Cut and run from Iraq? No way

No way the US can abandon Iraq

From The Statesman

George Tenet, the former CIA director, who was awarded the presidential medal of freedom (for providing intelligence about Afghanistan and Iraq) has come out with a book in which he states that the Bush gang, Vice-President Dick Cheney and former secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, turned the intelligence agency into nothing but a propaganda machine for educating the US Congress into supporting the war against Iraq and bamboozling the international community into believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and in fact he was the enemy of mankind (read the United States.)

Since his retirement from the cloak and dagger agency, Tenet has been a sort of an academic at Georgetown University; and now with a $4 million book advance, the former spymaster has been going from talk-show to talk-show peddling his own version of truth and washing his hands of all that had been said and done in his name. But every time he opens his mouth, the talk show host shows the picture of the former secretary of state Colin Powell showing fake satellite images of Saddam’s preparations for weapons of mass destruction. Behind Powell is seen Tenet with a “Slam Dunk” confident face.

Tenet’s book cannot undo the television images of his complicity in the war that has turned Iraq into a hellhole. Based on faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, in 2002 the US Congress authorised President George W Bush to go to war in Iraq. Mission accomplished, said Bush four years ago on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of California; but instead of drums of freedom Iraq ironically exploded with ancient Shia-Sunni hatred. The United States has been trying to stamp out sectarian civil war with the help of an impotent government, albeit democratically elected.

There seems to be no way out. Americans did not expect a future of this kind, a bloody mess that has killed hundreds of thousands of the Iraqis and driven millions out of the country. Seeing the ceaseless daily carnage of civilians being blown off in streets and the marketplace we have become numbed. Why no one ever in the US Congress imagined the probability of this kind of scenario of hell? Having been complicit in the war, along with the US news media, Congress has no means of ending the raging sectarian violence, insurgency or civil war, by whatever name you call it, and bring peace to the region. With its funding power

Congress tried to force the president to bring troops back home but Bush vetoed the spending bill. Bush does not want to abandon Iraq. That will be an act of cowardliness and national humiliation. Supporting the US combat forces in Iraq while opposing the additional deployment represents the raging but impotent rhetoric in the country. Like most of the American people Congress wants troops back home but does not want to leave the Iraqi people to chaos; or at the mercy of their neighbor Iran or other surrounding Sunni Arab countries. Hence the political schizophrenia and confusion worse confounding at the Capitol Hill.

Iraq is splintered on ethnic lines among Kurds, Shias and Sunnis, and unfortunately there is no well-organized force strong enough to transcend sectarianism and impose order on the country and put it together again. The American people, though overwhelmingly opposed to the President’s Iraq policy, do not want troops to be denied of necessary funds. And probably there in lies the source of Bush’s persistence in pursuing his policy of troop surge in spite of the fact that repeated polls have been pushing him down the popularity ladder. He refuses to be a lame duck. He is still a man with a mission though you see the agony of failure on his face.

Increasing confrontation with Democratic controlled Congress is nonetheless compelling Bush to explore some other ways of mitigating the situation; for example, reluctantly recognising Iran and Syria as parties to the conflict and bringing them to the negotiating table as it was tried in the last week’s Middle East conference held in Egypt. A diplomatic breakthrough the kind recently achieved with North Korea, based on negotiations with regional powers, is a way out. But the search for diplomatic solution requires that the Bush administration must think about new strategies in dealing with Iran.

Congress can be very effective in using its power of the purse by stressing the importance diplomatic means of negotiating peace in Iraq. It must urge the Bush administration to shed its inhibition in talking with Iranian authorities and develop common grounds with Iran in ending ethnic conflict in Iraq, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been trying to do with Syria. In the meantime watch people like George Tenet getting out of the White House and run after mega-million book deals.

There is nothing more spectacular and pathetic than a former loyalist develop sudden pangs of conscience and begin telling kitchen and bedroom tales for a handful of silver.

March of wirelessly mobile masses

Challenge of wirelessly mobile masses

From The Statesman

India’s phenomenal growth in cell phone users, now totaling to 166 million, will have tremendous political and cultural repercussions. Last year 67 million new users were added and by the year 2010, at this rate of growth, India will have more than 400 million cell phone users. Cell phones are not just for calling.

While we become used to picture taking, web surfing and photo and music sharing on cell phones, we should look forward to newer uses of the tiny handheld: live television broadcast, credit card purchases for airline tickets, and ID for security checks and data access. With the spread of WiFi hotspots and ability to roam wirelessly, cell phones will become, for some of us, better than (hmm!) our better-halves. Most of all cell phones will be used as a tool for mass political actions.

On 20 January, 2001, President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines became the first head of a state that lost power to a digitally smart mob in Manila, a million of them who used cell phones to exchange text messages and swarmed like bees for a peaceful demonstration at Epifanio de Santas Avenue (EDSA). The message was: GO 2EDSA, Wear black. It was impossible for Estrada to hold on to power in the face of the people’s mobile power. Whether that would happen in China or not is a matter of speculation. But the 2008 Summer Olympics is upon us and anything could happen.

Different cultures use the same technology differently. Koreans and Japanese use their cells for text messaging. Americans love to talk and listen to music. Music mobility is big in the United States and before long cell phones and mobile music devices would converge. Let’s see how Indian culture assimilates cell phones now that the technology is penetrating even rural areas. Millions of Indians cell users cannot chat idly all the time.

They will make money, they will change minds, and they will change the government. I wonder whether we would become more responsive to the human condition if we are able to surf the Web through wearable computers, eyeglasses or do instant messaging through picture cell phones. But there is no denying the fact that as wireless computer chips get embedded into various devices, communication ecology would change, so would society.

Wireless networks are collapsing space and time, turning Indian geographic space into cyberspace, and are bringing people together through digital presence for collaboration in the workplace and cultural space. The experience of the presence of others in a virtual environment created by networked communication is a new social experience for many. Virtual presence could become active political presence, as it might happen during the Beijing Summer Olympics. Terrorist networks too could organize virtually to strike anywhere. Every human activity from a child’s laughter to the most complex mathematical hypothesis is nothing but information in the binary format. Every human activity that takes place in an analogue world can be turned into digital data, and can instantly be distributed globally through computer networks, thus extending the reach of human communication.

Digital data can not only be stored and retrieved instantly anywhere but they can also be transformed into predictive intelligence about human behaviour regarding commerce, national security or any other social or political activity. Books, music files, love bugs or terrorist messages, for example, become indistinguishable as they converge in a digital stream and surge through cyberspace.

Convergence, instantaneity and feedback interactivity make the Internet the most powerful medium of communication ever developed. Since the traditional media including books, television, newspapers, magazines, radio, music and interpersonal communication are converging on the Internet as a multimedia stream into which anyone can plug in, their power increases manifold and in ways whose implications we still don’t understand. Outsourcing, for example, has given India a constant state of virtual presence in the American corporate discourse (Read the latest Wall Street Journal report, “Getting China and India Right”).

Unlike the offshoring of manufacturing, outsourcing of research and development and other forms of intellectual and professional work is bringing India, the European Union and the United states into a virtual world where brain power and creativity are shared and enhanced. The Internet thus is revolutionary in the sense that it is lowering barriers for cooperative co-existence of cultures.
Cultures prosper when they share boundaries, interpenetrate and cooperate with each other. Computer networks and the Internet have altered our view of space and time.
A networked organisation or an individual with instant messaging and e-mail has different feel of space and time than the people of the pre-digital era.
Cell phone is the new door to cyberspace; and once you are there, you are simultaneously in a synchronous and asynchronous world, a world that gives a greater illusion of freedom and control than the real world.

Today cyberspace has become a multi-dimensional virtual universe in which activities are as real as they are in physical space. With the rise of mobile digital power in India we will see the emergence of collective brainpower to solve complex problems. As more and more people experience activities in cyberspace through wireless presence, they will see that what is local is becoming global.

(ND Batra is the author of Digital Freedom: How Much Can You Handle? forthcoming from Rowman and Littlefield. He is working on a new book: This is the American Way)

Killer friendly handguns

When university campus goes
bang, bang, bang

From The Statesman

Virginia Tech like most university campuses is a digital beehive. Through blogs, instant messaging, video cell phones, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube, no one should have been left behind but the whole academic community was caught unaware.
Jamal Albarghouti, a graduate student, used his video cellphone to record the panic, when the campus popped up with gunfire. A week before the horrific shooting, the university had received bomb threats and Albarghouti suspected that something untoward might happen. But the proverbial digital brushfire did spread through the campus.

