Chinese Diplomacy on the
India-Pakistan Military Standoff
Fazal-ur Rahman, Institute of Strategic
studies, Islamabad
China has played an important role through
its pro-active diplomacy in the India-Pakistan military standoff. Chinese leadership has
been in touch through all diplomatic channels with the US and India as well. Ahead of
President Musharaff’s second visit, the Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan,
expressing China’s concerns, to the US Secretary of State Colin Powell said that,
“if the situation gets out of control and results in large-scale armed conflict, not
only would India and Pakistan both suffer, it would also influence the peace process in
Afghanistan and endanger the stability and development of South Asia and even all of
Asia”. A Chinese national security analyst, who requested anonymity while reflecting
on the Chinese apprehensions regarding the situation in the region, pointed out that:
‘What worries China more is the
possibility that it could be drawn into a conflict, not between Pakistan and India per se,
but between Pakistan and the US, with latter using India as a surrogate. This likelihood
is becoming even more plausible with the sweeping success of the US operation in
Afghanistan. The recent Indo-Pakistani conflict is unlike all previous conflicts between
the two sides. It is in fact, a US-Pakistan conflict, with India serving as an American
pawn. This situation puts China in a dilemma. Open support for its traditional ally
Pakistan would risk jeopardizing its relations with US and India as well. A t the same
time if China does not support Pakistan, China’s southern flank will be exposed to
unrestrained Indian moves. That is perhaps the reason that China has extensively engaged
in phone diplomacy with the US and India to diffuse the situation and does not want to be
seen as playing favorites in South Asian crisis.’
The Chinese apprehensions about a possible
conflict in South Asia and the US direct or indirect involvement in it were not totally
out of place, given that similar kind of alarming perspectives, on a possible war between
the two South Asian nuclear powers were presented by eminent American scholars and think
tanks. For example, Brookings Institute’s Stephen Cohen, an expert on South Asia, had
said well before the December 13 suicide attack on the Indian Parliament building, that
India had several choices, one of which was ‘to go to wart to punish Pakistan’
in the same way the US was punishing Afghanistan. The Indian Parliament building attack,
therefore, provided a timely opportunity for India wage a war against Pakistan, almost
along the same lines thought possible by Dr. Cohen. He even hinted that creating a threat
for Pakistan might serve US purposes. Thus, playing India against Pakistan appears high on
America’s to-do list’. Similarly, according to a US based global intelligence
firm, Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor):
‘The US did not want an Indo-Pakistani
war, but a threat of such a war is precisely what Washington needs to move Islamabad. The
core of the problem is that the next country the US has to deal with, if it wants to break
Al-Qaeda, is Pakistan. The US cannot begin the process of shutting down Al-Qaeda globally
until its organizations and connections inside Pakistan are broken. According to Stratfor,
the US is on a collision course with Pakistan and will need regional strategic support,
which India is ready and willing to offer.’
Under such a volatile environment, the
Chinese diplomacy to help diffuse the situation was put iuin action and it achieved
significant results. Immediately after President Musharraf'’s January 3 visit to
Beijing, the Chinese premier was scheduled to visit India from January 11-15, 2002, which
was previously scheduled for November, but was postponed for different reasons. Prior to
the visit, Director General of the Asia Department of the Chinese Foreign Ministry. Mr. Fu
Ying said, ‘I think the role that can be played by China together with the
International Community is to persuade the tow sides to continue to exercise restraint.
However, in the end, it is up to the two countries to find a peaceful solution. As
afar as tension between India and Pakistan is concerned, our position is the hope to see
the ease of tension. I don’t think China has ever been leaning on any side on the
Kashmir issue because we never involved ourselves in the disputed. The visit by the
Premier to India is a strong message in itself. The message from, China is for cooperation
and good relations with India.
Chinese neutrality at the declaratory level
regarding the India-Pakistan military standoff gave added flexibility to Chinese diplomacy
to help avert a war in the South Asia, a desire equally shared by Pakistan. China
undertook ‘telephone diplomacy’ by sustaining a regular telephonic contact with
the US authorities, and of India and Pakistan. Political analysts credited Chinese
overtures as playing a great power role on the global political scene. As one observer put
it, the ‘Chinese President Jiang Zamin, has been sending President Bush the message
that ‘if America is tilting more and more towards India, China will remain loyal to
Pakistan. Jiang’s telephone diplomacy may have been intended as a warning to America
not to do anything that would plunge Pakistan into what could become a terminal
crisis’. The US clearly understands the depth and strategic nature of Pak-China
relations. One of the irritants in Sino-US relations is China’s sustained support for
the defense forces of Pakistan. Despite US sanctions on some Chinese companies and use of
pressure tactics, China has not changed its policy position on principles.
