Friday 31 January 2014

John Kenneth Galbraith

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"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."

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Calvin Trillin

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"Health food makes me sick."

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Bill Gates

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"Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning."

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Ali Vincent

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"In order to truly give to others, you have to give to yourself first."

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Jennifer Hudson

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"When someone wants to lose weight, they will do whatever it takes. They can�t do it for anyone else but themselves. It has to be for them alone. Without that understanding, they will fail."

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Eleanor Roosevelt

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"Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world."

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Louise Bogan

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"I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!"

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Thursday 30 January 2014

Afghanistan’s uncertain future: Playing with fire

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com



THANKS to its bewildering president, Afghanistan has seen relations with the United States plunge to new lows just two months before a presidential election. If Hamid Karzai cannot reach an agreement with America for some troops to stay, then NATO is scheduled to pull out completely by the end of the year. Thus, though Mr Karzai will step down at the end of a possibly drawn-out process of choosing his successor, his unpredictability, and his desire to settle scores before going, threaten his country’s interests far into the future.


Confirmation of serious trouble came first in November, on the occasion of a loya jirga, a grand assembly of 2,500 community leaders and tribal elders. The meeting was convened to approve a bilateral security agreement (BSA) with America that will allow a small number of foreign troops to continue training and assisting Afghan security forces. Without their presence, many Afghans fear that flows of foreign aid will dry up and that, unable to resist the Taliban, the state might collapse.


The BSA had taken nearly a year to negotiate, and the loya jirga overwhelmingly endorsed it. Yet Mr Karzai used the occasion to attack his American allies for myriad perceived failings and to announce new conditions for his signing the pact. He also suggested that the responsibility for doing so should probably fall to his successor. (Mr Karzai is constitutionally barred from contesting another term.)


Since then, Mr Karzai has continued to give free rein to his resentments. On January 25th he held a press conference in which he excoriated the Americans further. He accused them of engaging in a “psychological war” in their efforts to seal the BSA and acting as a “rival” rather than as a friend. For good measure, Mr Karzai insisted that America must start serious peace talks with the Taliban—an impossibility, given the Taliban’s hostility to the BSA. If the Americans would not accept his conditions, he added, “they can leave anytime and we will continue our lives”.


Mr Karzai has also gone out of his way to raise the temperature over two other issues. The first is over civilian deaths from a NATO bombing strike on January 15th on the village of Wazghar in Parwan province north of the capital, Kabul. The second is a dispute over the release order of 88 detainees at Bagram prison, which America handed over to Afghanistan last year. Angry American officials say that 17 prisoners to be freed were involved in making bombs that killed 11 Afghan soldiers and they claim that most of the other detainees also have blood on their hands. But Mr Karzai describes Bagram as “a place where innocent people are tortured and insulted and made dangerous criminals”.


The row over what exactly happened at Wazghar has become both toxic and farcical. NATO says it was the Afghan army that called in the strike when its soldiers were under heavy fire from Taliban positions in two village compounds. NATO acknowledges that civilians, including two children, died in the action. But it says the lives of dozens of Afghan soldiers and a handful of American advisers were at risk. As it is, an Afghan and an American soldier were killed. But a report commissioned by Mr Karzai asserted that 13 villagers had died after relentless bombing, with not a Taliban fighter to be seen. America, in other words, was guilty of a war crime.


When local news outlets and the New York Times questioned the veracity of the report, carried out by a virulently anti-American MP, the government brought several villagers to Kabul to back up its claims. The move backfired. A photograph was produced purporting to show a funeral for dead villagers. But some in the media thought the photograph looked familiar. In reality, it had been taken a couple of hundred miles from Wazghar—in 2009.


To the consternation of American officials, Mr Karzai now appears to be compiling a list of insurgent-style attacks which he claims the Americans were behind as part of a plot to undermine his government and destabilise the country. The list apparently includes an attack on January 17th on a Kabul restaurant that killed 13 foreign civilians and at least seven Afghans and had been immediately claimed by the Taliban.


Mr Karzai may even believe some of his outlandish assertions. Cocooned in the presidential palace, he receives delegations of elders from around the country only too happy to peddle eccentric theories. On January 27th James Cunningham, America’s ambassador in Kabul, portrayed Mr Karzai’s views as “deeply conspiratorial” and “divorced from reality”.


