Global News Journal

from Afghan Journal:

U.S. mid-terms and the Afghan war

It's one of the biggest weeks in U.S. politics, with the mid-term elections to the Senate and the House of Representatives, and it may well eventually impact the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, even though it's not been a campaign issue. If the Republicans win big, as everyone expects them to, what happens to President Barack Obama's war strategy for the two countries, increasingly operating as two full-fledged theatres, rather than a conjoined Af-Pak mission?

Max Boot at the Council on Foreign Relations says given the Republicans' solid support for the war in Afghanistan, a defeat may not be such a bad thing for Obama so far as his Afghan mission is concerned in the near term. Support and funding for the war could be enhanced if they gained control, which may not be the case if the Democrats, who have serious doubts about the mission, were to return. Big Republican gains will also signal to Afghanistan and Pakistan that America remained serious and committed to the region, despite a deteriorating security environment on both sides of the Durand Line.

Indeed the one big reason why the war hasn't made it as a campaign issue is because of the schisms it has opened in the two parties. Democrats are silent because many oppose the war but don't want to run on an anti-Obama platform. Most Republicans, on the other hand, support the war but now find themselves uncomfortably aligned with a Democratic president whose every other policy they are bitterly opposed to.

But this may not be the situation for long. First off, carrying the argument further,  many Republicans who support Obama's decision to send additional troops don't like the idea of setting out  a withdrawal date as the president did when announcing the surge.  They argue that the July 2011 deadline for the withdrawal of troops to begin sends the wrong signals to U.S. partners in the region who question Washington's commitment, as well as further emboldens the insurgents to simply wait out the U.S. departure from the region. They are also more likely, reflexively, to oppose any truck with the Taliban; certainly not at this point when the insurgency is at its strongest. They would rather General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. and NATO forces, were given more time to pound the militants into coming to the negotiating table.  As Politico blog says :

For starters, Republicans would almost surely press President Barack Obama to loosen the July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, as well as seek assurances that he would be willing to send in more troops if Gen. David Petraeus, his commander there, asks for them.

It quotes Republican strategist John Ullyot, a former staffer of the Armed Services Committee , as saying that putting deadlines on the mission is going to be a lot tougher to defend in a beefed-up Republican congress. “There is no question there will be a lot more pressure on the administration to give commanders as much time as they need; the summer deadline is going to be huge.”

Already, the administration has been insisting that no high-level talks with the insurgents are going on. On Friday, Richard Holbrooke, the special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said while more Taliban foot soldiers were coming forward to lay down their arms, reports of peace talks were overblown. Official sources, though, say all parties in the conflict are considering ways to reach a political settlement, and have described cautious preliminary contacts between the Taliban and the U.S.-backed Afghan government.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Will Obama refer to Kashmir in public in India?

Will President Barack Obama make some public remarks on Kashmir during his trip to India next month?

At a White House press briefing, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes refused to be pinned down on specifics,  beyond saying that the United States would continue to express support for India and Pakistan to pursue talks.

"I wouldn’t -- I don't want to get into prefacing with precision what his comments are, in part because he’ll be answering a lot of questions there in the town hall and press conference and we haven’t -- we’re still working through his remarks on certain things," he said.

Yet it is a question that cannot -- and will not -- be left to chance.

Indian is deeply sensitive about foreign visitors talking about Kashmir -- as British foreign ministers have learned to their cost on earlier trips. It regards Kashmir as an integral part of India and refuses even to recognise the territory at the heart of more than 60 years of enmity with Pakistan as disputed. Moreover, it has consistently rejected outside interference, saying that its disputes with Pakistan must be settled bilaterally.

Obama, who raised hackles in India during his presidential election campaign by suggesting the Washington should try to help resolve the Kashmir dispute, is hoping to use the trip to help U.S. business tap into India's growing economy. With a flagging economy at home, he cannot afford to offend his hosts.

