Desicritics Category: Politics: US

Drones for Pakistan - a Potential Game Changer

jay — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:26:32 EST

Soon after the US Defense Secretary Robert Gates left India's shores last week for Pakistan, came the announcement that the US was considering offering UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles popularly called drones) to Pakistan. This was supposedly to appease Pakistan to get them to join the US' war against al-Qaeda (see the New York Times story here).

Although the drone technology being provided is meant to be used against al-Qaeda it does not require a long stretch of imagination to see where it will end up getting used eventually - against India. It is appalling how neither the Indian establishment nor the Indian press has made any noise about this particular handout from the US to Pakistan considering the immense game changing quality of this deal.

Drones are essentially unmanned aircrafts the latest of which can fly for more than 2000 miles, stay unobtrusively at an altitude of about 3 kilometers and stay put in its position for even up to 14 hours. The latest advanced versions are able to sense the heat of human beings on earth from that height and precisely destroy something as small as a car from that height using Hellfire missiles with much less collateral damage than an F-16 would. These are therefore highly preferred by the Obama administration to eliminate terrorists in Pakistan, the most high-profile recent casuality being Beitullah Masud. The drone program is considered to be so successful that Mr. Obama has authorized more predator killings in hist first ten months than what Bush did in 3 years.

What is all the more striking about this is that being unmanned, these are actually controlled by operators who could be sitting anywhere in the world. According to experts, more questions about what it means to be "at war" is being raised due to this program. The operators of these drones are very often suburban home dwellers who drive down to their office for an 8 hour war from an air conditioned office (much like a video game) and then go home for dinner to their family. It is not clear how the concept of "being at war" itself will change with this kind of technology.

Admittedly, the US is wary of providing this technology to any other country as it provides them a military superiority over anyone else in the world. What they are offering Pakistan is only the surveillance technology and not the firing capability. However, this first step itself is going to introduce an inequality between India and Pakistan. Pakistan will now gain the capability to intrude into Indian airspace without being detected. And its Air Force will gain knowledge of the technology which is just one step behind the Predator missile-enabled technology.

From the deafening silence with which this news is being greeted by the Indian establishment, it is clear that the Indians were probably told and their acquiescence sought by the US before this offer was made. Perhaps that was one of the items in the agenda of Mr. Gates' visit last week. If so, it is a shame that India has agreed to this deal without thinking through the consequences. This is like the old Arabian tale of the camel and the sheikh. We are letting the camel just enough room to get his head into the tent to make him more comfortable. It won't be long before he occupies the whole tent throwing the sheikh out.

For more details on the Predator program, robotic warfare in general, and its consequences, here is an excellent book by P.W. Singer: Wired for War.

The Haiti Earthquake - Do Your Part for Relief

Aaman Lamba — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 10:14:51 EST

The Haiti disaster is beyond belief in terms of impact and relief organizations are scrambling to meet the need. Please contribute to the Haiti crisis through your local charity, company, or organizations such as the International Red Cross.

The situation is dire. The Haitian President said over 7,000 people were buried in a mass grave. The infrastructure is defunct, and the geopolitical implications are bleak for Haiti as a country. After shocks continue, with the mass of people on the streets amidst uncleared debris. Thousands of people are missing, presumed dead. Google has established a website for helping people find their missing loved ones, People Finder.

Relief flights are tied up in air traffic and at the small airport in Port-au-Prince. The police are insufficient to keep order and a U.N. food warehouse was looted as the people grow more desperate. American troops arrived in Haiti to speed up relief operations. While one might decry disaster capitalism, now is not the time to pick holes but to step up and do your part. As an illustration of how disasters can bring humanity together, Cuba allowed U.S. flights to fly over the island, reducing the flight time to Miami by 90 minutes. Major U.S. Telecom companies have waived charges for calls to and from Haiti, and on fees on SMS messages to charity organizations. Over $5 million has been raised through SMS campaigns thus far.

Here is a link to contribute through Google Checkout - Indian credit cards accepted - through UNICEF and CARE.

The International Red Cross donations page to efforts such as Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq, and more zones is another useful page.

As the ICRC puts it, when talking about this international disaster:

Our World, Your Move - In Haiti

It Takes Intelligence to Review & Deliver Intelligence

Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta — Fri, 8 Jan 2010 21:20:21 EST

This is the most amazing and honest report I have read. This Major General (U.S. Major General Michael Flynn) has shown huge courage to be brutally honest about the intelligence failings in the Afghan campaign and typically the press reports and the Pentagon have dumped on him. This is one reason the USA and its allies will win, because they learn (at least I hope they do). I would also hope that his maverick behaviour does not end up harming him, but given the courage and intelligence shown by General Petraeus and General McChrystal, his two respective bosses, I think not. But let us get back to the report and what a report it is! It is brutally honest. It cuts across the fog of organisational chaos by the ton and homes in directly, in a few short pages, on exactly where the problem is, giving some examples of where they are going right now and what they need to do.

