Bharat Rakshak

Carl_T wrote:
S**t he's a good speaker. I was comparing him to ABV/Advani through the prism of their reactions against a secularist status quo. I think the resemblance with Vajpayee is even more apt, they were both fiery orators.

Suppiah wrote:http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/news- ... pital.html

More on headscarf - PM Erdogan's wife was refused entry to military hospital for WEARING one...and 60% ONLY disapprove that...

Imagine this in Pakbarian animalistan..firstly the ban would be on NOT wearing one...secondly 400% would approve it..

Masaru wrote:
“Turkey fully supports Pakistan on Kashmir. This problem should be tackled as soon as possible.

Time and again Turks have sided with the Pakis and helped them out in times of need. This 'great nation' also has a brilliant history of denial when it comes to owning up to its violent past. Ref: Armenian genocide. No wonder why Pakis seek to claim ancestry from Turks, and get inspired to repeat the same in 1971.

Acharya wrote: DELETED

Acharya wrote:

Carl_T wrote:
S**t he's a good speaker. I was comparing him to ABV/Advani through the prism of their reactions against a secularist status quo. I think the resemblance with Vajpayee is even more apt, they were both fiery orators.

Dont bring Indian politicians into this. And dont compare ABV with any of these countries. None of them are democracy in true sense.

Carl_T wrote:
It's a perfectly legitimate comparison. How is Turkey not a democracy?

Suppiah wrote: There are two ways to look at the AKP regime and what it is doing with Turkey and with its intl relations. One is the Islamist agenda which has so far been quite mild and in any case restoring some semblance of neutrality (not hostility as was past) as re religion. Gross hostility to own religion imposed by whatever means, however long has little chance of success in long term. So in a way, relaxing a bit ensures their overall secular character survives longer. But there is a big IF

Suppiah wrote: The other aspect is Turkeys' attempt to become more friendly with 'Arab' and less 'European' (not by intent, it is automatic corollary) something like TSP's move to be more ME and less SA. This is also with all good intentions, here again they are restoring an old out of balance relation - Gul mentioned in one speech that it was so bad, Arab in Turkish slang stood for street dog - so much was the hatred for Arabs for historic reasons. But the world is not short of Arab style conduct of internal and external affairs, it needs more of old Turkeys...

MKB and other lefties see this as a natural assertion of old Turkey's image and a desire to be respected, not taken for granted. I personally dont buy that argument. You dont have to befriend Syria or Iranian mullahs and issue certificates of innocence to Sudans' Bashir to be seen as 'independent'...that is being seen as yet another ME regime.

Acharya wrote:

Carl_T wrote:
It's a perfectly legitimate comparison. How is Turkey not a democracy?

Do you know the History of Turkey. Why is the military the guarantee of the constitution. Do you have any idea what that means.
Also dont compare Indian religions with Islamic ones.

Carl_T wrote: If you've realized, the point has nothing to do with "Indian religions and Islamic ones", it was a comparison of political climes in different countries.

Acharya wrote:

Carl_T wrote:
It's a perfectly legitimate comparison. How is Turkey not a democracy?

Do you know the History of Turkey. Why is the military the guarantee of the constitution. Do you have any idea what that means.
Also dont compare Indian religions with Islamic ones.

A Turkish court has sentenced the editor of a Kurdish newspaper to 21 years in prison for publishing material sympathetic to the outlawed PKK.

The editor, Ozan Kilinc, allowed 12 editions of the paper to go out with references to the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party.

Comments or acts judged supportive of the PKK are a serious crime in Turkey.

Last month, a 15-year-old Kurdish girl was jailed for nearly eight years for throwing stones at police during a demonstration.

Gerard wrote:
Acharya, please stop trying to police this thread. It is disrupting the smooth flow of the thread and stifling to other posters. Surely you can provide your own perspective without this aggressive response to other posters?

Thank you for your cooperation.

Suppiah wrote:The other aspect is Turkeys' attempt to become more friendly with 'Arab' and less 'European' (not by intent, it is automatic corollary) something like TSP's move to be more ME and less SA. This is also with all good intentions, here again they are restoring an old out of balance relation - Gul mentioned in one speech that it was so bad, Arab in Turkish slang stood for street dog - so much was the hatred for Arabs for historic reasons. But the world is not short of Arab style conduct of internal and external affairs, it needs more of old Turkeys...

RamaY wrote:I found these thought-streams in this thread very interesting. Appreciate some insight.

