Has Carla Bruni’s charm worked in India? (PO)

M D Nalapat

The Obama administration has largely reverted to the Clinton presidency’s policy of looking at India as a lesser power, although unlike Clinton, who began mouthing praise on Delhi only when US business interests in the country reached critical mass, Barack Obama has been generous with “wampum”, showering sugary words and making insubstantial gestures, even while it seeks to lock India into a dependent relationship now that Pakistan is drifting apart from Washington and moving into Beijing’s orbit. In the nuclear field, the Obama administration is insisting on conditions that collectively negate the Singh-Bush nuclear accord, in effect continuing to force India off the path of nuclear capability. In Space, although a few token gestures have been made, none of these has been followed up by any intensification of cooperation between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The grip of the Europeanist world view is too strong for President Obama to acknowledge that India is at least the equal of France, Britain or Germany, and needs to be so treated. Instead, the policymakers in the DC Beltway are still at work using their many friends in the Sonia Gandhi-led coalition to lock India into a one-sided relationship that would severely affect this country’s prospects for future growth and technological autonomy and excellence.

That the Sonia Gandhi-led administration ( for let us face reality, rather than cling to the legal fiction that any minister other than - perhaps - himself sees Manmohan Singh as the boss) is uninterested in going the China route of technological self-sufficiency has been once again illustrated by the decision to award the 126-aircraft contract to the French or to a French-led consortium. A senior Indian politician, who seems to have been given information from a rival country’s sources once it was clear that France was in the driver’s seat on what is expected to balloon into a $18 billion contract, has publicly accused France’s First Lady Carla Bruni of having intervened with Italian-born Sonia Gandhi in order to ensure that the contract went to Paris in one form or the other, something that has now happened. For more than a year, reports have been swirling around Raisina Road that “Number Ten” ( the 10 Janpath residence of the all-powerful UPA chairperson, who was born in Orbassano in Italy but has made India her home for four decades) was in favour of the French option, although such reports were not accompanied by any proof. It may be that Sonia Gandhi is simply being made the target of a smear campaign, so hopefully both she as well as Bruni will clarify the nature of their contacts and discussions before gossip spreads about the relationship that she shares with the Maino family, who are frequent visitors to India. Of course, given the timidity of the Indian media on all negative matters relating to Sonia Gandhi, the allegation made by Dr Swamy, the Indian politician close to both China and the US, has gone almost totally unreported.

The silence of the lambs (PO)

M. D. Nalapat

China, India, Russia and Brazil — now joined by South Africa — are fast-growing economies that have recently taken up a lot of newspaper space for the speed with which they have been developing. However, the fact remains that they are as yet marginal players on the world stage, which is still dominated by the former colonial powers of Europe and their ally, the US. 

The latest proof of this has been the extraordinary silence of Beijing, Delhi, Moscow, Brasilia and Pretoria on events in Libya. After an initial show of disapproval once it became clear that UN Security Council Resolution 1973 was being used by NATO as an excuse for bombing Libya into submission, the five countries have watched the daily air raids on infrastructure and other assets largely in silence. Clearly, they are nervous at the possibility that they would annoy the NATO powers by coming out more forcefully against what in effect is a war of that military alliance against Colonel Kadhafi and his regime. Is it that countries that were regarded as tigers are in reality only lambs?

What lies behind the NATO attack on Libya? It is definitely not democracy, for if it were, there are far bigger states in the region that are far from democratic. It cannot be the protection of civilians, for NATO is doing nothing to stop the ongoing slaughter of pro-Kadhafi elements by those opposed to the Libyan strongman. In fact, it is tacitly assisting in such slaughter by its open backing for one side in what is a civil war. As for implementing the UN resolution, that has been left far behind by the scale and scope of NATO attacks, now being waged even on oilfields, according to the Libyan regime. 

The excuse of democracy has often been used by NATO powers as camouflage for their actual aims. However, if we take as an example the case of Hong Kong, the British colonial administration discovered the virtues of democracy only after it became clear that China would not allow the British to get a fresh lease of rulership over Hong Kong, and that they would have to pull out by 1997. 

