The Google Ruckus

I have an article up on Asia Times about the Google hack entitled Winner of the Google-China feud is – India.

In the article I speculate that Google might have hoped to leverage international outrage over Chinese hacking in order to get better treatment from the PRC (more aggressive pursuit of hackers and reduced filtering for its Google.cn search engine in order to put it on a better competitive footing vis a vis archrival Baidu).

However, as the issue became an international human rights/open society/US government cause celebre, Google may have gotten more than it bargained for.

A few interesting data points that I didn’t cover in the article:

1. The main hack—sometimes known as the Aurora exploit or Trojan.hydraq—exploited a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer that enabled the command-and-control server to inject a shell and run its application on the target computer unmolested after the victim opened the trick e-mail attachment that directed his computer to the hacker’s URL.

2. According to the UK’s Register, an Israeli computer security firm, BugSec, reported the vulnerability to Microsoft on August 26, 2009. Microsoft had planned to grunt out a patch in February 2010, but the worldwide kafuffle compelled it to rush an “out of band” patch to users on January 21.

3. Symantec’s Security Response Blog took an attitude of “meh” to the Google incident, implying that the only thing new about this intrusion was Google’s decision to go apesh*t about it:

The story of the attacks went public following the announcement from Google, with news media organizations worldwide choosing to place the story prominently on the front pages of numerous Web sites and printed publications. Far from being confined to security-related mailing lists and blogs, the story became part of the week’s headlines with its news of potentially politically motivated “information warfare” in conjunction with the possibility of significant change ahead for one of the world’s most prominent companies.
…
The Trojan.Hydraq incident was no different and was almost textbook in its execution of a targeted attack. While there is much talk of the most recent incident, we observed a Trojan.Hydraq based attack in July 2009. …

Trojan.Hydraq itself is very much a standard backdoor Trojan. Considering the efforts that the attackers put into staging the attack as a whole, the end malware is not so sophisticated. It doesn't use any anti-debugging or anti-analysis tricks. It just uses some basic obfuscation in the form of spaghetti code on some of its components.

4. The Aurora exploit seems to have been a big hack. If what’s leaking out of Google is accurate, perhaps 30 Silicon Valley companies were targeted. But to me it’s open to question whether the scale of the hack was an escalation of Chinese attacks, or merely an opportunistic, organized attempt to exploit the “day zero” IE vulnerability with a simultaneous, multi-enterprise attack, knowing that the flaw would get patched soon after the assault occurred. China’s interest in industrial espionage, conducted directly and through hacker cutouts, is undeniable and the Aurora incident was perhaps just business as usual.

5. There have not been a lot of full-throated support of Google by the high-tech community. On the other hand, Bill Gates pooh-poohed the intrusion on Good Morning, America and John Chambers of Cisco seemed less than impressed. Maybe all they care about is shoveling Beijing’s bloody coin into their pockets but maybe the hack wasn’t all that remarkable.

6. Microsoft is, of course, the main target of Chinese hacks. In contrast to Google’s chest-thumping, Microsoft goes for low key engagement with Chinese entities. Its efforts are chronicled in a very interesting blog called “Dark Visitor” (English translation of the characters for “hacker” – 黑客. The Chinese government obliged Microsoft (while eliciting squeals from the Chinese high tech community) in August 2009 by arresting one Hong Lei, the author of Tomato Garden, the pirated version of Windows XP retailing for about US$ 0.70 that enjoys sizable market share inside the PRC. Also in August 2009, Microsoft participated in a conference of Chinese “security researchers” a.k.a. hackers, apparently hoping to bring hackers over from the dark side with the lure of financial incentives. In the case of the Aurora exploit, however, Microsoft apparently didn’t receive a useful heads-up from its Chinese friends.

7. I’m wondering if Google went public in the hope that aroused Chinese netizens and the international IT community would flock to its support and force a climbdown by the Chinese government on Google.cn results filtering, as Beijing was forced to do last summer in the case of the “Green Dam Youth Escort”, a porn and violence filtering software it tried to mandate for installation on all PCs. Difference is, Green Dam was apparently a poorly conceived, easily circumvented kludge that, allegedly, relied on 3000 lines of stolen code from Cybersitter (the Chinese creator is now looking at a US$2.2 billion lawsuit). When the Green Dam mandate was announced in June 2009, Chinese media watcher Imagethief did a good, snarky takedown on this doomed effort to deprive Chinese netizens of their porn privileges.