- Are we seeing ME thru TSP-lens only? How much of India’s relationship with ME is India centric, instead of IM centric or TSP centric?
- If we write-off ME as Islamic Ummah and accept Islamic domination on these societies for time immemorial, how could we question Islamism’s hold on TSP or even BD?

somnath wrote:
Well, not so much PAk centric, but it would be natural in any democracy for foreign policy to be influenced by domestic opinion..For some time till the '80s, countering Pak influence in the Arab world was a key policy objective, but now no one really has the "hyphen", barring the Indian media and some of us! It is however natural for any govt to be sensitive to shades of domestic opinion, eg, shias wrt Iran, the broader muslim community wrt Palestine and so on...I see nothing wrong in that per se..

Eurasia's energy wars: the US, China and Muslims in Pipelineistan
We can also see Pipelineistan as a romance, with characters competing for Eurasia’s virgin wealth. For the US to maintain its dominance over world markets, global energy flows, and its network of alliances, it has placed all its bets on the pipeline linking Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI). TAPI is widely believed to be the raison d-etre of the Afghanistan and Pakistan conflicts. Piping oil from gas rich Turkmenistan, where Chevron has won a lucrative contract, to the hungry markets of Pakistan and India ensures that Pakistan remains a subservient American satellite and India remains within the US sphere of influence. TAPI will deliver American controlled gas to the world via Karachi and Surat, Pakistan and India’s warm water ports on the Indian Ocean. IPI and TAPI are then dueling pipelines mapping two global geographies: one drawn by US visions for maintaining its vertical influence over key geostrategic regions, while the other represents Anglo-Israeli nightmare of bilateral relationships growing between and integrating Iran, Central and South Asia into a power-house unit. TAPI’s price tag announces as much. The project is valued at $3.5 billion, a number covering development and construction but not the auxiliary costs of politically destabilizing Afghanistan and Pakistan. Regional self-sufficiency appears to contradict every tenet of the US foreign policy bible.
US desperation in securing its pipeline in the shifting terrain of the Eurasian Game can be seen in the change of its war strategies in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Paralleling its strategy of paying off shaikhs in Iraq’s Anbar province, the economically distressed nation

Russia Finds Itself Passed its Security Prime
Pavel K. Baev
At the annual Munich security conference last weekend, Russia received as little attention as it had attracted at the Davos World Economic Forum in the previous week. The star presenter this year was the Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, and hardly anyone reflected upon the sensational speech delivered at this venue by the then President Vladimir Putin just three years ago. Political vogue tends to swing, but Russia’s eclipse is caused by a profound loss of international influence accentuated rather than camouflaged by President Dmitry Medvedev’s efforts to build his profile. Russia has turned out to be one of the worst losers in the global recession, and while China’s model of “market communism” has proven its strength, Putin’s petro-state is struggling on a slow recovery track (Ekho Moskvy, February 5).

RamaY wrote: Who is "Public Opinion" here?

So you DO associate Indian Shia Muslims with Indo-Iranian relationship, and Indian Sunni Muslims with Indo-Pak/KSA relationship. A corollary to that is YOU DO view Indian Muslims to influence or be influenced by how India conducts business with rest of Islamic world.

Displaying welcome assertiveness, New Delhi was candid in expressing its displeasure on being left out of the regional conference on Afghanistan hosted by Istanbul in the run up to the London conference last month a move Turkey has admitted was the outcome of Pakistan's insistence in keeping India out. Turkey seems to have got the message and has committed to invite India to the next conference it will host later this year, the focus of which will be economic assistance to Afghanistan.

The tale of what the Bush Administration is up to in the Caucasus is slowly filtering out, although the U.S. press has largely deep-sixed the story. The recent Georgia-Russia war was just one move in a chess game aimed at cornering the energy reserves of Central Asia, extending the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to Moscow’s vulnerable southern border, and ending Russia’s control of the Black Sea. Georgia was just a pawn—an expendable one at that— in a high stakes game.

While the White House and some in the European Union (EU) represent the recent war as one between an increasingly powerful Russia reasserting itself in its former empire versus a small, democratic nation trying to recover two of its former provinces, that story is fraying a bit. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was recently condemned by the EU’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights for undemocratic practices, and a recent NATO analysis of the war supports the Russian charge that Tbilisi started the whole affair. The maneuvers that led to the war, however, have gone largely unreported.

Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. moved into Kazakhstan, Central Asia’s richest energy producer. U.S. oil companies, including Chevron, showed up in an effort to pry Kazakhstan away from its leading partners, China and Russia. Kazakh President Nurusultan Nazabayev was wined and dined, campaigning to get his country to send its oil through the trans-Caucasus Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, thus bypassing Russia and putting China’s energy jugular in Western hands.

The U.S. put a full-court press on oil-rich Azerbaijan as well.

Georgia was on the chess board because the BTC runs thorough that country’s south. The U.S. cemented control over the pipeline by helping to sponsor the “Rose Revolution” that brought Saakashvili to power in 2003.

But there was more than oil at stake in all this.

