Sunday, February 3, 2013

The Coming Anarchy

How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet

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The Minister's eyes were like egg yolks, an aftereffect of some of the many illnesses, malaria especially, endemic in his country. There was also an irrefutable sadness in his eyes. He spoke in a slow and creaking voice, the voice of hope about to expire. Flame trees, coconut palms, and a ballpoint-blue Atlantic composed the background. None of it seemed beautiful, though. "In forty-five years I have never seen things so bad. We did not manage ourselves well after the British departed. But what we have now is something worse—the revenge of the poor, of the social failures, of the people least able to bring up children in a modern society." Then he referred to the recent coup in the West African country Sierra Leone. "The boys who took power in Sierra Leone come from houses like this." The Minister jabbed his finger at a corrugated metal shack teeming with children. "In three months these boys confiscated all the official Mercedes, Volvos, and BMWs and willfully wrecked them on the road." The Minister mentioned one of the coup's leaders, Solomon Anthony Joseph Musa, who shot the people who had paid for his schooling, "in order to erase the humiliation and mitigate the power his middle-class sponsors held over him."
Tyranny is nothing new in Sierra Leone or in the rest of West Africa. But it is now part and parcel of an increasing lawlessness that is far more significant than any coup, rebel incursion, or episodic experiment in democracy. Crime was what my friend—a top-ranking African official whose life would be threatened were I to identify him more precisely—really wanted to talk about. Crime is what makes West Africa a natural point of departure for my report on what the political character of our planet is likely to be in the twenty-first century.
The cities of West Africa at night are some of the unsafest places in the world. Streets are unlit; the police often lack gasoline for their vehicles; armed burglars, carjackers, and muggers proliferate. "The government in Sierra Leone has no writ after dark," says a foreign resident, shrugging. When I was in the capital, Freetown, last September, eight men armed with AK-47s broke into the house of an American man. They tied him up and stole everything of value. Forget Miami: direct flights between the United States and the Murtala Muhammed Airport, in neighboring Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, have been suspended by order of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation because of ineffective security at the terminal and its environs. A State Department report cited the airport for "extortion by law-enforcement and immigration officials." This is one of the few times that the U.S. government has embargoed a foreign airport for reasons that are linked purely to crime. In Abidjan, effectively the capital of the Cote d'Ivoire, or Ivory Coast, restaurants have stick- and gun-wielding guards who walk you the fifteen feet or so between your car and the entrance, giving you an eerie taste of what American cities might be like in the future. An Italian ambassador was killed by gunfire when robbers invaded an Abidjan restaurant. The family of the Nigerian ambassador was tied up and robbed at gunpoint in the ambassador's residence. After university students in the Ivory Coast caught bandits who had been plaguing their dorms, they executed them by hanging tires around their necks and setting the tires on fire. In one instance Ivorian policemen stood by and watched the "necklacings," afraid to intervene. Each time I went to the Abidjan bus terminal, groups of young men with restless, scanning eyes surrounded my taxi, putting their hands all over the windows, demanding "tips" for carrying my luggage even though I had only a rucksack. In cities in six West African countries I saw similar young men everywhere—hordes of them. They were like loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid, a fluid that was clearly on the verge of igniting.
"You see," my friend the Minister told me, "in the villages of Africa it is perfectly natural to feed at any table and lodge in any hut. But in the cities this communal existence no longer holds. You must pay for lodging and be invited for food. When young men find out that their relations cannot put them up, they become lost. They join other migrants and slip gradually into the criminal process."
"In the poor quarters of Arab North Africa," he continued, "there is much less crime, because Islam provides a social anchor: of education and indoctrination. Here in West Africa we have a lot of superficial Islam and superficial Christianity. Western religion is undermined by animist beliefs not suitable to a moral society, because they are based on irrational spirit power. Here spirits are used to wreak vengeance by one person against another, or one group against another." Many of the atrocities in the Liberian civil war have been tied to belief in juju spirits, and the BBC has reported, in its magazine Focus on Africa, that in the civil fighting in adjacent Sierra Leone, rebels were said to have "a young woman with them who would go to the front naked, always walking backwards and looking in a mirror to see where she was going. This made her invisible, so that she could cross to the army's positions and there bury charms . . . to improve the rebels' chances of success."
Finally my friend the Minister mentioned polygamy. Designed for a pastoral way of life, polygamy continues to thrive in sub-Saharan Africa even though it is increasingly uncommon in Arab North Africa. Most youths I met on the road in West Africa told me that they were from "extended" families, with a mother in one place and a father in another. Translated to an urban environment, loose family structures are largely responsible for the world's highest birth rates and the explosion of the HIV virus on the continent. Like the communalism and animism, they provide a weak shield against the corrosive social effects of life in cities. In those cities African culture is being redefined while desertification and deforestation—also tied to overpopulation—drive more and more African peasants out of the countryside.

A Premonition of the Future


West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real "strategic" danger. Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels are now most tellingly demonstrated through a West African prism. West Africa provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization. To remap the political earth the way it will be a few decades hence—as I intend to do in this article—I find I must begin with West Africa.
There is no other place on the planet where political maps are so deceptive—where, in fact, they tell such lies—as in West Africa. Start with Sierra Leone. According to the map, it is a nation-state of defined borders, with a government in control of its territory. In truth the Sierra Leonian government, run by a twenty-seven-year-old army captain, Valentine Strasser, controls Freetown by day and by day also controls part of the rural interior. In the government's territory the national army is an unruly rabble threatening drivers and passengers at most checkpoints. In the other part of the country units of two separate armies from the war in Liberia have taken up residence, as has an army of Sierra Leonian rebels. The government force fighting the rebels is full of renegade commanders who have aligned themselves with disaffected village chiefs. A pre-modern formlessness governs the battlefield, evoking the wars in medieval Europe prior to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ushered in the era of organized nation-states.

As a consequence, roughly 400,000 Sierra Leonians are internally displaced, 280,000 more have fled to neighboring Guinea, and another 100,000 have fled to Liberia, even as 400,000 Liberians have fled to Sierra Leone. The third largest city in Sierra Leone, Gondama, is a displaced-persons camp. With an additional 600,000 Liberians in Guinea and 250,000 in the Ivory Coast, the borders dividing these four countries have become largely meaningless. Even in quiet zones none of the governments except the Ivory Coast's maintains the schools, bridges, roads, and police forces in a manner necessary for functional sovereignty. The Koranko ethnic group in northeastern Sierra Leone does all its trading in Guinea. Sierra Leonian diamonds are more likely to be sold in Liberia than in Freetown. In the eastern provinces of Sierra Leone you can buy Liberian beer but not the local brand.
In Sierra Leone, as in Guinea, as in the Ivory Coast, as in Ghana, most of the primary rain forest and the secondary bush is being destroyed at an alarming rate. I saw convoys of trucks bearing majestic hardwood trunks to coastal ports. When Sierra Leone achieved its independence, in 1961, as much as 60 percent of the country was primary rain forest. Now six percent is. In the Ivory Coast the proportion has fallen from 38 percent to eight percent. The deforestation has led to soil erosion, which has led to more flooding and more mosquitoes. Virtually everyone in the West African interior has some form of malaria.


Sierra Leone is a microcosm of what is occurring, albeit in a more tempered and gradual manner, throughout West Africa and much of the underdeveloped world: the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war. West Africa is reverting to the Africa of the Victorian atlas. It consists now of a series of coastal trading posts, such as Freetown and Conakry, and an interior that, owing to violence, volatility, and disease, is again becoming, as Graham Greene once observed, "blank" and "unexplored." However, whereas Greene's vision implies a certain romance, as in the somnolent and charmingly seedy Freetown of his celebrated novel The Heart of the Matter, it is Thomas Malthus, the philosopher of demographic doomsday, who is now the prophet of West Africa's future. And West Africa's future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world.
Consider "Chicago." I refer not to Chicago, Illinois, but to a slum district of Abidjan, which the young toughs in the area have named after the American city. ("Washington" is another poor section of Abidjan.) Although Sierra Leone is widely regarded as beyond salvage, the Ivory Coast has been considered an African success story, and Abidjan has been called "the Paris of West Africa." Success, however, was built on two artificial factors: the high price of cocoa, of which the Ivory Coast is the world's leading producer, and the talents of a French expatriate community, whose members have helped run the government and the private sector. The expanding cocoa economy made the Ivory Coast a magnet for migrant workers from all over West Africa: between a third and a half of the country's population is now non-Ivorian, and the figure could be as high as 75 percent in Abidjan. During the 1980s cocoa prices fell and the French began to leave. The skyscrapers of the Paris of West Africa are a facade. Perhaps 15 percent of Abidjan's population of three million people live in shantytowns like Chicago and Washington, and the vast majority live in places that are not much better. Not all of these places appear on any of the readily available maps. This is another indication of how political maps are the products of tired conventional wisdom and, in the Ivory Coast's case, of an elite that will ultimately be forced to relinquish power.
Chicago, like more and more of Abidjan, is a slum in the bush: a checkerwork of corrugated zinc roofs and walls made of cardboard and black plastic wrap. It is located in a gully teeming with coconut palms and oil palms, and is ravaged by flooding. Few residents have easy access to electricity, a sewage system, or a clean water supply. The crumbly red laterite earth crawls with foot-long lizards both inside and outside the shacks. Children defecate in a stream filled with garbage and pigs, droning with malarial mosquitoes. In this stream women do the washing. Young unemployed men spend their time drinking beer, palm wine, and gin while gambling on pinball games constructed out of rotting wood and rusty nails. These are the same youths who rob houses in more prosperous Ivorian neighborhoods at night. One man I met, Damba Tesele, came to Chicago from Burkina Faso in 1963. A cook by profession, he has four wives and thirty-two children, not one of whom has made it to high school. He has seen his shanty community destroyed by municipal authorities seven times since coming to the area. Each time he and his neighbors rebuild. Chicago is the latest incarnation.
Fifty-five percent of the Ivory Coast's population is urban, and the proportion is expected to reach 62 percent by 2000. The yearly net population growth is 3.6 percent. This means that the Ivory Coast's 13.5 million people will become 39 million by 2025, when much of the population will consist of urbanized peasants like those of Chicago. But don't count on the Ivory Coast's still existing then. Chicago, which is more indicative of Africa's and the Third World's demographic present—and even more of the future—than any idyllic junglescape of women balancing earthen jugs on their heads, illustrates why the Ivory Coast, once a model of Third World success, is becoming a case study in Third World catastrophe.

President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, who died last December at the age of about ninety, left behind a weak cluster of political parties and a leaden bureaucracy that discourages foreign investment. Because the military is small and the non-Ivorian population large, there is neither an obvious force to maintain order nor a sense of nationhood that would lessen the need for such enforcement. The economy has been shrinking since the mid-1980s. Though the French are working assiduously to preserve stability, the Ivory Coast faces a possibility worse than a coup: an anarchic implosion of criminal violence—an urbanized version of what has already happened in Somalia. Or it may become an African Yugoslavia, but one without mini-states to replace the whole.
Because the demographic reality of West Africa is a countryside draining into dense slums by the coast, ultimately the region's rulers will come to reflect the values of these shanty-towns. There are signs of this already in Sierra Leone—and in Togo, where the dictator Etienne Eyadema, in power since 1967, was nearly toppled in 1991, not by democrats but by thousands of youths whom the London-based magazine West Africa described as "Soweto-like stone-throwing adolescents." Their behavior may herald a regime more brutal than Eyadema's repressive one.
The fragility of these West African "countries" impressed itself on me when I took a series of bush taxis along the Gulf of Guinea, from the Togolese capital of Lome, across Ghana, to Abidjan. The 400-mile journey required two full days of driving, because of stops at two border crossings and an additional eleven customs stations, at each of which my fellow passengers had their bags searched. I had to change money twice and repeatedly fill in currency-declaration forms. I had to bribe a Togolese immigration official with the equivalent of eighteen dollars before he would agree to put an exit stamp on my passport. Nevertheless, smuggling across these borders is rampant. The London Observer has reported that in 1992 the equivalent of $856 million left West Africa for Europe in the form of "hot cash" assumed to be laundered drug money. International cartels have discovered the utility of weak, financially strapped West African regimes.
The more fictitious the actual sovereignty, the more severe border authorities seem to be in trying to prove otherwise. Getting visas for these states can be as hard as crossing their borders. The Washington embassies of Sierra Leone and Guinea—the two poorest nations on earth, according to a 1993 United Nations report on "human development"—asked for letters from my bank (in lieu of prepaid round-trip tickets) and also personal references, in order to prove that I had sufficient means to sustain myself during my visits. I was reminded of my visa and currency hassles while traveling to the communist states of Eastern Europe, particularly East Germany and Czechoslovakia, before those states collapsed.

