India's reputation as a harrying and difficult travel destination is basically legendary, but I'm pretty sure that I've managed to take it to a new extreme in my oh-so-characteristic way.  So let me tell you the story of the past few days.  Well, I was staying with my friend Chintan in Kathmandu, meeting up with lots of people from home who were on their way to Tibet, waiting for my visa to come through.  Once I got my visa, I decided to head on down to India and since it's hotter than sun itself here right now, I figured I should just fast-track it up north back to the mountains where the air is a bit cooler.  So, I hop on a bus bound for the border (which I am proud to say I got for local price even though the bastard bookers wanted to charge me 30% more.  This bus ride used to be downright legendary - dirt roads slinging themselves around 1000 ft chasms with only two pairs of 30-year old tires and a driver hopped up on betel nuts to keep you on it.  They used to say that you should ride on the top of the bus so that, if it suddenly decideds to join the National Nepalese Diving Team, you would have a change to jump off that bandwagon.  Well, now the roads are paved and have been widened, so the safety record has improved, but thanks to the new infrastructure, so have the speed records.  I found my stomach somewhere between my right ear and my left nostril on at least seven different occasions (usually I pay for that kind of ride at Six Flags!).

But anyways, so I made it down to the border after a brief daytrip to Buddha's birthplace at Lumbini, and I was trying to find transport to Varanasi.  The touts were out in full force, so I had my Advanced Anti-Tout Multiweapons Defense System engaged.  So, again, I got local price down to Varanasi.  The downside is that when I have AATMWDS engaged, my vision becomes restricted and I didn't pay any attention to the money changers that I needed to get rid of my Nepali rupees.  So now, I find myself in Varanasi trying to change Nepalese currency and they're offering me a rate by which 30% of the value of the money just disappears.  So now I'm sitting on 50 bucks worth of toilet paper (in addition to the 70 bucks I got jacked from me on my trek in Nepal). 

If the tenacity of India's touts is famous, then the virulence of its food is downright infamous.  Thus, since stomach problems are a hallmark of any trip to India, I am pleased to say that the instant I put foot in India, this experience was mine to be had.  I think I stepped on a mango seed when I was crossing the border, and the bacteria must have seeped through my shoe and crawled up my leg (waving enthusiastically at the beads of sweat headed the other way).  Thankfully I had a kind host with a five star bathroom and twenty dollars to change in Varanasi.

So now I need to cross a couple thousand K of space to make it up north.  Indian trains get booked like months in advance, and I can barely decide what color underwear to wear today, much less where I'm going to be in a few days.  So I'm stuck in second class unreserved the whole way, sweating my ass off, dozing off briefly only to wake up to the pungent odor of a hundred similarly sweaty Indians mixed with baby puke.  With a stomach that  could be the star atraction at any rodeo.  After a while, I decided to whip out my thermarest and set up shop in the luggage racks overhead. 

Ok, here's the thing about Indians.  They love to tell you what to do.  And they always say what they want as if they're a prophet delivering God's command.  And since nobody has ever given them anything, they have a mind-set by which it's perfectly polite to just take whatever it is they want.  Well, while most of the people looked at my sleeping solution with a touch of admiration, some jackass gets jealous that I'm smart enough to find a place to sleep, and so he starts tugging at my pant legs telling me to get down so that he can put his luggage up there (when there is more space like 10 ft away).  Jackass.  But otherwise, people are very kind, sharing food and water with me, asking me where I'm from etc.  Oh yeah, and water.  I've been drinking at least five liters a day, but I'm sweating so much that my urine still looks like the streets of Eldorado.

Well, now I'm in Amristar a stone's throw from the Himalayas, spending the day relaxing in this super sweet Sikh temple before the next leg of traveling.  On the way here, I was sweaty, sick, and angry at life in general when I got into a shared taxi.  As the taxi started moving, a blast of cold air hit my face and all I could think was "ahhhhhh... life is good."

Then the driver tried to rip me off.

F'ing India

Hi everyone.

So yes, I know that I haven't blogged in a while. Yes, I do have crazy stories to share, but for I think I will maintain the silence a little while longer.  Sometimes you just need to live a life first and write the memoirs afterwards, right?

The real reason I wanted to write was because I have a theory that I need to get down on paper with a time stamp on it so that I can say "I told you so" if I am right and, if I am wrong, at least take credit for an active imagination.

So there are these bombs going off in Bangkok.  Kind of a surprise - Bangkok hasn't seen anything like this in decades.  But the big mystery is who the hell is doing it?  Well, I have a genuine conspiracy theory for you.

Right now, there are three major players: the diposed Prime Minister Taksin (currently in London); the Islamic separatists in the south, and the military government. 

Now, the first question that we should ask is who stands to gain the most from bombing Bangkok?  The logical answer is the Muslims.  I think that it's safe to say that terrorism has been widely adopted within the Muslim world as a means of political protest, an scarring the shit out of your opponent's civilian population certainly can have the power to force change. 

