Bharat Rakshak

Two Palestinians were charged by a court on Sunday with planning a rocket attack on Teddy Stadium, home to the Beitar football team.

Three more Palestinians, two of them maintenance men employed by the British Consulate General, were arrested on suspicion of supplying them with guns. All five were arrested in November but the details have only now emerged following Sunday’s court hearing.

A Foreign Office spokesman said that security and vetting procedures were being reviewed. He said all employees were vetted in co-ordination with the Israeli authorities “to a level appropriate to their job”.

The Consulate-General plays an important political role in Israel and would be considered a major terrorist target, in common with diplomatic posts elsewhere in the Middle East. However, the authorities have said the men’s arrests had “no connection to their work at the consulate”.

The two men initially charged over the stadium plot, named as Mussa Hamada and Bassem Omari, were said to be members of Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip and is in a state of war with Israel. They were also alleged to have received financial support from the Muslim Brotherhood in Saudi Arabia.

Is Saudi Arabia Opening Up?

by Daniel Pipes
National Review Online
January 4, 2011

http://www.meforum.org/pipes/9274/saudi ... opening-up
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On Jan. 1, 1996, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz became regent and effective ruler of Saudi Arabia. His 15th anniversary this week offers an opportunity to review the kingdom's changes under his leadership and whither it now heads.

The Saudi king, Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz, 86.

His is perhaps the most unusual and opaque country on the planet, a place without a public movie theater, where women may not drive, where men sell women's lingerie, where a single-button self-destruct system can perhaps destroy the oil infrastructure, and where rulers spurn even the patina of democracy. In its place, they have developed some highly original and successful mechanisms to keep power.

Three features define the regime: controlling the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, subscribing to the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, and possessing by far the world's largest petroleum reserve. Islam defines identity, Wahhabism inspires global ambitions, oil wealth funds the enterprise.

More profoundly, wealth beyond avarice permits Saudis to deal with modernity on their own terms. They shun jacket and tie, exclude women from the workspace, and even aspire to replace Greenwich Mean Time with Mecca Mean Time.

Not many years ago, the key debate in the kingdom was that between the monarchical and Taliban versions of Wahhabism – an extreme reading of Islam versus a fanatical one. But today, thanks in large part to Abdullah's efforts to "tame Wahhabi zeal," the most retrograde country has taken some cautious steps to join the modern world. These efforts have many dimensions, from children's education to mechanisms for selecting political leaders, but perhaps the most crucial one is the battle among the ulema, the Islamic men of religion, between reformers and hardliners.

The arcane terms of this dispute make it difficult for outsiders to follow. Fortunately, Roel Meijer, a Dutch Middle East specialist, provides an expert's guide to arguments in the kingdom in his article, "Reform in Saudi Arabia: The Gender-Segregation Debate." He demonstrates how gender mixing (ikhtilat in Arabic) inspires a debate central to the kingdom's future and how that debate has evolved.

Current stringencies about gender separation, he notes, reflect less age-old custom than the success of the Sahwa movement in the aftermath of two traumatic events in 1979 – the Iranian revolution and the seizure of the Grand Mosque of Mecca by Osama bin Laden-style radicals.

When Abdullah formally ascended to the monarchy in mid-2005, he ushered in an easing of what critics call gender apartheid. Two key recent events toward greater ikhtilat took place in 2009: a change of high government personnel in February and the September opening of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (known as KAUST), with its ostentatiously mixed-gender classes and even dances.

The Saudi crown prince, Sultan bin Abdulaziz, 82.

Debate over ikhtilat ensued, with jousting among royals, political figures, ulema, and intellectuals. "Although the position of women has improved since 9/11, ikhtilat demarcates the battle lines between reformists and conservatives [i.e., hardliners]. Any attempt to diminish its enforcement is regarded as a direct attack on the standing of conservatives and Islam itself."

Meijer concludes his survey of the debate by noting that "it is extremely difficult to determine whether reforms are successful and whether the liberals or conservatives are making gains. Although the general trend is in favor of the reformists, reform is piecemeal, hesitant, equivocal and strongly resisted."

The state under Abdullah has promoted a more open and tolerant Islam but, Meijer argues, "it is obvious from the ikhtilat debate that the battle has not been won. Many Saudis are fed up with the inordinate interference of religious authorities in their lives, and one can even speak of an anti-clerical movement. The liberals, however, speak a language that is alien to the world of official Wahhabism and the majority of Saudis and is therefore hardly likely to influence them."

In brief, Arabians are in mid-debate, with the future course of reform as yet unpredictable. Not only do elite and public opinion play a role, but, complicating matters, much hangs on the quirks of longevity and personality – in particular, how long Abdullah, 86, remains in charge and whether his ailing half-brother crown prince, Sultan bin Abdulaziz, 82, will succeed him.

Saudi Arabia being one of the world's most influential Muslim countries, the stakes involved are high, not just within the kingdom but for Islam and for Muslims generally. This debate deserves our full attention.

Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

shyamd wrote: In Damascus, the Hamas leader in exile, Khaled Mashaal addressed the visiting activists on December 22. He paid his tributes to Mahatma Gandhi “for his inspiring struggle against the colonialism”.

Saudi Arabia 'detains' Israeli vulture for spying

Saudi Arabian officials have "detained" a vulture on accusations of being a spy for Israel, media reports say.The griffon vulture was carrying a GPS transmitter bearing the name of Tel Aviv University, prompting rumours it was part of a Zionist plot.Israeli wildlife officials dismissed the claims as ludicrous and expressed concern about the bird's fate.

Last month, Egyptian officials implied the Israeli spy agency Mossad was to blame for shark attacks off its coast.

The vulture, which can have a wing span of up to 265cm (8ft 8in), was caught after it landed in the desert city of Hyaal a few days ago.When locals discovered the GPS transmitter, they suspected the worst and handed it over to the security forces, said Israel's Ma'ariv newspaper.Conspiracy theories quickly began circulating in Saudi newspapers and on websites that the bird was involved in espionage.

'Terrible price'
Israeli officials told Ma'ariv they were "stunned" by the allegations and concerned that the bird could meet a horrible punishment in the notoriously severe Saudi justice system.

Israeli Park and Nature Authority: "The device does nothing more than receive and store basic data about the bird's whereabouts, and about his altitude and speed," a bird specialist at Israel's Park and Nature Authority told the newspaper.

The data would be used to improve understanding of the endangered species' behaviour.

"Now, this poor bird is paying a terrible price. That's very sad," said the unnamed expert."I hope they release the poor thing."
The vulture is the latest animal to be accused of being an unwitting Mossad operative.

In December, the governor of Egypt's South Sinai province, Mohamed Abdul Fadil Shousha, suggested the spy agency may have had a hand in a string of deadly shark attacks off the coast of the Sharm el-Sheikh resort.

He said it was "not out of the question" that Mossad had put the killer shark in the area.

The Israeli foreign ministry dismissed that allegation, saying the governor "must have seen Jaws one time too many, and confuses fact and fiction"

Without boldness from Barack Obama there is a real risk of war in the Middle East
The United States, Israel and the Arabs Dec 29th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION


NO WAR, no peace, is the usual state of affairs between Israel and its neighbours in the Middle East. But every time an attempt at Arab-Israeli peacemaking fails, as Barack Obama’s did shortly before Christmas, the peace becomes a little more fragile and the danger of war increases. Sadly, there is reason to believe that unless remedial action is taken, 2011 might see the most destructive such war for many years.

