Frayed Fabric of South Asia-US Geopolitics
Both India and Pakistan governments have respectively dismissed as "false" "unfounded and totally baseless" The Times (London) April 23, 2011 report of "back channel" diplomacy.
The following news story appears to have been faked all the way up and down. Or not.
Because the story was allegedly faked, the question is Why? Actually the more productive line of inquiry would be, why did all the India and Pakistan media run with the news story, before checking whether it was fact?
Look, this is not about building a conspiracy theory. Instead, the story gained weight and credibility because it's really all about the drone-weary, terror-wary PEOPLE, the Aam Janata in India and Pakistan, hoping for some stability, some positive momentum, some hope to keep the positive feelings going, after the heady India double victory against a sporting Sri Lanka side and a fumbling Pakistan team in an unprecedented ALL South Asia 2011 World Cup Cricket Final.
The allegedly fake news report, excerpted from The Times of London states:
"Singh appointed an unofficial envoy to make contact with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan's chief of the Army Staff who exercises de facto control over foreign policy"
"De facto control"? Really? Not so much.
The US controls Pak's foreign policy, which is shaped by the CIA acting in its own interest against various factions of the ISI.
The LeT is therefore funded both directly and indirectly by the USCIA.
The CIA dictates US Govt's Foreign policy, not the other way around.
[Most recent example, CIA operatives are and have long been in Libya]
That is the rocky, murky terrain of South Asia-US geopolitics that Manmohan Singh, born in Pakistan (!) has to negotiate. The tragedy of Partition becomes more real every day.
Further, the Times article states Manmohan sent "an unofficial envoy" to talk to Ashfaq Kayani and ISI chief Shuja Pasha.
I lived in Kolkata (then Calcutta) and saw the raped and pregnant Bengali Hindu women, broken but still survivors, enter the streets as brutalized refugees from Dacca (now Dhaka).
Kayani (b. 1952, same year as ISI head honcho Shuja Pasha) was commissioned, age 19, a highly impressionable age, in the year (1971) that the Pakistan Army was driven out of East Bengal under the leadership of Libertador Sheikh Mujb-ur-Rahman (BangaBandhu) and East Bengal became the sovereign nation-state of Bangladesh.
Q.Will Kayani or Pasha, ever forget that humiliating defeat and lost territory?
If we rely on the hard evidence of political psychology,
India will have to wait for bitter but pragmatic Kayani's and bitter but pragmatic Pasha's successors, successors born in a later generation, to see significant progress and change.
This defeat is why Pakistan will keep clamoring for Kashmir because of the psychological and political scars of a forever lost East Bengal. It's understandable but not tenable.
Pakistan now shrinks by the minute, its territory overrun by USCIA/NATO and its people droned from the air by the USCIA. The Raymond Davies CIA agent, who was set free by the PakISI, is only the latest predictable twiststory in PakISI/USCIA geopolitics.
See how complex and challenging our shared history with Pakistan is?
So long as the territory of Pakistan, not just the Af-Pak border, is owned and operated by the USCIA, India will continue to need to take ***baby steps*** towards dialogue, always watching our backs and looking over our shoulders.
No problem, India can keep doing that, we have become adept at watching the US operating in our region against both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
USCIA operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan go back to the early US-invented Cold War 1950's, just about the time Kayani and Pasha were born!
Pity and empathy for the people of Pakistan, our blood sisters and brothers, who are suffering, in propagandist/hate Hindu denial for the crimes committed against them by:
1) Pak/ISI,
2) in collusion with the USCIA
South Asia-US Geopolitics: Collective Memory Vs. Militarist Memory
To deepen the gravitas of South Asia-US geopolitics in 2011, let us note that Kayani and Pasha, both newly commissioned at age 19 in 1971, would even now, in 2011, gratefully remember 1)the US Seventh Fleet and 2)the CIA. How would they remember that?
The US Seventh Fleet, (specifically the TF 74, which included the nuclear-powered Enterprise and Gumard, destroyers and missile escorts ) was there when Pakistan needed them most, in 1971.
The USCIA was there again, after 9/11, when the US airlifted key CIA-directed ISI/Taliban operatives out of Kabul and Kandahar, before the US invasion of Afghanistan.
It can be gratifying (not to mention profitable) to be a dependent-client state. Kayani and Pasha can understandably appreciate that.
In 1971, at the height of Bangladesh’s war of Liberation, the United States Seventh Fleet conducted an incursion into the Bay of Bengal, to advance its own interest vis a vis Pakistan, its dependent-state client.
This is the same US Seventh Fleet that supported combat intelligence that divided the Koreas (1945) in the context of the US- invented Cold War against the Soviets. This is the same Seventh Fleet that provided the balltle support that napalmed little girls in VietNam (1972). Se how that Vietnam atrocity in 1972 is neatly juxtaposed with the Bay of Bengal incursion in 1971?
See how our current geopolitics is driven by collective memory of powerful militarists in a client dependent-state ?
To perform Development Journalism, Kayani and Pasha’s anti-people, geopolitical militarist memory needs to be outweighed and outmaneuvered by Aam Log Collective Social Justice memory, based on evidence, proof and personal experience of dislocation and dispossession from Swat to Sylhet.