But at the same time, the biggest foreign policy challenge of his administration is over how to deal with Afghanistan and Pakistan.  The war in Afghanistan cannot be ended without Pakistan's help. And Pakistan itself faces serious instability -- potentially a much bigger worry than Afghanistan with its 180 million people and nuclear bombs. Pakistan's identity in turn is intimately bound up with India - its past support for Islamist militants was driven by its belief that this was the only way to neutralise the influence of its much bigger neighbour both in Kashmir and in Afghanistan.  Depending on who you listen to, it either will not, or can not, tackle Islamist militants based in Pakistan without a peace settlement with India, including on Kashmir.

from Tales from the Trail:

Green energy aspirations for Obama’s India visit

When Barack Obama heads for India next month, he'll be carrying a heavy policy agenda -- questions over the handling of nuclear material, the outsourcing of U.S. jobs and India's status as a growing economic power, along with regional relations with Pakistan and Afghanistan. But Rajendra Pachauri, the Nobel Peace laureate who heads the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, hopes the U.S. president has time to focus on clean energy too.

Even as Pachauri and the U.N. panel evolve -- and as Pachauri himself weathers pressure from some quarters to resign -- he urged Obama to work on U.S.-India projects that he said would enhance global energy security.

Given India's red-hot economic growth rate -- 8 or 9 percent a year, Pachauri told reporters during a telephone briefing -- he said it makes sense for the United States to work with India to head off an expected soaring demand for fossil fuels.

Over the next two decades, Pachauri said, "If we continue on a business-as-usual path, India will be importing something like 750 million tons (that's about 5.25 million barrels) of oil a year ... and possibly over 1,000 million tons of coal. So I think India has to make some very radical shifts and bring about a movement towards cleaner energy technology."

While the two countries have launched a few initial programs in this area, Pachauri acknowledged that "nothing of great substance has been achieved so far." Obama's passage to India could change that, he said on the call, which was set up by the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council.

Areas ripe for cooperation include collaborative research and development in new areas of energy technology, as well as "a much more liberal approach" to investments in clean energy technology, Pachauri said.

Low interest financing for Indian clean energy projects, including large-scale solar projects in the Indian states of Rajasthan and Gujarat, would also be welcome, he said.

from Tales from the Trail:

Clinton sees diplomats of the future in cargo pants as well as pinstripes

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has urged Congress to finance a major new U.S. push on overseas development aid, arguing that only by building up a global middle class will the United States increase its own national security.

Clinton, in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine which previews a pending State Department report on diplomacy and development, says it is essential for Congress to keep the money flowing even as the United States grapples with its own financial problems at home.

"The American people must understand that spending taxpayer dollars on diplomacy and development is in their interest," Clinton wrote, saying it was time to put to rest "old debates on foreign aid."

"It is time to move beyond the past and to recognize diplomacy and development as national security priorities and smart investments in the United States' future stability and security," Clinton said. "These missions can succeed, but only with the necessary congressional leadership and support. Congress must provide the necessary funding now."

Clinton's article comes ahead of the expected release of the State Department's first Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), a study launched in July 2009 which aims to set the framework for how U.S. diplomacy and overseas aid efforts will work together in coming years.

As with so many things in Washington, it will essentially be a plea for more money -- a sore spot for Clinton, who frequently contrasts the relative ease the Pentagon has in pushing funding requests through with the much tougher sell she must make for diplomatic and development projects.

from Reuters Investigates:

Inside the Pirates’ Web

Reuters trade correspondent in Washington Doug Palmer had an unusual assignment: buy a fake Louis Vuitton handbag on the Internet, and take it to a LVMH store for a comparison test, before handing it over to U.S. authorities.

    What was startling was how easy it was to find websites selling a dazzling array of stuff online. This is the new face of piracy and its costing businesses billions.   No need to skulk around back alleys or some pirate's rental van to browse through footwear, watches, DVDs and whatnot. Just pick out your LV shoulder tote from a virtual catalog on a website based in China. It looks and feels like the real thing at a fraction of the price.

Counterfeit goods ranging from shoes to software seized by the U.S. government  on display at the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center in northern Virginia, October 7, 2010.  REUTERS/Jason Reed  

    The bulk of these goods comes from China. The workshop of the world is also the sweatshop oif the world when it comes to making fake goods.

    Reuters Shanghai correspondent Melanie Lee and a photographer accompanied a private investigator to grubby neighbourhoods around Guangzhou to find the leather workshops that make these fake bags. She saw mothers and daughters through the windows working the leather, and young toughs outside serving as lookouts. Chinese authorities occasionally do raid these places, which are often run by triad gangs. Photographer Tyrone Siu stealthily took photos with his iPhone.

