China’s Navy is going through a massive, blue-water build up too.
What could go wrong?
India has plans to add about 100 warships to its navy over the next decade as it seeks to modernise its armed forces, and develop its low-cost shipbuilding capabilities.
Captain Alok Bhatnagar, director of naval plans at India’s ministry of defence, said on Thursday that 32 warships and submarines were under construction in the country’s shipyards. Work on 75 more ships, including aircraft carriers, destroyers, frigates and amphibious vessels, would begin over 10 years.
New Delhi is sensitive to lagging behind Beijing’s naval might in the region. China has three times the number of combat vessels as India and five times the personnel. Officials are wary of port developments in neighbouring Pakistan and Sri Lanka that offer Chinese warships anchorages and potentially greater control of the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea.
However, India has one of the fastest growing navies in the world. Its fleet of about 120 vessels is the fifth largest. At the weekend, it launched a locally built nuclear-powered submarine, based on a Russian design, to join only a few countries with the technical prowess to produce such a war machine.
President Obama’s foreign policy is a complete failure. There’s no white-washing it, and his administration would do better to admit it than to spin the reality. That reality is:
Iran is still closing in on starting its nuclear bomb factories (if it hasn’t already).
India believes the Taliban and other Islamic extremists already have some control on nuclear sites in the frontier province:
India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has told President Obama that nuclear sites in Pakistan’s restive frontier province are “already partly” in the hands of Islamic extremists, an Israeli journal has said, amid considerable anxiety among US pundits here over Washington’s confidence in the security of the troubled nation’s nuclear arsenal.
Claims about the high-level exchange between New Delhi and Washington were made in the Debka, a journal said to have close ties with Israeli intelligence, under the headline “Singh warns Obama: Pakistan is lost.” The brief story said the Indian prime minister had named Pakistani nuclear sites in the areas which were Taliban-Qaida strongholds and said the sites are already partly in the hands of “Muslim extremists.” A sub-head to the story said “India gets ready for a Taliban-ruled nuclear neighbor.”
Amid all that some experts in the US are pissed off that Obama and his lackeys are shrugging their shoulders at Pakistan and the Taliban: Read the rest of this entry »
Failed Presidential Candidate and war hero/anti-war hero Senator John Kerry is adamant that strict conditions be put on aid for the weak Pakistani government. That government is begging that the terms be removed so that it can maintain some sort of control over its people, its region, its ballistic missiles aimed at the billion people in neighboring India, and its 100 nuclear bombs.
President Obama sided with the Bush administration Friday, saying detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights.
In a two-sentence court filing, the Justice Department said it agreed that detainees at Bagram Airfield cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their detention. The filing shocked human rights attorneys.
“The hope we all had in President Obama to lead us on a different path has not turned out as we’d hoped,” said Tina Monshipour Foster, a human rights attorney representing a detainee at the Bagram Airfield. “We all expected better.”
All of a sudden, six nations are building aircraft carriers (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, India and China.) For over half a century, most of the carrier building took place in the United States. Russia built some, without much success, towards the end of the Cold War. Britain and France built a few, and several other nations (like India and Brazil), bought second had British carriers so they could maintain one or two in service.
But now six nations are planning or building new carriers, most of them a bit smaller (about 60,000 tons) than the larger U.S. ones (100,000 tons).
“The terrorists’ aim in Mumbai was precisely this – to get the Pakistani army to withdraw from the western border and mount operations on the east,” said Ahmed Rashid, a journalist and author who has written extensively about militancy in the region.
“The terrorists are not going to be sitting still. They are not going to be adhering to any sort of cease-fire while the army takes on the Indian threat. They are going to occupy the vacuum the army will create.”
~~~
A Swat militant boasted that “we are doing our activities wherever we want, and the army is confined to their living places.”
“They cannot move independently like us,” said the man, who was reached over the phone and gave his name as Muzaffarul Haq. He claimed the Swat militants had no al-Qaida or foreign connections, but that they supported all groups that shared the goal of imposing Islamic law.
“With the grace of Allah, there is no dearth of funds, weapons or rations,” he said. “Our women are providing cooked food for those who are struggling in Allah’s path. Our children are getting prepared for jihad.”
AP writer, Nahal Toosi writes today of a newly expanded control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan by Taliban militants. It is especially worrisome since this is new territory outside their normal operational control. The 2000 approx fighters – both Afghan and Pakistani – have managed to overwhelm what residents did not flee by a campaign of violence, beheadings and fear.
