Making Sense of the Multiverse

So, what does Stephen Hawking's The Grand Design tell us about God?

By Peter GalisonPosted

SLATE - Oct. 10, 2010

Religious conflict rolls across the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia. A tiny, loony sect threatens to burn the Quran, and the world's leaders respond. You might not think there could possibly be any room in the headlines for a debate about the divine stirred up by a mere physics book. Think again. Several weeks ago, the London Times devoted much of its front page to heralding just that: "Hawking: God did not create Universe: The Big Bang was inevitable consequence of laws of physics, says Britain's most eminent scientist." In a high-profile flurry of attention that any author would envy, the archbishop of Canterbury, Britain's chief rabbi, and the chair of interfaith relations of the Muslim Council of Britain have all locked arms against Stephen Hawking's anti-God fluctuation in his new book.

Hawking has a track record for delivering utterances that endow his work with the aura of Holy Writ. Back in 1988, in his A Brief History of Time, he looked ahead and offered this pronouncement: "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we should know the mind of God." Now, in The Grand Design, a popular synthesis of contemporary physical and cosmological theory, he dares to outdo himself: The new account of cosmogenesis he favors just might, he has decided, make the divine mind unnecessary.

What new theoretical developments since 1988 does Hawking point to that might obviate God the way oxygen displaced phlogiston? He takes the reader in steps, from the foundations of modern physics through a hope, a battle, and a leap of anti-faith. Let's proceed one at a time. 

Hawking begins as every popular book on recent physics and cosmology does: by introducing the basic ideas of relativity and quantum theory. Relativity insists that our physics description of the world around us should not depend on our frame of reference. If a magnet and coil approach one another and make electricity in the coil, then this should be so whether we follow along with the coil or track the magnet. Perspective should not change our explanation of what happens.

This simple demand, along with Einstein's insistence that we never catch up with a beam of light (no matter how fast we go, light always appears to us to be passing at 186,000 miles per second), led to startling changes. To the shock of physicists, artists, poets, and the public, it turned out that duration, length, and simultaneity of events depend on movement. With general relativity (general in the sense of including not only constantly moving frames of reference but also accelerating ones), things got even more interesting: Einstein could consider the geometry of the whole universe (cosmology), and others began in the late 1930s to explore the bizarre, newly recognized phenomenon of black holes. 

If relativity shook the classical world, quantum mechanics shattered it. In the 1920s, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger brought to the world an account of physics in which electrons sometimes acted like waves and sometimes like particles. The idea of rigid causality had to be abandoned. When Richard Feynman and others combined relativity and quantum mechanics just after World War II, the result, a relativistic and quantum account of electric field, became a model of physical theory: The electric field became no more than the exchange of photons. In Feynman's way of thinking, in order to account for any event, every possible alternate "history" of the event had to be reckoned—and all the histories summed up. How does an electron interact with another? Feynman said: A photon could travel from one electron to another—or a photon could turn en route into a pair of particles that could then return to being a photon and complete the voyage. Even more complex processes could happen en route and all, in a certain sense, did. As physicists like to say, anything not forbidden is required. Hawking and his co-author, Leonard Mladinow, rightly emphasize this "everything that can occur does" philosophy. I wish more popular physics did. 

Gravity resisted all attempts to be joined to the quantum theory of force fields. But in the 1980s, string theory began to take hold. The basic idea of string theory is that the fundamental objects in the world are not miniature BBs, but instead one-dimensional, stringlike bits of matter under enormous tension. Such a strand could have different vibrational states—like a violin string. The different "notes" would correspond to different energies. The world's most famous equation, E = mc², then tells us that these different string vibrations would have different masses. Hope was high in the '80s that this would allow one type of string to stand in for many apparently different particles. For a brief and shining moment, a whole and complete unification of physics seemed to be within grasp. The dream was that mathematical self-consistency would rule out all but the one right theory. In the absence of that theory, the still-empty throne where it will sit has been called M-Theory. Find and fully articulate M, the hopeful suggested, and the historical mission of physics would come to a close.

It hasn't happened—no fully defined M theory has yet come to rule. But that isn't all. Theorists realized that string theories had more solutions than anticipated. A lot more—maybe 10⁵⁰⁰ of them, maybe an infinite number. And each solution gives a different picture of the allowable particles and laws. What to do? Some string theorists despaired. Other string theorists tried to rethink the situation to achieve the desired unique solution to a unique theory. Anti-stringers sharpened their scissors. Give up, they said, and say the laws just happen to be what they are.

Others, now including Hawking, embraced what has come to be known as the multiverse: The idea is that there are actually many universes, each with its own set of laws and particles. Advocates see it as a natural continuation of Feynman's vision. All possible histories have indeed been followed, but this time not merely to describe the many ways a photon can go from Electron A to Electron B—this time to account for the history of the universe itself and all its laws. 

As Hawking puts in it The Grand Design: "the universe appeared spontaneously, starting off in every possible way. Most of these [alternative beginnings] correspond to other universes. … [S]ome … are similar to ours, most are very different." So how to understand the fact that we find ourselves in a universe with atomic laws that operate in such a way as to make matter and life possible? If the charges on a proton and an electron were not very, very close to equal and opposite, we wouldn't be here… a miracle tuning, or a divine intervention? It is no miracle, Hawking joins multiverse supporters in saying—any more than it is a miracle that we find ourselves on a planet in that narrow region of temperature where water is liquid. 

