Securing Kabul

NATO’s withdrawal from Afghanistan will not have the impact some observers were fearing. The new rulers of Kabul, President Abdul Ghani and Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Abdullah, have signed the agreement with the US that former President Hamid Karzai kept rejecting for months.

According to this agreement, US forces can stay in Afghanistan “until the end of 2024 and beyond”, mostly in nine major land and air bases. But this Bilateral Security Agreement, as it is called, is mostly intended to enable the Americans to train the 3,50,000 Afghan security forces. Not only will American troops be reduced to 9,800 over the course of the next year, but most of the remaining sophisticated arms that the US had brought to Afghanistan will also return home.

Will the Afghan National Army (ANA) be able to resist the Taliban, which has already rejected Ghani’s invitation for peace talks? Once Nato pulls its air assets out of the country, the Afghan air force will not be in a position to sustain military operations. Not only because it does not have the needed modern military aircraft (including helicopters), but also because it will have trouble obtaining working replacement parts.

Western countries may provide some help, but they are already channelling vast funds into the country’s defence. And there are other problems. The legitimacy of the ANA is somewhat affected by its ethnic character — a majority of its officers are of Tajik origin — and the desertion rate remains very high because of the low pay, especially given the risks taken by security personnel and compared to what the Taliban sometimes offers. Already, many regions are de facto in the hands of the Taliban, which exercises administrative power, levy taxes, regulate opium cultivation/ transformation and dispense some form of justice. This is true not only in the south and in the east, but also in the north, at least in the Kunduz area.

If the Afghan regime is destabilised by the Taliban and no Western government is prepared to intervene, who will? Among the neighbours, the only countries that have the potential to play a stabilising role are India and China. However, India has been reluctant to engage with Kabul intensively in the defence sector, in spite of having made commitments over the last 10 months. Not surprisingly, Ghani has now decided to shelve Afghanistan’s demand for military equipment from India, also because partnering with India would complicate the already bitter Af-Pak relations. Last week, Beijing became his first international port of call. During the visit, Ghani remarked, “The only one who can be effective in peace is the one who has good relations with all sides” — an oblique comment on India’s position.

Till recently, China’s interest in Afghanistan was solely economic. It had invested heavily in Afghanistan’s copper reserves and oil fields, and promised infrastructural development. Now, Chinese President Xi Jinping has not only committed to investing more in Afghanistan, but also hinted that the Chinese will step up their security engagement in Afghanistan in the coming years.

And with good reason. First, a large portion of the opium consumed in China comes from Afghanistan and Beijing has long viewed drug consumption as a serious danger to its society. But Chinese engagement in Afghanistan is primarily driven by the Uighur militancy, considered the biggest threat to the country’s internal security. The Uighurs are a 10-million strong Turkic Muslim community resisting “Hanisation” and state oppression under the rubric of an ethno-religious separatist movement. Xinjiang, the province that is home to most of China’s Uighurs, is strategically important not only because it is rich in gas, oil and coal reserves, but also because it represents one-sixth of the country’s landmass and is bordered by eight neighbouring countries, including Afghanistan.

Now, the Turkistan Islamic Party, a prominent strand of the Uighur movement, which has claimed responsibility for a number of the killings in the last few months — 29 people died in mass knife attack at Kunming station this May, for instance — has close ties with Islamist groups in the Af-Pak region. These include the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, whose leaders have found refuge in the same area.

But what can the Chinese do? They are no more willing than India to deploy troops. So they may arm the Afghanistan government and train its security forces instead. As Avinash Paliwal mentions in a recent Observer Research Foundation brief, China has already trained hundreds of Afghan policemen and provided a few million worth of material and logistical support to the ANA. It may well do more. But what if this is not enough, as one may well anticipate?

The other card China may play is Pakistani. The Pakistan army has already handed over to Beijing the Uighur activists it has captured in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) over the past few years. And the North Waziristan operation launched in June may have been partly suggested by Beijing — much like the 2007 Red Mosque operation — in the context of the intensification of “Uighur terrorism”.

The magnitude of this operation, which officially began on June 15, is unprecedented, mainly because of the number of internally displaced persons it has generated: one million. By early September, the army had announced 910 terrorists had been killed (whereas 82 soldiers had died), dozens of hideouts and 27 explosives and arms-making factories had been destroyed.

