Blue Gal filling in for Mike this week, taking this opportunity to link the international activist bloggers featured at this past weekend's BlogHer09 Conference:
Known Turf, India: Oh, you think the US has bad political sex scandal coverups?
Indigenous Bolivia, revealing and welcoming the hidden and banned indigenous peoples of Bolivia (and the only blogger I know blogging in English on this subject).
Mideast Youth People in Iraq marching on behalf of democracy in Iran.
Pilirani Semu-Banda, Malawi: Africa steps up the fight against maternal and infant mortality.
Gender and Me, Nigeria: Yes, India has Bollywood, but Nigeria has Nollywood. Interview with a Nollywood director.
The President had a big victory this week when the Senate voted to strip funding for additional F-22 fighter jets, which the Pentagon and the Air Force didn't want, which haven't been flown once in Iraq or Afghanistan and which are apparently vulnerable to rain. It was a small step toward breaking the stranglehold of the military-industrial complex. The lobbyists were out in force to keep this alive, and a lot of lawmakers who have parts of the F-22 made in their district wanted to keep the gravy train going, but eventually, sanity prevailed. The military budget is increasing this year, and eventually we have to end a circumstance where we spend more on the military than every other country in the world combined, but if we couldn't cancel the F-22, we would not be able to cancel pretty much anything. So it was a good step toward lessening the power and influence of military contractors. Robert Farley has a great roundup of opinions.
Naturally, John Cornyn (Bugfuck Crazy-TX) doesn't agree. In fact, he thinks we have to use the F-22 to counter all sorts of threats. Including... India.
"It's important to our national security because we're not just fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq," Cornyn says. "We're fighting -- we have graver threats and greater threats than that: From a rising India, with increased exercise of their military power; Russia; Iran, that's threatening to build a nuclear weapon; with North Korea, shooting intercontinental ballistic missiles, capable of hitting American soil."
I wasn't aware that we were at war with India. In fact, I don't get over there much, but I'm pretty sure we're an ally. In fact, Hillary Clinton just spent four days there this week. We just completed a civilian nuclear power agreement with them last year.
I guess being Republican means "never having to say you're sorry to an allied country for calling them an enemy." Remember when John McCain thought we were at war with Spain?
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(Things were heating up with China)
For a lot of people, the name Jawahralal Nehru conjures up a deep-distant past of India during its struggle for independence from Colonial rule. Nehru was a close associate of Mohandas Gandhi and it was Nehru who delivered the historic "Tryst With Destiny" address on the eve of India's independence. But Nehru was a substantial figure in India's rise to power, committing it to a policy of industrialization - largely responsible for what it has become today.
But in 1961, Nehru had come to the U.S. on a State Visit and to meet with President Kennedy regarding the recent resumption of Nuclear testing. Nehru wanted an outright moratorium of nuclear weapons testing for all parties, both Western and Iron Curtain, even though the prospect seemed unlikely. India would have its own conflicts shortly - war with China would erupt a few months after this broadcast. The question about China is asked, but it's carefully danced around, in true political fashion.
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The America's Future Now gathering in D.C. just wrapped up today. I haven't been able to post a lot about the panels and talks that went on over the past three days, but probably the most interesting speech I heard came from Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, talking about the energy bill working its way through Congress.
If I’d been here a year ago, I would have talked to you about three things: The need to transform energy economy, create jobs, and tackle global warming. ... About the third, during the campaign, I spoke it about every single night. People asked me why, as it was 21st on people’s concerns. I responded: it should be first on everyone’s agenda and the only way it will be is if we talk about it.
... If I am going to simplify the issue, we have to quit taking geologic carbon and turning it into atmospheric carbon.
... In the past, people have described the Senate as the place where a good House bill goes to die. ... We need to change that. We need to reestablish the Senate as a place where an okay bill goes to get vastly improved.
... There is the possibility that we will end up with a framework that is ineffective, that has offsets, that doesn’t have a firm cap. ... Or, we could end up with something that could really transform our use of energy. Obviously, we’re going to have to work real hard to get from the former to the latter.
The whole session was fascinating -- including the speech by Sierra Club president Carl Pope, who talked at length about how the federal government's fickle ways on energy have been killing our ability to create green jobs. (You can watch it all here.) The classic case of this involves the reality that even though wind turbine transformers require elements mined from American soil, China is the world's leading manufacturer of them.
And if you don't believe that "green energy" is going to be the key to restoring America's position as the world's leading economy, check out this report about the fact that investment in that sector is rising at a sharp rate:
See, I'm a little confused. Because for years, big companies like IBM have insisted there were so few talented IT workers in the U.S., they had to import them from India. And yet now we have so many, we can send them to India! Isn't that funny?
