February 2009

, which left behind a raging civil war in Afghanistan, enabling the rise of the dogmatic Taliban, who in turn gave a home to Osama bin Laden. In 1986 I visited Peshawar in north east Pakistan, close to the Khyber pass. The town even then was full of armed encampments in its outer suburbs – Pathan chiefs who had escaped with their people from the war in Afghanistan had built huge well defended compounds to house the refugees from their kin group. It was clear then that the hospitality that Pakistan felt it had to extend to the displaced Pathans was storing up trouble ahead. Two million such refugees bred violence and extremism. The Americans and the Saudis were engaged at that time in bolstering these Pathans with money and weapons to fight the Red Army. All of it was funded through Pakistan’s notorious secret service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate....

LONDON – Everyone knows Keynes’ witticism, making fun of the economics profession’s ability to take the long, long view, no matter how much suffering there may be on the way. “In the long run we are all dead”, the world’s greatest economist sagely observed. Less well known are the arguments that come from his path breaking book, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”, written in midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s. One of the most important is that while in a time of recession it might seem good for individuals to save against a rainy day, it is bad for rescuing the national economy. What is needed is a fiscal stimulus from the mass of consumers spending almost up to their last penny. It has been the fashion since Keynes died for many economists to deride him – not least the school of monetarists led by...

February 10, 2009Jonathan Power LONDON – A range of people from cardinals to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, have told the pope, or communicated to the press, their profound unhappiness at what he has done lifting the excommunication of an ultra traditionalist British bishop, Richard Williamson, who has questioned the extent of the Holocaust and denied the existence of gas chambers in Nazi death camps. The notorious interview on Swedish radio was only broadcast last month but a Google of the bishop reveals that he has long held these views. In June 2006 during a visit to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz the Pope seemed to pass over the culpability of ordinary Germans in what happened then. Only four months later he made his supposedly major speech in Regensberg in which he seemed to tar the whole of Islam with the the violence of one long forgotten aggressive Muslim...

February 3, 2009 Jonathan Power LONDON – Quite right – the Obama administration is gearing up to pressure the Europeans to put more men in boots on the ground in Afghanistan. Quite right – the Europeans don’t want to engage in a war of attrition à la Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s or as the U.S. in Vietnam a decade and a half before. There is nothing worse than having to pull out with your tail between your legs and confront the electorate for thousands of needless deaths of your brave young. The answer to this paradox is that the Europeans, using their nouse as well as their soldiers, should confront the issue of the Afghanistan poppy crop, the one that is 90% responsible for all the heroin sold in Europe and the one that funds over 80% of Taliban activity. This brings me to a memorable conversation I...