Catch 22 Development

"I'm forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air.
 They fly so high, they reach the sky,
 And like my dreams, they fade and die." 
When West Ham United fans sing these lines, they probably rue all the missed opportunities that have been responsible for their mediocrity in the Premier League today. But fear not, my readers, this is not a historical account of West Ham United. Nor is it a ramble about the football culture of England. This, my friends, is a treatise on the People's Republic of China.
Because to me, nothing is as inevitable as the bursting of the China bubble. Think about it. For 3000 years, every time somebody told people what to do, that somebody eventually became a badly mutilated corpse. Unless, of course, the people had worse things to worry about, like the Black Death, or a World War, a famine or the United States of America. As soon as these temporary inconveniences passed by, the country's leader passed away, usually after a goodish deal of torture and/or humiliation.
Today, very few countries have such leaders, and China is clearly the most developed among them. North Koreans, for instance, have the US Army as well as large scale poverty and underdevelopment to worry about. So Kim Jong-Il has become 'The Dear Leader' of the DPRK, and he's not losing any sleep at night.
China, on the other hand, is a completely different story. Most Chinese people have food to eat, clothes to wear and houses to live in. And with the world's largest Army, security is now a non-issue. But of course, being human, they now want more. And more. Smartphones? Check. Mercs? Check. Swiss watches, French wines, Italian suits? Check-eroo. Freedom? The question hangs. 
It's not that nobody's asked that question in the last 60 years - of course they have. The problem was that they were too few in number. The well-educated elite were vastly outnumbered by the starving, homeless and illiterate populace. Their cries for freedom simply didn't matter because the average Chinese guy in the '70s hardly had enough time to worry about his next meal, let alone the way his government ruled him. Today, however, the Chinese public education system has brought about a sea change in the mentality of each and every single citizen. Illiteracy has fallen from over 80 percent down to five percent. Today, 250 million Chinese get three levels of school education(elementary, junior and senior high school). Net elementary school enrolment has reached 98.9 percent, and the gross enrolment rate in junior high schools 94.1 percent. With education, every single man can form an opinion on the world around him, and he can now safely worry about his government, knowing that a day off from work doesn't mean going to bed hungry.
And that's when things start to turn sour. Uncomfortable questions will be asked by increasingly large numbers of people. The Government will neither be able to silence the askers nor will it be able to provide satisfactory answers to their questions. If a hundred thousand students in 1989 could keep Tiananmen Square forever engraved in the world's memories, imagine what 250 million of them could do now. It's only a matter of time.
The most maddening aspect of it all is that the Chinese government will have brought it all upon itself. If Chinese leaders had kept the entire country poor, starving and homeless, this won't happen in a million years. But no, they wanted to go full speed ahead with development. If that was the case, then a shift from authoritarianism should have been made long, long ago. 
Unfortunately, if the Universe has one flat rule, it's that you can't have the best of everything.
If you give a football to Lionel Messi, he'll keep it right between his legs and blitz through the opposition before finding the back of the net. If you were to give it to Frank Lampard, he'd put his boot through it and drill a hole in the net before you know it. But if you gave it to, say, Salomon Kalou, he'd probably try running with it, but sooner or later, he'd push the ball too far and the inevitable slide in from the defender would take the ball away from him. If you show the defender too much of the ball, he'll pounce immediately. And if you show your people too much of freedom, they'll pounce on it too. Sooner or later. 
So now the Chinese government can't do a thing. Quelling the revolutionary instincts of the people will be as impossible as taking back the education they've given their people. They're sitting on a rainbow, but what they don't know is that there's a big, ugly mess at the end of it. Not only will they be faced with a political overhaul, they'll also have to deal with a complete economic breakdown. 
And so I guess it's safe to say that every single road leads to doom for the Chinese.
In a typically train of thought, I am now certain that no matter how fast China develops, they will but hasten their own death, at least in this incarnation. And I'm feeling this deep-seated satisfaction in knowing that. 
I haven't had a Chinese reader yet, but if you're Chinese and reading this, there's nothing more I can say than "I'm sorry dude, all the best."
And if you're Indian, "Aane de, bhai! Aane de!".


- bala

Drug problem? What drug problem?

What comes to your mind first when you read the word "drugs"? Do you think of an addict, immersed in a world of his own making? Or of a person slowly killing himself, one dose at a time? Of faces in the news, accompanied by pictures of huge shipments of a mysterious white powder?

I think of soldiers in a far-off jungle, fighting heavily armed criminals and burning down plantations.

However, any one of the above visions is disturbing, to say the least. I happened to muse a little on the subject, and here are my views, for what they're worth.

For modern civilization to be born, humanity had to make a fundamental distinction. We had to decide who was an adult, and who was not. By 'adult', we mean someone who is wholly responsible for his actions, knows what he's doing and can be trusted to fit into society to a moderate degree.

