#3
Crackers and Nazi Islamic garbage killing each other and Russia is helping them realize their dream Ukraine is over done ancient history get it a waste of resources a Trap for the United States!
Through the long era of the "Nehruvian consensus", Indian policymakers enjoyed a favourite occupation: introspection.
Every problem needed introspection. Every setback called for introspection. Every initiative required introspection.
After over 60 years of introspection, we have policymakers who still advise — yes — further introspection.
The new Indian government has laid the Nehruvian consensus to rest. Action and outcomes count. Introspection is fine. But too much of it can lead to sclerotic inertia.
Can an outcome-focused government lose sight of first principles? The Nehruvian consensus had three guiding dictums: socialism, secularism and non-alignment.
Socialism fell apart under Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh (when he was finance minister) and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. It was revived by Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh (when he was Prime Minister).
Instead of growing the economy and then distributing its benefits inclusively, the Sonia Gandhi-Manmohan Singh government did the exact opposite. The fiscal crisis is the result of failed economic socialism.
The Nehruvian consensus on secularism (introduced into the Constitution along with socialism by Indira Gandhi during the Emergency in 1976) descended into farce under Rajiv Gandhi following the Shah Bano case in 1985-86.
Muslims have since become poorer than even Dalits. Communal polarization began not with LK Advani's rath yatra in 1990 but with Rajiv's terrible blunder over Shah Bano five years earlier.
The third pillar of the Nehruvian consensus, non-alignment, fell with the Berlin wall 25 years ago. In a unipolar world dominated by the United States, strategic policy requires India to be a regional leader, not part of an amorphous non-aligned bloc.
Jairam Ramesh recently compared Narendra Modi to Richard Nixon — the US President who opened up China to American blandishments at the height of the Cold War.
Weaning China away from the Soviet Union into a position of equidistance with the US was achieved by both Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
Can Modi do the same with China over Pakistan?
Modi's visit to Bhutan was calibrated to achieve several key ends. Bhutan has conducted over 25 rounds of border talks with China since 1986. The next round of talks between the two countries is scheduled in July/August.
India sought and got an assurance in Thimpu that vulnerable border areas in the north and the east will not be compromised during the China-Bhutan talks.
India's own border dispute with China in Arunachal and Ladakh can then progress without unnecessary impediments.
China's growing concern over Islamist militancy in its northwestern Xinjiang province is a lever India will use to focus Chinese minds on restraining terrorism bred in Pakistan's fertile jihadi soil.
As events in Karachi have shown terrorism, like water, is fungible. It can drown its creators and damage its neighbours. China has no wish to allow further Islamist radicalization of Xinjiang, where Muslim Uighars speak a Turkic dialect. China earlier this week executed 13 terrorists for a series of attacks by Uighars in Xinjiang.
The emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) has further underscored the dangers Sunni jihadism poses to the world.
ISIS was initially funded by wealthy individual donors in Sunni Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to weaken Shia-majority Iran and Iraq (which is 60% Shia, 20% Sunni and 20% Kurd).
Like all Frankensteins — including Pakistan's Tehreek-e-Taliban — ISIS has now become a menace to its sponsors. It could in future threaten the Saudi Wahhabi princelings and spread its brand of unspeakable brutality from the Middle-East to north-west India.
ISIS will eventually be defeated by moderate Sunni rebel factions in Syria and Iraq once Iraq's blundering Shia prime minister Nouri al-Maliki gives minority Sunnis a role in his government. ISIS's lightning advance towards Baghdad has warned the world against allowing the culture of jihadism free rein. A rattlesnake has to be defanged before it spreads its poison.
India has long punched below its geopolitical weight. A colonial inferiority complex, corrupt governments and chronic misgovernance since, especially, 2004 have eroded India's ability to influence events outside its own sphere.
The new government must change that. How?
