The Western footprint on the world is about to get a whole lot smaller.

By Kishore Mahubani

Singapore - For many, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the so-called "end of history" and the final victory of the West.

This week, Barack Obama, the first black president of the once-triumphant superpower in that cold-war contest, heads to Beijing to meet America's bankers - the Chinese Communist government - an unfeasible prospect at the time of the wall's fall 20 years ago. Surely, this twist of the times is a good point of departure for taking stock of just where history has gone during these past two decades.

Let me begin with an extreme and provocative point to get the argument going: Francis Fukuyama's famous essay "The End of History" may have done some serious damage to Western minds in the 1990s and beyond. Mr. Fukuyama should not be blamed for this. He wrote a subtle, sophisticated, and nuanced essay. However, few Western intellectuals read the essay in its entirety. Instead, the only message they seemed to take away from the essay? The end of history is the triumph of the West.

Western hubris was thick in the air then. I experienced it. In 1991 I heard a senior Belgian official, speaking on behalf of Europe, tell a group of Asians, "The cold war has ended. There are only two superpowers left: the United States and Europe." This hubris also explains how Western minds failed to foresee that instead of the triumph of the West, the 1990s would see the end of Western domination of world history (but not the end of the West) and the return of Asia.

There is no doubt that the West has contributed to the return of Asia. As I document in my book, several Asian societies have succeeded because they finally understood, absorbed, and implemented the seven pillars of Western wisdom: namely free-market economics, science and technology, meritocracy, pragmatism, culture of peace, rule of law, and education.

Notice what is missing from the list? Western political liberalism - despite Fukuyama's claim that "The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism."

The general assumption in Western minds after reading Fukuyama's essay was that the world would in one way or another become more Westernized. Instead, the exact opposite has happened. Modernization has spread across the world.

But modernization has been accompanied by de-Westernization, not Westernization. Fukuyama acknowledges this today. As he said in a recent interview, "The old version of the idea of modernization was Eurocentric, reflecting Europe's own development. That did contain attributes which sought to define modernization in a quite narrow way."

In the same interview, Fukuyama was right in emphasizing that the three components of political modernization were the creation of an effective state that could enforce rules, the rule of law that binds the sovereign, and accountability.

Indeed, these are the very traits of political modernization that many Asian states are aspiring to achieve. Asians surely agree that no state can function or develop without an effective government. We feel particularly vindicated in this point of view after the recent financial crisis. One reason why the US came to grief was the deeply held ideological assumption in the mind of key American policymakers, like Alan Greenspan, that Ronald Reagan was correct in saying that "Government is not a solution to our problem; government is the problem." Fortunately, Asians did not fall prey to this ideology.

Consequently, in the 21st century, history will unfold in the exact opposite direction of what Western intellectuals anticipated in 1991. Then they all assumed that the end of history is the triumph of the West. Instead, we will now see that the return of history is the retreat of the West.

One prediction I can make confidently is that the Western footprint on the world, which was hugely oversized in the 19th and 20th centuries, will retreat significantly in the 21st century.

This will not mean a retreat of all Western ideas. Indeed many key ideas like free-market economics and rule of law will be embraced ever more widely.

However, few Asians will believe that the Western societies are best at implementing these Western ideas. Indeed, the general assumption of Western competence in governance and management will be replaced by awareness that the West has become quite inept at managing its economies. A new gap will develop. Respect for Western ideas will remain, but respect for Western practices will diminish, unless Western performance in governance improves again.

Sadly, in all the recent discussions of "The End of History" 20 years after its publication, few Western commentators have dared to address the biggest lapse in Western practice.

The fundamental underlying assumption of "The End of History" was that the West would remain the "beacon" for the world in democracy and human rights. In 1989, if anyone had dared to predict that within 15 years, the foremost "beacon" of human rights would become the first Western developed state to reintroduce torture, everyone would have shouted "impossible." Yet the impossible happened!

Few in the West understand how much shock Guantánamo has caused in non-Western minds. Hence, many are puzzled that Western intellectuals continue to assume that they can portray themselves and their countries as models to follow when they speak to the rest of the world on human rights. Fukuyama is right to emphasize the importance of "accountability." Yet no one in the West has been held accountable for Guantánamo.

Consequently, what moral authority does the West have to speak on the issues of human rights anymore? This loss of moral authority is the exact opposite outcome that Western minds expected when they celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Does this mean we should give up hope? Will the world become a sadder place? Probably few in the West will remember what Fukuyama wrote in the last paragraph of his essay.

