Pakistan Flood - possibilities unlimited

The flood and forecasted disaster series look and sound menacing enough for everyone to understand that Pakistan is going through a rough patch. While both the Government (a little late) and NGO have stepped in to provide aid to their best effort, what might have been relatively easier and a routine task a few years ago is taking a significant effort now because of Pakistan’s impression on a big chunk of the world as a nation that misuses aid to sponsor Islamic terrorism – a post-modern world boomerang. But aids are trickling nonetheless and groups are at work. And that’s where a major drama is probably unfolding.

The majority view is that Pak Govt responded late to the flood victims. That bit is actually true. Mr. Zardari was paying visits to delegates in Europe’s fine palatial buildings while citizens were drowning back home. Some one had to act, and the Army stepped in. Now the Islamists have followed their suit. They have actively augmented whatever little rescue operations they could muster, as the govt has kept cribbing about the broken bridges and uprooted rail lines. By the time Mr. Zardari had enough minutes in his hands to grace the disaster sites - the rescue work, official and unofficial had started rolling.

There is indeed a humanitarian angle to any rescue that is undertaken in any calamity affected area, and Indus River banks ideally should have been no exception. However with Pakistan’s history of incompetent governance throughout has made way for two crucial elements into the folds of social network of that country – the Islamic Fundamentalists and the Army, and post that, no angle can ever be ‘only humanitarian’ in Pakistan. There are lot of mileages to be gained among Pakistani people. And any agency, Army or Religious, would want to capitalize this ‘relief operation’ to their advantage.

To cut straight to the point, this might be an Allah sent chance for the Military-ISI-Taliban structure to step in more permanently and oust the civilian govt. And if that happens, Pakistani people would not entirely unhappily come to terms with the fact that a civil govt is no good for them. The ghost of Zia ul Haq and the very much alive Parvez Musharraf will be smirking through their respective moustaches, but that is not the point. The Military/Taliban in power will have a series of milestones to achieve immediately afterwards.

First, they will probably move to kick out the ‘kebab-seller’ of Kabul Hamid Karzai from his chair, or better still, force him to invite and re-establish Taliban rule there. And it is not the Afghan Taliban that rules the house these days, it is Pakistan’s very own Quetta Shura Taliban – a big home brewed bonus.

What would USA do? The first option might antagonize them, but the second one is going to be a sure shot hit, given the dual love Obama has for the good kebab-seller and ‘good’ Taliban. He wants a favourable status-quo in his FakAp (or AfPak) and so h would get one – and US would remain happy as long as the Talibans stone their own women, screw their own camels and basically mind their own business – and let Uncle Sam build a few bases to keep an eye on Iran, and also build the much awaited billion dollar money churner for future – TAPI or the Trans Afghanistan Pipeline.

Given such a probability turns real, it would be all smiles back in Islamabad as Pakistan would finally regain their ‘strategic depth’ over India by establishing full control over Afghanistan. And while the Sunni world of UAE, KSA and brotherhood would hail the new success mantra, India would keep cribbing - something that a largely senile Delhi (irrespective of whoever is in power) has mastered over the years.

Only two caveats in this whole hunky dory ‘and they lived happily for a long time after’ situation are China and Iran. China, with its overall above average relationship with Pakistan, and with its mining interest in AfPak province might not see a US/Pakistan alliance settle in Afghanistan too favourably. On a normal day, China would want Pakistan to be a member of SCO, and the dual character that Pakistan has, it would want its hand in that cookie jar too. But it has US dollars in mind. The flood, crumbling economy, poverty, lack of infrastructure, poor health, all are for real, never mind the ‘war on terror’, and never mind where IMF/World Bank alms eventually disappear – no one is baptised in fire these days. And that begging for billions won’t be possible if it joined SCO. Back in China, they might feel cheated.

Iran has been feeling really confident so far with US troops nearly ready to move out of Iraq. They have a respectable Shia presence in Iraq to spoil a stable govt if/when they want – the result of a US killing spree of Baathist Sunni population. Iran has been rationally dreaming of a Finlandization of Iraq in the long run. With Iraq looking loosened from American grip, with Iran’s own civilian nuclear programme, with Caspian Basin gas-reserve, and among a list of other things - with their support extended to the anti-Taliban Tajik based Northern Alliance fighters in Afghanistan – Iran is already advance-savouring the taste of becoming the largest geopolitical power in Middle East. They wouldnt react nicely if someone threw flood-mud on their plate.

If Taliban comes to power in Afghanistan, one side of Iran might become vulnerable. If ‘good’ Taliban and USA become friends again, in celebration of the memory of a USSR bashing on Hindu-Kush or for whatever reasons – Iran would not only have a Taliban at its eastern flank, but also US presence in their ranks. This they will not take lightly.

A possibility of a China feeling cheated and an Iran promoting a round of Civil War in Afghanistan might not be the best state of affairs for Pakistan. But this nation has made tightrope walking a habit for over the past 60 years. And the world knows that they have a damn good balancing sense.

