RIGHTS-PARAGUAY: New ‘Archives of Terror’ Unearthed

October 31, 2008 By

Global Geopolitics Net Sites / IPS
Friday, October 31, 2008

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

Natalia Ruiz Díaz

ASUNCIÓN, Oct 31 (IPS) – The discovery Friday of new archives from the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner is expected to shed new light on the regime that ruled Paraguay from 1954 to 1989.

Identity cards and folders full of photographs and information on former political prisoners were found in the basement of a building in downtown Asunción that belonged to the Interior Ministry.

The discovery was made possible by a tip-off from a former military cadet who served in the Interior Ministry under Stroessner.

Local human rights activist Martín Almada, who uncovered the so-called ”Archives of Terror” in 1992, said the man who provided the information used to take meals to political prisoners held in the basement, which was used as a torture chamber by then interior minister Sabino Augusto Montanaro, a key member of Stroessner’s inner circle who is now living in Honduras, where he was granted political asylum.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: History, Human Rights, Justice, News

DRAGON TURNS INTO ROBERT CLIVE

October 21, 2008 By

Global Geopolitics Net Sites
Tuesday, October 21, 2008

© Copyright 2008 Malladi Rama Rao. All rights reserved.

By Malladi Rama Rao

Sinologists are obsessed these days with Hun Chinese obsession to dominate other nations in their vicinity. Scholars of all hues admit that today’s China is different and yet harp on Mao’s favourite Chinese adage: “If the east wind doesn’t prevail over the west wind, then east wind will prevail over the east wind”.

Take for instance its Nepal policy. Beijing had supported King Gyanendra when he was fighting the Maoists. And armed his army to the teeth. Says David G Wiencek, President of International Security Group: “Although the Maoist insurgency was explicitly based on the Chinese model, Beijing denied any links and had gone out of its way to distance itself from Nepal’s Maoists for the sake of advancing its border interests”. A reality check Kathmandu, however, tells us that Beijing had maintained ‘ties’ with the Maoists too. So, when the Maoists slipped into the driver’s seat in Kathmandu, China changed sides with effortless ease, rolled out the red carpet to Prime Minister Prachanda on his maiden overseas visit to Beijing, and increased its aid to Nepal to 120 million Yuan, up from 80 million Yuan given earlier.

Pragmatism has been the hallmark of Chinese foreign policy. Socialism or the so called Third Worldism has no place in its scheme. Nor does it have any place for Western agenda of free markets and democracy, according to Alex E Fernandez Jiberto and Barbara Hogenboom of the University of Amsterdam, who have made a close study of China’s growing economic and political power. For China, trade is a tool as it set about globalising its economy, courting governments aggressively with no political questions asked and with no concern for the local civil societies. A departure from the ‘idealistic sixties and the seventies when liberation movements were the flavour of the day. And this stooping to conquer has forced Chinese government to set up a Department of External Safety to worry about companies and workers in the line of fire in countries hit by political turmoil.

China has adopted ‘daguo xintai’ (great power outlook), shed its long held ‘shouhaizhe xintai’ (victimised nation feeling), and has begun to straddle the world proving Napoleon right for once. Two centuries ago, the great warrior had said: “There (China) lies a sleeping giant. Let her sleep. For when she wakes, she shall shake the world”. The sleeping giant has woken up by the realisation that being a big shark in the sea of foreign direct investment (FDI) alone is not enough and that it must promote investments to tap new energy resources needed to sustain the scorching pace of its development.

A Chinese foreign policy expert argues that his country will never indulge in hegemonic behaviour even when it enjoyed hegemonic power. Peace and development across the world and the Chinese economic goals can flourish side by side, according to him. Nepalese traders who go regularly to Tibet and beyond with their merchandise are unlikely to agree with the scholar. A report in a leading News Portal of Kathmandu says, the Chinese adopt a take it or leave it approach. “All their (Chinese) documents are in Chinese. Raise any question. The standard reply is refer to Beijing. They are producing clones of our local brands. Even for Vanaspati. All this poses a threat to our nascent industry”, a trade chamber was quoted as saying.

Interestingly, Nepalese scholars like Tara Dahal, have been viewing their country as a ‘Transit State” between India and China with immense trade possibilities. China too appears to subscribe to the view since it has begun to talk about plans to extend the Shanghai – Lhasa railway line into most of Tibet and into Nepal. There are 28 passes on Nepal – Tibet border but only three are open and functional through out the year. The Raxual-Kathmandu-Khasa road links India, Nepal and China It is a 390 lm long road. But Barhabise-Kodari part of Northern Nepal road turns into a long puddle during the rainy season. Marketing and trading infrastructure is also absent on either side of Nepal-Tibet border. Yet, King Gyanendra who first spoke of the ‘grand concept’ first at the Afro-Asian summit in Jakarta in April 2005, and his ‘democratic’ successors are convinced that ‘transit state’ route is the ‘development manna’ for landlocked Nepal as it battles to protect national economy from two evils- regional competition and cross border smuggling.

Trade pundits, however, point out that low cost goods from China are flooding the Kathmandu Valley and the plains of Terai, both officially and unofficially. “For us the threat is from China. India is no match in dumping (goods by China), and quantity-wise”, they say, pointing out that India itself has become a huge grey market for cheap Chinese goods that range from toys to computer chips and even photos of Hindu Gods and Goddesses.

In a sense, the Nepalese business community is echoing the views expressed in an Australian E-Journal of social and political debate. Writing on June 20, 2005, Tony Henderson, a freelance writer and chairman of the Humanist Association of Hong Kong, said ‘When it comes to China and the stance of its neighbours, caution is the by-word; trade is the catch-word”. According to him, ‘expressions of benign intent included in China’s media releases, while acceptable, may be seen more like a silver lining in a Nimbus –like thunder cloud, because China’s history is not quite that depicted in its rosy statements to the world’.

Take river waters, for instance.

The Himalayas give rise to all the main rivers of Asia and form a natural boundary on the south-west just as the Altai Mountains do on the north-west. Countries that share China’s rivers voice strong complains about uncaring attitude of the Communist big brother, who runs his empire even in the 21st century like a Sicilian Mafioso.

