Global News Journal

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Between the lines: Obama’s comments on Kashmir

President Barack Obama's words on relations with Pakistan were always going to be carefully scripted during his visit to India, where even to say the word "Kashmir"  aloud in public can raise jitters about U.S. interference in what New Delhi sees as a bilateral dispute.

So first up, here's what he had to say during a news conference in New Delhi with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in response to a question about what role the United States could play in resolving the Kashmir dispute (NDTV has the video).

"With respect to Kashmir, obviously this is a long-standing dispute between India and Pakistan; as I said yesterday, I believe that both Pakistan and India have an interest in reducing tensions between the two countries. The United States cannot impose a solution to these problems but I have indicated to Prime Minister Singh that we are happy to play any role that the parties think is appropriate in reducing these tensions. That's in the interests of the region; it is in the interests of the two countries involved and it is in the interests of the United States of America.

"So my hope is that conversations will be taking place between the two countries; they may not start on that particular flashpoint; there may be confidence building measures that need to take place, but I am absolutely convinced that it is both in India's and Pakistan's interest to reduce tensions and that will enable them I think to focus on the range of both challenges and opportunities that each country faces."

"I do want to make this point though, that I think Prime Minister Singh throughout his career and throughout his prime ministership has consistently spoken out both publicly and privately on his desire, his personal commitment to reduce tensions between India and Pakistan and for that I very much commend him. I think Prime Minister Singh is sincere and relentless in his desire for peace.  And so my hope is that both sides can, over the next several months, several years, find mechanisms that are appropriate for them to work out what are these very difficult issues."

A quick reading between the lines suggests that he is unfraid of referring to Kashmir in public and keeping it on the agenda, while also acknowledging that resolving the dispute may take years rather than months, and that the two countries might need to build confidence by agreeing on other issues first. He also steered a middle course between Pakistan's insistence that Kashmir is the core issue, and India's demand that "cross-border terrorism" must end before it will agree to talk.

Obama has moved quite some distance since his 2008 election campaign, when he raised hackles in India by suggesting a resolution of the Kashmir dispute could help in the war in Afghanistan by convincing Pakistan to focus on tackling militants holed up on its border rather than its traditional enemy.

from India Insight:

Going global in India’s chaotic way

India is globalising, but not the way much of the world wants.

That rather contradictory thought nagged at me one morning during the chaotic Commonwealth Games here in New Delhi.

On the road to the media venue's gate, I trudged past a squatter's family living in a tarpaulin. The mother was helping her son pee on my left. Rubbish, the smelly, sickly kind, lay to my right. My shoes sunk in mud from an unfinished pavement.

Hardly the stuff of a showcase international event meant to rival China. But after four years in India, the scene appeared normal. So was news during the Games that stocks had hit a near three-year high and that the Economist had predicted India's economy would soon outpace China.

For the umpteenth time, a centuries-old history bubbled under the surface of this emerging global power, a pressure cooker of India's own eccentricities and ills that seem to avoid blowing up, despite straining at the seams.

Indian history is littered with the mistaken predictions of sceptical foreign correspondents who have underestimated the ability of this country, with one sixth of humanity, to confound its critics despite massive social, communal and ethnic problems.

In Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, new police are charged with stopping the violence

It is difficult to imagine things getting much worse in Ciudad Juarez, the manufacturing city across from El Paso that has become one of the world’s most dangerous places. Extortions, beheadings, bombs in cars, daylight shootouts and kidnappings are all daily fare in the border town once better known as a NAFTA powerhouse and party zone for fun seeking Americans. Even the Mexican army stands accused of abusing the trust citizens once placed in it, carrying out possibly hundreds of wrongful arrests and illegal house raids.

Things are so bad that business leaders are calling for a state of emergency to be called in the city on the Rio Grande with nighttime curfews in a bid to control the violence.  Around 10,000 businesses have closed in Ciudad Juarez over the past two years. A military-enforced curfew doesn’t resound much with residents who want the thousands of troops sent in by President Felipe Calderon to leave town for good. More than 6,700 people have died in drug killings since the army arrived in early 2008 and locals say the army-led crackdown on gangs has only provoked more violence across the city and its surrounding Chihuahua state.  (Click here for full Mexico drug war coverage)

The latest initiative implemented by Chihuahua state Governor Cesar Duarte, who took office for a six-year term this week, is to create a new, state-wide police force dissolving notoriously corrupt local cops. It fits in with Calderon’s plan to send a constitutional reform to Congress soon to give governors more power over the police in cities and towns where local mayors run the municipal police. The thousands of disparate municipal police forces across Mexico are the most ineffective and corrupt, seen as an outdated model unfit to fight drug gangs.

But things don’t look promising. Many mayors across Mexico are against the reforms and in Chihuahua, where the reform is going ahead, many of the same corrupt officers are being absorbed into the new force, despite promises of tough checks on dishonest police. Several officers accused of allowing criminals to steal 69 weapons from Chihuahua police headquarters last week were included in the new Chihuahua force.

