Unlike other pro-West rulers in the Arab world , most of whom have suddenly become dictators in the west ,with Ben Ali and Mubarak fleeing their presidential Place , Moammer Kaddafi is still standing and fighting against rebels (encouraged by the West , with reportedly US and UK special forces inside Libya , merceneries like Davis in Lahore Jail) .

Except the British poodle , all including China, Russia and Turkey ( vehemently) have expressed their opposition to any Western adventure in Libya. India has also expressed opposition to intervention. Thank God ( Swapan dasgupta had suggested India joining US in 2003 invasion of Iraq)

Kaddafi has been referred to ICC, which Washington does not recognize as it would then try Bush and Blair etc

Most of the news about Libya still comes vis BBC and CNN and other western outlets. I watched day in and day out spins, half-truths and blatant lies being spouted US/UK leaders from 2002 onwards being magnified by the media before the illegal invasion of Iraq and its brutal occupation. There are atleast 50,000 US troops in Iraq .Iraqis like other Arabs have made protests , peaceful and many gunned down. But little in media .The current Iraqi rulers , many have foreign passports and mostly reside in well protected Green Zone castle in Baghdad and many live abroad .

The same US/UK jokers are now covering Libya and as usual Indian media relies on them.

Kaddafi is ruler of a tribal society , so he lives like them and speaks their lingo like some of our own leaders .

In 1974 Kaddafi had come on a private visit to Paris and in a colloque , talking across the table with France’s socialist and communist leaders had stood his ground well about his policies.

The lies about the Lockberie , downing of a Panam plane ( in revenge for US shooting down of an Iranian civil airliner) had field day.

I have kept a watch over it since it happened .

Read a piece by a British labour MP.

http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/2009/08/by-tam-dalyell-former-labour-mp-for.html

MONDAY, 17 AUGUST 2009

The truth about Lockerbie? That’s the last thing the Americans want the world to know.

By Tam Dalyell
Former Labour MP for Linlithgow and former Father of the House of Commons.

Why have US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her officials responded to the return of Megrahi with such a volcanic reaction? The answer is straightforward. The last thing that Washington wants is the truth to emerge about the role of the US in the crime of Lockerbie. I understand the grief of those parents, such as Kathleen Flynn and Bert Ammerman, who have appeared on our TV screens to speak about the loss of loved ones. Alas all these years they have been lied to about the cause of that grief.

Not only did Washington not want the awful truth to emerge, but Mrs Thatcher, a few - very few - in the stratosphere of Whitehall and certain officials of the Crown Office in Edinburgh, who owe their subsequent careers to the Lockerbie investigation, were compliant.

It all started in July 1988 with the shooting down by the warship USS Vincennes of an Iranian airliner carrying 290 pilgrims to Mecca - without an apology.

The Iranian minister of the interior at the time was Ali Akbar Mostashemi, who made a public statement that blood would rain down in the form of ten western airliners being blown out of the sky.

Mostashemi was in a position carry out such a threat - he had been the Iranian ambassador in Damascus from 1982 to 1984 and had developed close relations with the terrorist gangs of Beirut and the Bekaa Valley - and in particular terrorist leader Abu Nidal and Ahmed Jibril, the head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command.

Washington was appalled. I believe so appalled and fearful that it entered into a Faustian agreement that, tit-for-tat, one airliner should be sacrificed. This may seem a dreadful thing for me to say. But consider the facts. A notice went up in the US Embassy in Moscow advising diplomats not to travel with Pan Am back to America for Christmas.

American military personnel were pulled off the plane. A delegation of South Africans, including foreign minister Pik Botha, were pulled off Pan Am Flight 103 at the last minute--

Robert Fisk, the well known journalist who normally writes for UK’s ‘Independent ; also says the same thing

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/robert-fisk/robert-fisk-for-the-truth-about-lockerbie-look-to-tehran-and-damascus-ndash-not-tripoli-14463453.html

Robert Fisk: For the truth about Lockerbie, look to Tehran and Damascus – not Tripoli

Saturday, 22 August 2009

--Megrahi's ( who was accused falsely and convicted and then released after fat payments by Kaddafi )lawyers had delved deeply into his case – which rested on the word of a Maltese tailor who had already seen a picture of Megrahi (unrevealed to us at the time) so he could identify him in court – and uncovered some remarkable evidence from the German police.

Given the viciousness of their Third Reich predecessors, I've never had a lot of time for German cops, but on this occasion they went a long way towards establishing that a Lebanese who had been killed in the Lockerbie bombing was steered to Frankfurt airport by known Lebanese militants and the bag that contained the bomb was actually put on to the baggage carousel for checking in by this passenger's Lebanese handler, who had taken him to the airport, and had looked after him in Germany before the flight.

