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Political Defiance: A New Weapon Of Separatists – OpEd

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The agitation involving a deluge of stones thrown on police forces in the Kashmir Valley, has, in effect, written a new page in the books of asymmetric warfare. Hartals (strike action) and strikes in Kashmir have become an integral feature of the mundane life of people.

The connection of hartals and strikes in Kashmir is quite extensive and can be linked with many stakeholders, especially separatists. People have been made to believe that hartals are quite justifiable and they are called for appropriate causes. However, with the increasing violence and indiscipline that we can associate with hartals, the justification, relevance and importance of these strikes is diminishing. It is believed by a certain sections of people that hartals are strong measures for civil revolution. As a result of the tremendous influence that hartals and strikes have on the daily life of the common people, it is much dreaded as a means of showing dissent.

When a hartal takes place, Kashmir has to bear huge revenue losses. Vandalizing and torching of buses and other public vehicles and shattering the glass windows of the vehicles by the mob makes the situation even worse. At the time of a hartal the state-run transportation system comes to a standstill, the state transport agencies are bound to suffer big financial losses as they can’t bring out their vehicles on the road. The schools and colleges get affected and have to be closed due to fear of turbulence and chaos.

A hartal or strike becomes a deterrent for a daily labourer or casual worker who has to earn his or her livelihood on day to day basis. They can’t go to work and therefore lose their daily wages. Since the transportation system during a hartal is lamed, patients can’t reach the hospitals when the need is utterly high. When they can’t reach the hospitals or nursing homes in time, it leads to horrible outcomes. Pregnancy cases and emergency patients are the worst hit during such an expression of anguish.

Tourists coming to the state get to see of hartals and carry a bad impression. This is not beneficial for the travel and tourism industry of the state that fetches a lot of revenue, which in turn contributes towards the growth of the economy as a whole. Tourism is amongst the more established industries in the Kashmir Valley. Last two years have been so bad for tourism that it is difficult for tourism player to survive.

The stone pelting movement has been undertaken during the tourist season that starts around April and goes on up to October. Small businesses are also hit by these meaningless hartals and strikes since they largely depend on their daily sales or turnover. Foreign tourists are particularly not used to such incidents and suffer due interruptions or delays in the schedule problem in arriving at their desired destination. Travellers ready to set off on their trip also get held up by these unprecedented events. Public transport is grossly unavailable on these days, creating a mess for the needy travelers. Sometimes, they have to spend an exorbitant amount for private transport and in this way, the private operators make merry.

Hartals and strikes often result into clashes between mob and state administration (Police), causing death and injuries to participants. Though on the face of it, these hartals appear to be expression of annoyance or disappointment of ‘aam admi’ but actually they are stage managed, often sponsored financially. These have been instances were brought from different places and employed by inimical elements on daily wage. The modus operandi has involved recruitment of a hundred odd stone pelters, with a large percentage of children among them, in a few areas of Kashmir. These cadres assemble as per a schedule that is circulated via Twitter, Facebook, SMS and such other means. Over ground workers, separatists and outfits muster men, women and children to congregate at the appointed place and time.

The crowd agitates forcing the deployment of police forces, and the core cadre starts pelting stones. The mob mentality takes over, the situation turns violent with the crowd braving the riot control arsenal till they draw fire. It leads to the death of a few more, thereby proving the fodder for the Valley to remain on the boil, a little longer.
With the valley in turmoil, the average Kashmir has taken a hard hit. They surely did not want any such trouble, and definitely not in the season when it would be detrimental to their annual earnings, the most. The organisations behind the whole movement belong to the separatist groups.

Today, there is hardly a constituency left in J&K that espouses a merger with Pakistan. Those who raise the banner of independence are also fully aware, that within days of such independence, Kashmir will be taken over by the jihadis and there will be no such civil liberties as they are enjoying now and they will not even be allowed to undertake protests. The leadership perpetuating violence in J&K has long been hijacked by groups like the Lashkar-e-Tayiba and the Hizbul Mujaheedin. The call for liberation is a tool in the quest of extending their radical boundaries further.

At present, India is the biggest democracy in the world. In a democratic setup, everyone has the right to articulate their views and vocalize their problems as long as it does not lead to the infringement on law and order. In a number of developed countries including the US and France, an embargo has been put on hartals or strikes.

It is quite regrettable that the separatists in valley abuse the democratic rights of the people by calling these hartals and strikes which are stifling the economic development of Kashmir. People can’t go to work, students are unable to go to school and exams get postponed. There is no logic for calling these hartals and strikes that are causing hardships the common people. It is the common people who bear the brunt of these machinations of civil revolution. We should remember that only sensible discussions and talks can bring us to a feasible solution and these talks should serve the interest of the common people. It is high-time that people of Kashmir are not taken to ransom to serve the motivated agenda of few.

*Farooq Wani is a Kashmir-based senior journalist and commentator


Fighting Inequality In Asia And The Pacific – OpEd

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Inequality is increasing in Asia and the Pacific. Our region’s remarkable economic success story belies a widening gap between rich and poor. A gap that’s trapping people in poverty and, if not tackled urgently, could thwart our ambition to achieve sustainable development. This is the central challenge heads of state and government will be considering this week at the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP). A strengthened regional approach to more sustainable, inclusive growth must be this Commission’s outcome.

It’s imperative, because ESCAP’s Sustainable Development Goal Progress Report shows that at the current rate of progress, Asia and the Pacific will fall short of achieving the UN’s 2030 Agenda. There has been some welcome progress, including in some of the least developed countries of our region. Healthier lives are being led and wellbeing has increased. Poverty levels are declining, albeit too slowly. But only one SDG, focused on achieving quality education and lifelong learning, is on track to be met.

In several critical areas, the region’s heading in the wrong direction. Environmental stewardship has fallen seriously short. The health of our oceans has deteriorated since 2015. On land, our ecosystems’ biodiversity is threatened. Forest conservation and the protection of natural habitats has weakened. Greenhouse gas emissions are still too high. But it’s the widening inequalities during a period of robust growth that are particularly striking.

Wealth has become increasingly concentrated. Inequalities have increased both within and between countries. Over thirty years, the Gini coefficient increased in four of our most populous countries, home to over 70 per cent of the region’s population. Human, societal and economic costs are real. Had income inequality not increased over the past decade, close to 140 million more people could have been lifted out of poverty. More women would have had the opportunity to attend school and complete their secondary education. Access to healthcare, to basic sanitation or even bank accounts would have been denied to fewer citizens. Fewer people would have died from diseases caused by the fuels they cook with. Natural disasters would have wrought less havoc on the most vulnerable.

The uncomfortable truth is that inequality runs deep in many parts of Asia and the Pacific. There’s no silver bullet, no handy lever we can reach for to reduce it overnight. But an integrated, coordinated approach can over time return our economies and our societies to a sustainable footing. Recent ESCAP analysis provides recommendations on how to do just that.

At their heart is a call to in invest in our people: to improve access to healthcare and education.

Only a healthy population can study, work and become more prosperous. The universal basic healthcare schemes established by Bhutan and Thailand are success stories to build on. Expanding social protection to low income families through cash transfers can also help underpin a healthy society.

Increasing investment in education is fundamental to both development and equality. Here the key to success is making secondary education genuinely accessible and affordable, including for those living in rural areas. Where universal access has been achieved, the focus must be on improving quality. This means upskilling teachers and improving curricula, and tailoring education to future labour markets and new technologies.

Equipping people to exploit frontier technologies is becoming more important by the minute. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is a rapidly expanding sector. It can quicken the pace of development. But it is also creating a digital divide which must be bridged. So investment in ICT infrastructure is key, to support innovative technologies and ensure no one is left behind. Put simply, we need better broadband access across our region. Geography can’t determine opportunity.

This is also true when it comes to tackling climate change, disasters and environmental degradation. We know these hazards are pushing people back into poverty and can entrench inequality. In response, we need investment to help people to adapt in the region’s disaster hotspots: targeted policies to mitigate the impacts of environmental degradation on those most vulnerable, particularly air pollution. Better urban planning, regular school health check-ups in poorer neighborhoods, and legislation guaranteeing the right to a clean, safe and healthy environment into constitutions should be part of our response.

The robust growth Asia and the Pacific continues to enjoy, gives us an opportunity to take decisive action across all these areas. But for this to happen, fiscal policy needs to be adjusted. More effective taxations systems would increase the tax take, and better governance would increase people’s willingness to contribute. Public expenditure could then be made more efficient and progressive, the proceeds of growth shared more widely, and inequalities reduced.

My hope is that leaders will seize the moment, strengthen our commitment to fighting inequality on all fronts and put us back on track to sustainable development in Asia and the Pacific.

*Shamshad Akhtar is the Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Secretary of Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)

High Alert For Palestinian Slaughter And Conflict With Iran – OpEd

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There will be a confluence of trigger events this week that could lead to an escalation of conflict. At the same time that the US has reneged on the nuclear agreement and Israeli missiles are attacking Iranians in Syria, the US embassy will be moved to Jerusalem and Palestinians will protest the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, capping six weeks of actions.

United States moves embassy to controversial site

On Monday, May 14, the United States will move its embassy to Jerusalem, even though the new US embassy is not yet built. Jerusalem is considered by both Israelis and Palestinians as their capital. This action is part of a 100-year history of Zionist colonization of Jerusalem.

When the announcement of the move was made, there was widespread anger. In Gaza, protesters took to the streets bearing Palestinian flags and denouncing the decision. Students held demonstrations in the West BankBernard Smith of Al-Jazeera reported from Gaza, “People here compared the protests to a small ball of fire that would roll and turn into a much larger ball later on.” The decision unified Palestinians, putting aside their divisions to focus on Trump and Israel.

Arab governments issued statements of condemnation and emergency meetings of both the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation were held while the UN voted 128-9 to reject the Trump administration’s decision and approve a resolution urging countries to not move their embassies to Jerusalem. Reuters reported that Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, Imam of Egypt’s al-Azhar mosque, one of Islam’s most important institutions, said the decision incites “anger among all Muslims and threatens world peace.” Sheikh added, “The gates of hell will be opened in the West before the East.” Hamas leader Ismail Haniya described it as a “flagrant aggression…that will know no limit to the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim reaction.”

Thousands of people rallied in Turkey and Jordan on Friday to protest against the decision to move the US embassy. Tens of thousands of Muslims gathered in Jakarta, Indonesia on Friday to protest the United States. Israelis in Jerusalem are also protesting the move.

The Jerusalem Post reported that Palestinians have called for a day of rage and that mass protests are being mobilized for the opening of the US embassy. Choosing to move on the day before the Nakba is a provocation by Israel and the United States.

Israel is illegitimate

The Great March of Return held its seventh Friday of protests last week. At least 49 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli snipers since the protest began on March 30, and 8,500 have been wounded (see e.g. 9 killed 780 wounded and violence continues 16 killed 1,500 wounded). The protests will culminate May 15 on the Nakba, or Catastrophe when Palestinians memorialize being forced from their homes, their villages being destroyed, hundreds of thousands becoming refugees and scores being killed during the founding of Israel 70 years ago. Land theft and ethnic cleansing have continued, often legalized by property law. Palestinian protesters are demanding the right to return to their homes and marching after decades of Israeli violence and injustice. They proclaim they will not wait another 70 years.

The reality is clear, as Miko Peled, whose grandfather signed the Declaration of Independence of Israel 70 years ago and whose father was an Israeli general, says — that Israel has no legitimacy. Peled emphasizes that people in the US have a responsibility to take action to end the occupation of Palestine and outlines ways to do so, including an aggressive BDS campaign. Peled says “Israel” is an illegitimate state and “the area should be called Palestine.”

Peled is correct to focus on the responsibility of the people of the United States. No other country has been more supportive of Israel. The US gave “more than 250 billion dollars in direct government aid to Israel, [and] the USA has used its veto more than 70 times in the Security Council to prevent passage of resolutions condemning Israeli policies.” Alexander Haig, the former Secretary of State who served as chief of staff to Presidents Nixon and Ford and was a four-star general who served as the supreme commander of NATO, told the truth, saying, “Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security.”

