NATO's Dance with the Taliban (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Those familiar with the situation on the ground in Afghanistan are aware that only around 17 percent of the money spent in that unfortunate country is in the control of President Hamid Karzai’s "free government of independent Afghanistan."

The remaining 83 percent is, directly or via proxies, disbursed in accordance with instructions given by one or the other NATO country, or NATO’s loyal partner, the United Nations, whose hand-picked staff in Afghanistan keeps in close touch with "their" embassies and military establishments.

Local officials are aware of the way in which tenders and requests for supplies have been manipulated to ensure that they are directed toward countries favored by NATO decision-makers rather than the most cost-effective source.

Bloated salaries and allowances, as well as logistics costs similar to the levels of Halliburton – a U.S.-based provider of products and services to the energy industry – form part of the mosaic of reasons why NATO is so loathed by the people it claims to have liberated.

However, not a single international media outlet focuses on the misdirection of resources by NATO, preferring to focus their ire on the measly proportion of total expenditure under Karzai's control, as do notables like Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. President Barack Obama.

More Troops not the Answer in Afghanistan (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — During the 1960s, the United States had a president who did more for the underclass than most of his predecessors put together. Lyndon Johnson introduced healthcare, civil rights and other measures designed to provide a level playing field for people of different classes and colors among the citizenry.

Instead of acclaim, what he got was unpopularity, forcing him to surrender office after just one term. The reason was an unpopular war, fought the wrong way – through the insertion of greater and greater numbers of troops.

U.S. soldiers marauding through their land converted several hundred thousand South Vietnamese into Viet Cong. As a recent editorial on Afghanistan in the New York Times put it, Americans too would be tempted to violence were a strange-looking bunch of aliens to invade and occupy Oregon.

Those who seek conventional military solutions to problems within other countries forget that the world is very different from what it was during the peak years of European colonialism. Then, mass killings were acceptable. But now, were NATO to repeat in Afghanistan the tactics of European colonial powers in South America, Africa and Asia, their own populations would halt such slaughter.

In the age of worldwide cable television, significant "collateral damage" is unacceptable. This is not a situation that would have endeared itself to Winston Churchill, the wartime British prime minister who once favored the bombing of undefended villages in the Middle East, and looked the other way when more than 6 million Indians died in 1944 of starvation in the single British-ruled province of Bengal.

Pakistan Army Seeks to Save Mullah Omar (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat 

Manipal, India — The Pakistan army, through its spokesperson Athar Abbas, has publicly confirmed that it is in touch with the senior Taliban leadership, including Mullah Omar, Osama bin Laden's protector. Abbas has helpfully suggested that the army would be happy to serve as the conduit for negotiations designed to facilitate a cease-fire in Afghanistan.

This cease-fire would give the Taliban unchallenged control over at least one-fifth of Afghanistan, a wedge of territory from which the terror group could send out its agents in preparation for future active hostilities. Thus far, despite the seemingly boundless faith of the Obama administration in the Pakistan army, the U.S. side has not accepted its offer to be a middleman in talks with the Taliban.

Those dealing with Taliban-linked terror groups in South Asia should keep in mind the example of President Mahinda Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka. Aware that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam invariably called for a cease-fire and negotiations whenever it needed a respite, only to return to the battlefield after replenishing its oxygen, Rajapaksa ignored calls from Britain, India and Norway, among others, to declare an immediate cease-fire. Instead, he stopped the conflict only after the LTTE had been comprehensively defeated after two decades of war.

The Taliban is even more fanatic than the LTTE. Its cadres have zero intention of changing their chemistry to join the flock of Afghani and Pakistani politicians milling around the pickings of office. They seek the re-establishment of a medieval state, and regard terror as a suitable instrument of war.

A cease-fire with them – especially with the still-feared Mullah Omar – would demoralize the Afghan forces battling them alongside NATO forces, and scare more Afghans into acquiescence with their harsh primitivism. In particular, it would deal a blow to the hopes of women in Afghanistan, who dread the return of a misogynistic force that brutalized them at home and elsewhere.

Obama's Bold Game of Russian Roulette (UPI)

M.D. NALAPAT

With the same confidence that allowed the junior senator from Illinois to launch a campaign for the presidency of the United States, Barack Obama has decided to "reset" U.S.-Russian relations, banking on the forward-looking vision he shares with Russian President Dimitry Medvedev.

For the U.S. president this has been a high-risk operation, given the undercurrent of suspicion toward Russia within the U.S. strategic community as well as the citizenry. But the benefits are clear. The securing of transit rights through Russian territory and airspace for U.S. military materiel to Afghanistan, as agreed Monday, will reduce Washington's current dependence on Pakistan.

