MH17-Was Putin the target? As Obama led Western Lies exposed by Experts and Evidence

MH17-Was Putin the target? As Obama led Western Lies exposed by Experts and Evidence

 

Before you read the article at the end by Robert Parry, a reputed US journalist, who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for the Associated Press and Newsweek, see the report I had posted with my blog of 23 July, 2014 on MH17.

 

http://tarafits.blogspot.in/2014/07/flight-mh-17-lying-west-brings-world-to.html

K.Gajendra Singh 10 August, 2014.

 

Europe: ECM Battle Over Poland Saved Putin's Life and... 

europebusines.blogspot.com/.../ecm-battle-over-poland-saved-putins.htm...

• Europebusines.blogspot.com

·        7/18/2014

Electronic Counter Measures (ECM) Saved Putin's Life but Downed MH17

The ECM Battle in the Sky Above Poland, Russia and the Ukraine That Saved Putin's Life but Downed MH17

When I learned that Vladimir Putin was going to travel to South America for the last game of the World Cup and for the Brics Conference, I was concerned that he might be attacked.  Now when the US President travels, he flies on one of two identical Boeing 747-200B USAF Presidential State Aircraft.  The one that he is riding in is officially designated as Air Force One; the other is carrying staff and reporters, etc., but is also acting as a decoy aircraft making the task of shooting down the correct Boeing 747 more difficult.  The planes have constant fighter coverage with AWACS and refueling tankers.  In areas over the ocean the US Navy has been known to re-task super carrier task forces to provide USN fighter coverage when necessary.  

Now Russia remains a nuclear superpower, but it no longer is the overall superpower that the old Soviet Union was with its Warsaw Pact allies.  There is no Warsaw Pack now, and many of these nations are members of NATO.  The USSR is broken up and long gone.  So Russia cannot provide the level of protection to its Presidential State Aircraft, an IL-96-300PU that the American President has.  Still, the Russians do take special efforts to keep their Head of State safe.  

Considering the level of pre-WWIII events currently happening in the Ukraine and the Middle East, and the growing irritation that Globalists and Zionist forces have had with Putin and his Russia, the security experts charged with protecting Putin were no doubt very concerned about his long overseas visit.  

Putin effectively stopped an Israeli/US attack on Iran almost two years ago and a US/UK/Israeli attack on Syria about a year ago.  The US/Zionist/Globalist supported/funded coup against the elected Ukraine government and the resulting conflict was a calculated effort to draw Russia into a war over the Ukraine and thereby tie it down in order to allow Netanyahu free hand to create his long-sought General Middle East War.  Putin has proven to be a brilliant strategist and not easy to trap.  Hence, I believe that the decision was made to "take him out" of the picture by destroying his state aircraft as it flew over Russia but near the Ukraine on his return from South America.  

That the Latin American trip included a key Brics Conference in Brazil which was a direct attack on the Rothschild-headed Global Banking Cartel's power over the global economy and financial system was a key factor in the decision that Putin had to be eliminated.  

Taking the Russian State Aircraft down presented a number of problems.  If it were downed over the open ocean, fingers would point at America as the superpower capable of global military action.  Host nations did provide considerable security to Putin and his aircraft while he was in their nations and airspace.  What better place to attack the IL-96 than over Russian airspace near the Ukraine, shortly after it had left Polish airspace.  At worst the coup junta in the Ukraine would be blamed and Moscow might invade the Ukraine in response, thereby tying down its military and freeing the Mideast for a truly horrific general war.

The Russians were well aware of the dangers and were actively looking for stealthed fighters and mobile ground-to-air advanced systems with airborne state-of-the-art sensors.  A few years ago, Russian engineers devised a way to 'stealth' existing non-stealthy aircraft using a plasma system.  This system has been reported on and no doubt copied by various western powers.  Now no stealth system is perfect, and in fact the whole field of stealth has had its share of PR hype.  The attempt is to create a 'black hole' in the sky that no radar or infrared/etc. signals are capable of being detected.  However, no such system is perfect and highly advanced electronic systems can usually detect a stealth aircraft (manned or unmanned) operating in a given area.

Based on assorted reports and a general knowledge of military systems including ECM (electronic counter measures) this is what I believe happened in the skis over Poland, Russia and the Ukraine that led to the deaths of 295 people on Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17:  Russian Air Force electronic surveillance/ECM aircraft were able to detect a stealth fighter in/near the expected flight path of the Russian State Aircraft.  Since shooting down this aircraft was not a certainty, especially since the Ukrainian Junta had just moved a number of advanced 'Buk' ground-to-air missile systems into eastern Ukraine, the Russian ECM aircraft immediately began to spoof things.  The IL-96 was likely contacted by satellite secure radio transmissions and told to turn off or change its ID squawking and a nearby large aircraft, the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 Flight MH17 was spoofed to cover its normal ID code and replace it with the IL-96 code.

In the meantime the Israeli Air Force F-15 (likely a F-15I two-seat Strike Eagle with AIM-20 AMRAAM radar-guided missiles and using a plasma stealth system), which had taken off some time, from a base in Azerbaijan, before the IL-96 was in Poland, was positing itself in a 'kill box' anticipating the known altitude, speed, route, and time window of the Russian jet.  This is where the Russians make use of ECM to protect the Presidential State Aircraft of Russia.  They knew that the IL-96 and a similar sized Boeing 777 (Flight MH17) were traveling along the same route over Poland.  According to Russia's Interfax News Agency: 
"I can say that Putin's plane and the Malaysian Boeing  intersected at the same point and the same echelon. That was  close to Warsaw on 330-m echelon at the height of 10,100 meters.  The presidential jet was there at 16:21 Moscow time and the  Malaysian aircraft – 15:44 Moscow time," a source told the  news agency on condition of anonymity. "The contours of the aircrafts are similar, linear dimensions  are also very similar, as for the coloring, at a quite remote  distance they are almost identical", the source added.

The Malaysian airliner was now being electronically spoofed by Russian ECM to give the ID of the IL-96.  The Israeli flight crew knew that the plane was over Ukrainian airspace, but just barely, and it closed to make a visual contact.  What it saw was a white large airliner sized plane.  It launched a radar-guided AIM-20 AMRAAM missile from a few miles away to lesson the radar jamming expected to be on the IL-96 and destroyed the target and quickly exited the local area.

Early reports, and these are always most important as they are given and reported before a coverup can be initiated, quoted multiple witnesses on the ground that a fighter had fired a missile and this missile had hit the airliner bringing it down. The witnesses thought that the fighter was a Ukrainian fighter such as a Su-27 which has a twin-tail and from a distance looks similar to a F-15 with its twin-tail.