Ali A. Mazrui, the director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at the State University of New York at Binghamton, predicts that West Africa—indeed, the whole continent—is on the verge of large-scale border upheaval. Mazrui writes, "In the 21st century France will be withdrawing from West Africa as she gets increasingly involved in the affairs [of Europe]. France's West African sphere of influence will be filled by Nigeria—a more natural hegemonic power. . . . It will be under those circumstances that Nigeria's own boundaries are likely to expand to incorporate the Republic of Niger (the Hausa link), the Republic of Benin (the Yoruba link) and conceivably Cameroon."
The future could be more tumultuous, and bloodier, than Mazrui dares to say. France will withdraw from former colonies like Benin, Togo, Niger, and the Ivory Coast, where it has been propping up local currencies. It will do so not only because its attention will be diverted to new challenges in Europe and Russia but also because younger French officials lack the older generation's emotional ties to the ex-colonies. However, even as Nigeria attempts to expand, it, too, is likely to split into several pieces. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research recently made the following points in an analysis of Nigeria: "Prospects for a transition to civilian rule and democratization are slim. . . . The repressive apparatus of the state security service . . . will be difficult for any future civilian government to control. . . . The country is becoming increasingly ungovernable. . . . Ethnic and regional splits are deepening, a situation made worse by an increase in the number of states from 19 to 30 and a doubling in the number of local governing authorities; religious cleavages are more serious; Muslim fundamentalism and evangelical Christian militancy are on the rise; and northern Muslim anxiety over southern [Christian] control of the economy is intense . . . the will to keep Nigeria together is now very weak."

Given that oil-rich Nigeria is a bellwether for the region—its population of roughly 90 million equals the populations of all the other West African states combined—it is apparent that Africa faces cataclysms that could make the Ethiopian and Somalian famines pale in comparison. This is especially so because Nigeria's population, including that of its largest city, Lagos, whose crime, pollution, and overcrowding make it the cliche par excellence of Third World urban dysfunction, is set to double during the next twenty-five years, while the country continues to deplete its natural resources.

Part of West Africa's quandary is that although its population belts are horizontal, with habitation densities increasing as one travels south away from the Sahara and toward the tropical abundance of the Atlantic littoral, the borders erected by European colonialists are vertical, and therefore at cross-purposes with demography and topography. Satellite photos depict the same reality I experienced in the bush taxi: the Lome-Abidjan coastal corridor—indeed, the entire stretch of coast from Abidjan eastward to Lagos—is one burgeoning megalopolis that by any rational economic and geographical standard should constitute a single sovereignty, rather than the five (the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria) into which it is currently divided.
As many internal African borders begin to crumble, a more impenetrable boundary is being erected that threatens to isolate the continent as a whole: the wall of disease. Merely to visit West Africa in some degree of safety, I spent about $500 for a hepatitis B vaccination series and other disease prophylaxis. Africa may today be more dangerous in this regard than it was in 1862, before antibiotics, when the explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton described the health situation on the continent as "deadly, a Golgotha, a Jehannum." Of the approximately 12 million people worldwide whose blood is HIV-positive, 8 million are in Africa. In the capital of the Ivory Coast, whose modern road system only helps to spread the disease, 10 percent of the population is HIV-positive. And war and refugee movements help the virus break through to more-remote areas of Africa. Alan Greenberg, M.D., a representative of the Centers for Disease Control in Abidjan, explains that in Africa the HIV virus and tuberculosis are now "fast-forwarding each other." Of the approximately 4,000 newly diagnosed tuberculosis patients in Abidjan, 45 percent were also found to be HIV-positive. As African birth rates soar and slums proliferate, some experts worry that viral mutations and hybridizations might, just conceivably, result in a form of the AIDS virus that is easier to catch than the present strain.

It is malaria that is most responsible for the disease wall that threatens to separate Africa and other parts of the Third World from more-developed regions of the planet in the twenty-first century. Carried by mosquitoes, malaria, unlike AIDS, is easy to catch. Most people in sub-Saharan Africa have recurring bouts of the disease throughout their entire lives, and it is mutating into increasingly deadly forms. "The great gift of Malaria is utter apathy," wrote Sir Richard Burton, accurately portraying the situation in much of the Third World today. Visitors to malaria-afflicted parts of the planet are protected by a new drug, mefloquine, a side effect of which is vivid, even violent, dreams. But a strain of cerebral malaria resistant to mefloquine is now on the offensive. Consequently, defending oneself against malaria in Africa is becoming more and more like defending oneself against violent crime. You engage in "behavior modification": not going out at dusk, wearing mosquito repellent all the time.

And the cities keep growing. I got a general sense of the future while driving from the airport to downtown Conakry, the capital of Guinea. The forty-five-minute journey in heavy traffic was through one never-ending shantytown: a nightmarish Dickensian spectacle to which Dickens himself would never have given credence. The corrugated metal shacks and scabrous walls were coated with black slime. Stores were built out of rusted shipping containers, junked cars, and jumbles of wire mesh. The streets were one long puddle of floating garbage. Mosquitoes and flies were everywhere. Children, many of whom had protruding bellies, seemed as numerous as ants. When the tide went out, dead rats and the skeletons of cars were exposed on the mucky beach. In twenty-eight years Guinea's population will double if growth goes on at current rates. Hardwood logging continues at a madcap speed, and people flee the Guinean countryside for Conakry. It seemed to me that here, as elsewhere in Africa and the Third World, man is challenging nature far beyond its limits, and nature is now beginning to take its revenge.

Africa may be as relevant to the future character of world politics as the Balkans were a hundred years ago, prior to the two Balkan wars and the First World War. Then the threat was the collapse of empires and the birth of nations based solely on tribe. Now the threat is more elemental: nature unchecked. Africa's immediate future could be very bad. The coming upheaval, in which foreign embassies are shut down, states collapse, and contact with the outside world takes place through dangerous, disease-ridden coastal trading posts, will loom large in the century we are entering. (Nine of twenty-one U.S. foreign-aid missions to be closed over the next three years are in Africa—a prologue to a consolidation of U.S. embassies themselves.) Precisely because much of Africa is set to go over the edge at a time when the Cold War has ended, when environmental and demographic stress in other parts of the globe is becoming critical, and when the post-First World War system of nation-states—not just in the Balkans but perhaps also in the Middle East—is about to be toppled, Africa suggests what war, borders, and ethnic politics will be like a few decades hence.
To understand the events of the next fifty years, then, one must understand environmental scarcity, cultural and racial clash, geographic destiny, and the transformation of war. The order in which I have named these is not accidental. Each concept except the first relies partly on the one or ones before it, meaning that the last two—new approaches to mapmaking and to warfare—are the most important. They are also the least understood. I will now look at each idea, drawing upon the work of specialists and also my own travel experiences in various parts of the globe besides Africa, in order to fill in the blanks of a new political atlas.

The Environment as a Hostile Power


For a while the media will continue to ascribe riots and other violent upheavals abroad mainly to ethnic and religious conflict. But as these conflicts multiply, it will become apparent that something else is afoot, making more and more places like Nigeria, India, and Brazil ungovernable.
Mention The Environment or "diminishing natural resources" in foreign-policy circles and you meet a brick wall of skepticism or boredom. To conservatives especially, the very terms seem flaky. Public-policy foundations have contributed to the lack of interest, by funding narrowly focused environmental studies replete with technical jargon which foreign-affairs experts just let pile up on their desks.

It is time to understand The Environment for what it is: the national-security issue of the early twenty-first century. The political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and, possibly, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh—developments that will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts—will be the core foreign-policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate, arousing the public and uniting assorted interests left over from the Cold War. In the twenty-first century water will be in dangerously short supply in such diverse locales as Saudi Arabia, Central Asia, and the southwestern United States. A war could erupt between Egypt and Ethiopia over Nile River water. Even in Europe tensions have arisen between Hungary and Slovakia over the damming of the Danube, a classic case of how environmental disputes fuse with ethnic and historical ones. The political scientist and erstwhile Clinton adviser Michael Mandelbaum has said, "We have a foreign policy today in the shape of a doughnut—lots of peripheral interests but nothing at the center." The environment, I will argue, is part of a terrifying array of problems that will define a new threat to our security, filling the hole in Mandelbaum's doughnut and allowing a post- Cold War foreign policy to emerge inexorably by need rather than by design.

Our Cold War foreign policy truly began with George F. Kennan's famous article, signed "X," published in Foreign Affairs in July of 1947, in which Kennan argued for a "firm and vigilant containment" of a Soviet Union that was imperially, rather than ideologically, motivated. It may be that our post-Cold War foreign policy will one day be seen to have had its beginnings in an even bolder and more detailed piece of written analysis: one that appeared in the journal International Security. The article, published in the fall of 1991 by Thomas Fraser Homer-Dixon, who is the head of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Toronto, was titled "On the Threshold: Environmental Changes as Causes of Acute Conflict." Homer-Dixon has, more successfully than other analysts, integrated two hitherto separate fields—military-conflict studies and the study of the physical environment.

In Homer-Dixon's view, future wars and civil violence will often arise from scarcities of resources such as water, cropland, forests, and fish. Just as there will be environmentally driven wars and refugee flows, there will be environmentally induced praetorian regimes—or, as he puts it, "hard regimes." Countries with the highest probability of acquiring hard regimes, according to Homer-Dixon, are those that are threatened by a declining resource base yet also have "a history of state [read 'military'] strength." Candidates include Indonesia, Brazil, and, of course, Nigeria. Though each of these nations has exhibited democratizing tendencies of late, Homer-Dixon argues that such tendencies are likely to be superficial "epiphenomena" having nothing to do with long-term processes that include soaring populations and shrinking raw materials. Democracy is problematic; scarcity is more certain.

Indeed, the Saddam Husseins of the future will have more, not fewer, opportunities. In addition to engendering tribal strife, scarcer resources will place a great strain on many peoples who never had much of a democratic or institutional tradition to begin with. Over the next fifty years the earth's population will soar from 5.5 billion to more than nine billion. Though optimists have hopes for new resource technologies and free-market development in the global village, they fail to note that, as the National Academy of Sciences has pointed out, 95 percent of the population increase will be in the poorest regions of the world, where governments now—just look at Africa—show little ability to function, let alone to implement even marginal improvements. Homer-Dixon writes, ominously, "Neo-Malthusians may underestimate human adaptability in today's environmental-social system, but as time passes their analysis may become ever more compelling."

While a minority of the human population will be, as Francis Fukuyama would put it, sufficiently sheltered so as to enter a "post-historical" realm, living in cities and suburbs in which the environment has been mastered and ethnic animosities have been quelled by bourgeois prosperity, an increasingly large number of people will be stuck in history, living in shantytowns where attempts to rise above poverty, cultural dysfunction, and ethnic strife will be doomed by a lack of water to drink, soil to till, and space to survive in. In the developing world environmental stress will present people with a choice that is increasingly among totalitarianism (as in Iraq), fascist-tending mini-states (as in Serb-held Bosnia), and road-warrior cultures (as in Somalia). Homer-Dixon concludes that "as environmental degradation proceeds, the size of the potential social disruption will increase."
Tad Homer-Dixon is an unlikely Jeremiah. Today a boyish thirty-seven, he grew up amid the sylvan majesty of Vancouver Island, attending private day schools. His speech is calm, perfectly even, and crisply enunciated. There is nothing in his background or manner that would indicate a bent toward pessimism. A Canadian Anglican who spends his summers canoeing on the lakes of northern Ontario, and who talks about the benign mountains, black bears, and Douglas firs of his youth, he is the opposite of the intellectually severe neoconservative, the kind at home with conflict scenarios. Nor is he an environmentalist who opposes development. "My father was a logger who thought about ecologically safe forestry before others," he says. "He logged, planted, logged, and planted. He got out of the business just as the issue was being polarized by environmentalists. They hate changed ecosystems. But human beings, just by carrying seeds around, change the natural world." As an only child whose playground was a virtually untouched wilderness and seacoast, Homer-Dixon has a familiarity with the natural world that permits him to see a reality that most policy analysts—children of suburbia and city streets—are blind to.

"We need to bring nature back in," he argues. "We have to stop separating politics from the physical world—the climate, public health, and the environment." Quoting Daniel Deudney, another pioneering expert on the security aspects of the environment, Homer-Dixon says that "for too long we've been prisoners of 'social-social' theory, which assumes there are only social causes for social and political changes, rather than natural causes, too. This social-social mentality emerged with the Industrial Revolution, which separated us from nature. But nature is coming back with a vengeance, tied to population growth. It will have incredible security implications.
"Think of a stretch limo in the potholed streets of New York City, where homeless beggars live. Inside the limo are the air-conditioned post-industrial regions of North America, Europe, the emerging Pacific Rim, and a few other isolated places, with their trade summitry and computer-information highways. Outside is the rest of mankind, going in a completely different direction."
We are entering a bifurcated world. Part of the globe is inhabited by Hegel's and Fukuyama's Last Man, healthy, well fed, and pampered by technology. The other, larger, part is inhabited by Hobbes's First Man, condemned to a life that is "poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Although both parts will be threatened by environmental stress, the Last Man will be able to master it; the First Man will not.
The Last Man will adjust to the loss of underground water tables in the western United States. He will build dikes to save Cape Hatteras and the Chesapeake beaches from rising sea levels, even as the Maldive Islands, off the coast of India, sink into oblivion, and the shorelines of Egypt, Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia recede, driving tens of millions of people inland where there is no room for them, and thus sharpening ethnic divisions.

omer-Dixon points to a world map of soil degradation in his Toronto office. "The darker the map color, the worse the degradation," he explains. The West African coast, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, China, and Central America have the darkest shades, signifying all manner of degradation, related to winds, chemicals, and water problems. "The worst degradation is generally where the population is highest. The population is generally highest where the soil is the best. So we're degrading earth's best soil."

