Barrack Obama

A Tribute to Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, But When Will India Have Its Own RBGs?

Not until our lawyers and judges rise and prosper on account of merit alone and not the accident of birth, connections and gender, and until we have a system which produces judges wedded to their oath to protect and defend the constitution and not to solely secure their progeny and retirement.

“What is the difference between a bookkeeper in Brooklyn, New York, and a Supreme Court justice”? asked the deceptively diminutive lady, the daughter of an Austrian immigrant, addressing a group of new American citizens assembled for their “naturalization” ceremony, all ready to sing the ‘Star and Spangled Banner’.

Bill Clinton’s nominee to the United States Supreme Court answered it herself:

“The difference between the opportunity that was offered to my mother and that which was offered to me”.

As Ruth Bader Ginsburg, indefatigable at 87, threw in the towel in her latest and fifth battle against cancer, a pall of gloom fell over Marble Palace, constructed by John P. Frank in three years between 1932 and 1935. It houses ‘the Nine’ – as the United States Supreme Court justices are called, three of whom were women. Last night the Supremes were left one short. Scores of people braved the pandemic to spontaneously gather in front of the building that had been her workplace since August 10, 1993.

President Clinton lifts a photo away during comments by Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg after announcing June 14, 1993, that he is nominating her to the Supreme Court. Photo: Reuters

The justice of a constitutional court is no popular actor of tinsel town or a politician of fame and reach. Public interface is minimal and she is sentenced to that fabled “Ivory Tower” of judicial rectitude and social distancing, for life if she wants. She labours mostly away from the public gaze, in chambers and conference rooms, plodding through memorials and summaries made by her law clerks, writing opinions and hearing lawyers wax eloquent in court.

Then why has RBG, as she was known, captured the peoples’ imagination like no other judge before? Why has she spawned a fan following that can be the envy of a rockstar or screen diva, with people going crazy, including this author, hoarding RBG merchandise like cell covers, coffee mugs, T-shirts and posters? Why is RBG a cult?

The answer is simple. She spoke for the people and was the voice of the voiceless. RBG, by her courage and conviction, fought the adversities of life and law with equal passion. She became us.

A mother of two, the opera-loving, fitness crazy gym enthusiast Ruth had already litigated six crucial cases in the Supreme Court which set the architecture of the women’s rights jurisprudence of the court. She had lost only one.

So Clinton was not exaggerating when, on her appointment, he said, “Ruth Bader Ginsberg does not need a seat on the Supreme Court to earn her place in the American history books. She has already done that.”

Also read: US Democracy Survives Even When POTUS Attacks SCOTUS But India Can’t Handle Prashant Bhushan

Yet the beginning was not that smooth. In Ginsburg’s own words, she had three strikes against her – woman, mother and Jewish. Even her Harvard professor was convinced that she had wasted a seat which could have gone to a deserving male. Dedicated to her husband Martin, her faithful companion until he died in 2010, Ruth transferred to New York to follow her husband and transferred to Columbia.

The topper of Columbia Law’s Class of 1959 could find no law firm in New York willing to hire a woman attorney. Ruth was not one to give up. Taking to academia, she became a professor of law at Rutgers Law School, teaching some of the first women law students there. Then finally luck smiled her way when in 1971 she appeared before the Nine with her lead brief in Reed v Reed, where the court was considering whether men would be preferred over women as executors. Ruth won the first gender discrimination case of the court. In 1972, she co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union and under this banner took numerous causes to the court on which she would one day go on to sit as a justice herself.

In 1980, Ginsburg was nominated to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia by President Jimmy Carter. This is considered the waiting room for justices on fast track to the top court. Sadly, Carter was a single term president and Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush followed him. Judge Ginsberg bided her time while taking a centrist view in most cases she decided.

It is this struggle which made RBG, in later years, respond to the stock question inevitably put to her – when would there be enough women justices in the Supreme Court. She would answer with her mischievous smile – when there would be nine. Almost prepared for a shocked response, she would not hesitate to point out that for long, all nine were men and no one was shocked by that.

As the conservative lot in the court became stronger with every Bush and Trump nominee, so did RBG’s voice of dissent; so much so that there came a point when RBG became synonymous with “I Dissent”.

And dissent Ruth did with judicial élan. In a 2013 court decision to attack a vital part of the Federal Law (Voting Rights Act 1965) that ensured voting rights to Blacks, Hispanics and minorities, RBG’s dissent read as follows: “(it is) like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

Justice Ginsburg’s battle with the law was as inspiring as her battle against cancer. In 1999, she had surgery for colon cancer and received radiation and chemotherapy. A decade later, cancer struck again in the pancreas. RBG battled on. In December 2018, cancer appeared in her left lung. In August 2019, the tumour reappeared in her pancreas and three weeks of radiation made RBG whole again. In July 2019, RBG announced that her pancreatic cancer had returned though she assured all that she was “fully able”. Through her long battle with illness, RBG was a regular at the gym and her weight training videos propelled her further to her ultimate status of a pop-culture icon. In fact, Ruth herself was amused at the morbid obsession and fascination with her “notoriety”. She confessed “I am now 86 years old and yet people of all ages want to take their picture with me”.

Also read: The Only Institution Capable of Stopping the Death of Democracy Is Aiding it

RBG had her share of controversies as well. Her comment on Trump being a “faker”, made just as America was readying herself to vote, raised quite a few eyebrows as it breached the convention of judges not commenting on politicians. She made quick amends and apologized. She also drew liberal ire by refusing to step down while Barrack Obama had the power to appoint a successor who could fill her large liberal shoes and help with the court’s ‘balance’. Perhaps Ruth was not done. Perhaps she was not so confident that Obama could get a liberal successor through. We will never know.

US Chief Justice John Roberts (seated, C) leads Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (front row, L-R), Justice Anthony Kennedy, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Stephen Breyer, Justice Elena Kagan (back row, L-R), Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch in taking a new family photo including Gorsuch, their most recent addition, at the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., US, June 1, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

RBG never let her experience on the bench affect her life. Her fans could never understand why, despite constantly sparring on the bench with her conservative colleague Scalia, outside court both were opera buddies.

Once on an India trip, the besties were on elephant back with Scalia sitting up front. What about feminism, she was reminded. Ginsburg with a deadpan expression and that glint in her eyes answered, “It had to do with the distribution of weight”.

As RBG joins the pantheon of legendary justices in a tech-savvy world which has made her a popular icon – that perhaps lack of technology may have denied others before her – the question we should ask is: Why can’t India have an RBG?

Waiting for an Indian RBG

With two women judges out of the 30 in the Supreme Court and 78 in the high courts amongst hundreds of male justices, India has a long road to cover. Until our judicial appointment system remains opaque shielding and nurturing the transactional approach shared by the executive and the court, until our lawyers and judges rise and prosper on account of merit alone and not on account of accident of birth, connections – and gender – and until we have a system which produces judges wedded to their oath to protect and defend the constitution and not to solely secure their progeny and retirement, we can be confident that no RBG will come our way.

There is no reason to imagine a single judge cannot sustain fame like RBG did or that she was a flash in the pan. Nearer home we have recently witnessed how someone in the Indian Supreme Court nearly rivalled Ruth in eyeballs and impact of a kind, but not in admiration. This underscores the hitherto underestimated impact that the justice system can have on a people.

Also read: Because of ‘Sex’: The US and India on Workplace Discrimination Against LGBTQI Persons

As an optimist, I shall wait for that day when India too can boast of its homegrown Ruth. Increasingly, young women are joining the bar and are slowly and silently chipping away at the glass ceiling that patriarchy and privilege have placed to impede their rise in a profession that has been ruthlessly oligarchic and non-meritocratic. The Bar is the Mother of the Bench and someday our sisters at the Bar will have the opportunity to try their hand at Ruth-level awesomeness.

