Jeopardy Benefits:Containment don't hold water

Jeopardy Benefits: Containment don’t hold water


Josh Brolin as “W”, in the 2008 Oliver Stone directed feature film on George W Bush has him saying: “Containment don’t hold water,” in that epigrammatic way of his.

We know George W Bush believed in aggressive action against the forces of Islamic terrorism. In short order, during his first term of office, he demolished Afghanistan after 9/11 but stopped short of eliminating the Al Qaeda. Instead, he set about destroying the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, following through there from where his father had left off. Here too there were problems. The Americans did not find any WMDs and faltered badly over the subsequent occupation of Iraq. Aggression, like containment, to be sure, is far from perfect.

Dubya never did get aggressive with nuclear Pakistan. Instead, he outsourced the fight against the Al Qaeda to the double-dealing Pervez Musharraf - with less than spectacular results. But the policy of encouraging extremism while pretending to counter it in order to obtain American funding gradually got out of hand. It now threatens the very state of Pakistan. But even now, America has chosen to carry on with a curious and theoretical AFPAK Policy.

Incredulous as it may sound to us, long familiar with Pakistani terrorism and duplicity, the new US policy actually expects to find and negotiate with a reasonable and “moderate” Taliban. This is so naive a plan, that it fills the average Taliban commander in the field, both in Pakistan and Afghanistan, with a full and unbridled mirth. And even Hamid Karzai, the compliant Afghan President, almost totally dependant on American support, can’t bring himself to believe in it.

But perhaps events are fast overtaking such improbable strategies. As radical Taliban hordes muster at Buner, a mere 100 km from Islamabad and advance further to Shangla, just 70 km from Islamabad; their intentions are no longer in doubt. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tacitly acknowledging as much, has accused the Pakistani government of “abdication” in advance of the great Taliban push to come.

And as this end game plays out, America, in the interests of its own self preservation, may be forced to harden its stance. Short of militarily attacking the main problem till it becomes unavoidable, it must at least stop financing the very forces ranged against it.

India, contrary to the conventional wisdom, may have cause to be happy with this latest turn of events. Because, quite apart from the barbaric beating and killing women as a mark of its resolve, the Pakistani Taliban has declared war on the “infidel” Islamic moderates and also against what it has labelled an “Unislamic democracy,” in the rest of Pakistan.

Compared to these seismic and elemental stirrings over our western border, India’s thus far inept and ineffectual diplomatic bleating abroad, complemented by its appalling inability to resist terrorist attacks at home, may not matter very much going forward.

Among influential Western voices, that of Australian anthropologist, David Kilcullen, a former Lt.Colonel in the Australian Army turned Reservist turned US State Department strategic adviser to Gen. David H. Petraeus of the Iraq theatre, is prominent. He holds Pakistan to be the unequivocal central front in the war on terror.

Kilcullen cites its “ 173 million people, 100 nuclear weapons, an army bigger than the US Army, and Al-Qaeda headquarters sitting right there in the two-thirds of the country that the government doesn't control,” as some of the immediate threats. He goes on to say that “The Pakistani military and police and intelligence service don't follow the civilian government; they are essentially a rogue state within a state,” echoing the long-held Indian position.

And as recently as March 22nd, Kilcullen created a stir by predicting, in the Washington Post that: “We're now reaching the point where within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state, also because of the global financial crisis, which just exacerbates all these problems. . . . The collapse of Pakistan, al-Qaeda acquiring nuclear weapons, an extremist takeover -- that would dwarf everything we've seen in the war on terror today”.

Of course he’s quite right: the most pressing strategic concern are the Pakistani nuclear weapons and their capacity, with long-standing Chinese and North Korean backing, to create ever more of them, threaten first use of them, and even send them out to, or with, whomsoever they please.

America may be forced to act sooner rather than later to destroy this dangerous capability while it still has covert control of the Pakistani nuclear establishment. There is a perfect excuse currently for America to defang Pakistan’s nuclear threat, and it may regret vacillating over this issue. Once this monumentally important task is completed, degrading the fighting ability of the extremists is a long-term function of shutting down the flows in the financial taps and mounting a slew of technological, military and economic sanctions.