Yet the attacks in Bangkok carry few of the markers of Islamic terrorism.  To begin with, while making a bomb is relatively easy, making one that you can trasport is considerably more difficult, especially if you have to transport it from the south and get it through military and police check points without giving yourself away or accidentally blowing yourself up.  Making the small, triggered bombs that were used in Bangkok usually requires a specialist.  Most people in the south are poor and uneducated (thanks to the government neglect they are rebelling against).  Al-Qaeda has been known to supply specialists to the Islamists in the south through Jerimayah Islamiah, but there have been few recent indications that JI has been sending a lot of its highly prized specialists to Thailand (they have their own problems, dealing with a government crackdown in their base country of Indonesia).

Ok, so if they weren't made in the south and transported here, then they were probably constructed in Bangkok.  But the problem with this is that the Muslim community is small and highly scruitinized in Bangkok, making it unlikely that they could have built six plus bombs with no one knowing.

Next problem: mounting a coordinated terror attack (especially six bombs within a few minutes) is hard.  It requires using doing a lot of planning, which leads to a lot of chatter, which makes it easy for governments get wind of it.  It also requires a disciplined group of bombers, something that the south is not known for (most of the attacks are single uncoordinated attacks).  Since it wasn't a suicide bombing, it also requires technology (either timers or remote triggers), again suggesting the input of a specialist. 

Also, look at the size of the bombs.  They were nothing like the IEDs that commonly go off in Iraq.  They had the explosive power of a grenade - deadly for sure, but by no means the best way of inflicting massive civilian casualties (which is usually the goal in Islamic terror attacks).  I'm not going to say that these were for show, but I will say that if I were waging Jihad, I would have used bigger ones.

Next, the general who stagged the coup was a Muslim and, with him in power, there has been wide hope in the south that now would be a good time to get political concessions from his government.  Why bomb someone who could be your benefactor?

But the biggest indication is that no one from the south has taken credit for the bombings.  Think about it - if you are waging Jihad, what's the point in bombing someone and then keeping quiet about it?  How does that help you advance your political agenda?  If you're going to terrorize a population, then you want them to know who they should be afraid of.  Historically, almost all of the attacks by southern insurgents have been claimed by one group or another (often more than one group!) within 24 hours, yet I haven't heard a single murmer from any southern group.  And, because of the aforementioned difficulties, launching six simultaneous attacks is worth bragging rights, and you can be sure Al Qaeda would be on top of that if they were behind it.

No, I do not think that it was the Muslims.

Next: Thaksin.  Him and his supporters have been targeted by the military regime as the most likely culprit, but that doesn't make much sense either.  For sure, Taksin had some corrupt people in his camp that lost a lot of money and power when the coup happened, and it's plausible that they could lash out randomly, but this doesn't fit their bill either.  The Taksin supporters the regime is accusing got into power through the manipulation of power.  Through money and corruption and mafia games.  While not all of them are bad guys, among the ones that are bad guys, assasinations, bribes, intimidation, black mail, etc. are the primary weapons.  Terrorism is a political game that none of them have experience with - it's too sloppy, too uncontrolled to try to scare the entire population and achieve any kind of specific goal.

Indeed, the primary goal of the people in the Taksin camp is self-interest.  Most of them are buisnessmen; they want power and money - they have no ideological loyalties.  The party that Taksin controlled, Thai Rak Thai, was created using Thaksin's personal fortune for the sole purpose of getting him and his cronies elected.  Members of the party had no ideological platorm - if you wanted power (and therefore money), you joined TRT.  And for buisnessmen who are solely interested in money and power, bombing Bangkok is bad buisness - it scares away the tourists, keeps the investors leery, stunts the markets, etc. You'd be shooting yourself in the foot.

The timing is also inconvenient.  Right now, the general who staged the coup is on the Hajj in Saudi Arabia.  Since the last coup happened while Taksin was out of the country, it seems to make sense that Thaksin could stage a counter-coup with General Sonti was making his pilgrimage (why he chose to do it immediately after staging a coup I'll never understand, unless he's in on my conspiracy theory).  But of course the army was ready for that and the only way a counter coup could have worked was if it was the whole deal - troops loyal to Taksin shooting at troops loyal to Sonti and visa versa.  Setting off random bombs among the populace has nothing to do with a counter coup - indeed, if they were to do that, it would most likely damage their cause.

No, I do not think it was Taksin or his supporters.

That leaves only one major player: the Sonti military regime.  Right now the country is in the process of restarting the government.  They created a ruling council first.  Now they are recreating a parliament.  The military guys say they want to return power to the democracy ASAP, but of course you should never take such claims at face value.  For one thing, they know that if they were to return to democracy and hold elections right now, Taksin would run again and would win again (he has strong constituency in the provinces).  So they need to find a way to rig the system so that he can't win again.  For another thing, what better way for a military regime to retain power then to come to Bangkok's rescue and pose as necessary protectors against an invisible and nefarious enemy? 

I think you can see where I'm going.  In short, I think that the bombers were elements in the military that want to strengthen the current regime and discredit Thaksin by using him as a scapegoat. The military folks are not buisnessmen and thus have little regard for the economic fallout of bombing Bangkok.  They have the expertise and access to resources to build small, remotely detonated bombs that would get the point across without killing scores of people, and they could do it under the intelligence radar.  Doing it while Gen Sonti was out of the country helps to cast blame on Thaksin, who wouldn't in his right mind try to stage a counter coup now unless he was willing to take the country into civil war (which I don't think he is).  The military has the most to gain from bombs going off in Bangkok, therefore I think it is them.  That's my conspiracy theory - we'll see how things play out!