• Home
  • About
  • Reading Lists
    • Egypt
    • Great Books
    • Iran
    • Islam
    • Israel
    • Liberalism
    • Napoleon
    • Nationalism
    • The Nuclear Age
    • Science
    • Russia
    • Turkey
  • Digital Footprint
    • Facebook
    • Instagram
    • Pocket
    • SoundCloud
    • Twitter
    • Tumblr
    • YouTube
  • Contact
    • Email

Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: military

Taming the Dragon

01 Sun Oct 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on Taming the Dragon

Tags

China, China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, CPEC, Dragon on Our Doorstep, George Tanham, Ghazala Wahab, India, Jawaharlal Nehru, Kargil, Line of Actual Control, Line of Control, LoAC, LoC, military, Nathu La, OBOR, One Belt, One Road, Operation Meghdoot, Operation Vijay, Pakistan, People's Liberation Army, PLA, Pravin Sawhney, Russia, Siachen, Sumdorung Chu, United States

Sawhney, Pravin and Ghazala Wahab. Dragon on our Doorstep: Managing China Through Military Power. New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2017. 488 pp.

Let alone China, India cannot even win a war against Pakistan. This is the provocative opening sentence of Dragon on our Doorstep: Managing China Through Military Power by Pravin Sawhney and Ghazala Wahab. While most Indians grudgingly admit to the vast disparity between their country and its giant northeastern neighbour, they are emotionally unprepared to accept that India might struggle to win a war with its Islamic twin to the west. Sawhney, a journalist with 13 years of service in the Indian Army, and Wahab, a career journalist covering security and terrorism, describe in their book the disturbing lack of strategic thought in India’s defence policy. While the material is nothing new for seasoned analysts, it brings to to the general public in a readable manner what the authors see as shortcomings in the country’s security and their proposed solutions.

The crux of the central point of Dragon on our Doorstep is made at the outset – Sawhney and Wahab begin with the argument that bean-counting the number of tanks, artillery pieces, fighter jets, and other hardware may make for colourful charts and captivating news coverage but says little about military strength. The authors differentiate between military power, which Pakistan has developed, and military force, in which India enjoys numerical superiority. The latter is merely the stockpiling of war materiel while the former is concerns the optimal utilisation of that force through well considered defence policy and political directive.

If the famous Prussian military theorist was right that war is the continuation of politics by other means, Sawhney and Wahab have put their finger on the fundamental weakness in Indian security that propagates to all other aspects and levels. The authors’ observation that India’s political will and institutional structure is ambivalent at best reinforces an observation made by an American analyst, George Tanham, in that has been received with some rancour in the Indian establishment. In a now famous 1992 essay for Rand titled, Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretive Essay, Tanham bemoans that India has always lacked in strategic thinking. This has only been to the advantage of Delhi’s enemies. As Sawhney and Wahab contend, “India’s political and military leaders, in cahoots with its diplomats, have sold falsehoods to their own people” about the country’s security.

Establishment weakness is partly due to incompetence: in its crusade to establish civilian primacy over the military, the government has effectively eliminated the armed forces from decision-making process and replaced them with generalist civil servants who are simply unaware of the implications of policies. Dragon on our Doorstep gives several examples of diplomatic errors that were caused by having little knowledge of precedence, history, and facts on the ground.

The lack of a coordinated security policy sometimes results in different government departments working at cross purposes with each other. The lines of authority are also inordinately ambiguous; for example, the Indo-Tibetan Border Police falls under the Ministry of Home Affairs during peacetime but is seconded to the Ministry of Defence in wartime. Not only do such regulations denude cohesiveness and self-awareness among units at the border but they create multiple chains of command that report to different bureaucracies that do not always have the same goals.

Sawhney and Wahab contrast the Indian condition with a conference they attended in China. From the beginning to the end, all representatives of the Chinese media had only one message to impress upon their guests, from the political leaders and bureaucrats to military officials and the media. Such is Beijing’s coordinated strategy, aligning everything from the battlefield to the airwaves.

Not only are Chinese forces well-coordinated, they have, through arms exports and constant training, achieved a high degree of interoperability with the Pakistani Army. This means that India’s enemies retain the physical option to fight on two fronts against a common enemy, holding only the political decision in abeyance. Delhi, on the other hand, suffers from poor coordination between its units, its services, and with foreign powers. Blurred chains of command and the lack of a joint chief of staff has hurt military planning severely, and Raisina’s reticence to establish regular and comprehensive exercises with foreign militaries has left India completely unprepared even if foreign assistance were immediately forthcoming in the event of war.

