Osama in Pakistan, US special forces in Pakistan, US drone planes over Pakistan but where is Pakistan's Government?

Although I cringed writing anything political but this time I had to as I just could not understand how someone could still wake up in the morning and feel good with one self.

This particular questiong: "Osama in Pakistan, US special forces in Pakistan, US drone planes over Pakistan but where is Pakistan's Government?" has been haunting me for a few days now.

On a moral, ethical as well as self honour level, how can the political powers in Pakistan can face the world when everything they say are lies/half-truths?

Lie 1: Osama is not in Pakistan > Not True
Lie 2: Pakistan has a say in the flights of the killer drones > Not True
Lie 3: Pakistan does not allow foreign fighters operating on the ground > Not True

These three lies are just the ones uncovered on Sunday. Can you imagine what else could be lurking?

As a matter of policy, I believe in the the practice of not poking into other countries affairs. We should be neutral about this. However, on a personal and moral standpoint, when it is as clear as day the lies being told, please do what is honourable and pass the baton to someone that can at least be seen as still having the moral and ethical high ground.

Yes, politics can be dirty and politicians can be easily sucked into the dark side. Once caught, just own up and resign...

UN strikes against Libya - Justified? Don't think so!

Coalition strike hits Gaddafi's control centre

When will the superpowers learn that it is not good to be a busy-body? A country's internal affairs is none of our business. Those people fighting in Libya is all about politics, not because of their colour or their religion.

In my view, physical intervention is only justified if someone is oppressed because of his or her (1) faith; and/or (2) physical attributes. In this case, it is just one group that does not like one particular individual leading the country (that individual has his set of supporters as well!). So, the issues is about one's political view. To kill someone because of this view is pure madness.

Politics can change so why bother going to war over it?

Keith Olbermann Special Comment: There Is No 'Ground Zero Mosque' - 08/16/10

NANG THIS POST

The President's Mirage - Does Obama's recovery plan ignore economic logic?

Please read this article that came out in Newsweek. It is very telling of the mistakes that the new President of the US is current making on the economy.

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President Obama has made no secret of his vision for America's 21st-century economy. We will lead the world in "green" technologies to stop global warming. Advancing medical breakthroughs will improve our well-being, control health spending and enable us to expand insurance coverage. These investments in energy and health care, as well as education, will revive the economy and create millions of well-paying new jobs for middle-class Americans.

It's a dazzling rhetorical vista that excites the young and fits the country's mood, which blames "capitalist greed" for the economic crisis. Obama promises communal goals and a more widely shared prosperity. The trouble is that it may not work as well in practice as it does in Obama's speeches. Still, congressional Democrats press ahead to curb global warming and achieve near-universal health insurance. We should not be stampeded into far-reaching changes that have little to do with today's crisis.

What Obama proposes is a "post-material economy." He would de-emphasize the production of ever-more private goods and services, harnessing the economy to achieve broad social goals. In the process, he sets aside the standard logic of economic progress.

Since the dawn of the Industrial Age, this has been simple: produce more with less. ("Productivity," in economic jargon.) Mass markets developed for clothes, cars, computers and much more because declining costs expanded production. Living standards rose. By contrast, the logic of the "post-material economy" is just the opposite: Spend more and get less.

Consider global warming. The centerpiece of Obama's agenda is a "cap-and-trade" program. This would be, in effect, a tax on fossil fuels (oil, coal, natural gas). The idea is to raise their prices so that households and businesses use less or switch to costlier "alternative" energy sources such as solar. In general, we would spend more on energy and get less of it.

The story for health care is similar, though the cause is different. We spend more and more for it (now 21 percent of personal consumption, says Brookings economist Gary Burtless) and get, it seems, less and less gain in improved health. This is largely the result of costly new technologies and the unintended consequence of open-ended insurance reimbursement that encourages unneeded tests, procedures and visits to doctors. Expanding health insurance might aggravate the problem. Many of today's uninsured get health care for free or don't need much because they're young (40 percent are between 18 and 34).

Together, health care and energy constitute about a quarter of the U.S. economy. If their costs increase, they will crowd out other spending. The president's policies might, as he says, create high-paying "green" or medical jobs. But if so, they will destroy old jobs elsewhere. Think about it. If you spend more for gasoline or electricity -- or for health insurance premiums —then you spend less on other things, from meals out to home repair. Jobs in those sectors suffer.