 Melanie and her PI then followed the trail of the fake handbags to an illegal market a few miles away. The Baiyun wholesale market, occupying a space equivalent to five football fields, is the biggest market for leather goods in the world. Much of the merchandise is counterfeit.

    The market is occasionally raided -- including the day they went. But the shopkeepers are used to it. It's like the Whack a Mole game. As fast as you can hammer down one operation, another one pops up somewhere else.

Numbed by Ciudad Juarez’s endless killings, Mexico shrugs off teen party deaths

The people of Ciudad Juarez are starting to lose all hope. When gunmen burst into a birthday party on Friday and killed 14 people, the horrific act should have at least shocked Mexican authorities into action. But even the sight of blood running out of a suburban patio, the broken chairs and the party-goers’ bodies slumped on the concrete have become all too familiar in the desert city across from El Paso, Texas.

It was at the start of 2010 that another, gruesomely similar shooting was warning enough that the city was spiraling toward criminal anarchy.

In January in a working class neighborhood just blocks away from Friday’s shooting, gunmen killed 15 people, again mainly teenagers, at a party. Back then, just like on Friday, a nearby federal police checkpoint seemed to turn a blind eye to what was going on and did nothing to stop the killers.

At the very least in January, the mother of one of the slain teenagers had the chance to vent her anger in person at Felipe Calderon, the conservative president who launched Mexico’s drug war four years ago. The Mexican leader was sufficiently moved by the January killings to fly to Ciudad Juarez and there, amid national outrage, he announced a plan to rebuild the broken, dirty mess of the city that was once lauded as a poster child for free trade, with its factories producing fridges and television for U.S. consumers.

Poverty, joblessness and a lack of a future for the young, it was rightly said, were the sources of much of the drug gang warfare that has broken out in Ciudad Juarez since 2008.

That reconstruction has included thousands of education grants, parks and community centers, hospital beds and giving almost 140,000 more people access to free medical care. There is even a sports field dedicated to the teenagers killed in January. But most of the streets of Ciudad Juarez are still folorn and many in the downtown that once catered to free-wheeling American tourists are filled with crumbling buildings. Childrens’ playgrounds lie abandoned, covered with graffiti. Killers are still at large.

Residents say that after eight months, a new federal police operation to fight drug gangs, and hundreds more murders, Calderon’s plan has failed. It’s hard to disagree.

from Afghan Journal:

Obama in India next month; ripples in the region

U.S. President Barack Obama's visit to India is still a couple of weeks away and there is the huge U.S. election before then, but it has already set off ripples in the region. The Chinese have especially cottoned onto Obama's Indian journey, fretting over what they see as a U.S. attempt to ring fence China by deepening ties with countries around it. And continent-size India with a population of over a billion and an economy growing at a clip just behind China's is seen as a key element of that strategy of containment.

Qui Hao of the National Defense University, writes in the Global Times that while U.S. military alliances with Japan and South Korea form the backbone of the "strategic fence" around China, the "shell" is the partnership that Washington is building with India, Vietnam and other nations that have territorial disputes with China.

India, Qui cautions, would do well not to blindly follow America's policies in the region, especially if it really wanted to be a global player. India, China and the United States were bound up in a triangular relationship, and as the two weaker parts of that relationship, it was important that they maintained stable ties so that Washington didn't exploit their differences, Qui wrote.

Quite remarkable, since for decades and especially so in recent years, the Chinese have hardly seen India as little more than a regional player locked in disputes with its neighbours, much less an equal in a three-way relationship involving the United States.

Qui is not alone. Du Youkang who heads the center for South Asian studies at Fudan University said the rise of India and China was the 21st century's biggest development, and both countries must work to deepen ties. Some Western countries and the media were trying to drive a wedge between the two neighbours , Du said in the China Daily, urging both to be vigilant against elements inside their countries and outside trying to stir trouble and derail a growing relationship. There was much that was common between the two countries, not least their desire to meet the challenges  globalisation in  a Western-dominated international  economic  system.

China and India share a lot of common views on many major international issues such as a multi-polar world, reform of the international economic and financial system, South-North relations, democratization of international relations, climate change and World Trade Organization talks. In recent years, the two sides have enhanced coordination and cooperation over these issues to protect their as well as the entire developing world's interests.

