In all the noise about the war in Afghanistan over the last week, including the WikiLeaks uproar and a spat between Pakistan and Britain over remarks made by Prime Minister David Cameron about Pakistan’s links to Islamist militancy, one piece of news carries real significance.

On Friday, five Taliban members were struck off a U.N. Security Council list of militants subject to sanctions in a move designed to smooth the way for  reconciliation talks with insurgents.  Among those, two of the five were dead. The other three - Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad Awrang, a former Afghan ambassador to the United Nations, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the last Taliban ambassador to Islamabad before 9/11, and  Abdul Satar Paktin – are no longer subject to the asset freeze and travel ban imposed on those on the list.

To get a sense of quite how significant a change this is, consider how Mullah Zaeef – who now lives in Kabul and says he is no longer an active member of the movement – describes his treatment when he was arrested in Pakistan in early 2002, according to his book “My Life with the Taliban“. The Pakistani official who arrested him told him:  “Your Excellency, you are no longer an Excellency! America is a superpower. Did you not know that? No one can defeat it, nor can they negotiate with it. America wants to question you and we are here to hand you over to the USA.” 

Turned over to the Americans near Peshawar after being driven there from Islamabad, he says he was attacked and his clothes ripped with knives. “The Pakistani soldiers were all staring as the Americans hit me and tore the remaining clothes off my body. Eventually I was completely naked, and the Pakistani soldiers — the defenders of the Holy Koran — shamelessly watched me with smiles on their faces, saluting this disgraceful action of the Americans.”

“That moment,” he says, ”is written in my memory like a stain on my soul.”

That was followed by long years of humiliation and degradation in jails first in Afghanistan and later in Guantanamo. Finally freed from Guantanamo without charge on Sept. 11 2005, he returned to Kabul where he has lived under government protection.

The decision by the United Nations, with American support, to remove the names of Mullah Zaeef and others from the sanctions list is possibly the closest Washington has come since 9/11 to offering some kind of legitimacy to the Taliban movement which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.

It is an important step for a movement which some analysts argue always craved legitimacy – it was recognised only by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan when it was in government - and which in any negotiations about giving it an eventual share of power in Afghanistan would be looking for the kind of funding and trade possibilities that only international recognition can provide.

It should also make it easier to open the kind of informal  contacts that could eventually pave the way to more serious negotiations.  Mullah Zaeef – who in his book speaks of his loyalty to Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar – was involved in earlier meetings in Saudi Arabia which were reported to have focused on the possibilities of reconciliation with the Taliban.

The United States and its allies have increasingly spoken about the need for talks with the Taliban to try to bring an end to an unpopular war now into its ninth year, although Washington has also said it needs more time to end a stalemate on the ground so that it can enter any talks from a position of strength.

But if and when talks do start, one of the obstacles has been over how to talk to a movement whose members are on the United Nations “most-wanted” list.

The Taliban leadership is not expected to negotiate in public until their names are removed from the list. The United States and its allies are unlikely to remove those names from the list until the Taliban sever ties with al Qaeda. And the Taliban are unlikely to sever ties with al Qaeda until after negotiations start, since that is their biggest bargaining chip.

The removal of some names – even of former Taliban members – from that list is a small step to resolving that conundrum. Potential intermediaries can now travel more freely and if they choose to do so, open up lines of communication to agree on the kind of confidence building measures which would likely be an essential prelude to more organised talks. U.S. and other officials can also meet them without fear of sanction.

Whether those contacts succeed or not is a different question – the Taliban leadership will make their own calculations about whether they can win more at the negotiating table than by waiting out the clock for the Americans to leave. But they should help both sides to understand each other a bit more in a shadowy war where neither side, each from radically different cultures, has much of an understanding of the enemy it is fighting.

In the words of Mullah Zaeef again:

“The biggest mistake of American policy makers so far might be their profound lack of understanding of their enemy. The U.S. brought an overwhelming force to Afghanistan. They arrived with a superior war machine, trying to swat mosquitoes with sledgehammers, destroying the little that was left of Afghanistan and causing countless casualties on their mission, knocking down many more walls than killing insects. Till this very day, it is this lack of understanding and their own prejudices that they still struggle with.”

