open Democracy News Analysis - Cities and new wars, Saskia Sassen - Comments

zindadil on "Cities and new wars: after Mumbai "

zindadil — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 03:45:40 +0000

this is internal, the hindu fascist,

Prgaya case mystrey

Three Police officers killed for investigating the Pragya case.

Indian army personnel caught collaborating with Pragya(BJP, RSS, Bajrang Dal, Sangh Parivar)

Underworld was tired of the above police officers being very just,
shoot at sight and these police officers did not take prisoners. Hence
a collaboration.

These elements got together and created a scene just to get rid of
the three police officers. (the families of the slain police officers
refuse to take the charity money from Modi)

Why Mumbai? Why not Kashmir? Why Not Gujarat?

Because Pragya was being tried in Mumbai a State run by congress.
Because Maharashtra is a Congress state and elections due in the near
future, BJP wants to be a strong contender. And BJP needs money from
underworld to spend on elections. Underword wants Mumbai to run it's
dirty business without any obstacles.Obstacles were the three fine
Police Officials.

Understand this. The LET wants Kashmir, attacks there would be
understanding. Attacks in Gujarat by LET, may be. No link there, but
then again maybe because Muslims were macassered by Modi. But it is
highly unlikely. Mumbai too far for LET and no adwantage at all.

This has to be them i.e. the BJP and Underworld.

rosross on "Cities and new wars: after Mumbai "

rosross — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:12:18 +0000

Once again, and still, India seeks to deal with problems by denying reality. This attack was not an attack against Indian democracy but, like 9/11, an attack against State sanctioned terrorism and a denial of freedom. India has as many Muslims as Pakistan and there has been a steady rise in Hindu fundamentalism … Hindoostan for Hindus is the catchcry… and increasing violence toward and discrimination against Muslims.
Add to this the festering sore of Kashmir …. where India plays the role that Israel plays in Palestine and the US plays in Iraq and the international community plays in Afghanistan, and you have a fertile bed for disaffection and rebellion.
Add to this the appalling inequalities and hopelessness of life for most Indians where poverty, illiteracy and homelessness are a way of life while the Government spends billions upon billions on military hardware, a space programme for heaven’s sake, and a nuclear weaponry industry and you can see why just some of India’s billion odd people might be ripe for rebellion.
No, one does not condone the violence, ever, but one can understand it in light of the violence done by the Indian Government to Kashmiris in particular and Muslims in general.
It is sheer fantasy to talk about a united India. It has never been united. It is in fact a nation which did not exist until the British cobbled it together as part of their empire and then left it as one State, minus the partition of Pakistan. Another totally disasterous action. India was a collection of mini-royal states, more like an Indian ‘Europe,’ it was never one country. Those in the South had different cultural origins and language to those in the North and the miracle is that India has survived for so long. The people of Assam are neither racially nor culturally Indian and yet as part of the old British Empire were bundled in with India. Like Africa, the colonial powers gave no thought to borders, race, culture or religion. The result is chaos.
Read William Dalrymple for greater understanding of India past and present and look to the source of this latest atrocity. You will find its bones in the same place as 9/11- aggression by government, State sanctioned terrorism, meddling foreigners and the arrogance of power.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/30/mumbai-terror-attack…

krahman50 on "Cities and new wars: after Mumbai "

krahman50 — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 07:55:04 +0000

The most important question is "WHY?"
1. Why did this happen? Home-grown or imported, terrorism is always a reaction when you do not listen to genuine grievances and try to address them. It is a protest in desperation, and the more delay is made in resolving the issues the more widespread it gets. Criminal elements can easily take over desperate persons and use them for their own vile purposes. It gives criminals to ultimately strike a deal with the authorities while the simple people who have been really wronged become the victims.
2. Why some people are willing to die while killing others? It is stupid to think that they just hate our lifestyle. Only an imbecile like American president G W Bush can utter this nonsense. Others repeat it because either they are themselves responsible for creating the trouble or they want to use it as a smokescreen.
3. Why the government is still harping on Pakistan ISI behind the bloody masacre. It's always been a tit for tat between RAW and ISI. A matter of 'pan calling the pot black'. Let's ask the two military-led organization to have mercy on the civilians and stop killing innocent people in both the countries.
4. Why the Investigator who blamed an Indian army officer for another bloodshed killed in the recent Mumbai episode? News reports said another official who was related this Invetigator was also shot by the 'terrorists'.
5. Why some people think the only way to eradicate terrorism is to massacre entire communities? Nothing can be more insane. Targeting a community just because they conquered some territories and ruled there for centuries in the name of Hindutva is the most insane thing. Aryans too were outsiders who invaded India millenniums ago and are still ruling it. Isn't it interesting that the most hated Mughal emperor Aurangzeb was the one to give the Maharaja of Jaipur the royal title of "Sawaai" which means a quarter better or more chivalrous than a common man.
6. Why real issues creating terrorism are not addressed? Despite the sane voices of intellectual stalwarts like Arundhati Roy why the people of Kashmir are being denied their birthright. Hasn't this inhuman Indian policy emboldened Pakistan to annex a part of Kashmir?
7. Why is Indian media so blind and biased? Check reporting on Indian TV channels and on the net; they seem to have a sick knack for naming Pakistan as the culprit, a country ruled by incompetent fools that itself is in turmoil and has been a target of the worst form of terrorism.