I have a pile of pending books that are yet to be read by me. Till then, I shall put Linda Hirshman’s Sisters In Law on the top of the pile and get myself distracted by the story of how Sandra Day O Connor and Ruth Ginsburg, the first two women in America’s Top Court went about changing the world.

Sanjoy Ghose is a labour lawyer in Delhi.

Business Officers Included in US Expulsion of All Cuban Diplomats

The Trump administration on Tuesday expelled 15 diplomats to protest Communist-run Cuba’s failure to protect US embassy staff in Havana.

The Cuban national flag is seen raised over their new embassy in Washington July 20, 2015. Credit: Reuters

Havana: The Cuban diplomats expelled from the US this week included all those dealing with US businesses, Cuba’s embassy in Washington told Reuters on Thursday, dealing another blow to bilateral commercial ties.

In an escalating crisis between the Cold War foes, the Trump administration on Tuesday expelled 15 diplomats to protest Communist-run Cuba’s failure to protect US embassy staff in Havana from a mysterious spate of alleged health attacks.

“Due to this decision, the activities developed by the Economic and Trade Office of the Embassy of Cuba to the US… will be seriously affected,” one Cuban diplomat said in a farewell message to a US group that takes investors to the Caribbean’s largest island.

The Cuban embassy is often the first step in the process for US companies to explore opportunities and make a pitch. Officials help them submit a trip proposal, seek out counterparts at state-owned enterprises in the centralised economy, and receive a business visa to travel to Havana.

Whether the embassy will still be issuing such visas remains unclear, given one diplomat will remain in the consular section.

On the American side, the downgrade of the US embassy – Washington last Friday ordered the departure of all non-emergency staff – will likely make it harder for US companies to find their way in Cuba.

“It’s the chilling effect of a diplomatic crisis,” said Pedro Freyre, a Cuban-born attorney who heads the international practice at law firm Akerman.

Some US companies may choose to stay on the sidelines until relations improve, he said, adding that his clients already pursuing opportunities in Cuba were staying the course as they saw it as a long-term play.

US companies flocked to Cuba in the wake of the detente former Democratic President Barack Obama agreed in 2014.

Some deals allowed by new exemptions to the decades-old US embargo have come to fruition. American Airlines and United Airlines now run commercial flights to Cuba. Royal Caribbean and Carnival Corp operate cruises there.

The original frenzy in US commercial interest in Cuba was tempered by the realization that doing business in cash-strapped Cuba was difficult and even harder with a trade embargo in place.

Businesses now face a hostile stance from Republican US President Donald Trump, who in June ordered tighter restrictions on travel and trade that have yet to be unveiled. Last Friday, his administration issued a warning on travel to the island.

(Reuters)

Obama Unlikely To Act On Israeli-Palestinian Issue Before Leaving Office

The central issues to be resolved in the conflict include borders between Israel and a future Palestinian state, the fate of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the fate of Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem.

US President Barack Obama delivers remarks as he welcomes 2016 Nobel laureates in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, US November 30, 2016. Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

Washington: US President Barack Obama, keen to preserve his legacy on domestic health care and the Iran nuclear deal, is not expected to make major moves on Israeli-Palestinian peace before leaving office, US officials said on Thursday.

One official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the last word on the president’s failed peace effort might come from Secretary of State John Kerry at an appearance on Sunday at an annual Middle East conference in Washington.

Obama’s aides are wary of being seen picking a fight with Donald Trump at a time when he hopes to persuade the Republican President-elect to preserve parts of his legacy, including the Iran nuclear deal, Obamacare and the opening to Cuba.

While Obama has yet to present his final decision, several officials said he had given no sign that he intended to go against the consensus of his top advisers, who have mostly urged him not to take dramatic steps, a second official said.

“There is no evidence that there is any muscle behind [doing] anything,” said a third official.

Putting new pressure on Israel could be seen as a vindictive parting shot by Obama at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the first official said, noting they have had a testy relationship.

There is concern that Trump, in response, might overreact in trying to demonstrate his own pro-Israel credentials, for example by moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, a step that would enrage Palestinians and create an international furore.

Officials said Obama has weighed enshrining his own outline for a deal in a UN Security Council resolution that would live on after he gives way to Trump on January 20, 2017. Another idea was to give a speech laying out such parameters.

These options appear to have lost steam.

Kerry, who led the last round of peace talks that collapsed in 2014, appears on Sunday at the Saban Forum conference of US, Israeli and Arab officials.

Officials could not rule out that Obama might also talk about Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy before he leaves office. The White House and the Israeli embassy declined comment.

The central issues to be resolved in the conflict include borders between Israel and a future Palestinian state, the fate of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which most nations regard as illegal, the fate of Palestinian refugees and the status of Jerusalem.

Israeli officials remain concerned that Obama and his aides have not explicitly ruled out some kind of last-ditch US action, either at the United Nations or in another public forum.

US officials said Obama could also have his hand forced, notably if another nation like France put forward a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement activity as illegal or illegitimate, daring Washington to veto it as it did a similar French-proposed resolution in 2011.

US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, asked if Washington would again veto a French proposal, told Israel’s Army Radio: “We will always oppose unilateral proposals.”

He added: “If there is something more balanced, I cannot guess what the response will be.”

(Reuters)

Modi Government Not Tilting Towards United States, Officials Say

Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressing a joint meeting of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 8. Credit: PTI

New Delhi: Pushing back against criticism that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is locking India into a tighter strategic embrace with the United States, senior officials insist that his recent visit to the US and four other countries demonstrated a more independent, assertive role for Indian foreign policy.

A day after Modi returned from his five-nation, six-day day trip – the highlight of which was his seventh meeting with US President Barack Obama in two years – officials here sought to nudge the narrative in the ‘right’ direction, away from concerns that India was drawing deeper into the US camp and against China.

And while they acknowledged that the US has been doing its bit to get India into the Nuclear Suppliers Group, Indian officials acknowledge that all the dominoes are still not in a straight line.

First leg

Sources say the prime minister’s stops in Herat and Qatar were, in fact, a reflection of the government’s ‘sharper activism’ to India’s west.

Modi’s second visit to Afghanistan in the space of four months – on both occasions he inaugurated long-in-gestation development projects – have created a “distinct profile” for India, in contrast to Pakistan, they argued.

Similarly, the visit to Qatar – an “exceptional player” in the region – is being projected as part of India’s new outreach to the region, linking back to visits the prime minister and president have made recently to the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel. Before 2014, there wasn’t a coherent policy to woo West Asia, the sources asserted.

Noting that in his speech to the joint meeting of the US Congress, Modi engaged in plainspeaking – that India and the United States would have differences in the future, these should not be seen as a roadblock – the sources said that one of the reasons New Delhi sought to reach out to Congress was because there was a “broader constituency” beyond President Obama, now in his last year in office. Also, it was important to speak directly to Congress, especially when the US was perhaps more inward-looking than ever before, the sources added.

Defence agreement

The Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement, whose text was finalised on the eve of the US-India summit, is also not as geo-politically important as it being projected, the sources insisted. They described the proposed pact – the text of which is not yet in the public domain – as primarily a facilitatory arrangement which has a “finite applicability”, limited to certain situations like exercise, training and disaster relief.

The officials presented Modi’s two stops immediately before and after Washington as yet another demonstration of India being proactive: Switzerland and Mexico had been added to the itinerary largely with the intent to lobby for the country’s membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group. This was a demonstration of India making a point that it was capable of lifting its own weight, that it was not entirely dependent on the US to do the lion’s share of the legwork for the NSG campaign, the sources asserted.