The Russians have no advantage to 'outing' the true story.  For one thing they helped, by using ECM, to cause MH17 to be shot down.  Secondly, without a downed Israeli F-15I, to prove the story, it would simply be a "he said, she said" story that the Israelis and Ukrainians would deny.  So we have this on-going back and forth claims that the Junta's Buk  surface-to-air missile downed the Malaysian  airliner, or that somehow the 'rebels' shot it down, or that the Russians fired a surface-to-air missile that took it down. 

However, experience intelligence analysts in Europe and elsewhere are not apt to buy a story line that somehow a large airliner was shot down over the Ukraine, when no plane had ever been shot down at this altitude (33,000 feet) before during the on-going conflict and moreover that this same airliner had crossed paths with Putin's State Aircraft, returning from the Brics Conference in South America, only minutes before being shot down.  

This is an absolute disaster for Netanyahu's Israel.  When you try to kill someone like Putin you damn well better get the job done or he is apt to institute a 'payback' that you will not want to pay.  Further, a large number of European nations, and others, are realizing that tiny Israel tried to kill the President of Russia.  That will not work in Israel's favor.  

The aftereffects from this event are only just beginning but they are apt to change the world.

Tim Earl of Stirling  

Europebusines.blogspot.com

7/18/2014

Was Putin Targeted for Mid-Air Assassination?

By Robert Parry (about the author)

August 8, 2014 at 21:05:24

http://www.opednews.com/populum/pagem.php?f=Was-Putin-Targeted-for-Mid-by-Robert-Parry-Airlines_Evidence_Flight-17_Intelligence-140808-413.html

Cross-posted from Consortium News

A side-by-side comparison of the Russian presidential jetliner and the Malaysia Airlines plane.
(image by Consortium News)

 

U.S. intelligence analysts are weighing the possibility that the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was a botched attempt by extremists in the Ukrainian government to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin whose aircraft was returning from South America the same day, according to a source briefed on the U.S. investigation.

If true, the direction of the investigation into the July 17 crash has veered dramatically from initial U.S. government allegations that eastern Ukrainian rebels, using a Russian-supplied anti-aircraft battery, were responsible for bringing down the plane, killing 298 people onboard.

The Obama administration used those claims to whip up an anti-Russian hysteria that prompted European countries to ratchet up economic sanctions against Moscow, starting what now looks like an incipient trade war.

But the U.S. analysts dismissed those original suspicions because they could find no evidence that such a missile battery had been supplied by the Russians or was in the possession of the rebels, prompting a shift in thinking toward a scenario in which Ukrainian hardliners working with elements of the air force may have tried to ambush Putin's plane but instead hit the Malaysian airliner, said the source speaking on condition of anonymity.

Putin flies in a plane with similar red, white and blue markings as the Malaysian airliner and was known to be on his way home after a six-day visit to South America. But his plane took a different route and landed safely in Moscow.

After the crash, as U.S. intelligence analysts pored over phone intercepts and other intelligence data, they began to suspect that the motive for the shoot-down was the desire among some Ukrainian extremists to eliminate Putin whom they had been privately vowing to kill -- words initially viewed as empty bluster but which were looked at differently in hindsight -- the source said.

If some Ukrainian authorities were hoping to ambush Putin's plane, they also would have had only a matter of minutes to detect the aircraft's presence and make a decision to fire, so it could be plausible that the attackers made a hasty decision to hit Putin's plane before they realized that they had made a tragic mistake.

Blaming Russia

After the crash, the Ukrainian government quickly assembled some pieces of information from "social media" to pin the blame on the eastern Ukrainian rebels and the Russian government for what would have been a reckless decision to supply such powerful weapons to a poorly trained force.

The rebels denied having a Buk anti-aircraft battery capable of reaching an aircraft flying at 33,000 feet and the Russians denied having supplied one, but those denials were brushed aside by the mainstream U.S. news media and were rejected as well by senior U.S. officials. Only three days after the crash, Secretary of State John Kerry made the rounds of five Sunday talk shows to embrace the Ukrainian government's assertions although the official investigation into the crash had just begun.

The following Tuesday senior U.S. intelligence officials briefed mainstream reporters from several news outlets offering qualified support to the claims by Kiev and Kerry, but some journalists noted the lack of any real evidence and the briefing's curious reliance on "social media" rather than aerial reconnaissance, phone intercepts or other official sources. The absence of this corroborating evidence suggested that the case against the rebels and Russia was weaker than the Obama administration was letting on.

Yet, because of the high-level endorsements of Russia's presumed guilt, the U.S. intelligence analysts are moving cautiously in developing their alternative scenario, said the source, who added that another line of inquiry still being pursued is that the Ukrainian military brought down the passenger plane simply to create a provocation that could be turned against the rebels and Russia.

But the assassination motive would seem to make more sense given the intense hatred expressed by Ukrainian leaders toward Putin and how Ukrainian extremists would view the murder of Putin as a giant feather in their cap.

Still, the idea of assassinating the Russian president by shooting down his plane -- even if the attack were carried out by hardliners without the approval of top officials -- could have provoked a major international crisis. Nuclear-armed Russia would have almost surely retaliated against Ukraine, possibly with a full-scale invasion which could have escalated into a dangerous military confrontation with the United States.

This possibility of a cascading crisis beyond the control of rational policymakers has always been a risk since the U.S.-backed overthrow of elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22, a putsch spearheaded by neo-Nazi militias though also supported by more moderate political figures. The U.S. State Department quickly embraced the coup regime as "legitimate," but ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, which had been Yanukovych's political base, resisted the new order.

Crimea, another stronghold of ethnic Russians, voted overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, a move endorsed by Putin and backed by Russian troops who were stationed in Crimea, the site of the Russian naval base at Sebastopol. The annexation of Crimea was heartily denounced by President Barack Obama and U.S. allies in Europe, who began applying sanctions on Russia.

Meanwhile, the new Ukrainian government, which gave the neo-Nazis several ministries in appreciation for their key role in the coup, began calling the ethnic Russian resistance "terrorists." New National Guard units, formed from neo-Nazi militias, were dispatched to intimidate ethnic Russians in the southern city of Odessa, where scores were killed when a pro-Kiev mob set a trade union building ablaze.

A Worsening Crisis

As the crisis worsened, several eastern cities in the Donbass region also voted to secede and an armed resistance emerged against the Kiev regime, which responded by vowing to crush the rebellion with an "anti-terrorist operation" that has included artillery and aerial bombardments against towns and cities held by the rebels.

