By Divya Kumar Soti*

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Central Asia and Russia comes in the backdrop of ominous events having potential of making significant impact on India’s national security interests as well as changing equations in international relations. Central Asia happens to be one of the key theatres where all this security and strategic gambit will play out in the coming months and years, so the region assumes very important position in the Indian scheme of things.

Central Asian Islamist groups like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and Imam Bukhari Jamaat (IBJ) are taking prominent roles in jihadist alliances in Afghan and Syrian wars respectively. In March 2015, an IMU faction rescinded its allegiance to Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar and announced alliance with the Islamic State. On the other hand, IBJ has aligned with Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate Jabat al-Nusra and has been able to make some advances in the Syrian war, which many believe has become possible with Turkish covert support and facilitation.

In a more recent development, Islamic State announced formation of Governorate (Wilayat) in Russia’s North Caucasus region on June 23, 2015. The event assumes importance because Georgian jihadist elements were already fighting alongside the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and now the network extends from Syria via Turkey and Georgia up to North Caucasus. All these events pose a serious challenge to global security. Over the last few years, Central Asian jihadists have been found to be active from Af-Pak to Syria and Iraq in alliance with international Islamist networks led by Al Qaeda and Islamic State. The increasing number of Central Asian jihadists in these theatres is a serious cause of concern not only for Central Asian nations toured by Prime Minister Modi and for Russia but also India and Afghanistan.

Recent reports have again suggested the growing links of South Asian jihadist groups like Indian Mujahideen with Islamic State. These reports indicate that some key operatives involved in terrorist attacks in India like Jaipur blasts have slipped into Syria and Iraq from Pakistan via Turkey. Now the extension of this Islamic State network into Central Asia as well as north and south Caucasus regions pose a serious intelligence challenge for Indian security agencies as to monitoring the movements of terrorist elements through these regions.

More importantly over the last few months, Afghanistan’s northern provinces have seen unexpected and unprecedented rise in violence led by Taliban. Growing Taliban presence in north Afghanistan is also attributable to more locals joining it in the region, including fighters from local ethnic groups like Turkmens which in itself is a disturbing trend. In response to this, former Tajik and Uzbek warlords like Mir Alam and Rashid Dostam have again started to recruit independent militias to reinforce the Afghan National Army (ANA). These militias have reportedly skirmished with the Taliban at many places in northern Afghanistan where ANA suffered reverses. While coming up of such militias is being seen as failure of the Ashraf Ghani administration to stem the tide of Taliban’s spring offensive in Western strategic circles, it cannot be forgotten that such militias once formed part of the Northern Alliance which stopped Taliban from gaining complete victory over the country in pre-9/11 era.

Tajiks, Uzbeks and Turkmens together constitute nearly one third of Afghanistan’s population, having deep traditional ethnic ties with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan respectively. In view of all this, closer intelligence and security cooperation with these Central Asian nations becomes highly important for India’s stabilizing efforts in Afghanistan post US troop withdrawal.

Over the last few years due to India’s passive Central Asia policies as well as mismatch in economic might, the economic dependency of these Central Asian nations on China stands highly increased. Over the last few months, China has made diplomatic forays into Afghanistan attempting to push forward Pakistan’s viewpoints. Beijing went as far as to enter into negotiations with Afghan Taliban to broker a power sharing deal, designed by Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment, with Ghani administration. During Prime Minister Modi’s visit to Central Asian countries, the first officially acknowledged “peace talks” between the Afghan government and Taliban were hosted by Pakistan on the outskirts of Islamabad with US and China acting as observers where both sides agreed to meet again in near future. China is in a position of influencing Tajik and Uzbek politicians forming part of the Ghani administration by capitalizing upon its economic relations with countries like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. So it was very important for India to make its presence felt in Central Asia at this particular juncture.

There is another geopolitical complexity involved as India embarks upon an active role in Central Asia. The Ukraine crisis and tensions with North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) has pushed Russia towards China. China has capitalized on this opportunity as it is itself locked up in somehow tense relations with the US over the South China Sea dispute. With the economic rise of China, Russia witnessed Central Asia becoming China’s front yard with deep unease. But as President Xi Jinping’s Silk Road initiative is all set to make way through Central Asia, President Vladimir Putin is faced with attempts to isolate Russia, both economically and diplomatically, on part of the West as tensions or what some term as “Cold Peace” now extends to issues beyond Ukraine. In these circumstances, Russia could have done little but to make way for China in Central Asia, which would necessarily involve irreversible lessening of Russian influence in the region.

However, emergence of India as a player in Central Asia presents an opportunity to Moscow to balance out things. This however does not mean that over the next few years there would not be a continued convergence between Russia and China in the region and beyond given the economic and geopolitical factors. But Prime Minister Modi is likely to successfully secure tacit Russian support in helping Central Asian nations to diversify their economic and strategic relations by partnering with India.

*Divya Kumar Soti is an independent national security and strategic affairs analyst based in India. He can be contacted at contributions@spsindia.in

The post Modi’s Central Asia Visit: Russia Could Welcome India Factor – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Michael Lelyveld

Steep drops in China’s stock markets have shaken trust in the country’s economic management following a series of missteps and measures to avert further falls.

The plunge of over 30 percent in the Shanghai Composite Index (SCI) between June 12 and July 8 has made a lasting impression on China’s investment environment, despite government efforts to provide support.

Never mind that the SCI more than doubled in the previous 12 months and remains above the 3,000 mark that was considered a psychological breakthrough level late last year.

And never mind that the government responded with a barrage of intended fixes and capital infusions to slow the slide and stage a partial recovery.

The first flurry of government remedies did little to help small investors who lost savings by buying into the market at the peak and then were unable to get out when it plunged.

Many borrowed on margin accounts and then were shocked when their stocks stopped trading after reaching the 10-percent daily limit for declines.

A series of unprecedented rescue efforts have had mixed results.

On July 4, China’s regulators stopped 28 companies from launching planned initial public offerings (IPOs) out of concern for diluting the market.

The government also pushed 21 brokerages to invest 120 billion yuan (U.S. $19.6 billion) in exchange-traded funds (ETFs), hoping to buoy the sinking boat with liquidity from the China Securities Finance Corp. and the central bank.

The SCI responded only briefly on July 6 with a 2.4-percent gain, but shares slipped back as debt fears and economic gloom returned.

By midweek, over half of the listed companies on China’s exchanges had filed for trading suspensions to limit their losses.

Estimates of lost stock value topped U.S. $3 trillion (18.6 trillion yuan), equal to nearly 29 percent of China’s gross domestic product (GDP) last year.

Further rescue efforts followed but failed to restore confidence.

At first, the government “ordered” state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and “asked” state-owned financial companies not to sell shares during the downturn, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Regulators also “allowed” government pension funds and insurance companies to buy stocks with eased rules.

But the market only rebounded on July 9 with a 5.8-percent gain after the government stacked the deck with measures that virtually guaranteed that there would be more pressure to buy than to sell.

Among the more controversial moves, large shareholders were “ordered” not to sell company stock for six months, while police vowed to investigate and punish “malicious short selling” by investors who hoped to profit from price declines, Xinhua reported.

On Friday, the SCI climbed 4.5 percent, closing up 5.2 percent for the week but 25 percent below this year’s high.

The two-day rise “to some extent helped restore shattered confidence,” Xinhua said in a commentary.

On Monday, the rebound continued with a 2.4-percent rise as some issues lifted the freeze on their shares.

Global image

But in a classic case of bad timing, the pitfalls of China’s economy have come into focus and contrasted sharply with the image it has been projecting abroad.

“We’re talking about China taking a leadership role in the world at a time when China’s economy is stagnating,” said Derek Scissors, an Asia economist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington.

While the debacle in stocks may not be a measure of China’s long-term prospects, it has been seen as a black eye for the economic management of President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang.

Premier Li was “very angry” that the crisis struck just as he was returning from a five-day visit to Europe aimed at promoting investment and trade, according to a source “familiar with the trip,” the Financial Times said.

Li’s mission to Belgium and France was one of several recent efforts to push China’s economic power to the front of the world stage.

In May, Li also toured Latin America offering trade and investment partnerships. Last month, Xi and representatives of 56 other countries launched the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) as a major development initiative.

Despite the troubles at home, Xi traveled to Ufa, Russia last week for meetings of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the emerging BRICS countries, including Brazil, India and South Africa, to announce new financial institutions that may compete with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

One interpretation is that Xi may only have shaken confidence in the market further if he had cancelled the trip.

On Friday, The New York Times reported that “perhaps no one has taken a bigger hit” to his image than President Xi as a result of the market crisis.

Other reports suggested that Xi sought to place the responsibility for the plunge on Premier Li and left him to work his way out of it on his own.

While Xi and Li have tried to portray China’s economy in a favorable light to foreign audiences, its weakening growth has produced some suggestions that it is struggling to stave off instability.

“The Chinese economy is generally stable in the first six months,” Li told a business summit in Toulouse, France on July 2, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

“We have confidence in achieving the goal of around 7 percent growth for the whole year,” he said.

The extent of the market’s damage to the economy has yet to be seen, but it may already have shelved the government’s plan to promote private investment through “mixed ownership” of SOEs, which may now be barred from selling shares.

On Friday, China securities regulator said “there will be no IPOs in the near term.”

While insurance companies have reportedly bought stock, it is unclear how much additional risk financial institutions will be willing to take.

The official English-language China Daily cited “fears of rising bad loans in the banking sector, since many listed companies have used their shares as collateral to borrow money.”

‘Immature’ financial system

In the end, China’s market turmoil may have relatively little economic consequence, despite the pain for investors, Scissors argued.

“This has to do with an immature financial system, which the Chinese aren’t fixing,” he said.

China’s markets have followed a boom-and-bust cycle, last seen in October 2007, when the SCI plummeted 71 percent over a one-year period after soaring fourfold since the start of 2006.

Despite the slump, China’s GDP climbed 13 percent in 2007 and 9.6 percent in 2008, according to National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) data.

But with GDP growth in 2014 falling to a 24-year low of 7.4 percent and a six-year quarterly low of 7 percent in the first quarter, investors will be looking anxiously at second-quarter figures due to be announced later this week.

The longer-term weakening of China’s economic growth remains the main consideration, Scissors said.

In a Washington Examiner article last month, AEI analysts cited the China slowdown as a major challenge to the notion that this will be the “Asian century.”

“While economists have accepted that China is perhaps heading toward long-term stagnation, the foreign policy community is stubbornly resisting the new reality: A Chinese slowdown is becoming a defining fact of Asian geopolitics,” the authors wrote.

“Without China, there is no Asian century,” they said.

Whether the market crisis will cut deeply enough to affect China’s many international investment plans is uncertain, but the sheer number of them suggests a possible pullback if the stock slide is prolonged.

In addition to the AIIB and BRICS funding, China has been promoting its “belt and road” initiatives to recreate ancient Silk Road trade routes and an “industrial capacity cooperation” program to build manufacturing bases abroad.

The threat of a serious economic setback could follow the pattern of 1998, when the Asian currency crisis delayed China’s “go out” plan for foreign energy investments by several years.