The three Abrahamic religions — Christianity, Islam and Judaism — have been the fount of global conflict for centuries. India's post-Nehruvian consensus must deal with the embers of that conflict by evolving a robust strategic doctrine. A future article will expand on that and more.
Posted by: John Frum ||
06/21/2014 15:48 ||
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Mohd. Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum (1985 SCR (3) 844), commonly referred to as the Shah Bano case, was a controversial maintenance lawsuit in India, in which Shah Bano, a 62-year-old Muslim, daughter of a police constable[1] and mother of five from Indore, Madhya Pradesh, was divorced by her husband in 1978 but even after winning the case at the Supreme court of India was subsequently denied alimony because the Indian Parliament reversed the judgement under pressure of Islamic orthodoxy.[2][3][4][5][6] The judgement in favour of the woman in this case evoked criticisms[7][8][9] among Muslims some of whom cited Qur'an to show that the judgement was in conflict with Islamic law.[8] It triggered controversy about the extent of having different civil codes for different religions, especially for Muslims in India.
Posted by: John Frum ||
06/21/2014 15:53 Comments ||
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[DAWN] Nadeem F. Paracha in classic form. Some pieces shouldn't just be read, they should be memorized. Just a sample or two:
Jatt and his wife moved to Lahore in 1975 and earned a meagre living by selling old spare-parts of the cars and bikes that Jatt would smash and dismantle just for the heck of it. Jatt's antics in this regard got him arrested and he was sentenced to 10 years hard labour in a Lahore jail.
Meanwhile, Nuri Nutt gave birth to their first child whom she named Gullu Butt (Rosy Butt- cheeks). Two years later Jatt was paroled and gained an early release from jail, thanks to the government of General Ziaul Haq who had taken over power in July 1977. The Zia regime considered Jatt to be a political prisoner, arrested by the fallen ZA Bhutto regime.
Meanwhile, Jatt had acquired some basic education in jail and re-discovered faith. After he was released in 2001, he first set-up a madrassah in Lahore (which was a huge spiritual, ideological and commercial success), and then joined a TV news channel as an anchor and talk-show host.
Jeera rose to become an ASI in the police (only because his tummy was the biggest the precent) and Nutt went nuts, now claiming she was Madam Noor Jehan. She was recruited by PTI trolls.
Gullu continued to smash cars (still just for the heck of it), but from 2005 onward he tried to give a semblance of meaning to his art by smashing cars and bikes during anti-US/India/Rwanda rallies and during protests against Pakistan's gazillion enemies - especially Godzilla nurtured by famous Zionist scientist, Amrish Puri.
But, alas, this great artiste's luck finally ran out when in June 2014, while he was in the process of smashing his 5,000th car (to set a new Shahbaz Sharif-backed Guinness World Record), some jealous folks claimed that he was one of the instigators of violence against the supporters of Canadian Moose-breeder, Tahir-ul-Kennedy.
Gullu was arrested and booked for injuring a Toyota car and then he was himself injured when he was attacked by a group of lawyers who were otherwise famous for showering rose petals on heroic killers.
Gullu's fan-club, 'Gullu Kay Pathey', at once initiated a powerful campaign on Twitter against Gullu's arrest with such hashtags: #JusticeForGullu; #WeAreAllGulluToday; #ButtHe'sInnocent; and #JustinBieberForPresident.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/21/2014 00:00 ||
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Well, what does it do you ask? Why this single simple tool can slice, dice, educate the y00f in the way of the Profit. It can wham and slam and bring CASH money to your 'ville. It's cheap and legal in all 1200 states comes with a warranty and easy inastruction. Any man, child or woman (properly) escorted by a clansman can use this simple tool to enrich their life. It's simple, cheap and effective. Better than a new wife, cheaper than a cow, it's everymans route to power.
