HEADLINES OVER THE HORIZON

[Dr. Jai Maharaj]

Headlines Over the Horizon

The Atlantic Monthly
July-August 2003

Analysts at the RAND Corporation lay
out ten international-security developments
that aren't getting the attention they deserve

The Wall

Whenever hopes for peace between Israelis and
Palestinians rise, a new surge of bloodshed extinguishes
them. Palestinian suicide bombings provoke Israeli
military attacks, which provoke more suicide bombings,
which provoke more military attacks. Now the Israelis are
trying to stop the violence by building a 225-mile wall--
variously consisting of concrete, barbed wire, electronic
fencing, motion detectors, and trenches -- that will
separate the Jewish state from the West Bank. It will be
completed this year and will profoundly change the
geographical and political landscape of the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict.

The wall is the most ambitious attempt by Israelis to
reclaim the relative quiet they enjoyed before the second
intifada, which began in September of 2000 and has since
subjected Israel to a relentless wave of suicide
terrorism. The logic behind the wall is unassailable.
Israel's other borders (with Lebanon, Syria, Jordan,
Egypt, and Gaza) are fairly well protected; none has the
security problems with terrorist infiltrators that exist
on the frontier with the West Bank. The Gaza Strip, for
example, was a major departure point for Palestinian
terrorist strikes into Israel before it was fenced off,
in 1994. Since the current intifada began, no Palestinian
suicide bomber has entered Israel from Gaza.

Polls show that at least 70 percent of Israelis support
physical separation from the West Bank. However, many of
the 200,000 Jewish settlers who live there oppose the
wall, for a simple reason: once it is finished, the
Israeli army will no longer provide the level of
protection settlers currently enjoy. Few settlers are
likely to want to remain outside the wall, given their
increased vulnerability to attack; most will probably
move back to Israel. Thus the wall could spell the death
of the attempt to settle Greater Israel, which
encompasses the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria and
includes the West Bank. It will also create a de facto
international border.

The idea of the wall also makes many Palestinians
unhappy, because it will not exactly follow the Green
Line -- Israel's pre-1967 border with the West Bank.
Instead it will reach into the West Bank to embrace some
nearby Jewish settlements. Palestinians consider this a
land grab. In addition, the wall will further weaken the
already severely damaged Palestinian economy in the short
run, since entry into Israel will be more difficult. As
Palestinians are forced to turn elsewhere for jobs and
income, however, the impetus for a more self-reliant and
robust Palestinian economy could emerge.

But the wall could also deepen Palestinian rage and
enmity, of course, prompting escalated mortar and ground-
to-ground missile attacks against targets inside Israel.
Hamas has already launched such attacks from the Gaza
Strip, and it may now do so from the West Bank. The wall
could also prompt further attacks on Israelis overseas,
like the suicide bombing last November of a Mombasa hotel
filled with Israeli tourists and the accompanying attempt
to shoot down an Israeli chartered plane.

- Bruce Hoffman

A Shrinking Russia

The population of Russia is getting smaller and older. In
1992 the country's population was estimated at 148
million; today the number is 145 million. That's an
absolute decline greater than that in any other nation
during the past decade -- and some analysts predict that
the number of people in Russia will drop below 100
million by 2050. The number of Russians aged fifteen to
twenty-four, though temporarily growing because of high
birth rates in the 1980s, may shrink by nearly half over
the next fifteen years, because of low birth rates in the
1990s. This will greatly strain a country that is already
struggling to cope with a daunting array of security
challenges, including controlling the world's longest
borders and largest land mass, maintaining the world's
largest nuclear arsenal, and reining in one of the
world's most serious weapons-proliferation problems.

Sidebar begins

From the archives:

"Dead Souls" (January 1999)

A prominent demographer warns that the spread of
tuberculosis and AIDS in Russia will soon make Western
hand-wringing over the pace of Russian "economic
reform" seem quaint. By Murray Feshbach

Sidebar ends

The security implications of this demographic change
become clear when one examines its effect on Russia's
military, police, border guards, and other security
forces, which in coming years won't be able to fill their
ranks. And more is at issue than a simple decline in
numbers. Young Russian men, the population from which the
military and other security agencies draw most of their
personnel, are today plagued with health problems, among
them alcoholism (a long-standing problem), tuberculosis
(a returning scourge), and HIV/AIDS (a rapidly emerging
new epidemic). The mortality rate among Russian men aged
fifteen to twenty-four nearly doubled in the 1990s and is
now almost three times that among American men of the
same age. The rate of death from suicide, one of the
leading killers of young Russian men today, is more than
three times that for young American men. And many young
Russians who are fit for (ostensibly compulsory) military
service bribe their way out of it, leaving a force even
less healthy than the military-age population as a whole.

