Mugabes biggest sin
By F. William Engdahl
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Aug 7, 2008, 00:24
Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, presides over one of the worlds richest minerals treasures, the Great Dyke region, which cuts a geological swath across the entire land from northeast to southwest.
The real background to the pious concerns of the Bush administration for human rights in Zimbabwe in the past several years is not Mugabes possible election fraud or his expropriation of white settler farms. It is the fact that Mr. Mugabe has been quietly doing business, a lot of it, with the one country which has virtually unlimited need of strategic raw materials Zimbabwe can provide -- China. Mugabes Zimbabwe is, along with Sudan, on the central stage of the new war over control of strategic minerals of Africa between Washington and Beijing, with Moscow playing a supporting role in the drama. The stakes are huge.
Zimbabwes president, Robert Mugabe is a very, very bad man. This we all know from reading the newspapers or hearing the pronouncements of George W. Bush, earlier Britains Tony Blair and more recently Gordon Brown. In their eyes, he has sinned badly. They charge that he is a dictator; that he has expropriated, often with violence, the farms of whites as part of land reform; they claim he rigged his re-election by vote fraud and violence; that he has ruined the economy of Zimbabwe.
Whether Robert Mugabe deserves to be in Washingtons honor roll of villains alongside Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, Ahmadinejad, and Adolf Hitler, however, it is not the reason Washington and London have made Zimbabwe regime change priority number one for their Africa policy.
What his sin is seems to have more to do with his attempts to get out from under Anglo-American neo-colonial serfdom dependency and to pursue a national economic development independent of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. His real sin seems to be the fact that he has turned to the one nation that offers his government credits and soft loans for economic development with no strings attached -- The Peoples Republic of China.
Western media accounts conveniently tend to omit the second major party to what is a huge tug of war between Anglo-American interests and China to get control of Zimbabwes vast mineral wealth. We should keep in mind that for Washington there are always good dictators and bad dictators. The difference is whether the given dictator serves US national interests or not. Mugabe clearly is in the latter category.
Cecil Rhodes legacy
Zimbabwe is the name of what under the era of British Imperialism a century ago was named Rhodesia. The name Rhodesia came from the British imperial strategist and miner, Cecil Rhodes, founder of the Rhodes scholarships to Oxford, and author of a plan for a vast private African zone, to be chartered from the Queen of England, from Egypt to South Africa. Cecil Rhodes created the British South Africa Company, modeled on the East India Company, along with his partner, L. Starr Jameson of Jameson Raid notoriety, to exploit the mineral riches of Rhodesia. It controlled what was later named Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Southern Rhodesia (Nyasaland). The model was that the British Government would assume all risks to defend militarily Rhodes looting while Rhodes and his London bankers, above all Lord Rothschild, who was a close associate, would assume all the gains of the business.
Rhodes, a seasoned geologist, knew well that there was a remarkable geological fault running from the mouth of the Nile at the Gulf of Suez south through Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, down through todays Zimbabwe on to South Africa. Rhodes had already instigated several wars to gain control of the diamonds of Kimberly and the gold of Witwatersrand in South Africa. This geological phenomenon he, as well as enterprising German explorers, had discovered in the 1880s. They named it the Great Rift Valley.
Rhodesia, like South Africa after the bloody Boer wars, was settled by white settlers to secure future minerals gains for allied interests of the City of London, mainly those of the powerful Oppenheimer family and their gold and diamond enterprises in the region.
In 1962 when Africa was undergoing the wave of national liberation from colonial rule, a wave calculatedly supported by non-colonial power Washington, Rhodesia was one of the last bastions, along with former British colony South Africa, of white Apartheid rule. Whites in Rhodesia constituted only 1-2 percent of the total population so their methods of holding on to power were rather ruthless.
White supremacist Prime Minister, Ian Smith, declared Rhodesian independence from Britain in 1965 rather than agree to the slightest compromise on race or power sharing with black nationalists. Britain got UN trade sanctions imposed to force Smith to buckle under. Despite sanctions, there was considerable support from conservative business interests in London. Britains Tiny Rowland, head of the Lonrho mining conglomerate, secured the bulk of his African profits from Rhodesian copper mining and related ventures under the Smith regime. The City of London knew very well what riches lay in Rhodesia. The question was how to secure enduring control. Smiths Rhodesian backers had little interest in giving it all to London.
