³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

Year's end brings the inevitable navel gazing about how the world might have changed. Two things are very clear about 2008: that it will go down in history as a significant year because of the scale of the global financial crisis but also that 'the west' suffered more in this than the emerging economies.

In broad geo-political terms, power moved east in 2008. The USA or European Union will still wield considerable world influence of course. Equally, China, India and Russia have shown they are far from immune from global recession. But even taking all of this into account, the slow tectonic shift caused by growing western indebtedness and huge trade surpluses elsewhere has this year produced an earthquake in global power politics.

As for the plans to check the decline of the US or west more generally, stimuli like Barack Obama's proposed 'Green New Deal' are fine if they work as well as the 1930s un-green equivalent. If they do not, the new American administration or indeed the British government will simply have acted like debt consolidation companies -re-packaging ruinous personal or corporate losses into an ever larger national debt. This in turn will accelerate the decline of western societies..

Read the rest of this entry

Monday's show that India, the US and Pakistan, which used its army to arrest 'more than a dozen' suspected militants at the site, seem to share a view about what happened in Mumbai. The authorities in Islamabad early demands for proof from India have given way to action based upon the assumption that , a Kashmiri militant group, played a key role in organising last month's terrorist attacks on that city. This in turn will lead investigators closer to Inter-Services Intelligence - the ISI - the Pakistani military's organisation for gathering secret information, and one of the most written about but least understood intelligence agencies in the world.

The ISI helped to establish Lashkar e-Taiba, just as it played a key role in organising religious students (Taleban) to fight in Afghanistan. During the 1980s Pakistan's leaders wanted to foment trouble in neighbouring countries and these religious-based organisations were a useful tool in that policy. More recently Pakistani leaders have sworn that they would have nothing to do with organising Mumbai or the blowing up of the Indian embassy in Kabul earlier this year, but nobody who knows the region is completely sure that these events were unconnected with the ISI.

Having met a few serving members of the ISI, the impression they usually give is of serving military officers who are on secondment to military intelligence. In other words they seem no more religious, conspiratorial, or devious than any other service type one meets in the sub-continent, carrying out normal military duties.

There is though an odd duality about many of these people. Meeting one senior officer in ISI recently, I asked him some questions about insurgency in various parts of Pakistan only to have him shoot back at me, "and what efforts have you made to interview the Taleban?" It was a fair question. Was it born of an intelligence officer's curiosity about what 'the opposition' think? Or did he feel that organisations like the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ do not give enough attention to the Taleban's point of view? Was it, in other words an expression of some form of sympathy for them?

Alas our conversation did not last long enough to get beyond my expressions of anxiety about how such an interview could be conducted without a high risk to myself and others or, indeed, whether he could facilitate it. I may though get in touch with him again to pursue this last question.

The view of some of those in Western organisations that liaise professionally with the ISI is that there is an, educated, politically-sensitive, senior management who have become de-coupled from some of the foot soldiers - the captains or majors who have trained insurgents or run sources in Lashkar e-Taiba or the Taleban. As if this is not already a problem, the ISI has indeed just been through one of its periodical management re-shuffles - something apparently designed to ensure its loyalty to the current army chief.

Some Pakistani observers buy this theory too - hence talk of 'elements within the ISI' still being loyal to the Taleban. It is however an organisation that runs on the basis of military hierarchy, and the , apparently based on US intelligence briefing, that the CIA believes the ISI has been liaising closely recently with a senior Lashkar e-Taiba militant called Zarrar Shah. This suggests the military command structure must know something about these contacts.

The ISI might argue that penetration of these organisations - including paying some militants - is all part of the struggle for intelligence information. It is also probable that some of the recent in the tribal areas have relied upon intelligence provided by the ISI.

So how does one explain these contradictions: arresting Lashkar militants after years of supporting them? Sympathising with the Taleban while providing the Americans with intelligence needed to kill them? In the end, the ISI is part of Pakistan's impossible balancing act - trying to reconcile its need for cooperation with the west against its sympathy and sense of Islamic solidarity with many of those the Indians or Americans despise. We might marvel at some of the verbal gymnastics of a Pakistani politician trying to explain a recent American attack in the tribal areas but the ISI is different in that it attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable in secret and when it fails, the consequences can be quite terrible.

The global honeymoon that accompanied Barack Obama's election was never going to last forever, but there are some people for whom it already appears to be over - even though the president elect will not take power until 21st January. The Illinois senator's desire to name his administration, in order to 'hit the ground running' has already been the cause of some political sniping, and so have his meagre foreign policy pronouncements to date.

The appointment of in October as White House Chief of Staff nettled many. There were his former Republican opponents in the House of Representatives, who consider him abrasively partisan, but I am not talking about them. Put his name and 'Zionist' into Google and you will see what I mean. The brickbats are already flying on certain Islamic, 'progressive', and far right websites.

With , the plot thickens for those who wish to imply that a good man - President-elect Obama - is surrounding himself with 'zionists' who will prevent any fresh thinking about Middle East peace. Ms Clinton is not of course Jewish, unlike Mr Emanuel, but she has been a two-term senator for New York state.

"She's had a certain position which has not been very friendly toward the Palestinians", said Karen AbuZayd, Commissioner General of the United Nations Works and Relief Agency , adding, "we hope that there'll be a broader view once she comes into office". Ms AbuZayd's job involves daily dealing with the dismal humanitarian consequences of Israel's blockade of Gaza, so I'm not surprised she longs for a different US foreign policy in the region. But the implication from an international civil servant - who must get on with all the relevant players - that an incoming US Secretary of State is bringing too much political baggage to the job is unusual, to put it mildly. Is it not obvious that Secretary Clinton, representing the US national interest, will serve quite different political imperatives to Senator Clinton, representing one of the largest Jewish democratic constituencies in the world?

It was to be expected that extremists like al Qaeda number two would write off President-elect Obama swiftly, calling him a "house negro", or, depending on which translation you follow, a "house slave". Similarly, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad already made a thinly veiled attack on Mr Obama during his speech at the United Nations in September.

The response to the appointment of the new foreign policy team shows something else. In the first place, the president-elect's campaign promise of change was always going to look less exciting once he put in place the people with the necessary political experience to run their departments. If you think Ms Clinton comes with political baggage - what about Robert Gates, who will switch from being President Bush's defence secretary for the past to years to the new president's administration?

Secondly, there are certain laws of political gravity that cannot be defied, whatever the brand of a new administration. The anti-American imperative is so central to certain ideologies - in this case militant Islam - that any Jewish appointees or appeals to Jewish voters will be used to argue the administration is pro-Zionist. It might turn out to be, but shouldn't everyone wait until the new president has been sworn in and set out some Middle East policies before jumping to that conclusion?