Shelving of US Missile Defence in Europe: How Does it Impact on US-Russia Relations?

On September 17, 2009, President Barack Obama decided to do an overhaul of the US missile defence in Europe. The missile defence shield in Poland and the Czech Republic is going to be replaced with a revamped project, after a careful reconsideration of the threat from Iran. Obama, making a statement on the subject, said, "This new approach will provide capabilities sooner, build on proven systems and offer greater defenses against the threat of missile attack than the 2007 European missile defense program."

While the two East European allies are not entirely happy with the development, Russia has appreciated what the US has done, with the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, saying "We value the US president's responsible approach towards implementing our agreements ... I am ready to continue the dialogue." He went further to say that there are "good conditions" on the ground to start joint anti-missile projects. Konstantin Kosachev, a prominent MP and Chairman of the International Affairs Committee, State Duma of the Russian Federation, said: "The Obama administration is starting to understand us. Now we can talk about restoration of the strategic partnership between Russia and the United States."

How does Obama's temporarily shelving of the missile defence programme affect US-Russia relations? Will Russia come on board on Iran sanctions? Will Russia become far more cooperative on the Afghan front?



The decision was taken after a careful reading of the situation, noting that the threat from Iran's long-range missiles was not so immediate. The decision was also based on advances in US missile defense technology, particularly with land and sea based interceptors. Elaborating on the revamped programme, Defence Secretary Robert Gates said that interceptor missiles would be initially deployed on ships in order to enable easy transportation from one region to the other. He added, "The second phase, about 2015, will involve fielding upgraded land-based SM-3s. Consultations have begun with allies, starting with Poland and the Czech Republic, about hosting a land-based version of the SM-3 and other components of the system."

While the programme has been been put on hold for sometime, it is not being scrapped entirely. As Gates pointed out, the first stage does not include fielding of those interceptors in Europe, but a second stage, may be in 2015 will deploy the upgraded land-based SM-3s in Poland and the Czech Republic. It is quite apparent that the Russians are aware of this. For instance, one of the scholars on NATO at the Russian Foreign Ministry's Diplomatic Academy, Vladimir Shtol pointed out, "I don't believe the US would ever fully back out of the missile shield, because it is in their long-term interests and closely connected with their strategy in Europe." Similarly, Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, says that the issue if never off the table. It may be off the agenda temporarily. He said, "Nothing has been canceled, missile defense has just been postponed. For a while this topic is off the agenda, but later it will return. So, for now the political situation may improve, but the underlying pattern of relations is unlikely to change in any basic way." However, there are Russian specialists in India like Nandan Unnikrishnan who believe that missile defence in Europe is a closed issue and that Obama's current posture is not temporary, but a permanent move. However, he added on to say that the missile defence issue will be a closed one, at least for the next couple of years.

While the US looks the change in posture as a major concession to Moscow, what does Washington expect in return? Tougher actions on Iran by Moscow may be one, better cooperation in the war on terror in Afghanistan may be another one. Renewal of START talks with lesser number of conditionalities (from Russian side) could be another expectation. Will Russia be able to deliver on all these major issues?

While tough action on Iran by Moscow is conceivable, it is not certain. If one has to go by what the Russian Foreign Minister Sregei Lavrov said last week, Iran issue is not going to be an easy one. He said, "I do not think these sanctions will be approved by the United Nations Security Council ... They [Iran] need an equal place in this regional dialogue. Iran is a partner that has never harmed Russia in any way." He went on to addd that the US cannot expect to have a timetable as far as the Iran issue is concerned. In fact, Lavrov went a step ahead to say that the changed US posture is not necessarily a concession, but merely a correction of the past mistake. A Christian Science Monitor report on the subject says that while the changed US posture on missile defence issue may contribute to a warmer dialogue between the US and Russia, Washington should not expect major concessions on some of the issues of key concern to the US like Iran. If Moscow has to extend some reciprocal concessions to Washington, the US will have to be more accomodative to Russian concerns on NATO expansion into the Russian backyard. In fact, as the US National Intelligence Strategy 2009 noted, Russia "may continue to seek avenues for reasserting power and influence in ways that complicate US interests." For instance, on September 15, 2009, Russian Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov has signed agreements on cooperation in the military sphere with heads of the military departments of Abkhazia and South Ossetia Merab Kishmaria and Yuri Tanayev. As per the agreements, the headquarters of the Russian military base in Abkhazia will be in the Black Sea port of Gudauty, and in South Ossetia -- in Tskhinvali. The strength of the personnel of each of the military bases will be around 1,700. The agreements are signed for a period of 49 years, with an automatic prolongation for five years. These moves may come to compete with the US interests in the Russian backyard. Again, there are Russian experts in India who argue that the US is going to slow on the NATO expansion and that it will not pursue inclusion of Georgia and Ukraine into NATO in the near future.

Howevers, what appears certain is progress on arms control measures such as the START. The 1991 START that is expiring in December 2009 is likely to be replaced by a new arms reduction treaty. In fact, Lukyanov says, "Now we can be sure the new START agreement will be completed on time, because the vexing issue of missile defense and how it affects the strategic balance has been removed for the time being. “That’s quite an important matter."

Lastly, how does the changed posture affect Russian position on the war on terror in Afghanistan. Russia may possibly come around assisting the US significantly in the war in Afghanistan. However, what Obama has to do for long term stability in Afghanistan should include not just Russia, but also other regional powers such as Iran, India, China, Japan and some of the Central Asian states. The US has to become proactive to establish a larger colaition of states on Afghanistan if there has to be peace and stability in the Af-Pak region.

Obama and Sino-US Ties

Here's a story that Dr. Satish Misra has done on Obama and Sino-US ties, where he has taken views from several experts, including me. Does US-China relations affect India-US ties?

Experts say that, notwithstanding the ongoing debate, the global economic crisis has created a situation in which the Sino-US ties are bound to get a constructive push.



