Here is the caption as to the origin of the picture:

I came across this photograph recently. It is a photo of British veterans of the American Civil War of 1861-65. The British veterans had gathered in London in 1917 to welcome the American troops on their way to Fight in France during World War One. Among them is (I believe ) a Sikh gentlemen sitting near the centre. I am curious to see if there were any Sikhs in the US army at this time.I am trying to discover this persons story as it is seems very interesting. Any insight in this matter would be most appreciated. -R.S. Kooner

Keep in mind that service in the U.S. military has always been one path to citizenship.

An Indian pilot who flew Hawker Hurricanes during World War II has died, it has been announced.

Squadron Leader Mahinder Singh Pujji, 92, died at Darent Valley Hospital in Kent on Saturday following a stroke.

Sqn Ldr Pujji was believed to be the last surviving fighter pilot from a group of 24 Indians who arrived in Britain in 1940.

He survived several crashes and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for services in Burma. [Google]

The photograph in the article conveys the swagger of a pilot who knows he’s a bad-ass.

He seems to have given an interview earlier this year:

Mohinder Singh remembers the start of the war vividly. Just a year after it had begun, at the height of the Battle of Britain, he decided to join the Royal Air Force (RAF). He was 22 years old and in search of adventure.

‘I saw London being bombed, I saw what people were suffering and I knew what they were going through and how cruel the enemy was because they were throwing bombs on civilians. They were not fighting soldier to soldier and hundreds of people were being made homeless so that changed my perspective, then I was very keen to fight for the country, for this country where I had come to seek adventure really.’

Two or three pilots would be lost everyday and Mohinder almost became a casualty himself several times.‘From day one in every letter to my parents I said don’t expect me back.’ [Link]

Here is a newer picture from an article in The Guardian last year that detailed a permanent exhibit at the RAF museum (that I once visited as a kid) called “Diversity in the Royal Air Force”:

I will likely re-visit this whole topic in greater detail at some point in the future.

I haven’t followed the week-to-week developments since then terribly closely, but several recent developments were mentioned in a thought-provoking Op-Ed by Bishop Desmond Tutu and Lakhdar Brahimi in the Guardian yesterday. There is some good news overall, as the peace has held, but Tutu and Brahimi also acknowledge that progress towards rebuilding the affected parts of northern Sri Lanka, and the broader project of healing and reintegration, has been painfully slow. Here are the specific things Tutu and Brahimi want to see the government do:

Respect for minorities, human rights and the rule of law must be centre stage in Sri Lanka’s future. The worsening conflict saw limitations imposed on civil liberties and democratic institutions. The recent relaxation of emergency laws and the promised presidential pardon for Tamil journalist JS Tissainayagam are welcome, but they are only a start. Real change must begin with repealing the state of emergency and re-establishing the constitutional council.

All displaced civilians should be helped to return home. Those suspected of being fighters must be treated humanely with full regard to international law.

[...] There is a growing body of evidence that there were repeated and intentional violations of international humanitarian law by both the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or Tamil Tigers) in the last months of the war.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s decision earlier this month to appoint a commission on lessons learnt and reconciliation is a step in the right direction but not nearly enough. There is no indication, as yet, that the commission intends to hold anyone to account for any violations of domestic or international law. (link)

The particular development that stands out here is Rajapaksa’s decision to create a South Africa (and Rwanda) style Truth and Reconciliation Committee to deal with human rights violations on both sides. On the one hand, this seems like a good thing, since up until now the Sri Lankan government seemed very reluctant to even acknowledge the possibility of any military misdeeds.

But there is also a problem — unlike in South Africa and Rwanda, where the Truth commissions were established by new governments to deal with the violence associated with previous regimes, in Sri Lanka the government has not changed. In order to ensure that witnesses from both sides feel safe coming forward, Tutu and Brahimi advocate a different approach to establish a reckoning — an independent, international committee.

