Enemies to the east? http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=173878

Thursday, April 23, 2009 Kamila Hyat The writer is a freelance columnist and former newspaper editor Two stuffed camels, as tall and as dour as the actual beasts, stand these days along the Lahore canal. Atop them ride two figures – dressed from head-to-toe in stark white robes and obviously meant to represent desert Arabs. The camels seem oddly out of place amidst the colourful floats and other, sometimes garish, displays of dancers and peacocks and boats and horses meant to mark the city's Spring Festival. One asks how they came to stand there or what role they have amongst the 'dhol' carrying figures from a Punjabi village or the colourfully dressed women who churn their pots of 'lassi'. But the presence of the Arabs represents something of the confusion that has overtaken us. Since the 1980s, a forceful attempt has been made to turn heads to the west, to place Pakistan in the Muslim Middle East and to have it abandon its place amidst the more diverse whole of South Asia. It is this thinking of course that has led to the absurd -- but widely held notion that the history of Pakistan begins with the landing in Sindh of Muhammad Bin Qasim in 711 A.D. Today, the mindset that inspired this twist on history seems active again. There is talk of India, rather than the Taliban, being the 'real' enemy. This view is echoed frequently in the media. This of course is no big surprise given that the media has, indeed, traditionally leaned largely to the right. But more alarming is the fact that within Pakistan's military there is a clear opinion that while the civilian government may see militants as the enemies, the real foe is India. An effort to persuade at least selected politicians of this, and thus create a divide in the setup, is now on. To make this process still more effective, the whole war being fought in Pakistan is depicted as one between the US and the Taliban. The fact that over 300 Pakistani civilians have died this year in suicide bombings carried out by the militants is cleverly ignored. And attempts have been made – some media insiders believe almost certainly orchestrated by intelligence agencies – to discredit video footage of the flogging of a girl in Swat by painting it as a NGO conspiracy. No rational, no logic has been put forward as to the hows and whys of this. The entire chain of reasoning that holds the war against the militants is the USA's rather than ours, and that it is India whom we should be fighting, must be challenged. Our politicians need to come out unequivocally to question this flawed line of thought. Whereas it is true that much of the militancy we confront today is a consequence of US policies and the continued presence of that country's troops in Afghanistan, we must keep in mind that the situation is not that of 'either the US or the Taliban'. It is possible to have two enemies; it is sensible in such a situation to decide how strategically to take them both on, possibly one at a time. But simply because there is so much to oppose as far as Washington goes does not mean we should place ourselves in the camp of the blood-thirsty militants who think nothing of gunning down people and then impaling their heads upon poles. So far, even if reluctantly, the military has been following political orders to take on the militants. It has not had much success. This embarrassment seems to be one factor in its decision that it may be better to join an enemy one cannot beat. Faced with a military that it believes is not fully under its command, the political setup too has shown signs of wavering. In parliament last week, with one honourable exception, no one seemed willing to question the peace deal in Swat. This included the 'liberals' and the women in the National Assembly. Perhaps the fear of Taliban bullets was a factor in their silence; perhaps it was an obligation to toe the line of their parties. But whatever the reasons our politicians showed themselves both unwilling and incapable of defending the right of people who live under the ruthless rule of the Taliban. There is another problem. While there are politicians who have no sympathy with the Taliban, they ask how this force is to be battled without the full support of the military. There are no easy answers. But a start has to be made somewhere. One place to do so is by encouraging people to gaze once more to the east and to re-establish Pakistan as a South Asian nation, an inheritor of its unique blend of cultures, rather than as a country that equates itself only with that portion of the past that belongs to Islam. To do this, the fallacy that we can militarily take on India – perhaps because we have nuclear weapons – must be exposed as nothing more than a lie. An army that has been unable to tame a few thousand maverick militants can hardly be expected to take on a far larger and more organized army. There are also other hard realities that must be confronted. Much as we may wish to deny it, much as stories of Indian 'failure' are lapped up by our media, the real, unquestionable fact is that that country has succeeded. Its 1.2 billion people, despite a slowdown that has crippled many segments of the Indian economy, look to the future with hope. Pakistan's 160 million see less and less light to brighten the darkness that swirls all around and threatens to overwhelm them. Think tanks hold India will, by 2020, rank as a world super power. They ask if Pakistan can till then even hold together as a cohesive state. Some Pentagon analysts have envisaged a situation where it breaks up into separate fiefdoms, controlled by Taliban warlords. This is not impossible to envisage given that control of Swat has already been handed over to Maulana Fazalullah and Sufi Mohammad Khan. Some of the scenarios being drawn up may be far-fetched. Many drafts for the future drawn up by American or European think tanks have of course proved inaccurate. Among these was the notion that Pakistan would evolve into a stable, developed country. This has not happened. The country's president has warned the world that terrorists based in Pakistan threaten everyone. He has not said how this threat is to be tackled. But answers have to be found. The only option for Pakistan is to break free of the militant grip, focus on building a new relationship with India and realize the only hope for a brighter future lies in building regional harmony rather than in waging war.

December 8, 2008

Op-Ed Contributor

They Hate Us — and India Is Us

By PATRICK FRENCH

London

AS an open, diverse and at times chaotic democracy, India has long been a target for terrorism. From the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi in 1948 to the recent attacks in Mumbai, it has faced attempts to change its national character by force. None has yet succeeded. Despite its manifest social failings, India remains the developing world’s most successful experiment in free, plural, large-scale political collaboration.

The Mumbai attacks were transformative, because in them, unlike previous outrages in India, the rich were caught: not only Western visitors in the nation’s magnificent financial capital but also Indian bankers, business owners and socialites. This had symbolic power, as the terrorists knew it would.

However, I recently saw a televised forum in which members of the public vented their fury against India’s politicians for their failure to act, and it soon became apparent the victims were poor as well as rich. One survivor, Shameem Khan — instantly identifiable by his name and his embroidered cap as a Muslim — told how six members of his extended family had been shot dead. Still in shock, he said: “A calamity has fallen on my house. What shall I do?” His neighbors had helped pay for the funeral. Like most of India’s 150 million Muslims, Mr. Khan is staunchly patriotic. The city’s Muslim Council refused to let the terrorists be buried in its graveyards.

When these well-planned attacks unfolded, it was clear to anyone with experience of India that they were not homegrown, and almost certainly originated from Pakistan. Yet the reaction of the world’s news media was to rely on the outmoded idea of Pakistan-India hyphenation — as if a thriving and prosperous democracy of over a billion people must be compared only to an imploded state that is having to be bailed out by the I.M.F. Was Pakistan to blame, asked many pundits, or was India at fault because of its treatment of minority groups?

The terrorists themselves offered little explanation, and made no clear demands. Yet even as the siege continued, commentators were making chilling deductions on their behalf: their actions were because of American foreign policy, or Afghanistan, or the harassment of Indian Muslims. Personal moral responsibility was removed from the players in the atrocity. When officials said that the killers came from the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, it was taken as proof that India’s misdeeds in the Kashmir Valley were the cause.

These misdeeds are real, as are India’s other social and political failings (I recently met a Kashmiri man whose father and sister had died at the hands of the Indian security forces). But there is no sane reason to think Lashkar-e-Taiba would shut down if the situation in Kashmir improved. Its literature is much concerned with establishing a caliphate in Central Asia, and murdering those who insult the Prophet. Its leader, Hafiz Saeed, who lives on a large estate outside Lahore bought with Saudi Money, goes about his business with minimal interference from the Pakistani government.

Lashkar-e-Taiba is part of the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders (the Qaeda franchise). Mr. Saeed’s hatreds are catholic — his bugbears include Hindus, Shiites and women who wear bikinis. He regards democracy as “a Jewish and Christian import from Europe,” and considers suicide attacks to be in accordance with Islam. He has a wider strategy: “At this time our contest is Kashmir. Let’s see when the time comes. Our struggle with the Jews is always there.” As he told his followers in Karachi at a rally in 2000: “There can’t be any peace while India remains intact. Cut them, cut them — cut them so much that they kneel before you and ask for mercy.” In short, he has an explicit political desire to create a state of war between the religious communities in India and beyond, and bring on the endgame.

Like other exponents of Islamist extremism, he has a view of the world that does not tolerate doubt or ambiguity: his opponents are guilty, and must be killed. I have met other radicals like Mr. Saeed, men who live in a dimension of absolute certainty and have contempt for the moral relativism of those who seek to excuse them. To achieve their ends, it is necessary to indoctrinate boys in the hatred of Hindus, Americans and Jews, and dispatch them on suicide missions. It is unlikely that any of the militants who were sent from Karachi to Mumbai — young men from poor rural backgrounds whose families were paid for their sacrifice — had ever met a Jew before they tortured and killed Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, who was several months pregnant, at the Mumbai Jewish center.