View full post on Global News Journal

A picture of an uncovered 2012 Dodge Durango, which may get its name changed to Magnum when it hits the market, has been leaked onto the internet through microblogging site, Twitter.

The leaked picture shows that the grills of the new Durango have been reshaped and its sides have also been rounded. The new headlights on the vehicle are accompanied by a hood that is broader in size. The bumper has also been remodeled while the side-sills look better than the previous version as well.

Other outer design features that can be seen are the teardrop shape of the rear window which complements the new design of the side windows. The vehicle’s c-pillar is also thicker than before and the b-pillar blends in with the body.

The Durango could become available as the Magnum next year with either a Penastar V6 with 3.6-liter capacity capable of producing 280 hp, or a HEMI V8 engine of 5.7 liter capacity capable of producing 360 hp power.

[Twitter via Autoblog]

View full post on Car Blog | Breaking Motoring News Daily

A man unloads clay tiles, used for flooring and roofs, at a makeshfit factory in Karachi.

 India may have  a bigger problem in Pakistan than previously thought. More than half of Pakistanis surveyed in a Pew poll  say India is a bigger threat than al Qaeda or the Taliban. So it’s not just the Pakistani military that believes bigger, richer  India to be the existential threat;  a majority of ordinary people share that perception and that surely ought to worry Indian policy planners looking to find a way around the security establishment and make an opening to the Pakistani people.   Only 23 percent thought the Taliban was the greatest threat to their country, and just 3 percent for al Qaeda, despite the rising tide of militant violence in not just Pakistan’s turbulent northwest region on the Afghan border, but also cities in the heartland. 

More troubling for India, Pakistanis have mixed views about Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan based organisation that New Delhi has blamed for a series of attacks in India including the Mumbai assault of 2008.  Just 35% have a negative view of the group, a much lower percentage than for the other extremist organizations tested. One-in-four Pakistanis express a positive assessment, while 40% offer no opinion, Pew reported. For a large number of Indians, memories of the  26/11 attacks in Mumbai are still too fresh, and this will only reinforce  negative perception of the neighbour. Indeed,  India has virtually made all dialogue with Pakistan conditional on the steps it takes to roll up groups like the Lashkar.  The latest poll findings will only strengthen the case of the hawks in New Delhi, watchful for any sign of a concession to a country they consider pathologically opposed to India.

One must approach all surveys with caution, especially so in countries such as India and Pakistan with very large populations .  Pew conducted face-to-face interviews with 2,000 adults in Pakistan between April 13 to 28, 2010. It says the sample was disproportionately urban, and parts of the troubled areas of the northwest and Baluchistan were not covered. For a country with a population of over 170 million, drawing hard conclusions based on a sample size that small  must come with a mandatory health warning. 

Still, there were some positive take-aways.  Despite the deep-seated tensions between these two countries, most Pakistanis want better relations with India. Roughly seven-in-ten (72%) say it is important for relations with India to improve and about three-quarters support increased trade with India and further talks between the two rivals.  But India wouldn’t talk unless Pakistan acts against the militant groups and their patrons  that it considers waging an asymmetric war against it. And Pakistan won’t act because it doesn’t consider them to be a threat in the way India does.  How do you square such a circle ?

The Indians can take some comfort from the equally poor approval ratings for the United States.    Roughly six in10 (59 percent) Pakistanis describe the U.S. as an enemy.And President Barack Obama is unpopular — only 8% of Pakistanis express confidence that he will do the right thing in world affairs, his lowest rating among the 22 nations. So for all the money that has been lavished on Pakistan, the United States seems to be getting nowhere in winning public support. Indeed,  support for the U.S. involvement in the fight against extremists fell over the last year. “The lesson unlearned in fifty years is that feeding Pakistan cash will not alter a national psychosis of war and hatred for the U.S,” as Dr. Aseem Shukla wrote in the Washington Post.

By contrast, the United States enjoys one of the strongest approval ratings anywhere in the world in India where it provides almost no humanitarian assistance.  A Pew survey last month found India among the top six countries with favourable ratings for America. 