I hope this process does move forward somehow. Rebuilding people’s homes and putting a new economic infrastructure has to be the first priority (and even there, it appears the government has lagged, despite significant infusions of foreign aid to help rebuild the north). But the longer-term project has to include some sort of credible reckoning: of the numbers of deaths, of specific crimes and atrocities, and admissions of responsibility (even if no criminal punishments are involved). If you don’t make efforts to confront the legacy of violence and, establish a shared baseline for the truth of what happened, the sense of bitterness and rupture people feel won’t begin to heal.

Since a lot of our discussion last year involved the Tamil Diaspora’s anguish about the way the war was concluded, it might also be worth noting that getting into these matters is especially important to address the concerns of that community.

In USA Today: Dentist Tejdeep Singh Rattan (right) is the first turbaned Sikh to graduate from U.S. officer basic training since 1984. (He is pictured with Kamaldeep Kalsi, who is doing basic training this summer.)

We heard about them last year, when they were first granted the exemption. (The Langar Hall had a post on the subject here.)

As I understand it, this is not a permanent policy change — in the future, observant Sikhs joining the U.S. military will again need to apply for a special exemption to uniform requirements to be allowed to serve while wearing a turban and unshorn beard. The fact that both Kalsi and Rattan have medical training makes me think that things might be different for someone applying for the same waiver at the ground level. That said, this still seems like a significant shift on a symbolic level, and I would fully expect there to be at least some controversy about it.

Predictably, some of the reactions I’m seeing online to this change are not exactly positive. The following comment on the story at USA Today is pretty typical:

This is an utter disgrace to the United States and the United States Army. How on God’s green earth did they allow this? It never ceases to amaze me the stupidity in our governments leadership. A civilian made this call on allowing this “individual” (that’s what he is not a trooper), to graduate.

But another commenter responded to that statement much more supportively:

He’s a Captain in the US Army. I find your disrespect for our military disgusting, ignorant and anti-American.

What kinds of reactions have people been hearing to this news?

(Incidentally, the Amardeep Singh quoted in the USA Today article is not me.)

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The Brigade of Gurkhas is the collective term for units of the current British Army that are composed of Nepalese soldiers. The brigade, which is 3,640 strong, draws its heritage from Gurkha units that originally served in the British Indian Army prior to Indian independence, and prior to that of the East India Company. The brigade includes infantry, engineer, signal, logistic and training and support units. They are famous for their ever-present kukris, a distinctive heavy knife with a curved blade, and for their reputation of being fierce fighters and brave soldiers. They take their name from the hill town of Gorkha from which the Nepalese kingdom had expanded. The ranks have always been dominated by four ethnic groups, the Gurungs and Magars from central Nepal, the Rais and Limbus from the east, who live in hill villages of impoverished hill farmers. [Link]

Nepal is on the brink of all kinds of disaster due to political and economic instability. My Nepali sister-in-law often talks of Nepal as an already failed state with no future. Even though Nepal very clearly falls under India’s sphere-of-influence, I wonder if there might be a strategic opportunity here. Can the U.S. perhaps somehow better fold contributions from Nepal into it’s strategy. I ask because mention of Nepal is often left out of our public strategic discussions. I know the video above is just one small anecdote, but some more Gurkhas working with the British and American forces there sure wouldn’t hurt if our objective is to train Afghanistan’s army as quickly as possible so we can get out.

Also, even if you aren’t interested in this post, make sure to watch the video to see the Gurkha Soliders sing “Poker Face” by Lady GaGa.

This is a new kind of political post for me here on SM because it’s the first time I have “skin in the game” with regards to a candidate I am writing about. What I can tell you about Manan is that he regularly reads Sepia Mutiny and sends me tips all the time on various political stories. While practicing medicine at UCLA he also took policy classes with our blogger Taz and he earned a Mater’s degree in Public Policy. He is pretty much a health care policy wonk that just finished a stint with the Surgeon General of the Navy’s Office. Oh, he is also a medical doctor and a Marine Devil Doc that served on one of the first ground units to enter into Iraq in 2003. He treated (on both sides) a lot of the worst kinds of injuries that you might expect to see when you are on one of the first units in to a war. Manan received the Combat Action Ribbon and his unit also received the Presidential Unit Citation.

