In advance of talks in New Delhi on Thursday between Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and her Pakistani counterpart, Salman Bashir — which touched on a number of sensitive issues — a Pakistani newspaper suggested that Mr. Bashir’s delegation included a secret weapon: a diplomat “who can read the faces of people and predict what they are actually thinking and feeling — an art known as physiognomy.” More:
Below, the report in The News, a Pakistani newspaper:
When Pakistani negotiators start their dialogue with the Indians in New Delhi on Wednesday, they will be informally helped by one of their team members who can read the faces of people and predict what they are actually thinking and feeling — an art known as physiognomy.
Director-General for South Asia, Afrasiab Hashmi, may turn out to be a treasured guide for the country’s delegation by reading the faces of the Indian negotiators.Few people know about the God-gifted quality of Hashmi. He is an expert in judging a person’s character or personality from that mans facial characteristics and structure. Physiognomy and its practice dates back to the ancient Greece but was abandoned later.
Hashmi is said to have harboured this skill by birth, not learning through any special courses. It becomes very difficult to hide one’s inner-self in front of Hashmi, people close to him say, though he gives his frank opinions only to frank friends. More:
The man who masterminded covert US support for the mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan war. From the Guardian:
His accomplishment in launching and sustaining America’s largest clandestine war – supplying arms to Afghan rebels fighting the Soviets in the 1980s – might have been more understandable had he been one of those discreet figures who slide greyly through the corridors of power. In reality, he was a loud-voiced, 6ft 4in Texan, addicted to outlandish clothes and notorious for his womanising. He staffed his congressional office with beautiful female assistants (dubbed Charlie’s Angels on Capitol Hill) and had well-publicised brushes with the law, including allegations of cocaine-sniffing and drunk driving.
Yet he somehow managed to persuade the Bible belt of rural east Texas to return him for 11 successive congressional terms and to attract huge financial support from American Jews and from the strict Wahhabi Muslims of Saudi Arabia. His inexhaustible capacity to be all things to all men brought him enormous influence in American governance, allowing him to spend the Reagan years virtually running his own foreign policy. More:
In many ways Charlie Wilson was as much an architect of today’s Pakistan as General Zia-ul-Haq. Only a lot more colorful, and maybe a little more well-meaning; even if equally misguided.
There are, it must be conceded, legitimate grounds on which Shashi Tharoor may be attacked. The hair, for instance. It isn’t the 1980s, dude: get it cut. The ultra-posh accent. And I’m talking here of his English accent. One shudders to think what his Malayalam must sound like. And we haven’t yet started on the most sensitive issue — the novels. Has anyone managed to finish Riot?
Since the man has so many soft spots, it’s puzzling that his ill-wishers are attacking him in the one place where he is invulnerable: his attitude towards Pandit Nehru’s foreign policy. Some years ago, Penguin India issued a series of small, handsomely-bound biographies that re-introduced us to the nation’s founding fathers. The best of this series was the one on Pandit Nehru, and it was written by Shashi Tharoor. This book, Nehru: The Invention of India, deserves to be quoted in the context of the present controversy, because it is probably the finest short book written on Nehru’s legacy. More:
The new external affairs minister, S.M. Krishna, is changing the flavour of South Block. No longer are visitors to the first-floor office of the minister asked if they want tea or coffee. Instead, waiters walk in and out of his suite of offices and that of his long-time personal aide, Raghavendra Shastry, now Krishna’s advisor, with trays of south India’s celebrated filter coffee. Of course, tea is available for those who do not drink coffee, but otherwise, the aroma of Mysore coffee from the home state of the external affairs minister constantly wafts through his office.
Loyalty, often bordering on sycophancy, is ingrained in bureaucrats all over the world and South Block is no exception. So, taking the cue from the boss, many Indian Foreign Service officers at their headquarters have taken to serving south Indian filter coffee to visitors instead of tea or the good old café au lait brewed at the Indian Coffee Board’s outlet at the ministry of external affairs as its most popular beverage for many years.
The new minister’s decision to popularize south Indian filter coffee goes well beyond any commitment to coffee-growers in Coorg in his native Karnataka. Krishna, who will soon be celebrating 50 years in public life, has enough political savvy to find mileage even in south Indian filter coffee. Although he does not deal with the Islamic world or Haj, Krishna has already told some Muslim visitors to his office about the ‘Islamic’ virtues of the Karnataka beverage he is now consciously popularizing in his ministry. It is a tale that, surprisingly, Muslim leaders to whom Krishna narrated the story did not know themselves. More:
Nirupama Rao, currently India’s Ambassador to China, has been named the country’s next Foreign Secretary. She will succeed Shiv Shankar Menon.
