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对不住大家，昨晚发的速度重了，现在改一个，应该没问题了吧吧吧吧。。。
ORZORZORZORZ
India's Gandhi family
The Rahul problem
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WHAT is the point of Rahul Gandhi? The 42-year-old scion of the Gandhi dynasty, which has long dominated India’s ruling party, is still the most plausible prime ministerial candidate for Congress at the looming 2014 election. In advance of that, possibly within weeks, he may get some new party post (some talk of a “vice presidency”) or possibly a government job (as rural affairs minister, perhaps?). A cabinet reshuffle is awaited, with the washed-out monsoon session of parliament swirling down the drain.
Promoting Mr Gandhi now would in theory make sense for Congress. He has long been presumed the successor-in-waiting to Sonia Gandhi, his mother and the party’s president. He needs time to start showing some skills as a leader before campaigning starts in 2014. And for as long as Mr Gandhi does not rise, it is hard for other relative youngsters to be promoted without appearing to outshine him. That has left Congress looking ever older and more out of touch.
But he has long refused to take on a responsible position, preferring to work on reorganising Congress’s youth wing, and leading regional election efforts, both with generally poor results. The problem is that Mr Gandhi has so far shown no particular aptitude as a politician, nor even sufficient hunger for the job. He is shy, reluctant to speak to journalists, biographers, potential allies or foes, nor even to raise his voice in parliament. Nobody really knows what he is capable of, nor what he wishes to do should he ever attain power and responsibility. The suspicion is growing that Mr Gandhi himself does not know.
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The latest effort to “decode” Mr Gandhi comes in the form of a limited yet rather well written biography by a political journalist, Aarthi Ramachandran. Her task is a thankless one. Mr Gandhi is an applicant for a big job: ultimately, to lead India. But whereas any other job applicant will at least offer minimal information about his qualifications, work experience, reasons for wanting a post, Mr Gandhi is so secretive and defensive that he won’t respond to the most basic queries about his studies abroad, his time working for a management consultancy in London, or what he hopes to do as a politician.
Mrs Ramachandran’s book—along with just about every other one about the Gandhi dynasts—is thus hampered by a lack of first-hand material on its subject. Mr Gandhi can only be judged by his actions, his rare and halting public utterances, and the opinions of others who work near him. Given that limitation, she does a decent job: sympathetically but critically analysing his various efforts. She concludes that his push to modernise the youth organisation of Congress as if it were an ailing corporation, applying management techniques learned from Toyota, were earnest and well-meaning but ultimately doomed to fail. “Brand” Rahul, she suggests convincingly, is confused. A man of immense privilege, rising only because of his family name, struggles to look convincing when he talks of meritocracy.
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The overall impression of Mr Gandhi from Mrs Ramachandran’s book is that of a figure who has an ill-defined urge to improve the lives of poor Indians, but no real idea of how to do so. He feels obliged to work in politics, but his political strategies are half-baked, and he fails to develop strong ties with any particular constituency. He has tried to disavow the traditional role of a Gandhi (which would pose him as a Western-educated member of the elite with a near-feudal style of concern for the masses) preferring to pitch himself as a man ready to drink the dirty water of village peasants, and to eat food among the most marginalised of society. But his failure to follow up on such gestures (and many others), with policy or prolonged interventions to help a particular group, suggests a man who strikes an attitude but lacks skills in delivering real change—either as election results, or social improvement.
Part of the problem is presumably the coterie of advisers who surround Mr Gandhi. Western-educated, bright and eager to cosset their leader within a very small bubble, they appear unready for the messy realities of Indian politics: the shady alliances that are required to win elections; the need to strike deals with powerful regional figures who increasingly shape national politics; the importance of crafting a media strategy in an era of cable TV news. More basically, they seem not to have developed any consistent views on policy. What does Mr Gandhi stand for: more liberal economic reforms; defensive nationalism; an expansion of welfare? Instead they prefer to focus on tactics. Perhaps because of their poor advice, their man too often looks opportunistic and inconsistent.
