SPY EYES ANALYSIS

Unless India agrees to open its military facilities to nuclear inspectors, sale of uranium by Australia to that country will be a breach of Federal government’s obligations under the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, a noted legal expert said on Tuesday. “Australia would be in breach of the so-called Rarotonga Treaty, if India does not change its stand,” Donald Rothwell of Australian National University said in a written legal opinion. The Rarotonga Treaty bans uranium sales to most countries unless they agree to “full-scope safeguards” defined by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The uranium sale policy is said to be the hot topic of discussions at this week’s national conference of Australian Labor Party in Sydney. The Labor Party will debate on lifting its long standing ban on uranium sale to India. “If India does not agree to Article 3.1 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) safeguards and Australia were to export uranium to India, Australia would be in violat...

The air strike by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) at the Pakistani military post at Salala in the Mohmand Agency on the Afghan-Pakistan border Friday night is destined to become a milestone in the chronicle of the Afghan war. Within hours of the incident, Pakistan’s relations with the US began nose-diving and it continues to plunge. NATO breached the ”red line”. What is absolutely stunning about the statement issued by Pakistan’s Defence Committee of the Cabinet (DDC), which met Saturday at Islamabad under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani is that it did not bother to call for an inquiry by the US or NATO into the air strike that resulted in the death of 28 Pakistani soldiers. Exactly what happened in the fateful night of Friday – whether the NATO blundered into a mindless retaliatory (or pre-emptive) act or ventured into a calculated act of high provocation – will remain a mystery. Maybe it is no more important to know, since blood has been drawn and in...

The American and Pakistan armies are locked in Afghanistan (2001) and Fata (2004) respectively. Pakistan is a poor country and cannot financially afford its continued presence of 1.5 million soldiers deployed in Fata and sooner than later the army has to pull out. My questions are how can the army pull out of Fata if at all? And when? Pakistani Afghan policy is tied to the American policy in that country. The Americans after 10 years have realised that they are unable to bring peace to Afghanistan. The American trained Afghan army and police force are corrupt and unreliable despite huge amounts of dollar inflow. At the same time the Americans cannot leave Afghanistan to its people and warlords. Recently Karzai called Loya Jirga in Kabul to give future direction for Afghanistan. Over 2,000 delegates attended Loya Jirga in Kabul authorising US troops to stay in Afghanistan for 10 years beyond 2014 (Afghan jirga. Editorial. Dawn. November 22, 2011). Members of Loya Jirga in Afghanistan...

Pakistan’s military has been handed a rare opportunity to press its strategic ambitions in neighbouring Afghanistan after a cross-border  NATO attack  that killed 24 of its soldiers over the weekend. Fury over the incident at home, where  anti-American sentiment runs high , makes it likely that both the army chief, General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, and the civilian government will play hardball with their ostensible ally, the United States. “The Pakistan military is clearly very angry at the turn of events and the army’s top leadership is under tremendous pressure from middle-ranking offices and junior officers to react,” said Hasan Abbas at the US National Defense University’s College of International Security Affairs. That pressure will spur the military to flex its muscles in diplomatic manoeuvring with Washington in the run-up to the exit of US combat troops from Afghanistan in 2014. Indeed, on Monday, the military’s spokesman threatened to drastically reduce cooperati...

US drone raids targeting militants in Pakistan will not be jeopardized if Islamabad does indeed expel Americans from a key air base, officials and a former intelligence officer said Monday. Angered over a Nato air attack on Saturday that left 24 Pakistani soldiers dead, Islamabad has shut off supply routes to US-led forces in Afghanistan and ordered Americans out of the Shamsi air base used by the CIA’s fleet of unmanned aircraft. Even if the Pakistanis make good on their threat over Shamsi, US officials and analysts say the move would be largely symbolic as Washington could fly Predator and Reaper drones out of air fields in neighboring Afghanistan. “Shamsi is a nice thing to have, but it’s not critical to drone operations. They can be carried out from bases in Afghanistan,” said Bruce Reidel, a former CIA officer and fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank. The remote Shamsi air base in the country’s southwest is particularly useful for flights hampered by poor weather cond...

‘The assumption that it (Pakistan) has no choice but to obey America may turn out to be a dire strategic error’ —Simon Tisdall in The Guardian,  November 27,2011 In the early hours of the first day of the Islamic New Year US/NATO forces struck a clearly demarcated Pakistani Check Post in the Mohmand Agency of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal areas. Two officers of the Pakistan Army and 22 soldiers were killed with another 13 seriously injured. The strikes, which Pakistani officials said had involved both helicopters and fighter jets, took place at two military posts in Salala, a village in Pakistan’s Mohmand tribal region near the border with Kunar province in Afghanistan. At least 40 soldiers were deployed at the posts, which according to Pakistani officials were established to repulse attacks by Afghan militants and the Taliban. Pakistani military officials said NATO aircraft had penetrated roughly 2.4 kilometers into Pakistan to make the strikes. A NATO spokesman, Br...

Fractional-reserve banking is a system by which banks lend money whilst guaranteeing that depositors will be able to make withdraw their deposits on demand . However it is important to remember that when they lend money, they are in reality creating it. A fraction of deposits held by the bank cannot be lent against to create new loans and acts as a reserves . This fraction varies from nation to nation. Because the bank creates the loan as a promise to pay rather than existing money, this system has the effect of increasing the economy's money supply . When this money is spent into the economy, the newly created money will be deposited in a bank again, where it will be lent out again, increasing the money supply further. However it should be noted that although the bank creates the money for the loan, it does not create the interest that needs to be repaid with it, and thus for all debtors to meet their loan repayments of principle plus interest the money supply needs to co...