He wrote: "The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history."

Here, too, as the 21st century unfolds, we will see the exact opposite outcome. The return of Asia will be accompanied by an astonishing Asian renaissance in which many diverse Asian cultures will rediscover their lost heritage of art and philosophy.

There is no question that Asians will celebrate the return of history in the 21st century. The only question is, Will the West join them in these celebrations, or will they keep waiting for the end to come?

Kishore Mahbubani is the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of "The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East."

Article Source : http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1110/p09s09-coop.html

Sherwood Ross

Washington has been negotiating secret, "highly sensitive understandings" to "provide added security for the Pakistani arsenal in case of a crisis," investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reports.

"The secrecy surrounding the understandings was important because there is growing antipathy toward America in Pakistan, as well as a history of distrust," Hersh writes in the November 16th issue of The New Yorker magazine.

"Many Pakistanis believe that America's true goal is not to keep their weapons safe but to diminish or destroy the Pakistani nuclear complex," he writes. The arsenal is a source of great pride among Pakistanis, "who view the weapons as symbols of their nation's status and as an essential deterrent against an attack by India."

Pakistan keeps its nuclear warheads separate from their triggers to prevent anyone from launching a warhead without at least pausing to put it together. A U.S. rapid-response team of terrorism and nonproliferation experts is stationed at the ready at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, is at the ready to fly to Pakistan if the security of any of its 80-plus nukes is threatened.

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari "spoke with derision" in an interview about U.S. concern over the vulnerability of his country's nuclear arsenal, Hersh said. "In your country, you feel that you have to hold the fort for us. The American people want a lot of answers for the errors of the past, and it's very easy to spread fear. Our Army officers are not crazy, like the Taliban. They're British-trained. Why would they slip up on nuclear security? A mutiny would never happen in Pakistan."

Moreover, an unnamed senior Pakistani official said to have close ties to Zardari added, "you'd like control of our day-to-day deployment. But why should we give it to you? Even if there was a military coup d'etat in Pakistan, no one is going to give up total control of our nuclear weapons. Never. Why are you not afraid of India's nuclear weapons?"

The official answered his own question with, "Because India is your friend, and the longtime policies of America and India converge. Between you and the Indians, you will fuck us in every way. The truth is that our weapons are less of a problem for the Obama Administration than finding a respectable way out of Afghanistan."

A former senior U.S. intelligence official told Hersh the Pakistanis gave the U.S. intelligence about their warheads, some of the warheads' locations, and their command-and-control system. However, a U.S. military spokesman for Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, "I am not aware of our receipt of any such information."

In the July/August issue of Arms Control Today, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, former director of the Department of Energy's intelligence operation, warned of the "lethal proximity between terrorists, extremists, and nuclear weapons insiders" in Pakistan. "Purely in actuarial terms, there is a strong possibility that bad apples in the nuclear establishment are willing to cooperate with outsiders for personal gain or out of sympathy for their cause. Nowhere in the world is this threat greater than in Pakistan…" He added, "Anything that helps upgrade Pakistan's nuclear security is an investment" (in America's security).

The question of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is made more perplexing by U.S. efforts to pursue its Afghan enemies on Pakistani soil and involve that country's military in its operations. Sultan Amir Tarar, a retired Pakistani intelligence official, told Hersh that the U.S. campaign will backfire. "The Americans are trying to rent out their war to us." If Obama persists, he added, "there will be an uprising here, and this corrupt government will collapse." Tarar is further quoted as saying, "The longer the war goes on, the longer it will spill over in the tribal territories, and it will lead to a revolutionary stage."

Tarar believes the U.S. has to negotiate with the Afghan Taliban, even if that means direct talks with Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, Hersh reported. He noted that stepped-up fighting in the tribal areas of Pakistan could further "radicalize" that nation.

How respect for the U.S. is declining in Pakistan was reflected by a source described as "a retired senior Pakistani intelligence officer" who told Hersh, "My belief today is that it's better to have the Americans as an enemy rather than as a friend, because you cannot be trusted. The only good thing the United States did for us was to look the other way about an atomic bomb when it suited the United States to do so."

And in India, which has been at loggerheads with Pakistan since the 1947 partition, an official told Hersh, "They like us better in Pakistan than you Americans. I can tell you that in a public-opinion poll we, India, will beat you."

Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, currently living in exile in London, told Hersh that he is troubled by U.S.-controlled Predator drone attacks on targets inside Pakistan, which began in 2005. "I said to the Americans, 'Give us the Predators.' It was refused. I told the Americans, 'Then just say publicly that you're giving them to us. You keep on firing them but put Pakistan Air Force markings on them.' That, too, was denied."