But first the background. This report was written by the Head of Military Intelligence of the US forces in Afghanistan as a review report on how intelligence gathering is happening, what the objectives are, what the drawbacks are, and how to improve the procedures so it benefits the senior military leaders and the political masters.

Reading this report will also help the generals and ministers of any other country currently facing an insurgency or dealing with a terrorist campaign. If you look at Thailand, India, Pakistan, China, etc., they all need to read this report.

However, it is not only a must read for those, but actually also for those who are also facing not just direct insurgency campaigns. Are the people in the United Kingdom who are being faced with a domestic British Muslim terrorist campaign reading this? Are they adapting the lessons learnt from Afghanistan in this intelligence evaluation report with respect to the Islamic societies in British Universities and the mosques in the UK? The quiet neighbourhood doctor or engineer who is secretly planning to blow up a building or nightclub? How are the links between the society, the mosques, the press, the NGOs, the charities, the police, MI5 & MI6 and the ministers being managed?

I don’t think this is only applicable to terrorism or the military. I think this is equally applicable to big firms and financial institutions. Here’s a question you can ask any grand poobah of strategy or CEO or head of planning. Do they have a strategy for collecting product, customer, market, country, regulator, and other types of information which is relevant to what head of the business needs to know? Have they ever run a review akin to what this report does? How do they know the mass of information being produced at the coalface (and believe you me, there is a whole load of information that is produced - ranging from product information, customer details, trading details, supply chain information, contact reports and emails, etc. )? How are they aggregated, distributed, sliced, fed up, sideways and down the chain? I quote from the report:

“Creating effective intelligence is an inherent and essential responsibility of command. Intelligence failures are failures of command – [just] as operations failures are command failures.”

In other words, if you as a senior manager are not getting sufficient information, then the responsibility of getting that information is yours, not somebody else’s and you need to take responsibility for this The execution, however, can be done by your head of MI, sales, COO, etc. etc.

There are absolute gems hidden in this report, which again have implications for both the military and civilian businesses. I am going to quote them and try to comment on them to clarify what I mean.

The second inescapable truth asserts that merely killing insurgents usually serves to multiply enemies rather than subtract them. This counterintuitive dynamic is common in many guerrilla conflicts and is especially relevant in the revenge-prone Pashtun communities whose cooperation military forces seek to earn and maintain. The Soviets experienced this reality in the 1980s, when despite killing hundreds of thousands of Afghans, they faced a larger insurgency near the end of the war than they did at the beginning.

This is far too common. Just measure the number of body bags (as was done in Vietnam), or the number of meetings held with customers or the revenue per customer, etc, these are often metrics that are used to judge progress or performance. But is that really what the military or corporate strategy is? No, that’s not it. The military strategy is to provide security and allow or support a fairly stable governance in Afghanistan so the Taliban’s bent of ideology and governance backed by their rage boys cannot take root. Yes, there are other requirements as well, but the objective is not to kill the Taliban, but to take the moral, civil, economic and military ground away from them. This might mean (and does mean) popping off the relevant commanders and does include having fire-fights, but you don’t measure by this metric. One needs intelligence and analysis to supports decision making. Similarly on the business front, far too often metrics drive management and strategy. We need to grab customer loyalty. No, we want customers to not only give us their business, but help us get more business by recommending us to other customers. That cannot be achieved, managed and delivered by measuring the number of calls you make to the customer, it needs a much broader sense of information. Otherwise, what you will end with is a huge body count or a huge list of contact reports, but lose the war or the business.

What are the barriers in getting this information?

“The barriers to maximizing available intelligence are surprisingly few. The deficit of data needed by high-level analysts does not arise from a lack of reporting in the field. There are literally terabytes of unclassified and classified information typed up at the grassroots level. Nor, remarkably, is the often-assumed unwillingness to share information the core of the problem. On the contrary, military officers and civilians working with ISAF allies, and even many NGOs, are eager to exchange information. True, there are severe technological hurdles, such as the lack of a common database and digital network available to all partners, but they are not insurmountable.

