The Pakistan puzzle

On August 14th this year, Pakistan completed 60 years as an independent country. In these 60 years, the state of Pakistan has endured, but doubts about it still persist - it has been called a failed state and a rogue state. For its own people, the state has done precious little. Small groups of individuals, however, have enriched themselves. Constitutional democracy has yet to find a foothold in Pakistan. Indeed, the constitution itself has not found a foothold yet. The Pakistani state has fomented and supported insurgencies and terrorism, both of which now pose serious dangers to Pakistani society. Its rulers have flirted with Islamic fundamentalism to various degrees, with the ill effects on society becoming increasingly obvious in recent years.

Is Pakistan really a failed state ? In what form do Pakistan's failures manifest themselves ? What are the reasons for these failures ? What are the possible remedies ? What are the criteria for defining the failure of states?

While thinking about these issues, it struck me that it is far more interesting to analyze the politics of third world countries than it is to think about the historical provenance of liberal Western democracies. In third world countries, external manifestations of democracy such as elections are prominently visible. Political power though, is unevenly distributed. Rhetorical tributes to democracy are frequent. The structure of government looks like that of modern Western nations on paper but reality is quite different. Pakistan offers a good case study.

Take for example the separation of powers between the three branches of government so dear to Western political theory. In Pakistan, there are four branches of government:

• The executive: the President (quite often) , the Prime minister (some times), or the Chief Martial Law Administrator (several times)
  
• The Army
• The Judiciary
• The Legislature

No matter what the current constitution says, this is the reality. Secondly, the powers are not always separated. The chief of the army has been the president several times. When the president or the prime minister is not from the army, he or she survives on the sufferance of the army. Thirdly, there are no checks and balances, since the legislature and the judiciary have proved to be rubber stamps for most of Pakistan's history - with the recent notable exception of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry.

Pakistan's politicians come from its land-owning elites (the Bhutto family) or its business classes (the Sharif clan). Their privileged background has unfortunately proved to be no guarantee against venality. Benazir ('the incomparable') is rumored to have stashed away more than a billion dollars in foreign bank accounts.

Pakistan has had long stretches of military rule, during 1958-71 under Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan, from 1977 to 1988 under Zia ul-Haq and from 1999 until now under Pervez Musharraf. While all of these generals are clearly guilty of cornering all political power, they don't fit the standard stereotypes of despotic dictators. Under Ayub and Yahya Khan, while life may not have been a bed of roses, large scale tyranny was not the norm. Under Musharraf, the press has considerable freedom, with TV channels such as Geo TV being allowed almost as much freedom as the media enjoy in Western countries. In fact, this very freedom might ultimately prove to be Musharraf's undoing.

The prospects for Pakistan's emergence as the secular state imagined by Jinnah were dealt a catastrophic blow under Zia ul-haq. Under his rule, the Pakistani state took a clear turn towards Islamic fundamentalism. Zia had already introduced medieval punishments (such as the chopping of hands for theft) in Pakistan by late 1978, before the Iranian revolution brought Ayatollah Khomeini and Sharia-based law to the world's attention. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the US decided to fight a proxy war. The recruits for this war were fundamentalist muslims, recruited from the madrasas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Saudis contributed generously to the founding and upkeep of the madrasas. The Americans provided the money for the weapons, to the tune of several billions of dollars. The money was funneled through the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI (Inter Services Intelligence). Some of the weapons and money were also used to fund deadly insurgencies in India - in Punjab in the early 1980s and in Kashmir in the later part of the decade.

Recently, the the judiciary in Pakistan has asserted itself against Musharraf. Musharraf's attempted dismissal of the Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry failed spectacularly. Chaudhry was reinstated by a panel of judges after months of public protest in many cities by lawyers. This protest was unusual and led many optimistic commentators to believe that civil society was finally confronting military rule. The reinstated Chaudhry is reversing the Musharraf regime's decisions with a vengeance. First, Javed Hashmi, an opposition leader who was arrested in 2003 for criticising the military was released. Hashmi's appeal against his detention had been rejected just a few months ago by a bench headed by Chaudhry. But that was before Chaudhry had been dismissed and reinstated. Since his reinstatement, Chaudhry has rediscovered judicial wisdom. Or maybe he is just getting back at Musharraf.

The court moved with lightning speed to let Nawaz Sharif, the ex-prime minister who was deposed by Musharraf and exiled to Saudi Arabia, return to Pakistan. Nevertheless, Sharif was sent back to Saudi Arabia upon landing at Lahore, amid high drama for a few hours. The whole idea of exile to Saudi Arabia has fascinating historical parallels: pre-modern Muslim rulers of the subcontinent often banished troublemakers to Arabia, with the offender being forced to proclaim that he was performing the religious duty of the Haj.

Meanwhile, there have been persistent rumors of an understanding between Benazir Bhutto and Musharraf. Benazir is believed to have told Musharraf that he cannot be president and army chief simultaneously and that he should give up the army chief's post. This would seem to be a deal-breaker. If you want to hang on to power in Pakistan, the last thing you would do is abandon the army.

Musharraf is under considerable pressure, no doubt. He contemplated imposing an emergency and suspending constitutional rights and the elections, but backed off. A couple of weeks ago, Musharraf passed an ordinance granting Benazir amnesty from corruption charges and got himself elected president by a pliant parliament. In what is a surprising move, he is promising to resign from the army chief's post, if his election as the president is not invalidated by the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, he did reshuffle the army top brass in anticipation of having to resign as army chief.

