A Quick Comment on Gwadar

Smashing the Old World Order and Making the World Anew

As Robert D. Kaplan and some other observers in the West and the East have noted, the port of Gwadar in Pakistan is becoming more and more important day by day as the Chinese labour to construct a deep-water port in the far south of Pakistan. Why would the Chinese seek to do this?

Safe economic development for China always comes first to the Politburo of the People's Republic. Which is why they're always willing to cut a deal with an African dictator here, support a despotic tyrant while his subjects starve there and export manufactured products everywhere. To the point where China is dependant on whether how many G20 nations purchase goods from China. If not, unemployment in the tens of million is the result with the Chinese hinterlands such as Tibet, Xianjing, Inner Mongolia etc becoming uppity if not totally rebellious. Also, in order to safe guard this economic necessity, the Chinese need fuels and minerals.

Copper from the Congo, oil from Sudan, natural gas from Russia. Anything to feed the massive jaw of the Chinese export economy. However, all those goods must travel through the Straits of Malacca, a chokepoint for China. Extremely vulnerable to the United States and its upcoming rival to be - India. The Chinese leadership has been dreading the day that the US might blockade south Chinese cities like Guangzhou and force the Chinese to submit. Even worse is the threat that one day the Indian Navy might blockade the straits and push China out of the Indian ocean. The port of Gwadar eases this.

The first thing Gwadar does is allow easy access from Middle Eastern Oil or goods from Africa to the rest of Eurasia. Pipelines and transport routes shall be built which will allow resources especially oil to be siphoned up into Western and Central China. Thus, eliminated the threat of the blockade of the straits of Malacca however if the straits of Hormuz is blocked, that's a whole other story not only for China but for the rest of the planet.

The second thing Gwadar does is that it cements a Sino-Pakistani alliance against the emerging threat of a strong India. It makes Pakistan a transport hub which will generate billions of dollars for its' ramshackle economy and make a strategic Chinese-Pakistan pact essential to Chinese economic interests - which is paramount to the future success of the People's Republic this century. Two nuclear nations with such a pact will force India to make drastic moves to insure its own security. This could come in the form of a US or a greater Pacific alliance that would include perhaps Japan, Australia, the US, South Korea and even Indonesia if it saw any geopolitical benefit to it.

Finally, it corners India on both sides of the Indian Ocean (Pakistan and Burma) not including the mountainous plateau of Tibet. India would be endanger of losing control over its ocean. The Indian sphere of influence would be threatened and its economic vitality too.

My only concern is how the Taliban insurgency which ventures closer and closer to the Land of the Five Rivers (the Punjab) will affect not only Pakistan ability not to crumble as this deal is made but India's own terrorism problem not including the Naxalites. Finally, China would have to be decisive on the survival of Pakistan if so much hope is fixtured on that Pakistani pipe dream. So not only the US would be mired in Pakistan but the most neutral or dare I say heartless nations around. The People's Republic of China. As it battles pirates in Somalia, digs mining pits in Central Africa and invests in Latin America; China's century looks more peculiar by the year.

A New Order is rising in Eurasia. A potential conflict between India and China becomes more and more real. 100 years ago, the 20th century was predicted to be either Germany's or the United States. We all know who won that battle and the millions who died in order to seek a result. Hopefully, such events do not come true, again.

The Never-Ending Congo Crisis

The Congo has never had a chance. Ever.

The dark heart of Africa has rarely experienced peace. It has lurched from crisis, to catastrophe despite the cheerfulness and good-natured part of most of its' people (listen to Soukous music). You can even argue that the state was founded upon a crisis. The only time this Crisis-State has experienced peace is when it was under the thumb of the most diabolical people to have ever graced this Earth. What an unlucky nation. If you can even attempt to classify it as that much. Like most African countries, it's real-estate with some poor dark skinned people living on it.

The crisis that founded the Congo was purely a European one of course. Considering that Europeans were well on their way to becoming 40% of the World's population by 1900, they had technology to carve up Africa, like what a famous line from that period said "We have the Maxim and they have not". They machine gunned hundreds of tribes across Africa. The major powers decided that tiny Belgium would have the Congo river basin instead of France and Napoleon in 1884-5. The nation that sealed the deal was a rising German Empire which made it legit. Leopold II of Belgium made the Congo his tropical backyard.