NDA making up for ‘lost time’ on NSG

They presented India’s move for MTCR and NSG membership as “making up for lost time”. The UPA government’s failure to pursue this campaign led to other countries losing interest in pursuing the matter or dropping support.

Asked for their assessment of how the NSG meeting at Vienna on June 9 had gone, the sources said a “large number” of the group’s 48 members had “responded well” to India’s membership, but that there were still a number of ‘hold-outs’ – officials said the numbers were in single and not double digits – with lingering concerns.

From New Delhi’s perspective, the outcome of the upcoming June 20 Seoul meeting of the NSG is still “open-ended” – the mood is cautious, rather than being confident.

The debate within the NSG has been to create a ‘process’ for non-NPT countries to accede to the cartel, which was formed after India’s 1974 ‘peaceful’ nuclear test. The belief here is that the link some countries are making between the NPT and NSG is an ‘emotional’ one. India could “persuade” them to change their view by pointing out that all the commitments undertaken by India when the NSG exempted the country from its restrictive export guidelines in 2008 have been met, the sources said.

On June 3, US secretary of state of John Kerry had made a direct, written plea to NSG members to not block the consensus on India’s membership. He indicated that New Delhi was also not averse to the NSG creating criteria for new members. “With respect to other possible new members of the NSG, Indian officials have stated that India would take a merit-based approach to such applications and would not be influenced by extraneous regional issues,” Kerry wrote, according to Bloomberg.

Echoing the essence of Kerry’s letter, sources here said that the criteria issue raised by certain countries is not opposed by India, per se. If there were questions on whether applicant countries have met export control regulations, separation of civil nuclear from military programs, adherence to an additional protocol or their past record, then India would be able to pass them with flying colours.

Hopeful on China

The sources also said China’s position is more ambiguous than that perceived from reading Indian media columns. The sliver of hope in New Delhi is apparently due to the fact that China has not yet categorically stated – either publicly or behind closed doors – that it will reject India’s membership, even if the Chinese foreign ministry has been insisting on adherence to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT) as a key criterion for membership.

The ‘black and white’ depiction of China being the sole adversary to India becoming an NSG member has not been helpful, the sources added.

It was pointed out that while India has been talking of “freedom of navigation” at various fora, including the recent Modi visit to US, New Delhi has also found common ground with China. The Indian position on warships entering a country’s exclusive economic zone is much closer to Beijing than to the US, the sources noted.

Obama Walks the West Asian Tightrope

Although he had a clear understanding of the Arab world and was committed to promoting change in West Asia when he first came to power, the US president now appears defeated by contentions and conflicts he did not anticipate nor can control.

Although he had a clear understanding of the Arab world and was committed to promoting change in West Asia when he first came to power, the US president now appears defeated by contentions and conflicts he did not anticipate nor can control.

US President Barrack Obama. Credit: imgkid

Well before he landed in Riyadh on April 20, US President Barrack Obama’s views about his interlocutors in the Gulf had already been in the public domain for some weeks. In a 70-page article in the April issue of The Atlantic – The Obama Doctrine by Jeffrey Goldberg – Obama spoke in considerable detail about his hopes for the region, his understanding of the root causes of the region’s political and cultural malaise, and his deep frustration at the short-sightedness and obduracy of the Gulf Arab leaders in failing to effect domestic reform. He reiterated that leaders in West Asia were “failing to provide prosperity and opportunity for their people,” and the leaders needed to “do more to eliminate the threat of violent fundamentalism”.

Obama specifically noted that the Saudis and the other Gulf Arabs “have funnelled money, and large numbers of imams and teachers” into countries like Indonesia, so that their syncretistic and moderate traditions were now at risk. His panacea for regional security was clear: “[The Saudis] need to “share” the Middle East with their Iranian foes … and institute some sort of cold peace.”

His carefully calibrated thoughts and their well-timed publication on the eve of his West Asia foray had, before his arrival, already evoked strong criticisms across the region. Saudi journalist Hussein Shobokshi wrote that the Obama administration had proven that it was “neither an honest nor an effective partner” of the Arabs in addressing regional crises, and that his government had exhibited “scandalous impotence” in the face of serious challenges posed by Syria, the threat from Iran and the war on extremism.

Pages from the 9/11 report

Besides the president’s apparent insensitivity to Arab interests, another matter bothering the Saudis before Obama’s arrival related to 28 pages of the report of the Joint Congressional Inquiry that had investigated the 9/11 attacks that have been not been published by successive US administrations on the ground that their publication would harm US security. A number of prominent Americans across the political divide have been demanding their publication so that the larger support system behind the perpetrators of the attacks is revealed: it is widely believed that these papers will confirm high-level Saudi complicity behind the attacks.

Linked with the clamour to publish these pages is the bipartisan initiative in the US Senate to pass a bill that would allow US citizens to sue the Saudi and other governments for providing support to terrorist organisations and individuals. Fearing that the passing of this bill would lead to legal action against Saudi Arabia in US courts by family members of 9/11 victims and freeze its American assets under court order, Saudi foreign minister Adel al Jubair has issued a public warning that his country would sell-off assets of $ 750 billion that it has in the US.

Most US commentators have shrugged off this warning as an “empty threat”. They point out that it would be quite difficult to dispose of such huge assets without causing serious turmoil in global markets. It would also harm the value of the dollar with which the Saudi currency is pegged, so that the Kingdom’s own financial standing would be adversely affected.

The Obama administration is lobbying against the Senate bill and the president is expected to veto it if it is passed. Most observers also believe that the 28 pages of the Congressional report are unlikely to reveal any new or damning evidence against Saudi Arabia. However, the matter of the unpublished pages and the Senate bill have become part of the increasing differences between Saudi Arabia and the US.

The Obama visit

In this unpropitious background, Obama commenced his dialogue with the Saudi monarch on April 21 and then had a summit meeting with the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) the next day, the second such interaction with GCC leaders collectively after the Camp David meeting in May last year. At that meeting, Obama had obtained from the GCC leaders their grudging backing for the nuclear agreement with Iran. In return, Obama had promised greater support for the GCC vis-à-vis Iran, including enhanced military supplies, intelligence cooperation and a stronger military role in Syria to achieve regime change in Damascus.

The record of achievement over the last year is mixed: while the GCC countries have generally got the weaponry desired, they have not obtained the regime change or the fulsome support against Iran they so desperately need. As The Atlantic report has shown, Obama continues to believe that West Asia should be shared with Iran, while most GCC leaders view Iran as having hegemonic aspirations in the region. They point out that Iran directly or through its affiliated militia foments discord in various Arab countries and thus expands its influence.

The recent GCC-Obama interaction in Riyadh has yielded some important positives: the two sides have agreed to meet annually at summit-level, and to set up a bilateral working group to meet twice a year to promote cooperation in counter-terrorism, defence supplies and cyber security. They have also agreed to conduct joint military exercises in March next year. To the satisfaction of the assembled monarchs, Obama made it clear that the nuclear agreement with Iran still left a number of issues of concern for the US and its Gulf allies such as: illegal arms shipments, ballistic missile tests and “destabilising acts”. He agreed to bolster GCC interests through joint naval patrols to detect weapons’ supplies, boosting GCC missile capabilities and training special forces.

He also agreed with the GCC understanding regarding Iraq: he highlighted its ongoing “political crisis” (caused, in the GCC view, by Iranian “interference” in the country’s domestic affairs), and added that further funding against ISIS and for national development would be contingent on Iraq resolving its domestic challenges. The two sides seem to have differed on Syria in that while Obama agreed that Assad had to relinquish office, he thought this would best be achieved through the “diplomatic approach”.

