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.

With courage, Pak people face Nature (PO)

M D Nalapat

Unlike the catastrophe in Haiti, which was extensively covered in international media, there has been much less coverage of the recent floods in Pakistan, caused by unprecedented rains. In Peshawar, on a single day (July 28) nearly 318 millimetres of rain fell, while the previous record was 217 millimetres - in an entire month. Stretching over 1500 miles and affecting nearly 25 million people, comparisons have been made between this flood and Cyclone Bhola in 1970, which hit then East Pakistan. However, while Bhola led to an estimated 300,000 deaths, the loss from the present disaster has thus far been contained at less than 2000 directly dead, although illnesses and accidents can push this figure higher during the coming weeks. Thus far less than $500 million have been pledged by foreign countries for flood relief, although close friends of Pakistan such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia can be expected to match the US contribution, thus far the biggest. Both governments need to launch an immediate appeal within their citizens to donate money for the floods, funds that should flow through agencies that have a good track record of effectiveness in their operations.

Where in 1970 it was East Pakistan that was hit, this time around the primary damage has been done in the Baloch and Pashtun territories of Pakistan. Major infrastructure has been destroyed, and livelihoods lost. The international community will need to locate $ 5 billion of civilian assistance each year for three years, if Pakistan is to regain the assets lost in a few deadly weeks last month. Although Pakistan’s main ally, the US, has given large amounts of assistance since the 1950s, the overwhelming bulk of this has gone to the military, a situation that is expected to continue under the Pakistan-friendly trinity of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and CIA chief Leon Panetta, two of whom are loyalists of Bill Clinton, while the Defense Secretary is a George W Bush pick. Although Candidate Obama sought to distance himself from the Washington DC Beltway, once elected President, he ensured that his administration is 70% Clinton, 20% Bush and 10% Obama in its composition, one reason why the gloss seems to have disappeared from Barack Obama, who promised change but has thus far delivered a warmed-over version of the past two decades.

Russia Starts "Lukewarm War" with the West (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — The Soviet Union became a superpower during the rule of Josef Stalin, who terrorized those territories that he did not immediately annex. After the 1939-45 war, the USSR controlled Eastern Europe and challenged the primacy of the United States and its European partners across the world.

But since Stalin’s death in 1953, Moscow has almost always given way when confronted with a resolute Western response. Nikita Khruschev blinked hard in Cuba in 1962, with the United States agreeing only to avoid another invasion of Cuba -- a course that anyway had been shown to be folly a short while earlier -- in exchange for a humiliating withdrawal of Soviet missiles from the island.

Throughout the Cold War, although Moscow enjoyed considerable conventional military superiority in Europe, its forces never once strayed beyond the boundaries set in 1945. Had it done so, the history of Europe may have been different in that such tensions would almost certainly have affected the economic environment negatively.

As it turned out, it was the USSR that imploded economically, drained both by a dysfunctional central-command system as well as by military spending that would have been justified only if the armaments so expensively procured were put to use to secure geopolitical gains.

The Afghan war most exposed the strategic cowardice of the Soviet leadership. At any stage in the decade-long conflict, an attack on Pakistan would have resulted in the immediate drying up of the flow of supplies from across the border to the mujahideen. It is unlikely that the United States and other NATO partners would have risked a flare-up of Warsaw Pact-NATO tensions in Europe by seeking to protect Pakistan from a Soviet assault. Peshawar and other centers of Afghan resistance would have been pulverized by Soviet bombing, and international jihad -- which today has morphed into a severe threat to international security -- would have lost its Afghan-Pakistani sanctuary.

No Thaw Across the Himalayas (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh returned Wednesday from a four-day visit to Beijing that even his spinmeisters could not categorize as a success. Having made the India-U.S. nuclear deal the foundation of his legacy, Singh had expected Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao to follow through on the promise of "nuclear cooperation" that he had made during a 2005 visit to New Delhi.

While there was a reiteration of that pledge in the Vision Statement released during the visit, this was qualified by subsequent explicit references to any such partnership being within the boundaries set out in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. As the justification for the deal was that it opened the way for international civil nuclear cooperation with India outside the restrictions imposed by the NPT on powers other than the five recognized nuclear weapons states, this caveat reduced the Chinese offer to a meaningless pleasantry.

Neither in the International Atomic Energy Agency nor in the Nuclear Suppliers Group did the Chinese leadership give any indication during the Jan. 13-15 talks of softening their earlier position that India would have to sign on to the NPT as a non-nuclear weapons power -- in other words, to denuclearize -- before securing international cooperation.

Then came another blow. The new Labor government in Australia reversed the decision by former Prime Minister John Howard to sell uranium to India once the India-U.S. deal becomes operational. Canberra said that India's signing the NPT would be a precondition for such transfers. This is a non-starter in the Indian context of the need for a nuclear and missile deterrent against possible attack.

Manmohan Singh had also hoped to persuade his hosts in Beijing to nudge the long-stalled border talks forward by accepting India's condition that areas with "settled populations" would be excluded from any exchange of territory. Although Wen Jiabao had accepted this condition in 2005, a year later Beijing returned to the earlier hard line that even populated zones were open to negotiation.

Why India Will Sit out Iran (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat


Manipal, India — Iran's ongoing effort to master uranium enrichment technology, despite its denials, is likely to lead to a series of surgical U.S. air and missile strikes designed to cripple reprocessing capacity. The risks and rewards of such an action have been extensively detailed; hence the focus here is on a small part of the overall mosaic -- the response of India to such a strike.

Although Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is solicitous of perceived U.S. interests, and has been working to create an alliance between the world's two biggest democracies, geopolitical logic will dictate that New Delhi will sit out a future Iran conflict, rather than follow its instincts and back the United States.

In evidence that India-Iran strategic ties remain in good standing, the chief of the Iranian Navy, Rear Admiral S. Kouchaki, is on a March 4-9 visit to India, during which he will visit key installations and discuss joint exercises.

The reasons for India to avoid conflict with Iran are primarily four:

First is the Shiite factor. There have been a little over 17,000 Muslim-Hindu clashes since India became independent in 1947, of which less than two hundred involved Shiites and Hindus. Almost all such clashes have been Sunni versus Hindu, and 87 percent of these have been Wahabbi-Hindu, as the more moderate sections of Sunni Muslim society seldom adopt a confrontational posture with their Hindu neighbors.