Protests against Israel and AIPAC, the DC-based Israeli lobby, consistently occur in the US, even though the media hides the truth about the Israeli lobby. Even YouTube censors information about Israel but people still see the reality of Israeli violence. Israel works to inject pro-Israel propaganda in the media while US universities censor speech about Palestinian justice. The massacre of nonviolent Palestinians is leading to calls for an arms embargo against Israel, a BDS that includes a military embargo.

The combination of current events reveal the true costs of the creation of Israel. Israel is a fortress-like apartheid state that practices ethnic cleansing and whose government applauds snipers using Palestinians as targets. Some of its citizens watch the slaughter and cheer the death of Palestinians. Israel has created a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza with a decade-long embargo with intermittent mass destructive bombings. Even people of Jewish faith who criticize the barbarism of Israel are characterized as traitors and threatened by the government.

Press TV reports the Israeli military will be doubling the number of forces around the Gaza Strip and in occupied West Bank territories ahead of the controversial opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are expected to hold massive protests along the Gaza fence.

Widespread attacks on Palestinians are expected. In preparation for the massacre, people are urged to donate to help the wounded in Palestine.

Israel is provoking Iran in Syria

On May 4, military and intelligence analyst, the Saker, described how Israel was attacking Iranian bases in Syria in an attempt to get Iran to respond and pull the United States into a war with Iran.

On May 10, Voice of America reported that Israel launched an assault on more than 50 Iranian targets in Syria. Israel hit weapons depots, logistics sites and intelligence centers used by Iranian forces, many near Damascus.

In between these reports, Israel claimed that Iran fired rockets into the Golan Heights (Israeli occupied territory, part of Syria). Iran described the Israeli claims as “fabricated” and “baseless.” Holly Dagres, an Iran analyst for the Iranist questions why Iran would conduct such an attack “right after Trump’s decision and while Tehran is looking for European support to stay in the [nuclear deal]?” Other analysts also doubt the Israeli claim, and Iran says Syria fired into the Golan Heights, quoting a Syrian official. Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah describes Syria responding to multiple Israeli attacks in Syria to set new rules of engagement and plans to retake the Golan Heights from Israeli occupation.

Dr Roham Alvandi, a professor at the London School of Economics suggests this is the United States and Israel  “working hand in glove to escalate the military confrontation.” He adds, they seek to “provoke the Iranian leadership into taking action that will isolate and ultimately weaken the Islamic Republic.”

Israel is concerned about Iranian soldiers amassing in Syria close to its border. As Peled reports, the Israeli media and political leadership are banging the drums for Israel’s own war with Syria and Iran.

The Independent describes the situation as “bringing two of the region’s major powers closer to the brink of direct confrontation than ever before.” While Russia and European countries urged de-escalation, the United States repeated their refrain, “Israel’s right to act in self-defense.”

US withdraws without cause from the Iran Agreement

All of this comes when Trump has decided to renege on The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear agreement between France, Britain, Germany, Russia, China, the United States and Iran. In a belligerent speech filled with lies, Trump provided no evidence that Iran had violated the agreement and leaders of France, Britain, Germany, Russia, and China tried to convince the US to live up to the agreement.

Israel urged Trump to leave the agreement, presenting an intelligence dossier that claimed Iran had violated it. However, the dossier contained information weapons inspectors had already found to be false. Netanyahu made a big public relations presentation to urge Trump to get out of the agreement. Telesur summarizes the reaction, writing, “After Netanyahu’s speech the International Atomic Energy Agency said it has ‘no credible’ evidence Iran was developing nuclear arms since 2009.”

US activists published an open letter apologizing to Iran. The letter described Trump’s decision as “reckless, baseless, and dangerous” and expressed that we are “ashamed that our government has broken a deal that was working.” The signers promised, “We will do everything in our power to stop Donald Trump from strangling your economy and taking us to war with you.” People in Iran took to the streets to protest the US’ decision.

The decision is part of the long history of the US trying to dominate Iran going back to the 1953 coup, continuing in recent years, during which the US has spent tens of millions of dollars annually to build opposition inside Iran, and to the US’ involvement in recent protests. Activities today are consistent with a 2009 Brookings Institution report, Which Path To Persia? Options For A New American Strategy For Iran,” which put forward various paths to regime change, including Israel taking the lead and the US and Israel falsely claiming that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons.

Richard Johnson, a top US nuclear expert, handed in his resignation after Trump’s unilateral withdrawal. And the chief inspector of the UN nuclear agency stepped down unexpectedly, a few days after the US withdrew from the nuclear agreement.

The decision may hurt the United States in many ways. The sanctions Trump will reintroduce do not just limit U.S. dealings with Iran, but will also penalize other countries, causing a riff with US allies. John Bolton threatened to enforce the sanctions against European corporations and countries, while Europe punched back supporting the Iran agreement and planning legislation to protect European companies. Iran is entering agreements with Russia and China, who are its protectors. Iran will seek to build its relationship with European and Latin American countries as well. The US may be left out, its credibility damaged. Given the failure of US military power in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, traditional allies recognize the limitations of the US as a super power.

There are many reasons a war with Iran would be a disaster for the US and Israel. Moon of Alabama describes that the Bush administration considered it but war games ended badly for the US. This remains true. So, if the US is rational, war can be averted.

No war on Iran

While escalation makes no sense, the leaders of Israel and the US may see a political benefit.  Prime Minister Netanyahu is facing charges of corruptionProsecutors recently questioned him and his wife for five hours at the same time but at different locations, both as suspects. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, had his home and office searched and documents and tapes were seized by prosecutors. Trump’s legal team is a mess. Rudy Guiliani recently resigned from his law firm after making counterproductive comments in the media. Israeli and US leaders may seek to change the subject and play to their conservative political base; a military conflict could aid both.

The 2018 election, which currently looks like a potential Democratic sweep, is also a factor. Sheldon Adelson, a top donor to Trump and Republicans in 2016 who gave $83 million to the campaigns and $5 million to Trump’s inauguration, pushed for moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, even offering to finance the move, and for quitting the Iran nuclear pact. Adelson also urges a US nuclear attack on Iran.

The day after Trump left the pact, Adelson had lunch with him in the White House. Not long after, Paul Ryan went with former senator, Norm Coleman, who chairs the Republican Jewish Committee, and others from a Republican PAC, to meet Adelson and his wife at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. They urged support for keeping Republican control of the House. Ryan left the room (since he is not legally allowed to ask for seven-figure donations) and Coleman made the ask, with the Adelsons donating $30 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund, doubling their cash on hand. Adelson’s company recorded a $670 million income tax windfall from the GOP tax law in the first quarter.

The forces are aligning right now in a disastrous way. We must not allow the administration to lie us into another prolonged and costly war. We must oppose the slaughter of more Palestinians. We must be clear that we do not support war and that we do support the rights of Palestinians. Protests are being planned across the US. Join them or organize your own. And spread the truth to your neighbors and your community. You can also support the 2018 Freedom Flotilla, which has left Norway, to bring supplies to Gaza.

South Asian Strategic Stability And India’s Nuclear Bomb – OpEd

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In the history of nuclear proliferation, the month of May is of great significance for the South Asian region as in this month both India and Pakistan tested their nuclear weapons. South Asian nuclearization is dynamic and dangerous enough to be an issue of concern for not only the region, but also for international security.

May 2018 marks 20 years of overt nuclearization in South Asia, however, the often forgotten fact is that the process of nuclearization started way before 1998. Many would say that it started when in 1974 India tested nuclear explosive device under the guise of peaceful nuclear explosion. But the attempts to bring nuclear weapons in South Asia started even before 1974. However, that particular PNE by India started the chain reaction in the region and resultantly Pakistan started its own nuclear program to securitize its sovereignty and security. Before, India’s 1974 test, Pakistan had no intention of going nuclear.

On the other hand, the threat from China is taken as a reason behind India’s nuclearization. Nonetheless, a proper analysis of Indian ambitions and nuclear proliferation suggests otherwise. Initially the Indian nuclear program was projected as a peaceful program started at the time of Nehru administration. Additionally, it is believed that the military usage of India’s atomic program started under the rule of Lal Bahdur Shastari as the PM. But it was Nehru government that set the foundations of India’s atomic program by utilizing the master plan of Dr. HomiJehangir Bhabha, who entwined civil nuclear program with military nuclear program in a way where the growth of civil program would mean the growth of military program. He was a firm believer that the growth of Indian civilization was dependent upon atomic energy.

These views were expressed in 1948 when the concept of peaceful nuclear explosion didn’t even exist. Moreover, declassified US State Department documents tell that India was interested in the nuclear explosion technology since 1954. The timeline of these actions suggests that Nehru administration was aware of the future dimension of India’s nuclear program. Moreover, it also asserts that when it comes to the nuclear program, India’s actual policies are different from its state narratives and doctrines.

Later in 1974 by extracting plutonium from spent fuel at CIRUS and its reprocessing at Trombay under the supervision of HomiJehangir Bhabha, India tested its nuclear device under the label of peaceful nuclear explosion to avoid direct backlash from international community. In addition, it was also an attempt to develop a deterrent by demonstrating technological competence to all players in Asia-Pacific region. India started its program way before Chinese nuclear test and 1962 war.

Furthermore, by a peaceful nuclear explosion, a deterrent was established by India, which stopped the war during the crisis with Pakistan. Even then after 24 years of covert nuclearization, overt nuclear tests were conducted by India in May 1998. Beyond any doubt those tests changed not only South Asian, but also international security architecture and political environment. However, the problem of nuclear proliferation started when India made ambitious nuclear energy program, which was a tool to facilitate its military ambitions.

The question arises that when the deterrent was established and in place for 24 years, then suddenly what motivated India to conduct nuclear tests in 1998. Even if one believes that China was the reason behind India’s military nuclear program, still there was no immediate threat to India in 1998. Thus, the factor which motivated the Indian government in 1998 was its ambitiousness to rise as a threat in international system to adjacent states.

At the end of 20th Century international community was determined to make India, Pakistan and Israel sign the CTBT to achieve decisive success in attempts for non-proliferation. But, if the CTBT was signed by India the ability to develop all kind of missiles including ICBM would be taken away. Resultantly, the biggest South Asian state would never be able to show its strength at the regional and global level.

These actions taken by India to achieve its national goal of being a regional and international power, changed the security layout of South Asia. In addition, it has pulled the region into a neverending conventional and non-conventional arms race. Thus, to avoid war and counter India, Pakistan resorted to nuclear deterrence as a strategic stability in an environment of mistrust and on-going conflicts.

*Ahyousha Khan is a “Research Associate” at Strategic Vision Institute, Islamabad.

Unnecessary Panic In India About Walmart’s Online Trading – OpEd

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The recent announcement by Walmart that it would enter into 16 billion USD deal by acquiring 79% state in Indian online retailer Flipkart appears to have caused considerable anxiety among the small and medium scale shop keepers and what is known as kirana stores in India. This largest e-commerce deal in India has been opposed by the small and medium traders, who seem to fear that they would be thrown out of business and several thousands of people involved in such small trade would lose jobs.

However, a careful analysis of the overall scenario and clear understanding of the ground realities would abundantly make it clear that such apprehensions have no sound basis and are born due to lack of clear understanding of the various aspects of trade in a developing economy.

Dominating presence of kirana stores (neighbourhood retail stores)

It is reported that there are around 13 million shop keepers / kirana stores in India , operating at tiny and small scale level in unorganized sector. They are well spread throughout the country including rural areas and remote villages. They largely cater to the consumers in the nearby localities, who mostly belong to middle and lower income group and buy small quantity for their immediate requirements. Such items sold are largely groceries, hardware items, toiletries, dairy products, medical stores, etc. which are fast moving products and with most of them having low shelf life.

Kirana shops, which are off line traders, meet the sentimental requirements of the buyers to see the product, touch and buy, making their choice and such needs are not met by e commerce companies. This is a significantly striking advantage for off line traders and shopkeepers, which would stand them in good stead.

Most of such kirana shops also extend small credits to the familiar and loyal customers, which help them in retaining their client base.

The advantage of these kirana shops are their low investment and consequent low overheads, with many of them operated by family members.