8. Presumably anybody in China who cares about open Internet access is getting their daily dose of porn, Tibetan nationalism, and whatever through one of the many Great Firewall workarounds promoted by the open society crowd. Green Dam would have endangered these users at their PCs—not only blocking images but, presumably firing off messages to the mothership about what was getting blocked. Loosening the filtering restrictions on Google.cn, on the other hand, could never substitute for untrammeled access to the global Internet through a proxy. So I don’t think Google, whose Google.cn is solidly in second place behind Baidu in China’s in-country search engine business, is tapping into a lot of pent-up demand for a slightly liberalized but still porn-free local search engine.

9. After Google’s threat to stop filtering its search engine results became front-page news around the world, the Chinese government is probably not in the mood to do Google lots of favors. There is brave talk about how China needs Google but the Chinese government may not see it that way. Current reports indicate that Google is negotiating to retain its R&D center inside China and I would expect that’s just a way for Google to keep its mangled foot in the door until some major regime liberalization occurs in the currently unforeseeable future.

Update: According to an insider account in the Jan. 14 Wall Street Journal, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who came from the Soviet Union, put his anti-totalitarian foot down and ordered the public pushback against China over the objections of CEO Eric Schmidt.

From the Department of...

...Unfortunate Checkout Aisle Juxtapositions


The black man with the heavy-lidded, smoldering glare, the mouth set in sullen defiance, the badass watchcap, the hatred for America's decadent capitalist values...

Hey, wait a minute, that's Tiger Woods!






Of course, that's Tiger Woods on the right, courtesy of the current issue of Vanity Fair.

On the left is alleged underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, in a photo that Newsweek used on the cover of its January 11 issue (the China Matters media strategy precludes shelling out $5.95 for Newsweek, so I found and cropped the relevant picture of Abdulmutallab pretty much as it appeared on the cover. More about that later.)

On an expedition to my local supermarket I was confronted by these two strikingly similar images and was reminded that an important function of illustrations is to help shoehorn readers' perceptions into preconceived narratives.

The most recent images available of Abdulmutallab don't do a good enough job of conveying implacable jihadist menace.

The photograph released by the U.S. Marshal's Service after his detention is a compositionally striking and flattering photo of a glum but passive, well-groomed, and not particularly threatening-looking young man in a snow-white T-shirt that looks like it came out of an ad for fabric softener.

On the other hand, Newsweek could not be expected to use the other current picture that was available:




This smiling, relaxed image of Abdulmutallab, together with a graphic representing the plane he planned to blow up, was provided by a jihadist website as part of the martyr media package used to glorify, motivate (and recruit) perpetrators of suicide attacks.

As for Tiger Woods, the image Vanity Fair used on its current cover was taken by Anne Leibovitz in 2006, well before his current troubles.

Apparently, Leibovitz was trying to show us the great athlete and competitor--the tiger, shall we say-- beneath the pastel knits of the pampered corporate pussycat.

Instead, the picture does a good job of showing that no golfer, not even Tiger Woods, looks good with his shirt off, especially with a lighting scheme dialed to "decaying mackerel". The snaps were shelved until Vanity Fair discovered that the world was thirsting for pictures of Woods looking down and dirty.

Returning to the underwear bomber, the Newsweek cover is rather effective.

The resentful expression, the inner city accoutrement of knit cap and windbreaker, the booking-photo-meets-security-camera-screen-grab photographic values, the heavensent subliminal message of the vertical bars, all combine to create an image--and impression--of a mean, scary outsider.

Interestingly, the picture Newsweek used was taken in 2001, during a class trip to London arranged by the exclusive international school Abdulmutallab attended in Togo.

Here's the uncropped photo, with Abdulmutallab and a schoolmate (whose expression and physique would defeat any attempt to convey whipcord menace) in front of some London landmark. The photo was taken by his history teacher, Mike Rimmer, who provided it to the media.

Abdulmutallab was 14 years old or so at the time.

Using an image of a child to illustrate a story about the crimes of a man is, to me, a questionable journalistic decision.

To be fair, Abdulmutallab was already attracted to a radicalized brand of Islam at the age of 14 and probably did not really enjoy his visit to the Crusader stronghold of London just as the Western world was cooking up the invasion of Afghanistan.