Unlike many European states that also have shrinking
populations of young people, Russia isn't currently in a
position to compensate for a loss of manpower by putting
more money or technology into its military and other
security organs, because the country's economy and
scientific sectors have suffered considerably during the
past decade. And as the country's population ages,
burgeoning pension obligations will drain away resources
that could otherwise have been devoted to security.
Although immigration might mitigate some of the
population loss and help to fill the ranks, the trend is
not encouraging: immigration has plummeted from more than
1.2 million in 1994 to fewer than 185,000 in 2002. Russia
could try to expand its military ranks, at least, by
relying more on women soldiers, but the military's
attitude toward women is hostile in many ways, and
cultural adjustments simply will not come quickly.

Without enough manpower to police its extensive borders
and to respond effectively to internal and external
security problems, Russia could well lose its battles
against smuggling, terrorism, and weapons proliferation
-- all threats that pose dangers far beyond Russia's
borders.

- Julie Davanzo, Olga Oliker, & Clifford Grammich

The Hindu-Muslim Divide

A defining element of Indian politics since independence
has been a commitment to secularism. That commitment is
now at risk from an aggressive brand of Hindu nationalism
that equates Indian national identity with Hindu
religious identity. The country's radical nationalists
view the secular political system as a threat to Hindu
identity, largely because of the power it offers India's
140 million Muslims. Weakening, or even abolishing, the
secular state has therefore become part of the radical-
nationalist agenda. This may force Indian Muslims --
traditionally moderate and supportive of the secular
state, even on the sensitive matter of Kashmir -- to
shift their allegiance from the state to some sort of
larger international Islamic movement, as many Muslims
have done in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Such a
radicalization of religious identities is a matter of
serious concern in a nation of a billion people that
possesses the world's seventh largest nuclear arsenal and
has had troubled relations with its populous and nuclear-
armed Muslim neighbor, Pakistan.

Radical Hindu nationalism is already a dominant force in
mainstream Indian politics. A Hindu nationalist party,
the BJP, has led the country's coalition government for
five years, and extremist Hindu organizations with
explicitly anti-Muslim sentiments have heavily influenced
the party's agenda. Strife between Hindus and Muslims has
been the predictable result. Last year a group of Muslims
burned a train full of nationalist Hindus in the state of
Gujarat; the attack killed fifty-eight people and led to
Hindu reprisals that killed about 2,000 Muslims. An
Indian tribunal investigating the massacres found that
Hindu nationalist groups had methodically targeted Muslim
homes and shops. It even charged that one important
group, the VHP, had recruited and trained militants for
the violence, and had provided them with computer
printouts of names and addresses. Local and national
security forces failed to respond adequately to the
crisis as it unfolded: initially the state police did not
intervene, and the central government only belatedly sent
troops to Gujarat to restore order. Although thousands of
extremist Hindus were involved in the violence, few were
arrested. On the whole, the Gujarat episode has left
Indian Muslims feeling neglected by the government.

The radicalization of India's Hindus and Muslims poses
obvious domestic-security challenges. According to recent
reports, Muslim militants based in Kashmir have been
working with Pakistani groups to target the VHP and other
groups in retaliation for the massacre in Gujarat.
Militant Hindu groups have vowed to destroy Muslim
mosques throughout India, and to build temples in their
place.

- Rollie Lal

AIDS and African Armies

The devastating impact of the AIDS pandemic in Africa is
well known. According to the United Nations, some 28
million people in sub-Saharan Africa now live with
HIV/AIDS, and in some countries the rate of HIV infection
approaches 40 percent of the adult population. AIDS
claimed more than 900,000 lives in southern Africa during
2001, and has left more than three million children
without one or both parents. The strain on Africa's
social fabric is hard to overestimate, and the problem is
finally getting widespread attention -- beyond just the
medical community. In January of 2000 the U.S. National
Intelligence Council issued its first-ever national
intelligence estimate on the global impact of infectious
diseases, in which the HIV/AIDS pandemic was identified
as a serious threat to U.S. national security.

