New Orleans

We pray for the victims of Katrina.

Let's open our hearts and please give generously to appropriate charities. If not now, when?

Contributions are urgently needed to support the Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund.

Thousands of desperate families are taking refuge from Hurricane Katrina in more than 230 Red Cross shelters in the affected areas.American Red Cross is launching the largest mobilization of resources for a single natural disaster in our history.

We’re preparing 500,000 hot meals a day to serve to survivors who have no where else to turn.

Several hundred emergency vehicles and thousands of ARC staff and volunteers have been deployed from around the country for immediate emergency assistance.

Red Cross disaster response teams are deploying to the hardest hit communities to distribute drinking water and other supplies to victims who were unable to flee from Katrina.

Blog Interrupted

This blogger will be on the road the next three days. Normal blogging will resume Thursday.

Mahmoud And Manmohan

Via BBC, India renews historic Afghan ties

Correspondent Sanjoy Majumdar writes about Dr. Manmohan Singh's visit to Kabul:

When Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh steps off his aircraft in Afghanistan on Sunday, he will be hoping to strengthen his country's historic ties with that country.

It is the first visit to the country by an Indian prime minister for 29 years.

... one of the key moments of Manmohan Singh's visit will be the laying of the foundation stone of the country's new parliamentary building, built by India.

India which plays on its strong tradition of democracy is keen to be seen to be strengthening democratic institutions in a country, fragmented and torn by ethnic rivalries.

Mahmoud of Ghazni came to India on a brutal steed and a thousand years of on-going war followed. Manmohan of Delhi gets to return the favor by offering democracy to Afghanistan.

Chalk one up in history for India's plural civilization!

Blinded By Revolution

Via BBC, India rebels 'making porn films'

Via The Economist, Porn makes you blind

Homeopathy

Via ABC, Homeopathy ineffective, study finds.

Will Indians, who patronize those little white pills so much, take heed? Fat chance.

Saeed Naqvi

Via Indian Express, columnist Saeed Naqvi observes:

The collapsing consensus on Iraq is sought to be replaced by introducing more glue into the apparatus being erected for the war against terror. This will work as long as terrorists, jihadis, intelligence operatives continue to oblige with 9/11s and 7/7s. But skepticism, without which good journalism is not possible, will soon set in. Who knows, a reformed BBC, eager to rediscover its once peerless credibility, may sponsor a series of well researched, balanced documentaries on "jihad". The authors may even stumble upon John Buchan's wartime thriller (1914), Greenmantle: "It looks as if Islam had a bigger hand in the thing than we thought" I said. "You are right -- there is a Jehad preparing." "Supposing they had got some tremendous sacred sanction -- some holy thing...which will madden the remotest Moslem peasant with dreams of Paradise?" "Then there will be hell let loose".

This "jehad" was brewing in European minds before the First World War. As A.F.S. Talyarkhan used to ask: "Do you get me, Steve?"

The throwaway mention of intelligence operatives (that we've bolded for emphasis) in connection with 9/11 and 7/7 is puzzling. What does he mean there? Is he referring to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia -- or is he alluding to ridiculous conspiracy theories, widely circulated in the Arab world, of West's own complicity in the murder of its people? Doesn't this need some clarification -- if not from Mr. Naqvi, then from Indian Express (a usually sensible newspaper).

Then, Mr. Naqvi goes on to suggest that the West has been building up to (or imagining) an anti-Jehad crusade, if you will, since before WWI. This is to say, the war (which he finds offensive) was on the cards even before Osama and his ilk (or perhaps the shadowy intelligence agencies he wants to blame!) pulled off 9/11 and 7/7 -- the latter then became excuses for the former.

In this airbrushed version of faux-reality, the evil genius is not Osama, rather the West (and its media, i.e., propaganda apparatus)! If this isn't an unhinged idea, what is? Frankly, we wouldn't care for Mr. Naqvi's thoughts, except that millions of young, impressionable Indian minds read this kind of garbage and begin accepting bizarre conspiracies as reality. We're not just talking about some poor Indian Muslims here -- in a December trip to rural India, we heard very well educated Hindus cycle through the same foolishness.

Mr. Naqvi blames the media (not terrorists and Wahabis) for demonizing Muslims and Jehad. We blame Mr. Naqvi and like fantasists in the media for demonizing the entirely valid war against terror.

It's a darn shame Indian Express continues to give this horrible columnist a perch to spew his nonsense from. Or if freedom of speech dictates he be given his say, at least it should be presented as mostly fiction.

Rummy Is Toast

President Bush is in political trouble.

A botched good war and pain at the pump would do it to any President.

When crisis strikes, a good politician shifts responsibility. Who better to pin the blame on than the Secretary of Defense? Dumping Rumsfeld will represent a material accountability moment for all that's gone wrong in the prosecution of a valid war.