But the army admitted that most of the militants had crossed over to Afghanistan, except the foreigners, mainly Uzbeks, who did not have the benefit of tribal solidarity. This is probably something Beijing appreciated, but it is revealing of the challenge the region is facing. On one hand, the Pakistan army will probably target the “foreigners” more and spare the “good Islamists”, including the Haqqanis, in order to help the Taliban restore its “strategic depth”. On the other hand, Kabul will fight the Haqqanis (the ANA recently arrested two senior leaders of the network), but protect others, including Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) chief Mullah Fazlullah, who has probably been in the Afghan province of Kunar since 2010. Ironically, Afghanistan has become for the TTP the same kind of safe haven that the FATA and Quetta used to be for al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban.

One way out may be to follow the recommendations of Lt Gen (retd) Talat Masood of the Pakistan army: “If we are unable to convince the Haqqani leadership and Quetta Shura that they should work out a negotiated settlement with the Afghan government then what have we gained by hosting these groups apart from inviting the hostility of the Afghan government and the international community and much worse?… If Pakistan and Afghanistan were to take each other’s insurgencies seriously and cooperate, it would be far easier to contain them.”

While the Pakistan army may not listen to these lucid words, it may still initiate a paradigm shift under Chinese pressure. If not, China’s confidence in the Pakistani military to seriously tackle Islamist movements may dwindle, especially after Rahmatullah Nabil, acting director of the Afghan intelligence agency, who reached Beijing a few days before Ghani, made clear to the Chinese that most of the Uighurs captured by the ANA had been trained in Pakistan. In other words, the “all weathers friend” was not that reliable.

In response, Beijing may renew its overtures to New Delhi and Moscow to form joint counter-terrorism forums, an eventuality the Pakistan army would not want to occur. But China’s capacity to address the Islamist phenomenon in its entirety remains to be seen. In fact, it is a major test for a country that, till now, has not paid much attention to threats beyond its borders. The way it responds to Kabul’s invitation to intervene more in Central Asia may begin a new chapter — or not.

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40 years ago...and now: Still a lot of ground to cover on social indicators

Despite emerging one of the largest economies in the world, India's performance on various socio-economic indicators has been far from satisfactory. While the progress made over the past decades is undeniable, the country still lags considerably on various development indicators, even compared to countries with lower levels of per capita income.

At the aggregate level, life expectancy in India rose from 58.5 years in 1990 to 66.2 years in 2012. Women's life expectancy is estimated to be even higher at 68 years. While progress has been made, China achieved this level of life expectancy three-and-a-half decades ago. Even Bangladesh, whose per capita income is roughly half of India's, achieved it a decade ago.

While there exists a marked variation on infant mortality rate (per 1,000 live births) at the state level, at the all-India level, it had fallen from 88.4 in 1990 to 41.4 in 2013. By comparison, China achieved the same level nearly two decades ago, South Korea four decades ago and Bangladesh four years ago. The maternal mortality rate, estimated at 178 deaths per 100,000 live births, is way behind the target of 103 deaths, to be achieved by 2015 under the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. A comparative view of how far behind India is on various socio-economic indicators is reflected in theUnited Nations Human Development Index (2014). The index, estimated by using country-level information on life expectancy, education, and income indices, is used to rank countries. India ranks 135 out of 187 countries on the index, only seven positions ahead of Bangladesh. It is way behind Sri Lanka, which is at 73. Nepal and Pakistan, with lower levels of per capita income, are ranked 145 and 146, respectively.

Successful Flight Testing of LR SAM Missile

The Long Range Surface to Air Missile (LRSAM) is successfully flight tested against a flying target in a range in Israel, today. Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), Israel has carried out the test in the presence of DRDO scientists and officials of the Indian Armed Forces. The LRSAM system is jointly developed by DRDO and IAI Israel. All the systems including the radar, communication launch systems and the missile system have performed as expected and hit the target directly and damaged. The system is developed for both Israel Defence Forces and Indian Armed Forces. Scientific Advisor to Defence Minister Dr. Avinash Chander has witnessed the test along with President of IAI Mr. Joseph Weiss and other top officials of Israel Defence Forces. He termed the event as a milestone in the cooperation between two countries in developing advanced weapon systems.

