WhirledView

Aung San Suu Kyi: Should She or Shouldn’t She?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Some Americans boast of not voting in 2010.  Others strut and say they’ve never voted!  The system is too corrupt, too unresponsive, too dirty.  Idiots! They’re so pure they don’t exist, politically.  I wonder sometimes if WhirledView has any impact. And yet, without tossing a few well-chosen stones into the ocean, how to make a splash?

What's in a Win?

Just such questions of purity and efficacy have arisen in the aftermath of the recent Burmese elections.  Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League of Democracy have won 43 of the 44 seats available to civilian voters, which leaves 80% of the seats in Parliament controlled by the military (to say nothing of the presidency and other offices held by figures who have “resigned” from the military).  Suu Kyi herself has pointed out that the elections were flawed.  Observers from the European Union stopped short of praising the process as anything more than a step in the right direction. 

The elections, which were not nation-wide, evidently, were scheduled for many districts where cynics would have predicted no hope for reform-minded candidates, a devious way of tipping the scales even further against the opposition.  Most hard-headed observers expected voters in the four districts around the new capital and those in districts hosting military installations to back regime sympathizers.  Who employs them?  Who fills their rice bowls?  You don’t usually bite the hand that feeds you.  In addition, analysts assumed, the people in hilly tribal areas would vote for fellow tribals, not a Berman lowlander, whatever her glamor or her opposition to a repressive army.  This, too, would hurt Suu Kyi’s NLD.

Voters Thought for Themselves

The “realists” turned out to be wrong.  Suu Kyi and her party members won all but one available district, a Shan constituency, which did indeed send a tribal to the new Parliament, although the National League of Democracy won in a neighboring Shan district.  The NLD even came out ahead in those army-dominated districts.  This achievement should remind us all that military men and women can think for themselves, even if they spend most of their time following orders.

But let’s not over-hype the election results. Aung San Suu Kyi and her party have won a resounding victory in an election guaranteeing, by its very design, that she and her NLD colleagues will be hopelessly outnumbered in Parliament.  This clever bit of engineering on the part of the regime has led to the big question: should The Lady claim the seat she has won—or should she not, lest she legitimize a junta that kept her under house arrest for two decades and treated too many other justice-seekers worse by far? 

Is She Just a Tool?

Some analysts worry that Suu Kyi is being manipulated by a deeply-hated regime that has turned Myanmar into an economic basket case during its decades of iron-fisted control.  The Generals, they believe, have dug themselves into a hole they can’t get out of by themselves.  However, with Suu Kyi as a decorative but ineffectual figurehead in Parliament,  it may be that the US and other sources of economic aid will be sufficiently charmed and bamboozled to lift sanctions, allow trade and investment and provide the country with humanitarian assistance. 

What a contrast to the regime’s policy in the wake of the devastating cyclone Nargis in 2008, when the Generals preferred to allow people to die rather than risk the interference that would inevitably come with accepting commensurate emergency aid!  No doubt this callous policy lost them more than a few votes in the recent election.  Having monks shot during the Saffron uprising a few years ago didn’t help either. 

The Koran Burning Episode: Negligence or Stupidity?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

In Afghanistan (and Pakistan) even locals can lose their lives for mishandling a Koran, which mostly they don’t do, although accusations of Koran abuse occur with some regularity.  The best way to carry out a land grab is to accuse a landowner of mishandling a Koran.  If you are lucky, the accused will get lynched and you can snatch the land with little futher ado.  If you aren’t lucky, the accused will end up with a long prison sentence, but the land might still end up as yours.

An American contact was annoyed with me recently.  I’d declared that anyone and everyone serving in the U.S. Army (or with any of the allied forces) should know that Afghans are pretty touchy about how Korans are treated.  Ordinary American soldiers aren’t going to know that, he said.  Even if they’re told, it won’t make any impression.  They won’t remember.

