India and geostrategy

ajtr

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A geostrategy for Eurasia by Zbigniew Brzezinski



Seventy-five years ago, when the first issue of Foreign Affairs saw the light of day, the United States was a self-isolated Western hemispheric power, sporadically involved in the affairs of Europe and Asia. World War II and the ensuing Cold War compelled the United States to develop a sustained commitment to Western Europe and the Far East. America's emergence as the sole global superpower now makes an integrated and comprehensive strategy for Eurasia imperative.

Eurasia is home to most of the world's politically assertive and dynamic states. All the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia. The world's most populous aspirants to regional hegemony, China and India, are in Eurasia, as are all the potential political or economic challengers to American primacy. After the United States, the next six largest economies and military spenders are there, as are all but one of the world's overt nuclear powers, and all but one of the covert ones. Eurasia accounts for 75 percent of the world's population, 60 percent of its GNP, and 75 percent of its energy resources. Collectively, Eurasia's potential power overshadows even America's.

Eurasia is the world's axial supercontinent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world's three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America's global primacy and historical legacy.

A sustainable strategy for Eurasia must distinguish among the more immediate short-run perspective of the next five years or so, the medium term of 20 or so years, and the long run beyond that. Moreover, these phases must be viewed not as watertight compartments but as part of a continuum. In the short run, the United States should consolidate and perpetuate the prevailing geopolitical pluralism on the map of Eurasia. Tins strategy will put a premium on political maneuvering and diplomatic manipulation, preventing the emergence of a hostile coalition that could challenge America's primacy, not to mention the remote possibility of any one state seeking to do so. By the medium term, the foregoing should lead to the emergence of strategically compatible partners which, prompted by American leadership, might shape a more cooperative trans-Eurasian security system. In the long run, the foregoing could become the global core of genuinely shared political responsibility.

In the western periphery of Eurasia, the key players will continue to be France and Germany, and America's central goal should be to continue to expand the democratic European bridgehead. In the Far East, China is likely to be increasingly pivotal, and the United States will not have a Eurasian strategy unless a Sino-American political consensus is nurtured. In Eurasia's center, the area between an enlarging Europe and a regionally rising China will remain a political black hole until Russia firmly redefines itself as a postimperial state. Meanwhile, to the south of Russia, Central Asia threatens to become a caldron of ethnic conflicts and great-power rivalries.

THE INDISPENSABLE POWER

America's status as the world's premier power is unlikely to be contested by any single challenger for more than a generation. No state is likely to match the United States in the four key dimensions of power -- military, economic, technological, and cultural -- that confer global political clout. Short of American abdication, the only real alternative to American leadership is international anarchy. President Clinton is correct when he says America has become the world's "indispensable nation."

America's global stewardship will be tested by tension, turbulence, and periodic conflict. In Europe, there are signs that the momentum for integration and enlargement is waning and that nationalisms may reawaken. Large-scale unemployment persists even in the most successful European states, breeding xenophobic reactions that could cause French or German politics to lurch toward extremism. Europe's aspirations for unity will be met only if Europe is encouraged, and occasionally prodded, by the United States.

Russia's future is less certain and the prospects for its positive evolution more tenuous. America must therefore shape a political context that is congenial to Russia's assimilation into a larger framework of European cooperation, while fostering the independence of its newly sovereign neighbors. Yet the viability of, say, Ukraine or Uzbekistan will remain uncertain, especially if America fails to support their efforts at national consolidation.

The chances of a grand accommodation with China could also be threatened by a crisis over Taiwan, internal Chinese political dynamics, or simply a downward spiral in Sino-American relations. Sino-American hostility could strain the United States' relationship with Japan, perhaps causing disruption in Japan itself. Asian stability would then be at risk, and these events could even affect the posture and cohesion of a country like India, which is critical to stability in South Asia.

In a volatile Eurasia, the immediate task is to ensure that no state or combination of states gains the ability to expel the United States or even diminish its decisive role. However, the promotion of a stable transcontinental balance should not be viewed as an end in itself, only as a means toward shaping genuine strategic partnerships in the key regions of Eurasia. A benign American hegemony must still discourage others from posing a challenge, not only by making its costs too high, but also by respecting the legitimate interests of Eurasia's regional aspirants.

More specifically, the medium-term goal requires fostering genuine partnerships with a more united and politically defined Europe, a regionally preeminent China, a postimperial and Europe-oriented Russia, and a democratic India. But it will be success or failure in forging broader strategic relationships with Europe and China that shapes Russia's future role and determines Eurasia's central power equation.

THE DEMOCRATIC BRIDGEHEAD

Europe is America's essential geopolitical bridgehead in Eurasia. America's stake in democratic Europe is enormous. Unlike America's links with Japan, NATO entrenches American political influence and military power on the Eurasian mainland. With the allied European nations still highly dependent on U.S. protection, any expansion of Europe's political scope is automatically an expansion of U.S. influence. Conversely, the United States' ability to project influence and power in Eurasia relies on close transatlantic ties.

A wider Europe and an enlarged NATO will serve the short-term and longer-term interests of U.S. policy. A larger Europe will expand the range of American influence without simultaneously creating a Europe so politically integrated that it could challenge the United States on matters of geopolitical importance, particularly in the Middle East. A politically defined Europe is also essential to Russia's assimilation into a system of global cooperation.

America cannot create a more united Europe on its own -- that is a task for the Europeans, especially the French and the Germans. But America can obstruct the emergence of a more united Europe, and that could prove calamitous for Eurasian stability and America's interests. Unless Europe becomes more united, it is likely to become more disunited again. Washington must work closely with Germany and France in building a Europe that is politically viable, remains linked to the United States, and widens the scope of the democratic international system. Choosing between France and Germany is not the issue. Without both these nations, there will be no Europe, and without Europe there will never be a cooperative trans-Eurasian system.

In practical terms, all this will eventually require America's accommodation to a shared leadership in NATO, greater acceptance of France's concerns over a European role in Africa and the Middle East, and continued support for the European Union's eastward expansion even as the EU becomes politically and economically more assertive. A transatlantic free trade agreement, already advocated by a number of Western leaders, could mitigate the risk of a growing economic rivalry between the EU and the United States. The EU's progressive success in burying centuries-old European antagonisms would be wen worth a gradual diminution in America's role as Europe's arbitrator.

Enlargement of NATO and the EU would also reinvigorate Europe's waning sense of a larger vocation while consolidating, to the benefit of both America and Europe, the democratic gains won through the successful end of the Cold War. At stake in this effort is nothing less than America's long-range relationship with Europe. A new Europe is still taking shape, and if that Europe is to remain part of the "Euro-Atlantic" space, the expansion of NATO is essential.

Accordingly, NATO and EU enlargement should move forward in deliberate stages. Assuming a sustained American and Western European commitment, here is a speculative but realistic timetable for these stages: By 1999, the first three Central European members will have been admitted into NATO, although their inclusion in the EU will probably not take place before 2002 or 2003; by 2003, the EU is likely to have initiated accession talks with all three Baltic republics, and NATO will likewise have moved forward on their membership as well as that of Romania and Bulgaria, with their accession likely to be completed before 2005; between 2005 and 2010, Ukraine, provided it has made significant domestic reforms and has become identified as a Central European country, should also be ready for initial negotiations with the EU and NATO.

Failure to widen NATO, now that the commitment has been made, would shatter the concept of an expanding Europe and demoralize the Central Europeans. Worse, it could reignite dormant Russian political aspirations in Central Europe. Moreover, it is far from evident that the Russian political elite shares the European desire for a strong American political and military presence in Europe. Accordingly, while fostering a cooperative relationship with Russia is desirable, it is important for America to send a clear message about its global priorities. If a choice must be made between a larger Europe-Atlantic system and a better relationship with Russia, the former must rank higher.

RUSSIA'S HISTORIC TASK

New Russian ties with NATO and the EU, formalized by the Joint NATO-Russia Council, may encourage Russia to make its long-delayed post-imperial decision in favor of Europe. Formal membership in the Group of Seven (G-7) and upgrading the policymaking machinery of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe -- within which a special security committee composed of America, Russia, and several key European countries could be established -- should encourage constructive Russian engagement in European political and military cooperation. Coupled with ongoing Western financial assistance and infrastructure investment, especially in communication networks, these steps could bring Russia significantly closer to Europe.

But Russia's longer-term role in Eurasia win depend largely on its self-definition. Although Europe and China have increased their regional influence, Russia stiff remains in charge of the world's largest piece of real estate, spanning ten time zones and dwarfing the United States, China, or an enlarged Europe. Territorial deprivation is not Russia's central problem. Rather, Russia must face the fact that Europe and China are already economically more powerful and that Russia is falling behind China on the road to social modernization.

In these circumstances, Russia's first priority should be to modernize itself rather than to engage in a futile effort to regain its status as a global power. Given the country's size and diversity, a decentralized political system and free-market economics would be most likely to unleash the creative potential of the Russian people and Russia's vast natural resources. A loosely confederated Russia -- composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic -- would also find it easier to cultivate closer economic relations with its neighbors. Each of the confederated entitles would be able to tap its local creative potential, stifled for centuries by Moscow's heavy bureaucratic hand. In turn, a decentralized Russia would be less susceptible to imperial mobilization.

Russia is more likely to make a break with its imperial past if the newly independent post-Soviet states are vital and stable. Their vitality will temper any residual Russian imperial temptations. Political and economic support for the new states must be an integral part of a broader strategy for integrating Russia into a cooperative transcontinental system. A sovereign Ukraine is a critically important component of such a policy, as is support for such strategically pivotal states as Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.

Large-scale international investment in an increasingly accessible Central Asia would not only consolidate the independence of the new countries, but also benefit a postimperial and democratic Russia. Tapping the region's resources would increase prosperity and prompt a greater sense of stability, reducing the risk of Balkan-type conflicts. Regional development would also radiate to the adjoining Russian provinces, which tend to be economically underdeveloped. The region's new leaders would gradually become less fearful of the political consequences of close economic relations with Russia. A non-imperial Russia could then be accepted as the region's major economic partner, although no longer its imperial ruler.

EURASIA'S VOLATILE SOUTH

To promote a stable southern Caucasus and Central Asia, America must be careful not to alienate Turkey, while exploring whether an improvement in U. S.-Iranian relations is feasible. If Turkey feels like a European outcast, it will become more Islamic and less likely to cooperate with the West in integrating Central Asia into the world community. America should use its influence in Europe to encourage Turkey's eventual admission to the EU, and make a point of tre-ating Turkey as a European state, provided internal Turkish politics do not take a dramatically Islamist turn. Regular consultations with Ankara regarding the future of the Caspian Sea basin and Central Asia would foster Turkey's sense of strategic partnership with the United States. America should also support Turkish aspirations to have a pipeline from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Ceyhan on its own Mediterranean coast serve as a major outlet for the Caspian sea basin energy reserves.

In addition, it is not in America's interest to perpetuate U.S.-Iranian hostility. Any eventual reconciliation should be based on both countries' recognition of their mutual strategic interest in stabilizing Iran's volatile regional environment. A strong, even religiously motivated -- but not fanatically anti-Western -- Iran is still in the U.S. interest. American long-range interests in Eurasia would be better served by abandoning existing U.S. objections to closer Turkish-Iranian economic cooperation, especially in the construction of new pipelines from Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. In fact, American financial participation in such projects would be to America's benefit.

Although currently a passive player, India has an important role in the Eurasian scene. Without the political support it received from the Soviet Union, India is contained geopolitically by Chinese-Pakistani cooperation. The survival of Indian democracy is in itself important, in that it refutes better than volumes of academic debate the notion that human rights and democracy are exclusively Western. India proves that antidemocratic "Asian values," propagated by spokesmen from Singapore to China, are simply antidemocratic and not necessarily Asian. India's failure would be a blow to democracy's prospects in Asia and would remove a power that contributes to Asia's balance, especially given China's rise. India should be engaged in discussions pertaining to regional stability, not to mention the promotion of more bilateral connections between the American and Indian defense communities.

CHINA AS THE EASTERN ANCHOR

There will be no stable equilibrium of power in Eurasia without a deepening strategic understanding between America and China and a clearer definition of Japan's emerging role. That poses two dilemmas for America: determining the practical definition and acceptable scope of China's emergence as the dominant regional power and managing Japan's restlessness over its de facto status as an American protectorate. Eschewing excessive fears of China's rising power and Japan's economic ascension should infuse realism into a policy that must be based on careful strategic calculus. Its goals should be to divert Chinese power into constructive regional accommodation and to channel Japanese energy into wider international partnerships.

Engaging Beijing in a serious strategic dialogue is the first step in stimulating its interest in an accommodation with America that reflects the two countries' shared concerns in northeast Asia and Central Asia. It also behooves Washington to eliminate any uncertainty regarding its commitment to the one-China policy, lest the Taiwan issue fester, especially after China's digestion of Hong Kong. Likewise, it is in China's interest to demonstrate that even a Greater China can safeguard diversity in its internal political arrangements.

To make progress, the Sino-American strategic discourse should be sustained and serious. Through such communication, even contentious issues like Taiwan and human rights can be addressed persuasively. The Chinese need to be told that China's internal liberalization is not a purely domestic affair, since only a democratizing and prosperous China has any chance of peacefully enticing Taiwan. Any attempt at forcible reunification would jeopardize Sino-American relations and hobble China's ability to attract foreign investment. China's aspirations to regional preeminence and global status would be diminished.

Although China is emerging as a regionally dominant power, it is not likely to become a global one for a long time. The conventional wisdom that China will be the next global power is breeding paranoia outside China while fostering megalomania in China. It is far from certain that China's explosive growth rates can be, maintained for the next two decades. In fact, continued long-term growth at the current rates would require an unusually felicitous mix of national leadership, political tranquillity, social discipline, high savings, massive inflows of foreign investment, and regional stability. A prolonged combination of all of these factors is unlikely.

Even if China avoids serious political disruptions and sustains its economic growth for a quarter of a century -- both rather big ifs -- China would still be a relatively poor country. A tripling0f GDP would leave China below most nations in per capita income, and a significant portion of its people would remain poor. Its standing in access to telephones, cars, computers, let alone consumer goods, would be very low.

In two decades China may qualify as a global military power, since its economy and growth should enable its rulers to divert a significant portion of the country's GDP to modernize the armed forces, including a further buildup of its strategic nuclear arsenal. However, if that effort is excessive, it could have the same negative effect on China's long-term economic growth as the arms race had on the Soviet economy. A large-scale Chinese buildup would also precipitate a countervailing Japanese response. In any case, outside of its nuclear forces, China will not be able to project its military power beyond its region for some time.

A Greater China becoming a regionally dominant power is another matter. A de facto sphere of Chinese regional influence is likely to be part of Eurasia's future. Such a sphere of influence should not be confused with a zone of exclusive political domination, like the Soviet Union had in Eastern Europe. It is more likely to be an area in which weaker states pay special deference to the interests, views, and anticipated reactions of the regionally dominant power. In brief, a Chinese sphere of influence can be defined as one in which the first question in the various capitals is, "What is Beijing's view on this?"

A Greater China is likely to receive political support from its wealthy diaspora in Singapore, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, and Jakarta, not to mention Taiwan and Hong Kong. According to Yazhou Zhoukan (Asiaweek), the aggregate assets of the 500 leading Chinese-owned companies in Southeast Asia total about $540 billion. The Southeast Asian countries already find it prudent to defer at times to China's political sensitivities and economic interests. A China that becomes a true political and economic power might also project more overt influence into the Russian Far East while sponsoring Korea's unification.

Greater China's geopolitical influence is not necessarily incompatible with America's strategic interest in a stable, pluralistic Eurasia. For example, China's growing interest in Central Asia constrains Russia's ability to achieve a political reintegration of the region under Moscow's control. In this connection and in regard to the Persian Gulf, China's growing energy needs means it has a common interest with America in maintaining free access to, and political stability in, the oil-producing regions. Similarly, China's support for Pakistan restrains India's ambitions to subordinate that country, while offsetting India's inclination to cooperate with Russia in regard to Afghanistan and Central Asia. Chinese and Japanese involvement in the development of eastern Siberia can also enhance regional stability.

The bottom line is that America and China need each other in Eurasia. Greater China should consider America a natural ally for historical as well as political reasons. Unlike Japan or Russia, the United States has never had any territorial designs on China; compared to Great Britain, it has never humiliated China. Moreover, without a viable strategic relationship with America, China is not likely to continue to attract the enormous foreign investment necessary for regional preeminence.

Similarly, without a Sino-American strategic accommodation as the eastern anchor of America's involvement in Eurasia, America will lack a geostrategy for mainland Asia, which win deprive America of a geostrategy for Eurasia as well. For America, China's regional power, co-opted into a wider framework of international cooperation, can become an important strategic asset -- equal to Europe, more weighty than Japan -- in assuring Eurasia's stability. To recognize this fact, China could be invited to the G-7's annual summit, especially since an invitation was recently extended to Russia.

REFOCUSING JAPAN'S ROLE

Since a democratic bridgehead on Eurasia's eastern mainland will not soon emerge, it is all the more important that America's effort to nurture a strategic relationship with China be based on acknowledgment that a democratic and economically successful Japan is America's global partner but not an offshore Asian ally against China. Only on that basis can a three-way accommodation -- one that involves America's global power, China's regional preeminence, and Japan's international leadership -- be constructed. Such an accommodation would be threatened by any significant expansion of American-Japanese military cooperation. Japan should not be America's unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Far East, nor should it be America's principal Asian military partner. Efforts to promote these Japanese roles would cut America off from the Asian mainland, vitiate the prospects for reaching a strategic consensus with China, and frustrate America's ability to consolidate stability in Eurasia.

Japan does not have a major political role to play in Asia, given the regional aversion it continues to evoke because of its behavior before and during World War II. Japan has not sought the kind of reconciliation with China and Korea that Germany sought with France and is seeking with Poland. Like insular Britain in the case of Europe, Japan is politically irrelevant to the Asian mainland. However, Tokyo can carve out a globally influential role by cooperating closely with the United States on the new agenda of global concerns pertaining to development and peacekeeping while avoiding any counterproductive efforts to become an Asian regional power. American statesmanship should steer Japan in that direction.

In the meantime, a true Japanese-Korean reconciliation would contribute significantly to a stable setting for Korea's eventual reunification, mitigating the international complications that could ensue from the end of the country's division. The United States should promote this cooperation. Many specific steps, ranging from joint university programs to combined military formations, that were taken to advance the German-french reconciliation, and later between Germany and Poland, could be adapted to this case. A comprehensive and regionally stabilizing Japanese-Korean partnership might in turn facilitate a continuing American presence in the Far East after Korea's unification.

It goes without saying that a close political relationship with Japan is in America's global interest. But whether Japan is to be America's vassal, rival, or partner depends on the ability of Americans and Japanese to define common international goals and to separate the U. S. strategic mission in the Far East from Japanese aspirations for a global role. For Japan, in spite of the domestic debates about foreign policy, the relationship with America remains the beacon for its international sense of direction. A disoriented Japan, whether lurching toward rearmament or a separate accommodation with China, would spell the end of the American role in the Asia-Pacific region, foreclosing the emergence of a stable triangular arrangement for America, Japan, and China.

A disoriented Japan would be like a beached whale, thrashing helplessly but dangerously. If it is to turn its face to the world beyond Asia, Japan must be given a meaningful incentive and a special status so that its own national interest is served. Unlike China, which can seek global power by first becoming a regional power, Japan can gain global influence only if it first eschews the quest for regional power.

That makes it all the more important for Japan to feel it is America's special partner in a global vocation that is as politically satisfying as it is economically beneficial. To that end, the United States should consider the adoption of an American-japanese free trade agreement, creating a common American-japanese economic space. Such a step, formalizing the growing link between the two economies, would provide a solid underpinning for America's continued presence in the Far East and for Japan's constructive global engagement.

TRANSCONTINENTAL SECURITY

In the long term, Eurasia's stability would be enhanced by the emergence, perhaps early in the next century, of a trans-Eurasian security system. Such a transcontinental security arrangement might involve an expanded NATO, linked by cooperative security agreements with Russia, China, and Japan. But to get there, Americans and Japanese must first set in motion a triangular political-security dialogue that engages China. Such three-way American-Japanese-Chinese security talks could eventually involve more Asian participants, and later lead to a dialogue with the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe. That, in turn, could eventually pave the way for a series of conferences by European and Asian states on security issues. A transcontinental security system would thus begin to take shape.

Defining the substance and institutionalizing the form of a trans-Eurasian security system could become the major architectural initiative of the next century. The core of the new transcontinental security framework could be a standing committee composed of the major Eurasian powers, with America, Europe, China, Japan, a confederated Russia, and India collectively addressing critical issues for Eurasia's stability. The emergence of such a transcontinental system could gradually relieve America of some of its burdens, while perpetuating beyond a generation its decisive role as Eurasia's arbitrator. Geostrategic success in that venture would be a fitting legacy to America's role as the first and only global superpower.
 

ajtr

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Balancing act (Asian version)


Last week I suggested that if China's power continues to rise, then Sino-American relations are bound to become significantly more competitive. China is likely to seek to become a regional hegemon, and the United States will probably try to prevent this. (For more on this broad theme, see Robert Kaplan's essay on "The Geography of Chinese Power" in the latest Foreign Affairs, which arrived in my mailbox the day after I posted my original comment).

I also noted that China's path to regional hegemony would be more difficult than America's path had been, because there were no other major powers in the Western hemisphere and no strong obstacles to U.S. expansion across North America. (Britain was a major power presence in Canada, of course, but was generally preoccupied by events elsewhere). By contrast, there are several significant medium powers in China's neighborhood. A key question, therefore, is whether other Asian states are likely to balance against China's rising power, or whether they will choose to "bandwagon" with it. If the former, containment will be relatively easy; if the latter, the gradual emergence of a Chinese "sphere of influence" may be difficult to prevent.

Well, lo and behold, over the weekend the Times published an interesting article about China's rising influence in Indonesia. Lots of Javanese are apparently learning Mandarin, and in the process ignoring an aversion to things Chinese dating back to Beijing's role in the abortive 1965 coup there. This trend reflects both China's growing economic clout and an active Chinese effort to expand the teaching of Mandarin overseas.

So will Asia balance or bandwagon? In my previous work on alliances, I argued that balancing behavior tends to predominate in international politics, but that especially weak and/or isolated states were somewhat more likely to bandwagon than strong states are. Because weak states can do little to affect the outcome of a contest and may suffer grievously in the process, they must choose the side that is likely to win. And where great powers tend to have global interests, weak states worry mostly about the balance of power in their immediate region. They may be willing to stand up to a stronger power if they are assured of ample allied support, but a weak state left to its own devices may have little choice but to kowtow to a larger and stronger neighbor. That is how "spheres of influence" are born.

What does this logic tell us about future events in East Asia? On the one hand, prospects for balancing ought to be fairly good. Although China has the greatest power potential in Asia, several of its neighbors are hardly "weak states." Japan has the world's third largest economy (despite a lengthy period of stagnation), a latent nuclear capability, and significant military power of its own. Despite an aging population, it would be hard to intimidate. Vietnam has never been a pushover, India has a billion people and is nuclear-capable, and states like Indonesia and Singapore possess valuable real estate and (in Singapore's case) military strength disproportionate to size.

Furthermore, even a far more powerful China would have some difficulty projecting power against its various neighbors, because it would have to do so via naval, air, and amphibious capabilities and not via land power alone. And given the U.S. interest in preventing China from exercising regional hegemony, the potential targets of a Chinese drive for regional dominance would have a great power ally ready to back them up.

But on the other hand, a U.S. effort to maintain a defensive alliance in East Asia would also face several obvious obstacles. First, defensive alliances invariably face collective action problems, as each member of the alliance tries to shift the main burden onto its partners. This is a tendency that an adroit rising power can exploit, in effect playing "divide-and-rule" while the putative partners quarrel over strategy and burden-sharing.

Second, and closely related, is the difficulty of figuring out just how much support the United States has to provide its Asian partners to keep them on board. Provide too little, and some of them might be tempted to cut a deal with Beijing. Provide too much, and Asian allies will free-ride on Uncle Sucker. Add to this the perennial U.S. obsession with credibility and the fact that these same allies have an incentive to exaggerate their own propensity to bandwagon (to convince a nervous Washington to do more on their behalf), and you have a recipe for American over commitment.