Multiverse advocates contend that the origin (or, more precisely, origins) resides in quantum fluctuations—new universes pop into existence with no more fuss than a photon transforming into an electron-positron pair and then returning to its good old photonic self. The initial spark just happens because quantum mechanics tells us that, with some probability, new universes will come into existence. Physics can account not only for how the universe works but for why it is there at all. No divine help required. It is quantum physics all the way down—accompanied by just the right lot of elementary particle physics and string theory. 

The archbishop of Canterbury, with the concurrence of eminent colleagues across the religious spectrum, begs to differ with Hawking. "Belief in God is not about plugging a gap in explaining how one thing relates to another within the universe," he announced. But tell that to Pope Pius XII, who half a century ago proclaimed support for the "fiat lux" in the early glimmers of a big-bang cosmology. Or tell it to the group of Cambridge physicists around the same time who were pushing for a no-first-moment account: a steady-state cosmology that would wipe out the big bang, undermining an overly religious moment of creation. Once you start reading God's presence—or his absence—into the ever-evolving equations of physics, it is hard to keep him from coming and going, creating a stir in the process. Hawking, who briefly left the door open for the mind of God two decades ago, surely knew he would stir an outcry by slamming it shut. In fact, it was no doubt part of his grand design.

The Looming U.S.-Chinese Naval Rivalry

Keeping the Pacific Pacific

Seth Cropsey

Foreign Affairs - September 27, 2010

 

While visiting Japan in late August, Admiral Robert Willard, the leader of the U.S. Pacific Command, told journalists that China is almost ready to make operational the world's first anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM). Anti-ship cruise missiles already exist in abundance, but they travel at about one-tenth the speed of a ballistic missile, possess far less kinetic energy, and are proportionately less lethal. According to recent Pentagon reports, the Chinese ASBM will have a range of at least 1,000 miles, whereas a long-range cruise missile has a range of about 600 miles. Chinese military planners expect that the missile's maneuverability will allow it to hit and put out of action or destroy large-deck aircraft carriers while they are at sea and too distant from the Chinese mainland, as a result of the fact that even the next generation of naval fighter aircraft will lack the range to return to their carriers safely if launched further than 600 miles from their intended target. This unprecedented missile range and accuracy would allow China to finally achieve its oft-stated goal: denying major U.S. naval forces a significant portion of the Western Pacific.  

Ongoing friction between China and Taiwan poses the most immediate threat to U.S. Navy operations in the Western Pacific. Such an extension of Chinese firepower would erode the United States' ability to honor its commitment to defend Taiwan if it were attacked. The U.S. Navy has no defense against the ASBM, nor does it have one in development. If the United States cannot counter and overcome the ASBM, U.S. influence in Asia will likely decline, China's implicit claim to regional hegemony will gain traction, and a regional arms competition, driven by territorial disputes in the South China Sea, may erupt. Indeed, U.S. allies, including Australia, Japan, and South Korea, may begin to ask themselves fundamental questions about how to cope without the U.S. Navy's presence, which has helped keep the peace in East Asia for decades, as exemplified by U.S President Bill Clinton's successful use of aircraft carriers in 1995 and 1996 to quell tensions between China and Taiwan in the Taiwan Straits. 

If the U.S. Navy recedes from the Western Pacific over the next generation, its withdrawal may result in a regional arms buildup as U.S. allies scramble to fill the vacuum. In July, Tokyo announced that it would enlarge its submarine fleet for the first time in 36 years. In the spring of 2009, Australia announced its largest defense increase since World War II, with plans to double its submarine fleet and purchase powerful modern surface ships. South Korea is also modernizing its naval and amphibious forces but faces an additional consideration: What if China offers to replace receding U.S. influence by providing security to Seoul in exchange for South Korea expelling U.S. troops currently stationed there?  

Until now, most U.S. policymakers and analysts have ignored China's emerging missile capability, reflecting a general sense that the threat of growing Chinese military power is too remote to take seriously at present -- a sense born from the United States' focus on fighting land wars at the expense of preserving the maritime power on which U.S. grand strategy has historically rested. But China's policy beyond its borders has recently become more assertive -- a fact not unrelated to its new military and naval capabilities. 

Willard's concern about China's ability to target U.S. aircraft carriers follows several months of aggressive Chinese foreign policy. In March, Beijing announced that the South China Sea is a "core" interest. An international body of water, the South China Sea stretches from China to the Philippines, down to the wide expanse of ocean that separates Malaysia and Vietnam, and serves as the shipping lane through which oil and other critical seaborne trade is transported between East Asia and the Middle East. Its many islands are the subject of disputed claims between China and other South Asian nations, such as Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. By labeling the sea a core interest, Beijing is signaling that it views the international body of water as an asset to be protected at all costs.  

