An Obsolescent Military: Bombing Everything, Gaining Nothing

The consequences both probable and assured make the adventure unattractive, especially since likely pretexts for a war with China – a few rocks in the Pacific, for example – are too trivial to be worth the certain costs and uncertain outcome. Again, military superiority doesn’t mean much.

by Fred Reed

( September 25, 2016, Boston, Sri Lanka Guardian) What, precisely, is the US military for, and what, precisely, can it do? In practical terms, how powerful is it? On paper, it is formidable, huge, with carrier battle groups, advanced technology, remarkable submarines, satellites, and so on. What does this translate to?

Military power does not exist independently, but only in relation to specific circumstances. Comparing technical specifications of the T-14 to those of the M1A2, or Su-34 to F-15, or numbers of this to numbers of that, is an interesting intellectual exercise. It means little without reference to specific circumstances.

For example, America is vastly superior militarily to North Korea in every category of arms – but the North has nuclear bombs. It can’t deliver them to the US, but probably can to Seoul. Even without nuclear weapons, it has a large army and large numbers of artillery tubes within range of Seoul. It has an unpredictable government. As Gordon Liddy said, if your responses to provocation are wildly out of proportion to those provocations, and unpredictable, nobody will provoke you.

An American attack by air on the North, the only attack possible short of a preemptive nuclear strike, would offer a high probability of a peninsular war, devastation of Seoul, paralysis of an important trading partner – think Samsung – and an uncertain final outcome. The United States hasn’t the means of getting troops to Korea rapidly in any numbers, and the domestic political results of lots of GIs killed by a serious enemy would be politically grave. The probable cost far exceeds any possible benefit. In practical terms, Washington’s military superiority means nothing with regard to North Korea. Pyongyang knows it.

Or consider the Ukraine. On paper, US forces overall are superior to Russian. Locally, they are not. Russia borders on the Ukraine and could overrun it quickly. The US cannot rapidly bring force to bear except a degree of air power. Air power hasn’t worked against defenseless peasants in many countries. Russia is not a defenseless peasant. Europe, usually docile and obedient to America, is unlikely to engage in a shooting war with Moscow for the benefit of Washington. Europeans are aware that Russia borders on Eastern Europe, which borders on Western Europe. For Washington, fighting Russia in the Ukraine would require a huge effort with seaborne logistics and a national mobilization. Serious wars with nuclear powers do not represent the height of judgment.

Again, Washington’s military superiority means nothing.

Or consider Washington’s dispute with China in the Pacific. China cannot begin to match American naval power. It doesn’t have to. Beijing has focused on anti-ship missiles – read “carrier-killer” – such as the JD21 ballistic missile. How well it works I do not know, but the Chinese are not stupid. Is the risk of finding out worth it? Fast, stealthed, sea-skimming cruise missiles are very cheap compared to carriers, and America’s admirals know that lots of them arriving simultaneously would not have a happy ending.

Having a fleet disabled by China would be intolerable to Washington, but its possible responses would be unappealing. Would it start a conventional war with China with the ghastly global economic 

consequences? This would not generate allies. Cut China’s oil lanes to the Mideast and push Beijing toward nuclear war? Destroy the Three Gorges Dam and drown god knows how many people? If China used the war as a pretext for annexing bordering counties? What would Russia do?

The consequences both probable and assured make the adventure unattractive, especially since likely pretexts for a war with China – a few rocks in the Pacific, for example – are too trivial to be worth the certain costs and uncertain outcome. Again, military superiority doesn’t mean much.

We live in a military world fundamentally different from that of the last century. All-out wars between major powers, which is to say nuclear powers, are unlikely since they would last about an hour after they became all-out, and everyone knows it. In WWII Germany could convince itself, reasonably and almost correctly, that Russia would fall in a summer, or the Japanese that a Depression-ridden, unarmed America might decide not to fight. Now, no. Threaten something that a nuclear power regards as vital and you risk frying. So nobody does.

At any rate, nobody has. Fools abound in DC and New York.

What then, in today’s world, is the point of huge conventional forces?

The American military is an upgraded World War II military, designed to fight other militarizes like itself in a world like that which existed during World War II. The Soviet Union was that kind of military. Today there are no such militaries for America to fight. We are not in the same world. Washington seems not to have noticed.

A World War II military is intended to destroy point targets of high value – aircraft, ships, factories, tanks – and to capture crucial territory, such as the enemy’s country. When you have destroyed the Wehrmacht’s heavy weaponry and occupied Germany, you have won. This is the sort of war that militaries have always relished, having much sound and fury and clear goals.

It doesn’t work that way today. Since Korea, half-organized peasant militias have baffled the Pentagon by not having targets of high value or crucial territory. In Afghanistan for example goatherds with rifles could simply disperse, providing no point targets at all, and certainly not of high value. No territory was crucial to them. If the US mounted a huge operation to take Province A, the resistance could just fade into the population or move to Province B. The US would always be victorious but never win anything. Sooner or later America would go away. The world understands this.

Further, the underlying nature of conflict has changed. For most of history until the Soviet Union evaporated, empires expanded by military conquest. In today’s world, countries have not lost their imperial ambitions, but the approach is no longer military. China seems intent on bringing Eurasia under its hegemony, and advances toward doing it, but its approach is economic, not martial. The Chinese are not warm and fuzzy. They are, however, smart. It is much cheaper and safer to expand commercially than militarily, and wiser to sidestep martial confrontation – in a word, to ignore America. More correctly it is sidestepping the Pentagon.

