#2
Why am I not surprised that Rantburg's representative of the Pashtun fanciers club of British Columbia is less than enamored of a post describing how militant Islam persecutes Christians and seeks to eradicate the very physical evidence of two thousand years of Christian presence?
During a panel talk at New Yorks Asia Society on January 21, Professor Ashutosh Varshney of Brown University claimed that some right wing forces in the US and India were interested in seeing Pakistan break up and that they imagined that somehow India would be able to neuter the nukes and prevent them from getting into unfriendly hands, something he considered highly risky and likely to lead to catastrophe. During the same event former Pakistani diplomat Munir Akram claimed that any war between India and Pakistan would escalate uncontrollably and go nuclear quite quickly.
At this moment, they are both right. The India-Pakistan nuclear stand-off is stalemated to Pakistans advantage, in that they can launch (or allow) terror attacks such as the November 2008 one on Mumbai and India can do essentially nothing in response. The unmistakable smugness of the former Pakistani diplomat made this evident. However, this situation will not last forever. India is now seeking way to neutralize the majority of Pakistans nuclear weapons and within a decade or perhaps a little longer they may come up with a solution.
In 2006 India began testing a missile defense version of its Prithvi medium-range ballistic missile. This test is just one sign that New Delhi is seeking to develop a multi-layer complex that can defend against Pakistans nuclear missiles. Due to its liquid-fueled first stage, the Prithvi Air Defense (PAD) is certainly not an ideal system, but it is both available and locally made. The Indian military is comfortable enough with this weapons effectiveness to make it their main battlefield ballistic missile for both conventional and nuclear applications.
Even if they give missile defense a big budget and a high priority, it will be many years before India has a moderately effective, indigenous missile defense shield. The claim last year by the head of the Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO) that they will have a multi-layered system ready in 2010 is taken with a grain of salt by observers both inside and outside the subcontinent. However, unless the geopolitical situation radically changes, there is no doubt that India will continue work on the systems for the foreseeable future.
If they wanted to they could buy systems from the US, Israel, or Russia, and they have already bought themselves a pair of Israeli Green Pine radars originally designed for the Arrow ABM system. If they were ready to spend the money they could combine, for example, the US PAC 3 version of the Patriot with the Israeli Arrow and have an effective but limited defense system within a fairly short timeframe. While the US may have blocked India from buying the Israeli system in the past, this no longer would be the case.
What is more likely, though, is that they will continue to build up their own technology while procuring a few items from overseas and entering into collaborative development programs with carefully selected foreign firms. The hard part may not be the interceptors themselves but building up the network of sensors and command and control systems needed to make the whole thing credible.
One requirement will be for some sort of space based early warning system to supplement the powerful long-range radars they will have to deploy both in the air and in the western Himalaya mountains. India is lucky in that it does have a few good places where it could place radars that, if they were powerful enough, could cover most of the possible launch sites. But they will still need satellites to cover the whole of Pakistan and to provide a secure and unambiguous warning of a launch event.
India could, if they wanted to, gain access to the US DSP (Defense Support Program) and SBIRS (Space Based Infra Red System) information the same way that NATO, Israel, Japan, and South Korea all have this data available to one degree or another. However, given the history of the subcontinent, and the shaky basis on which the new US-India relationship rests, the government may not be willing to put its trust in Washingtons goodwill.
They may choose to build their own heat detecting satellites. The IRS (Indian Remote Sensing) and Cartosat series of remote sensing spacecraft have given India some of the expertise required to build an equivalent of the DSP. Such a system does not have to be as heavy or as sophisticated as the US one; it could, in fact, consist of a larger number of small satellites in low Earth orbit. This would certainly be expensive by Indian standards and would take at least as long to develop and deploy as the indigenous interceptor missiles themselves.
Another factor that will add to the expense of this project is the fact that India is a big country and will need a fairly large number of long-range and short-range BMD missiles. The better that they can do in the boost phase the better off they will be, but there are few signs that they, or anyone else except the US, are seriously looking at this capability.
As long as India vigorously pursues this capability it will put Pakistan into the same kind of dilemma that faced the Soviet Union after President Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program in March 1983. Islamabad has neither the resources nor the technology to compete with India in this field. Indian missile defense will not, by itself, prevent a Pakistani loose nuke situation, but it will reduce the value of their atomic stockpile.
They also lack the resources to build up a very large and diverse force of reliable, sophisticated, nuclear-tipped missiles that could overwhelm an effective Indian defense system. If they tried to build such a force they would either have to weaken their already limited conventional defense forces or spend themselves into economic oblivion. Indias robust and growing economy is a strategic asset that is slowly but surely making itself felt in the military balance between the two subcontinental rivals.
