Tuesday 15 March 2011

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Saturday 12 March 2011

Corruption in India: A million rupees now

Corruption in India

A million rupees now

Congress drags its feet over tackling graft. It may pay a high price

THE prime minister’s loyalty to his friends looks to be ever more a fault. This week parliament grilled Manmohan Singh over his latest failure to fight corruption and his habit of sticking with compromised allies. The grilling concerned P.J.

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Lexington: Muslims and McCarthyism

A witch-hunt on one side, denial on the other, as the threat of home-grown terrorism rises

IS A new Joe McCarthy strutting his stuff up on Capitol Hill? You might think so, to judge by the abuse that has thundered down on the head of Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, following his decision to start hearings on “The Extent of Radicalisation in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response”. Even before the first one took place this week, the very idea of the hearings came under withering fire from liberal America. They were “fuel for the bigots”, said Richard Cohen, a columnist at the Washington Post. “To focus an investigative spotlight on an entire religious or ethnic community is a violation of everything America is supposed to stand for,” echoed Bob Herbert in the New York Times. “Security hearings that focus exclusively on Muslim Americans serve only to amplify the rumblings of Islamophobia that seem to become louder and crazier by the day,” concurred Eugene Robinson, another of the Post’s columnists.

It is indeed hard to find much to like in Mr King. The representative for Long Island has approached this most sensitive of subjects with the delicacy of a steamroller, plus an overactive imagination and a generous dollop of prejudice. To be clear: he may not be prejudiced against America’s Muslims (the “overwhelming majority” are “outstanding Americans”, he says) but he long ago prejudged the question his own hearings are supposed to answer, being already firmly of the view that the country’s Muslims are doing too little to counter radicalisation within their ranks. He is the author of a novel, “Vale of Tears”, in which a heroic version of his thinly disguised self busts a home-grown al-Qaeda cell at a Long Island Islamic centre. His own attitude to terrorism, though, is conveniently elastic. In the 1980s this Irish-American Catholic sympathised strongly with the Irish Republican Army, going so far as to compare Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, the terrorist group’s political wing, to George Washington.

Beyond these objections to his person, prejudices and past, most of the available evidence suggests that Mr King’s central thesis is overblown, if not flat wrong. Muslim co-operation with the authorities is not perfect, but by most accounts—including those of Robert Mueller, the director of the FBI, and Eric Holder, the attorney-general—the community has in general worked hard to expose terrorist plots in its midst. In one prominent case last year, for instance, five men from northern Virginia who had travelled to Pakistan in search of jihad were convicted after their families tipped off the FBI. The Triangle Centre on Terrorism and Homeland Security, a research group affiliated with Duke University and the University of North Carolina, reported recently that 48 of the 120 Muslims suspected of plotting terror attacks in America since the felling of the twin towers in 2001 were turned in by fellow Muslims.

With the inflammatory Mr King planted on one side of the quarrel and pretty much all liberal opinion arrayed indignantly on the other, the hearings are expected to produce heat, not light. But it is worth noting that the liberal side has a defect of its own. Many say that Mr King’s exclusive focus on Islam is misplaced, since terrorism can arise from any group or grievance (Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 are suddenly much cited). But this is to let political correctness obscure a troubling development that America’s terrorism experts had started to worry about well before Mr King announced his hearings. It is true that not all terrorism takes an Islamist form, but Islamist terrorism is the clear and present danger—and al-Qaeda has lately shown an unexpected ability both to recruit American Muslims and to move its battle back to American soil.

The Americanisation of al-Qaeda

Two experts on al-Qaeda, Peter Bergen and Bruce Hoffman, pointed out in a study last year that Americans have occupied some senior positions in al-Qaeda. Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaeda leader in Yemen, grew up in New Mexico. Adnan Shukrijumah, probably al-Qaeda’s director of external operations, is a Saudi-American who grew up in Brooklyn and Florida. David Headley, from Chicago and now in custody, scouted targets for the attack on Mumbai in 2008 that killed more than 160 people.

America is producing followers as well as leaders. When a bunch of Somali-Americans from the Minneapolis-St Paul area started turning up in Somalia to wage jihad, the authorities hoped that this was a one-off. But the phenomenon turned out not to be confined either to Minnesota or to Somalis. In November 2009 Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Palestinian-American, killed 13 people at Fort Hood in Texas, and a few months later Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American, tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square in New York. “The American melting pot”, Mr Bergen and Mr Hoffman concluded, “has not provided a firewall against the radicalisation and recruitment of American citizens and residents, though it has arguably lulled us into a sense of complacency that home-grown terrorism couldn’t happen in the United States.” The White House is worried too: Barack Obama’s National Security Strategy, published last May, promised to invest in efforts to counter radicalisation at home.

The subject, in short, is a real one. It merits frank discussion, not least in Congress. But Mr King’s clumsy approach to it risks feeding the sense of beleaguerment and outrage many American Muslims have come to feel in the face of the recent scaremongering over the so-called “ground zero” mosque in New York and the Republican Party’s paranoid fantasy about Islamic sharia law taking over America by stealth. As it happens, Mr King was in the forefront of the trumped-up objections to the Manhattan mosque. What folly to let such a man chair the Homeland Security Committee of the House of Representatives.

Ghosts in Kentucky: Genteel spirits

The spectral residents of America’s most haunted neighbourhood

ONE evening in 1918 a Louisville belle paced anxiously on the front steps of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, waiting for her lover, a soldier stationed at a nearby camp. When he did not come she believed herself spurned; in fact, he lay in his barracks, quarantined and dying from Spanish flu—the same disease that killed the young woman days later. Some say she can be seen of an evening pacing there still.

Then there is Avery, who haunts an ornate pink house that housed both a chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and allegedly (not at the same time) a brothel. He appears to warn inhabitants of impending doom. He supposedly saved one inhabitant from immolation in a kitchen fire and another from having her head crushed by a cinderblock thrown through the window. Not far away, at the Conrad-Caldwell House Museum, the ghost of Mr Conrad, who built the mansion, has been known to appear wagging his finger at stragglers who wander off from tour groups.

At 48 square blocks, Old Louisville is one of America’s largest historic districts, and has a reputation as one of the most haunted. It abounds in brick and stone Victorian-era mansions. With their ornate turrets, spires, gabled windows and forbidding facades, many of them certainly look haunted. And given their age and size, most of them must have had people die in them at some point.

As for what to do with a haunted house, that varies; running out the front door screaming is one option, but you can also get to know the spook in question. David Dominé, who writes about Old Louisville’s history, said that the ghost haunting his house quietened down as soon as he learned that her name was Lucy and she was a maid. He sold that house to a ghost-fancier precisely because it was haunted.