Military and diplomatic power spring from economic power, and China is proving successful economically. Using commercial clout, she is expanding her influence, but in ways not easily bombed. She is pushing the BRICS alliance, from which the US is excluded. She is enlarging the SCO, from which America is excluded. Perhaps most importantly, she has set up the AIIB, the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, which does not include the US but includes Washington’s European allies. These organizations will probably trade mostly not in dollars, a serious threat to Washington’s economic hegemony.

What is the relevance of the Pentagon? How do you bomb a trade agreement?

China enjoys solvency, and hegemonizes enthusiastically with it. Thus in Pakistan it has built the Karakoram Highway from Xian Jiang to Karachi, which will increase trade between the two. It is putting in the two power reactors near Karachi. It is investing in Afghan resources, increasing trade with Iran. . 

When the US finally leaves, China, without firing a shot, will be predominant in the region.

What is the relevance of aircraft carriers?

Beijing is talking seriously about building more rail lines, including high-speed rail, from itself to Europe, accompanied by fiber-optic lines and so on. This is not just talk. China has the money and a very large network of high-speed rail domestically. (The US has not a single mile.) Google “China-Europe Rail lines.”

What is the Pentagon going to do? Bomb the tracks?

As trade and ease of travel from Berlin to Beijing increase, and as China prospers and wants more European goods, European businessmen will want to cuddle up to that fabulously large market – which will loosen Washington’s grip on the throat of Europe. Say it three times slowly: Eur-asia. EurasiaEurasia I promise it is what the Chinese are saying.

What is the Pentagon’s trillion-dollar military going to bomb? Europe? Railways across Kazakhstan? BMW plants?

All of which is to say that while the US military looks formidable, it isn’t particularly useful, and aids China by bankrupting the US. Repeatedly it has demonstrated that it cannot defeat campesinos armed with those most formidable weapons, the AK, the RPG, and the IED. The US does not have the land forces to fight a major or semi-major enemy. It could bomb Iran, with unpredictable consequences, but couldn’t possibly conquer it.

The wars in the Mideast illustrate the principle nicely. Iraq didn’t work. Libya didn’t work. Iran didn’t back down. ISIS and related curiosities? The Pentagon is again bombing an enemy that can’t fight back – its specialty – but that it seems unable defeat.

Wrong military, wrong enemy, wrong war, wrong world.

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Fred, a keyboard mercenary with a disorganized past, has worked on staff for Army Times, The Washingtonian, Soldier of Fortune, Federal Computer Week, and The Washington Times. http://fredoneverything.org/p26/

When Will Trump and Hillary Use the K-Word?

The crisis in Kashmir is starting to boil over — and the next U.S. president isn’t going to be able to avoid intervening.

BY SREERAM CHAULIA-SEPTEMBER 22, 2016

This year’s grueling U.S. presidential campaign has had the occasion to discuss the Ku Klux Klan, Tim Kaine, and Don King, but not the K-word that every citizen of South Asia instantly knows by shorthand: Kashmir. In all likelihood, Americans will soon recognize this as a costly omission. Whoever wins the White House in November will likely be forced, early in his or her administration, to address a crisis that is quickly coming to a head — one involving jihadi terrorism, nuclear weapons, and military conflict, with the potential to unsettle American allies and interests across Asia.

Kashmir is the unresolved business of India’s bloody partition in 1947, when the departing British colonialists carved out the new nation-state of Pakistan for the Muslims of the subcontinent. A large part of Muslim-majority Kashmir remained a part of India while Pakistan seized a smaller portion, leaving it as a major bone of contention and the site of multiple wars between the two countries. Seventy years have passed, but there is no end in sight to the India-Pakistan rivalry to reclaim the whole of the territory.

The root causes of the present crisis in Kashmir are political changes outside that restive region. Pakistan has always been a conventionally smaller power than India, but in recent years it has seen its neighbor’s economic and diplomatic power grow rapidly, especially relative to its own stagnation.Pakistan has tried to stay relevant by using all means to up the ante against Indian control of Kashmir. In the past two months, there has been a sustained separatist upheaval in Indian-administered Kashmir, with street battles between alienated local Muslim youth who demand secession or integration with Pakistan and Indian security forces in riot-control gear. On Sept. 18, four heavily armed jihadi militants ambushed an Indian Army camp in the Kashmiri town of Uri, near the Line of Control separating the region between India and Pakistan, and killed 18 soldiers. It was the worst such cross-border incident in years.

An outraged Indian government rightly believes the civilian unrest and armed extremist attacks in Indian Kashmir are the handiwork of the Pakistani intelligence and military. Most of the world tends to agree. Islamabad’s efforts to raise the “Kashmir problem” in international forums are mostly being met with shrugs and snubs. Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has appointed nearly two dozen emissaries to lobby world capitals to galvanize opposition to India’s “occupation” of Kashmir and has also been ratcheting up mentions of the “K” word at the U.N. General Assembly — but to no avail. Most of the international community, barring some countries in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, is saying that if Kashmir matters at all, it is not as a freedom struggle but as a flash point for jihadis acting on Pakistan’s behest.