Sawhney and Wahab take readers on a tour of India’s security blunders and make a convincing case that someone, somewhere, who should know what is going on in fact does not. As the authors explain, weakness at the top has percolated to all levels – from strategic to operational and tactical. The elimination of military inputs from foreign policy and even, to an extent, defence policy, has created a dangerous blind spot in the manner India views the world.

One of the concerns is that India does not seem to learn from its mistakes; perhaps the structure of the defence establishment is such that it does not retain an institutional history. For example, Operation Vijay (1999) was preceded by an Operation Meghdoot. Just as Indian soldiers returning to the mountain tops of Kargil in the summer of 1999 discovered that Pakistani soldiers had infiltrated into India during the winter and occupied the heights, Indian soldiers at Siachen had already had a similar experience in 1983. Sawhney and Wahab describe how Indian delegations were surprised to bump into their Pakistani counterparts in Europe shopping for the same winter accoutrements. The inability to learn from experience is a death knell for any organisation.

There is nothing particularly new by way of data or analysis in Dragon on our Doorstep for scholars or even seasoned observers of Indian foreign and security policy. However, the solutions offered are bound to raise hackles and ignite spirited debates. Ultimately, however, this is perhaps what Sawhney and Wahab seek – greater discussion of issues of vital importance among citizens and decision-makers alike.

For example, it is suggested that the path to India becoming a leading power is Pakistan because Delhi would not be able to focus on global issues or dedicate resources to them without a stable neighbourhood. This would indeed be ideal but the observation underestimates Pakistan’s hatred of India. The authors remind readers of how close both nations were to peace during the Agra summit in 2001 with Pakistani military dictator Pervez Musharraf but India was wary of trusting any offer from across the border so soon after the Kargil conflict.

On a related issue, Dragon on the Doorstep warns that Kashmir is potentially destabilising for India and goes on to criticise the highly controversial enactment of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) in the state. Again, the ideal of diplomacy over bullets is proposed without taking into account relentless cross-border instigation. Sawhney and Wahab also work on the assumption that Kashmir is the root of India’s problems with Pakistan, something that has always been rejected by India and recently been dismissed by even Western scholars such as Christine Fair and Daniel Markey.

Provocatively, the authors write, “India needs to understand that the road to managing an assertive China runs through Pakistan.” This is not the first time this suggestion has been made. Bharat Karnad, a scholar at the Centre for Policy Research, has long advocated some emollience with Pakistan so that India may better focus on the real threat to its security from China. As Sawhney and Wahab see it, India has three options towards China. One, it can form a closer partnership with the United States to contain Chinese ambitions; however, India will always have a deficit of trust with a country that is as supportive of Pakistan as the United States has been.

Two, India can go it alone – build the requisite military and economic strength to become a true rival to the dragon; this is easier said than done and the umpteen structural weaknesses in the Indian state will make this a decades-long process, assuming there is no wavering of political will in the meantime. Three, India can bluff its way along without aggravating China too much; the authors leave the substance of this ambiguous but it possibly means maintaining the status quo and playing the unsatisfying balancing act between Beijing and Washington. The language leaves one suspecting that this would be the authors’ choice.

While the title may imply a hawkish position on China, some of the authors’ suggestions are surprising, some may even say naive. For example, Sawhney and Wahab recommend that India join Chinese infrastructural initiatives like One Belt, One Road (OBOR) and even the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) because it would give Delhi leverage to open negotiations on Tibet and facilitate a stable peace with Pakistan.

The same credulity is witnessed when Dragon on the Doorstep accept every positive claim about the Chinese and Pakistani armies while questioning the Indian army at every turn. The simple fact of the matter is that India managed to “win” its wars with Pakistan and hold its ground with China in later conflagrations such as at Nathu La in 1967, Sumdorung Chu in 1987, and Doka La in 2017. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has no doubt advanced leaps and bounds since the modernisation begun by Deng Xiaoping in the early 1970s – which Dragon on our Doorstep discusses at length – but despite its clear strategic vision, the PLA still suffers from lack of decent hardware, regular political indoctrination, insufficient training, a crisis of loyalty, and corruption much like the Pakistani Army.