Since the election of Barack Obama as the US President in last November, there has been considerable debate on how Sino-US relations would shape up.

While meeting traditional allies in East Asia, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also made Beijing a port of call. Before leaving the Chinese capital, Ms Clinton set the tone for the relationship by stating that she was “encouraged by the possibilities of what a stronger relationship can mean for the Chinese and American people”.

The political battle between the ‘Red Team’—those who advocate stronger ties with People’s Republic of China (PRC)—and the ‘Blue Team’—those who wish to contain the regime in Beijing—continues unabated in the United States. But the global economic downturn seems to have given an edge to the former in the Obama Administration.

Experts say that, notwithstanding the ongoing debate, the global economic crisis has created a situation in which the Sino-US ties are bound to get a constructive push.

Affirming growing Sino-US ties, ORF Senior Fellow and US specialist Dr. Harinder Sekhon says that “there is a strong constituency within the United States that advocates the forging of close ties with China. They recognize that there is a strategic mistrust between the leaders but there is an urgent need to move beyond that and exercise what is now being termed as ‘smart power’ to reduce mutual tensions where leaders in both countries should adopt a broader and more practical approach to finding solutions to many of the global and bilateral issues that confront both the countries”.

“With the global meltdown having hit the US thoroughly,” says ORF Senior Fellow Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, “Obama’s view is that the US needs Chinese help in getting out of the economic mess. In February 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appealed to the Chinese government to continue buying US treasury bonds or be prepared for the fall of both economies.”

ORF Vice President Samir Saran, however, avers that “clearly a geo-economic moment (the financial crisis) is being used by certain sections of the American Polity to realign the mood and inclination of their citizenry in favour of engaging with China by overemphasizing on the financial imperatives to overcome issues of ‘freedom, liberty and human rights’ that have held back the bilateral relationship for so long”.

“The argument that Chinese investment in American Treasury has in any ways made
the US vulnerable (in relation to China) or dependent on it (China) is extremely simplistic” argues Mr. Saran, who sees the issue as “being played out in different ways in the US media. It is a classic case of ‘manufacturing consent’ and shaping public opinion for a geo-political objective”.

“On the contrary, the beneficiary of the investment, in this case the US will not only decide the fate (returns on the treasury bonds) but also can leverage this downturn to extract further investments in order to protect the Chinese investment” says Mr. Saran. The emphasis on economic ‘compulsions’ towards China is largely to conceal an underlying geopolitical realignment.

ORF Visiting Fellow Neil Padukone feels that the perception that the US is “kowtowing to China” is amplified by Indian fears. Mr. Padukone sees “Chinese exports and Treasury bonds ownership as just one part of US-China relationships, and US-China economic engagement as just one party of the overall financial recovery process.”

ORF Senior Fellow Nandan Unnikrishnan disagrees with the argument saying that the global meltdown has not pushed the US into Dragon’s lair.

***

Though Republican President Richard Nixon made the first step towards China, the Democratic Party is perceived to have a “tilt” towards China.

As Dr. Rajagopalan argues, “Democrats have generally tended to have a stronger partnership with China as compared to India. Democrats have sidelined issues such as democracy and human rights in its relationship with China. For instance, post-Tiananmen Square incidents, President George H.W. Bush had imposed sanctions, but by the time Clinton came into office, most of the sanctions were removed. In fact, President Clinton and President Jiang Zemin’s agreement in 1998 to “jointly manage South Asia” had angered India. It was President George W. Bush who managed to break that trend and establish a strategic partnership with India. Obama appears set to continue with Clinton’s pro-China policy.”

Mr. Padukone, however, confessing his “Democratic leanings,” contends that it is “difficult to make these sorts of generalizations. The ‘Red Team’ consists of both Democrats and Republicans that favor enhanced trade relations. Meanwhile, the ‘Blue Team,’ has members of both parties that find such engagement to be anathema for reasons of values (communism and human rights) as well as geopolitics.

“Moreover, different arms of the Executive Branch have different views of PRC, with the State Department pursuing diplomatic engagement, Treasury Department managing economic ties, while the Defense Department has remained wary of China since the late 1980s”, observes Mr. Padukone.

“Perhaps Clinton gave Democrats their reputation as ‘Panda Huggers’ with the disconnect between the 1992 campaign China-bashing in the wake of Tiananmen and Clinton’s enhanced trade with China. But even in the 1990s, the relationship was turbulent, with defense trade restrictions, the Taiwan Straits Crisis, and the Hainan Island incident. The George W. Bush administration, on the other hand, had a more laissez faire approach to relations with China, with some antagonism due to the primacy of Sec. Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense. At the same time, during Bush’s tenure, America’s twin deficits increased and America’s adversaries were dealt with through isolation—which ultimately benefited China, which owned a great deal of US debt and stepped into the political space with countries with which the US would not engage.”

“Most fundamentally, the United States as a whole does not have a coherent long-term China policy. Whether China will be a geopolitical rival or an economic partner remains unclear, with various factions of various parties and bureaucracies arguing various things. Even if China is both rival and partner, the paradox must be reconciled within a coherent strategy,” stresses Mr. Padukone.

***

Many accuse the US of sidestepping issues of freedom and human rights in order to push closer engagement with China. But Mr. Unnikrishnan partially agrees saying that “Not yet but it will.” If the pro-China sector has an upper hand in the ongoing debate, Mr. Unnikrishnan says the question whether they are winning is not relevant here, “but it appears rational for the Americans to want to reach accommodation with the second largest economy in the world, particularly one on which they have become dependent on.”

The first challenge, according to Dr. Sekhon, would be to cooperate to “advance mutual interests in a lasting economic recovery” by overcoming some of the irritants like trade issues, especially the trade imbalance between the two countries, placing human rights concerns on the backburner.