Life Sciences: The end of
“genetics as everything”?
By Emmanuel Thevenon, Journalist,
France
In spite of its considerable resources, the
therapeutic outcome from genetics is meagre. To the extent that scientists are beginning
to question the conceptual bases of a discipline that has for the last fifty years been
the star of biology.
“Everything is in the gene”.
Genetics has for long time seen itself encapsulated in this paradigm. After the discovery
of the double helix structure of DNA which makes up chromosomes, a theoretical
representation became established: the structure of DNA is like computer program in which
gene, by coding proteins, determines the appearances of living organisms and for the moist
part governs their behavior.
Like an all-powerful demiurge, the genome
was seen as creating the organism and as being its ultimate explanation. This mindset,
that sees “genetics as everything”, culminated in the international project to
sequence and decode human genome, which brought together the United States, Great Britain,
France, Germany, Japan and China. Since everything, or almost everything, is written in
the genetic program, all that was needed was to locate a gene so that an undesirable
function could be neutralized by manipulation.
The media daily carry stories on this
research, periodically announcing that it is going to lead to the development of new
medicines. However, over ten years after the discovery of the genome sequence of the AIDS
virus, no vaccine is yet on the agenda.
After having aroused immense hopes, gene
therapy is offering a pretty meagre outcome. Out of the hundreds of clinical tests that
have been or are being carried out world wide, it boasts just one real success: the cure,
by the team of Professors Marina Cavazzana-Calvo and Alain Fischer (Inserm U 429, Hopital
Necker- Enfants Malades, Paris), of around ten “ Bubble Children” suffering from
a severe combined immuno-deficiency disease due to defective gene. But the success is a
fragile one: in October 2002, an unexpected serious complication (a kind of leukemia),
affecting one of the children treated, led to the suspension of the clinical trails. At
the same time the United States stopped part of their gene therapy programs.
Today, geneticists are shifting their hopes
to “proteomics”, which, following the decoding of the humane genome, aims to
determine the precise functions of the 30,000 genes that characterize each human being.
From ten to twelve thousand have already been identified to date, but the functions of
only 5,000 of them have been discovered.
Another source of hope: the recent
discovery of “interfacing RNA”. This small molecule, derived from DNA, is, by
itself, able to switch genes on or off according to the needs of the organism. In plants,
it also serves to fight viruses. The aim of the researchers is to be able to synthesize
interfacing RNA for use in combating genetic abnormalities, but also in combating
infectious agents and certain genes that are responsible for cancers. In July 2002,
American researchers already succeeded in making in vitro human cells resistant to AIDS
virus and to poliomyelitis.
In the meantime, the abundance of public
and private funds that the geneticists have at their disposal is exasperating researchers
in other life disciplines, often much less well provided for. Botany and zoology are
without doubt the most marginalized by the hegemony of genetics. To the extent that it has
become difficult today to recruit taxonomists, specialists capable of describing and
recognising plants and animals.
One example among others: in 2001, when the
whole sequence of the genome of the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) was published to
great fanfare, Europe had only two working specialists who were capable of comparing and
identifying with precision the 3,000 known species of Drosophila flies. Quite a contrast!
Mistaken theory
Criticisms of an epistemological kind are
also being made by certain scientists who feel that if genetics is not leading to concrete
results, it is because its theoretical bases are wrong. In its early days, the
"central dogma" of the discipline asserted that a strand of DNA – a gene
– coded one and only one protein. But this is not the case. In reality, it has been
known for some time that the same gene can code several proteins, whilst several genes can
contribute to the expression of the same characteristic.
The sequencing of the human genome has
confused the issue even further. It has been discovered that a constantly growing number
of genes present only a statistical correlation with the characteristic that they are
supposed to determine. This means that, among the individuals carrying these genes, some
present the characteristic (an illness, for example) and others do not. In view of this
problem, which complicates the use of genes for therapeutic purposes, geneticists now
explain that the complex influences of numerous genes and environmental factors have to be
taken into consideration. As a result, we tend now to speak of genetic
"component" rather than genetic "determinism". This seriously calls
into question the initial view of the all-powerful nature of the gene, for a long time
considered as the "essence of life".