Pakistani expert Imtiaz Gul says the  more Pakistan becomes the subject of international criticism, the more alienated Pakistanis grow. This week, the country is back in the international  glare following the release of classified military documents reinforcing allegations that it was actively collaborating with the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan while accepting massive U.S. aid to fight the militants.  First, British Prime Minister David Cameron kicked off a diplomatic offensive against Pakistan,  saying that it cannot be “allowed to look both ways and is able to promote the export of terror, whether to India or whether to Afghanistan, or anywhere else in the world.”    It was the bluntest warning yet from a British leader, delivered during a visit to India  which must rankle even more.

And then Afghan President Hamid Karzai  demanded NATO action against militant havens in Pakistan,  raising questions about whether a new-found partnership with Pakistan to find a negotiated settlement would withstand  the impact of the disclosures.   

Is it any wonder then that Pakistan feels encircled – India, a rising economic power which also threatens its western flank by expanding influence in Afghanistan like a dagger pointed at its heart ?  And then America  and its allies breathing hard down its neck with the  ”do-more mantra”  that has taken a heavy toll of Pakistan blood and treasure.

Overall Pakistanis themselves  remain in a grim mood about the state of their country. Overwhelming majorities are dissatisfied with national conditions, unhappy with the nation’s economy, and concerned about political corruption and crime. Only one-in-five express a positive view of President Asif Ali Zardari, down from 64% just two years ago, Pew said.

View full post on Global News Journal

The second generation Aero, called the Ultimate Aero, from Shelby Sports Cars will be unveiled by the company on August 8th at the Boeing Flight Museum in Seattle. The Ultimate Aero is SSC’s attempt to regain its title of “fastest road car in the world” from current title holder Bugatti Veyron Super Sport.

The Bugatti Veyron had achieved its title after breaking the 255.83 mph record set by the previous model of the Aero called the Ultimate Aero TT. The new Ultimate Aero will require more than the 1,183 hp present in the Aero TT to become faster than the Veyron Super Sport, which has a 1,200 hp-engine and has set a record top speed of 268 mph.

The designer of the new Ultimate Aero, Jason Castriota, will also have to make sure that the design does not cause aerodynamic drag, besides ensuring better power features for the car.

So does the Veyron Super Sport have a reason to be scared? The answer will be revealed on August 8.

View full post on Car Blog | Breaking Motoring News Daily

When I write about Apple, I do my best to lay out some historical data and discuss where my experience came from as it helps put things in perspective for whatever I’m about to rant or rave about. There have been way too many times where I complain about the price of a machine, only to realize it’s actually cheaper than the last generation model.

I wish meaningless facts like the viewing angle of Apple’s 23″ Apple Cinema Display and the price of the Dual 500Mhz PowerMac G4 were just stuck in my head, but they’re not. I cheat quite a bit, but not by running all over the web trying to find wiki pages and old press releases. Instead, I use Mactracker.

This donation-ware application that’s available for Mac and iPhone is a tool I fire up before starting a blog post about Apple or Macintosh products. In addition to price and technical specs, Mactracker also contains history of models, their code names, and the startup chime associated with that machine. As a blogger and fanboy, this application can keep me entertained for hours, and I’m never caught wondering what stock hard drive came on the 600Mhz iBook G3 (it was 20GB).

I hope you’ll download this great application and send a nice little donation off to the developer. I discovered Mactracker in 2004, but the developer has been updating it with info since 2001, which is quite the commitment from one guy.

View full post on TheAppleBlog

It’s just another day where I board the train and head home with an iPhone, iPad and MacBook in my bag. Since buying the iPad, I prefer it to the other three devices in nearly every situation except blogging, which still requires a real keyboard and at least a 13″ screen.

Something sort of hit me in the head while reading the New York Times as Bob Marley played into my earphones: I have no visual or performance signs that a song is playing other than the music entering my head. Bob Marley is singing “No Woman, No Cry” and the iPad doesn’t signal to me that it’s actually doing that, which feels magical, but it made me think about the future and how Apple  is shaping it.