And there are plenty of ghost-fanciers: around 5,000 people a year take Mr Dominé’s tours, around half of those from out of state. Chris Morris, the master distiller and resident historian for Brown-Forman, which makes several Kentucky bourbons (including Woodford Reserve, whose distillery is home to two ghosts), notes that Kentucky was largely settled by Irish and Britons, and “Celts believe in ghosts.” In other words, Kentucky may abound not in restless spirits, but in people who believe in them.

Public-sector unions: Time for second thoughts?

A backlash against Republican attacks may be under way

IT IS hard to get away from the subject of union rights in the Midwest these days. Protesters agitating against moves to curb them could be heard booing and chanting throughout the “state-of-the-state” speech delivered this week by John Kasich, the new Republican governor of Ohio. In nearby Wisconsin, the also-new Republican governor is under heavy fire for having, on March 9th, used a procedural dodge to force through a bill that will strip public-sector unions of their right to collective bargaining: Democratic state senators had tried to frustrate him by fleeing across the state line to Illinois. In Indiana, the state legislature is paralysed too, after its own Democratic flight. Both sides see ramifications for national politics—but do not agree, naturally, on what they will be.

Unions argue that the hullabaloo has done wonders for their cause. “We’ve never seen the incredible solidarity that we’re seeing right now,” said Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO, America’s main umbrella group for unions, earlier this month. But the union’s foes say much the same thing. Tim Phillips, the boss of Americans for Prosperity, a small-government pressure group, says that he and his colleagues encountered enthusiastic crowds everywhere they went during a 12-city tour of Wisconsin in support of the proposed checks on the state’s public-sector unions.

Both sides could be right, points out Andy Downs of IPFW, a university in Indiana, in that both may be rallying those already sympathetic to their cause. But the true test of the row’s impact, in his view, is the response of moderate, independent voters. In that respect, most polling suggests that Democrats fighting the erosion of union rights have an advantage over the Republicans advocating it. Voters seem to dislike the idea of depriving public-sector unions of collective-bargaining rights, as the Republican governor of Indiana has already done and his counterparts in Ohio and Wisconsin are proposing. Although they tend to support the idea of cutting benefits for government employees, that stance does not appear to rest on a broader animosity towards public-sector unions, and certainly not towards the teachers, police, and firemen they represent.

Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, has seen his ratings fall since the uproar in his state began, especially among independents. Some of his fellow Republicans in the legislature are beginning to edge away from his insistence that scrapping collective bargaining for state workers is non-negotiable. By the same token, proponents of a similar move in Ohio had to turf two reluctant Republicans out of the relevant committees in the state Senate to secure its passage. In Indiana, Mitch Daniels, the governor, who is thought to have presidential ambitions, has asked the legislature to put off consideration of a bill that would end mandatory collection of union dues from pay-cheques.

Amy Hanauer of Policy Matters Ohio, a left-leaning think-tank, sees hope for Democrats in all this. Support for the party among working-class voters has been unreliable in recent years, she says, thanks in part to their conservative stance on social issues. By contrast, union rights, she believes, are a subject on which Democrats and the working class can agree. It was a plunge in support among the white working class, along with low turnout among youth and minorities, which earned the Democrats their drubbing throughout the Midwest at last year’s mid-term elections. The current furore should help reverse both trends, she thinks. That, in turn, could improve Barack Obama’s chances in a clump of states critical to his re-election.

But Mr Downs of IPFW is more cautious. Voters, he says want to see the melodrama end. It is not yet clear how the Democrats in Wisconsin will respond to Mr Walker’s latest move. But if their party, there and elsewhere, is seen to be the main obstacle to agreement, their defence of the unions could backfire. Midwesterners are looking forward to a change of subject.

Manufacturing: Rustbelt recovery

Against all the odds, American factories are coming back to life. Thank the rest of the world for that

ACME INDUSTRIES is a small contract manufacturer with only ten big customers. But those customers are a cross-section of the industrial economy, spanning mining, oil, transport and construction. Right now, Acme’s order book is bulging. “Everyone is up across the board,” says Bob Clifford, the company’s head of sales and marketing.

In one corner of its factory just outside Chicago, three workers polish what looks like a steel Lego brick the size of a steamer trunk. This is designed to channel water underground at high pressure, and will go into natural-gas-drilling equipment. In another corner sit rows of hollow steel cylinders that will hold bearings inside the wheels of gigantic mining trucks being built in nearby Peoria. Mr Clifford points to several parts destined for diesel locomotives built by a subsidiary of Caterpillar a big maker of heavy equipment. Caterpillar is booming, and its ecosystem of suppliers across Illinois is “seeing a real trickle-down effect,” he says.

At the nadir of the recession Acme’s sales had fallen 20% and it had laid off ten of its 125 employees. Sales are back up, the head count is now up to 130, and Acme reckons it will hire 20 more people this year to handle the growing order book.

For the first time in many years, American manufacturing is doing better than the rest of the economy. Manufacturing output tumbled 15% over the course of the recession, from December 2007 to the end of June 2009. Since then it has recovered two-thirds of that drop; production is now just 5% below its peak level (see chart 1).

Factory employment has been slower to recover than output, since productivity has risen. Nonetheless, that too is growing. In February factory payrolls rose by 33,000 from January. In the past year manufacturing employment has gone up by 189,000, or 1.6%, the biggest gain since the late 1990s. Total employment rose just 1% in that period. Unemployment has fallen more sharply than the national average in Illinois, Ohio and Michigan, which are relatively dependent on manufacturing.

Much of the recovery there is payback for the stomach-churning plunge that came before. Sales of cars, still one of America’s biggest manufacturing sectors, collapsed between 2007 and 2009 as customers lost access to credit, lost their jobs, or lost confidence in cars made by General Motors and Chrysler, which went through government-sponsored bankruptcy. That rippled through the industry’s thousands of suppliers strung out across the rustbelt. “We were in the valley of death in April of 2009,” says John Winzeler, president of Winzeler Gear, whose small plastic gears go into door latches, lumbar supports and countless car parts. Sales, down 40% during the recession, have recovered more than half that drop, in line with the recovery in car production.

Beyond this cyclical bounce-back, though, a structural shift may also be under way. Makers of floorings, furniture and glass, all of which go into houses, were especially hard hit and have yet to start hiring again. But those that make things for businesses or customers overseas—computers, machinery, electronic equipment, heavy-duty trucks—are thriving. Cisco Systems and Intel Corporation notched up record sales last year. Caterpillar and John Deere, which makes diggers, bulldozers and farm equipment, saw sales leap.