It is important to understand the assumptions behind these evaluations, for they are not limited to the authors alone. In this world view, the United States is seen as untrustworthy, and India’s nuclear deal with it a failure. Russia is the model relationship, and China is a regrettable enemy. With these parameters, Dragon on our Doorstep makes a far more compelling argument than without. Sawhney and Wahab do not explore these assumptions beyond a superficial glance, unfortunately.

Otherwise, it might be countered that the United States remains the only country that has the economic and military wherewithal to catalyse India’s hesitant rise to an international power to reckon with. Furthermore, its relations with India and Pakistan over the decades have been coloured by Delhi’s (Jawaharlal Nehru’s) assumptions about the United States. Regarding Russia, there are more thorns in that relationship than are publicly discussed. The ballooning cost of the Admiral Gorshkov aircraft carrier was just one incident among several disagreements on transfers of technology, quality of equipment, and cost. Finally, on China, it is unfathomable that a rising superpower would ever tolerate a powerful country on its border. Regardless of how much both countries can achieve together, Beijing can never countenance Delhi’s power.

Dragon on our Doorstep has a questionable foreign policy analysis but that should not detract readers from its strength – the discussion of the nitty-gritty of military planning and preparation, from foot soldier to president. The expertise of both the authors is on display as they marshal facts and anecdotes to make their argument that security-wise, India is ill-prepared at all levels. Sawhney and Wahab present a comprehensive accounting of India’s weaknesses, from border logistics to Islamist and Maoist insurgencies that draw soldiers away from military operations to counter-terrorism, from an anaemic domestic defence manufacturing industry to over-confidence in India’s armed forces.

A more conscientious editor would have certainly helped Dragon on our Doorstep sharpen the argument and reining in the authors when they got carried away by their narrative. What should be obvious by now is that Sawhney and Wahab are primarily interested in revealing the inefficiencies and incompetence in the Indian security structure despite the ominous, admonitory title implying China. In this, the book certainly succeeds, and is a valuable addition to the security buff’s reading list .

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

Not Quite An Aliyah

19 Mon Jun 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Opinion and Response

≈ Comments Off on Not Quite An Aliyah

Tags

agriculture, Benjamin Netanyahu, cybersecurity, energy, India, Israel, military, Narendra Modi, nuclear, Palestine, water

Ever since the announcement of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Israel, few have failed to reiterate the historic nature of such a visit: it will be the first by an Indian prime minister, and more suggestively, Modi will not lump even a perfunctory visit to Palestine during his two-day stay in Israel. Pace the undeniably rich symbolism, it is still difficult to discern what makes the Indian prime minister’s trip so significant.

Modi’s trip, starting on July 5, does not upend India’s decades-long policy by betraying a tilt towards the Jewish state. Shortly before leaving for Israel, Modi played host to a three-day visit by the president of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, during which India took pains to reiterate that it stood firmly with the Palestinians who had some legitimate claims. A year earlier, in April 2016, India had shamelessly and inexplicably voted for a UNESCO resolution that denied Jewish ties to the Har HaBáyit. The de-hyphenation between Israel and Palestine that many are trying to see in Modi’s foreign policy is just wishful thinking.

The prime minister’s visit is supposed to usher in a new era of military cooperation and trade relations. However, those have been on the increase since relations were established in 1992, with bilateral trade in non-military goods increasing from $200 million to slightly over $4 billion last year. Military trade has ranged from the upgradation of India’s aging Soviet-built air force, drones, anti-tank missiles, surface to air missiles, and airborne early warning and control systems. Of course, trade can develop far beyond these one-off transactional deals into research partnerships and joint manufacturing. However, neither truly needs a prime ministerial visit to actualise; military needs, domestic compulsions, and market forces can precipitate such closeness.

Economically, the free trade agreement negotiations are languishing since the idea was first proposed in 2004 and negotiations started two years later. It is true that Modi’s visit could breathe life into the discussions but such agreements are too technical to be made over a handshake and a few hours with one’s foreign counterpart. The state visit could indicate seriousness to both the negotiating teams, but this should have been clear to them already from sentiments within their departments as well as the increasing warmth at least in rhetoric between the two countries.