PM launches Jeevan Pramaan – Digital Life Certificate for Pensioners

Huge relief for senior citizens who have to produce Life Certificates each year to continue receiving pension The Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, today launched "Jeevan Pramaan" – an "Aadhar-based Digital Life Certificate" for pensioners, in a move that could eventually benefit over a crore pensioners. The Prime Minister said that after the push towards self-certification, this digital life certificate was another enabling mechanism which would benefit the common man. The proposed digital certification will do away with the requirement of a pensioner having to submit a physical Life Certificate in November each year, in order to ensure continuity of pension being credited into his account. The Department of Electronics and IT has developed a software application which will enable the recording of the pensioner`s Aadhar number and biometric details from his mobile device or computer, by plugging in a biometric reading device. Key details of the pensioner, including date, time, and biometric information will be uploaded to a central database on real-time basis, ultimately enabling the Pension Disbursing Agency to access a Digital Life Certificate. This will conclusively establish that the pensioner was alive at the time of authentication. The earlier requirement entailed that a pensioner either personally presents himself before the Pension Disbursing Agency, or submits a Life Certificate issued by authorities specified by the Central Pension Accounting Office (CPAO). At present, 50 lakh individuals draw pension from the Central Government alone. A similar number draw pension from State and Union Territory Governments. Several PSUs also provide pension benefits. Over 25 lakh retired personnel draw pension from the Armed Forces. The Aadhar-Based Digital Life Certificate will go a long way in reducing hardship which so many senior citizens have to go through to produce a Life Certificate every year. The software application system will be made available to pensioners and other stakeholders on a large scale at no extra cost. It can be operated on a personal computer or a smartphone, along with an inexpensive biometric reading device. This facility will also be made available at Common Service Centres being operated under the National e-Governance Plan, for the benefit of pensioners residing in remote and inaccessible areas.

india Signs Loan Agreements with World Bank for US$ 200 Million for Technology Centre System Programme (TCSP)

The Loan Agreement for World Bank (IBRD) financing of US$ 200 million for Technology Centre System Programme (TCSP) was signed here today between Government of India and the World Bank             The Loan Agreement was signed by Shri Tarun Bajaj, Joint Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs on behalf of the Government of India and Mr Onno Ruhl, Country Director (India) of World Bank on behalf of the World Bank.  Representatives from Ministry of Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSME) and the World Bank, among others, were present on the occasion.             The Technology Centre System Programme (TCSP) is for setting-up 15 new Technology Centres (TCs) and to modernize/upgrade existing 18 TCs at an estimated cost of Rs. 2200 crore (US$ 400 million) including World Bank assistance of US$ 200 million.             Project Components: The project will have three components which are: (i) Technical assistance to the Technology Centers (TCs), (ii) Investment to upgrade existing/develop new TCs and (iii) Technical Assistance to the MSME Ministry for programme implementation and monitoring & evaluation.             The Objective of the project is to enhance the productivity of MSMEs by improving their access to technology and business advisory services as well as skilled workers through systems of financially sustainable technology centers.             The programme beneficiaries will be Indian MSMEs and larger firms as well as trainees and workers.                         The loan is for an implementation period of 5 years. The Office of Development Commissioner, Ministry of MSME is the implementing agency.

New drug to replace antibiotics

In a breakthrough, scientists have developed the first effective alternative to antibiotics that may aid the fight against drug-resistant infections.

In a small patient trial, the drug was shown to be effective at eradicating the superbug Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

Researchers said it is unlikely that the infection could develop resistance against the new treatment, which is already available as a cream for skin infections.

They hope to develop a pill or an injectable version of the drug within five years.

The treatment marks “a new era in the fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria,” according to Mark Offerhaus, chief executive of the biotechnology company Micreos, which is behind the advance.

The treatment attacks infections in an entirely different way from conventional drugs and, unlike them, exclusively targets the Staphylococcus bacteria responsible for MRSA, and leaves other microbes unaffected.