Now we know why last Monday a lone gunman, a 23-year-old student Cho Seung-Hui turned himself into a brutal killing machine on a sprawling peaceful campus with 36,000 students, faculty members and staff. Campus authorities including some of his professors knew that the young man was mentally off the track and suspected suicidal tendencies. “Schools should be places of sanctuary and safety and learning,” President George Bush said trying to offer condolences after the gunman had killed 29 students, three professors (one of them, Dr GV Loganathan, originally a native of India), and finally putting a bullet through his own head that made him unrecognisable. “When that sanctuary is violated, the impact is felt in every American classroom and every American community,” Bush continued. But he refused to yield on the need to enact stricter national gun control laws that will screen out mentally disturbed people from buying handguns and assault weapons.

There are 65 million hand guns in the United States but the gun lobby is strong and the market so huge that during the election year no candidate dare suggest stricter gun laws. Lucinda Roy, a co-director of the creative writing program at Virginia Tech, and the author of the novel “The Hotel Alleluia” wrote in the New York Times that “none of us is safe as long as there are angry young men who yearn to blast a hole in the world.” She is one of the instructors who had observed dangerous tendencies in Cho’s writing and sounded an alarm. But if you take away guns, deranged young men (and women) will have to find some more ingenious methods of killing people.

Cho who is being described as a sociopath, could have strapped a bomb though that would have been much more difficult than concealing a couple of handguns in his pockets. Guns are so user friendly that you don’t have to be a marksman to kill someone. Just point and shoot. A child can do it - and some do it, killing their brothers, sisters, and even parents.

Details of the campus massacre and how it happened are before us now. Why did not the university shut itself when the first shot was fired and two persons got killed 7:15 in the morning? How stupid that the campus security thought that the first shooting was a kind of domestic dispute. Cho went to kill his ex-girl friend, they surmised, but now we know that he had no girl friend. In his video declaration he berated the debauchery of the rich, not lost or spurned love, as one of the reasons of is murderous action.

Charles W. Steger, Virginia Tech’s president, expressed his “horror and disbelief and sorrow” but was quick to point out that the gunman at the classroom building was “an Asian male who was a resident of the university.” Pointing out the gunman’s ethnicity was thought to be necessary but he did not explain why the university failed to take more aggressive approach to safeguard the community from someone whose behavior was clinically diagnosed as a mentally disturbed. Virginia Tech rampage has been called the deadliest campus shooting in American history.

Eight years ago two unhinged high school students at Columbine High in Colorado killed 13 students and themselves. The nation was shocked. People mourned and prayed. Then they indulged in collective psychoanalysis and finally came to the same old conclusion, Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.

The gunman was brutal, said students who observed him and escaped his bullets. Zach Petkewicz, a student, told CNN, “ Me and two others got up, threw a couple of tables in front of it and had to physically hold it there while there were gunshots going on.” The killer was so determined and single-minded that he “came to our door and tried the handle. He couldn’t get it in because we were pushing up against it. He tried to force his way in and got the door to open up about six inches and then we just lunged at it and closed it back up. That’s when he backed up and shot twice into the middle of the door, thinking we were up against it trying to get him out.” So much pent up rage and hatred could not have been the effect of one small incident.

Did the university respond adequately?

There was a gap of two hours between two shootings. After the first shooting the gunman retuned to his dorm and mailed his video declaration to NBC. Later he walked through the engineering building and went on shooting in the hall and classrooms where he killed most of his victims.

Although students are not allowed to have guns on the campus, the state of Virginia has one the most liberal gun laws in the country. No license or training is required to have a gun and once a background check is done, law enforcement must issue what is called concealed carry permit.

If Cho were an Arab-Muslim, the background check would have been thorough. But who would have suspected a Korean, Japanese or Chinese student to go on a shooting spree?
(ND Batra is the author of Digital Freedom forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield)

The American Handyman

American handyman keeps tinkering

From The Statesman

ND Batra
Last Wednesday, the US Senate passed yet another resolution easing restrictions on stem cell research. Early in the year the House of Representative had passed a similar resolution. But President George Bush will veto the bill again because, he said, it crosses the moral line.

The rest of the world including private research institutions and universities, nonetheless, do not have to follow the dictates of the White House. The American handyman does not need funding from the US government. He keeps tinkering. Stem cell research is too important to be left at the mercy of the White House. Consider this: A few years ago an American woman gave birth to a girl whose genetic system was cleaned up at the embryonic stage to rid her of the certainty of Alzheimer’s disease. Without doing genetic tinkering at the embryonic stage, the girl would have gotten the defective gene of her mother, a thirty-year-old woman with the Alzheimer gene, who was destined to become victim of the disease.

Genes do shape our destiny; nevertheless, now you can eliminate the bad gene and have a different fate on earth, well, to a great extent. What it means is that there’s hope when life seems hopeless and that’s why everyone wants to do what the American handyman (with an MD or Ph.D.) is doing: look to science and technology, not astrology or some holly book, to solve the problem of human suffering and make living better. When in trouble, whom would you call, a cleric or handyman? The procedure as explained by Harvard Medical School professor, Dr Jerome Groopman (Read his latest book, How Doctors Think) in an article he wrote at that time for The Wall Street Journal, seemed very simple. It is called “preimplantation genetic diagnosis” (PGD), a technology that is nothing more than doing quality control before a machine, let’s say, an automobile, is built.

An in-vitro fertility doctor harvests eggs from the prospective mother, mixes them with her husband’s sperms in a petri dish, and lets the embryos grow. At this stage the doctor could select an embryo from the cluster of test tube embryos for the purpose of sex selection of the child (as some do in India and China); or he could go further. He could do genetic testing of all the embryos for a disease and select an embryo that’s free from the defective gene. Just as an automobile quality control engineer would reject a defective carburetor from a car on the assembly line, the fertility doctor in the case of the American woman chose an embryo that had no Alzheimer gene and threw away the rest that were defective, though they too had potential life in them.

If your are thinking whether in the future fertility doctors might develop methods of discovering violence-prone genes that could be eliminated in embryonic stage so that there will be no Hitler or Osama bin Laden, or other human scourges that will be expecting too much from the genetic tinkerer. (That should be the job of social engineers and early childhood educators.)

But this is not the only ingenious work that the American handyman has been doing. Remember how a few years ago he went to space to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, the humankind’s spy on the cosmos. American astronauts rode the shuttle Columbia to rendezvous with the Hubble to replace its aging solar wings and upgrade its other instruments, and after two days of chase at 17,000 mph, they finally caught up with the space observatory 360 miles above the earth over the Pacific Ocean.

Using the Canadian-built robotic arm, the astronauts dragged the Hubble to the shuttle’s cargo bay area for repair and renovations, much like marine biologists tug a sick whale to shore to nurse it to health and then release it to do God’s work in the ocean. After hours of working in space, the space-walking handymen installed the new wings that gave the Hubble twenty percent more wattage and enabled its instruments including a new powerful camera and power system to work more efficiently, that’s, “to see the planets, stars and the universe better.” In spite of the leak in Columbia’s cooling system, it was not such a mission impossible because earlier too repairmen had been up into space for a tune up service on the Hubble. This was their fourth service call and the most daring.

I do not see any difference between a genetic handyman repairing an embryo to rid an unborn girl of a breast cancer-causing gene and a space handyman implanting new eyes, heart and nervous system on the old man Hubble, so that we could understand the universe. So I believe: It is absolutely ethical and courageous to transform stem cells into useful body parts. What amazes me the most is the eternal optimism in the United States that the American handyman will make the world a better place.

Perhaps the source of this self-renewing hope is the bastion of the nation’s core value, the free marketplace of ideas, a force so overwhelming that religious fundamentalism seldom raises its ugly head in the United States.

Will Turkey Give Up Kamal Ataturk's Legacy?

Will Turkey Go the Iran Way?

Do Turks have to choose between Islam and freedom? Yes, if they want to join the European Union.

LA Times
"Secular Turks rally to send a message to prime minister
A possible presidential bid by Erdogan, an Islamist party leader, stirs opposition. 'We don't want to become Iran,' one says."

“A nation which makes the final sacrifice for life and freedom does not get beaten.”
~ Kemal Atatürk ~

Free Enterprise and freedom

Freedom is more than free enterprise, otherwise the Chinese people too would have been free.

