Wheat, Bread, Noodles and Global Competition

By Alan Caruba

My late Mother used to bake her own breads, along with cookies, cakes, and pies. I miss the taste of freshly baked bread and I miss the aroma that floated from the kitchen to the rest of the house. The author of several cookbooks, she knew a lot about the history of foods. Much of history was shaped by the development of agriculture, the growing of grains.

In the Middle East, it wasn’t called the Fertile Crescent for nothing. In Rome there were public ovens. The bakers of ancient Greece had a worldwide reputation. Much later when French peasants could not get bread, it sparked a revolution. “Let them eat cake” cost Marie Antoinette her head!

Great famines have marked history as well. There is a reason why bread is called the staff of life and there is a reason to keep an eye on today’s worldwide market for wheat. It reflects the competition between nations for the sale of this vital commodity.

Casting an eye over the world, one learns that Syria, in the midst of the riots to overthrow the Assad dictatorship, the more mundane business of the country goes on including the announcement that it plans to sell 50,000 tons of durum in extra stock bought from farmers last year.

Wheat Life, a publication of the Washington Growers of Wheat Association, monitors the global wheat market for its readers. Suffice to say that wheat is a major export for the U.S., generating billions in revenue every year. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. wheat exports will reach 31.3 million metric tons (mmt) in 2011 and 2012.

Farmers, as always, are dependent on the weather and other factors over which they have no control. In the U.S. the environmental movement has often been responsible for shutting off their access to water to “save” some reptile or other species. The EPA is trying to define “dust”, a by-product of farming, as a “pollutant.” This kind of regulation has a serious impact on the availability of all manner of foods at your local supermarket, in restaurants, and bakeries.

Since the growth of all vegetation, including wheat, is dependent on an abundance of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, the demand by global warming hucksters that emissions of this vital gas be reduced is idiotic, either domestically or worldwide.

But I digress. The fact that the world is now home to seven billion hungry humans will put a lot of pressure on farmers to produce more wheat, rice and other grains.

In 2007 India banned the export of wheat, but “large crops and inefficient storage centers means large quantities of India’s crop is spoiled every year.” India’s politicians are under a lot of pressure to ensure that the price of wheat remains within reach of its millions of poor people. Recently, however, India announced that it would allow private companies to export two million metric tons from its 86 mmt annual yield. That would make India the world’s second largest wheat producer after China.

China, however, is paying a price for the expansion of its wheat production. The Chinese Academy of Sciences says that the overuse of chemical fertilizers for the past thirty years is causing the deterioration of arable soil. When you have more than a billion people to feed, it poses a problem that could translate into political unrest, so the Chinese leadership pays a lot of attention to such things.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Russia’s export of wheat is expected to quadruple from last year to 16 mmt. In 2010, a hot summer that resulted in poor production led to a ban on wheat exports. The demand for Russian wheat has “outstripped the ability of the ports to handle it.” Former Soviet satellite nations such as Bulgaria and the Ukraine have had a banner year for wheat production.

This in turn has knocked Pakistan’s wheat producers out of the competitive marketplace despite the fact that it is the Middle East’s third largest wheat producer. Its expected exports of 3 mmt have been reduced to 1.8 mmt. Along with all its other problems, the excess wheat is likely to be dumped on the domestic market, driving prices downward.

From nation to nation, wheat, whether in abundance or the lack thereof, affects their internal affairs in ways that only rarely make headlines, but it remains as valuable as oil and other commodities that shape policies.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Pakistani Pit of Deception

By Alan Caruba

Even Pakistanis do not believe that their political and military leaders did not know bin Laden was living, as one columnist put it, “wrapped in the bosom of the Pakistani security establishment.”

Cyril Almeida, writing in the Pakistani newspaper, Dawn, a few days after the killing of bin Laden noted that, when the question is asked privately, “No one will say anything but, yes, they knew he was there.”

For 34 of its 64 years, Pakistan has been run by generals whose military intelligence presumably works in league with its Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), though both have their own agendas. It is unlikely that much civilian control over either exists.

Almeida wrote, “If we didn’t know, we are a failed state; if we did know, we are a rogue state. But does anyone believe they didn’t know?”

If it were an individual, Pakistan would be diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, subject to raging fears that India intends to invade on a moment’s notice and antagonistic to Afghanistan as it harbors those who attack it.