Mr. Padukone argues that while the Obama Administration may look beyond issues of human rights, “this may be part of a larger shift in diplomatic strategy. By engaging the governments of Iran, Sudan, Russia, China, possibly Myanmar and others, the Obama Administration is changing course in the way it deals with human rights and freedom in larger bilateral relations.

“The Administration’s view seems to be that American aims, both geo-strategic and political, will be served more effectively through proactive engagement than isolationism or confrontation,” points out the Visiting Fellow.

Mr. Padukone puts the whole debate on a wider canvas, saying that “in the wake of the Iraq and Afghan campaigns, diminished political capital globally, global recession that requires a reworking of a financial system that is based on a model of consumption that is largely supplied by China—the US needs to tread relatively carefully. Not to mention, a number of the geopolitical challenges that the United States faces— in Central Asia, the Middle East, Iran, Northeast Asia, and Africa—require multilateral approaches after years of failed unilateral methods. Given the political and economic leverages that China has in many of these areas (that other countries lack), a concerted effort with China may be necessary.

***

To a question about whether there is a substance in an argument that the US would like China to assume greater global influence and share in policing troubled regions such as Africa and the Indian Ocean, Mr. Unnikrishnan says that “the US will want it” and goes on to say that “they will do to the extent their strategic interests converge.”

Mr. Unnikrishnan dismisses the emergence of a G-2 (China and the US) in the conduct of international affairs as a “nightmare scenario”.

But Dr Sekhon views the question in a positive light saying, “A beginning seems to have been made where both nations have agreed to cooperate in the global fora on these issues.”

“But China’s increasing influence is in many ways inimical to US interests. If America is the “world’s sheriff,” a “deputy” with opposing worldviews and aims on human rights, proliferation, militarization, economics, resource acquisition, and so forth, is counter to US interests”, disagrees Mr. Padukone. “If the “other policeman” in the world were the UK, for example, there might be more credence to the argument.”

Rising Chinese influence in the Middle East and Africa “gives China access to energy resources that the US itself would rather control,” Mr. Padukone argues. “It diminishes any influence the United States would have in those countries: Iran or Burma remain unaffected by American sanctions because they can still trade with China; Sudan needn’t give up its military campaigns in Darfur, Southern Sudan, or Chad because Khartoum receives weapons, investment, and diplomatic support from Beijing.”

Dr. Rajagopalan agrees, arguing “the US will not like to see a more powerful China raising its influence beyond a certain point. On this issue, there could be agreement between the Democrats and the Republicans. Preventing the rise of regional hegemons—peer competitors—remains an objective common to both the Democrats and the Republicans. In fact, the 1992 formulation of the Defense Department remain an underlying principle in the US grand strategy. But China is also clear that its economic engagement with Washington is beneficial and it will continue. China appears to believe that American strategic presence in Asia is still necessary for stability in the region, as well as to prevent the rise of regional hegemons like Japan.”

Any shared policing, points out Mr. Padukone, “has more to do with China’s importance in global governance—in Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Pakistan, Myanmar, the economy, climate change—than with any notions of a ‘bilateral world police’.”

***

To bring this back to the Indian perspective, Dr. Rajagopalan argues that “India clearly does not want to see very close relations between the two countries as during the Clinton administration, where they wanted to jointly manage south Asia. On the other hand, we do not want to see them get into conflict situations, where India being a neighbor, may be forced to take sides. A serious US-China dispute will have wider security consequences throughout Asia and adversely affect India, too. While the two extremes should be avoided, there are increasing concerns about China and its rise, particularly on the military side.”

As for the prevailing view in India that the Obama Administration is ignoring India in favor of China, Mr. Padukone argues that, “if India isn’t necessary in global politics, then it can be ignored easily. India’s strategic culture remains reactive; it hasn’t made itself indispensable in global governance outside its own borders (and arguably Pakistan).”

“If India becomes pivotal in the resolution of global challenges, then neglecting India (to China’s benefit) will not be an option. But as of now, it is negligible, and there is no reason for American politicians to engage India rather than China.

Mr. Padukone argues that “Indian fears of the US ‘pandering to “the Panda”’ are exaggerated by (a) Indian hypersensitivities to Chinese strength, and more importantly, (b) displacement of blame: India needs to realize that to be treated like an important player, it must be one. India needs to get its own act together before it loses its voice complaining about the US and China.”

Women's Empowerment: What and How

Here's an NYT story on the plight of women. The article brings out the point that I have always believed in, i.e., economic independence is a key factor for womens' empowerment. Economic independence does make a lot of difference in the way a man treats a woman, the society treats her, and last of all, the woman will respect herself. For a married woman, her in-laws will treat her differently if she is a career woman, or at least has some job, in which she could be on her own financially. A woman should be able to stand on her feet and not depend on the man, even if all is well.

The article does a kind of case study of several countries including Pakistan. for instance, the article highlights initiatives by Kashf Foundation, a Pakistani microfinance organization that lends tiny amounts of money to poor women to start businesses. Kashf is typical of microfinance institutions, in that it lends almost exclusively to women, in groups of 25.



August 23, 2009
The Women’s Crusade
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF and SHERYL WuDUNN
IN THE 19TH CENTURY, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape.

Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. “Women hold up half the sky,” in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.

One place to observe this alchemy of gender is in the muddy back alleys of Pakistan. In a slum outside the grand old city of Lahore, a woman named Saima Muhammad used to dissolve into tears every evening. A round-faced woman with thick black hair tucked into a head scarf, Saima had barely a rupee, and her deadbeat husband was unemployed and not particularly employable. He was frustrated and angry, and he coped by beating Saima each afternoon. Their house was falling apart, and Saima had to send her young daughter to live with an aunt, because there wasn’t enough food to go around.