Come on friends, let's come to our senses. If we do not open our eyes to see what horrible things are coming next and do something effective to change the ground situation, the entire region is going to see the beginning of a global holocaust. The third world war. Stop injustice. Honour human rights everywhere. Do not let the friendship of your allies refrain you from speaking out the truth and supporting it.

Cities and new wars, Saskia Sassen

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 22:38:52 +0000

The Mumbai attacks of 26-29 November 2008 are part of an emerging type of urban violence. These were organised, simultaneous frontal assaults with grenades and machine-guns on ten high-profile sites in or near the central business and tourism district.Also in openDemocracy on the assaults of November 2008 in Mumbai:

Kanishk Tharoor, "What to make of the Mumbai attacks" (27 November 2008)

This has affinities with the asymmetric street warfare waged by the gangs in Rio de Janeiro that every now and then announce they will take over a major central area of the city from (say) 9am to 5pm: the result is shuttered shops and empty streets. If the police try to respond, it is open warfare, and the police rarely win - this is a challenge for which the police are not trained. After 5pm the gangs withdraw. It is often said that all of this results from inadequate policing or crime waves.

But that is too simple. There is a deeper transformation afoot. It is still rare but it is more frequently becoming visible. It is as if the centre no longer holds. Cities seem to be losing the capacity they have long had to triage conflict - through commerce, through civic activity. The national state, confronted with a similar conflict, has historically chosen to go to war. In my new research project - on cities and war - I am studying whether cities are losing this capacity and are becoming sites for a range of new types of violence.

Further, the new asymmetric wars have the effect of urbanising war. This brings with it a nasty twist: when national states go to war in the name of national security, nowadays major cities are likely to become a key frontline space. In older conventional wars, large armies needed large open fields or oceans to meet and fight, and these were the frontline spaces.

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S Lynd professor of sociology and member, Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University. Her books include Losing Control? Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization (Columbia University Press, 1996) and The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton University Press, 2001). Her latest book is Territory, Authority, and Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press, 2006), based on a five-year project on governance and accountability in a global economy

This article is based on a larger project, based on her new project on Cities and War. A slightly different version was published in the Huffington Post (26 November 2008)

Among Saskia Sassen's articles in openDemocracy:

"A state of decay" (3 May 2006)

"Globalisation, the state and the democratic deficit" (18 July 2007)

"Lahore: urban space, niche repression" (21 November 2007)

"The world's third spaces" (8 January 2008)

"Fear and strange arithmetics..." (19 June 2008)

Today the search for national security may well become a source for urban insecurity. The "war on terror" reveals that cities become the theatres for asymmetric war, regardless of what side of the divide they are - allies or enemies. The attacks in Madrid, London, Casablanca, Bali, are symptomatic. So too is the United States's conventional military aerial bombing. It took under three weeks to destroy the Iraqi army's resistance and take over power in 2003. But then the asymmetric wars set in, with Baghdad, Mosul, Basra, and other Iraqi cities the sites of conflict - for years. Indeed, the fact that the Mumbai attackers evidently sought and prized Americans and British among the hostages they took, is clearly related to George W Bush's declaration of war on Iraq and Britain's supportive role.

The traditional security paradigm based on national-state security does not accommodate this triangulation. What may be good to protect the national state apparatus may cost major cities and their people a high (increasingly high) price. In the dense and conflictive spaces of cities, a variety of forms of violence can be foreseen.

Moreover, new kinds of crises may result from the major environmental disasters that are looming in our immediate futures. These will further challenge the traditional commercial and civic capacities that have allowed cities to avoid war when confronted with conflict. These crises could feed the violence that can arise from extreme economic inequality, and racial and religious conflicts.

The results will be felt particularly in cities because of the often profound kinds of dependence of cities on complex systems - apartment buildings, hospitals, vast sewage systems, huge underground transport systems, whole electric grids - all of which rest on computerised management vulnerable to breakdowns. A major mock experiment by Nasa found that by the fifth day of a breakdown in the computerised systems that manage the electric grid, a city like New York would be in extremis. In Mumbai's tragedy can be glimpsed the image of a global future.

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