Starting almost a decade ago, the U.S. began pressuring fellow NATO member Turkey to modify or abrogate a rather obscure treaty called the Montreux Convention, a 1936 agreement that gives Turkey the right to restrict the passage of warships through the Bosporus Straits and the Dardanelles. The Convention has allowed Turkey and Russia to control the Black Sea and to prevent any foreign power from establishing a major presence there.

The U.S., which was not a party to the original treaty, has pressed Turkey to let it turn the Black Sea into a NATO lake. Turkey is a NATO member, as are Bulgaria and Rumania. The U.S. already has military bases in Romania. If the Bush Administration had succeeded in bringing the Ukraine and Georgia into the Alliance, NATO would have checkmated the Russian fleet at Sevastopol, restricting its access to the Mediterranean and isolating it from the Middle East.

However, the Americans play a lousy game of chess, particularly if some of the pieces on its side of the board have different agendas.

Take Turkey, for instance.

Ankara has not only shown no inclination to dump the Montreux Convention, it has proposed a “Caucasus Stability and Cooperation Pact” that would sideline NATO in favor of a settlement by regional powers. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan presented the proposal to Moscow shortly after the war.

“The chief value in the Turkish initiative,” said Russian Foreign Minster Sergei Lavrov, is that it is “common sense” and assumes that “countries belonging to the region themselves should decide how to conduct affairs there.”

Lavrov went on to add two other “regional” issues that could be dealt with using a similar framework: Iraq and Iran.

That the Turkish proposal caught the Americans by surprise is an indication of how the U.S. failed to understand how complex the game of chess is in that region of the world. Turkey is indeed a member of NATO, but it also has its own national interests to consider.

While Turkish trade with Georgia is $1 billion a year, it’s almost $40 billion with Russia. Turkey also gets 70 per cent of its natural gas from Russia. Turkey and Russia have long dominated the Black Sea, and both see it as central to their economic and security interests. If the U.S. moves large numbers of warships into the area, it won’t just be the Russians who lose control of that body of water.

Neither are the Turks eager to modify international treaties like the Montreux Convention. Doing so, writes M.K. Bhadrakumar, a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service and a former ambassador in the region, “would open a Pandora’s Box. It might well turn out to be a step towards reopening the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, the cornerstone which erected the modern Turkish state out of the debris of the Ottoman Empire.”

According to Bhadrakumar, the U.S. plan was to bring Kazakhstan into NATO as well. The Kazakh-Russian border is the longest land border shared by any two nations in the world. “It would be a nightmare for Russian security if NATO were to gain a foothold in Kazakhstan,” he says.

In short, what the U.S. is up to is the 21st century’s version of the “Great Game,” the competition that pitted 19th century imperial powers against one another in a bid to control Central Asia and the Middle East.

The move to surround Russia and hinder China’s access to energy is part of the Bush Administration’s 2002 “West Point Doctrine,” a strategic posture aimed at preventing the rise of any economic or military competitors.

When U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently said that Russia was facing international isolation over the Georgia war, she was whistling past the graveyard. Rather than being isolated, the Russians have been lining up allies among the very states the U.S. had hoped would join it in ringing the Russians with newly recruited NATO allies.

Conn Hallinan says he’s a “foreign policy analyst” but don’t hold that against him. Co-editor Cockburn has known Conn, aka Ringo, since they went on Aldermaston peace marches together in the late 1950s, together with Conn’s brother Terrence, later the two-term D.A. of San Francisco. Hallinan can be reached at ringoanne@sbcglobal.net

Suppiah wrote: mullahs screaming their heads off like Barkha Dutt and so on..amazing

RamaY wrote:I found these thought-streams in this thread very interesting. Appreciate some insight.

- Are we seeing ME thru TSP-lens only? How much of India’s relationship with ME is India centric, instead of IM centric or TSP centric?
- If we write-off ME as Islamic Ummah and accept Islamic domination on these societies for time immemorial, how could we question Islamism’s hold on TSP or even BD?

Philip wrote:The reason for EU reluctance to take on Turkey as a full EU member is that Turkey straddles two continents,Europe and Asia and Anatolia,which is in Asia is a different cup of tea from Istanbul/Constantinople/Byzantium.

Hence Islamisation is the common factor in both areas which seems to deter GoI to seek active coupling with Turkey. In that sense we are viewing Islamisation through TSP lenses onlee! Typical case of "burnt child dreads the fire" syndrome. In any case any relations with Turkey will span the entire Eurasian landmass and will tilt the balance in GoI's favour, bringing both the ME and Central Asia into our sphere of influence

Klaus wrote:Actually I feel that BD might go the Malaysia way in about 25 years time, they already feel more SE Asian than South Asian, I'm not saying they will go out of our hands or anything like that, I'm just saying that based on projecting their economy forward, Malaysia is the best country they can hope to emulate (economically and culturally) rather than KSA or Egypt.