Harvard educator Samuel Huntington, the most controversial political scientist of the past two decades, breathed his last on 28 December 2008, aged 81. A prophetic genius to some and an evil war-mongering ideologue to others, it is an opportune time to revisit the controversial works of Huntington.
With Marxist-Communist regimes collapsed ending the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama argued in his influential thesis, The End of History, in 1989 that liberal democracy may signal the end-point of humankind's ideological evolution and the final form of governance, which would eventually be adopted globally. Fukuyama's thesis had two seminal assumptions: a) Triumph of civilized liberal democracy globally, and b) Emergence of a nonconflictual world civilization.
Huntington's Civilizational Clash theory (1993) challenged both assumptions of Fukuyama. Regarding Fukuyama's presumed triumph of civilized liberal democracy globally, Huntington emphasized that "Law and order", "the first prerequisite of Civilization", were evaporating or under threat everywhere--China, Japan and the United States included. Globally, "Civilization seems in many respects to be yielding to barbarism... a global Dark Age possibly descending on humanity," he wrote.
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Reminds me of BRAD PITT as ACHILLES to KING AGAMENON IN "TROY" > BE CAREFUL, KING, TO WIN AN EMPIRE YOU MUST WIN FIRST! Good thing ole ACHILLES had a sexy slinky Perso-Iranian Temple CaptiveSlave-Babe/Lover to show him + Greeks the light.
Over the last week, many Americans (and not a few Indians) have asked me why India does not "do a Gaza" on Pakistan, referring, of course, to an emulation of Israel's punitive use of force against Hamas-run Palestine, a territory from which rockets rain down on Israeli soil with reliable frequency (if not reliable destructiveness ... but that is not for want of Hamas intent).
My answer, given with the heavy heart that comes always with a painful grip on reality, is simple: India does not because it cannot.
Here are five reasons why:
1. India is not a military goliath in relation to Pakistan in the way Israel is to the Palestinian territories. India does not have the immunity, the confidence and the military free hand that result from an overwhelming military superiority over an opponent. Israel's foe is a non-sovereign entity that enjoys the most precarious form of self-governance. Pakistan, for all its dysfunction, is a proper country with a proper army, superior by far to the tin-pot Arab forces that Israel has had to combat over time. Pakistan has nukes, to boot. Any assault on Pakistani territory carries with it an apocalyptic risk for India. This is, in fact, Pakistan's trump card. (This explains, also, why Israel is determined to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran.)
2. Even if India could attack Pakistan without fear of nuclear retaliation, the rationale for "doing a Gaza" is, arguably, not fully present: Israel had been attacked consistently by the very force--Hamas--that was in political control of the territory from which the attacks occurred. By contrast, terrorist attacks on India, while originating in Pakistan, are not authored by the Pakistani government. India can-- and does--contend that Pakistan's government should shut down the terrorist training camps on Pakistani soil. (In this insistence, India has unequivocal support from Washington.) Yet only a consistent and demonstrable pattern of dereliction by Pakistani authorities-- which would need to be dereliction verging on complicity with the terrorists--would furnish India with sufficient grounds to hold the Pakistani state culpable.
3. As our columnist, Karlyn Bowman, writes, Israel enjoys impressive support from the American people, in contrast to the Palestinians. No other state--apart, perhaps, from Britain--evokes as much favor in American public opinion as does Israel. This is not merely the result of the much-vaunted "Israel lobby" (to use a label deployed by its detractors), but also because of the very real depth of cultural interpenetration between American and Israeli society. This fraternal feeling buys Israel an enviable immunity in the conduct of its strategic defense. India, by contrast--while considerably more admired and favored in American public opinion than Pakistan--enjoys scarcely a fraction of Israel's "pull" in Washington when it comes to questions of the use of force beyond its borders.
4. Pakistan is strategically significant to the United States; the Palestinians are not. This gives Washington scant incentive to rein in the Israelis, but a major incentive to rein in any Indian impulse to strike at Pakistan. However justified the Indian anger against Pakistan over the recent invasion of Mumbai by Pakistani terrorists, the last thing that the U.S. wants right now is an attack--no matter how surgical--by India against Pakistan-based terror camps. This would almost certainly result in a wholesale shift of Pakistani troops away from their western, Afghan front toward the eastern boundary with India--and would leave the American Afghan campaign in some considerable disarray, at least in the short term. So Washington has asked for, and received, the gift of Indian patience. And although India recognizes that it is not wholly without options to mobilize quickly for punitive, surgical strikes in a "strategic space," it would--right now--settle for a trial of the accused terrorist leaders in U.S. courts. (Seven U.S. citizens were killed in Mumbai: Under U.S. law, those responsible--and this should include Pakistani intelligence masterminds--have to be brought to justice.)