Assessment and outlook

The Obama visit has affirmed that the US and Saudi Arabia, with its GCC allies, will maintain ties based on shared security concerns even though both sides recognise that these ties will reflect their changing interests and priorities. Thus, the visit fleshed out the military component of the relationship pertaining to training and weaponry, but gave little evidence of a strategic congruence.

While Obama and large parts of his administration continue to believe that there are significant limits to how far relations with Iran can go, the president still views West Asian security as being anchored in a multipolar framework in which the Arabs and Iran should maintain a balance and a “cold peace”.

This understanding has few takers in the Kingdom, which defines its regional strategic interest through maintaining unequivocal Sunni hegemony: Saudi commentator Nawaf Obaid has categorically stated that Saudi Arabia will not allow Iran “to give its minority Shia sect the upper hand in worldwide Islam [as that would] disrupt 1400 years of majority Sunni domination”.

To achieve this agenda, the Kingdom has gone beyond the US to set up other alliances and regional security arrangements, reaching out to Turkey and Egypt, and even Israel when necessary, and pursuing an “Islamic NATO” by bringing together a 21-nation Sunni alliance that is ostensibly against terrorism but is clearly a show of force against Iran.

The US does not seem to be too agitated about these differences. Its president has conveyed in his remarks to The Atlantic that West Asia is now much less important to his country and, in any case, there is little the US can do to make things better: war is not an option as that would only lead to a “haemorrhaging of US credibility and power”. West Asia, as Goldberg has noted in his article, seems to have become “a region to be avoided”.

The Atlantic interviews give the impression of an exhausted, dispirited and disillusioned president who, seven years ago, had a clear understanding of the Arab world and the root causes of its deficiencies, and had committed himself to promoting change, but is now defeated by contentions and conflicts he did not anticipate and finds himself unable to control. As he ended his last visit to West Asia as president, we can think of Obama as one who had the right vision and ideas for reform, but they crashed against the rock of ground realities, leaving the region with even more fierce divisions and animosities fanned by tribalism, sectarianism and jihad.

Talmiz Ahmad is a former diplomat.

After Super Tuesday, Decoding What America Stands For

As Donald Trump inches towards the Republican nomination, and the Democratic party contest remains locked in battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, one wonders what America really stands for.

As Donald Trump inches towards the Republican nomination, and the Democratic party contest remains locked in battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, one wonders what the US is really all about.

What does American really want? Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Donald Trump’s emphatic victories in Florida, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina, to add to his previous thirteen wins, makes him the clear favourite to win the GOP’s nomination for US president, while Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders remain locked in the battle for the Democratic party nomination. But the big story of this cycle of primaries is the routing of the Republican establishment by Trump, a populist property tycoon. Trump has just dumped out of the race the principal GOP establishment candidate, Marco Rubio, crushing him in his home state, Florida, 45-27% of the vote. Many worry about the damage Trump’s populist-paranoid style is doing to America’s standing, as his illiberal, Islamophobic and racist ‘anti-politics’ galvanises crowds and provokes violent protests across the country.

With 621 delegates to the nominating convention, Trump is almost half-way to the 1231 he needs to become the popular choice of registered Republicans, while Ted Cruz languishes in distant second with 396 delegates. Yet Cruz is also deeply hostile to the Republican party’s leadership and is, for now, the Tea party’s chosen son. Only John Kasich, who won his home state, Ohio, is openly loyal to the party but has just 138 delegates (mainly from his Ohio triumph).

Trump’s victories should not be surprising by now. His average polling in all five contests (Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio) on March 15 was 32.5%, and he’s getting even more popular, topping 50% Republican voter support nationwide for the first time. With his rallies turning violent, and attracting widespread protests, Trump has raised the temperature by refusing to condemn aggression and assaults by his supporters, and instead blamed Sanders and anti-Trump Republicans for the violence. According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre’s recent survey of hate crime, the inflammatory political rhetoric used by Trump, Cruz, Rubio and others, including by many more liberal voices, has created a climate of violence against minorities.

The GOP is as puzzled as everyone else: a few days ago, Rubio defended US President Barack Obama against Trump’s accusation that Obama had divided Americans – and its Rubio who’s been dumped out of the primaries by Floridians. Last week, over a hundred so-called ‘reasonable Republicans’, including some supporters of Bush’s global war on terror, rendition, torture and the Iraq war, declared Trump a racist, militarist warmonger – and the Republican electorate has delivered four more states to the Trump tally. Those dubbed the ‘crazies’ by the George HW Bush administration are now calling Trump names, but few Republicans are listening.

When academics were asked early on in the primaries if Trump was a fascist, most laughed. But comparisons to Benito Mussolini’s style are becoming more common. Trump’s anti-intellectual, illiberal, anti-minority, anti-democratic, anti-politics, which harks back to a mythical golden age of American greatness, which Trump promises to restore, his profound prejudice against minorities and outsiders, and opponents regardless of their politics, his flip-flopping and inconsistencies, and encouragement of violence at home and abroad – makes the comparison more viable. His campaign, and especially his rallies, look and sound like those organised by segregationist third party candidate George Wallace in 1968, whose language about protestors and disorder were remarkably similar to the restore-order-through-violence rhetoric of Trump. Both Wallace and Trump appear to welcome violent altercations because of their essentially authoritarian approach and appeal to strength over weakness.

With all this thunder on the right, it is important to remember that there is a real contest brewing in the Democratic party primaries. Although Clinton has won many more states than Sanders, with a little under 1100 pledged delegates, she is just 320 ahead of the ‘socialist’ candidate, mainly due to the proportional distribution system in party primaries. Sanders has been a strong second in several contests, including losing by under 2% in Illinois and by just 0.2% in Missouri. He lost Massachusetts (1.4%) and Iowa (0.2%) by tiny margins as well. But Sanders’s best states – those outside the deep South – are yet to come and the demographics there weigh towards Sanders. In such conditions, come the nominating convention in July, Clinton’s majority might be much smaller and force the hand of the so-called super-delegates of party elders towards Sanders. And, finally, most polls show Sanders defeating Trump in a presidential contest more handsomely than Clinton does.

But the bigger meaning of the primaries was perhaps delivered by the defeated Rubio. From within the Republican elite’s tent, he condemned the party’s leadership for complacency, arrogance and elitism towards conservatives: “…I blame… a political establishment that for far too long has looked down at conservatives as simple minded people… as bomb throwers…. taken conservatives’ votes for granted, and that has grown to confuse cronyism for capitalism and big business for free enterprise.”

With a few tweaks, that could as easily have been said about the Democratic party establishment – as Sanders suggests and millions of votes attest. The gap between the established political elite and the vast majority of Americans is now wider than it has been since the 1970s – the last time the very legitimacy of the American political system was called into question in the wake of the horrors of the Vietnam War, the illegal bombing of Cambodia, the furore over the leaked Pentagon papers and the Watergate scandal that destroyed Richard Nixon.

It is unlikely that a contest between Trump and any Democratic candidate will not be ugly, possibly violent, divisive and damaging to America’s global standing. But it might clarify what America really stands for.

Inderjeet Parmar is Professor and Head of the Department of International Politics, City University London.

What to Make of Obama’s World

The US president’s unabashed realism leaves behind a mixed legacy.

US President Barack Obama. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

US President Barack Obama has ten months left in office, but the contest over his legacy has already begun. In a detailed article in The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg has fired an early salvo in what will certainly be a long drawn out intellectual battle over Obama’s foreign policy. This is not simply a partisan or academic debate. Whether Obama leaves behind a world that is fundamentally safer, more stable and better off is a matter of global interest. The answer will not be apparent for some time.

