Showing posts with label France. Show all posts
Showing posts with label France. Show all posts

Friday, April 22, 2022

France

Macron May Keep the Presidency, but Le Pen Has Already Won Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally, has worked hard during this election campaign to soften, even detoxify, her image. It seems to be working. “I think she’s full of good ideas,” Cyrielle Bernard, a 19-year-old who lives in this picturesque Burgundy town, told me one afternoon last week, chatting in the tobacconist shop where she works. Of all the candidates, she said, “I think she’s the most logical.” ......... Ms. Le Pen’s success comes from casting herself as the defender of the countryside and the working class, focusing on cost-of-living issues and defending social protections. She has also been helped by an image makeover in which she opened up about raising her children as a single mother and now combines tough talk on immigration with social media posts about her cats. ......... In the second round, polls predict she could easily win more than 40 percent, potentially 10 points more than in 2017. ........ The same winds that brought Brexit and helped elect President Donald Trump are also blowing through France. ....... Ms. Germain, who works as a house cleaner, dislikes Mr. Macron. “He always has that smirk,” she said. That smirk is a problem for Mr. Macron. He has a tendency to talk down to people — to say “let me explain to you,” rather than listen. ........ how deeply entrenched Ms. Le Pen’s hard-line views on immigrants have become and how she has successfully recast anti-immigrant rhetoric into practical policy recommendations. ........ Her father” — Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former presidential candidate and the longtime leader of the far-right National Front party — “was completely racist. She’s not. She wants everyone to respect our ways. If you go to Africa, you respect African law. Her father just wanted to kick them all out.” ........... Such views are not uncommon, especially in small towns in France with little to no immigration. ......... She wants asylum seekers to be processed abroad and has said her first act as president will be to propose a referendum on immigration. ......... “A lot of them take advantage of the system and aren’t integrated in France,” she told me. ....... Ms. Le Pen has managed to widen her consensus by combining far-right positions on immigration with a left-leaning defense of public spending and social welfare. ........ she has promised to eliminate income tax for people under 30 — and her once extreme positions appear less so now that the center right has also adopted much of the same rhetoric, especially on national-identity issues. Help came as well from Éric Zemmour, whose firebrand declarations made her seem more moderate. ........ “We’ve tried the right; that didn’t work. We’ve tried the left; that didn’t work. Maybe we need to try the far right, with a woman in power.” ........ The unemployment rate fell to its lowest in 13 years ........ it is hard to win saying, “Imagine how much worse things could have been.” ....... She proposes “reducing VAT tax, raising low salaries and pensions, spending more on health and education.” ....... Mr. Macron, by contrast, has become the embodiment of frightening economic trends, even if they predate him and extend far beyond France. ........ Ms. Le Pen has long expressed her respect for Vladimir Putin. .......... “Lots of voters are tired of voting against their own convictions in order to block the far right — ...... That anti-far-right alliance, he added, is “much weaker than 10 or 20 years ago.” .

The Rise of Authoritarian Capitalism Democratic capitalism is showing signs of deep, systemic sickness in the United States, Europe and Australasia, even as varieties of state or authoritarian capitalism are slowly becoming entrenched around the world, particularly in China and Russia. ......... In the developing world, democratic capitalism has always had a mixed reputation. While the West preached its freedoms at home, it happily engaged in political and economic exploitation abroad. ........... as of 2017, 88 of 195 states were classified as “free,” compared with 65 of 165 in 1990. ........ After the end of the Cold War, however, four structural challenges emerged to endanger the future of democratic capitalism: financial instability, technological disruption, widening social and economic inequality and structural weaknesses in democratic politics. ....... The 2008 financial crisis, one sign of a systemic sickness, occurred because of poorly regulated financial elites. The costs to governments and peoples were bailouts, lost jobs and more public debt. Governments had to scramble to save capitalism from itself as financial markets failed to self-correct. As a result, the markets privatized their profits and socialized their losses. Only one top bank executive went to jail. The taxpayer, by and large, paid the bill. And democratically elected governments were routinely tossed out because they had either failed to prevent the crisis, or were unable to manage the resulting public debt — or both. Another crisis could push the system to its breaking point. Yet a weakened Dodd-Frank Act in the United States now makes a repeat of the 2008 crisis more likely. All at a time when governments have even less room to respond. ............ Democracies, like corporations, can now be hacked. Social media distorts the free flow of facts that has been the lifeblood of democratic capitalism. .......... The financial and technological challenges are compounded by a rising economic inequality. The extreme concentration of wealth in the United States in recent decades is well documented. The new barons of capital and technology thrive while the American middle class stagnates and the American dream fades. ......... In the United States, unrestricted campaign financing continues to undermine democracy. The spectacular corruption of the electoral redistricting system — gerrymandering — only compounds the problem. ....... As Western democracies look increasingly sick, other systems of governance are now on offer. Russian nationalism .......... China has become increasingly confident in its own model, described as authoritarian or state capitalism. And its “Beijing consensus” is held up to the non-Western world as an example of a more effective form of national, and even international, governance. ........ The American social contract needs to be rebuilt through a revised New Deal. The social impact of technological change must be politically managed, rather than left to the market. Finance should return to its historical role as the servant of the real economy, rather than its master. And the Supreme Court must set a new direction on campaign finance (by overturning the Citizens United decision), gerrymandering and some of the crazier interpretations of the Second Amendment used to justify a breakdown in basic law and order. ........... Both represent the enduring idea of freedom. Yet both rest on increasingly fragile political and economic institutions. History cautions us against any belief that democratic capitalism will somehow inevitably prevail. Unless, of course, we make it so by tending the garden while there is still time. .