And Tiger Woods was probably already well on his way to destroying his trophy life/trophy wife gilded existence through serial lechery when Anne Leibovitz snapped his portrait.

But it should not be forgotten that pictures often don't tell us anything new; sometimes they merely emphasize something we think we already know.

And sometimes--when images of a (black) terrorist and America's most successful (black) athlete unexpectedly converge--they can tell us something about ourselves, something that maybe we don't want to hear.


The images of Abdulmutallab come from the Facebook page of Nigerians for Nigeria, which has an interesting rundown of his background, and further photos by Mr. Rimmer.

P.S. I received some negative feedback concerning this post. To clarify, I feel that any picture showing an unsmiling black male staring at the camera can't illustrate an article about terrorism (Abdulmutallab) or the temptations of fame (Woods) honestly, given America's race-related issues. Instead, the picture is all about using a symbol of American racial fears to juice stories in which race is a virtually non-existent element. And using old images that enable this coding--instead of more recent and relevant photos that are readily available--is doubly reprehensible. CH, 1/13/10

Weaponizing Treasury’s Financial Enforcement: Credit Suisse Rolls Over on Tehran

…While Poker Players Fight Back

From her perch at Politico, the estimable Laura Rozen reports that the U.S. government has slapped Swiss bank Credit Suisse with a “half billion dollar” settlement punishing the bank for helping Iran evade U.S. financial sanctions.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced the decision, flanked by the head of Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Bush administration holdover, and China Matters bete noire Stuart Levey.

China Matters’ response: Grrrrrrrrr.

During the North Korean disarmament debacle in the last years of the Bush administration, China Matters tirelessly documented Levey’s efforts to sabotage the State Department's negotiated arrangement with Pyongyang by throwing up countless regulatory and extra-regulatory roadblocks to the key trigger for the deal: release of $24 million in North Korea-related funds frozen at Banco Delta Asia in Macau.

I hear echoes of that fiasco in the Credit Suisse deal.

I would note that, according to the Deferred Prosecution Agreement that Politico linked to, the $536 million dollars looks like it’s not Credit Suisse’s (also, the stock price doesn’t seem to have taken much of a hit since the announcement), which makes it look like Credit Suisse got off kinda easy in return for helping drop the hammer on Tehran:

…the parties agreed that the United States could institute…forfeiture against certain funds held by Credit Suisse…

And

Credit Suisse hereby acknowledges that $536,000,000 was involved in transactions described in the Factual Statement…[emphasis added]

So, it looks like it’s not Credit Suisse capital or earnings at stake. Probably it’s Tehran’s money and we have another Banco Delta Asia/North Korea situation.

In other words, just as we tied up North Korea’s money in a Macau bank in order to exert political pressure in 2007, now we’re tying up Iran’s money in a Suisse Bank.

From the U.S. point of view, the situation is improved because, instead of the money frozen under the jurisdiction of a bewildered and resentful foreign monetary authority, this agreement binds Credit Suisse to hand the money over to the United States on demand or face the consequences.

The Iranians, of course, are welcome to wade into the Swiss courts to try to get their money released from Credit Suisse. Once the $536,000,000 makes it to the United States, however, fuhgedaboutit.

So I guess China Matters may have Stuart Levey to kick around a lot longer.

Levey going rogue on North Korea policy, perhaps at the behest of the Office of the Vice President or some other hardline coven inside the Bush administration was one thing.

However, my strongest objection was the use of Treasury’s ability to exploit America’s central position in the world financial system to intimidate our insufficiently aggressive friends into disrupting the international financial dealings of North Korea and Iran and who knows who else.

I realize that President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton are much enamored of “soft power” and feel that working the financial levers is preferable to shooting a cruise missile down someone’s throat. And keeping on a Bush appointee to run the show makes for continuity, even if Levey runs an independent and refractory bureaucratic bastion.

But my main gripe about “financial enforcement” is that it’s unilateral, utterly untransparent, and targets our allies.

Most importantly, weaponizing financial enforcement undercuts America’s stance as indispensable honest broker in the world financial system.

Considering the emerging challenges to America’s role as world reserve currency from the EU and China (though, admittedly, no one seems eager to take on the job of keeping the world awash in liquidity, any more than any nation or bloc wants to assume Uncle Sam’s role as the world’s largest debtor nation), it would not seem especially wise to give other countries more reasons to start avoiding the greenback—and dodging Treasury’s heavy-handed intimidation.