It is impossible to visualize trading activity in India without such kirana shops, which are in thousands and which are elegantly meeting the vital needs of people belonging to the middle and lower income group and competently fulfilling their expectations. They are essential and integral part of Indian trade and business structure.

No need for apprehension for kirana shop keepers

The fear of the kirana shop keepers appear to be the possible comparatively low pricing business model of large e commerce companies, which can offer discounts and incentives to promote sale. By adopting the information technology practices and modern trade procedures, they will have huge competitive advantage over the small shop keepers. Further, since such large e commerce companies operate in large scale with high turn over and procure the products for marketing at comparatively low cost in view of the large quantity of requirement, their competitive muscle power to operate in the trade market vis a vis the kirana shops would be much higher and stronger.

While the above views are logical and appropriate, it is necessary to keep in view that such advantages of e commerce companies will not by themselves upset the prospects of the kirana shops, since the kirana shops have their own essential role and significance in the trading sector.

Enough space for e-commerce companies & kirana shops

It is estimated that the trade market in India is steadily increasing at around 6 to 7% per annum in tune with the overall GDP growth of the country and rising percapita income. Share of e-commerce is presently only around 2.5% of the overall Indian trade market of around Rs. 45 lakh crore. While the growth in the trading activity will be well sustained and with the market steadily expanding, there would be enough space for both e-commerce companies as well as the kirana shops.

E-commerce companies like Flipkart and Amazon have been operating in India for quite a long time now and they have not adversely impacted the performance of the kirana shops in any visible manner.

All said and done, it is necessary to keep in mind that whether ecommerce marketers or kirana shops, they have to necessarily cater to the expectations of the consumers at various levels. With the rapidly developing technology practices and steadily expanding economy, modernization of retail market at every level cannot be avoided.

In recent times, it is seen that even many such small shop keepers have been responding to the changing expectations of the consumers in variety of ways.

Presently, the e-commerce marketers essentially meet the requirements of only such customers, who can wait for a few days to get their products and such products generally have long shelf life and the clients have to make the immediate payment in cash or by digital mode to the delivery agents. It is estimated that at present only around 50 million people in India shop online and this number will increase in the coming years. However, such number of online buyers are unlikely to make a big dent in the overall trade market in India, in view of the large Indian market size, which is steadily expanding.

Further, it should be noted that no buyer exclusively go for shopping online and the buyers shop both online as well as buy from the physical market depending upon the products and their need .

Let not the competitive ability of kirana shop keepers underestimated

In the coming days, convergence between off line and online retail market is bound to take place and in all probability, several present off line traders like kirana shops will also resort to online trading in small and medium way while continuing their existing activity and will mature into larger traders.

It is necessary not to under estimate the capability and dynamism of traditional operators of kirana shops in India ,who have grown with the times and will continue to do so.

Credibility Of India’s Second Strike Capability – OpEd

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The third leg of the bourgeoning Nuclear Triad of India is of great significance. In any event, the first strike takes out India’s land based ballistic nuclear missiles and strategic aviation, then the Indian Navy’s Arihant lurking in the ocean depths to avoid and launch ambush and retaliatory strikes will render the attacking country unfit for human life.

The austerity of the idea of placing a nuclear deterrent on submarines emerged in 1950s, as the United States and the USSR explored different avenues with arming diesel-electric boats with basic cruise and ballistic missiles.

India has maintained a strong nuclear force to ward off any possible misadventure; India too has built a formidable arsenal including nuclear weapons. As indicated by the most recent information by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) an international think tank on conflict, armaments, arms control and disarmament, India has burned through $63.9 billion on its defense forces in 2017, an increase of 5.5 per cent compared with 2016.

The Indian Navy too has the indigenously built nuclear submarine INS Arihant which carries nuclear-tipped missiles, giving India an assured second strike capability only if the nuclear sub marine is operational. As per the Indian avowals the nuclear submarine is equipped with the K-15 (Sagarika) and K-4 missiles. The Sagarika missile has a range of 750km to 1,500km and can carry a warhead of 1 tons; the K-4 is a much bigger missile having a range of 3,500km with a warhead capacity of 2.5 tones. INS Arihant is the first indigenously built submersible nuclear submarine with assistance from the Russian technology and designers.

Notwithstanding the reports that surfaced regarding an accident that might have damaged INS Arihant. The news item reported by The Hindu stated that the Arihant’s propulsion compartment was damaged after water entered it, as a hatch on the rear side was left open by mistake. This report however raised questions rather than furbishing any response primarily because of the glaring technical irregularities, for the submarine has no hatches there. INS Arihant is based on Russian double hull design which has a sealed nuclear reactor section.

Moreover, The Hindu’s reporting on the Arihant brings into limelight the threatening and upsetting partition between the nation’s political and military authority.
According to the Ministry of External Affairs, India has formally announced and established a command structure which is directly under the civilian control. The Nuclear Command Authority established by India includes a Political Council and an Executive Council. India’s Prime Minister chairs the Political Council. it is the only body with authority to order a nuclear strike. The National Security Advisor chairs the Executive Council, which advises the Nuclear Command Authority and carries out orders from the Political Council. However the height of incongruity is that the absence of Arihant from operations came into the knowledge of the Political leadership only when the Indian Navy was carrying out the precautionary advance deployment of submarine assets following the Doklam standoff with China.

It is exasperating to note that India’s political leadership came to know about one leg of nation’s strategic triad only after they requested a precautionary advance deployment.

The accident not only underscores the professional incapability of the Indian Navy but also speaks volume of the broad failure in intelligence and the respective checks and balance in place. It additionally implies that military is not keeping the civilian government on the up and up which is against India’s declared operating procedures.
Lastly, the accident also called attention to the credibility of India’s second strike capability, for the best mode of second strike capability is the submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and for the missiles to be launched an ‘operational’ nuclear submarine is needed, which India as of now has not been able to acquire.

*Ubaid Ahmed, currently working as research Associate, Strategic Vision Institute. He can be reached at ubaid@thesvi.org

Cultural Appropriation And Cultural Imperialism – OpEd

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You may have seen the uproar caused by an American student wearing a Chinese-style dress to her prom, bringing her widely publicized criticism that she was guilty of cultural appropriation. What is cultural appropriation?

This commentary says cultural appropriation is “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include the unauthorized use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.”

Following that definition, it would seem that American (and perhaps more broadly, Western) culture is the most appropriated culture in the world today. Everywhere in the world, people have adopted Western styles of dress, music, language, and cuisine.

The definition above included the word “unauthorized” and when a McDonalds opens somewhere outside the US, that’s not unauthorized. Maybe that qualifies as cultural imperialism. But people choose Western-style dress, they choose to speak English, they choose to watch American movies, and they choose to eat American-style food. When a Subway restaurant opens in South Korea, is that cultural appropriation or cultural imperialism? When English phrases infiltrate other languages, is that cultural appropriation or cultural imperialism?

Those who use these terms tend to associate both with dominance and power. When a dominant group adopts cultural aspects of a dominated group, that is cultural appropriation. When a dominated group adopts cultural aspects of a dominant group, that is cultural imperialism. For example, when aspects of Mexican culture come into the United States, that is cultural appropriation, but when aspects of US culture migrate into Mexico, that is cultural imperialism.

Following this line of reasoning, as aspects of different cultures diffuse around the world, countries like the United States are guilty of both cultural appropriation and cultural imperialism, whereas countries like Peru (I just chose Peru as an example) are victims of both cultural appropriation and cultural imperialism.

I’m not saying that the United States and Western Europe are dominant nations—those who accuse those countries of cultural appropriation and cultural imperialism are. The whole idea appears demeaning to those countries that are claimed to be victimized. (Note that in the prom dress case, it was not the Chinese who claimed cultural appropriation, but other Americans.)

This is, as I see it, a small issue, but also a symptom of a larger one: the victim mentality that keeps some people and some nations from advancing. The claimed victims of cultural appropriation are saying others are taking what’s theirs without their permission, and the claimed victims of cultural imperialism are saying that they are having the culture of others forced upon them without their permission.

This victim mentality is evident in many economic issues, such as trade policy, the international operations of Western corporations, immigration policy, laws governing intellectual property, and more. There may be real issues there, so I’m not dismissing them. I am saying that victim mentality must be widespread, and is likely pernicious when an issue like the design of a prom dress gets the reaction it has.

This article was published by The Beacon.

Kosovo Engages Imams To Deradicalize Extremists

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By Perparim Isufi

Kosovo’s Ministry of Justice and Islamic Community have signed an agreement on engaging imams to help radicalised Muslims who have been arrested or jailed for terrorism.

Kosovo Justice Minister Abelard Tahiri on Friday signed a deal with the body representing the country’s Muslim clerics, the BIK, on deradicalising prisoners charged or convicted of terrorism.

“We already have a proposal from the Islamic Community and we expect they will help in deradicalisation of those who have returned from the wars in Syria and Iraq,” Tahiri said.

Before accrediting clerics for the program, imams will have to undergo a vetting procedure led by the Kosovo Intelligence Agency, AKI.

“We cannot leave anything to accident,” the minister said.

“I believe that we have the capacities to control this process,” he added, noting that the agrement clarifies also what literature will be allowed inside prison cells.

“Now everything will be authorised,” he explained.

The head of of the BIK, Naim Ternava, said the official Islamic community wanted to contribute to the deradicalisation drive inside the country’s prisons.

“Radicalisation and extremism have nothing to do with Islam,” Ternava said.

Eyeing its eventual inclusion in the European Union, Kosovo has taken the threat of Islamist extemism seriously in recent years.

Five imams have been charged with terrorism since late 2014. One of them, Zeqirja Qazimi, from Gjilan, is serving a 10-year jail sentence while the four others have been acquitted.


The Meaning Of Withdrawal – Analysis

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By Adam Garfinkle*

(FPRI) — The deed has been done to the deal: on Tuesday, as by now everyone above the age of about six knows, President Trump withdrew United States from the so-called Iran deal—formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Before and especially since then, enough electronic ink has been spilled in efforts either to explain or to spin what has happened to fill a virtual ocean basin. The riptides are treacherous; none but the intrepid should dare to enter. I, however, am intrepid, and with any luck at all, so are you, dear reader.

Let’s dive right in, first by posing the seven key questions:

  • Was the decision a mistake, or not?
  • What broader context do we need to understand and parse the commentary thus far on the decision?
  • Mistake or not, does it mean that the United States is on the road to war with Iran, a war that almost certainly would drag in other parties (Israel, Lebanon courtesy of Hezbollah, Saudi Arabia most likely, the United Arab Emirates by extension, maybe Bahrain by extended extension, and so on)?
  • Does it represent a new breach too far to repair with America’s closest European allies?
  • Does it complicate the effort to drive a nuclear deal with North Korea, as the elite media and associated chatterati assume?
  • Does it suggest or imply that the Trump Administration now actually has an Iran policy, and perhaps even a broader policy for the region?
  • What does the decision tell us about the Administration’s broader strategy compass and likely future trajectory, not just in foreign and national security policy but also for domestic U.S. politics?

Now let’s turn to answers. Novices in these treacherous swells, bring your inflatable water-wings. You might need them.

Mistake, or Not?

 If one thinks that the deal, whatever its several birth defects, was working to limit and slow the danger of an Iranian nuclear breakout, then leaving the deal is a mistake unless one has in mind some better way of limiting that danger. And it had better be a lot better, because the diplomatic costs of the decision are real: the main two being the dissing of America’s best European allies—with whom we still have much important business to conduct in tandem that we cannot achieve unilaterally, not least with regard to Russia—and undermining the U.S. government’s reputation for consistency and predictability worldwide.

Well, which is it? If the Trump Administration has a better way in mind to limit the dangers posed by an Iranian nuclear breakout, what might they be? There are only two generic possibilities.