China, in Homer-Dixon's view, is the quintessential example of environmental degradation. Its current economic "success" masks deeper problems. "China's fourteen percent growth rate does not mean it's going to be a world power. It means that coastal China, where the economic growth is taking place, is joining the rest of the Pacific Rim. The disparity with inland China is intensifying." Referring to the environmental research of his colleague, the Czech-born ecologist Vaclav Smil, Homer-Dixon explains how the per capita availability of arable land in interior China has rapidly declined at the same time that the quality of that land has been destroyed by deforestation, loss of topsoil, and salinization. He mentions the loss and contamination of water supplies, the exhaustion of wells, the plugging of irrigation systems and reservoirs with eroded silt, and a population of 1.54 billion by the year 2025: it is a misconception that China has gotten its population under control. Large-scale population movements are under way, from inland China to coastal China and from villages to cities, leading to a crime surge like the one in Africa and to growing regional disparities and conflicts in a land with a strong tradition of warlordism and a weak tradition of central government—again as in Africa. "We will probably see the center challenged and fractured, and China will not remain the same on the map," Homer-Dixon says.
Environmental scarcity will inflame existing hatreds and affect power relationships, at which we now look.
Skinhead Cossacks, Juju Warriors

n the summer, 1993, issue of Foreign Affairs, Samuel P. Huntington, of Harvard's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, published a thought-provoking article called "The Clash of Civilizations?" The world, he argues, has been moving during the course of this century from nation-state conflict to ideological conflict to, finally, cultural conflict. I would add that as refugee flows increase and as peasants continue migrating to cities around the world—turning them into sprawling villages—national borders will mean less, even as more power will fall into the hands of less educated, less sophisticated groups. In the eyes of these uneducated but newly empowered millions, the real borders are the most tangible and intractable ones: those of culture and tribe. Huntington writes, "First, differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic," involving, among other things, history, language, and religion. "Second . . . interactions between peoples of different civilizations are increasing; these increasing interactions intensify civilization consciousness." Economic modernization is not necessarily a panacea, since it fuels individual and group ambitions while weakening traditional loyalties to the state. It is worth noting, for example, that it is precisely the wealthiest and fastest-developing city in India, Bombay, that has seen the worst intercommunal violence between Hindus and Muslims. Consider that Indian cities, like African and Chinese ones, are ecological time bombs—Delhi and Calcutta, and also Beijing, suffer the worst air quality of any cities in the world—and it is apparent how surging populations, environmental degradation, and ethnic conflict are deeply related.

Huntington points to interlocking conflicts among Hindu, Muslim, Slavic Orthodox, Western, Japanese, Confucian, Latin American, and possibly African civilizations: for instance, Hindus clashing with Muslims in India, Turkic Muslims clashing with Slavic Orthodox Russians in Central Asian cities, the West clashing with Asia. (Even in the United States, African-Americans find themselves besieged by an influx of competing Latinos.) Whatever the laws, refugees find a way to crash official borders, bringing their passions with them, meaning that Europe and the United States will be weakened by cultural disputes.

Because Huntington's brush is broad, his specifics are vulnerable to attack. In a rebuttal of Huntington's argument the Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese-born Shi'ite who certainly knows the world beyond suburbia, writes in the September-October, 1993, issue of Foreign Affairs, "The world of Islam divides and subdivides. The battle lines in the Caucasus . . . are not coextensive with civilizational fault lines. The lines follow the interests of states. Where Huntington sees a civilizational duel between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Iranian state has cast religious zeal . . . to the wind . . . in that battle the Iranians have tilted toward Christian Armenia."

True, Huntington's hypothesized war between Islam and Orthodox Christianity is not borne out by the alliance network in the Caucasus. But that is only because he has misidentified which cultural war is occurring there. A recent visit to Azerbaijan made clear to me that Azeri Turks, the world's most secular Shi'ite Muslims, see their cultural identity in terms not of religion but of their Turkic race. The Armenians, likewise, fight the Azeris not because the latter are Muslims but because they are Turks, related to the same Turks who massacred Armenians in 1915. Turkic culture (secular and based on languages employing a Latin script) is battling Iranian culture (religiously militant as defined by Tehran, and wedded to an Arabic script) across the whole swath of Central Asia and the Caucasus. The Armenians are, therefore, natural allies of their fellow Indo-Europeans the Iranians.
Huntington is correct that the Caucasus is a flashpoint of cultural and racial war. But, as Ajami observes, Huntington's plate tectonics are too simple. Two months of recent travel throughout Turkey revealed to me that although the Turks are developing a deep distrust, bordering on hatred, of fellow-Muslim Iran, they are also, especially in the shantytowns that are coming to dominate Turkish public opinion, revising their group identity, increasingly seeing themselves as Muslims being deserted by a West that does little to help besieged Muslims in Bosnia and that attacks Turkish Muslims in the streets of Germany.

In other words, the Balkans, a powder keg for nation-state war at the beginning of the twentieth century, could be a powder keg for cultural war at the turn of the twenty-first: between Orthodox Christianity (represented by the Serbs and a classic Byzantine configuration of Greeks, Russians, and Romanians) and the House of Islam. Yet in the Caucasus that House of Islam is falling into a clash between Turkic and Iranian civilizations. Ajami asserts that this very subdivision, not to mention all the divisions within the Arab world, indicates that the West, including the United States, is not threatened by Huntington's scenario. As the Gulf War demonstrated, the West has proved capable of playing one part of the House of Islam against another.

True. However, whether he is aware of it or not, Ajami is describing a world even more dangerous than the one Huntington envisions, especially when one takes into account Homer-Dixon's research on environmental scarcity. Outside the stretch limo would be a rundown, crowded planet of skinhead Cossacks and juju warriors, influenced by the worst refuse of Western pop culture and ancient tribal hatreds, and battling over scraps of overused earth in guerrilla conflicts that ripple across continents and intersect in no discernible pattern—meaning there's no easy-to-define threat. Kennan's world of one adversary seems as distant as the world of Herodotus.

Most people believe that the political earth since 1989 has undergone immense change. But it is minor compared with what is yet to come. The breaking apart and remaking of the atlas is only now beginning. The crack-up of the Soviet empire and the coming end of Arab-Israeli military confrontation are merely prologues to the really big changes that lie ahead. Michael Vlahos, a long-range thinker for the U.S. Navy, warns, "We are not in charge of the environment and the world is not following us. It is going in many directions. Do not assume that democratic capitalism is the last word in human social evolution."

Before addressing the questions of maps and of warfare, I want to take a closer look at the interaction of religion, culture, demographic shifts, and the distribution of natural resources in a specific area of the world: the Middle East.
The Past is Dead

Built on steep, muddy hills, the shantytowns of Ankara, the Turkish capital, exude visual drama. Altindag, or "Golden Mountain," is a pyramid of dreams, fashioned from cinder blocks and corrugated iron, rising as though each shack were built on top of another, all reaching awkwardly and painfully toward heaven—the heaven of wealthier Turks who live elsewhere in the city. Nowhere else on the planet have I found such a poignant architectural symbol of man's striving, with gaps in house walls plugged with rusted cans, and leeks and onions growing on verandas assembled from planks of rotting wood. For reasons that I will explain, the Turkish shacktown is a psychological universe away from the African one.

To see the twenty-first century truly, one's eyes must learn a different set of aesthetics. One must reject the overly stylized images of travel magazines, with their inviting photographs of exotic villages and glamorous downtowns. There are far too many millions whose dreams are more vulgar, more real—whose raw energies and desires will overwhelm the visions of the elites, remaking the future into something frighteningly new. But in Turkey I learned that shantytowns are not all bad.
Slum quarters in Abidjan terrify and repel the outsider. In Turkey it is the opposite. The closer I got to Golden Mountain the better it looked, and the safer I felt. I had $1,500 worth of Turkish lira in one pocket and $1,000 in traveler's checks in the other, yet I felt no fear. Golden Mountain was a real neighborhood. The inside of one house told the story: The architectural bedlam of cinder block and sheet metal and cardboard walls was deceiving. Inside was a home—order, that is, bespeaking dignity. I saw a working refrigerator, a television, a wall cabinet with a few books and lots of family pictures, a few plants by a window, and a stove. Though the streets become rivers of mud when it rains, the floors inside this house were spotless.

Other houses were like this too. Schoolchildren ran along with briefcases strapped to their backs, trucks delivered cooking gas, a few men sat inside a cafe sipping tea. One man sipped beer. Alcohol is easy to obtain in Turkey, a secular state where 99 percent of the population is Muslim. Yet there is little problem of alcoholism. Crime against persons is infinitesimal. Poverty and illiteracy are watered-down versions of what obtains in Algeria and Egypt (to say nothing of West Africa), making it that much harder for religious extremists to gain a foothold.
My point in bringing up a rather wholesome, crime-free slum is this: its existence demonstrates how formidable is the fabric of which Turkish Muslim culture is made. A culture this strong has the potential to dominate the Middle East once again. Slums are litmus tests for innate cultural strengths and weaknesses. Those peoples whose cultures can harbor extensive slum life without decomposing will be, relatively speaking, the future's winners. Those whose cultures cannot will be the future's victims. Slums—in the sociological sense—do not exist in Turkish cities. The mortar between people and family groups is stronger here than in Africa. Resurgent Islam and Turkic cultural identity have produced a civilization with natural muscle tone. Turks, history's perennial nomads, take disruption in stride.

The future of the Middle East is quietly being written inside the heads of Golden Mountain's inhabitants. Think of an Ottoman military encampment on the eve of the destruction of Greek Constantinople in 1453. That is Golden Mountain. "We brought the village here. But in the village we worked harder—in the field, all day. So we couldn't fast during [the holy month of] Ramadan. Here we fast. Here we are more religious." Aishe Tanrikulu, along with half a dozen other women, was stuffing rice into vine leaves from a crude plastic bowl. She asked me to join her under the shade of a piece of sheet metal. Each of these women had her hair covered by a kerchief. In the city they were encountering television for the first time. "We are traditional, religious people. The programs offend us," Aishe said. Another woman complained about the schools. Though her children had educational options unavailable in the village, they had to compete with wealthier, secular Turks. "The kids from rich families with connections—they get all the places." More opportunities, more tensions, in other words.

My guidebook to Golden Mountain was an untypical one: Tales From the Garbage Hills, a brutally realistic novel by a Turkish writer, Latife Tekin, about life in the shantytowns, which in Turkey are called gecekondus ("built in a night"). "He listened to the earth and wept unceasingly for water, for work and for the cure of the illnesses spread by the garbage and the factory waste," Tekin writes. In the most revealing passage of Tales From the Garbage Hills the squatters are told "about a certain 'Ottoman Empire' . . . that where they now lived there had once been an empire of this name." This history "confounded" the squatters. It was the first they had heard of it. Though one of them knew "that his grandfather and his dog died fighting the Greeks," nationalism and an encompassing sense of Turkish history are the province of the Turkish middle and upper classes, and of foreigners like me who feel required to have a notion of "Turkey."

But what did the Golden Mountain squatters know about the armies of Turkish migrants that had come before their own—namely, Seljuks and Ottomans? For these recently urbanized peasants, and their counterparts in Africa, the Arab world, India, and so many other places, the world is new, to adapt V. S. Naipaul's phrase. As Naipaul wrote of urban refugees in India: A Wounded Civilization, "They saw themselves at the beginning of things: unaccommodated men making a claim on their land for the first time, and out of chaos evolving their own philosophy of community and self-help. For them the past was dead; they had left it behind in the villages."
Everywhere in the developing world at the turn of the twenty-first century these new men and women, rushing into the cities, are remaking civilizations and redefining their identities in terms of religion and tribal ethnicity which do not coincide with the borders of existing states.
In Turkey several things are happening at once. In 1980, 44 percent of Turks lived in cities; in 1990 it was 61 percent. By the year 2000 the figure is expected to be 67 percent. Villages are emptying out as concentric rings of gecekondu developments grow around Turkish cities. This is the real political and demographic revolution in Turkey and elsewhere, and foreign correspondents usually don't write about it.