One much-discussed way in which war might arise stems from the apparent desire of Iran to acquire nuclear weapons at any cost, and Israel’s apparent desire to stop Iran at any cost. But fear of Iran’s nuclear programme is only one of the fuses that could detonate an explosion at any moment. Another is the frantic arms race that has been under way since the inconclusive war in 2006 between Israel and Hizbullah, Iran’s ally in Lebanon. Both sides have been intensively preparing for what each says will be a “decisive” second round.

Such a war would bear little resemblance to the previous clashes between Israel and its neighbours. For all their many horrors, the Lebanon war of 2006 and the Gaza war of 2009 were limited affairs. On the Israeli side, in particular, civilian casualties were light. Since 2006, however, Iran and Syria have provided Hizbullah with an arsenal of perhaps 50,000 missiles and rockets, many with ranges and payloads well beyond what Hizbullah had last time. This marks an extraordinary change in the balance of power. For the first time a radical non-state actor has the power to kill thousands of civilians in Israel’s cities more or less at the press of a button.

In that event, says Israel, it will strike back with double force. A war of this sort could easily draw in Syria, and perhaps Iran. For the moment, deterrence keeps the peace. But a peace maintained by deterrence alone is a frail thing. The shipment to Hizbullah of a balance-tipping new weapon, a skirmish on the Lebanese or increasingly volatile Gaza border—any number of miscalculations could ignite a conflagration.

From peace process to war process

All of this should give new urgency to Arab-Israeli peacemaking. To start with, at least, peace will be incomplete: Iran, Hizbullah and sometimes Hamas say that they will never accept a Jewish state in the Middle East. But it is the unending Israeli occupation that gives these rejectionists their oxygen. Give the Palestinians a state on the West Bank and it will become very much harder for the rejectionists to justify going to war.

Easy enough to say. The question is whether peacemaking can succeed. After striving for almost two years to shepherd Israeli and Palestinian leaders into direct talks, only for this effort to collapse over the issue of settlements, Mr Obama is in danger of concluding like many presidents before him that Arab-Israeli diplomacy is a Sisyphean distraction. But giving up would be a tragic mistake, as bad for America and Israel as for the Palestinians. The instant the peace process ends, the war process begins, and wars in this energy-rich corner of the world usually suck in America, one way or another. Israel will suffer too if Mr Obama fails, because the Palestinians have shown time and again that they will not fall silent while their rights are denied. The longer Israel keeps them stateless under military occupation, the lonelier it becomes—and the more it undermines its own identity as a liberal democracy.

Don’t mediate. Legislate

Instead of giving up, Mr Obama needs to change his angle of attack. America has clung too long to the dogma that direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians are the way forward. James Baker, a former secretary of state, once said that America could not want peace more than the local parties did. This is no longer true. The recent history proves that the extremists on each side are too strong for timid local leaders to make the necessary compromises alone. It is time for the world to agree on a settlement and impose it on the feuding parties.

The outlines of such an agreement have been clear since Bill Clinton set out his “parameters” after the failure of the Camp David summit a decade ago. The border between Israel and a new Palestine would follow the pre-1967 line, with adjustments to accommodate some of the bigger border-hugging Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and land-swaps to compensate the Palestinians for those adjustments. But there is also much difficult detail to be filled in: how to make Jerusalem into a shared capital, settle the fate of the refugees and ensure that the West Bank will not become, as Gaza did, an advance base for war against Israel after Israeli forces withdraw.

Mr Clinton unveiled his blueprint at the end of a negotiation that had failed. Mr Obama should set out his own map and make this a new starting point. He should gather international support for it, either through the United Nations or by means of an international conference of the kind the first President Bush held in Madrid in 1991. But instead of leaving the parties to talk on their own after the conference ends, as Mr Bush did after Madrid, America must ride herd, providing reassurance and exerting pressure on both sides as required.

The pressure part of this equation is crucial. In his first round of peacemaking, Mr Obama picked a fight with Israel over settlements and then backed down, thereby making America look weak in a region where too many people already believe that its power is waning (see article). This is a misperception the president needs to correct. For all its economic worries at home and military woes in Iraq and Afghanistan, America is far from weak in the Levant, where both Israel and the nascent Palestine in the West Bank continue to depend on it in countless vital ways.

The Palestinians have flirted lately with the idea of bypassing America and taking their cause directly to the UN. Going to the UN is well and good. But the fact remains that without the sort of tough love that America alone can bestow, Israel will probably never be able to overcome its settler movement and make the deal that could win it acceptance in the Arab world. Mr Obama has shown in battles as different as health reform and the New START nuclear treaty with Russia that he has the quality of persistence. He should persist in Palestine, too.

from PRINT EDITION | Leaders

Published: December 10, 2010

In his column “The big American leak” (Views, Dec. 6), Thomas L. Friedman wrongly conflates America’s disparate diplomatic relationships with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He also chooses to ignore Saudi Arabia’s efforts to counter terrorism, disregarding the fact that over the past nine months Saudi security forces have risked their lives to apprehend 149 individuals linked to terrorist activities, and in the process seized nearly $600,000.

Mr. Friedman does his readers further disservice by claiming that the Arab public’s disapproval of U.S. foreign policy is somehow a disguised expression of their disappointment with their own governments. One of America’s pre-eminent columnists on the region should acknowledge that the people of the Middle East criticize America mainly because of its refusal to condemn Israel’s apartheid-like policies, and, more recently, because of the war in Iraq — a tragic misadventure that was at one time encouraged by Mr. Friedman’s own commentary.

Bandar Saud Shawwaf, London Former congressional liaison at the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington.

Prime Minister Saad Hariri met with Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal at his office in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, Hariri's press office said in a statement.
Hariri was accompanied by his advisor Hani Hammoud, the statement said.

It added that the premier discussed with the Saudi prince the latest developments.
A short meeting was held between the two men on the sidelines of the opening of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beirut in June.

Why did the Mossad permit things to go so wrong in Dubai? In a word, the answer is leadership. Because Dagan refashioned the Mossad in his own image, and because he drove out anyone who was willing to question his decisions, there was no one in the agency to tell him that the Dubai operation was badly conceived and badly planned. They simply did not believe that a minnow in the world of intelligence services such as Dubai would be any match for Israel's Caesarea fighters. As one very senior German intelligence expert told me: "The Israelis' problem has always been that they underestimate everyone—the Arabs, the Iranians, Hamas. They are always the smartest and think they can hoodwink everyone all the time. A little more respect for the other side—even if you think he is a dumb Arab or a German without imagination—and a little more modesty would have saved us all from this embarrassing entanglement."

The Dubai fiasco caused a great deal of damage to Israel, to the Mossad, and to its relations with other Western intelligence organizations. It led to unprecedented revelations of Mossad personnel and methods, far more than any previous bungled operation. A number of states who believe that their passports were forged or otherwise misused by the agency have expelled Mossad representatives. The British response in particular was furious. And Israel's long-standing security-and-intelligence cooperation with Germany has also been dealt a hugely damaging blow. In early June, the head of the Caesarea unit in the Mossad—who had been considered the leading contender to eventually replace Dagan—offered his resignation. As for Dagan's future, before Dubai he had hoped that the liquidation of Al-Mabhouh would ensure yet another extension of his tenure as director of the agency. But that has not come to pass. At the time of this writing, it is assumed that he will not continue. And so the Mossad "with a knife between its teeth" likely is entering another period of confusion and self-doubt.

