And This Too Is Art

June 2007

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A woman lying on a stage made to look like a bedroom, completely naked, with a small dead pig draped over her, which she cuts with a knife. What would you call this?
Crazy?
Perhaps.
Exhibitionist?
Certainly.
Art?
I wouldn't say so, would you?
Well, what do I know? 
Kira O'Reilly not only did it, she got paid for it as well. From taxpayers' funds.
Now we know the future of art...
I think I'll stick to being a dinosaur.

The Last King Of Scotland

No, this is not a review of the film which got Forest Whitaker an Oscar – I have not watched it (if anyone has, I'd like feedback). But it did spark off a train of thought.

In the first place, Forest Whitaker, whom I first saw in “Platoon”, is someone whom I’ve long thought underrated as an actor. Certainly, looking at some of the people who have won best actor awards in recent years, one would get the idea that he should have won some time earlier. Just like Denzel Washington, who, also, had to wait inordinately long before winning an Oscar.

Of course, there is the little fact that these two men had their own low points – ifWashington acted in “Glory” and “Malcolm X”, he also acted in “Courage Under Fire”; and Whitaker may have done “Platoon” and “Good Morning Vietnam” but he also did “Phone Booth”. That said, I must admit I enjoyed “Phone Booth”. It was so ridiculous it was funny. I watched it more than once.

Well, to get back to what I wanted to talk about, “the last king of Scotland” was

"His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular."

Rather a grandiose title for a man who got noticed and promoted because of his gift for sucking up to his British superiors, being a keen footballer and boxer, and someone who got his nickname “Dada” because of his standard excuse whenever a woman was found in his tent – she was his dada (sister in KiSwahili). It’s kind of easy to think Amin was a cross between buffoon and homicidal maniac, but it should be remembered that his predecessor, Milton Obote, was so awful that the world heaved a sigh of relief when Amin took over in a military coup; and that Amin’s fall did not end violence and civil war in Uganda; and that the current Ugandan government of Youweri Museweni is as responsible as anyone else in stoking the flames of Congo’s never-ending civil war.

Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

An Inconvenient Truth

From May 2007

(I'm stealing Malcolm's idea and inventing a new tag "hero" for Hugo Chavez)

Yesterday I was reading, in the newspaper, some “columnist” or other who, apropos of the faltering Nuclear Deal, said that it was in India’s interests to be on the right side of the world’s “sole superpower” rather than “jokers like Chavez”.

Some joker, Hugo Chavez.

Winner of repeated elections against an opposition overtly supported, funded and advised by Washington (his last election win, in 2006, was so emphatic, in an election that was so free and fair, that even Washington could not pretend it was fixed), restored to power in a popular revolution after a Washington-directed military coup against him, winner over Washington inspired industrial strife and organised street demos, he proves that if you have the people on your side, you can buck Bush and survive.

This is not a convenient truth.

This joker Chavez, by proving himself a beacon of hope for the poor, the neglected, the indigenous of Latin America, has set off a wave of left wing governments being voted to power.

To see the true value of this achievement, it is to be remembered that this was Uncle Sam’s bailiwick and that the US would have tolerated no challenge to its hegemony here; that no people here has the right to choose its own government if it is or might be inimical to Washington (Salvador Allende’s Chile, Grenada, Sandinista Nicaragua, and all the right wing regimes foisted on all these nations including Chavez’ own Venezuela). Chavez proved that people in South and Central America have the right to choose their own leaders, who will not sell out their timber, their oil, their water, their tin to the gringos up north for private gain.

This is not a convenient truth.

This joker Chavez has nationalised his oil industry and now is about to nationalise his banks as well, in a world where Washington is busy privatising its Iraqi colony’s oil supplies and in India public sector bank employees are fighting a rearguard action against privatisation (and while horror stories about the private banks’ harassment of customers, credit card overcharging, etc, are so legion the Supreme Court has taken note of it, somehow these stories never seem to make it to the main pages of newspapers or to the TV channels, and what a big surprise, huh?). Well, to get back to the point, this joker Chavez is on a nationalisation kick, defying history. Capitalism is the only way to progress and prosperity, right? Socialism means poverty, is it not so?

Well, guess again. Chavez, that joker, has paid off his nation’s debt and quit the World Bank (where Paul Wolfowitz, super-Bushie - and another big surprise there, huh? – is fighting desperately to save his job after being caught in flagrante delicto giving his girlfriend an illegal salary raise and a transfer) and the International Monetary Forum. How many small countries who have in recent days trodden the capitalist path written out for them in Washington have not sunk deeper into poverty? Is there a single one?

This joker Chavez proves socialism works.

This is not a convenient truth.

This joker Chavez, when he came to India a couple of years ago, got a hero’s welcome from students and common people, not the protests and the cold shoulder that met Bush last year. This proves you don’t have to come from a big country to be known, respected, and loved, much to the chagrin of the pro-US cabal in our Foreign Ministry.

That is not a convenient truth.

This joker Chavez is the only democratically elected political leader I know of who has, consistently, done what he promised to do after being elected back to power.

This proves that politicians who continuously plead the pressures of circumstances outside their control to show why they can’t fulfil their promises are lying. If they want, they can. If they don’t, it’s because they don’t want.

And that is one hell of an inconvenient truth.

In fact, this joker Chavez is a living inconvenient truth in himself.