America’s so-called war on terror has been, in many respects, a catastrophe. In Pakistan, it has been chronically mishandled, leading to the radicalization of areas in the north that were previously peaceful. Yet links between the military, the intelligence services and the jihadis have remained intact: Lashkar-e-Taiba is merely one of a number of extremist organizations that continues to function.

The prime solution to the present crisis is to force the closing of terrorist training outfits in Pakistan, and apply the law to those who organize and finance operations like the Mumbai massacres. Hafiz Saeed and other suspects should be sent to India to stand trial. The remark by Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari (a man whose history of shady business dealing makes him demonstrably unfit for high, or even low, office), that he did not think the terrorists came from Pakistanwould be funny if it were not tragic.

The United States gives around $1 billion a year in military aid to Islamabad; that is leverage. It does the people of Pakistan no favors for Washington to allow their leaders to continue with the strategy of perpetual diversion, asking India to be patient while denying the true nature of the immediate terrorist threat. I received this e-mail message recently from a friend in Karachi: “Nowhere can get more depressing than Pakistan these days — barring some African failed states and Afghanistan.”

Patrick French is the author, most recently, of “The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul.”

Next Steps in the Indo-Pakistani Crisis

December 8, 2008 | 1923 GMT

By George Friedman

Related Special Topic Page

• Militant Attacks In Mumbai and Their Consequences

In an interview published this Sunday in The New York Times, we laid out a potential scenario for the current Indo-Pakistani crisis. We began with an Indian strike on Pakistan, precipitating a withdrawal of Pakistani troops from the Afghan border, resulting in intensified Taliban activity along the border and a deterioration in the U.S. position in Afghanistan, all culminating in an emboldened Iran. The scenario is not unlikely, assuming India chooses to strike.

Our argument that India is likely to strike focused, among other points, on the weakness of the current Indian government and how it is likely to fall under pressure from the opposition and the public if it does not act decisively. An unnamed Turkish diplomat involved in trying to mediate the dispute has argued that saving a government is not a good reason to go to war. That is a good argument, except that in this case, not saving the government is unlikely to prevent a war, either.

If India’s Congress party government were to fall, its replacement would be even more likely to strike at Pakistan. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Congress’ Hindu nationalist rival, has long charged that Congress is insufficiently aggressive in combating terrorism. The BJP will argue that the Mumbai attack in part resulted from this failing. Therefore, if the Congress government does not strike, and is subsequently forced out or loses India’s upcoming elections, the new government is even more likely to strike.

It is therefore difficult to see a path that avoids Indian retaliation, and thus the emergence of at least a variation on the scenario we laid out. But the problem is not simply political: India must also do something to prevent more Mumbais. This is an issue of Indian national security, and the pressure on India’s government to do something comes from several directions.

Three Indian Views of Pakistan

The question is what an Indian strike against Pakistan, beyond placating domestic public opinion, would achieve. There are three views on this in India.

The first view holds that Pakistani officials aid and abet terrorism — in particular the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), which serves as Pakistan’s main intelligence service. In this view, the terrorist attacks are the work of Pakistani government officials — perhaps not all of the government, but enough officials of sufficient power that the rest of the government cannot block them, and therefore the entire Pakistani government can be held accountable.

The second view holds that terrorist attacks are being carried out by Kashmiri groups that have long been fostered by the ISI but have grown increasingly autonomous since 2002 — and that the Pakistani government has deliberately failed to suppress anti-Indian operations by these groups. In this view, the ISI and related groups are either aware of these activities or willfully ignorant of them, even if ISI is not in direct control. Under this thinking, the ISI and the Pakistanis are responsible by omission, if not by commission.

The third view holds that the Pakistani government is so fragmented and weak that it has essentially lost control of Pakistan to the extent that it cannot suppress these anti-Indian groups. This view says that the army has lost control of the situation to the point where many from within the military-intelligence establishment are running rogue operations, and groups in various parts of the country simply do what they want. If this argument is pushed to its logical conclusion, Pakistan should be regarded as a state on the verge of failure, and an attack by India might precipitate further weakening, freeing radical Islamist groups from what little control there is.

The first two analyses are essentially the same. They posit that Pakistan could stop attacks on India, but chooses not to. The third is the tricky one. It rests on the premise that the Pakistani government (and in this we include the Pakistani army) is placing some restraint on the attackers. Thus, the government’s collapse would make enough difference that India should restrain itself, especially as any Indian attack would so destabilize Pakistan that it would unleash our scenario and worse. In this view, Pakistan’s civilian government has only as much power in these matters as the army is willing to allow.

The argument against attacking Pakistan therefore rests on a very thin layer of analysis. It requires the belief that Pakistan is not responsible for the attacks, that it is nonetheless restraining radical Islamists to some degree, and that an Indian attack would cause even these modest restraints to disappear. Further, it assumes that these restraints, while modest, are substantial enough to make a difference.

There is a debate in India, and in Washington, as to whether this is the case. This is why New Delhi has demanded that Pakistan turn over 20 individuals wanted by India in connection with attacks. The list doesn’t merely include Islamists, but also Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, the former head of the ISI who has long been suspected of close ties with Islamists. (The United States apparently added Gul to the list.) Turning those individuals over would be enormously difficult politically for Pakistan. It would create a direct confrontation between Pakistan’s government and the Pakistani Islamist movement, likely sparking violence in Pakistan. Indeed, turning any Pakistani over to India, regardless of ideology, would create a massive crisis in Pakistan.

The Indian government chose to make this demand precisely because complying with it is enormously difficult for Pakistan. New Delhi is not so much demanding the 20 individuals, but rather that Pakistan take steps that will create conflict in Pakistan. If the Pakistani government is in control of the country, it should be able to weather the storm. If it can’t weather the storm, then the government is not in control of Pakistan. And if it could weather the storm but chooses not to incur the costs, then India can reasonably claim that Pakistan is prepared to export terrorism rather than endure it at home. In either event, the demand reveals things about the Pakistani reality.

The View from Islamabad

Pakistan’s evaluation, of course, is different. Islamabad does not regard itself as failed because it cannot control all radical Islamists or the Taliban. The official explanation is that the Pakistanis are doing the best they can. From the Pakistani point of view, while the Islamists ultimately might represent a threat, the threat to Pakistan and its government that would arise from a direct assault on the Islamists is a great danger not only to Pakistan, but also to the region. It is thus better for all to let the matter rest. The Islamist issue aside, Pakistan sees itself as continuing to govern the country effectively, albeit with substantial social and economic problems (as one might expect). The costs of confronting the Islamists, relative to the benefits, are therefore high.

The Pakistanis see themselves as having several effective counters against an Indian attack. The most important of these is the United States. The very first thing Islamabad said after the Mumbai attack was that a buildup of Indian forces along the Pakistani border would force Pakistan to withdraw 100,000 troops from its Afghan border. Events over the weekend, such as the attack on a NATO convoy, showed the vulnerability of NATO’s supply line across Pakistan to Afghanistan.

The Americans are fighting a difficult holding action against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The United States needs the militant base camps in Pakistan and the militants’ lines of supply cut off, but the Americans lack the force to do this themselves. A withdrawal of Pakistani forces from the Afghan border would pose a direct threat to American forces. Therefore, the Pakistanis expect Washington to intervene on their behalf to prevent an Indian attack. They do not believe a major Indian troop buildup will take place, and if it does, the Pakistanis do not think it will lead to substantial conflict.

There has been some talk of an Indian naval blockade against Pakistan, blocking the approaches to Pakistan’s main port of Karachi. This is an attractive strategy for India, as it plays to New Delhi’s relative naval strength. Again, the Pakistanis do not believe the Indians will do this, given that it would cut off the flow of supplies to American troops in Afghanistan. (Karachi is the main port serving U.S. forces in Afghanistan.) The line of supply in Afghanistan runs through Pakistan, and the Americans, the Pakistanis calculate, do not want anything to threaten that.

From the Pakistani point of view, the only potential military action India could take that would not meet U.S. opposition would be airstrikes. There has been talk that the Indians might launch airstrikes against Islamist training camps and bases in Pakistani-administered Kashmir. In Pakistan’s view, this is not a serious problem. Mounting airstrikes against training camps is harder than it might seem. The only way to achieve anything in such a facility is with area destruction weapons — for instance, using B-52s to drop ordnance over very large areas. The targets are not amenable to strike aircraft, because the payload of such aircraft is too small. It would be tough for the Indians, who don’t have strategic bombers, to hit very much. Numerous camps exist, and the Islamists can afford to lose some. As an attack, it would be more symbolic than effective.

Moreover, if the Indians did kill large numbers of radical Islamists, this would hardly pose a problem to the Pakistani government. It might even solve some of Islamabad’s problems, depending on which analysis you accept. Airstrikes would generate massive support among Pakistanis for their government so long as Islamabad remained defiant of India. Pakistan thus might even welcome Indian airstrikes against Islamist training camps.