In the current downturn, China’s partners will be looking to see how well it performs as an emerging world financial center and how much it relies on interventionist, arbitrary and non-market policies. Some of its moves have already proved contradictory and self-defeating.

The government’s infusions of liquidity into the falling market serve as a reminder that Li complained only three months ago that state banks were more interested in lending for stock market speculation than in financing to support the “real economy.”

Now, the government has called for more lending to buy shares and avoid a market collapse.

On April 17, regulators also tightened margin trading rules and allowed funds to lend shares for short selling in a bid to bring the stock market bubble down.

Now that the bubble has apparently burst, regulators have reversed course, pumped more funds into margin trading, blamed short sellers for the crisis and threatened them with prosecution.

Last week, Bloomberg News suggested that “government meddling is making matters worse.”

The post China’s Stock Plunge Undercuts Foreign Plans – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Redmond Alejandro B. Lim*

Last March, Somali Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke flew to Qatar in a visit that was supposed to lobby for more foreign investments in his country. “Somalia is no longer equated with the negative aspects: piracy, terrorism. Now the country is ready for business,” he declared in an Al-Jazeera interview. “Somalia… has seen a steady decline in terrorism activities in the last few years. So I think Somalia is less vulnerable and the country is really moving out of this, gradually but surely.”

A month later, a widely reported attack by the Somalia-based Al-Shabaab on a Kenyan university near the Somali border killed 148 people, mostly students, the deadliest attack in Kenya since the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in the Kenyan capital Nairobi. Uhuru Kenyatta, the Kenyan president, immediately denounced the attack and promised swift retaliation with international backing. Then, around a week later, the group carried out another attack against Somalia’s Ministry of Higher Education in the center of the capital Mogadishu, killing at least ten people. Then on April 20, the group carried out yet another bombing in northeastern Somalia, killing many UN workers.

These are merely the latest in a lengthy string of increasingly gory attacks carried out by the Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen, more commonly known as al-Shabaab. The group is responsible for many terror attacks against the Somali central government and its African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) partners. Most prominently, some of these attacks include a raid against a hotel popular with government officials in late March of this year (the same hotel was also attacked previously in 2013), and the much publicized siege of an upscale mall in the Kenyan capital in 2013, which lasted days and left close to 70 people dead. Apart from Kenya, the group has also carried out numerous attacks in other nearby East African countries including Ethiopia and Uganda in retaliation for the latter’s participation in AMISOM, transforming a previously Somali problem into a transnational terrorism issue.

The uptick in violence in East Africa, as well as in West and North Africa, comes amid today’s rose-tinted African narrative of progress and rapid economic expansion popular among many Africa hacks. Together with a string of other setbacks – the most recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa, pervasive corruption, interethnic strife, and weak democratic institutions in many parts of the continent – global jihadism in East, West, and North Africa, has sobered many an optimistic outlook for the second-fastest growing region of the world.

A history of extremism

Al-Shabaab (Arabic for “The Youth”) emerged in 2003 as a militant youth wing of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), an alliance of Sharia courts which themselves were formed from the decades of chaos and instability in Somalia following the collapse of the last central government in 1991. After losing a lot of ground, including the capital Mogadishu and the lucrative port of Kismayo, to Western and AMISOM-backed government forces, Al-Shabaab today controls pockets of territory in the southern part of the country, quickly adapting the guerilla tactics and bombings prevalent among many radical jihadi groups.

Al-Shabaab funds its guerilla war through a variety of sources, including extensive racketeering and extortion, sympathetic and/or dummy charities, and donations from the Somali diaspora. There is also speculation that the terrorist group occasionally colludes with Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa, although this claim has yet to be corroborated. Before the liberation of Kismayo by government troops, the group had also controlled the charcoal and sugar trade there. Finally, there are suspicions that they also have foreign state sponsors, although these states deny the allegations.

It should be noted that in terms of its internal organization, the group is not monolithic and is rather decentralised. Just as in Somali society, Al-Shabaab’s foot soldiers come from different local tribes with strong clan loyalties. Moreover, the leadership envisions a more transnational agenda by linking up with other jihadi groups around the world and eventually targeting the West, while the rank-and-file has a more nationalist inclination to simply establish an Islamic Somali government.

Groundhog day

The origins and methods of Al-Shabaab sound a discomfortingly familiar narrative. Indeed, while the particular details and minutiae are different, radical jihadi groups share not just a universal distaste for all things American, but also form from conditions of poverty and alienation from mainstream society: without access to education and economic opportunity, many young people become disillusioned with their governments and become drawn to more radical means of social change.

Indeed, in recent years many jihadi groups have formed connections (as well as rivalries) with each other: Al-Shabaab has been an Al-Qaeda affiliate since 2012 while its West African counterpart Boko Haram had just recently pledged its allegiance to Islamic State (IS), Al-Qaeda’s rival for brutality. Globalisation and the Internet age have made many issues borderless, and terrorism certainly weighs heavily on this list.

The Philippines, although half a world away, can learn much from the experiences of East Africa. Connections and networks between Southeast Asian terror groups, such as Abu Sayaff and the Malaysian Jemaah Islamiyah, are well known and can threaten the livelihoods of the people in the regions involved, as well as commerce and trade in the maritime routes in the Sulu Sea. Transnational terrorism destabilizes not only the Philippines but also the wider Southeast Asian region. In the same vein, Al-Shabaab’s forays outside Somalia have threatened not only the country but also the regional and even global order; the country is adjacent to the Gulf of Aden which forms part of the critical Suez Canal international shipping route linking Europe and Asia.

Garissa and beyond

To be sure, Al-Shabaab has since suffered many setbacks thanks to pressure from AMISOM, US drone strikes, and the Somali army. As recent as April 24 of this year, Uganda, which has contributed a substantial number of troops to the peacekeeping effort, declared the group to be defeated.

However, the April 20 attack on Garissa University should serve as a wakeup call to complacent policymakers to take important steps in the battle against extremism. Right away this includes increasing local/national security measures. Freezing financial assets linked to Al-Shabaab can also severely hamper the latter’s activities. Complementing these measures would be coordination at the regional and international level to combat global jihadism. Local and national religious leaders should also speak out against the use of violence to achieve political goals, and interreligious dialogue between faith community leaders should be encouraged.

But in the long-term, ultimately it is only through reducing poverty and providing access to both basic services and political participation from the marginalized sectors of society can a disillusioned population be dissuaded from the allure of violent upheaval. Making people have a stake in society by providing democratic participation ensures that they stick to peaceful and lawful activities to protect their rights.

About the author:
*Redmond Alejandro B. Lim is a former Foreign Affairs Research Specialist with the Center for International Relations and Strategic Studies of the Foreign Service Institute. Mr. Lim can be reached at rblim@fsi.gov.ph.

Source:
This article was published by FSI. The views expressed in this publication are of the authors alone and do not reflect the official position of the Foreign Service Institute, the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Government of the Philippines.

The post Is It Over? Terrorism In East Africa – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Deepak Sinha*

Recently, British Prime Minister David Cameron said that the media should not give legitimacy to a “death cult” by calling it the Islamic State. He could not be more wrong, because the Islamic State is just that – a state. It controls territory, has a chosen leader, has its own army, its own supporters or citizens, collects taxes and even, if reports are to be believed, its own currency. IS also uses terror as a weapon but it not the only one to do so – the LTTE, for example, used it to great effect in Sri Lanka.

The IS, despite its defeats on the battle field and losses suffered from air attacks, is far from neutralised and is probably gaining volunteers internationally. The problem with the international community’s approach towards the IS is that it has projected the group as a purely terrorist organisation. By doing so, the international community is free to use military force to neutralise the group. But the truth is that the IS leads an insurgency by the Sunni population opposed to the regimes in Iraq and Syria. It is also looking to further expand this insurgency to other Sunni population.

Insurgencies, past and present, the world over, occur when the affected population takes up arms against the regime to achieve a political aim or correct a historic wrong. Insurgencies only succeed when they have the support of the local population and thus can be considered to be a political movement that can only be resolved through political means. Unfortunately regimes in West Asia, whether they are states with a Sunni majority, like Saudi Arabia, or a Shia majority but with a sizeable Sunni population, such as Iraq, are unwilling to consider political measures that give, either their populations or their minorities, even a modicum of real say in governance. They also still continue to believe that they can suppress the aspirations of their own people by the use of force.

The Sunni insurgency in Syria and Iraq has moved into its final phase, from that of a stalemate to that of an offensive, which culminates in a civil war. That IS gas a regular army capable of taking on other regular forces in conventional operations clearly points to this. That it needs to be opposed and destroyed because of its perverse ideology is also not in doubt. It is also common knowledge that regimes in West Asia neither have the forces nor the capability, nor the motivation, to succeed against IS without international support. However, if this insurgency is to be resolved and West Asia is to become a stable, peaceful and progressive region, then political concessions must go hand in hand with the military offensive against the IS. Political resolution of problems faced by local populations can go a long way in weaning them away from the hardline IS ideology thereby making it difficult, if not impossible, for the IS leadership to continue the insurgency. This requires that the hypocrisy of the West and its allies in the region be ended.

Finally, the fact that India’s sizeable Muslim population has not yet reacted with any vigour to the ideological inducements offered by the IS – thanks probably to our democratic system – must not be taken for granted. The IS is reportedly already knocking on the doors in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. India, therefore, needs to urgently look at pro-active and out-of-the- box solutions that will help them integrate and achieve Muslim aspirations through the democratic system. One measure that could be given serious consideration is Singaporean housing system – wherein the law there requires each locality and housing community to have specific quotas for every section and ethnicity of the population. This enhances inclusiveness among all sections of society.

*The writer is a consultant with Observer Research Foundation

Courtesy: The Pioneer

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By Terri Moon Cronk

Because it takes a network to defeat a network, the Defense Department on Monday debuts its newest agency to stay at the forefront of improvised threats.

DoD’s Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Agency, or JIDA, is built from what had been the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization. It is a combat support agency in the office of the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, Army Maj. Gen. Julie A. Bentz, the agency’s vice director, told DoD News. JIDA has a new, expanded mission to reflect the new name, she said.

“DoD broadened JIEDDO’s mission set to include the improvised threat,” Bentz explained. “Our job was always to counter the improvised explosive device, and this new mission set asks us to look at the next IED.” The nation’s adversary is an adaptive one, Bentz said, adding that the next generation of IED will be an improvised threat. “The department has given us an increased latitude to go after those innovative networks, because it takes a network to defeat a network,” she said.

JIDA Works in a Network

As a network, JIDA is a community of action, and will work with such organizations as the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Defense Logistics Agency, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and across all communities that are affected by an improvised threat, the general said. JIDA’s network also includes coalition forces, partner nations and other U.S. agencies, she added.

The team approach brings the necessary authorities and capabilities to use each one’s strengths “to go after an adversary who knows how to exploit the seams between our capabilities,” Bentz explained. “The closer we stitch our abilities and leverage our authorities, the tighter a network we become to go after their network,” she added.

Patterns Lead to New Devices

JIEDDO learned early that as it defeated a device, “the next device was in front of us,” Bentz said. “But if we went upstream, [we] started noticing there were similar patterns and similar signatures that helped us understand there was a network of materials, people, tactics, techniques and procedures all coming together to build that IED.”