Mr Karzai’s behaviour is, unsurprisingly, having a corrosive effect in Washington, DC. Last week Congress halved proposed development aid to Afghanistan for the coming year, ruled out big new infrastructure projects carried out by the armed forces, and cut by three-fifths the Pentagon’s $2.6 billion bid to add “critical” capabilities to the Afghan security forces. The White House appears to have accepted the cuts without a murmur.


How much President Barack Obama’s exasperation with Mr Karzai now threatens America’s commitment to a security agreement is unclear. In his state of the union speech on January 28th, Mr Obama said that, with an agreement, America would stand by Afghanistan and keep on a “small force” of Americans who, with NATO allies, would train and help Afghan forces in other ways and go after what remains of al-Qaeda.


He appears to have heeded advice he received from the senior American commander in Afghanistan, General Joseph Dunford. General Dunford took the unusual step of going to the White House a day before the speech to plead for the president to agree to keep 10,000 American troops in Afghanistan after 2014 (backed by a further 2,000, mainly from Germany and Italy). General Dunford’s plan is supported by the defence secretary, Chuck Hagel; the secretary of state, John Kerry; the CIA director, John Brennan; and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Martin Dempsey. They argue that this force is the minimum that can accomplish anything and still be capable of protecting itself.


In a bid to make the plan more palatable to Mr Obama, General Dunford suggested that the “enduring force” need only stay for two years rather than the possible decade envisaged by the BSA. That would allow the president, on leaving office in 2017, to claim that he had brought all of America’s troops home from two wars. But other voices in the White House, not least Joe Biden, the vice-president, would prefer a much smaller force, devoted only to counter-terrorism. The longer the signing of the BSA is delayed, the more likely the enduring force is to be whittled down. Military advice would then quickly swing to the “zero option” of no troops at all.


What the Americans, and indeed many Afghans, appear to be hoping is that even if Mr Karzai must now be written off as hostile, his successor will want to sign the security pact. It looks a reasonable bet. According to Lotfullah Najafizada of Tolo News, the BSA is supported by most Afghan government ministers, the heads of the security forces and all the main presidential-election candidates.


A two-month election campaign opens on February 2nd, and most pundits see it as a four-horse race between a former foreign minister, Abdullah Abdullah, a candidate in 2009 and no ally of Mr Karzai, and three others who hope to gain the outgoing president’s still-useful endorsement: Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank official; Zalmay Rassoul, another former foreign minister; and Qayum Karzai, an elder brother of the president. All are considered more pro-Western than Mr Karzai and understand the importance of keeping some foreign troops in the country to help the fast-improving but still fragile Afghan army in its dogged fight against the Taliban.


The worry, however, is that the election will go to a second round and that no winner will emerge until June. The new president will then have to concentrate on putting together a government seen as reasonably legitimate and competent. That could push the likely date for signing the security agreement to early August, dragging out the uncertainty (there are already signs of capital flight) and frustrating military planning. American and other NATO commanders still think it will be doable—so long as Mr Obama’s patience holds up in the face of Mr Karzai’s relentless provocations.





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Thailand’s political crisis: The show staggers on

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On the way to the revolution


IN FRONT of the Royal Thai Army Club the rump of a people’s revolution gathered to collect their reward. Inside, the prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, was locked in talks with the election commission over whether to suspend a snap poll which she had called for February 2nd. Before the meeting, the commission had cited disruption and the risks of violence as reasons for delaying the poll by four months. The revolutionaries were clear about what they wanted: the announcement of a temporary interruption of Thai democracy so that an appointed council of “good men”, as dreamed up by their leader, Suthep Thaugsuban, could save the country. Mr Suthep, a former deputy prime minister with the opposition Democrat Party, and his followers were disappointed. Ms Yingluck emerged to say that the election would go ahead.


It was unexpected, and takes Thailand into uncharted territory. The young men outside the army club were veterans of a three-month protest that at times has brought Bangkok, the capital, to a standstill. The men have vowed to rid Thailand of the influence of the “Thaksin regime”, meaning Ms Yingluck and her elder brother, a former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, whom they see as pulling the strings from his refuge in Dubai. Violence against people on both sides of the stand-off is mounting, with ten deaths to date. At one point outside the army club, a self-appointed guard of the protesters was shot in the leg and packed off to hospital. The gunman was quickly apprehended.