Islamabad also views the crisis with India with an eye to the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. Any attack by India that might destabilize the Pakistani government opens at least the possibility of a Pakistani nuclear strike or, in the event of state disintegration, of Pakistani nuclear weapons falling into the hands of factional elements. If India presses too hard, New Delhi faces the unknown of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal — unless, of course, the Indians are preparing a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Pakistan, something the Pakistanis find unlikely.

All of this, of course, depends upon two unknowns. First, what is the current status of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal? Is it sufficiently reliable for Pakistan to count on? Second, to what extent do the Americans monitor Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities? Ever since the crisis of 2002, when American fears that Pakistani nuclear weapons could fall into al Qaeda’s hands were high, we have assumed that American calm about Pakistan’s nuclear facilities was based on Washington’s having achieved a level of transparency on their status. This might limit Pakistan’s freedom of action with regard to — and hence ability to rely on — its nuclear arsenal.

Notably, much of Pakistan’s analysis of the situation rests on a core assumption — namely, that the United States will choose to limit Indian options, and just as important, that the Indians would listen to Washington. India does not have the same relationship or dependence on the United States as, for example, Israel does. India historically was allied with the Soviet Union; New Delhi moved into a strategic relationship with the United States only in recent years. There is a commonality of interest between India and the United States, but not a dependency. India would not necessarily be blocked from action simply because the Americans didn’t want it to act.

As for the Americans, Pakistan’s assumption that the United States would want to limit India is unclear. Islamabad’s threat to shift 100,000 troops from the Afghan border will not easily be carried out. Pakistan’s logistical capabilities are limited. Moreover, the American objection to Pakistan’s position is that the vast majority of these troops are not engaged in controlling the border anyway, but are actually carefully staying out of the battle. Given that the Americans feel that the Pakistanis are ineffective in controlling the Afghan-Pakistani border, the shift from virtually to utterly ineffective might not constitute a serious deterioration from the United States’ point of view. Indeed, it might open the door for more aggressive operations on — and over — the Afghan-Pakistani border by American forces, perhaps by troops rapidly transferred from Iraq.

The situation of the port of Karachi is more serious, both in the ground and naval scenarios. The United States needs Karachi; it is not in a position to seize the port and the road system out of Karachi. That is a new war the United States can’t fight. At the same time, the United States has been shifting some of its logistical dependency from Pakistan to Central Asia. But this requires a degree of Russian support, which would cost Washington dearly and take time to activate. In short, India’s closing the port of Karachi by blockade, or Pakistan’s doing so as retaliation for Indian action, would hurt the United States badly.

Supply lines aside, Islamabad should not assume that the United States is eager to ensure that the Pakistani state survives. Pakistan also should not assume that the United States is impressed by the absence or presence of Pakistani troops on the Afghan border. Washington has developed severe doubts about Pakistan’s commitment and effectiveness in the Afghan-Pakistani border region, and therefore about Pakistan’s value as an ally.

Pakistan’s strongest card with the United States is the threat to block the port of Karachi. But here, too, there is a counter to Pakistan: If Pakistan closes Karachi to American shipping, either the Indian or American navy also could close it to Pakistani shipping. Karachi is Pakistan’s main export facility, and Pakistan is heavily dependent on it. If Karachi were blocked, particularly while Pakistan is undergoing a massive financial crisis, Pakistan would face disaster. Karachi is thus a double-edged sword. As long as Pakistan keeps it open to the Americans, India probably won’t block it. But should Pakistan ever close the port in response to U.S. action in the Afghan-Pakistani borderland, then Pakistan should not assume that the port will be available for its own use.

India’s Military Challenge

India faces difficulties in all of its military options. Attacks on training camps sound more effective than they are. Concentrating troops on the border is impressive only if India is prepared for a massive land war, and a naval blockade has multiple complications.

India needs a military option that demonstrates will and capability and decisively hurts the Pakistani government, all without drawing India into a nuclear exchange or costly ground war. And its response must rise above the symbolic.

We have no idea what India is thinking, but one obvious option is airstrikes directed not against training camps, but against key government installations in Islamabad. The Indian air force increasingly has been regarded as professional and capable by American pilots at Red Flag exercises in Nevada. India has modern Russian fighter jets and probably has the capability, with some losses, to penetrate deep into Pakistani territory.

India also has acquired radar and electronic warfare equipment from Israel and might have obtained some early precision-guided munitions from Russia and/or Israel. While this capability is nascent, untested and very limited, it is nonetheless likely to exist in some form.

The Indians might opt for a drawn-out diplomatic process under the theory that all military action is either ineffective or excessively risky. If it chooses the military route, New Delhi could opt for a buildup of ground troops and some limited artillery exchanges and tactical ground attacks. It also could choose airstrikes against training facilities. Each of these military options would achieve the goal of some substantial action, but none would threaten fundamental Pakistani interests. The naval blockade has complexities that could not be managed. That leaves, as a possible scenario, a significant escalation by India against targets in Pakistan’s capital.

The Indians have made it clear that the ISI is their enemy. The ISI has a building, and buildings can be destroyed, along with files and personnel. Such an aerial attack also would serve to shock the Pakistanis by representing a serious escalation. And Pakistan might find retaliation difficult, given the relative strength of its air force. India has few good choices for retaliation, and while this option is not a likely one, it is undoubtedly one that has to be considered.

It seems to us that India can avoid attacks on Pakistan only if Islamabad makes political concessions that it would find difficult to make. The cost to Pakistan of these concessions might well be greater than the benefit of avoiding conflict with India. All of India’s options are either ineffective or dangerous, but inactivity is politically and strategically the least satisfactory route for New Delhi. This circumstance is the most dangerous aspect of the current situation. In our opinion, the relative quiet at present should not be confused with the final outcome, unless Pakistan makes surprising concessions.

Inexpensive Bottles to Help Keep You Afloat

By Jason Wilson
Wednesday, October 29, 2008; F05

Hey, have you heard the one about the failing economy? As we sink further toward a recession, people probably will be drinking more. It's not just a cliche, it's fact: Historically, sales of alcoholic beverages grow during recessions. And not just the cheap stuff. In a recent survey conducted by Zagat and liquor giant Diageo, 58 percent of Americans said they would be willing to pay more to have a cocktail made with premium, "top-shelf" brands, even during an economic downturn.

That may be true, but one thing I have learned through writing this column is that no one agrees on exactly what top-shelf means. For some it means $100 cognac or Calvados; for others it's $35 craft-distilled gins. Some envision obscure European liqueurs; some, $40 flavored vodkas. For others it means anything except what they swilled when they were young and broke.

"I've decided I'm just going to start drinking the same stuff I drank in college," an old friend told me a few weeks ago.

That friend has never had good taste in booze, so I asked, "Does that mean you'll be drinking Zima again?" Little did I know that would prove impossible. Last week, MillerCoors, the geniuses who tried to persuade Gen-Xers to drink Zima in the early 1990s, announced that it was, at long last, discontinuing sales of the much-maligned "malternative." A moment of silence, please.

Okay, seriously: I believe one can drink frugally without resorting to a "malternative" or other such nonsense. I'm sure many will continue to invest in top-shelf liquors (which might be a shrewder bet right now than the stock market). But I can't imagine that, during tough times, many people will be shelling out for such specialties as $35 cachaca, $50 10-times-distilled vodkas or $60 absinthe (of which there are now a half-dozen on the market).

In the past, when I've given advice on stocking the bar, I've generally set $20 to $25 as the standard for "value," that elusive mix of quality and affordability. But my friend who's closest to college age (at 25) told me that, for her, $20 was "very top shelf" and $15 "still feels like a splurge." I think a lot of people feel that way. And a lot more soon will.

I still believe, though, that there are certain costs you have to suck up: You need to keep vermouth and bitters on hand. Cointreau will cost you about $39, but it's the one nonnegotiable mixer. I'd still stick with Tanqueray or Plymouth gins ($20 to $25), though you could consider switching to Beefeater's ($17). But there are some spirits that, if finances are tight, you might have to go without. Finding a good 100 percent agave tequila under $25 is nearly impossible; ditto for single-malt scotch and cognac.

There are alternatives. In an emergency, you could replace your usual margarita with a caipirinha, using a basic, low-cost cachaca such as Pitu ($13). Or switch to a pisco sour, because most piscos retail for $16 to $18. Or just stick with rum: You can pick up a bottle of four-year-old Flor de Caña Gold rum for about $13. If Stolichnaya vodka is too pricey at $18, you could survive with Svedka at $12.

When it comes to scotch, you'll have to switch to blended, but you could do worse than White Horse ($17). As spirits critic F. Paul Pacult writes in his new book, "Kindred Spirits 2," "All the world's dictionaries should place a photo of a White Horse bottle next to the words 'Blended Scotch Whiskey.' " As for brandy, switch from cognac to more underrated Spanish brandies, such as Osborne Veterano, Torres 5-year-old, or Fundador Solera Reserve (all about $15).