The federal police are hardly setting an example either. In August, some 450 federal agents held a public protest to denounce their superiors that they say force them on pain of death into the drug trade. “They sell as foot soldiers to the drug gangs. Why isn’t the violence stopping? Just take a look at our bosses,” an agent told Reuters who declined to be named.

Balancing powers in the Malacca Strait

  Singapore’s warning of a terrorist threat in the Malacca Straits has again highighted the issue of who is in charge of security in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

 Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia have stepped up sea patrols in the strait after Singapore’s navy said on Thursday it had received indications a terrorist group was planning attacks on oil tankers.

A Police Coast Guard vessel patrols shipping lanes near freight ships off the coast of Singapore March 4, 2010. ( REUTERS/Vivek Prakash)

 The 900-km long (550 miles) Malacca Strait, linking Europe and the Middle East with the Asia-Pacific, carries about 40 percent of the world’s trade. More than 50,000 merchant ships ply the waterway every year. 

About 3.3 million barrels per day (bpd) of Middle East crude passed through the strait and to Japan last year. Middle East crude accounts for 90 percent of Japan’s total imports. Up to 80 percent of China’s crude imports are delivered via the narrow and congested waterway.

 So China and Japan have a stake in keeping the Malacca Strait secure, as does India which has a blue water navy patrolling in the Andaman Sea at the western end of the strait.

 The strait is a vital sea lane for the U.S. Navy, which sent warships to Taiwan via the Malacca Strait at a time of heightened tensions between China and Taiwan in 1996.

Security: Never safer, or close to the civil liberties abyss?

As an air crash survivor I know how long jitters about safety can last. Eighteen years ago I crashed in an old Dakota in a remote corner of Africa, where such tragedies are sadly still not that rare.

The worst moment was when I was trapped for 20 seconds in the burning fuselage before being rescued by a fellow journalist. My physical injuries cleared up within months and I resumed flying, but mentally it was difficult. It took me about four years to recover my composure on planes.

The point about this story is that there was a good reason for my nervousness – even back then, we knew about post-traumatic stress. But these past few years, anxiety has come back into my travelling life. And while there is certainly a reason for this, I’m not sure it’s a good one.

This time the stress is far less intense and less personal but a lot more insidious. And it’s not just related to travel. You could call it security anxiety, a subliminal uneasiness aroused by the messages I am bombarded with day in day out about an array of alleged security risks. My job is reporting on security and counter-terrorism so my inbox is awash with this material.

But it’s not just me. In many countries, anyone with access to a PDA, TV, radio or laptop receives a daily array of stories, Tweets and emails and broadcasts not just about al Qaeda, but also about problems of a bewildering variety — climate change, pandemics, youth delinquency, food shortages, Internet fraud, organised crime, stray nuclear weapons, migration and water crises.

What’s going on? Well, it’s a commonplace that we live in a jittery, tremulous age of rapid social and technological change. More media, greater awareness and the tidal wave of globalisation is driving this hyper-awareness.

But are we over-reacting? What’s not so widely noted is the willingness of some governments to lump a range of hazards together as security risks, to be measured and mitigated by tougher laws or more electronic surveillance. Not surprisingly, civil liberties groups have been pressing the alarm bell.

An effective weapon in the war on terror: women

C.M. Sennott serves as a GlobalPost correspondent, where this article first appeared.

BOSTON — In Peshawar, Pakistan, the sermons of radical imams are carried on loudspeakers atop the minarets of mosques, and the words echo in the narrow streets.

The Pakistani Taliban is strong in Peshawar. In recent months, the Taliban leadership has used these radical sermons to step up recruitment of young fighters in their jihad against the Pakistani government and across the border in Afghanistan.

The Taliban recruiters are playing off bitter resentments over the Pakistani military’s offensive that left millions displaced. The Taliban also exploit anger over America’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan, using it to search for young men willing to kill in the name of God.

A 16-year-old boy from a small village in the Khyber Agency near Peshawar answered the Taliban’s call and the militants set about grooming him to be a suicide bomber.

He underwent a rigorous indoctrination and was trained to “accept martyrdom,” to borrow the language used by the ready to detonate a belt bomb to kill themselves and as many Pakistani soldiers and civilians as possible.

Russia’s security proposals – about much more than security

Western responses to President Dmitry Medvedev’s proposal for a new European-Atlantic security body that stretches from Vancouver to Vladivostok have ranged from dismissive to lukewarm. None have been enthusiastic.

But some inside and outside Russia argue it would be unwise for Europe and the United States to reject the proposal out of hand, not least because, as one Russian official put it, this is one of the few occasions where Russia isn’t disagreeing but coming up with something constructive.

Yes Moscow’s draft treaty has gaps, they concede, yes it is almost entirely focused on security in the military sense and yes it doesn’t give much weight to liberal democracy and human rights as envisioned in modern perceptions of security – but it is a starting point for discussion.

