The Democracy Manifesto (go to the manifesto) represents a significant moment as far as the global conversation on democracy is concerned. It is also a moment of new beginnings.  A good conversation is one that produces more of it. I hope this one snowballs into more debates and dialogues. Democracy is worldly, primarily an artifact. Like other human artifacts, it too needs care, continuous attention, ingenuity and passion. The ongoing conversation on democracy, as I can recall from my own experiences, never suffered from dearth of ambition. Yet it has always been an exercise in humility and deep engagement.

Imagine that you go into a ‘sleep mode’ today and are revived after a gap of several decades. What do think will have been the history of democracy while you slept? What narratives will emerge? Will experiences in different parts of the world, particularly in the global south, be a part of the larger story of democracy?

You only need to ask the question to sense the importance of an affirmative answer. If currently existing democracy in India has merely overcome corruption and ensured the rule of law, if China has moved towards democracy, if Brazil continues to have popular government and there are elections in South Africa that change the ruling party, if there is democracy in Egypt (who would have thought of writing that three months ago?) and Palestine… or if there are not any of these things…

It is clear that the dominant ways of thinking of democracy are and continue to be narrow. They tend to make the political clamour, experiments and mobilizations in different parts of the world invisible. But it is surely the case as our experiment shows that if we think of democracy and look forward then the still dominant view is quite inadequate. The future of democracy will be shaped and even decided in countries that are more experimental than its traditional homelands. The ‘frontier’ of democracy to borrow an image, is no longer found in the ‘west’ or the global north.

This is the starting point of our global conversation. It questions the dominant view, and shows that other ways of engaging with democratic experiences are possible. Not only possible but also necessary and now in the public domain. 

First, a bit of history. 

A few years ago a group of scholars and activists from South Asia wanted to reflect on democratic experiences in their countries in the region. They all agreed that knowledge about democracy must be produced in a democratic fashion and that this demands a methodology that does not devalue specificities of experiences. They initiated a conversation within the region and finally produced a report - State of Democracy in South Asia.  The impetus for a further, global conversation on democracy emerged from several regional conversations that followed especially this South Asian one. No doubt, in the past there were discussions on democracy. But this time round, the conversation delves deeply into the fundamental questions regarding the ways in which democracy has to be explained and evaluated.  It attempts to re-define what it means to be democratic.

The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), in Delhi, coordinated the initiative, and thanks to the intellectual energy of Professors Rajeev Bhargava and Yogendra Yadav, and a grant from the Ford Foundation, the global conversation took off to a good start three years ago.   During this period, three major international meetings, involving participants from Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America and North America, were held (two in India and one in South Africa). Besides academics, a good number of participants came from the world of civil society and social movements.  The conversations thus far have been focused and productive.  

As I write this, activists and ordinary citizens have gathered in different parts of India to raise the issue of corruption in politics and public life. To them, fighting against corruption is a struggle for democracy. Like the continuing upsurge in the Arab World, the mobilization in India reflects the local concerns, dreams and aspirations. In some of these cases, practices on the ground seem to run way ahead of the dominant democratic thinking. However there are occasions when these events fall far short of the high normative standards of democracy. The lack of fit between theory and practice, in the above sense, is what grounds the substance of the ongoing conversation on democracy.

Being conversationalists we decided that we would produce only a draft of a Democracy Manifesto and ask for further thoughts, comments and even asides. Here it is. Let’s see what happens. We already have responses from Anthony Barnett, Laurence Whitehead, Jorge Heine and Melissa Williams. Hope more will join in.

The Democracy Manifesto: Re-imagining Democracy in Our Time 

To the introduction

The Arab democratic upsurge of 2011 inspires democrats all over the world. It has fired up the imagination of all those struggling for self-rule under authoritarianism. It also gives hopes to those engaged in deepening democratic practices everywhere. To all those who see democracy as a shared journey of humanity, it provides an occasion to reflect on what democracy means. This is a moment to re-imagine democratic ideals and practices in our time. 

1. Democracy as a political principle and as a form of government has expanded to nearly all corners of the world. It is recognized now that every human being must have an effective say in the decisions that affect their life. The notion that every government must respect this fundamental principle has greater acceptance than ever before. The ideal of self-rule has begun to fire up peoples’ imagination all over the world.  Democracy may not be a form of government that is experienced globally, but it has become an aspiration that is shared across the globe. This aspiration takes different forms. The ideal of popular self-rule has multiple readings.  Theses will depend on which people are being talked about, what understanding of self is being invoked and what  is accepted as self-rule.  “ The people” could mean all the citizens of a national state, the citizens at a region or locality, or the planet’s entire population. The self could be seen in terms of the individual citizen or in terms of a social community. Self-rule could be interpreted as voice, consultation, consent or consensus in any authoritative and binding decision-making process. A standard understanding is that democracy means free and fair elections, but it can also take other forms.
2. The globally dominant notion of what democracy means, however, does not reflect the journey of democracy. The prevailing orthodoxy about democracy  draws upon the limited experience of a small part of the globe. Selected facts of European and North American history have been turned into abstract principles. One of the many strands of western political thought has been assumed to be the sole repository of the normative imagination for democratic practices in different societies at different points of time.  An idealized notion of western liberal democracy hegemonizes the democratic imagination. It is assumed that capitalism and modernity have an intrinsic relationship with democracy. This hegemony of the western experience and imagination may not always affect popular struggles that are being waged in the name of democracy all over the world. Yet, it does constrain the translation of popular aspirations, practices and struggles into a set of norms, institutions and theories in the Global South. It also constrains the deepening of democracy within the global North.
3. Enriching our democratic imagination in line with the expansion of democracy would involve several things: widening our conceptual apparatus to accommodate diverse languages and idioms of democracy;  enriching our normative standards to reflect multiple histories and traditions of democratic thinking; and  correcting our explanations to account for radically different experiences and trajectories of democracy. Reimagining democracy along these lines is one of the most pressing ethical and political tasks of our times. It is imperative not just for democrats in the ‘aspiring’ and ‘new’ democracies, but equally in ‘established democracies’.
4. The prevailing orthodoxy on the democratic imagination assumes that democracy is strictly the gift of western civilization.  Yet, an honest genealogy of democratic ideas and practices must acknowledge that these are rooted in multiple trajectories. Ancient Greece was but one of the sources of democratic imagination. The ideas of democracy can be traced to Buddhist Sangha, Ganatantra traditions in ancient India, Islamic traditions in many societies and practices among the indigenous communities across the world. Much of the modern ideology and language of democracy has spread to most parts of the world from Western Europe and North America. Many of the well-established democratic institutions and practices in today's world were secured first in Europe through a series of popular struggles. The gains of these struggles are now part of our global human heritage.  Yet the western legacy is neither singular nor unambiguous.  For every advance in democracy, there is also the history of denial of democratic rights. Besides, the history of the expansion of self-rule for one's own citizens was inextricably woven with the history of denial of self-rule to larger subject populations outside and ethnic minorities inside the territory of a ‘democratic’ state. For most of the world, the contemporary practices of democracy are neither a direct off-shoot of the various ancient traditions nor an imitation of the modern west. The democratic aspiration spread to most of the world by way of anti-colonial struggles and the various movements for self-determination and self-rule in the last two centuries.
5. Enriching the democratic imagination requires questioning the simple-minded democracy/non-democracy binary canonized by the dominant orthodoxy. As democracy becomes the most sought after regime label, the quest for self-rule is reduced to a contestation about the latter. This promotes binary, either-or, thinking over a graded understanding of the spectrum from democracy to non-democracy. The dominant orthodoxy’s focus on classifying a country either as a democracy or a non-democracy encourages façade democracies. This binary distinction has resulted in an excessive focus on the threshold of when a non-democracy turns into a democracy.  This summative and static judgment performs the function of putting some ‘established democracies’ beyond reproach. This artificial binary construct must come to an end.  Democratic practices may exist in apparently non-democratic regimes. Established democratic states can embody a vast array of non-democratic practices. There is no "finished product democracy" and there never will be.  The aspiration for democracy is open-ended. Each fresh step opens new horizons.
6. The dominant orthodoxy espouses teleology. Democracy is the ultimate and inevitable destination. This often leads to thinking in terms of stages or pre-conditions to the ‘transition’ to and ‘consolidation’ of democracy. Yet, there are multiple sequences and routes by which different political regimes come to be democratic. The route taken by democracy in the west is but one sequence of many. In turn, there are multiple trajectories within the west itself. Material prosperity and cultural uniformity are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for democracy.  We also need to move away from an instrumental and determinist view of the outcomes of democracy.  Democracy leads to different outcomes in different historical settings.  Democrats need to be aware of the dysfunctions of democracy, and not just in 'new' or 'developing' democracies. The case for democracy cannot rest on dubious and instrumental grounds such as its purported usefulness for desired economic outcomes. Democracy must be cherished for its intrinsic value, for what it means to human dignity.
7. Reimagining democracy requires a fundamental shift. There is a tendency to assume that democracy is an attribute of political regimes rather than that of political practices. This leads to privileging form over substance, to making too much of formal political institutions and to reducing democracy to electoral democracy. An emphasis on practices would require a more careful and painstaking sifting of the substance of political action, its contextual meaning and its consequences.  This also enables us to think of democracy beyond the formal domain of politics. Practices within the domain of the family or the market, for example, need to be viewed in terms of the extent to which they enable or constrain self-rule. Democracy needs to be thought of as a way of life.
8. Questioning the dominant orthodoxy also leads us to the search for an appropriate level of analysis. There is a need to move beyond a fixation with the national state as the natural unit within which one thinks about self-rule. The locus of national power is no doubt the principal level of struggles for self-rule. But to focus exclusively on it side-steps the colossal inequalities among and within nation states. The latter deny vast numbers of people across the globe an effective voice over decisions that affect their lives and livelihoods. The quest for democracy must go wherever effective and binding decision-making occurs.  Shifting sites of sovereignty require that we begin to think of inter-national relations as an arena of democratic contestation. The same could be extended to the level of continents or other groupings of nations. At the same time, the unit of analysis needs to be extended downwards, to regional and local units, for this is the level at which most citizens experience self-rule or its absence.  
9.  The idea of democracy is becoming global, and it acquires multiple meanings. As democracy becomes a global aspiration, it attaches itself to different and often competing values.  This entails a conversation with pre-existing cultural values. Many of these values are contradictory to the democratic ideal; they must go. Some of the pre-existing values are not fully compatible with democracy; they must change. At the same time, the idea of democracy itself does and must undergo a change.  As the idea of democracy is interpreted and re-interpreted in different parts of the world, misunderstandings and misuses will arise. Therefore democracy is and will remain a contested concept.  This contest is resolved by entering on a case by case basis. It cannot be resolved a-priori by insisting upon an original, all-encompassing definition of democracy.  The demand that democracy all over the world must conform to a fixed definition first worked out in one part of the globe is inherently undemocratic. The ideal of democracy requires a respect for the democracy of knowledge. Knowledge production is not limited to some privileged sites, some societies or some period in history. The ideal of democracy has emerged from a dialogue of the various expressions of self-rule in human history. If democracy is anchored in reason, dialogue is the custodian of reason.

10. Current definitions of democracy threaten to reduce it to an institutional checklist derived from idealized notions of the experience of a small part of the globe.  The ideal of democracy is seen to be synonymous with the historical form of liberal democracy in advanced capitalist societies of Western Europe and North America.  Often this is further reduced down to a few key institutional features.  Yet, the historical experience of democracy in most of the world provides overwhelming evidence against this approach.  More often than not, imported institutions do not produce the same consequences that they did in their home context. Similarity of form is no guarantee of democratic substance.  In fact, a search for familiar form is an invitation to cynical and superficial copying for extraneous gains. On the one hand, the experience of ‘established democracies’ shows that the appearance of a democratic form of government can very well go hand in hand with the de facto rule by experts, the dominance of corporate power, social control by private networks and  the decline of citizen participation. On the other hand, the experience of democratic success outside the global North suggests that a departure from the mandated institutional form is often a pre-condition for success.  Mass democracies of post-colonial societies tend to acquire depth through practices that may not have a legitimate institutional expression in the conventional wisdom on democracy.  Institutions are crucial to the formation and strengthening of democracies, but what institutions do depends on the context in which these are located.  We need to shift the focus from the form of an institution to its real- life consequences in a given context. Democracy is an ever-evolving principle that can take different institutional expression at different points of time in different societies.

11. Thus, the principles and practices of democracy have to be open to multiple sources of learning. There are several living 'traditions' of consultation and consensus making all over the world. Such local practices need to be 'critically transformed' in order to make them relevant for democratic practices today. New power sharing arrangements are being worked out all over the world in different contexts, in response to different needs. Various monitoring tools are being invented in different democracies. So far only a few of these appear on the radar of  the democratic imagination. The search for a richer democratic imagination requires that we look for practices, institutions, intellectual traditions and thinkers everywhere to help us reshape democratic theory.

12.  The very notion of exporting democracy is inimical to the spirit of democracy. Democracy promotion can turn into democratic imperialism. Like all ideologies, democracy too can turn into a dogma. Strengthening democracy is about deepening the values which shape the principles of democracy within a society. The 'culture of democracy' of a given society is vital to building democracy. The idea that some people lack 'culture' and are not ready for democracy also goes against the principle of democracy.

13.  To deparochialize the idea of democracy is not to privilege an Eastern or Southern view of democracy over existing Western or Northern views. To the contrary: it means universalizing our understanding of democracy and democratic practices. The insistence on difference and divergence is designed to synthesize the multiple experiences of democracy. This is a necessary condition for reclaiming the global heritage of democracy and for reimagining a truly global future for it. FROM SOUTH TO NORTH.

Of the various values that the idea of democracy attaches itself to, four deserve a special mention.  First, democracy requires individual and collective freedom, for self-rule cannot exist in the absence of a basic guarantee of freedom.  Any kind of coercion or violence thus goes against the spirit of democracy. Second, the idea of self-rule requires that everyone have an equal say in matters that concern them.  Democratic deliberations require a level playing ground, free from widespread inter- and intra-group inequalities. Third, the ideal of self-rule requires a recognition of communities that often constitute the self. Thus democracy requires respect for deep diversity. In a world where most political units contain diverse communities, any attempt at cultural homogenization is not in keeping with the spirit of democracy. Fourth, given that democracy requires maintaining the conditions for democratic deliberations for future generations, it implies an ethic of responsibility towards nature.

Three people were crushed to death on the spot and as many critically injured when a speeding truck rammed into a stationary van at Ambathurai village on the Madurai-Dindigul National Highway here today.

Police said the occupants of the ill-fated van were going to Sivaganga with construction materials from Thindal village in Erode district when the mishap occurred.

The identity of the deceased was yet to be established. The critically injured people were rushed to the government hospital here.

Ambathurai police have registered a case and are investigating, the sources added.

NNN

The Dalai Lama’s seven-page letter to the Tibetan parliament-in-exile in March 2011 announcing his full retirement of all political and administrative responsibilities is a historic political moment. Tibet’s spiritual leader, in exile in India since 1959, has in issuing it taken two positive steps: towards reforming the political authority of the highest religious institution in Tibet, and encouraging and empowering the young Tibetan democracy.

At 76, the Dalai Lama has long been conscious of his role as the symbol of Tibetan unity and independence; but he has always understood and emphasised that the Tibetan problem will remain after his demise. In spiritual terms, the Dalai Lama continues to represent an important moral voice in a world that poses hard questions about how to respond effectively and in non-violent ways to the violence of the age, and how to build a better world that struggles against the causes of war and terrorism.

The Dalai Lama’s democratic effort for Tibet is a strong expression of his Buddhist and Gandhian convictions, founded on two principles: self-reliance and non-violence. These two principles will remain central to any democratic measures taken by the new Tibetan prime minister, Lobsang Sangay, and to all future dialogue and compromise with Beijing.

In the view of the Dalai Lama, democracy is a source of power for the powerless and of hope to the hopeless. It offers a politics that is completely at odds with the logic of occupation and violation of human rights in which Tibet lives today.

In his acceptance speech on the occasion of the award of the Nobel peace prize in Oslo on 10 December 1989, the Dalai Lama proposed a wider vision: “the conversion of the entire Tibetan plateau into a zone of Ahimsa, a sanctuary of peace and non-violence where human beings and nature can live in peace and harmony.” 

China’s economic strategy in Tibet has been in the opposite direction, and has caused immense cultural and environmental damage and increased the social marginalisation of Tibetans. Chinese officialdom - which still describes its violent takeover of Tibet in 1950-51 as a "peaceful liberation" - has long hoped that Beijing’s economic and cultural policies in Tibet will create a new generation of Tibetans that are less influenced by Buddhist religion and that, with the passing of the Dalai Lama, will accept finally to be part of China.

In this context, the Dalai Lama’s decision to relinquish his duties as political head of the Tibetan people in exile has increased anxieties in Beijing. No wonder, for the Dalai Lama’s democratic strategy places him a step ahead of China in setting the terms for the tumultuous situation in Lhasa that might follow his death.

The revered Tibetan institution of the Dalai Lama has played a dual role of spiritual and political authority since 1642. Its political reform opens the way to one of the major tests of Tibet’s modern history, namely trying to strike a win-win deal that reformulates Tibetan autonomy within the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Much is at stake here: the capacity to resist Chinese efforts to restrict traditional rituals, to reverse the the neglect of the Tibetan language at the expense of Chinese, and to defend the ecosystem in the face of unbalanced development.

The political path

In his address to the European parliament in December 2008, the Dalai Lama reiterated Tibet’s desire for “genuine autonomy” within the PRC and reaffirmed the will of the Central Tibetan Administration to move beyond fear and help to promote a culture of trust between the two nations. The major task of the prime minister of the Tibetan government-in-exile, Lobsang Sangay, is to promote such a culture. Will he make a difference to future dialogue between Beijing and Dharamsala?

So far, the 42-year-old Harvard law researcher has said that his top priority is to ask the Chinese authorities to review their "hardline" Tibet policy and take a "more moderate and liberal approach". This said, both Chinese and Tibetans will continue to expect the Dalai Lama to have an important influence on future negotiations between Tibet and China, and over the question of Tibetan autonomy. In the final analysis the leaders of Tibet’s reformed institutions, temporal and spiritual, need to work together to build and develop a new Tibet.

The road to Tibet’s autonomy is paved with many difficulties and challenges. That is why the election of Lobsang Sangay and the Dalai Lama's announced departure from political life are noteworthy. They mark a new chapter in the democratic exercise of the Tibetan community, which can show China and the world that even amid marginalisation and hardship the Tibetan community-in-exile is capable of forming a stable and transparent government.