H. Joseph Ehrmann, owner of Elixir in San Francisco, offers some excellent tips to economize on spirits:

· Buy American. The weak dollar drives up the prices of imported spirits.

· Avoid new and trendy products. "They price higher right out of the gate. Everyone wants to be 'the next Grey Goose.' You pay for what is fashionable."

· Don't be afraid to order what your dad used to drink. Old brands usually are still around because they are good.

Keeping that advice in mind, I am recommending that my readers invest heavily in good old Kentucky bourbon and domestic rye whiskey in the coming quarter. As Pacult told the Associated Press a few months ago, these American whiskeys remain "the best bargains in spirits."

My favorite bargain whiskeys? I like both Old Overholt and Rittenhouse Rye (both $14) and even Wild Turkey Rye (about $18). They are great for a Manhattan, old fashioned, Vieux Carre or Sazerac. For bourbon, cheap, hard-to-beat options include Evan Williams ($11) and Ancient Age ($10). But even a good-quality bourbon like Maker's Mark is still only $22, and I know plenty of people who consider Maker's Mark to be pretty close to "top-shelf."

Let's all just raise a glass in hopes that all of the shelves -- top, middle and bottom -- don't coming crashing to the floor.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/28/AR2008102800903_pf.html

July 17, 2008
Our Towns
Moving Too Fast to Drive 55
By PETER APPLEBOME

PLATTEKILL, N.Y.

At the Plattekill travel plaza of the New York State Thruway on Wednesday, you didn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing on gas prices and on the economy over all.

Forget the $4.27 per gallon for regular at the pumps. Inside, every flat-screen television seemed to feature one scary message or another for people to ponder over their Starbucks lattes or Roy Rogers burgers.

“America’s Fuel Crisis,” read the headline on CNN as various talking heads were summoned to debate drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. “What I’ll Never Give Up,” was the topic on Headline News as callers were asked what they could not do without (favorite guitar and amp was one reply) no matter how far under water their finances might sink.

So you might have thought an idea that could cut people’s gasoline costs by 15 percent or more as soon as they pulled out of the lot might have some appeal. It’s a Golden Oldie from the 1970s that was resuscitated this month when Senator John Warner, Republican of Virginia, suggested that Congress might want to consider returning to a national speed limit to save gasoline and possibly ease fuel prices.

Mr. Warner did not call for a return to 55 miles per hour, the limit set by Congress in 1974 in reaction to the energy shocks of another generation. But he asked the Energy Department to determine the most fuel-efficient speed limit, noting that Americans had saved 167,000 barrels of petroleum a day when the 55-mile limit was in effect. (Congress repealed the measure in 1995.) The experts say that fuel efficiency deteriorates radically at speeds above 60 miles per hour. Every 5 miles over that threshold is estimated to cost drivers, Mr. Warner said in his letter, “essentially an additional 30 cents per gallon in fuel costs.”

So slowing down from 65 or 70 miles per hour to 55 or 60 might seem a no-brainer — free money! — for drivers reeling from high gas prices. But though the rational brain might say yes, the reptile brain, the metabolic modern brain, the highway-driver brain, seems to say, let’s look for savings another way.

“It’s unrealistic,” said Darren Jacobs, an engineer from Grantham, N.H., who was driving home from Macungie, Pa. That is a trip of 412 miles, or 6 hours and 47 minutes, according to MapQuest. So assuming 25 miles per gallon, driving at 55 would likely cost 40 minutes and save at least $7. He figured he’d spend the money.

“It’s too slow,” Mr. Jacobs said. “It’s not the way we live. Everything is fast. We eat fast food. We have high-speed Internet. If you’re going from Point A to Point B you want to get there as soon as you can. I don’t think the solution is making us go slower. It’s getting tough on the greedy people who are profiting from this.”

Pete Boucheron, a retiree from Schenectady, N.Y., said, yeah, there’s some logic to 55, but it might have more appeal if prices got really high, say $6 or $7 a gallon. Gustavo Cardenas said he was for it — but then, he’s from Montreal.

Environmental groups say 55 is a good idea and as there’s an Internet presence for everything, groups like the Drive 55 Conservation Project, (www.drive55.org) are ready to go.

On the other hand, given red-state fury over the mere thought of a return to 55, don’t bet on a new law. As Sammy Hagar’s “I Can’t Drive 55” put it: “Write me up for 125/Post my face, wanted dead or alive/Take my license, all that jive/I can’t drive 55!”

In fact, there are various ideas out there to cope with the crushing increase in gas prices; one is for governments to be open four days a week, for longer hours, instead of five. But maybe Phil Gramm wasn’t entirely wrong. Maybe we are happier whining about problems rather than coming up with solutions that entail any sort of inconvenience.

As for 55 — law or not, no one’s stopping you. A retro drive toward the Catskills on Wednesday, with Chopin (way above my customary cultural pay grade) playing on the radio, had its pleasures. Crossing the Tappan Zee at 55, I was pretty much in the traffic flow, but before long I was being passed by everyone except one guy in a Nissan Maxima with handicap plates. It was not too bad on 287, but quite a bit more harried on the Thruway, which was two lanes, populated by many big trucks and S.U.V.’s probably not listening to Chopin.

I would not have been averse to a similar trip home, but like Mr. Jacobs, I had a deadline, and 55 seemed a luxury I couldn’t afford. I tuned the radio to oldies rock on WCBS, and a little pokily, but more or less in the traffic flow, set the cruise control to 65.

Update: Alas, the saga of the Wiffle ball kids of Greenwich, Conn., seems to have come to a lawyerly, if not entirely happy ending. After a group of players, parents and town officials met for two hours on Wednesday, First Selectman Peter Tesei said that the field youngsters built in May in an empty lot owned by the town would have to come down by Friday because it raised unacceptable liability issues. The town plans to help them build another field at a nearby school. “I think they could have let us play a few more weeks,” said Vincent Provenzano, one of the organizers. Then he excused himself, saying he was in the middle of a game.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

Veteran manager Eveillard blames Greenspan, sees bargains in Asia

Mutual Understanding Veteran manager Eveillard blames Greenspan, sees bargains in Asia Last Update: 1:53 PM ET Jun 26, 2008 Mutual-fund manager Jean-Marie Eveillard is a veteran buyer of value stocks, and when he surveys the global investment landscape nowadays, years of experience make him a cautious shopper. ...Read the rest of the story

Most E-mailed Gas could fall to $2 if Congress acts, analysts say Veteran manager Eveillard blames Greenspan, sees bargains in Asia CORRECT: U.S. stocks plunge; worst June for Dow since 1930 Sour on brokers, Goldman puts Citigroup on conviction sell list Oil scores record gains as Fed decision weighs on dollar Do your dependents qualify for coverage? Employers want to know Pimco's El-Erian sees high inflation, waning U.S. economic power Sprint Nextel shows good Instinct Existing-home sales rise 2% in May UBS fraud charges latest in auction-rate securities saga

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Gas could fall to $2 if Congress acts, analysts say
Limiting speculation would push prices to fundamental level, lawmakers told
By Rex Nutting & Michael Kitchen, MarketWatch
Last update: 2:15 p.m. EDT June 23, 2008

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- The price of retail gasoline could fall by half, to around $2 a gallon, within 30 days of passage of a law to limit speculation in energy-futures markets, four energy analysts told Congress on Monday.
Testifying to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Michael Masters of Masters Capital Management said that the price of oil would quickly drop closer to its marginal cost of around $65 to $75 a barrel, about half the current $135.
Fadel Gheit of Oppenheimer & Co., Edward Krapels of Energy Security Analysis and Roger Diwan of PFC Energy Consultants agreed with Masters' assessment at a hearing on proposed legislation to limit speculation in futures markets.
Krapels said that it wouldn't even take 30 days to drive prices lower, as fund managers quickly liquidated their positions in futures markets.
"Record oil prices are inflated by speculation and not justified by market fundamentals," according to Gheit. "Based on supply and demand fundamentals, crude-oil prices should not be above $60 per barrel."
"Energy speculation has become a growth industry and it is time for the government to intervene," said Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., chairman of the full committee. "We need to consider a full range of options to counter this rapacious speculation."
Dingell introduced a bill on June 11 that would ask the Energy Department to gather the facts on energy prices, including the role played by speculators. See full story.
There are two kinds of speculators in the futures markets, Masters said. Traditional speculators are those who need to hedge because they actually take physical possession of the commodities. Index speculators, on the other hand, are merely allocating a portion of their portfolio to commodity futures.
Index speculation damages price-discovery mechanisms provided by futures markets provide, Masters added
The committee will likely consider legislation that would rein in index speculation by imposing higher-margin requirements; setting position limits for speculators; requiring more disclosure of positions; and preventing pension funds and investment banks from owning commodities.
Both major presidential candidates have supported closing loopholes that encourage speculation in the energy markets. Read more on Election Blog.
However, other witnesses said that pure speculators have had little impact on energy prices, which have doubled in the past year to about $135 per barrel. Both Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman have dismissed the impact of speculators on prices paid by consumers.
Speculators now account for about 70% of all benchmark crude trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up from 37% in 2000, said Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., chairman of the investigations subcommittee. Stupak introduced a bill on Friday that would limit index speculation.
There has been much discussion recently about how big a role speculators have been playing in the sharp rise in energy prices, though no consensus has emerged on this point.
Congress, however, has grown increasingly concerned over speculative investors' role in the energy market in comparison with those buying futures contracts to hedge against risk from price changes. Lawmakers are expected to consider legislation to set strict limits -- or in some cases, an outright ban -- on speculative trading in energy futures in some markets.
Dingell is looking into any legal loopholes that may have contributed to speculation in energy markets. In 1991, according to documents provided by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to the committee's investigators, the agency authorized the first exemption from position limits for swap dealers with no physical commodity exposure. This began what Dingell said was "a process that has enabled investment banks to accumulate enormous positions in commodity markets."
In a letter to the CFTC last week, Dingell asked the agency to disclose how many other exemptions it has provided over the years. End of Story
Rex Nutting is Washington bureau chief of MarketWatch.
Michael Kitchen is a copy editor for MarketWatch and is based in New York.