If past history in Pakistan is any guide, many scenarios are possible from this point onwards, starting with legitimate elections and a civilian government, a clampdown and emergency rule by Musharraf, a coup by disaffected elements in the military or some compromise between Musharraf and Benazir.

Whatever the outcome of these moves and countermoves, the Western world need not worry. Pakistan's military calls the shots with regard to all aspects of the state and while the basic players may change, it is the institution of the military that persists. And the military knows which side of its bread is buttered. Having been addicted to the millions of dollars in US aid and arms for years, the Pakistani military is unlikely to let anything contrary to US interests happen in Pakistan.

The drama continues, with tragedy being added to political farce. Yesterday, Benazir made a triumphant return to Karachi, only to witness the deaths of over a hundred people when bombs went off in her procession.

Death of a Colonel

Col. Vasanth V, commanding officer of the 9th Maratha light infantry battalion, died on Tuesday, July 31st. He was injured while battling a group of militants who were trying to cross the India-Pakistan Line of Control (LOC) in the Uri sector in Kashmir.

I had met Col. Vasanth briefly in 1991 when I was on vacation in India. He was a soft-spoken man with a good sense of humor. He had surprised me with his knowledge of obscure things by asking whether the culture of the Cajuns in Louisiana was still alive. I hadn't known about the Cajuns before coming to the US, and hadn't expected that someone in India would know about them. So I naturally asked him how he even knew of their existence. Though he couldn't recall exactly where he had read about them, he brushed off my surprise by saying "We used to read a lot of things, including the newspaper the samosas came wrapped in"! I could immediately sense a kindred soul, having been book and library-starved during my childhood. For some reason, that moment of resonance came back to me today, when I heard about his death.

I have often wondered if the chaos of the world of political violence, either within countries or between them, is going to affect me directly. There are so many conflicts in the world that I must count myself incredibly fortunate never to have come within sniffing distance of any. This time though, the violence has come quite close. Col. Vasanth and I had only one degree of separation. He was a long-time colleague and a good friend of my brother.

I wonder if the planners of violence like the generals and spy agencies pursuing "strategic depth" or "balance of power" ever pause to think of the misery they are inflicting upon people. Scratch that. It is quite obvious that they don't. For them, the jihadi groups are pawns in a broader chess game.

We read of the deaths of people in the news reports so often. Yet, when a person we know dies, we are forced to pause and reflect on the tragedy. Our own sorrows, frustrations and hassles start looking trivial by comparison. A death you reflect upon forces you to evaluate life again.

The tragedy of the Congo

The history of European colonialism is replete with examples of extreme cruelty. The decimation of the American Indians in South America and the United States is but one example. What was done to the natives of Africa is no less barbarous. The British, the French and the Germans were all guilty of slaughtering native populations. Among the less well-known examples is what the Belgians and their King did to the people who lived in the Congo river basin.

Adam Hochschild wrote a book in 1999 describing the rape of the Congo. King Leopold's Ghost is his attempt to document the atrocities of Belgian rule over the Congo, starting from about 1875 to 1908. Among other things, the book is a remarkable account of the chicanery of Belgium's monarch. However, its most disturbing aspects are the stark descriptions of the inhuman brutality of European rule. It is also startling in its revelation of the magnitude of the inhumanity - Hochschild estimates that nearly 10 million people died due to unnatural causes during the period ranging from the 1880s to about 1920. The Congo basically underwent a holocaust in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century.

It all started with European penetration of the interior of Africa through the famous geographical expeditions of Livingstone and others. The crowning glory of these expeditions was Henry Morton Stanley's charting the course of the Congo. Leopold II, the constitutional monarch of the small country of Belgium, was desperate for a colony. He found the ideal opportunity in the Congo. He swindled the Europeans into believing that he was merely heading an International Africa Association with philanthropic aims, among which were the laudable ones of bringing civilization and Christianity to the natives - aims that no one in Europe could find fault with.

With Stanley acting as his agent, Leopold convinced European nations into accepting the "Congo Free State" as being a territory under his control. The European powers were more interested in carving up Africa than in ensuring legitimate government in the Congo. There was, in fact, no government to speak of. Leopold's soldiers, known as the Force Publique, unleashed a regime of extreme brutality. From the very beginning, forced labor was the order of the day, with the Congolese being led in gangs with chains around their necks. Brutal whippings with a hippopotamus-hide whip called the chicotte were commonplace. Any resistance was met with the full force of European weaponry, with entire villages being burnt down for minor offenses.

Leopold's goal was to exploit the Congo's natural wealth as much as possible. First, it was ivory. Then when the demand for rubber exploded in the 1890s, the Force Publique wreaked havoc. Villagers were assigned fixed quotas of rubber, to be collected from vines growing in the wild. Punishments for failing to meet one's quota were severe. In addition to the whipping, killing of children and rape were also used to terrorize the population. It was during this time that the innovation of chopping off hands began to be used widely. The casual, inhuman brutality was sustained by a monetary incentive. Leopold's soldiers were paid commissions by the pound for the rubber collected.

