India Lodges Formal Protest with Pakistan

The government of India has lodged a formal protest with the government of Pakistan over the Mumbai terrorist attack:

Pakistan's High Commissioner was summoned and handed an official protest against Pakistan's alleged failure to crack down on terrorist groups within its country.

The Indian Government says the terrorist attacks in Mumbai were carried out by elements from Pakistan, and it expects the Pakistani Government to take strong action against those responsible.

Indian Minister of State for External Affairs Anand Sharma says the attacks are a grave setback to the relationship between the two nations.

But the Pakistani Government has denied any direct involvement in the terrorist strike.

Pakistan Prime Minister Syed Youssuf Rasa Gilani is urging calm, and says the blame game should be avoided at all costs.

— Source: Australian Broadcasting Company

This "let's not play the blame game" and the denial of direct government involvement in the attack seems a rather insufficient response on the part of Pakistan. It is worse if there was involvement between the terrorists and the Pakistani government, to be sure, but even if there is not, this doesn't excuse Pakistan's failure to clean up it's own house. The ISI certainly had a hand in breeding monsters in the past and the likelihood seems great that this latest batch of fundamentalist militants is at the very least a by-product of those past entanglements.

Pakistan has been, at least nominally, an ally to the United States in The War Against Terror (try the acronym from that one for size), and so its government has been aware of the use of Pakistan as an extremist breeding ground for some time now. They should have acted long ago to change the situation. They did not, and that is, indeed, their own fault.

That being said, a war in the region is unlikely to eliminate the terrorism and very likely to foster more of it. A destabilized Pakistan losing control of, or using, nuclear weapons is clearly in the best interests of no civilized segment of humanity, either. Pakistan should accept culpability in this and, as the brief description of the complaint given above notes, should take the strongest possible action on the most immediate terms possible to insure that they no longer serve as the launch pad for horrors visited upon people who are trying to do nothing more than live their lives.

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India and Pakistan May Be Readying for War in Aftermath of Mumbai Attacks

It's beginning to look like the religious militants of the Deccan Mujahedin may get their way. Indian government officials are stating that they have certain proof of a link between the Mumbai terrorists and elements with links to Pakistani intelligence. Pakistan, for its part, is ending military operations along the Afghan border and putting its own military on stand-by for a confrontation with India.

At war level: India raises security status amid grief

by Randeep Ramesh and Jason Burke

The Indian government raised the country's security to a "war level" yesterday saying it had certain proof of a Pakistani link to the Mumbai attacks.

The dramatic move prompted Pakistan to say it would end military operations against Islamist militants on the Afghan border, which are critical to the "war on terror", for an "unwanted conflict" with Delhi...

...Sri Prakash Jaiswal, India's minister of state for home affairs, said the country's "intelligence will be increased to a war level, we are asking the state governments to increase security to a war level"...

...the group named by India, Lashkar-e-Taiba, has longstanding relationships with Pakistan's security establishment...

The Indian minister said yesterday there was "no doubt that the terrorists had come from Pakistan ... We have evidence of their nationalities. We will reveal everything soon"...

Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is fighting Indian control of the disputed Kashmir region, was behind a deadly 2001 assault on the Indian parliament that pushed New Delhi and Islamabad to the brink of war...

Wonderful. Two nuclear powers may end up at war, thanks in no small part to the actions of religious fundamentalists who dehumanize and kill. More death, more destruction, more horrors... maybe huge horrors, and the deaths of more innocent people could be the result of all of this. These are countries with nukes pointed at one another, both of which contain influential religious factions willing to die for their causes in order that they reap some divine reward.

I hope both can be convinced to step back from this brink. I also hope that more moderate heads prevail, even if they are religious ones. (c.f. Muslims Against Sharia).

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Wheat-Decimating Fungus Appears in Southwestern Asia

Puccinia graminis strain Ug99, a particularly virulent strain of the fungus that causes wheat stem rust has made it across the Arabian Peninsula. One variant of Ug99 reported from Kenya last year has already overcome genetically-engineered resistance in its host. As of last December, the strain had jumped across the Red Sea from Ethiopia to Yemen. the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reported yesterday that the fungus has now been found in Iran for the first time.

Iran finds wheat fungus, threat to region - FAO

Iran has detected a 'wheat rust' fungus in its crops that poses a potential threat for production there and in surrounding countries, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation said on Wednesday.

Iran informed FAO that it had discovered Ug99 -- a virulent fungus strain first detected in Uganda in 1999 -- in the west of the country...