I have read all the interviews which the German police conducted with their suspects. They are devastating. There clearly was a Lebanese connection. And there probably was a Palestinian connection. How can I forget a press conference in Beirut held by the head of the pro-Syrian "Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine" (they were known, then, as the "Lockerbie boys") in which their leader, Ahmed Jibril, suddenly blurted out: "I'm not responsible for the Lockerbie bombing. They are trying to get me with a kangaroo court."

Yet there was no court at the time. Only journalists – with MI6 and the CIA contacts – had pointed the finger at Jibril's rogues. It was Iran's revenge, they said, for the shooting down of a perfectly innocent Iranian passenger jet by the captain of the American warship Vincennes a few months earlier. I still happen to believe this is close to the truth.

But the moment Syria sent its tanks to defend Saudi Arabia after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, all the MI6 truth-telling turned into a claptrap of nonsense about Col Gaddafi. And Gaddafi, let's face it, was in deep trouble. Libya almost certainly was responsible for the earlier bombing of French UTA flight 772 over Chad in 1989. Why not frame him with Lockerbie too—

Now read a somewhat balanced piece on Kaddafi and Libya .

Taking the Cake: The Creeping Militarization of the Libyan Crisis

By Chris Floyd

March 04, 2011 " ---- - The howling hypocrisy of the American response to the uprising in Libya has been so jaw-dropping and nauseating that I've hardly been able to address it. Fortunately, Seamus Milne is on the case, and voices much of my thinking about the matter:

The same western leaders who happily armed and did business with the Gaddafi regime until a fortnight ago have now slapped sanctions on the discarded autocrat and blithely referred him to the international criminal court the United States won't recognise.

Yes, does this not, as they say, take the cake ... and the plate and the forks and the napkins too? The United States pushing through a measure to refer Libyan leaders to an international court which the United States resolutely refuses to recognize -- lest its own leaders and their underlings find themselves in the dock for the most monstrous war crimes of this century? Yet even today, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate was sternly wagging his finger at Gaddafi and his underlings, telling them they "will be held accountable" for their actions before the august institutions of international justice, which weigh the whole world in the balance ... except for the Peace prize-winning drone assassin and Continuer-in-Chief of a worldwide campaign of state terror, that is. But now back to Milne:

With Colonel Gaddafi and his loyalists showing every sign of digging in, the likelihood must be of intensified conflict – with all the heightened pretexts that would offer for outside interference, from humanitarian crises to threats to oil supplies.

But any such intervention would risk disaster and be a knife at the heart of the revolutionary process now sweeping the Arab world. Military action is needed, US and British politicians claim, because Gaddafi is "killing his own people". Hundreds have certainly died, but that's hard to take seriously as the principal motivation.

When more than 300 people were killed by Hosni Mubarak's security forces in a couple of weeks, Washington initially called for "restraint on both sides". In Iraq, 50,000 US occupation troops protect a government which last Friday killed 29 peaceful demonstrators demanding reform. In Bahrain, home of the US fifth fleet, the regime has been shooting and gassing protesters with British-supplied equipment for weeks.

The "responsibility to protect" invoked by those demanding intervention in Libya is applied so selectively that the word hypocrisy doesn't do it justice. And the idea that states which are themselves responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands in illegal wars, occupations and interventions in the last decade, along with mass imprisonment without trial, torture and kidnapping, should be authorised by international institutions to prevent killings in other countries is simply preposterous.

One key point Milne makes here deserves underlining: Western military intervention would be "a knife at the heart of the revolutionary process now sweeping the Arab world." But of course, that's exactly what Peace prizeniks and Etonian schoolboys now leading the "Free World" would like to see happen. As Milne notes, the Arab Awakening is threatening some of the West's favorite dictators and tough guys, from the religious extremists in Saudi Arabia to the ever-complaisant corruptocrats in Bahrain to the client brutalists in Iraq and elsewhere.The dullards directing world affairs have been desperately casting about for a way to put the kibosh on the movement - and Libya might give them the opening they've been fumbling for. Milne again:

The reality is that the western powers which have backed authoritarian kleptocrats across the Middle East for decades now face a loss of power in the most strategically sensitive region of the world as a result of the Arab uprisings and the prospect of representative governments. They are evidently determined to appropriate the revolutionary process wherever possible, limiting it to cosmetic change that allows continued control of the region.