People often think that they need a giant new CRM system, network, or a database or that they have to establish big hairy governance bodies aligned with massive organisational transformation or dual / triple reporting lines. Not really, frankly that is rarely the problem. But it’s an easy solution, mind you, because it provides a concrete “something” that you can touch and deliver. Why do most of the business intelligence projects fail? They do because the fixation is on the damn system, database, network and not on the information or the culture or the strategy. An example where many of these issues have been resolved and fixed is the investment banking business, which is perhaps one of the most efficient legal sustainable moneymaking organisations known to man, with the exception of loan sharking or drug running or Ponzi trading. Data is always there, people LOVE to talk and give you information. But one needs to listen, read, review, pass up and down and sideways. See what the report says further:

The most salient problems are attitudinal, cultural, and human. The intelligence community’s standard mode of operation is surprisingly passive about aggregating information that is not enemy-related and relaying it to decision-makers or fellow analysts further up the chain. It is a culture that is strangely oblivious of how little its analytical products, as they now exist, actually influence commanders.
It is also a culture that is emphatic about secrecy but regrettably less concerned about mission effectiveness.1 To quote General McChrystal in a recent meeting, “Our senior leaders – the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, Congress, the President of the United States – are not getting the right information to make decisions with. We must get this right. The media is driving the issues. We need to build a process from the sensor all the way to the political decision makers.”

I would add another factor when discussing the impact on commercial firms. We have lost layers of middle management in the previous few decades, which has had an impact on the organisational ability to aggregate. I have nothing much further to add to the points above. Pretty self explanatory, no?

Nowhere does our group suggest that there is not a significant role for intelligence to play in finding, fixing, and finishing off enemy leaders. What we conclude is there must be a concurrent effort under the ISAF commander’s strategy to acquire and provide knowledge about the population, the economy, the government, and other aspects of the dynamic environment we are trying to shape, secure, and successfully leave behind. Until now, intelligence efforts in this area have been token and ineffectual, particularly at the regional command level. Simply put, the stakes are too high for the stability of Afghanistan and Pakistan, for NATO’s credibility, and for U.S. national security for us to fail in our intelligence mission. The urgent task before us is to make our intelligence community not only stronger but, in a word, “relevant.”

We are now faced with a set of very challenging, complex economic, social and political conditions across the world. This will require intelligence, information and data to be provided to managers - up and down the chain - in a significantly different manner. The firms which manage to crack this will win. I don’t have to tell you the changes that we are going to face in the next 3-5 years, but how to react to them? Well, a good management information, business intelligence, strategy and planning function can assist in doing this much better. In other words, yes, deal with the tactical bits, but don’t forget the strategy and the broader basis for analysis.

The example of Nawa was brilliant. Within the British area of operations, they were getting killed day in and day out. And the British thought the Americans knew nothing about COIN. Now look at what the Americans did. This might well be conflicting information and may be counted as national chest thumping, but by heck, the 1st Btn, 5th Marines gave an example of how to wage broad war. He quotes an example of how they avoided the issue of logistical problems.

The battalion intelligence officers refused to allow the absence of a data network to impede the flow of information. Each night, the deputy intelligence officer hosted what he called “fireside chats,” during which each analyst radioed in from his remote position at a designated time and read aloud everything learned over the last 24 hours. Using this approach, daily reports incorporated a wide variety of sources: unclassified patrol debriefs; the notes of officers who had met with local leaders; the observations of civil affairs officers; and classified HUMINT reports. The deputy intelligence officer typed up a master report of everything called in by analysts and closed each “chat session” by providing them with an updated list of questions – called “intelligence requirements” – for the companies to attempt to answer.
In the earliest days of the operation, many of these questions dealt with basic logistical matters, such as the location and conditions of roads, bridges, mosques, markets, wells, and other key terrain. Once these were answered, however, the focus shifted to local residents and their perceptions. What do locals think about the insurgents? Do they feel safer or less safe with us around? What disputes exist between villages or tribes? As the picture sharpened, the focus honed in on identifying what the battalion called “anchor points” – local personalities and local grievances that, if skillfully exploited, could drive a wedge between insurgents and the greater population. In other words, anchor points represented the enemy’s critical vulnerabilities.

Please note the second paragraph above. This shows that a smart intelligence officer (or a BI person in a corporation) understand the value of time. The same questions will not be asked all the time, there is an element of time, and things move on, questions change, the environment changes, you build on what you have got, evolve your strategy and questions. This means that it’s a learning organisation. It’s an important point which is often forgotten, that just when you have found the answer to the question, somebody goes and changes the question. Your organisation should have the ability to understand this, crack this an be able to handle these changes and then evolve to answer the changed question.

The report then moves into a detailed discussion of how the recommendations will work out in the Afghan theatre, which is very much unique to Afghanistan, presuming he knows more than I on the situation on the ground and will not comment more on this part. However, the organisation that he is suggesting is eerily similar to how commercial organisations are also setup. It might be an idea for commercial analysts to check back or back-test their MI or BI organisation and operating model against this. It might give them some ideas.

Like the NGO’s mentioned on page 20, the investor relations department and the corporate communications department could benefit from these organisational and operating model recommendations. They frequently need this information for the analysts, the shareholders, the regulators, press, etc. etc. Good information like this will almost certainly have a definite impact on the stock price and on the reputational risk of the firm.