However, the Credit Suisse announcement gives me a cause for holiday cheer: the opportunity to revisit one of the most popular posts in the history of China Matters, The Worldwide Gambling Storm, whose focus was the unilateral extension of the long, costly, and rather arbitrary arm of U.S. financial enforcement into foreign jurisdictions, and update the story.

The point of departure for the post was the passing of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) in 2006, a piece of calculated political folly by a delusional presidential aspirant, Bill Frist.

Under UIGEA’s aegis, the U.S. aggressively cracked down on financial institutions that held electronic wallets or otherwise facilitated the play of American gamers on offshore Internet poker sites.

The U.S. action shaved billions of dollars off the market value of British on-line gambling companies, who relied on U.S. players for much of their revenue.

The U.S. government also threatened to compel British investors to disgorge their illicit gains from illegal poker play by Americans.

The result was near apoplexy in the British establishment, and rage at the U.S. government’s use of Treasury sanctions to intimidate foreign corporations into adhering to U.S. national and even state statutes.

The Europeans brandished their own regulatory and financial clubs in a June 2009 decision citing the U.S. for WTO violations in its jihad against online gaming:

…report made it perfectly clear that there are high costs associated with U.S. infractions, citing the losses in revenue and stock market capitalization incurred by European companies who had to vacate the U.S. market. The report also provided a projection of what U.S. online gaming revenue would have been if not for the UIGEA, which showed $10 billion of hypothetical revenue loss for 2012 alone.

The report also chastised the U.S. Department of Justice for continuing to pursue European online gambling and betting companies that left the U.S. market in 2006, stating "The report comes to the conclusion that these proceedings are legally unjustified as well as discriminatory, because the activities of EU companies took place under the cover of US WTO commitments."

The U.S. is in the process of formally withdrawing from its GATS obligations as they pertain to online gaming. While the European Commission acknowledges that this process may have some influence on the actions it may ultimately take, it also was quick to point out that the U.S. would still be culpable for all its GATS violations prior to the withdrawal.

Meanwhile, American poker players felt the claws of the government at their throats.

In keeping with the theme of politicized and selective financial enforcement with zero due process, those of us with memories of the contortions and pretexts used to tie up North Korean-related funds at ADB will have a smile at this (although the 24,000 online poker players whose funds were frozen are no doubt struggling with other and stronger emotions):

Gambling911.com can reveal that the total amount of seized monies from the two largest online poker rooms, PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, has now reached $40 million.

Gambling911 sources informed us that a few banks voluntarily froze another $10 million in funds over the past few days following news that the US Attorney out of New York froze $30 million transferring through payment processors on behalf of PokerStars and Full Tilt.

Last week, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York instructed four banks to freeze accounts belonging to online payment processors.

In a letter dated Friday and faxed to Alliance Bank of Arizona, the prosecutor alleged that accounts held by payment processor Allied Systems Inc. were subject to seizure and forfeiture "because they constitute property involved in money laundering transactions and illegal gambling offenses."

Some of the said money was reportedly slated as $10,000 buy-ins to the World Series of Poker won by online players in satellite tournaments. The 2009 WSOP is already in progress with the main event set to begin the first week in July.

America’s poker players have found a friend in Barney Frank, who has memorably described UIGEA as “the stupidest bill ever written”, because of its impingement on Americans’ rights to lose their money quickly and efficiently as possible on the Internet, and because it mandates costly and onerous monitoring and enforcement obligations on the banking industry.

Just after Thanksgiving, Frank engineered a six-month postponement of full implementation of UIGEA to June 2010, and will try to push through a repeal of UIGEA in the next few months.

Frank, who doesn’t gamble himself but receives significant campaign contributions from gambling advocates, visited the World Series of Poker and apparently told reporters that the $40 million seizure did not represent the priorities of the Obama administration (again bringing to my mind recollections of the rogueish tendencies of Stuart Levey’s shop at Treasury):

In response to one question, Frank questioned whether [sic] the recent seizure of some $40 million connected to individual players’ online poker funds, asserting instead that it was likely Bush Administration holdovers at the Department of Justice’s Southern District of New York who initiated the action.