The prospect is that energy and health costs may rise without creating much gain in material benefits. That's not economic "progress." Rebating households' higher energy costs (as some suggest) with tax cuts does not solve the problem of squeezed incomes. Given today's huge and unsustainable budget deficits, some other tax would have to be raised or some other program cut.

And collective benefits?

What defines the "post-material economy" is a growing willingness to sacrifice money income for psychic income—"feeling good." Some people may gladly pay higher energy prices if they think they're "saving the planet" from global warming. Some may accept higher taxes if they think they're improving the health or education of the poor. Unfortunately, these psychic benefits may be based on fantasies. What if U.S. cuts in greenhouse gases are offset by Chinese increases? What if more health insurance produces only modest gains in people's health?

Obama and his allies have glossed over these questions. They've left the impression that somehow magical technological breakthroughs will produce clean energy that is also cheap. Perhaps that will happen; it hasn't yet. They've talked so often about the need to control wasteful health spending that they've implied they've actually found a way of doing so. Perhaps they will, but they haven't yet.

We cannot build a productive economy on the foundations of health care and "green" energy. These programs would create burdens for many, benefits for some. Indeed, their weaknesses may feed on each other, as higher health spending requires more taxes that are satisfied by stiffer terms for cap-and-trade. We clearly need changes in these areas: ways to check wasteful health spending and promote efficient energy use. I have long advocated a gasoline tax on national security grounds. But Obama's vision for economic renewal is mostly a self-serving mirage.

What a whole load of orthodox baloney

The Western powers are clever that proving their "superiority" while "lamenting" on the state of the globe full of uneducated and backward thinking "locals". Below is an article on that subject that I found can be a good learning experience for all.
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JOHN TEO: What a whole load of orthodox baloney

WHAT I've found amusing lately is how the Western-dominated international media have been able to quickly accept and reflect new orthodoxies just as soon as Western governments -- those self-appointed arbiters of anything good and moral in the world -- trotted them out.
I should be rather scared, considering how anything from the West is still accepted unquestioningly all over the globe.

Bailouts of banks and companies were frowned upon when it was developing countries that were attempting to desperately shore up their crisis-hit economies.

Now that it is the developed countries that are engineering bailouts on a stupendous scale, the same things that Malaysia did a decade ago that earned us either rebuke or the moniker of "unorthodox" have become all the rage -- or the new orthodox.

Western-dominated institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have fallen largely silent, as have the Western media, on such concerns as moral hazard and the wisdom of so-called "creative destruction".
As if to make light of the profligacy-run-amok that lies at the heart of the current economic crisis, scapegoats are found in the least likely of places. Such as here in East Asia, where such evergreen virtues of thrift and prudence are now blamed for creating such high savings rates, resulting in huge global imbalances as Western countries suffer an ugly debt hangover of massive proportions.

As if we Asians deviously and surreptitiously plied all those debts upon unsuspecting and helpless Westerners.

Then, almost as if to assure themselves that Western supremacy is still intact, the Western media revel in pointing out how an economic crisis originating in the United States has a global impact, and how talk about Asia decoupling itself from the ill effects is merely an empty boast.

It is a small step from there to seeking out and magnifying social problems and darkly hinting at risks of riots in such "undemocratic" places as China resulting from the whiplash of the economic crisis. The fact is that serious riots have already happened in the very cradle of Western democracy itself, Greece, among other places.

All this in order to fit into the mother of all orthodoxies: that without political freedoms, economic freedoms are unsustainable (freedoms as defined by the usual Western arbiters, of course). Which itself is a slight reincarnation of an earlier orthodoxy: that economic freedoms are impossible without political freedoms first.

This earlier political orthodoxy is hard to abandon even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. India enjoyed political freedom for decades without much economic freedom to speak of until the last decade or two -- and even then, with the vast majority of its people still mired in abject poverty and likely to remain so into the foreseeable future, unless its currently messy politics is suddenly transformed.

And so it is the same failed orthodoxies that are being repeated in Iraq and Afghanistan: election following election producing little to show but massive corruption and unending poverty.

