Zardari: International community is losing war against the Taliban.

I still can't work out what David Cameron hoped to achieve by accusing Pakistan of "looking both ways" on the subject of Islamist militancy. And to make those comments whilst in India was simply crass beyond belief.

Well, now Pakistan's president, Asif Ali Zardari, is preparing to visit Britain and has fired a shot across the bows before he gets here.

"The international community, to which Pakistan belongs, is losing the war against the Taliban," said Zardari. "This is above all because we have lost the battle to win hearts and minds."

The president said the Taliban had no chance of regaining power, but he warned: "Their grip is strengthening." He is due to meet Cameron at Chequers on Friday, and said he would speak to the prime minister about his remarks.

"The war against terrorism must unite us and not oppose us," said Zardari. "I will explain face to face that it is my country that is paying the highest price in human life for this war."

He added: "A frank discussion will allow us to restore a bit of serenity. This is why I am not cancelling my visit to London despite this serious accusation. The relationship between our two countries is old and sufficiently robust for that."

And even hardened Tories seem to be shaking their heads in disbelief at Cameron's comments:

The former Conservative party chairman Lord Tebbit said in the London Evening Standard: "I called it sloppy, slap-happy government. It is time for some disciplined thought and disciplined action. Being a prime minister is a serious business."

Tebbit said Cameron's comments exposed a "muddle" in British policy on countering terrorism.

George Bush used to put Musharraf into a similar situation, to the point where Musharraf had to publicly state that he was not America's poodle. Bush never seemed to understand that his War on Terror was deeply unpopular in Pakistan and that Musharraf paid a terrible price for supporting it:

He has suffered terribly for supporting the war in terror. Since shortly after 9-11 there were rioting protesters roaming his streets demanding that Pakistan not be used as a base for the intended attack on Afghanistan.

As we all know Colin Powell had left Musharraf with no choice other than to comply. His compliance made him so unpopular in Pakistan that he suffered from two assassination attempts.

One would imagine that with the situation so fragile that Bush would recognise his ally's troubles and tread gingerly, especially as Pakistan is a nuclear power and the removal of Musharraf from office could allow these weapons to fall into the hands of al Qaeda.

Did Bush tread carefully? Not a bit of it.

Asif Ali Zardari is now being treated in a similar fashion by Cameron. Just because something is true, it does not necessarily follow that it is wise to say it aloud. And it is never wise to criticise any ally whilst standing in the country of their oldest enemy.

The prime minister was also criticised by the former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell, who suggested Cameron could mollify Pakistan by pledging more money to the relief effort after floods that have killed more than 1,000 people.

"It is not in our interests to be at loggerheads with a country which is so important to the outcome in Afghanistan and so essential to our national security," Campbell said. "The more generous we can be with aid and assistance, the easier it will be to get back on good terms."

A senior Pakistani official told the Guardian that during his meeting with Cameron, Zardari intends to "put him straight" and press him to be "more careful in what he says".

Cameron looks naive at best and out of his depth at worst.

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Tags: Cameron, United Kingdom, Pakistan

Israel's "Nuclear Global Legitimacy".

Avner Cohen makes a strange point in today's Ha'aretz newspaper regarding Israel's nuclear ambiguity:

Let there be no doubt - Israel's policy of nuclear opacity is perceived by many the world over, including its best friends, as a political anachronism that is hard to swallow. To them, the problem is not the question of Israel having nuclear capacity, but the country's refusal to acknowledge it. The more Israel is viewed as a cautious, responsible nuclear nation, the harder it is to accept its policy of opacity as appropriate.

Opacity is widely perceived as concealment, an act of covering up a secret that cannot be revealed to the public. Today, however, the secret is known to all, so it's unclear why it must remain wrapped in ambiguity. In a world demanding that Iran speak the truth over its nuclear activity, ambiguity is seen as a bizarre relic from the past.

My understanding of this, and I am sure American readers can correct me if I am wrong, is that Israel's ambiguity is linked to the inability of the US to give aid to country's who possess nuclear weapons but have not signed up to the NNPT.