This is what we predict will happen within months, perhaps even weeks.

The real issue is to find a credible person to take Rumsfeld's job. Two names come to mind. General Powell (incompetent as he is, he remains quite popular with Americans) and Senator McCain (Vietnam war hero, maverick politician). Either one would restore American confidence in the winnability of the war. What it'll all come down to is the political price to pay for this. Both men (or similarly credible others) would likely demand (and undoubtedly get) the Republican nomination for Presidency in 2008 -- if successful in turning this ship around.

The stakes are suddenly much higher than the fate of Iraq.

Chasing China

Blue Sky is correct in calling China's over-spending on oil assets The Winner’s Curse.

Chasing China to absurd prices is plain silly. It betrays a profound failure of understanding what's really going on.

Chinese currency is deliberately undervalued versus the Dollar -- by as much as 30-40%. Consequently, China's trade surplus is basically Dollar denominated, hence overvalued in local currency terms.

Why this matters is because Chinese liabilities are its people's savings denominated in local currency, hence undervalued in Dollar terms.

Running a financial system with overvalued assets financed with undervalued liabilities is a fool's game. China knows this but has few options to get out of the mess it has made. It's in this context that it's trying to swap its hoard of Dollars for real assets -- e.g., overseas oil reserves.

The notion that a large unrealized currency losses can be resolved by bidding up physical assets (even assets like oil reserves) is laughable. But that is China's new game. They think that their newly acquired assets will appreciate sufficiently to hedge some of the unrealized currency losses they have already incurred. In other words, they are trying to trade out of a gigantic mess. Likely, they'll turn up snake eyes.

When this happens and the currency corrects (as it absolutely will), the peasants will ask for their money back -- from bank's who won't have enough assets to make them whole. Then, one of two things will happen. Either China will dump physical assets at throwaway prices to generate liquidity, or Chinese domestic economy will stand destroyed. Either way, oil prices will tumble.

Given all this, is there any sense in chasing China up a foolish price ladder? Think about a similar dynamic with Japan buying up all manner of assets in the 80s at absurd prices -- only to sell them at much lower prices when the bubble collapsed.

When there's a desperate buyer in the game, the smart trader sells -- he does not chase prices at market highs. Does New Delhi understand this?

Our Friends, The Pakistanis

Via BBC, Khan 'gave N Korea centrifuges'

Via BBC, Madrassas resist regulation drive

Via Indian Express, Pak SC upholds death sentence for ‘Indian spy’

A Thin-Skinned Court

Via The Tribune, Miffed, CJI asks govt to shut down courts.

Facing attack from political quarters on its decisions in various controversial issues, including the judgment in the private and minority professional institution case, the Supreme Court today lambasted the government for adopting such an 'attitude' and said if it did not want to give due respect to the courts it could wind them up.

First, emotional outbursts by judges hardly inspire confidence.

Second, much of this stems from the Supreme Court's frequent practice of, in effect, legislating from the bench rather than merely interpreting the constitution. It may be that our legislatures are inept and inefficient but at least they are directly accountable to the people -- who they must face every election. The (presumed) noble intent of the court is no substitute for such accountability.

This outburst by CJI relates to a reservation case. We have very mixed feelings about reservations ourselves and might possibly support the court on the substance of its ruling. But, for the court to get upset over the consequent political process makes little sense. Indeed, this practice is quite dangerous.

The US Supreme Court has come under withering criticism following its 2000 judgment which led to now-President Bush's election over then-Vice President Gore. The court has not lashed out at its critics -- if it had, it would have gotten embroiled in the rough and tumble of daily politics, leading to a decline in its credibility.

Courts do not have armies -- all they have is credibility which is easily lost if judges get emotional about criticism.

Principles of Modern Autocracy

Here's an interesting article via IH Tribune that argues against the conventional wisdom that market liberalism leads to democracy. It presents a theory of how modern autocrats successfully side-step democratization while reaping / spreading the benefits of economic growth, which perversely serves to strengthen their autocracy. The article is a sneak preview of the detailed version in next month's Foreign Affairs. A few snippets:

Economic growth has traditionally been thought to promote democratization by making strategic coordination easier, as communications technology improves, news media become more diverse and the citizenry more educated. But in recent years some savvy regimes have learned how to cut the cord between growth and strategic coordination, allowing the former without having to worry about the latter.

Their trick is to ration carefully the subset of public goods that facilitate political coordination, while investing in others that are essential to economic growth. The "coordination goods" that they need to worry about consist of things such as political and civil rights, press freedom and access to higher education. "Standard public goods" include public transportation, primary and secondary education, and public health; all of which contribute to economic growth and pose relatively little threat to the regime.