Third, as the Times story suggests, China's most promising strategy will be to speak softly and focus on building economic and cultural ties with its various neighbors. Heavy-handed Chinese diplomacy will make it easier for Washington to maintain strong Asian partnerships, while the persistent exercise of Chinese "soft power" could convince some Asian states that Beijing was the wave of the future and that Chinese hegemony wouldn't be all that onerous. At the very least, it would make the United States work harder to preserve its current position.

Taken together (and at the risk of beating a dead horse), this analysis implies that managing alliance relations in Asia is going to take a lot more attention and skill than it took to manage relations in Europe during the Cold War (and even that wasn't always so simple -- remember Suez?). That task will be even harder if the U.S. government is devoting a lot of time and attention to areas that are ultimately of marginal strategic importance, like ... um ... Afghanistan.
 

ajtr

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INDIA AND GEOPOLITICS - PART I​

Praker Bandimutt

Introduction
Geopolitics is a method of political analysis, popular in Central Europe during the first half of the 20th cent. that emphasized the role played by geography in international relations. Geopolitical theorists stress that natural political boundaries and access to important waterways are vital to a nation's survival. The term was first used (1916) by Rudolf Kjeflen, a Swedish political scientist, and was later borrowed by Karl Haushofer, a German geographer and follower of Friedrich Ratzel. Haushofer founded (1922) the Institute of
Geopolitics in Munich, from which he proceeded to publicize geopolitical ideas, including Sir Walford J. Mackinder's theory of a European heartland central to world domination. Haushofer's writings found favor with the Nazi leadership, and his ideas were used to justify German expansion during the Nazi era. Many expansionist justifications, including the American manifest destiny as well as the German Lebensraum, are based on geopolitical considerations. Geopolitics is different from political geography, a branch of geography concerned with the relationship between politics and the environment. One just has to look at what South Asia comprises of and where it is situated in the world, it becomes apparent why this area has acquired a vital position in the world at the end of the 20th century. The eight countries Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives - that constitute South Asia are a zone of fire. China is situated in the north of this zone, Russia is on the North and West, the Middle East, Balkans and Europe are on the West, and the Indian Ocean on the South. The Indian Ocean connects the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.

Classical Geopolitics
Geopolitics is concerned with how geographical factors, including territory, population, strategic location, and natural resource endowments, as modified by economics and technology, affect the relations between states and the struggle for world domination. classical geopolitics was a manifestation of interimperialist rivalry and emerged around the time of the Spanish American War and the Boer War. It constituted the core ideology of U.S. overseas expansion articulated in Alfred Thayer Mahan's Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890),Frederick Jackson Turner's "The Frontier in American History"(1893), and Brooks Adams's "The New Empire (1902)" as well as in Theodore Roosevelt's " Rough-Rider" policies. The term geopolitics itself was coined in 1899 by the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjelln, after which it quickly emerged as a systematic area of study. The three foremost geopolitical theorists in the key period from the Treaty of Versailles through the Second World War, were Halford Mackinder in Britain, Karl Haushofer in Germany, and Nicholas John Spykman in the United States.
States pursue different grand strategies at different times with different degrees of success. Why? Why select one grand strategy (an integrated,multidimensional approach to security) and not another? Why not deal with all threats in the same manner? And why, once selected, do some strategies succeed and provide security (i.e., territorial integrity, political independence, economic viability, environmental sustainability, and social cohesion) while others fail? The Geographical Pivot of History is a book published in the Geographical Journal and written by Sir Halford Mackinder, who is the founder of the school of geopolitics. Geopolitics may be defined, crudely, as the influence of geography upon politics: how distance and terrain and climate affect the affairs of states and
men. Because of geography, for example, Athens was a thalassocracy - a sea empire - whereas Sparta was a land power.Mackinder summarised his theory in Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919) thus:Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; (Eurasia)
Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; (Eurasia and Africa) Who rules the World Island commands the World.Eighteenth-century Britain, as an island, enjoyed the freedom of the seas;eighteenth-century Prussia was ringed by foes on all sides. One of the US's current great advantages is that, in contrast to Prussia then or Russia today, it has no great powers on its borders.Here's how the Heartland Theory would apply to Iraq: Get a globe and put your finger on Iraq. Notice how your finger is resting right in the middle, the "heartland," of the Middle East, halfway between Egypt and Pakistan. In 1904, British geographer Mackinder placed his finger on Eastern Europe and declared that to be the "pivot area" or "heartland" of Europe. He declared: "Who commands Eastern Europe commands the heartland; who rules the heartland commands the world island; and who rules the world-island commands the world." (By world-island, he meant the Euro-Asian-African landmass.) Did anyone buy the Heartland Theory? Yes. Napoleon nderstood it even before Mackinder was born. That is why he attacked czarist Russia. Moreover, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin and three generations of the world's foremost military strategists embraced it as gospel and acted upon it.Even now, the United States is steering NATO's drive into Mackinder's Heartland with the addition to its ranks of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. The essential element in the Heartland Theory is simply "being there." There have been two great shifts in the international balance of power over the past 500 years. The first was the rise of Western Europe, which by the late 17th century had become the richest,most dynamic and expansionist part of the globe. The second was the rise of the United States of America, which between the Civil War and World War I became the single most important country in the world. Right now a trend of equal magnitude is taking places the rise of Asia, led by China, which will fundamentally reshape the international landscape in the next few decades. For America, whether it is preserving jobs or security, recognizing and adapting to this new world order is key. Today in the beginning of the 21st century; the question might be rephrased: "What is the purpose of international affairs?" and the answer: "To keep the Americans in, the Americans out, and the Americans down." The United States, as the world's only superpower, provides the only game in town. How a nation plays this new game depends on what it needs most and wants most."I confess that countries are pieces on a chessboard," said Lord Curzon, viceroy of India in 1898, "upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world." Zbigniew Brzezinski, adviser to several presidents and a guru admired by the Bush team, has written virtually those same words. In his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, he writes that the key to dominating the world is central Asia, with its strategic position between competing powers and immense oil and gas wealth. "To put it in terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires," he writes, one of "the grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy" is "to keep the barbarians from coming together".

Geography
The first person to mention "the Middle East" in print seems to have been General Sir Thomas Gordon, a British intelligence officer and director of the Imperial Bank of Persia. In an article published in 1900, Gordon, who was concerned with protecting British-ruled India from Russian threats, located it in Persia, or present-day Iran, and Afghanistan. Two years later, an US naval historian, Captain Alfred Mahan, also referred to the Middle East in an article entitled The Persian Gulf and International Relations. Despite Gordon's earlier
article, Mahan is usually credited with coining the term, and as an enthusiastic advocate of sea power, he centered his Middle East on the Gulf and its coasts.The term was brought into popular usage by a series of 20 articles that appeared in the Times in 1902 and 1903 under the heading The Middle Eastern Question. Written by Valentine Chirol, head of paper's foreign department, the articles expanded Mahan's concept of the Middle East to include all land and sea approaches to India - Persia, the Persian Gulf, Iraq, the east coast of Arabia, Afghanistan, and Tibet. Wherever the Middle East may actually be, the common thread in all these early debates was how to control it in order to safeguard India, the jewel in Britain's imperial crown. This set a pattern that continues even today: there is nothing within the Middle East, as generally conceived, that binds it together. Yes, it has oil, Islam and the Arabic language, but there are major sources of oil and important centers of Islam outside it too. It is not a region in its own right but a concept devised to suit the policies of outsiders,and it changes shape according to their strategic interests. The word "middle" was used initially to distinguish the region from the "far" east - India and beyond - and the "near" east - the lands of the eastern Mediterranean sometimes also known as the Levant. By the end of the first world war, however, the distinction between "near" and "middle" was becoming blurred, at least in the minds of British policy-makers. The war had brought the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the rise of Arab nationalism. Britain had gained control over Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon and its strategic interests were changing. Protecting the route to India was still a vital concern, but there was also a growing awareness of the importance of oil.
The analysis of Asian security dynamics is a growth field of late. Many observers characterize schools of thought on the region s future in terms of a debate between the optimists and the pessimists (as with the dialogue on nuclear proliferation). Optimists point to economic growth and interdependence,and the spread of democracy as reasons to believe that 21st century Asia will be more peaceful than was 20th century Asia. Pessimists, however, envisage rampant anarchy and conflict, sometimes characterized as a move back to the future.It is likely, however, that if the future holds in store calm and prosperity the traditional tools of military force projection will be of minimal utility. On theother hand, if we do see the emergence of rife instability, these tools may well play a major role in bringing about such a circumstance, and perhaps even in making it worse.It would seem that the post-post colonialist era for Asia entails a more autonomous system than during the cold war, with security dynamics being driven more by indigenous actors and a somewhat reduced US role. In many ways the existence of contested nation-states, political-military conflict, and economic interdependence and cooperation make the region of Asia a serviceable, and perhaps even the best, microcosm of the world as a whole. The South Asian region today is particularly vulnerable to conflict. It has a higher absolute poverty rate than sub-Saharan Africa, abundant transnational ethnic groups, sectarian disputes,terrorist groups, nuclearized powers, massive migration and refugee problems,
narcotics trafficking, disputed borders, resource disputes, and rampant political corruption .

India during Colonial times
Currently there is the longest cold war which precedes the cold war of the 20th century after the rise of communism. Russian expansion to the east to the pacific by the 1700 triggered the Europeans to expand worldwide. By the 1800 Europeans (British) had the southern end of the Asian landmass under their control. Russians had expanded towards the central Asia and consolidated by 1900.By the 1900 the British and the Russians were locked in the central Asia for control and influence. By 2000 the Russian empire had receded back to its position in 1800. The Asian landmass has been in the eyes of the Europeans even before America was born. After the dependence of oil for the growth of the modern economy after 1900s the MiddleEast and central Asia have taken a new role in geo-politics. Central Asia has become the center stage of the 21st century and is right in India's backyard. Hence Kashmir takes a prominent place in the Indian geopolitical strategy.Two people invoked Lord Curzon ideas to define India's new standing in the world. The first was Henry Kissinger, a former American Secretary of State who was talking about India's role in the region stretching from Aden to Singapore. The second was none other than the former External Affairs Minister, Jaswant Singh.Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, Viceroy of India (1898- 1905) and British Foreign Secretary (1919-24), might only be mentioned in our text books as the man who partitioned Bengal. But within the foreign policy elite, he is recalled as the man who outlined the grandest of the strategic visions for India. Why should the imperialist vision of Lord Curzon - outlined nearly a century ago for British India - be of any significance to New Delhi's foreign policy? Some diplomatists suggest that the political context might have changed, but geography has not. If
geography is destiny, India has a pivotal role in the Indian Ocean and its littoral, irrespective of who rules New Delhi.In his book `The Place of India in the Empire', published in 1909, Lord Curzon talks of India's geopolitical significance. ``On the West, India must
exercise a predominant influence over the destinies of Persia and Afghanistan; on the north, it can veto any rival in Tibet; on the north-east and last it can exert great pressure upon China, and it is one of the guardians of the autonomous existence of Siam,'' he wrote.
However, much one might dream about India's strategic future, this is not the kind of role India can play now. Nor is the world going to parcel out the Indian Ocean littoral to India. New Delhi can, however, significantly contribute towards the advancement of the region through political cooperation with other great powers. That precisely is what Mr. Kissinger was talking about when he referred to the ``parallel interests'' of India and the United States from Aden to Singapore. These shared interests include energy security, safeguarding the sea lanes, political stability, economic modernization and religious moderation.Lord Curzon's emphasis on the value of fixing boundaries, conceived in the context of expanding empires, remains very relevant for India. Settled boundaries
can make India's frontiers into zones of economic cooperation rather than bones of political contention. The assessment that ``frontiers, which have so frequently and recently been the cause of war, are capable of being converted into the instruments and evidences of peace'' is even more true in a globalizing world.
By leaving territorial and boundary disputes with its key neighbors - Pakistan and China - unresolved for so long, India has tied itself down. Lord Curzon seems to have been aware of the tendency to avoid boundary settlements. ``In Asia,'' he wrote, ``there has always been a strong instinctive aversion to the acceptance of fixed boundaries arising partly from the nomadic habits of the people, partly from the dislike of precise arrangements that is typical of the oriental mind, but more still from the idea that in the vicissitudes of fortune more is to be expected from an unsettled than from a settled frontier.'' Can India take Lord Curzon's advice on frontiers and seek a final resolution of the Kashmir problem with
Pakistan and the boundary dispute with China?
Almost 90 years before Samuel Huntington wrote his famous essay on the impending clash of civilizations and later developed it into a book with the same title, and decades before even the Hindu nationalism and organizations were formally organized in 1925 in India, Bipin Chandra Pal, a Hindu nationalist leader of India's freedom movement, had foreseen this clash among various civilizations and predicted that Hindu civilization will side with the Judeo-Christian West in
its war against Islamic and Chinese civilizations.Pal's essays and articles written almost a century ago make fascinating reading. A genuine thinker and visionary, Pal propounded his theories despite the fact that he considered the West as the greatest danger to humanity and was a great admirer of Islam's spiritual values. He thought that Islam was going to conquer large parts of the world, through its power of propaganda and not through war. He considered this inevitable. He was, however, scared of Islam's political
manipulation. He foresaw the dangers of political Islam, which he considered an aberration. For, in his view, Islam is not only "extra-territorial" in its ideology, but also "extra-political".In a collection of his essays entitled "Nationality and Empire", Pal writes
under the sub-head Pan-Islamism and Pan-Mongolianism: "This Pan-European combination [that we now call the West] will be a very serious menace to the non-European world.
It will be bound to come into serious conflict with both Pan-Islamism and Pan-Mongolianism. If Europe can settle her internal jealousies betimes, she will be able to dominate easily both the Islamic and the Mongolian world. Nothing will prevent in that case the parceling out of the Muslim lands on the one side, and of China on the other. But that is not very likely. It will take, at least, as long a time for the European chancelleries to forget their past jealousies and present rivalries, as it will take for China, now that she has awakened from the sleep of ages, to put her own house in order and organize her
leviathan strength to hold her own against the entire world. "The same thing is likely to happen in the Islamic world also; and the fall of Turkey in Europe will hasten this combination. It will not be an organized confederacy like that of China and Japan, but a far more dangerous, because more subtle, combination of the hearts of countless hordes who hold nothing so dear,neither land nor life, as their religion. And the real strength of this Pan-Islamic outburst will come from Egypt and India [which then included present-day
Pakistan and Bangladesh], where it will be safe from the crushing weight of the Pan-European confederacy. England will not allow her European confederates to interfere with her own domestic affairs; such interference would break up the confederation at once. She will have to settle this Pan-Islamic problem, so far as it may affect her own dominions, herself."Then describing where the danger for India will come from, Pal writes under the title "Our Real Danger". "And it is just here that our safety from this possible Pan-European combination also lies. Because of the British connection, India will have nothing to fear from any possible combination of the European powers. The same is also true of Egypt, though perhaps in a lesser degree. Our real menace will come not from Europe but from Asia, not from Pan-Europeanism but from Pan-Islamism and Pan-Mongolianism. These dangers are, however, common, both to India and Egypt and Great Britain. To provide against it, Great Britain will have to find and work out a satisfactory and permanent settlement of the Indian and the Egyptian problem, and we, on our part, will have also to come to some rational compromise with her. British statesmanship must recognize the urgent and absolute need of fully satisfying the demands of Indian and Egyptian nationalism,and India and Egypt will have to frankly accept the British connection - which is different from British subjection - as a necessary condition of their national life and freedom. To wantonly seek to break up this connection, while it will only hurt Great Britain, may positively kill every chance and possibility of either Indian or Egyptian nationalism ever realizing itself."Predicting and pleading the need for the alliance of the West and India,Pal writes under the sub-head "Our True Safety":"Indian nationalism in any case, has, I think, really no fear of being permanently opposed or crippled by Great Britain. On the contrary, the British connection can alone offer its effective protection against both the Pan-Islamic and the Pan-Mongolianism menace. As long as we had to consider Great Britain alone or any other European Power for the matter of that, while thinking of the future of Indian nationalism, the problem was comparatively simple and easy. But now we have to think if China on the one hand, and of the new Pan-Islamic danger on the other. The 60 millions of Mohammedans in India, if inspired with Pan-Islamic aspirations, joined to the Islamic principalities and powers that stand both to our West and our northwest, may easily put an end to all our nationalist aspirations, almost at any moment, if the present British connection be severed. "The four-hundred millions of the Chinese empire can, not only gain an easy footing in India, but once that footing is gained, they are the only people under the sun who can hold us down by sheer superior physical force. There are no other
people who can do this. This awakening of China is, therefore, a very serious menace - in the present condition of our country, without an organized and trained army and a powerful navy of our own - to the maintenance of any isolated, though sovereign, independence of the Indian people. Even if we are able to gain it, we shall never be able to keep it, in the face of this Pan-Islamic and Pan-Mongolian menace. And when one considers these terrible possibilities of the world situation as it is slowly evolving before one's eyes, one is forced to recognize the absolute need of keeping up the British connection in the interest of Indian nationalism itself, for the very simple and sufficient reason that there is absolutely much greater chance of this nationalism fully realizing itself with
rather than without this connection."
 

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INDIA AND GEOPOLITICS - PART II

Praker Bandimutt

Geopolitics is a method of political analysis, popular in Central Europe during the first half of the 20th century that emphasized the role played by geography in international relations.

Post Independence India
AT the time of independence Sir Olaf Caroe, ICS (Indian Civil Service), who was Secretary in the External Affairs Department; served the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). Olaf Caroe belonged to a distinguished band of Foreign Secretaries who thought afar and left a legacy. Unlike Mortimer Durand and Henry McMahon, his impact was not in the realm of action but in the realm of strategic thinking. When Caroe emphasised to a colleague in London, on September 13, 1945, the "concept of India and [the] centre of [an] Asiatic System" he articulated a concept which lay at the core of Nehru's vision. "In the modern world it is inevitable for India to be the centre of affairs of Asia." Caroe wrote on August 18, 1944: "All who look forward to the emergence of India as a Great Power must assume and work for her unity." He was a true friend of India whom Nehru woefully wronged.Caroe told the Study Group in 1941: "It was clear that with India on the threshold of greater industrialisation and increasing world importance, wider and fuller education was necessary on technological grounds to meet the rising demands for labour capable of efficient work with modern machinery in all forms." He wanted to publicise the "certainty that India would be the centre of (the Indian Ocean) region". One of the things Partition of India did was to push India away from China in a very fundamental sense -- not in terms of economic strategy, for both went different ways and made big mistakes -- but in that India became internally balanced. Once British India was partitioned, India became surrounded by a lot of small states, and India got internally balanced, and it was always very difficult to get out of that quagmire which India got into. Geographically, India is a peninsula with a huge seacoast and two hostile neighbors to the north and to the west. The seacoast touching the Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean puts India at the centre of the major sea routes carrying energy from Gulf region to South Asia and South East Asia, Japan, Australia and possibly China. Commerce, manufactured goods and raw material is carried towards Europe, Middle East and Africa from these countries. It s the second busiest sea route of the world (quoting 1999 statistics), hence this makes Indian Ocean vitally important to the
US, which is the sole super power and guardian of the world order. One Indian study states that the power vacuum in that ocean in this century can only be filled by India, China or Japan either by "complete pre-eminence or by a mutual stand-off". One analyst suggests that anybody who controls the Indian Ocean will become a superpower in the new century.If the 19th century was the century of the Atlantic and the 20th century of the century of the Pacific, then, as the calculations of India and some other countries go, the 21st century will be the century of the Indian Ocean. This is not speculation, but there is actually an organization of 14 countries, called the Indian Ocean Rim - Association for Regional Co-operation (IOR - ARC) which has been formed since 1997 with the aim of defining economic cooperation among the member countries. The thesis that whoever controls the Indian Ocean will control the passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans in the 21st century and hence the world envisages a geopolitical role for the IOR-ARC which will eventually include all the 35 countries and island nations around the Indian ocean.What this reveals is that geopolitics is not static and unchanging; far from it, it is extremely dynamic. In 1971, when the last full scale war in South Asia was fought and Bangladesh was carved out of the-then Pakistan, the geopolitics of South Asia presented itself within the context of the bipolar division of the world. Today, geopolitics presents itself in a very different way,in the context of the unipolar world of the US and the multipolar world desired by other big powers. But if we begin from the premise that the 21st century must belong to the people who will take the centre-stage and defeat the big powers and their dreams to dominate the world, we have to examine the geopolitics in a
radically different way. India is home to nearly 1 billion people. To that large number, if you add 140 million people of Pakistan, 125 million people of Bangladesh and another 75 million from the other five countries, we have nearly a quarter of the world's population living in this region at this time.Without controlling the Indian Ocean, no one can conquer the world. India considers itself as a regional power in the Indian Ocean region. India wants to be recognised as a power, if not for any other reason, but for the size of its
population. By 2010, India will have first-rate consumers. Who does not want to conquer India and South Asia? With the push for a market oriented economy in the countries of South Asia from Bangladesh to Pakistan, from Nepal to Sri Lanka,this region is a giant big market, a giant reservoir of labour force, a giant source of raw materials and so on. In the 1940s, South Asia, the Middle East, etc., were places of extreme tension where people were rising up against colonial rule for national liberation.The US policy of containment was formulated in that period on the basis of the theory that any country which had national liberation would go towards communism.The US welcomed the creation of Pakistan and went on to make Pakistan its centre for containing communism in South Asia at that time.India s geopolitics is to keep South Asia divided, become the most important power and come to terms with other powers possibly China, the US,Russia. It is keeping its options open towards the United Europe. The next war for the re-division of the world will inevitably have India as an active player.Within that, all the big powers are very keen to see that India does not renew itself.Geo-political goals of the western major powers have been total domination of the Eurasian landmass, securing the oil resources and extending the covert empire for the new century and maybe even the millennium. For a long time US is aware of global role of Asia in world economy and a strong united Asia after the world war in 1945 was a threat to domination of western powers. In the 1890s,
France, under the brilliant political leadership of Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanataux, was attempting to forge a Eurasian alliance with Germany, Russia and Meiji Japan. The idea was to link continental Europe with Japan and China through a series of large overland infrastructure projects, beginning with the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Through treaties covering key areas of economic and security matters, Hanataux hoped to create a zone of prosperity, built on a foundation of rapid economic growth and extensive trade. Such a political-economic common interest alliance threatened the imperial hegemony of Great Britain. At the turn of the 20th century, Britain looked to the United States (as its English-speaking ally) to join in sabotaging the Hanataux plan. Through the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Britain and her American junior partner (by then led by Henry Stimson's old mentor Teddy Roosevelt) managed to disrupt the French-German-Russian-Japanese economic axis. Two world wars and the Great
Depression were the consequences of that interference. By the 1970s the seeds of rivalry were planted in the Asian landmass with the alignment of China and Pakistan with US on one side and Russia and India on the other side. After the cold war from 1991; the seeds of revision list policies of China and Pakistan which was put in by US during cold war; have continued to create a momentum of confrontation. In the long run a continent scale war could bring Asia down for total domination by non-Asians in the world. The current campaign after 9/11 including the war in Afghanistan and Iraq is seen as the road to full domination on the Eurasian landmass and power to thwart any future raising powers.Z Brezinski in a recent speech at World Affairs Council in 2003 feels that India will disintegrate because of its excessive demographic diversity and future animosity with the Islamic ummah. This confirms the plan discussed in this document; to push a powerful Islamic political center in the sub-continent as long as possible so that the Indian state crumbles and then create sufficient fissures inside India so that more than one regional political center comes inside India.The future animosity with Islamic Ummah has been laid for a long time and renewed due to the policies in the last 30 years of the cold war. This has been deliberate; looking at the long-term geo-political force of history in the last few centuries.