“I was raised in this district by working-class parents and experienced what many families are going through now with the loss of their jobs and their pensions. But I also learned the importance of serving others and working hard for things that matter. These principles have guided my career, from the battlefield to the emergency room,” said Trivedi.

“I am now prepared to serve my community in a new capacity: in the halls of Congress. We have some big challenges facing our nation. Our health care system is broken, we’re engaged in two wars, and our economy continues to struggle. I know how to get things done under extremely difficult situations, and my direct experience with these challenges will give the working families in my district a strong and credible voice in Washington,” Trivedi concluded. [Link]

So what lies ahead for Manan? A really tough primary challenger in Democrat Doug Pike who comes with a lot of money. Pike was a former aide to Senator Paul Tsongas back in the 1980s. He later wrote editorials for The Orlando Sentinel and served on the editorial board of The Philadelphia Inquirer for 14 years. The fact that he was a reporter for all those years pumping out stories makes him very susceptible to Republican attacks in the general election. The other thing working both for and against Pike is his personal wealth:

Pike has indicated that he plans to spend $1 million of his own money on the campaign – an obviously very consequential sum that guarantees that he remains a force to be reckoned with no matter which other Democrats jump in the race. Pike’s fortune, more than any other attribute, is likely to get the DCCC to take him seriously. After all, the national party and local committees are always looking for candidates who are rich enough to buy themselves a congressional seat (see Scott Murphy) – quite an unfortunate reality, especially considering that many politicians who come in office in such conditions, like Jon Corzine, are far from the most successful, qualified or popular of politicians. [Link]

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p>So here are the cold hard facts about running for a congressional seat that most SM readers already know: it takes money. If, at regular intervals, you don’t show you are collecting enough donations you fall further behind in terms of support from the party establishment (e.g. DCCC). Both parties take safe bets instead of assessing how welll a candidate might actually do with, you know, policymaking (see Blue Dogs). What Manan needs now is as much support as he can get before the next fundraising reports are due in roughly three weeks (end of September). If any of you are excited about this South Asian candidate and veteran then you can see his website for instructions on how you can get involved. If you want to know more about him or his background you can email me. If you are in the South Asian media (or any media for that matter) and need help getting in touch with Manan you can also contact me at abhi [at] sepiamutiny.com and I can help facilitate.

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p>This will be the first of many posts I do following Manan’s campaign.

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There is obviously a huge problem when the BSF can shoot unarmed people with impunity. But this report by Jonathan Rugman also has some problems, which need to be addressed.

First, how big a problem is it? The numbers are a little confusing. The BSF itself reports 5000 “militants/extremists” killed since 1990, but there is pretty clear evidence that they are under-reporting total deaths (perhaps they simply aren’t reporting deaths of unarmed people at all). For the Channel 4 reporter at least, it was relatively easy to find many villagers on both sides of the border with relatives who had been killed — who were obviously not “militants/extremists.”

That said, there are some problems in the story above, and in Robert Mackey’s blog post about it. One is the inclusion of footage from a “BSF Recruiting video” by both reporters. In fact, you can see the video on YouTube, and it seems highly unlikely to me that “Kashsoldier,” the author of the video, is putting together his various amateur videos for official Indian military use. I wonder why they think his videos are official recruiting videos? Amy I missing something? (Would the Indian armed forces really be using American heavy metal music to recruit Indian soldiers?)

Second, in the Channel 4 coverage I linked to above, there is a good deal of what seems like irrelevant material inserted, confusing the story. The historical references to partition, and footage of places where the border between India and Bangladesh is a mere alleyway, do not relate to the people being shot around the fence. If I understand the story correctly, people are not being shot in those alleys.