So what do you do? I loved this quote:

Doing so will require important cultural changes. Analysts must absorb information with the thoroughness of historians, organize it with the skill of librarians, and disseminate it with the zeal of journalists.

Brilliant! This is an absolutely stonking formulation. It’s pretty straightforward and you know immediately what you need to do. We know what historians, librarians and journalists do and we can relate to that function.

There’s another great comment:

The format of intelligence products matters. Commanders who think PowerPoint storyboards and colour-coded spreadsheets are satisfactory for describing the Afghan conflict and its complexities have some soul-searching to do. Sufficient knowledge will not come from slides with little more text than a comic strip. Commanders must demand substantive written narratives and analyses from their intel shops and make the time to read them. There are no shortcuts. Microsoft Word, rather than PowerPoint, should be the tool of choice for intelligence professionals in a counterinsurgency

I was perhaps one of the worst offenders for PowerPoint use, but over the past 4-5 years, I have realised the value of a word document. It forces people to think about what they are writing and arguing about, especially for senior management. People spend hours and days mucking around with graphics and fancy animation when a short summary of one-page distils things down. This forces people to think about what are they trying to achieve, what decision they want their audience to take and whether the information they are providing is enough to help them take that decision?

Here’s another interesting point:

Historical lessons run the risk of sounding portentous, but disregarding them comes at a high price. History is replete with examples of powerful military forces that lost wars to much weaker opponents because they were inattentive to nuances in their environment. A Russian general who fought for years in Afghanistan cited this as a primary reason for the Soviet Union’s failures in the 1980s

History is indeed a vast early warning system and people who forget the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them. I know, I know, you are going to tell me that nobody has ever won in Afghanistan, not in any war, at any time, but hey, guess what? They didn't do the nuances either. Think about how the Mughal Empire managed to rule over Afghanistan for such a long time. They were not locals, they were invaders as well, so if pointing to the British and Soviets as a reason for saying that NATO will lose in Afghanistan, one should realise that the Mughals did win.

While we are not adopting the Mughal way of conquest and rule, the reason I think we will win is because we have Generals who have the courage to write reports like this, others who have the patience to read it, the confidence to realise that we are going down a wrong route and the humility to make changes. As it so happens, the US Secretary of Defence has now stated that he loves the report and would like to see the recommendations implemented. Sometimes being a maverick helps.

All this to be taken with a grain of salt.

Another Bungled Blow-up: Passengers Safe, Suspect Apprehended

temporal — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 22:04:46 EST

Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on the runway after arriving at Detroit Metropolitan Airport from Amsterdam. Northwest and Delta have merged. (J.P. Karas / Associated Press)

They arrived safely. It was a merry Christmas for the 278 passengers aboard Northwest/Delta flight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

Republican Congressman Peter King identified the suspect as Abdul Mudallad, a Nigerian. King said the flight began in Nigeria and went through Amsterdam en route to Detroit.

The alleged terrorist tried to set fire to an 'incendiary device' as the plane began its descent.

The suspect, identified by a U.S. government official as 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was placed in custody and is being treated for second- and third-degree burns on his thighs, according to federal law enforcement and airline security sources.

The sources said the suspect flew into Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam on a KLM flight from Lagos, Nigeria, and is not believed to be on any "no fly" list, although his name does appear in a U.S. database of people with suspect connections. He did not undergo secondary security screening in Amsterdam, the administration official said.

The administration official said there was no evidence that Abdulmatallab was a hard-core, trained member of al-Qaeda.

According to Syed Jafri, who was sitting three rows in front according to CNN, or three behind according to CBC and L A Times, a young man jumped on the alleged terrorist and subdued him.

He suffered minor body burns and is being hospitalised.

***

Questions:

* How much more can the airport security be tightened?
* Is there a better way to detect potential terrorists?\/
* Will this lead to more racial and ethnic profiling?
* Why don't they stop all carry on save medicines, diapers and baby food?
* What is the IQ of the alleged terrorist? (The timing of the act).

No Cop-out At Copenhagen

jay — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 06:57:18 EST

The lights have been put out at the Bella Center after two hectic weeks of heated debates in Copenhagen. To most observers, the net result of all that hullabaloo was nothing much to cheer about. After much hype and fanfare leading up to the event, it was somewhat of an anti-climax to see the delegates returning home empty handed. Although on first look it does not seem to augur well for the world that nothing happened at 'Hagen, I think there are a few intangibles that have been achieved that can take the momentum forward to Mexico next year.

For one, the US is now firmly in the ring. This was of course expected with the change in leadership in Washington. After 8 years of being against the green movement politically, the US has now assumed its role as the primary mover in these negotiations. It was evident in the way Mr. Obama and his team wanted to wrest the initiative and come up with something at the end (for him to boast of, back home!) even if it meant some arm-twisting. Whether it was in the right spirit or not, at least it set an agenda for the coming years to work on and puts the US rightly at the center of it.