On Friday, a Ukrainian parliamentary group reported that more than 10,000 people have been killed in Kiev's offensive since April, a number far higher than earlier estimates.

Angered by the mounting violence, the Russians lodged murder accusations against two Ukrainian officials, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and Ihor Kolomoisky, a billionaire oligarch who was appointed by the coup regime to be governor of the southeastern Dnipropetrovsk Region.

Kolomoisky, known for his strong-arm business tactics including deploying paid thugs to intimidate rivals, is now using his fortune to finance paramilitary units, such as the Dnipro Battalion which is considered one of the most aggressive and brutal units in the "anti-terrorist operation" in eastern Ukraine.

Since the February coup, Kolomoisky also has engaged in a bitter war of words with Putin whom he publicly mocked as a "schizophrenic shorty." But Kolomoisky's fury toward Putin has intensified in the face of the Russian murder charge and other threats to the billionaire's PrivatBank holdings. In private conversations, Kolomoisky has made angry threats against Putin, the source said.

Other Ukrainian officials have vowed to kill Putin. Ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a onetime Kolomoisky ally, said in an intercepted phone: "It's about time we grab our guns and kill, go kill those damn Russians together with their leader."

Though U.S. intelligence was aware of such threatening anti-Putin rhetoric via American intercepts, the rants were not taken seriously, at least not until after the shoot-down of the Malaysian airliner, the source said. Now, they are reportedly being studied as a possible motive for the July 17 attack.

Another curious development was the sudden resignation on Thursday of Andriy Parubiy as chief of Ukraine's national security. A longtime neo-Nazi leader, Parubiy had organized and directed the paramilitary forces that spearheaded the putsch on Feb. 22 forcing Yanukovych and his government officials to flee for their lives.

Parubiy refused to explain his reason for quitting but some analysts believe it may have a connection to the Malaysia Airlines shoot-down, the source said. The U.S. intelligence analysts specifically said their evidence does not implicate Ukraine's current President Petro Poroshenko or Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, but they did not extend that clearance to the more extreme elements of the government, the source said.

Russian Evidence

Based on technical evidence that Moscow has supplied to U.S. and other investigators, it appears that the Ukrainian military had several Russian-made Buk anti-aircraft missiles along the path of the Malaysia Airlines flight as well as two jetfighters in the air in the vicinity of the doomed plane.

Eyewitnesses also reported seeing one or two Ukrainian jetfighters near the airliner right before it was blown out of the sky. Two theories are that the jetfighters were trying to identify the plane or were responsible for finishing it off if the missile failed to do the job.

An independent analysis by an expert on the Buk systems, who has reviewed the Russian evidence, says it shows that one of the Ukrainian anti-aircraft batteries was in position to take down the Malaysian airliner by inflicting damage consistent with the wreckage that has so far been recovered from the plane.

As the pieces of this puzzle fill in, the image that emerges is of a possible Ukrainian ambush of a jetliner heading into Russian airspace that had markings very similar to President Putin's official plane. As shocking as that picture may be, there is a grim logic to it, given the demonization of Putin who has been likened to Hitler and Stalin by pundits and politicians from Ukraine to the United States.

However, even if the U.S. intelligence analysts do assemble a strong case implicating an extremist faction within the Ukrainian government, there is still the political problem for the Obama administration of dealing with a conclusion so dramatically at odds with the original accusations aimed at the rebels and Russia.

Powerful people are notoriously unwilling to admit mistakes, especially when it could open them to charges that they rushed to judgment and behaved recklessly. There are similarities with the hasty U.S. conclusions a year ago when sarin gas killed hundreds outside Damascus on Aug. 21 -- and the finger of blame was pointed immediately at the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

On Aug. 30, Secretary Kerry declared repeatedly that "we know" that the Assad regime was guilty, but some U.S. intelligence analysts were privately expressing their doubts and refused to endorse a "Government Assessment" which presented no verifiable evidence to support the accusations. The four-page white paper also suppressed the dissents of the analysts.

Over the ensuing months as much of Kerry's case fell apart, some of these analysts came to believe that rebel extremists were likely responsible for the attack as a provocation to draw in the U.S. military into the civil war on their side. But the U.S. government has never retracted its allegations against the Syrian government. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Collapsing Syria-Sarin Case."]

Given how far senior U.S. officials have gone in heaping blame for the Malaysia Airlines shoot-down on the rebels and the Russians, it is hard to envision a walk-back of those accusations regardless of the actual evidence. To compel that would require true courage from U.S. analysts or from international investigators looking into the crash.

It is never easy to contradict important people, especially when they have leveled such serious accusations so confidently. That is one reason why Kerry and the mainstream U.S. news media should have held back on their conclusions until a thorough investigation had been done.

 

http://www.consortiumnews.com

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered atsecrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at more...)
 

 

Islamic Caliphate (ISIS); Its Creators, Financiers and Suppliers, US and Sunni Allies, Turkey & Gulf States

 

Islamic Caliphate (ISIS); Its Creators, Financiers and Suppliers, US and Sunni Allies, Turkey & Gulf States

 

When we look at the Greater Middle East ie West Asia, North Africa, South West Asia and other adjoining countries, we must remember that since World War II, the area has been ruled, exploited invaded ,bombed and destroyed by an axis of USA – Saudi Arabia – Pakistan. You can add poodle United Kingdom and Western implant Israel. Tel Aviv's strategic importance went up after the overthrow of Washington's Policeman in the region, Shah of Iran in 1979, making it more difficult and destructive. Since World War II and even earlier, US and UK have provided security to the medieval regimes specially in the Gulf in exchange for exploitation of their resources, use of strategic space and nominating the price of oil in dollars, thus helping it remain a reserve currency. Saddam Hussein was the first to try to break the dollars in sale of oil and paid the price. The next in line was Qadhafi of Libya.

 

Bashar Assad of Syria like his father did not bow down and remained a close ally of Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. In fact, after Bashar succeeded in beating down the US led revolt supported financed and helped by almost all Sunni states in the region , especially the oil rich Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, Jordan ( a dependency of USA and Saudis) and since coming to power of Islamist AKP party under its dictatorial leader Erdogan ,for the financiers, military-industrial complex and corporate energy interests in USA, it was difficult to digest that Iran under sanctions would be able to transport gas and petroleum via North Iraq, and Syria to Eastern Mediterranean and to Europe.