Kash Mansori, who provides economic consulting for manufacturers, attributes this to the composition of economic growth (see chart 2). Housing and car sales have typically led previous recoveries, but this time both have been held back by tight credit conditions and heavy household debt. Meanwhile business investment, typically a laggard, is rising because of tax incentives and because firms had so long delayed replacing ageing equipment. Exports are even stronger, thanks to the robust appetites of emerging markets and a lower dollar.

In its Economic Report of the President last month, Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers calculated that each additional percentage point of another country’s growth boosts its imports from America by three percentage points. It thus expects emerging economies, including Mexico, to account for 71% of America’s export growth from 2009 to 2014—especially in farm products, aircraft, integrated circuits and oil- and gas-field machinery.

Some hope this marks a broader turning point. American manufacturing employment peaked in 1979 and has been generally falling since. This was mostly because of rising productivity; but it also reflected the steady loss of domestic market share to foreign imports, especially from China. Some now wonder if those trends have stopped. Mr Winzeler points to announcements of Japanese and German companies opening plants in America. His own company has weaned itself off American car brands by developing relationships with foreign-owned suppliers.

Yet the notion that jobs may flood back from abroad seems a fantasy. Caterpillar added 19,008 employees (excluding acquisitions) last year; 60% of those were overseas. Like most multinationals, Caterpillar prefers to produce where it sells. Last year sales to Asia rose 43%, and to Latin America 58%, compared with 30% for North America. As long as emerging markets are growing fastest, that’s where the bulk of new manufacturing jobs are likely to go.

Arab economies: Throwing money at the street

Governments throughout the Middle East are trying to buy off trouble. They may be storing up more

IF YOU don’t own your citizens’ loyalty, perhaps you can rent it for a whil. That seems to be the mantra of Arab regimes at the moment. Throughout the Middle East and north Africa, they are showering their citizens with money and gifts, like Hosni Mubarak’s policemen hosing down protesters with water cannon in Tahrir Square.

Governments in the region have long controlled prices of food and fuel. If you fix domestic prices and world prices rise, subsidies will increase even if the regime does nothing. Egypt keeps bread prices at a few cents a loaf. With wheat prices soaring, Mr Mubarak promised that bread would stay cheap, raising subsidies which now run at over $2 billion a year. The new government can hardly break his promise.

Fuel subsidies are bigger. In 2009 they amounted to roughly $150 billion in the Middle East and north Africa. Oil then cost just over $60 a barrel. It is now almost double that, so if prices were to stay at the same level regional fuel subsidies would rise to almost $300 billion this year. That is 7.5% of the area’s GDP, a vast amount. The only way to prevent such a jump would be to increase domestic fuel prices. But no countries have been brave enough to risk that except Qatar and Iran.

Governments are not merely sitting by, watching existing subsidies shoot up. To buy off economic discontent, they are introducing new handouts (see table). The commonest is the old-fashioned wage rise. Saudi Arabia is boosting public-sector pay by 15% as part of a $36 billion spending splurge. Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Oman and Syria are all raising wages or benefits for public employees, though whether the 150% pay rise for Libyan civil servants will actually be paid is another matter. The wage increases in Jordan and Syria are worth 0.4-0.8% of GDP, which is not trivial. In addition Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, the king of Bahrain and the emir of Kuwait are offering one-off handouts to stop people demonstrating. These are princely, worth $4,000 per person in Kuwait and $2,500 per family in Bahrain.

Some governments have added shiny new subsidies. Kuwait, for example, is offering free food to everyone for 14 months. Bahrain says it will dish out up to $100m to help families hit by food inflation.

Many more are boosting social-welfare schemes. Jordan, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen have each increased the budgets of national programmes that give cash and benefits to the poor by just under 0.5% of GDP. Such programmes typically account for 2% of GDP, so the extra spending increases the size of the schemes by a quarter. A few countries have cut taxes on food or fuel to offset price rises. Lebanon, for example, has cut fuel excise tax by over 1% of GDP.

But far and away the most lavish sums are being spent or proposed by oil and gas exporters on infrastructure. Inevitably, the grand-daddy of such proposals is Saudi Arabia’s. The government is talking about increasing investment by half a trillion dollars, on top of the $36 billion stimulus plan. Algeria is proposing to spend $156 billion on new infrastructure projects between now and 2014, plus $130 billion on projects already under way. Oil-flush Abu Dhabi says it will finance more infrastructure projects in the poorer princedoms that make up the United Arab Emirates. The speaker of the UAE’s parliament says the state’s sovereign-wealth fund should disburse a further $40 billion to stimulate the economy and cut interest rates.

Let’s worry later

It is too early to gauge the effect of all these measures. To the regimes implementing them, the political results matter most. These look modest. Wage and subsidy rises did not save Mr Mubarak. First reactions to Saudi Arabia’s spending splurge have also been dismissive, to judge by social-media sites. “They are still stuck with the old mentality: giving away money!” said one. On the other hand, the measures may have bought time for the regimes there, and in Bahrain, Jordan and Syria.

The economic effects look clearer. Most governments probably have enough money to spend. Saudi Arabia certainly does. Each $1-a-barrel increase in the price of oil adds about $3 billion to the Saudi treasury, implying that the increase in oil prices this year could add roughly $100 billion to revenues. Saudi Arabia is also increasing oil production, so it could spend even more.

Explore our interactive map and guide to the Arab League countries

The position of oil importers is more precarious. They came through the global financial crisis with reasonable foreign-exchange reserves, falling debt-to-GDP ratios but rising budget deficits. If nothing else goes wrong, Egypt and Tunisia should be able to finance some extra spending. But their economies are suffering from an external shock from lost tourist revenues and are vulnerable to a downturn in demand: GDP growth in Egypt is forecast to fall from over 5% in 2010 to below 4% this year. Their fiscal position could deteriorate fast.

Everywhere the changes will increase the role of the state in the economy, which was too large already. They are already reversing the modest economic reforms of the mid-2000s. Then, Egypt lowered import tariffs, opened up its foreign-exchange market and cut taxes and red tape, so that by 2007 it was the top reformer in the World Bank’s “Doing Business Report”. Now it is 94th. Saudi Arabia also opened up, more cautiously. The massive stimulus measures will do nothing to loosen the economic grip of the House of Saud.

Most Arab regimes are fighting for their lives, in some cases literally. They have more pressing things to worry about than the economic consequences of their actions. But consequences there will be. And they may not be good ones.

