Inspector Jihad
Lifer
- Apr 17, 2005
- 13,465
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Are you retarded? Pakistan developed nuclear weapons in response to India getting the bomb. They are responsible for the nuclear situation in the sub-continent.
Secondly, no country, not even the US, can simply march into a country and do as they please. If they could, the thousands of nukes unprotected in Russia would be dismantled, the thousands of ICBMs that China has pointed at it's enemies would be dismantled, the NK nuclear program would be dismantled. It just doesn't work like that.
Finally, a war on the sub-continent would be a disaster. All it would take is one mis-guided bomb to hit a family's house and the entire conflict could escalate into a catastrophe. India would have be to foolhardy to risk their 15 major urban centers in a futile attempt to dismantle some terrorist camps. Pakistan will most definitely defend it's airspace against Indian incursion. It's just a lose-lose situation for both sides.
5150Joker
Diamond Member
All true but apparently Indians think they're a superpower now because they got a few outsourced Dell jobs even though most of their population is living in squalor. India has more to lose in a war than Pakistan does because investors will run away and their tourist industry will collapse. 1+ billion mouths to feed with an economy in disaster and many factions vying for independence would certainly spell the end of India as we know it.
India needs to learn a few things from Israel when it comes to dealing with problematic neighbors. Pakistan's inability to keep ISI activities in check is the whole problem. Of course India has more to lose, when you think about Pakistan you think about Al Qaeda, Dictatorship when you think about India you think about 8-9% growth, growing economy
The difference between the Palestinians and Pakistanis is that the Palestinians fight back with rocks and homemade rockets, the Pakistanis will fight back with tanks, cruise missiles, fighter jets and nuclear weapons.
There is no parallel. If India does the same things as Israel, the entire sub-continent will be glowing.
5150Joker
Diamond Member
Kalster is another delusional Indian that thinks India is some superpower now because it got a few outsourced Dell jobs. The Indians on these forums are living in a fantasy.
When did I ever say that India is a super power. It is however one of the leading developing nations, the same can not be said of Pakistan
So what was your point again?
Lemon law
Lifer
- Nov 6, 2005
- 20,984
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We have the kalster statement of, " When did I ever say that India is a super power. It is however one of the leading developing nations, the same can not be said of Pakistan."
And if India wants to continue to grow, it is much better off not provoking a Pakistani India squabble.
I am now seeing some evidence that the Mumbai attack were provoked by a few terrorists, and their terrorist aims appear to have succeeded. Both the Pakistani army and a good part of the Indian army are moralized at the border, basically giving Al-Quida and the Taliban free run in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Look what happened to the US economy when GWB allowed Al-Quida to manipulate our actions.
So I have the same message to both India and Pakistan, don't let Al-Quida manipulate you.
And if India wants to continue to grow, it is much better off not provoking a Pakistani India squabble.
I am now seeing some evidence that the Mumbai attack were provoked by a few terrorists, and their terrorist aims appear to have succeeded. Both the Pakistani army and a good part of the Indian army are moralized at the border, basically giving Al-Quida and the Taliban free run in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Look what happened to the US economy when GWB allowed Al-Quida to manipulate our actions.
So I have the same message to both India and Pakistan, don't let Al-Quida manipulate you.
Provoking a squabble?
India just wants Pakistan to act tough with terrorist outfits based in Pakistan (and thriving with the blessing of ISI) that are constantly targeting India
I don't think a full fledged war will happen but Pakistan's continued non compliance in rooting out known terrorists is a big cause for concern
The "few outsourced Dell jobs" have left India with a bank balance of USD 250 billion. Last I heard Pakistan was holding out it's begging bowl to the IMF for a USD 7.6 billion loan.
You should be thanking the unimaginative and incompetent politicians of India for giving you any respect. The Americans, Arabs, Afghans violate your country at will.
Umm no learn your history please. China attacked India in 1965 after Kennedy asked India to give asylum to the Dalai Lama, India wasn't very keen on doing it but Kennedy promised all support and coaxed India into protecting the Dalai Lama.
India lost the war badly and the United States did nothing to help! India realized that we needed a Nuke and came up with one in 1974 which was a very very basic Nuke and not a credible deterrent at all as India did not really have a delivery system.
In 1989 after hearing about the Saudi and other Muslim countries were keen on Pakistan getting a "Muslim Bomb" the then Prime Minister of India Rajiv Gandhi started the Nuclear and Missile development program.
So really India didn't star the crisis. We had been attacked by China once and Pakistan thrice what the hell do you expect us to do?
Never thought I'd say this but I agree with your thesis. Though I cannot help but feel that the day of reckoning for Pakistan is fast approaching, if not on the eastern border then on the western border. Swat has been overrun by extremists as we speak.