The reality is that the so-called “post-colonial” world has been characterised by an alliance between local elites in several countries and the former colonial powers.

A US-India Nuclear Alliance (USINPAC)

M.D. Nalapat

Although President George W Bush understood the need to ensure parity for India with France and the UK in a 21st century alliance calculus, the Europeanists within his administration slowed down his effort at ensuring an equal treatment for India. Much the same as Winston Churchill in the previous century, they regard it as a "country of a lesser god" that is simply undeserving of any except a subservient status. Sadly, the Obama administration has become even more a Europeanists' delight than its predecessor, and it has very rapidly sought to dilute the few concessions that President Bush succeeded in extracting from his skeptical team.

This has been especially pronounced in the nuclear field. It is not rocket science that India's ascent into middle income status will depend on a huge increase in its generation of energy, and that such an increase, given existing green technologies, will need to be powered mostly by energy from nuclear sources. The nuclear industries of India and the US have excellent synergy between them, provided the US acknowledges the implicit premise of the 2005 Singh-Bush statement and the 2008 unanimous vote of the Nuclear Suppliers Group to allow commerce and cooperation with India.

The non-proliferation lobby within the US (a group heavily represented in the Obama administration) made India its primary target since 1974, neglecting to take account of the leaching of nuclear and missile technology from China and other locations to Pakistan and North Korea. Small wonder that it has demonized the India-US deal as a "danger to non-proliferation efforts", despite the fact that a democracy of a billion-plus people is as much entitled to critical technologies as France or the UK. The reality, however, is that the Manmohan Singh government made several concessions to the US side that have had the effect of substantially degrading India's offensive capability. An example was the closing down of the CIRUS reactor, which was producing weapons-grade plutonium for decades. In exchange, India was to be given access to re-processing technology. Not merely has such technology continued to be denied to India, but the Obama administration is seeking to cap, roll back and eliminate India's homegrown reprocessing capabilities.

Apart from strong-arm (and secret) tactics designed to force India to agree to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT), the Obama administration is now seeking to force India to give up its Fast Breeder Reactor program. As if on cue, those commentators in the world's second-largest English-speaking country - including those not known for any previous interest in matters nuclear- who hew to the line of any incumbent US administration have used the Fukushima disaster to call for the FBR program to be abandoned.

Will China & Russia agree to bomb Libya? (PO)

M.D. Nalapat


In 1982, Ariel Sharon decided to intervene on behalf of the Maronite Christians of Lebanon, against the Shia. He gave weapons, training and other requisites to the Gemayel brothers, individuals whose concept of democracy was to send a bullet through the heart of any individual who disagreed with them. Intervening in a civil conflict in any society is fraught with risk, but this is exactly what some powers have repeatedly done.

However, Israel is far more vulnerable than former colonial empires such as the UK and France, in that it is located in a region where the population regards it with distaste, if not hatred. Secondly, it is far smaller than the major NATO powers in both size as well as population. Hence, caution ought to have been exercised rather than a reflexive exercise of power. Sadly for the world’s only Jewish-majority state, neither Sharon nor other Israeli leaders stopped to consider the ill-effects of their bias towards the Maronite Christian leadership. The consequence of Israeli intervention was to deepen the Lebanese sectarian conflict (with Syria and later Iran coming on the side of the embattled Shia) and to make the country the only one in the world that is the target of Shia-based terror groups. The intervention in Lebanon has cost Israel dearly.

These days, after having incorrectly assumed that Muammer Kadhafi will go the way of Hosni Mubarak, both the UK as well as the US are threatening to enforce a No Fly Zone over Libya, thereby seeking to ensure that the particular tribes backed by them have a better chance of dividing Libya into two states, with the oil-rich eastern state coming within the control of groups that are ( at least for now) friendly to the NATO powers. Strangely, even some governments in the region who ought to know better are secretly encouraging both President Obama as well as Prime Minister Cameron to attack Libya. This is a shortsighted view, caused by personal hatred of Colonel Kadhafi and disquiet at the fact that he is a republican rather than a monarch. Indeed, Kadhafihas become as much a figure of hatred within high councils in many Arab countries as was Gamal Abdel Nasser in his time. The difference, of course, is that Nasser was a simple man whose family declined to join in money-making, whereas the Kadhaficlan have become billionaires, thereby provoking anger within their own country. As in the case of the ancient Indian king Dritarashtra, Colonel Kadhafi’s blind spot are his sons. These have masterminded a policy of succumbing to the commands of the NATO powers, only to be abandoned by them at the first sign of an internal threat to the rule of their father.