Whereas rural poverty is age-old and almost a "normal" part of the social fabric, urban poverty is socially destabilizing. As Iran has shown, Islamic extremism is the psychological defense mechanism of many urbanized peasants threatened with the loss of traditions in pseudo-modern cities where their values are under attack, where basic services like water and electricity are unavailable, and where they are assaulted by a physically unhealthy environment. The American ethnologist and orientalist Carleton Stevens Coon wrote in 1951 that Islam "has made possible the optimum survival and happiness of millions of human beings in an increasingly impoverished environment over a fourteen-hundred-year period." Beyond its stark, clearly articulated message, Islam's very militancy makes it attractive to the downtrodden. It is the one religion that is prepared to fight. A political era driven by environmental stress, increased cultural sensitivity, unregulated urbanization, and refugee migrations is an era divinely created for the spread and intensification of Islam, already the world's fastest-growing religion. (Though Islam is spreading in West Africa, it is being hobbled by syncretization with animism: this makes new converts less apt to become anti-Western extremists, but it also makes for a weakened version of the faith, which is less effective as an antidote to crime.)
In Turkey, however, Islam is painfully and awkwardly forging a consensus with modernization, a trend that is less apparent in the Arab and Persian worlds (and virtually invisible in Africa). In Iran the oil boom—because it put development and urbanization on a fast track, making the culture shock more intense—fueled the 1978 Islamic Revolution. But Turkey, unlike Iran and the Arab world, has little oil. Therefore its development and urbanization have been more gradual. Islamists have been integrated into the parliamentary system for decades. The tensions I noticed in Golden Mountain are natural, creative ones: the kind immigrants face the world over. While the world has focused on religious perversity in Algeria, a nation rich in natural gas, and in Egypt, parts of whose capital city, Cairo, evince worse crowding than I have seen even in Calcutta, Turkey has been living through the Muslim equivalent of the Protestant Reformation.

Resource distribution is strengthening Turks in another way vis-a-vis Arabs and Persians. Turks may have little oil, but their Anatolian heartland has lots of water—the most important fluid of the twenty-first century. Turkey's Southeast Anatolia Project, involving twenty-two major dams and irrigation systems, is impounding the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Much of the water that Arabs and perhaps Israelis will need to drink in the future is controlled by Turks. The project's centerpiece is the mile-wide, sixteen-story Ataturk Dam, upon which are emblazoned the words of modern Turkey's founder: "Ne Mutlu Turkum Diyene" ("Lucky is the one who is a Turk").
Unlike Egypt's Aswan High Dam, on the Nile, and Syria's Revolution Dam, on the Euphrates, both of which were built largely by Russians, the Ataturk Dam is a predominantly Turkish affair, with Turkish engineers and companies in charge. On a recent visit my eyes took in the immaculate offices and their gardens, the high-voltage electric grids and phone switching stations, the dizzying sweep of giant humming transformers, the poured-concrete spillways, and the prim unfolding suburbia, complete with schools, for dam employees. The emerging power of the Turks was palpable.
Erduhan Bayindir, the site manager at the dam, told me that "while oil can be shipped abroad to enrich only elites, water has to be spread more evenly within the society. . . . It is true, we can stop the flow of water into Syria and Iraq for up to eight months without the same water overflowing our dams, in order to regulate their political behavior."
Power is certainly moving north in the Middle East, from the oil fields of Dhahran, on the Persian Gulf, to the water plain of Harran, in southern Anatolia—near the site of the Ataturk Dam. But will the nation-state of Turkey, as presently constituted, be the inheritor of this wealth?
I very much doubt it.
The Lies of Mapmakers

Whereas West Africa represents the least stable part of political reality outside Homer-Dixon's stretch limo, Turkey, an organic outgrowth of two Turkish empires that ruled Anatolia for 850 years, has been among the most stable. Turkey's borders were established not by colonial powers but in a war of independence, in the early 1920s. Kemal Ataturk provided Turkey with a secular nation-building myth that most Arab and African states, burdened by artificially drawn borders, lack. That lack will leave many Arab states defenseless against a wave of Islam that will eat away at their legitimacy and frontiers in coming years. Yet even as regards Turkey, maps deceive.

It is not only African shantytowns that don't appear on urban maps. Many shantytowns in Turkey and elsewhere are also missing—as are the considerable territories controlled by guerrilla armies and urban mafias. Traveling with Eritrean guerrillas in what, according to the map, was northern Ethiopia, traveling in "northern Iraq" with Kurdish guerrillas, and staying in a hotel in the Caucasus controlled by a local mafia—to say nothing of my experiences in West Africa—led me to develop a healthy skepticism toward maps, which, I began to realize, create a conceptual barrier that prevents us from comprehending the political crack-up just beginning to occur worldwide.

Consider the map of the world, with its 190 or so countries, each signified by a bold and uniform color: this map, with which all of us have grown up, is generally an invention of modernism, specifically of European colonialism. Modernism, in the sense of which I speak, began with the rise of nation-states in Europe and was confirmed by the death of feudalism at the end of the Thirty Years' War—an event that was interposed between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which together gave birth to modern science. People were suddenly flush with an enthusiasm to categorize, to define. The map, based on scientific techniques of measurement, offered a way to classify new national organisms, making a jigsaw puzzle of neat pieces without transition zones between them. Frontier is itself a modern concept that didn't exist in the feudal mind. And as European nations carved out far-flung domains at the same time that print technology was making the reproduction of maps cheaper, cartography came into its own as a way of creating facts by ordering the way we look at the world.
In his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson, of Cornell University, demonstrates that the map enabled colonialists to think about their holdings in terms of a "totalizing classificatory grid. . . . It was bounded, determinate, and therefore—in principle—countable." To the colonialist, country maps were the equivalent of an accountant's ledger books. Maps, Anderson explains, "shaped the grammar" that would make possible such questionable concepts as Iraq, Indonesia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria. The state, recall, is a purely Western notion, one that until the twentieth century applied to countries covering only three percent of the earth's land area. Nor is the evidence compelling that the state, as a governing ideal, can be successfully transported to areas outside the industrialized world. Even the United States of America, in the words of one of our best living poets, Gary Snyder, consists of "arbitrary and inaccurate impositions on what is really here."

Yet this inflexible, artificial reality staggers on, not only in the United Nations but in various geographic and travel publications (themselves by-products of an age of elite touring which colonialism made possible) that still report on and photograph the world according to "country." Newspapers, this magazine, and this writer are not innocent of the tendency.
According to the map, the great hydropower complex emblemized by the Ataturk Dam is situated in Turkey. Forget the map. This southeastern region of Turkey is populated almost completely by Kurds. About half of the world's 20 million Kurds live in "Turkey." The Kurds are predominant in an ellipse of territory that overlaps not only with Turkey but also with Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the former Soviet Union. The Western-enforced Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, a consequence of the 1991 Gulf War, has already exposed the fictitious nature of that supposed nation-state.

On a recent visit to the Turkish-Iranian border, it occurred to me what a risky idea the nation-state is. Here I was on the legal fault line between two clashing civilizations, Turkic and Iranian. Yet the reality was more subtle: as in West Africa, the border was porous and smuggling abounded, but here the people doing the smuggling, on both sides of the border, were Kurds. In such a moonscape, over which peoples have migrated and settled in patterns that obliterate borders, the end of the Cold War will bring on a cruel process of natural selection among existing states. No longer will these states be so firmly propped up by the West or the Soviet Union. Because the Kurds overlap with nearly everybody in the Middle East, on account of their being cheated out of a state in the post-First World War peace treaties, they are emerging, in effect, as the natural selector—the ultimate reality check. They have destabilized Iraq and may continue to disrupt states that do not offer them adequate breathing space, while strengthening states that do.

Because the Turks, owing to their water resources, their growing economy, and the social cohesion evinced by the most crime-free slums I have encountered, are on the verge of big-power status, and because the 10 million Kurds within Turkey threaten that status, the outcome of the Turkish-Kurdish dispute will be more critical to the future of the Middle East than the eventual outcome of the recent Israeli-Palestinian agreement.

America's fascination with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, coupled with its lack of interest in the Turkish-Kurdish one, is a function of its own domestic and ethnic obsessions, not of the cartographic reality that is about to transform the Middle East. The diplomatic process involving Israelis and Palestinians will, I believe, have little effect on the early- and mid-twenty-first-century map of the region. Israel, with a 6.6 percent economic growth rate based increasingly on high-tech exports, is about to enter Homer-Dixon's stretch limo, fortified by a well-defined political community that is an organic outgrowth of history and ethnicity. Like prosperous and peaceful Japan on the one hand, and war-torn and poverty-wracked Armenia on the other, Israel is a classic national-ethnic organism. Much of the Arab world, however, will undergo alteration, as Islam spreads across artificial frontiers, fueled by mass migrations into the cities and a soaring birth rate of more than 3.2 percent. Seventy percent of the Arab population has been born since 1970—youths with little historical memory of anticolonial independence struggles, postcolonial attempts at nation-building, or any of the Arab-Israeli wars. The most distant recollection of these youths will be the West's humiliation of colonially invented Iraq in 1991. Today seventeen out of twenty-two Arab states have a declining gross national product; in the next twenty years, at current growth rates, the population of many Arab countries will double. These states, like most African ones, will be ungovernable through conventional secular ideologies. The Middle East analyst Christine M. Helms explains, "Declaring Arab nationalism "bankrupt," the political "disinherited" are not rationalizing the failure of Arabism . . . or reformulating it. Alternative solutions are not contemplated. They have simply opted for the political paradigm at the other end of the political spectrum with which they are familiar—Islam."
Like the borders of West Africa, the colonial borders of Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Algeria, and other Arab states are often contrary to cultural and political reality. As state control mechanisms wither in the face of environmental and demographic stress, "hard" Islamic city-states or shantytown-states are likely to emerge. The fiction that the impoverished city of Algiers, on the Mediterranean, controls Tamanrasset, deep in the Algerian Sahara, cannot obtain forever. Whatever the outcome of the peace process, Israel is destined to be a Jewish ethnic fortress amid a vast and volatile realm of Islam. In that realm, the violent youth culture of the Gaza shantytowns may be indicative of the coming era.
The destiny of Turks and Kurds is far less certain, but far more relevant to the kind of map that will explain our future world. The Kurds suggest a geographic reality that cannot be shown in two-dimensional space. The issue in Turkey is not simply a matter of giving autonomy or even independence to Kurds in the southeast. This isn't the Balkans or the Caucasus, where regions are merely subdividing into smaller units, Abkhazia breaking off from Georgia, and so on. Federalism is not the answer. Kurds are found everywhere in Turkey, including the shanty districts of Istanbul and Ankara. Turkey's problem is that its Anatolian land mass is the home of two cultures and languages, Turkish and Kurdish. Identity in Turkey, as in India, Africa, and elsewhere, is more complex and subtle than conventional cartography can display.
A New Kind of War

To appreciate fully the political and cartographic implications of postmodernism—an epoch of themeless juxtapositions, in which the classificatory grid of nation-states is going to be replaced by a jagged-glass pattern of city-states, shanty-states, nebulous and anarchic regionalisms—it is necessary to consider, finally, the whole question of war.
"Oh, what a relief to fight, to fight enemies who defend themselves, enemies who are awake!" Andre Malraux wrote in Man's Fate. I cannot think of a more suitable battle cry for many combatants in the early decades of the twenty-first century. The intense savagery of the fighting in such diverse cultural settings as Liberia, Bosnia, the Caucasus, and Sri Lanka—to say nothing of what obtains in American inner cities—indicates something very troubling that those of us inside the stretch limo, concerned with issues like middle-class entitlements and the future of interactive cable television, lack the stomach to contemplate. It is this: a large number of people on this planet, to whom the comfort and stability of a middle-class life is utterly unknown, find war and a barracks existence a step up rather than a step down.

"Just as it makes no sense to ask 'why people eat' or 'what they sleep for,'" writes Martin van Creveld, a military historian at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in The Transformation of War, "so fighting in many ways is not a means but an end. Throughout history, for every person who has expressed his horror of war there is another who found in it the most marvelous of all the experiences that are vouchsafed to man, even to the point that he later spent a lifetime boring his descendants by recounting his exploits." When I asked Pentagon officials about the nature of war in the twenty-first century, the answer I frequently got was "Read Van Creveld." The top brass are enamored of this historian not because his writings justify their existence but, rather, the opposite: Van Creveld warns them that huge state military machines like the Pentagon's are dinosaurs about to go extinct, and that something far more terrible awaits us.

