Recent South Asia Articles

Dow is the least disgraceful Olympic sponsor

Mr Boyle’s Olympic kick-off was bloody amazing. I was cynical about the whole scenario, but it was one of the actual best things ever. Celebrating the things that make the UK worthy of having, not the Michael Gove crap. Culturally, beautifully excellent.

The Olympics, being sponsored by people with money, are sponsored by a wide variety of organisations who do terrible things. McDonald’s and Coca-Cola do, well, come on, you’re human and capable of reading. Visa have barred people with Mastercards from using their cards in the vicinity of the arena. This shit is disgraceful.

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The Daily Mail blames the EU for Indian workers too

“Secret EU deal forces Britain to take in 12,000 Indian workers despite soaring unemployment” thunders the headline of James Slack at the Daily Mail. It presses all the Dacre buttons: EU “diktats”, immigration, Indians, some Muslims, and maybe house prices.

Yet this is not quite the whole story. The drive to allow multi-national companies to bring in workers from outside the EU, working the rules to their advantage and paying less in wages and taxes, has not come from the EU but the Corporation of London and a body called International Financial Services London (IFSL).

The UK Government also on board.
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This trade agreement with India will destroy thousands of lives

Yesterday, in a parliamentary debate on UK-India trade, I found myself in the somewhat unusual position of quoting Peter Mandelson approvingly. Writing for the FT in advance of the major IPPR report on globalization (published today), Mandelson argues:

[L]iberalisation of trade and financial markets requires a careful parallel process of building domestic institutions and capabilities. It is not the absolute level of openness in the global market that matters for growth so much as the fact that it is governed by shared rules and sustainable practice.

I agree.
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The full extent of US drone attacks in Pakistan revealed

contribution by Jamie Thunder

On June 29 this year John Brennan, President Obama’s chief counter-terrorism advisor, said in a speech at John Hopkins University that there ‘hasn’t been a single collateral death’ in the past year from the USA’s use of unmanned drones in Pakistan.

This echoed earlier assurances from unnamed US and Pakistani officials, who claimed some militants had been allowed to escape rather than risk civilians being killed.

But research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism published yesterday shows that claims no civilians have been killed are wrong.
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Why the assassination of Salman Taseer matters

Just a few days ago I wrote about the tensions building in Pakistan over the proposals to amend the blasphemy laws.

I mentioned in passing high profile Punjabi governor Salman Taseer who was an outspoken advocate of the reforms. He was the focus of much bile and criticism from the religious right.

Today he was murdered.
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Pakistan faces religious riots over Blasphemy law

A one day strike rocked Pakistan last week against proposed changes in the blasphemy laws. Currently those who ‘insult Islam’ can be sentenced to death and, according to the BBC, this has led to around thirty people being killed.

Critics add that the law is used to persecute religious minorities or to pursue vendettas.
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It still doesn’t make any sense

So, Wikileaks dumps a load of documents revealing what we all knew – that we’re losing an unwinnable war, using extremely unsavoury and hyperviolent methods in the process. We learn that we little understand the enemy and can, without too much effort, surmise that we have no clear plan for victory.

Further, we get final confirmation that we’re rubbing out hundreds of civilians per year, possibly thousands – our governments can’t guess how many men, women and children our armed forces are killing and frankly, they show little sign of caring.

When questioned, their stock response is that our deranged enemies kill far more than we do. This none-too-sly evasion is generally received as if it were a fair point, rather than a travesty.
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How Pakistan has terrorised its Ahmadi minority for decades

contribution by Sadaf Meehan

My family are Ahmadi Muslims, a small Islamic sect that was declared non-Muslim by Pakistani authorities in 1974.

This pacifist sect – one of the central tenets is never to meet violence with violence – make-up less than three per cent of the Pakistani population, yet have been described by the BBC as one of the ‘most relentlessly persecuted communities in the history of Pakistan’.

A few years ago, it was to be my first Eid in Pakistan since childhood, and I was excited. My parents, both Karachi-ites, left in 1972 and settled first in Yorkshire, where I was born, and then in Macclesfield, Cheshire, home to New Order, the Macc Lads and me, until I went off to Uni at 18.
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Is this the only solution to Afghanistan?

There’s a distinct air of unreality which must around hang around newspaper offices and also the realms of Whitehall. The reaction to the killing of 5 British soldiers by an Afghan police officer was one of a still aloof nation that regards it as unbelievable that it can be so apparently easy to kill Our Boys, while also perplexed at how “Terry Taliban” isn’t prepared to play by good old fashioned Queensbury rules.

It wasn’t so long ago that IEDs were being described as “new” and “asymmetrical” tactics, as if guerilla warfare was some new concept, and that it was perfectly beastly that the other side weren’t allowing themselves to be shot out in the open like the clearly inferior fighters that they are. How dare they make the greatest, best trained army the world has ever seen look bad?

The problem the attack poses though is obvious: when our policy is to train the Afghan army and police and then get out, or at least that’s what it’s meant to be, that this officer was apparently not a new recruit and had been in the police for three years raises the nightmare that there may be many more “cells” where we have in fact trained those will then turn on us when the chance arises.

This isn’t exactly new either though: the Iraqi police and army were and probably still are riddled with those with their own distinct agendas, and that was in a country where there are only two major sects in conflict with each other.
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More on why we must stay in Afghanistan

Last year when traveling around Nepal, a friend who worked out there said she saw India as basically an imperial nation telling the Nepalese government what to do. India controls all the main trade routes going into Nepal (the border with China is closed) and this allows them to dictate policy.

I highlight this point to illustrate that in South Asia, all the big powers are in a sense imperialists – trying to exert lots of influence outside their borders. Afghanistan has always been a target of proxy wars, with India, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, China and USA trying their hands in various degrees.

If we leave, the game begins again. I said this as much in an article for Guardian CIF on Friday: that staying in Afghanistan right now outweighs the potential dangers of leaving: the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, their attempts to take over Pakistan, and stir trouble in India. With over a billion and half people in the immediate region, the deaths caused by more instability, which is inevitable, would outweigh the death-rate right now.

I highlighted a comment on my own blog in response to my article, by a Pakistani, on the menace that the Taliban is. And I think to leave the Afghanis under their mercy is not a viable position to take: for humanitarian reasons and because it would mean we’d have to intervene again sooner or later (if war broke out between India and Pakistan over terrorist attacks).
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