In Libya, the disintegration of the regime offers a crucial opening. Even more important, unlike Tunisia and Egypt, it has the strategic prize of the largest oil reserves in Africa. Of course the Gaddafi regime has moved a long way from the days when it took over the country's oil, kicked out foreign bases and funded the African National Congress at a time when the US and Britain branded Nelson Mandela a terrorist.
Along with repression, corruption and a failure to deliver to ordinary Libyans, the regime has long since bent the knee to western power, as Tony Blair and his friends were so keen to celebrate, ditching old allies and nuclear ambitions while offering privatised pickings and contracts to western banks, arms and oil corporations such as BP.

Now the prospect of the regime's fall offers the chance for much closer involvement – western intelligence has had its fingers in parts of the Libyan opposition for years – when other states seem in danger of spinning out of the imperial orbit. ... Military intervention wouldn't just be a threat to Libya and its people, but to the ownership of what has been until now an entirely organic, homegrown democratic movement across the region.

Again, that would be -- will be? -- the very point of any type of Western military intervention in Libya: to kill a popular, democratic movement that is at present beyond the control of the imperial militarists along the Potomac. Such an intervention would allow Gaddafi and other tyrants under threat to paint opponents to their rule as "tools of the imperialists," while rallying many who oppose them back to their side, to defend the nation against outsiders. This in turn would help "stabilize" the revolutionary situations -- and the leaders, now safe once more, could then turn back to their cynical backroom deals with the West, and hoarding the blood and toil of their people in the cool vaults of Swiss banks. Hey, it's a win-win situation all around.

Events are in free, chaotic flow right now. The Libyan opposition might be able to oust Gaddafi before President Peacey and Prime Minister Fauntleroy go in with guns blazing. And events elsewhere might suddenly erupt and draw off attention and resources. But we are certainly seeing a creeping militarization in the response to the Libyan uprising -- and behind the exigencies of this crisis, there is the deeper shadow that Milne discerns: the longer-range project to diffuse and destroy the Arab Awakening before it further spreads its genuine threat to the business-as-usual dominance of Western elites.

http://www.chris-floyd.com

BETWEEN FRIENDS AND FOES - It is in India’s interest to forge a coherent West Asia policy

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray http://www.telegraphindia.com/1110305/jsp/opinion/story_13666780.jsp