Islam and geopolitics
Geopolitics was to owe its resurrection as an explicit, even official,doctrine of U.S. foreign policy in the 1970s to the influence of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Faced with the debacle in Vietnam and the need to restore U.S. power in the context of a growing imperial crisis, Kissinger and President Nixon reached out to the concept of geopolitics. A massive attempt was therefore made in the 1980s and 90s to reconstitute overall U.S. hegemony, especially the position of the United States in the Persian Gulf. The signal event was the Carter Doctrine, issued by President Carter in his State of the Union speech in January 1980, in which he declared that, An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests
of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force. Modeled after the Monroe Doctrine, the Carter Doctrine was meant to extend the umbrella of direct U.S. military hegemony over the Persian Gulf.
Middle east is of vital importance to US and its long time strategy. One of the western dilemmas to fulfill the Islamic aspirations is how to accommodate the political Sunni Islam to counter the threat of Shia Islam. Political Islam is trying to find legitimacy in any country for stability of the middle east which is crucial to the oil economy of the west. There is a sense of desperation since this has not materialized in the last two decades. Bernard Lewis the world's leading authorities on the Middle East discusses the eclipse of the Middle East in their last three centuries in power and how their decline is still felt to this day. The biggest weakness of the Islamic countries is their geo-political location. For many centuries, the world of Islam was in the forefront of human achievement--the foremost military and economic power in the world, the leader in the arts and sciences of civilization.Christian Europe, a remote land beyond its northwestern frontier, was seen as an outer darkness of barbarism and unbelief from which there was nothing to learn or to fear. And then everything changed, as the previously despised West won victory after victory, first in the battlefield and the marketplace, then in almost every aspect of public and even private life. In his [Bernard Lewis] three essays Conquest, Expulsion, Discovery he examines how the Islamic world was transgressed from conquers to conquered. Lewis bases the expansion on three significant areas weaponry; education and navigation.Quote from a reviewer: Without a core state the Muslims can never restore their dignity in the world and be equal partners with other civilizations. It is only a core Muslim state that could address the paradox of geopolitics in the interest of international peace and security. And the only country that fits that status is Turkey because as observed by Huntington it has history, population, middle level economic development, national coherence, military tradition and competence to be the core state of Islam. So long as Turkey continues to define itself as a secular state leadership of Islam is denied to it.West may have explored the idea that Pakistan with support from Saudi Arabia financially could be a candidate during the 1980s but on the condition that non-Muslim India is not going to challenge the legitimacy of the sub-continent political Islam. To cause the change and have India weakened and possibly broken in the long term the west has tacitly supported an aggressive Kashmir policy of Pakistan. This makes sure that non-Muslim political center in the Indian ocean/sub-continent is weak and does not get recognition. From a historical perspective and global perspective the major powers of the world do not want a non-Muslim or a non-Chinese political power or a core state to be recognized in Asia at all. This means they do not want a non-Muslim India to be recognized as a major power if they can help it. They also want to reduce India's influence in the southern part of the Eurasian continent and totally eliminate it as a single political entity if possible. This suits the western powers [Anglo-Saxons] without much problem for their geo-political goal because this reduces the number of players in Asia and they could manipulate smaller nations.White house and administration strategy in the new strategic document for the problems facing Islam in 2003: Carl Rove (advisor to President GWBush in 2003) argued, 'Islam was one of the world's great empires' which had 'never reconciled... to the loss of power and dominion'. In response, he said, 'the United States should recognize that, although it cannot expect to be loved, it can enforce respect'.This probably requires that an Islamic nation with a political center with WMD capability be propped up and given a UNSC seat and work for the interest of the western power. But this requires India not be in the strategic location with such military power. Hence there is a long-term plan to undermine the power of
India from inside and from outside using Kashmir and other Islamic subversive activities. Kashmir may have come as a opportunity and not really sought before but has become important now since it is seen as pinning the Indian ambition and expansion down.There are foreign policy strategists in Washington who have sought for decades to turn militant Islam into a tool of policy. This is not a flight of critical fancy: it is a well documented fact; it is not challenged as an accusation, but it is not unduly admitted either. The strategy of effective support for Islamic ambitions in pursuit of short-term political or military objectives has helped turn Islamic radicalism into a truly global phenomenon.
The underlying assumption was that militant Muslims could be used and eventually discarded like Diem, Noriega, the Shah, and the Contras: CIA 's Operation Cyclone poured over $4 billion into setting up training centers where young fanatics were sent to learn terrorist skills. The assumption all along has been that the Islamic genie could be controlled. For the ensuing two decades, in the conflicts that inevitably define the line between Islam and its neighbors, Washington almost invariably supported the Muslims most notably in Bosnia and Kosovo. By January 1996, Jacob Heilbrunn and Michael Lind of The New Republic approvingly wrote of the U.S. role as the leader of Muslim nations from the Persian Gulf to the Balkans, with the Ottoman lands becoming the heart of a third American empire (Jacob Heilbrunn and Michael Lind, The Third American Empire, The New York Times, January 2, 1996).
Alija Izetbegovic, Bosnian Muslim leader proudly proclaimed in his Islamic Declaration (1974; republished 1990) that there can be no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic societies and political institutions: The Islamic movement should and must start taking power as soon as it is morally and numerically strong enough not only to overthrow the existing non-Islamic power structure, but also to build a great Islamic federation spreading from Morocco to Indonesia, from tropical Africa to Central Asia.America's crusade is not against Muslim state power, per se in the War on Terror after 9/11. In fact, the latter is supported, in numerous Muslim states, by Washington, simply because of the submission of autocratic Muslim leaders to the American diktat. In its current construct, the perceived threat to the US emanates from a diffuse force, not contained within the geographical boundaries of the state. The afflatus for the struggle against American imperialism does not arise from narrow nationalism, but the universal Islamic principle of justice and a concomitant jihad to that end. Consequently, American policy concentrates against the pristine impulse of Islam, and seeks to mould the Islamic identity to conform to American interests. Changing the textbooks in Islamic nations is to mould the Islamic identity of the future generations.The January 2 2004 edition of the Times ran an editorial entitled "The New Great Game in Asia," which began: "While few have noticed, Central Asia has again emerged as a murky battle ground among big owers...." It continued, "Western experts believe the largely untapped oil and natural gas riches of the Caspian Sea countries could make that region the Persian Gulf of the next century."It would be difficult, the editorial warned, for the US to prevail in the struggle for dominance in the new Caspian Sea states of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Russia, Turkey, Iran and China all have historic interests and claims in the region. And they have been joined by Japan in a scramble to develop new oil and gas pipelines. "But," adds the Times, "the resources justify the attempt." Here, for once, the Times let slip the veil of humanitarianism and exposed the basic driving force behind American interventions around the world --the striving of US business to grab natural resources and extract super profits from the domination of foreign economies.The authors asserted that the major aim of the American military deployment in Bosnia was to exert US dominance in the Middle East, transforming the strategic region from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf into a virtual US protectorate:"Instead of seeing Bosnia as the eastern frontier of NATO, we should view the Balkans as the western frontier of America's rapidly expanding sphere of influence in the Middle East."The article documents the thrust of American military power into the Middle East, site of the world's largest oil reserves. Shortly after the 1979 Iranian revolution, President Carter formulated the so-called Carter Doctrine, which designated the Persian Gulf as "vital" to US interests and established a Rapid Deployment Force to answer any threat to American imperialist interests there.This force was subsequently upgraded by the Reagan administration into the United States Central Command. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the US-led invasion of Iraq in the gulf war enabled washington to massively increase its geopolitical and military presence in the Middle East, establishing a permanent military presence in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States and creating the US Navy's Fifth Fleet to police the Persian Gulf.The Third American Empire," in The New York Times, 2 Jan 96 stated:"In a recent opinion piece in The New York Times, Jacob Heilbrunn and Michael Lind of the New Republic editorial staff argue that the American commitment to the Islamic connection is so strong that the US design is to make
the Islamic world part of a new American empire and that American support of the Bosnian Muslims is part of the implementation of this plan." In order to gather support for an interventionist foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, the present American leadership has had to formulate a foreign policy that would combine the promotion of American national interests with the messianic perception of morality, democracy, and human rights-and do this in a convincing way, as they did during the Cold War.The Soviet Union s isintegration resulted in a geopolitical vacuum in central-eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Central Asia. American governments have not resisted the temptation to fill this vacuum and consolidate the gains of Cold War victory. For the United States, Eurasia is clearly the trophy of its victory in the Cold War. More importantly, its global primacy, according to its leading geopolitician, Zbigniew Brzezinski, will be directly dependent on how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained. Brzezinski [in "Out of
Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century"] advocates a more forward policy around the Russian periphery. He claims that the area, which extends from the Adriatic to the border of the Chinese province of Sinkiang, and from the Persian Gulf to the Russian-Kazahk frontier, will be raven by ethnic conflict and weapons of mass destruction-a whirlpool of violence Geopolitics in the twenty-first century It was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that was to constitute the sea change for the U.S. Empire. The U.S. assault on Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, was made possible by the erosion of the balance of power in the Middle East in the wake of the weakening of Soviet power.At the same time, the Soviet meltdown and signs of its possible breakup constituted one of the chief reasons why the United States refrained from invading and occupying Iraq during the Gulf War. Geopolitical uncertainties associated with the collapse of the Soviet bloc were such that Washington could not afford to pin
down large numbers of troops in the Middle East. Nor could it risk the possibility that an invasion and occupation of Iraq might serve to revive Soviet concerns about U.S. imperialism, and thus delay or reverse the massive changes then occurring in that country. The Soviet Union's demise came only months later in the summer of 1991.The new world order that followed was soon dubbed a unipolar world with the United States as the sole superpower. The Department of Defense lost no time in initiating a strategic review known as the Defense Planning Guidance, directed by Paul Wolfowitz then undersecretary of defense for policy. Parts of this classified report, leaked to the press in 1992, stated in Spykman-like language that Our strategy [after the fall of the Soviet Union] must refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor.Wolfowitz also took a leaf from the Heartland doctrine, arguing that Russia will remain the strongest military power in Eurasia and the only power in the world with the capability of destroying the United States.25 The Defense Planning Guidance proposed a global geopolitical goal for the United States of permanent military hegemony through preemptive actions In May 2004, Alan Larson, under secretary of state for economic, business,and agricultural affairs, issued a report entitled Geopolitics of Oil and Natural Gas, which declared that it is almost an axiom in the petroleum business that oil and gas are most often found in countries with challenging political regimes or difficult physical geography. Here the geopolitics of oil and natural gas was seen as creating vital U.S. strategic interests in the Persian Gulf, Russia and the Caspian Sea basin, West Africa, and Venezuela. The new geopolitics shares with classical geopolitics the aim of world domination, but entails a strategic shift
aimed in particular at south-central Eurasia.The purpose of the war in Iraq,according to Michael Klare,is to redraw the geopolitical map of Eurasia to insure and embed U.S. power and dominance in the region vis-a-vis...other potential competitors such as Russia, China, the European Community, Japan, and even India. The U.S. elites have concluded that the European and East Asian rimlands of Eurasia are securely in American hands or [are] less important, or both. The new center of geopolitical competition, as they see it, is south-central Eurasia, encompassing the Persian Gulf area, which possesses two-thirds of the world's oil, the Caspian Sea basin, which has a large chunk of what's left, and the surrounding countries of Central Asia. This is the new center of world struggle and conflict, and the Bush administration is determined that the United States shall dominate and control this critical area.Concerning political realism, the most basic post-Cold War geopolitical aims of the US refer to: controlling Eurasia as well as the energy resources in
the Middle East and Central Asia; containing China; and attempting to prevent the creation of local powers in regional subsystems, especially if they are hostile to American interests.What the realists are searching for is a way to implement these aims.Realists, such as David Abshire, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, have argued in favor of a flexible and selective international interventionism, according to which the US would get involved only in cases when its strictly defined vital interests are at stake.
Proponents of this selective engagement argue that the United States should engage itself abroad, in places like Eurasia, in order to maintain a balance of power and avert a great power war.Other realists, however, argue that the US should choose and impose any strategy it wishes, since it is the only superpower left in the world. Some have even spoken openly in favor of the establishment of an American empire.According to this school of thought, the US should not just be primus inter pares;
it should be primus souls. Consequently, the US must maintain the primacy with which it emerged from the Cold War. The objective for primacy is not merely to preserve peace among the great powers but to preserve US supremacy by politically,economically, and militarily outdistancing any global challenge. Another reason for US to look at India is energy needs and India is close to some of the largest energy resources in the world but US want to control those regions. The US government sees similarities with India one, the nature of source of energy, coal is similar. The other is the diverse nature of markets India offers a lot of smaller vehicles that can be used for fuel-cell technology more effectively than just cars in the US. The other countries that form a part of this vision are Japan, Canada, Australia, Canada, Iceland, Italy and the UK. The reason they have decided to work with India is the vast scientific and research talent pool that the country offers.We don t want India to get up and then start identifying viability for fuel cell, we want it to be part of use while the technology is being evolved.Also, Indian scientists have done phenomenon work in working on fuel cell,said an official of the US government who took part in discussions of the working group. This is a very indirect way to make sure that India does not threaten the oil supply for US and the west and are encouraging alternative fuel inside India.An India with a growing energy needs is a direct threat to US interest in the Middle East and central Asia. Some policy makers may even classify India as a
major threat to US dominance in the world due to clash of energy needs or more precise the control of energy needs.Paul Wolfowitz D Defense Secretary quoted in an Asian security conference:And I think that the importance of India is just enormous. I think in fact the improvements actually began to be fair in the last administration and they've been continued strongly in this one. I think that as much as one would like to not have this be true, it remains the fact that our relationship with India seems to constantly have the conflict with Pakistan keep emerging as major part of it. I'm happy to say in that regard I think progress has been made between those two countries in the last few months and clearly that will be a big contribution to the peace in the whole region if that can be advanced. In the meantime in any case our bilateral relationship with India in its own right is enormously important both in the defense relationship but also more broadly in the economic and technology relationship, and I think it is important to make sure that we approach India in a larger context and not have them feel that they're simply an appendage of a disagreement with Pakistan Pakistan was seen and even now seen as a bridge to bring China closer to the Middle East.
Based on a well equipped workforce, Pakistan could take part in the rapidly evolving "outsourcing" opportunities that are changing the global production system. On the other track, Pakistan could become the hub of northsouth and east-west commerce. The north-south track could link Central Asia,including Afghanistan with India and points beyond. The east-west track could connect the western parts of China with the Arabian Sea through the ports of Karachi and Gwadar. These two tracks will cross in Pakistan and bring enormous benefits to the country according to its strategic community.U.S. geopolitical strategy accepts no bounds short of Brzezinski's global supremacy. It thus reflects what Mackinder called the tendency to a single World-Empire. So brazen has this new geopolitics now become among todays empire enthusiasts that Atlantic Monthly correspondent Robert Kaplan began his recent book, Imperial Grunts, by celebrating the Pentagon's global military map of five unified commands in terms of its uncanny resemblance to a map drawn in 1931
for the German military by Professor Karl Haushofer, a leading figure of Geopolitik.Some critics like to say American foreign policy is discernible only in retrospect. Even so, such opinion could be taken as a left-handed compliment for a nation that has done rather well in defending itself and its allies in the previous century, and now, at the beginning of the 21st century. Though it might be too early to put a name to the Grand Strategy US is employing with regard to Iraq,
just "being there" suggests that its strategy aligns quite nicely with the Heartland Theory put forth in 1904 by Sir Halford John Mackinder, one of the great military strategists of the 20th century.Just being there is enough. The essential element in the Heartland Theory is simply "being there." Properly applied, being there means Iraqi oil revenue cannot go to al-Qaeda. Being there means the Iraqis can choose whatever government they want, as long as it does not support terrorism. Being there means interdicting the radical Islamists' lines of communication that run across the
Middle East from Cairo to Islamabad, Pakistan. Sir Halford John Mackinder (1861 1947) who is said to be the inspiration for Bush s ultra-hawkish Deputy Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz. Mackinder's Heartland theory is taught at the Pentagon and I found this in an article about Mackinder in an edition of Parameters the US Army War College Quarterly:One of the reasons that Mackinder is being resurrected yet again is because policymakers are searching for ways to conceptualize and deal with the heart of his heartland Central Asia and the Caspian Sea which is a region that has the potential to become a major source of great-power contention in the new century. Some analysts estimate that the fossil fuels in the region will transform it into a new Saudi Arabia in the coming decades. (Parameters, Summer 2000) The geostrategic problem for the USA is that it is separated from the great land mass that contains most of the world's population, markets and resources. The solution is occupation.In the Indian Ocean region, the rise of India will play a key role in the gradual integration of the various lands and peoples of this basin. Whether in the Arabian Sea or the Bay of Bengal, this trend while still nascent is already evident. The long-term result will be a more prosperous and globally more influential region. India's rise in the Indian Ocean also will have important implications for the West and China. Perhaps most significantly, New Delhi's ascent suggests strongly that the ongoing reordering of the asymmetric relationship between the West and Asia will be centered as much in the Indian Ocean as in East Asia. It was in the IO, moreover, that the effects of Western power first made themselves manifest in the centuries after 1500. On one hand, it would therefore not be surprising if it were here that the Western tide first receded. On the other, India's role will for a long time to come be no longer in opposition to the United States but in cooperation with it.India also is no longer geopolitically contained in South Asia, as it was in the Cold War, when its alignment with the Soviet Union caused the United States and China, with the help of Pakistan, to contain India. Finally, the sea change in Indian-U.S. relations, especially since 9/11, has made it easier for India to enter into close political and security cooperation with America's friends and
allies in the Asia-Pacific. The nature and implications of India's strategic goals and behavior however, will be felt globallyat the United Nations, in places as distant as Europe and Latin America, and within international economic institutions. It also will be manifest on the continent of Asia, from Afghanistan through Central Asia to Japan. Finally, and most of all, the rise of India will have consequences in the broad belt of nations from South Africa to Australia that constitute the Indian Ocean littoral and region.
 

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collection of quotes from the following book courtesy BR



Pages 105-106 discuss Pakistan. The mention of India is as follows:


Scowcroft: Pakistan, in a sense, got a tough hand in the division of India, in 1947. They inherited the tribal areas, the most fractious areas. They did not inherit the Congress Party, which gave a sense of unity of India that Pakistan didn't enjoy. And they have been unable to deal with democracy....

....I think it's going to take great skill to prevent an explosion. If the army splits, the nuclear weapons are not necessarily secure. And a Pakistan in chaos could be a fatal attraction for India to solve the Kashmir problem. It certainly would have repercussions in Afghanistan.

Ignatius: That's a grim forecast. Zbig, do you share that?
Page 112 mentions India in the context of Kayani's problems, including reprofessionalizing the Pakistani army.


Scowcroft: .....He has another problem, and that is, in a sense, reorienting the army. The Pakistan army has always faced India, because that's where the problem's been. He has to get them to face their northwest territories, not because the United States wants it but because that is the new threat.
On page 136, they're discussing the balance of power in Asia.


Brzezinski: ...India is preoccupied with its conflict with Pakistan and is certainly not capable of playing a stabilizing role, even if it is not actively destabilizing....

Then Ignatius raises the question of whether China will become more democratic or whether the world will look at China and turn more authoritarian. Scowcroft talks about the Russians and then


Scowcroft: ...India is another interesting case. India is becoming an economic powerhouse, but they're doing it almost in spite of themselves. In its early years, many of the Indian governing elite were educated in England in Marxist economics. They had a socialist orientation. As a result, the government still continues some residual suspicion of entrepreneurship. And yet they're doing reasonably well...
The main discussion of India occurs on pages 143-146


Ignatius: We haven't talked much about India, and that's typical of foreign policy discussions. This enormous, increasingly prosperous democracy in the heart of South Asia just doesn't hit the American radar screen. We worry about the Middle East. We worry about China and Japan. We often forget about India.

The Bush administration has worked very hard to cement a new strategic relationship with India, to make real accommodations to India as a nuclear power, in effect to grandfather their breakout nuclear weapons program into the nonproliferation treaty. Do you both think that was wise? And do you think it was successful?

The Indians, to my surprise, at this writing seem unwilling to close the deal. It's a very favorable deal for them. But something in their nationalist character keeps them from signing on the dotted line. Zbig, why is that? What's going on with India?

Brzezinski: Well, the Indians are very difficult customers. They have been that way for fifty years. They certainly were not helpful during the cold war. They weren't helpful during the Afghan War. I'm not sure how helpful they are right now, because they're obviously interested in limiting Pakistani influence in Afghanistan. And that's driving the Pakistanis into some of their more rash actions. So that is worrisome.

Secondly, I feel very uncomfortable about the nuclear deal we signed with India. I think we are legalizing what might be called preferential and selective proliferation. The exclusion of their fourteen reactors from international control damages our credibility on the nonproliferation issue.

These fourteen reactors are producing weapons. Excluding them from international control has potentially significant implications, even in terms of the military balance in the Far East. If the Indians were to significantly increase their nuclear arsenal, would the Chinese stick to their minimum nuclear deterrence posture? I don't think we have thought through the strategic implications of this.

Ignatius: Brent, the administration saw this as a real breakthrough agreement.

Brzezinski; But for what?

Scowcroft: They did.

Ignatius: For the opportunity it presented to make a strategic alliance with a rising economic superpower in Asia that was also a democracy.

Brzezinski: Against whom?

Ignatius: It wasn't against anybody. It was, again, a positive-sum game. It was premised on these two great democracies, the United States and India, making common cause and putting aside their differences. How well do you think that's worked out? Zbig's skeptical of it.

Scowcroft: I don't think it has worked out. It was, at best, premature. I don't know what deliberations went into this emotional surge toward India. Maybe because Russia was no longer a pillar for India, they were available. There may have been some calculation about needing a counter to growing Chinese strength. I don't know. But obviously, we embraced India very strongly. As it turned out, that had negative implications for Pakistan. We're paying for that right now.

Brzezinski: There may have been anti-Muslim feeling, too, among some of the people who were for it.

Scowcroft: I don't know. It's possible. I'm puzzled by it. But from the Indian perspective, they obviously felt they needed partners other than Russia. But part of the reason they have not fully embraced a close relationship may be that the Indians don't want to be a small boat floating in the wake of the great United States, because one of their other alternatives is to lead the developing world. And as we've seen in the Doha [Development] Round discussions, they have played that role quite seriously.

So we've got a whole situation in flux right now. My own sense is that it's good that the nuclear deal is now on the shelf. I think it was premature at least. But what's going on with India is a much deeper issue.

Ignatius: Do you both regard India as essentially a benign force? We focus on the Chinese economic miracle, but some people argue that we're looking in the wrong place. The country that will really be increasingly dominant in technology and will really compete with us is India, not China. Do you think there's a malign underside to this story of India's growth?

Brzezinski: Maybe there's a vulnerability rather than a malign reality. India is a remarkable success as a democracy, but it's also a deceptive success. India's social disparities are far more acute than China's. } The poverty, for the lower portion of the population, is far graver. That is something that still has to be overcome. The Indians are way behind the Chinese in developing a respectable modern urban sector and even in their transportation system.

The second problem is illiteracy, in which India is again way worse than China amongst women -- somewhere near fifty percent. Among men it's somewhat lower, but still staggeringly high for a country that aspires to be a technological pioneeer.

And, then there is a third aspect, which is again very different from China, and again to India's disadvantage. China is ninety percent Han. India is really diverse ethnically- 180 million Muslims. I think there are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan.

Think what will happen when the masses get literate and politically activated. That hasn't happened yet. The system works on the basis of dynastic political parties inherited form British colonial rule, with a democratic tradition but with the masses relatively easily molded in one direction or another. Once the masses begin to be motivated by their personal or group preferences, ethnic dislikes, religious phobias, and social resentments, India could be a very troubled place.
The last mention of India is on page 219, where they're discussing the shape of the future. Brzezinski is saying that in the emerging Far East centric world, Europe and North America will still have a preeminent role to play, if they take the right strategic direction.


Brzezinski: .....If we can do that, then the West will remain the preeminent region in the world for some decades. Even if we are more attentive to the Far East, Japan needs us at least as much as we need them, and probably much more. China, for all its potential for global leadership, will still be, for the next several decades, a country with massive infrastructural problems and poverty. India has yet to prove that it can sustain its national unity. They're a population of a billion people who are still mostly politically inactive and not yet mobilized. We don't know what will happen when that population, so differentiated in ethnicity, language and religion, becomes genuinely politically awakened.