One little-noted aspect of this threat will become
increasingly clear in the decades ahead: AIDS is
decimating the ranks of African armed forces. A 2000
survey by the Civil-Military Alliance to Combat HIV and
AIDS noted that by the mid-1990s several African defense
ministries were reporting significant rates of HIV
infection among their armed forces. Today the militaries
hardest hit by HIV/AIDS infections include those of
Zimbabwe (with a 50 percent infection rate), Angola (40
to 60 percent), Tanzania (15 to 30 percent), Congo-
Brazzaville (10 to 25 percent), Côte d'Ivoire (10 to 20
percent), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (40 to 60
percent), Eritrea (10 percent), and Nigeria (10 to 20
percent). In South Africa the pandemic has reached
biblical proportions, with HIV-infection rates in some
units of the South African National Defence Force --
which happens to be the biggest peacekeeping-capable
military in southern Africa -- reaching as high as 90
percent. The rate of HIV infection, like the rates of
infection for other sexually transmitted diseases, is two
to five times as prevalent in African armies as in
corresponding civilian populations. And the soldiers
themselves -- often prone to sexual promiscuity and
illicit drug use -- are a major factor in the spread of
the virus, both domestically and internationally. Many of
the African countries with the greatest prevalence of HIV
infection are engaged in conflict of one kind or another,
and rape is often a tactic or a byproduct of war.

As the pandemic claims more lives, African militaries
will lose the manpower they need to carry out their
missions. It will deplete many armies' officer corps,
leading to a loss of command capacity, and will drain
defense budgets, as unprecedented resources are channeled
to the care of infected service members. The effects of
the pandemic on African armed forces are already
profound. In 1999, for example, when members of numerous
southern African militaries came together for a
peacekeeping exercise known as Operation Blue Crane, more
than 30 percent of the South African participants turned
out to be medically unfit for deployment, primarily
because of HIV infection.

African armies are often seen as problems, not as forces
for good, but in many cases only they have been able to
ensure national and regional stability. Many countries,
with their armies dramatically weakened by AIDS, are
likely to lose control over national security,
territorial integrity, and public order.

- Kevin A. O'Brien

The Tehran-New Delhi Axis

Iran, with its Islamic regime, seems a strange ally of
India, a predominantly Hindu democracy. But the two
nations have been overcoming past antagonisms and
developing closer ties that will affect not just
Southwest Asia and the Middle East but also the United
States. Their new relationship could powerfully influence
such important matters as the flow of energy resources,
regional and worldwide efforts to combat terrorism, and
political developments in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and
other states in Central Asia. The consequences will not
always suit U.S. interests.

Before the Islamic revolution, in 1979, Iran's ties with
the West greatly vexed India, which had championed the
non-aligned movement. Those concerns disappeared after
the revolution, of course, but were soon replaced by
concerns about Iran's support of Kashmiri aspirations and
its efforts to spread Islamic revolution to other Persian
Gulf states. Nevertheless, after the Cold War ended, Iran
and India discovered that they shared a stake in checking
U.S. global power, opposing the Taliban in Afghanistan,
fighting narcotics trafficking in Asia, and developing
mutually beneficial energy options.

More recently New Delhi and Tehran have found common
ground in the reconstruction of Afghanistan and in the
preservation of Pakistan as a functioning state (because
its collapse would pose even more of a threat to India
than its survival). The two have also recognized that
closer ties would help each nation meet important needs
of its own: for Iran, India could be a source of
technical expertise, industrial goods, and foreign
investment; for India, Iran could be a much needed
additional source of energy and could serve as a gateway
to Central Asia (which India seeks in order to develop
new markets) and as a new military flank against
Pakistan. In the realm of domestic politics, too, India
has strong reasons for wanting improved relations with
Iran. As India witnesses a surge in Hindu nationalist
politics and sentiment, it needs to signal to its
increasingly marginalized and disaffected Muslim
population (the second largest in the world) that it has
Muslim interests in mind.