To be sure, there are the odd stories appearing in the Western media now challenging the general optimism born out of a hubristic assumption that the West has figured out all the answers to the key questions. There is palpable fear that the good life the West has known in the last century or so can never be had again.

There have been ominous predictions of late that as economic stresses weigh on Western societies, fascism as a political ideology may again gain popular currency. Funny how nobody seems to notice that the rest of the world, long accustomed to economic stresses, never has to worry much about fascism.

We do have our freedoms, all right. They do not have to be those defined and accepted by the West. Let the West wallow in its orthodoxies, redefined or reinvented as they suit its prevailing convenience, while we bear witness to the looming spectacle of the first "non-free" country claiming the world's top spot.

Or more accurately, reclaiming it. Now wouldn't that be oddly unorthodox?

Obama’s Asian Agenda

I don't believe Obama has an agenda for Asia. The first 100 days of his administration was wrought with problem appointees to key posts in the government. Now he has announced that he will "surge" an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan. Doesn't this look very similar to how the Bush administration will react to the problems they are now facing with the Taliban?

What he needs to do to create a niche for himself is to make things happen. People have great expectations that he can do something different but the people will not wait for long. He must do what he promised during the election: peace.

The Blogger.

The UN Security Council is a limp dog

I guess there will be a time when I too will have to admit that the UN Security Council is a limp dog. I know a lot of people have already come to that conclusion many years ago but I always held out that maybe it is still a strong institution.

The event unfolding for the last week or so has shaken me away from this ideal notion.

I would like to recommend nations that hold true to notion of fair play to remember this event unfolding in Palestine and make your stand by symbolically turning your back towards the UN. Prayers and hope is the least that we can offer the the Palestinians.

Israel's failure to learn

An article from AlJazeera

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When George Bush, the US president, first entered the White House as the commander-in-chief in 2001, Palestinians were being killed in the al-Aqsa intifada.

Eight years later, as Bush prepares to leave office, Israel is carrying out one of the largest massacres in its 60-year occupation of Palestine.

The US, then and now, strongly backs Israel's offensive, justifying it as being, in fact, defensive.

An Israeli general recently threatened to use military force to set Gaza back decades in much the same language used before the invasion of Lebanon in 2006.

But despite the Israeli devastation of Lebanon, Hezbollah emerged victorious and the Shia resistance and social movement emerged a hero to the Arab world.

Israel is about to make the same mistake with Hamas.

Its notion of a truce with Hamas was that the Palestinians would quietly accept the siege. Israel would deny them the basic means of survival, let alone the basic means to create a functioning society.

If the Palestinians attempted to resist, they would be crushed.

As in Lebanon, Israel should have learned years ago that military might cannot crush Palestinian resistance movements.

Media matters

While the Israeli military again bombs the starving and imprisoned population of 1.5 million Gazans, the world watches their plight live as Western media scrambles to explain and, in some cases, justify the ongoing carnage.

Even some Arab outlets have attempted to equate Palestinian resistance - and homemade rockets - with the might of the Israeli military machine.

However, none of this is a surprise; the Israelis just concluded a global public relations campaign to gather support for their assault, even gaining the collaboration of some Arab states.

An American periodical once asked me to contribute to a discussion on whether terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified.

My answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for the weak, such as the Native Americans 150 years ago, the Jews in Nazi Germany, and the Palestinians today, to answer.

Terrorism is a normative term which is used to describe what the 'other' does, not what 'we' do.

Powerful nations such as Israel, the US, Russia or China will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism.

However, they fail to acknowledge as acts of terror the destruction of Chechnya, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the repression of Tibetans, and the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Normative rules and what is legal and permissible are determined by the powerful. They formulate the concept of terrorism in normative terms and make it appear as if a neutral court derived such definitions instead of the oppressors.

For the weak to resist becomes illegal by definition.

This excessive use of legal jargon actually undermines the fundamentals of what is truly legal and diminishes the credibility of international institutions such as the UN. The law becomes the enemy of those who struggle.

It becomes apparent that the powerful - those who make the rules - insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.

Desperate resistance

Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the natives, be they indigenous populations in North America or Palestinians in what are today Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Attacking civilians, then, becomes the last, most desperate and basic method of resistance in the face of overwhelming odds and imminent eradication.

