The following article appears in the 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal.
Theodor H. Winkler: The Shifting Face of Violence
The following article appears in the 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal.
Mira Kamdar: India on Track for 2033 Predictions
Somehow, I don’t feel cheered by indications in the month since I wrote my article for the 25th anniversary edition of World Policy Journal that India seems right on track to fulfill the mixed future I predicted in India: Richer, Poorer, Hotter, Armed. On the wealth front, cellular telephone company Bharti Airtel posted a net profit increase of 27 percent, Standard & Poor’s retained its bullish outlook for future economic growth, inflation snuck down under 11 percent and the stock market roared, snapped, roared and snapped again. In comparison with the continued panicked erosion of the financial markets and economies in the West, India seems poised to survive the global financial crisis not too bruised nor too battered. It will even, along with China, emerge with a new global say in the world’s financial architecture since it’s participation in a new G7 that will rise to some as yet unclear new number is now assured.
On the poverty front, India’s minister of finance, Palaniappan Chidambaram swore that slowed economic growth would not result in job cuts. Indeed, Jet Airways first fired then rehired hundreds of young workers who were shocked that the mall stalking they’d just begun to get used to being able to pay for might come to a sudden end. Even at a slower 7 percent rate, he opined, jobs would still be created though not as many as quickly as at a higher rate of growth. Of course, that doesn’t include India’s still moribund agricultural sector where the vast majority of its people still eek out a living and where growth is at a near-stagnant 2.3 percent. India’s Ministry of Agriculture released its fall or Kharif harvest projections a couple of weeks ago: production has declined across the board in basic food crops and cotton, on which great hopes were placed, increased by only 0.5 percent. Saving a few hundred service jobs in the airline industry cannot come near to compensating for this disaster. After more than 60 years of independence, India is still stealing from its farmers to push for the industrialization and urban development that will make it feel like a developed country. The poor, in other words, continue to be sacrificed to the rich and the newly minted and eagerly consuming middle class.
David P. Calleo: How Europe Could Save The World
The following article appears in the 25th anniversary issue of World Policy Journal.
Rush McCloy: Letter from Afghanistan
Rush McCloy is Lieutenant in the Navy who has been serving in Afghanistan since January 2008.
Shaun Randol: China’s Chechnya (part 2 of 2)
When confronting the situation in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region (XAR), are there lessons Beijing can draw from similar events?
China’s neighboring power, Russia, for one, has experience with Muslim separatists. Chechnya, a federal subject in southwest Russia, has fought two wars against the big Bear in search of independence. The first (1994–96) ended with a cease-fire and upwards of 100,000 dead. The second war, begun in 1999, continues to simmer.
The two contests have many parallels: For one, superpower geopolitics is involved on both ends, as Russia and China seek to maintain and assert control over their immediate spheres of influence. Both Chechens and Uighurs seek independence, are dominant ethnic minorities in their homeland, subscribe to the Islamic faith, and speak their own languages. Despite sporadic fighting, Russia continues to pour money into Chechnya, and in Xinjiang, China is investing tens of billions of Yuan as violence bubbles to the surface.
Oil is a major factor in both regions too: critical infrastructure runs through Chechnya, while Xinjiang, naturally oil-rich, feeds a 4,200 km pipeline to Shanghai. In Chechnya, Russia has successfully installed a pro-Moscow regime, while in XAR Beijing has a friend in appointed Party Secretary Wang Lequan. Lastly, Chechnya and Xinjiang border states less-friendly to their respective capitals. Below Chechnya lies the pro-American (now humbled) Georgia, while just south of Xinjiang Tibet seethes with resentment toward Beijing.
Shaun Randol: China’s Chechnya (part 1 of 2)
Things are heating up in China’s westernmost province. In response to a number of violent incidents in Xinjiang Autonomous Region (XAR), Beijing has ratcheted up its security presence. Tit-for-tat clashes between pro-independence groups and police forces threaten stability and may portend a vicious cycle of killings.
Ninety-two percent of China’s population is ethnic Han; the remaining 8 percent is constituted by a mix of 55 officially recognized minority groups, including the increasingly vociferous Uighurs in Xinjiang and Tibetans. Yunnan Province, home to at least 26 different minority populations, lies south of Tibet in China’s far southwest, a cool 1300 miles away (as the crow flies) from Beijing.
Most unrest affiliated with minority populations occurs outside of Beijing’s immediate geographical area, making suppression burdensome for the central government; still, Beijing maintains tight control over the media and internet ensuring that uprisings and subsequent crackdowns in these relatively sparsely populated regions remain largely invisible to most outsiders. Currently Beijing has control over separatist (or as officials prefer, “splittist”) movements in Tibet and Xinjiang, but for how long?
Jonathan Power: Downhill in Afghanistan
How far is downhill? Well, that’s like asking how long is a piece of string. But whatever the answer, the American/NATO military effort in Afghanistan, triggered by 9/11, seems to have all the marks of a quick descent.
In Barack Obama’s phrase, American public opinion doesn’t get it. How could they when Obama himself, supposedly a fresh eye on the international scene, bangs the drum for more troops and yet more force?
Does European and Canadian opinion get it? Apart from the Canadians, who have had the good sense and the foresight to give a date for the withdrawal of their troops, public opinion appears to be asleep at the switch.
Our Afghanistan policy, made within hours of the atrocity of 9/11, seems still to be to try to bomb the country to cinders, irrespective of the number of civilian casualties. How is it possible that Americans have yet not learned the lesson of Dresden, that wild and merciless bombing rather than leading to capitulation merely reinforces local opinion against the aggressor. And troops on the ground have continued to alienate local opinion with their seeming inability to differentiate between fighters and civilians.
The war is being lost as the Taliban, whether actively defending Al Qaeda or just fighting for their own piece of ground, gain the upper hand, improving their strength and their military skills by the month. The poppy growers watch their profits soar, with plenty of coin going to Taliban coffers, because the West is unable to face honestly the one policy that might work—legalization of the drug trade, as the former minister of finance of Pakistan, Sartaj Aziz, suggested in Prospect magazine. (He argued for a controlled experiment in one province.)
President Bush, the American military, and now Obama seem to think the only way out is to take their failed tactics into Pakistan, despite the opposition of the government in Islamabad and its powerful military chiefs. (So much for territorial integrity, the war cry of NATO for Georgia.)
Mira Kamdar: French Lessons
When I was an undergraduate in college (in the last century), French was considered the language of diplomacy. My United States passport, despite the recent estranged “Freedom Fries era” of Franco-American relations, still states most entries in both English and French. Alas, in this brave new age, the diplomatic power of French appears to be slipping, not the least in Europe, and especially on its now contested borders with Russia.
France currently holds the presidency of the European Union, in which role and under the enterprising leadership of President Nicolas Sarkozy (whose name it is really too tempting in the present context to spell “Czarkozy”) France undertook to broker the withdrawal of Russian forces from Georgia after their recent incursion to “liberate” South Ossetia and Abkhazia. With typical French panache, the whole thing was neatly presented, apparently understood, and expected to be rapidly executed. However, it quickly became apparent that certain critical details of the original French draft of the terms of Russian withdrawal had, literally been lost, or at least warped, in translation.
It all hinges on a prepositional dispute. Does the draft agreement call for security “for” South Ossetia, as the Georgian and English translations state, or does it call for security “in” South Ossetia as the Russian translation allows. The Russians are sticking with their translation, which they are interpreting to mean that their presence in South Ossetia is essential for security in this disputed territory. Mon dieu!