South Asian Aam Log Collective Memory can prevail against Militarist Memory, so long as We the People, our activists, our media (even some of our governments and some of our armies some of the time), take effective ethical steps on that collective path, in the name of All South Asians for the sake of a Greater Collective Good (GCG). That’s pragmatic idealism with a calm, steely eye fixed on the geopolitics of the dependent-client state(s) in our region.
Dr. Chithra Karunakaran
City University of New York [CUNY]
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
[blog funded by CUNY]
www.facebook.com/chithra.karunakaran
www.disqus.com/EthicalDemocracy
@EthicalDemocracy
http://Southasianidea.com
posts on "A People's General."
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Rising Kashmir newspaper copyright
Manmohan in secret talks with Kayani: THE TIMES
London, April 23: India's Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh opened secret talks with Pakistan Army chief ten months ago to build on the cricket-inspired diplomatic thaw between the two countries, a media report said today.
“Singh appointed an unofficial envoy to make contact with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan's chief of the Army Staff who exercises de facto control over foreign policy," The Times reported. It said the talks, through a back channel, have encouraged the UK and US believe that the countries competition for influence in Afghanistan could be better managed during efforts to start a peace process.
Earlier also, there were reports that India has asked its envoy in Pakistan to open channels of communication with Pakistani army chief General Pervez Kayani as well as ISI chief Shuja Pasha.
"We have given the green signal.
As a new season of Indo-Pak engagement bursts upon the sub-continent, there is a realization that India's efforts to talk is incomplete because there is no communication with the Pakistani army — effectively the real power centre. The diplomatic outreach to General Kayani is under the rubric of engaging all stakeholders so as not to attract extra attention, but it's a special effort by India,” sources in Indian government had said.
The visit of Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani to watch the semi-final match between India and Pakistan in the cricket World Cup last month has sparked hope of a diplomatic thaw between the two neighbouring countries.
Kayani visited Kabul this week to meet members of the High Peace Council, a body set up by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, to build contacts with Taliban groups. The army chief was accompanied by General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, head of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
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The Times (London) copyright
The Times (London) April 23, 2011
Restart of cricket relations leads to secret India-Pakistan diplomatic drive
Francis Elliott and Tom Coghlan
• The Times
• Published: 23 April 2011
• Asia
[Full text obtained through LexisNexis]
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 42
LENGTH: 440 words
The Prime Minister of India has opened secret talks with the head of Pakistan's military to build on the cricket-inspired diplomatic thaw between the rivals.
appointed an unofficial envoy to make contact with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan's Chief of the Army Staff who exercises de facto control over foreign policy, about ten months ago, The Times has learnt.
The talks, through a back channel, have encouraged London and Washington to believe that the countries' competition for influence in Afghanistan could be better managed during efforts to start a peace process.
General Kayani visited Kabul this week to meet members of the High Peace Council, a body set up by President Karzai, to build contacts with Taleban groups. General Kayani was accompanied by General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the head of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
Delhi, which in the past would have condemned the visit as Pakistani "meddling", remained silent - providing the latest evidence of rapprochement being driven by the US, after the Cricket World Cup semi-final between the two nations.
Cricketing ties, severed in the wake of the Mumbai attacks in November 2008, have been restored and a series of three one-day games will take place to coincide with a visit to Islamabad by Mr Singh.
The settling of a disputed border at Sir Creek in the south, and the demilitarisation of the Siachen glacier in the north, are also being used to create an impression of diplomatic momentum.
Genuine progress, however, requires the co-operation of Pakistan's military, which India has long accused of fostering militant groups to fight a proxy war in Kashmir. For its part, Pakistan accuses India of promoting separatists in the province of Baluchistan and seeking undue influence in Afghanistan as a counterbalance to its neighbour. It questions the need for India to maintain four consulates in Afghanistan, two of them close to its borders in Kandahar and Jalalabad.
Pakistan insists that it must insure against a possible collapse of Afghanistan into civil war, by retaining proxies within the country. It is pressing the US to open talks with figures from the Haqqani network in North Waziristan, as it seeks to influence the future Afghan government.
Despite US pressure and Mr Singh's commitment there remain other substantial obstacles to a lasting thaw. Access for Indian investigators to the suspected conspirators behind the Mumbai attacks, who are detained in Pakistan, remains a sticking point.
Although it will allow the investigators to travel, Islamabad said that they may interview only the interrogators, not the suspects.
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Rising Kashmir copyright
News report 2 days later:
‘Kayani did not contact Singh’
Islamabad, April 25: Pakistan Army Monday dismissed as unfounded and totally baseless a media report that its powerful chief Gen Ashfaq Pervez Kayani held talks with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh through a "secret envoy and back channel".
A spokesperson of the Inter-Services Public Relations Directorate (ISPR) denied the news item which appeared in The Times of London on April 23 and called it "unfounded and totally baseless".
The paper had reported that Singh had appointed an "unofficial envoy" to make contact with Kayani, "who exercises de facto control over Pakistan's foreign policy".
The talks, through a back channel, have encouraged the UK and US believe that the countries' competition for influence in Afghanistan could be better managed during efforts to start a peace process, the media report had said.
The prime minister's office in New Delhi had yesterday termed as 'false' the report that Singh had contacted Kayani before the Mohali meeting between prime ministers of the two countries.
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