A further warming of ties also may encourage the Moscow-leaning former Afghan Northern Alliance groups to stop sulking and participate in the war against the Taliban. Leaving this struggle to the ethnic Pashtun groups alone would be a mistake that could cost Afghan President Hamid Karzai at least one-fifth -- if not one-third -- of his country. The Taliban has to be rooted out of both Pakistan and Afghanistan if the region is to have a chance at rapid social and economic development.

NATO's substantial outsourcing of Afghan strategy to the Pakistan army has resulted in the neglect of former elements of the Northern Alliance, despite the group's experience in fighting the Taliban. This should be rectified through reconciliation between the former anti-Taliban fighters and NATO, a process that the Obama-Medvedev initiative begun in Moscow on Monday could accelerate.

Kayani: Arsonist Disguised as Firefighter (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat 

Manipal, India — Pakistan's chief of army staff, General Parvez Ashfaq Kayani, is a master at the strategy of starting a fire and then volunteering to put it out in exchange for concessions. Yet he was taken aback when President Asif Ali Zardari declined to enter the noose of imprisonment being prepared for him by the expected return to office of dismissed Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry.

Zardari has refused to reinstate Chaudhry, ousted by his predecessor Gen. Pervez Musharraf, despite urgings from Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani – who was functioning in tandem with Kayani in wanting a more pliant head of state than Zardari.

Since then, Kayani has been working at undermining his nominal superior, ensuring a steady diet of negative media reports about Zardari, and ensuring backroom backing for those champions of Punjabi supremacy in Pakistan, the Sharif brothers. The conspirators meet outside Pakistan, usually in locations in the Middle East, to fine-tune their plans to ensure the removal of Zardari and the return to center stage of Kayani ally Nawaz Sharif.

Of concern to democracies about this Pakistani soap opera is the backing that Kayani has given to the Taliban and its parasite, al-Qaida. It is no accident that NATO has failed to prevent this group of louts from retaking one-third of Afghanistan and moving into the rest.

U.S. backing for Kayani has ensured that the Pakistan military's double-faced policy of secretly helping the Taliban while publicly backing NATO continues. Now that the Clinton team is back in office, courtesy of President Barack Obama, the United States is returning to the 1994-96 policy of backing the Taliban.

Miliband Bats for Pakistan's Military (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Someone forgot to tell Britain's foreign secretary and would-be prime minister, David Miliband, that the Union Jack no longer flies over New Delhi’s Viceregal Palace, now renamed "Rashtrapati Bhavan," or "Head of the Nation House." During his visit to India last month, his hosts found Miliband’s conduct and views so offensive that a relatively junior official from the External Affairs Ministry was trotted out to insist that India did not need "unsolicited" advice.

The official was referring to Miliband's motif during the visit – that New Delhi ought to make concessions on Kashmir so the Pakistan army would assist NATO with more sincerity and efficacy than it has since the 2001 NATO-Taliban war started in Afghanistan.

Clearly, Miliband is unaware of the dynamics of decision making in a democracy. He appears to view India in the same league as China, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, in each of which a single institution – the Communist Party, the army and the monarchy, respectively – calls the shots.

Were Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee to follow Miliband’s peremptory advice – enabling the Pakistan army to gain through diplomacy concessions that they have thus far been unable to wrest by jihad – not only would domestic politics in India be inflamed to Bangladeshi proportions, but the Wahabbis that control the Pakistan army would be able to recover some of the ground they have lost with regard to public opinion and moderate civil society.

Racism in the Era of Globalization (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Throughout the European Union, and increasingly in the United States and Australia, immigration is being directed on racial grounds, with preference given to immigrants of European origin. This is despite the reality that an immigrant from Chennai or Hyderabad in India is far more likely to add immediate economic value to a society than migrants from Tirana, Bucharest or Sofia, to take just three examples.

Even Britain, till now a haven of race-neutral policies, has lately introduced measures directed against citizens of countries other than those with European-origin majorities. Clearly, to many Western policymakers, "globalization" is a one-way street, confined to improving Western access to other locations but hostile to a reverse flow. The blocking of a Dubai-based company from acquiring a port in the United States -- even though that city is largely run by executives from Western countries -- is just one of numerous examples of the phobic reaction to efforts by outside corporations to buy into Western companies.

Astonishingly, even the corporate sector has not freed itself of biases dragged over from an age in which European countries administered most of the world. Today, both India and China are witnessing growth rates that could in a generation recreate the period when India and China accounted for over half the world's output, an age that vanished only in the early 1880s. Especially since the 17th century, what has driven Western prosperity is the unprecedented expansion of knowledge within those societies, which even today account for nine out of ten scientific patents worldwide (a small but increasing proportion of which are being contributed by researchers of Asian origin).