Marine Le Pen Is as Dangerous as Ever When Ms. Le Pen lost to Emmanuel Macron, albeit with a worrying 34 percent share of the vote, we breathed a collective sigh of relief. Many hoped Ms. Le Pen, after falling at the final hurdle, would fade into obscurity. ........ She now has more chance of winning it than ever: After taking 23 percent in the first round, she’s within eight points of Mr. Macron in the second, on April 24. ........ she’s also embarked on a comprehensive effort to soften her image, renaming her party, downplaying the harsher elements of her platform and presenting herself as a warm, even folksy woman who loves her cats. ....... Ms. Le Pen is an authoritarian whose deeply racist and Islamophobic politics threaten to turn France into an outright illiberal state. She may pretend to be a regular politician, but she remains as dangerous as ever. For the good of minorities and France itself, she must not prevail. ....... She especially targeted minorities, “to whom,” she said bitterly, “everything is due and to whom we give everything.” ........ There is now barely any space in French politics to advocate for French citizens who don’t look, behave, pray or eat the way “traditional” French people are supposed to — let alone to champion the rights of immigrants and refugees. ....... In this environment, Ms. Le Pen can turn her attention to more everyday issues, such as rising energy bills and the cost of living, safe in the knowledge that on immigration, citizenship and “national identity,” she’s already won the argument. ......... For more than 30 years now, French political debate has centered itself around issues of identity at the expense of more pressing topics such as health care, climate change, unemployment and poverty. ........ Exploiting feelings of decline at the end of the 1960s — as France shed its colonial empire, lost the war in Algeria and submitted to American domination of Western Europe — the far right became a potent political force. ......... to defend its conception of French identity, evoking a thousand-year-old European Christian civilization threatened by North African Muslim immigration. .......... As people from France’s former colonies migrated to the metropole, the party focused obsessively on the supposed dangers of immigration. ......... “Tomorrow,” he infamously said in 1984, “immigrants will stay with you, eat your soup and sleep with your wife, your daughter or your son.” Such rancorous resentment found some sympathy in certain quarters of French society, where the homogenizing effects of globalization and the increased visibility of Islam among French-born citizens were held to be stripping France of its essential character. ........... With the rise of Islamist terrorism, Muslims were seen to be practicing an inherently violent religion that required containment by public authorities. To be a Muslim was to be guilty until proved innocent. ......... The past decade has taken this equation to a new level. The widespread fear now is not that a handful of people among nearly six million Muslims might pose a danger to public safety, but that all French Muslims by their very existence threaten the cultural identity of “traditional France.” ........ and passing a bill that gives the state power to monitor Muslim religious observance and organizations. ......... underneath the sheen of normalcy, the brutally racist ideology her party pioneered over the past 30 years is very much intact. ........ the company she keeps — she has associated with Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad and Viktor Orban .......... Her administration would echo those in Brazil, India and other countries where a similar rightward slide has taken hold. For minorities, immigrants, dissidents and democracy itself, it would be a disaster. ......... As a French Muslim citizen born and raised here, I fear for my country. ...... it’s instructive that voters may elect a politician whose core ideology violates the values of liberty, equality and fraternity that France has long championed. In that irony lies the gap between what France could be and what it is. .