[DAWN] PRIVATELY and largely away from the public gaze, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ... served two non-consecutive terms as prime minister, heads the Pakistain Moslem League (Nawaz). Noted for his spectacular corruption, the 1998 Pak nuclear test, border war with India, and for being tossed by General Musharraf... has cultivated PkMap leader Mehmood Khan Achakzai as an interlocutor between Afghanistan's Caped PresidentHamid Maybe I'll join the Taliban Karzai ... A former Baltimore restaurateur, now 12th and current President of Afghanistan, displacing the legitimate president Rabbani in December 2004. He was installed as the dominant political figure after the removal of the Taliban regime in late 2001 in a vain attempt to put a Pashtun face on the successor state to the Taliban. After the 2004 presidential election, he was declared president regardless of what the actual vote count was. He won a second, even more dubious, five-year-term after the 2009 presidential election. His grip on reality has been slipping steadily since around 2007, probably from heavy drug use... and the Pak political government. While such private channels can sometimes backfire and raise the suspicions of unelected powers-that-be in both countries, Mr Achakzai's personal standing and reputation appear to have given him some leeway to use his unofficial role for positive influence.
In addition, where PPP leader Asif Ali Zardari tried and failed to build a rapport with Mr Karzai, Mr Sharif appears to have been somewhat more successful, leading to opportunities even at this very late stage of the Afghan president's stay in office for working together on issues of mutual security interest between the two countries. With the recently held two-stage Afghan election and now a military operation in North Wazoo under way, there have certainly been immediate and practical grounds for security and intelligence cooperation between Afghanistan and Pakistain. And yet, in true Pak-Afghan relationship fashion, perhaps the biggest challenges lie ahead.
To begin with, even at this late stage, there is little certainty about how and on what terms the Afghan government and the Afghan Taliban will be able to achieve reconciliation — meaning the post-2014 stability and the gains of the last decade still very much hang in the balance. Two factors above all else will determine whether Afghanistan remains relatively stable or plunges into chaos again: the line the Afghan Taliban take on reconciliation as foreign troops pour towards the exit door and the degree to which the incoming Afghan administration is able to establish a better, more legitimate and more credible government.
Here, the jury is still out on whether Pakistain — the sum of the army and civilian power matrix — is doing as much as it could to nudge those two goals along or whether the state's public pledge to adopt non-interference and non-intervention in Afghan affairs has meant not doing as much as it can. And while Mr Sharif has remained troublingly quiet on articulating a distinct, civilian-run policy on Afghanistan, how the prime minister's wider relationship with the army leadership develops in the months and years ahead will also surely affect what is and isn't achievable in the context of Pakistain's overall posture towards Afghanistan.
To be sure, not all the cards are in Pakistain's hands. Who wins the election in Afghanistan, whether an exiting American force means evaporating American influence in Afghanistan, how the TTP and the Afghan Taliban's relationship develops or deteriorates, whether the nexus between the TTP and the Afghan security establishment deepens, how the ongoing and deepening strife in the Middle East will shape Iran-Saudi-US ties — much is unknown and even unknowable. But as Mehmood Khan Achazkai and Prime Minister Sharif have demonstrated, whatever happens, it's better to talk than not to.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/21/2014 00:00 ||
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#1
how and on what terms the Afghan government and the Afghan Taliban will be able to achieve reconciliation
Will the Taliban accept the rule of law? If no then they remain criminals and what can reconciliation really mean?
...When I came into this field I was told two things by older and more experienced colleagues. One of them was that for all its glitzy innovation and its very real new ways of doing business, the publishing business remained at heart a nineteenth century business: contracts weren't as important as a hand shake; who you were as someone for people to work with was more important than cold hard sales; your publisher would take care of you. All of these things -- except for one publisher in the field (Baen Books) -- were a lie by the time I started in the late nineties. Well, maybe not the first. If your book was a year late in being published, and technically out of contract (my very first published book, Ill Met By Moonlight, now indie) the contract meant nothing.