The world was not entirely unaware of what was going on. Missionaries, among them African Americans like George Washington Williams, began writing about the barbarism starting in the 1890s. Unfortunately, this had no effect until the early years of the twentieth century, when E. D. Morel and Roger Casement in Britain highlighted the continuing cruelty in the Congo in a campaign that lasted several years. Finally, in 1908, the Belgian government took over the colony from Leopold. By that time rubber from plantations in Asia was plentiful and the easily available wild rubber in the Congo was nearly exhausted. Nevertheless, Belgian rule in the Congo lasted until 1960.

Hochschild's book is a remarkable piece of investigative journalism and narrative history. There is still a strong desire in Belgium to suppress this history. Given the lack of historical material from the Congolese side, Belgium has had a monopoly on the history of the Congo Free State. Despite that monopoly, Hochschild's book is destined to become the preeminent history of Belgium's depredations in Africa.

Unfortunately, the tragedy of the Congo has continued into our times. After independence from Belgium in 1960, the country has not known much peace or development. The nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba, a target of the CIA due to his "mad dog" ideas of wanting to use the country's resources for its people, was assassinated in early 1961 after being deposed in a coup. The coup leader, Joseph Mobutu, became president in 1965. Propped by the US as an anti-communist dictator, he renamed the country Zaire, stole several billions of dollars over the years and survived into the 1990s. In 1997, Mobutu fled from the Congo, to be replaced by the rebel leader Laurent Kabila. Kabila had sought assistance from Rwanda and Uganda to oust Mobutu, who agreed to help with the ostensible motive of breaking up the Hutu militias that had assembled in the Congo after the Rwandan genocide of 1994. After becoming president, Kabila tried to get rid of the Rwandan and Ugandan troops, but they refused to leave, having become addicted to the gold, diamonds and coltan. Kabila then enrolled Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe on his side, leading to a multinational war.

Laurent Kabila was assassinated in 2001 and was succeeded by his son Joseph. Joseph Kabila entered into a set of partially successful peace agreements, including one in 2003 that seems to have held. The neighbors' interest in the country has also declined along with the price of coltan. Most foreign troops seem to have withdrawn substantially, though Rwandan troops were reported in the eastern provinces in 2005 as well. There are estimates that about 4 million people died as a result of the conflict.

While the intensity of conflict has diminished somewhat since the 2003 peace agreement , there still are several well-armed militias in operation in the country, so the outbreak of wider war and conflict is always a distinct possibility. The cruelties perpetrated by the militias are beyond belief. As this stomach-churning account reveals, the mineral wealth of the country has been the main motivation for many of the sponsors of the fighting.

"Continue reading" in Blogger

It is pretty amazing that Blogger doesn't have this as a feature yet. You can find various solutions on the web, all of them involving mucking around with HTML.
I have found one solution that works with what is known as a "classic template". Your mileage, as usual with all such things, will vary.

Infrequent posting

For the last month or so, my blogging has been more infrequent than usual, which wasn't very frequent to begin with. Part of it was that I was a bit busy. The major reason though is that I have a new gig in a group blog. The group blog is run by my friend Shunya, though he has now given up his nom de plume and blogs under his real name.

The group blog has a fairly interesting set of contributors, so I invite you to check it out. I haven't decided what I will be doing with this one, but it is most likely that I will be cross-posting on both blogs.

Oil: a story in numbers and pictures

Price I paid at the pump for Regular Unleaded: $ 3.62 / gallon.

Oil company profits (sources: Reuters and firm financial reports):

	$, billion
Company	2006	2005	2004	2003	2002
Exxon	39.5	36.13	25.33	20.96	11.01
Chevron	17.138	14.099	13.328	7.23	1.132
Conoco Phillips	15.55	13.529	8.129	4.735	0.698
BP	22.29	22.63	17.26	12.62	6.87
Royal Dutch Shell	26.31	26.26	18.18	12.31	9.66

The price of crude oil over the last 20+ years:









Who's got the stuff:









Who consumes it the most:

Region/Country	2004 Consumption (million barrels per day)
United States	20.7
Europe	16.2
China	6.4
Middle East	5.6
Central & South America	5.3
Japan	5.3
Eurasia	4.0
Africa	2.8
Russia	2.8
Germany	2.7
India	2.4
Canada	2.3
Korea, South	2.2
Brazil	2.1
France	2.0
Mexico	2.0

Military bases of the largest consumer, in the region which has most of the stuff:

Maximum Bombay

Before I came to the US in 1989, I had been to Bombay only once, for four days. It rained the whole time. Buckets of water poured down in sheets. I was marooned on the IIT campus where I was staying. The only sights I saw were the campus buildings and those visible from the local train that took me to and from Dadar railway station. The much-celebrated city of dreams was a stranger to me when I was living in India.

I have visited Bombay several times since then, staying for a week or ten days in New Bombay, where residents repeatedly tell you that it's much cleaner than Bombay. I took the local train to VT from the Vashi railway station on the harbour line several times. In the 1990s, the Vashi railway station, quite amazingly for an Indian railway station, used to be spotlessly clean. From there, the cleanliness went downhill on the one hour ride to VT. You couldn't avoid the horrors of Bombay even if you wanted to. About half way to VT, the slums begin to appear. For kilometers on end, shanties line the tracks. The rudimentary dwellings of mud, brick, tin and tarpaulin are barely a few yards away from the rushing trains. Mounds of garbage and open drains abound. The extent of the slums, the number of people who live there and the dire living conditions are overwhelming. There is no alternative but to block it out of your mind.