The Arab uprisings: Democracy's hard spring

AS A dramatic revolutionary moment, the storming of Egypt’s notorious State Security Investigations Directorate (SSI) seemed to rank with the fall of the Stasi headquarters in East Berlin in 1990. Over the first weekend in March furious crowds surged into the imposing bureaus of the secret police in half a dozen Egyptian cities. At their sprawling main complex in a Cairo suburb, some gleefully hunted for documents and computer discs. Others searched for hidden dungeons, shouting into air vents and frantically prising up floor tiles in the hope that long-missing relatives might be found underground.

Yet the buildings were largely empty, their floors deep in drifts of shredded paper. The SSI had not only withdrawn its own men, emptied its prisons and destroyed archives; among documents that did leak onto the internet, some appeared to be plants designed to throw up a smokescreen. One, for instance, contained the scarcely credible revelation that a son of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s fallen president, had sponsored a series of terrorist bombings in revenge for failing to secure a cut in a lucrative deal to sell natural gas to Israel.

In East Germany the people were luckier. Most of the Stasi archive was saved. Unification with West Germany soon allowed for an orderly transition to a fair and open political system. For Egypt and other Arab countries in the throes of revolution or on its verge, overhauling the ship of state will be much more difficult. Not only are institutions such as the secret police hard to clean out; there is also no ready model for an open, democratic Arab society, whether republic or constitutional monarchy. Bits may be borrowed from the manuals of other democracies, but much will need to be invented from scratch.

Tunisia and Egypt, the region’s revolutionary pioneers, are already running into turbulence. The core of activists who mobilised their revolutions have been joined by motley groups pursuing narrower agendas, ranging from higher wages to women’s rights to the imposition of sharia law, and to demands that other demonstrators stop protesting. Criminality is on the increase, as ordinary police have been slow to return to the streets. Businessmen protest that attempts to prosecute former officials and their cronies for corruption have broadened into witch hunts that frighten off investment. Purges continue in universities, government agencies and state-owned industries, where officials implanted by the former ruling parties and security agencies now face open revolt.

Pre-revolutionary social ills are also resurfacing. In Egypt, where the revolution featured heartwarming scenes of cohesion between Muslims and the 10% Coptic Christian minority, sectarian clashes have again erupted, with at least 13 killed in riots on the outskirts of Cairo. The fatal stabbing of a Polish monk in the Tunisian capital on February 18th was ascribed by some to Islamist radicals. Others blamed renegade policemen bent on implicating Islamists and maintaining a state of fear.

Aside from such surface troubles, deeper problems have emerged. Their source is not just the shakiness of both countries’ interim governments, which have largely been purged of ministers associated with old ways and are now led by fresh, untainted prime ministers. Debates rage over whether to scrap the old constitutions immediately or to reform them temporarily, whether to push for early elections or hold off until rules are set and the playing field levelled, and whether to opt for presidential or parliamentary political systems. Such essential questions as the proper relation between religion and the state, and between central and local government, remain to be resolved.

In Egypt, where such debates are more intense and better reflected in a broader, more mature press, some progress is being made. The army high command that assumed overall control after Mr Mubarak’s overthrow sketched a basic political road map early on. They appointed an expert panel to revise the constitution so as to allow for fairer presidential elections in six months’ time. Egyptians are set to vote yes or no to a package of revisions on March 19th. Should this pass, and a new president be elected, he would then be “invited” to oversee more sweeping constitutional changes. These could include a reduction of the regal presidential prerogatives enjoyed by Mr Mubarak, more independence for the judiciary and a stronger legislature.

How far, how fast?

So far the military men have not shifted from this plan, but a chorus of doubts is growing. Some point to the absence of guarantees that a new president would agree to surrender powers. Others say that too fast a transition would strengthen existing parties, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood and the remnants of Mr Mubarak’s corruption-riddled National Democratic Party, at the expense of newer groupings. Among intellectuals and the core of revolutionary activists there is wide agreement that a longer transitional period is needed. They want the army to appoint a temporary ruling executive council, charged specifically with setting up a body to draft a completely new constitution. This would set the rules for both parliamentary and presidential elections.

To general surprise, the army has proved responsive to protesters’ demands so far. Senior officers have had regular meetings with a range of opposition leaders, and at their urging removed the last prime minister appointed by Mr Mubarak. In a gesture to the Facebook generation, the army has set up its own page, and uses it to broadcast its views. Soldiers have largely allowed protests to continue, and at first stood aside to let citizens invade secret police offices. To back down on the constitutional referendum, however, might be viewed as showing too much flexibility.

Already there are signs of stiffening. Calls to dissolve the SSI, as Tunisia recently did with its similar secret-police organisation (even announcing the move on Facebook) have so far been rebuffed. Soldiers now guard its offices, and the army has demanded the return of all missing documents. It has tightened the midnight curfew in Egypt’s main cities. On March 9th soldiers forcibly removed a remaining encampment of protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The new cabinet also issued its first decree, setting severe penalties for the hazily defined crime of “thuggery”.

Many Egyptians welcome such moves as necessary to restore stability. Egypt’s new prime minister, Essam Sharaf, is genuinely popular. An expert in traffic management, he served briefly under Mr Mubarak as minister of transport before resigning. As a university professor he joined in the mass demonstrations calling for Mr Mubarak to go. On his first day in office he pointedly walked to Tahrir Square to address the crowd, promising to uphold the aims of the revolution.

Freedom's tiring

And although Egypt’s broader political evolution is sure to take time, changes are already being felt. In the last decade of Mr Mubarak’s 30-year rule, Egypt’s privately owned press began to overtake the stodgy state-owned media. Both, however, were subject to intense pressure to convey the regime’s views. State-security officers frequently reprimanded editors, or summarily banned unwanted voices from the airwaves. During the revolution, Mr Mubarak and his minister of information personally telephoned television presenters to berate them for unfavourable coverage.

The revolution has greatly emboldened Egypt’s press. Private TV channels now venture into the previously forbidden realm of news coverage, and workers in the state-owned press have managed to eject editors appointed by Mr Mubarak. Mr Sharaf’s briefly installed predecessor as prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq, is widely believed to have been removed after acting arrogantly on a talk show.

Another institution subject to manipulation by the security services, Egypt’s judiciary, is also showing signs of greater independence. Not only is it vigorously prosecuting former officials, including Mr Mubarak and senior ministers; it has also overturned bans on some political parties. The new justice minister has also reduced his own power to appoint judges, in favour of selection by their peers.

Egypt’s state universities, which account for some 90% of college enrolment, have also been convulsed by change. In the past not only their presidents, but even minor academic appointments and candidates for student unions, were vetted by security officers. Faculty and students in many institutions have now united to get rid of unwanted administrators.

