:: Wednesday, April 16, 2003 ::

An Unanswerable Question for an Unthinkable Loss

The burning of Baghdad and its antiquities, its legacy of Islamic and pre-Islamic civilization, is a loss that cannot be captured with words. We have seen the pictures of a state destroyed, read of families and homes destroyed by our bombs, but now we have to add to this the death of a history. The images conjured by Robert Fisk's account of the burning of the Quranic library in Baghdad, and of his fruitless attempt to elicit U.S. assistance in saving this treasure and the attendant U.S. indifference, is painful. This loss doesn't touch me simply as a student of Islamic and Middle Eastern history, but also as someone who has, with perhaps Pollyannaish optimism, continued to hope that America might, at some point, come to understand and respect the integrity of the region in which we have left such a terribly bloody footprint. This makes that hope even more remote.

That this destruction came amid the American Occupation, even if not at American hands, is striking. Given that an occupation is, by definition, a paternalistic enterprise, it appears that we couldn't even get that "right." We did not protect the Iraqi people from the cruelty of Hussein's regime, in all the years in which we funded and supported his rule; we did not protect the Iraqi economy, or shield Iraqis from the embittered hunger and deprivation that came as a result of our economic sanctions; we failed to protect Iraqi civilians from our bombs, artillery, or rifles; and now, we're not even able to protect Iraqis from chaos, from the destruction of their heritage, the source of considerable - and justifiable - pride. As the occupying power, we bear responsibility for this. We cannot have it both ways - we cannot claim that the Iraqis are not fit to rule themselves, and at the same time, shirk any responsibility to maintain order.

It may seem callous to be so concerned about the burning of paper when houses and the people who inhabit them have been burning for weeks. But these papers are at the heart of Iraq, they are not ancillary to it. The literate heritage that has been destroyed will never be recovered. Self-rule will be restored, whether by peace or by force. The bureaucracy will be rebuilt, as will homes, schools, and hospitals. But now this "artificial" country created by the British will have no pre-colonial record from which to construct a meaningful post-American-colonial identity. When every American tank is gone and the streets are peaceful, I fear that this destruction and loss will never be forgiven. And I'm not sure that it should be.

Robert Fisk writes, "For almost a thousand years, Baghdad was the cultural capital of the Arab world, the most literate population in the Middle East. Genghis Khan's grandson burnt the city in the 13th century and, so it was said, the Tigris river ran black with the ink of books. Yesterday, the black ashes of thousands of ancient documents filled the skies of Iraq. Why?"

:: Stacey Philbrick 11:20 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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The Failure of Mutual Deterrence:

I agree with Conrad's frustration at the childishness of India & Pakistan's foreign policy establishment. I thought the following extended quote from a presentation by Dr. George Perkovich on a panel discussion on "Arms Transfers to India & Pakistan" in January, might help clarify some of the reasons why the possession of nuclear arms by both countries has not led to a detente:

Many would say, well, deterrence will work, it has worked and it will work, it will work. My problem with that is that there isn't any evidence, really, that India and Pakistan both have accepted mutual deterrence yet. They each believe that the other should be deterred, so they each feel that they have a deterrent and that the other guy should be deterred, but they also each feel that they themselves shouldn't be deterred.

So India celebrates that it acquired the bomb, "Now the Pakistanis won't mess with us any more, we solved this problem." Then came the Cargill war that disproved that. Pakistan feels, "The Indians now can't afford to fight with us, they're deterred," so you don't back down and you still support low-intensity conflict.

Now lest this seem crazy, and there's a tendency in our press and in some of our political leaders to say, "These people just don't understand," "They can't manage nuclear weapons," and everything else, we should realize that no state wants to be deterred. The deterrence that we came to say was normal during the cold war actually came after every alternative was tried.

So if you look at the '50s and the '60s and what the U.S. and the Soviet Union did, each was trying to escape from deterrence, each was trying to develop a new weapon that would somehow enable it to use nuclear weapons and keep from being deterred by the other guy. That's what the arms race was about. And it was only in 1971 with the ABM Treaty when both sides basically said, "We're now accepting mutual deterrence, we now accept that we can't escape the reality that the other guy can hit us with nuclear weapons and therefore, that we both have to avoid war." And that treaty enshrined the idea of mutual deterrence.