I have been wary of the common stereotypes of slums, poverty and ugliness tagged on to the cities of India (and the rest of the country by extension). I used to live in the middle of the country, away from the cities, in a government-built township for employees of a public sector firm. While living in India, I had rarely encountered the dire poverty and sheer ugliness of the cities that travel writers described. Unfortunately, my visits to Bombay in the 1990s convinced me that there wasn't much exaggeration in these accounts.

And then there is the other Bombay. A city of wealth. A city of glamour. A city of gangsters. People in the rest of India read about the outrageous lifestyles of the rich and the beautiful. With awe and fascination, they hear about the exploits of the dons of the underworld. Back in the 1980s, the now defunct Illustrated Weekly of India featured regular reports on the dons - I recall in particular a picture of Varadarajan Mudaliar, a somewhat unlikely Tamil don, gazing out to sea.

Suketu Mehta's Maximum City is an attempt to record and capture many of these aspects of the city. His book is unlike any other book featuring Bombay. It is not a work of fiction, but many parts of it are far more fascinating than fiction. It has been described as a travel narrative, but Mehta does not travel much. In as much as a city can be said to possess a character, Mehta exposes it. And what he exposes is not pretty.

The book is peopled by a diverse cast of characters - along with the vicious murderers and political goons are gangsters and brutal cops, bar-room dancers, movie stars and directors. You have to keep telling yourself that all of this is real. Mehta spends a considerable amount of time with each of these people and soon we get to know them as well as it is possible to know any literary character. Many of these people are despicable. Others, like the bar-room dancer, are not wholly admirable either. Even someone Mehta paints with some sympathy, like the police commissioner Ajay Lal, comes across as a tyrant who lets his underlings do the dirty work for him. There is hope, however, in the form of the naive teenage runaway from Bihar, an aspiring poet with a delicate sensibility.

What is remarkable in all of this is Mehta's ability to report things without pronouncing judgement. His powers of observation are acute, but he lets his characters do all the talking. But because he chooses what to write about and what to tell us, his voice is unmistakably present throughout. Mehta's stupendous achievement is thus ultimately journalistic. He shows us aspects of life and human behavior that we suspected all along did exist, but had no means of knowing anything about.

Most of the book is set in the late 1990s. It seems to have been in production for many years, finally being published in 2004. I remember having read an early excerpt in Granta back in 1997, in which he described a Shiv Sena goon's account of burning another human being alive. This is perhaps the most ghastly thing you will encounter in the book, but other depravities come close.

Maximum City is a truly Dickensian book. It is unlikely to be surpassed as a picture of late 20th-century Bombay.

La Bataille d'Alger

The Pentagon, demonstrating unusual prescience, screened this movie for its educational value in August 2003 for Americans about to descend into a morass of insurgency, counterinsurgency and civil war in Iraq. The historical parallel between Iraq today and Algeria in the 1950s is far from perfect, but a Western occupying power in a third world country facing violent uprisings was not all that uncommon in the 20th century. It is an enduring tragedy that Western powers continue to delude themselves about occupations.

The Battle of Algiers is a captivating film due to its historical authenticity. It is based on a book by a member of the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), who also acted in the film. [The FLN, in its pre-independence role, was a revolutionary organization fighting the French during the Algerian war of independence from 1954-1962.]

The movie is fair in the sense that it depicts violence both by the insurgents as well as the French, though it seemed clear to me that the sympathies of the script are with the Algerians. The characters are well-etched, despite the shortness of the film. On the Algerian side, there is the organizer of the insurgency Jafar, the common criminal turned revolutionary Ali La Pointe, and the ideologue Ben M'Hidi explaining the goals of terrorism. The French response to the insurgency is articulated through the character of Colonel Mathieu. The scenes of his press conferences for the Parisian press are striking - especially when he tells them that the success of the counterinsurgency depends on the support of the press and the public back in France.

The film is black and white, in conforming to the film-making canon that this somehow makes the narrative more authentic. I first encountered this belief when Schindler's List was released, but I have found it difficult to agree with it. My argument is simply that reality happens in color, so a film aiming to be realistic ought to use color.

In terms of technique, the quality of the film-making is quite good. The performances are controlled, the violence is no more gory than necessary, and the melodrama is kept to a minimum. The film has a very sure-footed script and screenplay and the viewer's interest does not flag.

There are a couple of scenes of torture. The extent of the torture was probably underreported at the time and is consequently underplayed in the film. Despite this, in keeping with the great traditions of Western culture and support for free speech, this movie was banned in France for five years and had its torture scenes deleted before being released in Britain and in the US.

The French have only recently begun to acknowledge some of what went on during the Algerian war of independence. Unfortunately, the Algerians have not covered themselves in glory, either during the war of independence, or in the massacres of collaborators after it, or during the ensuing power struggles, or during the civil war of the 1990s. Adam Shatz covers the historical ground very well in a November 2002 essay in the New York Review of Books, reproduced here.

The French connection with Algeria was extraordinarily brutal, going back to the 1840s, after their involvement in Algeria began with the initial capture of Algiers in 1830. From this article in Le Monde Diplomatique, we learn that Alexis de Tocqueville, he of Democracy in America fame, felt that the French were entitled to "ravage the country" in order to suppress the rebellion in the 1840s. The ravaging is estimated to have killed around 500,000 people out of a population of about 3 million.