The single biggest contribution made by Goldberg’s article is that it removes the ambiguity, if ever there was any, about Obama’s realist instincts. A note of explanation is perhaps required here. The central divide in Washington foreign policy circles is not between Republicans and Democrats, but between liberals and realists. There is a little confusion about the terminology, but it is helpful to think of all American foreign policy thinkers and practitioners as falling somewhere along a liberal-realist continuum.

Liberal-realist continuum

Those on the liberal side of the spectrum place a good deal of emphasis on liberal democratic values, which they believe to be universal. By and large, liberals also embrace economic globalisation. They are generally less averse than others to the use of military force to advance their security objectives. They also have greater faith in American leadership and Washington’s ability to wield its power to shape the world in positive ways. They believe that the US should be engaged globally and actively, whether commercially, diplomatically or militarily, to ensure long-term global stability and American leadership in the international order. Critics of this approach describe liberals as warmongers and use, particularly with Republicans, the term “neoconservative” to pejoratively describe them. Bill Clinton falls instinctively within this camp, as do the Republicans who dominated the George W. Bush administration. Among those running for presidency, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Marco Rubio have positioned themselves on this end of the spectrum.

Realists, on the other hand, believe that the US’ capabilities are limited and that foreign involvements often come at the cost of nation-building at home. They believe the US’ alliances should be instrumental, rather than based on any shared sense of values. They can be more sceptical of globalisation and trade liberalisation than liberals, and are generally hesitant about attempts at promoting liberal democratic values. They also believe the US should act only when its interests are directly imperilled. Critics often describe their approach, particularly in its extreme form, as isolationist or neo-isolationist. Many Democrats would find themselves on the realist side of the liberal-realist continuum, but so would Republicans such as former President George H.W. Bush and his closest advisor Brent Scowcroft, or even former Secretary of State Colin Powell. Among the US presidential candidates, Democrat Bernie Sanders and, in certain respects, Republican Donald Trump have positioned themselves closer to realists.

During the presidential electoral campaign of 2008, Obama situated himself as the realist in opposition to his rival Clinton’s liberal instincts. Vulnerable to charges of inexperience, particularly on foreign policy, Obama stuck to the claim that he – unlike Clinton – had opposed the Iraq War. But throughout his presidency, he latched onto certain elements of a liberal worldview. Rhetorically, he made attempts early in his tenure to lay out an idealised, international vision, whether in his now-forgotten speech to the Muslim world in Cairo or during the acceptance of his ridiculously premature Nobel Peace Prize. Obama also found inspiration in Reinhold Niebuhr, the mid-century theologian and thinker who bridged realism with idealism. Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs, described the president recently as an “ideological liberal with a conservative temperament.” And it is true that in practice, Obama belatedly turned his efforts to trade, initiating two mega-trade agreements, the recently finalised Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which is still under negotiation.

Obama’s foreign policy

But with less than a year to go, Obama has started to become much more candid, defensive even, about his fundamentally realist approach to foreign policy. It has won him few admirers and many critics. Yet Obama will leave his mark on American foreign policy in more ways than one. Each of at least three elements is worthy of some admiration but also deserving of healthy doses of criticism.

The first element of Obama’s foreign policy legacy – the most politically loaded and easily derided, and possibly the one that will most closely be associated with the Obama Doctrine – involves a simple mantra: “Don’t do stupid shit.” This is self-explanatory. Early in his tenure, Obama made it clear that he wanted his legacy to be that of the president who ended wars – Iraq first and, after giving the ‘surge’ a decent shot under Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, Afghanistan too. The US intervention in Libya was minimalist, and in any case was led by France and Britain. Conflicts in Syria, Ukraine and Yemen were, in the president’s view, not worth the loss of American lives. The US’ overseas military commitments when Obama steps down in January 2017 will be far less than on the day he took office eight years earlier, something his proponents will herald as a victory of sorts. But it is worth asking whether Obama’s reluctance to involve the US in conflicts as a matter of principle doomed these countries to long drawn out, horrifically violent and perhaps avoidable wars. After all, more than 50% more people have died in Syria since 2011 than in Iraq since the 2003 US invasion – in less than half the time. By another test, is the Middle East better off today than it was in 2008? Not by any stretch of the imagination, the Iraq debacle notwithstanding. The dangers of prudence and retrenchment are that a situation might deteriorate too fast, spiralling out of control, rather than being nipped in the bud by a decisive early intervention. And Obama and his supporters perhaps underestimate the effects of the uncertainty generated by the US’ reluctance to use military force. Not just Tehran and Pyongyang, but Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi and Tokyo all noticed that the US declared – and then did not enforce – a red line in Syria. This will no doubt hasten the onset of a multipolar world.

The US president might take more solace in a second major foreign policy legacy, and that is his partial resetting of the US’ longstanding matrix of allies and adversaries. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are, in Goldberg’s telling, the allies that Obama holds in greatest contempt, although Israel is not immune to criticism. At the same time, Obama has overseen diplomatic openings to Myanmar, Cuba and Iran, all arguably long overdue. These developments have created more diplomatic space for the US in East Asia, Latin America and the Middle East respectively. If there is criticism in this respect it is that Obama has not gone far enough in overturning some of Washington’s predispositions. To be sure, he has faced severe opposition in Congress on Cuba and Iran, while Myanmar opened up both economically and politically largely of its own volition. But Obama’s cutting his India visit short to attend the funeral of Saudi King Abdullah and his administration’s decision to continue supplying Pakistan with F-16s indicate the level to which the US remains in thrall of its dysfunctional alliances, despite Obama’s apparent objections.

Obama’s third major legacy could in fact be the most uncharacteristic and least realist: the so-called ‘pivot’ or ‘rebalance’ to Asia. It remains a work in progress, but Obama is very much guilty of adopting this approach belatedly and pursuing it inconsistently. At the outset of his presidency in 2009 and 2010, Obama tried working with Beijing to reach a condominium – a so-called “G2” – in order to resolve certain issues of bilateral and global significance, such as economic and trade relations, climate change and the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs. Beijing, exhibiting newfound arrogance in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, rebuffed his overtures. By the end of his first term, in 2011, liberals within the Obama administration were ascendant and Clinton, his secretary of state, unveiled the pivot to Asia, a conscious attempt at rebalancing American military, diplomatic, and commercial attention and resources to the Asia-Pacific to better manage China’s rise. But with the departure of Clinton and certain other key advisers, the momentum behind the rebalance was lost. This was in part a casualty of new Secretary of State John Kerry’s obsession with the Middle East and the realist disposition of Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. It is only in the second half of Obama’s second term that the rebalance has been pursued with more purpose. The conclusion of the TPP negotiations has been of great significance, as have the improvements in US relations with Japan, Vietnam, Australia, the Philippines and India, and the US Navy’s freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea. The doubts about the US commitment to Asia that marked most of Obama’s tenure have largely been put to rest.

The legacy

How will Obama go down in history? Probably not as badly as many of his critics allege. The US economy has made a steady recovery since the downturn in 2008-2010, and Obama has achieved major domestic and foreign policy victories by securing Obamacare, reaching a climate deal and killing Osama bin Laden. He leaves an Asia policy on mostly sound footing, he has advanced two of the most ambitious trade agreements in history and he has overseen historic diplomatic openings with several longstanding adversaries.

But his legacy will nonetheless be tarnished by a broader approach of restraint or retrenchment in international affairs, one that has led to a significant loss of credibility for the US the world over, and one that has contributed to the utter mess that is the Middle East. Even his biggest champions will have difficulty defending that. Only time will tell, but it is quite probable that Obama’s greatest successes have been achieved despite his realist impulses, not because of them.

