Greece Isn't Pakistan

David Rothkopf in Foreign Policy points out that Greece is in a mess because it is not Pakistan:

The problem isn't the Greek finance ministry. The problem isn't the Greek legislature. The problem isn't the Europeans who are being dragged kicking and screaming toward helping Greece. The problem isn't even Goldman Sachs and the other banks who lent Greece more money than they could afford and even helped them hide a bunch of the financings off the books.

Nope, the problem is Greek nuclear scientists and radical terror groups affiliated with the Greek intelligence services -- or rather, the lack thereof.

Because if Greece had nuclear weapons and crazed terrorists hiding in every luxury housing development, you can bet we wouldn't be going through this long drawn-out process of figuring out whether the country was going to default or not.

We know this because of Pakistan. Pakistan is an absolute financial basket case. It is in many respects in as bad a shape as Greece -- and in some it is even much worse off. But do you hear anyone talking about Pakistan's financial problems? Heck no.

Of course, talking about Pakistan's financial problems is like talking about whether Anthony Weiner's socks match. It's not exactly the first issue that comes to mind. Having said that, the reason we are not sweating the meltdown of Pakistan's financial markets is that there is no way the United States or the world would let it happen. Because a financial collapse could trigger the kind of unrest that would put Pakistani nukes at risk, and that's just not tolerable. So the United States pumps billions into Pakistan knowing full well that it is this aid that helps keep the ship of state afloat. (And, money being fungible, if it also pays for expanding Pakistan's nuclear arsenal … well, apparently we're willing to look the other way. Again.)

Once again, one of the main messages of modern international affairs comes through loud and clear: Nukes pay. From Pyongyang to Tehran, enterprising leaders know that the easiest way to boost your country's profile, gain political leverage, and win cash and prizes is to toss a little enriched uranium in the old Cuisinart, let the satellites take a few snaps, and start rattling your radioactive saber.

The problem with Greece is that if the economy collapsed, if the government collapsed, if the country descended into chaos, no one is worried that a nuclear catastrophe would follow. An ouzo-induced hangover maybe -- which can be a pretty horrific thing -- but it's the specter of a mushroom cloud that really is the attention grabber.

Alcohol and murder

Alcohol played a role in the year-ago murder of Diyyendu Sinha of Old Bridge.
Here:

"The five Old Bridge High School students first convinced someone to buy 10 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor for them and they went to a gathering of other students behind Grissom School, a defendant in a murder case told investigators after the beating death of Divyendu Sinha last June.....After an hour of drinking the teenagers got back into Contreras’ Honda Civic....“They were just trying to get into a fight,” Steven K. Contreras, 18, told investigators from the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office during a taped interview.

They encountered Sinha and family, who weer out for a walk, and beat Sinha up with fatal consequences.

Another set of lives ruined possibly by judgement impaired by intoxicants.

B Street Band

One of the "Thursdays by the Sea" concerts at Pier Village, Long Branch, NJ.

Vegetarian Dilemma

If one is a vegetarian, not out of habit or tradition, or religious conviction, but for reasons of dharma [1],  then one cannot eat mass-grown American tomatoes, it appears.

Bridges

Another shot from that room with a view:

A Room With A View

From the twenty-first floor of an apartment building in Brooklyn:


Pannable version below the fold.
PS: Not sure how to make it work on the iPad.  On a PC, you can drag the picture around seeing detail in full resolution.

Hitchens on Pakistan

Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair:

Again to quote myself from 2001, if Pakistan were a person, he (and it would have to be a he) would have to be completely humorless, paranoid, insecure, eager to take offense, and suffering from self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred. That last triptych of vices is intimately connected. The self-righteousness comes from the claim to represent a religion: the very name “Pakistan” is an acronym of Punjab, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and so forth, the resulting word in the Urdu language meaning “Land of the Pure.” The self-pity derives from the sad fact that the country has almost nothing else to be proud of: virtually barren of achievements and historically based on the amputation and mutilation of India in 1947 and its own self-mutilation in Bangladesh. The self-hatred is the consequence of being pathetically, permanently mendicant: an abject begging-bowl country that is nonetheless run by a super-rich and hyper-corrupt Punjabi elite. As for paranoia: This not so hypothetical Pakistani would also be a hardened anti-Semite, moaning with pleasure at the butchery of Daniel Pearl and addicted to blaming his self-inflicted woes on the all-powerful Jews.

Garden pics

Clematis at full bloom (more photos after "Read more")

Javed Akhtar and Two-Nation Theory

A delightful interview of Javed Akhtar: (it is in English, btw.)