China is not the only one watching Obama's passage to India. Arch rival Pakistan will be closely following the trip, beginning from Mumbai and indeed the very hotel which was one of the centres targeted by Pakistan-based militants in deadly attacks in 2008.  Pakistan, and by extension Afghanistan, will by themselves be the elephants in the room when Obama sits down for talks with his Indian hosts. Any tilt, or a perceived slight or remarks such as the one made by British Prime Minister David Cameron when he was visiting India, saying Pakistan couldn't look both ways in the fight against terrorism, run the risk of further souring U.S.-Pakistan ties.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

“Orientalism” in Afghanistan and Pakistan

In his must-read essay on the debate about the state of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, Amil Khan has one of the best opening lines I've seen for a while: "Much is said about Pakistan, but I'm constantly saddened that so many innocent pixels are lost without good cause."

Much the same can be said about the recent flurry of stories on the war in Afghanistan, from upbeat assessments of the U.S.-led military offensive in Kandahar to renewed interest in the prospects for a peace deal with Afghan insurgents.

There is a shade of "Orientalism" in all this, a modern-day equivalent of Edward Said's 1978 argument that the collective understanding of the Middle East, South Asia and Islam was skewed by the vested interests of European colonial powers.

Scroll forward to the 21st century and we have the United States keen to end a war that is increasingly unpopular at home, with a president who has committed to starting to bring home troops by July 2011.   That framework would be best suited by military success in Afghanistan, peace talks which would begin to show fruit by - let's choose a random date, July 2011 - and a willingness by Pakistan to stick to the U.S. timetable when it comes to tackling militants on its own territory.

Hence the "received wisdom" in the media - or perhaps more precisely, the consensus you would find if you averaged out all the stories on Google News - tends to fit neatly into that framework. 

The problem is that just as Said complained the "Orientalist" world view distorted the facts to suit European interests, the current U.S.-inspired narrative tends to overlook the very real people and countries which get in the way of its own deadlines.

Start with Afghanistan.  We have heard from non-U.S. sources that all insurgent groups are engaged in tentative "talks about talks" to try to agree the ground rules under which all Afghan factions could be brought together into "reconciliation" talks. The United States and NATO have meanwhile been talking up a separate effort  to win over individual insurgent fighters or commanders through "reintegration".

Adios to Mexico’s marijuana haul

The black smoke could be seen across Tijuana as Mexico’s biggest-ever marijuana haul went up in flames.

The equivalent of more than 250 million joints were soaked in gasoline and set on fire, with the smell of the drug soon overpowering the acrid smell of the fuel.

It took soldiers 10 hours to assemble all the bales for incineration, 134 tonnes in all, wrapped in packets all marked for their respective U.S. dealers, including some with Homer Simpson logos. They were seized across the city in homes and trucks, a public relations victory of sorts for President Felipe Calderon and his drug war. 

The marijuana took two days to burn.

Still, private estimates put Mexico’s annual marijuana production at 7,000 tonnes, so there are either going to be a lot more bonfires, or, more likely, a lot smoke ups north of the border still to come.

from Environment Forum:

Backyard tigers

Would you keep a tiger as a pet?

A puppy-sized tiger cub can be bought in the United States for as little as $200, and there are probably about 5,000 such backyard tigers across the country, about the same number of privately owned tigers in China, according to World Wildlife Fund.

That is far greater than the approximately 3,200 wild tigers worldwide, compared to the estimated 100,000 wild tigers a century ago. The growing number of these animals in captivity poses a threat to the species in the wild, WWF reports.

"People don't realize when they buy a $200 tiger cub that it grows into a full-grown tiger, which means a huge enclosure and costs about $5000 a year just to feed," says Leigh Henry, an animal conservation expert at WWF. "So you end up with a lot of unwanted animals that are very poorly regulated."

These unwanted animals are a potent lure to poachers, who can use parts and products from these backyard tigers to sell on the lucrative black market. Because many of these beasts are untraceable -- it can be tougher to adopt a dog from a U.S. animal shelter than to sell a privately owned tiger -- many wind up in Asia, where tiger parts and products are used in traditional medicine.

The trade in these unwanted privately owned tigers can threaten wild tigers by feeding the market, Henry says.

Wild tigers are preferred for traditional medicine, but poached privately owned tigers are much cheaper. As long as any tigers are filtering into this market, wild ones are under pressure -- and not just from poachers, according to Henry. Their natural habitat is being destroyed by logging and agriculture, and humans are moving into areas where tigers used to live.