"There is no doubt Dagan received an organization on the verge of coma and brought it back to its feet," one Mossad veteran of many years told me. "He increased its budget, won great successes, and most important, he rebuilt its pride. The problem is that multiplying its volume of activity many times over came with the price of compromising on security protocols. And along with success came hubris. Together, they brought the Dubai debacle. And now, in some areas, his successor will find a Mossad even worse off than Dagan found in 2002."

Ronen Bergman is the senior political and military analyst for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth and the author of several books, including By Any Means Necessary and The Secret War with Iran. He is currently writing a book about the history of the Mossad's targeted killings.

Iran has been dominating the news over the last few years, mainly due to its development of a Nuclear Program.
Lets assess the issue at large, interests of each country in the region and world at large.

Iran's Nuclear Program

Iran's nuclear program appears to be the most pressing issue for the GCC and the west.

What does Iran stand to gain by going nuclear?

It is the same reason why India and others went nuclear. In the words of Former Indian President Abdul Kalam, nuclear weapons are a "weapon of peace". First and foremost for Iran, it is to deter aggressors/bullying and protect the country from the US. Having a nuclear weapon, can deter a major war and essentially cements Irans position as a regional and international player in politics.
Secondly, I believe it allows Iran to flex its muscles regionally. Consequently this is the biggest worry for those in the GCC.

The Iranians continue to agree to talk, just in order to stall for time and keep the clock ticking so that Iranian nuclear scientists can continue to work. It’s just a question of time for the Iranians to come out and say they have a bomb ready for testing.

Will the Iranians actually use it?

You may have heard in the press of Ahmadinejad telling people that Israel will be wiped off the map etc. The west is using this as a tool to scare ordinary people and obtain support for their governments actions on stopping the Iranian nuclear program.

No nation is crazy enough to use it as it will likely be met with an equi-proportionate nuclear response, especially if the target nation has a triad of nuclear missiles (Missiles/Bombs deliverable via Land systems, Airplanes and using Submarines).

Iran and perhaps the nuclear powers too, believe in MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). This is where both sides have enough nuclear missiles to cause serious damage to each other.

So its safe to say that Iran isn't actually getting a nuclear weapon in order to use it, its more of a deterrent and use as a support to foreign policy objectives. However, as the USSR showed us, possessing a nuclear weapon does not guarantee the regime power to rule for an infinite period. Regime change is still very much possible and will continue to be a major threat in my opinion.

Factors to keep in mind:
- It takes more than one test to perfect the weapon (The West have conducted 100's of tests to perfect theirs)
- Even once you have a weapon, you need a credible delivery vehicle that can reach your intended enemy. This can take many years.

Anyone interested in understanding why India went nuclear and how it outsmarted the US in going nuclear, please read Weapons of Peace: The Secret Story of India's quest to become a Nuclear Power by Raj Chengappa.

The US

The views of the senior leadership in Iran is that the US cannot afford another major war. The US has announced timelines to pull out of Iraq and any increase in violence in Iraq will probably slow this process. Iran can obviously make it difficult for the US to pull out. An attack on Iran will in all likeliness cause an upsurge in violence in Iraq by Al Qods forces (Iranian special forces troops controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps). and Iranian controlled militia - specifically the Mahdi army (Officially disbanded but highly active in the South of Iraq) who have been undergoing training with the Hezbollah/IRGC in Iran.

Of course this is also a similar situation in Afghanistan, where certain part of the Taliban are backed by Iran. Evidence of Iranian made shells, weapons etc have showed up in Afghanistan[1]. Members of the Taliban still receive training in Iranian bases close to the border with Afghanistan.

Now the biggest reason why the US can't afford another war is because of its economy. Recent data published by the US Department of Labor of high unemployment (9.8%[2]) Some people go as far as to say that the unofficial US unemployment rate taking into consideration those that have not claimed unemployment benefits is around 1 in 5 people. The economic situation is not improving very much either, this can be witnessed by recent remarks of Ben Bernanke and further stimulus plans.

Imagine if the US was to go to war with Iran, would ordinary people in the street in the West be happy with this? Probably not. Public opinion would frown at such an idea, and will not be happy with a significant portion of their budgets/taxes being spent on "another war!”. Tehran also appears to agree with the idea that US cannot afford another war[3]. In my opinion this is also the same reason why Israel is being held back from attacking Iran, simply because Israel would not be doing itself any favours with the West (support that it needs for its very survival).

The GCC

The GCC is the one that is most worried about the Iranian threat. One can witness the statements from the recent wikileaks saga: HM King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia repeatedly exhorted the United States to "cut off the head of the snake" by launching military strikes to destroy Iran's nuclear program.

HM King Hamad of Bahrain argued "forcefully for taking action to terminate Iran's nuclear program, by whatever means necessary". "That program must be stopped," he was quoted as saying. "The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping".

An Iranian nuclear weapon will provide a lot of power on foreign policy. Each nation in the GCC approaches the issue of Iran differently:

KSA

A crux of the issue for the Saudi's appears to be that Iran is a challenge for their regional power and a leader of Islam.

There are also worries that Iran will be able to meddle in the internal affairs of the Kingdom, especially amongst the significant Shia population in the East of the Kingdom (the majority of saudi oil is located in this region). Worst comes to worst Iran could back a succession movement in the East of the Kingdom.

Bahrain

Similar to the Saudi's, there is a significant Shi'ite population in the island nation. Bahrain has a long history with Iranian meddling in Internal affairs of Bahrain. The majority of the population in Bahrain is Shi'ite and the rulers are Sunni. I'll go into Iranian activities in the GCC as a whole in another post.

Qatar

Main issue for Qatar is believe it or not NATURAL GAS! Both Iran and Qatar share the worlds largest natural gas fields. They are competitors, in this way and are trying to extract as much gas as possible. As the sea borders are not actually demarcated by either Iran or Qatar, this can be a source of conflict. Iran has displayed aggression here by routinely sending IRGC personnel in boats to damage Qatari Gas infrastructure[4].

UAE

Lesser Tunb, Greater Tunb and Abu Mussa Islands that are claimed by the UAE but currently under occupation of Iran.

The GCC

I have left out Kuwait, Oman and Qatar on purpose as most of the issues are covered above. Iran has made threats of attacking GCC nations in the event of any US/Israeli strike coming from their territory. Iranians have also made it clear that they have covert cells in the GCC, in the event of war, will be activated to damage infrastructure (electricity, roads, etc), conduct suicide attacks.

Is this threat for real? Bahrain has faced these threats from the 80s and have dismantled many cells since. Even to this day, building construction work in Manama usually ends up finding buried cache's of professionally packed weapons[5].

Trained in Iran or in Hezbollah camps in the Oronte valley in Lebanon, the elements aim to launch sabotage operations against American and European interests in the event of an attack against Iran. In the event of a war, Iran will use these sleeper cells to launch a civil disobedience movement and send people to the US embassy and to the HQ of the 5th fleet in Manama5.

The Saudi decision to set up a force to protect oil facilities came because of the discovery of Iranian infiltrated operatives in the East of the Kingdom.

So in short, Yes the Iranian threat is very real.

Conclusion

Will there be war?

Mmm.... Not sure. At this point in time, the US can't afford a war and neither will the US let anyone else launch any attacks against Iran. But Israel and the West will probably continue to use other methods to slow Iran down - Stuxnet and other covert means.

Does Iran want war?