There is a second scenario – a distinct possibility of Army not ascending to power right away but scoring enough brownie points from the crisis. In that case, majority of them aiding to a population rescue mission will have the NWFP, Waziristan and even Balochistan thrown wide open, to be reclaimed by al Qaeda, Taliban, Haqqani Network or whatever other insurgent groups are there. Relief money would flow in and would religiously get scattered and lost in the bureaucratic maze. The elites would keep paying lip service while impoverished sectors would remain sick and become more pro-Isamist in nature. More foreign aids would come and eventually disappear – in reverence to Pakistani tradition. More Deobandi Madrassas will dot the landscape. More number of orphans will be recruited for the causes of jihad.

The second part of Obama’s AfPak would also become unstable thus, and this will throw the Eurasia equation off balance once again. Unstable Af, insurgent and anti-USA Pak – that can only mean another protracted war, billions of dollars to the dogs, hostile public opinion back home, with no guarantee on the gas pipelines or mining rights. The White House armchair neo-cons won’t want that. The way out then? Step in and re-establish the Army and promote the ‘good’ Taliban cause in Kabul.

The way this flood issue stands now, the Army might choose to end the civilian govt themselves, or might wait for USA to do the honours. Either way, it is a win-win game for them.

FRIENDS OF Uncle Sam

Stalin – Mega-murderer, USSR
Pol Pot – Chief Architect of Cambodian massacre
Shah Reza Pahlavi – Dictator, Iran
King Abdullah – Dictator, Saudi Arabia
Nursultan Nazarbayev – Dictator, Kazakhstan
Alesandri – Chief Architect – Chilean crisis
Anastasio Somoza – Guatemalan Gangster
Rios Montt – Genocidal President, Guatemala
Vilbrun Sam – Dictator, Haiti
Heydar Aliyev/Ilham Aliyev – Dictator Dynasty of Azerbaijan
Islam Karimov – Dictator, Uzbekistan
Jalaluddin / Sirajuddin Haqqani – Terrorist
Osama bin Laden – Terrorist
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar – Terrorist
Saddam Hussain – Dictator
Nour al Maliki – Puppet in Iraq
Hamid Karzai – Kebab Seller from USA, now President, Afghanistan
Taliban/Hizbul Mujaheedin – Terrorist Outfit
Gen Zia ul Haq – Dictator, Islamist, Pakistan
ISI – Brother-in-arms in ravaging Central Asia

‘War against terror’.... now, ain’t THAT funny?

Guys, I might have missed on a few scores... please feel free to add on.

Thy Cycle of Conflict

The folliwng's been edited by me - it is another person's work altogether.


Globalization is like Poe’s maelstrom. A black void, rather. No one can escape it.
And we don’t know how it ends.

What we do know is that it has nothing to do with an “invisible hand.” It has to do with maximization of profit; a huge concentration of capital; and the unrestricted power of monopolies. German cross‐cultural scholar Horst Kurnitzky tells us globalization has configured “a new world, in which wealth and poverty, with no control by markets or the flux of cash, coexist with no form of social equality.” So it’s not globalization per se, but greed (that classic Christian sin…) and high concentration of capital that are responsible, in Kurnitzky’s formulation, for “the uniformization and cultural and real impoverishment of the world.”

Wallerstein defines our economy, also known as the capitalist world economy, as “a historic system which has combined an axial division of labour integrated by means of a world market less than perfect in its autonomy, combined with an interstate system composed of presumed sovereign States, a geoculture that has legitimized a scientific ethos as the basis of economic transformations and the extraction of profit, and liberal reformism as the way to contain popular discontent with the continuous socioeconomic polarization caused by capitalist development.”

Inevitably, the stage is set for conflict if not mayhem. Wallerstein identifies for the next decades three geopolitical faults we will have to confront. Out of which, the most relevant as on date stands out as -

“The struggle among the Triad—U.S., E.U. and Japan—over which will be the main stage of accumulation of capital in the next decades.” The third pole of the
Triad– Japan, for Wallerstein—should rather be considered as “East Asia,” with an emphasis on China.

Wallerstein reminds us that the concept of Triad became popular in the 1970s — with its first institutional expression via the Trilateral Commission, which was “a political effort to reduce the emerging tensions between the three members of the Triad” (Chinese gangs happened to become globally popular at the same time). This has happened after what Wallerstein describes as “a phase A of the Kondratiev cycle from 1940‐1945 to 1967‐1973”: euphoria over the fabulous expansion of the world economy, Baby Boom heaven, Elvis, the Beatles, a beautiful house, a beautiful kitchen full of appliances and a red convertible. The next 30 years were “a phase B in the Kondratiev cycle,” where speculation became the name of the game, unemployment exploded and there was “an acute acceleration of economic polarization at the global level as well as inside States.”

In the early 1920s Nikolai Dmitrievich Kondratiev was the very talented director of the Moscow Institute of Economic Investigations. In 1922 he coined his legendary theory of the “long waves” which not only explains but also previews the sweeping flow of History. Kondratiev ended his days in misery in a Stalinist gulag in Siberia. But his reputation as an economic guru survived him. Nowadays everyone from right to left to all points centre invoke Kondratiev to justify the capitalism system forever surfing History in a succession of “long waves.”