I don’t think American troops are stupid.  I don’t believe that they are incapable of learning respect for local custom.  It’s far more likely that their commanders and their commanders’ commanders haven’t done a very good job of providing the cultural sensitization that (we’re told) is routine.  Maybe sensitizing is on the syllabus, so to speak, but carried out so badly, so offhandedly, with so little sense of urgency, that anyone in the audience would fall asleep. Or maybe it’s done in an off-putting preachy way. Sermons do get boring.  How clearly are the troops taught that Koran handling is a life and death matter?  Your buddy could die.  Your vehicle could get blown up.  Etc

Like many observers, I was pretty outraged by this unnecessarily provocative act, but it may be that I’m even more puzzled by it.  Nowhere in my reading have I found any reference to clear cut, codified procedures for handling Korans, step by step procedures to be followed without fail.

The Military Way With Development: It Doesn't Work Very Well

By Patricia Lee Sharpe.

Drip, drip, drip, and whoooosh: that’s the sound of our hard-earned personal income, once taxed, going down the drain in the Pentagon.  And now I know why the military gets away with it.

America the Fearful

First off, there’s the fear factor.  Too many Americans have been terrorized by military fear-mongering into granting whatever the Pentagon asks for.  As for “our” representatives, they have a different fear.  They’ll support the iffiest military project, lest campaign donations dwinde to a dribble that won’t be enough to get them re-elected in our increasingly plutocratic star-and-serf system.

Here’s some context: the U.S. spends nearly as much money on its military-related functions as the rest of the world altogether and nearly half of all U.S. discretionary funding is allocated for the use of the Pentagon, yet all those trillions are still not enough, we’re told.  No, we sheep are not yet 100% safe from free-wheeling, copy cat terrorists, let alone the occasional malefactor dispatched by organizations like Al Qaeda.  So the dictum is: give up your Social Security, give up your Medicare, give up your carefully-inspected food, give up your well-tested medical devices, and fork it all over to the national security apparatus.   

Playing expertly on those fears, Leon Panetta, Obama’s new Secretary of Defense, accompanied for intimidation purposes by the usual be-medaled general, in this case the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin E. Dempsey, was in Congress this week, doing his best to protect the humongous Pentagon budget from cuts that may go beyond the present $450 billion over the next ten years.  The specter of a $1.2 trillion lopping looms.  To put all those zeros (count ‘em: eleven)  in perspective, that’s the cost of three or four military aircraft.  Seems entirely doable at a time when ordinary people have been losing their jobs and homes, doesn’t it?  Not to the military.

An Audit for the Pentagon, at Last

Meanwhile, Panetta also let a very interesting, very relevant and potentially damaging cat out of the bag: the military doesn’t know how it spends all its money—or whether the funds have achieved their nobly intended goals, which (in practice) may come down to box-checking or  promotion-seeding (see Van Buren below). Evidently, while other executive departments are being hounded to stop waste, fraud and abuse right down to the last paperclip, the Pentagon has escaped thorough scrutiny.  Panetta, clearly on the defensive, has promised to expedite “a full audit” of the Pentagon budget—and (wow! what speed!) to have it done by 2014, not the previously anticipated 2017.  Says Panetta: “ I have also directed increased emphasis on accountability and a full review of the Department’s financial controls....”  Who’d have thunk the Pentagon wasn’t already paying attention to such basics?  Even I had more faith, and I’ve got pretty cynical in recent years.

The FederalTimes reports that “many lawmakers have latched onto the Pentagon’s inability to pass an audit as a [relatively painless] way to make the Department more efficient in light of upcoming budget cuts.  However,” the report continues, “most defense analysts agree that efficiencies alone will not generate the kind of budget savings needed.” 

Indeed!  But easier said than done, as Americans have discovered, whenever attempts to cut military programs or eliminate military bases have been advanced.  Can you say pork?  Have you ever heard, “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”  Today, if you listen closely enough, you’ll discover that many of the stingiest no-more-taxes Tea Party freshmen have already learned these little tricks.

The Need for Anecdotes

Still, it might help those who are really, not just cosmetically, trying to put an end to the malallocations of business as usual, if we had a trustworthy accounting of exactly where the Pentagon-designated money goes (including the security stuff that’s being turned against us)—and whether this billion or those millions actually achieved anything but ribbon-cutting publicity (also see Van Buren).  Until we have this complete and systematic audit, we’re left with various outrage-producing but isolated examples and anecdotes of a sort that are easily criticized as “atypical” or “merely subjective.”