But the U.S. presidential contenders seem not to be moved by the present crisis at all. India and Pakistan, governments and citizens alike, have been scrutinizing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and her Republican rival, Donald Trump, for signals of how they would fashion their South Asia policies. The Democratic Party’s platform promises to maintain President Barack Obama’s definite tilt toward India — “the world’s largest democracy, a nation of great diversity, and an important Pacific power” — while continuing to apply pressure on Pakistan to “deny terrorists sanctuary” on its soil. The Republican Party’s platform echoes similar sentiments to its counterpart by calling India a “geopolitical ally and a strategic trading partner” while wryly noting about Pakistan that a “working relationship is … necessary, though sometimes difficult.” Republicans also call for “ridding the region of the Taliban and securing Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal,” highlighting American anxieties about Islamabad’s status as a sponsor of jihadis and host to the world’s fastest-growing nuclear weapons arsenal.

This is all part of a tendency by the U.S. government to view India and Pakistan primarily as potential partners that can serve American interests in Asia, with India considered the preferred alternative and Pakistan seen as a problem to be managed. Washington favors abstracting from the Kashmir crisis in service of its own regional interests, rather than addressing it in specific terms. But to that extent, its approach to crisis diplomacy there has not kept pace with events. The United States still feigns a studied neutrality in Kashmir, when it should be actively intervening in a way to clear a path for its deepening alliance with India.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been leveraging the country’s soft and hard power to isolate Pakistan on Kashmir. Yet, as the Uri attack demonstrated, marginalizing Pakistan on Kashmir is not enough to shut down Islamabad’s jihadi proxies or mitigate civilian disenchantment in Indian-administered Kashmir. Moreover, Modi is sensitive enough to public opinion in India that he feels compelled to retaliate each time Pakistani-trained jihadis cross over the Line of Control and perpetrate brutal violence on Indian soldiers and civilians. Options including the “hot pursuit” of terrorists inside Pakistani territory and the assassinations of jihadi leaders are not off the table in New Delhi. All of which suggests the Kashmir crisis will get much hotter in the time ahead.

Already, the Indian prime minister has delivered a tit-for-tat blow to Islamabad by mounting a diplomatic and unmentioned covert action strategy to support anti-Pakistani separatists in the war-torn Pakistani province of Baluchistan. The Pakistani military establishment, for its part, has traumatic memories of the Indian military intervention that severed Pakistan in 1971 and birthed the new nation of Bangladesh. Modi’s strategy of hitting Pakistan where it hurts, i.e., in regions where the state’s control is shaky, is bound to have a reflex reaction in the form of intensified Pakistani-inspired protests and attacks in Indian Kashmir.

 It would be an understatement that matters in Kashmir are coming to a head after a few years of quiet. A relatively weakened and cornered Pakistan, like North Korea, is also a more dangerous Pakistan. Something’s going to give, and when it does, it won’t just be Kashmir on the line. Another full-scale or quasi-war over Kashmir is sure to have spillover effects, as India and Pakistan are both nuclear-armed and share a tense international border, along which the populous provinces of Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat, and Rajasthan lie. Hopes of containing the Taliban in Afghanistan will be set back if Pakistan returns to total war with India, since Islamabad would view domination over Kabul via a resurgent Taliban as necessary for “strategic depth” with respect to India. Kashmir is a trigger for mayhem in South Asia.  

Clinton and Trump cannot ignore this tinderbox. The winner of their contest will have to find a way to tamp down the terrorism emanating from Pakistan that has made Kashmir a simmering hotbed. But assuaging the interrelated fears and concerns of both Pakistan and India will require sustained American strategy — not the diplomatic clichés devoid of substance that have long marked Washington’s policy prescriptions.

What’s clear is that Pakistan would like formal U.S. mediation on the territorial dispute in Kashmir, which is precisely what India will not countenance. Creative diplomats, however, can create confidence-building measures to help break that impasse. If a President Clinton or Trump uses civilian and military aid as a lever to pressure Pakistan to have its jihadi allies in Kashmir cease their attacks, Modi can then be persuaded to ease the massive Indian military presence that antagonizes civilians in Kashmir and can encourage more democratic administration in the restive region. 

By pressing Pakistan to abandon its proxy war in Kashmir and reduce its hostility toward India, Obama’s successor can meet America’s bigger need for a strong Indian strategic partner that can counterbalance China in Asia. But that will first require that he or she diagnoses early on the true roots of the current Kashmir crisis and realizes that it is building up to explode.

Photo credit: TAUSEEF MUSTAFA/AFP/Getty Images

Pakistan captain Misbah hopes bilateral ties with India will resume

Britain Cricket - Pakistan Press Conference - Kia Oval - 10/8/16Pakistan's Misbah-ul-Haq talks to the media during the press conferenceAction Images via Reuters / Paul ChildsLivepic

 Mon Sep 26, 2016 

Pakistan captain Misbah-ul-Haq hopes bilateral cricketing ties with India will resume despite the chief of the neighbouring board ruling out the possibility in the near future after the recent attack on an army camp in Kashmir.

In a latest setback to relations, Indian Cricket Board President Anurag Thakur last week ruled out the possibility of reviving ties with Pakistan, saying even considering such a thought in the current situation was not appropriate.

His statement followed the Sept. 18 attack on an Indian army camp in Kashmir, which New Delhi blamed on Pakistan. The attack claimed the lives of 18 Indian soldiers in the biggest blow to security forces in the disputed Himalayan region for 14 years.

Bilateral cricketing ties between the neighbouring countries were suspended after gunmen killed 166 people in Mumbai in 2008, an attack which India blames on a Pakistani militant group.

The nuclear-powered South Asian countries, who have fought three wars since their 1947 independence, have played each other in International Cricket Council events like the World Cups.