 

Throughout history , all colonial, imperialist and now globalizing powers have used divide and rule policy But U.S.-led West has now opened the genie of Shia- Sunni warfare in full bloom, something to which this author has referred to many times in his earlier articles.|

 

I reproduce below an in depth article by, Patrick Cockburn giving back ground to how Islamic caliphate or Islamic state was created and the dangers it poses. The rapid success of these fanatic and bloodthirsty warriors also shows the softness and corruption ridden regime of Prime Minister Maliki in Baghdad. The so-called Peshmarga Kurdish Militia has also lost its sheen against the fanatic Islamic warriors. However, North Iraqi Kurdistan , now almost autonomous has been a special preserve of Washington, to which USA first provided protection after the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait from Iraq . Israel too is well established and entrenched there. In fact, some 10 years ago AKP government in Ankara had protested against this development, but now, although the relations between Ankara and Tel Aviv are extremely bad, but Turkey, with almost no hydrocarbon resources, now looks at Erbil, capital of North Iraq Kurdistan, as an energy source, market and a partner.

 

I have been greatly dismayed by the Islamist and dictatorial policies of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, who is trying very hard to become all-powerful President in the elections soon to follow... When it is all over, Turkey will pay a very high price for its stupid foreign policy. Kemal Ataturk, one of the greatest tacticians and strategic thinkers, who created Turkey out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, defended it against rampant victorious European powers, which egged on the Greeks, who were beaten back from the outskirts of Ankara .He modernized the new state and created a secular republic from the dead wood of an Islamic Caliphate. He died just before the Second World War, but advised his deputy and successor Ismet Inonu to keep out of the Second World War, which Ankara did. Having spent 10 years in Turkey. I feel sad at the direction of the state, its foreign policy and internal policy .I is not optimistic about the outcome.

 

K.Gajendra Singh. 9 August, 2014.Mayur Vihar, Delhi.

Isis Consolidates

By Patrick Cockburn

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article39356.htm

August 07, 2014 "ICH" - "LRB" - As the attention of the world focused on Ukraine and Gaza, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) captured a third of Syria in addition to the quarter of Iraq it had seized in June. The frontiers of the new Caliphate declared by Isis on 29 June are expanding by the day and now cover an area larger than Great Britain and inhabited by at least six million people, a population larger than that of Denmark, Finland or Ireland. In a few weeks of fighting in Syria Isis has established itself as the dominant force in the Syrian opposition, routing the official al-Qaida affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, in the oil-rich province of Deir Ezzor and executing its local commander as he tried to flee. In northern Syria some five thousand Isis fighters are using tanks and artillery captured from the Iraqi army in Mosul to besiege half a million Kurds in their enclave at Kobani on the Turkish border. In central Syria, near Palmyra, Isis fought the Syrian army as it overran the al-Shaer gasfield, one of the largest in the country, in a surprise assault that left an estimated three hundred soldiers and civilians dead. Repeated government counter-attacks finally retook the gasfield but Isis still controls most of Syria's oil and gas production. The Caliphate may be poor and isolated but its oil wells and control of crucial roads provide a steady income in addition to the plunder of war.

The birth of the new state is the most radical change to the political geography of the Middle East since the Sykes-Picot Agreement was implemented in the aftermath of the First World War. Yet this explosive transformation has created surprisingly little alarm internationally or even among those in Iraq and Syria not yet under the rule of Isis. Politicians and diplomats tend to treat Isis as if it is a Bedouin raiding party that appears dramatically from the desert, wins spectacular victories and then retreats to its strongholds leaving the status quo little changed. Such a scenario is conceivable but is getting less and less likely as Isis consolidates its hold on its new conquests in an area that may soon stretch from Iran to the Mediterranean.

The very speed and unexpectedness of its rise make it easy for Western and regional leaders to hope that the fall of Isis and the implosion of the Caliphate might be equally sudden and swift. But all the evidence is that this is wishful thinking and the trend is in the other direction, with the opponents of Isis becoming weaker and less capable of resistance: in Iraq the army shows no signs of recovering from its earlier defeats and has failed to launch a single successful counter-attack; in Syria the other opposition groups, including the battle-hardened fighters of al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, are demoralised and disintegrating as they are squeezed between Isis and the Assad government. Karen Koning Abuzayd, a member of the UN's Commission of Inquiry in Syria, says that more and more Syrian rebels are defecting to Isis: 'They see it's better, these guys are strong, these guys are winning battles, they were taking territory, they have money, they can train us.' This is bad news for the government, which barely held off an assault in 2012 and 2013 by rebels less well trained, organised and armed than Isis; it will have real difficulties stopping the forces of the Caliphate advancing west.

In Baghdad there was shock and terror on 10 June at the fall of Mosul and as people realised that trucks packed with Isis gunmen were only an hour's drive away. But instead of assaulting Baghdad, Isis took most of Anbar, the vast Sunni province that sprawls across western Iraq on either side of the Euphrates. In Baghdad, with its mostly Shia population of seven million, people know what to expect if the murderously anti-Shia Isis forces capture the city, but they take heart from the fact that the calamity has not happened yet. 'We were frightened by the military disaster at first but we Baghdadis have got used to crises over the last 35 years,' one woman said. Even with Isis at the gates, Iraqi politicians have gone on playing political games as they move ponderously towards replacing the discredited prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.

'It is truly surreal,' a former Iraqi minister said. 'When you speak to any political leader in Baghdad they talk as if they had not just lost half the country.' Volunteers had gone to the front after a fatwa from the grand ayatollah, Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most influential Shia cleric. But these militiamen are now streaming back to their homes, complaining that they were half-starved and forced to use their own weapons and buy their own ammunition. The only large-scale counter-attack launched by the regular army and the newly raised Shia militia was a disastrous foray into Tikrit on 15 July that was ambushed and defeated with heavy losses. There is no sign that the dysfunctional nature of the Iraqi army has changed. 'They were using just one helicopter in support of the troops in Tikrit,' the former minister said, 'so I wonder what on earth happened to the 140 helicopters the Iraqi state has bought in recent years?'

Probably the money for the missing 139 helicopters was simply stolen. There are other wholly corrupt states in the world but few of them have oil revenues of $100 billion a year to steal from. The sole aim of many officials has long been to get the largest kickback possible and they did not much care if jihadi groups did the same. I met a Turkish businessman in Baghdad who said he had had a large construction contract in Mosul over the last few years. The local emir or leader of Isis, then known as al-Qaida in Iraq, demanded $500,000 a month in protection money from the company. 'I complained again and again about this to the government in Baghdad,' the businessman said, 'but they would do nothing about it except to say that I could add the money I paid al-Qaida to the contract price.' The emir was soon killed and his successor demanded that the protection money be increased to $1 million a month. The businessman refused to pay and one of his Iraqi employees was killed; he withdrew his Turkish staff and his equipment to Turkey. 'Later I got a message from al-Qaida saying that the price was back down to $500,000 and I could come back,' he said. This was some time before Isis captured the city.

