Pakistan's centrality in the US-China Great Game

There are about seven billion ways of looking a the World, since there are some seven billion human animals, all with the capacity of forming independent views of what passes as reality.

One way to look at the World is to see World Events not a struggle of nation-states for supremacy, but as a struggle among several forms of concentrated Capital to expand and secure market control over lines of commerce in as many areas of the world as possible.

Looked at the World this way, news outlets available on the web give a clear-enough picture of the struggle between Western neoliberal Capitalism and Chinese Socialist Capitalism (not, I think, a non sequester), especially in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.  See, for example, "Into Africa: China’s Wild Rush", The New York Times, May 16, 2014.

The chart understates China and Saudi Arabia, since it only counts wealth of individuals, and in both countries wealth is concentrated in countries which are controlled by individuals or a small group of individuals.

See, e.g., Forbes, The 147 Companies That Control Everything (an interesting study and list of companies, though it does not include entities  such as the World Bank, nor those whose wealth is controlled by states, such as in China and Saudi Arabia.

The Times pictures China as a blundering new colonialist, making mistakes that Western colonialists learned to avoid decades ago.

The Nation, a Pakistani Punjabi-oriented English-language newspaper,   sees the Chinese as shrewd, single-minded, intense, and determined one way or another to get Middle East oil in a way that cannot be blocked by the U S. Fifth Fleet, which now controls all oil coming out of the Persian Gulf.  The U.S. is making multiple mistakes, primarily with its drone strikes and its policy of blocking Iranian petrochemical exports.

The Nation's article is printed after the jump.  Here are some sentences that stood out. [All images are added my me; comments in italics are mine.]

Although drone attacks have ceased for the moment, the conditions in Afghanistan require a post-US Afghanistan strategy soon. It can be argued that a number of commitments, reassurances and promises were made at the conclusions of these foreign visits, especially with regional partners, China and Turkey. On the other, the visit to the United States could not bring any breakthrough in an already existing relationship of mistrust.

The first foreign visit took Nawaz Sharif to China, in July 2013, resulting in various agreements, ranging from building dams and the generation of electricity through coal. Furthermore, Pakistan’s largest civil nuclear power plant with Chinese assistance, in Karachi, is expected to be completed within 72 months.

  

Baloch Society of North America (BSO-NA) 

However, the most prominent understanding was on the construction of a 2000 km stretch of road linking Gwadar with Kashgar in Northwestern China.

pakistan-map

[The Gwadar deep-water port is, next to the Iranian border and within reach of an undersea pipeline from Oman.The port is guarded by Chinese soldiers and police, uses Chinese workers, and flies a Chinese flag].
adar:

Gwadar, Balochistan Province, Pakistan (گوادر، صوبہ بلوچستان، پاکستان), in restive Baloch territory

Kashgar, Xinjiang province,China (喀什，新疆，中國), in restive Uighur territory (維吾爾族領土)

The completion of this port is expected to enable Pakistan to provide a useful road and rail link, between the Central Asian Republic and China, along with the rest of the world. In this way, Pakistan would be provided with adequate opportunity for economic advancement. It was agreed that at a later stage, a rail and gas pipeline would also link the two cities. Furthermore, China promised to provide 85 per cent of the financing for the three-year $44 million project budget for a fiber- optic cable, stretching from China to Rawalpindi. Such an embedded involvement of China in the Gwadar Port project with Pakistan has raised serious concerns for India and the US, as it can affect the American naval monopoly in the Gulf and Arabian Sea region.

Portion of U.S. Fifth Fleet, stationed in Bahrain, Persian Gulf, through which much oil is shipped

The third foreign visit was to the US. A joint communiqué was signed which revealed the divergent policy positions of the two leaders. Although PM Sharif carried an agenda including the drone attacks in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA); economic cooperation through trade, and the release of Pakistani citizen Dr. Affia Siddique, no commitment to address these concerns were made by the US President. Nawaz failed to take advantage of the release of the US based Amnesty International Report on the matters of drones, which revealed facts relating to the killing of thousands of Pakistani civilians in FATA and pronounced this act a gross violation of human rights.