"Pakistan is always ready to play against India but what can we do if they do not want to play," Misbah said.

"If India can play against Pakistan in ICC events then why not in bilateral series."

Pakistani cricketers played in the inaugural edition of the cash-rich Indian Premier League Twenty20 tournament in 2008, but have been denied permission since due to tensions between the rivals following the Mumbai attacks.

Pakistan, top of the world test rankings, and India last played a three-test series at end 2007, which hosts India won 1-0.

India defeated Pakistan in a Super 10 stage match of the World Twenty20 in Kolkata this year.

(Reporting by Ian Rodricks in Bengaluru, editing by Ed Osmond)

UN rep seeks security guarantees for probe on Philippine drug war

26th September 2016

A UNITED Nations rights rapporteur on Monday welcomed Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s statement last week that he would allow an international probe on his drug war, but said she would first seek security guarantees for the people she planned to interview.

According to AFP, Agnes Callamard, who is UN rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, also said she planned on soliciting a formal invite from the Philippine government to conduct the investigation.

“I welcome the reports recently (conveyed) through the media that the president and government of the Philippines will invite a UN mission to investigate the alleged extrajudicial executions,” she was quoted telling the agency via email.

She said she planned on insisting on a range of measures to ensure those she spoke to would not be punished by the Philippine government later.

SEE ALSO: Philippines: Duterte drops ‘F’ Bomb on the EU over drug war

“The date and scope of the fact-finding mission will be discussed and negotiated with the government, along with essential guarantees,” she said.

Among others, these “essential guarantees” would include allowing her freedom of movement and freedom of inquiry, as well as an assurance that those who cooperate would not later be subjected to intimidates, threats or even punishment.

Last week, Duterte gave the green light to the UN and officials from the European Union (EU) to investigate his bloody anti-drug campaign.

The offer, however, came attached with conditions. Duterte said in return, the foreign bodies must allow his government to question them in public afterward to prove their human rights concerns were baseless.

SEE ALSO:  EU mum on Duterte’s ‘F-bomb’ but maintains Philippines relations good

According to the Philippine Inquirer, Duterte said he planned on sending invites to the UN’s special rapporteur and experts from the European Union, to explain to them the context of his government’s drug war.

Duterte said in keeping with the time-honored principle of the right to be heard,  he will question them after they are finished making their remarks.

“I will ask them one by one. In open forum, you can use the Senate or Folk Arts (Theater), whatever. 

Everybody will be invited,” he said. “You can watch how I will beat these devils to the ground.”

Duterte has repeatedly lashed out at both the UN and EU for criticizing his war on drugs.

Among others, he has accused them of hypocrisy for raising concerns about his anti-crime campaign while launching military strikes that kill innocent people in the Middle East.

More than 3,000 suspected drug dealers and users have been killed since June and more than 600,000 others have surrendered for fear of being killed in the crackdown.

Despite growing alarm, Duterte says he won’t stop the campaign.

China prepares for Dalai Lama’s death by looking to its own top Tibetan cleric

Gyaltsen Norbu, the Chinese government-supported 11th Panchen Lama, center, is accompanied by Tibetan monks while attending the Kalachakra ritual in Xigaze, in southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region. (Purbu Zhaxi/Xinhua via AP)

By Simon Denyer September 26 at 4:17 AM

LHASA, China — In the contest for Tibetan hearts and minds, a 26-year-old Buddhist monk is emerging into the spotlight. He is the Chinese-appointed Panchen Lama, and he is being groomed by the Communist Party to fill an important political and religious role in Tibet.

Obedient to the party and loyal to the Chinese state, the “Chinese Panchen” is being pushed forward as an alternative to the Dalai Lama, a man widely loved by Tibetans as their supreme religious leader, but reviled by the Chinese Communist Party as a “wolf in monk’s clothing” trying to split Tibet from the motherland.

Experts are skeptical about whether ordinary Tibetans will accept this young man’s credentials: his status as the true reincarnation of the Panchen Lama — Tibetan Buddhism’s second most important living religious figure — itself the subject of bitter controversy.

Yet there is no doubt that, with the Dalai Lama now 81, the contest for Tibet is entering a new phase, and decades of Communist Party preparation for the older monk’s eventual demise are gathering pace.

Officially at least, the Panchen Lama will become the most important religious figure in Tibet when the Dalai Lama dies — that is, until the older monk’s reincarnation is found. And he will also play a key role in the Chinese government’s efforts to install a new Dalai Lama who is more amenable to Communist Party rule than the current one.

Gyaltsen Norbu, the Panchen Lama, is being pushed forward by China’s Communist Party as an alternative to the Dalai Lama. Experts are skeptical whether ordinary Tibetans will accept him as an important religious leader. (2012 photo by How Hwee Young/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY)

In July, the young, bespectacled Gyaltsen Norbu, dressed in Tibetan religious finery, presided over an important and rare ritual inside Tibet to a large audience of laypeople, monks and nuns. Since then, he has been busy visiting monasteries, temples, schools and hospitals across the high plateau.

“An increasingly active Panchen Lama is expected to mitigate the Dalai’s influence,” announced the nationalistGlobal Times tabloid last month, citing speculation that this process was being encouraged to “prepare for a post-Dalai Lama era.”

Chinese state media said 100,000 people had attended each day of the four-day gathering, called a Kalachakra ceremony, braving rain and cold weather, and quoted monks praising this young man’s “attainments.”