Second of two on Pakistan

Dhruva Jaishankar in The Indian Express:

Finally, there are those elements that Washington continues to give credence to, or at least leave unquestioned: Pakistan’s insecurities are legitimately propelled by fears of encirclement, India’s growing resource base, its nuclear weapons programme, and its reported “Cold Start” doctrine, thus adequately justify Pakistan’s inordinate military spending, greater investments in its nuclear and missile programmes, and support for terror groups targeting India and Afghanistan. That lasting peace between India and Pakistan and the settlement of the Kashmir dispute to Pakistan’s satisfaction will almost entirely eliminate its insecurities. That the army remains the only secular institution in Pakistan that “works” and is therefore deserving of support. And that Pakistan’s top military and intelligence officials bear little or no responsibility for the actions of their subordinates and affiliates, a claim even less credible given revelations from the ongoing trial of Tahawwur Rana and the testimony of David Coleman Headley. The erroneous conclusion drawn by the Obama administration from such questionable assumptions is that demonstrations of Indian magnanimity will allow Pakistan’s misguided, but not necessarily malevolent, security forces to reallocate resources towards improving the country’s security and economy. 

Responding to Pakistan’s narrative requires an important cognitive leap, one that most in Washington are still reluctant to take: Pakistan’s purported obsessions and insecurities are self-inflicted, created and consistently advanced to serve important private interests, almost always to the detriment of the country and its people. This applies equally to all the challenges commonly associated with Pakistan, be it the military’s political preponderance, the proliferation of nuclear technology and materials, the cultivation and use of terrorist proxies against both adversaries and nominal allies, the growing radicalisation of the body politic, and periodic India-Pakistan crises. There is also little clarity regarding Pakistani pleas for a long-term strategic relationship, which it professes to desire as a symbol of legitimacy, but also works to undermine through its transactional demands and poorly concealed enthusiasm for a hasty US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

First of two on Pakistan

Sushant Shareen writes in Tehelka: (excerpt, but read the whole thing)

PAKISTAN IS not so much a victim of terrorism as it is a victim of the stupendous success of the indoctrination programme that has replaced the innate pragmatism of the people. Islamism doubles up as nationalism and validates substantially, if not entirely, the concept of Islamofascism. It is this phenomenon that leads a newspaper owner, who is an ideal candidate for a lunatic asylum but in today’s Pakistan is a leading flagbearer of the ‘ideology of Pakistan’, to demand a nuclear strike on India because after a nuclear exchange Pakistan will be able to progress like Japan did after Hiroshima! It is this thinking that leads a top general under Pervez Musharraf, and a man who at one point was touted as a possible successor to Musharraf, to advocate firing “a nuclear warning shot in the Bay of Bengal, across India, demonstrating our circular range capacity” in order to send the message that “you don’t mess with a nuclear power and get away with it”. It is this thinking that makes a former information minister declare that “Pakistan has made nuclear weapons not to keep them in the cupboard but to use them against its enemies”. It is this mindset that makes the so-called ‘civil society’ — news anchors, lawyers, activists — defend the action of the assassin of Punjab governor, Salman Taseer. And it is precisely this mindset that prevents the Pakistan army (its ranks filled with the oxymoronic ‘moderate Taliban’) from ending its double-game in the war on terror. 

Today, it is not the nukes that protect Pakistan but Pakistan that protects its nukes. 

This then is the terrible reality of Pakistan. Unfortunately, just as the Pakistanis are in denial, so too are the Indians, or at least the Indian establishment, about the ground reality in Pakistan. India’s Pakistan policy (if at all there is such a thing) is predicated on interactions with what is a fringe group of liberal, moderate, modern, and sensible Pakistanis who are excellent advocates of their country but whose words don’t count for anything in terms of setting their country’s policy or direction. This is a class that doesn’t number more than a couple of thousand.

Water on the Moon

The New York Times reports that apart from the surface water detected by NASA and Indian space probes,

Now, scientists analyzing tiny fragments of hardened lava from long-ago lunar eruptions report that the fragments contain about as much water as similar magmas on Earth, meaning there is plenty of water inside the Moon too.

Einstein, Feynman, Hopper visit AT&T Labs

Famed Scientists Richard Feynman, Grace Hopper and Albert Eistein explore AT&T Labs during a mid-2011 visit.

Originally presented as part of the 2011 AT&T Cyber Security Conference. A complete replay of this video, as well as a live panel session including the scientists and AT&T Chief Security Officer Ed Amoroso, will be available at http://www.att.com/securityconference

India and Organic Farming

This is a post in 3 parts.