In the face of these failures Iraq's Shia majority is taking comfort from two beliefs that, if true, would mean the present situation is not as dangerous as it looks. They argue that Iraq's Sunnis have risen in revolt and Isis fighters are only the shock troops or vanguard of an uprising provoked by the anti-Sunni policies and actions of Maliki. Once he is replaced, as is almost certain, Baghdad will offer the Sunnis a new power-sharing agreement with regional autonomy similar to that enjoyed by the Kurds. Then the Sunni tribes, former military officers and Baathists who have allowed Isis to take the lead in the Sunni revolt will turn on their ferocious allies. Despite all signs to the contrary, Shia at all levels are putting faith in this myth, that Isis is weak and can be easily discarded by Sunni moderates once they've achieved their goals. One Shia said to me: 'I wonder if Isis really exists.'

Unfortunately, Isis not only exists but is an efficient and ruthless organisation that has no intention of waiting for its Sunni allies to betray it. In Mosul it demanded that all opposition fighters swear allegiance to the Caliphate or give up their weapons. In late June and early July they detained between 15 to 20 former officers from Saddam Hussein's time, including two generals. Groups that had put up pictures of Saddam were told to take them down or face the consequences. 'It doesn't seem likely,' Aymenn al-Tamimi, an expert on jihadists, said, 'that the rest of the Sunni military opposition will be able to turn against Isis successfully. If they do, they will have to act as quickly as possible before Isis gets too strong.' He points out that the supposedly more moderate wing of the Sunni opposition had done nothing to stop the remnants of the ancient Christian community in Mosul from being forced to flee after Isis told them they had to convert to Islam, pay a special tax or be killed. Members of other sects and ethnic groups denounced as Shia or polytheists are being persecuted, imprisoned and murdered. The moment is passing when the non-Isis opposition could successfully mount a challenge.

The Iraqi Shia offer another explanation for the way their army disintegrated: it was stabbed in the back by the Kurds. Seeking to shift the blame from himself, Maliki claims that Erbil, the Kurdish capital, 'is a headquarters for Isis, Baathists, al-Qaida and terrorists'. Many Shia believe this: it makes them feel that their security forces (nominally 350,000 soldiers and 650,000 police) failed because they were betrayed and not because they wouldn't fight. One Iraqi told me he was at an iftar meal during Ramadan 'with a hundred Shia professional people, mostly doctors and engineers and they all took the stab-in-the-back theory for granted as an explanation for what went wrong'. The confrontation with the Kurds is important because it makes it impossible to create a united front against Isis. The Kurdish leader, Massoud Barzani, took advantage of the Iraqi army's flight to seize all the territories, including the city of Kirkuk, which have been in dispute between Kurds and Arabs since 2003. He now has a 600-mile common frontier with the Caliphate and is an obvious ally for Baghdad, where Kurds make up part of the government. By trying to scapegoat the Kurds, Maliki is ensuring that the Shia will have no allies in their confrontation with Isis if it resumes its attack in the direction of Baghdad. Isis and their Sunni allies have been surprised by the military weakness of the Baghdad government. They are unlikely to be satisfied with regional autonomy for Sunni provinces and a larger share of jobs and oil revenues. Their uprising has turned into a full counter-revolution that aims to take back power over all of Iraq.

At the moment Baghdad has a phoney war atmosphere like London or Paris in late 1939 or early 1940, and for similar reasons. People had feared an imminent battle for the capital after the fall of Mosul, but it hasn't happened yet and optimists hope it won't happen at all. Life is more uncomfortable than it used to be, with only four hours of electricity on some days, but at least war hasn't yet come to the heart of the city. Nevertheless, some form of military attack, direct or indirect, will probably happen once Isis has consolidated its hold on the territory it has just conquered: it sees its victories as divinely inspired. It believes in killing or expelling Shia rather than negotiating with them, as it has shown in Mosul. Some Shia leaders may calculate that the US or Iran will always intervene to save Baghdad, but both powers are showing reluctance to plunge into the Iraqi quagmire in support of a dysfunctional government.

Iraq's Shia leaders haven't grappled with the fact that their domination over the Iraqi state, brought about by the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein, is finished, and only a Shia rump is left. It ended because of their own incompetence and corruption and because the Sunni uprising in Syria in 2011 destabilised the sectarian balance of power in Iraq. Three years on, the Isis-led Sunni victory in Iraq threatens to break the military stalemate in Syria. Assad has been slowly pushing back against a weakening opposition: in Damascus and its outskirts, the Qalamoun mountains along the Lebanese border and Homs, government forces have been advancing slowly and are close to encircling the large rebel enclave in Aleppo. But Assad's combat troops are noticeably thin on the ground, need to avoid heavy casualties and only have the strength to fight on one front at a time. The government's tactic is to devastate a rebel-held district with artillery fire and barrel bombs dropped from helicopters, force most of the population to flee, seal off what may now be a sea of ruins and ultimately force the rebels to surrender. But the arrival of large numbers of well-armed Isis fighters fresh from recent successes will be a new and dangerous challenge for Assad. They overran two important Syrian army garrisons in the east in late July. A conspiracy theory, much favoured by the rest of the Syrian opposition and by Western diplomats, that Isis and Assad are in league, has been shown to be false.

Isis may well advance on Aleppo in preference to Baghdad: it's a softer target and one less likely to provoke international intervention. This will leave the West and its regional allies – Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey – with a quandary: their official policy is to get rid of Assad, but Isis is now the second strongest military force in Syria; if he falls, it's in a good position to fill the vacuum. Like the Shia leaders in Baghdad, the US and its allies have responded to the rise of Isis by descending into fantasy. They pretend they are fostering a 'third force' of moderate Syrian rebels to fight both Assad and Isis, though in private Western diplomats admit this group doesn't really exist outside a few beleaguered pockets. Aymenn al-Tamimi confirms that this Western-backed opposition 'is getting weaker and weaker'; he believes supplying them with more weapons won't make much difference. Jordan, under pressure from the US and Saudi Arabia, is supposed to be a launching pad for this risky venture but it's getting cold feet. 'Jordan is frightened of Isis,' one Jordanian official in Amman said. 'Most Jordanians want Assad to win the war.' He said Jordan is buckling under the strain of coping with vast numbers of Syrian refugees, 'the equivalent of the entire population of Mexico moving into the US in one year'.