What has happened to the Mekong has been well documented. From its headwaters on the Tibetan Plateau, the river, known in Tibet as Dza-Chu, China as Lancang Jiang and Thailand as Mae Nam Khong, traverses 4800 km before it falls into South China Sea. The river basin is nearly the combined size of France and Germany. Initially, China refused to join the Mekong initiative and later on in the Mekong River Commission (MRC). It became a ‘dialogue’ partner only in 1996. From April 2002, China began providing daily water level data to the MRC during the flood season. It is still reticent in providing information about dry season flows and the operation of its dams.

Many Sinologists believe that Chinese leaders still take a passive approach to world affairs. According to them, China tries to maximise its interests through minimal involvement abroad and opts to claim the high moral ground. Two American strategic experts Evans S Medeiros and M Taylor Fravel don’t agree. “In the last 10 years, Chinese foreign policy has become more nimble and engaging than at any other time in the history of the People’s Republic,” they say (Foreign Affairs, November/December 2003). Accompanying these ‘changes in substance’ has been a new Chinese campaign to publicise and promote the country’s foreign policy.

Liu Huaqiu, director of the State Council Foreign Affairs Office, seconds their theory in his in-depth analysis of China’s foreign policy as well as its major readjustments and diplomatic achievements since 1949 (Qiushui Magazine, December 1, 2007). His hypothesis is that the basic goal of China foreign policy is to adopt a ‘positive’ attitude towards safeguarding world peace in a bid to ‘create a long term peaceful international environment for China’s socialist modernization drive’.

It may be true. What is equally true is that China operates without any political strings and adopts a policy of trading, investing and providing aid without regard to ‘whether its partner is a democratic visionary or a tyrant’. And as the experience of the world from Darfur to Zimbabwe and from Pakistan to Bangladesh, Myanmar and North Korea shows, China’s silence has been boosting tyrants. It is giving the dictators the means to resist the global pressures.

The United States contributed no less to the emergence of trade centric China. Under President Bill Clinton, the White House went out of its way to allow commercial interests to dominate other concerns in shaping policy towards Beijing. That is beside the point and going into Sino-American ties only offers a digression. The fact of the matter is that China plays on both sides of the local divide when necessary with no qualms whatsoever as pointed out at the outset in Nepal. It just did the same ‘in-thing’ over the years in India, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, for instance. Also it picks up ‘willing proxies’ like Pakistan against India, for instance, in the classic Chinese mode of ‘breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting’.

All this quest is for a strategic reach. And the pursuit is for access to and control over raw materials across three continents to secure the badly needed edge in the present day unipolar world. To what extent success comes China way is a moot point since its long term ally has failed to achieve its own goal of strategic depth beyond the Durand Line. What is not, however, is its lack of commitment to counter terrorism. Noted Sinologist, Bhaskar Roy opines that China’s commitment to counter terrorism has always been suspect particularly from 2002.

The issue came upfront early August with a court in Los Angeles taking up a case against ‘The Bank of China Ltd’, the third largest Bank of mainland China. The charge is that the Chinese bank was knowingly involved in financing Islamic Jihad and Hamas between 2004 and 2007. The money ‘transfers’ route was West Asia – US- Guangzhou- West Bank, Israel and the Gaza Strip. Such money laundering after 9/11 fits in well with the image of China as the modern day Robert Clive out to make a fast buck in league with gun runners, narco traders, insurgents, terrorists and black marketers and to carve out ‘a new empire’.

China has its own ‘in-house’ Islamists and insurgents in Xinjiang. Therefore, the least expected of Beijing is an understanding, if not sympathy for countries like Sri Lanka and Myanmar, where hundreds of innocents have fallen victims to the Mao’s dictum- power through the barrel of a gun. Double dealing is a standard fare in the text books for sleuths but how can a country that lays claim to super power status justify double dealings with the very nations which it is courting and is offering strategic infrastructure to secure for itself an elusive strategic reach through Gwadar, Sittwe and Hambantota.

About the Author

Malladi Rama Rao is an analyst and writer on the Indian political scene and geo-political and security issues of South Asia. He directs a Weekly Feature Service in English, Syndicate Features, in colloboration with his wife Vaniram. He is also the India Editor of Asian Tribune.

SYNDICATE FEATURES

B-308, Puneet Apts. B-10, Vasundhara Enclave, Delhi; Ph -22617660 E-mail: syndicatefeatures@rediffmail.com

Filed Under: Exclusive, Geopolitics, History, Politics

Did India have to do the nuclear deal?

October 16, 2008 By

Global Geopolitics Net Sites
Thursday, October 16, 2008

© Copyright 2008 Susenjit Guha. All rights reserved.

By Susenjit Guha

Way back in the 1950s and early 1960’s, U.S. media couldn’t really figure out why India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was not as comfortable in the United States as he apparently was during his trips to Britain and Western Europe.

Even though former U.S. President John F. Kennedy failed to charm him during a White House visit, journalists noticed that Nehru’s eyes lit up when his wife Jacqueline entered the room.

Later, Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi had her famous face-off with U.S. President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1971 – the latter going on record as having used the choicest of expletives over her “obduracy.”

Critics pointed out that India had missed the Greyhound bus many times. First, it was non-alignment, then a strategic partnership with the Soviet Union during the Cold War years, to counter the U.S. alliance and obsession with India’s arch foe, Pakistan.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Exclusive, History, Nuclear Weapons, Politics, United States

POLITICS-US: The Return of the Return of History

September 3, 2008 By

Global Geopolitics – Global News Blog – IPS
Wednesday, September 03, 2008

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2008.

Analysis by Daniel Luban

WASHINGTON, Sep 3 (IPS) – In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Georgia last month, many commentators have been quick to proclaim that the war signals ”the return of history”. But attentive observers could be forgiven for responding to these pronouncements with a sense of déj? vu.

History, after all, was already supposed to have returned once before — seven years ago, following the Sep. 11 attacks. Then, ”the return of history” was meant to signal the commencement of an all-out struggle against the forces of radical Islam and secular Arab nationalism.

The appropriation and reinterpretation of the phrase in recent weeks — in many cases by the same commentators who first made use of it in 2001 — may be indicative of a new turn in U.S. foreign policy debates, as hawks move away from a focus on the Islamic world and push for more aggressive confrontation with Russia and China.

