December 2010

Rudyard Kipling, one of the truly great Victorian writers, wrote in 1915, following the death of his only son in the misbegotten World War 1, “If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied”. During the Vietnam War someone coined the phrase: ‘old men sending young men to die. How should we put it today in Afghanistan? No one yet has come up with a pithy line or two. They will. President Barack Obama has been conducting a promised review of the war, yet his generals have long been pre-empting him, doing what General Douglas MacArthur did with President Dwight Eisenhower at the time of the Korean War, trying by public comment to steamroller the president into the policies he wanted. Even after the president fired MacArthur the generals were not quiet for long. Eisenhower said in a secretly taped conversation with newspaper publisher, Roy Howard, “I...

The Idea Imagine living in a healthy environment, in peace and justice, with social conditions, work and production developing creatively, arts blooming, people realizing their potencials. 99% of humankind would prefer that, right? So how can we optimize our efforts to get there?One strange thing is that although every good physician knows that treatment of the patient must complete diagnosis and prognosis in order to get well again, the „physicians“ of the world seem to mostly lack the treatment part.Where do we find constructive thinking, where do we see the stories of success, where do we find the images of a better world, the ideas of what might be possible? Media as well as research and public debate seem to be in love with criticism of the status quo and warnings of the breakdown of the world – and yes, both is clearly neccessary. We definitely need the diagnosis for...

“One small step forward by North Korea and the US, one large step for mankind. The political fight to persuade North Korea to halt its nuclear bomb making activities seems at last, in the dying days of the Bush presidency, to be entering a serious phase.” Yes, I was able to write that three years ago. But since then we have plunged from optimism to the darkest pessimism. North Korea has been threatening war against the South, and the US and the South Korea have been upping the ante by holding military exercises close to North Korea. After seven years of erratic US policies under President George W. Bush – met by equally erratic and bellicose North Korean ones – the negotiations ended up almost where they started following the highly fruitful diplomacy in the last days of the Clinton Administration that transformed North Korea from total intransigence to a...

Daily, thousands all over the world read, benefit from and use what we at TFF publishes at our “home”, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Many tell us that we contribute to a less-bad, perhaps even a better, world. Some write us to tell that they don’t know what they would have done had TFF not existed and been a constant voice of criticism of elite power, violence and injustice. Quite often our 70 Associates – indisputably some of the world’s most distinguished experts – have produced early warnings and early proposals in conflict zones and other matters, such as UN reform.  That’s good to hear – particularly since we do not know of anybody else who produces as much as we do exclusively on the basis of people’s donations, around € 20.000 or $ 26.000 per year – only possible because we are all volunteering for the cause of peace! That’s how it has always been....

By Jonathan PowerDecember 15, 2010 Last night I went to bed feeling like a frozen corpse. I was up in the Himalayas, not dressed for the occasion. Fortunately, the little hotel in which I lodged, built simply of cold concrete, provided its guests with duvets almost half a metre thick. Once asleep all was forgotten- and once awake in the morning all was forgiven. I was in the Ganges valley in the foothills of the Himalayas. From where I stood it was a mighty drop to the river. I was spellbound. The river was a turquoise green, something I, and I suspect you, have never seen. I was told it was because of the absolute purity of the glacier-fed river and the colour of the rocks beneath. In this forbidding environment cultivation is almost, if not quite, an impossible task. I came to see a project run by my favourite...

December 15, 2010 Farhang Jahanpour The latest batches of WikiLeaks files do not reveal anything unexpected or exciting, or anything that most people who have an interest in international politics did no already know. All that they do is simply to confirm some open secrets. In her ground breaking 1963 work, Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil the late Hannah Arendt talked about the “banality of evil”. She showed that when you see the evil monsters who have committed untold atrocities in flesh and in the dock, not only do they not look very impressive and imposing; on the contrary, they look like a bunch of miserable and pitiful cowards. In the same way, the new documents reveal the banality of politics and of most politicians. Many people have a rather rosy and exaggerated view of their politicians, thinking that although they may not be honest, at least they are...

Dr Pranab Mukherjee, Finance Minister of India, the second fastest growing state in the world, expects India to break through the 10% a year economic growth barrier by the end of next year or early 2012. Then the world’s press will all be talking about the implications of this big race when the horses are going are going at full tilt, neck to neck. In fact, India will appear to be leading by a head if after 20 years of 10% growth China’s falls back a step or two, which is predicted. I was talking two days ago with Dr Mukherjee in his Kolkata home – a simple flat in a modest building, close by a noisy, fumy, honking, main street. He grew up in West Bengal and returns to Kolkata for the weekend as often as he can. He was chosen by Euromoney as the best finance minister in...

I sometimes wonder if the Americans don’t understand the most perceptive, clean and honest politician in Pakistan because they don’t play cricket. Imran Khan, when captain of the Pakistan team, was feted round the cricketing world. Even here in India, 9 years after he “retired” he remains a hero. No other Pakistani has more reach into Indian affections than Imran Khan. Not so long ago I sat next to him at a private dinner party in Islamabad. For over an hour we talked about the ins and outs of volatile and ultra destructive Pakistani politics. Head of his own small political party he made no effort to browbeat me with his youthful charisma. Instead, I found a careful, lucid, almost ordinary guy, showing me the way to cut through the labyrinth of Pakistan’s often destructive, sometimes deadly, political minefields. He could never be accused of being Anti-American or Anti-European. Yet...

To understand what is going on in Korea it is helpful to try to see the conflict from the other side, from that of North Korea. There is no peace agreement after the Korean War, which ended in 1953 with an armistice agreement. There is still a state of war between the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, DPRK, and the United States. The Armistice Demarcation Line is the 38th parallel. However, no agreement has been reached regarding where that line continues in the sea. The sovereignty of the waters where the recent shelling occurred is disputed. As I write this article, on November 30, 2010, marine forces from South Korea together with US units are conducting a military maneuvre in these disputed waters. Such operations have in the past often been opposed by the North. When shots were fired from the South as a part of that exercise, the North...