By Abhijit Singh

Early Sunday morning on 12 June, 29-year-old Omar Mateen, a U.S. citizen of Afghan descent perpetrated the worst mass shooting in the U.S. history that left 49 dead and scores injured at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando which is frequented by the LGBT community. The latest mass shooting, which went on for three hours, ended when Mateen was killed by police who stormed the scene.

Mateen, in 911 calls and Facebook posts during the attack at the nightclub, had pledged loyalty to the Islamic State (IS/ISIS) and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Soon after the attack the IS-affiliated news agency Amaq News, broadcasted a claim that Mateen was an “ISIS fighter.”

The characteristics of the Orlando shooting is seen by some analysts as evidence that the nature of terrorism in the US is changing and the jihadists’ use of mass shootings could be the biggest change and challenge in dealing with terrorism since 9/11. This article looks at some of the peculiarities of the Orlando mass shooting.

The US authorities had issued advisories in recent weeks that IS-inspired individuals could respond with violence to a spate of defeats and loss of territory the IS had suffered in Iraq and Syria. The terror group was seen to be frustrated by the curbs on flow of recruits and funding. In a recent appeal, IS spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani had called on the followers and sympathizers of IS in the west who were unable to join the IS in Iraq and Syria, to carry out suicide attacks in their home countries during Ramadan.

US officials familiar with the investigation into the massacre have been repeatedly stressing from the first day that there is no evidence yet to indicate a direct link with IS or any other militant group. Rather, Mateen was someone who was inspired over the internet; a do-it-yourself—DIY—terrorist. The US Congressional Research Service (CRS) in its report on Islamic State radicalization characterised such terrorists as being “largely isolated from the operational support of terrorist organizations, they acquired violent skills (however rudimentary) by themselves or relied on abilities that they had developed prior to becoming violent jihadists”.

The point being made is that the incident was not directed and funded by any foreign terrorist organization; hence the security framework put in place post 9/11 to deal with such threats originating outside the country, has not been compromised. While this may be reassuring to a certain section of the community and law enforcement agencies, the fact is this whether Mateen was IS-supported or IS-inspired is irrelevant to the outcome which saw loss of innocent lives and social dislocation. Islamist terror attacks within the US are reported to have significantly increased in the past one year, with Orlando being the 22nd instance since 2015.

However, in the case of Orlando shootings, the worry persists even after ruling out direct links. While the US president confirmed that Mateen was “self-radicalized” through materials he had found on the Internet, the FBI feels the Orlando shooting does not fit into a single category of hate crime, mass shooting, or jihadist act of terror.

The IS, as distinct from its peers, views spreading of fear as widely as possible also as a worthy objective. It seeks any disgruntled Muslim angry enough to pick up a gun as its ideal weapon. A ‘trojan’ with no warning indications of its cause, target and timing of attack till the attack itself has been carried out. A socially disruptive weapon in which the IS has never invested. Was Mateen such a ‘trojan’?

John Feffer, the director of Foreign Policy In Focus, frames the issue quite succinctly as the “last-minute marriage of convenience between Mateen and ISIS”. Feffer views Mateen declaration of allegiance to IS as an opportunistic act where “the shooter seemed to want to elevate his homophobic rampage to a higher level, and the IS was eager to demonstrate its capability to target the American homeland. The shooters and IS had no prior contact, but enthusiastically embraced each another through the act itself”.

The threat to the US comes from the number of such vulnerable individuals in the society and the IS’ ability to convince them to attribute their violence to the terror group as an initial step. This would provide fodder to the IS propaganda network and help it to create an environment to scale up its influence in attracting and actively bringing more susceptible individuals into its fold.

The situation in the near term could be more sensitive with a bitterly contested US presidential contest thriving on issues such as Islamic radicalisation, acceptance of migrants and gun control.

There would also be the realisation that Mateen was not the perfect ‘trojan’; he had been investigated by the FBI on two prior occasions for suspected links to terrorist organizations. Yet, he perpetrated the worst mass shooting in US history.

*Monish Gulati is an Associate Director at the Society for Policy Studies, New Delhi. He can be reached at: mgulati@spsindia.in. This article appeared at South Asia Monitor.

Adopting energy efficiency, investing in renewables and building capabilities on nuclear energy safety may be crucial for Southeast Asia to realise a low-carbon ASEAN Community consistent with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.

By Julius Cesar Imperial Trajano and Phidel Marion G. Vineles*

The need to mitigate climate change has never been more apparent. This is particularly so in Southeast Asia, which is both severely affected by the impact of global warming and a rapidly increasing emitter of greenhouse gases. The Paris Agreement on Climate Change has set a global action plan that participating countries, including the ten ASEAN Member States (AMS), need to implement to realise a low-carbon future.

With Southeast Asia’s increasing energy demand, carbon emission reductions will become a huge challenge for the region. According to International Energy Agency (IEA) and Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA), Southeast Asia’s energy demand is projected to grow to under 1,100 Mtoe (million tonnes of oil equivalent) in 2040. Driven by economic growth, Southeast Asia’s energy demand has increased by more than 50% between 2000 and 2013. Hence, future prospects of energy markets in the region must be examined to identify what energy policies are needed for low-carbon ASEAN Community.

ASEAN Energy Landscape

The power sector shapes the energy outlook of Southeast Asia, with a shift towards intensive coal-based electricity generation, despite the pledges of AMS to reduce their carbon emissions. According to IEA and ERIA, the coal demand expands at the fastest rate among all other energy sources in the region, which is projected to reach 440 Mtce (million tonnes of coal equivalent) in 2040. This entails the need to accelerate the use of clean coal technologies.

Renewables-based electricity is seen to make inroads in the region’s energy mix, as it is projected to increase three and a half times from 2013 to 2040. However, according to IEA and ERIA, the overall contributions of renewables to energy mix will decline from 26% in 2013 to 21% in 2040 due to the decreasing use of traditional biomass.

Southeast Asia is also set to lose its role as a major gas supplier to international markets as domestic demand outpace production. By 2040, the region is projected to turn into a net importer of gas of around 10 bcm (billion cubic metres), and the region’s net oil and gas import bill is set to triple to US$320 billion.

Towards Low-carbon ASEAN Community

Accelerating the use of low-carbon technologies will help to mitigate the rise of energy demand and carbon emissions without harming the region’s economic prospects. For that, ASEAN must step up to employ energy efficiency technologies that improve power use.

First of all, to encourage energy efficiency, governments need to completely eliminate fossil fuel subsidies which indirectly inhibit investments in energy-efficient goods, services and infrastructure. However, the region spent US$36 billion on fossil-fuel subsidies in 2014 despite subsidy reforms in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Myanmar.

Promoting efficient energy resource development and utilisation can be done by enhancing the region’s cross-border energy trade. The ASEAN Power Grid facilitates cross-border electricity purchases and exchanges within the region and has 11 operating cross-border grids. The Trans-ASEAN Gas Pipeline aims to interconnect the gas pipeline infrastructure of AMS. As of 2015, 13 bilateral gas connections have already been established with a total of 3,600 kilometres of pipeline connections.

Since it is projected that the energy use patterns are moving towards the increased use of coal, carbon capture and storage (CCS) is considered an essential component of curbing carbon emissions. CCS is an energy efficient technology that can cut up to 90% of emissions from coal-fired power plants. The application of this technology will help to mitigate the carbon emissions threat in Southeast Asia, which is projected to be 60% higher in 2050 than in 2010. However, the use of CCS requires huge investments due to its high operating costs.

Expanding the use of renewable energy sources would also help drive ASEAN’s transition to low carbon economy. Presently, renewables, such as hydropower, bioenergy and solar, serve as an important component of Southeast Asia’s future energy mix. Technical potential for modern renewables is significantly large. For example, hydropower energy is the largest source with technical potential at 170 GW (gigawatt), compared with the already installed of 37 GW in 2014. Aspiring to be the ‘battery’ of Southeast Asia, Laos has massive hydropower development plan which includes 72 new large dams, 12 of which are under construction. There is also a strong potential for solar development in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and southern Vietnam. This potential, however, remains untapped.

Nuclear Energy in Southeast Asia

But some countries in the region foresee that renewable energy will not be enough to meet the rising demand for base-load electricity. Hence, they have been considering to integrate nuclear power into their long-term energy plans, reflecting their governments’ view of nuclear power as an alternative energy source that can help address the dual objectives of energy security and mitigation of climate change effects.

Vietnam is scheduled to complete construction of its first nuclear power plant (NPP) by 2026 while Indonesia is still planning to build a small experimental power reactor to increase its technical expertise in using nuclear power for the future. Malaysia has started to conduct a feasibility study on exploiting nuclear energy that includes addressing public acceptance. Just recently, Cambodia and Russia signed two deals to set up a nuclear energy information centre and a joint working group on peaceful uses of atomic energy.

However, there is still a tremendous need to educate young people and enhance the skills of older professionals in the nuclear field, especially nuclear safety. The region currently does not have enough human resources that can safely operate NPPs.

Southeast Asia is uniquely placed to contribute to achieving the ambitious goals stipulated in the Paris Agreement. Countries across the region must lead efforts to achieve these goals. This entails countries taking strong policy commitments and adopting innovative solutions to revolutionise energy systems both domestically and regionally.

The regional approaches towards decarbonisation through energy efficiency, renewables, and building capabilities on nuclear energy have all been stated in the ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint 2025 and the ASEAN Plan of Action for Energy Cooperation 2016-2025. The region’s specialised energy bodies such as the ASEAN Centre for Energy, ASEAN Network of Regulatory Bodies on Atomic Energy (ASEANTOM), the Nuclear Energy Cooperation Subsector Network, and the Renewable Energy Subsector Network can facilitate enhanced cooperation on clean energy sources, through knowledge sharing and institutionalising regulatory safety norms. The ASEAN Centre for Energy, for instance, assists AMS by offering innovative solutions for ASEAN energy challenges on policies, legal and regulatory frameworks, and technologies.

Addressing the region’s carbon emissions requires ASEAN to jointly examine its future energy patterns, and actively pursue energy efficient technologies and clean energy sources needed towards a low-carbon ASEAN Community. At the same time, intensified and creative public education across ASEAN is needed to galvanise people support for region-wide policy initiatives on decarbonisation.

*Julius Trajano is Associate Research Fellow with the Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies, S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS). Phidel Vineles is Senior Analyst in the Office of the Executive Deputy Chairman, RSIS, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

By Michael Lelyveld

China’s conflicts with foreign news reporting have added to doubts about its currency policies as it tries to maintain confidence in the economy and control over capital flows.

Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) had effectively abandoned a reform of exchange rate policy announced last August to make the value of the yuan more market oriented, putting daily rate setting decisions “back under tight government control.”

Under the announced policy, the PBOC says that it sets a central parity rate, or “fixing,” based on a weighted average of market prices on the interbank market, allowing the value to rise or fall by 2 percent against the U.S. dollar in domestic trading each day.

The rate setting system is one of a series of compromises that China has made since 2005 under pressure from international demands for free trade in its currency.

Although the yuan’s value is influenced by the daily fixings, it fluctuates freely on markets abroad.

Last December, the PBOC added a further wrinkle following criticism of unexplained devaluations, arguing that the yuan fixings should be measured against a basket of 13 foreign currencies instead of the dollar alone.

In relation to the basket, the yuan had actually strengthened over time, officials of the China Foreign Exchange Trade System (CFETS) said.

The details matter in part because China’s trading partners have been on guard for any sign of currency manipulation that would give the country’s exports an unfair price edge as the yuan weakens against the dollar.