It has also touched off a heated media debate about the future of world politics, notably pitting erstwhile neoconservative allies Robert Kagan and Francis Fukuyama against each other.

It has been nearly 20 years since Fukuyama wrote his influential 1989 essay ”The End of History?”, later expanded into a 1992 book. Published just months before the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War, Fukuyama’s essay argued that no further ideological alternatives existed to market-based liberal democracy, and that the era of large-scale ideologically-driven conflict was over.

Many hawks initially embraced Fukuyama’s thesis, seeing in it the promise of a ”unipolar” world in which the United States could exercise ”benevolent hegemony”. In the years that followed, with no clear rival in sight, much of U.S. foreign policy was oriented toward peacekeeping operations in far-flung places like Haiti, Somalia, and the Balkans.

But after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks, many of the same hawks were quick to fault Fukuyama for his optimism. According to an instantly ubiquitous phrase, the 1990s marked a mere ”holiday from history”, and radical Islam was destined to replace fascism and communism as the consuming focus of U.S. foreign policy.

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, a prominent neoconservative, spoke for many in a Weekly Standard article published two months after the attacks, proclaiming that ”[o]n September 11, our holiday from history came to an end”. U.S. foreign policy, he wrote, had ”acquired a new organising principle: we have an enemy, radical Islam…and its defeat is our supreme national objective”.

Krauthammer explicitly rejected the notion that Russian and Chinese power posed serious threats to the U.S., instead viewing them as potential allies. If cooperation in the war on terror required recognition of Russia’s Great Power status in Central Asia, he argued, then so be it.

”Radical Islam” was defined broadly enough to include Sunnis and Shiites, religious fundamentalists and secular nationalists. And although Afghanistan was the first front, hawks inside and outside the Bush administration immediately looked ahead to Iraq — and beyond that, to Iran and Syria.

Much as they derided Fukuyama’s optimism, what neoconservatives proposed was the armed imposition of the universal liberal democracy that he had predicted. But Fukuyama himself was not coming along for the ride; he was sceptical that liberal democracy could be imposed by force and broke with his former neoconservative allies in opposing the Iraq war.

It would be an understatement to say that the war against radical Islam has not gone as its planners had hoped. Whether or not the U.S. can salvage acceptable political outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the large-scale democratisation of the Middle East appears to be off the table for now.

And as moderates seem to have gained the upper hand over hardliners within the Bush administration, the U.S. has shown a new willingness to use diplomacy in its dealings with the Islamic world.

With the apparent stalling of the war against radical Islam, many felt that hawkish elements in Washington had begun casting about for a new threat to serve as the ”organising principle” of U.S. foreign policy.

Russia and China, both longstanding neoconservative fixations, made for something of a natural fit. In the months before 9/11, the Weekly Standard in particular had pushed for more aggressive confrontation with China — a Jun. 18, 2001 editorial accused the U.S. State Department of engaging in ”appeasement of Beijing’s Communist rulers”.

If there has been a central figure in reformulating the ”return of history” to push for confrontation with Russia and China, it has been Kagan, a neoconservative stalwart based at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace who serves as an advisor to John McCain.

Kagan’s latest book, ”The Return of History and the End of Dreams”, published this past April, argues that the 21st century will be dominated by conflict between the forces of democracy (led by the U.S.) and autocracy (led by Russia and China), in a sort of return to 19th century great power politics.

Kagan’s influence was important in leading McCain to call for a ”League of Democracies” to counter Russian and Chinese power, and in the weeks since the Russia-Georgia war his predictions have attracted significantly more attention.

But although few would argue that Russia and China have gained increased salience recently, many critics have questioned whether direct confrontation is the only way to deal with their rising power.

Foremost among these critics has been Fukuyama himself. In recent weeks, he and Kagan have penned a series of opinion pieces that were clearly written in response to each other.

In an Aug. 24 Washington Post op-ed, Fukuyama cautioned against ”facile historical analogies”, and argued against the view that autocratic governments inherently share the same interests or seek aggressive territorial expansion.

In an earlier debate with Kagan on the website Bloggingheads.tv, Fukuyama also claimed that Kagan’s predictions of conflict with Russia and China could prove to be a ”self-fulfilling prophecy”. If Washington simply assumes that conflict with Russia and China is inevitable, he and other analysts caution, then it may end up making such conflict inevitable.

In a Newsweek article bluntly titled ”This Isn’t the Return of History”, prominent foreign policy realist Fareed Zakaria argued that Russia’s invasion would be remembered as a blunder rather than a show of strength, and that globalisation and economic integration would continue to promote a convergence of interests between great powers.

Much of the debate has come to revolve around which side can lay claim to the realist mantle. In an Aug. 30 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Kagan fired back at Fukuyama and Zakaria, accusing them of betraying the disillusioned worldview of their realist predecessors by espousing na?ve predictions about the end of large-scale geopolitical conflict.

Fukuyama, for his part, remains sceptical that even a return to the 19th century world of great power politics would justify the aggressive policies espoused by Kagan and other neoconservatives.

”You can’t have it both ways,” he said in his Bloggingheads debate with Kagan. If one accepts the notion of a return to a great-power world, ”then you take that seriously, and say what do great powers do when we can’t expect to get everything we want?”

”The normal great power understanding of what you do is you come to an accommodation, you give some things up in order to get what’s more important to you.”

Filed Under: Featured, History, Politics, United States

The miscalculation of small nations

August 27, 2008 By

Global Geopolitics
Tuesday, August 26, 2008

This article was originally published on opendemocracy.net under a Creative Commons license. Read the article in its original form.

Fred Halliday

The Russia-Georgia war highlights the need for a nuanced understanding of international politics that recognises the autonomy of local agents, says Fred Halliday

24 – 08 – 2008

The brief and vicious war between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia has killed an untold number of people and displaced and traumatised many thousands more; promised a lengthy and abrasive aftermath; postponed even further the prospects of a settlement over this and the region’s other territory lost to Georgia’s control in the early 1990s, Abkhazia; created new enmities as well as poisoning existing ones; and planted seeds of yet further conflict.