The most important milestone in the development of Indo-
Iranian ties came this past January, when Iran's
President Mohammad Khatami visited New Delhi as the chief
guest for the Indian Republic Day parade -- an honor
reserved for the closest friends of India. During the
visit Khatami and India's Prime Minister Atal Bihari
Vajpayee signed an accord that focuses on economic,
scientific, and technological ties between the two
countries and that also provides a framework within which
to explore a defense relationship. This new relationship
began to take shape in March, in a small-scale naval
exercise that Indian diplomats refer to as a "port call."
Meanwhile, Iran seeks to buy arms and spare parts from
India, which is steadily acquiring the capacity to
manufacture a wide array of Russian military hardware,
and India sees Iran as a major buyer that could help to
defray the costs of this manufacturing program.

- C. Christine Fair

Anti-Satellite Attack

Within the next five years not only Russia and China but
also Pakistan, North Korea, and even Iran may acquire the
ability to carry out a nuclear attack against satellites.
Launching such an attack would be much simpler
technically than launching a nuclear attack against a
distant city; only a primitive nuclear program and basic
missile technology are required. And as the importance of
satellites grows, so will the destructive potential of
such an attack, adding a significant new dimension to the
politics of preventing nuclear war.

An anti-satellite attack could be mounted in a variety of
ways, but a high-altitude nuclear detonation would create
by far the most extensive effects. It would destroy
satellites near the detonation point, of course; but,
more significant, it would also expand and intensify the
power of the Van Allen radiation belts, clouds of high-
energy particles that encircle Earth. Satellites passing
through the region after a nuclear attack -- among them
hundreds of low-orbiting communications, weather,
imaging, and scientific satellites, including the
International Space Station and the Hubble space
telescope -- would be subjected to greatly increased
levels of radiation, against which civil and commercial
systems are not protected. (The satellites of the Global
Positioning System are not nuclear-hardened either -- but
they operate in higher, less vulnerable orbits.) Such
radiation would progressively degrade the satellites'
solar panels and onboard electronic systems, and within
months, or even weeks, after a nuclear explosion every
satellite orbiting at the affected altitudes -- aside
from a few military systems that are protected against
nuclear attack -- could be disabled. It would take many
months for the excess radiation trapped in the Van Allen
belts to dissipate.

A nuclear anti-satellite attack would do the most harm to
the United States, which owns most of the more than 250
satellites that might be affected, and which depends more
than any other country on space systems. Such an attack
would substantially damage the U.S. and world economies
(replacing the ruined satellites could cost tens of
billions of dollars, in addition to the costs of losing
their services) and would seriously inconvenience the
U.S. military, which relies heavily on civil and
commercial satellites for functions such as
communications and weather forecasting. Although no
nation is likely to attack satellites as a short-term
military strategy (the full effects would take too long
to accumulate), someone might well consider using the
tactic as a deterrent, as a coercive threat, or to strike
a painful blow against the United States and its allies
without the difficulties or obvious risks of attacking a
target on American soil.

- Karl P. Mueller & Elwyn D. Harris

Defense-Industry Goliaths

In recent decades so many U.S. defense contractors have
merged or been taken over that a few giant companies now
dominate the industry. Initially companies chose to
combine forces, to cope with the increasing complexity of
new technologies and weapons systems; but the trend
intensified significantly after the end of the Cold War,
when Washington curtailed defense procurement and
formally endorsed consolidation as a way to cut costs.
The Pentagon today deals with a dramatically limited
number of firms to research and develop new systems for
defense, and it is almost certainly not giving those
firms enough work to sustain their teams of engineers and
managers. The consolidation of the defense industry has
been so drastic, in fact, that the U.S. military -- which
must now be able not only to prevail in battle but also
to do so quickly and with minimum loss of life -- could
see its vast technological superiority erode.

Virtually all major classes of defense equipment,
including surface ships, armored vehicles, and
helicopters, are threatened by consolidation. But nowhere
is the threat more apparent than in the case of tactical
aircraft systems. In the 1950s at least eleven firms had
the engineering know-how and experience to design
military aircraft for the Navy and the Air Force. More
than forty different designs reached the flight-test
stage during that decade -- an average of roughly four
per company. Keen intercompany competition provided the
military with a rich menu of choices and the defense
industry with a wealth of design and engineering
experience. Today only three American companies --
Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman -- are
capable of leading the design of a manned military
aircraft, and major contracts for which they can compete
will emerge only once every other decade or so. For
perhaps the first time the U.S. military is relying on
only one prime contractor to design and build its new
tactical fighters: Lockheed Martin, an amalgamation of
more than a dozen former major aerospace companies, is
developing the F-22 and the F-35. If either program runs
into trouble (and few programs of comparable ambition and
complexity escape it), the Pentagon's fallback options
will be scarce.