“My sister-in-law made fun of me, saying, ‘You can’t even feed your children,’ ” recalled Saima when Nick met her two years ago on a trip to Pakistan. “My husband beat me up. My brother-in-law beat me up. I had an awful life.” Saima’s husband accumulated a debt of more than $3,000, and it seemed that these loans would hang over the family for generations. Then when Saima’s second child was born and turned out to be a girl as well, her mother-in-law, a harsh, blunt woman named Sharifa Bibi, raised the stakes.

“She’s not going to have a son,” Sharifa told Saima’s husband, in front of her. “So you should marry again. Take a second wife.” Saima was shattered and ran off sobbing. Another wife would leave even less money to feed and educate the children. And Saima herself would be marginalized in the household, cast off like an old sock. For days Saima walked around in a daze, her eyes red; the slightest incident would send her collapsing into hysterical tears.

It was at that point that Saima signed up with the Kashf Foundation, a Pakistani microfinance organization that lends tiny amounts of money to poor women to start businesses. Kashf is typical of microfinance institutions, in that it lends almost exclusively to women, in groups of 25. The women guarantee one another’s debts and meet every two weeks to make payments and discuss a social issue, like family planning or schooling for girls. A Pakistani woman is often forbidden to leave the house without her husband’s permission, but husbands tolerate these meetings because the women return with cash and investment ideas.

Saima took out a $65 loan and used the money to buy beads and cloth, which she transformed into beautiful embroidery that she then sold to merchants in the markets of Lahore. She used the profit to buy more beads and cloth, and soon she had an embroidery business and was earning a solid income — the only one in her household to do so. Saima took her elder daughter back from the aunt and began paying off her husband’s debt.

When merchants requested more embroidery than Saima could produce, she paid neighbors to assist her. Eventually 30 families were working for her, and she put her husband to work as well — “under my direction,” she explained with a twinkle in her eye. Saima became the tycoon of the neighborhood, and she was able to pay off her husband’s entire debt, keep her daughters in school, renovate the house, connect running water and buy a television.

“Now everyone comes to me to borrow money, the same ones who used to criticize me,” Saima said, beaming in satisfaction. “And the children of those who used to criticize me now come to my house to watch TV.”

Today, Saima is a bit plump and displays a gold nose ring as well as several other rings and bracelets on each wrist. She exudes self-confidence as she offers a grand tour of her home and work area, ostentatiously showing off the television and the new plumbing. She doesn’t even pretend to be subordinate to her husband. He spends his days mostly loafing around, occasionally helping with the work but always having to accept orders from his wife. He has become more impressed with females in general: Saima had a third child, also a girl, but now that’s not a problem. “Girls are just as good as boys,” he explained.

Saima’s new prosperity has transformed the family’s educational prospects. She is planning to send all three of her daughters through high school and maybe to college as well. She brings in tutors to improve their schoolwork, and her oldest child, Javaria, is ranked first in her class. We asked Javaria what she wanted to be when she grew up, thinking she might aspire to be a doctor or lawyer. Javaria cocked her head. “I’d like to do embroidery,” she said.

As for her husband, Saima said, “We have a good relationship now.” She explained, “We don’t fight, and he treats me well.” And what about finding another wife who might bear him a son? Saima chuckled at the question: “Now nobody says anything about that.” Sharifa Bibi, the mother-in-law, looked shocked when we asked whether she wanted her son to take a second wife to bear a son. “No, no,” she said. “Saima is bringing so much to this house. . . . She puts a roof over our heads and food on the table.”

Sharifa even allows that Saima is now largely exempt from beatings by her husband. “A woman should know her limits, and if not, then it’s her husband’s right to beat her,” Sharifa said. “But if a woman earns more than her husband, it’s difficult for him to discipline her.”

WHAT SHOULD we make of stories like Saima’s? Traditionally, the status of women was seen as a “soft” issue — worthy but marginal. We initially reflected that view ourselves in our work as journalists. We preferred to focus instead on the “serious” international issues, like trade disputes or arms proliferation. Our awakening came in China.

After we married in 1988, we moved to Beijing to be correspondents for The New York Times. Seven months later we found ourselves standing on the edge of Tiananmen Square watching troops fire their automatic weapons at prodemocracy protesters. The massacre claimed between 400 and 800 lives and transfixed the world; wrenching images of the killings appeared constantly on the front page and on television screens.

Yet the following year we came across an obscure but meticulous demographic study that outlined a human rights violation that had claimed tens of thousands more lives. This study found that 39,000 baby girls died annually in China because parents didn’t give them the same medical care and attention that boys received — and that was just in the first year of life. A result is that as many infant girls died unnecessarily every week in China as protesters died at Tiananmen Square. Those Chinese girls never received a column inch of news coverage, and we began to wonder if our journalistic priorities were skewed.

A similar pattern emerged in other countries. In India, a “bride burning” takes place approximately once every two hours, to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry — but these rarely constitute news. When a prominent dissident was arrested in China, we would write a front-page article; when 100,000 girls were kidnapped and trafficked into brothels, we didn’t even consider it news.

Amartya Sen, the ebullient Nobel Prize-winning economist, developed a gauge of gender inequality that is a striking reminder of the stakes involved. “More than 100 million women are missing,” Sen wrote in a classic essay in 1990 in The New York Review of Books, spurring a new field of research. Sen noted that in normal circumstances, women live longer than men, and so there are more females than males in much of the world. Yet in places where girls have a deeply unequal status, they vanish. China has 107 males for every 100 females in its overall population (and an even greater disproportion among newborns), and India has 108. The implication of the sex ratios, Sen later found, is that about 107 million females are missing from the globe today. Follow-up studies have calculated the number slightly differently, deriving alternative figures for “missing women” of between 60 million and 107 million.

Girls vanish partly because they don’t get the same health care and food as boys. In India, for example, girls are less likely to be vaccinated than boys and are taken to the hospital only when they are sicker. A result is that girls in India from 1 to 5 years of age are 50 percent more likely to die than boys their age. In addition, ultrasound machines have allowed a pregnant woman to find out the sex of her fetus — and then get an abortion if it is female.