In his recently published book, “Pakistan: A Hard Country”, Anatol Lieven provides insight to a nation that, until lately, was home to the most wanted man on the face of the Earth, Osama bin Laden. He was dispatched in a compound that was within a short distance of Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point or England’s Sandhurst. If we are to believe Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership, neither had any idea he was there.

“Trying to understand Pakistan’s internal structures and dynamics is complicated,” writes Lieven. “If there is one phrase which defines many aspects of Pakistan…it is ‘Janus-faced’: in other words, many of the same features of Pakistan’s state and government which are responsible for holding Islamist extremism in check are at one and the same time responsible for holding back Pakistan’s social, economic, and political development.”

“Pakistan,” writes Lieven, “is divided, disorganized, economically backward, corrupt, violent, unjust, often savagely oppressive towards the poor and women, and home to extremely dangerous forms of extremism and terrorism.”

Pakistan came into being in 1947 when leaders of India’s Muslim population like Mohammed Ali Jinnah, its founder, made it clear they did not want to be part of the newly independent India after Great Britain relinquished its colonial rule. Later, when East Pakistan broke loose to establish its independence in 1971, it became Bangladesh.

The thing Westerners find difficult to understand is the tribal nature of nations like Pakistan and Afghanistan, but it is not difficult to understand “Muslim nationalism and the bitter hostility to the U.S. role in the Muslim world in general and Pakistan’s region in particular.” However, in order to pursue the present combat role against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the U.S. and its European allies rely on neighboring Pakistan in order to provision supplies to their troops.

Since the Taliban are a creation of Pakistan’s ISI and because Pakistan has long been where al Qaeda has found refuge, those in charge have played a Janus or two-faced role for a very long time; at times providing intelligence of great value and at others aiding or at the very least, protecting the terrorist organizations. In return, the Taliban have proven an internal problem for the military and the government, occasionally requiring that they be driven out of areas they have seized.

In many ways, Pakistan is barely a nation. In its tribal northwest regions, such as the now fabled Waziristan, the state has little influence or control. As to its tribes, the two dominant ones are Punjab and Pathan. Both pursue their own interests.

As Lieven describes it, “A fundamental political fact about Pakistan is that the state, whoever claims to lead it, is weak, and (the) society in its various forms is immensely strong.” It is a nation of many separate fiefdoms who “plunder the state for patronage and favors” and this is graphically demonstrated by the fact that “barely one percent of the population pays income tax, and the wealthiest landowners in the country pay no direct taxes at all.”

Thus, the billions that the U.S. has pumped into its economy take on a very critical role, particularly for the military. This is a very different world from that of the West. The majority of Pakistan’s political parties are dynastic, led by a few powerful families. The entire society operates on kinship loyalty.

Pakistan is a perfect example of why the U.S. and the West are stymied by the illogic, the irrationality, and the duplicity of nations in which Islam is the predominant factor in their politics and society.

When you add in the geography of Pakistan, lodged between India and Afghanistan, bordered by China and Iran, you have a nation that can neither be ignored nor abandoned because of its strategic location.

Finally, there is the fact that Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal that must never be allowed to fall into the hands of the Taliban, al Qaeda, or anyone else crazed enough to use it for the greater glory of Allah.

Pakistan is a pit of deception and it is notable that our current relations with it consist of the special operations raid that killed bin Laden and the drones that continue to kill al Qaeda and Taliban who make themselves available targets.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Pakistan Implodes

By Alan Caruba

The wars going on in the Middle East will soon be the entire world’s next war as the fanatic Islamists throughout the region threaten to take over Pakistan and Afghanistan while continuing to wage war in Iraq. If they’re successful, India will be dragged into the full scale battle against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Where it spreads from there is anyone’s guess.

It is a battle between the seventh century of Islam and the twenty-first century of the rest of the world. It is a battle between men who believe that Allah demands it and they are prepared to spend as much time as necessary to achieve victory.

It is a battle in which the United States has been an unwilling participant for a very long time. The jihadists drew blood in Beirut, Lebanon during the Reagan years in the 80s and again when they blew up two U.S. embassies in Africa during the Clinton years. Tellingly, it included an abortive effort to destroy the Twin Towers in 1993.