*

The foster parents of Isis and the other Sunni jihadi movements in Iraq and Syria are Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies and Turkey. This doesn't mean the jihadis didn't have strong indigenous roots, but their rise was crucially supported by outside Sunni powers. The Saudi and Qatari aid was primarily financial, usually through private donations, which Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, says were central to the Isis takeover of Sunni provinces in northern Iraq: 'Such things do not happen spontaneously.' In a speech in London in July, he said the Saudi policy towards jihadis has two contradictory motives: fear of jihadis operating within Saudi Arabia, and a desire to use them against Shia powers abroad. He said the Saudis are 'deeply attracted towards any militancy which can effectively challenge Shiadom'. It's unlikely the Sunni community as a whole in Iraq would have lined up behind Isis without the support Saudi Arabia gave directly or indirectly to many Sunni movements. The same is true of Syria, where Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to Washington and head of Saudi intelligence from 2012 to February 2014, was doing everything he could to back the jihadi opposition until his dismissal. Fearful of what they've helped create, the Saudis are now veering in the other direction, arresting jihadi volunteers rather than turning a blind eye as they go to Syria and Iraq, but it may be too late. Saudi jihadis have little love for the House of Saud. On 23 July, Isis launched an attack on one of the last Syrian army strongholds in the northern province of Raqqa. It began with a suicide car-bomb attack; the vehicle was driven by a Saudi called Khatab al-Najdi who had put pictures on the car windows of three women held in Saudi prisons, one of whom was Hila al-Kasir, his niece.

Turkey's role has been different but no less significant than Saudi Arabia's in aiding Isis and other jihadi groups. Its most important action has been to keep open its 510-mile border with Syria. This gave Isis, al-Nusra and other opposition groups a safe rear base from which to bring in men and weapons. The border crossing points have been the most contested places during the rebels' 'civil war within the civil war'. Most foreign jihadis have crossed Turkey on their way to Syria and Iraq. Precise figures are difficult to come by, but Morocco's Interior Ministry said recently that 1122 Moroccan jihadists have entered Syria, including nine hundred who went in 2013, two hundred of whom were killed. Iraqi security suspects that Turkish military intelligence may have been heavily involved in aiding Isis when it was reconstituting itself in 2011. Reports from the Turkish border say Isis is no longer welcome, but with weapons taken from the Iraqi army and the seizure of Syrian oil and gasfields, it no longer needs so much outside help.

For America, Britain and the Western powers, the rise of Isis and the Caliphate is the ultimate disaster. Whatever they intended by their invasion of Iraq in 2003 and their efforts to get rid of Assad in Syria since 2011, it was not to see the creation of a jihadi state spanning northern Iraq and Syria run by a movement a hundred times bigger and much better organised than the al-Qaida of Osama bin Laden. The war on terror for which civil liberties have been curtailed and hundreds of billions of dollars spent has failed miserably. The belief that Isis is interested only in 'Muslim against Muslim' struggles is another instance of wishful thinking: Isis has shown it will fight anybody who doesn't adhere to its bigoted, puritanical and violent variant of Islam. Where Isis differs from al-Qaida is that it's a well-run military organisation that is very careful in choosing its targets and the optimum moment to attack them.

Many in Baghdad hope the excesses of Isis – for example, blowing up mosques it deems shrines, like that of Younis (Jonah) in Mosul – will alienate the Sunnis. In the long term they may do just that, but opposing Isis is very dangerous and, for all its brutality, it has brought victory to a defeated and persecuted Sunni community. Even those Sunnis in Mosul who don't like it are fearful of the return of a vengeful Shia-dominated Iraqi government. So far Baghdad's response to its defeat has been to bomb Mosul and Tikrit randomly, leaving local people in no doubt about its indifference to their welfare or survival. The fear will not change even if Maliki is replaced by a more conciliatory prime minister. A Sunni in Mosul, writing just after a missile fired by government forces had exploded in the city, told me: 'Maliki's forces have already demolished the University of Tikrit. It has become havoc and rubble like all the city. If Maliki reaches us in Mosul he will kill its people or turn them into refugees. Pray for us.' Such views are common, and make it less likely that Sunnis will rise up in opposition to Isis and its Caliphate. A new and terrifying state has been born.

Copyright © LRB Limited 2014 |

 

 

Enlarged & Stronger Shanghai Cooperation Organisation to Counter NATO

 

Enlarged & Stronger Shanghai Cooperation Organisation to Counter NATO

Modi leads India to the Silk Road

 

Reproduced below is an excellent marshalling of facts by Amb MK Bhadrakumar , about the proposed tectonic change in East- West relationship, perhaps the most crucial since the end of 16 century, when Ottoman forces went right up to the Gates of Vienna. Since then, European powers and after World War II USA have brought misery, exploitation and destruction to East and South countries of the world. East is finally standing up to the military might and barbarism of North aka Atlantic powers.

 

The reported invitation for full membership of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) to India and Pakistan, apart from Iran and Mongolia is a major retort and development by Russia and Asian powers and nations to get together against a bankrupt USA and equally bankrupt European countries, barring Germany and perhaps France, which have been playing a dance of death all around the world. Obama led Western leaders and media whores are doing all they can to provoke a war with Russia. They tried it last year around Syria and now are at it again in Ukraine.

 

I had written a number of articles about U.S.-led Western countries chipping away at the nations which were in alliance with Soviet Union or were its federal republics after the Fall of The Berlin Wall.

Strategic Chess Moves Across Eurasia 

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9703.htm

 

Obama, a product of Chicago Jewish political machine is doing exactly what his Masters want him to do ie bankers, financiers, military- industry, energy and other corporate interests.

 

West scared of imminent loss of its dominance & hegemony is doing its best/worst to avert or postpone it, even threatening a war which could engulf the whole world and bring in a very long nuclear winter night. A worried Chomsky warns about it.

 

Hiroshima: Counting minutes to midnight

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/JAP-01-060814.html

 

Pakistan has been completely destroyed and turned into a wasteland by criminal British and American governments. It is a cancer created by West with Saudi support along with a feudal and corrosive military leadership mafia of Pakistan, which can be only excised with help from all members of SCO. They can also help in bringing peace to Afghanistan.

 

U.S.-led West has done enough destruction and damage to the world. It will be interesting to see the impact of SCO becoming powerful and its reaction in the Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait et cetera. Most have been assured of security (and hence no coups) to their mediaeval style regimes .In return they have put all their wealth at the disposal of Western energy and other corporate interests. Putin has been trying to bring Riyadh and Tehran together.