The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls and women are now missing from the planet, precisely because they are female, than men were killed on the battlefield in all the wars of the 20th century. The number of victims of this routine “gendercide” far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.

For those women who live, mistreatment is sometimes shockingly brutal. If you’re reading this article, the phrase “gender discrimination” might conjure thoughts of unequal pay, underfinanced sports teams or unwanted touching from a boss. In the developing world, meanwhile, millions of women and girls are actually enslaved. While a precise number is hard to pin down, the International Labor Organization, a U.N. agency, estimates that at any one time there are 12.3 million people engaged in forced labor of all kinds, including sexual servitude. In Asia alone about one million children working in the sex trade are held in conditions indistinguishable from slavery, according to a U.N. report. Girls and women are locked in brothels and beaten if they resist, fed just enough to be kept alive and often sedated with drugs — to pacify them and often to cultivate addiction. India probably has more modern slaves than any other country.

Another huge burden for women in poor countries is maternal mortality, with one woman dying in childbirth around the world every minute. In the West African country Niger, a woman stands a one-in-seven chance of dying in childbirth at some point in her life. (These statistics are all somewhat dubious, because maternal mortality isn’t considered significant enough to require good data collection.) For all of India’s shiny new high-rises, a woman there still has a 1-in-70 lifetime chance of dying in childbirth. In contrast, the lifetime risk in the United States is 1 in 4,800; in Ireland, it is 1 in 47,600. The reason for the gap is not that we don’t know how to save lives of women in poor countries. It’s simply that poor, uneducated women in Africa and Asia have never been a priority either in their own countries or to donor nations.

ABBAS BE, A BEAUTIFUL teenage girl in the Indian city of Hyderabad, has chocolate skin, black hair and gleaming white teeth — and a lovely smile, which made her all the more marketable.

Money was tight in her family, so when she was about 14 she arranged to take a job as a maid in the capital, New Delhi. Instead, she was locked up in a brothel, beaten with a cricket bat, gang-raped and told that she would have to cater to customers. Three days after she arrived, Abbas and all 70 girls in the brothel were made to gather round and watch as the pimps made an example of one teenage girl who had fought customers. The troublesome girl was stripped naked, hogtied, humiliated and mocked, beaten savagely and then stabbed in the stomach until she bled to death in front of Abbas and the others.

Abbas was never paid for her work. Any sign of dissatisfaction led to a beating or worse; two more times, she watched girls murdered by the brothel managers for resisting. Eventually Abbas was freed by police and taken back to Hyderabad. She found a home in a shelter run by Prajwala, an organization that takes in girls rescued from brothels and teaches them new skills. Abbas is acquiring an education and has learned to be a bookbinder; she also counsels other girls about how to avoid being trafficked. As a skilled bookbinder, Abbas is able to earn a decent living, and she is now helping to put her younger sisters through school as well. With an education, they will be far less vulnerable to being trafficked. Abbas has moved from being a slave to being a producer, contributing to India’s economic development and helping raise her family.

Perhaps the lesson presented by both Abbas and Saima is the same: In many poor countries, the greatest unexploited resource isn’t oil fields or veins of gold; it is the women and girls who aren’t educated and never become a major presence in the formal economy. With education and with help starting businesses, impoverished women can earn money and support their countries as well as their families. They represent perhaps the best hope for fighting global poverty.

In East Asia, as we saw in our years of reporting there, women have already benefited from deep social changes. In countries like South Korea and Malaysia, China and Thailand, rural girls who previously contributed negligibly to the economy have gone to school and received educations, giving them the autonomy to move to the city to hold factory jobs. This hugely increased the formal labor force; when the women then delayed childbearing, there was a demographic dividend to the country as well. In the 1990s, by our estimations, some 80 percent of the employees on the assembly lines in coastal China were female, and the proportion across the manufacturing belt of East Asia was at least 70 percent.

The hours were long and the conditions wretched, just as in the sweatshops of the Industrial Revolution in the West. But peasant women were making money, sending it back home and sometimes becoming the breadwinners in their families. They gained new skills that elevated their status. Westerners encounter sweatshops and see exploitation, and indeed, many of these plants are just as bad as critics say. But it’s sometimes said in poor countries that the only thing worse than being exploited in a sweatshop is not being exploited in a sweatshop. Low-wage manufacturing jobs disproportionately benefited women in countries like China because these were jobs for which brute physical force was not necessary and women’s nimbleness gave them an advantage over men — which was not the case with agricultural labor or construction or other jobs typically available in poor countries. Strange as it may seem, sweatshops in Asia had the effect of empowering women. One hundred years ago, many women in China were still having their feet bound. Today, while discrimination and inequality and harassment persist, the culture has been transformed. In the major cities, we’ve found that Chinese men often do more domestic chores than American men typically do. And urban parents are often not only happy with an only daughter; they may even prefer one, under the belief that daughters are better than sons at looking after aging parents.

WHY DO MICROFINANCE organizations usually focus their assistance on women? And why does everyone benefit when women enter the work force and bring home regular pay checks? One reason involves the dirty little secret of global poverty: some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes but also by unwise spending by the poor — especially by men. Surprisingly frequently, we’ve come across a mother mourning a child who has just died of malaria for want of a $5 mosquito bed net; the mother says that the family couldn’t afford a bed net and she means it, but then we find the father at a nearby bar. He goes three evenings a week to the bar, spending $5 each week.

Our interviews and perusal of the data available suggest that the poorest families in the world spend approximately 10 times as much (20 percent of their incomes on average) on a combination of alcohol, prostitution, candy, sugary drinks and lavish feasts as they do on educating their children (2 percent). If poor families spent only as much on educating their children as they do on beer and prostitutes, there would be a breakthrough in the prospects of poor countries. Girls, since they are the ones kept home from school now, would be the biggest beneficiaries. Moreover, one way to reallocate family expenditures in this way is to put more money in the hands of women. A series of studies has found that when women hold assets or gain incomes, family money is more likely to be spent on nutrition, medicine and housing, and consequently children are healthier.