Shutting Russia out plays in to the hands of those in Moscow, Washington and other capitals who prefer the simplicity of the Cold War’s zero sum game. It does no favours to modernisers in Russia who want to build cordial international relations, promote democratic society and build Russia’s economy away from its over-reliance on natural resources.

Russia needs stability outside its borders in order to modernise at home.

Twenty years after the collapse of communism, Russia and the rest of Europe are still struggling to establish a relationship of mutual trust and respect. They are bound by commerce – Europe is the prime market for Russian energy exports – but even that relationship is rarely straightforward. The annual Russia-Ukraine-EU gas drama is just one example of how fraught the relationship can be.

On a political and diplomatic level the complications are even greater. One need look no further than the 2008 war in Georgia when preconceptions and stereotypes dictated responses on all sides. Western media and many politicians condemned Russia outright. It was only with the publication of an EU commissioned report into the war this year that a fuller story was told. NATO’s steady expansion towards Russia’s borders has angered Moscow, where it has been noted that the Baltic states and central Europe became far more openly hostile to Russia once they had NATO and EU membership in the bag.

Other rumbles in the Iran nuclear storm

In the sound and fury following the U.N. nuclear governors’ censure of Iran last week for its cover-up of a second uranium enrichment site, and Tehran’s rejection of a nuclear cooperation deal with world powers, a broader, festering issue was obscured.

That is the question of “alleged military dimensions” to Iran’s nuclear programme — that is, whether Tehran illicitly coordinated projects to process uranium, test high explosives and revamp the cone of a missile to fit a nuclear payload.

 Uranium enrichment can be calibrated to yield fuel either for nuclear power plants or the fissile core of a nuclear bomb.

Resolving whether Iran has sought to “weaponize” enrichment will be one of the biggest challenges for Japan’s Yukiya Amano, new director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who took office on Tuesday ominously referring to “the stormy situation” enveloping the U.N. nuclear watchdog.

from The Great Debate UK:

Getting to grips with the post-Cold War security threat

The fall of the Berlin Wall, on November 9, 1989, was one of history’s truly epochal moments. During what became a revolutionary wave sweeping across the former Eastern Bloc countries, the announcement by the then-East German Government that its citizens could visit West Germany set in train a series of events that led, ultimately, to the demise of the Soviet Union itself.

Twenty years on, what is most striking to me are the massive, enduring ramifications of the events of November 1989. Only several decades ago, the Cold War meant that the borders of the Eastern Bloc were largely inviolate; extremist religious groups and ethnic tensions were suppressed, there was no internet (at least as we know it today) and travel between East and West was difficult. The two great Glaciers of the Cold War produced a frozen hinterland characterised by immobility.

Today’s world is a vastly different place. When one of the great Glaciers - the former Soviet Union – melted it helped unleash a potential torrent of security problems. We now live in an era characterised by huge mobility and instability, in which issues such as mass migration, international crime and international terrorism have a much higher prominence.

The end of the Cold War, together with subsequent conflicts across Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East, for instance, has led to many millions of people migrating the globe in hope or fear. In the West, this has given rise to pressure on jobs, healthcare, education, housing and cultural identity, causing local populations to feel threatened.

While international migration has generally been culturally enriching and beneficial, it has nonetheless also increased the range of threats to our societies. For instance, the 48 radical Islamicists implicated in terror plots in the United States between 1993 and 2001, including the 9/11 hijackers, all used legitimate immigration devices (e.g. "green cards", student/tourism/business visas, and amnesty and asylum) to get into the country.

Getting to grips with this specific threat is a major challenge and the reason why, as UK Home Secretary, I placed so much emphasis on the need to overhaul our immigration system. Key elements of the changes I championed include a new points-based system -- which represents the biggest reform of UK immigration procedures for more than half a century; electronic border controls (all UK entry visas, for instance, are now based on finger prints); and the National Identity Scheme which features compulsory fingerprint biometric identity cards for foreign nationals.

A costly U.S.-Mexico border wall, in both dollars and deaths

By Robin Emmott

Securing the United States’s border from illegal immigrants, terrorists and weapons of mass destruction “continues to be a major challenge,” says the United States Government Accountability Office in a new report. It is also proving to be expensive in both lives and money.

In dollar terms, the outlay is substantial. Every time someone breaks a hole in the U.S.-Mexico border wall, it costs about $1,300 to repair. The estimated cost of maintaining the 661-mile (1,058 km) double-layered fence along part of its 2,000-mile (3,000 km) border with Mexico over the next 20 years is $6.5 billion, the GAO report says. 

That is on top of the $3.7 billion allocated to the Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Border Initiative since 2005 to build a system of fencing, lighting, sensors, cameras and radars to keep out job-hungry immigrants, terrorists and smugglers.

While border agents say the wall is a tool that helps them protect the United States, the GAO report found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection cannot accurately determine the fence’s impact on improving border security, suggesting the money might not be well spent.

“What a waste in resources and creativity ,” said Jorge Mario Cabrera Valladares of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA). “Our tax dollars are being wasted on an ineffective, old strategy instead of urgently working on serious, long term, workable immigration reform,” he said.