In 2001, my iBook G3′s 500Mhz CPU would be 50 percent utilized while playing high quality music through the speakers. That number has dropped to basically zero while playing the same song on my Core i7 iMac, but iTunes is still open, taking up screen space even if it’s minimized or hidden. I know iTunes is open but the way I interact with iTunes hasn’t changed since iTunes 1.0 was released 10 years ago. The way my Macintosh organizes folders, plays music, and manages windows is unchanged, and it still takes a certain technical proficiency to understand this even if it is an easy-to-use Mac.

Today, while music played on my iPad and I was reading the news story, I thought about how there’s nothing showing a song is playing other than a play icon at the top of the screen. When I change the page or zoom in to a photo, nothing about the iPad’s performance is compromised, even if that song is heavily compressed. Music is playing, and my iPad doesn’t mind.

No other consumer electronics company has done this.

That’s a bold statement coming from a guy that uses Apple products almost exclusively, but I’ve been looking for a product like this for years. The iPod did this, but when you clicked a button on the device, it would show you the currently playing song. It was single-purpose, even if it did come with a way to view your calendars (only view, not change). Devices like my Palm Treo did this, but the music app would crash, and browsing the web would have a 50 percent cut in performance while playing music. Yes, it’s been four years, and the Treo was much slower with fewer resources, but Apple has set us on course to a point where our kids won’t have that feeling of, “I shouldn’t open my web browser because the music might skip.” For those of you who used the original iPhone extensively, music skipping was very common when hitting the phone with heavy tasks.

I didn’t see a huge change in how we interacted with technology until Apple came along with iOS and shook things up. The Mac and Windows experiences feel dated. There are power, usefulness and capabilities that iOS (and yes even Android devices) can’t do now, but it won’t be long before they can. In 2007, iPhone was cutting edge for having a tough screen that worked. These days, I can FaceTime with friends, download movies over the air, read the news as it happens, and always know the answer to what guy played in that movie within the time it would take to boot up the ole’ Mac and fire up Safari. Grab iPhone, slide to unlock, click Safari and search.

I don’t give Apple all of the credit, but this is TheAppleBlog, so it’s good to highlight everything Apple got right that set us in this direction. Who was going to change things and set us onto the next era of computing? Microsoft is still introducing product flops (ie. Microsoft Kin) and Google’s business model is to create and leverage technologies in order to target ads to you. I can’t think of another company other than Apple that’s continued to pioneer the technology experience. Cisco is a distant 4th, but it’s too busy powering the entire Internet to make consumer electronics. Sadly, Sony (c sne) has become more irrelevant as simply “expensive” and not as breakthrough as it was in the 90s. I still buy Sony TVs, but only because it’s Sony and not because it’s doing anything truly remarkable over Panasonic or Vizio.

Apple has set itself apart in the way it’s brought power to elegance — where the design of the software and form factor of the hardware fades away, and all you’re doing is sitting on a train, reading a news article while listening to a song. Of course, now that I think about it, that 3G connection to AT&T is ticking along as well. There was no application I had to pull up to initiate the connection (like on Mac OS or Windows 7), and there’s no thought to it. As soon as I leave the office, my Wi-Fi connection there drops and 3G starts. This kind of experience is something we all assume would be common in 2010 but you’d be surprised how many devices simply don’t do this in a way that the consumer can consume with no awareness of what’s going on behind the scenes.

I don’t know what it is but, with Apple technology, I feel the future. It’s not a stylus smartphone with a hardware keyboard; it’s not a 24″ tall tower with a big power button on the front; and it’s not a mouse with a cord attached and a floppy disk that makes this wretched click sound while reading and writing data. Apple doesn’t have any of that, and it’s chosen to integrated technologies into an experience that no other company has.

View full post on TheAppleBlog

(AP)

“American Idol” still hasn’t announced its replacement for Simon Cowell, and now it looks like it has two more seats to fill before it’s 10th season kicks off in the fall.

Ellen DeGeneres just confirmed that she will not be returning to the show when it kicks off it’s next talent search in September.

And now TMZ is reporting that Kara DioGuardi has been given the boot.