After September 11, 2001, Americans applauded the vigorous response of the Bush administration in Afghanistan, but in point of fact al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri easily moved across the border into Pakistan and intelligence services believe they have been there ever since.

This enemy senses serious weakness in the new President. Obama has chosen Afghanistan, the worst place to fight a war, as his new “front” while at the same time announcing he is withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. The increase of bombings in Iraq is no accident. It is an al Qaeda calling card. The worst of the news is the potential collapse of Pakistan as Taliban factions acquire more and more territory in what has always been a very poor excuse for a nation.

As Pakistan’s leading English-language newspaper, Dawn, recently said in an editorial, “…the Taliban are no longer a threat, but a grotesque reality,” noting that “The writ of the government weakens by the hour, while the terrorists are steadily emboldened. Yet the state and its institutions—including the military—have so far shown an appalling lack of commitment or wherewithal to force back the swarm.”

This is a newspaper in a Muslim nation, written by Muslims, who call the Taliban “grotesque.” And they should know! The editorial warned that, “The time in which to turn back the tide is fast running out.”

One of the most brilliant analysts of Middle Eastern affairs is Walid Phares, the Director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. “As the U.S. administration and its allies are devising a new strategy for the next steps in Afghanistan, the jihadists have already begun their next move—but this time it’s inside Pakistan.”

“If Washington and its allies fail to see the big picture in the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda,” wrote Phares, “which unfortunately may be the case now, the rapidly deteriorating situation will soon exceed the northwestern provinces of Pakistan to spill over to both Afghanistan and India.”

Simply put, you cannot negotiate with the Taliban or al Qaeda. Their promises mean nothing because they operate under taqiyya, an Arab/Muslim term that terrorism expert, Douglas Farah tells us is “embraced by radical Islamists. It blesses the concept of disguising one’s beliefs, intentions, convictions, ideas, feelings, opinions or strategies from the enemy and the infidel.”

“In practical terms,” says Farah, “it is manifested as dissimulation, lying, deceiving, vexing and confounding with the intention of deflecting attention, foiling or pre-emptive blocking.”

In an excellent Policy Analysis published by the Cato Institute on April 13, Malou Innocent shared her observations after having recently returned from a fact-finding trip to Pakistan.

Just how bad is the situation there? All of the seven tribal agencies administered by the Pakistan government are either under the de facto control or threatened by the Taliban movement. A recent truce between the government and the Taliban is of no real substance and should not be treated as such. As Ms. Innocent notes, “the military agreed not to launch operations without consulting tribal elders…(but) the army is more inclined to fight India, not a civil war within its borders.”

That is extremely bad news, but Pakistan has been a nation of extremes since it came into being after breaking away from the newly independent India in 1947 to become an Islamic state. The army—currently some 600,000 soldiers—has been the only stable element and has provided a number of presidents or rulers via coups.

Elements within the government such as its intelligence service have leaned favorably toward the Taliban and al Qaeda. Even so, “U.S. officials acknowledge, however, that the Pakistani government has captured more terrorists and committed more troops than almost any other nation in the ‘war on terror’.”

In its urban, modern cities and areas, there appears to be a genuine desire for real democracy, but the Taliban threatens to drag Pakistan back to the seventh century in its quest for a new caliphate. While the nation has remained focused on war with India since its founding, the real threat has always been the growth of fundamentalist Islam and it now poses the potential overthrow of the government.

Should that government fail, you will watch India go to full battle-ready status. Afghanistan’s government will likely fail despite the presence of U.S./NATO forces and the momentum to continue the jihad into all the nations of the region would pose a grave threat to the West. It could only be solved only by combat.

And the question everyone is wondering, if not asking, is whether Barack Obama will make the tough decisions necessary to keep Pakistan from falling to the Taliban or is willing, as George W. Bush was, to drive out a tyrannical regime?

Pakistan as a Perennial Problem

By Alan Caruba

Pakistan is another way of spelling T-R-O-U-B-L-E. Just ask anyone living in Mumbai or anywhere else in India, Kashmir, or neighboring nations.

Pakistan shares a 5,000 year old history with India. In 1,500 BCE, Aryan invaders from the northwest founded a thousand year Vedic civilization, but Pakistan and India’s real troubles began in 712 CE when Arabs invaded, bringing with them Islam. What followed was the Mogul Empire from 1526 to 1857 when the British Empire took an interest in the vast subcontinent, bringing with it the benefits of a modern civilization such as trains for transport and the machinery of governance.