In the long run, history teaches us that theocracies tend to fail, particularly when they are subjected to a determined siege. But in this instance, the world may find that in the unwinding, this particular extremist movement that has loudly promised dominion in return for blood, may, when exposed as hollow, do more. Its eventual fall, or overthrow, may well act as a poultice to the Afghan-Pakistani body politic, drawing out its poisons and leaving it free to indeed engage with that intended moderate residue.

Meanwhile, at the other tip of this country, an end game is finally playing out. A fugitive V Prabhakaran of the LTTE is all but captured if not destroyed. President Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka has shown a relentless and commendable determination to visit the end of this scourge that has long tormented his country. After the LTTE is gone, a bright new day will surely dawn for the future of the Tamil minority living in Sri Lanka. It will be a bright future because much has been sacrificed over many years to bring it about. It may be composed initially of many challenges, but none will be comparable to the corrosive terrorism of the blood-soaked decades during which the LTTE terrorists held the country and its future to ransom.

But for the Pakistan established by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, now grown almost unrecognisable, sadly, it may already be too late for it to cleanse itself.

(1,050 words)

23rd April 2009
Gautam Mukherjee


Appeared as "Naive America, silly policy" OP-Ed Leader in The Pioneer on Thursday, 30th April 2009 and online at www.dailypioneer.com. Also archived under Columnists.

Indian Economy in Minnow Raj: Tera Kya Hoga Kaliya?

Indian Economy in Minnow Raj: Tera Kya Hoga Kaliya?



As we launch into the first-phase of our tumultuous, Naxalite attack-ridden, month-long General Elections for 400 million voters, we need to be justifiably proud of the endeavour. It will cost us at least US $ 2 billion to execute. But, after all the sound and fury is over on May 16th, there is a clear threat looming pretty much constant to all expected outcomes.

It is the resurrected threat of another bout of a regressive Luddite/Lohiaite/Loknitiist/Socialist/Casteist/Populist economic muddle confronting India’s future. It is an anticipated muddle. And we must brace for it. Because, it will be brought on, not just by the natural infirmities of coalition politics, now par for every course, but largely because of the nature of its constituent parts.

Most of the regional and small parties of today, without whom there will be no forming a government this time, were spawned on a diet of anarchic and self-defeating Socialist politics. Their views were inspired by erstwhile freedom-fighters Pandit Ram Manohar Lohia and Loknayak Jayaprakash Narayan. These worthy gentlemen revolted against our benighted socialism of the time, which they, however, found to be elitist!

Of course it is true that even after 61 years of independent India, we have been unable to reconcile the needs of the hinterlands of Bharat with the internationalism of India. And this is the principle reason, along with a desire for a share of voice, for the rise of the regional and small parties.

Pandit Nehru tried to reconcile the two worlds, the urban and the rural, the educated and the masses, by embracing Socialism. As a former imperial colony, we took on an early anti-capitalist policy direction. Of course, it didn’t work then, and not just for us, and it won’t work now. But the Bharat versus India schizophrenia persists, with some new overtones of India Inc. versus the rest.

Back then, even without more extreme hands at the helm of power, we endured the infamous “Hindu rate of growth”, for over thirty years, pegged at no more than 2 per cent of GDP. We started to grow at a better pace with increasing doses of economic liberalisation since 1991 and the future demands an acceleration of market reforms if we are to maintain high GDP growth rates.

But followers of Lohia and Narayan amongst us even today, aided and abetted by their new generation ranks of have-nots, those as yet untouched by the effect of market reforms, populate the small and regional parties, all seething with assertion. But do their leaders realise the way ahead as they seem poised to wrest a greater share of power at the centre? Do they see the practicality in policies that can help them deliver on their promises? Do they know there is nothing to gain by blocking progress and going back to a discredited and woolly ideology that simply does not work?

In this television and internet age, they had better realise they will not get away with it for long, as each regional party in power is already witnessing. Bharat or India alike will reward or punish its rulers based on development and its pleasant effects on their daily life and populism can only go so far.