Al Mamlakah

I recently finished reading a book by As'ad Abukhalil about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (which has the resounding Arabic name Al-Mamlakah al-'Arabiyya as-Sa'ūdiyya). My knowledge of the middle east is sketchy and has been focused on Israel and Palestine, thanks to persistent arguments I had with Jewish and Israeli friends some years ago. I have been meaning to find out more about the other countries in the region and broad histories such as the popular one by Arthur Goldschmidt and the relatively obscure one by Yahya Armajani helped a little. Abukhalil's book, titled 'The Battle for Saudi Arabia' is more narrowly focused and is about the modern history of Saudi Arabia. Abukhalil, a professor of political science in the US, is a modern, progressive thinker. He has very little sympathy for the Saudi monarchy, the Wahabbiyah brand of Islam, or for the political setup of the kingdom. He makes no attempt to feign the air of neutrality so favored by academics. In fact, his blog, Angry Arab, says it all. It's a pity that its comments sections are destroyed by hateful bigots.

The book provides a short and succinct history and explains the connections between the monarchy and the religious establishment. In addition, it has many interesting bits of information. A family tree of the ruling clan helped me sort out the Sauds, the Faisals and the Fahds. As the note at the bottom of the tree states, it is incomplete, since Abd Al Aziz Ibn Saud, the founder of the modern kingdom, had 39 sons and many daughters. Abukhalil quotes a source to tell us that Abd Al Aziz married "no fewer than 135 virgins" and kept a large number of concubines, though he decided "to limit himself" to two new wives a year after some point. [ A chronic wed-better, as a joke I heard a long time ago had it. ] Apparently his son and successor, Saud, outdid him in the matter of progeny by fathering 53 sons and 54 daughters.

According to this Al Jazeera story, the royal family has about 25,000 members, with thousands of princes though only 200 of them are considered influential. Abukhalil notes that one of the princes revealed to the New York Times in 2001 that the men in the royal family are given an annual salary of $180,000 for their entire lives. The family considers the entire kingdom and its resources to be its patrimony. A substantial chunk of the oil revenue is cornered by the princes.

The Saudi kingdom was established following World War I, thanks to much help from Britain over the years, whose strategic calculus at that time made it expedient for it to support Abd Al Aziz Ibn Saud. The discovery of oil in the 1930s allowed the pre-modern political arrangement to survive. The critical dependence of the world on oil allowed it to get stronger. Today, the monarchy is as entrenched as ever. Its military expenditure is of the order of $ 25 billion per year.

Today's Saudi Arabia has a strong fundamentalist culture, with harsh punishments, the oppression of women and the religious police enforcing virtue and preventing vice. There are hints of dissatisfaction and dissent, from tribal groups, the Shia minority, and from religious extremists. This does not get much world attention for various reasons. The media in Saudi Arabia are of course all officially controlled, but Abukhalil maintains that the Saudis have bought or co-opted most of the Arabic press and writers. Negative references to the monarchy or to Wahabbiyyah are apparently hard to find. No wonder Al Jazeera is banned in Saudi Arabia.

This book has helped me to think about the Arab world with some more clarity. I was aware that thinking of it as a monolith was a big mistake, but the ways of making distinctions was a bit unclear to me. Here is how I look at it now. The phrase "Arab world" is a poor description, since it merely refers to the vast area where people speak Arabic. The Arabian peninsula is quite distinct in its religious culture and in its social and political arrangements from the Levant (Syria and Lebanon) or from Egypt. Indeed, it is not similar to Iraq either. Even on the peninsula, Yemen is clearly quite different from Saudi Arabia. The Gulf kingdoms are similar to Saudi Arabia politically, in that they are monarchies supported by oil wealth, but their societies and cultures are much more relaxed. Dubai is looking more and more like Las Vegas on steroids, as I discovered during a brief stay in the UAE in December 2005.

Just realizing (a) that most Saudi oilfields are in the east and (b) that the Gulf sheikhs all have very similar cosy political setups helps explain why the US is keen and able to keep a big military foothold in the Persian Gulf. This also explains the membership of the Gulf Cooperation Council (which excludes Yemen), its fear of its big Shia neighbor from across the water and the recent report of a defense spending binge, where it was claimed that member states had a "shopping list of arms worth more than $60 bn".

India's budget

Until fairly recently, India's annual budget exercise used to be anticipated eagerly. The Indian government had a big role to play in the economy and the budget could often make life more (or less) unpleasant for millions of Indians. The impact of the budget on the economy is not as dramatic as it used to be, both in perception and reality. Reporting conventions though, have not changed very much: an arbitrary list of new taxes, sops, subsidies and measures are reported, with barely any context or overall picture. Here is an extract from such a list published under the headline "Highlights of Union Budget":

* Employee Stock Options brought under Fringe Benefit Tax

* Excise duty on petrol, diesel reduced from 8% to 6%

* Specific duty on cigarettes increased by 5%;

* Specific duty on beedis raised from Rs 7 to 11 per Thousand for non-machine made and from Rs 17 to 24 per Thousand for machine made

* Duty on pan-masala not containing tobacco reduced from 66 to 45 per cent

You can of course go to the source of all the budget data for India if you want more information. This very useful one-page summary is the best place to find some overall context. The following table uses a little bit of additional data as well:

(Rs., billion)	2005-06 (Actual)	2006-07 (Est.)	2007-08 (Budgeted)
Receipts	3597	4293	5296
Expenditure	5061	5816	6805
Deficit	1464	1523	1509
Interest payments	1326.3	1461.92	1589.95
	26%	25%	23%
Defence	817	860	960
	16%	15%	14%

At an exchange rate of Rs. 45 to the US dollar, government expenditure in 2005-06 was $112 billion and the deficit was $33 billion (about 5.6% of GDP).