So the West has role to play....
 
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ajtr

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The end of the world as we know it?



For the past 500 years or so, world politics has mostly been driven by the actions and priorities of the transatlantic powers (aka "the West"). This era began with the development of European colonial empires, which eventually carved up most of the globe, spread ideas like Christianity, nationalism and democracy, and created many of the state boundaries that still exist today. (They also screwed a lot of things up in the process). Although other actors (e.g., Japan) played significant roles too, especially after 1945, the transatlantic community (broadly defined) had been the most important set of players for centuries.

Europe's decline after World War II was immediately followed the era of American liberal internationalism. With NATO and Japan as junior partners, the United States underwrote a variety of global institutions (mostly of its own making), maintained a vast array of military bases, waged and won a Cold War, and sought-with varying degrees of enthusiasm and success-to spread core "Western" values and institutions to different parts of the world.

I don't want to go all Spenglerian on you (or even Kennedy-esque) -- but I'm beginning to think this era is essentially over, and that we are on the cusp of a major shift in the landscape of world power. Asia's share of world GDP already exceeds that of the United States or Europe, and a recent IMF study suggests it will be greater than the United States and Europe combined by 2030. Europe has already become a rather hollow military power, and the current economic crisis is going to force European states-and especially the United Kingdom -- to cut those capabilities even more. Needless to say, hopes that the euro might one day supplant the dollar look rather hollow today. Politics within many European countries is likely to get nasty as austerity kicks in, and there will inevitably be less money and less support for Europe's various philanthropic projects in Africa, Central Asia, or the Middle East. Such activities won't disappear entirely, but it's hard to see how they can continue at anywhere near their current levels.

America's situation is more favorable for several reasons (greater growth potential, a younger and still-growing population, more flexible labor markets, greater capacity to borrow abroad, etc.), but it will face analogous pressures of its own. We've piled up some serious debt due to the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis, unemployment remains uncomfortably high, the health care bill won't cut costs fast enough to make up for all those aging (and demanding) baby boomers, state and local governments are facing major fiscal problems of their own, resistance to taxation remains endemic, and we've got a lot of deferred maintenance in our national infrastructure. As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates acknowledged in a major speech last week, the Department of Defense won't be immune from these realities and it is going to have to make some serious cuts in the next few years too. And I'm betting that once the dust settles, the combined experience of Iraq and Afghanistan is going to cool U.S. enthusiasm for more open-ended and ill-conceived efforts at "nation-building," "regional transformation" or whatever other label you want to place on our mucking about in areas we don't understand and where we mostly don't belong.

Taken together, this means that the countries that have done the most to try to manage global politics over the past several centuries are going to be doing a lot less of that sort of activity in the decades to come. In some ways, this could be a good thing, because some Western meddling was misguided and harmful and it would be better if other countries started taking more responsibility for their own affairs. But it also means that some areas of the world are going to get messier, and in ways that could still affect us all directly. And it also means that a new set of players will be increasingly involved in shaping the global agenda, and in some unfamiliar ways.

Of course, to some extent the shifts I am describing merely reflect the fact some parts of the world are now developing rapidly, and shifting the global balance of power largely through their own efforts. China is the poster child for this trend, and its rapid rise is mostly due to Beijing have finally cast off the failed policies of the past century or so. Similar trends are evident in India, albeit more slowly, and in other Asian countries too.

But the impending end of the Atlantic Era also reflects the self-inflicted wounds that Europe and America have each suffered over the past decade. In the European case, it was the misguided attempt to float a common currency on an inadequate institutional foundation, combined with irresponsible budgetary practices (the Labor era in England), fiscal chicanery (Greece) or a speculative bubbles (Spain and Ireland). In the American case, it was simple hubris: somehow we convinced ourselves that markets would always go up, that debts did not need to be paid, that whole regions could be transformed in liberal democracies at a point of a rifle barrel, and that we really could run the world on the cheap and without raising taxes. In simple terms, we can now see that the United States and much of Europe were like happy drunks enjoying a pleasant if prolonged pub-crawl. But eventually the party has to ends, sobriety returns, and the hangover must be faced. Welcome to 2010.

If this analysis is even partly correct, then we are going to need some serious rethinking of grand strategy in both Europe and the United States. Hard choices will have to be made, and traditional world-views and familiar platitudes won't help us very much. Experience is valuable trait for policymakers in normal times, but it can also blind them when new circumstances arise and the conventional wisdom is no longer relevant. One doesn't see a lot of bold foreign policy thinking on either side of the Atlantic these days, and one could argue that lengthy service inside-the-Beltway (or even worse, at NATO headquarters) is one of the best ways to stamp the life out of any kernels of imagination that might arise.

Call me fanciful, but I'd still like to see Obama (or Cameron, or Merkel) create a "Team B" to inject some new thinking more directly into the policy process. Or why not create several? Why not a Team B on the future of NATO, another on the Middle East peace process, a third on how to deal with Iran, a fourth on how to rebuild global institutions, and yet another on future relations with China? Don't give these groups any formal authority, but tell them to take a zero-based look at our current strategy and populate them with at least a few people who might not pass a Senate confirmation hearing and who haven't spent their whole lives repeating what everyone else has said before. And then listen to what they have to say. Who knows? They might actually come up with something useful.

Travel note: I am back to the Balkans this week, attending conferences in Istanbul and Athens. As always, blogging frequency will be subject to jet lag, time, and internet access.
 

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Outside View: India in a globalized world


The MEA's policy planners will have to cast India's foreign policy in a new perspective and come up with an inclusive mapping exercise. SREERAM CHAULIA takes a close look...

THE REVIVAL of the long-dormant Policy Planning Division of India's Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in September 2009 through the initiative of the then Minister of state for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor is a positive step for a country that wants to climb up the rungs of global status and power.

Policy planning bureaus have played a vital role in foreign ministries of great powers by providing broad direction, outlook and blueprints that percolate through the veins and arteries of the system. The famous Cold War doctrine of containment, for instance, was the brainchild of George Kennan, the first Director of Policy Planning in the US State Department. His 'X' article in the journal Foreign Affairs (July 1947) recorded his acute observations on the wellsprings of Soviet conduct and laid out the parameters of a global response to the USSR's "expansive tendencies." Encouraged by his mentor — the powerful Secretary of State George Marshall — Kennan and his team of researchers produced the fundamentals that became the bedrock of American foreign policy for decades to come.

India's policy planners must always bear in mind that power of any kind is relative in international relations, and accordingly come up with power-enhancement plans that factor in the prospects of other states in a dynamic environment. For instance, if India keeps growing at around 8-9 per cent for twenty years and China stays the course with double-digit growth, both states will be absolutely better off but India will be relatively weaker. If India's nuclear deterrent improves through our scientific community's efforts (the latest figure is that we have the capacity to assemble a 200-kiloton nuclear device) but falls below the shifting definition of 'credibility' due to the even more rapid weapon experimentation by other powers, we will continue to be subjected to blackmail and bullying.

Decisiveness about what kind of a power China is and where it is heading has to be a key formulation for the MEA's policy planners. Just as Kennan instinctively grasped the reality of Stalin's USSR and made a value judgement that it was characteristically aggressive, India has to make up its mind about its northern neighbour one way or the other and compose a broad set of measures to manage this relationship. At present, vacillation and ambiguity about China's motives, behaviour and future trajectories predominate in Indian policy circles, leading to a confusing approach that is neither fish nor fowl.

While some degree of open-mindedness and flexibility, to some extent, are definite assets in the highly unpredictable and volatile social world, Indian foreign policy planners cannot be paralysed with a wait-and-see attitude towards a China that is undertaking a rapid revolution in military affairs and has a predatory commodity exports and foreign investment-promotion strategy.

Even the booming bilateral trade between India and China must be tempered with comparisons to China's trade equations with other countries. This will help New Delhi foresee longer-term tensions and avoid a scenario where Beijing can convert thick economic exchanges into unacceptable political domination through lobbies or infringement of India's foreign policy autonomy. How and through what means China might attempt to parlay its ballooning trade surplus with India (which stood at $16 billion, as of 2009) into a superior-inferior power relationship must be closely monitored and countered. Comparative examples of China's relations with Taiwan, South Korea, Russia, Japan, the EU and the USA must be studied extensively by Indian planners before crafting appropriate defensive and offensive mechanisms.

Unlike the days of the 'Indira Doctrine', when domination of South Asia was a transparent and suffused aim of Indian foreign policy, we now live in an interconnected world where we must register our strong presence in far-flung parts of the world to be recognised as a genuine, global power. Indian policy planners have to revisit lessons from the gradual displacement of New Delhi by Beijing as the pre-eminent Asian power in Africa: first by means of Mao Zedong's radical "Afro-Asianism" and later through proactive loans and natural resource-centric infrastructure building sprees.

Be it the 1960s or the 2000s, India has been passive and lacking in concrete tools for courting and winning over African nations and people. It is largely due to foreign policy neglect and underestimation of Africa's economic and human potential that New Delhi has been left with a tough mission of playing catch-up with Beijing. Given the high priority of gaining traction in Africa, the MEA's policy planners must devise quickimpact projects, funds and programmes on a war footing that would reconnect African states and societies with their Indian counterparts.

Contemporary India is not known for 'thinking big' on foreign policy thrusts despite the legacy of Nehruvian globalism. The narrow educational and experiential backgrounds of the current Indian political class and the obsessive media focus on just the country's immediate neighbours have reproduced a frog-in-the-well mentality that discourages knowledge accumulation and production beyond a certain geographical radius or comfort zone. There are, for example, countless Pakistan and Sri Lanka hands in and outside government in India but hardly anyone who has a masterly grasp of the politics and predilections of the Caribbean or Bolivarian America.

The revived Policy Planning Division should have the luxury of not being entrusted with one particular brief and instead should have the whole world as its horizon. It must acquire the acumen to interpret the direct or indirect ramifications for India of a disputed election in Ukraine, a coup in Côte d'Ivoire, or a flared up boundary dispute between Thailand and Cambodia. Inputs do come into the MEA from different embassies and consular missions around the world, but more than collating in-house diplomatic cables and emails is required to arrive at comprehensive estimates and policy adjustments that keep relating back and forth to the refrain of pre-eminent doctrinal foreign policy principles. Intellectual talents that are outside the charmed circle of power holders will have to be mined extensively for situating Indian concerns within larger contexts.

MEA's policy planners should embark on their historic mission with the basic presumption that the entire world is or soon will be India's backyard. While the primacy of some regions or issues may demand greater attention at times, Indian foreign policy must be ready with doctrines and deeds to exert influence in the remotest of corners. Since all of planet earth and outer space are India's theatres, a robust and competent foreign policy planning arm to execute this challenging role becomes a pressing imperative.
 

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The decline and fall of America's supporters?

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Monday, May 17, 2010 - 1:00 PM Share
If realists have a literary trope, it's talking about the decline and fall of great powers -- and Steve Walt does not disappoint in this post about, "the impending end of the Atlantic Era."

He makes a good case. The European project as we know it is in serious trouble. The United States is in much better shape. That said, there are weeks when we no longer seem like the center of the diplomatic universe. Brazil and Turkey are negotiating deals with Iran, and regionalism in the Pacific Rim seems to be passing America by.

Still, my take is that what's going on is a combination of two separate problems. If either one is fixed, then I suspect that the shift in greast power politics will not be terribly acute.

The first is the decline in the "supporters" of the U.S.-led system -- Japan and Europe. International relations theory likes to stress the importance of hegemonic states. When it comes to creating stable world orders, however, this only works when supporter states are willing to sign up (click here and here for scholarly takes on this point). I agree with Walt that, in the near term at least, both of America's principal supporters are going to be turning inward.

The second is whether the United States can adapt to this shift in the distribution of power, and here I'm on the fence. There are ways in which U.S. support for the shift from the G-8 to the G-20 showed some creative adaptation to new realities. The G-8 was overweighted towards European countries, exaggerating their influence. In shifting from the G-8 to the G-20, EU members saw their power diluted. The United States, in contrast, maintains stronger bilateral ties with each of the other G-20 members than most do with each other. If one thinks of the United States as the central node in a more networked governance arrangement, then one can see how the reforms made to date do not weaken American influence.

The thing is, this only holds if rising powers such as Brazil and India want to be supporters of a U.S.-led system, or if they want to posit an alternative. This is where some of that strategic vision and adroit diplomacy that the Obama administration allegedly possesses in ample quantities would make a difference. To date, however, that is not what I see from this administration. To be fair, they were handed a foreign policy mess, and have done an admirable job of accelerating the clean-up that began in the Bush administration's last two years. What they have not done -- yet -- is articulate a message that will win it new supporters in world politics.

The National Security Strategy is due to be rolled out any week now, and this is precisely the kind of issue it needs to address. So I'll be paying very close attention to see if the strategy document addresses this problem.
 

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The return of Plan B: emerging power diplomacy in the Middle East

Posted By David Rothkopf Monday, May 17, 2010 - 11:27 AM Share

Whether the deal brokered by Turkey and Brazil with Iran ultimately actually defuses the stand-off between Tehran and the international community remains to be seen. And even if it does, it seems unlikely to actually stop Ahmadinejad & Co. from continuing surreptitious efforts to cultivate nuclear weapons capability -- especially given the Iranians' decision to simultaneously announce that they will continue their enrichment program in any event. Indeed, it, like the sanctions program the United States has been engineering, seems more likely to simply hit the "pause" rather than the "reset" button, thus buying the one commodity the Iranians want most: time.

That said the effort is significant on another level. It represents the return of Plan B both to Middle Eastern and global relations. During the Cold War, international actors typically had a binary choice. They could seek the favor and advocacy of the East or the West, the Soviets or the Americans. Then, almost twenty years ago that all ended. And for a while it appeared, the choice was America or an international community that couldn't get its act together terribly effectively.

But Turkey and Brazil working closely with Russia, India, and China, have effectively sent a message that Plan B has returned to the global equation. They have essentially said they didn't want to go along with the American approach to solving the problem (sanctions) and were vehemently against the Israeli approach (bombs away). The Turks in particular have been vocal with their BRIC partners in expressing their skepticism of the effectiveness of sanctions and their sense they would be very counterproductive.

The Iranians in turn seem to have recognized that the Brazil-Turkey deal is a win-win for them. It makes them look like they want to be constructive and thus takes the heat off of them and buys time. They get to tip the geopolitical scales in the direction of the relevance of emerging powers, tweak the U.S. efforts, and seemingly help usher in a new era in international diplomacy.

Something else vitally important to notice has happened here. This has become the first Middle Eastern stand-off in which the most important player from outside the region was China -- because China is the one country that had and has the power to determine whether or not a sanctions regime would work. The Chinese, while still internally debating just how much they want to lead on the international stage, have played this deftly so far. They have engaged in talks with the United States and with their BRIC plus one partners. They have evaluated. Behind the scenes they have been constructive and moderate with reports coming out of recent meetings among BRIC leaders that they have made the case for understanding the pressure that President Obama is under. And they have pressed the Iranians to make a deal while sharing like the others in the emerging power leadership a healthy skepticism of Iranian motives and likely compliance.

Thus this deal may seem smallish and technical from afar, but it could well signal a change in the way international diplomacy works. Certainly, it signals an intent on the part of a group of vitally important emerging powers not to be cowed by the "with us or against us" mindset that still permeates some in the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
 

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Amartya Sen: The Open India (AUDIO)


Amartya Sen, when I ask about this "Year of India," quips that the biggest change in the "new" India is in our non-Indian heads. Meaning: that common wisdom has finally shaken off the British imperial canard that "old" India was a backward pre-industrial scene before the East India Company, in the 17th and 18th Centuries, rescued it for civilization and modernity.

India's grandest eminence outside the subcontinent is satisfied that we've all absorbed the news that behind the modern Bangalore boom lie 3000 years of an "accounting culture" and India's own imperial trading history. The name of Singapore, he notes, comes from the Sanskrit for "City of Lions." So "all those people who say: the West is materialist and business-oriented, Indians are spiritualist and thought-oriented, are talking absolute nonsense." Neither are those "new" Indian stakes in software and biotech all that new, or all that Indian. Many of the great Indian success stories were incubated in Silicon Valley, starting in the 1950s, and at MIT, where Nehru got the model of the endlessly fertile Indian Institutes of Technology. So Kipling is dead and buried; the twining of East and West, the meeting of the twain, is no surprise anymore. The unfolding story, in Amartya Sen's telling, is Open India.

Part of the reflection of Open India is the willingness to accept that you don't have to belong to the mainstream [80-plus percent Hindu] in order to be counted as a genuine Indian. As Rabindranath Tagore said in two quite famous statements: one, that anything that we admire, no matter its origin, instantly becomes ours. And the other, similarly, that any person who comes from abroad and is ready to live the kind of life that people lead in India is instantly accepted as being Indian. Because a lot of Indians are going everywhere in the world, and they're traveling as a kind of modern Jew of the 20th century and 21st century, India doesn't get enough credit for the fact is that there has been more immigration into Indian than almost any country in the world -- for one thing, tens of millions of Bangladeshis. Even though people grumble about it... you don't see the kind of hysteria about it that's going on Europe, for example, or the United States. That anger may yet come, but it hasn't been a part of traditional India at all. The fact is the boundaries are porous between India and abroad and it's served India very well. I think Indian booming would not have happened but for the openness of the educational sector, of the high tech sector, and the big booms, the informational as well as biochemical and medical, have come very much from a dialectic interaction with the West.
Amartya Sen warned famously (five years ago) that India is at risk of becoming "half California, half Sub-Saharan Africa." To me he says he was offering tabloid India a caution, not a prediction. In conversation these days, Amartya Sen sounds half Victorian gent, half liberal social critic, but not a worried man -- not about India's engagement with the United States in Afghanistan, for example; and not urgently concerned about the decline of the once sacrosanct "village India." He doesn't "miss" village India, he said, "because it's not gone." From his father's house 100 miles from Calcutta, "I walk half a mile, and I'm in rural Bengal."

The villages are not gone, but the tragedy isn't so much that [village India] is changing and going, but it's not changing and not going, in the sense that we want every village with schools, we want them with hospitals and primary health care institutions.... These things are not happening. So my grumble isn't that the Indian villages are changing; my grumble is that it's not changing fast enough. I have nothing against village life. I very much enjoy...getting on my bike and taking 15, 20 miles of bicycling through the rural areas. Absolutely wonderful! But I would like to see dispensaries, primary health care, schools there. And that's not happening fast enough. That's my grumble. And sometimes when I complain that India is becoming bifurcated between half California and half Sub-Saharan Africa, my complaint is that the line is unfortunately often rural and urban. It's not just that, because there are a lot poor people in the urban areas as well, it's a more complicated line, but the rural-urban division, that's a very big division that we have to keep in mind.
Amartya Sen in conversation with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, May 7, 2010.
I thank him for an hour's discursive gab with "an old fashioned Indian wiseman."

"Shame on you," he says, laughing. "Thank you."

Did I get it wrong, I ask.

His last word: "You got it exactly right."
 

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Dated article but quite relevant today also with UPA govt. taking mis-steps after mis-steps on the geo-strategic front .be it afghanistan,pakistan or iran or burma.UPA govt. seems like bunch of kids allowed to rule india.

ROAD TO YANGON

- India is unable to wed economic self-interest to strategic vision
Swapan Dasgupta


It's never easy to balance ethics and expediency in foreign policy. Throughout the month-long anti-junta stir in Myanmar, India was at the receiving end of domestic and overseas criticism for being indifferent to the struggle for democracy. The land of the Mahatma was taunted for suggesting a moral equivalence between Senior General Than Shwe and Aung San Suu Kyi, the woman who has replaced Nelson Mandela as the living personification of Gandhi. Most damning of all, India's attitude to the upsurge in Myanmar has been compared to the self-serving cynicism of China — a country with an impressive track of bolstering rogue regimes in North Korea and Sudan.

Viewed in terms of pure self-interest, India's refusal to come out decisively in favour of the Buddhist monks and National League for Democracy is understandable. In the early-Nineties, New Delhi found itself cut off from the loop in Yangon for its open expressions of solidarity with the popularly-elected leader who was never allowed by the military to assume power. The collateral damage that arose from supporting democracy in Myanmar was profound. The Tatmadaw (as the junta is known) wilfully turned a blind eye to groups like the United Liberation Front of Asom and the National Socialist Council of Nagalim, which used camps inside Myanmar as springboards for operations in northeast India.

It took a great deal of patient diplomacy for Indo-Myanmar relations to be restored to a somewhat even keel. By 2000, India was successful in enlisting Yangon's cooperation in meeting the threat of the northeastern insurgent groups. Not only did the Tatmadaw close down many of the camps inside its territory, it actually facilitated some cross-border operations of the Indian army. The camps that remained were in areas over which the writ of the Myanmar state did not run.

For a military regime that had become excessively dependent on China, it made sense to clutch India's hand of friendship, if only as a hedge. India extended valuable assistance in upgrading the old Burma Road that links Manipur to Mandalay. Egged on by the state governments in Assam and the Northeast, India mooted a joint project to restore the famous 1,000-kilometre Stillwell Road which began at Ledo in Assam, ran through the Hukawng Valley in Myanmar, before finishing at Kunming in the Yunan province of China. Since a 300-km stretch of the road passes through an inhospitable Kachin belt, a subtext of the proposal was Indian assistance for Myanmar's domestic anti-insurgency operations.

It is important to acknowledge that India's engagement with the military regime in Naypyidaw, the new garrison town which is officially the capital, actually stems from a position of utmost weakness. Ideally, it would be in New Delhi's interest to have an economically vibrant, democratic Myanmar headed by Suu Kyi, who has a deep, personal association with India. The deep involvement of China with the Tatmadaw in both the military and economic spheres has added to India's fears of Chinese "encirclement", fears that have grown with the turbulence in Nepal.

Yet, there is a recognition that the democratization of a society caught in a time-warp is unlikely to be trouble-free. Convinced that it is the sole guardian of the country's traditional values, the Tatmadaw has so far resisted all moves to enlarge the decision-making process. It nurtures the belief that democracy will unleash fissiparous tendencies and undermine Myanmar's existence as a united, Buddhist nation. In particular, it is fearful that the ethnic insurgencies along the borders will get out of hand with a federal, democratic constitution.

These are familiar concerns of self-serving cliques who believe they alone can safeguard national interests. That, however, does not mean that every fear is based on paranoia. India has reason to be grateful to the Tatmadaw for its success in containing the spread of the insurgencies, particularly those which blend sub-nationalism with Christian evangelism. A weakening of the central authority in Myanmar — unavoidable in the transition to democracy — will inevitably have a bearing on India's internal security.

If India's anxieties with the military junta stem from fears of growing Chinese influence, there is the corresponding apprehension that democracy could throw Myanmar into temporary chaos and lead to a free-for-all. The West genuinely wants democracy in Myanmar but this desire does not stem from the worship of ideals. It reflects a pragmatic desire to regain some influence in a country that has chosen to live in isolation from 1962.

For the Anglo-American alliance, the restoration of democracy is also the instrument to contain China's "hegemonism" in Asia. Tarring China with the brush of encouraging human rights abuses is also a good way of deflating the hype around next year's Beijing Olympics.

There is a happy convergence between Western designs and Indian wishes. Yet, the problem with Indian foreign policy is its inability to marry the pursuit of strategic and economic self-interest with a larger strategic vision. The mismatch is all the more pronounced since India acquired a new self-confidence rooted in the success of its private corporate sector.

The West, needless to add, would love India to take the lead in implementing a common agenda in southeast Asia — the other candidate, Thailand, has its own junta problems. But where does Myanmar fit into India's larger scheme of things? If a stable Myanmar is all that India should hope for, it makes more sense to accept in the short-term the certitudes of the Tatmadaw rather than the uncertainties of the well-meaning Suu Kyi. However, if curbing China's growing influence is the prime objective, how is that to be achieved?

It is interesting that many of these issues were discussed in considerable detail by the Viceroy's Study Group, established in 1942 under the chairmanship of India's foreign secretary, Sir Olaf Caroe, a man who combined his fascination for the Great Game with a Curzonian belief in the destiny of India. These deliberations have been dissected in detail by American historian, P.J. Brobst, in The Future of the Great Game.