Speaking of Predator attacks, Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai told Hersh, "What the (Pakistani) Army did not understand, and what the Americans don't understand, is that by demolishing the house of a suspected Taliban or their supporters you are making an enemy of the whole family."

The issue of nuclear weapon instability in Pakistan reflects on the series of historic American decisions to (a) manufacture and use atomic weapons in World War Two in the first place, and (b) to spend literally trillions of taxpayer dollars over the years to increase their numbers and lethality and (c)to help nations such as Israel, India and Pakistan to build their nuclear arsenals over the objections of the international authority. The U.S. (d) has also sold warplanes capable of carrying nuclear bombs both to hostile neighbors India and Pakistan, further increasing the possibility of their use.

(Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based writer and public relations consultant for good causes. He formerly reported for the Chicago Daily News and worked as a columnist for wire services.

Article Source : http://www.opinion-maker.org/navigation.do?mode=showArticles&id=1035

By Jeff Gates

When waging war "by way of deception," the motto of the Israeli Mossad, well-timed crises play a critical agenda-setting role by displacing facts with what a target population can be deceived to believe. Thus the force-multiplier effect when staged crises are reinforced with pre-staged intelligence. In combination, the two often prove persuasive.

That duplicity was on display when U.S. lawmakers were induced to invade Iraq in response to the mass murder of 9-11. That crisis alone, however, was insufficient. Military mobilization required a "consensus" belief in Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, Iraqi mobile biological weapons, Iraqi meetings in Prague, and so forth. Though all were false, those "facts" proved sufficient to induce an invasion of Iraq.

Such agent provocateur operations typically include collateral incidents as pre-staging for the intended main event. Ongoing incidents suggest a follow-on operation is underway. Recent history suggests we'll see an orgy of evidence that plausibly indicts a pre-staged Evil Doer. Though Iran is an obvious candidate, Pakistan is also a possibility where outside forces have been destabilizing this nuclear Islamic nation with a series of violent incidents.

Will it be coincidence if the next war—like the last—is consistent with the expansive goals of Jewish nationalists?

The Indo-Israel Alliance

December 2007 saw the murder of former Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Mark Siegel, her Ashkenazim biographer and lobbyist, assured U.S. diplomats that her return was "the only possible way that we could guarantee stability and keep the presidency of Musharraf intact."

President Pervez Musharraf had announced that resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict was essential to the resolution of conflicts in Iraq and neighboring Afghanistan. That comment made him a target for Tel Aviv.
During Bhutto's two terms as prime minister, Pakistani support for the Taliban—then celebrated as the freedom-fighting Mujahadin—enabled her to wield influence in Afghanistan while also catalyzing conflicts in Kashmir. By fueling tension with India, she also fueled an Indo-Israel alliance as Tel Aviv provided New Delhi an emergency shipment of artillery shells during a conflict over the Kirpal region of Kashmir.

In January 2009, Israel delivered to India the first of three Phalcon Airborne Warning & Control Systems (AWACS) shifting the balance of conventional weapons in the region. That sale confirmed what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier announced: "Our ties with India don't have any limitation…." That became apparent in April when Israel signed a $1.1 billion agreement to provide India an advanced tactical air defense system developed by Raytheon, a U.S. defense contractor.

In August 2008, Ashkenazim General David Kezerashvili returned to Georgia from Tel Aviv to lead an assault on separatists in South Ossetia with the support of Israeli arms and training. That crisis ignited Cold War tensions between the U.S. and Russia, key members of the Quartet (along with the EU and the UN) pledged to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Little was said about the Israeli interest in a pipeline across Georgia meant to move Caspian oil through Turkey and on to Eurasia, using Israel as an intermediary while undermining Russia's oil industry.

More Game Theory Warfare?

Bhutto's murder ensured a crisis that replaced Musharaff with Asif Ali Zardari, her notoriously corrupt husband. By Washington's alliance with Zardari, the U.S. could be portrayed as extending its corrupting influence in the region.

On August 7, 2008, the Zadari-led ruling coalition called for a no-confidence vote in Parliament against Musharraf just as he was departing for the Summer Olympics in Beijing. On August 8, heavy fighting erupted overnight in South Ossetia. As with many of the recent incidents in Pakistan, this violent event involved armed separatists.