The approach is inspired by naturally occurring viruses that attack bacteria using enzymes called endolysins. It uses a ‘designer’ endolysin, Staphefekt, which the scientists engineered to latch on to the surface of bacteria cells and tear them apart, ‘The Times’ reported.

“Endolysins exist in nature, but we’ve made a modified version that combines the bit that is best at binding to the bacteria with another bit that is best at killing it,” said Bjorn Herpers, a clinical microbiologist, who tested the drug at the Public Health Laboratory in Kennemerland, the Netherlands.

Conventional antibiotics need to reach the inside of the cell to work, and part of the reason they are becoming less effective is that certain strains of bacteria, such as MRSA, have evolved impenetrable membranes.

By contrast, endolysins target basic building blocks on the outside of bacterial cells that are unlikely to change as infections genetically mutate over time.

Scientists believe that the results could mark the first of a wave of endolysin-based therapies for infections that conventional drugs are no longer able to treat.

About 80 per cent of gonorrhoea infections are resistant to frontline drugs, and multidrug-resistant salmonella, tuberculosis and E coli are regarded as significant threats.

Naturally occuring endolysins can attack all of these diseases, and the challenge is to create stable versions that can be packaged as drugs, researchers said.

The findings were presented at the Antibiotic Alternatives for the New Millennium conference here.

- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/science/new-drug-to-replace-antibiotics/#sthash.dlf5TX9W.dpuf

The failure of the Indian imagination

If the recent image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi swinging on the jhula with Chinese President Xi Jinping was meant to suggest a technological consensus of two great eastern republics, it was a mistaken metaphor. China’s advances in technology and infrastructure have moved it much beyond Indian reach, leaving Mr. Modi alone on the swing. With no one to push, India flounders.

In fact in the standard parlance of engineering development, the Chinese have even outwitted the West. Earlier, if the country’s geopolitical isolation had made comparisons difficult, the opening up has asserted its preeminent presence in the new world. In allowing the world’s star architects to build and plan the Olympic Games and the commercial structures of Shanghai, the Chinese model is now a diligent and deliberate upscaling of western ideas. In China, roads and railways whisk traffic across thousands of miles on flawless concrete, and its rail system straddles some of the world’s highest passes. Even the Hoover dam is child’s play when compared to the Three Gorges dam. German and French engineers are agog at the sight of such structural bravado; connectivity across the eastern seaboard of China is being studied by western transport planners. At one time, the industrial town was a symbol of 19th century England, the highway of 20th century America; now, the shiny factory assembly line is a picture of the new China. Having outwitted most western engineering inventions, the Chinese have even given everything a hyperbolic edge: the biggest dam, the highest rail line, the tallest single span bridge, the longest highway, the largest port, the greenest city. They have become better Americans than even the Americans.

Right course of action?

But the Chinese technological thrust has always been part of a history of persistence that came from political and economic hardship. A nation whose ethics of work and physical labour were intrinsically linked to political ideology, Chinese success came at a huge cost to personal freedom and a Draconian martial arts-like discipline that has had widespread social and cultural implications. It need hardly be confused with the exercise of a new eastern imagination. Moreover, it would be downright ludicrous to suggest that India attempt anything on that scale.

There are of course serious doubts whether the Chinese model of physical development of city and countryside is in fact the correct course of action for India. Serious differences of perception and interpretation remain. China’s continental size — more than three times our own — and consequently a population density a third of India, makes the applicability of standard urban models a real possibility there. Moreover, Indian cities have large concentrated pockets of marginalised population — a growing number that live off the streets in a hand-to-mouth existence. The real qualities of Indian urbanisation are therefore closer in character to West Africa, where similar migrations from the impoverished countryside make African cities a makeshift melting pot of the dispossessed. Cities like Lagos, Monrovia and Abuja and their ramshackle unmade state are similar to Indian towns like Lucknow, Pune, and Hyderabad — places that seem not to be governed by any overall civic order, but appear as either planning failures, or as temporary encampments. Without any defined sense of public purpose, people jostle, park, sell, eat, sleep, defecate … everything goes on everywhere.