Caroe envisaged a pivotal role for an independent India, strategically linked to Britain, "at the centre of an Asiatic system". The defence of India, he argued, had to be based on an "outer ring" that extended to Iran, Tibet, Malaya and Thailand and an "inner wall", which included Baluchistan, the North-West Frontier Province, Nepal and the North-eastern hill tracts. In Caroe's mind, the biggest threat to India in the east was a China that "makes no secret of its ambitions to reassert its sway over its former territories; it recalls that it once claimed suzerainty over Nepal and Myanmar"¦ and though in the past it has"¦had little interest in India, today the shrinkage of distance"¦ may well turn the attention of Chinese imperialists to new and dangerous paths."

The containment of Chinese imperialism, he argued, depended on establishing buffers all along the "outer ring". The first was Tibet which gave several hundred miles of depth to India's frontiers. The second was Myanmar. According to him the neutrality of a small state like Myanmar was impractical. "Any conception of the future of Myanmar," he wrote, "must be related to a larger international order, to be guaranteed by some greater powers or power." The buffer roles of "Myanmar, Malaya and Indo-China will depend entirely on the prestige of the sovereign power set against the acquiescence of other powers". In plain language, it would not do for India to submit meekly to China.

Some six decades later, despite regime changes and the topsy-turvy of frontiers, Caroe's understanding of Indian imperatives hasn't lost relevance.
 

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Modeling the Great Game in Asia Part One: The Viceroy's Study Group and Afghanistan


Abstract
The Great Game provided an analytical framework that organized successful efforts by
imperial Britain to build a stable and secure Asian rimland long before automated machines
allowed the rapid accumulation and processing of information. The Great Game framework
provided structured forms of argumentation for the production of intelligence that resulted in
improved monitoring and analytical capability. However, these insights do not translate readily
into current analytical frameworks and cannot work with automated reasoning tools. The
authors combine historical knowledge with UML, model-based transformations, and
computational analysis to configure the Great Game framework to a more formal and modern
assessment. This first part focuses on the Viceroy's Study Group and their assessment of
Afghanistan, with a model to illustrate the British approach to Indian stability.


Modeling the Great Game in Asia Part One: The Viceroy's Study Group and Afghanistan
Peter John Brobst
The Great Game: A Resilient Framework for Analysis

The "Great Game" describes the international struggle to build a stable and secure Asian rimland from the
Persian Gulf on the west to Indochina on the east. In the past, victory in the Great Game secured a barrier between
global economies and networks of communication and defense linked by the sea, on the one hand, and power based
in the Asian heartland on the other. Today, victory in the Great Game denies the Asian rimland as a base area for
forces bent to destroy the modern world system. The future will hold additional permutations as the actors and goals
change with time. In each case, victory depends on the security and stability of the Indian subcontinent as the
geospatial center of the Asian rimland. The rules of the Great Game are defined by the relative constancy of
geography versus less permanent and less predictable factors such as ideology. This paper describes an effort to
configure this model of the Great Game in UML for use by modern analytical and computational tools.
For the historical conception of the Great Game and its rules, the authors used the work of the Viceroy's Study
Group (VSG). Sir Olaf Caroe organized the VSG in 1942 in his capacity as Foreign Secretary in Britain's
Government of India. The VSG operated in British India until 1945. Their function was to review British planning
for the end of the World War II and India's independence in the postwar era. The notion of a continuous Great
Game that preceded and would survive the withdrawal of British rule in India transfixed the VSG's analytical work.
As a whole, the product of the VSG represents a canonical summation of British imperial concepts and learning
relating to the Great Game.1
Intelligence production in the British Empire, as represented by the VSG, compares quite favorably to that of
the present day in its relative comprehension of regional systems such as the Asian rimland. The reason for this
success? The VSG had sophisticated methods for analysis based on common models. Intelligence production
emphasized anonymous work products while stressing accurate information. The VSG encouraged the evaluation of
information from multiple vantage points within their models, but demanded the presentation of analysis in
falsifiable terms. Overall the VSG employed a remarkably efficient system of information processing, especially
given the IT limitations of the era. In their use of a common analytical framework, the VSG typified intelligence
production in the British Empire. Historians refer to the broader phenomenon as the "official mind." The official
mind was not like a machine going through sets of rules or algorithms. The official mind more closely resembled an
organism monitoring, assessing, and adapting to actual events, trends, and patterns. It neither squelched debate nor
led to group-think nor provided a collective will. What it did provide was the context used to mediate debate among
distributed British officials managing a far-flung empire. These officials engaged in lively give-and-take about any
number of policies and their implications as shown by the documentary record in British archives. In the case of the
VSG specifically, one can reconstruct accurate assessments about flashpoints such as Afghanistan that have ignited
along the Asian rimland since India's independence and partition in 1947.
Although much of the analysis from the VSG or other debate in the "official mind" appears quite acute in
hindsight, its work did not always form the basis of policy in its own time. But the importance of the VSG does not
derive from their influence, or lack of it, on policy. The importance of the VSG derives from the acuity, complexity
and sophistication of their argumentation.
Insights from the VSG
The VSG worked from the premise that the security of the Asian rimland from the Persian Gulf to Indochina "is
one complete strategical problem." The security of the Gulf was bound up with the security of the Indian
subcontinent which in turn depended on Burma and Indochina. A stable if not united subcontinent formed the
fulcrum in the system. Its fragmentation would leave the wings isolated and the balance broken. This view
contrasted with a geospatial perspective both natural and understandable for Americans that located the Gulf on the
eastern edge of a European-centered system and Burma and Indochina on the western edge of a Pacific-centered
system. But by viewing the region from an Indian center, as the VSG did, events along the Asian rimland since
1945 seem unsurprising, the products of a predictable, albeit complex and dynamic, structure.
To give a concrete example, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was, as Olaf Caroe, the VSG's
director put it, the predictable (and predicted) "after-effect" of India's partition in 1947. By creating two mutually
antagonistic successor states in India and Pakistan, the partition effectively turned the subcontinent's power potential
in on itself. For nearly a century beforehand, power based on a stable subcontinent had provided the indispensable
counterpoise to Russia that had allowed the emergence of a viable Afghan state. The fragmentation of the
counterpoise on the subcontinent allowed Soviet decision-makers to calculate their interests and options in 1979 very differently than their Russian predecessors had in comparable crises in 1885, 1895, and 1925. It is worth
emphasizing that the subcontinent's stability formed a counterpoise in diplomatic and economic terms as well as
military ones. The continued hostility of India and Pakistan in the 1990s thus weighed heavily against the
reconstruction of security and stability in Afghanistan. The fact that different elements in the Afghan polity pulled
variously toward Pakistan, Iran, and former Soviet states in Central Asia was not so much symptomatic of strength
on the part of those countries as it was of the subcontinent's weakness as a center of gravity. Afghanistan
consequently reemerged as the kind of base area and seedbed it had once formed in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries for forces of regional instability and terrorism.
Figure one and two review key entities before and after partition for a scenario based on Afghanistan. The
<<stereotypes>> in the model to define locations, agents, values, and other entities have their definition in the Great
Game profile described in the next section. Figure one shows the main agents in that have goals leading them to
focus on Afghanistan. Note that none of the players, or <<agents>>, hold goals or values that lead them to promote
a version of social control in Afghanistan. In contrast, as shown in Figure two, the Great Game following partition
inserts new agents into the game, most importantly Pakistan, split into the unwieldy federation bifurcated by another
new agent, India. The United States also appeared on the scene as a great power, but they lacked the focus on the
goal of maintaining Indian stability that had animated the British in India. Pakistan and India had territorial goals
that forced competition between them, especially in terms of which princely states the Imperial successors would
control, with the Kashmir region still a thorn. Post independence, the Great Game now had actors concerned with
the type of social organization in the region, with Pakistan organized as an entity protecting Islamic values of some
undetermined form in a social polity. The differences between these two models illustrate Caroe's emphasis on
systemic instability that left the Soviet Union room for maneuver to bring troops in the region.


Figure 1: Great Game Afghanistan c. 1935

These diagrams do not suggest a historical determinism, but are snapshots from a broader analytical framework.
For its own part, the VSG explicitly worked to take account of new and emerging factors in its analysis of the Great
Game. For instance, the VSG assessment of Afghanistan (as in other country studies the VSG conducted) imbedded
a presumption that air power would likely be the dominant mode of strategic projection and organization in the
postwar era. The result generated opposing estimations of Afghanistan's future importance. In the first estimate air
power dramatically discounted the importance of Afghanistan to the security of India and by extension to the
stability of the Asian rimland. Air power presumably obviated the utility of buffer states, of which Afghanistan was
the archetype (the term was actually coined by Sir Alfred Lyall, a British Indian official in the 1870s and 1880s, to
describe Afghanistan's position between Russia in Central Asia and Britain in India). In the second estimate, air
power actually increased the value of buffer states, and specifically of Afghanistan. Air power may have increased the strategic reach and speed of attack of its possessors, but it was limited by distance and range. By effectively
adding space to the subcontinent, the buffer formed by Afghanistan would buy time—time to detect and intercept
the inbound units of an airborne attacker. A similar importance arguably attached to Afghanistan when viewed from
the vantage of a power based Central Asia. Either way, air power actually portended an intensification of
international competition for influence in and over Afghanistan. Today the question is not whether air power
obviates the Afghan buffer but whether air power obviates the Indian center. To what extent does modern airlift
make the reconstruction of a viable Afghan state possible irrespective of the situation on the subcontinent? To what
degree of effectiveness does a Central Asian base area for the supply and support of Afghanistan substitute for an
Indian center? These considerations can all be folded into the model as values on attributes in the model, providing
a framework for debate and analysis using software.


Figure 2: Great Game Post Partition c. 1950
Indeed, the VSG was ultimately concerned to avoid the pitfall of planning, or in their case studying, to fight
the last war. Their interest in Afghanistan reflected their presumption of a continuation in the late twentieth century
of traditional Russian/Soviet expansionism in Asia, which came to pass. Today's interest in the country derives
from the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism as an organizing principle hostile to cosmopolitan values with
territorial ambitions. The potential trouble lies in the distraction from the eastern wing of the rimland system. The
VSG argued that the Russian threat on India's west so consumed British strategy that too little thought was given to
the east. When the long-expected great power attack on India's frontiers actually materialized in World War II, it
came not from Russia through Afghanistan but from Japan through Burma. In the context of the Cold War, the
VSG's erstwhile director argued that intelligence assessment must not find itself choosing between "leaving the
Himalayas open to China and the Indian Ocean to Russian fleets." Applied to the current scene, the insight is surely
that the Islamist threat in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere not come to so define the morphology of future
enemies that we are left surprised by say state-against-state competition igniting flashpoints in the eastern rimland.
The Great Game framework avoids the pitfall while keeping a focus on the priorities at hand.

The computational rigor to model the Great Game requires more than a couple of illustrative diagrams. The
analytical framework requires much more detail to export the ideas into computational tools. Part two of this paper
reviews the underlying profile that is the core of the model and suggests paths to migrate the insights for
computational analysis.
References
1 The material on the Great Game is from Peter John Brobst, The Future of the Great Game: Sir Olaf Caroe,
India's Independence, and the Defense of Asia(Akron: The University of Akron Press, 2005)
 
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SIR OLAF CAROE & VICEROY'S STUDIES GROUP (1942) - UK's ROLE - PART 1 of 2


India is today, at the cross-roads of the Great Game.

The British objective to control the oil wells of Central Asia was part of the Great Game to prevent the mighty Russian empire from having access to the oil fields. Former British Governor of the NorthWest Frontier Province during the British Raj days, Sir Olaf Caroe (Sir Olaf Caroe organized the Viceroy's Study Group - VSG in 1942 in his capacity as Foreign Secretary in Britain's Government of India ) used to say that the shadow of the north (meaning = Russia) must not extend over the wells of power. Britain realized during World War II that the one who controls the oil fields controls the destiny of many nations. As a result, beginning 1940, south Asia was important to imperial Britain, for the protection of oil fields of Arabia.

Before coming to this part, it is important to put a historical context to Afghanistan.

According to the Encyclopaedia of Islam the word Pathan is from the Sanskrit word Pratisthana.

The original Afghans are a race of probably Jewish or Arab extraction; and they together with a tribe of Indian origin with which they have long been blended still distinguish themselves as the true Afghans, or since the rise of Ahmad Shah Durrani as Durranis, and class all non-Durrani Pushto speakers as Opra. But they have lately given their name to Afghanistan, the country formerly known as Khorasan.

THE JEWISH CONNECTION TO AFGHANISTAN:

Afghan Jewry may date back 2,700 years to the destruction of the Temple and the Babylonian exile.

Several Jewish Afghan histories are circulating. Early biblical commentators regarded Khorasan as a location of the Ten Lost Tribes. Today, several Afghan tribes including the Durrani, Yussafzai, Afridi and Pashtun believe they are decedents of King Saul. They call themselves Bani-Israel, similar to the Hebrew, B'nai Israel, meaning the children of Israel. Even some Muslim scholars and writers accept this. The exiled Afghan Royal family also traces its roots to ancient Israel, the tribe of Benjamin specifically. As evidence, they cite Makhzan-i-Afghani , a chronicle published in 1635, in the time of King Jahangir by Khawaja Nimatullah of Herat.

The Pashtun, the main Afghan ethnic group and Taliban supporters, also believe they are descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel , and later converted to Islam. Dozens of Pashtun names and customs sound Jewish, from the Pashtun tribe names of Asheri and Naftali to the Pashtun custom of a wedding chupah and the circumcising of the sons on the eighth day after birth. The Pashtuns claim that the city of Kabul stands for "Cain and Abel" and Afghanistan is derived from "Afghana," the grandson of King Saul of the tribe of Benjamin.

NOTE: The Pashtuns have refused to undergo DNA testing to trace its Jewish roots.

HISTORY:

Afghanistan was an important crossroads, dominated by other civilizations throughout its history. By 522 BC Darius the Great extended the boundaries of the Persian Empire into most of the region. By 330 BC. Alexander the Great conquered Persia and Afghanistan. When Hsuan-Tsang visited the region early in the 7th century CE, the Kabul valley region was ruled by a Hindu Kshatriya king, who is identified as the Shahi Khingal, and whose name has been found in an inscription found in Gardez.

The Hindu Shahi kings of Kabul and Gandhara (today's Kandahar) may have had links to some ruling families in neighboring Kashmir and other areas to the east. The Shahis, though Hindu, were rulers a multi religious Buddhists, Zoroastrian, and pagan population and were thus patrons of numerous faiths, and various artifacts and coins from their rule have been found that display their multicultural domain. The Last Shahi rulers Jayapal, Anandapal and Trilochanpal fought Muslim Turjks from Europe and were gradually defeated. They then retreated to the Punjab.

Buddhism was introduced in 50 AD, when Afghanistan became part of the Kushanid Empire. Hephtatlites (White Huns) invaded in the 5th century and destroyed the Buddhist culture.

From 225 to 600 AD, Sassanians (Persians) established control. The first Muslim-Arab conquests occurred from 652 to 654. A succession of dynasties, the Ghaznavid, Ghorid and Timurid ruled the area from 997 to 1506 AD. Babur, the founder of India's Mughul Dynasty governed Kabul in 1504.

Khushhal Khan Khattak, a famous Afghan warrior poet, led a rebellion against the Mughul Dynasty in the 1600s. Mir Wais Khan Hotaki revolted against Safavid rule and took over Kandahar in 1708. By 1736 Afsharid ruler, Nadir Shaw, gained control of the region. In 1747 Nadir was assassinated. Later that year Ahmad Durrani was elected king by a council of tribal leaders. During the 1760s, Ahmad Shah Durrani extended Afghanistan's borders into part of India. The nation of Afghanistan finally began to take shape under the leadership of Ahmad Shah Durrani after centuries of invasions. Timur, Ahmad Shah Durrani's son, succeeded to the throne in 1773. He ruled Afghanistan until his death in 1793, leaving over 20 sons. Timur's descendants were later engaged in a struggle for power. His son Zaman Shah became king in 1793. Zaman Shah's brother Mahmud captured the throne in 1800. In 1803, another brother Shah Shuja reigned after replacing Mahmud. Mahmud forced Shuja to flee in 1809 and remained king until he was driven from the throne in 1817. From 1818 until 1826, Afghanistan disintegrated into a group of small units each ruled by a different Durrani leader.

IMPORTANT TO NOTE - DATE & PLAYERS:
During this time the "Great Game" between Great Britain and Russia was beginning to be played out. "The Great Game" involved not only the confrontation of two great empires whose spheres of influence moved steadily closer to one another until they met in Afghanistan, but also the repeated attempts by a foreign power to impose a puppet government in Kabul.

First Anglo-Afghan War

The next leader, Dost Muhammad, ascended to the throne in 1826. Concerned about growing Persian and Russian influences, the British, along with former King Shuja, invaded Afghanistan in late 1838 while Dost Muhammad was still in power. Shuja was killed a few years later and the British were defeated. Dost Muhammad returned to the throne in 1843.

( Digress for a moment to present :UK -US -NATO FEAR INDO-IRAN-RUSSIAN NEXUS (the same nexus that helped Northern Alliance topple Taliban in Afghanistan. Hence US may again prop up Taliban - the game goes on).

Treaty of Peshawar

During the years after the First Anglo-Afghan War the Russians, interested in the territories of Central Asia, advanced southward. The British, hoping to stop Russian advances, resumed relations with Dost Muhammad in 1854. In 1855 the Treaty of Peshawar proclaimed respect for Afghanistan's and Britain's territorial integrity and declared each to be friends of each other's friends and enemies of each other's enemies. In 1856 the Anglo-Persian War broke out and the Qajar Dynasty took Herat back into its control.

Second Anglo-Afghan War

During the 1860s the Russians intensified their southeastern advances. "The Russian foreign minister claimed the Russian movements in Central Asia were taken simply to unite Russia, not to oppose any other government."In 1872, Russia signed an agreement with Great Britain consenting to respect the northern boundaries of Afghanistan. King Sher Ali permitted an uninvited Russian delegate to enter Kabul in July 1878. Hoping to retain the British influence, British Viceroy Lord Lytton ordered a diplomatic mission to travel to Kabul on August 14th. When no reply was received the British sent a military force to cross the Khyber Pass. Afghan authorities refused the British permission to cross. This incident triggered the Second Anglo-Afghan War. On November 21, 1878 approximately 40,000 British soldiers entered Afghanistan. The British withdrew two years later after facing strong resistance from the Afghan forces.

Treaty of Gandomak

At the end of the Second Anglo-Afghan War, the Treaty of Gandomak was completed between the British government and Amir Yaqub Khan. The treaty was to establish peace and friendship between both countries. It provided amnesty for Afghan collaborators with the British occupational forces and committed the amir to conduct his foreign relations with advice from the British Government. Great Britain, in exchange, promised to support the amir against ANY foreign aggression.

Russian Advances 1885

Abdur Rahman Khan ruled Afghanistan from 1880-1901. He modernized the country, formed a strong army, brought in foreign professionals and imported machinery. "Caught between the Russians and the British, Abdur Rahman turned his formidable energies to what turned out to be virtually the creation of the modern state of Afghanistan, while the British and the Russians, with the Afghans as bystanders, determined the borders of the Afghan State."

Russian forces seized the Merve Oasis inhabited by the Turkoman people in 1884. In 1885 they took possession of the Panjdeh Oasis. Afghan attempts to retake the territory failed. In 1886 the Anglo-Russian Boundary Commission agreed on a border along the Amu Darya River. The Russian-British agreement resulted in a permanent northern frontier, however, much territory was lost in the Panjdeh region.

The Durand Line

On November 12, 1893, Abdur Rahman Khan, and the Foreign Secretary of the Colonial Government of India, Sir Mortimer Durand, agreed to mark the boundary between Afghanistan and British India. The Durand Line cut through Pashtun tribal areas and villages. It was a cause of dispute between the governments of Afghanistan and British India and later between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It remains a source of major instability in the region till today.

A map of Afghanistan, published in 1893, the year Abdur Rahman Khan and Sir Mortimer Durand agreed to mark the boundary between Afghanistan and British India. (CLICK ON MAP TO ENLARGE VIEW)



(NOTICE: BALUCHISTAN (BELOOCHISTAN) exists as a SEPARATE COUNTRY)

Early 20th Century

Abdur Rahman's son, Habibullah, reigned from 1901-1919. In 1904 a boundary commission determined the border between Iran and Afghanistan. The boundary was accepted by both countries. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 divided Afghanistan into areas of Russian and British influence. Habibullah wanted full Afghan independence and Great Britain's assistance in an attempt to regain lands taken by the Russians. "Britain far more interested in the European power struggle and the defense of India through an Afghan buffer state was uninterested in such a scheme." Habibullah was assassinated in 1919. His son Amanullah succeeded him.

Third Anglo - Afghan War:

During his reign the month long Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919 resulted in complete Afghan independence. The British forces were decimated. Amanullah established diplomatic relationships with Russia in 1919, Iran in 1921 and Great Britain in 1922.

Russia invades Afghanistan again in December 1979 – and we all know of the consequences of that – and the ensuing chaos of Taliban, Al Qaeda etc is well documented.

After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the US also departed from the region to invade Iraq. However, UK stayed back and took over the reins of the Great Game. UK knew the Great Game, after all – they were at it from the very begining.

The following has been taken from Modeling the Great Game in Asia Part One: The Viceroy's Study Group and Afghanistan written by Dr. Peter John Brobst (Ohio University)

Sir Olaf Caroe and Viceroy's Study Group:

For the historical conception of the Great Game and its rules, the authors used the work of the Viceroy's Study Group (VSG). Sir Olaf Caroe organized the VSG in 1942 in his capacity as Foreign Secretary in Britain's Government of India. The VSG operated in British India until 1945. Their function was to review British planning for the end of the World War II and India's independence in the postwar era. The notion of a continuous Great Game that preceded and would survive the withdrawal of British rule in India transfixed the VSG's analytical work.

As a whole, the product of the VSG represents a canonical summation of British imperial concepts and learning relating to the Great Game.

INSIGHTS FROM VSG:

The VSG worked from the premise that the security of the Asian rimland from the Persian Gulf to Indochina "is one complete strategical problem." The security of the Gulf was bound up with the security of the Indian subcontinent which in turn depended on Burma and Indochina. A stable if not united subcontinent formed the fulcrum in the system. Its fragmentation would leave the wings isolated and the balance broken. This view contrasted with a geospatial perspective both natural and understandable for Americans that located the Gulf on the eastern edge of a European-centered system and Burma and Indochina on the western edge of a Pacific-centered system. But by viewing the region from an Indian center, as the VSG did, events along the Asian rimland since 1945 seem unsurprising, the products of a predictable, albeit complex and dynamic, structure.

To give a concrete example, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was, as Olaf Caroe, the VSG's director put it, the predictable (and predicted) "after-effect" of India's partition in 1947.

By creating two mutually antagonistic successor states in India and Pakistan, the partition effectively turned the subcontinent's power potential in on itself. For nearly a century beforehand, power based on a stable subcontinent had provided the indispensable counterpoise to Russia that had allowed the emergence of a viable Afghan state. The fragmentation of the counterpoise on the subcontinent allowed Soviet decision-makers to calculate their interests and options in 1979 very differently than their Russian predecessors had in comparable crises in 1885, 1895, and 1925. It is worth emphasizing that the subcontinent's stability formed a counterpoise in diplomatic and economic terms as well as military ones. The continued hostility of India and Pakistan in the 1990s thus weighed heavily against the reconstruction of security and stability in Afghanistan. The fact that different elements in the Afghan polity pulled variously toward Pakistan, Iran, and former Soviet states in Central Asia was not so much symptomatic of strength on the part of those countries as it was of the subcontinent's weakness as a center of gravity. (NOTE: IMPORTANT POINT)

Afghanistan consequently reemerged as the kind of base area and seedbed it had once formed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for forces of regional instability and terrorism.