Another positive is that China has now agreed to be a major player. Mind you, without the US and China leading this effort, there was no way any meaningful mitigation would result out of anything any one else would do. Not only has China agreed to be a major player, it has even agreed to make its effort verifiable. Now, one could say that for a country like China, this is easily done. Given the opaque nature of whatever it does and the thick hide it possesses, it is easy for China to agree to something, cook up the numbers when required or even to renege on commitments with impunity. However, the silver lining is that there are indications that China understands that worsening environment is detrimental to its own citizens more than any one else and has repercussions for the continuation of the Communist party regime in Beijing.

India, South Africa and Brazil got some brownie points to boast of. They were given recognition as emerging powers with a say in world affairs (as the BASIC group) and can at least be privy to what is being decided if not have a vote.

Another positive outcome of the meet has been the pledge by advanced nations to provide $100 billion of annual payouts to developing countries and technology transfers to help them mitigate the effects of climate change while transitioning to newer greener methods of energy production. This is a great achievement for the South as the North was never ready to acknowledge this need so far.

There are those who would declare that this conference has been a washout given that no legally binding requirements were agreed upon. It should be remembered that legally binding or not, if the adoption of green technologies resulted in a country losing out economically, those requirements would be chucked out the window. So, it is critical that every one have a say in the final outcome and that it not be shoved down some people's throats. With 192 members to agree on such a draft is going to take some time. We need to be patient and thank the leading countries for moving the talks in Copenhagen forward rather than backward.

2010-11: Crucial Period for South Asia

jay — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 01:05:45 EST

The coming two years are likely to be 'make-or-break' years for the future security situation in Central and Southern Asia. By 2011, the US will have decided what it would like to do in Afghanistan and Pakistan and what their role in this region is going to be. President Obama would like to begin the withdrawal of his troops from there by 2011 with an Afghanistan that is stable and functioning. But the situation on the ground in all likelihood will be very different from what he is planning for. Here is why.

Mr. Obama's plan hinges heavily on having a cooperative and willing ally in Pakistan. And that is where his hinges begin to come loose. He needs a Pakistan that will not provide a safe haven to the Afghan Taliban leaders. A Pakistan that is willing to wage a proxy war for the Americans against their own self interest. He is just not going to get that.

As far as Pakistan is concerned, there are three different extremist groups in their midst which the government views as operating in their own silos, each with a different purpose.

1. The Afghan Taliban - comprising the Pashtuns and their brethren who have spilled over into Pakistan - who are only interested in capturing Kabul. It is in Pakistan's interest that they win in their endeavor so that they can have a friendly regime in Afghanistan to encircle India. So their leaders - Mullah Omar, Osama bin Laden et al, continue to live in Pakistan and run their operations from there with impunity. This is the same gang that hijacked the Indian Airlines plane in 1999 and are definitely anti-India.

2. The anti-India militants - LeT and others - whom Pakistan likes to encourage and support to wage a war against India by a thousand needle pricks. Despite all the noises India makes, neither does Pakistan want to do anything about it, nor does America think it is their business.

3. The Pakistani Taliban which is waging a war against their own government . They would like to eliminate them and the Americans are today helping them in this endeavor using drones (e.g. Baitullah Mehsud's elimination two months ago).

The Pakistan government and the military are only interested in eliminating the Pakistani Taliban while nurturing and feeding the other two extremist groups. The US is trying to get Pakistan to fight the Afghan Taliban, with no luck so far. There is no reason to believe that Pakistan will change their tacks now given that the US is not interested in staying in the region for ever. Lost in this melee is India's opprobriums to rein in the LeT and other groups waging a war against India. So, given that Pakistan has a very narrow goal which does not align either with the US's goals or India's goals it is not very difficult to see how Mr. Obama is never going to get any help from Pakistan.

There are only two reasons why Pakistan does not want to tell the US off, when there is no confluence of interests between them.

1. Pakistan needs the billions of dollars that they get from the US by feigning cooperation and play-acting as if they are doing the Americans' bidding.

2. The US already has quite a good handle on the nuclear weapons installations in Pakistan and in the eventuality that they tell the Americans off, they could move in to secure, takeover or eliminate them completely.

Therefore, Pakistan continues to play the double game with the Americans. Mr. Obama and his administration have at last realized this game that Pakistan is playing (Mr. Bush never paid attention and never understood this), but their hands are tied. The Americans do not want to spend their own blood and toil on a lost cause, and they have no one else to rely on except Pakistan. India will not, under any circumstances, do the Americans' bidding. Nor will China. The other major country in the region is Iran. Less said the better about the relationship between the US and Iran (ironically, Iran is against the Taliban taking control over Kabul - talk about the confluence of interests!!).

