The Burning World 1

We are, as a culture, a parochial one though we consider our values and ideas universal. At a time when no one in the UK is being allowed to ask or to think anything sensible--not by oppression, but by constant diversion, it makes sense to look at what is happening to the rest of the world.

I do not mean the creaking eurozone, which, sooner or later, is now going to tear unless vast resources are thrown after Italian debt. Nor the United States, where the next President will find himself facing a recessional power which needs to cut its spending and rebuild its infrastructure.

What's going on in the plains and mountains of central Asia? I don't mean this as some mad diversion, Russell Brand for bores. This country has failed to do what it should have done twenty years ago--expand nuclear power and keep the coal industry going. It is therefore going to be dependent on foreign oil and gas from places very far away, and therefore upon their politics.

This country will be dependent upon those countries either because they produce the energy, or because the energy trips on new and more vicious silk roads over them, or because any one of them could destabilise the others.

So I've been snarfling around. The joy of the internet is that you can too. Here is the Central Asia-Caucus Institute Analysis. You'll notice that some of the countries have been trading vast debts to Russia with loans from the Islamic Development Bank so that they can be free of dependence on that power. Tajikistan certainly has. That country is using some of its borrowing, which runs to twenty nine per cent of GDP--far lower than most of the west--to lend hands and aid to Kazakhstan, which was badly hit by the earthquake recently that most of us did not notice.

Kazakhstan may be forced into a similar position, because recession means that, whatever your views on the decline in peak oil flow, the coffers of oil states are dwindling. Chechnya has opened a vast new mosque. Russia and British Petroleum are locked in a game for influence between Azerbaijan, and Armenia.

At the same time, the forces of order and balance and law are also meeting. This is the week of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Summit. It is, on the model of Europe and West Africa, bringing the groups I write about together. I'm a democrat; I'd prefer votes and democracy in appropriate places.

But ultimately, I think lives led in order, and under the freedom and security that comes from law,(by which I don't just mean rules) are good lives. I think people should have the chance to live such lives. Democracy is a means to that end which won't stop me from seeing that some things are better sorted out by due process and agreement amongst the chiefs in our packs, at the top.

My American readers should note that; your freedom is unusual, amazing, and very lightly regarded. Look to it, before you allow the loudmouths and manipulators to train their megaphones and gunsights on the world.

The oil countries are a cockpit for the issues that western people frequently excite themselves over after misplacing them in the middle east narrative of Israeli defiance and sinister Arab gangsterism. But expand the circle a little, and more is obvious.

Pakistan, for instance, is approaching one of those moments that, as a state, it has tended to have before but which are supremely dangerous. The British and the Quaid erected that country out of disparate elements. It had been governed by tribal cronies, and a metropolitan elite, who later on formed the 'democratic class', and by superb soldiers, who later on formed the governing class five times. In between stood a truly superb judiciary.

All of these things have now been compromised, and it is only a matter of time before the Americans, under McCain or Obama, realise who their enemy is. Once they get it, they'll do something about it; Americans, God love them, are unfortunately not widely known for their lama-like capacities of restrained contemplation.

It is all very well killing tribal lunatics; what will happen when the Americans, who probably already realise this, understand that they have to find some way of taking on the ISI? A clandestine war with all the poison of Cuba or British Egypt attached to nuclear firing pins in a smouldering oil region? This is not the stuff of fiction, it's fact.

The nature of this situation is going to lead to a gang war at the top of Pakistan and God knows where all that will lead--I don't. I find it hard to write this because I was never that impressed with her, but perhaps Benazir Bhutto actually did get the point which might be why she, well, got killed.

I should make a note about that. It may be that she was just killed by Mehsud, Al-Yazid and Al-Qaeda. The way she died suggests but does not prove a powerful organisation. The ISI may have had a hand, or may have simply covered it up. Oswald, ultimately, did shoot Kennedy alone; perhaps Bhutto was just killed by nuts. It would be wrong to pretend suspicion is anything more than that unless proof, which never appears in these sorts of things, presents itself.

Expand further. China, Russia and North Korea have not finished their game yet, though the responsible behaviour of China is calming the whole situation down. I find that hard to write because of this sort of abortion story from China. I've had friends who are quite prepared to tell me about babies in rivers, and about the attitude to life. I find it horrifying. But I find war horrifying too, which means that China should, as this spiritual genius says, come slowly to the right and be at peace outside.

A low flame is licking most of Asia, occasionally super heating some areas to a charnel house. Many are protected, many doing well, as in South East Asia. As I posted numerous times last year, Bangladesh seems to be weathering its own storms well, and they deserve a certain amount of admiration for that. But, even given mounting evidence for the end of natural cyclical warming, and for global cooling, the world is burning.

Remember that.