"When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of "happiness" has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions."
~ Hannah Arendt ~

Read more about the topic in Digital Freedom (Rowman & Littlefield)

John Adams on Freedom

"When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more."
~ John Adams ~

History of freedom is very brief.
Read all about it in Digital Freedom (Rowman & Littlefield)

Engaging Iran

Engaging Iran through diplomacy and more

From The Statesman
ND Batra

Prime Minister Tony Blair will be retiring after the May elections and should be indeed thankful for diplomacy to have succeeded, regardless of any under the table quid pro quo, in the return of fifteen British sailors and marines.

Never did Britain seem so lonely and helpless and wounded during the two weeks of captivity even when Blair talked of a calm and conciliatory approach to get out of the impasse. You might call it a facing saving device on the part of Iran when last week President Mehmoud Ahmadinejad announced to free the hostages as a “gift”, nonetheless, reprimanding Britain for not being “brave enough” to admit that its naval personnel had made a mistake and strayed into Iranian territorial waters, the centuries old disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway which was one of the causes of Iraq-Iran of the 1980s.

Now Iran wants its “generosity” to be reciprocated and is expecting that Britain would open up meaningful channels of communication and would persuade Washington to release five Iranians held in Iraq by the US forces since January. Prolonged hostage crisis or any military action would have aggravated the situation and ruined Blair’s brilliant though controversial political career. Blair escaped Jimmy Carter’s political fate. The blunder the former president made in his desperate attempt in rescuing the American hostages held by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in 1979 by launching the operation Desert One (which had to be aborted) in fact prolonged the crisis and humiliated the United States.

The treatment of the captured British sailors and marines, though they were initially blindfolded and cuffed and forced to make confessions, as they told the BBC, was not as inhumane and cruel as it was in 1979 when Iranians seized 66 Americans from the US Embassy in Tehran and held them for 444 days only to release them (the remaining 52) hours after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president on 20 January 1981. The hostage crisis ruined Carter’s presidency; and in spite of the Nobel Peace Prize and global humanitarian work Carter has been doing since he left the White House, the image of his presidency is associated with the blindfolded American hostages in Tehran. In those days, Iran was riding the wave of Ayatollah Khomeini-led Islamic revolution and did not care much for rest of the world, least of all the United States, whom the Iranian spiritual leader denounced as the “Great Satan” and the enemy of Islam.

Times have changed. When the world conference he presided in Tehran on 14 December 2005 to denounce the Holocaust as fiction and his denunciation of Israel as a country that should be wiped out from the map failed to arouse any revolutionary fervour in the Arab-Muslim world, Ahmadinejad must have realised that he is no ayatollah. When the British hostages were being paraded before the media, no Muslim country raised a voice to support Iran’s action. Despite his blustering charm and media swagger mixed with abrasiveness, Ahmadinejad has the charisma of more like that of a used car salesman than a world statesman.

The hostage crisis has not brightened the image of Iran, nor added to Ahmadinejad’s diminutive stature. Iranians need to learn that global networking and diplomacy can be more fruitful in dealing with nations like the United States and Britain than kidnapping and hostage taking, which has become associated with terrorism. But bad national leaders should not be the reason for punishing their people as it tragically happened in Iraq, where to get rid off Saddam Hussein, the whole country has been devastated. I

ran needs to be engaged through diplomacy to be a responsible power in the Middle East, where another conflict will neither change a regime nor anyone’s mind. Although the US stance toward Iran has not softened, European politicians see a door opening for dialogue about the most contentious issue, Iran’s nuclear program for uranium enrichment for which the UN Security Council passed a unanimous resolution imposing sanctions, asking the country to cease uranium enrichment and reprocessing and open its nuclear facilities to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The question is how to accept Iran’s right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without letting it clandestinely transfer the enriched uranium for the development of nuclear purposes. The release of sailors and marines might be construed as a desire, as German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was quoted in Deutsche Welle, to “open the door to further cooperation.”

It might seem that the Bush administration is adamant in not negotiating with Iran unless it meets the precondition that it must stop uranium enrichment processing. But since the elections much has changed in the United States. Congress controlled by Democrats has become increasingly assertive and active in international affairs, as the recent trip of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Syria shows. Despite strong rebuke from the White House, Speaker Pelosi and her delegation went ahead to meet with President Assad of Syria in order to seek cooperation to stabilize Iraq so that American troops could return home.

The American people are not ready for any violent confrontation with Iran; nor are they willing to let Iran keep up with its nuclear weapons program, which necessitates that nuclear and other issues must be solved through diplomatic negotiations. Iranian rulers too seem to be prepared for dialogue if one reads their minds correctly after the hostage crisis.

Don Imus

What to do about Don Imus?

Offensive and outrageous speech is protected by the First Amendment.
Apart from apologizing, which Don Imus has done several times, he should donate one year salary to a charity that serves black women. He should also volunteer for some community service. Imus represents something very deep in American society. He is like "the canary in the coal mine." Do not destroy him.

My new book Digital Freedom: How Much Can You Handle? is forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield in August.
ND Batra
Work inprogress: This is the American Way (2009)

CorporatePower: Motherhood on demand

CorporatePower: Motherhood on demand

Global View

How do you build trust in the global marketplace?

The challenge for a rising economy is how to go beyond the trust based on family ties, clubs, neighborhood, caste and creed, especially in a diversified and multicultural society like India, so that investors can repose their faith in the system—a system that must be so open and transparent that it creates a spiral of trust. Tatas, Mittals and the Reliance boys are showing the way and building the infrastructure of global trust. There lies the future of India.
Doing business is essentially building social trust, which is a necessary condition for capital investment. Family is the basic unit of mutual trust. Families, whose members trust each other, because of transparency and openness, do well in business, provided they are enterprising and risk-take people. But in the age of globalization, when capital flow swirls like digits, trust cannot be limited to families.
When enterprising families join hands with government, business growth can be rapid in the initial stages, because regulatory constraints and market accountability can be waived to access credit and investment. The rapid economic growth of the South-East Asian tiger economies before the currency collapse in 1997 was not due to the miracle of Asian values but because of the government-family conglomeration of economic interests, contemptuously though rightfully called crony capitalism.
Although crony capitalism is present in every society, it flourishes best where flow of information, both economic and political, is limited. This has been the pattern in most of the Pacific Rim countries. China fits into this pattern at present.
But the protected family-based business system reaches its limits of growth when it needs infusion of technology and capital investment for expansion, which can come from sources outside the family. Investors, especially now when they have many competitive opportunities available all over the world and can electronically transfer their investments instantly, demand sunshine—transparency, openness and accountability.
Investors do not care, for example, whether Ford Motor sells or keeps its prestigious Aston Martin, the James Bond car (with price tags starting at $110,000 for the V-8 Vantage coupe), so long the company gets out of the red. Last year Ford posted a loss of $12.7 billion. The company has to rebuild its trust, even if it has to sell parts of it; or move its headquarters to some other country, as the oil service company, Halliburton is doing.
It is possible to create trust beyond the family-based business system but it can be done only under the supervision of an independent watchdog authority that creates a level-playing field for all. In the United States, the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) monitors business corporations and stock markets. Markets are complex but fragile systems, which thrive not on family ties but on honest and open communication with investors.
Since the market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, corporate America is required by the law to make full disclosures and communicate regularly with the investing public in certain prescribed manners, under the vigilance of the SEC. This has been the foundation of trust, which attracts millions of investors not only in America but also from rest of the world. A Japanese or Chinese would rather invest in Wall Street, where there are checks and balances, than in Shanghai where he may be playing the Russian roulette.
At the heart of the US market vigilance system is the anti-fraud provision (Rule 10b-5), which operates to prohibit insider trading. Insider trading is a serious crime and occurs when knowledgeable insiders in a corporation, who are privy to critical information not available to outside investors, purchase or sell the corporation’s securities, stocks and bonds based on prior knowledge.
To create an equal opportunity field for all investors, whether they live in Mumbai or work in the corporation, material information about the company must be made to the investing public by the release of reports to the financial press and general circulation newspapers promptly, without any attempt to mislead.
But rules and regulations are meaningless unless they are enforced and the violators punished. Take the notorious textbook case of R. Foster Winans, who many years ago wrote a column "Heard on the Street" for the Wall Street Journal, which analyzed market forces that might influence the price of a company's stock (Read his op-ed piece in the Times http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/opinion/13winans.html). He also noticed that share prices rose or fell significantly after his column appeared. Snared by the temptation of making money on the inside information he collected for the column, he joined hands with a few stockbrokers and a copy clerk from the Journal. Their trading pattern was soon noticed by the SEC, which on investigation, found a conspiracy to commit security fraud through insider trading. The columnist and his co-conspirators were found guilty and sentenced to prison. The SEC and other agencies keep a hawk eye on the stock market, which is the source of America's vitality and worldwide trust in capitalism.
During the past few years so many US company executives have gone to jail. One of them was Martha Stewart of the Living Omnimedia who having served her time in jail for five years for inside trading is back in business and is doing well. The United States is a country of second chance. You fall and rise again.

