A New Great Game in the Asia-Pacific

CounterPunch, April 30, 2012 

India tested its first inter-continental ballistic missile, named Agni-V, this month and joined the select group of nations possessing both nuclear weapons and a delivery system capable of hitting targets across continents. Only a few days before, nuclear capable North Korea had test fired a rocket, supposedly to place a satellite in the orbit, but it failed.

Within days, India’s long-time adversary, Pakistan, tested a more advance version of its Shaheen-1 missile. Named Shaheen-1A, it is capable of hitting targets between 2000 and 3000 miles––a substantially upgraded intermediate-range ballistic missile. Before the latest launch, Pakistan’s longest-range missile, Shaheen II, was thought to have a range of less than 1500 miles.

The North Korean attempt brought strong condemnation from the United States and its allies in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. The Obama administration announced a ban on food aid to Communist North Korea, an ally of China. Pyongyang immediately said that it was no longer bound by the agreement to refrain from its nuclear program. The expectation in Washington is that North Korea will now conduct another rocket or even a nuclear test, its third since October 2006.

Reaction to India’s first ICBM test was different from that after North Korea’s unsuccessful rocket launch. The Indian missile is not something China can ignore. The Chinese are ahead of the Indians in the nuclear and space race by a decisive margin. Beijing has the capability of hitting targets anywhere in the world. It has had the atomic bomb since 1964 and the hydrogen bomb since 1967. It tested its first inter-continental ballistic missile four years later.

Today, China’s Dong Feng-41 missile has a range almost three times greater than the 3500 mile range of India’s latest missile. In all important respects, India is still in the Second Division of the nuclear league. Delhi hopes that further tests of Agni-V will enable the country to implement its nuclear deterrence in two years. Once the latest missiles are in operation, they will launch India into the First Division.

Notwithstanding the celebratory mood in India over the success of its missile test, the recent overall trend will be seen as an intensification of the arms race in the Asia-Pacific region. Whereas the North Korean nuclear and missile programs have caused upset in South Korea, Japan and Washington, India’s Agni-V is unwelcome to China and Pakistan. It is hardly surprising that the Chinese response was filled with warning and ridicule.

Pointing at its superior firepower, the Chinese media called Agni-V a “political missile” and mocked it as being “dwarf.” Beijing warned that “India should not overestimate its strength.” And the Global Times accused “vested interests” of promoting an arms race between neighbors.

The United States reacted with an unusual degree of calm and understanding on India’s entry into the league of nations possessing inter-continental ballistic missiles. President Obama had recently proclaimed Asia-Pacific as the new focus of American strategy, indicating it to be a logical necessity to depart from the grinding wars of the Bush administration and counter China and North Korea in the future. Reacting to the Agni-V’s launch, a State Department spokesman called for “restrain” and, at the same time, praised India’s solid “non-proliferation record.”

With China continuing to build its naval and air presence in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond, and others striving to stay in the game, the race for influence among Asian powers is a reality. The West, led by the United States, eyes India as its long-term ally with a view to countering China. As the American administration continues its attempts to lure India into an ever closer alliance, Delhi is not wholly willing to oblige. Washington’s offer to help India develop a “missile shield” is one significant issue between them. Then there are diverging views on relations with Iran causing tension between Delhi and Washington.

The arena of the new Great Game is Asia-Pacific. The race is complicated in a unipolar world, but the trend is clear. India’s intention to close the gap with China is welcomed by the West in general and the United States in particular. Pakistan is determined to stay close to India’s military might whereas China will want to maintain its supremacy.

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Just Plain Stupidity Or A Failure By Design

The explosion of national anger in Afghanistan after the revelation that U.S. soldiers dumped and burned copies of the Quran in an incineration pit has an uncanny familiarity with the history of previous foreign occupations of the country. Despite ceaseless official media campaign through the decade of U.S.-led war to convince us how well things were going for NATO, the battle for the hearts and minds in Afghanistan has not been won.

