Imagine if the son-in-law of the President of Sri Lanka was caught in discussions with the LTTE; indeed, if the President’s own appointed National Security Adviser and the country’s new Attorney General were also to acknowledge that they, too, had hitherto undisclosed dealings with the LTTE. The very first public reactions here will be accusations of treachery and national betrayal, won’t it?
Substitute the SL President with the President of the United States of America and substitute the hypothetical Lankan son-in-law with millionaire New York businessman and Special Presidential Adviser Jared Kushner, and, also bring in now-sacked US National Security Adviser (retired Army General) Michael Flynn and current US Attorney General (former Senator) Jefferson Sessions.
Finally, substitute the Sri Lankan State’s deadliest enemy, the LTTE, with Russia, successor of the Soviet Union, America’s one-time deadliest enemy and currently principal political adversary in world politics. This bizarre situation is what currently besets the United States’ capital even as President Trump, senior US ministers, and his motley personal retinue, including close family members, are on tour across two continents.
Amid all these very startling and shocking revelations of possible massive misdemeanours, including even treason, by the Donald Trump administration, some of the notable features of the President’s first foreign tour failed to catch world attention. And while all these truly sensational goings-on in the USA divert our attention, we also need to take note of the rest of the world: the sudden heating up of cross-border Indo-Pak military tension, the Islamist guerrilla strikes against civilians in the UK and Egypt, and a the rise of an Islamic State-linked insurgency in some southern islands of The Philippines archipelago.
After weeks of an increase in reported ‘infiltrations’ by pro-separatist Kashmiri insurgents from Pakistan into Indian-held Kashmir, the Indian Army last week retaliated with artillery bombardment across the ‘Line of Control’ (LoC) marking the ceasefire line between Indian and Pakistan-held parts of Kashmir. Unlike the actual incursion into Pakistan-held territory that Indian forces undertook in a similar retaliation a few years ago, the Indians were this time content with cross-border artillery fire.
The firing reportedly targeted what Delhi claimed were insurgents’ camps on the Pakistani side that were used as launching points for so-called Kashmiri separatist insurgents’ infiltration into India. In recent months there has been a rise in guerrilla strikes in various parts of Kashmir targeting military personnel and outposts and also local civilian officials, political activists and ordinary civilians.
The rise in insurgent activity has been of much public and government concern across Palk Strait. Indian news media broadcast videos issued by the Army ostensibly showing Indian artillery fire striking insurgent bases on the Pakistani side.
Pakistan routinely rejects Delhi’s accusations that Islamabad facilitated these cross-border infiltrations. Pakistani artillery fire responded with shelling of settlements on the Indian side. This flare-up, however, is similar to bouts of heightened military tensions that have regularly occurred over a half-century of Indo-Pak hostilities and is likely not to get any worse.
Meanwhile, the UK is reeling in shock over last week’s massacre of pop music concert-goers, mostly teenagers, by an Islamist suicide bomber in Manchester. And, Egypt has reacted to the equally bloody massacre, also by Islamists, of 28 Christian pilgrims near a Coptic sect shrine, with air strikes against suspected Islamic State insurgent camps in the Libyan desert.
In The Philippines, the government last week clamped martial law in some islands in the southern part of the archipelago after the biggest ever assaults against military and police units by the new, Islamic State-linked insurgent group active in that remote region.
The new Islamist insurgent group is the successor to the Moro Muslim separatist insurgent movement that in the 1970s-1990s period waged a sporadic armed rebellion for a separate southern Muslim state in the Philippines archipelago. The original Moro liberation front was not Islamist but ethn0-nationalist and later those forces gave up insurgency in exchange for government promises of greater regional autonomy.
However, the political settlement has not satisfied all sections of the minority Moros and residual dissatisfaction seems to have enabled the intrusion of external Wahabbi Islamist radicalism which, in turn, has seen the emergence of Islamic State-linked insurgency. Even if the experienced Filipino military does succeed in containing this new insurgency – a big ‘IF’ – neighbours Indonesia and Malaysia may worry that this Islamist military dynamic could spill over into their territory.
The problem of Islamist insurgency threatening the US seems to have been the sole focus of Donald Trump’s first foreign tour with receiving foreign leaders in West Asia and in Europe having to listen to continuous exhortations against ‘terrorism’ by the American leader.
Trump may claim that he has the Western powers as well as Arab powers behind his counter ‘terror’ push. Media commentators in those countries, however, think that his attempt to impose on his hosts what he sees as the US’ primary geo-political concern – Islamist ‘terrorism’ – is not in tune with the complex of global challenges faced by the world community as a whole.
In Washington DC, instead of outrage and charges of ‘betrayal’ swirling around, strangely, the current public reaction in the US to the revelations of their new VIPs’ dealings with the Russians is limited to a muted questioning of Jared Kushner’s competence as a Presidential Adviser. Gen. (Rtd.) Flynn, of course, was hurriedly asked to resign his National Security Adviser post, but only on the grounds that he failed to disclose his dealings with the Russian Ambassador in Washington, rather than because of those very dealings themselves.
But US Congressional committees have begun investigations and Flynn is already under pressure to release information to these probes.
At the same time, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has now focussed its investigations into the Russia connection even more closely on the immediate circle of officials around President Trump. US new media is already speculating that the latest subject of the Russia inquiry is Jared Kushner.
Both Reuter news agency as well as the Washington Post newspaper are newly reporting that not only did have Kushner have secret – or undisclosed – talks with the Russian ambassador in Washington, but, far worse, he had apparently attempted to set up secret communications links with the Russians that would be free of surveillance by the US intelligence agencies! Imagine, a ‘senior presidential adviser’ of the US President – and his son-in-law at that – attempting to hide secret dealings with his country’s main adversary, Russia, from his country’s security apparatus!
This would seem like something done by spies and traitors working with their own country’s enemies.
And, Reuters reports that alongside Kushner in these dealings with the Russians had been close Trump election campaign associate and short-lived National Security Adviser Mike Flynn.
Everybody, of course, is now wondering how much Trump knew of all this. Indeed, in Washington, that awful word that is the nemesis of the world’s most powerful democratic politician is now in the air: impeachment. Increasingly the US news media as well as many Opposition Democratic Party politicians have begun taking about the possibility of the constitutional impeachment of the current US President. Public discussion is beginning to recall the impeachment of President Nixon over the Watergate scandal.
Commentators, however, not that Nixon was impeached well into his second term as President after a massive popular vote in his election unlike Donald Trump who only narrowly won the presidency and is barely into the first few months of his first term.
Whatever these nuances, readers are fortunate, in these media-connected times, to be able to closely follow how one of the world’s most democratic states, the USA, tackles such serious political challenges that are now confronting the American state.
American democracy triumphed over the anti-democratic depredations of Richard Nixon. Can American democracy today fairly and dispassionately dissect the torrent of controversy surrounding the current President? Will the ruling Republican Party place country before party interests – and class/ethnic interests – and thoroughly investigate their own President in the White House?
But let me end this week with a question of culture and gender, of imperialism and patriarchy: How come the Trump females – First Lady, Melania, and First Daughter, Ivanka – did not cover their heads when visiting rigidly Islamist-patriarchal Saudi Arabia but did so, black lace and all, when meeting with the (no longer that rigidly patriarchal) Roman Catholic Pope?
How come the Western media praised the Trump ladies’ uncovering in Riyadh as freedom from oppressive patriarchy and, then, positively admired the style of their head coverings during audience with the currently relatively un-patriarchal Pontiff?