It has been suggested that Modi’s visit will see the announcement of a slew of deals between India and Israel. Already, the two countries have been working closely on water management, agricultural technology, space research, terrorism, cyber security, medicine, and several other sectors. Additional agreements are always welcome but they indicate deals already made that were held back to be announced during the visit. Modi’s visit did not contribute to their achievement.

A state visit is an inherently political affair, and that is where the changes must be seen. While bureaucrats negotiate the terms and conditions of military and economic concords, the direction must be set by elected leaders. Modi’s visit comes at a time when the stability (sanity?) of the world order is in doubt and most countries are looking for new partnerships of mutual security. It is rumoured that Benjamin Netanyahu has cleared his schedule and plans to spend much of the two days Modi is in town ensconced with him in discussions representing the wide range of mutual interests the two states share. As India looks to develop a foothold in the Middle East, Israel is looking east for other partners.

A truly historic moment would be if India were to disassociate itself completely from the Palestinian question – it is not as if it has contributed in any meaningful way all these years. The issue does not affect India and is best left to the concerned parties to resolve, much as India insists on Kashmir. If India’s voting at international fora were to shift to reflect this new position, such a move would give Israel much diplomatic room to manoeuvre.

Another substantial transformation would be for Modi to offer Israel cooperation in nuclear energy. Like India, Israel is not a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and therefore ineligible for nuclear commerce internationally. Although Netanyahu has said that Israel is not interested in nuclear energy, his Ministry of Power has something different to say in their projections of the Israeli energy scenario through to 2050. India is the perfect country to understand why a state would want to remain out of the non-proliferation cabal and it cooperation in such a sensitive area would be a true indicator of how seriously it takes its relations with the Jewish state.

Observers of Indian foreign policy always stress that dramatic changes are not possible in foreign policy. In the Indian context, they may be right but that is is not universally true: Richard Nixon’s hand of friendship towards China fundamentally altered international geopolitics from 1968 to 1972. Back home in India, the Modi government has not shown such boldness in its policies – maybe with good reason. However, there is no reason such changes cannot be made especially when the new policy makes little material demands.

None of this is to say that symbolism does not matter in the public space – it does. However, it is important to distinguish between show and substance and the Indian prime minister’s visit is not too central to Indo-Israeli relations. Indeed, the visit is a historic one in that it is a the first time an Indian prime minister has visited Israel but there are many firsts that the world has found uninteresting or forgotten and moved on – such as where the world’s first parking meter was installed (Oklahoma City, 1935), or even who took the first space walk (Alexei Leonov, 1965). While Modi’s visit is unarguably historic, the real question is if it will be equally substantive.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...

The Chosen Weapons Industry

25 Sat Mar 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on The Chosen Weapons Industry

Tags

adaptive armour, Aman, Amir Bohbot, Ballistic Missile Defence, computer virus, David Ivry, Haim Eshed, high-tech, IDF, Israel, Israeli Defence Forces, jugaad, Lou Lenart, Merkava, military, Mossad, Reuven Gal, satellite, Shimon Perski, Shuki Ben-Anat, Stuxnet, The Doctrine of Defense and State of Armed Forces, The Weapon Wizards: How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower, Yaakov Katz, Yehoshua Saguy, Yom Kippur, Yosef Avidar

Weapons WizardsKatz, Yaakov, Amir Bohbot. The Weapon Wizards: How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2017. 304 pp.

Today, Israel has become synonymous with military prowess. The tiny West Asian nation has a reputation for always deploying a qualitative edge on the battlefield and tactical chutzpah, an appropriately Yiddish word. Many states the world over, bigger and richer, struggle to replicate what the tiny Jewish state of eight and half million has achieved within a short time. In The Weapon Wizards: How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower, Yaakov Katz, editor-in-chief at the Jerusalem Post, and Amir Bohbot, military editor at Walla, describe Israel’s journey from independence in 1948 when the new state had barely two shekels to rub together to its emergence now as a destination for high-tech military equipment.

Some of Israel’s success is due to its rather unique situation – from the moment of independence, the state has constantly been at war. The nature of Israel’s wars may have changed from state to non-state opponents but the threat still remains. As Haim Eshed, the father of Israel’s satellite programme, casually remarks, “the shadow of the guillotine sharpens the mind.” Material adversity, numerical deficiency, and geographical disadvantage forced the Jewish people to compensate with motivation, intelligence, and innovation. As former deputy national security advisor Reuven Gal commented, if Israel is not creative in its thinking, there is a chance that it will not survive; therefore, with its meagre resources, it had to become the ultimate jugaad nation.