The degree to which Van Creveld's Transformation of War complements Homer-Dixon's work on the environment, Huntington's thoughts on cultural clash, my own realizations in traveling by foot, bus, and bush taxi in more than sixty countries, and America's sobering comeuppances in intractable-culture zones like Haiti and Somalia is startling. The book begins by demolishing the notion that men don't like to fight. "By compelling the senses to focus themselves on the here and now," Van Creveld writes, war "can cause a man to take his leave of them." As anybody who has had experience with Chetniks in Serbia, "technicals" in Somalia, Tontons Macoutes in Haiti, or soldiers in Sierra Leone can tell you, in places where the Western Enlightenment has not penetrated and where there has always been mass poverty, people find liberation in violence. In Afghanistan and elsewhere, I vicariously experienced this phenomenon: worrying about mines and ambushes frees you from worrying about mundane details of daily existence. If my own experience is too subjective, there is a wealth of data showing the sheer frequency of war, especially in the developing world since the Second World War. Physical aggression is a part of being human. Only when people attain a certain economic, educational, and cultural standard is this trait tranquilized. In light of the fact that 95 percent of the earth's population growth will be in the poorest areas of the globe, the question is not whether there will be war (there will be a lot of it) but what kind of war. And who will fight whom?
Debunking the great military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, Van Creveld, who may be the most original thinker on war since that early-nineteenth-century Prussian, writes, "Clausewitz's ideas . . . were wholly rooted in the fact that, ever since 1648, war had been waged overwhelmingly by states." But, as Van Creveld explains, the period of nation-states and, therefore, of state conflict is now ending, and with it the clear "threefold division into government, army, and people" which state-directed wars enforce. Thus, to see the future, the first step is to look back to the past immediately prior to the birth of modernism—the wars in medieval Europe which began during the Reformation and reached their culmination in the Thirty Years' War.

Van Creveld writes, "In all these struggles political, social, economic, and religious motives were hopelessly entangled. Since this was an age when armies consisted of mercenaries, all were also attended by swarms of military entrepreneurs. . . . Many of them paid little but lip service to the organizations for whom they had contracted to fight. Instead, they robbed the countryside on their own behalf. . . ."

"Given such conditions, any fine distinctions . . . between armies on the one hand and peoples on the other were bound to break down. Engulfed by war, civilians suffered terrible atrocities."
Back then, in other words, there was no Politics as we have come to understand the term, just as there is less and less Politics today in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sri Lanka, the Balkans, and the Caucasus, among other places.

family and guerrilla comrades, truces arranged with one Bosnian commander, say, may be broken immediately by another Bosnian commander. The plethora of short-lived ceasefires in the Balkans and the Caucasus constitute proof that we are no longer in a world where the old rules of state warfare apply. More evidence is provided by the destruction of medieval monuments in the Croatian port of Dubrovnik: when cultures, rather than states, fight, then cultural and religious monuments are weapons of war, making them fair game.

Also, war-making entities will no longer be restricted to a specific territory. Loose and shadowy organisms such as Islamic terrorist organizations suggest why borders will mean increasingly little and sedimentary layers of tribalistic identity and control will mean more. "From the vantage point of the present, there appears every prospect that religious . . . fanaticisms will play a larger role in the motivation of armed conflict" in the West than at any time "for the last 300 years," Van Creveld writes. This is why analysts like Michael Vlahos are closely monitoring religious cults. Vlahos says, "An ideology that challenges us may not take familiar form, like the old Nazis or Commies. It may not even engage us initially in ways that fit old threat markings." Van Creveld concludes, "Armed conflict will be waged by men on earth, not robots in space. It will have more in common with the struggles of primitive tribes than with large-scale conventional war." While another military historian, John Keegan, in his new book A History of Warfare, draws a more benign portrait of primitive man, it is important to point out that what Van Creveld really means is re-primitivized man: warrior societies operating at a time of unprecedented resource scarcity and planetary overcrowding.
Van Creveld's pre-Westphalian vision of worldwide low-intensity conflict is not a superficial "back to the future" scenario. First of all, technology will be used toward primitive ends. In Liberia the guerrilla leader Prince Johnson didn't just cut off the ears of President Samuel Doe before Doe was tortured to death in 1990—Johnson made a video of it, which has circulated throughout West Africa. In December of 1992, when plotters of a failed coup against the Strasser regime in Sierra Leone had their ears cut off at Freetown's Hamilton Beach prior to being killed, it was seen by many to be a copycat execution. Considering, as I've explained earlier, that the Strasser regime is not really a government and that Sierra Leone is not really a nation-state, listen closely to Van Creveld: "Once the legal monopoly of armed force, long claimed by the state, is wrested out of its hands, existing distinctions between war and crime will break down much as is already the case today in . . . Lebanon, Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Peru, or Colombia."

If crime and war become indistinguishable, then "national defense" may in the future be viewed as a local concept. As crime continues to grow in our cities and the ability of state governments and criminal-justice systems to protect their citizens diminishes, urban crime may, according to Van Creveld, "develop into low-intensity conflict by coalescing along racial, religious, social, and political lines." As small-scale violence multiplies at home and abroad, state armies will continue to shrink, being gradually replaced by a booming private security business, as in West Africa, and by urban mafias, especially in the former communist world, who may be better equipped than municipal police forces to grant physical protection to local inhabitants.

Future wars will be those of communal survival, aggravated or, in many cases, caused by environmental scarcity. These wars will be subnational, meaning that it will be hard for states and local governments to protect their own citizens physically. This is how many states will ultimately die. As state power fades—and with it the state's ability to help weaker groups within society, not to mention other states—peoples and cultures around the world will be thrown back upon their own strengths and weaknesses, with fewer equalizing mechanisms to protect them. Whereas the distant future will probably see the emergence of a racially hybrid, globalized man, the coming decades will see us more aware of our differences than of our similarities. To the average person, political values will mean less, personal security more. The belief that we are all equal is liable to be replaced by the overriding obsession of the ancient Greek travelers: Why the differences between peoples?
The Last Map

In Geography and the Human Spirit, Anne Buttimer, a professor at University College, Dublin, recalls the work of an early-nineteenth-century German geographer, Carl Ritter, whose work implied "a divine plan for humanity" based on regionalism and a constant, living flow of forms. The map of the future, to the extent that a map is even possible, will represent a perverse twisting of Ritter's vision. Imagine cartography in three dimensions, as if in a hologram. In this hologram would be the overlapping sediments of group and other identities atop the merely two-dimensional color markings of city-states and the remaining nations, themselves confused in places by shadowy tentacles, hovering overhead, indicating the power of drug cartels, mafias, and private security agencies. Instead of borders, there would be moving "centers" of power, as in the Middle Ages. Many of these layers would be in motion. Replacing fixed and abrupt lines on a flat space would be a shifting pattern of buffer entities, like the Kurdish and Azeri buffer entities between Turkey and Iran, the Turkic Uighur buffer entity between Central Asia and Inner China (itself distinct from coastal China), and the Latino buffer entity replacing a precise U.S.-Mexican border. To this protean cartographic hologram one must add other factors, such as migrations of populations, explosions of birth rates, vectors of disease. Henceforward the map of the world will never be static. This future map—in a sense, the "Last Map"—will be an ever-mutating representation of chaos.
The Indian subcontinent offers examples of what is happening. For different reasons, both India and Pakistan are increasingly dysfunctional. The argument over democracy in these places is less and less relevant to the larger issue of governability. In India's case the question arises, Is one unwieldy bureaucracy in New Delhi the best available mechanism for promoting the lives of 866 million people of diverse languages, religions, and ethnic groups? In 1950, when the Indian population was much less than half as large and nation-building idealism was still strong, the argument for democracy was more impressive than it is now. Given that in 2025 India's population could be close to 1.5 billion, that much of its economy rests on a shrinking natural-resource base, including dramatically declining water levels, and that communal violence and urbanization are spiraling upward, it is difficult to imagine that the Indian state will survive the next century. India's oft-trumpeted Green Revolution has been achieved by overworking its croplands and depleting its watershed. Norman Myers, a British development consultant, worries that Indians have "been feeding themselves today by borrowing against their children's food sources."
Pakistan's problem is more basic still: like much of Africa, the country makes no geographic or demographic sense. It was founded as a homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent, yet there are more subcontinental Muslims outside Pakistan than within it. Like Yugoslavia, Pakistan is a patchwork of ethnic groups, increasingly in violent conflict with one another. While the Western media gushes over the fact that the country has a woman Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto, Karachi is becoming a subcontinental version of Lagos. In eight visits to Pakistan, I have never gotten a sense of a cohesive national identity. With as much as 65 percent of its land dependent on intensive irrigation, with wide-scale deforestation, and with a yearly population growth of 2.7 percent (which ensures that the amount of cultivated land per rural inhabitant will plummet), Pakistan is becoming a more and more desperate place. As irrigation in the Indus River basin intensifies to serve two growing populations, Muslim-Hindu strife over falling water tables may be unavoidable.
"India and Pakistan will probably fall apart," Homer-Dixon predicts. "Their secular governments have less and less legitimacy as well as less management ability over people and resources." Rather than one bold line dividing the subcontinent into two parts, the future will likely see a lot of thinner lines and smaller parts, with the ethnic entities of Pakhtunistan and Punjab gradually replacing Pakistan in the space between the Central Asian plateau and the heart of the subcontinent.
None of this even takes into account climatic change, which, if it occurs in the next century, will further erode the capacity of existing states to cope. India, for instance, receives 70 percent of its precipitation from the monsoon cycle, which planetary warming could disrupt.
Not only will the three-dimensional aspects of the Last Map be in constant motion, but its two-dimensional base may change too. The National Academy of Sciences reports that "as many as one billion people, or 20 per cent of the world's population, live on lands likely to be inundated or dramatically changed by rising waters. . . . Low-lying countries in the developing world such as Egypt and Bangladesh, where rivers are large and the deltas extensive and densely populated, will be hardest hit. . . . Where the rivers are dammed, as in the case of the Nile, the effects . . . will be especially severe."

Egypt could be where climatic upheaval—to say nothing of the more immediate threat of increasing population—will incite religious upheaval in truly biblical fashion. Natural catastrophes, such as the October, 1992, Cairo earthquake, in which the government failed to deliver relief aid and slum residents were in many instances helped by their local mosques, can only strengthen the position of Islamic factions. In a statement about greenhouse warming which could refer to any of a variety of natural catastrophes, the environmental expert Jessica Tuchman Matthews warns that many of us underestimate the extent to which political systems, in affluent societies as well as in places like Egypt, "depend on the underpinning of natural systems." She adds, "The fact that one can move with ease from Vermont to Miami has nothing to say about the consequences of Vermont acquiring Miami's climate."

Indeed, it is not clear that the United States will survive the next century in exactly its present form. Because America is a multi-ethnic society, the nation-state has always been more fragile here than it is in more homogeneous societies like Germany and Japan. James Kurth, in an article published in The National Interest in 1992, explains that whereas nation-state societies tend to be built around a mass-conscription army and a standardized public school system, "multicultural regimes" feature a high-tech, all-volunteer army (and, I would add, private schools that teach competing values), operating in a culture in which the international media and entertainment industry has more influence than the "national political class." In other words, a nation-state is a place where everyone has been educated along similar lines, where people take their cue from national leaders, and where everyone (every male, at least) has gone through the crucible of military service, making patriotism a simpler issue. Writing about his immigrant family in turn-of-the-century Chicago, Saul Bellow states, "The country took us over. It was a country then, not a collection of 'cultures.'"

During the Second World War and the decade following it, the United States reached its apogee as a classic nation-state. During the 1960s, as is now clear, America began a slow but unmistakable process of transformation. The signs hardly need belaboring: racial polarity, educational dysfunction, social fragmentation of many and various kinds. William Irwin Thompson, in Passages About Earth: An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture, writes, "The educational system that had worked on the Jews or the Irish could no longer work on the blacks; and when Jewish teachers in New York tried to take black children away from their parents exactly in the way they had been taken from theirs, they were shocked to encounter a violent affirmation of negritude."

Issues like West Africa could yet emerge as a new kind of foreign-policy issue, further eroding America's domestic peace. The spectacle of several West African nations collapsing at once could reinforce the worst racial stereotypes here at home. That is another reason why Africa matters. We must not kid ourselves: the sensitivity factor is higher than ever. The Washington, D.C., public school system is already experimenting with an Afrocentric curriculum. Summits between African leaders and prominent African-Americans are becoming frequent, as are Pollyanna-ish prognostications about multiparty elections in Africa that do not factor in crime, surging birth rates, and resource depletion. The Congressional Black Caucus was among those urging U.S. involvement in Somalia and in Haiti. At the Los Angeles Times minority staffers have protested against, among other things, what they allege to be the racist tone of the newspaper's Africa coverage, allegations that the editor of the "World Report" section, Dan Fisher, denies, saying essentially that Africa should be viewed through the same rigorous analytical lens as other parts of the world.

Africa may be marginal in terms of conventional late-twentieth-century conceptions of strategy, but in an age of cultural and racial clash, when national defense is increasingly local, Africa's distress will exert a destabilizing influence on the United States.

This and many other factors will make the United States less of a nation than it is today, even as it gains territory following the peaceful dissolution of Canada. Quebec, based on the bedrock of Roman Catholicism and Francophone ethnicity, could yet turn out to be North America's most cohesive and crime-free nation-state. (It may be a smaller Quebec, though, since aboriginal peoples may lop off northern parts of the province.) "Patriotism" will become increasingly regional as people in Alberta and Montana discover that they have far more in common with each other than they do with Ottawa or Washington, and Spanish-speakers in the Southwest discover a greater commonality with Mexico City. (The Nine Nations of North America, by Joel Garreau, a book about the continent's regionalization, is more relevant now than when it was published, in 1981.) As Washington's influence wanes, and with it the traditional symbols of American patriotism, North Americans will take psychological refuge in their insulated communities and cultures.