The expectation appears to be that President Obama, himself a poker player, will support the reversal of UIGEA and a more sympathetic stance toward online poker.

The European Union appears to think so:

The investigation has been ongoing since March 2008 and the report has been long awaited. But it might not be entirely coincidental that its release comes as U.S. Representative Barney Frank's bill, the Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection, and Enforcement Act, is in committee and looking for support. In fact, the report specifically stated that the European Commission's actions against the U.S. hinged on the path chosen by the Obama administration, asserting: "Moreover, the approach that the new US Administration takes with regard to the subject matter under investigation in this Trade Barriers Regulation examination may also be relevant for determining which subsequent acts are in the interest of the Community."

EU Trade Commissioner Catherine Ashton said: "Internet gambling is a complex and delicate area, and we do not want to dictate how the US should regulate its market. However, the US must respect its WTO obligations. I hope that we will be able to reach an amicable solution to this issue."

In addition to Frank, the Poker Players’ Association—ostensibly one million strong—has enlisted the services of Alfonse D’Amato. Whether this alliance of opposites is able to overcome the inevitable Republican resistance to any Obama administration initiative, regardless of its merits or ideological slant, remains to be seen.

But for now, interested readers can revisit The Worldwide Gambling Storm--which covers UIGEA, Britain's big bet on online casinos, Chinese gambling, the nuts and bolts of cheating people at poker, the origin of the phrase “pass the buck”, and an amusing anecdote concerning another poker-playing American president: Harry Truman—at this link.

Happy reading and happy holidays!

p.s. In the e-mail notice for this post, I incorrectly referred to the Swiss Bank as UBS i/o Credit Suisse. It's corrected here. Sorry 'bout that.

Bloody Kashmir, Bloody India, and the Bloody Deal

Western media is always on the alert for China’s insults to its Uighur and Tibetan minorities. Certainly, China’s occupation of Tibet since 1950 has been a brutal, bloody botch that killed upwards of half a million Tibetans during the rebellion in the 1950s and during the Cultural Revolution. Despite China’s determined efforts to fulfill its enlightened despot role and reduce the body count in recent decades, Tibet’s hostility to Han control is intense, justified, and seemingly terminal.

But I think the well-oiled Western outrage machine gives a free ride to India, and brushes aside New Delhi’s ongoing shenanigans in Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Nepal, Jammu-Kashmir, Balochistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan as “nothing to see here” efforts by the dominant power (and vibrant democracy!) in the region to secure its sphere of influence.

Kashmir is the place where India’s democratic ideals and regional power aspirations collide with the greatest violence.

Kashmir is largely Muslim; it would have ended up in Pakistan at partition in 1947 but for the fact that its ruling Maharajah was a Hindu and something of a dingbat.

As it has clung to Kashmir for six decades, India has recapitulated Israel’s policies on the West Bank, occupying the region, ignoring U.N. resolutions calling for a plebiscite, and steadfastly resisting calls to internationalize the issue even as Kashmir’s insurgency exploded following a rigged election in 1989.

India has benefited from Western support and complacency in keeping Kashmir off the international front burner.

An EU delegation visited Kashmir in November; its statement that “Kashmir is an integral part of India” was triumphantly and extensively trumpeted in the Indian press.

The United States, as part of its pro-India tilt in Asian policy south of the Tibetan plateau, as recently as December 10 formally rejected a call by Pakistan’s president Asif Zardari to insert itself in the issue.

Kashmir is a big deal and a big problem.

Here are some numbers:

Population of India—controlled territories of Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh: 10,000,000

Muslims as % of population: 67%

Number of people who demonstrated in the Kashmiri capital of Srinigar in 2008 to protest the Indian government’s transfer of 100 acres of land (out of a total of 6000 square miles in the total parcel) to a Hindu religious board to construct shelters for pilgrims visiting the sacred cave at Amarnath in Kashmir to worship a phallus-shaped ice stalagmite known as the Shivalingam that waxes and wanes with the seasons but is, most Hindus will indignantly tell you, not a phallic symbol: 500,000

Indian troops stationed in Kashmir: 700,000

Since all Americans are by now counterinsurgency experts, we note immediately that the locals to troops ratio is an eye-popping 14:1.

That’s the sign of a major security problem. In fact, that’s the sign of a major insurgency.