Perhaps one of the most muddleheaded things that Mr. Obama did in his speech on Afghanistan was in setting the deadline for troop withdrawal (later clarified as the beginning of withdrawal). This has given a clear signal to both the Afghan Taliban and Pakistan that the US does not have the stomach for a fight and all they need to do is to wait it out for another two years. So, one can expect reasonable calm for the next two years. This will give Mr. Obama his fig leaf to claim that they have established control over the region and begin the withdrawals. What happens after that will be chaos and India and other countries in the region better watch out for the repercussions. It could even undermine the economic progress we have made so far in the past two decades if the security of our borders is not strengthened.

An important threat that should also be noted is that although the Pakistan government continues to treat the three exrtemist groups as separate entities, there is a lot of co-mingling between the three groups. This was established with evidence by the US recently, complicating matters a lot for every one in the region. As it usually happens, the three could coalesce at some point in the future and direct their energies at a single target. The first target in such an eventuality could very well be the Pakistan government, because they possess the ultimate holy grail that can be easily pried off - the nuclear weapons.

We are in for precarious times and unless India is prepared for this eventuality we could find ourselves being subject to major security situations after 2011. The Indian government's responses so far to such breaches do not give us much hope. So, we can only pray that things do not turn out as bad as I have portrayed here.

Obama's Surge in Afghanistan

jay — Sat, 5 Dec 2009 11:47:22 EST

So, the Af-Pak announcement has finally been delivered by President Obama after considerable calculations and hand wringing. As expected, it was meant to get as many people under his tent as possible. But given that there was no good choice in front of him in the first place, it probably got many people to get away from his tent than get in.

After nearly one year on the job a couple of things are emerging crystal clear in this presidency. One, Mr. Obama believes fervently that it is possible to get people to come together if only you can show your sincerity and show the big picture to them. So far, it is not working. Second, he believes that allies will remain allies anyways, so it is more important to woo your tormentors even if your allies are let out to pasture. The problem with this approach is that international politics often requires hard bargaining using carrots with a clear intent of use of force as the backup stick to bring rogues to submission. Mr. Bush erred on the side of the stick in getting the job done. Mr. Obama seems to be erring on the side of the carrot with no stick in the background.

Israel is one example, where Mr. Netanyahu was able to call the bluff of Mr. Obama and defy his pronouncement on settlements with impunity. Iran is another where the stick is nowhere to be seen and therefore is encouraged to defy the nuclear reprocessing pact being talked about. If this approach continues, there will be others who will be encouraged to defy the US on various issues and teh writ of the US will no longer run anywhere in the world. If Mr. Bush's approach was far too much to one side, Mr. Obama's seems to be far too much to the other side.

On the Afghanistan front, Mr. Obama has decided on a surge of tropps but has set a timetable for the beginning of withdrawal. It appears that he wanted each party to hear only certain lines of his speech. So, while he was warning the Taliban and al-Queda with the surge, he wanted his domestic audience to only hear about the withdrawal, and Pakistan to only listen to the "partnership" piece. However, each party has focused on the wrong parts of his speech, so no one is happy. The domestic audience is not happy with the surge, the Taliban will simply wait out their time for the withdrawal, and Pakistan will simply continue their war of attrition with India because the US is no longer going to be around in the region in 2 years.

In this process, India as an ally has been given the short end of the stick. It is difficult to get India to do anything in Afghanistan because Pakistan would not like it. China is not very interested in getting involved in the quagmire. India's issues with Pakistan as far as terrorism is concerned, is simply being given lip service.

Movie Review: Kurbaan - Typically Stereotypical

PH — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:37:37 EST

Kurbaan proves yet again – if proof were needed – that Karan Johar is incapable of churning out anything but the worst stereotypes. Harsh, perhaps, but it is my honest assessment of his work so far.

In Kuch Kuch Hotaa Hai, for instance, Rahul (SRK) is attracted to Anjali (Kajol) only when she trades in her Western outfits for sarees, loses a basketball game to him, and drops her pallu for his gaze. This is as offensive to men as it is to women. In Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, the women suffer silently to feed a patriarch’s gargantuan ego, and when he finally caves in – presto! – all those tears that poor saas and bahu had shed are suddenly water under the bridge.

True, Hindi cinema isn’t exactly big on independent women with a mind (let alone sexuality) of their own. But, unlike Johar’s films, there’s no duplicity in the works of the other blockbuster directors. So when Sooraj Barjatya makes a Hum Aapke Hain Kaun or a Vivaah, he seems to believe in his work; the universe of these films, and the characters that inhabit that universe are extensions of his world view – the sincerity shows. Whereas Johar’s yuppiness on his talk show (his rather bold assertion, for instance, that he doesn’t believe in the institution of marriage) doesn’t quite square with his championing of the traditional on celluloid. There is a cynical marketing strategy at work here: given the big bucks he puts in to a film, he’d rather pander to an imagined lowest common denominator than speak his mind - a deception that is the politician’s stock in trade.