December 4, 2007
Observatory
Chimps Exhibit Superior Memory, Outshining Humans
By HENRY FOUNTAIN

Spend even a little time around chimpanzees, and you begin to realize how intelligent they are. But can they outshine humans in brain power? Most humans would scoff at that.

But researchers have shown that young chimps outperform adult humans in a memory test, a Concentration-like game using numerals on a computer screen.

“We were very surprised to find this,” Tetsuro Matsuzawa of the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University said. “But it’s a very concrete, simple fact. Young chimps are superior to human adults in a memory task.”

Dr. Matsuzawa and a colleague, Sana Inoue, first trained chimps to recognize the numerals 1 through 9 in sequence. Ai, the first chimp trained, an adult female was found with a memory capability equal to that of adult humans.

When the researchers went to see if there was a difference with chimps younger than 6, the animals had a touch screen where scattered numerals appeared for up to two-thirds of a second and were then masked by white squares. With the shortest exposure time, about a fifth of a second, the chimps had an 80 percent accuracy rate, compared with adult humans’ 40 percent. The findings are described in Current Biology.

Dr. Matsuzawa said the ability reminded him of the phenomenon called eidetic imagery, in which a person memorizes details of a complex scene at a glance. This so-called photographic memory is present in a very small number of children, and is often associated with autism.

Dr. Matsuzawa speculated that perhaps somewhere back in common evolution, humans and chimps had this ability. But humans lost it because they gained something else, communicating through a complex language.

As Ai demonstrates, adult chimps lose the ability, too. Dr. Matsuzawa suggested that as the chimps age, their memory capability is otherwise occupied.

November 5, 2007
U.S. Is Likely to Continue Aid to Pakistan
By DAVID E. SANGER and DAVID ROHDE

WASHINGTON, Nov. 4 — The Bush administration signaled Sunday that it would probably keep billions of dollars flowing to Pakistan’s military, despite the detention of human rights advocates and leaders of the political opposition by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the country’s president.

In carefully calibrated public statements and blunter private acknowledgments about the limits of American leverage over General Musharraf, the man President Bush has called one of his most critical allies, the officials argued that it would be counterproductive to let Pakistan’s political turmoil interfere with their best hope of ousting Al Qaeda’s central leadership and the Taliban from the country’s mountainous tribal areas.

Speaking to reporters in Jerusalem, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that while the United States would “have to review the situation with aid,” she said three times that President Bush’s first concern was “to protect America and protect American citizens by continuing to fight against terrorists.”

“That means we have to be very cognizant of the counterterrorism operations that we are involved in,” she said. “We have to be very cognizant of the fact that some of the assistance that has been going to Pakistan is directly related to the counterterrorism mission.”

In Islamabad, aides to General Musharraf — who had dismissed pleas on Friday from Ms. Rice and Adm. William J. Fallon, the senior military commander in the Middle East, to avoid the state-of-emergency declaration — said they had anticipated that there would be few real consequences.

They called the American reaction “muted,” saying General Musharraf had not received phone calls of protest from Mr. Bush or other senior American officials. In unusually candid terms, they said American officials supported stability over democracy.

“They would rather have a stable Pakistan — albeit with some restrictive norms — than have more democracy prone to fall in the hands of extremists,” said Tariq Azim Khan, the minister of state for information. “Given the choice, I know what our friends would choose.”

It was a sign of their confidence that Pakistani officials announced that parliamentary elections set for January might be delayed for as long as a year. Just before she learned of that announcement, Ms. Rice said, “We have a very clear view that the elections need to take place on time, which would mean the beginning of the year.”

Visiting Beijing today, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said the United States was reviewing its programs for military assistance to Pakistan, although he noted that the Bush administration also would take into serious consideration the need to continue counter-terrorism efforts in the region.

“Pakistan is a country of great strategic importance to the United States and a key partner in the war on terror,” Mr. Gates said during a news conference at the Chinese Ministry of Defense. “However, the actions of the past 72 hours have been disturbing. We urge President Musharraf to return his country to law-based, constitutional and democratic rule as soon as possible.”

Mr. Gates said the United States had begun “reviewing all of our assistance programs” to Pakistan. But, he noted, “We are mindful not to do anything that would undermine ongoing counter-terrorism efforts.”

In a further sign of American concern over the situation in Pakistan, the United States postponed annual security consultations between the two nations that were to have been held for two days this week in Islamabad. The chief of the American delegation, Eric Edelman, the under secretary of defense for policy, already was on his way to the meeting when the Bush administration decided it would not allow its representatives to attend the bilateral session.

“We have taken the initiative to postpone it,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, who accompanied Mr. Gates to Beijing. Mr. Morrell said the American decision illustrated “a degree of disappointment” with Mr. Musharraf’s declaration of a state of emergency on Saturday. The bilateral security talks could be rescheduled, Mr. Morrell said, “as soon as conditions are more conducive.”

In Washington, officials acknowledged that they were trying to balance the American insistence that Pakistan remain on the path to democracy and General Musharraf’s unwillingness to risk chaos that would allow Al Qaeda and the Taliban to operate more freely.

“The equities in Pakistan are huge,” said a senior official deeply involved in trying to persuade General Musharraf to fulfill his promise to hold elections and run the country as a civilian leader. “We’ve got U.S. and NATO troops dying in Afghanistan, and a war on terrorism” that cannot be halted while General Musharraf tries to shore up his powers, he said.

It was unclear to what extent General Musharraf perceived an urgent threat to the country in deciding to declare an emergency that suspended civil liberties.

But several administration officials said they were struck by the heavy-handed nature of the crackdown announced Saturday. Until a few days ago, they said, General Musharraf had been offering private assurances that any emergency declaration would be short-lived. “They have made this crisis more acute by the way they’ve done this,” the official concluded.

President Bush has made spreading democracy a major foreign policy theme and his administration has quietly pushed General Musharraf for months to be more open to sharing power, going so far as to help broker talks between him and Benazir Bhutto, the leader of Pakistan’s largest opposition party.

But Mr. Bush has said nothing in public about General Musharraf’s latest action. His silence contrasts sharply to his reaction to the crackdown on dissidents in Myanmar last month. In that case, Mr. Bush announced specific steps against Myanmar rulers. But Pakistan, officials argued, is a different case: it is a nuclear-armed nation that Mr. Bush had designated a “major non-NATO ally,” even though its enthusiasm for counterterrorism has been episodic.

In Islamabad, Western officials said Mr. Bush’s limited choices could worsen if protests erupted, and they complained that in the past few months General Musharraf had focused more on weakening his rivals than fighting Islamic extremists.

For more than a year before Saturday’s declaration, American officials have seethed over Pakistan’s poor performance against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. General Musharraf’s effort to strike a deal with Islamic militant groups in the tribal areas failed. When he ordered troops back into the tribal areas in recent months, many were killed or kidnapped.

In interviews before and after the emergency declaration, Western diplomats and former Pakistani military officials said General Musharraf had done a poor job countering growing militancy, particularly this year. The military-led government has moved too slowly, prepared poorly for operations and often appeased militant groups.

“Initially, this was not complicated,” said Mahmood Shah, a retired brigadier who was the senior Pakistani government official in charge of security in the tribal areas until last year. “Now, this is a very complicated situation.”