WOW! Great idea: spend your entire life posturing to run for President, then spend your Senate career being a professional Presidential candidate instead of a senator, and when you finally get the job…
THEN READ UP ON IT
Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled that Senator Obama is finally getting national security briefings, reading up on the dangers in the world by reading 4yr old books about 20yr old subjects. I’m really thrilled. I’d of course prefer he read MY BOOKS, but maybe he’ll get around to it. More than anything, I really would have loved-I MEAN LOVED(!!!!) to have been a fly on the wall at the first NatSec briefing of his cabinet appointees. Oh MAN that had to be a conundrum!
“We have to leave Iraq 18 months from now per the campaign pledge, but the DoD says they can’t do it logistically. Hillary Clinton at State says it’d ’cause chaos and force a third invasion of Iraq (OUCH, tough sell to the DNC base!). Intel guys are saying that 1) AQ was in Iraq before the invasion, 2) AQ chose to make Iraq the central front in the gwot (not Bush), 3) AQ is being decimated by Bush’s Surge so leaving now let’s AQ revive in an oil-rich/money rich country. They also tell me that Iran’s gonna be making 40+nukes a month starting in January, India is moving troops to border w Pakistan & both sides are on their bi-annual brink-of-nuclear-war escapade. Oh, and despite the speech in Germany…ain’t nobody in the world gonna stop the anarchy in Africa or SE Asia.”
WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE!
Suggestion: Appoint Dennis Kucinich to form a Dept of Peace and abolish the DoD. Yeah, that’s the ticket!
Poor Obama. He honestly had no clue & actually believed the leftist rhetoric. He followed Kos and Huffpo instead of the Milblogs and Flopping Aces. If he HAD been reading FA, then he wouldn’t need to be such a “voracious” reader of dated books. I’m only shocked he’s not skipping to the Cliff’s Notes.
Scary stuff-not surprising, not unwarranted, nothing but pure scary.
ISLAMABAD, Dec 13: Indian planes violated Pakistan’s airspace on Saturday, but fighters of the Pakistan Air Force chased them away, military as well as civilian officials confirmed late in the night.
Air Commodre Humayun Viqar Zephyr, a PAF spokesman, told Dawn that the Indian planes intruded into Pakistan’s airspace in Azad Kashmir and Lahore sectors, but left as soon as they sighted the PAF jets.
He said there was no cause for concern as the PAF was “fully alive to the situation and capable of giving a befitting reply in case of a misadventure”.
Official sources said President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani were immediately informed about the incident and the matter was taken up with the Indian authorities.
Information Minister Sherry Rehman confirmed that Islamabad had got in touch with authorities in New Delhi, implicitly conceding that the violation did take place. But she hastened to add that Indians had done it inadvertently.
Analysts, however, described as ‘meaningful’ the ‘inadvertent’ intrusion of Pakistan’s airspace in two different sectors on the same day for the first time in recent memory.
They termed it a deliberate attempt on the part of India to create a war hysteria instead of responding positively to Pakistan’s offers of cooperation in investigations into the Mumbai carnage.
CJCSC MEETS PRESIDENT: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, Gen Tariq Majeed, called on President Asif Ali Zardari here on Saturday and discussed professional matters with him.
Sources said the situation in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks came under discussion during the meeting.
They said Gen Majeed briefed the president on the state of preparedness of the armed forces.
TROOPS ON THE MOVE?: A number of people travelling between Lahore and Rawalpindi over the past two days have come up with claims that a heavy redeployment by the army was under way.
“Long convoys of military trucks are heading towards Lahore from Jehlum,” Jawad Khan, a motorist, told Dawn.
Indian police interrogators are preparing to administer a “truth serum” on the sole Islamic militant captured during last week’s terror attacks on Mumbai to settle once and for all the question of where he is from.
The mystery of the man dubbed “the baby-faced gunman” has weighed heavily on India’s relations with Pakistan as the nuclear-armed neighbours dispute each other’s accounts of his origin.
Police interrogators in Mumbai told The Times that they have “verified” that Azam Amir Kasab, who was captured after a shoot-out in a Mumbai railway station on Wednesday night, is from Faridkot, a small village in Pakistan’s impoverished south Punjab region. They say that the nine dead gunmen are also Pakistani.
Disputing that account, President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan told CNN last night: “We have not been given any tangible proof to say that he is definitely a Pakistani. I very much doubt it … that he is a Pakistani.”
He added: “The gunmen plus the planners, whoever they are, [are] stateless actors who have been holding hostage the whole world.”
Proof that the militants were Pakistani would rapidly escalate the pressure on Mr Zardari’s government to take action or risk a backlash from allies including the United States.
Police interrogators in Mumbai told The Times that they are poised to settle the matter of Kasab’s nationality through the use of “narcoanalysis” – a controversial technique, banned in most democracies, where the subject is injected with a truth serum.