Following a long and bloody struggle, in 1980 the leader of the black African Popular Front coalition, Robert Mugabe, overwhelmingly won election as the first Prime Minister of a new Zimbabwe. Twenty eight years later, the same Robert Mugabe is under escalating attack from the West, especially Zimbabwes former colonial master, England, including strong economic sanctions designed to bring the country to the brink of collapse, to force him to open the economy to foreign (read Anglo-American and allied) investment. Ironically, the issue seems not all that different from the Ian Smith era: London and US control of the resources of the rich land, and Zimbabwean efforts to resist that control.
The Great Dyke
Within Zimbabwe, a portion of the rich Great Rift is called the Great Dyke, an intrusive geological treasure zone running over 530 kilometers from the northeast to the southwest of the country, in places up to 12 kilometers wide. A river runs along the fault and the region is volcanically active. Here also lie vast deposits of chromium, of copper, platinum and other metals.
The US State Department, as well as London, is aware of the vast minerals and other riches of Zimbabwe. It states in a recent report on Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe is endowed with rich mineral resources. Exports of gold, asbestos, chrome, coal, platinum, nickel, and copper could lead to an economic recovery one day . . . The country is richly endowed with coal-bed methane gas that has yet to be exploited.
With international attractions such as Victoria Falls, the Great Zimbabwe stone ruins, Lake Kariba, and extensive wildlife, tourism historically has been a significant segment of the economy and contributor of foreign exchange. The sector has contracted sharply since 1999, however, due to the countrys declining international image. [sic]
Energy Resources
With considerable hydroelectric power potential and plentiful coal deposits for thermal power station, Zimbabwe is less dependent on oil as an energy source than most other comparably industrialized countries, but it still imports 40 percent of its electric power needs from surrounding countries--primarily Mozambique. Only about 15 percent of Zimbabwes total energy consumption is accounted for by oil, all of which is imported. Zimbabwe imports about 1.2 billion liters of oil per year. Zimbabwe also has substantial coal reserves that are utilized for power generation, and coal-bed methane deposits recently discovered in Matabeleland province are greater than any known natural gas field in Southern or Eastern Africa. In recent years, poor economic management and low foreign currency reserves have led to serious fuel shortages.
In short, chrome, copper, gold, platinum, huge hydroelectric power potential and vast coal reserves are what is at stake for Washington and London in Zimbabwe. The country also has unverified reserves of uranium, something in big demand today for nuclear power generation.
It is clear of late that so long as the tenacious Mugabe is running things, not the Anglo-Americans, but rather the Chinese, are Zimbabwes preferred business partners. This seems to be Mugabes greatest sin. Hes not reading from the right program as George W. Bushs friends see it. His real sin seems to be turning East not West for economic and investment help.
The Chinese connection
During the Cold War China recognized and supported Robert Mugabe. In recent years as Chinas search for secure raw materials escalated its foreign diplomacy, relations have become stronger. According to the Chinese media, China has invested more in Zimbabwe than any other nation.
Already back in July 2005 as Tony Blair turned the sanctions screws tighter on Zimbabwe, Mugabe flew to Beijing to meet with the top Chinese leadership, where he reportedly sought an emergency loan of US$1 billion and asked increased Chinese involvement in the economy.
It began to bear fruit. In June 2006 state--owned Zimbabwean businesses signed a number of energy, mining and farming deals worth billions of dollars with Chinese companies. The largest was with China Machine-Building International Corporation, for a $1,3bn contract to mine coal and build thermal-power generators in Zimbabwe, to reduce Zimbabwes electricity shortage. The Chinese company had already built thermal-power stations in Nigeria and Sudan, and had been involved in mining projects in Gabon.
In 2007 the Chinese government donated farm machinery worth $25 million to Zimbabwe, including 424 tractors and 50 trucks, as part of a $58 million loan to the Zimbabwean government. The Mugabe administration had previously seized white-owned farms and gave them to blacks, damaging machinery in the process. In return for the equipment and the loan the Zimbabwean government will ship 30 million kilograms of tobacco to the Peoples Republic of China.