Deferring the poll no doubt carried risks that the government must have deemed to be intolerable. Ms Yingluck’s supporters would have hated to see a postponement. Two other factors may have coloured the government’s decision to risk a showdown. First, an opinion poll suggested that four out of five Thais intended to vote were an election held on February 2nd. Second, American and Japanese diplomats have been telling politicians on all sides that Thailand’s frail democracy and its economic prospects should not be held hostage by an angry minority.


Now that Ms Yingluck insists the poll must go ahead, the police and army, likely to be deployed in huge numbers, may try to disperse Bangkok’s protesting crowds. A state of emergency exists in and around the capital, though it has not yet been enforced. Over the weekend, roving mobs shut down all 50 of the polling stations open for early voting in Bangkok. It is hard to see how voting can take place there on February 2nd without army protection.


All the same, a landslide in elections that will be boycotted by the opposition is unlikely to help Ms Yingluck. She may not even be able to form a government. The constitution stipulates that 475 members of the 500-seat parliament are needed to convene parliament—and the protesters have already prevented candidates from registering in 28 out of the 375 constituencies open to direct elections.


Thailand’s political crisis, in other words, will only grow. The Democrats close to the royalist establishment have thrown in their lot with the street protesters and are prepared, even willing, to see electoral democracy sidelined. Ms Yingluck’s chief fear must be that the opposition steps up its efforts to overthrow her by resorting to legal action. The Democrats have filed a case with the anti-corruption commission to impeach her over a controversial rice-subsidy scheme. Another fear is that at some point the army may decide it must step in to reimpose order in a coup. After all, it unseated Mr Thaksin in just such a coup in 2006.


For now, the advantage is with Ms Yingluck. The army offers to mediate in the stand-off, but is reluctant to be seen this time round to take sides. The government has vowed to arrest Mr Suthep and other protest leaders. But Ms Yingluck might hold that card in reserve, giving the protesters opportunity to discredit themselves by denying their fellow citizens the right to vote.


But nothing suggests a resolution to the crisis. A measure of the mess is that Myanmar, only just emerging from a half-century of authoritarian rule, is expressing alarm about the instability next door.





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Japanese politics: The odd couple

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NATSUO YAMAGUCHI is the leader of Japan’s junior coalition party, New Komeito. He likes to boast that Komeito acts like an “opposition party within the ruling party”, reining in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, when it really counts. It has meant friction over virtually every significant policy since the coalition took office in late 2012. After not a little spousal abuse, the LDP may now be looking at ways to dump its unlikely partner. The wonder, indeed, is that this mismatched political pairing has endured so long.


Relations hit a low point over Mr Abe’s visit in December to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, a memorial to Japan’s war dead controversial for its honouring of 14 high-ranking war criminals. Mr Yamaguchi quickly added his party’s voice to the outcry at home and abroad. Soon afterwards, LDP officials lashed out at New Komeito’s refusal to force party members in Nago, a city in Okinawa prefecture, to vote for an LDP-backed candidate in a critical local election on January 19th. He lost. Had he won, the relocation of Futenma, a key American marine base at the centre of years of political wrangling, would have been made much easier, boosting Mr Abe.


A bust-up between the two partners now looms. The LDP will soon challenge the constitutional interpretation that bans collective self-defence, a pillar of Japan’s post-war pacifist stance. Opinion polls suggest more than half of the public oppose Mr Abe’s pet project. More problematically, his Buddhist-backed and avowedly pacifist partner also rejects revision. It is the two parties’ toughest issue this year, says an LDP insider. Still, he says, in 1994 the LDP managed to persuade a still more left-leaning governing partner, the Social Democratic Party of Japan, to accept that the country’s Self-Defence Forces were compatible with the constitution.


The differences lie across the policy spectrum. While the LDP aims to switch back on Japan’s mothballed nuclear reactors, its junior partner campaigned against nuclear power in the past two elections. Mr Abe favours an increasingly robust approach towards China and its ratcheting up of tensions over island claims. New Komeito, with long-standing informal ties to the Chinese leadership, wants more talk and less sabre-rattling. The two parties also disagree over the economy. New Komeito questioned Mr Abe’s moves last year to assert influence over the central bank’s conduct of monetary policy.