The collapse of the secret police has brought relief in smaller ways. Arbitrary checkpoints on roads, which snarled traffic and humiliated drivers, have vanished. Egyptian mobile-phone operators, whose licences gave the SSI unlimited rights to snoop, now want them revised. Businesses and even government agencies that once felt obliged to hire former security officers, or contract companies owned by them, feel free to look elsewhere.

A new-found sense of freedom appears even to have infected the Muslim Brotherhood, where many of the younger members who manned the barricades in Tahrir Square now want a greater say, open internal elections and revisions to the group’s political platform. Among other things, they suggest dropping the idea that a body of clerics should vet future laws.

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Even without such internal pressure, the Brotherhood appears to be maturing as it ceases to be the main target of state repression. By its count, some 40,000 members were jailed during the last two decades of Mr Mubarak’s rule. None remains inside, but the group has made it clear that it intends to act as a responsible and even loyal opposition. Spokesmen say it will abide by the army’s commands, would accept minor constitutional reforms and does not intend to run a presidential candidate or seek a parliamentary majority.

The wider picture

Egypt’s emerging democracy remains very much a work in progress, but already it is having a wider influence. Rebels opposed to Muammar Qaddafi in eastern Libya say they also seek to create a pluralist parliamentary democracy with reduced executive powers (see article). Islamists there, including former members of groups linked to al-Qaeda, have shown a willingness to accommodate secular views.

Yemen, embroiled in massive protests against the 33-year rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, has traditionally looked to Cairo for guidance and will do so again. But the template of a successful Egyptian transition to democracy will prove harder to apply in Arab monarchies. These, so far, have been more resistant to change, although pressure is mounting against hereditary rulers from Morocco to Oman, and even in Saudi Arabia.

Except in the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain, where anger among the majority Shias against the ruling Sunni royal family has intensified after a failed police crackdown on protests last month, the call in all these countries is not for the overthrow of monarchs but for constitutional limits to royal rule. If just one Arab monarchy finds a new people-empowering model that works, the rest will be pressed to follow.

Over the Horizon: Rethinking Our Approach to Piracy

The battle against piracy off the coast of Somalia is not going well, with pirates continuing to attack and seize vessels and, in some cases, becoming more violent. The recent deaths of four American missionaries at the hands of pirates served to highlight the helplessness of the world navies gathered in the Gulf of Aden: Four American warships, including the USS Enterprise, monitored the situation, but none were able to prevent the tragedy. While the multinational naval flotilla -- primarily CTF-151, but including some other navies -- off Somalia has seen some notable successes, it has not defeated the pirates or changed the circumstances under which piracy has flourished. It is time for the world's maritime powers to rethink their approach to piracy.

That anti-piracy efforts have failed is now recognized at the highest levels of government. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently reported to Congress that "the naval ships that have been involved from . . . more than 20 nations just have not been willing to really put themselves out. They're happy to patrol, and they're happy to . . . count themselves as part of the coalition. But when push comes to shove, they're not really producing." Sen. Mark Kirk, a former Naval reservist, proposed a set of tactical and legal reforms that would improve the flotilla's ability to make contact with pirates -- and to defeat them after contact is made.

Global Insights: The Mystery of Iran's Slow Nuclear Pace

One of the mysteries of Iran's nuclear program is the fact that, despite periodic warnings about how close Tehran is to acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, the Iranian nuclear program is proceeding at a slower speed than that of earlier nuclear weapons states. Whereas Pakistan and North Korea needed only some 10 years to develop atomic bombs, Iran has had a nuclear program for almost three decades without producing a weapon.

Various explanations could explain this deliberate pace. Iranian leaders might still be debating their nuclear weapons options and not yet committed to pursuing a nuclear weapon or capability. Iran's nuclear activities have also been suffering from design-related technical problems, increasingly tough international sanctions and deliberate foreign sabotage. These factors have combined to impede Iranian efforts to acquire the technologies, equipment and other materials needed to enrich uranium for a possible bomb.

The New Rules: Leadership Fatigue Puts U.S., and Globalization, at Crossroads

Events in Libya are a further reminder for Americans that we stand at a crossroads in our continuing evolution as the world's sole full-service superpower. Unfortunately, we are increasingly seeking change without cost, and shirking from risk because we are tired of the responsibility. We don't know who we are anymore, and our president is a big part of that problem. Instead of leading us, he explains to us. Barack Obama would have us believe that he is practicing strategic patience. But many experts and ordinary citizens alike have concluded that he is actually beset by strategic incoherence -- in effect, a man overmatched by the job.

It is worth first examining the larger picture: We live in a time of arguably the greatest structural change in the global order yet endured, with this historical moment's most amazing feature being its relative and absolute lack of mass violence. That is something to consider when Americans contemplate military intervention in Libya, because if we do take the step to prevent larger-scale killing by engaging in some killing of our own, we will not be adding to some fantastically imagined global death count stemming from the ongoing "megalomania" and "evil" of American "empire." We'll be engaging in the same sort of system-administering activity that has marked our stunningly successful stewardship of global order since World War II.

Taliban is losing its advantage in Afghanistan

Taliban is losing its advantage in Afghanistan

HELMAND PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN

Until five months ago, Forward Operating Base Jackson, in Sangin, was an island in a Taliban sea. Patrol bases were ringed by Taliban flags, about 100 to 200 meters out, to dramatize the state of siege. Everywhere beyond the main road was an enemy sanctuary. Each spring the fertile land along the Helmand River bloomed red with poppies from horizon to horizon. Thirty-five drug-processing labs helped fund the Taliban.

In October, about 1,500 Marines arrived, took the offensive, pushed into the territory beyond the roads - and sustained the highest casualties of the Afghan war. During the first three months of operations in Sangin, more than two dozen Marines died; 150 others were wounded.

But the Marines, as usual, got the better of the killing - counting more than 400 insurgent dead. In the end they owned the ground. War-weary locals have begun cooperating and providing information. Morale of the Afghan army and police has improved. Farmers are being given other seeds to replace poppies. Though the region is not fully pacified, the Marines have quickly established themselves as the toughest tribe in this part of the Taliban homeland.

The Afghan surge - involving about 40,000 additional coalition forces and more than 70,000 new recruits to the Afghan army and police - has made swift progress. And these advances are accumulating into a strategy. Coalition forces are moving north up the Helmand River valley, connecting their gains to Kandahar next door, hoping to expand the security bubble toward Kabul.