The problem for India is incompetent politicians and bureaucrats. I seriously doubt that Al-Qaida can manipulate this unimaginative bunch of morons.
5150Joker
Diamond Member
I'm not Pakistani ya dolt. Secondly, let's see how much India's economy continues to grow in the midst of this global financial crisis. And like I mentioned before, the majority of India's population continues to live like shit--worse than their Pakistani counterparts.
India acquired nuclear weapons as security against China and doesn't go threaten to use them as if they're Diwali crackers like Pakistani whackos do. And India got them by setting up solid R&D facilities within it's huge industrial base whereas Pakistan begged, borrowed and stole to get their hands on them. This is akin to a virgin teen visiting a cathouse so that he could brag about how he scored. Now Pakistan is left facing the diseases that such an action has bought.
Not everyone is as stupid as you. And India has enough critical economic mass and domestic consumption to weather this storm better than most countries. Read this and weep:
From the New York Times:
How India Avoided a Crisis
By JOE NOCERA
MUMBAI
?What has taken a number of us by surprise is the lack of adequate supervision and regulation,? Rana Kapoor was saying the other day. ?This was despite the fact that Enron had happened and you passed Sarbanes-Oxley. We don?t understand it. Maybe it?s because we sit in a more controlled economy but ....? He smiled sweetly as his voice trailed off, as if to take the sting off his comments. But they stung nonetheless.
Mr. Kapoor is an Indian banker, a former longtime Bank of America executive with a Rutgers M.B.A. who, along with his business partner and brother-in-law, Ashok Kapur, was granted government permission four years ago to start a private bank, which they called Yes Bank. In the United States, Yes Bank is the kind of name a go-go banker might give to, say, a high-flying mortgage lender in the middle of a bubble. (You can even imagine the slogan: ?Yes is part of our name!?) But Yes Bank is not exactly the Washington Mutual of India. One news release it hands out to reporters who come calling is an excerpt from a 2007 survey by The Financial Express: ?#1 on Credit Quality amongst 56 Banks in India,? reads the headline.
I arrived in Mumbai three weeks after the terrorist attacks that killed 200 people ? including, tragically, Yes Bank?s co-founder Mr. Kapur, who had served as the company?s nonexecutive chairman and was gunned down while having dinner at the Oberoi Hotel. (His wife and two dinner companions miraculously escaped.)
My hope in traveling to Mumbai was to learn about the current state of Indian business in the wake of both the credit crisis and the attacks. But in my first few days in this grand, sprawling, chaotic city, what I mainly heard, especially talking to bankers, was about America, not India. How could we have brought so much trouble on ourselves, and the rest of the world, by acting in such an obviously foolhardy manner? Didn?t we understand that you can?t lend money to people who lack the means to pay it back? The questions were asked with a sense of bewilderment ? and an occasional hint of scorn. Like most Americans, I didn?t have any good answers. It was a bubble, I would respond with a sheepish shrug, as if that were an adequate explanation. It isn?t, of course.
?In India, we never had anything close to the subprime loan,? said Chandra Kochhar, the chief financial officer of India?s largest private bank, Icici. (A few days after I spoke to her, Ms. Kochhar was named the bank?s new chief executive, in a move that had long been anticipated.) ?All lending to individuals is based on their income. That is a big difference between your banking system and ours.? She continued: ?Indian banks are not levered like American banks. Capital ratios are 12 and 13 percent, instead of 7 or 8 percent. All those exotic structures like C.D.O. and securitizations are a very tiny part of our banking system. So a lot of the temptations didn?t exist.?
And when I went to see Deepak Parekh, the chief executive of HDFC, which was founded in 1977 as the country?s first specialized mortgage bank, practically the first words out of his mouth were these: ?We don?t do interest-only or subprime loans. When the bubble was going on, we did not change any of our policies. We did not change any of our systems. We did not change our thought process. We never gave more money to a borrower because the value of the house had gone up. Citibank has a few home equity loans, but most banks in India don?t make those kinds of loans. Our nonperforming loans are less than 1 percent.?
Yet two years ago, the Indian real estate market ? commercial and residential alike ? was every bit as frothy as the American market. High-rises were being slapped up on spec. Housing developments were sprouting up everywhere. And there was plenty of money flowing into India, mainly from private equity and hedge funds, to fuel the commercial real estate bubble in particular. Goldman Sachs, Carlyle, Blackstone, Citibank ? they were all here, throwing money at developers. So why did the Indian banks stay on the sidelines and avoid most of the pain that has been suffered by the big American banks?
Part of the reason is cultural. Indians are simply not as comfortable with credit as Americans. ?A lot of Indians, when you push them, will say that if you spend more than you earn you will get in trouble,? an Indian consultant told me. ?Americans spent more than they earned.?