But on a recent visit to Tibet, it was hard to find much enthusiasm for the Chinese Panchen Lama, as many people know him.

Indeed, mention the Panchen Lama to many Tibetans and they start talking about a 6-year-old boy, recognized by the Dalai Lama as the true reincarnation of the Panchen Lama in 1995, who immediately disappeared into Chinese custody and was referred to as the world’s youngest political prisoner.

His name is Gedhun■ Choekyi Nyima, and he has not been seen since, but a Tibetan official claimed last year he was living a normal life and did not want to be disturbed.

In Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, a shop selling photographs of leading Tibetan religious figures contained none of the Chinese Panchen, but several of a predecessor, the 10th Panchen Lama, who was vilified and imprisoned during China’s Cultural Revolution.

There were also many images of the Karmapa Lama, another important reincarnated lama, who was recognized by China before fleeing to join the Dalai Lama in exile in India in 2000 at age 14 — a decision that embarrassed Beijing but won him credibility among many Tibetans.

One shop worker said there simply wasn’t any demand for images of the Chinese Panchen, while another man dismissed him as a “Chinese Buddhism official.”

Similarly, images of the ninth and 10th Panchen Lamas were easy to find at the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, Tibetan Buddhism’s holiest site, but images of the Chinese Panchen Lama — the 11th — were not on obvious display.

The Tibetan government-in-exile, representing refugees and based in the Indian hill town of Dharmsala, said Tibetans had been forced to attend the Panchen Lama’s Kalachakra, with “severe penalties” for failing to do so.

Sonam Dagpo, the exile administration’s international relations secretary, called the Kalachakra a “political sham” and said it was ironic that it had been organized by a “self-declared atheist government” during some of the worst repression of religious freedom in Tibet.

But whatever Tibetans think of the Chinese Panchen, he will be thrust into the limelight after the Dalai Lama dies.

The ninth Panchen Lama, for example, was instrumental in the search for the boy who came to be recognized as the 14th and current incarnation of the Dalai Lama in the 1930s. The Dalai Lama in turn played a key role in identifying the 10th Panchen Lama in the 1950s.

The Dalai Lama said he might decide not to reincarnate at all, but if he does it would be in a baby born outside China. Beijing almost certainly has other plans.

“Ultimately, China has made the necessary plans to find and choose a Dalai Lama of its own once the present Dalai Lama passes away,” said Elliot Sperling, a professor at Indiana University and an expert on Tibet. “And certainly the Chinese Panchen Lama will play a big role in that process.”

China’s enthronement of both the Karmapa Lama and the Panchen Lama can be seen as dress rehearsals for the eventual nomination of a new Dalai Lama, experts said.

“In the case of the Chinese Panchen Lama, the authorities have found that they can indeed install a lama who is rejected by large segments of the Tibetan population, and maintain him in his position by simple coercion and state power,” Sperling said. “This is significant because they will certainly find little support for a Dalai Lama chosen by the Chinese state.”

Gyaltsen Norbu was born in Tibet in 1990 to parents who were Communist Party members, and has lived in Beijing, reportedly under “protective” guard, since being enthroned in 1995 as Panchen Lama.

He has always stressed his loyalty to the Chinese state, declaring last year that “the lives of the masses are moving towards wealth and civilization,” and that “the Tibetan future is bright like the endless light of the golden sun.”

He has praised the party for liberating Tibet from feudal serfdom when its troops moved into Lhasa in 1951, but did cause a stir when he expressed some concerns in a 2015 speech — complaining that official “quotas” for the number of monks allowed in the Tibetan Autonomous Region were too low, and there was “a danger of Buddhism existing in name only.”

The International Campaign for Tibet, a Washington-based advocacy group for Tibetan democracy and human rights, said those comments may have reflected concerns relayed to him by senior lamas during his visits to monasteries in Tibet.

Tsering Shakya, a Tibetan historian and scholar at the University of British Columbia, said the fact that the Panchen Lama does not live in his traditional seat in Tibet’s Tashi Lhunpo Monastery showed that monks there still did not accept him.

An earlier version of this article reported that Gyaltsen Norbu was born in 1970. It has been corrected to read 1990.

Animal trafficking: the $23bn criminal industry policed by a toothless regulator

Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species finds itself confronting powerful networks, but has no detectives, police powers or firearms

A baby rhino whose mother was killed by poachers has been hand-raised at the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Ngare, Kenya. Photograph: Luca Ghidoni/Barcroft Media--Animal rights activists carry placards outside the Sandton convention centre in Johannesburg, where the Cites summit is being held. Photograph: Kim Ludbrook/EPA

Elephants gather at Big Toms waterhole in Hwange national park, Zimbabwe. Just 450,000 elephants exist in the whole of Africa. Photograph: Alamy--A Zimbabwe National Parks official inspects the country’s ivory stockpile in Harare. Photograph: Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP

Nick Davies and Oliver Holmes-Monday 26 September 2016

The illegal trade in wildlife is a most attractive crime. But it is highly destructive, and its scale is threatening the extinction of some of the world’s most iconic species.

It is also grotesquely cruel: poachers slice off the faces of live rhinos to steal their horns; militia groups use helicopters to shoot down elephants for their tusks; factory farmers breed captive tigers to marinate their bones for medicinal wine and fry their flesh for the dinner plate; bears are kept for a lifetime in tiny cages to have their gall bladders regularly drained for liver tonic. But for any criminal who wants maximum money for minimum risk, it is most attractive.