Near Kandahar, Tabin is one of a string of villages that the Taliban controlled last summer but lost to the coalition offensive. Local insurgents have been fighting not just for the past few years but since the Soviet Union was the enemy. Yet the U.S. Army has succeeded where the Russians did not. Troop strength has more than tripled in this area. Taliban weapons caches and IED factories have been destroyed. Village leaders are cooperating. During a visit this week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates (trailed by the press, including myself) walked down the main road in Tabin. Six months earlier, according to an American officer on the scene, an armored vehicle would not have dared to make the trip.
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It is possible for progress in a war to be real but not sufficient. Current coalition efforts are as great as they will ever be. Is their scale, in the vastness of Afghanistan, large enough?

"For the first time since the [earliest stage] of the Afghan war," Gates told me, we have "the resources, both civilian and military, and the strategy in place . . . to actually put us on the path to success, rather than sort of holding our own." The mission, in his view, has been refocused on achievable goals: "Deny the Taliban control of populated areas. Degrade their capabilities. And expand Afghan national security forces to the point where they can handle a degraded Taliban threat."

We are "going into places the Taliban have controlled for years," explained Gates. This is undermining the Taliban's economic support from the drug trade, pushing insurgents into remoter regions and giving local government a chance to take hold.

Afghans must eventually defend these gains - a heavy weight on a slim thread. Yet American officers in Helmand and Kandahar told me they were impressed with their Afghan army counterparts, whom one American officer described as "solid and eager." When the first Americans arrived in Helmand a little over a year ago, there were five coalition soldiers on the ground for every one from the Afghan security forces. Now that ratio is one-to-one. The Afghan police have always been a harder case - often untrained and predatory. But the coalition is taking a new approach, organizing the Afghan Local Police (ALP) - nominated by village elders, vetted by coalition forces, charged with extending security into rural areas. The $12 billion spent annually by the United States to train Afghan security forces is too expensive to be sustainable, but it seems to be working.

This progress is about to be tested. The green leaves of spring also provide cover for Taliban soldiers returning from Pakistan. American commanders anticipate a strategy of assassination against Afghans who participate in community structures such as the ALP. "We are expecting violence to pick up," said Lt. Col. Jason Morris at FOB Jackson. "They've started moving forces here. They'll try to reassert their authority, but they'll have a hard time doing it. They will be met at every turn."

How does this fighting season differ from that past 10? "When [the Taliban forces] come back this spring," Gates responds, "it's no longer their home-court advantage. We hold the home-court advantage now."

The Limitations of a No-Fly Zone Over Libya

Unlike the successful uprisings in neighboring Tunisia and Egypt, characterized by largely unarmed protests and government crackdowns with tear gas and bullets, Libya is now in the midst of a full-bore violent civil war. Refusing to stand down, Col. Moammar Gadhafi has vowed "to fight until the last man and last woman to defend Libya from east to west, north to south." While rebel forces have taken control of many town and cities, forces loyal to Gadhafi firmly control Tripoli, the country's capital, and have started to contest the rebels' control of strategic town and cities over the past week. The fighter jets and attack helicopters at Gadhafi's disposal will enable his forces to intensify the conflict, leading to the deaths of many more Libyans and expanding Gadhafi's territorial control.

Opposition leaders have called on the United Nations to authorize the imposition of a no-fly zone, but given Russia and China's resistance to these calls, the U.N. Security Council is unlikely to consider the request. There is a possibility that the Arab League and the African Union may partner to shut down Libya's airspace, but it is not clear which countries would lead this operation. Similarly, some European and American leaders have publicly discussed the possibility of using NATO to impose a no-fly zone over Libya.

India's Perspective on a U.S.-China Grand Bargain

With Indian newspapers still carrying obituaries of the country's strategic doyen, K. Subhramanyam, who passed away in February after almost a half-century at the forefront of New Delhi's strategic debates, it is worth considering the object of Subhramanyam's concern during his final days: the implications for India of a proposed U.S.-China grand strategy agreement hammered out by a group of policy experts in Washington and Beijing. The document proposed a series of strategic compromises between China and the U.S., including a massive Chinese investment in the U.S. economy in return for an informal nonaggression pact, particularly with regard to the U.S. military's posture toward China in Taiwan. Indian analysts led by the late Subhramanyam, however, saw the proposal as a ploy by the Chinese to "use the U.S. to attain hegemonic power in Asia."

In the proposal, Subhramanyam heard echoes of the Nixon-Deng compact, born out of the expediency of the Cold War. That agreement saw the United States push huge sums of commercial technology investment into China, ultimately followed by the outsourcing of mass manufacturing. Now, by contrast, it is high technology that would be transferred to China in return for the $1 trillion that Beijing would invest in the U.S. private sector. Over time, these transfers would enable China to leverage its demographic advantages to become the world's dominant economy

Can Diplomacy Work in Libya?

Who is ready to talk to Moammar Gadhafi? Last week, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela announced that his Libyan counterpart and longtime ally would accept an international "Committee of Peace" to end the rebellion that threatens to destroy him. Rebel leaders in Benghazi dismissed the proposal out of hand. Yet there is a good chance that outside mediators -- if not necessarily Chávez -- will eventually play a part in ending the Libyan civil war.

A negotiated end could in fact come quite soon if the rebels regain their early momentum and push on to Tripoli. Although Gadhafi says he is ready to fight to the death, he or his lieutenants might change their minds if defeat becomes imminent. For their part, the rebels might begrudgingly accept talks rather than risk the bloodbath that may accompany a major assault on Tripoli. International officials could be drafted to oversee the surrender, observe the disarming of Gadhafi's forces and take the colonel into exile or, better still, into custody. ...

The Manas Boondoggle: U.S. Needs Operational Energy Strategy

The story reads like a spy novel.

The setting is Kyrgyzstan. The U.S. government pays billions of dollars to a mysterious American businessman known to the public only as the owner of a burger-and-beer joint. His mission: grease the right wheels in order to purchase and transport large volumes of fuel for the U.S. military. Accusations that the Kyrgyz government took kickbacks from these shady deals lead to the toppling of its leader. The Russians, as top fuel suppliers in the region, get involved, followed by the Chinese. Relations among governments grow strained. Meanwhile, dogged journalists find that the mysterious businessman's fuel companies, registered in Gibraltar, amount to little more than mailboxes. The more the reporters dig, the more surreal the tale gets.

Global Finance: A House Divided

With the aftershocks of the global financial crisis continuing to rumble, leaders of the world's major economies have struggled to define a meaningful role for the G-20. Meanwhile, the European Union has been pushed to the limit in efforts to address a gathering debt crisis among members of the eurozone. And the threat of a currency war has strained relations and tested the role of the dollar as global reserve currency. In this special report, World Politics Review considers global finance through articles published in the past year.