The big ticket items are interest payments and defense allocations. Interest payments account about 25% of the expenditure and defense for about 15%. About 90% of the deficit for 2005-2006 arose from interest payments. In fact, if projections turn out to be correct, the Indian government would experience a surplus in 2007-08 in the so-called "primary deficit"- the deficit if it did not have to make any interest payments.

The scenario in which interest payments are insignificant is not as far-fetched and wishful as it might seem at first sight. India's total external debt is around $135 billion and its forex reserves are around $180 billion. If India decides to payoff its external debt (like Brazil and Argentina, who paid off some of theirs last year), it would make no difference to the net position, but it could save a substantial amount of money that goes annually to servicing this debt. Of course, there is the small matter of internal debt, but that is not such a bad thing, economically speaking.

The size of the defense budget is large for an emerging country like India. A fair amount of it goes to assorted countries in the world among whom are Britain, France, Russia, Israel and somewhat surprisingly, the Czech republic. This has generated a constant stream of scandals, with well-connected middlemen and politicians skimming off large commissions. According to this newspaper report, as many as 48 defense contracts are under investigation, with former defense minister George Fernandes being a target of at least one investigation. One ubiquitous wheeler-dealer, son a former Admiral and himself an ex-navy man, was the subject of income tax raids yesterday.

The military-industrial beast

The US defense budget continues to reach astounding heights. The Bush administration's request for fiscal 2008, made in early February, has topped $600 billion. This uncontrolled expenditure, already at 48% of world defense spending in 2005, has probably breached the 50% barrier. Think about what that means: the US spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined.

Historically, the US has been big on defense budgets, at least since the cold war began. As the chart below demonstrates, the fall of the Berlin wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union, courtesy of Mikhail Gorbachev, had a fairly small effect on US military spending. The military-industrial beast must be fed, cold war or no cold war.
(Picture from slide 2 of presentation by Winslow Wheeler of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information. Click on the picture to see it a bit more clearly.)

The table below, created with data from one of the White House's budget documents, shows that about 25% (or less) of the government's largesse is spent on military personnel and housing for their families. Even those who are fond of the empty slogan "support our troops" cannot fail to see that the troops and their families get very little of this taxpayer funded bonanza. The giant procurement and R&D budget is what goes to feed the military-industrial complex. Note that this amount is not used for "Operations and maintenance", for which additional money upwards of $200 billion is spent.

	2006	2007 (Est.)	2008 (Est.)
Total ($, billion)	522	572	607
Military personnel, housing ($, billion)	129	131	137
(as % of total)	25%	23%	23%
R&D, Procurement ($, billion)	158	337	295
(as % of total)	30%	59%	49%

Of the amount requested for fiscal year 2008, $481 billion is for expenditure on things other than the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A chunk of this absurdly large amount, to the tune of $60 billion, is being spent on obsolete cold war weapons - this according to an assistant secretary of defense from the Reagan era.

I find it hard to believe that any sensible person fails to see that this is corporate welfare at its worst. Nevertheless, there will be the occasional op-ed column in the national newspapers by paid shills claiming that the correct way to view the defense budget is to see it as a percentage of GDP. This has been one of my pet peeves for the last few years. The GDP is the total amount of spending by every entity in the economy - the government, businesses as well as the entire population of the country. It is a large number. Dividing a large number (the defense budget) by a much larger number (the GDP) is obviously going to yield a comfortingly small number. What is more relevant is the ratio of defense spending to total government spending. This number hovers around 25%. If you use discretionary government spending as the denominator (i.e., spending that excludes mandated expenditure such as social security and medicare), the number jumps to around 50%. Add to this the fact that the consistently large size of the defense budget is the primary reason for the growing US public debt, which stands at $8.9 trillion. For fiscal year 2006, the interest expense on this mountain of debt was $406 billion.

The military industrial beast and the parasites it brings along are feasting on American taxpayers.

The Afghanistan spiral

For a couple of years or so now, I have been peripherally aware of the state of affairs in Afghanistan - the Taliban not yet routed, Karzai's authority being limited to Kabul, the occasional bombings and deaths of civilians, reconstruction going nowhere, promises of international aid remaining unfulfilled and the opium crop and trade booming.

Suicide bombings in Afghanistan have jumped sharply in the last couple of years. In 2002, there was one failed attempt. In 2005 there were 21 incidents of suicide bombings. In the first 8 months of 2006 there were 43. The Taliban (and perhaps Al Qaeda) have found this method of mayhem to be quite effective.

Syed Saleem Shahzad, who is supposed to have spent a few days in Taliban captivity, has recently written a series of articles at Asia Times which speak of a coming spring offensive by the Taliban as an inevitability. The articles contain, among other interesting details, descriptions of "logistics experts" gathering supplies, a field commander discussing how the occupation is unifying disparate groups and notorious warlord Gulbudin Hekmatyar jockeying for more power. None of these is a good sign.