Downward pressure

But downward pressure on the yuan in trading also reflects market concerns about underlying weakness in China’s slower-growing economy.

Slippage in the currency runs the risk of snowballing if Chinese savers and investors start dumping the yuan to seek shelter in the dollar, using various dodges to evade China’s capital controls.

But interventions to defend the yuan’s value are costly to PBOC foreign currency reserves, which have dropped by U.S. $459 billion, or over 12 percent, since the market reform of last August was announced.

On any given day, the yuan may be driven up or down by unseen business or government interests, speculative bets and opaque PBOC responses.

The Journal story, based on secret minutes of PBOC meetings, angered regulators because it reported that they had quietly backtracked on reforms in order to maintain stability and were choosing between setting the yuan’s value against the dollar and the wider currency basket at will.

Promises of greater transparency and market reforms figured largely in the International Monetary Fund’s decision last year to include the yuan in its Special Drawing Rights basket of freely-traded major currencies, elevating its status abroad.

But there have been repeated signs of a bumpy ride for China’s compliance with IMF guidelines since then.

In January, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde called for greater “clarity and certainty” in China’s exchange rate management, “in particular with reference to the dollar, which has always been the reference.”

Lagarde’s comment came 16 days after an abrupt 0.5-percent drop in the yuan’s fixing against the dollar on Jan. 7. According to the Journal story, the PBOC had already “ditched the market-based mechanism” at a closed-door meeting three days before.

‘Fabricated’ story

On May 27, the PBOC issued a statement on its Weibo social media account, blasting the Journal story as “fabricated” and also denying a Bloomberg News report that it would seek advance information from U.S. officials about Federal Reserve Board plans to raise interest rates.

“We condemn such irresponsible actions, which contravene professional ethics of journalism, and reserve the right to pursue relevant responsibility through legal channels,” the bank said, according to the International Business Times.

But since then, readings of China’s currency policies have been anything but clear.

Yuan fixings have been up one day and sharply down the next, including a 0.45-percent depreciation against the dollar on May 30, hitting a five-year low.

In May, the currency fell 1.6 percent, its second-biggest monthly drop on record after an unexplained 2.7-percent devaluation last August, Reuters reported.

Analysts linked the late-May decline to expectations of a U.S. rate cut, but that possibility has been in the wind for months.

On June 1, Xinhua published a commentary arguing that “a sharp depreciation of the currency is less feared this time” because of “more policy transparency.”

“Compared with before the overhaul last August, the current mechanism is more market-based, setting the yuan’s value with more reference to a basket of currencies instead of the dollar alone,” Xinhua said.

The qualifier of “more reference” made it appear that the PBOC had not settled on one reference point or the other.

One day later, Xinhua ran a second commentary suggesting that the recent volatility “is likely to encourage China’s central bank to push through with more capital account liberalization and FX (foreign exchange) reform measures.”

Uncertainty over the yuan continued Monday as the PBOC lowered the daily fixing by 0.3 percent against the dollar following a series of largely disappointing economic reports, indicating slower growth in May.

Speaking at Tsinghua University in Beijing on June 5 before the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue meeting, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said China “has committed to moving in an orderly way to a more market oriented exchange rate.”

“It’s important for China to stick to its reform agenda,” Lew said. He added that the PBOC’s communication last August “was not clear,” according to Bloomberg News.

Puzzling aspect

One puzzling aspect is that the more recent depreciations appear to be just the opposite of the PBOC’s position in its meetings with economists in March reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The confusion may be partly the result of mixed motives for driving the yuan up or down.

Economists seeking freer markets may argue that the yuan has become overvalued, while the interests of China’s indebted state-owned enterprises (SOEs) cut both ways.

A cheaper yuan could boost exports, but it also makes dollar-denominated debt more costly.

The Journal cited an estimate by France’s BNP Paribas that a 3-percent devaluation would add U.S. $25.6 billion (168 billion yuan) to the annual interest payments of Chinese companies.

Despite those concerns and SOE political pressures, the depreciation has been taking place.

“It’s a very curious situation,” said Gary Hufbauer, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “There’s no clarity.”

“The markets are certainly perplexed by this,” Hufbauer said in an interview.

Not the first time

The conflict with foreign media is not the first time that China has warned of possible legal action in defense of its exchange rate policies.

In January, the official Xinhua news agency threatened that “radical speculators” could face “potential legal consequences” following reports that international hedge funds had placed large bets against the yuan.

Some hedge fund managers were quoted as predicting a major devaluation of at least 10 and perhaps 20 percent, but the relative stability of the yuan in the following months had eased speculative pressures.

By the end of May, the yuan had dropped by 6 percent against the dollar since the currency reform last August, The Wall Street Journal reported separately.

The more recent pace of depreciation against the stronger dollar and uncertainty over PBOC policies may make the case that the hedge funds were right after all.

Either way, the controversy appears to be a setback for confidence in China’s exchange rate management and reform plans.

“It takes China back from its announced goal of having a freely floating exchange rate and the yuan becoming an alternative to the dollar in world financial markets,” Hufbauer said.

By June Teufel Dreyer*

(FPRI) — In early June, dignitaries from over fifty countries gathered for the 15^th iteration of the Shangri La meeting, organized by the prestigious London-based Institute for International Strategic Studies.  Named for the hotel that serves as its venue rather than for the mythical Tibetan kingdom of peace and harmony of James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizons, the forum aspires to the less ambitious yet vitally important goal of fashioning a system conducive to the creation of a secure environment in the Asian Pacific region. Keynote speakers, typically the heads of state or defense chiefs of their respective nations, lay out their countries’ positions and respond to questions from counterparts as well as defense intellectuals and representatives of concerned corporations with multinational interests.

In a symbolic gesture of Beijing’s regard for the meeting, the Chinese delegation was led by a deputy chief of the Joint Staff Department of the PRC’s Central Military Commission, a rank considerably lower than the heads of delegations sent by other countries. Attendees commented that the PRC delegation’s members seemed apprehensive about the upcoming decision of the United Nations Tribunal on the Law of the Sea in the Philippines’ case against the People’s Republic of China’s 9-dash line claiming jurisdiction over eighty percent of the South China Sea.  Beijing, which refused to participate in the case, has stated that it will not recognize the ITLOS verdict.  Should the ruling favor the Philippines’ position, as widely expected, and the PRC not comply, also as expected, there are fears that respect for international law will be undermined.

In what was considered an affirmation of the importance of the forum as well as of New Delhi’s rising concern with events in the region, India, not usually represented at Shangri La, sent its defense minister. Notable for its absence was the ordinarily faithful Australian delegation, assumed to be the result of its upcoming elections rather than because of a diminished interest in the Asian-Pacific region.

Although members discussed threats from the Islamic State, terrorism, and North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, China’s expansionist activities in the South China Sea were by far the major source of the forum’s concern, as they had been in 2015 as well.  In a speech to the U.S. Naval Academy shortly before the forum began, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter had described China as building a great wall of isolation around itself with its intransigent attitude toward solving disputed areas of the South China Sea. His address at Shangri La might be described as measured in tone but with unmistakable messages to the People’s Republic. Observing that one country, China, had reclaimed over 2,000 acres of land in the disputed areas, more than all the other claimants combined, and that these activities had occurred in only the last 18 months, Carter stated America’s opposition to any further militarization of disputed features: it would support the right of claimants to pursue international legal arbitration and other peaceful means to resolve disputes while opposing any coercive tactics designed to resolve the disputes. Should the disputed Scarborough Shoal be militarized, there would be unspecified consequences. The U.S. would continue to fly and sail in areas as permitted by international law.

Carter suggested that regional institutions be strengthened, offering China a place in a principled security architecture that would respect rights, not might. Using the word “principled” no less than 38 times, Carter hinted strongly that the PRC’s stance had fallen far short of the definition.  Implicitly rebutting notions that the U.S. was in decline, Carter noted that the country had made great strides in both jobs and GDP since its worst recession since the 1929 depression, and that progress would continue because of America’s dynamic and innovative businesses, world-class universities, strong commitment to the rule of law and domestic energy revolution. Its military’s unmatched operational edge and capabilities were, said Carter, being sustained. Tacitly reassuring those who doubted America’s commitment to the region, the secretary emphasized that the country’s rebalance to Asia would continue to bring the best platforms and people to the region, as well as increasing economic and diplomatic engagement with it.[1]

The PRC’s representative, Admiral Sun Jianguo, delivered his country’s reply. In a spirited address delivered at a decibel level that embarrassed even some members of his own delegation, Sun stated that China neither made trouble nor feared trouble. Unlike the U.S., an outsider to the region, the PRC did not and never would seek hegemony. In Sun’s narrative, the cause of instability in Asia was the United States’ military alliances and indeed presence in the region. America’s motive was to thwart China’s path to peace through its “zero-sum mentality” rather than, as China wanted, strive for win-win cooperation. By contrast, America’s alliances had provided support that was enabling small countries to make trouble against big countries. If Sun had other large countries in mind besides China, his remarks gave no clue as to their identity. In any case, the result was that the U.S. had single-handedly militarized the South China Sea and sown discord among heretofore harmonious Asia states.

Responding to both Carter’s words at Annapolis and his address to Shangri La, Sun rejected the contention that the PRC was isolating itself.  To the contrary, many other countries supported China’s position on the SCS. Earlier efforts to establish this, however, have been less than completely successful. While some countries such as Kenya — notably not a member of the region and therefore, according to Sun’s schema, not qualified to comment — several of the countries said to be in support did not issue statements affirming such a stance. Cambodia — normally considered to faithfully follow Beijing’s wishes — explicitly said it had not done so,[2] with Fiji stating bluntly that China had either misunderstood or misrepresented Suva’s position. [3] In a seeming non sequitur from the scenario of a militarized, disharmonious region, Sun stated that the overall situation in the South China Sea remained stable and that freedom of navigation has not been affected by the disputes, averring that the Southeast Asian states and China were perfectly capable of solving their differences through peaceful means without outside powers. “Any countries not directly concerned are not allowed to sabotage our path of peace for their selfish gains.”[4]

Other countries not directly concerned, however, did claim standing in regional issues. French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian argued that the South China Sea dispute concerned not only Europe but the rest of the world as well since, if the laws of the sea were not respected in this region, they would also be challenged in the Arctic Ocean or the Mediterranean Sea. He proposed that European navies coordinate patrols in Asian waters to reinforce a rules-based maritime order. The French navy had already been deployed to the South China Sea three times in the year, and would be a continued presence.[5]  And Czech Army General Petr Pavel, who chairs the North American Treaty Organization’s military affairs committee, stated that Beijing risked fueling regional instability by unilaterally flouting international norms in dispute resolution.[6]

Canadian Defense Minister Harjit Singh Sajjan stated his country’s conviction that “we have more than a generalized stake in the region’s prosperity and stability, but specific security interests that are defined by our growing economic ties with a region that will be the key driver of global growth.” Sajjan left no doubt that Canada planned a more robust presence in the area.[7]

Indian defense minister Manohar Parrikar also claimed a role for his country in the area.  India, by virtue of its location at the center of the Asian landmass astride the Indian Ocean, understood the term Asia in the sense of “its fullest geography ranging from the Suez to the shores of the Pacific.” More than half of India’s trade passes through the South China Sea.  Hence, as a coastal state, Asia was a focus of India’s Act East policy in all its dimensions: cultural, economic, and security.  Aggressive behavior or actions “by any one of us” would cause all to suffer, whether big states or small.[8]  Japanese defense minister Nakatani Gen also asserted his nation’s stake in the region. declaring that no country could be an outsider as “large-scale and rapid land reclamation, building of outposts, and utilization of them for military purposes” took place in the South China Sea. Japan, he pledged, would help Southeast Asian nations build their security capabilities to deal with “unilateral, dangerous, and coercive actions” in the area.[9]

The representative of Vietnam, definitely a regional state as well as a claimant to several of the disputed islands, described the Chinese delegation’s distribution of leaflets making false claims to what his country regards as the East Vietnam Sea “prove if anything that China is running out of arguments to defend its so-called sovereignty over the waterways.” Senior Lieutenant General Nguyen Chi Vinh warned that the PRC’s unilateralism and coercion would, if not checked, “lead to armed crisis.” [10]

While sentiment against the Chinese actions is unmistakable, the question remains what difference it will make. There is no unity within the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on how to deal with Chinese expansionism. Not all Southeast Asian states have claims to the disputed territories being absorbed by China. Moreover, all count the PRC as an important trading partner, albeit to varying degrees, and fear the consequences of angering it by taking a strong stand against China’s actions.  The ITLOS’s rulings are not self-enforcing.