In the wake of the disaster, the urgent need is via an intense effort of humanitarian mobilisation and sensitive diplomacy to assist and protect the civilian victims from its continuing ravages. Beyond that, a survey of the freshly ruined landscape is needed to assess how the region, the continent and the notional "international community" can begin to pick up the pieces. But between the immediate and the strategic, an interim political assessment of this war suggests a lesson that relates both to Georgia itself and to the political leaderships of other local actors (and especially "small nations") who have found themselves – or chosen to be – involved in military contest with bigger neighbours.

The puff of ideology

Where Georgia itself is concerned, the lesson can be summed up in a phrase: pity (and of course help) the Georgians, but condemn their leaders. For if most western governments and commentators have focused on the high politics and historical echoes of the conflict – from Russia’s excessive military response to the implications for Georgia’s entry into Nato, from the role of the United States to echoes of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1968 – less attention than is warranted has been paid to Tbilisi’s contribution to the disaster.

In strict terms, the chief responsibility belongs to Georgia’s reckless and demagogic president, Mikhail Saakashvili. His precipitous launch of a brutal assault on the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali on the night of 7-8 August 2008 is worse than a crime: it is a terrible blunder. More broadly, however, the responsibility devolves onto the self-inflating nationalist ideology which traps Saakashvili and Georgians who think like him. Here, indeed, is a local manifestation of a universal problem. For while the particular circumstances of the latest Caucasian war have been ably analysed (not least on openDemocracy), it is important to broaden the discussion by exploring the role that the nationalist ideology of Saakashvili’s type – with its heady mix of vanity, presumption and miscalculation – has played in the modern world.

There is still a reluctance among many analysts of international relations to believe that local and / or "small" actors in a political situation – in this case the Georgian leadership – have their own agency, freedom of manoeuvre, and responsibility (a flaw that is shared by that particular kind of American – and of course "anti-American" – leftist for whom everything that happens in the world must by definition be the United States’s responsibility: an understudied genre of vulgar imperialism).

In fact, it is routinely impossible to make sense of almost any conflict or region without registering how much local states, opposition groups, or minority movements can act with considerable autonomy in pursuit of their own interests – even to the extent of manipulating (and on occasion deceiving) distant and more powerful "allies". There are many cases during the cold war, for example, where "third-world" states attacked their neighbours on their own accord yet were widely characterised as having acted on orders – as "clients", "proxies", "agents", "pawns"’. They include: Israel in attacking Egypt in 1967, and Lebanon in 1982; Turkey in invading Cyprus in 1974; Egypt in attacking Israel in 1973; Cuba in sending troops to Angola in 1975; Iraq in attacking Iran in 1980, and Kuwait in 1990.

The international context matters, but it is not determinant: what is determinant is the reading of that international situation, and the calculation of risks and opportunities, which the local leaders and political forces make. Sometimes they get it right. Cuba’s judgment that Washington, battered by defeat in Vietnam, would not stop its forces crossing the Atlantic to Angola in 1975, was one such – yet before he took that decision, Fidel Castro asked for a detailed analysis of opinion in the US Congress. More frequently, the leaders concerned are not so careful.

If the supreme responsibility of democratic leaders is indeed to protect their own peoples, then the briefest of comparative overview can show just how pernicious the impact of the kind of nationalist delusion displayed by Mikhail Saakashvili. His blundering into war over South Ossetia is but the latest example of how the nationalist obsession with the fetish of "territorial integrity" corrupts their worldview: for it entails a multiple refusal to look at reasonable, humane compromises; a misreading of international political realities; and a resort to destructive and often useless violence.

Here, the flaws of nationalism can match or exceed those of religion, in a way that offers a sidelight on the much-vaunted catch-all ascription of responsibility for modern conflicts to a supposed "clash of civilisations" (by which is usually meant "Islam"). But South Ossetia and its neighbours share a history where Christianity intermingles with empire (Georgian, Ottoman, Russian and Soviet) in the experience of its peoples. The chief agent of destruction is not to be found in "culture" (in the guise of religion or some other vague source of identity) but in the arrogance, recklessness and ignorance born of nationalist excess – which, to be sure, often uses religion and associated "cultural" offerings as part of its packaging. The problem is a political one; and where "cultural" differences are small – as in Transcaucasia, parts of the Balkans and Northern Ireland – the political conflicts can more than compensate.

The wind of blame

The case of Cyprus is illustrative in this regard. In July 1974 a group of right-wing Greek Cypriots, with the support of the junta in Athens, toppled the elected (and more moderate) government of Archbishop Makarios. At first it seemed that the world – even Turkey – had accepted it. I was in Cyprus at the time, and recall well conversations with Greek Cypriots to the effect that "The Turks will never invade. The Russians will stop them." So it went until the sky north of Nikosia was filled with the transport-planes despatched by Turkish prime minister Bülent Ecevit, out of which floated the Turkish paratroops coming to occupy the north of the city, and of the island – where they remain to this day.

Ever since, the Greek Cypriots have blamed everyone but themselves for this debacle: the Americans (who encouraged the Turks to invade because they wanted a base in northern Cyprus, at Kyrenia); the British (committed under a 1960 treaty to defending the integrity of Cyprus and with two bases on the island, who did nothing and so showed their historic "pro-Turkish" bias); the European Union and the United Nations (who have sought to impose unwanted solutions).

Similar miscalculations have dominated in the Palestine conflict. Few nationalist leaderships have shown such little strategic sense; ever since the re-emergence of a nationalist movement in the 1960s, policy has been led by militaristic rhetoric, a misjudgment of the regional and international situation, and misconceived sense of how friend and foes alike would react.

On two occasions the Palestinians, led by Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation, found themselves with forces, and considerable political support, in neighbouring Arab states: Jordan (1967-70) and Lebanon (1970-82). On each occasion the movement was carried away by delusions of power and of allied support far in excess of the reality, which led them needlessly to provoke local political forces and armed groups; the result was the destruction of their local bases and their expulsion from the country. In 2000, Arafat, faced with the failure of peace talks with Ehud Barak, agreed to support and promote a "spontaneous" uprising (the second intifada) He apparently imagined that, in so doing, he could break Barak’s political will and obtain more concessions: instead he got Ariel Sharon, who had ideas about to provoke a spontaneous uprising, and did a far better job of it in September 2000.