Through it all, the United States has continued pumping money to the country. While the total dollar amount of American aid to Pakistan is unclear, a study published in August by the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated it to be “at least $10 billion in Pakistan since 9/11, excluding covert funds.” Sixty percent of that has gone to “Coalition Support Funds,” essentially direct payments to the Pakistani military, and 15 percent to purchase major weapons systems. Another 15 percent has been for general budget support for the Pakistani government; only 10 percent for development or humanitarian assistance.

General Musharraf’s supporters argued Sunday that his government — now unencumbered by legal constraints and political concerns by the emergency decree — will be in a better position to eradicate extremists and that if the United States wants that security, it must back him.

“If your agenda is to save attacks in the U.S. and eliminate Al Qaeda, only the Pakistani Army can do that,” said the close aide to General Musharraf. “For that, you will have to forget about elections in Pakistan for maybe two to three years.”

Pakistani opposition groups argue that General Musharraf has failed and that his emergency declaration will increase instability and militancy in the country. They say nationwide elections would produce a moderate government with popular support to crack down on militancy.

There is little question that General Musharraf has failed to develop broad domestic support for battling terrorists. His political party is divided, has not carried out promised reforms and would likely lose an election.

A poll in September by Terror Free Tomorrow, a Washington-based nonprofit group, showed that Osama bin Laden was more popular in Pakistan than General Musharraf, with 46 percent of respondents giving him a “favorable” rating against 38 percent for the president. Ms. Bhutto got a “favorable” rating from 63 percent. The nationwide poll surveyed 1,044 adults and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

David E. Sanger reported from Washington, David Rohde from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Thom Shanker from Beijing.

India's Nuclear Deal Has Growth at its Core

Bronwen Maddox: World Briefing

The storm over India’s new nuclear pact with the US, which now threatens to bring down the Indian Government, illustrates the only good thing about the deal – it is an antidote to anti-Western reflexes in the country that still run deep.

Other than that, the deal is a worry, for all the reasons that the US Congress has asserted: it is an extravagant breach of the spirit of non-proliferation treaties, showering the benefits of US nuclear help on India even though it acquired nuclear weapons.

But the row is a reminder that Indian stability and prosperity are surprisingly fragile, given the country’s remarkable growth. If the resolution manages to silence the intense nationalist voices, who put a fantasy of independence ahead of the pursuit of growth, then a bad deal will have had one good result.

Who would have thought, in a deal that gives India too much while asking for too few safeguards in return, that the greatest opposition would come from within India itself? Communist allies of the ruling coalition, led by the Congress Party, have threatened to withdraw their support over the civil nuclear cooperation deal with the US.

The Communists say that the deal hurts Indian sovereignty and could make it beholden to the US. But Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister, argues that the deal ends three decades of isolation for India, because of its acquisition of nuclear weapons, which prevented it gaining help for the nuclear power stations that it needs to support its growth. The trigger for this week’s uproar has been a comment from Ronen Sen, the Indian Ambassador to the US, in which he appeared to call communists in parliament “headless chickens”; he said later that they should not be offended as the remark referred only to journalists.

The row is important, not only because it jeopardises the deal (and it probably does not do so fatally). If it pulled down the Government, it would choke off reforms needed to maintain growth at the current rate of more than 7 per cent a year. Singh, widely described as one of the architects of India’s economic modernisation, is a champion of those reforms, intended to curb the budget deficit and spread access to good jobs beyond the English-speaking middle class.

Neither Congress nor communists want an election this year, but the turmoil may still force one before the Government’s term ends in May 2009. It was never a strong coalition, born out of the mutual desire to keep the Hindu-nationalist BJP out of power. But both would be foolish to campaign on the nuclear issue, which has not touched a national chord. It arouses none of the passions of parallel nuclear questions in Pakistan or Iran, for example.

It does in the US, however, where Congress, even before it fell under Democratic control, was quick to accuse the Bush Administration of striking a deal that subverted efforts to curb proliferation in order to cement an alliance. It is some small compensation that the deal strengthens the hand of Singh and other reformers, at the expense of those who would rather India stayed shut off from the world.

Without ‘foreign’ masters

The Plight Of Indian Comrades

By Amulya Ganguli

There may be a simple explanation for the Left’s ideological rigidity on the nuclear deal which is taking the country towards a mid-term poll. The comrades are not getting good advice about the pros and cons of their stance. In the past, they had the advantage of turning to their friends, philosophers and guides in Moscow or Beijing to show them the way out of any difficulty which was beyond their ken. For instance, when the yeh azadi jhooti hai movement centred mainly in Telengana began to fade out, the undivided Communist party dispatched four of its stalwarts ~ Ajoy Ghosh, SA Dange, Rajeshwara Rao and M Basavapunniah ~ to Moscow in 1950-51 to seek guidance.
There is a delightful passage in Mohit Sen’s autobiography, A Traveller and the Road: The Journey of an Indian Communist, which recounts how Stalin paced up and down smoking a pipe as the four Indians interacted with Suslov, Malenkov and Molotov. It was as if the principal of a school was silently watching how the teachers were instructing their students.

Stalin’s suggestion

When the principal finally gave his opinion, it was a sensible one: call off the armed struggle. Not only that, Stalin said that although India was still under British colonial influence (yeh azadi jhooti hai), the Jawaharlal Nehru government was not a puppet, for it had a social base and mass support. The Indian communists should concentrate, therefore, on fighting elections.
It is this kind of practical guidance which Prakash Karat and Co. are unable to secure today. There is no principal or teachers to show them the right path even it means abandoning an armed uprising, which the ‘students’ evidently thought was the only course before a revolutionary, and participating instead in the bourgeois exercise of holding elections, which carries the danger of developing “an outlook which evades militant forms of mass action”, as a CPI resolution warned in 1971.
Although the Soviet advice meant a deviation from the prescribed text, the Indian communists had little hesitation in accepting it because their dogma also prescribed unquestioning obedience to their ideological lord and master. But now, in the absence of such a centre of gravity, the Indian communists are not only adrift in their ideological sea, but also lack the intellectual calibre to break out of their dogmatic straitjacket or even modify a doctrine in accordance with the existing situation. The revolutionary text, therefore, is now set in stone for them and the comrades have no option but to abide by it even if such blind adherence leads them into stormy waters.
It is obvious, for instance, that if Karat and Co were to be transported back to the fifties and left to their own devices without the benefit of Moscow’s advice, they wouldn’t have had the intellectual daring to admit that their path of armed struggle in Telengana was wrong and that they must switch to parliamentary politics. They would have marched on blindly towards disaster. Not surprisingly, they are now following a course which can have portentous consequences for them and the party ~ and not all of them beneficial.
Before examining such a scenario, it may be worthwhile to examine another instance of perceptive of lords and masters abroad steering the Indian communists along the right channels. This was when Kanu Sanyal, Jangal Santhal, Sourin Bose and several other Naxalites ~ 12 in all ~ went to Beijing in 1967 to find out about the ways to conduct a revolution. Then, as noted by Sumanta Banerjee in his book, In the Wake of Naxalbari, Sourin Bose went to Beijing again in 1970 when the Naxalites in India found that Radio Peking was no longer extolling them and not even mentioning their “achievements” in Srikakulam.
What he was told, however, by Zhou Enlai and Kang Sheng must have been hugely disheartening, for the Chinese leaders asked the Naxalites to stop raising the slogan, “China’s chairman is our chairman”, since they said, to quote Banerjee, “to regard the leader of one country as the leader of another party is against the sentiment of the nation; it is difficult for the working class to accept it”. Moreover, Zhou and Kang Sheng were against the gunning down of individual policemen, which was one of the favourite tactics of the Naxalties. The two Chinese leaders said that “secret assassination of police is anarchist, is isolated from the masses, is short-lived”. As is obvious, all this was good advice, just as what Stalin told the Indian communists made eminent sense.
Evidently, Indian communists need close supervision. Otherwise, they are liable to commit major mistakes. Their history confirms this flaw in their character. Whether opposing the Quit India movement in 1942 when the anti-imperialist World War II became a people’s war following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, or calling Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose a quisling and Rabindranath Tagore a bourgeois poet, the Left always seemed to be running against the national current.
But the Left’s biggest blunder was its curiously ambiguous response to the Chinese invasion in 1962. To quote Mohit Sen again, many in the CPI(M) “believed that the Chinese communists had done nothing wrong in attacking India. They thought that this was not an attack but a defensive action and that in the not so long run, the Chinese action would help the advance of the revolution by weakening the power of the ruling alliance, especially by pulling down the prestige of the Congress and its leader Pandit Nehru.”