Perhaps as a response to this, the Bush administration is seeking $10.6 billion for its efforts in Afghanistan. The money is for two years, but $8.6 billion of it is to be spent on "security". At 81%, the ratio of the money spent on security to the money spent on other activities (reconstruction/development/infrastructure/social services) is too high. Even this high a ratio is actually an improvement on the Bush administration's track record in Afghanistan and Iraq. Included in this extremely informative report by the Congressional Research Service is the fact that of the nearly $88 billion spent on Afghanistan since 9/11, only about $6 billion has gone towards reconstruction and aid.

I think that this is a consistent and tragic mistake. The only way that the Taliban can be ultimately rooted out is if the current administration is able to show that people are better off under it. Given that the country has been a ruin for a long time, thanks first to the Soviets, then to the civil war and finally to the American bombing campaigns, basic things like roads, electricity and medical facilities are extremely important. Lacking an economic base, the government has to rely on foreign aid. Unfortunately, therein lies the rub.

Foreign aid is notorious for being administered extremely poorly and aid to Afghanistan is no exception. Most US foreign aid ends up as payments to American companies who work on horrendously expensive projects that are shoddily executed. Take the case of the Louis Berger group for example. This company had received contracts worth $665 million to build clinics, schools roads etc. in Afghanistan. According to Ann Jones, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, the company built a two-lane shoulder-less road that cost about a million dollars a mile, when other groups could have built it for about 40% of the cost. The clinics that the company built are crumbling. This detailed report tells the long, sad story of Afghan reconstruction.

Multi-lateral aid is not very much better. Over the four-year period from May 2002 to September 2006, 25 donor countries had ponied up $1.4 billion (of the $1.7 billion pledged) to the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund. This fund is overseen by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Islamic Development Bank and the UNDP. Of the $1.4 billion, $860 million has gone towards the expenses of the Afghan government (salaries and maintenance) while only $214 million has gone for investment projects.

All of this is fairly well-recognized and documented. Nevertheless, it is galling to see headlines talk of the money being requested and spent as "aid". Firstly, most of the money is for military operations. It does not aid anybody. Secondly, whatever small fraction is for development or reconstruction makes its way to American companies or corrupt officials in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the end, the people in those countries are left without regular electricity or decent roads. All they have are the token schools and the crumbling clinics. These are then listed as proud achievements by local and American bureaucrats who don't ever distinguish between progress and the mere appearance of activity. No wonder the public in Afghanistan fails to see the benefits of American largesse.

American contractors, bless their souls, are generously rewarded for their devotion to duty. For its successes, the Louis Berger group has been awarded an additional five-year contract worth $1.4 billion.

I don't see things improving much in Afghanistan. And if Shahzad is right, a major confrontation between NATO forces and the Taliban is looming. Again, a lot of misery will be heaped upon the long-suffering population. For this at least, I would be very happy to be proved wrong by events.

More translation

This nazm was written by Rajendra Nath 'Rehbar' . I transcribed the lyrics from the version sung by Jagjit Singh, which seems to skip one stanza from the original.

जिनको दुनिया की निगाहों से छुपाए रखा
जिनको इक उम्र कलेजे से लगाए रखा
दीन जिनको जिन्हें ईमान बनाए रखा

तूने दुनिया की निगाहों से जो बचकर लिखे
साल हा साल मेरे नाम बराबर लिखे
कभी दिन में तो कभी रात को उठकर लिखे

तेरे खु़शबू में बसे ख़त मैं जलाता कैसे
प्यार में डूबे हुए ख़त मैं जलाता कैसे
तेरे हाथों के लिखे ख़त मैं जलाता कैसे

तेरे ख़त आज मैं गंगा में बहा आया हूँ
आग बहते हुए पानी में लगा आया हूँ

[ Jin ko duniya ki nigaahon se chhupaye rakha
Jin ko ik umr kaleje se lagaaye rakha
Deen jin ko jinhen eemaan banaye rakha

Tune duniya ki nigaahon se jo bachkar likhe
Saal ha saal mere naam baraabar likhe
Kabhi dine mein to kabhi raat ko uthkar likhe

Tere khushboo mein base khat main jalaata kaise
Pyaar mein doobe huye khat main jalaata kaise
Tere haathon ke likhe khat main jalaata kaise

Tere khat aaj main Ganga mein baha aaya hoon
Aag behte huye paani mein laga aaya hoon]

My translation:

Hidden from the eyes of the world, they were kept
Close to my heart for an age, they were kept
As my faith and conscience, they were kept

Concealed from the world, you wrote them
Year after year, in my name, you wrote them
During the day, sometimes at night you wrote them

Steeped in your fragrance, these letters how could I burn
Immersed in love, these letters how could I burn
Written by your hands, these letters how could I burn

Your letters afloat in the Ganga I have set
On fire, the flowing waters I have set

This has been rendered beautifully by Jagjit Singh. Listen to it here.

The Nobel prize for parsing

My nominee for this year is the Honorable Attorney General of the United States. Clause 2, Section 9, Article 1 of the US Constitution reads:

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

In testimony before the Senate judiciary committee on January 18, 2007, Mr. Gonzalez averred that this actually means that

"... the Constitution doesn’t say, “Every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right to habeas.” It doesn’t say that. It simply says the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended except by — ..."

A transcript of his deeply thoughtful remarks is available here.

A finer example of a legal mind in the service of freedom I am yet to find.