If we had gone into the Iraq occupation with those kinds of numbers (instead of Donald Rumsfeld’s ratio of roughly 300,000 troops per 24 million Iraqis for a ludicrous 80:1 or the industry standard of 50:1), we would probably have been able to keep a lid on things, too.

Make no mistake: the Indian occupation of Kashmir is as bloody, expensive, oppressive, and unpopular as the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories or, for that matter, the Chinese occupation of Tibet.

68,000 Kashmiris have died in the conflict, which reached its height in 2001 and then waned, apparently because Pakistan lessened its support of Kashmiri militants under U.S. pressure after 9/11. (By way of contrast, the Israel-Palestinian struggle has claimed less than 10,000 lives over twenty years).

The conflict has produced a great deal of ugliness and cruelty as India has pursued in heavy-handed occupation and counterinsurgency strategy in Kashmir at odds with its image as Asia’s democratic paragon.

Tim Sullivan of the AP filed a report on atrocities in Kashmir that should have received wider notice.

According to Sullivan, human rights groups have discovered 2400 bodies in multiple graveyards of the estimated 8,000 Kashmiris who were “disappeared” by Indian security forces during the worst of the insurgency in the 1990s:

Two decades after the insurgency broke out, only a tiny fraction have been accounted for.

The bodies themselves give a few clues. According to villagers ordered by police to bury them, they are often of particular sorts: there is blood and shattered bone where they were shot, or they are burned beyond recognition. Many show signs of beatings. At one cemetery, police told villagers they would bring seven bodies for burials. They brought seven heads
…

If support for the insurgency has withered, the Indian soldiers are still widely detested. Perhaps nowhere more than in the villages forced to bury the dead.

Atta Mohammed knows all about the nameless dead. The 70-year-old Bimyar farmer has buried 235 of them. He knows their bruises and their bullet wounds. He knows if they were burned so badly their mothers would not recognize them.

"I took mud from their mouths and ears. I cleaned the blood from them," said Atta, a quiet man with rotting teeth and a neatly trimmed white beard. About 12 years ago, police began bringing bodies to be buried in a small empty field. They stopped only when there was no more room.

The West gives overwhelming weight to India’s democratic system, its role as a victim of Islamicist terror, its support for U.S. strategic goals in South Asia, and its value is an anti-China chesspiece in the great game of Asian policy.

And it may be justified to take the Chinese occupation of Tibet—instead of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank—as the standard of comparison for Indian misbehavior in Kashmir.

Indeed, I would expect there is a dark deal at work: the governments of the West have decided to turn the same official blind eye to India’s occupation of Kashmir as they do to China’s presence in Tibet so that both powers can contentedly brutalize their subjugated minorities without interference while fulfilling their assigned roles in the multi-polar, U.S.-directed 21st century world.

I can imagine that, in the continual cycle of wounded pride, horse-trading, and reassurance that goes on between New Delhi and Washington in the shadow of China’s strategic, economic, and fiscal importance, India insisted that, if human rights in Tibet was off the diplomatic table, human rights in Kashmir should be removed as well.

In fact, the first conspicuous retreat from the ideals of Obama’s election campaign to the realities of his presidency was the removal of Kashmir from the brief of Richard Holbrooke, who was expected to broker the rapprochement and grand anti-terrorism alliance between the civilian governments of Pakistan’s Asif Zardari and India’s Monmohan Singh.

Instead, India’s democracy was granted (im)moral parity with China’s single party dictatorship in the matter of how it could treat its occupied territories.

Meanwhile the Western media keeps the anti-Communist pot boiling by bashing China and coddling India.

But there is a bloody side to India that we are unwilling to confront.

Nepal in the News!

…Kinda

Nepal’s government has decided to notify the international community formally of numerous violations of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) by the Nepalese Maoists. The last straw was the declaration of two newly minted autonomous regional governments in Maoist strongholds in eastern Nepal.

Good.

Maybe then the world will take notice of Nepal’s slide back into civil war thanks to the calculated defiance of the Maoists and India’s uncontrollable compulsion to meddle in Nepalese internal affairs.

I have four pieces on the deteriorating political situation in Nepal, and the exacerbating effect that the regional power rivalry between China and India has had on the brinkmanship of the various political parties.