Returning from West Africa last fall was an illuminating ordeal. After leaving Abidjan, my Air Afrique flight landed in Dakar, Senegal, where all passengers had to disembark in order to go through another security check, this one demanded by U.S. authorities before they would permit the flight to set out for New York. Once we were in New York, despite the midnight hour, immigration officials at Kennedy Airport held up disembarkation by conducting quick interrogations of the aircraft's passengers—this was in addition to all the normal immigration and customs procedures. It was apparent that drug smuggling, disease, and other factors had contributed to the toughest security procedures I have ever encountered when returning from overseas.

Then, for the first time in over a month, I spotted businesspeople with attache cases and laptop computers. When I had left New York for Abidjan, all the businesspeople were boarding planes for Seoul and Tokyo, which departed from gates near Air Afrique's. The only non-Africans off to West Africa had been relief workers in T-shirts and khakis. Although the borders within West Africa are increasingly unreal, those separating West Africa from the outside world are in various ways becoming more impenetrable.

But Afrocentrists are right in one respect: we ignore this dying region at our own risk. When the Berlin Wall was falling, in November of 1989, I happened to be in Kosovo, covering a riot between Serbs and Albanians. The future was in Kosovo, I told myself that night, not in Berlin. The same day that Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat clasped hands on the White House lawn, my Air Afrique plane was approaching Bamako, Mali, revealing corrugated-zinc shacks at the edge of an expanding desert. The real news wasn't at the White House, I realized. It was right below.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

PIONEER OF RANK PAY CASE: TRAILBLAZER MAJ AK DHANAPALAN(RETD)



A Mark of Honour
http://week.manoramaonline.com/ranked/online/MM/The_Week/Current_Events/3525402451_A%20mark%20of%20honour.jpg
at his home in Alappuzha - Photo by Jackson Arattukulam


It was 1987. General K. Sundarji was in Pune, briefing senior Southern Command officers on the Fourth Pay Commission, when a lowly captain asked an uncomfortable question. He wanted to know why his basic had actually gone down, after the rank pay was introduced. There was a buzz in the room. The chief told the captain to meet him separately, he would explain the issue. “I didn't seek private audience later. I was too junior,” chuckles Major A.K. Dhanapalan (retd). “I actually had no business rubbing shoulders with senior officers that day, except that I was operating the computer for the conference. But I hadn't got it wrong. I was right, bang on.” The Engineers officer chanced upon the anomaly when he was asked to work on preparing the pay fixation of defence civilian setups, like Military Engineering Service, on the Fourth Pay Commission template. “That year, the commission introduced a rank pay for defence officers between the ranks of captain to brigadier, which was 0200 at captain rank. But what it actually did was deduct the same amount from the basic pay and give it as rank pay. Since all emoluments are linked to basic, not only was there no net gain, we were actually losing out,” Dhanapalan explains. He redid his calculations several times till he was convinced the government had tricked the defence officers. “I wanted to take the matter to court, but I was in Pune and the High Court in Mumbai. Then, I got posted to Udhampur, and the High Court was in Jammu. Next, I was transferred to Port Blair....” Dhanapalan finally got his opportunity on being posted to Kochi in 1995. His office was close to the Kerala High Court; it was time to make that move. His colleagues were shocked at his daring. His advocate, too, was not convinced. The court, however, understood and ruled that the Union of India should pay the rank pay arrears and an interest of 6 per cent. The matter went on appeal and a division bench of the court upheld the judgment. The government took the matter to the Supreme Court but had to eat humble pie when, in 2006, the court rejected its plea. He did not stop there. The arrears, while welcome, were not his goal. His aim was to alert defence personnel not to be lulled into complacency by the “you are being looked after” attitude of the establishment. So he photocopied the verdict and posted them to officers and clubs he had addresses of. “That itself cost me a bomb,” he recalls. One such letter reached Colonel B.K. Sharma. Sharma was the first officer to do motorcycle daredevilry in the Republic Day parade in 1978. Post-retirement, he realised it was daredevilry time again, this time to take on the government for which he had once fought. He circulated copies of the judgment in canteens and clubs. Knowing there was strength in numbers, some retired officers got together and registered Retired Defence Officers' Association (RDOA) and filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court in 2007. Meanwhile, across India, officers were litigating for the same demand, and all the cases were finally clubbed together before a division bench of Justices Markandey Katju and R.M. Lodha.
“We had not bargained for the level of resistance from the government. Instead of conceding gracefully, they tried repeatedly to stonewall us,” says Sharma. When in 2010, the bench ruled that it agreed with the reasoning of the Kerala High Court that rank pay be paid retrospectively, with 6 per cent interest, the government filed a transfer petition before a bench of three judges. The three service chiefs recommended to the solicitor general to withdraw the litigation and honour the judgment. The defence ministry, however, pressured the chiefs to withdraw their written communique. In a rare show of defiance, the chiefs stood their ground. The RDOA had to file an RTI to confirm the service chiefs' stance on the matter. “They used every tactic, from pleading inability to meet the financial burden to the solicitor general not appearing in court, due to which proceedings would get postponed,” recalls Sharma. “This summer, when the court fixed the last hearing day on September 4, we actually wrote to the law ministry that so many officers had already died in the last 26 years. Delaying justice was not fair, so either they withdraw the special leave petition or ensure the solicitor general be present in court on September 4.” The final hearing was a marathon session. The government made a last ditch plea that interest be paid only to litigants. The court refused. However, it reduced the date of calculation of interest from 1986 to 2006 at 6 per cent, ordering that it be paid within 12 weeks. “This is a big victory,” says RDOA advocate Aishwarya Bhati. “It gives a shot in the arm to all other cases that the defence personnel have been fighting.” According to RDOA, over 45,000 officers, retired and serving, will benefit, and it will also impact pensions and widow pensions. The amounts, Sharma calculates, will range from around 06 to 01 lakh, depending on length of service and rank held. The government claims it is a burden of 01,600 crore. “It isn't about money. We fought on principle and we have won our prestige,” says Sharma, but admits being flooded with congratulatory calls, all of them with the suffix, “Mujhe kitna milega? (How much will I get?)” How did only Dhanapalan get wise to the anomaly? “Faujis are great at protocol, discipline and a hundred other virtues. Studying payslips isn't among those, unfortunately. They usually don't question what goes to the bank, or do the sums themselves,” says Dhanapalan.
There are many other issues with defence pay and entitlements, but defence personnel say the government is changing tactics. Instead of risking its decisions being challenged in court, it now procrastinates. The Sixth Pay Commission anomalies are an example. Last heard, a four-member committee headed by the cabinet secretary was appointed to look into the issue. Then Navy chief Nirmal Verma had expressed anguish at no defence representative being on the committee. Meanwhile, the man who ignited the spark sits back with a smile. “The government paid arrears only till 1996. I decided not to contest it, as by then, RDOA took up the fight.” There are fears the government might give arrears only till 1996 to others, too. “My mission is accomplished. No longer will faujis take at face value what is given to them. They have learnt to read between lines, ask, and fight for their dues,” says Dhanapalan, getting ready to go to the temple.
Message received from Maj AKD issent for yourfor kind consideration.
 
Dear Veterans, In the resent past a few issues have come up in the blog concerning the Armed Forces Personnel and the Veterans. A few of them are:- 1. Non Functional Up gradation (NFU) to officers. 2. Amending the Pension Regulations of the Armed Forces. 3. Non-Implementation of Judgments of AFTs which is around 2000. 4. Payment of 100% pension to the Veterans up to the age of 60 years (age for superannuation for central Govt employees) and payment of OROP thereafter. 5. Separate Ministry or a Defense Board (like that of Railway) for Armed Forces Personnel. 6. Cadre Review (being done at every 5 years in other Departments) 7. Date of Birth (DOB) issue of Army Chief himself. 8. Difference of pension between two immediate Ranks is more than Rs.11,000/-PM 9. With drawl of existing Rank Pay by 6th CPC (replacing with grade pay to give additional emoluments to civilian employees and also to create an equation between civ and Mily.) 10. Majors with more than 15 years of service equated with cadets and Hony Lt. (PB-3). 11. A meaningful resettlement of Armed Forces Veterans. 12. Dignity (Izzath) of the personnel in niform/Protocol/precedence, V/s civilians. The above are some of the major issues that are occupying internet mails and blogs nowadays. The blame is put on the babus of MOD and the Politicians. But one must think honestly…Are they fully responsible for these omissions. What is role of the Service HQs? Can we give a clean chit to service HQs on these issues? Are they not responsible for creating such a mess? Take the example of Judgments passed by the AFTs:- It is understood nearly 2000 judgments are pending for implementation. The Service HQs are the Nodal agency for their implementation. So the service HQs are answerable for the non-implementation. Can we blame the MOD for this.? If there is a problem, the service HQs should come out publically or inform the Ex-servicemen associations or at least inform the individual about the factual position rather than some “goal..Mall…English” , so that he can take further action. If some decision is needed from the Ministry, the service HQs should put up the note and get the same in a time frame. The service HQs should also give the present position of all judgments immediately in the web site for the info of all. Similarly, Is it not the responsibility of the Service HQs to get themselves involved in drafting the Pension Rules of men under their command? Is it possible now? When a dept called”Ex-servicemen welfare” has been created during 2004 , outside the Service HQs, no one has raised their voice. Even no one commented on the instructions issued by that dept regarding welfare, re-employment and re-habilitation of Ex-servicemen which can only be termed as an Essay on Ex-servicemen - no seriousness about the welfare-every org even the companies have the welfare schemes linked to their Provident Funds, whereas we depend on the mercy of some one which is also now restricted to only war widows and disabled which is the full responsibility of the Govt of India being the employer, re-employments are left to the States which only remained in paper, without any mechanism to check. How many vacancies in a year- now body knows, whether it commensurate with the number of retires in a year and the re-habilitation left to none- to the fate. There is yet another org called re-settlement , the jawans of the great Army is put on “Chowkidar” duties in front offices, hotels, houses for a petty 1500 to a max of 5000/- without any other benefits and taking commission out of it. (the benefit of pension of such person goes to the employers, if otherwise they have to pay salary like any other employee with other benefits like leave, pension, Provident Funds, ESI facilities etc- Take the case of the biggest employers-BSNL, Air Ports, Customs etc and see the difference between their regular employees and the “Chowkidars” under the re-settlement scheme- one can only feel pity!!) – No one has raised any voice on this policy issued by the newly created “Department of Ex-servicemen Welfare”. The service HQs felt very happy that this burden has gone from them.- So how can you blame that Dept now, for making a Pension Reg or any Regulation as they feel like? At least C’nt it be challenged in the Court of Law? Why is it not being done by the Army Chief who has filed a case for his own benefit, Is it the HONOR OF THE ARMY lies on the honor of the Army Chief or on the Soldiers of the Army? Where is pride of the Army Chief when lot many ex-servicemen are in the street with begging bowel after giving their youth to the Army? Is it not a matter of Right for them to have a Meaningful resettlement? Or the Right is only for the Army Chief to have his DOB corrected? What I am trying share with you all is that we are Not serious about what is happening to the Armed Forces Personnel as a whole, we are only self centered on petty issues. If it is a mistake on our part accept it instead putting the blame on someone else. Now, what is the further course of action to come out of this self created problems? Can these be solved by creating Mails or blogs?? It can only create awareness amongst the veterans but most of our problems were not ever made available to Medias for a public opinion. My humble suggestions are:- 1. Service HQs have to do some home work very seriously. The above points have come to light only when some of the Veterans have taken some trouble to study these cases and put in the mail, but the service HQs are silent or they have no such points at all. 2. Like any other department ,the Service HQs should take full responsibility to look after their Veterans, Widows, officers , JCOs and NCOs and their families who gave their blood and sweat to build Indian Army to the present shape from the scratches of Chinese aggression in 1962 and those who laid their lives . There is no point in blaming the Officers in MOD, for our in efficiency for that matter. It is for the Service HQs, how they Work out the strategy to accomplish this task. This is more important as there is no trade Union functioning in the org for collective bargaining of their service benefit which is available to all employees including the Central Govt. 3. Art 312 of the Constitution of India giving powers to Make Rules for Service benefit to Defense Services must be evoked by putting pressure on the Govt, the PM and the Supreme Commander. This has to be done by the Service HQs only because we are worst suffers of all other Central Services. If a pay or a service condition is to be changed /modified in respect of any Central Service, this has to be duly notified in the Gazette of India with the approval of the Govt/Parliament whereas it could be seen in the past that only an Army Instruction can meet the requirement in respect of the Armed Forces Personnel including the Service Chiefs. This has no backing of the Law of the Land. In the early years after the Independence, the matters concerning Armed Forces Personnel were dealt separately at the level of PM or RM but later it has been brought under the purview of the pay commission- only erode the dignity and reduce them to the status of mere employee. Well, then the Army Act also needs to be amended to include the liberty for collective bargaining for their service benefits which has not been done so far, the Service HQs should pursue this. 4. The Service HQs should create a high powered committee who will take up the matters concerning the personnel matters of Armed Forces Personnel with the RM, PM, The Supreme Commander. They should take feed -back and suggestions/complains from all corners including the jawans direct. They should also interact regularly with other departments, companies, consultants, Ex-servicemen Associations, Veterans etc. and update themselves with the latest, for which a proper office with well experienced Officers and Staff from both veterans and outsiders is set up for function on regular basis. It is not so difficult to set right the bureaucracy if the Service HQs have a will to firmly handle the Organizational interest, the interest of the Armed Forces Personnel and no compromise to be made at any point of time at any level. This should be made clear to all up to the Pl commanders. 5. A MEANIGFUL re-settlement of all veterans should be the full responsibility of the Govt and the Service HQ should ensure this (A suggestion in this direction is enclosed ) 6. All are requested to offer their valuable comments and they may also take up the matter with the service HQs individually or collectively. 7. May I request you to kindly forward this to at least 10 (Ten) veterans with your comments. With Regards, Major AK Dhanapalan, Veteran E-mail: http://mc/compose?to=dhanapalanakmajor%40gmail.com Mob 092 49 87 53 42.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