Now to prove that that acceptance of mutual deterrence is not a natural act for states, you can look at U.S. strategy in the last year and understand that it is a leaving of mutual deterrence and we're going from that position to a new position that says, "We will deter everybody on the planet and no one will deter us." And that is a natural position for states to acquire and so you see it in our offensive nuclear strategy and you see it in our ballistic missile defense program. This is the U.S. escaping the bounds of deterrence.

Now it's all for the good. I mean we're not aggressive, we're not going to attack other people, this is a rational thing to do. Why would you not want to have a situation where you could deter everybody and nobody can deter you? The point is that we shouldn't expect India and Pakistan to think differently, at least until they've had more opportunity to wrestle with these dilemmas.

So as long as they don't accept mutual deterrence, they don't accept that they cannot have a war, we have this chronic proclivity to crisis and we may experience a crisis again this year.

:: Vikash Yadav 10:02 AM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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My Gun is bigger than your gun: Playground Jingoism

The incredibly myopic and well frankly stupid comment by India’s foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha have surprised even those such as myself who have extremely low opinions about Indian foreign policymakers in general and the current administration of Saffronists in particular; yet just when one thinks the depths have been reached, new lows are found to sink to. I will respond to Sinha’s comments at a later date but as can be seen from the Pakistani reaction below it has not gone down well across the border. If the Indian side chose to behave like aggressive jingoists and indulge in suspiciously ill thought out rhetoric one could only hope that the Pakistani response would be a measured or at least muted rebuff. Such hopes are obviously unrealistic and Kasuri weighs in with his own aggressive counter rhetoric in this game of one-upmanship. Like a pair of children boasting before a fight in the playground these inane attempts to overplay one’s military capability in the field of missile delivery is mind-blowingly self-defeating. Any possible escalation to the use of nuclear weapons even on a limited scale would be catastrophic for northern India and Pakistan and lead to a massive humanitarian disaster. Instead of trying to cool passions both sides seem intent of playing a dangerous game of brinkmanship; this time the Indian side needlessly provoked such reactions by Sinha’s remarks. However, the BJP is in a coalition government that has not performed in a stellar fashion and will soon face elections; in line with their conservative and populist style of politics grandiose claims and gestures are made without any serious forethought given to their implications and when met with resistance or the cold light of reality they are rapidly withdrawn. Sinha became famous for this in his budget presentations which each year sought to slash subsidies such as those on fertilisers to the farm lobby and raise sensitively publicly distributed goods such as petrol; and sure enough every time this was met by an outcry from the affected lobby groups he would cave in an retract or water down his proposals earning himself the not-so-affectionate diminutive of “Rollback Sinha”. Unfortunately in the foreign policy arena words are the prevailing currency of intent and policy and they will prove to be harder to retract in such a cavalier and blatantly politicised fashion; one wonders what possessed Vajpayee to give a portfolio as sensitive as this to the gaffe-prone Sinha. Unfortunately the damage is done.

Kasuri’s reactions are hardly any better; as he seems to have failed to realise that any exchange of nuclear weapons will almost certainly spell complete breakdown for Pakistan given its geographical layout and vulnerability. Moreover, while acknowledging that Sinha’s comments were meant for domestic consumption and electioneering purposes; instead of laughing them off and playing down the purport; he has seen instead seen fit to match it with assertions of Pakistan’s missile advantage over India. This may well be true but unless Pakistan has a strike capability that can take out all Indian missiles aimed at Pakistan this is a somewhat vain boast and some sort of MAD scenario is likely. Moreover instead of simply ridiculing the whole policy of pre-emptive strikes and ceasing there; he insists on going on the old game of one-upmanship that is so common of diplomatic exchanges between the two countries and claim that India has made itself a prime target for such an action on the basis of the failure to respect UN resolutions in Kashmir and violations of Human rights in the Northeast. This is really pushing the envelope; as UN resolutions are binding on both Pakistan and India with regard to Kashmir neither of whom have respected them and none of the resolutions are of a mandatory nature but instead reflect the decisions taken in response to requests for arbitration made by both sides in the past. As for the Human rights violations, there is no doubt that they are occurring but there is something incredulous about a military dictatorship threatening a democracy over abuse of human rights not to mention Pakistan’s own lack of respect for the human rights of its own citizens under military rule. In short these attempts at counter-justifications make Pakistan look ridiculous when it could have instead much more effectively played for the moral high ground and made India look like the irresponsible actor. Given that Pakistan does not have an elected government that needs to be careful of public opinion and that the military leadership is instead much more dependent on American aid and support to remain in power this was a good opportunity missed by Islamabad to exploit this relationship and prevent New Delhi from moving closer to Washington. The linkage with Palestine is also egregious given that in the Islamic world India has friendly relations with many Muslim countries and over Iraq it has traditionally been very supportive of Iraq to the extent of remaining neutral and critical in the last Gulf war of 1991 and ambivalent in the current conflict with domestic opinion overwhelmingly against the war. Compared with Pakistan’s own cooperation on both occasions the contrast could not be greater; besides which Kashmir is hardly the emotional issue that Palestine is for the Arab world if not for the larger international Muslim community.