From the Hindu: Prior to becoming India’s woman in Beijing, she was High Commissioner to Sri Lanka. Her other diplomatic jobs included being Ambassador to Peru, deputy head of the Indian embassy in Moscow, and Minister (Press) at the Indian embassy in Washington, DC. At the headquarters, she ran the East Asia desk for several years but her most high-profile assignment was as spokesperson of the MEA, a job she performed with distinction and flair during a difficult period in the bilateral relationship with Pakistan: the Agra summit of 2001 and the military stand-off of 2001-02. More:
From Hindustan Times: Our foreign secretary designate’s many accomplishments don’t end with poetry. Trained in Carnatic music, she prefers Western classical. Mother of two sons, Nikhilesh (31) and Kartikeya (21), and wife of Sudhakar Rao, currently chief secretary in Karnataka, Rao appears to have found work, family, poetry and music an easy juggle. More:
Afghanistan’s US ambassador knows that influence comes with a steep price tag in DC. Read his confidential memo pleading for more lobbyists. From Mother Jones:
In his memo to Afghanistan’s finance minister, Omar Zakhiwal, which is dated April 21 and marked “confidential,” Ambassador Said Tayeb Jawad surveys the competition. Pakistan, he writes, employs nine American lobbying firms, including two “that alone represent and promote President Asif Ali Zardari’s interests in Washington.” According to the ambassador’s missive, these include Locke Lord Strategies-LP, which since May 2008 has been on retainer from the Pakistan government for more than $100,000 per month, and JWT Asiatic and Hill & Knowlton, which together collect a monthly payment exceeding $100,000. All told, according to Jawad’s estimate, Islamabad spent at least $3 million on Washington lobbyists in 2008 alone. Explaining how he has been outspent, he cites a January 2009 report in the Washington Post stating that India’s lobbyists successfully persuaded the Obama administration to remove Kashmir from Richard Holbrooke’s portfolio as the White House’s special adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan. In hopes his government might learn from the example, Jawad suggests that Kabul needs “to give serious consideration to allocating financial resources an on annual basis so that-like Pakistan and India and so many other countries-we are also able to effect pro-Afghanistan policy and legislation in Washington.” More:
President Barack Obama has called for a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world. In his address at Cairo University, he said America and Islam were not mutually exclusive, but shared common principles of justice, progress and tolerance.
He said: “I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”
Dawn, Karachi, said in an editorial: “Indeed, it was a sweeping message that tried to show a softer, gentler side of the US, one that emphasised similarities and opportunities and not divisions with the Muslim world. But as President Obama noted, ‘No single speech can eradicate years of mistrust.’ At the very least though, the speech was yet more evidence that the US has put behind it the roughest edges of the Bush years.”
According to a report in the Telegraph, Calcutta, Muslim leaders in Delhi say Obama’s reconciliatory speech was a “good beginning”, but some want to wait till they see some actual change in US policy. “Among the most elated was Kamal Farooqi, member of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, who said Obama’s speech had “changed the world order for ever”.”
In case you missed the speech, you can watch it here. (Our thanks to 3quarksdaily for this)
And below, the full text:
I am honored to be in the timeless city of Cairo, and to be hosted by two remarkable institutions. For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning, and for over a century, Cairo University has been a source of Egypt’s advancement. Together, you represent the harmony between tradition and progress. I am grateful for your hospitality, and the hospitality of the people of Egypt. I am also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum.
We meet at a time of tension between the United States and Muslims around the world – tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate. The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of co-existence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.
Violent extremists have exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims. The attacks of September 11th, 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and Western countries, but also to human rights. This has bred more fear and mistrust. Continue reading ‘Barack Obama’s speech at Cairo University’
It’s time for the Democrats to cement America’s major new alliance. Tunku Varadarajan in Forbes:
But the truth is that, for all his unpopularity in the U.S. (and Europe, and Latin America, and the Middle East, and practically everywhere else outside Albania and Georgia), Bush is a much-appreciated figure in India–at least in high policy circles. As many have noted, both in Washington and New Delhi, the one indisputable foreign policy success of the eight Bush years was America’s invigorating new alliance with India–an alliance that is based as much in a sense of shared ideology (democracy, pluralism, etc.) as it is in strategic need (both countries want a reliable counterweight to China and face a common foe in Islamist terrorism).