This was my first experience with the fact that the book business was in fact not a nineteenth century business, but a fourteenth century one. You came in and you were an indentured serf. No matter how badly you were treated, you had to be nice to the Lord, because he held your life in his hands. And no matter how badly you were treated, the other Lords would side with each other and conspire to keep you in servitude and destroy you if you spoke out against it.
The second thing I was told when I came in was "the publishing business is in crisis. And it's always been."
This was meant to imply that for all the moaning and bitching from publishers about how bad things were (usually when making an offer for a book) things went on and the publishers continued being paid their salaries and their pensions and writers had both the security of knowing the business would continue and the awful certainty it would continue the same way -- with them as peons.
...And then this week, I saw the walls tumble down. I saw the statue of Lenin dragged through the streets.
I saw Hillary's book tank.
Oh, sure, they spin it. They're publishers. They know how to spin. They've been doing it for decades. They say it's selling well enough. They say it's the "changing book market." But it's not.
""The rollout was touted as the best planned book tour ever, meticulously crafted by the smartest Hillary aides, publishing PR gurus, and the savviest superagents," writes another publishing source.
"The book will probably debut on the bestseller list at number one and then fall like a rock. After the smoke clears, with tens of thousands of books sitting in warehouses collecting dust, there'll be a lot of handwringing and probably a few people without jobs."
The book will debut on the bestseller list, because that's determined not by books bought but by "laydown", i.e. how many books the publisher shipped. (Bet you didn't know a book can be a "bestseller" without selling a single book).
What you might not appreciate from the outside is how amazing, how impossible this is. They still have control over what ships (and therefore gets on the bestseller list for at least one week), they have control over the figures they show, they have control over publicity, they can strong-arm bookstores to stock a book and to push it. And you bet your bottom dollar they deployed all this in favor of Hillary.
And it tanked. It tanked so publicly, so visibly, it can't be denied.
Even five years ago, they could push Obama to bestsellerdom, whether that was true or Memorex. (Those of us with experience saw a lot of discounted Obama merchandise, but never mind.)
Now they can't. And if they can't do it for Hillary! having pulled all the stops, then they certainly can no longer do it for the industry darlings, those politically correct parrots they've been pushing up readers' noses for years. They can still probably lie about those. They're not as public a flop as Hillary. But all the lies and all the gloss won't save them from losing their shirts.
#1
Meanwhile the oligarchs that own and operate the companies will continue to embezzle redistribute 'generously' in signing bonuses to their friends and political blood rather than practice fiduciary responsibilities owed a company.
[WaTimes]The administrators at the Veterans Administration have apparently been busy while old soldiers waited to see a doctor, after all. Serving those who served is not necessarily a priority, but saving the planet is Job 1. Solar panels and windmills can be more important than the touch of a healing hand.
The department early on set up an Office of Green Management Programs designed to "help VA facilities nationwide recognize opportunities to green VA, and to reward innovative 'green' practices and efforts by individual facilities and staff within the VA." This sometimes means paying more attention to greening the department and saving the polar ice caps than to health care.
In the department's words, it adopted a far more important mission to "become more energy efficient and sustainable, focusing primarily on renewable energy, energy and water efficiency, [carbon-dioxide] emissions reduction, and sustainable buildings." Let's see, NASA's job 1 is Muslim outreach, State's is Gay rights, and the VA is green energy. I guess dereliction of duty is everybody's job 2 in the Obama administration.
#5
Not much different than the State Department spending millions on Volt electric vehicle recharging stations, while blaming Congress for not funding security measures at the Benghazi consulate.
#7
Don't forget they are also spending money on a person to find locally sourced and organic food. Which is of completely dubious health value in terms of actual scientific evidence. Its a waste of money that should be spent elsewhere.
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.
Wazoo
[WaTimes]The administrators at the Veterans Administration have apparently been busy while old soldiers waited to see a doctor, after all. Serving those who served is not necessarily a priority, but saving the planet is Job 1. Solar panels and windmills can be more important than the touch of a healing hand.