The split

As is known, the undivided Communist party split within two years of the Chinese invasion as a result of the differences in the party on the issue. After the rupture, the CPI came to be known as a pro-Moscow organization and the CPI(M) as pro-Beijing, although the Marxists lost the label to the Naxalites five years later when the first of the many CPI(M-L)s were set up. However, the identification of the communists with foreign powers ~ either a friendly one like the Soviet Union or a hostile one like China ~ has remained a part of public consciousness.
Now, the Left’s attempt to scuttle the nuclear deal is likely to strengthen this unflattering impression because of the evident uneasiness in China and Pakistan about New Delhi’s growing ties with Washington. Such a perception will be all the more damaging to the communists because of the evident rise in Chinese bellicosity over Arunachal Pradesh. And Pakistan, of course, has long been a bugbear despite the recent marginal improvement in mutual relations.
Arguably, the current misgivings about the Left can be no less damaging than what happened in 1942 and 1962. Perhaps even more so because unlike in the earlier periods, India is seemingly poised today to become a major economic and political power. If the communists are seen, therefore, to be setting up roadblocks and that, too, at the behest of foreign powers, their electoral prospects cannot but be dim.

The writer is a former Assistant Editor, The Statesman

Editorial

Immigration Malpractice

Published: July 7, 2007, nytimes.com

The prickliness and glacial ineptitude of the immigration system is old news to millions of would-be Americans. Immigrants who play by the rules know that the rules are stringent, arbitrary, expensive and very time-consuming. But even the most seasoned citizens-in-waiting were stunned by the nasty bait-and-switch the federal bureaucracy pulled on them this month. After encouraging thousands of highly skilled workers to apply for green cards, the government snatched the opportunity away.

The tease came in a bulletin issued by the State Department in June announcing that green cards for a wide range of skilled workers would be available to those who filed by July 2. That prompted untold numbers of doctors, medical technicians and other professionals, many of whom have lived here with their families for years, to assemble little mountains of paper. They got certified records and sponsorship documents, paid for medical exams and lawyers and sent their applications in. Many canceled vacations to be in the United States when their applications arrived, as the law requires.

Then they learned that the hope was effectively a hoax. The State Department had issued the bulletin to prod Citizenship and Immigration Services, the bureaucracy that handles immigration applications, to get cracking on processing them. The agency is notorious for fainting over paperwork — 182,694 green cards have been squandered since 2000 because it did not process them in time. That bureaucratic travesty is a tragedy, since the annual supply of green cards is capped by law, and the demand chronically outstrips supply. The State Department said it put out the bulletin to ensure that every available green card would be used this time.

After working through the weekend, the citizenship agency processed tens of thousands of applications. On Monday, the State Department announced that all 140,000 employment-based green cards had been used and no applications would be accepted.

Citizenship and Immigration Services, the definition of a hangdog bureaucracy, says the law forbids it to accept the applications. The American Immigration Lawyers Association says this interpretation is rubbish. It is preparing a class-action lawsuit to compel the bureaucracy to accept the application wave that it provoked.

The good news is that immigrants’ hope is pretty much unquenchable. Think of the hundreds of people standing in the rain in ponchos at Walt Disney World on Independence Day, joining the flood of new citizens now cresting across the country. They celebrated on July Fourth, but for many of them the magic date is July 30, when a new fee schedule for immigrants takes effect, drastically jacking up the cost of the American dream.

The collapse of immigration reform in the Senate showed the world what America thinks of illegal immigrants — it wants them all to go away. But the federal government, through bureaucratic malpractice, is sending the same message to millions of legal immigrants, too.

Caste Aside

By ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN

Only in India are people clamoring to be called socially inferior. Last week, over 20 people died in protests in the state of Rajasthan when a group called the Gujjars demanded to be legally downgraded so they could benefit from job guarantees and handouts that flow from "reservation," India's form of "affirmative action" for its lower castes. Last month, citizens in Uttar Pradesh, the country's largest state, went to the polls and delivered an overwhelming mandate to a party committed to expanding reservations for the Dalits -- the caste formerly known as the "untouchables." Both events bring into sharp focus a larger question: Is it guarantees or opportunities that offer the best way out of social and economic backwardness?

Historically, the government's answer to this question was clear, if somewhat schizophrenic: Elites were given opportunities, while the poorer classes were given guarantees. The Constitution itself envisaged free universal and compulsory education for children up to 14 years. But in practice, policy makers since the 1950s emphasized higher education, which largely benefited urban elites who had excellent primary and secondary education. The relative neglect of basic education for the masses, meanwhile, deprived historically disadvantaged classes of similar opportunities for upward mobility. Instead, they were given guaranteed seats in colleges and public sector jobs. While these did have some benefits, by definition, only a small fraction benefited from the guarantees. This temporary, targeted fix, however, came to be regarded as a permanent solution. Guarantees have now become, insidiously, a substitute for creating opportunities.

Unlike the United States, where affirmative action came many decades after the nation's creation, reservation was an integral part of India's founding. And unlike in America, it is a large and blunt instrument of social engineering, taking the form of quotas. Thus, India's founding fathers mandated that 22.5% of all public sector employment and enrollment in government-financed higher education institutions should be reserved for "lower" groups called the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes (SC/STs).

Instead of shrinking with time, these quotas have vastly increased. Today, at least 50% of all public sector jobs and educational seats are reserved for SC/STs, along with another category called "Other Backward Classes," who were traditionally also discriminated against but occupied a slightly higher rung than the SC/STs in the old Indian caste hierarchy. In some states, like Tamil Nadu, the quota can approach 80%.

In politics, reservation used to be a dividing axis pitting the Congress Party, which broadly supported reservations, against its main national rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which historically opposed the policy. Over the last few years, however, in a remarkable shift, reservation has become a bipartisan issue, with politicians of all stripes embracing it as an imperative of electoral success. In this environment, reservation's reach is being extended to elite educational bastions of merit such as the Indian Institutes of Management -- which populates India's most visible companies, such as Infosys and Wipro, as well as many prominent multinational firms. More strikingly, for the first time, there is talk of extending it to private sector employment, an objective that was articulated in the electoral manifesto of the current government.

Is India fated to affirmative action in perpetuity? Interestingly, the public and private realms are moving in opposite directions: While federal and state political actors are reinforcing guarantees over opportunities, consumer choices are clearly reflecting a preference for the latter. The trigger has been provided by the turnaround in India's economic growth, which is now running around 9% annually.

Economic growth has increased the returns to education dramatically enough to set off a mad scramble to acquire education. Even the poorest rural households have internalized the imperative of acquiring education to survive in the new knowledge-based economy. But getting this education is, unfortunately, not always easy. In rural India, free public education is supposedly universally available but it is largely dysfunctional -- teachers often don't turn up to class, and when they do, they impart little of value to students. In a surprising new trend, even the poorest are willing to forego such free public education for costly but (slightly) better private education.

Yet it is a bitter choice when they must forego necessities to access a right accorded to them in the nation's constitution. India is therefore ripe for a voucher system that would combine public financing with the private provision of basic education. Such a scheme could be tailored to individual state needs: One possible twist could be to graduate the value of the voucher, increasing it for the backward classes. The benefits of this would be twofold: It would appease the populist clamor for equal opportunities and it might even be necessary to overcome any discrimination by private providers against enrolling children from backward castes.

Unlike many economic policies that involve trade-offs between equity and efficiency, vouchers can satisfy both objectives. Voucher programs, especially in their graduated variant, are particularly beneficial for the poor. And, by improving incentives and spreading opportunities, a voucher scheme would simply accelerate an ongoing market-driven trend toward the spread of basic education, helping to ease the supply constraints of the Indian educational system and adding to the pool of labor that is at the heart of the country's growth turnaround.

Voucher schemes could also be politically appealing. Studies show that bad policy choices often stem from an attribution problem: Voters can more easily credit politicians for targeted favors such as reservations than for diffuse benefits, such as better economic policies. Ironically, with vouchers, like for other handouts, identifying the benefactor would be easy. The first voucher scheme, instituted in New Delhi for the academic year 2007-08, attracted 100,000 applicants for 400 vouchers.

A general concern with voucher schemes -- their potentially negative impact on public education, as students flock to better, often private, competitors -- would be less relevant than usual in India because public education, particularly in the poorest states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, is considered very difficult, if not impossible, to repair. That makes private provision a viable, even unavoidable, long-term alternative. For this reason, public teachers, with their close links with local politicians, will oppose vouchers, but the large and widespread benefits could help overcome this opposition.

Reservation may have been necessary to redress India's historical inequities. But even its intended beneficiaries -- the poorest -- are becoming wise to its limitations. Voucher-based education cannot take reservation out of the popular political debate but, over time, it can be made less important, as the real opportunities created by better education reduce the illusory appeal of guarantees. A sign of that successful transition would be street protests aimed not at rejigging social classifications, but demanding that teachers actually show up in the classroom.

Mr. Subramanian is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C.

