Now why would Pakistan, an ostensible U.S. ally on the proverbial “war on terror,” provide health care for the one-eyed Taliban leader who is wanted for acts of terrorism?

The report, says Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, has “no basis whatsoever.”  Haqqani, a career diplomat and a democrat, is a credible man, perhaps more credible than the original source of the story, an organization called the Eclipse Group.

This is a shadowy consulting business run by Dewey Clarridge, a career CIA official whose loyalty to democratic norms has been questioned. Clarridge served as director of the CIA’s Latin American division of the CIA in the 1980s. In the 1980s, Clarridge was part of a CIA network that sought to evade congressional restrictions that forbade the CIA from waging covert war against the government of Nicaragua. Since then, he has toiled in the gray zone between public service and private enterprise. So let’s be clear on the dueling sources. Back then, Dewey Clarridge sought to evade the rule of law. Today, Husain Haqqani seeks to respect it.

On the other hand, Haqqani may not know what his own government is doing. There is no dispute that Pakistani intelligence service–our ally in defending the country’s nuclear arsenal–cultivates and funds its owns allies in the vastness of Afghanistan–including sworn and lethal enemies of United States.

Pakistani intelligence officials live and breathe the reality that the American public and the U.S. Congress have not quite grasped. The U.S. military–like every other Western expeditionary force in the region since Alexander the Great–will eventually leave Afghanistan. And when they do, Pakistan will still be there.

So: Nothing would be less surprising than Pakistan helping Mullah Omar in his hour of need.

Taseer’s death deprives Pakistan of a colourful politician with unusual reserves of pluck. More significantly, it signals a worrying reduction in the public space for public figures, who cannot even count on their own police to protect them. The country’s liberals have not felt so isolated since the dark years of the Zia dictatorship in the 1980s.

via The Hindu.

The radicalization of Pakistani society is at the heart of the conflict between Western countries and jihadists, and it is getting worse, not better, as we grow ever more dependent on the Pakistini intelligence services to sustain our over-extended military occupation of Afghanistan.

U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman spoke with a trusted tech source last January who told him the Beijing government is in “technologically-aggressive state of mind” in its dealings with Google and other Western Internet companies. He said

growing Chinese  pride, economic clout and influence, and the “weakened” position of the U.S. and its allies after the global economic downturn, are emboldening the Chinese to take ever more aggressive positions in advancing its innovative industries at the expense of foreign ones.

This state-to-corporation harassment is not going to stop.

The Wikileaks documents released in the past few days revive that question, first posed  in 2006 when the search engine entered China, by revealing  the hardball tactics that Beijing’s communists use to bring Mountain View’s capitalists to heel. One Google executive, worn down by three years of Chinese harrassment, told a U.S. diplomat that the company might consider leaving China, a comment quoted in this July 2009 cable. With company co-founder Sergey Brin already going public with his qualms, Google’s Chinese future seems in doubt.

The cables reveal how Beijing relentlessly pressurizes Google to achieve its economic and political goals.

–Use of the media: When the Chinese government charged that Google was failing to filter pornographic Web sites from its search results, there were at least 57 negative articles in the Chinese media  before Google had a chance to respond. These stories have damaged Google’s brand in the Chinese market.

–Manipulation of the private sector: When Google refused to remove a link to Google.com, its uncensored search engine, from its Google.cn site, which is censored, the government told three leading Chinese telecommunications firm to void existing contracts  and cease negotiations with Google, dealing a blow to the company’s mobile device estrategy.  Google’s share of traffic in China has suffered.

–Selective hacking. During the Chinese Communist Party’s annual meeting in 2007, Chinese hackers diverted searches from Yahoo and Google to Baidu, the Chinese search engine. For example, search for “Dali Lama” was sent to Baidu which reported it could find “no  information on your request.”

The cables showed that Google preferred to enlist U.S. government support rather than complain publicly about such incidents. With the diplomatic channel showing little success, senior Google executives, including Brin, have  to decide if they can live with these realities.

