The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

There's bad hoodoo in the air.

The Indians seem determined to put an end to the dangerous monkey business emanating out of Pakistan.

Al Qaeda, now regrouped within Pakistan, is organized and determined to commit further provocative incursions against India across the so-called Line of Control, as the border there is called. Anything that creates more disorder in Pakistan -- including the complete disintegration of the state itself -- will be a boon to the Qaeda if they can steal off with a warhead or two in the confusion. (Anybody interested in learning what a clusterfuck Pakistan has become ought to read Robert Kaplan's excellent book: The Coming Anarachy.) Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf not only can't act against Qaeda, or prevent them from doing anything, but elements in his Army and Intelligence commands actively support Al Qaeda's project. So, Pervez is between a rock and a hard place with a red-hot poker several centimeters from his rectum, and perhaps a coiled cobra somewhere about his feet.

All this is to say that I believe India will begin operations against its neighbor in a week at most. They will have to secure Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad at least. Peshwar and Quetta out near the Afghani frontier may lie beyond their abilities to control. Kashmir will end up as a mere sideshow.

Some basic questions stand out.

Can Pakistan actually deliver a nuke, and would they once a conventional Indian operation began?

Would the Indians mount a specific commando-type operation to gain physical control over Pakistan's nuclear arsenal? And could they succeed?

Some Indian officials have expressed, shall we say, non-western attitudes about the use of nuclear weapons. One foreign ministry officer was quoted in the news services a few days ago to the effect of (I paraphrase) "we all have to die sometime. . . what does it matter whether it is by nuclear weapon or some other means?"

It made my skin crawl.

Meanwhile, back home, the fiction that our "economy" is about anything other than suburban mal-investment, credit-card binging, and corporate creative accounting, is being discounted by a relentlessly grinding bear market that now has the DOW well below 10-K with perhaps 5-K of running room in the southward direction. The monetary chickens are also coming home to roost around a sick US Dollar. It looks to me like we are headed into the Mother of All Workouts.

An India / Pakistan nuke debacle would greatly accelerate and multiply the economic catastrophe by disrupting the global supply chains that the US (and therefore everybody else) is utterly dependent on. God knows what the other characters in the Asian neighborhood might do if mushroom clouds sprout on the subcontinent. Iraq, Iran, Syria in some combination could foolishly attempt to use the India / Pakistan fireworks as a cover to unleash a major attack upon Israel -- in which case Israel will transform these ancient precincts into ashtrays.

In the event, I can see the US, Europe, Russia, and China all standing goggle-eyed at the margins, their mouths hanging open in mute impotency.

Before the height of summer we could see both the end of Globalism as it has been known for a generation, and the commencement of Great Depression II. After that, all politics are local for a long long time.