Other Zimbabwe-China agreements included a deal between the Zimbabwe Mining Development and Chinas Star Communications, forming a joint venture to mine chrome, with funding from the China Development Bank. Zimbabwe also agreed to import road-building, irrigation and farming equipment from the China National Construction and Agricultural Machinery Import and Export Corporation and China Poly Group. Zimbabwe also relies on China for imports of telecommunications equipment, military hardware and many other critical items it can no longer import from the west because of the British-led sanctions.
Relations have become so important that Zimbabwes police have a dedicated China desk to protect Chinese interests in the country.
In April 2007 the chairman of Chinas top political advisory body, Jia Qinglin, head of the National Committee of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference, flew to Harare to meet with Mugabe. It was a follow-up to the 2006 Beijing China-Africa Cooperation Summit where the Chinese government invited the heads of more than 40 African states to discuss relations. Africa has become a diplomatic and economic priority for China and its economy.
At that time, Beijing got an open invitation to help develop dormant mines in the country. The deputy speaker of Zimbabwes parliament called for more Chinese investment in the countrys mining sector, according to Chinas Xinhua news agency. Zimbabwes mining laws were changed to allow the government to reallocate mining claims that were not being exploited.
Mining generates half of Zimbabwes export revenue. It is the only sector in the country that still has foreign investors after the collapse of the main agricultural sector. Western companies with mining claims in Zimbabwe were not exploiting them. We would appeal to the Chinese government to come in full force to exploit these minerals, Zimbabwean Deputy Parliamentary Speaker, Kumbirai Kangai said to the official Xinhua.
Kangai assured potential Chinese investors that they would not expose themselves to legal action if they took over claims held by Western companies.
A few months after, in December 2007, the Chinese company Sinosteel Corporation acquired 67 percent stake in Zimbabwes leading ferrochrome producer and exporter Zimasco Holdings. Zimasco Holdings is the fifth largest high carbonated ferrochrome producer in the world. It used to produce 210,000 tons of high-carbon ferrochrome per year, nearly all of it along the mineral-rich Great Dyke, accounting for 4 percent of global ferrochrome production.
Zimasco has also the worlds second largest reserves of chrome, after South Africa. It was formerly owned by Union Carbide Corporation, now part of Dow Chemicals Corp.
Oh, oh! Alarm bells went ringing in London and in Washington at that news.
China clearly views Africa as a central part of its strategic plan, most notably for its oil reserves and vital raw materials such as copper, chrome, nickel. The continent is also at the same time becoming an important region for Chinese manufactured exports. But the raw materials battle is at the heart, and the real reason by all accounts, why Washington recently decided to form a separate Africa Command in the Pentagon.
Controlling Chinas economic emergence is an unstated strategic priority of United States foreign and military policy and has been since before September 11, 2001. The only delicate point in the business is the fact that China, with well over $1.7 trillion of foreign exchange reserves, most believed in form of US Treasury securities, could trigger a complete dollar panic and further collapse of the US economy should she decide for political reasons it were too risky to continue holding its hundreds of billions of US dollar debt. In effect, by buying US government debt with its trade surpluses, China has been indirectly financing US policies counter to Chinese national interest such as the Iraq war, or even the $100 million or so annually that Condi Rices State Department spends on Tibet.
China is refusing to play by the rules of the Anglo-American neo-colonial game. It does not seek IMF or World Bank approval before dealing with African countries. It makes soft loans, regardless who might be running the country. In this it does nothing different from Washington or London. The Chinese see American influence in Africa less entrenched than in the rest of the world, thus offering unique opportunities for China to pursue its economic interests.
It may or may not be cynical. It may be Realpolitik. If it results in the ability of certain African countries to use China as a political counterweight to the one-sided Anglo-American domination of the Continent, that itself could be a major benefit to Africans depending on how they use it.
Clearly, it has been extremely positive for Chinese access to vital economic minerals for its economy as well as oil from places such as Darfur and southern Sudan, or Nigeria.
Mineral wealth has once more put Africa on center stage of a battle for mineral riches between East and West. This time, unlike during the Cold War era, however, Beijing is playing with far more assets, and Washington with far less.
F. William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press) and Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation. He is at work on a new book, from which this has been adapted, Power of Money: The Rise and Decline of the American Century. He may be reached through his website.