In Ivory Coast, one research project examined the different crops that men and women grow for their private kitties: men grow coffee, cocoa and pineapple, and women grow plantains, bananas, coconuts and vegetables. Some years the “men’s crops” have good harvests and the men are flush with cash, and other years it is the women who prosper. Money is to some extent shared. But even so, the economist Esther Duflo of M.I.T. found that when the men’s crops flourish, the household spends more money on alcohol and tobacco. When the women have a good crop, the households spend more money on food. “When women command greater power, child health and nutrition improves,” Duflo says.

Such research has concrete implications: for example, donor countries should nudge poor countries to adjust their laws so that when a man dies, his property is passed on to his widow rather than to his brothers. Governments should make it easy for women to hold property and bank accounts — 1 percent of the world’s landowners are women — and they should make it much easier for microfinance institutions to start banks so that women can save money.

OF COURSE, IT’S FAIR to ask: empowering women is well and good, but can one do this effectively? Does foreign aid really work? William Easterly, an economist at New York University, has argued powerfully that shoveling money at poor countries accomplishes little. Some Africans, including Dambisa Moyo, author of “Dead Aid,” have said the same thing. The critics note that there has been no correlation between amounts of aid going to countries and their economic growth rates.

Our take is that, frankly, there is something to these criticisms. Helping people is far harder than it looks. Aid experiments often go awry, or small successes turn out to be difficult to replicate or scale up. Yet we’ve also seen, anecdotally and in the statistics, evidence that some kinds of aid have been enormously effective. The delivery of vaccinations and other kinds of health care has reduced the number of children who die every year before they reach the age of 5 to less than 10 million today from 20 million in 1960.

In general, aid appears to work best when it is focused on health, education and microfinance (although microfinance has been somewhat less successful in Africa than in Asia). And in each case, crucially, aid has often been most effective when aimed at women and girls; when policy wonks do the math, they often find that these investments have a net economic return. Only a small proportion of aid specifically targets women or girls, but increasingly donors are recognizing that that is where they often get the most bang for the buck.

In the early 1990s, the United Nations and the World Bank began to proclaim the potential resource that women and girls represent. “Investment in girls’ education may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world,” Larry Summers wrote when he was chief economist of the World Bank. Private aid groups and foundations shifted gears as well. “Women are the key to ending hunger in Africa,” declared the Hunger Project. The Center for Global Development issued a major report explaining “why and how to put girls at the center of development.” CARE took women and girls as the centerpiece of its anti-poverty efforts. “Gender inequality hurts economic growth,” Goldman Sachs concluded in a 2008 research report that emphasized how much developing countries could improve their economic performance by educating girls.

Bill Gates recalls once being invited to speak in Saudi Arabia and finding himself facing a segregated audience. Four-fifths of the listeners were men, on the left. The remaining one-fifth were women, all covered in black cloaks and veils, on the right. A partition separated the two groups. Toward the end, in the question-and-answer session, a member of the audience noted that Saudi Arabia aimed to be one of the Top 10 countries in the world in technology by 2010 and asked if that was realistic. “Well, if you’re not fully utilizing half the talent in the country,” Gates said, “you’re not going to get too close to the Top 10.” The small group on the right erupted in wild cheering.

Policy makers have gotten the message as well. President Obama has appointed a new White House Council on Women and Girls. Perhaps he was indoctrinated by his mother, who was one of the early adopters of microloans to women when she worked to fight poverty in Indonesia. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is a member of the White House Council, and she has also selected a talented activist, Melanne Verveer, to direct a new State Department Office of Global Women’s Issues. On Capitol Hill, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has put Senator Barbara Boxer in charge of a new subcommittee that deals with women’s issues.

Yet another reason to educate and empower women is that greater female involvement in society and the economy appears to undermine extremism and terrorism. It has long been known that a risk factor for turbulence and violence is the share of a country’s population made up of young people. Now it is emerging that male domination of society is also a risk factor; the reasons aren’t fully understood, but it may be that when women are marginalized the nation takes on the testosterone-laden culture of a military camp or a high-school boys’ locker room. That’s in part why the Joint Chiefs of Staff and international security specialists are puzzling over how to increase girls’ education in countries like Afghanistan — and why generals have gotten briefings from Greg Mortenson, who wrote about building girls’ schools in his best seller, “Three Cups of Tea.” Indeed, some scholars say they believe the reason Muslim countries have been disproportionately afflicted by terrorism is not Islamic teachings about infidels or violence but rather the low levels of female education and participation in the labor force.

SO WHAT WOULD an agenda for fighting poverty through helping women look like? You might begin with the education of girls — which doesn’t just mean building schools. There are other innovative means at our disposal. A study in Kenya by Michael Kremer, a Harvard economist, examined six different approaches to improving educational performance, from providing free textbooks to child-sponsorship programs. The approach that raised student test scores the most was to offer girls who had scored in the top 15 percent of their class on sixth-grade tests a $19 scholarship for seventh and eighth grade (and the glory of recognition at an assembly). Boys also performed better, apparently because they were pushed by the girls or didn’t want to endure the embarrassment of being left behind.

Another Kenyan study found that giving girls a new $6 school uniform every 18 months significantly reduced dropout rates and pregnancy rates. Likewise, there’s growing evidence that a cheap way to help keep high-school girls in school is to help them manage menstruation. For fear of embarrassing leaks and stains, girls sometimes stay home during their periods, and the absenteeism puts them behind and eventually leads them to drop out. Aid workers are experimenting with giving African teenage girls sanitary pads, along with access to a toilet where they can change them. The Campaign for Female Education, an organization devoted to getting more girls into school in Africa, helps girls with their periods, and a new group, Sustainable Health Enterprises, is trying to do the same.