Motherhood on demand

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The United States, China and the Power Shift

Global power shift in digital age

From The Statesman

The recent stock market gyration triggered by the meltdown in Chinese stock market on 27 February showed how little control any one has over global phenomena. Chinese have begun to invest in the stock market with the hope of getting high returns but investing in China is more like gambling without rules. Investors panicked and global markets swayed. Welcome to globalisation. Share the pain.

US oil services giant Halliburton Co. has announced that it is moving its headquarters and chief executive to Dubai, a booming Middle East commercial center that would one day make Hong Kong and Singapore look like backwaters. Tatas and Mittals are expanding globally, hyping national egos without creating jobs at home.

The Untied States, like other countries, which is shaped politically like a pyramid with some power nodes superior to others, is now losing that well-defined shape and control. The present political tension between President Mr George W. Bush and Democratic controlled Congress is in one sense a manifestation of the slow change that has been occurring since the beginning of the digital age, pushing the United States toward more government but less power, regardless of what the conservatives and liberals profess.

The marketplace capitalism wedded to globalisation and fuelled by instant-networked communication makes too much government not only unnecessary but rather a severe handicap. The power shift, with due respect to Alvin Toffler, is inevitable. The traditional hierarchical political structure with well-defined power centers is becoming more or less heterarchical, in the sense that power is becoming increasingly distributed. No single power center seems to be capable of asserting greater authority than the other. Heterarchy, a favourite term of computer scientists, assures an uninterrupted flow of information without going through predetermined nodes.

The emerging shape of the political system has begun to mimic the Internet heterarchy. Life has begun to imitate technology. In the age of networked globalisation, the hierarchical structure, whether it is presidential, parliamentary or corporate, is very inefficient because information, a prerequisite of power, instead of flowing through the best available route must pass through only one critical path. This endangers the flow of information. That’s why the Chinese stock market is so dangerous because it is so opaque. It lacks transparency, which an anathema to the working of the digital age.

The heterarchical structure on the other hand is more robust because power centers are decentralised and can be mirrored and replicated without one being superior to the other. Heterarchy operates on the principle of equifinality, that’s, the same goals can be reached via different routes. It requires creative imagination to apply these constructs to the current global situation.

Why is Texas-based Halliburton moving to Dubai? It is where the oil is. Senator Patrick Leahy called it an insult to the American taxpayers and soldiers. The American people need to understand that political and economic power is being routed through many dispersed nodes. Less government is a distributed government, not a dereliction of power and responsibility but its more efficient exercise through dispersal of power. In a political heterarchy, as the United States is becoming now, there are multiple ways of getting from one node of power to another to get the work done. There is low correlation, for example, between who sits in the White House and the stock market gyrations.

China communist rulers too would soon understand that by becoming part of the world economy, they have lost political control. The digital age is metamorphosing American society into a new political culture in which the leader of the nation need not be a heroic figure or a great intellectual. Mr George W. Bush would do, in spite of his malapropisms and inadequate grasp of the issues.

China is ruled by inarticulate technocrats, albeit in well-cut Western suits.

Power is shifting to the knowledgeable. The Internet was designed as a heterarchical system of networked communication that would be virtually indestructible even if some of the nodes were nuked. Information could get from point A to B in more than one ways through dynamic routing so that no single node becomes indispensable for the entire network. Something like that is happening to the United States political system, though with a caveat that the hierarchical pyramidal structure will never be completely flattened. The world would never be totally flat.

But more importantly, the presidency has been diminished in power by globalisation; consequently further strengthening the emerging heterarchical political structure of dispersed power centers. Congress and other political institutions too are losing their power because the Internet economy finds the political system cumbersome.

The icons of the pyramidal power, the President, Congress and the Judiciary, will still be there, though with reduced powers, not due so much to the fifty-fifty gridlock but because the Feds, the stock market, the global capital flow, shareholders’ power and opinion polls are becoming the new power centers in the evolving heterarchical political structure.

Regardless of terrorism, another aspect of globalisation, these are extraordinary times to witness these awesome changes taking place in the United States and rest of the world.

(N.D. Batra, professor of communications at Norwich University, is the author of Digital Freedom, forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield)

Simple living and the pursuit of happiness

Quest for Humane Living

By Pathik Basu

The reason for human distress in modern technology dominated world can be traced to specialization, where only people with the required orientation can survive. People outside this sphere are redundant. Off and on, workers are thrown out of their jobs, peasants are uprooted from the land they had been tilling for generations. A faceless market economy is fast eliminating the human factor. The affluence of the few in the midst of the rudderless poverty-stricken majority, should be a matter of concern.
Hence, we started with the resolve that the above situation needs to be changed calling for a change in our attitude and practice to begin with. A compassionate creativeness should imprint our life style. Our daily schedule would naturally encompass our fellow men. So, certain factors should be kept in mind, such as -
a) the strength of our individual conviction and practice;
b) the strength of our collective wisdom and collective action;
c) the importance of connecting influential people with the marginal people and involving all classes of society in our action;
d) finally, an understanding of the role of Nature in our experiment. We should try to appreciate and understand Nature’s strength - her beauty, glory, as also the science that operates behind her.
Our understanding of the above four premises is to be accompanied by practice. Otherwise, our dream will remain elusive. If, gradually, we can tune our life-style to the harmony of Nature, we will surely be able to create a humane world notwithstanding that a heartless market economy has gained footing among us with all its potential for human misery. Yet, that does not necessarily mean that human misery will stay which we can eliminate if we can try to understand the science behind the working of Nature, the strength that is hidden within us, and the networking of compassion between the higher and lower strata of society. Those who pioneered these thoughts and taught us to think logically in this light, as also to work and experiment in their style were, to name a few, Christ, Buddha, Muhammad, Tolstoy, Gandhi and Rabindranath who basically preached pious and good living which we shall try to understand under the following heads:

Happiness
We all want to live comfortably by fulfillment of the material needs of food, shelter and clothing along with peace of mind which may be gained by perpetually being close to one’s real self based on one’s inner simplicity, good deeds, calmness, love of beauty, truth and plain living which will also be benign for all around. Fulfillment of material needs, while varying from person to person, one must cut one’s coat according to one’s cloth through simple life schedule for economy of money, time and labour which alone is the road to pious and peaceful life, for one’s own self and the society and the Nature at large, and must be aimed, however challenging. At the same time, one should realize one’s debt to the society and nature and try to repay it. Our prescriptions for the above goals follow.
Eating simple and nutritious meals wearing simple clothes and simplifying household activities, sympathizing the downtrodden along with selfless service to them and to Mother Nature as well are the hallmark of good and pious living. We have framed a schedule for this living - friends here and abroad have worked accordingly (making change in accordance with their own requirements) - we are continuously taking notes from their findings, their success and failure, everything. And we have come up with a brief commentary on this life style. We present this to our readers and they have liberty to modify it according to their situations and needs.

The Daily Schedule
At time in night when one retires
We prescribe showering of one’s mind with pious thinking while retiring to bed just as we shower to cleanse our body after the day’s hectic ordeals. It deepens one’s sleep and energizes one to look ahead to a better tomorrow.
Time in morning before one leaves bed
We prescribe a few Yogasanas for practice around 10 minutes or so for relaxation of various organs of the body, ejection of accumulated gas in the belly overnight helping easier bowels movement, to conclude with a Yogic exercise for abstinence of thoughts to free the mind. The extra circulation of oxygen in the process energizes the entire biological system.
Good morning
Our prescriptions include drinking plenty of water on leaving bed early in the morning which flushes the entire biological system to expel waste matters of the bowels and the rest of the body. Next we suggest cleansing of the room to be followed by a song, prayer or mantras and practicing breathing exercises (pranayam) and vacating the mind of all thoughts for sometime, all these preferably in empty stomach. The breathing exercises may be resorted to any time during the day at the moments of excitement which, within a few seconds, may douse the excitement.