In mid-July, four months after its declaration concerning the South China Sea, China continued its expansionist maritime policy. Its official news agency, Xinhua, quoted a Chinese military academic opining that the Yellow Sea -- an international body of water located between the Korean peninsula and China -- is "pivotal to China's core interests, given that it is related not only to the extension of the country's maritime rights but also to its maritime security." Itself strategically important, the Yellow Sea was the site of a collision earlier this month, when Japanese naval vessels seized a Chinese trawler that had strayed too close to the disputed Senkaku Islands, under Japanese control but claimed by China as well. 

Beijing returned its concern to the South China Sea in August, when it announced that it had used small manned submarines to plant China's national flag on the sea's floor. The implicit claim to sovereignty, along with China's earlier diplomatic claim to the South China Sea, is both provocative and illegal. Recent Chinese rhetoric suggests that Beijing is unwilling to compromise on its new claims of influence. In July, when the Obama administration presented a proposal to seek a regional consensus on how to settle disputes in the South China Sea, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told a Singaporean diplomat that "China is a big country and other countries are just small countries, and that's just a fact."    

China's path to regional hegemony raises questions about how the country will wield its new stature. With its military power on the brink of an exponential enlargement that threatens U.S. influence in East Asia, Beijing's recent actions and rhetoric suggest a darkening future for other states in the region that prefer the United States' traditional concern for maintaining freedom of navigation in the region, lack of interest in territorial gain, and policy of preventing the rise of an Asian hegemon -- in direct contrast to China's apparent interest in becoming one.

The notion that might makes right has precedent in Asia. So does the use of naval power to support might. In the sixteenth century, Spanish ships seized the Philippines, while England enjoyed naval superiority in East Asia during its reign of empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

But to Chinese leaders, the most instructive example of nautical might translating into political power is that of Japan. Japan's history is an especially prescient warning about the dangers to Asia of an ambitious, well-armed regional hegemon. After becoming the dominant naval force in the Western Pacific during the first part of the twentieth century, Japan invaded, subjugated, and oppressed its neighbors, rapidly expanding its domain of control. Its ability to transport troops and material through the ocean made it a legitimate threat, from India to Hawaii. 

The fact that Japan pursued such aggression does not prove that China would do the same if it achieves similar regional preeminence. But China's naval buildup, ASBM rocket technology, and claims to international waters are spurring its neighbors, such as Australia, India, and Vietnam, to substantially increase their naval fleets. Such developments indicate that the stability and security long ensured by a strong U.S. presence in the Western Pacific should no longer be taken for granted. 

China's ASBM threat is serious, but the United States has the capacity to respond. Reductions in the size of U.S. carriers, increases in their number, and changes in aircraft design to expand their range, as well as other new technology, could neutralize the threat of Chinese missiles. Yet the growing U.S. deficit makes this unlikely, as does U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates' skepticism regarding the utility of such large naval forces. For the immediate future, the administration is right to shore up U.S. alliances in the Western Pacific and continue to pursue a region-wide agreement on how to resolve territorial disputes in the South China Sea. It should also increase the level of naval exercises with allies in the region and proceed as scheduled with joint naval exercises planned with Japan in December on or around the Ryukyu Islands, which form the eastern perimeter of the East China Sea.  

The Obama administration should also lift its seeming gag order on the U.S. Navy's ability to speak candidly about the dangers posed by China's naval enlargement. Allowing the Navy to publicly discuss China's naval buildup as strategic justification for a larger naval force and presence could be useful: it might help build congressional support for reversing the U.S. Navy's virtual self-disarmament. The likely alternative to a more vigorous and robust security and diplomatic policy in East Asia is that the U.S. will be forced to surrender the benign preeminence it has exercised in the Pacific to the benefit of our own economic interest as well as the security of nearly half the world's population. China's anti-ship ballistic missile will not determine the future of U.S. power; the United States' future actions will.

The Arabs and Iran

The National Interest - September 20, 2010

Shibley Telhami

Regardless of Arab public opinion, governments in the Arab world remain largely authoritarian, with a demonstrated capacity to go against their public sentiment on critical issues, such as war. To be sure, there are always consequences for ignoring public opinion—and these may be growing—but when push comes to shove, governments have been able to disregard their publics when the stakes are important enough. The question is therefore: how do Arab governments think about the Iran issue, including the prospects of an American or an Israeli attack on Iran? 

The first thing to note is that there is no unified Arab government position. Although, with the exception of Syria, most are suspicious of Iran and worry about rising Iranian power and influence, the degree of concern varies, and the sources of concern vary even more. Even in the case of Syria, where Iran is seen for the foreseeable future as a strategic partner, the Syrian government, a secular Arab nationalist government, is not naturally comfortable with the Islamic regime in Tehran. This much is clear (and is the basis of the prevailing conventional wisdom in Washington): most Arab governments would like Iranian power trimmed, with some supporting a potential attack on its nuclear facilities by either Israel or the United States. 

But Arab governments' calculations cover a broad spectrum and are based on assessments on several issues: the impact of an attack on their own security (and longevity) particularly in the short to intermediate term; the impact on the regional balance of power, which includes the impact on Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict; the impact on domestic politics (and in some places this also means the Sunni-Shiite divide); the impact on broader Arab regional and global influence; and the impact on Iraq's future. The weight of each issue varies across the Arab world, partly as a function of proximity to Iran or to the Arab-Israeli arena, partly as a function of internal demographics, and partly as a function of size and aspirations.