Despite all the loud noises from Iranian generals of how they will strike their enemies, the Iranians do not want war. Iranians know that they will come out worse in any major war with the US. Iranians are happy to make gutsy moves, like the recent visit to the Lebanon - Israel border by Ahmadinejad, use IRGC boats to intimidate US Navy ships in the Straits of Hormuz. But in my opinion Iran will not do anything major to provoke the US.
In short, neither US or Iran wants a war! Neither will provoke the other in any big way.

What will happen if Iran does nuclearise?

The GCC will make peace with Iran and satisfy their needs. Game theory tells us that the GCC will probably nuclearise (How? Thats a different matter altogether). We have also seen this in the past between India and Pakistan. India was first to nuclearise and Pakistan responded with attaining nuclear weapons[6].
The cheapest option is probably to strike an agreement with one of the nuclear powers - Probably India, Pakistan and the US as the most reliable partners out of the nuclear nations to provide an umbrella. However, will these nations risk getting involved in nuclear war? You decide.
There are a lot of side issues related here that I could not talk about due to time constraints. I hope this has provided readers with a useful basic understanding on what is happening, what the world leaders are thinking about Iran and what we can expect to see in the future.

Thank you for reading.

Enforcement of modesty codes vary from place to place, but overall rules are growing looser

A Saudi couple was recently strolling through an open market in Ha’il, a city of more than 350,000 in the Ha’il Province of Saudi Arabia northwest of Riyadh, when two members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice confronted them.

The mutaween insisted that the husband order his wife to cover her eyes because they were too “seditious.” The husband became enraged and got into an altercation with the commission members. The brawl resulted in the husband taking a trip to the hospital for a stab wound in the back.

“I have not heard of that incident,” said a supervisor at the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in Jeddah. Jeddah doesn’t include Ha’il in his district. “We do not have a policy in which ladies must cover their eyes, but we also expect our brothers to use good judgment when trying to correct something they see as wrong. If someone is behaving in an inflammatory manner, then it’s our duty to stop it.”

The incident points to the delicate balance that the mutaween negotiate between guiding Saudi men and women away from un-Islamic behavior and what is considered invasion of privacy. Enforcement of the kingdom’s strict code of modesty is enforced unevenly, with major cities taking a more liberal approach. But the general trend has been toward a certain loosening following some well-publicized incidents of over-enforcement by the mutaween.

Sedition is in the eye of the holder, and in Ha’il the mutaween can determine what is seditious. Yet Saudi religious conservatives generally agree there is no religious obligation for a woman to cover her eyes. There is also is considerable debate among Saudi women whether they are religiously required to wear the niqab, a veil that covers the face. Indeed, many Saudi women in cosmopolitan Jeddah cover their entire face, including the eyes. However, attitudes have shifted dramatically in the past decade, said one Saudi woman professional.

“We never discussed the appropriateness of the niqab when I was growing up,” said a 40-year-old Western-educated Jeddah Saudi woman, who asked not to be identified. “Now, the younger generation thinks nothing of going out without the niqab or even a hijab, let alone covering their eyes.”

Sheikh Ahmed Al-Ghamdi, chief of the Mecca branch of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, said in November that women do not need to veil their faces. “There is a difference in interpretation of the verse ... which leads some scholars to rule that the whole body must be covered,” Al-Ghamdi told the Saudi press in an interview. “However, other scholars approve of showing the face, hands and elbows. And some even okayed the hair."

So why the brouhaha in Ha’il, which by any measure is not the standard of loose living?

The Ha’il confrontation illustrates the dichotomy between enforcement of religious values in rural areas and urban centers. In Jeddah, the mutaween have been invisible for much of 2010. They have made no appearances at the heavily trafficked Red Sea Mall and the Mall of Arabia. Even the shopping centers of Al-Balad and the Old Jeddah District, which attracts expats more inclined to flout religious and cultural rules, were absent of mutaween who once heavily patrolled the area.

One Saudi journalist noted that commission members assigned to remote cities like Ha’il face less accountability for their actions than in Jeddah or even Medina. Renegade mutaween may be inclined to abuse their authority in a region where residents are less educated and unquestioning of authority.

“The Hai’a wouldn’t dare make demands on a Saudi family in Jeddah,” the journalist said. “They [the Hai’a] don’t know who the Saudis are and run the risk of making someone important angry. But expats and Saudis living in the middle of nowhere? Who would dare complain?”

It doesn’t mean commission members have been inactive. On the contrary, in the hijri year 1431, which overlaps 2010, the commission announced in its annual report that 15,556 Saudi men, 1,004 Saudi women and 74,000 expatriates were arrested on such charges as possessing drugs, alcohol, distributing illegal publications or conducting illegal practices in shops. Nearly 10,000 Saudi men and women were arrested on suspicion of having illicit affairs.

In all, more than 250,000 Muslims and non-Muslims in the Kingdom were taken into custody on a wide range of moral charges. However, the commission reported that the number of arrests dropped 19.5% compared with the hijri year 1430. Most arrests occurred in Riyadh and Mecca.

In December, the commission announced that its members would break up New Year’s Eve parties.

While the commission remains active and Saudis are generally supportive, the agency’s public profile is decidedly low-key.

The reason for their low profile is threefold. The commission had in the past often exceeded its authority, which resulted in deaths following car chases and nationwide condemnation by the Saudi press. In the past year, it sought to minimize public clashes. The younger, wealthy and upper-middle-class class of Saudi men and women often ignore the edicts of the mutaween without consequences because they have tacit approval from their parents. The third reason is King Abdullah, who has shown little patience with commission members.

According to a May 11, 2009, U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, King Abdullah told a contingent at the Jeddah consul-general’s office “that conservative elements in Saudi society do not understand true Islam, and that people needed to be educated.” King Abdullah compared the mutaween to donkey herders. “They take a stick and hit you with it, saying ‘Come donkey, it’s time to pray.’ How does that help people behave like good Muslims? ” according to the cable.

“I haven’t seen anybody from the commission in months and I am out with my girlfriends every weekend,” said 26-year-old Nahed Jabari of Jeddah. “I wear the niqab. I choose to cover my eyes only when I’m in a public building or at the airport where there are so many strangers and every single one of them looks at me as if they want to eat me up. No one ever suggested, and I don’t think they would dare to suggest, that I cover my eyes. The girls I associate with do as they please.”

Worst comes to worst Iran could back a succession movement in the East of the Kingdom

Javed Anand Posted online: Fri Jan 07 2011, 02:54 hrs
An amazingly durable holy pact that has lasted over 250 years — between Prince Muhammad ibn Saud, a clan chief who ruled over a patch of the Arabian peninsula, and Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab, a religious fugitive — which forcibly imposed the latter’s arid, ultra-orthodox, intolerant version of Islam on Muslims and non-Muslims alike, is finally showing signs of coming apart.
Saudi Arabia ‘s all-powerful religious police (mutawallees, muttawa or Hey’a in Arabic), empowered by the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, are now hated and despised as never before. In May 2010, in an unprecedented outburst, a married woman shot at several officers in a patrol car after she was caught in an “illegal seclusion” with another man in the province of Ha’il. Only a few days earlier, the Saudi daily newspaper, Okaz, reported that a religious cop was taken to hospital with bruises after being punched by a woman in her 20s in the city of Al Mubarrazz. The young lady reportedly got violent with the officer after he asked her and the man she was with at a public park to verify their relationship.

Change is certainly coming to Saudi Arabia. Leading this churn are Saudi women and lending support to them are some very powerful men in the Saudi hierarchy, including the monarch, King Abdullah, who to some is the kingdom’s Mikhail Gorbachev. Whether the rumblings on the surface are indicative of a tectonic shift in the making is difficult to say. But there is no mistaking the shifting sands, especially in the last two years.