Carter’s assurances notwithstanding, even claimant states are not certain about whether and to what extent they can count on American backing in case of confrontation. There is additional uncertainty about the policies of the new president who is to be elected in November 2016.   And left-wing voices in ASEAN argue that their countries must resist being drawn into a confrontation between China and the United States.  For such individuals, the real issue is the struggle for primacy between two great powers, with control of the sea and the territories therein being simply a manifestation of a larger contest.  In a memorable metaphor by Malaysian defense minister Hishammuddin Hussein declared that whatever happens between major powers must not “leave us on the beach when the tide goes out.”[11]  And incoming Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte aroused a storm of internal criticism when he indicated that he might depart from claimant states’ desire for multilateral negotiations with Beijing by agreeing to bilateral talks.[12]

Clearly, no U.S. president should take actions that would reinforce the view that America is engaged in a great power primacy contest and should emphasize the shared stake of all countries in the region to check aggression. The Obama administration has repeatedly stated the need for multilateralism while seeking to draw the larger powers of the area — India, Japan, and Australia — into a loose quadrilateral alliance with itself.  This has not been easy: changes in the ruling parties of democratically elected states inevitably result in policy changes, and the Australian government’s decision to choose a not yet built French submarine concept over an operational Japanese design is considered an additional setback.  Trying to find the Goldilocks solution of a policy that is neither so hard line as to elicit accusations of a reckless cowboy mentality nor so soft that allies doubt America’s commitment will be a major challenge for the next administration.

About the author:
*June Teufel Dreyer is a Senior Fellow in FPRI’s Asia Program as well as a member of the Orbis Board of Editors. She is Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, and author of China’s Political System: Modernization and Tradition (Pearson, 2015, ninth ed.) and Middle Kingdom and Empire of the Rising Sun (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Source:
This article was published by FPRI.

Notes:
[1] http://www.defense.gov/News/Speeches/Speech-View/Article/791213/remarks-on-asia-pacifics-principled-security-network-at-2016-iiss-shangri-la-di

[2] VOA May 19, 2016. http://www.voacambodia.com/a/cambodia-stuck-in-the-middle-over-south-china-sea/3337331.html

[3] Radio New Zealand, April 15, 2016. http://www.radionz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/301556/fiji-quick-to-deny-supposed-south-china-sea-support

[4] Xinhua (Beijing) June 6, 2016. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2016-06/05/c_135414168.htm

[5] file:///C:/Users/jteufeldreyer/Downloads/160605_discours_shangri-la_-_anglais_final.pdf

[6] Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2006. http://www.wsj.com/articles/nato-general-says-china-should-respect-tribunal-on-maritime-claim-1464962826

[7] Huffington Post, June 13, 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/dr-fen-hampson/the-liberals-new-defence-_b_10383428.html

[8] Press Information Bureau, Government of India, Ministry of Defence, June 4, 2016.

http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=145975

[9]Reuters, June 4, 2016. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-asia-security-japan-idUSKCN0YQ02N

[10] Tuoi Tre News (Hanoi) June 5, 2016. http://tuoitrenews.vn/politics/35197/china-fools-nobody-but-itself-at-shangrila-dialogue

[11] Japan Times, June 5, 2016.  http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/06/05/asia-pacific/diplomatic-tag-teams-emerge-countries -find-new-ways-stand-china/#VIRNueS2q9g

[12] The Philippine Star, May 23, 2016. http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2016/05/23/1586122/duterte-talk-china-sea-dispute-if…

By Chayanika Saxena*

The political journey of the post-Bonn Afghanistan appears to be all muddled-up. With the time running out on the National Unity Government (NUG) that was put in place with an ‘original mandate’ of two years, the political situation in Afghanistan, much like the situations that prevail in every other sector of its national life, is fragile at best, and bleak, at worst. Adding to its woes are a declining international interest in Afghanistan; peace-talks that have appeared to be non-starter from the beginning, and intensifying border clashes with Pakistan, all which have made Afghanistan’s present appear even more dismal.

In the midst of all that which is going wrong for Afghanistan, what has dealt a further blow to its political apparatus is the shooting down of the second Presidential decree for reforms in the country’s electoral landscape by the members of the lower house (Wolesi Jirga) of the Afghan National Assembly. Shooting down the recommendations that came from the Special Electoral Reforms Commission (SERC), the Presidential decree was expected to initiate reforms, among other things, within the structural composition of two bodies that are in-charge of executing free and fair conduct of elections in Afghanistan- the Independent Elections Commission (IEC) and the Independent Electoral Complaints Commission (IECC). Caught up in political dynamics, the little progress achieved on the electoral reforms’ front has not only left the international donors dismayed, but it has also impacted the political morale of the country in an adverse fashion.

Established under Article 156 of Afghanistan’s constitution (2004), the IEC, which is the country’s ‘election management’ body, is tasked with the responsibility to “administer and supervise every kind of elections as well as refer to general public opinion of the people in accordance with the provisions of the law”. On the other hand, as per Articles 64-65 of the current electoral law (2013), the IECC is an election watch-dog which has the authority of disqualifying votes on grounds that affect the freeness and fairness of polling, making it also the authority which has the final say on the election results which cannot even be overrun by the IEC.

Apart from the above mentioned functions, the mandate of the IECC vests it with the responsibility to hear complaints pertaining to the conduct of elections in Afghanistan. Dealing with complaints ideally through public presentation, the IECC in consonance with the IEC is expected to adjudicate over these complaints, deciding in turn, on the ‘freeness and fairness of the elections conducted’ at various stages.

Given the centrality of elections to democracy, the responsibilities shouldered by these bodies are quite immense, but whose execution has been dampened with charges of corruption and nepotism besides the delays that have held up their internal reform. It is important to note that the members who make it to both the Commissions are decided upon by the President who is given lists of hopefuls by a Selection Committee to choose from.

The IEC, at the top, is composed of the Chairman and Deputy and seven Commissioners and is currently led by Ahmad Yousuf Nouristani. The term-in-office to be served by this cohort is sixyears long. The IEC is run by an executive arm called the IEC Secretariat, which under the Presidential Decree on the Electoral Law (Article 8; 2004) is expected to appoint electoral officials at country, provincial, and district level for conducting free and fair elections in accordance with the guidance issued by IEC.

The IECC on the other hand was formally retained as an independent body (which was expected to be replaced with a Special Tribunal, whose definition and scope remained shrouded in confusion) following the passage of the Law on the Duties and Structures of the Independent Election Commission (IEC) and the Independent Electoral Complaints Commission (IECC) on July 13, 2013 by Afghanistan’s National Assembly. As a body which was hitherto run by 7 members, of which two were international representatives, the IECC was given an all-Afghan make-up, reducing the strength of this body to 5 following the promulgation of this law.

Similar to the selection process followed for the IEC, the members of the IECC are chosen by the President out of a list of (15) hopefuls that are kept to him/her by the Selection Committee. The Selection Committee in concern too was given a formal shape with the passage of the above mentioned law, and it currently comprises of: Speaker of the Wolesi Jirga (the lower house), the Speaker of the Meshrano Jirga (the upper house), the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the head of the Independent Commission on the Oversight of the Implementation of the Constitution, the head of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission, the heads of registered political parties with at least six members in parliament, and one representative from Afghan civil society.

Till 2010, the electoral processes in Afghanistan were conducted on the basis of a Presidential decree that was passed in 2004 when the Afghan Parliament was yet to be put in place. The process of formulation and reformulation of electoral laws; a process that gathers steam every time there is an election in Afghanistan reflects that the political system in the country is yet to find a perfect, comfortable fit in this socially variegated nation. And, while this almost-perennial tumult can be attributed to the sheer diversity of interests within Afghanistan, it also to a great extent reflects on international misjudgments. The add-salt-to-taste approach which is being followed in Afghanistan has not yielded anything, even as observers have maintained that a top-down approach in defining the country’s political processes may ultimately galvanize its domestic political dynamics, which if were to be left to their own devices, would have resulted in little.

A decade and a half has passed since the Bonn conference in 2001 had tethered the major international players with the thread of common commitment to rebuild Afghanistan. While the conditions in Afghanistan did improve considerably, but since it has been weaned-off some apparent international spoon-feeding, not much progress has been witnessed by the country in any sphere, with the internationally-brokered National Unity Government serving as an instructive case.

In the absence of concrete, fully transparent and accountable electoral laws, the outcome of the Presidential elections of 2014 could hardly have been anything but chaos. True to the Afghan spirit of ‘holding-on’, while the NUG was formed (but not without the intervention of Uncle Sam), it could not manage to get its house in order for long. Almost two years into its existence, it did not even have a formal appointee to the position of Minister of Defence; charges of partisanship rattled it, with rising insurgency and persistent regional interference adding to the mess.

Securing the government in place were commitments to reform the electoral landscape of Afghanistan, which was deemed by its Chief Executive Officer, Abdullah Abdullah was highly fraudulent and corrupt. Under the agreement that was signed between the two contenders – Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, and who are now the President and CEO of the country, respectively- electoral reforms were designated as top priority especially as they are needed to hold the Parliamentary elections in a free, fair, and orderly manner.

Besides the Parliamentary elections, the conduct of the first District Council elections that are requisite for the convening of the Loya Jirga as envisaged in the NUG agreement, too depend a great deal on the reforming of the electoral laws in Afghanistan which are affected by many shortcomings, particularly those related to the determination of electoral rolls. Since a vital part of the NUG agreement was to convene a Loya Jirga to officially incorporate the position of the Prime Minister into Afghanistan’s political system, and to do which, electoral reforms were necessary, the President of Afghanistan after months of delays could manage to put in place a Special Reforms Election Commission.

Mired in controversies from the beginning, especially over its membership, the SERC in its extended tenures had proposed 11 recommendations. It was reported that the President had given his consent to 7 of the 11 recommendations and had put them up for Parliamentary ratification in two lots.

As the Afghan Analysts Network reports, the first lot of recommendations included some controversial themes that touched upon 7 key issues including, (i) the cancelation of the existing voting cards, the establishment of voter lists based on voters’ tazkeras (ID documents) and the linking of voters to specific polling stations; 2) review of the polling centre distribution; 3) changes in composition of the Selection Committee for the electoral commissioners; 4) changes in the composition and tenure of the IEC by decreasing the number of commissioners and both decreasing and staggering the term of service; 5) changes in the requirements for the IECC commissioners; 6) changes in the composition of the Wolesi Jirga (an extra separate seat for Sikhs/Hindus) and provincial and district councils (25% women’s quota); and 7) the employment of school teachers and others civil servants as temporary electoral personnel.