Mr. Parekh said, ?Savings are important. Joint families exist. When one son moves out, the family helps them. So you don?t borrow so much from the bank.? Even mortgage loans tend to have down payments in India that are a third of the purchase price, a far cry from the United States, where 20 percent is the new norm. (Let?s not even think about what they used to be.)
But there was also another factor, perhaps the most important of all. India had a bank regulator who was the anti-Greenspan. His name was Dr. V. Y. Reddy, and he was the governor of the Reserve Bank of India. Seventy percent of the banking system in India is nationalized, so a strong regulator is critical, since any banking scandal amounts to a national political scandal as well. And in the irascible Mr. Reddy, who took office in 2003 and stepped down this past September, it had exactly the right man in the right job at the right time.
?He basically believed that if bankers were given the opportunity to sin, they would sin,? said one banker who asked not to be named because, well, there?s not much percentage in getting on the wrong side of the Reserve Bank of India. For all the bankers? talk about their higher lending standards, the truth is that Mr. Reddy made them even more stringent during the bubble.
Unlike Alan Greenspan, who didn?t believe it was his job to even point out bubbles, much less try to deflate them, Mr. Reddy saw his job as making sure Indian banks did not get too caught up in the bubble mentality. About two years ago, he started sensing that real estate, in particular, had entered bubble territory. One of the first moves he made was to ban the use of bank loans for the purchase of raw land, which was skyrocketing. Only when the developer was about to commence building could the bank get involved ? and then only to make construction loans. (Guess who wound up financing the land purchases? United States private equity and hedge funds, of course!)
Then, as securitizations and derivatives gained increasing prominence in the world?s financial system, the Reserve Bank of India sharply curtailed their use in the country. When Mr. Reddy saw American banks setting up off-balance-sheet vehicles to hide debt, he essentially banned them in India. As a result, banks in India wound up holding onto the loans they made to customers. On the one hand, this meant they made fewer loans than their American counterparts because they couldn?t sell off the loans to Wall Street in securitizations. On the other hand, it meant they still had the incentive ? as American banks did not ? to see those loans paid back.
Seeing inflation on the horizon, Mr. Reddy pushed interest rates up to more than 20 percent, which of course dampened the housing frenzy. He increased risk weightings on commercial buildings and shopping mall construction, doubling the amount of capital banks were required to hold in reserve in case things went awry. He made banks put aside extra capital for every loan they made. In effect, Mr. Reddy was creating liquidity even before there was a global liquidity crisis.
Did India?s bankers stand up to applaud Mr. Reddy as he was making these moves? Of course not. They were naturally furious, just as American bankers would have been if Mr. Greenspan had been more active. Their regulator was holding them back, constraining their growth! Mr. Parekh told me that while he had been saying for some time that Indian real estate was in bubble territory, he was still unhappy with the rules imposed by Mr. Reddy. ?We were critical of the central bank,? he said. ?We thought these were harsh measures.?
?For a while we were wondering if we were missing out on something,? said Ms. Kochhar of Icici. Banks in the United States seemed to have come up with some magical new formula for making money: make loans that required no down payment and little in the way of verification ? and post instant, short-term, profits.
As Luis Miranda, who runs a private equity firm devoted to developing India?s infrastructure, put it: ?We kept wondering if they had figured out something that we were too dense to figure out. It looked like they were smart and we were stupid.? Instead, India was the smart one, and we were the stupid ones.
Ms. Kochhar said that the underlying risks of having ?a majority of loans not owned by the people who originated them? was not apparent during the bubble. Now that those risks have been made painfully clear, every banker in India realizes that Mr. Reddy did the right thing by limiting securitizations. ?At times like this, you tend to appreciate what he did more than we did at the time,? said Mr. Kapoor. ?He saved us,? added Mr. Parekh.
As the credit crisis has spread these past months, no Indian bank has come close to failing the way so many United States and European financial institutions have. None have required the kind of emergency injections of capital that Western banks have needed. None have had the huge write-downs that were par for the course in the West. As the bubble has burst, which lenders have taken the hit? Why, the private equity and hedge fund lenders who had been so eager to finance land development. Us, in others words, rather than them. Why is that not a surprise?
When I asked Mr. Kapoor for his take on what had happened in the United States, he replied: ?We recognize it as a problem of plenty. It was perpetuated by greedy bankers, whether investment bankers or commercial bankers. The greed to make money is the impression it has made here. Anytime they wanted a loan, people just dipped into their home A.T.M. It was like money was on call.?
So it was. And our regulators, unlike theirs, just stood by and let it happen. The next time we?re moving into bubble territory, perhaps we can take a page from Mr. Reddy?s book ? sometimes it?s better to apply the brakes too early than too late. Or, as was the case with Mr. Greenspan, not at all.
?
None of this is to say that the global credit crisis hasn?t affected India. It certainly has. I?ll be back after the holidays with more columns from India, including how Sept. 15 ? the day Lehman Brothers defaulted ? changed everything, even here, on the other side of the world.