JIDA will continue that effort, she added. “Those same networks that build the IEDs are the same networks that will continue building improvised threats,” she said. The IED will continue to be a threat to U.S. and coalition forces worldwide, Bentz acknowledged.

“It is a threat that’s not going away anytime soon, unfortunately,” she said.

The post US Defense Dept Focuses On Improvised Threats appeared first on Eurasia Review.

One of the most significant developments of the recently concluded Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) meeting is the acceptance of permanent membership of India and Pakistan into the organisation. The SCO is a political, economic and military cooperation initiative of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

From India’s point of view, the SCO presents a decisive platform which could influence its strategic and economic status in the Central Asian region and bring to fruition its ‘Connect Central Asia’ policy. The membership of the SCO will give India major strategic inroads into Central Asia and the Eurasian region. This is particularly important in the view of changing political and economic realities of the region.

India’s accession to the SCO will help the country to engage vigorously in economic and strategic dialogues to secure its own interests in respect to energy security, among others. It could be the balance that this region needs for its stability and prosperity. India can provide that balance to counter possible calls by some members of the SCO to consider it as a counter to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).

In this context, there are three major benefits which could accrue to India through its SCO membership. First, India’s membership in the SCO is important to protect its strategic and security interests in Afghanistan particularly in view of planned withdrawal of the United States led NATO army. For the emerging Afghanistan project to be successful in terms of peace and stability, India has to engage into meaningful dialogues with those SCO member countries such as Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, which are geographically closer to both India and Afghanistan, and are getting increasingly concerned with threats of religious extremism.

Secondly, while China is expanding its footprint in the region through its ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative, Russia is expected to show more eagerness through its historical links and influence. There is a proposal for a free trade agreement among the SCO member countries to exploit the vast energy resources that this region has. India’s joining of the SCO will help the Central Asian countries to follow their multi-vector foreign policy, which calls for a more diversified engagement.

India is keen to fast-track its trade and investment engagements in this region through a comprehensive economic cooperation agreement with the Belarus-Kazakhstan-Russia Customs Union, which will be expanded to other members of the Eurasian Economic Union. India is looking for more secured access to this region’s abundant natural resources such as oil, natural gas, uranium, potassium, phosphorous through long-term commodity agreements. Moreover, India has strong comparative and competitive advantages in services, and it can contribute significantly through its knowledge in information technology and IT enabled services to boost the manufacturing competitiveness of Central Asian countries.

Thirdly, Pakistan is increasing its influence in the region through active engagements in a number of infrastructure development projects. India’s accession to the SCO will help engaging with similar kinds of commercial and strategically viable infrastructure development projects. This will not only help India to deepen its relations with key member countries of the SCO but will also help monitoring Pakistan’s activities in the region.

In short, given the geo-strategic and economic importance of Central Asia and its extended neighbourhood including Afghanistan and Iran, there is a strong political and economic case for India to put more weight behind the SCO. India should put more political and economic capital towards an effective implementation of its ‘Connect Central Asia’ policy through institutional mechanisms.

Therefore, India should get more involved with the International North-South Trade Corridor initiative, which runs through Iran to Central Asian countries to Russia. Other than substantially reduce the cost of doing trade with these countries, this is the only viable route for India’s connectivity with Central Asian countries and also with Afghanistan. To achieve the goal of securing a better physical, institutional and people-to-people connectivity with Central Asia, India should establish an India-Central Asia Forum along the lines of the India-Africa Forum.

*Bipul Chatterjee, Deputy Executive Director, CUTS International (bc@cuts.org); and Surendar Singh, Policy Analyst, CUTS International (sus@cuts.org)

The post SCO Membership Vital For India’s ‘Connect Central Asia’ Policy – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Iran’s President Hassan Rohani says the Islamic Republic achieved all four objectives it was seeking throughout intensive nuclear talks with six world powers.

“We were following four objectives in these negotiations. As part of today’s agreement and under this Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, all the four objectives have been achieved,” Rohani said in a televised address on Tuesday after the conclusion of talks between Iran and the P5+1 countries.

He enumerated the objectives as Iran’s ability to go ahead with its nuclear activities, lifting of “cruel and inhumane sanctions,” annulment of all “illegal” sanctions adopted by the UN Security Council against Iran and the withdrawal of Iran’s nuclear dossier from the Security Council.

Rohani said the sanctions regime imposed on the Islamic Republic was never successful, adding that the bans only targeted the Iranian nation.

He said the nuclear case had played into the hands of those involved in an Iranophobia campaign.

Important juncture in history

The Iranian president added that resistance of the Iranian nation guaranteed their victory in the nuclear talks.

“Today, we are at an important juncture in the history of our country and our [Islamic] Revolution and the situation in the region,” Rohani said.

He said some powers had had some illusions over the past 12 years regarding Iran, but “a new page has been turned and a new chapter has begun.”

“Iran will honor the agreement, if the other side abides by it,” the Iranian president said, adding that the Iranian nation always keeps it promises.

Lifting of sanctions

President Rohani said there are phases to a final agreement, and today served as the first of those steps, where all parties involved in the negotiations came to terms on the text of an agreement and its annexes. The negotiating partners agreed that the next phase will be within the coming days, he added.

Rohani said as a result of the talks, all sanctions imposed on Iran including the financial, economic and banking sanctions will be fully lifted and not suspended on the day of implementation of agreement.

The Iranian president said the day of agreement will come when the United States and the European Union clearly announce the lifting of all sanctions. From that day, President Rohani added, Iran will begin implementation of its commitments.

Language of respect

President Rohani recalled his first speech on the nuclear case in 2013, where he called on the global powers to stop bullying and put an end to the sanctions regime and instead speak with the Iranian nation through the language of respect.

He said the Tuesday conclusion showed that the global powers had come to terms in that regard.

Centrifuges spin on

Elsewhere in his remarks, Rohani elaborated on some details of the conclusion, including the number of Iran’s centrifuges in operation, saying that Tehran had convinced its negotiating partners to have 6,000 centrifuges in operation, although the other side initially wanted only 100 machines to remain in place.

The Iranian president said the other side accepted Iran’s right to research and development, adding that Tehran also convinced the other side to have IR6 and IR8 machines and have UF6 gas injected to IR8.

He said Iran’s right to have the heavy water reactor in Arak is now recognized and work will be done in the future for the reactor to be completed.

The Fordow nuclear facility will also continue operations with 1,000 centrifuges, Rohani stated.

Defeat for the Israeli regime

Rohani said the Tuesday statement benefits not only Iran and the Iranian people, but all the resistant nations in the region.

Israel’s efforts to push the nuclear talks of the past nearly two years into failure have led to the defeat of the Tel Aviv regime, the Iranian president stated.

President Rohani once again appreciated all those contributing in the course of the negotiations, most notably Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei for his guidance and the Iranian people for resisting the inhumane pressure over the past years.

The post Rohani Says Iran Achieved All Targets In Nuclear Talks appeared first on Eurasia Review.

With President Barack Obama announcing Monday the commutation of the sentences of 46 US government prisoners, Reuters calculates that the president “has now commuted the sentences of 89 prisoners, the vast majority of whom were nonviolent drug offenders who applied for clemency under an initiative the White House began in April 2014.” The freeing of any drug war victims is reason for celebrations. Yet, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons 95,265 people (48.7% of all federal prison inmates) are in US government prisons for drug convictions. How about freeing them all?

As Obama indicated in his announcement of his newest round of commutations, drug law violations are nonviolent crimes. In addition, they are victimless crimes. With no violence and no victim in drug crimes, it is absurd for the US government to incarcerate a single person for a drug crime for even one more day.

There is no need to wait for clemency requests and laborious study of the facts of each prisoner’s case. The proper action is to eliminate the drug crimes portion of all federal prison inmates’ sentences. This would result in people convicted only of drug crimes being immediately freed. People convicted of drug and other crimes would be freed as soon as they have served the portions of their sentences arising from nondrug convictions, meaning many of them would be freed immediately as well.

What’s the hold up? President Jimmy Carter, on his first full day in office, pardoned thousands of people for the nonviolent and victimless crime of evading the US government’s military conscription. Obama could take similarly heroic action by freeing thousands of drug war prisoners from federal prisons.

This article was published by the RonPaul Institute.

The post Hey, Obama, How About Freeing The Nearly 100,000 Drug War Victims In US Prisons? – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

In March 2011, President Barack Obama succumbed to French pressure and led the NATO alliance from behind in bombing the Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. At the time, Obama was criticized for not letting the United States remain in the forefront of eliminating odious regimes through the use of military power. Given the results of post-Gaddafi chaos in Libya, however, perhaps having “led from behind” gives Obama some political cover for what has become yet another U.S. intervention fiasco. It shouldn’t.

Although France was the political instigator of the idea to intervene in Libya, the United States actually did not lead from behind in the military campaign. The United States conducted the most dangerous initial air strikes before turning the battle over to its ever less-and-less militarily capable NATO allies and also provided critical command, control, communications, and logistics, which no other military on earth can contribute. In short, the overthrow of Gaddafi using NATO military power had U.S. fingerprints all over it.

Obama undertook this questionable intervention even after George W. bush had left him the long nation-building wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to clean up. These military tar pits already had demonstrated clearly the difficulty in converting to democracy, at gunpoint, faraway countries with unreceptive political cultures, let alone even governing those lands sufficiently to prevent chaos after strong indigenous regimes had been toppled using military power. Nevertheless, France and the United States duped Russia into agreeing to a United Nations Security Council Resolution providing for a NATO “no-fly” zone over Libya—allegedly to prevent Gaddafi from killing civilians in the Libyan city of Benghazi during an Arab Spring revolt. Instead of just clearing the skies of Libyan aircraft, the NATO aircraft, in combination with rebel forces on the ground, destroyed Gaddafi’s security forces and overthrew him.

This “humanitarian” intervention was based on the false pretense that Gaddafi was already slaughtering civilians, which Obama implied in his public statements. Gaddafi was beating back the rebellion, but in the four major cities that he had retaken, no civilians had been massacred. Before his assault on the fifth city, Benghazi, he had threatened only to kill rebels in active resistance, not civilians. In fact, he said he would not kill rebels who threw down their weapons and even offered to give rebels free passage to Egypt. Some say that Gaddafi couldn’t have been trusted, but in this war he did have a track record; instead, the reality of the situation demonstrated that Obama and other Western leaders couldn’t be believed.

Thus, this U.S.-led “humanitarian” mission likely had ulterior motives—as most historically have. Of course, one must speculate as to what they were. Gaddafi, a small-time dictator, had been excessively demonized as a threat to the United States since Ronald Reagan picked a fight with him in the 1980s. In fact, at the time of the 2011 NATO intervention, Gaddafi had made nice with the West, given up his nuclear weapons program, and was providing the United States good intelligence on Islamist terrorists. However, because Gaddafi had long been demonized, France and the United States just couldn’t resist taking advantage of the Arab Spring revolt against him to get rid of him for good.