At every stage in the supply lines, the systems that are supposed to defend the animals against this global butchery are no match for the organised crime groups that dominate the trade.

This is a vast business, valued by the UN Environment Programme at $23bn (£18bn) a year – twice the gross domestic product of poached countries such as Tanzania or Kenya. The profit margins are enormous. The poacher in Africa sells ivory at up to $150 a kilo. At the other end of the supply line, in Beijing, it sells for well over ten times as much, with some sales reaching $2,025 a kilo, according to research by Chatham House. The markup is even bigger with rhino horn: from $1,000 for a pair of horns (average weight 6kg each) at poacher level to upwards of $66,000 a kilo in China.

Profits have increased dramatically over the past decade, driven by the wealthy new elites in Asia, accumulating ivory carvings and tiger skins as status symbols for their homes; buying ground powder of rhino horn and tiger-bone wine as traditional remedies for almost every ailment from hangovers to cancer, none of it based on any scientific evidence. This is a demand driven by two things: greed and superstition.

For a gangster, these animals are like bundles of cash lying almost unprotected in the wilderness. This is a profit-hungry global crime conducted by some of the same ruthless and violent groups that traffic drugs and guns. And up against this collection of highly organised and well-resourced criminals, we currently deploy some of the world’s weakest law enforcement.

The only global body tasked with protecting the world’s wildlife is a network of officials in each of the nations signed up to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), which is co-ordinated by a small secretariat in Geneva.

Cites was written in 1973 when the main threat to wildlife was the encroachment of human settlements on vulnerable habitat. Now it finds itself confronting these criminal networks, even though it has no detectives, no police powers and no firearms. In short, Cites is not a law enforcement agency. It is there to regulate trade. It can try to punish rogue governments by asking its members to stop trading Cites species with them, but it has no tools to punish the criminals who have already decided to defy those governments.

The global agencies set up to fight organised crime have bigger priorities: terrorists, arms traffic, narcotics, counterfeit goods. Other agencies try to fill the gap. Interpol distributes intelligence on the worst wildlife offenders; the UN Office on Drugs and Crime publishes research; the World Bank advises on the tracing of laundered money. None of them goes out to catch criminals. The few specialists who try to work internationally find themselves swimming against a tide of inertia.

A senior law enforcement figure in southern Africa who specialised in wildlife crime told the Guardian that the crime groups enjoyed far better international links than he does. “I have to rely on people I meet at conferences,” said John Sellar, who spent 14 years as enforcement support officer for Cites before he took early retirement.

“A major reason for that,” he told the Guardian, “was that I was fed up with the complete hypocrisy of people coming to Cites meetings and passing resolutions and then going home and, frankly, doing bugger all about them – politicians and law enforcement people.”

The few traffickers who are caught are dealt with by prosecution systems riddled with failure. When the international law firm DLA Piper in 2014 investigated criminal justice in ten countries on the frontline of wildlife traffic, it found “a host of weaknesses” including legal loopholes, chronic shortage of funds for prosecutors and courts, low rates of conviction, inadequate penalties and corruption. “The only consistent theme,” it concluded, “is that significant work needs to be done in every country in order to effectively tackle the illegal wildlife trade.”

Currently, the void is being filled to some extent by a loose network of volunteers, journalists and NGOs running their own investigations and attempting to get local law enforcement agencies to make arrests and prosecute. This includes NGOs like Freeland in Bangkok running long-term investigations of the kind whose results we are publishing today. That investigation was paid for by a small English charity that has sent tens of thousands of pounds across the world to pay Freeland to do the policing that was otherwise absent.

The effect of this law enforcement void is traumatic. From African bush to Asian jungle to Russian steppe, the valuable parts of animals are ripped and sliced from their skeletal sockets and shovelled onto invisible conveyor belts, almost all headed for the same destinations in South East Asia and China. They leave Africa by sea, most often from Mombasa, Kenya, where the Elephant Action League last year ran a 12-month undercover investigation, which concluded that “massive amounts of ivory continue to pass unhindered”; or by air, from Johannesburg, where the Guardian found a long-term airline employee who was part of a smuggling network, or through Maputo, Mozambique, which was described to us by a South African policing source as “a major security problem”.

There are only 30,000 rhinos in the wild, just 5% of the number 40 years ago. Several sub-species are already extinct. Others are officially ‘critically endangered’. The biggest surviving population is the 21,000 southern white rhino, most of whom are in South Africa. And that is where the rhino poachers are busiest: 88% of the rhinos killed last year were in South Africa.

The attack on elephants is even more frenzied. The conveyor belt to Asia sags under the weight of the ivory from something like 90 dead African elephants every day. In 2013, a single seizure in Guangzhou uncovered 1,913 tusks, the product of nearly 1,000 dead animals. The US National Academy of Sciences in 2014 found that in the previous three years poachers had killed 100,000 elephants, reducing the species to a total of only 450,000 in all Africa. And the numbers are still falling: the kill rate has exceeded the birth rate every year since 2010. Central Africa has lost 76% of its elephants since 2002. Tanzania has lost 66% in the last six years alone. Mozambique has lost 48% in five years.

The scale of ivory poaching is so colossal that the UN Office of Drugs and Crimethis year concluded that it could not be explained simply by looking at its sales, legal or illegal. In his time at Cites, Sellar speculated that financial and/or criminal elites were hoarding ivory as a long-term investment and method of laundering cash.