Figure one and two review key entities before and after partition for a scenario based on Afghanistan. The <> in the model to define locations, agents, values, and other entities have their definition in the Great Game profile described in the next section. Figure one shows the main agents in that have goals leading them to focus on Afghanistan. Note that none of the players, or <>, hold goals or values that lead them to promote a version of social control in Afghanistan.

In contrast, as shown in Figure two, the Great Game following partition inserts new agents into the game, most importantly Pakistan, split into the unwieldy federation bifurcated by another new agent, India. The United States also appeared on the scene as a great power, but they lacked the focus on the goal of maintaining Indian stability that had animated the British in India.

Pakistan and India had territorial goals that forced competition between them, especially in terms of which princely states the Imperial successors would control, with the Kashmir region still a thorn. Post independence, the Great Game now had actors concerned with the type of social organization in the region, with Pakistan organized as an entity protecting Islamic values of some undetermined form in a social polity. The differences between these two models illustrate Caroe's emphasis on systemic instability that left the Soviet Union room for maneuver to bring troops in the region.

Figure 1: Great Game Afghanistan c. 1935



These diagrams do not suggest a historical determinism, but are snapshots from a broader analytical framework.

For its own part, the VSG explicitly worked to take account of new and emerging factors in its analysis of the Great Game. For instance, the VSG assessment of Afghanistan (as in other country studies the VSG conducted) imbedded a presumption that air power would likely be the dominant mode of strategic projection and organization in the postwar era. The result generated opposing estimations of Afghanistan's future importance. In the first estimate air power dramatically discounted the importance of Afghanistan to the security of India and by extension to the stability of the Asian rimland. Air power presumably obviated the utility of buffer states, of which Afghanistan was the archetype (the term was actually coined by Sir Alfred Lyall, a British Indian official in the 1870s and 1880s, to describe Afghanistan's position between Russia in Central Asia and Britain in India). In the second estimate, air power actually increased the value of buffer states, and specifically of Afghanistan. Air power may have increased the strategic reach and speed of attack of its possessors, but it was limited by distance and range. By effectively adding space to the subcontinent, the buffer formed by Afghanistan would buy time—time to detect and intercept the inbound units of an airborne attacker. A similar importance arguably attached to Afghanistan when viewed from the vantage of a power based Central Asia. Either way, air power actually portended an intensification of international competition for influence in and over Afghanistan.

Today the question is not whether air power obviates the Afghan buffer but whether air power obviates the Indian center. To what extent does modern airlift make the reconstruction of a viable Afghan state possible irrespective of the situation on the subcontinent? To what degree of effectiveness does a Central Asian base area for the supply and support of Afghanistan substitute for an Indian center? These considerations can all be folded into the model as values on attributes in the model, providing a framework for debate and analysis using software.

Figure 2: Great Game Post Partition c. 1950



Indeed, the VSG was ultimately concerned to avoid the pitfall of planning, or in their case studying, to fight the last war. Their interest in Afghanistan reflected their presumption of a continuation in the late twentieth century of traditional Russian/Soviet expansionism in Asia, which came to pass. Today's interest in the country derives from the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism as an organizing principle hostile to cosmopolitan values with territorial ambitions. The potential trouble lies in the distraction from the eastern wing of the rimland system. The VSG argued that the Russian threat on India's west so consumed British strategy that too little thought was given to the east. When the long-expected great power attack on India's frontiers actually materialized in World War II, it came not from Russia through Afghanistan but from Japan through Burma. In the context of the Cold War, the VSG's erstwhile director argued that intelligence assessment must not find itself choosing between "leaving the Himalayas open to China and the Indian Ocean to Russian fleets." Applied to the current scene, the insight is surely that the Islamist threat in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere not come to so define the morphology of future enemies that we are left surprised by say state-against-state competition igniting flashpoints in the eastern rimland.

The Great Game framework avoids the pitfall while keeping a focus on the priorities at hand. The computational rigor to model the Great Game requires more than a couple of illustrative diagrams. The analytical framework requires much more detail to export the ideas into computational tools.

Part two of this paper reviews the underlying profile that is the core of the model and suggests paths to migrate the insights for computational analysis. For the die-hard game theorists - click on this link.


THE PARTITION OF INDIA:

One of the least understood themes of the partition of India in 1947 by the departing British Raj, is what led the British to do it. Run-of-the-mill analysts point out that the British did not want a unified India which could be strong and anti-British. Some others say the British saw that the minority Muslims were in danger in the hands of the majority Hindus, and that that is why they moved in to form Pakistan. While the British did not want the emergence of a strong India, the formation of Pakistan hardly helped the Muslims, who felt that they were a threatened minority. To begin with, those provinces that became a part of Pakistan were those provinces where the Muslims were in majority. Hence, the Muslims there were not in danger. The provinces where Muslims were a minority, and ostensibly "in danger," became a part of the Hindu-majority India.

But the British objective in breaking up India was simply not to divvy up the country.

The British wanted two things out of it: 1) They wanted a weak nation (Pakistan, that is), which would depend on Britain for its defense. And 2) they wanted that newly-formed weak nation (aka PAKISTAN) to border the oil wells of Central Asia (part of the Soviet Union, then) and to be close to the Muslim-majority, oil-rich nations of the Middle East.

Corollary to the objective was that India, the larger of the two nations then in the subcontinent (now, with the emergence of Bangladesh in 1972, the subcontinent has three nations) must not have any common border with either Afghanistan (the buffer state) or the Soviet Union.Hence, Kashmir state must not go to India in its original form to INDIA and at best, status quo can be maintained.

The British objective to control the oil wells was part of the Great Game to prevent the mighty Russian empire from having access to the oil fields. Former British Governor of the NorthWest Frontier Province during the British Raj days, Olaf Caroe used to say the shadow of the north must not extend over the wells of power. Britain realized during World War II that the one who controls the oil fields controls the destiny of many nations. As a result, beginning 1940, south Asia was important to imperial Britain, for the protection of oil fields of Arabia. Nothing more, nothing less.
 
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DAVID MILIBAND TO SIR OLAF CAROE - THE KASHMIR AGENDA REMAINS SAME - PART 2 OF 2



MUMBAI ATTACKS - THE BRITISH CONNECTION!

Two important remarks:


DAVID MILIBAND

1. David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, uttered in absolute disgraceful undiplomatic crass – the Mumbai attacks by LeT had the unresolved Kashmir issue as a root cause.

2. Lashkar-e-Taiba in Jammu and Kashmir was reported to have offered to shun its armed campaign for justice if the international community would help peacefully resolve Kashmir.

To take back to the concluding points of part 1 of the article - "SIR OLAF CAROE & VICEROY'S STUDIES GROUP (1942) - UK's ROLE - PART 1 of 2:

The British objective in breaking up India was simply not to divvy up the country.

The British wanted few things out of it:

1) They wanted a weak nation (Pakistan, that is), which would depend on Britain for its defense.

2) they wanted that newly-formed weak nation (aka PAKISTAN) to border the oil wells of Central Asia (part of the Soviet Union, then) and to be close to the Muslim-majority, oil-rich nations of the Middle East.

3) Corollary to the objective was that India, the larger of the two nations then in the subcontinent (now, with the emergence of Bangladesh in 1972, the subcontinent has three nations) must not have any common border with either Afghanistan (the buffer state) or the Soviet Union. Hence, Kashmir state must not go to India in its original form to INDIA and at best, status quo can be maintained.

Give emphasis on point 3 – The UK objective – Kashmir cannot go to India in original form as India must be prevented to have common borders with either Afghanistan and then then Soviet Union.

Juxtaposed in the historical facts are some current issues which I shall only highlight in a couple of points.

1. Mirupuris, from Mirpur region of POK (Pakistan Occupied Kashmir) form a vast diaspora in Britain. They control some major mosques from which British Intelligence picked up Muslim youths for jehad. Mirpuris formed an electorate base that could influence election results in UK. British Airways has a desk in Mirpur, POK – such is the scale of business and travel from the region.

2. Former Justice Department prosecutor and terror expert, John Loftus, revealed that Al-Muhajiroun group based in London and formed during the Kosovo crisis, were recruited by MI6 to fight in Kosovo. Believe it or not, British intelligence actually hired some Al-Qaeda guys to help defend Muslim rights in Albania and Kosovo.

Read also an article by Michel Chossudovsky : "London 7/7 terror suspects linked to British Intelligence."

3. A brilliant analysis by Ramtanu Maitra (A MUST READ)– on the Mumbai train bombings of July 2006 writes : "Behind the Mumbai Bombings : Tracking the British Role".

Ramtanu wrote the follow up to the 26/11 Mumbai attacks in: Mumbai massacre calls for a probe of British role.

4. Omar Sayeed Sheikh, the same chap we let go in Kandahar hijack, was also an MI6 asset. While B Raman writes about it in his article, what is not mentioned is the fact, after getting released from the hijack – Omar made two trips to London to visit his parents. Not once was he stopped at airports.

5. Lashkar e Taiba is a Punjabi terror organization incubated by ISI for asymmetric warfare against India in Kashmir. Imagine a bunch of Punjabi rag tags showing sympathy towards Kashmir !! ISI, fearing that local Kashmiris may not be able to wage war against the Indian state, incubated LeT to direct covert war as per its direction. That LeT was penetrated by KSA intelligence and CIA was discussed earlier. And as long as LeT targeted India in Kashmir, the British and the US looked the other way. And that LeT remains focused in Kashmir was brought forward by the statement above – "it will shun armed struggle if there is international intervention in Kashmir". And lo and behold, from Obama to Miliband, we see Kashmir being uttered.

We know why Imperial Britain did not want India to have Kashmir.

We know why US / UK today, are suddenly concerned about Kashmir.

We see why LeT suddenly wants to shun violence in Kashmir if there is international intervention.

I was going to write a piece on this, but I noticed that Mr B Raman has already covered all that I wished to write and more, far better than I could have ever written. Hence, instead of even trying, I am giving Mr Raman's article in full.

(Permission to reproduce the article received from author)



B.RAMAN

(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. He can be reached atE-mail: [email protected])

1.There has been considerable anger and indignation in India over the attempt of David Miliband, the British Foreign Secretary, who visited India last week, to rationalise the terrorist attack in Mumbai from November 26 to 29,2008, by the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LEt) of Pakistan by linking the attack to the Kashmir issue. None of the indigenous Kashmiri organisations has linked the Mumbai attack to Kashmir.Yet Miliband sought to provide a legitimacy to the LET's terrorist attack by linking it to Kashmir, disregarding the fact that the attack, as seen from the brutal murder of nine Jewish persons and 12 nationals of Western countries, which have contributed forces to the NATO contingent in Afghanistan, was part of the global jihadi agenda unrelated to either Kashmir or the grievances of the Indian Muslims.

2. The shocking attempt by Miliband to play down the murders of 138 Indians and 25 foreign nationals committed by the Pakistani terrorists of the LET should not have come as a surprise to those aware of the historic links of the British intelligence with the Mirpuri migrants from Pakistani-Occupied Kashmir (POK) in the UK and their important role during elections in certain constituencies which traditionally return Labour candidates to the House of Commons with the support of the Mirpuri vote bank.

3. In this connection, I am reproducing below extracts from my article of 6-5-07 titled HOME-GROWN JIHADIS (JUNDULLAH) IN UK & US.

THE EXTRACTS

"After Pakistan and Afghanistan, the UK has been traditionally for many years the largest sanctuary to foreign terrorists and extremists. Everybody, who is somebody in the world of terrorism, has found a rear base in the UK--- the Khalistanis in the past, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Mirpuris from Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK), the Chechens, the Al Muhajiroun, the Hizbut Tehrir etc. Having allowed such a medley of terrorists and extremists to operate unchecked from their territory for so long, the British intelligence just does not have a correct estimate of how many sleeper cells are operating from their country and of which organisations.

"Since persons of Pakistani origin have been playing an increasingly active role in promoting the activities of Al Qaeda, it is necessary to analyse the nature of migration from Pakistan to the UK and the US. Muslims from Pakistan constitute the single largest Muslim migrant group from the sub-continent in both the UK and the US---followed by Indian and Bangladeshi Muslims. There are estimated to be about 700,000 Muslims of Pakistani origin in the UK. No estimate is available in respect of the US.

"The largest migrant group from Pakistan in the UK are Punjabi-speaking Muslims----from Pakistani Punjab as well as Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK). The migrants from the POK are called Mirpuris. They are not ethnic Kashmiris, but Punjabi-speaking migrants from the Pakistani Punjab, whose families had settled down in the Mirpur area of the POK for generations. They were essentially small farmers and landless labourers, who lost their livelihood as a result of the construction of the Mangla dam. They, therefore, migrated to West Europe---the largest number to the UK and a smaller number to France, Germany and the Scandinavian countries. Many of them preferred to go to the UK because it already had a large Punjabi-speaking community from Pakistani Punjab. The initial Mirpuri migrants, who hardly spoke English, felt themselves comfortable in a Punjabi-speaking environment.

" As the number of Muslims of Pakistani origin in the UK increased, mosques came up to cater to their religious needs. Till 1977, these mosques were headed by clerics from the more tolerant Barelvi Sunni sect. When Gen.Zia-ul-Haq, a devout Deobandi, captured power in Pakistan in 1977, he embarked on a policy of marginalising the influence of Barelvi clerics not only in Pakistan, but also in Europe and increasing the influence of the rabid Deobandis. He inducted Deobandis into the Education Department as Arab teachers and into the Armed Forces to cater to the religious needs of the military personnel. He encouraged and helped the Deobandis to take over the mosques in Pakistan and in the UK by replacing the Barelvis. With the induction of an increasing number of Deobandis started the process of the Arabisation/Wahabisation of the Muslims in Pakistan and of the Pakistani diaspora in the UK.

"The intelligence agencies of the US and the UK went along with Zia's policy of Arabising/Wahabising the Muslims of Pakistan because this contributed to an increase in the flow of jihadi terrorists to fight against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

Till 1983, the members of the Pakistani diaspora in the UK were considered a largely law-abiding people. The first signs of the radicalisation of the diaspora appeared in 1983 when a group of jihadi terrorists kidnapped Ravi Mhatre, an Indian diplomat posted in the Indian Assistant High Commission in Birmingham, and demanded the release of Maqbool Butt, the leader of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), who was then awaiting execution in the Tihar jail in Delhi following his conviction on charges of murder.

When the Government of India rejected their demand, the terrorists killed Mhatre and threw his dead body into one of the streets. This kidnapping and murder was allegedly orchestrated by Amanullah Khan, a Gilgiti from Pakistan. He was assisted by some Mirpuris of the Pakistani diaspora. The British were unco-operative with India in the investigation of this case and declined to hand over those involved in the kidnapping and murder to India for investigation and prosecution. By closing their eyes to the terrorist activities of the Mirpuris from their territory, they encouraged the further radicalisation of the diaspora.

" Just as the radicalisation of the Muslims of Pakistan suited the US-UK agenda in Afghanistan, the radicalisation of the diaspora in the UK, particularly the Mirpuris, suited their agenda for balkanising Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Many Pakistanis from the UK went to the training camps of the Harkat-ul-Ansar (HUA -now called the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen) and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) in Pakistan and got themselves trained with the knowledge and complicity of the British. They then went to Bosnia and Kosovo to wage a jihad against the Serbs with arms and ammunition and explosives allegedly supplied by the Iranian intelligence with the tacit consent of the Clinton Administration and paid for by the Saudi intelligence.

(RAMAN DOES NOT MENTION THE FACT THAT HERE ISI TRIED TO OUTWIT THE CIA/BRITISH INTELLIGENCE - WHEN THEY SUPPLIED SOPHISTICATED ANTI-TANK MISSILES TO BOSNIANS THAT HELPED THEM WIN AS SERBS HAD TO LIFT THE SIEGE. THIS ANNOYED CLINTON WHO WANTED TO BRAND PAKISTAN A TERRORIST NATION - WHICH NAWAZ SHARIF AVERTED WHEN HE SACKED THE ISI HEAD JAVED NASIR)

As the Pakistani Prime Minister between 1993 and 1996, Mrs. Benazir Bhutto had visited these jihadis from the Pakistani diaspora in the UK who were waging a jihad against the Serbs in Bosnia. After waging their jihad against the Serbs, these jihadis from the UK moved to Pakistan to join the HUA and the LET and participate in the jihad against India.



OMAR SHEIKH

"The most notable example of the home-grown jihadis of the diaspora in the UK, who waged a jihad in Bosnia at the instance of the British and American intelligence and then turned against them, is Omar Sheikh. From Bosnia, he came to India to wage a jihad and was arrested by the Indian security forces. He was released by the then Indian Government headed by Mr. A.B.Vajpayee, in December,1999, following the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane to Kandahar by a group of HUM terrorists from Pakistan. After his release, he went to Pakistan and orchestrated the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl. The second notable example is Rashid Rauf, a Mirpuri, who went to Pakistan from the UK to join the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) after marrying a relative of Maulana Masood Azhar, the Amir of the JEM. He was allegedly involved in the plot detected by the London Police in August last year (2006) to blow up a number of US-bound planes. This plot was hatched by some members of the Pakistani diaspora in the UK.

"The Mirpuris in the Pakistani diaspora in the UK were in the forefront of those supporting jihadi terrorism against India in Jammu and Kashmir and other parts of India since 1993, when the Pakistani jihadi organisations of Afghan vintage were infiltrated into India by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). They collected and sent funds to the jihadi terrorists in India. Many of them underwent training in the camps of the LET, the HUM, the JEM and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) in Pakistan and assisted them in their jihadi operations. The British intelligence was aware of members of the Pakistani diaspora going to Pakistan for training, but closed its eyes to it since it thought that they were going to wage a jihad against the Indians in J&K.

"A careful examination of the details relating to the various jihadi terrorism-related cases in the UK would reveal that the MI 5 was intercepting the telephone conversations of these Mirpuris and other Punjabi Muslims with their friends and relatives in which they spoke of their going to Pakistan for jihadi training. It did not take any action against them because it thought that they were going to wage a jihad only against the Indians and hence did not pose a threat to the British. The MI 5 intercepted the telephone conversation of even one of the perpetrators of the London blasts of July 2005, about his going to Pakistan for jihadi training. It did not act on it thinking he intended to wage a jihad against the Indians. Only after the London blasts of July, 2005, did the MI 5 realise with a rude shock that this Mirpuri was talking not of going to India to wage a jihad against the Indians, but to London to wage a jihad against the British.

"There is a sheepish, but indirect admission of this in the statement issued by the MI 5 rebutting criticism of its perceived failure to prevent the London blasts. It says: "RUMOUR: In February 2004, the Security Service recorded Khan's (Mohammed Siddique Khan) wish to fight and him saying goodbye to his family - a clear indication that he intended a suicide mission. REALITY: The Security Service did record conversations involving an individual identified after 7 July as Khan. From the context of the recorded conversation it is probable that Khan was talking about going to fight with militia groups in the Pakistan border areas. He was not talking about acts of terrorism in the UK."

" Today, innocent British civilians are paying for the sins of commission and omission of their authorities since jihadi terrorism broke out in Indian territory in 1989. It would be very difficult for the MI 5 to have an accurate idea of the number of trained Pakistani jihadis already in their midst. Reliable Police sources in Pakistan say that there are at least about 200 trained, potential suicide bombers in the Pakistani diaspora in the UK waiting for an opportunity to strike. These trained potential suicide bombers also provide a recruitment reservoir for future operations of Al Qaeda in the US homeland.

"The position in the Pakistani diaspora in the US is somewhat different. The initial wave of migrants to the US from Pakistan consisted largely of Urdu-speaking Mohajirs from Sindh, who originally went to Pakistan from India. The influence of the more tolerant Barelvi sect on them is still very strong. The extremist Deobandi/Wahabi ideology has not yet made the same impact on them as it has on the Punjabi-speaking Pakistani diaspora in the UK. Moreover, there has hardly been any migration of the Mirpuris from the POK into the US. Most of the Kashmiri migration into the US has been of ethnic Kashmiris----either the Hindu Pandits, who were driven out of the Valley by the jihadi terrorists after 1989, or sufi Muslims from the Valley. The Muslims from the valley, who had migrated to the US from J&K, are politically active against India, but they have so far kept away from the Deobandis and Wahabis.

"Since the 1980s, there has been an increase in the migration of Punjabi-speaking Muslims from Pakistan into the US. There has been growing Deobandi/Wahabi influence on them. It is these elements that Al Qaeda has been targeting for recruitment. A saving grace is that the US intelligence has a better awareness than the British of the dangers that could arise from its population of Pakistani origin and has been keeping a tight watch on them."
 

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MICHAEL VICKERS - A VERY IMPORTANT MAN (1 of 3)​




Vickers is a former GREEN BERET (elite US Special Ops) and he also holds MBA from Wharton School (Pennsylvania). He is not only brawns but comes with serious strategic brains.



HISTORY:

Vickers was the principal strategist for covert CIA operations in Afghanistan that resulted in the defeat, and subsequent break up of the Soviet Union. If there is one man who can be credited for the break up of Soviet empire - it is Vickers.

His greatest influence was in the precise way he reassessed the potential of Afghan guerrilla forces and prescribed the right mix of weaponry to attack Soviet weaknesses. (According to me, he is simply an asset of platinum class for any country to have - period.)

At the height of Afghan operation, he was giving strategic and operational direction to 300 unit commanders, 150,000 full time and 500,000 part time fighters ("mujahideens"). He co-ordinated the efforts of TEN countries and oversaw an annual budget of US $ 2 billion.

From 1973 to 1986, Mr. Vickers served as an Army Special Forces Non-Commissioned Officer, Special Forces Officer, and CIA Operations Officer. During this period, Mr. Vickers had operational and combat experience in Central America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Central and South Asia. His operational experience spans covert action and espionage, unconventional warfare, counterterrorism (including hostage rescue operations), counterinsurgency, and foreign internal defense.

CURRENTLY:

Michael G. ("Mike") Vickers was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict & Interdependent Capabilities) on July 23, 2007. He is the senior civilian advisor to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense on the capabilities and operational employment of special operations forces, strategic forces, and conventional forces. He is also the senior civilian advisor on counterterrorism strategy, irregular warfare, and force transformation.

Special Operations Command (SOCOM) which is part of the portfolio that Vickers handles is based in Tampa, FL. It's annual budget is US$ 8 BILLION and more than 60,000 covert and overt personnel are on its payroll. Vickers also sits on 3rd floor of Pentagon "C" Ring.


WHY AM I WRITING ABOUT HIM HERE?

Mr. Vickers is the co-author of The Quadrennial Defense Review and U.S. Defense Policy, 2006-2025 (QDR) in which he states Pakistan and terrorism is the near term threat to USA. The longer term threat to US are CHINA, INDIA and RUSSIA. (INDIA - a serious economic threat to US, specially after the economic meltdown)

Hence, in the immediate term, Vicker's attention will be on PAKISTAN & AFGHANISTAN - an area he knows well. After all he created many of the mujahideen cells and was its paymaster. All the major Taliban leaders, who fought the Afghan jehad against the Soviets, have deep respect for Vickers and all of them are on "FIRST NAME" basis with him.

He controlled them (ex- Mujahids and today's TALIBAN etc) at one time - hence the question is - how does he "control them" today?

This will have a bearing on "incidents" in India to drive the goal which Vickers has in mind. With a budget of US$ 8 billion and 60,000 assets (most top of the line special ops), it is in India's interest to embed its interests with Vickers.

Terrorism in and from Pakistan / Afghanistan has many masters and many loyalties. How Vicker's plays his cards will have a serious bearing in the geo-political situation in Central Asia and India and Pakistan in particular.

"I am just as confident or more confident we can prevail in the war on terror," said Vickers.

To get an insight into Michael Vickers - read this transcript from Military Strategies for Unconventional Warfare.
Here Vickers states : "Again, Pakistan is a critical ally in the war on terror, but life's not perfect. But again, what's the alternative—invade the Northwest Frontier Provinces? Good luck. You know—and so there's a—you know, there's a time and place."

(My question - Is this time and place NOW?)

We all know of Charlie Wilson's war. Well, Washington Post calls it "Sorry Charlie, this is Michael Vicker's war."

LATERAL THINKING:

If I wish to achieve something, do I do it directly or do I make events happen to reach that desired objective and remain far away hidden from the events?