A Biden Blood Bath? Biden’s approval rating had sunk to just 33 percent ......... only seven months out from the midterms. ....... a really sour environment for Democrats.” ..... a major part of the problem is messaging. “We’re scared of our own shadow on taxes,” he said in the interview, and it “makes no sense.” .............. They feel stuck and angry, they’re tired and overwhelmed, and that energy is being directed at Biden. ....... America has changed its mind and its mood. It wants a show and a showman to distract from its misery. Biden is not that. And he is being punished for not being a huckster. ........ Biden isn’t constantly tweeting and hamming it up for the cameras — in fact, too often, he has shied away from interviews — and his reticence has left a void of emotional connection to him. ........ Biden has moved from the macro to the micro, taking steps that will indeed benefit many Americans but are too narrowly focused to transform our society or fix the core problems that plague it ........ two major perennial issues are resurgent: crime and the economy. The fear of crime and the pinch of inflation aren’t abstractions or complicated foreign policy or perks for special interests. .......... oppression by conservatives in this country is like an amoeba: simple, primitive, pervasive and highly adaptable. It simply shifts its shape to fit the environment and argument. ........ Biden’s approval rating among people identified as Hispanics was even lower than it was among those identified as white. ........ Hispanics hew conservative on some social issues. .... we could well be looking forward to a Biden blood bath. .

News: April 22

पालिकाको नेपाली विकास मोडल इच्छाशक्ति र बलियो नेतृत्व भए कसरी कुनै प्रदेश वा पालिकाले आमूल परिवर्तन ल्याउन सक्छ भन्ने उदाहरणहरु धेरै छन् । जस्तो कि, भारतको आम आदमी पार्टीको सरकारले दिल्लीको सार्वजनिक शिक्षाको गुणस्तरमा छोटो समयमै धेरै उपलब्धि हासिल गर्‍यो । ....... यसअघिको स्थानीय चुनावमा गरिएका घोषणाहरूको उपलब्धि केकति भयो र अब त्यही अनुभवमा टेकेर अघि बढ्ने भन्ने समीक्षा कतै भएको देखिँदैन । ...... सहरको फोहोरसम्म उठाउन नसक्ने धेरै पालिकाले यसअघिको स्थानीय चुनावमा ‘स्मार्ट सिटी’ को नारा लगाएको देखियो । मोनोरेल र मेट्रोको नारा दिने काठमाडौं महानगरले करोडौं बैंकको मुद्दती खातामा राखेर ब्याज खाएको पनि सुनियो । ....... सिंगापुरजस्तो नवविकसित देश वा नर्वे, स्विडेन, डेनमार्क र फिनल्यान्डजस्ता कल्याणकारी राज्यहरूको इतिहास र भू–अवस्था के हो; विकासनीतिको नेतृत्व कसरी सुरु भयोÙ भ्रष्टाचारको नियन्त्रण र सुशासन कसरी कायम भयो आदिको समीक्षा गरी त्यहाँको विकासबाट सिक्नु एउटा पक्ष हो, तर नेपाललाई हुबहु त्यस्तै बनाउने भन्नु आफैंमा नारा मात्रै हो । कुनै गाउँ, सहर, समाज वा देशको विकास त्यहाँको मौलिकता अनुसार हुनु राम्रो मानिन्छ । ......... केन्द्र र प्रदेशको राजनीतिक अस्थिरता, अस्पष्ट विकासनीति र अकासिएको प्रशासनिक खर्चका तुलनामा स्थानीय तहप्रति समग्रमा नेपाली जनताको अभिमत सकारात्मक देखिन्छ । ....... ७० प्रतिशत जनता स्थानीय तहसँग सन्तुष्ट रहेको र करिब ८५ प्रतिशत जनताले स्थानीय तहलाई भरोसा गर्ने देखाएको थियो  ....... पालिकाका न्यायिक समितिका कामले न्यायालयमा मुद्दाको चाप घटाएको छ । स्थानीय तहमार्फत विकासमा महिलासहित समाजका सीमान्तीकृत र अल्पसंख्यकको प्रतिनिधित्व बढेको छ । ........ अर्कातिर डोजरे, भ्यु टावर र गेट बनाउने विकासले प्रश्रय पाउनुका अलावा स्थानीय तहको बजेट परिचालनमा अनियमितता र भ्रष्टाचार, बेरुजु आदि समस्या छन् । ....... अहिले अख्तियारमा आउने करिब एकतिहाइ उजुरीहरू स्थानीय तहका छन् । इन्डोनेसियामा यस्तै अवस्था हुँदा त्यहाँको भ्रष्टाचार निवारण संस्थाले एकैचोटि एक सय मेयरको अनुसन्धान गरेर मुद्दा दायर गरेको थियो । .