The first is the use of force, at one level or another, to seriously degrade if not entirely destroy the Iranian nuclear infrastructure—if not also to try to destroy the regime. If one thinks that the use of force is inevitable on account of the short fuses built into the deal, a reasonable case can be made that doing it sooner is better than doing it later, especially if you don’t trust your successors to bite the bullet and do what is required.[1] As Lord Vansittart said, “it is usually sound to do at once what you have to do ultimately.”[2]

The counter to this advice is some form of Micawberism: waiting, hoping against hope, for “something to turn up” that will enable one to wriggle out of doing what one really doesn’t want to do. That was essentially the Obama Administration’s choice: the regime would moderate; or by showing that the United States did not seek regime change, the mullahs would decide to forgo the expense and danger of building a nuclear arsenal; or something else useful would happen. To its considerable credit, however, the Obama Administration recognized the dilemma for what it was, and did not make the disastrous analytical error, popular in some circles, of simply assuming that an Iranian breakout would be no big deal since deterrence would inevitably and unerringly work despite circumstances and a context vastly different from that of Cold War U.S.-Soviet deterrence.[3]

Not all forms of Micawberism are illusory—it depends on the case to hand. Sometimes something does turn up: The Royal Navy was in the fight of its life in late July 1588 when a huge storm swamped the Spanish Armada. Besides, it was not irresponsible to resist unleashing another spasm of American violence in the heart of the Middle East at a time when we were still engaged in two other shooting wars, and when the political carrying capacity for a third was decidedly low—certainly in the President’s own party but broadly in the nation as well. A can-kicking exercise can become quite appealing under such circumstances.

The second generic possibility is the re-establishment of the sanctions regime and its further tightening, putatively to be used to renegotiate the deal to get a better outcome. This idea, whose origin rests in arguments used to oppose the deal in 2015, is either naïve or disingenuous. It took a long time and a lot of effort over more than one administration to strengthen the sanctions regime to the point that, combined with the generic incompetence of the Iranian regime’s economic management techniques, it inflicted real pain. Having just dissed our own partners in that effort, it is highly unlikely that the Trump Administration can resurrect a similarly draconian sanctions regime—unless of course the Iranians in due course engage in behavior roughly as chest-bumping as that of the Trump Administration. That’s possible, but unlikely anytime soon.

The notion that a more painful sanctions regime could be used after the fact to renegotiate a better deal depends on the premise that the Iranian regime would agree to do something that runs hard against the grain of its own interests. The deal as signed was strategically ambiguous, and had to be to be concluded. For both sides it constituted to some extent a wager against an indeterminate future. Under such circumstances, neither side gets a do-over. To insist on one exemplifies bad faith, and to succumb to such an insistence amounts to humiliation under duress. That sort of thing doesn’t happen except under very extreme circumstances—so extreme that if it takes an American knife to the Iranian throat to get them to agree, one can take it for granted that the terms of such a forced agreement will not be honored, and so one might as well just slide the knife downward and have done with it.

In sum, whether the decision to withdraw was a mistake or not isn’t as simple a question to answer as many commentators seem to think. And that is precisely because the situation created by the Iran deal, in all its necessary ambiguity, has not surprisingly been a mixed one.

On the one hand, the deal has slowed Iranian momentum toward a nuclear breakout, even if it has not stopped a range of critical ancillary activities other than those represented by spinning centrifuges. But on the other the deal essentially codified and in effect blessed Iran’s status as an incipient nuclear power, and represented a major concession from earlier U.S. insistence that the weapons program be abandoned in total as opposed to partially and temporarily frozen.

Also on the one hand, the deal has not moderated Iran’s regional and wider international behavior, as the Obama Administration promised, albeit with a wink and a nod and a false demurral, would occur. The sequestered Iranian assets thawed by the deal have mostly been used for military and proxy expeditionary support in Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere—in every case directed against the interests of the United States and an assortment of allies and partners in the Middle East. On the second other hand, however, that very fact has stimulated a good deal of popular ill will toward the regime, and has contributed to an increasingly fissiparous optic between the Rouhani government on the one side and the Supreme Leader/IRGC phalanx on the other—as illustrated in recent days by Rouhani’s extraordinary public statement about the government’s opposition to the latter’s banning of the “Telegram” app.

Where this spinning wheel will stop no one knows. That’s why, as noted above, the best way to characterize the deal from the perspective of the protagonists is as a wager against the future. If the deal ends up teasing the clerical leadership and its domestic allies into a level of overreach that eventually tanks the regime, and if it is ultimately replaced by a more normal, post-revolutionary regime, that will be an excellent outcome from the U.S. perspective. In turn, it would make what happened on Tuesday seem in retrospect to have been of minor importance, except if it could be demonstrated that U.S. withdrawal from the deal accelerated a wave of fatal Iranian hubris. That is obviously a very different outcome from the existing regime becoming more moderate; but it is an outcome that will have required, at least for its first few acts, a good cop/bad cop tandem that neither the Obama Administration nor the Trump Administration could either imagine or admit.

But we don’t know if this will happen, and even if it does we don’t know when—before or after a disastrous catalytic regional war occurs. I would have advised against withdrawal, because the prospect of war—especially a wider catalytic war in the region—bears too many imponderable dangers to risk. It would have been wiser to insist not on a renegotiated deal but on a follow-on agreement, and that demand our allies would have readily supported.

That said, it’s too soon to know with any assurance whether the withdrawal was a mistake or not. It too, like the deal itself, represents a wager against the future. All consequential decisions in foreign and national security do.

Parsing the Commentary

The U.S. debate over the Iran deal was one of the most profoundly dishonest debates in our history. It illustrated the politicized rancor that characterizes American politics writ large these days, and demonstrated the truth of the verity, usually attributed to the late Christopher Hitchens, that partisanship makes people stupid. And the stupidity, let loose to roam the nation at large, produces a level of general understanding about complex issues roughly analogous to a coconut’s grasp of differential calculus. The Iran deal debate was no exception.

The Obama White House line was that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” What it really believed is that almost any deal was better than no deal, because the only responsible alternative to a deal—with the Iranians racing pell-mell toward breakout—was to resort once again to force. It also dissembled about what kind of war it wanted to avoid by suggesting that a war with Iran would be another Iraq-scale ground war, complete with calamitous occupation. No serious person, anywhere, imagined a military campaign against Iran looking like that. Yes, they spun and spun well beyond the threshold of lying, as Ben Rhodes’s infamous interview with David Samuels revealed.[4]

Equally disingenuous was most of the opposition to the deal. A few opponents came clean and confessed that they preferred a military campaign to a deal—and in doing so they expressed the secret hopes of the Sunni Arab state elites and of many Israelis as well. But most insisted that there was some third way—a better deal backed by the aforementioned hyper-charged, new and improved, sanctions regime. Few of the people who made that case actually believed it, but it seemed politically useful to make it anyway in opposition to those who were making equally but politically opposite dubious claims. Don’t forget: Most of these folks, on both sides, were trained as lawyers, and so felt a lot more comfortable than they should have declaiming about things they knew to be eyewash.

Now, in the aftermath of Tuesday’s withdrawal, we are witness to the second coming of all this hogwash, repurposed for a different political context. When supporters of the deal tell you it was the best thing since sliced bread, and that, for example, the verification safeguards of the deal are airtight, don’t believe them. As to the latter, if you actually read the JCPOA you’ll see that on-demand IAEA inspections are limited to certain kinds of sites and, more important, require the unanimous consent of the P5+1 to go forward. That group includes Russia, which would act as Iran’s lawyer now as it once did for Saddam Hussein in Iraq under roughly similar circumstances—all on behalf of frustrating U.S. policy. Who believes that under current political circumstances the Russian government would help facilitate on-demand spot IAEA inspections of Iranian facilities? If that’s you, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.

When supporters of withdrawal tell you that the decision does not make war more likely, and that they really just want to get a better deal via a strengthened sanctions regime, don’t believe that either. I wish I had another bridge to sell.

Does Withdrawal Mean War with Iran?

It might, but war is not inevitable.

It might because the Iranians might react to petulance with petulance. They might elect to restart their program and dare us to do something about it. You don’t need a crystal ball to see where that kind of dynamic might lead.

But the Iranians may choose another tack. They might decide to play aggrieved party, milking the U.S. withdrawal for all the sympathy it can haul. And the world being the way it is, and Trump being the way he is, that’s several supertankers’ worth of sympathy.

More specifically, the Iranians might stay within the constraints of the deal because the other members of the P5+1—Russia, China, Britain, France, and Germany—have not withdrawn. Remember that the Iran deal is not a treaty, or even an executive agreement between the sides. It is an odd duck, though not a unique one. It is, in essence, what its name suggests it is: a joint declaration. In other words, one side says we will do X, Y, and Z at the same time that the other side says it will do A, B, and C. The deal would obviously break down entirely if the Iranian side withdrew, but not just because the P5+1 becomes the P4+1.

Now, in Europe the P5+1 is often called the E3+3. Do the Europeans do this just to be cute? Not exactly. The P5 are the permanent members of the UN Security Council, and that mattered when these negotiations got going because the demands arrayed against Iran were couched in the language of several fairly useful UNSC resolutions. But Germany is not a permanent member of the UN Security Council: It’s the +1. For manifest political reasons having to do with the vicissitudes of the European Union, the Europeans prefer to see themselves as working in unison: hence E3 and, by default, +3—now +2.

If this seems silly, the political meaning of it isn’t silly at all. The E3 are hoping that, together, they have enough leverage to keep the Iranians from acting out of the deal. The Iranians know that, and so they expect to be offered something for letting the E3 succeed in their aspiration, temporarily at least. What might the coin of that offer look like?

It could be economic, and the JCPOA specifies some carrots for the Iranians that could bear elaboration. But it could also transcend the four corners of the JCPOA document to include certain European dispositions toward Syria, or Yemen, or Bahrain, or Qatar, or the Palestinians and Israelis. Use your imagination, and remember: EU policies toward various Middle Eastern actors and contingencies have been shown over the years to be remarkably flexible, much more flexible in many regards than a succession of U.S. administrations have thought helpful or wise.

Note finally on this point that the Iranians and the Russians are in cahoots with each other in Syria, and the Russians can be counted on to encourage the Iranians to harvest European largesse, because that largesse doubles as an enormous wedge to drive between the United States and its key European NATO allies. The Russian leadership loves such wedges. If you like a metaphor, think lettuce wedges…..with Russian dressing.

In sum, the slough to war can be avoided through the shifting of the U.S.-European-Iranian triangle in such a way that the American withdrawal appears as an act of self-exclusion; or, put a bit differently, as “a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”[5] But the price of American self-exclusion is not trivial: the ceding of leverage and influence with respect to U.S. interests and allies in the Middle East. The Europeans play the couriers as they flee, having been pushed after all, from us; the Russians are the recipients.

A Transatlantic Breach Too Far?

It could be, at least for a while.

There is a history here. First came the U.S. withdrawal from the TTP, but with implications for the T-TIP; then came the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord; along the way was the Brussels Summit at which President Trump refused to explicitly endorse Article V of the NATO Treaty; then the “easy to win a trade war” remark and the tariffs—and now this.

But not just this: Mark the way of this. Emmanuel Macron comes to the United States, and we all know his view of the Iran deal. He puts it to Trump; Trump smiles and is cordial. Angela Merkel follows, with the same view. Trump harrumphs, and she goes home. And then Trump ignores them both, doing it even sooner than the May 12 deadline requires, so that no one can miss the intended humiliation. It’s reminiscent of how Trump handled Mitt Romney before the inauguration, dangling the State Department job before this prominent member of the establishment, the Republican Party establishment at that, before humiliating him as well.

The press in the United States and in Europe is now referring to this as a “snub.” It goes much deeper than that. It is personal, because Trump makes everything personal. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Trump really does ultimately support Le Pen in France, the AfD in Germany, and the likes of Nigel Farage in Britain. How comfortable AfD types would have felt in Charlottesville this past summer, among what Trump called some “fine people.” Just as the vast majority of what seems to be foreign policy in the Trump Administration is just signaling for domestic political purposes in Trump’s quest to realign American politics, so his manipulations of NATO-European leaders seems tailored to encourage certain political outcomes in those countries. (So Teresa May was smart not to come to Washington in recent weeks.) To the extent there is a “nationalist internationale” reminiscent of its 1930s’ fascist forerunner, Trump seems to be aware of and subtly supportive of it.