With his poll ratings high, Mr Abe appears to be looking at alliances with two likelier LDP bedfellows, the economically liberal Your Party and the right-wing Japan Restoration Party. Yet the bond that binds this political odd couple is clear: votes. Backed by Japan’s most powerful lay Buddhist sect, Soka Gakkai, with 8m members, New Komeito has consistently delivered a huge chunk of Japan’s conservative countryside since the coalitions began in the late 1990s. Soka Gakkai is in effect a huge volunteer army of canvassers. By contrast, neither Your Party nor the Japan Restoration Party has a local election machine.


Another factor in the coalition is murkier. In the 1990s perhaps half in the LDP wanted to strip Soka Gakkai of its status as a religious corporation, according to Koichi Kato, a veteran former LDP lawmaker, potentially forcing it to pay taxes on its enormous assets. The threat evaporated after the LDP’s electoral machine faltered later in the decade, but the party was not above using that legal stick to control its junior partner, says Mr Kato. Mr Yamaguchi denies this. “It’s impossible for us to be in the coalition just to bring preferential treatment to our supporters,” he says. “We must serve everyone.” He insists that only with public support will the party change its position on the constitution.


The coming months will show just how far Mr Yamaguchi is prepared to bend in service of the LDP. Any big shift by Komeito on collective self-defence risks losing its identity as a party defined by its pacifism—and with it the support of its religious followers. After much bickering, a divorce is not out of the question.





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Banyan: Snarling, not pouncing

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THE prime minister’s sprawling house in Lahore is crammed with cat sculptures, cat paintings and enough stuffed ex-cats to make a taxidermist purr. Nawaz Sharif’s party, the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), has a badly drawn tiger as its symbol. Now that he is prime minister, the “Lion of Punjab”, as he is widely known, has to decide whether to show his claws and order a military campaign against the Pakistani Taliban, an assortment of three dozen home-grown terrorist groups based mainly in the wild north-west of the country. For now, at least, he is likelier to hiss than act.


Mr Sharif, in office since June (his third go at being prime minister), should be doing much more about the Islamist violence that has claimed thousands of lives over the past decade. Sectarian murders and extremists’ bombs give Pakistan the feel of being on the brink of war. Karachi was once a liberal, industrial city, but the Taliban make their presence ever more strongly felt. In January they killed the city’s leading anti-terrorist cop, a charismatic and effective officer. They have also murdered journalists in the city whose coverage they did not like. Farther north, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, militants blew up a bus, killing over 20 army recruits. Even dispensers of polio vaccines are targeted.


Mr Sharif has long set store on talks with the terrorists. Perhaps the Taliban would agree to murder less in return for concessions. Some in the Taliban say talks are possible. Mr Sharif and his brother, Shahbaz Sharif, who runs Punjab province, have a history of dealmaking with extremists. The brothers, who are religious conservatives, used to say little against the Taliban, condemning instead “America’s wars” in the region. This policy bought protection: for the past five years the Taliban and their Punjabi allies, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), have carried out no big suicide-attacks in Lahore or elsewhere in Punjab. Nor, during last year’s election campaign, did candidates or rallies of Mr Sharif’s party suffer the threats and bombs endured by luckless secular types, such as the Pakistan Peoples Party. Hasan Askari Rizvi, an analyst in Lahore, calls such dealmaking a “naive view of dealing with terrorism”. But since some of Mr Sharif’s associates claimed ties to the LeJ, perhaps he saw a useful channel to the Taliban.


Yet a growing view is that Mr Sharif really is set on eventual military action, and that talks are about winning time. In the past few months the prime minister has been busy replacing the country’s president, army chief and chief justice. He has tried to keep on good terms with the army—a delicate act with Pervez Musharraf, a former dictator claiming a dodgy heart, on trial for treason. Mr Sharif and the new army chiefs appear to be rubbing along, helped by the fact that his government is a bit less incompetent and crooked than the previous crew. Meanwhile, he has tried to improve the economy and forge ties with India. A lot going on, in other words. Besides, political support for a military push is much harder if talks have not been tried first.


Evidence of a greater appetite for a full-blown assault on Taliban bases in North Waziristan is growing. Last week, officially for the first time since 2007, Pakistani forces bombed North Waziristan, reportedly killing over 20 Taliban fighters. On January 27th lawmakers from Mr Sharif’s party appeared to back a broader military push. Two days later, for the first time in months, Mr Sharif showed up in parliament to talk about such an assault—though he also said a high-level team would continue to seek talks. He has huddled with the new army chief to discuss strategy. The rhetoric is getting tougher. Shahbaz Sharif says, “We have to win this battle hands down”; the time has come, he says, to act. Others in Mr Sharif’s camp say, “It is time to fight, to end this problem of the past 15 years”. Earlier criticism of America has been put aside. Indeed, America may quietly be helping create useful conditions. There have been few drone strikes in Pakistan, always controversial, since the death in November of Hakimullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban’s deputy commander. And on January 27th John Kerry, resuming stalled “strategic dialogue” talks in Washington, pledged that America will keep aid flowing to Pakistan.