President Hu goes to Washington (PO)

M D Nalapat

Giving a rival credit is always difficult, so it is no wonder that few commentators in Europe, North America and India mention the fact that the ongoing visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao to the US is pathbreaking. In the past too, Chinese Heads of State have landed up in Washington. There was Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s and Jiang Zemin in the 1990s. Both Deng and Jiang worked hard to give a positive impression of China and its people to the US public, wearing cowboy hats and boots, and in Jiang’s case, singing a song in American English. During the 1980s,China was dependent on the US for almost all its technology and its economic progress, a situation that had not dramatically changed when Jiang Zemin came calling. However, from the time he took over power in 2002, Hu Jintao has concentrated on making China a technology superpower, nurturing R & D laboratories and presiding over the growth of world-class companies such as Huawei.

For the first time in the history of relations between China and the US, it is a meeting of equals. An Indian scholar in the US estimates that in Purchasing Power Parity terms, the economy of China is already as big as that of the US. Others say that it will take China about fifteen years to reach parity. However, what is not in doubt is that China under Hu Jintao and his designated successor Xi Jinping is on course to become the world’s biggest economy within the first quarter of the 21st century. In five years time, the country will most likely be competing with Boeing and Airbus to sell Aeroplanes across the world, and in ten years, will probably produce manufactures that are qualitatively superior to those being made within the powerhouse of the European Union, Germany. Over the past decade, China has moved away from being a low-end supplier of intermediates into a producer of sophisticated finished products, thereby posing a threat to the present commercial hegemony of the US and the EU.

A US-India war on corruption? (PO)

M D Nalapat

During the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidential term, “Billary” ( Bill and Hillary Clinton) has been his motto. More than 90% of his policies, and his staff - those not Republican -come from the ranks of those who supported Hillary Clinton and husband Bill in their personal attacks on the charismatic African-American who overshadowed them. Within his administration, he formidable trio of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke saw India as a troublesome country that ought to be told to behave (in other words, accept US diktat) before being given any concessions. Their condescension towards India was in contrast to the stand taken by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who backed Indian independence even while Winston Churchill said that the “Hindoos were a beastly people” who do not deserve freedom.Of course, Churchill believed that Muslims too ought to remain British subjects for eternity. President Roosevelt (and his idealistic spouse Eleanor) disagreed, pointing out that the Atlantic Charter to which both the UK and the US was committed stood for freedom. Of course, Churchill’s reply was that only those of European origin deserved to be free. The rest should remain in the same way as several European peoples were under the occupation of Hitler-led Germany.

Although they pass themselves off as “liberals”, there is a subliminal prejudice beneath the “tolerant”l veneer of several of the East Coast intellectuals who form the bulk of the Clinton cohort. They are people who would like to freeze “primitive” societies into their present lifestyles, the way anthropologist Verrier Elwin got Jawaharlal Nehru to do to the North-east. Because of Nehru’s policies, the Northeast of India was denied development, so that “the people may continue in their pristine way”. Even today, the standard of roads and other infrastructure in that region is way below that of other parts of India. While George W Bush embraced multiculturalism - especially as it related to the vibrant Hispanic community - Bill Clinton sought to impose solutions on the rest of the world in partnership with Europe. To the Talbotts and the Holbrookes, the only way a country can be a “responsible stakeholder” is if it accepted the US-EU position on all major issues. Small wonder that many were sceptical of the faith of Manmohan Singh that President Obama would not come to India empty-handed, but would announce several major agreements in a Rooseveltian spirit.