Absent an in-your-face threat to a NATO member—and perhaps even then—ever fewer European believe the U.S. government would come to that member’s assistance, or would try to rally the alliance as a whole to do so. Alliances thrive on the predictability inherent in trust. Where there is no trust, there can be no predictability, and where there is no predictability there is no deterrence. And right now there is little trust, perhaps even none at all, across the pond. Another conventionalized speech like the one the President gave in Warsaw this past July, and even another act of symbolic solidarity in expelling some Russian diplomats, can’t fix this now. We are below and beyond that.

Of course, there have been rough spots in the Transatlantic relationship before—many of them, in fact. But in Cold War times the specter of Soviet power and pretension worked as a great salve to heal all wounds. That specter is no more; Russia today is a pale shadow of that specter in west European eyes. Russia, they think, is “new” Europe’s problem, which “new” European governments anyway exaggerate. “New” European elites resent the cavalier attitude of their wealthier EU associates toward what they consider existential security concerns. And they worry that in due course Germany, its Russlandverstehers in the lead, will create Rapallo 2.0 at their expense.

But this has nothing to do with Iran, right? Not right. Just as the E3 fleeing Washington on account of differences over the Iran deal provides a wedge for the Russian leadership to harm the Transatlantic connection, so that wedge deepens divisions within the EU. The Polish, Czech, and Hungarian governments never had any access into the P5+1 negotiations, yet the deterioration of the P5 into the P4 materially harms the two institutional arrangements on which these newly independent countries depend most: NATO and the EU. All the more so, just by the way, for the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian governments.

And if that were not enough, on the other geographic flank of the alliance, the Turkish government is now far more beholden to the Russians than to us. That is largely owed to a combination of Turkish mistakes and bad luck going back several years now, but Russian skill and American errors have helped shape the current situation as well.

Dean Acheson once said, at least on this occasion not meaning to be witty, that “things are not always as they seem, but sometimes they are.” Well, if NATO seems to be bleeding in the gutter right now, that’s because it is. Now, some will immediately object that if you look not at “high politics” but at budgets and improvements “on the ground” things look vastly better than they have in years. There’s a fair bit more money flowing to necessary tasks, even in Europe for a change. That’s both true and irrelevant. At staff levels things are indeed improved and improving. NATO careerists on both sides of the ocean are happy, and methodically dismiss brow-furrowed diagnoses of trouble. But capabilities don’t mean much if there is no political will to use them.

What our smiling colleagues seem to miss is that the United States has two policies toward Russia: one, the government’s policy, toward that country, and a second generally contradictory policy, Trump’s policy, toward its leader. (Vignette interlude: Imagine Admiral Mike Rogers, the recently retired Director of NSA, showing the President in the Oval Office unredacted sigint intelligence proving Russian government interference in the November 2016 presidential election, and the President looking back at Admiral Rogers and saying simply, “Well, I have a different view.”) Same for NATO-Europe: The U.S. government has one set of policies toward our allies, and the President has a different and often contradictory policy toward their leaders. Secretary of Defense Mattis is clearly on record as advising against withdrawal from the Iran deal; but the President did it anyway.

It is hard to blame anyone, say at the Marshall Center in Garmisch, Germany, for not fully taking in this strangeness, because it is indeed very strange. It is an affront to experience and logic alike. But should push come to shove, which policy will prevail? Short of something like a military coup, the President’s will.

And a Prospective Nuclear Deal with North Korea?

The bumper sticker visible on the media and think-tank street is that if the U.S. government walks away from a pledge made by a previous Administration, then the future credibility of all Executive Branch international commitments will be degraded accordingly. This is true in general terms, but specific negotiations are not conducted in general terms. Just because a president, any president, thinks an element of the U.S. security architecture is not in the national interest doesn’t mean that all aspects of that architecture are called into question. During the Bush 43 Administration the U.S. government withdrew from the ABM Treaty. I had hoped that withdrawal would have taken place much earlier, for circumstances and technology had changed dramatically since the thing was signed in 1972. By the time we withdrew, it hardly made any difference: the Cold War was over, the strategic nuclear competition had thus been rendered vastly less salient, and so the practical outcome of the withdrawal was very minor.

The point is that agreements are kept or not kept because they serve the interests of the signatories. So if—and this is highly speculative, of course—the U.S. and North Korean governments manage to reach an agreement that both sides believe to be in their interests, the staying power of the agreement will hinge on those paired beliefs. It will not hinge on the terms of other agreements, whether still in force or not. And if some day one side or the other changes its mind about the ongoing utility of a U.S.-North Korean agreement, as happened with the Iran agreement (for good reasons or not isn’t the point here), then the agreement is liable to lapse.

That is just the nature of international agreements among sovereign states. Agreements entered into freely—in the context of perceptions of relative power and leverage outside the negotiating room, which are always present to shape negotiating outcomes—are just that. And just as governments enter such arrangements freely, they can withdraw from them the same way simply by paying some (small or not-so-small) reputational price for doing so. That’s different from situations, as mooted above, in which one side signs a piece of paper at the point of a bayonet, in which case coercion rather than free will seals the deal. Again, such arrangements will be subverted at first opportunity by the coerced party, and so really are not worth much qua agreement.

No one today imagines a U.S.-North Korea agreement being signed under extreme coercion, nearly amounting to a situation of unconditional surrender. So if a deal delivers something that both sides value, it will stick. There is no such thing as a reputational virus that floats through the air, necessarily contaminating one negotiating experience with another.

Such a deal is theoretically possible—basically, a nuclear stand-down from North Korea in return for diplomatic normalization and a formal pledge of no regime change from us—but whether it will actually come about is impossible to say. I doubt that President Trump fully grasps the relentlessly complex geopolitics of East Asia, or cares to grasp them. He is, in my view, capable of getting fleeced in a negotiation so long as he thinks he can present the outcome as a “win” as seen through the prism of U.S. domestic politics. If that happens, we can perhaps look forward to a Democratic president one day disowning a Korea deal.

So Is There Now an Iran Policy?

I doubt it, but it depends on what we mean by “policy.” Sometimes policy means an integrated, well-thought out plan that matches objectives to means, or at least tries to. Sometimes policy is used to mean a more general set of orientations to specific problems, but that does not necessarily include a lot of dot connecting from problem to problem within regions, let along among them. And sometimes policy refers only to certain instincts or intuitions, often not explicitly articulated, that may or may not congeal into something more over time if a President has to revisit the same problems area repeatedly during his tenure.

The latter describes fairly well the Obama Administration’s adventure in Syria policy. That policy area was in due course connected to a larger picture, one defined by the tantalizing payoff of a diplomatic breakthrough over Iran afforded by a nuclear deal. The gist was: make a deal with Iran, bring it in from the cold as Nixon brought in China, and create a new regional balance of power that would allow the United States to reduce its presence in a part of the world in which it was “over-invested.” If the Saudis et al. didn’t like it, too bad. But a policy in the first sense—a truly integrated policy on a regional level, let alone on a fully global level—the Obama Administration, in my view, did not attain. Not “doing stupid shit” does not require that kind of effort. Both its admirers and detractors exaggerated the Administration’s policy sophistication the better to support or criticize it.

And so what of the Trump Administration? Well, if one goes back and rehearses the logic already laid out here, one could conclude that the Trump Administration does indeed have an Iran policy: in simple form, it would be that Iran is an implacable and dangerous adversary that needs to be thwacked good and hard. In that scenario, the withdrawal from the deal expects to catalyze a sequence of events that gives the Administration an opportunity to attack Iran, and at the same time to roll back its forward positions in Syria and elsewhere in the region.

Like the idea or not, there is a logic to it. If it exists—and the replacement of Rex Tillerson with Mike Pompeo, and of H.R. McMaster with John Bolton, can and has been read as the building of a “war cabinet” in preparation for a fight—it is a policy at least as coherent as the Obama policy toward Iran.

But I doubt it exists. If there were such a policy—I mean a real policy, not a Pinocchio policy—then how to explain Trump’s manifest urge to get the United States entirely withdrawn from Syria, an act that would constitute an unalloyed gift to the mullahs? Yes, he walked that back after someone explained to him the implications, but there’s no mistaking his basic isolationist/unilateralist instincts here. Just as he disdains in his personal life being bound to any inconvenient rules or norms, so he yearns to break U.S. policy free of constraints and obligations in general. His policies are projections of his personality in a purer form than any President heretofore.

Until there is evidence of more coherence and integration on the policy level, Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran deal strikes me as yet another example of his affinity for one-off in-your-face displays of petulance. He likes to flip off buttoned-down types. It draws attention, and if Donald Trump knows how to do anything really well, that’s it. He probably has no idea what comes next, and no idea of how to get an idea about it. That’s one reason why war is both entirely possible but not inevitable for already being intended or planned. Vansittart again, this time speaking about Kaiser Wilhelm, but eerily applicable to Donald Trump: “The Kaiser . . . may not have liked war, though he liked doing everything that led to it.”[6]

And What Next?

Everything has a context, without which nothing is fully intelligible. And that certainly goes for the decision to withdraw from the Iran deal. So what is the context that matters?

As noted, we live in a highly partisan, and hence publicly very stupid, environment right now. It makes having serious and honest conversations about consequential decisions much more difficult, and the fact that the American political class has let the formidable powers of deep literacy slip away with its general abeyance of sustaining reading habits doesn’t help.

But it also doesn’t help to exaggerate, at least to exaggerate the wrong things. There have been plenty of over-the-top episodes in American politics and in our foreign policy debates over the years. The imperialist jingoism of the 1890s counts; the ravings of Father Coughlin and the America First movement of the 1930s do, too; the McCarthy witch hunts of the early Cold War era also come to mind, as does the staged moral panic of the nuclear freeze movement of the early 1980s. There have always been fringe, populist-tinged undercurrents in American politics, but because foreign and national security policy has been mainly an insulated domain of elites, the weirdness has never been decisive or even influential, except rarely.

The difference between then and now is that now the fringe is in power in the White House, and that has led to a mass breakdown in process—one suspects deliberately—which always affects policy outcomes in one way or another. The personnel volatility of the Administration thus far may reflect not so much an inexperienced President who doesn’t know what his in-box looks like, but a President who is determined to master the political stage by undermining even the institutional apparatus that was created and exists to serve his office.

President Trump is engaged in a political insurgency designed, in effect, to bring about global regime change, despite the fact that the regime he wants to change is one of mainly American design, construction, and maintenance. His war plan has two fronts: the attack on the so-called administrative and “deep” state domestically; and the attack on the institutional framework of the so-called liberal international order.[7] So Trump may not have policies as they are conventionally understood, but he may well have a strategy of statecraft, however idiosyncratic and illiberal it may be, that combines domestic and foreign aspects into a whole. He may not know or much care what withdrawing the United States from the Iran deal will lead to in the Middle East, but he does seem to know at least in broad outline what the skein of that and related decisions, taken together, are leading to.

When a few months ago White House aide and speechwriter Stephen Miller called Trump “a political genius,” most of us scoffed. But then most of us have thought for the better part of a year that Trump, defined as the sum of his many deficiencies, would yield to more experienced management, and that therefore the arc of policy would regress to the mean. That has not happened, and the decision to leave the Iran deal sharply punctuates the point. Its larger meaning for the future may therefore inhere in that broader context.

About the author:
*Adam Garfinkle
is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and serves on its Board of Advisors.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI.

Notes:
[1] This is not a mere decorative remark. Menahem Begin ordered the June 1981 Israeli attack on the Osirak reactor in Iraq in part because an election was near, and he feared that, if he lost, his Labor Party replacement would not be willing to do what he believed was a necessary deed.

[2] Robert S. Vansittart, The Mist Procession (London: Hutchinson, 1958), p. 50.

[3] For years I and others tried to debunk this widespread and dangerous foolishness; see, for example, my “Culture and Deterrence,” Foreign Policy Research Institute E-Note, August 25, 2006.

[4] David Samuels, “How Ben Rhodes rewrote the rules of diplomacy for the digital age,” The New York Times, May 5, 2016.

[5] For those who might need to buy a vowel here, it’s Macbeth, Act V, Scene V.

[6] Mist Procession, p. 151.

[7] To understand why I say “so-called,” please see my “Parsing the Liberal International Order,” The American Interest Online, October 27, 2017.