My point is that we in India seem to recognize the value of our old practices and traditions only when it is blessed by westerners.   Far better that we record our old practices and traditions while they are still extant, and then go through them looking for value, than to lose them altogether, except for fragments recorded by Westerners, because we consider them to be superstition, unscientific, etc., etc.

An illustration of this point follows:

1. For context, I'm reproducing part of one of my posts from January 2009:

Fruitless Fall : The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis

Rowan Jacobsen examines the recently emerged phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder - the mysterious death of honey bee hives, almost all over the world. Science has unable to pin it on any one cause; so there may be a systemic problem and a combination of stresses on honey bees may have crossed a threshold. This is a scientific whodunit narrated in a very engaging style. I'm ordering my own copy as I return this to the library. I strongly recommend it, five stars out of five.

2. I point you to an excerpt of Rowan Jacobsen's book that I had posted previously, about Kirk Webster, a beekeeper in Vermont.   It is not necessary to read this to understand the third point, except that Webster's bees do not suffer from colony collapse disorder.

3. Another excerpt from the book:

Central to Webster's worldview was the work of Sir Albert Howard, the father of the organic farming movement.  Howard, Britain's imperial economic botanist in India in the early 1900s, studied the farming practices of India's peasants and wrote two books based on his observations: An Agricultural Testament and The Soil and Health.   He was knighted for his work in 1935.

----

PS: Now in the years to come,  we will take organic farming as a western innovation, and seek to transplant it back to India, when it arose from traditional knowledge in India in the first place.  How much better to instead study, validate or invalidate our practices and then educate the farmer accordingly.  Why is imported knowledge given a place of privilege?  The same argument holds for Ayurveda.   The problem is that most of  past knowledge is in a million mouldering manuscripts that won't last a generation, or in the heads of people whose children scorn their knowledge, and so it won't last a generation either.

Richard Clarke on Pakistan

Richard Clarke on Pakistan: They are such pathological liars they even don't know when they are lying any more.

At the very end of this clip from Bill Maher's show:

OBL cartoons

http://rlindia.blogspot.com/2011/05/blog-post_11.html
and
http://rlindia.blogspot.com/2011/05/blog-post.html

Perkovich on Pakistan

In the NY Times, George Perkovich writes that

...aid combined with these other U.S. policies clearly has not changed the Pakistani military’s obsession with contesting India. There is nothing India or the United States can realistically do that will change this self-destructive obsession because the problem is India’s existence itself.

Prof. Walter Russell Mead on US-Pakistan relations

This is a must-read.

We are going to have to get tough.  The Pakistani security establishment lives to a very large degree in what, to American eyes, looks like a dangerous and delusional imaginary world.  As I’ve written before, Americans (and virtually everyone else in the world who looks at this question) sees Pakistan locked into a profoundly dysfunctional combination of misguided security ideas and comprehensive domestic failure.  Pakistani strategists embrace these seemingly destructive policies out of some very deeply-held beliefs and in response to what they see as existential questions of national identity and cohesion.  They will not be lightly diverted from this long-established and cherished course, however suicidal, and as is often the case with people whose goals are unrealistic, they are accustomed to very high risk strategies and brinkmanship.  Defeat after defeat by India, progressive deterioration of the domestic security climate and the utter collapse of political morality in what passes for the governing class in Pakistan have not forced a reevaluation.  Charm and appeals to sweet reason by American officials and emissaries won’t do it either.  Neither will humanitarian aid: the suffering of ordinary Pakistanis has little impact on the elite, and in the short to medium term public opinion in Pakistan is so anti-American and so politically marginal that we could die of old age waiting for spending however generous to change our image in Pakistan enough to change the politics of the relationship.

MJ Akbar on Pakistan's Army

Worth a read.

One story is too priceless to be ignored. Former Afghanistan intelligence chief A. Saleh recalls that when, four years ago, he told Musharraf that Osama was hiding in or around Abbotabad, Musharraf exploded, "Am I President of the Republic of Banana?"

A Sigh of Relief

We were sitting in the left side of the plane; but the winds were from the south west. So our flight from Dallas approached the Newark airport from the north, and I was treated to a view of the magnificent Manhattan skyline.  I shed my usual tear at the absence of the Twin Towers.

At home, I had had left the radio on, as a thief-deterrent.  As we entered the house, I heard President Obama saying that Osama Bin Laden had been killed.  I normally don't think of any death as an occasion for celebration; but as much joy as is possible on hearing that someone has been killed, I felt.    I think that  the world (a large part of it, anyway) heaves a sigh of relief that such a useless but dangerous man is no more.