When the British withdrew after World War II, on August 14, 1947, all hell broke loose as millions of India’s Muslim population fled into the area now known as Pakistan and to the east, Bangladesh, separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory. The turmoil of the separation and establishment of Pakistan has been a source of enmity between it and India ever since. To put it mildly, Pakistan has never been able to achieve a status of modern self-government. This is in part because Islam does not recognize any separation of church and state.

Since the 1970’s, Pakistan has largely been governed by its military. In 1971, a war broke out between Pakistan and India, one result of which was that Bangladesh broke away and became an independent nation. Millions fled in all directions, some into India, others into Pakistan, repeating the history that accompanied the establishing of Pakistan. By December, Pakistan surrendered and on July 13, 1972, the two nations signed a pact agreeing to withdraw their troops and resolve their problems peaceably.

After India, to the astonishment of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, tested its first nuclear weapon, Pakistan followed suit in 1998. The U.S. applied sanctions to both nations, later removed, but has since wisely tilted toward India, an emerging world economic power.

During the Cold War Soviet Russia provided North Vietnam with the weapons and support it needed and, after the Russians invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. mounted a covert support of the Afghani tribes that resulted in Russian defeat and withdrawal. The route through which American weapons made their way to that front line was Pakistan. Similarly, after 9/11 Pakistan became a staging area to pursue the Taliban and support U.S. troops still stationed in Afghanistan. The result of this has been that U.S. billions have been pumped into Pakistan. Any continuation of a U.S. military presence in Afghanistan requires the cooperation of whoever is running Pakistan.

Despite being Islamic, there is evidence that Pakistanis do want a secular government and the benefits of modernization. Living under a military dictatorship makes this difficult.

There are vast areas of Pakistan over which even its military has been unable to exert any control. The Northwest Provinces and Waziristan, the likely home to Osama bin Laden, are impenetrable. Then there is the disputed territory of Kashmir between the two nations. The result is that “non-state actors” such as al Qaeda and Kashmiri separatists have been able to operate and to create havoc between the two nations and inflict their murderous campaign to impose a new caliphate on the world. These people need to be killed.

The Indian government has acted with admirable restraint following the Mumbai attacks, but how long that will last will depend on international action. We can rule out the United Nations as utterly useless in this and all other atrocious behavior by fanatical Muslims. Consider the UN’s failure in resolving the Darfur crisis in the Sudan or inability to deal with comparable problems on the continent of Africa, the northern area of which is dominated by Muslim nations.

Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has recommended that “it would be useful for the United States, Europe and other nations to begin establishing the principle that Pakistan and other states that harbor terrorists should not take their sovereignty for granted. In the 21st century, sovereign rights need to be earned.”

If this sounds a lot like the Bush Doctrine of preemption, you’re right.

The military who run Pakistan, along with its intelligence services, despite the appearance of a democratic governing body, a president, elections, et cetera, are not to be trusted. It is entirely likely they played a role in equipping and training the Mumbai terrorists.

Thus, we are now living in a world where the largest international institution, the United Nations, continues to demonstrate its impotence and inability to respond to the rise of “non-state actors”, but the U.S. is also engaged in two separate conflicts in which Pakistan is geographically critical to our objectives to bring democratic reform to both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Can you spell T-R-O-U-B-L-E? It’s currently spelled P-a-k-i-s-t-a-n; trouble for the United States, trouble for India, and trouble for the whole of the Middle East given its nuclear weapons. Do you wonder still why Iran wants them too?

It is doubtful that President-elect Obama or his designated Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, will be able to resolve this Islamic time bomb. It is doubtful, too, that an international military operation will be mounted to root out al Qaeda and other terrorist forces.

Our attention to the Middle East is likely to exist for a very long time and our efforts to introduce democratic reforms in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the region will require the same kind of patient containment the Cold War necessitated from the end of WWI until the fall of the Soviets in 1991.

In the meantime, we can all hope that the incoming administration and Congress will be able to do something about the financial crisis—international as well as national in scope—before conditions arise that make war look like a viable response to India’s problems with Pakistan.

Can you say “World War Three”?