The problem is that in a change of policy India has now sought to lobby the US to mediate, albeit favourably to it on Kashmir, in marked contrast to the past when it insisted that all such talks should proceed on a bilateral basis. This may now be seen to be a strategic misstep as the over inflated opinion Saffronists have of India, is not widely shared outside the insulated corridors of North Block. Historically India’s stand on Kashmir has been a more restrained one internationally, despite its domestic mismanagement; now it seems even this legacy is to be lost.

Our missiles better than India, says Pakistan:

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan's foreign minister on Tuesday warned India of massive retaliation if it tried to launch a pre-emptive strike on his country, arguing that Islamabad had a more advanced missile programme than New Delhi. Mian Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri described as "irresponsible" comments from his Indian counterpart Yashwant Sinha this month that there was a stronger case for military action against Pakistan than Iraq. "Of course one is concerned, but I am not alarmed," he told Reuters in an interview, when asked about Sinha's comments. "They are threatening nuclear war against us. My response is this: 'Don't make that mistake'," he said. "Our (missile) programme is more advanced than India's.

"If India launches into anything stupid, they will pay a price." Both India and Pakistan detonated nuclear devices in May 1998 and have assembled arsenals of warhead-capable missiles. Sinha said India had better grounds for staging a pre-emptive strike against Pakistan than the United States had for invading Iraq. But he later said India was not about to attack Pakistan and said his comments may have been misunderstood. "I don't think they become a foreign minister," Kasuri said of the comments. "Foreign ministers have to keep their language in check because their primary purpose is to lower tension. To raise the tension all you require is a wag of the tongue. "My constituency is on the Indian border and I will get many more votes if I start speaking like Mr Sinha, but I take my job very seriously and I will not ever use such language."

Rejects pre-emptive doctrine

Kasuri said he rejected the doctrine of pre-emptive war, but added that there was an argument to use it against India itself, saying New Delhi had rejected United Nations resolutions about the disputed territory of Kashmir and violated human rights in its north-east, where separatist insurgencies rage. "I do not believe in any such doctrine," Kasuri said, "but if, for the sake of discussion, one assumes there was such a doctrine, India would be a fit case." "These leaders are issuing these inflammatory statements to soothe the domestic electoral agenda of the BJP," he said. "I think it is irresponsible." India, he said, also seemed concerned that the West, in an effort to soothe Muslim anger after the Iraq war, might push for a resolution not only of the Palestinian question but also of the Kashmir dispute. "One strand of my thought says it is the domestic electoral agenda," he said. "Maybe there's something else underlying it, that is this fear the international community may turn its attention at long last to a resolution of the Kashmir question." Kasuri said those claims were not correct, and challenged India to accept neutral observers along the ceasefire line in Kashmir, a suggestion New Delhi has repeatedly rejected. "Why does it want to be accuser, prosecutor and judge at the same time?," he asked. "Let them accept international monitoring along the Line of Control on both sides."

Source: REUTERS Tuesday, April 15, 2003.