The five years of Sangay’s prime-ministerial term offer Tibetans an opportunity to create a robust interface for the Chinese government to deal with. Even if Sangay does not succeed in convincing Beijing to abandon its hardline phase and accept the principle of autonomy for Tibet, his democratic election and the evolutionary move from the Dalai Lama reveal the anachronism of China’s authoritarian rule over Tibet. The Dalai Lama has once more proved to Tibetans and the world that he is not only a charismatic spiritual figure but a figure capable of bringing wisdom to democracy.

Sideboxes

'Read On' Sidebox: 

Dalai Lama

Central Tibetan Administration

Isabel Hilton, "Tibet's small exercise in democracy" (New Humanist, 125/6, November-December 2010)

Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy

chinadialogue

Tibet Parliamentary and Policy Research Centre

 

Sidebox: 

Ramin Jahanbegloo is professor in the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto. He was previously Rajni Kothari professor of democracy at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. His twenty books include India Revisited: Conversations on Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2007). His website is here

Also by Ramin Jahanbegloo in openDemocracy:

"America's dreaming" (30 August 2004) - with Richard Rorty

"Richard Rorty: living in dialogue" (20 June 2007)

“The modern Gandhi” (30 January 2008)

"Olympics of shame" (9 April 2008)

"The new middle east: intellectuals and democracy" (3 February 2011)

"The new middle east: a civic revolution" (17 February 2011)

Plus - contributions to symposiums on Iran, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2011

Related stories: 

Dharamsala: forging Tibetans’ future

Tibet and China: the past in the present

Tibet, Palestine and the politics of failure

Tibet, China, and the west: empires of the mind

China and Tibet: the true path

Tibet: questions of revolt

How to think about Tibet

Tibet: revolt with memories

Xinjiang, Tibet, beyond: China's ethnic relations

Tibet vs China: a human-rights showdown

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In the age of instant news, when headlines last at most a few hours before being replaced by the next "big story," the death of Osama Bin Laden has unusual staying power. Ever since word started to leak late Sunday night -- first on Twitter, quoting a Congressional aide, then in confirmation from the White House itself -- the press corps, Washington, most of the nation and much of the world, has been riveted. The horrific nature of his crimes, the video of the planes flying into the World Trade Center, the reports of phone calls from airplane passengers to husbands and wives as they faced an awful death, the memory of loved ones wandering lower Manhattan for days searching for the lost. Not to mention the jagged face of the Pentagon and the crash scene in Shanksville, Pa. All those memories came rushing back, to give a fresh, raw quality to the news that al-Qaida's leader had not only been located, he had been shot and killed.

And the questions poured out: how long had the CIA suspected his presence there? (At least 6 months.) How had they discovered him? (Years of painstaking work, tracking down a courier based on a nickname.) If the evidence Bin Laden was in the house was "circumstantial" as White House counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan noted, why had the operation gone forward? Just how risky was this venture, compared to other operations Navy SEALS are used to carrying out? How could Bin Laden have been living in Pakistan without Pakistani officials knowing about it -- especially since it was so close to Pakistan's equivalent of West Point -- an elite military training academy? Who else was living in the compound? How many were armed when the raid took place? How much and what sort of resistance did they put up? Why didn't bin Laden try to escape, or was there no option to do so? What really went wrong with the "stealth" helicopter that U.S. officials said malfunctioned as it reached its destination? If there was only one person inside the compound using a gun - reportedly the courier - why were we first told it was a 40-minute firefight? What were President Obama and secretaries Clinton and Gates and others looking at in the White House Situation Room in that amazing photograph taken as the raid was underway?

Those were questions for the first and second days, but because it was an operation conducted in secret, and because of its success, more questions popped up by the hour: Why weren't neighbors around the compound in Abbottabad (named after a British major, James Abbott, who helped govern the area when it was part of India in the mid-19th century. See below for a poem Abbott wrote about the city.) Why weren't they more suspicious of a place with barbed wire, unusually high walls and tinted window glass? Had bin Laden ever emerged on the outside, with or without any sort of disguise? Why had the myth persisted so long that he was living in a cave or another remote, rugged location, when he was actually living comfortably in a city just 30 miles from Islamabad? What sort of material did the Navy SEALS, who pulled off the raid, take away? What has happened to bin Laden's three wives who reportedly were in the house at the same time, including the youngest, who was with him when he was found? (They're reportedly in custody of Pakistani security.) What sort of information are they providing? (One is saying bin Laden had been living in the house for at least five years.) How could bin Laden have been operationally directing the al-Qaida network if he had to rely on couriers traveling on foot to make contact with those on the outside?

Of course, the answers to many of these questions are emerging in a flood of news reports - reporters working overtime to get what details they can from their sources.

But still, new questions keep coming: How embarrassing is this episode for the Pakistani government - the fact that U.S. forces could swoop into their country and conduct such a daring operation without their knowledge? (This and the question of whether anyone in the Pakistani government knew that bin Laden was living in their midst, are under investigation, according to Pakistani officials.) How will U.S. relations with Pakistan change as a result, at a time when our country relies on Pakistan to help fight Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan? Will Congress want to reduce the now-billions of dollars in aid this country provides annually to Pakistan? And a different line of questions: Why did the U.S. government -- the Obama administration -- decide to announce that it had captured a "treasure trove" of documents, computer material, hard drives, thumb drives and other potential valuables from the compound, thus giving al-Qaida a "heads-up" that they have this knowledge, and signaling to them the need to change phone numbers, couriers, codes, plans, etc.? Why not leave them guessing about what was retrieved? In fact, why did the administration feel the need to say much of anything about the operation and what they found? Why not keep more of it secret?

And possibly the most enduring questions: What does bin Laden's death mean for al-Qaida and its affiliates? How many are mourning his passing, in private, or in the open, as hundreds of Islamist Salafists -- a group with fundamentalist beliefs -- did Friday in Cairo? Who will take bin Laden's place at the head of al-Qaida? Where is his second-in-command, Egyptian-born Ayman al-Zawahiri? For that matter, where is former Taliban leader Mullah Omar? Are reports of a split in al-Qaida accurate? Will Bin Laden's death inspire more young Muslims to join the cause, or will it discourage them from moving toward radicalism? Coinciding with the Arab Spring taking place in Muslim countries across the Middle East and North Africa -- will al-Qaida ever be able to pose the threat it once did? Its confirmation Friday morning that its own founder, Osama Bin Laden, was indeed dead was the acknowledgement many didn't expect. But it was accompanied by a warning that any happiness would soon be replaced by sadness, as it planned to retaliate.

It's these questions, and scores more still surfacing, that will keep this story alive. Osama Bin Laden in hiding has been such a giant presence in American life for such a long time that his death will continue to fascinate and puzzle us.

Will we ever know everything there is to know about him and his "evil empire," the term Ronald Reagan once used to describe the Soviet Union? Probably not, and that's the reason this story will not only outlast the usual short news cycle in American journalism, it'll keep historians occupied for some time to come.

In the meantime, there is some irony in the lines of the simple poem British Major James Abbott wrote about Abbotabad in 1853, when he left it to return to England:

"Abbotabad"

I remember the day when I first came here
And smelt the sweet Abbottabad air

The trees and ground covered with snow
Gave us indeed a brilliant show

To me the place seemed like a dream
And far ran a lonesome stream

The wind hissed as if welcoming us
The pine swayed creating a lot of fuss

And the tiny cuckoo sang it away
A song very melodious and gay

I adored the place from the first sight
And was happy that my coming here was right

And eight good years here passed very soon
And we leave you perhaps on a sunny noon

Oh Abbottabad we are leaving you now
To your natural beauty do I bow

Perhaps your winds sound will never reach my ear
My gift for you is a few sad tears

I bid you farewell with a heavy heart
Never from my mind will your memories thwart

Via New York Review of Books/Wikipedia

The Taliban have declared categorically that they will fight on as long as any US forces remain in Afghanistan

The most important result of Osama bin Laden's death is likely to be a new US approach to Afghanistan. President Obama is now essentially in a position to "declare victory and get out", without risking too much in terms of US public and military opinion. Unfortunately, everything I know of the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, as described in my book, Pakistan: A Hard Country, suggests to me that the strategy towards which the Obama administration is tending could have disastrous consequences for Afghanistan, Pakistan and the US.

This is above all because the proposed new US approach is structured around the needs of US domestic politics and a crude approach to killing terrorists, with very little attention to the realities of Afghanistan or the reasons why many Pashtuns in both Afghanistan and Pakistan support the Taliban.

As things stand, the likely Obama strategy will be the following: the US will build up the Afghan National Army to the point where it can hold the main towns in the Pashtun areas without the help of US ground forces. Most US troops will withdraw, but the US will keep bases in Afghanistan from which its planes will smash any concentrations of the Taliban aiming at capturing the cities. US aircraft and special forces will continue to target any identified groups of al-Qaida in the country.

This is basically the Soviet strategy between their withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, albeit with the crucially important difference that the USSR did not keep bases in Afghanistan – it did not need to since it had them just over the border in Soviet Central Asia. And it must be said that up to a point, the Soviet strategy worked: the Afghan regime of Najibullah Khan which they left behind outlasted the Soviet Union itself. I was a British journalist with the mujahideen at the siege of Jalalabad in March 1989, when they were indeed decimated by the government's airpower when they concentrated to attack the city.

For Washington, this strategy appears to meet several objectives: It would greatly reduce US numbers and US casualties in Afghanistan; it would be in accordance with Obama's declared approach of reorienting US strategy towards targeted operations against terrorists; it would prevent Taliban victory and scenes of US defeat like Saigon in 1975, and at the same time avoid the perceived humiliation of having to negotiate with the Taliban leadership whom the US has spent years denouncing; and it would keep US bases in Afghanistan, which sections of the US security establishment see as useful to threaten Iran, raid Pakistan and maintain US influence in the region.

What is wrong with this strategy? Firstly, it means that the Taliban will continue their war. Their leadership have declared categorically that they will fight on as long as any US forces remain in Afghanistan. In the absence of any peace settlement giving them a share of power, the Taliban will also go on fighting against the Kabul regime.

US air and ground raids will go on infuriating the Pashtun rural population and encouraging them to support the Taliban. Because the war will continue, so will the Taliban's reliance on al-Qaida as a source of expertise, and on heroin as a source of revenue. And while the Afghan army may be able to hold the cities, it is obvious that it and the rotten Afghan state will never be able to extend real authority into the countryside.

Secondly, will the Afghan army even be able to hold the cities? The Soviet-backed regime after 1989 did, but it was in many ways a much more cohesive regime than the one that the US has created, with an army based on the old Afghan Royal Army, and led by a Pashtun with real authority among Pashtuns. The present Afghan civilian state is terribly weak, while the army, though large and heavily armed, is demoralised and deeply divided between Pashtuns and Tajiks.

A horribly plausible scenario for the future looks like this: the Afghan civilian regime disintegrates after Karzai steps down in 2014, leading to a coup by the Tajik commanders of the army. This is followed by a counter-coup by Pashtun troops, and civil war in the government-controlled areas. The US is faced with the choice either of pulling out, and allowing Taliban victory in the Pashtun areas, or of sending US troops back in to take over again.

Faced with this scenario, far better would be an attempt at a peace settlement with the Afghan Taliban, starting with the creation of a Taliban office with diplomatic immunity in some other Muslim country, and peace-building measures such as local truces. The broad outlines of a possible settlement have emerged from conversations with former leading Taliban officials such as Mullah Zaeef and Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil.

They involve the phased withdrawal of all non-Afghan armed groups from the country: on the one hand al-Qaida and all terrorist groups (including those targeting Russia, India, China, Iran and Pakistan), and on the other, US and Nato forces; de facto Taliban control of most of the Pashtun areas, with some form of power-sharing in a weak government in Kabul; and a Taliban commitment to stop heroin production in their areas in return for international aid to those areas.

This last is a question usually neglected by the US but is of crucial importance to the UK, Russia, Iran and increasingly China. Heroin has done more damage to our societies than terrorism; and we need to remember therefore that for more than 30 years, only the Taliban (in 1999-2000) has been able to prevent heroin production, because only the Taliban has exercised effective control over the Pashtun countryside. The idea that our allies in the Kabul regime and the Afghan army will be willing or able to do so is ludicrous given their record.

Would such a settlement hold? The Afghan Taliban must realise – and their allies in the Pakistani military certainly do – that whatever happens it will not be possible for them to conquer the non-Pashtun areas of Afghanistan in the face of US, Russian and Indian help to their local enemies. After all, they had a real fight to do so in the late 1990s when only Iran and a weak Russia were ranged against them. US carrier-based aircraft would still give the US great ability to coerce the Taliban and back their enemies if the Taliban broke the treaty.

On the other hand, everything I know about Afghanistan, and everything we see in the news about the Kabul regime and its armed forces, tells me that what is certain is that the US strategy sketched above will not work. As to whether the Taliban would agree to such a deal – well, we won't know that until we've asked them.

Osama bin Laden's death at the hands of U.S. Navy SEALs ignited debate about al-Qaeda's future as well as the future of militancy in Pakistan, where various outfits retain the capability to strike locally and globally. In the near term, analysts expect al-Qaeda Central's leaders in Pakistan will seek to ensure their security and execute a succession plan in the wake of bin Laden's capture, necessitating a communications lockdown and forestalling any direct retaliation. Instead, al-Qaeda Central is likely to rely on other outfits to respond on its behalf, either locally or globally. It already has called on fellow Muslims in Pakistan "to rise up and revolt to cleanse this shame that has been attached to them by a clique of traitors and thieves who sold everything to the enemies."[[BREAK]]

The threat of retaliation comes from a mélange of militants from various established outfits, splinter groups and independent networks. The internecine nature of this confederation also means that even if bin Laden's demise does provide space for a political resolution in Afghanistan, the threat from militants in Pakistan is unlikely to disappear. Despite understandable frustration, the United States must continue to engage with Pakistan. But the nature of that engagement should change, with a view toward the longer term, which means a greater focus on building civilian as opposed to military capacity. 

Taking Stock of the Major Players

The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has already promised retribution in Pakistan, which is understandable given that it has acted as a stalking horse for al-Qaeda in the past. Although the TTP has been on the front end of attacks in Pakistan, bin Laden's organization is believed to have been pulling some of the strings behind the scenes. Militants formerly associated with Punjabi outfits, such as Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), could contribute to a fresh round of attacks, as they have to previous operations in the past. These groups forged ties with al-Qaeda during the 1990s and some of their members began working with it to launch attacks in Pakistan soon after 9/11. Thus, at precisely the same time the army and ISI can expect additional (and deserved) pressure from the U.S. to stop playing favorites and crack down on all of the militants on Pakistani soil, the country may also be poised to witness a new wave of violence.

Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the group responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks, maintains the most robust transnational networks of any Pakistani militant outfit and is viewed as an increasingly global threat. However, despite the fact that its above-ground wing Jamaat-ul-Dawa organized street demonstrations to mourn bin Laden, it is far from certain the group would be willing to launch an operation on behalf of al-Qaeda. The army and ISI are believed to be putting significant pressure on LeT's leaders to refrain from overtly engaging in attacks on Western interests abroad. Unless Pakistan wants a showdown with the United States this is unlikely to change. However, this also presumes a level of organizational coherence and control that may be at odds with the ground reality. LeT militants are present on both sides of the Durand Line, meaning not all of them rely on safe haven in Pakistan. Furthermore, individuals or factions within LeT can utilize its infrastructure as well as transnational capabilities to pursue their own operations without the leadership's consent. Enhanced organizational integration with other outfits heightens the opportunities for freelancing, with former LeT members acting as an important bridge to al-Qaeda as well as other militant outfits.

Al-Qaeda is not a significant military force in Afghanistan, and any organizational turmoil it experiences is unlikely to impact the start of the spring fighting season. Neither the Taliban nor the Haqqani Network, the two most prolific actors in the Afghan insurgency, has embraced out-of-area attacks or operations in Pakistan, though the latter has supported actors that do. The bigger question is how bin Laden's demise will impact their respective Pakistan-based leaderships.

The army and Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) are unlikely to end their support for either entity, both of which are considered essential to protecting Pakistan's interests in Afghanistan. However, America's ability to unilaterally strike bin Laden's compound in the heart of Pakistan provides it leverage, in part because the operation raised questions about the ability of the army and ISI to protect senior leaders in the Taliban and Haqqani Network. More importantly, although al-Qaeda's connection to both of those entities goes deeper than just bin Laden's history with either outfit, that personal relationship was an important one. Osama's demise creates space for a political reconciliation in Afghanistan, in the event the U.S. chooses to pursue such a path. Problematically, there is no guarantee the army and ISI could, or would attempt to, dismantle the militant infrastructure in its entirety even if Afghanistan is settled according to Pakistan's interests.

The Protean Militant Milieu

Historically, there were three loci in which militants in Pakistan were active: Afghanistan, Indian-administered Kashmir and sectarianism attacks at home. Two new areas of activity have emerged during the past several years: a revolutionary locus manifested by the insurgency against Pakistan, and a global locus characterized by out of area attacks against America and its allies. Sectarian attacks continue, and have become a means of destabilizing the state. The Kashmir jihad has stagnated, though LeT remains committed to that cause and to attacks against India. Afghanistan, on the other hand, has become a focal point for every major militant outfit as well as a host of smaller networks and splinter groups.

Regardless of official army and ISI policy vis-à-vis militants on its soil, any political settlement in Afghanistan is likely to have positive and negative ramifications at the ground level. With the Kashmir jihad moribund, the abatement of the Afghan insurgency would mark the first time in decades that Pakistani militants were not faced with active open fronts on which to fight. A solution deemed acceptable by the Taliban would provide an impetus for many militants to demobilize and would rob jihadist leaders of a valuable rallying cry. However, those unwilling to lay down their arms could drift further into the sectarian, revolutionary or global orbits. Furthermore, whereas the Taliban might be willing to break ties with al-Qaeda, other actors might not. At this point the country is host to a consortium of established outfits, splinters, networks and freelance operators whose most enduring feature is its protean nature. These actors will continue to pose a threat to Pakistan, its neighbors and the West until the entire militant edifice is torn down.

Too Big To Fail

The response in Pakistan has not been promising. By focusing on the raid into Pakistani territory and glossing over the fact that bin Laden was living on Pakistani soil, the army appears to be doubling down on obstinacy. Nor is it helpful that the government says it will refuse the U.S. access to those who survived the raid. The one glimmer of hope thus far was the statement earlier this week by the Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, that the government would launch an investigation into how bin Laden managed to live for so long in Abbotobad and whether his support system included any serving officials. It now appears the military has taken charge of the investigation, which does not bode well for transparency. None of this is particularly surprising; even after being humbled by the U.S. raid the army remains the most powerful institution in the country, and regardless of what misgivings they may have, those in the civilian government have a history of circling the wagons in times like this.