The Israelis themselves are possessed of a military efficiency, a strong international ally and a historic self-righteousness that at times has served them ill; but they have also repeatedly overplayed their own hand. They missed the historic opportunity to resolve the Palestinian issue in the aftermath of the 1967 war by withdrawing promptly from the territories they had occupied by force. In 1982 they blundered into a war in Lebanon, where they failed either to destroy their enemies, or to instal a client regime, and ended up eighteen years later in unconditional flight with a ferocious Hizbollah enemy on their tail.

For years the Israelis boasted that they had achieved complete control of Gaza, only in the end to pull out, leaving the terrain open for Hamas. Many citizens of the Israeli state must wonder what the costs of long-term intransigence and settlement expansion will be; and indeed if such a posture may, in the end, not produce the very dire consequences that Israel seeks to avoid.

The tide of failure

The blunders brought on by nationalist (and associated revolutionary) delusion of the 20th century are indeed global. There was the disastrous attempt by North Korea’s then president Kim Il-sung to seize South Korea in a sudden attack in June 1950, to be repulsed by a rapidly mobilised United States expeditionary force. Only the massive intervention of Chinese "volunteers" saved the communist regime from annihilation. The inhabitants of Baghdad may also recall the miscalculations of Saddam Hussein, in his invasions of Iran (1980) and Kuwait (1990). These comparatively more recent examples were long preceded by the classic such miscalculation of the Easter uprising of 1916 in Dublin. On that occasion a poorly armed insurrectionary force was defeated, and part of the city destroyed, by a British riposte as rapid and predictable as that of the Russian in Tskhinvali.

True, such miscalculations about the capabilities of one’s own forces and the reactions of others are not confined to small nations. Most major nations have many and larger blunders to their name: the Americans in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq; the British in Suez; the French in Vietnam, Suez and Algeria; the Russians in Afghanistan; the Italians and Germans in the 1930s and 1940s. The difference is that except in the most extreme of cases – notably Nazi Germany – these large states have been able to recuperate their losses and in large measure continue to inhabit their illusions of grandeur. Smaller peoples pay a higher price.

It is said that, when he took over from veteran Georgian leader Eduard Shevardnadze in 2004, Mikhail Saakashvili told the older man – known in Georgian as tetri melia (the white fox) – that he had had the chance to be the great founder of a new Georgia, but that he had missed the opportunity. Saakashvili‘s entrapment in nationalist delusion was always going to backfire. In the moment of Georgia’s latest agony, it will be little consolation that he has brought his country into the modern world in a very different way.

About the Author:

Fred Halliday is ICREA research professor at the Barcelona Institute for International Studies (IBEI)

His many books include Islam and the Myth of Confrontation (IB Tauris, 2003), 100 Myths About the Middle East (Saqi, 2005), and The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

This article is published by Fred Halliday,Global Geopolitics Net, and openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. I

Filed Under: Analysis, Conflict, Geopolitics, History, Politics

Al-Qaeda and the Question of State Sponsorship

August 24, 2008 By

Republished on Global Geopoltics Viewpoints
August 24, 2008

By Alan F. Fogelquist, Ph. D.
International Monitor Institute

Completed August 29, 2002

© Copyright 2002 Alan F. Fogelquist, Ph. D.

Introduction

Shortly after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush declared an open-ended “war on terrorism”. Within a few days, intelligence and law enforcement organizations in the United States and around the world had gathered massive evidence that the global terrorist network, Al-Qaeda, headed by Osama Bin Laden, had organized and financed the attacks which were carried out by cells whose members had been recruited, trained, and dispatched by the organization’s top operational leaders. [1] Al-Qaeda became the primary target in this war and the US government sought support from governments around the world.

At the center of many discussions on how to defeat Al-Qaeda are questions about the level of military, financial, and logistical support which the organization has received from existing governments or regimes. In the language of international relations and terrorism specialists this is the issue of state sponsorship.

This study traces the history of Al-Qaeda and reviews some of the most important evidence of state support for the organization and its affiliates.[2]
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Editor's Column, History, Middle East, Politics, Security, Terrorism

RUSSIA, BOSNIA, AND THE NEAR ABROAD

August 24, 2008 By

This article is being republished on Global Geopolitics Viewpoints because of its historical interest and relevance to recent events in Georgia.

Eurasia Research Center
1998

© Copyright 1995 Alan F. Fogelquist, Ph. D.

By Alan F. Fogelquist

Post Doctoral Scholar History Department University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA)

Paper Presented April 19, 1995 at the International Conference on Bosnia-Hercegovina Organized by Bilkent University and the Grand National Assembly of Turkey
INTRODUCTION

Although the present Russian policy towards former Yugoslavia is related to political developments inside Russia and the former Soviet republics, it is also the result of the unsuccessful international policy initiated in 1991 by the United States and Western European governments. Russian policy towards the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina has generally followed in tandem the policies of Western Europe and the United States. If the leaders of these countries had correctly diagnosed the nature of the conflict in former Yugoslavia and acted energetically to stop Serbia’s war of aggression against its neighbors, Russia might have followed suit. At the time of the impending breakup of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, the leaders of the United States and Western Europe failed to understand that the movement towards greater independence by non-Serbian and non-Russian nations had become irreversible. Instead of acting to encourage a peaceful and democratic separation of the members of the two multi-national states, the United States and European leaders tried to discourage political leaders in both the non-Serbian and non-Russian republics from seeking independence. When Croatian representatives came to the United States in the fall of 1990 to discuss a plan for the peaceful reorganization of Yugoslavia as a confederation, American Secretary of State James Baker and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, told them that the United States was not interested in such a plan. They were told that the Bush Administration favored the preservation of both Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union as unified states, if necessary, by military force.
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Filed Under: Conflict, Editor's Column, Geopolitics, History

REVIEW OF SOME LITERATURE ON POST-COMMUNIST – POST-SOVIET ECONOMIC "REFORMS"

August 22, 2008 By

REVIEW OF SOME LITERATURE ON POST-COMMUNIST – POST-SOVIET ECONOMIC “REFORMS” AND THEIR SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES

Republished on Global Geopolitics Viewpoints
August 22, 2008

By Alan F. Fogelquist, Ph. D.