Treading on Eggshells: the curse of the landmine

Let's just imagine.
Imagine you're a little boy, oh, say, ten years old. You're a farmer's son, and in your time off from school you do odd chores and work in the field. You're pretty lucky that way - your parents never had the luxury of school, themselves, but they're putting you through it. Of course you still have to help out, but you don't work morning to night, all day, every day.
Got it? Got the picture in your mind's eye?
Good.
Now...
So, one morning - it's a holiday - you go out with the family cow and her calf to the field, to let them graze. It's early winter, chilly, the mist heavy on the ground, and no cultivation right now. The ground is fallow. Over to the west the border where, a couple of years ago, the soldiers had dug their trenches is now bare as it ever was, and is still shrouded in darkness. You were too little to remember well that time when your parents were prevented from going to the field to work, because it had been taken by the military for their own purposes. They had kept it a year, "in the national interest". Then they had done things to it, dug around, and then they had gone away.
You hardly remember that time.
The mist lies low on the ground - you can't even clearly see the ground you are walking on. You pull your shawl around you, and shiver. Let the cow and calf eat, then you'll take them back to their shed, tie them to the post, and go for your breakfast. That's what you think of.
And the next moment:
Suddenly you are hit by a terrific blow. It's a blow you could never, ever, have expected, because it comes up at you from below, from the solid ground. One moment you are walking along, shivering, still half asleep, wanting your milky tea; the very next, you are suddenly flat on your back, watching the sky go grey and the world get dizzy as your consciousness fades from blood loss...
You come to, much, much later, in an ill-equipped local hospital. You wake topain. Pain such as you have never known, pain that is all you can think about, pain that the medicines do little to alleviate.
Some day, the pain will go away. The physical pain. Then the other sort of pain will begin...
The pain of how to go through life with one leg amputated at the knee. As part of a poor rural farmer's family, which has no resources to adequately treat your injuries, or buy you a proper false leg. And of course, with no  guarantee that it will not happen again, to the other leg as well.
Imagined it? It happens -  somewhere in the world - every day.
Welcome to the world of the  anti-personnel landmine.
What do you do when a war is over, or when it has been averted at the last moment? You withdraw your forces from the battlefield, do you not? And you sort of remove left over weaponry, so far as possible, so people don't keep getting blown away half a century from, now, do you not?
Well, where landmines are concerned, not.
Unlike the naval mine, which by international law is supposed to deactivate itself after a specific period, no such law exists for anti-personnel land mines. And being cheap, destructive force multipliers, they are extremely popular as weapons in "uneven wars" where one side is either much weaker than the other or wants to adopt a defensive attitude, or even just as a terror weapon. They are more often than not intended to injure, not kill outright, because an injured man is more of a burden on the enemy than a dead man. At the same time, cased in plastic, they are extremely difficult to detect. And once the war is over, they will continue, on and on, to injure noncombatants, and often, to kill. And, of course, the most prominent victims of mines are those who have no alternative but to put themselves at risk - the poor who must claw a living from the land. Who cannot afford treatment either.
India launched a year long military demonstration called "Operation Parakram" in 2001-02 on the Pakistan border. Although this demonstration was a spectacularblunder and had never seriously been intended as preparation for war, it did involve the laying of many thousands of anti-personnel landmines along the Pakistani border in order to try and stop Pakistani armed thrusts into Indian territory. By June 2002, casualty levels from landmine blasts had already approached those suffered (by unreliable official figures) during the Kargil "war" of 1999. I recall one of these blasts occurring when mines were being unloaded from a truck and blew up, killing many soldiers. Those mines had fuzes constructed by toy maker Tobu. I don't know if there is a cause and effect relationship there.
After the army was withdrawn from the borders, demining was begun. Now this is not a simple job. When an army (unlike an insurgent force for example) lays mines, it is supposed to make clear records where each mine is so that the mines can be removed later. But demining, compared to laying mines, is expensive. An antipersonnel landmine is very inexpensive to buy.  It costs approximately one dollar to produce one mine. However, clearing an area of antipersonnel landmines is extremely expensive. Costs vary between $1,000 to $3,000 per mine, not to mention the enormous human, social and ecological consequences of removing the antipersonnel landmines. Also, many mines were no longer where they had been laid. Snow (in Kashmir), rainfall, and even animal burrowing had shifted them from the place they had been laid. Therefore, many were never recovered. Also, as the government has now admitted, demining equipment was not purchased for the army because, for some incomprehensible reason, the army did not think earlier that it would need it.
So, till today, the odd mine continues to blow the legs off an occasional border villager going about his or her business. These mines are often, in fact, shaped like toys or other harmless objects. Thus making them even more dangerous.
Things are of course far worse in such mine hotspots as Afghanistan, where the original enthusiasm post 2001 for demining has given way toindifference. Don't get me wrong - I'm not an anti-landmine fundamentalist, I recognise that they have legitimate military applications - but I think I have the right to join others in insisting that the people who lay these mines must ensure that civilians do not suffer the consequences of their actions, and, those, for years to come.
Given the use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium against civilians, not to mention napalm and Agent Orange, though, fat chance. So, despite the efforts of Heather Mills McCartney (gold-digger or not) and other anti-landmine campaigners, the kids will keep on losing legs.
Like you did, a while ago.

Why India Backed The Myanmarese Junta

(From October 2007)

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I’ve read rather a lot of people writing about Myanmar and why India should help the pro-democracy movement (such as it is) there.