December 2010: Saudi Arabia is elected a member of the executive council of the recently created UN Women, an organisation meant to stress gender equity. Sceptics are not impressed, but others see this as one more marker of the kingdom’s belated march towards modernity. Meanwhile, the former Saudi education minister Muhammad Ahmad al-Rashid kicks up a storm in the Arab world with his book that staunchly opposes gender segregation, supports co-education and questions the relegation of Muslim women to the rear section of the mosque. Al-Rashid argues that Islamic scholars who prescribe the headscarf or the veil merely represent a “minority view”. (In December 2009, Sheikh Ahmed al-Ghamdi, appointed head of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice after the sacking of his hardline predecessor earlier in the year, had also questioned Saudi Arabia’s strict gender segregation. The nation’s outraged clerics have been baying for his blood since, in vain.)

July 2010: Adel al-Kalbani, a cleric at Mecca’s Grand Mosque, issues a fatwa saying he found nothing in Islamic scripture forbidding music. This when musical performance in public is banned in the kingdom and the orthodox insist that music is prohibited even at home.

June 2010: Sheikh Abdul Mohsin Bin Nasser al-Obaikan, member of the Saudi Council of Senior Scholars and adviser to the king, creates a sensation by issuing a fatwa that says Saudi women can breastfeed their foreign drivers for them to become their sons (as a way of skirting the ban on gender mixing). Weird and even obscene as the fatwa may sound, Saudi women activists choose to turn it to their advantage and demand: “Either allow us to drive or to breastfeed foreigners.” (Women are banned from driving and hired drivers are mostly migrant males.)

May 2010: King Abdullah and Crown Prince Sultan get themselves photographed alongside 40 Saudi women with their faces uncovered. By Saudi standards, this is highly “provocative”. Also, a survey conducted by the Research Centre for Women’s Studies in Riyadh, examining Saudi newspapers and websites, showed that from mid-January to mid-February 2010, some 40 per cent of the articles in print and 58 per cent of online articles addressed gender issues.

April 2010: A national campaign is launched calling for women’s participation in municipal elections scheduled for the autumn of 2011.

The previous year also saw plenty of forward movement. Hatoon al-Fassi, an assistant professor of women’s history at King Saud University in Riyadh, describes 2009 as “the year of the campaigns” where women Saudi activists embraced causes as diverse as a ban on child marriage and the right to set up businesses without male sponsors.

November 6, 2009: Saudi women launch the “Black Ribbon Campaign”, an international campaign demanding that they be treated as citizens on par with their male counterparts; enjoy the rights to marry, divorce, inherit, gain custody of children, travel, work, study, drive cars and live on an equal footing with men; and gain the legal capacity to represent themselves in official and government agencies without the need of a male guardian.

The “year of the campaigns” is also noteworthy for many firsts: the launch of Saudi Arabia’s first ever mixed-gender university, the appointment of a woman to the council of ministers, the election of a woman to the Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Perhaps nothing symbolises the changes sweeping the Saudi kingdom better than a picture published on the front page of Al-Jazirah newspaper on November 16, 2010. The photograph shows a pilgrim couple perched on a stone on the holy Mount Arafat, absorbed in reading the Quran. It is the woman who holds the book, reading to the man. And her face is unveiled. Al-Jazirah’s caption applauds her role as the religious mediator.

Ya Allah, what might our own Jamiatul-ulema-e-Hind, Jamaat-e-Islami, Tableeghi Jamaat, Ahl-e-Hadith, All India Muslim Personal Law Board, and above all, Dr Zakir Naik, be thinking of such disturbing developments in Islam’s holy land?

The writer is general secretary, Muslims for Secular Democracy, and co-editor, ‘Communalism Combat

By Staff
Published Thursday, January 06, 2011
Saudi Arabia’s appointed parliament is set to debate a law to break a long-standing ban on women to drive cars after receiving a letter signed by more than 100 people, newspapers in the Gulf kingdom reported on Wednesday.

The letter, signed by 128 men and women, was addressed to Shura Chairman Sheikh Abdullah bin Ibrahim Al Shaikh, asking him to open a debate on a law allowing women in the conservative Moslem nation to drive.

“The Shura council agreed to discuss the issue of allowing women to drive in Saudi Arabia at its sessions in the next few weeks,” Kabar daily said.

The letter noted that many Saudi women drive cars outside the kingdom, the world’s largest oil exporter, as they hold international driving licences. The signatories said the new law is needed to match the development of the Saudi society and save women from daily agonies of trying to find a taxi. “You and any Saudi national should not accept that the dignity of the Saudi woman is spilt on streets every day as she struggles to find a taxi cab to go shopping, or to go to work, hospital or school…we ask you to discuss allowing women to drive and enforce this law on a trial basis in the beginning.”

The papers quoted a Shura member, Abdul Malik Khayal, as saying driving is “a natural right for women” on the grounds there are no “legal or security barriers.” “We have information that many Saudi women have obtained driving licences from other Arab countries in return for large sums of money…so why can’t we allow them to get licences here…I believe allowing women to drive in Saudi Arabia has become an inevitable and urgent need.”

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Fri, 07 Jan 2011 - 03:51:11S.O. News Service |
Manama: Saudi Arabia's consultative council will soon discuss a proposal to allow women to drive, a local daily said.

The likely debate of the highly controversial issue was prompted by a petition from 128 Saudi men and women who urged Shaikh Abdullah Bin Mohammad Al Shaikh, the council chairman, to launch discussions about the right of Saudi women to obtain a driving licence and drive, Al Yawm reported.

"As there are many Saudi women who drive in other countries, they should be allowed to do the same in their own country," the petition said. "We do not think that you or any other citizen would accept to see a Saudi woman on the side of the road begging a taxi driver to take her to hospital for instance," the petitioners said in their letter to Shaikh Abdullah.

The petitioners said that the law allowing women to drive should be accompanied by a set of strict rules that stipulate harsh action against males who harass them or annoy them as they drive.

"Stringent actions should include detention and prison terms as well as high fines so that no one would dare to bother women drivers," the petition said.

Other measures include setting up driving schools for women and opening offices in the traffic buildings that would deal exclusively with women, the petitioners said.

Initial reactions to the report in the Saudi daily ranged between support for the petition to outright opposition, the daily reported this week.

Those who were against the petition said that allowing women to drive would result in new social and family problems.

"Allowing women to drive means an increase in the divorce rates, loose family ties, more expensive spare parts, new and more crimes, less commitment for Islamic values and immoral activities, " Mazen, a blogger wrote.

However, those who endorsed the call said that Saudi Arabia should not remain the only country in the world where women are not allowed to sit behind the steering wheel and that the multi-layer reforms should not exclude women.

"Women need to be allowed to drive so that they can be more self-reliant. They will not depend on others and we will not so many foreigners as drivers. Women have often proven that when they are given the appropriate chance, they deliver and perform in a highly respectable manner," Hassan Haji wrote.

shyamd wrote:Shifting Saudi sands

June 2010: Sheikh Abdul Mohsin Bin Nasser al-Obaikan, member of the Saudi Council of Senior Scholars and adviser to the king, creates a sensation by issuing a fatwa that says Saudi women can breastfeed their foreign drivers for them to become their sons (as a way of skirting the ban on gender mixing). Weird and even obscene as the fatwa may sound, Saudi women activists choose to turn it to their advantage and demand: “Either allow us to drive or to breastfeed foreigners.” (Women are banned from driving and hired drivers are mostly migrant males.)

ramana wrote:RamaY, If you take the long view Shias despite their lower numbers will overpower the Sunnis due to their doctrine being more flexible. In addition by taking over Persia, modern Iran, they have latched on to the more creative of the Middle East people. Further historically Iran has been the power in ME for millenia: Cyrus, Sassnian, Safavid etc. So in long run I would bet on the Iranis. No wonder Saddam last words were "Beware of the Persians!"