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Opportunities have presented themselves to Mr Gandhi in the past couple of years. One was the Anna Hazare anti-corruption movement, of last year and this, when young, urban, middle-class voters, in the main, expressed rage at huge scandals overseen by the elderly folk who run Congress and their coalition allies. Mr Hazare’s campaign successfully drew on their anger, yet it was a halting, confused movement. Mr Gandhi might have intervened at some point, and tried himself to tap into public anger over corruption and inequality, and drawn some of the sting of the Hazare camp’s efforts.
Or, when Mrs Gandhi was absent, being treated abroad for a serious illness (rumoured to have been cervical cancer), he might have taken charge and confronted the anti-graft campaigners. He could at least have set out evidence for how the government was tackling graft, claimed credit for the government’s introduction of a right-to-information act, and lauded the fact that suspect politicians had been arrested and (temporarily) put in jail. Instead he flunked the test in hiding, not daring to speak out, other than in one ill-advised intervention in parliament.
Another opportunity of sorts was to energise Congress in state elections. The failure of the campaign led by Mr Gandhi in Uttar Pradesh (UP) early in 2012 is briefly but convincingly assessed in the biography. Congress did worse in the state during the assembly elections than it had in the 2009 general election. Mr Gandhi led the party to a humiliating fourth place, even doing dismally in constituencies where the Gandhis have long been local MPs.
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Perhaps he was doomed to fail from the start (voters did not think Congress could win in the assembly elections, so did not see a reason to “waste” their votes). But his methods—poor public speaking, a failure to understand how particular castes and religious groups would act, weak connections to local organisers—did not help. The main mistake, in retrospect, may have been that he invested so much of himself in that particular poll. But similar efforts, in Bihar and Kerala, in recent years, brought similar results.
Since the poll in UP Mr Gandhi has made little impact on Indian politics. That would change quickly if he is indeed promoted to a higher position and takes on a bigger role. But the growing impression of the man—certainly the one promoted by Mrs Ramachandran’s “Decoding Rahul Gandhi”—is of a figure so far ill-prepared to be a leading politician in India.
Just possibly, therefore, this is the moment for Congress to dare to think of something radical: of reorganising itself on the basis of policies, ideas and a vision for how India should develop, and not on a particular dynasty that seems, after various iterations, to be getting less and less useful. Mrs Ramachandran’s book does not touch on this thought, but it is high time for the powerful within Congress to think about it.
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越障
Murder in Libya
The world's policeman must not retreat from the world's most dangerous region; indeed America should do more
FOR many Americans the killing of Christopher Stevens, their ambassador to Libya, this week crystallised everything they have come to expect from the Arab world. In a country where the West only last year helped depose a murderous tyrant, a Salafist mob attacked the American consulate in Benghazi, killing Mr Stevens and three colleagues. The trigger for this murder, the riots in neighbouring Egypt and the storming of the American embassy in Yemen? A tacky amateur video about the Prophet Muhammad that the Obama administration had already condemned. Why on earth, many Americans are asking, should the United States try to police a region, when all it gets in return is mindless abuse, blame for things it cannot control, and mob violence?
The slaying of Mr Stevens is hardly the only recent example of Arab dysfunction. Just to take the seven days prior to the killing: in Iraq scores of people were killed in bombings on one day and the vice-president was sentenced to death in absentia for alleged murder; in Yemen the defence minister survived an assassination attempt; in the Gaza Strip Israel killed six militants; in Tunisia extremist Salafists smashed up a bar that serves alcohol to the town where the Arab spring began; and most graphically of all, in Syria the death toll in the gruesome civil war continued to rise exponentially—to over 25,000.
On the campaign trail Mitt Romney has been clobbering Barack Obama for being too keen on the Arab awakening. Many conservative Americans associate it with hostile Islamists, like the Muslim Brothers and their friends who now run Egypt and Tunisia, and see it as a threat to America’s ally, Israel. Americans of all sorts are nervous about being dragged into Syria and worried about Iran getting the bomb. They are fed up with being described as anti-Islam when their country is in fact far more welcoming to Shia Muslims than, say, Sunni Saudi Arabia is. With their troops now mercifully out of Iraq, their efforts to push the Israeli-Palestinian peace process going nowhere and shale gas reducing their dependence on Arab oil, surely it is time for them to leave the world’s least grateful people to make a mess of their lives by themselves?