An Obama defeat not bad news for India (PO)

M D Nalapat

Over the past month, a troupe of Obama backers have descended on India, seeking to soften opinion in the country ahead of President Obama’s visit. The English-language media in India, both print as well as television, have given continuos coverage of such non-events as former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott discussing issues centering around the braid theme of “what India can do for the US”. Apart from a few retired diplomats and civil servants, as well as the participants themselves, there has been no viewer interest in such fare. Then why air on television or print so many such “debates and discussions” featuring an army of retired (but hoping for re-employment) Clinton-era officials and their Indian clones? In large part, such coverage is a tribute to the public diplomacy skills of the huge US embassy in New Delhi, that networks intensively with not only the journalists working in these media outlets but ( much more crucially) the proprietors. Getting the US ambassador over to dinner is a social coup for Delhi’s glamorous society ladies, and all of Timothy Roemer’s charm and gift of the gab are being put to good use in a context where the Obama administration has been largely hostile to India.

This columnist visits the Information Technology (IT) hubs of Bangalore and Hyderabad often, and in both there is anger at the shabby way in which Indian IT professionals are being treated in matters of visa and entry into the US. These days, visa interviews for software professionals has turned nasty, with the (normally polite) consular officials clearly under instructions from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to discourage Indians from going on work assignments to the US. Interestingly, the Republican Party has turned to Indian-Americans, especially in the conservative south. Some years ago, India-born Bobby Jindal became the Governor opr Louisiana, defeating his Democratic Party opponent despite the fact that she belonged to the (Caucasian) majority. Now, another Indian-American, Nikki Randhawa, has been elected the Governor of South Carolina, defeating her Democrat rival in a campaign marked by numerous personal attacks on her. Both Nikki and Bobby have married within their communities, and that fact has not stood in the way of conservative white voters overwhelmingly preferring them to white Democratic opponents who have near-total backing from local African-American communities. Although it is not considered politically correct to mention this, it is a reality that several African-Americans resent the economic success of the Indian-American community. This is unfortunate, for India has been a consistent backer of racial equality, being for long the only non-Communist country to give assistance to the African National Congress while Nelson Mandela was in jail. Within the African-American community, leaders such as Martin Luther King have been inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, and they in turn have inspired many Indians, including this columnist, who once wrote a short biography of Dr King in his mother tongue, Malayalam. By his numerous negative actions on India, President Obama seems to be reacting more as a sectional leader than as the elected head of the entire American people, which is perhaps one reason why his party has suffered so badly in the 2010 polls, just two years after he was elected as the first African-American President of the US. In this respect, Obama;s election has put his country on a higher moral plane than India, which has yet to see a Muslim Prime Minister emerge, despite having been free for 63 years.

Can Obama make India an ally? (PO)

M D Nalapat

Within a week, President Barack Obama will come to India on a three-day visit,” the most time that he has spent in a single country” since assuming office. It seems an age ago, but just four years ago, it was then Senator from Illinois Barack Obama who introduced a killer amendment to the Senate legislation ratifying the Bush-Singh nuclear deal. Some weeks previous to this effort, Senator Obama had met a small group of Indians visiting Washington in order to sound out legislators on the agreement. At the breakfast meeting, which was held at the residence of a prominent Indian-American Obama backer, the brilliant and very persuasive junior senator was transparent in his distaste at the attempt by George W Bush to give India the same rights in nuclear commerce as those states that had signed the Non-proliferation Treaty. Obama clearly saw India as undeserving of the privilege of nuclear commerce unless it first gave up its nuclear weapons, a view that he shared with the leaders of almost all of Europe, Australasia, East Asia and North America.