See, e.g., for one of thousands if incidents in many countries, A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in Yemen

Secondly, just a day before the Oval meeting, the US released the suspended military and economic assistance of $1.6 billion to Pakistan, which was considered by the Pakistani government spokesperson as a sign of development between the two “strategic partners” (though some analysts believe that the released amount is nothing more than rent for the services by the Pakistani government facilitating the logistics for NATO and US forces in Afghanistan). The reality is that there is a serious trust deficit between the two countries. There are misperceptions and divergent national interests on both sides. The exit of the US and NATO troops from Afghanistan in 2014 might ease tensions between the two countries by providing them an opportunity for better understanding in other fields of cooperation, especially economically.

The Prime Minister needs to understand that his third term in office is considerably different from his last two, because the international scenario has over-whelmingly transformed. The US is not as “super” a superpower as it used to be, thus giving way to the rise of regional powers, especially in terms of financial potential.

Herndon Monument Climb 2014, first look

From Zimbao, recommended.

Air Force Times

KMOV.com St. Louis

For a good video of the Climb, se ABC2News.com

Kazakh audaryspak; Kyrgyz oodarsyh : Hore Wrestling in Central Asia 2014

Don't know when the audaryspak event takes place, probably in August.  Preliminary images of the audaryspak festival in Kazakhstan.   Full report comes later.

The Ground Never Misses: 

Ethnic Wrestling of African and Kazakh Cultures

Recommended

Pinterest

Oodarsyh is a festival in Kyrgyzstan featuring horse wrestling.  The event takes place this year from 19 July to 22 August 2014 The blog post, below, is not clear when thees picture were taken.

Festivals in Kyrgyzstan - 2014

The main Kirkpinar (Turkish Oil Wrestling) takes place at Edirne, Turkey, from 29 June to 5 July, this year.

Here is a website in English that describes the rules and history of the competition and has a video showing young wrestlers getting ready, for you who may be unfamiliar with the competition.

Here are some images from the website:

Can anyone control the post-superpower capitalist world order?

A provocative article in yesterday's Guardian raises an intriguing question:

Who can control the post-superpower capitalist world order?In a divided and dangerous world, we need to teach the new powers some manners

From the article:

The "American century" is over, and we have entered a period in which multiple centres of global capitalism have been forming. In the US, Europe, China and maybe Latin America, too, capitalist systems have developed with specific twists: the US stands for neoliberal capitalism, Europe for what remains of the welfare state, China for authoritarian capitalism, Latin America for populist capitalism. After the attempt by the US to impose itself as the sole superpower – the universal policeman – failed, there is now the need to establish the rules of interaction between these local centres as regards their conflicting interests.

For now I leave it to each of you to ascribe meaning to the terms used to define each of the four kinds of Capitalism used in the article.  For folks in Argentina , Chile, Bolivia, and elsewhere with whom I have sympathy, "neoliberal capitalism" may raise images of torture, the disappeared, dictatorship, misery for the many, increased wealth for the few.  

Google will tell you who the author is, and will give  bewilderingly different  definitions of  the various kinds of Capitalism.

• Slavoj Žižek

• The Guardian, Tuesday 6 May 2014 16.02 EDT

Presidents Putin and Obama.   'Today, the old and new superpowers are testing each other, trying to impose their own version of global rules.' Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters

To know a society is not only to know its explicit rules. One must also know how to apply them: when to use them, when to violate them, when to turn down a choice that is offered, and when we are effectively obliged to do something but have to pretend we are doing it as a free choice. Consider the paradox, for instance, of offers-meant-to-be-refused. When I am invited to a restaurant by a rich uncle, we both know he will cover the bill, but I nonetheless have to lightly insist we share it – imagine my surprise if my uncle were simply to say: "OK, then, you pay it!" 

There was a similar problem during the chaotic post-Soviet years of Yeltsin's rule in Russia. Although the legal rules were known, and were largely the same as under the Soviet Union, the complex network of implicit, unwritten rules, which sustained the entire social edifice, disintegrated. In the Soviet Union, if you wanted better hospital treatment, say, or a new apartment, if you had a complaint against the authorities, were summoned to court or wanted your child to be accepted at a top school, you knew the implicit rules. You understood whom to address or bribe, and what you could or couldn't do. After the collapse of Soviet power, one of the most frustrating aspects of daily life for ordinary people was that these unwritten rules became seriously blurred. People simply did not know how to react, how to relate to explicit legal regulations, what could be ignored, and where bribery worked. (One of the functions of organised crime was to provide a kind of ersatz legality. If you owned a small business and a customer owed you money, you turned to your mafia protector, who dealt with the problem, since the state legal system was inefficient.) The stabilisation of society under the Putin reign is largely because of the newly established transparency of these unwritten rules. 