Dhruva Jaishankar is a fellow with the German Marshall Fund in Washington DC.

The Onus is on Pakistan to Prove it is Serious About Fighting Terrorism

This in turn depends on whether Islamabad will change course or continue to back those who attack the Afghan parliament and Indian military and civilian installations.

This in turn depends on whether Pakistan will change course or continue to back those who attack the Afghan parliament and Indian military and civilian installations.

Security forces personnel during their operation against the militants who attacked the Indian Air Force base in Pathankot on Saturday. Credit: PTI

For the people of Pakistan’s restive Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa province, the year 2015 ended just like the past one had: on a bloody note. On December 29, a bomb explosion targeting a government office killed 26 in Mardan some 40 miles northwest of the provincial capital Peshawar. The breakaway Jamat-ul-Ahrar faction of the jihadist terror group Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has claimed responsibility for the attack. Separately, the TTP bragged about the attacks it carried out in 2015 in a year-end report, along with charts and info-graphics, posted to its website. Regardless of which faction of the Pakistani Taliban claimed what attacks, it is clear that for Pakistan’s Pashtun heartland the war against jihadist terror is not over by any means. Pakistan army’s Zarb-e-Azb operations, now into its 19th month, does seem to have disrupted the TTP’s command and control structure and its ability to launch cohesive attacks inside Pakistan at large though.

The TTP and its splinter groups might not have been able to hit a high-profile government or military target throughout the past year but they certainly focused on the soft civilian targets, especially the beleaguered Shia sect, indicating that its cadres remain intact and lethal.

Along with the bombing campaign, the low intensity but systemic targeted killings of the Shias and those belonging to secular political outfits such as the Awami National Party (ANP), continued relentlessly. The Pakistan army has boasted of eliminating 3400 terrorists – a curiously precise number – during its Zarb-e-Azb campaign. There is no independent confirmation of these figures, however, as the media is not allowed into the area of the operation, raising a flag about not just the bloated numbers of the terrorists eliminated but the whereabouts of those who might have escaped before and during the military operation. One is hard-pressed to find a single eye-witness account, even from the journalists who were taken on military-escorted tours of areas such as North Waziristan, where the thrust of the operation has been, confirming the rather tall claims by the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR).

No let up in terror

The upsurge in the violence in Afghanistan and the transient fall of a provincial capital, Kunduz, just as the TTP activities ebbed in Pakistan raises a concern that some, if not most, of these jihadists have been off-loaded onto the east of the Durand Line as Afghan president Ashraf Ghani said at the Heart of Asia Conference (HAC) on Afghanistan’s future, which he jointly hosted with Pakistan, in Islamabad last month.

Contrary to the Pakistani leadership framing the Wilayat Khorasan wing of the Islamic State as an exclusively Afghan phenomenon, there have been clear reports that many TTP leaders and cadres from Pakistan have joined this IS affiliate, which is now operating in the region straddling the Durand Line. The rebranding of the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban as IS indicates that while this jihadist franchise is of Middle Eastern origin, it is recruiting locally and allows considerable operational autonomy to such affiliates. More importantly, the jihadist milieu in which such recruitment takes place still seems preserved, the operations a la Zarb-e-Azb notwithstanding.

The anti-Soviet Mujahideen of the 1980s morphing into Taliban and al-Qaeda in the 1990s and now mutating into the virulent IS becomes possible when there is a continued demand for their lethal product. Pakistan’s consistent use of jihadism as a tool of statecraft and foreign policy over the past four decades has created a jihadist ecosystem which would require much more than tactical measures like the military operations it has undertaken so far. It remains to be seen whether Pakistan is willing to divest itself of its Afghan Taliban protégés and, if so, to what extent.

Afghanistan and Pakistan agreed at the Heart of Asia summit to resume the peace process leading to negotiations with the Afghan Taliban. While the US and Chinese representatives were also present at the last round of talks with the Taliban, when the news of Mullah Omar’s death disrupted the exercise, the process is being formally dubbed ‘quadrilateral’ this time around.

International guarantors like the US and China do add a layer of accountability and transparency but it is neither unprecedented in the Pak-Afghan relations nor foolproof, unless the two world powers opt to make their presence felt meaningfully. The US and the erstwhile Soviet Union were the formal guarantors of the 1988 Geneva Accords between Pakistan and Afghanistan but were neither able nor willing to enforce the non-interference obligation enshrined in Article II of that agreement. Going into the peace talks, Pakistan continues to provide sanctuary to the current emir (leader) of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, as it did to his predecessor Mullah Omar and the Mujahideen leadership before him. Mansoor was reportedly injured in a gunfight with a rival last month in the Kuchlak suburb of the Pakistani city Quetta, suggesting that despite all the fanfare to the contrary, Pakistan still harbours the most vicious of the Taliban elements.

It is no surprise, then, that the Pakistan army chief, General Raheel Sharif was not only acting virtually as the foreign minister of the Afghan Taliban but was rightly seen as their emissary by many Afghan political leaders when he arrived in Kabul last week to thrash out the details of starting the negotiations. On the other hand, a senior Afghan government official told me that they are optimistic about resuming the peace process and that Pakistan for the first time has “recognised the centrality of the Afghan elected government and constitution” and to “differentiate between the reconcilable and irreconcilable ones (Taliban)” and to act against those against peace by “all available means”. And therein lies the rub: scaling back from harbouring the Taliban leadership near a provincial capital to actually acting against the ones unwilling to come to the negotiating table would require a considerably larger Pakistani effort than meets the eye currently. The general Afghan expectation is that there has to be a pronouncement of ceasefire by the Taliban and no new assaults come Nowruz, the Afghan New Year, which has marked the start of the Taliban offensives for the past decade and a half. The Afghan redline, and deadline, thus is an end to Taliban hostilities before March 21st.

Ashraf Ghani’s government has bet on Pakistan two years in a row now; it would have almost no political wiggle room at home if Pakistan reneges on its pledges yet again. The ex-spokesperson for the former Afghan president Hamid Karzai, Aimal Faizi told me that “the problem is certainly not with engaging Pakistan. As two neighbours, Kabul and Islamabad should be engaged in inter-states relations and affairs. But the problem is the lack of clarity in President Ghani’s stance towards Pakistan and the confusing signals he is giving to the people of Afghanistan. For a decade, the core problem in relations between Afghanistan and the US was Washington’s lack of clarity towards Pakistan. Now the president has seemingly joined the US in this regard.” The lack of clarity in the US stance that the former Afghan official is alluding to is that the US has not done enough to prevent Pakistan from continuing to harbour the Taliban and Haqqani network, which attacks and kills not just Afghans but US and Nato troops as well.

US and Chinese stakes

The US certainly has a bigger role to play in the upcoming quadrilateral talks than it is willing to acknowledge. It can continue to look the other way while the assorted jihadists infiltrate from Pakistan into Afghanistan or it can put its foot down and curtail if not end a hostile neighbour continuing to fuel the pyres in Afghanistan.

China has economic stakes in Afghanistan but much bigger ones in Pakistan – not to speak of a security alignment with that country. With Pakistan having obliged China by consistently acting against the China-oriented Uighur terrorist groups, the security question is not necessarily part of the equation for China, leaving the heavy lifting to the US in the quadrilateral talks. Is the US willing to undertake the responsibility for holding Pakistan’s feet to a diplomatic and, in worst case scenario, a sanctions fire? The answer is, at present, no. In an election year, the US is unlikely to change tack and President Barrack Obama will quite likely bequeath the Afghan imbroglio to his successor. What Obama could do is to remove the caps on troops strength as his top commander in Afghanistan General John Campbell is expected to request.