This provides fresh insights into the reasons for the continued longevity of the Chinese and Pakistani regimes, in our neighborhood, among a long list of other accomplished autocrats worldwide. Seems like business is the new gladiatorial-bloodsport and the stock exchange is the new Colosseum. To quote from the recent hit movie Gladiator:

I think he knows what Rome is. Rome is the mob. Conjure magic for them and they'll be distracted. Take away their freedom and still they'll roar. The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the senate, it's the sand of the coliseum. He'll bring them death - and they will love him for it.

This is a disheartening article for those looking for practical tools to fight autocracies. It calls for a re-think of the engagement strategy, whether U.S. with China / Mideast or India with Pakistan. At a minimum, it requires abandoning the naive hope that economic and cultural engagement will somehow auto-magically transform autocracies. We need to find new levers to push for rights and liberties that ought to be self-evident truths everywhere. We need to push for this, if not for their peoples' sake, then for our own, as Sep 11 and Dec 13 showed all too well the consequences of not doing so.

Shariat

Via Times of India, Muslim law board tones down stand on imposing Shariat on India's judicial system. Apparently, this is a tactical retreat, not the abandonment of a rather controversial idea.

We have two questions on this issue.

Isn't Shariat the reason why non-Muslim Indians are denied prayer in Saudi Arabia?

What happens when Shariat comes in conflict with India's constitution?

Hopefully this is crystal clear to all. In India, the constitution must trump all else. Any denial of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms and equality (even in a civil context) in the name of any faith is invalid. This is the only possible secular position -- supporters of Shariat in Indian courts better be real careful lest they pick a bruising battle with secular Indians.

Dr. Singh And Naxals

Indian Express hails Dr. Singh's call that Naxals prove their popularity through the test of democracy.

We like Dr. Singh and his call sounds reasonable but it reflects an enduring naivete of the Indian soul -- that even such rabid killers as the Naxals can be rehabilitated in the broader sweep of our all-embracing democracy.

We strongly dissent with this view. Only smash-mouth strategies work with these monsters. They don't care about our democracy -- they've got a mafia-like extortion racket working that brings them money, guns, publicity, criminal power, and other very material things. If they were to settle their so-called grudges, where does it leave them and the elaborate terrorist lives they've built for themselves?

Dr. Singh, pick up the gun -- please quit exhorting these animals to become human.

Gaza

The New Yorker's editor David Remnick writes cogently about Israel's Getting Out of Gaza.

He correctly concludes:

In the nineteen-nineties, the era of the Oslo accords, a dream persisted of imminent peace—a state for the Palestinians, security and recognition for the Israelis. The Gaza disengagement makes plain the distance between that dream and its reality, and how traumatic it is to conduct earthly politics where so much is sacred to so many.

India And Stem Cell Research

Via New York Times, How India Reconciles Hindu Values and Biotech.

Novelist Pankaj Mishra writes:

Scientism has few detractors in India; and the elites find it easy to propose technological rather than political and moral solutions to the problems of poverty, inequality and environmental damage ... They subscribe to a worldly form of Hinduism - one that now proves to be infinitely adjustable to the modern era, endorsing nuclear bombs and biotechnology as well as India's claim to be taken seriously as an emerging economic and scientific superpower.

Mr. Mishra doesn't really address his subject line. In fact, as he sees it, Indians don't reconcile Hindu values and Biotech at all -- instead, they abandon Hindu values to pursue technology. This is a ridiculous perspective by an author seemingly grasping for cheap publicity by damning his own people.

Et Tu, Rezwan?

Recently, Rezwan accused us unfairly of generalizing our hatred for Muslims. He wrote:

You people can't get this thing off your head. There is no Islamist terrorism. There is terrorism of some f***ed up Islamists in the name of Islam.

In other words, he objected to our attaching the tag Islamist (not Muslim, not Islamic -- but Islamist) to the word terrorism.

We answered the charge and moved on. Then, much to our surprise, we read this in his recent post on the Bangladeshi bombings:

All the evidences and confessions of some nabbed terrorists point at the banned Islamic extremist Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), who carried out Wednesday's countrywide bombings.

So, it's OK for Rezwan to use the tag Islamic to describe these monsters, but it isn't for us to tag their terrorist soulmates outside Bangladesh with a more precise tag, Islamist? Hmmm.

Violins In Kalimpong

Fred de Sam Lazaro of American public television (PBS) reports on a really cool musical experiment in Kalimpong. Here, a Jesuit priest, gave violins and lessons to poor kids and watched them find joy from their own talents.

Take Kushmita, for example. As a poor kid having been accepted at an upscale convent, she faced typical challenges of peer acceptance and fitting in. This is what she tells Mr. Lazaro:

KUSHMITA BISWA KARMA: I used to play violin. I used to play solo songs, like Hindi, Nepali songs. And they all used to love me playing violin. I had friends. Many friends I had in the convent.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: So you had many friends in the convent school because you were able to play violin?