One has to put Iraq aside for the moment, since its politics are still unsettled, and the United States will remain there for the foreseeable future. Iran's small neighbors all have concerns about growing Iranian power in the region and Iran's influence in Iraq itself, and about their ramifications for regional security and for their own domestic politics, especially in places like Bahrain, where the Sunni-Shiite divide could become a bigger issue. Saudi Arabia too has its own worries about Iran, the nature of its government, and its growing power. But no one is as concerned as the United Arab Emirates, which is not only a close neighbor but also claims sovereignty over three islands that Iran controls. Even among these countries with close proximity to Iran, however, there are differences on how to deal with the perceived Iranian threats, including potential nuclear weapons. 

Their publics may see the United States as a bigger threat than Iran, but governments of Iran's small Arab neighbors see the United States as protecting them from Iran, particularly after the decline of Iraq. Even Qatar, which has maintained good relations with Iran, at the end of the day is an American ally; it hosts a large American base—not Iranian troops. The differences are all about available options and the prospects of their success. And this is central in calculations of the possible use of force by either Israel or the United States to attack Iran's nuclear program.

If the assessment is that there would be a limited war that does not expand to their countries and disrupt their comfortable lives, and that the war would end by destroying Iran's nuclear weapons potential, weakening Iran's influence, and better yet, lead to regime change in Iran—supporting war would be a no-brainer for most of them. If on the other hand, there is a high risk that the war would not be short, that Iran would still be able to develop a nuclear-weapons capability and also acquire an interest in disrupting their lives (particularly if American forces operate from within their borders), the calculations will be different. With the exception of Saudi Arabia, these states are all small states concentrated on the Gulf, and are particularly exposed to potentially destructive attacks. If, in addition, they have to be concerned that a protracted war between the United States and Iran may lead to American overextension and American public pressure to pull forces from the region, thus leaving them to deal with Iranian wrath on their own, their preference will be to avoid war. Gulf Arab states are not all of the same mind on assessing the consequences of war and, therefore, on supporting that option.

There is a big strategic picture that matters to Arab elites, especially those with a strong Arab identity and in states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia where there is an expectation of regional leadership and of an enhanced global role. There is no escaping the current sentiment that overall Arab influence has diminished and that all non-Arab states in the region—Iran, Israel, and Turkey—have grown in power—particularly since the Iraq war. While governments in the region are first and foremost driven by what's good for them, they also face a public, including elites, that places more emphasis on transnational identity, whether Muslim or Arab, than on state identity. This means nuclear power not only has strategic value but also symbolic weight. And Arab governments would have to deal with the sense that Arabs are falling further behind. 

They also worry about Israel's regional hegemony and, whatever cost there is in terms of public face, Arabs may still view Iran's potential to acquire nuclear weapon as added pressure on Israel, making it more likely its government will need Arab support.

Ideally, they would like to see the Middle East turn into a nuclear-free zone, with no Israeli or Iranian bombs. But it is also clear that the potential Iranian nuclear weapons have helped them make a stronger case for such a zone, assisting Egypt to secure what was seen as a foreign policy achievement when it successfully lobbied last May, in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, for taking up the issue of turning the Middle East into a nuclear free zone in 2012, with American backing.

This perspective also gives a different view of a possible Israeli (sans America) attack on Iran. An Israeli success would be a mixed blessing: Iran would be weakened, but Israel would emerge even stronger. On the other hand,Israel would then be engaged in a real conflict with Iran bound to last for the long term, regardless of the government in power. Whereas, at the moment, the conflict between Israel and Iran remains primarily ideological; war would create a deeper divide. The negative turn in Turkish-Israeli relations, particularly since the Gaza war in 2008, has oddly left Israel dependent particularly on its relations with Egypt, for creating some regional balance. To be sure, Israel continues to rely primarily on the backing of the United States and on its own military capacities, but it has always been mindful of maintaining regional friends. A war with Iran would jeopardize that leverage in the long term.

Taken to an extreme, a protracted Israeli-Iranian conflict (that did not draw in other Arab states) would be seen by many in the region in the same way that the protracted Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s was seen by Israel: two powerful and feared countries weakening each other—in this case, with strategic benefits for the Arab states.

The trouble is that it is hard to envision a war scenario that does not impact Arabs in the region, directly or indirectly—just as it is hard to envision an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities that does not draw in the United States. For states like Egypt, Jordan, or Morocco, the Iranian threat is not a direct military threat. What they fear most is Iranian influence, in the region, broadly, and in their own internal politics. In particular, they worry about the success and popularity of the militant narrative that Iran sells, and its support for groups they oppose, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, far more than they worry about the number of Iranian troops, or the number of Iranian weapons. And it is for this reason that these states see a connection between the Arab-Israeli conflict and the degree of Iranian influence: diplomatic failure sells militancy, and conflicts like the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war and the Gaza war in 2008 make Hezbollah and Hamas more popular in Arab countries. That is why they emphasize Arab-Israeli peace diplomacy as a way of curbing Iranian influence.