Dozens of Afghans have been killed in violent demonstrations across the country. Relations between foreign forces and civilians on one hand, and the Afghan population on the other, have sunk to a new low. The killings of two senior American military officers, deployed as “advisors” in the interior ministry, by an Afghan intelligence officer prompted NATO member-states to withdraw their “advisors” from all Afghan ministries and offices, for no one was deemed to be safe.

Extraordinary scenes of public defiance looked so threatening that, in Washington, President Obama had to issue an apology. In Afghanistan, the U.S. commander Gen. John Allen apologized repeatedly and profusely.

There are those in Washington who will say it is easy for critics to deride the “achievements.” The truth is that any military venture is ultimately judged by its final outcome. As President Obama prepares to end the Afghan venture launched by his predecessor George W. Bush a decade ago, these events in early 2012 remind us of the chaos surrounding the 1989 Soviet military retreat.

What will follow is anybody’s guess, but the instinct of many in touch with Afghanistan will be to pray.

The burning of the Quran at Bagram Air Base, once a Soviet airfield when the Communist superpower occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, was described by a BBC correspondent as NATO’s tipping point in the country. The situation had been in the making almost from the beginning since the October 2001 invasion. The American military never understood that, in a country as impoverished but as rich in history and culture as Afghanistan, individual and national honor is the greatest asset. The failure to recognize this is particularly unfortunate for the United States, where so many politicians and those associated with the military-industrial complex would not stop talking about their honor and religious beliefs.

Is this failure down to the blindness of hubris? Or a disturbing level of prejudice against Muslims and Islam permeating certain sections of society and military? Is this the reckless instinct of a boyish mentality? Or a desperate method of finding a moment of laughter and entertainment in a highly stressful environment. Is it because of lack of training? Or no training is enough when irrationality rules human minds.

Acts such as the recent desecration of dead Afghan bodies by American marines urinating on them, and filming the episode, raise these awful but unavoidable questions. We have seen Abu Ghraib pictures of gross abuse of Iraqi prisoners before, and numerous other accounts are in the public domain. In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has been vocal in his condemnation of such episodes as they occur with regular frequency. But for most ordinary Afghans apologies have become meaningless. It is difficult to think of anything more offensive than what was done to the dead bodies, and to the Quran, in a deeply religious country. Surely, professional soldiers from the United States, where religious roots are deep, should know better.

For more than a decade, the official version of the military intervention in Afghanistan focused on claims that the war aim was to defeat the Taliban, because first and foremost they were al Qaeda enablers and enemies of the Afghan people; that Western powers were friends and respecters of Islam and the Afghan population; that the United States would never again make the mistake of turning its back on Afghanistan as happened in the early 1990s.

The credibility of each of these claims is seriously wounded today. The Obama administration is moving toward a withdrawal by the end of 2014. His military surge of 2009 has failed to overcome the Afghan resistance. And despite hearing many apologies, Afghans are not persuaded that foreign forces understand or respect their culture and sensitivities. The burning of the Quran was indeed the last straw.

The consequences of the episode go beyond the withdrawal of American “advisors” from Afghan ministries and other government offices. Britain, France and Germany are among those NATO powers who have followed. Cooperation between the Afghan government, such as it was, and the international forces deployed there has become more tricky. The BBC correspondent, Andrew North, reported there being “quiet fury” within the Afghan government with the Americans for their “brainless” behavior.

Other foreign military contingents are weary. The United Kingdom has signed a separate agreement with Kazakhstan, so British tanks and other military hardware leave Afghanistan via Kazakh territory when UK troops withdraw. More deals with former Central Asian republics may be in the offing. And in a strange move given the reality of military balance in the country, the Americans have demanded that the Afghan government protect U.S. troops.

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The Making of the Egyptian People’s Revolution

Foreign Policy Journal (February 9, 2011)

These are days of reckoning for Hosni Mubarak and those associated with the Egyptian regime in and outside the country. Outpouring of a million or more people in Cairo, in Alexandria, Suez and across the country repeats a familiar lesson. Once people living under a suppressive regime have broken the fear barrier, the masses have realized their collective strength and resolved to end their long nightmare. We are witnessing a phenomenon that is irreversible.