It is for that reason that I thought Israel's policy of nuclear ambiguity exists.

Cohen appears to be arguing that Israel, by refusing to send Netanyahu to Obama's nuclear summit, is missing a chance "to win global legitimacy for its nuclear program".

I don't think that there is any such chance. Obama is moving towards nuclear disarmament. The 40 year old deal - between the US and Israel - which protects Israel from ever having to declare her nuclear status is no longer in the interests of the United States as it's currently being defined by Barack Obama.

It's inconceivable that the US and Russia would ever contemplate going too far down the disarmament road without addressing the issue of India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.

Where Cohen sees a chance "to win global legitimacy for it's nuclear programme", I see only the opposite. The US and Russia would only ask Israel to acknowledge her nuclear arsenal as a first step to asking her to dismantle it.

The notion that Israel could prove herself "as a cautious, responsible nuclear nation" seems to me to me to missing the direction in which Obama is moving.

Obviously his presidency is not going to result in a nuclear free world, but neither is it going to result in a world where the US and Russia start the process of disarming whilst India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea maintain their status quo.

This is yet another point where the interests of the US and Israel are set to clash. Cohen is kidding himself if he thinks Netanyahu is missing a chance to legitimise weaponry which two of the world's largest powers are seeking to dismantle.

Such "global legitimacy" is a myth.

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Tags: nuclear disarmament, US, Russia, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea

The demise of the dollar.

Robert Fisk is reporting in this morning's Independent that China, Russia, Japan and France have been having secret meetings to end the world's oil trading in dollars and move towards trading in a basket of currencies, "including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar."

In what would be the greatest shake up of the modern financial system since the Bretton Woods agreement after the Second World War, this is dynamite and an indication that the world might soon have to accept that it is working with a new financial map.

The decline of American economic power linked to the current global recession was implicitly acknowledged by the World Bank president Robert Zoellick. "One of the legacies of this crisis may be a recognition of changed economic power relations," he said in Istanbul ahead of meetings this week of the IMF and World Bank. But it is China's extraordinary new financial power – along with past anger among oil-producing and oil-consuming nations at America's power to interfere in the international financial system – which has prompted the latest discussions involving the Gulf states.

This is a serious challenge to American control of the Middle East. Indeed, the only thing which makes me think China will have to tread slowly here is that China is so heavily invested in the dollar at the moment, having spent billions over the past decade buying up dollar assets.

But it does look as if serious moves are afoot to move international transactions away from the dollar and towards the Euro and other currencies.

The last person to announce that he wasn't going to trade in the dollar in oil transactions, but would instead move to the Euro, was Saddam. Within months US and UK tanks were rolling into Baghdad.

But Chinese banking officials say that things have gone too far to now be reversed:

"The Russians will eventually bring in the rouble to the basket of currencies," a prominent Hong Kong broker told The Independent. "The Brits are stuck in the middle and will come into the euro. They have no choice because they won't be able to use the US dollar."

Chinese financial sources believe President Barack Obama is too busy fixing the US economy to concentrate on the extraordinary implications of the transition from the dollar in nine years' time. The current deadline for the currency transition is 2018.

"These plans will change the face of international financial transactions," one Chinese banker said. "America and Britain must be very worried. You will know how worried by the thunder of denials this news will generate."

I'm not sure that I agree with the "Chinese financial sources" who think that Obama will be too busy fixing the US economy to concentrate on this. I think this will take up rather a lot of his attention.

But, should this come to pass in nine years time, it would be wrong for those on the right to lay the blame for this at the door of Obama. It will have been the credit crunch which occurred on George Bush's watch which laid the financial foundations for this to even be considered a possibility.

UPDATE:

The Independents leading article talks of why it is important to China that this process be carried out carefully and without a rush:

For the past decade Beijing has been recycling the proceeds of its giant national trade surplus into purchases of US government bonds and other dollar-denominated assets. China too stands to make a significant loss if the value of the dollar falls. For China, however, the timing is much more sensitive. Beijing needs to reduce its dollar holdings, but if it does so too quickly it will bring about the very devaluation it fears. This explains why Chinese officials appear to want this transition to take place gradually over the next decade.