But for pro-Israeli influence inside the U.S. government, would our State Department have installed in office the corrupt Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, leading to record-level poppy production? Is the heroin epidemic presently eroding Russian society traceable to Israel's infamous game theory war-planners? [See "How Israel Wages Game Theory Warfare" and "Israel and 9-11" .]

mumbai false flag

In late November 2008, a terrorist attack in Mumbai, India's financial center, renewed fears of nuclear tension between India and Pakistan. When the attackers struck a hostel managed by Chabad Lubavitch, an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect from New York, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni announced from Tel Aviv: "Our world is under attack." By early December, Israeli journalists urged that we "fortify the security of Jewish institutions worldwide."

Soon after "India's 9-11" was found to include operatives from Pakistan's western tribal region, Zardari announced an agreement with the Taliban to allow Sharia law to govern a swath of the North West Frontier Province where Al Qaeda members reportedly reside.

Pakistani cooperation with "Islamic extremists" created the impression of enhanced insecurity and vulnerability for the U.S. and its allies. That perceived threat was marketed by mainstream media as proof of the perils of "militant Islam."

With the Taliban and Al Qaeda portrayed as operating freely in a nuclear-armed Islamic state, Tel Aviv gained traction for its claim that a nuclear Tehran posed an "existential threat" to the Jewish state. Meanwhile Israel's election of an ultra-nationalist/ultra-orthodox coalition further delayed resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

More delay is destined to evoke more extremism and gain more traction for those marketing the "global war on terrorism." Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni argued after the assault in Mumbai: "Israel, India and the rest of the free world are positioned in the forefront of the battle against terrorists and extremism."

In announcing that list, Islamabad was indicted by its exclusion even though Pakistan is dominantly Sunni and, unlike Iran's Shi'a , abhors theocratic rule. The fact patterns suggest that Pakistan, not India, was the target of the murderous terrorism in Mumbai.

Advised by legions of Ashkenazim, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent mission to Islamabad was a diplomatic disaster. Abrasive and arrogant, America's top diplomat reinforced Pakistani concerns that it is surrounded by hostile forces and that the nation is being set up to fail by Jewish nationalist advisers to a nation it considered an ally.

In a climate of heightened tensions, Clinton undermined U.S. interests, boosted the Israeli case for a global war on "Islamo-fascism" and lent credence to the Clash of Civilizations.

Destabilization as a Prequel to Domination

As Afghanistan and Pakistan join other nations being destabilized by outside forces, key questions must be answered:

Was India's 9-11 a form of geopolitical misdirection meant to serve both the tactical goals of Muslim extremists and the strategic goals of Jewish nationalists? Who benefits—within Pakistan—from humiliation at the hands of India and the U.S.?

With Bhutto's murder and Musharraf's departure, the crisis in Mumbai drew Pakistani forces to the Indian border and away from the western tribal region. Was that the geostrategic goal of these well-timed crises? What role, if any, did Israel play?

Is delay in ending the occupation of Palestine part of an agent provocateur strategy? Was the latest assault on Gaza part of this strategy?

Each of these crises incrementally advanced the expansionist agenda of Colonial Zionists. Do these collateral incidents trace their origin to a common source? Is that source again using serial events to pre-stage a main event?

The public has an intuitive grasp of the source of this oft-recurring behavior. An October 2003 poll of 7,500 respondents in member nations of the European Union found that Israel was considered the greatest threat to world peace.

Is terrorism limited to "Islamo-fascists"? Are mass murders also deployed—from the shadows—as a strategy of geopolitical manipulation by those who Ashkenazim philosopher Hannah Arendt described as "Jewish fascists"?

Author, educator, attorney, merchant banker and adviser to policy-makers worldwide and U.S. Veteran

Jeff was counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance (1980-87) working for Democrat Russell Long, son of Louisiana Governor and U.S. Senator Huey P. Long. Specialist in employee benefits law—pensions, 401(k) plans, stock options, employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), et.al. Tax-qualified employee benefit plans accounted for $17 trillion in assets (April 2007) and more than half the funds in the hands of institutional investors. As of 2007, ESOPs were in place in 11,500 firms nationwide, covering 10% of the U.S. workforce and holding $800 billion in assets. Law practice w/ former Senators Russell Long, Democrat of Louisiana and Paul Laxalt, Republican of Nevada, chairman of Ronald Reagan's presidential campaigns.

Article Source : http://pakalert.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/israels-role-in-destabilizing-pakistan/

Gates: "What is Israel's Role in the Destabilization of Pakistan?"
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 4:29 AM
From: "Jeff Gates"

• Op-Ed — What is Israel's Role in Pakistan