Once we made this distinction, it was much easier for society to punish the errants, care for the needy and reject the misfits. Today, we define an adult as anyone over the age of 18 who is mentally fit. This person can elect governments, drive motor vehicles, buy firearms and, most importantly, buy and drink alcohol. So if I am over the age of 18 and decide that I would like a drink, the Government of India is not stopping me in any way. However, I may find alcohol unpleasant, realize the risk of addiction, and refrain from drinking it of my own accord. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of teetotalers in the world, and they must surely reason it out so.

Why, then, is the same logic not applied to narcotics? I never understood why alcohol and drugs are not met with the same set of control measures. Alcohol makes me happy and relaxed. Drugs make me happy and relaxed. Alcohol gives me a deadly hangover the next morning. Drugs give me deadly withdrawal symptoms soon enough. Too much alcohol makes me a menace to society. Too much of any drug makes me a menace to society. If I'm addicted, I'll kill for a bottle of alcohol. And of course, the same applies to narcotics. They are similar in so many ways, yet the steps we take against them are so different.

An adult can walk into a pub, flash his ID and get unlimited alcohol. It's hard to imagine a similar situation with narcotics.

One might argue that this is so because drugs are infinitely more potent than alcohol in almost every way. This is true, but again, I see a double-standard. Why are there similar restrictions in place on beer and hard liquor, then?

At the end of the day, I am still completely clueless. There must be something I don't know, or somebody must surely have raised this issue in the 200-odd years in which governments have implemented this flawed policy.

In the 1980s and 90s, it was Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel which ruled the world in terms of the narcotics trade. However, the Columbian government saw to it that his reign (and life) was cut short quite abruptly. This led to the rise of the Mexican cartels - less powerful individually, but a fearsome prospect collectively. The sheer chaos of 10 or 15 cartels fighting multiple wars simply overwhelmed the Mexican administration. Each cartel fought other cartels for territory, and they all battled the government for survival. This was then compounded by corruption on a gigantic scale in the Mexican police, so much that the chief of Mexican Judicial Police switched sides to become a drug lord himself.

All this led to the calling in of the Army, always a bad idea. If you release troops into your own territory, there's always going to be trouble. The Army fought bitterly with the cartels, but also caused hundreds of civilian casualties.

The US Government then entered the fray, tightening up the Mexican border and making trafficking into the US almost impossible.

However, as the saying goes, when one door closes, another opens.

Like the financial corporations 20 years before them, the cartels realized that there was only one way out when their home market was choked - expansion. This was the second wave of globalization, except that no Economics textbook will ever be written about it.

It slowly dawned on the cartels that the good people of Europe were willing to pay double the US rate for cocaine. Business, as they say, is business. And so they began to expand. They set up camp in West Africa, tying up with local gangs for support. Sounds like your textbook example of a multinational?

From West Africa, they smuggled drugs to Spain in small shipments, and from there to the rest of Europe. And voila, Columbian cocaine could now be had (for the right price) in the picturesque calm of the Swiss Alps.

So what if gang violence spiked in Africa and drug use rose in Europe? The US doesn't care, right?

Anyway, my point is, world governments are spending millions of dollars, thousands of military as well as civilian lives, in pursuit of the un-gettable. Is it really worth paying that price for a few tonnes of narcotics and a couple of drug lords?

Narcotics have, for all intents and purposes, ceased to be a problem in today's world. It is now the non-availability of drugs that is a problem. People fight over drugs. They traffic arms in exchange for drugs. They traffic people for drugs. All things considered, people will do things far more illegal than drug trafficking, in order to get their hands on what they want.

So now the solution is not drug restriction - it's the opposite. Let us use the money we would have spent shooting drug lords, on implementing a comprehensive drug awareness programme. Not just in schools and colleges, but even in workplaces and public areas.

Instead of denying the masses narcotic substances, let us give them the choice. They are, after all, responsible adults, who know what's good for themselves and what's not. If they choose the path of gradual degeneration and decay, then so be it. Let them die out like the chronic alcoholics of today. If they choose to shun narcotics in favour of a life which they can actually remember, then let them do so. Governments can ask drug cartels to lay down their weapons and do business out in the open, treating them as normal companies. If the extremists of Assam could be persuaded to desist from violence, then an organisation with as much attraction to money as a drug cartel should be easy.

By de-linking drugs and organized crime, we will be cutting off an integral part of the operations of crime syndicates around the world. Their easiest source of income will now be away from their grasp, and call me an insane optimist, but they might probably die out too, as a result.

I hope you've either started asking the same questions as me, or got frustrated to the point of wanting to punch me in the face a good few times. Either way, leave a comment :)

bala

Blackwater or Red Blood?

His name is Prince, and he has hundreds of elite, highly trained and heavily armed soldiers under his command. Does he sound like a medieval knight? Well, then, think of this. His soldiers don't carry swords and shields - they are equipped with M-16 and AK-47 assault rifles, and ride around not on war-horses, but their own custom-built Armoured Personnel Carriers. I'm not talking about the days of Sir Lancelot and King Arthur - I'm talking about Erik Prince, and Blackwater Worldwide.

Blackwater, now known as 'Xe', is a "Private Military Firm". Apparently, the mercenary armies of the centuries gone by have decided to adopt a new name, and Erik Prince's organisation is the foremost example of this trend.

According to the Geneva Convention of 1949, a mercenary is defined as "A person who takes part in an armed conflict, who is not a national or a party to the conflict, and is motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and, in fact, is promised, by or on behalf of a party to the conflict, material compensation substantially in excess of that promised or paid to combatants of similar ranks and functions in the armed forces of said Party.

Blackwater's staff fulfill every single criterion in the above definition - their salaries are said to be higher than the soldiers that comprise the US Army, and they have no single national identity - they are ethnically diverse, and are citizens of a number of countries, ranging from the Philippines to the USA. Unaffiliated to any single country, they are essentially guns for hire, and very, very powerful guns, at that.

Blackwater started life in 1997, when ex-US Navy SEAL Erik Prince bought 6000 acres of land in North Carolina, for the express purpose of building and operating a training ground for elite warriors.

They were then given a contract by the US Department of Defense to protect US diplomats serving in Iraq. An exact headcount of Blackwater personnel in Iraq is unavailable, but estimates range from 20,000 to 100,000 troops. Their functions then diversified to include protecting supply convoys in the troubled Kurdistan region, providing air-dropped supplies to US soldiers in Afghanistan, and assisting in the management of Hurricane Katrina.

There have since been numerous allegations over the reckless disregard for human life exhibited by the company's forces - from shooting at civilians to firing about a hundred rounds into an unarmed vehicle, just because it was "moving in a suspicious manner".

By all accounts, Blackwater troops appear to be nothing more than a band of trigger-happy mercenaries, with alcohol and drug addictions to boot.

There have been instances in which the US government has been forced to acknowledge the above statement, at least in part. The number of Iraqi civilians killed by Blackwater mercenaries is far too high to be overlooked or justified. The Iraqi government, too, has had enough of the 'shoot first, ask questions later' attitude displayed by the mercenaries in such abundance.

The movie Hitman portrays an organisation like Blackwater - "An organisation which takes no sides, but has ties to every major government. An organisation that specializes in the art of killing without being seen, an organisation which trains and operates professional assassins."

Well, the last part may not apply, but Blackwater is exactly like the Organisation in Hitman. However, instead of moving heaven and earth to seek and destroy such an organisation, today's governments are actually employing them.

Just think of the implications. Until the advent of Blackwater, any military force of reasonable size was accountable to a government, usually democratic. Those armies that did not justify their actions to their people were almost immediately neutralized by organisations like NATO and the UN, like the case of Saddam Hussain or Slobodan Milosevic. Still others, like Muammar Gadaffi, were treated with caution, and their actions were carefully monitored. The underlying principles that defined these 'rogue' armies were sound - they went to war for very few reasons - territorial gain, or for a resource-rich region. In both cases, the identities of the belligerents were clearly defined - shooting a soldier in enemy uniform meant shooting at the enemy's institutions. Even in the case of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, the definition of friend or foe was extremely clear - in fact, more so than in case of conventional war. This is because the average terrorist is much more motivated to fight for his cause than the average conscript. A terrorist knows where his loyalties lie, and hence, a terrorist is much easier to identify as an enemy.

However, the case is different with mercenaries. Here, you have a sizeable army, under the control of a man or a group of people who have no clear agenda - they are completely unpredictable. Also, they appear accountable to no one - even when it was clear that Blackwater forces had killed innocent civilians, the US government was unable to take any action. Even scarier is the incident in which Blackwater mercenaries shot and killed a member of the Iraqi vice-presidential guard. The employee who fired the shots was whisked out of the country, and currently lives a comfortable life in Seattle, Washington. The US government couldn't do anything about it, and actually assisted in finding him a job for the next few years.

So ask yourselves, what kind of barbarian world do we live in? A world where money can get you your own personal army? A world in which private armies are actually encouraged by governments? For decades, the US has played the role of policeman and peacemaker in trouble spots around the world. True, it has had its share of failures in this area. However, employing Blackwater is tantamount to breaking the 1989 UN Mercenary Convention, which explicitly prohibits the recruitment and financing of mercenaries.

It remains to be seen how the alarmed screams of a few independent citizens helps the US see sense - it is, after all, a task at which several vastly more powerful agencies have singularly failed, with spectacular results.

If Al-Qaeda and 9/11 were the consequences of the US Government's misadventures in the 1980s, one can but wonder what the result of the current one will be.

As a footnote, let me say that Erik Prince has sold Blackwater, and now lives in Abu Dhabi, wallowing in the wealth that is proof of the US Government's stupidity.

bala