However, he wasn't the only one interested in the Congo. The Portuguese have been pushing up from Angola for centuries. The indigenous kingdoms in the Congo like Katanga were always obstacles for Whites. As were the Swahili merchants who came down from Mombasa and Zanzibar to capture slaves and trade for ivory like Tippu Tib. The Congo was a grocery store until the Belgians came in. By the end of the 19th century. All opposition was gone.

Also by that time rubber was boom business. Growers in Malaya (now Malaysia) and Brazil were making money off rubber trees. The Congo Free State had to go about in their own cruel manner. They'd clear land already cultivated by subsistence farmers or villages. Then force the dispossessed people to collect rubber from wild vines instead of tapping trees. The trick about this method is that they would soak their bodies with the latex from the vines, then scrape it off (skin and hair included) to meet their daily quota. Worse than cutting sugar cane in Haiti on any normal day.

They whipped, shot, raped, burned and decapitated limbs when it suited them in the Congo. Not much resistance in a vast rainforest with more than 200 tribes maybe with 100,000 per tribe on average. The Congo started losing people, and fast. I'm sure like conflicts today, most people died of diseases in rainforests where AIDS and the ebola stemmed from, where malarial swamps are the norm. The Congo might've lost 10 million people by 1920's.

Luckily, the celebrities of the day (like Bono and Geldof today) who were writers not threepenny opera actors in some Berlin show started detailing the events which went on in there. The Belgian government took over and Leopold II was no longer the richest man on Earth because of his big real estate in Africa. Even when the Congo Free State became the Belgian Congo, they treated the Africans like big children. They even had curfews for them and tried educated them in the "proper" Christian manner. However, Congolese were still forced to farm commercial products and scrape out uranium from the ground which was used to atomize Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Then 1960 hit and the Congo Crisis happened. The Army mutinied, there was riots in Leopoldville and Katanga - the copper rich southern part of the Congo seceeded. The massive country began showing what it truly is; real estate with people living on it. The Eastern Region, Kasai and even Equateur region tried to leave. Only the UN and the new brutality of the Mobutu regime could keep it in line costing the life of a UN Secretary General and the socialist Patrice Lumumba.

In an attempt to give the country some self-esteem, he changed the name to Zaire and Leopoldville with other cities became Kinshasa. Did I mention that Mobutu became insane due to his power and stole hundreds of billions of dollars from the Congo. They invented a new political term just for him - kleptocracy. An even bigger Crisis was brewing though, it just needed help from next door... in Rwanda.

When the Hutu Interhamwe fled into the deep crevice of morality called the Zaire. They allied with the Congolese army to attack Tutsis in Zaire. The Tutsis with backing back in the homeland invaded Zaire with Ugandan help and the new militia the AFDL led by a Mr Kabila to oust Mobutu. He fled dropping billions as he ran from his basket-case country. This time, hundreds of thousands of people died.

The second time, millions died. In an sickening African version of the Thirty Years War where all the neighbouring countries of the Congo got their trigger fingers busy shooting, looting and raping to grab cobalt here, copper there, young virgins everywhere in the Congo. Some 5 million have died since 1998 while simultaneously creating the greatest refugee crisis on Earth displacing nearly 4 million people. Even since then, the Tutsis have returned to reap revenge on the surviving Hutu militias in the Congo. After all, what international jurisdiction is going to stop them? The Congo is just real-estate with people living on it.

It's safe to assume a make-believe country like the Congo shall never experience peace. It will never enjoy its immense mineral resources which power most cellphones and laptops on Earth. It will never harness the power of the Congo river basin to generate electricity for Middle Africa. This shall never happen. It's always easy to be the naysayer when it comes to the Congo because in the Congo. There's always a crisis going on.

The Triumph of the Taliban?