The second lot of recommendations was weaved around characteristic changes in the electoral system of Afghanistan, and hence was fraught with greater uncertainty of approval and implementation. What was recommended by the SERC was a change in the template of voting in Afghanistan from the Single Non-Transferable Vote system to a Proportional Representative system (although what kind of PR system to be adopted is not very clear). Changes in the electoral constituencies, possibly their redrawing was the other recommendation that was put to vote, but both of which were unanimously struck down by the Wolesi Jirga. Here, it is critical to note that the Constitution of Afghanistan vide Article 109 does not permit the National Assembly to make any changes in the electoral law during the last year of the legislative term. The Wolesi Jirga is already living on extension; that which was extended twice since June 2015.

As the much-needed electoral reforms in Afghanistan continue to face resistance from different quarters, the Parliamentary and District Council elections that are due in coming October will be conducted under the same provisions, same guidelines and the same Commissions- all of which have been called ‘fraudulent’ by the CEO camp. The people of Afghanistan who have been fed with success stories of democracy are waiting impatiently for the winds of political change to sweep through their land. Before all hope is lost, it will be crucial for the political class in Afghanistan to look beyond petty rivalries and interest and sit down to shape the future of their country collectively.

*Chayanika Saxena is a Research Associate at the Society for Policy Studies, New Delhi. She can be reached at: chayanika.saxena@spsindia.in

Political infighting within Kuwait’s ruling family is about to take a dramatic turn with reports that the Gulf state plans to dissolve its national sports organizations in a blatant illustration of the incestuous relationship between sports and politics.

The expected Kuwaiti move, part of an effort to sideline Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah, a member of the Gulf state’s ruling family and one of world sports’ most powerful men, and his brother, Sheikh Talal Al-Fahad, the head of Kuwait’s National Olympic Committee (NOC), is the latest episode in a longstanding power struggle that has played out in Kuwaiti courts and international sports.

Sheikh Ahmad as a member of the International Olympic Council (IOC) and the FIFA Council that governs world soccer as well as his detractors in the ruling family who control the levers of power in Kuwait have both involved and manipulated international sports associations in what is effectively a political battle unrelated to sports.

The plan reported by the country’s authoritative Al Rai newspaper constitutes the government’s response to a decision by the Lausanne-based Court of Arbitration of Sports (CAS) to uphold FIFA’s banning last year of the Kuwait Football Association (KFA) on the grounds that a new Kuwaiti sports law amounted to political interference.

The IOC followed by FIFA and 15 other international sports associations banned their Kuwaiti members on the grounds that the law compromised the autonomy of sport. It was the second time in five years that Kuwait was banned by the IOC and prevented from participating in Olympic Games. The current ban bars Kuwait from taking part in this summer’s tournament in Rio de Janeiro.

CAS backed FIFA in a case brought to the court by Kuwaiti soccer clubs, including Kuwaiti Premier League champions Kuwait Sporting Club, Al-Arabi SC, Al-Fahaheel FC, Kazma SC and Al-Salmiya SC.

The government hopes that it can get the bans lifted by creating new sports associations while cancelling the controversial law. The new organizations would effectively lock Sheikhs Ahmad and Talal as well as their supporters out of Kuwaiti sports.

Al Rai quoted government sources as saying that the news associations would keep “troublemakers and those who created corruption in sport in Kuwait and put their personal interests ahead of the interest of Kuwait and its youth out of sports.”

Earlier, Kuwait’s Public Authority for Youth and Sports headed by Sheikh Ahmad Mansour Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, another relative of Sheikhs Ahmed and Talal, sued the brothers as well as other members of the NOC for $1.3 billion in damages.

The authority asserted that the damages resulted from Sheikh Ahmad’s complaint to the IOC about government interference.

Youth minister Sheikh Salman Sabah Al-Salem Al-Homud Al-Sabah further charged without mentioning him by name that Sheikh Ahmed was responsible for the “total decline” in Kuwaiti sports. Sheikh Salman claimed that the decline stemmed from “false complaints to international organizations in a bid to suspend the country’s sport activities.”

Sheikh Salman blames Sheikh Ahmad for his failure in 2014 to win an International Shooting Sport Federation (ISSF) presidential election. Sheikh Salman was at the time accused of abusing his position in government to garner votes.

The ISSF has since said that it was investigating Sheikh Salman for ethics breaches. It said that the government’s legal action against Sheikh Ahmad may constitute an “escalation” of political wrangling over control of sport in Kuwait.

“The ISSF experienced already during Sheikh Salman’s campaign to become ISSF President in 2014 that he showed little sensitivity for a democratic process, the autonomy of sports and ethical behaviour within an election process,” the group said in a statement.

Sheikh Ahmad, a former oil minister and head of Kuwait’s national security council who is also president of the Olympic Council of Asia and the Association of National Olympic Committees, was last year forced to publicly apologize to Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, his uncle, and other senior officials for levelling false allegations against them.

The allegations were widely believed to be part of an effort by Sheikh Ahmad to leverage his status in international sports to engineer his return to government in a prominent position.

Sheikh Ahmed had hoped to strengthen his position by accusing his relative, former prime minister Sheikh Nasser Al-Mohammad Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, and former parliament speaker Jassem Mohammad Abdul-Mohsen Al-Karafi of plotting to topple the government, launder money and misuse public funds.

Sheikh Ahmad had no choice but to withdraw the allegations and publicly apologize on television after a Kuwaiti court dismissed as fabrications his evidence in the form of digital documents and video recordings. A Swiss Court had earlier ruled that the voices heard in the recordings were those of the former prime minister and the speaker. Sheikh Ahmad’s forced television appearance was intended to humiliate him and thwart his ambitions in a country in which status and face are important.

“As I seek pardon from Your Highness, I stress that what happened will be a lesson from which I will benefit and draw appropriate conclusions. I am in full compliance with the orders and directives of Your Highness and I promise to turn the page on this matter and not to raise it again,” Sheikh Ahmed said in his apology.

Sheikh Ahmed has nonetheless insisted that he was the victim of a “personal attack” that was indicative of strained relations between the government and the sports movement.

Perhaps more to the point, Sheikh Ahmad and Kuwait’s travails are the inevitable consequence of the politicization and political manipulation of sports in Kuwait as well as elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa in which international sports associations are as a complicit as are the region’s autocratic rulers.

By Mitchell Blatt*

There’s a temptation in American politics to jump to conclusions before all the facts are in and for activists and politicians use tragedies to push for policies that they already support. Even—or perhaps especially—in the wake of the worst mass shooting in American history and the worst terrorist attack since 9/11, the politicization of cold-blooded murder started just about as soon as the initial news reports came in.

This counterproductive reaction is born out of an understandable desire to solve problems but also—less helpfully—by a human tendency to classify things and be blinded by our biases. When a person with a particular political bias hears about an attack, their first response is to think, “Who was the perpetrator? Was he a Christian? Was he a Muslim? He must have been a member of the group that I oppose!”

Even after the perpetrator in this case was found to be a Muslim who had been investigated by the FBI before on suspicions of harboring pro-terrorism sympathies, an ACLU attorney still tried to link it to Christian conservatives simply by virtue of the fact that Christian conservatives oppose gay rights.

“The Christian Right has introduced 200 anti-LGBT bills in the last six months and people blaming Islam for this. No,” Chase Strangio, a staff attorney with ACLU’s LGBT and AIDS Project, tweeted.

• Facebook

This response to immediately try to blame parties that weren’t involved is the same response of some on the left after the Charlie Hebdo attack. What about the Spanish Inquisition?, some asked, and it is just as stupid, as I wrote it was then in this article for The Federalist: “Let’s Blame Christianity For Everything, And Islam For Nothing.”

Needless to say, restrictions on gay marriage can be a form of discrimination and a bad idea on their own merits, but they aren’t the same as murder. And you don’t have to talk about hypothetical Christian terrorism in order to condemn Christian terrorism; earlier this year a Christian terrorist motivated by intense opposition to abortion shot up a Planned Parenthood in Colorado.

Of course, one single incident doesn’t necessarily say anything about the kinds of strategies that should be taken. Only large scale considerations will allow us to arrive at the right solutions. But, nonetheless, if people on both the left and right want to look from this terrible tragedy for solutions to try to decrease the likelihood of similar attacks from happening again, then let us find some answers first as to whether the proposed policies would actually make an impact.

Would bombing ISIS work?

Donald Trump called for increasing the amount of bombings of ISIS. “”We don’t know who they are. It’s absolute war, but we don’t have uniforms, we don’t know who it is or where they’re coming from,” he said on “Fox and Friends.”

1.) Would the shooter have not been able to do the attack if ISIS was being bombed in even greater frequency than they are now?

One would ask, if we don’t know who they are and where they are coming from, then how do we know who to bomb? That would be the reason why we need more answers first.

But, as it is, in this case we do know who it was. The murderer was Omar Mateen, an American-born citizen, whose father immigrated from Afghanistan, who was investigated by the FBI after making comments about terrorism. Given that the terrorist was an American and was living in America, how could bombing ISIS in Syria have stopped him?

2.) Was the attack motivated or planned in connection with ISIS?

The shooter called 911 during the attack and claimed to have pledged his support to ISIS. But does that really mean ISIS was involved? There is no information that ISIS knew about the attack or was involved in it. Another question is whether he was even motivated by ISIS. He was described by his father as an anti-gay bigot—and he had been a frequent customer of the club in question—so he could have committed the attack out of his own (self-)hatred whether or not ISIS existed.

However, it is at least worth considering whether the prominence of ISIS, both being actively involved in other international attacks and in occupying a huge “caliphate” in the Middle East, doesn’t glamorize the idea of terrorism in the eyes of radical Muslim extremists and increase the willingness of edge cases to put their hate into action. In that sense, decimating ISIS’s overseas presence could decrease the number of lone wolf attacks.

3.) Isn’t the U.S. already bombing ISIS?

Yes, the U.S. has been bombing ISIS since 2014. There’s a limit to how much can be done from the air. Should the U.S. put boots on the ground? Would it be worth the sacrifice? Would troops be able to push ISIS out without exacerbating other problems? Those are the questions one would have to consider even if they think attacking ISIS abroad is a good idea with relation to this attack.

Would restricting immigration work?

Donald Trump proposed banning Muslims from entering the U.S. after the San Bernardino shooting. After briefly going mushy on the issue, Trump is now back to emphasizing his plan. But would it have stopped this attack and others like it?

4.) Would the Pulse attack have been prevented if non-American Muslims weren’t allowed into America?

The shooter was an American-born citizen. The ban wouldn’t have impacted him.

5.) Okay, but might it have prevented his father from having immigrated?

If a blanket ban on Muslim immigration was enforced throughout the history of the U.S.—or at least since the 1960’s or 70’s—then the shooter wouldn’t have been in born in America. However, there would still be non-Muslim terrorists and also gang members and common criminals in the U.S. Critics of Trump’s proposed Muslim ban would argue that banning Muslims across the board is a discriminatory idea whose costs, in terms of discrimination, social division, and destruction to America’s international reputation, are not worth whatever gains might come.

Would gun control work?

Liberals have argued that the attack—the shooting—caused such a high death toll due to the easy availability of high-powered guns, especially those referred to as “assault rifles.” In particular, many outlets are reporting that the shooter used an AR-15, a rifle that is among those Democrats have tried to ban through a failed assault weapons bill.