#2
Don't waste your time reading this trash, here's a quick summary:
ZimBob's not so bad, the USA and George Bush are VERY bad, and poor Bob is only hated by the evil Westerners because he's helping the helpful Chinese who are not bad at all.
Alyssa Rosenberg, guest-blogging for Ezra Klein makes the very important point that a successful conclusion to the war (from the Russian standpoint) will likely give Putin and his domestic power base (the so-called siloviki clans) a major boost.
In the midst of the sound and fury coming of out of South Ossetia a very interesting series of events from a fortnight ago have gone almost completely mentioned. It all started with one of now Prime Minister Putin's increasingly typical outbursts - at a meeting with business leaders on 35th July he rather boorishly lashed out the head of a company called Mechel steel, accusing him of dodgy business practices, and threatening to 'send a doctor' to visit the company's owner who was in hospital (for non-business related reasons) at the time. Predictably, this caused the Russian stock market to lose about $65 Billion, and Medvedev, looking out for the interests of the business class that make up his main constituency made a few statements to the effect of, 'Putin, shut the fuck up before you put us all out of business' albeit couched in much more cautious terms than that.
A series of what, in the British political parlance, would be called briefings effectively against Medvedev started to appear in the press, talking up how Putin was the 'real' hand behind the country's foreign and security policy, and indeed behind all politics that 'really matters.' This was during this week, when state television (at least the kind that reaches us here in Kyiv) started to be dominated by coverage of the Sniper War between Georgia and South Ossetia that preceded what we're all watching with horror now.
Since war broke out Putin has been the source of the most bellicose statements, often preceding Medvedev's statements of 'official' policy. The very fact that Russia has committed itself so fully, at a major cost to its economy and business environment, at least nominally under 'Commander-in-Chief' Medvedev's orders is indicative of the bind Putin has put him in, and the latter's ability to now de facto create security and foreign policy, at least so far as the current situation is concerned.
Now that it looks like Russia is going to win this thing, and win it big, there's no doubt who'll take the majority of the plaudits when V-G Day is finally declared - V.V. Putin. And that may be the whole point. As I've pointed out below, starting an all out war over South Ossetia is a bit of a bit of a dumb move from the standard cost-benefit analysis of national security. But if you're a 'national leader' in waiting, with a nominal President threatening to undermine your power, well its a hell of a way to consign him to ceremonial status for the rest of his term and get your hands firmly back on the steering wheel.
The Caucasus is the kind of place where, when the guns start firing, it's hard to stop them. That is the brutal reality of South Ossetia, where a small conflict is beginning to spread exponentially.
Leave aside the geopolitics for the moment and have pity for the people who will suffer most from this, the citizens - mostly ethnic Ossetians but also Georgians - who have already died in their hundreds. It is a tiny and vulnerable place, with no more than 75,000 inhabitants of both nationalities mixed up in a patchwork of villages and one sleepy provincial town in the foothills of the Caucasus.
Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili seems to care less about these people than about asserting that they live in Georgian territory. Otherwise he would not on the night of 7-8 August have launched a massive artillery assault on the town of Tskhinvali, which has no purely military targets and whose residents, the Georgians say, lest we forget, are their own citizens. This is a blatant breach of international humanitarian law.
Moscow cares as little about the Ossetians as it does the Georgians it is bombing, regarding South Ossetia as a pawn in its bid to bring Georgia and its neighbours back into a Russian sphere of influence. Ordinary South Ossetians have also been cursed by a criminalised leadership which would long ago have lost power had they not been the rallying point for defence against Georgia.
This conflict was entirely avoidable. Its origin lies in one of the many majority-minority disputes that accompanied the break-up of the Soviet Union. The Ossetians, a divided people with one part living on the Russian north side of the Caucasus, the other in Georgia, generally felt more comfortable with Russian rule than in a new post-Soviet Georgian state. A small nasty war with Tbilisi in 1990-91 cost 1,000 lives and left huge bitterness.
But outside high politics, ethnic relations were never bad. For a decade after South Ossetia's de facto secession from Georgia in 1991, it was a shady backwater and smugglers' haven. It was outside nominal Georgian control, but Ossetians and Georgians went back and forth and traded vigorously with one another at an untaxed market in the village of Ergneti.
