The Karzai Itch

Hamid Karzai after taking over the helm of Afghanistan has probably not slept a day. He figures in the news lately as he has become quite a nuisance to the man in the White House. He should be a nuisance, considered that he’s trying to bring in peace into a war torn country.

Afghanistan is a country filled with nomadic tribes, each of these tribes act autonomously over their areas of dominance headed by leaders named elders (probably in Pashto). The country has always been in conflict. In the past 30 years the Soviets tried to capture it, then it had its own brand of civil war which the Taliban won, then the US came in to take them out and hasn’t left it yet. The Taliban still reiterate with small skirmishes.

Karzai, trying to bring peace to the country decided to call a ‘Loya Jirga’, a meeting of the ‘elders’ and has also invited the Taliban. He wants to devise a peace plan wherein all the tribes are pacified.

Now, this puts the US, UK and Pakistan in a pickle. If peace does come out of it, Uncle Sam and the Old Blighty has to bring back its troops putting a halt to their long term plan of attacking Iran (which has one of the largest oil reserves in the world!) and also the huge reconstruction plans of the country by which America’s corporate world can sell off their mediocre goods and use their scrapped off assembly lines to create ‘value’.

Pakistan, of course, has other plans. If Taliban directly talks to the Taliban, they would loose their stronghold over them. So, they demand that Afghanistan talk to the Taliban through the ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence agency) as they finance them and in turn provide Mujahideen to do their dirty work.

The Taliban can either risk it and go to the Jirga hoping they’ll have some say in running the government or continue to be loyal to Pakistan.I hope they do come together for an amicable solution and let peace prevail.

Obama and the Merry Men

2008 proved to be the year of the underdog. Obama won, Slumdog won, Resul Pookutty won and so on. It’s all because the underdog got fucked real hard. It was retaliation by them just to affirm their real power. The middle class defines a country, they drive the economy, and they work like dogs so they can give their earnings to conglomerates (to make/create unnecessary products) and to governments (to spend it on wars and bailouts because somebody fucked up).

Obama, an African- American, at the helm of the most powerful country in the world, means there is some serious ‘change’ happening. His promise to bring the country and in turn the world around seems to be a bit lofty. His policies so far have been quite populist which went about flaying the rich and giving to the needy. CEOs of companies getting bailouts have their salaries capped at half a million a year. Companies outsourcing outside the country would not receive tax sops (bad luck India!). H1B visas limited, possibly even eliminated.

But would this all work. His plan of action (a budget) is to bring the country back to the position it was in before the downturn and not eliminate the root cause altogether (bad asset management and sub-prime lending). Don’t we learn from mistakes? My layman’s opinion would get beaten down by a ton of economic experts. I just hope he realizes that any decision he and his merry men make may cause a family somewhere in remote China to probably resort to poison.

One more thing, I went through this news article recently which stated that Obama is being considered for the Noble Peace Prize. Now what is that all about???