A Covert Affair: Julia and Paul Child in the OSS by Jennet Conant: Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Choosing the right title for Conant’s latest book A Covert affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS must have been a challenge and I’m not sure that a better title, or at least a more accurate one, could not have been found.  This one's catchy and it's not a misnomer but here’s the problem:   a substantial amount of the book is not about the Childs.

The book also has little to do with a covert affair if- that is - Conant is referring to the Childs’ own relationship. This was openly known and previously disclosed elsewhere.  They met in Ceylon, dated in Chungking, China and married shortly after the war ended in the US but anyone who has read about or was aquainted with this remarkable couple already knew that - although pieces of  information in Conant’s book based on recently declassified documents are new. And it is an easy read.

Nevertheless, this book is certainly not just about the relatively short time the Childs spent in the OSS during World War II. It spans a much longer period. 

Rather, A Covert Affair is as much about the life of an intriguing, larger-than-life but little known woman whom the Childs had befriended– first in Ceylon when and where all three worked for the OSS and then later in Paris:  Paul Childs as head of exhibits at the US Embassy, his wife Julia as chef-in-training, and this mysterious woman friend pursuing an artistic career – and who knows what else.   

Jane Foster

The mystery woman’s name was Jane Foster. The only child of a wealthy San Francisco doctor and director of Cutter Laboratories, Foster was the ultimate rebel despite or perhaps because of her sheltered upbringing in the family’s apartment in San Francisco’s glitzy Fairmont Hotel and then as a student at Mills College, the West Coast equivalent of the Seven Sisters.

An aside:  Conant describes Mills as a school “where the rich sent their daughters” but it was not only for the children of the wealthy. Both my aunt and mother graduated from there several years before Foster.  Their middle class family worked hard to make ends meet – including paying Mills tuition for two - but they studied there nevertheless.

Paul Child's European adventure

After the OSS folded, Paul Child was offered a job with the State Department as an exhibits officer at the US Embassy in Paris.  When State’s overseas information arm    became the US Information Agency in 1953, Paul joined USIA. 

That Paul Child was suddenly summoned back from Bonn in 1954 where he ran the high profile exhibits office at the US Embassy to be subjected to interrogation by two special agents, W.H. Sullivan and A. W. Sanders, then ensconced in U.S. Information Agency Headquarters to ferret out Communists in this allied State Department agency may well have been because of the Childs’ friendship with Jane. 

But the Childs never knew for sure – although more recently declassified documents that Jennet Conant used indicate that Jane had been a Communist and likely a KGB agent although she apparently never provided the Soviets with information they couldn’t have found in the media or through other open sources.

McCarthy Era Goon Squads on the Lam

Neither Paul nor Julia Child were then or had ever been Communists although they were far from the stalwart right wing, rock-ribbed Republicans that McCarthy would like to have seen in America’s foreign policy establishment and representing the US abroad. In April 1953, well prior to Paul Child’s inquisition in Washington, two McCarthy goons, Roy Cohn and David Shine, had gone on a fishing expedition to the US Information Service operation in Paris as a part of a larger European junket that included America Houses throughout Germany.  One goal was to identify books by Communists in the library collection, but Ann Davis, the feisty American librarian in Paris refused to let them in. 

The word of these encounters travelled throughout the Agency and the Department. Cohn and Shine's activities did put a pall over USIA library acquisitions – for a time.

In the end, the Cohn and Schine book witch-hunt inspired caper identified exactly 39 copies of 25 books by 8 authors from the millions of books in USIS Libraries worldwide that met the “subversive” criteria test in a costly-fireworks-for-the-media display of right-wing petulance which should have been doused even before the first match was lit. 

Pakistan and the U.S.: the Red Dot is on the Haqqanis Now

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Dealing with Pakistan, diplomatically and militarily, presents a very special challenge. All governments lie sometimes, but the truth in Pakistan co-habits promiscuously with its more frequently expressed opposite.  Presented with offical statements from Islamabad, the question that should arise is: what do they really mean this time?  Right now Prime Minister Gilani appears to be angry.  But who knows?