There is zero possibility that the Chines government will change its behavior.  Google controversially acceded to the  government’s demand that it censor its China-based search engine. In response to the latest Chinese demands, Google dropped the Google.com link but installed a link to another uncensored site, Google.hk, which as you can see, could not be more prominent on Google.cn.

But in larger perspective, Google’s cat-and-mouse moves amount to a strategy of appeasement which, however sincere, has not impressed or deterred China. The Times reported yesterday that senior Chinese officials, initially worried that the Internet could undermine their grip on power, have concluded that “the Web is fundamentally controllable.”

So the ultimate question raised by the Wikileaks cables is: Will Google participate in (or acquiesce to) Beijing’s campaign control the Web in the world’s largest country?

Would that be good for Google’s bottom line ? Probably.

Would it be good for Google’s brand and self-respect. Probably not.

we can say that the White House was successful in changing the story of their midterm defeat, but the success was temporary.  The world still writes about the President much more positively than negatively, and the President received better coverage in our biggest rivals’ blogs than in their mainstream media sources.

What this snapshot of Obama’s recent travels omits is the larger picture, including the Middle East where Obama’s expensive kowtowing to Israeli demands ($33 milion a day) has ended the honeymooon of his Cairo speech, even in counties, , such Jordan and Qatar, where media outlets are controlled by pro-American regimes.

If Mr Karzai and most Afghans really do want peace talks with the Taliban then that should be Nato’s focus.

GM and its ventures in China sold 199,641 vehicles last month, up 20 percent from the year before. That took its sales for the first 10 months of the year to 1,976,913 vehicles — a gain of 36 percent….

So even as America protects its manufacturing base, the dominant market power of China is felt. In the alternative universe known as mainstream American politics this will perhaps be cited as proof that Obama’s administration’s success in Detroit is a victory for Maoist socialism.

Talk of negotiation is ramping up because the Obama administration thinks it necessary to draw up a feasible plan to exit with dignity, this given the electoral “shellacking” it recently received with barely a flexed muscle.  A sullen defeat, stretched out over time, tanks rolling on into adjacent border, replaying the recent Soviet past, will not do– especially with an opposition ascendant waiting by the sidelines for news of stubborn, drowning failure.

maybe we have to change things. And look around. You’ve seen al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula now; al-Qaeda in Maghreb. We’re fighting a difficult and flat organization. Given that we have a weak partner in the Karzai government and only a partial partner in Pakistan, we can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.

Armitage was clearly anchoring the left-wing of the panel. Eight dissenters called for staying the course showing that the policymaking consensus and in the South Asia press the story is playing as U.S. troops will fight Until 2014

With police investigations already underway in Australia, Ireland, and Germany, the Obama administration is going to deal with this. WashPost and NYT are still playing the story inside, appropriate  in light of the fact that there has been no official U.S. reaction, but that’s not going to last long.

For the Obama administration, this is where the rhetoric of the president’s Cairo address meets the realities of Middle East decisionmaking. Of course, Israel has the right to defend itself, and of course the U.S. assassinates al-Qaeda leaders every day. But the leaders and the publics of Arab countries (like the United Arab Emirates, where the hit took place) that are open to peace with Israel (and some of whom want U.S. help to deter Iran) are not going to be satisfied by the talking points that go over well in Washington and on cable TV.

The pro-American autocracies in the Middle East (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan) are especially helped by Israeli tactics. Vulnerable to accusations of being soft on Israel, they will posture about not allowing Israeli intelligence to operate on Arab soil with impunity. Democratic forces in the Arab world are undermined by Israeli’s assertion of its right to attack its foes anywhere. By enabling undemocratic Arab regimes to pander to public opinion without actually sharing power, Israeli actions actually force Obama to subordinate his goal of reaching out to the Muslim world to his consistent defense of Israel.

That’s fine with Israeli public opinion and it will probably go over well in the United States where cultural sympathies for the Jewish state run deep. But Jewish Israelis comprise less than 3 percent of the public in the Middle East. To the vast majority of the democratically inclined people in the Middle East, Obama will be seen as indulging the lawlessness that he denounces when Arabs engage in it.