EurasiaNews Analyst – December 4, 1998

(c) Copyright Alan F. Fogelquist – Eurasia Research Center, 1998

Here I present a quick review of some literature which reveals the complexity and inadequacy of reform efforts in the FSU. A reading of just some of the literature below will raise many questions about simplistic formulas for reform.

Two works which represent the viewpoints of western advisors to the Russian and other Post-Communist Transition governments are.

Anders Aslund, How Russia Became a Market Economy, Brookings, 1995

Jefferey Sachs, Wingt Thye Woo, and Stephen Parker, Economies in Transition, MIT, 1997.

In Russian similar views are presented by Yegor Gaidar in several works.

All of these books have a common two common characteristics. First, they go into considerable detail on the evolution of macro-economic policy, prices and exchange rates. Second, they contain very little detailed examination of what was happening in Russian enterprises as these policies were introduced, resisted, reintroduced etc.

These authors for the most part have attributed Russia’s woes to the resistance by members of the old nomenklatura to reform and the failure to continue the anti-inflationary monetary policies introduced by Gaidar in the first three months of the reform. Aslund’s book is particularly good for a detailed tracking of the policy changes and changes in aggregate prices during the first four years of the reforms. Aslund’s book is also useful in that he uses a language comprehensible to policy makers or laymen without advanced training in economics.
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Filed Under: Editor's Column, Europe, History

The Rise and Fall of Shining Path

May 6, 2008 By

Global Geopolitics Net
Tuesday, May 06, 2008

© Copyright 2008 Council on Hemispheric Affairs, COHA. All rights reserved.
Link to the original article on COHA.org

By Waynee Lucero, Research Associate, COHA.org

In the Beginning:

The Shining Path (Sendero Luminosos) Maoist guerrillas were formed by university professor Abimael Guzman in the late 1960s and were based upon Marxist ideology. At the time, Guzman was teaching philosophy at San Cristóbal of Huamanga University, while engaging in left-wing politics. He attracted many like-minded young academics to his cause of staging a radical revolution in Peru. He visited the Peoples Republic of China in the mid-1960s and his collection of inchoate ideas was profoundly influenced by a mumble-tumble of Maoist theories, which became the basis of the ideological foundations of the Shining Path. In 1980, he launched his campaign to overthrow the Peruvian government.

The Shining Path’s main goal was to destroy existing Peruvian political institutions and replace them with a communist peasant revolutionary regime, while resisting any influence coming from other Latin American guerrilla groups like the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), as well as from foreign ideologies. According to researchers, Shining Path’s basic strategy was to use violence to bring down the country’s imperfect democratic institutions, prevent citizens from participating in local government, destroy Peru’s economy, and to thwart government-sponsored programs to provide aid and services to the population. As a result of a series of clandestine meetings, Shining Path officials established a military school to teach young recruits military tactics and weaponry use. At first, Shining Path was successful in many of its endeavors because the Lima authorities were beset by organizational instability, corruption, and were ill-prepared to fight the internal war that would foreshadow the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent villagers caught in the middle of the struggle.

The Revolution Begins:

Shining Path formally initiated its uprising against the Peruvian government in 1980 after decades of inequality and marginality immiserated the peasantry. Led by Guzman, the revolution based itself mainly in the rural areas of the country where it carried out the bulk of its activities; this tactic had been used by other revolutionary guerrilla groups like Colombia’s FARC, due to usual presence of a weak government, as was the case in Peru. The country’s armed forces did not have the necessary physical presence in the area to allow it to effectively deploy against the revolutionary cadres. This lack of on-site military credibility on the government’s part gave Shining Path the opportunity to deploy its forces to wage an effective guerrilla war against its enemies with near impunity. Shining Path initially based its headquarters in the mountainous region of Ayacucho and Huanta, to the remote regions around the central selva and south of Vilcabamba (the site of the last Inca resistance). Characteristically, it launched attacks on agricultural areas in the Upper Huallaga Valley and the southern part of Puno, which also helped to sever any lingering urban ties for its recruits. Guzman played the role of all-powerful military and spiritual leader of his organization; in this sense, Shining Path was organized as a hierarchical cult rather than on a cell-based model.

Buying and Selling:

Similar to the FARC in Colombia and other revolutionary insurgencies, Shining Path in part funded its operations through the process of narcotrafficking, ransoms from kidnapping and forced taxes on small businesses and individuals. Shining Path also required Colombian dealers and buyers operating locally to pay higher than prevailing prices for raw coca in return for protection and the opportunity to buy weapons from them. Today, on a much smaller scale, Shining Path is attempting to revive and re-establish such a financial relationship. It has been listed by U.S. authorities as a terrorist organization based on the tactics it has utilized which include car bombings, kidnappings, and staged political assassinations. In 2006, Shining Path ranked 41 on the U.S. list of top terrorist organizations. Initially, Shining Path targeted local authorities (mayors, governors and mid-level bureaucrats) police barracks, and local political leaders. However, experts believe that by 1983, the group gradually began to target wealthy peasants and state agency heads with violence and the threat of abduction, as well as launched comparable attacks against left-wing activists, grass-roots organizers, and left-liberal intellectuals. This change in strategy eventually proved counterproductive for the insurgents because they were not able to capture the hearts and minds of the average Peruvian by their violent tactics. Instead, villagers were subject to the unremitting brutality by Shining Path and were unprotected by the military and intelligence services. Both the first Alan Garcia administration and his successor, Alberto Fujimori, used intimidation to tromp out local citizens. The Garcia government, as did the Belaúnde government before it, used tortures and randomly assassinated citizens for their alleged backing or at least sympathy for Shining Path.