A new Asia Society task force outlines a bold new strategy for the Obama administration to strengthen relations with India:
As the Obama Administration transitions to power already burdened with global economic crises and two wars, two events underscore India’s importance for US interests: the brutal Mumbai attacks and the financial sector meltdown. The Mumbai attacks reminded Americans of India’s vulnerability to global terrorism, our shared struggle against violent Islamic extremism, and the potential for crisis to rapidly escalate in the region. The financial sector meltdown and the emerging global response showed how India can be a key part of the solution through leadership in global bodies such as the G20.
India matters to virtually every major foreign policy issue that will confront the United States in the years ahead. A broad-based, close relationship with India will thus be necessary to solve complex global challenges, achieve security in the critical South Asian region, reestablish stability in the global economy, and overcome the threat of violent Islamic radicalism which has taken root across the region and in India. The members of this task force believe that the US relationship with India will be among our most important in the future, and will at long last reach its potential for global impact-provided that strong leadership on both sides steers the way.
Click here for a summary and to download the full report:
Over the last week, many Americans (and not a few Indians) have asked me why India does not “do a Gaza” on Pakistan, referring, of course, to an emulation of Israel’s punitive use of force against Hamas-run Palestine, a territory from which rockets rain down on Israeli soil with reliable frequency (if not reliable destructiveness … but that is not for want of Hamas intent).
My answer, given with the heavy heart that comes always with a painful grip on reality, is simple: India does not because it cannot.
Here are five reasons why:
1. India is not a military goliath in relation to Pakistan in the way Israel is to the Palestinian territories. India does not have the immunity, the confidence and the military free hand that result from an overwhelming military superiority over an opponent. Israel’s foe is a non-sovereign entity that enjoys the most precarious form of self-governance. Pakistan, for all its dysfunction, is a proper country with a proper army, superior by far to the tin-pot Arab forces that Israel has had to combat over time. Pakistan has nukes, to boot. Any assault on Pakistani territory carries with it an apocalyptic risk for India. This is, in fact, Pakistan’s trump card. (This explains, also, why Israel is determined to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran.)
[Tunku Varadarajan, a professor at the Stern Business School at NYU and research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, is opinions editor at Forbes.com, where he writes a weekly column.]
Why is the University of Texas naming a chair of Pakistan Studies after the notorious U.S. congressman who helped destabilize that country? Fatima Bhutto – niece of the late Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto – demands an answer. In The Daily Beast [via 3quarksdaily]:
Pakistan’s new government, the only in the world headed by two former convicts-who have their fingers on the button of a nuclear-armed state, no less-is nothing if not a keen purveyor of irony.
There’s currently an effort underway by the Pakistani diplomatic mission in Texas to raise funds for a chair of Pakistan Studies at the University of Texas in Austin. The chair, a dream of the Pakistani diplomatic community, is to be named after Charlie Wilson. For those who missed the movie, it’s worth noting that of all the people to name a chair of Pakistani Studies after, Charlie Wilson is possibly the stupidest.
Anand Giridharadas in International Herald Tribune:
Manmohan Singh leads the largest democracy on Earth. But the Indian prime minister is gentle of manner and speaks in whispers. One struggles to imagine him professing love without shyness to his own wife. And so it meant something when he recently laid the L-word on a little-loved man: George W. Bush.
“This may be my last visit to you during your presidency,” Singh told the U.S. president in Washington in September, “and let me say, thank you very much. The people of India deeply love you.”
Among the least coveted jobs in the world today, along with grave digging, is the task of burnishing Bush’s foreign legacy: the complex, competing challenges of Iraq, Afghanistan, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Iran, Venezuela, Russia, North Korea, China and what many in Europe and the developing world see as a tarnished national brand.
It is possible that the love-fest stoked by Singh and Bush will, with time, come to be seen as Bush’s enduring overseas accomplishment: the cultivation of India, long prickly about empires, as a partner of the sole superpower.
The U.S. deputy secretary of state bore the brunt of a range of complaints that Pakistanis now feel freer to air with the end of military rule. Jane Perlez from Islamabad in The New York Times:
If it was not yet clear to Washington that a new political order prevailed here, the three-day visit this week by America’s chief diplomat dealing with Pakistan should put any doubt to rest.
The visit by Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte turned out to be series of indignities and chilly, almost hostile, receptions as he bore the brunt of the full range of complaints that Pakistanis now feel freer to air with the end of military rule by Washington’s favored ally, President Pervez Musharraf.
Faced with a new democratic lineup that is demanding talks, not force, in the fight against terrorism, Mr. Negroponte publicly swallowed a bitter pill at his final news conference on Thursday, acknowledging that there would now be some real differences in strategy between the United States and Pakistan.