People have lived through atrocities and pain, economic and political hardships without any obvious recourse, distrust of their rulers and pessimism about their future long enough. They have reflected on what they must endure if things remained unchanged, examined their own worth and concluded that the system cheats them in every way. Their rage has broken the threshold of tolerance. They have decided that the existence of permanent humiliation is not worthy of continuation. Then the point of inevitability of a people’s uprising has been reached.

The inevitability of a revolution, once the dynamic has reached that point, is not in doubt. However, exact prophecy is more tricky. Juan Cole warns against the temptation to compare Egypt’s popular uprising to Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution (Why Egypt 2011 is not Iran 1979, Informed Comment, February 2, 2011). A number of observers have made alarmist predictions that the Muslim Brotherhood (i.e. radical Islamists) would take over power if Egypt’s military-dominated regime is swept away by popular revolt. What a betrayal of eighty million people?

The Muslim Brotherhood is neither a dominant entity in Egyptian polity nor is the movement in collaboration with the radical movements like the Islamic Jihad. There are secular, left-wing and right-wing parties, religious forces and labor activists in considerable numbers. Contrary to national elections and referendums to extend military-led rule under President Hosni Mubarak over three decades, the outcome of a free and fair election, if it were held, cannot be predetermined. However, with more than twenty parties, the scenario of a radical Islamist seizer of power looks unlikely.

Anti-Americanism in Egypt, the heart of the Arab world, is a different matter. Political machination by the ruling elites in and outside Egypt to keep the established character of regime in place will only serve to reinforce the anti-American feeling. Egypt’s uprising has both differences from, and parallels with, earlier civil revolts elsewhere. The local context of the events in Egypt is different. However, it is important to recognize what these events mean for the United States, Israel and their strategic designs in the Middle East. They mean something akin to what the Iranian Revolution meant back in 1978-79.

In the early stages of the Iranian Revolution, a weak American president Jimmy Carter in a moment of fatal misjudgment, described Iran, under a brutal regime, as a “free country” and an “oasis of peace and stability.” As the current Egyptian uprising started two weeks ago, the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that the regime in Cairo was “stable.” That only days after Clinton was moved to acknowledge the region being battered by a “perfect storm” demonstrated a crisis in Washington’s understanding of the Middle East similar to the one three decades before. America’s misjudgment and confusion about how to deal with the crisis does not stop there. The way ahead is littered with political landmines.

President Obama’s soaring rhetoric proved much stronger than his leadership in office. Today he looks like a weak president in the mold of Jimmy Carter. In July 2009, he embarked on his Middle East political journey in Cairo with a celebrated speech seeking “a new beginning” with Muslims based on mutual interests and mutual respect, justice and tolerance. That rhetorical promise faces a severe test. Obama seems clueless while American policy is hijacked by hawkish secretaries of state and defense, and uniformed military top brass openly meddling in Egypt’s affairs; and voices from the United States and Israel declare utter disrespect for the Egyptian people and the reasons for their uprising. Obama demands that a transition “must be quick, must be peaceful and must start now.” President Mubarak refuses to resign, promises to go in September 2011 at the end of his current term (thirty year in all) and offers instead committees to discuss reforms and bribes in the form of pay rises.

On February 8 the biggest demonstrations take place since the protests began on January 25. The masses reject Mubarak’s “concessions.” Egypt’s emerging strongman Omar Suleiman, whose intelligence service for years tortured his own people and those the United States sent for “extraordinary rendition” during the “war on terror,” declares that Egypt is “not ready for democracy.” And Obama’s secretary of defense, Robert Gates, pays fulsome compliments to the Egyptian military for showing extraordinary restraint.

No matter what comes out of Egypt’s tumultuous events, the U.S. Empire is collapsing. The Egyptian people have all but ensured the end of Hosni Mubarak’s rule and the prospects of a Mubarak dynasty. However, this is only a partial victory. The real victory will be democracy. As machinations in Israel, the United States and its European allies continue, that real victory is not certain – yet. Is it to happen soon? Or the people’s will to be thwarted – again? The point of inevitability in the Egyptian uprising has arrived. Attempts to cheat them this time will leave a legacy of anger and bitterness could have consequences far more serious and long term than the events in Iran in 1979.

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