If I were a suspicious sort (and God knows, I'm not), I'd wonder if this isn't really a way to keep experienced American workers while artificially suppressing their wages. And of course, I'd also have to wonder: If you're offered one of these jobs and you decline, are you then ineligible to collect unemployment compensation? Because that already happens with big companies in the U.S.
Isn't this new personal responsibility thing fun? Who knew we'd get to see the world at company expense?
The climate is warm, there's no shortage of exotic food, and the cost of living is rock bottom. That's IBM (NYSE: IBM)'s pitch to the laid-off American workers it's offering to place in India. The catch: Wages in the country are pennies-on-the-dollar compared to U.S. salaries.
Under a program called Project Match, IBM will help workers laid off from domestic sites obtain travel and visa assistance for countries in which Big Blue has openings. Mostly that's developing markets like India, China, and Brazil.
"IBM has established Project Match to help you locate potential job opportunities in growth markets where your skills are in demand," IBM says in an internal notice on the initiative. "Should you accept a position in one of these countries, IBM offers financial assistance to offset moving costs, provides immigration support, such as visa assistance, and other support to help ease the transition of an international move."
The document states that the program is limited to "satisfactory performers who have been notified of separation from IBM U.S. or Canada and are willing to work on local terms and conditions." The latter indicates that workers will be paid according to prevailing norms in the countries to which they relocate. In many cases, that could be substantially less than what they earned in North America.
IBM has laid off more than 4,000 workers in the United States since the beginning of January, according to an employee group. The company has confirmed layoffs but won't comment on specific numbers.
A few days ago, all the experts were saying there was no chance of a war between India and pakistan as a consequence of escalating tensions following accusations of Pakistani involvement in attacks on Mumbai last month. Now, with reports that both nations are moving some troops to their mutual border, everyone is talking about the chance of conflict. But if that conflict happens, it will be inadvertent - an accidental exchange of fire arising from both sides' readiness to repel the other which then runs out of control - rather than a deliberate act.
Pakistan has reportedly moved some 20,000 soldiers from its border with Afghanistan, a move that will suit Pakistan's ruling elite's short term political purposes very nicely. It has also been flying 24 hour patrols on its side of the India-Pakistan border to guard against Indian probes as the Indians try to find out for themselves what the Pakistanis are up to and has cancelled officer leave. But there hasn't as yet been a major mobilization of troops towards the Indian border. India has moved some troops and heightened its military's readiness too, but there's been no general mobilization of reserves as yet. India has twice the standing armed forces of Pakistan and a vastly higher reserve manpower (there are respectively the 4th and 6th largest armed forces in the world) - in a general war between the two, 20,000 troops are a drop in the ocean and both sides know it. Indeed, that's arguably why Pakistan developed its nuclear weapons in the first place.
So there aren't widespread signs of war preperations yet and in any case both nations have to be aware that, both economically and in terms of internal stability, they cannot afford war. It's more likely that both sides are simultaneously playing to their own publics and seeking to enlist international support for their own agendas. Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institution told McClatchy:
"There is nothing (the Singh government) can do except make threatening noises toward Pakistan," he said. "Both countries are rattling their sabers. These are two weak governments that are clearly trying to get the Americans nervous so they put pressure on the other country (to back down)."
He called the current atmosphere "a precursor to a crisis" that could erupt because of the high possibility of a misstep on either side.
"We are in a period of touch-and-go," he said.
It's not just America - the Chinese, who are even more Pakistan's military ally than ever the US could hope to be and cannot be happy about even the smallest prospect of an inadvertent nuclear war on their borders, are now involved in trying to get both countries to scale back their posturing too.
Crossposted from Newshoggers
The troops headed to the Indian border were being diverted away from tribal areas near Afghanistan, officials said, and the move was expected to frustrate the United States, which has been pushing Pakistan to step up its fight against al-Qaida and Taliban militants near the Afghan border.
Two intelligence officials said the army's 14th Division was being redeployed to the towns of Kasur and Sialkot, close to the Indian border. They said some 20,000 troops were on the move. Earlier Friday, a security official said all troop leave had been canceled.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.
Both countries have said they want to avoid military conflict over the attacks. But India has not ruled out the use of force as it presses its neighbor to crack down on the Pakistani-based terrorist group it blames for the attack.
Pakistani Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani has promised to respond aggressively if attacked but reassured India Friday that Pakistan would not strike first.
The Pakistani military has denied the AP's report and its anonymous Pakistani military sources. They claim that the military is undergoing regular, scheduled rotations, and that if an AP reporter saw trucks moving out of a tribal area, those troops were on a scheduled rotation, and not acting under new orders.
Of course, the Pakistani military has proven that its official pronouncements are entirely trustable...