Saudi Arabia: Royal Succession, Regional Turmoil

In November 2010, the Saudi monarch, King Abdullah bin Abd al-Aziz, traveled to the United States for medical treatment, touching off rounds of fevered speculation about the prospects for succession in Saudi Arabia. Crown Prince Sultan bin Abd al-Aziz's own frail health and recent convalescence in Morocco gave the speculation further life. Of course, due to the royal family's opaque approach to the issue, discussions of the internal rivalries that are reputed to divide the royal family are often based on mere conjecture. With little concrete information upon which to ground analysis, each decision of the royal family is then understood as a reflection of internal power-balancing arrangements.

Nevertheless, following apparently successful medical treatment and three months of convalescence, Abdullah returned home to a region that had undergone seismic changes, calling into question many of the assumptions about the Arab world and Saudi Arabia that had framed policy analysis and formulation as recently as the time of his departure. With protests spreading to previously quiescent corners of the region, an arc of political agitation now encircles Saudi Arabia, with incipient signs of internal ferment. ...

Egypt's Reshuffled Leadership Succession

Egypt's Reshuffled Leadership Successiona

When this article was commissioned back in December, its aim was to provide readers with an understanding of the players and scenarios for a leadership succession in Egypt. Just who would rule the country when President Hosni Mubarak eventually relinquished power had been a central question in Egyptian politics for the better part of the last decade. The most oft-mentioned contenders were Mubarak's second son, Gamal, and his close adviser, Lt. Gen. Omar Suleiman, then the chief of the General Intelligence Service.

Rumors of Gamal Mubarak's ascendance began in earnest around 1999 when, after a stint at Bank of America in Cairo and London, he began to dabble in politics. He first entertained the idea of starting his own political party, but instead joined the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP). Gamal was no party backbencher, however. He was named leader of the party's Policies Secretariat -- a vehicle created specifically for him -- and later became deputy secretary-general of the NDP. Gamal's rise fueled the widely held suspicion that the elder Mubarak was preparing the country for a familial succession. Indeed, constitutional amendments in 2005 and an additional round of changes in 2007 strongly indicated that the ruling party was setting the stage to nominate Gamal as its presidential candidate once Hosni Mubarak stepped down or died. The seeming inevitability of a Gamal presidency contributed greatly to popular anger toward Hosni Mubarak, the NDP and a government that featured a number of high-profile ministers who were aligned with the younger Mubarak. ...

The Realist Prism: Libya as Threat du Jour

The CNN effect is alive and well in 2011, even if its 2.0 incarnation might now be labeled the Al-Jazeera effect. The fact that U.S. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron are now talking about a "full spectrum of possible responses" to support the opposition to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and NATO is considering endorsing a "no-fly zone" over the embattled North African state -- even as the war in Afghanistan rages and Iraq is far from settled -- testifies to the ongoing power of the global media to drive even a superpower's foreign policy agenda. But although intervening on behalf of regime change in Libya has grabbed the attention of the commentariat, no such calls are heard for America to defend democracy just a bit further to the south and west, in the Ivory Coast, where a democratically elected president, Alassane Ouattara, has been unable to compel his predecessor, Laurent Gbagbo, to transfer power. Gbagbo's militias are using no less violent methods to hold on to power, but because the dramatic images have yet to saturate our television screens, pundits have not seen fit to gravely warn how Obama's "failure" to act jeopardizes U.S. global leadership.

There is a case to be made for U.S. intervention in Libya. My problem, however, is with the knee-jerk reaction of the foreign policy establishment to proclaim every new televised crisis as the "test" of whether America remains a global leader or whether the president, by not immediately dispatching U.S. military forces, is abdicating his responsibilities to defend U.S. interests and the U.S.-led international order. Indeed, stepping back to observe the big picture over the past six months, what is striking is the utter and complete incoherence of expert commentary on what America's interests are and what role the U.S. should be playing in the world.

Last summer, Iran was the looming threat. The Bushehr reactor was coming on line, and the likelihood of the Islamic Republic crossing the nuclear finish line -- and Obama's "failure" to prevent this from occurring -- led to calls for the U.S. to "do more in Iran!" Then, in short order, we had a war scare with North Korea, with pundits darkly warning that the restraint showed by both Seoul and Washington in responding to Pyongyang's provocations was nothing short of appeasement. The attack by drug cartels on a U.S. couple jet-skiing on a lake on the U.S.-Mexico border then suddenly refocused attention on an "undefended" southern border and the spillover effect of Mexico's narco-insurgency -- with the commentariat questioning why the administration wasn't doing more in America's backyard. Then the federal debt became the "threat du jour": America was bankrupting itself with its overseas commitments. Concerns about the federal government drowning in a sea of red ink were apparently so acute that even Tea Party conservatives were supporting a massive reduction in the size and scope of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan: Just two short months ago, two-thirds of self-described Tea Party supporters agreed with the proposition that U.S. interests would be best served by downsizing the American presence or leaving Afghanistan altogether. This distaste for overseas involvement, however, seemed to evaporate with the murder of four Americans on board the Quest in the waters off Somalia, resulting in calls for robust action against Somali pirates, including carrying the fight back to the shore. Of course, the Quest incident was soon relegated to footnote status as Libya coverage came to dominate the airwaves.

The problem, of course, is that other festering problems don't disappear simply because news coverage of them takes a backseat to the latest breaking story. Iran's progress toward a nuclear capacity proceeds apace, and the defeat of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as chairman of the Assembly of Experts -- the clerical body that among other functions has the power to select Iran's supreme leader -- is a sign that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the current Supreme Leader Ali Khamanei are strengthening their hold on the political establishment. Iraq is by no means settled; we face major challenges in Afghanistan; our counterterrorism strategy in Yemen is jeopardized by unrest in that country; and North Korea hasn't disappeared. Determining just how much time, energy and resources we should commit to an intervention in Libya -- resources that would then no longer be available for other overseas contingencies or for use in meeting domestic needs -- should be driven by a dispassionate assessment of U.S. interests. Instead, it is being driven by the "CNN effect."