Johar may liken himself to Yash Chopra, but no woman in his films has ever had an iota of Rekha’s sexuality in Silsilaa (which, incidentally, never made the kind of money Johar's films do). In fact Johar is closest to Ekta Kapoor. (That both have a 'K' fixation is no coincidence. When you don't believe in your work, superstition is all you've got. Unless, of course, Johar doesn't know that the word is qurbaan). Since he doesn't understand the characters he creates, stereotypes are all he can come up with – it may not be intentional but it is inevitable.

In Kurbaan, the worst stereotypes are the Muslim characters: Riyaaz (Vivek Oberoi), the only young Muslim male who isn't a terrorist, asserts that he's American and that “our side” is the embedded media version of events; his father, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, sides with “his people” on religious grounds (“mazhab se wafaadaarii”). No one objects to the American invasions on secular, humanist bases: the issue here is framed in a classic 'with us or against us' binary. The Muslims live in eerie suburbs, killing wives and planning attacks in their spooky basements; the “ali maula” number plays in the background when the terrorists are carrying out their dastardly attacks; the damsel in distress is a liberal Hindu girl (couldn't she have been Muslim, or is that asking for too much imagination?) who probably should've respected her father's reservations about marrying a Muslim. (At one point, I hoped that the heroine would turn out to be paranoid-schizophrenic, driven by the desolate suburbia and an Electra complex to imagine the worst about Muslims – some kind of a comment on latent biases. Then I remembered it was a Karan Johar movie.)

To top it all, there's the Hannity and Colmes phenomenon - the good Muslim is Vivek Oberoi and the terrorist is Saif Ali Khan. Guess which one is more charismatic. If the Muslims have it bad, the Anglo-Saxon Americans aren't spared either. The white students that speak out in a classroom debate are all pro-war – a gross misrepresentation if there ever was one; and the cops are geeky, clueless and ineffective. There isn't a shred of the nuance or sensitivity we've seen in Kabir Khan's Kabul Express and New York, or Mira Nair's short on 9/11. All we have is insiduous stereotypes - all unintended perhaps, but inevitable, given the absence of conviction.

Even if you look past the issues of representation, the pretensions of topicality, and the simple minded politics, the script is riddled with craters left over by blasts – far too many to enumerate.(And what on earth was Anurag Kashyap doing co-writing dialogues for this?) Someone in the row behind mine quipped, “Should've stayed home and napped”. “Curb-yawn huwaa”, anyone?

Politics - Going Rogue

Arundhati Thapar — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:12:34 EST

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely - these words ring true of not only the entire socio political setup of this world that we live in but also of things on a much smaller stage - everyday living and issues surrounding who rules who?

It would be an interesting experiment to give power in the hands of the downtrodden of today - the ones who curse the system and wish politicians dead. Would they then establish a just world order or fall prey to the very temptations and machinations they abhor today?

Would this then answer the quintessential question? Chicken or egg? Which came first?

Is it the wrong kind of people who go into politics, accumulate wealth and become powerful and then perpetrate the hideous culture that has become the hallmark of politics across the globe?

Or is it normal people ...people like you and me, but maybe with a dash more of ambition thrown in, who get into politics, wake up to the immense thrill and kick that power gives and then start on the journey of corruption to maintain that power?

Two old political scandals, or shall I say mishaps, have returned to the fore in the public arena this week. They belong in two different continents but the undertones are similar....

As the Chilcot enquiry begins its work to look into the legality of the war in Iraq, the most palpable sentiment around is hatred for Blair. Yet this is a man who could do no wrong a few years ago. A darling of the masses, twice elected to power, with a huge halo round his head and the glow of his charismatic personality radiating far and wide.

Did Tony Blair start off as a well meaning Prime Minister who seriously wanted to do the right thing, defend democracy around the world and establish a just world order? Few believe this today but in the heydays of Labour supremacy in Britain, he did have people enthralled by his sharp oratory and the look of earnestness about him. Did he start off as a smarmy, sly man or was it years in politics that made him cynical to the extent that many now are ready to believe he took the country into an illegal war? How cynical do you have to be to do something you know will cause immeasurable death and destruction, reduce an entire nation to a rubble and ruin the lives of generations to come?

Opponents of the war hope the inquiry will establish that the decision to invade Iraq was illegal and based on flawed or deliberately misleading intelligence about the risks posed by Saddam Hussein. Whatever else the enquiry achieves, simply by being in the news the past few months, it has played a major role in Blair losing out in the race to be EU President.