This is a seductive narrative—and no doubt it will play even better on the campaign trail after Mr Stevens’s death . But it is deeply wrong in both its analysis and its conclusions. Many parts of the Arab world are in fact heading in the right direction. And in the parts that are not, notably Syria, the United States is more needed than ever.
From one lunatic to another
Begin with the killing of Mr Stevens. Armed jihadists were involved, but other aspects seem more accidental than symptomatic. One misguided extremist in America made the video, and another lot of misguided extremists in the Arab world picked on it. Far from encouraging the violence, the Libyan government deplored Mr Stevens’s murder (though Egypt was less clear) and Libyans mourned a popular ambassador.
This underscores a much bigger point. The Arab spring, for all its messiness, is still broadly moving in the right direction. In Tunisia, Egypt and Libya tyrants have been replaced with democratic governments. These are more hostile to Israel than some of the dictators were, but just as in Turkey greater sympathy for the Palestinians reflects popular opinion (as democracies tend to). The Muslim Brothers hold unpalatable views on women, education and much else, but in government they have had to temper them because voters want jobs and bread on the table more than they want sharia law.
It will take many years, but these democracies promise eventually to embrace a style of government that is more like Turkey’s moderate, democratic Islamism than Iran’s harsh theocracy. At that point America would be spared its outsized role: Turkey and Egypt could emerge as effective regional powers and the Arabs could take more “ownership” of their problems.
But until then, America will remain essential to progress. Libya’s relative success, despite the murder of the ambassador, was largely thanks to American firepower at the start of the campaign against the Qaddafi regime. It was the State Department, in effect, that told Hosni Mubarak’s people that the game was up in Egypt. America is needed to put more pressure on the Gulf monarchies it supports to loosen up their political systems. And in the nascent Arab democracies, it can give vital economic support. Unemployment is rising in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, as governments struggle to replace the crony capitalism of the dictators. Small amounts of aid, especially if it is contingent on economic reform, could make a huge difference. If the Arab economies fail, the cost to the world of ever more angry young men being turfed out of work could be immense.
From Tehran to Damascus
Helping the Arabs sort themselves out is not naive do-goodery; it is rooted in Kissingerian realpolitik. The Middle East is still the crucible of Islam: so much that affects American diplomacy around the rest of the world, from Pakistan to Indonesia, Nigeria, and even the suburbs of Paris, has its starting point here. It is the world’s energy centre: the Middle East still sets the price at America’s petrol stations (something that could be rapidly proved if Israel attacks Iran). And the region is home to many of America’s most committed enemies, including Iran.
In general, America should do more in the Middle East, not less. Two issues look especially neglected because of American domestic politics. One inevitably is the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The Palestinians are themselves divided; but America should vigorously point out that each new (illegal) settlement that Israel builds in the West Bank makes it harder to make peace between Jews and Arabs. The conflict still enrages much of the region. Mr Romney’s electioneering on this, as on bombing Iran, has been especially crude.
The other issue is Syria. The number of dead is rising by as many as 200 a day, as fast as in the worst period in Iraq. So long as Bashar Assad remains free to kill with impunity, the slaughter will devour Syria and its people, sectarian hatred will eviscerate the country and its institutions and Syria’s poison will spread across the Middle East. Even now Jordan and Lebanon are under threat.
As our briefing this week makes clear, there is an alternative: to protect the Syrian people by enforcing a no-fly zone over their country. It is far from an easy decision, but depriving Mr Assad of his aircraft and helicopter gunships could save many thousands of lives. Bringing a swifter end to the fighting could yet give Syria a chance to emerge as a nation at peace with itself and its neighbours.
In the week of Mr Stevens’s killing, the idea of intervening in yet another Muslim country might seem far-fetched to many Americans. But if they think that today’s Libya is dangerous and violent, imagine what it would have been like were battle still raging . The humanitarian and strategic costs of standing back from Syria would be even higher.
So it is with the entire Middle East. Ultimately, anti-American violence thrives under the tyrants and the dictators. Because the Arab spring promises to put the Middle East into the hands of the people for the first time, it offers a better future. There are no guarantees, but America has everything to gain from being at the heart of this great awakening.
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发表于 2012-9-16 22:15:27
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