Biden calls Putin's actions 'genocide' unverified claims that Russia used chemical weapons in the besieged city of Mariupol. ...... Mariupol's mayor said 21,000 residents of the city had been killed since the start of the invasion; he accused Russian forces of bringing mobile crematoria to the city to dispose of the bodies. ....... Ukrainian security services have captured Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian politician and close friend of Putin who escaped house arrest early in the invasion. ....... Nearly two-thirds of all Ukrainian children have fled their homes since the start of the war, according to the United Nations children’s agency.

Sunday, April 10, 2022

Meanwhile, In France

France’s Far Right Turn A rising nationalist faction has grown its coalition by appealing to Catholic identity and anti-immigrant sentiment — and reshaped the country’s race for president......... With only one month to go until France’s presidential election in April ..... Emmanuel Macron’s presidential victory as an independent five years ago shook up France’s multiparty system. ...... Now Zemmour and Maréchal’s alliance, with its “anti-wokisme” and its appeals to anti-immigrant sentiments, has forged a revanchist politics that captures a notable shift in the public mood. ...... As the far right enjoys its greatest cultural primacy in France in 75 years, it is Zemmour and his followers, not the National Rally, who are defining the future of the French right wing ....... In 1992, Maréchal appeared in a campaign poster as a startled blond toddler held aloft in her grandfather’s arms. Twenty years later, Maréchal was elected to the National Assembly as a representative of the party. At 22, she was the youngest member of Parliament in the history of the modern French Republic. “The Le Pen name is a brand,” Maréchal, now 32, told me last fall. “It has been both my handicap and my advantage. I wouldn’t have been elected without it.” ......... Maréchal’s impending betrayal of her aunt, with its tantalizing mix of political ambition and familial wounds, had been a subject of media speculation for weeks. ...... the family’s treacheries have for decades delighted the French media ....... In 2015, Marine kicked her father out of the National Front for the same reason. They didn’t speak for months. (Eventually, they reconciled.) ....... Maréchal told me. “In people’s minds, it’s the nation, authority, family, heritage, preservation. Broadly speaking, that’s our identity.” ....... and, on the right in particular, around the father of modern France, Charles de Gaulle ...... Maréchal, who has continued to dodge precise questions about her political future as she campaigns full-time for Zemmour, is sometimes called the “fantasy” of the right, a double entendre that captures her political currency and symbolic importance. ....... the word “photogenic.” If it’s taboo to remark on the sex appeal of a female politician in 2022, it would also be disingenuous to pretend that it isn’t a strategic element of Maréchal’s public persona. ........ “So young! So pretty!” ...... she was 22 when she was elected to the National Assembly in 2012, and photos of her from that time, long blond hair swept to one side or, better yet, blowing in the wind against a backdrop of pastoral France, her face fixed in an expression of concern or confident command, are still used frequently by right-wing groups. ...... I’d attended several events where she was on the program, and I never saw her ill at ease. “Distance creates prestige,” Maréchal said, echoing de Gaulle, when I remarked that she had been out of politics for five years but everyone was still talking about her. “They’re projecting their fantasies onto me.” ...... Early on, Maréchal established a reputation not only as a nationalist but also as a Catholic. ...... introduced Maréchal into networks where Zemmour was also a frequent V.I.P. “Paris is the center of everything,” Maréchal told me. “It’s not that way in every European country, but Paris is the economic, cultural and political center of the country. And when you’re politically nonexistent in Paris, it’s very complicated to succeed.” ........ Maréchal also “had a hunger for intellectual questions,” says Eugénie Bastié, another young conservative journalist who worked with Zemmour. “She cultivated that dimension of herself, a depth that her aunt doesn’t have.” Le Pen famously floundered in a debate against Emmanuel Macron in 2017, an embarrassment from which she struggled to recover. “We have this need for our political figures to be intellectuals,” Bastié said. “Someone who doesn’t make us ashamed.” ........... Yet Maréchal still possesses the Le Pen hardness. She can rally the masses with the kind of primal emotion that can only be credibly acquired from a sense of grievance ...... She observed that, of the three traits of the French Republican trinity, “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” only the last couldn’t be imposed by law. “Fraternité is a sentiment of attachment,” she said, and concluded, “it is fragile.” ........ Like their American counterparts, Zemmour and Maréchal like to denounce the liberalism of cultural institutions, namely the media and academia. ...... Renaud Camus, the source of the “grand remplacement,” or “great replacement,” conspiracy theory (which has been picked up across the Atlantic by commentators like Tucker Carlson) ........ Camus’s argument holds that the white French population is being replaced by a nonwhite, non-French population. ........ the Overton window,” Tegnér said, referring to a shift in what’s considered acceptable discourse. D’Ornellas, of Valeurs Actuelles, agreed, pointing out that 15 years ago, the term “ ‘identity’ was absolutely a dirty word. Now it’s pretty much normal to talk about it.” ........ Some of this shift in French public life can be traced to the Islamist terror attacks that have devastated France, beginning in 2015. ........ Prominent left-leaning intellectuals formed a collective to battle Islamist extremism. ....... since the 1980s, as French Muslims became a more visible public presence, has been interpreted to mean that public life should be free from overt religious expression. ...... Last fall, Macron’s education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, founded the Laboratory of the Republic, a government-organized think tank meant to further the ideals of laïcité, proclaiming that “The veil itself is not desirable in French society” and decrying “le wokisme” as an American import. In 2013, Manuel Valls, interior minister to the Socialist president François Hollande, called for systematically deporting Roma, who are European Union citizens, from the country. ....... Conservatives like Zemmour openly use the doctrine as a tool to delegitimize Islam. He tells his audiences that under his presidency, he would “not want to hear the voice of the muezzin,” the person who issues the Islamic call to prayer, while simultaneously extolling France’s “Christian heritage.” ........... Michel Barnier, the former Brexit negotiator for the E.U., said, but he allowed that the French sometimes had a feeling of no longer being “at home.” ....... an environment in which “reasonable people decided that to be reasonable, you had to agree with unreasonable people,” Fassin said. They were made to feel that if they weren’t against the so-called Islamo-leftists, a way of branding those on the left as Islamophilic for cautioning against anti-Muslim bigotry, then they were “complicit with terrorism,” Fassin said. “And, of course, that has consequences. Intimidation, basically.” .......... “The ideas of humanism and solidarity have weakened in the public debate” ....... “They have refused to get into any questions of security, immigration or Islam. Every time those topics come up, they say, ‘Those are right-wing topics.’ So people say to themselves, ‘OK, then I’m on the right.’” ........ the far right has been able to set the terms of debate ...... “We are still far from dominant,” d’Ornellas told me. “But you could say at least that for the first time, we are in a position to contest the liberal cultural hegemony.” ........ Maréchal and Zemmour have long proselytized for what they call the union des droites, the joining of disparate right-wing factions behind a single leader. This could happen either by fusing the center-right party and far-right parties, though that is considered highly unlikely, or, more probably, by joining the most right-wing voters of the center to those on the far right. ....... It is hard to say what is electoral strategy and what is Zemmour being Zemmour. .......... He has asked whether “young French people will accept to live as a minority on the land of their ancestors,” a concern Maréchal shares. .........