A related concern is how quickly assessments change based on the latest television coverage. A month ago, though no less dictatorial or repressive, Gadhafi was the poster child for how to bring rogues in from the cold -- an eccentric despot who nonetheless gave up his WMD program and renounced support for terrorism in return for an end to his international isolation. Moreover, Libya's efforts against al-Qaida in the Maghreb -- and Qaddafi's assistance in helping to stem the flow of migrants from Africa into Europe -- were appreciated by the Euro-Atlantic community, while the prospect of easing the global energy crisis by renewed investment and development of Libya's energy resources turned the "Mad Dog" of the 1980s into a responsible statesmen. A steady stream of Western businessmen, politicians and academics traveled to Libya in order to advise and counsel the regime, and many assumed that Libya might follow the Taiwanese model, with the transfer of power from an autocratic father to a reform-minded son who would gradually lead his nation down the democratic path. Now, the "Mad Dog" is back, with warnings being sounded that should he manage to retain control, Libya will become a haven for terrorists and will restart its WMD program.

And what of the anti-Gadhafi opposition? Sen. Jim Webb sounded a cautionary note this past week, saying, "It is not a good idea to give weapons and military support to people who you do not know. When it comes to the opposition in Libya, we do not know them." Right now, the National Transitional Council based in Benghazi is characterized as pro-democratic and pro-Western, with some asserting that if it comes to power in Libya, it would turn the country into a firm ally of the West. But is that assessment based on hard intelligence or media speculation? During the uprising that deposed former President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, the protesters in Tahrir Square were hailed as the forefront of a new democratic movement. Will the same talking heads who last month castigated the administration for being too slow to "support freedom" in Egypt be the first ones to denounce Obama for "losing" that country if elections bring to power an illiberal democracy that ends up being much less pro-American?

Foreign policy is not a video game where a player can rely on an endless supply of resources and where there are no consequences for failure. Any military intervention should have clear-cut objectives and be undertaken with no illusions about the costs and risks. George Will raised a set of questions to this end in his column this week. We should formulate clear answers to them before making any commitment -- in Libya or elsewhere.

India, Libya and the Kashmir Paradox

India has vehemently opposed the imposition of a no-fly zone in strife-torn Libya. Though New Delhi supported U.N. Security Council Resolution 1970, authorizing ecomonic sanctions against Col. Moammar Gadhafi and referring Libya to the International Criminal Court, India has made it clear that it stands against any kind of military intervention in the troubled state.

However, New Delhi's aversion to intervention is far from consistent: When it comes to South Asia, in particular, intervention in the internal matters of other states has long been part and parcel of India's foreign policy. In 1971, India fought a war with Pakistan and liberated Bangladesh. It sent a peacekeeping force to strife-torn Sri Lanka in 1987. Maoists in Nepal blame their political misfortunes on India's interventionist policies there, and Bhutan exists as a virtual Indian protectorate.

Three other factors further complicate the picture. First, unlike during the Cold War, India no longer locates itself at the fringes of international politics. Today, it seeks its rightful place at the heart of the global order, based on its meteoric rise over the past few decades. By consequence, the old tropes of anti-imperialism and third-world solidarity do not figure in India's contemporary foreign policy rhetoric. Second, unlike China, India bases its claim to global prominence not only on its increased economic power, but also on its respect for the rules and norms of appropriate global conduct. Finally, India is a democracy and has much in common with the values and ethics of Western nations. The rule of law and fundamental rights constitute the basic edifice of the Indian state.

All of these factors would seem to put India's reluctance to go along with Western powers on Libya at odds with its national character. Why, then, is New Delhi so resistant to intervention in Libya?

In fact, India's policy is directly influenced by the present turmoil in Kashmir, India's Achilles' heel. Sixty years after gaining its independence, India has failed to integrate Kashmiris into the national mainstream. India's national government has bestowed political autonomy on the state of Jammu and Kashmir and showered it with economic largesse -- but to no avail.

The summer of 2010 was particularly discouraging for India. Unlike years past, when unrest in the Kashmir Valley could be blamed on Pakistan-trained terrorists, the violence in Kashmir last year was the result of an indigenous rebellion. Surprisingly, the revolt was not led by the Kashmiri separatists' aging leadership but by technologically savvy, highly organized young men and women of the Kashmir Valley.

The Indian establishment's handling of the situation was unfortunate. At least 112 youths are estimated to have died in five months of unrest. Thousands of others were detained by security forces and kept in prison without trial. The Indian government seemed to have no response other than imposing an indefinite curfew and pleading with the restive youth for peace and order. For India's political leaders, the current unrest in the Middle East bears an uncanny resemblance to the Kashmiri uprising.

With the success of revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the Indian establishment is again on tenterhooks. There is a real chance that the youth of Kashmir may rise again, and the news from the Middle East will surely add fuel to the fire. Since the Indian government has done hardly anything to contain the simmering discontent in the region, in all probability the next confrontation will also be bloody.

Nonintervention in internal matters has therefore become a convenient strategy to ward off the prying eyes of the international community. During the height of the anti-government protests in Kashmir, the U.N. secretary-general expressed his concern over the killings, unlawful detentions and virtual lockdown of the region. New Delhi called it "gratuitous advice" and made clear that the U.N. has no mandate in its domestic affairs. By contrast, the U.S. and European Union, in a nod to India's growing global clout, refrained from making any direct reference to the Kashmir crisis. When it comes to relations with Western states, nonintervention as a policy has served India well.

By maintaining the narrative of nonintervention, India is buying insurance against global pressure on Kashmir. Any relaxation of the norms of nonintervention would quickly undermine India's interests in the Kashmir Valley and provide a powerful weapon to Pakistan, which will leave no stone unturned in attempting to internationalize the issue. Moreover, if India acquiesces to a Western intervention in Libya, it will lose all moral and legal authority to keep the Kashmir issue away from international scrutiny.

India would do better to address the fundamental grievances being expressed by Kashmiri youth. First, draconian laws such as Armed Forces Specials Power Act providing blanket impunity to security forces should be immediately revoked. This will make security forces more vigilant against human rights abuses, the most important cause of the recent unrest. Second, Kashmiris' disillusionment with the façade of autonomy and dysfunctional governance needs to be addressed. Blatant intervention by successive Indian governments in the internal affairs of Jammu and Kashmir state has prevented the emergence of a cohesive governance structure, resulting in underdevelopment and unemployment. Real devolution of power that can cater to the needs of Kashmiris is needed. Third, India needs to face the reality in Kashmir, rather than hide from it. For too long, India's approach to Kashmir has suffered from a culture of procrastination with regard to serious dialogue with all stakeholders, including separatists and Pakistan.

Addressing the situation in Kashmir more resolutely will have the added advantage of allowing India's position on nonintervention to evolve, in order to reflect its newfound global status. If New Delhi is to leave behind its post-colonial anxieties and live up to its image as a beacon of democracy and freedom, it must embrace the responsibility to protect people whose rights are being trampled upon. When a people is targeted by its government with violence, as in Libya, it is incumbent upon the international community to intervene. And that means India, too.