Trotsky was one who didn’t fall for it—as Alan Woods impeccably summarized in a post on www.trotsky.net. Trotsky always mocked robotic Marxists who rhapsodized about “the final crisis of capitalism.” But he also could not agree with the Kondratiev assumption that the “unseen hand of the market” would always intervene to restore the equilibrium of capitalism between one wave and the next.

Trotsky accepted there were economic oscillations. But he denied they were cyclical. Trotsky did see History as a series of phases; but all of these phases had different booms and busts, related to different, specific causes. In a famous speech at the Third Congress of the Comintern in 1922, Trotsky stressed how “capitalism establishes [an]equilibrium, disturbs it, then re‐establishes it only to break it again, at the same time as it extends the limits of its dominion… Capitalism possesses a dynamic equilibrium which is always in a process of breakdown and recovery.”

The way Wallerstein himself examines what’s been happening inside the Triad seems to privilege Trotsky’s intuition over Kondratiev’s. Wallerstein’s point is that for the members of the Triad, roughly Europe got the better out of the 1970s, Japan out of the 1980s and the U.S. out of the 1990s. “Under the supposition that this long phase B of the Kondratiev cycle will reach its end,” Wallerstein wonders which pole of the Triad will jump ahead. That is, which will better survive the current Wrecker’s Ball. The winning player will be the one who sets his priorities in terms of investment in research and development, and thus on innovation; and who best organizes “the ability of the superior strata to control the access to consumable wealth.” Les jeux sont faits. If this was Vegas, one might suspect that the house was betting on East Asia.

Imbalance and inequality are the names of the game. Trade in goods and services are a virtual monopoly of the Triad—North America, the E.U. and North Asia. This has increased the tension—bordering on open war—between the U.S. and the E.U. on, for instance, civil aerospace, agriculture subsidies or genetically modified organisms. So the Triad does not operate like a unified cartel: there is fierce internal competition. The Triad concentrates no less than 70% of the wealth of the planet.

Africa is on the other end of the spectrum. Africa’s exports were 4% of the global total in the early 1980s; they had fallen to 1.5% by 2003. And then there’s trade as a weapon; if a country falls foul of the great powers, a commercial embargo—shut up and don’t trade!—is the weapon of choice (even though other countries always manage to sneak around them). The East to West financial market flux—Tokyo, Frankfurt, Paris, London, Wall Street—is a given. As for the human flux as well as the info flux of ideas, they should be increasing in all directions—but the flow still privileges the Triad. “The end of geography” and, in theory, political borders should have led—according to globalization cheerleaders—to a new configuration of the world population and a better division of wealth. Reality proves otherwise.

Flux is not a congregation of random electrons. Flux needs controlling engines — thus the criss‐crossing networks and companies articulated with the finance, insurance, innovation, counselling, publicity and security industries. Only megalopolises can function as the ideal providers for all these industries. And this of course increases their seduction appeal. Since 2005 more than 3 billion people— half of the global population—are urban. So the globalization flow is leading to increased concentration, not dispersion. The real world centres of economic and political power are networked cities monopolizing economic, financial and political flux.

We can identify 3 main nodes—all of them interlinked, of course.
Node 1—New York/Boston/Philadelphia/Washington, linked to “secondary” L.A., Mexico City and Sao Paulo.
Node 2—London/Paris/Frankfurt/Milan, linked to “secondary” Moscow, Dubai, Lagos and Johannesburg.
Node 3—Tokyo/Osaka—linked to “secondary” Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sydney.

R&D remains strictly a Triad affair. Less than 1% of patents come from outside the Triad. There is of course the odd foreign hub of technology and research like Bangalore. But as multinational corporations increase the amount of patents they register in the U.S. from overseas branches that gives a false impression of globalization of innovation. Technological innovation in a tectronic‐mad world originates from less than 20 countries—accounting for 15% of the global population. Although China and India are mounting challenges to the Triad’s R&D supremacy, for now the Triad (including Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Israel) still “reigns,” in Ezra Pound’s words.

The North maintains this structure by means of its monopoly of advanced productive processes, control over the world financial institutions, dominance over knowledge and information media at a global level, and what is most important, by means of military power.” Essentially, the North still brandishes an Iron Fist even though sometimes enveloped by a sexy, red velvet glove.

So the mantra that everyone equally profits from globalization is a myth. Further fragmentation flows through internal borders—like between coastal China and the countryside; south India and the rest of the country; Mexico and the southern Indian states; or southeast Brazil and the rest of the country. Niches prevail—like Silicon Valley, with 2 million people and a GNP bigger than Chile’s. The internet may represent the most glaring metaphor of inequality. By 2005, 1 billion people were connected—less than 15% of the world’s population, a figure that confronted with 3 billion people barely surviving on less than US$ 2 a day, and 5 out of 6 billion people living on only 20% of global GDP, spells out that the world economy can function just fine serving only 20% of the world’s population, that is, virtually the ones who are connected. As for the others, the harsh conclusion is inevitable: they are expendable. Forever.