5.) Did the shooter use an AR-15?

This is perhaps the biggest and most mysterious contention between liberal advocates of gun control and conservative opponents of gun control. After many mass shootings, it is reported that an AR-15 was used, and conservatives write that an AR-15 wasn’t used.

The Washington Post reports that the shooter used an AR-15, the same gun that has also been used in the shootings at San Bernardino, Calif.; Aurora, Colo.; and Newtown, Conn. The gun rights blog Bearing Arms reported, however, that the weapon was a Sig Sauer MCX carbine.

The Sig Saucer’s brochure notes that the MCX carbine has an “AR-15 Type” mag type.

The Orlando police were also quoted as reporting that a Sig Saucer MCX was found on the shooter’s person, and there was no mention of an AR-15:

He had a Glock 17 handgun purchased on June 5, a Sigsauer MCX assault rifle purchased on June 4 on his person during the shootout, and investigators later found a .38-caliber weapon in his vehicle.

• WRBL CBS

The dispute between what to call the gun could be due to the fact that AR-15 is now, like “kleenex” and “xerox,” a brand name that is used by many as a generic term for a series of similar guns. According to Rolling Stone,

Mateen carried two guns with him Sunday: a 9mm handgun and a .223 caliber AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle. [Editor’s note: Note the use of “-style.”]
…
The standard magazine for a Glock, like the one Mateen carried, is 15 rounds. The Sig Sauer MCX rifle Mateen used had double that capacity: 30 rounds.
…
AR stands for “ArmaLite rifle,” after the company the developed the gun for use by the U.S. military in the 1950s. (The military’s version, nearly indistinguishable from the AR-15, is called the M-16.) Today Colt holds the AR-15 trademark, but some 282 manufacturers make their own versions of the gun and its parts, according to a 2014 accounting by AR-15 enthusiasts.

• Rolling Stone

Think Progress, a liberal blog, also referred to the gun in the same way as Rolling Stone: as “an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle.”

If Congress tries to pass an assault weapons ban, the definition of what specific guns are being banned will be a sticking point, and there will be dispute as to what guns should be classes as such.

6.) Would banning the AR-15 or other similar rifles decrease the number of people killed in mass shootings?

One of the proposals from Democrats and liberals to cut down on mass shooting deaths is to regulate the kinds of guns civilians can purchase. During the Clinton administration, an assault riffles ban was passed, and California Democrat Dianne Feinstein tried to get one passed in 2013. Though her bill won the support of a majority of senators, it failed because Republicans filibustered it, preventing it from clearing a supermajority.

The argument is that such semiautomatic rifles that shoot in relatively continuous sprays and hold a large amount of bullets are more deadly more quickly than other kinds of guns. Clearly, however, one does not need an AR-15 or even a rifle to kill many people. Seung-Hui Cho, for example, murdered 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus in 2007 with two pistols. That was one example, though, nine years ago.

Academic studies have found mixed results, and it is hard to say how much of these results are attributable to the assault riffles ban and how many are attributable to the innumerable other variables in a country over a period of time.

Mass shootings, also, are a small amount of all homicides—“less than 1% claimed 3 or more victims”—so even if such a ban made an impact on mass shootings, it wouldn’t make a big impact on all homicides (though one could argue that mass shootings are worse).

7.) Would banning people on the terrorist watch list from buying guns cut down on terrorist attacks?

Recently, as the San Bernardino, Paris, and Orlando shootings have shown, there has been a trend of terrorists using guns to murder their victims. They have racked up large death counts.

Should people suspected of being terrorists, then, be banned from purchasing guns?

This shooter was actually being investigated by the FBI, but he wasn’t under investigation at the time. He himself wouldn’t have been stopped, then, but maybe other potential terrorists would have been.

The conservative counter argument is that terrorists could just purchase a gun on the black market. Of course people can, but having to do so on the black market does put up one more barrier and make it that much harder.

Another conservative argument is that many people on the terrorist watch list are not actually terrorists. Some people have been stopped from boarding planes just because they have a similar name to a suspected terrorist. In that sense, then, shouldn’t conservatives be arguing for scaling back the terrorist watch list? Should we be preventing people from flying (or making it harder for them to fly) but not restricting their rights to purchase guns at all? The U.S. does restrict people’s rights to buy guns for other reasons, like mental illness (though Republicans also oppose some of those measures on similar grounds).

That many completely innocent people are on the terrorist watch list shows the government can easily make mistakes, and that many future terrorists are not on the terrorist watch list shows that it is impossible to read people’s minds or see what they will be doing in the future.

8.) Would giving drunk people the right to shoot back stop terrorism?

Conversely, Donald Trump said, “[I]f you had guns in that room, even if you had a number of people having it strapped to your ankle or strapped to their waste, where bullets could have flown in the other direction right at him, you wouldn’t have had the same kind of a tragedy.”

In effect, conservatives either want the local or national governments to pass laws allowing people to carry guns concealed and make it easy for people to purchase guns (a legislative fix) or to pressure bars and public places to allow people to do so where they currently don’t. In some cases, Republicans even support laws guaranteeing the public’s right to carry guns in public places, overriding the owner’s rights to regulate guns on their own premises. (North Texas lawmaker aims to limit gun-free zones)

If some of the patrons of Pulse had guns and shot back, would they have been able to kill the terrorist before 49 civilians died? In fact, there already were good guys with guns on the scene. A security guard outside did fire at the killer, but he was able to enter. Two police officers also shot at him early on in the attack to no avail. According to Reid Henrichs, a former Marine and police officer who is now a firearms instructor, interviewed by Bearing Arms, “It could have been over with one round, in the first couple of seconds. … Poor marksmanship allowed this to take place.”

If a security guard and a few police officers couldn’t stop it, would an untrained customer with a gun have stopped it? Should police officers get better training at marksmanship?

Even if allowing guns into public places, including bars, might decrease the unlikely risk of mass shootings, might it also increase the risks of ordinary arguments escalating too quickly? People, when they get drunk, can act impulsively and lose self-control. Could someone who gets involved in a bar fight that would have otherwise ended in injury pull out a gun and end it in homicide?

There is also the fact that even if people have the right to carry guns into a bar (according to Florida law, they don’t appear to), most people will not do so. Most Americans do not own guns in the first place, and of those who do, not all of them carry their guns everywhere they go.

About the author:
*Mitchell Blatt moved to China in 2012, and since then he has traveled and written about politics and culture throughout Asia. A writer and journalist, based in China, he is the lead author of Panda Guides Hong Kong guidebook and a contributor to outlets including The Federalist, China.org.cn, The Daily Caller, and Vagabond Journey. Fluent in Chinese, he has lived and traveled in Asia for three years, blogging about his travels at ChinaTravelWriter.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @MitchBlatt.

Source:
This article was published at Bombs and Dollars

The European Union’s 28 foreign ministers are expected to throw their support behind the French-led Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative on Monday, according to Israeli news outlets.

The EU’s Foreign Affairs Council is set to adopt a resolution that will back the French initiative, calling for an international peace conference including Israeli and Palestinian participation before the end of the year.

Earlier this month the foreign ministers met in Paris to establish a framework for the larger summit, just one day after the director general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry equated the proposed peace process to a form of colonialism.

Since the French initiative began gaining more momentum in recent months, the Israeli government has come out in staunch opposition to the proposed multilateral peace talks.

Netanyahu first rejected the French initiative in April, saying the “best way to resolve the conflict between Israel and Palestinians is through direct, bilateral negotiations,” and instead voiced his support for Egyptian President Abd al-Fatah al-Sisi’s trilateral initiative aiming to bring Israeli and Palestinian leaders face to face and create steps towards the unification of Palestinian political factions.

The Palestinian Authority, however, has expressed support for the French initiative, something Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas reiterated during a phone call with French President Francois Hollande on Saturday.

Abbas stressed his commitment to the two-state solution within the 1967 borders, adding that all illegal settlement activity should be halted, and that there should be a timeframe for negotiations under international monitoring.

All past efforts towards peace negotiations have failed to end the decades-long Israeli military occupation or bring Palestinians closer to an independent contiguous state.

The most recent spate of negotiations led by the US collapsed in April 2014.

Israel claimed the process failed because the Palestinians refused to accept a US framework document outlining the way forward, while Palestinians pointed to Israel’s ongoing settlement building and the government’s refusal to release veteran prisoners.

Visitors to Makkah have been advised to leave the mataf area exclusively for Umrah pilgrims for the five-time mandatory prayers, especially during Taraweeh, for the remaining days of Ramadan.

A directive in this regard was issued by Makkah Gov. Khaled Al-Faisal on his Twitter account.

The mataf area is witnessing overcrowding during the prayer time and making it very difficult for Umrah pilgrims to perform tawaf (circumambulation) of the Holy Kaaba, he said. “Hence, visitors should allow pilgrims to perform tawaf smoothly.”

The governor said that there is a lot of space for prayers in the internal corridors and northern expansion and the upper floors of the Grand Mosque. “Only those performing Umrah can offer mandatory prayers in the courtyard,” he said, adding that the carts would be moved to the demarcated areas.

The directive follows reports of suspension of tawaf in the courtyard during the mandatory prayers, particularly Taraweeh.

All the Muslims coming to the Grand Mosque have been urged to abide by the directive and cooperate with the security personnel.

The Defense spending of Moldova, which has a neutral status according to the Constitution, will be increased for about 25 percent in 2016, the Chairman of Moldova’s Parliament Andrian Candu said. The draft of the national budget was approved by the parliament in the second reading with a six-month delay.

Under the bill approved, it is planned that in 2016 state budget revenues will amount to 31 billion 378.9 million lei (1 billion 585.2 million dollars), and will grow by 11.9% in comparison with 2015, and the expenditures will amount to 35 billion 561.7 million lei (1 billion 796.5 million dollars), which is 17.1% more than the year before. The state budget deficit will be covered mainly through external financing, the sale of government securities, revenues from privatization and sale of state property.

The opposition has criticized the draft budget, noting that it is based on irrelevant forecasts, relies heavily on foreign aid, receipt of which is in question, and does not create the preconditions for economic growth or improve people’s livelihood.

Meanwhile, the country is participating in the third over the past month Moldovan-US military exercises Joint Combined Exchange Training – 2016 held in the training center in Bulboaca near the unrecognized Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, also known as Transnistria. The purpose of the exercise is to exchange experience between Moldovan and American Special Forces. They have to work out joint military operations and parachuting with the MC-6 and MC-5 parachute systems, which are in service of the US Special Forces ground troops.

At the same time, the Moldovan opposition considers the intensification of military cooperation with the United States as a gross violation of the neutrality recorded in the basic law of the state.

Participating in joint exercises with NATO, Chisinau sends a signal that Moldova is a de facto member of the alliance, says German political scientist Alexander Rahr.

“This puts Moldova’s neutrality in doubt. Moreover, one half of the population of your country is experiencing geopolitical sympathies toward Russia, the other – towards the West. If nothing is done, there may be a split in Moldova,” he said in an interview with a Moldovan media.

According to him, the upcoming presidential election and the election to the parliament may change the situation.

“Federalization of the country may be a real chance to stabilize the situation, as it will make possible the reintegration of Transnistria. Moldova needs to decide for itself; otherwise someone else will do it for Moldova,” the expert stressed, adding that ignoring the views of the Moldovan citizens by the government may lead to the mistakes that have occurred in Ukraine.

Commenting on the situation in the country, the public official of the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, political scientist Andrey Safonov, suggested that external influence on political trends in the country is huge.