And so, if President Obama wanted to adopt a foreign-aid policy that built on insights into the role of women in development, he would do well to start with education. We would suggest a $10 billion effort over five years to educate girls around the world. This initiative would focus on Africa but would also support — and prod — Asian countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan to do better. This plan would also double as population policy, for it would significantly reduce birthrates — and thus help poor countries overcome the demographic obstacles to economic growth.

But President Obama might consider two different proposals as well. We would recommend that the United States sponsor a global drive to eliminate iodine deficiency around the globe, by helping countries iodize salt. About a third of households in the developing world do not get enough iodine, and a result is often an impairment in brain formation in the fetal stages. For reasons that are unclear, this particularly affects female fetuses and typically costs children 10 to 15 I.Q. points. Research by Erica Field of Harvard found that daughters of women given iodine performed markedly better in school. Other research suggests that salt iodization would yield benefits worth nine times the cost.

We would also recommend that the United States announce a 12-year, $1.6 billion program to eradicate obstetric fistula, a childbirth injury that is one of the worst scourges of women in the developing world. An obstetric fistula, which is a hole created inside the body by a difficult childbirth, leaves a woman incontinent, smelly, often crippled and shunned by her village — yet it can be repaired for a few hundred dollars. Dr. Lewis Wall, president of the Worldwide Fistula Fund, and Michael Horowitz, a conservative agitator on humanitarian issues, have drafted the 12-year plan — and it’s eminently practical and built on proven methods. Evidence that fistulas can be prevented or repaired comes from impoverished Somaliland, a northern enclave of Somalia, where an extraordinary nurse-midwife named Edna Adan has built her own maternity hospital to save the lives of the women around her. A former first lady of Somalia and World Health Organization official, Adan used her savings to build the hospital, which is supported by a group of admirers in the U.S. who call themselves Friends of Edna Maternity Hospital.

For all the legitimate concerns about how well humanitarian aid is spent, investments in education, iodizing salt and maternal health all have a proven record of success. And the sums are modest: all three components of our plan together amount to about what the U.S. has provided Pakistan since 9/11 — a sum that accomplished virtually nothing worthwhile either for Pakistanis or for Americans.

ONE OF THE MANY aid groups that for pragmatic reasons has increasingly focused on women is Heifer International, a charitable organization based in Arkansas that has been around for decades. The organization gives cows, goats and chickens to farmers in poor countries. On assuming the presidency of Heifer in 1992, the activist Jo Luck traveled to Africa, where one day she found herself sitting on the ground with a group of young women in a Zimbabwean village. One of them was Tererai Trent.

Tererai is a long-faced woman with high cheekbones and a medium brown complexion; she has a high forehead and tight cornrows. Like many women around the world, she doesn’t know when she was born and has no documentation of her birth. As a child, Tererai didn’t get much formal education, partly because she was a girl and was expected to do household chores. She herded cattle and looked after her younger siblings. Her father would say, Let’s send our sons to school, because they will be the breadwinners. Tererai’s brother, Tinashe, was forced to go to school, where he was an indifferent student. Tererai pleaded to be allowed to attend but wasn’t permitted to do so. Tinashe brought his books home each afternoon, and Tererai pored over them and taught herself to read and write. Soon she was doing her brother’s homework every evening.

The teacher grew puzzled, for Tinashe was a poor student in class but always handed in exemplary homework. Finally, the teacher noticed that the handwriting was different for homework and for class assignments and whipped Tinashe until he confessed the truth. Then the teacher went to the father, told him that Tererai was a prodigy and begged that she be allowed to attend school. After much argument, the father allowed Tererai to attend school for a couple of terms, but then married her off at about age 11.

Tererai’s husband barred her from attending school, resented her literacy and beat her whenever she tried to practice her reading by looking at a scrap of old newspaper. Indeed, he beat her for plenty more as well. She hated her marriage but had no way out. “If you’re a woman and you are not educated, what else?” she asks.

Yet when Jo Luck came and talked to Tererai and other young women in her village, Luck kept insisting that things did not have to be this way. She kept saying that they could achieve their goals, repeatedly using the word “achievable.” The women caught the repetition and asked the interpreter to explain in detail what “achievable” meant. That gave Luck a chance to push forward. “What are your hopes?” she asked the women, through the interpreter. Tererai and the others were puzzled by the question, because they didn’t really have any hopes. But Luck pushed them to think about their dreams, and reluctantly, they began to think about what they wanted.

Tererai timidly voiced hope of getting an education. Luck pounced and told her that she could do it, that she should write down her goals and methodically pursue them. After Luck and her entourage disappeared, Tererai began to study on her own, in hiding from her husband, while raising her five children. Painstakingly, with the help of friends, she wrote down her goals on a piece of paper: “One day I will go to the United States of America,” she began, for Goal 1. She added that she would earn a college degree, a master’s degree and a Ph.D. — all exquisitely absurd dreams for a married cattle herder in Zimbabwe who had less than one year’s formal education. But Tererai took the piece of paper and folded it inside three layers of plastic to protect it, and then placed it in an old can. She buried the can under a rock where she herded cattle.

Then Tererai took correspondence classes and began saving money. Her self-confidence grew as she did brilliantly in her studies, and she became a community organizer for Heifer. She stunned everyone with superb schoolwork, and the Heifer aid workers encouraged her to think that she could study in America. One day in 1998, she received notice that she had been admitted to Oklahoma State University.

Some of the neighbors thought that a woman should focus on educating her children, not herself. “I can’t talk about my children’s education when I’m not educated myself,” Tererai responded. “If I educate myself, then I can educate my children.” So she climbed into an airplane and flew to America.

At Oklahoma State, Tererai took every credit she could and worked nights to make money. She earned her undergraduate degree, brought her five children to America and started her master’s, then returned to her village. She dug up the tin can under the rock and took out the paper on which she had scribbled her goals. She put check marks beside the goals she had fulfilled and buried the tin can again.