Like his ancestors before him, the Pashtun waits for victory

Can Obama win the war in Afghanistan? I don't think so. Like LBJ before him, he has not described what victory would be as it is sought in Afghanistan. Like Bush before him, he doesn't understand Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a tribal, narco-state with immense corruption and violent warlords. At least Obama has realized this, unlike his predecessor Bush.

Bush wanted to make Jeffersonian democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The former being a multi-ethnic state created by Brits to squeeze Iraqi supply lines to India and oil, the latter being a Pashtun dominated tribal throwback that would've filled the Spartans will glee. It's non sequitur to believe that a Representitive government could be formed out of Afghanistan. It truly is. The country has been running the same way since the British first invaded in 1839. Warlords controlling the country side, a King of some sort dealing with foreigners, tribal jirgas within tribes and villages with bandits robbing merchants in the countryside. If only we did what the Angols did after the second time they invaded the country, bribe them and basically let them rot in their own Central Asian isolationism. However, the British did one thing that would come to haunt South Asians aftewards which was acquire Pashtun tribal territories....

Either way, an Afghan democracy is laughable. There's no educated middle class or people who even acknowledge the concept of democracy like we Westerners do. Our sacred religion Democracy shan't replace theirs - Islam.

Obama's new Afghanistan strategy intrigues me. He wishes to involve Iran (the Persians) in Afghanistan. Although Iranians have been linked to funding the Taliban, the Taliban and Al Qaeda dislike the Shi'a regime in Tehran. The Pakistanis are involved of course, they have to be. The Taliban and Al Qaeda (TalQaeda) are attacking Islamabad brazenly and they've sent more than 100,000 troops apparently to battle TalQaeda. Will multilateralism work? Considering that every country including Russia has its' own interest, I doubt that a common consensus other than defeating TalQaeda can work.

Defeating this threat is the difficult part. How can they? Obama and Bush in his latter years tried to bring them to the table, but they believe they're winning so why bother unless NATO/ISAF is considering throwing a going-away party. The Taliban leadership is not in some basement making bombs out of radios in Najaf or Baquba. They cannot be bribed like some Iraqi Sheikh. They are of a different type of make all together. Of course you could try to bribe them to leave them alone but considering there's more than 10,000 individual tribes in Afghanistan... good luck. Considering this war is international in the sense it's in two countries (Afghanistan and Pakistan) and the US isn't technically allowed in Pakistan (this doesn't stop US special forces from going in) this is too hard of a fight to 'win'.

What is victory in Afghanistan? Bush couldn't do it, Obama doesn't know? Here are two options of sweet victory.

1) Basically the status quo. Push back the Taliban somewhat, but allow the same old Afghan 'politics' to continue with the poor getting poorer, or forced to farm heroin. While the police forces and army gets more and more corrupt. With Afghanistan acting as the satrapy for the US government. Keeping troops in Afghanistan for generations battling Taliban and the odd warlord now and then.

2) Let the Talibs 'win'. Allow them to form a government but they'd have to get rid of international Jihad and respect some human rights. The US public would never go for this. You'd get castrated, especially by those women rights groups but of course its the realpolitik needed as of right now considering this situation. Giving the Taliban back their Pashtun homeland is technically a defeat. You'll go down as worse than Nixon. Pakistan might collapse in Islamic revolution and an area from downtown Gaza City to the hovels of Peshawar will be awash with Islamic victory over the infidels, strengthening Islamic jihad around the world and perhaps suffering a blow to your superpower status.

There's another far off option. That's making Afghans richer. In a country without a functioning economy and that heroin is it's biggest money maker. That's really far-fetched. Giving that Central Asian country an economy is like giving Burma a break from ethnic unrest, or the Horn of Africa from general suffering or a Canadian from complaining about the weather. It's just ridiculous to imagine.

I smell Vietnam here. Just after Tet, no clear sign of victory. Even after the 17,000 new troops are sent. What shall they be doing? Hanging around bases while getting shelled by Taliban or out there bribing tribal chiefs and making deals with Taliban brigands. Who knows? The Taliban have time on their side, all they got to do is indoctrinate the next generation in the Afghanistan War.