Posted by: john frum ||
01/26/2009 14:42 ||
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More than half-a-century ago, two of Pakistans most eminent judges drew this bleak lesson from a wave of violence that had led the country into the first of its many experiences of martial law: As long as we rely upon the hammer when a file is needed and press Islam into service to solve situations it was never intended to solve, wrote Justice Muhammad Munir and Justice Mohammad Rustam Kayani, frustration and disappointment must dog our steps.
Pakistans establishment didnt listen then and does not seem to be listening now. Ever since the Lashkar-e-Taibas attack on Mumbai, commentators have been struggling to explain just why Pakistan appears so reluctant to act decisively against the perpetrators. Some have focussed on the Lashkars patronage by the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate; others on the Pakistani militarys hopes of weakening President Asif Ali Zardari. All these explanations have merit but miss a critical element: the slow transformation of the Pakistani state itself into an instrument of the jihadist agenda.
Last month, as tensions between India and Pakistan escalated, Pakistans Federal Minister for Religious Affairs, Sahibzada Noor-ul-Haq Qadri, called a clerical convention to discuss the issue. In their fatwa, the clerics dismissed the charge that the Mumbai attacks were authored in Pakistan, and instead called on their government to unveil Indian conspiracies against Pakistan. The fatwa, issued on behalf of the Tahaffuz-e-Namoos-e-Risalat Mahaz the Front for the Protection of the Prophets Honour made it obligatory on all Pakistani citizens to wage jihad against India should war break out.
Earlier, ISI Directorate chief Lieutenant-General Shuja Pasha hailed jihadist leaders Baitullah Mehsud and Mullah Fazlullah, whose depredations have claimed the lives of thousands of Pakistanis, as true patriots for offering to fight India.
Much of the ongoing debate rests on the proposition that Pakistans institutional relationship with political Islam was forged by General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq, in the context of anti-Soviet Union jihad in Afghanistan. In fact, the problem is older and more fundamental. Ever since the birth of the Pakistani state, Islamists and secular democrats became locked in an irreducible ideological war for its soul. Each important battle, tragically, the religious right won.
In 1951, the Majlis-e-Ahrar, a group of clerics who had ceded from the Indian National Congress two decades earlier, initiated an agitation calling for members of the heterodox Ahmadiyya sect to be declared non-Muslims. It also demanded the removal of Pakistans Foreign Minister, Chaudhuri Zafarullah Khan, an Ahmadiyya. In the view of its mullahs, Pakistan was an Islamic state and in an Islamic state, the minorities could not enjoy equal rights.
Factional politics helped the anti-Ahmadiyya movement gather momentum. Punjab Chief Minister Mumtaz Muhammad Khan Daulatana had for long used the services of the mullahs, as well as Maulana Abul Ala Maududis Jamaat-e-Islami, to keep public attention focussed on religious issues. Daulatana thus covered up his inability to address the provinces economic problems. For their part, the clerics regained ground lost through their opposition to the creation of Pakistan, and pushed for its new constitution to decree into existence an Islamic state.
Punjabs Inspector-General of Police, Qurban Ali Khan a man who, as chief of Pakistans Intelligence Bureau, laid the foundations of the ISIs overt war against India repeatedly warned against allowing the anti-Ahmadiyya movement to gather momentum. Daulatana, however, refused to act even after attacks against the Ahmadiyya adherents and mosques began to escalate from 1951. Even Prime Minister Khwaja Nazim-ud-Din found his religious sentiments outraged by the Ahmadiyya literature he was shown during his discussions with the Ahrar clerics. Khwaja Nazim-ud-Din is a devoutly religious man and since he did not straight away reject the demands, he must have been impressed by their plausibility, Justices Munir and Kayani observed.
Despite the extensive efforts to bribe and inveigle the anti-Ahmadiyya movement into easing off, matters eventually came to a head. In March 1953, Pakistans Prime Minister was compelled to reject the Ahrar demands, leading to massive violence. Punjab declared local martial law. As Justices Munir and Kayani noted, the Islamist cause by this time had developed a broad base of support. Had this not been the case, they noted, Muslim Leaguers whose own government was in office would not have risen against it; [the] sense of loyalty and public duty would not have departed from public officials who went about howling against their own Government and officers; respect for property and human life would not have disappeared in the common man.
If there is one thing that has been conclusively demonstrated in this inquiry, Justices Munir and Kayani concluded, it is that provided you can persuade the masses to believe that something they are asked to do is religiously right or enjoined by religion, you can set them to any course of action, regardless of all considerations of discipline, loyalty, decency, morality or civic sense.
It was a lesson that key leaders of the movement to transform Pakistan into an Islamic state like the Jamaat-e-Islamis Maududi learned well. The failure of the Pakistani state to act against the rising tide of religious neo-conservatism aided their cause.