They are simply, as I suspected, too heavily invested in the dollar to risk any action which might devalue it.

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Tags: Obama, United States, Bretton Woods, China, Russia, France, world financial system

The 52 minutes of Obama magic that changed the nuclear rules.

As right wing bloggers obsess over whether or not Obama has stopped using the phrase war on terror or are lambasting him for observing customs like bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia, a man Bush never bowed to as he much preferred a good old snog, Obama is getting on with doing something much more radical.

I would have thought his aim of ridding the world of many of it's nuclear weapons would have incensed them, but they appear not to have even noticed what he is proposing, as they are so obsessed with trivia. In two recent speeches, both exactly 26 minutes long, Obama has set out a radical plan to rid the world of nuclear weapons:

The president pledged a drive on nuclear disarmament, possibly bigger than any ever attempted. He spelled out how he would accelerate arms control agreements with Russia, following his first summit meeting with President Dmitry Medvedev last week. The deal to conclude a new arms reduction treaty with Moscow, which would slash stockpiles by about a third was a beginning, setting the stage for further cuts.

Building on the momentum of a new agreement with the Russians, Obama said he wanted to cajole the other nuclear powers into agreeing international arms cuts.

This would include Britain's independent nuclear deterrent as well as France's force de frappe and could run into resistance.

I love the fact that this guy is such an idealist, and that he will take on something like this even though he must know that he will run into considerable resistance. He's doing it, not because it is easy, he is doing it because it is the right thing to do.

And he is signaling such a reversal of the tactics of the Bush years, where Bush actually proposed developing new bunker busting nuclear weapons. The signal Obama is sending simply couldn't be more different than the message sent by the Bush White House.

"It is time for testing of nuclear weapons to be banned," Obama said. He called for a resuscitation of the 1996 comprehensive test ban treaty outlawing all nuclear tests. Obama's Democrat predecessor, Bill Clinton, signed the treaty, but then gave up on it after running into resistance from the Republican-controlled Senate which refused to ratify it a decade ago. George Bush did not pursue the issue.

America is the most important country that has not ratified the treaty, although other nuclear countries such as China, Israel and Pakistan, as well as Iran have also declined to ratify.

Obama said he would pursue US ratification "immediately and aggressively".

This is one of my bugbears when it comes to our argument against nations like Iran. Under the NNPT no non nuclear country is allowed to develop nuclear weapons, but there is also an agreement that the countries which do have nuclear weapons will disarm.

That part of the equation is always ignored in this argument concerning Iran and other countries. We demand that others comply with a treaty that the US, under Bush, was clearly in breach of by developing a new range of nuclear weapons, rather than actively acting to disarm as the treaty demands.

Obama is certainly moving in the right direction. The last US president to attempt this was Ronald Reagan:

In 1986 at the Reykjavik summit, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, both passionate about nuclear disarmament, shocked deterrence experts with an unimaginable proposal – total nuclear disarmament. “It would be fine with me if we eliminated all nuclear weapons,” said Reagan. “We can do that,” replied Gorbachev, “Let’s eliminate them. We can eliminate them.”

However, U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz explained that the proposal was “too much for people to absorb, precisely because it was outside the bounds of conventional wisdom,” and “the world was not ready for Ronald Reagan’s boldness.”

It also failed because Reagan refused to drop his star wars scheme. But Obama could be said to be following in Reagan's footsteps. Perhaps that's why the right wing blogs are leaving this subject alone and obsessing over facile rubbish.

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Tags: Obama, nuclear weapons, NNPT, Iran, Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, UK

Sun sets on US power: report predicts end of dominance.

The latest global trends review, produced by the National Intelligence Council (NIC) every four years, is predicting that US power will wane by 2025 and that the advance of western-style democracy is no longer assured with countries like India and China challenging US dominance.