The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the expectation that such violence will destroy or defeat Israel.

When the native population understands that there is an irreversible dynamic stripping them of their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can muster.

PLO, then Hamas

In 1948, when Israel was being established as a new state, 750,000 Palestinians were deliberately cleansed and expelled from their homes, and hundreds of their villages were destroyed.

Their lands were settled by colonists who even today deny their very existence and wage a 60-year war against the remaining natives and the national liberation movements the Palestinians established around the world.

Israel, its allies in the West and some regional Arab countries have managed to corrupt the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and entice them with the promise of power at the expense of liberty for their people.

This eventually neutralised and transformed the PLO into a liberation movement which collaborates with the occupier.

The focus then shifted to Hamas, a movement which won legislative elections nearly three years ago and thus became a target for the Israelis.

By enforcing an embargo and allowing Israel's siege of Gaza, the world has effectively told the Palestinians that they are unfit for democracy.

Isolation and radicalisation

By informing them that they are not free to choose the leaders they trust but must conform to the requirements set in place by others, the world community is only further isolating and radicalising the Palestinians.

This radicalisation has increased several-fold as Israel pounds Palestinian infrastructure, saying it is solely targeting Hamas targets.

This is not true, however; Israeli forces have targeted Palestinian police forces, killing some such as Tawfiq Jaber, the chief of police - a former PLO official who stayed on in his post after Hamas took control of Gaza.

With the vestiges of security and order debilitated in successive Israeli military campaigns, chaos will prevail in Gaza. If Hamas is weakened it will not be a more moderate Palestinian group which will take the helm.

It will not be the weakened, corrupted and unpopular Fatah, but a more extreme group who have been persuaded through blockades and incessant Israeli attacks that compromise and negotiations with Tel Aviv are ill-fated.

Failed policies

In the past 60 years, Israeli leaders have toed the line that 'the only language Arabs understand is force'.

However, it is Israel that has routinely used violence to solve problems. During the 2002 Arab Summit in Beirut, the Arab League collectively offered Israel a framework to end the bloodshed and move towards a comprehensive regional peace deal. Israel responded by invading Jenin and killing hundreds.

Last month, Fatah launched a media campaign to revive the 2002 peace initiative, but this, too, has been answered with Israel's extreme brutality.

A Zionist Israel is no longer a viable long-term project. Israeli settlements, land expropriation and separation barriers have long since made a two-state solution impossible.

There can be only one state in historic Palestine. In coming decades, Israelis will be confronted with a fundamental question - whether to ensure the peaceful transition towards an egalitarian society in which Palestinians are given the same rights as Jews.

The alternative in a few years will become untenable.

History has shown that colonialism has only worked when most of the natives have been exterminated. But often, as in occupied Algeria, it is the settlers who flee. Eventually the Palestinians will not be willing to compromise and accept one state for both people, and the Jewish colonists will be forced to leave.

Restoring Palestine

Despite its lack of initiative for the Middle East peace process, the White House has in recent years been unable to dislodge the occupation of Palestine as the main motive for every anti-American militant in the Arab world and beyond.

It is the common denominator by which Arab populist policies are shaped. Invading Iraq or offering economic benefits to frontline states will not make the Palestinian issue go away.

During my travels and research, I have spoken with jihadists in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere; they all mentioned the Palestinian struggle as one of their motivations.

The US will pay a price for backing Israel. Soon the so-called moderate Arab dictatorships that collaborate with the US hegemony in the region will find themselves in untenable positions.

Loss of credibility

Already we see tensions increasing in the region. Damascus has pulled out of third-party talks with Tel Aviv and Arab anger has been mounting not just at Israel, and not just at America, but also at their own regimes which have collaborated with Washington.

Some Israelis have started to realise their government's flawed approach. While 81 per cent of Israelis support the military campaign, a poll has showed only 39 per cent believe it will succeed in removing Hamas or reducing violence.

An editorial in Haaretz, an Israeli daily, even went so far as to label Israel "the region's bully".

Barack Obama, the US president-elect, remains silent as Israel kills Palestinians with impunity. In his silence he expresses his complicity.