By the time the 1956 Constitution came into being, scholar Hassan Abbas has argued, the religious forces of the country had consolidated their position quite considerably. Among other things, the communist-inspired military coup attempt in 1951 had inclined the government of the day to view the religious parties with a certain detached, if not benign, neutrality. Maududi sentenced to death by a military court for his role in the Punjab Disturbances succeeded in securing the commutation of his sentence to life, and continued to wield enormous political influence. Pakistan, its 1956 Constitution decreed, would henceforth be called an Islamic Republic; the new Constitution also had a clause mandating that no law repugnant to the Koran and the Hadith could be passed.
General Ayub Khan, who took power in a palace coup two weeks after President Iskandar Mirza declared martial law in October 1958, initially attempted to reverse the tide. He renamed the country the Republic of Pakistan, removing the word Islamic; in 1961, he introduced a Family Law Ordinance that considerably strengthened the position of women; later, there were attempts to modernise madrasa education. However, Ayub Khan also set up an Advisory Council on Islamic Ideology, thus institutionalising the role of clerics in the affairs of state and launched a war in Jammu and Kashmir that was cast as a jihad.
Maududi greeted Pakistans next military ruler General Yahya Khan an officer whose hard-drinking, womanising ways were even then public knowledge as a champion of Islam. Yahya Khan did little for the Jamaats project in Pakistan but did use its Razakar irregulars to unleash a campaign of terror in what is now Bangladesh. Yahya Khans use of Jamaat-e-Islami irregulars in Bangladesh built on similar experiments in Jammu and Kashmir and prepared the ground for Pakistans use of jihadists as an instrument of state policy a decade later.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who became President and then Prime Minister in the wake of Yahya Khans post-1971 war humiliation, followed much the same trajectory. His Constitution declared Islam the state religion, and committed it to teaching religion in schools. Bhutto also set up a Council on Islamic Ideology, along the lines of the body instituted by Ayub Khan, to bring secular laws into line with the Shariah.
Islamist clerics, Bhutto hoped, would not ask for more but they did. By 1974, Bhutto who had alienated his peasant and working class constituency by this time was facing a new anti-Ahmadiyya movement led by the Jamaat-e-Islamis student wing, the Islamic Jamaat-e-Tulba. Bhutto at first sought to contain the agitation by arresting some 834 of the protesters and their leaders. Later, though, he caved in and declared the Ahmadiyya sect outside the pale of Islam. It did nothing, though, to prevent the near-inevitable outcome: the army leveraged the chaos to assert itself, and Zia-ul-Haq was installed as Pakistans third military ruler.
Pakistans establishment understands the agenda of the Lashkar, and groups like it but sees their actions as an asset, not a threat. In a recent article, Pakistani journalist Khalid Hassan recalled a colleague questioning President Pervez Musharraf on his decision not to act against the Lashkar and the Jaish-e-Mohammad. They are not doing anything in Pakistan, Hassan recalls General Musharraf explaining, they are doing jihad outside.
President Zardaris government, many had hoped, would dismantle the Pakistan that Zia-ul-Haq built a Pakistan based on the dual primacy of the military and the mullah, resting on the pillars of religious chauvinism and hatred for India. If President Zardaris handling of the fallout from the Mumbai carnage is any indication, the forces he represents have neither the will nor the resources to reverse history. Islamabad, post-Mumbai, isnt in denial. It is simply driven by the reflexes imprinted by the history which gave birth to it.
Posted by: john frum ||
01/26/2009 14:35 ||
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#1
Muslims readily admit that Islam is a totalitarian system. There CANNOT be separation of mosque and state in an authentic islamic state. For those who are unaware: the quran is the constitution of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. That is what they export when they do things like fund 95% of America's Sunni mosques.
#2
You want to restore the credit flow - restore integrity.
You fire the regulators who sat-by an did nothing to enforce margin and backing for trades because they were compromised just like Arthur Anderson was by Enron [familiarity breads contempt of the system].
You fire the regulators who put imagined paper growth over the integrity of the system if that meant a down turn in the markets.
You prosecute politicians who used their influence and friends to undermine sound fiscal practices for non-fiscal social programs.
Until you address these key failures, you can keep printing and pumping paper into the markets and they'll respond like a dead frog leg to an electric stimulus. You'll get twitches but no life in the creature.
#4
At some point you also have to address the unidirectional growth of government spending and the regulatory state. There are limits, if we've not reached them we will in a few yeas.
#2
The spending portion of the stimulus, in short, isn't really about the economy. It's about promoting long-time Democratic policy goals
This would be humorous if it wasnt so pathetically obvious. The Democratic front men of this ruse are struggling like spoiled children to explain why they arent willing to go through the normal appropriations process for their pet boondoggles. Their rationale is that a massive stimulus is quickly needed but it must include long-term investments. Kind of like your kids begging for a bump in their allowance because eventually you will have to pay for their college tuition.
#4
Some of the smarter Obama people tried to get the word "stimulus" to be replaced by "long term recovery" in all public statements. However, too many people had already bought the 'stimulus' line (or esle didn't understand the diff).
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