Lemon law
Lifer
- Nov 6, 2005
- 20,984
- 3
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I have seen the same basic news as tvarad has when he states "Swat has been overrun by extremists as we speak."
But from what I have seem, its only some 2,000 Taliban fighters doing the occupying of the Swat valley, so I would imagine Pakistani Government forces could easily take it back. And faced with massed Government strength and better weapons, its more like, IMHO, that the Taliban fighters would simply fade away rather than make a fight of it, hoping to come back later. But such is the nature of a gorilla war.
As General Petraeus says, Nato will not be able to kill its way to victory
But from what I have seem, its only some 2,000 Taliban fighters doing the occupying of the Swat valley, so I would imagine Pakistani Government forces could easily take it back. And faced with massed Government strength and better weapons, its more like, IMHO, that the Taliban fighters would simply fade away rather than make a fight of it, hoping to come back later. But such is the nature of a gorilla war.
As General Petraeus says, Nato will not be able to kill its way to victory
Small words from a small country.
Obviously removing dispersed nuclear weapons from a country would be a nontrivial task, but flexing your nukes at India is a different story than flexing them at Israel or other major US installations (I suppose if you nuke Afganstan, you'd be doing us a favor).
In a purely hypothetical sense, once you remove the fixed Pakisanti long range missiles from play, they're reduce to aircraft delivered bombs. Whether several dozen F-16s can break through a fully mobilized USAF or IDF with airbourne radar support is highly debatable.
Bark all you want at India, but don't delude yourself into thinking that you're a major military or nuclear power.
Drop a bomb on Diego Garcia and all of Pakistan would be glassed - sound like a road you want to go down?
Again be careful of what road you go down - the alternative may be for the US and NATO to operate unilateraly in Pakistan without any restraint or clearance.
And please, don't bring out the "we'll use our nukes on you" defense. If they threaten nuclear war over convential US strikes on tribal territories, you'll find that's a game that you'll lose oh so very quickly.
I would be totally surprised if the Americans don't have a link in the Pakistan nuke chain of command already. They'd be dumb not to considering how smug they were about their own security pre 9/11.
The problem is more complex than that owing to the fact that there is a considerable faction with the Pakistani ruling establishment that provides tacit support to the Taliban. The same faction that instigated the Mumbai bombings to divert attention from the Western border, as you say. It'll be doing all that can be done to thwart any decisive victory over the Taliban. So the half-hearted fight that the Pakistani army is waging is worse than no fight at all.
wtf? Do you even know how difficult it is to shoot an ballistic missile out of the air with another missile? It can't be done. The best US systems fail 50% in controlled settings (eg clear daytime, known trajectory, known intercept coordinates). Pakistan has hundreds of missiles that reach deep into Indian territory, all of them nuclear capable.
Firstly, Pakistan is as much a major military power as India, in the sense that they are both untouchable. Nuclear nations do not risk war because of the risk of nuclear bombardment. If India launched an attack on Pakistan and the war escalated, which is probably will considering the tensions on the sub-continent, we are looking at close to 500 million people dead on both sides and a limited nuclear winter globally.
Secondly, The US has as much say in Pakistan's nuclear deterrent as the US does in Russia's nuclear deterrent, and that is almost none. The Pakistan military holds the keys to the nukes, not the US president.
Finally, India has nothing to gain and everything to lose, just as Pakistan has nothing to gain and everything to lose. The destruction of a few, probably already abandoned, terrorist camps? Really? Attacking the Pakistani chain of command is the quickest way to have 15 major Indian cities glowing by the day's end.
There's no point in growing 10" claws if you don't have enough food to sustain the body. The question is when the body gives up. The military has commandeered all Pakistani institutions to finance this power and play big boy military games. Pakistan just doesn't have critical mass to sustain it forever.
And yet it took just 24 hours after a phone call from Colin Powell for the military to change a course that it had been charting for more than two decades. If the military had b*lls why don't they use a couple of their nukes on the Americans for violating their sovereignty with impunity on the Western border?
Really, this is the gist of any argument vis-a-vis Pakistan, right? The Pakistani military establishment is holding not just India, but the world at nuclear ransom. However, if the terrorist thugs pull off another Mumbai massacre or two, I seriously doubt that any Indian Govt. will be able to head off public opinion and not go after them on Pakistani soil one way or another.
As for India, the fundamental mistake it made was to dismantle it's formidable spy agency RAW's capabilities in the '70s after the '71 war was won. The only option it really has between now and the time Pakistan collapses from within is to revive this agency's capabilities on a war footing and go after thugs like Masood Azhar with targeted assassinations. I seriously doubt though that there's any military acumen in the current Indian Govt. to revive RAW or take other pro-active steps.
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