Musings on God
There are myriad concepts of God but, possibly, the preaching of the Vedas/Upanishads that God is the fearless truth that resides in me, will be universally accepted. We mainly preach this concept of God, that is, He is myself and I must believe in my own integrity to believe in God which is beyond the laboratory analysis of the scientists.
The moments of our life do come in various forms, sometimes diffused with simplicity, beauty, peace and euphoria and yet, there will be moments of challenge and compulsion where we have to retain our positive outlook in spite of those moments to our disliking. Rabindranath, whose life was replete with varieties of woes, anchored on the Upanishada’s solemn advice –“happiness or suffering, whether desired or not, whatever one receives, has to be welcomed and accepted with an invincible mind”. We try to pass down this sort of eschatology to the masses whose quality of lives we are trying to improve.

Daily Essentials
First, we would like to suggest some easy ways of preparing nutritious food. These recipes are meant for Indian people. People in Indian climate can easily procure these ingredients. Similar low-cost, easily grown nutritious vegetables are obviously available in other countries as well. Local people would know better about their utility and usage.
In brief, we may outline 3 items of food, as follows –
(a) a beverage made of sprouting grams such as pigeon pea or lentil or chickpeas, dried in the sun and powdered and stored. This is an incomparable health drink, yet very cheap.
(b) Again, food may be prepared by soaking pigeon-pea, lentil or chickpea which will sprout overnight which indicates presence of life force streamed in the gram and that Nature has endowed it with precious micronutrients. Boiled, sliced potatoes, lemon juice and salt may be added to this for a complete and tasty food.
(c) The traditional Indian Khichudi, hotchpotch or mishmash cost very little and are also nutritious, hygienic and easily digestible. The recipe may comprise rice or any kind of millet, mixed with grams (dal) mixed 1: 1/3 proportion and added to that all kinds of seasonal vegetable (preferably organically cultivated) of double the weight of rice and gram where may be added grated coconut, spinach or kalmia or amaranth with requisite addition of salt, pepper, boiled and sauté with ‘Jira’ etc. in very little oil to make excellent tasty dish.
Our studied economics of the above simplified food, as opposed to the costly packaged synthetic food widely marketed now-a-days to which a vast populace, including those not so affluent, is that a family comprising 5 members may save nearly Rs. 600/- per month by changing their food habit to our above prescription at least for one meal a day. This saving may be diverted for philanthropic programmes for those below poverty line, which is nearly 50% of our population for all practical purpose. However, this simplistic idea for wide implementation will need sincerity and courage. But, we may claim that we have made an encouraging start and, our conviction is, if this scheme is pursued vigorously, it will be a big step forward for poverty and hunger eradication.
Beside food, we are producing daily essentials also on cottage industry basis. The major items covered till now are tooth cleaner, washing soap and bath soap. We can dispense with the costly tubes of chemical toothpaste and take to ‘neem-stick’ and/or guava-stick instead. Use of bazaar soaps can be drastically reduced to achieve great cost cut on this item. Softened myrobalan (haritaki), baleric myrobalan (amla) and emblic myrobalam (boyera) by soaking in water and then pasted serves as an economic low cost as well as medicinal bath soap to purify our skin. In addition, the liquid extract taken in moderate doze in the morning brings balance in our inner system. An alternative to the above procedure is the following - place 10 to 12 neem leaves in a cup of water and continue to boil it till the volume is reduced to half. Add proportionate amount of ground turmeric. Rub the mixture well over the body, and then take a bath, which will be equally effective as above.
When on road
While on road one should insulate one’s mind by practicing Pratyahar-Yoga. Extraneous thoughts should be banished. Only thoughts exclusively one’s own, thoughts that need one’s attention for performance of duty at hand should be entertained. For this purpose one can continue to observe one’s breathing pattern. Engaging oneself with one’s own task alone gradually enhances self-confidence. We impart special lessons toward this goal.
Pursuit of Profession
We should pursue our profession not only to serve our personal need but also for welfare of others. If we work with on this mantra our work will never be a boredom and we can more easily overcome the obstacles on our way which will help us enjoy our work.
Family Life
A sense of responsibility and at the same time a calm detachment is to be cultivated. With respect to the family, a quiet, disciplined and inspired life may be achieved by imbibing the preaching of Ma-Sarada, a rough rendering of which is as follows -
a. for your own peace of mind refrain from finding fault of others,
b. subject yourself to self-criticism,
c. make this world your own,
d. consider no one as an alien in this world, and the world is yours.
Upon these guidelines one should be genuinely concerned about one’s family members, their likes and dislikes and should act accordingly without giving indulgence to prodigality of any member.
Our experience is, the adolescent generation, girls and boys in their teens, usually take tremendous interest in social service more than in their home task which they consider a drudgery. We, as guardians, can involve these youngsters right from their boyhood in social services, and in future there will be no dearth of socially committed persons.
In a family life there should be a place for virtuous discussion or worship. We prescribe 10 – 15 minutes of daily discussion among the family members to purify mind by reading suitable books e.g. the stories of Tolstoy, The Ramayana, The Mahabharata. The Dhammapada, the preachings of Muhammad etc.
Additionally, the elders in the family could be involved in the social activities we undertake. Given responsibility, these senior citizens will have a feeling of belonging. They will not feel neglected by society at large.
Serving Nature
Food grains scattered daily in small quantities on your verandah will bring birds crowding there. An earthen nest built for the birds in a corner of the verandah will provide them shelter for night and encourage the birds to proliferate. If gardenia and mulberry trees are planted the birds, bees, beetles, butterflies etc. will flock around those to taste their fruits and flowers. Thus, a nature festival can be organized almost at no cost.
The city dwellers also can plant trees or shrubs in their verandah, and those on the countryside may also plant banyan and neem trees in the open space around their house or in the fields beyond, and thus prevent denuding of the Nature and assist afforestation program.
In addition, we suggest rain-water harvesting, devising various means of trapping solar power at least by planting fast growing trees to harvest fast fuel, usage of organic manure, sericulture, and maximum use of air and space.
Social Service
Charity begins at home and so does social service which one may render right from one’s home without visiting remote slums, villages etc. Just at our doors people below poverty line, malnourished and without privilege of educational facilities abound. They are our domestic helpers, rickshaw pullers, vendors, bus drivers etc. with whom we interact commercially but not socially. We should cultivate sociability with them by sharing their joys and sorrows. We may share with them our aforesaid low-cost meal at least once a day. Further, eschatological sessions may be arranged for them where epics, scriptures etc. may be read to them and discussed to enrich their benign ideas to make them socially conscious and committed. We can also motivate them to secure their future financially by taking to insurance facilities, savings in banks, floating their independent cottage industries and/or building their own low-cost houses out of their savings or taking loan on low interest rate which facilities may be launched by the village Panchayats etc. Each affluent person may meet the liabilities of at least one of this poor group in this respect in part or full, as loan or charity, at least on temporary basis, preferably as a group scheme of the neighbors.

Other Activities
Vegetable gardens can be grown anywhere, even in urban spaces, in any corner of the house, even in slums, provided enough sunlight is there. Latin America, especially Cuba, has shown remarkable innovativeness in this respect where vegetable gardens now abound, both in the rural and in the urban areas which are seen in the terrace, balconies, corridors of houses. Amazingly, the entire economy was revived and strengthened as a result.
Indigenous medicinal herbs like Tulsi, Vasaka, Kalomegh, Sheuli, Thankuni, Gandhal and Punarnaba are daily essentials to cure chronic as well as seasonal diseases. These herbs should be grown in our vegetable gardens in plenty. Friends abroad should help research what other medicinal plants found in their respective countries can be transplanted in the climatic variations in India. Research is also required in recycling of domestic garbage to produce vermin-compost.

Any escape for the doomed humanity?
“The precious, irreplaceable riches of the world, including its waters and its forests, have all been transformed into raw materials. These are to feed an economic growth without end, because humanity, no longer limited by what it needs, has been set in an infinite chase after its runaway greed, euphemistically described as wealth creation.” –(Jeremy Seabrook). With this dismal vision, this great humanist among us to-day may peer a ray of hope in ‘Shrayan’ and its ilk. We welcome communications from persons interested in sharing our philosophy and experiments.
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The author is a leading member of SHRAYAN (= refuge), an association of some like minded persons primarily engaged in academic study in subjects like advent of globalization through science & technology; grass root banking; modernity & tradition; inequality; child education; present situation and seeking solution from Tagore’s widely written letters & diaries, inter alia, and publication of books on these subjects. They have started implementing the ideas on social & environmental reformations, as outlined in the following essay, at grass root levels in the border areas of Midnapur & Bankura districts of the West Bengal state in India. They are also consultants to 8 to 10 NGOs in India working in similar lines.

e-mail: parthapathik@gmail.com
shrayan1@gmail.com

Faust, Pelosi and Hillary:Women on the rise

Would Hillary break the glass ceiling?