A Question of I.S.I. Complicity in Embassy Assault

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appearing before a Senate Armed Services Committee on the eve of his retirement, fired a wow of a parting salvo which clearly hit home in Islamabad, too.  This is what he said:

“With ISI support, Haqqani operatives planned and conducted that truck bomb attack [on the Intercontinental hotel in Islamabad], as well as the assault [last week]on our embassy.”  All in all, he emphasized, “the Haqqani network acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.”

U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker has corroborated the assertion that the Haqqanis were behind the embassy attack. He has not been reported to have made the explicit I.S.I. connection. 

Many times in the past American officials have insinuated that the ties between violent extremists and the military in Pakistan are too cozy for comfort, a legacy of the first Afghan war and Pakistan’s proxy war against India in Kashmir, but this is the first time, to my knowledge, that such a bald accusation of complicity in anti-American attacks has been made by a high level American official for public consumption.  Unlike General David Petraeus, who was something of a political general before he shed his uniform and became head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Adm. Mullen has not specialized in splashy statements and does not seem to have a reputation as a loose cannon, which gives considerable credibility to his accusations.  It also suggests that he has been chosen by the Obama administration as the vehicle for letting Pakistan know that the game is up.  The time for creative ambiguity is over  An attack on an American embassy isn’t just a reflection of some mild divergence in national interests.  It’s an attack of the U.S. itself.

Interpreting Pakistan's Denial

The Pakistani government’s official responses to Admiral Mullen’s charges have been predictably full of fury, but it’s difficult to know what this means because the Pakistani establishment regularly says one thing to the Pakistani public and another in private to the U.S.  Case in point: drone attacks on targets in the F.A.T.A. areas bordering Afghanistan, which serve as safe havens for Taliban fighters and their allies.  The Pakistani public wants them stopped.  Government officials, quoted in the Pakistani press, denounce drone attacks as unacceptable violations of national sovereignty. Meanwhile, the Pakistani military is helping to guide U.S. drones to mutually agreed upon targets.

Back to Gilani.  In the case of the attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul,  is the Pakistani government (1) innocent of the charges and justifiably outraged by the accusation of complicity, (2) guilty as charged of using the Haqqani network to achieve goals directly antithetical to those of the U.S. while vigorously denying complicity or (3) guilty, but only of using the Haqqanis to punish the U.S. for cutting back on military aid for reasons I won’t go into here and now.

It’s easy to believe that the long-standing relationship between the very useful Haqqani clan and I.S.I. was never fully severed.  What's more, Pakistan is very clever about not denying the existence of contacts.  Just keeping tabs, as good intelligence operatives should, the I.S.I. says.  Right!  However,  I have to wrestle with the idea that the highest Pakistani officials were party to a decision to attack the U.S. embassy, even as it seems to me that an act as serious as an embassy assault could only happen with approval from the top.  Assuming any complicity, of course.  And, indeed, why not?  The U.S. could be a very nasty thorn in Pakistan’s side when it comes to determining the political future of Afghanistan, which Pakistan would dearly love to control, to the total exclusion of India, whether or not that means a reTalibanization of the country.  Perhaps there are those who think that the U.S. will skedaddle more quickly and more completely if the costs are escalated. 

No Time to be a Haqqani

If so, what a mistake!  The wrong target was chosen.  No one attacks an American embassy with impunity.  Bin Laden was a dead man as soon as he was associated with the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam.  The 9/11 debacle simply provided extra motivation for hunting him down.  It took ten years, but he was found, in Pakistan, and not in a mountain hideout, which raised a number of very interesting questions as well as Pakistani hackles.  Was the the government of Pakistan providing him with the far from palacial safehouse?   The official Pakistani respons, naturally, is negative.  That said,  I wonder if the leading members of the Haqqani network are pondering Bin Laden’s fate.  They should be.  They are going to be hunted down, whether or not the I.S.I. loves them, whether or not the Pakistanis complain about territorial violations. 

