Had President Biden listened to ‘Useful Idiots’ of the CCP and publicly gone against India, he may have put at risk the future of the Indo-Pacific.
NEW DELHI
Since 2017, there have been a succession of intense efforts, which by now have become almost desperate, by the Sino-Wahhabi lobby aimed at derailing the strengthening trajectory of India-US ties under Prime Minister Modi and Presidents Trump and Biden. Given the hold that the lobby has within the Democratic Party, it has to be said to the credit of US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin and Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in particular that their commitment to a strong India-US partnership has helped the White House to resist pressure to bite into the poison pill of going the Justin Trudeau way. The Canadian PM, for undisclosed reasons, transparently sought to divert public attention and anger within the G7 from the PRC to the world’s most populous country and democracy, India, which under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has emerged as a key partner of the G7.
That the Sino-Wahhabi lobby is thankless for past favours is clear from its recent criticism of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who had for decades been close to several members of the lobby. The cause is his support for backing Israel in its battle against the military wing of Hamas. The reality is that failure by the IDF to eliminate the military wing of Hamas during the current campaign would ensure its metastising in different forms into the entire Middle East, endangering the rulers of even staunch backers of Hamas such as Qatar. While much more attention needs to be given to protecting civilians in all Palestinian territories from becoming collateral damage, the imperative of eliminating the military wing of Hamas as a lesson to other present and potential terror groups is evident. Such an outcome is what the Sino-Wahhabi lobby seeks to avert, so as to destabilise the region to its advantage.
The lobby is mainly composed of ethnic elements linked to GHQ Rawalpindi and the diminishing number of business tycoons who have for decades put personal financial gain above the national interests of the US. Efforts have been incessant to have a resolution brought forward in the US Congress against India, and it is in this context that the incomprehensible step of elements in the Biden administration seeking immunity for a known facilitator of terrorists, G.S. Pannun, was taken. During the Nijjar-Trudeau episode, there were reports that it was from the US that Trudeau was conveniently provided (false) evidence that the Government of India was behind the gangland killing of a drug lord. The drug lord, H.S. Nijjar, in exchange for illicit profits openly participated in the facilitation of GHQ-inspired terror groups. The drip-drip of accusations against India by unnamed sources within the Biden administration was intended to ensure that a senior administration official, if not President Biden or Secretary of State Blinken, would testify before the US Congress that officials in India were seeking to assassinate Pannun in the way they were alleged by Trudeau in the Canadian parliament to have knocked off Nijjar.
In the event that such a malicious charge would be aired in so august a forum, facts about Pannun were compiled (and privately shared with the US side) that would expose the Washington Beltway’s double talk about fighting terror while protecting some of the most toxic of them. In the event, much to the disappointment of Moscow, Rawalpindi, Ankara and Beijing, President Biden refused to take a hammer to US-India ties by replicating the error committed by the Prime Minister of Canada. Sadly, under Trudeau a country that was once an exemplar of success has been awash in narcotics and gangs on a scale never before seen. Trudeau sought to damage if not destroy the relationship between India and Canada that have been partners since the 1950s.
BIDEN AVOIDS LOBBY TRAP
Joe Biden was given a lift by Barack Obama, the first African-American President of the US, who in that job enjoyed a close personal rapport with Prime Minister Modi. As a consequence of loyally serving as Vice-President during the Obama years, Biden was able to shrug off remarks by a few critics that cast him in a mildly racist light. Such allegations were divorced from reality, for neither President Biden nor First Lady Jill Biden are racist in any manner. Unfortunately, the manner in which Biden (under the influence of what may be termed believers in the trans-Atlantic Common European Home cohort of US policymakers) turbocharged support for the Kiev regime in Ukraine was used against him, once facts about Hunter Biden’s connections with businesspersons in that country got revealed. It was not Hunter Biden but a few European leaders led by Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen as well as certain business lobbies in the US that made Biden begin in Ukraine another quagmire of a war in 2022 months after he had ended US involvement in the Afghanistan quagmire in a way that went against US security interests, not to mention credibility as a partner.
More than 38,000 Afghan nationals whose only crime was to work with US staff in Afghanistan during 2001-21 have been executed by the new rulers of that country, much more than the number of Ukrainians who have been killed on the battlefield and elsewhere by Russian artillery and bombardment. Yet the murdered Afghans have scarcely merited a mention by the US administration, even while encyclopaedias could be filled with the statements made by the Biden administration on the killing of Ukrainians since 2022 onwards.
Erroneous though that may be, the belief that ethnicity is at the bottom of such a double standard by the White House is widespread in Asia, South America and Africa, which perception has come as a bonus for CCP influence operations. Afghan moderates and women in particular have been abandoned by the same White House that is shovelling taxpayer dollars into the doomed effort of pushing the Russian Federation out of Ukrainian territory that Moscow has been controlling since 2014. Unlike in the past, the world has since the 1940s been much more than just Europe, a fact known to Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, but forgotten by Harry Truman and by Richard Nixon, who pushed the US deeper into the Vietnam quagmire until he had to order a retreat in 1973 even more ignominious than the US retreat from Afghanistan in 2021. Had President Biden listened to “Useful Idiots” of the CCP such as Justin Trudeau and publicly gone against India, he may have put at risk the future of the Indo-Pacific. He would have facilitated those who seek to make the entirety of its waters a PRC lake in the manner that the South China Sea has almost totally become since the time Barack Obama was President of the US.
CCP IN FOR A SURPRISE
Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe worked on the creation of a security architecture that would keep the Indo-Pacific free, open and inclusive. The failure to derail the alliance by nudging Biden into adopting the Trudeau line has led the Sino-Wahhabi lobby to look towards California Governor Gavin Newsom as a replacement for the 2024 Presidential polls. Even were they to succeed in displacing Biden as the Democratic Presidential candidate for 2024, the CCP may be in for a surprise. Both Trump and Biden were considered by several in the US to be in Xi’s pocket before taking over the Presidency, and yet events proved such confidence in their pliability to be misplaced. Some advisors of Gavin Newsom want the personable California Governor to visit Taiwan to show that he is not the stooge of the CCP that several social media posts make him out to be. It remains to be seen if Newsom agrees to such a strategically significant visit. What is obvious is that the Sino-Wahhabi lobby regards Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India as a huge obstacle to their expansionist plans, hence the generation (often through AI) of multiplying fake news items that are intended to reduce Modi’s popularity. Such efforts at disinformation had no effect on the political fortunes of Chief Minister Modi over thirteen years, and appears to be failing completely now when he is seeking a third term as Prime Minister in 2024.
During the next few years, the expectation is that even the rulers of Qatar, known for their modern outlook and education, will abandon that country’s tryst with the Wahhabi International and join hands instead with the rulers of the UAE and Saudi Arabia in going forward with modernisation and moderation. In such an endeavour, India would be a willing partner. Efforts by the Sino-Wahhabi lobby notwithstanding, President Biden has thus far refused to play into the trap set by Moscow and Beijing to follow Trudeau’s example. Such a stance by the White House has led to disappointment on the part of those in his administration who dance to the tune of the Sino-Russian and Sino-Wahhabi lobbies, and who are seeking to distance the US from India before the partnership between the two biggest democracies develops any further.