In theory, Iranian influence, and the militant narrative would suffer if either Israel or the U.S. were to carry out an attack on Iran that succeeds with minimal spill-over. But it is hard to see how any attack, whether undertaken initially by the United State or by Israel, does not ultimately involve the United States, and therefore Arab states, by virtue of the presence of American troops on Arab soil, and the logistical support that the United States will require in any military effort. 

Even aside from such repercussions, and assuming that Iran lacked the immediate capabilities (or the political will) to retaliate against Arab targets in the Gulf, its will to support Hezbollah, Hamas, and any other militant group in the region will only expand, thus expanding the main threat that states like Jordan and Egypt fear. 

There is another way in which the calculations of Iran's energy-rich neighbors differ from other Arab states: the economic consequences of war. Even the energy producers have to worry about production-interruptions that affect them at least in the short to intermediate term. But they also may benefit from spikes in energy prices down the road. For the majority of Arab governments whose economies are not energy-based, they stand to pay a price, with little silver lining.

This complex picture—from Arab governments that may favor an American or Israeli attack on Iran to those who fear the consequence of such an attack—is not captured by the current debate about Arab support or opposition for an American or an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. These calculations vary depending on proximity to Iran or to Israel, on the internal demographic mix of Arab states, and the level of aspiration for Arab and regional leadership. Above all, they depend on an assessment of the probability of "success" which is defined both in terms of the military outcome, and in terms of the subsequent Iranian capabilities and will to influence politics in the Arab world. For most Arab governments that are not neighboring Iran, the latter fear dominates.

Indo-China cold war hots up

Ameen Izzadeen

Friday, 17 September

India has apparently lost its cold war with China, or at least the current phase of it. What is disturbing to India is not only China's superior military power and stronger economy, but also China's intrusion into what was once regarded as India's backyard. 

The development has rendered the so-called Indira doctrine ineffective or obsolete. The doctrine, formulated during the Indira Gandhi premiership, made it clear to regional countries that they should seek help from within the region — meaning India — before they approached any outside power. In terms of the doctrine, India opposed the presence of superpowers in the Indian Ocean which it regarded as its backyard. Small countries in the region were punished for defying the doctrine. It happened to Sri Lanka in the early 1980s. India armed, trained and financed the Sri Lanka's separatist rebellion. In the late 1980s Nepal tried to defy the doctrine and was punished. New Delhi economically suffocated the land-locked Himalayan nation by closing down almost all the trade routes.

Today India may be much stronger than what it was three decades ago. But its power is confined within its borders. In contrast, China has been increasing its soft and hard power and making its presence felt in South Asia and also throughout the world in so subtle a manner that India could do almost nothing except make belated remarks. Recent statements made by Indian leaders resemble the screams of a man who suddenly wakes up from his slumber under a tree and finds his belongings are gone.

Their statements, like a fiery storm, however, had blown away the cloth of diplomacy that had kept the disputes between the two countries covered. The disputes are now in the open.

The soft-spoken and usually philosophical Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was furious last week. The fire in his remarks made the rest of the world to stop and take note of what he said.

Though the remarks came against the backdrop of China's refusal to grant a visa to a top Indian military commander to visit Beijing, the real problem is more complex. It involves unresolved border issues — eg: Arunachel Pradesh — which led to a war between the two countries in 1962. It also involves Kashmir, the presence of Dalai Lama in India and New Delhi's perception that China is increasing its assertive presence in India's backyard.

 

India suspects China is interfering in Kashmir. A little known fact about Kashmir is that it is shared by not only India and Pakistan but also China. Kashmir's Aksai Chin region is with China. Though India has been making occasional noises about what it calls Chinese occupation of Kashmir, Pakistan goes along with China's claim of sovereignty over Aksai Chin. There is strong suspicion in New Delhi that not only Pakistan, but China also is stoking up trouble in Indian-administered Kashmir. 

China last year started issuing a different kind of visas to the people of Kashmir, sending a strong message to India that Beijing did not recognize India's sovereignty over the disputed region. China's explanation to India in refusing the visa to the Indian military officer is that he was not welcome because of his role in Kashmir. 

Premier Singh's remarks came days after India fired off a strongly-worded demarche — a diplomatic note — to China, saying it was calling off the defence exercises and exchange programmes between the two countries. 

China responded to the Indian anger with cool diplomacy pointing to the thriving trade between the two countries and claiming that Beijing was committed to the Pancha-Sheela principles that define China's relations with India.

Singh charged that China was seeking to expand its influence in South Asia and gain a "foothold" in the region.

"China would like to have a foothold in South Asia and we have to reflect on this reality. We have to be aware of this," Singh said.

He said China's leadership would change in two years and there was a new assertiveness among the Chinese. "It is difficult to tell which way it will go. So it's important to be prepared," he said.

Hidden in Singh's statement is India's disappointment over its failure to check effectively China's intrusion into South Asia and the Indian Ocean region. India was a mere onlooker when China built ports in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Myanmar. Except for Pakistan, India has friendly relations with all its neighbours. But today China weighs heavier on the diplomatic scales of India's neighbours. China has become Sri Lanka's biggest aid giver. China's harbour project in Hambantota has raised the eyebrows of Indian defence analysts. However much both Sri Lanka and China insist that the harbour project is essentially a commercial venture and has no military intentions, these analysts say India could not prevent Sri Lanka from allowing China to have a strong foothold in Hambantota from which Beijing can, if it wants to or if the needs arises, control a vast area of the Indian Ocean extending up to Antarctica.