Then Saakashvili came to power in 2004 with heady promises to restore his country's lost territories. He closed the Ergneti market and tried to cut off South Ossetia, triggering a summer of violence. Modelling himself on the medieval Georgian king David the Builder, he said Georgian territorial integrity would be re-established by the end of his presidency. He has sought to tear up the imperfect Russian-framed negotiating framework for South Ossetia, but has not come up with a viable alternative.
For their part, the Russians upped the stakes and baited Saakashvili, their bête noire, by effecting a soft annexation of South Ossetia. Moscow handed out Russian passports to the South Ossetians and installed Russian officials in government posts there. Russian soldiers, notionally peacekeepers, have acted as an informal occupying army.
Saakashvili is a famously volatile risk-taker, veering between warmonger and peacemaker, democrat and autocrat. On several occasions international officials have pulled him back from the brink. On a visit to Washington in 2004, he received a tongue-lashing from then Secretary of State Colin Powell who told him to act with restraint. Two months ago, he could have triggered a war with his other breakaway province of Abkhazia by calling for the expulsion of Russian peacekeepers from there, but European diplomats persuaded him to step back. This time he has yielded to provocation and stepped over the precipice.
The provocation is real, but the Georgian President is rash to believe this is a war he can win or that the West wants it. Both George Bush and John McCain have visited Georgia, made glowing speeches praising Saakashvili and were rewarded with the Order of St George. But Bush, at least in public, is now bound to be cautious, calling for a ceasefire.
The reaction in much of Europe will be much less forgiving. Even before this crisis, a number of governments, notably France and Germany, were reporting 'Georgia fatigue'. Though they broadly wished the Saakashvili government well, they did not buy the line that he was a model democrat - the sight last November of his riot police tear-gassing protesters in Tbilisi and smashing up an opposition TV station dispelled that illusion. And they have a long agenda of issues with Russia, which they regard as more important than the post-Soviet quarrel between Moscow and Tbilisi. Paris and Berlin will now say they were right to urge caution on Georgia's Nato ambitions at the Bucharest Nato summit.
Both sides are behaving badly. It is outrageous that Russia is seizing the chance to attack Georgian towns and airfields. Dozens of Georgian civilians are now dying too. But Georgia needs to be restrained, for its own sake. Otherwise Saakashvili looks set to lose both the economic stability he has achieved and hope of Nato membership. He already looks now to have forfeited his other lost territory of Abkhazia and the prospect of return there for the quarter of a million Georgians who fled the region during the 1992-93 war. Now it looks as though the Abkhaz are going on the offensive, taking the opportunity to tell the world that they will never return to Georgian rule.
Thomas de Waal is Caucasus Editor at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in London
Posted by: john frum ||
08/10/2008 08:15 ||
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Finally, for John McCain, a week to smile about. "Obama fatigue," a virus that's afflicted the GOP presidential candidate for sometime now, was discovered in a new Pew survey to have spread to 48 percent of the populace.
And recent national polls now place McCain and Barack Obama in a statistical dead heat. Gallup's numbers have Obama 46, McCain 43. RealClearPolitics' national average is about the same, Obama 46.9 to McCain 43.3.
What does it mean? Next to nothing. And Obama's team not only knows it, it thrives on it. They think "horse race" in the classic Seabiscuit sense.
Out of the gate, the thoroughbred who leads too early and by too great a margin is more often than not the vulnerable one, the one in danger of losing it all to the horse who strategically holds back, waits, and then thunders in the final furlongs to finish first.
Obama's political guru, David Axelrod, and his Chicago-based firm, AKP&D lay it out on their Web site. "We win tough races. . . . campaigns no one thought could be won," it states. "The governor who came from 20 points behind" . . . (Iowa's Tom Vilsack). "The incumbent mayor who came back from 20 points down in only 20 days" . . . (Deedee Corradini in Salt Lake City) "The congresswoman who won Dan Quayle's old seat in an upset" . . . (Indiana's Jill Long).
Axelrod & Co. can now include in its victory list the skinny unknown from Chicago who in one short year went from a mere 26 percent in the polls to toppling front-runner Hillary Clinton who was a full 22 points ahead of him last August.
"The national numbers mean nothing," said John Kupper, the "K" in AKP&D, last week by phone. "These are not national elections but state by state elections. We have vote goals. We know prior performance models."