There is, of course, the human element. As Katz and Bohbot explain, the greatest strength of Israeli society is its informality and absence of hierarchy. Contrary to expectation, mandatory military service has not made Israelis regimented. In fact, most revel in their casualness and indiscipline. New recruits into the Israeli Defence Forces address their superiors as ‘Sir,’ but after a while, are encouraged to refer to their commanders by their first names and are not obligated to salute them. As US Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish found out, in Israel, it is not uncommon to see aircraft mechanics argue with generals over the performance of a fighter jet – even in front of international visitors! What mattered to Kadish’s hosts was only that the lowly officer made sense.

Israel also benefits from the fact that its population seems to always be floating between active service and reserve duty. Along with the circulation of manpower, the IDF also benefits from the skills and networks this manpower brings in from the professional sphere. Their military experience gives them a perspective most weapons developers lack elsewhere in the world and helps them come up with innovative solutions to a fast-evolving battlefield. Some countries like the United States second military officers to defence contractors but personnel parachuted in run the risk of being seen as outsiders. The seamless flow of talent between civilian and military realms gives Israel a distinctive edge over other states.

The IDF does not take this inflow of talent for granted. “Reservists come for a set period of time, and the last thing you want to do is make them feel like they are wasting their time,” Shuki Ben-Anat, former head of the IDF Reserve Corps, explains. Much like their full-time brethren in the military, they often chase a problem up the chain of command until it is resolved. The emphasis is always on the workable practical rather than the perfect theoretical. “Harvard graduates might get a first-class education and a doctorate but it is all theoretical. In the IDF, soldiers get a doctorate in life,” David Ivry, a former commander of the Israeli Air Force told the authors.

The Weapon Wizards is thematically divided into chapters around certain technologies, weapons platforms, or tactics. The book begins with the smuggling of arms for the fledgling state of Israel in 1948 when no one was except Czechoslovakia was willing to sell it weapons. Even government officials were involved in the web of deceit Israel wove to acquire precious weapons and technologies that could hopefully be replicated at home. The United States, Britain, and France had put an embargo on arms sales to Israel in the hope that it would produce restraint in Moscow from supplying the Arab states with weapons.

The new state was incredibly blessed with talented immigrants such as Yosef Avidar, Lou Lenart, and Shimon Perski during this period, who were skilled warriors, administrators, technicians, or diplomats. More importantly, that the talent was put to proper use and not allowed to wither away and die under the burden of an overly cautious bureaucratic and political class. It was clear to David Ben Gurion, the nation’s first prime minister, even as early as 1950, that material advantages were fleeting and that his country need qualitative superiority over its enemies. The Doctrine of Defense and State of Armed Forces, which the prime minister scribbled down during a vacation at Sde Boker, serves as the basis for  Israel’s defence policy to this day.

Katz and Bohbot dedicate further chapters to Israel’s development of drones, the adaptive armour of the famed Merkava tanks, the birth of its satellite programme, ballistic missile defence, and computer viruses. The Weapon Wizards also discusses targeted assassinations and Israel’s practice of winning friends or purchasing diplomatic favours through the sale of arms. Readers would find it eye-opening to learn how much effort the IDF puts into reducing collateral damage during its raids on terrorist cells or assassination missions. Contrary to the general media coverage, the IDF has developed technology and tactics that would limit civilian casualties. It has been the experience of Israeli drone and fighter pilots, however, that civilians volunteer or are forced into acting as human shields; in some cases, Israel has had to even call off its strikes.

Israel’s emphasis on self-reliance comes from even before independence when the Jews of the Fertile Crescent learned the hard way that they had no friends. Even the United States, considered to be the Jewish state’s closest international friend, has refused to share intelligence or supply weapons to Israel more often than is commonly known. Perhaps one of the most egregious cases was when Washington turned down Tel Aviv’s request for satellite imagery of their region in 1973 to confirm intelligence reports that their Arab neighbours were planning an invasion; the Yom Kippur War started a few months later, causing the greatest loss of Jewish life since the War of Independence.