“From a political point of view, the government is led by the pro-Western compradors completely dependent on Brussels and Washington. There are no strategic development plans, or plans for the development of technology in Moldova; and it is beneficial to the European Union, which gets a cheap labor force. As to the economic sphere, the situation in the production area is fatal, which has been generated by the complete dependence of the country from Western financial institutions. The flow of migrants continues unabated. As a result, the state just depletes becoming a country of pensioners and young people, where the latter are often unable to find use of their skills,” he told PenzaNews.

In his view, the United States and the European Union seek to “put out the potential islet of Eurasian integration in the face of Transnistria, which is beyond their control.”

“Through Chisinau, Americans put pressure on Transnistria to transfer it under Moldova’s control and to make Russian troops and peacekeepers leave. The European Union wants Transnistria to join the agreement on association and trade zone between the EU and Moldova. In the future, we cannot exclude the attempts of tightening Moldova’s ties with NATO. Romania, which now acts as an active ally of the US in the south-western regions of the former Soviet Union, is very much interested in such events,” the analyst explained.

According to him, important events will unfold in the negotiations on the conflict in Transnistria in the 5 +2 format that includes the breakaway region and Moldova as the parties of the conflict, Russia, Ukraine and the OSCE as mediators, EU and US as observers.

“Chisinau, Brussels and Washington with the support of the Romania, which is not involved in the negotiations, will try to make Transnistria and Moscow begin the discussions of Transnistria status within Moldova. The West and Moldova may bring up the issue of Russian troops withdrawal and a change of the peacekeeping format. In between, they will put pressure on Transnistria through the economy to make Tiraspol retreat from the idea of its independence. However, the election of the Presidents of Moldova and Transnistria will somehow distract attention from the negotiations and foreign policy issues,” Andrey Safonov said.

He also stressed that Russia should not yield to persuasion and weaken its support for Transnistria.

“The game of the West will definitely aim to completely close the anti-Russian arc of former Soviet republics around Russia. Therefore, the US and the EU will seek to take control of Belarus and Transnistria, as the latest military and political allies of Moscow,” the expert added.

In turn, Gabriele Zimmer, President of GUE/NGL political group in European Parliament, also said that the external pressure on the political system in Moldova has always been high.

“The situation has worsened with the conflict in neighboring Ukraine and the signature of the EU-Moldova association agreement of 2014, which includes the free trade area. Russia’s penalty for this step of the so-called ‘pro-EU’ government was a ban first on wine and then on Moldovan fruit imports. This shows that countries like Moldova that are geographically situated between the EU and Russia should not be pushed to become an integral part of one side or the other – not to the price of war like in Ukraine or to the price of an economic and social break-down of the relations with other countries. There should not be a ‘pro-Russian’ or a ‘pro-EU’ government in Moldova, but a government that represents all interests in this multicultural and multilingual country and that first and foremost works on reforms in favor of democratic participation, social inclusion, and an independent justice system,” the MEP said.

According to her, the country needs an independent justice system and a real system of democratic power division with strong trade unions, an active civil society and free democratic opposition.

“We will continue to work with the civil society and democratic opposition in Moldova to help the country get back on track for social and democratic cohesion,” Gabriele Zimmer stressed.

From her point of view, the economic and social situation in Moldova is very bad for the ordinary citizens.

“A large part of the population lives in severe poverty. Many Moldavians, especially young and educated people, leave the country to work elsewhere, be it in Russia or in an EU member state, which causes a harmful brain drain. At the same time, Moldova suffers from an oligarchic system that is the biggest obstacle to economic and social development. Oligarchs control most of the political parties, the judicial system, and the media. The banking scandal of the ‘vanished billion’ that provoked mass protests in November 2014 is just an extreme example of this unscrupulous state capture by mafia elites,” the politician said.

According to Galina Selari, Executive Director at Center for Strategic Studies and Reforms (CISR) in Chisinau, political and economic situation in Moldova is very unstable today.

“The country feels some changes are coming, but subconsciously understands that there won’t be any positive shifts. The economy is stagnating. Despite some positive statistics, indicating some growth in industry and agriculture, the consumer prices during the same period increased by 10%. Export is steadily declining. For the first time in recent years, the volume of supply is reduced not only to the CIS market – the fact we got use to – but also to the EU market. The weather does not allow making any positive forecasts: it is already clear that the results of the agricultural year will be very modest,” the expert said.

According to her, the government has to borrow abroad, because it is not able to solve the problems of macroeconomic stabilization and finance its priority commitments to the citizens.

“The issue of external budget support is directly related to the resumption of financial relations with the IMF, and, consequently, the policy of stabilization and reforms should be agreed with the Fund. To date the Moldovan economy is more than ever determined by the policy. Sometimes the government just does not have enough time to discuss economic issues. For example, parliament is only being prepared to discuss the third reading of the draft of the national budget for the current 2016 year. They’ll think about its possible results tomorrow, and they’ll not think of the budget for 2017 at all,” Galina Selari added.

In turn, Bogdan Tardea, the political scientist, MP from the Socialist Party of Moldova, suggested that the economy of the state is “on the brink of the abyss.”

“In first quarter of 2016, the total volume of exports decreased by 14.5%, the volume of transported goods by 13.8%, real wages by 4.9%. General budget revenues decreased by 9.4%. Health care costs decreased by 42%, spending on education fell by 14%. The state budget deficit has grown by 6.8 times, and it is covered exclusively through internal borrowing, which resulted in the internal public debt increasing by almost 1 billion lei (about 50 million dollars) in first quarter of 2016. The government, which has no external funding and investment, decided to borrow from banks to pay pensions and salaries. The new draft of the national budget includes about 10 billion lei (more than 500 million dollars) of external loans. This has happened for the first time in the history of the country,” the deputy said.

According to him, the current government lacks popular support.

“The level of confidence in the government, president’s office and parliament is 10–12%. The government of Pavel Filip, controlled by oligarch Vladimir Plahotniuc, has the US support. The country is coming under external control: Washington openly imposed the government of Pavel Filip, despite of many months protests of the united opposition. There are Romanian consultants in every governing institution; the country participates in many NATO military exercises. In 2016, the EU-Moldova Association Council has started its work, actually becoming the body of the external governance,” Bogdan Tardea said.

However, in his opinion, the main threat for Moldova is the potential unification with Romania.

“They have started a powerful process of Moldova’s ‘Romanization.’ Romanian newspapers, TV channels, institutions and NGOs openly promote the idea of destroying Moldovan statehood. Some parties aggressively impose the idea that unification with Romania will speed up the accession to the EU and improve the financial status of citizens. There are persons with Romanian citizenship even in parliament, government, president’s office and the Constitutional Court. Almost every month, Romanian elite push the road maps for Moldova’s Anschluss; the question of unification is openly discussed in Moldova. After eight or ten years the Republic of Moldova may disappear from the political map,” the politician concluded.

A few days after Hitler broke his alliance with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, the Soviet dictator used a diplomatic back channel to explore whether the Nazi leader would be prepared to end the war if Stalin agreed to hand over to German rule Ukraine, the Baltic republics and perhaps even more.

That is the conclusion of a Friday article by historian Nikita Petrov in “Novaya gazeta” an article that undercuts both Stalin’s carefully cultivated stance as someone who was prepared to fight the invader to the end and Vladimir Putin’s use of World War II as a legitimating and mobilizing tool in Russia today (novayagazeta.ru/comments/73493.html).

The history of these events is by its very nature murky and can be reconstructed only by a careful reading of Russian archival materials, Petrov suggests. But the basic facts of the case are these: In the first days after the German attack, Lavrenty Beria on Stalin’s order directed NKVD officer Pavel Sudoplatov to meet with a Bulgarian diplomat to explore what it would take for Hitler to stop his invasion of the Soviet Union.

Among the concessions Sudoplatov was authorized to discuss with the Bulgarian who Moscow believed would communicate his conversation to Berlin was the handing over to Hitler of Ukraine, the areas that Stalin had occupied in 1940-41 on the basis of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and perhaps more.

Such a sacrifice would constitute “a new Brest peace” but would save Stalin and his regime, Petrov points out by allowing the communist regime to continue to function beyond the Urals.

Obviously, discussing anything of this then or later was incredibly dangerous given that such things would have constituted in the clearest way treason, but information about them came out in the interrogations of Sudoplatov and Beria in 1953. And Petrov mines these sources for his article, even reproducing the key Sudoplatov declaration.

As many have pointed out, Stalin believed in Hitler and in his own ability to cut a deal right up to the moment of the German invasion. The archives suggest that he continued to believe in his ability to cut a deal with Hitler even after that time. In fact, however, Stalin was manipulated by double agents before June 22, 1941, and by his own fears after that time.

Nothing came as a result of Stalin’s feeler. Hitler was confident that his forces could defeat the Soviet Union and therefore ignored what was passed on by the Bulgarians. But there were consequences in the USSR for those most immediately involved because Stalin never forgot, Petrov continues.

Despite his regime’s presentation of him as the great military leader during World War II, Stalin remembered that “three people knew the secret of his cowardice and the depth of the collapse in 1941.” The Soviet dictator ordered Abakumov to arrest Sudoplatov, although Beria urged the secret police chief not to obey lest he and Beria himself be next.

And there was a third potential victim of Stalin’s malignant memory: Vyacheslav Molotov, who certainly knew about the meeting with the Bulgarian diplomat in June 1941 and Stalin’s willingness to sacrifice much of the country to save himself. Had Stalin lived, Petrov says, all three would have come to a bad end. But his death kept him from realizing his goal.

The death of the Taliban leader Mullah Mansour as a result of the US orchestrated drone strike in the Noshki area of Balochistan on May 21, reflects a major shift in the US policy towards tackling the Afghan Taliban and their perception on the role played by Pakistan in fulfilling their commitment for peace and stability in the region.

Pakistan received this act by the U.S as its infringement of sovereignty, while the US highlighted the urgency on tackling the Afghan Taliban due to the incessant deteriorating security situation. According to the US and Afghan leadership, the group’s leader Mullah Mansour had become a major hurdle to the peace negotiations with the Afghan government.

With the recent setback in Af-Pak relations post the deadly attack in Kabul on 19th April, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had openly expressed his disappointment in Pakistan’s failure to take necessary action against the Haqqani group and its inability in bringing the Afghan Taliban to the negotiating table for the peace process. The QCG talks held on 18th May, exposed the differences between the group (Afghanistan, Pakistan, U.S and China) regarding the peace process. While, the United States and Afghanistan demand for a more decisive action against groups such as Haqqani network, Pakistan and China are of the opinion that only a peaceful dialogue shall lead to a stable Afghanistan. Both the US and Afghanistan agree that factions within the group that are not agreeable to negotiations should be dealt militarily.
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The possibility of peace talks leading to any positive outcome will be far from reality particularly with the Afghan Taliban’s new chief Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada determined to continue fighting in the region and his refusal to take part in the peace talk initiatives. Thus, this development renders the efforts by the QCG as a total failure. Earlier, Akhundzada was the deputy of Mullah Mansour and is known to share the same ideology as the slain chief. His two new deputies- Sirajuddin Haqqani, son of the head of the Haqqani network and Mullah Muhammad Yaqoob, son of Mullah Omar are equally keen on maintaining an aggressive policy on the battlefront. In fact, the growing relationship with the Al-Qaeda could strengthen the Talibani and act as an added threat to stability in the country.