So Pakis, KSA. oil, nukes etc are all aberrations and like all aberrations will subside. Outsiders can prop up locals and paly balance of power only so much.

MUSCAT — Oman will be the ‘Focus Country’ at a global conference in India this month expected to be attended by some 1,200 top policymakers from more than 30 countries.

The sultanate will be represented by a high-profile team led by Commerce and Industry Minister Maqbool bin Ali Sultan and will specifically promote two mega projects coming up in its Wusta and Batinah regions.

The ‘Partnership Summit 2011’, in Mumbai on January 24 and 25, is an annual event organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry featuring heads of state and governments, ministers, senior bureaucrats, academicians and CEOs. This year’s theme is ‘New Partnerships for Economic Resurgence: The Global Imperative’.

“We have been participating in the summit for seven years, and this year Oman is the Focus Country… It’s a great opportunity to market ourselves not just in India but all over the world,” Nisreen Ahmed Jaffer, Director-general of Investment Promotion at the Oman Centre for Investment Promotion and Export Development (Ociped), said addressing a Press conference here on Monday.

Trade between India and Oman, she said, had increased substantially in recent years. “India is one of the leading investing countries in Oman. There are also large Omani investments in India,” she added. The sultanate will invite investors to two of its biggest ongoing projects – the Duqm Port and the Sohar Free Zone – which, Ociped believes, provide ample investment opportunities for businessmen from India and other countries around the world.

Dr Maurice Girgis, Duqm Port Advisor at the Ministry of National Economy, said Duqm, some 500kms from Muscat in the central region, was poised to become a major economic hub in the coming years. Work began in 2007 and projects under way include a state-of-the-art sea port and dry dock, an international airport with a capacity to handle 500,000 passengers a year, an integrated fishing harbour and an exclusive industrial area.

“Hopefully, there will be a refinery and a petrochemicals complex. We will also be promoting Duqm as a logistics centre, especially because of the political stability that Oman enjoys… We expect to have huge projects there offering good investment opportunities,” Girgis said, also noting that Duqm and surrounding areas were rich in non-organic mineral resources.

“We hope to become a first-of-its-kind special economic zone,” he said. “Duqm has the right opportunities and the right environment… This is what we are offering,” he added. 
 —[email protected]

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered a scalding critique of Arab leaders here on Thursday, saying their countries risked “sinking into the sand” of unrest and extremism unless they liberalized their political systems and cleaned up their economies.

Cairo: The ousting of Tunisia's president after violent protests is a stark warning to authoritarian regimes across the Arab world, whose people have long voiced similar grievances, analysts said on Saturday.

A joke making the rounds in Egypt shortly after the news that the Tunisian leader, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, had fled the country after 23 years in power, reflects the mood on the streets of Arab nations.

It says: "Ben Ali's plane is approaching Sharm el-Sheikh (Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's residence on the Red Sea resort) not to land, but to pick up more passengers!"

Tunisia's "Jasmin Revolution," as it has been dubbed, "is the first popular uprising to succeed in removing a president in the Arab world," said Amr Hamzawy of the Carnegie Middle East Centre based in Beirut.

"It could be quite inspiring for the rest of the Arab world."

"Some ingredients in Tunisia are relevant elsewhere," from Morocco to Algeria and Egypt to Jordan, he said, citing unemployment, heavy handedness of police and human rights violations.

The Tunisian example also shows change can come from the Arab societies themselves.

"It doesn't have to be an invasion like in Iraq. It's a big lesson for autocratic regimes in the region," Hamzawy said.

The Lebanese daily An Nahar said in an editorial that the "echo" of the unprecedented revolution would resound "in more than one country of the region."

On Friday, dozens of Egyptians joined a group of Tunisians outside their embassy in central Cairo amid scenes of jubilation and a heavy police presence.

"Listen to the Tunisians, it's your turn Egyptians!," they chanted.

"Politics in the Middle East often spills over with much speed and ease because of porous borders and shared cultures," said Bilal Saab, a researcher at the University of Maryland.

In neighbouring Algeria, deadly riots have also rocked the country this month in protest at the rise in price of basic goods.

In Jordan, thousands took to the streets yesterday in several cities to protest against unemployment and inflation, demanding the sacking of the government.

But while the message from Tunisia would be heard loudly in the rest of the Arab world, some say, its short-term impact and the potential spread of popular uprisings were still too difficult to evaluate.

The end of the age of dictators in the Arab world? Certainly they are shaking in their boots across the Middle East, the well-heeled sheiks and emirs, and the kings, including one very old one in Saudi Arabia and a young one in Jordan, and presidents – another very old one in Egypt and a young one in Syria – because Tunisia wasn't meant to happen. Food price riots in Algeria, too, and demonstrations against price increases in Amman. Not to mention scores more dead in Tunisia, whose own despot sought refuge in Riyadh – exactly the same city to which a man called Idi Amin once fled.


If it can happen in the holiday destination Tunisia, it can happen anywhere, can't it? It was feted by the West for its "stability" when Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was in charge. The French and the Germans and the Brits, dare we mention this, always praised the dictator for being a "friend" of civilised Europe, keeping a firm hand on all those Islamists.

Tunisians won't forget this little history, even if we would like them to. The Arabs used to say that two-thirds of the entire Tunisian population – seven million out of 10 million, virtually the whole adult population – worked in one way or another for Mr Ben Ali's secret police. They must have been on the streets too, then, protesting at the man we loved until last week. But don't get too excited. Yes, Tunisian youths have used the internet to rally each other – in Algeria, too – and the demographic explosion of youth (born in the Eighties and Nineties with no jobs to go to after university) is on the streets. But the "unity" government is to be formed by Mohamed Ghannouchi, a satrap of Mr Ben Ali's for almost 20 years, a safe pair of hands who will have our interests – rather than his people's interests – at heart.

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For I fear this is going to be the same old story. Yes, we would like a democracy in Tunisia – but not too much democracy. Remember how we wanted Algeria to have a democracy back in the early Nineties?

Then when it looked like the Islamists might win the second round of voting, we supported its military-backed government in suspending elections and crushing the Islamists and initiating a civil war in which 150,000 died.

No, in the Arab world, we want law and order and stability. Even in Hosni Mubarak's corrupt and corrupted Egypt, that's what we want. And we will get it.

The truth, of course, is that the Arab world is so dysfunctional, sclerotic, corrupt, humiliated and ruthless – and remember that Mr Ben Ali was calling Tunisian protesters "terrorists" only last week – and so totally incapable of any social or political progress, that the chances of a series of working democracies emerging from the chaos of the Middle East stand at around zero per cent.

The job of the Arab potentates will be what it has always been – to "manage" their people, to control them, to keep the lid on, to love the West and to hate Iran.

Indeed, what was Hillary Clinton doing last week as Tunisia burned? She was telling the corrupted princes of the Gulf that their job was to support sanctions against Iran, to confront the Islamic republic, to prepare for another strike against a Muslim state after the two catastrophes the United States and the UK have already inflicted in the region.