Let us assume that X wants to tap into Central Asian gas reserves and Pakistan is NOT proving to be an IDEAL AND A PLIANT PARTNER for that. President Musharraf played ball for most part but proved deceitful in handling terrorism. A little terrorism towards India was "par for course" but global jehad to hurt interest of X was not on. To clip the wings of Musharraf, Benazir Bhutto was brought in to keep Mushrraf in check. As soon as Benazir arrived in Pakistan, X got in touch with ex-contacts who hated Benazir and had her killed (gun shots as in a commando for VVIP killing) in a clinical fashion (these contacts were jehadi contacts - who then outsourced this killing down the line)

Revise back to the motive: Mr X wanted an "ideal and pliant partner" in Pakistan.

Benazir would never have been that ideal and pliant partner too. But a dead Benazir and now we are talking. A dead Benazir complicated the situation for President Musharraf. Musharraf was cunning and a "good man for Pakistan" but no match for machinations of "X". Hence, Musharraf, after coercive tackles, gave in and paved the way for President Zardari & PM Gilani. And boy, "X" could not have asked for a more "pliant" partner(s).

We may say that ISI killed Benazir, the Al Qaeda killed Benazir, Hamid Gul had Benazir killed - all / some may be true. But then who gave the orders and where did the money come for this? Ah, we reach our elusive "X".

In Mumbai (26/11): The role of LeT, ISI and Pakistan Army is unfolding. And yes, they were involved, without a doubt. They were the foot soldiers, facilitators and HAPPILY carried out this assignment. But where was this planned and for what purpose? I had surmised, that this was to bring in GREATER PAKISTAN, to cut India deeper - but can it be the whole truth? I do not think so.

Imagine if "X" wanted India to attack Pakistan for a limited war - so that Pakistan Army would vacate the Afghan border and come to Indian border. This will be a nightmare scenario for the British / US / ISAF forces as this will lead to choking of supply lines leaving these forces with just 2 weeks of rations and fuels. However, this might be precisely what X wants. With India not playing ball - not mobilizing its Army and threatening Pakistan Army - maybe this is not going the way X planned it. Now what?

I leave the analysis and brain storming to the readers / viewers.

Initial mission accomplished Mr X. Or is it just the begining?
 

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THE GREAT GAME IN CENTRAL ASIA (2 of 3)

The world needs energy and hence we have the term "energy security". For the longest time, energy meant OIL. Well, that is changing now – to OIL & GAS, and then onto Renewable energy, Solar energy, Wind energy et al.

Today we are the initial cusp, where we are moving from OIL based energy dependence to a Gas based energy dependence. A few countries have made the leap, but globally we are at the inflexion point.

Why this shift ?

Oil has a finite supply and that supply is on the verge of coming to an end. According to the Energy Bible : BP Statistical Review, at current levels of production, Oil reserves of -

1. Saudi Arabia is projected to last only 66 years
2. Iraq & Kuwait is projected to last 100 years
3. India, Australia, Italy, Brazil is projected to last 21 years.



In contrast to the dipping oil reserves, the gas reserves are growing as new findings are being made. Cars which are running on gasoline (petrol) and diesel will be run on Auto LPG, CNG etc and these are all gas derived. Subsequently these cars will run on hydrogen and even on Compressed Air (Our very own TATA NANO). Industry, home etc will make this shift as pipeline infrastructures are put in place.



Currently the largest gas reserves are in Russia with 48 TCM, followed by Iran with 28 TCM. However, all this is changing and will continue to change. With the discovery of Yolotan Osman gas field in Turkmenistan in October 2008, the gas equation and dynamics have changed. Preliminary indications are the gas reserves in Turkmenistan is around 38.4 TCM – far more than Iran and just 20% lower than Russia. And this means immense geopolitical movements around this neighbourhood.

It is to be understood, gas needs to be extracted and then moved over pipelines, some running over thousands of kilometres to reach its ultimate destination. Mostly the end destinations are ports – from where super tankers carry their cargoes around the world. Getting hold of gas fields in not enough. Hence, it is also a game of getting hold of "warm water ports". The major players in Central Asia are Russia, USA and China.

Let us look at the map of Central & South Asia.



Turkmenistan is atop Afghanistan & Iran and this Yolotan Osman gas field is just near the Afghanistan – Turkmenistan border. Other than this, for other gas fields too, Afghanistan is of extreme importance – pipeline infrastructure to warm ports – hence USA will be embedded in Afghanistan for "generations".

Central Asian nations were part of Soviet Union and the breakup of Soviet Union was the handiwork of USA where MICHAEL VICKERS played a sterling part in arming and training the Mujahideen from bases in Pakistan. The goal – Access to Central Asian gas reserves, maintaining its superpower status etc etc.


The other major concern for USA is to keep both Russia and China out of the gas reserves of Central Asia. And also ensure that India and Russia do not join hands with Iran (USA remembers Northern Alliance).

BTC PIPELINE:



And most of this Gas is located in a place called Central Asia. The access to this by major global powers has been romantically called "THE GREAT GAME" - to get a toehold to the supply lines of Central Asia GasAzerbaijan was the true success story of US oil diplomacy. Clinton literally snatched it from Russian orbit in the 1990s by pushing through the Baku – Tbilsi – Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline against seemingly impossible odds. The pipeline meanders from Baku (capital of Azerbaian) to Tbilsi in Georgian and then onto the Turkish port of Ceyhan. From here gas is filled in super tankers and shipped to Europe for consumption.

BTC completely bypasses Russia and this was the main purpose of this line.

NABUCCO PIPELINE:



The other important pipeline for the USA is the Nabucco pipeline. However, question marks have appeared regarding the future of the Nabucco gas pipeline, which, if constructed, would bypass Russian territory and bring Caspian gas from Azerbaijan via Georgia and Turkey to the European market. What if Azerbaijan accepts the Russian offer to buy gas at "European prices"? Has the Caucasus conflict fatally hurt Nabucco's prospects? It seems, for the present, it has.

Europe has pinned its hopes on Nabucco, but it can only be implemented with Russian participation and also Iran. Nabucco is a serious threat to the Russian "South Stream pipelines" that feed Europe.



BLACK SEA TO A NATO LAKE:

USA was planning and plotting and came to the conclusion that it has to make BLACK SEA into a NATO LAKE. If you look at the map of Central Asia, notice that other than Russia the other 2 countries of ex-Soviet Union that skirt the Black Sea are Ukraine and Georgia. And guess, who have been offered NATO memberships – you guessed it right – Ukraine and Georgia.

However, Russia remains vehemently against this NATO intrusion into its former republics and has made its opposition very clear. USA overplayed its hands in Georgia and gave Russia the chance to kill two birds with one stone.

Georgia has two breakaway provinces – Abkhazia and South Ossetia. It has majority Russian population. The Georgian maverick President Mikhail Shakashvili, under direction from his US experts, started bombing these two provinces to take them over by force.



Russia just drove in and in deft military manoeuvres took control of these provinces. Russia annexed these two provinces, and thus took de-facto control of two major Black Sea ports of Sukhumi & Poti. This was a great tactical blow to USA, because with this single Russian manoeuvre, the US dream of making BLACK SEA into A NATO LAKE was LOST - probably FOREVER.

There were reports that Israel wanted to use bases in Georgia to attack Iran and one of Russia's aim was to pre-empt that. Interesting to note – Israel got wind of the Russian attack a week before the attacks and left Georgia with its advisers (note: USA stayed behind). The Israelis went to Russia and admitted that arming Georgia was a mistake and implored Russia NOT to arm Hezbollah and Iran with sophisticated armaments and missiles.

Germany came running to Russia and told them that they will block Ukraine's and Georgia's entry into NATO and this is exactly what they did – together with France. Germany, scarred from WWII memories of Russia and currently dependant on gas sales from Russia is in no position to take on Russia, nor is there any inclination to anger the Russian bear.

Condoleeza Rice came out defeated and admitted, "Georgia and Ukraine are not ready for (NATO) membership. That is very clear". Russia won through coercive diplomacy.

Russia also sent a message through this military move to all its former republics, to take cognizance of Russian interests while plotting their gas sales – which have all been duly noted.

Central Asian republics all saw that USA is actually in NO position to militarily help them – Georgia was a case in point.

Russia deftly followed this by meeting Syrian President Assad and getting the port of Tartus as a resting place for its Black Sea maintenance quarters.

With a series of further moves, Russia has made USA nearly redundant in the Caspian region. Russia is flush with funds, and the economic might of USA has taken a serious beating in the economic crisis.

Russia has re-negotiated to buy gas from Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan at prevailing "European prices" thus raising the bar.

The four Russian oil majors had asked Putin for $ 80 billion package to pay off their foreign debts and finance strategic projects. Putin responded by saying that the government will disburse upto $ 50 billion.

How many Western governments can match Russia providing such backing of sovereign wealth funds to its oil majors at the present time of global credit crunch?

Moscow offered $4 billion loan to Ukraine for establishing two nuclear power plant in its western region. This is despite the pro-US stance of Ukranian Victor Yushchenko.

Also, there is huge political symbolism when Iceland expresses "dissapointment" with the Western world and turns to Moscow for a 4 billion Euro ($ 5.5 billion) loan to salvage its economy from imminent bankruptcy.

Such images make a lasting impression on the Central Asian steppes.

Russia with its vast deposits of oil and gas is already an energy superpower. And unlike Iran and Venezuela, it does not subsidize its economy from the oil proceeds – hence with the oil price down, its economy is still strong unlike those that of Iran and Venezuela. The EU is heavily dependant on Russia for gas imports and this dependence is expected to increase further as a result of declining offshore production of North Sea.



TUSSLE IN AZERBAIJAN:

Currently there are 3 major pipelines running from Baku (capital of Azerbaijan). 2 are US sponsosred - the BTC pipeline and the Baku - Supsa pipleline (Supsa in Georgia). The 3rd one is the Russain pipeline : Baku - Novorossiisk pipeline. SEE MAP ABOVE.

Azerbaijan is negotiating with Russia to increase the annual capacity of the Baku – Nvorossiisk pipeline. At the same time Azerbaijanis reducing its commitment to the US sponsored Baku – Supsa and BTC pipelines and this is a major breakthrough for the Russians. Azerbaijan understands the Russian resurgence in southern Caucasus and Baku's new interest in the Russian pipeline stems from a desire to protect its relationship with Moscow.

The implications are very serious for Washington. Any reduction in the Baku export through BTC could impact the viability of the pipeline which has been the cornerstone of US diplomacy in the region, pumping nearly 1 million barrels of oil / day from Azerbaijan to Turkey's coast from where it is shipped to Europe. BTC, though secure now, has come under the watch of the Russians.



In September 2008, Uzbekistan and Russia agreed to build a new pipeline with a capacity of 26 to 30 billion cubic meters (bcm) annually to pump Uzbek and Trukmen gas to Europe. Such a pipeline will again undermine the US efforts to pump trans-Caspian energy routes bypassing Russia.

On top of this, neither Azerbaijan nor Kazakhstan appears interested in US entreaties to re-route energy exports bypassing Russia. Both hope to maintain good relations with USA but that cannot be done by picking a quarrel with Russia.

It seems the US phrase – "either you are with us or against us" is not finding any takers in Central Asia. Central Asian countries would do business with both but not at the expense of Russia and this rankles the USA as it has clearly fallen from the high "horse" they thought it was in.

continued to next post...
 

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continued from previous post...

CHINA:

At the same time China is anxious to get its act together and bind its energy security in this region. It has formed SCO to cement its energy needs in this region which the US is vehemently trying to push out. China knows that it cannot match US power for at least the next 15 years and its naval forces are no match to the US fleet and even the Japanese fleet. Hence it is going out of its way to get to the Central Asian gas reserves through land routes, even though many of them look unviable at the present time.




One of the better tieups will be to tag along the Russian ESPO pipeline. Russia is expected to complete this East Siberia to Pacific (ESPO) by 2012 for routing oil to Asian markets. Kazakhstan's state oil pipeline operator KazTransOil is interested in transporting Kazakh oil through the ESPO. To note – Astana has shown no hurry to commit Kashagan oil to the US sponsored BTC pipeline but has committed to the Russian ESPO pipelines. US influence has truly reached its nadir in this region.



Unlike the USA or Russians, the Chinese have their own method of doing business overseas. Being a mercantilist and free of moral and political constraints, it hopes that it will continue doing what it loves best – making money. Chinese hope to sell cheap DVD players and exotic Chinese prostitutes, build roads and docks and in the bargain – gobble up Central Asian energy.

Washington is clearly nervous that Kazakhstan is showing alarming signs of shifting towards Moscow. All early investments by the USA in this region has come to naught. Astana supported Russian action in the Caucasus and cut down its investment in Georgia.

Clearly the Russians and Chinese have outmanoeuvred the American in Central Asia stakes.

TURKMENISTAN:

We had touched earlier on the fact : Preliminary indications are the gas reserves in Turkmenistan is around 38.4 TCM – far more than Iran and just 20% lower than Russia (largest gas reserves in the world). The British consultancy company Gaffney, Cline & Associates (GCA) presented the first results of its audit of Turkmen gas reserves.

The biggest gas field discovery was in October 2008 – called the Yoloten Osman deposits. It is located near the Afghan – Turkmenistan border.

Turkmenistan has contracts to supply Russia with 50 bcm annually, China with 40 bcm and Iran with 8 bcm annually. The Russian energy giant GAZPROM requires this Turkmen gas to meet its export obligations in the European market, which accounts for 70% of the its total revenue. Gazprom sells 2/3 of Russia's 550 bcm annual gas production in the rapidly growing domestic market. This compels it to secure Turkmen supplies to meet contracted European demands.

Looks like Russia is all set to gobble up gas supplies from Turkmenistan – but look again. Gazprom's agreement with Turkmengaz DOES NOT INVOLVE YOLOTEN – OSMAN reserves.

Russia thought it held in its hand a chimera when it fancied that the July 25th Agreement put GAZPROM in charge of all of Turkmenistan's exports. Surely, this is proving to be a misconception of Himalayan proportions.

USA has deftly moved in to claim its stakes on the Yoloten-Osman gas reserves and for Russia the game starts again.

Take a look at the map. USA is well places in Afghanistan and can easily draw pipelines from Yoloten-Osman gas reserves through Afghanistan. And after that, it needs a warm water port to load it on super tankers.

The only viable ports are Karachi in Pakistan and also Gwadar port in Baluchistan area of Pakistan. Pakistan has built Gwadar with Chinese help to serve several purpose and one of them was access to Central Asian oil. USA is in no mood to see that this happens. Gwadar may well become the Chinese naval base in future and have eyeball to eyeball confrontation with the US naval fleet.

The other port is Chabahar in Iran. This has been built by India. Look how close the ports of Gwadar and Chabahar are.



We must not forget this part :

When Afghanistan was under the control of Taliban, USA was willing to shake hands with the devil – just to get access to pipelines through Afghanistan. UNOCAL the US company in the thick of pipeline planning through Afghanistan, was acting as the unofficial lobby for the Taliban and they were regularly briefed by CIA and Pakistan's ISI.

The then US Assistant Secy of State for South Asian Affairs, ROBIN RAPHAEL went on to state – "The Taliban capture of Kabul is a POSITIVE STEP."

Another senior US Diplomat stated : "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco, pipelines, an Emir, no parliament and lots of shari'a law. We can live with that."

We must not lose sight of these statements. These are not statements of two individuals - they represent the USA mindset.

The USA will have tolerated Taliban and Shari'a just to get gas pipelines and this approach has not changed. USA tolerates the Saudi emirs. It may be a democracy itself, but in matters of business, it follows only one policy – "ANYTHING GOES" as long as its interests are met.

USA is looking for any stable partner that will guarantee it "peace" to "do business" in Afghanistan. Hence, for India, this becomes very important – Who will guarantee this "Peaceful business environment in Afghanistan"?

Will it again be Taliban + Pakistan or will it be Pushtuns + Balochis through independent countries created out of parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan?

If the USA game plan is the former – Taliban + Pakistan, we must ensure that this never comes into being. This will be disastrous for India. The latter, we can deal with and we will come to this part in the next article.



The Central Asia as it will look in the future. Afghanistan will play a pivotal pipeline role.

India too has legitimate energy concerns but USA will see to it that the Iranian – Indian gas pipeline or even the TAPI (Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India) does not come into being.





The US with its dipping wealth and high levels of corruption is unable to stake claim of any sort in Central Asia. It is clutching at the straws with BTC and Nabucco pipelines. It will surely seek to leverage its presence in Afghanistan on the Yolotan-Osman gas fields to salvage pride and standing in the region.

THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE:

USA is not going to give up without a fight. The attacks of NATO supply trucks recently in Pakistan has given planners in Washington time to formulate alternative strategies. The US has begun working on an entirely new supply route for Afghanistan which steers clear of Tehran, Moscow and Beijing and which, more importantly, not only dovetails but holds the prospects of augmenting and even strengthening the US's containment strategy towards Russia and Iran.

Thus, the US has begun developing an altogether new land route through the southern Caucasus to Afghanistan, which doesn't exist at present. The US is working on the idea of ferrying cargo for Afghanistan via the Black Sea to the port of Poti in Georgia and then dispatching it through the territories of Georgia,Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. A branch line could also go from Georgia via Azerbaijan to the Turkmen-Afghan border.

The project, if it materializes, will be a geopolitical coup - the biggest ever that Washington would have swung in post-Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus. At one stroke, the US will be tying up military cooperation at the bilateral level with Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

The US will have virtually dealt a blow to the Russia-led Collective Security Treat Organization (CSTO) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Not only will the US have succeeded in keeping the CSTO and the SCO from poking their noses into the Afghan cauldron, it will also have made these organizations largely irrelevant to regional security when Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the two key players in Central Asia, simply step out of the ambit of these organizations and directly deal with the US and NATO.

Therefore, the US is making a determined bid to render Russian diplomacy on Afghanistan toothless. Interestingly, the US has allowed NATO at the same time to negotiate with Russia for transit route facilities, which Moscow will be hard-pressed to refuse.

Washington has certainly done some smart thinking. It is having the best of both worlds - NATO taking help from Russia with the US at the same time puncturing the CSTO and undercutting Russian interests in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Ever since the conflict in the Caucasus (Russia - Georgia conflict) in August, the US has maintained a continuous naval presence in the Black Sea, with regular port calls in Georgia. The indications are that the US is planning a carefully calibrated ground presence in Georgia as well. Talks are in the final stages for a US-Georgia Security and Military Agreement.

ENERGY CORRIDOR:

Another dramatic fallout is that the proposed land route covering Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan can also be easily converted into an energy corridor and become a Caspian oil and gas corridor bypassing Russia. Such a corridor has been a long-cherished dream for Washington. Furthermore, European countries will feel the imperative to agree to the US demand that the transit countries for the energy corridor are granted NATO protection in one form or the other. That, in turn, leads to NATO's expansion into the Caucasus and Central Asia.

RUSSIA is not expected to keep quiet and watch US intrusion into its former territories passively. The chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, General Nikolai Makarov, just about lifted the veil on the geopolitics of the Afghan war to let the world know that the Bush administration was having one last fling at the great game in Central Asia. Russia, it seems is about to transfer the S-300 missile defense system to Iran. S-300 is one of the most advanced surface-to-air missile systems capable of intercepting 100 ballistic missiles or aircraft at once, at low and high altitudes within a range of over 150 kilometers. As long-time Pentagon advisor Dan Goure put it, "If Tehran obtained the S-300, it would be a game-changer in military thinking for tackling Iran. This is a system that scares every Western air force." Russia stated that giving Iranians the S-300 will avoid "wars" in the region. More than US, the Israelis view this as a threat to their existence. the head of political-military policy in the Israeli Defense Ministry, Major General Amos Gilad, was traveling to Moscow with a demarche that Russia should not transfer S-300 to Iran. If things are not sorted out on the Iran front, Israel may have a go at Iran's suspected nuclear sites - ALONE.

All this is expected to unfold in India's backyard and soon.

The veiled threat of reopening the "Kashmir file", which is patently aimed at keeping India at bay, also serves a useful purpose. Plainly put, the US faces a real geopolitical challenge in Afghanistan if only a coalition of like-minded regional powers like Russia, China, Iran and India takes shape and these powers seriously begin exchanging notes about what the Afghan war has been about so far and where it is heading and what the US strategy aims at. So far, the US has succeeded in stalling such a process by sorting out these regional powers individually.

Was India getting too close to Russia and Iran for USA's liking and was the Mumbai blast a timely reminder for India not to meddle in the "GREAT GAME"?
 

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THE ULTIMATE GAME - US PLANS FOR CENTRAL ASIA ( 3 of 3)

In the last article,The Great Game in Central Asia, I highlighted the the extreme importance CARs (Central Asian Regions) hold for USA (and indeed for Russia and China too). However, it is USA that has plotted and planned the break up of Soviet Union for gaining the ultimate prize – access to gas in these regions. It is assumed that "anyone who controls the gas in Central Asian Regions, controls the world".

The huge gas reserves of Yolotan-Osman gas fields in Turkmenistan has increased the geopolitical importance of Afghanistan. USA is increasing its military strength - putting in an extra 30,000 troops by Mid 2009.





It seems US had only one plan – to keep the trophy of the Central Asian gas to itself. It was looking for partners who will support it in its logistical endeavour, as it was clearly in a land, far away from the mainland USA. With India having a cosy relationship with Russia almost through the 90s, and Pakistan providing the shortest pipeline route to warm waters of these Central Asian gas reserves, it was a no-brainer when USA supported Pakistan over India in geo-political and military matters. USA deliberately overlooked the Pakistani nuclear smuggling network, as its eyes were on the lucrative CARs gases and for that break up the Soviets was absolutely necessary. Pakistan provided the battleground to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan.



It is a fascinating story how Soviet Union was lured into Afghanistan for its ultimate break-up, the BEAR TRAP, but that is not for this blog.

Suffice it to say, the team of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz were active in oil & gas for much of their lives. These are the people who are / were in very senior positions in George Bush's government. The names of "oil & energy" companies:Enron, Unocal, Halliburton are synonymous with Rumsfeld, Cheney & Wolfowitz – be it for employment, or for pipeline contracts while in government charge, contributions to Republican party, or even stock-options. **** Cheney was even on the Kazakstan Oil Advisory Board. These were very interesting connections and again a thesis can be written but I am going to end here.

Add the name of Condolezza Rice to this trio – there was a Chevron oil tanker named "The Condoleeza Rice" prior to her taking charge of NSA in 2001.





RUMSFELD & CHENEY IN 1975

1976: IRAN & US NUCLEAR PLANTS:

While USA (with Israel) is now trying to bomb suspected nuclear sites in Iran today, in 1976 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and White House Chief of Staff **** Cheney unsuccessfully lobbied for the construction of a nuclear reprocessing plant in Iran. The two men devised the scheme because, they say, Iran needs a nuclear power program to meet its future energy needs. This is despite the fact that Iran has considerable oil and gas reserves. The deal would be lucrative for US corporations like Westinghouse and General Electric, which would make $6.4 billion from the project.

The USA today wants to control the flow of oil & gas from Central Asian regions through its pipelines and the ports of its choice. It will not want to sell all to Western nations, but depending on good and "reciprocal" behaviour to Russia and China too. But the control of the gas will be vested with USA. Russia and China have other plans.

The earlier US Plan:

USA wanted a stable partner for Central Asian gas and it found one in Pakistan. After the Soviets left, the Taliban took over in due course. The Taliban was a creation of ISI. At that time, CIA & ISI were "brothers in arms" and things were on course. Unocal took over the de-facto USA plans for pipeline access from CARs through Afghanistan and onto the warm ports of Karachi.

The then US Assistant Secy of State for South Asian Affairs, ROBIN RAPHAEL went on to state – "The Taliban capture of Kabul is a POSITIVE STEP."

Another senior US Diplomat stated : "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco, pipelines, an Emir, no parliament and lots of shari'a law. We can live with that."

On December 4th 1997, the representatives of Taliban were invited guests at the Texas headquarters of UNOCAL to negotiate support for the pipeline. Bill Clinton was the President and George W Bush was the governor of Texas at that point.