Yet overthrowing Gaddafi after he gave up his nuclear weapons program (as the United States also did with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein) is a bad signal to aspiring nuclear nations that non-nuclear nations get no respect from the United States. Also, getting rid of the Libyan strongman has created chaos in the country, as warring tribal militias have formed to rival governments, one infested with Islamist radicals. Also, ISIS has taken advantage of Libya’s turmoil to establish strongholds in the country.

The surrounding region has also been destabilized, as weapons from Gaddafi’s huge stockpiles have fueled conflict all over the Middle East. Included in those weapons are hundreds of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, which could be used by terrorists to shoot down civilian airliners. Also, a portion of those arms made it to Islamic jihadists in Nigeria. Furthermore, some of Gaddafi’s Tuareg fighters returned home to neighboring Mali and began a rebellion in northern Mali that was hijacked by radical Islamists, which necessitated a French military intervention to try to tamp it down. Terrorist bases in Libya have trained jihadists to conduct cross border acts of mass slaughter against Tunisia’s tourist industry, killing scores of people.

Yet there are still people who argue that toppling Gaddafi was needed for the symbolic goals of standing with the NATO allies and siding with Arab Spring revolts, even though the latter didn’t turn out to be very democratic after all. However, such symbolism is trumped by the harsh reality that if anything, U.S. security has been eroded by Gaddafi’s weapons being spread around the Middle East and by the resulting internal mayhem in Libya, which in turn has led to terrorist training bases and ISIS strongholds in that country. Even these developments could probably be overstated as threats to the United States per se, but security-wise the United States was still better off when Gaddafi kept things under control in Libya.

This article was published at The Huffington Post and reprinted with permission.

The post Lessons From Obama’s War In Libya – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Stemming climate change is a moral responsibility, suggests Pope Francis in encyclical on need for sustainability.

By Mary Evelyn Tucker*

On June 18th, news outlets around the world reported on the Pope’s Encyclical Praised Be: On the Care of Our Common Home. The encyclical is a global call for creating an “integral ecology” that brings multiple disciplines together for a sustainable future. This movement reflects a major shift in thinking regarding environmental issues – one where religious, cultural and secular values are seen as crucial for social transformation.

For decades the public has assumed that scientists or policymakers would solve environmental problems like climate change. Market-based and technological solutions were also pursued. While these approaches are necessary, we are realizing they are not sufficient to resolve pressing environmental challenges. Ecological issues are no longer viewed as simply scientific or policy issues, but also moral concerns. That is the significance of the encyclical and why it is provoking such strong reactions. Ethics is meeting ecology – a powerful formula for change.

The encyclical marks a historic moment. An encyclical is the highest-level teaching document in the Catholic Church, and this is the first in 2000 years concerned with the environment. It is addressed to the faithful, some 1.2 billion Catholics. Pope Francis makes it clear, however, that he is speaking not just to Catholics, or the larger Christian community of another 1 billion members. Rather, he is speaking to all people on the planet about our common home.

Even before its release there was a flurry of news stories – on its meaning and long-term significance – with attention from both supporters and detractors. The debate will continue for years to come for we are witnessing a historic moment.

The message has world-changing potential. The Pope is a popular leader who speaks simply and yet authoritatively, drawing on his MA in chemistry and his theological training as a Jesuit. And the encyclical was delivered as there is growing consensus that the human community needs to make changes on both global and local levels. The encyclical was released before the December climate talks in Paris and before the pope speaks at the United Nations and the US Congress in September.

The pope is calling for an integral ecology that brings together concern for people and the planet. He makes it clear that the environment can no longer be seen as only an issue for scientific experts, or environmental groups, or government agencies like the US Environmental Protection Agency alone. Rather, he invites all people, programs and institutions to realize these are complicated environmental and social problems that require integrated solutions beyond a “technocratic paradigm” that values an easy fix.

Under this framework, for example, he suggests that ecology, economics and equity are intertwined. Healthy ecosystems depend on a just economy that results in equity. Endangering ecosystems with an exploitative economic system is causing immense human suffering and inequity. In particular, the poor and most vulnerable are threatened by climate change, although they are not the major cause of the climate problem. Within this integrated framework, he calls for bold new solutions. This includes what he calls a “cultural revolution” of values from Christianity and the world’s religions.

Thus to contribute to global warming and compromise our planetary life systems is seen by the pope and many others as morally problematic. This is a watershed moment – a broadening of ethics that encompasses both humans and nature. The move in the United States from segregation to civil rights in the 1960s was sparked by moral voices, such as Martin Luther King. So, too, ethical concerns now led by the pope encourage the growing turn from unsustainable environmental and economic practices. Indeed, he calls for “ecological virtues” to overcome “ecological sin.” No wonder there is pushback; it is not surprising that climate skeptics are wavering. And just as with civil rights, this moral shift will take time.

For 25 years, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the US National Academy of Sciences have issued numerous scientific reports. All warn about irreparable damage to ecosystems with human-induced climate change. The US Pentagon has acknowledged that climate change is a major security risk and urged efforts at mitigation. Yet, citizens of the United States along with others in the developed world have not changed our consumptive habits regarding energy use. Moreover, political gridlock dominates on both national and international levels, preventing enforceable agreements from being negotiated.

From Pope Francis, a penetrating moral message is emerging. This man who washes the feet of prisoners and lives in simple quarters has captured the hearts of millions yearning for authentic leadership and genuine change. And he follows in the footsteps of his namesake, Francis of Assisi from eight centuries ago, a man who abandoned family wealth and spoke of Brother Sun and Sister Moon recognizing the kinship of humans with nature and the cosmos.

Pope Francis has also embraced the poor, threatening the status quo of privilege and power.

He is encouraging transformation in religious, spiritual and secular communities working for ecology and justice. In doing so, he acknowledges the need for believers and non-believers alike to help renew the vitality of Earth’s ecosystems and expand systemic efforts for equity. He is making visible an emerging worldwide phenomenon of religious environmentalism already working on greening seminaries and houses of worship as well as developing new ecotheologies and ecojustice ethics. This diverse movement is evoking a change of mind and heart, consciousness and conscience.

This is the focus of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, which has worked for two decades to highlight the diverse ecological and cultural values embedded in the world’s religions. The work began at Harvard from 1995 to 1998 with 10 conferences and then 10 edited volumes on World Religions and Ecology published at Harvard. The forum has since moved to Yale, continuing research, education and outreach; its website documents the publications, statements, and engaged projects that have emerged in the religious communities around the world.

The pope’s encyclical also happened to run in tandem with a conference in Beijing on the efforts in China to create an interdisciplinary “ecological civilization” drawing on science, business, education and cultural values – sponsored by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology. The conference is among more than 25 organized by the forum.

The rising moral force for ecological and social transformation can be witnessed on every continent and in every religious tradition, as covered in my book Ecology and Religion, co-authored with John Grim: Indigenous communities preserve forests in the Amazon and in North America; the film Renewal examines eight case studies of religious environmentalism in the United States; Buddhist monks protect forests in Southeast Asia. Hindu practitioners restore sacred rivers in India; Jews, Christians, and Muslims conserve the Jordan River.

These examples of religious communities caring for our common home offer hope that Francis’ message will not only be heard, but acted on. Indeed, the future of the Earth community may depend on it.

*Mary Evelyn Tucker is co-director with John Grim of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, with the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and Yale Divinity School. They are authors of Ecology and Religion, published in 2014 by Island Press, and producers of the Emmy Award–winning PBS film Journey of the Universe.

The post Our Common Home: Climate Change Brings Moral Change – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Statement by Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint

If allowed to stand, the Vienna agreement announced today will make the world a much more dangerous place. It completely fails to cut off Iran’s path to nuclear weaponry. Indeed, it moves the world one step closer to a regional nuclear arms race and possibly a nuclear war.

The Obama Administration entered negotiations with the goal of dismantling at least some Iran’s nuclear facilities. But the only things this agreement dismantles are the economic sanctions that have restrained the regime’s nuclear program.

Under this deal, Iran’s vast nuclear infrastructure remains largely intact. Moreover, the “freeze” on uranium enrichment is both temporary and partial.  That’s not a freeze; it’s a slight chill at best.

Nor is there much assurance that Iran will abide by even these scaled back conditions. Tehran has a long and continuing history of violating UN-sanctioned restrictions on its nuclear and missile programs.  The agreement should, therefore, stipulate rigorous verification procedures.  Instead, the Administration’s verification demands devolved from the “inspections anytime, anywhere” to “inspections sometimes, in some places.”

Meanwhile, Tehran remains free to continue its research and development programs for both centrifuges and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Compounding the problem, the deal also gives Tehran plenty of money to ramp up these—and other—destabilizing activities. The agreement gives Iran an immediate “signing bonus” of up to $50 billion in sanctions relief.  It calls for the gradual release of about $150 billion now frozen in overseas accounts—an amount more than six times that of Israel’s annual defense budget. Over time, the sanctions relief will pour tens of billions more into the regime’s treasury, courtesy of surging oil revenues.

The regime will use much of this windfall to fund Hezbollah, Hamas, the Shia insurgency in Yemen, and Shia militias in Iraq—further destabilizing the entire region. Leveraging its new-found wealth to escalate the Middle East’s ongoing wars, Iran could gain hegemony over Iraq and Yemen and win effective control of their important oil resources and oil supply routes.

Because this agreement puts so much wind in the sails of Tehran’s regional ambitions, it will leave others in the region no choice but to react strongly.  The Administration hopes to assuage their fears by ramping up conventional arms sales to some allies.  But fueling a conventional arms race won’t make the region more stable.

And Iran’s Arab neighbors and Turkey will want greater firepower than that, anyway. They recognize that—even at best—this agreement is only temporary.  As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has noted, it does not block Iran’s pathway to a nuclear weapon, but paves the way toward an Iranian nuclear weapons arsenal. The restrictions on uranium enrichment would sunset automatically in 10 to 15 years—leaving Tehran a clear field for its final sprint to nuclear power status.

For self-preservation, our allies will want that same status. In the end, this agreement will blow up the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, triggering a nuclear arms race among multiple countries in what is already the world’s most volatile and dangerous region.

In sum, this agreement fails to achieve—even on paper—the fundamental national security goals identified earlier by the Administration negotiators. Instead of stopping Iran’s drive to become a nuclear power, it puts the regime on a glide path to nuclear power status and the economic wherewithal to assure that it gets there. Concurrently, it will fuel nuclear proliferation and further destabilization—compounding rather than alleviating an already toxic security environment.

Source:
The Heritage Foundation

The post Iran Nuclear Deal Will Make World A Much More Dangerous Place – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Akanksha Sharma*

Recent diplomatic engagements between North Korea and Russia have raised the prospect of a resumption of denuclearisation talks between the Pyongyang regime and the international community. Although Russian envoy Grigory Logvinov pronounced a month ago that Moscow would not support any “behind the back” agreement regarding North Korea’s nuclear programme, it could still play a significant role in getting Pyongyang to address the issue on a bilateral basis.

Two developments encourage this prospect: Firstly, North Korea’s economic ties with Russia have witnessed significant growth. Both countries declared 2015 as the “Year of Friendship”. Last April they organised a meeting of the Intergovernmental Commission for Trade, Economic, Science and Technology, with proposals underway for cooperation in a variety of areas such as agriculture, energy, infrastructure, and tourism. Secondly, on 21 June 2015 Choe Thae-bok, Speaker of the Supreme People’s Assembly of North Korea, travelled to Moscow, presumably to ask for aid. Recent reports from the KCNA, substantiated by South Korean scientists, suggest that North Korea is gripped by a severe drought – a development that is bound to have a major impact on the political economy of the state.