The other case in point is our very own L K Advani. In a dramatic turn of events, -the Liberhan commission report, which was 17 years in the making, was tabled after details of its conclusions - apparently implicating top leaders of the Hindu nationalist opposition in the Babri masjid destruction - were leaked on monday, triggering uproar in the lower house. Personally, I have always found it extremely difficult to digest that Advani and co had at any point acted out of 'Ram bhakti'. It never was a campaign of moral outrage against historical acts of vandalism or a campaign to reignite religious sentiments in the hearts of the non believers. It always was a cynical political act directed towards exploiting the extreme naivety of the electorate, wasn't it? Yet at the time, even the intelligentsia was divided about whether to celebrate or lament their growing influence.

Who knows if these two men started out believing in a just cause and simply 'went rogue'. (Ha ha....could not keep our darling Ms Palin out of this) Time will tell.

Will Obama be a One-term President?

jay — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:00:46 EST

It has been a year since Mr. Barack Obama was elected president and about 10 months since he assumed office. When he was elected as the first African- American president of the United States, hope swelled among the ordinary people of the country. They anointed him as "The Chosen One" and believed that he was capable of performing miracles. Alas, that very same hyperbole of hope is beginning to break at the seams. And when the mighty fall, they do fall with a thud. Let me explain.

Mr. Obama inherited a presidency with insurmountable problems which probably would take years or decades to clean up. His oratory skills, charm and charisma brought him to the office, but when the time for action came he has fallen short, at least so far. He promised to clean up the politics in Washington. Admittedly, the politics in Washington is so sleazy that no one person can hope to clean it up. But he promised the moon to the voters to clean it all up and to build a bipartisan model of cooperation.

Of course every candidate promises that and no one ever believed them. But Obama was an outsider and believable, so they fell hook, line and sinker for him. However in the past year, the politics in Washington has degenerated to a level of partisanship not seen in many years. Cases in point : heckling of the President by a senator during an address to the Congress; boycott of his speech in August to the school children of the country; a senator openly calling to make his health care agenda his Waterloo; Rush Limbaugh, a partisan Republican big mouth declaring that it is important to have Obama fail even if the country goes down with him, etc.

There are other things as well. The health care debate has got so ugly in the past 6 months that they are way behind the August deadline for passing it through the Congress, despite the majorities enjoyed by the Democrats in the House and the Senate. Even now, the bill that will come out at the end of it all is still a mystery as there are enough factions and interest groups to sway it one way or another.

The climate change bill that was to have passed prior to the Copenhagen summit is still hanging and neither the House nor the Senate even expects to look at it before next year.

And the biggest of all, while the economy is declining and job losses are mounting, the Wall Street fat cats are paying themselves hefty bonuses under the administration's watch. This has rankled the taxpayers and many an Obama supporter is becoming an Obama hater. Although most reasonable thinking people are able to understand the complexities in untangling this mess, the man on the street who has lost his job would justifiably have no time for niceties and explanations. He is willing to desert Obama and the Democrats if only he could find an alternative.

On the International front, he started with a bang by addressing the Muslim population of the world from Cairo. He was quickly seen as the "un-Bush" and America began to be loved by many all over again. However, that love has not lived for long. Israel is bristling with anger at the Americans for turning their backs on the settlements issue. He has plenty of other problems like Afghanistan where the interminable wait for a decision seems to point to the possibility that it is all going to end in a thud. Pakistanis are no longer enamoured of his multi-billion dollar help (although they still love the money!).

India probably got a really bad deal from the White House. It is clear by now that Barack Obama is not a great believer in the India story (the upcoming Manmohan Singh visit is not expected to change anything!). He seems to have discounted the strategic role that India can play in the region and the world stage (unlike Bush and Clinton who both saw great potential for India towards the end of their terms!). He, as the Great Pacifier, has decided that rather than containing and encircling China in a bear hug, it is better to partner with them as an equal. In that goal India needs to be dispensed with. He even went to the extent of declining a meeting with the Dalai Lama to please the Chinese.

India can be an ally and can be useful at times as a faithful friend in the region. But beyond that he does not see much use for the country. This is an unfortunate development which the policy wonks in Delhi understand but can't do anything about.

The recent losses in the elections, the highly rancorous health care debates both in the Congress and on the street (with gun-toting Republications gracing Town Hall meetings), the state of the economy and high unemployment, and the strain of two wars - all are taking a toll on the presidency. There is clear evidence of a crack in Mt. Obama and it appears that he is beginning his downhill climb from the summit. In the past year his approval ratings have fallen considerably while his disapproval ratings have risen appreciably.

Perhaps his charm and goodwill will still see him through as he tackles one problem after the other while convincing his country men of the difficult times ahead. Perhaps the "do-nothing presidency" (from a skit in Saturday Night Live) will turn into a "do-everything" one soon. It was after all the Audacity of Hope that brought him to office.