The only reason that the Nuclear Suppliers Group accepted the US contention that India merited a waiver was the steady and relentless pressure exerted by President Bush. To the final hours before the final NSG vote two years ago, Bush and Condoleezza Rice cajoled world leaders among the 45 member-states to ensure a unanimous decision favouring India. To the last, countries such as Norway, Switzerland, New Zealand and China opposed the waiver, but finally fell in line because of the diplomatic blitz unleashed by President Bush. Had it been an Obama presidency, there would never have been an India waiver, for the incoming President of the United States has appointed a non-proliferation team whose members have spent much of their working lifetimes trying to get India to follow the advice given by Bill Clinton, which is to “cap, roll back and eliminate” its nuclear and missile deterrent. Although Clinton has got a bad press in India for such insistent advice, he may perhaps not have been aware that India was a country of more than a billion people in a very unpleasant neighbourhood. Or, if he was aware of this, perhaps he may have been willing to introduce legislation to permit a few tens of millions of Indian nationals to settle in the US, should a nuclear attack befall an India that disarms itself under his advice. Bill Clinton has visited India since demitting office as President, usually to paint the country as the endemic focus of either AIDS or as the prime candidate for a nuclear attack. These visits have been sponsored ones, one having as the host Amar Singh, one of the most colourful politicians in India, whose access to big money is as legendary as the wonderful time those attending his many soirees have.

Ethnic dimension in Kashmir & Afghanistan (PO)

M D Nalapat

Together with Kashmir, a territory that divides the Pakistan establishment from its counterpart in India is Afghanistan, a land of great beauty that has suffered the cruelty of conflict since the Soviet invasion of 1979. Led by the Pakistan military, the key policymakers in Islamabad wish to see an end to Indian interest in Afghanistan. This preference that has been embraced by countries such as China, Germany and Turkey, which take care to ensure that their international initiatives for that country do not include participation by Delhi. As for the US and the UK, while both believe that Pakistan’s support would be boosted by India being kept out of Afghanistan, neither is willing to risk its warming ties with Delhi by openly saying so. Of course, every now and again,” experts” close to the Obama administration (and friendly to the Pakistan military) such as

Barnett Rubin prescribe both a reduction in India’s involvement in Kabul as well as US and EU diplomacy to get Delhi to move much beyond the status quo in the matter of Kashmir. None of these scholars have fought a democratic election, so they can be forgiven for failing to understand the public consequences of any such “surrender” over Afghanistan and certainly Kashmir.

Will Wen’s India visit be a success? (PO)

M D Nalapat During the last quarter of 2010, the Heads of Government of all the P-5 (Permanent Five in UN Security Council) will have visited India. The first to land in Delhi was UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who made an excellent impression in India, in contrast to some of his predecessors. Next followed US President Barack Obama, who created history by setting in stone the foundations laid by George W Bush of a US-India alliance. Next has come President Sarkozy of France, a country that even during the dark days of the Clinton administration was friendly to India (in contrast to the UK, which followed the Clinton line as faithfully as a poodle). On December 15,Premier Wen Jiabao of China comes calling, followed a week later by Russian President Dimitry Medvedev.

Communists face defeat in India (PO)

M D Nalapat

Visitors to China will go to book stores without seeing a single copy of the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the authors of the “Communist Manifesto”. In contrast, should they visit India, several bookstores carry the works of the two, while in cities in Bengal and Kerala, communist literature is plentiful. Jesef Stalin and Vladimir Lenin may have been tossed aside in Russia, but not in these two States, where even today, they are lovingly commemorated in conferences and even in curricula. Indeed, the first place where a communist party came to power in a free election was Kerala, which elected the Communist Party to office in 1957, only to have the central government dismiss it in 1959,after an agitation led by the Catholic Church that was backed by the daughter of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Congress President Indira Gandhi. Soon afterwards, in 1967, the Communists were back in power, not only in Kerala but also in West Bengal.