What about China?

China’s foreign ministry recently announced that it is willing to provide aid to North Korea in its time of distress, although Pyongyang’s nuclear programme has put some strain on their bilateral relations. Given the country’s current strained situation, the time is ideal for both China and Russia to utilise their economic linkages with North Korea as a bargaining chip for starting denuclearisation talks.

However the two big powers hold different views on the issue. China has been taking a harder line with regard to North Korea’s nuclear programme, while growing closer to South Korea. In May this year, during China-US talks, Beijing agreed that putting pressure on Pyongyang was important, although China’s official stance is in favour of denuclearisation of the entire Korean peninsula, including American nuclear weapons on South Korean soil.

Russia’s contrary position, as stated by envoy Logvinov, is that Moscow would not support any pact agreed in North Korea’s absence.

North Korea, however, has continued with “provocative actions” such as firing short-range anti-ship missiles, carrying out live-firing artillery drills and threatening cyber warfare. Speculation on the reason for this show of belligerence focus on its current economic plight. Kim Jong-un’s provocations are part of a larger effort to distract his people from other concerns such as acute food shortage that are gripping the country.

He would recall the “Arduous March” that North Korea experienced from 1994 to 1998, a period of intense economic distress exacerbated by a severe famine, during which hundreds of thousands of civilians perished.

Factors threatening Kim regime

Besides a significant decline in public trust in the Kim regime, the emergence of the black market economy, which gave enterprising North Koreans ways around the established state structure, posed a direct challenge to the government’s control. Kim Jong-Un cannot afford to have a repeat of that dire situation, nor a mass exodus of desperate civilians. The declining defection rates in North Korea are at least partially influenced by his strict border security crackdown.

The government is committed to centre its domestic national identity on its purported progress on the path to nuclearisation to become a nuclear power “recognised by the US”. At this point in time, experts have judged the state’s nuclear capability to be sub-par but with potential for improvement. However, the North is determined to build up this narrative. This is a dangerous motivation, because it closes off avenues for communication such as the ‘Six-Party Talks’. As of now, North Korea is not willing to participate in the talks if the agenda includes de-nuclearisation. Nevertheless comunication channels need to be kept open.

North Korean identity quest

The time is ripe for actors that have economic influence and open lines of communication with North Korea – in particular China and Russia – to leverage their advantages in an effort to re-start serious discussions regarding denuclearisation. However the actors need to bring something to the table in order to disincentivise North Korea from nuclearising. The international community needs to do much more to encourage actors like China and Russia to dissuade the Kim regime from its nuclearisation path.

One prospect for the future of a non-nuclear North Korea would be if it chooses to change its focus with regard to identity building. This would involve the creation of new priorities and a new ideology as the centerpiece of its state identity. Whether this alternative will be economic in nature still remains to be seen.

But with the real presence of North Korea’s grey and black markets and the exposure of the younger generation – which accounts for 25 percent of the population – to non-state media and culture, it is not unthinkable to imagine a state narrative amenable to greater economic growth and cooperation.

*Akanksha Sharma is a research analyst at the Centre for Non-Traditional Security (NTS) Studies, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

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World Cup host Qatar is discovering the reputational risk involved in hosting high-profile mega sporting events. Qatar Airways’ sponsorship of FC Barcelona is producing exactly the kind of publicity that is a corporate sponsor’s worst nightmare while a Swiss investigation of the Qatari World Cup bid threatens to expose questionable financial dealings that will fuel demands for withdrawing the tournament from the Gulf state.

An online petition calling on FC Barcelona to ditch Qatar Airways as its shirt sponsor unless it ‘treats its workers fairly’ has collected within days more than 50,000 signatures.

The petition was launched in the wake of an International Labour Organization (ILO) report based on a year-long enquiry that accused the airline of gender discrimination with the backing of the government by retaining the contractual right to fire cabin crew that become pregnant and forbidding female employs to be dropped off at or picked up from company premises by a man other than their father, brother or husband.

To be fair Qatar Airways has addressed some but not all of the ILO’s concerns in changes to its employment contracts. The vast majority of the airlines’ cabin crews are women while migrant workers account for 90 percent of its work force.

“The women who work for Qatar Airways face an extremely grim reality: cabin crew are being exploited, imprisoned without charge, forcibly confined on company premises and automatically sacked if they become pregnant. These abuses are an everyday event not only in Qatar Airlines but in the Qatari national employment system,” the petition said.

“Barcelona’s millions of fans see the team as ‘more than a club’, revered not only for the quality of its players – like Neymar, Andrés Iniesta and of course, Lionel Messi – but for its allegiance to ethics, fairness and social justice. That’s why we’re asking the world’s most respected football club to cut ties with the airline until workers conditions improve,” it said.

Barcelona signed a €150m deal with Qatar Foundation for the 2011/12 season, which has since been replaced by Qatar Airways as the club’s shirt sponsor.

Beyond being a sponsor’s worst nightmare, the petition constitutes the first indication of a groundswell of fan opposition to Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup. Intermittent smaller protests in Britain focussed on the overall plight of migrant workers who constitute a majority of the Gulf state’s population and allegations that Qatar had bought the votes it need to win its hosting rights.

Allegations of wrongdoing in its bid have been fuelled as a result of the worst corruption scandal in the history of world soccer body FIFA that has sparked separate investigations in Switzerland and the United States where 14 people, including senior FIFA executives, have been indicted. Qatar has repeatedly denied wrongdoing.

Switzerland’s attorney general disclosed this week that his investigation had flagged a total of 81 instances of possible money-laundering linked to the Qatari bid and that of Russia for the 2018 World Cup. The attorney general said that he was “very pleased with analysis work done by the Money Laundering Reporting Office Switzerland as it is of great support to the (Swiss) criminal proceedings.”

The groundswell of fan hostility towards Qatar coupled with the investigations undermines the very purpose of the Gulf state’s massive investment in the World Cup that was designed to brand it as a cutting-edge 21^st century state and embed it in the international community in ways that other countries would come to its aid in an emergency.

Qatar’s model is the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in 1991 by a US-led international coalition. The groundswell of fan hostility towards Qatar suggests that public opinion would be less sympathetic to Qatar, a tiny state incapable of mustering the hard power to defend itself on its own, than it was towards Kuwait.

Not to mention that sponsorship of Barcelona was intended to enhance Qatar Airways image as a five-star airline that connects continents via its hub in Doha. Beyond making good business sense, the airline is like sports a key pillar of Qatar’s soft power strategy that increasingly is struggling to achieve its goals.

To be sure, criticism of Qatar, including Qatar Airways, is fuelled as much by facts that the Gulf state has promised to address even if it largely has yet to match words with deeds as it is by prejudice, arrogance and ulterior motives.

The Barcelona petition comes as the Qatari airline alongside two other Gulf airlines, Emirates and Ettihad, both based in the UAE, is locked into battles with American carriers who allege that they have distorted competition by benefiting from tens of billions of dollars in government subsidies. The Gulf airlines have denied the allegation.

The complaint of the US airlines, who are unable to match the level of service of their Gulf competitors, in part because they face no competition in their lucrative domestic market, ignores the fact that they have repeatedly been bailed out of bankruptcy by US government support. The Financial Times recently calculated that over the years US airlines had benefitted from almost four times the $42 billion that they allege Gulf governments have invested in their airlines.

Nonetheless, recent responses to criticism from Qatar, angry at what it sees as a biased Islamo- and Arab-phobic campaign against it, have done little to further the Gulf state’s soft power goals.

“I don’t give a damn about the ILO – I am there to run a successful airline. This is evidence of a vendetta they have against Qatar Airways and my country,” Qatar Airways CEO Akbar Al Baker said last month in response to the ILO report.

A different response together with engagement with Barcelona fans may not have prevented the launching of the petition, but could have cast the debate in a different light – a move that would have made both political and commercial sense.

The post Fan Opposition To Qatar Goes Viral – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Chan Hoi Cheong

In early September, China will once again showcase its military might as it gets set to mark the 70th anniversary of World War II with a massive parade in Beijing. Military parades of such scale are usually reserved for every tenth anniversary of the founding of the country, with the last being held in 2009 in Tiananmen Square under the leadership of then-president Hu Jintao. While the goose-stepping troops and new military hardware of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) are expected to be the centrepiece of the parade, this event also seeks to reinforce China’s image abroad, both in economic and military terms.

For the Communist Party, the significance of this event goes beyond the Square, as it also aims at reinventing Chinese identity under the leadership of President Xi Jinping. Though a defence ministry spokesman, Geng Yansheng said the parade is to “commemorate victims of World War II” and demonstrate its firm stance with the rest of the world to “maintain world peace and stability.” Speculation is already rife that the parade will also serve as a warning to its critics such as Japan or even the Philippines against a backdrop of territorial disputes in regional waters.

Geopolitical Considerations

In a historical context, the military parade by China will send a message to Japan over the latter’s refusal to admit its war-time aggression, a thorny issue that has dominated the relationship of the two giants in the past. For Beijing, Japan’s lack of remorse over the atrocities committed during the World War II era necessitates it to constantly highlight this issue via different means in order to prevent the latter from rewriting history by whitewashing past military aggression. With the declaration of September 3 as “Victory Day of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression” by the legislature last year, Beijing is definitely ramping up pressure on Japan to do more in addressing this issue with this military parade, where many world leaders are expected to be present.

While historical events serve as the official reason to hold this parade, China is also using this opportunity to warn the current leadership of Japan to back off from its nationalistic agenda to revise Article 9 of the constitution and instead adheres to its pacifist path that prohibits the Self Defence Forces from striking the first blow. In the eyes of China, Japanese attempt to revise the constitution is a direct threat as it was aimed at containing Beijing’s growing clout in the increasingly tense Asia-Pacific region. The decision by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last year to reinterpret the country’s pacifist constitution, thus allowing its military to aid friendly countries that come under attack, also adds to the Chinese reasoning for this military parade.

It is not only Japan that the Chinese have a message for. The parade to a certain extent also reminds the United States that Beijing is neither comfortable nor impressed with the “pivot” to Asia strategy announced by President Obama in 2011. As China is engaged in multiple territorial disputes with US allies in the East and South China Seas as well as the Taiwan issue, the parade also seeks to reinforce the message that Beijing will not rule out military option should situation spirals out of control and the United States must therefore play a constructive role in ensuring regional peace and stability. Furthermore, it is also a commonly-held view in China that countries like Japan and Philippines are able to antagonise it because the United States is using these countries to advance its containment agenda.

Soft Power on Display at the Military Parade

Although military strength will often be classified under the category of hard power, there is also a soft power dimension for China to hold this World War II commemoration parade. As disclosed by officials, foreign militaries will be invited for the first-time ever to participate in this massive parade, which usually takes place on 1 October to mark the country’s founding. According to official sources, both Russia and Mongolia have confirmed their participation for the event with reports claiming that China has also extended invitation to the two Koreas as well as Taiwan.