5. My last, and meta-, point: Israel has the privilege of an international pariah to ignore international public opinion in its use of force against the Palestinians. A state with which few others have diplomatic relations can turn the tables on those that would anathematize it by saying, Hang diplomacy. India, by contrast, has no such luxury. It is a prisoner of its own global aspirations--and pretensions.
Posted by: john frum ||
01/05/2009 14:52 ||
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#1
Of these 5 reasons, by far the most important are the first two, especially the second. In fact, India going nuclear, however much it filled their hearts with nationalistic pride, was a major strategic mistake. Pakistan was impelled to match them and this development partially negated India's advantage in conventional war (India had won all previous encounters) by raising the stakes by so much. Reasons 3-5 are more excuses than reasons. (However, there is a reason 6 which the author doesn't mention and which is a real concern for India: long-term response by China.)
#2
FOX NEWS AM > CAVUTO Show - guest Pert SHOULD got into a raucus debate wid Neil over WHETHER AND WHEN ISRAEL's LARGER-SIZED MUSLIM NEIGHBORS WILL PROVE WILLING TO GIVE UP SOME OF THEIR SOVEREIGN LANDS FOR THE BENEFIT OF THEIR FELLOW PALESTINIANS?
Once again, GUEST > T'AINT GONNA HAPPEN. ISRAEL PER SE IS THE ONE AND ONLY ONE THAT HAS TO GIVE UP LAND = ANYTHING!
#3
No other state--apart, perhaps, from Britain--evokes as much favor in American public opinion as does Israel.
Beat up on Pakistan and you can be a close third in my book.
#5
In fact, India going nuclear, however much it filled their hearts with nationalistic pride, was a major strategic mistake.
India going nuclear was a necessary response to China going nuclear. Pakistan needed to go nuclear to allow it to continue sponsoring terror attacks against India without being invaded in response.
Prof. Steven Plaut, Haifa University (@ National Review's "Media Blog")
The jets bombed the bejeebers out of them. The ground forces invaded. They at long last suppressed the terrorists, who had conducted a long campaign of suicide bombing and planting bombs, and put an end to any notion that the terrorists and their sponsors would be granted their own state.
Many civilians were killed and wounded, yet not a single protest was made against the invasion anywhere. I am of course referring to the conquest by the army of Sri Lanka over the past few days of the last hold-out city of the Tamil independence rebels.
Kilinochchi was the last town held by the Tamil Tiger Rebels, considered to be a terrorist group by the United States. With it fell the last Tamil hope of setting up an independent state or even of getting autonomy inside Sri Lanka. The Tamils have their own state inside India but were not satisfied with that manifestation of self-determination. Kilinochchi, 579 kilometers north of Sri Lankas capital Colombo, was until recent months the center of political power for the rebels.
Meanwhile not a single Solidarity-with-the-Tamil-Tigers protest has been organized on a single Western campus or in a single downtown square. Mobs and academics have not taken to the streets to demand an end to the war of aggression against the Tamils. Leftist web sites have not proclaimed every injury of a Tamil civilian to be a Nazi-like war crime and an act of genocide.
Eurocrats have not pontificated about how the Sri Lankan response to the terror was out of proportion. The International Solidarity Movement has not sent in protesters from the West to try to defend the terrorists. Communists and fellow travelers have not organized flotillas of boats carrying aid to the terrorists. Israeli politicians have not lectured the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka about how the whole problem is that they are insensitive to the needs of the Other.
None have proposed dividing Colombo and handing over half to the Tamils. Virtually no one knows that 65,000 civilians have died in the fighting and the media have no interest in covering the story.
Posted by: Mike ||
01/05/2009 11:57 ||
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There's a good reason for this. Unlike Arabs, Sri Lanka's Tamilian rebels aren't rabidly anti-Western. There's no glamor in sympathetically covering a guerrilla group that isn't anti-Western. Another angle is this - the West has little leverage over Sri Lanka - since the Sinhalese couldn't give a damn what the West thinks. Israel, on the other hand, is hyper-sensitive to Western opinion, because its leaders like vacationing in Europe.
WHEN US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in India this week, all the talk was about "non-state actors" and the challenge they throw up to the international system. The assumption was that the Pakistan-based terrorists responsible for the murders of about 175 people in Mumbai, and the injuries to hundreds more, were non-state actors.
Yet it may be that since the 9/11 attacks in New York, the world has completely misconceived the age of terror.
The radical increase in the lethality, range, political consequence and strategic influence of terrorists comes not from their being non-state actors at all. Instead it comes from their being sponsored by states.
The radical increase in the lethality, range, political consequence and strategic influence of terrorists comes not from their being non-state actors at all. Instead it comes from their being sponsored by states. Sometimes they are the instruments of states and at other times they make strategic alliances with states.
A terrorist group operating without any state sponsorship is an infinitely less dangerous outfit than a terrorist group operating with the co-operation of even the most ramshackle state.
However, states not only co-operate with terrorists, in many cases they direct and even found the terrorists.
