Author Archives: vinod

GWOT Update… Got Another One… In Pakistan

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Good News: Got Another One In Pakistan

Bad News: Why are so many of them in Pakistan?

A top al-Qaida leader whose links stretch from Osama bin Laden’s training camps to extremist networks in Europe has been captured in Pakistan, a U.S. law enforcement official confirms for the first time.

Pakistani officials also told The Associated Press that Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, a dual Syrian-Spanish national with a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head, had been flown out of the country to an unspecified location.

Nasar was captured in a November sting in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta that left one person dead,

…It would not be the first time Pakistan _ a key U.S. ally in the war against terrorism _ has detained al-Qaida terrorists and turned them over to the Americans.

Pakistan says it has captured more than 750 al-Qaida suspects since the Sept. 11 attacks and has handed most of them to the United States.

Now adjusting for reportage (e.g. folks captured elsewhere are less likely to get the press conference treatment than Pakistani’s seems to give), it says a lot about the state of governance in Pakistan that the Northwest Frontier is somehow a more hospitable place for these folks than… say… Afghanistan.

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Ignorance of the Law is no Defense unless…

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…unless you’re a Bangladeshi Muslim Woman in the UK. Then it’s all good –

A BANGLADESHI woman who shook a baby boy so violently that he suffered brain damage walked free from court yesterday because a judge conceded that she did not know how to behave in the West.

Rahella Khanom, 24, caused the five-month-old boy in her care to suffer fractures to his breast bone and ribs as she tried to rid him of evil spirits, Southwark Crown Court was told.

The injuries inflicted on the child over several weeks had caused one side of his brain to shrink. It was believed that the boy would have been screaming in agony for eight weeks because his injuries went untreated.

…The court was told that Khanom, a Muslim, did not understand that shaking a helpless baby would not exorcise an evil spirit.

The judge issued a verdict which is almost its own caricature of a relativist, multiculturalist world gone astray –

the judge said that Khanom’s strong cultural and religious beliefs, and the fact that she had been forced by her husband to live in isolation since coming to Britain from Bangladesh, meant that there were exceptional circumstances in her case.

One can only imagine other, future defenses inspired by the socio-cultural isolation tank argument.

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Race ain’t First

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Every 6-8 months or so, I find myself in a certain, very frustrating conversation template with a random brown dude somewhere. The most recent was last Sunday night –

Him: “I can’t believe you think Social Security privitization is good? So how do you feel about the Iraq war?” (I forget exactly how the tide turned to politics but it was rather abrupt…)

Me: “Look, I don’t want to get into this conversation, we’re out, having drinks, and it’s not necessary” (FWIW, you can gleam some of my position here)

“No, we are going to have this conversation. I’m guessing that your position here is just not very bright”

“I resent you calling me stupid… I’m willing to blame it on the wine and drop this whole thing right here”

“I can’t believe that you, as a brown dude support this”

“I don’t see what being brown has to do with this”

“Dude, you’re brown. Grow up. How old are you? Do you want to be white or something?”

“No. Clearly I’m out tonight with a desi crew and no one’s forcing me to be here.”

It goes downhill from there but rest assured gentle readers that I was very restrained and calmly pointed out to my interlocutor how insulting he was being towards me while he stormed up and had to grab a cigarette. As they say, in San Francisco, there’s still one last, openly persecuted minority…

Now, in an earlier, heavily commented thread, Ennis mused that it’s the height of hypocrisy for ABCD’s to get riled up when white folk embrace their culture — afterall what should race have to do with it? The white dude / gal who partakes the unbridled fun that is Bhangra makes “us” stronger. Heck, it even provides a 3rd party validation of sorts that, in this grand world of cultural exchange, we’ve created something of value.

I hope we can accept the reverse when some desi dudes embrace Locke & Friedman a bit more than Hugo Chavez & Arundhati Roy.