“in 2060 the historic native people could be minorities on French territory.”

........ Maréchal told me that the identity question is central to the election, that “for the French it is a vital question, they feel it in their flesh, a vital threat that gives them anxiety.” She explained that it was “because they have the feeling that in several years France will no longer be France, because the population will have largely changed, it will be majority-Muslim, it will no longer be France as we’ve known it.” She went on: “Often, Muslim women who wear the full-body veil or burqa are reproached: ‘If you want so much to live like in Afghanistan or in Iraq, then go live in Afghanistan or Iraq.’ ........... Officially, France promotes an “assimilationist” model. This means that anyone can be French, so long as they adopt French cultural norms. The origins of this code date to the 19th century, when the French government, in order to form a cohesive nation-state, imposed unifying measures on different regional identities. “French culture,” in other words, was created. ........... But it would be a mistake to conclude from this that the emerging French right is interested in neutral statism; on the contrary, it wants to assert the primacy of a particular notion of Frenchness — part historical, part phantasmagorical. “I think people on the right are exasperated by the idea that we put all the religions on the same level,” Bastié said. “The right has turned the page on this kind of relativism. We have a specific Judeo-Christian heritage that we must assume. Only Europe and the West refuse to assume their own heritage. A Muslim country would never say that its heritage isn’t Muslim.” .......... The French far right, like its American counterparts, has taken an interest in the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban. Orban’s calls for a Europe that rejects multiculturalism and asserts its “Christian heritage” were always meant to attract the attention of Western European conservatives. Zemmour and Maréchal visited Budapest together last fall, and Marine Le Pen made a showy campaign stop there. ......... Marquardt had invited a young philosopher and historian named Mohamed Amer Meziane to give a presentation on his recently published book, in which he argued that Europe, and France specifically, give themselves credit for having modernized during the 19th century. But this was the period of France’s imperial adventures in the Muslim world, which — not coincidentally, he argued — racialized the concept of “religiosity,” rendering it “uncivilized.” After Meziane finished, Marquardt opened up the discussion. Yassine Belattar, a well-known Paris comedian, observed that he thought the upcoming election would break relations among the French. “It’s a referendum for or against Muslims,” he said. .............. In response to Meziane and Belattar, one such guest stated that there was only one question to be answered, with a simple yes or no: Was being Muslim more important to them than being French? ........... a survey from 2020 which suggested that 57 percent of young Muslims believed that the law of God was superior to the law of the French Republic. ........