"Countries east of Iran, like Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, all major wheat producers, are most threatened by the fungus and should be on high alert," FAO said...

The spread of the wheat disease comes as world wheat stocks are already at 30-year lows and prices are soaring to record highs. A researcher at Oregon State University said the U.S. wheat crop could be hit by the fungus within the next four to five years.

The article doesn't specify whether this is normal Ug99 or the even more destructive variant reported from Kenya last year, but that's largely a matter of splitting hairs; plain old Ug99 already has the potential to affect 80% of the world's cultivated wheat. The newly-evolved Kenyan variant might take out another 5 or 10%. Any way you slice it, that's bad news.

I don't know what, if anything, the US is doing about this as a whole, though there must be some research going on here to figure out how to stop the fungus from hitting our own crops. Three to four years isn't a very long time, and fungal spores can certainly travel long distances in a short while. There's not much reason that a fungus that made it to Asia couldn't spring up almost overnight in North America. Even if the US government is worrying about preventing the spread of P. graminis here, though, it would make good sense to be involved with stopping it in Asia before it spreads further into Central Asia and China. Out of purely humanitarian concerns first, but also because a serious wheat shortage could touch off hostilities and cause economic hardships that would affect the whole world. To the extent that the US can be of help — not to take anything away from the Chinese and Japanese, who have much more research in mycology underway than we do — we should be of help, without regard to political considerations.

That last sentence might be asking too much, of course, out of the ideologues we have in command right now. We probably won't do anything about the situation unless and until it becomes a problem right here.

Here is a recent research paper wherein US-cultivated winter wheat varieties are tested for resistance to the new P. graminis strain. The results aren't exactly good news. A 2005 assessment of the risks to various parts of the world and strategies for control is also available. Again, it's not exactly good news for anybody, and hopefully it has been a real wake-up call.

Where things stand at the genetic level can be assessed at the USDA grain genes site.

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Byrne's Brilliant

I've been reading David Byrne's blog almost since he started it, but today he wrote what I thought was one of the most insightful things I've seen from him. Here's a link to his entry, which has to do with religious belief and how it can be used to propagandize whole societies. He draws a very sharp link between the radicalized Muslim views of the west encountered along the Afghanistan—Pakistan border and the kinds of charges the American religious right like to level against those who don't agree with them here.

Anyone reading this really ought to click over there now. I wish he allowed comments; I'd like to compliment him on what he's written, but barring that, this is the best I can do.

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Sadder and Scarier

When I was a kid back in the late 1970's and early 1980's, my friends and I believed that we wouldn't live to the age of 30. We thought that nuclear war with the USSR would happen before we had the chance to get that old. There wasn't much point, in our minds, in planning to live to the age at which we were likely to have families and careers and such. Life was all about escaping from that very frightening "reality" by whatever means were at hand. We were wrong, I'm happy to say. I'm still here and, as far as I know, so are they.

Still, the world seems determined now to revert to the way things were in that much scarier time. I don't know how children are reacting to it, or even if they're aware of it. There are so many more distractions now than when I was their age. It must be easier to tune it all out. All we had back then were drugs, essentially. Now there's technology of various sorts, too. One can easily plug things into one's sensory apparatus and remove oneself from their environment, hiding behind iPod and cell phone and DVD and such. Does anybody watch the new anymore? I can't blame them if they don't. I still keep up, though.

One item that has really grabbed my attention in the last couple of days is the conspiracy to blow up JFK airport in New York. It has come out that there is a tie to Trinidad in this, and it worries me on a personal level. First, I worry because I love Trinidad. I spent time there some six years ago and it became my favorite place on the planet. The people and the land itself are the most wonderful I have encountered in my life. The only time I encountered overt anti-Americanism on the island was when I wandered into one of the poor parts of Port-of-Spain while looking for a roti shop. Exactly one angry Trini uttered the phrase "Yankee go home" at me, and that was the extent of it. Aside from that one incident, I found myself being invited into homes and Hindu temples and having long conversations with strangers who quickly became friends. One of the things I learned of Trini culture was its general openness. This is a place where Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Orisha cooperated on staging public festivals for one another's holidays. It's sad to think that there could be murderous extremists in such a place. For it to come out now is also sad to me because I had intended and still do) to go back there in the next couple of years to do field work on cataloging the fungal flora of the rain forest that still covers half the island.

