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IN THIS ISSUE
Dust to dust
The KGB’s war
Back talk
August 23, 2024
Puzzles and mysteries

Good morning,


In their book Radical Uncertainty, Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future, economist John Kay and former Governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King, argue that mistaking complex mysteries, which cannot be solved by quantification of probabilities, for puzzles, which have unambiguously right and wrong answers, make the problems worse. What are puzzles and mysteries?


They write: “Greg Treverton, chairman of President Obama’s National Intelligence Council and for many years a senior figure in the US intelligence community, stressed the difference between ‘puzzles and mysteries’. A puzzle has well-defined rules and a single solution, and we know when we have reached that solution. Puzzles deliver the satisfaction of a clear-cut task and a correct answer. Even when you can’t find the right answer, you know it exists. Puzzles can be solved; they have answers. But the solutions may be difficult to find. Economists have thrived on “the difficulty of solving complex models of the economy precisely because they have been trained to tackle well-defined problems which have an answer. And (Nobel) prizes are awarded to those who solve the most difficult puzzles.


Mysteries offer no such clarity of definition, and no objectively correct solution: they are imbued with vagueness and indeterminacy. We approach mysteries by asking ‘What is going on here?’, and recognise that even afterwards our understanding is likely to be only partial. They provide none of the comfort and pleasure of reaching the ‘right’ answer. Columbus thought he had landed in Asia. And even today, ‘What was going on here?’ in the global financial crisis, or during bin Laden’s sojourn in Pakistan, is hotly contested. What will be the future of the Middle East? Or the development of mobile computing, or the automobile industry? Will banks as we know them survive? What is the future of capitalism, or democracy? A mystery cannot be solved as a crossword puzzle can; it can only be framed, by identifying the critical factors and applying some sense of how these factors have interacted in the past and might interact in the present or future.  Puzzles may be more fun, but in our real lives the world increasingly offers us mysteries — either because the outcome is unknowable or because the issue itself is ill defined.”


Have a great day!

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Dust to dust

One of the most explosive stories we’ve read appears in The Middle East Eye. It begins with the search for a remote mausoleum in Aurangabad by Imran Mulla. Why would anyone do that? Because they were looking for the resting place of the exiled Caliph Abdulmecid II. It is possible he settled down in India and was biding time to make his moves from Hyderabad. Turns out, he was. And there’s one heck of a story that follows. 


“In this bombshell dispatch, Lothian disclosed to his superiors in Delhi that he had discovered the nizam was withholding information from the British about the late caliph’s will. He reported that the president of the nizam’s executive council had told him that Abdulmecid, as one of his final wishes, had asked to be buried in Hyderabad. 


There was more: Lothian also wrote that the nizam had omitted to mention that, in the will, Abdulmecid named his grandson Mukarram Jah as successor to the caliphate.


This was incredible: it suggested that the deposed caliph had privately planned to resurrect the Ottoman caliphate in the Indian subcontinent through his grandson — and that the nizam, the world’s richest man, was in agreement.


The British government took no action, which is not surprising: London expected to pull out of India imminently and did so less than three years later. On 15 August 1947, Hyderabad declared its independence on the same day as the rest of India. The new republic refused to accept the nizam controlling a giant state in the middle of its territory and eventually invaded.


But what if Partition had not occurred, and India instead became a federation — an option that was on the table as late as 1946? Hyderabad could plausibly have become an autonomous and modernising princely state.


Prince Mukarram Jah, as nizam, could have claimed the caliphate as his birthright, with a huge impact on global politics, including the potential to transform the Islamic world.


A caliphate in the Indian subcontinent might have risked religious conflict. But the nizam would not rule outside Hyderabad, and Asaf Jahi rule usually amounted to tolerant pluralism.


An Indian caliphate could have made Hyderabad a focal point of the Islamic world, enhancing the Indian subcontinent’s importance to Muslims. But all that never happened.


By now I was keen for any detail, however small, about the events of decades ago. And then in January 2024, I saw it in the Hyderabadi press: a report about Imam ul-Mulk IV, Nawab Syed Ahmed Khan (the word "nawab" indicates a hereditary lord), who said he possessed a deed signed by Caliph Abdulmecid.


I contacted Syed Ahmed Khan: he had read one of my previous articles, which referenced the British Library letter and told some of the story. Did I want to come to India, at the invitation of his family, to research further?”

     
The KGB’s war

Old habits die hard. Just when we had gotten used to the KGB getting sidelined and an entire generation growing up imagining the KGB is a spent force, it is in the limelight. 


“Thanks to recent discoveries in the Czech Security Service Archive, we are now able to reconstruct the doctrine that informed the Soviet Bloc’s way of sabotage for much of the 20th century and draw parallels with the myriad suspected sabotage attacks we have seen in Europe and the United States since the Russian invasion of Ukraine… 


According to the doctrine that the KGB shared with their Czechoslovak counterparts in January 1963, the objectives of sabotage operations were threefold. They were to be deployed against the adversary to disrupt policies and military plans seen as antagonistic to Moscow’s interests. In an ideal scenario, sabotage operations would demoralize the government’s resolve to pursue these policies or undermine public support for them. The Kremlin also saw sabotage as an effective instrument to undermine the unity of the enemy camp. On the one hand, Soviet Bloc spymasters hoped to sow discord among national political parties. On the other, they also thought it a powerful tool to generate strife within NATO — French-American, Greek-Turkish, and British-German tensions were to be exploited and amplified. Finally, as the KGB spymasters told their allies, on a tactical level, sabotage was considered an effective way to cause economic harm or undermine military capability — an objective particularly crucial during times of escalation or all-out war.


While all adversarial states were fair game, at the same meeting in 1962, Moscow encouraged its partners to focus on countries that hosted institutions representing Western power, such as Belgium where NATO sported its headquarters and military command. France and Germany were singled out as top targets due to their perceived pivotal roles in any potential Western-led war. If other states were deemed vital to Western war strategy, they would also be added to the list. With harder or global targets, such as the United States, Moscow’s spies suggested hitting their assets elsewhere — ideally in Latin America.”

     
Back talk
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