But in other matters, in the assertions of their first flush, these self-same Lohiaities and Loknitiists did succeed at extending the march of Indian democracy. Looking back, the ferment engendered by them in the Sixties, and more particularly in the Seventies and Eighties, led to the end of the dominant, and undeniably arrogant one-party system, in favour of multiple parties, the advent of coalition governments, and a sprinkling of statistically significant Independents. And, it might be argued, even national parties proscribed to sizes well short of a majority as their vote-banks were redistributed.

But economically, by inclination, the regionals and smalls have always been retrograde so far. Irrespective of the global trend, they tend to position themselves further Left than the Fabian Socialism and Soviet inspired “mixed” economy favoured by Pandit Nehru and Indira Gandhi. They refuse to update their economics. Unless, that is, we take Union Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav’s positive handling of the Railway Ministry, and not that of the State of Bihar, as the economic policy pointer for the future.

In the early days of their struggle, the Lohiaites and Loknitiists also wanted to overthrow the upper-caste stranglehold of the Congress Party. The consequent ferment they engendered did; aided later by Prime Minister VP Singh’s Mandalisation of the Eighties, and the BSP’s Dalit empowerment of even more recent times.

But whenever these social progressives ran governments, or helped to run them, at the state level, or the centre, in stable coalitions, or majorities, or short-lived minority configurations; their economic policies have always been sadly backward, lacklustre and riddled with corruption.

This may not have mattered when India saw itself as a have-not, as a Third World nation. But now, with clear-eyed aspirations of becoming a leading world economy it must think differently. Since it is clear that the regional parties have come to sit at the high table for good they must resist the temptation to trash it. They must change course and adopt the development economics that will keep them in good stead with the electorate now and into the future.

Let us remember that all the socialist misdirection of the past before 1991 has already put us fifty years behind more market-economy based former colonies. And at a vast economic and strategic disadvantage to a politically Communist but economically Capitalist China.

With the increasing significance of regionals and smalls, it must be noted that their survival, in such luxuriant numbers, on a very crowded political bus, is unlikely. The victors will be those who have effectively savaged, vanquished and subsumed one of their own kind and/or taken to the service of one of the national parties.

It will be either DMK or AIDMK and friends. Likewise in state after state of this 28 state contest that will have to add up to a national election with a winning coalition and coherent policy thereafter. But all this comes afterwards.

For the moment, the most that the big fish can hope for is to lead a flock of disparate minnows into government formation after May 16th 2009 rather than the other way around.


(1,050 words)

16th April 2009
Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader EDIT in The Pioneer on 17th April 2009 as "Economy in minnow raj" and online at www.dailypioneer.com. Also archived online under Columnists.

Cadillac Dreams & Moderation Screams

Cadillac Dreams & Moderation Screams



Picture this--335 bhp at 4,800 rpm, gleaming poetry in motion, choice of interior trims, 18.58 feet long, a new four headlamp combination, and lashes of sexy chrome.

I write in hyper appreciation of one of man’s manifest fantasies, epitome of the American Dream--of the 1958 two-door Cadillac Eldorado Coupe hard-top, and the Eldorado Biarritz Convertible. This Marilyn Monroe of automobiles, with its wrap-around windshield and high, slender, pointed tailfins; was enhanced in 1958. That was when the Eldorado upped its engine power for muscular acceleration, added killer tailfins and twice as much wattage with those bright-eyed lights.

The 4 door hard-top version, the memorable Cadillac Eldorado Brougham was introduced in 1957, and kept the exact same styling till 1958. This one cost more than the Rolls Royce Silver Cloud , at $ 13,074. And this great car had the world’s first memory power seats. It also had a stainless steel roof, air suspension and every other luxury known to GM at the time. And it had great hand-built quality from Detroit, that quintessential Motown. In 1959, when the Eldorado was toned down, deviating from its early design sensibilities for the first time, and was outsourced to Pininfarina in Italy; they were actually hand-built a lot worse by the Italians.

