India is piling on the diplomatic pressure to convince the international community to lean on Pakistan to crack down on Islamist militants blamed by New Delhi for the Mumbai attacks.

According to the Times of India, "India has made it clear to the U.S. and Iran as well as Pakistan's key allies, China and Saudi Arabia, that they need to do more to use their clout to pressure Pakistan into acting..." The Press Trust of India (PTI), quoted by The Hindu, said India had used a visit by Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal to Delhi to drive home the same message.

As discussed previously on this blog, in the immediate aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, India's response was to look to the United States to put pressure on Pakistan. It also appears to have won some support from Russia, whose officials said publicly that the attacks were funded by Dawood Ibrahim, an underworld don who India says lives in Pakistan. China, Pakistan's traditional ally, supported the United Nations Security Council in  blacklisting the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the charity accused of being a front for the Lashkar-e-Taiba.  China's Foreign Minister has also telephoned his counterparts in India and Pakistan urging dialogue, according to Xinhua. 

And to complete the tour of the permanent members of the Security Council, Britain blamed Pakistan-based militants for the Mumbai attacks, while France has also called on Pakistan to take action.

That's a fairly broad consensus in favour of diplomatic pressure. There certainly seem to be more players more visibly involved than in 2001/2002 when India and Pakistan came to the brink of war over an attack on the Indian parliament that India blamed on Pakistan-based militants. You might therefore be tempted to argue that the diplomatic approach is working -- and as long as this stands a chance, the prospects of military escalation are slim.

So what is going wrong? Despite the flurry of diplomatic activity, the military tensions are rising.  Pakistan has cancelled army leave and redeployed troops.  The Washington Post said thousands of troops were being redeployed from the Afghan border to the border with India.

Are the two countries' armies simply making sure they are prepared, just in case the diplomatic efforts fail? Or is there more going on behind-the-scenes?

BASRA - It may not be the end-game Britain was hoping for when it ventured into Iraq, but it’s the end of the game nonetheless.

By the end of next May, almost exactly six years after 42,000 British troops joined the U.S.-led invasion and overthrew Saddam Hussein, Prime Minister Gordon Brown says Britain’s remaining 4,100 troops will be out of Iraq and his country’s role in the war over.

The overwhelming question, after 2,200 days of conflict and 178 soldiers killed, not to mention the thousands seriously wounded and the vast sums of money expended, is clearly: was it all worth it in the end?

Brown, who inherited the conflict from his predecessor Tony Blair and has never been entirely comfortable with taking on the mantle of ‘conquering commander-in-chief’, has been at pains to say it was, and spent Wednesday reiterating that point.

Making his fourth trip to Iraq as prime minister, Brown emphasised the training Britain’s troops had provided in Basra and the southern region, helping put 42,000 Iraqi police and soldiers onto the streets to maintain security for themselves.

Insurgent groups in and around Basra, a vital oil hub that at one stage looked liked falling into the hands of the Shi’ite militia known as the Mehdi Army, have been defeated, Brown said.

And as well as plans for another round of provincial elections at the end of January — a sign that democracy is taking root — the economy in the south is showing steady signs of growth, with inflation sharply down, oil exports up and the port of Umm Qasr busy hauling in much-demanded foreign goods.

But compare those outcomes — which remain tentative — with what Britain (and the United States with its claims of weaons of mass destruction) set out to achieve in Iraq, and ask Iraqis what they think, and a very different picture emerges.

Six years on, Iraqis complain about the persistent lack of electricity, which in some areas has still not reached the same level it was at before the invasion. They lament the number of civilians killed in military operations, and the number of Iraqis still languishing in military prisons.

The insurgency may have died down, they say, but it always threatens to return and security on the streets of Iraq is far from guaranteed. Economically, things may be improving, but jobs are few and far between and corruption is rife. The oil wealth the country is beginning to enjoy is not widely distributed.

In terms of politics, the successful staging of national and provincial elections has given Iraqis a feel for the process of democracy, but Iraqis often say they do not feel they have benefitted from the process — politics is a power game played way above their heads with little visible trickle down.

And then there are the persistent threats of internal breakdown, with the Shi’ite majority facing off against Sunnis, the Arab population nervous of Kurdish strength, and Iraqi nationalists fearful of the growing influence of Shi’ite Iran.

Those concerns, as well as the fact that any of the gains are easily reversed, leave many Iraqis (at least in the south) deeply ambivalent about the role that Britain has played.

Come mid-2009, when the last British military convoys are likely to be pulling out of Iraq, even British diplomats admit they don’t expect Iraqis to lay on parades in their honour.

It may not quite be good riddance from Iraq, and Britain may not have to leave with its tail between its legs, but by the same token it may be difficult for the military to leave with its head held high knowing the job had been well done.

(Pool photo of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown with troops in Umm Qasr port in Iraq)

By Dan Williams

A Reuters investigation into how the Israeli domestic intelligence service Shin Bet is tackling threats from Jewish ultranationalists has raised intriguing parallels with Britain’s handling of the sectarian “troubles” in Northern Ireland.

Radical Jewish settlers who might turn to violence in a bid to wreck Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking are, increasingly, the quarry of the Shin Bet’s shadowy “Jewish Division”, whose operatives draw on a range of spying and interrogation tactics.

But a question remains over whether the Shin Bet, criticised internationally for its treatment of Palestinian suspects whose rights are limited under Israeli martial law, is less likely to get rough with Jews.

Such differential doctrines potentially recall Northern Ireland, where for decades British authorities had to tackle both Catholic republicans seeking a united Ireland and rival Protestants loyal to London.

A former top official with MI5, the British counterpart to Shin Bet, told me recently that when sectarian strife erupted in the province in the late 1960s, republicans were generally seen as the main threat to Britain, with the assumption that it was their violence that provoked loyalist counter-attacks.

Of further concern was the fact that the Provisional Irish Republican Army was targeting British targets abroad, while the loyalist paramilitaries were more localised.

“But when loyalists started, for example, buying weapons on the (British) mainland and abroad, we took that very seriously and certainly didn’t regard them as more ‘friendly’,” the MI5 veteran told me. “They were quite dreadful thugs.”

    British Foreign Secretary David Miliband hopes his Middle East trip will help nudge Syria away from supporting the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, but on a visit to Damascus he let slip that other Syrian allegiances were troubling him.

    “People on the streets wanted to talk about politics but also about football,” he told reporters after a tour in which he sampled ice cream from century-old shop in the heart of the ancient capital.

    “There were not enough Arsenal supporters and too many Manchester United supporters,” he said.

    Miliband, a keen Arsenal fan, is not shy about expressing his views on football. When Arsenal unceremoniously exited the Champions League in April after a 4-2 defeat to Liverpool, he criticised the Swedish referee on his Foreign Office blog and accused a Dutch player of faking a fall.

    But he was more conciliatory in Damascus, perhaps because of the hospitality of his Syrian hosts.

    “The ice cream was extremely good and the generosity of the ice cream store owners also extremely broad,” said Miliband, who struggled with a huge cone of ice cream served up Bekdash, which has been making the traditional pistachio variety for over a century.

    “They gave ice cream to all the delegation and also to the security guards.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel sent a clear “I told you so!” to the United States and Britain at the weekend, criticising them in unusually frank terms for resisting measures that might have contained the current financial crisis. The conservative leader of Europe’s largest economy reminded her partners that she had pushed for steps to boost the transparency of hedge funds during Germany’s presidency of the Group of Eight last year. ”We got things moving, but we didn’t get enough support, especially in the United States and Britain,” she told the Muenchner Merkur newspaper. Merkel expanded on her point in a speech in Austria, suggesting that both Washington and London were only now coming around to her view.

“It was said for a long time ‘Let the markets take care of themselves’ and that there is ‘no need for more transparency’…Today we are a step further because even America and Britain are saying ‘Yes, we need more transparency, we need better standards for the ratings agencies’.

Germany had made greater transparency a key theme of its rotating presidency of the G8, which includes the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia. Berlin had expressed fears that hedge funds could threaten the stability of the financial system through their heavy reliance on borrowing to finance risky trading strategies. But it ran into resistance from the United States and Britain, achieving little.

Whether Merkel’s G8 initiative could have averted or limited the current financial market crisis if it had been successful is certainly debatable. But reminding voters that she had sought to address the problem as early as last year could help Merkel score points on the domestic front ahead of a general election next year. Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) rule in an uneasy grand coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD), and both sides have been trying to play up their own role as crisis manager in the current financial market turmoil.

Both Merkel and her SPD finance minister, Peer Steinbrueck, have tried to take credit for Germany’s efforts last year to agree better transparency rules for financial markets. SPD budget expert Carsten Schneider praised Steinbrueck’s efforts during Germany’s G8 presidency in a newspaper interview on Monday, adding: “At the time, the United States and Britain demonised every effort to agree more transparency and rules.”

As Germany’s election approaches, the “I told you so!” Berlin seemed to send to Washington and London on the weekend could turn into an “I told you so first!”-competition between Merkel’s CDU and her SPD rivals.