The Muslim world – at least, that bit of it between India and the Mediterranean – is a more than sorry mess. Iraq has a sort-of-government that is now a satrap of Iran, Hamid Karzai is no more than the mayor of Kabul, Pakistan stands on the edge of endless disaster, Egypt has just emerged from another fake election.

And Lebanon... Well, poor old Lebanon hasn't even got a government. Southern Sudan – if the elections are fair – might be a tiny candle, but don't bet on it.

It's the same old problem for us in the West. We mouth the word "democracy" and we are all for fair elections – providing the Arabs vote for whom we want them to vote for.

In Algeria 20 years ago, they didn't. In "Palestine" they didn't. And in Lebanon, because of the so-called Doha accord, they didn't. So we sanction them, threaten them and warn them about Iran and expect them to keep their mouths shut when Israel steals more Palestinian land for its colonies on the West Bank.

There was a fearful irony that the police theft of an ex-student's fruit produce – and his suicide in Tunis – should have started all this off, not least because Mr Ben Ali made a failed attempt to gather public support by visiting the dying youth in hospital.

For years, this wretched man had been talking about a "slow liberalising" of his country. But all dictators know they are in greatest danger when they start freeing their entrapped countrymen from their chains.

And the Arabs behaved accordingly. No sooner had Ben Ali flown off into exile than Arab newspapers which have been stroking his fur and polishing his shoes and receiving his money for so many years were vilifying the man. "Misrule", "corruption", "authoritarian reign", "a total lack of human rights", their journalists are saying now. Rarely have the words of the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran sounded so painfully accurate: "Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings, and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another with trumpetings again." Mohamed Ghannouchi, perhaps?

Of course, everyone is lowering their prices now – or promising to. Cooking oil and bread are the staple of the masses. So prices will come down in Tunisia and Algeria and Egypt. But why should they be so high in the first place?

Algeria should be as rich as Saudi Arabia – it has the oil and gas – but it has one of the worst unemployment rates in the Middle East, no social security, no pensions, nothing for its people because its generals have salted their country's wealth away in Switzerland.

And police brutality. The torture chambers will keep going. We will maintain our good relations with the dictators. We will continue to arm their armies and tell them to seek peace with Israel.

And they will do what we want. Ben Ali has fled. The search is now on for a more pliable dictator in Tunisia – a "benevolent strongman" as the news agencies like to call these ghastly men.

And the shooting will go on – as it did yesterday in Tunisia – until "stability" has been restored.

No, on balance, I don't think the age of the Arab dictators is over. We will see to that

India plans to set up an Income Tax office in the UAE are in the pipeline and will materialise only after necessary approvals, country's Ambassador to the UAE has said.

M K Lokesh confirmed to PTI that further to a decision taken by the Government of India , efforts are being made in this direction and such a center's scope and functions are being determined.

"It is still at a preliminary stage and might take some time. However, the suggestion did not go from the Embassy but was taken in New Delhi," he said.

Reports in the local media earlier said that New Delhi wants to set up an Income Tax office in Abu Dhabi to keep an eye on investments made by wealthy Indians in the UAE, which is among seven countries chosen for the project.

According to reports, similar offices will operate in the US, UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Japan and Cyprus while two already exist in Mauritius and Singapore.

The ambassador said that once the proposal materialises, several approvals will have to be taken including those of the local authorities.

Lokesh also said that such proposals are unrelated to recent debates in India regarding the taxation of expatriates.

He pointed out that a taxation agreement between the two countries already exists.

shyamd wrote:A few days ago, Royal Omani Police's new Embraer jets had flown on a test flight with VIP's on board.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_EUEW9aop_ik/T ... image.jpeg

Muscat International Airport was closed for a few hours.

Here's a round up of what happened:

A "Gear Unsafe" warning was received from the ECAM (crew alerting system).
The crew did a low pass, requesting that the control tower assist in viewing the gear.
The controller in the tower told the pilot that his gear was indeed down, however, could not verify if it was locked.

On landing, the aircraft was placed in its normal attitude and then gently controlled as the left main gear began to sink onto it's bogie and collapsed into the under carriage on landing.

Good job done by the pilot.
Not a hero - and he will say that to you himself.
He did his job. It is why we get paid so much.
As we like to say: "We earn our money about one day out of every year."

I've called it wrong on India's expanding reach into West Asia. Its not driven by anything other than US designs for the region. The US had pressured GCC to build up relations with India.

The dynamic is actually to do with US - China relations. The US wants to show them Chinese that they have other places for cheap labour. So the US sold it to GCC like this - This is your chance to make good deals with India. The US doesn't want China to be the sole power on its own.

Of course this doesn't mean there are no fundamentals to the India - GCC relationship. There are. But the core driver seems to be the US.

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Our Persian Gulf neighbourhood contains two-thirds of the world’s proven petroleum reserves and 35 per cent of the world’s gas reserves. Moreover, as energy demands increase worldwide, it is these countries maintaining 90 per cent of the world’s excess production capacity, which alone can meet the growing demand of the rapidly emerging economies like China and India. Our major suppliers of oil from the Gulf are Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE and Yemen. Iran provides 17 per cent of our oil imports, with some key refineries dependent on Iranian crude. Moreover, Iran remains our transit point for trade with Central Asia and through the Caspian, with Russia. With Pakistan denying us transit to Afghanistan, we have cooperated with Iran for reducing Afghanistan’s dependence on Pakistan, by development of infrastructure for Chah Bahar port. Iran is also providing political, diplomatic and material backing to the forces in Afghanistan which share our misgivings about the Taliban. At the same time, however, unlike their Arab neighbours, the Iranians have been unreliable in fulfilling signed contractual commitments with India, on supplies of LNG.
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India’s relations with Arab Gulf States have shown a distinct improvement after the visit of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah in January 2006 and Dr Manmohan Singh to Riyadh in February-March 2010. India has received Saudi assurances of meeting of its growing requirements for oil. The desert kingdom and home of Islam’s holiest shrines appears to recognise the need to reach out to countries like India and China even as it maintains its strong security ties with the US. Moreover, our relations with Oman, the UAE and Qatar have expanded significantly, with Qatar emerging as an important supplier of LNG. We, however, seem to have run out of ideas in fashioning a new relationship with Shia-dominated Iraq even as China seals lucrative deals for oil exploration in a country that has the greatest unutilised capacity to boost global oil production. Our efforts to train Iraqi-professionals on petroleum-related matters could, however, serve us well in the long run.
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While a partnership with the US certainly has its merits in developing our relations with the Arab Gulf countries, we have given an impression of behaving like an American client State in dealing with Iran. This was evident in the unseemly and hasty manner in which we cancelled our partnership with Iran in the Asian Clearing Union——-an arrangement advocated and supported by ESCAP since 1974. This action seriously disrupted payments for oil supplies at a time when even American allies like Japan have ensured the continuity of their oil imports from that country.

One sincerely hopes that the lure of World Bank and IMF patronage is not unduly affecting such decisions. Moreover, if we have reservations about the Iran-Pakistan- India gas pipeline because of legitimate doubts about the security of energy supplies through the volatile and violent Balochistan province of Pakistan, why are we hastily joining the proposed a Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline? Is Taliban-infested Afghanistan a haven for peace and stability? Or is it because of the diktats of others?
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Our relations with Iran should be based on hard-headed assessment of national interest and calculations of Iranian reliability on issues of energy supplies and not on sentimentalism about the so-called “civilisational affinities”. Persian Emperor Nadir Shah did not exactly endear himself to the people when he invaded, pillaged and occupied Delhi. With Israel and the US now agreeing that Iran won’t be able to build a nuclear weapon till 2015, there is an opportunity for India to work with others in the International Atomic Energy Agency and the UN Security Council to craft innovative measures to deal with the Iranian nuclear impasse. Similarly, while our principled support for the legitimate rights of the Palestinians should continue, our relations with the Gulf Arab countries should not inhibit our ties with Israel. These relations should be determined and fashioned by the larger geopolitical realities.

The United States instructed its Middle East diplomats in 2008 to gather data on encrypted Israeli communications and build financial and "biometric" profiles of Palestinian leaders, a leaked embassy cable shows.

Published: January 20, 2011

WASHINGTON — Erik Prince, the founder of the international security giant Blackwater Worldwide, is backing an effort by a controversial South African mercenary firm to insert itself into Somalia’s bloody civil war by protecting government leaders, training Somali troops, and battling pirates and Islamic militants there, according to American and Western officials.
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The disclosure comes as Mr. Prince sells off his interest in the company he built into a behemoth with billions of dollars in American government contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, work that mired him in lawsuits and investigations amid reports of reckless behavior by his operatives, including causing the deaths of civilians in Iraq. His efforts to wade into the chaos of Somalia appear to be Mr. Prince’s latest endeavor to remain at the center of a campaign against Islamic radicalism in some of the world’s most war-ravaged corners. Mr. Prince moved to the United Arab Emirates late last year.

With its barely functional government and a fierce hostility to foreign armies since the hasty American withdrawal from Mogadishu in the early 1990s, Somalia is a country where Western militaries have long feared to tread. The Somali government has been cornered in a small patch of Mogadishu by the Shabab, a Somali militant group with ties to Al Qaeda.

This, along with the growing menace of piracy off Somalia’s shores, has created an opportunity for private security companies like the South African firm Saracen International to fill the security vacuum created by years of civil war. It is another illustration of how private security firms are playing a bigger role in wars around the world, with some governments seeing them as a way to supplement overtaxed armies, while others complain that they are unaccountable.

Mr. Prince’s precise role remains unclear. Some Western officials said that it was possible Mr. Prince was using his international contacts to help broker a deal between Saracen executives and officials from the United Arab Emirates, which have been financing Saracen in Somalia because Emirates business operations have been threatened by Somali pirates.

According to a report by the African Union, an organization of African states, Mr. Prince provided initial financing for a project by Saracen to win contracts with Somalia’s embattled government.

A spokesman for Mr. Prince challenged this report, saying that Mr. Prince had “no financial role of any kind in this matter,” and that he was primarily involved in humanitarian efforts and fighting pirates in Somalia.

“It is well known that he has long been interested in helping Somalia overcome the scourge of piracy,” said the spokesman, Mark Corallo. “To that end, he has at times provided advice to many different anti-piracy efforts.”

Saracen International is based in South Africa, with corporate offshoots in Uganda and other countries. The company, which declined to comment, was formed with the remnants of Executive Outcomes, a private mercenary firm composed largely of former South African special operations troops who worked throughout Africa in the 1990s.

The company makes little public about its operations and personnel, but it appears to be run by Lafras Luitingh, a former officer in South Africa’s Civil Cooperation Bureau, an apartheid-era internal security force notorious for killing opponents of the government.

American officials have said little about Saracen since news reports about the company’s planned operations in Somalia emerged last month. Philip J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman, said in December that the American government was “concerned about the lack of transparency” of Saracen’s financing and plans.

For now, the Obama administration remains committed to bolstering Somalia’s government with about 8,000 peacekeeping troops from Burundi and Uganda operating under a United Nations banner.

Somali forces are also being trained in Uganda.

Saracen has yet to formally announce its plans in Somalia, and there appear to be bitter disagreements within Somalia’s fractious government about whether to hire the South African firm. Somali officials have said that Saracen’s operations — which would also include training an antipiracy army in the semiautonomous region of Puntland — are being financed by an anonymous Middle Eastern country.

Several people with knowledge of Saracen’s operations confirmed that that was the United Arab Emirates.

A spokesman for the Emirates’s Embassy in Washington declined to comment on Saracen or on Mr. Prince’s involvement in the company.

One person involved in the project, speaking on condition of anonymity because Saracen’s plans were not yet public, said that new ideas for combating piracy and battling the Shabab are needed because “to date, other missions have not been successful.”

At least one of Saracen’s past forays into training militias drew an international rebuke. Saracen’s Uganda subsidiary was implicated in a 2002 United Nations Security Council report for training rebel paramilitary forces in Congo.

That report identified one of Saracen Uganda’s owners as Lt. Gen. Salim Saleh, the retired half-brother of Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni. The report also accused General Saleh and other Ugandan officers of using their ties to paramilitaries to plunder Congolese diamonds, gold and timber.

According to a Jan. 12 confidential report by the African Union, Mr. Prince “is at the top of the management chain of Saracen and provided seed money for the Saracen contract.” A Western official working in Somalia said he believed that it was Mr. Prince who first raised the idea of the Saracen contract with members of the Emirates’s ruling families, with whom he has a close relationship.

Two former American officials are helping broker the delicate negotiations between the Somali government, Saracen and the Emirates.

The officials, Pierre-Richard Prosper, a former United States ambassador at large for war crimes, and Michael Shanklin, a former Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Mogadishu, are both serving as advisers to the Somali government, according to people involved in the project. Both Mr. Prosper and Mr. Shanklin are apparently being paid by the United Arab Emirates.

Saracen is now training a 1,000-member antipiracy militia in Puntland, in northern Somalia, and plans a separate militia in Mogadishu. The company has trained a first group of 150 militia members and is drilling a second group of equal size, an official familiar with the company’s operations said.

In December, Somalia’s Ministry of Information issued a news release saying that Saracen was contracted to train security personnel and to carry out humanitarian work. That statement said the contract “is a limited engagement that is clearly defined and geared towards filling a need that is not met by other sources at this time.”

For years, Mr. Prince, a multimillionaire former Navy SEAL, has tried to spot new business opportunities in the security world. In 2008, he sought to capitalize on the growing rash of piracy off the Horn of Africa to win Blackwater contracts from companies that frequent the shipping lanes there. He even reconfigured a 183-foot oceanographic research vessel into a pirate-hunting ship for hire, complete with drone aircraft and .50-caliber machine guns.

In the spring of 2005, he met with Central Intelligence Agency officials about his proposal for a “quick reaction force” — a special cadre of Blackwater personnel who could handle paramilitary assignments for the agency anywhere in the world.

Mr. Prince began his pitch at C.I.A. headquarters by stating “from the early days of the American republic, the nation has relied on mercenaries for its defense,” according to a former government official who attended the meeting.

The pitch was not particularly well received, said the former official, because Mr. Prince was, in essence, proposing to replace the spy agency’s own in-house paramilitary force, the Special Activities Division.

Despite all of Blackwater’s legal troubles, Mr. Prince has never been charged with any criminal activity.

In an interview in the November issue of Men’s Journal, Mr. Prince expressed frustration with the wave of lawsuits filed against Blackwater, which is now known as Xe Services.

Mr. Prince, who said moving to Abu Dhabi would “make it harder for the jackals to get my money,” said he intended to find opportunities in “the energy field.”

ramana wrote:Its not like the previous ones with outside coaching. The puppets are being hanged on the chain. Its really the fallout of end of Cold War. Cant keep the people down in name of anti-Communism.