Jurassic Fossil Tail Tells Of Missing Link In Crocodile Family Tree

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A 180 million-year-old fossil has shed light on how some ancient crocodiles evolved into dolphin-like animals.

The specimen – featuring a large portion of backbone – represents a missing link in the family tree of crocodiles, and was one of the largest coastal predators of the Jurassic Period, researchers say.

The newly discovered species was nearly five metres long and had large, pointed teeth for grasping prey. It also shared key body features seen in two distinct families of prehistoric crocodiles, the team says.

Some Jurassic-era crocodiles had bony armour on their backs and bellies, and limbs adapted for walking on land. Another group had tail fins and flippers but did not have armour.

The new species was heavily armoured but also had a tail fin, suggesting it is a missing link between the two groups, researchers say.

It has been named Magyarosuchus fitosi in honour of the amateur collector who discovered it, Attila Fitos.

The fossil – unearthed on a mountain range in north-west Hungary in 1996 and stored in a museum in Budapest – was examined by a team of palaeontologists, including a researcher from the University of Edinburgh.

It was identified as a new species based on the discovery of an odd-looking vertebra that formed part of its tail fin.

The study, published in the journal PeerJ, also involved researchers in Hungary and Germany. It was supported by the Leverhulme Trust and the SYNTHESYS project, part of the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme.

Dr Mark Young, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences, who was involved in the study, said: “This fossil provides a unique insight into how crocodiles began evolving into dolphin and killer whale-like forms more than 180 million years ago. The presence of both bony armour and a tail fin highlights the remarkable diversity of Jurassic-era crocodiles.”

New Technology For Liquid-Crystal Displays

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An international research team from Russia, France, and Germany has proposed a new method for orienting liquid crystals. It could be used to increase the viewing angle of liquid-crystal displays. The paper was published in the journal ACS Macro Letters.

“This is first and foremost a fundamental study exploring the mechanisms of liquid crystal orientation,” says Dimitri Ivanov, the head of the Laboratory of Functional Organic and Hybrid Materials at MIPT. “That said, we expect that these mechanisms might have applications in new LCD technology.”

Liquid crystals

Most solids are crystals. In a crystal, molecules or atoms form an ordered three-dimensional structure. Unlike solids, liquids lack this internal long-range order, but they can flow. Matter in a liquid-crystal state has properties that are intermediate between those of liquids and crystals: It possesses both the molecular order and the ability to flow. A liquid crystal can thus be viewed as an “ordered” liquid.

Not all materials can exhibit a liquid crystalline state, and the phase transition mechanisms may vary. Among other things, the molecules of an LC material have to be anisometric — that is, rod- or disk-shaped. Some compounds become LCs in a certain temperature range. These are called thermotropic. By contrast, lyotropic LCs adopt the liquid crystalline state when a solvent is added.

The properties of an LC material vary depending on the direction. For example, polarized light propagates in a liquid crystal at different speeds along different directions. Also, in an electric or magnetic field, the orientation of LCs can rapidly change. This phenomenon is known as the Fréedericksz transition. Thanks to the optical properties of LCs and their ability to be easily realigned, they are widely used in the electronic displays of TVs, computers, phones, and other devices.

Liquid-crystal displays

In an LCD, the image is generated by changing the intensity of light in each pixel via an electric field, which realigns liquid crystals. There are several LCD configurations, but the one most commonly used is based on twisted nematic LCs. These are rod-shaped thermotropic liquid crystals that can adopt a twisted configuration by using special aligning substrates. Applying an electric field to these LCs can untwist them. This reproducible and predictable response can be used to control light intensity.

Each pixel in a color LCD consists of three subpixels: red, green, and blue. By varying their intensities, any color can be displayed. A subpixel in a twisted nematic-based LCD ( consists of a light source, a color filter, two polarizers, and an LC cell between two glass plates with electrodes. If the liquid crystals were not there, no light would pass through the cell, because whatever light is let through by the vertical polarizer would be blocked by the horizontal polarizer before reaching the color filter. However, special substrates with groovy surfaces can be used to twist LCs in a spiral between two polarizers so as to turn the light precisely by the amount needed to pass through the second polarizer. The fully illuminated state of the subpixel is actually its “off” state. When voltage is applied, the liquid crystals untwist, changing the light polarization to a lesser degree. As a result, some of the light is blocked. Eventually, as some voltage no light can reach the color filter, and the subpixel goes dark.

One of the limitations of this technology is the viewing angle of a display: From a sideways perspective, the LCD will not render the colors accurately. This is due to the co-alignment of liquid crystals. The issue can be solved using multidomain displays, in which pixels belong to a number of domains, whose LC orientations are different. This means that at least some of the domains are always oriented in the right way. The international team of researchers led by Professor Dimitri Ivanov, who heads MIPT’s Laboratory of Functional Organic and Hybrid Materials, has proposed a brand new solution for multidomain display design.

Going orthogonal

The authors of the paper reported in this story worked with liquid-crystal polymers. These are substances composed of long molecules with chainlike repetitive structure. It turned out that a slight variation in the structure of polymers can drastically alter their orientation on the substrate. The polymers used in the study are poly(di-n-alkylsiloxanes), or PDAS. Each molecule is a chain containing alternating silicon and oxygen atoms. The silicon atoms in PDAS bear two symmetric hydrocarbon side chains (figure 2). The n in the name of the compound stands for the length of the side chains, which was varied between 2 and 6.

In the experiment, polymers from the PDAS family were deposited on a Teflon-rubbed aligning surface with a regular pattern of grooves. Generally, crystalline polymers are known to align on such substrates, but only when the lattice parameters of the substrate match those of the deposited polymer. The researchers examined the orientation of the liquid-crystal polymer chains relative to the direction of the grooves on the aligning surface. The side chain length n was increased in steps of just one methylene group (CH?) at a time.

It was found that, contrary to expectations, the liquid-crystal orientation varied depending on side-chain length. At n equal to 2, the needlelike polymer superstructures known as lamellae co-aligned with the Teflon grooves. Because lamellae are known to be perpendicular to the polymer chains, the researchers concluded that the polymer chains are perpendicular to the grooves on the substrate . When n was increased to 3, the orientation of the lamellae changed by 90 degrees, making them perpendicular to the grooves. As a result, the LC polymer chains were now oriented parallel to the grooves. At n equal to 4, no further change in orientation was observed. However, when the side-chain length was further increased to 5 and 6, the lamellae again co-aligned with the Teflon grooves.

The researchers have thus found that by merely adding one methylene group to the side chain of the polymer, they could switch the LC orientation, which is crucial for most applications of liquid crystals, including LCDs. According to the authors, the effect they discovered could be used to design LCDs with improved viewing angles. This could be achieved using a multidomain technology that works by orienting subpixels of one color in different directions. As a result, the pixels compensate one another when the display is viewed at an angle, improving color rendition. The researchers expect this technology to be considerably simpler and cheaper than other multidomain approaches that are currently used.

Oral Antibiotics May Raise Risk Of Kidney Stones

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Pediatric researchers have found that children and adults treated with some oral antibiotics have a significantly higher risk of developing kidney stones. This is the first time that these medicines have been linked to this condition. The strongest risks appeared at younger ages and among patients most recently exposed to antibiotics.

“The overall prevalence of kidney stones has risen by 70 percent over the past 30 years, with particularly sharp increases among adolescents and young women,” said study leader Gregory E. Tasian, MD, MSCE, a pediatric urologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Tasian noted that kidney stones were previously rare in children.

Study co-author Michelle Denburg, MD, MSCE, a pediatric nephrologist at CHOP, added, “The reasons for the increase are unknown, but our findings suggest that oral antibiotics play a role, especially given that children are prescribed antibiotics at higher rates than adults.”

Tasian, Denburg and colleagues published their study in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

The study team drew on electronic health records from the United Kingdom, covering 13 million adults and children seen by general practitioners in the Health Improvement Network between 1994 and 2015. The team analyzed prior antibiotic exposure for nearly 26,000 patients with kidney stones, compared to nearly 260,000 control subjects.

They found that five classes of oral antibiotics were associated with a diagnosis of kidney stone disease. The five classes were oral sulfas, cephalosporins, fluoroquinolones, nitrofurantoin, and broad-spectrum penicillins. After adjustments for age, sex, race, urinary tract infection, other medications and other medical conditions, patients who received sulfa drugs were more than twice as likely as those not exposed to antibiotics to have kidney stones; for broad-spectrum penicillins, the increased risk was 27 percent higher.

The strongest risks for kidney stones were in children and adolescents. The risk of kidney stones decreased over time but remained elevated several years after antibiotic use.

Scientists already knew that antibiotics alter the composition of the human microbiome–the community of microorganisms in the body. Disruptions in the intestinal and urinary microbiome have been linked to the occurrence of kidney stones, but no previous studies revealed an association between antibiotic usage and stones.

Tasian pointed out that other researchers have found that roughly 30 percent of antibiotics prescribed in office visits are inappropriate, and children receive more antibiotics than any other age group, so the new findings reinforce the need for clinicians to be careful in prescribing correct antibiotics. He added, “Our findings suggest that antibiotic prescription practices represent a modifiable risk factor–a change in prescribing patterns might decrease the current epidemic of kidney stones in children.”

One co-author of the current paper, Jeffrey Gerber, MD, PhD, is an infectious diseases specialist at CHOP who leads programs in antibiotic stewardship–an approach that guides healthcare providers in prescribing the most appropriate antibiotic for each patient’s specific infection, with the aims of improving individual outcomes and reducing the overall risk of antibiotic resistance.

Tasian and colleagues are continuing to investigate the microbiomes of children and adolescents with kidney stones in a single-center study at CHOP. Their goal is to expand this research into broader, population-based studies to better understand how variations in microbiome composition may influence the development of kidney stones.

Mimicking A Sweet Solution To Mop Up Pollution

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A fast and safe method to prepare a 3D porous material that mimics the shape of a honeycomb could have broad applications from catalysis to drug delivery or for filtering air to remove pollutants or viruses.

Both the lattice of a honeycomb and the symmetry of a diatom are complex living structures comprising patterns and shapes that have long provided inspiration for scientists. One recent application is to develop artificial hierarchical porous materials that are stable, yet have a large surface area and the ability to selectively extract materials. It has been difficult however to build these structures at the nanoscale due to their complexity and pattern repeatability across scales from the individual compartments to the whole structure.

A team from KAUST, led by Suzana Nunes, has proposed a simple method that, in just five minutes, can produce a flexible film with a complex hierarchical structure that has repeating patterns of interconnected, regularly shaped pores.

With experts in the Imaging and Characterization Core Lab, the team used the block copolymer called polystyrene-b-poly (tertbutyl acrylate) (PS-b-PtBA) to demonstrate this method. They tested various concentrations of PS-b-PtBA with different solvent mixtures, cast the resulting solutions on glass plates and evaporated them for different time periods to promote the nucleation and growth of cavities with highly porous interconnecting walls. The resulting film was then immersed in water to rinse off the solvent and halt the phase separation.

“By using this method we create an important platform to design artificial porous materials that replicate highly ordered porous and complex systems mimicking nature,” explains research scientist and lead author Stefan Chisca. “These have potential use for separations, such as virus filtration, and for biological scaffolds, such as those used for bone regeneration.”

Gene Editing Shows Promise For Improving The ‘Chocolate Tree’

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Use of the powerful gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 could help to breed cacao trees that exhibit desirable traits such as enhanced resistance to diseases, according to Penn State plant scientists.

The cacao tree, which grows in tropical regions, produces the cocoa beans that are the raw material of chocolate. Reliable productivity from cacao plants is essential to the multibillion-dollar chocolate industry, the economies of producing countries and the livelihoods of millions of smallholder cacao farmers.

But each year, several plant diseases severely limit global production, with 20-30 percent of cocoa pods destroyed preharvest, noted lead author Andrew Fister, postdoctoral scholar in plant science, College of Agricultural Sciences, Penn State.

“In West Africa, severe outbreaks of fungal diseases can destroy all cacao fruit on a single farm,” said Fister. “Because diseases are a persistent problem for cacao, improving disease resistance has been a priority for researchers. But development of disease-resistant varieties has been slowed by the need for sources of genetic resistance and the long generation time of cacao trees.” The researchers reported recently, in Frontiers in Plant Science, the study results, which were thought to be the first to demonstrate the feasibility of using cutting-edge CRISPR technology to improve Theobroma cacao.

CRISPR stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. It is a way to modify an organism’s genome by precisely delivering a DNA-cutting enzyme, Cas9, to a targeted region of DNA. The resulting change can delete or replace specific DNA pieces, thereby promoting or disabling certain traits.

Previous work in cacao identified a gene, known as TcNPR3, that suppresses the plant’s disease response. The researchers hypothesized that using CRISPR-Cas9 to knock out this gene would result in enhanced disease resistance.

To test their hypothesis, they used Agrobacterium — a plant pathogen modified to remove its ability to cause disease — to introduce CRISPR-Cas9 components into detached cacao leaves. Subsequent analysis of treated tissue found deletions in 27 percent of TcNPR3 copies. When infected with Phytopthera tropicalis, a naturally occurring pathogen of cacao and other plants, the treated leaves showed greater resistance to the disease. The results suggested that the mutation of only a fraction of the copies of the targeted gene may be sufficient to trigger downstream processes, resulting in systemic disease resistance in the plant.

The researchers also created CRISPR gene-edited cacao embryos, which they will grow into mature trees to test the effectiveness of this approach at a whole-plant level.

This research builds on more than 30 years of biotechnology research aimed at building a better cacao tree, according to senior author Mark Guiltinan, professor of plant molecular biology and leader of Penn State’s endowed cocoa research program.

“Our lab has developed several tools for the improvement of cacao, and CRISPR is just one more tool,” he said. “But compared to conventional breeding and other techniques, CRISPR speeds up the process and is much more precise. It’s amazingly efficient in targeting the DNA you want, and so far, we haven’t detected any off-target effects.”

In addition to providing a new tool to accelerate breeding, CRISPR-Cas9 technology can help deliver insights into basic biology by offering a method to efficiently assess gene function, the researchers said. “With CRISPR, we can quickly ‘break’ a gene and see what happens to the plant,” Guiltinan explained. “We have a list of genes in the pipeline that we want to test.”

There may be thousands of genes involved in disease resistance, Fister added. “We want to evaluate as many as we can,” he said. The ultimate goals of Penn State cacao research are to help raise the standard of living for smallholder growers and stabilize a threatened cocoa supply by developing plants that can withstand diseases, climate change and other challenges, according to co-author Siela Maximova, senior scientist and professor of horticulture.

“Any production increases in the last 20 years have been mostly due to putting more land into production,” said Maximova, who co-directs the cacao research program. “But land, water, fertilizer and other inputs are limited. To enhance sustainability, we need plants that are more vigorous and disease resistant and that produce more and better-quality beans.

“This study provides a ‘proof of concept’ that CRISPR-Cas9 technology can be a valuable tool in the effort to achieve these goals,” she said.

Could A Multiverse Be Hospitable To Life?

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A Multiverse – where our Universe is only one of many – might not be as inhospitable to life as previously thought, according to new research.

Questions about whether other universes might exist as part of a larger Multiverse, and if they could harbour life, are burning issues in modern cosmology.

Now new research led by Durham University, UK, and Australia’s University of Sydney, Western Sydney University and the University of Western Australia, has shown that life could potentially be common throughout the Multiverse, if it exists.

The key to this, the researchers say, is dark energy, a mysterious “force” that is accelerating the expansion of the Universe.

Scientists say that current theories of the origin of the Universe predict much more dark energy in our Universe than is observed. Adding larger amounts would cause such a rapid expansion that it would dilute matter before any stars, planets or life could form.

The Multiverse theory, introduced in the 1980s, can explain the “luckily small” amount of dark energy in our Universe that enabled it to host life, among many universes that could not.

Using huge computer simulations of the cosmos, the new research has found that adding dark energy, up to a few hundred times the amount observed in our Universe, would actually have a modest impact upon star and planet formation.

This opens up the prospect that life could be possible throughout a wider range of other universes, if they exist, the researchers said.

The findings are to be published in two related papers in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The simulations were produced under the EAGLE (Evolution and Assembly of GaLaxies and their Environments) project – one of the most realistic simulations of the observed Universe.

Jaime Salcido, a postgraduate student in Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology, said: “For many physicists, the unexplained but seemingly special amount of dark energy in our Universe is a frustrating puzzle.

“Our simulations show that even if there was much more dark energy or even very little in the Universe then it would only have a minimal effect on star and planet formation, raising the prospect that life could exist throughout the Multiverse.”

Dr Luke Barnes, a John Templeton Research Fellow at Western Sydney University, said: “The Multiverse was previously thought to explain the observed value of dark energy as a lottery – we have a lucky ticket and live in the Universe that forms beautiful galaxies which permit life as we know it.

“Our work shows that our ticket seems a little too lucky, so to speak. It’s more special than it needs to be for life. This is a problem for the Multiverse; a puzzle remains.”

Dr Pascal Elahi, Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, said: “We asked ourselves how much dark energy can there be before life is impossible? Our simulations showed that the accelerated expansion driven by dark energy has hardly any impact on the birth of stars, and hence places for life to arise. Even increasing dark energy many hundreds of times might not be enough to make a dead universe.”

The researchers said their results were unexpected and could be problematic as they cast doubt on the ability of the theory of a Multiverse to explain the observed value of dark energy.

According to the research, if we live in a Multiverse, we’d expect to observe much more dark energy than we do – perhaps 50 times more than we see in our Universe.

Although the results do not rule out the Multiverse, it seems that the tiny amount of dark energy in our Universe would be better explained by an, as yet, undiscovered law of nature.

Professor Richard Bower, in Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology, said: “The formation of stars in a universe is a battle between the attraction of gravity, and the repulsion of dark energy.

“We have found in our simulations that universes with much more dark energy than ours can happily form stars. So why such a paltry amount of dark energy in our Universe?

“I think we should be looking for a new law of physics to explain this strange property of our Universe, and the Multiverse theory does little to rescue physicists’ discomfort.”


US To Officially Open Its Israeli Embassy In Jerusalem On Monday

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(RFE/RL) — The United States will officially move its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on May 14, a decision that has caused joy in Israel and created an outcry from Palestinians, U.S. allies, and many other countries worldwide.

A delegation from the White House and Israeli officials will gather for the inauguration ceremony in the afternoon, while large numbers of Palestinians are expected to protest along the Gaza border with Israel and elsewhere.

U.S. President Donald Trump announced earlier this year that the United States was recognizing divided Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, reversing decades of U.S. policy.

Palestinians want East Jerusalem to be the capital of their future state. Israel has annexed East Jerusalem and declared the entire city as its capital, a move not recognized by the international community.

Trump’s decision sparked deadly protests and 128 states condemned it in a United Nations General Assembly vote.

The current U.S. Consulate is considered an interim facility for the embassy. Plans call for the construction of a permanent U.S. Embassy at a different location in Jerusalem.

Some 1,000 police officers will be stationed around the embassy and nearby neighborhoods for the inauguration, officials said.

The action coincides with the celebration of Jerusalem Day, an annual event marking “reunification” of the city following the 1967 Six-Day War.

May 14 also marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of Israel.

Hangover Pill Works On Drunk Mice

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Researchers have been working on a solution to treat massive hangover after a party, Great Lakes Ledger reports.

According to wine enthusiast Yunfeng Lu, who is a chemical engineering professor at UCLA, people shouldn’t have to worry about hangovers anymore.

Lu developed a solution to treat the negative effects of the alcohol you drank a night before. While his ‘hangover pill’ hasn’t yet been tested on human patients, lab mice showed promising results.

The pill Lu has developed natural enzymes that exist in liver cells. Their role is to help the body process alcohol. So, a pill could help the body process it faster. Not only will you get rid of headaches and dry mouth, but it could also treat people with alcohol poisoning in the emergency rooms from all over the country.

If you were wondering if the researchers had to get their mice drunk, the answer is yes. They got their mice drunk, and they gave them the treatment. In only four hours, the drunk mice’s blood alcohol levels dropped by 45% compared to the mice that didn’t get the treatment.

Even though mice didn’t complain about their hangovers, Lu explains that the levels of acetaldehyde, “a highly toxic compound that is carcinogenic, causes headaches and vomiting, makes people blush after drinking, and is produced during the normal alcohol metabolism, remained extremely low.”

In the alcohol market, hangover prevention is quite a big hit. Some drinks are said to be ‘hangover-free’ in some places. But the results can be inconsistent or debatable.

Central Bankers Won’t Tolerate Deflation: No Matter The Cost – Analysis

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By Alasdair Macleod*

It is hardly surprising that with equity indices stalling, the financial community is increasingly worried that the long, steady bull market is coming to an end. Naturally, this makes investors look for reasons to worry, and it turns out that there are indeed many things to worry about.

In fact, there are always things to worry about. Ever since the Lehman crisis, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have been casting long shadows across the financial stage. But as financial assets have continued to rise in value over the last nine years, bearish fund managers, spooked by systemic risks of one sort or another and the perennial threat of a renewed slump, have been forced to discard their ursine views.

As often as not, it is not much more than a question of emphasis. There is always good news and bad news. As an investor, you semi-consciously choose what to believe.

There are causes for concern, of that there is no doubt. Mostly, they arise from the consequences of earlier state interventions on the money side. Governments are slowly strangling private sector production with increasingly rapacious demands on taxpayers and have been resorting to the printing press to finance the shortfalls. In reality, there is a finite limit to government spending, because it impoverishes the tax base. Yet governments, with very few exceptions, seek to conceal this truism by increasing spending and budget deficits even more. In this, President Trump is not alone.

Bankruptcy is the end result. And don’t believe the old saw about how governments can’t go bust. They can, and they do by destroying their currencies, as von Mises implied in the quote above. The naïve inflationists referred to by Mises justify their stance by believing that inflation is invigorating, and deflation is devastating. Any and all statistics pointing to a slowdown in the growth of money supply or in the economy is therefore taken to be a forewarning of deflation.

Inflationists are simply recycling Irving Fisher’s debt-deflation theory, which is no longer relevant. Fisher held that in an economic crisis, bad debts forced banks to liquidate collateral, pushing down collateral values. And as previously sound loans lose their collateral cover, banks are forced to liquidate those as well.

But it is no longer the case. Central banks have removed the discipline of gold, so they can intervene to prevent financial and economic crises, rather than let them run their destructive courses. They have fully embraced inflationism, giving them the excuse for monetary and credit expansion as a cure-all.

Therefore, when the next crisis occurs, central banks will take steps to ensure that in aggregate the quantity of money does not contract. It is the one forecast we can make with absolute certainty. And every time a crisis happens it takes more monetary heft to get out of it. But that’s not an issue for a central bank with two overriding objectives, not the targeting of inflation and unemployment as such, but to ensure a recession never happens, and to finance, through money-printing if necessary, escalating government spending.

Minor Wobbles Are not the Credit Crisis

We must discriminate between the momentary problems faced by central banks and the inevitable crisis at the end of the credit cycle. Dealing with problems as they arise has become routine, the justification for continual inflationism. The credit crisis is a different matter. Central bankers do not seem to realize it, but the credit crisis is their own creation, the way markets eventually unwind the distortions created by earlier monetary policy. So long as central banks suppress interest rates and expand money and credit, there will be periodic credit crises to follow.

The trigger for the credit crisis is always the same. The general price level threatens to rise uncontrollably, reflecting the loss of the currency’s purchasing power. This forces the central bank to reluctantly raise interest rates to the point where business assumptions about the returns on capital, based on borrowing costs, turn from profit-making to loss-making. At that point, if not before, the accumulated mountain of debt becomes fatally undermined.

The timing of the rise and level of interest rates that triggers the crisis is set by the speed with which monetary inflation feeds into prices. And the severity of the crisis depends upon the size of the debt mountain being liquidated.

This has nothing to do with the minor wobbles along the way. Ahead of a cyclical credit crisis, central banks routinely deal with the fires breaking out in an increasingly desolate economic landscape. They are very good at it. The share prices of European banks, such as Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse raise concerns over systemic risk, but the ECB and SNB will always ensure credit is available to them. And if we are worried about systemic risk in key European financial behemoths, why is it that stock prices for major US banks such as JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America are so strong?