For China, the participation of foreign forces will bolster its reputation abroad as a great contributor to global peace, an element that has been critical to Beijing’s “peaceful rise” agenda. As the former leader Hu Jintao once stressed during the Communist Party Congress in 2007, China has been under what he described as “soft power assault” by Western media and Beijing will need to do more correct the misconception associated with its rise. With the expected attendance of world leaders, China is also keen to frame this event as an international parade that promotes the role its military forces play in global peacekeeping efforts instead of a showcase of latest military technologies as it did in the National Day parades.

A commentary in the state-run news agency, Xinhua confirmed this view when it quoted a senior military official who said that the parade “will convey to the world that China is devoted to safeguarding international order after World War II rather than challenging it.” The commentary further added that the presence of foreign dignitaries will boost China’s influence in the international arena, something it has invested heavily in over the past decade. As it appears, China does seem to be working toward elevating the status of this parade similar to the Victory Day in Russia or Bastille Day in France. The question is whether a successful parade will necessarily translate into better perception of a rising China among audiences abroad.

Military Parade shows Xi Jinping’s Growing Clout in Zhongnanhai

From the domestic politics perspective, the parade is yet another signal that Xi is cementing control over Zhongnanhai (the Chinese equivalent of the White House or the Kremlin) as well as the Communist Party as a whole. Since taking office in 2013, Xi has steadily consolidated his grip on power by purging once powerful senior officials such as Zhou Yongkang and Bo Xilai, launching a new doctrine called the “Chinese Dream” as well as moving away from the “collective leadership” style the party practised since the death of Mao.

In the case of the parade, Xi, who typically would have to wait for another four years for the one marking the country’s founding has instead chose to hold it now in order to show that the military is firmly under his control. While Hu struggled to consolidate power throughout his presidency, Xi’s meteoric rise according to analysts is matching that of Deng Xiaoping, who was considered as one of China’s most prominent leaders. Shortly after Deng took power, he similarly took the bold step to revive a military parade that has been put on hold for 25 years due to the Cultural Revolution and economic hardships among other reasons. The parade at Tiananmen Square in 1984 was a clear political message to others that Deng had emerged with a firm grip on power in the aftermath of chaos caused by the Gang of Four.

Xi’s ability to break the normal conventions can be interpreted as following Deng’s footsteps of quickly establishing a solid political base by taking command of numerous committees in party as well as neutralising critical elements including military and security that might become a threat to his leadership in the future. A successful parade will be vital for Xi to tell the domestic and international audiences that he is the commander-in-chief of the military and more importantly, the sole person-in-charge in the vast land of 1.3 billion people.

Though the exact details of the parade are still scant at the moment, the expected appearance of Russian President Vladimir Putin standing alongside Xi (just like Obama alongside Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Republic Day’s celebration in January) are already raising eyebrows among Western observers about the geopolitical message these leaders intend to send to the rest of the world. For others, it will be interesting to see if China will use this opportunity to showcase its latest military hardware including the DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missile, rumoured to be the world’s longest ranged missile, which failed to make an appearance during the 2009 parade.

This article was published by Geopolitical Monitor.com

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Few people today would dare call President Richard Nixon a radical liberal. But 44 years ago, he proposed a health plan that went far beyond what today’s Affordable Care Act includes. After the first plan failed, he did it again three years later.

And just like today’s heated rhetoric from opponents of the ACA, also called “Obamacare” after the president who introduced it, Nixon’s plans were met with inflamed opposition from the other party.

In a new article in the journal Pediatrics, a team from the Child Health Evaluation and Research Unit at the University of Michigan Medical School compares the reality, and the rhetoric, of two efforts to improve the nation’s health by reducing the number of people who lack health insurance.

“It’s not that one is right and one is wrong,” said author Gary Freed, M.D., MPH, a U-M pediatrician and health policy researcher. “But more that this is a chance to address the appropriate place of political rhetoric when it comes to improving public health, and the dangers of elevating blind partisanship over meaningful debate about important issues for our nation’s health.”

Looking at this comparison of the plans, Freed says, it’s easy to see that Nixon’s proposals were far more “liberal” than what passed under the Affordable Care Act during President Obama’s first term. Yet, he notes, the rhetoric directed against the ACA – as “a radical liberal plan,” “socialized medicine” and a “job killer” – seeks to paint the law in extremely inflammatory tones.

At the time of Nixon’s proposals, those seeking a single-payer plan, led by Senator Ted Kennedy, scoffed and said that his plans did not go far enough. The Democrats’ early-70s health proposal was far more liberal than anything the party has proposed in recent times, and they heaped scorn on the Republican plan.

Freed notes that the approach Nixon took, which preserved the insurance industry’s role in health care, would have covered more people than the ACA does.

At the time, Nixon put forth this rationale for his plan: “Those who need care most often get care least. And even when the poor do get service, it is often second rate…This situation will be corrected only when the poor have sufficient purchasing power to enter the medical marketplace on equal terms with those who are more affluent.” Employees around the nation supported Nixon’s plan as a welcome alternative to the single-payer proposals.

Both the Nixon plans and the ACA were driven by a desire to provide health coverage for the uninsured segment of the American people, says Freed, and to keep health care costs from continuing to rise out of control.

“It would be a very different country today if the Nixon plan had passed,” said Freed. “Instead, we had 30 more years with one-third of the population uninsured,” even after the expansion of Medicaid to cover near-poor children in the late 1990s.

“We need to put health care in a historical perspective, and not go to extremes for political purposes,” said Freed. “I would hope this history will help policy makers think about what the policy is trying to accomplish for the American people, and not turn a blind eye to proposals simply because they’re proposed by one party or the other.”

Freed, who is the Percy and Mary Murphy Professor of Pediatrics and Community Health at the U-M Medical School, is also a professor of Health Management and Policy at the U-M School of Public Health and a visiting professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is a member of the U-M Child Health Evaluation and Research unit and the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation.

Freed and co-author Anup Das note these key elements of the two presidents’ plans:

President Richard Nixon’s National Health Strategy (1971)

• All employers required to provide basic health insurance, including a range of specific coverage requirements
• Employees required to share the cost of insurance, up to a cap
• Insurance companies can only vary benefit packages to an extent
• Special insurance programs at reasonable rates for self-employed and others
• Replace most of Medicaid for poor families with a completely federal plan open to any family below a certain income level; cost-sharing rises with income.

Nixon’s Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan (1974)

• All employers must insure all full-time employees, with employee cost-sharing up to a cap, and federal subsidies to aid employers.
• Replace Medicaid with a plan open to anyone not eligible for employee health insurance or Medicare, as well as those who can’t afford their coverage

President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (2010)

• Employers with more than 50 employees must offer affordable insurance with a minimum set of benefits to most employees, or pay extra if their employees qualify for a tax credit to buy insurance on a marketplace instead.
• Smaller employers can buy through a special program, and smallest employers can get a tax credit.
• “Affordable” coverage is that which costs less than 9.5 percent of household income. Subsidies and tax credits available to many.
• Medicaid expanded by offering states funding to cover individuals earning up to 133 percent of poverty level (fully at first then tapering back to 90 percent over time).
• Minimum package of insurance benefits for all newly eligible individuals.
• Pays providers equal rates for caring for Medicaid and Medicare patients

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By Alicia Garcia Herrero and Carlos Casanova*

The BRICS have just held their annual summit in Ufa, Russia, amid looming concerns of financial turmoil in China, Europe and beyond. While not much has come out of the meeting, the differences between its members have been evident, signalling a shift in the bloc’s future dynamics.

On a happier note, the BRICS remain highly relevant. They still account for 42% of the world’s population and 26% of its surface. Furthermore, their share of global GDP has continued to increase, although at a very gradual rate, and now accounts for 22% of global GDP (according to IMF WEO figures see Figure 1). While this is encouraging, the increase has primarily been due to the steep growth rates in China –since the share of the BRICS’ GDP excluding China has actually fallen–, which, in any case, are a far cry from what the BRICS could have otherwise delivered.

Why haven’t the BRICS delivered?

As well as a global financial crisis of unprecedented depth and length, the BRICS have started to face mounting domestic pressures. Brazil is struggling with a recession, while Russia is grappling with crippling sanctions. South Africa lags behind in terms of basic infrastructure (power cuts are a major constraint on growth) while China is struggling to portray itself as a consumer-led market economy. According to Chen Yun’s ‘bird-cage’ theory of the post-Great Leap economic recovery, whereby the bird represents the free market and the cage represents a central plan, served as the basis for Deng’s ‘opening and reform’ agenda. Someone should coin the term ‘prison-break’ to describe the economic reform process under Xi Jingping. Perhaps the most conspicuous sliver of hope comes from India. It is now growing at a faster rate than China, although from a much lower base. Furthermore, most high-frequency domestic activity indicators such as credit growth, IP, freight traffic and vehicle sales, remain subdued while first quarter corporate earnings have been disappointing.

Another important topic is the fact that the BRICS’ growth prospects have been affected by the slowdown of China’s economy. It should not be forgotten that China is already a leading, if not the main, trade partner of the BRICS. During the good times, China’s thirst for commodities helped to fuel a commodity supercycle which favoured the BRICS’ exports. Global commodities prices have slumped this year, partly as a reflection of slowing economic growth in China, the world’s largest consumer of metals, oil and grains. For the less forward-looking BRICS, adapting to a ‘new normality’ of lower commodity prices –Brazil springs to mind–, it will not be easy as they have not built up fiscal and external buffers to cope with poorer trade terms.

The BRICS move towards a new world order

The differences between BRICS have never been more apparent. In addition to being at different stages of economic development, they have also become increasingly fragmented politically. Brazil, India and South Africa are emerging democracies that promote the rule of law and western-style governance structures, while China and Russia are autocratic. But the divisions do not stop there. While all countries have vested interests in maintaining good relations with Russia, China has become increasingly contentious. A good example of this is its decision to abstain (but not veto) the UN Security Council’s vote on the Ukraine.

When it comes to challenging the existing world order, the BRICS have advanced considerably as a bloc. Not content with the ‘Atlanticism’ of the Bretton Woods institutions, the BRICS have implemented a number of institutions that serve as a counterbalance but are intended promote more closely the emerging world’s common development goals. The most obvious example is the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), established in 1996 to prevent conflicts that would enable the US or NATO to intervene in areas bordering Russia and China. India and Pakistan are now considering joining the SCO and, while this was not confirmed at the BRICS summit, the meetings did pave the way for this to take place in six months’ time as China seeks to play a bigger role as a peace-keeper in the region.

Similarly, the BRICS’ New Development Bank (NDB), established last year in Brazil but launched right before the BRICS’ Summit in Ufa, will start its first batch of infrastructure projects in April 2016. The NDB, with an initial capital of US$100 billion, was established as an alternative to the IMF, after the BRICS were frustrated by stalled efforts to increase the emerging markets’ representation. Yet again, the differences between China and the other BRICS also became apparent, with Beijing’s (to some extent more successful) launch of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) only months after the NDB’s announcement. All the BRICS are also founding members of the AIIB.