From The Statesman

Behold! Women are on the rise in the United States of America.
A few months ago, Harvard University selected Dr Drew Gilpin Faust, a historian of American civilization, as the first woman president in its 371-year history. She would replace Larry Summers who got into trouble with the Ivy League faculty two years ago by wondering loudly in a politically incorrect manner as to why in spite of all the equal opportunities, women did not do as well as men in sciences. Dr Faust’s appointment would not turn women into Nobel laureates but she has been given a chance to end sex in equities. As she said in response to a question, “There is a lot of work still to be done, especially in the sciences.”

In the beginning of the year, the USA marked another milestone by electing Ms Nancy Pelosi as the first woman Speaker of the House of Representatives, one of the most powerful political offices in the country from where she can exercise tremendous influence and shape political events especially bringing about a closure to the war in Iraq, so that the USA could concentrate on Afghanistan. As a grandmother of six, Speaker Pelosi is an exemplar of what a determined woman can do in the USA, for example, competing with big boys and beating them at their own games.

But the woman to watch today is Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. In one of the meetings she said: “I may be the most famous person you really don’t know.” And so, “Let’s chat.” Of course once upon a time she was the First Lady and a woman who was wronged by her husband, whom eventually she forgave, and transcending her personal grief and humiliation, she rose to be a Senator. She is tough as steel and that’s why she voted for the 2002 Iraqi War Resolution, which was however based upon wrong intelligence.

Now as a Democratic aspirant for the White House, Senator Clinton, along with Speaker Pelosi and other Democrats, has been thinking how to undo the wrong in Iraq without jeopardizing the war against terrorism. Whatever Senator Clinton’s critics might say about her, it is impossible not to be touched by her passion for the plight of women and children and her desire to turn compassion into political action. Her nurturing feminine side as tender as ever.

On her visit to India in 1995 as the First Lady, she met in New Delhi the Lady Sri Ram College principal Meenakshi Gopinath, who gave her a poem, Silence, written by a student Anasuya Sengupta, which summed up for Hillary the patient suffering of women the world over.

Too many women
In two many countries
Speak the same language.
Of silence…
I seek only to forget
The sorrow of my grandmother’s
Silence.

Senator Clinton said that silence had become the metaphor through which she explored the sufferings of women in the USA and the rest of the world. But by coming out fearlessly and explaining courageously her pain and suffering and humiliation in her memoir, Living History, she gave a new meaning to the poem: “We seek only to give words/ to those who cannot speak.”

On her visit to Ahmedabad she had met another wonderful woman, Ela Bhatt, who has been breaking the silence of the poorest of the poor women by opening for them economic opportunities through the Self-Employed Women’s Association (Sewa), whose loan program to women have been enlarging their economic and personal freedoms and has given them self-respect and dignity, the way micro-loan programs have been doing in Bangladesh.

Senator Clinton wrote at that time: “I was overwhelmed and uplifted to be in the midst of women who were working to overcome their own hardships as well centuries of oppression. For me, they were a living affirmation of the importance of human rights.” During the visit, Senator Clinton had found the same intense desire for economic independence and personal freedom also among Bangladeshi women, who have been trying to achieve their salvation through Grameen Bank run by Dr Muhammad Yunus ~ now a Nobel Laureate ~ who told her that access to credit is “a fundamental human right.” What a noble and compassionate thought!

A Muslim woman told her in a public meeting: “We are sick of the mullahs. They are always trying to keep women down.”

This is the real clash of civilizations: Between religious fundamentalists and women who refuse to remain silent. The USA might withdraw from Iraq, but war against terrorism is forever. According to Senator Clinton’s own account, she has been working on women and children’s issues for decades but the Indian girl’s poem "Silence" crystallised her thinking, which she turned into a passion. She carried that passion even to China at the United Nation’s Fourth World Conference on Women in 2000.

Now Senator Hillary Clinton is seeking the highest political office in the USA and her victory in 2008 would change the face of the increasingly interconnected world as nothing else has done before.

(ND Batra is the author of a forthcoming book, Digital Freedom, to be published by Rowman & Littlefield in August)

HOW TO DEAL WITH PAKISTAN

From The Statesman

Why is Bush failing in Pakistan?

On a desperate unannounced diplomatic mission to Pakistan, a week ago on Monday, Vice-President Dick Chaney told President Pervez Musharraf that he was not doing enough to prevent Al Qaida and Taliban from rebuilding and strengthening the infrastructure of terrorism in the safety of tribal areas from where they have been operating to carry out terrorist attacks against Afghan and Nato troops.

While on a visit to the USA last year, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan publicly accused Pakistan of not controlling across-the-border terrorists attacks carried out by the resurgent Taliban and Al Qaida. Mutual hostility and contempt between Mr Karzai and Gen. Musharraf is well known. The suicide bomber attack at the main gate of the US Air Base in Bagram in Afghanistan during Cheney’s visit last Tuesday that killed 23 people provided enough evidence that the Taliban and Al Qaida are back in business.

Spring is around the corner and more attacks should be expected. How a proud military man like Gen. Musharraf would have listened patiently to Mr Cheney is difficult to say; but the word got out that Mr Cheney had issued a blunt warning that aid to Pakistan might be curtailed if Gen. Musharraf did not do much more to be effective, which of course brought about an expected response from the country’s foreign minister that Pakistan would not take dictation from anyone (unless, of course, the price is right).

Mr Cheney is not known for his diplomatic finesse but since he is the closest to President George W. Bush, the Pakistani ruler should have got the message. Besides, the deliberately-leaked conversation had a very important audience back home ~ members of the US Congress ~ some of whom are contemplating linking aid to Pakistan with measurable success in the elimination of terrorist camps from Pakistani soil. One might say that Mr Cheney’s blunt warning had an impact because only a few hours after the unannounced visit, the news media reported the arrest of Mullah Obaidullah Akhund, former defence minister of the Taliban government in Afghanistan and a member of Mullah Mohammad Omar’s inner circle. Which is quite misleading because the pursuit and arrest of a top Taliban leader must have taken long planning and complicated maneouvers. Moreover, there is no gainsaying the fact that Pakistan has arrested hundreds of Taliban and Al Qaida members, including Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and Ramzi bin al Shibh, the plotters of 11 September attacks. It belittles Gen. Musharraf to give the impression that he is yielding to American pressure taking into account that Pakistanis do not think much about the USA. Anti-American sentiment is widespread.

Pakistanis have never been enamoured of how Gen. Musharraf was forced into an alliance with the USA after the September 11 terrorist attacks. But in order to cooperate with the USA in its struggle against terrorism, Pakistan has turned itself into a country warring against the very elements, Islamic extremism and militancy, that its super intelligence agency, Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), nurtured as tools of foreign policy.

Gen. Musharraf has not been able, or may be he is not willing, to make a total break from the forces that have supported him in his hold on power and hence the minimalist approach towards helping the USA. Consequently, in spite of all the efforts by the Musharraf government, Al Qaida leadership has re-established its network of training camps in Pakistan’s tribal region of North Waziristan and other areas bordering Afghanistan. Once again, especially after Gen. Musharraf cut a deal last year with tribal leaders virtually relinquishing sovereign authority over the tribal territory, Pakistan has become a safe haven for Al Qaida and the Taliban. From these camps, Talibans have been launching attacks against Nato and Afghan troops in Afghanistan. But there is more to these attacks.

Mr John D. Negroponte, former director of national intelligence and now deputy US secretary of state told Congress last month that Al Qaida was “cultivating stronger operational connections and relationships that radiate outward from their leaders’ secure hide-out in Pakistan to affiliates throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.” Neither President Karzai of Afghanistan nor President Musharraf of Pakistan is in full control of the forces operating in their fractured countries.

Since failure is not an option, what can the USA do about it?

First of all, the USA and Nato forces should not hesitate to cross into the tribal territories in pursuit of the Taliban, since Pakistan has virtually given up control over them. Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, chief operations officer for the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week that “we have all the authorities we need to pursue, either with (artillery) fire or on the ground, across the border.” Since the USA and Pakistan are officially partners in the war against terrorism, Pakistan should not mind US troops crossing into the territory over which it has no control.

The USA should think of establishing direct relations with tribal leaders in order to wean them away from the Taliban and Al Qaida.

Again, the USA must persuade Gen. Musharraf to break the nexus between ISI and the militants including the Taliban, Al Qaeda and other sectarian extremist groups. In many ways ISI works much like an independent entity within Pakistan and it may become necessary for the US intelligence to establish direct relations with it since nothing happens in Pakistan without its acquiescence.