 

Let us hope it will also help in reorganization of UNSC and India's membership in it .Why do bankrupt states like UK and France be members of UNSC. These poodles were added by the post WWII bully Washington to counter the other real WWII winner Moscow.

 

K.Gajendra Singh .8 August, 2014.

 

Modi leads India to the Silk Road

By Amb MK Bhadrakumar

 

http://www.rediff.com/news/column/modi-leads-india-to-the-silk-road/20140807.htm

With Beijing having had a profound rethink on India's admission as a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the tectonic plates of the geopolitics of a massive swathe of the planet stretching from the Asia-Pacific to West Asia are dramatically shifting.

That grating noise in the Central Asian steppes will be heard far and wide -- as far as North America, says Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.

On the face of it, China has so far been reluctant about India's admission as a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

According to latest reports, Beijing has had a profound rethink.

At the SCO foreign ministers meeting last Thursday in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, a decision has been taken that the grouping will formally invite India, Pakistan, Iran and Mongolia as members at its next summit in September.

To be sure, Russia would be immensely pleased. A Moscow pundit promptly estimated that India's admission into the SCO will pave the way for the grouping to hold itself out as a 'centre of power in world politics.'

Make no mistake, the tectonic plates of the geopolitics of a massive swathe of the planet stretching from the Asia-Pacific to West Asia are dramatically shifting and that grating noise in the Central Asian steppes will be heard far and wide -- as far as North America.

The big question remains: What made China shift its stance?

We know that at the 90-minute meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Fortaleza, Brazil, on the sidelines of the recent BRICS summit, the subject of India's role in the SCO did come up.

Several reasons could be attributed to the 'new thinking' in Beijing. First and foremost, China may sense that under Modi's leadership, India is all set to pursue a genuinely independent foreign policy.

The idea of an 'independent foreign policy' has been a cliché in Indian discourses and has been bandied about cavalierly by many governments in India.

But the plain truth is that ever since India embarked on economic reforms a couple of decades ago, the Western industrialized world -- the US, in particular -- assumed centrality in the Indian calculus.

Subtle shifts in the country's foreign policy trajectory ensued, helped in no small measure by interest groups and lobbies in India.

This trend became much pronounced through the past decade under then prime minister Manmohan Singh's leadership and at times India seemed to be succumbing to the charms of a new form of entrapment -- of the mind.

Unsurprisingly, China's hesitation hitherto stemmed from its unspoken worry that India might work as a 'Trojan horse' for the Americans within the SCO tent, which was, of course, unacceptable since the grouping has been of critical importance to Beijing in the pursuit of its regional policies as well as for safeguarding the country's own territorial integrity and national security.

It is from such a perspective that Modi's imprimatur that is already visible in India's foreign policies needs to be judged. Clearly, the compass of India's foreign policy is being reset.

Modi has taken to the BRICS like fish to water, which surprised most Indian observers who were visualising that the interest groups most vociferously backing his candidature in the parliamentary poll in April would expect him to follow a 'pro-American' foreign policy, driven also by the craving to adopt a muscular approach to India's problematic relationships with China and Pakistan.

However, Modi's meetings on the sidelines of the BRICS summit with Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin brought out his conviction that India's long-term interests are best served by forging closer strategic partnerships with these two world powers.

Again, most expectedly, instead of beating war drums, Modi let loose peace doves into the South Asian skies.

And, least of all, came his audacious decision to demand that Delhi cannot ratify the World Trade Organisation's so-called trade facilitation agreement if it jeopardised India's food security.

Modi took this decision in the national interest, unperturbed by the fact that he is due to visit the US and anticipating that it will be seen as an unhelpful act by the Barack Obama administration and will annoy the Washington establishment and American business lobbies.

What emerges out of all these is that Modi has a world vision as regards the co-relation of forces internationally today and can fathom where it is that India's core interests would lie.

Modi is a reclusive and enigmatic personality and has spoken hardly anything on world politics, but he seems to have thought through a great deal in the privacy of his mind. That much is a safe guess.

Suffice to say, Modi supported the emergence of the BRICS development bank with great deliberation, knowing fully well that such a move challenges the dominance of the US dollar in the world economy and will seriously undermine the Bretton Woods system that provided a vital underpinning for the advancement and preservation of the United States' global hegemony for the past several decades.

If one ventures to put an intellectual construct on such trends as are available in these past 70 days that might eventually go into a 'Modi Doctrine', it would probably consist of the following elements:

• Modi has a pronounced 'India-first' approach, which is a rooted belief as well.
• But he is not dogmatic when it comes to the pursuit of India's national interests.
• Nor is it divested of emotions. The human factor is obvious from his trademark slogan, 'Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas' (meaning, inclusive development) and he visualises the foreign policy as an extension of national policies.
• India needs help for development from all available sources and there is willingness to source it without pride or prejudice.
• India needs a friendly external environment that is conducive to development and acts as a buffer for its national security. Modi places great store on regional cooperation.
• Modi visualises that India's 'influence' in its region is critically dependent on its capacity to carry the small neighbours along on the path of growth and prosperity that would make them genuine stakeholders -- rather than by demanding respect or insisting on 'influence' on the basis of its pre-eminence in the region as a military and economic power and through 'muscle-flexing'.
• He reposes confidence in the country's inherent advantages as a regional power and is not paranoid about any 'string of pearls' chocking India.
• Modi believes in promoting India's commonality of interests with other emerging powers that also have been denied their due role in the global political and economic architecture, which was erected by the West out of the debris of World War II and has become archaic, but remains impervious to change and reform.

The above elements are more or less visible and their interplay presents an engaging sight.

The dire predictions regarding the quintessential Modi have proved to be largely baloney -- that, for instance, a nasty confrontation between India and Pakistan was inevitable once Modi took over as prime minister.

Or that, China's PLA would 'test' Modi's grit by pitching a tent or two on the disputed Indian territory.

But nothing of the sort has happened. Discerning analysts, on the contrary, have noted some accommodative attitudes on China's part toward India in the most recent period.

Similarly, it is China that Modi has engaged most intensively so far.

A large corpus of Indian pundits have been emphatically predicting that Modi would form an axis with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe to counter Beijing's 'assertiveness' in the Asia-Pacific.

Curiously, however, by the time Modi gets around to seeing Obama (or Abe), he would have twice met Xi already.

Coming back to India's impending membership of the SCO, there are three salients that draw attention.

First, the timing of the SCO decision to admit India; secondly, how SCO is poised to evolve; and, third, what India can make out of its SCO membership. Each needs some elaboration.

ring his visit to New Delhi last week, United States Secretary of State John Kerry (in image, left, with Prime Minister Modi and Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj) was asked at a media interaction where India would stand in Washington's scheme of things as regards its recent sanctions against Russia.