Looking forwards: greater cooperation to overcome the obstacles to growth

While initiatives that promote infrastructure investments are a good start, it is unlikely that they will alone be enough to offset the mounting obstacles to growth stemming from weak global demand and China’s economic slowdown. First of all, it remains to be seen whether these initiatives can actually deliver noticeable results. Secondly, in order for investments to yield benefits, they need to be implemented in ways that are cost-effective, transparent and independent of political motivations. Thirdly, even if all pledges were to materialise, in which case the pool of money would be similar to the World Bank, the figures are still small in relation to trade flows. While China is an important trade partner, so are the EU and the US.

About the authors:
*Alicia García Herrero, Senior Research Fellow at the Elcano Royal Institute | @Aligarciaherrer

*Carlos Casanova, Economist at BBVA in Hong Kong | @carcasall

Source:
This article was published by Elcano Royal Institute

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Current event in eastern Ukraine may prove decisive for Russia’s future. Considering the growing instability in Ukraine and the North Caucasus, it is hard to imagine that these regions will not eventually destabilize the Russian political leadership and the ethno-religious stability within the Russian Federation. This is self-evident as strong nationalist movements continue to develop in the backdrop of the Russian political scene. Nationalist groups continue to place the identity of the current federal state under close scrutiny. This raises the questions of what the Russian Federation should be and who are the real Russians? Central to this overall discussion is what impact this discourse has on democracy-building process.

Regardless of the wording used to describe Russia’s current status within the “transition paradigm” (whose prevailing epistemological utility has of late come to be increasingly questioned) – a “spurious” or “imitation” democracy, a country that is stuck in the murky zone between autocracy and democracy, or an outright authoritarian system – there appears to be a consensus that Russia represents a classic case of a failed transition from totalitarianism to democracy.

What accounts for this regretful outcome? Some analysts tend to resort to old clichés, pointing to President Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin cronies KGB records and to the proverbial Russian penchant to unconditionally support a strong leader, right or wrong. Other Russian specialists search for deeper roots, such as Russia’s dearth of experience in representative governance, the populace’s general unfamiliarity with the principle of self-rule, the ignorance of civil rights, and the lack of any real notion of private property or rule of law compounded by a traditionally ineffective and often corrupt judiciary.

All these aspects of Russia’s historical-cultural inheritance have undoubtedly contributed to the country’s post-communist trajectory. However, at the heart of Russia’s failure to build a democratic polity in the wake of the collapse of communism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 is the fundamental and so far unresolved problem of national identity. Russia’s peculiarity continues to be the country’s chronic inability to forge national and social cohesion – in other words, to build a political or civic nation – which is the key to the success of any democratic transformation.

One established school of thought emphasizes the existence of an intimate link between nation-building and democracy. Before any society has a chance to become a democracy, it has to become a nation. On the other hand, civic nations emerge only in societies firmly based on the principles of “social contract” and people’s sovereignty. Only under these conditions can a people perceive itself as a true source of power and the state bureaucracy be vested with the authority to run state affairs in the common public and national interest. Only in such circumstances can the entire community imagine itself to be a cohesive entity – a unified “we”. This is how the civic nation is born, and this type of “imagined community” indeed represents something more tangible than a mere “figment of imagination.”

In Russia, more than in other countries, taking official documents and self-descriptions at face value can be very misleading. Whatever discursive realities are advanced by the 1993 Constitution that characterizes Russia as a “democratic federation” and “civic nation,” Russian national identity remains highly ambiguous, and the construction of the Russian nation appears still to be a work-in-progress.

Although the Constitution implies that the Russian (rossiiskaya) nation consists of the citizens of the Russian Federation which emerged as a sovereign state from under the rubble of the collapse of the USSR, there exist at least four alternative ways of conceptualizing the Russian nation.

First, many champions of Russia’s “imperial mission” continue to argue that the notion of “Russianness” is forever blended with the notion of empire. There can be no true Russia without a multi-ethnic Eurasian empire led by Russia. Recent events in Ukraine (the illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula, covert support to pro-Russian rebels, and collusion to growing separatism in eastern Ukraine), many would say, confirm this view.

Second, there is a school of thought that conceives Russia as a community of the eastern Slavs – a view that advocates the integration of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and northern Kazakhstan. The supporters of this approach, who are quite influential within the Russian bureaucracy, assert that Russians are members of a “divided nation.”

Third, there is a vision of Russia as a vaguely defined community of Russian-speaking people who, irrespective of their ethnic origin, perceive Russian culture as their own.

Finally, an alarming tendency of conceptualizing Russia in terms of ethno-nationalism has emerged. The growing popularity of the slogan “Russia for Russians,” attacks against representatives of national minorities, the emergence of organizations formed to fight “illegal migrants”, and growing anti-Americanism and anti-Western sentiments are all symptoms of this growing trend.

The disagreement as to what constitutes Russianness, coupled with the ambiguous attitude of the Kremlin leadership, which asserts that the Soviet collapse was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” presents a significant obstacle to building a civic nation in Russia. Furthermore, despite the existence of formal institutions in today’s Russian Federation (Constitution, elected president, national parliament, local legislative assemblies, etc.), the overwhelming majority of Russians do not identify with them, suspecting, quite rightly, that these institutions are a mere façade that camouflages the re-creation of a post-Soviet collection of “networks of personal dependence.”

Since existing Russia’s civic institutions do not properly function, the holders of formal Russian passports cannot regard themselves as full-fledged citizens. But in a country where there are no true citizens, there can be no true civic nation either. Lacking the demos (people) with its sense of civic loyalty that binds together members of society and the ruling elite, Russia’s democratization process will continue to be a moot issue and a non-starter.

*Richard Rousseau is Associate Professor at the American University of Ras Al Khaimah, United Arab Emirates. His research, teaching and consulting interests include Russian politics, Eurasian geopolitics, international political economy and globalization.

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By Richard Falk

Assuming that the current prospects for presidential candidates hold firm, and Hillary Clinton is nominated by the Democrats and Jeb Bush, Rick Rubio, or Scott Walker win the Republican nomination, what should a conscientious citizen do when it comes to voting in November 2016? Of course, step one is to rule out support for the Republican candidates due to their regressive views on a range of social and economic issues, and their militarist bluster on foreign and defense policy. Step two is more difficult. Clinton is clearly preferable if the domestic agenda is taken into account, and probably no worse than the Republicans when it comes to foreign policy, but also not noticeably better, and in some ways more objectionable.

For instance, she begins her recent letter to the billionaire arch Zionist mega-donor and longtime Clinton family supporter, Haim Saban, on July 7, 2015 this way: “I am writing to express my alarm over the boycott, divestment, and sanction movement, ‘BDS,’ a global effort to isolate the State of Israel by ending commercial and academic exchanges.” She seeks Saban’s guidance in pursuit of this nefarious goal with this deferential language: “Now I am seeking your thoughts and recommendations on how leaders and communities across America can work together to counter BDS.”

I am sure it didn’t escape the gurus of the Clinton campaign that Saban had joined with the casino mogul, Sheldon Adelson not long ago to headline a donors gathering at which each participant was expected to pledge $1 million to fight BDS. Although Adelson identifies as Republican and Saban as Democrat, both fervently embrace the Netanyahu brand of Israeli leadership. Saban has been quoted on Iran in language that manages to outdo Bibi, “I would bomb the daylight out of those sons of bitches.”

Clinton has a variety of other scary credentials, including voting in support of the Iraq War of 2003, and to this day remains unwilling to admit that the war was at the very least a tragic mistake, and more accurately, a costly international crime. She not only argued for intervention in Libya in 2011, but made a chilling comment on CBS News after learning of the grisly vigilante execution of Muammar Qaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died.” Further, among the emails that Clinton has long withheld from the public are several that substantiate the charges that France from the outset both intended to overthrow the Qaddafi regime, and expected to reap economic benefits by way of the spoils of war, especially with respect to Libya’s oil wealth. It is not that Clinton actually conspired with such plans while serving as Secretary of State, but she did knowingly lead the effort to support the French-led NATO intervention in 2011, claiming that its limited goal was the protection of Libyan civilians in Benghazi, when she was well aware that the real purpose of the UN-mandated intervention was regime-change in Tripoli.

Here is my dilemma. In view of such considerations, does one vote for Hillary Clinton with eyes wide open because she is likely to be better for ordinary Americans on a range of crucial issues, including some effort to challenge the obscene scandal of growing inequalities and sustained slippage in the real income and labor rights of workers and the accumulated hardships on much of the middle class? Or does one say there are certain candidates whose views are so abhorrent as to be unsupportable without weighing their suitability against alternatives? Many remember the acrimonious debates along the same lines concerning the 2000 campaign pitting Bush against Gore, and allegedly lost by Gore in Florida because Ralph Nader, running as a third party candidate, received over 90,000 votes, arguably more than enough to swing the state to Gore’s side of the ledger, and thus enough electoral votes to win the presidency. Most Democrats angrily dismissed Nader as a spoiler and harshly criticized supporters for indulging in irresponsible political behavior. As someone who voted for Nader in 2000, while coming to detest the Bush presidency, I continue to believe that primary duty of citizens in a democratic society is to be on most occasions responsive to their conscience rather than to attempt pragmatic calculations often glamorized as ‘the best being the enemy of the good.’ In the case more accurately phrases as ‘the worst being the enemy of the bad.’ I do admit that I didn’t realize in 2000 that Bush would turn out as badly as he did, and if I had, I might have wavered.

Looking ahead to 2016 the issue of choice can be at this stage put as follows: vote for Hillary Clinton as ‘the lesser of evils’ or vote for Jill Stein of the Green Party as the most attractive presidential candidate, but someone with no chance to do more than enliven the debate and give alienated voters like myself a positive option that feels better than not voting. Remember that there were those establishment liberals who in the tense days after the 9/11 attacks were ready to rationalize torture as the lesser of evils. It was alleged lesser as compared to the need for information that would lead to dangerous terrorist suspects, but where it actually led was to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and a nationally humiliating orgy of torture with very little security payoff. The Kathryn Bigelow film on the search for and execution of Osama Bin Laden, “Zero Dark Thirty,” also gave a bright green light to the torture policies of the Bush presidency, fed to the public by the grotesque evasion embedded in the words ‘enhanced interrogation.’

The alternative logic may be described as respect for ‘red lines.’ I happen to believe that the BDS campaign is a desirable and an essential step in the redesign of a peace process that might produce a just and sustainable peace for Palestinians and Israelis after more than 67 years of agonizing failure, including the recent frustrations associated with the Oslo diplomacy initiated by the handshake in 1993 between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat, with a beaming Bill Clinton standing in between. For me, Hillary Clinton crossed my red line with her craven letter to Haim Saban, making it impossible for me to vote for her by invoking the alternative logic of the lesser of evil. But maybe, although unlikely, by the time November 2016 comes around, I might reconsider.

I realize that if one of those awful Republicans is elected president by a close vote that is skewed by Green Party votes, I will be bitterly criticized by liberal friends. I admit that it is a tricky issue on principled grounds. Livelihoods and wellbeing will almost certainly be adversely affected by a Republican victory, whereas the differences in foreign policy between the two candidates are murky at best, and on Israel/Palestine there is no up side regardless of which party prevails. At the same time, the American plutocracy has become a bipartisan enterprise, calling for resistance as an ethical and political imperative, acknowledging the validity of Chris Hedges’ powerfully reasoned insistence that the country is experiencing pre-revolutionary tremors.

At this stage of the electoral process, my overall sense is that the lesser of evils is still evil, and that morally significant red lines are important for citizens to draw and respect. Until further notice, then, I have decided not to cast my vote for Hilary Clinton.

* Richard Falk is Albert G Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Research Fellow, Orfalea Center of Global Studies. He is also the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights. Visit his blog.

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By Jim Garamone

Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are the nations most able to threaten the United States, according to the president’s nominee to be the next vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In his confirmation hearing today, Air Force Gen. Paul Selva told the Senate Armed Services Committee that while terror groups like al-Qaida and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have the desire and capability to attack the American homeland, they do not present an existential threat to the United States.

If confirmed by the Senate, Selva, who is currently the commander of U.S. Transportation Command, will succeed Navy Adm. James A. Winnefeld Jr. to become the tenth vice chairman.

Types, Degrees of Threat

Selva hastened to add that these nations do not present a clear and present danger today. “In that order, you see the countries that are peer and near-peer competitors who are developing conventional and nuclear weapons that match our own,” he said. “You see opaque governments that have ideologies that we don’t agree with, and you see the broad base of terrorist threats that might threaten our interests abroad, our interests abroad and our homeland.”

Russia is the preeminent threat, the general said, because that nation possesses conventional and nuclear capabilities, should Russian leaders choose to use them.

Selva said the threat posed by ISIL and similar extremist organizations is one that must be dealt with, but it’s regional in nature. “ISIL does not possess the tools or the capabilities to threaten the existence of the United States as we know it,” he said.

The United States is also increasingly at risk in space and across the networks of cyberspace, he added.

“Effectively confronting these threats, as diverse as they are, requires a whole-of-government approach,” Selva said. “Our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Cost Guardsmen truly are the heart and soul of our competitive advantage, and they are far more effective when the full weight of our country’s power is working in unison.”

Budget Concerns

Selva noted another direct threat to the U.S. military: sequestration — spending caps that will take effect Oct. 1 in the absence of congressional action to change budget law.

“We see the effects of sequestration and the potential declines in the defense budget affecting readiness,” he said. “They affect our ability to train those young men and women to do their work. They affect our ability to maintain and reset the equipment that they have been using for the better part of the last decade and a half in Iraq and Afghanistan. And they affect our ability to retain the best of those soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.”

Selva called overseas contingency operations funding -– money appropriated outside the DoD base budget -– “a one-year incremental fix to a long-term problem.”

The general said he is concerned about Iran and its policy of sponsoring terrorism.

With the agreement on Iran’s nuclear program finalized, “the sequential lifting of sanctions will give Iran the access to more economic assets with which to sponsor state terrorism should they chose to do so,” he said. “I think we need to be alert to that possibility, and, as the military, we have an obligation to provide the president with a full range of options to respond.”

Finally, Selva stressed the importance of military-to-military ties. “I think it is very important that our senior military leaders maintain an open dialogue with the senior military leaders of competitor nations so that we can minimize the chance of miscalculation or missteps,” he said.

“In any military operation anywhere in the world — that goes for Russia and China, specifically, and for any other country that might wish us ill — we need to open those dialogues to make sure that we don’t miscalculate,” the general said.

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By Bhaskar Roy

The recent arrest (July, 02) of 12 militants in Dhaka, Bangladesh, including the resident co-ordinator of the Al Qaeda in South Asia (AQIS) may not be a total surprise for counter-terrorism experts, but it is an eye-opener for the people of South Asia.

The arrested included the AQIS co-ordinator, Mufti Mainul Islam (with many aliases), Maulana Zafar Amin, advisor of AQIS, and ten others. The arrests revealed they had acquired a huge amount of arms and explosives, bomb-making and training manuals. They planned to hit Dhaka in a spectacular strike after the holy month of Ramadan, to announce their arrival in the country.

This is not the first time Al Qaeda tried to get a foothold in Bangladesh. According to earlier reports, a group of Al Qaeda men of foreign origin were spotted in 2005, in the Banderban area of Bangladesh. They were reportedly assisted by the Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI). But the group slipped out of the country when the political situation became unfavourable for them and international attention shifted to Bangladesh on terrorism. Mufti Mainul Islam, 35, was earlier a member of Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami, Bangladesh or HUJI-B. The others were committed to Al Qaeda ideology. Senior HUJI leader, Maulana Mufti Moinuddin @ Abu Zandel, who is on death row for his attempt on the life of a former British High Commissioner in Bangladesh, was in touch with this group through mobile phone and letters, from Kashimpur jail, where he is lodged. Have some prison guards been influenced by extremist ideology? Or have they been bribed or been just negligent? The Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) who are pursuing terrorists with a significant degree of success would, expectedly, enquire into this.

A simultaneous development is the attraction for ISIS/ ISIL/ Islamic State among some expatriate Bangladeshis in the UK. A family of 12 from UK visiting Bangladesh in April/May, left for Syria to join the Islamic State. The oldest of the family was Muhammed Abdul, 75, and the youngest three children between one and eleven. In between were Muhammed’s wife, 53, and relatively young sons and daughters.

Reportedly, they were indoctrinated by the banned Islamist group al-Muhajiroun, which has some presence in London. The name al-Muhajiroun suggests this group has its roots in South Asia.

These are not the first expatriate Bangladeshis from UK to join the Islamic State. In this year along, several Bangladeshis from UK, especially young women, went off to join the Islamic State, to serve the fighters of the Caliphate led by the Iraqi cleric, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi who was reported to have been seriously injured in an American air attack, but seems to have recovered.

Baghdadi has appointed himself Caliph-Allah’s deputy on earth-to take over the dream of the late Osama bin Laden, who wanted to avenge the historical defeat of Muslim forces in Europe. The “9/11” attack in USA was, supposedly, revenge on behalf of Turkish forces defeated at the gates of Vienna (1683). Osama dreamt of a Caliphate stretching from Spain to South East Asia, covering Central Asia, West Asia, North Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan, parts of India, Bangladesh and the Philippines. Baghdadi is pursuing the same dream, albeit with much more ruthlessness and stupendous success, challenging the world. Extremist organisations with distorted ideologies, such as Al Qaeda, Afghan Taliban, Pakistani Taliban and the Islamic State did not fall from the skies. They were created by powerful states to further their political and strategic agendas. When deadly creatures are reared to destroy others, they will multiply according to the laws of nature, and ultimately turn on their creators. And these dangerous creatures have a tendency to coalesce and form a formidable family. The genie is out of the bottle and it is hungry,

The growth of the Islamic State has been unprecedented by any count. It has money, technology and propaganda expertise to attract Muslims who feel oppressed in the societies they live in.

A survey by the Clarion Project revealed that more than 8.5 million people view the ISIS/ Islamic State “positively”, and about 42 million view them “somewhat positively”. Sympathy for those leaving the UK to join the terrorists was highest among female Muslims. Ryan Mauro of the Clarion Project warns that “ISIS is only a fraction of what it could potentially become”. (Express, Tom Parfitt, July 01, 2015).

Returning to Bangladesh. Even before liberation, when the country was East Pakistan, the majority of the people followed Sunni Islam tinged with Sufi philosophy. Muslims and Hindus lived side by side, sharing their weal and woe. Travelling mendicant singers, the Bauls (Hindus) and Mafratis (Muslims) sang similar songs, mystical in nature, exhorting people to search for God (Allah) not in temples and mosques but within their hearts. Of course, there were always fringe elements owing allegiance to religious extremist schools of thought. They were unleashed with ferocity by the Pakistani army during Bangladesh’s war of liberation. These forces were controlled but never eliminated. After the assassination of the country’s founder, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, these forces who had the blood of innocent Bengalis on their hands, were given new life by political leaders. There is no space to discuss this in detail but suffice it to say that the Jamaat-e-Islami was reborn in 1978 with the active help of the leaders of that time. And with active external assistance.

Extremism really progressed rapidly when the BNP-Jamaat government ruled Bangladesh from 2001-2006. More than a hundred Islamist tanzeems mushroomed with external financial and religious aid and abetment. At one count, around 2004, more than a hundred such groups received funds from abroad. There is enough evidence to prove that these tanzeems became tools for the BNP-Jamaat government.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had promised she would act against extremists, terrorists and Indian insurgents taking refuge in Bangladesh. She did, and continues to do so with considerable threat to her life. Of the 160 million population of the country, most are young and focused on development. But the cancer of religious extremism has spread too wide. Well educated people such as professors, doctors, lawyers, officers in the armed forces directly or indirectly support Sharia law. This includes women who know what such a law would do to them.

The poor may dream of a paradise under the Islamic Caliphate where there is no discrimination in terms of wealth and status. But what about educated professionals?

The religious extremist tanzeems are very likely to network among them to form a base for the Islamic State. The stateless Rohingyas are eminent candidates for the same.

A huge challenge is looming over Bangladesh. In the course of the rise of religious extremism, secular politicians cannot be totally absolved of blame. They also played footsie with the Jamaat for the vote bank. There is still a tendency to be somewhat soft on them. Bringing the killers of the secular bloggers of justice is not moving at a desired pace. Again, the issue of votes appears to be weighing the decision. Do not make the mistake that some Jews made in Germany, when Hitler was rising.

India must also be alert to the spread of the elements contributing to the idea of the Islamic State and the Caliphate. There is an argument that Indian Muslims are primarily Indians, they are inclusive and no Indian Muslim joined the Afghan Jihad. That is true. But things are changing slowly but surely. Some Indians joined the Islamic State and have died fighting. To garner Muslim votes, so-called secular politicians, especially in the Congress allowed the Students Islamic Movement in India (SIMI) to grow. No right thinking Muslim would support the strategy of SIMI. Out of this the Indian Mujahiden has grown. What is pushing these young Muslim men towards extremism? Has any government in New Delhi honestly tried to address this most critical question? The answer is an emphatic “No”!

In this connection, let us not close our eyes to Hindu extremism. The demolition of the Babri Masjid for example is an incident Muslims (and Hindus) find difficult to forget. It would be disastrous if the National Investigation Agency (NIA) starts diluting cases against Hindu extremists who attacked Muslims.

The Islamic State is not offering paradise. First, it is offering oppressed Muslims a governance of equality. Next, it is telling Muslims the world over that they are avenging the cruelty of the Christian crusaders hundreds of years ago. These are very strong propaganda points. That they are, at the moment, killing mainly Muslims is explained by pointing out that they are traitors to the Ummah,

The world is yet to find a powerful narrative to convince those who are flocking to the Islamic State a convincing reason that the Islamic State is pure evil.

The great powers are masters in psychological warfare. They also have the military muscle to significantly weaken the Islamic State. But their actions do not inspire observes like this writer.

Given the situation, countries like Bangladesh and India will have to face some facts squarely and devise their own strategies. Do not count upon countries like Pakistan and China. They still believe in using extremism against their enemies.

*The writer is a New Delhi based strategic analyst, He can be reached at e-mail grouchohartayahoo.com

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