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.

The Pakistani Army's Phony War on Terror (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India - Pakistan's U.S.-approved chief of army staff, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, wanted a less unpredictable personality than Asif Ali Zardari as president of the country. But the crafty equestrian from Sindh insisted on the job, aware that the absence of high office would almost certainly mean either a death sentence or a fresh stint in jail, as Zardari faced several corruption charges.

Since then, "the chief" has seethed as Zardari admitted publicly that the jihadis fighting India in Kashmir were terrorists, and further, that he himself saw no threat from India, thus destroying the army's rationale for consuming more than one-third of the budget. By the time Pakistan's new president said that, like India, Pakistan was committed to a "no first use" policy on nuclear weapons, Kayani had made up his mind that Zardari had to go, and was searching for an opportunity to get him out.

The chief's undiplomatic descriptions of his nominal superior to his intimates have been many and acid, but his personal relationship with U.S. policy gurus has thus far ensured that Washington saw nothing untoward in the clear divergence of views and interests between the chief and the president – or in the chief's private musings about replacing the president. This was Pakistan, after all.

Mumbai 11/27 – the date that marks the midpoint of the three-day terrorist siege in the city – may have shaken the complacency of U.S. and EU policymakers about Kayani's suitability to lead an army touted as the linchpin of the allies in the war on terror.

Sarkozy and Brown: We cheated, So Trust Us (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat


Manipal, India — It must be wonderful to believe that the rest of the world shares one's own self-perceptions of omniscience. Weeks after Western financial institutions and instruments cleaned out thousands of clients in the Middle East, China and Russia, French President Nicholas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, at last weekend’s Asia-Europe Meeting in Beijing, offered Asia a simple prescription: Trust us and follow our lead unquestioningly, so that the non-Western part of the world can earn the tag of being "responsible (to the West) stakeholders."

It is unlikely that Asian governments will follow this advice and pour billions of dollars of their capital into two institutions controlled by North America and Europe – the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. After the recent banking meltdown in the United States and the European Union, it is not only small children in the rest of the world who can see that the emperor has no clothes.

What has astonished many in Asia is the way in which Western governments are acting as accomplices to what looks like the perfect crime: the stealing of trillions of dollars in value from pockets across the world. This was done not simply by getting the unwary to invest in assets known to be dubious, but by gerrymandering increases in the prices of commodities, notably petroleum, which has gouged economies such as China and India.

This columnist would like to repeat his advice to the oil economies to install gold statues of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney in prominent locations, for it is the policy pushed by that distinguished international statesman that caused oil prices to rise far above what market fundamentals dictated.

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 Muslims hate the United States (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Anger against the United States within the Muslim "Ummah," or diaspora, has risen above the level aimed at the USSR after its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. The United States seems on course to overtake Israel as the primary object of hate. This despite a well-funded campaign to convince Muslims that Uncle Sam loves them and is eager for reciprocation.

Unfortunately, apart (presumably) from Muslims resident in the country itself, followers of Islam around the globe see the United States as determined to emasculate and finally eliminate them. Such views have been in vogue since the 1950s, so it would be inaccurate to credit this perception entirely to George W. Bush, great though his contribution has been.

Since 1945 the United States, after being isolationist for most of its previous history, has metamorphosed into the most interventionist nation since the inhabitants of Britain decided in droves during the 18th century to leave their insipid food and miserable climate behind and seize control of much of the globe. Sadly for the United States, this attempt at emulating Britain has simply reinforced Karl Marx's dictum that history the second time around converts itself from tragedy to farce. A historical evaluation of the strands that fuse into Muslim hatred for the United States would be too ambitious for this column, which will therefore confine itself to some of the reasons behind the current loathing.

George W. Bush and other U.S. policymakers often speak of their desire to "bring democracy to the Middle East" by "empowering the people" and backing "voices of moderation" within the Islamic world. They apparently see no irony in the use of such language when the two King Abdullahs, Pervez Musharraf, Hosni Mubarak and the Turkish General Staff -- to name a few -- are given U.S. cover.