(Watch your back, Randy!)

With all of the openings, several big-name stars are being considered to host the most popular show on television.

Obama’s press secretary Robert Gibbs is even interested.

Here are some of the big names being bandied about.

View full post on Entertainment

By Angus MacSwan
The sentencing of Khmer Rouge torturer Kaing Guek Eav this week and the forthcoming trial of former leader Khieu Samphan by a United Nations-backed court has brought renewed attention to their murderous rule of Cambodia in the 1970s — and a certain amount of satisfaction in the “international community” for its role in seeing justice done.

But there was a time when you could meet Khmer Rouge officials at cocktail parties in Phnom Penh, with the drinks provided by the United Nations.

It was one consequence of a Faustian pact between the Khmer Rouge and the United States, Britain and other countries following the Pol Pot regime’s overthrow by Vietnamese troops in 1979.
The relationship illustrates the sometimes bizarre nature of Cold War politics and is one that today’s governments probably hope is forgotten.

I found myself next to Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot’s right hand man, at a party at the U.N. mission’s headquarters in Phnom Penh at the end of 1991. Standing behind him was Son Sen, who had run the Khmer Rouge’s torture apparatus during their “Killing Fields” rule from 1975-79, in which at least 1.5 million Cambodians had died.

They had just returned to Phnom Penh after years in jungle camps and friendly foreign capitals and were in the decrepit city as the representatitves of the Party of Democratic Kampuchea — as they prefered to be known — in a new national council set up under a peace accord aimed at ending decades of war.

How had the Khmer Rouge survived and prospered in the decade since their reign of terror was ended by the Vietnamese invasion?
Their main supporter was China — an enemy of both Vietnam and its backer the Soviet Union despite their shared communist beliefs. The United States was still smarting from its defeat in the Vietnam War and saw China as an indispensable regional ally with a bright future.

Thus a coalition government was formed, dominated by the Khmer Rouge and including two non-communist factions, even though they controlled hardly any territory other than border enclaves. Its nominal head was Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who actually spent most of his time in North Korea of all places, but despite this fig leaf the military muscle in the bush war was provided by the Khmer Rouge.

Throughout the 1980s, this body held Cambodia’s seat in the United Nations, supported by the United States, Britain and other European nations, China and pro-Western Asian countries. The Vietnamese-backed government — which included Khmer Rouge defectors — was recognised only by the Soviet bloc.

Denied international aid and trade, Phom Penh was one of the most forlorn places on earth as war raged in the Cambodian countryside.
Thailand played a crucial role in supporting the coalition and Thai officials got rich through timber and gems deals with the Khmer Rouge based in the border enclaves.
U.S. officials in Bangkok and Washington would play a game of smoke-and-mirrors when asked about Washington’s support for an alliance spearheaded by some of the 20th Century’s worst mass murderers.

Arms and other other aid only went to the non-communist groups, they said. The Khmer Rouge had changed and was now genuinely popular in some areas, they ventured. While the film “The Killing Fields” made many people aware of the horrors of Khmer Rouge rule, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told a British children’s TV show in 1988 “There’s a much, much reasonable grouping within that title, Khmer Rouge…who will have to play some part in the future
government.”
The British elite military unit the SAS were later revealed to have trained their fighters.

The guerrilla factions also ran the vast refugee camps on the Thai border, so the Khmer Rouge were able to keep tens of thousands of people in their grip with generous helpings of United Nations aid. With the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia in 1989 and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, a peace agreement was painstakingly hammered out.

All four parties joined the national council pending elections and a huge U.N. peacekeeping mission swept into the country.And so the Khmer Rouge came back to Phnom Penh.

Khieu Samphan was run out of town by an angry crowd at his first attempt to return in October 1991. A few months later, though he was back and looking relaxed.At the U.N. party, he was dressed in a neatly-pressed grey safari suit and looked well-manicured — quite different to the black pyjamasand checkered scarves of the iconic Khmer Rouge image. After a few pleasantaries, I asked him about their bloody rule. Nonplussed, he replied almost by rote that yes, some mistakes were made but that most of the accusations were just
propaganda. Cambodia’s real problem was Vietnam’s plan to annex
the country, he said with a smile.
With Son Sen lurking sinisterly in the background, I thought the conversation had probably run its course.