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Marital Advice from the Homeland

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Aside from Religion, few things have spilt more blood and ink than the battle of the sexes. Even those beholden to the most strict and twisted notions of piety recognize the one domain where the rules sometimes just don’t apply –

Mr. Moussaoui said there were times when a Muslim can lie without being immoral: to reconcile Muslims, to answer “yes” when a wife asks, “Am I beautiful?” and to carry out jihad.

Because any man knows that answering that question honestly is tantamount to jihad unto itself. Best to save that energy for a battle you might actually win.

Now while mere questions of spousal beauty allow for wiggle room, in a different corner of the world, we learn that divorce is rather literal –

A Muslim couple in India has been told by local Islamic leaders to separate after the husband “divorced” his wife in his sleep, the Press Trust of India reported.

Sohela Ansari told friends that her husband, Aftab, had uttered the word “talaq,” or divorce, three times in his sleep, according to the report published in newspapers on Monday.

When local Islamic leaders heard of the sleep talking, they said Aftab’s words constituted a divorce under an Islamic procedure known as “triple talaq.” The couple, married for 11 years with three children, were told they had to split.

Husbands and wives are known to lash out at small annoyances as a way of signalling something deeper; in this case, maybe it really was just the small annoyances –

A jobless man burned himself to death after his wife refused to serve him meat for dinner, Indian police said Sunday.

The wife, who works as a domestic, refused to cook meat, saying they could not afford it.

Irritated by this, Sanjivan locked her in the house before setting himself on fire outside.

Poor Sanjivan, if he only knew about the Triple Talaq.

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Noonan & Freedom at Midnight

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Long-time mutineer KXB points us at a wonderfully written column by Peggy Noonan with her reflections on the classic Freedom at Midnight and its lessons as we grapple with Iraq –

I have been reading “Freedom at Midnight,” the popular classic of 30 years ago that recounted the coming of democracy to India. The authors, journalists Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, capture the end of the Raj with sweep and drama, and manage to make even the dividing of India and Pakistan–I mean the literal drawing of the lines between the two countries, by a British civil servant–riveting. But the sobering lesson of this history, the big thing you bring away, is this: They didn’t know.

Mountbatten and Nehru and Jinnah were brilliant men who’d not only experienced a great deal; they’d done a great deal, and yet they did not know that the Subcontinent–which each in his own way, and sometimes it was an odd way, loved–would explode in violence, that bloodlust would rule as soon as the Union Jack was lowered.

…The only one who knew what was coming was Gandhi, mystic, genius and eccentric, who drove the other great men crazy by insisting on living among and ministering to the poor, the nonelite. He knew their hearts. He had given his life for a free and independent India but opposed partition and feared the immediate chaos it would bring. He spent the eve of Independence mourning. Six months later he was dead.

What follows is a wonderful, treatise one of the perils of leadership – distance. Noonan reminds us that elites across societies and throughout history walk a fine line between leading people to a better future vs. the folly of trying to impose a possibly unattainable ideal.

And yet, it’s an intrinsic curse of humanity that excess in the service of progress will always be a risk. The only surefire way to avoid any cost is to nihilistically abandon the quest itself.

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The Science Gap – Revisited

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A bit of an oldie (forgive me, work’s been a beeyatch). Economist Robert Samuelson writing for MSNBC, hits an issue recently discussed on Sepia Mutiny – the much feared Science & Engineering gap with India & China.

Samuelson’s retort is multi-pronged. First, the gap with India/China isn’t as crazy as the numbers might suggest it to be –

Judged realistically, China and India aren’t yet out-producing the United States in engineers. Widely publicized figures have them graduating 600,000 and 350,000 engineers a year respectively, from six to 10 times the U.S. level. But researchers at Duke University found the Chinese and Indian figures misleading. They include graduates with two- or three-year degrees–similar to “associate degrees” from U.S. community colleges. And the American figures excluded computer science graduates. Adjusted for these differences, the U.S. degrees jump to 222,335. Per million people, the United States graduates slightly more engineers with four-year degrees than China and three times as many as India.

…Only about 4 percent of the U.S. workforce consists of scientists and engineers.

Secondly, even if the gap is real, econ 101 would dictate that the “shortage” should reveal itself in engineering salaries (on average). And yet….