Now, once again, people mostly understand the complex cobweb of social interactions. 

In international politics, we have not yet reached this stage. Back in the 1990s, a silent pact regulated the relationship between the great western powers and Russia. Western states treated Russia as a great power on the condition that Russia didn't act as one. But what if the person to whom the offer-to-be-rejected is made actually accepts it? What if Russia starts to act as a great power? A situation like this is properly catastrophic, threatening the entire existing fabric of relations – as happened five years ago in Georgia. Tired of only being treated as a superpower, Russia actually acted as one. 

How did it come to this? The "American century" is over, and we have entered a period in which multiple centres of global capitalism have been forming. In the US, Europe, China and maybe Latin America, too, capitalist systems have developed with specific twists: the US stands for neoliberal capitalism, Europe for what remains of the welfare state, China for authoritarian capitalism, Latin America for populist capitalism. After the attempt by the US to impose itself as the sole superpower – the universal policeman – failed, there is now the need to establish the rules of interaction between these local centres as regards their conflicting interests. 

This is why our times are potentially more dangerous than they may appear. During the cold war, the rules of international behaviour were clear, guaranteed by the Mad-ness – mutually assured destruction – of the superpowers. When the Soviet Union violated these unwritten rules by invading Afghanistan, it paid dearly for this infringement. The war in Afghanistan was the beginning of its end.  

Today, the old and new superpowers are testing each other, trying to impose their own version of global rules, experimenting with them through proxies – which are, of course, other, small nations and states. 

Karl Popper once praised the scientific testing of hypotheses, saying that, in this way, we allow our hypotheses to die instead of us. In today's testing, small nations get hurt and wounded instead of the big ones – first Georgia, now Ukraine. Although the official arguments are highly moral, revolving around human rights and freedoms, the nature of the game is clear. The events in Ukraine seem something like the crisis in Georgia, part two – the next stage of a geopolitical struggle for control in a nonregulated, multicentred world. 

It is definitely time to teach the superpowers, old and new, some manners, but who will do it? Obviously, only a transnational entity can manage it – more than 200 years ago, Immanuel Kant saw the need for a transnational legal order grounded in the rise of the global society. In his project for perpetual peace, he wrote: "Since the narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world, the idea of a law of world citizenship is no high-flown or exaggerated notion." 

This, however, brings us to what is arguably the "principal contradiction" of the new world order (if we may use this old Maoist term): the impossibility of creating a global political order that would correspond to the global capitalist economy.
What if, for structural reasons, and not only due to empirical limitations, there cannot be a worldwide democracy or a representative world government? What if the global market economy cannot be directly organised as a global liberal democracy with worldwide elections?

Today, in our era of globalisation, we are paying the price for this "principal contradiction." In politics, age-old fixations, and particular, substantial ethnic, religious and cultural identities, have returned with a vengeance. Our predicament today is defined by this tension: the global free circulation of commodities is accompanied by growing separations in the social sphere. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the global market, new walls have begun emerging everywhere, separating peoples and their cultures. Perhaps the very survival of humanity depends on resolving this tension.

[Hawaii residents may be interested in billionaires' goings-on on the Big Island.  See here. ]

"Let them eat apple pie," Foreigh Policy Review

It’s one of the most famous quotes in history. A

t some point around 1789, 

when being told that her French subjects had no bread, 

Marie-Antoinette (bride of France’s King Louis XVI) 

supposedly sniffed, 

“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”—“Let them eat cake.” 

With that callous remark, the queen became 

a hated symbol of the decadent monarchy 

and fueled the revolution that 

would cause her to (literally) 

lose her head. . . .

Ask HISTORY

 Marie Natoinette

 

Louie XVI

Louie XVI 178988 french revolution

 

JAMES TRAUB
Let Them Eat Apple Pie
Income inequality in the U.S. is now as bad as it was in aristocratic Europe. Are the bread riots finally coming?
Voice/Fpeign Policy
 Everyone's a convert -- except, of course, for the Republican Party. Congressman Paul Ryan's budget plan (which the GOP-controlled House has now adopted) proposes to cut the top tax rate both for individuals and corporations from 35 percent to 25 percent and to sharply reduce virtually all forms of domestic spending which benefit the poor and even the middle class.


  imagine a scenario in which the Ryan plan would not increase what is already the most unequal distribution of income and wealth in the industrialized world


Per contra:  David Ddaavenoprt, Inconvenient Truths Should Slow The Income Inequality Bandwagon, Forbes




This viral video is right: We need to worry about wealth inequality  Wonkblog, Washingto n Post





In New Tack, I.M.F. Aims at Income Inequality, New York Times

Ms. Lagarde rejects the notion that the I.M.F. didn’t care about income distribution before. She noted that over the last two decades the institution has put emphasis on ensuring that its programs don’t hurt the neediest. The fund’s own research concludes that its programs have increased spending on education and health in poor countries.