Nationally, the only time that Communists have held office was during 1996-97, when the Home portfolio was looked after by Indrajit Gupta. Indeed, there was even a prospect of India getting a Communist as Prime Minister, something that would have choked off the economic liberalisation that has powered this country’s ascent since the 1990s. Luckily for the economy, a section of the Marxist leadership sabotaged the chances for West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu to move to Delhi, thus clearing the way for the Karnataka leader H D Deve Gowda to take charge, although only for a year. After that, the high point of Communist and Marxist influence in the central government came in 2004,when the government led by Manmohan Singh was forced to depend on the 61 MPs of the Left to ensure a majority in Parliament. In the 2009 polls, the Red bastions fell, and today, the two Communist parties are once again sitting on the outside, except in Tripura, West Bengal and Kerala States. While the Communist parties (the pro-Moscow Communist Party of India and the pro-Beijing Communist Party of India-Marxist) have both won and lost elections in Kerala, in Bengal they have been continuously in power for more than three decades, a record of longevity only equalled by the Congress Party, which was in office in India from 1947 to 1977 without facing defeat. The long years of “Red Rule” have changed the culture and mindset in Bengal, pushing to the sidelines the courtly, aristocratic culture that has for hundreds of years been the hallmark of the Bengali. In days past, visitors to Kolkatta (then named Calcutta) would marvel at the charm and politeness of every local citizen he or she encountered, from taxi drivers to hotel receptionists to shop assistants. They were matched in good behaviour only by the old Lucknow aristocracy, which to this day retains the formal traditions of the Mughal Court.

Obama rejects high-tech cooperation with India (UPI Asia)

MD Nalapat


Manipal, India — Once in office, U.S. President Barack Obama apparently decided to abandon his own policy preferences in favor of those of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Given the reluctance of the former president and the current secretary of state to agree to an equal partnership with India, it is no surprise that the past year has seen the killing-off of the tiny shoots of U.S.-India high-tech cooperation promised by former President George W. Bush.This is despite the eagerness of NASA for joint projects with India. The U.S. space agency is aware that it will continue to be commercially outclassed by the European Union unless it ties up with India's Space Research Organization.

The Indians can undertake space launches that are 40 percent cheaper than the EU. Were NASA to outsource some of its hardware and software needs to India, the agency would outclass the Europeans in almost every segment of space research and exploration. This is why successive NASA administrators have – on record – pushed for closer cooperation with India.

However, the death-grip between Washington and Islamabad has thus far sabotaged all such efforts, even though NASA and ISRO have numerous complementarities, such as in hardware and software.

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.

Only India can Challenge China's Primacy in Asia (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat 

Manipal, India — More than radical Islam, the threat to the primacy of the West will come from Sinic civilization, centered in the People’s Republic of China. Should China continue to grow at the pace of the last 20 years for the next two decades, by 2015 the backwash created by such progress will pull Japan and South Korea into its gravity field. This will later extend to Siberia and large swathes of Southeast and Central Asia.

As armed conflict would be a lose-lose proposition for all major players, the odds are that such an expansion of geopolitical space will take place peacefully. China’s strategy will be to make cooperation with it attractive while increasing the costs of conflict to Asian countries that may seek to present a challenge, principally India.

Obsessed as Germany is with ensuring the ethnic purity of Europe by blocking immigration even from established, English-speaking democracies outside the West, and France with the preservation of Franco-German primacy in Europe, the European Union is unlikely to adopt the only course that would enable it to retain its edge in the face of rising Sinic power. This is an alliance with India.

Russian President Dimitry Medvedev, with his obsessive focus on Europe and neglect of Asian Russia, has been all but begging France and Germany to admit Moscow into the European Union as an equal of these two states. This course is likely to go the way of Turkey’s application to join the club; in other words, it will end up in the refuse bin. This is likely to push Russia further toward being a partner in the Sinic alliance that will be stitched together by Beijing in a decade.

Obama's Afghan War Needs Credible Change (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — This columnist was among the first outside the United States to cheer on, in February 2008, the ascent of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency. Even if he achieves little else during his term, the election of an African-American by a majority Euro-ethnic electorate will mellow the tension between races in the United States.

It also gives poorer peoples around the globe a confidence that there is nothing intrinsic in themselves that prevents them from reaching the collective levels of achievement of the Euro-ethnics. For this alone Obama has merited the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to him.

However, many in the future are likely to judge the soundness of the Nobel Committee's decision by Obama's success or failure in Afghanistan. This is now Obama's war.

In this theater, as yet, change has been absent. An important reason has been the high cost of operations due to the policy of sourcing materiel almost exclusively from the United States and other NATO partners. Such procurement resembles the policies of former U.S. President George W. Bush, who declined to get needed materiel from the most cost-effective sources.