:: Conrad Barwa 10:11 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Pesticide consumption in Andhra declines dramatically: An Old Story Revisited:

According to official statistics, the consumption of pesticides in Andhra Pradesh has decreased in the past decade due to increased awareness among farmers and the introduction of `new generation’ pesticides in the market Andhra Pradesh, one of the largest consumers of agro-chemicals in the country, has seen a drastic decline in pesticide consumption over the past decade. Technical-grade pesticide consumption in the state during 2002-2003 stood at 2,207 tonnes, as against 13,650 tonnes in 1992-1993.

According to official statistics, there has been a continuous decline in the consumption of pesticides from 1992-1993, although the year 1995-1996 was an exception. The amount of technical-grade pesticides consumed in the state stood at 10,908 tonnes in 1993-1994, 9,343 tonnes in 1994-1995, 10,957 tonnes in 1995-1996, 8,702 tonnes in 1996-1997, 7,298 tonnes in 1997-1998, 4,741 tonnes in 1998-1999, 4,054 tonnes in 1999-2000, 4,000 tonnes in 2000-2001 and 3,850 tonnes in 2001-2002.

The state agricultural department attributes the decline in pesticide consumption to the adoption of integrated pest management practices and a growing awareness among farmers about the optimum use of agro chemicals. This apart, new molecules introduced by pesticide manufacturing companies have also led to a decline in the amount of agro chemicals consumed. For example, 80 ml of Tracer, a new pesticide introduced in the market to control the incidence of American bollworm, is sufficient for an acre of cotton crop. If a farmer were to use an older generation pesticide, he would require at least a litre of it to bring about the same effect. A decline in pesticide consumption does not always reduce production costs, however. Tracer costs about Rs 10,000 per litre. At the rate of 80 ml per acre, the cost of using this pesticide per acre would be Rs 800. On the other hand, an older generation pesticide costs just Rs 200 per litre -- the quantity required to spray an acre of cotton crop. While the new pesticide protects the crop for a fortnight, the older pesticide offers protection only for five days. Even then, however, using an older generation pesticide is cheaper.

For the agro chemical industry, the reduction in pesticide consumption does not mean anything if crop productivity does not increase. Says G S Raju, director of Nagarjuna Agrichem Ltd: “We should compare our level of pesticide consumption as well as the productivity of various crops with that of developed countries. Consuming less inputs and also producing less (crops) may not be the correct indicator for the future growth of our agriculture sector.”

Source: The Hindu Business Line, March 31, 2003


:: Conrad Barwa 2:12 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Poor in developing countries may continue to starve: FAO update

The FAO’s latest assessment indicates that the world's population will be better fed by 2030. But hundreds of millions of people in developing countries will remain chronically hungry ‘World Agriculture: Towards 2015/2030’, the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) latest global assessment of the long-term outlook for food and agriculture, updates and extends the last FAO assessment made in 1995. The projections, covering 140 countries and 32 crop and livestock commodities, analyse supply and demand for major agricultural commodities and sectors, including fisheries and forestry. “By the year 2015/2030, per capita food supplies will have increased and the incidence of undernourishment will have been further reduced in most developing regions,” writes FAO director-general Dr Jacques Diouf in his foreword.

However, parts of South Asia may remain in a difficult position and much of sub-Saharan Africa will probably not be significantly better off than at present, in the absence of concerted action by all concerned. “Therefore the world must brace itself for continuing interventions to cope with the consequences of local food crises, and for action to remove permanently their root causes,” says Dr Diouf. According to the study, the number of hungry people is expected to decline from around 800 million today to about 440 million in 2030. This means that the target of the World Food Summit in 1996, to reduce the number of hungry by half by 2015, will not be met even by 2030. “The report aims at describing the future as it is likely to be,” says Jelle Bruinsma, editor of the FAO report. “It does not describe the future as it ought to be nor does it provide a development strategy for global agriculture.” “The study draws to the maximum extent possible on the knowledge of various disciplines in the FAO’s technical divisions>. It represents the FAO’s perspective on the future of food, nutrition and agriculture,” says Bruinsma. “We hope that governments and the international community use the report as a basis for their actions, to cope with both existing problems and with new ones that may emerge.” The study examines issues such as the prospects for food and nutrition, commodities and international agricultural trade, the implications of agricultural production on the environment, agriculture and poverty alleviation, globalisation in food and agriculture and agricultural technology.


:: Conrad Barwa 2:05 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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