Despite all of this, the United States must continue to engage Pakistan: first, because the Pakistani populace should not be punished for the behavior of its military leadership; second, because the United States cannot degrade the militant threat emanating from Pakistan on its own; third, because doing so would help to disprove the narrative in Pakistan that American will abandon it after objectives vis-à-vis al-Qaeda are achieved; and fourth, because Pakistani stability is necessary for greater stability in South Asia, a region in which the United States will continue to have equities for a long time to come.

The question is, who should the United States engage and assist? While recognizing the contributions and sacrifices the Pakistani military has made in the struggle against some militant outfits, it should also be apparent by now that relying so heavily on the military is not a recipe for long-term stability in a militant-free Pakistan. Instead, the U.S. should focus more attention on capacity building for civilian intelligence agencies and law enforcement, which are precisely the institutions that should be on the front lines of counter-terrorism in Pakistan.

This must be part of a wider realignment of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship and one that sees greater emphasis given to building up civilian institutions in Pakistan. For too long the United States has relied on the army as its primary interlocutor out of perceived operational necessity, often with frustrating results. The military-to-military relationship is an important one, but over-reliance on the army is at odds with the aim of fostering civilian governance in Pakistan. The United States finds itself with additional leverage this week, and should use some of it to promote that cause. Doing so is in keeping not only with American interests, but also American values.

Stephen Tankel is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of the forthcoming book, "Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba."

In UP, life is a holiday Times of India LUCKNOW: If the number of holidays you get is a compelling factor before you say `yes to a job offer, make sure you consider a position in one of the several offices of the Uttar Pradesh government. Heres why. In UP, babus can take up to a cool 199 ... and more »

Elizabeth Rubin

Osama bin Laden’s death in a mansion in exclusive club house territory of retired Pakistani officers has exposed the terrible paradox at the heart of our war in Afghanistan—Pakistan’s hypocrisy and our acquiescence. Bin Laden’s Pakistani hosts, two rich businessmen called Arshad and Tariq Khan who owned the house and were killed with him, hail from Charsadda, 15 miles north of Peshawar. Their uncle was a retired Brigadier. (Arshad was apparently the courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who led intelligence officials to the compound.) This is not a lawless land. This is highly controlled territory.

We give billions in aid to Pakistan’s military and civilian government. Yet Pakistan is harboring our enemies and even the enemies, one could argue, of its own healthy survival. Portions of our money are being funneled into the variety of insurgent networks whose fighters are killing American soldiers, Afghan soldiers, American civilians, Afghan civilians, European civilians, Pakistani civilians—mothers, fathers, children on multiple continents. Why, asks a US army major, did all his friends die in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province when the real problem is on the other side of the border? Why, asks a twelve-year-old Afghan girl in Kandahar whose family has been wiped out by US air strikes, are you bombing us? How has this come to pass?

In 2006, I traveled through Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, meeting with many Taliban fighters. I described it at the time as a kind of Taliban spa that offered them rest and rehab between battles in Afghanistan to which they would be returning. But it was more than that. I met Afghan Taliban who’d tried to make a deal with the Afghan government to get back to a life without fighting. One told me he was then arrested by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, the ISI, and blackmailed—they would release him if he would resume fighting and dispense with notions of reconciliation. He rose up the ranks of the Taliban command, traveling freely between Quetta in Pakistan and Zabul, a province in Afghanistan, where he was an intelligence commander for Afghan Taliban fighting coalition forces.

Another young Afghan Taliban I met in Peshawar was involved in the production and distribution of propaganda and recruiting DVDs—beheadings, inspirational music videos, and killings of American soldiers, all set to Pashtun war songs. But after spending hours and hours with him, I noticed his anti-infidel rhetoric beginning to subside, and when the subject of the ISI’s operatives came up, his whole demeanor changed. “Snakes,” he called them. Their first offense, he said, was trying to oust Mullah Omar and create a more obedient Taliban leader—like Jalaluddin Haqqani, an old jihadi we once financed to fight the Soviets but who has now set up shop in Waziristan under ISI protection. (Along with his son Sirajuddin, Haqqani stages the big-media-grabbing attacks in Afghanistan but seems to abide by the rules of his hosts—no attacks against Pakistan. He also runs a virtual kidnapping factory in Waziristan and the Pakistanis have done nothing to stop it.)

Then he said:

I told you that we burn schools because they’re teaching Christianity, but actually, most of the Taliban don’t like this burning of schools or destroying of roads and bridges, because the Taliban, too, could use them. Those acts were being done under ISI orders. They don’t want progress in Afghanistan.

He told me about ISI orders to behead an Indian engineer who was captured (and these orders were later corroborated). “People are not telling the story, because no one can trust anyone,” he told me. “And if the ISI knew I told you, I’d be fucked.”

That was 2006. Since then, just about everyone has learned the rules of the game: The ISI will continue to support the various jihadi groups (like Lashkar-e-Taiba) in order to attack and intimidate India, and get what it wants in Afghanistan—more or less a semi-independent extension of Pakistan. In 2008, American intelligence even proved definitively what Afghans and Indians on the ground already knew: that the deadly attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul was planned with the help of the ISI.

And it isn’t just the ISI that is supporting the Taliban. During my travels through Pakistan, I had a long discussion about the Pakistan Army’s conflicted loyalties with Najam Sethi, the longtime editor of Lahore’s Friday Times. What does it want? Where does it stand? The Pakistani military retains a secular strain, but religion is central to its ideology. Since its inception in 1947, its raison d’etre has been to defend the Muslim world. This mission, however, is constantly undermined by the fact that, while Pakistan was founded as a refuge for South Asia’s Muslims, more Muslims live in India, and most of the attacks by the militant groups it supports have ended up killing fellow Muslims. There is a contradiction at the heart of the Pakistani Army and it’s expressed in what everyone has come to call Pakistan’s “double game.”

The military officers I met—many of them retired, living better than bin Laden, in lavish Latin-American style mansions with pure-bred dogs, English-style cooks, and manicured lawns—spoke to me as if they envied the jihadists’ clarity of purpose, their moral vision. In Sethi’s view, the military also harbors “a degree of self-disgust for selling themselves” to the Americans. They are still angry with the US for abandoning them after the Afghan jihad, and for sanctioning them over the nuclear program. The standard army phrase about their treatment by the Americans was, Sethi said, “They used us like a condom.”

Despite these widely held sentiments and the evidence against a strong alliance, US diplomats and generals have tried to sustain the image of close cooperation.

In 2010, I had the chance to ask Secretary of Defense Robert Gates about the US relationship with Pakistan. He’d just been to the country to urge its generals to go after the jihadists, the Taliban, and the Haqqani network. I asked Gates how he could possibly consider Afshaq Kayani, the chief of the Pakistani army, an ally. “It’s frustrating,” Gates told me. I waited for more, but nothing came. Your silence says a lot, I said. “Well, I was very specific in a couple of my meetings in looking at them point-blank and saying, ‘Haqqani and his people are killing my troops. I’ve got a problem with that,’” Gates responded. And what did they say, I asked. Gates is all control, but he cracked a small smile as he said: “They listened.”

Admiral Mike Mullen has spent the better part of the first two years of the Obama administration—hours and hours of flight time, face time, and phone time—cultivating a strong relationship with Kayani. Up until recently, Kayani’s Wikipedia entry said that he counted Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, as a close friend and ally. That line has now been removed. US officials maintain they don’t think that Kayani or ISI chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha had direct knowledge themselves about bin Laden. But even before Sunday’s assassination of bin Laden, a friend of mine told me that when he recently saw Mullen the admiral seemed puzzled by the breakdown of the relationship. “What relationship?” my friend asked. “[Kayani] was never on your side.”

Or as an advisor to Ambassador Holbrooke told me not long before Holbrooke died: “We see Pakistan as a flawed ally and the Afghan Taliban as our enemy. The truth is the reverse.” It is the Taliban, the advisor suggested, who can be worked with; they who distrust—and in many cases despise—the ISI overlords they depend on for safe havens and support. All along they’ve let it be known through different channels that they want to talk directly to the Americans. The question is how?

Will the revelation that bin Laden and family were dwelling in a newly built Pakistani Army mansion not far from the capital finally change the nature of the strange dance between the US and Pakistan? One wonders how good and smart men and women are taken in by diplomatic friendships, how they allow themselves to believe lies they know to be lies, or worse, settle for the lie because it seems there’s no way out, no creative solution to change the trusted old forms of diplomacy or the definitions of enemy and ally.

Of course at the heart of the problem lies Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. We’d rather our Pakistani army enemy controls it than our Pakistani Taliban enemy. But will we ever know who is who, and can we tell them apart? And so our policy in Pakistan has collided with the Lot equation: How many righteous men must there be for God to save Sodom and Gomorrah, asks Abraham. And when God says fifty, Abraham keeps lowering the number. What if there is just one? How many American, Afghan, Pakistani, European casualties are worth keeping this Catch-22 policy alive?

Indianapolis, Indiana

12:10 P.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you, everybody.  Good to see you.  (Applause.)  Thank you so much.  Thank you, everybody.  Please have a seat.  Thank you.  It is good to be back in Indianapolis. (Applause.)  Hello, Hoosiers!  Sorry about the Pacers.  (Laughter.)  I'm sorry, Mr. Mayor.  (Laughter.)  Give the Mayor a big round of applause.  He’s doing a great job.  (Applause.)

Along with the Mayor, we've got Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood in the house.  Ray -- (applause.)  We've got your own member of Congress, André Carson, here.  (Applause.)  And I want to thank Larry Dewey and everybody here at Allison for their extraordinary hospitality.

It is wonderful to be here.  I just had a chance to see the hybrid systems that you’re working on at the plant.  I love to see high-tech machinery like this.  I stand there and people explain it to me and I pretend like I know what they’re talking about.  (Laughter.)  But it looked outstanding.  (Laughter.)     
What you’re doing here at Allison Transmission is really important.  Today there are more than 3,800 buses using hybrid technology all over the world -– buses that have already saved 15 million gallons of fuel.  And pretty soon, you’ll be expanding this technology to trucks as well.  And that means we’ll have even more vehicles who are using even less oil.  That means more jobs here at Allison.  Last month, you added 50 jobs at this company and I hear that you plan to add another 200 over the next two years.  So we are very proud of that.  We are very happy about that.  (Applause.)  

This is where the American economy is rebuilding, where we are regaining our footing.  We just went through one of the worst recessions in our history, worst in our lifetimes, the worst since the Great Depression.  But this economic momentum that's taking place here at Allison is taking place all across the country.  Today we found out that we added another 268,000 private sector jobs in April.  (Applause.)  So that means over the past 14 months, just in a little bit over a year, we’ve added more than 2 million jobs in the private sector.

Now, we’ve made this progress at a time when our economy has been facing some serious headwinds -- and I don't need to tell you about that.  We've got high gas prices that have been eating away at your paychecks.  And that is a headwind that we've got to confront.  You’ve got the earthquake in Japan that has had an effect on manufacturing here.  So there are always going to be some ups and downs like these as we come out of a recession.  And there will undoubtedly be some more challenges ahead.

But the fact is that we are still making progress, and that proves how resilient the American economy is, and how resilient the American worker is, and that we can take a hit and we can keep on going forward.  That’s exactly what we're doing.  (Applause.)  

Now, despite the good work that's being done in Allison, obviously here in Indiana and all across the country there’s still some folks who are struggling.  And a lot of people are thinking, where are those new jobs going to come from, that pay well, have good benefits, can support a family?  And how do we finally reduce our dependence on oil so that we’re not hostage to high gas prices all the time?

The reason I’m here today is because the answers to these questions are right here at Allison, right here in these vehicles, right here in these transmissions.  This is where the jobs of the future are at.  We’re going to have a lot of jobs in the service sector because we’re a mature economy, but America’s economy is always going to rely on outstanding manufacturing, where we make stuff -- where we’re not just buying stuff overseas, but we’re making stuff here, and we’re selling it to somebody else.  And that's what Allison is all about.  (Applause.)

This is also where a clean energy economy is being built.  This is the kind of company that will make sure that America remains the most prosperous nation in the world.  See, other countries understand this.  We’re in a competition all around the world, and other countries -- Germany, China, South Korea -- they know that clean energy technology is what is going to help spur job creation and economic growth for years to come.

And that's why we’ve got to make sure that we win that competition.  I don't want the new breakthrough technologies and the new manufacturing taking place in China and India.  I want all those new jobs right here in Indiana, right here in the United States of America, with American workers, American know-how, American ingenuity.  (Applause.)

And that's also how we’re going to get gas prices under control.  Now, I confess, it’s been a while since I filled up.  (Laughter.)  Secret Service doesn't let me fill up my motorcade. (Laughter.)  But it hasn’t been that long ago since I watched those numbers scroll up and I know how tough it is.  If you’ve got to drive to work, and you may not be able to afford buying a new car, so you’ve got that old beater that gets you eight miles a gallon, it’s tough.  It is a huge strain on a lot of people.

But if we can transition to new technologies, that's what’s going to make a difference over the long term.  That's how we’re going to meet the goal that I’ve set of reducing the amount of oil that we import by one-third by the middle of the next decade.
We can hit that target.  We can hit that target.

Now, in the short term, we still need to do everything we can to encourage safe and responsible oil production here at home.  In fact, last year, American oil production reached its highest level since 2003.  So I want everybody to remember that if people ask -- because sometimes I get letters from constituencies saying, why aren’t we just drilling more here?  We’re actually producing more oil here than ever.  But the challenge is we’ve only got about 2 to 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves and we use 25 percent of the world’s oil.  So we can’t just drill our way out of the problem.

If we’re serious about meeting our energy challenge we’re going to have to do more than drill.  And that’s why the real solution is clean, homegrown energy.  The real solution is advanced biofuels -- and there’s a lot of good biofuel work being done here in Indiana.  It means that we’ve got to have natural gas vehicles.  We’ve got a lot of natural gas that can be produced here in the United States of America.  It means making our cars and trucks more energy-efficient, because if we use less oil, that reduces demand; that brings the price down; and you will see the impact at the pump.  That’s what’s going to make a difference and that’s why what you’re doing here is so important.

Now, it turns out even though they don’t let me go to the gas pump, I do have a lot of cars under my jurisdiction, as President.  The federal fleet is enormous, and we’ve already doubled the number of hybrids in the federal fleet.  And I’m directing every agency to make sure that 100 percent of our cars and trucks are fuel-efficient or clean-energy vehicles by 2015.  So you’re going to have a customer, hopefully in the United States government, because we want to make sure -- (applause) -- that we are making clean fuel-efficient cars and trucks.  (Applause.)   

We’ve also launched private sector partnerships with companies like FedEx, UPS, utility companies.  A lot of these companies that have trucks and delivery trucks that are used in urban areas with a lot of stops and starts are perfect for the technology that you’re building.  So we’re forming partnerships to make sure that you’ve got more customers.

And to spur the production of fuel-efficient cars and trucks across the country, we’ve reached an historic agreement with every major auto company.  Thanks to the leadership of Ray LaHood, they’re ramping up the fuel economy of their cars and trucks.  And that will not only save 1.8 billion barrels of oil, it’s going to save you, the average driver, about $3,000 at the pump as cars increasingly get better gas mileage.

And this July, we’re finalizing new fuel-efficiency standards for heavy-duty trucks for the first time in our history.  And that could actually end up saving us -- we were talking about this the other day -- it could end up saving us something like 500 billion barrels of oil, huge amounts of oil, because heavy trucks use so much.

We’re also promoting clean energy technologies in other ways, from investing in hybrid systems like the one Allison is developing for commercial trucks, to championing vehicles that run on clean-burning natural gas, to spurring the creation of next-generation batteries for electric vehicles.

You know, a few years ago, America only produced 2 percent of the world’s advanced batteries.  Those are the batteries that are going into these new electric cars.  Because of the investments that we made in the first two years that I was in office, we’re on track to produce 40 percent of the advanced batteries.  That is going to be a huge boon to American manufacturing.  (Applause.)  That’s an example of a big new industry that we can create right here in the United States of America.   

And to make sure we’re not only investing in clean energy technologies but encouraging people to use these new technologies, I’ve proposed a $7,500 tax rebate for electric vehicles.  So if you do have that old beater that you need to get rid of, and you decide that you’re going to buy a new car, choosing an electric car you can actually get a huge rebate that will save you money at the gas pump, but is also going to save money on your tax returns.  And that will make a big difference.
We should reward also communities that are making it easier for folks to use electric vehicles and leading the way when it comes to clean energy.  And that’s the kind of leadership that Indianapolis is showing.  You’re installing natural gas pumps around town and you’re taking other steps to promote clean energy.  And I hope cities and towns across this country follow in your example.

Of course, these investments in clean energy do cost some money, and we’re going to need to find a way to pay for them.  Part of the cost can be made up by putting an end to the unwarranted subsidies that we are giving oil companies right now through the tax code.  (Applause.)  I want everybody to listen here.  Oil companies over the last five years, through a recession, through ups and downs, the top five oil companies, their profits have ranged between $75 billion and $125 billion.  That's with a B -- not million; billion.  And yet, they still have a tax loophole that is costing taxpayers $4 billion every year.  Now, if you're already paying them at the pump, we don't need to pay them through the tax code.  We do not need to do it. (Applause.)  Especially at a time when we’re scouring every part of the budget to try to figure out how we bring down our deficit and our debt.

Now, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that even if we end these taxpayer subsidies, we’re still going to have more work to do in getting control of our deficit and debt.  And I know that in this difficult fiscal climate, it may be tempting for some people to say let’s stop investing in hybrid technology; let’s stop investing in basic research; let’s stop investing in the infrastructure that's needed to make sure that we can transition to new forms of transportation.  That's the temptation.  But I profoundly disagree with that approach.

If we’re going to win the future, we’ve got to cut out the things we don't need, but still make investments in the things that we do.  That's what you do at home.  If somebody in your family loses a job, if your hours get cut, what do you do?  You may stop going out to a restaurant to eat.  You may decide we’re going to put off buying that new furniture or taking that vacation.  But you’re not going to stop fixing the boiler or the hole in the roof.  You’re not going to stop making sure that you got enough money to help your kids go to school.  Those are the things -- that's like your seed corn.  You don't eat that.

The same is true for the federal government.  We can’t cut investments in clean energy that are going to help us out-innovate and out-compete and help America win the future.  We’re not going to stop making investments that allow plants like this one to find the new ways of doing business in the future.

I want to make sure the federal government is right here with you as a partner with you as you move forward, and we can do it and still get control of our debt and our deficit if we do it smart.