Myanmar has become a virtual Chinese protectorate. Last month, China and Myanmar conducted a series of naval exercises close to Indian waters, prompting India to put its naval troops on alert. 

Premier Singh's statement is not the sole protest. Opposing China's assertiveness has become India's official policy. This week, India's Defence Minister A.K. Anthony addressing a combined commanders' conference in Delhi, said India could not ignore the fact that Beijing was fast improving its military and physical infrastructure on the border. He called on Indian military leaders to keep abreast of the military modernisation drive in the neighbourhood to ensure that the Indian armed forces held an edge in the region.

India's sudden awakening to the growing Chinese power has moved it to seek new strategic allies. It has found one such ally in Japan. In recent weeks, Japan and China have been trading charges and counter charges over the arrest of a Chinese fishing captain off some disputed islands in the East China Sea after his boat collided with Japanese coast guard craft. The uninhabited but believed-to-be oil-rich islands, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, are controlled by Japan, but are also claimed by China and Taiwan. The incident has raised tempers in both countries.

When Japan's Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada held talks with his Indian counterpart S.M. Krishna in New Delhi last month, they shared concern over Beijing's growing military power and its military build-up in India's neighbourhood.

The Indian Express newspaper quoted sources as saying that the two sides had expressed "similar language" in describing Chinese actions. 

India is also seeking to strengthen its defence relations with the United States. During the George W. Bush administration, the two countries had struck a strong bond in the fight against their common enemy — Islamic terrorism. The relations between them improved with the signing of a civilian nuclear deal and enhanced defence cooperation. But under President Barack Obama, the speed with which the relations improved has slowed down a little. This was largely because of the Obama administration's pressure on India to find a speedy solution to the Kashmiri problem. However, the visit of Obama to India in November, analysts say, will give the necessary impetus for relations between them to reach the level that was seen during the Bush era.

Of course, the rise of China's military power is a concern for the US as well. According to Indian media reports, US Pacific Forces' commander Admiral Robert Willard on a visit to India referred to China's 'naval assertiveness', which he said had 'complicated matters'.

Though Admiral Willard did not elaborate, he was probably referring to the US concern over the growing Chinese presence in South Asia, Central Asia and the Pacific. One reason why the US is unwilling to leave Afghanistan is its fear that the vacuum created by its departure would be filled by China. According to the latest Globalfirepower.com rankings, China is second only to the United States in terms of military power. India occupies the fourth place after Russia. 

These moves and diplomatic contacts may indicate informal alliance formation. The problem with these informal alliance formations is that no bloc has advantage over the other, especially in view of the nuclear capabilities of the major players. The nuclear deterrent works and will avert a major war. China certainly knows this and quietly spreads its power far and wide, reaching even Africa and Latin America.

The Great Pakistani Deluge Never Happened

Don’t Tune In, It’s Not Important 

By Juan Cole

The Great Deluge in Pakistan passed almost unnoticed in the United States despite President Obama’s repeated assertions that the country is central to American security.  Now, with new evacuations and flooding afflicting Sindh Province and the long-term crisis only beginning in Pakistan, it has washed almost completely off American television and out of popular consciousness. 

Don’t think we haven’t been here before.  In the late 1990s, the American mass media could seldom be bothered to report on the growing threat of al-Qaeda.  In 2002, it slavishly parroted White House propaganda about Iraq, helping prepare the way for a senseless war.  No one yet knows just what kind of long-term instability the Pakistani floods are likely to create, but count on one thing: the implications for the United States are likely to be significant and by the time anyone here pays much attention, it will already be too late.

Few Americans were shown -- by the media conglomerates of their choice -- the heartbreaking scenes of eight million Pakistanis displaced into tent cities, of the submerging of a string of mid-sized cities (each nearly the size of New Orleans), of vast areas of crops ruined, of infrastructure swept away, damaged, or devastated at an almost unimaginable level, of futures destroyed, and opportunistic Taliban bombings continuing.  The boiling disgust of the Pakistani public with the incompetence, insouciance, and cupidity of their corrupt ruling class is little appreciated.  

The likely tie-in of these floods (of a sort no one in Pakistan had ever experienced) with global warming was seldom mentioned.  Unlike, say, BBC Radio, corporate television did not tell the small stories -- of, for instance, the female sharecropper who typically has no rights to the now-flooded land on which she grew now-ruined crops thanks to a loan from an estate-owner, and who is now penniless, deeply in debt, and perhaps permanently excluded from the land.  That one of the biggest stories of the past decade could have been mostly blown off by television news and studiously ignored by the American public is a further demonstration that there is something profoundly wrong with corporate news-for-profit.  (The print press was better at covering with the crisis, as was publically-supported radio, including the BBC and National Public Radio.)