Consider the prime example, al-Qa'ida. For a long time al-Qa'ida was the very image of decentralised, non-state globalisation. Men in caves, it was said, could bring death and destruction in New York. Yet that image, powerful and pervasive as it was, does not really capture the truth about al-Qa'ida. Al-Qa'ida began life in its campaign against the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan, with the support of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
The US, too, was supporting the mujaheddin in Afghanistan, though it certainly didnot support transnational terrorism. After Osama bin Laden fell out with the ruling family in Saudi Arabia, he moved the centre of his operations to Sudan. Al-Qa'ida and its leadership would not have been able to keep going, much less consolidate as a global, revolutionary terrorist movement, without the safe haven and other facilities that the Sudanese provided for at least the first half of the 1990s.
Then, from 1996 onwards, al-Qa'ida headquartered itself in Afghanistan, where its ideological soul mates, the Taliban, were running the country. The infrastructure the Taliban provided to al-Qa'ida was crucial. Tens of thousands of jihadists went through terrorist training camps that al-Qa'ida ran on Afghan soil.
Even after the 9/11 attacks, the US did not move immediately to attack Afghanistan and depose the Taliban. Rather it gave the Taliban a choice: they could avoid US military action if they handed over bin Laden and the other al-Qa'ida leadership.
What saved al-Qa'ida was the refusal of its state sponsor in Kabul to give it up. When the Taliban leadership escaped from Afghanistan, the al-Qai'ida leadership escaped with it. Nonetheless, al-Qa'ida at least has an independent existence apart from its succeeding state sponsors.
In the case of Iran, this is not so clear. Iran sponsored Hezbollah as its representative force in Lebanon. Increasingly, Tehran has taken direct control of Hezbollah.
Hezbollah undoubtedly commands some genuine popular support in Lebanon, but increasingly it is run as a unit of the Iranian state. That is one of the reasons it has been relatively quiet in the past 12 months. Iran plays these games with a lot of precision.
Hezbollah is a particular type of terrorist organisation. It is certainly capable of suicide terrorism, but it has become in effect a standing terrorist army, with its most important investment being in medium and even hi-tech missiles that it can launch at Israel whenever Iran gives the order.
Thus Hezbollah is less a non-state actor, as the popular jargon has it, and more an instrument of state power that nonetheless provides its state sponsor with political distance or a level of plausible deniability.
When Hezbollah struck Israel, Israel struck back against Lebanon, including Beirut, but the real return address on the Hezbollah rockets was Tehran. If Israel had attacked Iran it would have been accused of starting a Middle East war, but Hezbollah's rockets have the capacity to paralyse the northern half of Israel.
Similarly, Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood organisation. But its primary capacity is a conventional military capacity, especially the rockets it is now acquiring. It receives support from one big state, Iran, but it also constitutes on its own a kind of state power in Gaza.
Terrorists have to operate from somewhere. There are three alternatives. They can operate in what is truly ungoverned space, such as much of contemporary Somalia. Or they can operate clandestinely, against the wishes of a governing authority, as say the terrorist groups that have gathered in London. But of necessity such operations tend to be small and furtive. It is the third option that allows terrorists to grow to their full potential: where they are operating as either allies or agents of a sympathetic government.
Which brings us to Mumbai.
Pakistan has for many years been a significant state sponsor of terrorism. Its military intelligence agency, ISI, founded the Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorist group, initially to harass India in Kashmir. The ISI also founded the Taliban to ensure a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul.
Even when Pakistan allegedly turned against terror and rounded up a few al-Qa'ida leaders, it never captured a Taliban leader. Nor did it ever really try to.
Now US intelligence has determined that former leaders of the ISI and other former Pakistani military figures trained the terrorists who perpetrated the Mumbai massacres.
Even if the impotent Pakistani civilian Government was not directly involved in the Mumbai massacres, it makes sense to see the long campaign of terror against India as sponsored by at least part of the Pakistani state. Given the Pakistani state also pioneered the idea of the Islamic nuclear bomb, this should sound the gravest alerts.
Thus it may be that modern terrorism is not so much the emergence of non-state actors on to the strategic field but, rather, the latest refinement of state power, giving the option of state military and terrorist action with plausible, or at least politically useful, deniability. If anything, therefore, we have tended to underestimate the strategic importance of terrorism.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/05/2009 00:00 ||
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Thank goodness we have reached the end of Rice's blabbering. She and her numbskull ideas have been very destructive. What a pack Bushie assembled. Cheney, Rumsfeld and Greenspan. Granted Greenie was at arm's length, but he was certainly getting the wink and nod to keep the good times rolling. A pox on all their shacks.
#3
I hate to say it, but if there is to be a silver lining to the Obama administration, it must surely be Rice's departure. Unfortunately her tenture was preceeded by another total waste. Just my opinion, nothing more.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