KUSHMITA BISWA KARMA: And I was good, also.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: She's good at the violin-- so good she was pulled out of school to be tutored by a visiting German music teacher in hopes of attending one of Germany's most prestigious conservatories.

KUSHMITA BISWA KARMA: Before, I didn't know, like, the rules and the way... how we should play violin. She taught me how I should hold my bows and how should I cast the violin. I want to come back to Kalimpong because my parents are here. I was born here. I studied in Gandhi Ashram School in Kalimpong.

Father Thomas McGuire of Gandhi Ashram died recently. What a beautiful legacy he's left behind. Very cool!

Rural Wi-Fi

Via Christian Science Monitor, India bypasses the wires to bring Wi-Fi to its remote residents.

Good stuff. Yet, some think this is wasteful expenditure.

The biggest challenge may not be technological, but linguistic, and developing services that give rural communities reasons to use the Internet. In Malappuram, for example, a study by professors at the University of California, Berkeley, found that just 5 percent of the traffic from the Akshaya centers related to e-governance or education. Some experts on rural technology, like Anil Gupta, a professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, question whether the Internet should be a priority, if people don't speak English.

"We find that the Internet is not the technology [through] which we will reach villages in the country in the next five years," Dr. Gupta says. "Look up Google and find the content we have in local languages.... Unless that happens, how can we justify what we are doing?"

We're not sure this is a valid fuss. Even if 95% of internet traffic is not e-governance or education related, it's still a valid interaction our rural folks can now have with the rest of the world. What could possibly be wrong with this?

The Nature Of Defeatism

Via The American Thinker, the conservative Lawrence Auster mocks the Bush Revolution :

Bush turned a set of rights long established in America and for Americans into a requirement for all of humanity. It wasn't just that we regarded the enumerated rights as self-evidently true. It was that we regarded their practical establishment in the whole world and particularly in the Muslim lands as, first, a non-negotiable moral demand, and, second, as the only way to assure a world safe from terrorism. There was a specious logic in the latter argument that passed for great wisdom in some quarters. The past policy of cooperating with Arab and Muslim dictatorships hadn't prevented the growth of Muslim extremism. Therefore we had to try the opposite tack, of democratizing the Muslim countries.

In New York Times, Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose chimes in:

The Bush doctrine has collapsed, and the administration has consequently embraced realism, American foreign policy's perennial hangover cure.

What explains this utterly absurd defeatism?

Two independent dynamics have collided here to create a very dangerous confusion in some minds. On the one hand, there is terrorism spewing out of paleo-political ideologies pretending to be Islam. On the other, there is American hyper-power status. How people weigh the threat from each versus the other determines where they stand on this war.

Most sensible people understand that whether or not we wage war on terrorists, terrorists will wage unrelenting war on us. Therefore, the only valid course is to take war to where it spews from -- regardless of the short-term cost.

There's, in opposition, a sizable & amusing coalition of isolationists, pacifists, naive liberals, and some Muslims who feel that waging war on terrorists only provokes them further. Instead, they argue, civilized world should essentially concede even illegitimate terrorist demands (really clever excuses for their murderous nature) to avert future attacks.

Finally, and crucially, there are many (especially on the left) who are appalled at the present dominance of the world by America and her allies. They are enraged by American leadership of the war on terror not because this is a war on terror but that it is an American-led war. They'd rather see America retreat even if it means continued life for terrorism.

This is also the view of some Americans who see the war on terror as the building blocks of an American empire. To them, the war against terror (and more generally, the war against local disorder with global impact) is really an excuse to re-design the global order where a handful of great powers dictate policy to everyone else. This they cannot stand.

The exact same fear offends many in the developing world whose memories of colonialism are still fresh.

Consequently, there's a faux-romantic tendency to see all manner of frivolous and damaging claims against even democratic great powers as being valid root-causes, the paralyzing and paralyzed UN as a noble entity, dictatorships and corruption as matters of sovereignty and, worst of all, terrorists as freedom fighters and insurgents.

This is the nature of the defeatism in our midst -- the terrorists understand and exploit this quite well. It is up to democratic societies to find the steel in their character to resist this devilish exploitation and stay the course on an entirely just and necessary war of survival.

Bangladesh Bombings

Via BBC, Bombs explode across Bangladesh .

Perhaps the root-cause crowd would like to explain what Israeli, Indian, or American crime lies behind this terror directed at ordinary Muslims in Bangladesh?

Hopefully it will soon dawn on these naive terror-apologists that terrorists seek no political goals -- rather, they only seek murder and mayhem, because they only know murder and mayhem.