WIDENING THE GAP

Why Pakistan needs entente cordiale with Israel (Ehsan Ahrari, 6/18/03, Asia Times)

Watching India and Israel nurturing a strategic partnership, I frequently wonder why Pakistan is merely sitting on the fence and not building entente cordiale with the Jewish state in order to maximize its own strategic advantage.

Pakistan is a county that I thought I knew, since it was once part of "British" India. But I no longer recognize the Pakistan of today. It is a place where Islamists are busy dragging the country back to the Seventh century. It is a country where the government has used Islamist groups to terrorize Indian-administered Kashmir. It is a land where democracy has been occasionally given a chance, and only for a limited duration. It is a place whose elites have long argued that democracy is a luxury, which only the Western-educated populace can and should enjoy, and that Pakistan will not be ready for democracy for a long time. The same type of elitist malady is inordinately manifested in Pakistan by its army, an institution that has sabotaged democracy throughout its existence as a nation since 1947.

So, why am I committing political heresy by suggesting the necessity of entente cordiale between a Muslim Pakistan and a Jewish Israel? In my judgment, such a development will be a good thing for Pakistan for two reasons. First, a move on the part of Pakistan to deal openly with the Jewish state will break many taboos - most of which self-created - by that South Asian state and also by its Muslim neighbors. Islamist groups of Pakistan will hold a number of demonstrations against it. Once they blow off their steam, they will learn to live with it. Second, as the India-Israel strategic partnership is evolving, Pakistan will find itself facing yet one more reason why the gap between its conventional military power with that of India"s will be further widened.

"The gap"--between Western military power and both communist and Islamicist military and economic power--is in many ways the key to
liberalization across the globe. It was, of course, "the gap" that forced Gorbachev to try and loosen the Party's grip enough to compete with the U.S., a miscalculation which led to the crumbling of the Soviet Union. Similarly, there's good reason to believe that by forming an alliance of the main enemies of the remaining communist states (N. Korea, China, Cuba) and of the various Islamic states--an alliance that at a minimum should include Taiwan, Japan, India, Israel, Russia, Australia, and the U.S.--we can demonstrate just how massive a gap they face because of the dysfunctioning of their political systems as opposed to those of the liberal democratic protestant capitalists. This would place them in the same unenviable position that the Soviets faced: to stand still is to fall further and further behind and face certain defeat if war comes, but to liberalize is to face certain revolution from within.

Accompanying the creation of this Axis of the Good should be a shift in rhetoric, similar to that effected so brilliantly by Ronald Reagan, which begins to speak openly of Western superiority, of our inevitable victory, and of the unsustainability of these totalitarian systems. Such psychological warfare--which has the benefit of being truthful--will serve to destabilize these regimes just as surely as it did the USSR and its evil empire.


MORE:
-Beware the Gorbachev experience (Ehsan Ahrari, 6/19/03, Asia Times)
-Report debunks 'China threat' (David Isenberg, Asia Times)

In recent years the United States, in its role as global super-nanny, has expressed concern about other states' potential aggression. One of them was China. Though that country never made President George W Bush's "axis of evil", it was seen as a rising potential threat, especially with regard to a possible invasion of Taiwan. But such a scenario has been over-hyped and is very unlikely, according to a newly released report.

"Taiwan Strait II: The Risk of War", released on June 6 by the International Crisis Group (ICG), a Brussels-based non-profit organization, finds that "there is still some way to go before China would feel itself ready to launch a major military assault. China is operating very much at the
psychological or political, rather than military, level of conflict." In fact, the most important conclusion is that "China has since 1995 displayed a clear preference for use of military coercion against Taiwan only in a very limited, modulated and non-lethal fashion".

This policy was reflected in then president Jiang Zemin's report to the 16th Communist Party Congress last November. In his White Paper on National Defense, Zemin stated the view that it would not be until the middle of the century that China would be a "strong" and "prosperous" country, thus China should, for the foreseeable future at least, avoid a direct and large-scale military confrontation with the United States over Taiwan. The White Paper's conclusions are similar to those of a report released on May 22 by the Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force on Chinese Military Power, whose central finding was that China was at least two decades behind the United States in terms of military technology and capability.

Similarly, the ICG report concluded that "if China did launch an invasion it might well, whatever its ballistic-missile capability, lack the military
capability to succeed, particularly if the US intervened, and even in the best-case scenario would not be able to subjugate Taiwan without large loss of life".

Even if China did manage to occupy Taiwan it would be a Pyrrhic victory, a case of being careful what you wish for, the report states. "Such use of force could certainly be expected to lead to recognition of Taiwan, even an occupied Taiwan, as an independent sovereign country by major powers such as the US and EU. The subsequent domestic repression in Taiwan over a protracted period under a China-installed regime would ensure a total breach between China and the developed world. Such a breach would bring a near total end to China's substantial exports to the developed world and produce massive unemployment in its costal cites at a time when domestic political stability is under severe strain."

-THE STRUGGLE FOR HARMONY: Part 2: Imagined danger (Henry C K Liu, 6/14/03, Asia Times)
-China hawk settles in neo-cons' nest (Jim Lobe, 5/13/03, Asia Times) Posted by Orrin Judd at June 18, 2003 8:46 AM