On the conveyor belt alongside these iconic creatures there are the remains of hundreds of other animals: paws for ashtrays; teeth for pendants; genitals for sex drive; the skins of snakes; the scales of pangolin anteaters to be roasted and chewed for a health fad, 275 of them a day, 100,000 a year. There is a steady flow of tiger corpses, sometimes whole, sometimes only the skin and bones. A hundred years ago, there were some 100,000 wild tigers spread all across Asia and into eastern Russia: now there are an estimated 3,500, only 2,200 of whom are in populations big enough to make breeding and survival viable.

This trade has been allowed to grow not only because of the failure of law enforcement but because it is inextricably linked with power.

The wealthy elite in Asia that consumes illegal animal products overlaps with the political elite, and the commercial elite. The criminal entrepreneurs who run the supply lines are able to conceal their identity behind front companies, and hide their enormous profits by using the same secretive offshore jurisdictions exploited for tax avoidance by multinational corporations.

This week, the 182 signatories to Cites are debating the future of the animals currently being wiped out in their thousands by this criminal industry.

Cites secretary general John Scanlon knows the road ahead will be tough. “Cites sets the rules that these crime syndicates are trying to avoid. We do work with law-enforcement partners. I have told them: ‘This is crime, this is transnational, this is your core business.’

“They have now all bought into this. The good side is that we are in there with these agencies. The bad side is that they are not yet investing heavily in it.”

Additional reporting by Calvin Godfrey

Body fat link to bacteria in faeces

SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARYImage captionAt least 50% of human faeces is made up of bacteria shed from the gut

26 September 2016-

The make-up of the bacteria found in human faeces may influence levels of dangerous fat in our bodies, say researchers from King's College London.

Their analysis of stool samples in a study of more than 3,600 twins found evidence that some of this bacteria is inherited.

What is contained in faeces bacteria could therefore partly explain why obesity passes down through families.

The study is published in Genome Biology.

The research team extracted information from study participants about the human faecal microbiome - the bacteria present in faeces samples - and compared these to six different measures of obesity, including body mass index (BMI) and different types of body fat.

iWonder - What does your poo say about you?

The researchers found the strongest links with visceral fat, where participants with a high diversity of bacteria in their faeces had lower levels of visceral fat.

This type of body fat is bad news because it is stored in the stomach area around important organs such as the liver, pancreas and intestines and is linked with higher risks of cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

More investigation

Dr Michelle Beaumont, lead study author from the department of twin research and genetic epidemiology at King's College London, said although the study showed a clear link, it was not yet possible to explain why it existed.

One theory is that a lack of variety in faecal bacteria could lead to the domination of high levels of gut microbes which are good at turning carbohydrates into fat.

Dr Beaumont said: "As this was an observational study we cannot say precisely how communities of bacteria in the gut might influence the storage of fat in the body, or whether a different mechanism is involved in weight gain."

And she indicated more research was needed to investigate how microbes in our guts and in our faeces can influence our health.

But there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that gut bacteria may play a role in obesity.

It is known that at least 50% of human faeces is made up of bacteria shed from the gut.

Dr Beaumont said that eating a broad diet including a variety of different types of food - much like that of the early hunter-gatherers - could increase the diversity of microbes in our faeces.

If the theory that microbes are passed on down the generations is correct, she said they may play an important role in how fat develops around the body and the health risk it presents.

SRI LANKA’S CODE OF CRIMINAL PROCEDURE ACT: AN AMENDMENT THAT DEFEATS ITS ENTIRE PURPOSE

BY Kishali Pinto Jayawaradena.-25/09/2016

It is unfortunate that a Bill purporting to amend Sri Lanka’s Code of Criminal Procedure Act made public this week takes away existing rights to suspects detained by the police through constitutional precedents.

Torture is at the early stages

This is in relation to a suspect’s right to consult a lawyer of his or her choice at the earliest point after arrest. The amendment purports to give that right only after a suspect has been interrogated by the police and statements recorded. This is manifestly unacceptable at several levels.

For years, the demand by advocates had been to liberally interpret Article 13(3) of the Constitution which states that “‘any person charged with an offence shall be entitled to be heard, in person or by an attorney-at-law, at a fair trial by a competent court.” As criminal law practitioners are aware, long before glamorous notions of constitutional rights gripped our collective imagination, these same rights had been secured in a solid body of jurisprudence which was developed quietly and without much fanfare by Sri Lanka’s appellate court judges in relation to accepted criminal procedures.

Much of these safeguards were however displaced by national security laws to the point of negation. One noticeable absence concerned the failure of the criminal procedure law and constitutional provisions securing the prompt right of legal counsel to a suspect.For practical reasons, this right became of the utmost importance as endemic practices of torture by the law enforcement machinery became evident, whether in relation to petty crimes or in interrogating suspects in graver offences. As studies have extensively documented, torture takes place at the very early stages that a person is taken into a police station.

State policy needs to be clear
Non-access to a lawyer has been a pivotal step in this perverted chain of custodial torture. The Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Manfred Novak has rightly observed that this failure deprives Sri Lanka’s Criminal Procedure Act of basic safeguards preventing torture (see Mission to Sri Lanka 1-8th October 2007 (A/HRC/7/3/Add.6, 26 February 2008, at para. 36).