In his speech on the withdrawal of designated combat units from Iraq last week, Barack Obama put Pakistan front and center in American security doctrine, “But we must never lose sight of what’s at stake. As we speak, al-Qaeda continues to plot against us, and its leadership remains anchored in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan.”  Even if Pakistan were not a major non-NATO ally of the United States, it is the world’s sixth most populous country and the 44th largest economy, according to the World Bank.  The flooding witnessed in the Indus Valley is unprecedented in the country’s modern history and was caused by a combination of increasingly warm ocean water and a mysterious blockage of the jet stream, which drew warm, water-laden air north to Pakistan, over which it burst in sheets of raging liquid.  If the floods that followed prove a harbinger of things to come, then they are a milestone in our experience of global warming, a big story in its own right.

News junkies who watch a lot of television broadcasts could not help but notice with puzzlement that as the cosmic catastrophe unfolded in Pakistan, it was nearly invisible on American networks.  I did a LexisNexis search for the terms “Pakistan” and “flood” in broadcast transcripts (covering mostly American networks) from July 31st to September 4th, and it returned only about 1,100 hits.  A search for the name of troubled actress Lindsay Lohan returned 653 search results in the same period and one for “Iraq,” more than 3,000 hits (the most the search engine will count).  A search for “mosque" and "New York” yielded 1,300 hits.  Put another way, the American media, whipped into an artificial frenzy by anti-Muslim bigots like New York gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio and GOP hatemonger Newt Gingrich, were far more interested in the possible construction of a Muslim-owned interfaith community center two long blocks from the old World Trade Center site than in the sight of millions of hapless Pakistani flood victims.  

Of course, some television correspondents did good work trying to cover the calamity, including CNN’s Reza Sayah and Sanjay Gupta, but they generally got limited air time and poor time slots. (Gupta’s special report on the Pakistan floods aired the evening of September 5th, the Sunday before Labor Day, not exactly a time when most viewers might be expected to watch hard news.)  As for the global warming angle, it was not completely ignored.  On August 13th, reporter Dan Harris interviewed NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt on ABC’s “Good Morning America” show at 7:45 am.  The subject was whether global warming could be the likely cause for the Pakistan floods and other extreme weather events of the summer, with Schmidt pointing out that such weather-driven cataclysms are going to become more common later in the twenty-first century.   Becky Anderson at CNN did a similar segment at 4 pm on August 16th.  My own search of news transcripts suggests that that was about it for commercial television.

The “Worst Disaster” TV Didn’t Cover

It’s worth reviewing the events that most Americans hardly know happened:

The deluge began on July 31st, when heavier than usual monsoon rains caused mudslides in the northwest of Pakistan.  Within two days, the rapidly rising waters had already killed 800 people.  On August 2nd, the United Nations announced that about a million people had been driven from their homes. Among the affected areas was the Swat Valley, already suffering from large numbers of refugees and significant damage from an army offensive against the Pakistani Taliban in the spring-summer of 2009. In the district of Dera Ismail Khan alone, hundreds of villages were destroyed by the floods, forcing shelterless villagers to sleep on nearby raised highways.

The suddenly homeless waited in vain for the government to begin to deliver aid, as public criticism of President Asaf Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani surged.  President Zardari’s opulent trip to France and Britain (during which he visited his chateau in Normandy) at this moment of national crisis was pilloried.  On August 8th in Birmingham, England, a furious Pakistani-British man threw both his shoes at him, repeating a famously humiliating incident in which an Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at President George W. Bush.  Fearing the response in Pakistan, the president’s Pakistan People’s Party attempted to censor the video of the incident, and media offices in that country were closed down or sometimes violently attacked if they insisted on covering it.  Few or no American broadcast outlets appear to have so much as mentioned the incident, though it pointed to the increasing dissatisfaction of Pakistanis with their elected government.  (The army has gotten better marks for its efficient aid work, raising fears that some ambitious officers could try to parlay a newfound popularity into yet another in the country’s history of military coups.) 

By August 5th, the floods had taken an estimated 1,600 lives, though some aid officials complained (and would continue to do so) that the death toll was far larger than reported.  Unlike the Haitian earthquake or the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, this still building and far more expansive disaster was initially greeted by the world community with a yawn.   The following day, the government evacuated another half-million people as the waters headed toward southern Punjab.  At that point, some 12 million Pakistanis had been adversely affected in some way.  On August 7th, as the waters advanced on the southernmost province, Sindh, through some of the country’s richest farmlands just before harvest time, another million people were evacuated.  Prime Minister Gilani finally paid his first visit to some of the flood-stricken regions.

By August 9th, nearly 14 million people had been affected by the deluge, the likes of which had never been experienced in the region in modern history, and at least 20% of the country was under water.  At that point, in terms of its human impact, the catastrophe had already outstripped both the 2004 tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.  On August 10th, the United Nations announced that six million Pakistanis needed immediate humanitarian aid just to stay alive. 

On August 14th, another half-million people were evacuated from the Sindhi city of Jacobabad.  By now, conspiracy theories were swirling inside Pakistan about landlords who had deliberately cut levees to force the waters away from their estates and into peasant villages, or about the possibility that the U.S. military had diverted the waters from its base at Jacobabad.  It was announced that 18 million Pakistanis had now been adversely affected by the floods, having been displaced, cut off from help by the waters, or having lost crops, farms, and other property.  The next day, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, surveying the damage, pronounced it was “the worst disaster” he had ever seen. 

