The terrorist atrocities in Mumbai this week serve as another reminder of two fundamental issues for India:
- India’s future will always be imperiled as long as relations with Pakistan remain on a hair-trigger. The terrorist group that attacked the city may have no official ties to Pakistan, yet still managed to raise tensions between the two states. All India’s hopes could disappear in nuclear fire if each crisis could lead to war.
- The problem of Kashmir — a predominately Muslim area ruled by India, which stations hundreds of thousands of troops there — is also likely to bedevil India’s future. There are signs that the terrorists were motivated by the Kashmir problem, and Kashmir will continue to generate crises until India resolves the issue. It is also the most dangerous flashpoint for Indo-Pakistani relations.
In a New York Times article by Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, analysts say that Al Qaeda has lashed out at President-elect Obama in a new video because he “challenged its worldview,” with his multiracial, multicultural background.
Mazzetti and Shane wrote, “American antiterrorism officials and other experts dismissed the video as a desperate tactic by a terrorist group that suffered a defeat in the global war of ideas with Mr. Obama’s election.”
They quote Dr. Ronald Walters: ““You’re talking about someone who looks like the rest of the world, and that’s got to be threatening to them.”
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Reports–such as this AP article–suggest that the Tibetan self-determination movement may be nearing a crossroads.
The reporter summarizes the feelings at a meeting of 600 Tibetan exile leaders thusly:
Many young leaders – some of whom have only seen their homeland from across the Himalayas in India – are pushing for a declaration of independence from China. However, much of the older guard, who witnessed firsthand China’s military might, are standing by the Dalai Lama’s path of compromise.
Younger factions have grown more dissatisfied with the Dalai Lama’s compromise approach, and more now advocate violence against Tibet’s Chinese rulers.
Such a strategy would be perilous.
- China has vastly more raw power than Tibetans can ever muster.
- The Chinese government and general populace are likely ready to use that power.
- China’s political culture is still in a stage that demonstrations of Tibetan dissatisfaction with Chinese rule–whether violent or nonviolent–are unlikely to meet with much sympathy, except from small groups of liberal Chinese.
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Somali pirates seizing ships on the high seas and militias driving hundreds of thousands from their homes in the Congo are prime examples of what happens when there is too little government to manage even basic control of a country.
FutureAtlas has a new issue page examining just this issue; see the page for a larger version of this map.
Government effectiveness is crucial because many key 21st century issues — from climate change and intellectual property theft to human rights and terrorism — are decisively affected by it.