Romy sent me this blog post with lyrics of Rabbi Shergill’s new song Bilqis: Jinhe naaz hai. The post also has background information on the people that the song is about: Bilqis Bano, Satyendra Dubey, Shanmugam Manjunath and Navleen Kumar. Here is the Bilqis: Jinhe naaz hai video.
September 25, 2008
August 1, 2008
How many roads…?
India has known this for 2 decades. Pakistan’s intelligence agency – ISI – is not only “involved” in terrorist attacks on Indian soil, they actively plan and carry them out. For years I have read newspaper reports in the Indian media talk about the Indian government providing proof of ISI’s “involvement” to the Americans.
How many deaths will it take till he knows…? Finally, the New York Times reports that the CIA has directly obtained proof that ISI was “involved” in the attacks on the Indian embassy in Kabul on July 7, 2008.
“It confirmed some suspicions that I think were widely held,” one State Department official with knowledge of Afghanistan issues said of the intercepted communications. “It was sort of this ‘aha’ moment. There was a sense that there was finally direct proof.”
The nation of Pakistan is, as the Brits might say, rummy. They have had serious political stability issues. Coups – bloodless or otherwise – have been commonplace. The liberals (or moderates, or sane people, or whatever you want to call them) in Pakistan are struggling with growing religious fanaticism that was, in its infancy, nurtured for targeting India. While they have certainly exported terrorism to India (in addition to exporting nuclear weapons technology to god knows who) over the years, the U.S. is now starting to get concerned because the terrorist network is interconnected globally. And Pakistan is a pretty big hub in that network.
Pakistan’s new civilian government is wrestling with these very issues, and there is concern in Washington that the civilian leaders will be unable to end a longstanding relationship between members of the ISI and militants associated with Al Qaeda.
One can only hope that the Pakistani government, military and ISI can rein in the fanatics, bring more peace and stability internally to Pakistan first and insha-Allah prosperity to that part of the world. But one’s optimism would be misplaced if one did.
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July 30, 2008
WTO talks fail after 7 years
I first came across this news on the IHT website. I was mildly surprised to see the article written from a U.S. perspective. Compare this with the EU perspective of the same situation. The IHT tries to blame India, China and Lamy, acknowledging that the US negotiators failed to reach an agreement. Mandelson places most of the blame on the US.
IHT writes
Pascal Lamy, director general of the World Trade Organization, could not bridge differences between a group of newly confident developing nations and established Western economic powers.
Reuters quotes EU trade chief Mandelson
…the United States helped to bring down global trade talks this week when its negotiators shunned a compromise proposal at a key juncture in the talks.
“…when WTO chief (Pascal) Lamy reconvenes the Group of Seven negotiators at midday, the Indians and the Chinese express reservations and the U.S. rejects the proposal outright, much to Lamy’s understandable frustration”.
IHT writes
He said the sticking point this time was countries like China and India, which have become more aggressive in advancing their interests. “Maybe they’re now thinking, ‘We’re big enough that we don’t even need the process,’ ” Macrae said.
Mandelson says:
a U.S. official “simply does not show up” when negotiations resume and U.S. trade chief Susan Schwab, heading into the finale of the negotiations, stopped off in the press room “to get her rebuttal in first,”
“It is bad enough to be facing defeat in the last mile of such a marathon. It’s worse to realise that some of the people across the table, instead of working for success, are in reality preparing for failure.”
You never know when the media presents you with biases cloaked in news articles. The title of the IHT story in their RSS feed was “Trade talks broke down after Chinese shift on food”.
The heart of the dispute is, of course, that the US wants developing countries to “open up” their markets. Developing countries believe they need provisions to allow them to erect temporary barriers to foreign food products in the event of import surges. With a significant amount of subsistence farmers in India and China, a large number of whom are forced to commit suicide when the going gets tough, can you blame developing countries for wanting this provision? The United States and EU countries offer vast subsidies to their farmers. To be fair, the negotiations are around the developed countries reducing their farm subsidies in exchange for better access to developing nations’ markets.
The U.S. seems to be demanding a “dollar-for-dollar” approach in this negotiation. According to Mandelson,
Washington’s demand that its farmers get new market access in return for less subsidies had hindered the Doha round, launched in 2001 to help poor countries develop, especially in agriculture.
“The dollar-for-dollar approach does not add up in any way,” Mandelson said. “Yes, there has to be balance, yes there has to be reciprocity, but in a development round a dollar-for-dollar approach is never going to stack up.”
After decades of an uneven playing field following centuries of colonial imperialism, I’ve got to agree with Mandelson. The “dollar-for-dollar” approach does not make sense.
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