- Michael Rich, John Birkler, & Mark Lorell

The Carrier Shortage

As the recent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan
demonstrated, the United States relies more than ever on
aircraft carriers to meet its military and foreign-policy
objectives. The advantages of aircraft carriers are
obvious: they can quickly move large air forces and their
support to distant theaters of war; they can respond
rapidly with tremendous firepower to changing tactical
situations; they can support several missions at once,
with a great number of flights per day; and deploying
them in international waters requires no negotiations
with other nations. But the United States has no plans to
expand its fleet of aircraft carriers, which numbers
twelve, four of them dating back to the 1960s. (Current
plans call for one carrier to be replaced about every
four or five years during the coming several decades.)
And even if the U.S. government decided tomorrow to add
three carriers to the fleet, as the Navy has argued it
should, more than a decade would pass before they would
all be in service.

The United States has by far the largest fleet of
aircraft carriers in the world; the United Kingdom
operates three carriers, and Brazil, France, India,
Italy, Russia, Spain, and Thailand each operate one. But
the numbers are somewhat misleading, because a carrier
spends less than a third of its life in actual
deployment; crew training, maintenance, and overhaul take
up the rest. During the recent Iraq war only eight of the
twelve U.S. carriers were deployable; five played
important roles in the conflict, leaving only three
available for action elsewhere. Simply keeping even those
eight carriers deployable required that maintenance and
crew-rotation plans be deferred -- something that can't
be done indefinitely. If a nuclear standoff with North
Korea had escalated to war, or if Israel, Japan, or
Taiwan had required U.S. military assistance, or even if
the United States had simply needed to project power into
the Indian Ocean or the Philippine Sea, taking adequate
action would have been difficult.

Can the United States afford a fifteen-carrier fleet? The
price would be impressive: each carrier would cost around
$6 billion to build; operation and support for each one
could be expected to cost several hundred million dollars
a year. But considering the international military and
security challenges that the United States is likely to
face in the years and decades ahead, twelve carriers may
simply not be enough.

- John Birkler & John Schank

The Indus Water Fight

India and Pakistan have a long history of conflict: they
have fought three limited territorial wars (in 1947,
1965, and 1999); a larger war (in 1971); and a protracted
proxy war (since 1989) over the disputed Kashmir region.
Now they are embroiled in a high-stakes dispute over
water, an issue on which they had managed to cooperate
for years. If it is not resolved, it could become a
serious new source of conflict.

The dispute has its roots in the 1947 partition that
split Pakistan from India. Pakistan received most of the
western Punjab region, which was irrigated by canals that
used water from the Indus River system. (The Indus River
originates in western Tibet, flows through China and the
Indian-held portion of Kashmir, and then turns south into
Pakistan.) At the time of partition Sikh and Hindu
farmers living in predominantly Muslim areas fled to the
Indian-controlled eastern Punjab, which was relatively
dry and had few canals; to address their water needs
India began, in 1950, to build a canal system that
diverted some of the flow from Pakistan. Eventually the
World Bank and the United States brokered the Indus Water
Treaty of 1960, which stipulated that India would control
the eastern rivers of the Indus River system, with the
remaining waters going to Pakistan. Both sides were
satisfied with the treaty, possibly because it required
little interaction, but it has come under increasing
strain. Aquifers are being depleted, water tables are
falling, waterways are severely polluted, and soils are
becoming acutely saline from the overuse of underground
water supplies. Yet both countries must not only maintain
a supply of food and potable water for their populations
but also develop the hydroelectric potential of the river
system that runs through the borderlands.

In December of 2001, following the terrorist attack on
the Indian Parliament (which precipitated an extensive
Indian military buildup along the Pakistani border),
India openly raised the possibility of revoking the
treaty, as part of a strategy of coercive diplomacy with
Pakistan. The Indian Cabinet Committee on Security
identified the cutting of a major water supply as a
threat to use against Pakistan. For its part, Pakistan
began to argue that India had already effectively
suspended the treaty that same month, when the Indian
commissioner for the treaty severed all contact with his
Pakistani counterpart and canceled a visit by Pakistani
engineers.