In other words, this is now and always has been the sum of political component parts for the Obama operation, not a national popular election but a sophisticated, incremental accumulation of delegates in the primary, and electoral votes come November. I read this weeks ago - he outsmarted the Clintons. Maybe they were too arrogant?
It isn't that Axelrod's team has had no experience losing. Their most recent defeat came in 2006 and it stung. The candidate, Tammy Duckworth, was a charismatic Iraq war veteran, a pilot who lost both legs when her helicopter was shot down. Though Duckworth and AKP&D had a corner on charisma and a lot of cash, they failed to wrest U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde's former seat from Republican control.
Obama can certainly lose this race. But McCain's going to have to find a better way to win it than by invoking Paris Hilton or by sniping in his most recent ad how "life in the spotlight must be grand but for the rest of us, times are tough."
What's tough for McCain is that despite having had a practice run at the presidency once before, it didn't limber him up, cause him to realize that even the elderly now skillfully navigate the Internet or help him craft a "vision thing."
In the short run, jealous jabs at Obama for having too much face time on the covers of Rolling Stone and GQ may appear to close the gap in national polls. But the aggregation of images - Obama in Germany, Obama with his cute girls and beautiful wife, Obama visiting his grandmother in Hawaii -- is by dribs and drabs helping America feel familiar with him, visualize him on foreign soil, and see him, perhaps, as both human and presidential.
In some ways the tightening numbers work for Obama, not against him. "No cause for panic," said Kupper. No, indeed, Obama is off to splash in the Pacific surf with his family.
It's the horse race play. Or, as the Axelrod game goes, you always play the come from behind, even when you're ahead.
Posted by: Bobby ||
08/10/2008 14:25 ||
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#1
I can bet the Clintons have a convention surprise coming.
#2
I'm waiting for the ad asking why a presidential candidate retains dual citizenship (US & Kenya). While that 'citizen of the world' stance plays well with some, there are many who will see it as a lack of commitment to the US. Difficult issue to leverage head-on, but I'm wondering if it won't get raised in some clever way nonetheless.
#6
Obama up in the polls = It's over, let's get the inauguration planned, and stop yer bitchin', Hillary supporters.
Obama down in the polls = It's trivial, polls don't mean anything, blah blah blah.
And the MSM wonders why most people find it irrelevant...
Posted by: Swamp Blondie in the Cornfields ||
08/10/2008 19:18 Comments ||
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#7
I read this weeks ago - he outsmarted the Clintons.
That only works for the Democratic Primary, though... and no doubt annoyed immensely the Democratic voters thus gamed out of their candidate. Not to mention not working at all for those voting Republican or Independent.
ISLAMABAD: The ruling coalition has finally decided to move towards President Musharraf's ouster through an ingenious method apart from impeachment. He will be asked to honour the pledge made before the Supreme Court in October last at the time of his election from the outgoing assemblies -- he had promised to seek vote of confidence from the new assemblies after the general elections.
Since his supporters are heavily outnumbered in all the assemblies, the move in practice would turn into a no confidence, bringing Musharraf under moral and political, if not legal, pressure to step down.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
08/10/2008 00:00 ||
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Book review by Khaled Ahmed: Demystifying Kashmir by Navnita Chadha Beher
Author Behera is 'impartial' on a subject on which Indians and Pakistanis can't shake off their nationalist positions. Pakistanis have lost the international community on their cause and nothing they say is considered right; the Indians used to present a closed mind to what they thought was a world convinced of the Pakistani case, but now they can feel easy looking closely at the Indian warts. The logic of losing and winning has emphasised realism and the Pakistanis are lost when their nose is rubbed into it. The book still looks anti-Pakistan but what can one do if Pakistan has been mostly wrong?
The book begins by taking account of India's aim to gobble up the hundreds of states left unrealistically behind by the British in 1947. Pakistanis worked on the principle of 'Muslim majority' contiguous areas that could be roped in to swell up the territory inside Pakistan. India threatened the states with the label of hostile states till 551 of them acceded in three weeks. VP Menon and Sardar Patel pulled off the coup, but Kashmir remained on the brink, with a Hindu maharaja ruling uneasily over a majority Muslim population. Nehru was personally involved there because of the great Kashmiri Sheikh Abdullah who was close to the Nehruvian ideal of secularism.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: john frum ||
08/10/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
Personally I favor India over Pakistan but if you put things to a vote in Kashmir I think the bulk would vote to join Pakistan. I could be wrong and the ethnic makeup may have changed (at least on the Indian side of the line of control) but I dont think so. So having said that India is in the wrong. Kashimir is worthless tactically (despite what Indians and Pakistani's will tell you about high ground) and the ongoing fighting has ruined its potential a vacation spot so it's worthless doubled.