Which gives rise to another thought: is it possible that the Paskistanis want the U.S. to do exactly this?  Get rid of the Haqqanis for them.  Have the Haqqanis got too big even for their baggy Pathan britches, now that Pakistan itself is being ravaged by religion-inspired violence?  Not just to help the U.S., but also on their own account, the Pakistani army has mobilized against militants in the frontier area.  They have even collaborated in the capture of figures sought by the U.S.  But taking on the Hakkanis alone would be daunting, even if Pakistan were willing to withdraw more troops from the Indian border.  Do they possibly want the U.S. to do their dirty work for them?

Meanwhile, of course, Pakistan’s civilian politicians are loudly warning the U.S. not to violate Pakistani territory in search of the embassy attackers: no boots on the ground they say.  No sane American could disagree with this demand.  Do the warnings apply to drones, too?  Proabably.  At least for public consumption.  The politicians must insulate themselves from public outrange when drones hit the wrong target.

A Sober but Short-Sighted Military Reaction

The military response has been more nuanced.   At an "unprecedented" Sunday meeting, the High Command decided that the war of words needs to be “de-escalated” considerably.  Karachi’s daily Dawn reports a source as saying that “escalation is harmful.  In the cost benefit analysis there appears to be no benefit of a confrontation” with the U.S.  Cost-benefit analysis indeed!  The Pakistani army certainly doesn’t want to slaughter the goose that lays hundreds of millions of dollars of golden eggs.  The source also reported that the meeting ended with “nothing to suggest that the army had agreed to act against the Haqqani network under U.S. pressure.”

Shrugging off U.S. complaints in the confident belief that the status quo will quickly reassert itself might have been the sensible way to go in the past.  Over and over again the U.S. has granted the Pakistani government immunity for outrageous double-dealing.  This time, however, complacency may be the wrong reaction. 

Why the Congress Over-reacted to Anna’s Hunger Strike

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

It’s hilarious.  A Prime Minister from the Indian National Congress, which led the movement for Indian independence, thinks to silence a picture perfect Mahatma Gandhi impersonator, his weapon a hunger strike, by throwing him in jail.

“It’s blackmail,” the PM sputters.  “You can’t use this cheap trick of fasting to put pressure on the government.” 

So—does the police action work?  Not in India. The upstart’s appeal is enormously enhanced.  More people take to the streets in support of their anti-corruption champion.

Why the appeal?  History.  Plus a fine union of style and substance, all magnified by the modern media. 

Aside from the fact that maintaining its hold on India was getting prohibitively expensive, the British colonial regime found it hard to cope with an opponent who wanted to fight with  moral force rather than violence.  That was Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Mahatma, who perfected the tactic of non-violent resistance, which included some cliff-hanging hunger striking by the Mahatma himself.

The issue today isn’t independence.  It’s corruption and whether the government is willing to deal with it, not cosmetically, but effectively.  Graft, bribery, palm-greasing—this is the daily reality in India at all levels. India is 87th on the corruption perception index, in the middle essentially, but that’s not good enough for Indians.  The all pervading stench (and financial drain) of systemic corruption doesn’t make them happy.  Nor are they deceived by bureaucratic responses to demands for reform.

So Anna Hazare, a retired military man cum social worker from Maharashtra, decided to reincarnate himself as a modern day Gandhi.  Note the white cap and the home spun khadi cloth his clothes are made of.  Shades of Jawaharlal Nehru and the other freedom fighters. Note the tactic of the hunger strike, by which one puts one’s own life on the line.  As a septuagenarian with caved-in cheeks Hazare even looks like the aging Gandhi.

So the issue is of urgent universal appeal and the tactics build on the most vital symbols of modern Indian history—and Indians were responding fervently. Surely the government should have been more cautious in its approach.  Surely Prime Minister Man Mohansingh might have guessed that arrest would have been counter-productive.  Why has the Congress-led government been so clumsy?

I have a hunch. The Congress Party is, to a certain extent, a family affair, and there is an heir apparent: the great grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, the grandson of Indira Gandhi, the son of Sonia Gandhi, current leader of the Congress Party and widow of Rajiv Gandhi, who was the third in his line to be prime minister when he was assassinated.  Because Rahul Gandhi needed seasoning and a little time to demonstrate charisma, character and competence, Man Mohansingh, the eminently respectable and highly respected economist, has been filling in as PM.  