More importantly, the US has to stop pointing to a calendar for its withdrawal dates. The Taliban and their backers love nothing more than waiting the US and its allies out in Afghanistan. President Ashraf Ghani and his team, however, have the responsibility of making their case in Washington, D.C. Let’s face it, the Afghans have no military or militant leverage over Pakistan and even if they did, it would be a patently horrible idea to exercise it. With the specter of the IS rising, the last thing a US president would want to do is replicate in Afghanistan the mistakes committed in Iraq.

The Afghan leadership should not feel coy about having allies like India that are willing to build the parliament in Kabul and support the democratic process. Pakistan is unlikely to change its negative perception of the Indian support to Afghanistan no matter what Kabul does to assuage its feelings, as those anxieties are anchored in Islamabad’s perennial desire to seek parity with India. Pakistan’s army may have been willing to let the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visit his counterpart in Lahore last week but has remained stubbornly averse to dismantling the India-oriented Pakistani jihadists, whom it seems to consider as force-multiplying assets against the larger eastern neighbour.

Pathankot and after

The terrorist assault on the Indian Air Force base in Pathankot on Saturday indicates that the jihadist groups still retain both the will and capability to hit India without hindrance from the Pakistani state.

It may be too early to say who authorised the Pathankot attack but it clearly benefits those who risk going out of business if the peace process between India and Pakistan – jumpstarted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Nawaz Sharif’s ranch – goes through. Pakistan is the only country that the anti-India terrorist groups have historically operated out of and it would be hard for the Indians not to point a finger of blame in that direction. Keeping the attack focused and its intensity rather low, unlike the 2008 Mumbai massacre, serves two purposes: it throws a spanner in the peace process and does not provoke India into a retaliatory strike, which it had pledged, and perhaps prepared for, since the Mumbai attack.

The Indian media and analysts are blaming the Pakistan-based jihadist group, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), while the Pakistanis are responding by saying that the actions of individuals or even non-state groups do not amount to state-sponsored terrorism. The problem is that groups like JeM and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT) have remained under the Pakistan army’s wing for so long that the plausible deniability being invoked in that country seems abysmally farcical. The JeM leader Masood Azhar has been operating out of Bahawalpur, Pakistan and as far as Muzafarrabad in Pakistan-held Kashmir, without any fear of prosecution or arrest throughout General Raheel Sharif’s stint despite the latter’s declaration that he’d vanquish terrorism in the year 2016. Chances are slim-to-none that Pakistan’s powerful military will allow normalisation of relations with India for it perceives such normalisation as a recipe for forgetting the Kashmir problem, which to it is the core issue and “the unfinished agenda of Partition”. Whether or not Kashmir is a core issue to Pakistanis at large, it certainly is the army’s trope to justify its existence and appropriation of the lion’s share of the country’s resources.

The onus is on Pakistan to prove that it is part of the solution in Afghanistan and not the cause of the problem there and not a constant pain in the Indian side.

Mohammad Taqi is a former columnist for the Daily Times, Pakistan. Follow him on Twitter @mazdaki

What America’s Nuclear Deals with India and Iran have in Common

The contents of the agreements are very different but in both cases, Washington was driven by concerns about strategic shifts occurring in the wider regions of South Asia and the Middle East

Photo By Abdolreza Mohseni

It may be a mere coincidence that Washington and its partners operating as the P5+1 were able to strike a nuclear deal with Iran exactly 10 years after the US and India issued their landmark join statement on civil nuclear cooperation in July 2005. In terms of their contents and scope, the two agreements couldn’t be more different. Yet, they also make for an interesting comparative study.

When the George W Bush administration announced its intention of changing its laws and pushing for an India-specific waiver at the Nuclear Suppliers Group, there were many critics within the US who saw this as an unwarranted dilution of the international nonproliferation region. They asked why India was being “favoured” despite possessing nuclear weapons when Washington was working hard to ensure Iran did not develop a military nuclear programme.

Of course, India was not a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty – and ought never to have been penalised by the attendant regime for its weapons programme – while Iran was (and is) party to the NPT and had committed itself to forgoing the weapons option. Nevertheless, debate raged over this chalk-and-cheese comparison and eventually became a stick to extract further concessions from the Indian side.

As India’s own relations with Iran came under sharp scrutiny, New Delhi eventually acceded to the American diktat that its strategic and energy ties with Tehran – including the pursuit of gas import options via pipeline – had to be downgraded if the nuclear deal was to go through. Once India fell in line, Bush was able to crack the whip and ensure the deal’s critics in Congress remained a minority.

Fast forward to 2015. Where earlier it was a Republican president who decided to reverse the India policy of his Democratic predecessor, this time it was a Democratic president, Barack Obama, who pulled out all the stops to suppress a Republican revolt in the Senate that was threatening to scuttle the Iran nuclear deal. Earlier this month, in a major victory for the White House, the deal’s critics were bested on Capitol Hill.

While this is not the place to analyse the contours of the Iran agreement, it differs from the India deal in one major respect. The US-India deal brought India’s civilian nuclear facilities under an international verification regime but exempted its military nuclear programme from such verification. In the case of Iran, which is a signatory to the NPT, however, the already existing supervision of the International Atomic Energy agency (IAEA) has been supplemented in additional ways – the purpose being to help Tehran reassure the international community that there will never be a military dimension to its nuclear activities.

Beyond this difference, however, there is one striking parallel between the Iranian and the Indian deals. In both cases, it was the strategic dynamics of their respective regions that pushed the US towards accommodating New Delhi and Tehran.

Evolution of Indian deal

India’s nuclear programme had begun to face troubles after its first atomic test in 1974. The troubles were as much due to the gradual withdrawal of aid to its nuclear programme by its Western partners, as because of the progressively stringent non-proliferation measures imposed by the evolving international regime, particularly after the first Gulf War of 1991, when the NSG tightened its guidelines to bar the sale of safeguarded nuclear material to countries that were outside the NPT. India’s pariah status became even worse after the nuclear tests of 1998, when the US and others imposed sanctions.

Pokhran-II, however, had come at a time when politico-strategic equations in South Asia had begun to change rapidly. During his tour to India in 1999, the then Russian Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov mooted the idea of a Russia-China-India strategic triangle. The suggestion came immediately after Moscow had made a rapprochement with Beijing, and just at a time when the post-Cold War estrangement of New Delhi and Moscow was coming to an end.

Around the same time, New Delhi and Tehran also began discussing the extension of the proposed Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline (agreed in 1995) to India. US-Pakistan relations deteriorated following the October 1999 coup in Pakistan. Washington imposed further cuts in its aid to Pakistan, already curtailed after Islamabad’s nuclear test of 1998. As the Bush administration took charge, the geopolitical equations in the wider Asia-Pacific region had begun to change as well. China had successfully improved its relations with ASEAN and its economic aid had made significant inroads in Myanmar, the newest ASEAN member on the northeastern frontier of India. Washington was quick to comprehend the benefits of winning over New Delhi’s friendship as a counter to China in the Asia-Pacific, thus adding impetus to New Delhi’s renewed thrust on a Look East policy. As a result of these events, the non-proliferation priorities of the Democratic administration in Washington gave way to a pragmatic perspective on the need to tap into the economic and strategic opportunities that a rising India was presenting; this in turn resulted in a genuine effort to improve relations between the two “estranged democracies.”