India really needs a propaganda offensive to convince the Muslims, on both sides, that being a Muslim in India is a good thing. That there are more Muslims in India than in any other country in the world and they are well treated and semi-prosperous. Probably wont' undo the Jihadi brainwashing but they need to do it anyway.
#2
Give Kashmir a few years of jihadi control and they will be just as anxious as the Iraqi Sunnis to get rid of them. But a lot folks will die in the meantime.
#4
Kashmir is not worthless tactically. India will not surrender the high ground and leave the Gangetic plains vulnerable to attack.
It will not surrender the source of the major rivers.
'Kashmir' is Hindu Jammu, Muslim Kashmir and Buddhist Ladakh. The actual valley itself (with its Muslim population) only occupies a small part of J+K state.
Posted by: john frum ||
08/10/2008 8:05 Comments ||
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#5
Given that it's much better to be a Muslim or anything else in India than Pakistan -- except for that whole dhimmitude thingy for the untermenschen, of course -- any Muslim in the region who cannot see reality ought to be written off as not qualified to have an opinion. That said, those who don't see reality agreed to even by thinking Pakistanis will not be persuaded by propaganda outside of what their religious leaders manage to find in the Koran or the Hadiths.
#6
The Kashmir valley relies on the tax revenue from Jammu and the direct funding from Delhi. They know who butters their bread. They will however continue to agitate, since that keeps the gravy train running.
Posted by: john frum ||
08/10/2008 12:32 Comments ||
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#7
High ground is meaningless in this context. High ground is a tactical concern, not a strategic one. This ground is so high and so far from anything it couldn't be used against an enemy any more than capturing the top of the Himalayas could. Kashmir is not "on the way" anywhere and is in effect a side-track between in India and Pakistan. In fact controlling this high terrority in Kashmir is a problem, not an asset. The concept of high ground when used regarding kashmir is simply propoganda because its the easiest explanation to those that aren't sure what it really means.
Both sides want Kashmir for face-saving reasons and not for any tactical rational.
#8
The Himalayas are a wall that protects the Indian subcontinent from China. They are strategic to India.
All those mountain valleys empty out onto the Gangetic plains. What do the Indians do when the valleys turn into jihadi training areas from which the population centers on the plains are attacked?
Posted by: john frum ||
08/10/2008 16:35 Comments ||
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#9
In addition, India will not allow the source of many of its major rivers to fall into the hands of a hostile state.
Posted by: john frum ||
08/10/2008 17:01 Comments ||
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#10
What are the Pakis gonna do with river sources? If they have the ability to poison the rivers it doesn't matter if they control the source or not.
jihadis high in the mountain are no different than Jihadis in any other neighbor. There is nothing special about the high altitude. At the ranges we're talking because of hte altitude any attacks from kashimir into India would be wild, random, and virtually worthless and attacking armies don't gain speed as they race downhill, they instead increase the wear and tear on their vehicles and extend their supply lines because Kashmir is out of hte way.
Given the divisive debate over the Iraq war, perhaps it was inevitable that the accomplishments of the recently concluded "surge" would become shrouded in the fog of 30-second sound bites. Too often we hear that the dramatic security improvement in Iraq is due not to the surge but to other, unrelated factors and that the positive developments of the past 18 months have been merely a coincidence.
To realize how misleading these assertions are, one must understand that the "surge" was more than an infusion of reinforcements into Iraq. Of greater importance was the change in the way U.S. forces were employed starting in February 2007, when Gen. David Petraeus ordered them to position themselves with Iraqi forces out in neighborhoods. This repositioning was based on newly published counterinsurgency doctrine that emphasized the protection of the population and recognized that the only way to secure people is to live among them.
#1
The Op-Ed was posted here yesterday. It's been so long since I've visited the Post's op-ed page that I had forgotten that the Sunday editorials and opinions are put up on the WaPo's site on Saturday.
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.