Rahul Gandhi, a young man of privilege and position if there ever was one in modern India, set out to position himself as a man of the people, a noble but unrealistic aspiration.  Although he’s never been exposed as a rank hypocrite and he’s managed to get himself elected to Parliament where he’s an entirely competent Member, but he hasn’t exactly caught the imagination of the Indian people as a whole.

And then, out of the blue, comes this nobody who has the pulse of the people. How galling!


 

Annals of Democracy, in India: She Won the Election; How’s She Doing?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

For some reason or another, India seldom gets credit for doing anything right or even half right.   No other “developing” country seems to suffer from the curse of such high expectations.  Imagine the chorus of negativity if the same standards were applied to China.

India was expected to fall apart shortly after Independence.  That didn’t happen.  Modern India began as a democracy and has remained a democracy, despite a short spell of authoritarianism under Indira Gandhi, who was thrown out, by popular demand, via the ballot box.  For six decades, in fact, India has achieved peaceful transfers of power through elections considered remarkably honest.  Where else, with the exception of North America, Europe, Japan and Israel has any democracy endured more than a few years, and under the same Constitution, at that?

A Newbie Wins

Speaking of peaceful transfers of power, just last fall an upstart party by the name of the Trinamul Congress managed to terminate the three decade-long rule of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in West Bengal.  It was a fiercely contested campaign in which four parties vied for control of  the State Assembly: Trinamul, CPI(M), the Indian National Congress and the Bhartiya Janata Party.  When the votes were counted, the results were accepted by all concerned, and Mamata Banerjee, the founder of the Trinamul, became Chief Minister. 

In this world of greedy entrenched elites, Mamata’s triumph underscores another characteristic of Indian democracy.  Although India has its share of political dynasties, people with no birthright political entitlement may rise to the top, sometimes from the lowest socio-economic echelons, as in the case of Mayawati, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh.  What’s more, as these examples prove, there’s room at the top for ambitious women who make it on their own.

The Political Game

At any rate, having chronicled the election of Mamata two months ago, I thought it might be interesting to see what she’s done with her power. 

A. Q. Khan’s Revenge: A Solution to a Pakistani Puzzle?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Remember the yellow cake forgery that was used by the Bush Administration to support the contention that Saddam Hussain was actively engaged in WMD development which, in turn, was used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq?  This oh-so-convenient smoking gun letter turned out to have U.S. fingerprints all over it.

Now another very interesting letter has surfaced, and it’s not surprising that some Pakistanis and others are floating claims that it was produced by U.S. intelligence services.  Thus, memories of dirty tricks past taint everything that comes after. 

Is It or Isn't It?

Like others cited in this excellent WaPost article which reproduces the letter, I cannot pretend to know beyond a doubt whether this letter that purports to come from North Korean sources is authentic or not  Some people have dismissed it for being written on plain paper, not on official stationary with a recognizable letterhead.  Others have said that the plain paper tactic is well known as the preferred way for North Korean officials to communicate re sensitive issues and on this one they find the signature convincing.  I might point out that the yellow cake forgery included the feigning of an appropriate letterhead. 

Others have said the Khan letter is worth paying attention to because it appears to support rumors or allegations that have been circulating in clandestine circles for some time—rumors about high level Pakistani army involvement in the shopping around  ofnuclear designs and equipment.  The weakness of this argument as “proof” one way or another need not be elaborated, but it predisposes one to more serious consideration of the letter. 

I’m more interested in the arguments of those who try to dismiss the letter by saying it’s been put in circulation only because A. Q. Khan is having another hissy fit over the way he’s been treated. As well he might, it seems to me.  Nothing about the Pakistan government’s handling of the A. Q Khan affair has ever made much sense.  The notion  of “revenge” for selective punishment crops up here, and how natural and appropriate that would be. Khan has always seemed like a scapegoat to me, not an innocent by any means, but a plausible morsel provided with a gilded cage to keep him comfortably alive—and quiet.