And, finally, the USA needs to do much more aggressive public and business diplomacy in Pakistan to reach out to the middle classes, who have the same global aspirations as other countries with growing economies. The prospects of rapid economic growth and rising prosperity would present Pakistanis with an alternative future where the USA would look a friendly nation.

Instead of depending upon the questionable political strength and commitment of President Musharraf for war against terrorism, the USA should reach out to a wide variety of constituencies in Pakistan including universities, businesses, non-profit organizations, tribal leaders and intelligence communities.

(ND Batra teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University and is the author of the forthcoming book Digital Freedom to be published by Rowman & Littlefield)

DOING PUBLIC DIPLOMACY IN A FRACTURED WORLD

Diplomacy in a fractured world

From The Statesman
ND Batra

Even if it were possible to eliminate Islamic jihadism, some new dangerous ideology would arise to threaten peace and our most cherished ideals of freedom and equality.There would never be a time when we can say that we have won the war of ideas.

It is a perpetual struggle. Ultimately, it is the mind that is the battlefield. You could look at history as progress, like a train going to some destination, leaving the past behind.Or you could imagine history as an uninterrupted landscape, where past, present and future co-exist in dynamic tension. Even if India and Pakistan were to sign a final peace accord over Kashmir, some people would continue blowing up trains.

Some people believe that all that the USA needs is a new image and therefore it must re-brand itself, just as corporations do. That shows poor thinking. To a great extent, a corporation can control its message and its image because it is the sole source of information about itself. But you cannot control the image of an open society because there are so many independent actors, institutions and corporations; for example, Hollywood, Hip-Hop, the US military, corporate America, Anna Nicole Smith, Wal-Mart, Google ~ all of them contribute to the US image abroad.And now add to all this the havoc caused by the horrific images of innocent people being daily blown up in Baghdad; or a Sunni woman going on Al Jazeera television and painfully saying that she was raped by the police, who are mostly Shia.And the US military’s helplessness in doing much about it.

The US image abroad is an “emergence” and its quality depends upon how much of the USA is present in a particular country. A country that is exposed to only Hollywood violent movies and video games is likely to have a distorted image of the USA.But if you add to it the presence of an IBM R&D center, university campus, cultural centre, and Nike factory, you would see how the image of the USA in that country begins to change. Keeping the emergent nature of the image, it should not be difficult to understand why the public image of the USA differs from one country to another.The image depends upon the quality and the extent of its presence and its usefulness to the country.

American corporate presence in India has generated goodwill, which a public opinion poll might miss measuring if it were to pay attention to an occasional demonstration against a global retailer such as Wal-Mart trying to establish a foothold in the marketplace. Even the smartest public diplomacy campaign won’t change perceptions overnight, especially when the USA is engaged in multifarious activities abroad. Events might occur beyond its control, which could further blur the image in some countries. No quick fix crisis communication would help.

The always-on, 24-hour global communication, blogs, instant messaging, chatrooms, and news cycles, make it impossible for practitioners of public diplomacy to devise a central strategy to impose a message discipline, as it can be done in advertising campaigns for a product or a political candidate.Nor is public diplomacy like a political campaign, where negative campaigning could kill an opponent with a devastating effect. In an environment of decentralised communications, you might still control the message, but you cannot control the meaning when instant alternative interpretations, Al Jazeera, for example, are available.

Each nation is different, so what works in Indonesia may not work in Nigeria or Pakistan. The challenge is to find the right vehicle to embody the message for a specific local audience. Al-Qaida uses local clerics to spread its jihadist message. Public diplomacy practitioners must use local leaders to champion and advance their cause and they should do so in such a manner that it makes the local people feel good about their own society, while at the same time generating goodwill towards the USA. There was a time when Hollywood was the best cultural export, but now many people believe that US popular culture, due to proliferation of senseless violence and explicit sex, creates negative impressions in foreign audiences, despite the fact that the world has been spending billions of dollars importing American entertainment, filmed and taped programmes, as well as box-office hits.The global popularity of Oscar remains unparalleled.

The paradox is that in spite of negative feelings about American popular culture that it depicts profanity, nudity, mayhem and crime, its allure remains unabated even in the Muslim world.In any case, public diplomats, who want to win over the hearts and minds of the people, should not count upon Hollywood’s popular culture as the nation’s goodwill ambassador. Nor should India count upon Bollywood.

US corporations, educational institutions, and non-profit organisations represent some of the most precious American values, such as individual initiative, innovativeness, entrepreneurship, freedom of speech, and competition.Wal-Mart, Microsoft, and Silicon Valley, for example, embody more of what America stands for than what Hollywood produces.Public diplomats should show and tell the world ~ especially Muslim countries like Pakistan, a most dangerous breeding ground for terrorism ~ that America is what Americans do in the workplace, its ultimate source of strength, economic prosperity and self-renewal.

(ND Batra is the author of a forthcoming book, Digital Freedom: How Much Can You Handle? to be published by Rowman & Littlefield in August)

IRAQ AND US CONGRESS

USA’s white elephant

From The Statesman

In 2002, the US Congress authorised President George W Bush to go to war in Iraq based on Intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that later turned out to be inaccurate. It was expected that with the removal of the tyrannical rule of Saddam Hussein, a genuine regime change would occur with new hopes for democracy in the region. Instead of regime change, there was an implosion and the society collapsed.
The USA is no longer waging war in Iraq; it is now trying to stamp out sectarian civil war with the help of a sectarian government, though there seems to be no easy way out. Americans were not ready for a future of this kind, a bloody mess that has killed 3,100 US troops; you might say, not a large number as wars go but if you consider hundreds of thousands of the Iraqi dead and the ceaseless daily carnage of civilians being blown off in streets and the marketplace, you wonder why no one ever imagined the probability of this kind of scenario of hell. Or why would anyone in his right mind think of imposing a regime change on any other country?

Having been complicit in the war, with the news media, the US Congress cannot end the raging sectarian violence, insurgency or civil war, by whatever name you call it, and bring peace to the region if it forces the President to bring troops back home. Comparisons with Vietnam are misplaced and silly. In 1975, when South Vietnam fell to the North, the war ended. Vietnam was united under the Communist government of the North and the country began to settle down and rebuild itself. Nothing of the kind would happen in Iraq if US troops were to withdraw today. If Congress were to cut funding for the Iraq war, consequently forcing the troops back home, Iraq ~ unlike Vietnam ~ would never return to itself. Last week’s non-binding resolution in the House opposing the administration plan for deployment of 21,500 more troops in Iraq was not such a thundering bipartisan move as it was supposed to be.

The resolution dutifully supporting the US combat forces in Iraq, while opposing the additional deployment was representative of the raging but impotent rhetoric in the country.The Senate in spite of Democratic majority, on the other hand, could not muster enough votes to debate a similar non-binding resolution rebuking the President.The non-binding resolution is more like a strongly written opinion piece, which the President does not have to veto but at the same time he cannot ignore.

Congress like most Americans want troops back home but it does not want to abandon Iraq, leaving people to chaos or the mercy of their neighbour Iran or other surrounding Sunni Arab countries. Hence the political schizophrenia and confusion worse confounding. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the first woman ever to become leader of the House, said the non-binding resolution “will signal a change in direction in Iraq that will end the fighting and bring our troops home safely soon.” Her words drew thundering cheers but did not carry any conviction. She did not explain how this sudden change from the present sectarian violence between Shias and Sunnis, with the continuous insurgency, would end if the administration were stopped from carrying out the surge in deployment or even if there were effective reduction in the existing troop strength. In any case, even before Congress began to debate the issue of the surge in deployment of extra troops, the President had made up his mind to send 21,500 extra troops to Baghdad. And they are already on their way.

In the case of Vietnam, there was an alternative, a well-organised North ready to take over the whole country. That choice does not exist in Iraq because the country is splintered on ethnic lines and there is no well-organised force to transcend sectarianism and impose order on the country.Yet there has to be an alternative and Iraq must be put together again. The next few weeks would show which way the wind blows when President Bush asks Congress for $93 billion for the military for Iraq and Afghanistan. Democrats would launch another attack on the President’s failure to end the conflict in Iraq; and Congress would dilly-dally but would be unwilling to block the spending request to the President.

The Americans, though overwhelmingly opposed to the President’s Iraq policy, do not want troops to be denied of necessary funds. Increasing confrontation with Democratic-controlled Congress might, however, compel the President to explore some other ways of mitigating the situation; for example, recognising Iran and Syria as parties to the conflict and bringing them to the negotiating table. A diplomatic breakthrough the kind recently achieved with North Korea, based on negotiations with regional powers, might be a way out. But the search for diplomatic solution would require that the Bush administration must abandon any plan to invade Iran to forestall its nuclear weapon plans.