Three pieces are up at Asia Times Online (Sino-Indian Rivalry Fuels Nepal’s Turmoil, Nepal Rhetoric Warms to Violence, and Monarchy Re-enters Nepal’s Political Mix) and one on the ideological roots of the Maoists is in the Counterpunch print edition (you can subscribe here).

India is working non-stop to transplant sufficient financial, military, and diplomatic backbone into Nepal’s outgunned bourgeois democracy so that it will continue to defy the Maoists and deny China the services of a friendly regime in Kathmandu.

The Nepalese Maoists are not a bunch of grubby jungle insurgents; they are the biggest party in the Constituent Assembly and held the prime ministership for almost a year before they pulled out in response to the machinations of the democratic parties and India.

The Maoists have street muscle on tap for conventional political intimidation in the form of their Young Communist League and a hardened military force, their People’s Liberation Army, currently rusticating under UN supervision but ready to return to action.

If the Maoists resume the insurgency, it will probably be as a strategic move from strength, not desperation, and could be a bloody business.

In the previous iteration of the insurgency, from 1996 until 2006, the Maoists exploited Nepal’s vast, mountainous terrain and the Nepalese army’s lack of men and equipment to fight the government to a standstill in a conflict that claimed 16,000 lives.

I find the West’s lack of interest in this burgeoning crisis curious, particularly when contrasted with the media frenzy that greeted the Dalai Lama’s visit to another Himalayan flashpoint, Arunachal Pradesh (territory claimed by China but held by India), at the beginning of November.

The Western press, in its wisdom, has instead obsessed on three hot stories out of Nepal:

1. A female Nepal government minister vigorously slapped around a local bureaucrat for failing to arrange suitable transportation during her visit; the interesting but ignored backstory was that she felt that she had been intentionally insulted because of her membership in the aggrieved lowlander Madhesi ethnic group, which is perennially treated with condescension and suspicion by Nepal’s hilly elites;
2. The Nepalese government tried to trump the Maldives underwater cabinet meeting by strapping on oxygen tanks for a twenty-minute confab at 17,000 feet adjacent to the Mount Everest base camp to publicize global warming issues;
3. Elephant kills eleven (including one victim trying to worship it as an incarnation of Ganesh!) in rampage of terror in southern Nepal.

Meanwhile, the Nepalese Maoists helpfully provided the Telegraph Nepal with a scorecard of the thirteen autonomous districts they intend to set up, color-coded to show the two already declared and listing the scheduled dates for declaration of autonomy in the other eleven over the coming week.

That’s good. Given the level of Western coverage coming out of Nepal, we’ll need all the help we can get to follow the story.

The elephant, by the way, is still at large!

Obama’s Afghan Surge a Geopolitical Windfall for India

…and a Catastrophe for Pakistan and China

Well, I guess President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is going to go into the record books with a big, fat asterisk next to it.

I have an article up at Asia Times Online Beijing broods over its arc of anxiety addressing the implications of the U.S. plan to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

As long-time readers of China Matters know, I’ve consistently argued that Pakistan is the collateral damage in our Afghan policy.

Under U.S. pressure, Pakistan’s army is forced to go to battle a united Pashtun insurgency that would otherwise be split into murderous factions battling each other for control of the broad plains of southern Afghanistan and using Pakistan’s mountainous FATA as little more than a secure and inaccessible redoubt for rest, recreation, and resupply.

Instead, we expect Pakistan to go to war against its own Pashtun areas for the sake of the distinctly ungrateful Hamid Karzai.

For Pakistan, it’s an extremely difficult and costly battle with few tangible benefits. The dean of South Asia journalists, Syed Saleem Shahzad analyzes Pakistan’s problems with the current U.S. Afghan strategy—and America’s attempts to address them--in his Asia Times Online article, Pakistan at odds with Obama’s vision. It’s well worth reading.

The anti-Taliban war is dangerous for Pakistan as a nation because the Pashtun/Deoband/extremist nexus has a tremendous ability to make mischief throughout Pakistan by exploiting the enormous Pashtun underclass in Karachi, the vulnerability posed by the borderline-heretical character of the dominant Baralvi Islamic observance in Punjab and Sindh, and the smoldering resentment of the tens of millions of urban and rural poor throughout the country against the corrupt, pro-Western elites that rule them.