In Arkansas, she took a job working for Heifer — while simultaneously earning a master’s degree part time. When she had her M.A., Tererai again returned to her village. After embracing her mother and sister, she dug up her tin can and checked off her next goal. Now she is working on her Ph.D. at Western Michigan University.

Tererai has completed her course work and is completing a dissertation about AIDS programs among the poor in Africa. She will become a productive economic asset for Africa and a significant figure in the battle against AIDS. And when she has her doctorate, Tererai will go back to her village and, after hugging her loved ones, go out to the field and dig up her can again.

There are many metaphors for the role of foreign assistance. For our part, we like to think of aid as a kind of lubricant, a few drops of oil in the crankcase of the developing world, so that gears move freely again on their own. That is what the assistance to Tererai amounted to: a bit of help where and when it counts most, which often means focusing on women like her. And now Tererai is gliding along freely on her own — truly able to hold up half the sky.

Nicholas D. Kristof is a New York Times Op-Ed columnist and Sheryl WuDunn is a former Times correspondent who works in finance and philanthropy. This essay is adapted from their book “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide,” which will be published next month by Alfred A. Knopf. You can learn more about “Half the Sky” at nytimes.com/ontheground.

Split India,says Chinese strategist

Zhan Lue of the Chinese government-funded think-tank, China International Institute for Strategic Studies says Beijing should join forces with different nationalities like Assamese, Tamils, and Kashmiris and support the latter in establishing independent nation-states of their own, out of India, for its own interest as also for the progress of Asia.

Should India have a panicked response to this writing? No. However, India cannot ignore such sentiments for two reasons. First of all, such expressions are being quite frequent. Second, CIISS being a government-funded think-tank, one can be reasonably certain that these expressions do have the government backing.

Here's D.S. Rajan's translation of the original Chinese article.

Almost coinciding with the 13th round of Sino-Indian border talks (New Delhi, August 7-8, 2009), an article (in Chinese language) has appeared in China captioned “If China takes a little action, the so-called Great Indian Federation can be broken up” ( Zhong Guo Zhan Lue Gang, www.iiss.cn , Chinese,8 August 2009). Interestingly, it has been reproduced in several other strategic and military websites of the country and by all means, targets the domestic audience. The authoritative host site is located in Beijing and is the new edition of one, which so far represented the China International Institute for Strategic Studies (www.chinaiiss.org).



Claiming that Beijing’s ‘China-Centric’ Asian strategy, provides for splitting India, the writer of the article, Zhan Lue (strategy), has found that New Delhi’s corresponding ‘India-Centric’ policy in Asia, is in reality a ‘Hindustan centric’ one. Stating that on the other hand ‘local centres’ exist in several of the country’s provinces (excepting for the U.P and certain Northern regions), Zhan Lue has felt that in the face of such local characteristics, the ‘so-called’ Indian nation cannot be considered as one having existed in history.

According to the article, if India today relies on any thing for unity, it is the Hindu religion. The partition of the country was based on religion. Stating that today nation states are the main current in the world, it has said that India could only be termed now as a “Hindu Religious state’. Adding that Hinduism is a decadent religion as it allows caste exploitation and is unhelpful to the country’s modernization, it described the Indian government as one in a dilemma with regard to eradication of the caste system as it realizes that the process to do away with castes may shake the foundation of the consciousness of the Indian nation.

The writer has argued that in view of the above, China in its own interest and the progress of whole Asia, should join forces with different nationalities like Assamese, Tamils, and Kashmiris and support the latter in establishing independent nation-states of their own, out of India. In particular, the ULFA in Assam, a territory neighboring China, can be helped by China so that Assam realizes its national independence.

The article has also felt that for Bangladesh, the biggest threat is from India, which wants to develop a great Indian Federation extending from Afghanistan to Myanmar. India is also targeting China with support to Vietnam’s efforts to occupy Nansha (Spratly) group of islands in South China Sea. Hence the need for China’s consolidation of its alliance with Bangladesh, a country with which the US and Japan are also improving their relations to counter China. It has pointed out that China can give political support to Bangladesh enabling the latter to encourage ethnic Bengalis in India to get rid of Indian control and unite with Bangladesh as one Bengali nation; if the same is not possible, creation of at least another free Bengali nation state as a friendly neighbour of Bangladesh, would be desirable, for the purpose of weakening India’s expansion and threat aimed at forming a ‘unified South Asia’.

The punch line in the article has been that to split India, China can bring into its fold countries like Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan, support ULFA in attaining its goal for Assam’s independence, back aspirations of Indian nationalities like Tamils and Nagas, encourage Bangladesh to give a push to the independence of West Bengal and lastly recover the 90,000 sq km. territory in Southern Tibet.

Wishing for India’s break-up into 20-30 nation-states like in Europe, the article has concluded by saying that if the consciousness of nationalities in India could be aroused, social reforms in South Asia can be achieved, the caste system can be eradicated and the region can march along the road of prosperity.

The Chinese article in question will certainly outrage readers in India. Its suggestion that China can follow a strategy to dismember India, a country always with a tradition of unity in diversity, is atrocious, to say the least. The write-up could not have been published without the permission of the Chinese authorities, but it is sure that Beijing will wash its hands out of this if the matter is taken up with it by New Delhi. It has generally been seen that China is speaking in two voices – its diplomatic interlocutors have always shown understanding during their dealings with their Indian counterparts, but its selected media is pouring venom on India in their reporting. Which one to believe is a question confronting the public opinion and even policy makers in India. In any case, an approach of panic towards such outbursts will be a mistake, but also ignoring them will prove to be costly for India.

(The writer, D.S.Rajan, is Director of Chennai Centre for China Studies, Chennai, India, email: dsrajan@gmail.com).