With even the aftershave coming from home, NATO armies have become the most expensive to field in combat. Should NATO ever do battle against an enemy more endowed than the goons that fill the Taliban's ranks, or the debilitated militaries such as those of the late former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the enemy may only need to focus on their supply lines from home to demotivate the NATO troops.

Nuclear Weapons: To Test or Not To Test? (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — At precisely the moment that U.S. President Barack Obama is returning to the road travelled by Bill Clinton – trying to "persuade" India that nuclear weapons would make the country less, rather than more, secure – top scientists within the country have stated publicly that India’s 1998 nuclear test was a dud, and that the declared yields were false.

The assertion is not surprising – it dates back to the day of the test – but what is surprising is that this important question remains unresolved 11 years after the event.

The majority view among India's nuclear scientists has always been that the 1998 nuclear test was unsuccessful. Only a single scientist and his superiors in the Prime Minister's Office believed then – and still do – that it was a "great success." Understandably, the Manmohan Singh government is reluctant to conduct a serious peer review, preferring instead to rely on the opinions of a few in-house scientists on a matter critical to national security.

The "success camp," led by that determined scientist, R. Chidambaram, insists that the “yield” – or destructive capacity – was satisfactory. It relies on statements published in journals by the Bhabha Atomic Research Center, which made the bomb, to prove its point.

Its primary source is the internal BARC newsletter, which has no peer review process, is circulated only within the BARC/Department of Atomic Energy family, and has been known to publish practically anything that carries any senior BARC functionary’s name on it. In the case of the 1998 explosion results, the "proof" is the printed view of Chidambaram himself, as then director of BARC.

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.

Why is Obama silent when disaster returns? (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — From 2003 to 2008 – the years when the uncontrolled greed of a handful of speculators was sending the price of commodities to intolerable levels – this columnist was among the few who pointed to such market manipulation as the cause of price fever, rather than "market conditions."

Today it is clear that it was the greed of a few financial institutions and their managers that caused the rise in food prices that killed hundreds of thousands in Asia and Africa from starvation. Super-high food prices sucked the purchasing power out of middle- and low-income consumers by raising the prices of oil and other commodities to levels where continued economic health was unsustainable.

The 2008 market crash caused not a ripple in the consciences of this handful, who continued to award themselves generous bonuses after creating economic disaster. Speculation – forward trading where the speculator need not take delivery of the commodity – caused death and hardship across the world, and it was expected, not least perhaps by U.S. voters, that President Barack Obama would make good on his promise to deal harshly with such economic depredators.

Instead, he handed over the reins of the U.S. Treasury Department to Timothy Geithner, himself a creature of the very system that is causing a second tsunami of high prices and a collapse of consumer demand. Under Geithner, the U.S. taxpayer has underwritten nearly US$2 trillion in write-offs and advances to the very agencies that caused the speculative fever which began in 2003, after the defeat of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

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.

Punjabi Power and Zardari (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat


MANIPAL, India, March 18 (UPI) -- Regular readers of this column will not have been surprised at recent developments in Pakistan, in which army chief Ashfaq Kayani enforced the surrender of the Pakistan Peoples Party-led government to the demands of the Pakistan Muslim League-N chief, Nawaz Sharif.

The core purpose of Kayani's institution is to ensure the continued supremacy of Wahhabi Punjabis over all other groups in Pakistan, a mission that it has fulfilled thus far.

Uppity non-Punjabis, such as assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, were shown their place for daring to talk of a genuinely federal structure for the country. Now it is the turn of her husband, President Asif Ali Zardari, to be at the business end of Kayani's swagger stick.

The "honest" former -- and soon to be reinstated -- chief justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Chaudhry, has been a member in good standing of the Punjabi supremacist brigade since his years as a lawyer. He detests Zardari and has only kind words about his champion and fellow Punjabi, Nawaz Sharif. This despite the fact that the Sharif family has acquired an asset base of close to $2 billion, entirely because of its proximity to the military and other levers of patronage in Pakistan.