But wait a minute. Don’t they know they have another secret weapon in Obama? I mean, he could fly in on Air Force One and ask him politely. That should get him talking.
The WSJ reports that the leader of the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba is behind the attacks in Mumbai:
India has accused a senior leader of the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba of orchestrating last week’s terror attacks that killed at least 172 people here, and demanded the Pakistani government turn him over and take action against the group.
Just two days before hitting the city, the group of 10 terrorists who ravaged India’s financial capital communicated with Yusuf Muzammil and four other Lashkar leaders via a satellite phone that they left behind on a fishing trawler they hijacked to get to Mumbai, a senior Mumbai police official told The Wall Street Journal. The entire group also underwent rigorous training in a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, the official said.
Just to get everyone back up to speed (since the msm seems to prefer distracting us with more Natalie Holloway stories or political smears about an irrelevant Palin)… Read the rest of this entry »
The only member of the jihadi assault team captured during the Mumbai attacks has fingered several Pakistani organizations as providing support to the group, according to reports in the Indian press.
Kasab has implicated the Pakistani Navy and the Dawood Ibrahim criminal network based in Karachi for providing assistance and training for the Mumbai assault team, police sources told India Today.
Indian intelligence has identified additional links to Pakistan and the Lashkar-e-Taiba. An “intercepted conversation between Muzammil, Muzaffarabad chief of LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba) operations, and a certain Yahya in Bangladesh,” showed a direct link in the Mumbai attacks, The Times of India reported. “Yahya arranged SIM cards, fake ID-cards primarily from western countries like Mauritius, UK, US, Australia.”
Phone numbers on the satellite phone found the hijacked Indian fishing boat show calls were made to Zakir Ur Rehman, a Lashkar-e-Taiba training chief based in Karachi.
Indian intelligence officials also told The Times of India that 25 terrorists were “training in the Pakistan village of Durbari Mitho, and that an ISI agent was also involved in the training.” It is unclear if these were members of the Mumbai assault team.
…and Pres-elect Obama has already made it very clear that if India wants to conduct airstrikes on America’s ally, Pakistan, it’s perfectly acceptable. [QUESTION: is there a VIDEO PROFESSOR CD on diplomacy that we can send to Pres-elect Obama before January?]
Q Thank you, Mr. President-elect. During the campaign you said that you thought the U.S. had a right to attack high-value terrorist targets in Pakistan if given actionable intelligence, with or without the Pakistani government’s permission.
…do you think India has that same right?
PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA: I think that sovereign nations obviously have a right to protect themselves. Beyond that, I don’t want to comment on the specific situation that’s taking place in South Asia right now.
I think it is important for us to let the investigators do their jobs and make a determination in terms of who was responsible for carrying out these heinous acts. I can tell you that my administration will remain steadfast in support of India’s efforts to catch the perpetrators of this terrible act and bring them to justice. And I expect that the world community will feel the same way.
[ie here's my comment, but I don't want to comment, so I'm gonna comment some more so I can really screw the pooch] link to transcript
Brilliant piece of diplomacy there Senator. Our key ally in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda leaders (Pakistan), has just been told that if their nuclear neighbor feels justified in attacking our ally, then we have India’s back…not our ally’s. Call me crazy, but if I’m in a bar fight, and the guy next to me says, “I’ve got your back, unless that guy w the big club over there feels like hitting you” well, that’s not an ally I can count on-not even diplomatically let alone in a fight-be it in a bar room or a nuclear neighborhood.
Way to go. Amazing diplomatic skills. Oh well, can’t say Joe Biden didn’t warn us.
EXIT QUESTION: If India conduct air raids in Waziristan against suspected leaders of the group that attacked them in Mubai…does anyone think the Pakistanis won’t go beserk, or should we believe the narrative that they’ll just shrug their shoulders and smile at ?
Distressed over widespread charges of involvement of Pakistan in the Mumbai terror attacks, Pakistan foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi cut short his four-day visit to India and abruptly left for Islamabad on Saturday morning
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Qureshi, who started his visit to India Wednesday on a positive note, was “quite upset” about what he saw as India’s “insinuations” pointing to the involvement of Pakistan-based terrorists in audacious terror strikes at in Mumbai.
Indian intelligence officials said the gunmen who launched the coordinated attacks appeared well trained and well prepared. The assailants seemed familiar with the layouts of the two hotels and the Jewish center, giving them a tactical advantage over the police and Indian army troops sent in to dislodge them.
“This is a big-scale operation, but it is not beyond the capability of Lashkar-i-Taiba,” said the intelligence officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the nature of his work. “The person we have caught is a foot soldier; he is from Pakistan’s Punjab,” the officer said, referring to a region divided by the India-Pakistan border. Read the rest of this entry »