The following week a second crest of river water hit Sindh Province.  On August 30th, it submerged the city of Sujawal (population 250,000).  The next day, however, there were a mere 16 mentions of Pakistan on all American television news broadcasts, mostly on CNN.  On Labor Day weekend, another major dam began to fail in Sindh and, by September 6th, several hundred thousand more people had to flee from Dadu district, with all but four districts in that rich agricultural province having seen at least some flooding. 

Today, almost six million Pakistanis are still homeless, and many have not so much as received tents for shelter.  In large swaths of the country, roads, bridges, crops, power plants -- everything that matters to the economy -- were inundated and damaged or simply swept away.  Even if the money proves to be available for repairs (and that remains an open question), it will take years to rebuild what was lost and, for many among those millions, the future will mean nothing but immiseration, illness, and death.

Why the Floods Weren’t News    

In the United States, the contrast with the wall-to-wall cable news coverage of the Haitian earthquake in January and the consequent outpouring of public donations was palpable.  Not only has the United Nations’ plea for $460 million in aid to cover the first three months of flood response still not been met, but in the past week donations seem to have dried up.  The U.S. government pledged $200 million (some diverted from an already planned aid program for Pakistan) and provided helicopter gunships to rescue cut-off refugees or ferry aid to them.

What of American civil society?  No rock concerts were organized to help Pakistani children sleeping on highways or in open fields infested with vermin.  No sports events offered receipts to aid victims at risk from cholera and other diseases.  It was as if the great Pakistani deluge were happening in another dimension, beyond the ken of Americans. 

A number of explanations have been offered for the lack of empathy, or even interest, not to speak of a visible American unwillingness to help millions of Pakistanis.  As a start, there were perfectly reasonable fears, even among Pakistani-Americans, that such aid money might simply be pocketed by corrupt government officials.  But was the Haitian government really so much more transparent and less corrupt than the Pakistani one? 

It has also been suggested that Americans suffer from donor fatigue, given the string of world disasters in recent years and the bad domestic economy.  On August 16th, for instance, Glenn Beck fulminated: “We can't keep spending. We are broke! Game over… no one is going to ride in to save you… You see the scene in Pakistan? People were waiting in line for aids [sic] from floods. And they were complaining, how come the aid is not here?  Look, when America is gone, who's going to save the people in Pakistan? See, we got to change this one, because we're the ones that always ride in to save people.” 

Still, the submerging of a fifth of a country the size of Pakistan is -- or at least should be -- a dramatic global event and even small sums, if aggregated, would matter.  (A dollar and a half from each American would have met the U.N. appeal.)  Some have suggested that the Islamophobia visible in the debate about the Park 51 Muslim-owned community center in lower Manhattan left Americans far less willing to donate to Muslim disaster victims.

And what of those national security arguments that nuclear-armed Pakistan is crucial not just to the American war in Afghanistan, but to the American way of life?  Ironically, the collapse of the neoconservative narrative about what it takes to make the planet’s “sole superpower” secure appears to have fallen on President Obama’s head.  One of the few themes he adopted wholeheartedly from the Bush administration has been the idea that a poor Asian country of 170 million halfway around the world, facing a challenge from a few thousand rural fundamentalists, is the key to the security of the United States. 

If the Pakistani floods reveal one thing, it’s that Americans now look on such explanations through increasingly jaundiced eyes.  At the moment, no matter whether it’s the Afghan War or those millions of desperate peasants and city dwellers in Pakistan, the public has largely decided to ignore the AfPak theater of operations.  It’s not so surprising.  Having seen the collapse of our financial system at the hands of corrupt financiers produce mass unemployment and mass mortgage foreclosures, they have evidently decided, as even Glenn Beck admits, it’s “game over” for imperial adventures abroad. 

Another explanation may also bear some weight here, though you won’t normally hear much about it.  Was the decision of the corporate media not to cover the Pakistan disaster intensively a major factor in the public apathy that followed, especially since so many Americans get their news from television? 

The lack of coverage needs to be explained, since corporate media usually love apolitical, weather-induced disasters.  But covering a flood in a distant Asian country is, for television, expensive and logistically challenging, which in these tough economic times may have influenced programming decisions.  Obviously, there is as well a tendency in capitalist news to cover what will attract advertising dollars.  Add to this the fact that, unlike the Iraq “withdrawal” story or the “mosque at Ground Zero” controversy, the disaster in Pakistan was not a political football between the GOP and the Democratic Party.  What if, in fact, Americans missed this calamity mostly because a bad news story set in a little-known South Asian country filled with Muslim peasants is not exactly “Desperate Housewives” and couldn’t hope to sell tampons, deodorant, or Cialis, or because it did not play into domestic partisan politics?   

The great Pakistani deluge did not exist, it seems, because it was not on television, would not have delivered audiences to products, and was not all about us.  As we saw on September 11, 2001, and again in March 2003, however, the failure of our electronic media to inform the public about centrally important global developments is itself a security threat to the republic.