Finally, the reporter, Jonathan Rugman, doesn’t really attempt to bring the two issues discussed in the story together in an adequate way. On the one hand, he is interested in the massive border fence between India and Bangladesh that is being constructed. But he is also interested in the BSF’s frequent killing of unarmed villagers, who are either crossing the border illegally, or simply working on land that happens to be a little too close to the fence. But is there a connection between the two issues? Have the numbers of killings shot up since the fence was constructed? One presumes that is what has happened, but Rugman also mentions that the BSF has been much more aggressive since the 11/26 attacks in Mumbai. So which is the main cause of these killings of unarmed people?

I’m not saying the report about the BSF isn’t still chilling. But Jonathan Rugman’s coverage of leaves something to be desired; a supporter of the Indian military might be able to find some holes.

Attention Brave Taliban! The Infidel Are Here!

The CIA is secretly using an airbase in southern Pakistan to launch the Predator drones that observe and attack al-Qaeda and Taleban militants on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan, a Times investigation has found.

The Pakistani and US governments have repeatedly denied that Washington is running military operations, covert or otherwise, on Pakistani territory — a hugely sensitive issue in the predominantly Muslim country.

…Shamsi lies in a sparsely populated area about 190 miles southwest of the city of Quetta, which US intelligence officials believe is used as a staging post by senior Taleban leaders, including Mullah Omar. It is also 100 miles south of the border with Afghanistan’s southern province of Helmand and about 100 miles east of the border with Iran.

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p>Aiding theTimes/UK’s hunt was the array of investigative tools more generally available to an ambitious first world reporter than a trapped-in-a-cave Jihadi –

Key to the Times investigation is the unexplained delivery of 730,000 gallons of F34 aviation fuel to Shamsi. Details were found on the website of the Pentagon’s fuel procurement agency.

The Defence Energy Support Centre site shows that a civilian company, Nordic Camp Supply (NCS), was contracted to deliver the fuel, worth $3.2 million, from Pakistan Refineries near Karachi.

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p>In addition to naming contractors & supply routes, the piece goes on to assert that the site is manned exclusively by CIA personnel with more formal military assistance likely provided by Pakistani rather than US forces. If the CIA + supporting force composition is still there at the time of this writing, perhaps they’d provide a softer target for the enemy than the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan. Perhaps a well placed female suicide bomber at an NCS office in Pakistan might be able to disrupt Predator fuel supplies and thereby ground them in a way Jihadis on the battlefield have never been able to?

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p>At the minimum, even if brave Taliban/AQ or their brothers in arms aren’t up for a military attack, the piece does identify a couple new places for a photo-op protest or 2.

I for one eagerly await similar investigative effort put into helping Allied forces track Jihadis. Of course, that might be more dangerous for our ambitious journalists – ultimately, the CIA is far less likely to behead nosy reporters.

The program targets two groups: medical professionals and those with language expertise including speakers of “Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Igbo (a tongue spoken in Nigeria), Kurdish, Nepalese, Pashto, Russian and Tamil. [link]” In other words, this is a program tailor made for desis (although not exclusively so)

The only catch is that you have to serve out your time in the military honorably, or you might lose your citizenship (!) even if you received it in the first six months of service:

Language experts will have to serve four years of active duty, and health care professionals will serve three years of active duty or six years in the Reserves. If the immigrants do not complete their service honorably, they could lose their citizenship. [link]

What made the US military realize their sudden love for brownz? They’re not getting the right kinds of recruits for service in Afghanistan:

Recruiters’ work became easier in the last few months as unemployment soared and more Americans sought to join the military. But the Pentagon, facing a new deployment of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, still has difficulties in attracting doctors, specialized nurses and language experts. [link]

(Can somebody explain why the military thinks it will need Igbo and Tamil speakers in Afghanistan? I’m a bit puzzled by the mix of languages that they’re trying to pick up.)