The Religion of Peace Strikes Again

By Alan Caruba

The attacks in Mumbai, India are the latest in the 1,400 year history of Islam and yet people continue to express surprise that the alleged religion of peace could harbor so many cold-blooded killers of innocent people.

Since 9/11, Muslims have carried out more than 11,000 attacks all in the name of Islam and Muhammad. Americans got a taste of it when 3,000 of their own were mercilessly killed without warning and, I might add, without any better reason than Muhammad’s call to “wage war against such of the infidels as are your neighbors.”

With more than 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, about 21 percent of the world’s population, that’s a lot of neighbors and wherever Muslims are gathered in great numbers or wherever they have immigrated, the demand for unbelievers is always the same, convert or die.

The death toll in Mumbai as of this writing is nearing 130 and the target area, just as with 9/11’s attack on the World Trade Center, is the financial center of India. Islam takes a dim view of capitalism wherever it is practiced, but then Islam takes a dim view of everything that is not Islamic.

To understand Islam is to understand two central factors, its sense of superiority and its certitude. While other religions exercise tolerance for those who do not share their faith, Islam requires that “unbelievers” either convert or be killed.

While not all Muslims seek their neighbor’s blood and many are good and decent people, the single truth about Islam is that its holy book is a call to war. This thought is so frightening that most in the West end up denying the threat it poses to their lives. Terror, however, was a means to secure new adherents from its beginning.

In a new book, “The 9/11 Verses: Terrorist Teachings in the Koran”, author Karl J. Trautwein has painstakingly studied the book that Muslims are taught is the word of Allah and the Haddith a collection of stories about Muhammad’s life that are intended to guide the lives of Muslims. Islam lays down rules for every single aspect of a Muslim’s life and it requires prayer five times a day, always facing Mecca. One can purchase the book from http://www.the911verses.com/.

Muslims often point to the Koran’s verses on tolerance, but Trautwein notes that, “Passages teaching peace and tolerance are believed to come from the early days when Muhammad lived in Mecca. Verses calling for hate and violence are believed to have been revealed in Medina, which was later in his life.” In Medina, after Jewish tribes that lived there refused to accept him as a prophet and convert, Muhammad had between 600 and 900 men killed. Their wives and children were taken as slaves.

Trautwein calls Islam “bi-polar” because it contains two totally opposite beliefs and sets of behavior. The violence that the Koran demands cannot be “misinterpreted” any more than its more peaceful, earlier statements. Even so, the Koran promises great rewards for hunting, harming or killing non-believers. A statistical study of the Koran found that 52.7 percent of the verses are hatred aimed at infidels.

The lesson of 9/11, the attacks in Spain, the United Kingdom, Mumbai, and elsewhere around the world is that neither the West, nor anywhere else can “peace” be achieved with Islam. Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, animists and all others are the legitimate targets for Muslims because they are not Muslims or refuse to submit to Islam.

The 21st century is now challenged by the 7th century and, everywhere, it finds itself bewildered by what appears to be appalling and senseless killing.

It makes perfect sense, however, to those who believe they are practicing Islam as commanded by Muhammad and the Koran. The Koran heaps scorn on both Judaism and Christianity despite incorporating aspects of both faiths that preceded Islam, claiming that Muhammad received the Koran from the archangel Gabriel and is the last of the prophets. This is a thin veneer to suggest the legitimacy of Islam.

Western and other nations put themselves at peril when they seek accommodation with Islam and it is an irony that 9/11 marked a moment in time when many Muslims began to question their faith, often leaving it either openly or secretly.

An “insult” to Muhammad carries with it a death sentence. Perceived insults can result in riots and attacks as occurred when a Danish cartoonist drew an unflattering picture of Muhammad. Apostasy, the act of converting to another religion is a death sentence for Muslims. Adultery, homosexuality, alcohol, and a long list of other “offenses” can get you killed.

It is an irony, too, that Muslim nations such as Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and others find themselves the victims of Islamofascism because Islam does not separate the state from the religion.

The final irony is that the United States of America has elected as its next President, Barack Hussein Obama, born to a Muslim father, adopted by a Muslim step-father while living in Indonesia, and emersed in Islam in his formative years.

Mumbai now becomes another page in the history of Islam’s war on the world when its two major sects, Sunni and Shia, are not making war on one another.

For the West and all around the world, there can be only one response to Islam, resistance.