The US wanted Taliban to stabilize Afghanistan, wracked as it was in brutal infighting by warring tribes. The US wanted someone – anyone who can bring in stabilization for business to flow uninterrupted.

Unocal was to set up gas pipelines from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through Afghanistan. And Halliburton was to provide drilling services in Turkmenistan (**** Cheney, the Vice President of USA, was the CEO of Halliburton).

US told Pakistan to use ISI and effect a change in Afghanistan – allow Taliban forces to take over and allow Unocal to start business. If that happens, the USA will recognise the TALIBAN government in Afghanistan.

Unocal Vice President John J. Maresca - (later to become a Special Ambassador to Afghanistan) - testifies before the House of representatives that until a single, unified, friendly government is in place in Afghanistan the trans-Afghani pipeline will not be built.

The US viewed the Islamic countries in CARs and Middle East as different states and it needed to be brought into a confederation of states – for oil to flow smoothly. Much like the United States of America, they will be called the United States of Islam. This would be akin to the Islamic Caliphate that the Islamists were dreaming of. US fed Pakistan the dream of taking over this Islamic Caliphate, after all it had the Islamic bomb and its military was running the show for Saudi Arabian air force and UAE too.



USA looked at the Islamic Caliphate as a giant oil MNC and Pakistan as the COO with itself as the CEO. However, Pakistan started thinking, why be the COO when it can become the CEO too?

USA too, soon realized that this United Islamic concept was simply not possible, the inner contradictions of these countries will not allow an Islamic Caliphate to take place. Also ISI started acting out of the confines and tasks given to it and started operating to the detriment of USA and Western forces (discussed before – like Somalia, Bosnia etc). In Bosnia ISI actions of arming Bosnian Muslims with top of the line anti-tank missiles brought upon USA wrath – Bill Clinton was going to declare Pakistan as a terrorist nation which was averted when Pakistan sacked ISI Chief Javed Nasir.

USA realized that the ISI has morphed into a different entity, spawning its own terror units for deniable operations that hurt the US. The honeymoon with ISI started turning sour. On the other hand, ISI moved with impunity across the globe, in Philippines, in South Asia, in Europe. See my article ISI & AL QAEDA.

9/11 changed the contours of USA plans. Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Advisor, has stated, "You show me one reporter, one commentator, one member of Congress who thought we should invade Afghanistan before September 11 and I'll buy you dinner in the best restaurant in New York City."

Omar Sheikh Sayeed was the alleged person who wired the money to the attackers. There are insinuations that he is a British intelligence asset. The rationale for this stems from the fact that Omar Sayeed went to UK to meet his parents, twice, after being released by India in Kandahar air hijack, and he was not even detained at the airport. That he is under house arrest, is to deny him access to western media / intelligence agencies.

Whatever the truth – USA which had no reason to go back to Afghanistan, had one now. See also how the 9/11 commission covered up Pakistan and ISI's role in 9/11.

Can USA attack its own country for a stated overseas military objective? If one looks at Operations Northwoods, one will be tempted to say : YES.

OPERATION NORTHWOODS:

This document, titled "Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba" was provided by the JCS to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, as the key component of Northwoods. Written in response to a request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, Col. Edward Lansdale, the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. These proposals - part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose - included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake "Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington," including "sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated)," faking a Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a "Remember the Maine" incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage.



James Bamford himself writes that Operation Northwoods "may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government." Or was it the most corrupt?




ISI and Pakistan army, not satisfied with the Islamic Caliphate, wanted, dreamt and plotted about the break up of India with a 1000 cuts – see these two maps 2012 and 2020 Pakistan maps that was discussed in this article: GREATER PAKISTAN.

A broken India, if at all possible, will be a nightmare for USA in light of hostile Islamic regions surrounding USA if it were to stabilize its role in Afghanistan on one hand and contain China on the other. USA realised, a stronger INDIA is its better bet but not a VERY STRONG India.

USA meantime, too, realized that it had created a monster without the safety valve. ISI has morphed into an untamable monster with an appetite for global jehad and most importantly the means to do so too.

The Mumbai attacks of 26/11 will have dispelled doubts amongst the fence sitters about the intention of Pakistan. Hence these attacks definitely do not help Pakistan and the way the events have unmasked its terror nurseries. At superficial levels it helps Pakistan Army, only if the Indian Army started mobilizing its troops, giving Pak Army reasons to disengage itself from its disastrous military campaign against the Taliban on Afghan border. India, has so far, not played ball.

USA moves onto Plan B.

The Changed US Plan:

USA is not going to give up on access to Central Asian gas. If ISI and Pakistan was not playing ball, it would be made to play ball or it will break up Pakistan. Benazir assassination and the departure of Musharraf paved the way for a pliant Pakistan government, subservient to US.

The US is attacking militant hideouts in NWFP regions of Pakistan with impunity and under coercive diplomacy the Pakistan Army has to take care of militant hiding and operating from its territories. Attacking Taliban has been the biggest "nightmare" for Pakistan Army. As discussed earlier, Taliban was the brain child of ISI and it was made to create strategic depth in Afghanistan. Pakistan Army embedded its soldiers into Taliban – this fact can be easily ascertained from the huge Pakistan Army evacuation of Kunduz when Taliban was surrounded by Northern Alliance forces. Taliban who were supported and mollycoddled by Pakistan Army is up in arms against this "treacherous" role of the Pakistan Army, and this has created a civil war like situation within Pakistan. A situation ripe for working on the ethnic fault lines of Pakistan.

Ahmed Quraishi from Pakistan writes: As part of psych-ops, 40-feet wide billboards that have mysteriously sprung up on the main roads of NWFP showing the map of a new country – Pashtunistan – with meticulously defined borders that incorporate most of northwestern Pakistan. This 'billboard campaign' has to be the boldest statement of rebellion and separatism ever made in the history of nation-states anywhere in the world.



The deliberate destabilization of Pakistan through American military and political interference will result in turning large parts of the country against the federal government and increasingly draw the military into a civil war that will bleed us for decades to come in the presence of covert support from Afghan soil.

Ethnic politics, the new Trojan horse of anyone who wants to meddle in our affairs, have to be ended through legislation and by creating more provinces on administrative lines and by strengthening Pakistani nationalism. The question is: Who will do this? The current crop of politicians can't. The military is not trained to do this, at least not alone. I am afraid we are soon approaching a situation where something will have to be thought of outside the box.

It's either this or more separatist billboards in the future."

This is the exact thinking of the Pakistan Army too. It wants to move its soldiers from Western borders of Afghanistan to the Indian border and it needed a reason to do so. The Mumbai attacks gave it a reason – hence one concluded that 26/11 was a Pakistani Army job.

Pakistan military strategists saw that instead of the original plan of becoming the CEO of the Islamic Caliphate the USA, together with India is now instrumental in making Pakistan a smaller entity. And there is no way, any self respecting Pakistani esp., its Army was willing to go down without a fight. Was 26/11 – a "thinking out of the box" strategy?



continued to next post..
 

ajtr

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continued from previous post

THE NEW SMALLER PAKISTAN AS PER THE NEO-CONS IN USA:



THE NEW SMALLER PAKISTAN AS PER THE AFGHANS:



Whichever one ultimately comes about, the net loser will be Pakistan. And Pakistan Army, aware of this, wanted to pre-empt the plans. As I have said before, it was helped along as someone played into Pak Army's insecurities.

Yes 26/11 it was indeed a Pakistani Army job, which contracted the work to ISI, which then sub-contracted the work to Laskhar e Taiba.

But how is this connected to the USA and its plans for the Central Asian gas and a greater plan for breaking up Pakistan today?

USA knows the visceral hatred the Pakistan Army and ISI has of India. It just needed to play along these fears.



In comes Michael Vickers with his vast contacts in Afghanistan and Pakistan especially with the Mujahideens. As stated before : Vickers was the principal strategist for covert CIA operations in Afghanistan that resulted in the defeat, and subsequent break up of the Soviet Union. If there is one man who can be credited for the break up of Soviet empire - it is Vickers.

His greatest influence was in the precise way he reassessed the potential of Afghan guerrilla forces and prescribed the right mix of weaponry to attack Soviet weaknesses.

At the height of Afghan operation, he was giving strategic and operational direction to 300 unit commanders, 150,000 full time and 500,000 part time fighters ("mujahideens"). He co-ordinated the efforts of TEN countries and oversaw an annual budget of US $ 2 billion.

Presently, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) which is part of the portfolio that Vickers handles is based in Tampa, FL. It's annual budget is US$ 8 BILLION and more than 60,000 covert and overt personnel are on its payroll. Vickers also sits on 3rd floor of Pentagon "C" Ring.

Is Pakhtunistan Michael Vickers' parting gift for his Afghan Mujahids? Only time will tell.

A sudden spurt of US spies (special operations group_ have been reported in the past one year in Baluchistan and FATA areas. There are "declared" US spies who run operations together with ISI, but these were covert spies operating out of the ISI ambit in Pakistani territory. Was Jude Kenan, an American caught in FATA, one such covert operative?

In August 2007 a representative of the jihadi outfit - a burly man in mid thirties with medium-length, thick beard met an American in Sadabahar who was dressed like a Pushtun. The meeting lasted more than three hours and the jihadi left with a canvas bag full of cash.

The American could not be identified but the jihadi was traced to a splinter group of LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba). As is known, LeT is not a single entity; it is more like a brand name, used by many groups with diverse objectives and split loyalties.

The jihadi went to Karachi and met a colleague in Shah Faisal Colony and apparently gave him some of the cash he received from the American in Quetta. This assumption is based on the fact that the jihadi's colleague in Shah Faisal Colony purchased a flashy SUV a few days later. And Benazir Bhutto was assassinated a few months later (direct connection not established that it was this money that was used, but people in the know state that this is so).

Again, this LeT is involved in the Mumbai blasts. Let us look at LeT from a different angle.

In 1988, Abu Abdur Rahman Sareehi, a Saudi and a deputy of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, founded an organization in the Afghan Kunar Valley which recruited Afghan youths and Pakistanis in Bajaur Agency to fight the Soviets. Sareehi was the brother-in-law of Zakiur Rahman Lakhvi, (ALLEGED MASTERMIND OF MUMBAI 26/11 ATTACKS) now named by the US Treasury and the Security Council as chief of operations for the LET. Seed money for the training camps was provided by Bin Laden.

BAHAZIQ A SAUDI INTELLIGENCE PROXY:

Mahmoud Mohammad Ahmed Bahaziq, (described by the US Treasury as the main LET financier in the 1980s and 1990s and now named by the Security Council as a terrorist) was a Saudi intelligence proxy planted in the network. "¨"¨

He built up his influence in the network with Saudi money and eventually established Markaz Dawa wal Irshaad. The name related to a renowned Saudi office for preaching Islam.

MARKAZ HIJACKED BY RSA INTELLIGENCE AND CIA:

This organization was then COMPLETELY HIJACKED by Saudi intelligence and the CIA and later operated under the name Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). To be fair to USA & RSA (Repuplic of Saudi Arabia), their intention was more to infiltrate the LeT than to use it for terror purposes.

CIA and Pakistan establishment never went after LeT - as LeT never attacked Pakistan and any US interests. The ban on LeT was laughable at best.

After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US, it renamed itself Jamaatut Dawa and clearly distanced itself from al-Qaeda.

The above statements are all facts. There is a connection of LeT to CIA & Saudi intelligence. There is a connection of LeT to Mumbai blasts. LeT was infiltrated by the CIA and RSA (Saudi) intelligence. What can this mean?

The 10 terrorists that attacked Mumbai were supposed to go to Kashmir. The ISI forward station head in Karachi and Zakiur Rahman Lakhvi changed their destination to Mumbai. Why was this done and under whose orders?

Russia stated that Dawood Ibrahim's drug money was used in 26/11. Dawood is listed as the top 3 drug barons of the world by USA. And India recently said, it is more interested in Masood Azhar than Dawood Ibrahim – is this not strange?

Hamid Karzai's brother is the largest drug baron in Afghanistan. And Afghanistan produced 6000 tons of opium in 2006, 8200 tons in 2007 and 7700 tons in 2008. On average, the world demand of opium-based narcotics, including heroin, is only half of this production. Where is the rest of opium going?

American forces – this includes all kinds of Americans such regular forces, CIA, Socom and contractors – have been buying and storing all the surplus opium. (See the movie American Gangster to figure out US military complicity in narcotics trade).

This report gets credence from the fact that about 70% of all opium production in Afghanistan comes from Helmand province, an area under the direct control of the Americans.

What would the Americans do with all this opium?

Experts are of the view that this opium, in raw or refined form, would be spread in the neighbouring countries (Pakistan, India, Iran, Central Asia and China). Some of it would go to Russia also.

This would bring several advantages to the Americans:

1. By increasing drug addiction in target countries, Americans would sap the economies of these countries and produce the generations of junkies that would be long-term liabilities for their countries;

2. If the opium is mostly consumed in the neighbourhood, less of it would be left for export to the American markets;

3. Narcotics are a traditional source of additional revenues for the American forces, especially the CIA. However, in this case, the US is not making money as it is subsidizing sales in CARs, INDIA, PAKISTAN & RUSSIA for a "different" reason (explained in points 1 & 2 above).

The suspicion that the American want to spread drug addiction in the neighbouring countries is also supported by the fact that even though the 'farm-gate' price of opium has remained stable at nearly US $ 70 per kilo, it is becoming available in the neighbouring countries at around US $ 40 per kilo. Clearly, the Americans are subsidizing the export.

Coming back to Pakistan, the latest NIE (of USA ) describes Pakistan as – No money, no energy and no government.

If USA now wants to break Pakistan, it cannot do so alone. There has to be military participation of India to break Pakistan's strong army. Someone has to play the game for USA and that attack on Mumbai can be looked at that game changing scenario that broke the stupour of Indian politicians and let it be aligned with Indian Army's vision which matched the US vision for the region.

USA wants to de-fang Iran but is in no position to do so itself. It has to show as an existential thereat to Israel and Israel will then attack Iran alone.

USA wants to India to tackle Pakistan and Israel to tackle Iran.

The next game changer will either be an attack inside India or more likely an attack within USA that will fast forward the military option and pincer attacks on Pakistan from two fronts.

My point – even if USA was involved in 26/11, albeit in a circuitous way, it has done India more good than harm. (Some commentators may disagree, but its ok – this is after all a view).

While India should be aligned with the short term vision of USA today, it is the long term vision of USA that India needs to be wary of. Before looking at these long term visions, USA has showed India two cards it will not hesitate to play, should India not play along with USA in these plans:

1.Open the Kashmir card – which US alluded to, it might do by sending Bill Clinton as a special representative

2. Last week of September 2008, USA brokered a meeting in Mecca. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia hosted the talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban militant group, according to a source familiar with the talks.

India, together with Russia and Iran pumped in money and armaments to Northern Alliance force that fought the Taliban in Afghanistan. Any talks with Taliban will raise the hackles of these three countries.

Obviously, both the above options have "deadly" consequences for India. And India will see to it, that the above two do not come about. And US knows that it will continue to prick India with these uncomfortable situations to bring it "in line" to its game plan in the Great Game.

THE PAKISTANI VIEWPOINT:




Mushahid Hussain, General Secretary of Pakistan Muslim League (Q) and chairman of Pakistan's Senate Foreign Relations committee made the following statements about the current Indo-Pak relations, in Indian Express: - a few of his comments:

1. I feel American clout in the region has weakened. America as a superpower is not all that powerful. Now there's a resurgent Russia, a rising China, emerging India, a stronger Iran and Pakistan is a regional power. But among our political and military elite, there's infatuation with America. Still, the Americans told us to join the war in Iraq, we refused. They opposed the Iran pipeline, we didn't agree. We recognize the Hamas government in Palestine, they don't. We made the bomb despite American opposition. We have close relations with China despite American opposition.

2. Pakistan's future is linked with China. The 21st century will be an Asian century. For me, the interesting question is: which way will India go? Will it play the role of the frontman for USA against China or will it go with the tide of the Asian century?

The contours of Mushahid's statements cannot be more "clearer" - which is also the Pakistan military view. Pakistan is at the cusp of moving from American arms into the waiting arms of China – lock, stock and barrel. A fact, that will not at all go well with the strategic planners in USA.

CONCLUSIONS:

The US military is burning nearly 600000 gallons of fuel per day. More than 80% of this comes from Pakistan, through 700 or so road tankers that are vulnerable to all kinds of attacks on their long journey from facilities in Pakistan to American bases in Afghanistan. And ISI has increased the attacks to these NATO convoys through Taliban in their depots in Peshawar. However, there are people who say that these attacks on NATO convoys are the work of Taliban who are carrying out orders from non-ISI masters (whatever that means).

The reserves in Afghanistan will suffice for only two weeks if the supply line is disrupted.

Aware of this, the Americans have been trying to create an alternate route through Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Even if the alternate route is opened fully, it is very long and inefficient and there are risks that Americans are not in a position to counter at present.

There is need to abandon the Pakistan route but there is nothing to replace it.

Benefits of bifurcating Pakistan: From American point of view, there are many benefits in creating an independent Balochistan:

1.An independent Balochistan will be an ideal territory to keep supply lines open to the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

2.Independent Balochistan will provide Americans with excellent locations for putting up their military and naval bases to police the Persian Gulf and make sure that no other naval power including India, China and Russia ever gets upper hand in the Indian Ocean.

3.An independent Balochistan will be the place from where Americans can maintain permanent pressure on Iran, even in the remote possibility that they may have to eventually leave Iraq.

4.China and Russia will be denied any access to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.

5.The Gulf countries will remain dependent on the USA for export routes of their hydrocarbon products.

6.Full control of the entrance to the Gulf will enable USA to allow or deny oil flow by tankers to any country in the world.

7.Central Asia is a land-locked region and the whole region would be on the mercy of the United States.

If Balochistan is detached from Pakistan, the rest of Pakistan is likely to exist as a perpetually unstable entity, creating a permanent source of trouble for India. This fits nicely with other American plans because India has come very close to becoming an economic rival of the United States.

Also:

1. One logical consequence is that India and Pakistan would probably go to war or at least move their forces to the borders in a position of war readiness. Every expert knows that keeping forces ready for war is nearly seven to eight times more expensive than keeping them in the barracks. This is an excellent way to make sure that Indian and Pakistani economies would be crippled for a long time to come.

2. India and Pakistan are negotiating for two gas pipelines, one from Iran and the other from Turkmenistan. There are also plans to put oil pipelines from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to South Asia. USA would use every method to deny India the energy resources of Central Asia and IranIndia is not what USA has in mind. The tide has reversed already and it is not to the liking of the Americans. Students from the United States are now coming to India, Indian businessmen are giving tough time to American corporations worldwide, and India has entered some of the export markets that were traditionally dominated by the west. In short, a weak India will be acceptable as a friend but a strong India will be a pain in the neck for Americans.

The game changers and the current situation sits well with the Neo-Cons who have ensured that Obama is tied to the events and plans as envisaged by the Neo - Cons.

Obama has kept Robert Gates as defense secretary. And Bill Richarson comes in as Energy Secretary - the same Bill Richardson who as US Ambassador to the UN in 1988 met the Taliban officials in Kabul (illegally as US did not recognize the Taliban as legitimate Afghanistan government) - all for pipeline through Afghanistan. Which means - under Obama - Afghanistan policy will not change.

MICHAEL VICKERS in 2006 said: "Again, Pakistan is a critical ally in the war on terror, but life's not perfect. But again, what's the alternative—invade the Northwest Frontier Provinces? Good luck. You know—and so there's a—you know, there's a time and place."

The time is now INDIA - it is NOW!

However, Pakistan feels at most India will precision bomb the terrorist training camps (which are anyway emptied out) in POK and nothing more. All this "bravado" that Congress is showing is only for elections that are due in 2009 to steal the thunder from BJP. Are they correct?

MY 2 CENTS WORTH : This article to show the importance of USA and how India must hedge its bet in the Great Game. The villain is not USA, it is PAKISTAN. Pakistan attacked because it wanted to. Pakistan's aims and designs on India remain the same - To bleed India by 1000 cuts and use home grown "jehadis" for terrorism. Mumbai attacks have opened an avenue for Indian military action - let us not shy away from this moment. CARPE DIEM - SIEZE THE DAY. JAI HIND!



(CLICK ON THE MAP FOR AN ENLARGED VIEW). This map is drawn by an American, so please excuse their lack of knowledge of the map of J&K. If I were to remove this map, on the basis of this serious error, I will not be able to present their plans to you - the detailed NATO bases. Also you will have noticed the derogatory term used "hillbillies" which connotes to people who dwell in remote "mountainous" areas. (earlier referred to American Indian tribes of Appalachia and Ozarks).
 

ajtr

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The phrase "New World Order" is generally used to refer to the emergence of an international political system dominated by western elites, under which individual nations will lose much of their sovereignty.

One of the first questions that usually arises is whether this is just an "internet conspiracy theory". Well, it is a conspiracy, but it is very much a reality.

Let us take a look at some credible sources that discuss this -

First, here are some excerpts from Carroll Quigley's book "Tragedy and Hope", Macmillan, 1966. Quigley (1910-1977) was a Professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and was a mentor of Bill Clinton:

There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network ... has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists ... and frequently does so.

...there grew up in the twentieth century a power structure between London and New York which penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and the practice of foreign policy.

I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments.

They were gracious and cultured gentlemen .... who were largely responsible for the partitions of Ireland, Palestine, and India, as well as the federations of South Africa, Central Africa, and the West Indies.
Quigley recounts how the American people have been thoroughly confused and ineffective in dealing with this Syndicate:

...the relationship between the financial circles of London and those of the eastern United States ... reflects one of the most powerful influences in twentieth-century American and world history. The two ends of this English-speaking axis have sometimes been called, perhaps facetiously, the English and American Establishments. There is, however, a considerable degree of truth behind the joke, a truth which reflects a very real power structure. It is this power structure which the Radical Right in the United States has been attacking for years in the belief that they are attacking the Communism. This is particularly true when these attacks are directed, as they so frequently are at "Harvard Socialism," or at "Left-wing newspapers" like The New York Times and the Washington Post, or at foundations and their dependent establishments, such as the Institute of International Education.

These misdirected attacks by the Radical Right did much to confuse the American people in the period 1948-1955, and left consequences which were still significant a decade later. By the end of 1953, most of these attacks had run their course. The American people, thoroughly bewildered at widespread charges of twenty years of treason and subversion, had rejected the Democrats and put into the White House the Republican Party's traditional favorite, a war hero, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Qiugley also mentions some of the over-ground fronts utilized by this Syndicate:

At the end of the war of 1914, it became clear that the organization of this system had to be greatly extended ... This front organization [was] called the Royal Institute of International Affairs [aka "Chatham House"].... In New York it was known as the Council on Foreign Relations ...
Now, the Syndicate has very little respect for democracy. Quigley explains how the Syndicate intends to operate -

to allow an alternation of ... two parties in public office in order to conceal their own influence, inhibit any exhibition of independence of politicians, and allow the electorate to believe that they were exercising their own free choice.
...
Hopefully, the elements of choice and freedom may survive for the ordinary individual in that he may be free to make a choice between two opposing political groups (even if these groups have little policy choice within the parameters of policy established by the experts) and he may have the choice to switch his economic support from one large unit to another. But, in general, his freedom and choice will be controlled within the very narrow alternatives ...
Quigley also talks about the end-goal of the Syndicate:

The powers of financial capitalism had [a] far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands, able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences (p. 324)
This ties in with an older quote from historian Arnold Toynbee, who it appears was part of the syndicate:

I will merely repeat that we are at present working, discreetly but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious political force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands, because to impugn the sovereignty of the local national states of the world is still a heresy for which a statesman or a publicist can be — perhaps not quite burnt at the stake, but certainly ostracized and discredited"

- Arnold J. Toynbee, "The Trend of International Affairs Since the War," International Affairs, November 1931, p. 809
Apparently the Syndicate has pretty much controlled the US since the late 19th century, as this quote from FDR suggests:

The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a letter written to Colonel E. Mandell House
(It appears that Lincoln was trying to be independent of the Syndicate, which was one of the hidden causes of the Civil War, and his assassination. We may explore this history later in this thread.)

**comments courtesy Pranav@BR.
 

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