Part of this is the military looking for specific skills, but part of it is a desire to raise the quality of recruits. Right now almost 1 in 5 has a waiver for a past criminal record or a health problem. A similar number don’t even have a high school diploma. Recent immigrants are expected to have high skills, and cannot have a criminal past:

Military figures show that only 82 percent of about 80,000 Army recruits last year had high school diplomas. According to new figures, the Army provided waivers to 18 percent of active-duty recruits in the final four months of last year, allowing them to enlist despite medical conditions or criminal records. [link]

While this is just a trial run, officials are looking at temporary immigrants as a source of up to 14,000 volunteers or 17% of army recruits each year!

The big challenge this program faces is political pressure from nativists who would rather have American-born recruits with a criminal past and no high school diploma than higher skilled and more closely vetted recent immigrants:

A preliminary Pentagon announcement of the program last year drew a stream of angry comments from officers and veterans on Military.com, a Web site they frequent… Commenters who vented their suspicions of the program on Military.com said it could be used by terrorists to penetrate the armed forces. [link]

It’s also possible that this security suspicion is just a fig leaf for naked protectionism, of the old guard wanting to keep certain jobs for Americans (that is citizens and green card holders). We’ll see which proves stronger – market forces or politics, in the coming years.

Related posts: Major Bhutani, Neil Prakash in ‘Wired’ (updated)

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Not much I have heard about the state of affairs in Pakistan after their elections has given me confidence that this particular iteration of “democracy” will survive for very long there. I was initially most concerned that a weak (and corrupt) central government would hurt ordinary Pakistanis by failing to adequately confront the extremists that sought to de-stabilize their country.

Case in point, let’s consider the huge blast that occurred in September at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad killing 53 people (two of whom were Americans):

A suicide bomb attack that killed 53 people at the Marriott Hotel in Pakistan’s capital bore the hallmarks of an operation by al Qaeda or an affiliate, Pakistani and U.S. intelligence officials said on Sunday.

Teams combing the burnt shell of the hotel found more charred bodies after the blast on Saturday evening ignited a blaze that swept through the hotel, part of a U.S.-based chain and a favorite haunt of diplomats and wealthy Pakistanis. [Link]

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p>So how did Pakistan respond around that same time to the threat of internal terrorism? For one, they declined investigative help from the FBI who are quite experienced with this kind of attack given past U.S. embassy bombings abroad:

Malik rejected FBI assistance and said Pakistani security agencies were capable of handling the probe.

A US official at the Guantanamo naval base told Reuters “the attack certainly bears all the hallmarks of… Al Qaeda or its associates”.

Six suspects: Online said six suspects from FATA had been held. [Link]

I understand the need to maintain the appearance of “standing up to the U.S.” to play to the domestic crowd, but not in the absence of doing anything. Now that we no longer have the slightly more compliant Musharraf to deal with, the U.S. has had to become a bit more proactive about rooting out terrorists:

Bush confronted Yousuf Raza Gilani, Pakistan’s prime minister, with evidence of involvement by its military intelligence (ISI) in the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul.

“They were very hot on the ISI,” said Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s interior minister. “Very hot. When we asked them for more information, Bush laughed and said, ‘When we share information with your guys, the bad guys always run away.’ “… [Link]

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The solution to America’s Pakistan problem may lie in Iraq. Bob Woodward initially reported a few months ago that there was a secret behind the military success of the surge in Iraq: a sophisticated and lethal special operations program.

“This is very sensitive and very top secret, but there are secret operational capabilities that have been developed by the military to locate, target, and kill leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq, insurgent leaders, renegade militia leaders. That is one of the true breakthroughs,” Woodward told Pelley.

“But what are we talking about here? It’s some kind of surveillance? Some kind of targeted way of taking out just the people that you’re looking for? The leadership of the enemy?” Pelley asked.

“I’d love to go through the details, but I’m not going to,” Woodward replied.

