This post is prompted byever smiling plump,Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who is due in India early September. Pompeoalways takes a bagful of Trump’s surprises with him. WithGenMattisthey will confer with our two Lady Ministers Sushma with a great past, and Nirmala brought in to defend India both guided by PMO on India’s US policy and military trade. IDF feels NSA Doval PM’s alter ego on Security would like to be present. No ?
At the recent Indo-Pacific Business Forum, Pompeo clarified , “ the Trump administration’s strategy is for advancing a free and open Indo-Pacific. Heemphasized that for U.S.A, business engagement is at the center of it – as a staple of USA’s mission to promote peace, stability, and prosperity.” Note the words business and staple !
The message was also for China which has grown 25 times in three decades with trade. India grew three times and USA grew 2.5 times and Chinaclaims it has never stopped trade. The underlying fact is, China has usurped the South China Sea islands and challenges USA as a peer competitor in trade and stops US warships entering the 12 nm territorial seas it claims, for the rocks now amazingly fortified into islands by Chinese engineers. So Trump has unleashed a trade war, as war is not an option but intimidation is, in tactical Nuclear times.
Indians will have to understand USA lives by Alexis de Tocqueville. He was an Intelligence man and the French author who wrote, Democracy in America (1835), perhaps the best, and certainly the most widely-quoted book ever written about the United State, like Discovery of India by Pandit Nehru. IDF used both to write Indians Why We Are What We Are and got ‘Gallis’ (critical reviews)like the book The Ugly American. , Khushwant Singh wrote, Indians like to criticize but cannot stomach criticism …..ala Rahul and a Modi and a Shah are at it, tooth and nail !
But here lies the difference. Tocqueville explains the Business of Americans is to make money (business). Pandit Nehru looked to culture, history and fairness which USA does not, and even told the first Principal of NDA, Prof Vyas, Economics Is Not To Be Taught To The MilitaryAnd Is Supposedto have said, Commerce Is a Dirty Word…Vive la Differnce.
USA genuinely,for it’s own sake wants to make greenfield India great and rich, like it did China and Japan and regrets it now. USA is the only nation that can do that for India by investing, arming and providing technology with Capitalismand covets the Indo Pacific to tame China. Both Russia and EU both are struggling, and cannot do that. RSS and BJP as traders believe in USA’s partnershipand brook no debate, adding religion to gain the vote of Hindus, telling them other religions are to be feared.Its working in the stock market traders
It is in that that vein this IDF post also attempts to bring home the importance of the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) and Indo Pacific to USA for business. Half the world’s goods in this 21st Maritime Century traverses through Indo Pacific including energy for China which can be disrupted if India and QUAD joins, USA will be affected least..
The region is home to geographically rich India and Pakistan,with 1.5 billion intelligent less educated people steeped in religion and both are major nuclear powers that hold prime sea front positions as flash points.Strategist HaroldMakinder wrote the Great Game for Russia which the British stopped. But clever Chinese have used the Great Maritime Game and is unlikely to change, as Army in Pakistan had stopped Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1990s but Pakistan’sArmy that rules,are cahoots with the Chinese to challenge India and looks unlikely to change.
Since the last four years India is lockedin dis-harmony with Pakistan on the Western border in Kashmir and wants to stop CPEC and take POK. Pakistan illegally holds CdrJadhav calling him a spy and catches Indian fishermen at will and ransacks their boats before returning them only when both Coast Guards meet.
The Geography of the IOR and Indo Pacific makes this region very different from other areas in most aspects, especially with religious biases and politics of Geo Strategic competition with the rise of China. The region is very different from the rest of the Oceans of the world as the seas washes thirty five littoral states with large EEZs with strategic locations, and fourteen adjacent landed states with potential to grow.
Nearly three and half billion people or forty five percent of percent of the world’s population live and inhabit this region to where the World’s Economic Fulcrum has moved, even though many of the nations are developing nations. USA’s President is trying to divide the region with sanctions on China, Iran and Russia which brings India to a Catch 22 situation if it forsakes Russia it’s arms supporter and Iran its oil supplier. Trade war will hurt India
In all this soldiers and civilians are being killed regularly, on both sides with Mortars and powerful guns and terror attacks from Pakistan in to Kashmir,that Pakistan covets, and India will have to do something about it..
The dispute is over a piece of land called India’s Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) for the last 70 years, that India demands back and Pakistan wants a almost de-functUN referendum of the people of Kashmir to decide their future with India or Pakistan or Independence, and the terms are not agreeable to both parties and India brooks no foreign mediation.
Three wars has left both as they were (jaise the) over Kashmir. It needs appreciation which current leaders forget, that Independent India’s freedom fighters in goodwill promised Kashmiris a sort of Azadi……and a sort of freedom to chose their daily life and inked it in to the Constitution in article 370 is quoted below :-.
Article 370 of the Indian constitution is an article that gives autonomous status to the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The article is drafted in Part XXI of the Constitution: Temporary, Transitional and Special Provisions.[1]The Constituent Assembly of Jammu and Kashmir, after its establishment, was empowered to recommend the articles of the Indian constitution that should be applied to the state or to abrogate the Article 370 altogether. After the J&K Constituent Assembly later created the state’s constitution and dissolved itself without recommending the abrogation of Article 370, the article was deemed to have become a permanent feature of the Indian Constitution.
Article 370 of the Constitution of India can only be changed by two third majority in the Parliament and ratfied by states. Its India’s many Catch 22’sto get over the impasse as 80% of Kashmir’s population are India born. How dare they ask for Independence but few priviliges are due as in some other states………Can they be bribed like Hemut KOHL did for Soviets to leave East Germany ??? Another Catch 22.
Cerdit to keep Kashmir glued with India goes to India’s fine Army’s of over 250,000 load bearing troops stationed in Kashmir which includes Jammu and Ladakh.Kashmir has become a football to be kicked arround by Pakistan with terrorism and Jihad and by Indian politcians to gain power and the goodies that go with it. PM to be,Imran Khan wants peace but Paki Generals will need to be compensated. Money talks.
ShirinMazari, a prominent Islamabad-based scholar is under consideration for appointment as Pakistan’s next defence minister by Imran Khan.
IDF has long ago heard Shireenspeak in India, and she has even advocated nuclear strikes on Indian population centres in the event of war between the two countries, with, “Targeting” by Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, Mazari in October 1999 in Army Supported The Defence Journal, “as this should be primarily counter-value focusing on Indian urban and industrial centres”.
In nuclear warfare, counter-value targets refer to enemy assets like cities which are of value, but not a military threat. The term counter-force is used to refer to military targets. In an anotherarticle Mazari had given more specifics on her counter-value targeting recommendations. “Included in this,” she wrote, “would be New Delhi,and Bombay and all that come within this range.”
“India’s nuclear installations are close to population centres,” Mazari continued, “so damage can be compounded by attacking these facilities.
The Army is Pakistan hadloved that, as war was the worry in Kargil and during last year’s surgical strikes.
But in the next such actions can Pakistan’s bluff be called ? This is another Catch 22 ……and finally is the big Catch 22 that India will have to be subservient to USA’s demanding President Trump who PM Modi has invited to 2019 Republic Day and must decide to de-link Russia to get him to agree.Shan Na Varuna.