JANE KAHAN GAYE WOH DIN






India- Pak dialogue, futile exercise

·
 
 
         LT GEN VIJAY OBEROI ( RETD)
·         16 Jan 2013
·         Hindustan Times (Chandigarh)
·         Defence Matters (The writer is a former vice- chief of army. The views expressed are personal)
Zo
 
The killing, and more importantly, savage mutilation of two soldiers of the Indian Army on the Line of Control ( LoC) has put a big question mark on the ' on- again/ off- again' dialogue the two countries keep having, seeking the elusive peace.
My focus today is on these two aspects; the first is tactical and the second falls squarely in the strategic realm. While the former is predominantly military, the latter does need to take note of this deplorable incident while analysing the future of the dialogue.
 
 
DYNAMICS OF LOC
 
It is important to understand the dynamics of the LoC first. The present LoC is the second avatar of the erstwhile Cease Fire Line ( CFL). While the CFL was delineated in 1949, the LoC became the dividing line after our victory in the 1971 war with Pakistan.
Despite these formal delineations, the Pakistani Army did not honour the sanctity of these lines. They commenced encroaching and nibbling on our side of the line, with a view to gaining tactically advantageous positions.
This was naturally resisted by our troops. The eyeball- to-eyeball deployment of troops resulted in the LoC becoming an active and live border, where it was considered a fair game to seize any opportunity and occupy areas across the CFL/ LoC, by both sides.
There were casualties on both sides and ‘taking revenge’ was an established way to pay the other side in the same coin. I have no doubt that even in this case, our army will exact retribution at a place and time of its choosing.
After Pakistan started sending terrorists across the LoC, it started resorting to heavy firing on our posts to divert the attention of our troops. This continued even after agreeing to the ceasefire. Our army adopted several counter- measures to check such infiltration, including an increase i n the number of observation posts, erecting a border fence, increasing patrolling and so on. Such tactical actions will continue in future.
 
 
 
LONGEST CEASEFIRE
 
In the last over six decades, there have been a number of ceasefires on the LoC, but the existing one, which has been in force since 2003, has been the longest.
Even though an active LoC favours our troops, in the interest of better relations we agreed to a ceasefire, so that Pakistan could withdraw troops from the LoC to conduct operations against the Taliban and other insurgents, which were creating mayhem inside Pakistan. However, Pakistan chose not to do so and instead continued to nurture the terrorists, who are still considered assets to fight against India.
Coming to the strategic aspects, the stances and actions of Pakistan in practically all spheres of interaction between neighbouring nations point to it wanting a perpetuation of antagonism with India. The reason is that while many citizens of Pakistan want to live in peace with India, its policymakers do not want i t. Although there is an elected government in Pakistan, it will be naive to think that they are the decision- makers. The Pakistani Army has the last word on all policy matters, including on security, nuclear and foreign policy affairs.

The Pakistani Army wields power on account of only one shibboleth, which is that India is out to gobble up Pakistan and it is only the Pakistani Army that is preventing it. This is such an oft- repeated statement that most Pakistanis, if not all, believe it to be true. The day India and Pakistan succeed in agreeing to live in peace as friendly neighbours, will be the start of the Pakistani Army losing its pre- eminent position i n the power structure of Pakistan. It is obvious that no one i n the Pakistani Army would like to relinquish such a premier position, which abounds in power and pelf. That being so, where is the question of peace between India and Pakistan? Consequently, it is not peace dialogues and formal talks but the whittling down of the Pakistani Army's predominant position as the sole policy- formulating organisation that will bring eventual peace between the two countries. Policymakers in India, therefore, must strive to change the thinking of the Pakistani polity, instead of engaging in futile dialogues and discussions.
 
 
BANKRUPTCY OF IDEAS
 
India has been making overtures for peace for decades, yet all we have received in return from Pakistan is violence of many types, including wars and terrorism; hedging; impossible demands; and subterfuges. The latest consistent policy of Pakistan is to be ' perpetually in a state of denial'. That our political establishment, undoubtedly spurred on by self- styled experts of the ‘Aiyaars' and ‘Nayyars' variety, continues with this futile exercise is both maddening and naive. Either we have no sense of history, or we deliberately do not want to learn from it. It also indicates the bankruptcy of ideas and lack of any policies of a strategic nature.
 
It is nobody's case that we should not live peacefully with our neighbours and resolve all problems and disputes by discussion and in a peaceful manner, but this needs give and take from both sides. So far, it has been a one- sided affair and there are no indicators that the future would be any different.
 
The bottom line is that at the military level, let us not impose unnecessary restrictions on how the sanctity of the LoC should be maintained. The army knows how it should be done.
At the strategic level, we should put a brake on the peace process till a more conducive environment emerges. At the same time, we need to jettison the Composite Dialogue. Much water has f l own down the Indus since it was first compiled. Since then the security, economic and social environment in the sub- continent has changed drastically.
 
Our policymakers and security experts must first formulate a comprehensive security strategy and thereafter the diplomats and others should work out an entirely fresh negotiations plan.
 
This will also give a chance to their counterparts in Pakistan to take stock and l earn that it takes two to tango.
 
 
 
 





THIS  IS  HOW WHEN THE TROUBLE STARTRED


 I went to see a  'MUSLIM TRIBUTE BAND'  last night. 

They were called “Bomb Jovi”. They were brilliant.
Their last song “Living on a Prayer Mat” almost brought the house down.
Then this Muslim bloke started bragging about how he had the entire Kura.. on DVD.
I was interested so I asked him, “Can you burn me a copy?”
Well ....... that was when the trouble started.
                                                                                                            (Pradeep  Lall) 








--- from the diary of an old soldier ..... people like Lt Gen Bhagat were still alive ......and the modern breed of Gens was beginning to be born!
 The recent brutal killing of two Indian soldiers by Pakistani troops on Indian soil, then the Indian government's protests and the Pakistani government's denials, etc etc has left me pondering and reminiscing about the good old days.
 I have had three postings in J&K, and I distinctly remember three incidents that took place around NW Kashmir during my first posting at Uri in 1976-77:
 Incident 1: A Maratha Light Infantry battalion was newly inducted in a sensitive sector. On the very first night when the rear party of the previous battalion finally moved out and the main body of Marathas newly moved in, Pakis fired 2" mortar shells on a Maratha forward post. (This has been the usual way to welcome newly inducted Indian Army units by the Pakis for ages.) As soon as day broke, a Major on the Maratha post climbed a tree with an RL (Rocket Launcher, for my civilian friends) slung on one shoulder and two rockets slung on the other, and simply blasted two bunkers of the Mujahid post across the LOC. 
 Thereafter, not one bullet was fired by the Pakis on the Maratha paltan for as long as they stayed there.
 Incident 2: Pakis observed that Gorkha soldiers in their OP (Observation Post) just left the LMG (Light Machine Gun) un-attended for 2 to 3 minutes while they went out of the OP for a pee. One summer day at about 11 o' clock in the morning, in a daring raid, two Paki soldiers sneaked in and ran back with the LMG. 
 Four hours later, which is normally siesta time and security is lax, a team of Gorkha soldiers raided the Pak post and came back with the Paki CO's 15 years old daughter. (Pakistan Army's officers-lot is super privileged. They even stay on border posts with their families.) The Gorkhas did not harm the child, they just made her sit on a chair on top of the OP bunker. Soon enough, a bunch of Paki jawans came up to the LOC with a white flag and the Gorkhas' LMG, and a neat and clean exchange took place.
 Incident 3: This incident happened when Naga Regiment was newly raised in the Indian Army and Pakis had no clue what material the Nagas were made of! (Those with a weak stomach may please skip reading this incident further.)
 The Nagas were also given the customary welcome on their induction, but they did not retaliate. Then, for the next two consecutive nights, a couple of Paki soldiers would cross over to the Indian side, lob hand-grenades at the Naga post and run back. On the third night, a few Naga soldiers laid an ambush and caught 2 Pakis. They brought the Paki soldiers back enough to be hidden from the Paki OP sights. They tied the Pakis to a tree, lit a fire and performed a traditional Naga dance! Then they chopped a leg off one of the Paki soldiers and literally barbecued it over the fire. Both the Paki soldiers were let off the next morning, but not before the were made to hear this dialogue between a Naga Havildar and a Sepoy:
 Sepoy: "Ustaad, inko rakhte hain, bilkul chicken jaisa taste hai."
 Havildar: "Nahi re, inko jaane do, yeh dono bahut kamjor hain. Ab yahan 3 saal rehna hai; tu tension mat le, aur bahut mote tagde milenge."
 This news spread like wildfire, and the Pakis (Baluch Regiment) across the LOC were thereafter not to be seen even through binoculars, till the Naga battalion was replaced by another unit after 3 years.
 Now-a-days, the only reason Pakistanis keeps blatantly bullying us Indians is because we allow them to do so.
 How I miss the good old days. Jaane kahan gaye woh din!



 
 
PAK SAVAGERY ON THE LINE OF CONTROL IN J AND K
Lt-Gen HarwantSingh (Retd)
 
               Pakistani troops crossed the Line of control (LoC) in the Poonch  Sector of J & K and killed two India soldiers. It is not so much the killing but the savage act and heinous crime of mutilating the bodies of these soldiers, which has caused widespread indignation and outrage in India. There is nothing unusual for casualties to take place, on both sides of the L of C due to sporadic firing from either side. It is the crossing of the LoC and committing the brutal and un-soldierly act of mutilating the bodies and beheading one of our soldiers, that has created such uproar in India.
            Such cowardly acts are normally the wont of Taliban. On all accounts, Pakistan army has been through a phase of Talibanisation.  Shooting women, stoning them to death as a dispensation of justice is reprehensible practice followed by the bigoted and the savage. Whereas soldiering, is an honourable profession where gallantry and chivalry is the hallmark of a good army. It is also in the interest of discipline and good morale that the troops are required to conduct themselves in a dignified manner, both in peace and during operations.
           In the same sector, in early nineties, Pakistani troops crossed over the L of C and established a post in the upper part of Kirni village. A few days later, Pakistani troops were evicted from this post. While the enemy was thrown back, it left behind dead bodies of a soldier and an officer. Next day at a flag meeting at Poonch and in the presence of a few thousand civilians from both sides, the dead bodies were handed over to Pakistan military, observing complete religious rites and with full military honours. Because, for the Indian army it is an Article of Faith that enemy dead must be honoured and the unarmed done no harm. Those who violate this code of conduct are hauled over the coals.
         Pakistan army does not fool around with those who take firm and punitive action against any misdemeanor on its part. In the above narrated incidence, it was expected that Pakistan army would react to, what it felt was an ignominy of being evicted from that post and having to accept two dead bodies in the presence of such a large gathering of civilians. Pakistan army had tremendous tactical advantage in the area, but Indians took the necessary steps to nullify that advantage and cater for such an eventuality. Pakistan army launched two battalion size attacks on two successive nights and both the battalions were decimated by the defensive fire tasks (DF tasks) much before the enemy could close in with our troops. Thereafter, the Pakistan army pleaded for a ceasefire, to evacuate its dead and wounded. Such a firm action by the Indian army resulted in complete peace along the L of C for the next many years.
              There is complete lack of trust of the Pak army and it is this, which has resulted in Indian army’s stance of no withdrawal from Siachen without demarcation of the Line of Actual Control on the ground and delineation of the same on the maps of both countries.  Wherever and whenever India has firmly dealt with Pakistan, the latter has refrained from repeating the same mischief. Be it the invasion of J & K in 1947 or the offensive in the Akhnur sector of J & K in 1965.
Had India acted firmly against Pakistan after the attack on Parliament, in all probability 9/11 at Bombay would not have taken place. These and the attack on Red Fort were preplanned and executed with the full knowledge and support of Pakistani establishment. BJP government then and UPA now, failed in its primary duty to protect the nation.
             It is our failure to deal with Pakistan at Kargil in an appropriate manner and not punish it for it’s perfidy that has left us with the sinking feeling that once we vacate positions at Siachen, Pakistan would invariably occupy these. At Kargil the political executive showed extreme timidity and the military failed to put across the necessity of making Pakistan pay for its mischief, with the result that we paid in heavy casualties in those frontal attacks, up impossible slopes and heights. Further we ended up deploying a division where a brigade was enough and a corps where a division could do the job. Such large addition of troops, North of Zojila ­­­­­ Pass, has sent the Indian defence budget into a tailspin.
              India’s backward bend to create a climate of trust and good neighbourly relations, building bridges of trade and commerce has been a one sided affair. These attempts need to be linked with, end to cross border terrorism. Any mischief by Pakistan needs appropriate reaction by India: politically, diplomatically and militarily.
 The author was a Corps Commander in J & K during the early nineties; and later retired as the Deputy Chief of Army Staff