Proteomics is not likely to enable us to
understand this complexity of life, any more than the sequencing of the human genome did
before it. "By cataloguing proteins," Andras Paldi, director of research at the
National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) says in an interview with the newspaper Le
Figaro, in July 2002, "there is a risk that we are pushing the problem a bit further
away. It is like trying to understand the way a rocket works by reading the list of its
spare parts! We have to reach an understanding of the kinds of interactions between the
different components of the cell and the laws that govern these interactions. And these
laws are not coded in the genome."
Genetic Darwinism
The botanist Jean-Marie Pelt, a sworn enemy
of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), also challenges "the basic reductionism of
genetic engineering, in so far as it resorts to considering the living being strictly as
an accumulation of juxtaposed, and therefore interchangeable, elements", thereby
ignoring global approaches. In his view, the genetic engineers opening this Pandora’s
box are interfering with the genome of living beings without having a precise vision of
their functioning and their structure. Contrary to what they say, it is for example
impossible to predict the consequences of transferring a gene from one type of organism to
another. The transferred gene might in fact mutate within the genome, or even be
transferred to another organism, even to another species.
To get out of the epistemological impasse
in which genetics finds itself confined today, two French molecular biologists,
Jean-Jacques Kupiec and Pierre Sanigo, are proposing to apply Darwin’s theory to
their discipline, breaking radically with the present determinist model.
In their book Ni Dieu ni gène [Neither God
nor gene], published two years ago, they explain that it is not the genetic programme that
structures cell populations but the competition engaged in by the different components of
the living being to get hold of the external resources that they need in order to live.
The assembly of molecules would happen in a random way, and a principle of
"natural" selection would be at work to retain viable assemblies.
As with the populations of higher organisms
(plants, animals...), the molecules and cells that survive and continue their development
are those that are more successful than others at finding their nutrients. This theory
would explain the failures in the research on a vaccine against the AIDS virus. It is
impossible to create a vaccine capable of adapting to the billions of mutations per minute
of billions of individuals. This would make no more sense than analysing atom by atom the
composition of a car in order to prevent road traffic accidents...
(Courtesy: Label France Magazine No. 49
January –March 2003)
The NATO of the future
The NATO summit prepared the way for a
larger Alliance that is adapting to the New World security situation.
Global political developments do not
stop for historic meetings and their agendas. The latest example was the Prague NATO
summit in late November, where the Alliance’s second eastern enlargement – a
significant step by anyone’s standards – was all but ignored by public opinion.
The invitation to the seven future members was overshadowed by the conflict over Iraq.
Opening the summit, NATO Secretary General George Robertson underlined Prague’s
historic importance. In his welcoming speech, he invited seven additional countries to
join. By this point in time it was no longer a surprise that these countries were
Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania. These states can
–and certainly will- join by 2004. Federal Minster of Foreign Affairs Joschka
declared that the NATO summit in Prague was ushering in a new era: “Twelve years
after the end of the Cold War the world has been given a new face, “stressed Fischer
and simultaneously advocated a global system of cooperative security in which crisis
prevention was just as important as crisis reaction. In Prague Germany also reiterated its
position that the threats posed by international terrorism could not be combated by
military means alone. Rather, Federal Chancellor Schroder stressed, a comprehensive
concept for crisis solution must take effect which supports the development of civil
societies in what are often poor countries.
There is no doubt that the new members are
ambitious enough to place their military capabilities at NATO’s disposal. To some
extent, these are niche capabilities. Even so, for one thing, some of these capabilities
may well be useful in crisis intervention and, for another, the United States can use the
new members as an example to increase the pressure on the old members to be equally knee
to meet their obligations to the Alliance. In the final analysis, this was probably the
biggest issue at the Prague NATO summit, with the united States making another attempt-via
the NATO headquarters in Brussels- to narrow the great transatlantic gap in the
Alliance’s military capabilities. One symbol of this was the creation of a so-called
“NATO Response Force”, a rapid-reaction force of land, marine and airborne
troops comprising up to 21,000 men to be deployed “quickly, wherever they are
needed” by 2006. This will entail additional challenges for the Europeans in terms of
personnel and materials, because a 60,000-men European Union strike force is being set up
parallel to this.
The 19 NATO states agreed to strengthen
their capabilities in order to counter threats to the safety of their forces, populations
and territories, “wherever these might come from”. NATO must be able to both
deploy forces quickly and support them for long periods a long way from home.
Christoph Schwennicke is an editor of
Suddeutsche Zeitung |