For nearly 100 years this company has made its way forward through ups and through downs, making advances that have transformed everything from buses to planes to tanks.  Jim Allison actually helped start the Indy 500 back in 1909 -- not just to race cars, but to test new racecar components.  And that same spirit of innovation and ingenuity is what I’ve seen in the workers that I talked to today.

And that's why I’m so confident in this country.  That's why I’m so optimistic about our economic future -- because I believe in all of you.  I believe in the American worker, and I believe in American business.  For all the challenges we face, this country is still home to the most entrepreneurial, most industrious, most determined people on the planet.  There is nothing we cannot do so long as we put our mind to it, so long as we keep our eyes on the prize.  (Applause.)

And I’m going to keep on working with you to make sure we do that so long as I have the privilege of being President of the United States.

Thank you, everybody.  God bless you.  God bless the United States of America.  (Applause.)

END
12:28 P.M. EDT

The government has agreed to reinstate the suspended pilots and restore recognition of the pilots' union. The strike was on for 10 days.

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Tibetans eager for Dalai Lama's visit to Minnesota Minnesota Public Radio The Dalai Lama is preparing to hand over political power to a newly elected prime minister of Tibet's government-in-exile, Harvard legal scholar Lobsang Sangay, who will be sworn in May 30 in Dharmsala, India, where the exile government is based. ... Even the Dalai Lama Signed Off on Osama bin Laden Killing: Are You With Him?SodaHead News all 6 news articles »

"As for duplicity, I would say that diplomacy is not single tracked. We all follow many different tracks; sometimes, apparently, working against each other," a retired senior official from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) told me and my colleagues during a private gathering in Islamabad in July 2010 that was organized as part of The Century Foundation's International Task Force on Afghanistan. "Double games or triple games are part of the big game."

The ISI has long cultivated ties with militant groups as part of the country's national security strategy, in order to mitigate considerable gaps in conventional military capabilities with its principal adversary, India, and to check regional competition within Afghanistan. The United States and its international partners have been somewhat tolerant of this Pakistani game-playing. While it has long been known that Pakistan continues to support and harbor Afghan insurgents, American dependence on Pakistani supply routes, international fears about the nuclear-armed country's own stability, and its presumed counterterrorism cooperation with respect to al Qaeda, created a dynamic that has indulged official duplicity.

The discovery that Osama bin Laden was residing within walking distance of Pakistan's military academy in Abbottabad has shaken the foundations of this unsustainable arrangement and generated widespread outrage regarding Pakistan's possible links with the most reviled of transnational jihadis.

There will now be considerable congressional pressure to at least curtail or condition U.S. aid and military reimbursements to Pakistan. But rather than ceasing all counterterrorism cooperation or downgrading ties in the near term, the United States should now use its enhanced leverage with Pakistan to push forward an inclusive political process to end the fighting in Afghanistan -- a process that necessitates positive Pakistani involvement. The death of al Qaeda's leader has created additional momentum for those on all sides seeking a political resolution to the current conflict. And in the final analysis, such a process also offers Pakistan an opportunity to realize some of its strategic aims.

It is high time for the White House to realize that recent U.S. and allied military efforts and tactical successes in Afghanistan have not shifted the overall strategic balance of the war. With a safe haven in neighboring Pakistan, and a corrupt Afghan government fuelling the expansion of the insurgency and unable to hold cleared territory, the sustainability of current military efforts remains untenable. Therefore, the Obama administration should seize on the success of its audacious military operation to kill bin Laden to push forward a political strategy of outreach to the Taliban. [[BREAK]]

Such a political settlement will no doubt require distasteful compromises for all sides and its achievement is far from certain even if all practicable efforts are made. But bin Laden's death provides Taliban leaders -- who would have to sever their ties with al Qaeda in future negotiations -- with greater political cover.

In discussions last July with insurgent field commanders and others with political connections to the major Afghan insurgent factions, many Afghan interlocutors made clear to me their own willingness to eventually sever ties with al Qaeda. But they also emphasized that such a move could only be the result of negotiations, as opposed to its opening act. Several further argued that such a move at this stage, when the U.S. surge was reaching its peak, would be tantamount to a unilateral and partial disarmament.

As we were told repeatedly, when faced with the military might of the United States, these fighters were willing to accept the assistance of any other parties that could amplify their military efforts, including al Qaeda. For many of these insurgents, their struggle was conceived in terms of Afghan national goals, and tactical cooperation was more about survival than ideological convergence. Alex Strick van Linschoten, a Kandahar-based researcher who has discussed the issue of al Qaeda at length with members of the Taliban, points out that any moves to sever ties at this juncture could "jeopardize links with other militant factions that provide material support and assistance to the Taliban, and could even incite violent retaliation against them."

But the issue of severing ties with al Qaeda will face internal resistance. Bin Laden's death improves the optics of any such move, and strengthens the ability of those insurgent leaders who favor a political approach to win over skeptics and rejectionists within their ranks. It also eliminates the key personal tie that cemented the relationship between al Qaeda and the Taliban and their allies in the Haqqani network, which in some cases go back to the insurgency against the Soviets.

The opacity surrounding Pakistan's role is also likely to breed paranoia among the ranks of the Taliban, who will fear that the military operation was the result of a U.S.-Pakistani deal. This heightened sense of vulnerability to double cross by their Pakistani patrons could prove useful in encouraging political engagement.

Of course, the Taliban's position is only one factor in the effort to reach a political settlement to end the Afghan war. Any viable political process will necessitate active and constructive Pakistani engagement.

Pakistan's diminished international standing as a result of the bin Laden operation may partially remedy the issues that have long bedeviled U.S.-Pakistani relations, including the moral hazard that has driven Pakistani actions. While the exact connections, if any, between Pakistan's security establishment and bin Laden remain murky, the picture that has already emerged is deeply damaging to Pakistan's credibility -- at best, they appear oblivious and incompetent and, at worst, they have provided covert support to the most odious of transnational terrorists.

While Pakistan has called repeatedly for political reconciliation and a political settlement to the conflict, its commitment to such a process continues to be an open question. Pakistan's security establishment has not yet signaled that it is willing to pressure its allies to abandon conflict in favor of a political path.

While all of Pakistan's familiar options for subversion remain, the bin Laden episode has raised the stakes for this beleaguered state. The specter of bin Laden has created a possible pathway for international isolation and pariah status -- if the Pakistani security establishment is intent on continuing along its current course.

Now would be the optimal moment to seek concrete steps from Pakistan. To begin with the focus should be on ensuring that Taliban leaders who seek to engage on a political level are afforded the freedom to do so without interference or threat. Instead of forsaking a relationship with Islamabad, which would bring it little strategic gain, Washington should instead pressure its chastened and embarrassed partner into making constructive contributions to an all-inclusive peace process.

Michael Wahid Hanna is a fellow and program officer at The Century Foundation.

A report says a third of Africans are now middle class. Their interests coincide with the interests of the poor and should help to bring about change

One in three Africans are middle class. Or are they? A new report from the African Development Bank says: 34%, or 313 million Africans are now middle class (living on $2-$20 a day), after several decades without any change, a jump from 27% in 2000.

A similar report by the Asia Development Bank (pdf) last year found something similar in the data and noted that 56% of people in developing Asia lived at the $2-$20 a day level (all figures purchasing power parity ).

This is all good news. However, is someone living on just over $2 a day "middle class"? Two dollars is the average poverty line for developing countries, meaning you're poor or middle class – but what about in between?

There are various definitions of middle class in what is a burgeoning area of interest for poverty reduction research – stimulated perhaps by ideas about the middle classes as change-makers or catalysts. Think about the middle classes who voted with the poor for Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as president in Brazil, or the vibrant civil society of India that brings together the poor and middle-class activists (or possibly even the middle classes who are the protesters in the Middle East).

There are at least five reasons why the middle classes (variously defined) might matter for poverty reduction. First, as small business owners their potential to hire employees. Second, their higher disposable income, a share of which could be saved and invested domestically. Third, their higher demand has potential to drive economic growth and attracts private investment. Fourth, their investment in human capital for children potentially leads to higher participation in education and a larger pool of skilled labour. And fifth, they're more likely to hold the government accountable for decisions.

In terms of evidence, development economist William Easterly (pdf) finds empirical evidence linking the middle classes and economic growth, and E Sridharan, from the University of Pennsylvania, outlines the role of the Indian middle class in promoting reform. The World Bank's Martin Ravallion (pdf) also provides evidence that empirically links a middle class to growth and poverty reduction. He notes: "Countries starting out with a small middle class judged by developing country rather than western standards [$2-$13 a day per capita] face a handicap in promoting growth and poverty reduction, though this too is largely accountable to differences in the incidence of poverty."

This means – taking this definition of poor and middle class (there is no in-between) – at any given mean consumption, the countries with lower poverty will have a large middle class and see higher subsequent rates of both growth and poverty reduction.

In the middle-class work there are a range of definitions: some relative – the middle class as the middle 60% of consumption expenditure; and some absolute – the middle classes as those living on a range of scales between $2-$100 a day, (a global middle class).

More fundamentally, any definition of the middle class needs to be clear about the extent to which the middle class "starts" at the point where poverty "ends", or whether there is an implicit distance between the characteristics of the poor and the middle class that would suggest a rather clearer demarcation. But at what point does saving start? At what point does consumption of non-essentials, such as mobile phones, start?

MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo point out, the middle classes are: likely to be less connected to agriculture; more likely to be engaged in small business activities; and benefit from formal sector employment, with a weekly or monthly salary, which enables them to adopt a longer-term perspective towards their finances.

However, in contrast to the rather idealised image of the middle class as "risk-taking entrepreneurs", Banerjee and Duflo highlight empirical evidence showing that many businesses operate at low profits or fail to experience significant growth.

What about the idea of a catalytic class? This is the idea: the catalytic class is a group, whose expansion triggers internally driven, self-sustaining, political and economic change, a group whose exertion of pressure for better governance and economic reform leads to change when the class hits a certain size (in population or economic or tax revenue size). The interests of this class coincide with the interests of the poor.

As noted in the Globe and Mail, the catalyst class (a) has an interest in accountability because they pay more taxes; (b) probably don't work for the state and thus don't see their loyalty and interests tied to the status quo; (c) have parents who led quite different consumption lifestyles to them; (d) probably have internet (cafe) access and cell phones; and (e) want "open business conditions, fair and honourable contracts, and a route to employment unclotted by corruption".

That sounds more like the middle class to me.

The 10-day-old strike by a section of th pilots of national carrier Air India was called off this evening after the government agreed to reinstate all those whose services were terminated during the agitation.

A UNI report quoted official sources as saying that the pilots, who belonged to the erstwhile Indian Airlines, would resume duty later tonight.

The derecognition of the Indian Commercial Pilots' Association (ICPA), which had spearheaded the strike, has also been withdrawn, the sources said.

The strike had forced the loss-making airline to curtail its domestic schedule drastically and cancel hundreds of flights over the past ten days, leaving thousands of passengers stranded and leading to huge losses for the company.

The agitating pilots want parity in pay and allowances with pilots of the erstwhile Air India. The state-owned Air India and Indian Airlines were merged in 2007.

NNN

Henry Ford once said that a business that makes nothing but money is a poor business. Impact investing takes that thought to a new level.

Impact investors look for businesses that have a positive social or environmental impact as well as the potential for financial return. These enterprises can be anything from schools to mobile carriers serving the poor. Can profit-led companies solve social problems? Impact investors think they can.

One of the pioneers in the field is the Omidyar Network, created by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, and his wife Pam. Amy Klement, who leads Omidyar Network’s Access to Capital initiative (and previously headed up payments at PayPal) told me that Omidyar’s approach to philanthropy was formed by eBay. “By providing tools and a platform, he saw what people could do with opportunities. Ebay created more than 1 million new entrepreneurs” Klement said.

The Omidyar’s initially created a non-profit, family foundation but quickly realized that this imposed a lot of restrictions on what they could do. It was very difficult to make for-profit investments in social enterprises. “According to the tax laws, if something is a business it can’t be for good.” explained Klement. ”Through eBay the Omidyars had seen that businesses can have social impact and lasting social impact. They are sustainable, they are scalable in a way that non-profits generally aren’t.”

So the Omidyars created a new organization that could invest. The network uses a range of tools including non-profit grants, direct equity investments and debt investments, and it also invests in funds like the Ignia venture capital fund (which I’ll get to shortly). It has made grants to, or invested in companies like Wikipedia and P2P microfinance lenders Kiva.

Profit and loss is easy to measure, but how do you measure social impact? Klement explains. “We look at reach and engagement. Reach you can think of as breadth — the number of lives touched. And there we look for scale. We want to touch hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives. Engagement is depth — to what extent are we touching those lives. How deep is the impact?”

One of the network’s current investments is in Bridge International Acadamies, a chain of schools based in Nairobi, Kenya, and founded by an ex-technology entrepreneur. “He founded this school-in-a box model. It’s a highly replicable franchise model where he can scale these schools quite quickly. The education system in Kenya is completely broken. Teachers show up about 50 percent of the time. Even when they do show up, the average teaching time per day is about 90 minutes. The free government schools are not really free by the time people pay for uniforms and supplies and often bribes to the teachers,” said Klement.

The Bridge International schools cost less than $4 per pupil per month, which is in line with the costs of the government schools. There are now 25 schools making Bridge International the largest chain of schools on the African continent, and that will expand to 100 by the end of the year. Within 5 years the schools will serve a million children.

Another investment is D.light which makes solar lanterns to replace kerosene lamps. Kerosene causes millions of burns a year and serious respiratory system problems. One use is equivalent to smoking 2 packs of cigarettes. D.light has shipped more than a million lanterns to India, Africa, and Haiti and is poised for exponential growth.

Klement told me that once you screen for social impact, this type of investing is similar to traditional VC investing but “We are prepared to take more risk because we are entering markets that are less developed” like India and Sub-Saharan Africa. The network invests in the range of $1 to $3 million per deal. The Omidyar Network is also one of the investors in the $100 million Ignia fund, a VC fund based in Mexico that invests in businesses that provide products and services to bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) people, the poorest sector of society, but expects venture capital-level returns.

I asked founder Álvaro Rodríguez Arregui why he started the fund. “There is tremendous lack of access to basic, quality products and services in the base of the pyramid,” he said. The poorest people often pay over the odds for goods and services. If you don’t have a credit history, you can’t get a post-paid mobile phone plan, and pre-paid minutes are a lot more expensive. If you live in an area with no electricity, you have to pay someone more to charge your phone.

Ignia’s definition of positive impact is the following: ”If you provide this product or service to the BOP, will it improve their quality of life? The way we define our impact is providing access to basic products and services to as many people as possible as soon as possible. The only way to grow as fast as possible is through returns. The more profitable you are, the faster you grow and the faster you deliver on your mission.” Ignia invests in a range of sectors from healthcare to financial services and telecommunications.

Rodríguez Arregui started fundraising for Ignia in November 2007. It was a challenge. There was the small matter of the financial crisis, and Ignia invests in a company for up to 15 years, a longer horizon that most investors are used to. But there was a more fundamental problem. ”We are at the intersection of VC and impact investing. The biggest challenge was definitely fund-raising because not many people believe that intersection exists. Because of the way we have been educated, we believe that it is either impact or returns and that there is a conflict between those two in that there is an embedded philosophy which is ‘profit is bad’. We don’t believe that is the case.”

“I am a huge believer that businesses with purpose end up being significantly stronger than those that don’t have a purpose. I am convinced that when you wake up in the morning every day to try to address a mission, it’s a much stronger motivator than when you walk into the office every day and just want to make a buck,” he said.

It’s early days for Ignia, but its star investment Finestrella has grown 9-fold in the last year. Finestrella provides affordable, post-paid mobile phone plans to the BOP. 86 percent of people in Mexico have access to a mobile phone, but they only take incoming calls. Outgoing calls are made on public pay phones, which are much cheaper than pre-paid minutes. People still spend up to 30 percent of their income on mobile services.

Finestrella has defined a set of algorithms that it uses to assess the creditworthiness of people who don’t have an official employment history, bank account or credit rating. If they meet the criteria, customers are offered a post-paid mobile phone plan at much lower rates than pre-paid.

Finestrella started in 2010 and will have 35,000 customers by the end of this year. It already has $8 million in revenue (which is considerable in a country like Mexico) and is growing exponentially. The target is to have 800,000 customers by 2015.  A couple of Silicon Valley VC funds, one of which is Storm Ventures, have also invested in Finestrella.

One of Ignia’s investment team, Joshua Motta, explained why BOP businesses can make excellent returns. “Those activities which have the highest financial returns tend to have the highest social returns. Major corporations and even entrepreneurs have overlooked the BOP segment of the population and dismissed them outright simply because of their low earning power. But aggregated (BOP is 70 percent of the population in Mexico), the BOP actually has a huge amount of disposable income” according to Motta.

Motta maintains that corporations often don’t understand the needs of the BOP and just sell their standard products more cheaply in emerging markets. This strategy is often ineffective. Procter and Gamble discovered this with its detergent. ”In Western markets the quantity sold per unit is quite large. The BOP can’t afford a gallon of detergent. What P&G discovered was that if it used smaller packet sizes, literally single-use tablets, it was able to sell substantially in the BOP,” said Motta.

I asked Klement and Rodríguez Arregui what trends they see in impact investing. Both see momentum picking up and more money coming into the sector. Companies like Wells Fargo and JP Morgan are putting money into this new asset class. Rodríguez Arregui thinks that a lot of the talent in the social investing world comes from the non-profit sector rather than business and that more business expertise is needed.

Finally, Rodríguez Arregui explains that people need to be clear on why they want to get into impact investing. ”Do you want to do good, or do you want to feel good? It’s much easier to feel good by giving away meals to starving kids in Sudan, but you are not going to solve any systemic problem in the world by doing that. The outcomes of impact investing are much more long-term. This is business, and business is messy and you have to make hard decisions. When your only purpose is to feel good, you are not willing to make those hard decisions,” he said.

Tags: impact investing, investing, Venture Capital

Companies: Bridge International academies, D.light, Finistrella, IGNIA Fund, Omidyar Network

People: Pierre Omidyar

Air India pilots tonight called off their 10-day-long strike after the Government agreed to reinstate sacked and suspended pilots, restore recognition to their union and look into their complaints of irregularities.

 

 

 

Jammu, May 06 (Scoop News) – Acting on reports of illegal transfusion and collection of whole human blood being carried out by some Nursing Homes, a joint inspection team of officers from State Drugs Control Department and Central Drug Standard Control Organization conducted a raid on Navyug Nursing Home, Old Rehari Chungi, Jammu.

During the raid, blood collection bags were found stocked in the premises and the inspectorate staff seized the available stocks of blood bags and other medicines under the provisions of Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940 and Rules thereunder.

The premises of prominent dealers dealing with procurement and distribution of blood bags and blood transfusion sets were also raided. Investigation in the matter is being carried out and preliminary exercise as mandated under relevant provisions of law has been completed. The public in general is requested to object illegal transfusion and collection of whole human blood since the subject matter is entirely the domain of licensed blood banks. Un-lawful blood transfusion can have serious health implications. A case under relevant provisions of law is being registered against Navyug Nursing Home in the Hon’ble Court of Law.

 

 

Meanwhile Minister for Health, Horticulture and Floriculture, . Sham Lal Sharma, today inaugurated a blood donation camp at Jammu University organized by National Students Union of India (NSUI) & Law School in collaboration with Directorate of Health Services and Medical College, Jammu.

            Director Health Services, Jammu, Dr. Ashok Sharma, Director NRHM, . Yashpaul Sharma, Administrator Medical College Jammu, senior officers of concerned department and representatives of various organizations were also present on the occasion.

            Speaking on the occasion, . Sham said that the decreasing sex ratio in the country is alarming and those support female foeticide be treated as murderers and be brought to the book. He said that female foeticite is a slur on the present day society and this menace if not checked will have a devastating impact on the sex ratio. He hoped that the dignitaries present spread the message of curbing the female foeticide thus help promoting balanced sex ratio. The need is to organize state level seminars to focus on raising awareness to the fact of the sex selective foeticide and the issue be dealt through medical ethics and strong campaign, he added. He said the government has purchased full fledged blood donation van with modern facilities

            The Minister said that recent census report showing substantial decrease in State’s Male-Female sex ratio is an eye opener and time has come to strictly implement the PNDT Act. He asked the people particularly youths to extend their cooperation in this regard.

            Appreciating the efforts of NSUI and Law school for organizing such type of blood donation camps, the Minister said that the government is keen to promote this type of practice particularly in the field of healthcare. He said that government wants massive participation of private health institutions in providing better healthcare services and supplement government efforts in this regard. He hoped that NSUI and other such organizations will expand their activities in future also with added zeal and dedication. He appealed the youth to come forward and donate blood to save precious lives.

            Later, the Minister accompanied by Minister for Revenue, Relief and Rehabilitation . Raman Bhalla laid foundation stone of 2-storeyed PHC at Lower Gaddigarh, coming up at an estimated cost of Rs. 3.17 crore.

www.scoopnews.in

 

The government has agreed to reinstate the suspended pilots and restore recognition of the pilots' union. The strike was on for 10 days.

 

150th Birth Anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore

Image source : Pradip Jain, Patna

To mark the 150th Birth Anniversary of Tagore India, Srilanka and Bangladesh will issue commemorative postage stamps on 7 May 2011.

Over the weekend India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka will celebrate the 150^th birth anniversary of poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, who was born May 7, 1861

The writer and painter who gave both India and Bangladesh their national anthems—“Jana Gana Mana” and “Amar Shonar Bangla”—and who traveled widely, making friends from Europe to Argentina, is still seen as towering cultural icon today. He was the first person who was not from the West to win the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature for his prolific body of work. According to Judith Plotz, a George Washington University professor who moderated an event in the Nobel laureate’s honor at the Asia Society in March, Tagore wrote 12 novels, 3,000 poems and and over 2,000 songs.

The government of Sri Lanka will release on May 7, a postal stamp and first day cover on Rabindranath Tagore, on the occasion of his 150th birth anniversary celebrations.

The stamp, priced at LKR 5, will be released by Sri Lankan Minister for Postal Services Jewan Kumaranathunga at a function presided over by Indian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka Ashok K. Kantha, said Vikram Misri, Indian Deputy High Commissioner in Colombo.

Tagore visited Sri Lanka thrice – in 1922, 1930 ad 1934 – and was instrumental in the renaissance of its culture. Tagore wrote the national anthem for two countries – India and Bangladesh – and influenced the anthem in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan national anthem was written by Ananda Samarakoon, most probably in 1939-40, while he was Tagore’s disciple at Visva-Bharathi University. Samarakoon’s first Shantiniketan stint ended after six months but he heralded a new brand of Sinhalese music influenced by Rabindra Sangeet.

"Creation is not repetition, or correspondence in every particular between the object and its artistic presentation. The world of reality is all around us. When I look at this phenomenon with my artist's eye, things are revealed in a different light which I try and recapture in my picture - call them realistic or not. There is a world of dreams and fantasies which exists only in a man's imagination. If I can but depict this in my pictures I can beat the Creator at His own game."
                                                                                                 - Rabindranath Tagore

In a shocking report by Frederick Kaufman that has been featured on the Foreign Policy website, the role of Goldman Sachs and its Wall Street cohort in creating the food crisis has been revealed.

Frederick uncovers the 1991 scheme where Goldman bankers lead by Gary Cohn created a derivative that tracked 24 raw minerals; including coffee, cocoa, cattle, corn, hogs, soy and wheat and how that scheme was then manipulated to raise food commodity prices.

Each element was given a calculated investment value and is now known as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI).  The GSCI has been a static commodity vehicle for the past decade while bankers focused their attention on collateralized debt (hello economic crisis) until 1999 when futures markets were deregulated. That’s when bankers started taking large positions in grains.

Following the money trail Frederick reports:

Food inflation has remained steady since July 2008 when there was $318 billion in the commodity markets - up from the $55 billion speculators dumped in the first 55 days of 2008. In 2003 commodities futures markets were only worth $13 billion. "You had people who had no clue what commodities were all about suddenly buying commodities," an analyst from the United States Department of Agriculture stated.

Between 2005 to 2008 worldwide prices of food rose 80 percent, and they’ve kept on rising. Olivier De Schutter, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, concluded that in 2008 "a significant portion of the price spike was due to the emergence of a speculative bubble."

So as the dollars poured into the markets, bankers hedged bets on food derivates. Led by oil and gas prices which are the main commodities of the index funds, the new investment products boosted the markets of all other indexed commodities. The result: a food bubble.

Wheat topped $25 from $4-6 and so food prices started skyrocketing. "What we are experiencing is a demand shock coming from a new category of participant in the commodities futures markets," hedge fund Michael Masters testified before Congress in the midst of the 2008 food crisis.

Frederick writes: “The result of Wall Street's venture into grain and feed and livestock has been a shock to the global food production and delivery system. Not only does the world's food supply have to contend with constricted supply and increased demand for real grain, but investment bankers have engineered an artificial upward pull on the price of grain futures. The result: Imaginary wheat dominates the price of real wheat, as speculators (traditionally one-fifth of the market) now outnumber bona-fide hedgers four-to-one.” Read the full scoop on Foreign Policy.

According to him, the solution could be for the US government to outlaw long-only trading in food commodities for investment banks. The Minneapolis Grain Exchange brokers laughed at him - while the world’s poor are on the brink of starvation.

But while US congress denies a food crisis, the World Bank reported 44 million people are affected by the escalating price of food at a G20 meeting. In another report:

"According to Moskovsky Komsomolets, in March global inflation has accelerated in most regions of the world. Inflation in the Euro zone last year amounted to 2.7%. In the U.S., where the economists have long feared deflation, in March the annual price increase amounted to 2.7% as well (in February - 2.1%). Emerging economies also show price increase. In India, consumer prices over the past 12 months increased by nearly 9%, while in February this number was at 8.3%. Annual inflation accelerated in China as well and amounted to 5.4%. A comparable increase in prices was observed over two years ago when in July of 2008 prices rose by 4.9%. Food prices in the country experienced even more significant increase at 11.7% compared to March of 2010."

and

"The food price index calculated by the World Bank has increased in the period from October 2010 to January 2011 by 15%. The prices of everyday consumer goods increased dramatically, including wheat, corn, sugar, butter and rice. The experts consider the Middle East and North Africa to be the most volatile regions today. There are also concerns related to Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova and Tajikistan, where the majority of the population falls into a low income category".

Has your household been adversely affected by rising prices of food? Share your stories with EconomyWatch below.

By. Liz Zuliani

Source: EconomyWatch.com

Agri and Industrial Biotech Day inaugurated at Bangalore INDIA BIO 2011 Business Standard Agri-Biotech and Industrial Biotech Day was inaugurated today by Prof. Samir K Brahmachari, DG CSIR, Secretary to the government of India, DSIR and Mr. MN Vidyashankar, IAS - Principal Secretary to Govt., Department of IT, Biotechnology and S&T, ... and more »

http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/pharma-majors-under-fire-over-trial-compensation/434534/

A Union health ministry probe has revealed that pharmaceutical majors conducting clinical trials in India have not given compensation to majority of the volunteers who died during the trials. Of the 671 deaths that were reported in 2010, the ministry has evidence of just three cases of compensation.
The ministry has asked 44 pharmaceutical companies, including global drug majors such as Eli Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer, Bayer, Merck, Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi Aventis, to explain why they have not given the compensation, which is mandatory under the current drug laws.

A Novartis spokesperson said the clinical trial investigator (who conducted the trial for Novartis) had asserted the deaths were not because of the study medication but due to progression of underlying disease (which won’t necessitate compensation). Similar arguments were made by most pharmaceutical firms that figured in the list.

The data compiled by the ministry show there were 152 deaths reported during Sanofi Aventis’ clinical trials, while in the case of Bayer, the number stood at 138.
The probe, carried out by the ministry under the instructions of a parliamentary panel — Committee on Government Assurances headed by Bharatiya Janata Party MP Maneka Gandhi — also revealed that 88 per cent of the deaths pertained to diseases of cancer and cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disorders.
In a submission to the committee, ministry officials said that except in 26 cases, all other deaths seemed to have occurred due to the advanced stage of illness the clinical trial volunteers were in.
Eli Lilly, Amgen, Bayer, Bristol Squib Myers, Boehringer, Quintiles, Sanofi Aventis and Pfizer are among the companies whose clinical trials figure in this list of 26 cases.
The argument, however, has not gone well with the committee. “Of the 671 deaths they (ministry) have mentioned, 26 are directly related to the administration of the experimental medicine. But they are not sure about the other cases as they use terms like ‘could be’ and ‘may be’, instead of outright rejection. They need to be more specific,” said Maneka Gandhi.
Gandhi said the committee was compelled to seek such information as the ministry did not have any records on the number of deaths and the socio-economic status of the clinical trial subjects who died.
According to Gandhi, the increasing number of clinical trial deaths — 137 deaths registered in 2007, 288 in 2008 and 637 in 2009 — is turning regulatory monitoring increasingly important.
The number of clinical trials going on in India is not more than 1,500, a meagre number as compared to over 100,000 trials that are happening across the world.
The number of trials happening in the US in a year is about 52,000. However, there is no country-specific data on the number of deaths in such trials.
“I am almost sure that other countries do not have this data. This is because there is no centralised body that collects this type of data in those ministries. Clinical trials in those countries (mainly developed) are a more decentralised affair with regulation at regional/local level being sufficient to ensure protection of subjects in such trials,” a World Health Organization (WHO) official said.
Experts, however, feel that identificaiton of actual clinical trial victims and compensating them is a universal practice and needs to be followed in India as well.
“There cannot be a comparison based on deaths as deaths during clinical trials can happen due to various reasons. But what excuse can one give when it comes to compensation? While every clinical trial volunteer is entitled to compensation in case of a severe adverse reaction, is it the same here? In India, it is zero,” said C M Gulhati, a Delhi-based medical expert.
McKinsey estimates that the clinical trials industry in India will touch Rs 5,000 crore by 2011.

SRINAGAR, India (AP) — After facing three summers of violent separatist protests in Kashmir, the Indian government is trying to prevent another outburst of rage with a new approach: charm. It’s starting cricket and soccer clubs, holding out the hope of new jobs, and teaching troops to speak the local language as it changes tactics

SRINAGAR, India (AP) — After facing three summers of violent separatist protests in Kashmir, the Indian government is trying to prevent another outburst of rage with a new approach: charm. It’s starting cricket and soccer clubs, holding out the hope of new jobs, and teaching troops to speak the local language as it changes tactics

After a lifetime of self-elevating sermons on his own divinity, the swami from Andhra Pradesh feared what lay beyond life

Sathya Sai Baba was unusual among India's grotesquely obese multitude of god-men. He was born in southern India in 1926. At the age of 14, according to his army of hagiographers, he had an epiphany: declaring himself a reincarnation of the 19th-century Marathi Sufi savant Sai Baba, he dropped his given name, Sathyanarayana Raju, and began calling himself Sathya Sai Baba. By the time of India's independence, Sathya Sai Baba was 20. But the man claiming to possess cosmic knowledge does not appear even on the margins of independent India's early history.

Southern India in the early decades of India's independence was a place of extraordinary social reform and radical political experimentation. Independent India's first linguistic state, Andhra Pradesh, was created in the south, and a democratically elected communist government appeared further down in Kerala. The new secular dispensation threatened the entrenched structure of Hindu society. Sathya Sai Baba does not figure anywhere in the many debates and movements of this time.

The countercultural movement of the 1960s in the west transformed neglected Indian sadhus into global gurus. Mahesh Varma became, briefly, a spiritual guide to the Beatles. The Bengali Vaishnavite Prabhupada found his early western converts during this time. But Sathya Sai Baba, stationed in distant Puttaparthi, away from the spiritual bazaars of Varanasi and Rishikesh, attracted only a small segment of the hippies who travelled to India. Almost all of them had heard about him from others, and virtually none of them knew what he looked like.

Unlike the Sufi Sai Baba, Sathya Sai Babai's message was banal: there was an emphasis on vegetarianism, love and peace, but no radical insights into the condition of humanity. Nor was he in the business of converting people. Instead, in a novel touch, he urged his followers to be good practitioners of their own faith. But what made him distinct was his uniquely arresting appearance: the flowing saffron robes, the tiny body, and the woollen hair, resembling a topiary bush, that sat above his childlike face. His intellectual limitations were more than compensated for by thaumaturgy, his principal strength, and he cultivated his devotees with impressive gifts conjured from the air.

Until the 1990s, Sathya Sai Baba's influence rarely extended beyond his circle of followers. Within his own home state of Andhra Pradesh, he was rubbished as a charlatan by the charismatic and wildly popular film star-turned-politician NT Rama Rao. But when PV Narasimha Rao, a fellow Andhrite, became prime minister in 1991, it consecrated Sathya Sai Baba's position as the most powerful god-man in India.

There are riveting accounts by devotees of encounters with Sathya Sai Baba. One westerner records being handed a "freshly glazed" photograph, produced in the swami's palm as if by magic, with the address of his ashram on the back. "You've been asking for my address," Sathya Sai Baba tells him. "Here it is. Keep it in your wallet." There are numerous tales of patients beings healed by the swami's sacred ash. In one of the more fantastic tales, the swami is approached by a terminally ill woman; her only hope of survival is a treatment that is available exclusively in Japan, but she does not have the means to travel. The swami smiles, points to a door and asks her to open it. She does. On the other side is Japan.

Sathya Sai Baba preferred earthly modes of transport for himself, travelling in a Rolls-Royce gifted to him by a wealthy devotee. The Sufi Sai Baba had lived in a dilapidated mosque; his supposed reincarnation's "humble" ashram was a veritable palace. For a man claiming to be god, Sathya Sai Baba was oddly enthusiastic about science; perhaps it had something to do with his own mastery of the laws of physics. He collected vast sums of money to build super-speciality hospitals – although no one bothered to ask him why, as god, he would not make hospitals redundant by eradicating disease altogether.

To Sathya Sai Baba's great credit, he condemned the destruction of the Babri mosque in 1992 and, despite blandishments by the Hindu right, always refused to endorse their project. But proximity to power brought its own benefits. In 1993, four men entered the swami's bedroom carrying knives; they were confronted by the police guard, overwhelmed, sealed up in a room, and then shot dead. The then home secretary of Andhra Pradesh described the killings as "cold blooded murder". But investigations never followed.

Reports of sexual misconduct were similarly ignored. At least two young men accused the swami of putting his penis in their mouths. In 2001, India's first Hindu nationalist prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, circulated a letter on his official notepaper condemning the allegations as "concocted".

Ultimately, Sathya Sai Baba's protracted struggle to avert death demonstrated that, even as a human, he was merely ordinary. After a lifetime of self-elevating sermons on his own divinity, he feared what lay beyond life – and he feared it so severely that he ceased to be concerned by the gulf it opened up between image and reality. God spent his final days on a life-support system.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) chairperson Sonia Gandhi were among the thousands of people who paid their last respects today to late Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Dorjee Khandu, who was killed in a helicopter crash on Saturday with four others.

Dr Singh and Ms Gandhi touched down at the helipad in the Raj Bhawan campus here at about 1030 hours, accompanied by Union Home Minister P Chidambaram.

They drove down to the chief minister's official residence and paid their last respects to the departed leader.

The Central leaders also met the family of late Khandu and extended their condolences to them before flying back.

Khandu's body is now being flown to Tawang by an Indian Air Force (IAF) helicopter, where his last rites will be performed at his native village as per Buddhist rituals. A state funeral will be accorded to the late chief minister.

The state government has announced a three-day mourning, starting yesterday, during which the tricolour will be flown half-mast and no government entertainment programme will be organised.

All Central government offices in Arunachal Pradesh remained closed today. The national flag was flown at half-mast yesterday and today in the the capitals of all States and Union Territories.

Hundreds of admirers of Khandu have paid their last respects to their beloved leader here since yesterday. The people lined up the route from the CM's residence to the helipad in Raj Bhawan as the mortal remains of Khandu were transferred in a flower-decked vehicle.

A Pawan Hans chopper, coming from Tawang to Itanagar with Mr Khandu on board, had gone missing minutes after take-off at 0950 hours on Saturday.

Besides Khandu, on board were two pilots J S Babbar and T S Mammik, the chief minister’s security officer Yashi Chadook and Yeshi Lhamu, sister of Tawang MLA Tsewang Dhondup.

The wreckage and bodies were recovered by locals near Luguthang in Tawang district four days later on Wednesday after a massive search operation in which more than 3500 personnel of the Army, Air Force and para-military forces as well as the State police were involved.

Meanwhile, 50-year-old Congress leader Jarbom Gamlin was last night sworn in as the new chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh.

Mr Gamlin, the Power Minister in Khandu's Cabinet, was administered the oath of office by the Governor , General (Retd) J J Singh, in Raj Bhawan after a majority of Congress Legislature Party (CLP) members backed his candidature for the post.

NNN

At least 11 people were killed and three children critically injured when a taxi they were travelling in plunged into a deep gorge in the mountainous Reasi district of Jammu and Kashmir today, police sources said here.

"A Sumo taxi, which was on its way from Shahdara Sharief to Gool, skidded off the road this afternoon and plunged into a 200-feet deep gorge near village Badoora between Chasana and Mahore in Reasi," police sources said.

They said 11 passengers died on the spot while three children were critically injured in the mishap.

On receiving information, police and the army rushed to the spot and started rescue operations.

"The seriously injured are being airlifted to the Government Medical College and Hospital in Jammu," they added.

NNN

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari will pay an official visit to Russia on May 11-14, the Kremlin said on Thursday.

The visit will take place on an invitation from President Dmitry Medvedev, the presidential press service said, adding that talks between Medvedev and Zardari will take place on May 12.

The visit was announced just days after world’s most wanted terrorism Osama bin Laden was killed in a U.S. raid on his compound 50 kilometers from the Pakistani capital.

Islamabad has both praised and criticized Monday’s operation by U.S. troops on its territory, which the Pakistani government was not told about until it was over. In a statement on Wednesday, Pakistan expressed “its deep concerns and reservations on the manner in which the government of the United States carried out this operation without prior information or authorization from the government of Pakistan.”

A cradle of the Taliban movement, Pakistan allied with the United States when U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan in a hunt for bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

Russia has expressed its readiness to support Pakistan in its fight against terrorism. Last March, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called for an international assistance to the Pakistani government in combating terrorist activity.

However, the Russian government has reiterated that it will not develop military cooperation with Pakistan, taking into account the concerns of India, a major purchaser of Russia’s military equipment.

MOSCOW, May 5 (RIA Novosti)

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The first week in May marked a momentous announcement from "the president of the free world": their number-one nemesis had been killed.

Perhaps the spontaneity of some of the celebrations in Washington and other US cities took the administration by surprise. There is only one death that is so widely celebrated in the West. For the United States of America, this mission is most momentous.

A reveller dressed as "Captain America" celebrates the killing of bin Laden (courtesy of Der Spiegel)


The first announcement by president Obama seemed sombre and reflective, projecting an impression of closure and an opportunity for conciliation, "we will never be at war with Islam" he said. Osama Bin Laden was "not an Islamic leader".

Picking on the hints of conciliation, Muslim leaders all over the world put the issue of the world's most-wanted man aside and opted to welcome the opportunity for conciliation. There was not one word of praise for bin Laden or grief over his death from any credible Muslim leader anywhere. We thought that this would mean the end of US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, that Obama's next announcement would be "mission accomplished" and it is time to resume our friendship.

However, the first deflating comment I noted from our Prime Minister right here in Australia, gave the impression that she missed the conciliatory tone of president Obama, opting rather to maintain the fear-alert by her promise to stay the course in Afghanistan and alarming the population about increased risk of a terror attack.

Then the confused conflicting messages started to emerge, the Pakistani government was quick to deny any involvement or knowledge in the operation that led to the killing. They even denied any knowledge that bin Laden might have been living in Pakistan. The US did not take long to corroborate the denial with an allegation that Pakistan is untrustworthy and if they had told them they might have jeopardised the operation. Not to be outdone, India also ignored the potential for conciliation, perhaps in pursuit of some US brownie points, India's home minister immediately charged Pakistan with being a haven for terrorists. In a coincidence mired in irony, the day that the German Der Spiegel questioned the legality of the operation we received the announcement that the US was suing the Deutsche Bank over mortgage fraud.

Nothing in our world happens in a vacuum!

The comedy of errors continued with president Obama's chief counterterrorism advisor at first charging "bin Laden" with trying to use his wife as a human shield only to be contradicted later by the statement that "bin Laden" was unarmed but tried to resist and she was not his wife, but his aide's wife caught in the crossfire even though only the Navy Seals were firing and "bin Laden" had no weapons! The latest revision of the story says that the room had several weapons and they shot at him as he tried to reach for one, or seemed to be reaching for one! It goes on, the son who was killed was not Hamza as first thought but Khaled! Hang on, let us make sure we get it right, it was Khalid not Hamza. Make sure that you get those details, they must add up to something?

Then that telling short video from the White House observation room, the president of the free world looks like he is biting his nails, Hilary Clinton holding a weight of worries on her brows and the rest of the talent in the room, visions that could provide the posters for the inevitable Hollywood production of these nail gripping events described by the president’s chief counter terrorism advisor John Brennan as "probably the most anxiety-filled periods of times".

They say that they respected Muslim tradition by washing the body and seeking to bury it quickly only to then dump it into the sea. Oh what secrets lie beneath thine waves!

To try to make a little more sense of what is happening, one needs to go back in time a few weeks, in March of this year, Reuters reported US Attorney General Eric Holder telling a house panel that "Osama bin laden would never appear in a US court room". This led to speculation that either bin Laden is already dead or would soon be. Various writers have speculated that bin Laden has been dead for some time, for example, in his book Messages to the World: the Statements of Osama bin Laden, Bruce Lawrence presented a compelling argument that bin Laden had been dead since 2004. Others have suspected that he had been dead or killed earlier, possibly in the 2001attacks on Tora Bora. David Ray Griffin in his book Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive provides other compelling arguments that bin Laden died of kidney failure in December ‘01, just a few months after the September 11 attacks. If he was not already dead, Holder's statement meant they had discovered his whereabouts and made a decision to kill him and that they soon would. Though such certainty raises more questions.

For an empire that has suffered great moral and financial losses in Iraq and Afghanistan, the "death" of bin Laden provided that pivotal point from which they can announce a face-saving withdrawal of troops and divert the resources to much-needed facilities and services at home.

For Muslims, torn between the conflicting stories about bin Laden, all we wanted was for the enigma to be put to rest. To us, all the stories about bin Laden painted a picture of our faith that was alien to anything that we knew and cherished. He has been presented as a leader who would stop at nothing to achieve his plans of domination. The enigma drew some to his cause. However, the trickle of individuals who heeded his call were being arrested and he was left with a very small following, perhaps tens of people, perhaps less. They were the remnants of those idealists who came to Afghanistan to help save its people from Soviet occupation, they were trained and equipped by the United States in its hope to tear down Soviet power and limit its influence.

That plan worked too well. The resulting the hubris may have been a key factor in developing the false perception that it can invade, occupy and dominate the resources of countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. They forgot one important element, the Afghan Mujahideen and their foreign friends were fighting a war of liberation whereas the US campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan were campaigns of occupation. They forgot the lessons from history that no people, no society would ever acquiesce to foreign occupation. As the great Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, said: "now that they have achieved their goal, they should pack up and leave".

Muslims are relieved that the West no longer has to beat the drums of war after a "Muslim" bogeyman. We have four views with respect to bin Laden, all these views pour into the same end result.

1) He was a crusader for his own worldview and died with the Arab spring revolution, long before the Navy Seals killed the actual person. Those who sympathised with him would view him as a martyr dying at the hands of his enemies and those who didn't would be rather indifferent. For those who view him as a martyr, from the Islamic perspective, they view martyrdom for a cause as a noble aspiration which had been achieved by its seeker, they would not begrudge him that fate, rather, they would celebrate it and draw comfort from the verse that says: Nay, they are alive, with their Lord, well provided for.

2) He never stopped working for the CIA who trained and equipped him to help defeat the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and that the US wanted to put an end to the enigma and they have given him a new identity and killed off his character, like producers do for a television series. In which case, we are all being manipulated as is the strategy of governments.

3) He died a while ago and the US only saw fit to make a "convincing" announcement this week because there are no longer any strategic gains from keeping his myth alive.

4) He is still in hiding, the US didn't kill him, we will hear of bin Laden "sightings" in the future. However, as the publicity around his death has been so profuse, no-one is going to believe that he lives, he will not want to come out because he knows that they will go after him so his character is killed off just like in point 2.

Under all four scenarios, we need to all view this very difficult period in our lives as over. For those brothers and sisters who were antagonistic or indifferent to Osama bin Laden or those who believed that he was genuine, maybe we can put our different opinions aside and see if we can bring some semblance of unity into our community. Our mission as peacemakers, do-gooders and disseminators of goodwill compels us to look for opportunities and signals to do just that.

The baggage that had been associated with the bin Laden persona which we have been forced to carry has been delivered; let us move on, our work is just beginning.

There is a golden opportunity for the US and the Western world. Seeing the conciliatory reaction from the Muslim world to their operation against bin Laden, the US must receive those Muslims’ hands that have been stretched in the spirit of conciliation and seek a future of cooperation and collaboration on the premise of mutual respect. The estimated 1.6 to 2 billion Muslims around the world are showing signs of goodwill, will the Western world reciprocate?

On another note: A number of countries in the Muslim world have witnessed peaceful and not-so-peaceful revolutions. Whilst these revolutions were taking place, supporters rallied the world over to give them moral support and lobby on their behalf. I thank all those who have supported the oppressed in their march towards freedom. At the same time, I appeal to them to research their audience and select slogans that make sense, slogans that get the message across to the people who witness their demonstrations. In a secular society, chanting that a certain despot should be ousted because he is an enemy of God or religion is really counter-productive and neither conveys the intended message nor wins people over. This is especially so when the chant is in a foreign language. What does it mean when an Australian says: we will give our blood and soul for a foreign country (even if it is the country of his parents)? These become meaningless or negative slogans chanted because we have not applied our minds to develop the message that we need to develop for our audiences. Such chants give the impression that we were not thinking, that we focused on the activity but not on the message, that we started on a journey but lost ourselves on the way choosing a detour that would not deliver us to our destination. Please my dear brothers and sisters, instead of shouting ‘Down down’ whatever, or so-and-so is an ‘enemy of God’, or ‘our blood and soul’ for such-and-such a country or some other counterproductive slogans that were only selected for rhyme rather than reason, we should put a little more effort and select slogans that convey to those who hear them exactly what we want to convey in a manner that they will understand.

Finally, as we hear that the International Criminal Court is about to issue warrants for senior leaders in Libya, very disturbing news is coming out of Egypt that possibly as many as 50,000 individuals have faced military trials without due process. This is a terrible outcome when the Egyptian people showed so much confidence in and gave so much praise for their military. Whatever counter revolutionary forces are influencing these show trials (and the alleged associated tortures), the Egyptian military must as a matter of absolute urgency hand over these cases to the civilian judiciary and the people be assumed innocent until proven otherwise.

Keysar Trad is founder of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia.

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After facing three summers of violent separatist protests in Kashmir, the Indian government is trying to prevent another outburst of rage with a new approach: charm.

What is the world's population according to the latest UN estimates? See when it will hit 10 billion - and which countries are growing fastest
• Get the data

By the end of this year the world's seven billionth citizen will be born. The latest United Nations population estimates, out this week, say the global population will reach 10bn in the next 90 years.

According to the UN Population Division's best-case 'medium' estimate - and you can see the original report here - it will take 13 years to add the eighth billion, 18 years to add the ninth billion and 40 years to reach the tenth billion.

The big increases are coming from countries with high fertility rates - the high-fertility countries identified by the UN comprise of 39 countries in Africa, nine in Asia, six in Oceania and four in Latin America. Today, 42% of the world's population lives in low-fertility countries, defined in the UN report as

countries where women are not having enough children to ensure that, on average, each woman is replaced by a daughter who survives to the age of procreation

Low-fertility countries include all countries in Europe except Iceland and Ireland. Europe is the one region in the world to see its population decline by 2100 - and you can see below how fertility rates go down across the globe by 2100:

That trend is not repeated in the UK - our population has grown by 23% since 1950, and will grow another 21% by the year 2100 to reach 75.7m.

Population expert Hans Rosling points out the release is a treasure trove of new data, including detailed fertility rates by country, life expectancy and migration figures.

The high-fertility countries (> 3 kids per women) are mainly in Africa and only have 18% of the world population = 1.2 billion people. They are expected to tripple their population to 3,6 billion this century! The Low fertility countries are 40% of world population and will decrease their population and the intermediate are 40% will level of at 2050 … The peak size of the world population, therefore, depends on how fast peace, school, basic health care, poverty alleviation and family planning will become accessible to all in Africa and a few other countries like Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan

And what about China and India? China will hit its peak population in 2027 when it will have over 1.395bn people, before reducing down to 941m by the year 2100. India will hit 1.718bn in 2062, and will come down after that to 1.6bn by 2100.

The full data is below for you to play with - and we've added country codes too. What can you do with it?

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May 5 – The Employees’ Provident Fund Organization is a legislative body of the Government of India under the Ministry of Labor and Employment. It manages a mandatory contributory Provident Fund (PF), pension and an insurance scheme for the Indian work force. It is one of the biggest social security units in the world in terms of members and volume of financial transactions. The Employees’ Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act came (1954) into existence on March 4, 1952. The association is governed by a Central Board of Trustees, made up of representatives of the Government of India, provincial governments, … Continue reading →

I was a little disappointed in Seattle last night; only about 25 people came out for a discussion between Sherman Alexie, Chinese satirist Yan Lianke, and Indian novelist Rahul Bhattacharya. (Admittedly, yesterday's rare appearance from the sun did make it hard to descend into the belly of Elliott Bay for the reading; across the street in Cal Anderson Park, everyone was having fun and lounging while pale book-lovers descended beneath the earth like naked mole rats.) Still, Bhattacharya said Seattle was the best-attended reading of the tour so far (four people in Portland bothered to show up), and the audience asked some of the best questions I've heard at a reading in ages, so we represented ourselves pretty well in comparison. Lianke spoke through a translator about the process of publishing his most recent novel about the AIDS epidemic in China, Dream of Ding Village. On the date of the book's publication, the publisher had to send a dozen copies to the censors for examination. After the examination, they seized about half the shipments of the book, the publisher had to issue "a declaration of self-criticism," and they were not allowed to advertise the book at all. Alexie asked if e-books could get around the government's wall of censorship, and Lianke said that no, the government had an even tighter grip on technology than they did on traditional publishing. When Alexie said that his book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian had only been banned at 45 schools across the country last year, Lianke expressed surprise that Americans banned books at all, saying, "I don't feel so lonely anymore."

Bhattacharya read an excerpt from his novel, about an Indian cricket journalist who travels to Guyana. The excerpt featured chicken-fuckers and the man with the longest dong in Guyana (everyone knew about his dong because all the prostitutes in town refused him). He praised the Caribbean for being a "gorgeously vulgar part of the world," which led to questions about whether he felt like a regional writer. He said he did not; he was raised in a stew of languages and he doesn't feel rooted in any single region. Lianke, however, took the opposite, hyper-regional perspective. He said he considers himself to be a "Faulknerian" author. If he can understand one tiny part of the world, he believes his work can be understood on a global level. He said Chinese literature is all about realism right now, because China is in such a complicated place that fiction would only simplify things. The talk covered so much more—about how AIDS in China spread thanks to the money-making amateur phlebotomy trend that spread through the country, how Thomas Friedman is the most popular American author in India right now, how Americans who like cricket are maybe assholes—and my only real complaint about the discussion is that more people didn't get to hear it.

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As the coroner delivers her verdicts on the victims of 7/7 Esther Addley talks to some of the families they left behind

At around 9.45am one sunny morning in July 2005, John Hyman took a call from his daughter Miriam. There had been some sort of problem at King's Cross, she said, and she had been evacuated from the tube. She was fine, though, and he wasn't to worry. Her father suggested she find a coffee shop and wait until things calmed down.

In the hours and days that followed the terrorist attacks on London, the Hyman family clung to that phone call like a lifebuoy, desperately telling themselves the call had come after 9.49am, the moment when 18-year-old Hasib Hussain blew himself up on the upper deck of a number 30 bus to Hackney.

Four days later, after touring the capital's hospitals, putting up posters and making appeals via the media, they were at last told by a police family liaison officer that Miriam had been identified by her dental records. She had been sitting directly in front of Hussain at the moment of explosion, and was blown from the bus and on to the pavement, where she died very shortly afterwards.

Almost six years later, Esther Hyman, Miriam's older and only sister, has found a way of talking about the family's loss without being overwhelmed by it, but there is a heavy sorrow as she sits in the garden of her parents' home in north London, where she and Miriam played as children and smoked as teenagers.

Miriam was 32 when she died, a freelance picture researcher who, thanks to a brief contract at News International, was claimed as "Sun girl Miriam" by the newspaper, a title which, her family delightedly note, would have amused and appalled her in equal measure. She was known at work, says Esther, as "the smiley one". "A gentleman came up to me at her funeral and said: 'I met Miriam only once but I loved her.' And that's what she had the capacity to do, to really make a direct connection with people."

Like her mother, Miriam was a talented artist, and had been planning to start a greeting cards business when she was killed. Mavis Hyman had come from Calcutta in the 1950s, and both her daughters delighted in their mixed-race heritage, says Esther. They loved music, and the weekend before the bombings they had gone together to an Elvis Costello concert on Hampstead Heath, and danced all the way home. "I will always treasure that and be grateful for that."

Philip Russell was also evacuated at King's Cross and also boarded the No 30 bus, in an attempt to get to his banking job. His parents had seen him the previous weekend, when his sister Caroline's baby daughter had been baptised in their village in Kent. Philip's birthday was round the corner, on 11 July, and the family had given him a DVD player. "The last time I saw him was walking across the footbridge at the station, carrying his birthday presents," recalls his father, Grahame. It was on the Monday following the bombings, the day he was due to turn 29, that his parents learned that he, too, had been murdered by Hussain.

Though they were a very close family, Grahame and Veronica Russell have been a little surprised by some of the things they have learned about their son since his death. Philip was a very quiet and reserved young man, says Grahame. "He was no problem at all. One thing about Philip, he was never a problem." He had a large and close circle of friends, they knew, but they hadn't appreciated the extent to which Philip was the quiet centre of his social circle, or how fondly he would talk, at work, about his parents and sister, and his two adored nieces.

His employer, JP Morgan, set up a book of condolences; "he's got articles in this book, people have written from New York, Chicago, Hong Kong. And they have all put something in that makes you proud to know that he was your son."

Those same bleak few hours and days after the attacks – the slow realisation that something was awry, the frantic hunt for information, the agonising wait for their fears to be confirmed – were being repeated many times around the country, and much further afield. Andrea Watson lives just over the Welsh border, not far from Chester, and so when the first reports emerged of explosions in London – "London is quite far away for a lot of people here" – it didn't really occur to her colleagues to be sensitive about the fact that her father and sister both worked in the capital, and that neither were answering their phones.

'So me and my mum kept on trying, we emailed everyone we knew, and slowly friends started clocking in to say 'Yes, I'm fine.'" Her dad got in touch eventually; he'd been stuck in a building where he couldn't get a phone signal. But still nothing from her big sister Fiona Stevenson, a criminal solicitor.

"I wasn't even worried about her, because I thought, Fiona will be at court. Fiona is just jammy like that. She blags her way out of things like that. She's just jammy." Shortly afterwards she had a cup of tea with a friend, "and I remember … just shaking, and I didn't really know why".