a standard that would never be applied to Catholics. “If you were a believer, would it be Jesus or Macron, the decisive influence in your life?” he shouted. “Answer that!”

........... In the postcolonial era, when ideas about social hierarchy have been overturned, a generation whose ancestors were born under colonialism but who are themselves French-born and highly educated are not keen to be instructed on how to be “French.” .......... In 2018, he said that he dreams of a French Vladimir Putin, a man who “takes a country that was an empire, that could have been a great power, and tries to restore it.” ........ Putin’s Russia has always been the model for the kind of conservative Christian civilizational state that Zemmour and Maréchal espouse, one ruled by a strong leader who patronizes the church, enforces traditional values and unapologetically rebuffs any kind of rights-based progressivism. ........ Le Pen’s party has taken loans from a Russian bank; in 2017, in an attempt to bolster her standing, she met with Putin. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Le Pen’s campaign moved quickly to trash a trove of campaign leaflets that featured a picture of Le Pen and Putin shaking hands at the Kremlin. ......... The French Revolution of 1789 overthrew both the monarchy and the aristocratic order that preceded it; but there is a deep-rooted reactionary right that never fully accepted the new republic. It is a sentiment that still resonates in the bourgeois Parisian circles that Maréchal and Zemmour frequent. Maréchal has remarked that France and the Republic are not necessarily the same thing, that the Republic is just one regime, and “France preceded the Republic.” ........ At the rally in Toulon, the speakers who introduced Zemmour and Maréchal, some of them former National Rally members, spoke of France’s past “imperial grandeur” and the war in Algeria. ........ I stayed to talk to the young man, Salahedin Hamzi, who is 17. He showed me his ID, marked “République Française.” “I have to prove 10 times a day that I’m French,” he said, gesturing to his face. “When I was little, everyone was the same, but as I got older I was made to understand that I wasn’t French.” ....... when France was liberated from Nazi occupation in 1944, many of the soldiers that freed Toulon were from the French colonies.
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Wednesday, February 27, 2019

India And Pakistan Must De-escalate

For Prime Minister Modi to give the Indian army a "free hand" is to abdicate responsibility. Do what you have to do is not an order. That is more like saying, I don't really know what needs to be done.

That Prime Minister Imran Khan has no real control over his army is an open secret. The Pakistani army has been a state inside a state for as long as Pakistan has existed. The Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, is even less answerable to the elected government.

The same terrorist group that is accused of having blown up 40 Indian soldiers in Kashmir is also on record having made attempts on the life of Pervez Musharraf, who was then dictator king of Pakistan. How do they do that? Who supports them?

Traditional diagrams that explain how a state works seem to fail in explaining how power works inside Pakistan. The Islamist ideology also has major sway over a section of the ISI. And elected leaders have a hard time confronting that ideology. It is not dissimilar to the Hindu extremism of some BJP types in India.

India sees that 40 soldiers were blown up. But India doe not see how many Kashmiri youths have been killed and captured by the Indian army over years of military subjugation of Kashmir.

In short, this is a difficult problem. It has been for almost 75 years. But now there is a nuclear dimension to it. And so de-escalation is the only sane option.

Pakistan and India might not be able to do it themselves. And so all external players have to proactively engage. Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, the US, France, Japan.

This is about Kashmir. But then this is not really about Kashmir. Political and military leaders in both countries have used Kashmir for too long for their internal reasons. An external enemy is a great way to distract your people from their genuine problems. Take away Kashmir and the Pakistani people might no longer tolerate why the Pakistani army does not really answer to its elected parliament. Take away Kashmir and India might have to confront its reality of abject poverty. There are more poor people in India than in any other country in the world.