It's a further indication that the country which Barack Obama inherits will no longer "call the shots" and makes him a perfect choice as the kind of person both the world and the US needs to see the US through this dangerous transition period. The era of George Bush and the neo-cons, the era of "we do what we want and there's nothing anyone can do to stop us" is looking as if it is very much nearing it's end.

Looking ahead to 2025, the NIC (which coordinates analysis from all the US intelligence agencies), foresees a fragmented world, where conflict over scarce resources is on the rise, poorly contained by "ramshackle" international institutions, while nuclear proliferation, particularly in the Middle East, and even nuclear conflict grow more likely.

"Global Trends 2025: A World Transformed" warns that the spread of western democratic capitalism cannot be taken for granted, as it was by George Bush and America's neoconservatives.

"No single outcome seems preordained: the Western model of economic liberalism, democracy and secularism, for example, which many assumed to be inevitable, may lose its lustre – at least in the medium term," the report warns.

It adds: "Today wealth is moving not just from West to East but is concentrating more under state control," giving the examples of China and Russia.

"In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, the state's role in the economy may be gaining more appeal throughout the world."

At the same time, the US will become "less dominant" in the world – no longer the unrivalled superpower it has been since the end of the Cold War, but a "first among equals" in a more fluid and evenly balanced world, making the unilateralism of the Bush era no longer tenable.

The vanity of the neo-cons and the American right wing in particular was best summed up after the cold war by the title of Francis Fukuyama's book, "The End of History". They really did believe that the they had won the battle for world domination and that they would forge ahead and create A New American Century and that there was nothing anyone could do to stop them.

It was this vanity which led Bush to rip up international law with his invasion of Iraq, as he and other right wing loons believed that the law would be what they stated it to be and that the rest of us would simply have to swallow hard and accept this new reality.

Those of us who had read Emmanuel Todd's "After the Empire" suspected that American power was actually on the wane and the fact that Bush not only failed to win in Iraq, but that he was unable to punish countries which opposed the invasion - France, Germany etc., - only reinforced that impression.

People like Bill Clinton have always argued that international law mattered because the US was in a position to model the world into how it would like it to look for the day when it was no longer on the top of the pile. Bush and the neo-cons, consumed by vanity, argued that international law didn't really exist and that they observed it merely as a courtesy and reserved the right to ignore it as it suited them.

As we move into this difficult transition period, we can be grateful that a steady hand like that of Barack Obama is on the US wheel. Were Bush and Cheney in charge at such a time we could very well sit on the edge of the nuclear abyss.

The time is approaching when the US can no longer tell the rest of the world to fuck off and international law is about to matter more than it ever has before.

The example set by the Obama presidency will matter greatly as America approaches the time when it finally becomes a first amongst equals.

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No more them and us, with a farewell to American supremacy.

The biggest winner in the coming multipolar age will be China, according to the NIC report.

"China is poised to have more impact on the world over the next 20 years than any other country," it predicts. On present trends China will have the world's second largest economy by 2025, and could well be the largest importer of natural resources and the biggest polluter. It will be a leading military power, with a considerable navy to protect the sea lanes that deliver its raw materials, and at the same time wield hi-tech asymmetric tools.

A US congressional panel claimed on Wednesday night that China was already practising its cyber warfare skills.

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Tags: American power, wanes, China, India, Francis Fukuyama, Emmanuel Todd, Iraq war, international law

Slavery: A Global Investigation.

Slavery is officially banned internationally by all countries, yet despite this there are more slaves , in the world today than ever before. In the four hundred years of the legal slave trade around 13 million people were shipped from Africa. Today there are an estimated 27 million slaves - people paid no money, locked away and controlled by violence. Multi-Award winning documentary makers Kate Blewett and Brian Woods - who produced the groundbreaking films The Dying Rooms, Innocents Lost and Eyes of a Child, saw this terrible exploitation with their own eyes. The result is an utterly devastating film.

Part 1:



Part 2:

Tags: Slavery, India, UK, USA