Pakistan’s Endless Lies & India’s Gutless Pundits
Kunal Verma
 
After the Kargil War, I was filming the eight Pakistani prisoners who had been captured by us in the Dras and Batalik Sectors. The Army PROs had told the POWs that I was from the Red Cross or some such bullshit in the hope that they would talk on camera. The first thing I did with each of them was to tell them that I was from no such organization. I also told them point blank that their country was denying that their Army had been a part of the infiltration and their best chance of returning to Pakistan was to talk turkey and tell the truth or languish in our jails for years. The fear of God and the fact that they would never see their families again worked and they began to talk – all eight of them. As ordinary soldiers they didn’t know too much, but what they said was detailed and clearly established how their regular units had moved into position masquerading as ‘mujahideen’.
 
The visuals of those men, some with bandages on their eyes, was flashed on virtually every television channel and within a week the eight POWs were flown back to Pakistan. That footage is still with me, and the verbal evidence of the POWs blows whatever fig leaf of cover the Pakistani establishment ever had.
 
Kargil was not a one off thing. The same thing had happened in Jammu and Kashmir in 1948. From day one the Government of Pakistan had gone blue in the face repeating ad nauseam that their Army was not involved. Their entire case in the United Nations was based on that one big lie which we could never convincingly expose, despite the fact that Western journalists had splashed photographs of the active involvement of the Pakistan Armed Forces. For my book, The Long Road to Siachen: The Question Why I found some of these images fairly easily, yet no one on the Indian side felt the need to aggressively nail this great big lie. Years later, when Pakistani officers began to publish their own stories, we still did nothing to counter this propaganda.
 
As a nation, we are pathetic when it comes to remembering our history or honouring the brave men who died defending this country – sixty-five years on and our political leadership grudges them even a National War Memorial! Not surprising then that October 1947 in Baramula has all but been forgotten, when the tribal lashkar pulled out and raped virtually every woman and girl in the town; or for that matter forgotten the chilling words when Skardu fell and the Pakistani field commander wired back “All Sikhs killed and women raped” or words to that affect.
 
In 1965 they did it again, and then again in 1971, even when the Pakistan Army was fighting for its survival in Bangladesh, they tortured and mutilated our boys. 22 Rajput at Madhumati had two men stripped naked and dragged through the streets behind jeeps while others were tied to trees and their eyes were gouged out! The Indian Government’s response was predictable – 22 Rajput was pulled out of the Eastern Theatre. The Pakistan Army which had behaved in the most barbaric manner possible with the people of Bangladesh were then protected by us from the Mukti Bahini and 93,000 POWs were sent back by a preening Indian Government while some of our own boys even today are reportedly languishing in their jails. Not one of the Pakistani soldiers was tried for war crimes.
 
Our Parliament is attacked and Mumbai is held hostage by ‘non-state actors’, Kashmir has been on fire for thirty years thanks to our hostile friends across the border and all we do is sanctimoniously talk of CBMs and signing Track 2 ‘deals’ where we want to talk of demilitarization of Siachen based on some ridiculous sentimental hogwash of being brothers who have been separated at birth! We want to play cricket and hold hands and sing songs and write articles about ‘Aman ki Aasha’. Sure, there’s nothing wrong in building people to people contacts and keeping dialogue open, but surely it must be on our terms.
 
And now this! Pakistani soldiers behead our boys and we wring our hands in collective anguish. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH US?
 
We’ve brought this upon ourselves! We can’t protect our women, we can’t look after our farmers, or our soldiers – either on the borders or in Chattisgarh – we can’t take a damn step any more without being surrounded with the stench of corruption. As a people we have failed and the Government of India, which is us, have failed the country as we squabble at every level. Every institution is today under attack – be it the Army, the Police or the Judiciary. We watch as our Parliamentarians make monkeys of themselves in the highest edifices of democracy and then go scuttling into their homes behind a barricade of police protection and barbed wire when our children take to the streets. Just imagine what would have happened if the President of India had walked down the Raisina Hill slope and embraced the anguished youth and shared their concern. All we got was lip service. And water canons and a few lathi charges.
 
The underlying message of these protests – be it Anna Hazare or Ramdev or Kejriwal or Sangeeta, Radhika, Madhulika, Meena or Jyoti is the same, even if our screaming, sometimes hysterical media misses it! THE PEOPLE ARE CRYING OUT FOR BETTER GOVERNANCE! Every scandal – be it the CWG, 2G, 3G, Coalgate, Kodankulam or FDI, is a nail in our crumbling wall. When your intestines are bleeding, your women being raped, your fishermen are being shot by drunk Italian Guards as sport, and all you do is make shrill noises on TV, do you seriously expect the enemy sitting beyond your gate to shake his head in sympathy or do you expect him to hit you even harder. If he takes away your heads, it anguishes us today. But as we have regularly demonstrated, we will do nothing about it.
 
I have two simple suggestions:
 
The media must stop covering the Pakistan border. A complete news black out on anything concerning the LOC. The Indian Army is more than capable of making the people who did this heinous act pay. Just leave the Army alone. It is their ghost and they will burry it at their time of choosing.
 
Enforce a Naval economic blockade of Karachi until Dawood Ibrahim, the perpetuators of the Mumbai Attack, and the Pakistani Army personnel who beheaded our boys in 2011 in Kupwara and now in Mendhar are handed over. There should be no compromise on this. The Indian Navy has had a virtual son-in-law status since Independence and all the talk of a blue water Navy now needs to be put to the test. Choke Pakistan economically so that they hurt. Neither the Army nor the IAF have the numerical superiority over Pakistan to conduct any surgical retaliation strike. The Navy on the other hand, has a major edge over the Pakistan Navy. If the rest of the world, especially the US, has a problem with this, tell them to go to hell and shut the door behind them!
 
 
Kunal Verma is the author of The Long Road to Siachen: The Question Why and The Northeast Trilogy. A filmmaker, he has been professionally associated with the Armed Forces for over two decades. His films include The Standard Bearers (National Defence Academy), The Making of a Warrior (Indian Military Academy), Salt of the Earth and Aakash Yodha (IAF), The Naval Dimension and Kashmir: Baramula to Kargil among others. The recently published Northeast Trilogy documents the entire Northeastern region of India.
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Wednesday, January 9, 2013

SHE WAS "JYOTI SINGH PANDEY" SHE SHOULD NOT HAVE DIED>



Tears your heart
RIP Damini. We pray that your death will not be in vain. That the people of India will unite to make this place a better one for all those who are left behind. Amen.
Finally a picture of Damini / Nirbhaya!

Can't miss the spark in her eyes. Definitely a person with sweet dreams and ambitions....bitterly snuffed out. 



 
She was a student
She was 23
Her fault some people say because she boarded the wrong bus
And oh yeah
SHE WAS A GIRL
Six men raped her one by one and then used an iron rod to tear her vagina-

Small intestine and large intestine came out They left her to die on the road Naked!   Wounded!  Exposed!  Devastated What’s more is that no one even turned to look at her No one even bothered to throw a shawl on the ill-clad ill-fated girl She can never live a normal married life again She Went into coma five times since 16th December She was unconscious Critical and hasn't been able to stop crying But don’t worry She wasn't your sister She wasn't your daughter   But she could be. The brutality has to stop right here guys These people deserve capital punishment for their cruel, Perverted act She died Saturday 29th December 2012Rest in PeaceBlack heart (cards) and I pray that her killers get the WORST punishment possible This doesn't only happen in India But in every country around the world. .Is this how we treat our women?
It Makes me ashamed to even live on this planet today If her death Touches you and you are against RAPE   "Write RIP"  If u Support RAPE  "IGNORE"

COMMENT,SHARE & TAG to   at  least 5 of your best FRIENDS


--
RIP  Damini.
Thank you for making the world sit up, to wake up to the long drawn suffering of all womankind. You had to give up your beautiful life, to snuff your tender dreams to do this. I hope the world becomes a better place for the sacrifice you have made and for the fight you put up. In many ways, we are all responsible - when we show preference for the male child, when we support the thought that 'only men' are heirs to a bloodline and therefore yearn to keep our 'family tree' going through male progeny. When we use women as objects of desire in film and advertisement, when we use a woman's body to promote an object of desire( and do not for a moment think of it's far reaching consequences on those who want but cannot fulfill those desires. And hence bring out their frustration on their own women or other women, or anybody weaker for that matter.).
I am not justifying the behavior of these brutes, but I'm only trying to understand why. The main accused was also married, had a wife who died. He perhaps had desires that had to be suppressed while others around him seemed to 'have it all'. The youngest - a juvenile-going-on-adult, is a child of modern times. He sees youngsters of his age flaunting trappings that he can never dream of having perhaps. A frustration builds up inside, which then is expressed on a vulnerable victim. Who's to be blamed? The ever widening disparity between the have and the have-nots, the ever rising importance given to money and material possessions, the ever widening gap between the earnings and yearnings, are all signs of a dangerous cocktail that can only lead to destruction.
Coming to think of it, there is only so much money in the whole wide world. There is not going to be 'extra' coming in from outer space. The leaders of the world NEED to think of a way to bring back monetary balance. As Gandhi  said, "There's enough in this world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed." The rich get rich to do charity. What kind of charity is this that wants to take away from the weak and then 'hand down' to the 'have-nots' in a show of beneficence?
"How many miles must a man walk down, before he is called a 'man'?" For to be a "man" means to be human, which means to be compassionate and sensitive. Are we sensitive to what impact our actions have on our surroundings?
Let us all sit and think and think from the heart. To quote Dr  Lou Marinoff   (founding President of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association)- "How do we feel compassion for others if we are only guided by our head? I think that is not enough. There has to be a practice of the heart, too."

"Let me be more mother than the mother herself in my love and defense of the child who is not flesh of my flesh. Help me to make one of my children my most perfect poem and leave within him or her my most melodious melody from that day when my own lips no longer sing.”  - from "A Teacher's Prayer"

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

PURCHASE OF CAR from CSD(I)



----- Forwarded Message -----
Subject: Fw: Cars from CSD
Dear Friends,

I have been to the DDG Canteen services (QMG BR) this afternoon for seeking special sanction for purchase of car ex CSD canteen. He told me that THERE IS NO WAITING LIST FOR OFFICERS (both serving and retired) for purchase of cars ex CSD. He is giving sanctions within one week of receipt of application and one can apply after 4 years of last car purchased from CSD. The application can be sent even by post to him at the following address. He requested me to inform as many officers as I can do, so that there are no unnecessary rumors  and the touts and other middlemen make a fool of the officers by painting very wrong picture. All the list upto Dec 2012 has been liquidated and now there is no waiting list. I am also giving below a sample application that I have submitted.


From,
IC 12345A  Rank   Name,   (Retd)
Address
Mobile No. : (Required)  
Email: (Required)

To,
The Quarter Master General’s Branch
(for DDG Canteen Services)
Room No. 14 A L-1 Block
Army HQ,
DHQ PO
New Delhi 110011

SPECIAL SANCTION FOR PURCHASE OF CAR FROM CSD CANTEEN

Sir,

I have the honour to state that I,( IC 12345A,  Rank and Name ) wish to purchase a new (car model and make) car
through CSD Canteen for my personal use.

Earlier, I had purchased a (car name and make) through the CSD, in ..................... years ago. I have NOT purchased
any car through CSD Canteen since then.

I hereby give an undertaking that I will NOT sell the said car ( model and make) to be procured from the CSD
Canteen for at least four (4) years from the day of purchase.

In view of the above, it is requested that approval may please be accorded for purchasing a  ( full deatils of the
car ) through the CSD Depot (station) 


  
Sd.............................
(xyz)
Rank (Retd)
IC 12345 A

__._,_.___