But again, Trinidad had (and I assume still has) a tremendous gulf between rich and poor. I saw people dying of AIDS lying on flattened cardboard boxes just outside the downtown business section of Port of Spain. Two of the people whom I met were Nizam Mohammed and his daughter Shelly, the former being a vice president of Halliburton. Trinidad is blessed with a huge and somewhat untapped reserve of natural gas, and of course Halliburton can thus extract a great deal of wealth to ship off overseas, and not nearly a fair amount goes back to Trinidad itself. Perhaps that imbalance might have to do with why a small segment of the Muslim population of that nation is becoming more radical. I don't know this, but I do suspect it as a cause. I still believe, in any case, that Trinis are the sweetest people on the planet, and I still plan to go back there when the time comes. I'll take my chances. I just don't want Americans here at home to start looking at Trini immigrants (and there is a good number of them in New York) as all being suspect because of the action of one or two. Americans can go overboard with these things at the drop of a hat, and it would be a great shame upon the USA if they did that to Trinis at home and abroad.

Moreover, the nuclear issue raises its head again. Iran, it is said by our government (and it may or may not be true) is working to develop a nuclear arsenal. Pakistan already has one, albeit a small one at present. That Pakistan has such weapons should scare the hell out of us. Musharraf is himself a dictator who seized power in a coup. He has become increasingly unpopular and been subject to several assassination attempts. Sooner or later, his government is going to come down, and then who knows who will get control of those weapons and how prone they'll be to launching an attack on India, which itself has an arsenal. Still, the American government seems to be just fine with Pakistan proliferating weapons of mass destruction, so long as they seem on the surface to be helping to hold back the rising tide of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Baluchistan and Waziristan. It's the same stupid game that has gotten us into so much trouble over the years; we make monsters elsewhere in the world and then cry bloody murder when those monsters come to roost here. Why allow them to be born in the first place?

To add to that awful situation, now our fearless leader (fearlessness is often a symptom of psychopathology) and his cronies in ShrubCo. are going gangbusters to develop a "nuclear defense shield" that threatens Russia. At one time not long ago, Dubya met up with Vladimir Putin and declared that he'd looked into Putin's eyes, seen his soul, and found him to be a genuinely good man cut from the same cloth as Bush himself. Perhaps that last part is true; both seem to enjoy surrounding themselves with secrecy and using questionable methods to achieve their goals. Still, here what Putin had to say recently about the US putting its "shield" into Europe:

"If a new missile-defense system will be deployed in Europe, then we need to warn you today that we will come with a response," Putin said. "We have to ensure our security, and we are not the initiator of this process."

— Source

Most people in Eastern Europe oppose the building of such a shield, and I find it dubious whether the US needs one. Aside from Russia, nobody over there has weapons capable of reaching the US, or even Western Europe. The most advanced arsenals, in fact, are in Pakistan and India, not in Iran or any countries with major terrorist threats. Who are we shielding whom from, then? Is America going to draw the Iron Curtain back down across Eastern Europe and cram our interests down the throats of those countries in a manner not terribly different than that of the USSR only a few decades ago? If we do, we may well see a backlash in that part of the world, I think. The irony that the American administration would do this precisely to counter the monsters we created in Central Asia and the Middle East should be screaming to us how wrong our course has been.

We're going backwards. The US is not making the world a safer place. If we are sliding into a new Cold War where superpowers point missiles at one another and coldly calculate mutual assured destruction, then all we have achieved is the ultimate failure. If we are instigating radicalization from the Caribbean to the Balkans, we will succeed only in recreating a terrible climate across the globe, just like the one I remember all too clearly. I hope for all of us that we aren't going to have a planet upon which children grow up believing that they won't live to age 30. Not that we already don't; if we didn't, nobody would be strapping on explosive vests and destroying markets in Baghdad and Jerusalem. All the missile shields and military technology in the world can't change that situation. The only answer to it is to create hope, and that comes about by fostering societies in which people feel like there is a future for them to live for. Yes, there will always be extremists and killers. We will never be absolutely safe; that's the human condition. Still, the idea should be to minimize that, not make it worse. That's what we're doing right now, though. We're making it worse. The world is getting sadder and scarier. When does the American administration, with all it's "culture of life" rhetorix, wake up and realize that no culture life has ever existed under the nightmare mushroom-shaped cloud of impending incineration nor can ever take root in decades-old refugee camps nor in nations where dictators grab power and start concentrating ²³⁵U?

Haven't we been down this road before within recent memory, and why can't these idiots figure out that we've planted our feet on it once again?

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