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Rushdie Speaketh

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Salman Rushdie joins a group of prominent intellectuals & public figures in an anti-“Islamist” manifesto published in the now famous Jyllands-Posten (reprinted here in full because I agree with it so much) –

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism.

We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.

The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.

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The Backlash that Wasn’t

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Great little article in Newsweek about the short lived fury around the “giant sucking sound” of American jobs to India. We’re all rediscovering that economics (unlike politics) is almost never a zero sum game –

…Not long ago, what seemed most possible was that India would steal the jobs of American workers. But as George W. Bush visits there this week, he’ll find a maturing economy that is no longer all about call centers and basic tech support. Now big American investment banks and drugmakers are joining tech firms on the passage to India. R&D centers are springing up so fast that there’s now a shortage of Indian engineers. And the stigma of outsourcing jobs to India is disappearing.

…What happened to the outsourcing backlash? It has been muted by the fact that India didn’t suck Silicon Valley dry after all. Actually, U.S. tech employment is growing. There are 17 percent more tech workers in the United States today than back in the bubble days of 1999, says a new study by the Association for Computing Machinery. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that the U.S. economy will add 1 million tech jobs over the next decade, a 30 percent increase. “Everyone was worried about the offshoring bogeyman,” says Moshe Vardi, an author of the ACM study. “But the big whoosh of jobs to India never happened.”

Amen.

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UP Minister Joins the Fascist Fray

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When you’ve got a billion people, eventually some idiot will say something embarrassing that gets splashed in the news. Too bad in both the US and India, it’s often a senior politician. In this particular case, a UP minister is tossing in more bounty for the head(s) of a certain group of Danish cartoonists –

Rs 51-crore reward for Danish cartoonist’s head, says UP Minister

LUCKNOW, MEERUT, FEBRUARY 17: The Minister for Minority Welfare and Haj in the Mulayam Singh Yadav government, Haji Yaqoob Qureishi, has announced a cash reward of Rs 51 crore [~$11.5M] for anyone who beheads the Danish cartoonist who caricatured Prophet Mohammad.

Luckily, in India at least, cooler Muslim heads are talking back –

…the All India Muslim Personal Law Board member and Naib Imam of Aishbagh Idgah, Maulana Khalid Rasheed Firangi Mahali, criticised the Minister’s call for the killing of the cartoonist… “The Minister’s statement is anti-Shariat, anti-Islam and anti-humanity,” Mahali said.

And I hope that it’s because of heads like Mr. Mahali, that India hasn’t fully joined the cartoon fatality epidemic sweeping the globe (click the map below for one of the better applications of web mashups) –

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The World According to Mittal

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A post on Secular-Right India points us at a fantastic WSJ OpEd tracing the origins and rise of Lakshmi Mittal’s steel empire. Predictably, the WSJ loves Mr. Mittal –

A takeover of Arcelor would take Mr. Mittal a long way toward realizing his vision of a dominant global steelmaker in an industry for decades characterized, and brought low, by fragmentation. To pull it off, Mr. Mittal needs to break an Old World taboo against takeovers, hostile or otherwise, involving a company dear to Continental protectionists’ heart. That this task falls to a man born in Rajasthan, and raised in Calcutta, is one of the more delicious gifts of globalization.

Alas, the sentiment isn’t quite universal. Despite swashbuckling his way through the developing world and transforming almost overnight one of the oldest, stodgiest industries in the world, 3rd Way advocates appear tougher to tame. They hit back with words which will strike some SM’ers as rather racially-tinged –

Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president, warned against giving into economic “laws of the jungle.” A former French finance minister referred to Mr. Mittal as “an Indian predator,” although his company is traded and based in Europe and he hasn’t lived in India for 30 years. Mr. Dollé, the Arcelor boss, said Rotterdam-based Mittal Steel is a “company full of Indians” that wants to buy his with “monnaie de singe.” The expression means “monopoly money”–Mittal’s offer is mostly shares–but the literal translation is “monkey money.” That double-entendre wasn’t lost on people.

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