Kerry accepted that he was disappointed but appeared resigned to India's stance. 'We would obviously welcome India joining in with us with respect to that (sanctions). But it is up to them. It is India's choice.'

It does not need much ingenuity to figure out that the SCO is taking the decision to admit India at a defining moment in the post-Cold War era politics.

India's SCO membership is fructifying hardly days before Modi's first-ever meeting with Obama. The point is, the SCO is also taking a calculated decision to invite India to become a full member.

The backdrop to the SCO decision is extremely relevant. The US is pursuing a dual containment policy toward Russia and China, the two prime movers of the SCO. The US, on the other hand, has been assiduously wooing India as a strategic ally.

From the American viewpoint, India's SCO membership will inevitably impact the future trajectory of the US-Indian strategic partnership even as India is unavailable as 'counterweight' against China or as an accomplice to 'isolate' Russia.

India being a major power in Asia, its policy of 'non-alignment' grates against the US's rebalance strategy.

On a more fundamental plane, it needs to be understood that if the SCO has often been called the 'NATO of the East', it was not without reason -- although the grouping is far from a military alliance in the classic sense.

The SCO has disallowed a security vacuum appearing in Central Asia, which NATO might have seized as alibi to step in. Put differently, so long as the SCO is around, NATO's eastward expansion beyond the Caucasus remains blocked.

Meanwhile, it also needs to be factored in that the SCO and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation work shoulder to shoulder on regional security.

The two organisations challenge the US strategy to project NATO as a global security organisation.

The admission of India, Pakistan, Iran and Mongolia constitutes a major setback for America's regional strategies.

For one thing, an expanded SCO provides 'strategic depth' for Russia. The US and European Union's sanctions against Russia will be rendered even more toothless.

It weakens the American hand in the negotiations vis-a-vis Iran insofar as the sanctions regime aimed at isolating Iran becomes unsustainable.

It debilitates America's 'pivot' strategy in Asia; it diminishes its capacity to dictate terms to Afghanistan (or Pakistan).

In strategic terms, the stunning reality is that by the end of this year, the SCO will have as members four nuclear powers plus one 'threshold power'.

In geopolitical terms, the SCO will be stepping out of Central Asia and wetting its toes in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf.

It is entirely conceivable that at some point sooner rather than later the SCO countries may move toward trading in their national currencies, creating banking institutions to fund intra-regional projects and forming preferential trade regimes.

Needless to say, with India, Pakistan and Iran inside the SCO tent, the grouping becomes a lead player in Afghanistan.

The SCO's surge severely cramps the ability of the US to manipulate the forces of radical Islam and terrorism as instruments of regional policies in Central Asia and Afghanistan.

No doubt, from the Afghan perspective, NATO ceases to be the only show in town. This can only strengthen Afghanistan's independence and enable that country to regain its national sovereignty.

An enlarged SCO cannot but view with disquiet the US and NATO's game plan to establish military bases in Afghanistan and to deploy the missile defence system in the Hindu Kush.

In sum, the induction of India, Pakistan and Iran would become a game-changer for the SCO. For the first time in modern history, a collective security organisation would be taking shape in a huge landmass on the planet inhabited by some three billion people.

It would significantly boost the impetus toward multi-polarity in world politics by championing the pivotal role of the UN in upholding international law.

How can India make use of its SCO membership? There are four or five directions in which Indian diplomacy can hope to explore new frontiers. The SCO chronicle provides some useful pointers.

Since its inception in the mid-1990s, the SCO provided a platform for Russia, China and Central Asian States to lay to rest the ghosts of the past, namely, the bitter legacy of the Soviet era animosities.

The SCO offered a new pattern of relationship based on equality and shared concerns and commonality of interests that, in turn, helped create trust and confidence leading to the resolution of their border disputes and the harmonisation of their regional security objectives.

There is much food for thought here for India. A window of opportunity opens for Indian diplomats to work with China and Pakistan in a similar spirit as China did with its erstwhile Soviet-era adversaries.

Again, it is no small matter that the army chiefs or spy chiefs of India, China and Pakistan would get to meet and interact within the SCO tent on a regular basis within an institutionalised framework, exchange notes and begin seeking solutions to regional problems.

At the very least, the chances of an India-Pakistan turf war breaking out in Afghanistan would minimise, which would encourage Pakistan, hopefully, to craft a new course jettisoning its obsession with 'strategic depth'.

Curiously, the SCO membership makes Indians and Pakistanis comrades-in-arms in stabilising Afghanistan. Of course, such a turn of events cannot but have positive fallouts on the overall climate of India-Pakistan relationship.

Again, the SCO enables India to rev up its regional policies and it is no small gain that regional security is not held hostage by the US's unpredictable and capricious policies toward Afghanistan.

Finally, the Silk Road as such would get a massive fillip and within the SCO framework, India could aspire to gain greater access to Afghanistan and Central Asia.

India's energy security gets strengthened, too. The time may have come for the creation of an SCO energy club, an idea first mooted by Putin a decade ago.

New possibilities arise for initiating trans-regional energy projects under the auspices of the SCO, such as the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline.

In overall terms, the SCO membership makes the prevailing international situation highly favourable for India's overall development and its rise as a global power.

The best thing about the SCO is that it is not prescriptive and India can preserve its 'strategic autonomy'. Nor is the SCO directed against any country in the world community.

In short, the member-States are entirely at liberty to pursue their foreign policies attuned to their respective national priorities.

That is to say, SCO membership does not stand in the way of India deepening and expanding its multi-faceted cooperation with the US.

On the contrary, it only enhances India's capacity to negotiate a relationship with the US that is truly based on equal footing.

Suffice to say, SCO membership gives added raison d'etre and verve to India's non-aligned policies.

Through the six decades or so since the idea of non-alignment was born, the world has changed phenomenally and India too has transformed beyond recognition. But the idea of non-alignment as such continues to have great relevance for India.

The intellectual challenge for India's diplomacy today lies in reinterpreting the idea of non-alignment in tune with the spirit of our times, which is characterised by multi-polarity in international politics, so as to meet our country's needs in the coming period as an emerging power.

That is also what Jawaharlal Nehru would have expected Modi to do as his worthy successor presiding over India's tryst with destiny at a crucial juncture in world politics.

All things considered, therefore, India's SCO membership would signify that the Modi government is charioting India toward a new multi-polar world order where the country's political and diplomatic options will multiply.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar is a retired diplomat.