On the surface, it’s common sense. We profess to be a democracy. We should support other democracies. Of course, in reality the argument is dangerously facile, as the Bush regime’s policies have consistently demonstrated. But still the point stands. Myanmar has got a terrible regime, a really vile one, no doubts about that. It’s brutal, opaque, contemptuous of its own people and corrupt to the core (but, uh, apart from Myanmar, which other countries could I name with precisely the same features in their governments?) – nobody, except maybe the junta itself, denies that. Fine.

So, the choice should be simple, right? Help anyone and everyone who wants to overthrow the regime.

Only it’s not that easy.

India is helping the junta economically, infrastructurally, and militarily.India is backing it all the way.

Now, before I go further, so there isn’t any doubt about what my personal feelings are, let me make my stand clear.

While I’m not a supporter of venal military regimes, I am aware ofIndia’s reasons for backing the Myanmar dictatorship. And for once I understand them.

Let’s see the actual situation (as per India’s view) in Myanmar.

First, India does not think Aung San Suu Kyi will ever get to power any time soon, and probably never. The reason for this is that the junta is well-versed in the art of crushing public protest. Mass demonstrations may have brought down the odd East European regime, but they will achieve absolutely nothing against a government that is willing to use any amount of lethal force necessary to stay in power. In order to do that, the junta has even deliberately moved its capital from Yangon to Naypyidaw, so that the government is separated from the people and the army will not hesitate to fire on a citizenry it does not consider as part of itself. And since it’s not a single-man dictatorship, the death or incapacitation of one general will simply mean another moves up to fill the slot. So, conventional colour coded Western paid and backed “revolutions” are not going to work. Ergo, India has to live with the regime or help overthrow it.

How would India overthrow it? Would sanctions work? Of course not: sanctions only hurt poor people and actually force them to support the government, since it becomes a lifeline for them. A sanction-targeted people are a people suffering not for their own fault and who will support the government which is actually at fault, but which will just garner their support. And for other reasons, namely Myanmar’s natural resources, neither ASEAN nor India want it sanctioned.

Then, what about backing violent rebellions? From 1988 to 1991, India was a total supporter of Suu Kyi and even hosted and feted Myanmarese hijackers instead of handing them over to justice, something that would come back to haunt India in 1999 when Pakistani hijackers forced an Indian plane to Taliban controlled Afghanistan. India allowed the Myanmarese emigres to train and arm for a “freedom struggle”. All this achieved…nothing. All it did was alienate the regime.

So what were the results of alienating the regime? The immediate result was the sharply increased influence of China. HistoricallyMyanmar’s people weren’t pro-China. They are more South Asians than South East Asians and till the 1930s Myanmar was an administrative part of British India. All that India did was push them into China’s arms. And the Indian establishment is – whatever it says on the surface – hostile to China.

Now, let’s see what Myanmar can offer India.

Despite all the talk of the Nuclear Deal, now collapsing, India actually is going to depend on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future to meet its energy needs. A lot of the energy has to come from natural gas. The closest source of natural gas that exists close to India is in Myanmar.Myanmar needs money, India needs gas.

Do you still need me to spell that part of it out?

The second reason is the geopolitics of North East India. This part of the country is riddled with insurgencies. Many of the insurgent groups have set up bases in the parts of North Western Myanmar where the regime’s control is, let us say, less than absolute. All of the Baptist Naga rebel groups of North Eastern India have camps in Myanmar, and have developed close linkages with the Kachin narco-terrorist gangs of Myanmar (like the Kachin Independence Army) and the Karens further south. The KIA also hosts other Indian terrorist groups like the People’s Revolutionary Army of Kangleipak (PREPAK), United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) and many others. The KIA arms and trains these groups for a fee and is a major supporter of jade smuggling, gun running, and opium production. The terrain being heavily forested and mountainous, it’s difficult for the Myanmarese to destroy their terrorists because they flee over to India; and Indian terrorists, similarly pressed, cross over to Myanmar. The only way to crush the enemies India and Myanmar have in common is to co-operate militarily. Clear so far?

The third part of it is the fact that – at long last – the Indian government is realising the fairly obvious fact that the North East of India is a ready-made gateway to the thriving market economies of South East Asia. Hanoi is actually, as the crow flies, closer to me as I write this than New Delhi, the national capital, is. And if India was to use that gateway, the easiest way was to develop road and rail linkages through Myanmar. And also a large part of North East India’s economy is integrated with that of Myanmar. In this town it’s easy to buy Myanmarese processed fruit and textiles, for instance. That’s another good reason to develop the border crossing, at a place called Moreh in Manipur state, and infrastructure in Myanmar. It’s just national self-interest.

So these are the excellent reasons Delhi has for sucking up to the junta in Naypyidaw.

There are the counter-arguments of course. Most of them come from theoreticians sitting far from the action.  

I’ve read a pair of Indians “intellectuals” in the US writing of how a democratic “Burma” would be all-inclusive and the Karens and Kachins would immediately disarm and become peace-loving villagers. It was good for a hearty laugh. India is a democracy; the state of Nagaland, for instance, not only has its own freely elected legislature but no one but an ethnic Naga can be elected to it. No one but an ethnic Naga can even visit the state without getting prior permission (the Inner Line Permit). Yet Nagaland is insurgency-stricken and very large parts of it are ruled by factions of the terrorist National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN). Manipur state, just to the south, is even worse. Why should India have a “million mutinies now” as a democracy? For that matter, how can the Basque separatist group ETA still exist in democratic Spain? What about the IRA’s decades of revolution against Britain? Why is democratic Sri Lanka cut in two by civil war? All-inclusive democracies can’t have insurgencies? Spare me.

Then there are the lot who say a democratic Myanmar should beIndia’s friend. The experience of other democratic states in South Asia hasn’t exactly made Indian governments enthusiastic about it. Democratic Sri Lankan governments are bitterly hostile to India, and in Pakistan military governments have been less troublesome to this country than its occasional democratic regimes. The exact same thing holds for Bangladesh. Democratic rulers have always raised the fear of the Indian bogeyman to hold on to power. Why should India assume Aung San Suu Kyi will be any different?

There was yet someone else who said Myanmar never actually took any measures against Indian rebels, that it was all a bluff. Well, a senior member of the Khaplang faction of the NSCN recently admitted that the terrorist group had lost many bases to the junta’s army in the recent past, but that after the demonstrations in Yangonthe army had been withdrawn. So this puts the lie to that particular claim.

As I said, these are the Indian government’s reasons for supporting the Myanmarese junta. I can understand them, though not necessarily share them whole-heartedly. I have a couple of points of my own to add.

First, I’m deeply suspicious of dynastic politicians like Suu Kyi. They have utterly ruined, and are ruining, South Asia. Myanmar’s people may even be better off as they are.

Then, India has no business interfering in other countries’ internal affairs. What with our puppet “prime minister” and total criminalisation of politics, we can have nothing to say about that. We can’t possibly be holier than thou.

Also, I don’t really know how much of the information coming out of the country is genuine and how much is propaganda. I do know some of it is pretty dodgy, like a purported interview of an ex-security guard of Suu Kyi’s who was “beaten on his polio-afflicted legs”. What kind of security guard has polio-atrophied legs? And remember the Western media’s lies over Iraq?

And how can we ever continue to support terrorists and hijackers? The policy was insane from the beginning.

It’s all very easy to sit in comfortable surroundings and call for sanctions on Myanmar. But it’s not going to happen, and the junta will remain in place.

Ultimately, sometimes one can’t have what one wants, so one settles for what one has.

El Toro: The Corridas are emptying

From Dec 2006

"Eh, toro, toro," as the matador said in countles Hollywood movies.
Well, no more.
What animal lovers,schoolchildren, and normal human beings failed to halt is now falling  prey, ironically, to market forces - it costs far too much to hold a corrida nowadays, and far too many people stay away.
Here's an article about the demise of the bullfight:

Bullfighting future in doubt

FIONA GOVAN

A horrible cruelty Madrid, Dec. 20: Bullfighting was facing an uncertain future in Spain yesterday with the announcement that the last bullring in Barcelona is to close after failing to draw enough spectators. The rising cost of mounting a spectacle that a growing number of Spaniards view as a cruel and unnecessary part of their culture has forced the promoters of the Monumental Plaza de Toros to cut their losses and look for alternatives uses for the ring. The company which owns the bullring admitted that the falling number of spectators meant that it lost more than £16,000 each time it held a bullfight. The closure next year of the last bullring in Catalonia’s capital city follows that of two others in recent years. Promoters across Spain have seen their profits fall as it becomes ever-more expensive to stage the events. The Spanish Union of Fighting Bull Breeders estimates that it can cost more than £70,000 to stage a corrida with a big- name bullfighter. There are 60 major venues used for bullfights in Spain but many are used more for other activities, such as rock concerts, than for corrida. The industry has been hardest hit in Catalonia, in part because of a growing animal rights movement that has sought to ban a sport it considers “a horrible cruelty”. Two years ago, Barcelona declared itself “an anti-bullfighting city” following a series of public protests and a petition of more than 250,000 Catalan names. Another 38 Catalan municipalities have since followed suit and the Parliament has debated a bill to extend existing animal cruelty laws to include bullfighting. “Historically, the people of Catalonia have been against cruelty to animals and we are at the forefront of a movement that is gradually growing across Spain,” said Manuel Cases, the director of the animal protection group ADDA.

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

But shouldn't we mourn the passing of what is generally held to be a symbol of Spain, a part of the framework of the culture of the Spanish (and Spanish origin) people and nations?
No.
Despite all the (pardon the pun) bullshit spun by Ernest Hemingway (Death in the Afternoon, and more than a few stories) and later by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins (Or I'll Dress You In Mourning) bullfighting has never been other than a brutally cruel, senseless murder of almost defenceless animals.
In order to understand the statement, let's take a look at a typical bullfight.
(Extracts from the bullfighting article on Wikipedia):
In a traditional corrida, three toreros, also called matadores or, in French, toreadores, each fight two out of a total of six bulls, each of which is at least four years old and weighs up to about 600 kg (with a minimum weight limit of 460 kg for the bullrings of the first degree).
Each matador has six assistants — two picadores ("lancers") mounted on horseback, three banderilleros, and a mozo de espada ("sword servant"). Collectively they comprise a cuadrilla or team of bullfighters. However, the whole crew includes also an ayuda (aide to sword servant) and subalternos (subordinates) including at least two peones (pages, singular peón). The apoderado acts as a manager for the cuadrilla negotiating their tours.
(Remember that each of the three matadors will have the entire above team. There are also a lot of what would be called "stagehands" in theatre. Rather a lot of personnel to kill six bovines.)
To continue:
(T)he bull enters the ring to be tested for ferocity by the matador and banderilleros with the magenta and gold capote, or dress cape...In the first stage, the tercio de varas("Lances third"), the behavior of the bull is observed by the matador by the way the bull behaves in the arena and how he attacks the capes, when banderilleros play with the bull with their capes.
After this the matador will himself pass the bull around with the cape (it is not red, incidentally. Bulls are colour blind, so it the common theory that they are infuriated by red is incorrect.) All harmless so far, and if it stopped at this level, why, I'd want to watch too. But hold on.
Then two picadores enter the arena, armed with lances or varas. Each is mounted on a heavily padded and blindfolded horse of unusually large stature. The bull is encouraged to attack the horse which is protected by its padding and generally treats the attack with stoic patience. The way the bull charges the horse provides further important clues to the matador on its bravery and persistence. The picador stabs a mound of muscle on the bull's neck, leading to the animal's first loss of blood. If the picador does his job well, the bull will hold its head and horns lower during the following stages of the fight. This makes him slightly less dangerous while enabling the matador to perform the elegant passes of modern bullfighting. More importantly, this tempering of the bull's strength allows the human to take on substantially more risk.
Actually, the horse is only stoical because it has not the slightest way of seeing the bull or knowing what is going on. In the past the horses were not padded and usually lasted one fight before dying of the goring they received. Note that this "pic"-ing is for the purpose of making the bull easier to fight - so much for the "valour" of the corrida.
In the next stage, the tercio de banderillas ("banderillas third"), the three banderilleros each attempt to plant two barbed sticks (banderillas, literally "little flags" as they are decorated with paper in the local colors) on the bull's flanks. These further weaken the enormous ridges of neck and shoulder muscle, which set fighting bulls apart from ordinary cattle, through loss of blood.
Whenever one reads of the corrida in the descriptions of journalists, they always gush about how "balletic" the placement of the banderillas is. In fact, as even the Lapierre Collins duo pointed out, it's an act of gratuitous cruelty that has little to do with
the last chance to correct or fine-tune the charging tendencies of the bull.
Anyway, sounds logical, doesn't it? You breed an animal with large shoulder muscles for fighting, and then try and cripple those muscles by blood letting and stabbing. Great logic.
Now we go to the terminal phase. By now the bull, hurt and tired, will probably have marked a territory, called querencia, out for itself in the ring and it will not want to leave that area. In this phase, the tercio de muerte ("death third")
the matador re-enters the ring alone with a small red cape or muleta in one hand and a sword in the other. Having dedicated the bull to an individual or the whole audience, he uses his cape to attract the bull in a series of passes, both demonstrating his control over it and risking his life by getting especially close to it. The red colour of the cape is a matter of tradition, as bulls are actually colour blind: they attack moving objects.
Well, about that "risking his life", I have a couple of observations to make. First, the bull is a stranger to fighting. Only such bulls are used that, apart from a test at young calfhood for suitability for fighting prowess, have never fought before - and any bull that survives the corrida is murdered quietly, and legally (I read that it was a pope who began that practice) to make sure it would never fight again. So, a bull suddenly finds itself in a place full of pain and blood, run ragged for a cause it cannot understand, not knowing what is its enemy. It would not exactly be all that much of a danger.
Secondly, a common practice is to shave off the tips of the horns. Although this produces an artificially sharpened point, it also destroys the bull's acute sense of its horns and the space around them. A fighting bull is very dependent on that sense for its use of its horns. If they are shaved, it takes several days before that sense returns. Therefore, the bull is even crippled further for the fight.
Thirdly, whereas the actual third phase is supposed top be sing a heavy sword and a heavy muleta, cheating using a wooden sword (except at the death) and light muleta is usual, thus improving odds further for the matador. 
Anyway:
The faena ("work") is the entire performance with the muleta, which is usually broken down into a series of "tandas" or "series". A typical tanda might consist of three to five basic passes and then a finishing touch, or "remate," such as a "pase de pecho," or "pase de desprecio." The faena ends with a final series of passes in which the matador with a muleta attempts to manoeuvre the bull into a position to stab it between the shoulder blades and through the aorta or heart.
The act of thrusting the sword (estoca or estoque) is called an estocada. A clumsy estocada that fails to give a "quick and clean death" will often raise loud protests from the crowd and may ruin the whole performance. If estocada is not successful, the matador must then perform a descabello and cut the bull's spinal cord with a second sword called verdugo, to kill it instantly and spare the animal pain. Although the matador's final blow is usually fatal, it may take the bull some time to die. A coup de grâce is therefore administered by a peón named a puntillero, using a dagger to further pierce the spinal cord. The matador must kill the bull in fifteen minutes after the first muleta pass, at most.
Which means, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again, hack, stab, do what it takes, but finish the animal. If the bull is not killed within fifteen minutes, it is led off to the corral and murdered there at leisure. Only in very exceptional circumstances might an extremely brave bull be spared - but it is never fought again.
So much for the "spectacle" of the Spanish bullfight.
Is there an alternative? Funnily enough, there is. Both the Portuguese and French have developed forms which are different. The Portuguse form is if anything more cowardly than the Spanish, because the bull is not openly killed in the ring (and there is none of the risk of the matador) but quietly assassinated later in the corral; and the animal's horns are not just shaved, but the tips are chopped off.
In the French form, though, there is no blood and no death. The "matador's" aim is to try and pluck a rosette off the bull's horns within a specified time. Skill and courage. No pain, and the bull can fight for years, and not infrequently carry its rossette undefeated. Now that is a bullfight I could appreciate.
As for the rest, I'll back the bull every time.

How To Avoid Seccessionist Violence

Unless you’ve been living under a stone, you know all there is to know by now about South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Kosovo and probably Kashmir as well. 

You probably have also heard of Uighur separatists in China, Baloch separatists in Pakistan, Tamil separatists in Sri Lanka, the South Sudanese separatist groups, and maybe even the Naga and other separatist groups in North East India. Maybe you even heard of the US Civil War – have you? 

So much violence in so many nations, all for separate nationhood to various disaffected sections.

Let’s not make a mistake – any multi-ethnic, or not necessarily multi-ethnic, nation is prone to secessionism. It may be a democracy (such as the Quebecois in Canada or the Basques in Spain), a “democracy” (such as Kashmir and the North Eastern states of India), an authoritarian state (like the Karens of Myanmar) or an “authoritarian” state (like Chechnya in Russia) – but all of them have been at the receiving end of secessionism. And in most instances said secessionism has been violent, and therefore, in the long run, most of them are doomed to failure. (I am not talking here of out-and-out anticolonialist movements, but of secession from a recognised nation.) But doomed or not, it doesn’t stop them from trying, and in every case it is that nation as a whole that suffers.

Is there any way out of this cycle?

I believe, actually, that there is. 

Every one of these countries that face secessionism have no provision for actual secession; they can allow nations to join, but they will do anything to prevent them leaving and going their separate ways (as I’ve written a few days ago about Kashmir). Therefore, any group unhappy with the way things are going but without the numbers to make its presence felt in normal politics has no option but to rise in armed rebellion if it wants a separate nation that will allow it what it considers its legitimate rights.

When one puts it like that, the solution is self-evident.

It lies in making clear and unambiguous provision for secession by any such group. The provisions should not be too easy; in fact they should be tough and stringent – but not so tough as to be impossible to meet either. Everything should be spelt out, such as the territories the putative new nation may claim, the status of enclaves, if any, the status of territories whose administrative control was transferred to the putative new nation (like Crimea being given to Ukraine by Russia), what happens to military and other government facilities, what proportion of the national finances the new nation will get and what proportion of the national debt it must bear, what happens to ethnic minorities, the terms of payment between the new nation and it parent – all this must be clearly and explicitly mentioned. There can’t be any room for doubt.

Let’s say now that a portion of a nation wishes to secede. The people of the region will first have to vote in an internationally observed plebiscite, in which at least 75% of the population casts valid votes, for independence by a minimum margin of 75%. I think those margins are realistic (in 1952, for instance, more than 99% of the Naga population of India voted for independence in a plebiscite.) Then the decision will have to be ratified by the local parliament or equivalent body of the secessionist region. After that it will have to relinquish control over all territories transferred to it after its accession to the parent nation, while not recovering control over any territories transferred away from it. It will not gain control over any enclaves and will have to allow access to such enclaves by corridors through its own territory (the example here would be Nagorno-Karabakh of Armenia, separated from Armenia proper by Azerbaijan, and in the Indian context, if Kashmir secedes, the road links to Indian controlled Ladakh which will run through Kashmiri territory). It will have to bear a proportion of the national debt in proportion to its contribution to the national economy, and compensate the parent for any bases or facilities the parent loses – all in hard currency equivalents. If minorities are asked to leave, it will have to compensate them, in hard currency – all from the share of the national finances it gets. Now you see how many people will still remain determined to secede after that. If they do, and they can get the votes they want in the plebiscite, then they truly earned independence, are willing to pay for it, and there is no reason why they can’t be let go. If not, well…    

This secession law would be helpful, therefore, in two ways: first, it would point to a real, democratic possibility for peaceful independence if the conditions specified are met, and therefore it would defang any attempt to solve the problem militarily; and also, since it would spell out clearly what independence would mean, it might well persuade a lot of people that they would be better off not trying for something that would leave them worse off than they were already.

But at least in India I doubt if such a thing would ever happen. We’re too much the miser and his hidden hoard of unused gold. 
   

OffGoneIsTan

(From November 2008)

The official line, obviously, is clear: Afghanistan is the terror centre of the world, and the job should be done right this time. Osama bin Laden, wherever he may be, has to be tracked down and killed; and then, by implication, the war against the Taliban can be won, everyone can go home, and peace of a kind fall over the world.

As with all oversimplifications, it’s a puerile line of argument, and in this case reduces a highly complex situation to the level of a black hat/white hat Western. In fact, the situation is beyond complex; it’s attained a condition so intricate as to be virtually beyond solving.

Fourteen months ago, on this blog, I remember writing about the inevitable return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, that they may have had tactical reverses but utilised those to strengthen themselves to win the strategic war, and that the defeat in 2001 was something that the Taliban needed just in order to survive. With apologies to those of you who read the former post, here, I’ll repeat some of the things I’d said then:

Cut to Afghanistan, 2001. Approximately 90% or more of the country was under Taliban control. Just pockets in the extreme north and the Panjshir valley were still with the warlords of the northern Alliance, but these areas had held out so long that they were virtually impregnable.

In the Taliban-controlled south, however, things were not exactly great. The Taliban were under extreme economic pressure due to the mass sanctions against them. Drought ravaged the land. All the fantasies about Unocal-approved gas pipelines from Central Asia had been abandoned because the Americans no longer backed the Taliban as they had in the early days. And, where the Taliban had managed to earn substantial amounts from the sale of poppy products (opium, morphine and heroin) earlier, Mullah Omar had banned poppy growth and the Taliban had almost eradicated it. Yeah – there are some positive things to being an absolute ruler. You can get some things done.

Now, while in the earlier years the people had supported the Taliban simply because they needed security against the murderous and criminal Mujahideen “rulers”, once the security had been provided they needed something else. Once people can live free of the fear of being robbed, raped, or shot if they walked down to the corner shop, they begin to ask for more. Even if you’re a pure Islamic holy warrior host who won’t allow polluting things like culture, you still have to provide food, clothing and shelter for the population, and employment, and education, and other intangibles like satisfaction with life. Right?

It would be difficult for anyone, given the circumstances. For the Taliban, it was an impossibility. Jehadis are piss-poor rulers. Revolutions are all very fine when you’re fighting Western cultural pollution and Mujahideen bandits, but after a time, when all the women are in burqas and all the men have fist length beards, you have to begin filling their bellies and curing their illnesses. The Taliban might have got somewhere had they had something in the way of ruling talent, but they danced to the tune of Mullah Omar, a financial genius of such proportions that he kept the entire national treasury in two tin trunks under his bed in Kandahar. One trunk was full of Afghanis, the other of US dollars (vide Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: The Story of the Afghan Warlords). Some whiz-kid, yes. And while we’re about it remember that Islam already outlaws such things as lending money for interest and so on.

So, it isn’t too surprising that by 2001 the Taliban were creaking and nearing collapse. I’m sure that if they didn’t have the residual civil war to keep them glued together, they would have fallen apart then. As it was, the relative moderates among the Taliban were not exactly happy with Omar’s policies. They didn’t like the Arabs of Osama bin Laden, whom they considered unwelcome foreign interlopers and a millstone round their neck. They wanted engagement with the world, not confrontation. They even, to this end, tried to signal to the US that they would be ready for bin Laden to be conveniently “grabbed” – but the US refused to act. 

Then what happened? 11/9, or, as the Americans put it, 9/11. NATO invaded Afghanistan, and with the help of the Northern Alliance, “toppled” the Taliban. It wasn’t all that much of a “toppling”, the Taliban put up remarkably little fight, melting away into the tribal areas and waiting for the occupation to make a mess of things. Which it obligingly and promptly did, including indiscriminately bombing civilians, handing the nation back to warlords, and moving on to the invasion of Iraq, leaving the Taliban structure intact to fight another day.

And, therefore, today, outside the confines of Kabul, the Taliban have built right back up again, repositioned themselves as "nationalists", and the people, who hate and fear the occupation forces with excellent reason, are turning again to the Taliban as their saviours. There are excellent reasons to think the Taliban will be back in Kabul in some form in the not too distant future, perhaps as part of a “national unity” government, but back, yes, and more radicalised than ever. That’s what you get by gratuitously attacking an enemy which was about to implode anyway.

OK, back to the present. Not even NATO now pretends the Taliban aren’t a major threat. Of course they are...but who are the Taliban, and where do they operate?

A few home truths: in 2001, the Taliban were limited to (most of) Afghanistan and a few staging areas around the Pashtun localities of Pakistan.

Today, the Taliban are in de facto control of most of Southern Afghanistan and have made deep inroads into Pakistan, where they have fought the Pakistani army to a standstill and control so much of the northern stretches of the nation that it has become more of a haven to them than their old holdings in Afghanistan were. 

In 2001, the Taliban were hated by most Afghans in the same way as the Khmer Rouge was hated by most Cambodians, and for the same reason. Revolutionary fervour does not feed the hungry nor clothe the naked. When the Northern Alliance tanks drove into Kabul, magazine covers depicted joyous crowds cheering their throats out.

Today, the Taliban are considered heroic nationalistic freedom fighters; and the erstwhile liberators are back to looting and murdering, or have been quietly put on the shelf.  

In 2001, the Taliban were impoverished and virtually bankrupt, in charge of a nation without agriculture, industry, or anything to earn revenue, even illegally (remember the poppy cultivation had been stopped).

Today, the Taliban are flush with funds from the huge poppy crops which Afghanistan produces, and can pay their fighters far more than the so-called Afghan national army can pay its troops.

In 2001, the Taliban were a relatively homogeneous organisation, which could have been dealt with by  negotiating with a fairly small group of mullahs, Omar at their head.

Today, the Taliban are a medley of various groups of differing ideologies and viewpoints, with no central leadership, no organised structure, and no way of negotiating with them all one one platform, even if one should want to.

Back in 2001, the Taliban were a regressive organisation, against women’s education, music, etc, and easy to categorise as “evil” (but wait – isn’t the ruling regime in Saudi Arabia against the same things, more or less?).

Today, the Taliban speak of the need to let women study and work, and Taliban themselves use TV, the internet, and all the modern tools they used to shun.

In 2001, the Taliban were tottering, and it needed, to quote Hitler, “one good kick and the whole rotten structure  would come crashing down.”

Today, it’s hard to see how the Taliban can lose.

Let’s, before I move on, get a few things more out of the way.

First, you can’t bomb the Taliban into defeat. You can’t bomb it into defeat because in bombing it, you also bomb civilians, even if only unwittingly (and there’s no particular reason to believe the bombing of civilians is being done unwittingly). Since you’re operating in one of the most highly militarised societies in the world, where virtually everyone owns a gun, there’s no clear distinction between a civilian and a militant anyway. Today’s peaceable farmer can just walk into his house and take his AK47 to blow you away tomorrow if you come around to burn his poppy fields. And because you’re operating in a tribalised society with an ancient history of blood feuds, kill one civilian and you run the risk of the entire tribe going over to the enemy. 

Also, the US has shown an incredible slowness to learn about Afghanistan. There is no excuse, after seven years of war, to be still bombing weddings and tribal gatherings, and saying that the militants were using the “civilians as cover” just won’t do. Of course the militants were living in and around the civilians. For reasons I just talked about, there is no clear distinction any more between a civilian and a militant fighter. Since you can’t kill everyone, it seems logical that the better option would be not to unnecessarily piss people off, because when you kill one man, you create a dozen new opponents. But that seems to be something beyond the understanding of the average NATO officer.

What, one might ask, are the Taliban supposed to do to qualify as “not hiding among civilians”? Line up in the open with rifles and be shot down in droves by long range artillery and air strikes? 

Not that the pathetic compensation amount offered those “killed by mistake” by the NATO/US forces in Afghanistan has achieved anything more. As this site points out, the US spent ten times more to rehabilitate sea otters than it spends to succour the family an Afghan civilian killed as “collateral damage”.

No, you can’t bomb the Taliban into defeat. Can you, perhaps, defeat them by flooding the country with troops?

There is one fundamental fact about guerrilla warfare: if the guerrillas avoid being defeated, they win. No guerrilla army can destroy a conventional army by open warfare. You can flood the country with troops, all you’re going to do is present the guerrillas with the targets on which they can mount more attacks. And if you do manage to crush the country into a form of pacification, you’d better be willing to maintain that level of occupation, and pay for it, or else as soon as the pressure is off the guerrillas will raise their heads once more.

Contrary to popular supposition, Afghanistan has been conquered by invaders many times. In fact, I’d be hard put to name an invader who failed to conquer it. But nobody could hold on to it with anything like an economic level of force, because, whatever their many faults, the Afghans just won’t be ruled. That’s all it takes to defeat the most well-entrenched occupation – the refusal to be ruled.

No, you can’t beat the Taliban by flooding the damn country with weapons and troops.

What, actually, is the situation in Afghanistan today? The Taliban control virtually all the southern half of the country. Former UNOCAL employee Hamid Karzai has been reduced to rather less than the mayor of Kabul, and, years after his alleged victory, still depends on American mercenary bodyguards to stop his own people tearing him to pieces. Kabul itself is virtually cut off from the rest of the country, and when Taliban commanders wish to enter the city, incognito, they do. As for the non-Taliban parts of the country, they have fallen back under the control of the warlords, and these warlords (the erstwhile Northern Alliance) have to be kept in good humour to stop them going over to the Taliban. As for the Taliban, they are divided and disorganised, united only by a desire to eject the occupation. 

How can you fight a war under these circumstances? How can you negotiate your way out of a war under these circumstances?

It’s easy to call the Taliban “terrorists”. It’s way easy because it plays on the post 11/9 “all-terrorists-are-evildoer-Muslims” theme, but it’s just not true. It’s not true because the Taliban use of terror is to maintain, not attempt to secure, control. They have always terrorised in the fashion of state terror, beheading collaborators, shooting malcontents, hanging “enemies of the state”. That isn’t terror when practised by the abovementioned Saudis, and it isn’t terror when the Zionazi pseudostate of “Israel” uses mass punishment tactics against Palestinians or carpet-bombs Lebanon. But the Saudis are US allies, and the “Israelis” are not just allies (albeit informally) but have the Holocaust to hide behind. So it makes it all right for them. The Taliban, despite the fact that they were in Washington’s good books till the late nineties, have no such excuse. But although they remain a thoroughgoing bunch of nasties, it doesn’t make them terrorists, either.

Again, how can you fight a war like that?

By invading Pakistan? I’m aware that Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan is a US puppet, but he is also answerable (being a democratically elected leader) to the people of Pakistan, and they don’t like the US, not at all, at all. And if anyone wants to launch an invasion of Pakistan (attention, St Barack of the Winds of Change) – the nation is infinitely better armed than the Afghans ever were. How many wars can one fight?

All righty, just let’s imagine that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri are both alive and sitting in some cosy cave with Mullah Omar. Let’s imagine that someone manages to track them down and finish them all off, to worldwide exultation. So what?

 Will that defeat Al Qaeda, a completely decentralised group of organisations, split into a myriad of independent cells? Of course not.

Will that have the slightest effect on the Taliban, who have never had any direct affiliation to  Al Qaeda anyway and who no longer have any use for Omar? Not on your life.

So how will flooding Afghanistan with soldiers and trying to hunt down Osama bin Laden help matters? In the elegant words of some UN staffer in Kabul, “You can’t make a woman more pregnant by having several men f*ck her”.

Someone should really ask St Barack the question.

In case anyone wants to know what I suggest, it’s this: quit the whole scene, let the Afghans sort out their problems, and let the Taliban take out Al Qaeda, as left to themselves, they will. 

But, of course, that leaves the whole question of those lovely pipelines from Central Asia unsettled. And that was the entire not-too-hidden rationale behind the entire Afghan invasion, though we aren’t supposed to talk of it now.