Peruvian Citizens Caught in the Middle:

There is no doubt that the average Peruvian often experienced traumatic brutality from both government forces and Shining Path. The U.S. Department of State, among other sources, determined that the combined death total caused by several decades of conflict reached at least 70,000. The total death toll from the beginning of the uprising in 1980 to 1990, just before the decade-long conflict under Fujimori, can be found in a study conducted by DESCO, in which fatalities attributed to the conflict between the government and Shining Path have been carefully scrutinized. The mid-1980’s, during the Garcia administration, proved to be the years in which a surge of fatalities occurred. This includes casualties inflicted upon ordinary Peruvian citizens, government personnel and security forces, as well as Shining Path recruits. In the early years of the revolution, Shining Path was estimated to have ten to fifteen-thousand members; with its recruitment efforts targeted at the most poverty stricken areas of the country and in the Quechua-speaking part of the highlands. Harsh tactics were an integral step in the organization’s operation and its devilishly skillful propaganda efforts were employed to engage those in the general population who were experiencing the greatest degrees of injustice at the hands of Lima authorities. A key factor contributing to the large number of resulting fatalities in the uprising was that the government found it difficult to distinguish between a Shining Path member and an ordinary inhabitant of the Altiplano, because of the similar native attire. In 1983, President Belaúnde was reported to have announced a 60-day national state of emergency, in which he suspended civil liberties and gave the police broad powers to seize suspected guerrillas for up to ten days without charges. In this account, 200 people were reported as being arrested just 24 hours after the announcement was made. The country had been attempting to move towards democracy before Shining Path declared its war, but President Belaúnde’s action in declaring martial law along with several of these authoritarian initiatives, countermanded the democratic trend taking place in Peru. Ordinary citizens were forced to pay the price, as the then Peruvian leader earned the well-deserved reputation for tolerating human rights abuses.

Under Garcia and Fujimori, the country again found itself caught in the middle of mounting ideological strife and was made to suffer severe human rights abuses from both Shining Path and government forces.

Shining Path singled out the poor, indigenous populations, whose interests it disingenuously claimed to have at heart. It forced farmers to slash production to subsistence levels and to destroy whatever modern farm equipment the campesinos possessed. In addition, Shining Path imposed puritanical regulations that outlawed fiestas and prohibited drinking as part of a strategy of strong-arming local populations into submission and self-abnegation. Any person believed to be sympathetic to the government or to even slightly disagree with Shining Path’s fundamental beliefs, was a candidate to be tortured and killed. Outlandishly, Shining Path then abandoned its professedly leftist ideology and began to identify leftists as candidates to be kidnapped, tortured and/or murdered.

Not surprisingly, Shining Path failed to capture the hearts and minds of the natives due to this extremely bizarre metamorphosis. With leftist and trade union officials being specifically targeted, more and more Peruvians learned to lean more heavily in favor of government efforts to bear down on Shining Path’s revolutionary operations. In the DESCO study, leftist assassinations carried out by Shining Path began to rise a few years after the revolution was triggered—peaking in 1988 and then slowly declining. In 1992, now under Fujimori, assassinations increased drastically, and then dropped after Guzman’s capture. During the Garcia era, leftist assassinations were targeted against two main groups when ideological factors gave way to more bare-boned battles between Shining Path and the government: Garcia’s American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) and the more radical United Left (IU). Shining Path’s tactic to force individuals into submission was a strategy calculated to eliminate the competition. Considering its goals of ousting foreign influence and rival organizations, it was Shining Path’s sudden and unpredictable strategy to turn against its own people as well as like-minded potential allies which foredoomed its end. In the ensuing struggle, large numbers of deaths occurred, helping to transform its revolution into a stark case of conflicting interests. The question of principle was increasingly not in play.

In 1992, the Alberto Fujimori administration staged a coup against itself which led to the dissolving of Congress and the dismantling of the country’s legal system. This cynical ploy enabled his administration and the military police to carry out large numbers of murders and kidnappings of those though to be enemies of the state without having an opposition party or legal capacity capable of challenging various illegal acts.

The various degrees of power under the administrations Belaúnde, Garcia and Fujimori worked to subvert law and order more than to uphold it. Under these governments, Lima’s security forces exponentially increased the murders of ordinary Peruvians, who were suspected of being part of the Shining Path. In addition to the unrestricted power of the government, the Fujimori administration did little to solve the country’s stressful economic situation. Research reports at the time found that 4.5 million people in Peru were living in extreme poverty (lack of sanitation, water, electricity, and gas). Fujimori then sought to enlarge the death squads that carried out orders to kidnap, torture and murder those suspected of being part of the Shining Path or known to harbor anti-Fujimori sentiments. For example, in 1997, the gruesome discovery of anti-Fujimori activist Mariella Barreto Fiofano’s body was found with her hands cut off and spine broken in half. This demonstrated how far the regime was prepared to go in order to suppress and silence those it saw as its foes.

The Decline of Shining Path:

After his 1992 auto-coup, Fujimori took control of the press and almost all of the country’s other institutions, promising a return to democracy within a year. This formula enabled him to rule Peru by decree, with a massive number of killings taking place during this period as the result of fierce fighting between Shining Path and Lima’s security forces. On September 12, 1992, Abimael Guzman was captured by local authorities without a drop of blood spilled. This resulted in a major decrease of fatalities and the shrinking of the Shining Path’s armed effectiveness. One of Guzman’s top lieutenants had been interrogated after being detained and eventually was induced to reveal some of Guzman’s hiding places. By the local authorities rummaging through trash cans looking for any signs of his presence, the security forces were able to close in on him, finally locating him and placing him under arrest. Subsequently, Fujimori displayed him in an outdoor cage so the press could witness this act of public humiliation—simultaneously boasting of his success. Since capturing Guzman meant the destruction of Shining Path’s hierarchy, the group began to disintegrate due to organizational issues and opposition in the ranks. Research by DESCO demonstrates this decline in political assassinations of moderate leftist figures as part of the general trend after Guzman was captured. Looking back on the process, the government was able to bring down Shining Path, but only at the cost of suppressing civil rights and by carrying out a barrage of human rights violations against Peru’s general population. A few years after his capture, Guzman called for a supposed peace deal which caused the Shining Path to split into two groups: those who insisted on continuing to fight and those who wanted to put down their arms. Since then, the Shining Path has not come near having the success that it achieved as a guerrilla group in the mid-1980s. It has remained relatively quiet in comparison to the past, racking up relatively few kidnappings and murders.

The Return of Shining Path:

Recent reports show that Shining Path may be making something of a comeback, reorganizing its cadres and military capabilities to combat the Peruvian state. Over the past decade a number of Shining Path leaders have been peacefully apprehended. For example, news articles reported in 1999 that Ramirez Durand, who goes by the nom de guerre “Comrade Feliciano,” had been cornered, along with three women rebels, after being pursued for two weeks by a force of more than 1,500 commandos. Durand was captured without a shot being fired.