Translation

The main reason for the resurgence of the ghazal genre in India from the 1980s onwards has been its popularization by singers. As with other things subcontinental, popular ghazal music is often kitschy. Nevertheless, it has helped to keep Urdu poetry alive in public consciousness in India. The singers usually choose lyrics in which the Urdu has been kept simple. The main part of the poetry package is the surprise element in each sher (couplet). Most popular ghazals are about ishq, husn and nasha (love, beauty and intoxication) - themes that are long-lived staples of poetry in that part of the world. Deeper thought, if there is much of it, has not been popularized by the singers. Nor has the listening public demanded it.

Ghulam Ali, a Pakistani ghazal singer, is very popular in India as well. Here is one ghazal where he plays to the gallery. On this track, you can also hear the intrusive vaah-vaahi (loud audience approval) that is considered an essential ingredient of proper appreciation. Here are the lyrics:

हमको किसके ग़म ने मारा ये कहानी फ़िर सही
किसने तोड़ा दिल हमारा ये कहानी फ़िर सही

दिल के लुटने का सबब पूछो न सबके सामने
नाम आएगा तुम्हारा ये कहानी फ़िर सही

नफ़रतों के तीर खाकर दोस्तों के शहर में
हमने किस किस को पुकारा ये कहानी फ़िर सही

क्या बताएँ प्यार की बाज़ी वफ़ा की राह में
कौन जीता कौन हारा ये कहानी फ़िर सही

[ Ham ko kis ke gham ne maara, yeh kahani phir sahi
Kis ne toda dil hamaara, yeh kahani phir sahi

Dil ke lutne ka sabab poochcho na sab ke saamne
Naam aayega tumhaara, yeh kahani phir sahi

Nafraton ke teer khaakar doston ke shahar mein
Ham ne kis kis ko pukaara, yeh kahani phir sahi

Kyaa bataayen pyaar ki baazi, vafa ki raah mein
Kaun jeeta kaun haara, yeh kahani phir sahi ]

Here is my translation:

Whose sorrow was it that struck me; that story some other time
Who was it that broke my heart; that story some other time

Do not ask openly for the reason my heart was plundered
Your name will come up; that story some other time

Suffering the arrows of hate, in the city of friends
Who was it I called for; that story some other time

What can I say, the gamble of love in the path of fidelity
Who won, who lost; that story some other time

The trouble with translation is trying to be faithful to the original. If you get the rhyme right, you have to mess with the word order. If you manage to get those elements right, it will screw up the meter. If by some miracle, you manage to get past those hurdles, the idiom sounds outlandish or the lines seem to drip with sentimentality. Sometimes, there is no option but to give up the entire effort. Thanks to my limited attempts, I am beginning to develop great respect for Shahriar Shahriari, who has translated some Omar Khayyam verses in multiple and elegant ways.

Costa Rica

I visited Costa Rica for a short vacation in the last week of December. We spent 4 days in Manuel Antonio, book-ending our visit by a night and a day in San Jose, the capital. Costa Rica is a beautiful, peaceful country with the unique distinction of having abolished its military in 1949. It thrives today on eco-tourism, which attracts a large number of visitors from North America and Europe.

Manuel Antonio is a small town catering to the tourists coming to Parque Nacional Manuel Antonio, a rainforest preserve at the very edge of the Pacific Ocean. The beaches are some of the best in Costa Rica and the scenery is spectacular. We stayed at Hotel Coco Beach in Manuel Antonio. The hotel is functional at best, but is only a five minute walk from the beach and the national park. Being on a hill, it offers some good views. I managed to catch some dramatic orange hues one evening:

At the park itself, I got the feeling that there were very few animals. Perhaps they stay away from the well-trodden tourist trails. Perhaps the park authorities herd tourists through a stretch where the animals won't be disturbed. You also need a park guide with his telescope to point out the monkeys, sloths and birds high up in the trees. While pointing out the three-toed sloth, the guide told us that Costa Ricans believe that it is a close relative of their bureaucrats.

We got our best view of the sloth that night, when we noticed it making its slow progress while hanging upside down from an electrical wire by the roadside. This roadside sighting is not unusual, as we noticed another sloth the next day on a fence.

The highlight of our trip was the zip-line canopy tour at a forest in Quepos, about 10 km or so from Manuel Antonio. They use a harness and pulley system to suspend you from a steel cable set up between two tall trees. The cables are usually about 100 feet above the ground. Once you jump off the tree platform, you are literally flying above the forest canopy at a pretty decent speed. It is an exhilarating experience. And of course, the views are spectacular. The tour can be taken by most people; the guides usually ride along with children five and under. In our group, we had a 55-year-old woman and a 4-year-old girl. Don't miss it if you ever get a chance.

The people of Costa Rica are quite laid back and incredibly friendly and helpful. Enough people speak English, though we did have a couple of occasions where we wished we had some translation help.

Thanks to a colleague at work, I also had a list of fruits and fruit juices to try when I was there. Among the drinks I sampled were cas, mora en leche (blackberries in milk) and agua dulce (warm drink with sugarcane juice).

If you go to Manuel Antonio, make sure you visit the El Avion restaurant and bar. It is set up in and around a C-123 US cargo plane abandoned during the 1980s just when the Iran-Contra scandal came to light. You can enjoy the superb views while sipping some delicious fruit juice and pondering the ethics of US intervention in Latin America.