None of this, however, means that a push into North Waziristan will come soon. Deep winter is no time to start a campaign. And the Taliban has already promised to retaliate, making places like Punjab and the capital, Islamabad, vulnerable to large-scale violence again. To forestall this, the government has in mind a sweeping ordinance to give the army and police impunity in grabbing terrorism suspects. Increased abuse and torture would almost certainly follow. Those close to Mr Sharif say the risk of “some abuse” is worth taking. Yet it is unclear what difference the proposed ordinance would make: it was not a scrupulous regard for legal rights that let previous bombers through.


Mr Sharif probably also worries about politics. He has no wish to let Imran Khan—an ex-cricketer and diehard opponent of any attacks on the Taliban, and an ethnic Pushtun like them—assume the galvanising role in opposition that Mr Sharif previously enjoyed. As if to stiffen his resolve, Bilawal Bhutto, the new young leader of the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, this week urged Mr Sharif to push on with military action. Militants, after all, killed his mother, Benazir.


The time is now


Talk of Pakistani military action against the Taliban should be welcomed, even if it is actually designed to press them to talk. Making a better public case against violent groups who set off bombs in the name of Islam is a basic but long-neglected task of Pakistan’s leaders. Terrified of becoming targets themselves, few in public life dare to say the obvious: that extremists are destroying Pakistan from within. Like another lion, the timorous one in “The Wizard of Oz”, Mr Sharif may not be ready to act, but at least he could start to roar a little louder.





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Nauru: Aussies out!

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THE South Pacific microstate of Nauru (with a population of 9,400 spread over 21 square kilometres or eight square miles) has deported its Australian resident magistrate and barred its Australian chief justice from re-entering the country. In protest, the solicitor-general—also Australian—has resigned. Before these events came the dismissal of the Australian parliamentary counsel, wife of an opposition MP, though now banned from Nauru. It leaves the country bereft of a functioning judiciary, and also has wider ramifications. Nauru is the site of a detention centre that forms a key component in Australia’s “Pacific solution” aimed at stopping boats landing asylum-seekers on Australian shores. It houses over 900 refugees, mainly Afghans, Sri Lankans, Iranians and Iraqis. Riots at the centre last July triggered the sacking of the island’s Australian police chief.


The latest troubles began when the resident magistrate, Peter Law, stopped the government from deporting several foreigners, one of whom, Rod Henshaw, had been a media adviser to the former government. After Baron Divavesi Waqa’s government assumed office last June, Mr Henshaw’s contract was terminated. Instead of leaving, he acquired a business visa and opened a hotel bar. The home minister, Charmaine Scotty, claims this was symptomatic of a “system of cronyism” operated by Australian expatriates in league with the opposition. At issue is whether the government had the right to deport Mr Henshaw and two other foreigners. The government says it passed legislation in December enabling it to do so. The judges disagreed.


The government responded on January 19th by bundling Mr Law onto an aeroplane, defying a stay order issued by the chief justice, Geoffrey Eames, from his home in Melbourne. Mr Eames then had his entry visa cancelled. He cannot be formally dismissed except by a two-thirds majority in parliament and only with good cause. The opposition says the Waqa administration may declare a state of emergency, a common tool, to rid itself of the judge. Or it may simply fall, as 11 governments have done over the past dozen years. A reconfigured government might dispense with the justice minister, David Adeang, a power-broker who earnestly wants to settle scores with the opposition and its friends. On January 28th the government amended the immigration act so as to allow Mr Henshaw to be deported the next day.


Australia’s immigration minister, Scott Morrison, denies a conspiracy hatched in Canberra, the Australian capital, to remove legal oversight from its detention centre. The episode, he says, is “very much about internal Nauruan politics”. In tiny states like Nauru, parliamentary politics can become deeply personalised. But it all makes the Nauru end of Australia’s “Pacific solution” less palatable under international law, and leaves refugee rights poorly protected.





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A peace agreement in Mindanao: A fragile peace

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