This beautiful car, in all its versions, from the birth of the El Dorado Concept Car of 1952 till its zenith in 1958, epitomised the “anything is possible” optimism of the baby-boomer years after WWII. The Eldorado brand ran on and on, from 1953 to 2002. But later versions were truncated, suppressed, compressed; its looks, design, and larger than life performance hopelessly betrayed.

But the story of the Eldorado, struggling to reinvent itself, symbolises the decline and loss of self-confidence of all American Automotive design, engineering and manufacturing, much affected by Japanese competition from the sixties onwards.

The Land of The Rising Sun gradually took over the US mass market with its sexless, compact, but reliable runabouts. Except, that is, for brief rallies, from the likes of the much loved GM Pontiac Firebird, the Trans Am and from the “friendly fire” of the Ford Mustang.

But, for the most part, the great open road of endless possibility symbolised by the extravagantly styled American automobile, turned punishingly sensible as the time went on, with a crowd of Datsuns, Nissans, Mitsubishis, Toyotas and the like replacing an exuberant style sense with rank plodding utility.

And the wealthy, luxurious places vacated by top-end American cars, rejected increasingly for inferior quality, were filled by the great European marques and in the latter-day also by the Japanese, with the introduction of the Lexus. The fact is, GM, Ford and Chrysler lost their way in the forest a very long time ago in their attempt to emulate foreign ways when their heart just wasn’t in it.

Today, the talk is all about hybrids and electric cars, global warming and renewable energy. So firmly does this press upon the popular imagination that dissent in these areas is seen as a modern day heresy. But still, there are distinguished heretics, who persist in questioning the wisdom of the majority.

85 year old distinguished dissenter Freeman Dyson, a physicist and futurist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University in New Jersey says, “All the fuss about global warming is greatly exaggerated.” Dyson thinks “The climate studies people” championed by the likes of “opportunist” Al Gore, “who work with models, always tend to overestimate their models”.

Dyson is echoed by fellow physicist Richard Muller, from the University of California, Berkeley, who points out that 2008 was, in fact, globally speaking, the coolest year of the last ten. Muller says the present so-called global warming may be working to prevent a new Ice Age and does not have a lot to do with human intervention.

Dyson, who invented a rocket system called “Orion” that uses small and periodic nuclear explosions against a spaceship’s massive pusher-plate to propel it to the moon and beyond; still holds a candle for coal, properly scrubbed of its pollutants, as the bulk energy source to rely upon. This is because there is a lot of it, and because it can meet the energy needs of the poor in populous countries like India and China.

Dyson says it is silly to ask for green solutions that will put the prices of everything up. He thinks those who are flocking to the use of electric cars are not taking into account the cost of replacing their expensive batteries every three years. Dyson agrees however that there is too much Carbon Dioxide being emitted, but advocates the planting of genetically engineered carbon emission eating trees to tackle the problem. About a trillion of them, he calculates, will take care of all the extra CO2 being spewed into the atmosphere and a plantation programme like this is feasible.

Dyson does not agree with policies that seek to prevent the access of teeming millions of the world’s poor to betterment, in countries like India and China and the African Continent, in the name of saving the environment.

Richard Muller, on his part, holds a brief for more nuclear energy usage. He says there is more natural radioactivity from the rock formations around Denver, for example, than there is in the areas where nuclear waste is being buried in America and that a certain, fairly large amount of radiation, is actually harmless.

President Obama is well down the road to some form of Eco-Warriorship, judging from the “or else” tone of his recent advice to GM, Ford and Chrysler; even though, the contours of it, to public knowledge, are still vague. We don’t know if he will ask for changes beyond asking the American auto-industry to make electric and hybrid cars, presumably on a more affordable basis, in exchange for more government help.

From the point of view of the emerging nations like India and China, we are, as yet, responsible for under 15% of global carbon emissions jointly. This will, of course, rise as we grow our economies. But, increasingly, it seems better to try and ensure global cooperation on this universal issue by turning to solutions such as the ones offered by Dyson and Muller. These are solutions which are long on practicality and short on hysteria.

(1,051 words)

8th April 2009
Gautam Mukherjee