This accommodation with killers threw up many other surreal situations. A few months after the cocktail party encounter, I was in the town of Kompong Thom when Indonesian peacekeepers arrived to police the area. For some reason, they sang the old British army song “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” as they marched down the street.

A Khmer Rouge general, Men Ron, stood by the roadside, smiling as if this was the jolliest knees-up this side of the Emerald Isle. That night, he dined at a lakeside restaurant with a British envoy and an Australian general.
The next day, refugees were fleeing down the highway outside the city from Khmer Rouge attacks to the north.

An election to bring peace and democracy to Cambodia was held in 1993. The Khmer Rouge boycotted it and went back to war, but without the backing they previously enjoyed, they dwindled.
Son Sen was killed in 1997 in an internal power struggle and Pol Pot died the next year in mysterious circumstances. Khieu Samphan was arrested in 2007 and the next year was charged in court with crimes against humanity and war crimes.

I’ve not been back to Phnom Penh since 1993 but I’m told its a very different place, with bistros, night clubs and fast cars for the new rich elite. Its a favourite destination for Western youths on gap years.
The angy reaction from ordinary Cambodians to what they saw a light sentence for Kaing Guek Eav showed many of them still want atonement for the past. In some quarters though, the past will probably remain a closed chapter.

View full post on Global News Journal

Under my desk is a PowerMac G4, sporting dual 1.42 PowerPC processors and a whopping 512MB of RAM. When I acquired the old boy, it was running Tiger and had files scattered all over its hard drive. It had been used and abused, and desktop support had put it out to pasture. I saw it huddled forlornly in the corner of a co-workers cube, and knew I could put it back to work. All it needed was a little TLC.

Operating System Upgrade

The first thing I did was upgrade the operating system to Leopard. It’s too bad Apple decided to drop PowerPC support with Snow Leopard, but I can understand why it did. The move to Intel chips has been a phenomenal success for Apple, and I don’t think anyone can argue that it was the wrong thing to do. Thankfully, Leopard is pretty close to Snow Leopard. It’s close enough that I’m only missing a couple of features, and it has the same look and feel as a modern Mac. A lot of my favorite apps have dropped support for Tiger, but not too many have dropped support for 10.5 just yet.

Cleaning House

The next thing I did was clean house. Opening up the hard drive in Finder was an interesting look into how normal people use a Mac. There were aliases to nothing, a few shared folders, old disk images, and, of all things, Netscape Navigator (hello, what are you doing here?) in the root of the hard drive. People drop files everywhere. There was also an outdated version of Norton AV running…that got the axe pretty quickly. The scattered files reminded me of how neat and clean iOS is when compared with OS X. OS X didn’t seem to mind where the files were as much as I did though.

App Installation

With the filesystem cleaned up and the operating system upgraded, I set about finding my “must have” apps. I created an “Applications” folder in my home folder, and downloaded TextMate, Twitteriffic, OmniGraffle, CyberDuck, Yojimbo, CoRD, and NetNewsWire. I don’t run apps like Yojimbo or Twitteriffic in the same fashion on the G4 as I would on a MacBook. In the interest of saving RAM, I’ve found it best to close any background apps. When I need them, I launch the app, then quit it again when I’m done. The same goes for Mail and Safari, apps I’d normally leave running constantly on a newer machine.

Slow, Middle-Aged Champ

The PowerMac still runs like a champ, but a slower, more middle-aged champ. He’s not the thoroughbred he used to be; it takes a bit longer for some apps to start, and from time to time the dreaded pinwheel pops up for a few seconds, but nothing earth shattering. Unfortunately, there’s still a couple of Windows apps that I need to run, so I keep my Dell laptop on the side to run the latest version of Lotus Notes and VMware VSphere Client. It’s not the perfect setup, and I’ll be upgrading to a MacBook Pro to replace both of them soon, but it’s been fun finding out just how useful the older G4 can be. There’s very little I’m unable to do with it, and I think if I had more RAM, the system would be much, much faster.