Delhi Metro helped save 33,000 tonnes of fuel

New Delhi, June 04: The Delhi Metro helped save 33,000 tonnes of fuel and prevented the creation of over 2,275 tonnes of poisonous gases in the national capital, a new report has said. The completion of Phase I of Delhi Metro, covering 65 km, resulted in a reduction in road accidents, helped improve road traffic and travel conditions and made a substantial impact on the environmental well-being of the capital, the report by the Central Road Research Institute (CRRI) said. "As a result of less use of road vehicles with the coming of the metro, 57,858 tonnes of petrol, diesel and CNG would be saved by the end of year 2007. Over 33,000 tonnes of this have already been saved between 2002 and 2006," it said. "Since the metro began operations in December 2002, the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) has already taken 22,697 vehicles load onto its system which is likely to increase to about 40,000 by the end of year 2007." As a result, 16.6 lakh vehicle kilometres would be saved and Rs 218 cr would be saved on maintenance of vehicles by the end of 2007, apart from fuel savings of Rs 172 cr, it said. The report, commissioned by DMRC as part of the first ever study of the impact of its operations, also stated that "Delhites would have a saving of Rs 129 cr by the end of 2007 owing to the Metro". Apart from monetary and environmental benefits, the report suggests the metro has made a substantial improvement in travel conditions and earning capacity per person in the capital. "A person saves around 66 minutes every day by traveling in the Metro, which translates to the additional earning capacity of Rs 725 cr by 2007-end," it said. In addition, passengers traveling on the Delhi Metro save on human energy consumed due to the smooth and comfortable journey, and this has resulted in saving of 40.19 tera joules of energy by 2007. In terms of the human lives saved in road accidents, the report said, "Delhi Metro has helped in already saving 280 lives upto 2006 which would have lost if they had travelled on other modes of transport." The report also concluded that the metro would lead to total savings of around Rs 2,072 cr for the people of Delhi by the end of 2007. "These benefits are a result of passenger time saved, fuel cost saved, reduction in capital and operating cost of vehicles, reduction in environmental damage, accidents and time saved etc," DMRC spokesperson Anuj Dayal told agencies. "In fact, in terms of the total saving for Delhites, the CRRI report says that the total capital investment on phase i of Delhi Metro will be recovered by 2013," he added.

A little India, here in Raleigh
Students carve out a cultural niche

Josh Shaffer, Staff Writer

RALEIGH - Last fall, Kunal Shah flew 8,000 miles from Mumbai to Raleigh with his life in a suitcase, his heart still in India and his mind on an American master's degree.

(photo: Shrikrishna Khare, left, Neil D'Souza and Rishi Mehta walk home from class along Avent Ferry Road, an Indian enclave. )

Today, he walks out of his Southwest Raleigh apartment and feels his homesickness fade. Cricket matches spring up in parking lots and tennis courts. Cars pass by with pictures of Hindu gods dangling from the rearview mirrors. If he needs curry or roti bread, some neighbor will drive him to the Indian market in Cary -- six miles away.

Shah has melded into a growing cultural niche on Avent Ferry Road, a place where Indian graduate students at N.C. State University fill entire apartment complexes.

Indian students know about Avent Ferry even before they leave India, and they rank apartment complexes in order of preference: Champion Court, Avery Close, Colonial Arms.

Students here represent a migration of budding engineers seeking fruitful jobs at home in India, where high-tech jobs are blooming, but the master's degrees they require are scarce and competitive. They list as a top choice N.C. State University, one of a handful of American schools that offer graduate degrees in computer networking.

Shah and his peers also add flavor in North Carolina's Capital City, where more and more residents hail from somewhere else.

"People tend to joke it's 'Indian Ferry Road,' " said Shah, 22. "You are still in that mood. It's not as difficult coming to the U.S."

N.C. State lists roughly 2,000 people here on student visas, about 450 from India -- more than from any other country. Nationwide, Indian students add up to more than 75,000 -- again, the largest influx coming from any country. Next year, Shah expects perhaps another 300 students to arrive in Raleigh.

They cluster as close as possible to the engineering classes on Centennial Campus, sharing rides to Cary for Bollywood movies at Galaxy Cinema or Triangle Indian Market, which caters to their vegetarian diets.

"In the engineering classes, I think many Americans will tell you they feel out of place," said Ajit Gopalakrishnan, 23, who is studying electrical engineering.

On Avent Ferry, Shah points out low-slung brick complexes occupied almost entirely by Indians. Most show up for multiyear stays without a car, a credit card, a cell phone or much money. Furniture comes from garbage bins or garage sales.

Most require jobs to help them through school. Shah worked at Taco Bell despite being a strict religious vegetarian. "I had to touch meat," he said.

Raleigh's Indian pocket is discreet enough to escape most notice -- no saris hanging in the window, incense burning or curry scent wafting down the street. In Shah's apartment recently, the only activity amounted to four students crowded on living room couches, noses in their laptops, tennis shoes piled by the door.

N.C. State, abroad

Last month, N.C. State Chancellor James Oblinger took a weeklong trip to India to promote international education. He traveled with President Bush's ally, Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes, and several other university heads. Before he left, Shah assured him the United States was still a destination for Indians post-9/11.

"I had a young lady come up to me and say, 'I'm so excited to meet you. I'll be on your campus next year studying electrical engineering.' " Oblinger told N.C. State's board of trustees on Friday. "I was the only one that had that happen."

Tech jobs are exploding in India. Cisco Systems will build a second headquarters in Bangalore, spending $150 million and hiring 1,000 people. IBM plans to double its Indian work force by 2010, counting on skilled but lower-cost labor. Indians here plan to spend a few years working for American companies -- Shah has an internship in San Jose this summer -- then return to India for promising work.

Back in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), Shah followed an online community on Yahoo.com that offers advice to N.C. State's incoming Indian students. Dozens check in each day. Skip clothes hangers, which are cheap, they learn. Bring garam masala and other spices, which are expensive and hard to find.

All Shah and his peers knew on arrival was that someone from Maitri -- the campus's Indian support group -- would be waiting at the airport.

Maitri met Shah's group with three cars and a van, arranged squatter's housing with other seniors and pointed them in the direction of housing and jobs.

The call of higher ed

Hardik Thakker, 23, never imagined coming to America. He grew up in Mumbai in a household with 12 others including extended family, and he never got the urge to leave until he watched his Indian classmates migrate to American colleges seeking a professional edge.

At N.C. State, he felt horribly lost.

Avent Ferry Road offers a Food Lion, a Mediterranean grocery, an Ethiopian restaurant, a pool room and a few banks. Two-story brick apartments line the west side, and the sight of an Indian face is common.

But little is walkable, leaving a newcomer to navigate the Wolfline bus system.

Thakker and Shah found an apartment at Kensington Park --fourth on their list of preferences because Centennial Campus is a Wolfline ride away rather than a few minutes' walk.

Thakker spent months knocking on doors in search of work, reminding himself to be patient and persistent. Finally, in October, he found a job.

"I issue tickets for parking violations," he said with a smile. "People come and abuse me when they see me writing tickets."

Soon, Shah and Thakker joined Maitri, which offers a chance to share Indian food and company. The Food Lion suffices for milk and other staples.

Thakker has started a blog. In a recent entry, he wrote about earning his driver's license after two failed tries and a botched U-turn:

"It might seem pretty easy to get a license, but for me, it was no less than a war."

No cultural vacuum

Still, "Indian" Ferry Road is not an isolated Indian island, said Jay Narayan, an N.C. State distinguished professor in material science engineering and a Maitri adviser.

"They integrate quite well," Narayan said. "The English language is not a problem. They speak well. They write well. It's just that they like to live together, especially when they come in. It's not a ghetto."

N.C. State works to integrate students into the community, and Indian students often visit Wake County schools to give cultural lectures, said Michael Bustle, director of N.C. State's Office of International Services.

Still, he added, "If you went to India and there were a few Americans who lived there, you'd most likely live with them because they know what a Big Mac tastes like and who the sports teams are."

Shah and Thakker celebrated Lord Krishna's birthday in Raleigh last year -- a festival they tended to skip back home.

Tradition and change

Now Shah and Thakker share an apartment with three other students in Champion Court, their first preference just outside Centennial Campus.

The cricket club meets near Carmichael gym each Friday when the weather gets warm.

Shah and Thakker organized a screening of the Cricket World Cup games -- the Indian equivalent of the Super Bowl -- on campus. But time to relax is scarce.

American classes are more rigorous than those in India, Shah said. Class is awkward for Indian students, too, because N.C. State professors are so much more approachable and friendly. They are used to formality on campus back home.

But they adjust. On a warm Saturday, Shah and Thakker sit at Cup A Joe on Avent Ferry, both wearing Wolfpack shirts.

Shah was elected president of Maitri in February. Thakker took vice president. They call their apartment "Maitri Headquarters."

"It feels like giving back what you have got," Shah said.

"We feel honored," Thakker echoed.

In July, they will organize a caravan to the airport, shuttling hundreds of newcomers to their temporary digs -- confident after a year's experience on Indian Ferry Road.

Staff writer Josh Shaffer can be reached at 829-4818 or josh.shaffer@newsobserver.com.