The following morning, she and her husband drove south to her parents' home in Essex. "And I remember having this very strange memory, that at the time I was packing I thought, so calmly, well I'd better put in some black trousers, in case there's a funeral." It was more than a week before they were told that Fiona had been killed on the underground at Aldgate.

Though she had always been committed to a career in law, perhaps specialising in human rights, Fiona, who was 29, hadn't found it easy to find work, says her sister; as a result she worked incredibly hard, spending weekends and evenings doing paperwork or at police stations with clients. "But at the same time, she would always have the energy to then go on to a party or to a ball, and then go on after that or to a leaving do. She always managed to squeeze everything in." She was headstrong, full of energy, very kind. A family memory has toddler Fiona warming cotton balls on the radiator for her baby sister's nappy change. "That was the kind of relationship that we had."

Both sisters phoned their parents most days, and on the night of 6 July Fiona spoke to her mother, Emer, about her new flat in the Barbican, and her plan to come home at the weekend, "a normal family occasion, as they would normally have". She had recently returned from a three-month sabbatical in Belize, says Andrea, where she had been working with the government on developing the law around child protection, a trip that came as a revelation. "I think Fiona suddenly realised what she wanted to do with her life. When she came back, she was not only tanned and lovely, but she also had a mind clarity, in a way." The next chapter of her life was about to begin.

Fiona Stevenson, Philip Russell and Miriam Hyman had never met, but for their mourning families, as the inquest process draws to a conclusion, there is one important factor in common, namely that all are believed to have died very quickly after the bombing, without regaining consciousness. The Russells were reassured relatively soon after 7/7 that Philip had died immediately. For the other two families, however, the inquest has offered important and precious answers.

"We have been told that Fiona wouldn't have felt any pain," says Andrea Watson. "I suppose, listening to some of the other survivors talking, it would have been like a light going off. That is something we really wanted to hear, because some of the other people weren't as lucky as that."

The Hyman family made an even more striking discovery. They had been contacted, two years after the bombings, by Clive Featherstone, who had been working in Tavistock Square when the bomb went off, and who had held Miriam's hand in her final moments. "At first we didn't get back in touch with him … [But] since then we've become very close with him."

It was only during the inquest process that they discovered the existence of another man, a passerby called Richard Collins, who had gone to Miriam's side after Featherstone had been told to move along by a policeman. Initially they thought he must have been mistaken and confused Miriam with another victim, but no. "Richard told us afterwards: 'I would have felt a bit silly if it had turned out not to be Miriam, as I actually had her initials tattooed on my chest.' It's his only tattoo but it turned out that he had been so moved that he had this indelible mark put on himself. We find that exceptional."

The loss doesn't get any easier, says Grahame Russell. "[Philip] appears when you talk about things, Something will come up and you'll say, do you remember when we did this … Sometimes you're remembering a young lad, sometimes you're remembering him as a boy, or a guy." But you learn to accept, he says. "It doesn't work all the time, because certain things will suddenly come back and bite you. But you accept it. The thing is, it changes … If anyone has lost a child, they know that it changes their life for ever."

For all three families, it has helped, a little, to invest in establishing a legacy for their loved ones. JP Morgan helped set up a travel bursary at Kingston University, Philip Russell's old college, for students who propose a project that will in some regard help others; his parents sit on the panel that awards the prize each year.

Andrea Watson and her parents, unsure at first how best to use the financial donations given after Fiona's death, talked to the charity with which she had travelled to Belize and learned about the number of young children who die from drowning each year. It seemed fitting, given her love of diving, to set up a memorial scheme to teach children to swim. This year 200 poor children will graduate from the scheme, which will also offer lifeguard training to 100 young people to help them find work in the tourist industry. Friends hope through fundraising to develop it further.

Miriam Hyman's family used donations, and the compensation they were awarded, to fund an eye hospital in India at which 20,000 people have been treated since 2008. They are also working on an ambitious education project, in collaboration with Copthall school, where Miriam and Esther studied, that they hope will teach citizenship and non-violence, "hopefully to minimise the chances of UK citizens ever feeling the need to take arms against their fellow citizens in this way again".

Many other bereaved families, during the inquests, have spoken of their own legacy projects working with individuals spread throughout the world, like little points of light in the darkness.

What does the end of the inquest process mean for them? The past six years, says Andrea Watson, have been about waiting. "We waited to find out if she was dead, we then waited to find out information. We then had to wait for different criminal cases to happen in the courts; we waited for a memorial. We spent a lot of time waiting for things. I don't know what happens after this, but from our viewpoint, we're not then waiting for anything else.

"I still have to explain to my daughter why she doesn't have an aunt, and I don't know how I am going to go about doing that. So I don't think the feelings will ever stop, or the grief. It's more that the waiting is over."

Purulia arms drop: CBI team to visit Denmark for Davy's extradition Zee News New Delhi: Amidst accusations of playing a role in Purulia arms drop case, the government has now decided to send a two-member team comprising a CBI officer and a lawyer to Denmark seeking expedition of Kim Davy- a prime accused in the case. ... Kim Davy extradition case: CBI officer, lawyer being sent to DenmarkTimes of India CBI team to be present in Denmark when Purulia armsdrop accused Kim Davy's ...Economic Times CPI(M) for judicial probe into Purulia caseDaily News & Analysis Mangalorean.com all 17 news articles »

Kim Davy extradition case: CBI officer, lawyer being sent to Denmark Times of India NEW DELHI: Continuing its effort to bring Purulia arms drop case mastermind Kim Davy here to face trial, India will send a team comprising an investigator and a legal officer to Denmark to assist the government there in the court case on Davy's ... CBI team to be present in Denmark when Purulia armsdrop accused Kim Davy's ...Economic Times CPI(M) for judicial probe into Purulia caseDaily News & Analysis CPI-M for judicial probe into Purulia arms dropMangalorean.com all 15 news articles »

Here's my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 1 pm  in association with NZ Mint.

I'll pop the extras into the comment stream. See all previous Top 10s here.

I welcome your additions in the comments below or via email to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz.

Clarke and Dawe is a cracker today.

1. Why food prices are rising - Some people blame speculators for higher food prices. But there are some fundamentals driving this.

Peak oil output, population growth and China's industrialisation are all factors.

But there's also a problem with sliding productivity growth in terms of output growth per hectare of crops such as wheat, soy and rice.

This, in theory is good news for New Zealand's farmers, who are less reliant on grain output.

Thank goodness for grass, although we're not increasing output much there either.

But I have given up on toast as a food after reading this. Meat and dairy for me.

Here US resource economist Michael Roberts at his blog GreenGreenGrains picks out some stats from a recent FAO report.

The chart below tells the story too.

Recent data from FAO shows a pretty rapid slowdown in productivity growth.  The price spike in 2008 occurred in a particularly bad year in which yields declined on a worldwide basis for three of the four largest food commodities.  In 2009 all four of the majors saw yield declines, something that hasn't happened since 1974. 

2010 couldn't have been much better and was probably worse, given how bad things were in the U.S, the world's largest producer and exporter.

One question came up about planted area diluting yields through expansion onto marginal lands.  There might be some of that.  But I think it's mainly a combination of weather and slowing technological progress in breeding.  Cutbacks on basic science research do have consequences.  And so does climate change, even if it hasn't affected the US, yet.

2. Britain's biggest slump since Lehman -  Philip Aldrick reports at the Telegraph that Britain's economy has just suffered its biggest loss of momentum since the Lehman Bros crisis of 2008.

Together with weak PMIs on manufacturing and construction earlier this week, the services sector survey indicated "the largest loss of growth momentum seen since just after the collapse of Lehmans" in September 2008, said Chris Williamson, Markit's chief economist. He added that the PMI data signalled that GDP was expanding at a quarterly rate of just 0.4pc.

The weak PMI data has forced economists to push back their expectations of a rate rise to the end of the year. Many are now expecting them to be left unchanged until early next year, and the market is factoring in just one rate rise in 2011 - in December. Just two months ago, the markets believed there was a nine-in-10 chance that rates would have been lifted on Thursday.

3. The lobbyists are earning their money - Reuters reports Goldman Sachs is working hard to water down the Volcker Rule, which was designed to seperate the commercial banks from the investment banks and stop the Too Big To Fail banks from using their government guarantees to gamble and make big bonuses for bankers while offloading the risk to taxpayers.

High return on investment from lobbyists these days.

The Volcker rule was one of the main topics on the agenda when Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein met recently with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro. Wall Street chiefs do not often lobby top regulators directly, but this issue is unusually important to Goldman.

"They're totally freaked out about Volcker," said a Goldman lobbyist who declined to speak on the record for fear of losing the contract. "People are working on that a lot, with agency staff, with lawmakers, you name it."

Indeed, lobbying disclosures show Goldman representatives have been working both sides of the political aisle and meeting with top officials in the White House and regulatory agencies.

4. 'Just sell the gold' - As the countdown starts to America defaulting on its debt from August 2 if its debt ceiling isn't raised by Congress, some are wondering what the US government could do to avoid default.

Felix Salmon from Reuters has a suggestion:

Among the resources to be exhausted is a whopping US$400 billion in gold reserves — that’s the current value of the government’s store of 261 million ounces of gold. Selling at these prices seems like quite a good idea to me: I can’t think of any particularly good reason why the government should be storing $3,500 of gold for every household in the country.

5. Not so fast - PW at The Economist decodes the ECB's statement overnight, which seemed to trigger such global financial volatility.

Working that out is an exercise in deciphering various code words used by Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the ECB. "Vigilance" signals an early move, "strong vigilance"—used in March—makes it all but certain the ensuing month. Describing the current stance of monetary policy as "very accommodative" suggests that a rate increase may be on its way before too long. Instead Mr Trichet chose to describe policy merely as "accommodative".

What this suggests is that a follow-up rise in June is now unlikely and that one in July may be less certain than previously anticipated. There are two reasons why the ECB might wish to raise rates only gradually: the strength of the euro and the troubles of peripheral economies like Greece, Ireland and Portugal whose sovereign-debt woes have required bail-outs.

6. The Credit Impulse - Australian economist Steve Keen comments on this week's slump in Australian house prices.

The fact that the Credit Impulse leads changes in house prices also gives some indication of where future prices are likely to go. The mortgage Credit Impulse shown below is for the acceleration in mortgage debt over a year: the change in the change in mortgage debt compared to the previous year.

With the mortgage credit impulse still headed south, and leading falls in house prices by 3-6 months, that implies that there are at least two more quarters of negative house price movements coming up.

7. The population impulse - The New York Times reports on a UN report out this week forecasting the global population will hit 10 billion by 2100 from 7 billion now.

Previous assumptions were that the world's population would stabilise around 2050. African growth is the difference.

Oil and food price picks anyone?

Growth in Africa remains so high that the population there could more than triple in this century, rising from today’s one billion to 3.6 billion, the report said — a sobering forecast for a continent already struggling to provide food and water for its people.

The new report comes just ahead of a demographic milestone, with the world population expected to pass 7 billion in late October, only a dozen years after it surpassed 6 billion. Demographers called the new projections a reminder that a problem that helped define global politics in the 20th century, the population explosion, is far from solved in the 21st.

“Every billion more people makes life more difficult for everybody — it’s as simple as that,” said John Bongaarts, a demographer at the Population Council, a research group in New York. “Is it the end of the world? No. Can we feed 10 billion people? Probably. But we obviously would be better off with a smaller population.”

8. Pay attention to the headline - Economist Heleen Mees writes at VoxEu that headline inflation is more important than many central bankers think.

For much of the 20th century, core inflation has been both less volatile and more persistent than the inflation rate of non-core goods. However, the integration of China and India in the global market added more than 2.3 billion consumers and producers to the global economy. They entered as suppliers of core goods and services and as demanders of non-core commodities. The result has been a major, persistent, and continuing increase in the relative price of non-core goods to core goods.

Even if the current spike in headline inflation proves to be transitory, past experience suggests that it may well lead to a permanent increase in real hourly wages. Unless monetary policymakers in the US favour feverish boom-and-bust cycles with prolonged periods of high unemployment, they had better start paying close attention to headline inflation, like their counterparts at the ECB do.

9. Clarke and Dawe - Oliver Beerthanks discusses the death of Osama bin Laden. Experts is his favourite author. Funny as hell.

10. Totally irrelevant video of electric race bikes on the Isle of Mann. Ewan Macgregor narrates.

We all need to get ready for peak oil in our own way. HT Lance Wiggs via twitter.

Congress is up in arms over the Pakistan government's possible involvement in the sheltering of Osama bin Laden, and lawmakers are readying a long list of ways to place pressure on Pakistan until it gets answers.

Most of the sticks being contemplated on Capitol Hill involve the cutting of foreign aid. And while there likely will not be one overarching bill to cut off all aid to Pakistan, lawmakers and staffs are finalizing plans to reduce or restrict assistance. And unfortunately for Pakistan, this debate will take place within the larger context of a budget debate that includes an emphasis on cutting foreign aid.

The issue of how to deal with Pakistan divides both parties and both chambers. Traditional conservative/liberal distinctions do not apply, and lawmakers are bringing their long-held skepticism of Pakistani aid into the debate. In each party, there are roughly two camps -- those who want to withhold or at least reduce aid now, and those who want to wait to see if information is forthcoming that Pakistani officials were actually involved in supporting bin Laden's efforts to evade capture.

In the Senate, two top Democrats who control the writing of key legislation that allocates Pakistani aid have been particularly critical: Senate Armed Services chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) and Senate Appropriations State and Foreign Ops subcommittee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT). They are joined by House Foreign Affairs Committee ranking Democrat Howard Berman (D-CA), who issued a blistering statement on Thursday criticizing the administration's handling of the military assistance to Pakistan.

"Under the current legislative scheme, I don't think our military assistance is serving the interests we are intending it to serve," Berman said in a Thursday interview with The Cable. "What I'm asking the administration to do is focus on getting Pakistan to change its approach and go after extremist groups. If they're not successful, we should reconsider giving this money."

Berman was critical of the administration's decision to certify that Pakistan "demonstrated a sustained commitment towards combating terrorism," a requirement under the Kerry-Lugar-Berman aid bill passed last year, which is worth $7.5 billion over five years.

He also argued that a huge fund to reimburse Pakistan for counterterrorism operations, known as the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund (PCCF), has not been effective. That fund was transferred to the State Department last year, but the administration decided to give it back to the Pentagon in the fiscal 2011 budget deal, in order to trim State's overall budget number.

That places it back under the jurisdiction of Levin's committee, which is starting work on its fiscal 2012 defense authorization bill now. And PCCF is one of many ways that lawmakers are preparing to use aid funding as leverage over Pakistan.

"There are plenty of ways to hold the funds up. There needs to be a real form of tough love," said one senior Democratic aide said. "We're not trying to hamstring the administration, we're trying to give them leverage with the Pakistanis."

Berman's focus on the military aid is shared by other top Democrats, including Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA), who sits on both the defense and foreign ops appropriations subcommittees.

"We should cut off the military aid but not the economic development aid," Moran told The Cable Thursday. "We should insist the aid be used for education and economic development, but not for subsidizing the military presence on the border with India, which is what its being used for now."

Leahy is among those who never believed that the economic aid to Pakistan was being spent in an effective way, or with proper planning and oversight. His staff crafts the Senate's funding bill for Pakistani aid, but that bill won't surface for months, because all appropriations bills are on hold due to the ongoing budget debate.

The fiscal 2011 foreign aid allocations still have not been finalized, giving appropriators another avenue to trim the money going from U.S. taxpayers to Pakistan. The budget deal struck to keep the government running last month set overall allocations, but didn't get into the details of how the aid would be disbursed.

"We have to work with a smaller number overall for foreign aid, so that invariably will affect amounts for Pakistan," said one Senate appropriations staffer.

Several congressional aides told The Cable that other options include slowing the transfer of Kerry-Lugar money to Pakistani coffers, enforcing other provisions in the law that require the administration to consider Pakistan's progress on issues like corruption and human rights, or adding new legislative conditions on Pakistan aid.

There is already one bill in Congress, sponsored by Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX), that would require all aid be frozen until the Pakistani government proves it was not complicit in hiding bin Laden. But that bill is not likely to see the light of day on the House floor and several aides said it didn't make sense.

"How do you prove a negative? It's just ridiculous," one Republican House aide said.

But there are other ways to condition aid short of making Pakistan prove its innocence. Congress could require the administration to certify that Pakistan is cooperating with the bin Laden investigation. Or Congress could add conditions that have nothing to do with bin Laden, such as requiring Pakistan to raise its famously low tax rate for the rich before the United States provides any more direct budget support.

On the other side of the debate, an uneasy alliance of senior national security-focused lawmakers are stressing the importance of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship and warning that abandoning Pakistan could have dangerous long term effects, as it did after the U.S. cut off aid in 1990.

That group includes Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry (D-MA), Senate Armed Services Committee ranking Republican John McCain (R-AZ), and Senate Appropriations State and Foreign Ops ranking Republican Lindsey Graham (R-SC). On the House side, both heads of the House Appropriations State and Foreign Ops subcommittee, Kay Granger (R-TX) and Nita Lowey (D-NY), are urging a go-slow approach, although Granger has said she wants to examine cash payments to the Pakistani civilian government, known as "direct budget support."

Even House Foreign Affairs chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) -- who has pledged to cut aid to countries not cooperating with the United States -- is urging caution.

"They are an important partner. We would be jeopardizing our security if we cut off aid," Ros-Lehtinen told the Washington Post.

As more information in the bin Laden back story emerges and lawmakers get their ducks in a row, what's certain is that each and every aspect of aid to Pakistan is going to be scrutinized carefully.

"This is a delicate and balanced assessment that we have to carry out," said a senior GOP House aide. "There are enormous pressures on Congress to do something and everyone is in agreement that the relationship has to be assessed. The difficulty is finding what levers are most effective."

What is likely to happen in the end? If the Obama administration argues aggressively that the money is needed on national security grounds, they are likely to get their way.

"If the president, Gates, Clinton, and Panetta all stand up publicly and say we really need the aid, they'll probably get the aid," said one GOP senate staffer. "The Pakistani accounts may get a haircut, but they won't go down to zero."