The same setup I’ve got now can be had on eBay for less than $200, maybe even with a monitor to go with it. With a good Time Machine backup for peace of mind, and a little patience, a PowerMac G4 can still be a great day-to-day computer.

View full post on TheAppleBlog

The noise and commotion from one Gulf is drowning out activities in the other Gulf – the latter being the Persian Gulf.

A new chief executive has been appointed at BP, which is becoming more American by association with Bob Dudley now at the helm.

While clean up in the Gulf of Mexico and long-term solutions to cap the well dominate the agenda, there has been a tanker incident in the Straits of Hormuz, which raised some concerned eyebrows temporarily.

Maybe the "green light," which has been giving tankers unfettered passage of late, should be raised to amber as a sign of cautionary times ahead.

The tanker, "M. Star," owned and operated by Mitsui O.S.K. Lines of Japan had set sail off Das Island, Abu Dhabi and was headed to Japan with 270,000 tons of oil.

There was an explosion on board, the cause of which there are at least two explanations for. A crew member described seeing a flash before the explosion, leading a spokesperson for the company to say it could have been an attack.

A captain at the Port of Fujairah in the UAE said the tanker was exposed to a high wave attack as a result of an earthquake in Southern Iran over the previous weekend. After further inspection, port officials edged away from that cause.

The U.S. 5th Fleet is investigating the incident, and I am sure U.S. Central Command in Qatar will also be on higher alert, even if this was a false alarm.

I spent some time during the first Gulf War covering this main artery of energy transport. From up in the air, there are times when the Straits appear like a crowded highway for tankers.

Fifteen tankers a day, on average, pass through the Straits, handling about 17 million barrels – or 20 percent of the world’s daily crude demand. Japan is particularly dependent on the artery, with 75 percent of its supplies coming from the Gulf.

Since more than 40 percent of the proven reserves sit in countries that border the Persian Gulf: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, the UAE and Oman, the International Energy Agency believes the oil passing through the Straits will double by 2020.

This plays right into the hands of the current leader in Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has threatened to wreak havoc if economic sanctions hold back his ability to develop the energy sector.

The country’s Revolutionary Guard conducted naval exercises at the end of April to underscore the point. Iran sits atop the third largest proven oil and gas reserves and the majority of a huge natural gas field, which is shared with Qatar. It is fair to note that Qatar cannot produce energy at its state of the art LNG facility fast enough, while Iran suffers from a lack of investment and technical expertise on its side of the field.

All this discussion triggers memories of the so-called “tanker attacks” in the mid-1980s when Iran and Iraq planted sea mines to not only attack each other during their eight-year war, but to keep the energy passage on tenterhooks. Similar security challenges persisted during the Gulf War, creating wild gyrations in energy markets.

Not to be alarmist, but those I have recently spoken with in the business are not taking anything for granted. They remain concerned about the rhetoric coming out of Iran and the fact it was raised to a new level after the vote for European Union sanctions, which includes actions to target Iran’s energy sector.

At this stage, the incident of the M. Star may be an act of Mother Nature and the tanker can move on its merry way after minor repairs. That would be a simple ending to this story. But the Straits of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf are too complex for that.

Bring in Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to add an interesting plot twist. While hosting his British counterpart David Cameron in Ankara, Erdogan kept to the line that he prefers a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear plans.

Turkey cast a vote against U.N. sanctions and is not of course a supporter of stricter measures from Brussels. Let’s not forget two crucial elements that may influence his decision: the exhaustive debate over Turkey’s application to the E.U. and the country’s larger than life role in oil and natural gas distribution for Europe.

I invite you to call up a few of the maps that include oil and gas pipelines. Those arteries of energy seem to outnumber the major truck routes in the country.

Turkey’s emboldened stance comes after a few years of active diplomacy by the leader whose country straddles East and West. He has decided to take his chips to the East, where the role of one of the region’s most populated countries is more appreciated.

Against this backdrop there remain tensions in Gaza, re-emerging frictions in Lebanon and yes, Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

View full post on Business 360