Indeed, if the wish of the Prime Minister is to give effect to the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) as frequently declared on the floor of the Parliament and elsewhere, there can be no better way to do this than to revise this amendment so as to allow access to legal counsel at the very first point of arrest. Issuing a General Comment under the ICCPR, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has stressed that the right to communicate with counsel requires that the accused is granted prompt access to counsel. Counsel should be able to meet their clients in private and to communicate with the accused in conditions that fully respect the confidentiality of their communications (General Comment No. 32, Article 14: Right to equality before courts and tribunals and to a fair trial, U.N. Doc. CCPR/C/GC/32 (2007). It has also reiterated this same point in several Communications of Views against State parties.

The proposed amendment therefore defeats the entire purpose of changing the law in the first place. As the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka warned in an excellent statement released on Friday, such an amendment will gravely impact on the right to a fair trial which commences at the time of investigation.

Unacceptable excuses cannot be tolerated

In their earlier avatars, senior state lawyers of the Department of the Attorney General, (now yahapalanaya crusaders), defended the failure to give the right of access to legal counsel to a suspect at the earliest point on some novel arguments. Thus for example, in a 2002 report to the Committee against Torture submitted in terms of Sri Lanka’s obligations under the Convention Against Torture, it was stated that this was because police investigators should be able to conduct the initial investigation and interview suspects in an unhindered manner. Therefore, (as was said), such interview, by counsel representing suspects should not take place prior to the recording of the statement of the suspect.

Imaginatively it was further proclaimed that the suspect is free to divulge any assault or harassment at the time of initial production before the magistrate. It was also affirmed that counsel/attorney-at-law representing arrested suspects have the right to interview the officer-in-charge (OICs) of the relevant police station any time after the arrest (even prior to the recording of the first statement of the suspect) with a view to ascertain the basis of allegations against his client (suspect) and the date, time and location relating to the production of the suspect before a magistrate.

These explanations however are fundamentally unconvincing. They must not be allowed to stand if these are the same reasons as to why this particular amendment has been framed in such completely unacceptable terms. The stark reality is that when lawyers do indeed, proceed to interviewing the OIC or any relevant senior officer, he or she is open to the real risk of being chased out of the police station. This was indeed what happened to one gentleman at the Bambalapitiya police station in consequence of which the Supreme Court detailed the right of a lawyer to represent a client at a police station and directed the OIC to facilitate such access without hindrance.

Reconsider the ill-wisdom of this amendment

Where law reform is concerned, the right of a suspect to counsel after arrest has been grudgingly conceded in some cases but here too, this is not afforded at the earliest point. Thus special provisions amendments to the Code of Criminal Procedure, which were operative for specified periods of time, afforded a suspect the opportunity to consult an attorney-at-law of his choice to suspects. But this was only in relation to a particular category of serious offences and not pronounced as a general principle. This reluctance needs to be overcome.

If this Government wishes to live up to its promise that Sri Lanka is not a police state any longer, it is imperative that the basic right to independent legal representation must be available as of rights to suspects at the earliest point after arrest.

It is hoped that the profound ill-wisdom of bringing this amendment in its current form will be reconsidered.

– Courtesy The Sunday Times

Ezhuka Thamil: A Skewed Vision Of Self-Determination

By Mahendran Thiruvarangan –September 25, 2016

Mahendran Thiruvarangan

When I was doing field research recently in Musali South, a Muslim majority DS division in Mannar district in the Northern Province, an elderly Muslim man posed to me a couple of questions that indicated to me why one should be wary of Tamil nationalist politics even if it represents the aspirations of an oppressed community: “The government of Sri Lanka has banned us from using the forest resources in our village from which we have been benefitted over a long period of time. The land and the trees behind my house have been declared as belonging to a protected forest by the the forest authorities. Even to make a handle for the hoe that we use at home we now have to search for a tree that is not declared protected. A new Buddha statute has also sprung up in our village. We are also citizens of the Northern Province. But, why doesn’t your Chief Minister raise our problems? We cannot clap with one hand, right? Why can’t we all work together to solve our problems?”

When I first heard of the Ezhuka Thamil (Arise Tamil) processions and rally, an unmistakably Tamil-centric political event as the name itself reveals, I could not help but remember this political critique grounded in the everyday life of a Muslim man from a border village in the North who articulated it in a language so plain and devoid of jargon. Though some might say that Muslims consider themselves as a distinct political group or a nation or that Minister Rishad Bathiudeen is there to help the Muslims in the North, I refuse to buy these alibis which will never help us explore avenues for bettering Tamil-Muslim relations at the grassroots or forging, eventually, a common territorial movement of resistance as communities under oppression or communities that share the land, waterways and the environment in the region. As members of the Tamil community which constitutes 93% of the total population in the Northern Province, it is our responsibility to take the questions posed by this elderly Muslim man seriously and scrutinize our politics of resistance revolving around Tamil nationalism in all earnestness.

As my conversation with the Muslim man from Musali South indicates, deep-rooted structural problems like Buddhisization, militarization and land grab confront all the minority communities in the Northern and Eastern Provinces. To frame these issues through the lens of a narrow Tamil nationalism, as was done at the ‘Ezhuka Thamil’ rally, is misleading at best and dangerous at worst. Such attempts would never promote the much-needed goodwill and understanding among the minority communities but further their isolation from one another. Yesterday’s Ezhuka Thamil rally, where a large number of Tamils from across the Northern and Eastern Provinces gathered to articulate their political aspirations and channel their grievances to the South and the concerned international actors, seemed to me to be an event that sadly revealed the majoritarian sentiments of an oppressed minority. It did very little to bring out the multiple ways in which state oppression is experienced by multiple minority communities in the country or in the North-East.

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