An unthinkable outcome would be a war, even if not nuclear. But since the military hardware is so asymmetrical between the two powers with India having a distinct advantage, Pakistan might be tempted to go nuclear if pushed into a corner.

A good outcome would be that the two powers are forced to face the Kashmir issue and solve it once and for all.

Kashmir is the top hot spot on the planet. It beats Palestine. Pakistan is no Palestine. And India is not Israel either. Its anti-terrorism capabilities are not a match.

The long term solution is to help Pakistan along the path to full democracy and a proper state. But that is not a short term luxury. The immediate need is to de-escalate.

When Modi gives the Indian army a "free hand," he is taking himself out of the picture. When Imran Khan fears the situation might escalate to the nuclear level, he is not threatening nuclear war. He is saying the Pakistani army might get there on its own, and he might learn about it on the news.

Modi and Khan make it sound like this is a hardware problem between the two armies. The conflict has to be promptly dragged back into the political space. External players need to jump in fast as they can.


Sunday, January 03, 2016

Greece

A Pain in the Athens
Why Greece Isn't to Blame for the Crisis
despite endless lazy moralizing commentary to the contrary, Greece has very little to do with the crisis that bears its name. To see why, it is best to follow the money—and those who bank it. ....... The roots of the crisis lie far away from Greece; they lie in the architecture of European banking. When the euro came into existence in 1999, not only did the Greeks get to borrow like the Germans, everyone’s banks got to borrow and lend in what was effectively a cheap foreign currency. And with super-low rates, countries clamoring to get into the euro, and a continent-wide credit boom underway, it made sense for national banks to expand private lending as far as the euro could reach. ....... So European banks’ asset footprints (loans and other assets) expanded massively throughout the first decade of the euro, especially into the European periphery. Indeed, according the Bank of International Settlements, by 2010 when the crisis hit, French banks held the equivalent of nearly 465 billion euros in so-called impaired periphery assets, while German banks had 493 billion on their books. Only a small part of those impaired assets were Greek, and here’s the rub: Greece made up two percent of the eurozone in 2010, and Greece’s revised budget deficit that year was 15 percent of the country’s GDP—that’s 0.3 percent of the eurozone’s economy. In other words,

the Greek deficit was a rounding error, not a reason to panic

. ........ In such an over-levered world, if Greece defaulted, those banks would need to sell other similar sovereign assets to cover the losses. But all those sell contracts hitting the market at once would trigger a bank run throughout the bond markets of the eurozone that could wipe out core European banks. .....

something had to be done to stop the rot, and that something was the troika program for Greece, which succeeded in stopping the bond market bank run—keeping the Greeks in and the yields down—at the cost of making a quarter of Greeks unemployed and destroying nearly a third of the country’s GDP

. ...... how has such a small economy managed to generate such a mortal threat to the euro? ...... what the European elites buried deep within their supposed bailouts for Greece. Namely, the bailouts weren’t for Greece at all. They were bailouts-on-the-quiet for Europe’s big banks, and taxpayers in core countries are now being stuck with the bill since the Greeks have refused to pay. .......... The final figure “loaned” to Greece was around 230 billion euro. ...... They raised bonds to bail Greece’s creditors—the banks of France and Germany mainly—via loans to Greece. ..... Of the roughly 230 billion euro disbursed to Greece, it is estimated that only 27 billion went toward keeping the Greek state running. Indeed, by 2013 Greece was running a surplus and did not need such financing. Accordingly, 65 percent of the loans to Greece went straight through Greece to core banks for interest payments, maturing debt, and for domestic bank recapitalization demanded by the lenders. By another accounting, 90 percent of the “loans to Greece” bypassed Greece entirely. ...... bondholders, who got to sell their now LTRO-boosted bonds back to the governments that had just bailed them out .........

the whole shebang “was about protecting German banks, but especially the French banks, from debt write-offs.”

....... If 230 billion euro had been given to Greece, it would have amounted to just under 21,000 euros per person. Given such largess, it would have been impossible to generate a 25 percent unemployment rate among adults, over 50 percent unemployment among youth, a sharp increase in elderly poverty, and a near collapse of the banking system—even with the troika’s austerity package in place. ....... someone in core Europe is going to have to own up to all of the above and admit that their money wasn’t given to lazy Greeks but to already-bailed bankers who, despite a face-value haircut, ended up making a profit on the deal. ....... Germany being a serial defaulter that received debt relief four times in the twentieth century ....... We’ve never understood Greece because we have refused to see the crisis for what it was—a continuation of a series of bailouts for the financial sector that started in 2008 and that rumbles on today.