The US has pointed out that American forces shall target all possible threats emanating from Pakistani soilii, thus, this drone attack is likely to have an adverse impact on US-Pakistan relations particularly on the Afghan issue. It sends across a clear message to Pakistan, that it can no longer allow safe havens to Taliban on Pakistani soil. This move could aggravate the US-Pakistan ties particularly after United States’ refusal towards funding of the F-16 fighter jets. Clearly, the so-called Pakistani influence on Taliban has been declining over the years, thus, controlling them and bringing them to any form of negotiation with the Afghan government shall not be a smooth and immediate probability.

Challenge for the NUG

The Afghan National Unity Government (NUG) has a challenging path cut out for itself, the domestic situation is far from normalcy. In the backdrop of the NATO foreign ministerial meeting in Brussels, the US Secretary of State John Kerry had affirmed that around 9,800 American troops will remain in Afghanistan through most of 2016. The number may go down to 5,500 troops before President Obama leaves office in 2017iii, but that decision is still under review. The United States has committed itself to work along with its NATO partners and international community on assisting the training of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) to ensure overall security in the region. President Obama has approved a larger role for the US military to support the Afghan troops to fight the Taliban-led insurgency by assisting them on the battlefield.iv However, the Afghan leadership faces numerous challenges that they might not be fit to cope at such an early stage. The Afghan Taliban has been expanding their territorial ambitions within the region through offensive attacks targeted against both the Afghan government and foreign troops. Thus, they are gaining strength and are well aware of their stronghold in the region. The recent move on 21st May by the United States may have greatly reduced the possibility of the Taliban to negotiate the peace terms with the NUG.

To add to that, the Afghan forces involved in a security operation are suffering heavy casualties to suppress the insurgency activities within the region and lack the capacity both in terms of men and material to eliminate or restrict the Taliban for the overall transformation of the region. President Ghani recognizes the possibility of fresh challenges with the slow decline in the US military presence and needs to tighten its security infrastructure. The Afghan government lacks an all-encompassing strategy for waging war or building peace. Apart from this, there is a deep trust deficit between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Afghanistan accuses Pakistan of nurturing the Haqqani network as well as certain factions of the Taliban on Pakistani soil, particularly with regard to maintaining greater influence in Afghanistan and to ward off any Indian designs in the region. The present disturbance at the Afghan-Pakistan border has worsened the severed ties between the two neighbours. Thus, a resolution on the border front is necessary for the two countries in order to have cordial relations and focus on pressing issues of the region that demand our immediate attention. Keeping in mind the neighbourhood policy, Pakistan is strategically relevant for Afghanistan and it is important to increase international pressure on Pakistan to target the terrorist groups operating on its soil. Therefore, Afghanistan’s security problem is strategically connected to stability within Pakistan and its intent to ensure safety within the region.

Despite the Afghan-led and Afghan-owned initiative, the Afghan peace talks and the security situation have been largely in the hands of the foreign actors. Thus, Afghan leadership needs to build a strong political as well as a security plan along with international support in order to tackle Taliban and for the overall development of the region. Meanwhile, for the United States, it is obvious that there is a certain level of frustration with the duration of war and functionality. However, given the deteriorating security situation in the region, the lack of capability of the Afghan forces and the weakening government, the United States should consider to maintain a greater number of their troop presence in Afghanistan for an extended period. This shall assist the Afghan government in gathering necessary political strength and expertise to manage the security situation of their region.

*Sabah Ishtiaq is a Junior Fellow at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. The views expressed by the author are personal.

By Vikram Sood*

The expression that relations in the past were marked by “hesitations of history” was particularly evocative and summed up India-US relations in the past and points to a new future. Yesterday’s “natural allies” are now referred to as “indispensable partners”, making it obvious that if India has to realise many of its dreams for its people, the US will have to play a major role in this. But surely not the only one. There is no doubt that Prime Minister Modi’s speech on June 8, when he addressed the US Congress, was brilliant. The contents resonated with the audience; there was a bit of humour and all issues were covered. The first three Modi visits were the buildup to this hard-core business visit. The joint statement at the end of the visit sets out the path ahead in considerable detail.

Hopefully, in India we will accept that we are dealing with a preachy democracy and a sanctimonious media in America. Just as much as one hopes that Americans have understood that they are dealing with an evolving, sometimes chaotic and hesitant, but aspirational democracy that is just breaking free from being a dynastic democracy. We were preachy at one time too, when Jawaharlal Nehru admonished the West for making Indians fight and die for their imperial wars. Modi turned this around by saying Indians too had fought and died for democracy. Thunderous applause.

The script of India-US relations, since May 2014, has run like the first half of a mid-60s Bollywood movie. All fun and games with cosy moments and promises before the interval. The future looks bright, and together, the two can conquer the world. All this, while the bad guys China, Pakistan and North Korea sulk in their dark corners. The hard part is about to begin after the intermission, so fasten your seat belts and hope for a happy ending.

There are plenty of positive takeaways from the visit for both countries, some grey areas still remain and some issues were swept under the carpet. The proof of this partnership lies in the future. Six AP 1000 Westinghouse reactors will be built in Andhra Pradesh once the contracts are signed. The question here is that the US has not constructed any reactors for decades and these might be with untested technology. We have merely agreed so far on the draft text of LEMOA; obviously, there are some reservations. As and when this, and the other basic agreements are signed, it will mean a marked shift in how India views its defence relationship with the US. The joint statement refers, in laudatory terms, to the 2015 US-India Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific and the Indian Ocean Region. This is expected to serve as a guide for collaboration in the years to come, and the two countries should look to each other as priority partners in these regions. There will be collaboration in maritime security. The defence relationship could be an anchor of stability and the US recognised India as a ‘major defence partner’. That is different from being an ally.

The US “will continue to work toward facilitating technology sharing with India to a level commensurate with that of its closest allies and partners”. This would also entail US support to the Make in India initiative. Strong words, indeed, but they are for the future; nevertheless, there is great stress on defence cooperation and diplomacy. In addition, the US “is committed to bring to bear its technical capacity, resources and private sector… to spur greater effort in India’s renewable energy”.

These formulations bring the relationship a long way away from the Cold War era, when we were dubbed a satellite of the Soviet Union. However, now that the USSR has gone, we should not repeat the mistake in reverse of cosying up to the US and moving away from the Russians, acting on the rebound, as it were. The point is that we cannot and should not. The US-Russia relations were always destined to be inimical; Communism was an excuse and the real reason was that each sought global domination. And Russia has not quite collapsed the way Western powers hoped it would. Under Vladimir Putin, it has bounced back and India should not get carried away by the demonisation of the Russians and their leaders that we see in the West. We have to make our own judgments and evaluations.

The India-US ties are not only about bilateral relations. There are geopolitical considerations for both that could affect the bilateral equation. The other consideration is that having raised the India-US bar so high, other nations watching these developments, will have already begun to take counter-measures.

America’s relations with China are also strained, at present. Russia, too, will reevaluate its relations with India following the Modi visit and we must remain wary of a Russia-China arrangement, with Pakistan thrown in for added measure. The US ties with neither Pakistan nor Afghanistan are particularly healthy; nor with Iran. This means that the US footprint in our neighbourhood is presently weak and India is the only responsible power in the region that it can deal with. There should be a value-added for us in this situation.

The US has not taken too kindly to the BRICS initiative and all the other initiatives that have followed with China playing the lead role. An alternative development bank is one of these, and BRICS is seen as the embryo of another grouping to oppose the Western G-7. Brazil stands weakened in the group and the US opposition to both Russia and China is no secret.

It is doubtful that the US will, or can, influence Pakistan on terrorism and nuclear issues. The American warning, soon after the Pakistan-appointed Taliban leader Mullah Mansour was killed in a drone attack, related only to terrorism in Afghanistan. It is unlikely that the US would give priority in tackling terrorism on the ground if it does not affect its interests directly.

Pakistan military leaders have obviously not read or followed what Sun Tzu said about the art of war — “You can fight a war for a long time or you can make your nation strong. You cannot do both.” Pakistan chose to be in a state of perpetual war with its neighbours and China helped it along with the delusion that it was becoming strong with its missiles and nuclear weapons. And today, the results are showing but no change in policy either in Pakistan or China can be reasonably expected.

Regardless of these geopolitical realities, it was a successful visit but our celebrations should be tempered with keeping our expectations reasonable.

*Mr. Vikram Sood did M.A. (Economics) from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. He joined the Indian Postal Service in 1966. He joined Research Analysis Wing (RAW) in March 1972. He headed RAW from January 1, 2001 to March 31, 2003 (till retirement). Since May 2004 he has been regularly writing for Hindustan Times, New Delhi, mainly on matters concerning Security and India’s neighborhood. He has also attended various national and international conferences on South Asian Security.

This article originally appeared in The Tribune.

Last week America was rocked by the cold-blooded murder of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Unlike the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Orlando shooter appears to be a lone gunman who, while claiming allegiance to ISIS, was not actually working with a terrorist group. About the only thing Orlando has in common with 9/11 is the way power-hungry politicians and federal officials wasted no time using it to justify expanding government and restricting liberty.

Immediately following the shooting, we began to hear renewed calls for increased government surveillance of Muslims, including spying on Muslim religious services. Although the Orlando shooter was born in the US, some are using the shooting to renew the debate over Muslim immigration. While the government certainly should prevent terrorists from entering the country, singling out individuals for government surveillance and other violations of their rights because of religious faith violates the First Amendment and establishes a dangerous precedent that will be used against other groups. In addition, scapegoating all Muslims because of the act of one deranged individual strengthens groups like ISIS by making it appear that the US government is at war with Islam.

The Orlando shooting is being used to justify mass surveillance and warrantless wiretapping. For the past three years, the House of Representatives passed an amendment to the Defense Department appropriations bill limiting mass surveillance. But, last week, the same amendment was voted down. The only difference between this year’s debate and previous debates was that this year defenders of the surveillance state were able to claim that the Orlando shooting justifies shredding the Fourth Amendment.

The fact that the Orlando shooter had twice been investigated by the FBI shows that increased surveillance and wiretapping would not have prevented the shooting. Mass surveillance also creates a “needle in a haystack” problem that can make it difficult, or impossible, for law enforcement to identify real threats. Unfortunately, evidence that giving up liberty does not increase security has never deterred those who spread fear to gain support for increased government power.

The Orlando shooter successfully passed several background checks and was a licensed security guard. But, just like those who used Orlando to defend unconstitutional surveillance, authoritarian supporters of gun control are not allowing facts to stand in the way of using the Orlando shooting to advance their agenda. Second Amendment opponents are using Orlando to give the federal government new powers to violate individuals’ rights without due process. One pro-gun control senator actually said that “due process is what’s killing us.”

Ironically, if not surprisingly, one of those calling for new gun control laws is Hillary Clinton. When she was sectary of state, Clinton supported interventions in the Middle East that resulted in ISIS obtaining firearms paid for by US taxpayers!

Mass surveillance, gun control, and other restrictions on our liberty will not prevent future Orlandos. In fact, by preventing law-abiding Americans from defending themselves, gun control laws make us less safe from criminals. Similarly, mass surveillance and warrantless wiretapping erode our rights while making it more difficult for law enforcement to identify real threats.

If Congress really cared about our security and liberty, it would repeal all federal gun laws, end all unconstitutional surveillance, and end the hyper-interventionist foreign policy that causes many around the world to resent the US.

This article was published by RonPaul Institute.

The US Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to laws in two states that restrict ownership of semi-automatic firearms.

On Monday, justices rejected an appeal of an October decision by the Second US Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld laws in Connecticut and New York that prohibit civilians from owning certain semi-automatic rifles and high-capacity magazines.