Awaking to the news on Monday morning that al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. Navy SEALs in Abbottabad, Pakistanis had two ways to react: express outrage that the world's most-wanted terrorist had successfully sought sanctuary within their country's borders, with or without the assistance of Pakistan's security establishment; or, decry the fact that the United States had violated Pakistan's national sovereignty with a unilateral strike deep into its territory.[[BREAK]]

The fact that the Pakistani state and independent media have opted for the latter is no doubt frustrating for Washington, which is urgently trying to assess whether Pakistan remains an ally in the effort to stamp out terrorism. Since the news of bin Laden's killing broke, the Pakistani media has been railing against the American "insult" and "invasion" of its territory. The government, too, issued an obdurate statement describing the U.S. raid of bin Laden's compound as an "unauthorized unilateral action." What should have been an introspective moment has already become a defiant one. Rather than ask why bin Laden was able to live in Abbottabad, possibly since 2005, Pakistanis are asking how the U.S. managed to penetrate Pakistani airspace and hover for 40 minutes before leaving.

While Pakistanis fret about territorial violations, U.S. government officials have started asking difficult questions about bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad, and the nature of his support network within the country. Some members of Congress have called for economic assistance to Pakistan to be significantly reduced or suspended. Such enough-is-enough reactions are understandable, yet counterproductive, for they will only stir more defiance and reactionary tendencies among the Pakistani public. 

The fact is, Pakistanis are largely unmoved by the killing of bin Laden, but they are anxious about its potential fallout. The nation is currently bracing for a blowback, as the Taliban threatened retaliatory attacks barely hours after bin Laden's death had been announced.There are also widespread concerns about more unilateral strikes on Pakistani soil, especially after U.S. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers announced on Monday that at least a dozen senior al-Qaeda leaders are based in Pakistan.

Moreover, the Indian reaction to the news of bin Laden's killing has hardly helped matters. More than future U.S. actions, Pakistan fears that India may be emboldened by the Abbottabad raid to launch unilateral strikes against terrorist camps proximate to the eastern border. It is this cumulative paranoia of what might yet ensue that informed the weak response to the incident by Pakistan's Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir, who stated that the bin Laden operation "shall not serve as a future precedent for any state, including the U.S. Such actions undermine cooperation and may also sometime[s] constitute threat[s] to international peace and security."

In this perceived moment of vulnerability, the Pakistani public sphere is unlikely to turn against the Pakistan Army (except to criticize it for failing to prevent the U.S. incursion) and question its role in the bin Laden fiasco. Although the military and intelligence apparatus are the progenitors of Pakistan's current predicament (whether through duplicity, complicity, or incompetence), they are also being framed as the nation's last hope. 

Since Pakistan's creation, the army's institutional imperative has been to ensure state survival against threats posed by external enemies. The post-bin Laden concerns about interventionism play right into what Dr. Hasan Askari Rizvi has termed the Pakistan Army's "savior complex." In an ironic twist, a moment that should spark a crisis of credibility and a call for accountability could become an opportunity for the army to consolidate its role as the nation's protector against a variety of outside threats deemed to be existential. If this happens, the U.S. can only expect more of the same in its dealings with Pakistan.

But in the army's protectionist stance lies a rare opportunity to chart a new course in U.S.-Pakistan relations. Earlier this week, the Pakistani Ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani, said that the government would conduct internal investigations to determine how bin Laden was able to live undetected in the Pakistani heartland, and whether any state or security officials were helping to shelter him. On Thursday, however, the Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir backtracked on this idea, suggesting that investigations into the whole episode be left to historians.

Pakistan's civilian government should not back down from the chance to conduct an inquiry. By supporting the civilian government in such an effort - whether in terms of capacity, by helping establish protocols and a timeline, or by applying back channel pressure on military officials to comply -- the U.S. and other members of the international community can help Pakistan's nascent civilian government hold the army accountable. Such a move would significantly boost the government's credibility by helping it answer the Pakistani public's many burning questions regarding the bin Laden incident.

No doubt, inquiries in Pakistan are a bit of a sham, a highly refined form of political dodging and deferral. The current government alone has launched several inquiries into matters ranging from corrupt practices in accommodating Hajj pilgrims to match-fixing allegations against members of the national cricket team. None of these have yielded positive outcomes. Moreover, historic inquiries such as the Hamoodur Rehman commission - which investigated alleged atrocities committed in Bangladesh during the 1971 war with India - have set a poor precedent for such processes (that report was not made public until decades after the fact, and was found severely lacking).

But this needn't be the case again. Citing pressure from the international community to provide answers, the civilian government should appoint an independent, public commission to investigate the nature and scope of bin Laden's network within Pakistan. The commission should also investigate the army and intelligence agencies' claim that bin Laden's presence, and the U.S. raid it provoked, were the consequences of an "intelligence failure." Such a commission should be empowered -- and encouraged -- to summon high-ranking military and intelligence officials for interrogation.

This inquiry must be a purely civilian exercise that drives home the fact that the Pakistan Army is ultimately accountable to the Pakistani people through their elected representatives. It should be conducted solely by Pakistanis, without any foreign interference, but its findings should be shared with the world. And if the commission determines that bin Laden's presence and the Abbottabad raid resulted from army and intelligence failings, it should launch a stringent review of the Pakistan Army's defense expenditure. 

These actions will help reorient the conversation in Pakistan to focus more on the pitfalls of the country's current national security strategy. It will also put U.S.-Pakistan relations back on the right track. Seeking long-term, sustainable bilateral relations with Pakistan, the U.S. enacted the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009.  Assistance mandated by that act seeks to support Pakistan's democratically elected civilian government to develop increased oversight of national security issues, and maintain "effective civilian control of the military" and its institutions.  

Despite the positive language, though, the Obama administration has prioritized military-to-military exchanges with Pakistan, owing to a narrow focus on counterterrorism operations and the military and political endgame in Afghanistan. The recently concluded episode involving Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor who shot and killed two Pakistanis in Lahore in January, showed the extent to which the U.S. government is willing to defer to military officials at times of crisis. However, it is the world's historic reliance on the Pakistan Army that led us to Abbottabad. A new approach by the U.S., and a new debate within Pakistan, may yet show us the way out. 

Huma Yusuf is a columnist for Pakistan's Dawn newspaper and the Pakistan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

In his Distant Voices (1994), John Pilger narrates how a Soviet intellectual got the shock of his journalistic life during his visit to the US in the mid-1980s. He spent a few days in New York studying American print and electronic media. He concluded: in the Soviet Union, we suppress media to block divergent ideas. In the US, despite an immense profusion of media, there is such a remarkable unanimity of opinion on critical issues! Despite so many claims of freedom of expression, the American media, he felt, was complicit with the American government over various state agendas, which led to human rights abuses and suppression of freedoms in and outside the US.

If the same Soviet intellectual could visit Pakistan today, he would find that in Pakistan, the (electronic and print) media’s pandering to and unanimity of view(s) over the Pakistani military’s ‘causes and needs’ has made the American media’s complicity look like a minor coincidence. When it comes to the military, especially the Pakistan Army, the media finds, hears, or sees no evil, and smells no rat. Here is the weekly round-up in its chronology that I watched on a channel on Friday, April 15 (the same news items were aired by other channels too, but in this short column I cannot enumerate all of them):

1. Pakistan’s foreign debts are now 58 billion dollars.

2. India has set its sights on Gilgit-Baltistan now. After aiding and abetting the Baloch insurgents, India has set itself a new goal to cause Pakistan’s disintegration. It has started supporting separatist elements in Gilgit-Baltistan. The Gilgit-Baltistani terrorists plan to hold protest rallies for the rights of the people of Gilgit-Baltistan. The first objective India wants to achieve through these terrorists is to block the trade route between Pakistan and China. The US has also decided to support these terrorists. Soon American government-sponsored meetings will be held in the US [the channel did not identify in which cities] in which expatriate terrorists of Gilgit-Baltistani origin will kick off a campaign for ‘independent Balwaristan’.

3. The ISI chief has told the CIA boss directly that Pakistan will not accept the drone attacks.

4. The American government has said [apparently, only after the ISI chief had left] that it will continue to launch drone attacks.

5. Iran offloaded passengers from an airplane and arrested a suspected terrorist. A Pakistani official delegation, on board, was also offloaded.

6. Saudi Arabia will provide a monorail service to Pakistani pilgrims. Of all the South Asian countries, it is only Pakistanis who will have this facility.

7. In the forthcoming budget, there will be 18 percent increase in the money allocated for the military.

 

Let us take a closer look. The media is telling Pakistanis that they are insecure. India, the eternal enemy, is closing in on us from both sides, i.e., Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan. The US, more of an enemy than a friend, is also complicit in the conspiracy to break up Pakistan. Iran offloaded the Pakistani delegation. The insinuation of an inimical Iran is subtle, but cannot be missed. Iran evokes fear.

But then it is not just the enemies without who are lurking out there. The ‘Balwaristan terrorists’ are about to start subversion. Another subtle insinuation: Gilgit-Baltistan has a majority of Shias, and the present provincial government is dominated by the Shias. Iran, the country that offloaded our delegation, is also a Shia majority state.

Nevertheless, there is good news too. The ISI chief went to the States and returned, and it was only after his return that the Americans dared say that they would continue to send the drones. Saudi Arabia is good news. The Pakistani viewers should be thankful that Saudi blessings during the Hajj will be showered on Pakistanis only. The last news item on the weekly round up: 18 percent hike in the budget for the ‘defense of the country’. Education and health put together will not receive more than two percent of the forthcoming budget as opposed to 70 percent reserved for the ‘defense of the country’.

The real test of the media loyalty to the Pakistan Army, however, came on 2 May when the American Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden. The killing itself is insignificant compared to what is at stake: the credibility of the Army and its intelligence wing the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). He was killed in the safest possible place in Pakistan. His castle was less than a kilometer from Pakistan’s premier military academy. Before any Pakistan could hear or say that the Army had been sheltering and protecting Osama, the media launched a nonstop blitzkrieg to divert Pakistani people’s attention to other issues by scaring them with the spectre of the ‘evil’ forces out to destroy Pakistan. Hundreds of examples can be cited here, but a few representative ones should suffice.

One anchor who can see the suffering of the people of Gaza from the shore of Karachi, but cannot see the (Pakistani) people of Parachinar being daily killed by the Army-backed Haqqani Taliban, went hysterical, telling his viewers that the Americans jammed Pakistan’s radars when they raided Osama’s castle. The issue in his opinion was not where Osama was found and who sheltered him, but the fact that now “the Americans will look for Pakistan’s secret defense-related (i.e., nuclear) installations in the name of searching for terrorists. Our [nuclear] sites are not safe anymore.”

“How long would the Americans continue to violate the sovereignty of Pakistan?” thundered another anchor, “As if drone attacks in Pakistan’s northern areas were not a blatant violation of our sovereignty! Now they are attacking us so close to our capital!” An anchor, a Taliban apologist who makes strange claims about how people think and react vis-à-vis the Americans, speculated about which Pakistanis had been collaborating with the Americans - implying that the civilian government of President Zardari had facilitated the action, and by doing so had undermined the Army. Yet another anchor said: “I am standing on a pile of ashes and a volcano is raging inside me! Out national honor has been violated!”

Not a single anchor said that the Army, or some rogue elements in the Army, should be held accountable for harbouring Osama. No one asked a basic moral question: When you have taken billions of dollars from the Americans and promised to act against the terrorists, why would you support the super terrorist? Is it not pure cheating taking someone’s money and acting against them? But, no. In order to divert people’s attention from the culprits who gave sanctuary to Osama, our anchors in their ‘love’ of Pakistan and its ‘sacred institutions’ (i.e., the Army and the ISI) have sacrificed all norms of professional integrity and ethics.

The inevitable conclusion, therefore, is this: Who needs education and health when the very security of the ‘country’ is at risk? What is the point going to school or to hospital when the enemies within and without are operating? The very idea behind the security state is that civilians are expendable, that there is no need to build civilian institutions because we are permanently invaded, that when the whole world is your enemy, you must build an almighty army. National security must be safeguarded all the time even if the people end up as illiterate and in poor health. A country without people is acceptable, but what is a country without defense capabilities? Thus, education and health are a small price to pay for the sake of the ‘country’! This reasoning is why the media never takes the army to task for not allowing the government to audit the billions it squeezes from the exchequer, which belong to the people of Pakistan.

In the same book, Pilger writes: “Without the loyalty of The New York Times and other august (mostly liberal) media institutions ‘of record’, the criminal invasion of Iraq might not have happened and a million people would be alive today.” In Pilger’s style, I would like to say: without the loyalty of the Pakistani media, the army would not have been able to get away with billions of rupees every year in the name of national security leaving millions of Pakistanis without proper access to education and health. Think about it: 17 million Pakistani kids do not go to school because there are not any they can go to; and one government hospital caters for about half a million Pakistanis.

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(Steven Hayward)

Scott along with many observers (me included) have raised their eyebrows about Bin Laden's burial at sea with full Islamic observances. If it had been left to me. . . well, let's just say I probably incline to what I imagine are Scott's inclinations.

However, the matter did send me back, as it has many times since 9/11, to Churchill's account of the British campaign to retake the Sudan in 1898 and avenge the death of General Charles Gordon at the hands of Islamic fanatics more than a decade before, thrillingly told in The River War. (A new, annotated edition of the original two-volume version of The River War is forthcoming soon, produced by University of Alaska professor James Muller. Jim was kind enough to send me galleys a while ago.)

A little bit of the "backstory" is required to appreciate some of the rough parallels between 1898 and 2001. The British had dispatched General Gordon to Khartoum in 1885 to evacuate the British garrison that was growing increasingly isolated and menaced by the rising tide of jihad led by Mohammad Ahmed, who declared himself to be the second great prophet of Islam--the Mahdi. Gordon's forces were too little and too late; he was surrounded and wiped out by the Mahdi's forces. Although the Mahdi and his armies should not be regarded as the exact equivalent of today's terrorists, they were nonetheless barbaric in the extreme. They mutilated Gordon's body, and cut off his head to be paraded around the Mahdi's villages.

The British did nothing to avenge the death of Gordon or retrieve their position in the Sudan for several years. But throughout the early years of the 1890s, public opinion in favor of a war against the Madhdist forces in the Sudan steadily grew, until, following the replacement of a Liberal Party government with a Conservative Party government in 1895, it was decided to embark upon the reconquest of the Sudan. I wrote about the parallels between then and today in The Weekly Standard a few weeks after 9/11:

There was no single reason why this decision was made. As Churchill explained it: "The diplomatist said: 'It is to please the Triple Alliance.' The politician said: 'It is to triumph over the radicals.' The polite person said: 'It is to restore the Khedive's rule [the Khedive was the native ruler of Egypt] in the Sudan.' But the man in the street--and there are many men in many streets--said: 'It is to avenge General Gordon.'" (Emphasis added.) Much the same can be said about the aroused state of public opinion in America since September 11: by all means a deliberate and patient military and diplomatic campaign must be made by President Bush, but at the end of the day there is one requirement by the man on the street in America: The World Trade Center must be avenged.

Our moment of vengeance has at length arrived. But there is still another parallel from The River War to be drawn: what to do about the remains of the Mahdi, who had died and been enshrined in a large tomb in Khartoum. General Kitchener ordered the tomb destroyed and the Mahdi's remains disinterred. Similar to the Obama administration, Kitchener wanted the Mahdi's tomb destroyed and his remained scattered so that it wouldn't become a rallying point of jihadists. But Kitchener also wanted to give the Mahdi's skull to the Queen to use as an inkwell--a plan that Lord Cromer, the British administrator in Cairo, countermanded when he found out about it.

Although the Mahdi's similarities to Bin Laden are far from exact, from Churchill's evaluation of the matter it would seem that he would have lined up on the side of the Obama administration in giving Bin Laden a proper burial:

By Sir H. Kitchener's orders the Tomb has been profaned and razed to the ground. The corpse of the Mahdi was dug up. The head was separated from the body, and, to quote the official explanation, 'preserved for future disposal'-- a phrase which must in this case be understood to mean, that it was passed from hand to hand till it reached Cairo. Here it remained, an interesting trophy, until the affair came to the ears of Lord Cromer, who ordered it to be immediately reinterred at Wady Halfa. The limbs and trunk were flung into the Nile. Such was the chivalry of the conquerors! . . .

It may be worth while to examine the arguments of those who seek to justify the demolition of the Tomb. Their very enumeration betrays a confusion of thought which suggests insincerity. Some say that the people of the Soudan no longer believed in the Mahdi and cared nothing for the destruction of a fallen idol, and that therefore the matter was of little consequence. Others contend on the same side of the argument that so great was the Mahdi's influence, and so powerful was his memory, that though his successor had been overthrown his tomb would have become a place of pilgrimage, and that the conquering Power did not dare allow such an element of fanaticism to disturb their rule. The contradiction is apparent. But either argument is absurd without the contradiction. If the people of the Soudan cared no more for the Mahdi, then it was an act of Vandalism and folly to destroy the only fine building which might attract the traveller and interest the historian. It is a gloomy augury for the future of the Soudan that the first action of its civilised conquerors and present ruler should have been to level the one pinnacle which rose above the mud houses. If, on the other hand, the people of the Soudan still venerated the memory of the Mahdi--and more than 50,000 had fought hard only a week before to assert their respect and belief--then I shall not hesitate to declare that to destroy what was sacred and holy to them was a wicked act, of which the true Christian, no less than the philosopher, must express his abhorrence.

No man who holds by the splendid traditions of the old Liberal party, no man who is in sympathy with the aspirations of Progressive Toryism, can consistently consent to such behaviour. It will also be condemned by quite a different school of thought, by the wise public servants who administer the Indian Empire. It is an actual offence against the Indian Penal Code to insult the religion of any person; nor is it a valid plea that the culprit thought the said religion 'false.' When Sir Bindon Blood had forced the Tanga Pass and invaded Buner, one of his first acts was to permit his Mohammedan soldiers to visit the Tomb of the Akhund of Swat, who had stirred the tribes into revolt and caused the Umbeyla campaign of 1863. It is because respect is always shown to all shades of religious feeling in India by the dominant race, that our rule is accepted by the mass of the people. If the Soudan is to be administered on principles the reverse of those which have been successful in India, and if such conduct is to be characteristic of its Government, then it would be better if Gordon had never given his life nor Kitchener won his victories.

Different observers will come to varying conclusions about how firm are the parallels and differences in the character of Islamic jihad between what the British faced in 1898 and what the United States faces today. I offer this passage as food for thought.

Nota bene: This passage is one of the many Churchill suppressed--because he came to realize his many criticisms of Kitchener were politically imprudent--from all the subsequent editions of The River War that most people have seen. You'll have to get Muller's splendid new edition (not yet listed on Amazon, alas) to see this and many other hugely interesting passages from what I regard as one of Churchill's two or three greatest books.

The Air India crisis acquired a political hue on Thursday with the government suspecting the opposition BJP of instigating the striking pilots. The Air India crisis acquired a political hue on Thursday with the government suspecting the opposition BJP of instigating the striking pilots. HT reports.

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