It’s so much easier to blame the Greeks and then be surprised when they refuse to play along with the script.

Thursday, November 19, 2015

America Does Not Want Another Vietnam

Português do Brasil: O presidente Lula recebe ...
Português do Brasil: O presidente Lula recebe o presidente da República Árabe Síria, Bashar al-Assad, no Itamaraty. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
If the War On Terror is like the Cold War, which I have maintained it is since 9/11, will this war also see a Vietnam? ISIS sure wants one. Their central mission is to get enemy troops on the ground. But giving in would be a mistake. And that is where I find myself agreeing with President Obama. Troops on the ground are always a tricky operation, even when fighting a traditional state.

But there is no wishing ISIS away. And it is not a force that can be contained. They have to engage in far flung acts of terror to stay alive as an organization. They can not stay in their territory. If they did, they would die out.

Vietnam was an open-ended ground operation that ended very very badly and lasted way too long. Luckily, there are better options available. But the goal does have to be to deny ISIS territory. Working with Russia for an Assad-less Syrian transition might be one way. Smart, sustained aerial strikes might be another.

But this is a global fight. Better intelligence sharing among the democracies of the world would go a long way.

Thursday, June 18, 2015

Terrorism

Terrorists Among Us: Jihad in America
Terrorists Among Us: Jihad in America (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
ढाका में मोदी ने कहा, हमें traditional युद्ध करना आता है, सैनिक भेजो, टैंक भेजो, फाइटर प्लेन भेजो, लेकिन दुनिया को terrorism से कैसे सामना किया जाता है वो नहीं आता। True, it is a new strain of virus.

कुछ solutions हैं।

  • State building ---- जिस तरह मच्छर पानी न बहने वाली तालाब ढूँढती, उसी तरह आतंकवादी ऐसे देश ढूँढ़ते हैं जहाँ failed state हो। 
  • Cooperation between States ---- दुनिया के देशों को information sharing करनी होगी। Otherwise if each country is a silo of its own, you give the terrorists a lot of room to play. 
  • Information Technology ------ The leaders like Bin Laden might choose to go "dark." But generally speaking terrorist cells rely a lot on electronic communication. There has been much contention on this. Even in countries like America there has been a lot of talk about how civil liberties are being curtailed and citizens are being spied upon. Perhaps there is a happy medium somewhere where you rely mostly on machine reading until you have something substantial and only then you get humans involved. Like with Gmail, the email service serves you ads. But it is machine reading, and you don't feel violated. 
  • Social network mapping ------ All terrorist groups rely on social networks. Smaller and tighter the group, more reliant they are on their social networks. So when you nab a few, they lead you to others. 
  • Political grievances have to be proactively addressed. Not because terrorism is and should work. But if there are legitimate concerns, they are legitimate. And they should be addressed. Not as a matter of negotiation with the terrorists or as a step in being blackmailed, but independent of all that. 
  • The "frontline" is where you have small, agile, well trained operatives who engage in direct action. Mistakes have been made in drone attacks, but they are also one of the tools on the frontlines. 
  • Ideological fights on social media. 
  • Larger debates in society, at universities, in old media, on TV, in newspapers. Point by point rebuttals. 
Terrorists rely on the war of asymmetry because they know that is the only way they have any chance. आमने सामने आएंगे तो asymmetry गायब हो जाएगी। 

That is why you have to fear the ISIS more, because they are breaking many of the rules of the traditional terrorists. Terrorists prefer not to hold territory. 

Terrorists rely a lot on out of the box thinking. That goes along the lines of asymmetry. So you have to keep on your toes and constantly be trying to figure out what their next moves might be. It is a game of chess. 

Ultimately you just have to drown them out with plentiful information. Wireless broadband and cheap Android phones for the masses ----- I think that is the number one thing. Hundreds of millions of Muslims sharing cat videos makes ISIS irrelevant. You drown out the terrorists with everyday boring stuff. I happen to think that is the most potent weapon. 

I have said this many times. I think of the War On Terror as being on par with the Cold War. It will conclude after there is a total spread of democracy across the Arab/Muslim world.

India is the new Britain, because ultimately this is about the ideology of democracy. The oldest and the largest democracies belong together. America and India need each other.

Terrorism is "cutting edge" like Climate Change ---- they both require global coordination. No one country can tackle either.