Just days ago all the analysts were saying that there was almost no chance of war between the two nuclear-armed nations but now one retired Pakistani general has told the AP it's to deter US-style missile strikes on suspected militant targets:
"It is a message to India that if you think you can get away with strikes, you are sadly mistaken," said Talat Masood, a retired general and military analyst based in Islamabad.
I don't think the analysts are wrong - war is still highly unlikely although tensions have just ratcheted a little higher. The Pakistani military has always defined itself exclusively by its opposition to India and large swathes of both the military and the Pakistani general populace have become more and more hostile to fighting what they see as "America's War" along their Western border with Afghanistan. Using the current situation as a convenient excuse to walk away from that war and back towards facing off India was always on the cards, will be popular on Pakistan's streets and will strengthen the military's political position as the new civilian government attempts to be less than its puppet in many areas of domestic and foreign policy.
However, as my colleague Fester noted in an email, this redeployment means that supply lines for US and allied forces in Afghanistan will become more vulnerable and that militants along the Afghan/Pakistan border will become more active. That's a feature rather than a bug as far as much of the Pakistani military and the ISI intelligence agency are concerned. That the Bush administrations diplomats and generals have been unable to prevent this redeployemnt, despite their constant claims that Pakistan is a staunch ally in the War On Some Terror and recent assertions that Pakistan is committed to helping India investigate then root out the extremists responsible for the Mumbai attacks is indicative of just how badly they've been had by Pakistani spin and doubletalk over the last eight years.
Pakistani security forces have begun a crackdown on the Lashkar-e-Taiba terror group that India has blamed for the outrage, arresting its commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhwi and 19 other fighters.
This is the post where I willingly eat some crow,which will no doubt please some critics of my earlier posts on the recent terror attacks in Mumbai.
Right from the first, India blamed the Lashkar e-Taiba, a primarily Kasmiri-separatist terror group, for Mumbai. I felt that they had insufficient evidence to do so, even based upon the testimony of one captured attacker who was almost certainly tortured into confessing what Indian interrogators would have been already pre-disposed to hear. The Mumbai attacks represented a change in tactics more reminiscent of purely internal Indian terror groups such as the Naxalites and there'd been no shortage of internal Muslem-Hindu tensions to justify an indigenous group being behind the attacks. But the LeT had certainly been behind earlier attacks in Mumbai in 2006 and, if the LeT were involved, then the Pakistani ISI intelligence agency had to accept a great deal of culpability as the LeT have been their creature all along. Still, I cautioned against leaping to premature conclusions and using the LeT as an excuse to gloss over internal Indian ethnic strife. However, new details, independently gained, are now surfacing which give Indian accusations fresh impetus and in the light of those details I have been forced to re-evaluate my thinking on the whole issue.
First, an excellent bit of investigative journalism from Saeed Shah, a freelancer who often writes about the region for McLatchy but on Sunday had a piece in the UK's Observer in which he recounts tracking down the family of the captured attacker and placing him firmly as a Pakistani from a tiny village, one of four hamlets all called Faridkot in Pakistan's Punjab province. He also confirms that the man, Mohammed Ajmal Amir, had been a member of the LeT and has obtained national identity numbers for the whole family. Shah also alleges that there's been a careful attempt at a cover-up, orchestrated in part by ISI agents who were supposedly feverishly looking for Amir's roots, which is why other journalists couldn't track Amir's home and family down.
While sometimes confirming that Amir did live in the village, and had a son called Ajmal, on other occasions locals claimed to know nothing.
Finally one villager confirmed what was going on: 'You're being given misinformation. We've all known from the first day [of the news of the terrorist attack] that it was him, Ajmal Amir Kasab. His mother started crying when she saw his picture on the television.'
Attempts to meet Amir, the father, however, were not to be successful. Villagers eventually told us that he and his wife, Noor, had been mysteriously spirited away earlier in the week.
'Ajmal used to go to Lahore for work, as a labourer,' continued the villager who feared being named. 'He's been away for maybe four years. When he came back once a year, he would say things like, "We are going to free Kashmir."'
Dittoheads on CNN's Late Edition, Sunday. Sajjan Gohel agrees the Mumbai culprits are the Lek, even though he told the WaPo the day before it was definitely Al Qaeda, and former CIA DDI John McLaughlin, with a straight face and without challenge, says Pakistan's ISI is "very responsive" to civilian authority.
The international community and media appear to have accepted India's allegations of Pakistani involvement in the Mumbai bombings, via an ISI proxy terror group. Yet no-one is mentioning India's atrocious record of widespread torture or the questionable nature of confessions gained by such methods.
WITH EACH passing day, suspicions of a Pakistani link to the slaughter of 174 people, including six Americans, in Mumbai grow stronger -- and more plausible. A captured terrorist has reportedly confessed to Indian officials that he received training in Pakistan from Lashkar-i-Taiba, a guerrilla organization that was nurtured by Pakistani military intelligence to fight India in the disputed Kashmir region.