The details, Woodward says, would compromise the program.

“For a reporter, you don’t allow much,” Pelley remarked.

“Well no, it’s with reluctance. From what I know about it, it’s one of those things that go back to any war, World War I, World War II, the role of the tank, and the airplane. And it is the stuff of which military novels are written,” Woodward said. [Link]

And from the LA Times:

A military official familiar with the systems said they had a profound effect, both militarily and psychologically, on the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq.

“It is like they are living with a red dot on their head,” said a former U.S. military official familiar with the technology who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity because it has been secret. “With the quietness of the Predator, you never knew when a Hellfire [missile] would come through your window.”

The new Predator capabilities are a key ingredient in an emerging U.S. military offensive against Taliban strongholds and Al Qaeda havens in Pakistan. [Link]

In an article on Slate yesterday the author wonders if Pakistan’s new government has finally seen the light. They continue to protest now in public but secretly love the faceless killing machines that are helping to manage their terrorist problems. The key is that collateral damage be kept to a minimum.

In recent weeks, as Pakistani officials urged the U.S. to stop the drone attacks, I wondered whether these appeals were sincere or fake. They sure sounded fake. Now we have confirmation. In Sunday’s Washington Post, Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick report what they’ve learned from interviews with U.S. and Pakistani officials. Here are the highlights:

1. The drones are succeeding tactically. They found and killed three al-Qaida leaders in the first nine months of this year. In October, after drone operations intensified, they killed three more.

2. Pakistan tacitly accepts the drones. The U.S. and Pakistan “reached tacit agreement in September on a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy that allows unmanned Predator aircraft to attack suspected terrorist targets in rugged western Pakistan, according to senior officials in both countries.” Terms: “the U.S. government refuses to publicly acknowledge the attacks while Pakistan’s government continues to complain noisily about the politically sensitive strikes.”

3. Terrorism in Pakistan has made the government more acquiescent to drones, not less. According to U.S. officials, “Pakistan’s new acquiescence coincided with the new government there and a sharp increase in domestic terrorist attacks.” The attacks have persuaded Pakistan that the terrorists along its border are a grave threat to Pakistan as well as to Afghanistan and the U.S. The new acquiescence can be measured in hits: “From December to August, when Musharraf stepped down, there were six U.S. Predator attacks in Pakistan. Since then, there have been at least 19.”

Let’s think through what we’ve just read. Terrorists use civilian deaths and the prospect of more civilian deaths to blackmail governments. This is a political game, not just a military one. It’s what they did, for example, to Spain four years ago. In Pakistan, they’ve tried the same thing, but this time with a new twist: The enemy they’re trying to neutralize is mechanical. The terrorists can’t bog down or kill the drones because drones don’t bleed and they don’t have to land. So the terrorists tried to blackmail the nearest civilian target, Pakistan, to gain leverage over the drones.

If the Post story is correct, this strategy failed. In fact, it backfired. The terrorists are losing not just the military fight but the political one. [Link]

If even only some of this is true it will give President-elect Obama a powerful weapon to use in Pakistan and Afghanistan which he sees as the central front of this war. It may also give the Pakistani government some breathing room and a chance to actually govern.

A senior Pakistani official said that although the attacks contribute to widespread public anger in Pakistan, anti-Americanism there is closely associated with President Bush. Citing a potentially more favorable popular view of President-elect Barack Obama, he said that “maybe with a new administration, public opinion will be more pro-American and we can start acknowledging” more cooperation. [Link]

The only thing that worries me is that I fear the last sentence in the Slate article may be prophetic:

Some day, Pakistan will have its drones. So will India, China, and Iran. The proliferation of drones is well underway. Maybe it will solve the problem of terrorist insurgency. Maybe it will create something worse. [Link]

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This is Skynet people. Once these drones become sentient or fall into the hands of autocrats, then what? Not to mix cyborg references but “resistance would be futile.”