On March 25, 2008 Shining Path rebel members working with drug traffickers killed a police officer and wounded 11 on anti-drug patrols. The unit is said to have been led by one of Shining Path’s last remaining leaders—Comrade Artemio. Comrade Mono—who eventually was caught in March of this year was, in fact, part of another branch of the Shining Path hierarchy. Their apprehension demonstrated that police efforts have been achieving some success in dismantling the organization. Along with these efforts, Peruvian authorities currently hold ex-President Fujimori. Fujimori now faces trial for corruption, fleeing his presidential office, and the ordering of death squads. Others are to be tried for a range of human rights and law violations. This shows that Peruvians may finally be witnessing some sort of justice, rather than the past neglect of democratic standards and the exercise of privilege in the country. Peruvians are responding to this movement toward justice. “Human rights groups in Peru and family members of the victims killed in a 1992 massacre are celebrating now that four members of a paramilitary group will spend between 15 and 35 years in prison” (LivinginPeru.com).

In recent months, there have been accounts of political kidnappings and murders which could be an indication of the recrudescence of the Shining Path. Other reports have told of police forces closing in on them. Shining Path is rumored to be financing their reviving terrorist activities by charging for protecting drug-traffickers and intertwining the organization with coca production and distribution networks. Consequently, Peruvians may soon find themselves dealing with an increase in drug violence, a growing insurgency and an increase in government repression.

This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Associate Waynee Lucero
May 6th, 2008

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and information organization. It has been described on the Senate floor as being “one of the nation’s most respected bodies of scholars and policy makers.” For more information, please see our web page at www.coha.org; or contact our Washington offices by phone (202) 223-4975, fax (202) 223-4979, or email coha@coha.org.

Filed Under: Featured, History, Latin America

CHINA in Hu’s Colours—Part VII and Last

November 1, 2007 By

Global Geopolitics Net
Thursday, November 01, 2007

Copyright © B. Raman – South Asia Analysis Group
www.saag.org

By B. Raman

Economic and military strength go together. Without economic prosperity, there can be no military strength and without military strength, there can be no economic prosperity.

2. That was, in short, the theme of the observations of President Mr. Hu Jintao on China’s defence policy in the report presented by him, in his capacity as the Party Secretary, to the recently-concluded 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC). He described the responsibility of the armed forces as to obey the party and serve the people. He called for national defence with Chinese characteristics and the continued implementation of the concept of Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) with Chinese characteristics. However, he did not explain what those Chinese characteristics are or should be.

3. He called for an integrated attempt to make the Armed Forces more revolutionary, modernised and standardised. He also called for the acceleration of the mechanisation and computerisation of the Armed Forces and said they should be made capable of winning IT-based warfare.

4. Mr. Hu said: "We are determined to safeguard China’s sovereignty, security and territorial integrity and help maintain world peace." No one can object to this formulation provided the term territorial integrity means the integrity of the territory which constitutes China today. The problem which India faces in its relations with China arises from the fact that the Chinese speak of territorial integrity in the historical and not contemporary sense. Their concept of defence of territorial integrity includes not only the territory which is part of China today, but also which was, according to them, part of China historically and had been taken away from China by colonial powers. Under this category come India’s Arunachal Pradesh and certain other territory in the Western sector of the Indian border.

5. While there was no reference to the not-forward-moving Sino-Indian border talks during and in the margins of the Party Congress, Indian media reported just before the Congress, recurring instances of innumerable border intrusions by the Chinese troops. Two of these incidents are of worrisome significance. The first was an intrusion into Bhutan and the second was about the Chinese raising a pro forma objection to the Indian construction of two military bunkers inside Indian territory in Sikkim.

6. Apparently in its ill-advised anxiety to avoid any public airing of concerns before the visit of Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, the President of the Congress (I), to China and the expected visit of the Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, to China later this year, the Government of India has sought to play down the implications of these intrusions and to project them as unintended consequences of the differing perceptions about the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

7. One lesson which India learnt from its experience of dealing with China before the Sino-Indian war of 1962 was the folly of treating Chinese transgressions as unintended. There has always been a method in China’s transgressions, which are meant to assert periodically its territorial claims and exercise pressure on India to make territorial concessions.

8. Despite the positive spins put out by the Govt. of India from time to time about the progress supposedly being made in the border talks between the two countries, it is clear that the Chinese are determined to get satisfaction on their claims to what they project as southern Tibetan territory in Arunachal Pradesh. In fact, they look upon the entire Arunachal Pradesh as southern Tibet.

9. Their troops objecting to our Army constructing two bunkers in our territory in Sikkim cannot be dismissed as a minor incident of no consequence. The Chinese have de facto conceded Sikkim as a part of India by saying in 2005 that "Sikkim no longer constitutes a problem between the two countries." A de jure formalisation of this position will come only when the border talks lead to a settlement. Their renewed activism — even if verbal— on the border in the Sikkim area is an indicator that they might reverse their de facto concession on the status of Sikkim, if India does not transfer at least the Tawang Tract in Arunachal Pradesh to them. The Government of India will be repeating the pre-1962 follies if it relapses into the pre-1962 practice of playing down Chinese transgressions and volunteering to provide to the Chinese rationalisations of their transgressions.

10. In my previous articles, I had referred to the projected good behaviour of the Chinese in the months running up to the Olympics, but this has not prevented them from maintaining their campaign against the Dalai Lama and continuing with their policy of calculated border incursions to assert their claims. This underlines the need for our pressing ahead with our policy of military modernisation, improving our infrastructure in the border areas and revamping our intelligence apparatus so that it recovers the China-dedicated capabilities imparted to it after 1962, which have been allowed to rust since 2000.

11. One does not wish for a military confrontation with China. It will not be in the interest of either country. However, if a confrontation comes about, it will be on the land and in the air across the land border and not in the seas. In our eagerness to give a power projection capability to our Navy in the seas to the East of India, the Government should not be remiss in the exercise of its responsibility for giving the Army, the Air Force and the intelligence agencies the required capability for the protection of our territorial integrity. Concluded

(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. He is also associated with the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com)

Filed Under: Featured, Geopolitics, History, Political Systems, Politics
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