But really, that confession by one captured terrorist is the only evidence thus far advanced, and (until late Tuesday) everything we know about it has been leaked by unofficial officials rather than with the full backing of the Indian government.
We onlyhavethisdetainee'salleged word that all the attackers were from Pakistan, that there were only ten of them, that the attacks were funded with Saudi money, that they trained at an LeK camp inside Pakistan, that they hijacked a single Indian vessel to transport then to Mumbai or that they had hoped to kill 5,000 rather than the 200 or so they did murder. All of this relies on the confession of one man, presumably not one of the attacks leaders because that possibility hasn't been mentioned at all and certainly would have been if it were there. The leaked details of his confession have then been amplified and added to by rumor and speculation, particularly by the understandably angry Indian press.
There are a lot of conflicting reports coming out of the Indian subcontinent right now, and no-one seems to have told their right hand what their left hand is doing. For instance, The UK's Telegraphreports Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Mumbai, saying that two British citizens were among the terrorists who first attacked Mumbai two days ago and who are still being winkled out of their positions by Indian special forces- while elsewhere the Mumbai Police Commissioner Hassan Gafoor is being quoted as saying "We have found nothing to indicate they were British."
That confusion extends to speculation about who is to blame, although India seems to be prematurely certain. Pranab Mukherjee, India's Foreign Minister, has said: "Preliminary evidence, prima facie evidence, indicates elements with links to Pakistan are involved." India is stopping and searching Pakistan-flagged merchant vessels, yet the best indications are that the terrorists came ashore from Indian fishing vessels. Rather than admit it might have an indigenous terrorism problem, which would open an unhappy can of worms about tensions between militant Muslim extremists and equally militant Hindu supremacists, the Indian government is stretching as hard as it can to implicate Pakistan. Their working theory is that these Indian boats were hijacked off Pakistani shores - yet they've no evidence for that at all.
Analysts also say that the sophistication of the attacks point to training outside India, and Pakistan is India's favorite venue. But there are also Islamist terror camps in Bangladesh, where the 10,000 strong JMB group receives ample funding and arms from sympathizers across the Muslim world. Even in India, a massive country with large rural areas under-patrolled by police, Islamist terrorist camps have been found in the Karnataka jungles of the Southwest. The Maoist Naxalite movement operates in thirteen of India's twenty-six states and is a robust organisation with anywhere up to 20,000 members. In April 2006, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called the Naxalite threat the “biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country.” There's plenty of indigenous terrorist training capacity, not all of it controlled by or even backed by Pakistan.
However, institutional paranoia is the defining mental state of Pakistani-Indian relations. One of the big stories right now in Pakistan is about official claims that India is planning to destroy Pakistan by thirst, using dams on the Indus to deprive Pakistan's population centers of water. Rumor has it that, when Pakistani President Zardari recently offered to commit Pakistan to a "no first use" nuclear policy in a broadcast to Indian TV, he infuriated his military leadership from Kayani on down. Indian finger-pointing will not have defused their anger.The Indian and Pakistani governments have said that the head of Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency has agreed to to go to Indiato share information, at India's invite. However, despite the PR spin of Zardari's civilian government it's in no way clear that the dog yet wags the tail when it comes to civilian control of Pakistan's military and that visit might yet not happen in such a hostile atmosphere - which Indian politicians will immediately see as a sign of guilt.
C-Span coverage of the attacks - and Deepak Chopra points out that the War on Terror turns moderates into extremists.
With more than 100 dead and reports of up to 900 injured, the horrific events in Mumbai have now moved into a second day. Attacks by well-armed and organised Moslem terrorists, who targeted UK, US and Israeli nationals in particular and took hostages at top hotels in India's financial capital, have catapulted India's boiling sectarian feuds and regional tensions into the news this Thanksgiving. Some of the most up-to-date reporting can be found at India's NDTV.com.
Most folks missed it, because the vote came just before the bailout bill, but on Wednesday the US Senate voted 86-13 to approve the India 123 bill, giving India access to US nuclear know-how and materials for the first time since India conducted a nuclear weapons test three decades ago. Both presidential candidates voted for the bill and the House had already passed it 298 to 117. The roll call for the Senate vote shows that Boxer, Byrd, Feingold, Leahy and Sanders were among the few "Nay" votes.
Arms control experts aren't at all happy with the deal:
Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, blasted the deal as a "nonproliferation disaster." India, along with Pakistan and Israel, has never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. India conducted nuclear tests in 1974 and 1998, despite international outrage, and continues to produce fissile material. Kimball said the deal "does not bring India into the nonproliferation mainstream" because it "creates a country-specific exemption from core nonproliferation standards that the United States has spent decades to establish."