Democratic-controlled Congress can be effective in using its power of the purse by suggesting diplomatic means of negotiating peace in Iraq. It must urge the Bush administration to shed its inhibition in talking with Iranian authorities and develop common grounds with Iran in ending ethnic conflict in Iraq.

(ND Batra, the author of a forthcoming book Digital Freedom, being published by Rowman & Littlefield, teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University)

TOWARD A NATION OF NON-FAMILIES

Married families dwindle in USA

From The Statesman
ND Batra

Married people in the USA are in a minority now.
In 2005, according to the latest report released by Census Bureau, only about 49.8 per cent of households were families with traditional (heterosexual) married couples with or without children.

Six years ago, 52 per cent of the households had the sanctity of marriage, according to the report. Others just lived together or alone and their number has been increasing. Much has been vanishing from the good old America. The American family may be one of the disappearing institutions, if present trends become irreversible.

Work as a primary source of self-identity, legal complications of marriage and divorce, the responsibility of raising children in a two-parent working family, and the acceptance of alternative living styles normalised by television shows are some of the reasons for diminishing the family.
Where would the American family values come from, if the trend continues? More than a generation ago, when television programme rating companies wanted to measure audiences, they replaced family as a unit with household, a term that includes nuclear families, single-parent families, unmarried couples with or without children, and live-together groups, including same sex people or those who share facilities for economic reasons or claim some other bonds. The media rating companies’ attempt to count households was not meant to be a social commentary upon changing American values but a practical approach to develop a unit of measurement so that they could set rates for television commercials.

The bigger the audience for a television programme, the higher the cost for a thirty-second commercial, regardless of how the viewers in a group were related to one another.But as television producers looked for programmes that would attract maximum audiences, they discovered that the marketplace was asserting its primacy in American society.

Work began to compete with the family. Women had a sense of liberation; they could control pregnancy, work and have fun without having a family. The media companies’ programming choices reflected the changing mode of consciousness, network of assumptions and values of the American people.

Love and sex without marriage and having children without marriage became socially acceptable.

For more than four decades, or you might say, since the availability of the birth control pill, social norms have been incrementally changing and Americans have begun to accept diversity of interpersonal relations, such as some of TV’s hilarious work and living groups, Seinfeld, Friends, and Sex and the City, for example, show.

Traditional family households like that of the 1970s’ television sit-com’s Archie Bunker, his stay-at-home wife and their live-in daughter and unemployed son-in-law; and the 1980s Dr Huxtable, his attorney wife and with their several growing up children continue even today in real life. But according to the US Census Bureau, their number, the number of “married with children”, has declined substantially, from 45 per cent in 1960 to less than a quarter of the total households. Single mothers with children head seven per cent of American households and they tend to be poorer.

The number of unmarried couples has been soaring during the last decade or so and today you might say that almost one out of 10 coupling Americans never rang their wedding bells; or they have been living in sin, if you are a conservative and believe in the sanctity of marriage.Many of them would have children. American society accepts out of wedlock children without any stigma of shame. One-third American households consist of people who live alone, or are groupies who just live together.

Why is the traditional American family vanishing?

A few years ago, some sociologists attributed the decline to the socalled marriage penalty income tax that two-earner married couples have to pay when their combined incomes push them into a higher tax bracket than they would be paying if they were to file as singles.Republicans used the marriage penalty tax argument to cut taxes and Democrats were not unsympathetic to the idea. But tax incentives and church-related faith-based initiatives did not encourage more people to get married or stay on married.

The family was not built by the government and cannot be saved by the government.
High divorce rate and acceptance of children born outside marriage have taken their toll on the family.

Against the backdrop of the dwindling married families, consider the bizarre challenge of some fundamentalists, a Mormon splinter group, from Utah who live with multiple wives and some of them have more than 24 children.The wives seem to be happy and so are the children, well, if television does not lie. A few years ago, a 52-year old fundamentalist was prosecuted and convicted for bigamy and child abuse because one of his wives was only 13 when she became pregnant with his child.He argued that he was exercising his religious freedom. Originally, the Mormon Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, founded by Joseph Smith in 1830, allowed and encouraged its followers to marry and multiply. Polygamy was banned in Utah in 1896 as a condition for statehood in the Union, but even today there are 30,000 polygamous marriages in the state.

Americans accept unmarried couples, unwed mothers, bachelor fathers, same sex civil unions, multiple sex partners and all other kinds of human groupings but feel morally outraged when some one claims the right to be polygamous.

ND Batra is the author of a new book, Digital Freedom: How Much Can You Handle?
(Rowman & Littlefield)

Digital Freedom

Digital freedom structured

From The Statesman
ND Batra

While most digital media companies think inside the box and try to protect their works with copyrights, patents, trademarks and contractual laws, apart from using technological means such as trusted systems and digital rights management, Open Source movement has been offering an alternative way of doing work in cyberspace.

Open Source guys believe that if the underlying source code of computer software were made freely accessible, it would be easy to improve upon its vulnerabilities for the benefit of all. The marketplace works on the assumption that its open competitive system, too, would bring about similar efficiencies, which explains to some extent why Open Source free software has not been able to do any damage to proprietary systems provided by Microsoft, Apple and others.Vista, iPod are forever. So is the Open Source, coexisting in a competitive environment of the marketplace.

The marketplace needs competitive diversity. In any case, when people talk of free software, what they mean is freedom to creatively mess up with the underlying code and change it according to their needs.If you get Microsoft’s Vista, all you can do is to use the system as it comes, even if the company gives you a free copy. Not only is the underlying code inaccessible, the licence would also prevent you from any attempt to hack it open to correct its flaws, if any.Fixing bugs is Microsoft’s responsibility, and the company must do if it wants its product to survive.

An Open Source operating system such as Linux, however, gives you the freedom to build upon its underlying code and develop newer software programmes, though you might have to pay for a CD of Linux. In this sense, Linux is free and open, though you pay for it. Microsoft Vista is proprietary, though the company might give it free to schools, for whatever reasons.Sometime ago, Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation was quoted in the Associated Press as saying, “Proprietary software companies hand out free copies for the same reason that cigarette companies give sample packs to college kids ~ to encourage addiction.” That’s a terrible analogy to explain the behaviour of proprietary systems, but you get the drift.

Paul Wallich of the free software movement argued sometime ago in Scientific American that Internet culture thrives on freedom: “In some ways, it only makes sense that the Internet should run on free software: almost all its basic protocols were developed with US government funding by universities or contractors.“The Web is the brainchild of CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics near Geneva. But even after most of the Net’s infrastructure has been privatised development...of free open software continues.... The logic of the intellectual marketplace ensures that only the best code and overall structure ~ as judged by a programmer’s peers ~ will survive.”

The freedom he talked about is different from the freedom of the marketplace, which puts value on everything that passes through its portals.In its benign form, the marketplace is a platform for negotiations. But openness is no guarantee of survival of a product as the fate of the Netscape Web browser has shown. It must be understood that Open Source free software does not mean that it is in the public domain.You don’t need a licence to use a public domain software programme and you can do whatever you want with it. Nor can you take any legal action against the programme’s creator if there are problems.

On the other hand, Open Source software programmes are copyrighted and can be used only under a licence, just like proprietary software; but they come without any warrantee, to protect their creators from any liability.The difference between proprietary software and Open Source software is the degree of freedom that the latter gives under its licence.The greater the freedom, the greater is the responsibility of the user for fixing the problems that arise while using an Open Source programme. But by defining Open Source software and the conditions for licensing it in exclusive terms, some of its proponents seem uncompromising in their attitude. Some fear that the whole idea of openness might be stymied if proprietary companies were to release software that has some free features but is not really free enough to be deemed free under the strict definition of Open Source. And that could happen if proprietary software companies feel that they have to survive the challenge of Open Source.

But so far, the Open Source movement has not driven Microsoft or any other big company out of business. The challenge to Open Source is that it must be good enough to survive in the marketplace as an alternative to proprietary systems, keeping in mind that some proprietary programmes may assimilate its laudable features. That’s how the marketplace dialectics work. One of the claims made for Open Source software is that since the source code is open to modification, freelance programmers can fix bugs and eliminate any problem, which however has not always been the case.Besides, digital security is an industrywide global issue; it is not dependent upon the nature of the licence, open or proprietary.

Hackers love Open Source as much as they love Cisco, Sun Microsystems or Microsoft.