There is also a narrative being promoted which posits that a slowdown in broad money supply is giving an advance warning of recession. The chart below, of US M2 plotted weekly, puts it into context.

Yes, there has been a recent slowdown in the rate at which M2 is growing. But it has hardly diverged much from the average rate of increase, shown by the black line, for the last five years. And it’s not worth repeating the chart for M1 Money Stock, which is remarkably similar, despite the Fed reducing the size of its balance sheet.

How the Credit Cycle Progresses

Investors trying to understand the financial markets’ major trends should keep an eye on the credit cycle. The first point to note is that it is now nine years since the last credit crisis ended, and there are, as yet, no signs economic growth is over. However, as the cycle progresses, history and monetary theory tell us that interest rates begin to rise from the artificially suppressed levels set by central banks. That is now happening, leading us into the final phase of the credit cycle before the credit crisis finally ends it.

Bond markets have all peaked, and their yields are rising, and not only at the short end where prices are corelated with interest rates. The 10-year US Treasury yield bottomed at 1.46% in June 2016, since when it has increased to 2.79% currently. The 30-year UST yield bottomed at the same time at 2.182%, and now yields 3.02%. The bond bear market is firmly established.

Generally, the rise in medium and long-term bond yields anticipates increasing prices for commodities, goods and services, the consequence of earlier monetary expansion. Business conditions then appear to be improving, and equity markets have reflected this benign environment.

It is becoming clear that a further jump in bond yields will confirm the end of an equity bull market, and the beginning of a bear market. But that will not mark the end of the current phase of the credit cycle and the onset of the crisis. Even if equities have a 1987-type crash, the credit cycle will continue, rather than enter the crisis phase.

The concluding phase of credit expansion before the credit crisis is now about to begin. Demand will appear to be picking up while prices are rising and interest rates still low. It will be characterized by a growing belief among businessmen that they must borrow to invest. We can already anticipate the factors leading up to this happy but brief state.

President Trump has cut taxes and increased spending. The result is there will be a substantial injection into the US economy late in the business cycle, mostly financed by monetary inflation. It is bound to create short-term optimism but being based on money created out of thin air it will be an illusion. The consequence will be an acceleration of price inflation, as the extra money is absorbed into the non-financial economy. Bond markets will anticipate higher interest rates, so banks, losing money on their bond investments, will then compete for loan business in the non-financial economy. For a brief period, buoyed up by a business-friendly fiscal policy, the economy will appear to grow more rapidly.

The rise in prices, initially seen by business as a stimulant to production while borrowing costs remain suppressed by the Fed, will accelerate fuelled by too much money chasing too few goods. However, the business environment will only appear to be improved during the time period taken for the economy to absorb monetary inflation and reflect it in higher prices. When it dawns on markets that next year’s prices will be significantly higher than today’s the time-preference value on loans will be increasing, irrespective of the Fed’s monetary policy.

The crisis will then be upon us. The switch from stimulative fiscal policies to sharply escalating interest rates and bond yields could be sudden. At the worst possible time, the Fed will be forced to raise the Fed Funds Rate to protect a declining dollar. If they haven’t begun to do so already, financial assets will be crashing, along with physical assets whose values are set by interest rates, such as residential property.

America is not alone in its stimulation of markets. Interest rates are also suppressed in the Eurozone, Japan, Britain and Switzerland, all of which stand to benefit from China’s economic evolution. Those economists who in recent weeks have proclaimed that at last synchronized growth is here do not realize that the inflationary consequences for prices brings the global credit crisis forward in time.

So, that’s the sequence. Bonds top out, followed by equities, followed by a credit crisis. We have had the first, perhaps entered the second, and have the third event still ahead of us. And if the evidence before our eyes is not enough, we have proof of central bankers’ ignorance in these matters from Janet Yellen, who in her swansong said, “Would I say there will never, ever be another financial crisis? You know, probably that would be going too far but I do think we’re much safer and I hope that it will not be in our lifetimes and I don’t believe it will be.”

Hubris indeed, reminding us of Greenspan’s “Irrational exuberance” in December 1996, before the Dow nearly doubled, and his conversion to the New Paradigm of Larry Summers et al in 2000, just before the dot-com bubble burst. It is proof that those who have taken it upon themselves to protect us from our own financial indiscretions are clueless about the credit cycle, and their role in its creation. But will it result in a massive deflation?

If by deflation is meant an increase in the dollar’s purchasing power, the answer must be an emphatic No. As well as the views of central bankers, that deflation must be avoided at all costs, even a mild recession plays havoc with government finances. This is why the Fed and other central banks will do everything in their power to stop it. But their power is confined to the cure-alls of reducing interest rates and throwing yet more money at the economy.

Far from deflation, the Fed’s only response to the next credit crisis will be to take measures that will lead to the final destruction of the dollar. Other central banks are set to follow. Deflationists don’t have a leg to stand on, and unknowingly conform with von Mises’s description of naïve inflationists.

About the author:
*Alasdair Macleod
is the Head of Research at GoldMoney.

Source:
This article was published by the MISES Institute

Total Signs Agreement To Develop Integrated Gas Project In Oman

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Total has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Government of Oman to develop natural gas resources in Oman. This MoU covers both upstream and downstream businesses.

Total and Shell as operator will develop several natural gas discoveries located in the Greater Barik area on onshore Block 6 with respective shares of 25% and 75%, as per the agreement between both companies and before possible State back-in, with the objective of an initial gas production of around 500 MMcfd and a potential to reach 1 bcf/d at a later stage.

Total said it will use its equity gas entitlement as feedstock to develop in Oman a regional hub for Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) bunkering service to supply LNG as a fuel to marine vessels. This will be achieved thanks to a new small-scale modular liquefaction plant to be built in Sohar port. The plant will comprise a train of around 1 Mt per year and will offer the flexibility for expansion as required by the development of the LNG bunkering market.

“We are pleased to sign this MoU with the Sultanate of Oman that will give us access to new gas resources and the opportunity to develop an integrated gas project,” stated Arnaud Breuillac, President Exploration & Production at Total. “We will bring our expertise in LNG and will introduce access to a new gas market for the Sultanate. Developing an LNG bunkering service will generate in-country value and job opportunities, and will support industry diversification through fostering the shipping activity in Oman.”

In Oman, the Group’s production was 37 kboe/d in 2017. Total produces oil in Block 6 (4%) and in Block 53 (2%), as well as LNG through its participation in the Oman LNG (5.54%)/Qalhat LNG (2.04%) liquefaction complex with an overall capacity of 10.5 Mt/y.

Afghanistan: Action Urged On Flooding

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By Yousef Zarifi

Residents of Kunar province in eastern Afghanistan are urging the government to act after suffering years of catastrophic flooding.

Local residents said heavy rainfall and snowmelt from the Hindu Kush meant that the Kunar river, which runs through the province, floods almost every year.

Huge swathes of farmland were often wiped out by water, with local people also dying in flash flooding.

Farmers and business leader told IWPR that critical investment was urgently needed to shore up riverbanks and help prevent further loss of land and livestock.

Fazal Mohammad, 45, a resident of Khas Kunar district, described how he was left with a tiny fraction of farmland following a series of floods.

He said the loss of his fields now put him under enormous pressure to earn a sustainable income for his family.

“This river swallows up our land every year,” he complained. “It kills our animals but no one seems to care or grieves for our loss.

“I’ve petitioned district officials to help me but hear nothing back from them. They’ve not even come to see the devastation for themselves.”

The Kunar river stretches for more than 1,000 miles from eastern Afghanistan across the Durand Line and into neighbouring Pakistan.

Along its course it feeds into both the Kabul river in Kama district in Nangarhar province and later the Indus river in Attock city in northern Punjab, Pakistan. Eventually, waters from the river flow down into the Arabian sea.

Abdullah, who runs a restaurant by the river in the middle of Sawkai district, also told IWPR that the authorities must be held accountable for failing to act to prevent the frequent flooding.

He claimed dozens of villages and hundreds of hectares of land had been destroyed by the river and yet officials still chose to turn a blind eye to the problem.

“This river is bloody, trust me,” he said. “Every week where my restaurant is we pull at least one dead body from the water.

“People drown trying to cross it because of a lack of proper bridges, or they drown while fishing or working along its banks. When spring and summer arrives the water bursts over and just wipes out everything.

“We’re left trying to contact the families of the deceased,” he concluded.

Sometimes whole communities are displaced by the flooding. Wali Gul, 46, told how he and almost everyone in his village had been forced to abandon their homes a decade ago following severe flooding.

Many residents left to move to higher ground in Nangarhar and Gul now lives in a village in Shewa district.

“One evening in 2008 the river burst its banks and flooded the entire village,” he said.

“The Afghan National Army arrived and evacuated people via helicopters but the river swallowed everything. We were forced to abandon the area and move to Nangarhar because of the Kunar river.”

Abdul Ghani Musamim, a spokesman for the provincial governor, acknowledged the issues the region faced in respect of flooding.

He said retaining walls had been built in some areas where the river’s banks were most vulnerable, but agreed that further work was clearly needed.

Musamim  added that, owing to the volatility of the disputed border area with Pakistan, foreign donors were reluctant to commit to infrastructure projects that could help alleviate flooding.

“The international community is hesitant to help in a region where there’s significant dispute between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he said.

“It’s clear there’s a major problem and the river’s retaining walls aren’t effective but the government by itself doesn’t have the means to build a dam.”

Abdul Rashid Zalmai, the director of Kunar’s department of agriculture, irrigation and livestock, also said that the region needed substantial investment in dams and irrigation networks.

He said that canals were being constructed in some districts, but that efforts to attract government support for a larger dam project had foundered due to the lack of funds, the region’s rugged topography and ongoing security risks

“A major survey in Kunar province was conducted last year,” Zalmai said. “Plans and surveys for building a dam were prepared but the work never went ahead because of a lack of budget and unfavorable security conditions on the ground.”

Mohammad Safi, head of Kunar’s provincial council, criticised both his local administration and central government for failing to act. He said that he had repeatedly highlighted the issue of flooding with senior officials in Kabul, but to little effect.

“The government just doesn’t seem to want to pay any attention to Kunar,” he said. “No governor has been appointed who’s prepared to undertake the serious measures needed to control the river and regulate its flow.

“We’ve repeatedly raised the issue in provincial council meetings and with other relevant departments. But because of the significant investment needed to tackle the problem effectively, our pleas have gone unanswered.”

Mohammad Anwar Sultani, a political analyst, also criticised officials for failing to follow through on promises to construct dams in Kunar and elsewhere.

He said that President Ashraf Ghani had made a number of public commitments to better regulate the river’s flow during his election campaign in 2013, questioning again why officials had failed to act.

By building a dam in Kunar, he argued, engineers could not only boost electricity supply to Afghanistan’s eastern provinces but also to Kabul.

In addition, better provision of water to areas of desert in Nangarhar, Kunar and Laghman could lead to substantial gains in agricultural productivity and boost employment opportunities, he said.

“For many years Pakistan has been able to take advantage of the benefits of this river while we suffer the damages,” Sultani argued.

“There’s a lack of commitment by the government here; it’s made fake promises to the nation.”

Mohammad Sadiq Dawlatzai, the director of the Independent Land Authority in neighbouring Nangarhar, also said that the river caused substantial flooding in the province, destroying valuable pasture.

“We can’t provide exact figures on the amount of land destroyed because no surveys have looked at the problem,” he said.

“We’ve asked the ministry of agriculture to carry out the work but we’ve not yet received their agreement.”

Malak Nawab Khan, a tribal elder in Kunar’s Sawkai district, added, “At the time of the last election politicians made bold promises.

“But the promises they made were given only to guarantee our votes. No one has since helped save us from the dangers of this river. No one has paid attention to our requests.”

This report was produced under IWPR’s Supporting Investigative Reporting in Local Media and Strengthening Civil Society across Afghanistan initiative, funded by the British Embassy Kabul. This article was published at IWPR’s ARR 597

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