The laws bar access to the same gun used by Omar Mateen, the man who killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in a terrorist attack on an Orlando nightclub last week.

A federal ban enacted in 1994 had similar prohibitions on certain semi-automatic firearms and magazines that were defined as high-capacity, but that law expired in 2004.

The bans in Connecticut and New York were enacted in response to the Sandy Hook massacre, where a shooter with a semi-automatic rifle killed 20 children and six teachers at an elementary school in 2012.

Five other states and Washington, DC also have bans on semi-automatic rifles.

The two states’ gun laws were originally challenged in two cases from gun rights organizations and individual gun owners. The appeals courts consolidated the cases into one and upheld the law.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that individuals have a right to possess guns in their home for self-defense, but has since refused to strike down state and local laws that enact restrictions on activities. Those restrictions include requiring guns to be locked or disabled when not in use, banning ownership for those under age 21, and bans on carrying firearms in public.

The US Senate is currently expected to vote on a set of competing gun control measures in response to the Orlando mass shooting, two proposed by Democrats and two proposed by Republicans.

The four bills address changes to the federal background checks systems and restrictions on gun sales to those on terror watch lists. All of them are expected to fail, however.

Two Christians remain in detention after being found in possession of religious materials in China’s southern Guangdong province, reported China Aid June 15.

Police initially took three members of the Zhongfu Tongxin Church in Shantou into custody May 30 and later released one. The two remaining are being held because they received a copy of the Bible, said the China-focused Christian human rights organization. It is unknown when the two will be released.

The authorities closed Zhongfu Tongxin Church, an unofficial Protestant church, last August. Officials say it’s members were illegally practicing a religion.

China Aid said this incident is one of many acts of persecution against members of the church since they last year refused to join the government-sanctioned Three-Self Patriotic Movement, a grouping of churches that belong to the Chinese Communist Party.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have discovered a new way to optimize electron transfer in semi-conductors used in solar fuel solutions.

The finding, published today in Nature Chemistry, could have a big impact on devices that convert sunlight into electricity and fuel.

Researchers have already shown that the efficiency of electron transfer at semi-conductor interfaces depends on the distance the electron has to travel. The new finding shows that the efficiency of the transfer also depends on the type of chemical bonds—or the bridge—that the electron travels through along the way.

“Now we can design molecules to act as a gate and keep electrons moving forward in one direction and not reverse their direction,” said UBC chemist and chemical engineer Curtis Berlinguette, senior author on the paper.

“If electrons go in the wrong direction, we lose much of the sun’s energy as heat before it can be converted into electricity or fuel.”

The research also has ramifications in how we view electron transfer in biological systems.

In a collaborative study by the University of Oklahoma, University of Chicago, University of California, Merced, and Uppsala University, researchers conduct the first ancient DNA investigation of the Himalayan arc, generating genomic data for eight individuals ranging in time from the earliest known human settlements to the establishment of the Tibetan Empire. The findings demonstrate that the genetic make-up of high-altitude Himalayan populations has remained remarkably stable despite cultural transitions and exposure to outside populations through trade.

Christina Warinner, senior author and professor in the Department of Anthropology, OU College of Arts and Sciences, and corresponding authors Anna Di Rienzo, Department of Human Genetics, University of Chicago, and Mark Aldenderfer, School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, University of California, Merced, collaborated on the study published June 20, 2016 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article, “Long-term genetic stability and a high altitude East Asian origin for the peoples of the high valleys of the Himalayan arc.”

“In this study, we demonstrate that the Himalayan mountain region was colonized by East Asians of high altitude origin, followed by millennia of genetic stability despite marked changes in material culture and mortuary behavior,” said Warinner.

Since prehistory, the Himalayan mountain range has presented a formidable barrier to population migration, while at the same time its transverse valleys have long served as conduits for trade and exchange. Yet, despite the economic and cultural importance of Himalayan trade routes, little was known about the region’s peopling and early population history. The high altitude transverse valleys of the Himalayan arc were among the last habitable places permanently colonized by prehistoric humans due to the challenges of resource scarcity, cold stress and hypoxia.

“Ancient DNA has the power to reveal aspects of population history that are very difficult to infer from modern populations or archaeological material culture alone,” said Aldenderfer.

The modern populations of these valleys, who share cultural and linguistic affinities with peoples found today on the Tibetan plateau, were commonly assumed to be the descendants of the earliest inhabitants of the Himalayan arc. However, this assumption had been challenged by archaeological and osteological evidence suggesting these valleys may have been originally populated from areas other than the Tibetan plateau, including those at low elevation.

To address the problem, Warinner and colleagues sequenced the nuclear and mitochondrial genomes of eight high-altitude Himalayan individuals dating to three distinct cultural periods spanning 3150 to 1250 years before present. The authors compared these ancient DNA sequences to genetic data from diverse modern humans, including four Sherpa and two Tibetans from Nepal.

All eight prehistoric individuals across the three time periods were most closely related to contemporary highland East Asian populations, i.e., the Sherpa and Tibetans, strengthening evidence that the diverse material culture of prehistoric Himalayan populations is the result of acculturation or culture diffusion rather than large-scale gene flow or population replacement from outside highland East Asia.

Even more revealing, both prehistoric individuals and contemporary Tibetan populations shared beneficial mutations in two genes, EGLN1 and EPAS1, which are implicated in adaptation to low-oxygen conditions found at high altitudes, but EGLN1 adaptations were observed earlier.

“For me, the most tantalizing finding in this study is that the temporal dynamics of the two main adaptive alleles appears to be quite different, suggesting a complex history of how humans adapted to this extreme environment. I am excited at the idea that ancient DNA may allow us to further dissect this history in the future,” said Di Rienzo.

The study broke new ground in other areas as well, yielding the first ancient whole genomes of East Asian ancestry and the highest coverage ancient human genome from Asia (7x coverage) sequenced to date.

“Although hundreds of ancient genomes have been reported for individuals of European and western Eurasian ancestry, this is the first study to recover ancient whole genomes of genetic East Asians,” said Choongwon Jeong, first author of the study, University of Chicago. “Continued investigations of ancient Asian populations will reveal how our ancestors adapted to the overwhelmingly diverse environments found in eastern Eurasia.”

Following the recent conclusion of the Special ASEAN-China Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, some media reports suggest that China had pressured ASEAN countries to agree to a 10-point “consensus” summing up the talks. This brings to mind China’s claimed four-point “consensus” with Brunei, Cambodia and Laos in April on the South China Sea disputes and the question of whether ASEAN unity is still intact.

By Bhubhindar Singh, Shawn Ho and Tsjeng Zhizhao Henrick*

The recent Special ASEAN-China Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Kunming, China, concluded in what many have termed “disarray”, once again over the South China Sea issue. It was reported that an apparent joint statement by ASEAN expressing their “serious concerns” over recent developments in the South China Sea was supposed to have been read out at a joint press conference with China. However, China’s pressure on ASEAN countries to support its own 10-point “consensus” statement, which ASEAN could not accept, led to Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi helming the press conference by himself.

Many analysts view this latest episode, together with how ASEAN will react to an upcoming judgement in a case filed by the Philippines at the Permanent Court of Arbitration over the South China Sea disputes, as a test of ASEAN’s unity. As such, it is timely to revisit Minister Wang’s prior announcement of a four-point “consensus” reached with Brunei, Cambodia and Laos in April this year – which contained supposed agreements between the four countries on approaches to manage the South China Sea disputes – and evaluate the recent state of ASEAN unity.

Divergent Perspectives of those Bilateral Meetings

As that four-point “consensus” was only between three ASEAN countries and China, rather than between ASEAN as a whole and China, this would initially appear to indicate a split in ASEAN. However, upon further examination of official statements by Brunei, Cambodia and Laos, there appears to have been a divergence between their views and China’s perspective on what was really agreed upon in each bilateral meeting.

In their respective foreign ministry’s post-meeting statements, both Brunei and Laos avoided making any specific references to the South China Sea disputes and there was no mention of any agreement with China. As for Cambodia, its foreign ministry did not even issue a post-meeting statement regarding their bilateral meeting with China.

Cambodia’s government spokesman Phay Siphan did, however, confirm two days after China’s announcement that no deal had been reached with China: “There’s been no agreement or discussions, just a visit by a Chinese Foreign Minister.”

China’s Strategy

It is clear that China had gone to each of those three ASEAN countries with the intention to reach separate agreements with them over the South China Sea disputes. The choice of countries that Minister Wang visited – and the seven ASEAN countries that he did not visit on that trip – also provides some clues on China’s assessment of the countries which would not react negatively to that China-declared “consensus”. Such a move, as well as Chinese pressure on some ASEAN countries at the recent Special Meeting, can be seen as part of a broader strategy by China to project a split in ASEAN and garner support for its position in view of the upcoming judgement by the Permanent Court of Arbitration.

That four-point “consensus” had provided the impression that China had convened a meeting with all three ASEAN countries at the same time and had an agreement over their common approach in managing the South China Sea disputes. That was evidently not true, especially since none of the statements issued by the foreign ministries of the three ASEAN countries had used the term “consensus” (or a term containing a similar meaning) with reference to the South China Sea disputes.

This implies that the three ASEAN countries may not have viewed the “consensus” in the same light as China, and that Brunei, Cambodia and Laos may still have viewed the common ASEAN position as more important. The use of the word “consensus” therefore appears to have been China’s unilateral idea, something which China appears to have wanted to do yet again at the recent Special Meeting in Kunming.

ASEAN’s Unity

If not for the relatively unified stance that ASEAN took at this Special Meeting in rejecting China’s 10-point “consensus”, there could well have been another instance of China unilaterally declaring that a “consensus” had been reached with ASEAN at the press conference. As a bloc of 10 Southeast Asian states, ASEAN was able to achieve what Brunei, Cambodia and Laos were previously unable to do on their own, that is: preventing the Chinese narrative of meeting proceedings from dominating international media headlines.

This most recent episode in Kunming, in which ASEAN pushed back China’s 10-point “consensus” and absent itself at the planned joint press conference with Minister Wang, did in the end signal to the international community that ASEAN is still relatively united and will not bow to Chinese pressure.

This relative degree of unity of ASEAN was also evident at last year’s ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus (ADMM-Plus) in Kuala Lumpur. At this meeting, ASEAN was united in deciding not to issue a joint declaration, knowing that discussions over the joint declaration would result in endless acrimonious debates over the South China Sea disputes, favouring instead a chairman’s statement that mentioned the South China Sea issue. This served ASEAN’s purpose of preserving its policy position and unity in light of the competing pressures from the Plus countries, especially from the United States and China.

Therefore, the conclusion can be drawn that concerns over a fracture in ASEAN unity may not have been as deep-seated as media reports have been making it out to be in recent months.

Looking ahead, ASEAN will nonetheless continue to face challenges. Singapore’s Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen said at the recent Shangri-La Dialogue that ASEAN’s assertion of its centrality is a “position attained by default”. All major powers have consistently recognised and accepted ASEAN centrality. The key challenge in the years ahead for ASEAN, however, is whether it can continue to remain united in the face of the major shifts to the regional landscape, which is witnessing escalated great-power competition between the United States and China.

A divided ASEAN is not in the interest of the ten Southeast Asian states, nor of the major powers. Only a united ASEAN can be taken seriously on the international stage and only then can it make positive and long-lasting contributions to the international affairs of the twenty-first century.

*Bhubhindar Singh is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Regional Security Architecture Programme at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Shawn Ho and Henrick Z. Tsjeng are Associate Research Fellows at the same programme. An earlier version of this commentary was previously published in The National Interest on 14 June 2016.