Muammar Gaddafi complains the West has deserted him. So have the Arab League and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. So has India. The West’s desertion matters most, perhaps, not only because Gaddafi has been at such pains to surrender his nuclear options and reinvent himself as Uncle Sam’s pet but because of the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan. With British and German planes landing in Libya, talk of a no-fly zone and David Cameron accused of playing Tony Blair, a Western bid for regime change can be expected if the revolt fails to bring Gaddafi down. India’s position is enigmatic. A former ambassador to Libya once recalled admiringly that when he called on Gaddafi, the latter hugged his local driver because they had fought together in the resistance. He saw Libya’s leader as a man of the people. When Pranab Mukherjee visited Libya in 2007 — the first high-powered visit since Indira Gandhi’s in 1984 — Gaddafi waxed eloquent about the sky being “the limit for cooperation between the two countries.” Matching his exuberance, Mukherjee declared India’s “unlimited interest” in promoting “the historical friendship” and broadening ties “in the economic, commercial, cultural, and joint investment fields.” An Indian multi-product business delegation last March, followed in July by the eighth session of the Indo-Libyan Joint Commission, confirmed the promise of partnership in oil and petroleum, IT, education and human resource development. Has India’s evaluation changed because some of Gaddafi’s people have turned against him? Or because the United States of America has? Now we are told Seif al-Islam, Gaddafi’s son and heir, pulled a fast one on New Delhi’s Islamic Centre. Now India, like the US, wants sanctions against Libya, and its leader tried for crimes against humanity. Fellow columnist K.P. Nayar may be able to throw light on the number of telephone calls and summonses from the Americans before Hardeep Singh Puri, India’s permanent representative to the United Nations who was reportedly held at Texas airport not long ago in violation of his diplomatic immunity and his turban “searched forcefully”, agreed to suppress his own preference for a more calibrated approach and go the whole hog. Since Americans test friends and foes on the touchstone of UN votes, P.V. Narasimha Rao had to support revocation of Resolution 3379 (Zionism-is-racism), passed by the UN general assembly with great gusto in 1975, as part of the price of acceptance. As prime minister, I.K. Gujral did not rush to Kuwait’s defence when Saddam Hussein overran the emirate but realized — when the US cut off aid for impoverished Yemen because it voted against invading Iraq — that near-bankrupt India would have to toe the line. After that, India supported every American move at the UN. It’s ironical that the US, with India tagging along, should seek to commit Gaddafi to the International Criminal Court which neither country recognizes. It is also ironical that the world should suddenly have woken up to his dictatorship. Gaddafi has not been anything else since he overthrew the pro-Western monarchy in 1969 and set up the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. Presumably, the Americans and Indians would have continued to befriend him if he had ruthlessly suppressed the revolt before it exploded. It’s ironic, too, that a pro-democracy movement is pitted against a jamahiriya or “state of the masses”. The strident American campaign is the biggest irony. The US has accommodated too many dictators in the past for Hillary Clinton’s human rights rhetoric to be taken at face value. Perhaps Gaddafi’s nuclear penitence was never believed and the US has been biding its time since the unfinished business of 1969 when Henry Kissinger tried to topple him or 1986 when the Reagan administration tried to have him killed. Perhaps Washington wants to demonstrate that the Central Intelligence Agency, which could not save a star protégé in Cairo and has been caught with its pants down in Lahore, isn’t such a nincompoop (if an organization can be called that) after all. This could also be a manifestation of the new plan — CIA 2015 — by the CIA director, Leon Panetta, to refurbish his agency’s image. Another explanation might be the intelligence assessment that despite bombast about “fighting to the last man and woman”, Gaddafi will not survive the storm, and the consequent American determination to win favour with the next ruler(s) of a major oil exporter with Africa’s largest proven oil deposits. The danger is that a superpower can foment trouble in a country and use it as an excuse for intervention. It was a tactic imperial Britain perfected, and the US might feel tempted to employ to avoid the mess that outright invasion created in Iraq and Afghanistan. No one should be surprised if Western arms and funds are channelled to the “Free Libya” insurgents, as they were to Osama bin Laden and the Afghan Mujahideen. Hugo Chávez, who has produced a peace plan, can save his breath to cool his porridge, as they say. The Americans can’t back out now. Unlike the British, Indians don’t instinctively protest when civil rights are infringed anywhere in the world. Outsiders have commented India is absorbed in India. The British writer, Taya Zinkin, who knew India well, explained indifference to global events by suggesting that Indians are psychologically incapable of seeing repression when both sides are the same colour. The traditional aversion to championing human rights and democratic freedoms, evident in Jawaharlal Nehru’s hesitation over Hungary in 1956, may also reflect a genuine reluctance to interfere in another country’s sovereign jurisdiction. It could be born, too, of a hard-pressed people’s pragmatic strategy for survival. An Indian Zimbabwean at the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas strongly resented Western criticism of Robert Mugabe whose high-handedness he justified in the name of discipline, arguing that white farmers deserved to be expropriated. Typically, he was doing well and didn’t want the boat rocked. Not that Indian governments care much about emigrant sentiments. Nehru, who advised East African Indians to make the best of their circumstances, took up the cudgels against apartheid South Africa because of Mahatma Gandhi’s involvement. Playing to the Afro-Asian gallery and attacking Western colonialism were added incentives. Initiatives like the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas and liberalized passport, visa and voting rules were prompted by China’s success in mobilizing funds from its diaspora. Normally, West Asian countries are barely mentioned in the Indian media. The orgy of reports about the upsurge there reflects (dare I say it?) media imitativeness rather than a response to keen domestic interest. Yet, West Asia should rank high in foreign policy priorities. India imports 75 per cent of its oil needs and nearly three-quarters of that comes from the region. The four million Indians there (only 18,000 in Libya) are a major source of foreign remittances. The United Arab Emirates overtook the US in 2008-09 as India’s biggest trading partner. If national interest justifies dealing with Myanmar’s ruling junta (despite Barack Obama’s chiding) or an array of Arab sheikhs and sultans, there need be no squeamishness about Libya’s “Leader and Guide of the Revolution”. Whether or not his days are numbered, India must forge a coherent West Asian strategy that places India’s fiscal stability, technological expertise and familiarity with democratic institutions at the disposal of the emerging order. Whatever the earlier record of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, its request for help in conducting elections merits a positive response. The unique instrument of soft power that is Bollywood can be deployed with aggressive creativity. While India cannot afford to ignore either US strategic interests or its ties with Israel, being seen to hang on to America’s coat-tails like Hosni Mubarak’s ousted regime will only invite ridicule. “A subedar owing allegiance to a global overlord”, as Syed Shahabuddin put it in another context, won’t serve even American global interests either. The US needs a credible ally in Asia with an independent foreign policy.

sunandadr@yahoo.co.in