Allowed to fester, the dispute over the Indus Water
Treaty could fundamentally transform the Kashmir
conflict, already one of the major threats to regional
stability. Pakistani militants now operate in Kashmir;
India has taken aggressive action against them; and
demands are growing within India for a war against
Pakistan to stop the proxy war. The Indus dispute may end
up being the crisis that finally makes that pressure too
much to contain.

- C. Christine Fair

Urban Warfare

Future adversaries of the United States will not want to
fight battles on open terrain, where their forces and
equipment will be relatively easy for American forces to
find and destroy. The world's population is increasingly
migrating toward ever larger cities, and finding and
fighting a determined enemy in these new urban
environments -- characterized by dense civilian
populations, complex indoor spaces, "canyons" between
buildings, and subterranean mazes of sewers and other
infrastructure -- will be very difficult. Urban warfare
is not new, of course; often it has been the hinge point
of a conflict (consider Stalingrad in World War II and
Mogadishu in 1993). It has always been challenging and
costly. Yet we will certainly be seeing more of it.

Defense planners are now addressing this challenge,
researching and developing new technologies, systems, and
concepts that will render the urban battlefield as
transparent as possible. One example is micro-air
vehicles. Six inches wide or less, these could be carried
in a soldier's backpack and would provide real-time video
information about a situation by flying over it or
"perching and staring" at it; the vehicles would be
controlled by hand-held devices that would also receive
and display the images being sent back. Researchers are
also working on inexpensive micro-robot scouts that could
one day carry visual, auditory, chemical, and other
sensors from building to building.

Another possibility is "smart dust" -- tiny, cheap
electromechanical sensors that could be spread through an
enemy area to collect raw data on motion, sound, heat,
and magnetic fields. Such devices would use lasers,
micro-mirrors, and other methods to feed a hand-held
device that soldiers could consult to monitor the
battlefield from afar. Under consideration, too, are
robotic insects that could use flapping-wing flight to
carry similar sensors into, or even collect samples from,
hostile areas both indoors and out. Researchers are also
looking into how information might be collected from
real-life insect populations and used to map threats from
chemical and biological agents. Bees, whose bodies
collect airborne bacterial spores during flight,
naturally search wide areas and can be examined for
dangerous spores on return to their hive. Indigenous
insects can also be lured and trapped to identify local
environmental pathogens.

Successfully developing such systems will take years or
even decades, but many have already been shown to be
feasible.

- Eugene C. Gritton & Philip S. Antón

What do you think?
Discuss this article in Post & Riposte.
http://www.theatlantic.com/pr/

The authors are all employed by the RAND Corporation.
Philip S. Antón is a senior information scientist. John
Birkler is a senior policy analyst. Julie DaVanzo is the
director of the Population Matters project. C. Christine
Fair is an associate political scientist. Clifford
Grammich is a member of the Research Communications
Group. Eugene C. Gritton is the director of the
Acquisition and Technology Policy Center at RAND's
National Defense Research Institute. Elwyn D. Harris is a
senior policy researcher. Bruce Hoffman is the director
of the Washington, D.C., office. Rollie Lal is an
associate political scientist. Mark Lorell is a senior
political scientist. Karl P. Mueller is an associate
political scientist. Kevin A. O'Brien is a senior policy
analyst with RAND Europe. Olga Oliker is an associate
political scientist. Michael Rich is the executive vice-
president. John Schank is a senior operations research
analyst.

The Atlantic Monthly;
July/August 2003;
Headlines Over the Horizon;
Volume 292, No. 1; 84-90.

Source - http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/07/rand.htm

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There are some interesting links in the original article
that I edited out, so you might want to look at the
source too.

Posted on Friday, June 27, 2003 by Stultis

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End of forwarded messages

Jai Maharaj
http://www.mantra.com/jai
Om Shanti

Panchaang for 28 Jyeshtth 5104, Friday, June 27, 2003:

Shubhanu Nama Samvatsare Dakshinaya Nartana Ritau
Mithun Mase Krishna Pakshe Shukr Vasara Yuktayam
Rohini-Mrgashir Nakshatr Shool-Ganda Yog
Vishti Karan Chaturdashi Yam Tithau

Hindu Holocaust Museum
http://www.mantra.com/holocaust

Hindu life, principles, spirituality and philosophy
http://www.hindu.org
http://www.hindunet.org

The truth about Islam and Muslims
http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate

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