New Delhi had major apprehensions with Primakov’s idea of a Russia-India-China strategic triangle because it seemed to introduce rigidity and exclusivity at a time when India believed it was in a position to simultaneously improve its relations with all major powers. Over the years, of course, the RIC triangle has been overshadowed – and made more palatable – by the newer and broader group of countries, BRICS. After the initial enthusiasm, the IPI pipeline too stalled for almost a decade, largely due to American concerns. Though Washington quickly improved its relations with Islamabad following the 9/11 attacks, it also brought about a crucial “dehyphenation” in its South Asia policy – thus walking the tightrope of maintaining good relations simultaneously with New Delhi and Islamabad. The US-India nuclear deal was the cumulative product of all of these events happening in the wider region.

US rapprochement with Iran

The first sign of trouble for Tehran’s nuclear programme appeared in 2003 after allegations by a dissident group that Iran had not reported some sensitive enrichment and reprocessing activities to the IAEA. After a series of agreements between Iran and Europe failed successfully to resolve these issues, the IAEA, with the active encouragement of the US, voted to report Tehran to the UN Security Council.

Iran was asked to suspend its enrichment programme; following its refusal to do so, the UN imposed sanctions. A series of inconclusive negotiations followed – first with the E-3 (UK, France, Germany), and later also with the US, with the continuous participation of the IAEA.

It is true that the election of Obama as president of the US and Hassan Rouhani as president of Iran raised hopes of a deal between the P5+1 and Iran. It is also true that back-channel negotiations between Washington and Tehran helped the two sides move towards a mutually agreeable position. However, as in the case of India, it was the unfolding regional dynamics which played a major role in pushing the two sides towards a deal.

The political landscape of the Middle East after 2011 began to change with the Arab Spring, that led to regime change in four states – Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen – and anti-government protests and uprisings in another half dozen countries. One unintended outcome of the Arab Spring was the rise of Islamism in the Middle East – both moderate and radical. The widening sectarian divide between Shias and Sunnis was another unintended impact of the Arab Spring. Anti-government protests and civil unrest in Iraq subsequently led to the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, now called the Islamic State (IS) or Daesh. These developments coincided with steadily declining American dependence on energy resources from the Middle Eastern and Persian Gulf States, particularly since 2007. This was perhaps an important reason why the US chose not to directly interfere in the region during the Arab Spring, even when regimes friendly to it were threatened.

The rise of the Islamic State, however, has brought about a change in US policy – to the extent to which Washington is back to using military force in the region and reinvolving itself in regional politics. One of Washington’s concerns in the Middle East currently seems to be to avoid having multiple adversaries. The other is, possibly, looking at the merits of a truce with a Shia theological state which is most unlikely to support Sunni radicalism. Both factors seem to have provided added incentive to Obama’s resolve to strike a nuclear deal with Iran.

Thus, in addition to other positive factors, the dynamics of regional international relations have provided an impetus to the making of nuclear deals with Iran too. It remains to be seen how the US brings about a balance in its policy in the Middle East: walking the tightrope of good relations with Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran simultaneously. We are likely to see a Middle Eastern version of “dehyphenation”.

Uttara Sahasrabuddhe is Professor of International Politics at the University of Mumbai. Her email is: suttara@politics.mu.ac.in

Why Nikki Haley is Smarter than Bobby Jindal

By demanding that the widely reviled confederate flag be taken down in the wake of the racist massacre at Charleston, the South Carolina governor has grown in political stature

Confederate Flag on the grounds of the Capitol grounds in Columbia, South Carolina. Photo by Jason Eppink. CC 2.0.

Washington: In the wake of the killing of nine African-Americans inside a church in Charleston by a white racist, two Indian-American leaders – both with presidential ambitions – were in the forefront dealing with issues of racism, the confederate flag, which symbolises slavery, and gun violence.

Both are from the Republican Party and both are seen as rising stars. Yet, one appeared wedded to the worst political instincts in American society while the other seemed willing to defy them, whether for bald political reasons or the rightness of the cause.

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. Photo by Sam Holland, CC 2.0

Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina where the attack took place, showed a near perfect blend of emotion, political acumen and boldness. As the state’s first woman governor, she chose the high path, quickly getting ahead of the curve by calling for the confederate flag to be taken down. She shamed other Republicans to follow suit, having read the tea leaves just right.

But Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana who is expected to announce his bid for the presidency this week, hedged. He said it was up to the state to decide whether to continue flying the flag even as other Republican presidential hopefuls were making their fastest about turn on the issue. He then chose to shill for the gun lobby, refusing to see any connection between the killings and easy availability of guns.

Both Jindal and Haley are mascots of “diversity” in the Republican Party and began their political climb in the early 2000s. But Jindal has steadily lost popularity within his state and within the party while Haley has gradually risen in esteem.

The Charleston killings, which fused America’s frequent tragedies involving mass shootings and racist violence into a single horrific incident, proved to be a test for all politicians but especially these two: Should one respond in the usual, banal manner reflecting the old party line or use it as an opportunity to stand apart and even lead?

The difference between Haley and Jindal was apparent after a photo of Dylann Roof, the man charged with the shootings, surfaced where he was shown holding the widely reviled red and blue banner. Also known as the Southern Cross, the flag evokes the most painful chapter of American history – slavery.

It represented the southern states or the Confederacy, which fought to preserve slavery during the American Civil War against the North, or the Union, which was against slavery. To this day, racist individuals and groups use the flag as a symbol of racial superiority and a call to “take back the country” — an expression also used by Roof.

The confederate flag

African-Americans see it as a noxious reminder of an ugly past. As Sheila Jackson Lee, the firebrand black Congresswoman from Texas said the last time the confederate flag became a point of controversy, “Why would African Americans want to be reminded of a legalised system of involuntary servitude, dehumanisation, rape and mass murder?”

Yet there are significant numbers of Americans who insist the flag is a cultural icon representing history and honouring soldiers killed in the war. In South Carolina’s capital, Columbia, the flag perpetually flies full mast near the state assembly. Surrounded by an iron fence, it is padlocked to its pole. Even as the state and US flags were half-mast in memory of the victims, the confederate flag was not.

When Haley led the call to take the flag down, a move requiring support of two-thirds of the state assembly, she sensed a critical mass of both national and local opinion was coalescing in favor of the idea.

Interestingly, during her re-election campaign last year, she considered the flag issue an irritant at best. During a debate against her Democratic opponent, she said not a single CEO had ever raised the confederate flag as a problem in doing business during her first term as governor. In the days after the Charleston killings, did she get calls from executives of Boeing and others to resolve the flag problem? One may never know. What we do know is that her stand has taken her miles ahead in the popularity sweepstakes.

Jindal was the exact opposite. In addition to evading the flag issue, he chose to severely attack President Barack Obama for daring to raise the issue of gun control in his comments after the shootings.

Bobby Jindal. Photo by by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Obama had made the connection – all too apparent to the rest of the world – between mass shootings and easy access to guns. “Someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” the President said. He expressed frustration and tacitly admitted defeat for failing to change country’s the gun laws. According to one count, Obama has had to address the nation in similar situations no less than 14 times since taking office.

But Jindal found Obama “completely shameful” for bringing up gun control and accused him of playing politics with the issue. According to the governor, it was time to grieve, not engage in a political debate on gun control.

Jindal came across as a handmaiden of the National Rifle Association, arguably the most powerful lobbying organisation in US politics and the primary reason why guns continue to be sold openly with few restrictions or background checks.

Jindal has close links with the NRA, having been a key speaker at its annual jamboree this year, where he compared religious freedom to the freedom to own guns. He owns two and gets an A+ rating by the NRA.

Ironically, Haley too enjoys an A+ rating by the NRA and is unlikely to call for gun control. But by pushing the envelope on at least one count, she has risen in public estimation.

Note: During the editing process, a quote from Sheila Jackson Lee was wrongly attributed to Royce West