Losing Minds and Hearts in Iraq (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — India has been at the business end of jihadi-funded insurgency since 1981, the year in which Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) began to organize a "Khalistan" movement that would in a couple of years launch a terror campaign in India's Punjab State. Although local members of the Sikh community declined to come on board, enough funds were raised from ethnic Sikhs in the United States and Canada to provide the funding for a vicious struggle that lasted till the mid-1990s.

The Khalistan movement blended seamlessly with the other jihadist operation in Kashmir, an insurgency set off by those who returned to the Indian-held part of the state after receiving training in Pakistan from 1982 to 1988. It is still smoldering, and has thus far cost 73,000 lives, mostly in the killings of Muslims by Wahabbis.

In 1989 the USSR was defeated in Afghanistan and the ISI transferred its attention to Kashmir. Unfortunately for them, New Delhi proved a tougher proposition than Moscow, the reason being the manner in which the security forces conducted anti-jihadist operations. Given their low level of financial resources, these had perforce to depend on the "software" of psychological warfare against the jihadis, placing emphasis on changing of mindsets and preventing of unity between those disaffected with Indian rule.

In contrast, the United States has thrown into battle in Iraq a (usually wasted) flood of material resources, with far less success than the Indian armed forces have shown in Kashmir, where the jihadis have been beaten to the ground and are now desperately clutching at diplomacy to rescue themselves from the pit they have been pushed into.

Oil Conspiracy Theory (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPUR, India, May 31 (UPI) -- Nature and the "street" both abhor a vacuum, and even after Sept. 11, 2001, it is those active in the "War of Revenge Against the Crusades" who are more adept at crafting tales designed to link the United States with the unemployment, rage and perception of helplessness that provides recruits to the jihad.

While conspiracy theories that seek to "prove" that the United States -- together with those familiar villains, the "Zionists" -- is engaged in a war against Islam, thus far such street gossip has permeated only the Muslim countries, principally Saudi Arabia, Iran and Pakistan. The rest of the world has not been infected with this virus.

Indeed, a case can be made that the United States is more popular today in the poorer parts of the globe than it is in Europe. Unlike the period from the 1950s to the 1980s, when the United States was the target of the resentments and insecurities felt by those recently freed from colonization, from the time cable television spread in the mid-1980s,"street" perceptions of the United States outside the Muslim world have improved steadily. In the words of Jairam Ramesh, an Indian economist, while the cry may still be "Yankee, go home!", to this is added, "but take me with you."

For a superpower, the United States has been demonstrably inept in factoring in psychological attitudes and reflexes in countries visited by U.S. "experts" only in the safety of air-conditioned hotel and conference rooms. Thus, in Iraq the United States appointed an American "administrator" and Iraqi "advisers," when common sense would have indicated that it ought to have been the other way around.

Move the UN to Ethiopia (UPI)

M.D. Nalapat

WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 (UPI) -- Those responsible for the creation of the United Nations conglomerate were idealists, intent on seeking to avoid another international conflict.

They succeeded in the conventional sense. The prospect of another conventional world war is remote, though regional and intercontinental conflicts continue and groups like al-Qaida -- not specifically nation-states though tied to one or more of them -- have emerged to fight a global war against the values and the systems of pluralist democracies.

The Peoples Republic of China is seeking to create a self-perpetuating super state independent of the people as a means of securing its interests. The PRC is supporting a slew of similarly authoritarian structures across the world with missile and nuclear technology.

Several democracies are having to battle against insurgencies and terrorism while AIDS has replaced tuberculosis as the primary killer of the world's poor.

What are the conflicts that the UN has succeeded in preventing?

The threshold of effectiveness appears low. In a few instances the UN system as such -- as distinct from the actions of a few of its member states -- was able to prevent a conflict or stop it once begun. The organization's principal value has been as a talking shop, a pulpit for the preaching of verities. Much of the "work" of the several thousand functionaries is comprised of going from one meeting to the other, organizing yet another "talk-a-thon" after getting through several.

Stripped of verbiage, the UN has value only as a clearinghouse of concepts and policies. It has value in a world in which several countries are below the radar of the attention of the powerful. If there were no United Nations, it would need to be invented -- but not along the lines of how the current organization as taken shape.