What might push Pakistan’s military over the edge and demand that the Pakistani government be reorganized and abandon the war is the awareness that India is not only profiting from Pakistan’s misery; it is actively encouraging the Obama administration to continue its ruinous involvement in Afghanistan and deny Pakistan the relief of a prompt withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces.

India, thanks to the “world’s biggest democracy” meme and the unpopularity of China’s Communist, Tibet-and-Uighur repressing single party state, gets an undeserved free ride from the Western press.

Actually, New Delhi is a serial and callous meddler in the matters of its neighbors (see Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Sikkim). It is impossible to view India’s involvement in Afghanistan (and the anti-Taliban war) as anything other than a conscious effort to exacerbate and prolong the miseries Pakistan is suffering as a result of the U.S. policy.

It is revealing that virtually the only nation egging on the Obama administration to stay the course in Afghanistan was India. A weakened Pakistan not only diminishes Islamabad’s ability and appetite to do mischief in India and Jammu/Kashmir; it deprives Beijing of an effective ally in China’s intensifying struggle with India along their long and disputed border.

As to why President Obama chose to surge Afghanistan, I think he recoiled from the idea that, come the 2010 elections, the Republicans could make hay with pictures of Taliban dancing in the streets of a reconquered Kabul.

Since the President is apparently a decent and intelligent man, he also shrank from the idea of racking up another 500 or so U.S. fatalities over the next 18 months just so the Democrats could limit their losses in the congressional elections.

So I think all the well-publicized debating and handwringing over the Afghan policy involved in-depth consideration (and, if there are any practitioners of the Chicago school of cost benefit analysis in the White House, literal calculations) concerning the lives saved and improved that would balance the scale against the increased number of U.S. dead and maimed the surge will bring.

But even if the United States is able to defy the demographic, political, and military forces driving Afghanistan toward a Pashtun triumph and achieve victory (or a bloody stalemate) every day the Pakistan is forced to support the U.S./NATO strategy, the greater damage it suffers.

The only nation that benefits clearly and immediately from the Afghan surge, it would appear, is India.

Nepal in Crisis: Article up at Asia Times

Nepal in Crisis: Article up at Asia Times

It began with snark…

Why Isn’t the Foreign Press in Kathmandu?

Wailing and gnashing of teeth greeted the Indian government’s withdrawal of permission for foreign journalists to cover the Dalai Lama’s mid-November visit to the disputed border territory of Arunachal Pradesh and the town and monastery of Tawang on the border of China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region, as the Guardian tells us:

Four passes to Arunachal Pradesh, previously given to foreign reporters, have been revoked and all other news organisations that applied for permits including the Guardian have been turned down.

"We are incredibly surprised and disappointed to learn that reporters' visas to Arunachal Pradesh have been cancelled ahead of the Dalai Lama's visit," said Heather Timmons, the president of the New Delhi-based Foreign Correspondents' Club.

But nothing was going to happen there—the Chinese and Indian governments have wisely decided to set the burner for “border tensions” on simmer—except an eruption of local color, devotional Buddhist droning, drinking of butter tea, and babbling in Tibetan and local dialects that, it is safe to say, no outside journo could understand.

At the same time, a lot is happening in Kathmandu.

Massive torchlight parades, clashes between the cops and demonstrators, vows to bring the Nepalese government to its knees, a tottering U.N. peace process, barely concealed great-power sparring between China and India—and all this in Kathmandu, a city one could probably walk across in half a day, filled by a tiny, compulsively chattering and confiding Anglophone elite.

…

So far, Western reporting has reported, remotely and somewhat uncomprehendingly—and, perhaps reflecting the shared desire of the Indian, Chinese, and Western governments not to inflame the situation with excessive attention and rhetoric, with a marked lack of interest--on the massive demonstrations in Kathmandu led by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). The CPNM has vowed to bring 300,000 activists to the capital to shut down the government.

Andrew Buncombe of the Independent chose to devote his Nepal reporting to the admittedly amusing story of a female government minister who administered a vigorous pummeling to a hapless local official after he failed to arrange a satisfactory luxury vehicle for her tour of a southern district (subsequently a warrant has been issued for her arrest).

Then I realized that the balance of the article was a useful overview of the situation in Nepal. Asia Times Online agreed and ran it today as Sino-Indian rivalry fuels Nepal turmoil -- minus the snarky bits, which I reproduce above for the amusement of China Matters’ loyal readers.