Work by Carol Graham and Soumya Chattopadhyay at the Brookings Institution finds that recent episodes of unrest around the world, including the Arab Spring, Brazilian street protests and the uprising in Ukraine, were fueled not by the poor but by a middle class frustrated by a lack of opportunity to progress further.





Carol Graham and Soumya Chattopadhyay | March 7, 2014 11:02am

The Decade of Public Protest and Frustration with Lack of Social Mobility Brookings Institute
This is shaping up to be the decade of protest. From Chile and Brazil to Turkey, Thailand, and Venezuela, riots have broken out and even – as in Ukraine – broken governments. Each protest has its own character, of course: but there are striking similarities among them – and, in particular, among the people participating in them.

The Protestors Are Pessimistic, Not Poor

For one thing, the protests are being led by relatively wealthy people in relatively wealthy countries. The “prototypical” protestor is not a nothing-to-lose risk taker, but middle-aged, middle income, and more educated than the average, falling into the outdated category of “middle class”. He or she has, for the most part, made significant investments in the socio-economic system that she lives in, and yet is pessimistic about opportunities for the future within it. In fact, the protestors look a lot like the upwardly mobile but unhappy “frustrated achievers” around the world I have been tracking for years.

The united States is a Warrior Nation.

It spends more on War than any other nation, by a large margin.

It has military bases in most parts of the world, ringing Russia and China.

A partial  history US Wars

Military Conflicts in U.S. History

American Revolution (1775–1783) 

War of 1812 (1812–1815) 

Mexican War (1846–1848 

Civil War (1861–1865) 

Indian Wars (colonial era to 1890) 

Spanish American War (1898)

World War I (1914–1918)

World War II (1939–1945) 

Korean War (1950–1953) 

Bay of Pigs (1961) 

Vietnam War (1961–1973) 

Dominican Republic (1965) 

Lebanon (1982–1984) 

Grenada (1983) 

Panama (1989) 

Gulf War (1991)  

Somalia (1993) 

Bosnia (1994–1995) 

Kosovo (1999) 

Global War on Terror (2001– )  

Afghanistan (2001– ) 

Iraq War (2003–2010) 

Information Please® Database, © 2007 Pearson Education, Inc.All rights reserved.  [Commentary delete

From 1619 until the end of the US Civil War, chattel slavery was legal in North America.

It's Wars with indigenous peoples of the North American continent and Hawaii were, in effect and in some cases by intention, genocidal.  See here.

A small section near the end of The reasons for war, a survey, reported in this blog yesterday, is entitled "Democratic Peace".  It suggests, indirectly, that we, the people of the United States, are the sovereign, and control decisions of War and Peace. 

I am ambivalent about our gigantic War Machine.  Spending tax money on War stimulates the economy, and the US has the strongest economy in the world, for now.  There are other, more useful, ways to pend money to stimulate the economy, with more lasting benefits.

On the other hand, China seems intent on taking money and markets away form the United States and becoming the dominant power in the world.  

If there must be a dominant power, I prefer the United States to China. 

The United States is a mixture of many religions, cultures, and points of view, which gives it an information stream that uniform nations lack, increases flexibility to meet a changing world, and is a source of strength.  

China, the current challenger, is dominated by a tribal culture, the Tribe of the Han, more intolerant of minorities that the US currently is.  That allows for uniformity, which can be a source of strength, and bodes ill for a multifarious world, if it becomes dominant.  

I prefer that the United States remain the dominant power, and the cost is vexing.

Something we, as the sovereign, could do is to change our income tax code so that  the flow of wealth goes to the many. 

The richest American is currently Bill Gates, with 77.5 billion dollars.  That's enough.

A billion dollars is 1,000 million dollars. 

The Koch brothers, together, have 80.8 billion dollars.  They are using a small portion of that money to buy elections.  That's too much power, in a democracy.

We the people need to make some changes.