Readers will be relieved, however, to learn that Israelis are not some sort of übermensch: despite the lax hierarchy, culture of innovation, and the pressure to survive, even the Israeli establishment has plenty of cautious status quoists who are always ready to fight the last war. The drone programme, for example, originally conceived to peek over the massive sand dunes Egypt had constructed on its side of the Suez Canal, was shelved in the early 1970s and it took the disastrous Yom Kippur War to reactivate it.

The story of the satellite programme is similar: with the possibility of peace looming by the end of the 1970s, Israel would lose the Sinai buffer zone. In that eventuality, the Israeli military wanted a way to keep an eye on its former foe’s military without violating its airspace. Considered too expensive and a luxury a cash-strapped military could not afford, the top brass refused to sanction any money for the project. However, Major General Yehoshua Saguy, the commander of Aman, Israel’s military intelligence, believed in the project so much that he diverted $5 million of discretionary funds from his budget into an off-the-books pilot programme. This incident illustrates both, the freedom Israel gives its officers and the audacity with which that freedom is sometimes exercised in pursuit of a national goal. An interesting side note is that Israel is probably the only country that launches its satellites westwards, against the spin of the earth, because a typical launch would contain the risk of flying over and crashing into enemy – Jordanian and Iraqi – territory.

The Weapon Wizards is a pleasurable and breezy read, filled with fascinating anecdotes from Israel’s military history. However, scholars who study Israel might have preferred a more rigorous analysis of a couple or even a single project, spanning from conception to deployment. Such a story has the benefit of revealing the underbelly of the entire process and not just the pleasant, superficial elements of what must have been heated debates and technical challenges. Indian Air Marshal Philip Rajkumar’s The Tejas Story: The Light Combat Aircraft Project, though not as smoothly or captivatingly narrated, is one such example.

It would also not be wrong to accuse Katz and Bohbot of producing what is essentially cheerleading for Israel and its military. This is not to take away any credit from the authors or from the subject of their book, who have painstakingly built their much-deserved reputation. However, a couple of chapters dedicated to bad ideas, good ideas that were shelved, or good ideas that could not be technologically achieved would have presented a more realistic image of the Israeli defence establishment as well as give readers a better understanding of the several – political, technical, tactical, bureaucratic, and economic – challenges faced.

Nonetheless, The Weapon Wizards is an enjoyable read with engrossing tales that offers interesting insights into the Israeli mind. Something that has been on my mind recently is the sense of purpose and nation that undergirds successful, stable states. If readers ponder past the personal accounts framed by specific projects, there is much more to learn from a tiny West Asian nation that is barely larger than Nagaland.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • More
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...
← Older posts

Chirps

  • At UN, Washington assures support for two-state solution: reut.rs/2M9XzNn | That's what I said too, in 1921… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 14 hours ago
  • Elysium's new reactor eats nuclear waste: youtube.com/watch?v=C6BGLg… | See? Nuclear "waste" is a red herring 1 week ago
  • Iran resumes uranium enrichment up to 20% at Fordow: bbc.in/38akZug | Yeah, how has that walking out of th… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 3 weeks ago
  • Along the LoAC, India is clumsier in 2020 than it was in 1962: bit.ly/3o8z29g | Or at least, a sparrow wou… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 3 weeks ago
  • נובי גוד שמח קמראדים 🙂 youtube.com/watch?v=W_6Vs8… 3 weeks ago
Follow @orsoraggiante

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 213 other followers

Follow through RSS

  • RSS - Posts

Categories

Archives

Recent Posts

  • The Mysterious Case of India’s Jews
  • Polarised Electorates
  • The Election Season
  • Does Narendra Modi Have A Foreign Policy?
  • India and the Bomb
  • Nationalism Restored
  • Jews and Israel, Nation and State
  • The Asian in Europe
  • Modern Political Shibboleths
  • The Death of Civilisation
  • Hope on the Korean Peninsula
  • Diminishing the Heathens
  • The Writing on the Minority Wall
  • Mischief in Gaza
  • Politics of Spite
  • Thoughts on Nationalism
  • Never Again (As Long As It Is Convenient)
  • Earning the Dragon’s Respect
  • Creating an Indian Lake
  • Does India Have An Israel Policy?
  • Reclaiming David’s Kingdom
  • Not a Mahatma, Just Mohandas
  • How To Read
  • India’s Jerusalem Misstep
  • A Rebirth of American Power

Management

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com
Considerate la vostra semenza: fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
%d bloggers like this: