With all that is going on around the globe, here in our own country, it is easy to forget about India and the orient. Here is a really a good post from China Confidential on the latest from India. The situation in India is very complex and can be somewhat confusing at times. India is one Israel's strongest allies and very good business partner. It works both ways between India and Israel. India has had it's share of problems with Islam over the course of India's history. In fact, there are not too many countries, cultures,societies, and true religions that have not been attacked by Islam over the last 1400 years. India is a rising star in the world. Hope this is of interest to you all. It is China Confidential who has had the best coverage on this. News all but ignored by the MSM both here and abroad.
India Offers Talks Amid Maoist Shutdown
India's Maoist rebels have shut down five states for 48 hours, as reported here and in the above video clip.
At the same time, India says it is willing to enter into peace talks with the increasingly bold insurgents if they halt attacks for 72 hours. Click here for the story.
The Maoist uprising in India is a big, important story that has largely been ignored or underreported by foreign media (except for China Confidential).
Thanks to China Confidential
Showing posts with label India. Show all posts
Showing posts with label India. Show all posts
75 killed in ambush in India.
Labels:
China,
India,
Red Taliban in India,
Uighurs
Some call this group the "Red Taliban." Seems to be a pretty good name to me. First report is from DAWN. You will then find links to some other articles related to this nasty affair.
Maoists kill 75 police in central India attack
DAWN. RAIPUR: Maoist rebels killed at least 75 police by setting off explosives and firing from hilltops around dense forest in central India on Tuesday, in one of the worst attacks by the insurgents in years.
The ambush by more than 700 Maoist fighters in Chhattisgarh state highlights the strong rebel presence in large swathes of India, especially remote rural areas left out of the booming economy.
Recent attacks on police have raised questions over how well prepared security forces are to tackle the Maoists, especially during a counter-offensive by security forces this year.
“Something has gone very wrong,” Indian Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said.
“They seem to have walked into a camp or a trap.”
Police said the Maoist rebels, who control several areas rich in mineral resources, had retreated into the forest in the Dantewada district of the Bastar region, home to government-owned iron ore miner NMDC Ltd, the largest in India.
Tuesday’s attack left mining operations unaffected, but mining officials were rattled.
“There is an absolute panic,” S.P. Himanshu Kumar, the deputy general manager of NDMC, frequently attacked by Maoists.
Reinforcements trying to collect the bodies came under fire by the Maoists who had surrounded the area. Two Indian Air Force helicopters were used in a rescue operation.
“This is a big disaster and it shows the paramilitary forces are obviously not trained to tackle the Maoists’ rebellion and they don’t seem to have enough intelligence,”
said retired Major General Ravi Arora, editor of Indian Military Review.
Maoists regularly attack rail lines and factories, hurting business potentially worth billions of dollars in mineral-rich and often remote regions. They extort more than $300 million from companies every year, the government says.
“The growing activities of Maoists in Bastar in Chhattisgarh are threatening iron ore mining,” said Ashok Surana, head of a leading industrial body, Mini Steel Plant Association.
“The iron ore miners fear that the authorities might end up ceding control of Bastar’s ore reserves in five years if the dominance of the area by the insurgents is not checked urgently.”
Taken by surprise
The Congress-led government has been accused of failing to deal with the insurgents, and the security issue could be important in several state elections over the next two years.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has described the Maoists as the gravest threat to India’s internal security, and voiced his “shock” at Tuesday’s attack.
The rebels carried out more than 1,000 attacks last year, killing more than 600 people.
The rebels number between 6,000 and 8,000 hardcore fighters in nearly a third of India’s 630 districts. While they have made few inroads into cities, they have spread into rural pockets in 20 of 28 states.
Tuesday’s attack echoed a similar ambush in February, when Maoists caught police off guard in a daylight attack in the state of West Bengal, killing at least two dozen police.
On Sunday, rebels triggered a landmine blast that killed 10 police in the mineral-rich eastern state of Orissa.
Maoists have stepped up attacks in response to an offensive that began late last year in several states, which officials say has for the first time weakened the decades-old movement.
The government has offered peace talks to the Maoists on condition the rebels abjure violence. The Maoists say they want the government offensive to stop first.
Maoists say they are fighting for the rights of poor farmers and landless labourers and are trying to expand their influence in east, central and southern India.
Thousands have been killed in the insurgency since the late 1960s.
For more information about the Maosists continue here and here.
China has problems of it's own with the Uighurs
Hat tip: Holer Awakens
Maoists kill 75 police in central India attack
DAWN. RAIPUR: Maoist rebels killed at least 75 police by setting off explosives and firing from hilltops around dense forest in central India on Tuesday, in one of the worst attacks by the insurgents in years.
The ambush by more than 700 Maoist fighters in Chhattisgarh state highlights the strong rebel presence in large swathes of India, especially remote rural areas left out of the booming economy.
Recent attacks on police have raised questions over how well prepared security forces are to tackle the Maoists, especially during a counter-offensive by security forces this year.
“Something has gone very wrong,” Indian Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said.
“They seem to have walked into a camp or a trap.”
Police said the Maoist rebels, who control several areas rich in mineral resources, had retreated into the forest in the Dantewada district of the Bastar region, home to government-owned iron ore miner NMDC Ltd, the largest in India.
Tuesday’s attack left mining operations unaffected, but mining officials were rattled.
“There is an absolute panic,” S.P. Himanshu Kumar, the deputy general manager of NDMC, frequently attacked by Maoists.
Reinforcements trying to collect the bodies came under fire by the Maoists who had surrounded the area. Two Indian Air Force helicopters were used in a rescue operation.
“This is a big disaster and it shows the paramilitary forces are obviously not trained to tackle the Maoists’ rebellion and they don’t seem to have enough intelligence,”
said retired Major General Ravi Arora, editor of Indian Military Review.
Maoists regularly attack rail lines and factories, hurting business potentially worth billions of dollars in mineral-rich and often remote regions. They extort more than $300 million from companies every year, the government says.
“The growing activities of Maoists in Bastar in Chhattisgarh are threatening iron ore mining,” said Ashok Surana, head of a leading industrial body, Mini Steel Plant Association.
“The iron ore miners fear that the authorities might end up ceding control of Bastar’s ore reserves in five years if the dominance of the area by the insurgents is not checked urgently.”
Taken by surprise
The Congress-led government has been accused of failing to deal with the insurgents, and the security issue could be important in several state elections over the next two years.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has described the Maoists as the gravest threat to India’s internal security, and voiced his “shock” at Tuesday’s attack.
The rebels carried out more than 1,000 attacks last year, killing more than 600 people.
The rebels number between 6,000 and 8,000 hardcore fighters in nearly a third of India’s 630 districts. While they have made few inroads into cities, they have spread into rural pockets in 20 of 28 states.
Tuesday’s attack echoed a similar ambush in February, when Maoists caught police off guard in a daylight attack in the state of West Bengal, killing at least two dozen police.
On Sunday, rebels triggered a landmine blast that killed 10 police in the mineral-rich eastern state of Orissa.
Maoists have stepped up attacks in response to an offensive that began late last year in several states, which officials say has for the first time weakened the decades-old movement.
The government has offered peace talks to the Maoists on condition the rebels abjure violence. The Maoists say they want the government offensive to stop first.
Maoists say they are fighting for the rights of poor farmers and landless labourers and are trying to expand their influence in east, central and southern India.
Thousands have been killed in the insurgency since the late 1960s.
For more information about the Maosists continue here and here.
China has problems of it's own with the Uighurs
Hat tip: Holer Awakens
More failure of Obama's foreign policy:India
Labels:
India,
Obama foreign policy,
Pakistan and China
Obama is treating India like a second or third rate world power and has asked China to help manage the problems betwen India and Pakistan. Why would New Delhi trust the Obama administration after such an insult. There is no love between India and Pakistan. Israel has been quietly building a strong alliance with India over the last several years. People thought the Bush years were a foreign policy disaster but what Obama has done in just 14 months, makes the Bush years start looking pretty darn good in comparison.
Obama is losing India
Washington, The Obama administration is trying to play catch-up in its relations with the country that could become its most important long-term ally. But it may be leaving it too late, after India last week agreed a $7 billion deal in arms, nuclear reactors and space technology with Russia.
India's strategic importance can hardly be exaggerated. More than just the other Asian economic giant after China, India is a democracy where English is an official language. It shares with Washington the same love-hate attitude toward China, hopeful but deeply suspicious at the same time. And with a much healthier demographic profile than China, most extrapolations of long-term trend suggest that India's economy will outgrow China's by the second half of this century.
U.S. President Barack Obama himself seems to have understood this. The first state dinner he hosted was for India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. And then were strong foundations on which to build. His Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton had started the courtship of India in the 1990s and President George W. Bush's commitment to India was one of the few successes of his troubled foreign policy.
Bush's legacy was a nuclear cooperation agreement, which allowed India to escape the nuclear isolation into which it was plunged after testing a nuclear weapon outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Bush's deal also opened the way for the United States to sell nuclear power stations, fuel and other technology to India and to forge a lasting strategic partnership.
But for a host of reasons the Obama administration has let India slip down the list of its priorities. Not all of these reasons relate to Islamic terrorism, the war in Afghanistan and consequent urge to focus on Pakistan. Continue reading
Hat tip: China Confidential
Obama is losing India
Washington, The Obama administration is trying to play catch-up in its relations with the country that could become its most important long-term ally. But it may be leaving it too late, after India last week agreed a $7 billion deal in arms, nuclear reactors and space technology with Russia.
India's strategic importance can hardly be exaggerated. More than just the other Asian economic giant after China, India is a democracy where English is an official language. It shares with Washington the same love-hate attitude toward China, hopeful but deeply suspicious at the same time. And with a much healthier demographic profile than China, most extrapolations of long-term trend suggest that India's economy will outgrow China's by the second half of this century.
U.S. President Barack Obama himself seems to have understood this. The first state dinner he hosted was for India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. And then were strong foundations on which to build. His Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton had started the courtship of India in the 1990s and President George W. Bush's commitment to India was one of the few successes of his troubled foreign policy.
Bush's legacy was a nuclear cooperation agreement, which allowed India to escape the nuclear isolation into which it was plunged after testing a nuclear weapon outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Bush's deal also opened the way for the United States to sell nuclear power stations, fuel and other technology to India and to forge a lasting strategic partnership.
But for a host of reasons the Obama administration has let India slip down the list of its priorities. Not all of these reasons relate to Islamic terrorism, the war in Afghanistan and consequent urge to focus on Pakistan. Continue reading
Hat tip: China Confidential
Taliban's number two goon is nailed in Pakistan. Any guesses how?
Labels:
CIA,
India,
Israel,
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar,
Pakistan,
Taliban,
U.S. intelligence
This story has been plastered all over the MSM, blogosphere, you name it. Great snag too, do not get me wrong or take this the wrong way. The main reason I did not post any news on this capture was as stated above plus I like to wait a bit to see what information starts filtering down. Gateway Pundit has some good questions and possible answers on how this was pulled off. I think the mullah in the White House was forced to put the squeeze on Pakistan as they had not caught anyone worthwhile in a couple of years. The India angle is one that I had thought about. Plus India and Israel are getting pretty close as allies especially since Obama and his pals slammed the door on any major military aid to Israel over a year ago. That has not stopped Obama from arming up his so called Mulsim friends. That is another story but imagine if India suddenly got a big boost in aid being closely aligned with Israel, and India was 'given' the go ahead to operate more freely in the troubled regions that India and Pakistan have gone to war over. One more before closing my say; is this a move that will show Pakistan actually doing more or was this a one time shot? Stay tuned.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
How could Pakistani intel be pressured into rolling over on a guy this big? What could we have offered them — or threatened them with? One possibility is that we followed the Hitchens plan and threatened to bring Pakistan’s archenemy, India, into Afghanistan if they didn’t start playing ball. Another possibility, per CBS, is that we promised draconian cuts in military aid if they didn’t at least help us catch a few big fish.
Any other possibilities? A clue , maybe, from Time:
The commander’s arrest would mark a significant departure from Pakistan’s policy toward the Taliban. Usually, Islamabad officials deny to the Americans that they know where the top commanders are hiding while letting them move freely among the Pakistani cities of Quetta, Peshawar and Karachi as well as the country’s tribal areas, where the jihadi fighters launch their attacks and suicide bombings against U.S.-led forces inside neighboring Afghanistan. Pakistani officials privately say they regard the Taliban in Afghanistan as a strategic asset in their regional rivalry with India, which supports President Hamid Karzai in Kabul…
Some Taliban contacts suggest that Pakistan may have had no option but to cooperate this time, since the CIA may have tracked down Baradar in Karachi on its own and pressured Pakistani spy agency the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to help pick him up. A senior Pakistani official told TIME that the CIA “pinpointed the general area” and that Pakistani intelligence on the ground made the arrest in the night between Feb. 10 and 11. Baradar was arrested in the slum town of Baldia, just outside Karachi, which is teeming with migrant Afghans and Pashtuns. The Pakistani official insisted that “this shows that Washington and Islamabad’s priorities are starting to match up.” U.S. officials have complained that past efforts to tip off the ISI to the locations of Taliban commanders yielded no action. Until Baradar was seized, no significant Taliban fighter had been arrested in two years in Pakistan. “All of the major Taliban commanders are in Pakistan,” a source close to the Taliban told TIME – an allegation that Islamabad loudly and persistently denies. Continue reading
Gateway Pundit
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/02/16/how-exactly-did-the-u-s-catch-the-talibans-number-two/
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Abdul Ghani Baradar
How could Pakistani intel be pressured into rolling over on a guy this big? What could we have offered them — or threatened them with? One possibility is that we followed the Hitchens plan and threatened to bring Pakistan’s archenemy, India, into Afghanistan if they didn’t start playing ball. Another possibility, per CBS, is that we promised draconian cuts in military aid if they didn’t at least help us catch a few big fish.
Any other possibilities? A clue , maybe, from Time:
The commander’s arrest would mark a significant departure from Pakistan’s policy toward the Taliban. Usually, Islamabad officials deny to the Americans that they know where the top commanders are hiding while letting them move freely among the Pakistani cities of Quetta, Peshawar and Karachi as well as the country’s tribal areas, where the jihadi fighters launch their attacks and suicide bombings against U.S.-led forces inside neighboring Afghanistan. Pakistani officials privately say they regard the Taliban in Afghanistan as a strategic asset in their regional rivalry with India, which supports President Hamid Karzai in Kabul…
Some Taliban contacts suggest that Pakistan may have had no option but to cooperate this time, since the CIA may have tracked down Baradar in Karachi on its own and pressured Pakistani spy agency the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to help pick him up. A senior Pakistani official told TIME that the CIA “pinpointed the general area” and that Pakistani intelligence on the ground made the arrest in the night between Feb. 10 and 11. Baradar was arrested in the slum town of Baldia, just outside Karachi, which is teeming with migrant Afghans and Pashtuns. The Pakistani official insisted that “this shows that Washington and Islamabad’s priorities are starting to match up.” U.S. officials have complained that past efforts to tip off the ISI to the locations of Taliban commanders yielded no action. Until Baradar was seized, no significant Taliban fighter had been arrested in two years in Pakistan. “All of the major Taliban commanders are in Pakistan,” a source close to the Taliban told TIME – an allegation that Islamabad loudly and persistently denies. Continue reading
Gateway Pundit
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/02/16/how-exactly-did-the-u-s-catch-the-talibans-number-two/
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