In such a setting, the failure of Mr. Modi’s infrastructure plan reflects the larger failure of the Indian imagination — a desperate and mindless enumeration of ideas that have little or no bearing on Indian reality. When much of what is built is a half-baked imitation of disparate items tried and tested elsewhere, it becomes hard to fault Mr. Modi. So, his own campaign begins as a national sanitation drive. Pride in the belief of big things — like suspension bridges and high speed rail — can come only after a classroom reprimand on cleanliness and littering. Why give people the best highway if they are only going to defecate alongside it?

Endorsing public transport

In providing the right answers to the wrong questions, disappointment multiplies. The failure of the Delhi metro system for instance is not linked to its ability to respond to the city’s growing need, but its expediency as the right means to a wrong end. The city’s capacity to contain its residents in active living and working neighbourhoods is continually thwarted by encouraging them on longer and longer commutes, as the metro does. So much so, that the system itself is reaching breaking point. Though its 12-year operation, the metro has made regular changes to keep pace with demand. Increase in the number of coaches, length of the platforms, frequency of trains, the fight to stay ahead of the numbers is a lifelong struggle. Why then in such a failing scenario, does the government propose more metro systems in other cities: Bengaluru, Chennai, then Jaipur and Bhopal? In the long term, wouldn’t the Modi plan make more sense if it clearly restated the futility of distance travel and countered the excessive mobility that is destroying most cities?

Increasing car population similarly has rendered travel so inefficient, traffic speeds in India are some of the slowest in the world, Mumbai at 9 km per hour, Delhi at 7. Instead of promoting the car industry, with ready licences to set up new plants, the government needs to endorse both public transport and shared private transport. At the same time it should encourage the research and development of Indian solar/electric hybrids for buses and city trams. Brazil’s attempt at a cheap wooden vehicle for rural transport hasn’t met with much success, but in the search for alternatives, there is a sincere attempt to develop an indigenous model.

Imbalance in housing

Of the many other vague infrastructure promises, Mr. Modi’s agenda makes references to every Indian owning his own home by 2020. The history of government promises on home construction is littered with statistical failure and numerous housing programmes that have died while still on paper. In 1990, the National Buildings Organisation stated that the country’s requirement for shelter was two crore units. A decade later, the backlog doubled. Today, the housing demand stands at a whopping 5.5 crore. The dysfunctional imbalance between expectation and provision clearly suggests that a private house on a private piece of land is an impossible anomaly. Given the numbers, is the idea of home ownership itself practical? How can such demands be replaced by other more effective architectural mechanisms that examine urban privacy and community living and create living models?

On the subject of smart cities, the Prime Minister’s ideas arise out of mere information and communication technology, and state no clear guides to urban organisation, no vision on the values of civic life and settlement. The setting up of smart cities, based on the assumption that Indian cities can operate as technological models similar to Berlin and Toronto, is as good as inventing an air-conditioner for Alaska. Redundancy is guaranteed. How do computer-aided living, banking, utility distribution, etc. help a formless city where more than half its citizens are the unregistered dispossessed, without home or long-term employment?

Among the majority of people buoyed by Mr. Modi’s recent victory into an animated optimism, many remain a silent majority. Even if the Prime Minister’s intentions are good, their future action seems to be emerging from misguided sources and inspirations. Certainly, the Chinese experiment has been a resilient retesting of the American technological model, and Mr. Modi’s wholehearted support for it finds many takers among the young in India. But many others oppose its application on the grounds that slower development along traditional lines would perpetuate a more suitable Indian cultural identity and a less degraded environment.

The failure of both these streams of thinking leaves India a residual mess, and in a constant state of war over resources, distribution and implementation. The inability to fully grasp and copy the most rudimentary of time-tested western — now Chinese — models for cities, highways, trains, bridge designs, auto and transport ideas, Bus Rapid Transit Systems (BRT), etc. has left the country’s landscape a time warp of incompetence and despair. Because it stifles innovation, the traditional path on the other hand promises a far slower transition to modernity; in the surge for increasing material demands and a populace screaming for better days ahead, the traditional idea too is unacceptable. The unease with both approaches, must lead to a third, perhaps more innovative local approach, and one that Mr. Modi must first discover by asking the right questions. Otherwise the hope for something new, wholly inventive and wholly Indian will fade altogether from memory.